The Doublecross: And Other Skills I Learned as a Superspy

by Jackson Pearce

  Tossed over Ms. Elma’s right arm were dozens and dozens of SRS uniforms. Black spandex with blue trim that indicated our in-training status. “Stand up straight so I can see your shoulders,” she barked, and we all jumped, straightening our spines. Ms. Elma chewed her tongue for a moment and then began to toss uniforms to us with complete confidence, despite the fact that she was hardly looking at them. “Go change, come back. Fast, please. And no primping, ladies. I don’t have time for that. It’s a uniform, not a prom dress.”

  One by one, students vanished from the formation as they ducked into the bathrooms to try on uniforms. All SRS trainees wore the hand-me-downs of older SRS members. Every now and then someone would get lucky and be fitted with a suit on its first go-round, but for the most part, our uniforms came complete with rips, tears, and burns, a bouquet of problems that we’d only add to before handing them down yet again. Once I got one that had a whole leg spray-painted pink.

  I discovered that day that the only thing worse than black spandex is pink spandex.

  “And . . . Hale Jordan,” Ms. Elma said, a note of exhaustion in her voice. She looked down at the uniforms in her hand, then unfolded one and held it up in front of me. No. She tossed it over her shoulder and held up another, pursing her lips in a way that made her look like a duck. Finally she shoved the second uniform at me. “Try this, Jordan. It might work.”

  I nodded and trotted off toward the bathroom with my uniform. Walter and the other two boys in our class were still there, turning back and forth in front of the mirror, and I couldn’t help but think Ms. Elma had warned the wrong people not to primp. Walter’s arms were squeezed tightly into his sleeves; when I walked in, he turned to me and grinned.

  “Hey there, cheater,” he said. “Don’t worry. My uniform doesn’t fit either.” With that, he hunched his shoulders forward and flexed his arm muscles until the seams of his already-battered uniform gave way along his biceps. He laughed, the sound all echoey in the bathroom, and high-fived Michael and Cameron, his junior-agent best friends. They too had exceptionally large biceps, which I envied, and even larger foreheads, which was about the only thing I could silently make fun of them for.

  “I wasn’t worried,” I answered. “You might be, though, when Ms. Elma sees your sleeves.”

  Walter’s face paled a little, but he still managed to snort. “Yeah. Whatever, Whale.”

  Sometimes I pretended Walter hadn’t changed due to puberty—that he’d just fallen into some toxic sludge—and that was why he transformed from totally-normal-guy Walter to worst-person-at-SRS Walter. One day, he’s coming over after school; the next, he has a little facial hair and is busy in the afternoon. One day, he’s huffing and puffing through the field exam along with me; the next, he’s sprinting along with the junior agents, looking like a fairy godmother granted him the gift of calf muscles. It’s not like Walter and I had a big fight or anything. One day we were friends, and the next, we weren’t. Was it better or worse that way? I couldn’t tell.

  I walked into a stall, double-checked the door was locked, and began to change. My feet went in easily, as did my legs, but when it came time to pull the uniform over my torso, things came to a grinding halt. I shimmied and twisted and managed to get the shoulders up. I could even zip it a little, so long as I didn’t need to do things like breathe or eat or have to pee. All in all, it was at least a better fit than my last uniform, which I couldn’t even pull past my stomach. I walked out of the stall, trying not to move too much, and made my way back to the classroom.

  “I don’t know what happened, Ms. Elma. They just ripped!” Walter said as I reached the door. The Foreheads nodded earnestly behind him.

  “Showing off,” Ms. Elma snapped, and Walter shrank. I was pretty sure I saw his lip quiver. “Always with the showing off at this level.” She said all this through a mouthful of pins, so everything sounded vaguely like a hiss. She was pinning the legs of a girl’s uniform to mark for alterations—Ms. Elma was always talking about how our uniforms should feel like a “second skin.” They should “fit like a glove.” I questioned the sort of gloves Ms. Elma wore. I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of a chrome leg-press machine. I looked like I’d been eaten by an enormous seal.

  “All right, Jordan,” Otter said, motioning me toward Ms. Elma. “You’re up.”

  Ms. Elma looked at me and shook her head. “What are we going to do about this?” I couldn’t tell if she meant me or the uniform. “Perhaps we can use one of the others, sew some side panels in?”

  Otter nodded. “Probably—”

  “I wasn’t talking to you, Steve,” Ms. Elma said, waving him off without looking at him. Otter folded his arms, opened his mouth, but didn’t say anything. Ms. Elma buzzed around me, tugging here, pushing there. She suddenly had a tape measure in her hands, though I couldn’t have told you where it came from. “Right. Well, Hale, it’ll take me a few days, but you’ll have a uniform.” She said this like the uniform was something I desperately wanted.

  Twenty minutes later everyone who needed alterations had handed their uniforms back to Ms. Elma, who headed to the next classroom. Otter dug out a folder full of papers from a battered-looking leather satchel we all called a purse behind his back.

  “Practice missions,” he said. He rapped the folder against his palm, then sniffled in a way that made him look like a pug. Inside the folder were fake missions—many of which we’d been through before, and many of which were simulations of real, closed missions. He opened the folder and held out the papers, and my classmates dived, snatching and reading them hurriedly. Many were already running to the computer lab or the Disguise Department by the time I reached for one of my own.

  Otter slammed the folder shut and withdrew it. I looked up at him and tried not to stare at his coffee-stained mustache.

  “Jordan,” Otter said in a sneery way. “I’ve got a special mission for you.”

  The first time I was sent on a “special mission” was when I was around Kennedy’s age. Everyone else in my class was leaping off ropes onto sets of scaffolding. I, however, was swinging at the bottom of a rope like a human pendulum. When my teacher told me she had a special mission for me, one that involved leaving SRS, I was ecstatic. Everyone who wanted to leave SRS had to check out, of course, but kids that age never got to leave without supervision. Yet there I was, getting assigned a special mission! Going out on my own! The other nine-year-olds would be so jealous!

  And then I realized the “mission” was really just a trip to get her some coffee at the shop outside headquarters.

  It wasn’t a mission. It was an errand.

  I trudged toward the front office, trying to wash the bitter off my face—I didn’t want Otter or anyone else to know how much stuff like this got to me.

  “Oh, Hale, are you getting coffee?” the agent at the exit desk asked. She reached for her purse, and I began to wish I’d just snuck out through the loading docks.

  “Nope,” I said, and her face fell. “Dry cleaning for Agent Otter.” The agent slouched in her chair and went back to staring at her computer screen. They didn’t even bother having me sign out anymore, this happened so often.

  I walked onto the elevator, bracing myself on the railing in the back—shooting up six flights in about a second always made me lose my balance. On the upper level the doors opened, revealing a grubby office building with vinyl chairs and orange-green tile. A young woman wearing lots of eye shadow—an SRS agent—looked up at me from a desk, tilted her chin to say hello, and then went back to painting her toenails fuchsia while the Doctor Joe show played loudly on her laptop. I breezed past her, out the doors, and onto the street.

  SRS was located in a pretty little town called Castlebury, the sort of place where they strung Christmas lights between old brick buildings and had a parade for just about every holiday, right down to National Grapefruit Day. I’m serious.

  Obviously, the people of Castlebury didn’t have a clue that right under their feet was a progr
am of elite spies and their spy-in-training kids. I glanced back at the building I’d just emerged from—a sign with missing letters read BR MBY COUNTY SUBSTITUTE MATHEMATICS TEACHER TRAINI G. The label pretty much meant no one would ever come inside. On the rare occasion someone did, the upper-level agent’s job was to pretend to be an overworked receptionist and ask the visitor about fixing copy machines until they left. No one on the outside knew about SRS—well, I guess some politician somewhere had to, since we were technically a government organization—but it just wasn’t safe for everyone to know about us. A spy’s greatest weapon was anonymity, after all.

  It didn’t take me long to retrieve the dry cleaning. I held the plastic garment bags over my head, but I still wasn’t tall enough to keep the bottoms from dragging on the ground. The agent-slash-receptionist didn’t even look up this time as I walked to the elevator and pushed the Down button.

  The Down button didn’t light up. I frowned and pushed it again. The light was probably just out. But no—I couldn’t hear the sound of the elevator coming up. I turned to the receptionist, who was now looking at me with an eyebrow raised.

  “Is it broken?” I asked.

  “No . . . ,” she said, frowning, and lifted the ancient cream-colored phone. “Hello? I’ve got that kid up here—the coffee kid, yeah. The elevator—oh.”

  The way she said “oh” was different. It was so different that I abandoned the elevator and walked toward her. She cupped her hand over her mouth, mumbled a few things into the phone, and then quickly hung up. She avoided my eyes. I saw her rubbing her toes together anxiously, ruining her wet nail polish.

  Spies notice these things.

  “Someone will be here in a minute to escort you back,” she said. “The whole place just went on lockdown.”

  “Lockdown? Why?” Lockdown was serious—it meant something on a mission had gone wrong, so doors were locked, files were reviewed, and recordings were studied. No one came or went, so information couldn’t be lost or shuffled or forgotten.

  The receptionist’s lips parted, but then we heard the elevator begin to move. It chimed. The doors opened. My eyes widened—it was Agent Otter, and to his right was Dr. Fishburn, the director of SRS. He wore a shiny gray suit, the same color as his hair.

  “Hale,” Dr. Fishburn said. His voice sounded like that blue hand soap smells, all crisp and sharp and sinus clearing. “Come with us, please.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked cautiously.

  Otter spoke now, voice gruff and wildly unlike the snaky tone he normally took with me. “It’s your parents, Hale. They’ve been compromised.”

  Chapter Five

  Spies live dangerous lives.

  I’d always known that—in fact, the danger was part of the reason I’d always wanted to be a field agent. But when I thought about my parents’ job, I always saw being a spy mostly as dangling off buildings and karate chopping bad guys and stealing important hard drives—dangerous, sure, but also exciting and full of adrenaline and heroics. I never doubted for a moment that they’d be back, Mom retelling the nonconfidential parts of the tale and Dad struggling to shake his fake Russian accent. When your parents are The Team, you’ve got a whole houseful of medals proving that they can overcome any villain anytime and usually still make it home in time to start dinner.

  But they weren’t coming home. They weren’t coming home tonight or tomorrow, and probably not the next day either.

  Because spies live dangerous lives.

  “You understand, Hale,” Fishburn said, putting a hand on my arm gently. Fishburn’s office looked like him, all hard lines and metal surfaces and a half dozen locked file cabinets, one of which Otter was leaning against. “You understand that we don’t think they’ve been—”

  “Killed,” I finished for him. I thought saying it aloud would make the whole idea of it easier to handle, but it didn’t.

  “Exactly. They’re more valuable to The League alive,” Fishburn said, nodding, like my basic comprehension impressed him.

  I wasn’t afraid of much. I’d gone through years of spy training, after all. Did I like getting beat up when my classmates and I sparred? No. But it meant I wasn’t afraid of getting hit. I wasn’t afraid of the dark, either—sure, I couldn’t see spring-loaded rope traps in a blackout-training hall, but my classmates couldn’t either. I wasn’t afraid of heights, so long as I had decent climbing equipment, and I wasn’t even afraid of getting caught while running a training mission, since being afraid of getting caught is the fastest way to actually getting caught.

  I was afraid of The League.

  They were a top-secret organization, just like SRS. The difference was, they were . . . well . . . evil. SRS was a secret, sure, but we were on the side of righteousness and morality and other good, legal stuff. The League, however, was a wholly criminal organization. You’ve heard of the mob? Of heist rings? Of the black market? All The League’s work. Almost every major crime in the country traced back to them, and half the minor crimes did too. Two high-ranking agents like my parents would be invaluable to a bunch of criminals. They’d mine them for information, get it by any means . . .

  My stomach twisted.

  Fishburn continued, “I promise, we’re doing everything we can to find them.”

  “Who are you sending out?” I asked. Agent Morgan? No, no, he was still nursing a broken leg from his last mission. Agent Green would be a decent second choice—though she didn’t get along with the HITS, and that had botched more than one mission . . .

  “We’re working on it, Hale,” Fishburn said, smiling. It was a fake smile, the sort we were taught to spot when we were seven. To be honest, I was a little insulted he thought I’d buy it.

  “Who?” I asked again. “What’s the plan? They’ve got to be at League headquarters. Are we sending a team in, or do we have someone inside?”

  “Hale . . . ,” Otter said, running his tongue over his teeth, like my name was stuck between them. He gave Fishburn a look that said, Let me handle this.

  “Hale,” Otter started again. “The mission your parents

  were on is Gold Level classified. I don’t even know what it is. If we send in a team right now, we risk the mission.”

  I knew what it was—Project Groundcover, the mission that had had my parents so worried. I guess they’d been right to have been concerned. But how was some stupid mission, even a Gold Level classified one, more important than my parents? My hands were curled into fists so tight, my knuckles hurt. This wasn’t fair. This wasn’t right.

  “We’re doing everything we can, Hale,” Fishburn said, stepping in. “Right now you need to trust us.”

  “I will as soon as you tell me what you’re doing to save them.” It was a bold thing to say, and I knew it. I stood up and walked out. Otter called my name, but I slammed the door anyway. I silently dared him to come after me.

  He didn’t.

  Ms. Elma was at our apartment when Kennedy and I got back. She wandered around, too tall and lanky for the rooms, running her fingers across surfaces as if the whole place perplexed her. I knew I should actually be relieved to see her, because it meant SRS wasn’t certain our parents were never coming back. Kids whose parents were gone for good—or who were away on long-term missions—lived in the dorm rooms on the upper floor. I’d never really thought of those kids as very different from me. We were all part of the SRS family, right? But now I realized just how different we were—and how badly I didn’t want to be like them. I didn’t want to live in a dorm room and not eat breakfast with my parents and not complain to my dad when Otter was being a jerk and never go to Mom when I needed to talk about Walter . . .

  “I had the cafeteria send up dinner,” Ms. Elma said in a voice I think was supposed to be warm, but was still so cold, it froze my thoughts. She motioned toward the kitchen table, where she’d placed Styrofoam takeout boxes at three of the four seats. She flicked the overhead light on, which we never used because it made a buzzing sound Mom hated, and poured us
glasses of water with too much ice.

  Kennedy, who had barely let go of my hand since we’d met up outside Fishburn’s office, looked up at me, then exhaled and pulled me over to the table. She took her normal seat silently, and I took mine.

  Ms. Elma started to lower herself into a third chair.

  “That’s Dad’s seat,” Kennedy said crossly.

  Ms. Elma raised her eyebrows. “Is there somewhere else I should sit then?”

  I had to give her some credit—she seemed to be trying. But trying to step in for our parents was sort of like me trying to do a pull-up. It just wasn’t going to happen.

  Kennedy didn’t respond but kept her eyes hard on Ms. Elma. Even her freckles seemed to be glaring.

  “Right,” Ms. Elma said tersely. “What if I go watch television while I eat then? Give you two a little . . . sibling time.” She rose, breathed slowly, and settled in the other room. I heard the sound of her opening and rifling around in her takeout box. Kennedy and I stared at our own Styrofoam boxes like they might contain explosives.

  “Wait . . . is there no television here?” Ms. Elma called from the other room.

  “No,” I answered. “We’re not allowed.”

  “Not even a little one? What do you do at night?”

  “We play board games! Mom and Dad don’t like television!” Kennedy snapped, and I could see tears welling up in her eyes. I rose, nearly knocking my chair back, and went around the table. Kennedy hugged me so hard, her fingers almost touched and I thought she might break my ribs. Freeing myself, I knelt down. I shook my head at her.

  “Don’t cry,” I said as Kennedy’s face twisted up. She squeezed her eyes shut as hard as she could and fell forward, dropping her head to my shoulder.

  Kennedy whisper-sniffed. “Everyone’s saying Fishburn is just giving up on them.”