She has me there, so I step away from Jones, but only for a second. “Whether he’s a good guy or bad, we still need him to talk.”
Katie rummages around in her purse and pulls out … a tube of lipstick. Okay.
“Don’t even think about screaming,” she says, putting the lipstick near Jonesy’s neck. “I have three million volts aimed at your sternocleidomastoid.”
Of course Katie has a stun gun. And exceptional knowledge of human anatomy.
“I thought you’d gotten out. How did you get here, all tied up?” I ask Jones as I remove the gag and then immediately step away from him. I’m not as suspicious as Katie, but I’m also not dumb.
“Save the reunion for later,” Katie interrupts. “Where’s Joel?”
Jones flexes his mouth and jaw muscles, trying to recover from wearing the gag. “Well, that was annoying. Can you untie my hands?” Jones asks. He’s so calm about it that I’m wondering if Katie is right.
“No, we cannot.” Katie moves the stun gun a hair closer to Jones’s sterno-whatever. “Answer the question.”
“As you’ll recall, Ms. Carmichael, this morning you came by asking to look through the lost-and-found closet. I’d stepped into Ms. Dodson’s office while you were allegedly looking for your missing umbrella, but when I returned just ten seconds later, I noticed two sets of keys were missing from the key cabinet, the ones to the trophy case. And so were you. Then during the fire drill, I watched you extract Joel Easter from his class’s line and take him to the alcove. I put two and two together—”
“I wanted to show Joel where to hide out in case anything happened. It’s you who shouldn’t be here,” Katie says. “And you’re the observant one, aren’t you? A little too observant to just be the office guy, don’t you think, Peter?”
I do actually, but I don’t want to believe Jonesy is a bad guy since, until now, he was my only other friend at Carlisle. “Finish your story, Jones.”
“I’d been sick all morning, hungover—I told you about that, Jake, remember? Anyway, I was in the bathroom when all the announcements began, so I stayed in there, hiding out. Then, when I heard your announcement … well, it sounded crazy and I figured a brother couldn’t make up some shit like that. So I came here to hide out.”
“But I had all the keys.”
“Not all,” Jones says, smiling a little bit.
We hear the crackling sound of a stun gun being turned on.
I shake my head at Katie and she turns it off.
“Jones, you might want to get to the part about Joel going missing, if you know anything about it.”
“I figured whoever was looking for you would sweep the building and check the bathrooms, so I came here.” Considering Katie has been threatening to Taser him in a critical section of the circulatory system, Jones is pretty chill in recounting his story. As if he’s been rehearsing it. “That’s when I found Joel. We thought we’d hide out here until help came, but he came first.”
“Who?” Katie asks.
“The janitor.”
Koval.
“I swear to God, when we find that guy, we need to end him once and for all,” I say.
“And you just let him in?” Katie asks Jones. “Are you kidding me? If Joel is hurt … maybe you really are just the office guy if you’d let—”
“I didn’t have to let him in. He’s the janitor. He had a key. So he says he’s looking for a place to hide out, too. He said he saw one of these terrorists coming—”
“Who said anything about them being terrorists? As far as you know, they’re bank robbers,” Katie asks. “And you certainly know the lingo, don’t you? Sweep the building and extract Joel. Civilians don’t talk like that, Peter.”
I ignore Katie, even though she’s sounding more and more convincing. “Then what happened?”
“The janitor put a choke hold on me. That guy is huge. He could choke hold a grizzly. When I came to, I was bound and they both were gone.”
“Sorry, Peter, but I don’t buy it,” Katie says. “He’s probably some kind of decoy. If he were simply Joe Blow office worker, wouldn’t Koval have just killed him?”
“Mr. Smith, what’s going on?” Jones asks. “Who is she? Who are you, for that matter?”
Katie answers before I can. “He’s Mr. Smith about as much as you’re Mr. Jones. Can’t you Americans get a little more creative with the cover names? Here, hold this.”
Katie hands me the lipstick stun gun and before I can stop her, she jabs a syringe into Jonesy’s arm.
“Again with the tranquilizer? I’m sure Jonesy is a good guy.” Well, pretty sure. “Before he knocked out Jones, Koval might have inadvertently dropped a clue to where he was taking Joel. He was trying to tell us—”
“He was wasting our time,” Katie explains, “and he’s probably one of them.”
“A black spy from Ukraine?”
“They do have black people in Ukraine, you know. When you were there, you fit in just fine, apparently,” Katie reminds me. “But no, I figure him for a hired mercenary, like the one with the New York accent, or the groundskeeper.”
Katie is great and everything, but her inability to see anything but black and white, good and evil, is making me a little crazy. People aren’t that easy. I’m a hacker, but even I realize real life isn’t so binary. Neither is the spy game.
“I may not have a bottomless bag of spy supplies like you, but one thing I know is people. Jones is a good guy. I trust him.”
“Sorry, but I don’t. But if you’re right, he’ll appreciate that we did it to save Joel. Besides, that was the last of my carfentanil, and it was barely a drop. He’s probably just asleep, not really unconscious, which means he won’t be out for very long, so let’s get moving. I just hope Joel is still in the building.”
I’m about to follow her, but something stops me.
“Wait. Hear that?” I ask Katie.
“What am I supposed to be hearing?”
“Voices…”
“Are they telling you where we can find Joel? Otherwise—”
“Not in my head. Out in the hallway.”
“Who is it?”
“Dodson. Berg’s team must have located the office staff in the auditorium,” I whisper, stepping over Jones and heading out the other side of the closet. “Andrews was guarding them, which means Berg should know by now that she’s a dirty cop. If there were only six as we suspected, that just leaves Koval to capture. And his sister.”
“Peter,” Katie says, following me.
I put a finger to Katie’s lips. “Shhh. If we can hear them, they can hear us. They might give us some intel. Maybe Dodson and her staff were kept in the same place as Joel.”
Katie must see the logic in this because she stays quiet.
“That’s him. That’s the one who said he was a detective,” Dodson says, and I’m guessing she’s pointing out Marchuk, who must still be in the office where we left him unconscious. “The other one was a woman named Andrews. She had a radio, a badge, knew a lot about the area. She was very convincing as a police officer. How was I to know they weren’t real?”
“Thank you, ma’am. You and your staff can go with these officers so they can get your official statements. Don’t worry,” Berg is saying. “They’re the real deal.”
There is some murmuring of voices I can’t decipher, probably the rest of the office staff talking low, still in shock, and then Dodson adds from farther down the hall, “We’re still missing one. My assistant’s assistant disappeared just before everything happened, and we haven’t heard from him. I fear they have him.”
“Thank you, Ms. Dodson. We’ll find him.”
For a moment, I only hear the clicking of Dodson’s heels down the hall, and then another male voice asks, “You think the assistant was one of their inside men?” I recognize it as Berg’s second-in-command, from up on the roof. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m the only one who doesn’t suspect Jonesy, and whether that’s a bad idea.
Katie tugs on my shirt sleeve and points at Jones. “We need to get out of here before they start looking for him.”