Fake: The Scarab Beetle Series: #3 (The Academy) (17 page)

Normally, that would probably be the case. I lowered my voice. “Avery,” I said. “Please. If they see a cop coming, they might take it out on Axel and Marc. I don’t want to take that chance. Once I get them back, the FBI or the CIA or whoever can jump in and do whatever they want.”

Avery’s gaze drifted from watching Brandon, who was kicking a rock around near the corner of the building, to my face. “So all I need to do is get Axel and Marc back?”

It was a sweet offer, but Avery had probably heard too much during my conversations with both Marc and Brandon. “It’s dangerous,” I said. “You should go home before they think you’re with us.”

Avery lifted a hand, rumpling the Hawaiian shirt. His hand was empty, and then he turned it over to reveal the back, when he turned it again, his hand had another one of his business cards.

More of his sleight of hand. Impressive.

“Kayli, I can do more than just drive a cab. Keep my number. If you’re going to be chasing these guys, you’ll need it.” He opened his car door and wedged in behind the wheel. “But I’ll be holding you to your word. The moment your friends are out of harm’s way, the authorities get to fly in.”

“Sure.”

He grumbled a bit more but then drove away, leaving Brandon and me behind.

I sidled up next to Brandon. “Who’s North?” I asked, watching Avery’s car disappear down the road.

“An Academy friend,” Brandon said, offering nothing more.

I was sad, again, to see Avery leaving. He had helped, and then had been dismissed quickly. He was right about calling the police, no doubt, but he didn’t understand all that was going on, and he was going to get killed if he stuck around. Sending him out with a new car was the best thing this Academy could do, and I, for once, was grateful that there was someone to take care of his car while we were busy dealing with things. I owed Avery a lot after this, myself.

After Avery was out of sight, I turned, looking at the large building, waiting for Brandon to tell us why we were here. I assumed we were at a secret Academy place to pick up a car, or weapons, or the spy planes,
something
to help us get Axel and Marc back. And hopefully set Alice on fire.

Brandon walked right up to a side door of the garage. There was a window that was chest height. The window was on the small side. He felt around the edge, trying to pop the screen off.

I ran over, scoping out the neighborhood to see if anyone was watching us from other buildings. The area seemed deserted. “What are you doing?” I hissed. “You’re breaking in...”

“It’s my place,” he said. “I’m not going to call the cops on myself.”

“You own this?” I asked.

“There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me.” He wedged the screen off the window, then slid the window over to one side. “I may not be a fancy hacker, all smart and everything, you know, but I can do a few things.”

He compares himself to Corey?
“You leave your window open to your garage? You do realize it’s in North Charleston, right?”

“Shut up and get over here.” He bent over, presenting his hands to boost me up.

I stepped into the cradle of his hands and heaved myself over. This was an office space and I found myself on one of the desks as I slipped in. It was dark but there was enough light coming in from the window that I got the general layout. There were two doors, one leading, I guessed, deeper into the garage. The other was narrow, like a closet.

There was a thunk at the window, distracting me from my snooping. “Unlock the door,” he said.

I went over, released a couple of bolt locks and then opened it. There was a ding almost immediately, and a security panel on the wall lit up. I wondered why there wasn’t an alarm on the window. Or perhaps he left it that way just in case…he needed to break into his own garage?

Brandon pushed me out of the way and went for the panel, typing in a code. The panel beeped a couple of times and then silenced. Guess he really did own the place.

He flipped a switch, and overhead fluorescent lighting illuminated the office. There were a couple of desks with computers and a few tall file towers. There were schematics hanging on the wall, designs for machinery parts that I didn’t recognize.

Brandon shut the window and then went to one of the desks. He started up the computer and then bent to open a drawer. He fished out a cell phone, checked it over, and turned it on.

I studied him. His messy hair, the rough start of a beard on his chin, the cerulean eyes that were focused on the screen. On top of the ever-present sadness was something more. A drive. Determination.

Anger.

I recognized that all too well. It echoed inside of me. They’d pushed us around enough. Pushed us into a war that wasn’t ours to start with. Our lives were at risk, and all we wanted was our people back and to go home.

“Do you guys just keep cell phones everywhere?” I asked.

“Comes in handy, doesn’t it?” He pushed a button on it and started thumbing in a text message.

“Can we talk now?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, looking up at me. I caught the bruises around his shoulders then, the one under his chin.

I sucked in a breath at the sight. Amid the chaos, I’d been completely oblivious to it. Before, all I saw was that Brandon was back and was too excited to see him.

I reached out slowly, touching a purpling spot on his arm. “What happened after you left the warehouse?” I asked.

He tilted his head down, looking at the phone, frowning. “They tried to beat me until I agreed to help them. And when that didn’t work, they told me why they were trying so hard. They thought Corey was friends with this other team. That’s why they did what they did. They’d had enough of their own team killed and were willing to do almost anything to save themselves.”

“Who... I mean this other team. Who are they? I only met Alice, but there has to be more of them.”

“We don’t know,” he said. He looked up at my face with those determined, angry eyes again. “I almost felt sorry for them, but they brought this on themselves. They were originally going to exploit these secret phone lines, listen in on passwords and things like that. Now they’re being hunted, told they’ll live only if they pass over access to this core. Every time they fail to get the core, one of their members dies. There’s only three left on the team now, I think. That’s all I’ve seen.”

“Alice may have Axel,” I said. “And Marc. Or someone does. I don’t know for sure, because I didn’t see them with her. She just said she had them. She also said she poisoned them.”

“If they aren’t with her, they’re laying low for a reason,” he said. “Something tells me, though, that if Axel was still standing on his own, he wouldn’t have left you for that long, and he wouldn’t let us run off like that. I was with Eddie and his team, but I only ever saw Eddie. The others on his team were usually in the dark or gone doing something. They kept themselves at a distance. Didn’t want to take too many risks so they limited who talked to me.”

“They didn’t trust you?”

“They thought I was Corey. They thought “I” could have been working for the other team, until they realized I really did have no idea what they were talking about.”

“What are we going to do?” I asked. I sat on the desk. I drew my feet up and curled up with my knees against my chest. The crop pants started to slide off my butt, but I had given up trying to look presentable. I was surprised I still had the flip-flops on. “How are we going to find Axel and Marc? Even if she was lying about a poison, we already know her team will kill to get what they want. We’ve only got a day. We’ll need Corey to get it and he doesn’t even know what’s going on right now. And Raven and Kevin…”

“On it,” he said, showing me the phone. He’d sent a text to a phone number with some message about a hockey game and the score last night.

“Uh...” I lifted a brow, looking back at Brandon. “Did you hit your head?”

“Code. Corey will understand,” he said.

My heart lifted in the moment he said something about Corey.

Sure enough, a moment later, the phone buzzed.

Corey: “Yeah, great game. That girl in front row was pretty hot, wasn’t she?”

Brandon smirked at the phone.

“What?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

“He’s asking about you,” he said. He typed in a message.

Brandon: “She had a nice ass, yeah, but remind me how much you owe me for that bet? That big guy took out two of our players. Adam and McCarthy didn’t stand a chance.”

Corey: “Randy was pissed. He’s going to be hitting hard in the follow up game.”

I didn’t understand any of this, except who A and M and possibly who R was, because something told me those weren’t who they were really talking about. It must have been some twin brother code.

I stared at Brandon as he focused on the phone and continued to type messages to his brother. “Should we find this core, then? Give them what they want?”

“We need to get Axel and Marc back, or at least confirm where they are. We may need to make contact.”

“How...”

“I was going to work with Eddie to figure out what was going on and possibly help them, but we need to work faster than they were. I was willing to play along before, but Eddie and his team have absolutely no clue. And we’re dealing with real murderers now.”

“What do we do?”

He tapped at the phone, staring hard, and his jaw clenched. “If needed, I’m going to offer myself up,” he said.

My feet slipped off the desk from my curled-up position. “You can’t.”

“I’m who they want,” he said. He turned and looked at me. “Or who they think they want. They need someone to get access to this core. That’s the only playing card we have in our hand right now. They think I’m the key.”

“So you’re going to offer them yourself instead of the core? Can’t we just give them access for now?”

“We may not be able to. If I offer myself up, we can make a trade. That’s how we find them.”

He had to be crazy. He’d just escaped and now he wanted to dive back in again. This time with murderers. “Am I supposed to sit here while someone’s got a timer on your life? Do you think we can just walk up to her with you and she’ll just as easily pass over Axel and Marc? No way. Find out where this Alice lives. Find the German.”

“What are you going to do?”

“We’re going to find a set of Tasers, first off,” I said, going with my original plan. “But this time, we offer up the team to these new guys and walk away. This isn’t our business. They’re fighting over who steals this stupid core thing. Well let’s either give them the team, or the core, and we trade them for Axel.”

“No,” he said, “they’ll kill us on top of it all.”

“Who are they? That’s what we need to know.”

He grunted, sitting back in the chair and kicking at the desk. “Corey sounds like he’s been searching for this core, but he’s not having much luck. The Academy will want to pull us both back out of harm’s way. I don’t want to go in if I can help at least figure out where Axel and Marc are. The fastest way is to call them out to get me.”

I understood his impatience. I wanted this to be over, too, and he might have been willing to sacrifice himself to get to the end, but I wasn’t willing to take that risk. Not now. Not when I’d already made a huge mistake letting Axel and Marc go when they’d told me before to be careful.

“What would the Academy do next?” I asked quietly.

“The Academy can’t even help if we don’t know where these guys are.” He sighed, closed his tired eyes and pressed his palm to his face rubbing at his jaw. “I don’t know. I guess they’d go back to the aquarium. They’d look for… this Alice girl. Find out who she is.”

“How do we find out by going back?”

“Security footage,” he said. He sat up and then started typing into the phone. “I can get Kevin to direct some people there to grab copies. Corey and Raven can search through the footage.”

It was a start. I liked this plan. He was right; I didn’t want to sit around in some hospital waiting, either. “What can we do? I don’t know if Alice and her team might follow us. And Eddie might be looking for us now, too. We have to avoid them, but we should probably at least find where this core is. Axel said locating it would mean we might find them breaking into it later and catch them at it.”

“We need a backup just in case we can’t find it.” He showed me his phone where a text message had come in. Corey was sending some code I didn’t understand, but I was guessing it meant he was getting Kevin to go pick up security footage. “We need to do it alone, too. We can’t risk anyone else, not even from other Academy teams. We don’t want anyone else getting picked up.”

“Are we not telling anyone else?” Were we going to let Corey know?

He squinted up at me. “Limited liabilities.”

Protective brother. Marc had said the same thing. Why get Corey involved if the two of us are only going to get killed as a result? Or for that matter, if we limit what even the Academy knew, they wouldn’t send out a fleet and get us all killed. “But we can’t get the core and break into it without Corey...”