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“Because we’re leaving them behind to deal with it.” I waved my hand through the air. “Yeah, we know…”
“No…actually, I wasn’t thinking about that.”
I blinked at him, unsure of what he was saying.
He stood up, taking a step closer to me, but his eyes were…different. Happy, yes, always cheerful, but there was a weird mix of emotions just under the surface. He reached out and took my shoulders and held them in is palms. “I feel a bit guilty bringing all of this on you.”
“I know. You shouldn’t.”
He nodded shortly. “I can’t help it. I feel responsible.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“It is exactly my fault.” His eyes shifted as he looked into my face. “That recruiter, Eddie… the one who came around when you first came over that one day, remember him?”
I nodded. He’d wanted to speak to Corey in secret. He said something about a job. Last we’d heard, he was captured by the police. “What about him?”
“I should have known what he was there for and prepared for it. I was just…distracted.” He lowered his head a bit, looking very pointedly at me. “By something I felt was much more important.”
Although I was feeling the rippling emotions coming from his touch and his stare, I tried to be coy. “You really wanted to catch Blake.”
He smirked just a bit and then shook his head. “I wasn’t really worried about that.”
“Yes, you were,” I said and poked him in the stomach. “I saw your formula. You worked on that one and wanted to catch him.”
He laughed and play-slapped at my hand to bat it away. “Fine, I really wanted to catch him. I wanted to show the Academy we were ready to do what they were training us to do.”
The way he’d said that surprised me. “You mean that was the first time you all did something like that?”
“The first time we took a direct approach with a criminal…well, after you of course.” He waved over at me with a hand after the comment. “The Academy generally works without making direct contact at all if it can be helped. Especially if we know the person can retaliate.”
I put my hands on my hips. “So what do they do exactly? I mean we’ve been pretty direct. They sent us to Florida…”
“Yeah, on a suspicion a woman spent all her money on a pyramid scheme, which turned into a kidnapping. Which lead to guns blazing and a car chase and all kinds of hell. I think that’s why we were the experiment. We are able to dive in where the Academy wouldn’t have been able to. We weren’t afraid to face off with kidnappers. And every time, they have to cover our tracks and clean up. Face it. Our time so far with the Academy has been a disaster.” He sat down again at his office chair, rolling it toward his computer so he could focus. “And now we’re about to defy them on purpose. Probably for the last time.”
I felt bad for the guys. The Academy had done a lot for me, including looking out for my brother and now my dad. It was hard not to feel like I was going to let them down.
“But what else can we do?” I asked.
Corey didn’t answer for a long time and went back to looking at his monitors. I came up behind him. Those numbers were moving around pretty fast on one of his screens. On the other, he was looking at some sort of outline of a map. He flipped to another page and there were dots on the screen. Most were moving around the map.
It took me a minute to realize it was a map of the apartment building. I could see out to almost the parking lot on one side, and then almost out to the small lake on the other side. It was of the ground floor. Security was lingering around in the lobby. There was an office, and a laundry center and gym. The only one that had any moving dots was the laundry.
“What are you doing, exactly?” I asked him.
Without looking at me, he spoke. “Do you remember when I was telling you about how I tracked Blake with his cell phone, how we managed to figure out he was heading to the wrong side of town all the time and we couldn’t figure out why?”
“Is he doing it again?” I asked. “Is he here? Is he in the laundry room downstairs?” I pointed to the area on the screen.
He arched an eyebrow. “That’s not him.”
“Is he standing at the security podium?” I was about to ask him another question when another blue dot started to come in from the parking lot side. It went by the podium, through the metal detector and headed to the elevators and then shortly disappeared. It made me realize he wasn’t just talking about Blake specifically. “Are you tracking who comes in and out of the building?”
“Erm…”
Yup. I puzzled things over for a minute, trying to come up with the answers he wasn’t giving me. “You’re tracking people by their cell phones? I thought all you had was an alarm that alerted you to if someone was way out of consistency of pattern.”
“Well, now it’s set for anyone who comes within parking lot range of this building,” he said. “As long as we’re in it, we’ll need to keep an eye out for anyone coming in or out.”
“What’s wrong with the security team downstairs?”
“It’ll give us a chance to warn security if there’s any trouble.” He motioned to the screen. “Blue dots are people who live or work here. Green dots…” Just as he said it, a blue and green dot appeared on the screen, lake side this time, and they stopped just outside the doors, like they were waiting around. Corey tapped at his screen once just to point to the green dot. “They’re known numbers that have been around the last several months. People who are probably friends or something.”
“Any other colors?”
“Reds are people no one seems to have a connection to.” He motioned to the other screen. “I get a phone number and an associated name and some data, like if they’re local, who they work for, etc. Usually pizza delivery or someone’s new date.”
“What if they aren’t carrying a cell phone?”
“Most everyone does.”
“I don’t,” I said. “Children don’t.”
“We’re not looking for kids.” He waved to the monitor again. “But those come up purple, but only in view of the actual cameras. And there’s a camera in the elevator put there by the building’s security. I tapped into it. But we won’t have to watch it unless something blips the screen purple or red.”
“How often does that happen?”
He shrugged. “Not as many kids as I thought live here, but I’m still working on it.”
I smirked. “So you’re still having to sit here and watch.”
“Yeah, but I’m not likely to miss anything this way. And I don’t have to waste brain power trying to figure out who most people are or recognize faces.”
“Are we going to have to take turns?” I asked.
“Brandon and I can handle it. But if you want, we can put you into rotation.”
“Where is your bother, anyway?”
“I think he’s taking a nap. Long night. He’ll take a shift at this sometime later.”
Is that why Kevin was coming from Brandon’s room? What happened there?
Was he really tired or if he was more depressed about losing his garage? I had to wonder. Maybe he needed alone time.
I sat in the other office chair, stretched my legs out and tried to get used to watching the monitors with him. “What are all the numbers there?” I motioned to the screen with all the moving numbers.
“That’s just the algorithm working. I’m just monitoring. Fixing any blips if I come across anything.” He turned in his chair until his knee was touching mine. “If a red comes in, it pauses to show me the number and everything.”
While I was watching, his green and blue dots moved inside and to the elevator. He tapped a button, flipping the screen to an overhead camera view of the elevator, showing it to me. A couple of teens were headed up. “Simple enough, yeah?”
“What happens if Alice or her goons show up?”
He turned off the camera view and went back to his dot screen. “I don’t think they
would. This is just in case.”
“They did once.”
“And they probably suspect we are watching now. They’d have to be really crazy to try again. It’s the only reason we are staying here for now. It’s giving us time to decide the next move. We put in security. Too many witnesses. They’d have to send an army.”
“So we commit a felony following people by their cell phone numbers to catch the bad guys.”
He smirked. “I don’t think it’s a felony.”
“Are you sure?”
“Look, if there’s a line between right or wrong, we’re…walking the line pretty close.”
“Which side?”
“This line is pretty fuzzy. It’s more like a mile-wide gray area. Room to roam around a little.”
I wasn’t going to push buttons on his semantics.
Suddenly, Marc materialized behind us. I didn’t even hear him come in until he was on top of us. He had changed his shirt into a nice blue, collared, long-sleeve one and his hair was combed back respectively, looking like the charming boy next door. He karate chopped Corey on the head. “What are you showing her now? You should know better.”
Corey waved off his arm and guarded himself against another chop. “She can do security monitoring.”
“We’re not even supposed to be doing that.” He aimed a finger gun at me, square between the eyes. “Tell anyone, you’re dead.”
