Authors: Lynn Barnes
I wouldn’t ever be able to forget.
Anna edged toward Dr. Clark as two armed guards advanced on the Secret Service agent. I heard, as much as saw, the agent take a bullet to the shoulder.
He kept fighting.
Anna made it to Dr. Clark. Like one of these mothers who suddenly develops super strength to lift a car off her child, Dr. Clark shoved Anna down behind a bookshelf and bolted into the fray. Taking cover where she could, she
made her way to one of the fallen gunmen. She grabbed his weapon, then ducked back into the shelves on the opposite side of the room from us.
Don’t move
, I kept telling myself.
Can’t move. Stay frozen. Stay still.
I watched my World Issues teacher do what I couldn’t. The Secret Service agent glanced at her as he took down the terrorist who’d been firing at him.
“How many of them are there?”
he asked her.
She stepped out of the shelves, gun still in hand. “I don’t know.” She swallowed. “Is help coming? Were you able to call out?”
“Communication is down,” the agent told her. “The other agent on Starlight’s detail is dead. Backup will be here any time, but they won’t be able to get in. This place is a fortress. I have to get her out.”
The guard turned toward the vice president’s
daughter. “Anna, are you—”
A shot rang out. An instant later, Anna Hayden’s last remaining Secret Service agent slumped to the floor. Emilia’s second hand joined her first, pressing over her mouth, holding in a scream as tight as she could.
Secret Service. Shot.
I couldn’t process what I was seeing, or what it meant.
Someone shot him in the head—
Not just someone.
As I watched, Dr. Clark stepped
dispassionately over the Secret Service agent’s body. The gun she’d just fired was still in her hand.
My World Issues teacher just shot a Secret Service agent. She just shot Anna’s Secret Service agent.
“Time to come out now, Anna,” Dr. Clark said, sounding exactly like the woman who’d stood at the front of our World Issues class and lectured about everything from elections to acts of international aggression. “I don’t want to have to hurt you. None of us do.” Dr. Clark walked until
she was standing directly over Anna. She softened her voice as she looked down at the girl. “None of us want to hurt you,” she repeated, “but we will.”
“W—why?” Anna choked out the word.
“Believe me,” Dr. Clark said, “this was not my first-choice way to spend this morning, but unfortunately, I am not the one calling the shots.”
“You . . .” Anna’s gaze was locked on the dead Secret Service agent.
“You killed Dave.”
“He called you Starlight. I take it that was your Secret Service code name?” Dr. Clark’s voice was straightforward, no-nonsense.
In other circumstances, it might have been calming. “His job was to protect you. He died protecting you. He would want you to do whatever you have to do to protect yourself now.” Dr. Clark waved the gun at her. “Stand up.”
Anna was crying. She scrambled
backward until she hit a wall.
Dr. Clark simply repeated herself. “Stand up, Anna.” She trained her gun on the girl. Anna stood. A moment later, a pair of armed guards came into the room.
“Secure her,” Dr. Clark ordered. “Get her in the room with the other high-value targets. If you have to make an example of someone, do try to make it someone disposable.”
One of the guards grabbed Anna. She
screamed, and before I could blink, the guard had hit her over the head with his gun. The vice president’s daughter crumpled to the ground.
“Get her some ice,” Dr. Clark ordered. “We want these kids intact.”
The guard scooped Anna up and gave a brisk nod. “You’re the boss,” he said. His tone seemed to tack a disclaimer onto those words:
for now
.
Dr. Clark stared the guard down, her gaze unflinching,
her finger steady on the trigger of her gun. “We’ll have company any minute. If you’re going to mutiny, I suggest you do it now.”
The guard looked away before she did. The other guard stepped forward, shoving the man who held Anna toward the door.
“Reinforcements are in place,” he reported to Dr. Clark. “We have thirty men. The snipers are on the roof. Campus is secured.”
“I want a head count
of all students. We need to know who we’re missing, and we need to find them.
Now
.”
I closed my eyes, unable to keep watching. Every breath I took was deafening in my ears. My heartbeat, the barest shift of position—any second, they’d hear us. Any second, they’d find us.
Blood.
Blood on my hands.
I couldn’t let myself get caught up in a flashback, but the present was no better. There was blood
seeping into the library carpet.
The Secret Service agent. Two gunmen.
Bodies on the floor, and bodies strewn through the halls—and I was here, trying not to breathe, not to think, not to move. My fingernails dug into the wood of the bookshelf.
Still. So still. Have to stay—
There was a sound. I wasn’t sure if it was me or Emilia or the settling of the floor, but Dr. Clark’s head whipped toward
us. I pressed myself back, willing the dark on our side of the room to swallow me whole.
Don’t let her see us.
Don’t see us.
Don’t—
Dr. Clark strode across the room.
Toward us.
Beside me, Emilia shuddered. Then she shoved her tablet into my hands, threw her head back, and stood up.
There was a two-second delay before the lights switched on. Emilia used those two seconds to stride into the
aisle.
“Don’t shoot,” she said, holding her hands up. “Please, don’t shoot.”
Asher’s twin didn’t glance back at me. She didn’t give any indication that I was here.
“Emilia.” I could hear Dr. Clark’s greeting but couldn’t see her as I pushed myself back against the bookshelf, quelling the urge to go after Emilia.
I can’t help her.
And a moment after that:
She did this for me.
“You’re a sensible
girl,” Dr. Clark was telling Emilia. “Smart. Tougher than you look.”
Why?
I asked Emilia silently.
Why give yourself up to save me?
“You killed John Thomas, didn’t you?” Emilia said, walking toward Dr. Clark—and away from the motion sensor that controlled the light in my aisle.
Sixty seconds. Sixty seconds until it’s dark again. Sixty seconds to hope no one looks through the gaps in the shelves.
“I’m not sure what John Thomas knew, why you wanted him dead.” Emilia kept talking, kept Dr. Clark’s eyes on her. “Quite frankly, Dr. Clark, I don’t care. I don’t care why you killed him. I don’t care
that
you killed him. But you were also framing my brother to take the fall.”
“I assure you,” Dr. Clark replied evenly, “killing Mr. Wilcox was not
my
idea, nor was I the one who pulled the trigger.
We infiltrate, we observe, we influence, we recruit.
” Those words had the ring of a mantra, a prayer. “We kill only when we must—to make a point. Some of us take that vow more seriously than others.”
I thought of the hospital bombing, the assassination attempt.
What was the
point
of that?
“Why?” Emilia asked the same question of Dr. Clark that Anna had. She was still walking toward the woman—taking
her away from me.
“Ours is a grander purpose,” Dr. Clark said. “Everything we do is for the greater good.”
“How long have you—”
“Since the year I spent studying abroad,” Dr. Clark said. “I wasn’t much older than you.”
I remembered Dr. Clark describing her own flashbulb moment, getting off a plane right after 9/11.
Everything we do is for the greater good.
Was that what they’d told her? Was
that what she believed?
“How many people have died today?” Emilia countered. Her voice didn’t waver. It was like the moment she’d come out of hiding, the terror had started draining away. “How is killing people ever for the greater good?”
Dr. Clark didn’t answer. Instead, I heard her raise the gun. “Be smart,” she told Emilia. “Be sensible. Do what you’re told, and you’ll walk out of this.”
She paused. “And so will your brother.”
“Asher isn’t here.”
Dr. Clark’s silence spoke volumes.
We can get to him. Anytime, anywhere—we can get to anyone.
“I’ll be smart.” Emilia’s voice was strong and steady. “What do you want me to do?”
The light above me clicked off with a pop. For a moment, I could feel Dr. Clark looking in this direction.
“Secure her.”
It took me a moment to realize
that Dr. Clark was talking about Emilia, not me.
“High value or low value?” the guard she’d addressed asked.
“Low.”
Low value, because Emilia’s parents are dentists
, I thought, the realization somehow managing to pierce its way through the constant and overwhelming terror that had claimed my
entire body.
Low value, because her family doesn’t have anything the terrorists want.
Anna Hayden’s
father was the acting president of the United States.
High value.
It wasn’t much of a stretch, given my relation to Ivy and William Keyes, to think that they’d consider me high value, too.
I heard the door to the library open.
“Boss wants to talk to you,” a new voice informed Dr. Clark. “A couple of kids are missing.”
Boss?
I thought.
What boss?
Dr. Clark had said that killing John Thomas wasn’t
her idea.
Then whose idea was it? Who pulled the trigger?
It had to be someone at Hardwicke. Someone with access to the security cameras. Someone with the authority to bring new people in.
I didn’t finish that thought. I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. I didn’t do anything until I heard Dr. Clark and the others leave.
I heard the door shut behind them. But it wasn’t until I looked down at the
tablet Emilia had thrust into my hands and saw two guards pass, one escorting Emilia and the other striding next to Dr. Clark, that I let myself suck in a breath of air.
Alone.
I forced myself to move. My leg muscles screamed in objection. My feet were asleep, my muscles in stone-hard knots from holding myself still. My jaw hurt—I’d clamped it down too hard for too long.
I stayed low and moved slowly, trying to avoid the motion sensor.
I have to get out of here.
Out of this library, and out of Hardwicke. My mind went immediately to the tunnel, the one that
let out in the Aquatics Center. If I could get past the guards, get outside, make it to the tunnel—
This place is a fortress.
The dead Secret Service agent’s words echoed in my mind, followed by a statement issued by one of the guards.
The snipers are in place.
If I went outside, they’d see me.
If they thought I was making a run for it, they’d shoot me.
No way out.
I tried to ignore the low,
insistent voice that told me this wouldn’t end well, that if the terrorists had used
the element of surprise to let more than thirty armed men onto campus, if they had snipers on the roof and were prepared for the onslaught of a SWAT team or worse, I stood no chance of getting out of here.
That voice told me to hide.
It told me to stay here, where it was safe.
There is no safe
, I thought. Dr.
Clark had ordered the guards to take a head count and figure out who was missing. Once she realized I was unaccounted for, they’d sweep the building.
She’d remember that Emilia had surrendered herself here.
I have to move. I have to go—
“Where?” The word burst out of my mouth, a whisper as raw as an open wound. My chest was tight, each breath hard-won. My throat hurt. My eyes stung
Pull it
together, Tess. Think.
I turned my attention back to Emilia’s tablet. If she’d managed to tap the security feed, she was on Hardwicke’s wireless, and if the wireless was up and running, I might be able to get a message out.
I launched a browser. Every site I tried to go to was blocked. I tried to text, tried my phone again—nothing.
Pulling the security feeds back up, I stared at them, trying
to memorize the patterns of movement.
I can’t stay here. They’ll find me.
I had to move—without being seen.
Experimentally, I tapped the screen. Instead of a split screen, that let me go through the feeds, one by one. There were more than six of them now.
Armed guards at every exit.
There were over thirty cameras in the main building, giving me eyes on most of the rooms.
Including this one.
I couldn’t see myself on-screen. That was good, given that whoever was sitting up in the Hardwicke security offices right now was probably seeing the exact same thing.
If Emilia were here, she might be able to tell me how to knock some of these cameras out.
But Emilia had given herself up to save me. Why? I didn’t have time to let that question plague me.
You’re a fixer
, I told myself.
You
don’t ask why. You take what you’re given, and you find a way.
I went through the security cameras a second time and took stock of where the gaps in the coverage were.
No cameras in the bathrooms. No camera in the security center itself.
I tried not to dwell on the footage of the classrooms, of the students trapped inside. They lay on their stomachs, hands secured behind their backs.
I tried
not to wonder what had happened to the teachers.
By now the Secret Service would have realized there was a problem. People would come for us.
And do what?
a voice whispered in the back of my head. There were too many terrorists and too many lives at stake. Too many high-value targets.
Anna Hayden’s father is the acting president of one of the most powerful countries on Earth
. The moment it
had become clear that President Nolan was incapacitated, Anna’s father had taken those reins.