by Stuart Gibbs
The first step was to find a way out of Hidden Forest.
If I was really undercover, I needed to be able to get in touch with the CIA. If I wasn’t really undercover, then I needed a way to escape. I had to get close to the perimeter wall and see if there was any way to breach it. And while I was at it, I had to examine the rest of the grounds more closely as well.
Unfortunately, doing this was more difficult than I’d expected. I didn’t want to attract attention by nosing around too much—and I couldn’t find a chance to sneak away. I was never alone at evil spy school. There was always someone keeping an eye on me.
SPYDER’s watchfulness was subtle but effective. During class times, I was always with my instructors. And during free time, Ashley was always nearby. I wasn’t sure if she was staying close because SPYDER had asked her to watch over me or if Ashley was just really clingy, but the result was the same. Most of the time this didn’t bother me, because Ashley was surprisingly nice for someone studying to be evil, and quite fun to hang out with—as opposed to Nefarious, who remained as cold and distant as Antarctica. In fact, I suspected that Ashley’s constantly wanting to hang out was a direct result of having only Nefarious for company for the past year: Living with someone so remote was practically the same as being assigned to solitary confinement. Even though Ashley had said she was fine with cutting off ties to her outside friends, she seemed to be dying for company.
However, it would have been nice to have some time alone now and then. Ashley tagged along whenever I went to the Rec. She was with me at every meal, offering to whip up another vile protein shake. And at night, after our homework was done, she hounded me to play cards or watch movies.
Virtually the only time I wasn’t with Ashley was at bedtime, but I could never slip out then because my window was bolted shut and Nefarious was inevitably parked on the couch in the living room, blocking the route to the doors. Although he was always riveted to the TV screen and mumbling to himself, I wondered if he secretly was keeping an eye on me as well. It didn’t matter what time of night it was, he’d be there, preventing me from sneaking out. As far as I could tell, the kid never slept. Or at least, he needed far less sleep than I did.
So I was forced to wait for the right opportunity. In the meantime, I tried to be the best student possible, hoping to allay any suspicions SPYDER might have that I was a mole. I studied hard. I trained hard. I did well in all my classes—except advanced weaponry. But I at least tried my best in that class and earned a glimmer of respect from Mr. Seabrook.
And then, on my seventh night at evil spy school, I finally got my chance.
EXTRACTION
SPYDER Agent Training Facility
September 12
0045 hours
Even though I’d never found a chance to explore Hidden Forest on my own, I stayed up late every night, hoping for one anyhow. I’d sit in my room, studying or reading, waiting in vain for Nefarious to vacate the living room and go to bed, until I passed out from exhaustion. Ashley was the opposite. Since she used a tremendous amount of energy every day, she tended to crash early. She was usually out cold by nine p.m.
On my seventh night at spy school, that didn’t happen. Ashley acted like she was turning in early, wishing us a good night right after dinner and disappearing into her room. She stayed so silent afterward, I’d assumed she was asleep. But then, at 12:45 in the morning, I heard her creeping about quietly in her room—the same way a teenager did when they were trying to slip out of the house without waking their parents. I pressed my ear against the wall we shared. It sounded like she was getting dressed. Then I heard her door creak open softly, followed by the sound of her feet padding slowly toward my room.
I leapt back in bed and pretended to be asleep.
My door opened. I felt Ashley’s eyes on me. Then the door closed again and her footsteps receded down the hall, toward the stairs. Thirty seconds later, the front door opened and closed. Outside, a car pulled up in front of the house. Its doors opened and banged shut and then it motored on.
I pretended to be asleep for another fifteen minutes just to play it safe.
Then I got out of bed and dressed in the darkest clothes I had: jeans and a black T-shirt. I slipped out of my room. Nefarious’s door was closed and locked, but then, I’d never seen him actually enter his room. I checked downstairs. Nefarious wasn’t on the couch. He’d been such a fixture there that this was quite startling to me, sort of like going to the National Mall and discovering that the Washington Monument had disappeared.
I slipped out the door.
Outside, Hidden Forest was eerily dark. The lights were out in all the other homes, and while there were streetlamps, SPYDER had either installed them just for show or had forgotten to turn them on. We were far enough into the countryside that there wasn’t much light pollution. The sky was shrouded in black clouds.
I stuck to the shadows anyhow. Even though I was finally out of the house, I still wasn’t in the clear. SPYDER doubtlessly had surveillance cameras everywhere, and there were people patrolling the compound as well. I spotted two of them wandering about in the distance. I was too far away to tell if they were the normal security guards who mistakenly believed they were working for an average, everyday gated community or actual SPYDER agents, but it didn’t really matter. Whoever they were, I needed to avoid them.
Fortunately, I was quite good at this. At spy school, I had aced my exams in Avoiding Observation 101 and been highly commended on my skulking about. Now I stole through the compound with stealth and speed.
The backyards of the homes across the street ran right up to the security wall, so there was no way I could get close to it without venturing onto someone else’s property. I didn’t want to wake anyone in the houses or trip any alarms, so I headed for the far side of the community instead, where the homes were still under construction and the wall was more accessible.
The construction site was even spookier in the dark. The frames of the unfinished homes loomed like skeletons of enormous beasts and the construction vehicles looked like killer robots. The ground was an obstacle course of hazards: plumbing trenches, two-by-fours with nails spiking out of them pointy-end up, minefields of abandoned building supplies and broken glass. I almost toppled right into a giant hole for a septic tank. Even though it was ten feet wide, it was invisible in the darkness. No one had bothered to put up any sort of protective barrier, so I didn’t see the thing until I was right on the lip, pinwheeling my arms wildly to keep from tumbling in. The septic tank was already installed in the pit, but it was still a four-foot drop onto a hard cement surface, the kind of thing that could easily twist an ankle or snap a bone. It was only after I’d regained my balance that I noticed the CAUTION: OPEN PIT sign lying on the ground nearby.
I encountered more septic pits as I continued on, but now that I knew they were there, I was able to avoid them more easily.
To my dismay, the security wall around the community was impossible to breach. It looked normal enough—like any other wall around a gated community—but it might as well have been around a maximum-security prison. It stood twelve feet tall and the surface was perfectly smooth and unscalable. The barbed wire at the top canted back three feet on my side. Once I finally got close to it, I noticed there was yet another type of wire strung among the barbed kind. This was smooth and thin, and it connected to small transformers at regular intervals. I could hear the occasional faint pop coming from them.
The top of the wall was electrified.
The construction crews had apparently been ordered not to leave any ladders around—or, for that matter, any large lengths of wood I could have built a ladder out of—but the electric wire would prevent me from climbing the wall anyhow. If anything I was holding so much as touched the wires, I’d get myself flambéed.
I spent the next two hours cautiously prowling along the wall, scoping it out for weak spots. I couldn’t find a single one. Every now and then, one of the guards would wander down th
e road and I’d have to lurk in the shadows for a few minutes until they were gone.
The front gates were even more imposing than the wall. There were dozens of cameras focused on them and two guards stationed in a small booth, even in the middle of the night. This was the only spot in the entire community where there was any light at all. In fact, it was lit as brightly as a baseball stadium, with klieg lights all around, making it impossible to get anywhere close to the guard booth without them seeing me coming. And I knew they wouldn’t let me just saunter out the gates. Not at three in the morning. Instead, they’d report me and any goodwill I’d earned with SPYDER over the past week would be blown.
It was time to get back to my room. I’d probably been out too long as it was.
I decided to steer well clear of the gates, carefully looping back through the construction area and then cutting through the park in the middle of the community. I had just passed the rec center when I heard someone coming.
I dropped to the ground, following the First Law of Camouflage: Quite often, the best place to hide is right in plain sight. On a pitch-black night, all I had to do to stay unseen was flatten myself on the lawn next to the tennis courts.
A minute later, Joshua Hallal came along. Although he was too far away for me to make out his face, I could tell it was him; he moved with a slight limp due to his fake leg—and even in the faint light, his metal hook gleamed. He strolled along casually, not looking the slightest bit furtive, even though it was now three thirty a.m.
Joshua was only fifteen feet away from me when a cricket chirped right by my foot. Joshua froze and looked my way suspiciously. His one good eye shone in the night. I held as still as possible, knowing that a mere twitch of my leg or a rustle of the grass would give me away for good.
Joshua stayed still for an unnervingly long time, until the cricket chirped again.
“Freaking cricket,” Joshua muttered, and finally continued on. He headed to the rec center, typed the entry code on the security keypad at the door, and went inside. He didn’t bother turning on the lights, so it was difficult to make him out—he was one shadow against another—but I could do it. He headed right for the three-story rock-climbing spire and twisted one of the handholds.
A secret door hidden in the spire slid open.
Joshua stepped inside and flipped on the lights. In the otherwise dark night, the sudden brightness was almost blinding. Joshua became a silhouette, which immediately began lowering into the floor. It took me a few seconds longer than it should have to realize that he was descending a spiral staircase concealed inside the spire. He was only halfway gone before the door slid shut, plunging the world back into darkness again.
I stayed flat on the lawn, wondering what to do next. Following Joshua through the secret door seemed dangerous and reckless—but it was also what Erica would have done. Going home and waiting for another day—when Joshua wasn’t in the secret room—was certainly more prudent, but when would I get the chance to investigate again? The secret door was right out in the open, which would make it difficult to access during the day, especially when Ashley was always hovering nearby. And for all I knew, it might be weeks before Nefarious abandoned the couch again, allowing me to leave the house at night. Plus, Joshua was up to something now. Why else would he be creeping about in the middle of the night?
The point of my mission was to find out what SPYDER was planning. If I wanted to ever get out of evil spy school, I had to act.
I sidled over to the rec center, entered the code, and slipped inside. It took me a few minutes to find the right handhold on the climbing wall. I fumbled with dozens, trying to twist them one way or the other, but they were all bolted on firmly. Finally, I felt one give slightly. I jiggled it, felt something catch, and then rotated it clockwise.
The secret door opened with a hiss, revealing the spiral staircase. I tentatively stepped onto it and the door slid shut behind me.
The staircase wound down two stories, leading to a surprisingly well-decorated underground hallway. At spy school, the subterranean tunnels were drab and dingy, but this one looked straight out of a five-star hotel. The walls were wood-paneled, the floors were carpeted, and every few feet, there was a vase with fresh flowers. If you were going to spend a great deal of time underground, this seemed like the way to do it.
I crept down the hall. Through the door on the right was a conference room, currently empty, with an imposing oval table and eight ergonomic chairs. Oil paintings adorned the walls. It looked like the sort of room you could imagine diabolical villains discussing world domination in.
On the left side of the hall, there was a small kitchen. In it were a refrigerator, a sink, a microwave—and a frozen yogurt machine with a toppings bar. Apparently, the folks at SPYDER really liked fro-yo sundaes: There were dozens of toppings, ranging from crumbled toffee to rainbow sprinkles. The kitchen was empty, although there were a few fresh drips of strawberry yogurt on the floor, indicating someone had used the machine recently.
There was one last room at the end of the hall. I cautiously peered into it.
It was a command center.
It looked a bit like the living room back at the house I shared with Ashley and Nefarious, only significantly larger and with much nicer furniture. A fancy leather couch sat before an array of four high-definition TV screens. Soft jazz played from a surround sound system.
Joshua Hallal sat on the couch, typing on a laptop computer, a frozen yogurt sundae on the coffee table in front of him. The laptop appeared to be connected to all four TV screens at once. A great deal of information was scrolling across two of them, thousands of lines of letters and numbers. The third screen was full of words, but I couldn’t read them, because they were in Russian. The fourth screen showed a satellite map of a country road. Two blips were moving along it, one blue, one red.
Joshua wasn’t a very fast typist on account of the fact that he had only one hand. Plus, he kept stopping to eat his yogurt. And he spent a lot of time watching the screen with the satellite map.
I tried to focus on the other screens, hoping to catch a glimpse of something that made sense. However, on the first two, the information was scrolling too quickly to comprehend, even for me—and I was better at memorizing strings of numbers than most people.
So I focused on the screen with the Russian words. Back during the Cold War, Russian probably would have been the first language I’d have learned at spy school. These days, it wasn’t something you studied until later years. I’d been told to focus on Chinese and Arabic instead. Unfortunately, Russian wasn’t like French or Spanish, which were somewhat related to English and could be partially worked out, even if you couldn’t speak them. The Russian words—and even some of the letters—were completely unfamiliar. It might as well have been Egyptian hieroglyphics.
However, there were some numbers as well. Numbers were the same, no matter what language you spoke.
And Joshua was entering even more numbers. As I watched, he slowly typed them with his good hand, pausing now and then to check them against a piece of paper in his lap. I memorized them, although sadly, I could find no pattern in them.
243.657
94.1
40.7057
73.9964
A message in Russian suddenly flashed on the screen. There were two buttons to click on. I couldn’t read the word on either one, but it looked like the standard computer choice between “save” and “cancel.”
Joshua clicked “save.”
Three seconds later, that screen and the two with the lines of code on them went blank.
Joshua had turned them off. For a moment, I was terrified that he’d spotted me, but it turned out, he was fixated on the map screen again. On it, the red dot raced past the blue one. Ahead of them, the road suddenly disappeared from view, indicating a tunnel.
Joshua quickly downloaded something to an external drive, ejected it from his computer, and hurried to where a safe was built into the wall, the door wide open.
Joshua slid the drive inside, shut the safe, and locked it.
The safe had an electronic combination lock with fifteen digits.
Joshua returned to the couch and polished off the last of his sundae.
On the map screen, the blue dot entered the tunnel far ahead of the red one and vanished from sight.
The soft jazz suddenly cut out and was replaced by the sound of a phone ringing. The words “Incoming Call” flashed over the screen with the map.
Joshua clicked a button on his laptop, answering the phone over the surround sound system. “I see you’re in position,” he said.
“T-minus sixty seconds.” I recognized the voice. Ashley.
“Going live.” Joshua typed a command.
Views from four video cameras suddenly appeared on the TV screens, showing the inside of the tunnel from different angles. I figured SPYDER had installed the cameras well ahead of time in preparation for this event. They had extremely good picture and sound quality.
Joshua said, “Your practical exam in extraction is about to begin. If you do not succeed in this task, you will flunk the course.”
“We’re not going to flunk,” Ashley said confidently. “Relax. This is gonna be incrazing.”
“Incrazing?” Joshua repeated.
“Incredible plus amazing. Sit back and enjoy the show.”
A sedan skidded to a stop inside the tunnel, angled across the center line. It looked like the type of car my parents would have bought if they’d had a little more money. Sensible, with a bit of luxury.
Nefarious was driving. Ashley got out of the passenger side. Both were dressed casually in T-shirts and jeans, like typical high school students—except for the fact that they had fake blood all over their faces. They looked like they’d just been in a terrible accident.
Nefarious floored the gas and leapt from the car. It sped away, then plowed into the tunnel wall hard enough to crumple the front end. The windshield shattered and the airbags deployed. Nefarious then ran back to the car and climbed into the driver’s seat, wedging himself behind the airbag. He slumped over and closed his eyes, pretending to be unconscious.
