Cross My Heart And Hope To Spy (18 page)

Which was a nice way of putting it, I guess. “Yeah,” I said, wishing I could figure out some way to turn the conversation back to him. “Well, what would
you
do if everyone thought you had breached security?”

He smiled and leaned forward. I heard the front legs of his chair land on the hardwood floor with a crack. “I’d probably find out everything I could about everyone who…was _new _?” he said, as if the words had come right off the top of his head. “Who maybe didn’t have an alibi on the night of the ball? I might even try to get close to anyone I suspected,” he said. He eased in closer. “I might even bug their rooms if I got the chance.”

“Hahahahaha!” (Yeah, that’s the sound of a highly trained secret agent forcing laughter.)

“But
you
wouldn’t do any of that,” he said, standing. “Would you, Gallagher Girl?”

“Of course I—”

Then Zach reached into his pocket and pulled out a small wire that I had last seen disappearing inside an electrical outlet in the boys’ rooms. He dropped the bug on the table, then leaned close to my ear and whispered, “I’m not all bad, Gallagher Girl.”

He pulled his jacket from the back of the chair and turned to walk away. “Of course, I’m not all good, either.”

I sat staring at the bug, thinking about what it meant, as Zach turned the corner and called, “Thanks for the date!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Liz demanded, but I didn’t know which part of my horrendous night she was referring to—the part where Zach had said he wasn’t all good or all bad, or how he had routinely employed countersurveillance measures (a sign of the truly cautious and/or guilty), or that he’d thought we’d had a date! To tell you the truth, they all made me want to throw up.

Our observation post was dusty and cramped, so we sat on the floor, surrounded by candy wrappers and half-eaten bags of microwave popcorn, notebooks, and charts; and the only thing that was clear was that no matter how much it seemed like
normal
boys played mind games—going to school with boys who have had actual classes on the subject is infinitely harder.

“So did he think it was a
real
date?” Liz asked Macey. “Because he didn’t buy her anything. Or was it just a study date? Or did he see it as some kind of
date with destiny
or—”

“Shhh,” Bex said, holding an earpiece to her ear. “We’ve got audio!” she said, bright eyes shining.

21:08 hours: Audio surveillance captured, a conversation in which many of The Subjects agreed that Headmistress Morgan is a “smokin’ babe,” even though The Operatives know for a fact that Rachel Morgan opposes all forms of nicotine use.

“So he didn’t get all the bugs?” Liz asked.

“Or he
left
some,” I said, running through all the possible scenarios. “Maybe he wants us to keep listening so they can feed us false information. Or maybe he really did miss some bugs. Or maybe he left some in the other boys-rooms because he wants us to suspect them. Or maybe those other boys really did breach security, but Zach just can’t say so because he’s bound by some kind of freaky blood-oath-brotherhood pact that—”

“Cam!” Macey snapped, jerking me back to reality. (I fully admit the blood oath thing was a little out there, but the other options were totally viable.) “He gave you the bug either to show you he’s on to you, or to mess with your head, and…it’s working.”

Spying is a game, and so is dating, I guess. It’s all about strategy and playing to your strengths. People think espionage is all fun and games—that everything we do is cat and mouse, but that night I learned a CoveOps lesson as valuable as anything Joe Solomon had taught me. Real life in the clandestine services isn’t cat and mouse—it’s cat and cat.

“Lies,” Mr. Solomon said the next morning as he walked into the classroom. “We tell them to our friends,” he said. “We tell them to our enemies. And eventually…we tell them to ourselves.” He turned to write on the board.

“A lie is typically accompanied by what physical symptoms, Ms. Lee?” Mr. Solomon prompted.

“Dilated pupils, increased pulse, and atypical mannerisms,” Kim said as I racked my brain, trying to remember if any of those things had been true with Zach the night before. If anything he’d
ever
said had been true.

“Spies tell lies, ladies and gentlemen, but that’s not what today is about. Today,” Mr. Solomon said, “is about how to spot them. Now, a seasoned operative will know how to control their pulse and voice, but for the purpose of today’s lesson, I think these will come in handy.”

He handed each of us something that looked like the mood rings Bex and Liz and I had bought in Roseville in the eighth grade. “Dr. Fibs has been kind enough to share these prototypes of a new portable voice-stress analyzer he’s developing,” Solomon continued. “It’s equipped with a microchip that will monitor a person’s voice, and if they are lying, it will vibrate very softly, alerting the wearer to the he.”

The piece of plastic in my hands looked cheap— practically worthless—but like most things at the Gallagher Academy, there was a lot more to it than met the eye

“You have to be close to your subject,” Mr. Solomon explained as he walked to Tina Walters’s desk. “And the rings can be fooled, with training. For example, ask me a question, Ms. Walters—any question.”

Tina hesitated a second or two before exclaiming, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

Half the class giggled and the other sat silently in semi-horror. Joe Solomon bit back a smile and said, “No.”

Tina’s eyes were glued to the ring on her right hand as she said, “Nothing. It didn’t do anything. So it’s true?”

“Ask me again,” Mr Solomon said.

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

This time Mr. Solomon said, “Yes.” A moment later Tina was shaking her hand like it had fallen asleep or something. “It’s not broken, Ms. Walters,” Mr. Solomon said knowingly. “It’s just not as good at detecting lies as I am at telling them.”

I couldn’t help myself; I glanced at Zach, who caught me looking.

“Partner with the person across from you,” Mr. Solomon said, and an uneasy feeling settled in my stomach. “Watch their eyes, pay attention to their voice. And see if you can guess who’s lying.”

I know I’m not the first girl in history who’d ever had that mission, but I felt like there’d never been so much riding on it. “Oh,” Zach said with a quick raise of his eyebrows, “this should be fun.” I didn’t need the ring on my finger to tell me he totally wasn’t lying.

I started coming up with reasons I could be excused from the lecture, but no one had been exposed to plutonium since the mid-1990s, so I was stuck. With Zach. And my fibbing ability was about to be tested more than it ever had been before.

“What is your name?” I asked, thinking back to that cold, sterile room beneath the mall in D.C. and the way a professional had gone about looking for the truth.

“Zach,” he said.

“What’s your
full
name?”

“That’s a pretty boring question, Gallagher Girl.”

“Zach!”

“Yes, that’s correct.” He held up my right hand. “See— not lying.”

“Where were you during the Code Black?”

Zach broke out into a broad smile. “That’s better.”

“Answer the—”

“I was with you,” he said. “Remember?” Then he leaned on the desk between us. “My turn,” he said, grinning like an idiot. “Did you have fun last night?”

“Zach, I really don’t think that’s what Mr. Solomon is going for with this particular exercise.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Zach said. “We should really do it again sometime.”

I looked at the ring on my hand, but it didn’t do a thing. He was telling the truth. But I still didn’t know what it meant.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“The Blackthorne Institute for Boys,” he replied in a sing-song tune.

“What do your parents do?” I asked, and for the first time he didn’t respond. He didn’t smirk. He didn’t joke.

He just straightened the notebook on his desk and asked, “What do you think they do?”

I could hear Tina Walters asking Grant, “So what’s your idea of a perfect date?” On the far side of the room, Courtney wanted to know what Eva really thought of Courtney’s new haircut, but none of it seemed funny or interesting or cool at the moment.

If the Gallagher Academy were to sell truth rings on the black market, every girl in America would line up to have one, but I didn’t need the ring on my finger to tell me that Zach wasn’t acting or lying or living out some legend then. There was a lot more to the story.

“They were CIA?” I whispered.

“Used to be.”

But I didn’t ask for details, because I knew they were classified; and I knew they were sad; and, most of all, now I knew Zach Goode was a little bit like me.

It should have gone in the reports, of course. I should have told my friends. We’d been searching for weeks for any clue, any sign, that these boys had pasts and histories—that they even existed at all. For one brief moment I had seen the real Zach—no covers, no legends, no lies. But as I walked through the dim, quiet corridors on Sunday night, I carried Zach’s secret with me. I couldn’t bring myself to set it down. “Hey, kiddo,” Mom called when she heard me enter the office. Smoke and steam rose from a small electric skillet behind her desk while the microwave hummed. When she came to hug me, I saw that she was wearing thick wool socks that were far too big for her—Dad’s socks. She had on an old fraying sweatshirt that was rolled up at the sleeves—Dad’s sweatshirt. And even though I’d seen my mother in everything from ball gowns to business suits, I don’t think I’d ever seen her look more beautiful.

“Tonight,” Mom announced happily, “is taco night!” I had to wonder if that was the same woman who had sat in this very room while the world went black around us, shrouded in shadows and the red glow of emergency lights. I knew I would never know all my mother’s legends.

“How are your classes?” she asked, as if she didn’t know.

“Fine.”

“How are the girls?” she asked, as if she never saw them.

“They’re great. Macey’s getting bumped up to the ninth grade sciences classes.”

Mom smiled. “I know.”

Everything was normal. Everything was good. Even the tacos looked halfway edible, but still I picked at my fingernails and shifted around on the couch. I watched my mother, who had wrapped herself in the last traces of my father, and said, “How did you meet Dad?”

Mom stopped stirring whatever it was she’d taken from the microwave. She forced a smile. “What brought that on?”

I guess it was a pretty good question. After all, normal girls probably know their parents’ story, but that’s not necessarily true for spy girls—spy girls learn early that most things about their parents are classified.

Still, I couldn’t stop. “Was it a mission? Did you meet when you were both working at Langley, or was it before that?” I felt myself running out of breath. “Did the Gallagher Academy do an exchange with Blackthorne then, too?”

Mom cocked her head and studied me as if I might be coming down with something. “What makes you think your father went to the Blackthorne Institute?”

I thought about the picture but lied. “I don’t know. I guess I just…assumed. I mean, he did go there—didn’t he?”

She looked down at the bowl and kept on stirring. “No, sweetie. He had friends who went there. He guest-lectured on occasion. But your dad grew up in Nebraska—you know that.”

I did know that, but somehow in the last few months I’d started questioning everything I’d ever known.

“So how did you meet?” I asked again. “How did you know …” I said, biting back the one question I really wanted to know but couldn’t ask:
How could you trust him?

My stomach growled, but I didn’t feel hungry.

“Someday I’ll tell you the story, kiddo.” My mother smiled and handed me a plate. “Just as soon as you have clearance.”

I sat in the secret-room-slash-observation post for a long time that night, listening to the wire taps. Searching for some small clue.

It was well after midnight when I finally eased out of the corridor and stepped over the ashes of a fire that had gone out. I slipped through the massive opening of a stone fireplace (one of many entrances to that corridor), expecting silence, expecting darkness, expecting anything but the sound of Zach Goode saying, “So the tour is closed, huh?”

Which is why, spy training or not, I bolted upright too quickly and banged my head on the top of the fireplace.

“Ow!” I cried, clutching the back of my head. “What are
you
doing here?”

“Come on,” he said, ignoring my question and gently feeling the back of my head where a bump was starting to form.

I tried to pull away, but he pushed harder, and even though I know he was The Subject and all, it’s hard not to get a bit of a shiver down your spine when a cute boy is inches away with his hand in your hair.

“You’ll live.”

“You’re being nice,” I said, honestly shocked.

“Don’t tell anyone.” He crossed his arms and nodded at the stone wall from which I’d just mysteriously appeared. A smile grew on his lips as he said, “So…did your bugs hear anything interesting?”

21:00 hours: The Subject admitted to leaving some of The Operative’s listening devices within the East Wing. Or he tried to trick The Operative into admitting that there were remaining devices … Or The Subject was just making covert small talk. Or …

21:01 hours: The Operative couldn’t help but remember how much easier it is talking to regular boys.

“What is it, Gallagher Girl?” He asked, sliding his hands into his pockets. “No snappy comebacks? Nonexistent cat named Suzie got your tongue?”

“How do you know about Suzie?”

He pointed to himself once more and said, “Spy.”

Moonlight fell through the windows, slicing between us. There were no sounds of squeaking floorboards and giggling girls, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say as I stood there drowning in the silence, struggling for breath while my head throbbed and Zach leaned closer. And closer. His hand reached toward my face, and for the second time that semester I froze.