Free Spy to the Rescue by Jonathan Bernstein

not.
    I glance around the lobby. Little Lucien is still flailing around. Joanna is still trying to catch him. Alex is deep in conversation with the security guards. She’s making big extravagant hand gestures and the guards look like they want to retreat behind the pillars. I make my way back to the elevators. When the first gold door opens, I hop inside. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the elevator are mirrored. I see a million plucky young spies trying to look like we’re ready for anything. I press gold button number thirty-nine. Nothing happens. The doors remain open. I try again.
    â€œYou need one of these,” says Sam Gunnery, standing in front of me holding up a white plastic key card, and grinning as if to let me know that he knows something about me. Something secret.

CHAPTER TWELVE
Son of a Gunnery
    â€œT he cards are embedded with a code that changes on a daily basis,” says Sam Gunnery. “So they don’t fall into the wrong hands.”
    The Sam Gunnery facing me between the gold elevator doors is not the same slightly sappy, eager-to-please, perfect son who feared I might have been offended by his offer to carry my backpack. He’s not the same boy who hung on his mother’s every word in the SUV. He’s a different guy. I don’t know much about him, but I do know one thing. He’s waiting for me to say “So how did you get one?”
    He looks in the mirror behind me.
    â€œSecurity,” he says.
    I look over his shoulder. There’s a guard approaching.
    He steps inside and swipes the card across a scanner above the gold number buttons. The doors slide shut. He does not press another button. We’re not moving. There is silence in the elevator between me, this version of Sam Gunnery, and our million reflections.
    â€œI knew,” he says. “I knew from your face when you saw us all at JFK. I knew when you started in on Alex about your lifelong obsession with the Dominion Brothers Building. I knew when you sent the frère into sugar shock. You’re not here to hang out with Jojo. You’re here for something else. Something that involves this,” he says, holding the key card close to my face and then pulling it away.
    â€œYou don’t know anything,” I say. I don’t like what’s happening here. I don’t like the way he’s talking to me. I don’t like that he made me think he was one thing and now he turns out to be quite another. And obviously I don’t like that he has something I want. Most of all, I don’t like that I am now forced to gesture to the plastic key card in his hand and utter the words, “So how did you get one?”
    He raises a finger in the air, takes out his phone, scrolls through a few texts, and then sends a couple of replies. I have no doubt he is doing this to demonstrate that he currently has the upper hand. Now, I don’t think he does have the upper hand. I think my spy background gives me the way upper hand. But that self-same spy training reminds me that the Sam Gunnery pretending to be engrossed in his phone is not the sappy Sam Gunnery I thought I knew. So in fact, right now neither of us has the upper hand. I wait patiently for him to slip his phone back into his pocket.
    He gives me an oh, you’re still here? smirk. Holding the key card between forefinger and thumb, he says, “Someone did me a favor because I did them a favor. And now I’m in a position to do you a favor, which I really want to do. But first I need to know what you can do for me.”
    I feel like applauding Sam Gunnery the way Casey, Kelly, and Nola applauded me when they believed I was feigning innocence over the whole rival party thing. Except Sam Gunnery is really good. The guy his family believes him to be and the cocky, cool, calculating hustler wondering how best to exploit me are two radically different humans.
    I could just kick the card out of his hand. I have a really good,