Prettyboy Must Die Read online

  “I thought we only do one of these a semester,” I say to Bunker. “Not that I’m complaining about getting out of Maitland’s class for a few minutes.”

  “Or away from that icy indifference Katie is throwing your direction,” Bunker says as he lines up behind me. “How much you wanna bet someone pulled the alarm?”

  “That’s a sucker bet,” I say, because these things are never an actual fire, but I still keep an eye out for Katie, indifference and all, just in case for the first time in the history of ever, there’s a real emergency. She’s four people ahead of me, but since I have half a foot on her and a couple inches on the next tallest guy in the room, I can spot her no problem. At least, until I can’t. Somewhere between the hallway and the stairwell, I lose sight of her.

  What the hell? I only turned my back for a second, and now she’s gone. How does a whole girl just disappear?

  “Bunker, do you see Katie up ahead?”

  “Are you trying to remind me I’m the shortest guy in class, or what?”

  “No, it’s just weird that I can’t see her,” I say as we pass through the rear exit doors and into the parking lot behind the school.

  “Thought you didn’t care for that girl. You were really insistent about it twenty minutes ago.”

  “I don’t care who she’s dating or whether she stays pissed with me forever, but I do care if she dies in a fiery inferno.”

  “First off, did you detect even a whiff of smoke with that canine-like olfactory system of yours? Second, remain calm. It never helps to panic. There’s a reason the flight attendants always say that in airplane disaster movies.”

  Bunker really needs to catch up on film from the last couple of decades, but I appreciate his advice. He could not be more on point. Still, where the hell is Katie?

  “Now can you spot her?”

  “If you can’t see her, how do you expect I can?”

  Bunk’s right, it is a desperate question. But I’m beginning to feel a little desperate. I consider breaking formation, abandoning my class’s line and going back into the building, when I notice I’m being watched.

  A few girls in the lines on either side of ours—one line from a freshman class, the other full of seniors—are staring at me. The freshmen are trying to hide the fact that they’re staring; the older girls aren’t trying to hide anything. A few of them smile, one winks suggestively, and … okay, that blonde at the back of the freshman line just mouthed something at me that makes me wish I didn’t read lips. Almost.

  Like a car wreck you know you shouldn’t watch, I’m fixated on what the blond girl is suggesting we do after school, until Headmistress Dodson’s voice booms through a megaphone, snapping me out of it.

  That’s when I realize who the blonde is—the girl who took my photo last night.

  That’s also when I see the top of Katie’s head in the line, four people ahead of me, as though she’d never been missing.

  CHAPTER 4

  It turns out Bunker was right. Someone pulled an alarm and now Dodson is launching a full-scale investigation to find the culprit, which she just announced over the PA system in her usual I’m-not-screwing-around Voice-of-God way.

  I’m in the cafeteria at lunch, trying to focus on my own investigation and ignore the growing number of stares I’m getting from Carlisle’s female population. Since that first-period fire drill, whispering and pointing have been added to the staring. As long as I don’t run into the slightly scary blond girl who must be the most aggressive freshman ever, I won’t worry too much about it. I’m peeved she started all this by tweeting my picture, but I can deal as long as she keeps it at the harmless crush level. After two months on campus, my suspect list is still a couple of suspects too long to get sidetracked by crazy-making women, Katie Carmichael included.

  With Marchuk dead, the hacking mercenary may now be working for someone even more dangerous, though I’m still not sure why he chose Carlisle to hide out. My best guess is because it’s only ten miles from Boulder, home to several federal science agencies, one of which is working on quantum encryption technology to generate unbreakable codes to secure the nation’s defense systems. A lot of the lab’s scientists send their kids to Carlisle, and I’m thinking that’s how the hacker plans to get close to the facility—by making friends with some of those students, worming his way into their lives, and finally gaining the access I’ve been shutting down with his every attempt.

  Not everything is hackable; sometimes real-life people have to make real-life incursions. For a hacker who has spent months trying to breach our security systems, breaking into the National Institute of Standards and Technology would be like reaching Epic tier in Dungeons and Dragons. All that encryption technology. All those lasers. So far, I’ve managed to rule out three people: Katie, Bunker, and Joel Easter. They, like everyone else on my list, were presumed guilty until proven innocent because they were new enrollees this year. Fortunately, that list is small—five suspects in all—because Carlisle rarely admits new students who aren’t part of the incoming freshman class, and I know my target isn’t a ninth grader. He could be a child genius, but the confidence, or arrogance, it takes to tag his work suggests he’s older.

  Obviously, he could be a she—Katie made the list, after all—but the profile I created for the hacker says it’s a guy, so I call him a he, but I keep an open mind. Joel is a level-three legacy student, which means two generations of Easters before him attended Carlisle. So he was genetically destined to attend. He didn’t start until his junior year because his parents had lived in Europe until recently. Now that his family has returned stateside, he’s cashing in on his Carlisle legacy. Joel’s a nice guy, but I didn’t take him at his word on his backstory. I had my cubicle neighbor back at Langley look into it, and his story checks out. His father is one of the top laser scientists at NIST, which puts Joel in the potential asset category.

  Clearing Bunker was easier. Thanks to his previous life as a troglodyte, he didn’t even know what the internet was until recently. Of course, his father knew all about it, but thought it was some kind of mind-control experiment funded by the government. Bunk’s backstory was confirmed by a Time magazine investigative report, as well as thorough psych evals conducted by The Journal of Applied Behavioral Research. Yeah, Bunker and his crazy dad are kinda famous.

  And Katie … well, I already explained why it can’t be her. But in case my boss thinks I reached this conclusion because of hormones, I had her story checked too, and she totally doesn’t fit the profile. First off, Katie is all woman, and most hackers are not. Second, she has a well-documented family history through her aristocratic English father and an Indian maharaja grandfather on her mother’s side. Your average hacker-for-hire millionaire is only rich because hacking made him that way, not because he was born into it like Katie. Plus, I believe her when she says she chose Carlisle to improve her chances of acceptance at the local university’s optical physics program—aka laser science—the best in the country.

  That leaves two other students on my list: one male, one female. I got so sidetracked by Katie for a while there, my intel on them is sketchy at best. All I know about the girl is that her family has been in the mining business for generations. What I know about the dude is that I cannot stand him and hope like hell he’s the one.

  I’m looking over some notes I’ve made—indecipherable, of course—when I go to adjust my glasses and find them gone. In my defense, when you have perfect vision, it’s easy not to notice you’re missing your fake glasses for three and a half periods.

  Oh, that’s right. I took them off to clean right about the time the fire alarm went off. I remember leaving them on the desk before we all filed out, but now that I think about it, they weren’t there when we returned. I was so focused on Katie’s disappearing act, I hadn’t noticed they were gone. Who the hell would take my glasses? Whoever it was will discover there’s zero prescription in them, just as Bunker suspected. Maybe he grabbed them for me. Or … could that
be the reason Katie went missing? Did she notice I wasn’t wearing them and went back for them?

  Nah, that’s crazy. One—she’d have to care that much about me. Two—I’d have to believe I was something special to think she’d run back into a potentially burning building just so I’d be able to see. Not that you could blame me for thinking I’m all that, considering how these girls are scoping me right now. As long as Bunker isn’t around, I’ll admit I have always had a strong game with the girls. All that gym time required of my CIA training hasn’t hurt it either, but damn, these girls are jockin’ me. Is this what they feel like all the time? Because it’s making me a little uncomfortable.

  And apparently my glasses really are a powerful cover. I wasn’t wearing them in the photo that girl tweeted, either, and a few hundred girls thought I looked good enough to retweet. I wish Bunk was here so I could tell him Clark Kent knew what he was doing, but I need to eighty-six the suspect-hunting, and retrieve the backup pair from my locker.

  The theory about Katie having them is a bust. I pass her table as I leave the cafeteria, but she doesn’t even look up from her copy of Pride and Prejudice. You’d think a British girl would have already read it, but maybe I’m just stereotyping. Anyway, Katie might be the only girl in the place who isn’t staring me down right now.

  “Uh, excuse me, Pee-tah.”

  Or maybe I spoke too soon.

  “Katie, I didn’t even see you there.”

  Smooth. I’m sure she bought that one. You’d have to be blindfolded or have your head covered with a dark burlap sack to miss Katie Carmichael. I’ve had both of those things happen at the same time, and even under those conditions I’d probably still notice her. Yes, she’s that gorgeous.

  “Are you enjoying your fifteen minutes?” she asks.

  “Um, what?” Also smooth.

  She smiles as though we’re sharing an inside joke, but I don’t have a clue, and apparently she isn’t going to let me in on it.

  “I have something for you,” she says, reaching into her bag.

  Wow. She really did go back for my glasses. “I was wondering where they were. That was really cool of you to risk—”

  “Your half of the bill,” she says, handing me a piece of paper. “If you recall, we agreed to split the costs of homecoming. I’d buy the tickets and dinner and you’d pay me back. It’s been two weeks and I thought perhaps you’d forgotten.”

  Her tone indicates she thought no such thing. Her tone indicates she thinks I’m not only a loser who’d dump her the day before homecoming, but that I’d actually stick her with the tab for it. And she’s right, except I didn’t intentionally scam on the bill. In my obsession with finding the hacker, and oh yeah, trying to get over her, I just spaced it.

  “Oh, snap, I really did forget. I swear. Here, let me just give you the full amount.”

  “I don’t need the full amount,” she says, crushing my grand gesture. “I went to the dance and had a very nice evening. My date turned out to be as adept on the dance floor as he is in the engineering lab,” she adds, crushing my heart.

  There’s pretty much nothing left to say after that, so I take the rejected half of my money and walk away, certain I can feel the death rays her eyes must be shooting into my back. But when I turn around to get one last look at her, Katie is engrossed in her book, as though I’d never been there.

  CHAPTER 5

  Once I leave the cafeteria in search of my spare pair of glasses, I hear a whistling sound coming from the short hall leading to the main front entrance. Since Carlisle Academy won some big award for energy efficiency, there should be no drafts anywhere in the building. It must be coming from an open door.

  Pretty much only visitors use this door, so it’s no big deal that it’s been recently opened. But the hydraulic door closer should have fastened shut when the last person went out. And if it was ajar for more than thirty seconds, an alarm should have gone off. Carlisle takes this stuff more seriously than airport TSA during an orange-level terrorist threat, so something isn’t right. Someone must have tinkered with it.

  I find a small piece of paper at the bottom of the door, folded a couple of times to make it thick enough to keep the door from closing, but making the fact that it isn’t closed almost imperceptible. When I unfold the paper, I see it’s a bit thicker, more like the weight of a postcard; matte white on one side, shiny red on the other, and embossed with a white abstract design that seems vaguely familiar. I backtrack to the main office around the corner to get more information.

  The second thing I did upon my arrival at Carlisle was to befriend the office staff. Dodson might think she runs the show, but it’s her assistant that makes her look so good, and the assistant’s assistant who keeps the whole thing running. I stay on his good side with items from what I call my asset acquisitions cache, or bribe box. Things like a Cuban cigar my “mother,” a diplomatic attaché, brought back from the inaugural diplomatic trip after the US embargo was lifted. Or just last week, I gave him a pair of Denver Broncos tickets—just about the hardest NFL seats to get outside of Green Bay or Washington, DC—when my “father” suddenly couldn’t use them.

  My official CIA dossier indicates I have no mother and father, that they are both deceased, which is the truth. They went to Kenya for their tenth wedding anniversary and died during a big storm when their van tried to cross a washed-out road. My parents left for the airport one day, and that was the last time I ever saw them. At first I imagined they were still out there somewhere, and I made up stories of why they couldn’t get back to me. It made it easier to deal.

  But then I grew up. Now my parents are like my assets, and the stories I make up about them help me do my job. I won’t lie—it sucks to have no family. Actually, it hurts like hell. But having no one in the world who gives a damn about me makes for a perfect CIA operative. It’s probably the reason Rogers pulled me out of the foster system—that and my hacking skills—and made me her first Early Bird operative. If I’m ever caught, the bad guys will have no one to use as leverage against me.

  Getting fired permanently would suck because the agency is the closest thing I’ve had to a family since I lost my real one.

  When I get to the office, I find only one person behind the bulletproof window. Carlisle is a few miles outside the nearest town, yet administration treats security as though the campus is in the middle of the toughest big-city neighborhood. Some might call it overkill. I call it smart planning. There are no metal detectors at the entrance, like there were at all of my old schools—can’t make exclusive Carlisle feel like it’s a dangerous place to be—but everything else about the security is top-notch.

  Well, maybe not right at this moment, because Dodson’s assistant’s assistant has his back to the closed guest window, engaged in what must be a pretty serious phone call from the look of his body language. His stance is like a soldier’s at ease: feet shoulder-width apart, his free hand resting on the small of his back, palm facing me, except when he briefly holds it on top of his head. I’m guessing he hasn’t been watching the hallway, the window, or the monitor for the security camera trained on the front door. When I push the service buzzer, he turns, startled, and quickly ends his phone call.

  “What’s up, Jonesy?” I ask when he unlocks the window and slides it open. “Broncos handle their business yesterday or what?”

  “You missed a good one, brother,” he says, his tone giving away nothing about the conversation I’d just interrupted. “I damn near went broke on stadium beer, but that’s what I get for celebrating a little too hard. Tell your dad how much I appreciate those tickets. I took mine and made him the happiest man in Denver.”

  Maybe it’s because I was just thinking about my orphan status, but Jonesy’s game report makes me both bummed and happy at the same time. I lost my parents nearly half my lifetime ago. Too many memories of my dad have already faded, but I’m glad I gave Jonesy a chance to make some memories with his.

  “What can I do you for?”
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  “I have chemistry next and just realized I’ve lost my lab notebook. I know I’m not supposed to get supplies from the office, but—”

  “Not a problem, my man,” Jonesy says, getting up and heading for the supply closet in back. In the minute he’s gone, I’m able to sneak a look at the visitor sign-in screen.

  Hmm. Not good.

  I put the sign-in tablet back where I found it just as Jonesy returns with the notebook and an industrial-sized bottle of Tylenol, explaining, “For my pounding headache. A little too much game-day celebration last night.”

  “I know you only stock these notebooks for teachers. I can pay you for it,” I say, handing him a five-dollar bill, but for the second time in the past ten minutes, my money is rejected.

  “Don’t worry about it. Just don’t tell anyone or I’ll have fifty kids up in here asking for stuff. And watch it with the Jonesy. Only my friends call me that, and the Carlisle Official Handbook says you can’t be my friend. I’m still in my new-hire probationary period; gotta keep up appearances, Mr. Smith.”

  “Right, Mr. Jones.”

  I thank him for the notebook just as the bell rings. I head for my locker, thinking about what I saw in the visitor’s log. Or what I didn’t see. I don’t like the fact that we’ve had no visitors since fifth period—some doctor to meet with his kid’s teacher—and yet the door has been propped open for nearly an hour. It was probably a student who went out front to sneak a contraband smoke break, but why didn’t the alarm go off after thirty seconds? The folded paper kept the door from latching closed, but maybe not open enough to trigger the alarm. And about that paper—I have this nagging feeling that I’ve seen the design before. Not sure why the image should make me feel uneasy, but it does. It’s probably the hacker in me—I can’t stand an unsolved puzzle.