Spy School (7 page)

“Man, you should’ve seen the look on your face,” he snorted. “It was classic.”

I couldn’t tell anything about him in the dark room. A sliver of moonlight through the window illuminated only his gun. He was merely shadow set in deeper shadow.

“Please don’t kill me,” I said, for the second time that day. It was becoming my mantra.

“Whether I kill you or not is entirely up to you. Let’s see how well you play ball.”

I wasn’t sure how the assassin had gotten into my room. I’d taken the precaution of not only locking the door, but also propping my desk chair underneath the knob—although I’d only thought I was protecting myself from Chip, his goons, or other potential bullies at the time.

After dinner Murray had introduced me to a few fellow students, all of whom had made polite small talk and then run off to do homework. I’d returned to my room to find
an inch-thick packet of paperwork to fill out: registration forms, personal skills assessments, applications for false identification, weaponry rental agreements, organ donor cards, and the like. Once I’d finished all that, I’d compared my class schedule with the campus map to figure out everywhere I had to be the next day, logged in to the school computer system to set up my student profile and secure e-mail account, called my parents, lied to them about how great everything was, and discovered, somewhat late, that none of the locks on the toilet stalls in the common restroom worked. Then I’d secured my room—or so I’d thought—read a few pages of a book, and passed out.

According to my alarm clock, it was now one thirty in the morning.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Tell me about Pinwheel,” the assassin replied.

“Pinwheel? What’s Pinwheel?”

“You know damn well what it is. Don’t play stupid with me!”

“I’m not playing! I really am stupid!” Admittedly, that wasn’t the best choice of words, but I was panicked. I was new to having guns aimed at me and might have told my assailant anything I knew to spare my life, but he’d thrown me a major curveball by asking me about something I didn’t know anything about. “Are you sure you’ve got the right guy?”

“You’re Benjamin Ripley, aren’t you?”

“Uh . . . no.” It was worth a shot.

And for half a second it almost seemed to work. The assassin hesitated, slightly confused, then asked, “Then who are you?”

“Jonathan Monkeywarts.” I winced. It had been the first name to pop into my head. I made a mental note to be better prepared the next time this happened.

I didn’t even see the assassin move in the dark. I only felt it. He snapped my bedsheets so hard that I was catapulted out of bed. I landed hard, whacking my head on the night table. “You think
that’s
funny?” he growled. “You think this is all a game?”

“No, I don’t.” I’d been completely caught off guard by the attack. The room spun around me and sparks of light danced before my eyes. If this guy could cause that much pain using only a sheet, I was terrified what he could do with a gun.

I’d landed on my suitcase, which I hadn’t finished unpacking before bed. Its contents had spilled to the floor beneath me. Clothes and books, mostly, though I had a dull sense of something hard digging into my thigh.

“Then let’s try this again,” the assassin said. “And if you try anything else, I
will
shoot you. What . . . is . . . Pinwheel?”

My pain-clouded brain suddenly realized what the hard
thing was. My tennis racket. The one Alexander Hale had suggested I bring to use as a weapon, just in case. At the time, I’d thought he was making a wry, offhand quip, but now it seemed he’d been eerily prescient.

I grasped the handle, sat up to face the assassin, and tried to stall for time. “Who told you I knew about Pinwheel?”

“What do you think? It’s in your file.”

That didn’t help at all. I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say, seeing as there were several million wrong answers that would get me killed. “The thing is . . . it’s a . . . well . . .”

“Stop stalling or I’ll shoot you.”

I had a sudden flash of inspiration. Maybe this guy was after the same thing in my file that had interested Chip. “It has to do with cryptography.”

The assassin didn’t shoot me, which I took as a good sign. Instead, he snapped, “No kidding it has to do with cryptography. I want to know what it
does
.”

I racked my brain, desperately trying to recall my conversation with Chip. “It helps you circumvent a rotating sixteen-character daisy chain.”

“Really?” The assassin actually sounded a tiny bit impressed.

“Yes.”

“How?”

Nuts. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to talk my way
out of this one. But I tried. Maybe if I threw big words at the guy and sounded confident about it, he’d think I was way smarter than he was. “First, you have to set up a quadrilateral subnet matrix, then ossify the syntax and fibrillate the coprolites. . . .”

“Before you say anything else, there’s two things you should know,” the assassin said. “I’m not an idiot. And I’ve run out of patience. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Moonlight glinted off the gun as he raised it toward me.

My primal instincts kicked in once again. Only this time, they did a better job.

Before I even knew I was doing it, I’d ducked to the left while bringing the tennis racket around.

It caught the assassin on his wrist, knocking his gun free just as he fired.

I felt the heat of the bullet as it passed over my shoulder and shattered my window.

The gun disappeared into the shadows. We both heard it skitter across the floor and thud into the wall someplace behind me.

I swung the racket wildly, not caring what I hit as long as it was painful. I heard the crack of graphite against bone and the startled yelp of the assassin.

“Help!” I screamed, hopefully loud enough to wake the hall. “Someone’s trying to kill—”

The assassin lunged at me before I could finish. My eyes had adjusted enough to the dark room to see things now.

I leapt onto my cot, slipping past him as he tried to land a karate chop, which instead cleaved my bedside table in half. I’d intended to bolt for the door, but my feet got tangled in my sheets and the assassin recovered faster than I’d expected.

He wheeled around, looking to take me down at the knees.

So I bounced on the bed, hacking down with the racket at the same time.

I actually have a great forehand slice. It’s the best part of my game. I caught the assassin right above the ear, hard enough to shatter the racket. He gave a gurgle of pain and dropped, bounding off the mattress and landing on the floor with a thud.

I bolted, yanking open the door and racing into the hall. I banged the beheaded racket handle on every door I passed. “Help! Help me! It’s an emergency!”

I could hear people groggily waking in their rooms, saw a light flick on from beneath one door. But I didn’t stop to wait, fearing I had only temporarily waylaid my assassin. I kept moving for the stairs, screaming the whole way.

I was almost there when the door at the end of the hall opened and my resident adviser emerged. It was the first time we’d met, though my welcome packet had informed me
that her name was Tina Cuevo and she was a sixth year. She was tall and beautiful, with jet-black hair and skin the color of hot chocolate. She wore flannel pajamas, bunny slippers, and a look that said she wasn’t happy to be roused from her sleep—although this changed to one of astonishment when she saw me.

I wear only underwear when I sleep.

From the moment I’d been attacked, I had been thinking only about how to survive. Now, for the first time, it dawned on me that I was practically naked.

I spun around to find everyone else on the floor emerging from their rooms.

Most of them immediately broke into laughter.

Thankfully, Tina didn’t. I think the look of sheer terror on my face convinced her this wasn’t a prank. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“There’s an assassin in my room. He just tried to kill me.”

I’d expected Tina to evacuate the hall and call for help, but that ran counter to her training. Instead, she produced a gun from the pocket of her pajamas—apparently, she slept with it—and went into action mode. “I’ll take care of this. There’s a robe in my room. For Pete’s sake, put it on.” She flattened herself against the wall and moved quickly toward my door.

I slipped into her room, which was larger than mine and
far more nicely decorated. There were all sorts of homey touches like framed pictures, window dressings and throw rugs that made me feel oddly safe and secure, given that I’d been running for my life seconds before. The terry-cloth robe hung on a hook by the door. I put it on. It was warm and smelled like cinnamon.

I wasn’t sure what to do next. Fleeing still seemed like a perfectly rational option. But it felt wrong to run off in a woman’s bathrobe while she was facing an assassin for me. I’d already run down the hall almost nude; I didn’t need to make any more faux pas that night. I found a cozy stuffed chair buried under a stack of tutoring manuals and settled into it.

A minute later a fellow student my age poked his head in. “Uh . . . Tina wants to talk to you.”

“Where is she?”

“In your room. Duh.”

I went back out into the hall. Every doorway now had someone peeking out of it, looking toward me. Heading back to my room seemed like a terrible idea, given that I’d left an assassin in there, but everyone seemed much calmer than they might have if there was still an enemy agent on a killing spree. So I walked back down the gauntlet of gawkers.

Tina emerged from my room as I approached. “About this assassin of yours . . .”

I gulped, concerned. “Did I kill him?”

“That’s hard to say.” Tina waved me inside. “I’m having a little trouble finding him.”

I stepped back into my room. The light was on now. The place was trashed. Furniture was shattered. My belongings were strewn everywhere.

But the assassin was gone.

Armistead Dormitory

January 17

0205 hours

“You’re claiming that someone tried to kill you.
Tonight.”

“You don’t believe me?” I asked.

The principal stared at me for a bit. It was hard to tell if he was being careful with his answer or was just sleepy. It was 2:05 in the morning. The principal had been roused only ten minutes before and appeared to be in desperate need of caffeine. As he lived on the school grounds, he had merely wrapped a thick robe over his pajamas and hurried right to the dormitory. His fluffy slippers were soggy from the snow.

“There’s no sign of the killer,” he said. “Or the weapon.”

“He shot through my window,” I countered.

“Lots of things could have broken that window.”

“There must be a bullet.”

“Sure. Somewhere outside under five acres of snow.”

I grew exasperated. It probably wasn’t the smartest move, but I was tired too. “You really think I trashed my own room and smacked myself around to make it
look
like someone tried to kill me? Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know,” the principal replied. “To get attention, maybe. The more important question is: Why would someone want to kill
you
? You just started here. You barely passed your SACSAs today. If someone wanted to go to the trouble to get past all our defenses and break into a dormitory to kill someone, you’d think they’d go after somebody
worth
killing.”

I paused to think about that. Although the statement was offensive, I had to admit there was some logic to it.

The principal had commandeered Tina’s room to question me. My room had been sealed off until a team of expert crime scene investigators could arrive. I hadn’t even been allowed to grab my own clothes. I was still wearing Tina’s fluffy bathrobe. Together, the principal and I looked like a page from a Bed Bath & Beyond catalog.

There was a knock at the door.

“What is it now?” the principal snapped.

“Thought I might be of service.” Alexander Hale slipped inside. Unlike the principal, he was wide awake. In fact, it appeared he hadn’t gone to bed yet. He still wore his tuxedo, though the bow tie was undone and the collar was unbuttoned. There was a tiny red smear of what looked like lipstick on his neck. “I came as soon as I heard.”

The principal probably would have chewed out anyone else who barged into his interrogation, but he shrank respectfully before Alexander. “Where were you?” he asked.

“Doing a little undercover work at the Russian embassy.” Alexander gave a sly wink, then turned to me. “But that’s not what’s important right now. Are you all right, Benjamin?”

“Yes.”

“How’d you escape? Who rescued you?”

“I did it myself.”

Alexander whistled appreciatively. “Really? How? Karate? Jujitsu? Krav Maga?”

“Tennis racket.”

“Ah! I told you that’d come in handy. Nice work.”

The principal shrugged, unimpressed. “It would’ve been
really
nice if he hadn’t allowed the killer to escape.”

“It’s his first night here,” Alexander replied. “He hasn’t even had Intro to Self-Defense yet, let alone Enemy Subjugation and Apprehension.”