Spy School Goes South Page 17

  “How did a pathetic excuse for a human like you ever get to be so powerful?” Zoe asked.

  “His daddy gave him the company,” Murray said, wandering in from his bedroom. His hair was a rat’s nest, and his eyes were bleary. He had thrown a complimentary robe over the boxer shorts he’d slept in but, unfortunately, hadn’t bothered to tie it tightly, so we all had an unrequested view of his mostly naked body. Amazingly, what had been highly toned and well-muscled was already beginning to show signs of the wreck it had once been. His ramrod posture had been replaced by his old slouch, and his stomach was bulging pregnantly from all the food he’d consumed the night before.

  “I thought I taped you to your bed,” Erica said.

  “You did,” Murray agreed. “But Zoe cut me loose.”

  Erica shifted her icy gaze to Zoe. Before she could ask why, Zoe offered an answer. “I had to. He woke up after you left for the mission and needed to use the bathroom. I told him to hold it, but he said he really had to go. When I wouldn’t cut him loose he . . . yodeled.”

  “Yodeled?” I repeated, thrown.

  “At the top of his lungs,” Zoe went on. “He has the worst singing voice on earth, and he knows it. It was horrible. He wouldn’t stop until I cut him free.”

  “I had to go very badly,” Murray explained. “I think I had something like eight sodas last night. And three milkshakes.”

  Erica glared at Zoe even more icily than usual. “My great-great-grandfather once withstood three months of torture in a Confederate prison and didn’t crack. And you cut a prisoner free after a few minutes of yodeling?”

  Murray apparently didn’t want Zoe to get into deeper trouble, so he came to her aid. He cocked his head back and yodeled at the top of his lungs.

  It was worse than I could have ever imagined. Fingernails being dragged down a chalkboard had nothing on Murray’s yodeling. Paul Lee screamed in horror and curled into the fetal position again.

  Erica only made it a few syllables before yelling, “Stop!”

  Thankfully, Murray stopped. Blessed silence fell back over the room.

  “I owe you an apology,” Erica told Zoe. “That ought to be banned by the Geneva Conventions as cruel and unusual punishment.” She looked to Murray. “If you ever so much as think about yodeling again, I’ll forcibly remove your voice box with my bare hands.”

  “Duly noted,” Murray said, then asked, “Is there breakfast? I’m starving.”

  “It’s coming,” Zoe said. “I just ordered it.”

  “Is there bacon?” Murray asked hopefully.

  “You want more bacon?” Zoe asked. “You ate three pigs’ worth last night!”

  “With SPYDER after us, our time left in this life is limited,” Murray replied. “I’m going to enjoy every last second of it.” He opened the minibar and grabbed several bags of candy.

  I sat beside Erica on the coffee table and resumed our interrogation of Paul Lee. “You inherited the arms business?”

  “Er . . . ,” Paul began. “I, uh . . . well . . .”

  “Let me answer this. It’ll be faster.” Murray crammed half a Snickers bar into his mouth. “Paul’s family goes way back in illegal arms, the same way Erica’s family goes way back in the spy biz. Only while Erica’s family has been a bunch of Goody Two-shoes for the past ten generations, Paul’s family has been on the dark side.” He looked to Erica. “You’re both legacies. And as you know, when that’s the case, there’s a lot of pressure to keep the business in the family—even when talent skips a generation.”

  “Right,” Paul agreed, and then realized that he should have been insulted. “Hey! I’m not . . . uh . . . so bad. . . .”

  “Yes you are,” Murray said. “You screw up the orders for SPYDER all the time. You deliver the wrong number of weapons, or the wrong size—or the wrong weapons altogether. Last year SPYDER ordered two nuclear warheads from you, and you shipped us thirteen ground-to-air missiles. The only reason SPYDER has stayed in business with you is your accounting skills are worse than your organizational skills. They’ve been underpaying you for years.”

  “They have?” Paul said angrily. “Why those . . . those . . . those . . .”

  At this point, Mike entered from his bedroom, freshly showered and dressed in his pilfered Farkle Family shirt. He looked far more rested and refreshed than all the rest of us put together. He stopped and considered Paul Lee, who was still struggling to come up with the third word of his sentence. “Pinheads?” he suggested. “Jerks? Schmoes? Scum-sucking slimebuckets?”

  “Slimebuckets!” Paul agreed triumphantly. “Er . . . yes! That’s exactly what they are!”

  “You’re just as bad as they are,” Zoe told him. “SPYDER might be a bunch of murderous, sadistic scuzzballs, but they wouldn’t be able to do what they do if you hadn’t sold them the weapons to do it.”

  Paul blinked at her sadly, like he was hurt by the accusation. “If I, er . . . if I didn’t sell my, um . . . my weapons . . . well . . . er . . . they’d just find, uh . . . someone else to buy from.”

  “That doesn’t make what you do right,” Zoe informed him.

  Paul didn’t have a response to that. He could only nod meekly.

  Mike grabbed a bottle of orange juice from the minibar. “Here’s what I don’t get: Even if SPYDER stole the money they gave Paul back from him, they’re still laying out billions of dollars for these schemes. But none of their schemes has paid off lately. Ben and Erica have thwarted them all. SPYDER ought to be in the red for all that. But they seem to be as flush as ever. How can that be? How do they still have so much money?”

  “Insurance,” Murray replied.

  Even Erica seemed surprised by this. “Are you saying that SPYDER insures their evil schemes?” she asked.

  “Of course.” Murray poured an entire bag of M&M’s into his mouth. “They’d be idiots not to.”

  “So . . . ,” I began, trying to get my head around this, “there’s actually evil insurance?”

  “More or less.” Murray stored the M&M’s in his cheeks so he could talk, making him look like a chocoholic chipmunk. “Though the insurers themselves probably don’t think of it that way. To them, it’s just business. We show them a business plan, they do a risk assessment, and if they like the odds, they make the deal. And they almost always make the deal. Before you came along, Ben, a SPYDER scheme was regarded as very low risk. So the payouts SPYDER has received for your thwartings have been quite high. In fact, SPYDER has made money on their failures. So, I guess they owe you some thanks for that.”

  I stiffened at this. The idea that my defeating SPYDER would still have brought in profits for them was revolting.

  Erica put a calming hand on mine. “Don’t get upset. Whatever they’ve made in insurance is certainly only a fraction of what they would have made if their schemes had been successful.” She turned to Murray. “And now that they’re on a zero-for-four losing streak, I’m sure the insurance companies don’t see them as low risk anymore. In fact, I’d be surprised if they could line up any for this latest scheme.”

  Murray swallowed a lump of chocolate thoughtfully. “That’s possible, I guess. I haven’t been around SPYDER HQ much lately, given that you guys arrested me, but I do know it wasn’t so easy for them to get their last scheme insured. And you definitely screwed that one up.”

  “Which is another reason why they need to kill off all their arms dealers,” Zoe concluded. “They don’t have the funds to cover all their costs.”

  “They’re still laying out big bank for this job, though,” Mike said.

  “True,” Erica agreed, a smile spreading across her face. “But if they don’t have insurance this time, they’re taking all the risk themselves. So if we thwart them now, they might not have the funds to bounce back.”

  “You mean we could destroy SPYDER once and for all?” I asked, starting to smile myself.

  “It’s possible,” Erica answered. “Without money, they won’t be able to fund another scheme—and m
ore importantly, they won’t be able to run very far. Assuming they even get away from us in the first place.”

  “I like this,” Mike said approvingly. “I like it a lot.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Zoe asked. “We can’t thwart their scheme until we know what it is.”

  Mike waved this off casually. “I’m sure Ben can figure it out.” He turned to me. “Any ideas?”

  “None,” I confessed.

  “No big deal,” Mike said supportively. “I’m sure you’ll get it sooner or later. We just need to review a bit. What do we know so far?”

  Zoe pointed to Paul Lee. “Captain Pantywaist here sold a cargo ship full of serious weaponry to SPYDER and shipped it down to southern Argentina.”

  “Um,” Paul Lee said quietly. “Er . . . ah . . . not exactly.”

  “You didn’t ship it to southern Argentina?” Erica asked.

  “Er . . . no. I mean, I . . . uh . . . I did. But . . . ah . . . it wasn’t, um . . . it wasn’t only one ship.”

  Erica’s gaze bored into him. “How many ships was it?”

  Paul shrank in fear. When he spoke, it was so quiet, I could barely hear him. “Three.”

  “Three?” Erica exclaimed. “You sold three entire ships full of nuclear explosives to SPYDER?”

  “Um . . . yes.”

  “And that’s only the weapons you sold them,” I said. “They bought from Vladimir Gorsky, too—and maybe others as well.”

  Zoe returned her attention to the map of southern Argentina on the computer. “What on earth could possibly be worth using that much nuclear power on? There’s nothing around there but mountains and sea.”

  “There’s guanacos,” Murray said helpfully.

  “What the heck’s a guanaco?” Zoe asked.

  “It’s a relative of the camel,” Murray explained. “It kind of looks like an anorexic llama. From what I understand, the pampas down there are full of them.”

  “And you think SPYDER wants to nuke them all?” Zoe said. “What good is a whole bunch of vaporized guanacos?”

  “Suppose they only nuked one,” Murray said ominously. “What if they focused all that nuclear energy on it? If a single irradiated iguana could turn into Godzilla, just imagine what a giant guanaco would look like. It’d be terrifying!”

  Zoe gave him a withering look. “The only terrifying thing about this plan is that you actually think it’s possible. Godzilla never existed!”

  “But maybe he could,” Murray countered. “Or worse . . . Guanacazilla!” He gave a roar that was probably supposed to be half llama, half monster, but it sounded more like an angry hamster.

  We all considered him for a moment.

  “Moving on,” Erica said. “Does anyone have a suggestion that isn’t completely idiotic?”

  “Ha ha,” Murray said petulantly. “You mock me now, but we’ll see who’s laughing when there’s a thirty-story guanaco running rampant through Buenos Aires.”

  Paul Lee leaned close to me and whispered, “Has he . . . uh . . . had some sort of . . . um, brain injury?”

  “No,” I replied. “This is how he was born, I think.”

  “The lower tip of South America is awfully narrow,” Mike observed, staring at the map. “You think that much explosive could sever it from the mainland?”

  “What good would that do?” Zoe wanted to know.

  “Maybe SPYDER could create their own country,” Mike said.

  “They’d also render it completely uninhabitable from all the radiation,” Zoe said. “And it’d be full of radioactive mutant guanacos.”

  Mike sighed, then looked to me. “How about you, Brainiac? Any ideas?”

  “Maybe they just want to blackmail every country on earth,” I said.

  “You mean, they threaten to nuke everyone unless they cough up the money?” Erica asked.

  “Yes,” I answered. “It’s your basic James Bond villain plot from the early movies, but it could still work. It’s a variation on what they were planning last time, except now, instead of controlling the U.S. nuclear arsenal, they have their own.”

  Erica nodded gravely. “That’s the best I can come up with too. The biggest problem with threatening to nuke people is getting hit by the fallout yourself, but Ushuaia’s an awful long way from almost everywhere else.” She looked at Paul Lee. “Did you ever hear of SPYDER plotting something like this?”

  “They never . . . well . . . tell me . . . er, anything. . . . You see, they, well . . . they just ask for things, and . . . ah . . . I provide them.”

  Erica frowned in frustration, then looked back to me. “We should have just let Joshua kill this guy. He’s useless.”

  “He gave us crucial information about the amount of weapons he shipped,” I argued.

  “We could have learned that on our own,” Erica said dismissively.

  I was about to argue that there should have been some merit to saving anyone’s life, no matter how awful they were, but Zoe seemed to sense this and spoke up quickly to prevent any quarreling. “Let’s assume SPYDER is plotting to blackmail everyone on earth with nukes. Isn’t it about time that we alerted the CIA? We’re still only students. We can’t take SPYDER down by ourselves.”

  “We have before,” Erica said.

  “This time, we might not be so lucky,” Zoe said. “Don’t you think we could use some help?”

  “I never said we didn’t,” Erica replied.

  There was a knock at the door. “Room service!” a pleasant female voice announced.

  “Finally!” Murray exclaimed, tossing aside a wad of empty candy wrappers. “I’m starving!” He ran toward the door and flung it open before I could protest that this might not be the smartest thing to do with SPYDER around.

  Indeed, the woman at the door was not hotel staff. She was in her forties but looked much younger, and she wore slightly more formal dress than your typical tourist: a collared polo shirt, a nicely pleated skirt, and sensible shoes. Instead of carrying trays of food, she had a large suitcase.

  Murray froze when he saw her. “Hey!” he demanded. “Where’s my breakfast?”

  The woman socked him in the face.

  Murray reeled backward. “Okay, no tip for you,” he said, then collapsed on the floor, unconscious.

  Paul Lee screamed in fear again and ducked under the coffee table.

  Mike and Zoe both went on guard, worried about the sudden intruder.

  In contrast, I couldn’t stop smiling. I’d had the pleasure of meeting the woman before, and she had quickly become one of my favorite people.

  The woman stepped over Murray’s prone body, dragging her suitcase behind her. “That’s for trying to kill my daughter,” she informed the unconscious teen in a clipped British accent, then brightened when she saw me. “Hello, Benjamin! Such a pleasure to see you again!” She threw her arms open wide. “Come here! Give me a hug!”

  “Mike, Zoe,” I said, “I’d like you to meet Erica’s mother.”

  17

  REUNION

  Luxury Villa 11

  Aquarius Resort

  March 30

  0530 hours

  “It’s a pleasure to meet all of you,” Catherine Hale told my friends, then gave me a warm hug. The kind of hug that made me feel that all my problems were going to be taken care of. “Ah, Benjamin,” she sighed. “It seems you’ve gotten yourself into a spot of trouble yet again.”

  Erica’s mother worked for MI6, the British intelligence service, although Erica was the only one in her family who knew that. At first glance, Catherine looked as prim and proper as a servant at Buckingham Palace, but in truth, she could kick some serious butt.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I guess I have.”

  Catherine released me from her grasp, then opened her arms wide for Erica. “I have a hug here for you, too. Or is that not the sort of thing you care to do in front of your friends?”

  Erica’s cheeks turned a very faint shade of pink. Whenever she was around her mother, she ten
ded to act more like a teenage girl than at any other time. “Mom,” she said coolly, “I invited you here to help with the mission, not to embarrass me.”

  “I am here to help with the mission,” Catherine said. “The embarrassment just comes with having your mother around, I suppose. Benjamin, be a dear and help me with this, will you?” She nodded to her luggage.

  I picked the bag up and found it much heavier than I was expecting. I lugged it to the coffee table and was about to drop it there when Catherine said, “Oh, you might want to be cautious with that. There’s a few explosives in there. We don’t all want to get blown to smithereens now, do we?”

  Mike and Zoe, who were still trying to get their minds around the fact that Erica’s mother had appeared, now shifted their attention to the luggage and stared at it warily. Neither had said a word since Catherine’s arrival.

  I set the bag down on the coffee table as gingerly as I could.

  “I thought you said we couldn’t call for backup,” I said to Erica.

  “I said we couldn’t call the CIA,” she corrected. “Way too many double agents there. Look what happened with our pilots on the way down here. Plus, SPYDER is certainly keeping tabs on my father and grandfather. But I don’t think they know about Mom.”

  “Of course they don’t,” Catherine said. “I hate to toot my own horn, but virtually no one on earth knows of my position, even within MI6 itself.” She pointed a perfectly manicured finger at Mike and Zoe. “It’s a measure of how grave the situation is here that you’ve been made party to this information. If I get any sense that you’re about to ruin my secret, well . . . I’m afraid I’d have to take rather stern measures to protect it.”

  Even though Catherine sounded like the nicer, sweeter sister of Mary Poppins, there was an undercurrent of menace to her voice. Mike and Zoe both gulped fearfully.

  “You two don’t say much,” Catherine observed. “Are you always quiet as church mice, or has my arrival flummoxed you?”

  “The second one,” Mike answered. “We’re very flummoxed.”

  “Yes,” Zoe agreed. “It’s just that . . . I’ve known Erica for years, and I never realized she even had a mother.”