“The string!” I shouted, and she nodded. She wove it around the men’s legs, then grabbed the bit of string that had held the banner up and wrapped it around the agents’ feet as I heaved back to standing. The third guy, the one Kennedy had kicked, was watching everything, eyes wide, like he thought he might be hallucinating. Gritting my teeth, I ran straight for him, barreling into his chest. Kennedy didn’t weigh enough to knock him over, but I certainly did—he stumbled backward and toward the other two, whose legs were now expertly laced together. I huffed another lap with the banner around the three until they were gathered together, wrapped up into the banner like a very odd bouquet. They shouted—at us, for backup, for whoever’s-hand-is-on-my-butt to-move-it.
Kennedy stepped back and grinned like she was admiring a glorious piece of art.
“Come on,” I said, trying not to laugh—they did look pretty glorious, all things considered. Grabbing her hand, I pulled her toward the stairwell. I could hear more voices now. We burst into the stairwell, then through the emergency exit door.
The now-familiar fire alarm began to scream, but it didn’t matter—we were out. We dodged through alleys and around buildings, pausing to take deep breaths. Most people didn’t seem to notice us, but one kid stared at our uniforms, head cocked to the side, trying to work out what we were wearing.
“Scuba diving convention,” I panted at him. We hurried off before he could remember we were nowhere near a body of water.
By the time we made it to the train, my legs felt like jelly. Kennedy, on the other hand, was bouncing, like she was drawing energy from the danger of it all.
“Did you see me, Hale? I totally got that guy!” Kennedy said, diving into the train seat.
I looked back the way we’d come, sure I was going to see a League agent running for us at any moment, but the city was normal. Busy, but normal. Still, I didn’t take my eyes off the station platform until we’d rolled away and begun to pick up speed.
“Did you hear me, Hale?” Kennedy said, now whispering due to the full train, though it was the sort of whisper that might as well be a shout. “I bet if I keep doing the leg presses Agent Hartman’s always moaning about, I’ll be strong enough to knock him down next time!”
“Does anyone know you left?” I asked Kennedy.
She shrugged, tugging at the corner of her uniform. She’d managed to get a new one. “I don’t think so.”
“Does anyone know I left?”
“Just me. Because seriously, Hale, that was the worst fake-sick voice I’ve ever heard this morning. I knew you were up to something. So, did you find out anything? About where they’re holding Mom and Dad? That’s why you went, right?”
“That’s why I went, but I couldn’t find anything,” I admitted, and I felt Kennedy tense with disappointment. I put an arm around her shoulders. “Don’t worry, though. I’ll figure something out.”
It didn’t take us long to walk back to the BR MBY COUNTY SUBSTITUTE MATHEMATICS TEACHER TRAINI G building. We pushed the door open together, then froze in the open frame.
A crowd was gathered at the receptionist’s desk—Ms. Elma, Agent Otter, Dr. Fishburn, and a handful of agents—some of them my junior agent classmates. Otter, Green, and Kennedy’s teacher, Agent Hartman, were all wearing SRS uniforms; Otter was stashing a switchblade in his pocket. My eyes widened. Seeing someone like Agent Otter preparing to go on an active mission was worrisome, because 1) it was a reminder my parents weren’t available; 2) Agent Otter’s uniform was three sizes too small, which was pretty horrifying; and 3) it meant Kennedy and I were in serious trouble, if they were sending senior agents after us.
“He’s back?” one of the junior agents—it was Eleanor—whined. “Does this mean we don’t get to go? Man . . .”
“Who cares?” Riley snorted. “I didn’t want my first mission to be finding Fail Hale—”
Fishburn cleared his throat loudly, which shut the juniors up. He pointed at the elevator. Shooting me irritated glares, the juniors descended back into SRS.
Ms. Elma walked toward us in a slow, practiced way, like a big cat. For a second I thought perhaps she planned on punching me—her scar seemed to be pulsing red, like some sort of anger beacon. The senior agents were behind her. Dr. Fishburn didn’t get up; instead he leaned back in his chair and placed his fingertips together delicately.
The agents didn’t seem to know exactly what to do when they reached us at the doors. We weren’t family, so it’s not like they could sweep us into relieved and happy hugs—and to be honest, the idea of Otter hugging me was sort of gross anyway. Kennedy, being much more precious than I was, got a brief and awkward side-squeeze from Agent Hartman.
“Where were you?” Agent Hartman asked. Her voice was rough but pretty. I always thought she looked like she should be playing acoustic guitar instead of spying.
“I wanted to go after Mom and Dad,” I began, then paused. Truth.
“Jordan?” Otter asked, and I realized I’d been silent for too long.
“I wanted to go after Mom and Dad, but I got scared. I was hiding in the coffee shop.” I tried to hold my eyes and lips still, since those are usually the things that gave liars away, while my stomach felt like it was boiling over into my lungs. We had an entire class on deception techniques, yet it hadn’t prepared me for lying to the head of SRS.
“We checked the coffee shop,” Fishburn said. He didn’t sound mad. He didn’t even sound doubtful. His voice was a straight line, no ups or downs.
“I was in the bathroom—”
“I checked the bathroom,” Otter said, folding his arms.
“I was in the girls’ bathroom,” I said swiftly. The lie was getting easier as all the little untrue details fell into place in my head, like words in a book. “I got mixed up.”
Otter frowned, turned to Kennedy. “Is that true?” he asked her.
Kennedy’s face immediately broke into a wide grin. “Yep,” she said smoothly. “I heard him crying through the door. It’s the only reason I found him.”
I tried not to glare at her addition to the lie. That said, her line about me crying did seem to convince the other two; Ms. Elma and Agent Hartman stepped back and turned toward Fishburn, who rose slowly. He didn’t match the room; he was gray where it was brown, cool where it was warm. Fishburn sighed, walked over to me, and put a heavy hand on my shoulder.
“Hale,” he said. “I know you’re worried about your parents. We all are. But SRS has protocol in place for a reason. You can’t just leave unsupervised. And you encouraged your sister to do it too! Lucky the downstairs receptionist saw her sneaking into the elevator, or we might have never known you two were gone.”
I gave Kennedy a tense look. Really, Kennedy? You went out the front door? She chewed on her hair in response.
Fishburn shook his head, and then continued. “We did a full building lockdown for you two. But given that you’re both under a lot of stress, and that no real harm was done, I’m going to let this breach slide. Kennedy, no gym privileges for a week . . . Hale . . .” I saw him debating what to do with me, since revoking my gym privileges was more of a gift than a punishment. He frowned. “Hale, janitorial duty for the week. And please, Hale, Kennedy—never again. Your parents being captured is a tragedy, not an excuse. Am I clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Kennedy and I said in unison, Kennedy’s lower lip trembling. I could count the number of times she’d been in trouble on . . . Well, actually, I couldn’t count them. She’d never been in trouble.
“Ms. Elma, take them back home? And do keep a better watch on them this time,” Fishburn said. Ms. Elma nodded curtly, and she put a hand around me. I think she was trying to be kind, but her nails dug into my arm as we got on the elevator and descended back into SRS headquarters.
“Here we go,” Ms. Elma said as she unlocked the door to our apartment. “Back home, safe and sound.”
I nodded and went to my bedroom. SRS was home, sure—it was where I’d grown up, after all. Apartment 30
0. Where my family lived, where I’d learned how to fake a Swedish accent and shot my first laser gun. It was where one day I’d (hopefully) become a field agent, where I’d eventually retire and maybe even teach the next generation of superspies.
SRS was home, but all I could think of right then was what Mom and Dad said the morning they’d left—that heroes don’t always look like heroes, and villains don’t always look like villains.
I had to work out who was who. I had to work out the truth.
Chapter Eleven
The truth started with my parents. It was Oleander who gave me the idea, really—when she’d suggested that maybe SRS itself was behind my parents’ disappearance. If that were true, there’d almost certainly be some sort of clue to it in Mom and Dad’s personnel files. Everything got put in those, from if we’d had chicken pox to our favorite vegetables. Personnel files, of course, weren’t available from any old SRS computer lab. If I had to guess, they were probably encrypted and accessible only by the computers on the control deck, which was always full of HITS guys. The HITS guys were relaxed, but they still wouldn’t let me go poking around high-level encrypted files . . .
I needed help.
I was good at a lot of things. Russian, computer hacking, and putting on a disguise in under fifteen seconds, for example. I was not good at asking for help. There were a lot of reasons for this, but the main reason was: group projects.
Every so often Agent Otter would assign us fake missions we had to complete in groups of three or four—you know, stuff like “break open this door using four toothpicks” or “pretend I’m a League translator, and convince me you’re my Bulgarian contact.” No one wanted me on their team, so I usually got stuck with whoever was unlucky enough to have missed class the day everyone picked teams. Group projects at SRS were rarely about actually completing whatever the task was; they were about making the flashiest presentation. So while the other SRS kids in my group were figuring out ways to rappel into the classroom from the ceiling, I was actually opening the door or learning conversational Bulgarian. Mom always said I should talk to Otter about it; Dad said I should jam their rappelling equipment. I never did either—what was the point? I just wanted to get the dumb thing finished.
Anyhow, the point is, group projects didn’t teach me how to work with a team. They taught me to trust no one.
But there was one person at SRS I could trust, and right now, I needed her. I kicked off my blankets and crept into the hallway. I poked my head into Kennedy’s bedroom. The eyes of a dozen cheerleader animals stared at me, like they judged me for not wearing pink. I ignored them.
“Kennedy,” I whispered.
“I’m getting up!” she shouted so loud that I dived for the bed and clamped a hand over her mouth. She jolted awake and almost screamed before realizing it was me. We both froze and stared at her bedroom door, cringing, waiting for Ms. Elma to barge in with her scar throbbing.
Nothing.
Slowly, I shut the door behind me. Kennedy’s hair was tangled on top of her head, and her eyes were bleary and unfocused—I wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t fallen back asleep.
“I need your help,” I said quietly. “To figure out where Mom and Dad are.” That was a partial lie, but it seemed safer this way.
“How?” she asked immediately.
“Are you really awake? You need to remember this.”
“Yes!”
“What’s seven times eight?”
“I don’t know. I’m not good at math awake or asleep!” she answered, wrinkling her nose. “Seventy . . . fifty-six! It’s fifty-six!”
“Right. Okay—I need the HITS guys out of the control deck tomorrow.”
“When?”
“About two o’clock.”
Kennedy looked at me solemnly for a few seconds, and then nodded. “Okay.”
I knelt down by her bed and whispered quickly, explaining exactly what to do. She recited it all back to me four times before I nodded and stood.
“Are you sure you’ve got it?” I asked, warily. “We can go over it again.”
She rolled her eyes and flopped back onto her blankets, curling them around her like a nest. “I’ve got it, Hale.”
And then she was asleep again.
I wished it were that easy for me.
Truthfully, there were worse things than janitorial duty.
I mean, SRS didn’t really get that dirty, since there wasn’t much of an outdoor space. The janitors handed over a dustbin and broom and sent me off into the halls with instructions to come back once I’d swept all the way to the Disguise Department. Truthfully, they seemed pleased that I was in trouble—like they were proud of me for causing a little chaos.
“Except that lockdown,” one of the janitors said in a thick Bosnian accent. “I was stuck off the cafeteria, by the garbage bins.”
“Žao mi je,” I said, which is “I’m sorry” in Bosnian. I didn’t speak it as well as French and Russian, but I knew how to apologize and say, “I like your shirt”—which meant the janitors liked me way more than they liked any of my classmates. I wandered off, poking at the floor with the broom. The classrooms were on this hall; through a window I saw Walter doing pushups.
I wound through SRS, running the end of the broom along the baseboards until I finally arrived at the control deck. I glanced in, assessing.
Nine HITS guys, all with energy drinks or coffee cups on their desks. They were the only ones on deck when there wasn’t a mission being run, and though I saw a few scrutinizing spreadsheets, most seemed to be playing video games. The gigantic screen in the front of the room blinked, updating the world map full of little light dots where active agents were. I wondered which—if any—were my parents.
Mission: Find out who’s the hero
(and who’s the villain)
Step 1: Get onto the control deck
“Hale!” one of the HITS called out. He waved to me, his fingers thick with dust from a tub of cheese puffs. “So, man. Yesterday.”
“Yeah.” I sighed, stepping into the doorway. “I dunno. It was just—”
Another HITS shook his head at me. “Hey, man, your parents are missing. It happens. They gave you janitorial duty?”
I smiled a little and nodded. I hated the fact that I didn’t want to become a HITS guy—they were a thousand times nicer than Walter and four thousand times less sweaty.
“Want to take a break?” the first HITS guy said a little slyly. “Play a round of Starfighter?”
I grinned, then set my broom and dustbin by the door and walked over to one of the HITS guy’s desks. He hurriedly closed a few windows on his screen, switched the settings over so I couldn’t open any files, and then offered me his chair.
“All right,” one of them said, clicking something; suddenly the giant world map was replaced by the Starfighter opening sequence. I wasn’t really good at the game, but they were, and I think they fully believed that one day I would give up and join them. And when that day came, I guess they wanted me to already be good at their favorite game.
“We got the expansion pack,” one of the HITS guys explained.
“I thought you said it didn’t come out for another few months?”
“It doesn’t,” he said with a wicked smile. “Come on, Hale. We’re the tech guys at an elite spy organization, and you don’t think we can break into Starfighter’s servers?”
I laughed and forced myself to slouch and relax as we started up a game. I stole a glance at the clock every time we paused the game so they could take long swigs from their energy drinks/coffees. One fifty-three. Come on, Kennedy. I felt dumb worrying—this was the nine-year-old who broke into League headquarters. Surely she could handle sneaking out of class for this.
One fifty-seven. We started up another game and I began to lose faith—what if she’d been caught? She’d get punished again, and it would be my fault.
The intercom by the center computer beeped loudly, a light at the top flashing red. The HITS guys fr
oze the game, the team leader cleared his throat, and the others sank down into their desks—throwing me out of my chair—like one big choreographed motion. They might be the HITS, but they were still trained by the SRS.
“HITS, how can we help?” the agent said quickly. The others were at their stations, poised and ready to act.
“Hi—can you guys come help me? I’m in the computer lab on level four and the whole thing is acting weird.” My sister’s voice was loud and so high-pitched, it made the speaker crackle.
Step 2: Create a diversion the HITS can’t ignore
“Have you tried restarting?” the agent said as the others relaxed. They used the lull to ball up their empty chip bags and toss them toward the trash can. They all missed.
“Yeah, but it’s just—okay, so I’m making a project on hypnosis for class with Agent Farley, and I wanted to make it pretty, so I downloaded all these free fonts off a website. And then this thing popped up that said I’d won a laptop, and I clicked it, and then—”
Again, like a dance number, the HITS jumped to their feet. They sprinted for the door, their footsteps slapping down the hall so loudly, they sounded like a stampede. I heard them round the outside corner, shouting about virus protection and secure networks. It wouldn’t take long before they sent someone back to watch the deck while the others performed software surgery on Kennedy’s computer. I rushed across the eerily silent control deck and slid into the center computer desk—it was the one most likely to have full security clearance.
Step 3: Gather intel
First, Project Groundcover. It didn’t take me long to figure out how to open case files—after all, I’d seen the HITS guys do it dozens of times.
The Doublecross Page 7
