We watched the flashlight beams grow brighter as the enemy agents closed in from both sides. We heard their footsteps grow louder and louder. And then they all came together right in front of us. They were less than a foot away, although I still couldn’t make out their features. Their faces were almost completely cast in shadow.
They all noticed the STOP HERE on the floor at the same time. I caught a quick glimpse of one’s eyes. He seemed surprised by the words, and then his gaze hardened. Then the men began to search the immediate area, swinging their flashlight beams through the murk.
I held my breath, praying that our little niche in the machinery would cloak us in the darkness.
It didn’t. It took approximately half a second for the SPYDER agents to spot us.
Their flashlight beams fell on us. I saw the closest agent’s lips curl into a cruel smile.
And then, someone dropped on them from the ceiling.
The attacker had been waiting up in a nest of pipes in the darkness. He or she—I couldn’t tell which, as the person was cloaked in black from head to toe like a ninja—swung down like an Olympic gymnast and kicked two enemy agents in the back at once, sending them flying face-first into the machinery. Their heads clanged off the iron and they collapsed to the floor. Before the other two agents even knew what was happening, our savior had attacked them as well.
It was hard to tell exactly what was going on, as the light was terrible and the ninja was moving so fast. Even though I was only a few feet away, everything was a blur. I heard the SPYDER agents grunt in pain as blows caught them by surprise, and saw them crash to the floor as their feet were suddenly swept out from under them. The agents tried to fight back, but our savior seemed to be everywhere at once, doubling one bad guy over with a kick to the solar plexus, flipping another onto his back, then cracking the other two’s heads together. Within thirty seconds, all four were sprawled on the floor, two unconscious, two incapacitated by pain.
The ninja turned toward us and tugged off his black mask, revealing his identity.
To my astonishment, he was at least seventy years old.
Although he’d moved with the speed and grace of a far younger man, his hair was white and his face was creased with lines. He had a trim mustache, an ancient scar across his left temple, and blue eyes that twinkled with amusement, as though he was having a blast. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re all safe now.”
Erica pried herself out of our hiding place. She wasn’t surprised by the man’s age at all. Instead, she was thrilled to see him, flashing the biggest smile I’d ever seen on her face.
“Hi, Grandpa,” she said.
REUNION
Apple Valley Reformation Camp and vicinity
June 15
0900 hours
“Grandpa, this is Ben Ripley,” Erica said, pulling me forward to meet our savior. “Ben, this is my grandfather, Cyrus Hale.”
“Aka Agent Klondike,” Alexander added.
Cyrus’s eyes flicked over to Alexander and hardened for a moment. He wasn’t nearly as pleased to see his son as he was to see his granddaughter. Then his gaze shifted back to me.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said. “Thanks for helping us out.”
Cyrus looked me up and down, no longer smiling. “You’d better be worth all the trouble we’ve gone through for you,” he said.
Then he turned his attention to one of the two SPYDER agents who were still conscious. He rolled the bad guy onto his back and knelt on his ribs, adding a little extra pain to all that he’d doled out so far. Then he grabbed the guy by his T-shirt and pulled him up so the two of them were eye to eye. “What do you want with this kid?” Cyrus demanded.
The SPYDER agent only laughed in response. “There are a lot more of us coming, old man. I’m not saying squat to you.”
Anger flashed in Cyrus’s eyes. His grip tightened on the man’s shirt. But then Erica placed a calming hand on her grandfather’s shoulder. “He’s not bluffing,” she said. “Listen.”
Cyrus cocked his head, then adjusted the hearing aid that was lodged in his right ear.
In the distance, somewhere in the Apple Valley complex, we could hear more footsteps coming.
“Dagnabbit,” Cyrus grumbled. He let the SPYDER agent’s head drop back to the cement in the most painful way possible. “Follow me,” he told us, then ducked into the maze of machinery.
“There’s no point in running!” the SPYDER agent called after us tauntingly. “This valley’s a dead end. We’ve got you cornered.”
“We’ll see about that!” Cyrus yelled back. He led us quickly through the basement, moving with startling speed for a grandfather. Despite having just beaten four grown men to a pulp, he wasn’t even winded.
As opposed to Alexander, who was now bringing up the rear, audibly gasping for breath. “I don’t suppose we could slow things down a notch?” he wheezed. “I’ve got a stitch in my side.”
“Sounds like someone ought to be spending a little less time snowing his superiors and a little more time at the gym,” Cyrus groused.
“I’m in perfectly good shape, Dad!” Alexander retorted. “This is just a residual injury from my last mission. A terrorist in Afghanistan tried to waylay me with a monkey wrench . . .”
“Can the malarkey, will you?” Cyrus snapped. “I’m your father, Alexander, not some knucklehead CIA director. I know when you’re lying.”
Alexander clammed up after that, looking wounded, and didn’t say another word for a while. No one did. As we were trying to elude the enemy, making as little noise as possible seemed like a good course of action.
Cyrus led us out of the basement through a distant, dingy stairwell that I’d bet most of the employees at Apple Valley didn’t even know about. It came up into a maintenance room for the swimming pool. The pool was quite far from the main building complex—and thus our enemies—as well as being closer to the surrounding forest than any other building on the property. Cyrus cracked the door open and peered through to case the premises.
Over his shoulder, I could see across the large lawn to the main road in the distance. There were now three minivans blocking it. SPYDER for sure. Each van could seat seven adults, which meant there might be twenty-one agents combing Apple Valley for us, although only three were visible. They all stood by the vans, keeping a lookout for us, but they were all focused on the main building, away from the pool. I couldn’t see anyone else.
Neither could Cyrus. “Coast looks clear,” he whispered. “Erica, take this, just in case.” With that, he slapped a snub-nosed semiautomatic into her hand.
“Why don’t I get a gun?” Alexander whined.
“The last time I gave you a gun, you accidentally shot me in the leg,” Cyrus replied.
“I was eight years old!” Alexander protested. “And it was a BB gun . . .”
“Exactly. I’ll be darned if I’m gonna give you something you could actually hurt me with.” Before Alexander could say another word, Cyrus put a finger to his lips, then bolted from the maintenance room toward the woods.
We all followed him, keeping low to the ground to stay out of sight. It was a nerve-wracking run, as we had to cross a wide expanse of lawn. Although Cyrus had carefully chosen the route that was least visible from the other buildings, we were still badly exposed and out in the open. I kept waiting to hear the SPYDER agents sound the alarm—or simply open fire on us. But we made it to the cover of the trees without incident. The enemy agents didn’t spot us. SPYDER, which had predicted nearly everything we’d done so far, hadn’t predicted Cyrus Hale.
Cyrus led the way through the forest without hesitation, as though he’d already memorized the escape route.
“It won’t be long before they realize we’ve found a way off the property,” Alexander said. “Do you have a getaway car close by?”
“Not exactly,” Cyrus replied. “It’s about an hour’s hike.”
“An hour?” Alexander moaned.
“It was t
he best I could do on short notice,” Cyrus snapped. “You really put yourself in the crosshairs here, Alex. You couldn’t have picked a better place to be ambushed by the enemy.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Alexander said defensively. “It was Erica’s!”
“Laying the blame on your daughter again, are you?” Cyrus asked pointedly.
Alexander winced.
“She’s just a teenager,” Cyrus continued, and then, before Erica could say anything, he added, “A very talented and capable teenager, but a teenager nonetheless. As her father, you’re supposed to be looking out for her! Instead, you let her walk straight into a trap. If I hadn’t been keeping an eye on you, your goose would be cooked right now.”
“How long were you tailing us, Grandpa?” Erica asked.
“Ever since you got off the helicopter,” Cyrus replied. “I followed you on your little reconnaissance mission last night, so I had a good idea what you were up to. Gave me some time to plan an emergency escape route.”
“If you were so concerned about us, why didn’t you stop us before we went to Apple Valley?” I asked.
Cyrus shot me an icy stare. “You’re questioning me? You, a first year at the academy. Do you have any idea who I am?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean any offense . . .”
“I’m Cyrus Hale, for crying out loud! I’ve been serving this country since your mommy and daddy were still in diapers. I faced down the Russkies in the Cold War. I personally ended the Bay of Pigs fiasco. If it wasn’t for me, this planet would have gone thermonuclear ten times over. . . .”
Cyrus looked fit to rage on for another few minutes, but then Erica said, “Actually, Grandpa, it wasn’t a bad question.”
Cyrus immediately stopped ranting and softened. “Ah, I suppose you’re right, Cupcake. In the first place, I had direct orders not to engage you unless it was absolutely necessary. Second, I figured you might actually learn some important information on your mission, even if you weren’t taking the appropriate caution to protect yourselves.”
“You mean, you let us sacrifice ourselves?” Alexander asked.
“Sacrificing you would mean letting you get captured,” Cyrus growled. “Obviously, I did no such thing. I’ve been up since three in the a.m. planning this escape route. And have I gotten so much as a thank-you? No. All I’ve gotten is sass.”
“Thank you for rescuing us,” I said.
Cyrus swung back toward me, then nodded appreciatively. “That’s more like it,” he said.
“We did get some useful information, didn’t we?” Erica asked.
“You did, Princess,” Cyrus agreed. “You determined that SPYDER infiltrated the system to make sure that this Murray Hill character was never sent to Apple Valley. Which means that SPYDER is far more entrenched in the CIA than anyone has realized. We’d been thinking they have one or two double agents at most. But now, I suspect they have far more than that.” He suddenly came to a stop in a small clearing, his eyes darting from tree to tree.
“What’s wrong?” Alexander asked.
“Nothing,” Cyrus said. “I’m just trying to remember the way to the car.”
“You mean we’re lost?” Alexander cried.
“No, we’re not lost! I’m just getting my bearings is all.” Cyrus pointed through a gap between two oak trees. “The car’s this way.”
We started moving through the woods again.
“Dad,” Alexander said, “you wouldn’t have to try to memorize a path through the woods like this if you’d just get a smartphone . . .”
“Bah!” Cyrus said, sounding exactly like my grandfather when I tried to show him how to use the computer. “Smartphones! You kids today rely way too much on technology. Back in my day, we didn’t need smartphones to fight the Russkies. All we needed were guts, brains, and semiautomatic weapons.”
“They’re indispensable for the modern secret agent,” Alexander argued. “If you had one, you could be using the global positioning system to find the car. . . .”
“You don’t have to tell me about the global positioning system,” Cyrus said. “I know plenty about GPS. Take it from me, it’s not as accurate as everybody thinks.”
“Now, Grandpa, don’t be such a dinosaur,” Erica said. “Dad’s actually right about this.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” Cyrus muttered.
“There’s a lot of useful smartphone apps for spies,” Erica went on. “For instance, there’s a great one for fingerprinting. We could have taken the prints of one of those SPYDER agents you took out and transmitted them to the CIA already.”
Cyrus shook his head. “It wouldn’t have done us any good, Sweetie-Pie. I can guarantee you those men’s prints aren’t in the system.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Because the CIA doesn’t have the prints for every single person in the world on file,” Cyrus explained. “Only known criminals. And SPYDER’s too smart an organization to hire known criminals. Plus, if we had a smartphone right now, they’d be tracking our position with it. It’d be doing us far more harm than good.”
Erica smiled at Cyrus, impressed. “Good point, Grandpa. As usual.”
The ground had begun to rise sharply. The forest thinned, and we found ourselves scrambling over stone, sometimes scaling steep sections that required a few rock-climbing moves. We fell silent and focused on our ascent.
After a while, I realized Cyrus was staring at me. He was scrutinizing every move I made and didn’t look pleased by any of them. I got the sense that he and Erica were very similar. Both of them were cool customers from whom it was extremely difficult to earn respect. “Is something wrong?” I asked.
“I’m just trying to figure out what’s so all-fired important about you,” Cyrus said.
“What do you mean?” Alexander asked.
Cyrus rolled his eyes as though this was the world’s dumbest question. “I mean that SPYDER has been content to lie low for years now. So low that, until a couple months ago, we didn’t even know for sure they existed. During that time, they’ve wormed their way into the CIA. They’ve corrupted our agents and hacked our computers. And after going through all that trouble, what do they do? They come after this kid. A first-year student who’s still wet behind the ears. Why?” Cyrus narrowed his eyes at me. “What’s so darned special about you?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
Cyrus snorted in disgust.
We reached a gap in the trees that allowed us to see back down into the valley. Cyrus signaled for all of us to stop, then pulled out a pair of binoculars and cased the reformation camp. “Looks like they’ve figured out we’ve given them the slip,” he chuckled. “They’re running around like a flock of chickens with their heads cut off. Probably won’t be long before they figure out we’ve taken to the woods.”
“Think they’ll come after us?” Alexander asked.
“I doubt it.” Cyrus stuck the binoculars back in his utility belt and started up the slope again. “We’ve got too big a head start on them. Besides, they know we’ve got to come see them again anyhow.”
“They still have our friends,” I said. In all the excitement, I’d almost forgotten.
“Exactly,” Cyrus agreed. “We still need to spring those folks. Plan A might not have worked out for SPYDER, but they still have Plan B. All they have to do is sit back and wait for us.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” I asked.
“What can we do?” Erica echoed. “We have to go get them.”
“Even though that’s exactly what SPYDER wants?” I said.
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean we have to play by SPYDER’s rules,” Erica said. She and her grandfather shared a smile, indicating they were on the same wavelength.
“That’s my girl,” said Cyrus proudly. “I taught her everything she knows.”
“What do you mean?” I asked Erica.
“This time, we’re going to get the jump on them,” she re
plied.
SIMULATION
Winchester, Virginia
June 15
1500 hours
It took us another hour to walk to Cyrus Hale’s getaway car, which was parked on an old logging road up in the forest. It took another few hours after that to drive to Winchester, as Cyrus took a very roundabout route. “SPYDER will be watching the main highways,” he explained. We grabbed lunch at a Burger King drive-through on the way and arrived in Winchester almost a day earlier than we’d told SPYDER we could get there—which had been Erica’s plan all along.
“You never meet the enemy on their terms,” she explained as we sped into town. “You merely agree to their terms and then catch them off guard.”
“Exactly what I’d have done in this situation,” Cyrus said with a chuckle. “Where were you supposed to make the exchange?”
“An old barn just north of the city, at the intersection of highways 37 and 522,” Erica replied. “But that’s not actually where they’re holding the hostages.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Because I scoped the place out last night,” Erica told me.
“I thought you were doing recon on Apple Valley last night,” I said.
“I was,” Erica said. “And then I came here and did some recon too. That’s why I was gone so long. No better way to catch your enemy with their pants down than to show up way before they’re expecting you.”
Cyrus chuckled again. “Nicely done, Buttercup. So, what’d you find out?”
“SPYDER was already at the barn,” Erica said. “Preparing a trap for us, I suspect. I followed some of their guys back to a different farm on the western side of the city. I think the other kids are being held in the main house there. SPYDER had an awful lot of security set up around it. But I didn’t have the time to fully investigate.”