“We aren’t sure,” he said. “The issues the Agency has been dealing with lately are almost certainly related to security leaks, but we don’t have any hard evidence that Medlock himself is behind any of it. In fact, he’s virtually disappeared since the incident at the circus earlier this year. That said, it’d be foolish to assume that he’s simply gone away or that any of the recent oddities are completely unrelated. Here at the Agency, we’re not allowed to believe in coincidence.”
I nodded slowly. I decided to keep my other fifty-seven questions to myself and just let him talk. He wouldn’t have brought me all the way down here, during school, to sit across from me and not say anything.
“It started with a few missing field agents,” Agent Blue began. “That’s a rare-enough occurrence, and unquestionably cause for alarm. Hence the extra security you must have noticed.”
I nodded.
“From there, things have only gotten worse,” he continued. We shared a look, and he didn’t even need to mention Nineteen’s name. I realized that, despite his completely blank exterior, he was just as confused—and perhaps even as frightened—as I was. “But before I get into all that, I need to ask you, straight out, if you’re prepared to come work for us again.”
I’d suspected that was why I was brought down here, but officially hearing it spoken aloud still carried with it a wave of shock and excitement. The same sorts of feelings I used to get executing perfect pranks.
“I want you to truly consider the question before answering,” Agent Blue said, his dark tone carrying a surprising edge. “Because this isn’t going to be like last time. When we asked for your help in protecting Olek, there was the possibility of danger, of course, but you were never intentionally put directly into harm’s way by any of your Agency directives. This time . . . will be different.”
He let that part linger for a few seconds before continuing.
“I’m going to be blunt, Carson: What we’re about to ask will put you in a situation not dissimilar to that of a trained and experienced field agent, and will carry with it all the same risk, both to your person and to the Agency. We think you can help us save Agent Nineteen’s life; we wouldn’t be sitting here otherwise. But you need to know what you’re getting into.”
I let the question sink in. It felt as if it just melted into me like acid, burning my skin and bones and heart and lungs. The question seeped into my guts and melted them into a kind of gross blood and organ stew with my stomach acting as the stockpot.
And then I considered my options. It basically broke down like this:
1.I could say yes and maybe get killed. Or maybe I would save the day and save the world again, and most importantly save Agent Nineteen.
2.I could say no and then carry with me the knowledge that if Agent Nineteen died, it would be partly my fault for not even trying to save him. If I ever even found out what happened to him, that is, which was unlikely given the Agency’s love of secrets—and perhaps never finding out would be even worse.
3.I could say nothing, just sit here and stall for as long as possible, while the seconds in Agent Nineteen’s life slowly ticked away.
To be blunt, all of the options sucked. It’s easy to dream of being a secret agent, but another thing entirely when you’re confronted with the reality of what it might mean. Add this to the fact that every minute I thought about it was a wasted one. There were less than seventy-two hours left in Nineteen’s life according to the slip of paper in my corned beef, and I was wasting those precious minutes by sitting there debating whether or not to help save him.
And then something else occurred to me. For some reason, at that moment, I thought about Prankpocalypse. About how much I had pretended to love it as much as my friends. If the failure of Prankpocalypse to really bring back the excitement of my old life meant anything, it meant that maybe I was meant for something more than just running around with my friends at three in the morning giving my principal a hard time.
“I’m in,” I said.
Agent Blue must have seen the look on my face as I’d debated the question. He must have seen how tough it was to make such a decision with so little information. And he must have seen the conviction in my response.
Because instead of questioning me further or asking me if I was really sure, he simply nodded, and said, “Let’s go meet the Agency director.”
AGENT BLUE POKED HIS HEAD OUT THE DOOR OF THE CONFERENCE room and looked both ways before we exited. I followed him as he walked quickly along the wall opposite the glass railing surrounding the Lobby balcony. Seeing him sneaking through his own Agency’s workplace like an outside spy made me even more nervous than I already was.
At the end of the walkway stood a wall of solid concrete. Agent Blue stopped next to it and then pressed his palm against the hard surface. The wall slid aside, revealing a short metal hallway. We stepped inside and the concrete slab slid shut.
After one more set of secure doorways with retina and fingerprint scanners leading down another short hallway, we were finally inside of a massive office. It had large glass computer monitors everywhere and two huge desks. Behind one of them sat a man so large that he made the wooden desk look like a stepping stool.
He nodded at us as we entered. “Welcome.”
Agent Blue and I sat in chairs across from the freakish monstrosity.
“Carson, this is Director Isadoris,” Agent Blue said as we sat.
In movies, the Agency director or head of the division or whatever is usually some scrawny old guy with thinning gray hair, steel-rimmed glasses, and a cool and calculating manner. Or sometimes it is a bearded fellow with a sly grin and a gruff demeanor, but kind eyes that sparkle with a razor wit and years of hard-earned wisdom. Or something. It definitely usually isn’t a massive, hulking middle-aged dude who looks like he belongs in a UFC cage fight and has a nickname like Bonecrusher that he earned after literally crushing his opponent’s bones into powder during a match.
“My friends call me Bonecrusher,” Director Isadoris said with a grin, extending his meaty paw across the table.
My jaw flopped open. Then he chuckled and removed a thin metal disc that had been attached to his head. He set it aside.
“My nickname’s not really Bonecrusher,” he said. “I was just testing a new device our PTD team has been working on. My apologies.”
“That thing reads minds?” I said weakly.
“In a way,” he said, but he didn’t expand on that, and I was too stupefied to ask. “Let’s start over. I’m Director Isadoris.”
He held out his hand again. It was easily the size of my whole head. I shook it. Nothing had ever made me feel smaller in my life.
“I’m Carson . . . or, uh, Agent Zero.”
He grinned, but only for a moment. “Yes, I think we can reactivate your file and codename, given the dire circumstances. I know we didn’t have a chance to meet during your last stint with the Agency, and that was likely for the best. Still, I was quite impressed with your work, and Agents Nineteen and Blue expressed as much in their field reports as well. Despite your lack of experience, they were convinced that Olek would have been compromised without your help. Which brings me to why you’re here.” He took a file from the corner of his desk and opened it in front of him. “Last weekend, Agent Nineteen traveled to a remote base of ours for a routine check-in. Shortly after his arrival, one of our automated security sensors transmitted an abnormal reading. It seemed like it was nothing important at the time, likely just a technical glitch. But a few hours later, it became clear that something more serious had occurred.”
He paused. Agent Blue’s head was down and his hands were clasped tightly in his lap.
“What happened?” I asked.
“This particular base’s primary directive involves the research and production of insidious biochemical agents,” Director Isadoris said.
“Like, germ warfare or something?” I asked. I’d played enough video games to know what he was referring to.
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Director Isadoris said. “Some of the Agency’s activities might appear aggressive to an outside observer. But part of biochemical prevention and preparedness is knowing what the enemy may do or use before they even do themselves.” He leaned forward, towering above me.
“And one of the biochemical agents, or whatever, got released inside this base?” I ventured.
He nodded.
Nineteen had already explained earlier that year that being a Chaos Breaker (which is what Agency personnel sometimes informally called themselves) meant doing things that might seem pretty scary or even outright wrong on the surface. It didn’t come as any surprise to me that the Agency had created the virus that was threatening Agent Nineteen’s life at that moment.
“We’re not sure exactly what caused the outbreak in the lab,” Director Isadoris continued. “The base’s automated remote-communication link remained active just long enough for us to determine that a prototype airborne virus codenamed Romero had, in fact, been released in some capacity within one of the base’s science labs and possibly elsewhere within the facility. A very short time later, we lost contact with the base entirely. That was two days ago.”
“How do you even know any of them are still . . . ,” I started, before fear that Agent Nineteen might already be dead choked off my last few words.
“We don’t know,” Director Isadoris said. “But the Romero Virus only remains active for twenty-four hours after its release. It is highly potent and contagious, though. Once a person is infected, the virus slowly consumes the body’s nervous system, including the brain. In layman’s terms, the virus essentially causes the brain cells to literally eat themselves. Fortunately, we do believe that the virus has been contained within the base. Its structure was specifically designed to prevent exterior breaches should such a situation ever occur.”
I shifted in my seat and tried not to think about Agent Nineteen’s brain eating itself to death.
“How do you know it didn’t get out?” I asked.
“The laboratory wing of the base is completely air locked at all times, and if that air lock is breached without authorization, it sets off a remote security alarm signal. If anyone tried to enter or exit the lab areas without proper clearance, we’d know about it.”
“But you don’t know for sure,” I said. “What if someone with authorization sabotaged the lab?”
Director Isadoris stiffened. “That’s precisely why we’re here. Given that we don’t know who we can trust anymore, we need your help. Your mission will be to infiltrate the base, deliver the antidote, rescue any agents trapped inside, and, most important, help ensure that what’s left of the virus does not get outside the base. Even if that were to mean destroying both the virus and the base itself.”
“Destroy the whole base?” I asked, not sure I’d heard him correctly.
“Yes, one option for us at this point would be to use a covert radio signal to initiate the Base Security Breach Self-Destruct Sequence. But, as the name might give away, that would not be the best possible outcome for Agent Nineteen or any of the others still trapped inside. And we don’t anticipate the need for you to initiate the sequence, either. But it’s certainly a possible outcome, if the outbreak ends up to be worse than we suspect.”
I just sat there and gaped at Director Isadoris, and the same questions from last year flooded my brain. Why me? Wouldn’t a team of highly trained adult agents be much more effective than a thirteen-year-old retired part-time sort-of agent? I was too shocked and confused for my mouth to function enough to ask this question.
“You’re probably wondering why you,” Director Isadoris said. I glanced at the mind-reading device sitting on the desk. He followed my gaze and smirked momentarily. “This whole situation must remain completely covert. In order to get the trapped agents out, you’ll need to release the outbreak security hatches, which can’t be triggered from inside the lab, where most of the staff is likely quarantined. And we simply can’t risk sending in an Agency strike team. With all our security breaches of late and the threat from Medlock and perhaps others inside our own organization, we cannot put this on record as an official Agency mission. We need someone who will not raise the suspicions of a potential traitor who may or may not already be inside the base. Also, we need someone who can fit into the small air shafts that lead into the emergency entry point. Lastly, and perhaps most important, we need someone who can approach a public tourist attraction without raising the suspicion of anyone who might be watching.”
Everything that Director Isadoris had just said shocked and terrified me. But even so, one thing stuck out in particular.
“Did you just say ‘public tourist attraction’?”
“That’s right,” Director Isadoris said, placing his palms flat on the desk in front of him. “The secret Agency base is located inside Mount Rushmore.”
“MOUNT RUSHMORE?” I SAID. “YOU MEAN JUST LIKE IN THAT movie Team America?”
“We’d prefer not to discuss that, if you don’t mind,” said the director. “It’s made things uncomfortable enough for us as it is.”
Mount Rushmore. I could hardly believe it. There was a secret government laboratory hidden behind the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. A monument millions of people visited every summer. That our school, and probably dozens of others, took a trip to every school year.
And that’s when it hit me. The Mount Rushmore field trip was departing on Friday morning.
“I get it,” I said. “You want me to do it this weekend.”
“Yes,” replied Director Isadoris.
“But . . . Mr. Jensen, er, Agent Blue is one of the chaperones on the field trip. He has a believable reason to be there. Couldn’t he handle this mission?”
“That’s exactly the problem,” Agent Blue interjected, speaking for the first time. “I’m one of three chaperones. I couldn’t leave my post for any significant amount of time without drawing unwanted attention. Tourists and visitors are generally not allowed to get very close to the monument. There’s a trail that ends well short of where an agent would need to be in order to infiltrate the base.”
“You, however, will be just one of many students on the field trip,” Director Isadoris added. “You can leave without attracting nearly as much attention, and even if you are caught, it will be interpreted as nothing more than a troublemaker causing trouble. An adult doing the same would appear much more unusual and suspicious.”
“But I’m not even going on the field trip this weekend,” I said. “I didn’t earn it.”
“We can take care of that,” Agent Blue said.
I shook my head and gave him a grim smile. “Mr. Jensen, I don’t mean to tell you you’re wrong, but there’s no way in the world Gomez will ever sign off on letting me come with. You know him as well as I do. How could you possibly make that happen?”
He glanced at Director Isadoris, who reached inside a desk drawer. I actually thought he was going to remove a high-tech mind-control device or something like that. But instead, he took out a red Tootsie Pop sucker. It looked ridiculously small in his frying pan hand. With a delicacy I’d have expected from a watch repair specialist or a heart surgeon, he deftly unwrapped it with his sausage fingers and then lodged it inside his right cheek. He did not offer either Agent Blue or me any candy. Not that I really wanted any just then.
Finally, he spoke.
“My grandpa used to tell my brothers and me a story when we went camping near Duluth every year. That’s in Minnesota. You ever been there?”
I shook my head.
“That’s too bad. It’s nice. Or it was back then, who knows anymore. The story was about a man who lived north of the city, closer to the Minnesota Boundary Waters, deep inside the forest. He lived off the land, fished for food, trapped animals, cut down trees to build a cabin, et cetera. You ever been in the Boy Scouts?”
I shook my head again.
&nb
sp; “That’s too bad. Hardly anyone knows how to handle themselves in a survival situation these days. How to live off the land the way man used to. They don’t teach you much of that on TV or in video games. Listening to that survival-reality-show guy, Grizzly Skillet, or whatever his name is, is more likely to get you killed even faster than if you knew nothing at all. Anyhow, this fellow that lived off the land, David was his name, was chopping down a tree one day to stock up before the depths of the Minnesota winter set in. There’s a real art to chopping down a tree correctly, and David knew that. But this one day, this one particular tree didn’t fall the way it was supposed to. Maybe it was the slope of the hill. Or maybe a shift in the wind. Or maybe David simply made a rare mistake. Or maybe it was just bad luck. It doesn’t matter. The point is, the tree fell on top of him and pinned down his leg. David was trapped.”
I nodded dumbly, wondering where this was going and how it could possibly relate to Principal Gomez and the current situation. But I didn’t say anything. I got the sense that, even though he had a harmless-looking sucker in his mouth, challenging Director Isadoris would be akin to jabbing at a sleeping grizzly bear with an extremely short stick while wearing a shirt made out of salmon filets.
“David knew that nobody would be coming for him. He lived ten miles north of the nearest paved road.” Director Isadoris paused again to crunch down on the Tootsie Pop. “There was only one thing he could do. He just needed time to build up the courage.”
“Oh, no . . . ,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” Director Isadoris said humorlessly. “He chopped off his own leg below the knee in order to free himself. He was willing to do what was necessary, no matter how scared he was. He was willing to make a sacrifice.”
I hesitated. I thought I understood what he meant, but was afraid to venture a guess in case I was wrong.
“You’ll have to make a sacrifice, too, Agent Zero,” he said. “To get something, you have to give something. It’s the natural order of things.”
Countdown Zero Page 3
