Spy School (21 page)

Five seconds after that, Erica opened the rear doors, dragged me out, and snapped the hood off my head.

The first thing I saw was her face. She was smeared with black camouflage paint and blood, although I couldn’t tell if it was hers or someone else’s. There was a lump the size of a walnut over her left eye, her lip was swollen, and her hair was
a rat’s nest, but she still looked gorgeous to me. Of course, it’s possible that if a gargoyle saved your life, you’d think it was the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen.

Erica cradled my face in her hands and leaned in. For half a second I thought she was going to kiss me.

Instead, she tilted my head to the side, angled it toward the glow of a streetlamp, and examined my eyes. “Your pupils are slightly dilated,” she said. “Looks like they gave you Narcosodex. It’s a mild tranquilizer. Feel nauseous?”

“Yes, but I think it’s car sickness. I got tossed around pretty good just now.”

“Better out than in, just to be on the safe side.” Erica jabbed three fingers into my stomach.

I keeled over and threw up.

That was the last thing I ever wanted to do in front of Erica Hale, although I
did
feel considerably better afterward.

While I knelt on the ground, clutching my stomach, I noticed Erica was wearing head-to-toe camouflage gear. It was the winter white variety—to better blend in with the snow—smartly accessorized with a black utility belt. She opened one of the belt’s two dozen compartments, removed a small white pellet, and held it out to me.

“Is that a drug that counteracts the tranquilizer?” I asked.

“No, it’s a Tic Tac. It counteracts vomit breath.”

“I’ll take two,” I said.

Erica popped them into my mouth, then snapped out a pair of heavy-duty shears and went to work on my bonds.

I wasn’t handcuffed. Instead, my wrists and ankles were bound with some sort of flexible wire, so it took Erica the better part of a minute to get through it.

While she did that, I took in my surroundings. We were on the southwest side of the National Mall. The van was parked on a thin strip of land between the road and the Potomac River, about a quarter mile from the Lincoln Memorial, which loomed above the trees to my left like a giant marble air conditioner. To my right, farther away, was the shining dome of the Jefferson Memorial, while ahead of us was a dark expanse of baseball fields and the Tidal Basin. Beyond it, the Washington Monument stabbed into the sky.

I turned around and looked at the van. It was nondescript, dark green with a Virginia license plate I’d bet was stolen. The roof was severely dented and the front windshield was smashed in. The sides were pocked with bullet holes and the paint was gouged a dozen times over. The passenger’s side rearview mirror dangled by a wire. If the van had been rented, someone wasn’t getting their deposit back.

The men inside the van were in even worse shape. All three were unconscious. Their noses were broken. Their eyes were blackened. Their faces were so lumpy and swollen, it was impossible to tell what they usually looked like.

“What just happened?” I asked.

“I saved your bacon.” Erica snipped through the wire binding my ankles and tossed it into the van. Then she pulled something off my rear end and presented it to me. A Post-it note. “This was stuck to your butt. I’m guessing it’s theirs. Have any idea what it means?”

All that was on it was a number: 70,200. I shook my head.

Erica secured the Post-it in a plastic evidence bag, then grabbed my arm and tugged me toward the ball fields. “C’mon,” she said. “Before their backup arrives.”

“Shouldn’t we bring one of them?” I pointed to the unconscious bad guys in the back of the van. “Y’know, to interrogate?”

“It’s a nice idea, but we don’t have the time to lug a body around. This place is gonna be swarming with nasties in two minutes.”

I knew better than to argue with her. I turned and ran.

Even though the National Mall in Washington is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the country, it’s amazing how little visited some parts of it are. Even on a summer day, when the Lincoln Memorial is thronged with tourists, the southern side of the Reflecting Pool nearby can be virtually empty. On a cold winter night, there wasn’t another soul around. A few cars zipped past on Independence Avenue as
we darted across it, but otherwise, we might have been miles from civilization.

A large grove of trees ran along the south side of the Reflecting Pool. As we ducked into it, we saw the headlights of three cars stop where we’d left the van. It had taken them slightly under two minutes to arrive. I paused in the cover of the trees to watch, but Erica dragged me on. “Don’t stop. It won’t take them long to figure out we’ve come this way. There aren’t many other options.”

She was right. Between the Potomac and the Tidal Basin, there were few directions for us to have headed that didn’t involve swimming. For a moment I thought Erica had made a rare mistake, abandoning the van where she had. She’d left us about as far from cover—or a Metro station—as possible in the city, while the enemy had cars and a lot of men. It wouldn’t take them long to catch up with us.

But, as usual, Erica had thought everything out far in advance.

Not far into the woods was a small, almost-forgotten memorial to Chester Alan Arthur, one of our least effective presidents. I’d once stumbled upon it with Mike, a few years before, after a Little League game down on the ball fields. At the time I’d thought it was odd that someone would have bothered to build a monument to Arthur—or that if anyone had really cared, they would have built it where it was
doomed to be overlooked by anyone but lost tourists. It was a small monument, marble like everything else in Washington, with a Roman arbor arching over a statue of Arthur, who looked bloated and gassy.

Erica twisted a ring on his finger. A small panel flipped open in the marble, revealing an ancient keypad. Erica entered a code number.

There was a groan, and the statue rotated ninety degrees, revealing a hidden staircase beneath it.

After the events of the night, I hadn’t thought anything else could surprise me, but this did the trick. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

We ducked through the opening, and the statue automatically slid back into place, plunging us into darkness. The stairs descended only one story. Erica hit a switch, lighting a series of bare bulbs that stuck out from the ceiling, revealing a tunnel. It seemed to be significantly older than the tunnels on campus. The walls were stone, rather than cement, and the ceiling was propped up with rotted wood beams, like a mine shaft. It was even colder inside than it was outside.

I began to shiver. I was wearing only a sweatshirt over my clothes.

“Here. Put this on.” Erica removed a small packet from another compartment on her utility belt, then unfolded it. It
was an ultrathin jacket made of shimmering silver material. “It was developed at NASA for the astronauts.”

I pulled on the jacket. It seemed to hermetically seal my body heat around me. Almost instantly, I felt warmer.

We hurried down the tunnel for five minutes until it dead-ended at an ancient iron door. There was no computerized keypad here, only a rusted keyhole. Erica withdrew a key ring from her utility belt and selected a large iron key. It fit the keyhole perfectly. The door swung open with a squeal of protest.

We were now inside a large square room. The walls were made from massive stones, each ten feet across. An iron staircase spiraled up to a trapdoor in the wooden ceiling. It seemed as though we were inside the foundation of a much larger structure.

I calculated how far we must have walked and guessed where we were, but it didn’t seem possible. Not until I noticed that many of the stones had inscriptions. One in the corner proclaimed:
LAID BY ZACHARY TAYLOR, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, MAY 14, 1849.

“Holy cow,” I said. “We’re inside the Washington Monument.”

“Tell anyone I have the keys and I’ll kill you.” Erica closed the steel door and locked it from the inside.

“How on earth do you have the keys to the Washington Monument?” I asked. “Did your father give them to you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Erica laughed. “My
grandfather
did.”

She led the way up the staircase. Her key also worked a lock in the trapdoor, allowing us out of the foundation and into the monument itself. We emerged behind a statue of George Washington in a small alcove. The elevator the tourists use was right across from us, but Erica led me through a door to another set of stairs instead.

“We’ll have to hoof it,” she said, starting to climb. “The elevator makes too much noise. Anyone outside can hear it if they listen closely.”

I followed her. The empty shaft soared into the air 555 feet above us. “Why would your grandfather have the keys to the Washington Monument?”

“My family’s had the keys since it was built, seeing as it was such an important part of the city’s defense system.”

“This was built for defense?” I asked, incredulous.

“It’s a fifty-story surveillance tower smack in the middle of our nation’s capital, constructed on the eve of the Civil War,” Erica replied. “You honestly think they built this just for
tourists
?”

“I’m pretty sure everyone in America thinks that,” I replied defensively. “Except you.” Although, now that we were inside the monument, I could see how Erica’s version of the story was possible. Washington, DC, had been burned
to the ground in the War of 1812 and then wound up right on the edge of the Northern states during the Civil War. It would have made sense to build something that allowed the military to see the Confederates coming from far away. When the monument was finished, it was the tallest building ever constructed. It did seem the tiniest bit odd that it had all been done solely for sightseeing.

“The whole monument thing was a disinformation campaign to get the public to help pay for this,” Erica explained. “There wasn’t any income tax in those days. And though the place is outdated technology-wise, it still works just fine. There isn’t a better place to observe what’s happening on the Mall than up here.”

In that instant Erica’s plan became clear. I’d been up in the top of the monument several times before, usually on school field trips. It was the perfect place to hide. There were windows facing all directions, which would let us keep tabs on the enemy, and they’d never suspect we were up there.

Still, I couldn’t help but be a little afraid. These guys had abducted me from a supposedly impenetrable security chamber less than an hour before. “What if they
do
figure out we’re here? Then we’ll be trapped.”

“They won’t figure it out,” Erica said reassuringly. “I’ve been up here at night a million times. No one ever thinks twice about this place.”

We continued up the rest of the way in silence. It was hard climbing all the stairs, and even Erica was getting winded. When we reached the top, we went directly to the window that faced west.

The city below us was beautiful at night. The Lincoln Memorial shimmered in the Reflecting Pool, and the lights of Virginia sparkled on the Potomac. If I hadn’t been so focused on spotting the enemy, it might have occurred to me that I couldn’t have asked for a more romantic place to go with a beautiful girl.

Not that romance ever entered Erica’s mind for a second either. “There they are,” she said, after barely even glancing out the window.

“Where?” I asked.

“There’s three sets of two men. One pair just recovered their buddies from the van. The other two are combing the woods south of the Reflecting Pool for us.”

I studied the dark landscape as hard as I could. Now that Erica had brought them to my attention, I could barely make out the two men where we’d abandoned the van. They were bundling their pals into another car, which sped away while I watched. As for the ones hunting us, I couldn’t spot any of them. The woods were pure darkness. “How can you see them?” I asked.

“I eat a lot of carrots.” Erica watched the woods for
another twenty seconds, then announced, “They’ve lost our trail. We’re safe.” She leaned heavily against the wall and gave a tired sigh.

It occurred to me that she’d probably expended a ton of energy rescuing me.

“How’d you find me?” I asked. “When the entire CIA couldn’t?”

“I never lost you. I was monitoring everything that was happening. Once every agent on campus starting moving in one direction, I decided to look the other way. Just in case it was a diversion. Sadly, it turned out I was right.”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t a diversion. The enemy just got lucky. That guy they caught . . . that was my best friend.”

Erica’s eyes widened. It was perhaps the first time I’d ever seen her surprised by anything. “What the heck was he doing infiltrating the campus?”

“There’s a party tonight. He wanted to spring me. But with all the excitement, I forgot to text him back to say no. So he showed up anyhow.”

“At exactly the right moment to distract the CIA? That’s suspicious.”

“Mike Brezinski is not one of the enemy,” I said. “I’ve known him since kindergarten.”

“You can’t trust anyone,” Erica replied.

I tried to change the subject. “What happened after that?”

“While everyone else was surrounding your buddy, the enemy grabbed you. Their mole really came through for them. They knew the whole layout of the school, had the entire underground mapped out. They took you out through the toolshed you followed Chip through the other day, then blew a hole in the wall there. The van was waiting.”

“And you followed them?”

“I’d hoped to stop them on campus, but they moved faster than I expected. Luckily, I was able to commandeer a motorcycle and catch up to you.”

I stared at her for a second. “And luckily, you actually know how to drive . . . and take out an entire enemy team in a moving van . . . and know the secret entrance to the Washington Monument.”

Erica cracked a slight smile, then tried to shrug this off like it was no big deal. “I guess Grandpa taught me a few things.”