by Stuart Gibbs
Erica had a way of doing this without needing masks or hair dye or so much as a fake nose. Instead, she had an incredible talent for altering her entire personality when she needed to, and this, in turn, made her seem to be a completely different person. In real life, Erica was cold and calculating and almost always sheathed in her standard black outfit. Now she looked like an everyday middle school student. She wore trendy clothes, had her hair done up, and was chomping on a wad of gum the size of a walnut. Even more importantly, her whole persona was different, from the way she talked to her posture to the slightly vacant look in her eyes.
I was at once struck by her transformation—and the brilliance of her choice of where to reconnect. The Natural History Museum was the one place in the city that was crawling with kids our age in the middle of a school day. The other people in the gallery weren’t paying any attention to us at all.
“Amazing rock, huh?” she asked, indicating the diamond. “What do you think it’s worth, like a bajillion dollars?”
“Something like that.” I did my best to sound like an average teenage boy, but probably didn’t. I wasn’t an average teenage boy, and I couldn’t hide my relief that Erica was actually there. I had never been so happy to see anyone in my life. I had to fight back the urge to hug her.
“Let’s go see something else,” Erica said, like she was already bored of the world’s biggest diamond. She turned and headed out of the gallery.
I followed her. Once we were back on the mezzanine around the rotunda, it was loud enough for me to feel comfortable speaking about my current situation. “Thanks for coming.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” Erica said, dropping her ditzy character. “We’re still not in the clear.”
“I don’t think anyone’s recognized me yet,” I assured her. “And I know you’re too good to let anyone tail you.”
“I am,” she agreed. “But you have a lot of enemies right now, and I can guarantee you some of them were eavesdropping on our phone call last night. I didn’t give you the most clever clue about where to meet me. . . .”
“Why not?”
“I was afraid that if I was too clever, you wouldn’t get it.”
“Oh, right.”
“Point being, there’s a chance that someone else could put two and two together as well.” Erica froze by the mezzanine railing, looking down into the rotunda. “In fact, I’d say about a hundred percent chance.”
I followed her gaze. Sure enough, four men in suits and sunglasses had just entered the museum. They had government agent written all over them. Every other person in the rotunda was dressed in tourist casual. The men stuck out like penguins in a flock of chickens.
Erica and I both ducked back from the railing right as the agents glanced our way. It seemed like we had been quick enough to avoid them, though I didn’t know for sure. At the very least, they were now blocking the main exit.
“Looks like we’re not getting out the easy way,” Erica said with a sigh. She continued past the stairs and around the mezzanine, sticking close to the wall so that the agents below couldn’t see us.
Three started coming up anyhow, heading for the Hope Diamond. One stayed down by the entrance.
“Who do you think they are?” I asked. “Secret Service? CIA? FBI?”
“Could be any one of them. They’re all looking for you. You screwed up pretty big yesterday.”
“SPYDER tricked me.”
“Well, you, me, and SPYDER are pretty much the only people on earth who believe that.” Erica led me off the mezzanine and into the hall with the butterfly pavilion. It was an enormous, cocoonlike structure inside of which hundreds of butterflies and moths flitted around an indoor rain forest.
Behind us, on the far side of the rotunda, the three government agents emerged onto the mezzanine. Two entered the gems and minerals exhibit, while the other posted himself at the railing and cased the rotunda.
“Do you think SPYDER sent agents here too?” I asked nervously.
“I don’t see why not,” Erica replied. “If our government could figure out we’re here, then SPYDER certainly could too. And their agents are going to blend in a lot better than ours will.”
“I hope you’re ready to fight, then.”
“Why?”
“Because SPYDER wants me dead. They tried to kill me on the Arlington Bridge yesterday.”
Erica gave me a look that indicated I was the world’s biggest idiot. “That wasn’t SPYDER. That was me.”
“You?” I gasped. “Why would you try to kill me?”
Erica’s look hardened, now indicating that I might be the biggest idiot in the entire universe. “I wasn’t trying to kill you. I had to do something to get you free.”
“So you opened fire on an entire convoy of Secret Service agents?”
“It wasn’t like I had a whole lot of options.” Erica led me through the invertebrate zoo, where display cases were filled with an array of the world’s biggest, slimiest, and most revolting insects. “I had to act fast. If they’d gotten you to the Pentagon and locked you up there, it would have been almost impossible for me to free you.”
“Almost impossible?” I echoed.
“Nothing’s completely impossible. But some things are awfully close. So I improvised. Lucky for you, I was keeping an eye on you again at the White House yesterday when the bomb went off.”
“Really? I didn’t see you.”
“Because I didn’t want you to see me.” Erica cut through a demonstration where a museum employee was removing insects from Tupperware containers and showing them to a crowd of riveted children. “After the explosion, I saw the Secret Service drag you out and figured they were taking you to the Pentagon. So I grabbed my motorcycle and raced over to the construction site.”
I thought back to the flash of movement I’d seen among the construction workers, moving toward the crane. I now realized it had been Erica. “So, you swung that hook at the car on purpose?”
“Yeah. I realize that was a bit dicey, but I’d never operated a crane before. It’s harder than you’d think.”
“A bit dicey? You realize if you’d been off by another inch or two, you would have killed me?”
Erica considered this, then shrugged. “Well, we all make mistakes. I would have asked you to do the math, but you were tough to reach at the time.”
Behind us, there was a commotion. I glanced back that way, worried the government agents had spotted us, but it was only the museum employee from the demonstration, expressing concern that some of her insects appeared to have escaped. Panic rippled through the group of children watching the presentation, who were all now terrified there might be a rogue tarantula crawling on them.
Erica and I passed out of the invertebrates and into the mummies.
“If you went through all that trouble to engineer my escape,” I said, “why didn’t you come find me in the secret tunnel?”
“First of all, I wasn’t positive you would go there. You might have forgotten where it was, and I never taught you the code.”
“I memorized it when I saw you type it in.”
“I couldn’t guarantee that. And given that I’d just opened fire on a Secret Service motorcade, I couldn’t exactly go for a stroll around the Reflecting Pool. I had to make sure I didn’t end up getting locked up. So I took evasive action.”
We entered the dinosaur exhibit, cutting underneath the massive skeleton of a brachiosaur. “And you couldn’t get back down there anytime last night?” I asked.
“Grandpa was keeping tabs on me. I had to be careful. I wasn’t even supposed to be down at the White House in the first place, remember? If he found out I’d engineered your escape, he would have made sure I was grounded for life. Thankfully, he also thought SPYDER was behind the attack.”
“But now he’s even more convinced that I’m working for the bad guys.”
“Yes. He feels extremely betrayed by you. The whole thing made him look like a patsy. So he’s pretty much runn
ing the show to bring you down. And he was definitely suspicious that I might help you. I had to put on a major act to prove I was on board with him, right down to that phone call last night.”
“You couldn’t even tell Zoe that you’re helping me?”
“No way. Everyone knows Zoe’s loyal to you. The Feds have been questioning her all day. I know you’re pals with her and all, but it’s not like that girl can keep a secret. Once you threaten to do something horrible to her family, she spills her guts. So I had to keep her in the dark. . . . Plus, I needed to make some additional arrangements for today in case we ran into trouble.”
“Like what?” I asked.
Erica didn’t answer me. She had frozen next to a life-size model of a triceratops and was staring at two tourists across the room. “You’re about to find out,” she said. “Trouble dead ahead.” She then spun on her heels and ran back the way we’d come.
Apparently, we had been spotted and there was no longer any point in pretending to be normal kids.
The tourists bolted after us. A man and a woman, they blended in amazingly well with the standard Smithsonian visitors. Both wore souvenir T-shirts and jeans and looked as though they had just stepped off a bus from Iowa. Neither seemed particularly threatening as they came after us, but given Erica’s reaction, I had no doubt that it would be very bad if they caught us.
“SPYDER?” I asked as we raced back under the brachiosaur.
“Yes.” Erica didn’t backtrack through the mummies, but hooked a left into the Hall of Bones.
She could run extremely fast. It took everything I had to keep up with her.
To my surprise, the SPYDER agents didn’t do as well. They fell behind us as we dashed through the rooms full of animal skeletons. I was just starting to feel proud of myself when we emerged onto the rotunda mezzanine again—and nearly ran right into one of the government agents. He instantly recognized us and yelled to his partners across the rotunda, “Hey! They’re here!” Then he took up the chase.
Erica darted right past the stairs that led down to the first floor and charged into the next room. This wasn’t a gallery, but a small gift shop. It appeared to be a dead end to me.
“Why didn’t we go down the stairs?” I asked Erica, failing to hide the desperation in my voice.
“Because the Feds could have followed us down the stairs,” she explained, in a way that indicated our alternative route was going to be much less traditional.
We passed a large bin containing rocks and minerals for sale. They were inexpensive, but pretty: thousands of polished round pebbles in a cavalcade of colors. Erica deftly upended it behind us. The pebbles cascaded across the floor.
The government agent slipped on them, skidded wildly out of control, and careened into a rack of dinosaur toys, which promptly collapsed, burying our pursuer in a pile of plastic velociraptors and pachycephalosaurs.
We arrived at the back of the store. It was a dead end—almost. There was no way to walk out, but there was an open space in the wall that looked out over the Hall of Ocean Life. The viewpoint was one story above the main floor; a railing spanned the gap to prevent dumb tourists from taking a header into the exhibits below.
The hall was several stories tall, filled with exotic displays ranging from stuffed anglerfish to an actual giant squid encased in a huge vat of formaldehyde. The centerpiece was an enormous model of a humpback whale, which hung from the ceiling, suspended by thin steel wires. An only-slightly-less-enormous skeleton of a bowhead whale sat on a metal framework below us.
“You’re not expecting us to jump to that?” I asked, worried.
“I’m not expecting anything. We’re doing it.” With that, Erica sprang over the railing onto the whale skeleton.
She sailed through the air and landed perfectly atop the skull with an agility and finesse I knew I didn’t have in the slightest.
I looked around for another way out. The only other exit was blocked by the government agent, who was digging himself out of the dinosaur toys. He had a livid glare in his eye and a plesiosaur jammed in his ear.
The SPYDER agents appeared to have lost us, but the government agent was threatening enough.
I jumped over the railing.
To my surprise, I landed deftly atop the whale skull. Only, the perfect balance thing was completely beyond me. I pitched forward and nearly took a header into the piranha display below. Erica caught me at the last instant and steadied me, but my weight had thrown her off balance too. She now pitched forward herself and had no choice but to leap from the skull and catch onto the lip of the model humpback whale. The cables supporting it strained under the sudden jolt. One snapped free from the ceiling and the whale shifted wildly.
Erica swung from the whale’s lip, launched herself into a backflip, and stuck the landing in the middle of the hall.
The tourists gathered there all applauded, impressed. As though they figured the Smithsonian had started hiring circus performers to spice things up.
Erica looked to me expectantly.
So did all the tourists.
Now I had potential death and performance anxiety to deal with.
Knowing I couldn’t possibly do what Erica had just done, I carefully shimmied down the metal framework that supported the whale skeleton—and still biffed the dismount. I fell backward and landed on my butt atop a large sea turtle.
The tourists groaned, like I had let them down.
Above us, the government agent appeared at the giftshop viewpoint, realized there was no way he could follow the way we’d gone, and dashed back toward the stairs.
The remaining cables that supported the humpback groaned ominously.
The tourists around Erica were still staring at her expectantly, as if hoping she would perform another stunt.
“Clear the room!” she ordered them all. “Now!”
Despite her young age, the tone of her voice made them all instantly realize this wasn’t a show. They did exactly as she’d said, bolting for the exits.
Another whale support cable snapped above us.
“Guess that wasn’t part of the plan,” I said.
“Of course it was,” Erica replied. “We need a blockade.” She pointed across the room, to where the SPYDER tourists had just entered the exhibit hall. Apparently, we hadn’t ditched them at all; they had simply circled around down the stairs to ambush us.
They probably would have been successful—if the humpback hadn’t torn free from the ceiling and crashed down to earth between us. It shook the entire building, totaled a dozen exhibits, and shattered the case that held the giant squid, releasing it along with a tidal wave of formaldehyde.
“See what I mean?” Erica asked, then yanked me toward the exit from the hall.
Unfortunately, the three other government agents who hadn’t been buried by dinosaur toys raced in that way, blocking our escape. Erica snapped the nose off a model swordfish and hurled it like a javelin, spearing one of the agents to the wall through the sleeve of his sports coat. Then she tossed me a small Tupperware container and said, “Spider.”
“You think they’re with SPYDER?” I asked, confused.
“No,” she said in her standard you’re-an-idiot tone. “Spider. Like arachnid. Use it.” She then grabbed one of the giant squid tentacles, lashed it out like a whip, and took the second government agent down at the knees.
She was too busy to handle the third, though. I looked into the Tupperware container she’d given me and finally realized what she meant. There was a gigantic, hairy spider in it. Apparently, Erica had pilfered it from the insect show as we’d gone by.
The third government agent was quickly closing in on me. I popped the lid off the Tupperware and flung the spider at him. It landed right on his face. The agent screamed in terror, backpedaled away as though he could actually run from something that had latched onto his head, then slipped on the squid and tumbled into what was left of the formaldehyde bath.
In the ensuing chaos, Erica and I fled
. We charged out of the exhibit hall, but instead of heading for the exit, Erica made a sudden turn through a door marked STAFF ONLY. She then led me down two flights of stairs and through a door marked STORAGE.
We emerged into an enormous underground cavern. It turned out, all the amazing things on display in the museum above us were only a tiny fraction of the Smithsonian collection, much of which was mothballed around us. We moved quickly through miles of shelves containing everything from stuffed lemurs to mammoth tusks. There were thousands of insects mounted under glass, millions of meteorites, billions of bird feathers, trillions of trilobites. It seemed to go on forever, a labyrinth of artifacts from around the world.
Erica appeared to know exactly where she was going, as though she had not only been down here before, but had also rehearsed the route and committed it to memory. Which, knowing Erica, was a distinct possibility. After only a minute, an exit door appeared ahead of us, at the end of an aisle full of dinosaur bones.
Before we could get there, though, the SPYDER tourists stepped into our path.
They apparently knew the museum as well as Erica. Both had their guns drawn.
“Nice try,” the woman taunted. “But this is the end of the line for both of you.”
Erica froze. For once it looked like we were facing something she hadn’t anticipated.
At which point, someone dressed in black attacked the SPYDER agents from behind. Our savior whacked the woman on the head with what appeared to be a tyrannosaur femur, instantly knocking her out cold.
The male SPYDER tourist wheeled around, but before he could get a shot off, his attacker whipped the bone around like a ninja staff, thwacked him in the chin, and laid him out like a bearskin rug.
The entire battle had lasted five seconds.
Our savior then set the bone down carefully and turned to face us, finally allowing us a good look at her.
It was a woman. A lithe, athletic woman. Although I had never seen her before, there was something incredibly familiar about her. It was partly her looks—and partly the bizarre calm she exuded, despite having just rendered two highly trained enemy agents unconscious with a prehistoric weapon. She took a packet of wet wipes from her pocket and dabbed a bit of blood off the tyrannosaur bone, then spoke to Erica in a clipped British accent. “Hello, darling. I see you’ve gotten yourself into a spot of trouble per usual.”