Janis became aware that her cheeks had begun to smolder.

  “Hello, Scott,” the woman said, stopping before them.

  Her voice sounded professional—and yet, it was just breathy enough to bother Janis. When Janis glanced over, she found Scott’s Adam’s apple leaping up and down. She pistoned her elbow into his ribs. Scott jerked and shot his right arm forward, eventually grasping the woman’s offered hand.

  “Oh, ah, hi, hello.” Scott squinted at the woman. “Do I know you?”

  “You do, actually.” Her glossy lips pinched into a smile. “But you know me as Goblin.”

  “Goblin…” Scott repeated, still squinting. Then a bulb seemed to ignite in his brain. “Wait, Goblin?”

  “What are you two talking about?” The question felt hard in Janis’s throat, like an accusation.

  “Oh, ah, back when I was computer hacking, I used to frequent these online message boards. It’s where you’d go when you wanted logins, passwords—illicit access, basically.” Though he was answering Janis, Scott’s eyes hadn’t moved from the woman. “And Goblin here was an absolute god—I mean, ah, goddess. Sorry, but I always pictured you as a man. Anytime you got stumped, Goblin had the answer. Usually five of them. Everyone wanted to be him. Her.”

  The woman’s lips pinched into another smile that made Janis’s face smolder even hotter. “That’s sweet of you to say, Scott. But to avoid anymore gender confusion, why don’t you call me Gabriella?”

  “All right, Gabriella.”

  When she suggested they begin their assessment, Scott nodded eagerly. They were halfway to the room when Scott seemed to remember Janis. He turned and acknowledged her with a small wave before hustling to catch up with his new mentor. When the door closed behind them, Janis’s heart gave a final jealous kick.

  Relax, she told herself, she’s at least ten years older than he is.

  But for Janis, it was less that Scott might become attracted to her and more the idea that the woman had been selected for the very reason that he might become attracted to her. Something was up.

  She eyed Kilmer, who was telling Margaret she was next. She studied his inscrutable eyes and intelligent nose and mouth. Janis and the others had thrown the curtain back on the existence of the Champions Program, but she was pretty certain that plenty of curtains remained. And if the Program had its way, those curtains would stay tightly drawn.

  As Kilmer gestured toward another door, Janis felt around him, as she had so many times before. But that confounding chip which the Program had installed in its members’ heads (“To protect us from the Outside,” Kilmer had assured them) prevented her from actually feeling anything. Still, the intuition that sawed at Janis’s insides told her plenty. Namely, that the director knew more about the last Champions group than he was letting on.

  Much more.

  Janis watched her sister’s manager from JC Penney approach, a tall, gray-haired man with soft, but penetrating, blue eyes. The kind of eyes that could command a mega-church or launch a successful bid for the U.S. Senate. Janis had met him once in the store and admittedly been charmed. She watched her sister cycle through the predictable responses—surprise, disbelief, laughter—before accepting Mr. Giles’s arm and allowing him to escort her back to the room. Janis noted that except for Tyler, they had all gone enthusiastically thus far.

  They’re using carrots and sticks.

  The thought came to Janis suddenly. But before she could consider it further, she felt Kilmer’s hands on her shoulders. “Last, but far from least,” he said, though not to her. He was speaking toward the only door that had yet to open.

  She did not leap out as she had on that first day of school, and her long skirt did not feature multicolored patches, but her eyes blinked twice, owl-like, behind the same thick lenses. The silver-haired woman started forward, the very person Janis had guessed it might be.

  “Hello, Mrs. Fern,” Janis said.

  6

  Montgomery County, Maryland Eleven days until Eisenhower’s address 7:01 a.m.

  Reginald was mostly dressed, his Professor Reuben face in place, when Madelyn stretched on the bed behind him and noticed he wasn’t in it. Soft blond curls tumbled around her face as she sat up. He watched her in the mirror as he buttoned his shirtsleeves at the wrists. If it was possible to care about someone more, Reginald wouldn’t have known how. He just didn’t always know how to show it.

  “Morning, beautiful,” he whispered.

  She squinted toward the window, where gray light peered around the plain curtains, then back at him. “What time is it?”

  “Early. Why don’t you try getting some more sleep?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere important,” he said. “Just on a little reconnaissance. I’ll be back in two hours. Three, tops.”

  Her head tilted. Something fluttered through his thoughts, like the lightest breeze.

  She sighed. “If it’s not important, why are you keeping it from me?”

  “Because it’s not important,” he said, buckling his pants.

  The psychic rapport Madelyn had set up worked a little like a bank safe. It was a place where Reginald could put whatever thoughts and feelings he wanted her to access, and she would do the same, with the understanding that the repository would grow over time. She had promised never to go searching for the things he hadn’t put there yet—and she hadn’t. It was the most trust Reginald had ever placed in another person. More so, even, than when he had left the state home with Director Halstead, the strange white man who kept insisting he was a “Special.”

  So it made him bristle when Madelyn accused him, even implicitly, of holding back on her.

  “Reggie…”

  “I’m going to the Soviet Embassy, all right?” he snapped. “Not to talk or fight, just to look around.”

  “Hal’s going to blow a gasket.”

  “Hal doesn’t have to know.”

  Madelyn pushed the covers back and swung her legs off the side of the bed. Her silk slip shook itself straight as she stood. “If Hal said they’re looking into the embassy, then they’re looking into it. He promised an update on Tuesday. That’s four days from now. You can’t wait four days?”

  “He’s also worried about an inside job—you said so yourself. If someone in the Program’s collaborating with the Soviets, then of course they’re going to come back saying the Soviets are clean.”

  He slipped a tweed jacket from its hanger and pulled it on.

  Madelyn remained on the far side of the bed, one hand braced against her hip. “Take the jacket off, put your clothes away, and come back to bed. Technically I’m still team leader, so that’s an order.”

  “Sounds more like a come-on.” He smirked as he fastened the jacket’s button at his navel.

  “Damn you, Reggie.”

  The reproach in her voice caught him off guard, and he looked over. Her eyes, confused by sleep only moments before, had turned hard and bright.

  “What?”

  “You’re always doing this, always going against the chain of command—sometimes just for the sake of it, I think—and it never ends well. Never. Yet, you do it again and again and again. I love you, Reggie, but you refuse to listen. You refuse to learn from your mistakes.”

  “Name one time,” he said, anger climbing his throat.

  “How about that time in Europe when you took it upon yourself to slip into Ukraine and disable those missile silos?”

  “Yeah, because in briefing we were told that any short-range nuclear strike would most likely come from there. Was that so wrong, wanting to protect the people I love, not to mention half of the free world?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What is?”

  “You weren’t ordered to do that. And we later learned that the Soviets panicked over those outages. They thought, rightly, that they’d been sabotaged and then concluded, wrongly, that the Americans were preparing a first strike. They came this close to launching a preemptive first strike of their own, hitting every major city in the U.S.”

  “And that would have been my fault?”

  “Not intentionally, but yes.”

  As they stared at one another, he let her feel his betrayal. He turned back to the mirror, performed a final self-check, and then strode from the room.

  She hurried after him. “If you’re intent on doing this, then I’m coming with you.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  His special briefcase leaned against the hall table, but before he could grasp it, Madelyn seized his arm. “Reggie, I feel like something’s circling us.” Though her voice was even, emotion rattled around the edges of her words like a tire beginning to show its metal. “I’m scared.”

  Reginald felt his mind steeling against her, then relenting. He sighed and closed his eyes.

  “I know,” he said after a moment. “I’m scared, too.”

  “We need to stay together. We’re all the team that’s left.”

  “But it’s not just us anymore, is it?”

  She didn’t answer. When he opened his eyes, she was standing with one arm across her chest, hand gripping her opposite shoulder. A part of his mind screamed at him to stay, but he was determined to get a jump on whoever was targeting the Champions, whoever was circling them. He had to deal them a crippling, if not fatal, blow. He was going against the chain of command, sure, but he was doing it for her, for them. Why couldn’t she see that?

  “You’re safer here, Maddie.” He kissed her forehead. “Like I said, two hours, three tops.”

  “And if you don’t come back?”

  “Shhh…” He cupped her cheek. “I will.”

  Reginald stepped out into the cold morning. His and Madelyn’s eyes met as he closed the front door. He turned toward the street. Men dressed for work walked along the sidewalk, their faces hidden by gray fedoras. Reginald nodded to one of them, who returned the gesture with a distracted nod of his own. Keep her safe, Reginald thought. And then to Madelyn: See you soon.

  The door locked behind him.

  He paused a moment, then set off down the street in search of a cab.

  7

  Reginald had the cabbie drop him off at Capital University downtown. He was a visiting professor, after all; he needed a place to lose himself that wouldn’t raise eyebrows. The sidewalk streamed with bundled-up students. Trees and stone buildings rose around him. Reginald walked a block, crossed the street, then doubled back the way he’d come. Pretending to search his pockets, he paused near a bus stop. Morning traffic idled across the four lanes in front of him.

  He peeked up and down both sidewalks until he spotted his tail, one of them anyway. The man had stopped on the other side of the street and unfolded a newspaper, pages flapping in the cold wind. Another tail, probably one on Reginald’s side of the street, would take the lead position now. Madelyn was right: these guys were as professional as advertised.

  But on the Champion’s payroll or not, he still had to lose them.

  He reached for a passing student and asked for directions to the library. Her gloved hand swam as she talked him through the rights and lefts. Reginald smiled, thanked her, and headed off.

  The library was crowded with overachievers and warmth-seekers. Reginald strode to the staircase and climbed to the top floor, as though he knew where he was going.

  In the remotest stacks, he swung his briefcase atop a shelf and cannoned it open. A mirror snapped into position. He peered quickly around, then back at the mirror. The goatee disappeared, melding into a clean-shaven face, where the beginnings of age lines thinned away and pimples rose in their place. He moved his eyes apart, filled out his nose and lips slightly, and flushed his cheeks. More years fell away. He tamed the shag of hair until it was glossy and neatly combed.

  Reginald locked the look into place and closed his briefcase. His clothes were fine for now. He’d chosen an outfit that would work just as well for a professor as for the no-name student he’d just become.

  Back on the first floor, the tail was leaning near the magazine racks. Reginald walked past him. The man’s practiced gaze remained on the staircase, none the wiser.

  Outside, Reginald started to hail a cab before deciding it would be faster to walk. Traffic was still thick, and he’d made Madelyn a promise: Three hours, tops. And something about her final look through the closing door—

  “Hey, watch where you’re going!”

  Without realizing it, Reginald had drifted across the sidewalk and into the path of a man rushing to work. The man had a surly, swollen face and the turnip nose of a chronic drinker. Reginald knew the look from his one and only foster father, years before. The arrangement had lasted about a week, then it was back to the state home—by way of the county hospital.

  The man balled the shoulder of Reginald’s jacket inside his fist. “Didn’t your mother teach you no manners?”

  Reginald’s brain burst into flames. No one handled him like that. He went through the moves in his mind: seizing the man’s fist, driving the heel of his other palm into the man’s elbow until it snapped, sweeping his legs out, and then, as the man writhed on his back, arm clutched to his body, stepping on his windpipe and bearing down. It would all happen in the space of two seconds.

  But they were moves Reginald couldn’t execute out in the open, damn it. He had to protect his cover.

  “Hands off,” Reginald warned.

  “Not until I get an apology from you.”

  Passing students gave them a wide berth, some of their gazes lingering, but none of them stopping. He was anonymous, after all. An average, if not awkward-looking, student no one knew. Reginald’s eyes must have betrayed his indignation because the sodden screw tugged him closer. He cocked his head toward the nearest academic building, the puffy flesh around his eyes balling tighter.

  “College kids think you’re such big shots with your big-shot degrees, but these places don’t teach you no manners.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. Now let go, I’m in a hurry.”

  “What’s it gonna take, huh?” The man spoke as though he hadn’t heard, the oily exhaust of his breath breaking against Reginald’s face. “A dose of the real world? A mouthful of knuckles?”

  Reginald calmed himself with the understanding that the man was speaking to the collective youth, not necessarily to him.

  “You kids are getting as bad as them agitating Negroes down south.”

  That did it. Reginald drove his fist into the man’s liver. The man grunted and collapsed to a knee, his hand falling from Reginald’s jacket. Propped on his suitcase, he squinted up. His face appeared startled, if not a little sad. What’d you go and do that for? the expression seemed to ask.

  Classic wounded bully response.

  A couple of students stopped to ask the downed man if he was all right. They hadn’t seen the punch, which had been short and chopping, intimate. As the man began to raise a finger, Reginald spun on his heel and disappeared into the foot traffic.

  It took him twenty minutes to walk the twelve blocks to the Soviet Embassy. He maneuvered twice to make sure he wasn’t being followed. He wasn’t. At Sixteenth Street, near Rhode Island Avenue, he rested on a bus stop bench. The embassy loomed fortress-like on the far side of the street, an iron fence demarcating its front lot as separate from the sidewalk and the rest of the United States. The perfect place to harbor a team of mercenaries.

  Reginald studied the intercom mounted on the right side of the gate and the twin cameras higher above. Beyond, he could make out a guard booth and a man’s silhouette inside.

  Shouldn’t be too hard. Just have to be patient.

  But a glance at his watch told him he’d already burned an hour since leaving the safe house. He began to pace. Fifteen minutes passed. Twenty. He was considering whether to call it off when he saw what he’d been waiting for: a man leaving the embassy on foot. The official was aging, pale-faced and stout, a camel-hair coat cinched tightly around his rotund middle. As the gate closed behind him, the man set off with the forward hunch of someone in a hurry.

  Reginald waited a couple of seconds then began to parallel him. Two blocks later, the official crossed toward Reginald’s side of the street. Reginald crossed against him, committing every detail of his approaching face to memory. The official looked like he might be bald underneath his furry shapka hat, but Reginald couldn’t risk guessing wrong.

  The wind picked up and Reginald stumbled against him. With a furtive two-fingered jab, he displaced the hat.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Reginald said, racing after the man’s hat, which had begun to roll. When he returned, he held it out to him. “Are you all right?”

  The official regarded Reginald with a contemptuous ice-blue stare before snatching his shapka back and pulling it over his head, bald save for a few combed-over wisps of white hair. He resumed his stomping journey to the far side of the street, glaring back at Reginald once before heading north, probably to one of the Eastern Bloc embassies.

  At the closest bus stop—empty, thankfully—Reginald sat and pulled a newspaper from his briefcase. It was risky changing out in the open like this, but sometimes a crowd of time-pressed commuters hid you just as well as seclusion. When the transformation was complete, he waited another minute before lowering the paper. He peeked to either side, then at the mirror inside his briefcase. The official he had just passed looked back at him. He made his eyes paler, then practiced the cold stare.

  In front of the embassy, Reginald mashed the button on the intercom. The black box crackled.

  “Da?” a voice inquired.

  In training, they had studied Russian until the last vestiges of their accents melted away and they could pass for native speakers. Reginald had scored near the top of the class, second only to Madelyn, whose Russian was flawless. But he hadn’t heard the man speak. He didn’t know his tone.