Furious Jones and the Assassin’s Secret (6 page)

“We're all so sorry for the loss of your—” She started crying before she could finish. This was a mistake.

“You'll have to excuse Kristyn,” Douglas said. “These guys have had a rough couple of days.”

You've got to be kidding me.
They've
had a rough couple of days?

I looked around the lobby. There was a woman sitting behind the desk and six or seven uniformed cops standing
in the lobby talking to one another. They were clearly pulling out all the stops for my dad.

“I stopped by to talk to Sloan. Is he around?” I asked.

“I'm glad you're here, Furious. Let's find a place to talk.” Douglas stepped aside and gestured down the hallway. “Kristyn, is there some place Furious and I can talk in private?”

“Sure,” Kristyn replied. “You can use the conference room. Follow me.” “Where's Sloan?” I asked again.

“Mr. Harrison is dead,” Douglas said as he put his hand on my shoulder and started guiding me down the hall.

Dead? Did he say dead?

As I tried to process what he'd just told me, Douglas and I followed Kristyn down a long hallway with offices on both sides. They were mostly empty. But I could hear voices and noises from an office on the right. There was a cop standing in the doorway. The voices grew louder.

“Don't look,” Douglas said.

But it was too late. I'd already looked. And I saw Sloan's body on the floor of his office. I looked away, but the snapshot was already there. Etched in my mind. And it would be there forever.

We kept walking, and I didn't say anything. Sloan was truly the last person I could count on to help me and now he was dead. Gone. Clearly these guys could get to anyone. Were they killing everyone who knew my dad's new book was a true story? As far as I knew, I was the last one on the list.
The last living person to know that whatever was happening in Galena, Illinois, was nonfiction. If they killed me, it would stop here. The book would come out next Thursday, and the world would assume that it was just a fictional story. Like they had assumed with all the previous Kidd books. And the Salvatore crime syndicate, and whoever else, would get away with murder. Or, more accurately,
murders
.

Kristyn led us to a large glass-walled conference room at the end of the hall. I noticed an
EXIT
sign above a door next to the conference room. Maybe I'd get a chance to run. My grandpa thought Douglas might be mixed up in my mom's death, and my dad had made it clear that the Salvatores had infiltrated the CIA, so I couldn't trust Douglas. Or anyone in the CIA.

“In here,” Kristyn said, motioning with her left hand.

I circled around the large conference-room table. I wanted to sit as far away from Douglas as I could. A wall at the far end of the room was lined with dozens of books, carefully lit and displayed on glass shelves. Most of them were my dad's.

I walked up and grabbed a copy of
Miss Fire
, my dad's fifth book. The one I had read so many great reviews about.

“I hear this is the best one in the series,” I said.

“Yes, it's very popular. But I guess they're all popular,” Kristyn said with a smile.

I looked at the cover. It had a silhouette of a man in the
foreground looking at the Eiffel Tower. I wondered what adventure my mom went on in this book. I knew my mom could speak a little French. She could actually speak several languages in addition to Italian. I guess now I knew why. And my mom and I had spent a couple of months in Paris about a year and a half ago. Was she there killing people? I wondered.

There was a sticker on the cover that said
GET A SNEAK PEEK AT
DOUBLE CROSSED
.

“What's this sticker?” I asked Kristyn.

“Oh, that was the publisher's idea. They placed those stickers on his other books. There is a code on the back of the sticker that allows you to get excerpts leading up to the book's launch next Thursday. Can I get either of you something to eat or drink?”

I hadn't thought of it until she mentioned food, but I was starving. I hadn't eaten since late yesterday afternoon.

“I'd love something to eat, if it isn't too much trouble,” I said.

“Oh, no trouble at all. Do you like scones? There's a coffee shop downstairs, and they make killer sco—” She paused halfway through the word “scone,” and her cheeks reddened. “They make great scones,” she finished.

“That would be great,” I said.

“Anything for you?” she asked, turning toward Douglas.

“No, I'm fine, thank you.”

Kristyn left the room and Douglas turned toward me.

“What brings you here today, Furious?” Douglas asked as he sat down across from me.

“I was just coming to see Sloan.”

“What for?”

“Just to talk, I guess.”

“Do you two talk a lot? Were you close?” Douglas asked.

“Sort of,” I lied. He was my godfather, but we weren't particularly close.

“Oh,” Douglas dropped his voice to a whisper. “I'm sorry, I didn't know that.”

It was strange. This didn't seem like the same guy who'd stood in my grandpa's kitchen yesterday yelling. He seemed kind. Trusting. I wondered if that was all part of the plan. Kind of a good cop, bad cop thing.

“You know I was friends with your mother?”

His voice went up an octave at the end of the sentence. Like it was more of a question than a statement. I didn't respond.

“Did your grandpa tell you about me?”

“No,” I lied.

“Were you at your dad's talk the other night? The night he was killed?”

“Yes.”

“So you're not going to lie to me about
everything
, then?” Douglas said, leaning back in his chair.

How did he know I lied about my grandpa telling me who he was? Was my grandpa's house bugged?

“Did you sit with Attorney General Como at the event?”

“Yes,” I said.

“How well do you know Joe Como?” Douglas asked.

“Not at all. I just met him that night.”

“Did he approach you? How did you end up sitting together?”

“We kind of bumped into each other,” I said.

“What did you talk about?”

“Not much,” I said.

Douglas didn't respond. He just stared at me for several long seconds.

“Believe it or not, Furious, I cared about your mother, and I care about you.”

I said nothing.

“I have reason to believe you're in serious danger,” Douglas said.

“You think?” I asked. “My mom, dad, and grandpa have all been murdered. I'd say it's fair to assume I'm in a little danger.”

“Your grandpa?” Douglas sat up. “What are you talking about?”

I suddenly remembered I needed to be careful. My grandpa didn't trust Douglas. And he seemed to think he might have even had a hand in my parents' deaths. I couldn't trust him. I couldn't trust anyone.

“What happened to your grandpa?” Douglas asked again.

I could feel my eyes watering as I sat looking across the table. God, I had no one.

Douglas pulled out his cell phone and, without saying a word, walked out of the room. This was my chance. If I was going to get away, I had to go now.

I
couldn't sit around here
and wait to see if my grandpa was right or not about not trusting Douglas. Clearly Douglas had been unable to save my mom from whatever had happened in Galena, so how would he save me? No, I needed to go. I needed to find some facts and figure out what was going on.

I stuck my head out into the hallway and Douglas was standing about five feet from the conference room door. He was on his phone and facing away from me. I looked at the exit next to me. It was two feet away, but Douglas would surely hear the door. I needed a distraction. I needed Douglas to move.

I had absolutely nothing left to lose, so I pulled out my
phone and tapped the Internet icon. My browser was still on my dad's contact page. I clicked on Sloan's phone number and stepped back into the conference room. A woman answered.

“Harrison, Smythe, and Moore, how may I direct your call?” the woman asked.

I spoke softly into the phone, “Director Douglas, please.”

There was a short pause and then she put me on hold. I lowered the phone to my side and stood near the door. A minute later I heard a woman's voice in the hallway. And then the deep rumble of Douglas's voice. Then silence. Seconds later I heard Douglas's voice coming from my phone.

“Hello. Hello? Who's there?”

I clicked cancel, shoved the phone into my pocket, and opened the door.

“Oh, hello.” A tall brunette was standing directly in front of me. She was probably the woman who had answered the phone. “Agent Douglas will be right back.”

“Tell him I'll meet him in the lobby,” I said as I pushed the exit door open.

“Ah, no! Wait, I—”

I didn't bother with the rest of her protest. I stepped into the stairwell, grabbed the metal railing, and started moving quickly down the stairs.

This was crazy. There was no way this would work.

I started taking two steps at a time. Then I started jumping
the last several stairs at each landing. There was a landing at each floor and halfway between each floor. That meant I had to clear thirty landings to get to the bottom. To get free.

How many had I passed so far? Three? Maybe four? I tried to move faster. The entire staircase was made of metal. Like one big metal structure sitting inside a giant concrete shaft. It was loud. The noise from my jumping echoed in the shaft. I'd never hear Douglas coming after me. He was sure to have hung up by now. Was he already on the stairs?

Go! Go! Move! Move!

I was flying down the stairs. I was in a rhythm. My breathing was getting loud. I was sure the entire building could hear me now. My legs were burning. My right thigh felt odd. Like it was pulsing. Or twitching. I stopped to catch my breath. I was breathing hard. I bent over the railing and looked up toward the fifteenth floor. Then I felt the twitch again. It was my phone. It was vibrating in my pocket. I pulled it out. The screen said I had an incoming call from the Harrison, Smythe, and Moore agency.

Shoot! Caller ID. I really hadn't thought this through. Could he track me? Could he track my phone? Isn't that what the CIA did? I hit ignore, shoved the phone back in my pocket, and continued down the stairs. I gripped the railing hard at each landing and flung myself around the corners. The eleven floor. Tenth floor. Ninth. I kept going. I hit the sixth-floor landing and thought I heard someone enter the
stairwell. I stopped and tried to listen. My heart was throbbing in my ears. I breathed in deep and held my breath. Someone was definitely coming down the stairs. I started moving fast. A head start was all I had. I was jumping three stairs with every move now. I imagined Douglas was too.

Five. Four. Three. I kept moving. Kept jumping. Two. One. I stopped and took a couple of deep breaths before opening the first-floor door. Someone was definitely moving quickly down the stairs. There was no doubt about it—Douglas was close.

I pushed the door open and walked out into the corridor near the bank of elevators. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and walked toward the main set of doors. I walked past the security guard and gave him a nod. I was twenty feet from the door. Fifteen feet. Ten. Five. Then I heard my name.

“Furious?”

I kept walking.

“Furious?”

It sounded more like a question than a statement. I recognized the voice. It was Kristyn. I didn't look back. I just kept walking. I pushed myself into the revolving door and looked over my shoulder as it turned. Kristyn was standing in the lobby, holding a bag of pastries. My scones.

I
thought about heading to
the subway, but where would I go? I couldn't go back to my grandpa's house. Obviously it wasn't safe and, judging from the number of fire trucks that had rolled through the streets of New Canaan, my grandpa's house must have burned to the ground.

I needed to know what was going on. Why was the Salvatore crime syndicate killing my family? I needed to know what was in my dad's new book. What had my mom discovered in Galena? I thought of my mom as Carson Kidd. And then I thought of the sticker and the code on my dad's latest book. Kristyn had said it unlocked a couple of excerpts of the new book. Maybe there would be enough information to give me a better idea of what was going on in Galena. I
searched my phone for a bookstore. The closest one was five blocks away. I started to run.

• • •

It wasn't hard to find my dad's books in the store. They were piled a hundred high as you walked in. The store seemed to be preparing for the excitement surrounding my dad's new book. His death was sure to bring more publicity too. Lots more.

I grabbed a copy of his fifth book,
Miss Fire
, and headed to the café. I purchased a Coke, a scone, and the book. I handed the cashier some more of my grandpa's cash and felt bad as I looked down at the photo of my dad on the back of the book. I had never really gotten to know him. I'd always figured that we would spend time together later. I'd figured we'd make up for the lost years. But now that was impossible. And now I'd found out I didn't really know my mom, either. Not really.

I sat down and peeled back the sticker on the front of the book to reveal a seven-digit code along with instructions to enter the code at CarsonKidd.com. I pulled my phone out and started to type in the website when the phone began to vibrate.

It was an incoming call from a private number.

I pushed talk.

“Do you seriously think you can run from the CIA?” It was Douglas.