Spy School (10 page)

“Just talked. For a
really
long time.”

“About what?”

“She wants me to work on a project with her. Just the two of us.”

“What kind of project? Some kind of smarty-pants science thing?”

“It’s a little more interesting than that. I’m gonna be spending a
lot
of time with her.”

“Wow. Sounds awesome.”

“It is. I have to go. I’m late for class.” I wasn’t saying that just to leave him hanging, wanting more. I was really in danger of being late. I fell in with a group of students as they shoved through the doors of Bushnell Hall.

“Send me that photo!”

“Okay. Bye.” I pocketed my phone with a smile. It was time to begin my training.

Bushnell Hall

Lecture Room 2C

January 17

0930 hours

My first class was Introduction to Self-Preservation
.
I’d have been excited about it even if I
didn’t
think it would come in handy, given my recent circumstances. I was expecting a quick immersion into hand-to-hand combat or perhaps a scintillating discussion of how to incapacitate an armed man.

Instead, it was a snore. Two minutes into the first lecture, I was already nodding off.

This was partly because I’d had no sleep the night before,
but mostly because Professor Lucas Crandall had the charisma of a rock. Crandall was quite old, with unkempt white hair, the stooped posture of a question mark, and eyebrows that looked as though they’d recently been in a tornado. He was rumored to have served the CIA from the very early days, and he appeared to have been shunted off to spy school because no one had the heart to fire him. He rambled in a wheezing voice that was almost impossible to hear, often losing his train of thought and then pausing for great swaths of time to remember what he’d been saying.

Thank goodness Murray had saved a seat for me in the back row.

Class was in a large lecture hall, like on a college campus, rather than the type of small, boxy classroom I was used to from normal school. A tiered semicircle of seats faced a podium and blackboard. I’d entered late, having lost my way in the building, though thankfully, class hadn’t begun, as Crandall was late as well. My fellow students had shrewdly filled all the back rows, leaving the front rows a desert of open seats. I’d reluctantly started down to them when Murray yelled, “Ripley! Over here!”

He yanked his backpack off a back row seat and waved me over. “Never
ever
sit in the front row in a class here,” he warned. “Even if it means getting here early.”

“Why not?”

“Depends on the class. In Psychological Warfare, Miss Farnsworth has nasty halitosis. In Arms and Armaments, there’s shrapnel. In this one . . . well, it’s soporific. Crandall doesn’t appreciate seeing students passed out in the front row. Luckily, he can’t see much beyond that.”

Crandall had shuffled in shortly afterward, looking startled to find an entire lecture hall staring at him, as though perhaps he’d forgotten what he was coming to do. He spent the next three minutes searching his pockets for his notes and the two minutes after that searching for his reading glasses, after which he finally got around to the lecture, which wasn’t nearly as stimulating as I’d hoped. Crandall wasn’t the worst teacher I’d ever had—that’d have been Mr. Cochran, my fifth-grade history teacher, who hadn’t known when the War of 1812 took place—but his lecture style was dry as dust.

The general idea behind Intro to Self-Preservation turned out to be that the best way to stay alive was to not get into situations where you could be killed in the first place. This made sense in theory, but it wasn’t particularly helpful when you had assassins threatening to drop by your room on a regular basis. This morning’s lecture was on how to avoid ninjas, which might have been interesting if step one hadn’t been “Stay out of Japan.” Furthermore, Crandall had quickly become sidetracked, relating a rambling tale from his own Cold War days.

The next thing I knew, Murray was shaking me awake. “If you’re gonna snooze, try these,” he said, slipping something into my hand.

It was a pair of cheap glasses, though he’d cut out the eyes from a magazine photo and pasted them over the lenses. While I’d been unconscious, he’d slipped a similar pair on himself. They were ineffective and disconcerting at close range, but you could see how, to someone lecturing eighty feet away, you’d appear wide-eyed and rapt with attention, even while sound asleep.

“Thanks.” I accepted the glasses, though I didn’t put them on yet. I
wanted
to stay awake; it just wasn’t going to be easy. I tried to shake the cobwebs out of my head.

“Don’t fight it,” Murray said. “If we could weaponize Crandall’s lectures, we’d never have to worry about our enemies ever again. We could just bore them to death.”

Normally, I wouldn’t have pursued a conversation during a lecture, but half the class was doing it while Crandall droned on, completely unaware he was being ignored. “Didn’t you flunk this class last year?” I asked.

“Twice,” Murray replied.

“Don’t you think you should try staying awake through it this time?”

“Sure, if I were going to be a field agent. But the best way to avoid that is to be a guy who can’t even pass Self-Preservation
101. The Administration’s going to be so worried about me that they’ll assign me to the safest desk job in the Agency. Probably won’t even let me use a stapler. Plus, I kind of like repeating this class. I can catch up on my sleep.” With that, Murray slumped in his seat, rested his head against the back wall, and shut his eyes.

I tried to focus on Crandall’s lecture, but he’d veered off topic again and was blathering on about how much he’d hated the borscht in Russia. So I turned my attention to my surroundings, as Erica had ordered me to.

She’d laid out a plan for me in the Box the night before: “For right now there’s two parts,” she’d said. “First, we figure out who had access to your file.”

“It seems like
everyone
did,” I’d replied. “Everyone knew about Pinwheel. You, the assassin, Chip Schacter . . .”

“That’s only three people. There’s three hundred students at the school, fifty faculty, and seventy-five support staff.” Then she frowned. “Chip knew?”

“He showed up at my room right after I did, wanting me to hack into the mainframe for him.”

“Let me guess. To fudge his test scores.”

“Yes.”

“Wow. He’s an even bigger idiot than I thought.”

“Why?”

“You ever see those movies where some computer
specialist hacks into any site they want in less than a minute?”

“Sure.”

“Total nonsense. The CIA has hacking specialists, and it can take them
months
to crack a mainframe. Then they take everything they know and use it to protect ours. Which means the CIA’s mainframe is virtually impossible to hack. And yet Chip thinks that just because you know something about codes, you can do it.”

“But the fact that he knew about my cryptographic abilities means
something
, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose. It’d be worth finding out how he got his hands on your file.”

“How did
you
?”

“How’d my father know so much about you when he came to recruit you?”

I nodded, understanding. “He was given a copy.”

“A dossier, yes. He didn’t keep a very good eye on it.”

“Wait. He was given a
physical
copy of my file? This isn’t all computerized?”

“At the Computer Illiterate Agency? Not exactly.”

“But you said there’s a mainframe.”

“That doesn’t mean everyone knows how to use it. Your file was probably written on a computer and stored on the mainframe. But then it was disseminated to various people to assess your fit for Creeping Badger. A lot of these guys are
old school: terrified that someone will hack their e-mail but perfectly happy to leave a top secret dossier lying around their house. Hard copies got printed out . . . and one of them ended up in the hands of the mole.”

“So who was sent a copy besides your father?”

“I don’t know. The identities of the review panel members are classified. To find them, we’ll have to hack the mainframe.”

“What? You just said that was impossible.”

“No. I said it was
virtually
impossible. Nothing’s completely impossible.”

“So how do we do it?”

“Take advantage of the weakest link in the computer’s protection system. The human one.”

“You really
enjoy
being cryptic, don’t you?” I asked.

Erica gave me a hard look. “I’m still working on the details. In the meanwhile, you can work on part two of our plan: Keep your eyes open.”

“For what?”

“Anything of interest.
Everything
of interest. We know the mole knows who you are and is keeping an eye on you. So let’s try to catch them at it. If anyone’s following you, I want to know. If they’re watching you—or pretending like they’re
not
watching you—I want to know. Anything out of the ordinary happens, I want to know.”

“I just got here. As far as I’m concerned,
everything
that happens is out of the ordinary.”

“Okay, anything
really
out of the ordinary, then. Just be alert.”

So I did my best. I stayed as alert as possible for someone who’d weathered two attempts on his life the day before (one imagined, but still, it
felt
real enough at the time) and hadn’t managed a wink of sleep all night. The problem was, it was more difficult than I’d expected to tell who was paying attention to me . . .

Because
the whole school
was paying attention to me.

They were trying to act like they weren’t, but they were. Not just the clump of students I’d spied outside the building on the way to class. There’d been other clumps in the mess that morning and a gaggle in the hall on the way to class . . . and now, as I studied the class from the last row, there were an awful lot of students with their necks torqued around, studying me right back.

The girl sitting on the other side of Murray from me didn’t even try to hide it. She couldn’t at such close range. She was a fellow first year, still wearing her naiveté like a badge, so thin that her winter jacket seemed to swallow her, but with green eyes so bright and big that she looked like a cartoon character. “You’re Ben Ripley, right?” she asked. “The guy who fought off an assassin last night?”

The way she said it actually made me sound pretty cool. I had to stifle a smile. “Uh . . . yeah. That’s me.”

“Awesome.” The girl seemed legitimately excited to meet me. “Is that why they recruited you last minute? Because you’re some sort of martial arts expert?”

“No,” I admitted. “I’m really just good at math.”

“Right,” the girl said. “Coding and stuff. Everyone’s heard that. But it’s a smoke screen, right? Because Adam Zarembok’s a coding expert, and that guy can’t even fight off a mosquito. Meanwhile, there’s seniors
majoring
in martial arts here who haven’t defeated an assassin.”

“Well, none of them have ever been
attacked
by an assassin,” a weaselly boy sitting in the row in front of us countered. Now that the green-eyed girl had begun talking to me, everyone within earshot had turned their attention my way, blatantly ignoring Professor Crandall.

“I know,” Green Eyes said, then looked back to me and asked, “So why have
you
?”

“It wasn’t a real attack. It was part of my SACSAs.” I hated to lie, but Erica had warned me not let anyone know of the mole hunt.

“No it wasn’t. SACSAs are never run at night,” the weaselly kid announced. “And the word is, you tanked yours.”

“Or
faked
tanking them,” the green-eyed girl snapped, coming to my defense. “To make any assassins
think
you couldn’t defeat them. Which you then did. So, really, what was that all about?”

“Hey!” Murray chided, not even opening his eyes. “Let the guy be, will ya? Some of us are trying to sleep here.”

This didn’t deter anyone. More and more students were looking my way.

“I’m not at liberty to say,” I told them. It was all I could think of.

A lot of people frowned, disappointed.

“Of course you’re not,” the girl said, then extended a thin hand that was dwarfed by the sleeve of her jacket. “I’m Zoe. I think what you did was incredible.”

In my whole life I’d never had a girl introduce herself to me, let alone say that anything I had done was incredible. It felt good. So did having so many people impressed by me, whether I deserved it or not. Only a few hours before, I’d been mortified, embarrassed, frightened, and depressed by everything that had transpired at spy school. But for the time being, I’d gone from being a nobody to someone of interest.

“It’s nice to meet you.” I shook Zoe’s hand across Murray’s lap.

“Nice hands,” Zoe said. “Can you kill with them?”

“I haven’t tried yet,” I admitted, and Zoe giggled.

“I’m Warren,” the weaselly kid interjected. He didn’t seem to appreciate the fact that Zoe was giggling at something I’d said.