Dreams of the Golden Age (Golden Age 2)

She waited, again. The air felt much colder without Teddy’s arm around her. She had to think about that, what it meant, and what her answer was going to be. They were trying to fight crime, she didn’t want to think about fancy gowns and awkward school dances.

She imagined how disappointed he’d look if she told him no, and she didn’t want that either. God, why’d he have to bring that up tonight? Couldn’t he have waited until daylight when both of them were dressed like normal people? No, he had to wait until he was dressed as Ghost, because then he had all the courage.

Tracking his progress, she followed him up the fire escape to the third floor, where Judge Roland had his home office. Teddy phased through the wall, which meant he didn’t trigger the burglar alarm, which was wired to the doors and windows. Anna held her phone closer, in case he needed her.

She’d about decided he didn’t need her help at all when her phone vibrated, and she clicked it on. “Rose, hey Rose.”

“Yeah,” she pressed the button and answered.

“There’s a safe in here, I reached in and managed to phase a bunch of papers out, but I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

“Anything that looks like a bank deposit slip, anything that shows a lot of round numbers in a column. Lots of zeros,” she reminded him.

“It all has lots of zeros,” he said, plaintive.

She sighed. “Then just take pictures of it all. You remembered to put on your gloves, right?”

“Of course I did.”

She checked in with Judge Roland—still out and not anywhere near the town house. They were safe, with time to spare. Teddy was rushing down the fire escape, still invisible, and she mentally tracked his progress.

“Boo!” his voice burst, right next to her.

Unflinching, she glared at the place he was standing. “I can sense where you are, you know.”

He flashed visible and looked crestfallen. “One of these days I’m going sneak up on you.”

“Right,” she said. “Let’s get out of here before somebody spots us.”

They took off their jackets and masks, shoved them into their packs, transforming them back into normal teenagers who probably shouldn’t have been out this late but who probably wouldn’t get called on it. Five blocks away, they found a bus, and from there went to the Internet café they’d used before. Open twenty-four hours—Anna had checked. She gratefully ordered a coffee and gripped it tight to warm up her hands.

They found a booth in back of the café and made sure not to talk too loud. She scrolled through the pictures on Teddy’s phone, e-mailed them to herself, and used one of the Internet kiosks to print out the most likely looking documents of the bunch. The images were mostly not too blurry.

From a distance, the pages that Teddy arranged on the table looked like homework. Anna took a glance around the café, which was doing a pretty brisk business for ten o’clock at night. The patrons were diverse, from the punk-looking guys at the counter to the scattered nondescript blue-collar types getting off one shift or another. A pair of uniformed cops occupied a booth at the far end of the shop, and Anna’s heartbeat sped up. But they weren’t paying any attention to her, and she quickly turned away.

Did this ever get less stressful? Her grandmother never struck her as someone who’d spent a significant amount of her life stressed out—so how did you be a superhero without freaking out every time you saw a cop? Yet another thing to work on.

Teddy unhappily shook his head at the spread of pages. “I have no idea if this is going to do us any good. Wow, does that much money even exist?” He pointed at the number on what must have been a retirement account statement.

Anna turned the sheet around and looked at it. The amount wasn’t that big—well, not West Corp big. Anna had a rough idea what her mother’s company was worth, and this was a drop in that bucket. But she didn’t say that. She bit her lip and didn’t say a word about how much her family was worth. Teddy was at Elmwood on a scholarship.

Compared to the average, Judge Roland made a good living, a good annual salary as a judge for the city court. She’d looked up how much he ought to be making so she’d be able to compare, and the first few bank statements and the retirement account Teddy had commented on—for a city pension fund—lined up with that. Nothing looked unusual.

Until she got to a second set of statements. Foreign bank transfers and accompanying records. Roland might have had a good explanation for having this; she didn’t know enough to be able to tell. But did one guy, even a high-ranking city judge, really ever make three six-figure money transfers in the space of two weeks? All after the date of Scarzen’s arrest?

“I think this is it.” She showed Teddy, who studied the page with a blank look. She couldn’t tell if he understood. “Trust me, this is it.”

“How do you even know this stuff?” Teddy said.

“I don’t know. Osmosis or something.” Every school day, her whole life, she’d go to her mother’s office and give her report. Used to be, she’d spend more than a scant few seconds there, trying to detach from the situation as quickly as she could. Used to be, her mother would have her work spread everywhere, printouts with arcane lists of numbers, highlighted with colors or marked with bold, and Anna would ask, “What’s that?” And Celia never said, “It’s nothing, never mind.” Celia always told her, showing her what the pages were and what they did. She never learned what a balance sheet was, she always just knew. Her and Bethy both, but Bethy was the one who’d probably follow in Celia’s footsteps and take over the business.

Anna never thought she’d actually need to know what a financial statement was. But suddenly she did, and she knew these looked squirrelly. Mom would know what the oddness meant. The judge had never been investigated—he’d never needed to be. He was smart enough to pay his taxes and not flaunt the windfall that exceeded his income. But a large amount of money was tucked away, waiting for retirement in another country.

She put the suspicious pages on top of the stack, shoved the whole thing into an envelope, and left the coffee shop for the Eye’s offices. Before handing it off to Teddy, Anna included a note in the package signed in large, anonymous block letters: “Espionage.”

Teddy looked at it. “That’s it? That’s our team name? They’ll think it’s one person, not a team.”

“Better to throw them off our track, right?” she said, grinning.