Black Heart (25 page)

That is good advice—and it’s not the kind that seems useful to give someone that you want to get caught. I look at Yulikova, drinking her diet soda and chewing her food. I think of my brother. Am I really trying to decide which of them is more worthy of my trust?

“Okay,” I say, and pick up the map. “Can I keep this? I want to make sure I know the layout.”

“You act like you’ve done this before,” Agent Brennan says.

“I come from a long line of grifters,” I say. “I’ve pulled a con or two.”

She snorts, shaking her head. Jones glowers at both of us. Yulikova cracks open her fortune cookie and holds up the fortune. Printed across the ribbon of paper in block letters are the words: “You will be invited to an exciting event.”

I turn in shortly after that.

Looking at the hotel phone by my bed, I itch to call Daneca and find out how Sam’s doing. Even knowing that it’s probably bugged, I am tempted. But he should be resting, and I don’t even know if he’ll want to talk to me.

Any mention of him being shot would have the Feds making all the wrong guesses and asking too many questions. One more thing no one can afford.

I shouldn’t call Lila, either, even though last night seems more dream than real. Just thinking of her as I sit on the scratchy hotel comforter, remembering the slide of her skin on mine, the way she laughed, the curve of her mouth—it feels risky. As though even the memory of her will give the Feds something they can use against me.

Now that she knows I’m working with the agency, I wonder what she’ll do with that information. I wonder what she’ll expect me to do.

I get into bed and try to sleep, my thoughts careening between Lila and Sam. I hear her laugh and see his blood, feel her bare hands and hear his scream. On and on until everyone’s laughing and everyone’s screaming all the way down into my dreams.

The next morning I stumble out into the main room.
Agent Jones is there, sitting on the couch and drinking a mug of room service coffee. He glowers in my direction in the manner of a man who has taken a shift that started many hours ago. I bet the three of them traded off all night, to make sure I didn’t skip out.

I find another cup and pour myself some coffee. It’s terrible.

“Hey,” I say, thinking suddenly of my mother and a hotel nothing like this one. “Can you really cook meth in a hotel coffeepot?”

“Sure,” he says, looking into his cup thoughtfully.

Guess Mom was right about one thing.

After I take a shower and get dressed, the rest of them are there, ordering breakfast. The whole day stretches in front of us with very little to do. Jones wants to watch a basketball game on the big plasma television, so I spend the afternoon playing cards with Yulikova and Brennan at the table. First we gamble for candy from the vending machine, then for spare change, then for choice of which film we rent.

I pick
The Thin Man
. I need a laugh.

MONDAY MORNING I
wake up not remembering where I am. Then it all comes rushing back—the hotel, the Feds, the assassination.

Adrenaline hits my bloodstream with such force that I kick off the covers and stand, pace the room with no idea where I am going. Corralling myself into the bathroom, I avoid my own gaze in the mirror. I am nearly sick with nerves, doubled over by them.

I don’t know whether to believe Barron or not. I don’t know if I’m being set up. I don’t know who the good guys are anymore.

I thought that the people I grew up around—mostly criminals—were different from regular people. Certainly
different from cops, from federal agents with their shiny badges. I thought grifters and con men were just born bad. I thought there was some inner flaw in us. Something corrupt that meant that we’d never be like other people—that the best we could do is ape them.

But now I wonder—what if everyone is pretty much the same and it’s just a thousand small choices that add up to the person you are? No good or evil, no black and white, no inner demons or angels whispering the right answers in our ears like it’s some cosmic SAT test. Just us, hour by hour, minute by minute, day by day, making the best choices we can.

The thought is horrifying. If that’s true, then there’s no right choice. There’s just choice.

I stand there in front of the mirror, trying to figure out what to do. I stand there for a long time.

When I get it together enough to go out into the main room, I find Yulikova and Jones already dressed. Brennan isn’t with them.

I drink crappy gray room service coffee and eat some eggs.

“I’ve got your props,” Yulikova says, disappearing into her room. She comes back with a paintbrush, a small tube of what looks like oil paint, a brown hoodie, a lanyard with an ID tag hanging from it, and a headset.

“Huh.” I turn the ID tag over in my hands. The name George Parker is on it, underneath a blurred picture that could pass for me. It’s a good piece of identification. The photo is forgettable and would be useless on a wanted poster or blasted across the Internet. “Nice.”

“This is
our job
,” she says wryly.

“Sorry.” She’s right. I have been thinking of them as amateurs, honest and upright government employees trying to pull off a scam they’re unused to—but I keep forgetting, this is what they do. They con criminals, and maybe they’re conning me.

“I’ll need you to take off your gloves,” she says. “This stuff takes a long time to dry, so if you need to do any last preparations, do them now.”

“She means go take a piss,” Agent Jones says.

I shoulder on the hoodie and zip it up, then go into the bedroom, where I fold the pictures of Patton up and shove them into the back pocket of my jeans. I put the comb in the other pocket, with the index cards. The pen and hair gel I stick into the front pocket of the hoodie, along with my car keys.

I walk back out to the table and take off my gloves, spreading my fingers out on the pressed wood of the table as I sit.

Yulikova glances at my face and then back at my hands. She picks up my right hand with her gloved fingers and draws it closer to her, turning it palm up.

Jones is watching us, readiness in every line of his body. If I grabbed for the bare skin of her throat, he’d be out of his chair and on us in seconds.

If I grabbed for her throat, he’d be too late. I bet he knows it too.

She uncaps the tube and squirts cold black gel onto the back of my hand. She doesn’t look flustered at all, just calm
and efficient. If she thinks of me as anything more dangerous than just another worker kid she’s training, she doesn’t show it.

The bristles of the brush tickle—I’m not used to anything touching my hands so directly—but the paint covers my skin thoroughly, drying to a dull leathery sheen. Yulikova is careful to ink everything, even the pads of my fingers, and I am careful not to move, no matter how much I want to laugh.

“Okay,” she says, capping the tube. “As soon as that dries, we’ll be ready to go. You can relax now.”

I study her face. “You promise that the charges against my mother will be dropped after this, right?”

“It’s the least we can do,” she says. There is nothing in her expression that gives me any reason not to believe her, but her words aren’t exactly a guarantee.

If she’s lying, I know what I have to do. But if she’s not, then I will have thrown away everything for nothing. It’s an impossible choice. The only chance I have is to rattle her into revealing something. “What if I don’t want to join the LMD? I mean, after this operation. What if I decide I’m not cut out for federal agenting?”

That makes her stop in the process of cleaning off the brush in a cup of water. “That would be very difficult for me. My superiors are interested in you. I’m sure you can imagine. A transformation worker is very rare. In fact . . .”

She brings out a stack of familiar papers. The contracts. “I was going to wait to do this later, when we had a few minutes alone, but I think now is the time. My bosses
would feel a lot more comfortable if you would go ahead and sign.”

“I thought we agreed to wait until I graduated.”

“This operation has forced my hand.”

I nod. “I see.”

She leans back and pushes her gloved fingers through her mop of gray hair. She must not have gotten all the paint off her glove, because some of it smears like soot over her bangs. “I can understand if you have doubts. Go ahead and think about them, but remember why you first talked about joining us. We can keep you from becoming a prize to be fought over by rival crime families. We can protect you.”

“Who’s going to protect me from you, though?”

“From
us
? Your family are some of the worst—,” Jones starts, but Yulikova stops his words with a wave of her hand.

“Cassel, this is a real step forward for you. I’m glad you’re asking me this—I’m glad you’re being honest.”

I don’t say anything. I am holding my breath, without really knowing why.

“Of course you feel this way. Listen, I know you’re conflicted. And I know you want to do the right thing. So we’ll keep talking and keep being honest. For my part, I am telling you honestly that if you walk away from the LMD now, my bosses won’t be happy with your decision and they won’t be happy with me.”

I stand up, flexing my fingers, looking for cracks in the faux gloves. They move like a second skin.

“Is this about Lila Zacharov?” Yulikova asks. “The reason you’re hesitating?”

“No!” I say, and then close my eyes for a long moment, counting my breaths. I didn’t rattle Yulikova. She rattled me.

“We always knew you two had a close relationship.” She has tilted her head and is studying my reaction. “She seems like a nice girl.”

I snort.

“Okay, Cassel. She seems like a very ruthless girl whom you like very much. And she also seems like she wouldn’t want you working for the government. But this decision is yours, and you should make it. You and your brother are a lot safer here. She’ll come around if she really cares about you.”

“I don’t want to talk about her,” I say.

Yulikova sighs. “All right. We don’t have to, but you need to tell me whether you’re going to sign.”

There is something reassuring about the stack of paperwork. If they were just going to throw me in prison, they wouldn’t need me to agree to anything. They’d have all the bargaining power once I was behind bars.

I pick up the lanyard and hang it around my neck. Then I grab the headset off the table. I’m not going to be able to figure anything out this way—we could talk forever and Yulikova would never slip up, never reveal anything by mistake.

“The Zacharovs are a crime family, Cassel. They’ll use you up and spit you out if you let them. And her, too. She’s going to have to do things for them that will change her.”

“I said I didn’t want to talk about it.”

Agent Jones stands up and looks at his watch. “It’s almost time to go.”

I glance toward the bedroom. “Should I pack up my things?”

Jones shakes his head. “We’ll come back here tonight before we drop you off at Wallingford. Let you sleep off the blowback and wash off that paint.”

“Thanks,” I say.

He grunts.

All of that sounds possible. I might really be coming back to this room, Yulikova and Jones might really be federal agents trying to figure out how to deal with a kid whose criminal past and valuable skill make him both an asset and a liability. They might really not be planning on double-crossing me.

Time to go all in, one way or the other. Time to decide what I want to believe.

You pays your money and you takes your chance.

“Okay,” I say, sighing. “Give me the papers.” I take the pen out of my hoodie and sign on the dotted line, with a flourish.

Agent Jones’s eyebrows go up. I grin.

Yulikova walks over and looks at the papers, tracing one gloved finger just under my name. She puts the other hand on my shoulder. “We’re going to take good care of you, Cassel. I promise. Welcome to the Licensed Minority Division.”

Promises, promises. I put away the pen. Now that the final decision is made, I feel better. Lighter. The burden of it is removed from my shoulders.

We head out. In the elevator I ask, “Where’s Agent Brennan?”

“Already there,” is Jones’s response. “Setting things up for us.”

We cut through the lobby and go out to the car. When I get in, I make sure to take the same side that I rode in on the way here. As I fumble with my seat belt, I grab my cell phone out of the side well in the door and shove it into my pocket.

“You want to stop for a breakfast burrito or something?” Jones asks.

Last meal.
I think it but don’t say the words aloud.

“Not hungry,” I say.

I look out the tinted window at the highway and silently go over all the things I am going to have to do once we arrive at the press conference. I list them all to myself and then list them all again.

“It’s going to be over soon,” Yulikova says.

That’s true. It’s all going to be over soon.

They let me out into the memorial park by myself. I squint against the bright sunlight. I keep my head down as I pass through security, holding up my ID tag. A woman with a clipboard tells me that there’s a courtesy table with coffee and doughnuts for volunteers.

There is a big stage with a blue curtain covering the back. Someone is rigging a mic up to an impressive-looking lectern with the seal of New Jersey on it. A roped VIP section is being set up to one side of the press pit. A couple other people are stacking speakers under the stage, which is fronted by a shorter curtain, this one white.

Behind that is the area where the trailers are, arranged in a semicircle around several tables where volunteers are arranging stacks of leaflets, signage, and T-shirts. Then there’s the far table, with the food on it. Several people are milling around there, talking and laughing. Most of them are wearing headsets like mine.

Yulikova did her homework. The layout is just like the map. I pass by the trailer that Governor Patton’s supposed to use and head into the one that Yulikova marked for me. Inside is a gray sofa, a dressing table, a small bathroom, and a television mounted high on the wall, tuned to a news channel that’s promising a live broadcast of the speech. Two newscasters are talking to each other. Below them is the closed-captioning of what they’re saying, slightly off and on a delay, based on my limited lipreading skills.