by Stuart Gibbs
“Can you undo it?” I asked.
Orion snorted disdainfully, as though I’d asked him if he knew how to breathe. “Of course I can undo it. I did it in the first place.” He turned to Catherine and grinned proudly. “No one does this as well as I do,” he boasted.
“That’s why we came to you,” Catherine said flirtatiously. “You’re certainly the best.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Erica muttered under her breath.
Orion’s fingers flew across his keyboard, typing so quickly I could barely see them. The gibberish on the monitor began to change, though at first all it changed into was even more gibberish.
Mike noticed something lying on the desk haphazardly atop a pile of papers and picked it up reverently. “This is a Honus Wagner baseball card!”
“Hey!” Orion exclaimed. “I’ve been looking for that!”
“This sold for more than two million dollars at auction a few weeks ago!” Mike said.
“Two and a half million,” Orion said.
“And you just left it sitting around?” Zoe asked, stunned.
“I’ve been meaning to get it framed,” Orion said sheepishly. “I told you it was hard to keep track of things here.”
“Exactly how much money is there in illegal encrypting?” Mike asked earnestly.
“Oh, most of the work I do isn’t illegal,” Orion replied. “It’s for corporations and banks. They’re the ones with the serious cash. The contract for one Swiss bank alone nearly paid for this whole place.”
Murray opened one of the pizza boxes and reacted with almost the same level of excitement that Mike had upon finding the Honus Wagner card. “You only ate one slice of this pizza! Can I have the rest?”
“Sure,” Orion replied. “Though that might have been sitting around for a few days.”
Murray shrugged. “Can’t be worse than those scones we had for breakfast.” He took a bite and groaned with ecstasy. “Oh, this is good. I haven’t had pizza in more than a month.”
Zoe leaned in to Erica and said, “Now I’m going to be sick.”
Orion finished typing with a dramatic flourish. “Done! Here we go!”
The gibberish vanished and was suddenly replaced with good old, completely unencrypted English. There was a huge amount of information in the file. It scrolled rapidly across the monitor, filling up the entire screen.
“Pay close attention now,” Catherine told us.
We all crowded behind Orion to see it.
The first block of text was a long list of names and dollar amounts, although they hadn’t been spaced apart so they were difficult to read. I caught a glimpse of “Warren Reeves $250” before it scrolled off the screen, but I didn’t recognize any of the other names.
“Can you pause the scrolling so we can read this?” Catherine asked.
“Sure thing.” Orion tapped a button on his keyboard.
The information stopped scrolling. Instead of names, it was now showing lots of what looked like bank account information, but again, it was so run together that it was hard to make sense of.
Toward the bottom of the screen, I spotted a line that said “Mr. E +48.851764, +2.354130, UnicornsRule!!! Watch out for Operation Wipeout.”
I knew the head of SPYDER was known only as “Mr. E,” so I figured the numbers might be important. I focused on them and quickly tried to commit them to memory.
I had just done it when the computer monitor went black.
In the exact same instant, the hard drives shut down. And the lights in the room went off.
“What happened?” Alexander asked, startled.
“The power went out,” Orion said, perplexed. “But that shouldn’t have taken out the main computer. I have my own backup generators on the property so that I’m off the grid in case there’s a blackout.”
Erica and Catherine looked to each other, worried. “Someone’s cut the power on the property!” Erica exclaimed.
At the exact same time, Catherine told us all, “We need to get out of here. Now.”
None of us needed to be told twice. Even Orion. He might not have been a spy-in-training, but he was highly attuned to security issues. He snapped the flash drive out of the hard drive, leapt to his feet, and raced out of his office. “This way!” he announced.
We followed him into the hallway…
Where Joshua Hallal was waiting for us.
11 EVACUATION
Wickham Palace
Near Scumbly-on-the-Marsh
The Cotswolds, England
April 1
0700 hours
Joshua was coming down the hallway, flanked by a team of bad guys.
To his immediate left was Dane Brammage. Dane had been through quite a lot in the last few days, thanks to us: He had been thrown off a moving ATV, partially consumed by sharks, and nearly squashed by a collapsing waterslide. Plus, he had a nasty sunburn—although that wasn’t really our fault; he hadn’t used enough sunblock in Mexico. And yet he was still imposing. The man was built like a rhinoceros, a wall of muscle on legs. If anything, the red sheen to his skin made him look even more like a comic strip villain, possibly one from another planet.
To Joshua’s right was Ashley Sparks. Somehow she had escaped police custody in Mexico as well. She was so different from Dane that aliens might have thought they were two entirely different species. She was only the size of one of Dane’s legs, with her hair done up in a scrunchie and a combat outfit bedecked with sequins, but she still looked imposing herself. The submachine gun cradled in her arms probably had something to do with that.
Behind them were three other henchmen from Mexico, who had somehow escaped as well. Warren Reeves was almost invisible behind them—not because he was wearing some impressive camouflage, but because he was hiding behind them to keep out of danger.
And at the forefront was Joshua. His remaining human arm and leg were both in casts, so that he needed crutches, which mitigated his imposingness a bit. However, with his metal hand, his single eye full of anger, and the heavily armed bad guys around him, he was still awfully frightening.
We were unarmed, save for some dart guns—and we had only a few darts left for those. The only thing that really worked to our advantage was that Joshua and his team were at the far end of the hall. In most homes, this wouldn’t have been a big deal, but in Wickham Palace, this meant they were still half a football field away from us.
For a brief moment we all gaped at one another, startled to see each other there.
“You!” Joshua screamed in rage, pointing a metal finger our way.
In theory he might have been pointing at all of us, but I had the distinct sense that all his rage was directed at me. I felt his lone eye boring into me hatefully, like I was somehow responsible for all the damage his body had suffered.
“Captain Hook!” Orion exclaimed, surprised to see him again.
Mike and I grabbed Orion and dragged him along with us. We all raced out of the hallway and into the next room as Joshua gave the order to his team. “Kill them!”
Bullets tore through the hallway we had just evacuated.
We were now back in the room with the TV and the beanbag chairs. We raced through it, unsure where we were going, except that we were going away from the bad guys.
“Hey!” Orion yelled angrily at Joshua’s team. “No shooting in my house! Do you have any idea what it will cost to repaint this place?”
“There’ll be no negotiating with him,” Catherine said. “We need a way out of here. All of us.”
“Right,” Orion said. “Follow me. I have an idea.” He started to go through one door, then paused, like he was trying to remember the right way through his house, changed his mind, and led us in the other direction.
“You do know where you’re going, right?” Murray asked. Even though our lives were in danger, he was still carrying the box of cold, half-eaten pizza.
“I do now,” Orion said. “I was a little confused back there for a moment. But I
’ve got it figured out.”
Mike and Zoe both gave me worried looks, concerned that our fate was in the hands of a guy who couldn’t even remember how to get through his own house.
However, as we ran along, I realized that I might have the same problem if I lived at Wickham Palace. We passed through one giant unfurnished room after another, and while there were differences between them—one might have light green walls adorned with cherubs and woodland creatures while the next might have light yellow walls decorated with nymphs and pixies—it was hard to imagine that I could ever keep them apart. I found myself wondering what the original owners of the palace could have possibly been thinking. Exactly how many ballrooms and dining halls did one family need? How many people could they have possibly been entertaining—especially when you considered that the population of the countryside had been considerably smaller back then? Did they routinely invite entire villages to dinner?
The only advantage of the maze of rooms was that Orion had at least some idea how to get through it while Joshua and his team didn’t. I could hear them racing through the palace somewhere behind us, but we had temporarily shaken them, so they weren’t right on our tail.
“Split up!” Joshua ordered. “Find them and get that flash drive!”
“I’m on it!” Ashley’s perky voice responded.
“How is she even here?” I asked Erica, struggling to keep up with her as we ran through the palace. “She’s supposed to be in jail!”
“Joshua must have busted her out.” Even though we were fleeing for our lives, Erica wasn’t the slightest bit out of breath. She seemed as calm and relaxed as if she were merely out for a morning jog. “Or maybe he bribed the police to let her and the others go. But now at least we’ve learned something important.”
“What?” I gasped.
“Isn’t it obvious? They’re not working with Jenny Lake. Otherwise, Jenny and her henchmen from the museum would be here too. And since Joshua has gone rogue from SPYDER, then Jenny must be working for SPYDER, trying to recover the stolen information before Joshua can—or with a rival evil organization that’s trying to get that information to undermine SPYDER.”
“And meanwhile, MI6 is after us too,” Mike observed. “Is there anyone in this country who isn’t trying to capture or kill us?”
“Possibly a few shepherds,” Murray said. “Though I might be wrong about that.” He was still clutching the pizza box in his arms and doing his best to eat a cold slice as we ran.
We finally entered a room that wasn’t a ballroom or a dining hall. It was the grand entryway for the palace. Two massive doors led out to the main courtyard in the front. It was large enough to hold my entire house and was lined with enough marble to build a monument. Staircases that could each accommodate a herd of elephants swept along both sides of it, leading to a second floor that most likely had fifty bedrooms.
Alexander pulled up alongside Catherine as we passed through it, looking very peeved. He made sure Orion was out of earshot, then whispered angrily, “You were flirting with that hacker.”
“You should talk,” Catherine hissed back. “You flirt with anything that has a pulse. And you even did it back when we were married.”
“That was always for business reasons,” Alexander said, not quite believably. “A good spy has to manipulate people to his will.… ”
“What do you think I was doing with Orion?” Catherine asked. “I needed him to decrypt that flash drive. It wouldn’t have done a whit of good for me to reject him outright. You men always get so pouty when that happens.”
We passed into yet another large room. This one had a pool table in it, still wrapped in its original protective packaging.
“My pool table!” Orion exclaimed. “I knew I’d bought one of those!”
There was an unusual sound behind us—although it was a sound I had become somewhat familiar with back in Mexico. Joshua’s new mechanical hand had weaponry built into it, and I now recognized the sound of it preparing to fire. Which meant Joshua had found us.
I whirled toward the sound. The pool room connected to four other similarly enormous rooms in a row. Joshua and Dane were way down in the fourth, which was a good hundred yards away, but since the rooms were unfurnished, they had a straight shot at us. “Take cover!” I yelled. “Incoming!”
An explosive rocketed out of Joshua’s metal palm and streaked through the palace toward us.
Most of us dove to the sides of the entrance to the room, placing walls between us and the artillery, then curled up in balls to protect ourselves.
Unlike us, however, Orion hadn’t gone to class in taking cover. He started to duck behind the pool table, unaware that it wouldn’t provide much protection in a blast.
Mike was there for him, though. He threw himself into Orion, knocking him away from the table and behind the wall instead.
The flash drive tumbled from Orion’s hand and clattered to the floor.
There was no time to grab it. Even Erica realized this, fighting her usual urge to be the hero in the name of self-preservation. We all tucked our heads down and wrapped our arms over them.
The explosive screamed into the room and blew the pool table to smithereens. I was showered with splinters of wood. The eight ball rocketed right over my head and embedded itself in the wall.
I raised my head. Felt from the pool table was drifting down like green snow.
The flash drive had been incinerated. All that remained was a smoking lump of plastic.
“My pool table!” Orion shrieked. “I never even got to use it!”
The chandelier in the room, weakened by the blast, dropped from the ceiling and shattered in the wreckage.
The fallen chandelier was the size of a minivan, big enough to give us some cover. We dashed into the next room before Joshua or Dane could fire again, though Erica stopped just long enough to snatch a pool ball and half a busted pool cue off the floor.
“We lost the flash drive!” Zoe exclaimed.
“And my pizza!” Murray wailed.
“Without that drive, we don’t have anything on SPYDER,” Mike said despondently. “Our mission’s a bust.”
“Not necessarily,” Catherine said, although it sounded like she was struggling not to despair herself. “We all saw a bit of data on the monitor. If everyone memorized some of it, perhaps we can reassemble some of the important information.”
We passed into a kitchen. It appeared to be the second kitchen for the house—or maybe even the third or fourth—as it had apparently never been used. All the appliances were still shrink-wrapped and spotless. And yet, even for a backup kitchen, it was huge. Enough food for an army could have been prepared there.
“Whoa,” Orion gasped. “I completely forgot about this.”
“You forgot about an entire kitchen?” Murray asked, startled.
“No,” Orion said. “I forgot about this entire wing of the house.”
There was another ominous clicking behind us. Once again Joshua was at the far end of a line of rooms, preparing to launch an explosive our way.
While most of us immediately took cover, Mike turned to face Joshua and yelled, “Whoa! Time-out!”
“Time-out?” Joshua asked, surprised. “You can’t call ‘time-out’ in the middle of a gunfight!”
“The flash drive you’re after got destroyed,” Mike explained. “It’s useless. So there’s no longer any point in killing us for it, is there?”
Dane turned to Joshua, confused, like he was trying to work out the logic of this. “He has a point.”
Joshua simply raised his metal arm and fired at us. Maybe he thought Mike was bluffing. Or maybe he simply wanted to kill us because he was pure evil. Either way, the result was the same. The explosive rocketed through the house toward us.
“Uh-oh,” Mike said, then dove behind the island in the center of the kitchen.
However, this time Erica was prepared. She hurled the pool ball she’d been carrying back toward the explosive. I was too
busy cowering to see what happened, but it was obviously a direct hit. The explosive detonated a room away, instead of right where we were. The concussion of the blast caught Erica before she could dive to safety, tossing her across the kitchen. She slammed into the refrigerator and crumpled to the floor.
Flames licked through the doorway, setting the kitchen on fire.
I heard the distinct sound of yet another chandelier crashing to earth in the room behind us and hoped that this one would also shield us from our enemies.
“Erica!” Catherine and Alexander cried at once. They raced toward their daughter.
“I’m all right!” Erica yelled, leaping to her feet as though she’d merely tripped over the curb. “Let’s move!”
So we ran again.
“Oh man,” Orion said sadly, observing the flaming wreckage of his kitchen. “I really hope I have insurance for this.” Then he led the way onward through the palace.
Erica paused by the kitchen door while her parents ran ahead. “Ben,” she said quietly as I neared her.
I stopped, warily glancing back toward Joshua. Thankfully, the ruined chandelier was sitting between us and him a room away. “What?”
Erica slipped her hand into mine. “I need you to lead the way for me. I was sort of blinded by that blast.”
“Sort of?” I asked.
“Shhh!” she hissed. “Don’t freak my parents out. I’m sure it’s only temporary.”
I ran after the others, clutching Erica’s hand as tightly as I could. She dropped in beside me. With me guiding her, she moved just as quickly as before.
The others had got a little ahead of us, but we quickly made up the ground.
Beyond the kitchen, the rooms got significantly smaller. We had reached what would have been the quarters for the enormous staff that previous owners had required. There was no longer any attention to decor. Apparently, the help wasn’t entitled to luxuries like gaily painted walls or large living spaces. We found ourselves moving through narrow hallways, flanked by drab rooms that reminded me of our dorms back at school, only these appeared to have working heat and didn’t smell like the communal toilets had backed up again.