Spy to the Rescue (12 page)

When I first met Vanessa Dominion in the dim distant past of twelve minutes ago, she was a vision of icy cool. Now, her nose is a deep shade of red, her shimmering blond hair is coated in honey, her chic black cocktail dress is covered in flour, and her enviable poise has entirely deserted her.

“Nobody beats me in the kitchen,” I say, savoring every syllable. (It's a line from an old action movie my dad watches every time it's on cable, but I feel like I just made it my own.)

I know what I have to do now. I have to overpower and subdue Vanessa. I have to tie her up and hide her away. Then I have to get Irina to safety and find Ryan. It would be a lot for a lesser spy, but I feel up to the challenge.

I leap—like a young gazelle rather than a dirty, smelly monkey—off the shelves and reach for the frying pan she foolishly discarded.

But as I hurtle toward Vanessa, she spins around, lashes out her leg, and kicks open the fridge door. It flies backward and hits me full in the face.

“Remember that time at your parents' house when you hit me with the fridge door?” Vanessa says as I fall. “This looks like it hurt quite a bit more,” she says. “I certainly intended it to.”

I see a blond blur above me. I can't focus on her face. I'm not sure where I am. I can't keep my eyes open.

“That's right, peanut,” I hear an echoey voice say. “You go to sleep. It'll all be better in the morning. For me. When your mummy sees me take her crown. But for now,
oleya nagusu moomane
. . .”

Wait, what?

“D
on't scream,” says a voice. “Don't cry. Don't freak out. Listen to me. Focus on the sound of my voice. Open your eyes slowly.”

Is that Ryan? It sounds like Ryan. But what would Ryan be doing here in the kitchen of the safe house? I attempt to open my left eye. It requires more effort than I imagined, and now that it's open, it hurts. A lot. I try to blink the water out of my eye so I can see straight but I feel like my head is swimming and there's a roaring in my ears. As I slowly regain consciousness, I become aware of an odor. It's a hot-garbage-on-a-humid-day kind of
smell, and I feel like I'm going to gag.

“Are you okay?” Ryan's voice says.

“I don't know,” I try to say. My mouth feels like it's filled with sawdust. My throat stings when I swallow.

“I need you to stay calm for me,” Ryan says. “I know this looks bad but I'm going to get us out of here, I swear.”

The uncharacteristic urgency in his voice blows away my cobwebs. I open both eyes and focus. Ryan's face is inches from mine. His hair is sticking straight up. Except it isn't . . .

Ryan is hanging upside down. His hands are tied behind his back. The rope binding his ankles together is suspended from a metal hook attached to a long silver rail filled with similar hooks. The other hooks have nothing hanging from them, but I'm guessing from the dried red blood splashed across the dirty white floor and the dirtier white walls, those hooks used to have things hanging from them. Now there's only Ryan and me, dangling in what I very much hope is a disused meat storage facility. Even though there are no cow carcasses here, the odor of meats past hangs in the air. Once again, my throat constricts. I feel like I'm going to throw up, but if I do, I'm going to be sick down my own face. The thought of that makes me feel even more sick. And then I think about who put me here.

Vanessa.

I don't feel any less sick, but now it's accompanied by a burning rage. She did this to Ryan. What's she done to Irina? Where's Strike?

What did she say to me before I blacked out?

“How long have we been here?” I ask Ryan.

“I don't know,” he says. “You were still out when I woke up. Are you hurt? Did you see who brought you here? Have you seen Abby?”

Ryan's voice is getting shaky. He starts trying to squirm his way out of the ropes that hold him. I watch his face redden as he swings back and forth on the hook like the hand of an old grandfather clock.

“Ryan, take it easy,” I say.

“She must be so scared,” he says. “How could I let this happen?”

“It's not your fault,” I say. Just when I thought it was not possible to hate Vanessa Dominion any more than I already do, she ascends to a new level of evil. Vanessa knew exactly what she was doing by locking me in a room with Ryan.

“She doesn't see the world like we do,” Ryan moans. “She's so trusting, so childlike.”

“Huh?” I say.

“I know you never liked her. All the times she tried to
reach out to you and you threw it back in her face. Why doesn't Bridget like me? That's what she used to say to me, and she always had tears in her eyes when she said it. And now she's gone. She could be anywhere. She could be . . .”

He can't finish his sentence and I can't make him feel worse by doing it for him.

Ryan strains against the ropes knotted around his wrists and ankles. He keeps moving from side to side, trying to make the rope fray against the hook. What should I do here? Do I tell him the truth about Vanessa? He's only just discovered he has a heart. I can't break it already. But if I don't tell him, he'll be driven mad by the sudden inexplicable disappearance of his girlfriend.

I have to choose how deeply I want to scar my brother.

Well played, Vanessa.

“Ryan, stop wriggling on the hook like a worm,” I say.

“Start wriggling,” he shouts at me. “Do something. We've got to get out of here and find Abby.”

“That's what I want, too,” I say, and I'm not lying. “But let's think this through logically. Where were you when she vanished? What's the last thing you remember?”

The wriggling ceases.

“Abby wanted to go to Chinatown,” he says. “She
was on the platform. I jumped the turnstiles because the train was about to leave. The subway ticket guy shouted after me that I was in big trouble. When we got to our station and we were out in the street, I lost Abby in the crowds. I tried to run after her and then I don't know what happened; everything went black.” Ryan goes silent for a second and then says, “I should have paid the fare. We could have caught another train. I put a target on both of our backs.”

“You think the subway people are behind this?” I say. “Taking Abby, tracking me down, hanging us on hooks?”

“I'm not from here,” he bawls. “I don't know how they do things.”

Ryan goes back to swinging and wriggling. His exertions seem to make the knots tighter.

A sneaky thought pops into my head. “What if she's seeing someone else?” I say.

“What?” he groans.

“You're right, I don't care for Blabby, but we're just exploring possibilities here. What if she used the free trip to New York to hook up—no pun intended—with the other person she's seeing? Not that I'm saying there is one, but if there is, wouldn't that explain her random disappearance?”

“The pressure of blood on your upside-down brain
has made you go mental,” says Ryan. “Not a word of what you just said was anywhere near sane.”

“Maybe you're right,” I say. “Because you know every little thing about Miss Abigail Rheinhardt. You know every little thing about who she knows, you know every member of her family and every one of her friends and you know for an absolute flying certainty she doesn't have a boyfriend in New York she never told you about. A boyfriend who would be capable of going to extreme lengths to get you and me, the little sister who never liked her, out of the way.”

“That's crazy,” says Ryan. But he says it quietly, as if he's thinking about it. And that's all I wanted to do. I just wanted to sow a few seeds of doubt and let Ryan's imagination bring forth a beautiful garden of paranoia and suspicion.

“I mean, how . . . ,” I hear him say. “I mean, I'd know if . . .”

“'Cause it's not like people you meet online ever lie about themselves,” I say, deliberately overdoing it. “Everyone online tells the absolute truth. No one has a hidden agenda. No one keeps secrets. No one's so blinded by someone they don't know claiming to like them that they believe everything that person says.”

“Shut up,” shouts Ryan. I know I've hit a nerve. I
know his fear is now tinged with speculation.

“But maybe I'm wrong,” I say mildly.

“I would know if she was lying,” he says. “Wouldn't I?”

We hang in silence from our respective hooks. Ryan's mind is, I imagine, swarming with the most horrifying thoughts. He's probably replaying his last few weeks with Abby/Blabby/Vanessa and starting to question everything he took for granted. He's probably feeling like the biggest sucker of all time. Good. That's how I want him to feel. Because the alternative—finding out he's the pawn of an ambitious criminal who drugged him, then hung him on a hook—is way worse. He'd never be able to trust anyone again. I know a little about how that feels. I don't recommend it.

“What about your secrets, Bridget?” Ryan suddenly says.

“My what now?” I squeak, taken aback.

“We never talked about where you went all those times you snuck out at night. Or how you suddenly developed this tough, confrontational personality. How'd all that happen, Bridget?”

Ah. I didn't want to tell Ryan the hideous truth about his appalling girlfriend, but should I tell him the exciting truth about me? We're stuck in this smelly white room hanging upside down from hooks. It's not like we have
anything else to do. I take a second to decide the simplest way to explain it to him. I breathe in, which is a mistake because it's noxious.

“I—”

“Do you hear that?” Ryan hushes me with a gesture.

I listen. Footsteps and muffled voices, both of them getting louder. The sound of a thick metal chain being dragged from the handle of a door. The sound of a key in a lock.

“Oh God,” says Ryan.

It's Vanessa. I know it's Vanessa. She's come to gloat, come to luxuriate in her superiority over me, come to crush what's left of Ryan's heart.

From my upside-down position, I see the metal door open. A cold wind rushes in and overpowers the smell.

“Nice to see you guys hanging out,” says Joanna.

“Some people will do anything to avoid going to the Brooklyn Flea,” says Sam Gunnery.

“Gunnery,” I snarl. “I asked you to do one thing. When I get down from here, I'm kicking your butt.”

“Fair enough,” he says, unworried. “But maybe first you want to thank me and this little dude for tracking you down.”

Sam squats and holds a closed fist inches from my upside-down face. He opens it to reveal a long-lost friend.

“Red!” I gasp. “Oh, Red, I thought I'd never see you again.”

“Who's Red?” I hear Ryan say.

“The love of her life,” Joanna says.

She starts to tug at Ryan's ropes, and as she does, she casually says, “So you know your sister's a spy, right?”

“B
ridget?” I hear Ryan call after me as I stumble out of the abandoned meat place into the chill of a New York Saturday morning.

“Is it true? What she's saying, is it for real?”

I know Ryan's having to process a lot of new disturbing information. For example: he doesn't really know his girlfriend. For another example: she might have used him to get to New York and then abandoned him on a crowded street. He has to consider Joanna's revelation that I am the offspring of two spies and still have ties to the family business.

“It's complicated,” I tell him. “But yes, that's my secret and now it's yours.” I scowl at Joanna and Sam. “Do a better job than those two,” I say to Ryan. He looks shell-shocked and I don't blame him, but at least he's safe. Unfortunately that doesn't mean I don't have a lot to worry about. It's been hours since Vanessa showed me the literal door. She could be anywhere. Irina could be anywhere. Strike could be anywhere. What do I do? Who do I try to find first? Which birth parent can I actually save? I feel my teeth start to chatter and I realize I'm freezing. Vanessa did me the huge favor of removing my tourist garb, but all she left me was a white T-shirt and jeans.

And all of a sudden, I'm enveloped with warmth.

“Here,” says Sam, and I realize he's given me his hoodie.

I shrug it off and kick it back at him. Not my smartest move because—I don't know if I mentioned—I'm freezing. But I'm also mad at him, and with good reason: he ran when he should have stayed and found Strike, and he betrayed a confidence. Sure, Joanna probably already knew I was a spy, but he never should have confirmed it. If I have to keep secrets, everybody has to keep secrets.

Sam bends down to pick up his hoodie. “I don't have cooties,” he says.

“Beg to differ,” I retort, and yes, I know I'm being harsh, but this kid has a way of getting under my skin.

He blinks at me. “I let you down,” he says. “I freaked out. We're not all spies.”

I feel myself soften toward him.

“And I came back for you,” he says. “That's got to count for something.”

“You came back . . .” I look at my watch. It's ten minutes before nine on Saturday morning. Last time I saw Gunnery it was late on Friday afternoon. “Fifteen hours later.” It might even be more. Numbers are not my strong point.

“He tried to sell the marble to some dude he owes a ton of money,” Joanna suddenly says.

“Shut up,” Sam growls at Joanna.

“Username tedb,” I say, giving Sam my best steely glare. “I remember.”

His cheeks redden. “That's not what happened.” He pauses and grimaces. “That's not all that happened. I was going to use Red to settle the debt . . .”

“Who's Red?” I hear Ryan ask.

“But when tedb said yes, I switched Red for a double. I was always going to bring the real Red back.”

Sam looks to Joanna for confirmation. She nods. “He went back to the Forties looking for you. Then he came
to Brooklyn. He spent the night on his police scanners and calling all his shady underworld contacts. He even concocted a crazy story for Alex that you'd been stopped in the street by a casting director for some indie movie about homeless clog dancers.”

“Your story, if she asks, is that your one scene took all night to shoot and you were so convincing they expanded your role,” says Sam. “You're Roxy, the one-legged clogger who isn't letting her handicap stand in the way of her dream.”

I find myself laughing for the first time in what seems like a long time.

“We got out of Brooklyn Flea duties by telling Alex we'd both been cast,” says Joanna. “I'm K-Clog, the reigning champion who knows her time is up but wants one last shot at homeless clogging glory.”

Sam says, “I'm Buzz, the cynical con man who discovers Roxy clogging at the bus station and decides to do something good with his life.”

“I love this movie,” I say, because I do. I really want to see it. I take the hoodie from Sam and nod my thanks.

“Sorry it took so long to track you down,” he says. “I'm in the favor business. I don't want anyone hating me.”

“Stop saying things like I'm in the favor business and they won't,” I say.

Sam nods and gives me a tentative
so we're good?
smile.

I put the hoodie on and start to struggle with the zipper. Sam goes to help me but Joanna elbows him out of the way.

“Move, doofus,” she says to him. Joanna has even more trouble getting the zipper to close than I did. As she tugs at it, she lowers her voice and says, “Sam's not the worst person in the entire world.”

My recent acquaintanceship with Vanessa Dominion leads me to agree with that.

“He did me a favor,” she continues. “Alex didn't want to take me in at first. She'd never admit it, but it's true. Sam totally sold me to his mom. He made me sound like a shining angel from heaven. And it wasn't because we're such a close family. I know he did it so it would take the spotlight away from all the shady deals he does, but still . . .”

Joanna has this wistful little smile on her face. It's unsettling.

“So you're telling me he's selfish and he has secret agendas?” I say.

“I'm telling you things worked out for me because of him,” she says, yanking at my zipper. “He's a good person to have on your side.”

Ryan pushes Joanna away from the hoodie. He pulls
the zipper up to my neck with one quick movement.

“I'm probably not a good person to have on your side,” he says. “But my girlfriend disappeared, I got hung on a hook in a meat locker, and my sister's a spy on a secret mission. Something's going on and I want in.”

“You don't,” I tell him. “You really, really don't.”

“I want in, too,” says Sam.

“I don't want in at all,” says Joanna, scowling. “But it looks like that's the only way I get to hang out with you.”

I am almost touched by Joanna's lovely sentiment, except for the huge amount of resentment in her voice.

“So what's the mission?” says Ryan, rubbing his hands and looking way too excited.

We leave the
stench of dead animals and head to a half-empty diner on Mott Street, just north of Canal Street. I rip through a plate of buttered pineapple bun and eggs in under a second, such is my extreme hunger. I'm now attacking a fried fish ball and sausages. As I chew, swallow, and gurgle down a passion fruit green tea, I explain the situation to my three companions. I mean, at this stage, why not? Joanna and Sam know about the Forties. Sam saw the man in the Strike mask. Who am I protecting? I obviously do not reveal to Ryan that Blabby = Vanessa, but other than that small, trivial detail, I tell
my brother, my friend, and Sam Gunnery that Strike and Irina are missing and that Edward Dominion's lethally psychotic daughter plans on carrying out my biological mother's final assassination. I conclude with the small but important detail that I do not, as yet, know the target of Vanessa's bullets.

When my summation of my last twenty-four hours in New York is complete, I am met with three pairs of wide, staring eyes and three open mouths. Joanna's phone vibrates, breaking the silence. She picks it up and gives me a warning glance.

“Hello, Nancy Wilder, mother of Bridget and Ryan,” she says. “Yes, they're right here.”

Ryan looks stricken. “I lost my phone,” he mouths to me.

“I lost mine, too,” I mouth back.

“You know what, Nancy, they'd forget their heads if they weren't screwed on.” Joanna is talking to my mom like they are old friends. I don't know how she picked up these social skills but I'm not complaining. “Cut the kids a little slack,” she goes on, a friendly gurgling laugh giving her voice a melodic quality. “This town is a whirlwind, so much to do and see. Their feet haven't touched the ground. Ryan's been hanging out with us, him and his interesting girlfriend . . .”

I look over at Ryan, who stares down into his squid dish.

“They all stayed over last night and they're still sound asleep. I'll have them both call you when they surface. Okay, great talking to you, Nancy, my love to Jeff and Natalie. You take care now. Bye.”

“Wow,” I breathe. “You said more words to my mom in the past thirty seconds than you did in the last seven years, and none of those words were bitter or resentful. You sounded like you actually cared.”

“Neat trick,” Joanna says. “I learned from the best.” She inclines her head toward Sam, who is texting furiously on his phone.

Without looking up, he says, “Okay, I'm getting you both untraceable prepaid phones so that doesn't happen again. I'm uploading surveillance footage from the time Bridget and Irina climbed out the window of the Forties. I'm looking for film from Chinatown at around the time Ryan emerged from the subway. What else can I do? How else can I help?”

Three pairs of wide, staring eyes—one of them mine—and three open mouths—again, one mine—are trained on Sam Gunnery.

“Sorry, who are you again?” says Ryan.

“He's my cousin Sam,” says Joanna.

“He might not have cooties,” I say.

That cool, cocky, calculating quality I found so off-putting about Sam seems to have vanished. He owns that he did the wrong thing yesterday and he's making a conscious effort to redress the balance. Of course, knowing what I know of him, he's also doing it because I will now owe him a colossal favor.

“What happens if we get this footage?” says Ryan.

“When,” emphasizes Sam. “My most reliable guy's on it.”

“The Squirrel,” I tell Ryan.

“Okay, what then?” says Ryan. “What's the plan?”

I take a mouthful of fish ball, and between chews, I say, “I want to save Strike but he doesn't need me. Yes, I left him in the direst situation imaginable, but that's been the case his entire life. We could race all over the city looking for him, but he'll find a way to survive. Vanessa's a huge narcissist. She'll keep Irina alive so she can say”—I adopt a cold, heartless British accent—“‘Look at me, Irina. Watch me take your crown. Look at me, daddy. . . .'” I wait for the table to burst into applause at my acting abilities. There is no clapping, so I press on. “So we have to find out what Irina's last mission was and stop Vanessa from carrying it out.”

“Is that all?” says Ryan. “I was worried we wouldn't
have time to go to the Central Park Zoo.”

“You're not stealing a reptile,” I warn him.

“I can maybe get a list of the most popular assassination targets,” says Sam.

“Where would you get that?” says Ryan, who seems a little bit irritated whenever Sam opens his mouth. I can't say I don't understand.

“Deep web,” says Sam.

“Right.” Ryan nods then looks at me and mouths, “Deep web?”

Sam's fingers fly across his phone. As he texts, he says, “Did anyone—Edward, Irina, or Vanessa—say anything that would give you
any
kind of clue as to what this last job was about?”

All right, Bridget Wilder, so-called spy, do that thing where you retreat into your mind and play back every single event of the last day. Concentrate on the small details. The way Edward was sitting. The weapons Irina threw into her black bag. Vanessa's face when she walked away from Irina's body. Was there something I missed? An overheard conversation. A text I shouldn't have seen. Anything?

Something bubbles to the surface. Something Vanessa said to me after she hit me with the fridge door. I was losing consciousness. Nothing made sense at that point. One minute she was talking in her precise, cut-glass
English accent. The next she was speaking gibberish. She said something like . . .

“Oh-ley-ah. Na-ga-su. Moo-manay,” I say, tentatively sounding out the words I think I remember hearing her utter as I blacked out.

The other three give me baffled, slightly concerned looks.

“She invented a private language for us to communicate in, when we were like seven or eight,” Joanna tells Sam. “She was weird even then.” Joanna leans toward me. “Is that what you're doing now? Speaking in a private spy language you just invented?”

“No.” I can't believe she brought up the long-repressed memory of Bridgannese, the secret vocabulary that would have made us seem fascinating to other people if Joanna had bothered to learn even a few words from the Bridgannese dictionary I made for her.

“I remember that!” hoots Ryan. “She used to have . . . remember, you had that sign, Bridget's Room: Keep Out, on your door, and then one day, it had changed to this insane mixture of symbols, numbers, and letters.”

“It would have made sense if you'd read the dictionary,” I say, reddening.

Joanna and Ryan are both laughing too loud and too long.

Sam grins at me. Great. What's he have to say?

“I used to do things like that,” he says. “I remember when I was that age I drew a logo on my notebook. It said Gunnery City in big, bold writing. I didn't even know what it meant but I liked the way it looked. I even got this kid who owed me a favor to get it printed on a T-shirt. Pretty soon, everyone in school wanted one.”

“So basically your story's nothing like mine,” I say. “Except to let me know you've always been cool.”

“Well, you're cool now,” Sam says.

Oh. That was nice. And unexpected.

“So that thing you were saying?” he goes on.

“That thing?” Right. The important mission. “This thing I think I remember Vanessa saying. I might be wrong, but it sounded like oh-ley-ah na-ga-su moo-manay.”

Sam holds his phone up to my face. There's a microphone app on the screen. “Say it again, slow and clear.”

I repeat the words I may or may not have heard.

“Let's see if there's a translation that makes sense.”