Spy School (12 page)

I couldn’t help but smile. Alexander Hale, one of the greatest spies in America, wasn’t only proposing that we run a clandestine operation together; he was also pleased with my investigative skills. His odd relationship with Erica—the
fact that neither wanted the other to know what they were up to—nagged at me a bit, but I could certainly understand both their motives. Alexander was trying to protect his daughter from danger, while Erica was trying to prove she could be an agent without help from her father. I didn’t like keeping secrets from either of them, but it did give me an opportunity to work with both the master spy and his beautiful daughter. It was almost enough to make up for the downside: that someone might try to kill me soon.

Alexander slid the warm pizza onto a chopping block. There was an umbrella stand full of bladed weapons nearby. He selected a cavalry sword and hacked the pizza into eighths. “Any other possible suspects rattling around that brain of yours?”

I thought a bit. Another name popped into my head. “I don’t know about this one, but you said to trust my feelings. . . .”

“Never question your instincts. Once, I was headed to a safe house in Qatar when I had a sense something was wrong. No evidence at all, just my gut. So I didn’t go in. Thirty seconds later the place exploded. Nawaz-al-Jazzirrah had infiltrated the place and rigged it with enough C4 explosive to sink a battleship. If I hadn’t trusted myself, I’d be a fine mist right now. So, what’s your gut telling you?”

“Well, if it’s conceivable that Chip could be playing
dumb, then why not one of his goons, who are supposedly even dumber than he is?”

“Now you’re talking. Whom do you suspect?” Alexander slid the pizza onto the mahogany coffee table in front of me. He’d left it in the oven too long and burned the crust, but I didn’t care. I was famished.

“Greg Hauser,” I said between bites. “He was the one who got me in trouble in Professor Crandall’s class today. He
claimed
Chip said the assassin was a fake, but what if Chip never said that? Maybe it was Hauser’s idea all along, and he’s shifting the blame to Chip. In fact, maybe Hauser put Chip up to trying to bully me into hacking the mainframe in the first place.”

Alexander chewed his pizza thoughtfully. “Hmmm. The old Petersburg Puppeteer . . .”

“What?”

“Oh, sorry. Just a little bit of espionage lingo. It refers to someone who
looks
like he’s merely the henchman, but really, he’s the criminal mastermind, pulling all the strings. Often, the puppet doesn’t even know he’s being used. We call it the Petersburg Puppeteer after an infamous Cold War Russian operative who looked like a lowly pencil pusher at the St. Petersburg KGB, but who turned out to be running the show. I like this Hauser lead. I like it a lot.”

Alexander’s cell phone rang. He checked the caller ID. “Oh. I have to take this. It’s a contact.”

He quickly slipped into the bedroom, leaving me to polish off my pizza by the fire. He didn’t close the door, though, so I could hear faint snippets of his conversation:

“Where should we meet? . . . Ah, very good. I love the opera. . . . Of course I’ll use an alias. . . . That soon? . . . All right.”

He returned two minutes later, smartly dressed in a tuxedo. “Duty calls, I’m afraid. But we’ve done excellent work here today. Truly excellent. How was the pizza?”

“Great,” I lied.

Alexander fastened his cuff links. “Sorry, but I need to blindfold you before we leave. The location of these quarters is classified.”

“Oh. All right.” It occurred to me that I hadn’t left the couch the whole time I’d been there. I hadn’t even glanced out the window. So I had no idea where Alexander’s quarters were in relation to any other building on campus.

My jacket and snow boots were right by the couch. I tugged them on. “So what do we do now?”

“
You
simply keep doing what you’ve been doing. Keep a close eye on Schacter and Hauser—and anyone else you find suspicious. I’ll see what I can dig up on them. I’ve got quite a lot of experience with moles. Uncovered one in Karachi just last year.” Alexander cinched a wool scarf over my eyes, plunging me into darkness. “Can you see anything?”

“No.”

“Perfect.”

There was a metallic clank, then the sound of something large sliding open. I finally realized what had been odd about Alexander’s quarters: There wasn’t a front door.

Not an obvious one, anyway. I assumed the entrance was hidden behind one of the many bookshelves. We stepped into what I could tell was an elevator, though I couldn’t guess how many floors it went down. A blast of cold air hit us when the doors opened again.

Alexander led me through a few more twists and turns, possibly doubling back once or twice, before yanking off the blindfold. We were in the grand entry hall of the Hale Building. Outside, fresh snow was collecting on the windshield of Alexander’s Porsche.

“Stay alert!” Alexander told me. “I’ll be in touch!” Then he wrapped the scarf around his neck and headed out into the cold.

It was only as he drove away that I realized one more odd thing about that night:

While I’d given Alexander all the leads I had, he hadn’t shared a single piece of information about his investigation with me. Not one.

Academy Training Grounds

February 8

1400 hours

“Die, Ripley!” My attacker sprang from behind a
rock, blasting her gun indiscriminately.

I fled through the woods, ammo exploding off the trees around me.

I didn’t know my attacker’s name, though I recognized her from Chemistry 102: Poisons and Explosives. She was a year older than me, mousy and reserved in class, though out here, on the field of battle, she’d found a way to release her inner Rambo.

Of course she knew me.
Everyone
knew me already. I’d
been at spy school for only three weeks, but I was famous, either as the kid who’d outfought an assassin with a tennis racket—or the kid who’d gotten creamed by a ninja in record time in his first class.

I came to a snowy slope that plunged steeply toward a creek and dove onto it. A paintball whistled past my ear and splattered a rock. The snow had been at the academy as long as I had; a crust of icy rime had formed atop it, making the slope a luge run. I careened down it headfirst, leaving my attacker behind but quickly picking up speed.

At the bottom, straight ahead of me, sat a pile of jagged rocks.

The idea of a combat simulation had been appealing at first. So far, classes at spy school had proved a disappointment. As Murray had warned, they weren’t much different than classes at regular school: boring. Primary Investigative Techniques was mind-numbingly dull. History of American Spying was really just American history with a few spy stories thrown in; it should have been interesting, but our instructor, Professor Weeks, had taught it so many times that she seemed to be falling asleep during her own lectures. Algebra—and its uses in calibrating one’s aim—might have been challenging if I wasn’t gifted in it; Professor Jacobi said I ought to be bumped up to calculus, but the paperwork hadn’t gone through yet. And after the excitement of my pop
quiz, Crandall’s self-preservation lectures had slipped back into a series of doddering reminiscences.

A war game promised a chance to get outside and have some fun. We were basically going to be playing capture the flag with paintball guns. I hadn’t expected to stay alive very long; I figured I’d just run around in the trees a bit, get ambushed, and then retire to the “morgue” for a hot chocolate with the other corpses. But then the weather turned out to be frigid and sleeting. And Coach Macauley, our PE teacher, announced that our grade would be dictated by how long we stayed alive. The first quarter of the class to die would get D’s.

Nobody wanted a D except Murray, who “accidentally” shot himself in the stomach thirty seconds into the game and went off to take a nap.

The rocks at the bottom of the gully were coming up fast. I jammed the butt of my gun into the ice and hung on hard. The gun jolted to a stop and I whipped around it. I kept sliding, moving fast enough to yank the gun back out of the snow, but now I was at least sliding feetfirst. I slammed into the rocks with the soles of my snow boots rather than my face.

My attacker appeared at the top of the hill, gun at the ready. She leveled it toward me.

I tried to swing mine into position, but the strap had got
tangled around my arm during the slide. I struggled to get my gloved fingers around the trigger.

The girl had me right in her sights. “Nice knowing ya,” she smirked.

And then a red paintball nailed her in the helmet, splattering all over her face guard.

For a brief moment I was impressed with myself, amazed I’d somehow managed to fire off a kill shot.

Then I realized I hadn’t.

Zoe popped out from the jagged rocks behind me, cradling her paintball gun. “Little lesson for you!” she shouted at the girl she’d just downed. “Save the snarky comments for
after
you’ve killed your opponent!”

The dead girl stuck her tongue out at us, then trudged off to the morgue.

I got to my feet, shaking snow out of my jacket. I was about to say thanks, but Zoe beat me to it.

“Nice work there, Smokescreen. Led her right to me. How’d you even know I was hiding down here?”

I considered telling the truth: I’d had no idea Zoe was hiding behind the rocks. She’d saved my bacon. But I didn’t. Without Zoe, I might have been the lamest kid on campus. Instead, thanks to her, I was Smokescreen.

Zoe was big into nicknames. And despite all the evidence to the contrary, she thought I was cool. After witnessing my
quick defeat by the ninjas, she’d proclaimed to anyone who’d listen that I’d merely faked the loss. It was a smoke screen: a ruse to convince my enemies that I had no skills, when, in reality, I was a lean, mean killing machine. According to Zoe, I’d done the same thing on my SACSAs, which had led the assassin who came to my room later that night to think I’d be easy prey. In fact, Zoe publicly presumed that I’d actually killed the assassin and that the school had covered it up. She was so supportive that even my embarrassing loss to the ninjas bolstered her belief in me: No one could have really lost a fight that quickly, she insisted. It was such an awful display of self-defense, it
had
to be fake.

Although Zoe was only a first year like me, she was very persuasive. The story rapidly gained a life of its own. Chip and his goons, Hauser and Stubbs, did their best to push their own version of the story: I had no idea what I was doing and had simply got lucky against the assassin, which was pretty much the truth. But since not many people liked or trusted Chip, this only served to give Zoe’s version of the story more credence. The school was now divided into two camps. The majority thought I was Smokescreen, some kind of covert superspy who occasionally pretended to be inept. The rest suspected I actually
was
inept. I wasn’t exactly comfortable with so many people believing a lie about me, but it was still far better than everyone knowing the truth. The
past three weeks had been far easier than my first day; I’d even managed to make a few friends and have some fun. The downside was, I knew it would last only so long. It was only a matter of time before everyone found out the truth; this was a school full of potential spies, after all. So I figured I might as well keep the ride going as long as possible.

“I’ve been keeping tabs on everyone’s position,” I told Zoe, who looked at me with wide-eyed wonder.

The main thing I’d learned in my time at spy school was this:
Everyone
there was impressive. I’d been spoiled at my old school. There hadn’t been much competition for top student; I think my math teacher had stopped bothering to even grade my tests and begun rubber-stamping them with A’s.

Meanwhile, the students at spy school were the cream of the crop from around the country. They were brilliant. They were athletic. They were awe-inspiring. There were students who could defeat ten ninjas at once, students who could take out snipers while riding a horse, students who could build bombs out of household objects and chewing gum, and at least two who’d mastered piloting a helicopter while fighting an assailant with a knife (at least on the simulator). I’d begun to understand why my math skills alone hadn’t been enough for me to make the cut.

But I was still determined to prove I belonged there.
As tedious as the classes were, I’d thrown myself into my studies, tearing through my textbooks, trying to learn everything I could. (I was still sleeping in the Box, and though it wasn’t pretty, the solitary confinement made it easy to study without distractions.) I put in extra time at the gym and the shooting range.

And then something like the war game would come along, proving that I still had light-years to go to catch up with my fellow students.

Zoe and I ducked into a hollow in the jagged rocks where she’d been hiding until I’d come along. “What’s the plan, Smokescreen?” she asked.

I had no idea what the plan was. The best I had was to hide in the rocks and wait for everyone else to kill one another off, which I knew wouldn’t go over well with Zoe or our instructors. However, I’d learned one valuable lesson from Alexander Hale: You could always get someone who respected you to do your thinking for you.