Fake: The Scarab Beetle Series: #3 (The Academy) (21 page)

That didn’t sit well with me, either. I didn’t want anyone to have this core. I didn’t really want it to exist, either.

A few houses later, we found an L-shaped pool and the house that matched the real estate photos, just in a different paint color. The house was three stories, a Cape Cod style, bluish gray slate walls and white trim, with a balcony on the second floor, overlooking a small garden and pool and the beach. It all looked plain, like the other homes, except for the third floor, which was completely glass, gleaming in the sun. A third floor greenhouse? I couldn’t see in from the reflection. It must have been a hot box in the summer.

The extravagance of it seemed to even outdo the neighbors’ ostentatious homes. I imagined the owner could view far out into the ocean and around the island from all angles. That probably meant if anyone was up there, they could see us.

We stood on the beach together, looking at the house. I was trying to identify something that might be the antenna, but nothing stood out to me. It was just a big, fancy house. There wasn’t even a tiny satellite dish or weathervane. The sand from the beach was cut off by a low hedge from the garden and yard. The pool looked clean, with an unrestricted view of the ocean from it. I wondered how they kept local kids from getting in his pool. I guessed local kids probably had their own pools.

In fact, not a lot of the homes had fences at all. I could look right at the back porch. Most homes had hedges to block of sweeping sands, but that was it. Back doors were exposed. Did they really trust the one security guard in the front to be all the protection they needed? I suspected there were security alarms everywhere. I looked for cameras, not spotting any, but that didn’t mean they weren’t hidden somewhere.

There was a van parked on the driveway, near a side door. It had rolled up backward, facing the road, and the rear doors were open. The back of the van was empty now, so I couldn’t tell what was being delivered.

Brandon whistled, a low one meant just for me to hear. “That’s a big fancy house. Seems bigger than even Coaltar’s.”

“It is bigger than Blake’s,” I said, and then shut the idea of Blake Coaltar out of my mind.

“If this is the house, and there is a core here,” Brandon said, “then we should get inside and look for it. Maybe we can poke around and ask a few questions.”

“Ask questions?” I blinked at him, and took my hand away so I could rub at my tired eyes. “Sure. Let’s just walk in and ask the kids where the secret illegal core is.”

“I meant more like, ‘hey kids, which rooms are you not allowed to go in?’ or ‘which room does daddy yell at you if he finds you in it?’” he said, and smirked. “There’s ways to learn stuff without asking directly.”

“They teach you this in spy school?” I asked.

“You just said the spy word,” he said. He refocused onto the house. I did, too. Maybe Academy spy training taught him how to ask things without asking directly. Wasn’t my thing. I was more for waiting until people weren’t home and then breaking in a window and snooping around.

And exactly how were we supposed to deliver the core anyway? It’s not like we could walk out with it and it’d still be operational. She said she wanted access. It seemed like she needed to give us more direction. But then, she assumed Corey would be able to do it. We needed a Corey.

“We can’t stay too long,” Brandon said. “They might not notice us now, but they will notice if we’re standing here, staring at their house from the beach. We’ll have to move on and come back.”

How were we going to learn anything and get this core if we were going to sneak around? I was about to point this out when a couple of men came out of the side door, returning to the van.

Brandon immediately encircled my waist, turning enough to make it look like we were embracing on the sand, rather than staring like we were. He ducked his head close to mine, his cheek pressed against my face.

I was the one left looking at the house over his shoulder.

“Tell me what you see,” he said quietly into my ear, his lips brushing at my skin.

I swallowed, trying to focus, and checked out the van. The men were in black jeans and long-sleeved black button up shirts, clearly dressed up to deliver to opulent homes rather than common ones.

They shut the doors and headed for the front of the van, keys in hand and ready to go. The sign on the back of the van read: A1 Party Supplies.

“They’re hosting a party,” I said quietly. “Or they just hosted one. It’s a party supply company. Could we sneak in that way if they’re having a party tonight?”

Brandon groaned, and buried his head into my shoulder. “It isn’t the best of circumstances, but we don’t have time to do this another way. More eyes means more chances we’ll get caught where we’re not supposed to be, but we don’t have much of a choice, and it might be our only opening.” He backed up, pulling away from me and then captured my hand. “We’ll need to get ready. And we’ll have to do some research. We still don’t know for sure if this is the right house.”

“This house is owned by a company,” I said. “That probably means it isn’t like a normal house, and it might just be used for company events, right? Maybe no one really lives here. It’s just a party house. So if it’s a company party, we can check the company newsletter or something for information.”

Brandon caught my chin, and then squeezed my face, giving me fish lips. “Look at you. All this thinking smart. Someone’s getting the hang of this.”

I talked through my squished lips. “I’ll cut you if you call me cute.”

Brandon tugged at my arm, dragging me across the sand. I held onto my boots and hurried along, about to curse at him for pulling, but he cut me off.

“We don’t have a whole lot of time,” he said. “We’re not totally sure this core is here. We’ll have to work out our plan B, and try to get details on the owners before we crash the party.”

I stomped to keep up with him as we headed back. “If this is the core, Alice is watching from somewhere. Did Eddie know about a house on Kiawah?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “He was more focused on me tracing numbers connected to the core, and trying to work out how to break the security code while the information streamed. He didn’t seem to want to break into where the core was to access it after our first conversation. I think something changed his mind from that way of thinking.”

“Was it Alice?”

“Who knows,” he said. “Maybe. I don’t know anything about her and he didn’t talk about an Alice.” He checked his phone, reading text messages. “Corey has the videotapes and wants a description of her. If you recognize her face, he can run that image through some data scanners and find out a lot about her. Her real name, for one. If she has a driver’s license, a police record, or if she walks into any major airport, we can track her via facial recognition. It’ll take time, but the sooner Corey can start working with her image, the better. That’s our next step right now.”

“She had red hair,” I said, feeling a swell of hope at this realization that computers could eventually help us track her down. I wanted to get to work right away, to relay information that might be relevant to Corey finding the right person. “Blue eyes. Bitchy personality.”

Brandon shook his head, then motioned to the bike and further to the road. “We should get out of here, and get to a safe location to talk it over. And maybe grab some coffee.”

PLANNING A DATE

B
randon and I ended up in a small cafe on the road just outside of Kiawah, next door to a local grocery store on John’s Island. The café was tiny and the area was surrounded by trees, with a good view of the lot and the road so no one could sneak up on us. There was one old man server, and no customers.

I’d ordered an iced mocha, which was more burned coffee than mocha. I swallowed as much as I could quickly, before taking a bite of a sugar doughnut from a box we shared. The doughnut only just covered the bitter coffee taste.

Brandon had downed a hot coffee and was working on a second, all the while texting his brother, typing in my descriptions, asking me detailed questions about Alice and exactly what she had said.

Corey eventually came back with a few photos. They were still shots of the aquarium from various angles. The photos were focused on crowds, particularly women with longer hair like I’d described.

I thought at first we’d never find them, but just when I was about to complain that we were wasting time, Alice appeared in one of the pictures. She wasn’t wearing the coat, but just the pair of slacks and a loose blouse on her thin frame as she entered through the main doors. Corey followed up with photos of her journey through the aquarium before she disappeared behind an employee door. She walked in alone, with that smug smile on her face but the camera didn’t reveal the sheer contempt and malice in her cool eyes.

“That’s her,” I said, sitting up quickly and nearly spilling my mocha. I stilled just long enough for my cup to stop shaking. I reached over, pointing my finger at the phone Brandon held up. “That’s Alice. She was wearing a lab coat when she came in. Like she was trying to trick me that she worked there somehow. She seemed to know a lot, like my name and Axel’s.”

Brandon nodded, then studied the picture and sent a message on to Corey. “Since Eddie was trying to save his life and his crew, he might have given her a lot of information. It didn’t bug him to tell her about us. We were no one to him.”

“We’re doing the same thing, you know,” I said. “We’re giving up this core to Alice, and might be giving her the lives and livelihoods of...well rich snobs. But we don’t know who this might affect in the long run. And she said she’d blame Eddie for the murders that have already happened.”

“We’ll have to worry about it after we get Axel and Marc back,” he said. “The goal right now is to prevent any more deaths. Eddie and his team have been trying for a year to get at this core. We have to figure out how we’re going to get access to someone else in less than a day.”

“I don’t know what she expects even Corey to do for her. For us to unlock the doors and let them in? It’s not like we could steal the hard drive...or whatever it is the core works from. Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose if we shut it down by trying to move it?”

“I get the feeling we’re supposed to break in, shut down the security, and let the system keep flowing. But then anyone could read it.” Brandon picked up his coffee, took a couple of long sips, and put it back down again. He puckered his lips, and grimaced. “Why did it have to be Marc that got kidnapped? I’ve been spoiled by his coffee.”

“Not like he could make you one now, even if he were free,” I said. “He’d be with us chasing after Axel.”

“And chastising the people here about their coffees, giving them the lecture about beans and brewing.” He sighed, and stretched himself out a bit, his bones cracking in different spots. Long, lean arms and legs flexed out made him appear to be super tall. He relaxed again, a frown at the corner of his mouth. “The Academy won’t be happy about this, you know. I’m avoiding them to save Axel, but they won’t like being in the dark. As far as Corey knows, we’re laying low just to seek out information.”

“I figured they didn’t like it when their people get kidnapped and would want us to do whatever it took to get them back,” I said. I may not know that much about it, but I couldn’t imagine the group would like two of their guys getting tortured and possibly killed over an illegal cell phone scheme.

“They won’t like this business about Corey’s security packet, either. They’re not going to like that he’s got software out there that people are interested in and can trace back to him. Or that he resurfaced his old hacker name for something new he’d been working on. He’s made himself a target.”

I wondered if it was the new game Corey was working on. “How?” I asked. “I mean, what did he do? How did these bad guys find him? So he left his name in the code? That’s a thing?”

“He learned it when he was younger.” Brandon pursed his lips and then bent his head down. He rubbed at the blond bits of hair at his temples and then across his eyebrows. “He’s way too smart. With the way our parents are, they wanted us to be on athletic teams and it was his way of rebelling. If he could be exceptionally good at something else, maybe our dad would give up demanding we participate in sports all the time.”

I bit my lip, sitting back, and crossing my arms across my chest. I’d not heard about any of their parents or any other relatives. They all knew about mine. “So your father was mean?”

“He wasn’t abusive. He was going to turn us into sport stars,” he said. “The Henshaw Twins. The trouble was neither one of us cared. We didn’t want to be recognized as a pair. We wanted to be individuals and we didn’t like him telling us what to do and what to participate in. Corey didn’t like sports. I didn’t like the sports my father picked out as money-makers. I prefer surfing over basketball or football or hockey. And you can’t really succeed at a game unless you really want to be there.”

I couldn’t imagine Corey playing basketball for a living. Not that he wasn’t athletic in his own way. He was really strong. I’d watched him lift hundreds of pounds of metal, roofing material, and wood in the couple of weeks we’d spent fixing up old homes in the North Charleston area. For a nerdling, he had an admirable body. “So how did he end up with this security packet thing? Why did he even make it?”