Nick burst back into the room. “You’ve got to leave the building, Teddy. Now.”
“Leave? What?” She couldn’t process what was happening. She couldn’t think. Molly. Molly had fallen. Dara had tried to warn her, and she had gone ahead anyway.
“Teddy. You have to focus.” He grabbed her arm. “Someone called in a bomb threat. The building’s being evacuated.”
A bomb threat? Teddy felt her heart drop into her stomach. Had Dara called and done that to buy time? A signal to get Teddy out of the building? They were so far off-plan that Teddy had no idea what to do next. She desperately needed to check her phone. Make contact. Get back to the hotel room. Regroup.
“There’s a bar in the hotel across the street,” Nick said. “Wait for me. We’re not finished talking.”
Teddy’s heart dropped six stories to street level, where moments ago everything still seemed possible.
CHAPTER FORTY
TEDDY JOINED THE STREAM OF employees and visitors filing out of the FBI building. She blinked, trying to rid her mind of the image of Molly’s fall. When she opened her eyes, she surveyed the chaos. People running and shouting. Flashing lights and loudspeakers. Police officers warning everyone to stand back. In the midst of all this, Teddy saw two men wearing vests that said Bomb Squad, leading German shepherds toward the building. Teddy shook off her panic. She needed to focus if she didn’t want to call attention to herself.
Who had phoned in the bomb threat? That wasn’t adding up. It was too much of a coincidence. She remembered what Nick had told the class when they started their casework: Never dismiss coincidences.
They had almost secured the file when the alarm had gone off. She clung to the hope that Dara had been the one to create the diversion. She texted: All okay??? Molly???
The second Teddy pressed send, her phone lit up with a call.
“Teddy.” Dara’s voice was ragged. “I tried to stop her, but she insisted—”
“I saw. Is she—?” Teddy couldn’t say the words.
“She’s unconscious,” Dara said. “Pyro found a pulse. But we have to get her to a hospital.”
“Where are you?”
“The alley behind the hotel. We’re all here. Pyro, Jillian . . . and Molly. Jeremy, too. I don’t know how he found us, but I’m glad he did. He got us off the roof when the FBI closed the hotel. Fire escape and everything. He’s the one who had rappelling gear. But—”
“I’m on my way.” Molly was alive. She was still alive.
“Teddy, it’s bad. Really bad. There are agents everywhere. Cops, too.”
“That’s what happens when you call in a bomb threat.”
“I didn’t! God, why would I do that?”
“I thought maybe to buy more time.” She hesitated a second before she asked Dara one last question. The question she didn’t want to ask, the one that would make the mission salvageable. What was the point of risking everything if they hadn’t gotten what they’d come for? “Dara—did Molly locate the video file?”
Dara paused. “She did.”
Teddy let out a sigh of relief. “I’ll be there soon.”
“Teddy, there’s something I have to tell you—”
“It can wait. We have the file, we have Molly—”
“Molly dropped her laptop when she fell. The file . . . it’s gone.”
* * *
Teddy wove through the crowd, down Polk Street, and around the back of the Embassy Hotel. The file was gone. All that planning, all that work, had been for nothing. And the cost had been so great. Molly had survived the fall, but did Dara’s vision predict later complications? It was as if the wails of police sirens and fire trucks went silent. The only sound Teddy heard was her heart, thudding to the repeated question: What have I done?
A pair of rough man’s hands grabbed her, shaking her out of her stupor. Teddy struggled against his hands and landed an elbow in his chest. He was yelling, but Teddy still couldn’t register individual words, couldn’t understand what he was saying. He released her. And suddenly, the world was back to full volume.
“Teddy, relax. It’s me.”
Pyro.
Teddy looked and saw Dara standing nearby, fidgeting with her silver bracelets. Jeremy was sitting near a fire escape, his face blank. Then Teddy saw Jillian, face blotchy, stooped over Molly. Molly on the ground of the alley. Pyro’s navy hoodie, stuffed underneath her head as a pillow. Her head was bleeding, her wrist already swollen.
Oh, God.
Teddy bent down closer, reached out to touch Molly’s face.
“We didn’t want to move her,” Dara said. “But Pyro checked. Broken wrist. And she hit her head, but—”
“We have to get out of here now,” Pyro said. “The longer we wait, the harder it’s going to be.”
Teddy’s gaze was on Molly. Her pale face, her broken body.
“Teddy,” Pyro said.
“What?”
Teddy knew she should be focusing on next steps, but she still was struggling to understand what happened, how it had all gone wrong. “Did you call this in?” Teddy said.
“Hell, no,” said Pyro. “You think we wanted this kind of shit storm? Cops everywhere? We were trying to keep a low profile.”
“So someone called a bomb threat to both the hotel and the FBI building?”
“Probably not some random asshole, though,” Pyro put in.
Other than the Misfits, the only person who knew that Teddy had planned to retrieve the file was Yates. But he didn’t know when or how. And it was in his interest that the mission succeed.
Teddy forced her thoughts back to the immediate crisis. They couldn’t sneak into the hotel room. Staying in the alley until the threat passed wasn’t an option, either. Eventually, someone—hotel security, a cop, or an FBI agent—would spot them. Each second they wasted put their safety and Molly’s life in danger. They needed to get out of the alley and onto the boat as quickly as possible.
“There are a couple of police officers at the other end of the alley,” Pyro said. He turned to Teddy. “Do you think you can convince them nothing’s happening?”
Teddy nodded. She’d never influenced two people at once before, but she could try. She
