The Inside Job

by Jackson Pearce

  “We can’t be like them!” Kennedy said at the same time, and then she added, “But if we’re going to steal from him, can’t we take Annabelle instead of the books?”

  She had a point. Beatrix and Ben were mostly quiet, but Clatterbuck stammered something about never wanting to be part of SRS, having been a League agent from the start.

  Then they all looked at me. I kept my face calm, my eyes steady. “We see if it’s possible to rob the bank, like we planned. But if it isn’t . . . well. We have to have something to live off, guys. We can’t keep going up against SRS with homemade inventions and three kid agents.”

  “What’s wrong with my inventions?” Ben asked, hurt.

  “Nothing! Nothing’s wrong with them. I’m just saying, SRS is powerful. Money makes them powerful. If we can’t take their power away, we have to find a way to build some of our own.”

  “But we’re not like SRS,” Kennedy said, crossing her arms.

  “We are, though. We can’t help it. They trained us, Kennedy. Everything we are is because of them. And they’re good at what they do, evil as it may be. Maybe functioning a little more like they are will get us closer to stopping them.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Walter said shortly. “They’ve still got my mom. I don’t want to be anything like them.”

  “They don’t have your mom, Walter. She chose them!” I said, my voice sharp. Walter looked liked I’d struck him; he stepped back, his eyebrows knitted together, his mouth parted. I was instantly sorry and not sorry—sorry to have hurt him, not sorry because of how badly I wanted Walter to realize this for himself. His mom chose SRS.

  Just like my parents chose to be art thieves.

  Like they chose to leave us.

  It wasn’t something I wanted to think about, and it definitely wasn’t something I could say out loud, but there it was: my parents chose to leave me and Kennedy behind. I’m not saying it was easy, but that was still the choice they made. Maybe sometimes you just have to be like SRS and think of the mission. Maybe sometimes, you have to put aside what feels right or wrong or good or bad and just do what has to be done.

  Maybe sometimes, you act like SRS because otherwise, they win again, and you are just so, so, so tired of them winning.

  “I don’t want to keep the books,” I said, trying not to let all the mean thoughts in my head leak into my voice. “But I also don’t want SRS to crush us, and if we don’t get a leg up on them, eventually they will. Let’s put together a bank plan. See what we can do. We’ll get everything perfect, all scenarios covered, and go from there.”

  Except, I knew that what I was actually saying was, We’ll see, which is what your parents say when they mean, You’re not getting what you want, but I don’t want to say no. Everyone else knew it too.

  But no one left, because at SRS, we were taught to never walk away from mission planning.

  “I . . . um. I have the bank blueprints?” Beatrix said meekly. She tapped at her Right Hand; a nearby printer buzzed to life and spit out page after page of material. Basic blueprints. Vault information. Alarm systems.

  It was overwhelming, especially seeing as how we were all still steaming silently. We passed the papers around the table, staring at them, while Annabelle began to snore in the corner.

  Have you ever been stuck? Like, writer’s block or painter’s block or just one of those times where you read part of a book five times but still don’t really know what it says? That was what planning the bank job felt like. Usually, we all clicked into place to form the perfect mission, everyone with their own little roles to play, their own parts in the bigger picture. But tonight? Tonight it was like we were seven strangers, and none of us spoke the same language.

  Otter finally sighed heavily. “All right—go to sleep. That’s an order, everyone. We’ll work on the mission tomorrow. Ben, get the books out of the car, will you, and bring them to my room. Kennedy, sweep the perimeter to make sure we weren’t followed. Beatrix, double-check that your uncle’s rental cars don’t trace to us, just in case SRS is looking.”

  “What about us?” Walter asked, motioning to me and himself.

  “You two, don’t talk. Just go to sleep,” Otter said.

  Which was fine by me. Walter went straight to our room, but I didn’t want to have to lie in there, wondering if he was awake. I could feel all sorts of words on the tip of my tongue—Walter, I can’t trust you anymore. Walter, you were useless today, and you’re supposed to be my partner. Walter, you have to let your mom go. It was definitely for the best that we weren’t alone, where I might crack and say them. I opted to join Kennedy on the perimeter sweep. I think she knew why I wanted to get out of the house for a little while; she didn’t say much as we walked down the drive, along the edge of the pasture. Annabelle came with us, running ahead and bringing back sticks, which instead of giving us to throw, she gnawed into pieces and then abandoned.

  We could see the owners’ house up ahead, looking warmer and brighter and more lived-in than the farmhouse. The poneys were in a barn nearby for the evening, and when the wind blew just right, you could hear them chomping on hay or stamping their feet or generally being ponies. When we got a little closer, we could see the owners inside, sitting in front of their television on a couch so soft, it looked like it was swallowing them. They were old and wrinkly people who looked like they would give good hugs.

  “I think what you said to Walter was mean,” Kennedy said softly. I turned, realizing she’d fallen a few steps behind me. She had her head down and was kicking a rock along the path. Kennedy argued with me occasionally, but over stupid things—like what time to wake up, or how many unicorn temporary tattoos she could feasibly fit on her arms. This, however, was very different, and so it threw me. I stopped on the path, trying to drum up the arguments I’d shove at Otter or Walter or even Beatrix, but they didn’t come.

  “He could’ve cost us our freedom today. He could have cost us our lives, even. If he can’t focus in the field, then . . .”

  “He just misses his mom.”

  “Still,” I said, stopping and leaning against one of the wooden pasture fences. There were no clouds in the sky, and even with the glow of downtown Geneva’s lights a few miles away, you could see a billion stars.

  Kennedy kicked her rock again, hard enough that it vanished down the trail. Annabelle took off after it. “I miss Mom and Dad too.”

  I turned to her. “Of course you do. So do I. I’m not mad at Walter for missing his mom, Kennedy.”

  “What happens if Mom and Dad appear, and I freeze?” she asked quietly. “Or you? What would you do if you suddenly saw them again?”

  I exhaled a deep chesty breath. Behind us, the lights in the farmhouse clicked out as the owners went to bed. It made the already brilliant stars even more so, and the moonlight made the entire world look dark blue. I picked a few splinters from the fence, letting them drop to the ground, and finally said, “All right, that’s fair. I might freeze too. And I wouldn’t blame you if you did.” I smiled a little and stepped down from the fence. “I guess sometimes I just get angry, like today with Walter. Lately it’s hard for me to be a regular person instead of an SRS agent. And sometimes it’s hard to be an SRS agent instead of a regular person. I don’t know why it’s hard for me right now. I never had trouble with that when we were actually at SRS.”

  “That’s because there we didn’t get to be regular people very often,” Kennedy reminded me. “Remember how long it took for me to convince them to let me start a cheerleading squad? And how we couldn’t eat what we wanted, and how they wouldn’t let you become a junior agent even though you were the best one in your class? They wanted us to be agents, but they didn’t much want us to be people.”

  “Yeah, but . . . I think . . .” I looked at Kennedy for a long time before continuing—did I really want to admit this? “I think the person I am might be an SRS agent. I try to be a regular person, but all I can do is think about how SRS would do something, how they’d plan t
he mission, how they’d question the witnesses . . .”

  Kennedy lifted her eyebrows at me. “So you’re a spy, Hale. Isn’t that what you always wanted to be anyway?”

  “Well, yeah, but . . . I don’t want to be an SRS spy.”

  Kennedy shook her head. “Stop being dumb. You’re not an SRS spy. Like, you couldn’t possibly be less of an SRS spy. You’re working with their enemy, remember?” We rounded the corner; Kennedy did a neat cartwheel and, without missing a beat, added, “And you love being a spy, so who cares where you got your start, so long as you’re on the good side now? Stuff like taking Annabelle—yeah, Walter and I didn’t really like that, but it was something The League needed to do to make the mission work, right? Right. You think of the mission, and that’s a good thing, even if SRS taught you that.”

  “I don’t want to always be thinking of the mission. I don’t want to always put it first. I don’t want SRS to own me forever. I don’t want to be like Mom and Dad,” I said, and the words fell out of my mouth before I realized that maybe that wasn’t the best thing to say in front of my little sister. I was relieved when Annabelle bounded out of the darkness toward us with Kennedy’s rock in her mouth. She dropped it at our feet and looked pleased.

  “Good girl, Annabelle,” Kennedy said, ruffling the dog’s ears. I walked over to do the same, and we listened for a few minutes to the sound of the ponies munching and Annabelle panting.

  “I shouldn’t have said that about Mom and Dad. I’m sorry,” I said when even animal noises couldn’t lift the weight between us.

  “Don’t be sorry. I’m mad at them too,” Kennedy said, sighing heavily. “I still miss them. I still love them. I just wish they were here.”

  I exhaled and then put my arm around Kennedy’s shoulders. We continued along the path.

  “You know, though, that SRS doesn’t really own you, right, Hale?” she asked as we rounded the bottom of the pasture and started back toward the farmhouse.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “They don’t. Because if we were at SRS, you wouldn’t be worried about any of this stuff. You’d just follow orders.”

  I looked down at Kennedy and frowned. Then I almost smiled. “I guess you have a point.”

  She nodded. “That’s what makes us different. All of us. And that’s when everyone else at SRS will start leaving and joining us—when they can’t help but worry about right and wrong and good and bad. They’ll join us, and it’ll be great because then the whole hall at The League will be full, and we can all pick out a song to wake up to in the morning, like they do at camp.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “At camp? In the movies, when they blast a song over the loudspeaker? It’ll be like that,” Kennedy said, looking pleased.

  “Right. You have to be the one to tell Otter about that plan though,” I said, and we finally climbed the steps back up to the farmhouse. Annabelle jumped on Clatterbuck hard enough to knock him over, like she’d missed him horribly while we were gone, and then Kennedy hauled Annabelle off to her bedroom. While I brushed my teeth, I heard Kennedy and Beatrix trying to get Annabelle to leap between the beds without touching the floor. The frequent crashes told me she was no more of an athlete than I was.

  Then I went and sat in the kitchen for a moment, looking at Beatrix’s equipment and Ben’s inventions and the blueprints of the bank and the stack of glasses and plates by the sink from dinner, because if there was one thing every League agent could agree on, it was how gross doing the dishes was.

  Back at SRS, my parents did the dishes in the evening, and the cafeteria staff did them at lunch.

  Back at SRS, there was a fancy lab for inventions, with sleek electronics and supercomputers.

  Back at SRS, I was an agent in training. I was Hale the Whale.

  I realized, sitting there and looking at the pile of dirty dishes, that maybe Kennedy was right. Maybe all those things that I was made out of—SRS agent, Hale the Whale, and League agent who hated doing dishes—were just parts of who I was. I was a spy. I was a former SRS agent. I was a current League agent. And I was a hero—or at least, I was trying to be one, and that was something.

  But despite all that . . . maybe I needed to be a better friend.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The next morning, we concluded that we needed as many details as Hastings would give us before coming up with even a loose bank plan. We left the Runanko books in the trunk of the car and opted not to tell Hastings we had them with us, just in case he tried to pull something and get the books without trading us the information. Much to Kennedy’s—and, I’ll be honest, everyone else’s—dismay, we’d brought Annabelle with us to give her back to Hastings.

  “You have the books? Really? You really, really have them?” Hastings asked, his eyes globelike with surprise and wonder. He totally ignored Annabelle, who looked around heavily at her former home, then slumped onto the floor, like the very building zapped her energy. Ben and Kennedy sat down with her and petted her quietly, I think secretly hoping that if they laid low, Hastings would forget about Annabelle entirely and we’d be able to take her back with us.

  I said, “We do. They were stolen by SRS, as it turns out. That clown that came over was a deep-cover agent.”

  Hastings shook his head. “Wait—SRS has the books? And they’re blackmailing me? And their agents are clowns?”

  “The two situations might not even be related. The books were stolen long before you started working at the bank—long before you inherited your grandmother’s possessions. SRS was on something of an art theft spree at the time, trying to have a nice stockpile of assets that could be sold or bargained with,” Otter said.

  “They had the books and my secret. That’s . . . well, it’s genius, frankly,” Hastings said, pacing, his face contorted with a sort of impressed anger.

  Otter went on, “Well, all this means, Mr. Hastings, that you can have your books, and you can sell them and buy your own private SRS-free island somewhere.”

  “An island!” Hastings said, his face lighting up. “I could! I could sell this dump and the books and that dog and get an island—”

  “You’re going to sell Annabelle?” Beatrix asked, horrified. She dropped down beside Kennedy and flung her arms around the dog. Annabelle smacked her lips in response.

  “Who cares? She’s just a fancy mutt anyway! And besides, on my island, I’ll have . . . monkeys. Yes! No, cats. Cats are easier than monkeys, aren’t they? Maybe no animals. Parrots!” Hastings said in a frenzy of wealth-dreaming glee. I glanced at Walter warily, and he gave me a look that said, I can’t wait to be finished with this guy.

  “Me either,” I muttered.

  “What?” Hastings asked. I shrugged, and he went on, “So, SRS’s account numbers, right?”

  “Yes,” Otter said. “We want to know where the money is now, and where it’s going to be. And I want to know the bank’s security procedures.”

  “Okay . . . ,” Hastings said, wandering toward the living room. He sat down on the couch, Otter took out a legal pad to take notes, and Beatrix held her hand anxiously over her Right Hand. “SRS has its money in three places at the bank. A third of it is in gold bars. A third of it is in cash. And a third is just digital, really—not sitting in a vault anywhere. That’s the money they use for day-to-day operations.”

  Otter nodded. “All right—and who decides where the money goes?”

  “I do, mostly. Every now and then they’ll ask me to do something specific with it—put it all in an account here or there—but I think that’s usually when they’re trying to fool a background check. They can make people appear to be millionaires, you know. The digital money is easy to move around. The physical money is trickier. Sometimes it’s in private vaults, sometimes safe deposit boxes, and sometimes it’s in the main vault with the rest of the cash.”

  “Shocking,” Otter said drily. “So, you could feasibly put it all in one giant private vault for us to rob?”

  Hastings fro
wned. “Well, no. They’d notice if everything was put in one place, I’m sure. I could have the gold moved to . . . to the safe deposit boxes, maybe? It’s about thirty million in gold bars. I could spread those out among safe deposit boxes, so it’d all be in the same room. The boxes would be easier to rob.”

  “All right—what about the cash?” Otter asked.

  “The cash is always in either the main vault, which is basically impossible to rob, or in a private vault, which is . . . also impossible to rob. Well—impossible without having an access card.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew a card. “Like this one.”

  Otter smiled dangerously. “Then we’ll need you to give that to us.”

  “It’s not that easy—it’s the card, plus a retinal scan, plus a guard will check the weight of everyone going in and out of the vault to make sure it hasn’t increased. No one’s allowed back there but bank employees, and the guards know us all by name. Unless you’re planning to go in with a gun, you can’t get into that vault. But . . . I can go in. I can go get the money for you.”

  “Why would you do that?” I asked, lifting an eyebrow. So far I’d seen Hastings commit exactly zero selfless acts, and he had to know we couldn’t afford to pay him . . . “Ah, you want a cut of the money.”

  “No,” Otter said. “Not a chance. You’ve gotten your reward, Hastings. You have your books back. How could you possibly need yet more money?”

  “Fine, fine,” Hastings grumbled. “You’ll never get into the vault though. Even with my help, you’d need SRS to call and authorize me to move that amount of money from the vault.”

  I glanced at Beatrix, who nodded quickly. She could fake the authorization, but . . . Hastings was right. The vault would be tricky.

  Otter went on, “Anyway—the digital money?”

  “I guess you could do a massive withdrawal and get it in cash? But no, that wouldn’t work—there’s actually not enough cash in the bank on a given day to cover that amount.”

  “What if we moved it to another digital account? An account we own?” I asked.