Spy School (14 page)

Sublevel 1

February 8

1445 hours

Although a lot of surprising things occurred at
spy school, I was relatively sure no one there was capable of instantaneous molecular dispersion. I knew Chip and Hauser had come into the shed: Their wet boot prints still marked the floor. The trick was to figure out where they’d gone.

I was wary of going after them myself, given that both of them were significantly bigger than me and had several years more training in how to cause serious pain in other people. But there wasn’t much choice. In the distance I could see
my team’s victory celebration had already begun. Zoe and everyone else were racing toward the mill, chanting Erica’s name. It would take several minutes for me to go back and convince anyone to come help me, minutes I didn’t have if I wanted to stay close to Chip and Hauser.

But beneath my concern, there was a current of excitement as well. Outside, everyone else was merely pretending to be spies, while I had been given the opportunity to actually be one. I had an honest-to-God mission: to find out what Chip was up to. And if I did it right, people might soon be chanting
my
name.

I cased the shed for clues. It was freestanding, which meant there was only one direction Chip and Hauser could have gone: down.

I looked at the floor again. It was weathered concrete, chipped and scarred from years of poor treatment. There was a small square of it in the center of the shed, three feet on each side, nested inside a larger square that made up the rest of the floor. Chip’s and Hauser’s boot prints were confined to the central square, except for one. This was a toe print on the far side from the door, as though one of them had been reaching for something high up.

I quickly examined the far wall. A rack of garden tools hung from it—hoes, rakes, shovels, hedge clippers—with rusty blades and well-worn handles. It was like I’d stepped
into a gardening catalog in 1950. Above that was a second rack holding smaller items: lanterns, trowels, loops of extension cord. The toe print seemed angled toward a trowel. As both Chip and Hauser were at least six inches taller than me, I had to clamber onto a sack of fertilizer to reach it.

The trowel was welded to its rusty hook, so it didn’t come off. Instead, it swiveled upward when I grabbed it, like a light switch.

There was a soft metallic click from inside the wall, followed by a loud hiss from under the shed. The inner square of concrete suddenly lowered into the floor.

I pulled the shed door shut and leapt onto the square.

It sank into a subterranean tunnel thirty feet below the surface. The tunnel was fifteen feet wide and ten feet tall, big enough to drive a golf cart through. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all cement. Tree roots had forced their way through cracks in the ceiling, meaning the tunnel had been around for decades. Water dripped through the cracks, puddling on the floor, giving the whole place a dank, mildewy smell, like the showers in our middle school gym.

The tunnel was well lit—lights studded the ceiling every few feet—though it curved as it headed back toward the school, so I couldn’t see anyone ahead. I could
hear
them, though. Chip and Hauser weren’t bothering to whisper, confident
no one knew they were there, and their voices echoed back to me.

I hopped off the cement square. The tunnel dead-ended behind it, right where the wall of the academy property would be. There were two red buttons with up and down arrows on the wall nearby, like those you’d find in an elevator. I pushed the up one.

The concrete square rose back up, allowing me to see how it worked. A pneumatic column lifted it, silent except for the hiss of air, quiet enough that Chip and Hauser didn’t hear it over their own voices. The concrete square slotted back perfectly into the ceiling above.

Fearing my heavy snow boots would be loud on the cement floor, I yanked them off and carried them, padding down the hall in my socks. Once I rounded the curve, I could see Chip and Hauser in the distance, moving quickly, as though with a purpose.

They weren’t talking about anything clandestine. Hauser was just going on about how unfair Professor Oxley’s last offensive driving exam had been. “We had to drive these ancient cars with manual transmissions. When was the last time anyone even saw a car with a manual transmission?”

“Gotta be prepared for anything,” Chip said.

“Well, it wasn’t just me who couldn’t do it,” Hauser snapped defensively. “Stubbs didn’t even know how to get
hers out of park. Finally, she jammed the thing into reverse and nearly took out half the class.”

As we got closer to the heart of the campus, more tunnels began to branch off the one we were in. And then doors began to appear in them. The first I passed had a plate on it:
B-213–STORAGE.
The next read
B-212,
also storage. Soon the place became a labyrinth. We hooked left and right through it. If I hadn’t had my targets in sight, I would have lost them. And I doubted I could find my way back to the shed, though I figured that wasn’t problematic. We’d entered what was obviously an important subterranean level of the campus. The shed, with its small pneumatic lift, couldn’t have been the only entrance. There had to be other ways in and out.

Still, I was astounded by the size of the underground level—and that I’d had no idea it was there. It occurred to me that Alexander had said something right before my SACSA exam began about there being “far more here than meets the eye,” but at the time I’d thought he was merely being metaphoric. For the last three weeks I’d assumed the buildings I saw aboveground made up the entire campus. Now I realized that, as with so many other things at spy school, there was far more going on beneath the surface.

We began to pass other rooms, rooms that housed mechanical and electrical equipment, secretive unmarked rooms with multiple key-code entries, dormitories and mess halls that
probably dated back to the Cold War, when everyone feared a nuclear war might force them to live underground for a year. Pipes and electrical wires snaked along the walls and ceiling. Random objects, like filing cabinets and hand trucks, began to appear in the halls, as though despite all the storage rooms, there still hadn’t been enough places to put them. Throughout, it was all eerily unpopulated; everyone was still outside.

However, that was likely to change soon, now that the war was over—and Chip knew it. He kept glancing at his watch and hustling Hauser onward.

Then he suddenly stopped. They were in a nondescript section of tunnel that looked exactly like every other section of tunnel we’d been through.

I ducked behind a cart loaded with sacks of powdered eggs just as Chip furtively glanced in my direction. He didn’t see me—or anyone else—and decided the coast was clear.

“Check it out,” he whispered, then pointed to something nestled among some pipes along the wall.

“Holy cow,” gasped Hauser.

I was still carrying Zoe’s scope. I put it to my eye and zoomed in. I caught a glimpse of a nest of red and blue wires and some yellowish putty before Hauser shifted on his feet and blocked it from view.

I couldn’t be sure, but it
looked
like a bomb. Of course, I only knew about bombs from the movies. I’d never seen one
in real life. (Explosive Construction and Defusion didn’t get taught until our fourth year, when our eye-hand coordination was a bit steadier.) For all I knew, a
real
bomb looked like a sprig of posies.

“Got the kit?” Chip asked.

Hauser pulled a small gray box out of his pocket, though once again, I couldn’t see what they were doing with it. Hauser was a big guy to begin with; wearing his bulky winter clothes, he blocked half the tunnel.

“So this is Scorpius, huh?” Hauser asked.

“Scorpio,”
Chip corrected. “Hold that steady.”

Hauser shifted to the side. I caught a glimpse of the wires again.

If I wanted Erica or Alexander to believe this, I needed evidence. I fished my cell phone out of my pocket and pressed the camera to the scopes’s eyepiece, thinking maybe I could use it as a telephoto lens. It was hard to hold both pieces of equipment steady, though, so I rested the scope atop a sack of powdered eggs and tried to focus it.

My phone suddenly vibrated in my hand.

It was a text. I’d tried to use my phone underground hundreds of times in Washington—virtually every time I’d ridden the subway—and never once had I got reception. But now, in a subterranean hall thirty feet below ground level, my phone had chosen to work at the least opportune moment
possible. The unexpected vibration startled me. I bumped the scope, which rolled off the sack and clattered to the floor.

And if that hadn’t been loud enough in the otherwise silent tunnel, the scope noisily rolled away from me—and right toward Chip and Hauser.

There was no use hiding anymore. I ran.

“Hey!” Chip yelled. Then I heard his footsteps and Hauser’s pounding down the hall behind me.

I ducked around the first corner I came to, hoping they hadn’t seen my face, then took the next corner as well. I tried to look for landmarks so I’d be able to find my way back to the bomb later, but every hall looked the same and I was moving too fast to read the numbers on the doors.

I spotted a staircase ahead and charged toward it, though my stocking feet couldn’t get much purchase on the slick floor. I heard the footsteps bearing down on me from behind.

“Might as well stop, Ripley!” Chip taunted. “You can run, but you can’t hide! I’ll find you sooner or later!”

Later still seemed like the better option to me. I charged up the stairs. Two flights up was a steel door. I hit it with everything I had . . .

Just as Chip caught up to me. He snagged the hood of my snow jacket, though my inertia pulled him forward too. We tumbled onto a well-worn carpet.

I rolled over to find Chip’s fist on a collision course with
my face. I dodged to the right. Chip’s knuckles grazed my earlobe, then connected with the floor.

While Chip howled in pain, I tried to scramble away, but he caught my ankle and yanked my feet out from under me.

“What’d you see?” he demanded.

“Nothing!” I kicked his arm with my free foot, trying to wriggle loose.

Chip pounced on me.

In the movies, when spies fight, they always look very cool, using a combination of martial arts moves and cleverly improvised weapons, often in an incredibly picturesque location, like a castle in the French Alps.

This fight wasn’t anything like that. Chip certainly knew how to fight—it turned out that the one area he really excelled in was martial arts—whereas I’d barely had any training at all. However, I’d spent just about any spare time I had in the past few weeks boning up on self-defense techniques. Given the circumstances, I went with a move called the “Bashful Armadillo,” which simply involved curling myself into a ball and covering my head with my arms. I chose this for two reasons: (1) It was ridiculously easy, and thus I had already mastered it, as opposed to far more complicated procedures like the “Wily Chipmunk” or the “Spastic Cobra”; and (2) I was wearing thick winter clothes, which not only insulated me from the cold, but also from Chip’s attacks.

Chip was therefore reduced to fighting on my level, tumbling around on the floor with me and trying to get a shot in. He landed a few punches on my arms and torso, but my ski parka was so well padded, he might have been hitting me with a throw pillow. Meanwhile, I went for pressure points, trying to get him to release me—an eye gouge or a knee to the testicles—though the best I managed was to drive my elbow into a chair.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Chip snarled. “Would you just fight like a man?”

“I’ll pass,” I said. The Bashful Armadillo was working for me.

“What is going on here?!”

The principal’s voice was frightening enough to scare even Chip cold. Our fight stopped instantly.

For the first time since emerging from the subterranean level, I had a chance to take in my surroundings. I’d spent the entire battle with my head under my arms. It turned out, we’d emerged inside the main hall of the Hale Building—from behind a secret panel in the wall that still hung ajar—and had thus staged our fight in perhaps the most public place on campus. Dozens of students and faculty had just returned from the war game only to find us writhing about on the floor like a couple of idiots.

“He started it,” Chip said, pointing at me.

“I did not!” I protested.

“I don’t care who started it!” the principal roared. “Fighting isn’t allowed at the academy!”

“But we fight all the time in class,” Chip said.

“That’s for a grade!” the principal snapped. “Unsanctioned fighting is different. I want to see you two in my office right now!”

The students all went “ooooh” in response. None of them wanted to be in our shoes.

I sat up, feeling ashamed and frightened, noting familiar faces in the crowd. Zoe seemed impressed I’d taken on Chip. Warren (who was still royal blue from head to toe) seemed annoyed Zoe was impressed. Murray looked concerned for me. Hauser and Stubbs looked concerned for Chip. Tina, my RA, appeared embarrassed, as though my behavior somehow reflected badly on her. Professor Crandall didn’t seem to have any idea what was going on; he was too busy trying to dislodge some ice that had frozen in his eyebrows.

And then Erica emerged.

It was strange to see her in a crowd. Erica was such a loner, she seemed out of place surrounded by people.

Even stranger, she knelt by my side and cradled my face in her hands. “Are you okay?” she asked. It was such a gentle and caring gesture, I briefly wondered if someone had substituted the real Erica with a double agent. From the reaction of most
of the other students, they were wondering the same thing. But it was definitely Erica: She had the same wonderful lilac and gunpowder smell as usual, along with a hint of latex paint.

“I’ve been better,” I replied. Then I leaned in and whispered, “There’s a bomb under the school.”