by Ally Carter
Things were starting to get pretty calm. I mean, really, it was almost nice, being driven around, sitting between my two best friends in the world, feeling the sun beam through the windows. It was almost normal—or as close to normal as three geniuses, a cosmetics heiress-slash-senator's daughter, and a secret agent in a Ford Taurus can ever be.
Nestled in the backseat between Liz and Bex, I started thinking that it would have been way too much to ask for us to have a tour of the town before we were supposed to tail one of the most wanted men in the world through it. Oh, yeah, that would have been a totally unfair advantage. In the daylight, I could see thousands of hiding places where a girl could linger unseen. I recognized alleys and side streets that would have been great shortcuts. I started, despite everything, to want a rematch with Mr. Smith. But mostly, I wondered about the boy I'd seen. Was he real? Did he really walk these streets?
Then, I got my answer.
"What the bloody hell are you doing down there?" Bex asked.
"Looking for my contacts," I snapped back.
"You have twenty-twenty vision," Liz reminded me.
"It's just… I just… I can't look up right now."
I knew the car was stopped, probably at a traffic light— one of only two in the town, so Josh had to be getting close.
"What?" Bex asked in a whisper. "What's going on?" She shifted into spy-mode, sat up, and looked around. "There's nothing out there. Oh, well, you are missing a real hottie at three o'clock."
Liz craned her neck around to look. "Ooh, yeah, he's pretty skinny but worth checking out." Then she shrugged and said, "Oh. Never mind. He's giving us the Gallagher Glare."
I have no idea who came up with that name, but it's what we always call the look that people in town give us whenever they figure out where we go to school. It's the only time I ever hate our cover story—when people look at me as if I must be privileged, as if I must be spoiled. As if I must be like Macey McHenry. I want to tell them that I spent my summer cleaning fish and canning vegetables—but that's just one of a thousand things that the good people of Roseville will never know about me. Still, when people like Josh look at you like you're a cross between Charles Manson and Paris Hilton, it hurts a little—even for a spy.
"Yeah, but he's still a boy," Bex said longingly. "Hey, Cam, come take a peek."
"I am not going to look at some boy!" I snapped. "I don't care how wavy his hair is."
"Who said anything about wavy hair?" Oh, Bex is good.
"I can't believe this!" Liz said, pacing. She hadn't sat down once since we got back to the mansion—she just kept going back and forth—trying to make sense of it all. I couldn't really blame her. Liz's belief system is pretty natural for scientific geniuses. She wants life to be something that can be tested in a lab or referenced in a book. She'd thought she'd known me. I'd thought I'd known myself. Now both of our hypotheses had been thrown out the window, and we hated to start from scratch.
I couldn't let her see how shaken I was, so I did the next best thing: I got angry.
"Exactly what is so unbelievable?" I asked. "That a boy looked at me?" Sure, I'd never be an exotic beauty like Bex or a pixyish waif like Liz, but I had yet to grow boils all over my body. Mirrors don't crack when I walk by them. My Grandfather calls me Angel. Was I that unworthy of being noticed?
"Cam!" Bex ordered. "Of course that's not it."
Liz threw her hands into the air and said, "I can't believe you didn't tell us! I can't believe you didn't tell someone."
Liz's definition of someone didn't mean someone. Liz's someone meant a teacher.
"So what?" I said, trying to brush the whole thing aside.
"So what?" Liz said. "So, he saw you! Cammie, no one sees you when you don't want to be seen." She eased onto the bed beside me. "When we were trailing Smith and I had to keep you in sight, it was almost impossible, and I could hear you through the comms unit. And I knew what you were wearing. And …" She threw her hands into the air. "So what?"
I turned to look at Bex, my eyebrows raised as if to ask Are you freaked out, too?
"You really are amazing, Cam," Bex said in a perfectly serious tone, so I knew it must be true.
"Something isn't right, here," Liz said as I went into the bathroom and started brushing my teeth. (It's hard to say things that will do lasting damage to a lifelong friendship when you're foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.) "Mr. Solomon wants summaries of our mission, so we've got to include him. He could very well be trying to infiltrate the school through Cammie. He could be a honeypot!"
I nearly gagged on my own toothbrush. The technical definition of a honeypot is a female agent using romance to compromise a target. The practical definition is anyone with cleavage. (Rumor has it Gilly kind of inspired the term.) The thought that Josh could be the male equivalent made my stomach flip.
"No!" I cried. "No. No. No. He is not a honeypot."
"How do you know?" Bex asked, playing devil's advocate.
"I just do!" I replied.
But Liz was shrugging, saying, "We've got to include him in the reports, Cam."
But reports lead to reviews. Reviews lead to protocol. Protocol would lead to two weeks of the security department tailing him through town while they track down his birth certificate and find out if his mom drinks or his dad gambles—they've done far more for fewer reasons. After all, the Gallagher Academy hasn't remained a well-kept secret for more than a hundred years by taking chances.
I thought about Josh, how sweet and normal he had seemed. I didn't want strangers looking at him beneath a microscope. I didn't want there to be a file in Langley with his name on it. But mostly, I didn't want to sit in a room and explain why he'd approached me, when the town square had been full of far prettier girls.
I looked down at the floor, shaking off the thought. "No, Liz, I can't do it. That is way too high a price to pay for talking to a girl."
Then Bex crossed her arms and grinned deviously in my direction. "I think there's something more to this story," she said with her usual flair. The rush of blood to my cheeks must have been enough to betray me, because she leaned down and said, "Spill it."
So I told them about the trash can and the dropped Dr Pepper bottle and, finally, Tell Suzie she's a lucky cat, which, even if it hadn't been for the whole genius thing, I still would have been able to remember verbatim, because sentences like that are like peanut butter on a girl's mind. When I finished, Bex was staring at me as if she wondered whether or not I had been replaced by a genetically engineered clone, and Liz had a starry-eyed gaze very similar to the one Snow White wore while those birds fluttered above her head.
"What?" I asked, needing them to say something—anything.
"Sounds like I could snap his neck with one hand," Bex said, and she was probably right. "But if you go in for that sort of thing…"
"…he's amazing," Liz finished for her.
"It doesn't matter what he is or isn't. He's…" I struggled.
Liz shot upright and finished for me. "…still got to go in the reports!"
"Liz!" I cried, but Bex's hand was on my arm.
"Why don't we do it?" Her most devious expression flashed across her face. "We'll check him out, and if he's an ordinary boy, we forget about it. If something's strange, we'll turn him in."
I knew instantly what the arguments against it should have been: we were too busy; it was against about a million rules; if we got caught, we could be risking our careers forever. But in the silence of the room, we looked at each other, our mutual agreement settling down upon us in the way of people who have known each other too well and too long.
"Okay," I said finally. "We'll do the basics, and no one has to know."
Bex smiled. "Agreed."
We both looked at Liz, who shrugged. "Let's face it—he's either an enemy agent trying to infiltrate the Gallagher Girls through Cammie …"
Liz stopped midsentence, prompting me to say, "Or… ?"
Her entire face lit up. "He's y
our soul mate."
Chapter Ten
Okay, from this point on, if you are related to me or in a position to add things to my "permanent record" (which I'm assuming at the Gallagher Academy is a little more detailed than what they keep at Roseville High), you might want to stop reading. Seriously. Go ahead and skip the next hundred pages. It won't hurt my feelings at all
In other words, I'm not proud of what comes next, but I'm not exactly ashamed of it either, if that makes any sense. Sometimes I think my whole life has been that kind of contradiction. I mean, all I've heard for the last three years has been Don't hesitate, but be patient. Be logical—trust your instincts. Follow protocol—improvise. Never let your guard down—always look at ease.
So, see, if you give a bunch of teenage girls those kinds of messages, then, yeah, eventually things are going to get interesting.
The rest of the week staggered on, our unspoken mission looming in the back of our minds like a silent but ever-present charge that filled the air, so that every time one of us reached for the doorknob, I half expected to see sparks.
We were up at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning, which was definitely not my idea. Thanks to Tina Walters's annual Dirty Dancing extravaganza, where we watched the "nobody puts Baby in a corner" scene a dozen times, I was really needing a good "lie-in," as Bex calls it. But even though Liz might have been at the bottom of our class in P&E, she is the best person I've ever seen at getting me out of bed, which is saying something, considering the woman who raised me.
Macey was asleep in her headphones, so Liz felt free to yell, "We're doing this for you!" as she pulled on my left leg and Bex went in search of breakfast. Liz put her foot against the mattress for leverage as she tugged. "Come on, Cam. GET. UP."
"No!" I said, burrowing deeper into the covers. "Five more minutes."
Then she grabbed my hair, which is totally a low blow, since everyone knows I'm tender-headed. "He's a honeypot."
"He'll still be one in an hour," I pleaded.
Then Liz dropped down beside me. She leaned close. She whispered, "Tell Suzie she's a lucky cat."
I threw the covers aside. "I'm up!"
Ten minutes later Bex was falling into step beside me, handing me a Pop-Tart, as Liz led the way to the basement. The halls were empty; the mansion silent. It was almost like summer, except a chill had settled into the stone walls, and my best friends were beside me. When we reached the vending machines outside Dr. Fibs's office, I took a bite out of my breakfast and felt the sugar kick in.
"Ready, then?" Bex asked, and Liz nodded.
They both looked at me. I took another bite and figured that if we'd come this far (and since I was already out of bed), we might as well go all the way.
I pulled a quarter from my pocket and held it toward the slot, but Liz stopped me.
"Wait." She reached for the coin. "If anyone looks at the logs, my name will send up fewer red flags," she said, even though nothing we were doing was against school rules. (I know—I checked.) In fact, we are encouraged to do as many "special projects" for "independent study" as we'd like, and no one ever said we couldn't make a project out of studying special boys independently. Still, it seemed like a good idea to hand the quarter over to Liz and have her be the one to press her thumbprint onto George Washington's head, drop it into the vending machine, and order item A-19.
Two seconds later, the vending machine popped open, revealing a corridor to the most state-of-the-art forensics laboratory outside the CIA. (If Liz had ordered B-14, a ladder would have dropped down out of the mahogany paneling behind us.)
As we walked into the forensics lab, Liz was already pulling Mr. Smith's pop bottle from her bag and placing it in the center of a table. The broken shards were pieced together, and I could almost forget why I had dropped it—almost.
"We'll just run it through the system and see what we've got," Liz said, sounding very official and far too wide-awake for SEVEN A.M. on a SATURDAY MORNING! Besides, I could have told her what we were going to find— nothing. Nada. That Dr Pepper bottle was going to yield the fingerprints of a Gallagher Academy student (me), a nonexistent-as-far-as-technology-is-concerned-because-every-year-he-gets-new-fingerprints-to-go-with-his-face Gallagher Academy instructor (Smith), and a perfectly innocent bystander whose only crime was being concerned for teenage girls who are forced to pilfer from trash cans (Josh).
I started to share all this with Liz, but she'd already put on her white lab coat, and nothing gives Liz more joy than wearing a white lab coat, so I zipped my lips and tried to rest my head on the desk.
An hour later, Liz was shaking me awake, telling me that Josh's fingerprints were nowhere in the system (shocker, I know). This pretty much meant that he'd never been in prison or the army. He wasn't a practicing attorney or a member of the CIA. He'd never tried to buy a handgun or run for office (which, for some reason, came as kind of a relief).
"See?" I told Liz, thinking she'd abandon the hunt and allow me to go back to a proper bed, but she looked at me as if I were crazy.
"This is only Phase One," she said, sounding hurt.
"Do I want to know what Phase Two is?" I asked.
Liz just looked at me for a long moment and then said, "Go back to sleep."
"I can't believe I let you talk me into this," I said as we crouched in the bushes outside Josh's house. Another car drove by and the music got louder, and all I could say was, "I can't believe I let you talk me into this."
"You can't believe it?" Bex snapped then turned. "Liz, I thought you said that house was going to be empty at eight."
"Well, technically, the Abrams house is empty."
I couldn't blame Liz for being defensive. After all, it had taken her three hours of breaking through firewalls (ours, not theirs) and scrolling through the Roseville public schools' computer system to find out that "my" Josh was Josh Abrams of 601 North Bellis Street. It had taken another hour to access all the Abrams family accounts and intercept the e-mail in which Joan Abrams (aka Josh's mom) promised someone named Dorothy that "We wouldn't miss Keith's surprise party for the world! We'll be there at eight sharp!"
So imagine our surprise as we crouched in the azaleas and watched half the town of Roseville traipse in and out of a white house with blue shutters at the end of Josh's block. I pulled on a pair of glasses that only work if you're really nearsighted (they're actually binoculars) and zoomed in on the house where the party was in full swing.
"Keith who?" I asked, forcing Liz to think back on the e-mail we'd printed on Evapopaper and hidden under my bed.
"Jones," Liz said. "Why?"
I handed the glasses to her so that she too could look at the house at the end of the street and see the Keeping Up with the Joneses sign that hung over the front door.
"Oh," Liz mumbled, and we all knew that the Abrams family hadn't gone far.
I had imagined where Josh would live, but my dreams paled in comparison to what I actually saw. It wasn't a real neighborhood—it was a TV neighborhood, where lawns are manicured and porches are made for swings and lemonade. Before I came to the Gallagher Academy, we lived in a narrow town house in D.C. I spend my summers on a dusty ranch. I had never seen so much suburban perfection in one place as I looked through the dim streetlight toward the long rows of white picket fence.
Somehow, I knew a spy would never belong there.
Still, three were there—crouching in the dark—until Bex pulled out her lock-picking kit and rushed toward the back door. Liz was right behind her until she stubbed her toe on a garden gnome and landed flat on a holly bush with a quiet cry of "I'm okay!"
I helped Liz to her feet, and seconds later we were right behind Bex as she worked her magic on the lock of the back door.
"Almost got it," Bex said firmly, confidently.
I knew that tone. That tone was dangerous.
I heard the music from the party down the street, saw our picturesque surroundings, and a thought dawned on me. "Um, guys, maybe we should try—" I
reached for the knob. It turned effortlessly beneath my palm.
"Yeah," Bex said. "That works, too."
Stepping inside Josh's house was like stepping inside a magazine. There were fresh flowers on the table. An apple pie was cooling on a rack by the stove. Josh's sister's report cards were clipped beneath a magnet on the refrigerator— straight A's.
Bex and Liz darted through the living room and up the stairs, and I pulled my thoughts together long enough to say, "Five minutes!" But I couldn't follow. I couldn't move.
I knew at once that I wasn't supposed to be there—for a lot of reasons. I was trespassing not only on a house, but also a way of life. I found a sewing basket in a window seat, where someone was making a costume for Halloween. A book about do-it-yourself upholstery lay on the coffee table, and four fabric swatches hung on the arm of the sofa.
"Cam!" Bex called to me and threw a transmitter my way. "Liz says this has to go outside. Why don't you try that elm tree?"
I was glad to have a job. I was glad to get out of that house. Sure, doing basic reconnaissance was an essential part of honeypot detection. After all, if Josh was getting instructions from a terror cell or rogue government or something, planting a Trojan horse on his computer and digging through his underwear drawer was probably the best way to find out about it. Still, it was a relief to go outside and climb the tree.
I was on the third branch of the tree, tying off the transmitter, when I looked down the street and saw a figure cutting through yards. He was tall. He was young. And he had his hands in his pockets, pushing down in a way I've only seen once before!
"Bookworm, do you read me?" I tried; but even though Liz had done her best to fix my shorted-out comms unit, the crackling static in my ear told me that her hasty repair job hadn't worked. I stayed crouched against the branch as summer's last remaining leaves swayed around me.
"Duchess," I whispered, praying Bex would answer—or better yet—tap me on the shoulder and scold me for not having a little faith. "Bex, I'll let you choose any code name you want, if you'll just answer me," I whispered through the dark.
