Spy School by Stuart Gibbs
It sank into a subterranean tunnel thirty feet below the surface. The tunnel was fifteen feet wide and ten feet tall, big enough to drive a golf cart through. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all cement. Tree roots had forced their way through cracks in the ceiling, meaning the tunnel had been around for decades. Water dripped through the cracks, puddling on the floor, giving the whole place a dank, mildewy smell, like the showers in our middle school gym.
The tunnel was well lit—lights studded the ceiling every few feet—though it curved as it headed back toward the school, so I couldn’t see anyone ahead. I could hear them, though. Chip and Hauser weren’t bothering to whisper, confident no one knew they were there, and their voices echoed back to me.
I hopped off the cement square. The tunnel dead-ended behind it, right where the wall of the academy property would be. There were two red buttons with up and down arrows on the wall nearby, like those you’d find in an elevator. I pushed the up one.
The concrete square rose back up, allowing me to see how it worked. A pneumatic column lifted it, silent except for the hiss of air, quiet enough that Chip and Hauser didn’t hear it over their own voices. The concrete square slotted back perfectly into the ceiling above.
Fearing my heavy snow boots would be loud on the cement floor, I yanked them off and carried them, padding down the hall in my socks. Once I rounded the curve, I could see Chip and Hauser in the distance, moving quickly, as though with a purpose.
They weren’t talking about anything clandestine. Hauser was just going on about how unfair Professor Oxley’s last offensive driving exam had been. “We had to drive these ancient cars with manual transmissions. When was the last time anyone even saw a car with a manual transmission?”
“Gotta be prepared for anything,” Chip said.
“Well, it wasn’t just me who couldn’t do it,” Hauser snapped defensively. “Stubbs didn’t even know how to get hers out of park. Finally, she jammed the thing into reverse and nearly took out half the class.”
As we got closer to the heart of the campus, more tunnels began to branch off the one we were in. And then doors began to appear in them. The first I passed had a plate on it: B-213–STORAGE. The next read B-212, also storage. Soon the place became a labyrinth. We hooked left and right through it. If I hadn’t had my targets in sight, I would have lost them. And I doubted I could find my way back to the shed, though I figured that wasn’t problematic. We’d entered what was obviously an important subterranean level of the campus. The shed, with its small pneumatic lift, couldn’t have been the only entrance. There had to be other ways in and out.
Still, I was astounded by the size of the underground level—and that I’d had no idea it was there. It occurred to me that Alexander had said something right before my SACSA exam began about there being “far more here than meets the eye,” but at the time I’d thought he was merely being metaphoric. For the last three weeks I’d assumed the buildings I saw aboveground made up the entire campus. Now I realized that, as with so many other things at spy school, there was far more going on beneath the surface.
We began to pass other rooms, rooms that housed mechanical and electrical equipment, secretive unmarked rooms with multiple key-code entries, dormitories and mess halls that probably dated back to the Cold War, when everyone feared a nuclear war might force them to live underground for a year. Pipes and electrical wires snaked along the walls and ceiling. Random objects, like filing cabinets and hand trucks, began to appear in the halls, as though despite all the storage rooms, there still hadn’t been enough places to put them. Throughout, it was all eerily unpopulated; everyone was still outside.
However, that was likely to change soon, now that the war was over—and Chip knew it. He kept glancing at his watch and hustling Hauser onward.
Then he suddenly stopped. They were in a nondescript section of tunnel that looked exactly like every other section of tunnel we’d been through.
I ducked behind a cart loaded with sacks of powdered eggs just as Chip furtively glanced in my direction. He didn’t see me—or anyone else—and decided the coast was clear.
“Check it out,” he whispered, then pointed to something nestled among some pipes along the wall.
“Holy cow,” gasped Hauser.
I was still carrying Zoe’s scope. I put it to my eye and zoomed in. I caught a glimpse of a nest of red and blue wires and some yellowish putty before Hauser shifted on his feet and blocked it from view.
I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a bomb. Of course, I only knew about bombs from the movies. I’d never seen one in real life. (Explosive Construction and Defusion didn’t get taught until our fourth year, when our eye-hand coordination was a bit steadier.) For all I knew, a real bomb looked like a sprig of posies.
“Got the kit?” Chip asked.
Hauser pulled a small gray box out of his pocket, though once again, I couldn’t see what they were doing with it. Hauser was a big guy to begin with; wearing his bulky winter clothes, he blocked half the tunnel.
“So this is Scorpius, huh?” Hauser asked.
“Scorpio,” Chip corrected. “Hold that steady.”
Hauser shifted to the side. I caught a glimpse of the wires again.
If I wanted Erica or Alexander to believe this, I needed evidence. I fished my cell phone out of my pocket and pressed the camera to the scopes’s eyepiece, thinking maybe I could use it as a telephoto lens. It was hard to hold both pieces of equipment steady, though, so I rested the scope atop a sack of powdered eggs and tried to focus it.
My phone suddenly vibrated in my hand.
It was a text. I’d tried to use my phone underground hundreds of times in Washington—virtually every time I’d ridden the subway—and never once had I got reception. But now, in a subterranean hall thirty feet below ground level, my phone had chosen to work at the least opportune moment possible. The unexpected vibration startled me. I bumped the scope, which rolled off the sack and clattered to the floor.
And if that hadn’t been loud enough in the otherwise silent tunnel, the scope noisily rolled away from me—and right toward Chip and Hauser.
There was no use hiding anymore. I ran.
“Hey!” Chip yelled. Then I heard his footsteps and Hauser’s pounding down the hall behind me.
I ducked around the first corner I came to, hoping they hadn’t seen my face, then took the next corner as well. I tried to look for landmarks so I’d be able to find my way back to the bomb later, but every hall looked the same and I was moving too fast to read the numbers on the doors.
I spotted a staircase ahead and charged toward it, though my stocking feet couldn’t get much purchase on the slick floor. I heard the footsteps bearing down on me from behind.
“Might as well stop, Ripley!” Chip taunted. “You can run, but you can’t hide! I’ll find you sooner or later!”
Later still seemed like the better option to me. I charged up the stairs. Two flights up was a steel door. I hit it with everything I had . . .
Just as Chip caught up to me. He snagged the hood of my snow jacket, though my inertia pulled him forward too. We tumbled onto a well-worn carpet.
I rolled over to find Chip’s fist on a collision course with my face. I dodged to the right. Chip’s knuckles grazed my earlobe, then connected with the floor.
While Chip howled in pain, I tried to scramble away, but he caught my ankle and yanked my feet out from under me.
“What’d you see?” he demanded.
“Nothing!” I kicked his arm with my free foot, trying to wriggle loose.
Chip pounced on me.
In the movies, when spies fight, they always look very cool, using a combination of martial arts moves and cleverly improvised weapons, often in an incredibly picturesque location, like a castle in the French Alps.
This fight wasn’t anything like that. Chip certainly knew how to fight—it turned out that the one area he really excelled in was martial arts—whereas I’d barely had any training at all. However, I’d
spent just about any spare time I had in the past few weeks boning up on self-defense techniques. Given the circumstances, I went with a move called the “Bashful Armadillo,” which simply involved curling myself into a ball and covering my head with my arms. I chose this for two reasons: (1) It was ridiculously easy, and thus I had already mastered it, as opposed to far more complicated procedures like the “Wily Chipmunk” or the “Spastic Cobra”; and (2) I was wearing thick winter clothes, which not only insulated me from the cold, but also from Chip’s attacks.
Chip was therefore reduced to fighting on my level, tumbling around on the floor with me and trying to get a shot in. He landed a few punches on my arms and torso, but my ski parka was so well padded, he might have been hitting me with a throw pillow. Meanwhile, I went for pressure points, trying to get him to release me—an eye gouge or a knee to the testicles—though the best I managed was to drive my elbow into a chair.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Chip snarled. “Would you just fight like a man?”
“I’ll pass,” I said. The Bashful Armadillo was working for me.
“What is going on here?!”
The principal’s voice was frightening enough to scare even Chip cold. Our fight stopped instantly.
For the first time since emerging from the subterranean level, I had a chance to take in my surroundings. I’d spent the entire battle with my head under my arms. It turned out, we’d emerged inside the main hall of the Hale Building—from behind a secret panel in the wall that still hung ajar—and had thus staged our fight in perhaps the most public place on campus. Dozens of students and faculty had just returned from the war game only to find us writhing about on the floor like a couple of idiots.
“He started it,” Chip said, pointing at me.
“I did not!” I protested.
“I don’t care who started it!” the principal roared. “Fighting isn’t allowed at the academy!”
“But we fight all the time in class,” Chip said.
“That’s for a grade!” the principal snapped. “Unsanctioned fighting is different. I want to see you two in my office right now!”
The students all went “ooooh” in response. None of them wanted to be in our shoes.
I sat up, feeling ashamed and frightened, noting familiar faces in the crowd. Zoe seemed impressed I’d taken on Chip. Warren (who was still royal blue from head to toe) seemed annoyed Zoe was impressed. Murray looked concerned for me. Hauser and Stubbs looked concerned for Chip. Tina, my RA, appeared embarrassed, as though my behavior somehow reflected badly on her. Professor Crandall didn’t seem to have any idea what was going on; he was too busy trying to dislodge some ice that had frozen in his eyebrows.
And then Erica emerged.
It was strange to see her in a crowd. Erica was such a loner, she seemed out of place surrounded by people.
Even stranger, she knelt by my side and cradled my face in her hands. “Are you okay?” she asked. It was such a gentle and caring gesture, I briefly wondered if someone had substituted the real Erica with a double agent. From the reaction of most of the other students, they were wondering the same thing. But it was definitely Erica: She had the same wonderful lilac and gunpowder smell as usual, along with a hint of latex paint.
“I’ve been better,” I replied. Then I leaned in and whispered, “There’s a bomb under the school.”
Erica betrayed nothing. Her expression didn’t change. I might as well have told her that I liked rabbits. I was wondering if she’d even heard me, but as she helped me to my feet, she whispered back, “I’m on it. I’ll be in touch.”
I didn’t have time to ask anything else. The principal pointed upstairs toward his office. Chip and I dutifully followed him.
As we did, Chip whispered something to me as well. “Say one word about what you saw down there and you’re dead.”
The crowd parted for us, and I noticed the looks on my fellow students’ faces had changed. They didn’t seem to be pitying me for earning the principal’s wrath anymore. Instead, they were looking at me curiously, wondering how on earth I had managed to earn Erica’s concern. Many of the guys looked more impressed than they had upon learning I’d fended off an assassin.
Which made getting attacked by Chip and marched off to the principal’s office almost seem worthwhile.
Almost. But not quite.
PROVOCATION
Principal’s Office
February 8
1520 hours
The principal was five minutes into his tirade before I discovered what Erica had meant about being in touch.
I wasn’t paying much attention to the tirade. I’m not sure the principal was either. He was talking to hear himself talk, railing on and on about how the academy held its students to a very high standard and how Chip and I had fallen very short of that and how if either one of us expected to graduate to a dignified field position with such behavior, then we were in for a rude awakening. In fact, we were lucky he didn’t bounce us out of the school right then and there. . . .
I was surprised to find myself so calm in the face of the storm. In my previous 1,172 days of public school, I’d never gotten in trouble, let alone been sent to the principal’s office. But, though I wasn’t happy with the situation, I also knew the principal couldn’t kick me out. His entire mole hunt was based on me being there. In fact, he could have frightened me more by threatening to keep me enrolled.
However, the real reason I wasn’t very concerned by the principal was that I had plenty of other things to be very concerned about. Like what Chip and Hauser had been doing in the tunnel.
Had that really been a bomb down there? And what were they doing with it? Did it work? Were they trying to make it work? And if so, why?
What was Scorpio? It sounded like a code name for an operation, but what was the operation? Was the name “Scorpio” a key to explaining it? I knew Scorpio was a mythological giant scorpion—an extremely dangerous beast who had defeated Orion, the almost-invincible hunter. Scorpio was also a constellation and a sign of the zodiac for the duration of October 23 to November 22. Was that a clue? Was Scorpio scheduled to take place then? If so, it was a long way off.
I was glad I’d had a chance to tell Erica about the bomb. Hopefully, she was investigating it while we sat there. I even considered telling the principal about it, but I didn’t want to do so right in front of Chip. Back in public school, if someone told you something like “Say one word about what you saw down there and you’re dead,” you could assume it was an exaggeration. At spy school, they actually taught you how to back those words up—and gave you the weapons to do it.
Erica was probably far more competent than the principal anyhow. She’d most likely already tracked down the bomb, dismantled it, and figured out who was behind it. Or so I hoped. I was desperate to get out of that office—not merely to find out what was going on, but also to evacuate the building just in case the bomb went off and reduced the place to toothpicks. (I briefly considered that the bomb probably wasn’t live, because if it was, then Chip would have been sweating buckets. But then I also considered that, if Chip was as incompetent as Erica said, he wouldn’t have any idea if the bomb was live or not—and thus, fearing for my life was still prudent.)
Unfortunately, the principal didn’t show any signs of winding down. “Trying to hurt each other is unacceptable,” he was saying. “You’re supposed to try to hurt our enemies, for Pete’s sake.”
“Hello, Ben,” Erica said.
I snapped upright in my seat, startled. Erica sounded as though she were right behind me. I started to turn around. . . .
“Don’t turn around!” Erica ordered.
So I didn’t.
“Don’t do anything,” she continued. “And don’t respond to me. I’m not in the room. You’re the only one who can hear me.”
I suddenly realized Erica’s voice wasn’t coming from behind me at all. Instead, it seemed to be coming from inside me. Like it was a thought in my head.
“I slipped a miniature Wi-Fi transmitter into your ear downstairs,” Erica explained. “Which means I can hear everything that windbag’s saying.”
I frowned. So that was why Erica had cradled my face. It hadn’t been affection at all. It was merely a ruse to wire me.
Having a transmitter in your ear is extremely unsettling. Your gut instinct when someone talks to you—or tells you they’ve slipped a piece of technology into your head without your permission—is to talk back. It took every ounce of control I had to not respond.
As it was, Chip was already eyeing me suspiciously. My startled response to Erica’s first words had grabbed his attention. The principal was still lost in his own world, however. He was so caught up in his pontificating, he wouldn’t have noticed a herd of elephants stampeding through the room.
“You’re exactly where I need you to be,” Erica told me. “Now, I need you to do two things: First, I need you to pay attention to the principal. Not what he says. What he does. I don’t want you to take your eyes off him for an instant. Try to remember everything. . . . Second, I need you to insult him.”
What?! I wanted to ask. I almost did. It took an incredible amount of self-restraint not to. I couldn’t imagine why Erica could possibly want me to get into even more trouble. But due to the one-sided nature of our communication, there was no way I could ask her.
“I know it’s asking a lot, but you have to trust me.” Erica’s voice was soothing and confident. “I promise you, everything’s going to work out fine.”
For some reason, I believed her. Maybe because Erica was the only person I trusted. Maybe because her words inside my head made me think they were actually my words. Most likely, I just wanted to impress her. I probably would have stepped in front of a locomotive if she asked nicely enough. So I looked for an opportunity to cause trouble—and it wasn’t long before I found it.
“When I was a student here, we knew how to behave,” the principal chided. “Would you like to know how we were punished for fighting back then?”
“Wow, that would have been a long time ago,” I said. “Did they put you in the stockade? They used that a lot in Colonial America.”
The tunnel was well lit—lights studded the ceiling every few feet—though it curved as it headed back toward the school, so I couldn’t see anyone ahead. I could hear them, though. Chip and Hauser weren’t bothering to whisper, confident no one knew they were there, and their voices echoed back to me.
I hopped off the cement square. The tunnel dead-ended behind it, right where the wall of the academy property would be. There were two red buttons with up and down arrows on the wall nearby, like those you’d find in an elevator. I pushed the up one.
The concrete square rose back up, allowing me to see how it worked. A pneumatic column lifted it, silent except for the hiss of air, quiet enough that Chip and Hauser didn’t hear it over their own voices. The concrete square slotted back perfectly into the ceiling above.
Fearing my heavy snow boots would be loud on the cement floor, I yanked them off and carried them, padding down the hall in my socks. Once I rounded the curve, I could see Chip and Hauser in the distance, moving quickly, as though with a purpose.
They weren’t talking about anything clandestine. Hauser was just going on about how unfair Professor Oxley’s last offensive driving exam had been. “We had to drive these ancient cars with manual transmissions. When was the last time anyone even saw a car with a manual transmission?”
“Gotta be prepared for anything,” Chip said.
“Well, it wasn’t just me who couldn’t do it,” Hauser snapped defensively. “Stubbs didn’t even know how to get hers out of park. Finally, she jammed the thing into reverse and nearly took out half the class.”
As we got closer to the heart of the campus, more tunnels began to branch off the one we were in. And then doors began to appear in them. The first I passed had a plate on it: B-213–STORAGE. The next read B-212, also storage. Soon the place became a labyrinth. We hooked left and right through it. If I hadn’t had my targets in sight, I would have lost them. And I doubted I could find my way back to the shed, though I figured that wasn’t problematic. We’d entered what was obviously an important subterranean level of the campus. The shed, with its small pneumatic lift, couldn’t have been the only entrance. There had to be other ways in and out.
Still, I was astounded by the size of the underground level—and that I’d had no idea it was there. It occurred to me that Alexander had said something right before my SACSA exam began about there being “far more here than meets the eye,” but at the time I’d thought he was merely being metaphoric. For the last three weeks I’d assumed the buildings I saw aboveground made up the entire campus. Now I realized that, as with so many other things at spy school, there was far more going on beneath the surface.
We began to pass other rooms, rooms that housed mechanical and electrical equipment, secretive unmarked rooms with multiple key-code entries, dormitories and mess halls that probably dated back to the Cold War, when everyone feared a nuclear war might force them to live underground for a year. Pipes and electrical wires snaked along the walls and ceiling. Random objects, like filing cabinets and hand trucks, began to appear in the halls, as though despite all the storage rooms, there still hadn’t been enough places to put them. Throughout, it was all eerily unpopulated; everyone was still outside.
However, that was likely to change soon, now that the war was over—and Chip knew it. He kept glancing at his watch and hustling Hauser onward.
Then he suddenly stopped. They were in a nondescript section of tunnel that looked exactly like every other section of tunnel we’d been through.
I ducked behind a cart loaded with sacks of powdered eggs just as Chip furtively glanced in my direction. He didn’t see me—or anyone else—and decided the coast was clear.
“Check it out,” he whispered, then pointed to something nestled among some pipes along the wall.
“Holy cow,” gasped Hauser.
I was still carrying Zoe’s scope. I put it to my eye and zoomed in. I caught a glimpse of a nest of red and blue wires and some yellowish putty before Hauser shifted on his feet and blocked it from view.
I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a bomb. Of course, I only knew about bombs from the movies. I’d never seen one in real life. (Explosive Construction and Defusion didn’t get taught until our fourth year, when our eye-hand coordination was a bit steadier.) For all I knew, a real bomb looked like a sprig of posies.
“Got the kit?” Chip asked.
Hauser pulled a small gray box out of his pocket, though once again, I couldn’t see what they were doing with it. Hauser was a big guy to begin with; wearing his bulky winter clothes, he blocked half the tunnel.
“So this is Scorpius, huh?” Hauser asked.
“Scorpio,” Chip corrected. “Hold that steady.”
Hauser shifted to the side. I caught a glimpse of the wires again.
If I wanted Erica or Alexander to believe this, I needed evidence. I fished my cell phone out of my pocket and pressed the camera to the scopes’s eyepiece, thinking maybe I could use it as a telephoto lens. It was hard to hold both pieces of equipment steady, though, so I rested the scope atop a sack of powdered eggs and tried to focus it.
My phone suddenly vibrated in my hand.
It was a text. I’d tried to use my phone underground hundreds of times in Washington—virtually every time I’d ridden the subway—and never once had I got reception. But now, in a subterranean hall thirty feet below ground level, my phone had chosen to work at the least opportune moment possible. The unexpected vibration startled me. I bumped the scope, which rolled off the sack and clattered to the floor.
And if that hadn’t been loud enough in the otherwise silent tunnel, the scope noisily rolled away from me—and right toward Chip and Hauser.
There was no use hiding anymore. I ran.
“Hey!” Chip yelled. Then I heard his footsteps and Hauser’s pounding down the hall behind me.
I ducked around the first corner I came to, hoping they hadn’t seen my face, then took the next corner as well. I tried to look for landmarks so I’d be able to find my way back to the bomb later, but every hall looked the same and I was moving too fast to read the numbers on the doors.
I spotted a staircase ahead and charged toward it, though my stocking feet couldn’t get much purchase on the slick floor. I heard the footsteps bearing down on me from behind.
“Might as well stop, Ripley!” Chip taunted. “You can run, but you can’t hide! I’ll find you sooner or later!”
Later still seemed like the better option to me. I charged up the stairs. Two flights up was a steel door. I hit it with everything I had . . .
Just as Chip caught up to me. He snagged the hood of my snow jacket, though my inertia pulled him forward too. We tumbled onto a well-worn carpet.
I rolled over to find Chip’s fist on a collision course with my face. I dodged to the right. Chip’s knuckles grazed my earlobe, then connected with the floor.
While Chip howled in pain, I tried to scramble away, but he caught my ankle and yanked my feet out from under me.
“What’d you see?” he demanded.
“Nothing!” I kicked his arm with my free foot, trying to wriggle loose.
Chip pounced on me.
In the movies, when spies fight, they always look very cool, using a combination of martial arts moves and cleverly improvised weapons, often in an incredibly picturesque location, like a castle in the French Alps.
This fight wasn’t anything like that. Chip certainly knew how to fight—it turned out that the one area he really excelled in was martial arts—whereas I’d barely had any training at all. However, I’d
Chip was therefore reduced to fighting on my level, tumbling around on the floor with me and trying to get a shot in. He landed a few punches on my arms and torso, but my ski parka was so well padded, he might have been hitting me with a throw pillow. Meanwhile, I went for pressure points, trying to get him to release me—an eye gouge or a knee to the testicles—though the best I managed was to drive my elbow into a chair.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Chip snarled. “Would you just fight like a man?”
“I’ll pass,” I said. The Bashful Armadillo was working for me.
“What is going on here?!”
The principal’s voice was frightening enough to scare even Chip cold. Our fight stopped instantly.
For the first time since emerging from the subterranean level, I had a chance to take in my surroundings. I’d spent the entire battle with my head under my arms. It turned out, we’d emerged inside the main hall of the Hale Building—from behind a secret panel in the wall that still hung ajar—and had thus staged our fight in perhaps the most public place on campus. Dozens of students and faculty had just returned from the war game only to find us writhing about on the floor like a couple of idiots.
“He started it,” Chip said, pointing at me.
“I did not!” I protested.
“I don’t care who started it!” the principal roared. “Fighting isn’t allowed at the academy!”
“But we fight all the time in class,” Chip said.
“That’s for a grade!” the principal snapped. “Unsanctioned fighting is different. I want to see you two in my office right now!”
The students all went “ooooh” in response. None of them wanted to be in our shoes.
I sat up, feeling ashamed and frightened, noting familiar faces in the crowd. Zoe seemed impressed I’d taken on Chip. Warren (who was still royal blue from head to toe) seemed annoyed Zoe was impressed. Murray looked concerned for me. Hauser and Stubbs looked concerned for Chip. Tina, my RA, appeared embarrassed, as though my behavior somehow reflected badly on her. Professor Crandall didn’t seem to have any idea what was going on; he was too busy trying to dislodge some ice that had frozen in his eyebrows.
And then Erica emerged.
It was strange to see her in a crowd. Erica was such a loner, she seemed out of place surrounded by people.
Even stranger, she knelt by my side and cradled my face in her hands. “Are you okay?” she asked. It was such a gentle and caring gesture, I briefly wondered if someone had substituted the real Erica with a double agent. From the reaction of most of the other students, they were wondering the same thing. But it was definitely Erica: She had the same wonderful lilac and gunpowder smell as usual, along with a hint of latex paint.
“I’ve been better,” I replied. Then I leaned in and whispered, “There’s a bomb under the school.”
Erica betrayed nothing. Her expression didn’t change. I might as well have told her that I liked rabbits. I was wondering if she’d even heard me, but as she helped me to my feet, she whispered back, “I’m on it. I’ll be in touch.”
I didn’t have time to ask anything else. The principal pointed upstairs toward his office. Chip and I dutifully followed him.
As we did, Chip whispered something to me as well. “Say one word about what you saw down there and you’re dead.”
The crowd parted for us, and I noticed the looks on my fellow students’ faces had changed. They didn’t seem to be pitying me for earning the principal’s wrath anymore. Instead, they were looking at me curiously, wondering how on earth I had managed to earn Erica’s concern. Many of the guys looked more impressed than they had upon learning I’d fended off an assassin.
Which made getting attacked by Chip and marched off to the principal’s office almost seem worthwhile.
Almost. But not quite.
PROVOCATION
Principal’s Office
February 8
1520 hours
The principal was five minutes into his tirade before I discovered what Erica had meant about being in touch.
I wasn’t paying much attention to the tirade. I’m not sure the principal was either. He was talking to hear himself talk, railing on and on about how the academy held its students to a very high standard and how Chip and I had fallen very short of that and how if either one of us expected to graduate to a dignified field position with such behavior, then we were in for a rude awakening. In fact, we were lucky he didn’t bounce us out of the school right then and there. . . .
I was surprised to find myself so calm in the face of the storm. In my previous 1,172 days of public school, I’d never gotten in trouble, let alone been sent to the principal’s office. But, though I wasn’t happy with the situation, I also knew the principal couldn’t kick me out. His entire mole hunt was based on me being there. In fact, he could have frightened me more by threatening to keep me enrolled.
However, the real reason I wasn’t very concerned by the principal was that I had plenty of other things to be very concerned about. Like what Chip and Hauser had been doing in the tunnel.
Had that really been a bomb down there? And what were they doing with it? Did it work? Were they trying to make it work? And if so, why?
What was Scorpio? It sounded like a code name for an operation, but what was the operation? Was the name “Scorpio” a key to explaining it? I knew Scorpio was a mythological giant scorpion—an extremely dangerous beast who had defeated Orion, the almost-invincible hunter. Scorpio was also a constellation and a sign of the zodiac for the duration of October 23 to November 22. Was that a clue? Was Scorpio scheduled to take place then? If so, it was a long way off.
I was glad I’d had a chance to tell Erica about the bomb. Hopefully, she was investigating it while we sat there. I even considered telling the principal about it, but I didn’t want to do so right in front of Chip. Back in public school, if someone told you something like “Say one word about what you saw down there and you’re dead,” you could assume it was an exaggeration. At spy school, they actually taught you how to back those words up—and gave you the weapons to do it.
Erica was probably far more competent than the principal anyhow. She’d most likely already tracked down the bomb, dismantled it, and figured out who was behind it. Or so I hoped. I was desperate to get out of that office—not merely to find out what was going on, but also to evacuate the building just in case the bomb went off and reduced the place to toothpicks. (I briefly considered that the bomb probably wasn’t live, because if it was, then Chip would have been sweating buckets. But then I also considered that, if Chip was as incompetent as Erica said, he wouldn’t have any idea if the bomb was live or not—and thus, fearing for my life was still prudent.)
Unfortunately, the principal didn’t show any signs of winding down. “Trying to hurt each other is unacceptable,” he was saying. “You’re supposed to try to hurt our enemies, for Pete’s sake.”
“Hello, Ben,” Erica said.
I snapped upright in my seat, startled. Erica sounded as though she were right behind me. I started to turn around. . . .
“Don’t turn around!” Erica ordered.
So I didn’t.
“Don’t do anything,” she continued. “And don’t respond to me. I’m not in the room. You’re the only one who can hear me.”
I suddenly realized Erica’s voice wasn’t coming from behind me at all. Instead, it seemed to be coming from inside me. Like it was a thought in my head.
I frowned. So that was why Erica had cradled my face. It hadn’t been affection at all. It was merely a ruse to wire me.
Having a transmitter in your ear is extremely unsettling. Your gut instinct when someone talks to you—or tells you they’ve slipped a piece of technology into your head without your permission—is to talk back. It took every ounce of control I had to not respond.
As it was, Chip was already eyeing me suspiciously. My startled response to Erica’s first words had grabbed his attention. The principal was still lost in his own world, however. He was so caught up in his pontificating, he wouldn’t have noticed a herd of elephants stampeding through the room.
“You’re exactly where I need you to be,” Erica told me. “Now, I need you to do two things: First, I need you to pay attention to the principal. Not what he says. What he does. I don’t want you to take your eyes off him for an instant. Try to remember everything. . . . Second, I need you to insult him.”
What?! I wanted to ask. I almost did. It took an incredible amount of self-restraint not to. I couldn’t imagine why Erica could possibly want me to get into even more trouble. But due to the one-sided nature of our communication, there was no way I could ask her.
“I know it’s asking a lot, but you have to trust me.” Erica’s voice was soothing and confident. “I promise you, everything’s going to work out fine.”
For some reason, I believed her. Maybe because Erica was the only person I trusted. Maybe because her words inside my head made me think they were actually my words. Most likely, I just wanted to impress her. I probably would have stepped in front of a locomotive if she asked nicely enough. So I looked for an opportunity to cause trouble—and it wasn’t long before I found it.
“When I was a student here, we knew how to behave,” the principal chided. “Would you like to know how we were punished for fighting back then?”
“Wow, that would have been a long time ago,” I said. “Did they put you in the stockade? They used that a lot in Colonial America.”