9. Stealth Mode Activated
CHAPTER 9
STEALTH MODE ACTIVATED
OLLIE
I ask Daisy questions about her crafts, and she starts giving me details about different things she’s already made. Things like miniature terrariums in upcycled glass jars with tiny faux plants and clay figures. And hand-decorated journals with covers made from fabric, paper, or wood. They all sound so cool, and it blows my mind that she can come up with ideas like that out of thin air. And then to find a way to make those ideas a real, tangible thing.
And she talks about it with such passion that I’m sure she would do so well at it if she pursued it as a career. I’m enjoying hearing her talk about it so much that I almost forget I’m on a mission and not simply taking a leisurely stroll through the park during the fall festival with the woman I’ve spent the past eighteen months dreaming about .
I feel the buzz of a call, so I switch which hand is holding the case, pull my phone from my pocket, and answer it. It’s Jace , calling from the same number he had texted me from while Daisy and I were planting the bug, and my mind is immediately back on looking for the carousel.
“ Hey , Ollie ,” Jace says. “ I got tied up neutralizing a security breach, so I won’t be able to make it to the carousel for about forty-five minutes. Can you hang on that long? If not, my brother Ledger is in the area. He’s also an intelligence operative, and he can meet you to get the documents within a few minutes. Your call.”
Waiting to give this information to Jace when I’m pretty sure we’re being followed by the bad guys is so much riskier than I’m comfortable with. But two things cross my mind as soon as he asks. One , I remember his brother, Ledger . In fact, I remember being very intimidated by Ledger whenever he was around. He was tall and muscled back in high school— I can imagine he’s even more so now that he’s an adult and also an operative. I shudder.
And two, I really like being with Daisy . I want to ask her out, and I’ve told myself that I will before we are done with this mission, but I haven’t worked up the guts to do it yet. I could use another forty-five minutes.
Plus , I’ve been working on getting this information for Jace from the start. It would make me feel better if I could hand it off to him. Maybe we can go back to my car, drive around the park to see if we can find a parking spot closer to the carousel, and then wait there until the last possible moment. So , I say, “ We can hang on that long.”
Jace says he’ll be there soon and that he’ll see me at the carousel. I hang up, slide the phone back into my pocket, and let Daisy know that we’ve got another forty-five minutes to wait. “ Should we go back to my car and wait?”
She nods but freezes for a moment before slipping her hand in mine and leaning in. “ Suits at three o’clock.”
I look to my right, and sure enough, suits. Walking right down the middle of the two lines of food trucks. It’s not the man and woman from earlier, though. It’s two men. “ Did they send a whole team to look for us?” I look around frantically. They’re almost to the end of the row of food trucks where they will surely turn around and come back. We have no idea where the other two suits we saw are currently, and there’s a good chance they are somewhere between here and my car.
“ Where do we hide?” Daisy asks.
I hear my name and turn around to look for the source of it. My friend, Aziz , who I’ve known since I was ten, is waving from where he stands behind a table at a booth. A table with a tablecloth that goes all the way to the ground.
Daisy’s hand is still in mine, so I say “ Over here,” and we run to Aziz . I barely notice that his booth is all cookies before my eyes are back on his. “ Can we hide under your table? There are a couple of guys in suits that are after us.”
His eyebrows raise in alarm. “ Yeah , of course!” We hurry behind the table and he lifts the edge of the cloth, pulls out a couple of plastic totes that are filled with wrapped cookies, and lets us into the space. The cloth doesn’t go all the way to the grass on the backside, which is nice for the air not getting as stuffy as it did when we hid in the clothes, and it does let us peek out at what’s going on a little better—if we duck down—but I don’t like being exposed. Aziz is a good guy, though. He’ll look out for us. Plus , the back and left sides of his square awning are covered to the ground, so that helps keep us hidden.
Aziz crouches down and lifts the cloth with one hand as he grabs more wrapped cookies from a tote. “ I see a police officer patrolling a couple of dozen feet away. Do you want me to call him over and let him know you’re being followed?”
I look at Daisy , and she shrugs. “ I don’t know how this spy thing works,” she whispers. “ What if the officer is in on it? Or what if he’s not even an officer at all—he’s just a bad guy pretending to be one?”
I nod. “ Good thinking.” Then I turn to Aziz . “ No , don’t.”
Aziz nods and goes about running his booth as if we aren’t there. Daisy and I are both sitting on the grass, bent over awkwardly to avoid the diagonal braces between the legs and the bottom of the table, and I am hugging my knees to keep my legs from sticking out and tripping Aziz . Do we stay here until it’s time to go meet Jace ? Maybe that’s our only option. I give Daisy an apprehensive smile.
“ How long have you lived in Cipher Springs ?” I whisper to Daisy . “ Is this your first time at the fall festival?”
“ Second time,” she whispers back. “ My sister, Laurel , and I moved here a year and a half ago. Just before I started working at the Coffee Loft .”
“ What brought you to Cipher Springs ? Family ?”
She shakes her head. “ We needed a place to live and decided that nowhere was off limits. Everywhere was a possibility. I suggested we blindfold one of us, spin us around, then stick a pin in a map of the U.S . and see where it lands. Kind of like Pin the Tail on the Donkey , except it was Pin the Sisters on a Town .
“ But Laurel is a researcher—not by trade; she works in human resources—but she researches everything. Spreadsheets and a complex rating system were involved. Her calculations came up with Cipher Springs . Which , I guess worked out, because she met Gavin not long after, and they got married six months ago. Except then they moved to Charlottesville .”
“ Do you miss her?”
“ Yes . She’s been my best friend since birth. The one person who was always there for me. My roommate for twenty-three years.”
“ Oof ,” I whisper. “ That’s rough.”
She nods, and then she chuckles quietly. “ But she also claimed the status of Boss of Me when I was like two, so sometimes it’s also nice.” Daisy must be hungry because her stomach growls. Then she asks, “ Do you think we’ll need to stay here until Jace comes?”
“ Maybe ,” I say, shifting my awkward position a bit to give my neck a reprieve.
“ Here ,” Daisy says. “ Let me help.” Then she shifts her position enough that she can reach her hands past my pretzel-shaped legs to my neck, and starts rubbing.
Her touch sends so many sensations through me that I can’t even breathe. Her touch is soft and gentle, yet still firm enough to make my cramped muscles relax. And it’s brought her near enough to me that if it wasn’t for my knees residing at my chin, it’s almost like she’s hugging me. I can even feel her breath on my arms.
It’s fine that I can no longer breathe because there is so much electricity flowing through every part of me that it seems to have taken the place of oxygen. I don’t need air; I don’t need food or water. I can live off her touch. I close my eyes and turn all of my focus to soaking in the feel of her massaging my neck.
Okay , apparently my body doesn’t agree about not needing food because my stomach growls even louder than Daisy’s did .
It isn’t five seconds later before Aziz , not saying a word, crouches down like he’s getting something out of one of the bins, and reaches under the tablecloth to hand us two individually wrapped pumpkin chocolate chip cookies.
“ Thank you, Aziz ,” we both whisper at the same time.
Then Daisy giggles. “ Were our stomachs really that loud?”
We each unwrap our cookie. I’ve always liked pumpkin cookies okay, but would never choose that flavor if there were other options available. They’re always dense and dry. But I am hungry, so I take a bite, and it’s the best pumpkin cookie I’ve had in my entire life. It’s light and fluffy and moist and not too sweet. I’m pretty sure I could eat them for every meal without feeling terrible after. And I’d never get sick of them, either.
“ This cookie is amazing,” Daisy quietly moans after taking a bite. “ And I am so hungry.”
As I finish chewing my final bite—and wishing I had about five more of the cookies to eat right now— Daisy asks, “ So what about you? How long have you lived in Cipher Springs ?”
I wad up the wrapping from my cookie and work to stuff it in my pocket that’s bent up as awkwardly as I am so I can throw it away later. “ Except when I was away for college, I’ve lived in this area my whole life. ”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “ Really ? Your entire life? You spent from birth to age eighteen living in the same home?”
I shake my head. “ No . We lived a bit east of here when I was little. My mom wanted to live by the woods so the deer would come right to our house.”
“ And did they?”
I nod. “ Yep . Until the summer I turned five. Then there was a big forest fire in the hills that came right up to our house. It didn’t get our house,” I quickly add, so she won’t get worried, “but it came very close. We had to stay in a hotel in town for a couple of days.” I let out a single breath of a chuckle. “ It’s funny— I remember looking out at those hills from our hotel room window at night, thinking that the fire looked so beautiful. I was too young to think about the destruction at the time.”
“ But it was destructive?” she asks, her voice barely a whisper.
“ Yeah . It left those hills that my mom loved so much pretty barren.”
“ Is that why you moved?”
I shake my head. “ I remember my parents saying over and over that it would grow back. And all winter, as we got tons of snow, they kept saying that all the extra moisture would help. It would grow back. And , I mean, it did, eventually. The place looks great now.”
I take a long, slow breath, trying to decide if I wanted to tell her what came next. I look into her eyes, which isn’t easy because of the way my neck is craned, and I don’t know. Suddenly I want to. So I say, “ But we got a lot of snow that winter. And early that spring, we had a few really hot days in a row.”
“ Oh , no. Flooding ?”
I shake my head. “ Mudslide . I was upstairs in my bedroom when a wall of it came our direction. I was five, and I was playing with my brother, Ethan . He was one. My mom had gone downstairs to get something and was right below us. I remember the sound the most.”
“ Oh , Ollie . That’s awful.”
“ Luckily , it only took out half the house, and the side we were in stayed standing. But our bedroom no longer had a wall leading to the rest of the house or the stairs going down. People came with ladders and rescued us, though. The mud pushed my mom into the kitchen counter and she broke her arm, but other than that, we were okay. My dad was driving home at the time and got there just after the danger passed.”
An alarm goes off on my watch that usually tells me it’s time to make dinner, and I quickly silence it. The alarm makes me realize that we’ve spent enough time under this table that we’re only ten minutes away from Jace meeting us. “ Maybe we should make our way to the carousel.”
Daisy nods, so I lift the edge of the tablecloth enough to whisper to Aziz , “ Is the coast clear? ”
After a pause, he says yes and lifts the tablecloth more so we can crawl out. I gingerly get to my feet, shaking out my joints that are angry from the awkward position I was sitting in, and offer a hand to Daisy . There aren’t any customers currently at Aziz’s booth, and there are no suits in sight. I peek around the corner of his booth in the direction of the carousel and don’t see any that way, either.
“ Thank you, Aziz ,” I tell our hiding spot host. “ I owe you, big time. And thank you for the cookies, too. They’re the best I’ve ever had.”
He beams, then asks, “ Are you sure you don’t need any help?”
“ I’m sure. Help is already on the way.” I look back at Daisy . “ Are you ready?”
Her eyes are shining with excitement, which makes me happy. It’s way better than the fear of taking a risk I’ve got going on in my guts. And fear that we are heading out into possible enemy territory on our way to meet Jace .
I grip the case tight with one hand as Daisy slides her hand into my other, and we stroll out of the booth like we’re just two people enjoying the fall festival that we came to for very fall festival reasons. We even make it a good thirty yards before we spot the first suit.