City Spies

by James Ponti

  When there was no response, she tried again, this time pounding louder.

  Thwack, thwack, thwack! “Yo, Brookie the Rookie! Time to get up!”

  “All right, all right,” Brooklyn called back. “Come in and stop that banging.”

  Sydney didn’t enter the room so much as she invaded it, flinging the door open and flipping on all the lights. Brooklyn used her forearm to shield herself from their bright glare as she sat up and got her bearings.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” Sydney said firmly. “You really are in Scotland learning how to be a spy. Welcome to basic training!”

  Brooklyn rubbed her eyes and tried to focus on the clock next to her bed. “It’s four fifty in the morning.”

  “I know,” said Sydney. “It’s your first day, so I thought I’d let you sleep in.”

  “Do you realize that back home in New York it’s …” She tried to do the time-zone math in her head but gave up and said, “… yesterday?”

  “First of all, New York isn’t home anymore, so you’re going to have to get used to that. Second, you need to ask yourself something. Are you Sara? Or are you Brooklyn? Because Sara can go back to sleep, but Brooklyn needs to be downstairs ready to run in ten minutes.”

  That woke her up faster than a bucket of cold water.

  “I’ll be there in five,” Brooklyn said, now fully alert.

  “Dress warmly,” Sydney instructed as she left the room. “The sun doesn’t come up for another hour, and it’s cold along the water.”

  The previous night Brooklyn had demonstrated impressive natural spy skills, but if she wanted to be ready for a high-level operation in three weeks, she needed to prepare around the clock. It was decided that she wouldn’t enroll at Kinloch until after the mission so she could dedicate herself to getting ready full-time.

  Her training schedule was split up with everyone spearheading a different aspect. Sydney took charge of physical conditioning, which is why early Saturday morning the two of them ran on the beach in near total darkness.

  “We’re going to start every day this way,” Sydney said as the first glimmers of daylight began to peek out from the horizon. “We have to build up your stamina. Missions rarely follow a schedule, and you need to stay alert despite limited rest.”

  The ocean breeze was cold against their faces, and their strides fell into a steady matching rhythm.

  “What was that you called me earlier?” Brooklyn asked. “When you were pounding on my door.”

  “Brookie the Rookie,” she said with a laugh. “We came up with that last night when we were planning your day. I don’t remember if it was Paris or Rio who thought of it.”

  “They hate me, don’t they?” asked Brooklyn.

  “They’re embarrassed, but they’ll get over it,” said Sydney.

  “I’m not so sure,” said Brooklyn. “I got angry eyes from Rio all through dinner, and as far as Kat goes, you should’ve seen her when I sat in her chair.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with you,” said Sydney. “That’s just Kat.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s one of a kind,” said Sydney. “And I mean that in the best possible way. It’s what makes her amazing. She sees the world in patterns and equations. That’s why she’s such a stellar code breaker. But, if something’s out of order, like a person in the wrong seat, it knocks her for a stagger.”

  After a few more strides Brooklyn said, “Thanks, by the way.”

  “For what?”

  “You never believed that I’d stolen anything. You totally had my back.”

  In a day filled with improbable twists and turns, that moment stood out for Brooklyn. It meant more to her than Sydney would ever know because it felt like something a sister would do. Neither of them spoke for a while until Brooklyn asked, “How far are we going to run?”

  “I figured we’d go until you threw up. Maybe a little farther than that. This isn’t just exercise, we need to get you in spy shape.” Sydney laughed and started running faster. Brooklyn took a deep breath and tried to keep up.

  Attempting to keep up with her teammates was a recurring theme throughout Brooklyn’s day. She got completely lost in the woods when Paris tried to teach her how to navigate with a compass. Though she took it as a good sign that he came back to rescue her. She was fairly certain Rio would’ve let her wander for hours.

  She did her best to keep pace mentally when Kat tried to explain complex theories on patterns and codes using a Scrabble game. Most of it was beyond her grasp, and she couldn’t tell how much of that was because it was hard, how much was because Kat didn’t like her, and how much was the result of Kat’s social awkwardness. Ultimately, she decided it was probably a bit of each.

  But the most difficult lesson was the last one. At least from a confrontational standpoint. It was with Rio, who held the biggest grudge from the day before. She tried to lighten the mood with a friendly smile when they sat down at the kitchen table, but there was no smile in return.

  “What am I going to learn from you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know that there’s anything I can teach you,” he said mockingly. “I thought you already knew it all.”

  Brooklyn was not in the mood. She let out a deep sigh and asked, “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No,” he said. “I want you to keep up.” He flashed a sly grin. “If you can.”

  He placed three plastic cups and a red foam ball on the table between them. “I’m going to place the ball under a cup, and then I’m going to shuffle them around. When I stop, tell me where you think it is.”

  He did the trick three times in a row and each time, when she missed, he made an obnoxious buzzer noise and said, “Wrong!” After the third time, he added, “Maybe cups aren’t your thing.”

  Next, he did a variation of the same trick except with three playing cards. Again, she missed, getting the answer wrong three times in a row.

  “Boy, you’re not very good at this, are you?” he taunted.

  “I’m done,” Brooklyn said, starting to get up.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Rio. “You don’t like it when someone makes you look foolish?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  “Then how do you think it made me feel?” he said. “You have any idea how long I’ve waited for a chance to be the alpha? And you humiliated me.”

  “No,” she said. “You humiliated yourself. I didn’t ask you to spy on me. You chose that. Think about it. What do you think would’ve happened if, instead of spying, you just greeted me at the airport? If you made me feel like you were at least open to giving me a chance? You looked bad because you wanted me to look bad.”

  They both sat quietly for a moment.

  “Now, what’s the lesson?” she asked.

  “This is the lesson,” he said, motioning to the cards and cups on the table.

  “Magic tricks?”

  “They use confidence, deception, and audience manipulation. Just like spycraft,” he said. “The CIA even hired one of Harry Houdini’s best friends to teach magic to its agents.”

  “You’re making that up,” she said.

  “It’s completely true.” Rio pulled out a copy of The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception and placed it in front of her. “His name was John Mulholland, and this is the handbook he wrote.”

  She flipped through some of the pages. “And you learned magic by reading this book?”

  “No, I’ve been doing magic my whole life,” he said. “In Brazil I lived on the streets and made a living performing tricks for tourists. After my act, I’d pass around a hat, and they’d put money in it. One day, Mother was in the crowd.”

  “And instead of putting money in the hat, he asked if you wanted to go to Scotland?” guessed Brooklyn.

  “Something like that,” he said, looking at the table. There was an awkward pause before he added, “And when I got here, there was no one to welcome me at the airport either.”

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p; “That’s too bad,” said Brooklyn. “It would’ve been nice.” She paused for a bit and added, “And it’s too bad how things went down yesterday. I really didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  He gave a slight nod. “Right.”

  “So … can you teach me some tricks?”

  “Yes.”

  He spent the next hour demonstrating basic skills like palming a playing card or performing the French Drop, a maneuver in which a small object seemingly disappears when passing from one hand to the other. More important, he explained how these tricks translated directly into spy work.

  “If you can palm the ace of spades, then you can palm a flash drive or a piece of paper with a secret message on it,” he said. “And if you can do the French Drop, you can convince someone that your hands are empty when they’re not. These skills can mean the difference between the success or failure of a mission.”

  The last thing he showed her was the brush pass.

  “This is how a spy passes something to another spy without anyone seeing,” he said. “You act like you don’t notice each other, avoid all eye contact, and when you brush past, you slip the object into the other person’s hand or pocket.”

  They were practicing the move when Monty came into the kitchen.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “Good,” said Rio. “Just working on the brush pass.”

  “I need to steal Brooklyn,” she said. “I want her to meet Ben before the briefing.”

  “Who’s Ben?” asked Brooklyn.

  “The last member of the team,” answered Monty. “He’s down in the priest hole. That’s where Mother’s going to brief everyone on the mission.”

  Brooklyn gave her a quizzical look. “What’s a priest hole?”

  “Follow me and I’ll explain.”

  Monty led Brooklyn down a narrow staircase that connected the kitchen with the basement. “Many of the castles and manor houses across Scotland and England have priest holes,” she said. “They’re secret rooms where someone can hide.”

  “And why are they called that?”

  “Because a lot of the time, the person hiding was a priest or a minister,” she explained. “Religious conflict has been a common theme throughout this part of the world for centuries. And there have been times where if you were Catholic and your priest was visiting, the last thing you’d want was for the authorities to find him here.”

  “So he’d hide down below?” asked Brooklyn.

  “Exactly.”

  In the basement they entered a library that had floor-to-ceiling bookcases on each wall.

  “And this is it?” asked Brooklyn.

  “No,” said Monty. “This would be too easy to find.”

  She reached behind a book, flipped a switch, and pulled on a bookcase, which swiveled out to reveal a steel door with a keypad. “The priest hole’s back here,” she said as she typed in a combination. “Of course, it used to be rather small, but then MI6 expanded it and added some new features.”

  This was an understatement.

  The door swung open to reveal a room roughly twenty by twenty with high-tech gear everywhere. There were computers, a virtual reality station, and giant touch-screen monitors on two of the walls. Unlike the rest of what she’d seen at the FARM, this actually looked like it belonged in a spy movie. There weren’t, however, any people.

  “I thought you said we were going to meet someone named Ben,” said Brooklyn.

  “Not someone, something,” answered Monty.

  They stepped inside, and Brooklyn’s eyes were instantly drawn to a supercomputer running the length of the room behind a wall of glass panels. It was made up of ten silver units standing side by side like a row of refrigerators, each about six feet tall and two feet wide.

  “Brooklyn,” Monty said as they approached it, “this is Ben.”

  Brooklyn had never seen anything so beautiful in all her life. She pressed her hand up against the glass, which was cool to the touch. “It’s very nice to meet you,” she said. “I think we’re going to become excellent friends.”

  13. Operation Willy Wonka

  FOR BROOKLYN, IT WAS LOVE at first sight.

  As a student at PS 394, she’d become a skilled hacker despite only having access to some ancient PCs in the school’s computer lab. But now, with Ben, the possibilities of what she could do were limitless.

  “Mind if I talk Geek for a minute?” asked Monty.

  “Are you kidding?” answered Brooklyn, who stood virtually motionless, mesmerized by the machine. “I’d love that.”

  “Ben started off as a Cray XC40 supercomputer with a two-point-one gigahertz Xeon processor,” Monty explained. “As far as the rest of the world knows, that’s what FARM had installed to create state-of-the-art weather forecasting models. Luckily for me, the same type of computer that’s used for predicting the path of a hurricane is ideal for advanced cryptography. MI6 doubled the number of racks from five to ten, made some modifications to the operating system, and added a few next-generation technology touches so that now it can perform more than five hundred trillion floating-point operations per second. Unofficially, it’s the sixteenth-fastest computer in Britain.”

  “Why unofficially?”

  “Because not too many people know it’s here,” said Monty. “And almost nobody knows about the modifications.”

  “And it’s ours?” Brooklyn asked.

  “Technically it belongs to the people of the United Kingdom. But, since they’re unaware of its existence, we get to have all the fun.”

  “Why do you call it Ben? Do the letters stand for something?”

  “It’s just a name,” said Monty. “I thought it was a bit daunting to always call it ‘the supercomputer.’ And since it’s a weather-forecasting machine that we’ve hidden in a priest hole, it seemed right to name it after an actual weather-forecasting priest.” Monty pointed to a brown-tinted photo on the wall of a man with a hooknose and wire-framed glasses. “That’s Father Benito Viñes, a Spanish-born priest who moved to Cuba in 1870. He was the first person to successfully predict the paths of tropical storms, which saved countless lives. He was known throughout the Caribbean as Father Hurricane.”

  Brooklyn smiled at the man in the picture. “Buenas tardes, Padre Huracán.”

  For her every bit of it was perfect, especially Monty, who was the first woman she’d ever met who had the same level of excitement that she did while discussing technology. They continued their geek talk until the others arrived for the briefing.

  Everyone sat around a large oval conference table, and, trying not to upset Kat, Brooklyn waited until the others had taken their seats to make sure she didn’t sit in the wrong one.

  “What do you think of Ben?” Mother asked her.

  “He’s amazing,” she said, beaming.

  “Excellent,” he replied. “The good news is you’re going to spend a lot of time with him during the next few weeks.”

  “Excellent,” said Brooklyn. “What’s the bad news?”

  “Even with Ben working at top capacity, it’s going to be hard to be fully prepared for this operation,” he replied.

  This brought a smile to Sydney’s face. “But, if we need to get prepared, that means we have a mission,” she said hopefully. “Did we get official approval?”

  “Yes,” Mother answered, eliciting enthusiastic reactions from around the table. “I just got off the phone with Vauxhall Cross.”

  Sydney leaned over and whispered to Brooklyn, “That’s MI6 headquarters.”

  “I told them about Brooklyn and our faith in her,” continued Mother. “We also discussed our unique position with regard to the current situation, and we were given the all-clear to implement Operation Willy Wonka.”

  Brooklyn laughed. “You really do love Roald Dahl books, don’t you?”

  “I really do,” replied Mother. “But in this instance I think you’ll find the name’s particularly appropriate.”

  He pressed a button on a cl
icker, and half a dozen pictures filled the wall monitors. Although most of the photos had been taken from a distance, Brooklyn could tell that they were all of the same man. Only one, however, provided a good look at his face. It was a publicity shot that she’d seen in countless tech magazines.

  “Stavros Sinclair?” she said.

  “You know him?” asked Mother.

  “In the computer world he’s pretty much a god,” answered Brooklyn.

  “He’s founder and CEO of Sinclair Scientifica, a mammoth multinational technology company that makes everything from microchips to missiles,” said Mother. “He’s one of the richest men in the world and also one of the most secretive. These are the only known recent photos of him, and they’re not really that recent.”

  “Let me guess,” said Brooklyn. “He’s Willy Wonka.”

  “Bang on,” answered Mother. “He hasn’t made a public appearance in more than four years, but in a few weeks he’s scheduled to be part of the Global Youth Summit on the Environment. Have you heard of it?”

  “A little,” she said. “It’s going to be in Paris, right?”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  He pressed another button, and the screens filled with images from past summits.

  “Nearly fifty thousand young people from around the world are expected to descend on the city for four days of rallies and a scientific symposium,” Monty said, seamlessly taking over the briefing. “As part of our cover story with FARM, we were already planning to be there before Sinclair got involved. I’m on a symposium panel, and Sydney’s giving a speech at one of the rallies.”

  Brooklyn shot a surprised look at Sydney, who flashed a nervous smile.

  “But things changed four months ago when Sinclair unexpectedly announced the Stavros Challenge,” said Mother.

  “What’s that?” asked Brooklyn.

  “It’s a lot of money, is what it is,” answered Rio. “One million euros!” he said, drawing out each word carefully.

  “For what?” asked Brooklyn.

  “For the team of students who do the best job solving an environmental problem,” answered Paris. “Sinclair thinks young people are better at coming up with fresh ideas because they’re more open and idealistic. He plans to pick a different issue every year and give away a million euros each time.”