by Stuart Gibbs
The cramped architecture now worked to our advantage. No hallway ran straight for more than a few yards, preventing Joshua from taking another long-distance shot at us.
Still, it felt as though we had covered a half mile inside the house. I was getting a major cramp in my side, but I worked through it.
“Now, then,” Catherine went on. “Let’s discuss what we saw on that flash drive. I noticed a long list of names.”
“That’s what I saw too!” Zoe agreed. “With dates and dollar amounts beside them.”
Mike said, “It looked like a list of spies they’ve paid off to be double agents. The cash values were probably the amounts SPYDER gave them, and the dates were when they were bought.”
“That’s what I figured as well,” Catherine agreed. “Did anyone memorize any names?”
“Warren was on that list,” I said, struggling to catch my breath as we ran. “They only paid him two hundred and fifty dollars.”
“That’s it?” Zoe asked, stunned. “He turned to the dark side for less than the price of a video game system?”
“Warren was never the sharpest tool in the shed,” Erica said. “But I’d guess his anger about you was his primary reason for joining SPYDER. He probably would have done it for free, so the money was a bonus.”
She was giving no sign that she’d been blinded. If it were me, I would have been freaking out, but she was acting perfectly normally. Or at least, as perfectly normally as someone could act while being chased through a palace by a bionic ex-boyfriend who had turned evil and was now trying to kill her.
“Any other names?” Catherine asked. “Ones we didn’t know were evil already?”
“Harlan Kelly,” Erica reported. “And Lydia Greenwald-Smith.”
“Our professors?” Zoe exclaimed. “I loved Dr. Greenwald-Smith’s class.”
“Not me,” Mike said. “I suspected she was evil. She gave me a D on my counterespionage exam last week.”
The rooms were growing even smaller and more cramped the farther we got from the grand entry foyer, as though we were now where the lowest-ranked servants would be. I figured we had to be running out of house.
Catherine looked to Alexander. “How about you? Did you notice any names?”
“Er…no,” Alexander said weakly.
“Not a single one?” Catherine sounded extremely disappointed.
“I was distracted,” Alexander replied, then thought to add, “by something very important to the mission.”
“What?” Catherine challenged.
“A…uh…well… ,” Alexander stammered. “I sensed the enemy was coming.”
“Then why didn’t you give us a heads-up so that we’d have more time to save our lives?” Catherine demanded.
“Oh, all right, it wasn’t the enemy,” Alexander admitted. “It was a duck.”
Catherine lost her temper. “We’ve been risking our lives to get this information, and at the only moment we got to see it, you were distracted by a duck?”
“In my defense, it was an emerald-crested Welsh Harlequin,” Alexander said. “They’re very rare.”
“I put my neck out to bring you on this mission!” Catherine exclaimed. Despite all the adventures we’d had, this was the first time I had ever heard her lose her cool. “I knew it was risky, but I figured you couldn’t be totally useless! And yet you haven’t done us one whit of good the entire time. I told everyone to pay attention to the screen when that information came up! That shouldn’t have been too difficult! Look forward, read some words, try to remember a few of them. And you couldn’t even manage that! Because some jade-faced waterfowl wandered across your path!”
“It was an emerald-crested Welsh Harlequin… ,” Alexander corrected.
“I don’t care if it was a pink elephant wearing a baboon for a hat!” Catherine exploded. “All I needed you to do was focus for five seconds, and you couldn’t even do that!”
I grimaced, feeling terrible for Alexander—but also feeling miserable about my own lack of contributions again. Yes, I had noticed Warren’s name on the list of double agents, but that wasn’t exactly news. I had also noticed Mr. E’s listing with a few numbers next to his name, but I had no idea what they meant, or if they were even remotely important. Which meant that my own contributions to the mission were barely better than Alexander’s.
Everyone’s general sense of fear and exhaustion was now mixed with a bit of awkwardness as well; it was uncomfortable to listen to Erica’s parents bicker. And that started to segue into panic as we all noticed the rear of the palace coming up ahead. At the end of the hall, there was a door with a window, and out the window, there was nothing but acres of open lawn.
“Speaking of ducks,” Mike said, “we’re about to become sitting ones.”
“Maybe not,” Orion said, without as much confidence as I would have hoped. He made a sudden turn to the left, shoving through a door that didn’t look like any of the others in the hallway.
Instead of leading into a servant’s room, this one led into a small antechamber, which led to a set of doors that appeared to have been put in the exterior wall relatively recently. Orion pushed through those…
And we found ourselves inside the large warehouse structure I had noticed while casing the property before. Once inside, I discovered it was much larger than I had thought. Wickham Palace was so large that the warehouse had looked smaller next to it. But in reality it was the size of an aircraft hangar.
Because it was an aircraft hangar.
The floor was a vast expanse of concrete. The ceiling was retractable. And right in the middle of the hangar sat a military helicopter.
It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.
Not because it was literally beautiful. It was actually quite homely, squat and blocky and painted a bilious green. But it would allow us to escape, assuming we could get it going before Joshua and his team arrived.
“What is it?” Erica whispered to me, blinking blindly into the hangar.
“A helicopter,” I whispered back.
Erica heaved a sigh of relief, then handed me the busted shaft of pool cue she’d been carrying. “Barricade the doors.”
“Right.” I quickly jammed the cue through the handles, then threw the dead bolt too.
“That’s a Russian Yukutsk 260!” Catherine exclaimed excitedly. “Orion! What on earth are you doing with it?”
“I’m twenty-six and I have more money than I know what to do with,” Orion explained. “I also own a private submarine, a minor league baseball team, and forty percent of Madagascar.” He yanked on a chain by the door. It set a series of cogs in motion, which started the ceiling retracting.
Something slammed into the opposite side of the door, followed by the distinct sound of Warren Reeves yelping in pain. The doors, with the dead bolt and the pool cue jammed through the handles, held fast.
“Joshua!” Ashley shouted from the other side. “Come this way! I think they’re through here!”
Catherine threw open the doors of the helicopter, her anger at Alexander totally forgotten. Inside, the craft wasn’t cushy—it had been built for military transport—but there was plenty of room for all of us on jump seats lining the walls. “It’s gorgeous, Orion! How long have you been flying?”
“Um… ,” Orion said. “I was kind of hoping one of you knew how to fly it.”
Catherine spun around, her mood instantly shifting once again. “You have a helicopter you don’t know how to fly?”
“I’ve been meaning to take lessons,” Orion said. “But I kind of got distracted.”
Erica looked to Catherine as I helped her into the helicopter. Or, still being temporarily blinded, she looked in the general direction she thought her mother was, which wasn’t quite accurate. She directed her attention to an empty jump seat. “You don’t know how to fly this, Mom?”
“No!” Catherine was too distraught to notice Erica’s lack of sight. “A British helicopter, I can fly. But Russian
ones are completely different. Can you fly one?”
“How would I know how to fly a helicopter?” Erica asked. “I’m only a teenager!”
“I thought Cyrus might have taught you! You know how to drive a double-decker bus and—” Catherine was cut off by a loud whirr as the helicopter rotors suddenly started spinning.
To our surprise, Alexander Hale was sitting in the pilot’s seat—and for once he appeared to know what he was doing. His hands moved rapidly across the control panels, flipping on switches. Monitors sprang to life on the dashboard. Alexander snapped a headset over his ears to cut out the sound. “Everyone, buckle up right away,” he said, sounding like the confident charlatan he’d been when I had first met him. “We’re going to have to take off very fast.”
Everyone scrambled for the jump seats, except Catherine, who slid into the copilot’s seat, and Erica, who stayed rooted fast to her spot behind the cockpit, resisting my attempts to drag her away. “You know how to fly this?” she asked, stunned.
“Of course I do,” Alexander said. “I’ve told you that.”
“You’ve told me lots of things,” Erica said. “Like how you prevented the French from invading Turkey and how you thwarted an evil plot to turn all the gold in the world into soup. I figured this was a lie like all the rest.”
“It wasn’t.” Alexander flipped a few last switches. “I learned while on a covert operation in Siberia—but it was quite some time ago and I’m probably a bit rusty, so please go strap in right now, young lady. That’s an order.”
“You heard your father,” Catherine said. “Do it.”
Erica stared in surprise at her parents—or at least at the point where she thought her parents were—but then allowed me to lead her to the body of the helicopter.
Catherine was looking at Alexander with newfound respect. Though maybe it was old respect that she had just rediscovered. I could imagine her looking at him that way when they were much younger and had just met and she hadn’t realized what a sham Alexander was.
Everyone else was strapped into their seats. Orion didn’t seem quite as bummed about leaving his palace to a horde of criminals as one might have expected. Instead, he was brimming with excitement, thrilled to have an adventure—and to finally get to use his helicopter—after a long period of loneliness.
Erica and I strapped in as well.
Across the hangar, the doors to the palace smashed off their hinges as Dane Brammage bulldozed through them.
Ashley, Warren, and Joshua raced through the gap behind him. Joshua aimed his bionic hand at the helicopter.
Alexander yanked back on the stick just as Joshua fired. The helicopter shot upward. The explosive raced beneath us and blew out the opposite wall of the hangar.
The other thugs poured into the hangar as well. Together with Dane, they opened fire on us, but we were already rising through the retracted roof. The bullets rattled off the armored hull of the helicopter but didn’t punch through.
Alexander took us straight up as fast as he could before steadying the helicopter out of range of the bullets. For a moment we hovered above the property, high enough to see the grounds laid out like toys beneath us, and then we raced off across the countryside.
A sense of relief fell over everyone, though it was slightly tempered by the feeling that we had failed in our mission to recover the information on the flash drive.
Beneath us, the Cotswolds were a carpet of green fields and forests, speckled with the white puffs of a staggering number of sheep.
“Where are we heading now?” Alexander asked.
Everyone looked to one another blankly, unsure what the answer to that question was.
Except me.
I had a sudden, wonderful surge of insight into what I had seen on Orion’s computer, followed by the even more wonderful feeling that I had just become useful to the mission as well.
“Paris,” I said.
12 INVASION
10,000 feet above the Cotswolds
April 1
1000 hours
“There were three things written next to Mr. E’s name,” I explained. “+48.851764, +2.354130, and UnicornsRule!!! The first two are extremely specific points of latitude and longitude.”
“What’s the third?” Mike asked.
“I don’t have the slightest idea,” I admitted. “To be honest, it threw me off for a bit, because I was figuring all three items were a set. But they’re not. The first two are a location. The plus signs indicate north and east, while minus signs would have meant south and west.”
“Makes sense,” Erica said excitedly. “What would the single most important piece of information be about Mr. E? What secret would SPYDER desperately want to protect more than any other?”
“Where to find him,” Zoe said.
“Exactly,” Erica agreed.
“I can’t say where the exact spot is that those coordinates pinpoint,” I went on. “But I know forty-eight latitude north and two longitude east is Paris.”
“You know the latitude and longitude of every city?” Zoe asked, surprised.
“Not every one,” I said.
“Almost every one,” Mike put in. “He memorized them all when we were in elementary school. One of his crazy math things he came up with. Watch this. Ben, what’s Sydney, Australia?”
“Thirty-three degrees south, one hundred fifty degrees west,” I said before I could stop myself.
“See?” Mike asked. “And he thinks liking fonts is dorky.” He was teasing as he spoke, though, indicating he was proud of me.
“And you’re sure you memorized those coordinates perfectly?” Orion asked.
“Ben never forgets a number,” Erica told him, then looked at me. “Cairo, Egypt.”
“Thirty north. Thirty-one east,” I said.
“Sounds like we’re going to Paris,” Alexander said. He tapped the coordinates onto a touch-screen monitor, got directions, then veered that way.
“How far away is it?” Mike asked.
Alexander consulted one of the screens in the cockpit. “About two hundred and thirty miles. We ought to be there in around two hours.”
“Hold on,” Zoe said. “Are we really sure going after the head of SPYDER is the best thing to do right now?”
“Absolutely,” Catherine answered.
“Really?” Zoe pressed. “Because it’s going to be awfully dangerous. We saw a few names of corrupt teachers at spy school. Why don’t we just start with reporting them to the CIA?”
“To whom at the CIA?” Catherine asked in return. “That list was much longer than the few names we saw. There were dozens of corrupt agents on it, if not hundreds. For all we know, one of them might be the very agent in charge of rooting out corruption. Or perhaps the head of the CIA himself. All we have learned so far is that we can’t trust anyone in the CIA—and quite likely any other spy agency as well—except those of us in this helicopter. Now that Joshua’s flash drive has been destroyed, the only way to retrieve the list of double agents and root out this corruption once and for all is to get it from SPYDER. And the only lead to SPYDER we have is those coordinates. Therefore, I see no other options for us except infiltrating Mr. E’s compound.”
“Oh,” Zoe said. “I see.” She sank a bit in her seat, looking as nervous as I felt.
“Maybe it won’t be that dangerous,” Mike said. “Maybe Mr. E will be so confident that he can’t be found that he won’t have that much security.”
Catherine said, “While that would be a nice surprise, I think it’s best if we keep our guard up and assume this won’t be a walk in the park. So far, SPYDER has never done what we’ve expected.”
“I’m just saying it’s possible,” Mike said, settling back into his seat.
I turned my attention to Erica. She was sitting next to me, her eyes closed, looking amazingly serene for someone who had just nearly died several times over and had been temporarily blinded in the process.
“How are your eyes?” I whispered to
her.
“Not great,” she admitted. “But they’re improving slightly. I’m starting to pick up some light in my peripheral vision. If I rest them for the flight, they ought to be fine. Thanks for helping me through that, by the way.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And that was nice work, picking up on those coordinates,” she said softly. “See? You’re not totally useless.”
I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw the slightest flicker of a smile play across Erica’s lips, as though this last comment had been more of a tease than a flat statement. Which made me smile back. “Thanks.”
“You ought to get some rest too. We’re going to need to hit the ground running in Paris.”
“Right,” I agreed, and noticed that I was nodding off even as I said it. Alhough it was still morning, it had been a crazy day. The adrenaline that had been surging through me had now drained, leaving me feeling exhausted, and the rumbling of the helicopter was having a strangely soothing effect on me, lulling me to sleep. In their seats on the opposite side of the chopper, Mike and Zoe appeared to be nodding off as well, though Zoe managed one brief, surprisingly angry stare at me before conking out.
The next thing I knew, it was ninety minutes later.
“Rise and shine,” Catherine said pleasantly, gently shaking me awake. She sounded so calm and peaceful that for a moment I felt as though I were back home, being roused by my mother late on a Sunday morning. It was upsetting to realize that I was in a helicopter, infiltrating French airspace on my way to a dangerous confrontation with the head of an evil enemy organization—although things got even more upsetting two seconds later, when Catherine handed me a parachute and said, “Put this on.”
“We’re parachuting into Paris?” I asked, stunned.
“Well, we can’t possibly land there,” Catherine said matter-of-factly. “We’re all fugitives from justice, and we’re not entering the country through legal channels. The moment we set down, the French police would be all over us. Plus, there’s a severe lack of decent heliports in the city.”
