by Stuart Gibbs
“I know,” I said. “I was the one who shot at you.”
“I’ve done my time as a student here.” Murray made a sandwich, cramming half a package of bacon between two doughnuts, and took a huge bite. “Last spring, when the CIA thought I was at that juvenile correction facility, I was actually here, prepping for my mission. But now I’ve been baptized by fire. Gunfire. I’m part of the brain trust here now.”
“Then why are you living with us students instead of getting a house to yourself?”
“Because my house isn’t built yet,” Murray said peevishly. “But it’s under construction. I’ll have one soon enough, just like Joshua and all the other big shots.”
I didn’t quite believe what Murray was telling me—though it wasn’t because Murray was inherently untrustworthy. There was an edge to his voice, like I’d struck a nerve. Murray was being sent back to school, and he had a big chip on his shoulder about it. This time, he wasn’t lying because he was under orders to do so. He was lying so I’d think he was cool.
So I called him on it. “That’s not true. Those houses are for other people.”
“They’re not! I’ve got mine picked out already. It’s gonna be ready any day now—and it’ll be even better than Joshua’s. It has a Jacuzzi tub in the master bathroom. Joshua doesn’t have a Jacuzzi tub. If he wants bubbles in his bath, he’ll have to eat a whole bunch of beans first.”
“I’ll bet you don’t even know what SPYDER’s plotting this time.”
“Of course I do!”
“Then what is it?”
Murray started to say something but caught himself. Then he broke into a knowing smile and pointed at me. “You sly devil. You’re playing me. You almost got me to spill my guts. But it’s not gonna happen. For the time being, only those of us in the brain trust are allowed to know the future plans. You students will have to wait.”
This time, I couldn’t quite get a reading on Murray. He might have really known what SPYDER was up to and been following orders to keep it secret. Or he might have merely been pretending to do this so that I’d believe he had more access than me. I decided to take one more shot at cracking him. “I wasn’t trying to get you to spill your guts. I just didn’t think you were being honest with me.”
Murray held his hands up in surrender. “I know I haven’t always been straight with you in the past. But things are different now.”
I shook my head. “No, they’re not. You’re lying to me right now. Just like all the higher-ups at SPYDER have lied to me.”
Now Murray looked offended. “Oh, and the CIA was always completely honest. Like when they brought you in as bait to catch a mole without even telling you they were doing it. You could have been killed!”
“By you!” I pointed out. “You were the mole!”
“Water under the bridge,” Murray said dismissively. “Point is, SPYDER is a million times better than the CIA. “Look around you! Look what we give you: free housing, a rec center, all the bacon you can eat. Total and complete awesomeness. Meanwhile, what does the CIA give you? Criticism, angst, and ulcers. And then they kick you to the curb.”
There were only two strips of bacon left. I grabbed one before Murray wolfed the rest down. “I’m not saying that SPYDER isn’t better than the CIA. It is. I should have listened to you and switched sides months ago . . . .”
“Darn straight,” Murray said proudly.
“However,” I continued, “SPYDER still hasn’t been completely honest with me.”
Murray paused in the midst of taking the last piece of bacon. “What are you talking about?”
I had to fight the urge to smile. I might have failed to get SPYDER’s plans out of him, but I still had him hooked. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but . . . Well, sometimes I still get the feeling that SPYDER doesn’t completely trust me. Maybe it’s because I just defected from spy school and they think I’m some sort of double agent . . . .”
Murray shook his head wildly. “No. SPYDER would never have recruited you if they thought for a moment that you’d do that. To be honest, they’d written you off after you thwarted us the second time. You were too much of a Goody Two-shoes to flip. But then those idiots at spy school ousted you and the top brass here reconsidered. Nothing makes for a better bad guy than wanting revenge on the agency that dumped him.”
“Then why doesn’t SPYDER let me have a cell phone?” I asked. “Or an Internet connection?”
“That’s nothing personal. That stuff’s just too easy for the CIA to crack. E-mailing, texting, cell phone messages, Internet searches . . . It’s all traceable. We didn’t go through all the trouble to build this secret community to have someone accidentally blab its location to the CIA on Twitter.”
“And yet someone’s using the net. You guys are communicating with my parents for me.”
“Yes, but from an extremely secure location, far away from here. Which reminds me, I have some messages for you.” Murray fished some crumpled pieces of paper out of his pocket and tried to decipher his own handwriting on them. “Your parents are very proud of you but miss you very much. Your aunt Sadie had her archaeopteryx removed . . . .”
“You mean her appendix?” I asked.
Murray squinted at his notes. “Oh yeah. Her appendix. That makes a lot more sense. And Mike B-something says he can’t believe you’re going to another lame private school and that some girl named Kate is still asking about you.”
Once again, I had to wonder how much Murray actually knew. SPYDER wasn’t connecting to the Internet through a distant secure location; Joshua had been online the night before in the secret underground lair. Either Murray wasn’t aware of this or he was trying to keep me in the dark, but I couldn’t tell which.
My inability to get him to cough up any solid information was frustrating, but there was one last thing I could try to get him to do: spring me from Hidden Forest for a while. Once I was outside the compound, there was a chance I could figure out how to contact Erica—or at least figure out where Hidden Forest was in the first place.
“Okay,” I said. “I guess there really isn’t an Internet connection here. But SPYDER definitely doesn’t trust me.”
“Sure they do.” Murray popped the last of his bacon and doughnut sandwich into his mouth.
“Then how do you explain the fact that SPYDER won’t even let us leave the property?”
“We can leave.”
“I can’t,” I shot back. “This place is like a prison. A really nice prison . . . but still, a prison.”
“How many prisons do you know of that have their own rec center?”
“How many communities do you know of that won’t let you leave whenever you want?”
Murray started to argue, but before he could, Nefarious said, “Ben has a point.”
We turned to him, surprised as usual that he’d actually spoken, wondering how much of our conversation he’d listened to.
He had turned away from his game, although he wasn’t really looking at us. He was looking down at the floor, avoiding eye contact. “We can leave, but we need permission,” he mumbled. “And we haven’t had permission in a long time. It’d be nice to get out of here.”
“See?” I told Murray. “Even the guy who never gets off the couch is feeling trapped.”
“What are you talking about?” Murray asked Nefarious. “You got out of here just last night to rescue me!”
“Mneh,” Nefarious said.
Murray turned to me, unsure what to make of this.
“I think he means it’d be nice to leave the compound for something fun,” I translated. “Not just for a mission.”
Nefarious nodded agreement.
“Fun?” Murray asked. “Have you guys seen that rec center? That place is the capital of fun city! Anything you could possibly want to do, you can do there.”
“You’re making excuses,” I told him. “I thought you said you had some clout at SPYDER, but it sounds like you’re trapped here just
like the rest of us.”
Murray looked as though I’d insulted his honor. “I do have clout. If you want to get out of here, I’m your man. Where do you want to go, the beach?”
Before I could respond, Nefarious said, “Okay.”
“Great!” Murray agreed. “The beach it is! I’ll make it happen.” He shoved back from the table and hopped to his feet.
I didn’t want to go to the beach. I’d been hoping for something more urban. A restaurant or a mall. A place where I could clandestinely slip a message to a policeman. A place with Internet access. A place I wouldn’t have to wear a bathing suit. “Hold on . . . ,” I began.
“No can do.” Murray was already heading for the door. “I’m already late for some meetings today. Postincarceration briefings, reorientation, and all that jazz. Ben, it’s good to see you again. Glad to have you aboard. Oh, and thanks for the bacon.”
He grinned, flashing his gold tooth, and then slipped out the door.
TARGET PRACTICE
SPYDER Agent Training Facility
Recreation Center Firing Range
September 15
1400 hours
“Our business is not an easy one,” Joshua Hallal said. “We must always work in the shadows. Our successes must always remain secret. And, of course, there is always the issue of law enforcement.”
He looked right at me as he said this. Not so much accusing me of still working for law enforcement (I hoped) as much as indicating that I used to work for the other side.
It was early afternoon, right after lunch, and Joshua was lecturing us. We were on the firing range at the rec center. It had started as a normal class, with Mr. Seabrook teaching us the basics of weaponry (or at least in my case, trying to teach us the basics of weaponry), but Joshua had shown up suddenly and taken over. Mr. Seabrook obviously wasn’t happy about this, but he relented and now sat in the corner behind us, grumbling to himself.
Ashley, Nefarious, and I all stood at attention while Murray slumped beside us. It had been three days since he’d arrived at evil spy school, and despite his claims that he wasn’t a student like the rest of us, he’d been at every one of our classes. He’d claimed he was just auditing them—or brushing up on some information he’d forgotten while imprisoned—but it definitely appeared that he was under orders to be there and he made no secret of being annoyed about it. At the moment, he was making a show of being bored for Joshua, stifling yawns and checking his watch repeatedly, but Joshua barely glanced at him.
Instead, Joshua kept his gaze riveted on me. Or, at least, it seemed like it was riveted on me. It was kind of hard to tell because he had only one eye. “There is no other business in the world that must contend with what we do,” he continued. “No other business that has so many people actively trying to stop it from making a profit. No other business that has multiple government agencies, at both the local and federal level, working against it.”
“Well,” I said. “That’s because our business is illegal.”
Joshua stared at me for a long moment, then nodded. “A valid point. And yet the fact remains that, no matter what we do, one branch of law enforcement or another is always determined to muck it up. Unfortunately, they sometimes succeed. But then, we often succeed as well. In fact, we have succeeded far more than law enforcement knows. And that is the way it will always be. They try to thwart our plans. We try to stay one step ahead of them. Or more, if possible. Quite often, this results in direct conflict. So the question I have for you today is: In the event that you do encounter a law enforcement agent, what should you do?”
Ashley’s hand shot up in the air. “Ooh!” she cried. “I know! Pick me!”
Joshua pointed to her with his hook. “Yes, Miss Sparks?”
“Capture them!”
“I’m afraid that’s incorrect,” Joshua said.
Ashley sagged, disappointed.
I raised my own hand. Ashley raised hers again at the same time, having thought of another answer, but Joshua made a point of calling on me. “Yes, Mr. Ripley?”
“Kill them,” I said. Merely pronouncing the words made me feel sick to my stomach, but I hid this behind as stony a face as I could muster.
Joshua gave me an amused smile, like I was a dog who’d just mastered a trick. “That’s exactly right.”
I did my best to look pleased with the praise.
Since Murray had arrived at evil spy school, life had gone on exactly as before. Classes had continued. Ashley worked out. Nefarious played video games.
The only thing that had really changed, it seemed, was me.
I was growing more worried by the day. SPYDER was definitely up to something. The underground lair and Murray’s rescue indicated that. But no one seemed willing to let me in on the secret. I still hadn’t learned a thing about SPYDER’s plans—and yet, even if I did find out what they were plotting, I had no idea what to do about it. Because I still hadn’t heard one word from Erica. Or anyone else at the CIA.
“Capturing enemy agents might seem like a good idea,” Joshua explained. “After all, you can always use them as hostages. Or as bargaining chips: ‘Give us safe passage out of the country and we won’t hurt your friends.’ But the fact is, capturing them is never worth the headache. You have to imprison them somewhere, and prisons are expensive. You have to feed them, and that’s a big hassle. And worst of all, enemy agents have an annoying habit of escaping. It’s much less trouble to just kill them. And to kill them as quickly as possible.”
“Kill them quickly?” Murray asked, without bothering to raise his hand. “Really? Isn’t it more fun to draw their death out a little? To make them suffer?”
Joshua sighed. “No. We’re not James Bond villains here, kids. The more you draw out your enemy’s deaths, the more chance they have to escape. So no lowering them into pools full of crocodiles or trying to slice them in half with lasers or anything like that. Just shoot them and be done with it.”
Ashley nodded appreciatively, like she was cataloging this information in a mental file. Nefarious simply stared at the floor. Murray slumped against the wall, looking ashamed that Joshua had dismissed his ideas so quickly.
The silence from the CIA was really starting to eat at me. I’d been assuming all along that they knew where I was, even if I didn’t know. I’d figured they were out there behind the walls of Hidden Forest somewhere, watching me. But now I wondered if something had gone wrong. What if they’d sent me into the lion’s den but lost me en route? Or worse, what if they hadn’t really sent me at all? In either case, I was on my own, surrounded by the enemy.
Joshua stared us all down with his one good eye. “If you found yourself facing an enemy agent, could you kill them?”
“You know I could,” Murray groused. “You’ve seen me in action.”
“Mneh,” said Nefarious.
Joshua shifted his attention to Ashley, who grew uneasy. “Do we absolutely have to kill them?” she asked. “Can’t we just knock them unconscious? Because I’m good at that.”
“Yes, you are,” Joshua agreed. “You were quite adept on your mission the other night. However, there is a big difference between facing a lowly delivery boy for the prison system and an enemy agent who has uncovered information that could compromise our plans. There are cases when one must take drastic measures. Can you do that?”
Ashley’s features suddenly hardened. Any trace of doubt disappeared. I guessed she was channeling her huge reservoir of anger about the Olympics. “Yes,” she said. “I can.”
Joshua turned to me. “And you?”
“Sure,” I said confidently. “I can do that.”
“Really?” he asked. “Because you didn’t kill me when you had the chance.”
“Ah,” I said. My fake confidence faded a little. “Well, you know, the CIA has this whole policy about not killing people. They’re more of a capturing organization. Although, in my defense, I did arrange for you to fall off of a very high cliff. You were really very lucky to have
survived that.”
“Still, you didn’t come down and make sure I was dead,” Joshua pointed out. “That was sloppy.”
I fidgeted uneasily. “Um . . . are you saying that you’d be more convinced if I had actually killed you?”
“Yes.”
“But then you’d be dead.”
“But I’m not.” Joshua’s gaze, which was already cold, now grew significantly colder. “That was a big mistake on your part. A rather fortunate mistake where I’m concerned, but a mistake nonetheless. And I need to know that, the next time you find yourself in a similar position, you won’t be as careless. Because next time, there’s a very good chance that your enemy is going to be someone you know. One of your friends from spy school, perhaps.”
I nodded understanding. Of course, I’d known all along that something like what Joshua was suggesting could happen—but I was really hoping it wouldn’t. I had never liked the whole idea of shooting anyone to begin with, which was something my weaponry instructors back at spy school had always found frustrating. In my confrontations with the enemy so far, I’d always found ways to subdue them without personally inflicting any harm. But now I was in much deeper than before. And I didn’t have anyone else—like Erica—to protect me.
I tried to mimic Ashley’s stony glare. “You can count on me.”
Joshua held my gaze for a long moment before nodding. “I hope, for your sake, that you’re all being honest with me. Because when the moment of truth comes, any hesitation on your part means you’re the one who ends up dead. I can assure all of you that if I were to find myself in a situation where I was face-to-face with someone who I knew was working for the enemy”—here, he stared directly at me, as if issuing a challenge—“I would not hesitate to take them out.”
“Good to know,” I said, trying to sound nice and casual, like the entire exchange hadn’t been absolutely terrifying. Did Joshua still have suspicions about me? I wondered. Or was I just being paranoid? “I can assure you, I’m being honest. Those people from spy school . . . they’re not my friends anymore. If I have to take care of them, I can handle it.”
