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“I won’t be able to go right away,” I say. Agent Jones starts to speak, and I hold up a gloved hand, shaking my head. “No, I mean I can’t. The blowback makes it so that I will be shifting shape. You might be able to move me a short distance, but it’s going to be complicated, and I won’t be able to help.”
They look at one another.
“I’ve seen him do it before,” Jones says. “As much as I hate to say it, he’s right. We’re going to have to stall for time.”
Yulikova and Agent Brennan are both eyeing me speculatively.
“It’s that bad?” Agent Brennan asks. “I mean—”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I’m not really looking. Sometimes I don’t really have anything to look with, if you know what I’m saying.”
She blanches. I think I may have successfully freaked out my first FBI agent.
Go me.
“All right,” Yulikova says, “we’ll change the plan. We’ll wait out Cassel’s blowback and then get him out. We’ll have a car standing by.”
I grin. “I’ll need a leash.”
Agent Jones gives me an evaluating look.
“For Patton. And a collar. Can we get a really embarrassing one?”
His nostrils flare.
“That’s very practical thinking.” Yulikova seems sincere and calm, but Jones’s jumpiness is getting on my nerves. It might just be that he gets like this before missions, but it is driving me up the wall.
“And that’s it,” Yulikova says, reaching for another egg roll. “The whole thing. Any questions, Cassel? Any questions, anyone?”
“Where will you all be?” I touch the map, pushing it a little toward her.
“Back here,” she says, her gloved finger tapping against the table, indicating a vague place distantly in front of the stage. “There’s a van we can use as a command center where Patton won’t be threatened by our presence. He’s requested all his own security, so we can’t be too obvious. But we will be there, Cassel. Very close by.”
Very close by, but not anywhere I’ll know about. Great.
“What if I need to find you?” I ask. “What if the monitor isn’t working or the headset shorts out?”
“Let me give you some very good advice that was once given to me. Sometimes on missions things go wrong. When that happens, you have two choices: Keep going because the thing that went wrong wasn’t important, or abort the mission. You’ve got to go with your gut. If the monitor goes out, just stay in the room and do nothing. If it doesn’t feel right, do nothing.”
That is good advice—and it’s not the kind that seems useful to give someone that you want to get caught. I look at Yulikova, drinking her diet soda and chewing her food. I think of my brother. Am I really trying to decide which of them is more worthy of my trust?
“Okay,” I say, and pick up the map. “Can I keep this? I want to make sure I know the layout.”
“You act like you’ve done this before,” Agent Brennan says.
“I come from a long line of grifters,” I say. “I’ve pulled a con or two.”
She snorts, shaking her head. Jones glowers at both of us. Yulikova cracks open her fortune cookie and holds up the fortune. Printed across the ribbon of paper in block letters are the words: “You will be invited to an exciting event.”
I turn in shortly after that.
Looking at the hotel phone by my bed, I itch to call Daneca and find out how Sam’s doing. Even knowing that it’s probably bugged, I am tempted. But he should be resting, and I don’t even know if he’ll want to talk to me.
Any mention of him being shot would have the Feds making all the wrong guesses and asking too many questions. One more thing no one can afford.
I shouldn’t call Lila, either, even though last night seems more dream than real. Just thinking of her as I sit on the scratchy hotel comforter, remembering the slide of her skin on mine, the way she laughed, the curve of her mouth—it feels risky. As though even the memory of her will give the Feds something they can use against me.
Now that she knows I’m working with the agency, I wonder what she’ll do with that information. I wonder what she’ll expect me to do.
