License to Thrill (14 page)

He paused and looked them over closely. Theresa took another deep breath. “Okay, I see.” He nodded. “Oh, they did?” When he scratched his eyebrow and smiled over at them, Theresa figured they must be home free. “Very well, then. Have a good evening.”

He hung up and smiled at them apologetically. “Sorry about that,” James said, his tone a million times nicer. “Policy, you know.”

Caylin shrugged. “We understand.”

“Just let me buzz you in here,” he said, punching some
numbers into a keypad. The steel door raised up, allowing them entry. “This door will automatically close behind you. It will open again at ten o'clock sharp. If you need anything, press the red button and I'll buzz myself back in. Otherwise I'll see you at ten.”

Caylin's heart sped up as she followed the guard into the green-walled room, equipped with four desks, four computers, six ten-line phones, four paper shredders, and six huge filing cabinets.

As soon as the steel door closed behind them they sprang into action. “Okay, you know what to do. And remember: Leave no surface unturned,” Caylin whispered, dashing to a desk and exploring every crack and crevice.

Jo and Theresa followed Caylin's lead, beelining to the two desks on the opposite end of the room. “So should we only get the green discs?” Jo asked in confusion.

“Grab every disc you can, no matter what color,” Theresa said. “The ‘green' was probably just a reference to this room.”

Caylin dug through a drawer like a puppy digging for
a bone. As she found disc after unmarked disc her spirits lifted considerably. She knew that going through them later would be time-consuming and that maybe Devaroux had even planted a file in a file, but it felt good holding them in her hands.

“We have too much ground to cover,” Jo complained. “I don't think we'll have enough time!”

“No whining—we'll find it,” Caylin said, not looking up. She had tunnel vision at the moment and was focused on nothing more than recovering the disc. This was how she felt when she hang-glided or snowboarded—totally centered and determined to be all she could be. And that's what she was trying to do in the green room, for the sake of the mission and the fate of the world.

“We'd better start cleaning up,” Caylin announced suddenly. “It's nine-forty. We've only got twenty minutes.”

“Ohmigosh!” Theresa cried in disbelief. She went into a tailspin of activity, putting the room back together as frantically as she had torn it apart. By 9:58 the room looked immaculate and the duffel bag Caylin had smuggled in was full to bursting.

“Anyone need to wipe her brow?” Theresa asked as Jo and Caylin struggled to replace a computer monitor they had searched under. Theresa reached into a box of Kleenex, her fingers brushing something hard, flat, and very familiar feeling. She yanked the object out of the box and screamed with excitement. “Check this out! A green disc! A
green disc
!”

Jo and Caylin froze in place and gaped, open-mouthed, the monitor still in their hands.

“This was hidden in the Kleenex box!” Theresa exclaimed. “This is it!”

Jo and Caylin jumped up and down as Theresa kissed the disc in sheer glee.

The door whooshed open and James stepped inside. “Okay, it's ten o'clo—oy, what in blazes is going on in here?”

Jo shrieked. Caylin gasped. Theresa looked on in horror as they flung the monitor away from them. It hit James squarely in the gut. His eyes went wide with shock and he fell backward.

“Look out!” Theresa screamed, but it was too late.
James hit his head on the edge of a desk with a sickening
thunk
and sank to the floor.

“Wha-what?” he muttered, giving the girls a last, dazed once-over before passing out cold.

“Is he still breathing?” Theresa squeaked. She clutched the duffel bag, terrified.

Caylin bent down over him. “Yep.” She shrugged. “Well, this is our out. Let's book!” She led the mad dash down the hall and began frantically pushing the elevator button.

“What's wrong?” Jo cried desperately. “Open, stupid doors, open!”

“It's after ten,” Caylin said. “The doors probably won't work.”

“There's a secret door here somewhere,” Jo recalled. She strained her brain but couldn't remember the floor plan. “Let's just push all the tiles. Maybe something will give.”

Caylin pushed as hard as she could against the tiles on the opposite side of the hall, frustrated. “This isn't getting us anywhere. Maybe they tiled over the secret door or something.”

“Oh n-no,” Theresa stammered. “I think James is
coming to.” Her eyes were glued down the hall at the guard's twitching foot. She looked as if she might puke. “H-Hurry up, guys.”

Jo pushed tile after tile after tile until finally she felt one give. A satisfying whoosh at her feet heralded the opening of a two-foot-high hatch. “I've got it!” she called proudly. Without even thinking, she jumped in. She immediately regretted it as she slid toward oblivion in a coffin-wide metal chute.

Chilled to her core, Jo screamed in the hopes of saving her friends from suffering the same. But her cry was quickly joined by Caylin's wail and Theresa's squeal. They plunged toward certain death, their voices raised in a chorus—metallic, echoing, and terrifying. The sound plucked Jo's spine with cold fingers. Desperate, she reached out and tried to grab onto the sides of the chute, but the metal was more slippery than an oil slick.

Jo closed her eyes and prayed the chute had an end . . .
somewhere.
Visions of the center of the earth and a bed of foot-high spikes danced in her mind. She screamed even louder, her heart nearly stopping from fear. She kept
screaming and screaming until her echoing wail turned into no more than a flat screech. Suddenly she realized she wasn't moving anymore.

Jo opened her eyes and squinted into the darkness. She was lying on an old mattress. The room around her was totally bare—dirt floor, dirt walls. Jo stood up tentatively. She realized with a start that the screams behind her were growing louder. She stepped off the mattress and down came Theresa with a thump, followed by Caylin right on top of her.

“That rocked—in a really weird way,” Caylin said.

“Oh, stop!” Theresa cried. “Don't even joke about that, Cay. For about three full minutes I swear I was watching my own funeral on the backs of my eyelids.”

“Well, you can rest easy,” Caylin remarked. “Now we just have to figure out where we are.”

“I don't know—there's nothing here but dirt,” Jo said. “Maybe it's just your basic, average secret room. Do you think this is still embassy property?”

Theresa cocked her head. “I don't know. I think we were moving more to the side than down, to be honest.
Instead of taking us below the building, the chute shot us away from it.”

Jo shrugged. “The architect must have had a wiggy sense of humor,” she offered.

“No—this is probably a full-on escape hatch,” Caylin pointed out. “Like in case of a terrorist attack.”

“Well, I sure hope Jonathon Nicholson knows about it,” Theresa said. “He's going to need it if we didn't get that disc.”

“The disc!” Caylin gasped. “Theresa, do you—”

“I've got all of 'em right here,” Theresa assured her, holding up the duffel bag.

Caylin sighed with relief. “Thank goodness. Now let's head down this passageway and find a way out of here.” She dusted the soot off her polyester duds and grinned wryly. “At least we don't have to worry about getting our clothes dirty, right?”

•  •  •

“Caylin, I'm getting a bad feeling,” Theresa complained. “Maybe we should sit down and rest. Or . . . maybe . . . fall . . . asleep. . . .”

“Oh, you've always got a ‘bad feeling,' ” Caylin griped. “Where's your sense of adventure?”

“I left it in the dryer too long,” Theresa quipped. “It shrank.”

Caylin chuckled, but inside she was torn. She had absolutely no idea where she was or where they all were headed. Every time she turned a corner, she expected to see Dracula or Freddy Krueger or even that weird teddy bear from those fabric softener commercials. That thing always gave her the creeps. But she put her irrational fears aside and kept walking, kept leading, kept hoping with quickened pulse that she wasn't about to set foot in a trap.

“Jeez, this is making me tired,” Theresa complained. “Have you noticed how exhausting this walk is? We've only been going about twenty minutes, and I'm pooped.”

“Yeah,” Jo agreed. “It's an uphill battle.”

“It is!” Theresa snapped her fingers. “Guys, we're heading up. Slowly but surely. This tunnel will take us to ground level!”

Or maybe ground
zero
, Caylin thought with a wince.
She hoped not. She hoped that wherever the tunnel took them, it had nothing to do with Jonathon, or Laqui Bay, or Godiva chocolates. She just wanted to get back to the Ritz, shimmy out of that itchy polyester, and sort through those discs, pronto.

•  •  •

Theresa sprinted past Caylin, supercharged by the fresh air blowing on her face. “We've made it!” she cried. “The end! We're safe!”

“Shhh! Don't push your luck,” Caylin warned. “Just because the end of the line is outdoors doesn't mean it's not dangerous.”

“I don't care,” Theresa sassed, her lungs practically singing. “Oh, to be out of that musty tunnel . . . 'tis heaven.” She reached the end of the line and stopped cold in her tracks, amazed by what she saw.

“What is it?” Jo cried.

“Are we safe?” Caylin hollered, hurrying to catch up. “Yell if you're in trouble!”

“I'm fine,” Theresa said, dumbfounded. “It's just . . . that . . .”

“What?” Caylin reached Theresa's side and looked around. She gasped, her blue eyes widening. “I don't believe it.”

“I don't get it,” Theresa added.

“I don't even want to know,” Jo chimed in as she reached the end of the line.

Theresa shook her head. She couldn't piece it all together. She and her partners, after a death-defying plummet down a chute and a never-ending walk through underground catacombs, were standing not on the threshold of an amazing discovery or a deadly trap. No, they were standing in the mouth of a large, defunct drainage pipe near the banks of the Thames. Totally alone. Totally confused. Totally ticked off.

“This has got to be the lamest payoff
ever
,” Caylin groaned.

“I still don't get it,” Theresa murmured, slinging the duffel of discs over her shoulder. “Why even bother, you know?”

“Like I said before,” Jo quipped, “that architect must have had one
wiggy
sense of humor.”

•  •  •

After two hours of watching Theresa sit at her laptop and open every single file on every single disc, Caylin's anticipation had vanished into thin air.

The first defeat had come when their trump card, the green disc, turned out to be completely empty. Now, with every disc Theresa tested and eliminated, Caylin's frustration mounted to dangerous levels. Maybe the heat coming off my head is screwing up the laptop, she thought halfheartedly.

“This is the last one,” Theresa said. She stuck the disc into the drive and waited.

The ceaseless whirring of the disc drive made Caylin want to trash the suite rock-star style. Toss a few TVs out the windows, set stuff on fire, the usual. She'd never do it, of course. But it was fun to think about. More fun than listening to that darned whirring.

The whirring stopped. Caylin held her breath in anticipation until the dreaded prompt—
This disc is not initialized. Do you wish to initialize it now?
—appeared on-screen.

“Darn it,” Theresa muttered.

Jo sighed. “I guess we wore polyester for nothing.”

Caylin got up without a word and walked into her bedroom, slamming the door in defeat.

•  •  •

Friday night Jo sulked back to the Ritz after an uneventful day at work. Antonio was a no-show at the office, and Sandra had said he was sick. Sick in the
head
, Jo thought with a shudder. To make matters worse, Sandra had finally pigeonholed Jo into putting together the “up-tempo numbers” for the after-conference ball—on a
Sunday. Ugh!
What a way to spend the end of a weekend.
Especially
if it turned out to be the last weekend of her life.

A red Porsche approached the crosswalk, distracting Jo from her thoughts. What I wouldn't give to be in the front seat of that baby, Jo mused, hair flying everywhere, pedal to the metal, radio cranked to ten-point-five, no worries. To her surprise, the dream machine first slowed down and then completely stopped right in the middle of the road next to where she was standing.

As the tinted window came down she looked in, curious. One glance made her blood run cold: Antonio sat in
the driver's seat. Jo took off running as fast as she could. She spotted an alleyway and ducked into it. But as she exited the alley and rounded the corner near the post office, she could see his car clearing a hill in the distance and coming her way. How were her size-seven feet supposed to compete with a Porsche? Her eyes landed on a VW double-parked in front of the post office, motor running. Without a moment's thought Jo jumped in the VW and slammed her foot on the gas.

“It's not like I'm
stealing
it or anything,” she told her reflection in the rearview mirror. She was simply
borrowing
it to escape Antonio, who was now hot on her trail. She made a sharp turn onto a busy side street and erratically swerved in and out of traffic, trying desperately to lose the chocolate poisoner. This wasn't just
any
chase. She was driving for her life. And on the wrong side of the street, too.