"Liz," I said again, eyeing the rusty fender, "when you said you could get us a car… Liz, where did you get this car?"
"It's a project," she said simply, strapping herself into the backseat.
I pulled at the drivers-side door, and for a second I thought it would fall off its hinges. I looked at the seat. Stuffing was bursting through its fraying seams. The steering wheel was being held together almost entirely by duct tape.
"What kind of project?" I asked, almost afraid of the answer because something told me that pushing that van to Philadelphia wasn't really going to help our mission objectives.
"Oh, give me those," Bex said, grabbing the keys from my hand. She jammed them into the ignition and turned and then…nothing.
"Great!" I snapped. "It doesn't even work." But then I felt it. The car was running, but it was almost completely silent, almost completely still.
"New technology," Liz said with a shrug. "Dr. Fibs has been helping me. We've got it up to 250 miles per gallon now," she said, with only the teeniest hint of a gloating smile. "But I think I'll have it doing 325 by Christmas."
And who says Gallagher Girls on the research and operations track never get a chance to save the world?
We spent the next few hours in silence. Well, if by silence you mean that Liz was rattling on nonstop like she does when she's nervous, and Bex was totally tuning her out like she does when she's nervous. And me? I just drove, listening to the rain that started as we crossed the Pennsylvania border. The windshield wipers must not have been as high-tech as the engine because they stuck and stalled, leaving streaks across the glass that caught the light of passing headlights, and by the time we made it to Philadelphia, everything was a blur.
"Right turn," Liz said, navigating our way through narrow cobblestone streets. Buildings older than the Declaration of Independence rose into the rainy sky. Maybe I was expecting the noise of Ohio, the blockades and chaos of the convention, but instead we peered out the grimy windshield onto the slick black streets, and I couldn't help thinking that something felt…different.
"Are you sure this is the right place?" I asked. Liz leaned between the two front seats, but before she could act too insulted, we turned and saw a great stone building that covered two city blocks. Massive columns spanned its front entrance, so that it looked more like a Roman temple than a train station. And there, in the center of the façade, was a banner fifty feet long that read WINTERS-McHENRY: PUTTING AMERICA BACK ON TRACK.
The rain fell harder. Puddles collected on the sidewalks. And beside me, Bex said, "We're here."
Chapter Seventeen
Every mission is a lesson—in school and in life. And before we even reached the doors of the 30th Street station, I learned two very important things.
1. Getting dressed with two other girls in the back of a Dodge minivan should totally be worth extra credit in P&E.
2. Even if they are your best friends, you should never ever trust another operative to pack for you.
"I cannot believe I am wearing this," I muttered as I tugged at the hem of the little black dress Bex had personally smuggled out of Sub level Two. But it didn't feel like a dress. It felt like…torture. Torture with a very low back and very high shoes.
Stretch limousines were lined up outside the main stairs. Secret Service agents stood guard at every possible exit, but still Bex whispered, "The key to deception and disguise is to break with tendencies and norms."
And right then I knew that having genius friends who are really good at memorizing textbooks can sometimes be a very bad thing, because Bex was right: nothing about that dress was norm.
Still, I couldn't help saying, "Then you should be wearing it." But Bex just shrugged.
"I'd love to," she said. "And that's the problem."
Here's the thing you need to know about disguise: it's not about being unseen. It's not about being unnoticed. It's about being unrecognized—shedding your own skin. And right then I wasn't worried about the Secret Service or five hundred influential party donors. Right then our only concern was Aunt Abby: fooling her meant leaving our own identities in the van.
I glanced at Liz, whose long blond hair was hidden beneath a dark brown wig. Bex was wearing a wig too, plus glasses and a padded bodysuit that changed the natural silhouette of her athletic frame. We had used every trick in the Gallagher Academy closet, and as we passed the darkened windows of the station, I caught a glimpse of three strangers before realizing that, amazingly, they were us. I didn't even recognize myself under the wig, colored contacts, and fake nose that changed my forgettable face into one that…wasn't.
"Okay, gang," I said, "according to blueprints, there's an elevator access panel on the east side of the building. We may get a little dirty, but—"
"I thought we'd just go through the doors," Liz said, flashing three beautifully engraved invitations and some wonderfully authentic fake IDs.
The tickets were $20,000 each. The Secret Service had been vetting the guest list for weeks, so Bex and I stopped beneath a streetlamp and studied Liz.
"Do I even want to know where you got those?" I asked.
Liz seemed to ponder it, and then she said, "No."
And just like that I remembered that Liz was probably the most dangerous one of us all.
Stepping inside the station was like stepping inside another world. Beautiful carvings covered a ceiling that was at least fifty feet tall. A string quartet played from the second-story balcony, their music echoing off the stone floors, while five hundred men and women ate and drank and talked about the road to the White House.