Disruption (20 page)

“Yes, Yaakov,” Rylee said, “I know. It’s
impossible
. Unless by some unbelievable odds, there was someone out there in the vast world of hackers who was actually better than you.”

Yaakov’s mouth snapped shut like Rylee had just slapped it.

“Or,” she continued, “maybe he broke in and found the hard copy. Or maybe he’s got some leverage on one of the counselors and they told him.”

“Or any other one of the hundreds of possibilities,” Juno said.

Rylee nodded. “We just need to be ready. Chase is planning something, and we need to figure out what it is. Right now, he thinks he’s playing us.”

“He
is
playing us,” Angie said.

Rylee nodded. “Fine. Yes. He
is
playing us. He has a plan. We need to have one too.”

“Agreed,” Amara said.

Juno and Angie nodded, while Yaakov looked as though someone had just cooked his favorite toy in a Crock-Pot.

“Fine,” Yaakov said. “But I’ve given it some more thought, and I’m going on the record that it’s unlikely anyone would be able to hack past the extra blocks I put up to keep other team hackers out of the system.” He shook his head and lifted a finger. “No, not just unlikely. Improbable. If I weren’t such a believer in the fact that
nothing
is impossible, I’d say it was impossible.”

A long pause followed Yaakov’s comments, and then Angie said, “Well, that settles it; our little techie here is officially a megalomaniac.”

Chapter 29

“Are we part of the next event?” Rob stared up at me and bit his lip. He, Alexis, and Duncan had caught up to me while I walked back to the cabin from dinner the next night.

“I’m not sure yet,” I said.

“Didn’t we do a good job in Capture the Flag?” Alexis asked.

“You did fine,” I said. I felt myself getting annoyed. I wasn’t in the mood to coddle a bunch of kids. “I’ll let you know later.”

“When?” Rob asked.

I rolled my eyes. “I just don’t know what the next event is, so how can I decide if I want to use you for it?”

“We’d be good at anything,” Alexis said.

I shoved past them. “I’ll let you know.”

“Let us prove ourselves again,” Rob said, keeping pace. “We can get revenge on those guys who taped you to that tree.”

Rage flashed, and I spun around and shoved him, hard. He hit the edge of the path, rolled onto the grass, and then quickly righted himself back up to his feet. I took a swift step toward him, fist raised, fully prepared to smash the little twerp’s nose for even mentioning the tree.

He didn’t flinch.

If I had actually swung at his face, I don’t think he would have even tried to block or dodge it. “How’d you know about that?” As soon as I asked, I remembered that one of Chase’s teammates had filmed the whole thing. I’d hoped that film wouldn’t surface. I half expected Chase to keep it secret since cell phones were supposed to be banned. Clearly, he was showing it around, and word was spreading.

I heard Jason’s voice in my head. “Suck it up, Cambridge. Chase is a punk. Get revenge.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. There was too much I didn’t understand about this place. Not knowing the rules here made it very difficult to keep them . . . and to break them. I needed more information. I needed Jason to come through and find out some useful stuff for me.

An idea struck me like a brick, and I whirled around, planning to call out to Alexis, Duncan, and Rob, but I stopped short when I realized they’d stayed with me.

“You want to prove you’re really worthy of a spot on a Delta team?”

They nodded.

I reached into my pocket and handed them Chase’s phone.

Rob took it from me and stared at it as though he wasn’t sure what it was. “You want us to take it back now?”

“Pictures,” I said. “I want you to take pictures of campers, counselors, Mr. Dalson, and Mr. Smith. I want as many pictures as you can get.”

“Why?” Rob asked.

“Because,” I said, “that’s the price.”

“It’s a test.” Alexis sounded like she was talking to herself. Then her head snapped up, and she smiled. “At least it’s more challenging than stealing Chase’s phone.” She turned to her teammates. “He’s upping the stakes.”

Rob shook his head. “We get caught taking pictures with this, and we’re out. Not just kicked from the program. Kicked from any part of any program.”

If that happened, I thought, I’d have done all three of them a favor. This spy camp wasn’t at all like the movies, and there was always going to be a camper like Chase who would torment someone they thought was weaker. Or maybe these three would grow up and become punks like Chase, in which case I’d be doing some future camper a service. Either way, I wasn’t going to lose any sleep if they got kicked out.

“I want a picture of Chase too,” I said, without even acknowledging their concern. Jason could look him up and maybe find some dirt I could use against him. Something embarrassing. I almost smiled at the possibilities. “And I want the footage of what happened during Capture the Flag.”

Rob hesitated, and his lips pursed for a second, but Alexis snatched the phone out of his hand and shoved it in her pocket. “Not a problem,” she said. “When do you want them by?”

“Just get them to me as soon as possible. If I’m going to use you in the next event, I want those pictures back ASAP so we have lots of time to add you to our plan.” Mentioning the word
plan
out loud hammered home the fact that we didn’t have one, and the reason my teammates hadn’t suggested one was probably because of how angry I’d been.

Rob nodded. “Okay. Then we’ll get to be part of the challenge?”

“We don’t know what it is yet,” I said, “but if I need extra players, you three will be my first choices.”

Rob glanced over at Alexis and Duncan, and then the three of them looked at me and nodded. Without another word, they jogged away.

I did one complete loop of the walking path before heading for the cabin, and as soon as I stepped inside, I said, “We need a plan.”

“Well, welcome back,” Angie said. “We were wondering when you’d snap out of your little slump.”

“A plan for what?” Amara asked.

“The next event,” I said. “It’s only a couple days away. We need to be ready for it. More ready than we were for the last event.”

“We placed third,” Juno said. “That’s not bad.”

“We placed third, ahead of Chase,” I said. “And as Rylee already pointed out, that was Chase’s plan all along.”

Rylee nodded, and Juno scoffed at her from across the room.

“Well, we can’t very well make a plan if we don’t know the event,” Amara said.

“And remember what Clakk said,” Rylee added. “She said the events would be different this year.”

I saw an opening to get more information, and I took it. I pointed at Rylee. “Good point. So let’s brainstorm. What are some of the events from previous camps that you guys remember?”

“I was in a camp in Dubai a couple years ago,” Amara said. “The Delta teams were sent on a scavenger hunt for one of the challenges.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad,” I said.

Amara shrugged. “They had to get items like prosthetic limbs and the sidearm from an on-duty police officer.”

I blinked.

“I’ve seen the scavenger hunt before too,” Angie said. “The list is always difficult stuff, but it’s not something you can really prepare for.”

Difficult? That sounded impossible.

“But the scavenger hunt’s a pretty common one,” Angie added. “So if Clakk says it’ll be different this year, I bet that’s not one we need to worry about.”

Good.

“There was one challenge,” Yaakov said, “about a year ago, in Singapore. The teams were told to identify the one person in the group who was not like the others.” He looked up at the ceiling. “They called it Find the Spy or Find the Infiltrator or something like that.”

I didn’t get it, and I was just about to ask Yaakov what he meant when Juno spoke. “Yeah, I’ve seen that too,” he said. “They’d give you a group of ten Japanese people, for example, and tell you that one of them is a Korean spy and you have ten minutes to identify them.”

I rubbed my head. “What question could you ask a group in ten minutes that would reveal a spy?”

Yaakov shook his head and said, “You don’t ask a question. You come up with a shibboleth. It’s really the only way if you’re just looking for quick identification.”

I nodded. “Yeah, a shibboleth, sure. That makes sense.” I was going to have to do some research to figure out what in heck a shibboleth was.

“This isn’t helping us prepare,” Angie said, obviously frustrated. “If it’s different from other years, we’re not going to get anywhere by hashing out previous challenges. They’re never exactly the same anyway.”

“I’m not willing to wait around,” I said. “I’m not going to let Chase beat me again.” Angie snickered. My hand snapped out, and I pointed at her. “He is
not
going to beat us. I need everyone to take it seriously. If you can’t do that, fine, no problem. But I’ll go ahead and exercise that right I have to kick you out of the program so you don’t bring the rest of us down. I don’t want us to lose because we’re unprepared.”

Angie’s smile vanished. And a glance around the room revealed that none of my teammates were amused.

Good. Take it seriously. I was tired of getting shoved around. I wanted to shove back. And the next Delta event was exactly where I’d do my pushing. I needed my team to be ready for that.

“We’ll be ready,” Rylee said.

“Darn right we will,” I said under my breath.

Chapter 30

My outburst, or maybe my threat of flexing my muscle as team leader, jolted the group into overdrive. The morning martial arts session with Juno turned into a team-building exercise. Everyone turned out for it. Everyone, that is, but Angie. She insisted that no amount of training would protect us if we messed with her sleep. Rylee suggested we not take the threat lightly, and so as a group we decided it was just fine for Angie to stay in bed.

My actual fighting skills had improved considerably. Blocking was second nature now, and Juno had conditioned us to block and strike in almost the same movement. It hadn’t seemed possible to build a skill in just a few days, but he was an excellent teacher. He insisted we still fought like a couple of clumsy, one-legged baboons, but he said that was a step forward.

In the evening, despite Angie’s insistence that we were wasting our time, we brainstormed every possible event that might be thrown at us in the next competition. We considered a Capture the Flag rematch. An obstacle course. A skills test. Rylee said that in one of the previous camps she’d been to, the Delta teams had been deprived of sleep and then made to get something from a locked building downtown. At first the idea of breaking and entering seemed, well, illegal. Then again, this was a CIA training camp, so it wasn’t really illegal. Spies had licenses for breaking the law, and besides, in all likelihood, the building had been owned by the CIA in the first place. When I suggested that, the group laughed.

“You’re probably right,” Juno said. “That would be hilarious.”

I didn’t think it was all
that
funny, but people in high-stress situations sometimes laughed at things that weren’t funny just as a way to relieve stress. We’d been eating and breathing the training, so I figured it was pretty normal to be a little tightly wound.

We trained and planned and strategized, and then the next day we did it again. So when Friday rolled around, we were ready—as ready as any team at the camp could be.

Which was why it was such a shock to our system when Counselor Clakk did not stroll into our cabin at the crack of dawn, and an even bigger shock when, right in the middle of breakfast, Mr. Dalson delivered a bit of news:

“Campers,” Mr. Dalson said from the front of the hall, “as you may have guessed, this week’s Delta challenge has been canceled.” His expression hardened. “We will let you know if anything changes.”

And that was it.

Had such an announcement been made in any other mess hall in any other camp across the nation, it would have been met with a chorus of moans and sobbing twelve-year-olds. This camp being what it was, I seemed to be the only one disappointed. Everyone else simply turned back to their breakfast.

I kept my mouth shut until we got outside, and then I kicked a rock in frustration and sent it skittering a few feet down the path.

“So we get it in a few days, or at the very latest, next week,” Juno said. “No big deal.”

Amara nodded. “Juno’s right. Plus, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if this were all some kind of ploy. A trick to make us drop our guard to see how we’d react to a surprise challenge. But at the very least, we have more time to prepare. This is a good thing.”

Somewhere in some dark corner of my mind I knew they were right, yet I still wanted to scream and punch someone—no, not
someone
, Chase. I wanted to pound that kid into the dirt. I shoved my hands into my pockets and clenched my teeth to keep from saying something I’d regret. We walked in silence a ways before we came up behind two campers walking right down the middle of the path, totally blocking anyone behind them. Like us.

I opened my mouth to tell them to get out of the way but stopped just short when I heard what one of them was saying.

“We already know why.” The boy talking had toffee-colored skin and short dark hair. “There’s been a rumor about it since the first week.”

The kid he was talking to was at least a head shorter than he was. The smaller one shook his head as we came up behind. “Don’t be stupid. You know how many times we’ve heard these stories of camper abductions? It’s ludicrous.”

“Abductions?” The word fell out of my mouth before I knew it was there, and the doctor’s warning about people watching the camp rolled back into my mind. “No way.”

The boys spun around, disdainful, and mouths partially opened like they were ready to sling a few well-aimed insults, but both of them hesitated when they saw us. No doubt an entire Delta team would be a bit much to take on, even for the gutsiest camper. Instead of speaking, they stared at us for a long second, and then both turned and jogged away.