A Girl Named Digit by Annabel Monaghan

flicker behind his eye that told me that he was delighted. Over the past few years, it had been painful for him to watch me hide out. As much as he wanted me to have a fun and normal life, I wondered if he felt the strain of the charade as much as I had. My gift is much like his and has always been a serious source of bonding between us. I always suspected that he felt like he’d lost me during those years that I pretended it didn’t exist. At this moment I could tell he was proud that I had been right, and he was proud that I was being taken seriously by the freakin’ FBI. Mom, not so much.
    “So, you’re telling me there’s an organization of terrorists out there who now wants to off my daughter for having added up some numbers on the television?” She was incredulous.
    “She broke their code, yes. But they could easily make up another one. And they can find another way of disseminating their messages. It’s more that Farrah can positively identify this guy. He must be higher up in the organization than we believe if he wasn’t told to just slam his car into hers, killing them both. They must need him for something . . .” John clued in to the fact that he was freaking my parents out. “We may never know what. But we are prepared to protect Farrah at all costs.” Nice save.
    “You are going to rip Farrah out of school at the end of her senior year so that she can live holed up in some FBI hideout . . . My God! It’s only two weeks till the prom!”
    John jumped in. “The agent assigned to the case will have the support of the entire Terrorist Task Force to keep Farrah safe, but they will be more or less camping out until this is over. We are convinced that your daughter is in extreme danger and that she needs to be hidden until this terror ring is disbanded and, well, we think her gifts would be of great use to us in making that happen.”
    Shoulders back. I’m da man. Dad caught my eye and winked at me.
    “Can’t you at least put her up in a hotel while she’s hiding? The Peninsula has a great reputation for service, and the spa is . . .”
    John cut her off and managed to stay completely professional. “The terror cell in question has very little regard for the safety of innocent bystanders. Putting a target in a hotel would be endangering everyone in the vicinity. We must keep her in a remote, secure, and substantially less luxurious location.”
    Steven jumped in with, “And we are going to have to do more than hide her. If Farrah vanishes, they will know that we have her and they will come after you for leverage.”
    Mom had had enough. “So, how do you suggest we hide her and protect ourselves at the same time? Do we all go into hiding? This is ridiculous.”
    “No, Mrs. Higgins, we have to fake a kidnapping. They’ll think one of their own people took her. It might buy us enough time to find them.”
    John immediately picked up on the plan, like this was something they did all the time. “Jonas Furnis is very careful about direct communication within the organization, as they know that the FBI and every major government are tracking them. They generally operate by communicating with high-level spies that they have placed in key government jobs and then use that person as a central hub of information. Even that communication is coded to an absurd degree. Our hope is that their communications are convoluted enough that they won’t figure out that none of them has kidnapped Farrah before we can find them. We will send police and press to your house in the morning. We will send an agent to spend the night with you in case there is any activity before then. Unfortunately, there won’t be time to get Farrah a change of clothes before we go into hiding . . .”
    “That won’t be a problem,” Mom said, rolling her eyes at me and my uniform.
    “This shouldn’t take more than a week, during which time you two are to play the distraught parents of a kidnapped teen.”
    Dad elbowed Mom.