Bex turned to the first page and read the opening line: “‘I suppose a lot of teenage girls feel invisible sometimes, like they just disappear…’”
“What is that?” Zach asked, and I shook my head. It felt so strange that he could know me and not know those words.
“It’s a report,” I said. “About what happened fall semester, sophomore year.”
I’d written those words so long before, they felt almost like ancient history. I wasn’t embarrassed, I realized, because in so many ways they had been written by another girl.
A silly girl.
A naive girl.
A girl who missed her father and longed for a normal life.
I didn’t want normal anymore. Right then, I was willing to settle for life. Period.
“I brought a fake ID and an old CoveOps report to Rome. To sleep,” I said, bewildered.
“No.” Preston shook his head. “After a week or so you woke up and…” He trailed off, looked at us all in turn. “You were here, Cammie, because you said you needed to rob a bank.”
Chapter Twenty-six
The piazza was busy late the next afternoon. We stared down at it from the roof of a building across the way. I knew where the pigeons went when they scattered and what gelato stores were popular with tourists and which ones the locals preferred. But despite six hours of staring at la Banca dell’Impero, I still had no idea if I’d been there over my summer vacation. Or why.
All I really knew were the options.
Option one: forget what we’d heard and go back to school. Option two: call the CIA, the Marines, MI6, and the entire alumni association of the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women, and in the process, call a whole lot of attention to ourselves. Option three: we could watch and we could wait.
So option three was what we did.
“Guard change,” Bex said, her eyes never moving from the binoculars that had been a permanent part of her face for hours. Townsend made a note, and I remembered the immortal advice of Joe Solomon that, at its heart, being a spy is boring.
The older I got, the smarter my teachers became.
“Where’s Zach?” I asked.
“Working,” Townsend said from behind us.
“I want to work,” I told him. “Why can’t we work?”
“We are working, Cam,” Bex reminded me. “Just…safely.” Bex raised the binoculars again, and I thought about how neither she nor Macey had let me out of their sight all day. (I did, however, draw the line when Bex tried to handcuff herself to me before we napped that morning.)
It had been a full-time mission just staring down at the cobblestones, and I couldn’t help but remember that this too would pass. I wasn’t going to spend forever looking. Eventually, I had to get off that roof.
But I was still there an hour later when Zach and Preston climbed over the ladder that ran to the fire escape at the roof’s edge.
“You got it?” Townsend asked.
“Yes, sir,” Zach said, and I found it more than a little disturbing how fantastically the two of them were getting along. They were all monosyllables and perfect posture. I slumped against the stone railing, tired and annoyed.
“Don’t mind me,” I said. “I’m just the person who tried to rob the place last July.”
“No, you didn’t,” Abby said, appearing on the roof. She was wearing a trim suit and tall black boots. Her hair was pulled into a sleek ponytail at the nape of her neck, and either I was imagining things or Townsend wasn’t quite as good a spy as I thought, because I could have sworn I saw him drool a little.
Note to self: your aunt is a hottie.
“There was no break-in at that bank.” The cool wind blew the ponytail, splaying dark tresses across Abby’s fair skin, but she didn’t move to brush the hair away as she turned to look at Townsend. “If Cammie, or well…Summer Cammie…came to Rome to visit that bank—”
“It was that one,” Preston insisted, but Abby talked on.