by Stuart Gibbs
“Che bella cosa!” Gorsky sang in a voice that made me want to run screaming from the room. “Na jurnata ’e sole . . . Aaugh!” He screamed in surprise as he finally noticed us. The bar of soap shot from his hand, caromed off the wall, and clocked him in the head before falling to the floor. Gorsky lunged for his gun, only to realize it was now pointed at him, then recoiled in shock and promptly slipped on the soap. He gave another scream as his feet went out from under him, and he landed flat on his back with a wet thud on the shower floor.
“Hello, Vladimir,” Catherine said pleasantly. “How long has it been? Two years?”
“Uh . . . ,” Gorsky said, trying to gather his wits, then launched into desperate, mangled Italian. “My name-o es notta Vladimir. Me Benito Cacciatori!”
“Oh for Pete’s sake, Vlad, I’m not an imbecile,” Catherine said. “Now drop the moronic Italian routine and tell me what you’re doing here, or I’ll shoot your toes off.”
Gorsky took a moment to consider his options, then realized he didn’t have any. We had caught him defenseless and naked. “Could I at least have a towel to cover myself?”
Catherine grabbed a washcloth instead and lobbed it over the top of the shower glass. “That should work.”
“Oh come on!” Gorsky cried.
“If you answer my questions honestly, I’ll get you something bigger,” Catherine said. “Believe me, we want to be in this situation even less than you do.”
Gorsky didn’t seem pleased, but he was in little position to argue. He clapped the small towel over his privates like a loincloth and struggled back to his feet. The shower was still going strong, and he kept it on, probably so he could stay warm; if he turned it off, he would have been left soaking wet in the air-conditioned marble bathroom. “I’m not up to anything,” he informed us. “I am merely here on vacation.” Though his voice was inflected with a Russian accent, his English was perfect. Far better than his Italian had been. Despite his embarrassing position, he was handling himself as well as could be expected. I got the sense that he was far smarter and more competent than Paul Lee. Although there were probably hamsters who were smarter and more competent than Paul Lee.
Catherine clicked her tongue in disappointment. “I’m trying to be reasonable here, Vlad, and yet you’re still lying to me. Frankly, it’s quite aggravating. I’m tempted to truss you like a Thanksgiving turkey and go let SPYDER know you’re here. I doubt they’d be nearly as nice to you as I’m being right now.”
Gorsky gulped, his bravado quickly fading. “All right,” he said weakly. “Let’s not do anything rash here.”
“Then start talking,” Catherine told him.
“I have a bone to pick with SPYDER, all right?” Gorsky said. “They stiffed me on a huge deal and tried to kill me—along with that kid.” He pointed to me. “They destroyed my business when they didn’t pay me. Nobody does that to Vladimir Gorsky. So I tracked them down here, and I’m going to get my revenge. On all of them.”
“All of them?” I repeated, before I could help myself. “You mean you know who everyone at SPYDER is?”
Gorsky wiped some steam off the shower glass so he could get a good look at me. “No, I don’t know all of them. I’m not sure anyone does. They’re very secretive at SPYDER. But I’m working on it. Or I was until you guys showed up. I’ll tell you what: You let me go, and I’ll handle them for you. You won’t even have to get your hands dirty.”
Catherine ignored this offer. “Who runs the organization?”
Gorsky shrugged. “Some guy they only refer to as Mister E. I don’t know his real name. I’ve never seen him. All I know is, he’s out on that yacht anchored in the bay.”
“Warren and Ashley went out to the yacht last night,” Erica told her mother. “Guess they were meeting with him. Or at least relaying a message to him from Joshua.”
I flashed back to a night seven months before, when I had been sneaking around SPYDER’s compound in New Jersey. On that night, I had heard Joshua talking to someone high-ranking in the organization, although I hadn’t been able to see them. I had only heard the voice. Was that the mysterious Mister E? I wondered. Had I been that close? Or had it been someone lower in the organization?
Catherine never took her eyes off Gorsky. “Do you have names for any of the other members?”
“Of course I do.” Gorsky sounded offended. “What do you think I’ve been doing down here the last two weeks, playing shuffleboard? I’ve been doing research. Lots of it.”
“So give them to me,” Catherine said.
“I gotta get out of the shower to do that. They’re all written down in a safe place.”
“You don’t remember them all?” Catherine asked.
“I wrote them down so I wouldn’t have to remember them,” Gorsky replied.
“Is all of SPYDER’s top brass here right now?” Erica inquired.
“Not quite,” Gorsky asked. “But most of the leadership is on that yacht. There’s not that many of them. They run a very tight operation. You guys mind if I get out of the shower? I’m getting waterlogged in here.”
“Answer a few more questions first,” Catherine said.
“Aw, come on,” Gorsky pleaded. “I’m pruning up in here. Look at this!” He held up a hand to show that, indeed, his fingertips were puckered like raisins.
Catherine ignored this. “What did you sell to SPYDER?”
“Girl Scout cookies,” Gorsky said defiantly. “They’re suckers for the Thin Mints.”
“You’re very funny,” Catherine said. “I think I’ll call SPYDER now and have them come down to this villa so that they can have a good laugh with you.” She reached for the house phone by the toilet.
“Wait!” Gorsky cried, then sagged defeatedly. “I sold them planes.”
“Planes?” I asked. “Not weapons?”
“No. Although they were military planes. Russian army surplus. Antonov An-124 Ruslans.”
“How many?” Erica asked.
“Only two. Which ought to be plenty for anyone. Each one of those things is big enough to move a herd of elephants.”
I was suddenly struck by a very bad feeling. I had dealt with SPYDER enough times to begin to understand how they worked—and what they might be up to. “How far can those planes fly?” I asked.
“A couple thousand miles, easy,” Gorsky replied.
I sat on the toilet, feeling queasy. My breakfast was threatening to make a return trip through my digestive system.
“I know that nauseated look,” Erica said. “You know what SPYDER’s up to, don’t you?”
“I might know,” I corrected. “It’s only a guess.”
A tense moment passed.
“Don’t just sit there, building the suspense,” Erica snapped. “Tell us what it is!”
I said, “SPYDER just shipped a huge amount of weaponry down to the tip of South America along with two planes big enough to haul it all wherever they want. Now, Ushuaia is pretty far removed from most of the rest of earth . . . except for one place. It’s the jumping-off point for most tours to Antarctica.”
Catherine, Erica, and Gorsky all stared at me, considering this. Catherine spoke first. “Benjamin, are you suggesting that SPYDER is going to nuke Antarctica?”
“Worse. I think they’re going to melt it.”
“They couldn’t . . . ,” Erica said. “Even with all the nukes in the world . . .”
“But they could get the process started,” I said. “There are ice sheets the size of entire countries around the edges of Antarctica. If just one of those slides into the sea, that alone would be enough to raise ocean levels worldwide by a few inches. If a few of them go at once, we’re talking several feet of ocean rise. Any city located on the water anywhere in the world would be drowned. Last September, SPYDER was looking to get rich by destroying the infrastructure of New York City and then getting paid to rebuild it. Well, this wouldn’t just hit New York. It’d hit Miami, Rio, San Francisco . . .”
“Beijing,
” Catherine said. “Djakarta, Mumbai . . .”
“Cairo,” Erica continued. “Tokyo, Amsterdam . . .”
“The Bahamas!” Gorsky gasped. “Oh no! I just bought a house right on the water there! It will be ruined!”
“Serves you right for working with SPYDER,” Erica snarled.
I looked to Catherine. “Joshua had one of those fancy detonators from MegaCorp in the penthouse. You said it could trigger explosives anywhere on earth. If they used the planes from Gorsky to drop all the nukes somewhere on Antarctica, then detonated them, they’d cause an insane amount of chaos and mayhem.”
“The last shipment of those nukes arrived in Ushuaia this morning,” Erica reminded us. “It would only take a few hours for SPYDER to fly them to Antarctica, and then they’d be good to go.”
“Meaning we don’t have much time to stop them,” Catherine concluded. She grabbed a full-size towel and tossed it over the glass to Gorsky. “Dry yourself off and get dressed. If you want to save your vacation home—or any place on earth, really—then we’re going to need your help. No more dilly-dallying. It’s time to get your revenge on SPYDER.”
Gorsky turned off the water and gratefully wrapped the towel around himself.
Catherine turned to Erica and me. “I’ll stay here with him and work out a plan. Go get the others and bring them back here.”
“The others?” Erica asked. “They’ll only slow us down. And so will this guy. We can handle this by ourselves.”
“No we can’t,” Catherine told her. “Sweetheart, you have a lot of wonderful qualities, but humility isn’t one of them. Other people are not always liabilities. More often than not, they can be assets, and right now we need every asset we can find.” Erica started to protest, but Catherine cut her off. “That’s my word and it’s final. I’m your superior officer on this mission, and more importantly, I’m your mother. I’ve given you an order. I expect you to follow it.”
This was as sternly as I had ever heard Catherine speak. Given Erica’s reaction, this might have been the case for her as well. She immediately backed down. “All right, Mom,” she said, and then ducked out of the bathroom.
I followed her. In the living room, Gorsky’s thug was waking and discovering he was bound like a rodeo calf. He shouted something angry in Russian at both of us, but we didn’t stop. We raced right out the door, heading back to our villa—and nearly ran right into Emma Mathes and a small herd of Farkles. Today, they were all wearing matching neon-pink Farkle Family Fiesta T-shirts.
“Hey!” Emma shouted at me. “I need to talk to you!”
“Now’s not the best time.” I sidestepped her and ran down the path from the villa.
“I know you’re not Farkles!” Emma shouted after us. “And I know who your friend really is: Mike Brezinski!”
I stopped in my tracks, concerned. So did Erica. I looked back at Emma and signaled her to keep her voice down.
She ignored this and beamed proudly. “That’s right. He’s the boyfriend of the president’s daughter. Or the ex-boyfriend now. There was a whole story about him on CNN this morning, with photos and everything, about how he’s disappeared and hasn’t been returning Jemma’s calls and now she’s all heartbroken and stuff. And I realized it’s the same guy I met last night, not just some guy who looks a whole lot like him. And he hasn’t gone missing. He’s just come down to Mexico for spring break and didn’t even have the decency to tell his girlfriend about it!”
“Listen,” I said in a hushed voice. “You have to keep quiet about this. It’s very important. You can’t tweet it or post it or even tell anyone he’s here.”
A look of concern crossed Emma’s face. “Even your friends?”
The nausea I had felt since figuring out what SPYDER was planning suddenly grew much worse. “Which friends?”
“Well,” Emma said, “I was at the breakfast buffet when I saw the news this morning. So I started telling all my cousins that Mike Brezinski had crashed our reunion the night before, posing as a Farkle. And then these two friends of yours came up and said they’d been looking all over for him.”
“What did they look like?” Erica asked, sounding worried too.
“The girl was short and had sparkles in her hair. And the guy . . . he uh . . .” Emma frowned. “Hmmm. I can’t really remember anything about him at all. He kind of blended into the background.”
“What did you tell them?” Erica demanded.
“That you guys were all staying somewhere at the resort.” Emma now looked worried herself, feeding off the concern she sensed from us. “That was okay, wasn’t it? I mean, they said they were good friends of all yours.”
Rather than waste any more time, Erica simply turned and ran back toward our villa. I dropped in behind her.
“Hey!” Emma shouted after us. “If Mike’s really not interested in the president’s daughter anymore, tell him I’ll be on the beach volleyball courts this afternoon!”
“Even if she did tell Ashley and Warren we were here,” I said to Erica hopefully, “that doesn’t mean SPYDER could find us. There are thousands of rooms here.”
“But I booked ours with Edna Farkle’s credit card,” Erica said. “Last night. If Zoe could hack the resort computer, so could SPYDER. And if they knew we had crashed the reunion, they’d only have to check the rooms booked to Farkles. . . .”
We rounded a copse of coconut trees and caught sight of our villa up ahead. It only took one glance for my worst fears to be confirmed:
SPYDER had found my friends. Dane Brammage was dragging Mike and Zoe out the front door. He had survived the fall into the shark tank. His arms and legs were covered with bite marks, but that hadn’t slowed him down; he was still as imposing as ever. He was holding Mike and Zoe by the scruffs of their necks, moving them about as easily as rag dolls. Mike and Zoe were both doing their best to fight back, but they were no match for the behemoth.
Behind them, two of SPYDER’s other thugs followed. One had Murray, while the other had Paul Lee. Paul Lee was blubbering in terror while Murray was trying to cut a deal.
“There’s no need to be so rough,” he was saying. “I’m on your side—and I have been all along. I was only pretending to be a prisoner here to find out what the CIA was up to. . . .”
The thugs saw us the moment we saw them. Erica and I dove into the landscaping. Erica had her gun out before we even hit the ground.
But instead of shooting at us, the thugs simply backed through the door of our villa, dragging their captives with them. Dane slipped out of the line of fire, but left Zoe standing in the doorway, his massive hand clenched around her neck. “Drop your weapons and give yourselves up!” he yelled to us in his odd, singsong Dutch accent. “I’ll give you to the count of three, and then I’ll snap her neck!”
Zoe tried her best to put on a brave face, but she was obviously terrified. She knew Dane wasn’t bluffing.
I looked to Erica, worried. She was crouched in the plants, gun in hand, looking for a shot at Dane Brammage that didn’t exist.
“One!” Dane shouted.
Erica frowned in frustration. I knew what was going through her mind, because I knew Erica all too well. If we gave ourselves up, we were done for. SPYDER would win. The only way we could survive to beat them was to sacrifice our friends. And Erica had told me, over and over again, that she had no place for friends in her life. They could only be liabilities.
Like they were right now.
“Two!” Dane shouted.
If we wanted to prevent SPYDER from melting Antarctica and causing worldwide chaos, we needed to abandon our friends, run away, and regroup. Even I knew that. As much as I hated to admit it, this was a situation where Erica was right and I was wrong. Our friends would die, but if we didn’t defeat SPYDER, thousands of other people—if not millions—would suffer too.
“Three!” Dane shouted. “Time’s up! You asked for this!”
Zoe screamed in pain as he squeezed her neck.
“Stop!”
Erica shouted. “We give up!” To my astonishment, she leapt from the cover of the landscaping out into the open, holding her hands—and her gun—high above her head.
Dane must have lessened his grip on Zoe’s neck, because she stopped screaming. She was now looking at Erica with astonishment, as stunned as I was that she was sacrificing herself.
“Both of you need to give yourselves up!” Dane yelled from the villa. “That means you, Benjamin! And drop your weapons!”
I emerged from the landscaping into the open beside Erica, who let her gun clatter to the ground.
“All your weapons!” shouted Dane.
Erica sighed, withdrew the knives she had sheathed under her belt, and dropped them to the ground too.
“Very good!” Dane yelled. “Now approach the villa very slowly with your hands up. And don’t try anything funny—or your friends will die.”
Erica did exactly as he ordered. I did too. We started down the pathway toward our villa with our hands raised high.
Ahead of us, Zoe’s face was a jumble of emotions. Relief that she wasn’t dead. Concern that she’d allowed herself—and now us—to be captured. And a good amount of shame, given that Erica had done exactly what Zoe had said she would never do: sacrifice herself for her friends.
“Thanks,” I said to Erica.
She didn’t answer me. Instead, she muttered under her breath, “Stupid conscience. I hate it.”
Then the two other thugs emerged from our villa and took us captive.
19
DETONATION
Penthouse Suite
Aquarius Resort
March 30
0900 hours
“Benjamin Ripley,” Joshua Hallal said. “And Erica Hale. It’s such a pleasure to see both of you again.”
We were all on the penthouse patio. Joshua was having a late breakfast: a platter of fruit and cottage cheese. He held a green-colored smoothie in his metallic hand, which glinted in the morning sun.
“I’m not being sarcastic when I say that, mind you,” Joshua continued. “I really am excited to see you both. Because you caused me quite a bit of trouble here this morning. You thwarted a perfectly good murder—and you got hotel management upset with me as well. I had to spread a lot of pesos around to get them to stop asking questions and keep the police away. Like the thousands I’m laying out weekly for this place isn’t enough. But now, here you are again. Only, this time, you’re my prisoners. And rest assured, I am going to make you pay not just for this morning’s trouble—but for all the trouble you two have caused my organization.” He grinned cruelly as he said this, his one good eye alive with excitement.
