Double Digit (11 page)

“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.

I
T 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.

“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.

All of a sudden, a piece of paper emerged from the left side, slowly, like it was coming out of an ink-jet printer. I could barely see it in the dark room, but the feel of the paper was familiar and unmistakable. I reached into my backpack to pull out my phone and shone a little light on it. It was a five-dollar bill.

For fun, I pressed 20 Enter.
Vibrate, vibrate,
twenty-dollar bill. I pressed 100 Enter.
Vibrate, vibrate,
one-hundred-dollar bill. I’d just made $125. I ducked my head under my blanket and turned on the flashlight app on my phone. In the brighter light, the bills looked absolutely real, including the 3-D overlay of the metallic eagle on the twenty-dollar bill. I remembered reading that, besides the linen paper, that eagle image was the thing that kept amateur counterfeiters out of business. The change in ink and printing process of that 3-D overlay made dollar bills nearly impossible to replicate.

Where did Mr. Bennett get this money machine? I sat straight up as it hit me. Jonas Furnis has money now. And they have money because they have Adam Ranks.

“What the . . . ?” Evidently my eureka moment had sent my backpack, laden with my laptop, flying over to John’s makeshift bed. He sat up too, rubbing his arm where he’d been hit.

“Shhh. Come under here.” I checked to see that everyone else was sleeping and scooted over to make room for John under my blanket. Half asleep, he moved over to lie next to me, scooping his arm around me like it was the most normal thing in the world. I lay there for a second, smelling the John smell of his T-shirt and feeling the John feel of his shoulder underneath my head. It was a stolen moment, a cheap thrill at the expense of a sleeping man, but I’d take it. Because I was about to fess up to another lie.

“So I saw your dad,” I whispered into his chin.

“I know you love him, Digit. We’ll find him. Tell me about your dream tomorrow.” He was more than half asleep.

I whispered an inch from his ear, “I mean, I saw him for real, at the diner. He told me not to tell you, said that we needed to keep roaming around to buy him time to defend me. He’s found Jonas Furnis. He said they have money. And I know how they’re getting it.”

All systems were go. “You saw my dad? Is he okay?”

“Shhh. He’s making his way back to Langley. He gave me this.” I pressed the calculator into his hand. “Name a meal you really enjoyed.”

“Okay, osso buco in Boston. The last meal I had before the silence started.”

“How much did it cost?”

“I don’t know, maybe a hundred dollars?”

I typed 100 and Enter, and out it came, a hundred dollars. “We’re even.” John ran his fingers over the bill and held it up to the light of my phone.

I explained about the calculator and what it did. “And the reason everybody isn’t counterfeiting all the time is that the 3-D overlay is so hard to do. But Adam Ranks knows how to do it. They have him, and he’s given them this technology.”

John kept running his finger over the new bill in the dark. “If they could print endless money and had someone who could hack into the U.S. government’s most secure divisions, they could take down the system. They could overthrow our government.”

I pulled the blanket up over our heads so we were in our own cave. I whispered, “Which is exactly what the CIA thinks I’m trying to do anyway. Which is insane. I like the government and the roads and schools and stuff. Why would I ever mess with them?”

“Obviously, to go to a toga party.” John still had his arms around me, as we lay staring at each other in the pitch-blackness. I had, as usual, a thousand things to say. All of them were going to make me vulnerable to having my heart ripped out again. John touched my face in a way that made me want to cry. “I can’t tell if you’re smiling or frowning,” he said.

“Both.”

“I know exactly how you feel.”

Flashlights illuminated the room. I pulled our covers down to see what was going on and saw Danny sitting up, rubbing his eyes, and three men with guns surrounding us. Spencer was standing behind them so I figured they were the CIA or the FBI. Man, I’d really screwed up bigtime.

John jumped immediately to his feet but was knocked flat on his back by the butt of a rifle. “Hang on!” I grabbed the smallest guy by the arm. “He’s with you guys. I’m the one that did the bad thing. Jeez, I’m coming.”

“You’re all coming. You’ll come to work, and this guy and the clown in the skirt can come to die. Nice work, Spencer.” The one in the middle gave her a little nod.

John got up, holding his stomach, and came to my side. Nothing made sense to me. Well, not until they bound our wrists with plastic handcuffs and marched us off to meet Jonas Furnis. Spencer gave her hair a little flip as I passed her.

Bitch.

I
T WAS A PRETTY SHORT DRIVE
from Spencer’s cabin to Jonas Furnis’s place. I should have known that she wouldn’t have spent summers in a crappy cabin like that. Stupid.

She rode up in the front of the van with her thug buddies, and John, Danny, and I sat on a long bench in the back. They stripped us of cell phones, laptops, and my new magic calculator. Danny looked like his world had been turned upside down. “You carry a calculator now?!”

“It’s a money-printing machine; it’s theirs.”

“Nice move. Next time you get your hands on a money machine, stick it down your pants, will you?”

“At least I’m wearing pants.” Danny looked a little vulnerable, cuffed in a grass skirt. It reminded me of the time he was cast as Mary in his second grade Christmas pageant. (This sort of thing only happens in Los Angeles.) “Danny, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry you’re here and part of this. So sorry you’re not going to get to go to college and teach everyone at BU how to hula dance.”

“It’s okay, Dig. I wasn’t going to college anyway.”

“What? When did you decide that?”

“Forever ago. I just don’t have the heart to tell Dad. I mean, he’s Mr. College, but it’s just not for me. I want to do things, not read about them. Like maybe I could be an electrician? Or a carpenter. Or an actor.”

I looked at Danny and totally saw him as the love interest in any teen drama. He had the hair, the steady gaze, and the authentic coolness that would melt the audience. And he had great comedic timing, actually. “Acting, yeah, I could see that.”

“Yeah, but you’ve got to help me talk to Mom and Dad. I mean, what could Mom say? She’s an actress and she, like, breathes that stuff. But Dad . . .”

John snapped, “Uh, seriously, guys? Reality check? We’re being marched to our deaths and possibly the death of our nation. How about this: If my dad gets back here soon enough to save us, I’ll talk to your parents myself? Okay?”

Embarrassed, Danny and I shut up as asked. But shutting up can be so much work. I asked John, “So you knew about Spencer?”

“I suspected.”

“But why?” Maybe suspicion of natural blondes was a universal thing?

“It was a lot of things. Her story about the director’s reaction to your little crime seemed really out of character for him. He wouldn’t have taken it personally; he’s very pragmatic. He wouldn’t have waited for you to get to Langley; he’s very impatient. And he definitely wouldn’t have cursed; he thinks foul language is a sign of a weak mind.”

“How would you know all that about him?”

“He’s my godfather.”

Danny rolled his eyes.

John went on: “And the Farm? No one in the CIA, certainly not the director, would call Langley ‘the Farm.’ The Farm is an offsite training center for covert ops. They only call Langley the Farm in the movies. Everybody knows that.”

“Everybody. Right.” Danny looked at John like he was from a different planet.

The van stopped, and we were walked single file, me first, toward a long, low building. It was constructed log cabin style, but with an aluminum roof covered in polka dots. As we got closer to the building, the polka dots stopped me in my tracks. They were actually sculptures of butterflies, inlaid with small pieces of glass that reflected the light of the rising sun. They reflected every possible color of the rainbow, depending on their angle, and were arranged randomly. Each one looked as if it had just landed on the roof and was ready to take off again. Beautiful.

A voice from the doorway called to me, “They’re made of solar panels, young Digit. Like them?” I looked toward the voice and saw a completely bald man, very thin and maybe in his early sixties, in jeans and a poncho. “Please come in. I’m Jonas Furnis. I’ll be your host.” All the thugs, including Barbie Thug, laughed at his joke.

The guns in our backs led us toward him. Jonas Furnis put his hands on my shoulders, maybe in lieu of shaking my bound hand. “Ah, Digit. You’ve caused us so much trouble. But now, now you are going to make it all better. In a matter of days, we will consider ourselves even. No hard feelings. Ready to get to work, or would you like to have a look around?”

Because I knew the get-to-work part of this story was probably going to end up as the
Torture Digit Show,
I asked to have a look around. Jonas took us into a small entryway that led to a square pool. Above the pool was a ten-foot-tall iron sculpture of a woman, whose hands reached up as if to support the ceiling. Water trickled through the bottoms of her feet into the pool. “It’s our potable water system. Rainwater flows from the roof through Mother Earth’s hands into the cistern. We have more than enough water for all of our needs. Come.”