by James Ponti
“Are you serious?” said Mother. “Will this be televised?”
“Thankfully, no,” answered Tru. “It will all be held in secret to protect the identities of the students who were on the trip. That way, after every session, Bloody Mary can come out and address the press on her own.”
“If it’s going to be private, then why is it going to be difficult?” asked Sydney.
“Because I need you to lie,” answered Tru. “Now, that’s one thing for Brooklyn. She’s only twelve. But you’re fourteen, which means you’re old enough to be sworn in.”
“You want me to lie? In Parliament? Under oath?” Sydney couldn’t believe it.
“It’s not a matter of want,” said Tru. “It’s a matter of law. You have taken the United Kingdom Official Secrets oath. That supersedes any other oath. You cannot tell anyone that you are an agent of MI6.”
“So no matter what I do, I’ll be breaking at least one law?”
“I’m afraid so. Although I find it helps if you rely on your cover.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked Sydney.
“Your cover identity is Eleanor King,” she replied. “That was the name you used on the ship and the name you’ll be sworn in under. Think of it as Ellie lying, not you.”
“Can Mother and I be with them for the inquest?” asked Monty.
“You can, Monty, but not Mother.”
“Why not?” asked Mother.
“Because Monty is their official guardian, so she has legal standing,” Tru answered. “If you were there, it would only put you on the committee’s radar, which is not something we want to happen.”
She turned back to Sydney and Brooklyn. “Still, she won’t be able to testify for either of you. You’ll have to do all the talking. Do you understand?”
Reluctantly Sydney nodded. “Yes.”
“You’re a credit to the Service,” Tru said. “Both of you.”
15. Magpie
KIM PHILBY WAS THE BIGGEST villain in the history of British intelligence. While serving as a high-ranking MI6 official, he covertly led a group of double agents, known as the Cambridge Spy Ring, who passed secrets to the KGB for decades. His story was taught to incoming spies as a cautionary tale. Virtually all despised him because he betrayed his country and cost countless lives.
Magpie despised him because he got caught.
Like Philby, Magpie had spent years as a double agent passing secrets to the enemies of the United Kingdom, primarily to the crime and terror syndicate known as Umbra. For nearly a decade, MI6 was aware that it had a mole but had been unable to figure out who it was.
Magpie eluded discovery by being careful and cunning, mixing bold actions with intricate planning. This had been a successful recipe up until the hijacking of the Sylvia Earle, where it failed miserably.
Magpie’s search to figure out what went wrong led all the way to the Arctic Circle and the tiny Norwegian village of Reine. This was where Emil Blix had gone into hiding and where Magpie went looking for answers. They met alongside an old wooden rorbu, a fisherman’s cottage built half on land and half on stilts over the water. It was red with a grassy sod roof, and the two of them sat outside, looking across the water as the sun set behind the craggy granite peaks of Reinefjorden.
“What happened?” asked Magpie.
“You tell me,” said Blix, who had shaved his beard and dyed his hair blond to avoid recognition. “There were supposed to be two girls on that ship who you said would bring us millions.”
“They were there,” Magpie assured him. “You were just too inept to find them.”
Blix didn’t like being spoken to this way, but he knew he’d failed and was in no position to argue.
“They should’ve been in their cabin like you promised.”
“What about the SSAS button?” asked Magpie. “Who pushed it?”
Blix considered mentioning that he thought Brooklyn might be the culprit. But that was just a fleeting hunch, and everything about the hijacking was already embarrassing. The idea that a twelve-year-old girl had derailed his plan would’ve been unforgivable and would’ve undoubtedly marked the end of his career with Umbra. He offered his companion a more reasonable theory instead.
“It must have been one of the crew,” he said. “There was probably a second button hidden somewhere.”
“Everything about this looks bad,” said Magpie. “Which makes me look bad.”
“You?” said Blix, trying to control his frustration. “I’m the one whose picture is all over the news.”
“Exactly,” said Magpie. “And I’m the one who picked you for this job. So when Le Fantôme looks to point fingers, they’re aimed directly at me.”
Le Fantôme was the leader of Umbra, and the mention of his name added to the seriousness of the conversation.
“Is he angry?” asked Blix.
“He doesn’t get angry,” answered Magpie. “He gets results. And if we cannot give them to him, he will move along to someone else, and we will instantly become expendable.”
Blix nodded.
“Although,” added Magpie, “he was irritated about the explosives. How could you have bungled that so?”
“I didn’t bungle anything about the explosives,” said Blix defensively. “I set that limpet mine myself.”
“Then how do you explain the fact that there were two explosions instead of one? And if the explosives were attached with a limpet mine, why was there no damage to the ship?”
“The mine must have been tampered with.”
Magpie laughed at the absurdity of this. “By whom?”
“Someone from MI6?”
“You’re forgetting something,” Magpie said. “I am MI6. I would know.”
They were quiet for a moment and looked across the water toward the sky, now a brilliant swirl of reds, purples, and oranges.
“Maybe you don’t know everything, because I set that bomb and it was perfect. Maybe MI6 put someone on board that you don’t know about.”
16. The Stamford Swizzle
IT HAD BEEN NEARLY TWO weeks since Tru’s visit to the FARM, and the entire team had come to London for Brooklyn’s and Sydney’s testimonies at Parliament. Since it was a secret hearing, only Monty would be allowed in the room during questioning, but the others wanted to be there for moral support. More importantly, they wanted to be there so they could make headway on Operation Golden Gate. London was just a short train ride from Oxford, where they could investigate all things Parker Rutledge.
This aspect of the trip had to be kept secret from everyone at MI6. Nobody could know what they were up to. Not even Tru. Mother told her they were coming down a couple of days early to do some sightseeing, and she arranged for them to stay at a safe house in Notting Hill, one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city. Normally, they wouldn’t get such posh accommodations, but this was the only place available with enough rooms for them all. Besides, Tru wanted to reward the girls for their great work on the Sylvia Earle.
“We’re staying here?” Sydney said in disbelief when they came upon the row of pastel-colored Victorian town houses lining Portobello Street. “It looks like an Instagram filter, only real.”
“A gift from Tru,” Mother said. “Her way of saying thanks.”
“All hail Tru!” Paris replied as he and Rio traded a high five.
“Much nicer than the concrete bunker I was expecting,” Kat added in her typically understated manner.
MI6 safe houses tended to be small flats in nondescript neighborhoods, but this one was an exception. It was designed for high-level representatives from foreign governments and was well appointed with nice furniture, a deluxe kitchen, and a state-of-the-art home theater. It was also well equipped with listening devices, hidden cameras, and a wide array of cutting-edge surveillance equipment.
MI6 spied on everyone, including its friends, a point Mother reiterated as they navigated the maze of vendors, artisans, and merchants whose stalls filled the street for the Saturday Porto
bello Road Market.
“You have to assume that someone is always listening and that your every action is being monitored and recorded,” he said. “When you’re in the house, you cannot say a word about Golden Gate.”
They spent the day sightseeing, just as they’d told Tru they would. It was Brooklyn’s first visit to the city, and they wanted to show it off. They watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, posed for pictures on Tower Bridge, and checked out the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum. After a delicious dinner at an Indian café in Covent Garden, they capped off the whirlwind by seeing a West End musical.
As Mother suspected, their movements were tracked, albeit loosely. An MI6 agent posing as a produce seller noted their arrival at 9:47 a.m. and their subsequent departure at 10:21. The artificial intelligence software that monitored all conversations in the safe house detected none of the key words that might initiate deeper surveillance. And Tru was notified by her assistant, Jack Fissell, when the group arrived at the Lyceum Theatre. She’d arranged for the tickets in part as a reward, but also so she could keep an eye on them.
“Interesting,” Mother said to Monty as they entered the theater.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Don’t look now, but Jack Fissell, who rhymes with whistle, is sitting at one of the outside tables at the Wellington pub,” he answered. “No doubt he just told Tru that we are where we’re supposed to be.”
“We assumed she’d keep an eye on us,” Monty replied. “Why’s that interesting?”
“She’s using her personal assistant,” he said. “Someone we could recognize. That means she’s not overly concerned. It also probably means she has limited manpower and resources.”
“So tomorrow?”
“We shake them early and we should be fine.”
“Excellent.”
Operation Golden Gate began in earnest the next morning with a maneuver Monty dubbed the Stamford Swizzle. The goal was to make it virtually impossible for someone to follow them, but in a way that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. For this they needed a massive distraction, and Mother chose the football match being played between Chelsea and Liverpool at Stamford Bridge, one of the UK’s most legendary stadiums.
They took the tube to Fulham Broadway station, where they waded into a sea of supporters in bright blue jerseys who sometimes broke full-volume into songs like “Keep the Blue Flag Flying High,” which was sung to the tune of “O Christmas Tree.” Up at street level, Mother bought everybody shirts at a souvenir stand and quickly handed them out.
“Here you go,” he said. “Put these on over what you’re wearing.”
Paris was incredulous. “You want me to wear Chelsea blue to a Liverpool match?”
“No,” Mother answered. “I want you to blend in and disappear.” Then he smiled and added, “And it’s my good fortune that it will be much easier to do that with you wearing Chelsea gear.”
“But there are plenty of Liverpool supporters here,” he countered. “Let me wear red.”
“Sorry,” Mother replied, clearly enjoying Paris’s predicament. “It stands out too much. You’re the needle and the haystack’s blue.”
Paris shook his head in disbelief as he grudgingly pulled it on. “You’re only doing this because we’ve won four straight against Everton. You’re jealous.”
Mother laughed and said, “I don’t know, Paris. Blue’s a good color on you. Maybe you should switch teams.”
And then, to add to Paris’s grief, Sydney snapped a quick picture on her phone.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“You never know when you might need an instant blackmail photo.”
Paris wagged a finger at her. “Had I known you were a traitor, I wouldn’t have used my body to block that cameraman chasing after you.”
Despite Paris’s complaining, the plan worked perfectly. It soon became impossible to pick them out from the mass of people slowly herding their way down Fulham Road. Once their tickets had been scanned at the turnstile, they entered the grounds and looped halfway around the stadium before exiting back onto the street.
For Paris, this was even worse than wearing the wrong team’s jersey. “I can’t believe we have tickets to see Liverpool play at the Bridge and we’re not going to use them,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s one cruel trick after another today.”
Mother threw a consoling arm around his shoulders and repeated one of his sayings: “Most can go where fortune falls, but a spy must go where duty calls.”
Paris gave him a look and replied with an impromptu Motherism of his own: “I know that is what you think, but as for me, I think it stinks!”
Mother roared with laughter. “Very clever, Paris. I think it’s the Chelsea shirt. It makes you smarter.”
Once they were out of the stadium, they took the tube to Paddington to catch a train for Oxford. Along the way, they made sure to use cash so there’d be no digital trail left by swiping their Oyster cards, the specially made debit cards used to pay for fares on the London Underground. They had to assume MI6 could track them whenever they were used.
The train to Oxford took about an hour, and they were able to find an empty car where no one could overhear them as they discussed their plans. Monty was the Oxford expert. She loved her time there as a student, and because of her extensive local knowledge, she briefed the team during the train ride.
“I’m so excited that you’re finally going to see the dreaming spires,” she said, referring to the steeples and towers that made up Oxford’s skyline. “The first thing you have to know is that it’s not laid out like most universities. Instead of a main campus with dormitories and lecture halls, the university is made up of thirty-nine different colleges set in clusters around the city. The best one, of course, is Exeter, which is where I went. But the others are good too. Think of the colleges as planets and the university as a solar system that holds them in orbit.”
“If they’re the planets,” asked Kat, “then what’s the sun?”
“The Bodleian,” answered Monty. “The massive library right in the middle of everything. It’s gorgeous. They used it as the library in the Harry Potter movies. And it will be our rendezvous point.”
“If we have a rendezvous point,” said Paris, “does that mean we’re separating?”
“Yes,” answered Mother. “We’ve got to get a lot done quickly so we’re splitting up into four groups. Brooklyn and Kat are heading to the store where Parker bought his camera, Sydney’s going with me to visit his aged mother, Monty’s going to use her alumni connections to check out the college where he taught, and you and Rio will attend the monthly meeting of the Dodos.”
“The what?” asked Paris.
“The Dodos,” Mother replied. “It’s what the members of the Oxford Ornithological Society call themselves. They meet the third Sunday of every month at the Museum of Natural History.”
“Bird-watchers?” said Paris. “I’m missing a football match at Stamford Bridge so I can listen to a bunch of bird-watchers?”
“You’re not just going to listen,” Mother said. “I’m sure they’ll have pictures.”
17. Strange Birds
THE OXFORD UNION WAS ONE of the oldest and most respected debating societies in the world. For nearly two hundred years, leading figures, including presidents and prime ministers, had participated in lively and often heated discussions about topics ranging from the arts and sciences to global politics.
The Union was located on Frewin Court off Cornmarket Street, and as the City Spies passed by, they too were locked in a passionate debate.
“Gelato,” Kat said firmly.
“Cupcakes,” countered Paris.
“I’m with Kat,” added Brooklyn. “The gelato place looked amazing.”
“Well, I’m with Paris,” said Rio. “And all that matters is what I think.”
“Really?” asked Sydney. “Why’s that?”
“Because I set a lock-picking record and won Sa
turday Match Day,” he said proudly. “And the winner gets to pick what we have for dessert.”
“Not forever,” said Sydney. “That was two weeks ago, and it shouldn’t count anyway because Brooklyn and I were getting hijacked at the time.”
“I didn’t hijack you, and it’s not my fault we’ve been too busy to have another match,” said Rio. “So until we do, I’m the reigning champion. Rules are rules.”
“Except didn’t you hand the trophy over to Sydney and Brooklyn when they got home that night?” said Monty. “You were so happy to see them safe and sound. It was very sweet and lovely.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” added Mother. “I was touched.”
“But… but…” Rio sagged in defeat.
“So gelato it is!” Brooklyn said triumphantly. “I think I’m going with one scoop of coconut and one scoop of chocolate.”
“Um, not so fast,” said Sydney. “He gave the trophy to both of us, and my vote is for that pie shop we saw in Piccadilly. It smelled amazing.”
Monty and Mother smiled at the back-and-forth, and when they reached the corner where they were supposed to split up into their groups, Mother made a suggestion. “How about we hold a Match Day right now, here in the field?”
“Ooh,” said Monty, “that’s brilliant. Whoever comes back with the best bit of information wins the match and picks dessert.”
“Real world Match Day?” said Sydney. “I like it.”
“So do I,” added Brooklyn. “I can already taste the coconut.”
“No way,” protested Paris. “That’s not even close to being fair. We got the worst assignment. We’re going to a bloody bird-watching society.”
Sydney laughed and said, “Well, at least you’ll fit right in.”
“Why’s that?” asked Paris.
