Spy School (6 page)

“Wait,” I said. “You mean Chip was trying to—”

“Kill you? No. Then he wouldn’t have anyone left to intimidate. What’d he ask you to do?”

“Hack into the school mainframe.”

“For what?”

“‘Classified information.’ For one of his classes.”

Murray nodded knowingly. “Test answers, most likely. Chip’s tried to force virtually everyone here into helping him cheat one way or another.”

“And no one’s told the administration?”

“Oh, the administration knows.”

“And they haven’t kicked him out?”

“This isn’t your average school. We’re training to be
spies
, not Boy Scouts. You can get an A for cheating here, as long as you do it cleverly enough.”

I sat back, trying to make sense of that. “So I
should
have tried to hack the system?”

“Oh, heck no. You’d never have got past the first firewall. The Security Council would’ve nailed you, Chip would have proclaimed his innocence, and you’d have been sacrificed as a lesson to your fellow students to keep their mitts off the mainframe.”

“But you just said cheating was okay—”

“If you do it cleverly enough. Hacking’s idiocy.”

“But Chip coerced me into it.”

“And thus would’ve kept his hands clean. Doing something stupid isn’t so stupid if you can get someone else to do it for you.”

I shook my head, dumbstruck by all of this. “That’s insanity.”

“They don’t call this place an institution for nothing. You gonna eat that?”

I looked down at my own plate of spaghetti. It was untouched. After the day’s excitement, I didn’t have much of an appetite, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the food looked disgusting. It’s not easy to mess up spaghetti, but somehow, the kitchen staff had managed to do it. The noodles were barely cooked, and the meat sauce looked suspiciously like canned dog food.

I slid my dinner across the table to Murray, who dug
right in. “Big mistake,” he told me. “Spaghetti’s the best thing they make here. Word to the wise: Stock up on peanut butter and jelly. No one will admit it, but I think they make the food this awful on purpose. They’re building up our immunity so that if someone ever tries to poison us, it won’t work. Arsenic’s got nothing on the meat loaf here.”

“Is there
anything
good about this place?” I asked.

Murray waved around the room. “There’s a lot of hotness, girl-wise. And some of the classes aren’t half bad.”

“Like what?”

“The computer stuff’s all pretty solid. Good language programs. Oh, and I’d definitely recommend ISEA: Intro to Seducing Enemy Agents. I actually did my homework in that one.”

“What about classes in weapons and combat?”

Murray froze, a forkful of spaghetti halfway to his mouth. “Aw, nuts. Don’t tell me you’re a Fleming.”

“What’s a Fleming?”

“Someone who comes here actually thinking he’s gonna become James Bond.”

I got the reference: Ian Fleming had invented James Bond—and thus created several generations of people who naively assumed espionage was a glamorous profession. Like me. I felt my ears reddening slightly in embarrassment, but I tried to play it cool. “This school
is
supposed to teach us how to be spies.”

“Yeah. In real life. Which is different from the movies. Hollywood’s sold you a false bill of goods, that spying is all tuxedos and nifty gadgets and car chases in awesome places like Monte Carlo and Gstaad. When, really, it’s mostly grunt work in third world hellholes like Mogadishu and Newark.”

I tried to hide my disappointment. “There must be
some
good assignments. Alexander Hale doesn’t look like he’s doing much grunt work.”

“Yeah, there’s maybe one or two cherry jobs. But those are for the cream of the crop. If you want to join the rat race here, busting your butt for the next six years trying to prove yourself, be my guest. But you’re not gonna come out on top.
She
is.” Murray gestured behind me with his fork.

I knew whom he was pointing at even before I turned around.

I’d noticed Erica the moment I’d come in. She was the only student sitting alone, although her exile appeared self-imposed. Every guy in the mess looked like he wanted to be chatting up Erica; every girl looked like she wished they were friends. But Erica was immune to all of it. She had her nose in a textbook, apparently uninterested in anything—or anyone—else. Given my brief encounter with her, however, I suspected her aloofness was a front; Erica was probably well aware of every single thing going on in the mess at that moment, if not on the entire campus.

“She’s the best student here?” I asked. “She doesn’t look much older than us.”

“She’s not. She’s only a third year. But technically, she’s been at this a lot longer than the rest of us. Seeing as she’s a legacy.”

I turned back to Murray, about to ask why.

“That’s Erica
Hale
,” he explained.

Understanding descended on me. “She’s Alexander’s daughter?!”

“Not to mention granddaughter of Cyrus Hale, great-granddaughter of Obadiah Hale, great-great-granddaughter of Ulysses Hale, and so on. Going all the way back to her great-great-great-great-granddaddy, none other than Nathan Hale himself. Her family’s been spying for the United States since before there
was
a United States. If anyone’s graduating into the elite forces, it’s her.”

“So you’re not even gonna try?”

Murray shoved his second empty spaghetti bowl aside and dug into dessert, which was green Jell-O with unidentifiable objects suspended in it. “I used to be like you, back when I first got here. I was as gung-ho a Fleming as you’ve ever seen. But then one day in the middle of my second semester, I’m in the gym here, learning how to fend off an attacker with a machete, when I have this epiphany about becoming a field agent: People try to
kill
field agents. On
the other hand, very few people ever try to kill the guys who work at headquarters.”

“Hold on,” I said. “You
want
a desk job?”

“Absolutely. You work nine to five, get a nice place in the burbs, put in your thirty years, and retire with a big old government pension. Who gives a fig if it’s not glamorous? Give me mundane and safe over glamorous and dead any day.”

I had to admit, Murray had a point. And yet I still felt that if I worked really hard, someday I could be as good as Erica—and once I was, I’d be very hard to kill.

“Of course, you can’t let the administration
think
you want to be a desk jockey.” Murray polished off his Jell-O with one long slurp. “They’ll bounce you for not being with the program. You’ve got to make it look good, like you’re
trying
to be a field agent, but you just don’t quite have the chops. Now, trying to be bad isn’t easy . . . although it
is
easier than actually trying to be good.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“What do you mean?”

I waved around the room at all the clumps of students. “Have you shared this wisdom with everyone else? Why’d you save
me
from Chip?”

“No, I haven’t told everyone this,” Murray admitted. “Though I’ve
tried
to tell some, to no avail. As I said, I was like you once. On track to have a miserable school life, followed
by a miserable work life. But someone pulled
me
aside and showed me the light. That guy’s now a successful desk jockey in the Paris bureau with a hot French girlfriend and a long, happy life ahead of him. I’m merely paying it forward. As for Chip, well . . . simply put, I don’t like him. I’ll take any excuse I get to render him unconscious. Speaking of which . . .” Murray nodded toward the door.

Chip had entered. He’d taken the time to fix his hair after being electrocuted and was now flanked by two kids even bigger than he was. They were both hulking slabs of muscle with crew cuts and attitudes, though I thought one of them might be a girl.

“Greg Hauser and Kirsten Stubbs,” Murray told me. “Neither one’s exactly a genius, though the Agency always has use for a few people who are just big and mean and don’t question orders.”

Everyone in the room paused in mid-conversation to find out whom Chip and his goons were targeting. Every pair of eyes followed him—except Erica’s. She stayed riveted to her book, as if unaware anything else was happening.

The other 294 students heaved a collective sigh of relief as they saw Chip, Hauser, and Stubbs heading for Murray and me, not any of them. No one resumed their conversation, though. We were now the center of attention.

Chip slammed a hand on our table so hard that the
plates jumped. “I know you pulled that little stunt earlier,” he snarled at Murray.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Murray stayed amazingly calm, given that everyone else in the room seemed to be terrified for his safety. “I was in the computer lab all afternoon, and I have sources to corroborate that.”

“Don’t give me that garbage!” Chip snapped. “You know exactly what I mean.”

“Oh, I’ll bet I do,” Murray said. “You’re referring to the incident where you were trying to intimidate Ben here into helping you cheat because you’re not capable of doing your own dirty work, but then you let your guard down and allowed someone to knock you unconscious. Yeah, everyone’s talking about it. I can see why you’re upset. I’d be embarrassed as heck if I got caught with my pants down like that.”

Around the room there were a lot of snickers at Chip’s expense, though they were quickly stifled before Hauser and Stubbs could figure out who was making them.

Chip turned crimson in anger. Veins the size of night crawlers bulged in his neck. “You think you’re so smart, don’t you?”

“Not at all, Chip,” Murray replied. “I
know
I’m smart. For example, if I
had
played that little trick on you, I’d have snaked a fiber-optic camera under the door first and recorded the entire event, so that if someone like you or your girlfriends
here threatened to retaliate physically, I could threaten to send the video to the principal in return. He might not give a hoot about the coercion or the cheating, but he certainly wouldn’t be pleased to see how you got knocked out so easily. That’s F-quality self-preservation.”

Chip stared at Murray a long time, unsure whether this was a bluff or not, trying to figure out his next move. He ultimately opted for saving face. “But you
didn’t
shock me, right?”

“Of course not,” Murray replied. “And Ben here had nothing to do with it either.”

Chip nodded menacingly. “Well, you let whoever
did
do it know that, one of these days, I’m gonna get the upper hand on him. And when I do, he’ll wish he’d never crossed paths with me. Is that clear?”

“Crystal,” Murray said.

Chip turned his attention to me. “If I were you, I’d stop hanging out with this loser. It’s gonna cause serious harm to any chance you have of a social life here. It might even cause serious harm to
you
.”

To emphasize this, Hauser snatched the spoon out of Murray’s hand, clenched his fist around it, and squeezed. When he opened his hand again, the steel utensil had been crumpled as though it were a candy wrapper. He plunked it into Murray’s milk.

“I’ll be keeping my eye on you,” Chip warned me. Then he and his thugs stormed off to grab dinner.

“Morons,” Murray muttered. “Big muscles. Very little brains. Anyone remotely intelligent would know there wasn’t enough time to rig a fiber-optic camera
and
a portable Van de Graaff electrostatic generator. I wouldn’t be afraid of them if I were you.”

Only, I
was
afraid. In fact, it occurred to me that I’d spent a considerable amount of time since my arrival at spy school in various states of fear, ranging from moderately spooked to completely terrified. In a way, I was even more afraid of Chip than I had been of the enemy agents during my SACSA exam. They’d simply wanted to kill me (or so I’d believed at the time); Chip could make my life miserable for years to come. Given, I’d led a very sheltered life, but up to that point Chip Schacter was the scariest person I’d ever met.

Until that night.

The next guy made Chip look like a cream puff.

Armistead Dormitory

January 17

0130 hours

“Rise and shine, kid.”

There are plenty of lousy ways to wake up: having your REM sleep shattered at four a.m. when a raccoon trips your burglar alarm; snapping awake in a boring math class to discover you’ve been talking about Elizabeth Pasternak in your sleep and everyone has heard it; being pounced on by a young cousin who accidentally drives his knee into your spleen. . . .

But those are all bliss compared to having an assassin jam the barrel of a gun up your nose.

I pried my tired eyes open, saw the man shrouded in black . . . and my primal instincts immediately kicked in.

I leapt into action, springing as far away as I could.

Unfortunately, there was a wall six inches away from me.

I slammed into it hard enough to rattle my teeth, tumbled back into my cot, and found myself right back where I’d started. With the gun pointed at my nose. Only, the assassin was laughing now.