by Stuart Gibbs
Luckily, the traffic had lessened considerably since that afternoon. Campus wasn’t too far from the White House and Cyrus was driving like a maniac, so hopefully, the ride itself wouldn’t be that long.
“You didn’t warn me that Jason was the world’s biggest jerk,” I said.
“What was I supposed to do, say right in front of the president of the United States that his son’s a scumbag? Part of your training is to be ready for anything. If you can’t handle some thirteen-year-old punk, how can you be expected to handle a high-stakes criminal organization like SPYDER?”
“I have handled SPYDER,” I reminded him. “Plenty of times. The people who work there might be evil, but they were still generally nicer to me than Jason Stern was.”
“SPYDER tried to kill you,” Cyrus pointed out.
“Yes, but that was business. Jason was mean for no good reason. He actually said that anyone who killed his father would be doing him a favor.”
Cyrus’s eyebrows rose slightly. When he spoke again, he sounded intrigued, rather than irascible. “He did? To a total stranger? You think it’s possible he’s SPYDER’s man inside?”
“Jason?” I asked, incredulous. “He’s only a kid.”
“You’re only a kid. And you’ve met other folks your age working for SPYDER.”
“Yeah, but that was different.”
“How? You said yourself this kid was a class-A scumball.”
“I still can’t imagine him plotting to assassinate his own father. In fact, I can’t imagine any kid wanting to do something like that.”
“Just because you get along with your father doesn’t mean everyone does. Believe me, there are plenty of people out there who’d be more than happy to bump off their daddies.”
Like your son? I thought, although I didn’t say it out loud. I wondered if Cyrus was thinking it himself. His relationship with Alexander was among the worst I’d ever encountered. I didn’t really think Alexander would ever be reduced to patricide, but he certainly had some serious issues with his father.
Cyrus wove around a few cars and shot through a traffic light a good three seconds after it had turned red.
“There were plenty of other possible suspects at the White House,” I said.
“Like who?”
“There was this businessman who seemed pretty suspicious of me.” I brought up the picture I’d taken of the shifty man on my phone, then handed it to Cyrus.
He took a quick glance, then said, “Forward it to Erica; see what she can dig up. Anyone else?”
“A couple aides to a French diplomat looked kind of squirrelly.” I flashed Cyrus their pictures as well.
“Send them to Erica too,” he said.
I wondered if I should mention that Erica had been lurking outside the White House that afternoon, then decided against it. If Cyrus had asked Erica to be there, then this wouldn’t be news to him. But if Erica had decided to come down and check on me without his permission, Cyrus would probably be livid at her.
Instead, I said, “Then again, maybe these are the people we should be the least concerned about.”
“How’s that?” Cyrus asked.
“Well, these guys were kind of nervous and awkward, but that’s natural, isn’t it? They’re going into the White House. That’s a big deal. But if SPYDER really has someone on the inside, they’d probably be trained to not look nervous and awkward. I mean, there were hundreds of people there today, and these were the ones whose behavior caught my attention.”
Cyrus met my eyes, which was a bit disturbing given that he was driving at fifty miles an hour. He probably should have been watching the road. “So you think the people we should really be suspicious about are all the people who weren’t acting nervous?”
“Right.”
“Even though there were hundreds of them?”
“Yes. I realize it sounds kind of crazy, but you know SPYDER. What makes more sense to you: that they’d send in someone who looked nervous and shifty to kill the president—or that they’d co-opt someone on the inside to handle the job? Someone who’d look cool and confident and not stand out at all?”
Cyrus drummed his fingers on the steering wheel thoughtfully while he careened through an intersection. “So, after all your undercover work today, your deduction is basically that anyone in the White House could be the mole.”
“Er . . . yes.”
“You do realize that the whole point of sending you on this mission was to narrow the list of possible suspects down? It makes my job a lot easier if I only have to investigate one or two people, rather than every single person who set foot in the White House today.”
I sighed, feeling extremely ineffectual. “I understand.”
“There isn’t a single person you feel confident you can rule out?” Cyrus asked.
“Not really.”
“The Secret Service agents, for example? Given that the whole point of their job is to protect the president?”
“Actually, they seem like they’d be the perfect targets for SPYDER to turn into assassins. They can go anywhere they want on the property and they’re allowed to carry weapons.”
“How about that nice young gal who brought you to the car? You think she’s possibly a sleeper agent?”
“Kimmy?” I considered her. She was so sweet, she’d probably scoot a cockroach out the door instead of stepping on it. But then, Ashley Sparks had seemed awfully sweet as well, and she’d been a full-bore SPYDER agent. “It’s possible. Acting like the nicest person in the White House would be an awfully good way to deflect suspicion.”
“How about the landscaping staff?” Cyrus asked, annoyed. “Or the chefs? Or the florists? You think every single one of them could be a potential assassin?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Them, and every staffer and every aide and every single person who works for the president. If SPYDER could corrupt enough people inside the CIA that even you don’t trust your own agency, what’s to say they couldn’t corrupt one person who works inside the White House? Or more than one? Maybe they’ve corrupted five or six people. Or twenty. So if we actually catch one or two of them, the others are free to go on with the job.”
Cyrus muttered under his breath. He seemed even more annoyed now than he had when he’d picked me up. Only, he didn’t seem annoyed at me so much as at the entire situation.
We arrived at Dupont Circle. Instead of being chock-full of cars as it had been earlier that day, now it was merely moderately crowded. This didn’t slow Cyrus down at all, however. He appeared to be venting his frustration through aggressive driving. Despite the presence of other vehicles, he sped around the circle so fast that the centrifugal force threw me against the door of the car.
I was beginning to think that it might have been safer to stay back at the White House surrounded by potential assassins.
Cyrus veered from Dupont onto one of the northbound roads, forcing other cars to slam on the brakes to avoid him. I heard the soft crunch of two minor accidents behind us.
“All right,” Cyrus said finally. “You have a point. Any one of those people in the White House could be a potential killer. Which means your job just got a whole lot harder. And to make matters worse, our timetable has shrunk.”
“What do you mean?”
“The chatter I’ve been monitoring increased this afternoon. SPYDER is looking to hit the president soon.”
“How soon?”
“I don’t know. But I’d say sometime in the next few days.” Cyrus zoomed through a stop sign, prompting a bicyclist to shout a lot of very bad words at us.
I swallowed hard, daunted by the thought of this. “So, I have almost no time to vet hundreds of people and figure out which of them might be potential assassins? Without drawing any attention to myself?”
“No one ever said the spy game was easy.”
“Which means I’m going back for another visit with Jason.”
“After school tomorrow. And you’re gonna keep going back every day u
ntil you get to the bottom of this.”
“But Jason made it awfully clear he didn’t want me there.”
“Then figure out how to make it work. And figure it out fast. Because if you don’t . . . the president is going to die. And it will all be on your hands.” Cyrus roared through an intersection. A car swerved to miss us and ended up in someone’s front yard.
I slumped in my seat, feeling overwhelmed by my mission and wondering if I really had what it took to succeed.
We raced onward into the night.
PHYSICAL EDUCATION
Obstacle Course
CIA Academy of Espionage
February 11
0900 hours
I didn’t hear back from Erica about the photos I’d sent her until the next morning. That was unusual. Erica wasn’t a big fan of human contact, but when she had a mission, she never wasted any time following a lead. In fact, there had been several occasions when she had felt it was perfectly reasonable to wake me in the middle of the night to discuss something, rather than wait until the morning. However, there had been only silence from her until she caught up to me on the school obstacle course during PE.
At my old, normal middle school, physical education had generally meant running laps around the school track. At spy school, we ran a gauntlet of potentially harmful obstacles, pitfalls, and booby traps that our sadistic trainer, Coach Macauley, regularly altered for maximum torment. The administration claimed this was to prepare us physically and mentally for the strenuous and unpredictable demands of being a field agent, but I was quite sure that, in reality, the administrators simply enjoyed watching us get pummeled. Quite often, I caught glimpses of our professors laughing at us from the sidelines.
To make matters worse, PE was always the first class of the day, when it was freezing outside. This was a major concern, as a large number of the obstacles on the course involved mud. Crawling through mud at two in the afternoon on a sunny day was bad enough; doing it at nine a.m. in the winter was repugnant.
All classes had PE at once, although Coach staggered our starting times for the obstacle course so that no one got trampled—and so he had plenty of time to enjoy each student’s humiliation. When Erica found me, I was scrabbling through one of the course’s many mud wallows on my hands and knees with Zoe and Warren. The mud was the consistency of slightly melted ice cream, which allowed it to ooze into our clothing and refrigerate our various body parts. Our dull gray academy tracksuits were now stained brown—as were our faces. As if this weren’t bad enough, Coach had rigged a devious set of sensors only two feet above the pit; anyone who raised their head too high and tripped one would be immediately blasted with a paintball gun. The entire experience was awful—and I wasn’t the only one who thought so.
“Honestly, what is the point of this?” Zoe was griping. “The CIA does most of its work in cities. I don’t know of a whole lot of cities with mud pits in the middle of them.”
“There’s a pretty big mud pit in the middle of downtown Mogadishu,” Warren pointed out. He was so covered with mud that he was camouflaging himself without even trying. I could barely see him except for the whites of his eyes.
“Maybe so,” Zoe said, “but the Mogadishans still don’t crawl through it. They go around it. We ought to be learning useful stuff, like how to do car chases on city streets and have knife fights on the tops of speeding trains, not this garbage.”
“No CIA agent has had a knife fight atop a moving train since Kennedy was president,” Erica said, catching us all by surprise. As usual, we hadn’t even known she was near us. She was simply there beside us in the mud, as though she’d spontaneously popped into existence. “And it wasn’t even a speeding train. It was only a freight hauler moving at five miles an hour.”
Zoe, Warren, and I turned to Erica, stunned by her sudden appearance—and by the fact that she was engaging in normal conversation.
“I need to talk to you,” she told me.
“Now?” I asked. “Here?”
“National security is at stake,” she said.
“It was at stake this morning, when I was having waffles in the cafeteria,” I pointed out. “We couldn’t have discussed this then?”
Erica didn’t answer me. Instead, she turned to Zoe and Warren and said, “This is a sensitive issue. Could you two give us some space?”
Zoe and Warren didn’t look pleased to be cut out of the conversation, but they understood Erica’s reasons and obediently squelched toward the far side of the mud pit to let us talk in peace.
Erica and I continued wallowing through the muck. Erica lowered her voice to a whisper and said, “I looked at those photos you sent me last night. The sketchy businessman you were suspicious of? He’s Vladimir Gorsky.”
I hesitated before responding. I had no idea who Vladimir Gorsky was but was worried that Erica would judge me harshly for this gap in my knowledge.
Unfortunately, Erica knew exactly why I’d hesitated. And then she judged me harshly for the gap in my knowledge. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Vladimir Gorsky.”
“I haven’t,” I admitted.
Erica sighed disdainfully, like I’d just told her I didn’t know the capital of America. “Really? Because he’s only one of the world’s most powerful men.”
“Oh!” I said, trying to cover. “Vladimir Gorsky! Of course I know who he is. I thought you said Vladimir Borsky. . . .”
“Stop trying to cover,” Erica told me.
“Okay.” I grimaced, not merely because of Erica’s curt tone, but also because frigid mud had just seeped through my sweatpants and into my underwear.
“Gorsky is a Russian arms dealer,” Erica explained. “He’s made billions funneling weapons to pretty much every war waging in the world right now, often to both sides at the same time.”
“And he’s meeting with the president?” I asked, incredulous.
“First of all, his being at the White House doesn’t mean he’s meeting with the president. A thousand other people work in the West Wing and the EEOB. Second, just because he’s an arms dealer doesn’t make him a criminal. No one has ever been able to prove that he’s done anything wrong . . . yet. There are plenty of reasons someone in the administration might want to be meeting with him. We might want him to arm some rebels who support a cause of ours—or to stop arming some rebels who are fighting a cause of ours—or heck, maybe we even want to buy some weapons from him ourselves.”
“So, then, you don’t think he’s working for SPYDER?”
“I never said that. Gorsky’s as sleazy as they come. Grandpa’s pretty sure he’s a front man for Paul Lee.”
I grimaced once again, only this time it had nothing to do with the mud in my underpants. I knew the name Paul Lee. “The guy who sold SPYDER the missiles they tried to blow up New York City with?”
“The guy who allegedly sold them the missiles, yes.”
“And the guy who sold Leo Shang the nuclear bomb we had to defuse?”
“Ditto.”
“This guy Gorsky’s working for him?”
“That’s what Grandpa suspects, at least. No one has ever confirmed Lee and Gorsky are connected, but if it’s true, then you can easily connect Gorsky to SPYDER.”
We finally reached the edge of the mud pit. To get out of it, we had to scramble over a ten-foot-high wooden wall while Coach Macauley and some other professors took potshots at us with paintball guns. Erica vaulted over with the ease of an Olympic gymnast, landing gracefully on her feet.
I vaulted over it with the grace of a diseased elephant. I tried to stick the landing but lost my balance and face-planted in the dirt.
I still did better than Warren, though. While clambering over the wall, he caught his pant leg on a shard of wood, leaving him at the mercy of the paintball brigade. His rear end might as well have had a target painted on it. The professors shot him again and again before he finally managed to free himself—although to do it, he had to wriggle out of his pants altogether. He
landed with a painful thud on our side of the wall in only his tighty-whities.
“Reeves, that was pathetic!” Coach Macauley shouted. “Do that in the real world and you’ll get your legs blown off! Put your pants back on and start over!”
Warren whimpered at the mere thought of having to go through the mud patch once more.
Zoe hopped down from the wall and handed him his pants, which she’d dislodged. “It’s not your fault,” she said encouragingly. “Exactly when in real life are we ever going to exit a mud pit by climbing a wall? Even if there was a wall next to a mud pit, wouldn’t we just go around it? The whole concept for this course is preposterous.”
“Maybe, but I’m still flunking it.” Warren glumly took his pants from Zoe and slouched back toward the starting line.
Erica proceeded onward. The next obstacle was a three-inch-wide balance beam that stretched over yet another mud pit. The beam was covered with a slick of grease. Almost everyone who’d gone before us had slipped off and splatted into the muck. Erica calmly sauntered across it, as though it were a city sidewalk. Under most circumstances, she probably would have darted across it in seconds, but she took her time because I was following her and she still needed to talk to me.
At least, I was trying to follow her. The best I could do was edge slowly across the beam, desperately windmilling my arms to keep from toppling into the mud.
“So you think Gorsky’s the one targeting the president?” I asked.
“It’s possible. Or maybe it’s one of the underlings who accompanied him yesterday.”
“But they were there yesterday. If they’re targeting the president, they kind of missed their chance.”
“Not necessarily. Maybe yesterday was the setup for a Bombay Boomerang.”
“A what?” I asked. The Hale family often dropped arcane spy jargon into conversations as if everyone in the world knew it.