Spy School (3 page)

“Someone quit?”

“Flunked out. Your name was next on the list. Do you have any weapons?”

In retrospect, I realize the question was designed to distract me from the current topic. It served its purpose extremely well. “Uh . . . I have a slingshot.”

“Slingshots are for squirrels. We don’t fight many squirrels in the CIA. I meant
real
weapons. Guns, knives, perhaps a pair of nunchucks . . .”

“No.”

Alexander shook his head slightly, as though disappointed. “Well, it’s no matter. The school armory can loan you some. In the meantime, I suppose
this
will suffice.” He pulled my dusty old tennis racket from the back of the closet and swung it like a sword. “Just in case there’s trouble, you know.”

For the first time it occurred to me that Alexander might be armed himself. There was a slight bulge in his tuxedo, right below his left armpit, which I now took to be a gun.
In that moment, the entire encounter with him—which had merely been strange and exciting so far—became slightly unsettling as well.

“Maybe before I make any big decisions, I should discuss all this with my parents,” I said.

Alexander wheeled on me. “Out of the question. The existence of the academy is classified. No one is to know you are attending. Not your parents, not your best friends, not Elizabeth Pasternak.
No one
. As far as they’re concerned, you’ll be attending St. Smithen’s Science Academy for Boys and Girls.”

“A science academy?” I frowned. “I’ll be training to save the world, but everyone’s gonna think I’m a dork.”

“Isn’t that pretty much how everyone thinks of you now?”

I winced. He
did
know a lot about me. “They’ll think I’m an even bigger dork.”

Alexander sat on my bed and looked me in the eye. “Being an elite operative demands sacrifice,” he said. “This is only the beginning. Your training won’t be easy. And if you succeed, your
life
won’t be easy. A lot of people can’t hack it. So if you want to back out . . . this is your chance.”

I assumed this was a final test. The last step in my recruitment. A chance to prove I wouldn’t be dissuaded by the threat of hard work and tough times ahead.

It wasn’t. Alexander was being honest with me, but I was too caught up in the excitement of being chosen to notice. I wanted to be just like Alexander Hale. I wanted to be suave and debonair. I wanted to “let myself in” to people’s homes with a gun casually tucked inside my tuxedo. I wanted to ditch undesirables, keep the world safe, and impress the heck out of Elizabeth Pasternak. I wouldn’t have even minded a rakish crossbow scar on my chin.

And so, I stared back into his steel gray eyes and made the worst decision of my life.

“I’m in,” I said.

CIA Academy of Espionage

Washington, DC

January 16

1700 hours

The academy didn’t look a thing like what I
expected an institution that taught espionage to look like. Which, of course, was the whole point. Instead, it looked like a dowdy old prep school that might have been popular around World War II but had long since lost its mojo. It was located in a similarly dowdy, rarely visited corner of Washington, DC, hidden from the world by a high stone wall. The only thing that seemed the least bit suspicious about it was the cluster of security guards at the front gate, but since
our nation’s capital is also its murder capital, extra security around a private school wouldn’t raise many eyebrows.

Inside, the grounds were surprisingly large. There were vast expanses of lawn that I assumed would be beautiful in spring, although they were currently buried under a foot of snow. And beyond the buildings stood a large, pristine swath of forest, untouched since the days when our forefathers had decided a fetid, malaria-ridden swamp on the Potomac River was the perfect place to build our nation’s capital.

The buildings themselves were ugly and gothic, trying to imitate the majesty of places like Oxford and Harvard but failing miserably. Though braced by flying buttresses and dotted with gargoyles, they were still gray and uninteresting, designed so that anyone who accidentally stumbled upon St. Smithen’s Science Academy would turn his back and never think of it again.

But compared to the squat cement slab where I went to middle school, the campus was gorgeous. I arrived with Alexander at an inauspicious time, minutes before nightfall in the dead of winter. The light was bleak, the sky was leaden, and the buildings were shrouded in shadow. And yet, I was thrilled. The fact that we’d come in Alexander’s customized luxury sedan with a few extra buttons on the dashboard probably heightened my excitement. (Though he’d warned
me to keep my hands off them for fear of launching heavy artillery into rush-hour traffic.)

My parents hadn’t protested my leaving much. Alexander had wowed them with his pitch for the “science” academy and reassured them that I was going to be only a few miles away. Mom and Dad were both proud of me for getting into such a prestigious institution—and thrilled that they wouldn’t have to pay for it. (Alexander told them I’d earned a full scholarship, and he told
me
the whole tab was picked up by the U.S. government.) Still, they’d been surprised that I had to leave so quickly—and disappointed that Mom couldn’t even make me a farewell dinner. Mom was big on commemorative dinners, throwing them for things as mundane as my getting elected captain of the school chess team, even though I was the only student on the school chess team. But Alexander had quelled their anxiety by promising I could return home to visit soon. (When they’d asked if they could visit me on the campus, he’d assured them they could, although he’d artfully avoided telling them exactly
when
.)

Mike Brezinski hadn’t been quite so enthusiastic about my going. Mike has been my best friend since first grade, though if we’d met later in life, we probably wouldn’t have been friends at all. Mike had grown into one of those cool underachievers who should have been in all advanced classes but preferred remedial ones because he didn’t have to work
in them. Middle school was one big joke to him. “You’re going to a science academy?” he’d asked when I called him with the news, making no attempt to hide his disgust. “Why don’t you just get ‘loser’ tattooed on your forehead?”

It took every ounce of restraint I had not to tell him the truth. More than anyone, Mike would have been blown away by the idea that
I
had been selected for training by the CIA. As kids, we’d spent untold hours reenacting James Bond movies on the playground. But I couldn’t reveal a thing; Alexander was sitting in my room, casually eavesdropping on my phone call. Instead, I’d only been able to say, “It’s not as lame as you think.”

“No,” Mike had replied. “It’s probably lamer.”

So as I arrived at the Academy of Espionage, escorted by an honest-to-God federal agent, I couldn’t help but think that, if Mike were there, for the first time in our lives he’d be jealous of
me
. The campus seemed full of promise, intrigue, and excitement.

“Wow,” I said, my nose pressed against the car window.

“This is nothing,” Alexander told me. “There’s far more here than meets the eye.”

“What do you mean?”

Alexander didn’t answer. When I turned back to him, his normally confident expression had clouded.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t see any students.”

“They’re not all at dinner?”

“Dinner’s not for another hour. This period is reserved for sports, physical conditioning, and self-defense training. Campus ought to be crawling with people right now.” Alexander suddenly braked in front of a rambling four-story building with a sign denoting it as the Armistead Dormitory. “When I say so, run for that doorway. I’ll cover you.” It turned out, there
was
a gun holstered under his left armpit. He snapped it out and reached for my door handle.

“Wait!” Within a second, I’d gone from blissful to terrified. “Isn’t it safer to stay in the car?”

“Who’s the agent here? You or me?”

“You.”

“Then run!” In one fluid motion Alexander popped my door open and practically shoved me out it.

I hit the ground running. The stone path to the dormitory was slick with slush trampled by a hundred pairs of shoes. My feet slipped and skidded in it.

Something cracked in the distance. A tiny explosion erupted in the snow to my left.

Someone was shooting at me!

I immediately began to question my decision to attend the academy.

Another series of cracks echoed in the cold air, this time
from behind me. Alexander was shooting back. Or, at least, I
assumed
he was. I didn’t dare turn around to see for fear that it’d waste precious milliseconds that could be better spent running for my life.

A bullet ricocheted off the ground by my feet.

I hit the dormitory door at full speed. It flew open, and I tumbled into a small security area. There was a second, more secure door ahead next to a glassed-in security booth, but the door hung ajar and the glass was pocked with three neat, round bullet holes. I scrambled through and found myself in an open lounge area.

It was the type of place students would normally have been hanging out. There were ratty couches, an old television, a lopsided pool table, and some ancient video games. Hallways extended from it on both sides, and a weathered grand staircase led up to—

Something suddenly swept my feet out from under me. I landed flat on my back. A split second later someone dropped on me, sheathed entirely in black except for the eyes. Each knee pinioned one of my arms to the ground. A hand slapped over my mouth before I could scream.

“Who are you?” my attacker hissed.

“B-B-B-Benjamin Ripley,” I sputtered. “I’m a student here.”

“I’ve never seen you before.”

“I only got accepted this afternoon,” I explained, and then thought to add, “Please don’t kill me.”

My attacker groaned. “A newbie? Now?! This day just keeps getting better.” Now that the voice was inflected with sarcasm rather than aggression, it was higher than I’d expected. I looked at the body sitting on my chest and realized it was slim with curves.

“You’re a girl,” I said.

“Wow,” she replied. “No wonder you got accepted. Your powers of deduction are amazing.” She pulled her mask back, revealing her face.

I wouldn’t have thought my heart could have beat any faster than it had while racing for my life from a hail of gunfire, but it suddenly sped up to a whole new level.

Elizabeth Pasternak was no longer the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.

The girl sitting on my chest appeared to be a few years older than me, maybe fourteen or fifteen, with thick dark hair and incredibly blue eyes. Her skin was flawless, her cheekbones were sculpted, and her lips were full. She was slight of build—almost delicate—and yet she’d been powerful enough to flatten me in half a second. She even
smelled
incredible, an intoxicating combination of lilacs and gunpowder. But perhaps the most attractive thing about her was how calm and confident she was in the midst of a
life-or-death situation. She seemed far more annoyed that I’d stumbled into the action than by the idea that bullets were flying outside.

“Do you have a weapon on you?” she asked.

“No.”

“Can you use a gun?”

“I can handle my cousin’s BB gun pretty well. . . .”

She sighed heavily, then unzipped her flak jacket, revealing a sleek leather bandolier across her chest bristling with weapons: guns, knives, Chinese throwing stars, grenades. She bypassed all of these and selected a blunt little object for me. “This is a Taser. It’s not effective over long range, but on the plus side, you can’t accidentally kill me with it.” She slapped it into my hand, gave me a quick tutorial—“On/off switch. Trigger. Contact points.”—then stood and motioned for me to follow her.

I did. It wasn’t as though I had any other ideas. We passed the grand staircase and headed down the south hall of the dormitory. The girl seemed to know what she was doing, so I felt slightly safer being with her. I mimicked her moves, creeping along as she did, holding my Taser the same way she held her gun.

As it was my first action sequence, I wasn’t quite sure what the protocol was. It seemed I should introduce myself. “By the way, I’m Benjamin.”

“So you said. I’ll make you a deal. If we survive this incident, then we can get to know each other.”

“Okay. What’s going on?”

“Apparently, we’ve had a security breach. There was an assembly on diplomacy for the entire student body this afternoon. The enemy infiltrated the campus during it and surrounded the assembly hall. All students and faculty are being held hostage inside.”

“How’d you escape?”

“I didn’t. I’d ditched the assembly. I could give a hoot about diplomacy.”

“Is anyone else with you?”

“As far as I know, it’s only you and me. I tried calling for backup, but the enemy is jamming all transmissions somehow.”

“How many of them are there?”