Sister Spy

by Laura Peyton Roberts

  Contents

  Title Page

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Don't miss any of the Official Alias Books from Bantam Books!

  Copyright Page

  If you think being a full-time college freshman and a part-time agent-in-training with the CIA is easy, you've never tried it. For one thing, my boss, Wilson, doesn't seem to fully grasp the meaning of part-time. My schedule is a killer. If I'm not drilling with my self-defense instructors, practicing state-of-the-art surveillance techniques, or learning yet another language, I'm flying all over the world.

  All right. That part's pretty cool.

  And I know what I'm doing is incredibly important. I believe in this job like I've never believed in anything else.

  But just once I'd like to blow off an entire Saturday and sleep till noon on Sunday. Like a normal person. You know?

  Oops. That's my pager. Gotta go.

  1

  “You want me to what?” Sydney Bristow asked incredulously. She shook her head, laughing with disbelief. “Good one, Wilson!”

  Reginald Wilson, her SD-6 recruiter, leaned forward in his leather chair, bracing his hands on the long polished table at the center of the op-tech department. “This is serious, Sydney.”

  “You just told me to join a sorority! You must be joking. Right?”

  Wilson's eyes bored into hers, not a trace of humor in them.

  “Right?” she repeated, more urgently. “I mean, you can't be telling me that the future of the free world hangs on my mastery of panty raids and keg parties.”

  “I believe panty raids would be more of a fraternity thing,” Wilson said dryly. “Or possibly sixth-grade camp. However, you will be required to demonstrate an affinity for crafts, formals, and soul-baring games. Obviously you have some research to do before you attend your first event at Alpha Kappa Chi.”

  He's kidding, she thought. He has to be!

  But Wilson was a model secret agent—his face gave away nothing.

  “I cannot join a sorority,” Sydney said, doing her best to keep her voice calm. “Not unless you want to have someone hack into the school computer and fix the failing grades I'll get. I've seen those girls on campus, running around in their matching outfits. Just reading all the banners they put up would be a full-time gig—I can't imagine actually attending so many events. It's like they live in an alternate universe or something, and I just don't have time for a third reality right now. Between working for you and trying to pass my classes, I'm living two lives already.”

  She could have added that her impression of sororities was not particularly positive, but that objection seemed obvious. Sydney's studiousness, her reserved personality, and her outsider social status—all characteristics that had made her a prime candidate for recruitment into this top-secret branch of the CIA—were in diametric opposition to the sorority lifestyle.

  “You may have a point,” Wilson admitted, rubbing his square chin thoughtfully. “But a little careful hacking is certainly an option. There's this new kid in ops who—”

  “Wilson!” Sydney stopped him. “I don't want to join a sorority. I wouldn't fit in with those girls, and don't even get me started on frat boys! I'm totally in favor of exploring the college experience, but if you're going to start filling up my free time now—”

  “Who said anything about free time? I'm giving you your next mission.”

  “Joining a sorority?”

  “Joining Alpha Kappa Chi,” Wilson corrected her impatiently. “It wouldn't do any good if you joined one of the others.”

  What good will it do you if I join that one?

  Taking a deep breath, Sydney forced herself to swallow the question. In fairness to Wilson, she hadn't given him much of a chance to explain. Her two most recent missions, in Paris and Scotland, had been the kind of life-or-death international spying assignments she'd joined SD-6 to perform. How did a sorority fit in to the mix?

  “Why don't we start over?” she asked sheepishly.

  Wilson gave her a stern look. “Try to pay attention this time.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  Sinking lower in her chair, she hoped the two agents walking past the large conference room hadn't heard the reprimand. In the months since she'd begun her training, Sydney had earned her reputation as a nineteen-year-old wunderkind, but she still wasn't a full agent.

  “As I was saying,” Wilson continued in a slightly annoyed tone, “I want you to join Alpha Kappa Chi immediately. We had an agent in there, Jen Williams. Unfortunately, Jen died two weeks ago. The coroner called it an asthma attack, but we don't buy that for a second.”

  “Wait,” said Sydney, sitting up straight. “You think somebody killed her?”

  Wilson nodded. “Jen did have asthma, but it had been under control for years. Suffocation. That's my guess. With her history, people might not look too carefully.”

  “But . . . but . . .” Sydney tried to latch on to one of the thoughts swirling through her brain. “You think she was killed for being in a sorority?”

  “No. I think someone in the sorority killed her.”

  “So . . . they knew she was an agent?”

  “Why else would they have killed her?”

  “It doesn't make sense,” said Sydney. “Why did you send her in there in the first place? I mean, who are these girls?”

  Wilson massaged his temples, clearly trying to fend off a headache. “I didn't send her in. When we recruited Jen, she was already a member of Alpha Kappa Chi. It was difficult, working around all those functions, but it was also a built-in cover. Who's going to suspect a sorority girl?”

  “Not me,” Sydney admitted.

  “Exactly. Plus, the Alphas are a well-off group. They travel a lot. Jen did some odd drops and pickups for us. Mostly little stuff, but she was about to graduate and come on as a full-time agent.”

  “She was a senior?” Sydney asked, wishing she could have met her. She hadn't even known there was another member of SD-6 enrolled at her school . . . and now the girl was dead.

  “She started with us later than you did, and didn't move forward as fast. But Jen was a good, solid thinker. Her death is a big loss.”

  Sydney nodded, her eyes abruptly brimming with tears. “I'll find out who did it,” she vowed. “I'll rush that sorority so hard they won't know what hit them.”

  Wilson smiled faintly. “There's more. AKX is gearing up for its big spring trip to Hawaii, and Jen was going to do a mission for us there—the most important mission we'd ever given her. You'll have to take it now.”

  “I will. Anything.”

  Wilson gave her a long, probing look.

  “Don't make this personal,” he warned. “Whoever killed Jen is still out there. You storm in like the Terminator and you could end up dead too.”

  “I'll be careful.”

  “See that you are. We want to know what happened to Jen, but not if it costs us the mission—or another agent.”

  The way Wilson was looking at her made her stomach knot with fear. Joining a sorority no longer seemed the least bit funny.

  Sydney swallowed hard. “It could have been someone outside the sorority who killed her.”

  “I'm open to all possibilities. But Jen died in the AKX house, in her own bed—and that points to an inside job. Watch your back every second, Sydney. I c
an't stress that enough.”

  Walking across the sprawling Los Angeles campus on her way back to her dorm room, Sydney barely noticed the sun sinking into a smoggy red haze or the bicycles and skateboards weaving across her path. Instead, Wilson's warnings rang in her ears, and a map of southern Oahu filled her inner vision.

  “The sorority will be staying in Waikiki,” Wilson had told her, pointing to the display on an op-tech monitor. “Pearl Harbor is here, a short drive away. You'll have to get most of your equipment on the island, obviously.”

  “Obviously,” she'd echoed, still reeling.

  Wilson had handed her a Global Positioning System unit, an electronic device used for finding exact locations anywhere on the globe. The gadget looked like a TV remote with a tiny square LCD screen.

  “It's waterproof,” he'd said. “The mission coordinates have already been entered. Make sure you know how GPS works, and whatever you do, don't lose it.”

  “I won't.”

  She reached behind her now as she walked, locating the small lump the instrument made through the fabric of her backpack.

  “All right, then? Is everything clear?” he'd asked.

  “Crystal,” she'd responded in her most confident voice.

  But now, out among normal people again, she could barely believe what she'd just learned.

  A nuclear device, she thought, still stunned. At the bottom of Pearl Harbor. All these years . . .

  “It's not a live device,” Wilson had assured her. “It's a prototype of a unique detonation system for an atomic bomb. A sort of scale model. For years it was thought that Benjamin Suler, the only scientist working on the project, had made both himself and his work disappear. Only a handful of brass ever knew about Suler, and after Hiroshima they decided finding the prototype was irrelevant. They were wrong. We've had a researcher on this full-time ever since we heard about it, trying to track that device down.”

  “Why?” she had asked, but she was already starting to see the possibilities.

  “It's a dangerous world we live in, Sydney. And while technology has moved on since the A-bomb, it's believed the detonation system Suler developed would have made a more deadly bomb than the ones we eventually dropped on Japan. Smaller, more efficient. More powerful.”

  “More powerful?” she'd repeated, her mind replaying the footage she'd seen of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. The devastation that bomb had caused was wrenching to consider. To think that it could have been worse . . .

  “Let's just say we don't want this prototype falling into the wrong hands. The technology may be crude by today's standards, but that's its appeal—it's simple to make. At best, it would cost a staggering amount of money to get the thing back. At worst . . .”

  “We wouldn't get it back,” she'd finished for him, imagining nuclear bombs stashed in the hideouts of terrorists and warlords throughout the world.

  For just a moment fear had flickered behind Wilson's impassive features. Then the crack in his mask had sealed and he smiled again. “The good news is, we found it first. And right under our noses. Kind of ironic, really.”

  Ironic, Sydney thought now, reaching the main entrance to her dorm. She climbed the stairs in a trance, her mind still sifting through the chaos of a long-ago war.

  When the Japanese had launched their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that Sunday morning in 1941, their pilots had killed thousands of U.S. servicemen and sunk ships of all descriptions. Both American and Japanese aircraft had crashed during the fierce battle, and when the carnage was over, the surface of the harbor had burned in a horrifying stew of floating fuel and body parts.

  During the long war that followed, the ruined military hardware that came to rest at the bottom of the murky green harbor was never fully catalogued. Years later, a memorial was built over the rusting hull of the sunken battleship Arizona. The equally enormous Utah still lay on its side nearby. But numerous other ships, planes, and Japanese subs had sunk, and though most were eventually recovered, surprises had been discovered over the years as the tangled story of that morning continued to unravel.

  “When I first heard, I couldn't believe it,” Wilson had told her. “Right there in the harbor. All this time . . .”

  According to Wilson's research, Dr. Benjamin Leonard Suler had been secretly visiting a colleague aboard a yacht in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese had attacked. Suler's body was now presumed to have been among the hundreds never identified. The fate of the prototype was another story.

  “He took it everywhere he went, in a specially built stainless-steel case. He was obsessive like that. Paranoid.” Sydney could still see Wilson's eyes burning with intensity. “When the fighting started, he would have been consumed with saving his work, hiding it from the enemy. It's on that boat. It has to be.”

  And the boat, the Eagle, was at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. At least that was Wilson's theory, now that new top-secret remote sensing techniques had picked up a previously undetected mass in forty feet of water. All she had to do was sneak onto a military base under cover of darkness, dive to a wreck no one had ever seen, and find a lunchbox-sized case hidden by a paranoid lunatic.

  Piece of cake, she thought sarcastically, reaching for the door to her room and opening it with one quick shove.

  “You're back!” her best friend and roommate, Francie Calfo, exclaimed, scrambling up from the papers spread out on her twin bed. She was wearing old sweats and a tank top, her black hair wound into a knot secured by a pencil on top of her head. “Please, please, distract me from all this studying!”

  Sydney smiled, brought back to earth by her friend's urgent plea. “It is Friday,” she offered. “You have the entire weekend to finish whatever you're doing.”

  “That's the stuff,” Francie encouraged, raising her brows. “Give me more.”

  Sydney thought a moment. “I've decided to join a sorority.”

  “Get out!” Francie squealed, rushing forward. “No, wait,” she said, stopping abruptly. “You're just yanking me. Right?”

  “No, I'm totally serious. I mean, I realize I'm not the most sociable person . . . but being in a sorority isn't like hanging out with strangers. You get to know all those girls really well. Don't you think it would be fun?”

  “But—but—” Francie sputtered, too astonished to form a sentence. “You don't like doing stuff like that. I have to drag you to frat parties.”

  “True,” Sydney admitted. “But I'm not joining a fraternity.”

  “It's all the same,” Francie insisted. “I mean, I'm not trying to talk you out of it. But . . . why the sudden change of heart?”

  Sydney played with a strand of her brown hair, searching for a believable answer. “I guess I'm kind of bored,” she said at last. “Of me, I mean. All I ever do is work, and study, and work. This is college, the time of our lives, and I feel like I'm missing it. I don't want to look back and kick myself for the things I could have done. It's time to take drastic action.”

  “Well . . . congratulations,” said Francie. “If you're looking for drastic, you've found it.”

  “You think I'm crazy.”

  “Not crazy. Just . . .” Francie shook her head. Then, finally, she smiled. “You're really serious?”

  “I am.”

  “Okay, then. You'd better mean it, because I'm joining with you.”

  Sydney stifled a groan, knowing she should have expected that. Francie was far more outgoing than she was, striking up conversations with everyone from the cute boy on the next floor to total strangers in the lunch line. She loved parties and was usually first on the dance floor, even if it meant grabbing some random guy for her partner. Francie had never been seen at a social event with her back pressed into a corner and a plastic cup clutched in front of her, Sydney's favorite defensive position. Francie was sorority material all the way.

  “We'll have to research the houses,” Francie announced, sitting down at her desk and hitting the Power button on her laptop. “I mean, I already pretty much know
them, but this is a huge decision. Every sorority has its own personality. We want to find the group that's exactly perfect for us.”

  “I've already picked one.” Shrugging off her backpack, Sydney dropped it on her bed, pretending not to notice Francie's amazed stare.

  “Just like that?” Francie demanded. “Forget about rush, I'm not even logged on yet! You have to at least check out their Web sites!”

  “I'm joining Alpha Kappa Chi.”

  For a moment, Francie was literally shocked into silence. Then she burst out laughing.

  “Sure you are,” she said. “You've decided to quit working at the bank and rob it instead.”

  SD-6 hid its existence by posing as a bank, Credit Dauphine, to outsiders. Francie believed Sydney's part-time job there was as a lowly clerk, but that still didn't explain why she thought Sydney needed to rob her employer.

  “What are you talking about?” Sydney asked, stripping off the button-down shirt she'd worn to work. Her khakis came off next, leaving her talking in her bra and underwear.

  “Those girls are rich! AKX—are you kidding me? The other Greeks call them the Trust Fund Club.”

  “Well, what difference does it make? They're not going to keep me out just because I don't vacation on Saint Bart's.”

  “Don't bet on it,” Francie said darkly, typing away at her computer. Suddenly her face brightened. “Here are some girls we ought to be looking at—Sigma Omega. A couple of them are in my biology class, and they're really nice. They do a lot of community service, too. Remember those bins all over campus for collecting aluminum cans? They use the cash to buy books for a children's shelter.”

  “That is nice,” Sydney conceded, wrapping a bath towel around her middle. “But my mind's already made up.”

  “Just tell me this: Why AKX?”

  “I . . . like their house.”

  She knew how shallow she sounded, but it was the best she could do just then. If the girls were as rich as Francie claimed, it seemed likely they'd have a nice house. She half expected her friend to throw up her hands in disgust, but to her surprise Francie smiled.

  “They do have the best house. And I've heard there's an even more incredible pool behind it.”