“I know, it seems harsh,” he said, “but when you’re talking about high-profile political targets, you need to know who you’re dealing with, right?”
The door at the end of the room opened, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Dalson walked in as casually as if they were entering a coffee house to order their daily latte. I wanted to shout out for help, but they appeared entirely at ease and not shocked in the least to see me bound to a chair. I made a quick decision to keep quiet.
“Let him up,” Dalson said.
Oh, thank goodness!
Butler put a hand on my shoulder and smiled again. He leaned over and untied my legs, then my arms, and then reached around me. I heard a click, and the straps holding me to the chair fell away. I jumped. The top of my head struck Butler’s chin, and he stumbled back. I shoved his cart after him, and it smacked into his legs. He cursed and grabbed his shins. I sprinted for the balcony door, but my feet were wet, and I slipped as soon as I stepped off the rug. I scrambled to my feet again and, this time, managed to stay upright and get to the door. I heaved on it, but it didn’t budge. I moved the lock and pulled again.
“It doesn’t open,” Mr. Dalson said. His voice was as calm as a hypnotist’s. “Adrenaline is ripping through you right now, Matt. I need you to get it under control.”
I whirled around and pressed my back against the glass and raised my fists. Butler was rubbing his chin and limping, and Mr. Smith was as stone-faced as ever.
Dalson took a step forward. “This was your Crucible Training, Matt. It was also a Delta competition.” He gestured to Butler. “Butler is a pro. He’s been the head CIA interrogator for fifteen years; we’re lucky he agreed to help us out.”
Butler dabbed a Kleenex to his bloody lip and nodded at me.
“Butler’s done a couple others tonight. You’re only the second one not to crack.”
My teeth clenched, and my hands shook. “You dragged me to this place and kept me strapped to a chair for … for …” My mind raced. How long had I been there? I’d seen the sun come up and go down at least twice. “Days,” I said. “You kept me tied to a chair for days just for a stupid … freaking … competition?”
“Crucible Training,” Dalson said, without a hint of being put off by my tone. “Crucible, by definition, means occasion of extreme trial. Besides, I’m sure if you give it some thought, you’ll realize you haven’t been in a chair for days.”
I blinked. “I haven’t?”
Dalson smiled. “It’s only been …” He glanced at his watch and muttered, “Let’s see, dinner was at five …” He looked up. “It’s been five hours.”
“Wh-what? It’s only been hours? Not days?” I shook my head and nodded toward Butler. “It was night when he snatched me. Then daylight when I woke up. Then night again, then daylight …” I shook my head. This was another trick. Another test.
Dalson nodded to Butler, and the interrogator walked over to a switch in the kitchen and flicked it. Instantly the dark windows behind me illuminated. I turned and found myself looking out at a daylight scene. I heard the click of the switch being flicked again, and the scene outside the window changed to night.
“It’s … it’s fake?” I asked breathlessly.
Dalson nodded. “It’s fake.” He extended his hands palms up and walked toward me. I scuttled sideways along the wall. He sighed and said, “The drug you were given messes with your sense of time. Add the false lighting, and it’s easy to convince your mind of anything.” I flinched again with his next step, but only slightly. “Take it easy. This has been part of the training, Matt. It’s why you’re here.”
“To get beaten up?” My voice cracked, and I felt fresh tears sting my eyes. “What the heck kind of camp lets their campers get strapped to a chair to have the crap kicked out of them? You can’t keep me here. You can’t. You—you have to let me call my parents.”
Dalson raised an eyebrow and looked about ready to say something when Butler started clapping. “Oh, I am impressed,” he said, laughing. “This kid is method. He doesn’t break character for anything.” He pointed to the metal bowl of water. “I bet we really could’ve fried him, and he still wouldn’t have talked.” He shook a finger at me. “You wouldn’t have talked, would you?” He threw his head back and laughed again. “Where do you find these kids, Dalson? I bet he’s better than that crippled girl. I mean, she just sat there and stared daggers at me. She’s tough as nails, sure, but anyone interrogating her would know she’s hiding something. But this kid …” He laughed again. “He’s so convincing I almost thought you gave me the wrong kid.”
Mr. Smith gave Butler a hard look, and as soon as Butler noticed, his smile vanished. Then Mr. Smith turned to me. “Who taught you counter-interrogation techniques?”
Counter-interrogation techniques? Really? That was what we were doing? I drew several long, deep breaths. My heart stopped hammering to get out of my chest. This was part of it, Matt. Get yourself together. I realized that, at the end of it all, I really had spilled my guts. I’d told Butler everything. Well, I had at least told him enough that, had the interrogation been real, I would never have had a chance. Still, Butler seemed impressed. Why? Because I lasted five hours?
“Matt!” Smith barked.
I jumped so high I think they might have thought I was trying to fly away. “W-what?” I managed.
Butler grimaced. “My last punch might have been harder than I intended.” He hunched and lowered his face so it was level with mine. Blood smeared his lip where my head had connected. “Hope I didn’t do any lasting damage.” He smiled. “You’ve got a lot of promise, lad. Real top-shelf material. If you don’t win your last competition, I look forward to seeing you at the next camp. I bet I could work with you to make you a real expert.”
“N-next camp?” I stammered.
Dalson checked his watch. “Right. Well, it’s time for you to rejoin your team, Mr. Cambridge. I suspect they’ll be wondering where you are right about now. And you’re going to want to be preparing for tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Final Delta competition.”
I clenched my fist when Dalson walked over to put his hand on my shoulder, but I let him guide me toward the exit. I flinched when Butler jabbed me playfully in the shoulder as I walked by. I was led up a metal staircase, and when I stepped out of the door at the top, I found myself in the middle of Camp Friendship. The building I’d emerged from was a shed with red brick walls and a corrugated steel roof. It looked like a place where you’d store a lawnmower and hedge trimmer, which was no doubt exactly what they’d intended it to look like.
“An underground interrogation room,” I said under my breath.
“What was that?” Dalson asked from behind me.
I swallowed and shook my head.
“Well, good job, Matt,” he said. “I suggest you get some rest.” He and Smith turned and headed off together, leaving me alone on an almost deserted campus.
My hands shook as I made my way back to the Delta cabin. I didn’t really know how, but clearly I had made it to the final competition. Except, after what I had just gone through, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to be a spy anymore. My face hurt. My stomach hurt … in fact, every part of me hurt.
I wasn’t sure I had what it took to be a spy.
Chapter 37
“So you didn’t lose?” Angie asked. “We’re still in the competition?”
I shrugged and then flinched from pain and exhaustion. “I dunno the score. Dalson told me to be ready for tomorrow. For the final competition.” The idea of having just one more competition was almost a relief. This camp had been great, except when it wasn’t, and when it wasn’t, I was usually getting my face beaten in.
It was almost over. One more event. That’s it. Just one more. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Rylee nodded at me. “Who ran the interrogation? Was it really Ingleton?”
I’d barely managed to tell my team the gist of what had happened. Reco
unting the whole thing made my head hurt. Rylee’s question only half registered. “Huh? Oh, he, um, he said his name was Butler.”
“Butler!” Juno blew out a breath and looked up the ceiling. He said something that sounded Japanese, and then said, “So it was Robert Ingleton. I didn’t think he’d personally be doing the interrogations. I figured he’d be observing. Wow. You learned from the best.”
“He is the best,” Amara added. The others nodded knowingly.
“I had a cousin in another camp,” Angie began, “and Butler broke his nose in the first forty-five seconds of an interrogation.” She grabbed my chin and turned my face one way, then another. “You fared pretty well.”
I blew out a shuddering breath. “I didn’t fare well at all. That guy was certifiable. He was nuts.”
“Nuts?” Rylee asked. “I doubt it. Brilliant, maybe. He’s the CIA’s top interrogator. Imagine all the stuff he could teach us. What he could prepare us for.”
“Practical as ever, Rylee,” Angie said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rylee asked. She stood up and pointed at Angie. “I’ve had just about enough of your snide little comments, Angie. You might be a psychopath, but that doesn’t mean I’m afraid of you.”
Angie stood up and took a step toward Rylee. “Oh no? You should be.”
I wouldn’t have thought Rylee so aggressive, but she stood toe-to-toe with Angie, and the two of them shouted at each other. Their argument quickly gathered steam, and before long, everyone was yelling at each other. Everyone but me. I was entirely fixated on what Rylee had said about Butler. The same thing Dalson had said about him: he worked for the CIA as head interrogator.
Of course, Rylee was right. He could teach us so much. He was crazy, no question, but if I did end up becoming a spy, and I got discovered and interrogated, I needed to know how to handle myself. I placed a cold pack on the side of my face and lay back on my bed.
There was something else too. Something in the back of my mind that scratched at this CIA idea like a rat trying to escape a cage. I couldn’t quite get a handle on it, but it wasn’t right.
One thing was the fact that my dad had signed me up. How had he done that? I’d been to his building. I’d seen him work. That had to be what was bothering me: how in the world had my dad gotten me in here in the first place? Was the company my dad worked for a front for some clandestine operation, and they just had real janitors working there? No. That wasn’t it. There was a piece to this puzzle that I couldn’t put my finger on. A piece I wanted to discover.
One more challenge, I told myself. Just one more.
“Enough!” Yaakov shouted. The arguments in the room silenced at once, which was good, since it looked as if punches would’ve been thrown with one more insult.
“Thank you!” Yaakov added in response to the silence. “Whether you’re keen to learn from Butler, or hate his guts, it doesn’t matter.”
I glanced over at our hacker. His forehead was beaded with sweat, and his hands shook like the branches of a shrub.
“The only thing that matters is that tomorrow we’re in the final Delta competition, and we need to be ready.”
“Fine,” Angie said.
Rylee folded her arms across her chest and plopped down on her bed. Juno and Amara went to their respective beds as well, and in a matter of seconds, the room had gone from chaos to silence.
I cleared my throat. I needed to be careful about how I was going to ask my next question. I wanted one more shot at getting information from my teammates, and this might be my last chance. “Okay, let’s be smart about this. Let’s just talk it out. Let’s start with the basics. What can we know, based on experience, about the final competition?”
Rylee nodded. “Right. Well, we know it’s the final competition. We couldn’t be sure about that because of the cancellation last week, but now we know it’s really the final one.”
I nodded. I didn’t see how that made any difference at all, but since Rylee felt it was worth mentioning, I pretended her comment was a valid point. “Good,” I said. “What else?”
Amara paced across the room. “We know we’ll get mission parameters,” he said.
“It’ll be a location,” Angie added, “and probably a goal.”
“There’s always a goal,” Yaakov said.
“You’ll have to interpret what the goal means,” Rylee added. “Like that competition I mentioned before, about how the teams were supposed to steal something from the building downtown. They were told it had to be something of great importance. That’s all. They had to interpret what the term meant.”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “Good. So it’s fair that we expect the challenge to be off-site, right?”
“Good question,” Juno said. “Can anyone remember a camp where final challenges were on-site?”
Everyone shook their heads.
“Anyone have a cell phone?” Juno asked. “We might need it if we’re in the city.”
I knew Yaakov had seen me toss Jason’s broken cell phone into my storage bin on the first day, and it was entirely possible that the others had seen it too, so I said, “I had one, but it broke the first day when I fought Chase on the bus.”
“Seems like a million years ago, doesn’t it?” Rylee asked.
I nodded. It did. I could hardly believe it had only been three weeks. It really did feel like we’d been together for months.
Yaakov sighed. “I turned mine in when we got here, but it doesn’t really matter. If we need phones, we can get burners from pretty much any convenience store.”
“Money?” Angie asked. “How much do we have?”
“I don’t have much,” Rylee said. “A few bucks.”
“Me too,” Juno added.
“I think we’ll need to remember something,” Amara added. “This could be totally different from previous years. From the start, Clakk has been saying things might not play out the way they have in previous years.”
“Good point, Amara,” I said. “So we don’t really know what to expect, and either I’ll be setting the overall mission, or I won’t be.” I sighed along with a few of my teammates. “Basically this is one mission that there is absolutely no way for us to prepare for.”
“Basically,” Juno said, “I think that’s exactly right.”
“Wouldn’t be fun if it were too easy,” Angie added.
“I don’t know about that,” Yaakov said. “I think an easy mission would be great fun.”
I had to agree with that. Still, we were one competition away from the end. One event away from my goal of making it to the end of camp with my secret intact. I had thought I’d be okay with not winning, but not anymore. I was too close. I wasn’t sure who the last three teams were, but I knew Team Grizzly was one of them.
I could taste victory. It was right there, dangling just out of reach like a carrot on a stick. I could do this. We could do this.
“Let’s get some sleep,” Rylee suggested. “Tomorrow’s going to be here before we know it.”
Chapter 38
There were rumors circulating around the camp during the morning, but it wasn’t clear who had been eliminated in the previous night’s competition until we walked into the mess hall for breakfast. The tables and chairs had been arranged into three rows, and Arctic Fox’s banner was gone. Squirrel, Grizzly, and Hyena were the only ones that remained.
“And then there were three,” Juno said.
“How did Bratersky lose before Becca?” Rylee asked under her breath.
As we walked down the line toward the Delta tables, the campers in Team Grizzly congratulated me.
“Well done, Captain.”
“Glad you didn’t break, Captain.”
What? That comment caught me off guard. I had broken. I’d broken badly. I was kind of relieved no one seemed to realize that.
“Way to go, Matt,” another camper said. “I knew we were on the winning team.”
It continued the entire length of the table and
even trickled around us after we’d taken our seats. When we were allowed to get our breakfast, it continued in that line as well. I actually started feeling pretty good about myself. Sure, I hadn’t lasted all that long, but maybe that was the point. Maybe everyone has to break. Clearly, I’d lasted longer than Bratersky, and that alone was reason to grin. If nothing else, I’d proven myself to have some worth. I had myself half convinced that if they figured out who I was now, they’d still keep me around, but just before that belief really took hold, a knot formed in my stomach. No. No, they wouldn’t. I had to do something really great. Really remarkable. I had to prove myself in this last event. That was the only thing that would work.
Once everyone had eaten, Dalson stood at the front of the room and pointed a remote control toward the ceiling. A large screen unrolled behind him. “Campers,” he began, “in a few minutes, we will begin the final event. And three days from now, Camp Friendship will come to a close. Many of you will not be back until next summer. Others will be back in the fall.” He straightened. “And of course, some of you will not be back ever again.” He glanced down at the remote and then pointed it up at the projector mounted on the ceiling. “Let’s take a look at how we got here, shall we?”
“Oh, this is going to be great,” Juno whispered.
The video montage played out, complete with soundtrack.
It started with the soccer ball challenge and paid special attention to Becca and her explosion. It turned out she’d stepped on a mine on the sidelines behind the goal. The explosion had thrown her into the goal. She’d ricocheted off the post and then settled in the netting unconscious. You could almost hear her bones crunching. I glanced across the room. Becca was as red as a beet.
Scenes from the paintball game played out next. From a bird’s-eye view we got to see how the teams had moved. It was as if they’d received months of military training. The scene cut in a number of times to images that could only have been recorded by cameras in the woods. It made me wonder just how safe I’d been calling Jason, but then the paintball course was a different part of the camp, and they probably planned on using that section all the time. They either knew about my calls to Jason and didn’t care, or didn’t know. I decided not to worry about it.
Disruption Page 19
