The Academy (17 page)

Taddler had attended a couple of small meetings before with Mrs. D., but he’d never been the focus of her full attention. He thought he now understood what a small plant felt like in the noonday sun, the strength of that persistent heat, the way it begged you to be bigger and stronger than how you really felt.

She had this grown-up quality about her—the way her hair was so carefully taken care of, her clothes expensive and without a wrinkle, the strength behind her eyes, the way she controlled her voice. That, he realized, was the one word that came to mind with Mrs. D.:
control
. Maybe that described grown-ups in general; maybe that was what separated kids and adults. But when it came to Mrs. D., it was everything.

She had led him and Johnny up to the second floor of the boathouse, out onto a balcony that overlooked the Charles River, where college crews were rowing—fours and eights, men and women—the perfectly synchronized oars looking like a bug’s legs dipping into and disturbing the shining water.

“Tell me,” she said in a calm, soothing voice.

He cowered under the glare of her eyes. He wanted most of all to please her, to never let her down, to never do anything to upset her. She was at the very center of his universe, which made him think of the sun again. The boathouse—this rundown, ramshackle building—now felt like home, and yet he thrilled at the idea of graduating out of here.

“It’s fancy,” Taddler said. Johnny nodded. “Never fewer than three bellmen at the main entrance. No way we’re going to get past them.” Johnny shook his head. Taddler wished he wouldn’t keep doing that, but said nothing. “There’s a side entrance into a bunch of shops, and there’s an elevator on that level, but it only goes up one flight. From there you have to cross the lobby to get to the main elevators. I suppose if we stayed pretty close to a family we could pull it off, but if they gave us any kind of look or asked a question, we might be in trouble.”

“I’m well aware of the hotel’s physical layout,” she said, her enunciation perfect, her gaze unrelenting. “But your observations about your ability to make it inside safely are exactly the kind of insight I was hoping for. Johnny?”

He looked a little panicked. Taddler wondered if he should bring up the fortune-teller, and that Johnny hadn’t been spending his time conducting surveillance, but wasting it with a tarot card reader.

“It’s like Taddler said.” Johnny was having a hard time meeting Mrs. D.’s eyes. “Kind of looks impossible to get in there.”

“Is that what you’re saying, Mr. Taddler?” She sounded as if she were accusing him of a crime.

“No, ma’am. I just said the front entrance and the lobby elevators present problems.”

“And do you have a way around these problems? Either of you?” She aimed that last part at Johnny, who knitted his brow, confused.

“I have an idea,” Taddler volunteered.

“Speak.”

“Smoking.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“The workers are always standing around outside smoking. The kitchen guys, housecleaners. Even security, or at least guys in suits, every now and then.”

“Yes? Explain yourself?” Her voice could be so soothing and reassuring.

“We’ve tried that before!” Johnny barked out.

“I’m not talking about some kitchen door off an alley,” Taddler said.

“But?” Johnny scrunched his face. Their attempts to sneak into hotels had often included such doors—areas where workers loitered while taking breaks. Taddler seemed to be contradicting himself.

“It’s some kind of balcony. On the second or third floor. Off the mezzanine, I’ll bet. A place where all the conventioneers can sneak out for a smoke. I’ve seen ’em up there—people smoking. And not workers, either! A door like that’s got to be left unlocked—open—right? Or else they’d constantly be locking themselves out.”

Mrs. D.’s eyes glowed. She seemed positively fascinated with him. “Oh, this is marvelous work, Taddler. Exceptional. And at what hours have you seen people? And have you ever
not
seen people? Is it ever empty, this balcony?”

“It comes and goes, that is, the people do. And there’s this fire escape going up to it. What I’d like to do…what I’d like permission to do…is to try a run at it—climb the ladder and sneak up there and like just check it out. If I get inside, then we know that’s the way in.”

“Then I suggest you try it.”

“I’ll need some cigarettes,” Taddler said. Mrs. D. had strict rules regarding cigarettes, and if she took this as a ruse for him trying to win smokes off her, he’d be in big trouble.

She cocked her head, again giving him that hawkish look.

He did not flinch.

“Very well. That can be arranged.”

Johnny looked stunned and envious.

Taddler’s chest swelled with pride. Not only a mission, but cigarettes to go with it. It was a day to be remembered.

A week passed, the longest week of Steel’s life. Not only was the warning from the wrestling room on his mind, but, more important, Kaileigh was still not speaking to him. He attended classes. He practiced with the Spartan ga-ga team. He called home twice and talked to his mother. But nothing had prepared him for the ache in his chest that came with Kaileigh’s cold shoulder.

If he approached her in the common room, she clustered with girlfriends and ignored him. If he saw her walking to class, she turned on the afterburners and practically ran to stay ahead of him. During class, she wouldn’t so much as look at him.

Finally, on Thursday evening, pent up with frustration, he walked out of the dorm, threw his head back, and screamed up into the gray sky. “Ahhhhh!” That felt surprisingly better. But as he turned back toward the dorm, he faced the full, round, gloating face of Victor DesConte.

“Trapp.”

“Victor.”

“At ten minutes past ten you’re going to tell your roommate that you don’t feel so hot.”

“Am I?”

“And you’re going to head to the bathroom in our dorm.”

Steel felt his heart doing somersaults in his chest.
The fifteen squeaks
. He suddenly wondered what his time at the school would have been like had he never heard them.

“Okay,” he said, though reluctantly.

“You need to wear dark clothes to bed. A dark T-shirt. Maybe you leave a pair of jeans on a hook in the bathroom, a pair of running shoes, like you forgot them after a shower.”

“I could do that. But why would I?”

“Because I said so.”

“Past ten, I’m after curfew.”

“White Socks has already made his first round by then. You’ll be back by eleven.” DesConte looked at him with a weird, penetrating expression. He seemed on the verge of saying something like
I know it was you we were chasing that night,
but he held it back.

“And don’t try bringing a phone or recorder or anything, because you’re going to be searched.”

Steel experienced a quick spike of terror.
What the
…? “Whatever,” he said, trying to sound unimpressed.

If the days had passed slowly, the next several hours—through study hall, back to the dorm, a shower (leaving his clothes in the washroom) and into bed—were positively glacial. If anyone had asked, he might have said a day or two had gone by in that short period. Finally he turned off the room light, and a few minutes later White Socks appeared in the door and checked on Steel and his roommate.

“Trapp?”

“Here, sir.”

“Dundee.”

“Present.”

The door shut. Since Verne’s probation-earning encounter outside Randolph’s house, a simple visual check was no longer sufficient.

Steel sat up, checking the glowing clock: 10:04. He heard White Socks going door to door down the hall.

“My stomach’s not so great. I feel like I’m going to puke,” Steel said.

“That’s because they feed us roadkill,” Verne said. “Calling what they put on our plates meat is an insult to all cows and pigs.”

“Don’t talk about food.”

“Don’t hurl here, dude. This is a no-hurl zone. A no-fart zone. A shower-before-you-enter zone. Just because I have to room with you doesn’t mean I have to breathe you.”

Typically, when his 10 p.m. rounds were completed, White Socks left via the dorm’s far door and returned to his apartment. On rare occasions he would turn around and patrol the dorm a second time. Steel waited to see which it was to be tonight. After a prolonged silence in the hallway, he faked a groan and came off the bunk as if tender.

“I gotta get out of here.”

“I’m telling you: don’t blow that roadkill in here.”

Steel, clutching his stomach, sneaked a look into the hall and then made for the washroom. As he pushed through the door, there was DesConte, his index finger held to his chapped lips, indicating silence.

“Reddie?” Steel hissed at the boy standing to DesConte’s right.

His fellow Spartan also held his finger to his lips. He moved to block the door as DesConte told Steel to pull his pants on. Steel did so, and was then pushed into a shower stall. Suddenly he feared that this was nothing but more hazing by upperclassmen, that DesConte had suckered him. But the Argive reached up to the showerhead until there was a distinct click, then DesConte twisted it to the right and pushed it toward the tile wall. It looked like he’d broken the thing. But as the showerhead jammed against the wall, a deeper click resonated through the tile. DesConte pushed Steel out of the way, grabbed hold of the tile soap holder built into the wall, and pushed. The entire wall of the shower swung open like a door, revealing darkness beyond.

“You ever tell anyone about this, you’re a dead man,” DesConte whispered. He stepped into the void and signaled Steel to follow. A moment later, Reddie Long came through, and DesConte pushed the wall shut.

“Whoa,” Steel said in the consuming darkness.

“Yeah…just wait,” said DesConte. He switched on some lights. They were above the tunnels.

Steel tried to seem impressed, as if he were seeing this for the first time. He wasn’t sure how convincing a performance it was. DesConte led the way down the rebar ladder rungs and into the tunnel, and the three of them were off. DesConte kept looking back at Steel to measure how impressed he was. Steel did his best to continue to look surprised.

The tunnel passed the administration building. They turned left at the next junction, and DesConte led them up into the chapel’s organ pipe room, where he stopped to use a peephole to ensure that the chapel was empty. Then they slipped into the choir pews, past the organ, and into the choir room. Out this door and in shadow, to beneath the ash. Here, DesConte turned toward Steel, and his glaring eyes told him that he knew it had been Steel out here spying on them. Steel wondered if DesConte had been one of the boys in the wrestling room, but didn’t think so. Reddie had been there, however, and Steel didn’t love that Reddie was looming behind him the whole way.

To his relief, DesConte moved on. They stayed in shadows and reached the screened-in porch of Randolph’s home. Without knocking, DesConte let them inside. He did this comfortably and without hesitation, and it told Steel a great deal: they were expected, and DesConte had likely been coming here, this same way, for a long time.

He was led into a sitting room containing a small fireplace, two couches, and some chairs. He spotted the back of a girl’s head and tensed as Kaileigh glared over her shoulder at him. There were now six students in the room: he and Kaileigh, DesConte, Reddie Long, and two girls from the Sixth Form, whom he recognized by their faces though didn’t know by name.

Randolph entered the room. He wore gray pants and a starched white shirt unbuttoned at the neck. Close up, he looked older and tired. Steel’s grandmother had looked the same way after his granddad had died, and he attributed the look to Randolph’s having recently lost his wife.

Randolph motioned for Steel to sit next to Kaileigh, which he did. The teacher thanked the four students for their help, and they left the room, but not the house, Randolph asking them to stay in order to return his guests to their respective dorms.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Randolph said.

“We didn’t mean any disrespect, sir,” Kaileigh said, “to the rules or to the school. And we promise it won’t happen again.”

“I think he’s asking why we’re at Wynncliff,” Steel said, not taking his eyes off Randolph, who nodded slightly.

“Yes, Mr. Trapp. Why is that?”

“Kaileigh for her ability to pick up languages and mimic people—her impersonations. Me…well…I’m okay at remembering things.”

Randolph smirked.

“Because of Steel’s father?” Kaileigh asked.

“Well, we can’t discount legacy, can we?” Randolph said. “So, yes. That’s partly correct. But do you know why Wynncliff?”

Steel said, “No, sir. We don’t know what’s going on.”

“He means that there are times it feels different here at Wynncliff,” Kaileigh said, piping up. She flashed a disapproving look at Steel. “Not that anything is actually going on. We’re very sorry for nosing around, and it won’t happen again.” She wanted out of there.

“But your ‘nosing around,’ as you call it, is important to me. To us. To Wynncliff.”

“Are you going to expel us?” Steel said, blurting out what was on both their minds.

Randolph grinned. “Expel, Mr. Trapp? Far from it. I’m going to…
promote
you. I’m going to explain things, to answer the very questions you’ve no doubt been asking yourselves. But first I have to lay the ground rules. Anything—everything—I tell you I will deny ever having said. If you repeat any of what I’m about to tell you to a single other person, including your parents or your entrusted Mr. Pennington Cardwell, you will most definitely be expelled, you will find it impossible to be accepted at any other private educational institution, and there will be severe financial repercussions for your parents. The simplest of matters—applying for a driver’s license, for instance—you will discover becomes almost insurmountable. It will follow you for years to come. I cannot begin to express how much you will regret the day. Am I clear?”

Steel nodded his head.
He knows about Penny.

Kaileigh said, “What if I’d rather not hear it?”

“Too late,” Randolph said, finding room to smile at her. He paused. “So do we understand one another?”

Kaileigh nodded. But she looked terrified.

“Very well. Wynncliff is not your normal private school, as you’ve no doubt surmised. There are reasons for its physical isolation, for our not playing any home games in competitive sports. We like to keep as low a profile as possible.”

Steel felt goose bumps rush up both arms.

“It is an institution,” he continued, “that prides itself on enrolling some of the most intelligent and uniquely gifted students in the country. In the
country
,” he repeated. “There is a school within the school, hence the need for utmost secrecy. Only a handful of students, such as yourselves, are in a position to be enrolled in this inner school. Ten students? Fifty? Even I don’t know the number. That is privileged information known only to Mr. Hastings and a handful of board members. A few faculty members, such as myself, are responsible for our own small team of students. We keep to ourselves and we make
no attempts
to invade the privacy of others. Do we understand one another?”

Both Steel and Kaileigh nodded. Then Kaileigh changed her mind and shook her head.

“What kind of school?” she asked.

“This country is fighting a war. I’m not talking about
that
war. I’m talking about a war of intelligence that has been going on since its inception, a war that has multiple fronts and one that expanded greatly during the Cold War. Knowledge is everything. Information is knowledge. And this nation collects as much information as it possibly can, sometimes using technology, sometimes what we call human assets.

“Over the years—decades, really—it became apparent that we, as a nation, were lacking a means of intrusion, what we call a conduit, into certain aspects of foreign affairs. Particularly foreign embassies, where prospective employees are vetted—that is, background checked—so thoroughly as to often prevent any intelligence gathering. Quite by accident, a young person changed all that while visiting with a family in the mid-1960s. He was an overnight guest of a school chum at a foreign embassy—which one doesn’t matter—and overheard something that proved vital to our national interests. As luck would have it, he reported what he heard to his father. He and his friend attended an international school, and over the next several months, he gleaned a good deal of intelligence for us. He never broke any laws. He merely kept his ears open. And we learned something of vital importance: people will say things around children that they wouldn’t around adults. It’s as simple as that.

“Wynncliff Academy became the only school in the country—as far as we know—to begin training such students. Only certain students interested us for the program—”

“Those good with language, or with special memory skills,” Kaileigh said.

“Or a kid who could run fast, or climb well,” Steel said.

“There were many skill sets that interested us. In some cases, in students over eighteen, that is graduating seniors, students who were no longer minors, the assignments took on more covert activities, and physical attributes became important. That’s possible. Yes.

“Some students are recruited to Wynncliff for the wonderful private education the school offers. Others…like yourselves…are recruited for your individual skill sets that might prove useful to this other program. It’s a voluntary program. No one is going to force you to join. You face discipline only if you discuss what I’m telling you. Not for refusing to join. Do we understand one another?”

They both nodded.

“Normally, we, the school faculty, wait several months or even an entire school year before recruiting our special students. But a situation has arisen that has forced my hand. That, coupled with your curiosity.” He looked like he’d bitten into a lemon. “For these reasons, you are becoming involved much sooner than usual. Your situation is being accelerated. I’m required to recruit you ahead of time. As it happens, the timing is critical. There’s an assignment that needs your particular skills, and your ages, immediately. So I must ask you to carefully consider everything I’ve just told you, and to contemplate admission to our program. Questions?”