A Girl Named Digit (11 page)

At JFK we raced through Terminal 5, past armed military men, and hopped into a cab to Grand Central. “Aren’t we going to check in to our hotel first?”

John smiled at me like I was cute. And seven. “They haven’t let me know where we’ll be spending the night yet. We’ll get our work done first.”

“You mean staying.”

“What?”

“You meant to say, ‘They haven’t let us know where we are staying,’ like to imply a hotel, with a minibar and a big bathtub and unlimited hot water. Right? The phrase ‘spending the night’ suggests, well, what we’ve been doing the past six nights. I smell an air mattress when I hear that.”

“I meant spending the night. But we’ll see what they say after we get the bag.”

The city was just like I’d imagined it from TV and the movies. But bigger, taller, and louder. The traffic was slow, so we got out of our cab at Park Avenue and Fiftieth Street and walked seven blocks to Grand Central Station. I got half a block before I decided that women who could walk in heels must be professionally trained athletes. I teetered along beside John, stopping to fix my heel more than a few times. But no one saw me, no one noticed. You could really do anything in New York City.

We entered Grand Central Station through Vanderbilt Avenue and took the escalator to the Main Concourse. Riding down that escalator, next to John, I drank in the magic of what was around me. The ceiling was gold-leafed with a depiction of the constellations on it. The layout of the night sky was backwards, but perfectly backwards. If everything in New York was going to be that beautiful, I didn’t care if it was all upside down.

John was looking at me. “You okay?”

“I love it.”

“Me too. Let’s go.” Dream sequence over, back to work. Everything went so easily, that I started to wonder why it was so hard to get a job at the FBI. We asked at the Information booth where we could find the Lost and Found. We went there and looked through thirty-two bags until we found the one and only diaper bag. John threw it over his shoulder, and we walked out. Like shooting fish in a barrel, right? Wrong.

I was giddy with success and the realization that I had a future as a terror-fighting, high heel–wearing, code-breaking badass. John was noticeably less relaxed. He took my arm as we left Grand Central Station, scanning the Main Concourse like he was watching a tennis match. He led me up the main escalators and out onto Forty-third Street and Vanderbilt.

“John, they’re not after us.” I was teetering as he rushed me along. “They are probably still watching my house or the FBI parking lot. If they knew where their precious bag was, they would have grabbed it before we did or killed us already. Relax.”

A cab jumped out of the taxi line and pulled right up alongside of us. I guessed it paid to be well-dressed in the big city. We got into the cab and the driver muttered, “Where to?”    “Please take us uptown to the Excelsior Hotel, Eighty-first and Central Park West.”

We drove in silence across town, toward the West Side Highway. All the windows were down, and the cool spring air blew the sound of the horns and screeching brakes to make a symphony for my ears. We passed through Times Square, and I stuck my head out of the window to catch every light, every shimmer. It was like being in a big box made of Lite-Brites, but moving and magical. We passed four Broadway theaters with lines of well-dressed and not-so-well-dressed people clamoring to get in. I looked over to John, sure I would catch him watching my wonder with amusement. I was ready to defend my naiveté, but instead saw his profile with jaw clenched and brows furrowed in concentration. Did this guy have a problem giving his regards to Broadway?

I snuck a peek into the diaper bag. Inside I expected bombing tools, and what those were going to look like I had no idea. Instead I found a stack of maybe forty-five pages of computer paper, with columns of numbers.

“Anything?” John asked, still staring straight ahead.

I shook my head. “No, but it’s a little more my speed than the romance babble.”

We got onto the West Side Highway and headed uptown, the Hudson River and the lights of New Jersey in the distance. I couldn’t take it anymore. I was having the time of my life, and he was such a dud. “Okay, are you going to relax now? We did it. It sounds like you’re springing for a hotel and we’re heading back to L.A. tomorrow. Right?”

“Shhh.” Jeez. I couldn’t figure out why he was so tense. Maybe he had big plans for our night at the hotel together? I mean, we had just spent seven solid days together, no breaks. We’d developed such an easy banter and an equally easy silence. We’d slept ten inches from each other every night and had worked two inches from each other every day. Why would he be nervous? Had I been playing too hard to get?

“I’m going to need you to change your shoes.”

“Why? I like these. I mean, for sitting. I feel kind of . . .”

“Right now.” He grabbed my gym bag, pulled out my cowboy boots, and pulled my heels off. This was a little sudden. The guy’s had seven days to kiss me, and now he goes for my feet? In a cab? I pulled on my socks and boots obediently.

“Okay, you’re kind of freaking me out.”

He leaned in so close that I could feel his breath on my neck. In a flash I realized that my instincts had been right about these boots. I had worn them every day for four years, enduring my mother’s pleas that I try a pair of wedges. I’d had them resoled six times, because on some level I’d known that these boots had special powers. I vowed right then and there to never take them off, to never let my foot grow another half size. He was about to kiss me, and I owed it all to my boots.

He spoke in a whisper in my ear: “I’m holding up three fingers, and when I count back to one, we are going to jump out of the cab onto the grass to our right. Do you understand?”

I heard:
I adore you, you’re beautiful, and now I am going to kiss you like you’ve never been kissed before.
So when he threw open the taxi door and pulled me out onto the shoulder of the West Side Highway, and I felt myself crash into what passes for grass in New York City, let’s just say I was a bit surprised.

John grabbed my hand and started running. Our taxi driver swerved to a stop, abandoned his car in the middle of the highway, and ran in our direction, screaming into his cell phone. This was all starting to make sense to me. Kiss? No. Death? Maybe.

We were ahead of him by about a block as we ran east across Riverside Drive. We were both fairly fast, except that we were carrying our gym bags and the now-all-important diaper bag. We ran down a long block of apartment buildings on Eighty-fourth Street, barely catching the attention of the doormen standing guard. I longed to run into one of those buildings to safety but knew that John wouldn’t want to endanger the residents. We were running to get killed in solitude.

We crossed Columbus Avenue against the light and were nearly flattened by a downtown bus. The taxi driver was gaining on us, mainly because he was not schlepping luggage and was sporting slightly more sensible shoes. As we got closer to Central Park West, the streets were getting quieter and the taxi driver was getting closer. We would have been better off staying on the busier two-way streets where we could have ducked into restaurants or subway stations, but John was leading me, and I knew that wasn’t how he wanted this to end. As it was, we were running down a fancier part of Eighty-fourth Street, quiet and tree-lined, toward Central Park. Which would be deserted.

The street was so quiet that I could hear the taxi driver’s phone ring behind us. He must have looked down to answer it, because he missed John pushing me between two parked vans and flattening me face-down in the street.

I looked up in time to see the driver’s feet run by in hot pursuit. Very Scooby-Doo, right? All I needed now was a sarcophagus to hide in and a really big sandwich. Silently, John pulled me up again and dragged me through an alley to Eighty-third Street. “We have about thirty seconds to get in another cab and get the hell out of here before he backtracks. Move!” We ran like mad into a crowd on Amsterdam Avenue. A taxi was waiting for a lady with two little kids who was struggling to fold up her stroller, keep the kids off the street, and send a text. We slipped into the other side of the taxi, John threw a fifty into the front seat, and we sped off before she could hit Send.

“Where to?”

“Please drive all the way downtown. In fact, take us to Brooklyn.” He turned to me. “Are you okay?”

Since I didn’t know the answer to that question specifically, I just started to ramble. “My arm hurts, and I might have a blister on my left toe because I put my socks on wrong, but that was good that you had me change my shoes or I’d be dead. Did that guy want to kill me or get the bag or both? What’s in this bag, and how did you know that guy was going to try to kill us?”
And, believe it or not, I’m a little disappointed because I really thought you were going to kiss me in that cab while we zoomed along the Hudson River with no one but the city lights watching us.

“Let me look at your arm.” I took off my suit jacket, and he gently poked the newly forming bruise on my left arm. “It’s going to be an ugly bruise, but it’s nothing to worry about. And I don’t know why you thought I was going to kiss you.”
Hello?! Internal dialogue? Can you hear me now?!
“I think you can see now how important the job is that I’ve been given. I am responsible for keeping you alive. And I nearly failed a few minutes ago. You are my charge, and I am an agent. I am an adult, and you are a minor. I could get fired or arrested, or worse. I am not going to kiss you. Clear?” He was all business; I was mortified.

“What’s in Brooklyn?” My survival instincts told me I’d have to change the subject before I spontaneously combusted.

“Nothing. I just want to get away. This guy’s okay,” he said, motioning at the driver. “But that last guy was talking into his cell phone in a rare dialect of Russian, and he was speaking very cryptically. These past few days, you must have turned me into some sort of code cracker. He was checking in with someone and told them that he had us and that, yes, we had bags with us. He confirmed that he’d dispose of us and our belongings.”

“He didn’t want the diaper bag?”

“No, I think that guy was just out to kill you.”

I looked out the window at the city lights as we zoomed back down the West Side Highway. No kiss, almost dead, and fully mortified. What a day. I wondered why I didn’t feel worse. There was something so exhilarating about this whole experience, sore arm and hurt pride included. It was as if for the first time, I was fully engaged in life. The promise of a kiss, broken or not, and the threat of death, averted, had woken me up. I hated the sting of rejection, but at least I felt something.

“We need help. I’m calling Steven.” John was a man on a mission. I could tell his adrenaline was still high from the chase, and he was silently concocting a plan to keep us safe. He got Steven on the phone immediately. “We are in New York. They found us outside of Grand Central Station. A cabdriver speaking Russian had orders to kill us, but not to recover the bag. I believe that the bag is worthless and that it’s my charge they’re after. We need a place to hide tonight.” He was silent as he received his instructions. “Okay, we’re headed there now. We’ll head back to L.A. in the morning.”

“SoHo Grand?” A girl could dream.

“PS 142, Brooklyn.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a middle school. It’s Friday night, so it’ll be locked up and empty for the weekend. We don’t know what hotels they’re watching, and we can’t risk a big scene in a packed lobby, anyway. These guys won’t mind blowing up a few hundred innocent people just to kill you. So I can’t take you to an airport until we can rush directly on to a plane.” His human side returned long enough for him to see the terror on my face. He put his arm around me and let it rest lightly on my shoulder. “Steven thinks we need to be someplace where there are no other people, just in case. Plus, it’ll be like old times, camping out on the floor. I’ll even let you pick . . . the gym or the science lab?”

“I can’t remember the last time I slept on a real mattress. With clean sheets and a down pillow and maybe a bedside table with a cold glass of water and a book.”

“Maybe there’s a home ec class. We’ll have the run of the place.”

I smiled at him. He was trying to make me feel better, and I was not above letting him. “Do you mind if I get out of this costume?” He looked panicked. I went on, “Jeez, just look the other way, and I’m going to pull my jeans back on under this skirt. I’m not going to break into a middle school dressed like the principal.”

John did as he was told, and I slipped back into my dirty but insanely comfortable jeans. I slipped out of my silk blouse and back into my T-shirt, careful to stay low enough not to register in the driver’s rearview mirror and to hide the transfer of my phone. I powered it on in time to feel it vibrate with a few new texts. Would Olive give it a rest already?

“Okay, you can turn back.” But John looked straight ahead, silent.

By the time the cab stopped in Brooklyn, I was sound asleep. John woke me up, paid the driver, and led me into a Chinese restaurant. He offered an apology in Chinese to the woman who tried to seat us and then asked her if we could leave through the back. We went out into the garbage-lined alley and followed it three blocks to the back door of PS 142. It was a large building, painted public school beige, with prison-style gates over the windows.

“Does every FBI agent have a key to PS 142?”

“Sort of.” John pulled out his gun and fixed a silencer to the end. And as casually as if we were at the penny arcade, he shot off each of the four corners of the gate on the ground-floor window. He pulled off the gate and tossed it through the window (a less silent maneuver) and climbed through. “Come on in.”

“You can’t do that!” I stepped into what could have been a sixth grade classroom. Broken glass covered the floor, and the renegade security gate had knocked down a row of dioramas representing the polar biome. I was suddenly more afraid of the vice principal than the terrorists. “Are the kids going to show up for school on Monday and find their school vandalized? You know some kid’s going to get blamed for this, that kid with the dirty hair and shifty eyes who just broods because no one will talk to him . . . They’ll pin it on him, and it’ll ruin his future . . .”