Chapter Twenty-Seven
It was a trap. It was a trap. It was a trap.
The words echoed in my mind, keeping rhythm with my feet as the hit the ground.
"Bex!" I yelled as I ran through the tall trees that grew up around the roller coaster. Far above me, people were flying through the sky, but down below, there was only static in my comms unit, and the rough ground that no tourist was ever supposed to see. I hurtled over spotlights and dodged cables as I bolted to the top of a hill, not once allowing myself to think of Mr. Solomon or the woman of Agent Townsend. I just kept running - toward the lake, toward the fence, toward help.
It was a trap.
At the top of the hill I could hear the sounds of the park floating across the lake. All I had to do was keep running, keep fighting, but then I saw them - the agents who had been in the crowd all day - watching my every move. They were descending through the woods -
emerging form behind the tall trees and the roller coaster's massive pillars, rushing past me.
Past me?
Not a soul tried to usher me to safety. And in that moment I knew that they weren't protectors. They were hunters. And me? I was the bait.
It was a trap.
I heard footsteps behind me, hard and fast.
"Zach," I called to the boy who was running toward me.
"Where is he?" Zach yelled, out of breath. I lunged forward and grabbed him. "Let me go, Gallagher Girl. I have to -"
"Do you want them to take you too?" I shouted, shaking him. When he stopped fighting I held him tighter. "They have him, Zach." I heard my mother's words coming back to me.
"He's gone."
Mr. Solomon lay on the ground in the clearing below, bloody and bound, while agents still swarmed from all directions. I remember how, once on a helicopter en route to Ohio, Mr. Solomon had told us that often the hardest thing an operative can do is nothing.
Standing there that day, I knew that it was true - that Joe Solomon was always right.
"Stupid!" Zach yelled. He banged him hand hard against the truck of a tree, and I couldn't tell whether the hand of the tree for the worst of it. He turned to me. "What happened?"
"CoveOps exercise. I tailed a man here. And then Mr. Solomon was there, talking about the Circle, saying I was in danger. And then there was a woman. I thought she was the woman form Boston."
"That wasn't her, Cammie."
"I know that know."
He grasped my shoulders. I could see a kind of fear settle into his eyes as he whispered,
"There's no way Joe Solomon would ever be with her."
The roller coaster roared overhead, and I felt the ground vibrate beneath my feet.
"Why would he come here?" I asked. "It was a trap. Joe Solomon walked into a trap."
Believe it or not, of all things I'd seen and heard since London, that was what surprised me most of all.
"You." Zach sounded almost amazed that I did know. "If he thought you were going to be here - virtually unprotected . . . There's nowhere he wouldn't go to save you."
"Why would he do that?" I snapped, trying to pull away, but he just held me tighter.
"That doesn't make any -"
"It's in the journal, Cammie." Zach's gaze bore into mine. "It's all in the journal."