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Authors: Stuart Gibbs

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BOOK: Spy School
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“And yet he fought off a professional assassin? With a mere tennis racket?” the principal asked incredulously. “Maybe there wasn’t a killer at all. Maybe it was just some of the older boys hazing him and he couldn’t take it.”

My thoughts briefly flickered to Chip Schacter. He seemed like a big enough jerk to think threatening someone with a loaded gun was funny.

But then something occurred to me. Something I’d forgotten about in my panic.

“He asked me about something called Pinwheel,” I said.

The principal and Alexander both turned toward me, surprised. Then they both tried to hide the fact that they were surprised. Alexander did a considerably better job.

“Pinwheel?” the principal asked, acting as though this was the oddest thing he’d ever heard.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” the principal replied in a way that suggested he was lying. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“Well,
he
had,” I shot back. “He said it was in my file.”

The principal and Alexander shared a look. A glimmer of understanding—and perhaps concern—passed between them.

“Benjamin, I’d like you to think about this very carefully,” Alexander said. “What, exactly, did the assassin want to know about this Pinwheel?”

I tried to reconstruct the conversation in my room. Even though it hadn’t been long before, it wasn’t easy to do. My memories of the event were jumbled by fear and adrenaline. “He just wanted to know what it was. I think.”

Alexander sat on Tina’s bed and looked me in the eye. “And what did you tell him?”

“That I had no idea what it was.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes . . . No, wait. I told him it had something to do with cryptography. But I was only making that up.”

“Did he believe it?” the principal asked, intrigued.

“He said he already knew it had to do with cryptography,” I answered. “He wanted to know what it
did
. I tried to make something else up, but he knew I was lying and so he tried to kill me.”

“Are you sure that’s
exactly
what happened?” said Alexander.

“Well, he aimed his gun right at me—,” I began.

“But when did he pull the trigger?” Alexander asked. “Before you fought back . . . or after?”

“If I hadn’t fought back, he would have killed me,” I explained.

Alexander put a hand on my shoulder, signaling me to relax. “Take a moment and think about it. Try to recall everything that happened as it happened. Take your time.
There’s no rush. Determining the exact proper sequence of events is important.”

I closed my eyes and thought some more. It certainly
seemed
the assassin had been trying to kill me. That was the whole point of being an assassin, after all. But everything had happened so fast—and in the dark, no less. Finally, I had to admit, “I’m not sure if he was trying to shoot me or not. Maybe he was only trying to scare me—and the gun only went off when I hit him with the racket.”

Alexander and the principal locked eyes for a moment.

“Does that mean something?” I asked.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not,” the principal said, though I could tell he was lying again.

There was another knock at the door.

“What?!” the principal snapped.

A very attractive woman entered. She wore a formfitting pantsuit and, despite being about only thirty, didn’t seem fazed by the principal’s angry demeanor. Instead, she was all business. “I’m Agent Coloretti, Crime Scene Investigation. I have a preliminary report on the potential assassin.”

“It’s about time,” the principal groused. “What’ve you got?”

“Nothing,” Coloretti responded. “No fingerprints. No blood. Not a single hair left behind.”

“So . . . there wasn’t an assassin?” the principal asked.

“I didn’t say that,” Coloretti replied. “Only that there’s no concrete evidence of one.”

“What about the surveillance cameras in the dormitories?” Alexander asked. “They should have recorded something.”

Coloretti sighed. “Yes, they should have . . . if they hadn’t been dismantled.”

The principal snapped to his feet. “All of them?”

“No, not all of them,” Coloretti said. “But enough of them, starting with the ones on the northern perimeter wall about twenty minutes before the incident. Then the ones along the route to the dormitory. And finally, the ones
in
the dormitory. He knew exactly where they all were—and took out every single one that might have recorded him. That, in itself, is evidence that
someone
breached the campus.”

“Someone who really knew what he was doing,” Alexander added. “Someone professional.”

“And yet, not professional enough that he couldn’t be beaten by a newbie with a tennis racket,” the principal scoffed.

“Perhaps he underestimated his target,” Alexander countered. “Everyone does it now and then.”

“Really?” the principal asked. “Have you?”

Alexander thought for a bit, then admitted, “No.”

Agent Coloretti was staring at me so intently, I checked
to make sure my robe wasn’t hanging open. “Given the nature of this event, perhaps the rest of this discussion should be Security Level 4C,” she told the others.

Now the principal and Alexander both looked my way as well.

“Yes,” the principal agreed. “I think that’s well advised.”

The three of them started out the door without so much as another word to me.

“Wait!” I said.

They all paused.

“You’re just going to leave me here by myself?” I asked. “After someone might have tried to kill me tonight?”

“You saved yourself once,” the principal said. “If anyone else comes at you, just do it again.”

“But my room’s a crime scene,” I protested. “Where am I supposed to sleep tonight?”

The principal sighed, as though I were trying to be a constant pain in his rear end. “Where else? In the Box.”

DISCLOSURE

The Box

January 17

0500 hours

That’s it,
I thought, the moment I laid eyes on my
new room.
I quit.

The Box hadn’t been designed for use as a dorm room. It had been designed as a holding cell. If I had actually managed to capture my assassin that night,
he
would have ended up in the Box. Instead, I did. Lucky me.

My relocation there wasn’t officially a punishment. The Box was simply the safest place for me on campus. It had been designed to keep enemies from getting out—but that also meant it was extremely hard for one’s enemies to get
in
.
It was a reinforced cement bunker in the sub-subbasement of the administration building. The walls were three feet thick, and there was a steel door with three separate locks. Outside, it was protected by a matrix of lasers; tripping one would trigger an alarm—and the deployment of sarin nerve gas. There were also seven security cameras, all being monitored in the academy’s security command center.

Whereas all this made me safer, it wasn’t exactly comfortable. The security staff had made a few token attempts to spruce up the Box for me—a gingham comforter on the bed, a few dog-eared spy novels from the library, a plastic houseplant—but it was still a frigid, windowless block of concrete far removed from any of my fellow students. After a long day of being threatened and humiliated, the Box was the last straw. If it hadn’t been the middle of the night, I would have called my parents then and there to ask them to come pick me up and return me to normal life. But I figured I could hunker down and make it to morning. Washing out would be humiliating, and perhaps I’d regret it for the rest of my life, but the rest of my life promised to be much longer if I left spy school.

Even though the Box was the safest place on campus, I couldn’t fall asleep. My body was exhausted, but my mind was wired after the night’s excitement. Every time I heard a noise, I imagined another assassin was slipping in to kill me.
But beyond that, dozens of questions gnawed at me. What was Pinwheel? How could I have cryptography skills without knowing about them? Why was the principal behaving so strangely? Something mysterious was going on at spy school, and no one was telling me the truth.

I snapped upright in bed for the umpteenth time, thinking I’d heard the door creak. My cheap bedside clock said it was five a.m. I peered into the shadows of the Box, saw nothing, and chided myself for letting my nerves get the best of me yet again.

And then one of the shadows pounced on me.

It hit me full force in the chest, knocking me flat on my cot. The moment I opened my mouth to yell for help, a rag was crammed inside. I brought up my knee, hoping to connect with my assailant’s solar plexus, only to find my legs in a scissor lock between theirs.

“Take it easy,” my attacker hissed. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

If anyone else had said it, I probably wouldn’t have believed them, But I recognized the voice. And her smell: lilacs and gunpowder. It was the second time that day I’d been pinioned beneath Erica Hale.

I tried to say I understood, but with the rag in my mouth, it came out as “Mmmmthmmpphffthh.” So I relaxed and nodded agreement instead.

“Okay, then,” Erica whispered. “I’m going to let you go and take the rag out. But if you make any attempt to fight back or call for help, I
will
hurt you, understand?”

I nodded again.

Erica unscissored her legs and plucked the rag from my mouth.

I reached for my bedside lamp, but she caught my hand. “Don’t. There are cameras inside the room. I’d prefer no one know I was here.” She sat on the bed, only a foot away, as there was nowhere else for her to go in the tiny room.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, she began to take shape. She was sheathed in black, her hair tucked into a black scarf, black commando paint on her face. For a moment, in the extreme quiet, I thought I could hear her heart beating excitedly, but then I realized it was my own.

“How’d you get in here?” I whispered.

“I’m better at breaking and entering than they realize. And I wanted to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“What do you think? The assassin. Pinwheel. Something dirty’s going on here, and you’re in the middle of it.”

“Do you know why?”

“Of course I do. Isn’t it obvious?”

I toyed with the idea of lying, telling Erica that I wasn’t a naive rube, that of course I was aware of what was going on
as well, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to get away with that for more than thirty seconds and would only end up looking worse. So I went with the truth. “No.”

Erica rolled her eyes. “This guy tonight, he came after you because of Pinwheel, right?”

“How’d you know that?”

“I’m studying to be a spy. It’s my job to know things.”

“Do you know what Pinwheel is?”

“No. But what’s really interesting is that
you
don’t.”

“Why?”

“Because, according to your file, you
invented
it.”

I sat upright. “What? That can’t be true.”

“Exactly.”

There was a huge jumbled jigsaw puzzle in my mind, but suddenly, the first two pieces clicked into place. My supposed gift with codes. Pinwheel.
Click. Click.
“Somebody put false information in my file.”

“It looks that way.”

“Who?”

“Who created your file in the first place?”

“I don’t know. Someone in the administration, I guess.”

“No.
Lots
of people in the administration: the Admissions Office, Recruitment, Future Student Assessment . . .”

“And one of them inserted false information without the principal knowing?”

Erica gave me a long, hard, disappointed look.

Understanding descended on me.
Click.
“The principal told them to.”

“Yes. Though he certainly did it only because someone else told
him
to. He’s not exactly Mr. Think-for-Yourself.”

“You don’t think much of him.”

“Ever hear the phrase ‘Those who can’t do, teach’?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the principal can’t even teach. The guy’s a basket case. Although, in his defense, he’s had a bit of a tortured past.”

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“He was
tortured
,” Erica said. “A lot, in fact. Every time the CIA sent him out into the field, he got captured. He wasn’t a very good spy.”

“So the CIA put him in charge of the entire spy school?” I asked, incredulous.

“Our government at work.” Erica sighed. “The higher-ups probably know he’s lousy, though. They just want someone who won’t question orders. For example, they’ve got him fudging your file to deal with the situation here.”

“What situation?”

“Your file is supposed to be classified. All documents pertaining to the recruitment of new undercover agents—as well as anything pertaining to the existence of the academy
at all—is Security Level A1. For Your Eyes Only, no dissemination allowed. And yet, within eight hours of your arrival here, an enemy agent breaches our perimeter, knowing exactly where to find you and possessing intimate details of your file.”

BOOK: Spy School
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