I whirled around, ready for a fight.
Mike Brezinski was standing there. He leapt back from me, not so much afraid of my fists as still skittish after being swarmed by CIA agents the night before. “Whoa! It’s just me!” he exclaimed.
I was thrilled to see he was all right—and yet his presence there was unnerving as well. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Mike said.
“What’d you do? Tail me from campus?”
“Yeah. ’Cause last time I tried to see you on campus, I nearly got shot to bits.”
“Ben, you can’t have your friend around right now,” Erica warned. “He’ll tip off Tina. You need to shake him.”
“I know,” I said, completely forgetting that I wasn’t supposed to answer Erica when someone else was around.
“You did?” Mike thought I’d been responding to him. “How?”
“Uh . . . I can’t talk about it right now,” I said sadly. “This isn’t a great time. . . .”
“Did you hear me?” Mike demanded. “I nearly got killed last night! Because I tried to spring you for a party!”
“I know,” I said again. “And I’m sorry. But they’ve had some security issues on campus, and I guess the patrol got a little overzealous.”
“Aw, Ben, give me a little credit,” Mike snapped. “Those jerks tried to force-feed me that line a hundred times over last night. Now, I played dumb with them so they’d let me go. But I’m not doing that with you. I mean, honestly, I don’t care how bad the crime is, nobody gives their neighborhood watch night-vision goggles. Those guys were professionals, right?”
“Right,” I admitted. There no longer seemed to be any point in lying.
“What part of ‘shake this guy’ did you not understand?” Erica asked me.
While I knew Erica was right, I couldn’t bring myself to ditch Mike. He’d been used and practically traumatized because of me, and I felt horrible about it. Besides, Tina seemed to be in a protracted conversation with her bank teller and wasn’t going anywhere soon.
“This isn’t a normal science school, is it?” Mike asked.
I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that with Erica able to hear everything, so I tried to deflect the question. “What’d they do to you?”
“You mean after they nearly killed me? Well, they didn’t even apologize, for starters. Instead, they stuck me in a room with new age music and a cheap one-way mirror and grilled me like a steak until the middle of the night. And even though I played dumb, they still didn’t cut me loose until after one in the morning. Then they drove me home and ratted me out to my parents. So not only did I miss the Pasternak party, I also got grounded.”
“Then how are you here right now?”
“How else? I’m ditching school.”
“Aw, Mike, I’m really sorry.”
“So you’ve said. But are you really?”
“What?” I asked, shocked by the accusation. “Why would you say that?”
“Because ever since I got busted trying to spring you last night, you’ve totally blown me off,” Mike replied. “I’ve called you, texted you, e-mailed you . . . and you ignored all of it.”
“I haven’t had my phone and—”
“And you totally gave me the slip last night.”
I’d been trying to keep one eye on Tina, but now I directed all my attention to Mike. “When?”
“Right outside campus. I saw you from the car as I was leaving. You and some hot chick were going into an ATM vestibule. I called out to you, but you completely ignored me.”
I groaned, realizing what had happened. Even though the campus had been swarming with CIA agents the night before, none of them had spotted me. My own best friend had. That’s how they’d known Erica and I had returned. The only reason it had taken the agents so long to find us was because they never suspected we’d go to Crandall’s.
“Mike, I swear, I didn’t hear you,” I said.
Mike raised his hands, backing off. “All right. I’ll give you that one. I can see why that girl would command your full attention. Was that Erica?”
“How’s he know my name?” Erica asked, suspicious.
“How do you know her name?” I asked.
“Dude, you told me,” Mike said. “On the phone a few weeks ago. You bragged that she’d snuck into your room after curfew.”
“You told him that?” Erica sounded upset.
“It wasn’t a dating thing,” I said quickly. “She only wanted to work on a project together.”
“That’s not how you made it sound then,” Mike said with a laugh. “And frankly, that’s not how it looked last night. The two of you are sneaking around campus together at one thirty in the morning, but you’re not dating? Ben, own this. You should be proud! When you told me Erica was hot, I thought you were blowing smoke, but you were right. That girl is on fire!”
“Ben, we need to talk,” Erica said coldly.
“So have you kissed her yet?” Mike asked.
I looked back toward the bank, hoping Tina would be leaving. I was desperate for anything to interrupt the conversation. A gunfight would have been preferable to having Erica overhear another sentence. Thankfully, Tina was heading toward the door.
“Mike,” I said, “I’m not seeing her. Really.”
Mike’s mood shifted from excited to hurt. “I can take those jackbooted thugs lying to me, Ben. But you’re my friend. Or, at least, you used to be. But you haven’t been acting like one ever since you came to this stupid school.”
“It’s complicated. . . .”
“No, it’s simple: You’re being a jerk. You’re lying to me. You’re ignoring me. And you’re totally yanking me around.”
“I’m not!” I protested.
“You told me to come spring you last night, and then you completely abandoned me when I got in trouble.”
Tina was exiting the bank with a package under her arm. I knew I was supposed to follow her, but I turned back to Mike instead. “Wait. What do you mean I told you to come spring me?”
“You texted me!”
“No, I didn’t.”
“What do you call this, then?” Mike pulled out his phone and started searching for something on it.
Tina was about to round the corner and disappear from my sight.
I expected Erica to chastise me for not following her, but Erica seemed to be distracted by something on the other end of the radio link.
So I stayed put. It was a judgment call, based on something Erica had told me earlier that morning: If we learned how the enemy had manipulated Mike, we might catch the mole. Now Mike was claiming that I had sent him critical text, when I hadn’t. Figuring out what had happened suddenly seemed like the key to everything.
Mike found what he was looking for and thrust the phone into my hand. “There you go. Cold, hard proof.”
He was right. There was a text from my phone.
In for the party. Come spring me. 7:30 p.m. on the nose.
Explicit directions followed. The precise location to jump the wall. What route to take to the dormitory. A warning to avoid the cameras. Everything to set Mike up as a patsy.
And the exact time it was sent: 1:23 p.m.
For once, my ability to always know what time it was had a practical application. I knew exactly what I’d been doing at 1:23 p.m. the day before. And thus, I knew who’d used my phone.
Everything clicked into place. I suddenly understood what the enemy’s plan was.
I didn’t have to follow Tina anymore. Just like Mike, she’d been used as a patsy. A distraction from what was really important.
Which meant I had to get back to campus as fast as possible.
I thrust Mike’s phone back into his hands. “I’m really sorry. But I have to go. I promise, I’ll make this up to you. You’re my best friend. That’s more important to me than anything.”
“Whoa.” Mike took a step back, uncomfortable with all the emotion. “Apology accepted. No need to get al
l mushy. What’s the emergency?”
“I have to find Erica,” I said.
“Then why are you still here?” Mike grinned wolfishly. “Go get her, Tiger.”
I bolted down the street, racing back toward the academy. I was in too big a hurry to even pretend to speak into my imaginary phone.
“Erica!” I said. “I know who the mole is!”
She didn’t respond. Instead, I heard a sharp smack and then the distinct groan of Erica collapsing, unconscious.
REVELATION
CIA Academy of Espionage
Subbasement Level 2
February 10
1300 hours
I used the secret entrance through the ATM portal to get back on campus. I’d considered going straight through the front gate and recruiting the agents posted there to help me, but I was afraid they’d only incarcerate me again. I had taken the underground route enough times lately that I was starting to learn it and got lost only once on my way.
I knew I was being careless, rushing headlong to confront the enemy. I knew I should find someone to back me up, but I wasn’t sure whom to trust and without my phone, I had no idea how to locate anyone without wasting precious time. There wasn’t even time for me to visit the armory and get a weapon. It always took at least five minutes to fill out a firearms request form, which was five minutes I didn’t have. Right then, every second counted.
Erica had told me she was under the Nathan Hale Building. I wasn’t sure where exactly, but I guessed she’d been snooping directly under the conference room, as that’s where the meeting about Project Omega was taking place. Every major player in American espionage was there. With a single bomb, the enemy could take them all out at once.
But where was it? There were two levels below the library—and those were only the ones I knew about. It was possible there might have been another ten down there. And each level was a warren of tunnels, shafts, and locked rooms. I wasn’t even sure exactly where the conference room was in the Hale Building, which was a massive edifice, the biggest on campus, with a footprint the size of a football field. There might have been a thousand places to conceal a bomb beneath it.
As I neared the Hale Building, however, I heard a faint beeping in my ear. It was coming from the transmitter, and it grew slightly louder with every step I took.
Erica, I thought. She must have triggered some sort of tracking system before she was knocked unconscious. It obviously only worked within close range, but that was all I needed. I let the beeping lead me through the tunnels, down to Subbasement Level 2, until I found myself outside a steel door marked FURNACE ROOM. The beeping was so loud there, I had to take the transmitter from my ear.
There was a maintenance closet across the hall. The door was locked but flimsy. It took only three kicks to smash it in.
The shelves were loaded with industrial cleaners—the perfect things for me to make a chemical weapon out of—if I had taken Chemistry 105: Constructing Weapons from Cleaning Supplies yet. As it was, I had to opt for something a bit more basic: I snapped a mop handle over my knee, turning it into a club with a relatively sharp end. Then I went back across the hall.
The furnace room door wasn’t locked. It creaked softly as it opened, but the sound was swallowed up by that of the huge, ancient furnace, which clanked and chugged noisily as it struggled to heat the building above.
Erica lay unconscious against one wall, a small trickle of blood oozing from behind her ear.
Along the opposite wall sat the bomb. It looked like the bomb I’d seen Chip with in the tunnels before, only several hundred times larger. The block of C4 explosive was the size of a filing cabinet, big enough to level the Hale Building. A maze of wires extended from it, all leading up to a digital alarm clock, which was currently being rigged as a trigger . . .
By Murray Hill.
He had his back to me, but I knew it was him. I’d known since the moment I saw the message on Mike’s phone. It had been sent at the exact time Murray had gone off to get pie the day before.
He’d swiped my phone from my jacket, sent Mike the text, then deleted the outgoing message from my text log. It wouldn’t have been hard to do. He would have needed my access code, but that probably hadn’t been hard to get. I must have carelessly entered it in front of him at some point in the past few weeks, thinking he was actually my friend. All Murray had to do was keep his eyes peeled and remember it. Once he’d set up Mike as the diversion, he’d notified an associate to plant the chatter, gotten some pie, and slipped the phone back in my jacket. Then, after Alexander had removed me from the mess hall, Murray had gone off to arrange my kidnapping.
The only thing he couldn’t do was delete the text from Mike’s end. But he’d most likely assumed that Mike would never show me the text on his own phone—or that by the time he did, the Hale Building would already be a smoking hole in the ground.
From what I could tell, Murray hadn’t finished rigging the bomb yet, although I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t know much about bombs, though I did know one key thing about Murray: You couldn’t trust a single thing about him.
I cocked the mop handle over my shoulder like a baseball bat and crept up on him, focusing on the sweet spot at the back of his skull—the same place he’d probably brained Erica—intending to clobber him with all my might and knock him unconscious. The clanking furnace covered the sound of my footsteps as I closed the gap. . . .
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Ben.” Murray didn’t even turn around. Instead, he held up his left hand, in which he clutched a pressure-release trigger. “If you knock me out, I drop this . . . and kablooey.”
“Back away from the bomb,” I said, in as threatening a voice as I could muster.
“Sure. Just give me one more second. Ah! There we go.” Murray plugged a final wire into the digital clock and turned to face me with a smile. “Why don’t you put that weapon down so we can have a civilized discussion? C’mon, I’ll buy you an ice cream.” He started for the door.
“Stop or I’ll hit you,” I said.
Murray froze and gave me an annoyed look. “No, you won’t. You’d just blow up everyone—including yourself. You don’t want that.”
“I’d also blow you up,” I pointed out. “And you don’t want that. So it looks like we’re stuck here.”
“Not exactly.” Murray withdrew a gun from beneath his jacket and aimed it at my stomach. “Gun beats stick. I win.” He casually tossed aside the pressure-release trigger, which turned out to be a useless piece of junk. Like I said, you could never trust him.
He was now too far away for me to hit him with my mop handle. I lowered it, defeated, glaring hatefully at him.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “If I wanted to shoot you, I’d have shot you already.”
“Then why haven’t you?” I asked.
“Because I have a business proposition for you.” He motioned me toward the door with the gun. “Mind if we discuss it somewhere more comfortable than this? I wasn’t kidding about that ice cream.”
“I’d rather stay here,” I said.
“I’m paying. You can even get sprinkles.”
“The last time you got me dessert, it was a ruse to arrange my abduction.”
Murray sighed, exasperated. “You realize that’s a bomb over there, right? Now, it doesn’t go boom unless I say it goes boom, but still, the farther we get from it, the safer we are.”
“You want to talk to me, then talk.” I wasn’t sure why I felt it was necessary to stay in the room, but it seemed that if I left, I’d lose any chance I had to prevent the explosion. Or rescue Erica. “What’s this proposition?”
“How’d you like to be a double agent?” Murray asked.
Even though I’d been expecting him to do something to catch me by surprise, this completely floored me. “You’re offering me a job?”
“I’m not doing it. My superiors are. They’ve seen your file, of course. I leaked it to them. And they like what they see
. . . even though we all know the whole cryptography specialist thing is a crock.”
“I figured as much.” I did my best to sound reverential, hoping it would get him to drop his guard. “You’ve merely been playing along with that to set up Scorpio all along, right? First you make it obvious to the CIA that there’s a double agent at the school. You leak some information. Send an assassin to my room to prove you can infiltrate the campus. Then when Erica plays the Jackhammer card, you have your boys kidnap me. All just to frighten the government into considering the activation of Omega. Because you know only a crisis like that would bring all the higher-ups in espionage together at one time, which makes it the perfect opportunity to take them all out.”
“You figured that all out yourself?” Murray asked. He sounded impressed, but he might have been faking it as well. “I knew I was right about you. That’s the kind of clever deductive thought we’re looking for.”
“Oh, I’ve figured out more than that,” I replied. “You’ve been manipulating everyone left and right. For example, you pretended to let it slip that Chip was seeing Tina to divert my attention to him, but really, you’re the one who’s been using her.” I remembered the tutoring manuals I’d seen stacked in Tina’s room. “You didn’t flunk your classes last semester so you could get a desk job. You did it so Tina would tutor you.”
Murray grinned. “Guilty as charged.”
“That’s how you got your information. You swiped it from her. But then, when Chip—of all people—started to realize a bomb plot was afoot, you just deflected his attention toward Tina herself.”
Murray shrugged. “I admit that was a little sloppy. But let me tell you, it is not easy to sneak this much explosive material into a CIA facility. I dropped a little down in the tunnels. Thankfully, it was that lummox who found it and not someone intelligent.”
“You did make one mistake, though,” I said.
“What?”
“You actually like Tina. So you asked her to run an errand for you today so you could get her off campus before the bomb exploded.”
“I wasn’t doing that to protect Tina.” Murray rolled his eyes. “I was doing that to get you off campus. I wasn’t planning on having this conversation until after the big kaboom, but you caught on faster than I expected. I tell you, you’re gonna make an awesome double agent.”