Spy School Page 5

  It caught the assassin on his wrist, knocking his gun free just as he fired.

  I felt the heat of the bullet as it passed over my shoulder and shattered my window.

  The gun disappeared into the shadows. We both heard it skitter across the floor and thud into the wall someplace behind me.

  I swung the racket wildly, not caring what I hit as long as it was painful. I heard the crack of graphite against bone and the startled yelp of the assassin.

  “Help!” I screamed, hopefully loud enough to wake the hall. “Someone’s trying to kill—”

  The assassin lunged at me before I could finish. My eyes had adjusted enough to the dark room to see things now.

  I leapt onto my cot, slipping past him as he tried to land a karate chop, which instead cleaved my bedside table in half. I’d intended to bolt for the door, but my feet got tangled in my sheets and the assassin recovered faster than I’d expected.

  He wheeled around, looking to take me down at the knees.

  So I bounced on the bed, hacking down with the racket at the same time.

  I actually have a great forehand slice. It’s the best part of my game. I caught the assassin right above the ear, hard enough to shatter the racket. He gave a gurgle of pain and dropped, bounding off the mattress and landing on the floor with a thud.

  I bolted, yanking open the door and racing into the hall. I banged the beheaded racket handle on every door I passed. “Help! Help me! It’s an emergency!”

  I could hear people groggily waking in their rooms, saw a light flick on from beneath one door. But I didn’t stop to wait, fearing I had only temporarily waylaid my assassin. I kept moving for the stairs, screaming the whole way.

  I was almost there when the door at the end of the hall opened and my resident adviser emerged. It was the first time we’d met, though my welcome packet had informed me that her name was Tina Cuevo and she was a sixth year. She was tall and beautiful, with jet-black hair and skin the color of hot chocolate. She wore flannel pajamas, bunny slippers, and a look that said she wasn’t happy to be roused from her sleep—although this changed to one of astonishment when she saw me.

  I wear only underwear when I sleep.

  From the moment I’d been attacked, I had been thinking only about how to survive. Now, for the first time, it dawned on me that I was practically naked.

  I spun around to find everyone else on the floor emerging from their rooms.

  Most of them immediately broke into laughter.

  Thankfully, Tina didn’t. I think the look of sheer terror on my face convinced her this wasn’t a prank. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “There’s an assassin in my room. He just tried to kill me.”

  I’d expected Tina to evacuate the hall and call for help, but that ran counter to her training. Instead, she produced a gun from the pocket of her pajamas—apparently, she slept with it—and went into action mode. “I’ll take care of this. There’s a robe in my room. For Pete’s sake, put it on.” She flattened herself against the wall and moved quickly toward my door.

  I slipped into her room, which was larger than mine and far more nicely decorated. There were all sorts of homey touches like framed pictures, window dressings and throw rugs that made me feel oddly safe and secure, given that I’d been running for my life seconds before. The terry-cloth robe hung on a hook by the door. I put it on. It was warm and smelled like cinnamon.

  I wasn’t sure what to do next. Fleeing still seemed like a perfectly rational option. But it felt wrong to run off in a woman’s bathrobe while she was facing an assassin for me. I’d already run down the hall almost nude; I didn’t need to make any more faux pas that night. I found a cozy stuffed chair buried under a stack of tutoring manuals and settled into it.

  A minute later a fellow student my age poked his head in. “Uh . . . Tina wants to talk to you.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In your room. Duh.”

  I went back out into the hall. Every doorway now had someone peeking out of it, looking toward me. Heading back to my room seemed like a terrible idea, given that I’d left an assassin in there, but everyone seemed much calmer than they might have if there was still an enemy agent on a killing spree. So I walked back down the gauntlet of gawkers.

  Tina emerged from my room as I approached. “About this assassin of yours . . .”

  I gulped, concerned. “Did I kill him?”

  “That’s hard to say.” Tina waved me inside. “I’m having a little trouble finding him.”

  I stepped back into my room. The light was on now. The place was trashed. Furniture was shattered. My belongings were strewn everywhere.

  But the assassin was gone.

  DEBRIEFING

  Armistead Dormitory

  January 17

  0205 hours

  “You’re claiming that someone tried to kill you. Tonight.”

  “You don’t believe me?” I asked.

  The principal stared at me for a bit. It was hard to tell if he was being careful with his answer or was just sleepy. It was 2:05 in the morning. The principal had been roused only ten minutes before and appeared to be in desperate need of caffeine. As he lived on the school grounds, he had merely wrapped a thick robe over his pajamas and hurried right to the dormitory. His fluffy slippers were soggy from the snow.

  “There’s no sign of the killer,” he said. “Or the weapon.”

  “He shot through my window,” I countered.

  “Lots of things could have broken that window.”

  “There must be a bullet.”

  “Sure. Somewhere outside under five acres of snow.”

  I grew exasperated. It probably wasn’t the smartest move, but I was tired too. “You really think I trashed my own room and smacked myself around to make it look like someone tried to kill me? Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know,” the principal replied. “To get attention, maybe. The more important question is: Why would someone want to kill you? You just started here. You barely passed your SACSAs today. If someone wanted to go to the trouble to get past all our defenses and break into a dormitory to kill someone, you’d think they’d go after somebody worth killing.”

  I paused to think about that. Although the statement was offensive, I had to admit there was some logic to it.

  The principal had commandeered Tina’s room to question me. My room had been sealed off until a team of expert crime scene investigators could arrive. I hadn’t even been allowed to grab my own clothes. I was still wearing Tina’s fluffy bathrobe. Together, the principal and I looked like a page from a Bed Bath & Beyond catalog.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “What is it now?” the principal snapped.

  “Thought I might be of service.” Alexander Hale slipped inside. Unlike the principal, he was wide awake. In fact, it appeared he hadn’t gone to bed yet. He still wore his tuxedo, though the bow tie was undone and the collar was unbuttoned. There was a tiny red smear of what looked like lipstick on his neck. “I came as soon as I heard.”

  The principal probably would have chewed out anyone else who barged into his interrogation, but he shrank respectfully before Alexander. “Where were you?” he asked.

  “Doing a little undercover work at the Russian embassy.” Alexander gave a sly wink, then turned to me. “But that’s not what’s important right now. Are you all right, Benjamin?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’d you escape? Who rescued you?”

  “I did it myself.”

  Alexander whistled appreciatively. “Really? How? Karate? Jujitsu? Krav Maga?”

  “Tennis racket.”

  “Ah! I told you that’d come in handy. Nice work.”

  The principal shrugged, unimpressed. “It would’ve been really nice if he hadn’t allowed the killer to escape.”

  “It’s his first night here,” Alexander replied. “He hasn’t even had Intro to Self-Defense yet, let alone Enemy Subjugation and Apprehension.”r />
  “And yet he fought off a professional assassin? With a mere tennis racket?” the principal asked incredulously. “Maybe there wasn’t a killer at all. Maybe it was just some of the older boys hazing him and he couldn’t take it.”

  My thoughts briefly flickered to Chip Schacter. He seemed like a big enough jerk to think threatening someone with a loaded gun was funny.

  But then something occurred to me. Something I’d forgotten about in my panic.

  “He asked me about something called Pinwheel,” I said.

  The principal and Alexander both turned toward me, surprised. Then they both tried to hide the fact that they were surprised. Alexander did a considerably better job.

  “Pinwheel?” the principal asked, acting as though this was the oddest thing he’d ever heard.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” the principal replied in a way that suggested he was lying. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Well, he had,” I shot back. “He said it was in my file.”

  The principal and Alexander shared a look. A glimmer of understanding—and perhaps concern—passed between them.

  “Benjamin, I’d like you to think about this very carefully,” Alexander said. “What, exactly, did the assassin want to know about this Pinwheel?”

  I tried to reconstruct the conversation in my room. Even though it hadn’t been long before, it wasn’t easy to do. My memories of the event were jumbled by fear and adrenaline. “He just wanted to know what it was. I think.”

  Alexander sat on Tina’s bed and looked me in the eye. “And what did you tell him?”

  “That I had no idea what it was.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes . . . No, wait. I told him it had something to do with cryptography. But I was only making that up.”

  “Did he believe it?” the principal asked, intrigued.

  “He said he already knew it had to do with cryptography,” I answered. “He wanted to know what it did. I tried to make something else up, but he knew I was lying and so he tried to kill me.”

  “Are you sure that’s exactly what happened?” said Alexander.

  “Well, he aimed his gun right at me—,” I began.

  “But when did he pull the trigger?” Alexander asked. “Before you fought back . . . or after?”

  “If I hadn’t fought back, he would have killed me,” I explained.

  Alexander put a hand on my shoulder, signaling me to relax. “Take a moment and think about it. Try to recall everything that happened as it happened. Take your time. There’s no rush. Determining the exact proper sequence of events is important.”

  I closed my eyes and thought some more. It certainly seemed the assassin had been trying to kill me. That was the whole point of being an assassin, after all. But everything had happened so fast—and in the dark, no less. Finally, I had to admit, “I’m not sure if he was trying to shoot me or not. Maybe he was only trying to scare me—and the gun only went off when I hit him with the racket.”

  Alexander and the principal locked eyes for a moment.

  “Does that mean something?” I asked.

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not,” the principal said, though I could tell he was lying again.

  There was another knock at the door.

  “What?!” the principal snapped.

  A very attractive woman entered. She wore a formfitting pantsuit and, despite being about only thirty, didn’t seem fazed by the principal’s angry demeanor. Instead, she was all business. “I’m Agent Coloretti, Crime Scene Investigation. I have a preliminary report on the potential assassin.”

  “It’s about time,” the principal groused. “What’ve you got?”

  “Nothing,” Coloretti responded. “No fingerprints. No blood. Not a single hair left behind.”

  “So . . . there wasn’t an assassin?” the principal asked.

  “I didn’t say that,” Coloretti replied. “Only that there’s no concrete evidence of one.”

  “What about the surveillance cameras in the dormitories?” Alexander asked. “They should have recorded something.”

  Coloretti sighed. “Yes, they should have . . . if they hadn’t been dismantled.”

  The principal snapped to his feet. “All of them?”

  “No, not all of them,” Coloretti said. “But enough of them, starting with the ones on the northern perimeter wall about twenty minutes before the incident. Then the ones along the route to the dormitory. And finally, the ones in the dormitory. He knew exactly where they all were—and took out every single one that might have recorded him. That, in itself, is evidence that someone breached the campus.”

  “Someone who really knew what he was doing,” Alexander added. “Someone professional.”

  “And yet, not professional enough that he couldn’t be beaten by a newbie with a tennis racket,” the principal scoffed.

  “Perhaps he underestimated his target,” Alexander countered. “Everyone does it now and then.”

  “Really?” the principal asked. “Have you?”

  Alexander thought for a bit, then admitted, “No.”

  Agent Coloretti was staring at me so intently, I checked to make sure my robe wasn’t hanging open. “Given the nature of this event, perhaps the rest of this discussion should be Security Level 4C,” she told the others.

  Now the principal and Alexander both looked my way as well.

  “Yes,” the principal agreed. “I think that’s well advised.”

  The three of them started out the door without so much as another word to me.

  “Wait!” I said.

  They all paused.

  “You’re just going to leave me here by myself?” I asked. “After someone might have tried to kill me tonight?”

  “You saved yourself once,” the principal said. “If anyone else comes at you, just do it again.”

  “But my room’s a crime scene,” I protested. “Where am I supposed to sleep tonight?”

  The principal sighed, as though I were trying to be a constant pain in his rear end. “Where else? In the Box.”

  DISCLOSURE

  The Box

  January 17

  0500 hours

  That’s it, I thought, the moment I laid eyes on my new room. I quit.

  The Box hadn’t been designed for use as a dorm room. It had been designed as a holding cell. If I had actually managed to capture my assassin that night, he would have ended up in the Box. Instead, I did. Lucky me.

  My relocation there wasn’t officially a punishment. The Box was simply the safest place for me on campus. It had been designed to keep enemies from getting out—but that also meant it was extremely hard for one’s enemies to get in. It was a reinforced cement bunker in the sub-subbasement of the administration building. The walls were three feet thick, and there was a steel door with three separate locks. Outside, it was protected by a matrix of lasers; tripping one would trigger an alarm—and the deployment of sarin nerve gas. There were also seven security cameras, all being monitored in the academy’s security command center.

  Whereas all this made me safer, it wasn’t exactly comfortable. The security staff had made a few token attempts to spruce up the Box for me—a gingham comforter on the bed, a few dog-eared spy novels from the library, a plastic houseplant—but it was still a frigid, windowless block of concrete far removed from any of my fellow students. After a long day of being threatened and humiliated, the Box was the last straw. If it hadn’t been the middle of the night, I would have called my parents then and there to ask them to come pick me up and return me to normal life. But I figured I could hunker down and make it to morning. Washing out would be humiliating, and perhaps I’d regret it for the rest of my life, but the rest of my life promised to be much longer if I left spy school.

  Even though the Box was the safest place on campus, I couldn’t fall asleep. My body was exhausted, but my mind was wired after the night’s excitement. Every time I heard a noise, I imagined another as
sassin was slipping in to kill me. But beyond that, dozens of questions gnawed at me. What was Pinwheel? How could I have cryptography skills without knowing about them? Why was the principal behaving so strangely? Something mysterious was going on at spy school, and no one was telling me the truth.

  I snapped upright in bed for the umpteenth time, thinking I’d heard the door creak. My cheap bedside clock said it was five a.m. I peered into the shadows of the Box, saw nothing, and chided myself for letting my nerves get the best of me yet again.

  And then one of the shadows pounced on me.

  It hit me full force in the chest, knocking me flat on my cot. The moment I opened my mouth to yell for help, a rag was crammed inside. I brought up my knee, hoping to connect with my assailant’s solar plexus, only to find my legs in a scissor lock between theirs.

  “Take it easy,” my attacker hissed. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

  If anyone else had said it, I probably wouldn’t have believed them, But I recognized the voice. And her smell: lilacs and gunpowder. It was the second time that day I’d been pinioned beneath Erica Hale.

  I tried to say I understood, but with the rag in my mouth, it came out as “Mmmmthmmpphffthh.” So I relaxed and nodded agreement instead.

  “Okay, then,” Erica whispered. “I’m going to let you go and take the rag out. But if you make any attempt to fight back or call for help, I will hurt you, understand?”

  I nodded again.

  Erica unscissored her legs and plucked the rag from my mouth.

  I reached for my bedside lamp, but she caught my hand. “Don’t. There are cameras inside the room. I’d prefer no one know I was here.” She sat on the bed, only a foot away, as there was nowhere else for her to go in the tiny room.

  As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, she began to take shape. She was sheathed in black, her hair tucked into a black scarf, black commando paint on her face. For a moment, in the extreme quiet, I thought I could hear her heart beating excitedly, but then I realized it was my own.

  “How’d you get in here?” I whispered.

  “I’m better at breaking and entering than they realize. And I wanted to talk to you.”