The Academy (2 page)

Brian Taddler spit the glob of gum out into his hand and smacked the side of the potted tree outside Boston’s Patriot Hotel, sticking the gum on the side of the urn. He marched through the automatic doors as if he were a member of a royal family.

At fifteen, Taddler could pass for a few years older or a few years younger, depending on how he dressed. His close-cropped, nearly shaved head and dark, brooding eyes suggested intensity if not outright menace. But Brian Taddler’s smile and a missing front tooth transformed his face into youthful exuberance. This evening he wanted to look younger, and he did so in a pair of khakis and a pale blue golf shirt.

Cocktails were about to begin. There would be a crush to get through the doors to the Paul Revere Ballroom A. He picked out the first fat woman he saw—for this was the only description Mrs. D. had given him.

Taddler drew close to this woman. In a fraction of a second, his hands could have slipped in and out of her jacket pockets. He was perfectly capable of lifting money or even removing jewelry without her being the least bit aware. But he did not. The name was wrong.

Emerson
was the name of his mark. This woman’s tag read
Richards
.

Taddler smiled at her, and moved on.

A moment later, near the bar, he finally spotted her. Gwen Emerson was a big woman whose wool purse didn’t latch, and offered an easy target. Taddler approached her, faked a stumble as if tripping over his shoelaces, and face-planted himself into her massive chest—assuring that her purse would be the last thing on her mind. He pulled his face away and stammered an apology. At the same time he slipped a small, rectangular paper envelope from her purse into his own back pocket. A room key envelope certain to contain both the key and the room number.

“No problem,” she said, embarrassed by the contact. She stepped back and smoothed her clothing, unable to look at Taddler. She showed no sign of suspecting mischief.

The first woman he’d approached spotted Taddler’s collision with Gwen Emerson, and Taddler watched as she reached into her jacket pocket and checked for her key.

She either sensed what he was about, or had spotted the grab. Either way, he realized he was in trouble when her expression turned to suspicion.

Taddler had entered the hotel’s meeting room area with three possible exits in mind. He took the nearest, stepping onto the elevator just seconds before the doors were about to close.

He chastised himself for giving himself away. He should have known better. Should have made less of a scene. He’d overplayed it. Mrs. D. rewarded results, not effort. She provided Brian and a handful of others his same age with a roof over their heads. They went to school five days a week, and ate a decent dinner each night. He wasn’t about to forfeit his bed at the Corinthians because of a failure to deliver.

“What floor?” a young woman asked as he stepped into the elevator.

Taddler checked the paper packet. It opened, revealing a credit card–sized electronic room key.

“Seven,” he said, offering the woman an engaging smile.

Seven-forty-six, to be exact, he thought. Handwritten in a box at the top of the card.

The young woman got off at Six. The elevator doors opened again, and he felt a sense of urgency as he followed signs to room 746. If Gwen Emerson discovered her key missing, she’d alert security. If security caught Taddler, he was toast. Mrs. D. would never come to his rescue. She’d merely replace him with another fifteen-year-old boy thrown out of a city shelter.

She would abandon him just as his parents had. He’d be sentenced to time in a juvenile detention facility—a reformatory school—the last place he wanted to be: bars on the windows, locks on the doors, mold on the food, restricted TV time, no video games, no movie over a G-rating. Taddler knew a couple of boys who had been sentenced to juvie, and he wanted to avoid it at all costs. He moved quickly down the hall, careful not to attract attention, and arrived at 746. He knocked. No one answered. He put his ear to the door: no sound, no TV, no radio. He slipped the card into the reader. A light changed to green, and the door handle chirped.

He gently tried the handle, and the door opened. He was inside.

The routine was familiar enough. He counted backward from one hundred and eighty, which would give him approximately three minutes in which to operate. He probably had more like five or ten minutes, but why push it? Hotel house detectives were not the speediest bunch, but if they received a complaint, they would follow up on it.

He reached into the left pocket of his khakis and pulled out his iPod nano and skipped to the desk.

He opened a briefcase on the desk and came out with a Dell laptop. He turned it on; as it booted, he connected a cable to his iPod and waited to connect the other end to the computer’s USB port.

When it finally loaded, he searched for a particular directory and then connected the iPod. This had taken nearly the entire three minutes, and he hadn’t started the download yet. He worked through some menus, allowing the computer to recognize the iPod, and then downloaded the contents of the directory.

Returning the computer to its case a moment later, he dug through the briefcase’s contents, flipping through the papers he found there, looking for any account numbers, passwords, or other information that might interest Mrs. D.

Time to go.

Taddler was sweating enough to stain the armpits of the golf shirt. He considered stealing a bedside chocolate, but thought better of it.

On his way out he stopped in the bathroom to mop his face, and looked at himself in the mirror. He was a sturdy boy with wide shoulders, but at that moment he looked anything but strong. He double-checked that he had the connecting wire and the iPod. He didn’t want to leave any clues to his having been there.

As he reached the door he raised to his tiptoes to peer out of the fish-eye lens.

Then he remembered to place the key card and packet back on the desk so the woman would think she’d left it behind by mistake. Mrs. D. knew all the little tricks.

As he crossed the room, he suddenly heard voices from the other side of the door. Voices interrupted by a dull electronic chirping: someone was coming into the room.

He stole another peek out of the peephole.

Two guys.
Security?

He glanced around. Where to hide? The closet was a sure bust. Same with the tub.

Taddler ducked behind the room’s blackout curtain next to the desk chair, hoping the chair might hide his shoes. He heard the click of the door opening.

He held his breath.

“If you’re hiding in here, kid,” a deep voice said, “give yourself up. We plan on torturing you and beating you senseless.”

Another man laughed.

For a moment Taddler considered showing himself—
had they seen him?
—but stayed put.

“Bathroom?” the first voice asked.

“Nada,” said the second man.

“Closet?”

The sound of the closet doors sliding. “Zilch.”

“Oh, man, check it out!” said the now-familiar voice. “What a freaking moron! The key’s right here on the desk.”

Taddler heard the sound of the man fooling with the key packet.

“I hate getting my chain yanked by morons like this. We’re talking seventh inning, Sox down by one.”

A moment later the first guy spoke into the desk phone. He was standing less than two feet from Brian Taddler. “Key’s on the desk. You want us to bring it down to her? Yeah, okay. We got it.”

He hung up.

“We’re delivery boys.”

“Now there’s something new.”

“Let’s go.”

A moment later the door clicked shut. Taddler took that as his cue to breathe again.

A line of four interconnected three-story brick dormitories had been built cut into the Wynncliff Academy hill so that on the east side the middle floor opened to the school’s horseshoe-shaped driveway, and on the west side, the lower level led out onto athletic fields and the gym complex beyond.

Steel loved the majesty of the campus. The neoclassical brick buildings with their black slate roofs and sparkling white-painted trim reminded him of the historic buildings he’d seen in Boston and Philadelphia on family trips. The groomed lawn and magnificent old trees were reminiscent of British estates he’d seen on the Travel Channel. It was no less impressive from the back, an imposing line of handsome buildings connected by library-like faculty residences. The only thing odd about Wynncliff Academy was its isolation and anonymity. There wasn’t even a sign off the farm road announcing it; a driver either knew which turn to make or missed it completely.

Anxious to get as far away from the gym as possible, Steel climbed the stairs to the middle of the dorm building’s three floors, and went outside. He ran smack into the sea of arriving kids, parents, and SUVs bulging with lamps, furniture, and luggage. It was a zoo out there, and he suddenly understood why his father had dropped him off so early: Steel was already unpacked, had picked and made the top bunk, shelved his clothes, and chosen a desk.

Hand on the dormitory door handle, he froze as he caught a flash of red hair among the chaos out along the entrance drive.

Can’t be, he thought.

He mechanically moved toward the exit door, his heartbeat elevated, painful in his chest. His skin now prickled for an entirely different reason, and not something with which he was terribly familiar. He felt feverish. But unlike any allergy he’d ever experienced, it came on instantaneously. His mouth was suddenly bone dry and his tongue tasted salty.

He moved in a kind of trance, out the door and into the cool September breeze. A few sugar maple leaves had already turned scarlet; they clattered in the wind like broken wind chimes. Steel reached back to hold open the door and let a father and son go past carrying a desk chair. People were swarming into the dorms, moving in all directions, like in an airport or train station. Steel had lost track of the redhead, though his phenomenal memory directed him to look exactly where he’d first spotted her.

And there she was: Kaileigh.

He crossed the lawn and two walkways, dodging the throng of kids and parents carrying furniture, steamer trunks, and luggage—never taking his eyes off her. Same hair. Same height. Then he quickly convinced himself he had it all wrong: the girl wore a red-and-green-plaid skirt above black kneesocks, loafers, and a green cable sweater. Kaileigh—his Kaileigh—would never be caught dead in preppie clothes.

He saw her in profile. Again, his heart skipped painfully. It had to be….

He turned sideways to avoid a collision with a bookshelf suspended between a mother and daughter, ducked beneath it, and popped up on the other side.

He was ten feet from her. He stopped where he stood. His mouth hung open to speak, but at first nothing came out. He’d never felt the heat in his face and the seizure of his chest in quite this way. What was going on? A uniformed driver was unloading pieces of luggage from a black sedan. None of the luggage matched: bags of various sizes and colors, most of it well worn.

“My parents travel a lot,” she had once told him. “They’re almost never home.”

“Is it…really you?” he finally croaked out.

The red hair flew as the girl spun around, revealing her face like a curtain lifting. At first he felt like a complete moron: wrong girl. This person was refined, with a tall posture, square shoulders, and the definite body of a young woman—he didn’t remember Kaileigh that way—not at all—and he reminded himself he had a perfect memory.

“Steel?”

Coughing out a laugh of astonishment, he breathed for the first time in too long.

She laughed too. And now any doubts he’d harbored vanished, for he knew that laugh without question. He moved toward her without hesitation and enveloped her in a warm hug before he considered what he was doing. She hugged him back like the friend she was, but the physical contact between them brought unexpected and not entirely unpleasant feelings for Steel. Nothing he was comfortable with. They backed away an arm’s length and both erupted into blushing laughter, then talked over one another in a stream-of-consciousness blabber that had Kaileigh’s driver looking on in bewilderment.

“Steel’s the reason I’m here,” she informed a middle-aged woman Steel hadn’t seen. She introduced the woman as Miss Kay, and Steel felt he knew her. Kaileigh had told him a great deal about her governess. Miss Kay shook hands with Steel, but he sensed her disapproval.

“What do you mean, I’m the reason?” Steel asked Kaileigh.

“Your father, I should say,” she informed him.

“My father…”

“He didn’t tell you?” She studied him for some kind of crack in his veneer. Was he kidding? “It was his idea. Your father’s. Wynncliff Academy. For me to go here. All my parents’ money, and it took your father pulling strings to make this happen.” She stepped forward and spoke in a whisper. Her breath smelled impossibly sweet—like a vanilla milk shake. “It’s not your typical school, you know?”

He thought of the boys in the gym. Did she know more than he did? “I know,” he said, not really knowing. “But how was my father…?”

“He contacted my parents about my going here. My parents have been planning on boarding school for me since I was about six. But this place? Do you know it’s not on the registry of private schools? It has like, unlisted phone numbers, no Web page. I mean…are you kidding me? And you don’t just apply: you’re
invited
to apply.”

Steel knew approximately none of this. But he tried to look both unsurprised and unimpressed.

“Which is where your father came in,” she said, returning him to the moment.

“Enough, Miss Kaileigh,” Miss Kay said. “You’ll have time for catching up later.” The governess glanced overhead into the thick canopy of leaves, the branches swaying in the wind. She looked at Kaileigh thoughtfully, sympathetically, and shook her head. Clearly, beautiful campus or not, Miss Kay felt sorry for leaving her charge at such a place.

“Can I help?” Steel offered, eyeing Kaileigh’s bags.

“Sure, if you want,” she said.

He reached for one of the larger bags but, trying to pick it up, changed his mind and opted for one of the many smaller ones. He took two, one in each hand. To his surprise, Miss Kay hoisted the heavy one like it was nothing.

“My father?” he asked Kaileigh, still dumbfounded that he’d played a role in her attending Wynncliff. His father was full of surprises. Only recently had Steel found out that he worked for the FBI, that he wasn’t the computer salesman he’d always claimed to be. He was some kind of undercover investigator. He infiltrated organized crime and ferreted out wanted criminals. It was dangerous work, and Steel had never imagined his father—
his father
—to be that kind of person.

Another thing he’d learned about his father was that he never did anything without a reason. So why had he helped Kaileigh be admitted to Wynncliff? To what purpose? To provide Steel a friend in hopes that he would like the place? He didn’t put anything past his father.

“Can you believe this?” she asked excitedly, almost reading his thoughts. “Both of us here!”

No, he thought. No, I can’t. But he held his tongue.

Kaileigh was smarter than he was—he knew that. She lacked his photographic memory, a condition that tricked people into thinking he was smarter than he was. She, on the other hand, had a bright intelligence and street smarts that permeated everything she did. She had a keen sense about people, and plenty of nerve. He’d met her on a train on the way to the National Science Challenge. They’d had a wild time together—had been the target of a gang with terrorist connections. Together they’d saved a kidnapped woman’s life. She possessed an internal strength that Steel admired. She wasn’t afraid of much, and she’d demonstrated that she could think clearly under pressure. Better than that, she was a science geek—her invention for the National Science Challenge might have won if it hadn’t been stolen. And more than anything, she treated him as if he were normal. Around her, he didn’t feel like the freak of nature that
everyone
else thought he was. She rarely mentioned his memory skills, and when she did it was to tease him.

He wanted to trust his father in sending her here, and yet…why hadn’t he mentioned her coming? Why had he dropped Steel off without a word about Kaileigh?

“We’re going to have fun,” she said, the two of them lugging her suitcases toward the dorms.

“Yeah,” he answered, outwardly agreeing with her. Internally, he couldn’t help thinking:
But there’s got to be more to it than that
.