Shock (2 page)

She should have been able to tell the difference between a masked operative and the president of the Shakira fan club.

THANK GOODNESS GAIA HAD OTHER
things to occupy her mind. Her phone finally snapped out of its reverie and went through to Dmitri. Gaia thanked the God of Unpredictable Cell Phone Service and put the phone to her ear.

“Dmitri,” she said. “It's Gaia.”

“How are you this morning,” he said.

“I'm all right,” she lied.

“I thank you again for rescuing me and bringing me back,” he said. “My apartment is very comforting to be back in. It is not so much dustier than when I left it.”

“Well, good,” she said. Was this why he had called? To chat about his one-bedroom in Chinatown?

“I wonder if I can ask for your help,” he said, answering her unasked question with his polite segue. “I think I have some information that may be of assistance in finding your father. But I need you to help me get to it. Are you opposed to a little breaking and entering?”

Now this was getting interesting. “Not if it means getting more information about my father,” she told him.

“That is good. Your father trained you well.”

“I guess. So what's the deal?” she asked him, impatient.

“I don't want to say on the phone,” he said. “I've sent you instructions via e-mail. You can go retrieve them.”

“Why won't you just tell me?” she seethed.

“Too much to tell,” he said. “Too many details. You need to see them and commit them to memory. You should know that this is how things are done in the Organization.”

“Yeah, but the Organization should know that e-mail is never secure,” she retorted.

“This one is. It's encoded and contains a self-destructing virus. It can only be read once.”

“Okay, fine.”

“You can check in with me if you have any questions. Otherwise I will expect a visit from you when you've completed the task I've laid out for you.”

“Okay.” Gaia snapped her phone shut and started to head for the front doors of the school just as the bell rang.

“Gaia Moore,” a voice boomed from behind her. She turned to see Vice Principal Lorenz—the grooviest school administrator on the entire East Coast. Lorenz never wore suits, preferring jeans and a sweater, or khakis if he really had to dress up. His thick salt-and-pepper hair had only recently lost its extra ponytail length. Most students liked his get-to-know-you attitude—he acted like the tormented poems of the literary-magazine crew were genius and even thought the cheerleaders were following their bliss. And he liked everyone to call him Bob. Even Gaia thought he seemed cooler than your average schoolhouse bureaucrat—on a normal day. But at this moment he had a distressingly friendly look on his face, like it was time to have a
talk
. And Gaia didn't have time for one of those.

“It looks like you've got somewhere to go,” he said.

“No. No, I was just walking…past the front door, to my next class,” she said. She had to get to a computer and then bust out of school to complete Dmitri's assignment. She wanted to do it now. But Bob Lorenz had a different task in mind.

“I've noticed you've been missing a lot of classes,” he said, putting a reassuring hand on Gaia's shoulder. “And even when you're here, you don't really seem
present
. Is something going on?”

Well, let's see. My dad has disappeared, a mysterious old man is sending me on a secret mission, and both my ex-boyfriends are haunting me, in their own special ways.

“No!” Gaia said. “Nothing's going on.”

“I know you have an unsettled home life,” Bob went on, clamping that hand onto her shoulder and strolling down the hall with her…away from the front door. “It must be really tough. If you want to talk about it, you know my door is always open.”

Yeah, or I could just watch Dr. Phil,
Gaia thought. “I know,” she said aloud. “I was actually planning to stop by later this week.”

“Well, why don't we just chat now?” he asked, steering her into his office. “I mean, you're here, I'm here. We can talk about all the classes you've missed.” He pulled a file out from a stack on top of his desk. It had a yellow sticky on it. Clearly he'd been watching Gaia for a while…. She cursed silently.
Should have played my part better, s
he grumbled to herself.
I'm setting off alarms left and right.
If the school's administration thought she was some kind of tormented teen in need of intervention, then intervention was what she was going to get—and that meant less freedom to come and go as she pleased. Less freedom to defend herself and find her father.

This was not good.

Every muscle in Gaia's body felt poised for action. Finally there was something she could do about the Mystery of the Missing Parent—and all she had to do was get to a computer to find out what it was. Instead, she was sitting in the vice principal's office, being gently scolded for missing assignments and not being more “proactive in her educational advancement.” Ugh.

The intense irony of it was, with one
thunk
of her leg she could have had Vice Principal Bob on the floor and stepped on his unconscious body on the way out the door. But he was a nice guy. And she didn't want to get herself arrested. No, she had to play her part for now; nod and smile as if she understood her shortcomings and really,
really
wanted to better herself. She'd bide her time, make it through this meeting, and check her e-mail in the school library. Whatever was waiting in her in box, it would have to keep for an hour or so.

“STUPID ORGANIZATION,” SHE MUTTERED
as she waited impatiently for the infuriatingly slow 56-K modem to connect her to the Internet. “Left over from the Cold War. About as updated as Tang or the Fonz. Like this stupid modem,” she added, giving the pesky peripheral a whack.

This was a serious breach of security as far as she was concerned. Sending sensitive information over the Internet? Duh. Any twelve-year-old with a Dell could hack into it, encoded or not. Forcing Gaia to read it here, at school? Double duh, ha-doi, and a dah-hicky. This was public property. Maybe the fact that it was teeming with innocent civilians would make a less cynical operative think she was safe here, but Gaia knew her enemies better than that. Her classmates were in as much danger as she was, and whoever was after her—whoever had her father—wasn't going to let a few hundred teenage martyrs stand in his way.

Gaia swallowed hard, the knowledge that she was in constant danger peeking above the surface of her consciousness again. She couldn't live in a state of constant skitz. But she couldn't stop being vigilant, not for even one second. They were after her. Whoever they were. And they'd used something as innocent as a bite of chicken potpie to get her father. When anything could be a weapon, the world could start looking exceedingly twisted.

The modem finally connected, and she maneuvered through web pages till she got to her e-mail program.

Gaia eyed the e-mail with total and complete concentration. She had a photographic memory. The image of the words seared into her frontal lobe as the distractions of the library fell away. There was something meditative about this action: The words became more than black and white on the screen; they took on a life of their own, the shapes of the letters forming patterns that Gaia recognized apart from the meaning of the words themselves. Wow, her brain was freaky sometimes.

A pensive haze settled over her for a moment. There was nothing but the words and the message they brought her. Until a hand clamped over her eyes and the world went dark.

SAM'S POSSESSIONS LAY IN A TANGLED
heap on the floor, looking like they'd been ransacked by a couple of angry prison guards. He surveyed the mess with frustration and fury. He couldn't blame anyone but himself for it. He'd been tearing through his own stuff for half an hour, trying to find his cell phone.

He picked up the regular phone and was greeted, yet again, by the incessant whine of an Internet connection. Dmitri was still on-line, and all Sam wanted to do was call Gaia. The guy had been locked up for so long, he hadn't even heard of DSL. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it at a crawl, and Sam was itching with impatience.

He had an almost physical need to speak to Gaia—it pained him as much as the red scars of the gunshot wounds and operation incision that were the legacy of the time he'd spent in Loki's prison. The last time he'd seen her, she'd been trying like hell to get him out of her apartment while her boyfriend—
her boyfriend!
—read her the riot act in front of her building.

It just killed him. All Sam wanted for Gaia was for her to be happy, and she seemed miserable. Okay, he had to be honest: all he wanted, really, was for Gaia to be happy
with him
. Of course he was jealous that Ed got the title of boyfriend and everything that went with it.
Everything that went with it.
An image of Gaia wrapped in the thin sheets of his dorm-room bed flashed through Sam's brain. He pushed it back into whatever corner it had jumped out of. He was not going to think about that. Gaia had too much going on in her life to deal with Sam's feelings for her. She'd made that much clear. If he'd never been shot, if he'd never disappeared from her life, then things might be different. But they weren't. They were like they were, and he had to keep his distance and give Gaia her space.

But he wanted to call her, anyway. He had to speak to her today. Not to get in her way or push his feelings on her. Just to make sure she was okay. The whole party-packing-fighting-leaving thing the night before had been a situation of such relentless awkwardness, he hadn't been able to relax since.

Forcing himself to take a deep breath and try to relax while he waited for the phone to become available, Sam flopped onto the floor and started doing stretching exercises. The wounds on his back were still raw and painful, but he knew his best chance of healing was to get strong and keep his skin from atrophying into more scar tissue. He could even manage a few push-ups if he really focused. And all through his long imprisonment, there was one image that had helped Sam truly focus: Gaia. He saw her sitting on the edge of his bed, her knees drawn up, the toes of her sneakers pointing toward each other. If he worked out harder, he could even hear her voice.

Very impressive,
Sam's inner Gaia said in a flatly sarcastic, teasing voice.
What was that, half a push-up?

Sam stretched harder, feeling his muscles scream with the effort, but his inner Gaia was right: It wasn't hard enough. This was what he had done the whole time he'd been in that prison. Pictured Gaia to get him through the days. Used the memory of her to force himself to survive. And now he was back in the world with her. Come to think of it, this was probably none too emotionally healthy for him. But he really didn't give a damn: Healthy or not, he needed Gaia to be with him,
really
with him, his girlfriend. They'd had a brief moment of perfect bliss before he'd been captured, and he knew that she could bring him back to that earlier, more innocent, less troubled version of himself. The Sam Moon who was premed at NYU and played a little chess. Who didn't suffer from prison-flashback nightmares. Who wasn't reduced to living in a busted-up apartment in Chinatown where the air smelled like the “fresh” fish store downstairs and the paint on the walls flaked off in lead-filled hunks.

“You picked up the phone again!” Dmitri growled from the next room.

“I need to make some calls,” Sam said, stopping his workout and looking up. Sweat poured from his slick skin and his breathing was labored. He was glad to have an excuse to stop, inner Gaia or not. She vanished in a poof from her spot on his bed.

“Use your cell phone,” the old man told him, not even turning around from his post at the monitor.

“I told you, I can't find it. I need the phone to at least check my cell's voice mail.”

“I am sorry. I must get some things in order.”

Sam stood leaning against the doorway, and observed the gnarled fingers tapping away at the keyboard. “I thought you were in that prison for a long time,” he said.

“I was, yes,” Dmitri said impatiently.

“This iMac is a brand-new model. Did someone buy it for you while you were inside?”

Dmitri turned to him, giving him a baffled, hurt stare. The old guy had taken a long shower, cut what was left of his thin gray hair, shaved, and served a freedom feast for the two of them the night before, bringing in food from an old-school Romanian restaurant a few blocks away. He was no longer the frail scarecrow that he and Gaia had freed from Loki's prison. His blue eyes had taken on a sharpness, and his muscles seemed to have gained strength overnight. But he was still an old, old man, and one who had just survived a hell of an ordeal.

“Sorry,” Sam rushed to say, but Dmitri put up a hand to stop him.

“No, my boy,” he said. “I am sorry. I know what it is like to be brutalized the way that you were. I know what it does to you. And I know I am not an ordinary person. All I can tell you is, the years I spent in the Organization left me with many resources. I am not the only one who has used this apartment, though it is my home. Trust me when I say there are certain things you should not know.” He shrugged.

Sam nodded and left the room. But the truth was, he really didn't feel any better off here than he had in his cell at the prison. At least there he'd been able to see the bars that held him inside; here, in this apartment, he simply knew that there was danger lurking outside—people trying to recapture him, maybe, or just kill him—and that his life might never get back to normal. Then there was the Gaia question. Which wasn't really a question. It was more a screaming need that wrenched his heart the way his scars wrenched his chest.

He kicked over a milk crate full of his clothes and muttered a stream of curses. He wasn't in school, he had no job (what was he going to put on his resume for his lost semester—“professional prisoner kidnapped by shadowy spylike organization”?), and he didn't even know who he was anymore.
And
he still couldn't find his stupid cell phone.