by Stuart Gibbs
“Of course they are,” Erica said confidently. “Who else would want the information on that flash drive so badly?”
“A rival criminal organization looking to take SPYDER down,” Zoe suggested. “If all of SPYDER’s most important secrets are on that drive, their enemies could destroy them with that information.” She looked to Murray. “I assume a scumbucket like you knows a few groups it could be.”
Murray nodded knowingly. “CRUSH and SKORPION have never liked SPYDER much, though I’d put my money on ITGA. They’re about as evil as people get.”
“ITGA?” Alexander asked curiously.
“Yes. The International Tulip Growers Association.”
“Um… ,” Mike said. “That doesn’t sound very evil.”
“That’s the whole point,” Murray said. “It’s a front. If they called themselves the International Association of Evil People Who Commit Crimes for a Living, the good guys would have caught on right away.”
Alexander gasped in shock. “Are you telling me that every tulip grower in the world is part of an international criminal consortium?”
“No,” Murray explained patiently. “The legit growers are part of ITFA, the International Tulip Farming Association. From what I understand, they’re a lovely group of people, mostly Dutch. Although I wouldn’t mess with the International Daisy Farmers Association if I were you.”
“Are they also a front for evil?” I asked.
“No,” Murray said. “Daisy farmers are just jerks.”
“The point is,” Zoe said, before Murray could go on, “maybe your ex-girlfriend Jenny has joined up with one of those groups. And they’re looking to get their hands on that drive before SPYDER can get it. It’s possible that SPYDER might not even know that drive exists.”
“SPYDER knows everything,” Erica said dismissively. “They’re definitely the ones who attacked us today. What other organization would have the ability to launch an assault on us in the British Museum and then manipulate the police and the media to make them think we were behind it?”
“It doesn’t matter who’s behind it,” Catherine said bitterly. “The sad fact is, they’ve hung us out to dry. We can’t crack that flash drive: there’s a level-seventeen trapdoor retrovirus built into it that fries any device we try to access it with, and no doubt, even if we could access it, the information will be encrypted. It’d take an entire team of cryptographers to break that, and I’m sure the gang at MI6 doesn’t feel like helping me right now.”
“Then we find someone else who can break it,” Erica said calmly. “A world-class hacker. There’s ten million people in this city. Surely there must be someone who can deal with this. Possibly even the person who encoded it in the first place. I know Joshua doesn’t have the skills to build an encryption system like this. So he must have outsourced it to someone.”
Erica’s surprisingly caring demeanor seemed to make Catherine feel a little better. Catherine pulled herself together, picked up the flash drive, and examined it closely. “There is someone here in England. I suppose this could even be his handiwork. He goes by the name Orion. But there’s no way we could get him to look at this.”
“Why not?” I asked.
Before Catherine could answer me, an alarm went off. It was a very old alarm, and it hadn’t sounded in so long that the equipment had decayed badly. Instead of sounding like a warning Klaxon, it sounded more like an inebriated goose.
We all turned our attention to the security monitors. A phalanx of British agents in riot gear was charging up the stairs.
“Oh, nuts,” I said sadly.
MI6 had tracked us down.
7 DEFENSIVE DRIVING
Tower Bridge
London, England
March 31
1030 hours
“Follow me!” Catherine Hale pocketed the flash drive and leapt to her feet.
Instead of heading down the staircase that we had come up to get to the secret rooms—which would have led us straight into the horde of MI6 officers—she twisted a coat hook on the wall. There was the pained groan of neglected machinery, and then the room shuddered so hard that a shelf full of dusty codebooks collapsed. A section of the wall popped open with a gasp of musty air, revealing a secret exit.
We threw all the locks on the door to the stairwell, then filed out the secret exit behind Catherine. This led us down a rusty maintenance staircase and into a large room for tourists that gave the history of the bridge—minus the espionage angle. While the tourists had accessed this level via a relatively new bank of elevators, there was also an official stairwell. Zoe, Mike, and I headed toward it, but Catherine cut us off.
“Not that way,” she warned. “MI6 will have men stationed at the base. We’ll need to use the emergency escape.” With that, she led the way onto the pedestrian bridge toward the tower on the far side of the river.
There were actually two parallel bridges at this level, each with a glass floor. Bridge museum officials staggered the entrance times to each to alleviate crowds; the line to the right was cordoned off at the moment, meaning there were significantly fewer people in it, save for a small group of teenagers in school uniforms on a field trip at the far end. We tossed aside the cordon, ignoring the protests of the pasty young museum guide who worked there, and charged across the river. The guide chased after us, yelling, “Hey! No cutting the queue! Get back here and behave like decent humans!”
If we hadn’t been fleeing for our freedom, it probably would have been fun to stop and look down through our feet. The schoolkids at the far end of the passage certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves, gasping and giggling at the vertiginous view. As it was, I had time for only a fleeting glance, allowing me to note that the pedestrian bridge we were on was actually spread wider than the traffic bridge below. If you were on one side, cars and double-decker buses were passing beneath us, but on the other, it was a ten-story drop down into the turbid river below.
We were halfway across the bridge when the schoolkids stopped gawking at the scenery, snapped guns from holsters concealed beneath their Eton jackets, and aimed them our way. “Stop right there!” the girl in the lead shouted.
We all froze in our tracks. The guide who had been chasing after us turned even paler than the standard British native. “You know what?” he asked. “The queue jumping’s not such a bother. I’ll just return to my post.” He raced back the way we had all come.
The rest of us couldn’t do that. There were seven British students and each had a gun trained directly on one of us.
Now that we’d stopped running, I had time to focus on the schoolgirl in the lead and realized I knew her. In the nine months since I had last seen her, she had grown two inches and dyed her hair platinum blond, but it was definitely Claire Hutchins. Claire was a student at the MI6 version of spy school. We had first met at spy camp the previous summer, when she had come on an exchange program with several fellow students—some of whom were also aiming guns at us at the moment. Claire and I hadn’t hit it off well at first, but she had ended up helping out on a mission and even dated Hank Schacter, a spy school student a couple of years above me (although that hadn’t ended well).
“Claire!” I exclaimed, before I could think things through. “It’s me! Ben Ripley!”
“I bloody well know who you are,” Claire snapped. “I’m not daft, you idiot. You’re all under arrest.”
“You know we weren’t behind what happened at the museum,” said Erica, who’d been on the mission with Claire as well. “We were fighting SPYDER there, not working with them.”
Claire narrowed her eyes suspiciously at Murray. “If you’re not working with SPYDER, why’s this tosser with you? He’s one of them. I remember from West Virginia. The mole from your spy school.”
“I flipped sides,” Murray explained helpfully. “To the good guys this time. I’ve seen the light. By the way, I love what you’ve done with your hair. It really brings out your eyes.”
“Thanks.” Claire smile
d, flattered, before catching herself and getting angry again. “There’ll be no sweet-talking your way out of this. Right now we have piles of evidence against all of you. So put your hands where I can see them. MI6 will be here shortly.”
I looked to Catherine Hale for guidance, expecting that she, being a member of MI6 herself, might try to explain to Claire and her fellow students what was going on. Instead, she obediently raised her hands.
However, as she did, a few coins clattered to the glass floor, as though they had dropped from her pockets. They rolled across the glass and toppled noisily in a few random spots. “Oh dear,” Catherine said. “Looks like my change purse has a hole in it.” She looked to all of us. “Children, step to the right, please.”
Though her tone was sweet, there was an edge to it that said we should simply obey her and not ask questions. So we all shifted a few steps to the right, keeping our hands held high.
Claire instantly grew suspicious. She glanced at the coin that had rolled the closest to her, then warily took a few steps back, so that she was now on the regular floor, rather than the glass.
“Catherine,” Alexander said warily. “What have you done?”
“I told you we were heading to the emergency escape,” she said calmly. “Well, this is it. Children, don’t be alarmed, but we’re in for a bit of a drop.”
I looked down at the coin that was closest to me. Although it looked very much like a real coin, I now realized it was a fake. A few things tipped me off: It was the tiniest bit thicker than a real coin; the color was slightly off, indicating it was made from a different type of metal; and, while I was staring at it, it emitted a burst of high-frequency energy that shattered the glass floor beneath my feet.
The windows to our sides shattered as well, and the concussive force knocked Claire and her fellow students onto their rear ends, but the disintegration of the floor was the part that really concerned me, as I was standing on it.
To my side, I heard Zoe and Mike both gasp, “Uh-oh.”
And then we were falling.
Since we had all followed Catherine’s orders and stepped to the right side of the floor, we were all heading for the river and were not about to splatter on the road, but ten stories was still a very long way to drop. I had time to see Claire staring at us in shock through the brand-new hole in the walkway as we fell away from her. I had time to start shivering from the sudden shift into the cold air outside and the wind whistling around me. I had time to hear that someone was screaming in abject terror—and then to realize that it was me.
In my defense, I wasn’t the only one screaming. Screaming turned out to be a rather normal response to falling through the floor of a famous landmark and plunging to your possible death. Zoe and Mike were also screaming. Alexander wasn’t, but that was only because he appeared too terrified to make a sound. Meanwhile, Murray was screaming enough for an entire crowd of people.
Only Catherine and Erica appeared calm about the whole thing. Erica actually seemed to be enjoying herself, as though this were a theme park ride. Catherine simply seemed to regard it as a routine part of spying; I actually saw her look at her watch on the way down.
Bizarrely, this wasn’t the first time I had plummeted into a river with Erica and Alexander during a mission—and even if it hadn’t been, we had covered plummeting in Self-Preservation 202, in a special seminar, so I knew how to brace for impact. So did my friends. As the Thames rushed up to meet me, I held my arms tightly to my sides and pointed my toes downward.
This allowed all of us to slice into the water rather than smacking into it; even water could be hard enough to break bones if you hit it wrong. The impact still hurt, though, like a punch to every single part of my body at once. The water was cold, too, and that packed its own punch. I shot down deep into the river. The water was too murky to even see my own hands, but I could hear the thunking noises of my fellow spies plunging in around me. I kicked back toward the surface, which turned out to be disturbingly far above me—I had sunk much farther than I’d realized—but I eventually broke through, gasping for breath.
To my immense relief, all six of my fellow spies emerged around me, coughing and spluttering and looking like drowned cats but otherwise all right.
Unfortunately, our ordeal wasn’t over yet.
Our emergency drop had taken us away from Claire and the rest of the British spy school students, as well as the MI6 agents who had been running up the stairs, but of course they were all capable of running right back down again. There were also a few British agents who hadn’t even bothered to run up the stairs in the first place, along with some of the guards for the bridge, clustered around the base of the tower on the north shore.
So we swam toward the south shore instead. My limbs were tense from the drop and the cold, and the Thames smelled like fish that had gone bad, but my adrenaline was pumping so hard, I barely noticed. We all swam like professional triathletes, making it to the pedestrian walkway on the south side of the river just as Claire, her classmates, and a dozen MI6 agents exited the southern tower and charged after us.
Fortunately, we were still a good distance away from them, and there were too many tourists around for them to take a shot at us. A large crowd had amassed on the walkway. Many of the tourists came to our aid, helping us from the water, mistakenly believing that we were fellow vacationers who had just had our visit to the Tower Bridge go horribly wrong. We were quickly wrapped in jackets and scarves by good Samaritans.
“Are you all right?” the woman who helped me out of the Thames asked, placing her husband’s raincoat around my shoulders.
“I’m all right,” I told her.
She didn’t seem to believe me. “You just fell out of the bottom of the Tower Bridge and into the Thames!”
“I’ve had worse,” I said, which sadly was the truth.
“This way!” Catherine ordered, and she bolted through the crowd.
The rest of us followed, slipping into the sea of people before MI6 could get to us. Our shoes squelched wetly as we fled, and we left trails of water behind us. If it hadn’t been for the clothes we’d just been given (or possibly stolen) we might have frozen to death in the cool air. As it was, even with my newfound jacket, I was still chilled to the bone.
We raced away from the riverbank and into the city, passing London City Hall, a lopsided steel-and-glass structure that looked like a beehive in a tornado, and then through the large park beside it. Behind us we could hear the shouts of MI6 as they shoved through the crowd.
“Do you still have Joshua’s flash drive?” Erica asked Catherine, concerned.
“It’s safe and sound and wrapped in a watertight pouch with my phone,” her mother reassured her.
Sirens echoed off the river. The London police had now joined MI6 in pursuit of us. Three patrol cars were speeding across the Tower Bridge, their bubble lights flashing. They paused just long enough by the southern tower for a few MI6 agents to jump in, then sped off after us again.
“We’re not going to be able to outrun those,” Alexander observed.
“Then let’s take the bus.” Erica pointed to a traditional red London double-decker that was pulling up to the curb ahead of us.
“A bus barely moves!” Mike protested. “The police will catch us in no time if we ride it.”
“I didn’t say let’s ride it,” Erica corrected him. “I said let’s take it.” She barreled through the crowd of riders getting off, climbed the steps, and announced to the driver, “Sorry. I need to commandeer this vehicle.”
The driver laughed, amused. “I say, you Yanks are a cheeky lot…Yoinks!” He yelped as Erica forcibly yanked him from his seat and deposited him on the curb.
By now the rest of us had piled onto the bus as well. Erica gave us a cursory glance to make sure we were all accounted for, then slammed her foot on the gas pedal.
The bus sped away from the curb with surprising speed for something built like a cinder block, pitching half the passengers to the
floor. The bus driver chased after us, yelling British words that I didn’t recognize but which I assumed were curses.
My fellow spies all grabbed seats. Neither Catherine nor Alexander looked particularly concerned that their daughter was driving the bus instead of them. In fact, both looked relieved that they weren’t doing it—the same look my parents got when I handled the TV remote instead of them. I was about to grab a seat myself when Erica said, “Ben, navigate for me. The streets in this town are crazy.”
So I stayed beside the driver’s seat. Erica grabbed a map from a pocket beside her and pulled into the right lane of traffic. Unfortunately, since the British drive on the left, we suddenly found ourselves facing a horde of oncoming cars.
“Erica,” I said worriedly. “You’re driving on the wrong side of the street!”
“I’m not driving on the wrong side,” Erica argued, gunning the engine. “They are.”
The cars ahead of us swerved out of the way, crashing into one another and plowing through the storefront windows of several shops that had, up until that point, been very quaint and picturesque.
Alexander sighed and turned to Catherine. “She obviously gets this from your side of the family,” he said.
The police cars slewed onto the street behind us, but they had to slow to navigate the maze of wrecked cars Erica had left in our wake.
I unfolded the map. To my dismay, the street plan of London was incredibly confusing. Instead of being in a nice, neat grid, the roads went every which way imaginable. The map looked like someone had vomited up a plate of spaghetti.
“Which way do I turn up here?” Erica asked me.
I didn’t want to admit I didn’t have the slightest idea where we even were in the city. “Where do we want to go?” I asked.
“Anywhere that gets us away from them.” Erica jabbed a thumb over her shoulder toward the police cars pursuing us.
The intersection was coming up quickly.
“Go left?” I said, with far less conviction than I’d intended.