Crisis Zero (7 page)

“M
AKE ANY PROGRESS?” DANIELLE ASKED ME AS WE
STOOD in line for lunch.

“Uh, sort of,” I said.

I was reminded of Agent Chum Bucket's arrest when we saw his replacement, an old woman with a pouf of curly gray hair under a plastic net. I wondered how the Agency would contact us now if they needed to during school.

“What do you mean ‘sort of'?” Danielle asked.

I explained my day as quickly and quietly as I could.
She seemed pretty horrified when I got to the swirly part. Which was fitting since it was actually pretty horrifying. In fact, I still hadn't recuperated enough to work up an appetite. I couldn't get the taste of the toilet water out of my mouth.

“So your top two names are ‘maybes'?” she said.

I nodded as the old lady who'd replaced Chum Bucket scooped a blob of brown goo with chunks of some sort of “meat” in it onto my tray.

“What about you?” I asked.

“I think I can officially cross off Mrs. Food and Tyrell from my list,” Danielle said. “Tyrell definitely isn't our guy. He has a solid alibi. Turns out he and his family were all away on vacation the past two weeks, visiting some spy museum in Washington, DC. I even saw the date-stamped pictures of them in front of the White House and Lincoln Memorial and at the museum.”

“What about Mrs. Food?” I said.

“I asked her about some of her old CIA–KGB double agent missions at gym today.”

“Really?” I asked.

“It's no big deal,” she said. “Kids do it all the time. She loves telling those stories. I'd never really paid attention to them, of course, since I never had a reason to and
always figured they were totally made up. Anyway, she spun off a few, one that I'd heard before about fighting off a twenty-seven-foot anaconda while snooping around inside the State Kremlin Palace in Moscow looking for a secret borscht soup recipe that doubled as the blueprints for creating a fusion bomb.”

“Uhghghg.” I shuddered. I hated snakes. Even more than swirlies.

“Yeah, well, that's the thing,” Danielle said. “She said this was back in nineteen fifty-eight, but the State Palace at Moscow's Kremlin wasn't even built until 1961.”

“Please tell me you had to look that up?” I said.

Danielle grinned at me and then shrugged.

“Hey, I like Cold War history, so sue me,” she said. “But the point is none of the facts in her stories hold up. A bunch of other things she's said in the past don't add up either, like how Khrushchev was supposedly training a platoon of ferocious timber wolves to parachute into the US to wreak havoc.”

“Hey, that could technically be true,” I said. “You can't verify that it isn't as ridiculous as it sounds.”

“Maybe not, except that she said Khrushchev got the idea from the opening scene of an old movie called
Red
Dawn
, but that movie didn't even come out until nineteen eighty-four.”

“So?”

Danielle sighed as if she were talking to a wolf instead of a person.

“So, Khrushchev died in seventy-one! She's making it all up—she just likes to have fun with the kids, make them gasp and ooh and ah and all that.”

“Okay,” I said, as we headed toward our usual table. “But that doesn't prove much, does it?”

“Well,” Danielle said, “it means she probably never was a spy, for one. And even more telling was when I snuck into her office during her off period. I saw her talking on the phone and she was talking to her granddaughter in, like, baby talk and telling her how she would make her cookies that weekend. Which proves she's lying about her whole backstory—she always tells us she never had kids. But she does—I saw pictures on her desk of her with a big family. And old pictures of her wearing a college cheerleading outfit and wedding photos and pictures of her with all of her kids when they were babies. She's just a strange old lady who likes to make kids do military drills in gym class while telling outlandish stories. Nothing
more. At least, not as far as Medlock is concerned.”

I nodded, impressed with her work so far. It made me feel sort of bad. I had two maybes and one complete unknown. She was definitely down to one name.

“What are you guys whispering about?” Dillon asked as we sat down at the table. “You guys plotting against me? Are you going to try and steal my brain during the night and use it to power your new PlayStations?”

Dillon was convinced that his brain generated its own powerful electricity and could be used as an everlasting battery should it ever be removed from his head. Well, that is, if you could keep it “entertained and hydrated,” or so he said.

“Yeah, Dillon,” I said. “We were just discussing where to buy the saw. I heard Home Depot's got a great deal on skull saws right now. Just forty-nine ninety-nine. Plus tax.”

Danielle reached over and pretended to measure Dillon's skull with her hands.

“Come on, get off me.” Dillon laughed, swatting at her hands.

Danielle and I laughed as well, almost like old times. I was again reminded that at some point we'd probably have to tell Dillon the truth. We both couldn't
hide being a secret agent from him for much longer. Especially with how bad things were getting between Medlock and the Agency. For all we knew, the whole town could find out about the Agency soon, if Medlock's plan was carried out.

“What's up with you?” I asked him. “I haven't seen you much lately. Danielle says you're busy with researching some new theory.”

“Oh, yeah!” he said getting that excited look on his face. “This is the Big One, man. In fact, I could really use your help with it. Want to help me collect samples Wednesday morning before school?”

“Before school?” I said. “As in, like, five or six?”

“Yeah, man,” Dillon said excitedly. “That's the best time to catch the fungus unaware—that or late at night. But I need more morning samples. Come on, we haven't hung out in a while. It will be like old times. . . . Remember that summer when we went out every morning at six to see if we could amass the world's largest collection of living earthworms?”

To tell the truth, I didn't really want to get up that early to help Dillon with one of his ridiculous and pointless theories. But, honestly, I also felt really bad about how much I'd been blowing him off lately. Besides, it's
not like I was really going to do any spy work at five in the morning.

“Okay, sure, let's do that,” I said. “Tell me about the theory so I have some background.”

“Awesome, you're the best!” he said, his eyes practically sparkling. “Well, I made some great progress just last night. Get this: I collected fourteen samples of fungus from the snowy fields north of our house. My early testing shows that they're just a few years from being able to pull themselves from the dirt on their own, having survived two winters now somehow. A few of them were even starting to form legs! I sent them off for more testing, lab testing, you see, but the preliminary results are good. Or, well, not so good when considering what the fungus is planning. Because I also uncovered evidence that their first-phase goals will be to eliminate all steak sauce—don't ask me why. But after that it gets even worse. . . .”

I was sort of listening to him ramble on about his new theory, but mostly I was trying to keep an eye on Gus. I'd spotted him in line shortly after sitting down. He sat at the same table he normally did with a few of his friends and hangers-on. He seemed to be acting relatively normal. He laughed and joked and made fun of several kids
passing by. Typical Gus. Maybe he was just a sociopathic jerk and nothing more? Just because he was capable of supporting Medlock's insane plans didn't necessarily mean that he was actually the inside guy. That was pretty loose reasoning.

As I sat there, thinking it all over, I suddenly realized that I had been staring at Gus the entire time. And now he was staring directly back at me. With a scowl on his face.

A scowl that was now approaching me quickly from across the cafeteria.

“O
H, NO,” I SAID.

“I know, right?” Dillon said excitedly. “If the strawberry jam didn't make the fungi samples recoil in pain, then why would apricot? It makes no sense at all, and yet it makes perfect sense!”

But Danielle noticed right away what I was talking about. Several of our other friends had, too. It was hard to miss a guy like Gus Agriopoulas charging across a school cafeteria with an expression like that on his face.

His expression could best be described as Grim Reaper.

I stood up quickly, accidentally knocking over my chair, drawing even more attention to the whole mess. For a moment, running seemed like the best option. But, then again, I was dealing with one of the fastest kids in the entire state. He'd probably be winning varsity high school track meets as an eighth grader later in the school year, breaking records set by kids four years older than him. I held up my hands.

“What did I tell you?” Gus shouted, only a few feet away from me now.

At this point, I had two options:

Cower and get the snot literally beaten out of my nasal cavity.

Try to figure out if Gus was working with Medlock,
and
then
get the snot literally beaten out of my nasal cavity.

The way I figured it, if I was going to get pummeled in front of the whole school, I might as well accomplish something important while it happened.

“Wait, wait,” I said, sounding desperate enough to make Gus pause right as he got to my table. I took a step
back and spoke quickly, while I still had a fully operational mouth. “Did Medlock tell you to do this? Was it you who framed Gomez?”

I tried to speak softly, so that only he would hear me, since basically the entire cafeteria was watching us now.

My words stopped Gus dead in his tracks. His eyebrows furrowed up into a scrunchy mess on his forehead. Then he tilted his head like a dog seeing himself in the mirror for the first time.

“What are you talking about, Fender?” he asked.

He looked so utterly baffled that he might even have been reconsidering getting into a fight with me. What I had said must have sounded crazy, and crazy kids were unpredictable. Now that I was pretty sure Gus had no connection to Medlock (no one was that good an actor, not even Meryl Streep), I decided to play it up, try and use that angle to my advantage, now that I had it.

“I'm talking about jam!” I shouted, trying to sound like a lunatic, channeling my inner Dillon. “Raspberry jam! Gus-Putin, you've got to try my raspberry toe jam!”

I started flapping my arms like a bird. Gus took a step back. It was working! I was actually scaring him away from—

And that's when Gus's fist connected with my sternum. I have no idea why he went for a torso punch instead of caving in my face, but I suppose either way it was definitely a sign that he had tired of my antics rather quickly.

I flew back about five feet and landed hard. My chest felt like it had shattered into a million pieces. I gasped once and started climbing back to my feet. With a guy like Gus, you couldn't ever let your defenses down, no matter how bad you were hurt. Gus didn't feel remorse or empathy. He wouldn't stop a beating out of pity or satisfaction. Once he decided to destroy you, he wouldn't stop until someone made him stop.

I figured I had at least a small chance; after all, I was a secret agent who had taken down fully grown men with huge machine guns before.

But I never even got the chance to fight back against Gus, because the lunchroom aides were closing in on us now. Which, to be honest, I was pretty happy about. Three teachers swooped in and grabbed both Gus and me and then marched us out of the cafeteria while the fourth teacher tried to calm the cheering students and herd them back to their lunch tables.

Gus and I were taken to Mr. Gomez's office. Or, his
former office—it wasn't his office anymore. The nameplate on the door had been replaced with a new one:

M
S.
J
AYNE
P
ULLMAN

Ms. Pullman was behind the desk beyond the open door as we were led to the two chairs just outside the office. She sat there calmly and smiled at me as we passed. There was something about that smile that rattled my bones. I tried to shake it off as I took a seat outside. Gus was led directly into her office.

As I sat there and waited for my turn, all I could think about was that smile. It was a smile that told me all at once that she knew everything about me, had some sort of evil plan already in place, and that there was nothing I could do to get in her way.

It was the exact same smile I'd seen on Medlock's face.

I
DIDN'T HEAR ANY SCREAMING OR SHOUTING AS I SAT OUTSIDE
Ms. Pullman's office. In fact, I heard nothing at all coming from behind the wooden door. If it had still been Mr. Gomez's office, I'd have heard plenty of sputtering and shouting. Gomez was a classic screamer.

The attendance secretary looked at me as I fidgeted nervously. “Back again already, Carson?”

I shrugged. I had gotten to know Mrs. Bradshaw pretty well over the past year and a half. After all, I had probably spent a good third of my time at this school in this
office. She was a nice lady, and I don't think she disliked me as much as most of the other adults at the school did.

“Well, don't worry.” She smiled. “Ms. Pullman is real nice. I think you'll find her to be quite . . .
different
. She's even already approved a plan to get us a heated parking lot that Mr. Gomez had been rejecting for years. How neat is that?”

“Oh, yeah, sounds cool,” I said, trying to sound sincere. “Thanks, Mrs. Bradshaw.”

What she couldn't possibly know was that I wasn't nervous about whatever punishment was headed my way. I was nervous because it was a distinct possibility that Ms. Pullman was a diabolical secret agent working for one of the most evil criminal masterminds the world had ever known.

But there wasn't really enough time to explain that properly to the attendance secretary.

A short time later, the door opened and Gus walked out, and I saw something I never thought I ever would. Gus was crying. Tears ran down his cheeks and he wiped at them sheepishly. How in the world had Ms. Pullman managed that?

He looked at me and then looked away quickly. He turned back to Ms. Pullman.

“Thank you again,” he said.

She just smiled and waved and then he bolted out of the administration office area before I could say anything to him. I was almost too stunned to notice that Ms. Pullman was beckoning for me to head inside her office now. Slowly, I stood up and followed her in.

“Close the door please,” she said.

Her voice was soft and soothing. Like, you could listen to a recording of her reading aloud at night and it'd lull you into the most peaceful sleep of your life. It also made you want to obey every word without question.

I closed the door and then sat down across from her.

She'd already made a few decorative changes. It seemed brighter and somehow larger than the tiny death trap that had been Mr. Gomez's office. She'd even gotten the broken window fixed. For several weeks under Mr. Gomez, it had been covered by cardboard and duct tape. And now after less than a day in charge, she already had it replaced with a real new window. A pot of white lilies sat on the corner of the desk, enjoying the sunshine. I tried to focus on the flowers rather than look into the face of my new enemy.

Ms. Pullman was probably around my mom's age. She was pretty and had large eyes and never seemed to blink.
She smiled at me patiently. I attempted to smile back.

“So,” she began, “Gus tells me you two had a sort of misunderstanding today?”

I nodded.

“Why don't you tell me what happened.”

It was such an unusual thing to hear from the person sitting across from me in this office that I almost didn't understand her words at all. Mr. Gomez had never, ever asked for my side of the story first. He usually started things out with shouting and wild, paranoid accusations.

After taking a few breaths to calm my nerves, I explained to Ms. Pullman that I had been following Gus. I told her I was convinced that he had stolen a textbook of mine but was too afraid to confront him. Then later, I found it in the messy depths of my locker. At lunch, I had merely been daydreaming and was looking the wrong way and he thought I was staring at him. A small skirmish had ensued.

“Well, that more or less matches the account he gave me,” she said. “Do you wish to add anything else before I officially close this matter?”

I froze for a moment. Was this over? Just like that? What was her game? I was baffled. I just shook my head.

“Great!” she said brightly, as if we were discussing cute
puppies instead of a school fight. “Well, I see no need to issue any detention in this matter. At least for you—Gus will be serving some detention, of course. Punching another student will not go unpunished. But, ultimately, Gus assured me that the whole thing is over now. Unless you feel otherwise?”

“Uh, no, ma'am,” I said.

“Wonderful! Now, you and I have another matter to address.”

My mind reeled. Was she going to tell me she knew who I was and then pull out a silenced pistol and plant a bullet in my forehead? I grabbed the arms of the chair and tensed, waiting for the possible arrival of a bullet. Would I feel it, even for a second? Or would there just suddenly be nothing?

“I've reviewed Mr. Gomez's file on you,” she said. “It's quite extensive. Impressive, almost. The sheer size of it, and also the detail with which he documented your activities. That said, I'm not entirely certain that it was very fair or healthy or warranted for Mr. Gomez to obsess over you the way he did.”

“Ms. Pullman, you don't underst— Wait, what?” I said.

“That's right,” she said, smiling. “I think he had you pegged as a bad apple from the get-go. But there isn't
much in the way of hard evidence linking you to any of the incidents he discusses. It reads more like the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist, to be honest with you. It appears as if he never really treated you fairly. Do you not agree?”

“No . . . I mean, yes,” I said, not sure what to say. The fact was, I did agree . . . somewhat. He never had any evidence, but to his credit, I usually was the guilty party. Somehow I suspected Ms. Pullman knew that as well, in spite of what she was telling me. Not that I was going to admit to any of that. “Yeah, I suppose it wasn't fair.”

Ms. Pullman nodded. Then she picked up my massive file from her desk, it was at least five inches thick. She dropped it into the trash can next to her. It landed inside the metal bin with a thump that almost sounded like a gunshot. I flinched.

“I want you to know that as of this moment, you have a clean slate,” she said. “I want to give you a fair chance. Trust can be a very powerful and empowering thing. But, in order for it to work, it has to go both ways completely. I will always be honest and straight with you, and give you the benefit of the doubt in any future run-ins you and I might have. But I need the same in return. It's vital if we're going to make this work. You strike me as a good
person, Carson, and I have a feeling you mean well. But if any evidence comes to my attention that you, say, let goats loose inside this school, and you lie about it, then whatever trust we have built will be destroyed, and you will find me much more unpleasant to deal with than Mr. Gomez. Do I make myself clear?”

Her tone was still mostly pleasant, but I got the sense that Ms. Pullman didn't deal in lies and empty threats. Once again, I'd been struck dumb.

“Yes, it's clear,” I said. “Thank you for the second chance.”

“It's not a second chance,” she said. “In my eyes, you've yet to do anything wrong. But let's not ever get to second and third chances, right?”

I nodded.

“Okay, dismissed, Carson,” she said.

I got up to leave, more confused than ever. She didn't seem at all like an evil enemy secret agent. Maybe Director Isadoris's hunch was completely off? Maybe her background check was squeaky clean because she actually was squeaky clean? But if that were the case, then why would Medlock go through all the trouble to have Mr. Gomez removed from school?

As I walked to my next class, I realized that the only
way I would get an answer to that question was to find out who had framed Gomez. And so I turned my focus back to my first mission objective: locating the enemy spy.

Gus Agriopoulas was officially crossed off. And so it was probably time to go back to the first name on my list, Mr. Lepsing. I had to find a way to get inside his supply closet and see what he was really hiding in there.