Spy Camp

by Stuart Gibbs

  “It was an emergency,” I said.

  “It was a wild-goose chase,” Soccer Mom snapped. “I already called it in and got confirmation. Murray Hill is still under maximum security at the Apple Valley Reformation Camp for Delinquent Teens.”

  “Then something’s screwed up,” I said. “I know Murray. It was him.”

  “You took a pretty nasty fall just now,” Soccer Mom told me. “Maybe you hit your head.”

  There didn’t seem to be any point in arguing anymore. I had no explanation for how Murray could have been in juvenile hall and at FunLand simultaneously. “I also got the license plate,” I said. “Virginia VGG-228.”

  Soccer Mom looked the tiniest bit impressed; after all, that was more than she’d gotten. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure,” I replied. I have a gift for math, and thus, I excel at remembering random sequences. I still know every phone number I’ve ever been given by heart.

  Soccer Mom left my side to call the plate in.

  Two seconds later, Mike emerged through the smoke from the blazing knights. He was looking at me curiously. “What was all that about?” he asked. “Who was that guy?”

  I winced. In my haste to go after Murray, I’d forgotten all about Mike. “A kid from school,” I lied. “He owes me money.”

  “Must be an awful lot of money,” Mike said. “You went after him like a crazy man.”

  “He was also a jerk to Erica,” I added.

  “Ah,” Mike said, although he still seemed suspicious. He stared at me awhile longer. “Well, buddy, looks like you made the right call.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  Behind Mike, a flaming dragon toppled, crushing a small castle. “No point in getting a job here this summer,” Mike said. “This place is toast.”

  ORIENTATION

  CIA Academy of Espionage summer training facility

  Aka “Happy Trails”

  June 13

  1100 hours

  My first reaction upon seeing spy camp was that it didn’t look nearly as bad as I’d expected.

  This was because spy school itself had set the bar awfully low. I’d expected the summer facility to be more of the same: unattractive, unappealing, and outdated, but in the woods. Instead, the camp turned out to be quite charming. My family had never been able to afford to send me to camp before, but Happy Trails looked almost exactly how I’d imagined a normal camp would: rustic wooden buildings with screen windows and wide porches; a wide-open central lawn with a large communal fire pit; a crystal blue lake with a dock and dozens of watercraft; and plenty of outdoor equipment like obstacle courses and climbing walls.

  My parents weren’t allowed to drop me off there. No one’s were, as the camp’s location was classified. (Our parents, however, were told that the camp simply didn’t like parents to bring their kids there as this created “a constricting emotional bond that some campers then have difficulty overcoming.”) Instead, my fellow students and I were all taken by our parents to designated rendezvous sites in major cities, where we boarded the official covert academy vehicles—which turned out to be average, everyday school buses. I’d come on a bus with all the other kids from the DC area. The drive had been rough; I’d spent much of it feeling sad and homesick. Even though spy school was close to where my parents lived, I hadn’t been able to see them much during the school year and had been hoping to spend the summer with them.

  Meanwhile, my mind was full of questions: How could Murray Hill have been at FunLand when he was also supposed to be incarcerated? What had he wanted to talk to me about that was so important? What was SPYDER up to this time? And how did I fit into their plans?

  I also had to wonder about Erica. I hadn’t heard a thing from her since our conversation in the morgue. Had she learned anything? If she was truly keeping an eye on me, as she’d promised, where had she been when Murray showed up at FunLand? Why hadn’t I heard anything from her? Had something happened to her—or was she merely being her usual, cryptic self?

  Despite all this, my spirits lifted upon seeing the camp. The armed guards and the electrified fence around the perimeter made me feel safe—and the whole place had a much different vibe than spy school. Spy camp actually looked like it’d be fun.

  I hadn’t paid much attention to our route, but I figured we were somewhere near the border of Virginia and West Virginia. We’d been on the road much less time than I’d expected—just a little over two hours. I had assumed the CIA’s outdoor training facility would be as remote as possible—up in the northern reaches of Maine or Michigan, or deep in the Rockies. And yet, despite the short drive, we still seemed surprisingly far from civilization. There was nothing but green forest and blue water for as far as I could see. I stepped off the bus and took a deep breath of fresh air.

  “Smokescreen! You made it!”

  Zoe shoved through my fellow campers and threw her arms around me. Seeing her was a boost to my spirits as well. Like all the other campers, she was wearing cargo shorts and a green Happy Trails T-shirt.

  “Hey,” I said. “How long have you been here?”

  “Over an hour already,” Zoe reported. “Your bus was the last to get here. We better get you to your cabin before all the good bunks are taken.”

  “Too late,” someone behind me said.

  I knew, without even turning around, that it was Warren Reeves. Warren was another first year, a snide, weaselly kid who followed Zoe around as if he were a dog she had rescued. He was completely smitten with her—a fact that was obvious to everyone at spy school except Zoe, who thought they were merely good friends. Zoe had named Warren “Chameleon” because he was a master at camouflaging himself, although when she wasn’t around, the rest of us called him “Stalker.” Warren was jealous of Zoe’s adoration of me, so every time she tried to put me up on a pedestal, he rushed in to knock me off.

  “We’re in the same cabin?” I asked him, not bothering to hide my disappointment.

  “That’s right!” Zoe exclaimed obliviously. “You’re both Muskrats!”

  “Muskrats?” I asked.

  “Every cabin has its own name,” Zoe explained. “I’m a Polliwog. I wish I could be a Muskrat, but there’s no coed living at Happy Trails. In fact, the boys’ and girls’ cabins are on separate sides of camp.” She nodded toward the central lawn. Beyond the main buildings that surrounded it, cabins spread out into the woods on both sides.

  Word had gotten out that our bus was late, and everyone who’d ridden with me was grabbing their gear and hurrying to their respective cabins to claim the best bunks left. I hoisted my army surplus duffel bag out of the bus luggage compartment and slung it over my shoulder. “Where’s our cabin?” I asked Warren. “Might as well check it out anyhow.”

  Warren pointed in the general direction and was annoyed when Zoe decided to lead me there instead. “Muskrat Manor, this way!” she chirped.

  We headed off across the central lawn. Zoe acted as tour guide, pointing out everything of interest along the way. “That’s the mess hall,” she said, indicating a long, single-story building with a wraparound porch. “Though it also doubles as the dojo on rainy days. Then you’ve got the infirmary and the armory. The armory’s a little different than the one at spy school. They try to have a bit more of a ‘frontier’ kind of focus here. There’s still plenty of guns, of course, but they’ve also got bows and arrows and tomahawks.”

  “So we can defend ourselves if we ever time travel back to the 1700s?” I asked.

  Zoe laughed. “I think they just want us to be prepared for anything.” She shifted her attention to three wooden buildings on the other side of the main lawn. “That’s the wilderness outfitter, where you get all your tents and rock-climbing gear and stuff, the staff offices, and arts and crafts.”

  “Arts and crafts?” I asked.

  “With an espionage angle,” Zoe explained. “Tomorrow, they’re gonna teach us how to whittle our own spears.” She pointed to a cabin not far beyond the main bu
ildings. “That’s your place right there. They keep the first years closer in because it’s more dangerous out on the perimeter. Not that you need any protection, right?”

  “Er, right,” I said. Evidently, the top secret news that I’d been targeted by SPYDER hadn’t leaked yet. I wished I could share it with my friends, but the penalty for leaking information at spy school was expulsion.

  “It’s actually a pretty good cabin,” Warren was saying. “It’s close to the mess, it’s right on the lake, and it’s upwind from the latrines.”

  A dirt path snaked between administration and wilderness outfitting, heading through the woods to all the cabins. A group of fifteen students a few years older than me was coming the other way along it. I’d never seen any of them before. “Who are they?” I asked. “New recruits?”

  “No,” Zoe replied. “Exchange students. They’re from the MI-6 academy in England. They don’t have any facilities like this over there, though, so a troop of them comes here every summer.” Zoe waved them down as they approached. The leader was a fresh-faced, redheaded girl with exceptional posture and a regal bearing. It was easy to imagine her having high tea with the queen. “Claire Hutchins,” Zoe said by way of introduction. “This is Ben Ripley, the guy I told you about.”

  “Ah! Smokescreen!” Claire had a delightful upper-crust accent. “Your reputation precedes you. It’s a pleasure.” She held out a pale, dainty hand.

  “The pleasure’s all mine,” I said, hoping that sounded formal enough. I reached for her hand.

  Claire suddenly grabbed me by my wrist and spun. The next thing I knew, I’d flipped over her shoulder and was lying flat on my back on the ground.

  “This is your big-shot student?” Claire asked Zoe. Her upper-crust accent was gone, replaced by a Cockney one so strong I could barely understand her. “Drops his guard awful easy, doesn’t he?” She turned to her fellow students with a smirk. “Told you all these Yanks were weak.” The Brits all laughed in response.

  “I wasn’t being weak,” I groaned. “I was trying to be friendly.”

  “I was being friendly too,” Claire told me. “If I’d wanted to be mean to you, I’d have ripped your bloody arm from its socket.” She laughed, then continued on her way across the lawn, the rest of the Brits in tow.

  I sat up, rubbing my head. I’d dropped my duffel bag when Claire attacked. It had burst open on the ground, and my clothes and toiletries were now scattered in the dirt around me. I started to pick them up.

  “Lousy tea-sipping limeys,” Zoe grumbled, glaring after the Brits. “Always trying to prove they’re better than us.” She then turned to me, impressed. “That was amazing, how you let Claire flip you over so easily. Totally tricked her into thinking you’re a wuss. Man, the next time she tries anything on you, she’s gonna be sorry.”

  “Ben wasn’t faking,” Warren muttered. “She really did flip him over.”

  “Don’t be such a dork,” Zoe shot back. “Smokescreen once took out an assassin with just a tennis racket. You think he’s gonna let some crumpet-sucker get the drop on him?”

  Warren sighed heavily. “It sure looked like she got the drop on him.”

  “That’s the whole point,” Zoe said. “If it looked fake, Claire would’ve known the truth: that Ben’s a lean, mean fighting machine. You might want to be a bit nicer to him. There’s a good chance he might need to save your life some day.”

  “I hope not,” Warren muttered, thinking it was too quiet for any of us to hear.

  Just then, Chip Schacter stepped out of the outfitting cabin with a jet-black rock-climbing rope coiled over his shoulder. “You two lovebirds want to stop bickering?” he asked. “I can barely hear myself think.”

  Zoe and Warren clammed up, embarrassed.

  “We’re not lovebirds,” Warren said sullenly.

  “I didn’t know you could think,” Zoe told Chip.

  “You’re lucky you’re a girl,” Chip told her. “If Warren had said that to me, you’d be digging him out of the latrine by now.”

  Warren gulped. “But I didn’t say it,” he said quickly. “I didn’t even think it.”

  “You just get here?” Chip asked me.

  “A few minutes ago.” I crammed the last of my dusty belongings into my duffel. “We’re on our way to my cabin.”

  “I’m going that way,” Chip said. “Let me give you a hand.” He hoisted my fifty-pound duffel bag off the ground like it was a feather and casually slung it over his shoulder.

  Neither Zoe nor Warren was pleased Chip had crashed our party, but neither one of them had the nerve to tell him to bug off, either. Instead, they fell in behind us as we resumed our way to the cabin.

  “I saw you and the Brits,” Chip confided. “Way to drop your guard.”

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to be on my guard,” I told him. “Aren’t we all supposed to be on the same side?”

  “You can be such a Fleming sometimes,” Chip said with a sigh.

  I rubbed my aching neck. “Fleming” was Murray Hill’s term, derived from Ian Fleming, the inventor of James Bond. It meant someone who showed up at spy school expecting the world of espionage to be just like it was in the movies. Like me. I’d assumed that all British agents would be well mannered and proper, forgetting that England was also the world’s number one producer of soccer hooligans.

  “Your brother’s my camp counselor,” I said, trying to change the subject.

  “Oooh.” Chip winced. “Sorry about that.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me about him?” I asked.

  “ ’Cause he’s a dorkwad,” Chip replied. “And he always has been. When we were kids, his favorite hobby was sending me to the emergency room. Let’s figure out where his bunk is and put some fire ants in it.”

  “Uh . . . I’d prefer not to start off by antagonizing him,” I said. We reached the cabin. Like all the others, it was raised six feet off the ground on wooden pilings. There was a set of wooden stairs up to it, which could be hoisted off the ground by a pulley system. “What’s this for?” I asked.

  “To keep wildlife from getting in at night,” Zoe explained, then added, “and assassins.”

  Given my previous experience with an assassin, who’d somehow managed to infiltrate my locked fourth-floor dorm room in the center of a secure campus, I didn’t think retractable stairs would be much of a deterrent—especially when there were several easily climbable trees right next to the cabin. But I was willing to take any bit of protection I could get.

  We climbed the steps up to the cabin. Another advantage of being a few feet up was that it caught the breeze off the lake. A nice wooden porch lined with Adirondack chairs faced the water. Inside, the only furniture was two rows of four bunk beds and some footlockers. It looked like a rustic army barracks, and it was a bit cramped given that sixteen boys would be sharing it, but compared to the frigid, claustrophobic room I’d had at school, it was like a suite at the Ritz-Carlton.

  Warren was right, however. Fifteen of the bunks had already been claimed. The only one left was a bottom bunk in the middle of the room. “Looks like you’re sleeping under Nate Mackey,” Warren laughed. “Stinks to be you.”

  I frowned. Nate Mackey had recently developed a stress-induced bed-wetting problem. It probably would never have surfaced if he’d gone to a normal school, but at the academy, where a pop quiz in self-preservation meant a surprise ninja attack, there was an unusually high amount of stress. Nate’s future as a field agent was thus doubtful, although the CIA always needed data analysts. (Nate had tried to keep all this a secret, of course, but few secrets kept long at a school full of wannabe spies.)

  “Where’s your bunk?” Chip asked Warren.

  “Over there,” Warren said, proudly pointing to the top bunk with the best view of the lake.

  “Switch with Ben,” Chip ordered.

  “Why would I do that?” Warren asked.

  “Because if you don’t, I’ll rip off your arms and smack you senseless with t
hem.” Chip flexed a bicep the size of Warren’s head. “It’s the least you could do for Ben, seeing as you almost shot him last year.”

  Warren’s smile faded. “Bunk’s all yours, Ben.”

  I tossed my things on top of it. Being friendly with one of the toughest kids in school had its privileges. Normally, I wouldn’t have taken advantage of the situation like that, but knowing Warren, he’d probably engineered my getting the bunk under Nate Mackey in the first place.

  As I started to unpack, I noticed another building through the window, tucked back in the trees up the hill. It was significantly larger than any of the camper cabins. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Administration,” everyone said at once.

  “You mean, for the principal?” I asked.

  “The principal?” Chip laughed. “He wouldn’t be caught dead out here. The guy’s terrified of nature. Last year, a squirrel got into his office and he practically had a heart attack. Woodchuck runs the camp.”

  “Who’s Woodchuck?” I wanted to know.

  The other three looked at me, surprised. “You’ve never heard of ‘Woodchuck’ Wallace?” Zoe asked.

  “Uh . . . no,” I admitted. But before I could ask more about him, my mobile phone buzzed in my pocket. Generally, I might have ignored it, but it was vibrating in a way I didn’t know it could, like it was desperately trying to get my attention. I pulled it out and, instead of a number on the caller ID, I got a flashing message: CODE RED. URGENT. ANSWER NOW. Again, it was news to me that my phone could even do this. “Could you guys excuse me?” I asked, then stepped out the door onto the porch and answered the phone. “Ben Ripley.”

  “Ben, this is Agent Hamilton. We met at FunLand two days ago.”

  I recognized the voice: Soccer Mom. “Did you track down Murray Hill yet?”

  “No. We’re having a little trouble with that license plate you gave us. Are you absolutely positive you gave us the right number?”