Crisis Zero (4 page)

A
FTER RUNNING DOWN JUST ONE SHORT HALLWAY, I TURNED
the corner and crashed right into Agent Chum Bucket's stained and smelly white T-shirt. I bounced off his deceptively muscular gut and landed on the floor with a grunt.

He looked down at me in surprise and then threw a small slip of paper onto my lap right before two NSB agents tackled him from behind.

All three of them went sprawling to the floor beside me. I scooted back against the lockers, subtly closing my hand around the small message Agent Chum Bucket
had passed along. I quickly slid it behind the tag on the underside of the tongue of my shoe and then planted a shocked and scared expression on my face.

A backpack Agent Chum Bucket had been carrying had flown off his shoulder during the takedown. The contents were now spilled out across the hallway floor as he struggled with the two agents detaining him. The backpack wasn't mine, but among the contents was the hard drive I had just stolen from Principal Gomez's office.

My stomach dropped. Agent Chum Bucket must have been trying to sneak it out of the school before the NSB could search my locker. Now his cover would be compromised
and
the mission would fail. My head fell onto my knees, and when I looked up, there was a large hand in front of my face.

I recognized the guy in the suit standing above me as NSB Special Agent Loften, one of the men who had arrested Mr. Gomez earlier that morning. He was tall and skinny, yet still looked like he could wrestle a grizzly bear and win. But at the same time, there was something strangely comforting about the concerned look on his face.

“Come on, up you go,” he said as I grabbed his hand and he helped me to my feet.

The two agents who had tackled Agent Chum Bucket were putting him in handcuffs now as two more collected everything that had fallen out of the backpack and placed it in a black duffel bag with the letters
NSB
stenciled onto the side.

“Do I know you?” Agent Loften asked me.

“Yeah, well, no,” I stammered nervously, trying my best to sound like a normal kid who was face-to-face with an NSB agent. “I mean, I was in Mr. Gomez's office this morning when . . . you know, when you arrested him, or whatever.”

“That's right,” he said, eyeing me from head to toe. “We meet again.”

I shrugged just as Mr. Kittson rounded the corner. He was about to start yelling at me when the scene before him diverted his attention. He looked at the school cafeteria worker in handcuffs and the presence of several NSB agents and then locked eyes with me.

“What . . . ?” is all he managed to say aloud, even though it looked like he wanted to say so much more.

“And you are?” Agent Loften asked him.

“I'm Mr. Kittson. A teacher.” He pointed at me. “His teacher. He just ran from my classroom.”

“Did he?” Agent Loften said, squinting at me. “Well, we'll escort him back to your room after we're finished asking him a few questions. If you don't mind?”

Mr. Kittson blinked. It was pretty obvious that Agent Loften wasn't really asking his permission.

“Umm . . . sure,” Mr. Kittson finally managed. “Room two fourteen.”

“Thank you,” Agent Loften said, placing his hand on my shoulder and steering me down the hall away from the action. He stopped halfway down, once we were out of earshot of the other agents and Chum Bucket.

“What did he say to you?” Agent Loften asked, nodding back down the hallway.

“Mr. Kittson?” I said. “Nothing . . . you were right there.”

“No, the cafeteria employee.”

“I don't know . . . something about lettuce, I think,” I said. “He's always seemed a little crazy. Loves lettuce. Is he, like, a terrorist or something?”

Agent Loften smiled. It didn't seem to properly fit his face. Like sunglasses that were too small or a black toupee on a guy with a red beard.

The smile faded a second later.

“He didn't give you anything?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“You're sure?”

I nodded.

“So you would allow us to search your person to verify that?” he asked.

I nodded again. I was too busy working on an answer to a question I knew was coming eventually. Coming up with that answer was hard work—I hadn't had much to eat or drink that day.

“How can you explain your sudden departure from class?” Agent Loften asked, as he gestured for me to empty my pockets.

I pointed down at my pants, having finally gotten my answer ready.

He looked down and then took a quick step back.

“I didn't make it,” I said, probably looking as uncomfortable as I felt in my freshly peed pants.

“Go get yourself cleaned up,” Agent Loften said, trying to hide his disgust. “And then get back to class, okay? Here, take my card, call me anytime day or night if you remember anything more, okay?”

I nodded and then headed toward the locker room.
This was now the second time I'd peed my pants on purpose to get out of a jam as a secret agent. Who knew that peeing your pants and fainting goats were such great secret weapons for a spy?

O
NCE I WAS SAFELY INSIDE THE BOYS' LOCKER ROOM AND HAD
changed into the spare pair of jeans I always kept in my gym locker, I sat on the bench and tried to wrap my head around what I'd just witnessed.

For one thing, the mission had been an utter failure. The NSB now had the hard drive. Whatever was on it was probably already on its way to Washington, DC.

Secondly, Agent Chum Bucket was now officially compromised. Or maybe he'd keep his cover and instead get pegged as a terrorist and sent to some secret prison
on a deserted island out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. After all, rule number one as a secret agent was never, ever break your cover, not even to other government agencies. Either way, though, this was bad.

I stared down at the floor with my face in my hands and then my eyes passed over my shoes. I'd almost forgotten about the message! I quickly pulled out the slip of paper from behind the tongue of my shoe and unfolded it.

It looked the same as all the other messages he'd slip into my school lunches. Except those messages were usually pretty clear and straightforward. This one seemed like gibberish.

THE SCHOOL BURGER'S SECRET SAUCE IS REALLY JUST BARBECUE SAUCE AND KETCHUP MIXED.

What in the world did that mean? And why would he give it to me? Agent Chum Bucket couldn't have just lost his mind in the last few hours. Which meant the message had to mean
something
. But what? And what was I supposed to do with it? I checked my phone; school was out in twenty-one minutes. Not only that, but I likely needed to get back to class soon before Mr. Kittson
started wondering what happened to me.

So I needed to figure it out fast.

I thought back to every encounter I'd had with Agent Chum Bucket. The first time I'd met him was when he'd given me my spy gadgets for my first assignment at the beginning of the school year. We'd met in what he'd called his office, which was really just a pantry. He'd even blown a hole into a giant tub of mayo in order to demonstrate how to use the fruit roll-up explosive.

That's it!

Now it seemed so obvious I was a little embarrassed I hadn't figured it out right away. I jumped up from the locker room bench and ran out into the hallway, quickly making my way toward the school cafeteria pantry. I just hoped I would get there before the NSB decided to search it. Now that they thought Chum Bucket was involved in whatever sort of insanity Mr. Gomez was mixed up in, it likely wouldn't be too long before they started confiscating his stuff.

I made a quick pit stop at my locker to get my backpack. The door was closed and locked; yet the hard drive I had taken from Mr. Gomez's office was no longer inside my bag. Which meant that Agent Chum Bucket had
indeed removed it somehow.

I slung the empty bag over my shoulder and continued on toward the cafeteria, passing a few other kids and a teacher. They didn't pay any attention to me. The school must not have been on lockdown anymore now that the NSB had retrieved the stolen drive.

The door to Agent Chum Bucket's pantry room was slightly ajar. Which meant he'd either left it open for me or I was going to find NSB agents already inside, searching through the school's food supplies. I held my breath as I pushed the door open.

The pantry was chock-full of giant drums of salad dressings, sauces, and condiments, as well as fifty-pound boxes of crackers, bread, noodles, and other typical school lunch ingredients. About the only thing I didn't see inside the huge pantry room were NSB agents or any fresh and healthy lunch ingredients.

It didn't take as long as I expected to find a couple massive drums of secret sauce. I considered for a moment how gross it was that all of the condiments we ate in school lunches came from giant plastic barrels.

After pushing the thought aside, I unscrewed the lid on the closest barrel. The strong odor of vinegar and
sugar and tomatoes quickly filled the confined pantry. I looked around and spotted a box of plastic gloves on a nearby shelf. I pulled on a pair and then slowly dipped my hand into the reddish-brown sludge.

Even at room temperature, it felt surprisingly cold through the glove. I swished my hand around for a few seconds, feeling nothing. Sauce sloshed over the sides of the jug onto the floor and my pants. I was ready to give up, but decided to plunge my arm in a little bit deeper. That's when my fingers grazed something solid. Either there were rat carcasses inside our secret sauce, or I had been right about what the message from Agent Chum Bucket meant.

I grabbed the object and pulled it from the drum. It was a freezer bag dripping with red goop. Inside was a computer hard drive.

This had to be the one from my locker! The drive Agent Chum Bucket got caught with must have been a decoy. I had to admit it was pretty ingenious that the Agency had such a contingency plan ready to go. Although it was also a little annoying they hadn't told me about Chum Bucket's assignment. So much could have gone wrong.

So much still could.

If the stuff he'd been caught with weren't the real files and hard drive, it meant the NSB was going to figure that out eventually. Which meant that I needed to get the real one out of the school as soon as possible. I couldn't even waste time cleaning the condiments off the freezer bag.

I made a face as I shoved the secret sauce–covered freezer bag into my backpack. It was probably going to smell like McDonald's for the rest of its existence. But that didn't matter—getting this stuff to Director Isadoris was way more important than how my backpack smelled.

Before I left, I checked the other tubs of secret sauce. I didn't find more material from Gomez's office, but I did find several sealed packages of spy gadgets that Chum Bucket must have kept hidden there for emergencies. I recognized some of the equipment, but other items looked completely new. I stuffed all of it into my bag as well, then zipped it up, pulled off the plastic gloves, and exited the pantry faced with a significant decision. I had two options:

Take a right: exit the school, risking expulsion, and head directly toward Agency HQ with the hard drive.

Take a left: head back to seventh-period class, risking
another run-in with Agent Loften and his NSB goons and the reconfiscation of the hard drive, as well as the task of explaining to Mr. Kittson why I was covered in greasy red gunk.

I turned right, pushed open the door underneath the glowing green exit sign, and was out of the building about fifteen minutes before the end of seventh period.

T
O AN OUTSIDE OBSERVER, I WOULD HAVE LOOKED LIKE A CRAZY
person. Just some kid, half covered in gloopy condiments, jumping around in a snowbank without a coat like a lunatic. But what a passerby wouldn't have known, of course, was that there were secret cameras hidden inside the swallows' nests adjacent to the small snowbank I was frolicking in.

Hidden cameras planted there by a government agency so secret that its very name was classified and unknown by its own employees.

But I knew the cameras were there and so I jumped up and down in front of the swallows' nests, waving my arms like a madman. All I wanted was to get the evidence in my bag down to Agency personnel before the school bell rang and the odds of getting caught with the stolen hard drive would increase exponentially. After all, everybody, NSB agent or otherwise, would take a second and third look at a kid dripping with greasy barbecue sauce. Besides, it really was freezing without a coat—I was right in the middle of an infamous North Dakota winter, after all.

Luckily, I didn't have to wait very long before I heard the maintenance shed door open behind me.

Agent Smiley poked her head out and motioned for me to join her. I ran inside, where the secret elevator was already waiting. We stepped onto the platform.

“You have the hard drive?” she asked before pressing any buttons.

“Yep.”

Then we were shooting down into the earth, leaving our stomachs up at the surface. During the ride down into Agency headquarters, Agent Smiley held a hand over her normally unflinching face and tried to hide her crinkled nose.

“Sorry,” I said, looking down at the secret sauce stains on my pants and shirt. “Things got a bit, uh, messy.”

She didn't say anything back. Then we hit the bottom and the elevator doors opened. I'd been down to Agency HQ before, and each time it looked completely different. Sometimes it was bustling with activity, people in suits everywhere working hard to thwart whatever rogue threats faced the country. A few of the times I'd been greeted by armed guards pointing huge machine guns at my face. This time, however, I was stunned to find a virtual ghost town.

The place was empty. Deserted. The normally busy atrium was quiet and still. Half the lights were off, the dimness giving it an even darker vibe, as if it had been converted into an evil lair in my absence.

“Where is everyone?” I asked, suddenly worried that perhaps the base had been compromised and everyone I knew was dead or captured.

“Director Isadoris will explain,” Agent Smiley said. “Come on, follow me.”

I trailed her up the glass staircase and along the secret hallway at the end of the balcony that led to the director's office. He was seated behind his desk. Two other agents I didn't recognize were working on laptops at a small
folding table behind him. His hair was frazzled as if he hadn't showered in days, and his face was covered in dark stubble. It made the massive man look even more like a giant grizzly bear than he usually did.

“Agent Zero,” he said, not standing or smiling. “Have a seat.”

I took a chair across from him while Agent Smiley crossed the room and joined the other two agents at the small card table.

“You succeeded?” Director Isadoris asked.

I unzipped my backpack and looked down into the splattered interior. I debated giving him the whole bag, but then decided he didn't really need to know that I had snagged a few spare gadgets from the pantry. After all, he was the one who thought it wasn't worth telling me about the Chum Bucket contingency plan.

I plucked out the bag containing Gomez's hard drive and plopped it onto the desk.

“There it is,” I said.

He nodded and shoved the messy heap into a duffel bag.

“Agent Scion,” Director Isadoris said, “take this to the tech lab and see what you can find.”

One of the agents working behind him stood and
walked over to retrieve the bag. Then he slung it over his shoulder and left the office without saying a word. Director Isadoris treated the entire transaction as if he were asking a friend to get him a soda from the fridge. Then he turned back to me with a blank look.

I tried to suppress my annoyance. Did he have any idea what I'd gone through to get that? How close I had come to getting myself kicked out of school? How I'd risked being arrested by the NSB? How Agent Chum Bucket actually had been arrested? If it wasn't that important, then why ask CB and me to do it at all?

Director Isadoris must have noticed my glare.

“What?” he snapped. “You want a medal every time you complete an assignment?”

I was stunned by his words. And even more stunned to see one of the agents behind him smirking. I just sat there and failed to come up with any sort of a reply.

“That's what this job is,
Agent
Zero,” Director Isadoris continued. “You're given a dangerous mission, and if you can complete it without being captured or killed, you are given another. This was just another day at the office. You don't see florists getting a ticker tape parade each time they pick a flower, do you?”

I shook my head, despite not really knowing what a
ticker tape parade was. He had a point either way, but that still didn't quite take the sting out of his words.

“I'm sorry, sir,” I said, not able to look him in the eyes.

Then he sighed and leaned back in his chair.

“No, I'm sorry, Agent Zero,” he said. “My words still stand, but they should have been expressed more tactfully. I'm used to dealing with adults, after all.”

Even his apology felt like a backhanded slap to my face. But I nodded and accepted it. Once again, I couldn't really argue with his logic.

“As I'm sure you've noticed,” he continued, “things are a little different around here at the moment. First, we diverted a healthy chunk of agents to a new initiative, one that could be a real game changer. But even more drastic has been the need to scale back to essential personnel only. We simply don't know who we can trust anymore. The fact is, we've never had a security breach of this severity in the seventy-year history of the Agency. A former agent, systematically taking down every aspect of our operation . . . Medlock has all but destroyed us from the inside out.”

I nodded slowly, the true gravity of the threat starting to sink in.

“Which is why capturing him has become our sole
objective at the moment. Every other resource—outside the new initiative that we have—is now aimed entirely at finding, detaining, or eliminating Medlock. In the pursuit of this task, everything—even an agent—is considered expendable.”

I could only assume that was his way of confirming that Agent Chum Bucket was now on his own. I wanted to ask the director if he counted himself as expendable, too, but I stayed quiet. I didn't want to make him even angrier than he already was.

“And in line with that,” Director Isadoris said, “we have another immediate assignment for you. One that relates back to our primary subdirective, which is to figure out what exactly Medlock is up to. That is, if you feel you're up to the challenge.”

Director Isadoris might have been a little sarcastic with that last bit. But it didn't matter: I was in too deep to back out now.

“Yeah, I'm in,” I said.

“Good. As you know, we believe Medlock has yet another operative inside the school. Someone who likely framed Principal Gomez, set him up to get caught by the NSB. And it could be an adult, but it's just as likely another student.”

“What makes you think that?” I asked.

“Jake, Medlock's son,” Director Isadoris said. “Children are easier to manipulate than adults, and generally appear less suspicious. And, as you and Jake have both demonstrated, can be just as effective. While Medlock could have planted adult agents at the school, it's equally possible that Jake recruited other agents himself among the student populace.”

It made sense, but it was hard to imagine who else might be working for the bad guys. What kid would get on board with a plot for world domination, or whatever Medlock's endgame was, besides his own kid?

“Let me guess,” I said. “You want me to find out who this inside agent is?”

“Indeed,” Director Isadoris confirmed. “It could be anyone, so suspect everyone, and discount no one.”

“One thing I still don't get,” I speculated aloud, “is why Medlock would go to the trouble of framing Gomez if he wasn't working with the Agency.”

“Well, that's another thing we're hoping you can help us find out,” Director Isadoris said. “It must have something to do with the base, the Agency, and our ties to the school. As we speak, a new principal, Ms. Pullman, is being brought in to take over for Mr. Gomez.
Her background checks out: she has a family, a complete educational record; it's hard to imagine that she could be under Medlock's thumb. But circumstances dictate that we consider her a suspect for the time being.”

“So, what's next?” I asked.

“Well, that's hard to answer completely until we know what Medlock is up to. Once we figure that out, we can come up with a definitive way to stop him. So,
next
is simply doing everything we can to uncover his plans, starting with a thorough search through the files on the hard drive you brought in. Hopefully to confirm that it was a frame job and also look for clues as to who executed it and how and why,” Director Isadoris said. “In the meantime, the new direct assignment for you and Agent Atlas is twofold. One: Discover who, if anyone, framed Gomez and continues to execute small acts of sabotage that are interfering with Agency operations. Two: Look for evidence inside the school regarding why Gomez may have been framed, and ascertain Ms. Pullman's possible involvement. I'm going to level with you, Agent Zero: With Agent Chum Bucket in NSB custody, our other agents working on the new initiative, and Agents Nineteen and Blue still not ready for fieldwork, you and Agent Atlas are our best chance at finding out
anything from inside the school.”

I nodded. It was pretty simple, though I didn't really have any idea how I was going to start. Not yet, anyway.

“Speaking of Agents Nineteen and Blue . . . would it be possible for me to visit them?” I asked.

Director Isadoris sighed and said, “Yes, but I must warn you that you may not like what you see.”