Down to the Wire (3 page)

The guy led Frankie to a black SUV with tinted windows.
Opening the back door, the guy nodded Frankie inside.

What
was going on? Something didn’t feel right. Serial killers abducted people this way.

Frankie glanced back at the police station. No one had stopped them. This guy must be legit.

The guy reached inside his jacket and pulled out a wallet. He flipped it open. “Thomas Liba. IPNC.”

IPNC?

Frankie studied the man’s identification. Same light brown skin. Weird green eyes. Curly brown hair.

Frankie peeked inside the vehicle. It looked more like a cargo van than an SUV. Two benches faced each other, and locked cabinets lined the walls.

With one last look at Thomas, Frankie stepped up into the SUV and got the odd sensation his whole life was about to change.

Thomas closed the door. He opened a wall-mounted fuse box, pressed a button, and air-conditioning began to flow through the vents.

Taking the seat across from Frankie, Thomas pointed to a cooler under Frankie’s bench. “Help yourself.”

Food!
He dove in. Sandwiches, sodas, cookies, chips, fruit, carrot sticks. Oh yeah, a starving man’s paradise.

Thomas opened a folder. “Francisco Badaduchi.”

Yep. That’d be me.
He swallowed.
Love
ham and cheese. “I go by Frankie.”

Thomas nodded. “Italian American. Five feet ten. One
hundred and seventy pounds. Seventeen years old. One hundred fifty IQ. Black hair. Dark brown eyes. Goatee. Thorn tattoo around your upper arm.” He tapped his folder. “You’ve got quite a record. Mostly five-finger discount. Seems a bit beneath your skills.”

Beneath my skills? How would he know that?

Frankie popped a cookie in his mouth. “See something I want, I help myself to it.” Anything to get arrested.

“Like juvy hall better than the boys’ home, I take it.”

Frankie stopped chewing. He stared across the SUV at Thomas, a hunk of cookie in his mouth.
How’d he know that?

“I was like you once. A system kid. Hated the boys’ home. Hated what they did to me there. Juvy hall’s safer. Patrolled. I know.”

Forcing the unchewed cookie down his throat, Frankie closed the cooler. Food didn’t seem so interesting anymore.

Thomas consulted his file again. “Your uncle’s on death row for—”

“What do you want with me?” Buried panic tightened Frankie’s gut.

“You have a scar on your upper left shoulder where he—”

“What do you want with me?” Memories Frankie did
not
intend to relive.

“Okay. We don’t have to talk about your past.” Thomas closed the file. “According to court psychologists, you are highly intelligent and handle yourself with humor. You have the potential to be dangerous because of what you witnessed as a child. No
one wanted to adopt you because they were afraid of your mental stability.”

Idiots. All of them. What did they know anyway? “I said, what do you want with me?”

“I know you’re the Ghost. I’ve followed your career since your first breaking and entering at ten years old.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Bluffer. No way he had evidence. Frankie was too good.

“No more juvy hall. You’re going to prison. For a long time. No escape. Know what they do to guys like you in there?”

Frankie swallowed, trying not to be intimidated. “I’ve heard.”

“Then you know it’s a place you don’t want to be.” Thomas opened his file again and flipped through some pages. “You’ve got quite an online fan club. They buy your homemade electronic contraptions and keep you in business.”

Crud.
This guy did know a lot about him.

“Fictitious accounts. Rerouted IP addresses. Clever. You’ve cracked the most secure systems in the world. Systems the highest trained agents haven’t even broken.”

It came naturally for Frankie. What could he say? “Listen, it’s obvious you have my whole life right there in that handy-dandy file. So why don’t you tell me what you want?”

Thomas looked up from the folder. “I want you to come work for me.”

[1]

In her skin-tight
JUST TRY ME! T-shirt, Bruiser boinged onto her bed. Her red braids boinged with her. “I love a good soap opera. I think it’s so cool you two are getting a groove on.” She bounced off her bed.

“Shhh.” I glanced from my bed toward the open door. Now that I’d managed to convince David I wasn’t his “little sister,” I didn’t want him to know I’d told Bruiser that I liked him. “And we’re not getting a groove on.” As a matter of fact, it seemed like we rarely had a moment alone.

Laughing, David entered our room, and my stomach swooshed to my feet. Please tell me he didn’t just hear us.

He pointed at Bruiser. “I heard that.”

Groan.

“You’re more trouble than you’re worth.” He lifted her up in a fireman’s hold and tossed her back onto her bed.

She rolled over, grinning. “But don’t you all just looove me?”

Over the four and a half months I’d been with the Specialists, Bruiser’s silliness hadn’t changed at all. It was hard to believe that tiny freckled Molly, or Bruiser, as she’d been code-named, was our resident martial artist. At fifteen, she was a year or two
younger than the rest of us. Except David—he was eighteen. But she could outlast all of us. She was a real-life version of the Energizer Bunny.

David threw a pillow at her. “We tolerate you, squirt.”

He stretched out beside me on my twin-size bed, and my heart skipped a beat. His cologne swirled up my nose, and I resisted the urge to roll over and bury my face in his neck. Whatever kind he wore, I planned to buy him a whole case of it.

Wirenut strolled in. “Oh, GiGi. Brilliant, klutzy, drop-dead gorgeous GiGi. Ya know, David, you’re killing all chances I could’ve had with this tall blondie. But that’s all right. It’s all good.”

My face warmed at his flirting. I didn’t like Frankie, aka Wirenut, our resident electronics expert, in
that
way. He was like a brother or a really cool cousin.

I glanced at him, and he winked, and I knew he was purposefully messing with me.

Wait a minute. Did he just say David killed all his chances? So Wirenut knew I liked David, too?

David stacked his hands beneath his head, and his hip brushed mine, sending a warm wave through my body. Of course Wirenut knew I liked David. Everybody probably knew. How could they not with the fumbling fool I made of myself every time I was around him?

Beaker came out of the bathroom. She snagged her chemistry book off her bed and slid down in her corner of the girls’ dormitory room. She stuck her nose in her book and started reading.

Beaker, whose real name was Sissy, didn’t seem to like anybody. Me especially. I didn’t know what the problem was. I tried not to take her moods personally, but I wished she’d snap out of it. She seemed to get more and more distant as the months went by, when all the rest of us were becoming a family.

Wirenut jumped over Beaker’s bed and came down next to her. He put her in a headlock and knuckle-rubbed her choppy blue hair. She pushed him away, grumbling to hide her giggle.

He pushed her back, smiling. Wirenut was the only one who could make her halfway laugh.

Who would’ve guessed Beaker, the Goth girl with a nose ring and dog collar, would be one of the most brilliant chemists in the world? Looks were
definitely
deceiving, as this group had proven.

“Now, now. Let’s all be at peace.” Mystic walked in with Parrot and parked it right in the center of the carpeted floor. He folded up his legs and touched his thumbs to his middle fingers, assuming his in-touch-with-the-world position.

Mystic, or Joe, as his real name was, had an NFL player’s body, but he possessed the unique gift of clairvoyance. For some reason I never imagined a psychic would be so muscular.

Parrot sprawled across the foot of Bruiser’s bed. Darren, aka Parrot, was our linguist. Sixteen languages to be exact. “Almost time for our weekly conference.”

Wirenut pointed to a banana on top of my dresser. “Gonna eat that?”

“We just had burgers. You’re seriously hungry?”

“Serious.”

Wirenut was always eating. He should be like three hundred pounds with all the food he put away. But he just burned it all off like it was nothing. I reached over and tossed him the banana.

David’s watch alarm went off. “It’s time. Let’s go.”

We all made our way from our room, past the guys’ room and TL’s office, and down the long hallway to the elevator.

David placed his hand on the globe light fixture. The hidden laser scanned his print pattern, then the mountainous wall mural slid open to reveal the secret elevator. We all crammed into the small space. David punched in his personal code, and the elevator descended four floors beneath the California ranch where we lived.

We filed out and down the underground hallway, past all the locked doors, including mine and Chapling’s computer lab, and came to a stop at the conference room. Thomas Liba, TL, our team leader, sat at the head of a long metal table studying a file. Erin and Adam from Specialists Team One sat to TL’s left.

Rolling out the black leather chairs, we took our seats around the table, with David sitting in his usual spot to TL’s right.

TL leaned over and whispered something in David’s ear, and he nodded. David was TL’s right-hand guy. David had lived here his whole life, longer than anybody else. The ranch used to be a safe house for the children of the nation’s top agents. With his father being an agent, David grew up here. Now he was being trained to be a strategist, just like TL.

TL stood. “Afternoon, everybody.”

We all greeted him.

He closed the file in front of him. “This’ll be a quick meeting, as I have a prospective client to meet with. I want to begin by saying that this has been a productive week. We’ve been a private organization for a month now, and it has opened all sorts of avenues.”

With a contained grin, Bruiser nudged me. “Go, GiGi,” she mumbled.

I smiled. I’d found the funding that allowed the Specialists to break away from the government and become private.

“As you can tell”—TL motioned around the room—“Piper, Tina, and Curtis from Team One are not here. The girls are in Australia, and Curtis is in Japan. The money we’ll make from those two missions alone should sustain us for the next three years. So”—he nodded—“as I said, this has been a productive week.”

Everyone applauded.

TL held up his hand for quiet. “Everyone met Mr. Share, David’s father, after the last mission to Ushbania. The mission that GiGi went on, and a successful one at that. We were all very proud of her performance on her first mission.”

Bruiser nudged me again.

“After being kidnapped by a terrorist cell and held hostage for the past ten years,” TL continued, “there was a lot up in the air about Mr. Share. I’m happy to say he’s been cleared and is settled in his new life with his new identity.”

I glanced at David, wondering when he’d be able to see his
father again. I’d have to remember to ask him later on.

“Erin,” TL motioned across the table, “give us a quick update on what you and Adam are doing.”

Erin rolled her eyes. “That guy who hired us to track his son is wasting his money. All the kid does is go to classes, the library, and the cafeteria.”

Adam laughed. “It’s too easy a job. I keep waiting for the real fun to kick in.”

David smiled. “We’re getting paid good money, though, to play private eye. So grin and bear it.”

“Easy for you to say,” Erin grumbled. “You’re not the one yawning on the job.”

David chuckled at that. “Speaking of job. How are you tracking him right now?”

Adam held up his watch. “Good ole GPS. We planted a bug on him.”

“All right, moving on.” TL propped his fingers on the table. “Everyone’s report cards came in from the university and San Belden High. With the exception of Mystic’s D in gym, we have all A’s and B’s.”

Everyone looked at Mystic, and he shrugged.

“That’s it for me. As I said, this would be quick.” TL picked up his folder. “Questions?”

We all shook our heads.

“Dismissed.” TL motioned to David, and the two of them filed out.