Spy School (16 page)

It didn’t exactly seem like the best trade-off in the world. I just prayed Erica knew what she was doing.

The Box

February 8

1600 hours

It wasn’t until I had been perp-walked past the
entire student body and locked in the Box for the night that it finally occurred to me to check my phone for messages. Things had been so hectic, I’d never read the text that had alerted Chip to my presence in the first place.

It was from Mike.

Another Pasternak party tomorrow night. Want me to spring you?

A month before, this would have been the greatest message I’d ever received. Now it was only another reminder
of how lousy my life was at the academy. Mike was now a regular guest at Elizabeth Pasternak’s, while I’d spent my afternoon being pummeled and manipulated—and was now under lockdown for the next five and a half years. Public school: 1. Spy school: -1,000.

Sure, Mike,
I wanted to write back.
I’d love for you to spring me. FYI, you’ll need a commando team and a getaway car.

As it was, I couldn’t even fire off a lame excuse about why I couldn’t go. The Box had the Wi-Fi coverage of a coal mine. None.

I might have been less miserable if I’d heard from Erica, but there’d been radio silence ever since the principal’s office. I still had no idea why Erica had made me bait the principal or, for that matter, if she had tracked down the bomb. If she hadn’t, that meant I was now locked on a basement level with a live explosive device.

If it even was a live explosive device. I realized that I’d never gotten a very good look at it. . . .

Although I still could. I suddenly remembered I’d been taking a picture of the bomb right when I got the text from Mike. I quickly dug out Peachin’s
Field Guide to Bombs and Other Incendiary Devices
and then brought up the photo on my phone.

Turned out, I’d taken a really fantastic picture . . . of the
eyepiece of the digital scope. I had no photographic evidence of the bomb at all.

I sighed and flopped onto my bed, feeling depressed and useless. Not to mention imprisoned. Somewhere up on ground level, Zoe and my other newfound friends were probably celebrating their war game victory in a student lounge or practicing kill shots on the firing range. Meanwhile, I was totally isolated.

There was nothing I could do except homework. I cracked open Forsyth’s
Basics of Cryptography
, read until my eyes went bleary, then looked at my clock and saw it was only four thirty in the afternoon.

Time really crawled when you were on lockdown.

I struggled through another chapter, nodding off seventeen or eighteen times, then checked my clock again.

It was still four thirty in the afternoon.

Either time
really
crawled when you were on lockdown or my clock was broken.

I checked my phone. In fact, it was eight thirty at night, which explained why I was so darn hungry. No one had come to get me for dinner. I wondered if this was part of my punishment or if the administration had simply forgotten about me. I’d now been at spy school long enough to guess it was the latter, which began to worry me. I could get through the night without food, but if someone didn’t
remember I was in the Box by the next morning, things could get dicey.

Still, it wasn’t worth panicking yet. Maybe this was merely a test to see how I handled pressure. If so, I’d show them I was a tough egg to crack. For the benefit of any cameras that might have been on me, I played it cool, as though I were really enjoying being on lockdown. I laid back on my cot and gave a contented sigh. “This is great,” I said to any concealed microphones. “All this time to myself. It’s like being on vacation.”

Then I casually examined my clock to see if I could keep it from telling me that it was eternally four thirty in the afternoon.

After a minute it occurred to me that I didn’t have the slightest idea how to fix a clock. So I did the only thing I could think of. I pounded my fist on the top.

It worked. The clock started ticking again.

Just out of interest, I pounded on it once more. It stopped.

I pounded on it a third time. It started again. I cranked the time up to 8:31 p.m., then wondered exactly how to kill the next three hours until bedtime.

I dug out Dyson’s
How to Stay Alive,
which wasn’t exactly a cure for boredom. It was amazing how spy school textbooks could take any theoretically fascinating subject and make
it as exciting as reading assembly instructions. I attempted to bone up on the basics of hand-to-hand combat, which should have been not only interesting, but also relevant to my current situation. I was asleep within minutes.

I woke to the disturbingly familiar sensation of someone pinioning my arms and slapping a hand over my mouth. It was too dark to see my attacker, but thankfully, she smelled like lilacs and gunpowder.

“Hi, Erica,” I said, though my greeting was muffled by her hand.

“You might want to read the chapter on sleeping lightly, just in case someone who’s actually dangerous breaks into your room next time.” Although Erica’s words were harsh, her tone wasn’t quite as cold as usual, as though she might have actually been smiling as she said it. My staying calm under the circumstances had impressed her.

She took her hand off my mouth and sat on the bed.

“I assume you’ve dismantled the microphones?” I asked.

“Naturally,” Erica replied.

My eyes flicked to my clock: 9:10 p.m.

“You’re here earlier than I expected,” I said.

“It’s one a.m. sleepyhead. You really need to get a new clock.”

The truth was, I
hadn’t
expected her. I’d only been really hoping she’d show up. I was proud of myself for playing it so
cool, though I hoped she couldn’t hear my heart thumping in the dark. “Did you find the bomb?”

“No.”

Now
I tensed up, unable to control my fear. “You mean it’s still out there . . . ?”

“Keep your panties on, Alice. I couldn’t find it because it’s not there anymore.”

“You’re sure you didn’t miss it?”

If it was actually possible to do so, I heard Erica frown. “This is
me
we’re talking about. I cased all subterranean levels of the campus. Even the ones I’m not supposed to know about. There’s no bomb down here.”

“This one was back in some pipes on the first level—”

“About twenty yards from a pallet full of powdered eggs. I know. I found where the bomb
was
. But like I said, it’s gone. All that was left was a residue of C4 explosive putty. And a faint whiff of Chip Schacter’s toxic aftershave. That’s what you were fighting about? You saw him down there with it?”

“Yes. Him and Hauser. They came in through a secret entrance by the toolshed while—”

“I was capturing the flag. Yeah, I saw you going after him.”

“Through a snowstorm while you were fighting a dozen guys?”

“I’m good at multitasking.”

“Of course. Why didn’t you follow us then?”

“Because I had to go get the mini-microphone so I could plant it on you once you got busted for fighting.”

I thought about that for a second. “Don’t you mean ‘just in case’ I got busted for fighting?”

“No,” Erica replied. “I figured there was an exceptionally good chance Chip would spot you and then try to kick your ass.”

I winced, embarrassed by my poor performance—and how predictable it was. “So . . . Chip removed the bomb after I caught him with it?”

“That’s one possibility, though not one I favor.”

“Why not?”

“Because Chip got a D-minus on his last bomb defusion final. If that moron had tried to do anything with a bomb, we’d know, because there’d be a huge smoking crater where the school used to be.”

A thought came to me. “Then . . . that means he probably didn’t plant the bomb either.”

“You thought he did?” Erica asked in a disdainful tone.

“Uh . . . well . . . yes,” I admitted. “He’s kind of a jerk.”

“Jerks hang you up from the flagpole by your underwear. They don’t blow up schools.”

“So then how’d he know about the bomb?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he just stumbled across it.”

“And he didn’t tell anyone?”

“Well, as you saw, he told Hauser.”

“But not anyone in the administration. That’s suspicious, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t he?”

Erica shrugged. “I’m still working on that. Though there’s a few more pressing questions.”

“Like: ‘Who put the bomb down there if Chip didn’t?’”

“Yes, like that.”

“Do you think whoever put the bomb there is the one who also removed it?” I asked.

“It’s possible. Once they realized Chip, Hauser, and you knew about it, they yanked it. But there’s some questions about that as well.”

“Like what?”

“Like where the bomb was in the first place. If I were a bomber looking to cause some serious trouble here, I’d have set the bomb under one of the main buildings. But this one was out under the woods, next to a storage room for the mess hall. If it had gone off, all it would have done was blow up a couple trees and a lot of canned peas.”

“Maybe the bomber was only looking to cause a little bit of trouble,” I suggested. “To send a message or something.”

“What message does blowing up a bunch of canned peas send?” Erica asked.

“Um . . . stop serving us canned peas?”

“I think you could probably get that point across with an e-mail.”

“Not if you wanted to ensure there were no more canned peas to serve.”

“Drop the canned peas thing, Ben. It’s not going to fly.”

I backed down, then thought of something else. “Are there security cameras in the tunnels?”

“No.”

“Really? But there’s cameras everywhere aboveground.”

“Yes,” Erica said. “I think the idea was, if you’ve got enough cameras aboveground, you shouldn’t need any below. After all, the only people who are supposed to even
know
there’s a subterranean level here are the students and faculty, who are all theoretically good guys.”

“But if one of them decides to work for the enemy . . .”

“It’s not such a good idea anymore. Good point. Of course, it’s also possible that there’s no cameras down here because they’re expensive and there’s about thirteen miles of tunnels they’d have to wire. Whatever the reason, there’s no cameras. Thus no footage of anyone setting or removing the bomb.”

“Should
we
tell the administration?”

“What? That there
used
to be a bomb down here, but now it’s gone? They’ll never believe that.”

“You said there was residue.”

“Yes. There
was
. I took it.” Erica held up an evidence bag. There was a trace amount of yellow putty in it.

I eyed it cautiously, aware that even that tiny bit of explosive was enough to vaporize us. “So what do we do now?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Erica asked. “It’s time to hack the mainframe.”

Principal’s Office

February 9

0300 hours

There was only one place in the entire thirteen
miles of subterranean tunnels beneath the campus that actually had security cameras: the hallway directly outside the Box. Just in case any prisoners—or students—being held there tried to escape.

However, Erica had already taken care of them. It was relatively simple to do. She simply jacked into each camera from behind and froze the image it transmitted. A still frame of an empty hallway looked exactly like live footage of an empty hallway.

“It’s precisely what the assassin did to all the cameras when he paid you a visit,” she explained.

“It doesn’t look very difficult to take the cameras out of commission,” I said.

“No, it’s not. But you
do
have to know where they all are. Which your standard bad guy infiltrating the school wouldn’t—unless someone inside the school had told him.”

Erica knew the location of every camera on campus. All 1,672 of them. We had to jack sixty-three to get through the Hale Building and up to the principal’s office, as well as doing a bit of zigzagging and shimmying to avoid fifty-eight others. Even moving at a good clip, it still took us well over an hour to get there, during which time Erica forced me to be absolutely silent.