The Inside Job

by Jackson Pearce

  Mission control was looking good these days. Or better, anyhow. We’d spent ages sourcing old television sets and video equipment, Frankenstein-ing computers together under Beatrix’s careful eye, and now we had a pretty decent control center. It still smelled a little like corn chips, but to be fair, most of the building did. Otter was sitting at a giant metal desk in the back of the room, poring over papers and maps and folders, while my sister and Clatterbuck—Stan Clatterbuck, to be specific, who was Beatrix and Ben’s uncle—raced around in rolling chairs. Beatrix was at the command desk, typing hurriedly on her Right Hand, her name for a device that looked like three cell phones welded together but had more computing power than anything else in the building. Ben, meanwhile, was sketching something on a legal pad, face mashed into hard, thoughtful lines.

  “What’s that?” I asked as we walked up.

  “The BENdy Straw,” Ben said triumphantly, showing me the drawing. It looked like some sort of camera device on a wire, but you never could tell with his inventions. Sometimes stuff that looked like, say, a plastic boat, wound up being a miniature flamethrower. Walter learned that the hard way, when he went to play with the aforementioned plastic boat and lost three-fourths of his eyebrows.

  “You’re going to run out of words that have ‘Ben’ in them, eventually. You know that, right?” Kennedy said, rising from her rolling chair after thoroughly trouncing Clatterbuck. She’d traded her black spy suit for a fluffy pink skirt and a shirt with a cartoon dog wearing sunglasses. Ben either ignored or didn’t hear her because he was busy writing “The BENdy Straw” across the top of the paper.

  “All right, all right—we’re all here?” Otter grumbled, like he wanted to get this meeting over with as soon as possible. Everyone gathered around the desk.

  “All right, boss man,” Clatterbuck said warmly. “What’s our next move?”

  Our. That was the thing that made life here at The League worth it, even if it wasn’t easier. SRS might have been a team, sure, but here? We were an “us.”

  Otter cleared his throat, like Clatterbuck’s enthusiasm grossed him out. “Well. I’ve gone over all the information we’ve collected. And now that we have our own security sorted out, I think it’s time we strike SRS. See if we can knock them down a little further.” He waved to some papers on the desk, like we were supposed to make sense of them. “Now, we can’t best them with manpower or artillery or influence. But what we can do is make sure they don’t get any more of these things. Which is why we’re going to hit them where it hurts. We’re taking their money.”

  We collectively blinked at Otter. Finally Beatrix said, “We’re going to rob them?”

  “We’re going to rob their bank account,” Otter corrected. He pointed to a sheet of paper—it was a printout of some fancy-looking building. “This is the Central Bank of Switzerland. It’s where SRS stores their wealth—some in cash, some in digital accounts, and some in gold bars.”

  “How much money are we talking about?” I asked curiously.

  Otter shrugged. “Between all three? Around ninety million. They have smaller accounts in Russia and Thailand, but this is their heart, money-wise. If we try anything else—stopping a mission, say, or interrupting their operations, they’ll just be able to spring right back up so long as this account exists. We’ll be playing spy Whac-A-Mole for the rest of our lives. But I happen to know the fake name they use for their bank accounts: Antonio Halfred.”

  “How do you know that?” Walter asked. “You weren’t in accounting.”

  Otter looked indignant. “I dated an agent in accounting—”

  “You dated Agent Bullwhipple?” Kennedy squealed, though I couldn’t tell if it was in horror or delight. Having once accidentally caught Agent Bullwhipple tweezing her mustache at her desk, I was particularly horrified.

  Otter slapped his notebook to calm the chatter that had erupted over the room. “My private dating life is irrelevant! My point is, we know the name. Once we’re in Switzerland, we’ll sort out how to pose as Antonio Halfred and—”

  “We’re going to Switzerland?” Beatrix shouted, and she and Kennedy jumped around in a circle together. Ben and Walter high-fived—

  “Not for vacation! We’re going for work!” Otter roared, looking like he wished he’d stayed in bed today.

  “How are we even going to get ninety million dollars back into the country?” I asked. Even though we were a government agency, we operated more or less on our own—the government, after all, didn’t want to admit to 1) having a secret spy agency or 2) the fact that there was a second secret spy agency, a bad one, that they couldn’t stop.

  Otter said, “I’m thinking that rather than sneak it back in, we just open our own Swiss bank account. Transfer the money from their account to ours.”

  “We could afford new computers!” I said, getting excited. “And to run the air-conditioning all summer without dimming the lights! We’ll be a real spy agency again!”

  “Hey!” Clatterbuck said.

  “It’ll be enough that we can bring in some real agents too,” Otter said.

  “Hey!” Walter said.

  “Come on, Walter,” I said. “Let’s be real—it’d be nice to have some actual funding here. Think about how long it took us to set up a decent security system, what with the ancient cameras and all.”

  “I was thinking about how we did set up a great security system despite the ancient cameras,” Walter said darkly, and to my surprise, Kennedy, Beatrix, and Ben all nodded in agreement. Clatterbuck was staring at the ground, since he was a little wary of confrontation, but I could tell he agreed too.

  “Seriously? Guys, we can do a lot more good if we’re not worrying about keeping the lights on,” I said.

  Kennedy spoke up. “But . . . Hale. All that money belongs to SRS.”

  “Yes. That’s why we should take it,” I said impatiently.

  “No, you don’t get it—it belongs to SRS. Which means they probably got it by doing something terrible. That money is . . . Well. It’s . . . bad,” Kennedy said. And she was right, of course—SRS made their money in some pretty terrible ways. Black market deals. Robberies. Heists. Ransom payments.

  Still, I shook my head. “Money is money. Whatever SRS did to earn it, it’s done. Besides, isn’t it better that we do something good with that money, to undo the bad?”

  “Yes. I think we should give it away. To charity,” Walter said, his voice a little uncertain.

  “Oh, good idea,” Ben said. “There’s this space camp that would be really grateful—”

  “We’re not giving away millions of dollars while we’re eating five-dollar pizzas every night,” Otter scoffed. “We’re spies, not Robin Hood and his army.”

  “Robin Hood had a gang of thieves, not an army,” Beatrix said. Otter glared, and Beatrix shrank down. The room fell into stony, uneasy silence, save the dusty whir of old computer fans. I looked at Kennedy; she was studying the owl stickers on her boots intently, which was something she did when she didn’t agree with me.

  I exhaled. Maybe they had a point, and that money was dirty—money earned stealing and hurting and destroying and conning. That didn’t make much sense to me, to be honest, but . . . well. Maybe I was thinking too much like an SRS agent. Maybe if I were a better League agent, I would agree with them more, right?

  You want to be a hero, don’t you, Hale? Like your parents? I said to myself. I closed my eyes and tried not to daydream too hard about the air-conditioning working all summer.

  “All right,” I said, exhaling. “All right—how about we get the money. We see how much it is. And then we take what we have to have to cover the basics, and everything else, we give away to that space camp.”

  “We are not giving money to a space camp!” Otter roared. His head was flushed red and purple, like a giant grape.

  “We’ll decide once we have it!” I said firmly.

  Otter stared at me, then at the others, then back at me.

  “I like Hale’s
idea,” Kennedy said.

  “Me too,” Ben answered. The others chimed in one at a time, except Clatterbuck, who seemed torn between the promise of new computers and space camp. Finally he shrugged at Otter.

  “No harm in waiting to make a choice,” he said. Clatterbuck wasn’t much of a spy, but as the only other adult in the room, his words shut down Otter’s argument in a way the rest of ours couldn’t.

  “Fine,” Otter snipped. “Fine, fine, fine. We’ll decide once we’ve got the money. Which means we have to get the money. Nine hundred hours tomorrow, everyone. We’ve got to figure out how to get to Switzerland.”

  Otter spun around and stomped out of the room, talking about “superior officers” and “subordination” and a few other s words I didn’t understand but that definitely weren’t pleasant. Kennedy and Beatrix bounded away together, and soon Ben and Clatterbuck were off to begin salvaging parts of the BENdy Straw (“Do you think it’ll be bad if we take the hoses from the sinks on the fourth floor?”), leaving me and Walter alone on the command deck.

  “Switzerland,” Walter said. “Our first foreign assignment as real agents! Are you nervous?”

  “No. You?”

  “Well, it does . . . Well. It does sort of feel like I’m stealing from my mom,” Walter said, toeing at the ground.

  “Yeah.”

  That was a pretty dumb thing to say—“Yeah”—but I didn’t know what else to say. Walter and I never talked about his mom these days. We never talked about how she was still at SRS. We never wondered if she still believed SRS were the good guys, or if she was siding with them despite knowing they were the bad guys. We never wondered if she missed Walter, and I never asked if he missed her. I never asked if he forgave her for staying at SRS. It wasn’t that I wasn’t curious about all that—I was—it was just . . . Well. I didn’t know how to start the conversation, I guess.

  So we just didn’t talk about it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Switzerland wasn’t as cold as I expected.

  I mean, you think Switzerland, you think snow, right? And there was snow—on the mountains—but Geneva itself was pretty mild, like Castlebury in early fall. It was Kennedy’s, Beatrix’s, and Ben’s first time out of the country; Walter and I had been to London with our parents when we were seven or so while they were doing some undercover work (they never told me the specifics, but I remember Mom spent a lot of time in a palace guard costume). I wouldn’t have admitted it out loud, but I was trying to play it casual, like I was unfazed by world travel, because I didn’t want to 1) draw attention to myself, 2) remind Otter how inexperienced I was, or 3) look like Clatterbuck, who was wearing a big, floppy hat and taking photos of everything from the sidewalks to the street signs.

  But despite my best attempts, I was thrown by how amazingly pretty Geneva was. Like, calendar-photo beautiful. Desktop-of-your-computer beautiful. How the Swiss didn’t just walk around, mouths hanging open, I couldn’t understand. When no one else was looking, I urged Clatterbuck to take a few photos of the place where the sky met the lake—it looked like the entire world was the same shade of bright, cartoony blue. He obliged, but then got too close and fell in the lake. The Swiss guys who fished him out said it happened all the time, but I’m pretty sure they were just being nice.

  We set about learning everything we could about the Central Bank of Switzerland. Some of the information we needed was easy enough—the guard rotations, for example, which we got by hanging around the bank building like confused tourists and cataloging each moment a guard left his shift. The floor plans were easy to get too—they were on file with the local building commissioner, and with a little hacking on Beatrix’s part, we were able to get access without arousing any suspicion.

  But the tricky part—well, the nearly impossible part—was getting SRS’s actual account number. Without the account number, we couldn’t find their vault. Breaking in and robbing the bank was impossible if we didn’t even know where in the building we were looking.

  Mission: Get SRS’s account number

  Step 1: Play dress-up

  We didn’t exactly have the money to buy designer clothing for our cover story, but luckily, The League had some fancy clothes from the 1970s in storage. They looked . . . well. I wouldn’t say they looked good, but they were expensive when they were bought and had been around long enough that the styles were vintage cool rather than outdated gross. Otter was wearing sunglasses and a suit with stripes and had slicked his hair back in a way that accentuated the bald spot on the crown of his head. Kennedy looked pretty acceptable in this weird red dress with swoopy sleeves and cheetahs running around the hem—I think it was supposed to be a short dress on an adult, but on her, it passed for a drapey long one. And me?

  The League never had kid agents like SRS did, which meant none of the clothing fit me. Ben actually knew how to work a sewing machine, given the number of fabric-related inventions he’d made, so he tried to cut down a suit for me to wear. Except the jacket turned out all wrong, which meant I was currently wearing pale green suit pants with a sort of punk T-shirt we’d found in the storage box. Beatrix called it rocker chic. I called it legs-eaten-by-a-frog chic.

  But hey, rich people always dress weird, right? And that was our cover—a rich man and his two kids. More specifically, Antonio Halfred and his two kids.

  The bank was a giant old building, the sort that had placards everywhere talking about how this wall or that painting or that ceiling was built a billion years ago. The exterior was magnificent—all bright-white marble and columns so fat that four or five people could easily hide behind one. The doors were strange and modern by comparison—automatic revolving doors that I managed to get stuck in, because of course I did.

  Inside, the ceiling stretched high above us, arching at the top, where a chandelier hung amid elaborate gold ceiling panels. There were windows created in the swoops and curves where the ceiling met the walls, which let in light that bounced happily off sleekly polished wooden floors. Straight ahead was a long row of bankers at wooden desks set behind glass, and on either end was a smattering of offices with open doors and big windows, where people typed furiously at their computers. Otter held his head high and clacked his dress shoes across the marble floor to the nearest banker. He flipped his chrome-shiny sunglasses up on top of his gel-shiny hair. The banker—a pretty girl with ultrablond hair—looked up at him and smiled.

  “Hey there,” he said in a flirty voice, and winked at the banker. I wondered if it would be impolite to throw up in the bank?

  “Hello, sir. How can I help you?” she said with a smidge of a Swiss accent and eyes that said, Nice try, man, but no.

  Otter looked a bit crestfallen for a moment, but he bounced back. “I’d like to make a deposit into my account.”

  “Of course. We’ll need your identification and account number,” said the banker—LEONIE, according to her name tag.

  Step 2: Get behind the desk

  This was my and Kennedy’s cue—to start getting bored. I exhaled, like this entire trip was just too much, and began to kick my shoes at the ground. Leonie glanced at me, but Otter had her attention again within the second.

  “Here’s my ID, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the account number and lost my deposit slips. So many banks and countries to keep track of . . .” Otter said, and fished a fake Antonio Halfred passport from his pocket. As Otter removed the passport, he let a few stubs from a nearby horse race spill across the counter—pocket litter we’d planted to subtly seal the “rich guy” cover. Leonie noticed them as she took the passport and then typed a few things into the computer. Meanwhile, Kennedy and I continued being bored, until finally I pulled out a phone and began playing a game. Kennedy, who didn’t have a phone, wandered forward, pretending to play hopscotch along the floor tiles. Leonie glanced over at her.

  “I’m in a bit of a rush,” Otter said politely. Kennedy continued to hopscotch.

  Leonie looked back to Otter. “All right, Monsieur—er, M
ister—Halfred . . . Let’s see . . . Yes, here we are. You wanted to make a deposit?”

  “Indeed, just a bit from my winnings. I won’t be able to take this back to the US without having to declare the money at customs. More trouble than it’s worth!” Otter said. Then to me, “Georgie—son, fetch your sister!”

  I groaned dramatically. And while Otter held most of Leonie’s attention, I stomped over to grab ahold of Kennedy’s arm.

  Step 3: Get a picture of the computer screen with the account number

  All I needed was a decent image of the monitor. Beatrix could blow it up later so we could read the account number. While I bickered with Kennedy quietly, I casually tilted the phone, positioning my fingers to snap the photo.

  Leonie was in the way.

  She was sitting slightly off to one side, and her shoulder was blocking the screen. I tried again, but no luck—then she glanced back at me, so I had no choice but to grab Kennedy’s arm.

  “Hey!” Kennedy whined, and we began to retreat to Otter. I made eye contact with him and shook my head quickly, letting him know we needed more time.

  “The deposit, mademoiselle?” Otter said slickly, drawing Leonie’s attention back to him.

  “Yes, Mr. Halfred—it looks like this account is flagged. Only one of my coworkers, Markus Hastings, can deal with the account.” She said Markus Hastings’s name like he was a slug or centipede or something else people pretty much universally wanted to squish.

  “You mean, you can’t help me?” Otter said, turning up the charm again. I added him to the list of things people wanted to squish.

  “No,” Leonie said politely. “Just let me give Markus a call, though. He’ll be right down.”

  Leonie picked up the phone at her desk and then ran her finger along an employee directory taped to the wood below it. She stopped her finger and then dialed. Kennedy and I were passing the desk now. I still didn’t have a clear shot of the number.