Spy School (26 page)

The only thing he couldn’t do was delete the text from Mike’s end. But he’d most likely assumed that Mike would never show me the text on his own phone—or that by the time he did, the Hale Building would already be a smoking hole in the ground.

From what I could tell, Murray hadn’t finished rigging the bomb yet, although I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t know
much about bombs, though I did know one key thing about Murray: You couldn’t trust a single thing about him.

I cocked the mop handle over my shoulder like a baseball bat and crept up on him, focusing on the sweet spot at the back of his skull—the same place he’d probably brained Erica—intending to clobber him with all my might and knock him unconscious. The clanking furnace covered the sound of my footsteps as I closed the gap. . . .

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Ben.” Murray didn’t even turn around. Instead, he held up his left hand, in which he clutched a pressure-release trigger. “If you knock me out, I drop this . . . and kablooey.”

“Back away from the bomb,” I said, in as threatening a voice as I could muster.

“Sure. Just give me one more second. Ah! There we go.” Murray plugged a final wire into the digital clock and turned to face me with a smile. “Why don’t you put that weapon down so we can have a civilized discussion? C’mon, I’ll buy you an ice cream.” He started for the door.

“Stop or I’ll hit you,” I said.

Murray froze and gave me an annoyed look. “No, you won’t. You’d just blow up everyone—including yourself. You don’t want that.”

“I’d also blow
you
up,” I pointed out. “And
you
don’t want that. So it looks like we’re stuck here.”

“Not exactly.” Murray withdrew a gun from beneath his jacket and aimed it at my stomach. “Gun beats stick. I win.” He casually tossed aside the pressure-release trigger, which turned out to be a useless piece of junk. Like I said, you could never trust him.

He was now too far away for me to hit him with my mop handle. I lowered it, defeated, glaring hatefully at him.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “If I wanted to shoot you, I’d have shot you already.”

“Then why haven’t you?” I asked.

“Because I have a business proposition for you.” He motioned me toward the door with the gun. “Mind if we discuss it somewhere more comfortable than this? I wasn’t kidding about that ice cream.”

“I’d rather stay here,” I said.

“I’m paying. You can even get sprinkles.”

“The last time you got me dessert, it was a ruse to arrange my abduction.”

Murray sighed, exasperated. “You realize that’s a bomb over there, right? Now, it doesn’t go boom unless I say it goes boom, but still, the farther we get from it, the safer we are.”

“You want to talk to me, then talk.” I wasn’t sure why I felt it was necessary to stay in the room, but it seemed that if I left, I’d lose any chance I had to prevent the explosion. Or rescue Erica. “What’s this proposition?”

“How’d you like to be a double agent?” Murray asked.

Even though I’d been expecting him to do something to catch me by surprise, this completely floored me. “You’re offering me a job?”

“
I’m
not doing it. My superiors are. They’ve seen your file, of course. I leaked it to them. And they like what they see . . . even though we all know the whole cryptography specialist thing is a crock.”

“I figured as much.” I did my best to sound reverential, hoping it would get him to drop his guard. “You’ve merely been playing along with that to set up Scorpio all along, right? First you make it obvious to the CIA that there’s a double agent at the school. You leak some information. Send an assassin to my room to prove you can infiltrate the campus. Then when Erica plays the Jackhammer card, you have your boys kidnap me. All just to frighten the government into considering the activation of Omega. Because you know only a crisis like that would bring all the higher-ups in espionage together at one time, which makes it the perfect opportunity to take them all out.”

“You figured that all out yourself?” Murray asked. He sounded impressed, but he might have been faking it as well. “I
knew
I was right about you. That’s the kind of clever deductive thought we’re looking for.”

“Oh, I’ve figured out more than that,” I replied. “You’ve
been manipulating everyone left and right. For example, you pretended to let it slip that Chip was seeing Tina to divert my attention to him, but really,
you’re
the one who’s been using her.” I remembered the tutoring manuals I’d seen stacked in Tina’s room. “You didn’t flunk your classes last semester so you could get a desk job. You did it so Tina would tutor you.”

Murray grinned. “Guilty as charged.”

“That’s how you got your information. You swiped it from her. But then, when Chip—of all people—started to realize a bomb plot was afoot, you just deflected his attention toward Tina herself.”

Murray shrugged. “I admit that was a little sloppy. But let me tell you, it is not easy to sneak this much explosive material into a CIA facility. I dropped a little down in the tunnels. Thankfully, it was that lummox who found it and not someone intelligent.”

“You did make one mistake, though,” I said.

“What?”

“You actually
like
Tina. So you asked her to run an errand for you today so you could get her off campus before the bomb exploded.”

“I wasn’t doing that to protect Tina.” Murray rolled his eyes. “I was doing that to get
you
off campus. I wasn’t planning on having this conversation until after the big kaboom,
but you caught on faster than I expected. I tell you, you’re gonna make an awesome double agent.”

“How long have you been doing it?” I asked. “Were you already a plant when you started here?”

“No. Remember when I said I used to be just like you, but then someone showed me the light? That was my recruiter. A very successful double agent in the CIA. He turned me around this time last year.”

“Who do you work for?” I demanded. “The Saudis? The Russians? Jihadists?”

“Better,” Murray replied proudly. “You know how America is now outsourcing its peacekeeping, hiring independent contractors to handle part of it? Well, the bad guys are doing the same thing.”

I took a step back, stunned. “The bad guys are outsourcing evil?”

“Well, we don’t refer to it as ‘evil’ per se, but yes. I work for an international consortium of independent agents who cause chaos and mayhem for a price. A very good price. We’re called SPYDER.”

“Why?”

“’Cause it sounds cool. And frankly, calling ourselves ‘an international consortium of independent agents who cause chaos and mayhem for a price’ is a mouthful.”

I was shocked by how blasé he seemed about everything.
It was as though he were discussing an after-school social club rather than a criminal organization that had enlisted him to plot the deaths of dozens of people. “Do you even know who contracted you to do this?” I asked.

Murray shrugged again. “What’s it matter, as long as the checks clear? Now, I know what you’re thinking: I’m a callous and selfish jerk. Well, it’s true. I used to be a Fleming like you, only wanting to do good in the world. But then I learned that, even if
you
always want to do the right thing, it doesn’t mean the people you’re working for do. The fact is,
nobody’s
good. I mean, yeah, a couple people are . . . but organizations aren’t. Governments aren’t. Look at good old America, bastion of democracy and freedom, right? Except for all the coups we’ve funded in the third world, the useless wars we’ve waged, and the environmental degradation we’ve caused. Look at this academy itself. How has this place treated
you
? It’s used you as
bait
. Lied to you from day one. Made you a pawn. Hung you out as a target for the enemy . . .”

“But
you’re
the enemy!” I protested.

“And we never killed you, even when we had the chance,” Murray said. “Now, think about how much better we’ll treat you when you
work
for us. Know what you’ll make as a CIA agent, traipsing around third world cesspits, doing the dirty work for politicians? Diddly-squat. SPYDER, on the other
hand, pays very well. And it’s all under the table, totally tax-free. Most of our employees retire as multimillionaires before they’re forty. Of course, you have to fake your own death first to throw everyone off your trail, but then you can spend the rest of your life in luxury on a tropical island. How’s that sound?”

“Pretty good,” I admitted. I wasn’t faking that part. Except for the evil bits, Murray had a lot of valid selling points. “How would I fit in?”

“Oh, this is the perfect time to join up,” Murray said. “Most double agents start on the ground floor, like I had to, working as a mole in spy school. But after today, once we behead every espionage organization simultaneously, the American spy complex is going to be in chaos. They won’t know which end is up for months! And SPYDER has highly placed operatives in positions of power all through the government who’ll have even more power after today. We could swing you internships at the CIA, the FBI, or the Pentagon, all with access to highly classified and sensitive material. Or get you a summer job as a page in the Capitol. Or, dare I say, the White House. And from there, who knows how high you can go? SPYDER’s been talking about getting a double agent president in office for some time now. Maybe it could be you. The world can be your oyster, Ben. All you have to do is say yes.”

Murray lowered his gun slightly and looked at me expectantly.

I carefully thought over everything he’d said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Really?” Murray looked thrilled.

“Really,” I repeated. “You’re right. This place has treated me like garbage.” I wasn’t
really
interested in SPYDER; I was only faking it to get Murray to drop his guard. But the frustrations I had with spy school were genuine. I could barely contain them. “They brought me in as bait, knowing I could get killed, and didn’t even have the decency to tell me. I’ve been set up, humiliated, bullied, locked in the Box, and attacked by ninjas. They let me get captured, and then—when I escaped—they acted like
I
was the bad guy. If this is any indication of what my life is going to be like when I’m a real spy, it stinks on ice. So let’s do this double agent thing. Where do I sign up?”

Murray broke into a big smile. “You have made a very good choice, my friend. C’mon. Let’s grab ourselves a sundae and watch the fireworks.” He turned his back on me and started toward the door.

I swung the mop handle at the back of his head.

The whole time we’d been in the furnace room, I’d been hoping that, at some point, Erica would suddenly snap to her feet behind Murray’s back—revealing that she’d only
been
pretending
to be unconscious—and take him out. But she hadn’t. Which left me to take care of things and I wasn’t going to get a better opportunity than this.

Unfortunately, Murray was onto me; he’d only been faking
his
excitement to see if I was faking mine. Now he dodged as I swung. The mop handle missed his skull by a fraction of an inch.

I staggered off-balance, like a baseball player who had whiffed at a fastball, and when I regained my footing, Murray was aiming both a gun and a look of betrayal at me.

“I can’t believe you,” he said. “You
lied
to me!”

“All you’ve done is lie to me!” I shot back.

“That was business,” Murray spat. “It wasn’t personal. I just gave you the opportunity of a lifetime—and this is how you thank me? You are such a Fleming.”

“Better that than a double agent,” I shot back.

“At least I’m going to be a
live
double agent,” Murray sneered. “And after today everyone will think you’re a dead one. You just made the worst decision of what is about to be your very short life.”

Keeping his gun trained on me, he pressed a button on the alarm clock, starting the timer at five minutes. Then he stormed out the door and slammed it shut behind him, locking me and Erica inside the room with a ticking bomb.

Nathan Hale Administration Building

Subbasement Level 2

February 10

1315 hours

The first time you find yourself locked in a room
with a ticking bomb, a lot of thoughts go through your mind.

And a lot of fluid threatens to go through your bladder.

Which means one of the primary thoughts you have is:
Please don’t let me wet myself.

Dying is bad enough, but leaving a corpse with a big damp spot on the pants is just plain embarrassing.

I tried to ignore the urge to pee and deal with the crisis at hand. My first—and only—plan was to rouse Erica; she’d
probably been defusing bombs since she was three. I ran to her side and shook her gently, and when that didn’t work, I shook her a lot harder. Then I shouted things like, “Erica! If you don’t wake up now, we are going to die!” Despite this, she stubbornly remained unconscious.