Crisis Zero (5 page)

A
GENT SMILEY ESCORTED ME TO THE MEDICAL UNIT. WE DIDN'T
pass a single person along the way. The emptiness of Agency headquarters somehow made me feel empty as well. It made me question why any of us were still trying, even though the answer was pretty obvious and undeniable.

The med unit was very much like a hospital, just with fewer people. It consisted of a few wide, bright, and generically tiled hallways with rooms branching off on both sides. As we entered, I saw a few men and women
in white coats and green scrubs, holding clipboards and discussing something just down the hallway to our left.

Agent Smiley asked me to follow her into a large room with several huge pieces of machinery that looked straight out of a science fiction movie. In fact, one machine, which was basically just a huge glass tank filled with clear liquid, looked almost identical to a bacta tank. A bacta tank is the thing that they put Luke Skywalker in after Han Solo rescues him on the ice planet of Hoth at the beginning of
The
Empire Strikes Back
. I'm not a Star Wars geek, but Dillon definitely was and he made me watch the whole series at least once a year, complete with his thorough breakdowns, commentaries, behind-the-scenes trivia, and explanations of various set pieces.

“It's like a bacta tank,” I said as we entered the room.

Agent Smiley gave me a look. Then she motioned for me to follow her around to the other side, and pointed at the top of the machine.

Affixed to the top of the metal seal was a long piece of white tape. On it, someone had written these words in thick black marker:
Bacta Tank I.

“One of our lab technicians is a science fiction nerd,” she said humorlessly.

I resisted the urge to laugh and shook my head as a young guy in a white coat and scrubs entered the room. He walked over to a small desk in the corner and opened a folder. He leafed through the papers for a few moments, jotted something down, and then came over to us.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“We're here to see Agents Blue and Nineteen,” Agent Smiley said.

“Of course,” the doctor said. “This way.”

He led us into an adjacent room. It was nearly identical to the one we'd just come from. This room also had a bacta tank, except this tank wasn't empty. Floating inside it, just like Luke Skywalker, was Agent Nineteen. A breathing mask was affixed to his face, and his eyes were closed. I saw several nasty bullet wounds in his torso, as well as several older scars scattered about his abdomen, back, arms, and legs.

“He suffered the more severe injuries of the two agents,” the doctor said behind me. “He's currently in a medically induced coma while the tank does its thing, so to speak.”

“A coma?” I said, frowning.

“Don't worry,” the doctor assured me. “It's standard procedure. We find that being submerged in the tank
while conscious can cause claustrophobia, disorientation, and other undesirable side effects. Agent Nineteen is in stable condition, and should make a full recovery. He has been through far worse in his career.”

I looked at my wounded mentor. It was hard to imagine him looking any worse. I tried to reassure myself that the doctor knew what he was doing. If he said Agent Nineteen would be fine, then he would be. I took a deep breath and forced myself to look away.

“What about Agent Blue?” I asked.

“I'm right here, Carson.”

I spun around, startled to hear his voice. He was lying in a hospital bed at the other end of the room. The sight of the occupied bacta tank had distracted me from noticing anything else when I'd entered.

“Mr. Jensen,” I said, rushing over to him.

Giving him a hug seemed awkward and unprofessional, so instead I reached out to shake his hand. But he had raised his hand for a high five, and so we ended up doing a kind of awkward hybrid where I grabbed and shook his raised palm. I looked down, embarrassed, and that's when I noticed the void under the sheets where his leg should have been. There was nothing there.

“Your leg!” I gasped before I could stop myself.

“It's okay, Carson,” he said. “They had to take it off, but it's okay.”

“How is that okay?”

“Well, when you put it that way, I guess it is pretty horrible,” Agent Blue said, looking as if he was about to cry.

I panicked for a moment before realizing he was just having some fun with me.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“I said, it's okay. I'll be getting a replacement artificial limb. Pretty high-tech stuff, as you can imagine. I'll be like the Bionic Woman.”

I had no idea what he meant by that, but I was happy to see that he was staying so positive. I bet he was probably just feeling happy and lucky to be alive at all. The last time I saw him, sitting in the Ford Fusion we'd stolen from Snaketown, rambling deliriously and his venom-filled leg bloated and swollen, he looked just a few seconds from death.

And so instead of focusing on his leg, I filled him in on my new assignment, after Agent Smiley said it was all right. She had yet to crack half a smile since I'd met her. She hadn't even so much as sneezed, or coughed. She was like a robot or something. Maybe she
was
a robot? With
the Agency's funding and technology, anything was possible.

“When will you be back?” I asked Agent Blue.

“The doctor says a few weeks. But I suspect I can get back sooner.”

“Awesome,” I said. “I don't like not having you guys there.”

“You can handle the assignment just fine on your own,” he said. “You're among the best agents I've ever worked with. Well, you still have a lot to learn, but you get what I'm saying. . . .”

He trailed off, clearly embarrassed. They must have had him drugged up on some good stuff. He had never been so jokey and smiley and complimentary before. Agent Blue was usually surly, not so different from Agent Smiley. I sort of liked the painkiller version of Agent Blue.

“Uh, thanks,” I said. “Still, I can't wait for you to get back. I'm nervous, there's so much resting on my shoulders. I'm still just a kid, after all.”

Agent Blue shook his head.

“No. You're not
just
a kid. You're Agent Zero.”

B
EFORE DANIELLE AND I HAD BECOME SECRET AGENTS, I CAN'T
think of one time when the two of us hung out without Dillon. He was my best friend and her twin brother, after all. Turns out, though, that this is necessary when plotting missions as secret agents. Dillon still had no idea that we were working with the Agency, with codenames and everything. Even with all of his crazy conspiracy theories, he still hadn't guessed that one.

But meeting up without him later that night ended up being easier than expected.

“He's distracted by this new master theory of his,” Danielle explained, as I closed the door to my room behind her. “It has something to do with all of the fungus growing around town. He's convinced that nuclear missile silos surrounding Minnow have created radioactive mushrooms that will one day sprout legs and go on some sort of nationwide rampage, inducing black-and-white, slow-motion hallucinations that will involve talking buildings and pickled chicken feet falling from the sky.”

“Wait, the radioactive . . . What?”

Danielle grinned and shook her head.

“Carson, I have no idea. He didn't give me much of an explanation. But he's really into this one; I've never seen him so preoccupied before. Right now, he's spending the night out in the coulee behind our house, extracting and carefully cataloging fungus samples.”

I laughed. “That sounds like Dillon.”

“So what happened this afternoon?”

I explained how I'd managed to get away with the evidence, and how Agent Chum Bucket had taken the fall for the success of the mission. I told her about how I'd met up with Director Isadoris and how eerie and deserted Agency headquarters had been. She was
shocked, horrified, relieved all in one. Then I told her about our new mission.

“Pretty straightforward,” I said. “Find the enemy agent and figure out why they framed Gomez. Of course, this is assuming they let me back into school tomorrow. I mean, I did ditch out on seventh period. And I'm sure someone is going to want to punish me for the goats, even if it's not Mr. Gomez. And that's not even mentioning what Ms. Pullman will do once she arrives and reads the files Gomez kept on my pranks.
And
, that's all aside from the possible scenario in which she is in fact an enemy secret agent sent to eliminate the Agency's people inside the school.”

“Wait a second,” Danielle said, stemming my nervous rambling. “You're getting way ahead of yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can't control any of that stuff,” she said calmly. “Let's just focus on our mission. If you get expelled, or whatever, then we'll deal with it. But we'd be wasting time and energy worrying about it now.”

This was why Danielle was the perfect partner. She was way more logical and reasonable. After all, she'd figured out how to get inside the secret Mount Rushmore base to save Agent Nineteen and me all by herself. I guess
if you really stepped back and looked at it, she was probably a better secret agent than I was. All I had going for me was being stupid enough to attempt the impossible and lucky enough to have succeeded a few times.

But all that is beside the point. What mattered was that Danielle was right; we needed to break down and make a plan for how to complete our two-pronged mission.

And so that's what we did for the next hour.

We started by making a list of teachers and students who could have possibly been enemy spies. Here's what we came up with:

1.  Mr. Lepsing
: seventh- and eighth-grade social studies teacher. He made the list simply by being a straight-up supersecretive weirdo. Mr. Lepsing had something strange hidden away in his supply closet. Everybody knew it. Rumors had swirled ever since I'd started school here about what it was that he kept in there. Some of the best theories were:

     
•
     
A leopard that he was secretly feeding a mixture of steroids and school lunches, which was creating a master race of muscular leopard mutants (courtesy of Dillon)

      
•
     
A colony of Venus flytraps that had evolved to
devour small animals, and which Mr. Lepsing was training to eventually eat students (also courtesy of Dillon)

      
•
     
An earwax collection that he had molded into various members of early-00s-era boy bands (Dillon)

      
•
     
A giant box of all the chewed-up pens and pencils he'd confiscated from students over the years, which he was saving in order to clone his best students to create an army of hyperintelligent and obedient slaves (this is what most students believed—he was a bit of a freak about taking away writing implements if he saw you chewing on them—except the last part about cloning, which came from—you guessed it—Dillon)

      
•
     
A lobster man that he was secretly keeping just alive enough to have a never-ending supply of lobster to feed on (Dillon again, much to Danielle's horror and gagging)

      
•
     
Seventeen twenty-three-year-old Whoppers from Burger King that he was using to grow an army of preservative-laced (and thus indestructible) super bacteria that would eventually incite the
apocalypse (take a wild guess)

      
•
     
Special diet lunches and/or a stockpile of vitamins (another popular theory with the general student body, given that Mr. Lepsing was an unabashed health freak)

      
•
     
A stash of gold bars and other valuables that he'd recovered while treasure hunting across the US (Mr. Lepsing was a proud amateur treasure hunter, but Dillon was really the only one who believed this)

Okay, so clearly most of the theories came from Dillon. But the point was, Mr. Lepsing definitely kept
something
locked inside that supply closet that he didn't want any students to see or find. He kept the key on a chain around his neck, after all. Who does that? Answer: someone hiding something very valuable—or very sinister.

2.
 
Gus Agriopoulas
: eighth-grade student. He made the list primarily for being the sort of kid who would probably be first in line to sign on for a plot of total world domination. If our middle school voted on awards at the end of each year, like Most Likely to be Famous or Most Likely to Succeed, Gus Agriopoulas
would have definitely won for Most Likely to Become an Evil Villain Planning to Blow up the Sun. It wasn't just that he was a bully; our school, like any other, had plenty of kids who were mean to other kids from time to time. It was the
way
Gus bullied kids that made him such a threat. He went after kids with reckless abandon—nothing was off-limits. Gus was the sort of kid who'd make fun of a kid whose parents had just died in car accident. In fact, he did that once when I was in third grade and he was in fourth. I wish I were exaggerating. One time, Gus lit a girl's ponytail on fire at recess. And the thing was, he almost always got away with it. He was the best athlete at every sport, he got straight As, his dad was one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the world, and all of these things generally gave Gus a free pass. No one wanted to believe that Mr. Small Town Superstar Rich Kid could be such a completely evil psychopathic jerk. That, and if Gus got expelled or sent away to juvie or something, the hopes for our town ever winning the state high school football championship would have been dashed. And that stuff is pretty important to people from small towns with nothing else to worry about.

3.
 
Ophelia Perkins
: fifth-grade student. She had made the list by being cousins with Jake Tyson-Gulley, and so was also Medlock's niece. That was pretty strong evidence for sure. But at the same time, it was the
only
reason she made the list. Nothing else about her seemed even remotely suspicious. In fact, everything else about her made her the least likely person, on or off the list, to be an enemy spy. She always followed all the rules, and she was always making a spectacle of herself, which aren't exactly the best traits for a secret evil spy. She would tattle on other kids for just about anything; she once tried to tell on a kid for dropping a green bean on the floor in the cafeteria at lunch and not picking it up. She almost cried once when she accidentally sneezed in class during a test, because she was so upset she broke the silence rule. The teacher had to reassure her four or five times that it was okay. But, even considering all of that, we simply couldn't ignore her bloodline connection to Medlock.

4.
 
Mrs. Food
: gym teacher. She made the list because of her alleged past connections and experiences. I'll explain more about that in a bit, but first I should
clarify that her name really isn't Mrs. Food, it's Mrs. Canterbury. Mrs. Food is just what people call her, going way back to when my dad went to school there. That's how long Mrs. Food has been teaching. Apparently there was this old TV host called Mr. Food, and she looks a lot like him. The funny thing is, Mr. Food is most famous for his big gray beard. Mrs. Food doesn't have a beard, but somehow the resemblance is there. It's hard to explain. But that's beside the point. She didn't make the list for being a seventy-year-old woman with a passing resemblance to a famous TV chef. Mrs. Food made the list because she
claimed
to be a former special ops double agent. She said her assignment was so top secret that even Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon didn't know she existed. She supposedly served as a KGB double agent in Russia and across Eastern Europe. Mrs. Food always had all these crazy spy stories that she told while making kids do army crawls and insane military training stuff instead of normal calisthenics. For instance, she once claimed that she had been given the green light to assassinate Leonid Brezhnev, who was apparently a Russian president or something. She said she had slipped poison into his drink and then
had to run back across the room and slap the glass from his hand at the last second when the hit was suddenly called off. Anyway, I was pretty sure she was just a weird, harmless old lady who loved telling stories to kids, since everyone knows that real double agents can never give up their identity, even after retirement. But just the same, we'd have been stupid to overlook her as a possible target, given her alleged past.

5.
 
Peter Nilsson, aka Junior
: seventh-grade student. He made the list for hating Mr. Gomez even more than I did, and thus likely to agree to a plan in which Gomez would be framed and extracted from the school in such an embarrassing and extreme manner. Other than that, I didn't think he was really capable of being a spy. In fact, I didn't think he should make the list at all; it was only at Danielle's insistence that I added him. For one thing, Junior was not the smartest cookie in the jar, or whatever. He was mostly known for being the school's biggest class clown, a goof-off of epic proportions. Whereas I had a reputation for carrying out elaborate, precise, well-planned pranks, Junior was known more as the kid making fart noises in class, usually by actually farting for real as loudly as he
could. Or for picking his nose and wiping the boogers on the kids around him. He also invited kids to dare him to drink entire bottles of glue, which he always did even when they insisted that he shouldn't. Other stunts of his included sticking pushpins into his ears, sucking the ink out of those multiflavored scented markers, making suicide school lunches (where you mix together everything on your lunch tray into one massive blob of food and eat it), and doing cartwheels down the school hallways in between classes. See what I mean? How could that kid possibly be an enemy spy? But Danielle insisted that we not overlook any student with a connection to Gomez, and it was true that he was in the principal's office almost as much as I was. And so here he is on the list.

6.
 
Tyrell Alishouse
: eighth-grade student. He made the list because he was pretty much a spy already. He'd transferred here after getting expelled from his old school, and had already developed a reputation for being an amateur sleuth. According to kids around school, he was a master of disguise and sneaking around and doing covert surveillance. He'd supposedly already gotten one teacher in trouble when he
caught her on camera smoking behind the school Dumpsters. He once told a kid in my homeroom that he's only seen when wants to be seen. I mean, any kid who says that sends off immediate red flags for being a possible spy. He seemed like the most obvious name on the list, especially since he was a new kid and could have easily been planted there by Medlock directly. But something inside my gut told me I was wrong. I could tell that he had a strong moral code, even if he was a bit shady.

Danielle and I split up the list. We each took three names.

“Now, what about investigating Ms. Pullman?” I asked.

“Why don't we wait to make a plan until she's officially started working at school,” Danielle suggested.

I agreed. Besides, Director Isadoris had made one thing very clear before I'd left Agency HQ that afternoon: The primary objective was tracking down the unknown enemy agent. And so that's where we'd start, beginning first thing in the morning.

As long as the morning didn't start with me getting expelled.