Codename Zero

by Chris Rylander

  CHAPTER 16

  THE CREEPY DARK SEDAN WITH NO HEADLIGHTS DROVE DOWN my street again that night. I didn’t see how they could know that I had the package, but at the same time I didn’t know if I could afford to assume that they were just driving up and down random streets in town. Either way, it was still terrifying to see them creeping past my house.

  Not that it really mattered anymore. As Betsy had warned me after dinner, I only had twenty-three hours until she self-destructed. And I still had no idea who the package needed to be delivered to. There was no way I was just going to leave it somewhere random either. If it really did contain information that the country depended on, I couldn’t have it on my conscience to just let it self-destruct.

  I spent most of that night lying in bed replaying my conversations with the two Jensens over and over again. Trying to see if there was some look or signal that I’d missed. Something that would give me some hope that one of them was the intended recipient of the package.

  But it was sort of hard because I’d gotten a lot of weird looks from both of them. From their perspectives I must have sounded crazy. Maybe I was crazy? Maybe this thing was still a hoax after all? Some hugely elaborate prank orchestrated by Dillon and Danielle?

  It was this surprisingly disappointing idea that finally put me to sleep. I mean, if that was actually the truth, then it should have made me happy because then the pressure of having the fate of the country in my hands would be off my shoulders. But it also would mean that things would go back to normal.

  But it didn’t matter. Reality woke me the next morning in the form of Betsy’s voice.

  “You now have twelve hours and forty-five minutes to initiate fail-safe measures before self-destruction.”

  As I was brushing my teeth that morning, I decided I just needed to take action. I simply couldn’t be in possession of Betsy when her countdown hit zero. I couldn’t be responsible for failing to carry out one little task and bringing doom to the whole country. I would have to just pick the most likely Jensen and give Betsy to him. That would be that. And even if that meant I’d have to go back to days so predictable that I could almost write them out every morning before they even happened, well, then so be it.

  I synched my watch to the timer like the day before, put Betsy in my bag like the day before, and then got on the bus to go to school like the day before. The difference was this time I would not be coming home with the device still in my bag.

  Olek sat next to me on the bus again. I didn’t even consider stopping him. I kind of liked him, despite the fact that he always smelled like dry milk and cardboard. He made me laugh, and a good laugh here or there is just what a guy needs sometimes.

  “Ah, hello, you again,” he said, sitting down.

  “Hey, Olek,” I said.

  “Ah!” he yelled. “You say my name right!”

  I smiled and nodded. There weren’t exactly a lot of foreign people in North Dakota, and so the few who did live here had their names mispronounced constantly. I had a teacher once who kept calling Jesus (pronounced Hey-Seuss) Jeez-us all year long even though he corrected her every time she said it wrong during that first month. Eventually, he just gave up. But that’s North Dakota for you. I mean, Jesus isn’t even a hard name to say.

  I peeked at my watch. Seven minutes until the next warning.

  “You sing song again?” Olek asked.

  “Actually, yes.”

  “Good, I help you,” he said. “Only, I sing song from my country.”

  “A Jimmy Buffett song?”

  “Yes, of course! You hear how magical his songs are. Like unicorn horn!”

  “Awesome, thanks!” I managed to say while laughing. “Yeah, sing it as loud as you can.”

  “Now?”

  “I’ll tell you when,” I said.

  Olek nodded and grinned even wider. I was really starting to like this kid. If this whole package situation didn’t result in my arrest or the collapse of the whole country, I was thinking it wouldn’t be so bad to hang out with him more often. Kind of like Dillon, I could see him bringing something unexpected to each day. Although, to be fair, I’d gotten so used to Dillon’s theories that even those seemed like a predictable routine these days.

  “Want see something cool?” Olek asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  He opened his backpack and showed me an old black boot. It was like a work boot with a steel toe. It was dirty and old.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “You never see shoe before?” he asked.

  “No, I just . . . I mean, why is it in your bag, Olek?”

  “I find it outside in street today. Crazy, yeah? I mean, who throw away perfectly good shoe!”

  “I don’t know that I would call it perfectly good,” I said.

  “Why, what wrong with it? Has it some defect that I not see?” He inspected the boot closely, turning it over in his hands.

  I laughed and then he grinned at me but continued to examine the boot.

  “Please, show me where defect exists,” he said, holding out the old boot.

  “I was kidding. It’s a perfectly good boot,” I said.

  “Yes, this what I think also. In my country, this find does not exist. Nobody throw away perfectly good shoe. But here, what they say, some man’s old trash can contain some other man’s money satchel?”

  “You mean, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure?” I offered.

  “Yes, this what I say,” Olek said.

  I checked my watch. I’d almost forgotten.

  “Anyway, are you ready to sing?” I said.

  Olek nodded.

  “Okay, start singing in three, two, one . . .”

  CHAPTER 17

  WHEN WE GOT TO SCHOOL THAT MORNING, I SAW TALL JENSEN with a football tucked under one arm standing by the front entrance. It had to be a sign. I mean, it was pretty unusual. He’d never before been assigned morning door-monitoring duty since I’d started going to school here last year. Then I was even more surprised when he held up the football and motioned toward me with it.

  I gave him a questioning look and he waved me over. This was about more than just him wanting to say hi to me randomly or something. This had to be about Betsy.

  “Hey,” I said as I walked up to him.

  “Just the guy I wanted to see,” he said.

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “Look, I owe you an apology. I probably shouldn’t have called you weird like I did yesterday. That was uncalled for.”

  “It’s okay, Mr. Jensen,” I said. “I was acting a little weird.”

  “Listen, what I mean to say is that if you want to try out for the team next year, then by all means go for it. Even if you want to be quarterback because you like to deliver stuff or whatever, I shouldn’t discourage you. That is, whatever reason you have for wanting to try out for the team is okay. It doesn’t matter. Even if you end up being terrible, we can always use more bodies for the starters to knock around in practice.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said.

  “That was a joke,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Well, thanks, Mr. Jensen. I’ll keep that in mind next year.”

  “All right, good deal. Have a nice day, Carson,” he said.

  “Uh, thanks,” I said, and walked past him and into the school.

  That was it. It had to be. That was his signal to me that he was the guy I was looking for after all. There was no other explanation. I mean, from what I knew of him, Tall Jensen wasn’t exactly the sort of guy who tracked down kids to make apologies for something so insignificant. All he’d done the day before is call me out when I’d acted like a complete weirdo.

  So that’s why, right after I entered the building, before I even went to my locker, I made a quick stop at Tall Jensen’s classroom. His door was open and the lights were on, but the room was empty. I knew that he’d show up before too long, though. After the buses all made their drop-offs, he’d leave the front door and m
ake a quick pit stop at the teachers’ lounge before heading back here to his classroom. Teachers always made stops at the teachers’ lounge whenever they could, probably to get coffee or cry or fistfight one another or do who knows what. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he’d be back shortly and that meant I could just ditch Betsy here and now and take off without having to explain anything further.

  I took Betsy out of my bag and put it on his desk. I turned to leave but then considered that some of his students might show up before he got here. They might get curious as to what the strange black box on their teacher’s desk was. So I went back and moved Betsy to his chair, which I then pushed all the way in to the desk.

  As I was walking away, I heard Betsy’s voice for what I hoped would be the last time:

  “You now have ten hours to initiate fail-safe measures before self-destruction.”

  I basically sprinted out of his classroom and to my locker. And then it was suddenly over.

  Just like that.

  And even though I was relieved to finally get rid of Betsy, part of me was sort of bummed that it was all over. I mean, for the past day I had been involved in some crazy spy plot. For real! And now, things were suddenly back to normal.

  Compared to the last few days, the rest of that day was about as boring as you can get. Well, except for at lunch when Dillon tried to convince us that bananas were actually extinct. He said that real bananas went extinct in the 1950s and the ones we’ve all been eating were genetically manufactured replicas or something. He also said that they were putting stuff in the bananas that made people fart because they don’t want banana lovers to be able to breed easily.

  “What?” Danielle shouted.

  “Yeah, that’s a stretch even for you,” I said. “Who’s the ‘they’ this time, anyway?”

  “The 1988 Olympic US hockey team,” he said. “Obviously.”

  I’d laughed so hard that I almost choked on a green bean.

  Even detention felt extra boring later that day. It’s never terrible; it’s not exactly torture or anything. But it was always pretty boring. You weren’t allowed to read or play games on your phone or anything like that. You were given two options: (1) do homework or (2) sit there quietly. But now it felt even more boring than usual, knowing that there wasn’t a top secret package that I needed to covertly deliver to a spy afterward.

  By the time detention ended there usually weren’t too many kids left wandering the halls because after-school activities were either over or still going on in some room or practice field somewhere. I got my backpack from my locker and then headed out the side entrance, hoping to be able to catch the late bus home so I wouldn’t have to walk.

  It left usually within a few minutes of detention ending, so some days I caught it and some days I didn’t. I rounded the corner that day just in time to see it pulling away from the curb, its double exhaust pipes blasting gray fumes behind it as if to rub it in my face.

  I sighed and walked back around behind the school, the shortest route to my house. I’d only just turned off school property when I saw the men with suits standing on the sidewalk, right in my path.

  There were two of them. Black suits, black ties, black sunglasses.

  “Howdy,” one of them said.

  Howdy? Where did he think we were, Deadwood?

  “Hey,” I said and kept walking toward them, pretending that there was nothing at all unusual about two guys wearing suits standing outside of a school in Middle-of-Nowhere, North Dakota.

  “You seen a kid around here?” the other guy asked.

  I was only a few feet away now and I saw that their faces were both glistening with sweat. As if they’d been standing outside in the sun all day. There was something familiar about them, even as generic as they looked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Lots of them. It’s a school.”

  The one on my left clenched his fists by his sides. The one on the right crouched down so he was at my level and then took off his sunglasses. As soon as he did, I realized why he’d looked so familiar. He was one of the guys I’d seen abducting the dude who had given me the package. I hadn’t recognized him because his face wasn’t nearly as pasty as it had been on that day. But I recognized his eyes immediately. This was the same guy who I could’ve sworn had looked right at me before they all piled into the unmarked sedan and drove off.

  “We’re looking for one particular kid,” he said. “He’s probably about this tall and has dark hair.”

  He held his hand in the air to vaguely show me the kid’s height.

  “Probably?” I said.

  He looked at the other guy, who merely shrugged. Then he turned back to me.

  “Yeah, probably this tall. What do I look like, a tape measure?” he said. He had a slight southern accent. “Look, kid, we just want to talk to him.”

  Even if I hadn’t recognized him from a couple of days ago, I’d know that he was likely up to no good. I had no idea who he was looking for, but I definitely wasn’t going to help find him, that was for sure.

  “Well, mister,” I said, “that describes like a hundred kids here. Sorry I can’t help more.”

  That’s when it occurred to me that I might be the kid they were looking for. I sort of fit that description, after all, even as vague as it was. Were they looking for the kid who they saw talking to that guy right before they grabbed him? Were they looking for me to get to the package? I swallowed and tried to look like a totally oblivious kid with no worries in the world.

  I started past them and I thought for sure that they would stop me, but they just looked at each other again and then stepped aside and let me pass. I wanted to look back to make sure one of them didn’t have a gun trained to my head or something, but decided it was safer to just keep walking.

  “Hey, kid,” one of them said after a few steps.

  I turned around to face him.

  “You be careful,” he said.

  A shiver went up my spine. I tried not to let it show. I gave him a nod and kept walking. After maybe twenty feet or so, I heard one of them say something to the other.

  “Hey, what about that kid? He’s alone, too.”

  I glanced back. One of them was pointing just past me toward some Dumpsters attached to the school’s rear parking lot. They started walking in that direction just as a kid darted out from behind a Dumpster and started running away.

  It was Olek.

  He looked terrified. The pure panic on his face was enough to tie my stomach in a knot.

  The two guys had been walking calmly, but when they saw Olek start to run, they broke into a run as well. Within seconds they were about to rush past me.

  I didn’t even think about what I did next. Had I had the time to debate the pros and cons of it, I might have decided it was stupid. Or maybe I would have done it anyway. Maybe, just like everything else that had happened lately, I’d have been faced with two options: (1) get involved even deeper into something bigger than I ever could have imagined could exist in this town or (2) ignore it all and go on my way and go right back to my boring, single-track life.

  But it didn’t matter, because instinct kicked in before I even had a chance to consider all that. The look on Olek’s face had been enough to convince me that these two guys weren’t chasing him so they could treat him to ice cream and a movie. Let alone the fact that I’d seen these same guys abduct some other guy a few days ago.

  So I took off my backpack. Even without Betsy, it was still pretty heavy due to the textbooks inside. Just as the two guys were passing me, I heaved my bag at their knees.

  It crashed directly into one of the guys’ shins, taking his feet out right from underneath him. The bag didn’t even hit the other guy, but he got pulled down by his partner’s desperate flailing. They both crashed onto the pavement pretty hard.

  I dived in before they could collect themselves, grabbed my bag, and sprinted toward Olek. He had stopped running when he saw them fall and was just watching us.

>   “Go!” I shouted.

  He stayed frozen for a few more moments but then snapped out of it and started running. I caught him and then motioned for us to head back toward the school.

  “This way,” I panted.

  He nodded and followed me.

  I glanced back and saw the two guys getting to their feet. One of them had a trickle of blood running from his forehead down onto his white shirt. They saw us running back toward the school and followed.

  “Oh, crap, faster, Olek,” I said, through heavy breaths.

  “Me? I go slow for you, friend,” he said, barely even breathing hard. He started running faster, getting ahead of me by a few feet.

  “Go right,” I yelled as we approached the school.

  He listened and veered right. We ran alongside the back of the building. I could hear our pursuers’ black dress shoes clomping on the pavement behind us. They were gaining pretty quickly.

  “Quick, in here,” I said, motioning toward the school’s back door.

  I was pretty sure they wouldn‘t follow us inside. Even if they were up to no good, chasing down a couple of kids inside of a school was not a good way to remain inconspicuous. I could only hope that the door was still unlocked. It was supposed to have been locked fifteen minutes ago, but our janitor never did things like that on time. It was a pretty safe town. Most people didn’t even lock the doors to their own houses every day, so nobody really noticed much if the school doors weren’t locked on a strict schedule.

  I grabbed the door and pulled. It opened.

  “Come on,” I said to Olek, and we went inside.

  The hallway was deserted. I turned around and saw the two men standing just outside the double glass doors, looking unsure of what to do. They glanced at each other, exchanged a few words, and then the one with the head wound reached out and opened the door.

  “They are still coming,” Olek said in a panicked voice.

  I turned to run and that’s when I saw the janitor standing there behind us.

  “What are you kids doing?” he asked. “You have a club or something to get to, or were you just leaving? I need to lock these doors.”