“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Chloe replied, then flashed me a coy smile.
I twisted Dirk’s arm a bit more, making him yelp in pain. “Are you going to behave now?”
Dirk whimpered and nodded, which was hard to do with his face in the potatoes.
“All right, then.” I released my grip on him.
Dirk immediately went back on his word and attacked again. He came up roaring—which might have been scarier if there hadn’t been French-cut green beans jammed up his nose. Then he charged me, swinging his fists wildly. I quickly went with the Angry Monkey counterattack, spinning away, then delivering a quick elbow to the solar plexus. When Dirk doubled over, gasping for air, I gave him a good, quick thwack to the back of the neck, which laid him out for good on the cafeteria floor.
The entire room erupted with cheers.
Every single person—most of whom had been picked on by Dirk at some point—was applauding. Even the lunch ladies. Mike was grinning proudly, like a dad who’d just watched his son hit a home run. And Elizabeth Pasternak’s friends seemed much more interested in me than they had before.
“You expect us to believe you learned that in science school?” Chloe asked.
“Karate’s really just physics,” I replied.
“What are you gonna do to the other three guys?” Kate said, excited.
“What other three guys?” I asked.
The girls pointed behind me.
It was only now that I noticed Dirk had brought backup. Three guys, each considerably bigger than I was, were lurching toward me, cracking their knuckles.
“Get him!” Dirk gasped from the floor, where he was still curled in the fetal position. “And make him pay!”
I hadn’t studied fighting three opponents at once yet. That was to be covered in Self-Preservation 102, which was a second-year class at spy school. Although I’d still learned one useful thing about this situation in S-P 101: When severely outnumbered by the enemy, running away is always a good call. And so I went with the Frightened Rabbit defense and turned tail.
The three thugs followed, knocking hapless students aside and sending lunch trays flying as they came after me.
“Wait!” Mike yelled to me, but there was no way I could do that.
I barged out of the cafeteria and raced through the halls, which were now empty for lunchtime. I’d been hoping to outrun the bullies, but they were surprisingly fast for guys so big. They kept pace as I zigged and zagged through the halls. Then I rounded a corner, expecting to find an exit ahead of me . . .
And found a wall instead. Either there had been some new construction at school or I hadn’t remembered the layout right. Either way, I was at a dead end.
I had no choice but to turn around and brace for the oncoming attack.
Only, it never came.
Around the corner, the sound of the three brutes storming down the hall toward me was interrupted by the sound of them all reacting with surprise, followed by the sounds of them getting thrashed in a fight: the muffled thuds of fists hitting flesh, the metallic clangs of heads caroming off lockers, the wet slaps of bodies landing hard on a linoleum floor.
Then there was silence.
I peered around the corner, wondering who had come to my rescue, expecting Mike—or perhaps Mike and a few other guys—or maybe even Erica, who’d reveal that she’d been keeping an eye on me out of habit.
The three bullies were laid out, unconscious.
And standing in the middle of them, brushing a bit of blood off his sleeve, was Joshua Hallal.
This was a considerable shock to me, as Joshua worked for SPYDER. Plus, the last time I’d seen him, he’d been plummeting to his death.
He looked up and smiled politely, as though there was nothing insanely abnormal about his being there at all. “Hello, Ben,” he said. “We need to talk. I have a proposition for you.”
RECRUITMENT
Robert E. Lee Junior High
September 4
1245 hours
“I thought you were dead,” I said.
“I’m not,” Joshua replied. “Surprise.” Although he was trying to be civil, there was a bitter edge to his voice, which made sense, given that I was partly responsible for his plunge off a cliff. I had just thwarted SPYDER’s plans and Joshua had been trying to escape when he’d fallen to what I’d thought was his doom. Although he hadn’t died, he hadn’t come out of it unscathed, either. In fact, he was extremely scathed. Joshua was only eighteen, and he’d been a student at spy school before defecting to SPYDER. Back then he’d been renowned for his good looks, with piercing green eyes, a mane of dark hair, and flawless skin. Now his once-handsome face was a maze of scars. In addition—or perhaps, subtraction—he was missing an eye (covered by a patch), a hand (replaced by a high-tech hook), and a leg (now a robotic prosthetic). And yet he carried himself with grace and style, sporting designer clothes and a watch that probably cost more than my father’s car. He looked like an extremely well-dressed pirate.
“How’d you survive?” I asked.
“I landed in a bog. Or a marsh. Something squishy. It broke my fall enough to spare my life.” Joshua spoke with a clipped, somewhat snobbish accent that made him sound like he’d spent a lot of his life at a country club. That, combined with his battered body, made him seem older than he actually was. “SPYDER’s agents found me later, and the doctors did the best they could to fix me.”
Voices echoed through the school halls. It sounded like a lot of other students were coming our way, probably wanting to see what the bullies had done to me—or vice versa.
I could hear Mike’s voice among them, leading the pack. “I think they went this way! Come on!”
“We need to go,” Joshua told me. “I can’t be seen here.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said.
Joshua produced a gun from his pocket. “Does this change your mind?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “It sure does.”
Joshua motioned me toward a classroom with the gun. “Move.”
I did as ordered, and found myself in a chemistry class. Joshua came in behind me, locked the door, and then pointed to the window with his hook. “Open that.”
I did this, too. We were only on the first floor, so it was easy to clamber out onto the school lawn.
Through the door behind me, I could hear my fellow students discovering the trio of unconscious bullies in the hall. There were lots of gasps of surprise.
“Holy cow!” Mike whooped. “Ben wiped the floor with them!”
“You weren’t kidding!” Chloe gasped. “He was a spy!”
“Is he dating anyone?” Kate asked.
Joshua slipped out the window with surprising grace for a man missing half his limbs. A gray sedan idled nearby, a man in sunglasses in the driver’s seat. “Get in,” Joshua demanded.
There was no one else outside the school, no one I could signal to for help. And while I could outrun bullies, I couldn’t outrun a bullet. So I got in the car.
There was a thick glass partition between us and the front seat, like in a taxicab. It was soundproof, so the driver couldn’t hear us. The backseat was spacious and comfortable. There was a small cooler with some drinks on ice for us. It might have all been very pleasant if I wasn’t being forced to be there against my will.
Joshua climbed in, keeping the gun trained on me. The car started moving before I even had my seat belt fastened.
“It’s good to see you again, Ben,” Joshua said. “You look like you’ve kept yourself in good shape.”
“Thanks.” Seeing as he had a gun, I tried to be polite. “You look . . . um . . . well, not good exactly, but . . .”
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘terrible.’ ”
I frowned. “Did all that happen in the fall?”
“Most of it. I lost the arm and the leg, but not the eye.”
“Oh. How’d you lose that?”
“A
bug flew into it.”
“Er . . . You don’t lose your eye if a bug flies into it.”
“You do if it’s your first day with the hook.”
I winced. I almost apologized, but then it occurred to me that I hadn’t directly caused Joshua’s misfortune. All I’d done was defeat his evil plans. The damage he’d experienced as a result was all due to his own actions as he tried to escape. “So,” I said. “What’s this proposition?”
“You’re a smart kid. You can’t figure it out?”
There was only one reason I could think of that I was still alive. “You want me to come work for SPYDER.”
Joshua smiled. “Yes.”
“You guys have already made me this offer,” I said. “Twice.”
“I know. And you’ve rejected us twice. Not to mention thwarting our plans twice, causing us considerable embarrassment and costing us a great deal of money. But we don’t see that as a problem. When the New York Yankees get repeatedly shut out by a great pitcher, they don’t hate the pitcher. Instead, they try to recruit him.”
“This isn’t baseball.”
“True.”
“So what makes you think I’m going to accept this time?”
“The way spy school treated you, for starters. You’re one of the finest students they’ve produced in years. Not just anyone could have undone our plans. And how do they repay you? With expulsion. I assure you, we would never treat you that way at SPYDER. In fact, we are prepared to treat you far better than the Academy of Espionage has treated you all along.”
I didn’t want to work for SPYDER. Not in the slightest. And yet Joshua had struck a nerve. Spy school had treated me badly. So I couldn’t help but ask, “How so?”
“For starters, we’d compensate you very well financially. While your friends from spy school will be struggling to make ends meet on measly government salaries, you’ll soon make millions with us—tax free. Enough to be extremely comfortable for the rest of your life. But more important, we’ll give you respect. The respect you deserve. The respect the CIA should have given you for your amazing work, but didn’t.”
I glanced out the window. We were passing through the suburbs of Washington, DC. I saw a Starbucks and a McDonald’s slide past. It occurred to me that I probably should have been keeping better track of where we were going, but I’d forgotten to. It was hard to focus on my location when Joshua Hallal still had a gun aimed at me.
“Are you going to shoot me if I say no?” I asked.
“Of course not. This was only to make sure you’d get in the car.” Joshua slipped the gun back into his pocket. “If you say no, the only punishment we’ll give you is returning you to your normal life. You’ll be free to go back to middle school and join the chess club and spend your weekends at the arcade like a regular boring teenager.”
I was quite sure Joshua was lying. SPYDER didn’t seem the type of organization that would simply let bygones be bygones. My mouth was getting dry from fear, so I fished a root beer out of the cooler and cracked it open. “What would I be doing for you?”
Joshua smiled, pleased I’d taken the bait. “Given your age, we wouldn’t activate you right away. Even though you’ve shown some mettle, you still have things to learn. So for the time being, you’ll be sent to our training facility.”
“Training facility?”
“Yes. Being a bad guy isn’t easy, you know. In fact, it’s considerably harder than being a good guy. There is a great array of skills and abilities that you’ll have to master. Many of them are similar to those which you began studying at the academy: self-preservation, cryptography, facility with weapons. But there’s also duplicity, conniving, subterfuge, and killing without making it look like murder, to name just a few things.”
“So . . . it’s kind of like evil spy school.”
Joshua frowned. “I suppose. Although we prefer to call it the Wiseman Preparatory Academy.”
“Why?”
“Because ‘Evil Spy School’ sounds a little suspicious, don’t you think?”
I glanced out the window again, just in time to see us go past a Starbucks and a McDonald’s. I had no idea if they were the same Starbucks and McDonald’s we’d passed before or different ones that merely looked the same.
I took another sip of root beer. “Where is this academy?”
Joshua chuckled. “You don’t honestly think I’d tell you before you accepted our offer?”
“I was only wondering if it was far. I just got done unpacking . . . .”
“So you’ll pack again. This isn’t some pedestrian commuter school. Should you say yes, we will return to your home and inform your parents that Wiseman Prep sees an opportunity where those fools at St. Smithen’s no longer do. You now have a brand-new scholarship that will require you to reside at another school, effective immediately.”
“Immediately?” I repeated.
“Yes. The sooner you can begin your training with us, the better.”
“I understand, but . . . You’re asking me to make a really big decision here. Can I at least have a little time to think it over?”
“Of course. You can have three minutes.” Joshua plucked a book of crossword puzzles out of the seat back pocket in front of him and turned his attention to it.
I stared out the window again. Another Starbucks slid by, although I was relatively sure this was a different one.
I really didn’t want to join SPYDER. Even though the Academy of Espionage had treated me badly, it still seemed wrong to go to the dark side: I simply wasn’t an evil person. But a few things made me think I shouldn’t reject SPYDER’s offer.
First, Joshua would kill me if I did. Which was a very powerful incentive to say yes.
Second, as bad as going to evil spy school sounded, it would probably still be better than normal middle school.
Third, Erica’s final words kept coming back to me.
The next time someone comes to you with an offer to change your life, accept it—and then try not to mess it up like you did this time.
In retrospect, it had been kind of an odd thing to say. Now it made me wonder. Had Erica suspected this was going to happen all along?
I thought back to the mortar incident that had gotten me in trouble, realizing what had been bothering me about it.
There was a very good chance that Erica had planted the live round.
She’d been carrying a knapsack throughout the SACSA. She could have easily smuggled in a live round designed to look like a paint bomb, then tricked Warren into loading it. It would certainly explain how she’d known the round was live so quickly. And, now that I thought about it, it also explained how Warren had been able to wrest the remote trigger away from Erica. On an average day, Erica could have outfought Warren in her sleep; there was no way he’d have ended up with the trigger unless she wanted him to have it. Everything seemed to indicate that I hadn’t randomly fired that bomb at the Nathan Hale Building; I’d been manipulated into doing it.
Could it all have been a setup to make SPYDER think I’d been kicked out of spy school?
Or was I deluding myself, inventing evidence to make myself feel better after getting expelled for real?
If it hadn’t been for those last words of Erica’s, I would have figured I was deluding myself. But this was certainly an offer to change my life, and she’d given me specific instructions on what to do if such an offer came along.
I still had a thousand questions. Was Erica working with someone else, or had she gone rogue and dragged me in? Did the principal know about this, or was he just a pawn like me? Did Erica know Joshua Hallal was still alive? If I did go to evil spy school, what was my assignment? Was I supposed to only be a mole, or was there something more specific? What was I supposed to be looking for? Was this really an undercover mission? If so, why hadn’t anyone told me about it? And did I actually have what it took to succeed?
“Time’s up,” Joshua said.
I turned back from the window, where another Star
bucks was passing.
Joshua was looking at me expectantly. The bulge of his gun was barely visible inside his pocket.
I took a deep breath, hoping that I’d interpreted everything correctly and that I wasn’t making the worst decision of my life.
“I’m in,” I said.
IMMERSION
SPYDER Agent Training Facility
Location Unknown
September 5
1030 hours
I woke in a strange room.
I felt groggy, like I’d been drugged. It took me only a few seconds to figure out why: I had been drugged.
A thirteen-year-old kid probably shouldn’t have been drugged enough times to recognize the sensation, but that was life when you were a spy-in-training. My head was pounding and my mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton.
Joshua Hallal had done this to me. Even with my mind cloudy, I had no doubt of that. There wasn’t anyone else who could have done it. Immediately after I’d accepted his offer, we’d driven to my house, where he’d presented my parents with an official-looking contract stating that I had been accepted with a full scholarship to another school for gifted children. Joshua had claimed to be my new student adviser, shown them some glossy promotional brochures, and had gone on at length about how Wiseman Preparatory Academy was an even better school than St. Smithen’s. He sold it well—although Mom and Dad seemed just as impressed by him as the school. My parents were at once pleased by my prowess and saddened that I’d be leaving again—though they were perhaps a bit more prone to accept the offer as my middle school principal had just informed them that I’d received six weeks of detention for fighting and then skipping school. We had a farewell meal, where Joshua was the perfect guest, charming and graceful and not the slightest bit evil, and then . . .
Well, I wasn’t quite sure what had happened after that. The whole point of drugging someone is to leave some blanks in their memory. Joshua must have slipped me something shortly after dinner, probably in the apple pie Mom had made for dessert.