Spy School Secret Service

  For Dashiell, the best son anyone could ever ask for

  acknowledgments

  Turns out, it isn’t very easy to get into the White House. It used to be a bit easier: you could arrange for a tour shortly before visiting Washington, DC. But these days, you have to call your congressman’s office months ahead of time, and even then, there’s no guarantee you can get in. I couldn’t. So I called my good friend Nani Coloretti instead. Nani is the kind of person who gets invited to the White House, rather than having to take the tour. She gave me all sorts of fascinating info about the White House, which was invaluable in writing this book. I couldn’t have done it without her. In fact, I probably learned more from Nani than I would have from the tour, because the official tour doesn’t even take you to the West Wing or the Eisenhower Exective Office Building, while Nani has been to both. (I should point out that, if I got anything wrong in my description of the White House, that’s not Nani’s fault; I may have screwed some things up.)

  For the record, the White House does have a website that gives some info about the place, and you can even tour it on Google maps, so that was all helpful too.

  In addition, I owe thanks, yet again, to my good friend Larry Hanauer. For those of you who have been carefully reading the acknowledgments to every one of my books, you will certainly have seen Larry’s name come up before. In fact, this is the third series Larry has helped with, making him the first person to get the coveted Stuart Gibbs Trifecta Award. Larry’s contribution this time was to tell me what an insane place the Pentagon was—and to point out that, even though it’s almost impossible to get into the White House, pretty much anyone can take a tour of the Pentagon. (Including me, it turns out.)

  Also, thanks to my editor, the great Kristin Ostby, who sadly left the publishing world after this book. (Not because of it, mind you. She simply had other things she wanted to do more.) Kristin oversaw a lot of my books and left some pretty big shoes to fill, but my new editor, Liz Kossnar, has stepped up to the challenge. And huge thanks to my publisher, Justin Chanda, for making the transition happen smoothly and always supporting my work.

  Thanks also need to be given to my eternally excellent agent, Jennifer Joel, without whom Spy School wouldn’t exist, and to her extremely clever nephew Maverick Satnick, who came up with the title for this book.

  Finally, I need to thank my wonderful wife, Suzanne, for her constant support, enthusiasm, and cheerleading—and the world’s greatest test audience, my children, Dashiell and Violet. I love you all to infinity and beyond.

  contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1: RESURGENCE

  2: ASSIGNMENT

  3: SECURITY

  4: CONFRONTATION

  5: POSSIBLE SUSPECTS

  6: PHYSICAL EDUCATION

  7: BOOMERANG

  8: APPREHENSION

  9: DEATH TRAP

  10: WARNING

  11: EVASIVE ACTION

  12: RECONNECTION

  13: FOREIGN RELATIONS

  14: INFILTRATION

  15: NEGOTIATION

  16: ESCAPE

  17: MORALE BUILDING

  18: TRIBUNAL

  19: INSPIRATION

  20: PERSONAL ISSUES

  21: PURSUIT

  22: COMMENDATION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  February 9

  2100 hours

  Mr. XXXXXXXXX

  Since my last dispatch, I have continued to monitor various channels used by SPYDER for their communications. I regret to report that, in the last twenty-four hours, there has been an enormous increase in chatter concerning a XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX. Given this, I think we can only assume that you are in imminent danger. This is a Code Red situation. We need to activate Operation Pungent Muskrat immediately.

  To that end, I stand by my recommendation of agent-in-training Benjamin Ripley for the job. I have worked with Benjamin on three previous (albeit unauthorized) missions and he has proven himself on each, displaying intelligence, cleverness, and moral fiber. The only drawbacks are his XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXX and his severe crush on XX XXXXXXXXXXXXX, neither of which should affect this mission. I have attached his dossier for your approval.

  Of course, this mission will also require the cooperation of your son, XXXXX. I know you two have had your issues lately, but please impress upon him that XXXX XXXXXXXXX XX XX XXXXX XX XXXXXXXXXX XXX. Your life—and the fate of this entire country—is in his hands.

  Please let me know if we are clear to proceed at your earliest convenience. I am prepared to initiate this operation at a moment’s notice. Although, for your safety, the sooner it happens, the better.

  Sincerely,

  XXXXXXXXXXXX

  P.S. Given the highly risky nature of this mission, please do not discuss it with anyone at XXX XXXXX XXXXX, not even XXXXXX and XXXXX. In addition, burn this message and the dossier and then, if possible, flush the remains down the toilet.

  RESURGENCE

  Vandenberg Library

  Nathan Hale Building

  CIA Academy of Espionage

  February 10

  1500 hours

  “SPYDER is back!”

  Zoe Zibbell’s exclamation rang out through the spy school library. In her excitement, Zoe had spoken a bit too loudly—and since we were in the library, it was quieter than any other place on campus. The cavernous room was four stories tall, ringed by three mezzanines on which thousands of books were shelved. Zoe’s words seemed to echo off every last one of them: “SPYDER is back . . . SPYDER is back . . . SPYDER is back. . . .”

  Zoe winced, realizing her announcement had been a lot more public than she’d intended. Then she quickly sat down at the table where she had just interrupted my homework.

  The library was far more crowded than usual. On most afternoons, my fellow students and I would have probably been studying in the school dormitory, but on that day the freshmen had their first homework assignment in Introduction to Explosives: Each was assigned to defuse a small bomb. The bombs weren’t supposed to be strong enough to level a building, but where explosives were concerned, things could always go wrong, so it made sense to play it safe and steer clear of the dorm. More than a hundred students, ranging from second to seventh years, were hunched over tables throughout the library. They all tried to act like they weren’t interested in Zoe, as we’d learned in Intermediate Clandestine Observation: Seeing Without Being Seen, but I could tell they were desperate to hear more.

  Until recently, SPYDER’s existence had been extremely classified: Only a few highly ranked people at the CIA had known about the evil organization. But in the past year, SPYDER had caused some major trouble, like trying to blow up the very building I sat in, attacking a busload of students near the school’s wilderness training facility, and attempting to destroy a large portion of Manhattan. After that there was no hope of keeping SPYDER confidential at the Academy of Espionage. Everyone there was training to be a spy; it was their job to know things. Almost all of them had sussed out the truth by now.

  I made no attempt to hide my own interest in Zoe’s news. SPYDER had attempted to recruit me twice—and then tried to kill me when I’d refused—so I had a vested interest in knowing what they were up to. I looked up from my cryptography homework and asked, “How do you know?”

  Zoe slid into a seat across the table from me and whispered, “Chameleon and I overheard. We were doing our eavesdropping project for Advanced Covert Ops, and we figured the higher-placed our target, the better our grade would be. So we went after the Idiot.”

  Zoe was into nicknames. Chameleon was Warren Reeves, who excelled at camouflage (but was lacking in most other spy skills). The Idiot was our school principal, who was an idiot. A b
ig one.

  “And you pulled it off?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” Despite her worried state, Zoe flashed a proud smile. “We slipped two X-class wireless transmission bugs into his office last night.”

  “His office?” I repeated, impressed. The principal wasn’t an easy target. True, he wasn’t a very intelligent person—his job was basically to handle paperwork and administrative issues that no one else wanted to—but the CIA knew he wasn’t intelligent, so he had far more security around him than a capable person would have required. His office was on the top floor of the building we were in, five floors above us, and entry to it was protected by an advanced network of cameras and armed guards. “How’d you get past all the security?”

  “I distracted the guards while Chameleon did the infiltration.”

  “And he did it without any problems?”

  “Why do you sound so surprised?”

  “Because Warren’s a lousy spy. The last time he tried to infiltrate a room, he got stuck in the air vent. We had to call the fire department to get him out.”

  Zoe frowned. “Chameleon’s been working hard to improve his skills lately.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’ve actually gotten better.”

  “Yes, they have,” snapped a nasal voice behind me.

  I wheeled around to find Warren standing three feet away. Although if he hadn’t spoken, I might not have noticed him. His camouflage was even better than usual. He was wearing a set of clothes and face paint that exactly matched the ancient oak furniture of the Hale Building, allowing him to blend in perfectly at the end of a row of shelves.

  I wasn’t the only one who’d failed to notice him. Most of the nearby students were caught by surprise as well. A fourth-year girl who’d been pretending to browse the books behind us while furtively listening to our conversation was so startled by Warren’s sudden appearance that she yelped in fear and dropped a heavy volume of Caldwell’s Pictorial Guide to Poisons and Antidotes on her foot.

  Warren sat down beside me, gloating smugly. This was disconcerting, as he’d done such a good job with the face paint that he didn’t really look human. Instead, it was like sitting next to an extremely obnoxious ventriloquist’s dummy. “You’re no better a spy than I am,” he declared. “The only reason you’ve had all these missions is that you’ve just been lucky enough to have SPYDER attack you.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly consider that lucky,” I said.

  “Whatever. The point is, if I’d been there, I could have saved the day instead of you.”

  “Chameleon, you were there,” Zoe pointed out. “And you didn’t save the day. In fact, you nearly killed Ben by accident. Twice.”

  Warren recoiled like a puppy who’d been caught piddling on the carpet, the way he always did when Zoe hurt his feelings. While Zoe was developing into a very good spy, she somehow remained completely oblivious to the fact that Warren had a massive crush on her.

  “Hold on,” I said to Zoe. “Did you say you infiltrated the principal’s office last night?”

  “That’s right,” Zoe replied.

  I looked back at Warren. “Then why are you still camouflaged?”

  “The paint won’t wash off,” Warren said morosely. He looked as though he might have turned red if he hadn’t been painted brown. “I couldn’t get the perfect oaken tone with standard face paint, so I had to use wood stain instead. Now I can’t remove it.”

  Zoe snickered despite herself.

  “It’s not funny!” Warren whined. “Today in self-defense class, Professor Simon mistook me for a table and set a book on my head.”

  Zoe laughed even harder.

  “We’re getting off track,” I reminded her. “What’d you hear in the principal’s office?”

  “Oh, right.” Zoe returned her attention to me while Warren sulked. “We’ve been monitoring the bugs ever since we placed them last night, but we didn’t pick up any intel until just now.”

  “Was the principal out of the office all day?” I asked.

  “No, he’s been in since oh-nine-hundred,” Zoe reported. “He just hasn’t been doing anything important. He spent most of the day filling out ammunition-request forms and playing games on his smartphone. And it took him an hour to decide what to order for lunch. But then, about thirty minutes ago, he got a phone call about SPYDER.”

  “From who?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Zoe admitted. “We didn’t tap the phone. We only bugged the room, so we could only hear the Idiot’s side of the conversation.”

  “What did he say?”

  Zoe glanced around the library before answering. All the other students who’d been eavesdropping made a show of pretending to read their textbooks. Zoe removed her cell phone from the pocket of her jacket and slid it across the table to me.

  A set of earphones was wound around it. I stuck the buds in my ears. Warren gave me a jealous look, as if I were the luckiest guy on earth because I might have come into contact with some of Zoe’s earwax.

  Zoe’s phone was already cued up to the proper audio file. I pressed play.

  The file began with the principal muttering what sounded like nonsense. “Stupid hedgehogs!” he yelled. “Stop stealing my flapjacks!”

  I looked to Zoe, intrigued. “Is this some sort of top secret code?”

  “No,” Zoe replied. “It’s about the game he’s playing on his phone.”

  “It’s called Flapjack Frenzy,” Warren explained. “You try to make as many pancakes as possible and these hedgehogs try to steal them. So you have to fight them off by shooting them with maple syrup. . . .”

  “The rules of the game really aren’t important right now,” Zoe told him.

  Warren frowned sullenly.

  On the recording, the principal’s phone rang. He let it ring ten more times while he apparently tried to finish the level of the game, before finally giving in and answering. “This is the principal,” he said curtly. “This had better be important. I’m in the midst of something very serious.” Then he gasped in surprise and asked, “SPYDER? Really? How do you know?”

  This was followed by a period during which the principal was obviously listening to a lot of information that the person on the other end of the phone line was giving him. For the most part, it seemed he was trying to sound interested, saying things like “Hmmm” and “Fascinating” and “Wow,” although I could also hear the distinct sounds of the game continuing: tinny music punctuated by the occasional squelch of maple syrup and squeal of pixelated hedgehogs. Suddenly, the principal said, “No, I’m not playing a game on my phone! I’m listening to you!” And then the tinny music shut off. Afterward, the principal continued to make interested sounds, as if trying to prove that he was rapt with attention.

  At the entrance to the library, Mike Brezinski slipped through the doors.

  My fellow students regarded him with almost as much surprise as they had given Zoe’s announcement that SPYDER had returned. Mike was well known on campus as the newest recruit to spy school. Until only a few weeks before, he’d been my best friend from the outside world. Up until that point, I had tried to keep my enrollment at the Academy of Espionage a secret from him—as well as everyone else I knew, including my own parents. The school’s very existence was classified: The rest of the world thought we attended St. Smithen’s Science Academy for Boys and Girls. But Mike hadn’t merely figured out that I was attending a top secret spy school; he’d also played a crucial part in thwarting some bad guys on Operation Snow Bunny, after which the CIA had recognized his potential and recruited him. However, even though Mike was my age, he had been forced to start as a first-year student. Which meant he should have been dealing with his explosives homework, not sauntering into the library.

  “What’s he doing here?” Warren hissed.

  “Maybe he finished his homework already,” Zoe suggested.

  “There’s no way,” Warren said. “They only started the timers fifteen minutes ago. Even Erica Hale didn’t defus
e her first bomb that fast.”

  Mike spotted us, waved happily, and hurried over, pausing to smile at a few attractive girls along the way.

  Most of the girls smiled back. That’s the kind of guy Mike was.

  The recording on Zoe’s phone was still playing. On it, the principal suddenly spluttered, “Benjamin Ripley?” He sounded extremely annoyed. “What do you want with him this time?”

  I stiffened, surprised that he’d just used my name.

  Unfortunately, nothing else was said. The principal returned to listening again, only now his occasional grunts and interjections sounded much more aggravated than they had before.

  The principal wasn’t a big fan of mine. Shortly after my arrival at spy school, I had insulted him to his face in order to further an investigation, and at the beginning of the current school year, I had accidentally blown up his office with a mortar round. That hadn’t entirely been my fault, but no matter how many times this had been explained, the principal refused to listen. He was still using a broom closet as his office, and he hated me for it.

  Mike reached my table, spun a chair around, and sat in it backward, resting his arms on the backrest. “What are you listening to?” he asked.

  “Class lecture,” I replied quickly. I didn’t know if Mike had learned about SPYDER’s existence yet (he had missed all my previous confrontations with them), but I certainly didn’t have clearance to tell him about it.

  Mike gave me a sideways glance, like he didn’t believe me and wanted me to know it.

  “What happened to your explosives homework?” Zoe asked, trying to distract him. “Did you defuse it already?”

  “No,” Mike said.

  Warren gasped. “You mean you left a ticking bomb in your dorm room?”

  “Calm down, Salamander,” Mike told him. “I didn’t do that either.”

  “My nickname’s ‘Chameleon,’ ” Warren said testily. “Not ‘Salamander.’ ”

  Mike shrugged. “They’re both lizardy things.”

  “So what’d you do with the bomb?” Zoe asked.