“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 the
ir 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.
ASSASSINATION
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.
“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.