“What?” Bunker asks, looking genuinely surprised by my reaction. “I’m just trying to make the point that you are fooling no one.”
Actually, I’d been fooling everyone, including Bunker, until the Buy-the-Slice alley incident. That was the exact opposite of flying under the radar and a total rookie mistake. But I go into denial mode anyway. You always deny.
“I think you inherited your father’s gift of paranoia, Bunk. Sorry, but no one can live underground for one-point-five decades and not be a little…” I finish the sentence by twirling my index finger next to my head.
“See, that’s what I mean. A regular person would just say fifteen years, or maybe one and a half decades, not ‘one-point-five.’ The way you talk sometimes is so, I don’t know, precise. And you know all those languages.”
“This is Carlisle. Plenty of people here speak multiple languages.”
“You speak five. I’m pretty sure there has never been another student in the whole history of Carlisle, one allegedly born in the United States, who spoke Farsi, Urdu, and Mandarin,” Bunker says, making me wish I’d never divulged my aptitude with foreign languages. Good thing I never told him I actually speak eight. Nine if you include the Tlingit I picked up working a summer job in Alaska, but I’m not really fluent in that, so it probably doesn’t count.
“I mean, when the most pedestrian foreign language you speak is Ukrainian—”
“Stop,” I say, and not only because Bunker’s now wheezing like an old man, or because the word Ukraine is like my Kryptonite. It’s mostly because I know we’re not alone. The shhh sound I just heard didn’t come from either of us.
Bunker bends over, hands on knees, obviously grateful for the break. For the second time tonight, I tune out the crickets, and now Bunker’s raspy wheezing, and listen. The intruder has gone silent, but I know he’s there. It could be another student come to burn off some midterm stress with a late run. Or it could be an assassin dispatched by Pavlo Marchuk. There has been no sign of him since he escaped our capture, and word is one of his clients found him before we could, which would make him very dead if true. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t take out a contract on me before he kicked off, intent on avenging his father from beyond the grave.
Okay, now I’m the one being paranoid. They can’t possibly know I’m here, or who I am. Still … someone is out there, watching me.
I take a defensive stance—imperceptible, at least, to anyone but Bunker—who has regained the ability to breathe.
“What is it?” he asks, looking around us. “Is someone after you?”
I ignore his questions and scan the field beyond the track, looking for points of entry I may have missed.
“Look, Bunk,” I whisper, “if something goes down in the next minute, don’t try to play tough like you did in the alley last week. Just run like hell and get help.”
Bunk looks simultaneously terrified and vindicated. “I knew you weren’t just mild-mannered Peter Smith. Smith. Is that even your real—”
I put my finger to my lips. Still I hear nothing. But the wind stirs, and I detect a familiar scent in the direction of the same hedge Bunker hid behind. Floral, but in a chemical way. Perfume. Girls.
No sooner do I think it than a gang of them jumps from behind the boxwoods, their leader pointing a weapon that I fear almost as much as Japanese shurikens (hate those): her phone.
All I can make out of her is shiny blond hair and long red nails wrapped around the phone as it creates a momentary flash of light.
Five townies seeking revenge, even Ukrainian black ops, I’m prepared to handle. But giggling, camera-wielding girls? What are they doing out here in the dark, anyway—stalking me just to get a picture? I’m not that good-looking, no matter what Bunker says.
I’m thrown off my guard for a few seconds. By the time I regain it, the damage is done. They’ve taken my photo and are already running away toward the dorms, their laughter sounding conspiratorial. They might as well have hurled a ninja star at my heart.
CHAPTER 2
By morning, I’ve put the camera incident into better perspective. It was weird and random, but equating a bunch of freshmen taking my photo to a ninja-star attack was a total overreaction. Bunker said it only confirmed his point about me looking like a member of a boy band, suggesting they just wanted a photo of me with my shirt off. He also was convinced the girls had put me and my cover in grave danger, though I had neither confirmed nor denied the fact that I even have a cover.
The thing is, Bunker is mostly right. I technically do still work for the Company, also known as the CIA. Rogers’s high-school recruitment program, Operation Early Bird, will likely be shut down, but I was able to talk her out of completely firing me and agreed to an indefinite suspension. I also convinced her to get me enrolled at Carlisle Academy. I told her I chose Carlisle and its stellar STEM programs for my senior year because it was always a dream of mine to attend. I also pointed out that, given the student body, I could amass quality intel on some of the nation’s top science research laboratories and the scientists working inside them. The Company is never supposed to spy on the homeland, and technically I’m off the job, so it was a hard offer to refuse.
Rogers wrote in the Ukraine final incident report that I was good at what I did, but tended to get a little too “emotionally invested.” Until Rogers recruited me, I hadn’t been emotionally invested in anything. I was only hacking because I could, because no one could stop me, because it was all I had of my own. This job gave me a reason to … I don’t know, just a reason, period. So hell yeah, I get worked up about it sometimes. Rogers doesn’t see it that way, but I’ll prove her wrong when my skills and my passion for my job help me capture the most dangerous member of Marchuk’s team. Pavlo may be dead, but I’ve been watching his hacker-for-hire since we left Ukraine. Over the summer, I caught him monitoring our defense command center down in Colorado Springs, as well as some of our country’s top research labs right here in town, and in my book that makes him a threat to national security. Which is why I’ve tracked him to Carlisle.
Even before Rogers gave me the job, I always kept a low profile because of being, well, a criminal. I was never a fan of selfies or social media, so it wasn’t hard to stay low. But once I started hacking for the right side of the law and became an operative, the Company searched for and removed every trace of me or my face from the internet. What they say about the internet being forever? It’s true unless the CIA eradicates the old you and creates the fake you.
So while I got zero sleep thinking about the girl with the camera, remembering my bigger mission has kept me from freaking out. At least until Bunker found me at my locker this morning.
“Bro, how’re you holding up?” he asks me. “I’m guessing not well, since you sneaked out of the house so early this morning.”
Bunker’s just worried about me, but I can’t deal with an interrogation this morning, so I fake being chill about the whole thing.
“I didn’t sneak … I just wanted to get my mind right for the calculus exam today and used the walk to think,” I say, banging on my stuck locker door until it finally unsticks and flies open. “Wouldn’t happen to have any WD-40 on you, would you?”
But Bunker will not be distracted.
“You had the Morrisons worried, but I covered for you,” Bunker says, referring to our host family. He was assigned to them because he’s attending Carlisle on a scholarship that doesn’t include the outrageous boarding fees. I live there because spies who are suspended, and gathering intel that is only potentially useful, rate the lowest expense budgets possible. “Mrs. Morrison made me bring you this.”