“Ben’s just received a death threat,” Tina said.
Hank’s jaw dropped. “No kidding? Wow. I’ve only been on the job five seconds and I’ve already got a death threat to deal with?”
“It’s really more of a capture threat . . . ,” I put in.
“Ben, give Hank the full update. I’m heading over to inform the administration.” Tina tousled my hair like a big sister might. “In case I don’t see you before I leave, be strong.” She hurried out the door.
Hank shut and locked it behind her. When he turned back to me, his smile had vanished. Apparently, he’d only been acting nice in front of Tina, but now that she was gone, his true colors were showing. He looked at me in the same menacing way that Chip had when I’d first met him—only Hank was far more menacing than Chip. “Let’s get a couple things straight here, Smokescreen. Number one, I don’t like you.”
“What?” I asked. “Why not?”
“I understand you’re friends with my brother.”
“Yes.”
“I hate my brother. Therefore, I hate my brother’s friends. Therefore, I hate you.”
“Actually, Chip and I aren’t great friends,” I said. “In fact, he really didn’t like me when we first met. . . .”
“But there’s another, more important reason I don’t like you,” Hank told me. “You’re trouble. And when a student is trouble, his residential adviser ends up looking bad. Look what happened to poor Tina. She’s getting a raw deal because of this business you got mixed up in. . . .”
“That’s not my fault,” I protested. “Murray was already using Tina by the time I came along.”
“No matter how you slice it, you were involved. Which makes you trouble. I intend to run a tight ship here—and I don’t want any problems from my students. That would make me very angry, understand?” Hank put a hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. He’d barely seemed to expend any energy, and yet it was incredibly painful. It felt as though his fingers had furrowed my scapula.
“I understand,” I managed to squeak out.
“Glad to hear it,” Hank said. “Now then, is this death threat thing going to be trouble for me?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, hoping it was the truth. After all, Tina was alerting the administration, and Erica had already begun her own investigation. If all went well, the whole issue would be taken care of well before the summer was over. Either SPYDER would be foiled—or I’d be dead.
“All right.” Hank steered me out the door and into the hall, as though Tina’s room was already his own. “I’ll see you on Monday.”
“Monday?” I asked. “You’ll be at spy camp, too?”
“Of course,” Hank said. “I’m not just your resident adviser. I’m also your camp counselor.”
I winced. It looked like I would be causing Hank Schacter some trouble. And much sooner than I’d hoped.
MANIFESTATION
FunLand Amusement Center
Alexandria, Virginia
June 11
1400 hours
“Camp?” Mike Brezinski frowned at me through the fence of the batting cage. “What on earth do you want to go there for? Camp stinks.”
“This one’s supposed to be a lot of fun,” I lied.
The automatic pitching machine launched a ball at eighty miles an hour. Mike effortlessly swung his bat and cracked a home run. “That’s what they all say. And then you get there and find out they think ‘fun’ means getting mauled by mosquitoes and pooping in an outhouse.”
We were at FunLand, a combination of batting cages, arcade, and miniature golf course, all designed with a completely inexplicable medieval theme. Normally, I wouldn’t have ventured into such a public place knowing SPYDER was targeting me, but Tina had come through in a big way. The administration had assigned me a covert security detail. In fact, since SPYDER was involved, they’d gone a bit overboard. Only half of the bored parents waiting for their kids at FunLand were actually bored parents waiting for their kids; the rest were undercover CIA agents. Several of the kids were as well. The CIA had deployed every one of its shortest agents to protect me.
In my batting cage, I swung at a ball and whiffed. Apparently, all the eye-hand coordination exercises I’d been doing at spy school didn’t apply to baseball. “It won’t be that bad,” I said.
“Maybe not, but it won’t be as much fun as staying here. I had an awesome summer planned for us.” Mike smacked another ball downtown. “For starters, my brother thinks he can get us a job here.”
“How is work supposed to be more fun than camp?” I actually made contact with the next ball, but fouled it off so badly that it nearly took out a seven-year-old in a batting cage down the row.
“Because it’s not really work,” Mike explained. “We’d be the change guys in the arcade. Which means we’d basically get paid to hang around here and play video games all day.”
I doubted that plan would have worked for anybody—except Mike. Just about everything always worked out for Mike. He took easy classes so he could get A’s without ever cracking a textbook. He was the star of any team he played on. And all the girls liked him. He was now dating Elizabeth Pasternak, the most beautiful girl at my old middle school.
Of course, I had done my share of cool things as well lately. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell Mike about a single one. If anyone would have been impressed by a death threat, it was Mike. But spy school was top secret. Even my own parents thought I was attending St. Smithen’s Science Academy for Boys and Girls. Which meant that they, like Mike and everyone else, thought I was a nerd.
Shortly after I’d arrived at spy school, however, Mike had come close to learning the truth about me. He’d snuck onto the academy campus to spring me for a party and been captured by a horde of CIA agents who’d mistaken him for a SPYDER operative. Afterward, the CIA had tried to convince Mike that he’d merely stumbled upon a very overzealous neighborhood watch, but he’d seen right through this and told me as much. I’d then informed the academy, and the CIA’s Department of Misinformation had subsequently redoubled its efforts to mislead him. They’d actually pretended to recruit him to St. Smithen’s, plying him with glossy brochures and inviting him to the science fair, knowing full well that Mike would never attend a lame science school. (The science fair never happened, but the CIA was prepared to stage a full-blown fake one just in case Mike felt like dropping by.) Meanwhile, the Agency sent a team of “lawyers” to Mike’s house to “admit” that Mike had stumbled upon a CIA “exercise”—but they claimed they had nothing to do with St. Smithen’s and even pretended to fear a lawsuit from the school for conducting maneuvers on its grounds without authorization. Mike, being Mike, asked what they’d be willing to give him to keep his mouth shut. The CIA coughed up his future college tuition, a membership for Mike’s family at the Pasternaks’ country club—and a car, even though Mike wouldn’t be sixteen for three years. (Like I said, everything always worked out for Mike.) Ultimately, after expending a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money, the Department of Misinformation declared that Mike was officially fooled, although every once in a while, I found myself wondering if Mike had seen through all this as well and simply kept his doubts to himself.
The pitching machines launched our final balls. I barely nicked mine. Mike almost knocked the hide off his, then stepped out of the cages with me. “It’s bad enough that you had to switch schools,” he groused. “Now you’ll be gone all summer, too?”
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I thought I was going to be here too. My parents had already paid for camp by the time I found out.” Another lie: The CIA paid for the camp in full, but told everyone’s parents that we’d all won scholarships there.
“Your parents would let you stay here if you told them you wanted to,” Mike said. We turned in our batting gear and started up the walkway toward the fake medieval castle that housed the arcade. Two of the agents pretending to be bored parents waiting for their kids tailed us.
“I did tell my folks,” I told Mike. “They said no.”
“Really? I thought they were all excited to throw your birthday party next week.”
“They said we could just do it at the end of the summer. . . .”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Ben, just be honest with me.”
I turned to Mike a little too quickly, wondering if he could possibly have known the truth.
“Erica’s going to be there, isn’t she?” he asked.
“Yes,” I admitted, relieved.
“That’s all you had to say,” Mike told me. “ ‘My super-hot girlfriend’s going to camp and I want to go with her.’ Totally understandable.”
Mike was under the mistaken impression that Erica and I were dating, as the one time he’d seen us together, we were sneaking back onto campus at one thirty in the morning. The truth was that I’d just been abducted by SPYDER and Erica had saved me, but I couldn’t tell Mike that—and he probably wouldn’t have believed it anyhow. So for the time being, I let him believe what he wanted—not that it pained me to do this. It was the first time in my life Mike had ever been jealous of me.
“Hey, you don’t start camp for another two days,” he said as we entered the arcade. “Why don’t we double date tomorrow? You and Erica and me and Elizabeth. We could all go to the movies or something.”
“I told my parents I’d spend tomorrow with them,” I said. “I’ll have the whole summer to see Erica.”
“So then, this is it?” Mike asked. “I won’t see you for the rest of the summer?”
“I’m not sure.” Before Mike could argue, I said, “So let’s make the best of it. I’ll bet I can kill more zombies than you.”
“No way,” Mike told me. “Loser buys dinner.” He plugged a couple of tokens into one of the dozen video games that allowed us to kill the undead and handed me a fake firearm.
The last time I’d played Mike in any shoot-’em-up game, he’d destroyed me. Actually, anytime I’d played Mike in anything, he’d destroyed me. (I could have smeared him in chess, of course, but guys like Mike didn’t play chess.) However, today was different.
I’d spent a great deal of time on attack simulators and the shooting range over the last few months. I’d been under the impression that I wasn’t really that good—but I suddenly discovered that was because I was comparing myself to other future spies. Next to Erica, for example, I was a basket case. But compared to your average kid, I had become impressive. Now, I blew away zombies with impunity, splattering virtual green goo everywhere and sending severed body parts wheeling through the air. I barely missed. I was racking up points and extra men as fast as possible.
I was so pleased to be defeating Mike in something for once, I didn’t notice a crowd had gathered around us. Apparently, word had got out that I was gunning for the high score, and kids were coming from all over the arcade to watch. Mike practically stopped playing so he could watch me himself. “Are you even studying at that science school?” he shouted over the sounds of zombie screams. “Or are you just playing video games the whole time?”
Before I could answer, I noticed someone trying to get my attention. It was one of the undercover agents, a young woman posing as a soccer mom. She was shaking her head slightly, signaling me to ease off on the zombie slaying. Apparently, in my rush to display my skills, I was threatening to blow my cover.
I almost backed down and let my avatar get eaten. But then it occurred to me that the CIA had robbed me of a summer off and put me in danger once again. The least they could do was let me be cool for an afternoon. So, instead of taking a dive, I snatched Mike’s gun from him and started blasting away with both hands. I mowed down an entire army of the undead in seconds.
A roar went up from the crowd. Kids slapped me on the back and cheered as I racked up more points.
I shot a cocky smirk to the CIA agent, who gave me an annoyed frown in response.
And then Murray Hill emerged from the crowd.
He was suddenly only a few inches away from me, flashing a big smile. “Hey, Ben,” he said. “How’s it going?”
I didn’t say anything in response. Murray’s arrival was so startling and improbable—he was supposed to be imprisoned, after all—that for a few moments, I couldn’t comprehend that it was really him. I just gawked at him in a way that made him laugh.
“Sorry,” Murray said. “Don’t blow your high score on my account. Fire away.” He gave me a friendly pat on the back, as though he’d forgotten that the last time we’d seen each other, he’d tried to shoot me.
The game no longer meant anything to me, however. And I wasn’t about to turn my back on Murray Hill. I found myself wishing the guns in my hands were real. “What are you doing here?” I snarled.
Murray look a step back, holding his hands up. “I’m here on behalf of SPYDER. We said we’d be coming. We really need to talk to you.”
“About what?” I demanded.
Murray started to say something, but it was drowned out. The crowd around me had turned on Murray as well, annoyed at him for distracting me from a record-setting game. Lots of people were yelling at him to back off, or at me to focus, and the encroaching virtual zombie horde was roaring angrily as well.
Mike leaned in beside me, giving Murray a hard stare. “This guy making trouble for you?” he asked.
On the video screen, the zombies pounced on my avatar. A huge groan went up from the crowd. Sensing trouble, the soccer mom CIA agent approached, her hand dipping into the fanny pack where her gun was concealed.
Murray glanced toward her, his smile fading. “Maybe this isn’t the best time to talk,” he told me. “There’s a little too much heat around here.” With that, he ducked back through the crowd and bolted for the exit on the far side of the arcade from Soccer Mom.
“I gotta go,” I told Mike, and then went after Murray. Perhaps it was foolish to run toward the enemy, but as enemy agents went, Murray wasn’t exactly imposing. Besides, if he’d truly wanted to hurt me, he could have done it while I was distracted by the video game. Unfortunately, a knot of teenagers got in my way, demanding to know why I’d just given up. By the time I broke free of them, Murray was already out the door.
Soccer Mom fell in beside me as I raced past the Skee-Ball games. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Murray Hill just approached me,” I said.
The sun was blinding as I emerged from the cavelike arcade—and the mini golf course was a labyrinth of places to hide: fifty-four holes of castles, dragons, and fake waterfalls spewing water dyed neon blue. As I desperately scanned it for Murray, Soccer Mom emerged beside me.
“It couldn’t be Murray Hill,” she said. “He’s incarcerated.”
I caught a glimpse of Murray disappearing behind a cheesy representation of Stonehenge on the seventh hole. Murray wasn’t exactly an athlete; he had the very distinct gait of someone with a constant stomach cramp. “I’d check and make sure,” I told Soccer Mom, then took off again.
Soccer Mom stayed right on my tail. “Stand down!” she ordered. “If it really is Murray, we can handle him.”
I ignored her and kept going. I knew it was Murray. There was no time to wait for confirmation. I tore across the miniature golf course, dodging small children and poorly hit balls. I zigzagged through Stonehenge, knocking over a few fake druids, then cut around a large plastic object that was probably supposed to be a dragon, although it looked more like a dyspeptic stegosaurus.
Several holes away, Murray was closing in on the chain-link fence at the back of FunLand. On the far side of it, a sedan with tinted windows idled, waiting for him. A large fake pond filled with neon blue water and Viking ships lay between us. I didn’t have enough time to go around it . . .
But there was a chance I could go over it. To my left, a twenty-foot-tall plastic volcano rose above the rest of the park. It didn’t really fit with the medieval theme; I think the builders of FunLand just thought it was cool. Every fifteen minutes, it would belch smoke and spit wa
ter dyed red. The water was supposed to look like molten lava, although it actually looked far more like blood (for which reason every kid in town called the volcano Mount Hemorrhoid). To power these anemic displays, an electrical wire ran from the top of the volcano down to an old generator by the back fence.
I snatched a putter away from a nearby girl, who burst into tears.
“I’ll give it back,” I told her, then scrambled up Mount Hemorrhoid. I swung the putter over the electrical wire, then grabbed on to both ends, creating a makeshift zip line, and launched myself after Murray. I shot down the wire even faster than I’d expected, roaring right over the Vikings.
Murray was scrambling over the back fence, but he was taking his time, winded from his run. I bore down on him, closing the gap quickly.
And then the electrical wire snapped. It ripped free from the top of Mount Hemorrhoid and went slack, dropping me flat on my back in the middle of the sixteenth fairway. The live wire plopped into the fake lake and shot a bolt of electricity through it that instantly cooked all the resident koi fish. The old generator overloaded and blew out in an incredible display of sparks that started several other fires as well. The ridiculous structures that adorned the golf holes all turned out to be extremely flammable. Within seconds, the air was thick with smoke as medieval churches, castles, and dragons flamed.
As this happened in the midst of peak family hours, it started a bit of a panic. Parents grabbed their children and stampeded for the exits. The CIA agents who were rushing to catch up with me were nearly trampled.
I sat up, groaning, and saw Murray clambering into the getaway car. Before he closed the door, however, he couldn’t help but take a look back. He flashed me another smile and waved good-bye. “We’ll be in touch, Ben!” he called, and then the car peeled out, disappearing into a cloud of smoke.
Soccer Mom caught up to me. She’d wisely decided to go around the electrified lake, although she’d arrived too late to see the getaway car. She begrudgingly helped me to my feet, then waved toward the flaming golf course. Nearby, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table were being roasted alive. “This is why I told you to stand down,” Soccer Mom said testily.