No Test for the Wicked: A Lexi Carmichael Mystery, Book Five (13 page)

“What about the
Shahids
?”

“No. Just the
Mehsuds
. This has apparently upset the
Shahid
. They are responsible for a string of bombings across the capital city, killing several people. They’ve also claimed responsibility for the assassination of a prominent Pakistani politician who supported the peace talks. They’re threatening worse if the talks continue.”

I nodded. “Yes, that’s similar to what Slash told me. But while all of that is horrible, what’s the connection to a high school in D.C.?”

“Not a clue. Let’s see what else we can find.”

Elvis angled the laptop back toward him and clicked on another document. Blueprints filled the screen. He whistled.

“Blueprints for the school.”

“I guess it would be too much to hope that they would identify the location of each teacher’s office.”

He rotated the view. “If only. These look like they came from the original builder. I imagine the police already have a copy of this.”

“That’s a given.” I tapped on a spot on the blueprint. “We’re here in the Weather Lab.”

Elvis traced a finger on the air-conditioning and heating grids and the crawl spaces. “This is where the SWAT teams will look in terms of an entry. But given what I’ve seen of the expertise of the group so far, I would presume that they’ve thought of this, as well.”

I blew out a breath. “You think they’ve got explosives there, too?”

“I wouldn’t discount that possibility.”

I pointed to another document. “Try that one.”

He opened it and scanned it. “Another news article. This one focuses on U.S. involvement in Pakistan peace talks.”

“The U.S. is involved?”

Elvis shook his head. “Actually, no. Well, at least according to this article, the State Department spokesman denies any involvement. It looks like there was a related Pakistani news article that surfaced saying the U.S. Senate subcommittee on Near Eastern and South and Central Asian Affairs had been secretly urging the Pakistani prime minster to shut out the
Shahids
because of their connections to al Qaeda.”

I felt a headache start to throb behind my eyes. “This is all fascinating, but I’m not sure how it helps us narrow down what is going on. Do you think these terrorists are from the
Shahids
?”

“It seems the most logical assumption at this point.”

“But why hold a school full of kids hostage in the U.S.? To what end?”

“I wish I knew. I think we have to wait until we hear the demands.”

I leaned back, trying to stretch a part of my back that had started to hurt. “It’s been hours since they broadcast their first demands. I don’t think they’re going to keep broadcasting demands by intercom. I think they would have issued more demands by now. They must be using the email system to communicate.”

“We’ve got to get in. But first we figure out how to find and then get to Jouret’s office.”

“The sooner the better.”

Elvis tapped his chin. “What about a school directory of some kind? I would assume classroom information and phone numbers would be available on the school’s intranet, but do you think they might have also distributed a hard copy to the staff?”

“Maybe. It’s a good idea, Elvis. I can take a look through the teacher’s desk.”

He shifted the laptop to me. “No way. I get to go this time. My idea, my trip.”

“Okay. Fair enough. Hurry up.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice.”

He climbed out of the cabinet and crept toward the teacher’s desk. I closed the cabinet after he left and then waited. It was agonizing not being able to see him. Now I understood how he must have felt sitting in the cabinet not knowing what I was doing, waiting for me to return and hearing someone come into the room. The soft slide of the drawers opened and closed sounded and then the soft rustle of paper. It seemed like it was taking him forever. I was about to tell him to forget it and come back when the cabinet door opened and he slipped inside.

He held a thin paper booklet covered in a plastic folder. “A present for you, my lady.”

“You give the best presents
ever
, Elvis.”

“I strive for perfection.”

I opened the booklet and flipped through. “Willem Jouret. Here it is. His office is Room 216. That’s on the second floor, one floor down from us, two rooms from the stairwell on the right side of the hallway, according to the blueprints.”

“Okay. So, how do we get there?”

One floor suddenly seemed light-years away. “I’m not sure. They’ll certainly have the security cameras cycling through the corridors and stairwells. The real question is, at what intervals? We can’t check because the security system is separate from the main system. Damn, what a pain. I didn’t create a freaking back door to that system. Why in the heck didn’t I do that?”

“Because you didn’t have time.” Elvis touched my hand. “Don’t knock yourself. Seriously.”

“Okay, you’re right. However, it means getting to Jouret’s office safely is going to be a crapshoot of the worst kind.”

“We’ll just have to chance it, if you’re sure you want to do that.”

What I
wanted
to do was to take a hot bath, eat a big juicy hamburger and snuggle under a warm blanket with Slash. I did
not
want to figure out a way to outwit a bunch of determined terrorists, especially when my nerves were shot and I was operating on too little sleep as it was.

I sighed. “Yes, it’s what I want. We have to get to his office. It’s our best shot at figuring out what’s going on.”

“I’m in full agreement despite the high probability of failure,” he said. “I’ve also been thinking about ways to get messages to the outside without tripping the monitoring software. I’ve got some possibilities.”

“That’s good, Elvis. That’s really good. I’ve got an idea, too, about how to get to Jouret’s office. But I have a feeling you’re not going to like it.”

“Why?”

“We’re going to have to split up.”

One thing I really liked about Elvis was that he didn’t jump to conclusions or think with emotion as a first instinct. He considered all angles, weighed the value and benefit of the proposal and made solid decisions based on intellect and reason.

“No.”

I blinked. “No? What do you mean ‘no’? You haven’t even heard the plan yet.”

“Just that. No. We’re not splitting up.”

“I haven’t even given you my reasons yet.”

“Don’t want to hear them. We’re
not
splitting up.”

I put my hand on his arm. “Elvis, you have to listen to my reasons.”

“No.”

I drew back. We didn’t have time for this.

I grabbed his face between my hands. “Whether or not you like it, you
are
going to listen to me, Elvis Zimmerman.”

His mouth drew into a tight line. There was more going on here, but I couldn’t try to figure it out while numerous lives, including our own, were on the line.

“Right now we are the best hope for saving the lives of the students in this school. It’s laughably clear that two geeks like us aren’t going to be able to physically take on a small army of highly trained and heavily armed people. As much as I wish we had the Hulk’s strength or Yoda’s powers, we don’t. That leaves us with our brainpower only. We’ve got pretty decent smarts between us. But on the practical side, I’m a student at this school, so if I get caught on my way to Jouret’s office, I, at least, have a measure of plausible deniability to offer. I would be able to say with reliable conviction that I hid, got scared or whatever. You don’t have a uniform, so they would shoot first and ask questions later. And if we both get caught at the same time, there is no backup plan, no way to help each other. We’re doomed before we get started.”

Elvis still didn’t say anything.

I tried a different approach. “Elvis, you know I’m making sense. I know you do. I don’t know why you’re shutting me out. Please listen to me. I need you.”

He finally spoke. “I’ll figure something out. It’s too risky to go running around out there separately. You’re safer with me.”

Panic gripped me. “You don’t really believe that. You saw the size of those backpack bombs. We both know no one is getting out of here alive unless we can get the security forces inside to save those kids. Those terrorists aren’t going to surrender.”

“I just don’t want anything to happen to you, okay?”

“I feel the same way about you. Seriously. Elvis, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had. You understand me like no one else on the planet, not even Basia, and I never want anything to happen that could take you away from me. I know you’re worried about me, but I need you to work with me now. Please, I can’t do this without you. I just can’t.” The last word turned into a sob.

He sighed. “Lexi, don’t cry. I’m sorry. It’s just that if you got hurt...”

“We
will
get hurt—me, you and a lot more people—if we do nothing. We have to help these kids, Elvis. Together. And the best way to do that is to split up. Please, at least listen to my plan.”

He finally nodded and I felt the knot in my stomach ease.

“You’re right, Lexi. It’s game time. I know what I need to do...what
we
need to do. We may have to operate separately, but we’re still a team. As much as I hate the idea, I agree splitting up will give us a second chance to get to Jouret’s office if one of us gets caught. Those kids are depending on us. What did you have in mind?”

I was so relieved to have Elvis back on board I nearly burst into tears. For a moment, I couldn’t speak.

“Lexi?”

I blinked back the wetness from my eyes and tried to focus. “Um, let me reorganize my thoughts.”

He gave my hand a soft squeeze. “Let me help, because I think I know where you’re going with this. We need to calculate the safest and fastest way to Jouret’s office. To do that we need to estimate the distance to the office from here, the speed at which we must go, how many locations we think the security camera is covering and the length the camera stays on each scene. We also need to factor in the frequency of roving patrols and the high probability that some of those patrols will not be scheduled. We also need to determine a way to communicate, whether by silence or an actual exchange, so if you are successful I can follow you at either the same interval or adjust mine accordingly, if you’re not.”

I managed a smile. “Exactly. You read my mind.”

“Maybe it’s like that with best friends.”

“Maybe.”

He smiled and then opened the laptop. “Okay. Let’s get started.”

Chapter Seventeen

We were trapped in a high school with terrorists who had enough explosives to blow us to kingdom come and back, but relying on math to save our lives was still pretty fun. Elvis must have been thinking the same thing because he gave me a smile as he glanced up from the laptop.

“Do you think we should recalculate with a higher percentage of uncertainty in terms of the roving patrols?”

I shook my head. “No. We’re good. I’m comfortable where we stand. It’s as solid as we’re going to get based on the high number of incalculable uncertainties. A twenty percentage success rate is the best we’re going to get even if we assess it a hundred more times.”

He sighed and closed the laptop. “You’re right.” He glanced at his watch. “Four minutes then. Are you ready?”

“As ready as I will ever be.”

“You’ve got this, Lexi. No,
we’ve
got this. I’ll be watching for the signal once you’re in. I know you’re going to make it.”

“I will. You’re sure you’ll find me via the back door?”

“Of the entire plan, that’s the part I’m the surest on.”

“Good.” I took a deep breath. “Okay. Goodbye, Elvis. It’s time.”

His grin faded. “Right. Look, before you go, I want you to know that I...I...”

“You what?”

“I...I’m behind you a hundred percent.”

“Good to know.” I started to crawl out of the cabinet and then stopped. There was something I wanted to ask him, and this might be my last chance. “Hey, Elvis, did you really think about having sex with me?”

“
What?
”

“Well, back in the computer room, before I made you strip, you said you’d thought a lot about ‘it’, which I presumed meant having sex...with me.”

“Um, are you sure this is a good time to talk about it?”

It definitely wasn’t. Even I knew that. “I just wondered.”

“Well, I...” He looked down. “I can’t do this right now.”

“Okay. No worries. I know that ninety-six point eight percent of men think about whether they’d like to have sex with a woman within the first eleven seconds of meeting her. That’s a biological fact, so I didn’t take it personally one way or the other. I guess it doesn’t matter anyway. It just surprised me. Forget I asked.”

“Lexi—”

“Never mind. It was a dumb question. I hope I didn’t embarrass you. I’ve got to go. Wish me luck one more time, Elvis.”

He blew out a breath. “Good luck, Lexi. Be in that twenty percent success rate, okay?”

“Okay.”

I crept out of the cabinet, took one last look at Elvis and closed the cabinet door. I crept toward the door. It was four fifty-six. We’d been under siege for more than three hours. I wondered if my parents and brothers knew I was here. I presumed Finn would have contacted them by now. I imagined that he, my parents and brothers were glued to the television along with most of America. They were all probably worried sick about me. Again.

But Slash...no, Slash wouldn’t be in front of the television. He was almost certainly just on the other side of the school wall, ordering people around and trying to figure out how Jouret played into this and why I’d sent him the message about him this morning. He’d be unraveling that thread, which was a good thing.

He’d probably be more furious with me than the terrorists because I’d somehow got myself stuck in the middle of the very incident he’d been worried about. Maybe trouble did follow me like a stalker.

Even though we’d only been officially dating for a few days, I missed him. I missed his smile, his strong arms and even the way he teased me. He’d be moving heaven and earth to get to me, and knowing that warmed me inside. I hadn’t ever had that kind of singular affection or attention, and it surprised me how much I’d started to like it. I’d never imagined I would.

My heart squeezed. How fair was it that I’d just entered into a relationship, and now there was a very real chance I might never see Slash again?

I paused by the classroom door, listening. Elvis and I had spent dangerous moments by this door, listening for footsteps go by and creating a behavior-based graph. The pattern indicated activity in this hallway every eleven minutes. If we presumed that the security camera would not be active on this hallway while the patrol was passing through, it provided me a small window of time to get from the classroom to the stairway hopefully undetected. Of course, this all rested on the theory that the patrols were structured, not random, and that there would be no logical reason to patrol an area already covered by the security cameras. We had to trust that there was a method to the madness. As it couldn’t be verified, we’d had to go with an educated guess, and now my life depended on our being right.

It was really dark in the classroom now and eerily quiet. I could see the occasional red and blue flashes from the police vehicles stationed outside, but otherwise, it was quiet. I swallowed the fear that lodged in my throat and glanced at my watch. The time was good. I should be in the clear.

I slowly eased the door open a crack and peered out to my right. The hallway was brightly lit and I had to squint a moment until my eyes adjusted. When I could finally see, all that came into view were a few books, papers and backpacks scattered across the floor. I shifted my position to the left and saw nothing that way either. I opened the door a bit wider and slipped out into the hallway.

I hugged the wall, heading for the stairway, feeling the bump of the locker combinations slide across my back as I moved as quickly and quietly as I could manage. I passed the first classroom, the second and was almost to the third when I heard heavy footsteps coming up from the stairwell.

Making an executive decision, I dashed for the third classroom and grasped the door handle. It was locked. Before I could turn around, I felt an arm snake around my neck and cover my mouth and nose, pulling me backward and into the second classroom I’d just passed. I flailed as whoever it was shoved me into the classroom and released me. I stumbled and then whirled around.

Brandon put out his hand. “Don’t say anything.”