by Stuart Gibbs
An ancient keypad popped open on the monument. I’d been paying close attention when Erica had entered the code, and thanks to my gift for memorizing numbers, I still knew it by heart. I tapped it into the keypad.
With a grumble, the statue rotated ninety degrees, revealing a staircase hidden beneath it, descending into the earth. I slipped down it and the statue slid back into place over my head.
The stairs led down one floor into an old stone tunnel. I fumbled along the wall for the light switch and flipped it on. A series of antique Edison bulbs flickered to life, illuminating the length of the tunnel, which led all the way back under the Mall to the base of the Washington Monument. At the other end was a secret hatch that led to the ground floor of the obelisk. The monument itself, Erica had taught me, wasn’t actually designed for tourism at all, but had been constructed by one of the earliest U.S. spy agencies as a lookout tower during the Civil War. Unfortunately, while I knew how to access the tunnel, I couldn’t get into the monument. I needed a key for that, and Erica and her family were the only ones who had them. Erica had locked the door behind us when we’d left the monument that night, and given the look of things, no one had been back inside the secret tunnel since then. I could still see the imprints of my own shoes from thirteen months before in the dust on the floor.
Not that it would have been a great idea to enter a crowded monument at the moment anyhow. At least a few of the photographers who had snapped pictures of me being arrested after the White House bombing would have certainly uploaded the photos to the Internet. By now I was quite likely the most famous fugitive in America, and a drenched teenager suddenly emerging from a secret passage in the floor of the Washington Monument would probably get a lot of attention from the tourists inside. Someone was bound to recognize me and call the police, or the FBI, or maybe even the army.
Even worse, SPYDER was also looking for me. I was far more concerned about them finding me than I was about law enforcement. Law enforcement would arrest me. SPYDER would kill me.
So for the time being, the tunnel itself was the safest place I could think of. SPYDER hadn’t known about it before, so they probably didn’t know about it now, and no one in any branch of U.S. security knew about it either. It was dank and gloomy, but it was better than being dead.
It was also cold, though. In my wet clothes, I was shivering as though my body was experiencing its own private earthquake. Thankfully, when I’d been in the tunnel before, I’d left a jacket behind. It was a shimmery silver jacket made out of some kind of space-age heat-retaining material designed by NASA. Erica had given it to me when we’d hid out there before, but she’d made me leave it behind when we’d left. We’d been lying low at the time, and shimmery silver jackets tended to make you stand out in a crowd.
It was still right where I’d left it, folded up and tucked in a wedge of rock.
I peeled off my wet clothes and slipped the jacket on. It sealed my body heat in and warmed me quickly.
Then I dug out my smartphone. It was an official academy model, completely untraceable, so I wouldn’t have to worry about SPYDER tracking my calls.
To my dismay, it was dead. Whether it had been killed by the water or the various explosions, I couldn’t say. It didn’t matter. It was no longer useful. Which meant I couldn’t call any of my friends back at spy school for help. (Erica had never seen fit to give me her phone number, but I knew everyone else’s by heart.)
The ground above me was now most likely crawling with SPYDER agents, law enforcement agents, and possibly even SPYDER agents pretending to be law enforcement agents. It was going to be a long time before I could risk going back up there again.
I was wanted for trying to kill the president, on the run from SPYDER, and completely on my own, without any way to contact help.
All in all, it had turned out to be a tremendously cruddy day.
Still, moping around wasn’t going to solve any problems for me. If I had learned anything from Erica Hale, it was that if I wanted to solve my problems, I had to be proactive.
I started looked for something I could set on fire.
WARNING
Underneath the National Mall
Washington, DC
February 12
0100 hours
The ancient wooden beams that supported the secret tunnel turned out to be dry and flammable. I used a rock to chip off a few pieces of several different ones—I didn’t want to weaken any of them to the point where the tunnel might collapse on my head—and gathered a pile of kindling. Then I found two pieces of flint among the rubble and banged them together to get a spark. The academy’s wilderness survival instructor, Woodchuck Wallace, usually took only about thirty seconds to ignite a fire this way.
It took me forty-five minutes.
I finally managed it, though. By this time, despite my shimmery space-age jacket, I was very close to freezing to death. The jacket didn’t cover my legs, which now felt like they were made of ice, and my fingers and toes had numbed to the point that I could barely sense them. I hovered over the flames until I got some feeling back, then wrung out my wet clothes and lay them to dry by the fire.
The rest of my time in the tunnel was the most boring seven hours of my entire life.
Yes, I was on the run from both the U.S. government and an exceptionally evil organization. But that didn’t change the fact that sitting in a dark tunnel with nothing to do but stare at a fire is excruciatingly dull. At times I actually missed the earlier part of the day when I’d been actively fleeing for my life. However, I didn’t miss it quite enough to want to relive the experience of nearly dying again, so I stayed put and waited.
I spent much of my night trying to work out how SPYDER had managed to take advantage of me in the first place.
To begin with, they had obviously tricked Cyrus into believing an assassination plot was under way and that they had an agent inside the White House. Cyrus had told me he’d picked up chatter to this effect, meaning he’d heard it from various sources, but SPYDER had planted fake chatter before. It simply took a few people plotting on phone lines that they knew the CIA had tapped. It wouldn’t have been easy to fool Cyrus, but SPYDER was an extremely patient and devious organization. It was likely they’d spent months, if not years, planning this attack.
Getting the bomb in my jacket would have been trickier. Since the heating was awful at spy school, I had worn my jacket most of the day, even in class, but a talented enemy agent could have slipped a bomb into the lining even while I was wearing it, like a pickpocket working in reverse. The best opportunity for this seemed to be my subway ride down to the White House. The Metro had been extremely crowded; I had passed thousands of people closely in the tunnels and been crammed in with hundreds on the train. I had also been distracted, focused on the task ahead of me—how to handle Jason Stern and root out SPYDER’s mole—rather than what was going on around me at the moment. It was a rookie mistake that Erica would be disgusted by. When confronting SPYDER, you always had to be on the alert. I had been so busy thinking about who their inside man might be that I’d dropped my guard, allowing them to turn me into the very inside man I was looking for.
I couldn’t guarantee SPYDER had armed me on the train, but I didn’t have much else to go on. It would have been helpful to see the remnants of the bomb itself, but they had probably been vaporized along with half of the Oval Office. If any evidence was left, the Secret Service would have it locked up tight by now.
By one in the morning, I couldn’t take it anymore. SPYDER or not, I had to move. My clothes were now warm and dry, and I was starving. More importantly, I had to stop worrying about SPYDER catching me and start thinking about how I could help catch SPYDER. The longer they had to regroup after their failed bombing, the more time they had to cover their tracks. Hopefully, Cyrus and Erica were already on their tail, but I needed to get back in contact with them and join the hunt.
I got dressed, stomped out my fire, left the shimmery jacket behind—Eri
ca was right; it was way too noticeable—and returned to the hidden staircase. Then I waited there for five minutes, listening to the world above for any telltale sounds that SPYDER was lying in wait for me. I didn’t hear any. I didn’t really even know what those telltale sounds might be—except for someone whispering “Has anyone killed Ben yet?”—but I was anxious and paranoid and trying my best not to get killed.
Eventually, I gathered my nerve and entered the code that made the statue swing out, uncovering the staircase. Then I emerged into the thicket of trees beside the Reflecting Pool.
No one was lying in wait for me.
I made my way back toward the heart of Washington.
I did my best to stay in the shadows and avoid being seen. Sometimes being a kid can really work against you, like when you’re trying to get around a city at one in the morning. No one looks twice at an adult walking around at one in the morning: There were even a few of them visiting the monuments that late, enjoying having the sites almost to themselves. But people notice a kid on his own, out long after curfew, without a jacket in the dead of winter. Quite often, they call the police, thinking that something bad must have happened—or that you’re up to no good. The last thing I needed was the police; they’d bounce me right over to the Secret Service. So I kept my distance from any other humans.
The closest part of the city to where I’d hidden out was the area around the White House. I figured it was actually somewhat safe to head there. The Secret Service probably assumed that the last place I’d go was right back where I’d theoretically committed the crime.
The White House was even more cordoned off than usual. The streets and sidewalks all around the building had been shut down. The closest glimpse I could get was from all the way across the Ellipse to the south of the White House. From that distance, I couldn’t tell if any investigating was still going on, but it appeared that construction crews had already gone to work trying to cover up the damage. Plastic sheeting had been stretched over the gaping hole to protect what remained of the Oval Office from the elements, as though they were saran-wrapping the world’s biggest sandwich. The hole was a dark scar on the building, and I felt terrible for my part in causing it.
There was a hotel only a few blocks east of the White House, across the street from a public fountain. Like any fountain in Washington, tourists had thrown change into it for no good reason. The spouts had been turned off for the night, which allowed me to scoop a few dollars’ worth of change out. I then slipped through one of the less-used hotel doors and found an actual working pay phone on the conference level by the bathrooms.
I dialed Zoe’s number, which I knew by heart.
Given that it was the middle of the night, I had expected that I’d wake her with my call. To my surprise, she answered before the end of the first ring. “Hello?”
“Hey. It’s Ben. What are you doing up?”
“Hoping you’d call! I’ve been so worried about you. The news was saying that you . . .” The words seemed to catch in Zoe’s throat. “That you might have drowned.”
“I didn’t.”
“Yeah, I figured that out. Where are you?”
“Virginia,” I lied. There was an extremely good chance the call was being monitored. Of course, there was also an extremely good chance it was being traced as well, meaning I didn’t have much time before law enforcement came looking for me. “Zoe, I swear, I’m innocent. . . .”
“You don’t have to explain to me. I know you were set up.”
“You do? How?”
“Because I know you, Ben. I’m your friend! You would never try to kill the president.”
“Well, you’re probably one of the only people who believes that.”
“No kidding. Campus is crawling with agents. CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and who knows what else. Everyone’s looking for you.”
“That’s why I need your help. Can you get to Erica and ask her to get in touch with Cyrus for me?”
“Uh, Ben . . .”
“Tell her I’m still alive and that I can explain exactly what happened.”
“Ben . . .”
“Then figure out a way for Cyrus to meet up with me and I’ll call you back tomorrow to find out what it is. . . .”
“Ben!” Zoe said sharply. “Cyrus isn’t going to help you!”
“Of course he is. He put me on this mission in the first place.”
“Well, now he thinks you betrayed him. He’s the one leading the whole investigation to track you down.”
I fell silent, dumbfounded. I tried to think of what to do next, but came up blank. Having the Hale family bail me out had been my entire plan; I didn’t have a backup.
“I’m sorry, Ben,” Zoe said. “He thinks you’re a mole for SPYDER.”
“Me? But I helped defeat SPYDER! I blew up their headquarters!”
“Cyrus says that doesn’t mean they couldn’t have bought you off anyhow. SPYDER has flipped plenty of agents before. And they have a track record of offering you a job. . . .”
“Which I’ve always turned down!”
“You don’t have to tell me that. I’m on your side here.”
I calmed a bit, taking heart in that. “Who else is?”
“Jawa and Chip, of course.”
“And Mike?”
“I guess. I don’t know Mike as well as you do, but he’s your best friend, right? And there’s also Warren. . . .”
“Really? I thought he’d be leading the crusade against me.”
“Warren might be snotty with you a lot, but that’s because he’s jealous of you. He really respects you.”
“Oh.” I paused before asking the next name, because I was worried I might not like the answer. “How about Erica?”
Zoe paused too, because she knew I wouldn’t like the answer. “I don’t know which side she’s on.”
“Really?”
“I’ve barely seen her. And you’re the only one she talks to. I’d like to think that she believes you’re innocent, but you know how by-the-book she is. If you think we can trust her, though, I’ll go to her.”
“You don’t have to go to her,” said a voice on the other end of the line, slightly distant, as if from somewhere in the room behind Zoe. “I’m right here.”
Erica.
Zoe gasped in surprise. I could guess what had happened. Erica had done her standard suddenly-appear-out-of-nowhere trick, having snuck up on Zoe at some point in the conversation. If they were in Zoe’s room, Erica could have infiltrated it without any trouble. The locks on our dormitory doors were disturbingly easy to pick, and frankly, Erica could infiltrate almost any place she wanted.
“How long have you been here?” Zoe asked.
“Long enough,” Erica replied, which was followed by the sound of her snatching Zoe’s phone from her. She then spoke directly to me, so angry I could practically feel it radiating over the phone line. “I trusted you, Ben. And you betrayed me!”
“I didn’t do it!” I exclaimed. “I was set up by SPYDER!”
“Don’t try to lie your way out of this. I know exactly what happened. They turned you. Just like they’ve turned everyone else.”
Her words were so harsh, they actually caused me pain. I felt like I’d been stabbed in the gut. I cared a great deal for Erica—and I’d thought that she cared for me too, at least a bit, in her own personal way. Hearing that she thought I’d betrayed her didn’t merely mean that she hated me. . . . It also meant that she had never really known what kind of person I was to begin with.
“That’s not true!” I heard Zoe argue in the background. “Ben would never . . .”
Her words suddenly trailed off. It was possible that Erica had knocked her unconscious, though equally likely that Erica had simply given her a stare so hard that she’d fallen silent in fear.
“They didn’t turn me, Erica,” I said. “I swear. And now I need your help!”
“Why would I help you? You’re even worse than Joshua Hallal.”
N
ow I felt like the knife in my gut had been twisted. Joshua Hallal had been one of the best students at the Academy of Espionage before defecting to SPYDER. He was one of the most ruthless, dangerous, horrible people I’d ever met—and Erica thought he was a better person than me.
This did give me a hint as to why Erica was so angry, though. She’d had a crush on Joshua and been devastated when she learned of his betrayal. Afterward, she had been wary about trusting anyone else, but I had finally convinced her to be my friend—or at least, the closest thing she had to a friend. And now she thought that I’d betrayed her as well.
I glanced at my watch. I had already been on the phone way too long. Federal agents would be swarming the building soon. But I knew I had to try to plead my case to Erica. If she remained against me, I was lost.
“I’m not like Joshua,” I told her. “And you know it. If you think about it—about me—I hope you’ll realize who I really am. . . .”
“You don’t have to hope anything for me,” Erica interrupted. “You’re the one who needs to find hope. You’re going to need it. Because I’m coming for you, Ben. There’s nowhere you can run. There’s nowhere you can hide. I’m going to make it my life’s mission to hunt you down. I will not rest until I find you. Do you understand?”
The anger in her voice was so frightening, so immediate, I felt as though she were right there in front of me, instead of speaking over the phone.
I’d had some low moments as a spy-in-training, but this was the lowest by far. The Death Valley of emotion. I had lost the faith of the one person I’d trusted to help me. And now she was so upset, she was determined to bring me to justice herself. Even though SPYDER had tried to kill me twice that day, it was hard to imagine they could have done anything worse than this.
It took almost every ounce of strength I had to say, “I understand.”
Then I hung up. I’d already taken too great a risk staying on the phone as long as I had. I heard the distant screech of tires on the street outside the hotel, the Secret Service or the CIA or some other group of agents rushing there to arrest me.