Dropping Like Spies - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Nineteen

I snapped my eyes up to his.  A flame had been flicked on beneath me, causing something to boil up underneath my skin, rising and rising until eventually I had to scream.  “No!  As a matter of fact, I don’t trust you.”

“Of course you don’t.  That would be too easy, right?”

“I was under the impression that Matt would be my partner,” I said, demanding answers.  Demanding explanations.  Demanding anything from him that wasn’t thinly veiled sarcasm. 

Collins sat forward again, leaning his arms up against the table.  Madame Baudin would’ve shrieked if she could see him, but she couldn’t.  We weren’t at school.  This wasn’t a training exercise.  This was an actual op with actual consequences and so when Collins said, “Listen,” I shut my mouth and I listened.  “Your brother blends in, right?  Pavement Artist and all that.”

I nodded.  The mention of Pavement Artists made me homesick in a way that I had never known before.  For Matt.  For Dad.  For my mother.  Just like that, the flame beneath me flickered off and I felt far too cold. 

Collins waited a moment before starting again and for a second I was worried that he saw it.  The sadness.  The cold.  But there was no way Luke Collins could get a read on me.  “You aren’t that way,” he said finally. “Not even a little bit.  You are the dictionary definition of standing out.”

He’d said it like it was a compliment, but in a spy’s life, it’s really the exact opposite.  I wanted to argue, mostly because it was Collins, and that’s what I did with Collins.  We would argue until we were both blue in the face and then we’d argue some more. 

But then I remembered a conversation in the shadows of MI6.  The boy who had joined me in London and claimed to live and die by the truth.  He was right and I couldn’t deny it.  I stood out.  I grabbed the attention.  “So… what?” I said.  “Matt retrieves whatever it is you’re here to get while you and I…?”

“Distract the guests,” he finished with a nod.  As he went on, it was almost like we forgot that we hated each other and I came to realize exactly how long it had been since anyone had talked to me like I was an equal.  Who would have thought that Collins would be the one to do it?  “You and I arrive at the ball with that invitation”—he pointed to a piece of cardstock in my file, rimmed with gold—“and I unlock the back door to let Matt in.”

“That’s it?” I asked, doubting that the way into an Ambassadors’ Ball could be so simple.  “A back door?”

“There’s always a back door, Goode,” he said with an excited grin.  As if he were sharing the best secret in the world with me.  “Especially since the threat isn’t coming from the outside.”

“An inside threat?” I asked, my voice taking on the same eager tone.  “You mean, like, a rouge Ambassador?”

He sat back like he’d just realized who he was talking to, debating how much he could really say.  “That’s classified,” he told me.  “But yes.”

“So you and Matt are there to stop them?”

“The three of us are stopping a trade, yes.”

“Trade of what?”

“Now that really is classified,” he told me, which was fair.  He and I both knew that I’d already been told more than I should have.  “Once we open the back door, Matt finds his way up to the study while we distract the guests.  So I hope you like dancing.”

He did that half-grin thing again and I could tell that he was in on one of my most shameful secrets.  I, Morgan Goode, am a terrible dancer and Collins knew it, which only made me despise him again.  “I’m going to kill my brother—and how did you two get this gig anyways?  Stopping the illegal trade of an ambassador sounds like it’s above your pay grade.”