“You could probably soften that a little,” Alex says.
No one says anything, then Reid starts laughing.
Ben pushes him, and he says, “What? He’s right.”
They’re both right, I guess. But I am too. I needed to know what happened. I shouldn’t have had to wait like this. Of course, things could have been worse.
Alex looks at me and tilts his head in the direction of my house, and I turn to Elijah and offer him my hand. “Thanks.”
His eyes narrow. “For what?”
“For beating the shit out of them for me.”
“I aim to please.” He snorts as a smile breaks across his face, and he reaches out and shakes my hand. “You know, Tenner, I might not like you that much, but I sure as hell respect you after that number you did on Hines tonight.”
I turn to Reid, but he’s so drunk he’s looking a little like he might hurl, and I doubt he’s going to remember much from tonight. Then I turn to Ben.
“Janelle, I’m sorry, I—”
I shake my head. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
And as Alex and I move to walk away, Ben reaches out and squeezes my hand, and neither one of us lets go as we move in opposite directions, until the last possible moment.
That’s one mystery solved. The mystery I never told my dad about. Guilt squeezes its way inside my chest and just throbs there. It was the only secret I ever kept from him. At least, the only important one.
“You okay?” Alex asks.
I glance over at him. He’s flushed, but he looks relieved. This secret was a weight on him. And he bore it for me, because I needed him to.
I nod, even though things are far from okay. Because this time Alex needs me to. I can’t keep asking him to pull me back from the cliff, and he shouldn’t have to keep worrying that I’m going to fall.
I
wake up hung over and a little depressed and decide I deserve a day off from school. Jared isn’t hung over, but he decides to follow my lead and I let him. We lie on the couch most of the morning, watching the first season of
The X-Files
.
Which is exactly where I am when the doorbell rings.
I look at Jared and he looks at me. “I think the
older
sibling has to get the door,” he says.
“Shocking,” I say as I get up off the couch and go to the front door.
It’s Kate.
By the way she’s dressed, she’s obviously just cutting class and not taking the day off, and even though I’m tempted to shut the door in her face and go back to the couch, I lean into the doorway and ask, “Are you lost?”
“No,” she says, shaking her head, and despite how put together she looks, underneath all the makeup, I can see how glassy her eyes are. “J, I’m so sorry about your dad.”
“I am too, but you’re the last person I want to talk about him with,” I say.
She opens her mouth to respond and then closes it. “Look, I had to talk to you,” she says, and I must be in a charitable mood because I wave a hand for her to continue. “I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what?”
“I didn’t know the beer had been roofied until after the party,” she says. “Brooke gave it to me to give to you and said it would liven you up, and—”
“And what? Kate, even if you didn’t know before, you knew after.” I shake my head. “Sorry, you’re not going to get absolution from me. You chose your friends, you have to live with it.”
She opens her mouth and looks like she might start pleading with me, but then her face changes. It sets, and I see the hard line of her jaw. “Fine. How long are you going to be keeping shit at my pool house?”
“I’ll have my shit out of there by the end of the day,” I say, this time not holding back when I want to slam the door in her face.
I grab my cell phone and call Alex. He’s in class, so it goes to voice mail, but he calls me back a few minutes later.
“Meet me at the UCSD library after school again?” I say when I answer. I have a renewed sense of purpose now.
“Why, what’s up?” he asks.
“Because if we were right about the bioterrorism angle, we have nine days before our own faces might be melting off.”
W
e sit in our soundproof cube, poring over my dad’s hard-copy files and his laptop for two hours. I try not to think about Ben, about last night, or about anything but this case. I need to figure it out, for my dad. But we’re ready to give up.
And then I find something.
It’s pure luck, but while I’m trying to root through my dad’s email, someone replies to him. And it’s exactly what I need to see.
“Alex…,” I breathe.
He leans over to look at the laptop and the brand-new email. It’s from a G. Lickenbrock with the Department of Homeland Security.
James,
After we spoke last Friday, I put a trace on all the credit cards we had associated with Mike Cooper. This morning we got a hit on one of them. Two charges—at Unique Pawnbrokers (3039 University Ave.) and Mira Mesa Pool (8251 Mira Mesa Blvd.). When you bring the bastard in, call me.
G
“A pawnshop and a pool store?” Alex asks.
I feel sick to my stomach. Because I know exactly what you can buy at a pawnshop and a pool supply store if you’re a bioterrorist. “Pawnshops sell guns and bullets,” I say to Alex. “And pool supply stores sell chemicals.”
He nods. “Should have seen that coming.”
Mike Cooper is our first solid lead. Whoever he is, my dad was interested in him, which means he could be important.
But it’s more than that. My dad organized his emails with preset filters so important ones came in already labeled. This new email is labeled MULDER. And I’m betting if I follow this one back to the folder, I’ll find more emails about the case.
Alex rolls his eyes. He’s never been an
X-Files
fan. “What do the other ones say?”
I scroll down to last Friday, which G from Homeland Security referenced, and I find a thread of emails between the two of them, beginning with the first one my dad sent to G. The subject is PERSON OF INTEREST.
I open up the first email and skim it quickly. My dad cuts to the chase right away. He’s attaching a picture of a guy who’s a person of interest in a case. He can’t identify the guy in any of his databases; could Homeland Security do Facial Recognition and let him know if they find anything?
I click on the attachment.
“Is that him?” Alex asks.
I shake my head. “I don’t know yet, but look at this,” I say, clicking to the next email, while we wait for the picture to download. My dad didn’t just send this email to G and Homeland Security. He literally sent hundreds of emails out to various counterintelligence agents and other agency contacts in different cities. Every email says the same thing—it all revolves around this one guy.
Alex leans in when the picture finishes loading. It’s grainy and black and white, and it looks like it might be a still shot from a security camera outside of a gas station. It looks like there’s a black Honda Accord and a gas pump in the background. But I wouldn’t be able to tell which gas station unless I was standing wherever this camera is, taking in everything at the same angle—and maybe not even then.
The guy himself is more distinguishable. He’s male, white, and probably between five feet nine and six feet two. He looks like he’s in his mid- to late thirties, still fit with broad shoulders, brown hair that’s cropped close to his head, and no facial hair. He has the look of someone who’s former or current military. Unfortunately, I can’t tell if he has any tattoos or piercings from the picture.
“Great, so he looks pretty average. Shouldn’t be hard to find him,” Alex says. “What’s Lickenbrock say?”
Agent G. Lickenbrock from Homeland Security had replied less than an hour after my dad’s original email.
James Tenner,
Haven’t talked to you since that stint out in L.A.
and you can’t even ask how I’ve been. I’d say
I’m surprised....
The guy in your picture: alias Mike Cooper,
real identity unknown. The case file’s attached,
call me if you want details.
G
“The case file is from 2010 regarding the deaths of two people, identities unconfirmed, as well as a missing person, suspected dead, where Mike Cooper, age thirty-six, was their main suspect. Until he went off the grid before they could gather enough evidence to take him into custody. When I open the picture on Cooper’s driver’s license, I’m staring at the same guy as the one in my dad’s grainy gas station picture. There’s no mistaking it.
Now we have a more identifiable picture.
“Do you have the backup drive?” Alex hands it to me before I’ve even finished the sentence, and I plug it in and start downloading all these emails and the files on this guy. “Are there color printers here?”
“Probably, but J—”
“We need to print a nice copy of this picture and go over to the pool supply store and the pawnshop. We might be able to get someone who remembers talking to Mike Cooper,” I say. “And we should keep an eye on the gas stations between those two stores. With all three of them in a similar area, it’s likely that he’s living or staying somewhere nearby.”
“Janelle.”
I glance up at Alex and stifle a groan. He’s wearing his serious face, and whatever he’s about to say, it’s going to be delivered in the form of a lecture.
“We should go to Struz with this,” he says.
I shake my head. I’m not ready to go to Struz with anything.
“I’m serious,” Alex continues. “You found a lot more than I thought we would today, and I’m not saying you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re good at this, but…”
“But what, Alex?”
“We’re in over our heads, you have to know that. We don’t even really know what the UIED is.”
I do know that. We don’t even know what we’re looking for. I might be ignoring it, but I do know. It’s more than just the fact that I don’t have credentials or access to an FBI database. It would be easier, sure. I could walk into Mira Mesa Pool, throw my ID on the counter, and demand to see exactly what alias Mike Cooper bought. But would that really solve anything?
We might be looking at the end of the world—the end of existence—and I’m running around playing teen detective.
“So I give all this to Struz, and then what?”
“I don’t know,” Alex says. “Maybe he’d investigate it?”
“Thanks for that—I mean, then what for us?” I ask, pulling my hair back into a ponytail. “Think about it, Alex, do you really just want to sit around and watch the clock count down? I can’t do that.”
Because that’s the truth. If something big is coming, I can’t just sit and wait for it. I need to be doing something active to stop it.
Alex nods. “Okay, but if we’re going to do this, you have to at least make sure that Struz and the FBI have found these leads too.”
“I’m sure they have someone going through my dad’s emails,” I say, because it’s true, though a part of me just dreads any phone call to Struz that’s going to clue him in to what we’re doing. I know he’ll be mad that I’m “playing FBI,” that he’ll want me to let him take care of it, and that he’ll pretend he doesn’t understand why I can’t.
“But you know your dad better than anyone else.”
He has a point. “Fine. I’ll call, but you find the color printer for this picture.”
“Yes, drill sergeant,” Alex says, grabbing the backup drive.
I pick up my cell phone and dial Struz.
And hope we’ve found everything useful on this laptop and in my dad’s email, because as soon as Struz realizes I have it, those passwords will get wiped.
I
doubt the guy in the pool supply store believed my story about my boss sending me to buy chemicals and forgetting which ones I was supposed to get, but he told me anyway.
Mike Cooper bought several gallons of two different kinds of chlorine.
I
buy the smallest size of each one, since he at least played along with my lie. I probably know a few people who have a pool, and I can donate it to them.
As he rings me up, he says, “Make sure you don’t mix them. These are two different kinds of chlorine, and they explode when mixed. You could end up blind, or worse.”
I
have less luck at the pawnshop.
That is to say: none.
Not only is the guy unwilling to buy my bullshit story, he threatens to call the cops unless we leave. I don’t actually think he’ll do it, but I’m not willing to call his bluff either.
“Friendly guy,” Alex says when we get in the car. “Maybe we’ll have better luck on our gas station scavenger hunt.”
“That implies we’re looking for something at the gas station. We’re just looking for the
right
gas station.”
Alex shrugs, and we pull out of the parking lot onto University Avenue. “Hey, think that guy from the pawnshop could be in on it?”
“I doubt it,” I say with a yawn. I haven’t slept through the night since I came home and found Struz on the doorstep. “He seemed more like he was just an irritable guy tired of taking shit than a terrorist.”
Alex laughs for a few seconds before his face sobers. “But really, J, how do we know what a terrorist looks like?”