Double Digit Read online

  Danny narrowed his eyes at my lie. He knew I could talk all day about how I solved a problem. And John, maybe reading my mind, tried to hide the tiniest smile.

  “That wasn’t my understanding.” Spencer got up to take her turn pacing.

  At four a.m. we left the library and dashed to Spencer’s car. She and John sat in the front; Danny and I sat in the back. Just like when we were kids. “This is what it’d be like if Mom and Dad worked for the FBI,” he whispered. “Except Mom’s kinda hot.” This must have hit a raw nerve in my fist because it punched him hard in the arm.

  At Logan Airport, we pulled up to Budget Rent A Car and switched to a navy blue Honda four-door. Spencer had this all figured out. We were going to say we’d been followed and had to switch cars, and that we’d had to go into hiding for a few days to be sure we lost them.

  We checked into the airport Hilton to get exactly five hours of sleep before we started our run. I bought myself a toothbrush, a ChapStick, a razor, and tweezers in the lobby store, knowing these would be my only beauty staples for the foreseeable future. Spencer wheeled her undoubtedly well-stocked overnight bag to the registration desk and paid for two rooms in cash. She handed one key to John. “You can share with Danny, and I’ll bunk with Digit. She is my responsibility after all.” Evil genius.

  John and I went our separate ways, without a word.

  At eleven a.m., we all met in the hotel restaurant to dig in to the dregs of the breakfast buffet. Spencer was fresh as a daisy in neatly pressed khakis and a fitted white blouse. I was in the clothes I’d slept in. Plus ChapStick.

  Danny was completely disoriented, not having had his customary twelve hours of sleep, but he seemed to have showered and re-donned his grass skirt and snow boots.

  “Seriously, Danny. It’s time to lose the skirt.”

  “All I’ve got under it are boxers. The skirt stays.”

  I guess I hadn’t noticed he wasn’t wearing any pants under there. “Well, weren’t you freezing last night? How can you go outside without pants?”

  “That’s why I was going to build a bonfire, Dig.” Danny leaned over and grabbed my left earlobe in the most annoying possible way. “Listening. Ever try it?”

  John agreed. “Right?”

  When Danny and Spencer hit the buffet, John grabbed my hand to keep me behind. “Hey. I know we need to talk.”

  Uh, hello, understatement. “Yeah. And there’s a lot you didn’t tell me about Spencer.” Like she has ovaries.

  “I know.” Not exactly what I was hoping for. “We’ve got to get in touch with my dad again. He really picked the wrong time to disappear.”

  Spencer and Danny came back with plates of fresh-ish fruit and breakfast meats, respectively. Spencer picked up a strawberry and smiled with pleasure like it was a donut. I asked, “Have you tried his cell this morning?”

  “Six times. But he won’t answer. He’s obviously doing something he doesn’t even want my mom to know about. He’s not going to pick up the phone.”

  Danny said, “Just send him a text and tell him we’re in trouble. Or that Digit’s screwed up even worse than he thought, to be more exact.” Danny had turned talking while chewing into an art form.

  “I did. I texted 911 last night. No word.” Just then his phone vibrated on the table. “It’s him. ‘I’m in 911 too. Can’t involve you without danger. Don’t leave Digit’s side. Stop calling.’ Oh my God.”

  “We’ve got to find him.” I resisted the temptation to grab John’s hand.

  “He said not to.” John looked totally hopeless.

  “Listen, he doesn’t want you to find him because he doesn’t want you in danger. But he’s in danger. And if we can’t find him, I’m going to jail.”

  “Digit, he could be anywhere. And if he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be. That’s his job.”

  Spencer piped up, “Yes, this isn’t like a lost puppy where we can go around the neighborhood calling his name, sweetie.”

  I’m. Not. Six.

  “What phone did he text you from?”

  “His personal phone, his iPhone.”

  “Who’s his carrier?” I grabbed my laptop and headed back up to my room. As the elevator doors closed, I heard Danny call after me, “Try not to black out too bad, Dig.”

  It’s easier than you think to hack into Verizon’s customer database and locate a phone that’s been accessing the Internet or sending a text. It took me ten minutes to locate Mr. Bennett in central West Virginia. Afterward I showered, shaved my legs, and painstakingly blew dry my hair to kill a little extra time. Blackouts aren’t quick.

  No one was surprised when I came back to the restaurant and announced that I’d found him. John said there was no way he was going to drive me directly into more danger. Spencer said there was no way to avoid it. Danny said that a good road trip calls for a lot of snacks.

  HONK IF YOU DO EVERYTHING YOU’RE TOLD

  MY SECOND TRIUMPH OF THE DAY was getting Danny to call shotgun so that John and I could be alone in the back. This seemed to annoy Spencer, which was my third triumph of the day.

  It’s a thirteen-hour drive from Boston to central West Virginia. Our destination seemed to please Spencer, and for the first time I started to see her as an FBI agent. She was decisive and stuck to her plan. She was pleased that we were driving right toward Virginia—where the FBI thought we were headed—so that our story about being followed on our way there checked out. She also knew of someplace where we could spend the night in New River, West Virginia, and in the morning we would try to determine where Mr. Bennett might be hiding, or where he might be held captive. I’ll admit the plan was a little loose, but it effectively got me out of where Jonas Furnis thought I was and got me closer to someone who might be able to fix things for me with the CIA.

  The vibe between John and me wasn’t really changing. I guess we needed to have some big conversation, but this was hardly the place for it. He’d seemed very angry about me not wanting to talk for so long. And I had wanted to talk. I mean, I had wanted to talk to him. But I just hadn’t wanted to talk the whole thing through. Needing space feels like leaving, and everyone knows you can’t go backwards in a relationship. I guess I just didn’t want to hear him dump me again.

  We each sat by a window in the back seat, leaving the middle seat as no man’s land, not to be crossed. After a few hours I pulled my knees into no man’s land, stealing more space for myself but still not touching John. The trees changed along the highway as we made our way south. Nearly every highway was lined with some sort of thin forest on either side, probably to protect the nearby houses from the noise. I thought about my perfectly landscaped street in Santa Monica and the fig tree in the front yard. A team of six men descend on our house to care for that tree and the rest of our small yard every week. They trim in the fall and prune in the spring, even fertilize a few times a year to really stink things up. I didn’t see any landscapers on the sides of the highways; these trees seemed to take care of themselves. And they looked no worse for it.

  Of course, there was starting to be a really good chance I’d have the opportunity to sport a bright orange jumpsuit along one of these highways, picking up garbage and sweeping acorns out of the road. Call me a little stressed out, but that actually sounded kind of relaxing.

  Somewhere around Pennsylvania, John took my hand. I tried not to move. He traced the back of it, like it was some mysterious new object. I watched his face looking at my hand for the longest time. When my throat started to close up and I thought I might start to cry, I shut my eyes and pretended to sleep. He kept holding my hand.

  Spencer’s phone had been ringing since we got into the car. On the sixth hour of our drive, she decided to pick it up. “Hey. Yeah. We’ve run into some trouble. We were followed on our way out of Boston and had to hide out for the night.” She paused and moved the phone slightly away from her head as the volume of her boss’s voice escalated. “Yes, I understand that she’s a threat now, but if they get thei
r hands on her, we’ve got a national emergency.” I’d take a compliment anywhere I could, but I’m not sure I wanted that one. “We’re taking the scenic route, and we’ll get there as soon as we can. Okay? So, otherwise are things good? How’s little Sophie?” She looked at the phone in her hand, as if it would tell her why her boss had just hung up on her.

  My mouth opened and this came out: “Thanks, Spencer.” I mean, she was lying to her boss to help save my butt. It was certainly unexpected.

  She let out a little laugh. “Sure. Any friend of John’s is a friend of mine.” And now I hated her again.

  We didn’t stop to eat until after nine p.m. at an old diner outside of Morgantown, West Virginia. At first glance it looked like one of those diners that was built inside an abandoned train car. But upon closer examination, I could see that it was really an old Greyhound bus remodeled to look like an old train. All this deception was getting to me.

  We sat down and ordered. John got a cheeseburger, I got a Mexican omelet, Danny got the Lumberjack Special, and Spencer got a scoop of chicken salad. On a bed of lettuce but not iceberg. Did they have a darker lettuce, maybe arugula they could use? Dressing? Of course not.

  “What, are you like a rabbit?” Danny asked.

  “Rabbits don’t eat chicken,” Spencer explained.

  “Right. You know who can eat chicken? Digit! Dude, have you ever seen her attack a rotisserie chicken? It’s like something from the Nature Channel!”

  John choked on a bit of water, laughing. “Yeah, I’ve seen it. But what about a chili cheeseburger? It’s like a week’s worth of food, and she can put it away in three bites.”

  Spencer’s eyebrows were high. Mortified for me, it seemed. What’s wrong with having an appetite? “Yes, I eat. Sue me. I’m going to the bathroom.”

  John snapped back to attention and stood up, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “Hey, I’ll take you.”

  Spencer nudged him. “God, John, she’ll be fine. They haven’t followed us; they have no clue where we are. It’s a diner. She’ll be fine.” And then John took the most awkward pause. Looking back and forth between us, choosing, and then finally sitting down and nodding.

  I stood there for a moment not knowing what to do. Was I disappointed that he wasn’t going to follow me to the bathroom? Or because she made light of my predicament and he agreed with her?

  I walked down past the bar to the ladies’ room sign that was really a personalized license plate from Hawaii: LADEEZ. A train, a bus, and now a Hawaiian car? This place could make me nuts. I pushed in the door to the restroom and had all of the air knocked out of me. It was a quick jolt to my gut as a strong arm pulled me inside and then a firm handkerchief to the mouth with the other arm. I could feel the strength of my assailant and knew I was outmatched by a factor of six.

  “Shhh. No one hears you. Clear?” I knew the voice, but how was that possible? “Don’t move. We need to talk.” His hands released from my gut and my mouth, and he spun me around.

  “Mr. Bennett? Jeez, you hurt me.” I rubbed my belly where I’d just had the Heimlich maneuver to end all Heimlich maneuvers. Then I threw my arms around him. “Oh my God, John’s going to be so glad we found you! I did something really stupid, which of course you know about, and I’m in so much trouble: They want to arrest me for felony espionage, plus the nuts are after me again and they attacked me but they don’t want to kill me—they want to keep me because I’m some sort of national threat, and I got an interview for the job I really want but it’s tomorrow and we are so far away from school that it’s never going to happen . . .”

  “Can you calm down? I don’t have a lot of time, but I have a lot to say, and John can’t see me.”

  “Okay.” I took a deep breath and looked up at him. I swear he’s like God: big and strong and just magically there reading your mind whenever you need him to be.

  “I’ve been tracking you since last summer.”

  My heart raced in ten directions. Tracking me? Like when? Like when I was alone with John? Like then? Oh my God.

  The mind reader’s smirk creeped up. “No, not like that. I mean that I’ve just kept tabs on you, through your computer activity. I know it’s a bit of an invasion of your privacy, but I didn’t know any other way to make sure that you were okay. At first I thought I could just have John do it, but he accused me of being ‘unnaturally interested’ in your relationship. And then the thing happened with you two.” He rolled his eyes. “When I’m traveling, my assistant does the monitoring. I figured that if I could confirm that you were on your laptop every day doing normal student things, then I would know you were okay. And if you missed a day, I’d come looking. The interesting part was that I could tell someone else was tracking your computer activity. I suspected it was Jonas Furnis but couldn’t prove it. And the two of us have been watching you, side by side, for months. But when I saw you hack into the DOD, I knew the NSA would see it and that they weren’t the only group that would want you in their custody. Jonas Furnis has money now, Digit, and if they had you, they’d be deadly.”

  “They were broke, remember? Where are they getting money?” I’d never heard of rich people holding fundraisers for terrorists.

  He didn’t answer me. “I found Jonas Furnis.”

  “Where?”

  “Their headquarters. You wouldn’t believe it. But one man can’t take them down. I need to get a whole assault team to go down there. After somehow explaining why I was there while saying I was on vacation. Jonas Furnis knows I’ve infiltrated by now; they have surveillance everywhere. I need to get out of here. I neutralized one of their operatives and took this from him. Keep it for me in case I don’t make it back to D.C. It proves what they are doing.” He tossed me an HP 12C, a standard run-of-the-mill financial calculator, a little bigger than my iPhone and a lot less interesting.

  “Why would I ever need this?” I mean, c’mon.

  “You’ll see. Now I’ve got to go.”

  “Hang on.” I grabbed the sleeve of his jacket. “What are we supposed to do? And why can’t I tell John?”

  “Pretend you never saw me. Go back out there, say nothing. I’m better off alone without you guys leading them to my door. Wander around the countryside while I get back to headquarters. I need to be the one to tell the director of the CIA about what you did. He can help run interference with the NSA.”

  “He already knows. He’s pissed and he’s taken over the investigation.”

  Mr. Bennett was quiet. “Why wouldn’t he have called me? He knows you and I are practically family. Never mind. They’ll do anything I want when they find out I’ve found Jonas Furnis. I’ll get them to leave you alone. I’m building us a little street cred, like you kids say.” We don’t say that, by the way. “I need time.” He turned to go again but stopped. “You okay?”

  “Not really. There’s this girl.”

  “Impossibly blond and put together? We’ve met her.”

  “I can’t believe he’s gone for someone so tall and blond and without hair follicles. He never takes his eyes off her. What am I supposed to do?” I was holding on to my already dirty sleeves and wiping my tears again.

  “Use your head, Digit.” He lifted my chin up to eye level. “Stay focused. I’ve got big plans for you, as always.” He hoisted himself out of the bathroom window.

  So she’d met his parents? I shoved the calculator in my back pocket and took a minute to splash water on my red eyes.

  WARNING: I HAVE CABIN FEVER

  IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE night when the car stopped abruptly, and I woke up with my face pressed into the door handle and my boots on John’s lap. “We’re heeeere,” Spencer chirped. We got out of the car and stepped into the pitch-black night. Spencer walked ahead, unlocked a door, and flipped on the light of a tiny cabin.

  Inside, I plopped down my backpack, and it seemed to take up half the living space. And the dining space. I saw blankets stacked in the corner and realized this was also the sleeping space.

&nbs
p; “Like it?” Spencer beamed. “My family and I used to spend summers in this cabin. So many memories.” Where do you keep them?

  “Oh-kay.” Danny looked around. “I think I might still be asleep—where can I crash?”

  Spencer motioned to the blankets and we all claimed our spots. Danny collapsed onto his blanket right where he stood. Spencer positioned herself horizontally in front of the door, my hero. John laid his stuff out next to mine.

  Lights out. “Digit? You okay?” John whispered.

  I thought: Not really. I’ve just flushed my life down the toilet and am lying down next to my old boyfriend who can’t stop staring at a girl I can’t compete with. I said, “Not really. I’ve just flushed my life down the toilet and am lying down next to my old boyfriend who can’t stop staring at a girl I can’t compete with.”

  “Can we talk about this later?” Yeah, sure. I’m pretty sure visiting hours at Sing Sing are Thursdays from two to six.

  I turned my back to him and pretended to go to sleep. I was wide awake, fuming. I imagined tearing into Spencer with exactly the right insult and storming off to leave behind only the memory of my quick wit and sharp tongue. I got taller as I walked away, so tall actually that she came to fear me. But really, what was there to tear apart? Her beauty? Her willingness to delay my imprisonment? Her self-control around salad dressing?

  Regressing back to the fourth grade, I started playing with my new calculator. Typing 7734 and turning it over to read the word HELL. Amateurish. I tried to spell GO TO HELL SPENCER in numbers but got stuck on the G. I typed a 5 for an S and accidentally hit the Enter button with my pinkie. The calculator started to vibrate, silently, and I just held on not knowing what I was waiting for.