“Got them,” Jake said, still not looking at me.
Phil examined both containers briefly, and for a split second I debated making a move to disarm him while he was distracted. But who was I kidding? He was a good six feet away from me. I’d have to move faster than was humanly possible to cover the distance before he noticed and pulled the trigger.
“Jake, what’s going on?” I asked.
Finally, Jake looked at me. Then he smiled. But not his normal smile. This smile was twisted and sick, like a circus clown’s smile. It was the sort of expression that gave little kids nightmares for years. It was the kind of look that people needed therapy to deal with.
“You . . . who are you?” I asked weakly.
Jake didn’t even bother responding. Instead he looked up at Phil again and asked, “How much time do we have?”
“Plenty,” Phil said. “But let’s not take any chances. Come on.”
He motioned toward the door, and he and Jake both stepped out of the room and resealed it from the outside. They stood there, on the other side of the glass wall, and grinned at me with shockingly similar smiles. I glanced again at the metal containers in Jake’s hands and suddenly had a feeling that I knew precisely what they contained.
This was bad.
Very bad.
Understatement of the year, Carson. No, better make that the century. How about ever, in the history of the universe? Yeah, that was probably most correct.
I watched them turn to leave without offering me any explanations or answers or clues as to what was going on. The door shut behind them, and we were alone.
I DIDN’T REALLY KNOW WHAT TO DO, SO I JUST SAT IN ONE OF THE chairs by the nearest lab table and put my face in my hands. I had a million questions, but was concentrating on the one fact that mattered most right now: I was alive. Agent Nineteen and I were both alive.
But why? If Phil was some sort of enemy agent, why give Agent Nineteen the antidote at all?
The answer hit me just as quickly: to gain my trust. He did it so I would let him out of the sealed room, since I was the only one with the quarantine-override code. Which I’d given him, letting him out into the open having stolen not only what was left of the antidote but also—if I was right about what was in those cases Jake had taken—an apocalyptic virus that could usher in the end of modern civilization in less than a month.
I shook my head slowly from side to side as if that could somehow undo all this.
Twice.
That was twice now that I’d thought I was helping to save the world, yet was unwittingly assisting some master villain with a diabolical scheme. And it was partly because I’d broken my primary directive as an agent: Keep Your Cover at All Costs. I’d gone ahead and broken the rule by bringing Jake in and now the mission had gone from bad to terrible.
Jake. Jake was an enemy agent, too. How could I have been so stupid? I was like a Bad Guy Secret Weapon. A double agent who didn’t even know he was a double agent. I couldn’t even be a proper single agent.
Agent Zero was sort of a fitting name for me, if you really thought about it.
A few minutes later, Agent Nineteen finally stirred. It started with a light groan, and then he opened his eyes and sat up. He rubbed his head where dried blood had matted his hair and then winced immediately.
“Agent Nineteen, you’re awake!” I said, stating the obvious like the idiot that I was.
He looked at me groggily, trying to get his bearings.
“What time is class?” he asked. “Are you late again, Carson?”
I would have laughed were we not trapped inside a secret government lab. Especially because I was never late to music class. It was the one class I was actually mostly on time for. Well, now that I’d signed that contract with Gomez, I would never be late to any classes again.
Then I almost started to cry when I realized that I didn’t even know if I’d ever get back to Minnow at all. But Agent Nineteen suddenly waking up gave me at least a little hope. This was what he did—he saved the day. He was a real hero.
He was the anti–Agent Zero. He was at least Nineteen better than Zero.
“What’s funny?” he asked, then rubbed his eyes and looked around.
“Nothing,” I said.
Which was true. I’d laughed, but it had been one of those moments where you laugh because what you’re thinking about is so depressing that laughing is all you can do to keep from crying.
“Carson, what are you doing here?” he asked, seeming to get a sense of where he was. “Wait. If you’re in here . . .”
His eyes went wide and he climbed to his feet. He moved slower than usual, but still a lot faster than I would have expected considering how dead he had looked just a few minutes ago. He wobbled once he was on his feet but steadied himself on a nearby table. Then he looked around.
After seeing nothing but an empty, mostly dark lab, his eyes drifted back to me. When I saw his face, it was enough to make the panic return in full force, like a double-barreled Super Soaker filled with corrosive acid blasting me in the torso at point-blank range.
“He got out?” Agent Nineteen asked.
“You mean Phil?”
Agent Nineteen slammed his hand onto the metal table. It was scary seeing a teacher lose control and act out so violently, even if we weren’t at school and even if he wasn’t really a teacher. The sound was almost like a gunshot inside the sealed room.
Agent Nineteen gave me that desperately hopeless look again. The one that melted my vital organs instantaneously.
“Did he get the virus?” he asked.
“Was it in a small metal box in that fridge over there?” I asked, my voice shaking, as I pointed across the room to the door I’d seen Jake come out of.
Then Agent Nineteen did something that I really didn’t expect. Something that almost terrified me more than anything else that had happened to me that day. He picked up the stool he’d been sitting on and threw it across the lab with incredible force while letting out a scream of pure rage.
The stool slammed into the glass wall of the Red Room, bounced off it, and crashed into some lab equipment on a nearby table. The beakers and vials shattered and smashed to the floor as the stool slid across the table and eventually came to a stop in a large metal sink.
I took two steps back and cowered, fearing that he might come after me next. I was the one who had let Phil get away with the virus, after all. I had been responsible for this.
But Agent Nineteen regained control again, and instead of coming after me, he simply slumped down onto the floor in a sitting position. He looked at me, his eyes watering, close to tears. I didn’t think I could handle seeing a teacher violently freak out and cry within one minute of each other.
He didn’t cry though. Instead, he just sat there and shook his head.
So I did the same. I sat down on the ground and tried to pretend I wasn’t as scared as I was. Because if I let myself buy in to what I was feeling, I’d definitely start bawling. If there was anything I could do about it, I would die with at least a little bit of my dignity left. Whatever dignity could be left after breaking an unbreakable rule that had helped lead to an apocalyptic virus falling into enemy hands.
“Can’t we go stop them?” I asked. “Aren’t you even going to try?”
He just stared straight ahead. “The door can’t be opened from the inside when the lab is under quarantine. There is no override I can activate from in here.”
“Won’t the Agency send someone else?”
“No—for the same reasons, I imagine, that they sent you in here, rather than sending another agent. But even if they were going to send another strike team, it wouldn’t do any good. We’re both going to be dead in . . .”
He checked his watch.
“Twenty-two minutes.”
“WHAT? WHY?” I SHOUTED. ANOTHER TICKING CLOCK? I was getting tired of countdowns that would end with the death of someone close to me. Which, in this case, was me.
“
The Base Security Breach Self-Destruct Sequence has been initiated. The BSBSDS, as we call it. Or sometimes we just call it the Proverbial Fan.”
“But who would do that?” I asked. “Was it Phil? Did he initiate the self-destruction?”
“No, it was me,” Agent Nineteen said.
“But—” I started. Agent Nineteen interrupted my feeble attempt to grasp the situation.
“I locked us in here,” he said. “I initiated the self-destruct. I was trying to keep Phil from getting his hands on the virus and escaping. And I’d succeeded . . .”
He didn’t need to finish his thought. He’d succeeded until I had shown up and ruined it. Not that I’d really known what I was doing. And I’m sure he knew that. But it didn’t matter. Telling me it was my fault couldn’t make me feel any worse than I already did.
“But that means you would have died,” I said.
“Yes. Some things are more important than one agent’s life. Do I want to die? Of course not. But if that’s what it takes to keep the virus from falling into the wrong hands, then so be it.”
“Can’t you contact the Agency? Override the system? Stop the self-destruct?”
Agent Nineteen shook his head slowly from side to side.
“It’s inevitable now,” he said calmly, as if he were talking about Johann Sebastian Bach’s final opus in class. “It cannot be stopped. Not by anyone. Not even Director Isadoris. This base will explode in nineteen minutes. Or, I should say, it will implode. This base was designed so that the implosion will destroy the base from the inside, cushioning the exterior of the mountain from the transferred energy of the blast. So Roosevelt’s face will survive. Nobody outside will know that anything happened. It’s an ingenious design, a completely new theory of energy transferal formulated by one of the Agency’s top demolition engineers.”
“The Agency won’t even know it imploded?”
“Oh, no. Right before implosion, the system will transmit all the base’s encrypted data via a secure Agency radio frequency. They’ll know everything that happened in here . . . after it’s all over.”
“Why would it only transmit later?”
“It’s a security measure,” he said. “To make sure that whatever breach happened here stays here. Although, I suppose, in this particular case it backfired. They sent you in, after all. But I imagine that likely had something to do with Phil cutting off the normal lines of communication before he released the virus, rather than a failure of our protocol.”
“So who is Phil? How did he even get in here?”
“He was one of our most trusted research-and-development agents. Science Officer Ichabod was his official Agency codename. Although he always preferred to just be called Phil. He’s worked for the Agency for over ten years, developing advanced biochemical weaponry and disaster prevention. It was a shock to those of us here when he sabotaged his own project and executed his plan. And while I still don’t know why he did it, I suspect it may link back to Medlock, somehow.”
I sighed. There wasn’t much else to say. We both just sat there thinking about stuff. I had no idea what Agent Nineteen was thinking, but I was thinking about my family and friends. How I’d never see them again. How they’d probably never find out how I really died. It made me wonder what sort of story the Agency would spin and how they’d manage to feed it to the school and public. After a while, it was just too much to think about.
And then I finally did start to cry. Agent Nineteen didn’t say anything or try to comfort me. He just let me sit there and cry in peace.
EVENTUALLY MY WELL OF TEARS RAN DRY. I WIPED AT MY RED eyes with no shame. Who would blame me for crying? Knowing your death is imminent is indescribably horrible, and I wouldn’t even wish it upon Phil, the evil psycho who had done this to us.
“How long?” I asked.
Agent Nineteen checked his watch slowly, like a person with all the time in the world to spare.
“Nine minutes,” he said.
“Oh.”
I wasn’t sure what else to say. What was an appropriate response to someone calmly informing you that you had nine minutes left to live? But after a few more seconds of silence, I finally did think of something else to say.
“So, how did you end up becoming an agent, anyway?”
“It’s a good question,” he said, nodding slowly. “Most of our agents are recruited internally via intel we have on other US agencies like the FBI, CIA, military special ops, Navy Seals, et cetera. But a handful of agents, including me, are recruited in more unique ways. Situations like yours, for instance.”
“So you became a secret agent by accident, too?” I said.
Nineteen nodded. “That’s one way to put it,” he said. “About twelve years ago, a bridge collapsed in my hometown. Almost thirty people died. I happened to have been riding my bike across the bridge that day. I was twenty years old at that time, going to college to be a psychologist. When the middle section of the bridge gave way, the whole thing shook and I was thrown from my bike and momentarily knocked unconscious. It was when I was finally able to get up, collect myself, and realize what was going on that I noticed the school bus.
“It was dangling on the edge of the collapsed bridge. There were screams everywhere, but the only ones I could hear were those of the kids inside the bus. I hardly remember what happened next. I wasn’t even thinking at that point, I just knew that someone had to do something.”
“Wait—was this that bridge collapse that happened in Spirit Falls?” I asked.
“I’m surprised you know about that. You were, what, two years old?”
“Ms. Lee gave us this reading assignment last year where we read a bunch of articles in old magazines and newspapers about ‘unsung heroes.’ The Spirit Falls incident was on the front page of one of the magazines. So . . . you’re the Forty-Third Street Saint?”
Agent Nineteen nodded. “Yes. That was me.”
“No one knew who you were! Most people thought you died after you got the kids out and the bus finally fell into the river! Why didn’t you ever come forward? You’re a hero.”
“Because I didn’t do it to be a hero. I don’t even know why I did it. I just heard those screams and acted. It’s as simple as that. To me, knowing the kids all survived was what mattered. If I had realized what I was doing, or stopped to think it over, I probably wouldn’t have acted at all. And those kids would be dead.”
“So what happened next?”
“The Agency was able to track me down. At the time, I had no idea how they did it, but one day I get home from school and there are two agents waiting there for me. The Agency has a whole department whose sole function is recruitment. We call them the Talent Scouts. They monitor CIA operations, FBI stings, military engagements, and also everyday occurrences like the bridge collapse. They identify individuals who display certain qualities and behaviors in extreme circumstances. For instance, one of our agents is a former World Series of Poker Champion, and another was recruited through a reality TV show for being able to withstand hours of ‘torture’ while simultaneously computing complex math problems in his head.
“Even after that, though, only a very small percentage of the people scouted end up becoming agents. There is a rigorous vetting process that weeds out over ninety-eight percent of possible candidates. It’s not even until the last few tests that the recruits even know what they’re getting involved with. There are psych exams, extensive background checks, all sorts of procedures and tests.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“Did you know that Jake was in on this somehow?” I said.
“Jake Tyson-Gulley?” Agent Nineteen asked like that couldn’t actually be true.
Then it dawned on me that Agent Nineteen had been unconscious that whole time. He had no idea that Jake was somehow working for the enemy. And I hadn’t told him yet, because I’d been way too distracted by the fact that we were going to get crushed inside an imploding secret base soon.
Agent Nineteen shook his head with an expression on his face that was clearly a mixture of disbelief and disappointment.
“I know I shouldn’t have broken my cover,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re right,” Agent Nineteen said. “You shouldn’t have. But that doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?”
I shrugged.
“Unbelievable,” Agent Nineteen muttered to himself. “Medlock somehow infiltrated the schools.”
“Yeah, he and Phil seemed to know each other and he helped him get the virus,” I said, trying to keep the focus off what I’d done. “If you used a kid then why is it so shocking that the enemy could use them as well?”
“We only used you because Medlock’s plan forced our hand. He involved you directly on purpose and we unwittingly played into that,” Agent Nineteen said with surprisingly humble honesty. “Then again, it was probably naive of us to assume he wouldn’t try to recruit his own inside agent eventually.”
I looked at my feet, picking at the little rocks caught in the soles of my shoes. My eyes burned as if they wanted to cry again. But there were no tears left. We only had a few minutes left to live. This was confirmed by the sudden flashing of a red emergency light in the center of the lab’s ceiling.
Then a female voice crackled over the intercom.
“Three minutes to facility self-destruction. Please evacuate immediately.”
I recognized the voice. It was the same one that had gotten me involved in all this to begin with earlier that year. It was Besty. But if I had been hoping to catch up with her, it clearly wasn’t going to happen. She didn’t even repeat the warning, as she had with the self-destructing data device I’d brought to school earlier that year. Instead she left us in silence to contemplate our demise.
Agent Nineteen and I locked eyes.
Countdown Zero Page 12
