Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller) (2 page)

Kevin frowned. And nodded.

Shit. He knows my name.

“It
is
,” the boy shouted, this time at the open door. “This is the right room. Come
on
.”

As though this were the signal they had been waiting for, twenty-four more boys came barreling through the door like marbles coming down a chute. They ran into each other, ran into the walls, and stumbled over the desks and chairs as if these were obstacles that had been suddenly thrown into their paths. The noise they made was high and loud and happy, like the sound of a pack of good-natured dogs being released into the clover fields for their daily run. Barking for the joy of barking. Shoving and shouting and punching one another on the shoulder and in the stomach, they treated each other with a level of physical disrespect that could be considered a sign of affection only by predatory pack animals and young boys.

They were enjoying themselves.

Kevin watched them with a numb fascination. They looked, he thought, virtually identical to one another. They were all wearing the same khaki pants and the same white shirt and the same blue blazer. Some of their neckties, at least, were distinct. Green ones, yellow ones, different patterns.

He glanced once more at the clock. The red hand was moving just fine now. Ticking along, marking the seconds.

After two minutes of jostling and jockeying for position, each boy found a desk and a seat of his own. And then, after another minute of chatter that filled the room and somehow amplified itself as the seconds ticked by, something in the air shifted. They seemed all at once to notice Kevin sitting behind his desk. They fell silent.

They waited.

Now they watched him carefully, as if he had crept into the room intending to ambush them.

Kevin stared back at them, and then he looked down for the first time at his own desk. There was a phone there, and it was a good-looking device. A slim slab of glass with a crisp screen and no visible buttons. It was already turned on, and the screen showed the date and time in large, blue, clearly visible type.

8:17 AM

9/17/2011

Kevin’s breath caught in his throat again.

September?

It made enough sense. September was when school began. And here they all were, decked out in their pressed white shirts and their blue blazers, watching him, waiting to see what kind of teacher he would be.

Pushover? No nonsense? Stone cold bastard?

It didn’t matter. He didn’t care what they thought. What mattered was that this could
not
be September. His last memory – going up the elevator to the 20th floor in that licensure building – had been from June. And that left three solid months unaccounted for.

Three months completely gone.

The students were still watching him. Still waiting and assessing. Kevin looked down at the desk again, and he saw a neat stack of papers directly in front of him.
The first sheet was dated 9/17, and it said
Algebra 1, Chapter 1,
at the top of the page.

A
ll of these things had been written out in his own handwriting.

How nice
.

He took another breath, and then he stood. He looked behind him, found a red dry-erase marker in the metal tray below the white-board, and turned back to the class.

I may not remember how I got here
, Kevin thought.
But I can definitely teach an introduction to Algebra.

“Take out your notebooks,” he said. There was a collective rustling as the students did as they were told. He glanced down again at the lesson plan he had evidently prepared for himself. “This should be easy enough. We’re going to start with – ”

Something distracted him, and he stopped and looked up from the desk. One of the boys in the third row on the far right was murmuring something to his neighbor.

“Hey.”

The boy did not look up. Still talking.

“
Hey
.”

The boy noticed him. He stopped talking. There was a little grin on his face.

Kevin put the lesson plan down and fixed the boy with a cold stare. “I don’t know you,” Kevin said. His voice was very quiet. “And you don’t know me. But let’s make this our introduction.”

“Okay,” the boy said. His eyes had gone very still, but the smile was still there.

“When I’m speaking, you don’t talk. You don’t whisper, you don’t chat, you don’t do a single thing except watch and listen. From the look of the room and your uniforms, this is a private school, which means I can throw you against a wall if I feel like it. I’m having what you might call a bumpy morning so far. Don’t make it any bumpier for me, all right? Because I’ll take it out on you.”

The boy nodded slowly. His smile was gone. The silence in the room was absolute, and Kevin was suddenly aware, for the first time, of his own size relative to these boys. He was a few inches over six feet, and somewhere north of 220 pounds, depending on the day. They didn’t let just anybody play quarterback on the UNH football team, after all.

He could see it in their eyes, could almost see them putting a mental check mark next to his name.

Mr. Brooks: stone cold bastard.

Fine
, Kevin thought.
That’s a role I’m willing to play with enthusiasm.

“Let’s get going,” he said, picking up his lesson plan again. There was no more murmuring this time.

He got to work.

We Want Him Marked

Kevin Brooks still did not understand what was going on – or where he had been, or what he was doing – but his understanding was, for the moment, irrelevant. His purpose had already been decided for him. And while he was busy teaching his first period Algebra class, six men were making their way down the stairs of a garage a half-mile away.

Unlike Kevin, these men knew
exactly
what they were doing.

Now the six of them sat hidden, cramped, and hot in the semi-dark of a windowless rear cargo space. They were in the back of a white Ford e250 super-duty van. The small overhead florescent was on, but the black clothes they were wearing soaked up the light and made the shadows seem larger. Nothing moved. The van was parked in the third sub-basement of an underground garage on First Avenue between 58th and 59th street in Manhattan, and the only other person in the garage at that moment was a bored attendant at street level, dozing in his booth, his feet propped up on a small television showing a woman doing calisthenics on an empty beach.

Nevertheless, the six men in the back of the van spoke in low voices. The Organizer was explaining the job.

“You’ll have until next Friday,” he said. “
Ten
days from now, minus about a half-hour. Go time at approximately 8 AM, depending on arrival.”

They waited silently. After a minute, one of the others raised his head and stared at the overhead light.

The Planner.

“We’ll need a pickup and three more vans,” he said. “Vans should be the same make as this one, but two of them need secondary controls installed. Remotes. Tracked and fully armored. Video inside and out, 360-degree coverage.”

The Organizer was typing quietly on a touch pad he had pulled from one of the countless pockets on his pants. He nodded along.

“We’ll also need
workups on every person at the
school,” the Planner went on. “I want them all.”

“Keep going.”

“A schedule for parents’ day itself, obviously. Which classes the
boy
has, where Billaud is expected to be. But also where his father’s coming from. We want him marked before he even arrives. Typical morning patterns, if there are any. Standard entry point, and a secondary.

“Good. What else?”

“For the surrounding area, we – ”

“Wait, why four vehicles?”

The Planner stopped speaking. He turned slowly to face the man who had interrupted, one of the Guns. The Organizer looked at him, too. They both stared at him. The silence was heavy. It seemed to grow hotter in the van.

The Gun shrugged helplessly. “I don’t understand,” he said, sounding cautious now. “It’s too many moving parts. Why would we need more than this van? It’s only going to be one man, and he’s – ”

The Organizer held up a hand. “Quiet.” He looked away from the Gun and stared at the black rubber floor of the van, as though considering something deeply troubling. “You’re not Gun One,” he said, without looking up.

The Gun blinked. “No, Gun Two, I – ”

“Gun One?”

“Sir.”

The Organizer lifted his head. He gave Gun One a look.

There was very little room to move inside the van, but Gun One did not hesitate. He leaned forward briskly, lifting and cocking his arm so that his elbow came out to one side. Then he pushed backward quickly and powerfully, driving the flat of his elbow into Gun Two’s unprotected face. There was a wet sound as Gun Two’s nose and upper lip were crushed and split, and then, an instant later, a dull thud as the back of his head struck the side wall of the van.

Gun Two shut his eyes and opened his mouth for air, but he did not make any sounds of his own. No cries of pain or distress. He put both hands up slowly, his eyes still closed, and he focused on breathing. He spread his fingers out like a blind man preparing to navigate his way through an unfamiliar room. Gun One returned to his ready state, and did not look at him. After another moment, Gun Two put his hands back down onto his lap, and then he opened his eyes. He made no move to examine his own nose or lips, or even to wipe away the blood that was now streaming down over his mouth, past his chin, and onto his black shirt.

The Organizer spoke again: “Will you be driving a van?”

Gun Two waited for an extra second to be sure he was the one being asked. Then he answered slowly. “No.” The word came out sounding muffled. Nasal and bloody.

“Are you in charge of planning?”

“No.”

“What is your role?”

“I’m a Gun.”

“Which means?”

“I handle operations. I pick up, I drop off, I neutralize threats, I secure targets.”

“Excellent. Is understanding required for any of these things?”

“No.”

“Do you expect to ask any more questions?”

Again the operative known as Gun Two waited, this time for emphasis. “No, Sir.”