Well, that explained one thing, because covert I'm good at. Invisible I'm good at. Hot I am totally not good at.
I pushed through the crowds again, knowing that it was getting later and later, and I couldn't help worrying more and more. Flashes of Boston went through my mind. I closed my eyes and shuddered, saw an almost identical crowd, felt that almost identical feeling.
"Bookworm, Duchess," I started, but then I stopped because I didn't have a clue how that sentence was supposed to end.
"Any sign of them?" I asked instead.
"No buses," Liz told me from her vantage point by the window.
"No sign at the east entrance. Wait," Bex said, stopping short.
The feeling of the crowd was changing. An energy so palpable was coursing through the old historic station that I looked out the massive windows at the cloudy sky, half expecting lightning.
"Oh my gosh," Liz exclaimed, echoing Bex's surprise.
"What?" I said out loud, not caring if anyone noticed. I spun, looking at the station's main entrance, but then I felt the crowd shift behind me. I turned slowly and realized there was no bus. There was no convoy.
Instead, a long, ancient-looking train with old-fashioned red, white, and blue bunting hanging from the caboose was slowly moving into the station.
In the next instant it didn't matter how great our comms units were, because the cry that came up from five hundred rabid voters was enough to drown out even the sound of my best friends' voices in my ear.
Governor Winters and Macey's dad stepped out onto the stage behind the caboose, and then their wives. Macey and Preston were one step behind them.
I waited for the fear in my stomach to subside. I told myself I was crazy. After all, Macey was smiling. She was waving. She was the perfect operative with the perfect cover. Aunt Abby was beside her. She was fine.
For a second a wave of relief like nothing I'd ever known swept over me. But then the crowd shifted, and for a split second my gaze fell on a man,
A man with crazy white hair and wild eyebrows.
A man I had seen before.
In Boston.
Chapter Eighteen
It didn't mean it was something. Odds were, it was probably nothing. After all, there were probably a lot of people who went to political conventions and political rallies. And the Secret Service was there—the Secret Service was good.
Still, I didn't know what was scarier, that I'd seen a man in the crowd who I'd literally bumped into on the very day my roommate had been attacked, or that—just that quickly—the familiar face had vanished.
"Duchess!" I practically shouted, but the crowd was too loud, the race too close, and the people who wanted the Winters-McHenry ticket to win on Election Day were too fired up as I called through our comms units for my friends. "Duchess, there was a guy … in a suit …" I climbed the main staircase to better scan the platform, and that's where I realized that I'd just described half of the clapping crowd. "A dark suit," I added. "Crazy-looking white hair.
Wild eyebrows. Mustache," I rattled off identifying characteristics as quickly as I could think of them.
The Operative realized that incredibly high heels made it very hard to pursue people quickly across very slick floors!
The band played. People drank. And where the train stood at the end of the platform, I saw the face again. I recognized something in the way he moved, and my mind flashed back to the hotel lobby in Boston while the Texas delegation sang.
And then I glanced at the train and saw Aunt Abby standing in the wings, ten feet from Macey and exactly where she was supposed to be. And the white-haired man moved closer.
I didn't know how to describe him, and that was maybe the most notable thing of all. He was just moving through the crowd as if there were someplace else he had to be. Call me crazy, but I couldn't shake the feeling that no one pays $20,000 to leave in the middle of the main event.
I hurried through the crowd as quickly as I dared without A) falling down, and B) attracting attention. And I was doing pretty well at both, until a waiter picked that moment to lose his grip on a tray of champagne. As the glasses fell, I sidestepped and spun.
And ran right in to Preston Winters.
"Oh, I'm so sorry!" he exclaimed, gripping me by the shoulders as if I were about to fall down. (Which I wasn't, but he probably didn't need to know that I've had entire sections of Protection and Enforcement class dedicated to helping an operative keep her balance.) "Are you okay? Can I get you some…punch … or something?"
"I'm fine, thank you, though," I said as I ran through the mental checklist of things that were going wrong at that moment, forgetting the most troublesome thing of all.
"Have we met before?" Preston asked, looking at me in a way that said that, despite the long black wig and tight black dress, there was something way too familiar about me.
"No, I don't believe we have," I said in my best Southern accent. I tried to pull away. The man was easing down the length of the train and into the stone tunnel from which it had emerged, and I just stood there thinking about my options.
The Operative regretted not packing Dr. Fibs's new Band- Aid-style Napotine patches. She also regretted not packing some regular Band-Aids, because her shoes really did hurt her feet.
Preston's father stood on a makeshift stage behind the caboose of the old-fashioned train—a physical homage to better times—and told the crowd, "We're going to get America back on track!" The crowd cheered, but I was too busy listening to two voices. One belonged to the boy in front of me, who was asking, "I know, you were at the Atlanta rally, weren't you?" The other buzzed in my ear as