“Oh yeah, she hates crying,” Walter said sagely. Beatrix plopped down on Kennedy’s bed and, though she didn’t say it aloud, I could tell even she thought this room was entirely un-Kennedy.
“All right. So, you want to know how I ended up here?” she said, and we nodded. “It’s actually pretty basic. Remember how I saw them looking through my and Ben’s hospital records? Well, I saw that they were sorting them and pulling out the records that had notes in them—you know: ‘this kid plays hockey!’ and ‘this kid prefers to go by “Junior” ’ and ‘this kid won a science fair!’ So I went ahead and put stuff in my file—you know, how I won a programming contest once, and how I figured out a better algorithm for filtering out Internet spam, things like that, just to see what would happen.”
“You won a programming contest?” Walter asked.
“Yes, but I got disqualified because it was supposed to only be for Germans. Anyway, these guys in suits stopped me on my way to the grocery store to get sodas, and then one of them stuck me with some sort of knockout gas, and then . . . I woke up here with all the other kids. One of them is the best chess player in the world. Seriously. Apparently, they flew him in from Belgium.”
“How are they not freaking out? How are you not freaking out?
“Well, they are, actually. A lot of them cried, and some of them are in shock. But they basically told us that we were geniuses, and the country needs for us to become superspies, which a lot of the others are excited about. I was sort of scared at first, but I figured that you guys were here, for one, but also that this is great. SRS has a closed system—I could never have hacked into their networks from the outside. But now I’m on the inside!”
“Yeah, but you’re stuck on the inside, Beatrix!” I said, exasperated.
“How can I be stuck? You sneak out all the time,” Beatrix reminded me.
I sighed and told her exactly what Oleander had told the rest of us—how me being gone wasn’t news, but a new recruit slipping out?
Beatrix’s face fell.
“I guess I didn’t think of that,” she said, folding her arms over her chest. Her pride seemed to be deflating, and Walter looked very worried she might cry. “What are we going to do?” Beatrix asked as Kennedy patted her back.
“We’ll get you out of here, Beatrix. But Oleander thinks we should wait. Once they realize I’m double-crossing them, I can never come back. This is our last chance to learn about Groundcover.”
“So . . . I ruined everything?” Beatrix asked, and her voice cracked a tiny bit. “I thought I was helping. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“No, no. You’re right—now that you’re here, you can break into their system. You can help us figure out Groundcover, and then we’re all safe to leave. But . . . it’ll mean you have to stay here a few days while I figure out a plan. It’s your choice. Do you want to escape now, or do you want to wait?”
Beatrix shifted a little. “I can wait,” she said, and then looked at Kennedy. “Can we leave the floor open, though, in case I get homesick?”
“Of course,” Kennedy said, and we all nodded in relief. We had more time, even if it was only a little.
“What about my mom? What happens to her when we break Beatrix out?” Walter interrupted my thoughts.
Kennedy snorted, like Walter was being ridiculous. “She’ll be fine. It’s not like we’re breaking Beatrix out with guns and grenades or anything.”
“I know that,” Walter said. “I meant—I can’t exactly tell her about all this, because for all we know, she’s in on it. But what if she really doesn’t know anything, even though she’s assistant director? I can’t just leave her here . . .”
“You’ll have to,” I said firmly, but I hoped not unkindly. There was no other way, though. We were also leaving the dorm kids and Kennedy’s friends and plenty of other people who I strongly suspected had no idea about what SRS was. It wasn’t something I wanted, or something I felt good about, but it was the only way I could safely get out everyone I cared about.
Walter faltered for a second, opening his mouth like he was going to argue, but then he shut it in a firm line.
His voice shook a little as he said, “I just wish there was a way to show everyone at SRS the stuff on Groundcover and Evergreen. Show them how your parents are In the Weeds. That way there’re no more secrets. People can choose their sides, and we don’t have to worry about innocent people being stuck here.”
I nodded. “Maybe . . . Beatrix, do you think you could leave yourself some sort of back door into the system? And then once we’ve read the Groundcover files, we can send them to every computer here or something—”
Beatrix was shaking her head. “They’ll find it and shut it down before we can even read the files.”
“Right,” I said, sighing. “We’ll find a way to tell them eventually, Walter. If we have to drop in on missions and hand them little scraps of paper that say, ‘SRS is evil!’ then we will. Okay?”
“Thanks,” Walter said, and kind of half smiled. He still looked worried, but I guess that was to be expected. I knew how he felt. Knowing the truth was a lot harder than believing the lie.
Walter and I returned to our rooms. I could hear Beatrix talking to Ben over her com unit—I guess we didn’t have different channels—so I waited until she was done to get one and ask for Clatterbuck and Oleander. I updated them on everything and told them I was going to work on a plan.
Oleander didn’t sound very excited—I guess because our team was five kids and an ex-agent who, last I saw him, was dressed as a race car driver. “It just can’t go wrong, Hale. If it’s too risky, we should wait. You know how missions work. The more moving parts, the more things to break.”
I agreed with her 100 percent, and told her so. An hour later I pulled the sheets on my bed tightly and began drawing my finger across them, formulating plans without ever actually putting a pen to paper, since the last thing I needed was hard evidence. There was no way to make this simple. We needed stuff from the Disguise Department.
We needed access to the SRS cameras. We needed a cheerleading squad. One wrong move and we’d all likely be In the Weeds.
Easy enough.
We just couldn’t make a single wrong move.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kennedy had to do the impossible for the plan to even get off the ground: finally convince Fishburn that SRS badly needed a cheerleading squad.
I had to admit that this was the strangest start to a mission I’d ever heard of, much less ever planned. It was also perhaps the most difficult, the most time sensitive, and the most specific—because let’s face it: this was something only Kennedy could do. No matter what sorts of missions I’d gone on recently, Fishburn would still be incredibly suspicious if I came to him with a burning desire for pom-poms.
In the meantime, there was nothing for me to do but wait. SRS kept the recruits pretty far away from the rest of us. According to Beatrix, they were suffering through a crash course in everything SRS, which was taught by Mrs. Quaddlebaum and a few other senior agents. Since she was slated to become a HITS anyway, they’d allowed Beatrix to skip all the physical stuff and go straight to the deck with the other HITS guys. It was perfect, since it meant she was already learning her way around the SRS system.
Beatrix tucked her feet under the edge of my blankets—the stupid dorms were always cold. She said, “It’s genius. They have it set up so if anything triggers the system, everything shuts off. Literally, just powers down.”
“What’re you going to do then?” Ben said over the com unit. It was Thursday afternoon, which made me nervous since it meant so many people might overhear us, but I figured it was smart to mix up the times of our secret meetings. Still no word from Walter, and Kennedy was just finishing class, so it was just Beatrix and me, with Clatterbuck and Ben over the com unit.
“Well, I can still get in, but I can’t change any permissions or send out any files or change anything, basically. Anythi
ng like that happens, it’ll trigger a shutdown.”
“Does that mean you can’t crack the Groundcover file?” I asked. There was no point in Beatrix taking risks if she couldn’t discover anything more than what I already knew.
“Well, it means that I can locate the file, but I can’t pull it up on the computer I use in the control deck because none of the computers in there have that level access. It’s labeled as a Gold Level file—what computers or people would have that, Hale?”
I sighed. “That’s Fishburn. I hoped you’d be able to crack it from up there, but . . . we’d have to get on his actual computer to look at it. His office is locked up and has an alarm system that I can’t get past without getting caught. I wouldn’t have enough time to read a single page before agents were on top of me.”
“What if I printed the pages?” Beatrix asked carefully. “He has a printer in his office that I could access.”
I frowned. “That’d be better—but I’d still have to break into the office and set off the alarm. We couldn’t make a clean getaway . . . but . . . maybe. Let me think on it.”
Beatrix nodded. “Sounds good. You know, I feel sort of bad. The HITS guys are nice. Everyone here is nice, really, except Mrs. Quaddlebaum, and even she’s okay. I can see why you never realized this place was full of bad guys, Hale.”
“The villains never look like villains,” I said quietly, thinking about when Dad said it to me. He was right. Really, really right.
Kennedy suddenly flung open my dorm room door. She was grinning, and it was pretty heartwarming to see her cartwheel over to us, just like she would have done back when Mom and Dad were here.
“I think Fishburn’s convinced!” she said, landing squarely on the bed beside Beatrix.
“How’d you do it?” I asked.
“I told him I was really sad that the new kids were all separated from us, and that we should do something to bring everyone together. And he said that new recruits were just having a hard time adjusting, and I was like, ‘No, we should do something to show them we’re fun and exciting and not really that different from them!’ and he said, ‘You mean like eating dinner together?’ and I was like, ‘No, like an activity,’ and then he went off on this long thing about making friendship bracelets and finally I told him that cheerleading teams were basically famous for being superclose to one another. And I reminded him that most of the new recruits probably knew exactly what cheerleading was, so what if we all got together and did a performance for the rest of SRS? So in the end, he said I had to ask the new recruits first, and that I had to get at least as many kids from SRS on board to make it worth all the effort.”
“And the uniforms? Did he approve uniforms?” I asked. That was the most important part.
Kennedy nodded. “He said Ms. Elma could do uniforms, but he asked me not to make them complicated, because she was already busy.”
I exhaled. “Okay. Okay, this is good. Beatrix, can you convince all the new recruits to sign up? Without telling them what we’re doing?” I hated not to let them in on our plan, but there was no way we could trust a dozen regular kids with a secret this big.
“I think so—but I’ll have to tell them what we’re really up to, Hale.”
“No, we can’t—”
Beatrix continued, her voice patient. “We’ve pretty much been kidnapped. Even the ones who were excited about becoming spies are starting to get pretty freaked out. Would you want to be a cheerleader if you were being held captive by SRS?” She waited to continue until after I’d sighed and shaken my head. “I know they’re not spies, but neither am I, and you trust me.”
“If they say anything, we’ll all be In the Weeds,” I said.
“I know—and I’ll make sure they know. They only have to keep it a secret for a few days, anyhow.”
“And now we’ll know that when we say run, they’ll really run,” Kennedy offered, and I nodded.
“All right, all right—tell them, but tell them as little as possible, okay? And, Kennedy, you think you can get a dozen kids from SRS? Remember that you can’t count me,” I told her.
She nodded. “I think so. I mean, if I can convince Dr. Fishburn, surely, I can convince other people, right?”
This proved harder than she’d thought. While plenty of kids thought cheerleading was interesting enough, far fewer were interested in participating—especially since it wasn’t entirely clear what they’d be cheering for. Still, she managed to get six girls and two boys from her own class, and then Walter helped her convince a few junior agents. Once Beatrix got the recruits on board—which she said was indeed easy, once they knew being a cheerleader would mean going home—Ms. Elma began working on the cheerleading uniforms. She liked to loudly complain about them whenever Kennedy, I, or Fishburn were within earshot. I couldn’t exactly blame her; going from sewing bulletproof panels into ball gowns to making cheerleading skirts was probably a little insulting.
The cheerleading squad was just one part of all the preplanning that had to be done. We also needed a new device from Ben, one that he’d stayed up all night—literally—to invent. Clatterbuck, dressed as a sandwich cart guy, delivered it to me the following morning. He handed it off while pretending to sell me a grilled cheese on whole wheat (which was delicious). I couldn’t use Ben’s creation right away, of course—the HITS guys would notice. I’d have to plug it in at the last possible moment. Ben called it the BENoculars, which I thought was a pretty clever name.
Finally, on the night before my plan truly went into action, Kennedy and I were in the Disguise Department. I was pretending to tutor her on artificial beard application. Secretly, we were stuffing our backpacks full of supplies we’d need the following day.
“Think we need a neck prosthetic?” Kennedy whispered while dabbing spirit gum along her jawline. She had half a long bristly beard on, and it looked pretty excellent except that it was on a nine-year-old girl.
“I think so,” I answered. “Take two just in case. Is the cheerleading routine done?”
“We’ve practiced every day this week. We’re really good! I wish we could go compete somewhere. I think we’d do okay. I mean, we probably wouldn’t place, but still. Walter does this really cool stunt with one of the girl chess players.”
“I’m sorry I’ll miss it,” I told her.
“It’s okay. You’re sort of saving our parents and all,” Kennedy answered. “Besides, I think we’re going to get it on video.”
The next morning I got up early. I wasn’t going to class today, but I needed to make it look like I was. I packed my bag carefully, putting everything we’d stolen from the Disguise Department into the main section. At eight o’clock, I put on the League com unit to check in with everyone like we’d planned.
“It’s Hale. Everyone here?”
Ben, Beatrix, and Kennedy said hello, then Clatterbuck, who added, “And Dr. Oleander is here with me. Her com got broken last night, so—”
“You broke my com last night,” I heard Oleander say in a very firm voice.
“I thought they were waterproof!” Clatterbuck protested.
“Anyway,” Ben said, then cleared his throat. “League base to field agents—let’s get started.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mission: Figure out Project Groundcover/Save Beatrix/
Save the new recruits/Escape SRS
Step 1: Install the BENoculars
The BENoculars were maybe Ben’s most clever invention yet. They looked like an air freshener, the kind you plug into the wall. They were actually some sort of wireless signal device. When combined with a tiny unnoticeable program Beatrix had written and installed on the SRS computers, they would transmit a signal that would give Ben access to SRS’s security cameras. Of all the million and a half parts this plan involved, the BENoculars were the piece I had the most confidence in. After all, Ben’s devices had never failed me before. I plugged them into an outlet in my dorm room.
“All right,” Ben said through my com unit
. “I see that they’re plugged in. The cameras are trying to load. They’re loading. I think they’re loading. Hang on—my computer froze.”
I groaned and wondered if maybe I could steal a new SRS laptop to replace one of the ancient ones The League was still using.
“Got them!” Ben said triumphantly. “Wait, no. They went out again. I think you need to plug them in somewhere else. The signal just isn’t able to make it through all the walls where you are. Go someplace big and open.”
“The cafeteria?” Kennedy said over the com, her voice a little lost in the chatter from all the cheerleaders. The cheerleading squad’s debut performance would take place during lunch today, which meant they’d get out of class early to get ready.
Beatrix, however, was on the command deck with the HITS guys, just as she was most days, so she had to whisper, “The cafeteria is too low, probably.”
“Hang on,” I said. I rooted through my trash can and removed the aluminum foil wrapper that Clatterbuck gave me with my sandwich at his pretend food truck. I tore along the edges until it was a circle, and then curved it into a cone shape. With a little tape, I stuck it on top of the BENoculars, where the scent would come out if it were actually an air freshener.
“Try now,” I instructed Ben.
“Hey! That did it. What’d you do?”
“Boosted the antennae. Do you have eyes on everything?”
“Pulling them up now . . . yes. I’ve got every camera at SRS, as far as I can tell. Including one in an office—oh, gross, that guy is picking his nose! Oh, now he’s—Oh, that is so gross—”
“Focus, Ben,” I reminded him. I double-checked that the utility belt was hidden by my shirt, and then I left my dorm room. I tucked the com bracelet under my sleeve, hiding the earring by pretending I was scratching my neck whenever someone passed me in the hallway. I glanced up at the hallway camera as I walked past it.
“I see you, Hale,” Ben said. “All right—go ahead and head toward the closet to wait. You’ve got plenty of time. Beatrix, have the HITS guys noticed the signal from the BENoculars?”