by Stuart Gibbs
I counterattacked. I’d asked too many questions about Murray as it was. Any more and I’d raise the suspicions of my fellow students. Instead, it seemed I should focus on being part of the team and enjoy my precious time at the beach. Or, at least, I should act like I was doing that. So I did my best to dunk Ashley back into the ocean—and when she proved too adept at getting away from me, I teamed up with her and we dunked Nefarious instead. Then Nefarious decided he’d had enough and fled for dry land. Ashley and I bodysurfed for a while, and eventually we returned to the beach and played smashball. Every once in a while, I’d steal a glance back at Murray to see what he was up to, but after a few minutes of snapping photos, he had put the camera away and returned to his beach chair. He stayed planted there with his book for the rest of the time, not doing anything remotely suspicious. He even dozed off for a while.
At six o’clock, he whistled for our attention. “Sorry, guys. But we’ve got to pack it in.”
“Already?” Ashley pleaded. “Can’t we have another half hour?”
“We’ve stayed late enough as it is. I had to twist a lot of arms to get us this free time. If you ever want to do something like this again, we can’t push it.”
Ashley sighed heavily but gave in. “All right.”
We slogged back to where we’d left our things in the sand and grabbed our towels. The sand around Murray was littered with crumpled soda cans.
“You leave anything for us?” I asked.
Murray tipped the lid of the cooler back and peered inside. “Uh . . . no. Unless you like melted ice.”
“Are you kidding?” Ashley gasped. “There were two six-packs in there at least. You drank twelve cans of soda all by yourself?”
Murray gave a loud, carbonated belch. “They didn’t let us have soda in prison. Only milk, water, and herbal tea. It was horrible.”
I grabbed my shirt and sneakers off the sand.
From my right shoe came the sound of something small inside it sliding down into the toe.
It was barely audible. Although the others might not have heard it anyhow. Ashley had coiled her beach towel into a whip and snapped it at Murray, cracking him in the knee. “That’s for not sharing,” she said.
Murray yelped. Ashley prepared for another assault, but he raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry! How about if we grab some ice cream on the way back?”
Ashley and Nefarious exchanged a look, then nodded agreement.
“Sure,” I agreed, then upended my shoe into my hand to find out what was inside.
I was expecting a pebble. Or perhaps a soda can pull tab that Murray had chucked into my sneaker.
Instead, it was a radio receiver.
It was very small, designed to be inserted deep inside your ear. It actually looked a bit like a pebble. I only recognized it because I’d used one in school before. It was an expensive, top-of-the-line model that the CIA favored.
I palmed it quickly, before anyone else could see, and tried to hide the fact that I was completely astonished by its presence.
I didn’t quite manage it.
“What’s wrong?” Murray asked.
“I got sand in my shoe,” I lied, then made a show of shaking it out.
Murray turned back to the others to discuss where to get ice cream. He seemed to have bought my ruse. Of course, there was little reason for him to suspect that I had a high-end radio earpiece in my shoe, rather than sand. After all, there was plenty of sand around. And even I was having trouble believing the high-end radio earpiece was there. I couldn’t imagine how it had ended up in my shoe. Except for Murray, no one had been anywhere near our things for the last few hours . . . .
No, I realized. That wasn’t quite true.
Understanding suddenly descended on me. The truth was so startling, I had to turn away from the others and pretend to be toweling my hair dry so they wouldn’t see the shock of revelation on my face.
One of the blond bikini girls had been near our things. The one who had chased the Frisbee over. Only, now that I thought about it, I realized she hadn’t been some random teenager.
It had been someone I’d known. Someone I was desperate to see, in fact. But I hadn’t even recognized her, because she was a master of hiding in plain sight.
Erica Hale.
COMMUNICATION
SPYDER Agent Training Facility
Student Housing
September 15
2100 hours
I wasn’t one hundred percent positive it had been Erica on the beach. Because if it had, she’d done a staggeringly good job of blending in.
As I’d learned in Avoiding Observation class, there was more than one way to camouflage yourself. You could make yourself blend into the surroundings, the way Warren Reeves specialized in, painting your face and covering yourself with leaves or bark so you looked more like a bush than a human. However, this method had its limitations. It was very difficult to drop a radio receiver into a shoe on the beach when you were dressed like a bush. People tended to notice bushes wandering around. So you could try option two: hiding in plain sight. This involved making yourself so obvious that even a suspicious bad guy like Murray Hill would never think for a moment that you could possibly be an enemy agent. Which was exactly what Erica had done.
At first thought, it seemed outlandishly risky. After all, Murray knew Erica well. But Erica had used that to her advantage. She hadn’t merely dyed her hair blond. She’d changed her wardrobe, her voice—and her entire personality. I knew Erica well too—in fact, I probably knew her as well as anyone at spy school—and yet it was almost impossible to imagine her wearing a bikini or talking animatedly about shoes or, for that matter, being friendly at all. In essence, Erica had turned herself into the anti-Erica. And she’d done it so well that, if I hadn’t found the radio, it would never have occurred to me that one of the vapid, blond Barbie dolls next to me on the beach was the very person I’d been desperately hoping to have contact from.
The possibility that she’d done it was so amazing, I spent much of the ride home trying to get my mind around it. Plus, I couldn’t wait to use the earpiece and check in. These thoughts kept me so distracted, I wasn’t nearly as terrified by Murray’s driving as I should have been. I barely even noticed when we clipped three cars just getting out of the parking lot at Sandy Hook, or when we drifted across the median of Route 18 and nearly got pancaked by a semi. I did my best to make conversation during our stop for ice cream and to play I Spy on the drive home, but my mind was somewhere else the entire time.
Murray was also up to his usual tricks, trying to divert me from paying attention to the route back. However, this time I wasn’t trying nearly so hard to figure out where Hidden Forest was located. If Erica had found me on the beach, she probably knew exactly where Hidden Forest was.
It was after dark by the time we got home. I was worried that everyone would be hungry and that I’d have to sit through dinner with them all, but the moment we climbed out of the car, Ashley announced she was going to take a shower to get all the sand off her.
“Me too,” Murray said. “Feels like I’ve got half of Sandy Hook in my bathing suit.”
“Mneh,” Nefarious said, which seemed to mean, “I’ll shower too.”
We all headed upstairs. I listened to the water come on in everyone else’s bathrooms, indicating they were too busy to eavesdrop on me, then stuck the radio into my ear and turned on my shower as well. It was possible that SPYDER had my room bugged, so the more noise, the better.
“Anyone there?” I asked.
“Guess you found my present,” Erica replied. Her voice was distant and all-business, but it still sounded wonderful to me. It was thrilling to make contact after so much time on my own. “Turn on your shower. Make some noise.”
“Already done.”
“Okay. Now get in. Don’t worry. The equipment is waterproof.”
I didn’t argue. I was feeling awfully briny anyhow. “So that was you on the beach today?”
/> “Didn’t even notice me, did you?”
“No,” I admitted. I felt embarrassed, though I wasn’t sure if this was because Erica had fooled me, or because I was hearing her voice in my ear while I was naked. Probably a little of both. “How’d you even know we were going to be there?”
“I didn’t. We followed you there.”
“We?”
“Yes. Me and Granddad.”
That would have been Cyrus Hale, Erica’s extremely impressive grandfather. “I thought he was retired.”
“Well, he unretired himself after SPYDER targeted him last year. He knows they’re up to something, and he’s determined to bring them down. We tailed you guys from their compound, then passed you on the road into Sandy Hook. It’s a peninsula, so once Murray turned onto it, we knew that was the only place you could be going. Then I got out and tried to blend in.”
“You mean, you didn’t know those girls?”
“Did those girls look like people I’d want to know? I’d just met them.”
“Wow. You seemed like you were all best friends.”
“It wasn’t hard to work my way in. I just walked up, asked if I could borrow some tanning lotion, and then complimented them on their hair. I had no idea Murray was going to set up right next to us, but I figured it was a decent shot. We were the only girls in bikinis on the beach, and he’s been in prison for a few months. Don’t forget to shampoo your hair.”
As usual, Erica’s abrupt shifts in conversation caught me off guard. “Why?”
“Because it’ll look suspicious if you get out of the shower and don’t smell clean.”
“Oh. Right.” Up until that point, I’d just been standing in the water, focusing on the conversation. Now I grabbed the shampoo and lathered up. Under my hair, my scalp was gritty with sand. “Where are you right now?”
“About a mile away from you.”
“And, uh . . . where am I, exactly?”
“You don’t know?”
“SPYDER’s worked very hard to keep me in the dark. No Internet. No phones. I know I’m in New Jersey, though.”
“Short Hills, to be exact. Or at least, on the outskirts of it. It’s gated community heaven out here. SPYDER couldn’t have picked a better spot to build this place.”
I rinsed my hair, then lathered again, trying to get all the sand out. “And how’d you know the compound was here?”
“We tailed you and Joshua the day he picked you up. We were watching you the whole time after you left the academy, figuring he might show. Or someone from SPYDER, at least.”
“So . . . I was right to accept Joshua’s offer, then? This was the CIA’s plan all along? Pretend like I’d been booted out of spy school, then have SPYDER come and recruit me?”
“Yes, it was planned. But not by the CIA. They don’t have any idea we’re doing this.”
I gasped in surprise, catching a mouthful of water, which I then sputtered out. “They don’t know I’m here? This wasn’t their idea?”
“Of course not. The CIA would never have approved sending a second-year student undercover.”
“Then whose plan is it?”
“Granddad’s.”
I had to lean against the tiled wall to steady myself. “Are you telling me that this mission is unauthorized?”
“Well, we couldn’t have done an authorized mission,” Erica said dismissively. “SPYDER has moles everywhere in the CIA.”
“So, as far as the Agency knows, I really have joined SPYDER?”
“Keep your voice down. The Agency doesn’t know you’re with SPYDER at all. They think you’re still back at your old middle school. They’re completely in the dark here.”
“And they really think that I blew up the principal’s office by accident? I got expelled for real?”
“Yes. We had to make it look official to SPYDER. And the principal would never have been able to fake it. As you know, the man’s an idiot.”
“So you did set me up. You replaced the fake bomb with a live one?”
“Yes. I wasn’t expecting you to nearly blow up the principal, of course. The moron wasn’t even supposed to be in his office. But that actually worked out better than expected. Normally, it would take a few days to expel a student. There’s usually a lot of paperwork involved. But the principal was so angry, he did it on the spot.”
I picked up the soap. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to do any of this?”
“We had to make your part look real, too.”
“You mean, you didn’t trust me any more than the principal.”
Erica paused a moment before answering. “To be honest, we weren’t sure how well you’d perform if you knew. I thought you’d be fine, but Granddad doesn’t really know you, and my father backed him.”
I squeezed the soap so hard, it fired out of my hands, caroming off the wall. “Alexander’s in on this?”
“We needed a third person. Granddad and I can’t do surveillance twenty-four hours a day by ourselves. Besides, I had to go back to your middle school and mop up the mess you left back there. Your cover story was blown.”
I groaned. “That wasn’t my fault. First Mike was goofing around—and then Joshua showed up and things got out of hand.”
“I’m well aware of what transpired.”
“So how’d you fix it?”
“I had to run a disinformation campaign. I showed up at the school, pretended to be your ex-girlfriend looking to make up, and I spread the word that you were the physics king of St. Smithen’s, not some undercover junior agent. It took a while to convince some of those airhead girls, but lucky for you, I can be very persuasive.”
“Er . . . You knew that I’d told Mike you were my girlfriend?”
“Only for the last six months. I’m a spy, Ben. It’s my job to know things.”
I quickly changed the subject. “I thought you felt Alexander was a terrible spy.”
“He’s gotten better lately. He’s really trying to prove himself to Granddad. Although we still won’t let him have a gun unless it’s an emergency.”
“I can’t believe you had more faith in your father than you did in me.”
“If I didn’t have faith in you, do you think you’d even be doing this?”
I considered that while picking up the soap again. “I guess not.”
“Exactly. Speaking of which, I need your intel. If you stay in that shower too long, they’re gonna get suspicious.”
I knew Erica was right, but I wasn’t ready to move on quite yet. “How long are you expecting me to stay here?”
“As long as it takes you to figure out what SPYDER’s plotting.”
“What if that takes a year? I’ll be stuck here that whole time!”
“You’re not the only one making sacrifices here. I’m AWOL from school. And while you’ve got a bed, a rec center, and fresh groceries every day, I’m crammed in a surveillance vehicle with my father and grandfather, living on fast food and sleeping on the passenger seat.”
“At least it was your decision to do this,” I said bitterly.
“Listen,” Erica told me, “we knew SPYDER was plotting something big, we knew something had to be done about it, and we couldn’t trust the CIA to handle it without tipping off the enemy. Like it or not, you’re the best option we had. Now, if you succeed, Granddad will be able to go to the Agency, tell them what we’ve done, get both of us reinstated at the academy, and probably even swing us some distinguished service medals to boot. You’ll make a bigger impression on the top brass at Central Intelligence with this one mission than most students will make in six whole years of spy school. So drop the sad sack act and let me know what you’ve learned.”
I sighed. “All right. I guess you’ve realized that SPYDER controls this whole community.”
“Yes. We’ve scoped it out thoroughly.”
“Did you know Joshua Hallal was still alive?”
“Not until he showed up at your middle school. He doesn’t look so good.”
I decided not to dwell on it. There was too much else to discuss and my skin was starting to pucker. “Are you aware SPYDER has a whole underground complex here?”
Erica didn’t answer right away, which was as close as she ever came to admitting I knew something that she didn’t. “Where?”
“Under the rec center. There’s a secret entrance in the rock wall.”
“What do they have down there?”
“There’s a conference room and a kitchenette with a sundae bar . . . .”
“Really?”
“Yeah. With toppings and everything. And then there’s some sort of control center. Joshua ran Murray’s extraction from there the other night, but I’m sure it must be for more than that. I saw him programming something in Russian.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know. I can’t read Russian.”
“Since when?”
“Since always.”
“That’s inconvenient,” Erica said in a tone that left no doubt in my mind that she could speak Russian—and had probably been doing it since she was three. “Did you see anything you could read?”
“A couple numbers, although I don’t know what they could mean.”
“What were the numbers?” Erica didn’t even ask if I remembered them. She knew I had.
I repeated them from memory. She wrote them down, then asked, “What did he do then?”
“He downloaded everything to a flash drive and stuck it in a safe.”
“What kind of lock did the safe have?”
“A fifteen-digit electric combination lock.”
“Did you see him enter the combination?”
“No. His body was blocking my line of sight.”
“Do you have any idea what SPYDER’s plans are?”
