Then suddenly he shifted his gaze to something behind me and a look of pure shock spread across his face.
I SPUN AROUND, AND GAPED.
On the other side of the glass wall, Danielle peered in at us with a panicked expression on her face.
I jumped up and hit the button on the intercom. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
Dumbest question of the year, I know. What I meant to ask was how in the world she’d gotten inside the base. And furthermore, how she had even known the base was here at all. But instead of clarifying I just stood there and stared in shock.
“There’s not really time for stupid questions right now, Carson!” she said. “Didn’t you just hear that? We have three minutes, so you guys need to tell me what to do to get you out of there!”
That was Danielle for you. She always was an excellent prioritizer.
Agent Nineteen sprang to his feet behind me.
“Mr. Jensen? What the heck are you doing here?”
“Same answer, Danielle,” he said. “Now listen to me very carefully.”
He began giving Danielle precise, clear instructions. She put her shock aside immediately and carried them out. I marveled at how well they both acted under pressure. Then again, I sometimes did, too, right?
Danielle located the terminal per the instructions, I gave her the passcode at the end, and just like that we were out of the Glass Cage of Death. I rushed over and gave her a huge hug. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever hugged Danielle before, but I didn’t care how awkward it was at that moment.
“We’re not out of the woods just yet, Carson,” Agent Nineteen said, rushing past us. “We only have ninety-six seconds. Follow me!”
And so we followed him as he ran out of the lab. After exerting so much energy scaling the mountainside and then sitting still for almost an hour, my legs were basically goop. I wobbled as I ran, struggling to keep up. Danielle kept grabbing my hand to hurry me along.
I thought we’d be headed to the same vent that Jake and I had entered through, but instead we went a completely different way. We went down a few long hallways, illuminated only by flashing red emergency evacuation lights. Down one of the adjoining halls I swore I glimpsed a dead body. One of the base employees, no doubt. I pretended that my eyes had been playing tricks on me in the hallway of the dark base.
Finally, we reached a room—a small laundry room, of all things. But it made sense if you really thought about it. Secret agents and scientists still had to wash their clothes somehow, didn’t they?
“We have twenty-two seconds,” Agent Nineteen said, panting as he jumped on top of one of the industrial driers.
He grabbed some pipes in the ceiling and then swung both legs forward and kicked at the aluminum drier vent duct. It ripped away from the ceiling with a screech, revealing a hole clogged with dust and fuzz.
“Let’s go!” he said, holding down a hand toward Danielle.
She grabbed it and he hoisted her up in one easy motion. He helped her climb into the vent and then handed her a small flashlight he’d gotten from somewhere. Seriously, seeing Agent Nineteen in action was incredible. He was the real deal. Not a bumbling poser like me.
“You’re next, let’s go!” he shouted, snapping me out of my daze.
I grabbed his hand and he lifted me atop the dryer and into the vent. I started crawling forward without waiting for further instructions. Danielle was already a good ten feet ahead of me.
Then Agent Nineteen was behind me, pushing at my feet.
“Go, Zero, go,” he said. “It’s a straight shot, just keep crawling.”
It worked. His constant shoving did seem to manifest an extra burst of energy from somewhere inside my exhausted, heaping excuse of a human body. I crawled faster, gaining on Danielle a little at a time. Twenty seconds had surely passed since he’d last said we only had twenty seconds left. Was the self-destruct system faulty? Or had the implosion already begun?
The answer became pretty obvious two seconds later when the metal sides of the vent began caving in with small, crinkling dents. We were surrounded by constant popping noises as little by little, the walls closed in around us. It sounded kind of like popcorn. But much deadlier, obviously, and not nearly as appetizing.
Suddenly there was light in front of us, much more intense than that of Danielle’s small flashlight. Before I even realized what was happening, Danielle’s outline in front of me disappeared as she exited the vent shaft. The vent walls continued to constrict. So much so that I was nearly crawling on my stomach now.
Agent Nineteen gave me one final hard shove and I went sprawling out of the vent and into the open air. I landed on a pile of brush and pinecones on an incline, and rolled down the hill a short way before managing to catch myself.
I stood up just in time to see Agent Nineteen squeeze himself out of a small opening in the side of the hill. Then suddenly it collapsed on itself, filling with dirt, rocks, and earth. And just like that the vent was gone, as if it had never even existed in the first place.
There was no explosion. No flames. No rumbling boom, or ground-shaking transfer of energy. There was nothing but the outline of a hole on a small hillside in a remote forest. The secret base had simply ceased to exist the way one would expect of a base that nobody knew even existed in the first place.
For a few moments the three of us just stood there under the tall trees and looked at one another with dazed expressions on our faces.
But then suddenly Danielle smiled and jumped up and down in celebration like she’d just found out she’d won a $450 million lottery jackpot. And I suppose that we had just won the lottery, in a sense. Except instead of getting money we got to not get crushed inside a metal tube like pickled fish or something.
And so I joined in the celebration. I hugged Danielle again and we jumped up and down on the hill for a few seconds. Agent Nineteen acted more like an adult, of course, but he also was grinning ear to ear.
His smile quickly faded, and I assumed it was reality settling in. Phil was on the loose, and in possession of one of the most deadly viruses in the history of humankind.
Danielle and I both stopped jumping. I looked at her, only a few inches away, and we separated quickly.
“So,” she said, glancing back and forth between Agent Nineteen and me. “Can either of you guys tell me what the heck is going on?”
AGENT NINETEEN HELPED ME CAREFULLY EXPLAIN THE SITUATION to Danielle. I imagined it was okay to finally break my cover in this instance since Danielle had just seen everything firsthand anyway. And it did feel way better to finally tell my secret with Agency approval. And to tell an actual friend at that, as opposed to that backstabber Jake. As she listened, Danielle’s face alternated between shock, fear, and amusement. After seeing what she had inside the base, I’m guessing there was little that she wasn’t ready to believe.
“So,” she finally said, “you’ve been a . . . secret agent . . . this whole time?”
“Carson can tell you more as we walk,” Agent Nineteen said. “We need to head back to the school group. They’ve no doubt noticed that you’re both missing by now. And I need to get in touch with Agent Blue as soon as possible. There’s no telling what Phil plans to do with the virus.”
Danielle and I followed Agent Nineteen as he walked across and down the hillside toward a stream at the bottom of a shallow valley.
“Before you ask anything,” I said to Danielle, “you have to tell me: How in the world did you find us?”
“Yeah, I’d like to know, too,” Agent Nineteen said.
“I definitely knew something was up,” Danielle said. “Carson has been acting strange lately, for one. But more than that, well . . . I’ve just never really trusted Jake. There’s something about him that has always made me feel uneasy. So when I saw that both of you were gone, and spotted Jake crawling up the hillside, I followed him. I eventually lost sight of him, but it didn’t take too long to find footprints leading to the crevice under Roosevelt’s face. I
t was a risk going inside, but I didn’t know what else to do. I just had a bad feeling about it all.”
“That means you crossed the chasm on the metal plank?” I asked, feeling sick to my stomach thinking about what would have happened if she’d fallen.
Danielle nodded.
“Wow,” I said.
“It’s truly impressive that you followed them in,” Agent Nineteen said, “simply because you were worried about Carson. Did you see Jake and an older gentleman come out of the base on your way up?”
Danielle shook her head, clearly confused by the question. So I explained to her that Jake had been working for the enemy all along.
“I knew something was up with him!” Danielle said. “I knew it.”
“You were right all along,” I agreed.
Agent Nineteen shook his head slowly, once again having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that a student had been used against the Agency. And then he spent the next twenty-five minutes grilling us for every last bit of information we knew about Jake as we walked.
“I can’t believe you told Jake your secret before me,” Danielle said once Agent Nineteen seemed to be finished questioning us.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to tell you,” I said. “Jake caught me red-handed. And saved my life. I didn’t know what else to do. Besides, it’s because I care about you so much that I didn’t want to get you involved in any of this.”
“I just can’t believe how many lies you told us.”
“I know, me either,” I said, looking at my feet instead of her face.
After we got to the base of the hill, we followed the creek around it, staying in the shallow valley. Before long, I could once again see the edges of the presidents’ stone faces above us at the top of the mountain. All four were still intact. That genius engineer who came up with the physics of an imploding secret base should be rewarded with a Medal of Honor. Or a million bucks. Or something. At least a free dinner at his local Applebee’s.
It wasn’t much longer before the wooden staircase tourist trail was also in view. There were a few people in park ranger uniforms walking around the base of it as if they were looking for something. Like a couple of missing kids, perhaps.
Agent Nineteen ducked behind a particularly thick tree. Danielle and I did the same without needing to be told.
“Okay, I’ll have to leave you here,” he said. “But first, Danielle, I need to know that you realize all of this must be kept secret. You can’t tell anyone, not your mom or brother, anyone. Understand? In the interests of national security.”
Danielle nodded.
“Okay, I trust you can turn yourselves in?” Agent Nineteen said.
We both nodded.
“Good. Just tell them you wandered off by accident and got lost. I’m sure you’ll come up with something,” he said, directly to me.
“Are you calling me a good liar?” I asked.
“You’ve earned it,” he said.
I truly didn’t know if I should be offended or flattered. A little of both, probably.
“What about Phil and Jake?” I asked. “What do we say about Jake?”
“The truth: that you don’t know where he went.”
I nodded. That seemed simple enough.
“What about Phil?” I asked. “He’s still out there.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Agent Nineteen said. “We’ll take care of him. Just get yourselves back to the group without arousing any more suspicion.”
SELLING THE LIE WAS EASY ENOUGH. IT HELPED THAT DANIELLE was with me. She’d never been suspected of helping with any of my pranks or getting into any kind of trouble at all, for that matter. So Mr. Gist and Ms. Pearson believed our story about how we’d noticed that Jake had snuck away and we had gone to find him and then gotten lost ourselves.
After that, they went back to working with the park officials to locate Jake. There was no sign of Agent Blue until we got inside the visitor center, where most of the other kids were hanging out. We locked eyes and a faint smile spread across his face. I shook my head slightly to let him know that everything was not exactly okay.
He furrowed his brow but was too busy consoling two melodramatic seventh graders who’d already decided to start crying over Jake being missing. If only they knew why he was gone . . . well, actually, I guess if they knew the truth, they’d probably still be crying, but for a whole different reason.
“Where were you guys?” Dillon asked with a slightly accusatory tone. “And where’s Jake?”
I exchanged a quick glance with Danielle and saw in that one look that she knew we couldn’t tell him the truth. That she now was beginning to understand my dilemma.
“We don’t know,” I said.
Danielle and I told him the same story we’d told the park rangers and other chaperones. He didn’t believe us, but it honestly would have been a lot more disturbing and out of character if he had.
“You were out searching for Forest Trolls, weren’t you?” he said. “I knew it. They’re real, and you saw one. Or maybe you saw Smallfoot and didn’t tell me because you hate admitting it when I’m right?”
“Come on, Dillon,” I said, even though deep down I was so happy to be getting the chance to hear more of his theories after being sure I was about to die just a half hour ago.
“But I do know you’ve been keeping a secret from me,” he said.
“What?” I asked. “How?”
“Because I know what it is,” he said. “I know your secret. And I can’t believe you told Jake, but not Danielle and me!”
I glanced at Danielle again, not sure what to say. She shook her head, telling me she didn’t know how he knew. “Um . . . tell Jake what?”
“Come on, Carson, you know I’d never make you feel bad for needing special toilet paper,” he said quietly, trying to keep my secret concealed. “Right?”
I had to bite my lip to keep from letting the relief show on my face. He must have still been awake that night and heard us talking, and then only faked talking in his sleep when we got back.
“Yeah, I should have told you.” I nodded like I was ashamed. “He caught me. Otherwise I never would have told him either.”
“It’s okay,” Dillon said. “Jake’s a cool guy. I’d trust him with my secrets, too.”
“Yeah,” I said, “he is a cool guy.”
As we all waited for Jake to be found, which I knew he wouldn’t be, I made sure to keep an eye on Agent Blue. I was mostly watching him for signals, sure that he’d try to pull me aside to find out what was going on. But he never did. Instead he looked and acted just like you’d expect a teacher chaperone to act in his position, nothing more, nothing less.
But a little while later, as we were all eating Burger King that Ms. Pearson had run into town to get us, I saw Agent Blue calmly look at his phone, say something to Mr. Gist, and then step out of the visitor center quietly.
“I gotta run to the bathroom,” I said to Dillon and Danielle.
“What happened to saving the world?” Dillon asked.
I paused. “Huh?”
“Isn’t that what you said you call it now?”
“Oh, yeah, but I don’t have to do that,” I said.
Not waiting to talk about it more, I slipped out the side door, toward the guest restrooms. But I walked right by the men’s room and toward the exit door at the end of the hallway. Just as I reached it, a hand grabbed my arm.
“Where are you really going?” Danielle asked.
“Come on,” I said, stepping outside.
I figured there was no point in trying to stop her from coming with me. She already knew everything now, anyway. Plus, I owed her one. Well, I actually owed her more like ten hundred thousand billion, or however many favors a life is worth.
She followed me through the exit. Just as we got outside, I caught a glimpse of Agent Blue’s jacket ducking behind some trees and heading down a hill toward the large amphitheater adjacent to the west branch of the walking trail.<
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We started toward the amphitheater and it didn’t take long to spot him again, going behind the stage building. We jogged down the concrete steps built into the hillside. When we neared the building, I heard voices and slowed. Danielle and I both walked as softly and quietly as we could toward the corner of the building until the voices were just barely audible.
“Why did you send him after me? Why did you send anyone for that matter?” one of the voices said in a harsh whisper.
I recognized it as Agent Nineteen. Agent Blue responded a little louder, but also in a whisper.
“You’d have done the same for me. Was I just supposed to let you die?”
“Of course you were—it’s protocol,” Agent Nineteen said. “There was a reason no distress signal was sent. I initiated the self-destruct and the quarantine lockdown. I simply couldn’t risk letting Phil get away with the virus. And now it’s out. You should have trusted me to have the situation under control.”
Agent Blue was silent, but only for a moment. “Director Isadoris had my full support. Nothing about the information transmitted to us indicated that the base had been compromised. We didn’t even know if you were still alive.”
“That’s because Phil cut off the emergency transmitter,” Agent Nineteen said, “but I suppose that doesn’t matter now. The fact is we’ve got a potential national disaster on our hands. And we need to stop it as soon as possible.”
“I’ve already started prepping the mobile base unit,” Agent Blue said. “It’s just down the hillside in Keystone.”
“I hope it’s a four-person MBU,” Agent Nineteen said loudly. Too loudly. “Since there will be four of us.”
Uh-oh.
I looked at Danielle. She shrugged.
“Yes, we know you’re back there,” Agent Nineteen said. “You might as well come on out.”
Danielle and I rounded the corner and walked over to them.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay,” said Agent Nineteen. “The fact is that you’re involved in this now, whether we like it or not.”
“What’s she doing here?” Agent Blue asked, pointing at Danielle.
Countdown Zero Page 13
