Girl Undercover 8 & 9: Traitor & The Smiley Killer by Julia Derek Page B

badly he collapsed on the floor. For a few seconds, I was sure that I, too, had been shot, but then I understood that I hadn’t. That sudden burst of gunfire was what saved me instead.”
    “Was it a drive-by shooting of some kind?” I asked. My mind’s eye pictured the neighborhood we had just left. The shady characters hanging at the street corners. I wasn’t as familiar with New York as I was with Los Angeles, but it had sure looked like it could be a place where gangs fought it out.
    “Yes, I think so,” Nadja said. “After the gunfire ended, everyone in the room was confused. Running around, checking who’d been hit and who hadn’t. Apparently, both the governor and Burt were hurt enough for them to decide that they needed to take them to be patched up by their doctors—‘their doctors’ was how that bitch senator put it, like they had their own doctors or something.”
    Again, Ian’s and my gaze met. Nadja was too caught up in telling her story to notice.
    “Janine rolled me into a corner,” she continued, “saying that I wasn’t going anywhere. They could return after Burt and the governor had gotten medical attention so he could finish the job. Then she and the other man helped the governor to his feet. After that they all just left.”
    “Well, that explains all the blood stains in the apartment,” Ian said to me.
    “Yeah, it sure does,” I said to him, then faced Nadja. “So, to conclude, Burt’s execution of you was interrupted by this drive-by shooting. I think it’s safe to say that it was some kind of gang settlement.” I glanced at Ian and he nodded.
    “Yes, I can’t see what else it could have been,” he agreed.
    “You told me you were undercover at the club,” Nadja said, looking at me. “What are you investigating? These people? The governor and the senator? They’re involved in something majorly crooked, that’s for sure.”
    “Um, kind of,” I replied, not sure how to answer her question. Part of me wanted to tell her the truth—that I’d come to investigate my husband’s murder and that I’d done so without the permission of my superiors. But another part wanted to tell her what that had led to—the discovery of a secret, worldwide conspiracy that was in the process of changing the world as we knew it by filling it up with super humans and getting rid of the others. The ones who weren’t deemed good enough to be allowed to live. But first the “sub-standard” people would be used as slaves or for experiments. How did you tell someone something like that? I knew myself just how hard it was to buy a truth as extreme as that. You just didn’t. At least not until the evidence was so ample that you simply couldn’t ignore it any longer.
    “Kind of?” Nadja asked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “I think we need to get off here,” Ian said then, rescuing me from having to explain myself further right then. He got to his feet and motioned for us to do the same. The train slowed as it entered a station in midtown and then came to a full stop. I got to my feet and so did Nadja. Ian grabbed hold of both of us, ushering us toward one of the train’s exits. Soon, the three of us were walking on the platform, mingling with the other subway riders who had just left the train, surprisingly many considering that it was ten o’clock a weekday night.
    “Where are we going?” Nadja wanted to know.
    “For now, let’s just go to a diner or something where we can continue our conversation,” Ian said. He smiled at Nadja. “You must be starving.”
    Nadja returned his smile. “Actually, I’m not, but I’d better eat something anyway.”
    We left the subway station and came up on Lexington Avenue and forty-second street, which told me we were close to Grand Central Station. Ian spotted a cheap-looking diner at the other side of the street, so we walked over there and entered. The hostess showed us to a booth where we slid in, grabbing the menus the girl placed