by Stuart Gibbs
“Because they’re scared,” Crandall told her.
“Hold on,” I interrupted. “What’s Omega?”
“The last-ditch, end-of-the-line program,” Erica said bitterly. “They shut down the academy.”
“They can’t do that!” I said. Given how upset I’d been at spy school a minute before, I was surprised by how much I hated the idea of it being closed. Maybe the place wasn’t for me, but without it, where was someone like Erica supposed to go? And how would I ever see her again?
“Sure they can,” Erica replied sourly. “One mole can corrupt decades of work. It doesn’t matter how good I am. If my name gets leaked, I’m useless as a spy. Same goes for everyone else here. So why even bother to keep the place open any longer? It’s just a waste of money. . . .”
“Now, now,” Crandall said reassuringly. “You’re acting like the decision has already been made.”
“Well, why wouldn’t they initiate Omega?” Erica asked. “The enemy has already shown they know this campus inside and out. They kidnapped Ben out of the security room! How much more compromised could the place be?”
“I’ll admit, it looks bad,” Crandall said. Then he added pointedly, “However, the higher-ups aren’t meeting to discuss Omega until this afternoon. If some significant progress could be made in the mole hunt before then, maybe that’d color their thinking.”
“How significant?” I asked.
“We’d need to find the mole.” Erica turned to Crandall. “What time’s the meeting?”
“One o’clock,” the professor replied. “Right here, in the main conference room.”
“Where’s that?” I asked.
“In the Hale Building, next to the library,” Crandall told me.
I checked my watch. It was two thirty in the morning. We had fewer than twelve hours to catch a mole who’d outfoxed the entire CIA the night before. It didn’t seem possible.
Erica was undaunted, however. She was now revved up, determined to do anything she could to save the academy. “What’s our best lead?” she asked.
It took me a moment to realize she was asking me, not Crandall. I scrambled to make sense of everything that had happened in the last day. One name sprang to mind before all others. “Uh . . . Chip Schacter.”
“Chip?” Crandall laughed. “That boy’s a moron.”
“Or maybe he just wants us to think he is,” I said, which struck home with Crandall and silenced him quickly. “He wanted me to meet him a few hours ago.” I found the crumpled note in my pocket and showed it to the others: Meet me in the librery tonight. Midnight. Your life depends on it.
Erica read it, then looked at me, surprised. “That’s Chip’s handwriting, all right. Why didn’t you mention this?”
“It sort of slipped my mind,” I replied. “What with being abducted by the enemy and all.”
“Any idea what this was about?” Erica asked.
“No,” I admitted.
Crandall set his teacup down with a sigh. “No offense, Benjamin, but this isn’t much of a lead. . . .”
“Chip’s connected to the last bomb that was under the school,” Erica said. “Either he planted it or he found it. That puts him closer to the plot than anyone else. And now he’s reaching out to Ben.”
“If this note is even from him,” Crandall cautioned. “Handwriting’s not hard to fake. This could be a wild-goose chase, designed to cost us valuable time.”
“There’s one other thing about Chip,” I said. “He’s dating Tina Cuevo.”
Erica and Crandall both wheeled on me, surprised by the information—and the fact that I knew it before they did.
“How do you know that?” Erica asked.
I started to answer, but Crandall suddenly put a finger to his lips, signaling me to be quiet.
In the ensuing silence I heard the distant sound of feet coming up the main stairwell. It was so faint, it was amazing Crandall had picked it up while we were talking.
Crandall flicked on his television. It appeared to be ancient, but it was actually linked to the campus security system. Crandall quickly found the camera feed from the stairs in the building. Six men were ascending, armed to the teeth.
“The enemy!” I gasped.
“Worse,” Crandall said. “The administration.” He spun toward us. “If they catch you, your investigation is over. Go! Find Chip!”
Erica already had the window open.
I followed her out it. After the warmth of Crandall’s apartment, the cold air hit me like a slap in the face. I leapt the one story to the ground.
They were waiting for us outside. The building was surrounded.
A dozen lights snapped on at once, blinding me. Dark shapes raced at me from the shadows. “Ripley!” one shouted. “Don’t run! We just want to make sure you’re all right!”
“Don’t listen to them!” Erica warned me as she leapt into action, a flurry of kicks and whirls. Several of her attackers went down quickly, clutching various body parts and groaning in pain. But there were too many for her to save me, too.
Now that she’d gone on the attack, the agents dropped any pretense of concern for my well-being and swarmed me. I did my best to escape, but that wasn’t much. I only managed to knock one man’s glasses askew before the others piled atop me. Through the tangle of arms and legs, I caught a glimpse of Erica disappearing into the woods with a horde of agents behind her.
Then someone shoved my face into the ground and hissed in my ear. “Come with us. The administration wants to speak to you.”
INTERROGATION
Cheney Center for the Acquisition of Information
February 10
1200 hours
I spent the next nine hours in an interrogation chamber.
In the movies they always make interrogation rooms look like cold, terrible places, small cement cells furnished with only steel chairs and a one-way mirror that everyone knows is a one-way mirror. At the academy, the interrogation rooms were still terrible places, but at least they were comfortably furnished. Mine had a plush couch, sisal carpeting, and a small Zen fountain. New age music played from a hidden speaker. It was like being in the waiting room at a spa—all the better to lull someone into spilling their guts, I suppose.
A succession of agents paraded through, each trying to find out what I knew. They were of all ages, shapes, and ethnicities, and they tried every interrogation approach in the book. (There actually was a book: Mattingly’s Advanced Methods of Interrogation. I had to read it for my Information Acquisition seminar.) Mostly, these were intended to be variations on the “good agent/bad agent” routine, although “incompetent agent/even less competent agent” was a more appropriate description. Only a few of them seemed remotely interested in what I knew about the enemy. Most were far more concerned about my own loyalties, as though I were the real problem.
The main sticking point was that no one believed what had actually happened: that I had single-handedly been rescued from the enemy by a fellow student—and a fifteen-year-old girl at that. No one doubted that Erica was incredibly competent; they had her file on hand, although not Erica herself. She’d not only escaped but also continued to elude them, which should have served as further evidence of her competence, but which instead made them question her loyalties as well. What made much more sense to all of my inquisitors was that I was somehow in cahoots with the enemy, and that they’d purposely freed me as part of some complicated scheme.
“How, exactly, did Erica engineer your escape?” I was asked time and time again.
“Why didn’t you attempt to contact us after you got away?”
“What did you do instead?”
“What is your relationship with Miss Hale?”
“Do you love America?”
“What’s that have to do with anything?” I asked.
“Just answer the question,” my interrogator said.
So I did. I answered it and every other question truthfully—though, inevitably, someone else would
enter the room and ask them all over again.
I also talked to a lot of people who acted like agents but whom I guessed were actually lawyers. They all seemed concerned that, if I were truly innocent, then I might want to sue the academy for gross negligence (i.e., allowing me to be captured and then failing to recover me). I was asked to sign dozens of forms filled with confusing legal jargon. I didn’t sign a single one.
Instead, I consistently pressed everyone to stop asking me questions and giving me forms to sign and just listen to me. Chip Schacter had to be tracked down. If anyone needed to be interrogated, it was him. He was seeing Tina Cuevo. Tina Cuevo was the only student who’d been given my original file—and the only student Erica had copied on the e-mail about Jackhammer. Chip could have easily accessed that information through Tina and passed it on to the enemy. Or maybe Tina had passed the information on herself. Whatever the case, there was a reason to investigate them.
Virtually everyone ignored me. The only one who didn’t was a stout, red-faced woman with hair so shellacked, it looked bulletproof. And she didn’t really listen so much as take offense.
“Are you telling us how to run our investigation?” she asked angrily.
“I’m trying to pass on information,” I said. “I thought that was the whole point of this interrogation.”
“Because it sounds to me like you’re telling us,” she snapped. “You. A first-year student. Who doesn’t know squat about spying. Why don’t you leave the investigating to the professionals?”
“Last time I tried that, I got kidnapped,” I replied.
The woman turned an angry shade of red, then stormed out of the room.
No one came in for a long time after that. They didn’t want me to know how long it actually was, because there were no clocks in the room and they’d confiscated my watch. I think it was some sort of interrogation tactic, though it’s possible they had no idea what to do with me. For a while I shouted at the people on the other side of the one-way mirror that they were squandering precious time, but when no one responded, there was nothing for me to do except sit on the couch and make a show of being annoyed.
Eventually, after what seemed like hours, the door opened and Alexander Hale entered.
Even though my image of Alexander had paled greatly over the past day, he was still a sight for sore eyes. He wore a custom-tailored gray suit with a crisp white pocket square. Instead of sitting down, however, he held the door open and glanced at the one-way mirror furtively. “Come on, Ben. Let’s move.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I sprang to my feet and followed him. It wasn’t until we were outside the room, in what I recognized as the complex of tunnels beneath campus, that I dared ask, “Am I free to go?”
“Not exactly,” Alexander said. “But as far as I’m concerned, you are. I asked for some time with you man-to-man. Off the record. No observers.”
“So you’re springing me? Won’t you get in trouble for that?”
“Let’s just say I owe you one. And besides, Erica says you’re more help out than in.” Alexander led me through the tunnels quickly, even running when there was no one around to see us, until we arrived back at the secret ATM entrance Erica had showed me the night before. He opened the door to the secret stairwell, but only waved me through.
“You’re not coming?” I asked.
“I have to go back and cover your tracks.” Alexander gave me a fatherly pat on the cheek. “But don’t worry. You’re in good hands.”
Before I could say another word, he shut the door behind me.
I rushed up the stairs and emerged from behind the ATM into the fake bank kiosk. Then I stepped out the door onto the sidewalk—and just like that, I was free. The stone wall of the academy loomed across the street, but I was on the other side of it.
“Welcome back, Ben,” Erica said.
I started in surprise before realizing the voice was coming from inside my head. Alexander had slipped a two-way radio into my ear.
There were lots of people out and about. The enemy had taken my cell phone, but I put my hand to my ear and pretended to be talking on one anyhow. No one gave me a second glance. Virtually everyone else was on a cell phone themselves. “Can you hear me?” I asked.
“Loud and clear,” Erica replied.
“Where are you?”
“Still on campus, looking into things. But I need you to tail someone for me.”
“Chip?”
“No. I think he’s clean.”
“What? But—”
“I’ll explain later. Right now I need you to go after Tina. She’s the mole . . . and she’s on the move.”
AMBUSH
Washington, DC
Streets in proximity to the Academy of Espionage
February 10
1230 hours
Erica informed me Tina was on her way out the front gate of the academy, so I hurried around the campus perimeter, racing to beat her there. I held up a block from the gate and fell in with a small group of people waiting for a bus.
Two limousines with diplomatic license plates came down the street and turned through the academy gate. The agents posted there saluted and waved them through.
“Looks like the higher-ups are arriving to discuss Omega,” I said.
“Oh, yeah. It’s a regular Who’s Who in Espionage here today,” Erica replied. “We’ve got the directors of the CIA, FBI, and NSA; the congressional chairs of the Intelligence Committee; a couple White House liaisons; and, of course, no party would be complete without my father. . . . Okay, here comes Tina.”
Tina Cuevo emerged through the gate a second later, swaddled in a chic overcoat with a wool cap yanked tightly over her head. She looked around cautiously, though I didn’t know if this was because she was afraid of being followed or because it was merely a reflex for anyone in her final year of spy school. Whatever the case, she didn’t notice me and hurried across the street.
“Give her a half block and then follow her,” Erica instructed. Apparently, she knew that while I’d studied tailing someone, I’d never done it. Our field tests in clandestine pursuit weren’t scheduled until spring.
I did exactly as I was told.
Tina moved quickly through the streets of the city, checking her watch each minute or so, as though she was on a tight schedule. Every now and then, she fired a cursory glance over her shoulder, but these were so quick, I don’t think she would have noticed me unless I was wearing a gorilla suit. I felt comfortable enough to talk to Erica on my “phone.” “Any idea where she’s going?”
“No, but she got a text and bolted all of a sudden. And not long before the meeting started. That’s suspicious.”
“Suspicious enough to think she’s the mole?”
“Oh, I’ve got more on her than that. Courtesy of Chip.”
“Chip?”
“Yeah. After I shook the goon squad, I tracked him down and asked him what he wanted to talk to you about last night. Turns out, he was coming to you for help.”
“Me?!” I failed to conceal my surprise. “I’ve only been here for a few weeks. Why not you?”
“Apparently, I intimidate people. He was worried I’d turn him in.”
“For what?”
“Doing an unauthorized investigation. Chip didn’t plant that bomb under the school. He was trying to figure out who did.”
Tina scurried across a street right before the light changed. I got caught on the wrong side of traffic and had to dodge a few cars to get across safely.
“Why didn’t he just go to one of his professors?” I asked.
“On the one hand, he wasn’t sure it was a bomb. A real one, at least. He thought it might be a test. That’s the type of quality paranoia four years of spy school instills in you. On the other hand, Chip feared that, if the bomb was real, and his first reaction was to merely tell someone else, the administration might consider him ineffectual.”
“Even though that might save lives?”
“This is
Chip we’re talking about. He’s used to getting someone else to do his thinking for him. Which is why he reached out to you. He respected that you didn’t rat him out to the principal.”
“I didn’t rat him out because he threatened me not to.”
“Again, this guy isn’t exactly Albert Einstein. He was also really impressed when you mouthed off to authority. He thought you were trying to toady up to him.”
Tina ducked into a bank. We were now six blocks from campus. It was a normal, everyday bank, too small for me to follow her inside without her noticing me. So I posted myself outside the window and watched as Tina stood in the teller line.
“She’s gone into a bank,” I reported.
“To do what?”
“I don’t know. She’s just waiting for the teller.”
“I don’t suppose you have a scope on you?”
“Sorry. They confiscated everything. I don’t even have a phone. I’m pretending to talk into my hand.”
“Okay. Keep an eye on her.”
“So what’d Chip have to say?” I asked.
“That he’s not the mole. Tina is.”
“And you just took his word for it?”
“Of course not. What am I, an amateur? I grilled him pretty hard. But whoever your source was got things wrong. Chip isn’t seeing Tina. He’s been investigating her.”
“And Chip was right?”
“Well, he can’t be a total idiot. After all, he got into spy school.”
And I didn’t, I thought. “What’d he have on her?”
“A good amount of evidence. Hard stuff: e-mails, photos, and such. Tons of it. I haven’t had time to go through it all, but I think he can prove she planted the bomb downstairs. Plus, he’s got some other circumstantial stuff. I’m following up on it.”
“Where? You’re breaking up.” The radio connection was weakening, interrupted by bursts of static.
“I’m in the tunnels under the Hale Building. I’ve got an idea what the enemy is up to.”
Before I could ask Erica what that was, someone grabbed me from behind.