by Stuart Gibbs
One of the enemy clambered up onto a sarcophagus to avoid being flattened, leaving her rear end the perfect target, Catherine pegged her hard, and she collapsed, snoring atop the effigy of Thutmose II.
There were now only two agents left.
Despite this small victory, Catherine looked sick to her stomach as the orb careened along like an enormous bowling ball. It didn’t hit anything big, but it did glance off a rack full of Byzantine pottery, which toppled, shattering the priceless artifacts all over the floor.
The two enemy agents left made a desperate attempt to regroup and mount another attack, but we had the jump on them. Well, Erica did. She grabbed an ancient metal shield off a stand and laid out one agent with it, then chucked it like a Frisbee at the last, bonging it off his skull before he could open fire. Both bad guys collapsed to the floor, writhing in pain.
Which should have meant that there were no enemy agents left. But before we could even breathe a sigh of relief, a group of emergency-backup bad guys blasted through the same door we had entered the gallery from, armed to the teeth.
Thankfully, they were all the way across the gallery, which offered us a few seconds of reprieve. I crossed my fingers and hoped Mike’s plan would work and that my calculations were right.
The orb was gaining speed as it rolled through the gallery. It still wasn’t moving fast, but there was plenty of force behind its mass. It slammed into one of the steel plates, which crumpled like tinfoil and tore free from the doorway, creating an escape route for us.
We funneled through the hole behind it and found ourselves in the main foyer of the museum. At one point, it had been outdoors, between the two main wings of the museum, but in the year 2000 a glass ceiling had been installed over everything. Now the foyer was a large expanse of white marble floor with a café and a gift shop. Normally, at that time, it would have been full of tourists excited to get into the museum, but due to the alarms, the only people there were a few museum security guards, who had all been gathered around the steel door. Now they scattered like extras in a Godzilla movie as the orb rolled through like a juggernaut and plowed into the gift shop.
We took advantage of the chaos and raced for the main doors.
“I am dreadfully sorry about all this,” Catherine said apologetically as we ran past the guards. “Please do forgive our mess. It was a life-or-death situation.”
We charged through the remains of the flattened gift shop and barged out the exit into the plaza in front of the building. A large crowd of tourists was gathered there, unaware of what had been happening inside, impatiently waiting to get into the museum. Most seemed annoyed that it was several minutes past opening time. We quickly wound our way through them all and then fled through the streets of London. We jagged left and right through alleys and main routes until we felt convinced that we had shaken the bad guys—if they had even attempted to follow us out in public in the first place. We melted into the crowd of commuters and tourists in the theater district, then found a coffee shop that finally allowed Mike to go to the water closet. The rest of us all went too, as per Hogarth’s Theory of Fear-Based Urination.
It was only then that my heart finally stopped thumping and I felt a sense of relief. It wasn’t quite as big a sense of relief as Mike’s, but it was sizable. We had tracked down Joshua Hallal’s flash drive and eluded a horde of bad guys. True, we still had to find out what was on the drive itself and we had destroyed some ancient relics, but at least we were all alive and had scored the first strike against SPYDER.
Then I emerged from the bathroom and saw all our faces on a TV screen. The British police had just accused us of attempted art theft, declared us public enemy number one, and issued warrants for our arrest.
Suddenly, I didn’t feel relieved anymore.
My friends all showed similar reactions as they emerged from the restrooms and discovered the news.
“We need to find somewhere to lie low,” Alexander proclaimed. “And fast.”
“I know just the place,” Catherine replied.
6 SANCTUARY
Top level
Tower Bridge
March 31
1000 hours
“You have to be kidding me,” Mike said.
“It makes sense,” I told him.
“No, it doesn’t,” Zoe replied. “There’s no way this place was designed for British security. It’s a national landmark, for Pete’s sake.”
“You’d be surprised how often that turns out to be the case with national landmarks,” I said.
The national landmark in this case was the Tower Bridge of London. We were in a secret room tucked into the very highest peak of the northern tower, peering east through the windows at the city of London.
The rain had let up, but the sky was still a low ceiling of slate-gray clouds, casting the city in somber tones. On the riverbank to our left, the Shard, a pointy glass skyscraper that was the tallest building in Europe, stabbed upward, while the Tower of London squatted on the bank to our right, a thousand years older than the Shard, more or less. Several stories beneath us, the Thames River flowed sluggishly toward the North Sea.
According to Catherine Hale, the unique design of the bridge, with its twin towers and double-decker spans over the river, had nothing to do with alleviating traffic. While history books and tour guides all claimed that the purpose of the additional second span was to allow pedestrians to cross the Thames while the lower bridge was open to let boats through, Catherine insisted that was all smoke and mirrors to distract the public from the bridge’s true purpose: surveillance.
“It was commissioned in 1874,” she’d explained while carefully leading us there via a shadowy network of back alleys and decommissioned subway tunnels. “At the time, airplanes were science fiction. The true power of every nation—including London—was its navy. So if there was ever going to be an attack on this city, it would be coming up the Thames. The towers were built in order to give us a view out toward the ocean. If anyone dared to attack—most likely the French—we would have advance warning of their arrival. And we’d be able to rain bombs down on them from above.”
I was surprised by how blasé my own response to all this was. In the past year, I had been just as shocked as Mike and Zoe to discover that the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty were both secretly built for national security reasons in the United States. Now it made perfect sense to me that the British had done the same thing, however bizarre it might be.
“Think about it,” Murray said to my friends. He was slouched on a stool in the corner, eating a Cadbury chocolate bar he’d bought from a vending machine down at street level. “The whole idea that the second level of this bridge is for pedestrians is crazy. Exactly how much time would it save anyone to schlep all the way up ten flights of stairs, cross the bridge, and schlep back down again? By the time they did all that, they could have just waited for the bridge to close and saved themselves all the effort.”
Mike and Zoe considered that. “That’s actually a good point,” Zoe admitted.
“The British government couldn’t even keep selling that malarkey,” Murray went on. “They shut the upper level down in 1910 because no pedestrians were dumb enough to use it.” He wadded up a pamphlet he’d been reading and tossed it to us.
I caught it and unfolded it. It was a tourist brochure about the bridge. According to it, the upper levels of the towers had been unused until 1982, when the bridge was opened as a tourist attraction. We had seen the tourists queued up as we had snuck into a secret entrance in the base of the bridge along the bank of the Thames. The brochure showed several glossy photos of the upper span of the bridge, where there was now a glass floor that allowed tourists to look straight down at the road and the river below.
The part of the bridge that we were in appeared to have been forgotten. We had taken a hidden staircase up to it, and the steps had been thick with dust and ancient rat droppings. Now we were inside the large pyramid that topped the northern
tower of the bridge, and the furnishings around us also looked as though they hadn’t been disturbed in years, if not decades. Piles of codebooks from World War II were stacked in a corner, a map pinned to the wall showed countries that hadn’t existed since 1945, and in an old ashtray there was a stubbed-out cigar that looked as though it might have been smoked by Winston Churchill.
I had asked Catherine how she’d known about this place when no one else at MI6 seemed to. She had simply given me a sly wink and said, “Alexander’s not the only one whose family business has been espionage.”
There were actually two separate rooms inside the pyramid: the crow’s nest at the very top, where we were at the moment, with its windows that allowed us to see the surrounding area for miles; and a larger room below, which had served as a command center for British Intelligence. That was where Erica, Catherine, and Alexander were. Erica and Catherine were trying to figure out how to crack the information on Joshua Hallal’s flash drive. Alexander was pestering both of them about having kept Catherine’s true identity a secret from him for so long.
“Relationships are supposed to be built on trust,” we heard him saying through the floor.
“Please, Dad,” Erica said with a sigh. “This is not the time. We have a major crisis to deal with.”
“We do,” Alexander agreed. “It’s a crisis that our entire relationship was founded on lies.”
“I meant the fact that we’re all fugitives,” Erica said.
We had been trying to piece together what had happened by tracking the news on Alexander’s and Catherine’s phones. All the reports claimed that we had made an attempt to steal several historically significant objects at the British Museum that morning—including the Rosetta Stone—but had triggered the alarm and then destroyed some priceless artifacts during our escape. But there was no mention of our attackers or of the gunfight at all. Either Jenny Lake and her team had managed to escape unnoticed and quickly cover up every bit of evidence that they’d been there, or someone was manipulating the media. Perhaps the bad guys had moles within British Museum security—which would explain how they’d gotten into the museum in the first place. Or maybe the British Museum security was so embarrassed that they were hiding the true story themselves.
Whatever the case, we were in trouble. The British were very fond of their antiquities, and the idea that we had launched the first attempted robbery of their beloved museum in decades—and damaged many artifacts in the process—had the entire country up in arms. Every single person the news interviewed wanted us thrown in jail. A few had suggested bringing back the death penalty.
Zoe stood next to Mike at the window, looking out at the city, and said, “That was a pretty great idea you came up with to get us through the steel wall at the museum.”
“Thanks.” Mike turned to her and gave her a shy smile. “Although Ben’s really the one who worked out all the math for it.… ”
“But you were the one who came up with the plan in the first place,” Zoe said. “We were all expecting Ben to do that, but it was you. How’d you think of it?”
“Because I had to pee so badly,” Mike replied. “I was thinking about my bladder bursting, like a dam collapsing, and that triggered this flashback to the time when my brother backed my dad’s car through the garage door. So I figured maybe we could do the same thing with that giant rock. It’s a good thing I had all those sodas on the plane. Otherwise, I might never have thought of it.”
“I’m sure you would have thought of it anyhow,” Zoe said.
I wasn’t sure, but it seemed like she might have fluttered her eyelashes at him as she said this.
I went to the other side of the attic room and looked out to the windows to the east, feeling jealous.
Murray joined me there. “Looks like your buddy Mike’s moving in on Zoe,” he observed. “And she’s giving him the all clear. Are you cool with that?”
“Sure,” I said sullenly. “I’m happy for them.”
“Really?” Murray licked the remnants of his chocolate bar off his fingers. “It doesn’t look like you’re happy at all. Which is weird, because I thought you had the hots for Erica, not Zoe.”
“I don’t have the hots for anyone,” I lied, staring off at the horizon.
“Oh. Well, I guess that’s good then. Because those two are doing some serious bonding. First there’s the whole weird nerdy love of typesetting. And now they’re in major flirtation mode over this escape thing.” Murray performed an over-the-top imitation of Zoe, fluttering his eyelashes wildly. “Oh, Mike, you were sooo smart back there. I used to think Ben was the brains of this team, but now I see it’s you…Ow!” A well-aimed shoe nailed Murray in the head, and he dropped to the floor.
“You think I can’t hear you mocking me?” Zoe asked angrily. Her other shoe was in her hand, ready to be thrown at the slightest provocation. “I’m only ten feet away, you idiot.”
“I wasn’t mocking you,” Murray lied, staggering back to his feet. The tread from Zoe’s shoe was imprinted on his forehead, right between his eyes, making it look like someone had stepped on his head. “I was only practicing a fake voice, just in case.”
“How stupid do you think I am?” Zoe asked.
“Not stupid at all,” Murray said quickly, hoping to avoid another shoe to the face. “You’re the total opposite of stupid. Brilliant, even.”
“That’s right.” Zoe stormed across the room, grabbed the shoe she’d thrown off the floor, then slipped it back on her foot while she glared at Murray. “And since I’m so darn brilliant, I don’t trust you one bit. I know you’re pretending to be on the same team as us for right now, but I’ve got my eye on you. If you keep stirring the pot, the next shoe goes where the sun doesn’t shine.”
Murray gulped, aware that wasn’t an idle threat.
Zoe stormed back to the window by Mike, though she was no longer in the mood for flirting. Murray had destroyed the moment.
I didn’t trust Murray either. I suspected the same thing that Zoe did—that his comments to me had less to do with any friendly concern for me than they did with fomenting dissent between me and my friends. Most likely, Murray was trying to drive a wedge between all of us, diverting our attention from him until he saw an opportunity to get the jump on us or to flee.
But that didn’t mean he hadn’t struck a nerve with me.
As crazy as it was, I didn’t like the idea that Mike and Zoe were hitting it off at all. Only a few weeks before, I had been completely focused on Erica and upset that maybe Mike was going to steal her attention from me. (Mike was cool and handsome and had a way of winning over girls.) Then I had discovered that Zoe had liked me—and ever since I’d been increasingly confused about what to do. I was certainly still hung up on Erica—even though she’d told me there could never be anything between us, as that would jeopardize our missions. But I also found myself drawn to Zoe, realizing that she was amazing and clever and pretty. A few nights before, during our mission in Mexico, she had told me she wasn’t going to wait around forever for me to make up my mind. Now it appeared that she had already shifted her attention to Mike, which I didn’t like one bit.
It was all driving me a little crazy, distracting my attention from the mission. I wondered if that was why I hadn’t been able to figure a way out of the Egyptian gallery. Then again, maybe I simply hadn’t been thinking well under pressure. Or maybe I just wasn’t the guy who could always be counted on to come up with a solution in the midst of a crisis.
Whatever the case, I had failed while Mike had succeeded, and now Zoe’s interest in him was stronger than it had been before.
There was a sudden, piercing wail from the floor below us. We all shared a look, fearing the worst, then bolted down the rickety staircase to see what had happened. Even Murray was concerned enough to follow us.
We came down into the command center. The room was a warren of outdated spy equipment, some of which appeared to date to the days before electricity. There were dusty computer
s that still used vacuum tubes and an actual telegraph in one corner. The security system was only a few decades out of date, however: Some ancient monitors the size of filing cabinets displayed flickering black-and-white camera feeds from the stairwell we had come up.
Catherine Hale was sitting at a desk, staring at her phone in shock. Up until that point, Erica’s mother had only been incredibly calm and collected in front of me, unflappable even in the midst of beating up several enemy agents. Now, however, she was a wreck, her hair disheveled, her clothes mussed, her eyes rimmed with red.
“What’s wrong?” Mike asked.
“The queen is angry at me,” Catherine said, on the edge of tears. “She issued a statement about the British Museum and said I was a traitor to the country! Me! My whole life I’ve fought to serve England, and now I’m a stain on our history!” She broke down, sobbing into her hands.
Erica moved to her side quickly and spoke to her with a tenderness I didn’t know she was capable of. “You’re not a stain. We just need to prove our innocence.… ”
“And how are we supposed to do that?” Catherine wailed. “I’ve been disavowed as an agent! My own colleagues have turned on me! I’m public enemy number one, destroyer of priceless artifacts, the shame of my country. Every MI6 agent, policeman, and meter maid is hunting for us. If I hadn’t known about this hideout from my grandfather, we’d all be locked up in Newgate Prison by now.”
Erica slapped Joshua Hallal’s flash drive on the table in front of her. “We decode this, and then we find SPYDER and bring them down. Once we reveal what they’ve done, it will clear your name. And all of ours.”
Catherine blew her nose into a monogrammed handkerchief. “That’s a Sisyphean task and you know it. We don’t even know that SPYDER is behind this.”