TWENTY FIVE

The next thing I knew I heard the sound of the door opening. Before I could open my eyes I felt a heavy weight thrown on top of me. The sound of the door closing again and lumbering footsteps receding.

I opened my eyes. They had turned out the light and the only light coming in came from the crack under the door. My head still throbbed from where it had been hit and my body was cramped from the position that I was slumped in. Added to that was this enormous additional weight across my legs. I peered down. A Chinese man was lying unconscious. Not just any Chinese man. A fake one. Jaisen.

First I needed to get the ropes off of my hands. This was the second time in two days that I’d had my hands bound. Unbelievable. But this time I had come prepared. Now that no one was looking I could use the knife that was tucked in the secret compartment of my belt. As quickly as I could, I got it out and sliced through the ropes. My hands free, I set to work getting Jaisen off of my lap.

Gently, I tried to push him off of my legs. It wasn’t easy. He weighed a ton. I didn’t want to give him any brain damage or anything so I tried not to rattle him around too much, but it took forever. I had him laid out at my feet on his back. I reached up to feel for the bump on his head.

His wig had stayed on securely and the faint smell of glue hit my nose as I poked my fingers through the silky fibers. Underneath that smell was the unmistakable scent of Aveda. After poking around for a bit I found the bump beneath his wig right at the back of his head where mine was. I knew exactly how he was going to feel when he woke up and it wasn’t good.

I may have pushed on the bump just a little bit too hard in my explorations because just then he groaned. I leaned in close to his face. I never realized how long his eyelashes were. His eyes flickered open.

He smiled. How in the world could someone smile after getting bashed in the head, tied up and thrown into a dark room? Jaisen, that’s who.

“If you keep poking my head you are going to push through to my brain,” he said quietly.

“Sorry,” I said softly and pulled my hand away. I glanced over to see in the dim light coming from the crack around the door if Franklin Culpepper had stirred. He hadn’t.

“I am glad that I found you.” Jaisen followed the direction of my eyes to Franklin Culpepper.

“Jaisen, do you realize that we have been kidnapped and are going to be thrown to the sharks soon?”

“I didn’t know that,” he said, musingly.

“Are you OK? You don’t have brain damage do you? Why are you taking this so well? State your name, where you are, and the day please. And do it quietly.”

“Jaisen Bax, in a small dark room with my partner Katie Carlyle who would prefer to be called Veronica LeSage though I think that Katie is a fine name, and it is Monday.”

“I guess you’re OK then.” I leaned back.

“Katie, come back here. I need to make sure that it’s you and not an imposter Katie.”

“Trust me, I’m not an imposter.”

But I leaned back down until our faces were close again anyway. He put his warm hands, bound together at the wrists, up to my cheeks on either side of my face and this sensation came out of nowhere that he was going to kiss me. Just like on our first mission, except there was no chauffeur here to fool. The moment stretched out and then I went and opened my mouth again.

“So? Am I an imposter?” I said.

“No, I don’t think so,” Jaisen said, pulling his hands away. “But just to be sure, what is your favorite aquatic animal?”

“Giant squid.”

He grinned at me and I caught myself wishing that I hadn’t spoken, but that was ridiculous. Just because I knew for a fact that Jaisen Bax was a good kisser didn’t mean that I wanted to be kissed by him. Did I?

I sat up straight and reached out my hands for Jaisen. He grabbed them and pulled himself upright. It was silent outside the room.

“Have you pushed the emergency button yet?” Jaisen asked.

The rookie. Didn’t he realize the career damaging consequences of having an emergency call on our records?

I shook my head. “You’re not going to believe what I found out. Whatever is going on Hank, Stan, and Veronica are all in on it. They were talking about trying to get some information out of Franklin–to make sure that their butts are covered.”

Jaisen nodded in the half-light.

“Actually, um, you remember Alex? My date from Saturday? You know the one who was really rude to you about being German and then got his butt kicked–OH my god.”

Jaisen raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“He can’t be. There’s no way. He’s still in high school. But he was so interested in translating his lyrics and he didn’t say that he couldn’t translate them himself, just that he wanted you to help him do it better. He couldn’t be the Translator, could he?”

“Slow down, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What about Alex?”

“He’s here,” I said. “He’s with the crooks on the ship with us right now. If he really is the Translator it would explain why they kidnapped me on Saturday. I was his date.”

Jaisen nodded. “It’s possible that he’s the Translator. I guess it would explain why you were targeted for kidnapping. They wanted something from Alex, so they kidnapped his date, you, held her ransom, and what? Why did they dump you?”

“Because they saw him with Alice! Another girl. They assumed that they had gotten the wrong girl.”

“What are they mixed up in? We have to find out.” I got up and tried the door. They had decided to lock us in. We seemed to hold more of a threat of escaping than had poor drugged Franklin. I listened at the door but didn’t hear anything. I flicked the light switch. A small plaque on the desk read “Captain Staley.” Franklin blinked blearily in the sudden light and then shut his eyes again.

“Let’s search the files.” I moved towards the file cabinets at the back of the office.

Then a loud humming started.

I jumped. “What is that?”

“The ship’s engines starting up. We’re headed for China.”

Somehow this was not how I had pictured my first international mission.

Jaisen gave me a look. “You’re sure you don’t want to press the emergency button and get out of here?”

“Very sure.” Jaisen, being a rookie, needed to be shown just how spies worked. We did not push emergencies buttons over something so small as being locked in a room on a ship headed straight for China. Spies took advantage of their circumstances and got the information that they needed, regardless of their circumstances. He would pick this up sooner or later.

I opened one of the file cabinets and started going through each file systematically.

Jaisen opened his mouth, presumably to argue with my ingenious plan, but just shook his head instead and went to the other file cabinet.

“Anything yet?” I asked, after exhausting the file cabinet I was working on.

Jaisen shook his head.

“There must be something in his desk. You can’t run an illegal operation without some documentation,” I said. “It’s just a matter of finding it.”

I went to the desk and tried the middle drawer. It opened smoothly and I found some rubber bands, pens, paper clips, a plastic jar of Mentos. I tried the side drawer. Locked.

“I think that we may have found something Jaisen,” I said. I grabbed a paper clip out of the middle drawer and went to work on the locked side drawer.

Just as the drawer sprang free we heard voices over the hum of the ship’s engines. We scuttled over to the door to listen.

“That dude Frankie just needs the proper motivation. After I’m done with him, he’ll sing. Otherwise, we throw him to the sharks, no prob,” came a male voice from outside, accompanied by the sound of boots clanging against the metal stairwell. Not just any male voice–Alex’s voice. My stomach turned over. Was he really so heartless? There wasn’t any chance that he could be undercover too, was there? His mobster talk was atrocious enough that I could almost believe it. Jaisen’s shoulder brushed mine. I kept my eyes down, I couldn’t look at him.

“Get what you need with your ‘motivation,’ but be quick about it.” Veronica’s voice. Her footsteps so quiet they made little sound on the stairwell. “Last time we left Hank and Stan in charge of the shipment and they blew it. I want you back up on deck with me when we pick up the placebo at the rendezvous point in forty-five minutes. Nothing is going to go wrong this time. This time, we place the Zolatec on a different ship one hour off the shore in China to go directly to the Chinese black market. No extra weight, no weight discrepancy at the weigh in at the dock before unloading. I can’t imagine that there is anything else that Franklin knows that could come up and show our hand to Margaret.”

The voices were now directly outside of our door. I had to look at Jaisen and I hoped I didn’t see a look of disgust in his eyes. When my eyes met his, they were all business. We quickly reassembled ourselves on the floor, wrapping the ropes back around to look like we were still imprisoned.

“If the dude’s got anything to tell, he’ll tell it. I knew we’d overdone it with the drugs—he doesn’t even know his own name. Now torture’s a whole different thing, you can’t go wrong with torture. Torture worked for the Inquisition, it’ll work for us. Hey, that would be really cool song lyrics.” Alex started humming and singing. My brief flicker of hope that he was in fact a good guy undercover faded. Torturing a prisoner voluntarily would be taking the undercover role a bit too far. My stomach plummeted all of the way down to my feet.

“This was your plan to resell ONC Corp.’s miracle drug, Zolatec, on the Chinese black market to the poor souls getting our placebo from their trusted doctors. You will make sure that it is successful and you will find out what Franklin did with that report. You promised us this will make us millions.”

“It will and this time around we’ll make out with the cash, no questions asked,” Alex said. “Hey, that almost rhymes.” He changed his song of torture into one of money. There was no doubt now. Alex was the Translator.

“I need to go get my tools. If I’m going to make this old guy sing.” Alex said. I heard the heavy tromping of Alex’s boots again on the stairs and his singing voice faded. Real nice guy, that Alex.

I relaxed my hold on the ropes. My date was the enemy. What kind of a spy was I?

“So it sounds like they are selling the hospitals a placebo and then selling the real Zolatec to the patients on the black market?” Jaisen said, after an interminable amount of time.

“Sounds like it. These patients must be suffering like crazy without any medication for the side effects of the cancer drugs and then they discover this miracle drug on the black market that makes everything better and pay through the nose for it. This totally explains the rash of deaths of ONC Corp. hospital patients in China. Didn’t you say that people will die from the side effects of the harsh Grentec chemotherapy without the addition Zolatec?”

“You were listening to me.” Jaisen smiled.

“Just that once. I’ll try not to make a habit of it.”

I couldn’t believe that Alex would murder people like this just to get some cash. Probably for his stupid band. They weren’t even that good. Even with a clean recording that he insisted they needed—that this blood money was going to buy, they would still sound terrible. And you want to know why? Because they sucked. I was too enamored with Alex to admit it before, but the truth was his band was terrible.

“Did you record all of this?”

“Of course,” I said. I tapped off my mic.

“Excellent.” Jaisen said. “Now all we need to do is get out of here, get off of this boat and get that information back to headquarters.”

“Right, no problem,” I said. “But first I want to see what’s in this drawer.”

I pulled out a fat file, marked CONFIDENTIAL, which I thought was quite funny, because he might as well have put a flag on it telling a potential snoop where to look. A potential snoop like me.

I set the file on the desk and opened it. Right on top was the documents that we had all been looking for.