“So, you see,” Ashley added gleefully, “what we’re doing here isn’t so bad, really. It’s not slaughter-thousands-of-innocent-people evil. It’s more like inconvenience-millions-of-people-for-a-few-months evil.”
“People are still going to die,” I told her. “You’re detonating ten missiles around the biggest city in America!”
“But we’re doing it in the middle of the night,” Ashley countered. “No one’s going to be on those bridges or in those tunnels at two thirty in the morning.”
“We specifically picked this time to minimize human pain and suffering,” Murray added. “So there.”
On the TV screens, the missiles were screaming over the outskirts of the New York metropolitan area. The farms were gone. Now there were only suburban homes, shopping malls, and supermarkets. In the distance, the skyscrapers of Manhattan were getting closer every second.
“That doesn’t mean no one is going to be on those bridges,” I said, keeping my eyes locked firmly on Ashley’s. “What’s going to happen to those people when they explode? What’s going to happen to the people in the tunnels when they collapse and flood? And what do you think is going to happen to everyone in Manhattan after you cut them off from the rest of the country? There’ll be panics. Food shortages. Power outages. What you’re doing here is going to lead to death and riots and agony, just so you can make some money off their misery.”
Ashley shook her head violently. “No, you’ve got it all wrong.”
“I don’t,” I told her. “And deep down inside, you know that’s true.”
“No,” she said again. “You are wrong. We’re not going to just make some money off their misery. We’re going to make an incredible amount of money off their misery.”
The moment she said this, any trace of doubt or concern in her eyes faded. So did any trace of the sweet, good-hearted girl I thought she was. Instead, she showed her true self—and it was evil. As though all the death and destruction SPYDER was about to cause was thrilling to her.
“You think those people are going to suffer?” she asked. “Well, no one’s suffered like me. I trained my whole life for the Olympics! I gave up my entire childhood to practice sixteen hours a day! I never had fun! I never had any friends! I never had a single piece of candy! And for what? So that some stupid judge could make a mistake on my score and keep me from my rightful place on Team USA!”
“Don’t blame the rest of the world for your failure,” Erica said coldly. “That judge was right.”
“She was not!” Ashley roared. “She was blind!”
“I saw the Olympic trials,” Erica informed her. “You blew that landing.”
“I did not!” Ashley was trembling with rage now, her arms shaking, her face twitching. I half expected fire to explode from her eye sockets. “I stuck that landing! I stuck it!”
I was terrified that, in her fury, she would blow Erica and me away. And she very well might have, if Cyrus and Alexander hadn’t shut the power down at that moment.
We’d planned that part. The idea was, Erica and I would try to deal with SPYDER via negotiation while the others would try to simply stop the missiles by hitting the power supply. The entire room went dark in an instant as every light, TV screen, and piece of electrical equipment went out.
Erica and I were prepared for this, while the others were caught by surprise.
From beside me, I heard the distinct sound of Erica going on the attack, followed by the wheeze of Ashley getting punched hard somewhere painful, and then the clatter of her guns on the floor as Erica disarmed her.
Then the backup generators whirred into action. The lights and TVs and electronics came back to life and the room looked almost exactly the same, save for a few small changes.
Instead of holding us at gunpoint, Ashley was now fighting Erica. And despite having started at a severe disadvantage, she was fighting well. Normally, Erica would have knocked her opponent unconscious by this point, but Ashley had proved more formidable than expected. She was using her personal combination of gymnastics and martial arts, blocking Erica’s attacks and launching her own.
Nefarious and Murray were exactly where they’d been before. Nefarious hadn’t moved. Murray had spilled his sundae down the front of his sweatshirt. For the first time since our arrival, he looked peeved. “Aw, great,” he muttered. “Now look what you guys made me do!”
The one other thing that had changed was that, on the TV screens, the landscape was still hurtling past, but now an emergency message was flashing in big red letters: AUTOPILOT DISENGAGED. The missiles began to drop from the sky, moving toward homes and schools, rather than the bridges.
“The navigation systems are blown,” Nefarious said, the first words he’d spoken all night.
“Guess it’s up to you, then,” Murray told him.
Nefarious flicked a button on the side of his customized joystick.
The emergency message disappeared, now replaced with the words MANUAL OVERRIDE ACTIVATED. The missiles straightened up and resumed their flights.
Suddenly, it was evident what Nefarious had been doing on the couch all those hours. He hadn’t been playing video games. He’d been training to pilot multiple high-speed missiles to their targets at once. It couldn’t have been easy, but he was doing it perfectly. As usual, he was also giving a mumbling commentary on what he was doing. “Adjustaltitudeonmissilefivereorienttrajectoryonnineincreasethrustfortwo.” On the screens, the missiles moved steadily over New Jersey, closing in on Manhattan.
I lunged toward Nefarious, but Murray moved faster, producing a gun from under a throw pillow and aiming it at me. “Oh no,” he taunted. “It’s not gonna be that easy, Ben.”
“Just shoot him!” Ashley shouted, launching another flurry of kicks at Erica. “Kill Ben before he thwarts us again!”
“He’s not gonna thwart us this time,” Murray said coolly. “It’s out of his hands.”
“So what?” Ashley screamed. “Do it anyhow! He’s the enemy!”
“You actually had a crush on this girl?” Erica asked me, fending off Ashley’s attacks. “She’s psychotic.”
“Apparently, I misjudged her,” I said sheepishly.
“Gee, you think?” Erica asked.
I tried to keep calm, but my head was spinning. I was reeling from discovering Ashley’s true colors and desperately trying to figure out what I could possibly do to stop the missiles.
The missiles neared the Jersey Shore. Sandy Hook was coming up fast. If there had still been Nike missiles there, they would have already been launched to take out the ones en route to the city, but of course, they couldn’t be launched because SPYDER had destroyed them. Soon, there’d be nothing between SPYDER’s missiles and their targets except open water.
And the kid who was still controlling them.
Now that Ashley had proven to be more evil than I’d realized, I turned my attention to the other evil spy school student, hoping he might be more reasonable. “Nefarious, think about what you’re doing. This isn’t a game anymore! When those missiles strike, it will happen in the real world.”
“And you’ll make real money!” Murray cried. “Tons of it!”
“No, you won’t,” I warned. “SPYDER only told you guys that to get you to do their dirty work for them.”
For the first time, Nefarious took his eyes off the screens in front of him. It was for only a fraction of a second, a fleeting glance my way, but there was concern in it.
“Don’t listen to him!” Murray warned. “No one at SPYDER conned us! They wouldn’t do that to me!”
“Then where are they?” I asked. “I haven’t seen them anywhere around here tonight. Joshua told us himself that SPYDER was going to get away with this because all the evidence would point to some fall guys. Well, you’re the fall guys.”
The missiles cleared Sandy Hook and barreled over the harbor toward Manhattan.
Erica and Ashley were still battling for the upper hand.
Murray shook his hea
d, though it seemed like he was trying to convince himself I was wrong as much as he was trying to convince Nefarious. “SPYDER’s blaming terrorists for this.”
“No. SPYDER’s framing you,” I told him. “Joshua and the top brass will make billions—and you’ll end up in jail. Unless you abort those missiles!”
Murray suddenly didn’t look so sure of himself anymore.
Instead, it was Ashley who yelled at Nefarious. “He’s lying to you! Stay on course!”
The missiles were approaching the lower tip of Manhattan. The ten of them suddenly veered in different directions, each homing in on a different target.
“Nefarious,” I pleaded, “I know you have trouble fitting in and that makes you angry, but this isn’t the solution. The people at SPYDER aren’t your friends. They’re using you. If you want to make real friends, you don’t do it by being the bad guy. You do it by being the hero. And this is your chance. You can be the hero right now. You can save the city!”
The missiles were bearing down on the southernmost bridges now, so close that we could see individual cars on each span. And then the people in the cars. And then . . .
The missiles dipped under the bridges at the last second, missing their targets.
Nefarious had barely moved. He’d made only a few subtle flicks of his wrist. But it had been enough.
For the first time since I’d met him, he was smiling.
“Noooo!” Ashley cried. “You idiot! What are you doing?! Bring them back around!”
“Ben’s right,” Nefarious said. “SPYDER set us up. The CIA has us surrounded. We’ll never get away. But Joshua and all the other leaders will.”
The missiles—whether they had just avoided their targets or were still en route—suddenly angled sharply upward, rocketing high into the night sky, away from the city and all the people in it.
Ashley unleashed another flurry of kicks at Erica. “So we’ll get caught. They’ll find a way to spring us!”
“Why would they?” Nefarious asked. There was a confidence in his voice I’d never heard before. “Then they’d just have to share the money with us. And they’re not going to do that. After all, they’re evil.”
The missiles were still climbing, rising through the atmosphere, leaving the city far behind.
Murray’s eyes went from the screens to me and back again. He seemed so stunned by SPYDER’s betrayal that, for the first time in his life, he was speechless.
Ashley grew even more apoplectic, however. She redoubled her attack on Erica while screaming at Nefarious the entire time. “You can still fix this! Even if you only hit a few of the targets, we’ll still be rich! Don’t let Ben confuse you! SPYDER isn’t the enemy here! He is! He’s—”
She didn’t finish the rest, because Erica punched her in the stomach. Ashley gagged in pain, bending forward, and then Erica nailed her in the jaw with an uppercut, sending her flying. Ashley slammed into the wall and crumpled into a pile.
On the screens, miles above the earth, nine of the missiles exploded. There was a huge flare of fire and then their feeds disintegrated into static.
But the tenth missile didn’t blow. Instead, it arced around and started hurtling back for earth.
Murray looked concerned, but he still kept his gun on me. “What’s happening there?” he asked Nefarious. “What are you doing with that one?”
Nefarious jiggled his joystick, concerned. “I’m not doing anything with it. I don’t have control over it anymore.”
“Then where’s it going?” Murray asked.
“Here,” I said.
Everyone turned to me, worried.
“I did the math for this, too,” I explained. “It was for extra credit. There’s a fail-safe built into that rocket in case things go wrong. A homing device.”
Murray’s eyes went wide. “Why would they send a missile here if things went wrong?”
“No loose ends,” I told him. “You all know too much. But the CIA can’t make you talk if you’re dead.”
“You mean they’re going to kill me?!” Murray gasped. “Me? That’s not possible! They promised me a house! With a Jacuzzi tub!”
“They lied to you,” Erica said. “They are the bad guys.”
Murray looked as though he’d been punched in the gut himself. “How much time do we have?”
“Eight minutes,” I told him.
“Then let’s get out of here!” Murray dropped his gun and ran for the exit. Nefarious, Erica, and I fell in right behind him.
We made it only a few steps.
Then we noticed Ashley. She wasn’t crumpled on the floor anymore. She was blocking the only exit and she’d recovered her guns, which she was now pointing at us.
“No one’s going anywhere,” she said.
MASS DESTRUCTION
SPYDER Underground Lair
September 18
0240 hours
“Aw, come on, Ashley!” Murray cried. “This is really uncool!”
“I’m being uncool?” Ashley screamed. “I’m not the one who just tanked all of our plans and triggered SPYDER’s doomsday scenario! You guys are traitors—and so you’re going to die here with these doosers from the CIA.”
“Doosers?” Erica asked.
“Dorks plus losers,” Nefarious translated.
“Ashley . . . ,” I began.
“Don’t you start with me!” she shouted. “You’re the biggest traitor of them all! You made me think you were my friend! You said you’d go to Disney World with me! But you were lying the whole time! You’re a jerk!”
“You should talk,” Erica muttered. “You’re evil.”
“That’s not really helping,” I told her.
“I’m not evil!” Ashley roared. “All I want is what’s due to me! I deserve to be rich for all that I’ve been through. I worked my whole life only to get screwed! I deserved to make the U.S. Olympic team. I stuck that landing! I stuck that—”
She didn’t finish the thought, because someone whacked her on the back of the head with a tennis racket. Ashley crumpled into a heap once again, revealing her attacker behind her.
Zoe Zibbell.
“Hey, Ben!” she said cheerfully, as though we’d just run into each other in the school cafeteria, rather than in a secret underground enemy lair that was about to blow up.
“Zoe?” I said, stunned. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m on a field trip!” she exclaimed. “The CIA let me come on the mission as a reward for turning you in! I came up here on a helicopter with some big-shot agents from Washington. It was supercool!” She glanced at Ashley, sprawled on the floor, and suddenly grew a bit self-conscious. “It’s okay that I knocked her out, isn’t it? I mean, it looked like she was going psycho on you guys.”
Murray spoke before I could. “You did great, Zoe. Really great. Can we get out of here now?” He tried to rush past her, but Zoe cocked the tennis racket over her shoulder like a baseball bat and he stopped dead.
“One more step and I’ll be more than happy to knock you out cold too,” Zoe snarled.
I couldn’t help but flash Erica a cocky grin. “I told you friends could be assets.”
Erica rolled her eyes, then told Zoe, “We have to evacuate. A missile’s en route to blow us up.”
Zoe’s eyes grew even wider than usual. “What?! Why?!”
“It’s a long story.” Erica pried the gun from Ashley’s hand and trained it on Murray and Nefarious. “Let’s go,” she told them. “Quickly. Though if either of you tries to escape, I’ll shoot you somewhere very painful, got it?”
Murray and Nefarious nodded obediently, then hurried out of the secret lair.
“Wait,” Nefarious protested. “I saved New York. I thought the hero was supposed to make friends, not get arrested.”
“You saved New York?” Zoe asked him. “That’s amazing!”
Nefarious now broke into a huge smile. Even though he was about to go to jail and was fleeing for his life, after getting a compliment from
Zoe, he looked like the happiest person on earth.
I stopped on the way out of the lair and hoisted Ashley onto my shoulder.
“You’re rescuing her?” Erica asked. “She’s the bad guy!”
“I’m not leaving her to die,” I said.
“She just tried to leave you,” Erica pointed out. “Carrying her is going to slow you down.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said, hoping it was true.
Erica looked concerned, then hustled after Murray and Nefarious. I followed as quickly as I could. Since Ashley was small, she wasn’t very heavy, but carrying her still wasn’t easy.
I took a final glance at the TV screens in the control room. The remaining missile was still racing our way.
Zoe stayed back to help me with Ashley, though she looked nervous about it. As we passed the kitchenette, she gasped with surprise. “Whoa. They have a sundae bar in their secret lair?”
“With toppings,” I said.
“We don’t even have a sundae bar in our mess hall,” Zoe groused. “And this rec center is way nicer than ours.”
“I know,” I admitted. “But on the other hand, they’re evil and we’re not. How’d you find me down here?”
“Oh, it was Jawa’s idea to search this building.”
“Jawa’s here too?” I stumbled on my way up the stairs. Not out of surprise, really. It’s very hard to carry an unconscious human up a spiral staircase.
“Yeah. Spy school let me pick three friends to come along. So I brought Jawa, ’cause he’s almost as smart as you; Chip, ’cause he’s tough; and Warren, because he’d have thrown a fit if I didn’t pick him. Technically, we were only supposed to observe the mission, but Chip said it would be lame if we came all this way and just sat by the helicopter. So he ran off and we came after him, and then Jawa noticed the rec center and said we ought to check it out. We split up to cover more ground. The secret door to the underground lair was open and I heard you and Murray and then spandex girl here going crazy, so I grabbed this tennis racket from the equipment room and came down to see what was going on.”