by Stuart Gibbs
“Your problem is with me,” I said. “Not my parents.”
“Maybe you should have considered that before you kept thwarting my plans!” Ms. E roared, losing her cool. “Do you have any idea how much time and energy it takes to engineer the destruction of Antarctica? Do you have any idea how much money you have cost me? Do you know what you have done to my reputation? I used to be respected in the evil community! Now I’m a laughingstock who can’t defeat a thirteen-year-old boy!”
“It wasn’t personal,” I pointed out. “You were trying to destroy a large part of the earth.… ”
“Well, it’s personal now!” Ms. E strode toward me, the soles of her sensible shoes squeaking ominously on the highly polished floor. “As I’m sure you realized, the men I have stationed outside your house aren’t just aiming a camera at it. They have guns, too. And the moment I give them the signal, they will break in and take care of your mommy and daddy.” She picked a small microphone up from the coffee table and spoke into it. “Blue Morpho Team, this is Monarch. Do you copy?”
The camera swung from my house to the face of one of the thugs keeping an eye on it. He was a big guy, dressed as a suburban dad to blend in in the neighborhood, though the menace in his eyes was anything but neighborly. “Roger, Monarch. Blue Morpho is in position and ready to proceed at your command.” The camera then swung back toward the house.
“Monarch?” Zoe asked. “Blue Morpho? You’re using types of butterflies as code names.”
“So I like butterflies,” Ms. E snapped. “That doesn’t make me any less powerful.” She turned on the rest of us. “If you don’t want me to let those men loose on Ben’s parents, then I want the information you’ve learned right now—and no tricks! Got it?”
I looked to my friends. The official protocol for a mission was that sometimes sacrifices had to be made. Including the parents of other people on the mission. The goal was to bring SPYDER down no matter what, and we couldn’t let hostages get in the way.
But my friends all looked worried for my parents. Even Erica, who had always preached the gospel of not letting relationships interfere with our spying, seemed unsure about what to do. Maybe it was because her own mother was in the room, or maybe it was because she cared about me and thus my parents as well, even though she had never met them. Whatever the case, the revelation that they were in trouble seemed to have shaken her.
“All right!” Mike exclaimed. “We’ll tell you what we saw!”
In the heat of the moment, I had forgotten that Mike might have cared about my parents almost as much as I did. He had spent hundreds of hours at my house over the years, having dinners with us, playing games, watching movies. Once, Mike had even told me that he liked my parents more than his own.
Ms. E looked to him expectantly. “Spit it out.”
“Sure thing, Ms. E,” Mike began. “For starters, obviously, we got the coordinates for this place. Although that was really all Joshua had on you. Just latitude and longitude. Not any other details, like the Mona Lisa or the Burger King or the fact that there was a secret entrance inside a seriously creepy tunnel filled with rats and the skulls of ancient dead people.… ”
“You’re stalling for time,” Ms. E said.
Mike feigned confusion at this, even though stalling was exactly what he’d been doing. “Don’t you want as detailed a report as possible?”
“Listen up, smart aleck,” Ms. E said menacingly. “I suspect you noticed that some of the skulls down there along my basement wall weren’t ancient. They’re relatively new. Would you like to know where they came from?”
Mike gulped. “Not really.”
“Some of them were enemies of mine,” Ms. E said, sounding very pleased with herself. “But others were people who were simply unfortunate enough to work for me. The architect who designed this place, for example. And all the people who helped remodel it. And the people who delivered the art. I mean, I couldn’t just let them live with the information about what was here, could I? Sooner or later, one of them would blab about it to the wrong person, and the next thing you know, Interpol’s knocking on my door.”
“So you killed them all?” Zoe asked, aghast.
“I did,” Ms. E said. “And for the record, I liked my architect. She was extremely talented. So at least I made her death very sudden and painless. She never saw it coming. If you all keep stalling me, though, I won’t show you the same respect.”
I suspected this was a lie. I was quite sure Ms. E planned to make our deaths as drawn out and painful as possible. And I was also sure, given her rage at me, that she wasn’t about to let my parents go, either. But I had no idea how to protect them when they were thousands of miles away from me—let alone how to save myself and my friends.
Luckily, I was with Erica Hale, who excelled at saving people. She locked eyes with me and mouthed, Stall her. Or possibly taller. Or maybe even stalwart. Lipreading isn’t that easy. Stall her made the most sense, though. It gave me hope that Erica was working on a plan to save my family, or maybe even had one already.
Of course, Ms. E had just threatened to use my skull as part of a subterranean decorating motif if she realized I was stalling…but I had to do something to save my parents. And there was one thing I could think of that might distract Ms. E for a little while. “There was an awful lot about Operation Wipeout on the flash drive.”
Ms. E looked at me in the same surprised-but-trying-to-hide-one’s-surprise way I had looked at her before. “Joshua knew about that?”
“He knew plenty.” I was pleased Ms. E had bought my ruse—but also worried. I knew nothing about Operation Wipeout except the name, which I had seen for a split second on Joshua’s flash drive. Now I had to hide that fact for as long as I could.
“Like what?” Ms. E asked.
“To begin with, there were lots of schematics,” I said, forcing myself to talk as slowly as I could. “Not official blueprints or anything. Instead, they were hand drawn. Probably Joshua’s. It looked like he might have copied them from the actual plans.”
“What did the drawings show?” Ms. E was watching me closely now, her back to Erica. Erica still couldn’t attack, given that there was a heavily armed thug right behind her, but she did nod to me encouragingly, recognizing that my stall tactics were working.
“To be honest, I didn’t have the time to get a really close look at them,” I went on. “There were dozens of them, and there was a tremendous amount of intricate detail. Joshua must have spent hours copying them all down. He had really taken his time.”
Erica made a very slight signal, twirling her index finger in a circle, the international sign to me to keep going. She stole a glance at the video screen while she did it.
I glanced that way too, but the scene hadn’t changed. It was still just my house, shown from the vantage point of some very dangerous men.
“Nothing’s happening at your house,” Ms. E told me. “Yet. Please continue.”
“Right. Sorry. I’m just getting a little nervous, knowing you’re plotting to kill the two most important people in the world to me.” I took a deep breath and continued. “Anyhow, while I didn’t fully grasp what Operation Wipeout was, it was pretty obvious that Joshua knows. He also had some notes about who to deliver it to at the CIA.”
“Yes,” Catherine agreed, coming to my aid. “Kind of a death-drop scenario.”
“Death-drop?” Ms. E asked. Despite her tough exterior, it seemed that she was growing slightly worried.
“Yes,” Catherine said. “It’s a bit of espionage parlance that must have come up after you left for the dark side. What happens is, Joshua prepares these documents he’s gathered and, in addition to placing them on that flash drive, he sets them up in a death-drop e-mail. Only, he doesn’t send the e-mail. Instead, if he doesn’t enter a password every day, the e-mail will be sent to the CIA. That provides insurance against you killing him. If you bump him off, he can’t enter the password, and the e-mail goes out with all your plans to t
he CIA.”
“Who at the CIA?” Ms. E demanded.
“I don’t know,” Catherine replied. “Though I must assume that it’s someone you haven’t bought off yet. After all, Joshua has the entire list of those moles as well, with every dime you’ve paid them. I suspect that list would be in the death-drop e-mail as well. Thus, if you take him out, your entire empire comes crashing to the ground. Not that there’s much left of it anyhow.”
“What do you mean?” Ms. E asked.
“Well, SPYDER has taken quite a lot of hits lately, thanks to this crew of young agents,” Catherine replied. “You’re really on the ropes financially now, aren’t you? In fact, I’d be surprised if you weren’t very deep in debt, given the debacle of your last operation.”
Anger flashed in Ms. E’s eyes. She wheeled on Catherine. “Yes, SPYDER has suffered some setbacks, thanks to this gang of twerps—especially that one.” She jabbed a painted fingernail at me while still keeping her eyes locked on Catherine’s. “But I assure you that SPYDER is as strong as it ever was and that it will be even stronger as soon as I am rid of all you pesky rapscallions once and for all!”
Behind Ms. E, on the video screen, there was a groan of pain and the view of my house suddenly tilted sideways, as though whoever had been holding the camera had taken a heavy blow.
Ms. E spun around to see what was going on.
Her thugs, who had already been somewhat distracted by Ms. E’s theatrics, now spun that way as well, dropping their guard even more.
Which allowed Erica and Catherine—both of whom didn’t seem surprised by the sudden turn of events at my house at all—to launch themselves at their respective thugs, unleashing a devastating series of martial arts moves.
Zoe and Mike responded quickly, wheeling on their thugs as well.
As for me, however…
I did exactly the same thing. Except I went straight for Ms. E.
I might not have been the best fighter in my class by a long shot but I had learned a few things over the past year. Plus, my parents being threatened had really pissed me off. And I wasn’t about to let Ms. E give the order to kill them if I could help it.
While my friends were clobbering their various opponents, with punches and kicks—and in Mike’s case, a very old, very expensive Chinese vase, which he had smashed over his thug’s head—I ducked away from the gorilla behind me and charged at Ms. E. My thug came after me, but he was big and slow, and before he got two steps, Erica sent her own thug crashing into him, bowling both off their feet.
Meanwhile, I lowered my shoulder and bulldozed Ms. E. She slammed into a large Rodin sculpture so hard that her head bonged off of it. Her gun flew from her hand and skittered across the polished marble floor.
Unfortunately, Ms. E was tougher than most older women. (Not that I had ever fought an old woman before.) She spun on me, her eyes full of fury, and socked me in the jaw so hard, I saw stars.
I dropped like a bag of cement, crashing to the floor.
Ms. E laughed and came toward me, ready to kick me while I was down.
Which was just what I was waiting for.
Professor Simon, my self-preservation instructor, had devised a new move for me based on the idea that I couldn’t fight well, so we ought to play to my strengths. It was called the Wounded Duck. Basically, when someone hit me hard—which Professor Simon was 100 percent sure would happen to me in any fight—then I was to drop, act dazed, and wait for them to come in for the kill. At which point I was to suddenly spin around, catch them by surprise, and sweep their legs out from under them. Or, if that didn’t work, I could always bite them on the ankle.
The leg sweep did work, though. I probably couldn’t have upended one of the muscle-bound thugs that my friends were fighting, but I could trip a relatively small woman.
Ms. E squawked in surprise and crashed to the floor beside me.
I’m not very proud of what I did next.
My parents had always told me that I should treat older women with kindness and respect—though I suppose they had never suspected that I would ever be confronting an evil woman in charge of a criminal organization who had killers poised outside our house. Therefore, I might not have treated Ms. E with kindness or respect, and I might have possibly punched her in the face a few times.
Not that she treated me with much kindness or respect either. Fistfights in real life are rarely as cool as the ones you see in the movies. Instead, there’s a lot of writhing around on the floor, trying to get in a good shot at the other person and usually failing. At one point, Ms. E locked both of her pantyhosed legs around my head for a brief moment—which was an experience I would prefer to never think of again—but I then drove my knee into some part of her that made her yelp in pain, and I wriggled away.
I’m not sure if I would have eventually won the fight or not, because Erica and Catherine came to my rescue, Erica prying me off Ms. E while Catherine painfully wrenched the woman’s arms behind her back and dragged her away.
I had missed what was going on elsewhere in the room while having my own battle, but we appeared to have won handily. Three of the thugs lay sprawled on the floor, out cold. Jenny Lake was fleeing for her life from Zoe, disappearing down the stairwell that led to the catacombs. Zoe was about to go after her, but Catherine caught her arm and said, “Let her go. We have bigger fish to fry.”
Zoe didn’t argue, but she didn’t look happy about it either.
My friends didn’t look nearly as bad as the thugs did. Sure, they weren’t completely unharmed—they all had bruises and scratches, and everyone’s hair was pretty badly mussed—but unlike the thugs, they were upright and conscious.
Meanwhile, the thugs outside my parents’ house seemed to have suffered the same fate. The camera was now lying on the ground, showing a sideways view of my neighbor’s pansies. Someone then picked it up and looked directly into the lens.
Jawa O’Shea. Chip Schacter stood behind him, looking into the camera as well.
Both of them were also slightly mussed and bloody, but in otherwise high spirits.
“Hi there,” Jawa said. “I’m not sure who I’m talking to at SPYDER, but I wanted you to know that your thugs here have failed to complete their mission.”
“Because we kicked their butts!” Chip crowed.
Zoe quietly grabbed the microphone Ms. E had used to speak to the thugs earlier. “Jawa! Chip! This is Zoe! Nice work, guys!”
Chip frowned, confused. “Zoe? You’re working for SPYDER?”
“No, you nimrod!” she snapped. “We’ve successfully infiltrated their headquarters! We kicked all their butts too!”
“Oh!” Chip grinned broadly. “Way to go, guys!”
I looked to Erica, who was strapping her utility belt back on again. “You told them to check on my parents?”
Erica shrugged. “I thought there was a distinct possibility SPYDER might play dirty once they knew you were on their trail. Like you always tell me, friends are assets, not inconveniences.”
Mike grabbed the microphone from Zoe and said, “Hey, guys, it’s Mike! While you’re in the neighborhood, could you swing by my house and check on my family?”
“Done and done,” Jawa reported. “No thugs around your place. Either SPYDER doesn’t have all the info on you—or they really just had it in for Ben.”
“Oh,” Mike said. “Well, in that case, can I ask something else? When you get back to campus, I might have forgotten to feed my goldfish before I left. Can you make sure he’s still alive?”
There was some movement behind Jawa.
Before I could even ask him to move the camera, Zoe saw what I had and said, “Hey, can you guys show Ben the view across the street?”
“Sure thing.” Jawa shifted the camera.
My parents were leaving the house for work. Neither of them had any idea what danger they had just been in. They were simply going about their lives like it was a completely normal day.
“Don’t worry,” Chip whispered.
“We hid the unconscious guys in your neighbor’s hedge. Your folks won’t suspect a thing.”
They didn’t seem to. They just climbed into the car and drove off together.
Still, I cherished every single second I saw of it.
“I hate them!” Ms. E screamed, then shifted her attention to me. “I hate them because they gave birth to you! And I hate you more than I hate anything! One of these days, Ben Ripley, I will destroy you and everything you hold dear!”
“Enough with the histrionics,” Catherine told her. “I want access to your computer now, or I’ll rip off both your arms and beat you senseless with them.”
“Bite me,” Ms. E said.
Catherine wrenched her arms harder. A lot harder.
Ms. E screamed in pain. Her tough attitude immediately vanished and was replaced by a much meeker, more frightened one. “All right. I’ll show you. You don’t have to hurt me.”
“Not so tough when you’re not aiming a gun at people, are you?” Catherine asked.
Ms. E obediently started across the room. As we passed some of the shattered Chinese vases, Catherine sighed heavily. “Those weren’t Ming dynasty by any chance, were they?”
“Yes,” Ms. E said, sounding far more upset about the pottery than she had about my parents. “They were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece.”
“Gosh,” Mike said. “I’d feel bad about that if, you know, your men hadn’t been trying to kill me when I bashed those vases on their heads.”
Catherine said, “Michael, will you be a dear and truss all these thugs so when they wake up, they won’t be able to harm us again?”
“Sure thing!” Mike told her.
Catherine pulled some zip ties from her utility belt and threw them to Mike, who set about binding the thugs’ hands and feet with them.
Ms. E led us out of the living room and into a stairwell. It wasn’t as grand as the sweeping staircase at Orion’s house, but it was still rather nice. Most of an entire brownstone had been gutted to provide the space for it. It spiraled upward in a graceful oval for five stories.