May Contain Spies: A Spy Thriller (Meet Abby Banks Book 1) (12 page)

The sound of shrieking metal exploded through the small submarine, and I craned my head toward the sound as the neon lights began to wink out one by one. The flash of blue-white flame filled my vision, blinding me so badly that I had to turn my head away as the fire ate through the steel wall like it was gasoline-drenched paper.

There was a loud clang, like a giant gong being dropped against the ground, and the sound of it reverberated in my ears. I looked back toward the sound, spots still dancing across my eyes, to see a huge hole in the wall. The metal had that bright-red color of superheated steel, and the edges looked like they were dripping.

Beyond the hole, I could see beige light filtering in, and I watched helplessly, as a tiny form stepped through the hole and surveyed the scene. I couldn’t make out the face because it was hidden behind a mask and goggles that made it look like an alien with giant green eyestalks jutting from its forehead.

It peered at the wreckage where Stephen had been buried for several minutes before turning its attention toward me. It took one ominous step forward, clearly not seeing me beneath the massive bulk of Donovan’s body. My heart started to hammer so loudly I was worried it would give away my position as the person began to walk toward me.

I held my breath as the form bent down and grabbed Donovan by the scruff of his shirt and turned him over. I squealed, trying to throw myself backward the moment I was free but got so twisted up in the unconscious body of Donovan still laying over my legs that all I succeeded in doing was drawing more attention to myself.

“I have a gun!” I lied. “I’ll use it if you move even a centimeter closer!”

The person’s lips quirked into a smile as it stared at me.

“It’s okay, Abby,” Esmeralda Banks said. “Mommy’s here to save you.”

“Mom?” I said, but I’m not sure if the words actually came out of my mouth because my jaw hit the floor. Shock rippled through me as Esmeralda Banks pulled off her mask and shook her head, allowing her golden locks to frame her movie-star face.

Then, as she leaned down toward me, presumably to help me up, everything turned sort of red because, well, wasn’t this the woman who had been lying to me for my entire life? Rage swelled up inside me, so thick and choking I could barely breathe as I shoved her hands away from me.

“You’re
not
my mother!” I snapped, curling my hands into fists. “You’re just some lady being paid to… to…” I gasped as tears tugged at my eyes and started to slip down my cheeks like little drops of wet lies, “paid to pretend you love me,” I finished.

“Abby,” she said, voice comforting, but there was a tremor beneath it, just the smallest hint of sadness in her normal, stoic calm. Her emerald eyes went glassy as something died just below the surface. “Abby,” she repeated and swallowed, hard.

“Stop saying my name!” I snapped and tried to push myself free, which was pointless because I couldn’t move. I was still trapped beneath Donovan’s bulk. “Argh!” I screamed in fury, and without thinking, smacked at him with my fists.

“Abby, calm down, let me help you,” Esmeralda said, reaching out toward me with one slow, tentative hand. It reminded me of someone reaching toward an angry mongrel dog in the streets.

“Don’t tell me to calm down!” I cried, finally succeeding in pulling my left leg free. I put my foot against Donovan’s body and pushed, the muscles burning beneath my skin. He flopped over, his head smacking against the steel with a horrible sounding thunk.

Esmeralda shook her head, snapping herself from some train of thought before turning mechanically to the back of the ship. Then she began to walk toward the scuba equipment.

“Are you ignoring me?” I screamed as I got to my feet and took an angry step toward her.

“Do you remember when you were a toddler and you used to throw fits?” Esmeralda wasn’t looking at me but she shook her head and sighed to herself. “You’d get so angry and you’d throw yourself down in the middle of the floor. Then you’d scream and start scooting backward. Well, this one time I got up and left you.” She glanced back at me and smirked. “It was one of my bad parent moments for sure. But what did you do? You ran into my room and grabbed me by the hand, insisting I follow you. So I did, and what did you do?”

“I have no idea what I did,” I said as she bent down and began to rummage through the equipment.

“Well, once we entered the room,” she continued, ignoring me, “you threw yourself back down on the ground and began to resume your fit. You repeated this same act three times, and every single time, I followed you because I thought maybe you wanted something else. You were so calm when you approached me, but all you wanted was to throw your temper tantrum where I could see it.”

“And what is the point of telling me that story?” I snapped, putting my hands on my hips and fixing her with my best glare, which really wasn’t hard because I was so angry I felt like I was going to burst.

“Because if I wasn’t your mother, do you think I’d remember your toddlerhood?” She stood, turning toward me and holding out a black, rubber-looking suit. “I
am
your mother, Abby. I raised you. I kissed your booboos. I attended your school plays. I helped you with your homework.” She shoved the suit into my hands. “I am not trying to cut out your insides and stuff them in my body to give myself a few more years. I am risking my life to save you.” She fixed me with her mom face. The one that made my legs turn to jelly. “Now put this on.”

Chapter 11

We were in the water. It was surprisingly warm for being a billion miles beneath the surface. This might have had to do with the super-expensive looking gizmos on my scuba suit that kept whirring and blinking with all sorts of lights. I glanced around, but couldn’t see beyond the end of the flashlight in my hand. Its beam extended only a couple feet into the distance before being swallowed by dark water.

I swallowed, still unused to breathing through my Darth Vader mouthpiece, and tried to keep calm like Esmer— my mother— had told me. The more I panicked, the more oxygen I would use. Running out of air didn’t exactly seem fun. Then again, I wasn’t even breathing air. I was breathing some kind of weird nitrogen mixture so my lungs wouldn’t explode. Man… even the air wasn’t genuine.

I glanced back toward where the submarine should have been but couldn’t see it through the inky blackness. I wished once again that my mother had brought a bigger vehicle. Why we hadn’t taken her submarine was immediately clear when we hit the water. Her ship was designed only for one person, so I wasn’t going to fit.

Also, since she’d cut a hole in Donovan’s submarine, if she detached, water would rush inside, killing both him and Stephen. Since they were alive, albeit unconscious, this seemed like a particularly bad plan since they were supposed to be colleagues.

I suppose we could have taken them with us, but well, she didn’t want to do that for reasons she hadn’t quite explained. This meant that now I was swimming under the ocean with my adoptive mother’s hand locked in a death grip.

Still, part of me was glad we were leaving them behind. There was something about Donovan that made him hard to trust, and well, I wasn’t sure I could trust Stephen either because, after all, I
was
leverage. Esmeralda, on the other hand, had come all this way just to save me. If I couldn’t trust her, I was screwed.

Already, my legs were starting to burn from the effort of kicking, which was lame because as I watched my mom and tried to mimic her perfect, mermaid-like strides… I just couldn’t. My kicks were all disjointed, and I kept swinging my flashlight around at every shadow. This made my body start to spin, and I’d have to kick again to right myself. It was getting very tiring.

“I still don’t think this is a wise way for one to first experience the joys of scuba diving,” I said, glaring at a shadow that turned out to be an outcropping of rock. “You could have taught me to do this, you know, in the comfort of our local pool.”

“Abby,” my mother sighed, her voice coming through the speakers embedded in the helmet just above my ears so it was like hearing her in surround sound. “I could have done a lot of things differently. Do you want me to go back in time and be all ‘Sarah Conner’ for you?”

“No,” I replied, trying to will my breathing to be slower. “We’re not facing any killer machines. If that was the case, the moment I tried to operate it, I’d somehow fill it with spyware.”

My mother’s laughter echoed in my ears, making me relax a little. Even if she wasn’t my real mother, she had raised me, and well, she wasn’t trying to gut me and play mix and match with my insides, which in my opinion, was a huge plus in her favor.

“But you could have taken me scuba diving, or like, taught me some martial arts, or well, anything,” I said a few minutes later.

“I could have, you’re right, Abby. But I wanted you to have a normal childhood. There’re lots of kids in our town just like you, should we be training all of them to be assassins to keep them safe from their parents?” my mother asked, and for whatever reason, it sounded like she genuinely wanted my opinion. “And I did try to get you to take a self-defense class, remember?”

“Well, I… okay fine,” I said, relegating myself to silence for a moment because she had a point. Ninety-nine percent of us would have complained and rebelled if we didn’t know why we were being trained. If we did know, well, that’d sort of defeat the purpose of the fake town designed to give us some semblance of a real life. It was like witness protection on steroids, and I could see the logic in not wanting us to all be crazy assassins. “And I guess no one wants a crazy assassin kid they trained bent on vengeance for being abducted as a child.”

“That, too,” my mother agreed and squeezed my hand.

“So what’s the plan?” I asked.

My mother was silent for a long time before she spoke, so long, I began to wonder if she had heard me. “We rendezvous with some people I know. They’ll take us somewhere safe,” she replied what felt like several hours later.

“Oh, like more agents? Like Donovan and Stephen?” I asked. “Where are they taking us?”

“It’s better if you don’t know, and they won’t be like Donovan or Stephen because… this isn’t exactly sanctioned.”

“Eh?” I asked, quirking my eyebrows even though she couldn’t see my face. “What do you mean it’s unsanctioned?”

“Abby, I was coming to get you whether or not Stephen got you out. That… didn’t sit well with my boss so I stole that submarine. Thankfully, Stephen got you out, but frankly, I don’t trust them. There’s a mole in the agency.”

“Whoa there, Mom. You mean you went AWOL to save me?” I asked.

“Yes, it was either that or put a bullet in Gabriella’s head. Unfortunately, she has some gizmo hooked up that makes it so if she dies from anything… unnatural, it detonates several more bombs,” she replied, and my heart sped up in my chest. “Now we’re going to meet some people I know and they are going to whisk us away to a safe place until Gabriella dies of natural causes. Then I’ll take us back home, and they won’t punish me because I succeeded where they failed.”

I glanced at her as she said the words, all full of bravado and confidence. “Um… Mom have you ever dealt with petty bureaucrats? Like at all? Because let me tell you, in my limited experience, that is exactly the opposite of how they work.”

“I know, Abby,” my mom said, turning to glance at me, before kicking again with one of her mermaid strides.

“Well, you don’t seem worried about it,” I said as water overhead pushed me down and to the left. I glanced upward, but all I saw were drifting shadows.

“Abby, I want to keep you safe. I’m glad you have such faith in me, but it’s still a coin toss. Once you’re alive and well and this is all over, I’ll worry about bureaucrats, okay?” she asked, and there was a strange change in her voice because she just sounded tired.

“Okay, Mom,” I replied as the water on my right surged, making me lose my grip on her hand. I flailed for a moment, my beam cutting through the darkness around me like one of those pathetic lighters in the cave in scary movies.

Then my beam caught the surface of something huge and grey as it swam away. All I could see was a shimmering tailfin. Only…

“Shark!” I screamed. My terror-filled voice ripped out of my throat as my heart felt like it exploded, and the pit in my stomach swallowed it.

My mother swung her body around in an instant, her headlamp illuminating the distance far better than my crappy flashlight could. The creature surged toward us, maw agape to reveal its fifty million teeth. There was a crack in the water to my left and bubbles surged forward in a cloud. Something struck the shark as my mother grabbed me by the arm and yanked my bobbing form behind her body.

She had a gun in her other hand, but she didn’t seem too keen on using it because it wasn’t raised toward the creature. The shark veered to the left, narrowly avoiding us as it passed so close to our bodies that I was sure it was going to turn and gulp us down in one bite.

“Shoot it!” I cried as we swung around to watch the shark. I hoped beyond all hope it would just go away.

“My bullets have an effective range of like three feet underwater, Abby. They’ll peel apart like metal flowers that will bounce harmlessly off of it at this depth,” my mother said as she holstered the weapon.

I couldn’t quite comprehend that. Didn’t people use guns underwater all the time in movies? The shark turned back toward us in one lightning-quick movement that made me shriek.

“Maybe we should try anyway?” I screamed, my voice cracking partway through.

“Stay here!” my mother commanded as she pulled a blade from a sheath on her leg and swam out a few feet in front of me. The monster caught sight of her and barreled forward, all teeth and fury. Its cold, flat eyes glinted menacingly in the glare of her headlamp as my mother swung her body around at the last second, narrowly avoiding its hideous, gaping maw.

With one lithe motion, she jammed the knife into the creature’s gills and tore it outward in a cloud of crimson that darkened the water. The shark snapped, gnashing its horrible teeth as my mother pushed off the creature with her other hand.