Free Sealed with a Lie by Kat Carlton Page A

portfolio to carry. It weighs a ton. “What’s in here?” I ask. Whatever it is, it’s metal and clanks.
    “You’ll find out soon enough.”
    He holds the door open for us, and we make our way out of the Augustiner Bräu as different people. The place is filling up as the afternoon goes on, and nobody notices us, not even our waitress, who’s already picked up the euros we left on the table.
    We walk north toward the Karlsplatz so that we can get lost among the people thronging the Christmas market set up there—row after row of colorful, packed-to-bursting stalls featuring handmade ornaments, sweets, trinkets, stuffed toy bears, hedgehogs, dolls, and othersouvenirs. Evan tells us that in the summertime there’s a large fountain in the center of the square, but I have a hard time picturing it.
    The festive holiday atmosphere seems all wrong to me, with Charlie kidnapped and my parents halfway across the world, doing God only knows what. The stares of the carved wooden Kriss Kringles seem accusatory, the brown noses of the teddy bears ingratiating, the smiles of the too-blond dolls synthetic . . . they all tell me that Christmas is a fairy tale that I’ll never enjoy again.
    Yet I walk on with Matthis and Evan, praying for a miracle. Everyone else can have their tinsel, their trees, their stockings, and piles of gifts. All I want on December 25 is Charlie, safe with me back at the Paris Institute.
    We walk quite a ways before we find what we’re looking for: an unremarkably beige older-model Mercedes wagon that’s conveniently unlocked and parked on a quiet side street. It’s the perfect car to borrow, and its half tank of gas will get us to Murnau am Staffelsee with no problem.
    It’s an uneventful journey south through the white, snowy hills for about seventy kilometers to Murnau. The main street of the old town is a living, breathing postcard, an advertisement for the charm of German villages. There are cobblestones and quaint shops, timbered inns and cafés wafting woodsmoke from their chimneys, and microbreweries rich with polished wood and shiny copper tanks. There are bakeries burstingwith pastries and confections. I see a little chocolate shop and think, with a pang, of Charlie.
    Evan, full of odd information—who knows where he gets it?—tells us that it was once a spa town and the home of Der Blaue Reiter, a famous modern art movement. It seems to me that it’s a strange place for a juvenile detention facility, but then Evan goes on to say that Murnau was also the site of a prison camp during the Second World War. Maybe they turned the facility into a juvie jail. Who knows?
    We ditch the car outside a Tengelmann, a German grocery franchise, then walk a few blocks before checking into a tiny timber-framed gasthaus (German for bed-and-breakfast). It’s a few blocks away from the juvie facility, which is a big, beige concrete structure surrounded by chain-link fence with loops of razor wire around the top.
    “Cozy,” Evan pronounces it.
    I’d call it intimidating, myself. I have no idea how we’re getting in there—I hope Rita’s uncovered some helpful information on their security.
    We sign into the gasthaus under assumed names, with another of Evan’s credit cards and passports. He gets one room for Matthis and him and a separate one for me that’s right next door.
    I ask Evan if he’s concerned that GI—or the bad guys, for that matter—may be tracing us through the credit cards and passports.
    He gives me an angelic look. “They can’t trace what they don’t know about.”
    “But . . . then where did you get them?”
    “Got my ways and means, love.”
    It’s his standard answer. I shouldn’t be surprised that Evan has somehow obtained multiple fake identities not issued by GI.
    I throw open the door to my room. Ditching the heavy portfolio, I collapse on the big bed, exhausted, just as my cell phone rings. The ID says only “private caller.” Wearily, I pull off my blond