Crisis Zero (8 page)

I
KNEW MR. LEPSING WOULDN'T BE IN HIS CLASSROOM AFTER
school. He was an odd guy, sure, but he was also somewhat predictable. Every kid knew he had a routine that he always stuck to: Every day after school, he went out to his small car parked across the street, off school property, and smoked a pipe. He smoked a really long pipe with a small bowl at the end, kind of like the one Gandalf uses. It looked kind of ridiculous. Once the first kid in school saw him out there years ago, the word spread quickly. Now every kid in the school had taken the time
to go see him smoking his wizard pipe by the end of their sixth-grade year—it was sort of like a rite of passage at Erik Hill Middle School.

Then he'd come back in and grade papers or do other work until 5:00 p.m. All teachers pretty much stayed at school until 5:00 p.m. It might have been some sort of rule. Not that all of the teachers followed it all the time. But, either way, I knew that from 3:16 p.m. to around 3:39 p.m., Mr. Lepsing would be in his car, smoking his weird pipe.

Danielle had agreed to help me make sure the hallway stayed clear by causing some sort of commotion around the corner. As I lurked near Mr. Lepsing's classroom, I heard a few kids talking to each other as they hurried her way.

“Dude, some girl is giving away prewritten essay papers and book reports.”

“Hurry up,” the other kid said as they rushed past. “I got one due in a few days.”

And then I was alone in the hallway. For now. Her distraction probably had an expiration date. Most things did.

Mr. Lepsing's classroom was locked, but my skills picking standard locks were getting pretty sharp. It didn't
take very long to get inside. I closed the door behind me and kept the lights off.

I moved toward his supply closet. Up until this point, picking a school lock had never been a problem. Every interior door in the school had the same type of lock: a simple four-pin tumbler lock, which is both common and easy to pick.

But Mr. Lepsing had installed a custom lock on his supply closet door to help conceal whatever was hidden inside. It looked slightly different from all the other standard school doorknobs. I inspected it. Just because it was a different model didn't mean it would be any harder to pick.

I got to work and quickly identified that one of the pins was a spool pin, which can make picking it a lot harder, especially for a relative beginner like me. Agent Nineteen had given me a little bit of spool-pin training, but not nearly as much as with standard tumbler pins.

I cursed even though nobody was around to hear me.

The trick was to release all tension on the lock in order to get the spool pin past the shear line. I gave it a few tries. They were unsuccessful. I silently wished that I had an Agency fruit roll-up with me. Not for a snack, of course, but for blowing this lock up. But that wasn't
going to happen now. They'd made those things specifically for me and I didn't even know if they had any left, let alone how I could get my hands on one. There weren't any in the stash of other gadgets I'd gotten from Chum Bucket's storeroom the day before either.

I closed my eyes and tried to envision the inside of the lock. It was pickable. I knew that because I'd seen Agent Nineteen do it a few times back during my initial training. I'd also watched YouTube videos of people doing it. If some yokel who had time to post videos on the internet could do it, then so could I—I was a secret agent, with a codename and everything.

A few deep breaths later, I was back at work. I tried it again and again with varying levels of tension and angles, but just couldn't get the pin to move. If only I had some graphite powder to loosen everything up . . . sometimes that's all a tricky lock needed.

That's when it hit me.

Everything Mr. Lepsing had was old. Which mean he likely still had good old-fashioned graphite pencils in his desk. I dug around in the top drawer and found a few ancient, yellow number two pencils.

I scraped one rapidly across the wood grain of his desk for five or six seconds until two parallel lines of
graphite powder developed. I used a piece of paper to gently scrape them onto a notecard. Then I made a single crease in the notecard down the center, creating an upside-down tent so all the graphite powder collected in the valley of the fold.

I slowly moved back toward the door, cradling the notecard in front of me like a tiny cup of radioactive waste. I steadied my hands as I positioned the front of the crease right next to the lock opening.

A very slight inhale was followed by a gentle exhale into the notecard's valley. I watched as most of the graphite powder disappeared into the key slot. I was still shocked it had worked, when, a short time later, I heard a click as I got all of the pins to finally slide into place. I grabbed the doorknob, careful not to move my equipment inside the lock, and turned. My heart leaped at the unlikely success of my makeshift lock lubricant.

Mr. Lepsing's supply closet door swung open in front of me, and then I was face-to-face with darkness.

I
WAS ALMOST AFRAID TO SWITCH ON THE LIGHT, AFRAID OF WHAT
I might find. So many rumors, so much speculation. What if one of them ended up being true? I knew there was only one way I would find out.

After feeling around on the wall for a few seconds, I located the light switch and flipped it up.

As it turned out, one of Dillon's theories had been right yet again. I found myself staring at a small table covered in little sculptures. They appeared to be made of wax, and right away I had a feeling that they were earwax,
as evidenced by the little wispy gray hairs sticking out of some of the figures.

The wax sculptures were mostly unidentifiable, but several of them appeared to be people dancing in groups of five, each a few inches tall. Even at that size, it was hard to mistake the tiny wax microphones in their hands. How in the world could Dillon have possibly guessed that? Earwax sculptures of boy bands?

I stood there and stared, completely dumbfounded. I didn't know whether to be amazed, disgusted, relieved, or disappointed—disappointed that Mr. Lepsing wasn't the spy, putting me right back to square one. Then again, I was now able to cross another name off the list, which was progress at least.

Turns out, Mr. Lepsing was so secretive because he was a legitimate weirdo with legitimately weird habits to hide. I switched off the light and closed the supply closet door behind me, and snuck back out into the hallway.

Just as I was turning to head toward the nearest school exit, I saw a dark figure running from a room at the end of the hall. It was someone in a black hooded sweatshirt, just a dark blur as they ran out the emergency exit.

The room they had just come from was Agent Nineteen's music room.

It took me a few seconds to act, but eventually I unplanted my feet and ran toward the room. Whoever the figure had been hadn't even bothered to cover their tracks. They'd left both the music room door and Agent Nineteen's office door wide open.

The office was completely trashed. Papers were scattered everywhere, all the equipment broken and smashed. The piano was even partially dismantled. I knew right away that the dark, hooded figure was my enemy spy. And I also suspected that I knew exactly what they'd been doing in there. They'd been looking for the entrance into Agent Nineteen's secret back office. Thankfully, the intruder had clearly failed. I turned to leave, to go running out the same emergency exit to see if I could pick up the trail.

But when I spun around, I found myself looking directly into Ms. Pullman's unsmiling face.

“I
KNOW IT LOOKS BAD, BUT IT WASN'T ME,” I PLEADED.

We were back in Ms. Pullman's office. Neither of us had spoken during the long walk there from Agent Nineteen's music room.

“Why were you even in that area of the school at all?” Ms. Pullman asked.

Her demeanor was different from the way it had been after the fight at lunch, but it was still calm. Controlled. Not at all the sputtering, shouting mess that Gomez always turned into when dealing with a disciplinary
situation. It was sort of unnerving in an odd way. Like when your mom, instead of getting mad over something you did, just told you she was disappointed in you.

I wasn't sure how to answer Ms. Pullman's question. So I shook my head. Like an amateur. Sitting there shaking my head, opening and closing my mouth like a dying fish, was basically as good as an admission of guilt. That was me right then: Carson with gills and beady unblinking eyes, struggling to breathe.

The ultimate question was: If she actually was in cahoots with Medlock, then she knew darn well it wasn't me who had ransacked the office, and if that were the case, then why had she gone down there at all, considering that a spy was trying to complete a mission there? More and more, the signs pointed toward Ms. Pullman being innocent, which raised the possibility that Mr. Gomez hadn't been framed at all.

“Carson,” she said.

I snapped out of my daze.

“We're not leaving until I get an answer,” she said firmly. “Why were you in that area of the school?”

“I—I,” I stammered. “I was walking through the halls, just on my way to meet up with my friend. And then I saw the craziest thing; it was this giant, like, rat. And its
ears were human ears, or something, and then this tall guy with rat ears showed up and—”

“Let me stop you, Carson,” Ms. Pullman interrupted. “If the next words out of your mouth are anything but the truth, then we're going to have a major problem.
Trust
, Carson, remember? You're giving me very little reason to ever trust you again right now. Think carefully before you speak.”

I exhaled. Maybe she was right. And so I did the only thing I could do, something I'd never done before inside that office. I told the truth.

Not the whole truth, of course, about me being a spy and everything. But I told her that I had been breaking into Mr. Lepsing's supply closet on a dare. I explained the years of rumors among the kids, and that I had drawn the short straw on being the guy who had to finally find out what he kept in there. I even told her about what I found inside his supply closet, wondering if that part might actually make her think I was lying again. Those wax figures were hardly any less weird or disturbing than a rat with human ears. Then I explained how when I came out of the classroom I saw a dark figure running from Mr. Jensen's room and walked down there to investigate. And that's when she found me there, looking guilty, and
rightfully so, but for totally different reasons than she suspected.

When I was done, she nodded slowly. “That's quite a story,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“But I believe you. I appreciate your coming clean about breaking into Mr. Lepsing's supply closet. That takes guts, Carson. And intelligence, too. Don't you think?”

I shrugged. I seriously doubted I was that smart, not after finding a way to botch pretty much everything somehow.

“I'm proud of you,” she said. “Truly.”

“Um, thank you?” I said, shocked that the gamble seemed like it would actually pay off.

“That said,” Ms. Pullman finished, “you're still getting one week of detention, an hour each day. And a stern warning, Carson. I'll admit I'm a bit disappointed that you've gotten yourself into trouble so quickly, considering what I thought was a very nice meeting we had today.”

“I know,” I said, looking down. “I'm disappointed, too.”

And I really meant it. I
liked
Ms. Pullman. It was such an odd feeling, actually liking one of my principals. If it wasn't for the whole secret agent thing, I think I really
would have been trying to be on my best behavior. But, as it was, I was a secret agent now and I couldn't change that. And so odds were that I'd find my way in here again before too long.

But unlike Mr. Gomez, Ms. Pullman wasn't going to let me keep getting away with it all. She was a woman of her word. She knew it, and I knew it. If I wasn't careful, I really would get myself expelled, whether or not I was able to save the world.

O
NE GOOD THING ABOUT WHAT HAD HAPPENED THAT DAY WAS
that it allowed Danielle and me to cross off more names from our list of suspects. We were down to just one each. Which meant that by the end of the next day, we would either know who the enemy agent was, or we'd be back at square one with virtually no clues and no leads at all as to who might have framed Mr. Gomez and why.

Danielle's last suspect was Ophelia Perkins, Jake's cousin. My last name was Peter “Junior” Nilsson. I couldn't be sure whether either of them was the right
size to be the hooded figure I'd seen running from Agent Nineteen's office. Which meant we still needed to thoroughly vet both the remaining suspects.

But my money was on Ophelia. She had the family connection, after all. Just like Jake, who, outside of that, also seemed an unlikely candidate to be an enemy spy. And so we couldn't let Ophelia's do-gooder status and high grades deter our investigation. I quietly reminded Danielle of that several times during lunch the following day.

After lunch, I had one goal in mind: finding Junior and verifying that I could cross him off the list. But as soon as I saw him later that afternoon, between sixth and seventh periods, I knew that it might not be that simple after all.

At first, when I spotted him heading to his locker, everything seemed normal. I caught up to him and said hi. We weren't friends technically, but as two of the school's more notorious troublemakers, we still crossed paths from time to time. And there was a sort of mutual respect there, in spite of our different styles.

“Hey, Carson,” Junior said with a grin as he spun his locker dial. “Nice job with the goats the other day. Hilarious! Especially all the goat poo.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said, not surprised that goat poo in the hallway was his favorite part. “So what have you been up to lately?”

“Me?” he said. “Nothing, why? Got something planned?”

“Maybe,” I said. “So your schedule is totally clear if I needed your help with another prank?”

He finally got the correct combination entered and pulled open his locker. And that's when things started to get more suspicious. There was a black hoodie hanging inside it. There were a lot of black hooded sweatshirts out there, of course, but it was too much of a coincidence to ignore.

As was his eventual response.

“Uh, well, yeah, sort of,” he said, suddenly seeming to be nervous. “I mean, I've got some stuff after school a lot lately. But I mean, yeah, I should be free.”

He saw me eyeballing the hoodie and quickly slammed his locker shut.

“Hey, Junior, where were you yesterday at—” I started to ask, but he didn't let me finish.

“Look, man, I'd love to chat, but I gotta go,” he said, turning away. “I'm running late.”

I stood there and watched him scamper nervously down the hall, suddenly realizing that I now had a lot more work ahead of me.

But I also finally had a solid lead.