Death by Denim (2 page)

Once inside, I paused to get my bearings. It was one of the rules Mom had drilled into me:
Know where the exits are at all times
. The problem was, the inside of the club was darker than the night outside, with a confusion of colored lights flashing, twirling, pulsing to the music. I could barely make out the silhouette of chairs and tables and people, let alone the layout of the building. A stairway just inside the door led up to a balcony that overlooked the main room of the club, but I knew better than to take the stairs.
Don’t escape up.
It wouldn’t do us any good to get trapped on a roof with no way down.

Mom pressed close against my back and pointed toward the rear of the club. I squinted through the darkness and relief flooded over me as I spotted a door beyond the bar. An exit. We wound our way around tables and past a crowded dance floor, the dancers jerking like silent film actors underneath the strobe lights.

Suddenly, a man’s hand grabbed mine and twirled me onto the floor. I reacted on instinct, all those months of self-defense training with my mom switching into autopilot. I yanked my arm up and out, breaking the hold, while at the same time stomping with my heel as hard as I could. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized the man before me was not my pursuer at all, but a much younger guy with brown eyes that widened in surprise—and then pain—as my foot slammed down onto his insole.

“Oh!” I cried.
“Je suis désolée!”
But I didn’t have time for much more of an apology than that. My mom whisked me away before I could do anything else to draw unwanted attention.

I could hear the dancer guy behind us swearing loudly in French, telling anyone who would listen that I was crazy and that all he had wanted to do was dance with me. I didn’t have time to feel bad about it. Besides, it was his own fault. He should have asked first.

Still, Mom couldn’t resist pressing her cheek close to mine and whispering, “Assess the situation
before
you act!”

“I know,” I muttered. “I know.”

We reached the back door without further incident and pushed out into a dark alley behind the club. Dirt and age had yellowed the bare bulb above the door so that its weak light barely managed to reach the bottom of the stoop. Shadows swallowed the empty crates and garbage cans beyond. Carefully, we picked our way down the alley to where it intersected the street.

“Now,” Mom said, “why don’t you tell me what—”

“Shh!” I grabbed her arm and pulled her deeper into the shadows, sniffing the air like a bloodhound. My nose filled with the same raw, burning odor I had noticed when the Marlboro Man passed us by the river. “Do you smell that?”

She frowned. “What?” For a moment I wondered if I had been imagining things, but then her lips parted for a quick intake of breath and her eyes grew wide. “French cigarettes,” she whispered. “Cheap ones. Perhaps even hand rolled. Those can be more pungent.”

Side by side, we peered around the corner of the building. Sure enough, Marlboro Man stood not more than three feet away from us, sucking on his cheap cigarette, watching the entrance. I was right; he
had
been following us.

“Come on,” Mom whispered, and pulled me back down the alley. We slipped down a side street and broke into a full-on run. Looking back, I’m pretty sure my mom had a destination in mind, but all I was thinking about was getting away.

We had gone maybe three or four blocks when Mom slowed to a brisk walk. She scanned the street and then stooped to pick up a loose rock. I thought maybe she was going to try to use it to clobber the Marlboro Man if he came after us, but then we came to a chrome-and-glass phone booth, its flickering fluorescent light casting reverse shadows along the brick sidewalk.

“Keep an eye out,” Mom said, and opened the door to the booth. She stepped inside and swung the rock upward, shattering the light.

I jumped at the sound, but I have to admit I was grateful for the resulting cover of darkness.

Inside the booth, Mom picked up the receiver and punched in a number. I inched forward and nudged the edge of the door with my toe so that it wasn’t closed all the way. The call connected and I could hear the burr of the phone ringing on the other end of the line. A man’s voice answered.

“C’est moi,”
Mom said softly. It’s me.

All I heard from the receiver for a long moment was silence, and then the man spoke again. I couldn’t make out the words, but there was no mistaking the tone of the voice—low and urgent.

Mom listened quietly and then nodded, as if the man—whoever he was—could see her head move.
“Oui.”
She paused again.
“Je comprends.”
And then she hung up.

I jumped back as she replaced the receiver, even though I was pretty sure she knew I’d been listening. Before turning to face me, she straightened her sagging posture, and then pushed through the door and started walking. “We have to go.”

It took half a second for her words to register. She didn’t mean go, as in get away from the phone booth; she meant go, as in clear out. Leave town. Immediately. And, though we had been prepared all along for that eventual probability, I suddenly felt lost.

“Our bags . . .”

“We can’t go back for them,” Mom said, already walking away. I had to run to keep up with her.

A weight settled on my chest as I realized we were going to abandon the Lyon apartment we had lived in for the past seven months. It’s not like we had a lot of memories there, just trappings of our fake lives, but since we’d left everything else behind when we slipped underground, those trappings were all I had. Leaving everything behind was like losing myself all over again.

I started making a mental list of the things I would miss. There wasn’t much; we had made a point of not gathering things that could be used to identify us. We kept no journals, took no photos, we didn’t have an answering machine because we had no phone. But . . . my heart sank. We had each kept a small bag with a change of clothes, a little bit of cash and extra copies of our fake identification next to the door in the apartment, in case we needed to leave in a hurry. Even those would be lost. Not that our fake IDs would do us any good now that we’d been found, but it felt like the last thread tying me to the past had been severed.

“What now?” I asked. I hated how small and lost my voice sounded.

Mom didn’t even slow her step. “That man on the phone was my contact with the Paris Station. He’ll make new arrangements for us.”

The CIA’s Paris office? I tried not to let my surprise—and concern—show. When we left the States, my mom had taken care of all the details herself because The Mole’s minions had infiltrated the Agency and she wasn’t sure who she could trust.

My silence must have given away my thoughts, because she nudged me with her shoulder. “Hey. Don’t worry.” She tried to sound light and upbeat. “Lévêque will take care of us. We’ll meet with him first thing in the morning. Everything will be fine.” She gave me a smile that I’m sure was supposed to convey confidence, but after so much time together I was getting to know her too well. I’d come to recognize the little twitch at the corner of her mouth as a sign that she was worried.

She reached for my hand like I was a little kid. “Come, now. The last train to Paris leaves at ten so we’ll have to hurry.”

Hand in hand we sprinted for the station, arriving out of breath just moments before the train was supposed to leave. The ticket windows were closed so we had to buy our tickets from the machines. It felt like forever that Mom was feeding coins into the slot and another eternity for the machine to print and spit out our tickets. We grabbed them and raced through the turnstile, reaching the train car just as the warning chimes sounded, signaling that the doors were about to close.

The train had already started to move by the time we settled into our seats. I leaned back against the upholstery, silently saying my good-byes to Lyon. Then I noticed Mom’s grip on the armrest tighten and I followed her gaze out the window.

Marlboro Man was running onto the platform. Late. Too late. I smiled at his failure . . . until it hit me. My ticket. I flipped it over and my heart dropped. Ours was an express train. No stops between Lyon and Paris. He may have missed us, but he would know exactly where we were headed. And when we would get there.

One glance at Mom and I knew she was thinking the same thing.

We were in trouble.

I
hugged my arms, eyes darting around the train car like an animal trapped in a moving cage. No, I didn’t know for sure that the Marlboro guy worked for The Mole, but it was a pretty safe bet. No one else was looking for my mom and me. No one that I knew about, anyway. So if Marlboro found us, The Mole had found us. The very thought made my insides curdle.

I leaned close to Mom. “Do you think that guy has connections in Paris?” I whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“But he could.”

She looked at me, the expression completely dissolving from her face. “Yes, he could.”

I sank back in my seat. That’s what I was afraid of. Now that he knew where we were headed, if Marlboro Man had colleagues in Paris, all it would take was a phone call and they could have the station surrounded by the time we got there. Or he could be waiting for us himself. Either scenario made me feel faint.

“Maybe he didn’t see us get on the train,” I said. But I knew he had; I could tell by the look I’d seen on his face that he knew we’d slipped through his fingers.

Mom didn’t answer, but stared straight ahead, tapping her fingers on the armrest. Trying to figure out how we were going to get off the train undetected, I imagined. I hoped she would be able to come up with something, and quickly.

Me, I couldn’t think of a thing, which worried me because I was usually pretty good about thinking on my feet. But then again, I hadn’t clued in to being followed by the Marlboro guy, had I? It’s like when I left my name behind, I lost the thinking part of me as well. I didn’t know how to be me, but someone else. I was having an identity crisis, and I’d been running for only seven months. I couldn’t imagine how the people who were forever uprooted by the Witness Protection Program maintained their sanity.

As soon as that thought came into my head I tried to push it out again. Because I knew what would follow, and thinking about him hurt too much. “Him” would be Seth Mulo. Seth’s family was also on the run from The Mole. The difference was that Seth had been running most of his life.

When he was very young, Seth’s parents defected from The Mole’s sleeper organization and turned to the U.S. government for asylum. Eventually, the CIA assigned my mom to protect them. She sent Seth and his parents to hide at my dad’s island resort where she thought they would be safe. She was wrong. The Mole sent an assassin to kill Seth’s parents and naturally, I got caught up in the drama. Together, Seth and I spoiled The Mole’s party—which was one of the reasons he wanted us dead.

I stared out at the French countryside, rolling the word
us
around and around in my head. Sadly, with Seth and I, there was no more
us
. We were too dangerous to each other to stay together. The Mole had used me to find Seth in Seattle and I wasn’t willing to take the chance again. No, the only solution was for Seth and I to stay far away from each other. That wouldn’t stop me from longing for him, though.

Too soon the two-hour ride had passed. I felt the momentum of the train slowing and I had to pull my thoughts from Seth. Lights dotted the landscape, increasing in number as we rolled into the city. We were almost there. I could feel the panic rising like an ice-cold blush.

I tried to act cool, but I’m sure Mom could see the way I was trembling as I turned to her and whispered. “What do we do now?”

She looked at me for a long moment and simply said, “It will be all right.” But the corner of her mouth twitched when she said it—and she wasn’t even smiling.

The train pulled up to the platform, creaking and groaning to a stop. My stomach twisted. How were we going to get out of the station without getting caught? There weren’t many people on the train, so it’s not likely we could blend with the crowd. Plus it was after midnight by then, so the station itself wasn’t all that crowded. I thought about sneaking out the wrong side of the train and hiding along the tracks, but I was afraid those tracks could be electrified.

“What do we do?” I asked again.

She raised her eyes to meet mine. “I’m going to be sick.”

“What?”

She pulled me close and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m going to pretend to be sick. Get up and walk toward the exit. I’ll be right behind you. Before we get off the train, I’m going to faint. If we’re lucky, they’ll take us into the station office to make sure I’m all right.”

“But . . .” One of the cardinal rules of being on the run was to not draw attention to yourself. Fainting on the train was sure to attract attention. On the other hand, there weren’t many people around, so our exposure would be limited. And really? What alternative did we have?