Also Known As (27 page)

What if those weren’t accidents? What if those were attempts to kidnap me again?

A tiny thought crept into my brain: Colton Hooper was responsible for our safety and new identities on our missions. All of them. He had effectively assigned himself to my family.

“Maggie?” Jesse’s voice was cautious. “You still there?”

“Yes. Give me a minute.” I put my hand over my mouth, Angelo’s words racing through my brain. It couldn’t be right, but everything was starting to collide in my brain, a perfect storm of corruption.

Colton was absolutely gutted when he found out about the kidnapping attempt
.

He was the one who had brought Oscar Young into the Collective, had sworn that Oscar was one of the best in the business
.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look of devastation on his face
.

He said, ‘I suppose Oscar Young was no knight in shining armor.’

And then Colton’s smooth, icy voice rose above everything else.

It’s the infamous Maggie
.

“Colton,” I said, my voice bigger than a ragged whisper. “He’s doing this. He set up the kidnapping attempt, and he’s been watching my family ever since. That’s how he has all this information about me. And he’s been sabotaging this case so that I wouldn’t be able to stop the article from running.”

“Wait, who?” Roux asked. “Colton?”

“I can’t explain right now,” I said, suddenly realizing
that the entire loft could be bugged. The Collective probably still owned Oscar Young’s old apartment. No one would think twice if Colton Hooper came and went from it.

“You can’t go to that apartment tomorrow, Mags,” Jesse said.

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “He tries to kidnap me when I’m a kid, endangers me and my family in Luxembourg and Buenos Aires….”

“Luxembourg?” Jesse said.

“Buenos Aires?” Roux added.

“… and now he’s trying to ruin the lives of my family and everyone I love?” I was starting to get upset and had to lower my voice again. “You are out of your damn
mind
if you think that I’m not going to that apartment tomorrow.”

“Hell yeah!” Roux cried. “No one fu—oops, swear jar—messes with my best friend!”

I tried to tell both Roux and Jesse that they weren’t allowed to come with me, that it was too dangerous, but they wouldn’t have it. And I couldn’t argue with them because suddenly my dad was knocking at the door.

“Mags?” he said. “Are you still up?”

“Gotta go. Tomorrow morning, same plan. Love you.” Then I slapped the phone shut. “Yeah, come in, Dad.”

He opened the door, letting a sliver of light spill onto the floor. “You okay, honey? I thought I heard you yelling.”

“I’m fine. Sorry, Roux just called. She had a nightmare about … squid.” It wasn’t true, but definitely sounded like something that could happen. “Big squid.”

“Oookay,” he said. “You sure you’re all right?”

I hesitated for a flickering second. I wanted to tell my dad about Colton, but I knew neither he nor my mom would believe me. Their faith in my abilities had already been rocked, set off course by my relationship with Jesse, and if I tried to explain my theories, I knew they would reassure me that I was wrong, that it wasn’t possible, that I was just trying to save Jesse’s family again.

But the only family I wanted to save now was mine.

“Good. Just tired. I didn’t get much sleep at Roux’s last night.” Again, not
technically
a lie.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. We’re all good here.”

“Okay, then. Go to bed, it’s late.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah, babe?”

“I love you.”

“Love you, too, kiddo. ’Night.”

I knew I couldn’t tell my parents. They would freak out, try to call Angelo, and …

Angelo.

Angelo was on assignment.

Who had sent him?

It could just be a coincidence, I told myself, even though Angelo rarely worked cases out of the city anymore. But what if someone wanted to get him out of the city, knowing that he would protect me at all costs, just like he had done that Halloween night twelve years ago?

I couldn’t take any chances. I dug out my civilian phone
and dialed his number. “Angelo,” I whispered after I got his voice mail. “I just wanted you to know that the newspaper was delivered but the headline was misspelled. That’s all.” Then I paused before adding, “I love you.”

Translation:
Angelo, the case is bad. Get out now. Run
.

Chapter 32

When Roux, Jesse, and I met up the next morning two blocks north of Gramercy Park, my nervous energy had given way to steely focus, and I was bouncing on the soles of my feet. Next to me, Roux was mainlining coffee, her eyes starting to look like slot machine windows. “I need about ten more cups,” she said as she passed me the coffee so I could take a sip. “That should put me at normal.”

Aside from that tiny sip, I wasn’t drinking anything. Caffeine can make your hands shake, and I needed them to be as steady as possible. I wasn’t sure what I was going to find in that apartment, but whatever it was, I was going to have to be ready for it.

Jesse showed up a few minutes after us, looking fresh as a daisy, complete with damp hair. “That jerk,” Roux muttered. “Why do guys always manage to look good after getting only thirty seconds of sleep? I feel like my eyes are so puffy that people in Philadelphia can see them.”

“Let’s focus on the big picture,” I told her. “Hi.”

“Hey,” Jesse said. “You guys get any sleep?”

“A little.” I shrugged. “Enough.”

Roux just held up her massive coffee cup. “Does this answer your question?”

“How about you?” I asked. It was so odd to make small talk with him now, after all the big talks we had had. I couldn’t tell if he was still pissed at me or not, but it was a conversation that would have to wait.

“Good, good,” he said, even though we all knew he was lying. No one was good that morning. I was pretty sure that if someone harnessed our collective nervous energy, it could power Manhattan through a holiday weekend.

“Are you ready?” I asked them. “Last chance to back out.”

“I’m in,” Jesse said.

“Me, too,” Roux agreed. “I have a bio test this morning that I didn’t study for, so there’s no way I’m going to school today.”

“Okay.” I took a few cleansing breaths and forced myself to focus.
You’ve been training for this your whole life
, I reminded myself.
This is just a job
.

I remembered what Angelo said to me once when I was frustrated by not being able to open a particularly difficult safe:
Let a veil of calm fall around you. Become very focused, very unperturbed by anything around you
. I knew what he meant now.

“Let’s do this,” I told Jesse and Roux.

Our first obstacle was probably the trickiest: the doorman. I had no idea how we were going to get around that,
but Roux had just said, “Leave it to me.” That had seemed like a viable plan yesterday, but now that we were about ready to walk through the door, I was wary.

“Roux, did you—?”

“
Hi
, Harold!
Hiiiii
!”

God help me, the poor, put-upon Harold was sitting behind the front desk, hands folded, like he fully expected to see Roux come sailing through the doors.

“Harold, don’t you just love Mondays?” Roux sighed dreamily. “A fresh start, a new beginning? Ugh, I’m such a romantic, it’s disgusting.”

“Do we know this guy?” Jesse whispered to me. “Or is this the beginning of Roux’s breakdown?”

“We know him,” I whispered back. “It’s her doorman. Roux! How did you do this?”

She shrugged. “I can be very convincing.” Then she smiled. “My parents’ money can be even more convincing.”

I looked at Harold, who still hadn’t acknowledged that any of this was unusual. “Please tell me that the doorman who’s normally here isn’t bleeding in a gutter somewhere.”

“How ridiculous.” Roux shook her head. “He’s working at my building. God, Maggie, you’ve gotten so dramatic.”

Roux was either a genius or an evil mastermind, but I didn’t have time to figure out which it was.

“So, Harold. Friend, pal, chum.” Roux folded her hands on top of the desk. “Are you going to buzz us in or not?”

We knew we had to go to #11N, since that was the apartment that Oscar Young had first rented back when
he tried to kidnap me (he didn’t use that name, of course, but I recognized the Collective’s all-purpose code name of Joe Miller on the digitized census reports). There were no changes in the name on the apartment, but if you thought Oscar was dead, then you would also think that the Collective had hung on to the apartment and never changed the name on the lease.

“Go on up, miss,” Harold said, waving us through the lobby and toward the elevators.

“Harold, you’re a gem. A pristine gem honed over years of trial and fire.”

“That’s how I would describe my job, too,” Harold replied.

“Thanks, Harold,” I whispered as we hurried past. “Really.”

He never even looked in my direction.

“Not the elevators,” I said as Jesse reached to press the button. “Never the elevator. Always stairs.”

“It’s the eleventh floor,” Roux protested. “I’ll have a heart attack by the fifth floor.”

“You’ll just have to revive yourself,” I told her. “And good work on the doorman.”

“Well, shucks,” she said, but her grin was a mile wide.

After huffing and puffing our way up eleven flights of stairs, Roux trailing behind Jesse and me, we arrived at 11N. The hallways were narrow and cramped, almost like an architectural version of intense pressure, and when we got to the door, the three of us stood and looked at it.

“It’s all you, Mags,” Roux said. “Take it away!”

“This is how you got into Gramercy Park,” Jesse added. “You really know what you’re doing.”

“I appreciate the cheerleading,” I whispered as I knelt down to examine the lock, “but you might want to save it for whatever’s inside.”

We knocked first, just in case Colton was home, but thankfully no one came to the door. I didn’t know what we would do if he was home, but I suspected that Roux would start pretending to sell Girl Scout cookies, and I wanted to avoid that sort of scene at all costs. “Okay,” I said. “Here we go.”

I could feel Jesse and Roux breathing over my shoulders as I worked, sticking the tension wrench (otherwise known as a Bic pen cap) in the lock while using my bent paper clip to scrub at the pins inside. It wasn’t very loud, but in the quiet hallway, every move sounded like a gun blast.

After two minutes, I got it. “Finally,” I muttered. “Took long enough.”

“Will you show me how to do that?” Roux whispered.

“Absolutely not.”

“That’s cool.”

We waited a few seconds, just in case Colton came bursting out, demanding to know who was breaking into his apartment, but all we heard was silence. An eerie, terrible silence, but silence just the same.

Jesse, Roux, and I crept in on our tiptoes. It looked messy, like someone had been coming and going and not cleaning up after themselves: dust gathered on top of file cabinets, the parquet wood floors had a few layers of grime
on top of them, and there were some copies of the
New York Times
that were from several weeks earlier. “Come on,” I said, “the coast is clear.”

Jesse followed me as I started to poke around the apartment, looking at antique oil paintings on the wall and crumbs on a plate that sat on top of a stack of old
New Yorkers
. “There’s a safe here somewhere,” I told him. “We just need to find it.”

“How do you know that it’s not somewhere in the filing cabinets?” Jesse said.

“Too easy to access,” I replied. “These are important files, and without them, he has nothing to sell. No one will buy a PDF file without the source material to back it up.”

“Right,” Jesse said. “Okay. So once we find this safe …?”

“I’m going to open it.”

“Hey, I’m making eye contact with a gargoyle!” Roux said, looking out one of the grimy windows. “I shall name him George.”

“Make eye contact with a safe instead. Name it whatever you want.”

“Aye-aye,” she said. “Later, George.”

The three of us poked around the apartment for a few minutes. I couldn’t believe no one else could hear my heartbeat, it felt so loud in my ears. If my parents knew I was doing this, they would murder me, bring me back to life, and murder me again. I was going against the Collective, which no one did. Where that put me on the morality scale, I didn’t want to know.

“Hey, Mags?” Jesse called from the bedroom. “I think this is it.”

Roux and I followed his voice until we arrived in a barren room that held boxes; manila files; and a squat, stout safe. I let out a breath I didn’t know I had been holding. “Is this it?” Jesse asked. “It looks old.”

“That’s it,” I said. It was the exact safe Angelo had let me play with when I was younger, before the kidnapping attempt. There was a brass fleur-de-lis etched into the side, and I put my finger in the groove and traced the pattern, just as I had done when I was little.

“Nice to see you again,” I whispered. “Let’s play.”

I unzipped my duffel bag and started to rifle through it. “What the hell is all that?” Jesse asked.

“A diamond core drill,” I replied. “It can go through cobalt and it lets me use this.” I pulled out a tiny scope camera that had a monitor attached to it. “This lets me see where the grooves are in the lock. Each groove corresponds to a number on the combination and I just have to line them up.”

Jesse and Roux looked at me like I was speaking Martian. “Where do you even get this stuff?”

“Sweet Sixteen present from my parents.”

Roux shook her head. “I got a Fabergé egg. What a ripoff.”

I knelt down in front of the safe and looked at the combination lock. All the blueprints that I had memorized over the years were flooding back into my mind at a terrible speed. “It’s a Sargent and Greenleaf,” I murmured. “Model 6643. No drilling allowed.”

“You’re getting all of that just by looking at it?” Jesse whispered.