Spy School British Invasion

by Stuart Gibbs

Erica shut the trapdoor above our heads and jammed a hairpin in the lock.

  A few police officers stayed behind to inform the tourists that no one was allowed to board the elevator down until the perpetrators were found.

  Then they sent the elevator down so no one could escape, unaware that we were sitting on top of it.

  We flattened ourselves onto the roof and held on tight as we suddenly dropped away from the top of the tower. The ride down was windy and cold but only slightly terrifying—and the closer we got to the ground, the better I felt.

  Unfortunately, I discovered that our elevator wasn’t heading all the way to the ground. We were going only about halfway, to the second tourist level, which was still a good four hundred feet above the earth. In a sense the tower was two different structures: The lower half was the legs, which splayed out at angles to the ground, while the upper half was a vertical shaft. The lower half had two tourist platforms, one at the top and one in the middle between the legs, forming a capital A, while the shaft sat atop it. Our elevator was descending the shaft, but to get all the way down, we still needed to travel down the legs. To do this, there were either specially designed elevators that worked on a slant, or staircases.

  I peered over the edge of the elevator, assessing the layout of the second tourist level below us. We were heading down to a loading station. There was an extremely long line of people waiting outside it, all of whom appeared very annoyed that the police had commandeered the elevators. A few police were stationed on the second level, probably to keep an eye out for us, but they had their hands full dealing with angry tourists. As we neared the loading station, I could hear tourists berating the police in a dozen different languages.

  No one had noticed us atop the elevator—yet. No one had been expecting anyone to ride down on the roof of it. However, a new squad of police was waiting to board the elevator, meaning that if we didn’t disembark, we would soon be on our way up to the top of the tower again.

  Luckily, the roof of the elevator was flush with the roof of the loading station. The moment our elevator stopped, we crawled onto the station roof. From there, iron struts slanted gently down to the viewing platform. It wouldn’t have been hard to run down them—but we couldn’t do that right away, as the struts sloped past the glass elevators and we didn’t want the police to see us. So we waited for the elevators to start upward again.

  The moment they rose past us, the police spotted us atop the loading station and promptly went nuts. It took them a few moments to hit the emergency stop, pausing the elevator fifty feet above us, but they couldn’t simply put it in reverse to come back after us. Meanwhile, the few police down on the platform who weren’t dealing with angry tourists now thought something was wrong with the elevators and ran to the doors of the loading station.

  Catherine, Erica, and I took advantage of the distraction to scurry down the iron struts and blend into the crowd. Once again, our ages worked to our advantage—as did Catherine’s motherly appearance. We didn’t look like spies or terrorists so much as a family on vacation—albeit a very disheveled one. We casually slipped through the hordes of tourists while, in the elevators above us, the police could only bang on the glass and shout mutely in frustration.

  The staircase in the southeastern leg of the tower was closest to us. This one switchbacked down through the iron struts around the canted shaft of the lower elevator. A lot of disgruntled tourists were streaming down it, upset that the elevators to the top of the shaft weren’t working and thus looking to visit somewhere else. We fell in with them and swiftly made our way down to the first tourist level.

  For a moment I allowed myself to believe that we were going to escape without any trouble.

  At which point everything went wrong.

  I didn’t say that I thought we were going to escape out loud, as this was a direct violation of Twomey’s Rule of Premature Gloating. Even the most logical spies at the CIA were superstitious about this, afraid that the tiniest bit of gloating could jinx a perfectly good escape. But I still thought it, which was apparently bad enough.

  Erica came to a stop so suddenly on the staircase that I ran right into her.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “SPYDER’s here.” Erica pointed to the base of the leg far below us. Jenny Lake and a group of thugs I recognized from the British Museum were racing toward the stairwell.

  So we abandoned that staircase and cut across the first level, hoping to find a stairwell that didn’t have people who wanted to kill us coming up it.

  Given how many tourists were at the tower, the first level was surprisingly unpopulated. Although we were still twenty stories above the ground, the views were significantly better from the higher levels, so that’s where the crowds gravitated. Plus, this level was quite large, so the few tourists who were there were spread out. Most were congregated at the railings on the exterior, or gathered in the gift shops and cafés, so that the wide expanse in the center was strangely free of tourists.

  The middle of the level was an enormous void, an eighty-five-foot square of emptiness, surrounded by glass walkways. Just like the floor of the Tower Bridge, these allowed you to see the ground far below you. Apparently, glass floors had become mandatory for all extremely tall European tourist attractions.

  We were halfway along one of the walkways when we got ambushed.

  “Stop right there!” someone shouted.

  The blood in my veins immediately ran cold. I knew the voice all too well.

  Joshua Hallal.

  21 COMBAT

  Level one

  The Eiffel Tower

  Paris, France

  April 1

  1640 hours

  Joshua was with Dane Brammage and Ashley Sparks, which led me to believe that Warren Reeves was around too, but I simply hadn’t seen him yet. They had all been hidden behind some racks of cheap souvenirs outside one of the gift shops. Although they were wearing T-shirts, shorts, and baseball caps to blend in with the tourists, they still were an odd trio. Joshua had his metal limbs. Ashley hadn’t been able to resist the most sparkly T-shirt she could find. And even the largest T-shirt still didn’t fit Dane well; it was stretched so tightly over his muscles that it was coming apart at the seams. I was surprised that neither Erica nor Catherine had noticed them before they’d surprised us—and was annoyed that I hadn’t either—but then, we were all tired and worn out and there had been quite a lot of other enemies for us to focus on.

  Joshua had his arm extended, palm out, aimed directly at us, ready to fire an explosive charge. Erica and Catherine immediately reached for their weapons, but…

  “Don’t touch those!” a reedy voice said from right behind my ear. Warren Reeves. He was wearing an outfit that was the exact same color as the metal girders of the Eiffel Tower, and he’d painted his face to match, allowing him to blend in seamlessly. We hadn’t even noticed him until that point, when he suddenly materialized behind me and placed a gun to the back of my head. “Get your hands in the air or I’ll blow Ben’s head off!”

  Erica and Catherine complied, raising their hands.

  I raised mine too, just to be on the safe side.

  “Very good.” Keeping his arm aimed at us, Joshua sauntered toward us from the gift shop. “Now, please remove all your weapons. Try anything funny, and you’ll regret it.”

  Dane and Ashley followed Joshua. Both of them had guns in their hands, though they kept them close to their sides, so as to not draw attention.

  Erica and Catherine started removing the weapons they had taken from Ms. E and setting them on the ground at our feet.

  Through the glass floor, I could see the SPYDER agents heading up the stairs toward our level. They all looked to be in good shape, so I figured it wouldn’t take them more than a few minutes to reach our level.

  Which would be bad, assuming we lived through the next few minutes anyhow.

  “You’re making a mistake,” I told Joshua and the others as they approached us. “S
PYDER’s people are on their way up here right now. They know you betrayed them. They’ll be just as happy to kill you as they are to kill us.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Joshua said. “In fact, I think they’ll be quite happy to see me once they realize I’ve captured you. I know you’ve taken down Ms. E. I know you’ve got access to enough information to destroy SPYDER for good. But that’s going to leave a power vacuum. Those idiots down there aren’t leaders. They’re followers. And they need someone with good, strong, evil ideas to follow. Like me. Once I show them I’ve captured the very jerks who brought SPYDER down, they’ll be lining up to work for me. There really aren’t many job opportunities out there for evil henchmen. It’s a limited market.”

  Erica looked to Dane and Ashley. “You do realize, when he’s talking about idiots who aren’t leaders, he means you guys too, right? Are you going to just take that?”

  “You’re the idiots,” Ashley sneered. “In fact, you’re midiots. Morons plus idiots.”

  Dane didn’t say anything. He seemed a little confused by the entire conversation.

  The SPYDER thugs were several stories up and coming fast.

  Catherine and Erica had amassed a sizable pile of weapons at our feet.

  “You’re never going to get away with this,” Catherine said. “This tower is crawling with police, and Interpol is surely on its way. You think you can negotiate a power play right here? You should run before you get caught.”

  “I’m not worried about the French police,” Joshua said. “Or Interpol. There are always people who can be bought. You three moralistic fools are the exception, rather than the rule. And when people can’t be bought, they have to die.”

  I said, “Actually, when you put it that way, I’d be happy to be paid off.”

  Joshua frowned at me. “You’ve had your chance to switch to our side. More than once. But instead of taking it, you had to be a Goody Two-shoes and thwart our plans.”

  “Well, maybe you weren’t offering me that good a deal,” I said. “I’m willing to discuss terms if you’d like.”

  “Can it,” Joshua warned. “I’m through negotiating with you. In fact, empty your pockets. Just to make sure you don’t have any weapons either.”

  Up until that point I had forgotten all about the hand grenade I was carrying. I removed it from my pocket. “Sorry.”

  “Put it with everything else,” Joshua said. “And then slide it all over to me.”

  I set the grenade down with all the other weapons and ammunition, then shoved it toward Joshua. It glided easily across the smooth glass floor, sliding the five yards over to our enemies, although a few stray bullets rolled off in random directions.

  “Very good,” Joshua said, and then went on to add something else. I wasn’t really paying attention to it, however.

  Instead, I was counting to ten, which was the amount of time you have to seek safety when you’ve pulled the pin out of a grenade.

  Which was what I had done right before sliding the weapons over to Joshua.

  At the same time, I opened my hand, palm out, showing Catherine and Erica the pin.

  While I could shield this from Joshua, Dane, and Ashley, I couldn’t hide it from Warren, who was still standing behind me with a gun to my head. I just had to hope Warren wouldn’t notice.

  He did, though.

  “The grenade is live!” he exclaimed, right in my ear.

  Joshua stopped talking and looked at the pile of weaponry at his feet. His eyes went wide in terror.

  Dane and Ashley, who were right nearby, looked awfully scared themselves.

  The three of them dove for safety.

  Warren was far enough from the grenade that he probably could have protected himself by simply ducking behind me, but Warren was a chicken by nature, so he just ran.

  Which allowed Catherine, Erica, and me to run away too.

  The grenade detonated, setting off the ammunition under it as well, resulting in a blast that sent Joshua cartwheeling backward—and shattered the glass floor we had all been standing on.

  Unlike the glass floor of the Tower Bridge, which had been above water, this floor was above concrete, which would have been far deadlier to smack into from a great height.

  Catherine, Erica, and I reached the safety of the metal platform at the edge of the glass floor just in time. So did Ashley, Dane, and Warren—although Joshua didn’t. The blast had thrown him quite a distance, but he had landed back on the glass floor—and now, without two fully functional legs, he didn’t have the speed the rest of us did.

  Instead, he found himself stranded in the midst of a floor that was rapidly disintegrating beneath him. In the split second before it gave way, he glared at me and snarled, “I really hate you.”

  And then he was gone, screaming in terror as he dropped.

  I averted my eyes to avoid seeing what happened to him—and was immediately punched in the stomach.

  Warren had gone on the attack.

  I stumbled backward, managing to catch my balance a second before I would’ve toppled through the brand-new hole in the floor, and then launched myself back at Warren.

  Meanwhile, Dane and Ashley joined the battle. Both of them had dropped their weapons in their scramble for safety, but they were formidable opponents anyhow.

  Erica and Catherine met them head-on, Erica taking on Ashley while Catherine fought Dane.

  I squared off against Warren. Normally, it wouldn’t have been that much of a fight. Warren had been the worst person in our class at combat. Professor Simon had once said that he fought like a sick butterfly. But I was exhausted and aching from fighting Ms. E earlier—as well as everything else I had been through lately. I felt like I had already tumbled down several dozen flights of stairs. But I dug down, finding strength in the deep reserve of hatred I had for Warren. He had betrayed me. He had betrayed my friends. And I wasn’t going to let him get away with it.

  I lowered my shoulder and slammed into Warren, driving him backward into a rack of souvenirs, which collapsed. Cheap Eiffel Tower key chains and snow globes rained down on us while I rained punches down on Warren. But before I could finish him off, he bashed me over the head with a commemorative souvenir beer mug, sending me sprawling into a pile of teddy bears wearing jaunty French berets.

  Nearby, Catherine and Erica were fighting valiantly against their opponents. Erica and Ashley had gone crashing through a café, while Catherine was using Dane’s own bulk against him. When he charged her outside the patisserie, she gracefully sidestepped him, then tripped him as he barreled past, sending him flying face-first into a case full of éclairs and napoleons.

  The problem was, we didn’t just have to win our fights. We had to win them before SPYDER’s agents arrived on the scene, which wasn’t going to be much longer.

  Warren came at me again, trying to spear me with a large model of the Eiffel Tower. I grabbed my own model and deflected his attack with it, and then we battled with the towers like they were swords, clanging them off each other as we leapt around the racks of T-shirts and souvenir shot glasses.

  “I…hate…you!” Warren panted as he tried to stab me. “Zoe was my girl until you showed up and stole her away!”

  “I didn’t steal Zoe from you!” I yelled back. “You never had her! She wasn’t interested in you!”

  “That’s…not…true! She was…falling…for my…charms.”

  “You’d need to have some charms for that to be the case. Face it, Warren, she never liked you.”

  “She did so! We probably would have ended up married! But then you ruined everything!” Warren screamed in delusional rage and charged me with his model tower, intending to drive it straight through my spleen.

  I simply cocked mine back like a baseball bat and then whacked him in the face with it.

  Warren sailed backward, smashing through a rack of souvenir plates, and collapsed unconscious to the floor.

  I hustled out of the store with the proprietor screaming after me, and f
ound Erica in the café next door, having just laid Ashley flat with a crepe pan.

  “We have to go!” I told Erica. “SPYDER will be here any second!”

  “Almost finished.” Erica gave Ashley a final whack on the head to make sure she was out for good. “Have you seen my mom?”

  “I’m here!” Catherine said, racing into the café. She was covered from head to toe with cream filling and icing and had a macaron stuck to her forehead, but she was still standing, which I took as a good sign.

  “Where’s Dane?” I asked.

  “He won’t be bothering us anymore. Let’s move.” Catherine dashed from the café. Erica and I followed her, leaving a gaggle of startled tourists behind.

  We all bolted for the stairs at the northeastern leg of the tower, passing the patisserie. Or what remained of it. It had been destroyed by Catherine and Dane’s battle. Every chair was broken. The walls were splattered with red.

  “Is that… ?” I said, on the verge of nausea again.

  “It’s not blood,” Catherine said. “It’s raspberry jam. I had to throw Dane through a case of tarts. Speaking of which… ” She pulled two éclairs from her pocket. “I thought you two might be hungry. I know it’s generally frowned upon to eat dessert before lunch, but when you defeat a horde of enemy agents, you deserve a special treat.”

  “Thanks!” I snatched the éclair from her hand and crammed it into my mouth as we ran. It was probably decent to begin with, but in my famished state, it was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted.

  Behind us, in the southeastern stairwell, SPYDER’s agents had just reached the platform, coming up from the ground. At the same time, the French police, having finally reversed the elevator, were streaming down to the platform from the stairwell above.

  Some of the agents and the police recognized one another and started fighting. Others came after us.

  We ducked into the northeastern stairwell and raced down it as quickly as we could, switchbacking through the iron struts of the tower. Lots of other tourists were heading down too, while a few hardy souls were climbing up. We had no choice but to rudely shove them aside in our haste.