Spy School British Invasion Page 16

  Catherine selected two handguns and some ammunition for herself. “We’d best take advantage of this and arm ourselves, children,” she said, then looked to me. “Including you, Benjamin.”

  “I’m not so good with weapons,” I reminded her. “I got an N on my last exam in firearms.”

  “An N?” Catherine asked, surprised. “Is that supposed to be five times worse than an F?”

  “Kind of. I think Professor Crichton made it up just for me. He said the N stands for ‘Never ever let this person use a gun.’ ”

  “Perhaps only a grenade or two, then,” Catherine suggested.

  I gingerly picked up a grenade while everyone else grabbed weapons. I didn’t like being responsible for something potentially deadly at all, but I reluctantly crammed it into my pocket. We were in the lion’s den now, and Catherine was right; I ought to be prepared.

  I also took some Ding Dongs, because we had missed lunch.

  Once armed, we passed out of the storage room. Catherine and Erica led the way, their newly pilfered weapons at the ready.

  We emerged into a basement that was a little more like what I had expected from SPYDER. It looked like a relatively normal basement, only with some evil touches. There was a foosball table and a dartboard, but there were also a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and some metallic cases of the sort that stolen nuclear weapons were stored in. The whole place was austere concrete and appeared to have been built within the last five years.

  The dartboard had my photo on it. Three darts were plugged directly into my face.

  I groaned upon seeing this.

  “You shouldn’t be upset,” Mike told me. “You should be flattered! You’re the number one enemy of the most evil organization in the world!”

  “That’s not really making me feel better,” I said.

  Also, I noticed that Erica looked the tiniest bit jealous that her photo wasn’t on the dartboard.

  A stairwell led up to the rest of the house, while a door with multiple security systems led into the catacombs.

  “That’s probably camouflaged with skulls on the outside too,” Erica said. “Luckily for us, SPYDER didn’t realize anyone might breach any place down here besides their own door.” She nodded toward an elaborate security system mounted over the door. “That looks like it drops poison gas on whoever enters uninvited.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. It appeared that, in this case, SPYDER might have been too clever for their own good. They had disguised their secret door so well that we hadn’t noticed it and had thus come in through the storage room wall instead.

  At the top of the stairwell, we heard a door creak open and then footsteps coming down.

  They weren’t the heavy, plodding footsteps of one of SPYDER’s usual thugs. Instead, the footsteps were light and soft, as though the person making them didn’t weigh much. We heard a woman speaking in French, though so softly, I couldn’t make out the words.

  Catherine signaled for all of us to hide. She and Erica flattened themselves up against the walls on opposite sides of the stairwell, weapons at the ready, while Mike, Zoe, and I ducked behind the foosball table.

  A maid came tottering down the stairs. She appeared to be in her sixties, with glasses perched on her nose and her gray hair drawn back in a bun. She wore a traditional maid’s black uniform, complete with a little headband and sensible shoes, and she was cradling a cat in her arms. It was a skittish orange tabby, and she was speaking to it in a slightly dotty fashion. “I know, Gaspard. I heard something down here too,” she said in French. “I hope the rats haven’t gotten into the Pop-Tarts again.”

  As she reached the bottom of the stairs, Catherine and Erica stepped out on both sides of her, aiming their guns.

  The maid was so startled, she dropped the cat, which yowled when it hit the floor and scampered back up the stairs. “Zut alors!” the maid exclaimed, which was French for something much more offensive in English, and then fearfully raised her hands over her head.

  “I’m terribly sorry to frighten you like this,” Catherine said in French. “Or your cat, for that matter. We mean you no harm. Do you speak English?”

  The maid nodded her head.

  Catherine switched to her native tongue. “Very good, then. Is Mr. E here?”

  The maid nodded again.

  “Could you please take us to him?” Catherine asked.

  The maid nodded a third time, then obediently turned and headed back up the stairs.

  “Is anyone else in the house?” Erica asked.

  “N-n-no,” the maid stammered.

  “No guards?” I asked.

  “They all are being outside,” the maid said in broken English. She seemed so terrified, I was worried she might wet herself.

  We followed her upstairs to the first floor of the house, which wasn’t what I had expected at all.

  It turned out SPYDER didn’t own only one house. They owned the entire block. They had bought every building, torn down the walls between them, and combined them all into a single massive home. Although the front door looked nondescript from the outside, it opened into an opulent living room that was completely hidden from the rest of Paris. It was thirty yards wide and two stories tall and opened onto a central atrium that had a lovely garden. The room was all white marble, and the windows onto the atrium were enormous, so light spilled in, illuminating everything brightly. And as for the art…

  I suddenly realized that I had no longer missed out on visiting the great museums of Europe—because this single room possibly had as much great art as all the rest of them. There were paintings by Monet and Picasso and van Gogh. Sculptures by Rodin and Bernini. Exquisite vases from China and Japan. And a painting that looked disturbingly like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, even though the Mona Lisa was supposed to be in the Louvre.

  My fellow spies seemed shocked by it all as well. Catherine gaped at the Mona Lisa. “Is that the… ?” she began.

  She didn’t get to finish her question, though, because the maid suddenly whirled on her with startling speed. Her tottering walk and meek persona had all been an act. In an instant, she snapped the gun from Catherine’s hand and spun it around so that it was now pressed against Catherine’s head.

  “Lower your weapons!” the maid yelled, in a voice that was far deeper and more ominous than the pretend one she had used before. “Or I’ll blow her head off!”

  It didn’t sound like she was bluffing. Erica and Zoe, who now had their own guns aimed at the maid, did exactly as she’d ordered.

  Four thugs raced into the room. Three were big and muscular, while the fourth was significantly smaller, but still quite menacing: Jenny Lake. They all aimed weapons at us.

  The maid had obviously lied to us about no one else being in the house.

  Catherine looked extremely disappointed in herself for underestimating the maid, but she remained surprisingly calm, given that there was now a gun pressed against her head. “There’s no need for violence,” she said. “You may have turned the tables on us, but the end result here will be the same. It’d be best if you brought us to see Mr. E.”

  “Catherine,” I said. I had to struggle to keep from freaking out. Not only because we now were on the wrong end of a lot of weapons in the middle of our enemy’s headquarters—although that should have been terrifying enough. I was worried because I had recognized the maid’s real voice. I had heard it once before, late at night while on a mission at SPYDER’s previous headquarters in New Jersey.

  “What?” Catherine asked me.

  “This woman doesn’t have to take us to see Mr. E,” I said. “She is Mr. E.”

  16 CONFRONTATION

  Secret lair of Mr. E

  Paris, France

  April 1

  1500 hours

  A proud grin spread across the face of the woman we had all assumed was merely a maid. “That’s right, Benjamin,” she said. “Though, sadly for you, this is one twist you didn’t figure out ahead of time.”


  I was already kicking myself for that. Looking back, it seemed there were clues I should have caught. The “maid” had claimed no one else was in the house, but unlike Orion’s palace, which had been dingy and dusty due to the lack of help, this place was spotlessly clean. The floor was perfectly polished, the windows onto the garden were immaculate, and the garden was meticulously cared for. All of that should have indicated the need for a team of servants and gardeners, at least some of whom would have been on duty in the middle of the day.

  Or maybe it should have occurred to me that, with an organization as crafty as SPYDER, the fact that they called their leader “Mr. E” was an obvious misdirection. And yet the name had worked its way into my mind so that I had idiotically only been looking for a man.

  Of course, everyone else on my team had been similarly caught off guard. Even now Mike and Zoe were gaping at Mr. E in surprise, while Erica and Catherine appeared extremely disappointed in themselves for not catching on sooner. And yet the attention of Mr. E remained firmly fixed on me.

  “After all the trouble you’ve caused me, I was expecting more from you,” she said tauntingly. “I’ll admit, that little trick of yours, coming through the storeroom wall downstairs instead of the doorway, was decent, but now I’m wondering if you just got lucky. Given the look on your face when I caught Catherine here by surprise, it never even occurred to you for a moment that I might have been the leader of SPYDER, did it?”

  Lying to someone who had multiple guns trained on me always seemed like a bad idea. So I admitted the truth. “No.”

  Mr. E’s glee at my predicament quickly turned to anger. “Just like everyone else at the CIA,” she said with a sneer. “Incapable of thinking that a woman might be the slightest bit competent.”

  A different thug came up behind each one of us and frisked us for the weapons we had just stolen from the storeroom. Jenny Lake handled Zoe. I got a guy who seemed to be only halfway up the evolutionary tree between gorillas and humans. He was big and smelly and extremely rough with his frisking.

  Mr. E turned her attention to Catherine. “You don’t even know who I am, do you?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Catherine replied.

  “It figures,” Mr. E spat. “I started in the CIA the same week as your moronic husband. Needless to say, I was a better agent than he was. Although that lamp over there would be a better agent than Alexander. And yet that charlatan rose in the ranks, getting all the plum assignments, while I got assigned to a desk in Wichita. I was talented. I was intelligent. And yet I was constantly overlooked and ignored.”

  “And that’s why you turned evil?” Mike asked.

  “It’s not like I was rewarded for being good!” Mr. E said angrily. “I was working my butt off and no one even seemed to care! So I figured, maybe I’d get a little more respect if I was bad. Plus, it turns out the pay is much better.” Mr. E cracked a smile again at the thought of this, then calmed herself. “Sorry for the digression. I just get so worked up whenever I think about the sexism inherent in the espionage game.” She returned her attention to me. “So, appease my curiosity, Benjamin. How did you finally figure out it was me?”

  “Well, Mr. E… ,” I said, then paused. “Is there another name I can call you besides ‘Mr. E’ given that you’re, well…not a mister?”

  “No,” Mr. E said.

  “Really?” Mike asked. “I mean, if you’re really upset about sexism in the evil workplace, it seems that not using the feminine form of address is playing right into their hands. Don’t you want it known that a woman is running the most powerful, corrupt, and evil organization in the world?”

  Mr. E considered that for a moment. “That’s a good point. Call me Ms. E.” She shifted her attention back to me. “You were going to say how you figured out who I was.… ”

  “I overheard you one night,” I said. “At Hidden Forest.”

  Understanding flashed in Ms. E’s eyes. “The night I was outside with Joshua! So you were creeping around out there after all.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Although your voice sounded a lot deeper then.”

  “I use a voice modulator whenever I’m in the field,” Ms. E explained. “Just in case some little twerp who can’t be trusted is eavesdropping.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Also, I rarely ever appear in public, and when I do, I dress inconspicuously and make sure to travel with my guards. People always assume one of them is the important one and that I’m only a lowly secretary. Sexism at work once again. You wouldn’t believe the places I’ve infiltrated by merely looking like the assistant to someone else.”

  The thugs finished frisking us. The one behind Erica had amassed a pile of weapons. He also snapped off her utility belt and took that as well.

  The thug behind me relieved me of the grenade I had taken.

  “So,” Zoe said to Jenny Lake, “I guess you were working for SPYDER all along.”

  “Of course I was,” Jenny said sharply. “Duh. Who else would I have been working for?”

  “A rival organization that wanted the information to bring SPYDER down,” Zoe replied, just as sharply. “So this isn’t exactly a ‘duh’ situation. Even Murray wasn’t sure who you might be working for.”

  “Murray Hill is a jerk,” Jenny said. Then she added, “Does he talk about me much?”

  “Not at all,” Zoe replied, taking pleasure in saying it.

  Jenny looked hurt. “Not at all?”

  “Never,” Zoe said happily.

  “Not even—” Jenny began.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Ms. E snapped. Although, being evil, she used a different word than ‘Pete’s.’ “Get ahold of yourself, Jennifer! Do you realize how difficult it is to be menacing when you’re mooning over your boyfriend like a sap?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Jenny said quickly. “And I broke up with him.”

  “Just can it!” Ms. E ordered.

  Meanwhile, my mind was racing, trying to figure out how we were going to get out of this alive. We had lost our weapons and the element of surprise. No one from the CIA or MI6 had any idea where we were—and there was a decent chance those agencies thought we were the enemy anyhow. However, instead of coming up with a solution to the problem, I found myself wondering why we were even still alive in the first place.

  “I can see that you’re wondering why you are even still alive right now,” Ms. E said.

  I reacted to this, surprised, then tried to act like I hadn’t been surprised at all, which probably gave away that I had been surprised in the first place. “Well…yes,” I said.

  Ms. E gave me a crocodile smile. “That’s a legitimate question, given how much trouble you have caused me. Sadly, as much as I would like to kill you right at this very moment, I still need to question all of you. You have all had access to information that traitor Joshua stole from me—and I need to know what it was.”

  I relaxed a bit upon hearing that, though not much. It had bought us a very small respite from imminent death. Our best chance was to draw out the release of what we knew, stalling for time until we could figure out a way to get the jump on Ms. E and her henchmen.

  “I suppose you’re now thinking that this gives you the opportunity to stall for time until you can figure out a way to get the jump on me and my henchmen,” Ms. E said.

  I reacted with surprise again, disturbed—and slightly impressed—by her ability to read my mind.

  “I have something prepared to prevent you from doing that.” Ms. E picked a remote control up from the coffee table and pressed a button.

  A projection screen began to lower from the ceiling in front of the Mona Lisa.

  “Sorry,” Mike said. “I know this probably isn’t an appropriate time, but I have to ask.… ” He pointed at the painting before it was covered up. “Is that the real Mona Lisa?”

  “It is,” Ms. E replied proudly. “Originally, I thought I could get by letting it stay in the Louvre. The whole reason I chose to live in
Paris in the first place was because of the amazing museums and galleries here. I do adore art. But the painting was too hard to see at the Louvre. There were always these enormous crowds of annoying tourists gathered around it, taking photos of it with their stupid cell phones, gabbing like they were at a baseball game instead of standing before one of the greatest works of art of all time. So I liberated it from there and replaced it with a copy. Those fools at the Louvre haven’t even noticed the difference. Or maybe they have and don’t want the public to know. The end result is the same.”

  The screen clicked into place, obscuring the painting. Ms. E clicked another button. A projection system lowered from the ceiling and began broadcasting video.

  The video appeared to be a live feed from a small camera, focused on a small suburban house. The house was two stories and slightly run-down, with an aging car parked in the cracked driveway and a front yard that was a good week past mowing. Overall, it was a rather ordinary house on an ordinary street, the kind of place most people wouldn’t have looked twice at or thought was remotely special at all.

  But it was special to me.

  It was my parents’ house.

  17 FEAR

  Secret lair of Ms. E

  Paris, France

  April 1

  1530 hours

  Up until that moment, I had thought I knew what fear was.

  After all, I had certainly had plenty of occasions to fear for my life. I had nearly been blown up, nuked, buried under an avalanche, and eaten by crocodiles. I had faced the wrong end of a gun so many times, I had lost count.

  But now it wasn’t my life I was worried about. It was the lives of my parents. Because of me, they were in serious danger.

  I looked back at Ms. E, who was actually laughing at my distress. It was a truly evil laugh; she thought my anguish was hilarious. “It never occurred to you that we knew where your family lived?” she asked. “You really thought you could cause us all of this trouble and we wouldn’t ever retaliate?”