United We Spy (Gallagher Girls) (6 page)

W
e were almost to the end of the alley when we heard the explosion. The truck shook. Macey was knocked off her feet, and Bex put the pedal to the metal, laying rubber down the cobblestone alley. When we reached the street, she didn’t even slow down. We shot into traffic, tires squealing, while black smoke filled the air behind us.

“Uh…” Terror filled Preston’s eyes. “I think my school is on fire.”

“We know,” Macey said.

His eyes got even wider. “
How
do you know?”

“Because we’re the ones who set it,” Macey said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world; but Preston just looked at us all in turn, taking it in. He knew the truth about the Gallagher Academy, after all. He shouldn’t have been surprised. But I guess there are some things you have to see to believe, and it was like Preston was seeing us for the very first time.

“Oh,” he said numbly. “Okay.”

In the front seat, Liz spun around. She had a laptop open and yelled at me, “He’s transmitting!” Then she looked at the boy and smiled. “Hi, Preston!”

“Hi, Liz. How are you—hey—hey!”

He stopped talking. I’m pretty sure that’s what most boys would do if Macey McHenry were ripping off their shirts.

“Macey!” Preston gasped, but Macey didn’t slow down.

“Take it off,” she told him. “Take it all off.”

She had ripped the button-down shirt off his arms and was going to work on his belt.

“No,” Preston snapped. But he didn’t protest long because, if I’m going to be honest—which is kind of the point of these reports—I was already unzipping his pants.

Then Macey started ripping off Preston’s white T-shirt. (Yes, actual
rippage
.) And I was fighting with his zipper. I wasn’t exactly proud of how we handled the situation, but desperate times call for incredibly desperate measures.

“Give me everything you have,” I told him.

“Really, Cammie. I never knew you thought of me that way.”

Preston’s pants were undone by that point and I ordered, “Step!”

He did as he was told, and a moment later I had the pants in my hands.

Preston just stood there, dumbfounded, in his boxers as I cracked open the back of the truck and hurled the pants into the street. A split second later the rest of his clothes and shoes followed.

“Hey!” he shouted, but right then, through the open doors, I heard the roar of motorcycles. Memory came rushing back. Terror mixed with adrenaline, and I didn’t feel sorry for the mostly naked boy. Not even a little bit. I just wanted us all to get out of this alive.

“Liz?” Macey asked, but Liz shook her head. “No go,” she said. “He’s still got a signal.”

“What if it’s
in
him?” Macey asked.

“Then we cut it out,” I said, pressing Preston to the floor of the moving truck.

“I don’t like the sound of this!” Preston shouted, his voice way more high-pitched than any eighteen-year-old guy ever wants his voice to be, but I didn’t have time to care. I was looking at his body, examining every inch for scars.

“Have you had any shots, Preston? Any implants in the last six months?”

“What?” he shouted.

“Focus,” Macey said. I thought she was going to slap him.

“I…I had to go to the dentist!” he shouted.

I didn’t ask for an invitation. I pried open his mouth like Grandpa Morgan trying to buy a horse.

“Retainer,” I told Macey.

“Give it to us, Preston,” she told him.

“No.” He scooted farther back, pressing against the side of the truck.

“Give it to us,” I told him. “Or I borrow Bex’s knife.”

And that must have done it, because he handed me the slimy piece of plastic and metal. I hurled it out the back of the van.

And we waited.

Seconds stretched out for what seemed like hours before Liz finally gave the longest sigh I’d ever heard.

“That does it,” she said. “He’s clean.”

Only then did Macey and I drop to the floor of the truck. Breathing hard. Hearts pounding. I laid my head against a basket full of croissants, resting there, staring at Preston, who sat in his boxer shorts, arms crossed self-consciously across his chest.

“Are you going to explain?” Preston was trying to keep his voice steady and failing. “What is going on?”

I wanted to tell him everything—about his father and Zach’s mother and all the ways his life was getting ready to change, but I couldn’t say a word because Bex was already yelling, “Hang on!”

Rebecca Baxter may possibly be the greatest spy I’ll ever know. She’s also probably the most aggressive driver. So when she gripped the wheel and took a corner far faster than any bread truck is ever supposed to move, we all held on for dear life while the truck jumped the curb and burst through a newsstand.

Preston looked like he might throw up, and I couldn’t really blame him.

Liz turned around and handed a bundle of clothes between the seats. “Here you go,” she said.

“You brought clothes?” Preston asked. “You knew you were going to make me jump out of a window. And strip. And throw a perfectly good retainer away?”

Bex glanced back. “I was just hoping about the stripping part. Nice abs, by the way.” Then she went back to driving.

“Look, Preston,” Macey started. “We can explain. And we will. Soon. But right now we have to get you someplace safe.”

“I
was
someplace safe! And then you made me jump out a window and blew up my school!”

“You
weren’t
someplace safe,” Macey told him just as I heard the roar.

“And, technically, we didn’t blow up the school,” Liz qualified. “It was a very small and highly controlled explosion.”

Through the dirty windows at the back of the truck, I saw motorcycles come racing up behind us. I felt Bex jerk the wheel, and the truck skidded onto a main street, going the wrong direction.

Cars honked. Pedestrians yelled as Bex swerved onto the sidewalk. But still she didn’t slow down.

Preston’s breath was coming harder than it should have as he asked, “What is going on?”

Before I could explain Bex said, “Guys, we have—”

But she never got to finish. The crash came too fast—too hard. One second we were careening along the Roman streets, and the next there was nothing but the screech of tires and the crunch of metal. I felt myself falling, tumbling in the back of the truck as it flipped onto its side. Sparks and scraping metal. Something was pushing us across the street.

And then we were falling, tumbling over and over like clothes in a dryer, until there was a splash and then nothing but cold and fear.

The river was freezing. Bread floated all around us as the water cascaded through the back of the truck and the broken windows, taking us lower. Deeper into the cold.

“Preston!” Macey was yelling, but she sounded too far away. “Preston!” she called again.

Slowly, water filled the back of the truck, and as my eyes adjusted to the black, my head swirled. Blood ran down my face. I wanted to be sick or maybe just close my eyes and sleep, but then I thought about what I’d told Bex just days before: what I really wanted to be was alive.

So I kicked and clawed and swam toward the broken doors at the back of the truck, and that was when I saw him. Preston’s eyes were closed and his lips were turning blue. A bump was growing on his head, and I knew it wasn’t just the cold water that was sending him into shock.

“Preston! Cam!” Macey yelled again, and I realized it was coming through my earpiece.

“I’ve got him,” I yelled. “Swim!” I ordered, and put my head down, pulling Preston out of the truck as quickly as I could. My friends must have done as I said, because when I surfaced they were gone.

Air bubbled up from the sinking truck.

“Cammie!” Liz yelled. She sounded afraid, but I couldn’t see her. It was like I was in an echo chamber. The whole world had had the volume turned down.

“Cammie, are you okay?” Liz said just as a bullet pierced the water, slicing into the murky darkness.
Splash
. And then another. And another.

So I just put my head down and kept on swimming, dragging Preston toward the shore.

The current must have carried us farther away from the wreckage than I realized, because when Preston and I came up for air, I gasped and looked around—waiting—but no shots came.

In the distance, there was shouting.

“Cammie?” Preston said, his voice groggy. “What happened? Where am I?”

“We went for a little swim, Pres. And now we’ve got to go for a run.”

“I don’t feel so good.”

“I know, but you can do it. Come on. I’ll help you.”

Running down the streets of Rome, I didn’t dare stop to think about what we must have looked like. A tiny line of blood was smeared across Preston’s face. My wet hair was tangled and filled with broken glass. Blood ran into my eyes, and the sweatshirt we’d packed for Preston was two sizes too big and hung off him like a wet blanket.

Macey and Bex and Liz were on the other side of the river, running past an SUV with a pair of busted headlights, and I immediately knew what had caused the crash. As they passed, the SUV revved its engine and started chasing after them, swerving in and out of traffic. Other cars stopped, but the SUV just kept coming, plowing onto sidewalks, bursting through barricades.

“Run!” Bex yelled, her voice carrying across the river, and Preston and I didn’t have to be told twice.

I reached for Preston’s hand, dragging him away. But the motorcycles were already weaving across a bridge, rushing toward us. I heard the haunting, piercing wails of police cars and fire trucks. In less than two minutes our sinking truck would be surrounded by authorities. Cops and bystanders would fill the streets, searching.

The motorcycle engines revved.

We didn’t have two minutes.

Preston’s hand was too still. He was going into shock. Of course he was. He was human. He was just a boy, no matter who his father was. And I knew it was up to me to pull the ambassador’s son away from the sirens and the sinking truck, the motorcycles and the men who wouldn’t stop until they found us.

Preston was the asset. The Gallagher Girl part of me knew that getting him out of there was my job—my mission. “Let’s go,” I shouted.

“This way,” Preston said. We were on his home turf, and I let him drag me into an alley I’d never seen before. Laundry hung on lines overhead, blocking out the sun. And still we ran faster and faster, pushing aside the low-hanging sheets that floated around us like ghosts. And then we broke free of the alley and onto another street, light streaming all around us, and I knew where Preston was going.

“Is that the embassy?” I asked, already sure of the answer.

“Yeah. We’re almost there.”

Even drenched and freezing, shocked and terrified, Preston was stronger than he looked. It was all I could do to stop him.

“No!” I shouted, jerking his arm, pulling him out of the street.

“Cam, we’ll be safe at the embassy. It’s US soil. They can’t get us.”

“No, Preston.” I shook my head. I found his eyes. I had to make him see—make him understand. But not even the Gallagher Academy can teach you how to change somebody’s world, alter everything they’d ever thought was true.

“What aren’t you telling me?” he shouted. It went far beyond fear and rage and panic. Preston was desperate. And desperate people do desperate things. “It’s the Circle, isn’t it? They’re after us.”

“Yes.”

“Is it because of last summer? Because you stayed here? Did you leave something or—”

“The Circle isn’t after you, Preston. The Circle…it
is
you.”

“What do you mean?”

“When did you get your new bodyguards? Was it back before Christmas?”

He didn’t say a word, but the answer was written all over his face.

“A lot of strange things started happening then, didn’t they?” I asked him. “Murders of prime ministers…disappearances of bigwigs in the European Union… Strange things keep happening to powerful people. People whose families have been powerful for centuries. People whose ancestors used to follow the teachings of a man named Iosef Cavan.”

“No.” Preston shook his head. He eased away from me.

“Think about it, Preston. Something has been different lately, hasn’t it? Your dad, he’s been changing his patterns. Fewer trips out of the embassy? New cars? New guards? New protocols?” I spoke slowly, but still Preston inched farther and farther away from me and the things I had to say. “Someone is hunting Circle members, Preston—the descendants of the Circle founders.”

“No.” Preston shook his head.

“Someone is hunting
you
.”

Carefully, I reached into the pocket of my jeans, my cold hands scraping against the wet denim; but I clawed until I found the piece of paper. Gently, I unfolded it, peeling back the damp layers until I could look down at the names I knew by heart.

“This is why they wanted me, Preston. Because years ago I saw this list. Because I knew about the people who founded the Circle of Cavan. Look, Preston. Look!” I pointed to the names. “Elias Crane. His great-great-great-great grandson is dead. Charles Dubois’s great-great-great-great granddaughter and her kids are probably dead. Look at the last name, Preston.”