The Academy (23 page)

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Authors: Ridley Pearson

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BOOK: The Academy
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DesConte moved stiffly, as if in a hurry, drawing Steel’s attention somewhat to the right, where he picked up Jason Voorhees making a beeline toward him and Kaileigh. DesConte had spotted him too, and was running interference, trying to cut off the kid in the hockey mask before he reached Steel and rearranged his face for staying overtime.

“Peter, is that you?” DesConte said, striking Jason in both shoulders like two football players celebrating a touchdown. Steel didn’t actually hear this; he read DesConte’s lips—the movement of the human mouth long since committed to memory—and it was as if he could hear the conversation between the two.

The blow knocked Jason back a step. “What the…?”

“North Atlantic hockey tournament?” DesConte said. “We played you guys in the third round.”

“Wrong guy, choirboy.” Jason Voorhees took a step forward. DesConte tried to block his way. Until that moment, Steel had considered DesConte to be the son of the Incredible Hulk, but the way Jason bumped him aside made him look like a wimp.

Steel saw Jason coming, and wasn’t sure what to say. A second later, the boy blindsided them. He bumped into the Russian kid, stumbled, and pushed Jasmine into Kaileigh and, as he apologized to both, shot Steel a look that needed no translation: Steel was going to die for overstaying his welcome.

Kaileigh signaled Steel with her eyes, and the two said their good-byes and moved toward the front, where they’d checked their bags.

“Did you get enough?” Steel asked.

Kaileigh looked around to make sure no one was within earshot and, lowering her own voice, spoke in Jasmine’s broken English, then in Farsi. If Steel hadn’t seen the words coming out of Kaileigh’s mouth, he would have sworn she’d tricked him by playing back what she’d captured with the recorder.

“That is freaky,” he said.

“You’re hardly one to talk,” she said.

“So we’re a pair of freaks.”

She grinned at him. He liked that. Truth be told, right now he liked everything about her.

Now filled to capacity, the party had escalated from a hum to a buzz. Taddler returned to the punch bowl, where Johnny continued to eat his way through everything the caterers put out. Johnny’s lack of focus bothered Taddler; he seemed more interested in girls and food than the assignment.

Taddler grabbed his cape from behind and dragged him away from the food table.

“Hey! What the—”

“You’re off-mission, dude,” he whispered through his hockey mask.

“No I’m not, I’m…scouting. So…are we outta here?”

“No. They didn’t have it on them.”

“But I thought—”

“So did I,” Taddler said, “but Mrs. D. was wrong, or the pass hasn’t happened yet. I frisked them both. Nothing. So stop stuffing your face and keep your eyes on the two of them, because that’s your job.”

“Who put you in charge?”

“You have other ideas?”

“I’m just saying…” But Johnny got a look through the hockey mask at the beady eyes, and he cut himself off. “We’re cool,” he said.

“We are so
not
cool,” Taddler said. “We’re going to have to follow them, and I’m going to have to bump them again, and that makes twice, which means they’re going to be suspicious. So once it goes down, we’re going to have to move fast. Mrs. D. wanted us out the front door, but now it’s probably going to be the staircase drop.”

“We practiced that. I’m cool with it.”

“Stop saying that, would you? You are not cool with anything. It’s tricky dropping that thing, and you gotta be there to catch it, and if we screw up and it bounces off the railing or something, then one of us has to go find it, and that’s probably going to be you.”

“Okay.”

“We’ve got to know where everybody is, ’specially any security guys, and that’s your job, and I don’t see you doing it.”

“Lose the rash, dude. We’re fine.”

“I’m going upstairs now.”

“I know…I know…”

“I’ve got the phone.” Taddler was proud that they’d been given the phones, and was hoping to actually use them.

“I’ve got mine too.” Johnny patted his pocket. But then, finally doing his job, he took a look around the big room, his eyes quickly lighting upon a familiar woman near the entrance, wearing a Buffy the Vampire Slayer costume. She wore a headband that held back her long hair, and she was talking to a tough guy in an old suit, who Johnny knew, absolutely knew, had to be a cop. She was pointing at him and Taddler.

“Dude, you’d…better…get…going.” He hadn’t meant for his voice to quaver, but there was no taking it back now.

Taddler followed Johnny’s paralyzed stare, and recognized the woman from the giant tarot card on the outside of her store.

“The fortune-teller,” he said.

Johnny’s astonishment that Taddler could possibly know the woman registered as a wide-eyed gawk. “Dude?”

“I saw you,” Taddler explained. “Tell me you didn’t tell her about this job.”

“I wanted to know if I was going to be one of the two picked by Mrs. D.”

“You
told
her?”

“Only that I had a job to do and that it was kinda dangerous and—” But as Johnny heard his own words he realized how lame he’d been. “Oh, man…I didn’t mean to.”

“That’s a cop she’s with.”

“Oh,
man
,” Johnny moaned.

“You screwed us. You…totally screwed us!”

“You get gone,” Johnny said. “I can lose the cop.”

“I need someone to catch the thing when I drop it. I need
you
.”

“I’m cool,” he said. “Seriously, I’ll be there.”

“You are so not cool. If you cost me this chance, Johnny, you’d better not ever show your face at the boathouse again.”

“I can do this,” Johnny insisted.

“You’d better.”

By the time the elevator stopped on the fourteenth floor and the doors slid open, revealing the hallway, with its dark wood paneling, a lead cut mirror in a gilded frame looming above an antique side table that held a giant bouquet of fresh flowers, Steel’s throat felt choked, and he found himself unable to speak. Although he’d practiced wearing the pigmented contact lenses, his eyes stung. The makeup he’d used to look more like Aladdin (and less like himself) made his face feel puckered. To make matters worse, he wore a gold turban, a vest over a baggy shirt, and puffy-legged pants, with faux-leather pointy-toed slippers that were supposed to look like genie shoes. But it wasn’t the costume he found suffocating, it was their situation.

The hallway looked about a mile long. Halfway between the elevators and an exit at the far end stood two men in black suits, their backs to the wall on either side of a hotel room door. With each step, Steel and Kaileigh grew farther from the safety of the elevators and closer to the danger of the men, for, according to Randolph, these two were professional bodyguards whose job it was to keep the ambassador and his family safe. The ambassador’s family included his daughter, and Kaileigh was now going to try to impersonate her—someone these two men probably knew well. The more Steel thought about it, the more foolish it seemed. Maybe he and Kaileigh were nothing but sacrificial lambs; maybe Randolph had other plans.

The problem, if there was one, wouldn’t be a matter of disguise. Like the Iranian girl downstairs, Kaileigh wore a piece of brown silk pulled across to hide her face—with only her brown contact lenses showing. She wore a Jasmine wig, a Jasmine blouse, and Jasmine pants that puffed out like Steel’s. At first glance, there was no telling the two apart.

Together, he thought, he and Kaileigh looked ridiculous, a situation that might play in their favor: it would be hard for the bodyguards to take them seriously. Maybe they wouldn’t look very closely.

Kaileigh played it cool, offering a slight wave to the bodyguards. She kept her head down—her face covered by the gauze—as she rattled off something in Farsi, pointing to Steel’s Aladdin. She’d introduced him. The two men smiled and nodded. Kaileigh and Steel stood there in front of the door. No one moved. It seemed to last a minute. Then one of the guards said something, and Kaileigh’s dark contact lenses flashed at Steel as she began patting her costume.

The key
. The guard had politely told her to use her card—a room key she didn’t possess.

She said something back to him, throwing up her arms.

The guard nodded, reached into his pocket, and unlocked the door for them. He said something to Kaileigh as they entered, and she said something back, and the guard pulled the door closed. It clicked shut.

She called out “Hello?” in Farsi and waited for an answer.

Four doors led off the living room: a small bathroom and presumably three bedrooms. Randolph’s intel had been good: they were alone in a luxurious living room with a gorgeous view of the city lights. A grand piano stood in the corner, accompanied by twin sofas, four comfortable-looking chairs, and enough potted plants to make a small jungle.

A giant flat-panel television on the far wall ran CNN. It sounded like another television was playing nearby.

“The safe!” Steel whispered, knowing there would be one in each of the hotel bedroom closets. They split up, Steel taking one of the bedrooms to the right, Kaileigh to the left.

“Over here,” she called out only seconds later. She’d located a bedroom with a king-size bed and a man’s dark suits hanging in the closet—the ambassador’s bedroom. She pointed out the safe below a stack of folded shirts.

Steel had memorized birth dates, phone numbers, the numbers from national identification cards, and even driver’s licenses for the ambassador and all his family. The safe used a four-digit combination, and Randolph had advised Steel to start with the month and date of family birthdays and eventually graduate to four-digit groupings of the ambassador’s Iranian identification card.

He entered a variety of different combinations. The safe continued to beep at him, displaying:
IMPROPER CODE…PLEASE TRY AGAIN
.

The flat-panel TV was tuned to a financial channel. The woman on the show was throwing out a series of numbers, confusing Steel.

“Mute that thing, would you?” Steel asked. Kaileigh found the wand and silenced the television.

The bedside phone rang, along with every phone in the suite. They stared at it, but did not answer. Steel turned back to the safe.

On his sixth try—the last four digits of the ambassador’s identification card—the safe opened. Inside were passports, some cash, jewelry, and a gray thumb drive.

“Got it,” Steel said, emerging from the bedroom. “Computer?”

“In here,” Kaileigh said, having found and started up a laptop in the kids’ bedroom. The TV was tuned to the Disney Channel.

The thumb drive was highly encrypted—requiring six groups of four combinations of letters and numbers, like software registration codes—but Steel had been told to expect this, and went about inputting the first of six possible code keys that Randolph had explained they’d intercepted in the string of e-mails that had put them on to the exchange in the first place. The first two failed, but the third took, and the thumb drive’s directory appeared.

Less than a minute later, Steel’s eyes were trained on the laptop screen as he scrolled down one page at a time, information captured in his brain like taking a series of photographs. Page by page he stored the data, moving remarkably quickly through the first two sizable files.

Six files to go…

He felt the clock ticking, the passing time working against him.

“Steel?” Kaileigh said, her voice a combination of demand and insecurity.

“Not now.”

“Yes…now,” she said, moving to the bedside end table and grabbing the television wand.

Steel mentally marked where he’d left off and turned to face her.

A face looked back from the TV screen. It was Penny’s.

She punched the mute button, and they caught him midsentence.

“…my suite friends. I tried calling you…”

Steel patted his pocket, as did Kaileigh. Steel had brought his cell phone with him because he was supposed to call Randolph, but he had it on vibrate and had somehow missed it ringing.

“He means the hotel room,” she whispered. “That was
him
, just now.”

“Hopefully you can hear me. If you can, you know that only I could figure out to hijack the hotel’s TV system, so you’d better trust me. Just trust me, okay? I’m on your side. There was a scene down here. Your
magical friends
,” he said with emphasis, “are heading your way. So is Mr. Motorcycle. You have like, three minutes. Do not, repeat, do not, use the elevators.” His image jerked, and Penny said, “A little gift for you.”

“Our side?” she said, as the screen changed to a four-way display, divided into quarters.

“Yeah, I caught that too, believe me.”

It took them both several seconds to understand that Penny was showing them views from various security cameras. The upper left revealed the real Aladdin and Jasmine riding in an elevator. The upper right showed Jason Voorhees and Malfoy in another elevator. Upper right showed…

The choirboys, DesConte and Reddie,
also
in an elevator.

The screen’s lower left frame displayed a long view of the fourteenth-floor hallway shot from the direction of the elevators and, next to it, a shot looking at the hallway from the other direction: toward the elevators.

The bodyguards stood by the living room door.

“They’re on the sixth floor…seventh…we’ve got to go,” she said, her voice rising in terror.

“No. I’m going to try to finish up here.” He fished out his phone and handed it to her. “Quick: call Randolph! Tell him it’s thrust technology detailed on the thumb drive and ask him what we’re supposed to do.”

“It’s
what
?”

“Thrust technology. Just tell him. Now!” Steel turned back to the screen and began scrolling again. Kaileigh made the call, but Steel paid little attention.

His eyes shifted from the laptop to the TV, where he saw the elevator information overlaid: the costumed kids were on the ninth floor. The doors opened, and no one boarded. Jason Voorhees, on the adjacent screen, also stopped; again, no one boarded his elevator car—currently on the third floor.

Penny was somehow overriding the elevators and causing them to stop on every floor to buy Steel time.

Steel sped up the pagination, careful to advance to the next screen only once he was certain he’d seen enough to memorize. The third file was short, and he got through it quickly. The fourth file was a PDF document of engineering plans—nozzle specifications. He had to view these a few seconds longer in order to catch every detail, but there were far fewer of them and he was into the fifth, and then the sixth file before Kaileigh returned to the room.

She waited for Steel to acknowledge her.

“He said to flush the thumb drive down the toilet,” she said.

“What?”

“I know. We weren’t supposed to take anything—to
steal
anything—and I started to say something about it, and he said how making something go away and taking it are different. He said to ‘crush it and flush it.’”

“He said that?”

“Those words: ‘crush it and flush it.’”

“Well…I suppose…if it’s actually secret stuff and it gets lost, it’s different than us stealing it. But I don’t know…”

“We are stealing it,” she said. “It’s in your head.”

Steel turned back to the laptop and committed the last few pages of data to memory. “It is now…” he said.

On the television, the Iranian girl and the Russian boy reached the fourteenth floor and stepped into the hallway, showing up on both the lower quadrants. They walked steadily toward the guards.

“Okay…” Steel said, “now we’re cooked.”

“We are so dead,” she said.

Steel took in the television and tried to concentrate.

“We’re trapped!” Kaileigh said, her fear turning to panic.

“No…” Steel ejected the thumb drive and removed it. It sat in his hand—so tiny and almost insignificant that it was difficult to see it as something important to the government. He knew that in the real world there were spies, and despite the fact that his father fought a kind of war against them, and who knows what Kaileigh’s parents did, Steel didn’t see himself as one.

“Penny made it so we can time it,” he said, indicating the room’s door. Each room in the suite had its own door leading into the hallway; the bodyguards were positioned at the central main door, outside the living room.

Predetermine your exit strategies. Always have more than one.

He recalled the hotel blueprints without so much as a second thought. “West stairway exit is twenty feet to the left of this door,” he said. “There’s another to the right, maybe thirty yards, but that’s past the bodyguards and past the elevators. We go together.”

He jumped up from the chair, hurried to the bathroom, smashed the thumb drive and flushed it, and joined Kaileigh, who stood at the door.

“I don’t get it,” she said.

“Watch the TV,” he said. The costumed kids came down the hall, and the girl clearly greeted one of the bodyguards. There was confusion and discussion, and Steel could hear muted voices through the living room door.

“We’re going to time it,” he said.

“We’re what?”

On-screen, Jasmine talked to the guard and opened the door.

“Get ready,” he said, pointing to the television screen. “We time it so as they come in, we go out,” he instructed. “Stairway is to the left.”

“Okay.”

He’d seen Kaileigh nervous before—in Washington, D.C., they’d taken some big risks—so he knew she was terrified now; he tried not to show his own fear. If they were caught he had no idea what might happen to them; Randolph had convinced them to break into a hotel room; there had to be laws against that.

As the other Aladdin, Jasmine, and the two guards charged
into
the living room, Steel and Kaileigh slipped out into the hall and turned left.

The emergency exit door at the end of the hall opened, and Jason Voorhees and Malfoy stepped through.

“Back!” Steel said, turning quickly around, now facing an impossibly long hallway.

“You left the party!” Taddler—dressed as Jason—called out.

“Ignore them,” Steel whispered. But Kaileigh glanced over her shoulder. “They’re coming fast!”

Steel had nowhere to go: every door was locked, the elevators might take a minute or more to arrive, and the far exit suddenly felt like it was in another zip code.

The elevator door sounded, and out stepped Victor DesConte and Reddie Long dressed as choirboys. Concurrently, the other Jasmine and Aladdin and the two security guards rushed out of the suite, bumping into Steel and Kaileigh.

Steel knew immediately what to do: he grabbed Kaileigh’s hand and swung her into the other Aladdin, knocking the boy into the other Jasmine, making sure that he and Kaileigh tangled with them.

The confusion stopped Taddler and Johnny in their tracks.

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