by Ally Carter
"So there could be other schools?" Tina exclaimed.
"Could and are, Ms. Walters," Buckingham said, her voice as strong as steel, "are two very different things." She gave us a cold smile that signaled that the Q&A portion of the program was officially over.
Buckingham went back to her notes. "This theory was the fashion until 1953, when a group of retired agents…" Eva and Tina's attention drifted back out the window. But my roommates and I remained on high alert.
There have been other schools.
It doesn't mean there are any now.
I thought of the way Mr. Solomon and my dad had been smiling in the picture. There was no date on it, no place. It was almost like it was a fake—part of some legend the CIA had manufactured in a lab, an alias of my father's that I had never known.
And then there was a knock at the door.
"Yes?" Buckingham said as she removed her glasses and the door eased open.
Every head in the room turned, and Mr. Solomon said, "Pop quiz."
I hadn't exactly slept. I hadn't really eaten. It was maybe the worst possible time for a CoveOps assignment, and yet, three minutes later, as I buttoned my winter coat and ran down the Grand Staircase with the entire sophomore CoveOps class, I stopped thinking about the picture and the file. I stopped thinking. And sometimes, even at the Gallagher Academy, that can be a very good thing.
The cold wind blew in our faces as we dashed through the front doors. A familiar van sat idling in the driveway, so we headed toward it until Mr. Solomon called, "That's not our ride, ladies," and eight highly trained operatives skidded to a stop.
I looked to my right, expecting another van to appear from around the corner of the mansion, but all I saw were eighth graders on their way to Protection & Enforcement class (P&E), their ponytails swaying back and forth as they ran. I turned to my left and saw nothing but snow in the vast open field that lay between the mansion and the woods.
"Then how are we …" I started, but then I trailed off. Bright sunlight bounced off slushy piles of half-melted snow. I squinted and blinked, making sure my eyes weren't playing tricks on me, because I could have sworn the ground's shape began to shift.
I glanced at my teacher, saw the faintest hint of a smile grow on his lips while, behind him, a great hollow opening appeared in the middle of the field. Twin blades of a helicopter rose steadily from the huge hole, and wet snow whirled over the frozen ground as the blades started to spin. Mr. Solomon pointed over his shoulder and said, "That's our ride."
Chapter Seven
When I was five, Mom brought me to the Gallagher Academy for the first time. I'd thought it was the biggest building in the world; but today I looked through the helicopter's windows and watched the mansion grow smaller and smaller until it looked like it was in a snow globe that someone had given a good shake.
We flew so low over the woods that I could almost touch the trees. I thought about how my school had taught me chemistry and biology and even a very real appreciation for calligraphy. But helicopters were completely new territory! Was there going to be jumping? Or rappelling? (Hello—our uniforms have skirts.)
I don't know if it was turbulence, nerves, or the sight of the blindfolds in Mr. Solomon's hands, but my stomach did a little flip.
"I'm afraid this isn't a sightseeing tour, ladies," Mr. Solomon said as he cinched the bands over our eyes. "If I were you, I'd get comfortable. We're gonna be up here a while."
Well, it turns out "a while" is exactly forty-seven minutes and forty-two seconds, because that's how long it was until I felt the helicopter's quick descent. During that time, Mr. Solomon had warned "No peeking, Ms. Walters" twice, but other than that and Bex's snoring (she can sleep anywhere!), there wasn't a single sound on our mysterious ride.
I had no idea how fast we'd been going, or in what direction. All I knew was that we'd been in the air for almost forty-eight minutes and I really had to go to the bathroom.
We touched down. I heard the helicopter doors open, then someone guided me out onto concrete and into a waiting van. Soon we were off again. Destination unknown.
I smelled Bex's perfume beside me and drew some small comfort in the familiar scent.
"Blindfolds off," Mr. Solomon said.
I tugged at the black band that circled my head, and soon I was squinting, trying to adjust to the light, the situation, and most of all, the sight of seven Gallagher Girls with very questionable hair. Static electricity filled the van. Eva's long black mane was practically standing on end. But I was riveted by the state-of-the-art equipment that lined the windowless walls. Gadgets two generations better than anything we'd ever had were at our fingertips. I didn't need Joe Solomon to say, "Today we're playing with the pros, ladies" to know that it was true.
Mr. Solomon turned to Courtney. "Countersurveillance has three functions, Ms. Bauer, name them."
"Detect and evade surveillance procedures?" Courtney said, her answer sounding more like a question than a direct quote from page twenty-nine of A Covert Operative's Guide to Surveillance Countermeasures.
"That's right," Mr. Solomon said. He didn't smile. He didn't say good job. Instead, he looked at the screens that filled the walls of the van, the wires and keyboards that were locked carefully into place. "It's a big world, ladies, but that doesn't make it easy to hide. If you stay on this course of study, you'd better be ready to look over your shoulders for the rest of your lives.
"Countersurveillance isn't something you learn from a book—it's not about theory," Solomon continued. "It's about the prickly feeling on the back of your neck, the little voice in your head that tells you when something isn't quite right." The van came to stop.
"Last semester, some of you"—he looked directly at me—"proved that you're pretty good at not being seen when you don't want to be. Well, today you go from being tailers to tailees. And, ladies…" Mr. Solomon paused. My classmates were so still, so quiet, I could almost hear our pounding hearts. "…this is harder."
I thought about our first mission last semester, how Mr. Smith had used every countersurveillance measure known to man simply to enjoy a night in the Roseville town square. It had been exhausting just watching him, and I knew Mr. Solomon was right. The bad guys could be anyone, they could be anywhere, and the odds would always be in their favor.
"Split up into four teams of two—and remember— I don't know exactly how many operatives are out there waiting today, ladies, but if they're good—and you should assume they're very, very good—then it will take every trick you know and every ounce of luck you can muster to identify them and lose them and make it to this location before five o'clock." He pulled an envelope from his coat pocket and placed it in Tina's hands.
He eased toward the back doors of the van. "Oh, and ladies, surveillance might help you do your job, but countersurveillance keeps you alive. If this Op is hard"—Mr. Solomon's voice trailed off, and for a second he wasn't just a teacher, he was my father's friend—"it's supposed to be."
The doors swung open, bright sunlight streamed inside, and by the time we heard the heavy metal clank of the doors again, Joe Solomon was already gone.
We could have flown two hundred miles, or we could have gone in circles and were now back in our school's driveway, twenty feet from where it had all began. Anything was possible, but one thing was sure: this quiz wasn't about grades—nothing at the Gallagher Academy ever really is.
"Do it, Cammie," Bex said. I eased toward the doors and opened one a crack.
A sliver of bright light sliced through the dim van as I peered outside and let my eyes adjust to what I saw. "It's the Mall."
"Cool," Bex said, sliding toward me.
I threw the door open wider. "Not that kind of mall."
Chapter Eight
We crawled, one by one, out of the back of the van and stood for a long time, staring down the grassy promenade that ran between the Washington Monument and the United States Capitol, the heart of Washington, D.C. A lot of people think the Smith
sonian is a museum, but it's actually a lot of different museums, and right then we were in the center of them all. We could have gone to see everything from the U.S. Constitution to Fonzie's leather jacket, but somehow I knew that, of all the school groups that take field trips to the National Mall every year, ours was very different.
A man in black stretched his hamstrings on a bench before taking off in a jog. A long line of women wearing matching sweatshirts that said "Louisville Ladies do D.C." milled in front of a Metro stop. And I couldn't help thinking, Oh, Mr. Solomon is good.
After all, he'd been telling us for weeks that surveillance is all about home-court advantage, and that the more limited a location's access is to the public, the easier it will be to see someone who doesn't belong; but that day, Joe Solomon had brought us to a place where tourists converge from all over the world, a place that's home to everyone from panhandlers to politicians (Macey, by the way, swears there isn't much difference). And before I knew it, Kim was saying exactly what I was already thinking.
"We're being watched…"
"By friends of Mr. Solomon's," Mick Morrison added with a crack of her knuckles.
"And they could be…" Anna started, but her voice broke and she swallowed hard.
"Anyone," Bex finished, her voice as excited as Anna's was terrified.
Beside me, Tina was opening the envelope Mr. Solomon had given her.
"What?" Bex asked. "What does it say?"
Tina held up a folded brochure from the National Museum of American History and pointed to a picture of a tiny pair of bright red shoes. There was a message scrawled across it:
There's no place like home.
5:00
Well, the girl in me has seen The Wizard of Oz approximately one billion times, so I knew that Dorothy's ruby slippers must be on the other side of the grassy lawn with the rest of our national treasures.
But the spy in me knew that getting there, tail-free, by five o'clock would be a whole lot harder than clicking our heels together and wishing for home.
"And…flip," Bex said an hour later.
We stopped midstride in front of the museum, then pivoted and started back in the opposite direction. The guy in the red baseball cap who had been following us since we passed the National Gallery of Art kept walking as if he didn't care that the two girls in front of him had just done a total about-face. And maybe he didn't. Care, I mean. But then again, maybe another member of his team had rotated into position and taken his place. There was no way to know. So we kept walking.
"We could be clear," Bex said, sounding wishful. "There might not be anyone on us."
"Or maybe there's a team of twenty CIA all-stars out here, and we're just not good enough to see them."
"Yeah," Bex said. "There's that, too."
I love being a pavement artist; seriously, I do. It's like when guys who would normally hate being freakishly tall discover basketball, or when girls with abnormally long fingers sit down at a piano. Blending in, going unseen, being a shadow in the sun is what I'm good at. Seeing the shadows, it turns out, is not my natural gift.
"I can't believe I haven't seen anyone!" I said in frustration.
"Look at the bright side, Cam." Bex flung her arms out wide like a girl who'd cut class or run away from a school group. To the people around us, she no doubt looked beautiful and exotic—but not at all like a highly trained operative who was memorizing the faces of every person who lingered within a hundred feet.
"We could be in Ancient Languages right now," she said, which was a very good point. "We could be locked in the basement with Dr. Fibs." Which was an excellent point. (Since the X-ray goggles incident, our chemistry professor's lack of depth perception had made him even more accident-prone.) "And here the view is infinitely better."
I wish I could say she was talking about the Washington Monument or the Capitol or any of the sights that drive tourists to D.C. But I know Bex well enough to know she was really talking about a pair of boys who were sitting on a park bench thirty feet away, staring at her.
"Oooh," Bex said, throwing an arm around my shoulders. "I want one."
"They're not puppies."
"Come on." She grabbed my hand. "Let's go talk to them. They're really cute!"
And … okay … I admit it: they were really cute. But this wasn't the time to encourage her. "Bex, we have a mission."
"Yeah, but we can multitask."
"No, Bex. Talking to civilian boys during a CoveOps exercise is a bad idea. Trust me." I forced a smile and added a singsong lilt to my voice as I said, "It's all fun and games until somebody gets their memory erased."
"Wow," Bex said. She blinked against the sun. "You're really …"
"What?" At that moment I knew there were at least nineteen security cameras trained on our path. I knew the Japanese man behind us was asking his wife if she still wanted a T-shirt from the Hard Rock Cafe. I knew a lot of things, but I didn't have a clue what my best friend was trying to say.
"I'm really what?" I asked again.
Bex glanced away, then back, and for one of the bravest people I know, she seemed almost afraid to say, "Not over Josh."
Josh. We'd been back at school for more than a week, but so far no one had said his name. And hearing it, to be honest, sounded strange.
"Of course I'm over him." I shrugged and started walking, scanning the crowd. "I broke up with him. Remember? It wasn't a big deal."
Bex fell into step beside me. Her voice was almost timid as she said, "You don't have to pretend, Cam."
But that's what spies do—we pretend. We have aliases and disguises and go to great lengths to not be ourselves. So I said, "Of course I'm over him," and walked on, clinging to my cover till the end.
Bex probably would have argued with me; I'm sure she would have pointed out that Josh had been my first boyfriend, my first kiss; that he had seen me when to the rest of the world I was invisible, and that's not the kind of thing a girl—much less a spy—forgets so quickly. Knowing Bex, she probably would have pointed out a lot of things; but at that very moment… twenty feet ahead of us … we saw a woman in a beige business suit sitting on a bench, talking on a cell phone. There was nothing unusual about her—not her hair, not her face. Nothing except for the fact that fifty minutes before, she'd been wearing a jogging suit and pushing a baby stroller.
"Bex," I said as calmly as possible.
"I see her," Bex replied.
Here's the thing you need to know about detecting and losing a tail: to do it right—I mean really right—you'd need to cover half a city. You'd climb in and out of cabs and train cars and walk against the grain on at least a dozen busy sidewalks. You'd take all day.
But Mr. Solomon hadn't given us all day, and that was kind of the point. So Bex and I spent the next hour going in one museum entrance and out another. Going up escalators only to come down the elevator two minutes later. We made sudden stops and looked in mirrors and tied our shoelaces when they didn't need it. It was a virtual blur of corner-clearing and litter-dropping—everything I've ever seen, everything I've ever even heard of! (At one point Bex had almost talked me into crawling out the bathroom window in the Air and Space Museum, but a U.S. Marshal walked by and we decided not to press our luck.)
The seconds ticked by and the sun went lower, and soon the shadow of the Washington Monument was stretched almost the full length of the Mall. Time was running out.
"Tina," I said through my comms unit, "how are you and Anna?" But I was met with empty silence. "Mick," I said. "Are you there?"
Bex and I shared a worried glance, because there are reasons operatives go radio-silent, and most of them are not good.
We were cutting across the Mall, walking north, hoping anyone who wasn't intentionally following us would stick to the path.
"Forty-seven minutes," I announced, as if Bex weren't fully aware of that fact.
She turned around to glance at a man walking too fast behind us, and I didn't know whether to take it as an insult o
r a compliment that a team of CIA pros didn't care if they stood out anymore. They just wanted to stay with us.
When a crowd of girls filled the sidewalk in front of us and started down the long, steep escalator to the Metro station below, I looked at Bex. "Do it!" she said, and we merged into the crowd. The girls were wearing white blouses almost exactly like ours. Their name badges bore a logo from something called Mock Supreme Court, They were almost identical to us from the waist up, so Bex and I slipped off our coats as we descended into the cavernous, echoing station.
"I love your bracelet!" I said to the brunette next to me, because, while most girls are on to the whole strangers-with-candy thing, the strangers-with-compliments strategy is still remarkably effective.
"Thanks!" said the girl, who, according to her badge, was Whitney from Dallas. "Hey, are y'all with the group?"
"Yeah," Bex said. Then she looked down at her chest. "Oh my gosh! I left my name tag in my senator's office—we took them off to have our picture taken," she explained.
"Really?" another girl said. "That's cool. Who's your senator?"
And then Bex and I each said the first name that popped into our heads: "McHenry."
We looked at each other and shared a very subtle laugh as the escalator carried us deeper and deeper beneath the city.
One of the girls, Kaitlin with a K, whispered to another girl, Caitlin with a C, "Are they back there?"
C peered back up the escalator, then grinned. "They are so following us!"
Bex and I might have exuded a panicked vibe about then, because K leaned in to explain, "These two hot guys have totally been checking us out."