Vera loved the silks, loved the feeling of climbing and twining, the combination of elegance and power required by tissu . She’d proven adept at aerial, graduating quickly to medium-stretch fabrics, the better to suspend herself gracefully above the gymnastic mats.
Her cover was equally graceful in its simplicity. She was a recently orphaned trust-funder, legally independent at eighteen years of age, here in the mountains of Switzerland to finish her schooling under the caring auspices of a fine English-speaking private school.
In reality she was sixteen years old.
An Orphan Program runaway.
And a world-class hacker.
Like Evan, she had been pulled out of a foster home by the Mystery Man, a recruiter who had lingered outside the front yard and watched the kids play. She’d noted him there at the periphery with his wrinkled face and the Ray-Bans he wore all the time, even at night, as though they were nailed to his face. He seemed like something out of a fairy tale or a nightmare, a mystical figure come to carry kids away. When he’d chosen her, she’d been glad to get out, clutching at the opportunity as if it were a lifeline thrown to fish her out of stormy seas. He wore a loose gold watch and smoked cigarettes one after the other, conveying her into a new life on a magic-carpet stream of secondhand smoke.
It had not been the life she’d hoped for.
Here at the school, no one knew her name, her capabilities, her software superpowers. She toed the line and played the part. Her death had been ordered by no less than the president of the United States, and a thing like that tended to make a girl wary.
Evan had helped her and tucked her away here, hidden safely from the prying tentacles of the three-letter agencies. Joey Morales, the real her, was presumed dead, and she and Evan preferred to keep it that way.
But sometimes, even here, Joey still came out to play.
Across the gym a trio of rich Florentine boys practiced kickboxing on a heavy bag. They’d torn the sleeves off their workout T-shirts to show off their triceps, and they were talking too loudly, making sure everyone noticed.
Hanging upside down from the silks fifteen feet above the floor, Joey took a moment to assess their back kicks. Their form was for shit—poor body mechanics on the spin, sloppy counterbalancing, no foot-to-hip alignment on the heel strike—but they egged one another on. Lots of chest bumps and high fives.
Matteo, the ringleader, chinned at the girl on the other set of silks and muttered something to his compatriots, who grinned like jackals.
The other girl was Sara, Joey’s lovely Dutch roommate.
At a secret-society party last month, Sara had drunk herself into oblivion, a stupid choice.
Still, a seventeen-year-old from a farming town in the northwest of Holland—or any girl from anywhere else—should be allowed to make stupid choices.
Suspended from the silks, Sara was practicing the midair splits, her eyes averted from the boys, her cheeks touched with color.
Joey braced herself, gathering the wraps around her legs, scaling higher yet and whipping herself upright twenty feet above the floor. She wound up in a foot lock, her back arched, gripping the bunched silks behind her, a Viking goddess commanding the prow of a ship. She felt a slight pull, the scar tissue in her thigh asserting itself, but that just made her feel more alive.
Below, inquisitive parents drifted through the gym, gazing up at the championship banners in the rafters with touristy wonderment. A presentation in the auditorium this evening would officially commence the year-end parents’ weekend. Joey knew the drill: cheese plates and Viennese tortes, a PowerPoint augmented with endless blathering, the dads pretending not to be bored, the moms pretending not to radiate vicarious intensity. A gagworthy father-daughter dance capped the evening. It would be full of parental pride and familial warmth, all the shit a foster kid like her had learned to steer clear of.
She’d already set up her mission directives: feign menstrual cramps, hang out in her room, and stream Veronica Mars on her laptop.
After the last of the parents exited the gym, Matteo squared to Joey’s roommate, still working hard on the silks. “Nice spread, Sara. Heard you got in some extra practice last month.”
The trio laughed.
Beside Joey, Sara contracted in midair like a pill bug coiling in on itself, a visceral shame reaction.
Joey flipped her way down to the mat, unwinding from the silks in a controlled fall.
She had to get out of here or she was gonna kill somebody, and killing somebody would blow her cover for sure.
As she stepped off the blue rubber mat and walked past the crew of boys, Matteo leaned against the heavy bag and gave her a long-lashed gaze, flirty and handsome, sweat dripping from his dark brow. “Wanna try?” he asked in lightly accented English. “Let’s see what those legs can do.”
Joey paused a few feet from the heavy bag, the muscles in her neck tightening.
She felt the eyes of the boys on her as if they were perusing something in a shop window. Her back was damp with perspiration, a pleasing coolness. She could sense her heartbeat in the side of her neck.
She lifted the ball of her lead foot a few millimeters off the polished floorboards and pivoted it, locking into a side stance. She turned away, raised her knee up high, and threw herself into a spinning back kick, generating power through her base. She let her eyes lead the target.
Her foot hammered into the heavy bag, and Matteo flew back and slammed into the wall loudly enough to rattle the bleachers twenty feet away.
The wind left him in an explosive bark, and he fell to all fours, his mouth clutching for air, one hand pressed to his stomach.
“Sorry,” Joey said, continuing for the door. “I kick like a girl.”
* * *
Joey pushed through the door into her dorm room, red-faced, her clavicles glistening with workout sweat. When she saw who was standing there, she came up short, her mouth slightly ajar. Her eyes welled.
Catching Joey speechless was something Evan relished.
It didn’t last long.
“Fuck a duck ,” she said.
He lifted a finger. “Language.”
She swallowed hard, blinked harder, regaining her composure. On the floor beside her nightstand was an Original S.W.A.T. shoe box stuffed with letters. She stepped inside, sweeping it quickly out of sight beneath the bed.
Then she stared at him awkwardly. “So are we supposed to hug or what?”
“I don’t know,” Evan said.
The ninety-kilometer drive from Milan to Lugano had been gorgeous, snow flurrying with postcard perfection, the sun bronzing Lake Lugano with a dreamy haze. He’d forgotten how clean Swiss air tasted, ice and whiteness finished with a hint of pine.
He paused a moment to take her in. It had been six months since he’d seen her, and she looked healthy. Her skin tone was darker than tan; her last name indicated that she was part Hispanic, but she probably didn’t know the full details of her ethnic background any more than he knew his.
She also looked a touch older, her features transforming into those of a young woman, the fullness of her face diminished ever so slightly. He was surprised at the glimmer of melancholy that brought forth in him. Did he expect her not to grow up? What an odd sentiment.
Before he could contemplate the matter, she said, “Why are you here? I thought, you know, we weren’t supposed to…”
“I need your help,” he said.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“I hacked into the phone of a Secret Service agent.”
“Well, whoop-dee-do,” Joey said. “I bet you can also program your DVR.”
She bit down a grin. He was glad to see her, too.
“Nice haircut,” he said.
She used to keep it shaved on the right side, but now she looked schoolgirl-proper.
“Hey. You’re the one who put me here. The Third Commandment: Master your surroundings. Well, this is me mastering some shit. Plus, look.” She pulled up her tumbling black-brown locks to reveal the thinnest strip of shaved hair just above her ear. “I’m still in here, bitches.”
He said, “Language.”
She broke out that smile at last, the one that changed everything, like a light switch flicking on inside her.
She let her hair fall, and once again she was Vera, somber heiress to a middling trust fund. “All right, all right. You need my help. With what?”
He presented the Boeing Black smartphone on his palm. “I’ve mirrored the agent’s phone,” he said. “Using a Stingray.”
Joey stepped forward and pinched his cheek. “Look at you, all grown up.”
“Joey.”
“Okay, okay.”
“I need to get into the Secret Service databases.”
She bit her lip. “To kill the president.”
“Yes.”
“Who wanted to kill me .”
“Yes.”
Joey said, “Okay.”
“The problem is, all Secret Service computers are air-gapped on a private secure network. No connection to the Internet or the outside world. Which means no way to get in.”
“Certainly not for a lesser brain like yours. You know how hard it is to keep an entire network hermetically sealed? Ask the DoD—they squirted epoxy into the USB ports of a hundred thousand PCs in the Pentagon to try’n block flash-drive exfiltration.” Joey plucked the phone from his hand. “Leave it to the trained professional.”
They were standing close, and she was looking up at him and he down at her. She wound her hand into a fist around the phone, and then she leaned into him, hard, and it took a moment for him to catch up to the fact that she was hugging him.
He could feel the heat of her through his shirt, her arms wrapped tight around his lower back. Her hair was soft and thick. He patted her shoulder, breathed in the scent of her—sweat and citrus—and realized with equal parts alarm and concern that she owned a small piece of him.
A brisk knock at the door startled them apart, and then the door opened and a portly man with ruddy cheeks and round eyeglasses entered. He wore a uniform with a nameplate that read CALVIN BLICKENSDERFER, SCHOOL PORTER.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Vera. I was checking in to tell Ms. Sara that the offensive graffiti on her locker has been removed.” He cleared this throat. “And this is your…?”
“Uncle,” Joey said at the precise instant that Evan said, “Cousin.”
The porter gave a confused smile to fill the silence.
“My Uncle-Cousin,” Joey said. “You know. It’s weird, with my parents, the accident—some distant relatives have stepped up.”
“Oh,” the porter said, brightening, swinging his focus to Evan. “You came to fill in for the father-daughter dance? How thoughtful!”
Evan felt the blood leave his face, saw the points of Joey’s jaw flex as she clamped her teeth.
He said, “Um…”
“The welcome reception for all parents kicks off in”—the porter consulted his polished silver watch, which no doubt kept exemplary Swiss time—“twenty-three minutes. I’ll make sure seats are held. You’d best hurry and get ready.”
“Yeah,” Joey said. “Great.”
The porter gave another twinkly grin and withdrew, easing the door shut so it barely clicked in the frame.
Evan said, “Fuck.”
Joey regarded him flatly. “Language.”