Spy School Goes South Read online

  There was a great deal of noise from the room we had just passed. As I had suspected, even in sleep, Dane Brammage was prepared for action. Through the ventilation system, I heard the pained groan of his bed as he sat up in it, the thud of his enormous feet hitting the floor, and then pounding as he raced through the hall. He burst into the dining room, a gun clenched in his hand. He would probably have been terrifying if his pajamas hadn’t been decorated with baby ducks.

  His arrival gave Paul Lee an unusual burst of confidence. “You kill me,” he told Joshua, “and Dane kills you.”

  Joshua didn’t appear the slightest bit concerned about this. In fact, he seemed amused. “Sorry to say this, old chap, but Dane here isn’t as loyal as you thought. Turns out, it was a lot cheaper to buy him off than it would be to pay you that two billion.”

  Dane shifted slightly, so his gun was now pointed at Paul Lee as well. If he was embarrassed about switching sides, he didn’t show it. His expression remained as implacable as always.

  I wouldn’t have thought that Paul Lee could have looked more pathetic than he already did, but he now proved me wrong. He shrank even smaller in his chair and began quivering in fear. His speech, which had barely been functional at normal times, now became completely unintelligible. “Urk,” he gibbered. “Murm . . . phlepthhh . . . yarp . . .”

  I looked at Erica, worried.

  She met my gaze coldly and gave me the same slight shake of her head that she had given me on the street during the robbery two days before. The message was the same: Don’t get involved.

  “Here’s something else you’ll find interesting,” Joshua was telling Paul Lee gleefully, really enjoying himself. “Remember that two billion we already paid you to get this deal going? Well, we’ve had access to your Swiss bank account the entire time. If you care to check it, you’ll see that we’ve taken our money back. And the rest of your money as well. After all, you won’t be needing it when you’re dead.”

  Paul Lee gawped at him. It seemed that he wanted to say something insulting, but in his fear and rage, he couldn’t even form words.

  I watched the entire scene play out below in horror. In my gut, I knew Erica was right: We shouldn’t get involved. We were supposed to be on a reconnaissance mission, finding out what SPYDER was plotting. We had one great advantage over them: They thought we were dead and thus had no reason to suspect that we were even at the resort, let alone lurking in the ventilation system above their heads. But if I did anything stupid—like trying to save Paul Lee—I would instantly give away that advantage. And I would be putting myself in direct and grave danger to boot. Danger that I was completely unprepared to handle.

  However, the alternative was idly sitting by and watching a man die. An evil man, yes. A man who probably would have happily ordered my own death, in fact. But he was still a human being.

  Despite all my adventures with the CIA, I had never seen anyone die before. I thought I had seen men die, but both those men—Joshua and Dane—happened to be alive and well in the room below me, so maybe that didn’t count. In any case, I hadn’t enjoyed witnessing what I thought were their deaths, and, thus, I was really, really sure that I didn’t want to witness this one.

  I looked back at Erica again.

  She was frowning menacingly at me, really wanting me to get the picture. No, she mouthed silently.

  Paul Lee was in a terrible state now. He was trembling so badly, his glasses were jouncing up and down on his nose, and his standard sheen of sweat was now a tidal wave. If Joshua didn’t shoot him soon, he would probably die from dehydration. He made a desperate attempt to say something, but couldn’t even manage a real word. “Flommenflirk!” he yelled at Joshua accusingly, then seemed to realize that hadn’t been what he was hoping for at all. “Gimpgrackle!” he tried again. “Pudwhanger!”

  Joshua laughed, finding this all very amusing. “Are you trying to insult me?”

  “Klumblebarf!” Paul shrieked. “Zingofloom!”

  Joshua clucked his tongue. “As much as I’d like to stay here all night, listening to you try to speak coherently for once, I have lots of things to attend to. So . . .” He looked to Dane. “Take care of him, will you?”

  Dane raised the gun in his hand toward Paul.

  Erica glared at me, a final warning to stay where I was.

  I glanced down through the grating, knowing that trying to stop Dane would be idiotic, rash, reckless, foolish, imprudent, and insubordinate. Not to mention it would also probably be completely ineffective, and I’d only get myself and Erica killed.

  But I did it anyhow.

  15

  AQUATICS

  Penthouse Suite

  Aquarius Resort

  March 30

  0430 hours

  Before I even knew what I was doing, I punched the grating out of the vent below me, then swung through the hole and launched myself at Dane Brammage.

  The first two steps of this process went surprisingly well. The grating fell out easily, and I swung through the hole with an agility I wasn’t even aware I had.

  The third part didn’t go nearly as smoothly.

  From the look on Dane’s face, I could tell that I had caught him by surprise. My whole plan was to slam into him, knocking him off-balance and keeping him from shooting Paul Lee. After that, I hadn’t really prepared anything. My plan was basically “Hope that Erica comes to my rescue.”

  I slammed right into Dane, as intended, but I didn’t knock him off-balance. He was simply too big. Instead, he stayed firmly rooted to his spot while I glanced off him harmlessly and wound up sprawled on the dining table.

  I did manage to scare Paul Lee half to death with this maneuver, though. As he was already severely stressed out, my sudden appearance pushed him over the edge. He screamed in terror and collapsed to the floor, unconscious.

  Dane looked at me, his face muddied with confusion, as though he was trying to place where he’d seen me before while at the same time trying to grasp where I’d come from. This distraction was what kept him from shooting at Paul Lee, rather than anything I had done to him physically.

  Joshua Hallal wasn’t nearly as thrown. “Ripley!” he yelled, quickly piecing together that 1) I wasn’t dead and 2) I’d been spying on him. He sprang from his seat and pointed his own gun toward me.

  I was still flat on my back in the middle of the dining table, with nowhere to hide.

  Luckily, Erica did come to my rescue. She punched out her own grating and swung through the hole, with even more finesse than I had done. She held on to the edge of the ventilation duct and drove her feet right into Dane’s face.

  Even though Erica wasn’t any bigger than me, her attack was much more effective. Dane didn’t fall, but he did get knocked off-balance. He stumbled backward and slammed into Joshua, which might not have been too bad if Dane had been a normal-size person. For Joshua, however, it was like getting hit by a truck. He was bowled off his feet. And the shot he intended for me went wide, ricocheting off a decorative vase and shattering the window.

  Joshua landed on the floor in a heap, a murderous glint in his eye. He still had his gun clutched in his hand, and he would have squeezed off another shot at me . . .

  Had Erica not nailed Dane with a flying roundhouse kick to the face. The bodyguard’s musculature might have been impressive, but it also made him top-heavy. He had already been struggling to regain his balance from Erica’s first kick; the second now sent him reeling. He tripped over Joshua’s prone body and came crashing down right on top of Joshua himself.

  Joshua barely had time to scream before he was flattened beneath Dane’s bulk.

  Erica gave me a disdainful glare. Obviously, there was a lot she wanted to say to me, none of it good, but there wasn’t time for that. She raced to the end of the table, hoisted Paul Lee to his feet, and yelled, “Help me get him out of here!”

  I rolled off the table and grabbed the other side of Paul’s body. Luckily, the arms dealer was even scrawnier than he lo
oked; he didn’t weigh as much as several sixth graders I knew, and we were easily able to prop him up between us. He was still unconscious, so we had to drag him from the room together.

  Behind us, at the other end of the table, Dane was struggling to get back to his feet. However, that wasn’t easy for a man built like a sequoia tree. Joshua Hallal was writhing around beneath him on the floor. “Get off of me, you idiot!” he shouted, although he was muffled beneath Dane’s mass, so it sounded more like “Bed offa knee, new bibbidit!”

  Erica and I raced out the door and found ourselves in a gourmet kitchen, filled with an astounding array of appliances and cooking utensils, given that most people who stayed there probably just ordered their meals from room service. “Take Paul,” Erica ordered, then shifted all his weight to me and grabbed every blade out of the knife block.

  Ahead of us lay the bedrooms. A door opened, and another bodyguard stormed out. This was the guy who I had seen on the balcony when we’d first arrived at the resort. He was built similarly to Dane, muscles on top of muscles. He had a gun in his hand—but only for a few seconds. Erica flung a carving knife at him that spiked his pajama sleeve to the wall and made him drop his weapon in surprise. She rapidly threw three more knives, pinning his other limbs to the wall, and then whacked him on the head with a waffle iron just for good measure.

  Next to me, Paul Lee regained consciousness. “Am I still alive?” he asked blearily, and we hurried through the kitchen.

  “Yes,” I told him.

  “Oh good,” he said. “I’m not, er . . . a fan of being dead.”

  “That makes two of us,” I said.

  Ahead of us, several more bedrooms, which probably all held enemy agents, lay between us and our escape route. So I took evasive action. A sliding door led out onto the wide patio that surrounded the penthouse. I shoved it open and dragged Paul through it.

  Back inside, another bodyguard had emerged from a bedroom, but Erica quickly took him out with a well-aimed panini press.

  A series of thumps and muffled yelps of pain from the dining room indicated that Dane was still trying to get back on his feet, to the great dismay of Joshua Hallal beneath him.

  Out on the porch, the warm, humid air was a relief after the heavily air-conditioned penthouse. There was a profusion of potted plants arrayed around a private rooftop pool, Jacuzzi, and sundeck, as well as Ashley Sparks’s gymnastics equipment.

  A fourth bodyguard came thrashing through the jungle of potted plants. This was the guy who’d been asleep on the balcony as we’d drifted over his head. He had been roused by the commotion and now looked groggy, embarrassed, and angry. He burst between two ficus trees behind us, preparing to open fire—

  When Erica sailed through the sliding door and body-slammed him. The bodyguard tumbled into a large, exceptionally thorny cactus and howled in pain. He immediately forgot all about us and flailed about, trying to pry the prong-laden cactus sections from his body.

  “Egad,” Paul Lee said. “That was, er . . . quite something.”

  Erica took the gear bag she’d been hauling around off her shoulder and threw it to me. “Get harnessed up!” she ordered.

  “Aren’t you coming?” I asked, with a lot more worry in my voice than I’d intended.

  “I have something to deal with first.”

  “What?”

  A penthouse window shattered as a small, incredibly muscular body dove through it. The body curled into a ball in midair, flipped over twice, and stuck the landing.

  “Her,” Erica answered.

  Ashley Sparks was awake and ready for action. She stood between Erica and me, wearing spangled pajamas and a look of abject hatred.

  “I should have known you jidiots wouldn’t have enough sense to stay dead,” Ashley sneered. Ashley had a thing for combining two words into one. “Jidiot” was “jerk” plus “idiot,” a favorite of hers—or at least one that she used for me an awful lot.

  Ashley had her own personal fighting technique, an impressive combination of martial arts and gymnastics that rivaled even Erica’s prodigious skills. I knew I wouldn’t stand a chance against her, so I kept running, doing my best to pull Paul Lee along with me.

  Erica attacked before Ashley could follow us. Ashley tucked into a defensive posture, deflecting Erica’s flying kick, and the two of them launched themselves into a fight that probably would have been extremely impressive if I’d had the time to stop and watch it. I didn’t, though.

  As Paul Lee gained more and more consciousness, he was becoming harder and harder to move. His naturally skittish personality was returning, and he was now dragging his feet and flailing his arms. “Oh my,” he said. “What is . . . Are we . . . Who are . . . ?”

  “I’m rescuing you,” I said, fearing that if I waited for him to actually finish a thought, I might die of old age.

  “How?”

  “I’m still working on that.” We stumbled past the end of the penthouse suite and arrived at the far end of the balcony. The fishing line that Erica had fired earlier stretched over the edge and angled downward, so thin it was almost invisible.

  To the east, daylight was peeking over the horizon, providing just enough illumination for Paul and me to see exactly how big the drop over the balcony railing was. Ten stories, straight down into a large, wide concrete expanse.

  I opened the gear bag and found a tangle of zip-line harnesses inside. I pulled one out and thrust it into Paul’s chest. “Get this on.”

  “Oh no,” he gasped, realizing what I intended to do. “You can’t . . . I mean . . . we won’t . . .”

  “It’s either this or staying behind,” I said, quickly slipping into my harness. Zip-lines had proven surprisingly useful in the spy game, and I could practically suit up for one in my sleep. “Your odds for survival are a lot better with me, though.”

  “But . . . ,” Paul protested. “I . . . well . . . the thing is . . . Aaaaahhhh!”

  His scream of terror came as a human form suddenly materialized from almost out of nowhere. Warren Reeves had emerged onto the patio. Or maybe he had been on the patio all along. With Warren, it was always hard to tell. His pajamas had blended perfectly with the brown stucco walls of the penthouse, allowing him to get the jump on us.

  “Ripley!” he shouted. “You’re not going to thwart us this— Aaaaahhhh!”

  His scream wasn’t one of terror so much as surprise and pain. In his haste to attack, he hadn’t noticed the fishing line stretched across his path. It caught him in the face and clotheslined him, knocking him flat on his back. His gun flew from his hand and sailed over the balcony railing, leaving him sprawled and helpless on the floor at my feet. His attitude instantly shifted from aggressive to cowardly. “Don’t hurt me!” he mewled.

  Fighting had never been my strongest talent at spy school. In fact, I had been one of the worst in my class. But Warren had still been worse than me, inevitably getting the lowest grade. In Introduction to Self-Preservation, I had often tried to be paired with him so that I could make myself look a tiny bit better. Now I simply pulled out another zip-line harness and swaddled Warren with it, binding him like a tuna snagged in a fishing net.

  Meanwhile, Paul Lee continued blathering beside me. “I can’t do . . . uh, this. . . . It’s . . . I mean, the splatting . . . I just . . . um . . .”

  “Oh for crying out loud.” I grabbed the harness from him, whipped it around his shoulders, and clipped the carabiner over the line. It wasn’t anywhere close to the proper way to put the harness on, but I figured it would still work in the short term.

  “What are you . . . ,” Paul yammered. “How dare . . . er . . .”

  A shot rang out, and a sliding glass door near us instantly collapsed into shards. Dane Brammage was on his feet again and charging down the hall toward us, a gun clutched in his hand. For a man the size of a rhino, he moved with surprising speed.

  There was no more time to listen to Paul Lee dither. I shoved him over the railing. The carabiner held tight, h
is harness cinched around him, and he skimmed down the fishing line, screaming the whole way.

  I quickly locked my own carabiner over the line and leapt after him.

  There was a sickening drop for a second as the line bowed under my weight. But then it yanked taut, and suddenly, I was racing down through the morning air behind Paul Lee.

  As the day brightened around us, I could now see where we were heading. The line was at least a hundred yards long, and the spear at the end was embedded in the wall at the very top of the fake pyramid where the waterslides ran.

  Although I was moving quickly, it still didn’t seem fast enough. The ground was disturbingly far below me, and there were lots of people who wanted me dead close by. I craned my neck around to look behind me, then immediately wished I hadn’t.

  Dane Brammage was at the railing, aiming his gun my way.

  And then he wasn’t. Something large clobbered him on the head. It looked vaguely like a potted geranium, but I couldn’t quite tell from my vantage point. Dane dropped out of sight, and then Erica sprang over him, hooked her own harness to the fishing line, and dove off the balcony.

  The line jounced unnervingly as Erica’s weight hit it, but in front of me, Paul Lee was almost at the end, which meant I was almost down myself.

  However, I now had to pass over the worst part: the shark tank. The enormous aquarium was several stories tall, wrapping around the fake pyramid, and to my dismay, it was open at the top, revealing dozens of large, torpedo-shaped bodies slicing through the water beneath me. Should the line have snapped then, I would have been breakfast.

  Thankfully, it held. Ahead of me, Paul Lee reached the end of the line. Unfortunately, the man made no attempt to brace himself for the finish and simply smacked into the wall with a resounding thud. “Ouch!” he cried. “I mean . . . ow . . . er . . . oof.”

  He also didn’t think to unclip himself so he could get out of the way before I arrived. I did my best to prepare myself, but I’d been expecting to hit a wall, not an arms dealer. I slammed right into him, producing yet another round of pained expressions.