Also Known As (2 page)

I know in the movies, spies always have this really cool look, like Angelina Jolie. I’m sorry, but Angelina Jolie would be the worst spy in the world. Who wouldn’t remember looking at someone like Angelina Jolie? My mom always gets really upset whenever we watch movies about espionage. “This is so unrealistic!” she always yells. “Why would you dye your hair pink if you’re trying to stay undercover? Why is she using a drill to open that safe? All that noise and time!” (My dad and I sometimes joke that the unofficial third rule of being a spy is: “Never mention
Austin Powers
to Mom.” She doesn’t know about that joke, but we think it’s hilarious.)

But she’s right about the drill. You just can’t use it any old time you want, not when the clock’s ticking and your arm’s tired and there’s building security ambling around just one floor below you. A lot of safes, at least ones that I’ve seen, have cobalt shields, and let me tell you, trying to drill through that is the most boring thing in the world and it takes
forever
. I’m sixteen—I don’t have that kind of time! And if you miss and hit the wrong spot, then you can trigger a bunch of extra locks, which means that you are never,
ever going to open up that safe. I’ll spare you the technical details, but trust me when I tell you that it’s bad, very bad. You will not be getting the Safecracker of the Year Award if that happens.

So no drills. Or explosives. Or sledgehammers. Sledgehammers are not beige, to say the least.

The office was dark and hummed with electrical energy, computers and outlets all downloading and backing up hard drives and whatnot. I’m not sure how all that works. I didn’t inherit my mom’s computer genius. Besides, my experience in this job has taught me that most CEOs don’t know how it all works, either. They hire some guy to come in and set up security, but they have no idea if it’s actually secure. That’s why CEOs are always getting busted.

Well, that, and because of people like us.

I glanced out the windows as I slipped into the office, past empty orange-lit parking lots and homes and shopping centers and the tall steeple of a church. Everything seemed stagnant, running into the horizon with no end in sight. If I squinted hard enough, Iceland appeared to be flatlining.

If I focused my eyes differently, I could see myself in the window, looking out on the Icelandic night. I was wearing black jeans and a black sweater underneath a dark denim coat that had a shearling lining. (It may have been September in Iceland, but it was already getting cold out.) Some spies get to wear cool outfits and change their hair up, but as a safecracker, all that mattered was that I did my job. No one cared about my shoes.

My hair was just as boring as my clothes: long and brown and way past my shoulders. “You need a haircut,” my mom kept telling me, sounding like she did when I was four years old. My bangs hung directly across my forehead, and I tugged at them self-consciously, trying to make them hang straight.

When I turned around, I saw Kandinsky’s
Composition VII
on the wall, the chaotic bull’s-eye of the office. This CEO probably thought it was an original, but I knew it wasn’t. I knew this because I had seen the original painting at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. This was two years ago, back when we were doing some research on local elections and their effect on Prime Minister Putin. In Russia. In the winter. Imagine sitting in a tub of ice cubes. That’s Moscow in the winter. I still shiver when I think about it.

But I didn’t care about Moscow or Kandinsky or even
Composition VII
. I cared about what was behind it. My mom had been cleaning these offices for the past three months, every night during the summer, and every night she would notice that the painting was off-balance in a different direction. No one moves a painting that often.

Not unless they want to get to the wall behind it.

I lifted the painting off the wall, struggling a little with the weight of the glass, and set it down before turning back to the safe that was set into the wall.

“Hello there.” I grinned. “Come to Mama.”

Okay. I’ve tried to explain safecracking to my parents several times, but their eyes start to glaze over and finally
my dad says something like, “Sweetie, we’re just so
proud
of you,” and my mom smiles and nods, so I’ve stopped trying. But the basics are this: For every number in the combination, there’s a corresponding wheel within the safe’s lock. Find out how many wheels there are, then find out all the possible notches in each wheel and their corresponding numbers by going through the numbers on the dial in groups of three. Find out where the numbers match up by graphing them, then start trying to open the lock using all the different combinations of those numbers.

As you can imagine, if there are only three numbers in the combination, then it’s Easy Street. If there are eight numbers, it’s Oh Crap City. And since our plane was due at the airport in less than an hour, I needed Easy Street. Judging from the knockoff Kandinsky, I was about to get there. When the painting’s an original, the safe behind it is always difficult. Like the designer Mies van der Rohe said, “God is in the details.”

The office was musty from too much paper, dust, and time, and I sort of wanted to cough, but I didn’t. The last thing I needed was to blow this whole thing because of a tickle in my throat. Instead, I pulled on gloves (yes, I wear gloves, mostly because I never know who’s touched the safe before me and whether or not they had the Death Flu) and got to work.

It was a standard fireproof wall safe, thank goodness. Fireproof safes are always easier to crack, because they’re not made of steel. Steel melts too quickly in a fire, as I learned after that unfortunate incident in Prague (that fire,
I would like to go on record as saying, was not my fault), which makes it useless if you want to protect paperwork.

Angelo loves to watch me crack safes. He always presses his lips together and nods his head and says, “Hmmm.” He says it’s because he’s never seen a safecracker remember all the numbers in her head without having to graph them. “How do you do it?” he once asked me, but I didn’t know how to explain it.

“I can just see them,” I finally said. “Like a picture. Graphing takes up too much time.” He thinks I have a photographic memory, which is fine by me. Whatever gets me in and out of there is great.

This particular safe had three numbers in its combination, which is
terrible
security if you’re ever trying to hide damning documents, just FYI. I clicked the dial back and forth, listening, listening, listening. The clicks were as soft as a mouse’s footsteps, but I could feel them against my fingers. I’ve been doing this since I was a baby.

The best is when you get into the Zone, as I call it. It’s almost like the numbers are singing to me, calling me to them. I don’t feel anything except those numbers and my heartbeat, and we work in synchronicity, like the best orchestra in the world. That dial is the baton in my hand, and we’re playing toward the final crashing crescendo, to the cymbal sounds of justice.

18-6-36.

It clicked open.

“Gotcha,” I whispered.

I swung open the door carefully, just in case it was like
a jack-in-the-box (small traumatic childhood incident, too long to explain), but all that was in there was a large envelope. I picked it up and used the dim lights outside the office to examine its contents.

Jackpot. Dozens of passports were inside, all belonging to young women, along with a Post-it note stuck on top, reading: “TO SHRED.”

“Not anymore,” I whispered, as I put them back in their manila envelope and tucked it underneath my shirt. I shut the safe, the knockoff Kandinsky went back on the wall, and I was about to leave when a noise stopped me.

At first, I thought that my pulse was so loud I could hear it, but it wasn’t my pulse. It was the sound of footsteps in the hall. They were a man’s, heavy and assured. Women’s shoes make
tap-tap-tap
sounds. Men’s shoes go
clunk-clunk-clunk
. They got closer and my heart sped up with them, clunking along at a breakneck pace. There was only one person who would be coming toward the office this late at night, and he was the one person I didn’t want to see: the CEO.

I hit the floor, the paperwork still hidden against me as I thought fast. I hate thinking fast like this—there are too many opportunities for mistakes—but I happen to work well under pressure. Still, it’s not fun, especially when you’re trying to suppress a sneeze because the floor’s all dusty and clearly my mom hasn’t been cleaning
this
office and …

I had an idea.

By the time the CEO came through the door, I had
slammed on the lights and was using a tissue to wipe down the Kandinsky’s frame, praying he wouldn’t notice that I was shaking a little from adrenaline. “Can I help you?” I said in Icelandic. “Are you looking for someone?” My dad had taught me those sentences, as well as “Hello” and “More coffee, please.”

The CEO looked like the most average man in the world, not someone who had conspired to make money off human trafficking. “This is my office,” he replied in perfect English, brow furrowing in concentration. (I love to watch them squirm; it’s so satisfying.) “What are
you
doing—?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” My mom appeared suddenly, pushing her cleaning cart and wearing her janitorial outfit. “I have a new assistant; we’re training her.”

I smiled. “There’s a lot of dust in here. Have you thought about getting an air filt—”

The CEO cut me off. “I need. My office back.” He spoke the same way my dad did whenever he was annoyed with me. Short sentences. Because the effort. Of Talking. Is just. Too much.

“No problem,” I said, balling up my tissue and skirting past my mom. “Only three hundred more offices to go, right? The night is young!”

I went out the door, the passports now scratchy and warm against my skin, and took off for the elevator bank while my mom apologized to the CEO once again. I was glad she was busy because she would
freak
if she knew I was taking the elevator. My parents are always like, “Take the stairs!” but to me, the stairs are usually foolish, especially
if you’re on a high floor. If you’re being chased, you’ve basically trapped yourself in a spiral, and running down twenty-eight flights of stairs is way too time-consuming. The elevator is best.

Plus elevator music can be very calming. I’m just saying.

The doors were just opening when I heard a
“Psst!”
sound behind me. My mom poked her head around the corner, glaring at me. “Stairs,” she mouthed, and pointed at the large EXIT sign hanging over the door.

I took the stairs.

By the time I got into the empty lobby, I was breathing hard but still moving, almost on autopilot. I could feel the security guard’s eyes on me as I went toward the revolving doors. “All good?” he asked nonchalantly, sipping at coffee while flipping through the local paper.

“We’re good, Dad,” I said, keeping my eyes straight ahead. “See you in ten.”

“
What
have we told you about taking the elevator?” my mom screeched at me eleven minutes later as my dad pulled our car out of the parking lot, backing over all of the SIM cards from our disposable cell phones and crushing them into smithereens. Another mission accomplished.

“I know, I know!” I said, trying to put on my seatbelt. “I just don’t like stairs!”

“You took the elevator?” my dad said, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

“She tried to, but she almost got caught,” my mom said. “Seriously, Maggie.”

“
Merde
,” my dad muttered.

Aside from being a statistician, my dad’s also great with languages. He knows how to say “You’re grounded!” twelve different ways.

¡Estás castigado!

Tu es privée de sortie!

Tы наказана. Ты не можешь выхо∂umь uЗ ∂оMy!

“Yeah, hey, by the way, guess who cracked the safe?” I pulled the envelope out of my shirt and handed it to my mom, ready to change the subject. “Check it out, he’s
so
guilty!”

She flicked through the passports, then gave me a smile over her shoulder. “How many numbers in the combination?”

“Three,” I said smugly.

“Amateur,” my mom and dad said at the same time.

We zipped through the wet streets toward the airport. Our car was a late-model sedan, black exterior, tan interior, just like every third car on the road today. Someday I’m hoping we get a Maserati or something cool like that. My dad taught me how to drive when I was ten, back when we lived in Germany near the autobahn. I’m pretty good at doing 180s and I’m awesome at driving a stick shift, which makes it all the more disappointing when we end up with Toyotas. The speedometer doesn’t even go past 160 mph. Not that we’d have to drive that fast, but it’d be nice if the car had
some
power.

We pulled in to the executive airport, and my dad parked the car in the lot. He got our overnight bags out of the car
(even spies like to brush their teeth before bed), and I went to work on the license plates, unscrewing them and handing them to my mom as I took them off the car.