Secretly Spies

Chapter 19

"Okay, Tikki. Tell me everything." I said, following Tikki and Adrien out of my room.

I had already put the key card in a plastic zip-lock bag and had hung it on my corkboard. I had written 'Operation Blue and Red' in black marker on the bag and had drawn a red string from it to Hawk Moth's logo.

Trying to act as if I was okay was a tough job when I actually wasn't. I felt the anger still burning within me, ready to take over and keeping up the facade wasn't east. So I did the logical thing and let Tikki distract me with the information she had extracted from Nathaniel.

She told me that his body had been carefully 'disposed of' which meant his body wasn't on grounds close to us. We had made plans to escort him to Master Fu where he was going to be further interrogated. But due to his sudden death, all plans had been cancelled. I knew that he had other ways of freeing himself but the option he had chosen was death.

The only way I was certain that he had been telling the truth was because of Tikki's lie detector. No one could fool the system and it had been connected to Nathaniel throughout his little period of time in our house. The machine was designed by one of our most elite group of scientists and failure was not something they were used to. 

I was saddened by the fact that Nathaniel had seen no other forms of escape other than death. Even though he was a criminal, he was a living person. And taking his own life because of a mission was absurd.   

"Okay. So we discovered a few things in his bag but this... This is the one that captured my attention." Said Tikki looking through the bag that belonged to Nathaniel.

I cringed at the thought of having his belongings with us even though he clearly wasn't. Even if we managed to evade the police or even Hawk Moth himself, having Nathaniel's possessions in our house was going to be a problem. Who knew what problems could surface upon finding the belongings of a person who was supposedly missing? I knew it won't be long before posters with his face were distributed all over town and being his classmate was going to directly pin me as a likely suspect.

But then again, if he was working with or for Hawk Moth, his posters won't be put up all over Paris after all. Hawk Moth was intending on keeping his presence a secret until the time was right, that much was clear. So distributing posters of an orphaned boy said to be missing was most likely going to put his secret identity on the line.

Tikki must have sensed my distress because she placed her hand on my shoulder. She turned to look at me and smiled.

"Don't worry. I'll make sure to dispose of this evidence soon after you see what I found."

And by 'dispose of', she meant to burn. 

She was going to make it look like Nathaniel had never even once stepped into our home and she was going to make sure that things remained that way. Tikki wasn't the type to cause someone any harm but she would go to the ends of the earth to protect the ones she cared deeply for. 

"Take a look at this." 

Tikki handed me a small rectangular card and I took it from her without a closer look. But upon feeling the cold surface of the metal, I opened my plan and looked at the card that was lying on my palm. It was a key card, quite similar to the one I had uncovered last night but the chip was missing. It was covered in a metallic purple coloured coating and a tiny logo of Hawk Moth's symbol was engraved into the bottom right corner of the card.

It looked more advanced and lighter compared to the one in my room and reflected the light from its surface. There was nothing much about the card itself but I knew right away that it was one of the passes that the truck driver had used to access the building the day Chat and I had spied on them.