Spy School (22 page)

Something about the comment nagged at me, but I couldn’t tell exactly what. An idea was forming in my mind, but it hadn’t crystallized yet. I took another glance out the monument window, but I still couldn’t spot the enemy in the woods.

“Shouldn’t we be calling for reinforcements?” I asked.

Erica shook her head. “Too dangerous. I’m not even carrying my cell phone. The CIA could use it to triangulate our position—and since the Agency’s been corrupted, the
enemy could find us as well. All we can do is wait for them to give up and go home.”

I realized my own cell phone was missing. The enemy had taken it from me. “That’s your whole strategy?” I asked, exasperated. “You don’t have a backup plan?”

“Like what, exactly?”

“I don’t know. Your father’s Alexander Hale. Sooner or later, he’s bound to notice you’re missing, right? You haven’t arranged some sort of system with him in case a mission goes wrong?”

Erica sighed. “No. That never really seemed like a good idea.”

The idea I’d been struggling with suddenly gelled. It didn’t seem right at first, but as I thought back over the events of the evening—as well as every comment Erica had ever made about Alexander—it made more and more sense.

“Your father isn’t a very good spy, is he?” I asked.

Erica turned to me, curious. “Why do you say that?”

“
You
suspected there might be a decoy,” I replied. “He didn’t. In fact, he fell for it so badly, he took my protection, allowing the bad guys to grab me without a fight.”

“They still had to take out the agents outside the door. . . .”

“Okay,
less
of a fight. That was a pretty bad mistake for someone who’s done as much as Alexander claims he has.”

“What do you mean, ‘claims’?” Erica asked it the way
one of my professors might have, pushing me to explore the concept further.

“Well . . . your father talks an awful lot about all the great things he’s done . . . but I haven’t actually
seen
him do anything great. So maybe all your father is
really
great at is convincing everyone how great he is.”

“Wow.” There was something in Erica’s eyes I’d never seen before: respect. “Finally, somebody noticed.”

I wasn’t sure, but I think I blushed. “You mean, no one else knows?”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know . . . the head of the CIA, maybe?”

“If the head of the CIA knew my father was a fraud, do you think he’d have assigned him to protect you?” Erica shook her head. “Alexander has them all snowed: the top brass at the Agency, the staff at spy school, everyone out in the field . . .”

“How could he get away with this for so long?” I asked.

“You hit the nail on the head. He has one talent: making himself look good. And he’s exceptional at it. Sometimes he makes up stories, but he usually just takes credit for other people’s work.”

“And none of the them ever complain?”

“Well, a lot of time they can’t, because they’re dead.” Erica noticed my shock and quickly added, “Oh, Alexander doesn’t kill them. Not directly, anyway. He’s almost as bad a shot as
you are. But quite often people have ended up dead
because
of his incompetence. And yet, somehow, he always manages to sell a story that has him come out smelling like a rose.”

“When did you first figure it out?”

“One day, when I was six, my father accidentally blew up our kitchen. He’d just had these missiles installed in the headlights of his car. The trigger was designed to look like one of the radio knobs, but of course, my dad forgot. He was pulling into the garage one afternoon, pressed the wrong button . . . and the next thing you know, all our major appliances are going into orbit.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“No, although my dad’s ego took a pretty big hit. And the kitchen was totaled. Our refrigerator ended up in the neighbor’s pool. They found the microwave three blocks away.” Erica began to giggle. She couldn’t control it. It was as though she’d been holding in her emotions for years, but now the dam was breaking. Soon waves of full-on laughter broke loose. “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “It’s all kind of funny in retrospect. Mom went ballistic. Dad tried to duck the blame, but he was so worked up, he actually claimed that Swedish radicals had sabotaged his car.”

I started laughing too. Erica’s amusement was infectious. And after days of tension I needed a release myself. “Did he ever screw up anything else?”

“Well, he did single-handedly destroy diplomatic relations between the United States and Tanzania.” Erica broke into a new fit of giggles.

“How?” I gasped.

“He was trying to give the president’s wife a compliment, but he botched his Swahili and ended up telling her she smelled like a diseased wildebeest.”

That was just the beginning. Now that Erica finally had someone to confide in, the stories poured out of her: how Alexander had almost caused the political collapse of Thailand; how he’d triggered a tribal war in the Congo; how he’d come within seconds of initiating a nuclear strike on France. Each tale of his incompetence was more shocking than the last, and yet, through it all, we couldn’t stop laughing. (Erica did dead-on impersonations of Alexander, the principal, and everyone else in the intelligence community.) After half an hour I hurt more from laughing than I had hurt after being attacked by ninjas.

I could have happily spent the rest of the night up there, listening to Erica’s stories, but sadly, duty called. After relating how Alexander had once lost a briefcase full of military secrets in a Tokyo karaoke lounge, Erica glanced out the window and immediately shifted from being a normal fifteen-year-old girl to the Ice Queen again. “Looks like they’re admitting defeat. It’s time to go.”

The enemy teams had regrouped on the eastern side of the Reflecting Pool by the World War II Memorial. Even I could see them now. They weren’t making any attempt to hide; they simply milled among a few other tourists willing to brave the cold. Erica whipped out a pair of binoculars, but they were of no use; the frigid weather gave our enemies an excuse to wrap their faces in scarves.

A van pulled up at the curb. The men jumped in and sped away.

Erica turned to me. “By the way, everything I’ve told you tonight is completely confidential. Say one word of it and I’ll destroy you.”

She started for the stairs. But while she was trying to be her usual, distant self, I’d noticed a hint of regret in her eyes. As though she’d wished she could have stayed up there, dishing dirt on her father and laughing for the rest of the night as well.

I followed her down into the dark shaft of the monument. “Have you ever thought of telling all this to someone
important
?” I asked. “Someone who could take Alexander out of circulation before he does any more damage?”

Erica shook her head. “They’d never believe it. My father has covered his tracks too well. And he has friends in very high places. They’d just dismiss it all as the ramblings of a teenage girl with daddy issues. And then I could kiss
my
career good-bye.” Erica grew so downcast as she said this, it seemed as if it wasn’t mere speculation on her part, but as though she spoke from experience.

“Maybe
you
wouldn’t have to share the information,” I offered. “Maybe it could come from another source. Like me.”

Erica gave me one of her rare, unexpected smiles, but she shook her head. “I don’t think it’d work out so well for you, either. Besides, we have bigger fish to fry for now.”

I nodded, although with every step toward the bottom of the monument, I grew more reluctant to leave it. First, there was a decent chance the enemy had only
pretended
to leave to lure us out of hiding. But perhaps more significantly, this was the one place Erica had ever felt comfortable opening up to me. I had little doubt that, once we left, she’d shut me out again.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Back to campus.”

I froze halfway down the stairs. “I was just abducted from campus! From the safest bunker there!”

“That’s exactly why we’re heading back. You think the director of the CIA would let that happen
twice
? You’re gonna have more security than the president.”

“Then maybe we should go to the CIA directly. To see the director himself.”

“No,” Erica said. “We’re going to see the one person we can trust.”

CIA Academy of Espionage

Faculty Housing

February 10

0200 hours

It took us a long time to work our way back to the
academy. We returned via an extremely indirect route, zigzagging back and forth across the city, using the subway, cabs, and our feet, constantly checking over our shoulders to see if we were being followed.

When we were finally only a block from the campus, I saw to my relief that there were CIA agents posted everywhere around it. Three manned the main gate, still alert
despite the late hour, guzzling coffee and blowing into their hands to keep warm.

I started toward them, but Erica held me back. “Not so fast.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked, concerned. “They’re on our side, aren’t they?”

“Don’t look so worried. They’re safe. But the moment they see you, they probably have orders to whisk you right off to the principal’s office for a debriefing—and all they’ll do there is pump you full of lies. If we want the truth about what happened tonight, we’ll have to get it ourselves.”

We rounded the campus until we came to a bank on the far side of the street. We entered the ATM kiosk, and Erica typed a PIN on one of the machines. Steel curtains instantly dropped over the window, obscuring us from view, and then the ATM swung free from the wall, revealing a hidden staircase beyond. The most surprising thing about this was how unsurprising I found it. At this point, I would have been shocked to enter a building with Erica and
not
find a hidden passageway.

The stairs connected to the maze of subterranean tunnels under the campus, only there was another security door to pass through to access it. “This is the only route from the tunnels that goes off campus,” Erica explained. “Thus, it’s extremely classified.”

“So, of course,
you
know about it,” I said.

Erica only smiled in response.

She led me through the underground maze without hesitation, as though she’d committed every hall and intersection of it to memory. Eventually, we climbed a staircase and emerged from behind the snack machine in a building I’d never been inside before. We were in the main lobby of what appeared to be a dormitory, only nicer. The room was cozy and inviting, if a bit threadbare. Leather couches were arranged before a still-smoldering fire. The walls were lined with books. It had the comforting smell of pipe tobacco and weapon lubricating oil.

“Faculty housing?” I asked. Many of the professors still lived at home, though a few were known to have residence at the academy.

Erica nodded, then led me up another flight to a short corridor with only four doors off it. She used her own key to let us into one of them.

The faculty apartments were much nicer than our dorms—although that wasn’t saying much. There were prison cells nicer than our dorms. This one was a well-appointed single bedroom with a living room and kitchenette. It was tremendously messy, however, with newspapers strewn everywhere and half-drunk glasses of water teetering on any available surface.

Professor Crandall was asleep in an easy chair in front of the television, wearing a moth-eaten terry-cloth robe over striped pajamas, a racing form across his lap. When we entered, he snapped awake with a start and looked about, disoriented. “Is that you, Thelma?” he asked, sounding more than a little senile. “Back from Tuscaloosa already?”

“You can drop the old coot act,” Erica said. “Ripley’s cool.”

Instantly, Crandall became someone else entirely. His standard slightly confused gaze sharpened, his posture straightened, and he seemed, for the first time in my experience, to know exactly what was going on around him. “Right. I suspect you’re here to find out how mucked up everything is, then.”

This
surprised me. “Hold on,” I said. “Your entire personality—the whole doddering professor thing—is an act?”

“Of course.” Crandall sounded slightly offended. “The best way to stay in the loop is to let everyone believe you’re totally out of it. You have no idea how much information people spill right in front of you when they think you’re a drooling idiot. Plus, it throws off your enemies too, and I’ve racked up my share of those over the years. They tend to underestimate you when they think you’re not playing with a full deck.” He tossed aside the racing form, revealing the cocked and loaded semiautomatic pistol that had been
resting in his lap. “Would either of you care for some tea?”

“I’d love some Orange Zinger if you’ve got it,” Erica said.

“Make it two,” I said.

Crandall hopped out of his chair and scooted to the kitchenette. Now that he wasn’t putting on an act, he moved like a man fifty years younger, as spry as anyone in my class. “Erica, I assume from your presence here that you’ve cleaned up after your father again,” he asked.