by Stuart Gibbs
“I do.” I truly meant that. Despite my previous success on missions, I still felt as though Zoe and Mike had far better talents than I did in many areas. They might not have been as incredibly adept as Erica, but they would still have been a welcome addition as far as I was concerned. Four spies seemed far better than two. And yet . . . “It’s still going to be a long shot.”
“Thanks,” Mike said. “I mean, if I had a mission, that’d be the perfect excuse for getting out of going to Hawaii with Jemma. She couldn’t get upset at me if the fate of the free world was at stake.”
“Hold on,” Zoe said. “Are you asking to go on a top secret mission solely to get out of breaking up with Jemma?”
“Kind of,” Mike admitted.
“He’s having a Jemma dilemma,” I explained.
“Why don’t you just be a man and break up with her?” Zoe asked Mike. Which gave me the impression that Mike might have told Zoe a lot more about Jemma than he’d told me. The idea that my two best friends were bonding behind my back made me a little jealous, but then, I’d had a lot going on lately.
“It’s not that easy!” Mike protested. “But I’m working on ways to do it. Ones that will still let me look like a pretty good person. Like maybe faking my own death.”
“Mike!” Zoe gasped. “You can’t do that!”
“Sure I could. It wouldn’t even be that hard. If I go on the mission, then we could say that something went wrong and I was killed in action.”
“There are three problems with that,” Zoe pointed out. “First of all, it’s idiotic. Second, it’s a horrible thing to do. And third, Jemma isn’t even supposed to know that you’re a spy. She thinks this is a science academy.”
“Crud,” Mike grumbled. “You’re right.” Then he brightened suddenly. “Maybe I could die in a tragic science experiment!”
“No!” Zoe said so forcefully that Mike shrank away from her.
“Guys,” I said, “I’m sorry, but I really need some time to pack. And if you want me to see about getting you on the mission, then I’d better do it right away—so that you have time to pack. We’re leaving at oh-two-hundred.”
Mike and Zoe were so excited by this prospect, they practically sprang for the door.
“Sure thing!” Mike told me.
“Thanks for doing this,” Zoe said. “I really appreciate it. Sorry I got upset at you earlier.”
“No worries,” I told her, following them out the door. “I’ll go talk to Erica and let you know what Cyrus says.”
They thanked me again and hurried off to their own rooms, whispering excitedly to each other. I quickly set off in the other direction, heading for Erica’s room. I was quite sure I was on a fool’s errand, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to try. I took the stairs down a floor, cut through a small common area where a few fellow students were doing homework, and approached Erica’s room.
Instead of my simple DO NOT DISTURB sign, Erica had dozens of threats posted on her door. Most promised bodily harm to anyone who bothered her.
I was considering whether or not to risk knocking when the door opened anyhow.
Erica had apparently known I was standing there.
She yanked me into her room, cased the hall to see if anyone was watching, then shut the door and locked it.
It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that I had never been in Erica’s room. I doubted anyone else had either. Erica wasn’t much for socializing.
What I saw astonished me.
It looked completely normal. I had been expecting walls lined with weaponry. Or cold, bare walls that concealed secret rooms with walls lined with weaponry.
I had not expected posters with kittens on them. Or a baby-blue comforter on the bed. Or a plethora of throw pillows.
Erica noticed the stunned look on my face. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing!” I said quickly. “I just didn’t think that, uh . . .”
“I was human?”
“Er, that’s not quite what I . . .”
“I like kittens, okay? And throw pillows.”
“Is that a teapot?” I asked, stunned. The one I was staring at was porcelain, and it had delicate paintings of flowers on it.
“I’m half British,” Erica said curtly. “Liking tea is genetic. Also, the pot is very good for brewing antidotes for poison. In case I’ve ingested too much.”
“Too much? Don’t you mean ‘any’?”
“No,” Erica said, like I was an idiot. “You have to ingest some poison if you want to build up an immunity to it.”
“Oh. Of course.”
“You do that, right? In case SPYDER ever tries to poison you, you need to be prepared.”
“I’m working on it,” I lied. “Listen, before we go, I have a question for you.”
“The answer is no.”
“You don’t even know what the question is!”
“Is it ‘Can Mike and Zoe come with us on the mission?’ ”
“Okay,” I said. “You do know what the question is. How’d you do that?”
“I’m studying to be a spy, Ben. It’s my job to know things.”
“Do you have my room bugged?”
“We don’t have time for this,” Erica said. Which was a dodge, rather than an answer. “Murray set the parameters for this mission. Only you and I are going. That’s it. That’s what Grandpa sold to the CIA, and it’s too late to make changes now. Plus, Mike and Zoe aren’t strong enough agents yet. They’ll make this mission more dangerous, rather than less.”
“So will I.”
“True, but Murray requested you personally, so you’re going. And your friends aren’t. End of story. Now go get packed.”
I sighed in defeat and turned back to the door, knowing any further arguments would be completely ineffectual. “All right.”
“Oh, and Ben?”
“Yes?”
“If you tell anyone about the kitten posters or the throw pillows or the teapot, I’ll kill you.”
“I figured as much.” I exited into the hallway and heard Erica triple-bolt the door behind me.
In only a few hours, I was going to begin a dangerous mission to confront people who wanted me dead in a place I didn’t yet know with a double agent I didn’t trust. And now I had to give my best friends the bad news that they couldn’t come along.
In other words, it was shaping up to be a typical mission at spy school.
4
AVIATION
CIA Jet A415
Somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico
March 29
0600 hours
I was jolted awake when the jet hit an air pocket at thirty-five thousand feet. The sudden turbulence shook me so hard in my seat that my head cracked against the window.
I came to, disoriented, momentarily having forgotten where I was.
“Good morning!” Murray Hill said cheerfully. “Ready for breakfast?”
I blinked at him a few times, trying to clear my mind. Even though I had seen the new, improved Murray before, the sight of him was so disorienting that I figured I might still be dreaming. He was buckled into the seat across the aisle from me, squeezing a hand strengthener in his left hand while eating a bowl of Greek yogurt and granola with his right.
This seemed wrong on many levels:
1) Murray was awake before noon—and was alert and chipper, to boot.
2) Murray was doing exercise without anyone forcing him to at gunpoint.
3) Murray was eating granola.
Back at school, Murray had slept more than your average house cat, had the muscular conditioning of a sloth, and rarely consumed any meal, let alone breakfast, that did not have bacon in it. He had also, on many occasions, disparagingly referred to granola as “hamster food.”
Murray noticed me staring at his meal. “I know I gave this stuff a bad rap,” he said. “But I’d never actually tried it. Turns out, it’s good! And obviously, it’s way better for the bod than my old diet used to be.” He flexed
his arms, making his biceps bulge. “This is my own special blend: milled oats, compressed kale bits, and Mongolian whey, with just a hint of agave syrup for some flavor. It’s got tons of antioxidants, fiber, and riboflavin. I brought some extra if you want to try it.”
“Maybe in a bit,” I told him. What I really wanted to do was go back to sleep. We had left spy school at two a.m. on the dot, exactly as planned, then been driven to a covert CIA airstrip somewhere in the Virginia countryside. Murray was already there, locked and handcuffed in the back of a CIA sedan, as were two CIA pilots, a man and a woman, who Cyrus said we could trust. While the pilots had prepped the jet for our flight, Cyrus had frisked Murray for any weapons (he didn’t have any) and reviewed our mission with us.
The plan was simple. Murray would have the pilots fly us to wherever SPYDER was hiding out. (He still hadn’t revealed where this was, wanting to keep it a secret until we were in the air.) Once there, Erica and I would make visual confirmation of SPYDER’s presence and send the exact coordinates to Cyrus, who would mobilize a select team of agents tasked with the ambush and capture of our enemies. Erica and I were not to engage SPYDER in any way until the team arrived; instead, we were only to keep a close eye on the organization. Even so, we would still be given full credit for engineering SPYDER’s downfall.
Our only other task was to keep a close eye on Murray to make sure he didn’t escape. Although Murray had been told he’d be able to go free, he was going to be apprehended along with everyone else from SPYDER. He would go right back to jail, though he might have a few years shaved off his sentence for turning over evidence.
At 0300 hours, we had boarded the jet and taken off.
I had been exhausted, but even then I couldn’t go right to sleep, because Murray was too fired up to allow it. He was thrilled to be out of his cell and on his way to an adventure and was annoyed that I didn’t want to catch up on old times or play cards. (I did want him to tell me where we were going, but he’d refused to do that, only giving the coordinates to the pilots.) I finally had to curl into a ball and pull a blanket over my head before he got the message, and I had eventually fallen asleep.
Now that I was awake again, I checked my watch. Normally, I had an extremely accurate sense of time—it went hand in hand with my math skills—although sometimes it was off when I had just woken up.
Six a.m. I had been asleep only two and a half hours.
The jet vibrated as it hit another air pocket.
I had always dreamed of flying on a private jet. It sounded so glamorous and exciting.
It wasn’t.
This jet was owned and operated by the CIA, who appeared to have bought it secondhand, if not third- or fourthhand, possibly from someone who had used it to transport farm animals. It was quite old as private jets went, and it smelled funny. It was also much smaller than I’d expected, with only six seats in the cabin, a tiny cockpit in the front, and an even tinier bathroom at the back that reeked of septic fumes. (The cockpit was concealed behind a door that had been closed since shortly before takeoff.) The furnishings were several decades out of date. To Murray’s great disappointment, the only entertainment system was an eight-track-tape player, and there did not appear to be any tapes for it, as none had been manufactured since the 1980s. The plane rattled constantly as it flew, even when there was no turbulence, giving the unsettling impression that the wings might fall off at any moment.
The seats were the nicest thing about the plane. They were big and plush, like the recliner my father had in our TV room. They tilted back a decent amount, which had helped me sleep, and they could also swivel around so you could face the seat behind you. There were three on each side of the plane.
Erica Hale was asleep in the first row, in the chair on the right. Though I suspected she might only be pretending to be asleep. It wasn’t like Erica to drop her guard around an enemy.
Murray and I were in the second row, with Murray directly behind Erica. The third row was empty, as we were the only passengers on the plane.
I looked out the window that I had whacked my head on. The sun was peeking over the rim of the earth, turning the clouds around it an iridescent pink. Below me was a great expanse of water, although I could make out a distant fringe of land ahead of us.
I was sitting on the left side of the plane. If the sun was coming up outside my window, that meant . . .
“We’re heading south?” I asked.
“Of course,” Murray said cheerfully. “Where else are we supposed to go for spring break?”
I did some quick calculations, given what I knew about the speed of the plane, how far we would have traveled since taking off, and the direction we were heading, which—now that I thought about it—appeared to be more south-southwest than due south. “We’re way past the United States. Is that Mexico up ahead?”
“That’s my buddy Ben! Always thinking!” Murray downed a heaping spoonful of granola and yogurt and then spoke with his mouth full. He might have improved the nutritional value of his food, but his manners were still atrocious. “I can never get anything past that big old brain of yours.”
“Is SPYDER’s hideout in Mexico?”
Murray grinned, granola flecking his teeth. “I can’t just tell you. That’s no fun at all.”
I sighed and looked back out the window. The land ahead was so flat it appeared to have been planed with an enormous power sander. There wasn’t a single hill. “That’s the Yucatán peninsula.”
Murray’s eyebrows raised slightly, giving away that I was right.
I tried to see if I could provoke another reaction. “Is SPYDER in Quintana Roo?”
No response this time. Murray managed to stay completely stone-faced.
“Belize?”
Nothing.
“Guatemala? Honduras? Nicaragua?”
Nothing. Nothing. And more nothing.
“C’mon,” I groaned. “I thought you wanted to talk.”
“Yes. But not about this. You’ll see where we’re going when we get there. Thirsty?” Murray fished a bottle of acai-berry-infused water from his duffel bag and offered it to me.
“No thanks,” I said. Even though the CIA had searched everything Murray had brought on the plane, I still didn’t trust him.
“Suit yourself.” Murray cracked the bottle open and took a big gulp. “You’re missing out, though. It’s delicious—and full of priambic electrolytes.”
Something was really bugging me about Murray’s behavior. Even more than I was normally bugged by Murray’s behavior. His habitual cockiness was cranked to greater levels than usual, like he was playing a joke on me and couldn’t wait for the payoff.
“What’s going on with you?” I asked.
“I’m just excited to be going on this mission,” he said. “It’s fun to be working with you, rather than against you.”
I gave him a skeptical look. “Really?”
“Really.”
“You don’t have any tricks up your sleeve?”
“Tricks?” Murray asked innocently. “Like saying that you’ll let me go free once I lead you to SPYDER, but secretly plotting to capture me with them anyhow?”
The way he asked this caught me off guard. But I did my best to act like betraying him had never crossed my mind. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”
Murray narrowed his eyes, like he saw right through this. “Of course you wouldn’t,” he said coldly.
The plane hit another pocket of turbulence and jolted wildly. If I hadn’t been wearing my seat belt, I would have flown out of my chair. Murray lost his grip on his yogurt and granola, which shot straight up out of his hands and splatted on the ceiling.
Erica appeared to sleep soundly right through it.
There was a thump from the rear of the plane, which sounded like some luggage bouncing around, followed by a yelp, which didn’t sound anything like luggage at all.
It sounded human.
I turned toward the back of the plane, concerned.
; “Don’t get so freaked out,” Murray told me. “It’s only Zoe.”
“Zoe?” I asked, surprised.
There was another thump. And another yelp. A more masculine one.
“And that other pal of yours,” Murray added. “The one you grew up with.”
“Mike?” I exclaimed.
“They snuck aboard while Grandpa Hale was giving you guys your final orders to betray me,” Murray said, then called out, “You might as well show yourselves! We know you’re here!”
A flimsy door in the rear of the plane popped open. Mike and Zoe tumbled through it onto the floor, looking embarrassed and banged up.
Thankfully, the turbulence ended before they could get thrown around the cabin.
Erica remained sound asleep.
“Hey, guys!” Murray said cheerfully. “Grab some seats. It’s way more comfortable than hiding in the luggage compartment.”
“I’ll say,” Mike muttered, getting to his feet. “We’ve been getting bounced around in there like pinballs.” He flopped into one of the rear seats and buckled himself in.
Zoe moved slower. She couldn’t take her eyes off Murray, astonished by his transformation. “Murray? Is that really you?”
I swiveled my seat around to face them. Murray did the same thing.
“Sure it’s really me,” he said. “The new me.” He flexed for Zoe. “What do you think?”
“It looks like someone Photoshopped your head onto someone else’s body.” Zoe sank into the chair across the aisle from Mike’s and buckled her seat belt. It took her a few tries, because she couldn’t remove her gaze from Murray.
“What are you doing here?” I asked them.
“We came to help you,” Zoe said weakly.
“But you were denied permission to join this mission,” I reminded her.
“We thought that, if we ended up helping capture SPYDER, the academy might overlook the fact that we’d disobeyed orders,” Mike said.
In his defense, this was probably true. But if they failed—or screwed up the mission—they could get expelled from the academy. However, I decided not to bring this up; they were certainly well aware of it.
“How did you even get to the plane?” I asked.