vehicles, repackaging and reselling them as something else?”
“It’s possible, but why bother with all the hassle?”
Alex just shrugs and doesn’t say anything else, which means we’ve both reached our limit. Because I’m still pissed that he doesn’t believe that I died, I add, “No theories? C’mon, they don’t let just anyone into West Point.”
“Don’t say that out loud.” Alex looks around shiftily.
I roll my eyes. “Your mother hasn’t bugged my house as far as I know.”
“Your dad thinks I’ll be able to get in.” Of course Alex will get in. He has a 4.6 GPA and he’s bilingual. And my dad will write him a recommendation, since he went to West Point and graduated at the top of his class. Which is one of the reasons Alex wants to go.
Alex has gone silent, staring into space with his jaw set. I feel bad now for making him think about all the drama he’ll have to deal with when he finally admits to his mother he’s not going to graduate early and go to Stanford, thereby deviating from the life plan she’s been outlining for him since he was conceived.
“So which one of the boxes do you think has stuff about the truck in it?” I ask, because getting back to the investigation will be the only way to make him feel better—and because I know my dad has info about the truck. It doesn’t matter that the FBI doesn’t allow you to investigate anything that happens to you or your family or even people you know. My dad wouldn’t let a truck just appear out of thin air and hit me without investigating it.
“When I helped Jared bring them into the office, I set the lightest box in the back corner, farthest from his desk.” He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to. We’ve been spying on my dad and comparing notes about his cases practically forever. We’re nerds like that.
21:18:10:00
W hen my cell phone beeps in the middle of the night, I almost say Whatever and go back to sleep. A stolen Toyota—or whatever it is—is hardly worth waking up to check out.
Except for the fact that the driver is dead, when it should have been me.
I roll out of bed and fumble into the hallway. We’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve done the get-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night stunt enough that I don’t need to turn on the lights. But I curse silently as I head down the stairs and see the sliver of light coming from my dad’s study. Either he and poor Struz are still working, or he’s fallen asleep at his desk.
I imagine it’s this way for all law-enforcement agents—long hours, sleepless nights, obsessive attention to detail, poring over case files. Every FBI agent I know has at least two cases they’ll never forget and never stop thinking about, investigations they’ll carry with them in the back of their minds always, for their entire lives. The one that went right. And the one that went wrong.
For my dad, the case that went right was the one that made his career.
It was more than ten years ago. It was his first case with Struz, who was a junior analyst at the time. I was too young to remember any of the details now, except the ones I heard repeated whenever he relived the story.
Ten Russian spies were discovered and arrested in Temecula, of all places. One was a Fox News reporter, popular with the public and, of course, beautiful. She ended up getting caught in a trap an undercover FBI agent set for her, and as a result all ten of them—and some guy bankrolling them in Budapest—went down. The undercover agent? My dad.
But the case that went wrong—the one still unsolved—is even older. It happened one of his first years on the job, before he got involved in counterintelligence. When my mom was pregnant with me—just after she’d found out I was a girl.
A seventeen-year-old girl—captain of the swim team, with an academic scholarship to USC, a boyfriend, friends, the perfect family, with a dog and white picket fence—went missing from her bedroom. All her
“It’s possible, but why bother with all the hassle?”
Alex just shrugs and doesn’t say anything else, which means we’ve both reached our limit. Because I’m still pissed that he doesn’t believe that I died, I add, “No theories? C’mon, they don’t let just anyone into West Point.”
“Don’t say that out loud.” Alex looks around shiftily.
I roll my eyes. “Your mother hasn’t bugged my house as far as I know.”
“Your dad thinks I’ll be able to get in.” Of course Alex will get in. He has a 4.6 GPA and he’s bilingual. And my dad will write him a recommendation, since he went to West Point and graduated at the top of his class. Which is one of the reasons Alex wants to go.
Alex has gone silent, staring into space with his jaw set. I feel bad now for making him think about all the drama he’ll have to deal with when he finally admits to his mother he’s not going to graduate early and go to Stanford, thereby deviating from the life plan she’s been outlining for him since he was conceived.
“So which one of the boxes do you think has stuff about the truck in it?” I ask, because getting back to the investigation will be the only way to make him feel better—and because I know my dad has info about the truck. It doesn’t matter that the FBI doesn’t allow you to investigate anything that happens to you or your family or even people you know. My dad wouldn’t let a truck just appear out of thin air and hit me without investigating it.
“When I helped Jared bring them into the office, I set the lightest box in the back corner, farthest from his desk.” He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to. We’ve been spying on my dad and comparing notes about his cases practically forever. We’re nerds like that.
21:18:10:00
W hen my cell phone beeps in the middle of the night, I almost say Whatever and go back to sleep. A stolen Toyota—or whatever it is—is hardly worth waking up to check out.
Except for the fact that the driver is dead, when it should have been me.
I roll out of bed and fumble into the hallway. We’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve done the get-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night stunt enough that I don’t need to turn on the lights. But I curse silently as I head down the stairs and see the sliver of light coming from my dad’s study. Either he and poor Struz are still working, or he’s fallen asleep at his desk.
I imagine it’s this way for all law-enforcement agents—long hours, sleepless nights, obsessive attention to detail, poring over case files. Every FBI agent I know has at least two cases they’ll never forget and never stop thinking about, investigations they’ll carry with them in the back of their minds always, for their entire lives. The one that went right. And the one that went wrong.
For my dad, the case that went right was the one that made his career.
It was more than ten years ago. It was his first case with Struz, who was a junior analyst at the time. I was too young to remember any of the details now, except the ones I heard repeated whenever he relived the story.
Ten Russian spies were discovered and arrested in Temecula, of all places. One was a Fox News reporter, popular with the public and, of course, beautiful. She ended up getting caught in a trap an undercover FBI agent set for her, and as a result all ten of them—and some guy bankrolling them in Budapest—went down. The undercover agent? My dad.
But the case that went wrong—the one still unsolved—is even older. It happened one of his first years on the job, before he got involved in counterintelligence. When my mom was pregnant with me—just after she’d found out I was a girl.
A seventeen-year-old girl—captain of the swim team, with an academic scholarship to USC, a boyfriend, friends, the perfect family, with a dog and white picket fence—went missing from her bedroom. All her
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