City Spies

by James Ponti

  “And we’re trying to win the money?” asked Brooklyn.

  “No,” said Monty. “We’re aiming for a nice finish between sixth and tenth.”

  “That’s pretty specific,” Brooklyn said. “Why between sixth and tenth?”

  “First place receives one million euros, with half going to their school or institution and the other half being split up among the five team members for their education,” said Monty. “The teams that finish second to fifth will each receive one hundred thousand euros. These students will all have their pictures splashed across media and will undoubtedly be scrutinized.”

  “Undercover agents hate media and despise scrutiny,” said Mother.

  “However, very little attention will be given to the teams that don’t win anything,” said Monty. “Thirty teams were chosen for the competition, but only ten will reach the final stage. We expect those to be the only people who will actually get significant face-to-face time with Stavros.”

  “So making the top ten is like finding the golden ticket?” said Brooklyn.

  “Exactly,” said Mother.

  “Here’s a silly question,” said Brooklyn. “Why do we care? I know he’s rich and all, but why do we want to work so hard just to be in a room with Stavros Sinclair?”

  “To protect him,” said Mother. “He’s what’s known as a national-level asset, which means countries can’t let him fall into the wrong hands. He only comes out in the open once every few years, so there will be representatives from every spy agency in the world there. Some will be keeping an eye on him, and others might be looking to snatch him.”

  “But we’ll be the only ones up close,” Sydney said proudly. “No one will expect us.”

  “Including the Purple Thumb,” said Paris.

  Brooklyn gave him a confused look. “The what?”

  “So far there’ve been three Global Youth Summits on the Environment,” Mother answered. “The first was in Stockholm, Sweden, and on the final night, there was a break-in at the headquarters of a recycling technology firm that hosted the main rally.” He pressed a button, and the monitors showed images from the crime scene. “Damage was minimal, and the police decided that it was just a prank. The only significant evidence was a purple thumbprint found in the middle of the CEO’s computer screen.”

  “Then came summit two in Tokyo,” said Monty. “It was sponsored by a group of renewable energy companies, including the Fu¯jin Corporation, which makes turbines for wind energy.” She walked over to the touchscreen and swiped on pictures from the Japanese crime scene. These showed shattered computers and broken furniture strewn across the room. “This was their headquarters the morning after the summit ended. This time the damage was more substantial, and, of course, there was another purple thumbprint.”

  “The Swedes only ran their thumbprint through their national database. It didn’t match anything, so they stopped pursuing it,” said Mother. “But when the Japanese found a second one, they shared the print with Interpol and the FBI, who found a match.” He tapped the screen, and a mug shot appeared. “Meet Leyland Carmichael, an environmental extremist who attacked multiple tech companies in the US and Canada.”

  “Did the Americans arrest him?” asked Brooklyn.

  “No, they didn’t,” he said. “You see, there was a slight problem—he’d been dead for nearly three years.”

  Brooklyn’s eyes opened wide. “That’s more than a slight problem.”

  “They even dug up his grave to make sure he was really buried in it,” he continued. “They found his body, but you know what they didn’t find.”

  “His thumb?” guessed Brooklyn.

  “Correct,” he answered. “He was missing his right thumb.”

  “Yet, somehow, the same thumbprint turned up at one of the hosting companies for summit three in San Francisco,” said Monty.

  “Is that the one when they had the big protest?” said Brooklyn. “When people locked arms and blocked the street?”

  “Yes,” answered Monty. “And since so much media attention was paid to that, few people heard about this.” She swiped the screen so that the images changed to a different crime scene. “The Fulgora Storm Three, a lithium ion battery prototype being developed for a next generation electric car, was stolen, and a purple thumbprint was left at the scene.”

  “Each time, these people have made a bigger splash,” said Mother. “And the worry is that they’re going to try to up their game again in Paris.”

  “Which companies are sponsoring the Paris summit?” asked Brooklyn.

  “None,” said Mother. “The expenses are being paid by a single individual.”

  He clicked the button, and once again the screen showed the publicity photo of Stavros Sinclair.

  “Which is why we’re going to be close to him to make sure they don’t do anything,” said Sydney.

  “So we’ve got to make it into the top ten,” Brooklyn said. “What’s the challenge?”

  “Rainmaking,” answered Monty. “Sinclair Scientifica wants creative approaches to making artificial rainfall. They believe it can be used to counteract drought and famine across the globe.”

  “And do we have any idea how to make rain?” asked Brooklyn.

  “We do,” said Monty. “More important, we have access to years of research. MI6 experimented with making artificial rain for nearly a decade. They gave up on the project, but we tweaked their data, made some new models with Ben, and created a proposal.”

  “For a contest that’s supposed to be for students, it sounds like we cheated,” Brooklyn said, only half joking. “I mean, it’s already kind of unfair that we have a supercomputer, which I’m guessing most teams don’t. But to have nearly ten years of secret government research doesn’t seem fair at all.”

  “It would be cheating if we were trying to win,” said Mother. “But we’re only shooting for sixth place. Besides, we had to ensure that we made the top thirty.”

  “And did we?” asked Brooklyn.

  “Yes,” he replied. “We received word two weeks ago and were told to keep it secret until the official list was announced. That was made public earlier today. There are teams representing leading research institutions and schools from around the world. Including one that’s surprising.”

  He pressed the button, and the names of the thirty finalists appeared on the screen.

  Brooklyn smiled instantly when she recognized one of them. “MIST!”

  “What?” asked Paris.

  “The Metropolitan Institute of Science and Technology,” she said. “It’s a school in New York. Actually, it’s the school I wanted to attend.” She looked around the table at the others. “You know, before I found out about teenage spies and castles with hidden rooms.”

  “Here’s a clanger,” Sydney said, noticing an obvious mistake. “They have us representing FARM.” She motioned to the list. “But they also have us listed as Kinloch Abbey.”

  “That’s not a mistake,” said Mother. “You’re the team from FARM. There’s another team of students from Kinloch who made the final thirty.”

  “How’s that even possible?” asked Rio. “Who do they have who knows anything about rainmaking and computer weather models?”

  And that’s when it hit them.

  “Charlotte,” said Kat. “They’ve got Charlotte.”

  “You mean the girl who used to live in my room?” asked Brooklyn.

  “No way,” said Sydney. “That can’t be.” Then she looked at Mother and saw it in his expression. “Can it?”

  “Yes,” said Mother. “Charlotte is the captain of the team from Kinloch. I just got off the phone with the headmaster. The school’s very excited.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” said Sydney. “Why would she quit our team, only to form another one?”

  “I can tell you one million reasons why,” said Rio. “Because we’re going to finish sixth, and she wants the money.”

  “We can’t let her do that,” Sydney said to Mother. �
��It’s not fair. We have to get them disqualified.”

  “We’ll do no such thing,” said Mother. “It would raise alarms at the school and might make Charlotte retaliate. As far as FARM is concerned, we’re thrilled that Kinloch is sending a team, and in the spirit of scientific cooperation, we’re going to help them.”

  “How?” asked Rio.

  “We’re letting them use Ben to prepare their weather models,” said Monty.

  “That’s bonkers!” exclaimed Paris. “We can’t let them down here.”

  “It will only be Charlotte,” said Monty. “She’s their computer specialist, and she already knows everything about us.”

  “And we know everything about her,” said Sydney. “Like the fact that she quit on us. Why are we helping them? So they can win a million euros?”

  Perhaps because she didn’t know Charlotte and this betrayal wasn’t personal, Brooklyn was the first one to see Mother and Monty’s plan. “No. We’re helping them to make sure they don’t win a million euros.”

  “Yes,” said Mother. “If they win, then Charlotte will get all the media and scrutiny we’re working so hard to avoid. Any light that shines on her has the chance to spill over on us. So we need to make sure they don’t win anything.”

  “How do we do that?” asked Kat.

  “We use me,” Brooklyn said. “If we work side by side, then I can hack her and stop them.”

  “You are going to hack Charlotte?” Rio asked, disbelieving. “No offense, but that’s easier said than done.”

  “He’s right,” said Paris. “She’s a computer virtuoso.”

  Brooklyn looked at them defiantly. “What makes you think I’m not?”

  “It’s nothing personal,” said Rio. “It’s just … One time we were down here, and Charlotte said she could hack anyone on the planet. Anyone. So we dared her to hack the prime minister.”

  “And?” asked Brooklyn.

  “An hour later we were reading his private schedule,” he answered.

  “So she failed,” Brooklyn said.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Rio.

  “Instead of the prime minister, it sounds like she hacked some appointments secretary,” answered Brooklyn. “That’s a fail.”

  Mother and Monty both smiled at this.

  “You think you could do better?” asked Kat.

  “I don’t see why not,” said Brooklyn. “I hacked Serena Ochoa.”

  The others shared a look for a moment, unsure if this was a name they should recognize.

  “I’m sorry,” said Sydney. “Who’s Serena Ochoa?”

  “A hero of mine,” Brooklyn answered. “She’s a professor of advanced computing and mathematical sciences at Cal Tech. I hacked into her laptop so that it gave her a special greeting on her birthday.”

  Rio was thoroughly unimpressed. “Not exactly the prime minister now, is it, mate?”

  “You didn’t let me finish,” Brooklyn said. “At the time, Dr. Ochoa was an astronaut on board the International Space Station. In order to reach her laptop, I had to hack into NASA, the Department of Defense, and Roscosmos.”

  “What’s Roscosmos?” asked Sydney.

  “That’s the Russian space federation,” she answered. “And, unlike Charlotte, I wasn’t using a supercomputer capable of performing over five hundred trillion floating-point operations per second.”

  For a moment, there was stunned silence around the table.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Monty said, “what were you using?”

  “An eight-year-old PC in my middle school computer lab,” Brooklyn answered.

  More silence until Rio uttered a single word. “Wow.”

  “Yeah,” replied Brooklyn in full swagger. “Wow.”

  “Well, then,” Mother said, barely stifling a laugh. “I guess that settles that.”

  14. Charlotte

  SHE WORE THE KINLOCH ABBEY uniform of burgundy blazer and tartan skirt as she rode in Coach A, seat 22B on the train to Aisling. Her dark brown eyes and full, round cheeks perpetually looked like they were on the verge of a smile. Her chestnut hair was cropped just above the shoulders and swayed ever so slightly due to the motion of the train. And her horn-rimmed glasses managed to look hip, bookish, and nerdy all at once. She was the picture-perfect schoolgirl. No one would have guessed that unlike other passengers who killed time checking social media or playing mindless video games, she was busy hacking into the laptops and smartphones of everybody seated in first class.

  You know, just for kicks.

  Her name was Charlotte Sloane. That was it. There was a time when that was one of many aliases she had. But she no longer spied for MI6, so now one name was all she got. Of course, in some corners of the dark web, she was better known as UKFlamethrower1999 or DundeeDeathMonger707, but mostly she was just Char, as the girls in the boarding house called her.

  In this instance, her hacking was more mischievous than malicious. She wasn’t stealing passwords or scamming bank records like she sometimes did. She was just keeping her skills sharp. “The greatest basketball players in the world are great because they practice shooting and dribbling so much it becomes as natural as breathing,” she once told Sydney. “This is my practice. This is my breathing.”

  Coach A, seat 22B wasn’t just some random ticket assignment. She’d ridden the train often enough to identify it as the best location for this sort of practice. She even called it “the throne,” just as she called herself the “queen of hacks.”

  There were three things about the throne that made it better than all the other seats on the ScotRail train. First, it was located just two rows behind the plastic barrier that marked first class. This meant it was a cheap ticket but still close enough to the router for her to steal the free Wi-Fi that came with expensive fares. Plastic barriers may stop passengers, but they do nothing to slow down radio waves.

  Second, it came with a table and electrical outlet. This allowed her to spread out with her laptop while she charged her other devices. Finally, it had an unobstructed view of six of the nine seats in first class. This let her see most of the people she was hacking, which made it so much more fun.

  For example, on this trip, she was able to see that the tall blonde with the movie-star sunglasses sitting in 3F was holding hands with her half-sleeping boyfriend in 4F at the exact same time she was sending flirty text messages to the man across the aisle in 1B. It also let her see that the car salesman in 8A looked nothing like the photo he’d just posted on a dating app.

  Everybody lies, she told herself. Everybody’s running a scam.

  “Ticket, please,” said the conductor.

  “Here you go,” she said as she handed him the orange-and-white round-trip ticket. “I bet you enjoyed the Celtic game this week.”

  His eyes lit up. “You bet I did. Two-nil over Rangers in the Old Firm derby.” He stopped for a moment. “How’d you know I was a supporter?”

  “I take this train a lot,” she said. “I’ve heard you talk about it before.”

  This was a total lie. She did recognize him from previous trips, but she only knew he liked Celtic because of an app on his phone. His had been the first one she hacked.

  “We’re going to win the cup again this year,” he said proudly before he continued down the aisle. “Mark my words.”

  Unlike the hackers in movies who always scurried about in the shadows, Charlotte liked to engage people in conversation. She wanted to be seen precisely because it made people less suspicious. The conductor would remember her fondly as the schoolgirl who talked football. There’s no way she could be up to any mischief.

  The final hack was the hardest. It was a laptop belonging to an accountant from Edinburgh sitting in 4B who had the latest firewall installed. But Charlotte still managed to breach it just as the train reached the platform at Aisling.

  She checked her watch. The trip had taken twenty-three minutes, and during that time she’d hacked nine passengers and the conductor. Solid if not specta
cular. This is my practice. This is my breathing.

  If there was any awkwardness about coming back to the FARM for the first time since she’d left, it was offset by the sense of familiarity that greeted her as she followed the footpath from the station. She knew every inch of it by heart: the curve of the stone fence that lined the road, the vibrant yellow of the rapeseed flowers blanketing the field next to the airstrip. This made it all the more startling when a total stranger answered the door.

  “Who are you?”

  “Brooklyn,” mumbled the girl through a mouthful of chocolate chip cookie. “You must be Charlotte.”

  Charlotte couldn’t believe it. Was it possible that they’d already replaced her?

  Brooklyn swallowed her cookie and smiled. “Come on in,” she said, like they were long-lost friends. “We’ve been expecting you.”

  Ever since learning that Charlotte had a team going to the competition, Brooklyn had been carefully planning for this interaction. She needed to hack a hacker in order to make sure that Kinloch didn’t win the Stavros Challenge. To do that, she had three targets she needed to hit. If she missed any of them, her plan would implode.

  The first was to take advantage of the fact Charlotte didn’t know she existed. That was why she’d wanted to greet her at the door. It put Charlotte on her heels from the very beginning. Brooklyn had watched as she approached the house and timed it down to the last second, taking a bite of cookie right before answering the door to make it seem like she was goofy and friendly rather than cool and calculating.

  Before Charlotte could react, Monty stepped out from the kitchen. “I see you two have met. The kids are at school and Mother’s in Edinburgh, so it’s just us girls. I’m making lunch right now, so why don’t you get to work and I’ll bring it down when it’s done.”

  “Sounds good,” Brooklyn said as she took another bite of cookie and headed for the basement.

  Charlotte’s head was still spinning as she and Brooklyn went down the stairs toward the priest hole. “I’m sorry,” she said, trying to piece it all together. “Who are you?”