Cross My Heart And Hope To Spy (7 page)

“And…flip,” Bex said an hour later.

We stopped midstride in front of the museum, then pivoted and started back in the opposite direction. The guy in the red baseball cap who had been following us since we passed the National Gallery of Art kept walking as if he didn’t care that the two girls in front of him had just done a total about-face. And maybe he didn’t. Care, I mean. But then again, maybe another member of his team had rotated into position and taken his place. There was no way to know. So we kept walking.

“We could be clear,” Bex said, sounding wishful. “There might not be anyone on us.”

“Or maybe there’s a team of twenty
CIA
all-stars out here, and we’re just not good enough to see them.”

“Yeah,” Bex said. “There’s that, too.”

I love being a pavement artist; seriously, I do. It’s like when guys who would normally hate being freakishly tall discover basketball, or when girls with abnormally long fingers sit down at a piano. Blending in, going unseen, being a shadow in the sun is what I’m good at.
Seeing
the shadows, it turns out, is not my natural gift.

“I can’t believe I haven’t seen anyone!” I said in frustration.

“Look at the bright side, Cam.” Bex flung her arms out wide like a girl who’d cut class or run away from a school group. To the people around us, she no doubt looked beautiful and exotic—but not at all like a highly trained operative who was memorizing the faces of every person who lingered within a hundred feet.

“We could be in Ancient Languages right now,” she said, which was a very good point. “We could be locked in the basement with Dr. Fibs.” Which was an
excellent
point. (Since the X-ray goggles incident, our chemistry professor’s lack of depth perception had made him even
more
accident-prone.) “And here the view is infinitely better.”

I wish I could say she was talking about the Washington Monument or the Capitol or any of the sights that drive tourists to D.C. But I know Bex well enough to know she was really talking about a pair of boys who were sitting on a park bench thirty feet away, staring at her.

“Oooh,” Bex said, throwing an arm around my shoulders. “I
want one.”

“They’re not puppies.”

“Come on.” She grabbed my hand. “Let’s go talk to them. They’re really cute!”

And … okay … I admit it: they
were
really cute. But this wasn’t the time to encourage her. “Bex, we have a mission.”

“Yeah, but we can multitask.”

“No, Bex. Talking to civilian boys during a CoveOps exercise is a bad idea. Trust me.” I forced a smile and added a singsong lilt to my voice as I said, 
“It’s all fun
and games until somebody gets their memory erased.”

“Wow,” Bex said. She blinked against the sun. “You’re really …”

“What?” At that moment I knew there were at least nineteen security cameras trained on our path. I knew the Japanese man behind us was asking his wife if she still wanted a T-shirt from the Hard Rock Cafe. I knew a lot of things, but I didn’t have a clue what my best friend was trying to say.

“I’m really what?” I asked again.

Bex glanced away, then back, and for one of the bravest people I know, she seemed almost afraid to say, “Not over Josh.”

Josh. We’d been back at school for more than a week, but so far no one had said his name. And hearing it, to be honest, sounded strange.

“Of course I’m over him.” I shrugged and started walking, scanning the crowd. “I broke up with
him.
Remember? It wasn’t a big deal.”

Bex fell into step beside me. Her voice was almost timid as she said, “You don’t have to pretend, Cam.”

But that’s what spies do—we pretend. We have aliases and disguises and go to great lengths to not be ourselves. So I said, “Of course I’m over him,” and walked on, clinging to my cover till the end.

Bex probably would have argued with me; I’m sure she would have pointed out that Josh had been my first boyfriend, my first kiss; that he had seen me when to the rest of the world I was invisible, and that’s not the kind of thing a girl—much less a spy—forgets so quickly. Knowing Bex, she probably would have pointed out a lot of things; but at that very moment… twenty feet ahead of us … we saw a woman in a beige business suit sitting on a bench, talking on a cell phone. There was nothing unusual about her—not her hair, not her face. Nothing except for the fact that fifty minutes before, she’d been wearing a jogging suit and pushing a baby stroller.

“Bex,” I said as calmly as possible.

“I see her,” Bex replied.

Here’s the thing you need to know about detecting and losing a tail: to do it right—I mean
really
right—you’d need to cover half a city. You’d climb in and out of cabs and train cars and walk against the grain on at least a dozen busy sidewalks. You’d take all day.

But Mr. Solomon hadn’t given us all day, and that was kind of the point. So Bex and I spent the next hour going in one museum entrance and out another. Going up escalators only to come down the elevator two minutes later. We made sudden stops and looked in mirrors and tied our shoelaces when they didn’t need it. It was a virtual blur of corner-clearing and litter-dropping—everything I’ve ever seen, everything I’ve ever even heard of! (At one point Bex had almost talked me into crawling out the bathroom window in the Air and Space Museum, but a U.S. Marshal walked by and we decided not to press our luck.)

The seconds ticked by and the sun went lower, and soon the shadow of the Washington Monument was stretched almost the full length of the Mall. Time was running out.

“Tina,” I said through my comms unit, “how are you and Anna?” But I was met with empty silence. “Mick,” I said. “Are you there?”

Bex and I shared a worried glance, because there are reasons operatives go radio-silent, and most of them are not good.

We were cutting across the Mall, walking north, hoping anyone who wasn’t intentionally following us would stick to the path.

“Forty-seven minutes,” I announced, as if Bex weren’t fully aware of that fact.

She turned around to glance at a man walking too fast behind us, and I didn’t know whether to take it as an insult or a compliment that a team of
CIA
pros didn’t care if they stood out anymore. They just wanted to stay with us.

When a crowd of girls filled the sidewalk in front of us and started down the long, steep escalator to the Metro station below, I looked at Bex. “Do it!” she said, and we merged into the crowd. The girls were wearing white blouses almost exactly like ours. Their name badges bore a logo from something called Mock Supreme Court, They were almost identical to us from the waist up, so Bex and I slipped off our coats as we descended into the cavernous, echoing station.

“I love your bracelet!” I said to the brunette next to me, because, while most girls are on to the whole strangers-with-candy thing, the strangers-with-compliments strategy is still remarkably effective.

“Thanks!” said the girl, who, according to her badge, was Whitney from Dallas. “Hey, are y’all with the group?”

“Yeah,” Bex said. Then she looked down at her chest. “Oh my gosh! I left my name tag in my senator’s office—we took them off to have our picture taken,” she explained.

“Really?” another girl said. “That’s cool. Who’s your senator?”

And then Bex and I each said the first name that popped into our heads: “McHenry.”

We looked at each other and shared a very subtle laugh as the escalator carried us deeper and deeper beneath the city.

One of the girls, Kaitlin with a K, whispered to another girl, Caitlin with a C, “Are they back there?”

C peered back up the escalator, then grinned. “They are
so
following us!”

Bex and I might have exuded a panicked vibe about then, because K leaned in to explain, “These two hot guys have totally been checking us out.”

“Oh,” Bex said, as she and I used this as an excuse to check behind us. Sure enough, red-baseball-cap guy was back there (by now he was dressed like a navy lieutenant). And ten feet in front of him we saw the boys from the bench.

The C(K)aitlins started to laugh. It was hilarious. It was fun. Cute boys were on their tail, and maybe they thought they were being covert or cool, but all that really mattered was that once they got home they’d have a story they could tell. And it wouldn’t be classified.

As the escalator entered the cavernous room, a train was already at the station. “Let’s run and get it!” Bex screamed.

And everyone was off, racing to the bottom of the escalator, then dashing to the end of the train. The girls piled inside as the doors closed, and red-baseball-cap-slash-navy-officer guy jumped forward, barely making it into the next to last car as the train pulled out of the station, and away from where Bex and I stood underneath the escalator, waiting for our new friends and old shadow to disappear.

Bex and I watched the man in the train press himself against the glass as the train sped into the tunnel.

We were free.

We were clear.

We thought.

Overconfidence is a spy’s worst enemy, so to be on the safe side, Bex and I decided to split up when we left the Metro station. We had exactly twenty minutes to make it to the Museum of American History and our rendezvous with Mr. Solomon. Twenty more minutes to make sure we really
were
clear.

I slipped into the shadows of the Metro station and watched Bex ascend the escalator, then waited long enough to be certain no one followed her. Then I headed to the elevator, but as I reached for the button, another hand beat me to it.

“Hey,” one of the boys from the park bench said. He did that half head nod thing that all boys seem to do … or at least the boys I know. Which mainly means Josh.

“Hi,” I replied, pushing the button again, hoping to make the elevator come faster, because the last time a random boy had said hi to me, things had ended badly—like Mr.-Solomon-practically-being-run-over-by-a-forklift badly. And needless to say, that’s not the kind of thing that looks good on a girl’s permanent record.

When the elevator doors slid open, I was kind of, sort of hoping he wouldn’t step inside, but of course he did; and since the Metro station was forever and a day underground, the elevator ride was forever and a day long. The boy rested against the railing. He was slightly shorter and broader through the shoulders, but in the blurry reflection of the elevator doors, he almost looked like Josh.

“So,” the boy said, pointing to the crest on my coat. “The Guggenheim Academy—”

“Gallagher Academy,” I corrected.

“I’ve never heard of it.”

Which was kind of the point, but I didn’t say so. “Well, it’s my school.”

The elevator seemed to move slower and slower as the clock in my head ticked louder and louder, and I thought about how Mr. Solomon might make us
walk
back to Roseville if no one achieved our mission objectives.

“You in a hurry or something?” the boy asked.

“Actually, I’m supposed to meet my teacher at the ruby slipper exhibit. I’ve only got twenty minutes, and if I’m late, he’ll kill me.” (Not a lie, but maybe an exaggeration—I hoped.)

“How do you know?”

“Because he said, ‘Meet me at the ruby slipper exhibit.’”

“No.” The boy was smiling, shaking his head. “How do you know you only have twenty minutes? You’re not wearing a watch.”

“My friend just told me.” The lie was smooth and easy, and I was a little bit proud of it, happy that I didn’t have to think about how, in forty-five seconds, this boy had noticed something Josh hadn’t seen in four months.

“You fidget a lot,” he said.

Make that two things Josh hadn’t seen.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but I wasn’t. “I have low blood sugar.” Lie number three. “I need to eat something.” Which wasn’t really a lie, since…well… I
was
hungry.

And then stranger-boy totally knocked me for a loop, because he handed me a bag of M&
M’S
. “Here. I ate most of them already.”

“Oh…um …” What was that I’d said about strangers with candy? “That’s okay. Thanks, though.”

He shoved the candy back in his pocket. “Oh,” the boy said. “Okay.”

We finally reached the surface, and the doors slid open onto the Mall, where dusk had somehow fallen in the last ten minutes.

“Thanks again for the candy.” I darted outside, knowing that to be safe I couldn’t take the most direct way to the museum—not yet. I had to—

Wait.

I was being followed!

But not in any kind of covert sense!

“Where are you going?” I said, spinning on the boy behind me.

“I thought we were going to meet your teacher in the wonderful world of Oz.”

“We!”

“Sure. I’m going with you.”

“No you’re not,” I snapped, because A) The aforementioned
forklift thing,
and B) I’m pretty sure bringing a boy to a clandestine rendezvous isn’t in the
CIA
handbook.

“Look,” the boy said confidently. “It’s dark. You’re by yourself. And this
is
D.C.” Oh my gosh. It’s like he had Grandma Morgan on speed-dial or something. “And you’ve only got”—he pondered it—”fifteen minutes to meet your teacher.”

He was wrong by ninety seconds, but I didn’t say so. All I knew was that I couldn’t shake him—not without creating a lot more drama than letting him tag along was going to cause, so I just quickened my pace and said, “Fine.”

As we walked against the cold wind, I told myself that this was good; this was fine. Nobody looking for a Gallagher Girl would expect me to be with a boy. He was cover. He was useful.

“You can really walk fast,” he said, but I didn’t say anything back. “So, do you have a name?” he asked, as if that were just the most innocent question ever. As if that isn’t how broken hearts and broken covers always start.

“Sure. Lots of them.”

That was probably the most truthful thing I’d told him yet, but the boy just smiled at me as if I were funny and flirty and cute. Let me tell you, I was none of those things, especially after not sleeping or eating, wearing a blindfold for an hour, then walking up and down the frozen Mall all day!