“Yeah, he was in on it. But how does that change you wanting to bring down Alpha?”
I jump back. “My father was a bad person! I can’t just get over that!”
There’s shouting right below us, and footsteps pound up the stairs. Before I can even think, three men tear up the stairs to our landing. They’re all wearing suits with skinny black ties and horn-rimmed glasses and have FBI written all over them. Yellow and I exchange one panicked glance, and then we’re surrounded.
“Who are you?” one demands.
“How did you get in here?”
Shit. When are we? When did I project to?
Yellow drops to her knees and holds up her hands. “I’m sorry, sirs,” she says with a convincing mock sob. “I just . . . I’m such a fan of the president’s . . . I had to see. I dragged my friend.”
“Get up!” the man in the middle says. “You both should be arrested. This is an active crime scene.”
“I’m sorry,” Yellow wails.
The man on the left grabs her and spins her against the wall, then pats her down. The man on the right comes over to me, and I hold up my hands in submission. He pats me down.
“Clear,” he says.
“I’ve got this,” the man holding Yellow says. He tosses Alpha’s notebook to the third man. Yellow looks at me with terrified eyes.
The man flips through it. “What’s this?”
“My notes from a home economics class at school,” Yellow says without missing a beat.
The man raises an eyebrow. “There’s an entry right here for June 17, 1998. HY. Eight point five. What’s that got to do with home economics, missy?”
Yellow clears her throat. “It’s an advanced sewing class. We’re trying to predict what fashion is going to look like in the future based on past trends. HY stands for Hiro Yu. He’s a Japanese fashion designer who’s currently creating some very avant garde pieces. I’m going to base my design on his. Eight point five is what I need to set the bobbin to. It’s just a note.”
I blink. I’m speechless. She just completely pulled that from her ass and passed it off like it makes all the sense in the world. Yellow is hands-down the best liar I’ve ever met.
“Sounds like a waste of class time to me,” the man says. “You girls need to be learning cooking and cleaning and maybe some typing.”
Yellow bows her head. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“What you girls did was very foolish.” He juts his chin toward the men holding Yellow and me. “Escort them out.” Then he looks right at Yellow and hands her back the notebook. “Don’t you ever enter this building again.”
It’s a long, tense walk down six flights of stairs. We’re given another warning to stay away from the building and pitched out onto the street. Piles of flowers, some long dead, some fresh, litter the front of the book depository. There are at least a dozen people out front, some crying, some praying, some standing and staring.
“Holy crap,” Yellow breathes after the door slams shut in our faces. “That was way too close.”
There is nothing like nearly getting arrested to snap you back to reality. Was it really only a few minutes ago I was curled up in a ball in the stairwell?
“Eight point five is what you set the bobbin to?” I ask. “What does that even mean?”
Yellow shrugs. “No clue.”
“When are we?”
She looks at the people in front of the building, then grabs my arm and marches me away. “December 23, 1963. You turned the month dial forward once. Thank God I saw you do it. Now promise me you will never project without me.”
“Yellow, I—”
“Promise me!”
“I won’t project without you,” I say through gritted teeth.
“Tell me how things have changed.”
“What?” I push off her.
“Murder, Iris. Assassination. This thing with Alpha is worse than we thought. And did you ever stop to think that maybe this means the entire organization is corrupt? Including my dad?”
I—no. I didn’t.
She huffs. “I’m sorry you had to find out about your dad that way. Really, I am. But that just means we have to work even harder to stop it. Do you get that? We have to stop it. And I have no idea where to go from here. None. It’s you and me, floundering around in 1963. We need help, and I don’t know how to get it.”
I close my eyes. I have to focus. I don’t want to focus. I’m sick of putting on a strong face. I’ve been doing it my entire life. For once it would be nice if I could just lie down, curl into a ball, and cry. But the only way I’m ever going to be able to do that is if I end this. If we end this.
“I do,” I whisper.
Yellow’s head whips around. “Huh?”
“I know where we can get help. We need to go back to Massachusetts. Cambridge. MIT.”
CHAPTER 24
Neither Yellow nor I say much on the plane. I take the window seat and stare out of it the entire flight. I don’t want to think about my dad. It hurts too much. But my mind won’t stop replaying the moment when my dad mentioned the ten million dollars. When I discovered he orchestrated an assassination, only to be betrayed and murdered himself.
How many other kickbacks had he taken before that—gotten away with?
I know the truth, but I don’t want to believe it. It’s Alpha. It’s all Alpha. He corrupted my dad. Blackmailed him, maybe. My dad would not have done this on his own. Please let that be the truth.
I puke in a tiny, cramped airplane bathroom.
We’re climbing down the metal stairs onto the tarmac at Logan when I lean over to Yellow. “What happened to Beta?”
Yellow cranes her head around, and her face turns pained. “I don’t think you really want to know the answer to that, do you?”
“Tell me.”
Yellow sighs. “He committed suicide. Years ago. Probably not too long after . . . uh . . .”
“Committed suicide or got taken out just like my father did?”
Yellow presses her lips together.
“Whose father was Beta?”
She hesitates for a moment. “Green’s.”
I nod once. I never got a warm and fuzzy feeling from Green; but here we are, locked together in a mess of corruption and murder. He and I will be forever linked. And I’m kind of glad Beta got his due, all things told. He murdered my father.
Even if my father deserved it.
Maybe.
Probably.
I don’t know.
It’s a short cab ride from Logan to MIT, and I know exactly where I’m going now. Yellow pays the driver while I start walking, head down, toward the building in front of me. I hear Yellow take quick steps to catch up. We are the only two souls wandering the campus right now.
“Are you sure he’s going to be here?” Yellow looks down at her Annum watch. “It’s eight o’clock the day before Christmas Eve.”
“The man practically lives here,” I say. “Besides, Ariel’s Jewish, so it’s not like he’ll be rushing off to trim a tree or anything. He’ll be here.”
“But if he’s not?”
I sigh. “Then I know where he lives.” Although I’d like to avoid going to his house. I don’t know if I’d have the strength not to collapse into a puddle of tears and mourning in the living room.
We round the corner. The sky is dark, and a window on the fifth floor is illuminated. I point.
“Bet you anything that’s Ariel’s office.”
The front door is locked. I jiggle the handle a few times to make sure, but it doesn’t budge. Christmas holidays. Of course the door is locked. I don’t know what I was thinking. We’re going to have to break in.
I turn to tell Yellow, but she’s already standing in front of a first-floor window with a fallen tree branch. “Is there an alarm?”