Authors: Robin Benway
Also Known As
Contents
Perchance you wonder at this show;
But wonder on, till truth make all things plain.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
It’s just you and me against me….
DANGER MOUSE AND DANIELE LUPPI,
“Two Against One”
I cracked my first lock when I was three.
I know that sounds like I’m bragging, but really, it wasn’t that hard. It was a Master Lock, the same combination lock that you probably have on your locker or bike. Anyone with Internet access and too much time on his or her hands can crack a Master Lock. I’m serious. Google it. I’ll wait.
See? Easy.
My parents were the ones who gave me the lock. They still swear up and down that they weren’t testing me, that I really wanted to play with it and they were just trying to keep me from having some sort of toddler meltdown. But really? I’m not buying it. How many of you had a Master Lock for a toy?
My parents weren’t surprised that I cracked the lock. I think they’d have been more surprised if I
hadn’t
opened it. It would probably be hugely disappointing for two spies to have a completely inept kid, you know? Even my
name—
Margaret
, ugh—was chosen because it has so many different nicknames: Peggy, Maisie, Molly, Margie, Meg—the list is endless. My parents have called me Maggie since I was born, but I have twelve birth certificates that all say something different.
Maybe I should explain.
My family works for the Collective. You’ve never heard of the Collective, but you’ve definitely read about our work. Tobacco executives on trial because of damning evidence? Human smuggling rings being broken up? The fall of that Peruvian dictator? That’s us.
I have to admit, I’m still not sure who or what the Collective even
is
. I know only a few details: there are about two hundred spies stationed around the globe, moving to wherever we’re needed. Some of us are forgers (more on that later), computer hackers, statisticians, weapons experts, and I think a few assassins, too, but my parents won’t answer my questions about them. I don’t know how many safecrackers there are, but my family moves a lot because of me. Apparently a lot of safes need cracking.
We don’t ever take things that aren’t ours. The Collective may be secretive, but we’re not sneaky. The whole point is to right wrongs, not create them. When I was little, I thought the Collective was like Santa Claus, giving out presents but never being seen. Now I know, of course, that the Collective is based in London, not the North Pole, but whether it’s run by dozens of guilty-conscienced millionaires working toward a noble cause or one crazy Howard Hughes–type dude, I have no idea.
The Collective had stationed us in Reykjavík, Iceland, over the summer. We were getting ready to head to New York tonight after finishing this job, which could not end soon enough for me. The summer had been painfully boring (and painfully bright, because Reykjavík gets twenty-four hours of sunlight during the summer), since my parents were both busy trying to figure out the case, and school wasn’t in session. I spent a lot of time practicing my safecracking skills on safes that the Collective sent to our house, but even that got old after a while. I started keeping an eye on the family across the street, even though there was nothing suspicious about them. They were painfully normal, especially their son. Especially their
cute
son. I even managed to mortify myself by having a long-running and completely one-sided “How
you
doin’?” imaginary conversation with Cute Boy.
Where’d we move from? Oh, nowhere you’d know. So what do you do around here for fun?
Ice cream? Yeah, I love ice cream. With you? Of course! No, my parents are totally cool with me dating
.
See? Pathetic. As you can tell, I’ve never had a boyfriend, but whatever. It’s cool. After all, most girls who have boyfriends probably can’t say that they helped to bring down the Peruvian government, right?
So, after a long and lazy summer spent safecracking and slowly going crazy over Cute Boy, I was ready for New York, ready for a change.
I was ready for something to
happen
.
*
The first rule of being a spy: Listen. Our family friend Angelo always says that a good spy never asks questions, that people will always tell you what you need to know.
I’ve known Angelo my entire life. He was friends with my parents back when they were all in Berlin together, and they’ve stayed in contact ever since. Angelo works for the Collective, too, but I think he’s semiretired now, or at least that’s what he says. For all I know, he’s getting ready to be knighted by the queen or about to go spelunking somewhere in the Galapagos. He always gives good advice, too, especially about safecracking and lock picking. It’s like if Tim Gunn and James Bond had a baby, and that baby was Yoda. Angelo’s response? “Who’s Yoda?”
I sent him the Star Wars DVDs for Christmas. And a DVD player.
Angelo’s a forger. I have twelve passports and just as many birth certificates, and they’re all Angelo’s handiwork. He handles most of the paperwork for the Collective, including duplicate documents. Like, let’s say that someone wants to sell the original Gettysburg Address on the black market and use that money to buy guns for crazy despots. (It’s been known to happen.) Angelo forges the document, switches them out, and then the bad guy ends up with no money, and the Gettysburg Address gets returned to its original home. There are probably about a million more steps involved, things like finding the right paper pulp and hiding printing presses, but Angelo doesn’t like to discuss details. He can be quite secretive that way, but I understand. We all work in different ways. As long as he keeps using flattering pictures on my passport photos, I’m happy.
As soon as I started writing, Angelo taught me how to forge signatures. In fact, the first name I wrote wasn’t mine, it was my mom’s, a near-perfect imitation of her signature. And when I was tall enough to reach his front door, Angelo taught me how to pick locks. Once his front door got too easy, we moved on to Gramercy Park, which is in Manhattan. Angelo has a key to that park, but it’s no fun when you have to use the key. I love my parents, I do, but neither of them could open a lock if their lives depended on it. And since our lives
do
, in fact, depend on it, that’s usually where I come in.
Here’s an example of how it works:
At the beginning of the summer, my parents and I got sent to Iceland to investigate one of their largest banks. The CEO’s family was suddenly driving imported cars, sending their kids to Swiss private schools, and buying homes in Spain with no money down, yet there wasn’t an uptick in the CEO’s yearly income.
That usually means someone’s hiding something, something like cold hard cash, and let’s just say I’m really good at hide-and-seek.
So, my mom gets a job as part of the bank building’s cleaning crew, which pretty much gives her access to everyone’s office, including the CEO’s. She’s an amazing computer hacker, which I think sort of rankles my dad. He’s useless when it comes to electronics. One time, we were in Boston and they got into this huge fight because my dad thought my mom was taking too long to do her job. She just handed him the TiVo remote and said, “Tell me how this works.” And of course he couldn’t, so she was all, “Don’t tell me how to do
my job,” and believe me, he doesn’t anymore. He really loves watching
Planet Earth
on Discovery Channel.
Anyway, my mom gets into the CEO’s office and, of course, has access to his computer. It’s so, so easy to get into someone’s computer, I can’t even tell you. Password protected?
Whatever
. All you ever need to hack someone’s computer is a copy of their birth certificate and, sometimes, not even that. If the person’s really famous, they’ve probably already talked about their mom in the news, so boom, there’s the mother’s maiden name. Pets, children’s names, the street where they grew up, their place of birth? They’re all password clues, and most people use the same password for everything.
Including the CEO of this company.
(I think my mom was actually sort of disappointed. She likes when she has to do the serious hacking. She says it keeps her young.)
So my mom goes into his computer and sets up a Trojan Horse virus that lets her look at the CEO’s computer from her laptop at home. Sneaky, right? Meanwhile my dad starts looking at the company’s financial records and notices that there were a lot of bank accounts being opened with tiny bits of cash in them, which is what money launderers do to avoid being caught.
And judging from the names on the accounts—all female, all young, and not an Icelandic surname among them—there was an excellent chance that this CEO was involved in human trafficking. What a degenerate, right?
There was definitely a paper trail somewhere—all the
e-mails pointed to that—and that paper trail was about to be shredded. My mom hurried up and jammed the shredder the next night, but it meant we had to work fast.
It meant that
I
had to work fast.
I went down the hall toward the CEO’s office, the fluorescent lights barely lit overhead as I crept past rows and rows of cubicles. It was almost eleven at night, so the employees were long gone by now—there weren’t even any overachieving stragglers. The only sound came from my shoes sliding over the cheap carpet as I stayed close to the walls and turned the corner. I was in total game mode after hanging around for three months; I was ready to play.
Here’s the boring part of my job: I don’t really get to do a lot. I mean, I open safes and I can forge signatures pretty well, but that usually happens at the very end. I’ve never had a case that was all mine, that rested on my shoulders rather than my parents’. I had spent most of my time in Iceland admiring the scenery, rather than kicking ass and taking names. It was cool, I guess, but it was sort of like being stuck in elementary school while everyone else goes to college. I wanted something more.
The CEO’s office door was open just like it was supposed to be, and I could hear the cleaning crew down the hall. My mother was working with the crew tonight as planned; she was the reason the door was unlocked. Personally, I would have rather jimmied the lock open because hi, let’s play to our strengths, but my parents are always about doing things the simple way. It gets annoying sometimes, I can’t lie. “If we wanted to do things the right way, then why are we spies?”
I sometimes point out, but I know they’re correct. It’s not about creating excitement; it’s about getting the job done.
That’s the second rule of being a spy: Be beige. Be beiger than beige. Be as average as possible. Be like the cashiers in your grocery store. Could you describe them? Chances are, no. Did you see them? Of course. Do you know their names, even if they were wearing name tags? Probably not. It’s like that.
