Going Rogue (2 page)

“Isn’t it sooner? You met in late September.”

“Yeah, but we weren’t
dating
-dating. He was still my assignment then.”

So …
yeah
. About that. There’s really no way to tell this story without making me sound like a terrible person, so I’ll keep it short.

Basically, I was assigned to get to know Jesse because his father runs
Memorandum
magazine, which is pretty big. They were going to run an in-depth article exposing the Collective and me, and it was my job to stop the article from running. Only I kinda maybe developed this huge crush on Jesse. And then he started crushing on me right
back. And then we sort of made out a lot, and I never told anyone, including Jesse, that I had pretty much become a double agent until we found out that his dad wasn’t going to run the story after all. And then when I tried to tell my parents, they realized that I had fallen in love with him and they didn’t believe me.

That was sort of a crazy time. I haven’t even told you about the attempted kidnapping yet. Or how the bad guys ended up chasing us twenty blocks and Angelo had to fly in on a helicopter to save me and Roux and Jesse from almost being killed.

I don’t like to brag, but sometimes my life can be really exciting.

Anyway, Jesse and I are still together, and he’s forgiven me for lying to him in the beginning. We both figure that if our relationship can survive all that, then we’re pretty good at being together. And we are. He’s the only person besides Roux who knows that Angelo, my parents, and I are all spies, and he’s never once spilled the secret. (Probably because he also thinks that Angelo is an assassin. Roux can be very convincing.)

“Wanna come over?” I asked Roux as we tried to walk under as many awnings as possible, avoiding the sun. “I think my dad’s doing something involving barbecue tonight.”

“No, thanks, I have my tae kwon do class.”

“Ah, that’s right.” During our exciting near escape last year, Roux had managed to break the bad guy’s nose and now she’s all gung-ho on self-defense and putting up a good offense.

“And I think my parents are going to be home late
tonight, anyway,” Roux continued, now examining her cuticles. “I should probably be around to guilt them about leaving for five weeks.”

“You could probably get a pony out of it,” I said.

“The last thing I need is something that neighs and craps all over the foyer.” She tossed her hair back over her shoulder and straightened her sunglasses. “Don’t worry, I’ll get my revenge when they’re old and it’s time to put them in nursing homes. They’ll spend their last days making macramé if
I
have anything to say about it.”

Roux’s parents are ridiculously wealthy. Like, how-are-you-even-a-real-person wealthy. It might sound amazing, but the real downside is that they’re never home. They live in this huge building on the Upper East Side and Roux always seems to have the place to herself. Her dad has meetings around the world, and her mom goes with him. “Someone has to see if all the luxury spas in the world are up to snuff,” Roux says, but it’s hard to miss the hurt in her eyes. And then there’s the Frieze Art Fair in London, Art Basel in Miami, antique auctions in Rome, getaway vacations in Bora Bora, and so on and so on.

It makes my parents insane because they like Roux and feel bad that she’s practically raising herself, but what can you do? “We could break into her parents’ online accounts and siphon out their money into an account for Roux,” my mom answered when I asked that several months ago, and it took an hour for my dad and me to talk her out of the idea.

Once a computer hacker, always a computer hacker.

“Well, tell your parents I said hi,” I told Roux as we started to cross the street against the light. “Even though they’ve never met me.”

“Please,” Roux said. “I could tell them that you met last year at a black tie cocktail reception for famous chimpanzees and they’d believe me. And maybe I
should
get a pony. I could name it Consolation Prize.”

“Brilliant idea,” I replied. I had learned long ago that Roux’s schemes came and went with equal speed. And sure enough, she was already off on her next subject.

“Are you bored?”

“What? You mean, right now? Not really. I mean, nothing’s really happening but—”

“No, I just mean in general. Like, with your life.”

I sighed. I knew where this conversation was going and decided to cut to the chase. “No, Roux, I am not leaving on any new missions. I told you, I’m out. At least until after I graduate next year.”

“Well, what if you
had
to? Like, if national security was at stake?”

“The government doesn’t even
know
about us. I doubt they’d call my dad and be like, ‘Hey, you three busy? There’s this thing …’”

We stopped at the corner across from the subway station at Astor Place as Roux lowered her sunglasses to look at me. “You’re lying,” she finally said. “Your eyes are going up and to the left.”

“That means I’m lying?”

“Yes. I’ve been studying up on human facial tics.”

“Sounds riveting. And I am
not
lying. Are you getting on the subway with me or not?”

“No, I have to go home and get my stuff.” Roux stepped off the curb to hail a taxi just as a man cut in front of us. He was wearing an old suit and tie that clearly had not been washed for a few days, and he had a few weeks’ worth of whiskers lining his face.

“You!” he said to me, pointing right in my face. His nails were long and dirty, but I didn’t flinch. A lifetime of learning how to stay calm in stressful situations often came in handy in New York.

“They’re after you next!” he yelled. “Especially you!”

“Excellent, that’s great,” Roux said under her breath, reaching for my arm and pulling me away from the man. “Let’s just step over here and get out of Insane Land, okay? There we go.”

I watched as the man staggered down the street, blending in with the late-afternoon crowds. “Well, that was weird,” I said.

“Do you know him?” Roux asked.

“I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

“You!” the man yelled again, this time pointing at a nanny pushing a stroller. She didn’t even blink. “Especially you!”

Roux just shook her head. “Welcome to Manhattan.” She held her arm out for a taxi. “It’s almost four, they’re all going off duty soon, and I am
not
standing on a subway platform in this heat.” She stepped farther into the street so that the next cab would have to hit her or stop for her, not
even flinching when one nearly grazed her as he slammed to a halt. I couldn’t hear the driver, but I could read lips well enough to know that he was using some pretty unique and colorful curse words.

He and Roux would get along just fine.

“I’ll text you later?” Roux said as she climbed into the backseat.

“You better! Enjoy your class! Don’t break anyone’s nose!”

“I make no promises!” She stopped and pushed her sunglasses up on her head. “You sure you’re not bored?”

Now I could hear the cab driver, as well as all the car horns behind them, mad that Roux was holding up traffic. “Definitely not bored,” I told her. “Trust me, I’m done. I’m a civilian. I’m out.”

And I meant it.

Until I got home and heard the news.

I first knew something was wrong when I rounded Spring Street and our loft came into view. Everything looked normal, just another day in Soho, but there was opera music soaring out, seeping through the cracks in our closed windows and floating down toward me.

It was “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” from Mozart’s
The Magic Flute
.

Translation? “Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart.”

I ran the rest of the way home.

We’ve lived in our loft since we moved back to Manhattan from Reykjavík last year. It was just supposed to be a stopping ground, like so many of our houses were. Sometimes they felt like movie sets rather than homes, four walls with actors inside, playing our parts and then moving on to the next set, the next role. I’ve lost count of all the places we’ve lived, but we’ve been on six out of seven continents. (Let’s be honest: Antarctica doesn’t see a lot of crime-related activity. It’s too cold to even
think
about committing a crime.)
I think this is the longest my family has ever been in one place, which is interesting. I’ve always had wings, never roots, and now I wake up to see the same four walls and have the same name—Maggie—every single day.

Hearing the Austrian aria made me realize how quickly all of that could disappear.

I dashed down the street and hurried into the elevator, yanking its steel door down and jabbing the button until my finger hurt and it finally started to rise. The soprano’s voice was staccatoing like rocks across a pond, making my heart match its pace. We never listened to this song, not ever.

This song meant that something was wrong.

The elevator doors opened at a glacial pace, and I finally got so impatient that I stuck my fingers in and practically pried them apart. Our front door was there, the dingy #3 hanging smack in the center, a stark counterpart to the fingerprint scanner that sat next to the doorbell.

The fingerprint scanner had been installed last year, notable not only because it was, you know, a
fingerprint scanner attached to our front door
, but also because the Collective had no idea that it was there. Angelo had it put in as an extra measure of security, along with our new steel front door. If anyone ever tried to sledgehammer through the door, they’d quickly find a half ton of metal waiting to stop them. It was cool if you didn’t think about why we needed those things.

This is why we need them:

When I was four years old, a man named Colton Hooper tried to kidnap me because I was apparently a little
safecracking genius and he wanted to use me for his own nefarious needs. We didn’t know it was him at the time because he hired someone to do it. Luckily, my parents and Angelo got wind of the plan and they flew me out of the country. Colton killed the kidnapper-for-hire to protect his own identity.

That’s crazy enough, I know, but what made it crazier was that Colton was a high-ranking member of the Collective. He was our handler—in charge of assigning our missions, providing our multiple identities, and setting us up in our new locations. It turned out he was quite the multi-tasker, trying to sell information about us to Jesse’s dad’s magazine. If he couldn’t get me, he might as well make some money, right?

Wrong.

Look, I don’t like to brag a lot, but I’m pretty proud of the fact that we stopped Colton. And by we, I mean Roux and Jesse and me. I sort of broke code—okay, I
completely
broke code—by telling Roux and Jesse about my family and the Collective. But they responded by being awesome and helping me prove that Colton Hooper was a liar and very dangerous.

And oh yeah, there was also a twenty-block high-speed chase in which Roux, Jesse, and I had to outrun Colton. Then Roux attacked Colton, and Angelo had to fly in on a helicopter and save us. Followed by taking out Colton, which made my parents be all like “What. The. Hell.”

It was a long week, I’ll tell you. I think I’m still recovering from the drama, even though it happened almost a year ago.

So that’s the short version of why we had a fingerprint scanner installed. I don’t even know where Angelo got it, or who installed it, but it was there now. I jammed my index finger against it and waited impatiently for the familiar sound of the bolt clicking open. I can crack the lock, of course (what good is being a lock picker if you can’t even break into your own house?), but it’s faster to wait for the scanner instead.

Still, every second felt like an hour.

I heaved the door open as soon as I could, and the music almost blasted me right out of the loft, it was that loud. There’s only two reasons to play music at that volume: one, a party, and two, a secret.

And I was pretty sure that my parents weren’t throwing a party.

My mom was the first to see me, arms crossed and brow furrowed as she stood leaning against the kitchen island. Her face totally changed when she saw me, smoothing out into a smile as she stood up straight and uncrossed her arms. “Hi,” she said, but I could only read her lips, not hear her.

My dad was standing across from her, the same worried gaze on his face, but it took him a few seconds longer than my mom to hide his emotions. He just waved and then pretended to lip-synch along with the aria, but I was in no mood for dad shenanigans. There was a pot of something on the stove, which was just as bad a sign as the opera. My dad stress-eats when he’s nervous: after Colton Hooper was assassinated, he put on ten pounds.

Angelo was standing next to my father, his face as calm and genteel as always. He wore a seersucker suit, a
gray-collared shirt, and a pink-and-gray-striped silk tie. How he wasn’t melting in the heat, I had no idea, but that’s Angelo for you. He’s a perfect spy because he’s like a mirage, like he exists outside of the world while still living in it. Sometimes it’s hard to believe he’s even real.

But he was very real, and very definitely standing in my kitchen, and, I knew, very much responsible for the music blasting out of the speakers.

He gave me a small wave and a beatific smile as I ran to hug him. “You’re a jerk for being gone for so long,” I yelled, since the music was so loud. “You owe me a million espressos.”

Angelo just grinned and reached for a remote to turn down the music. “Hello, my love,” he said. “Sorry, we were a bit loud, weren’t we. Apologies all around.”

I crossed my arms and looked at him, trying to figure out where he had been. Pale skin meant north, maybe Russia or Scandinavia. Tan skin meant West Africa, maybe the Mediterranean or Colombia. But Angelo looked the same, impassive as ever.

“Well?” I said. “Is anyone going to explain why we’re deafening half of lower Manhattan with our distress signal? I could hear the music all the way around the corner! And isn’t this a speech that
you’re
supposed to give
me
, your teenage daughter?”

My dad shrugged. “Your parents like to have fun sometimes. Let our hair down. We get crazy.”