Only the Good Spy Young (Gallagher Girls) (12 page)

I
t was a trap. It was a trap. It was a trap.

The words echoed in my mind, keeping rhythm with my feet as they hit the ground.

“Bex!” I yelled as I ran through the tall trees that grew up around the roller coaster. Far above me, people were flying through the sky, but down below, there was only static in my comms unit, and the rough ground that no tourist was ever supposed to see. I hurtled over spotlights and dodged cables as I bolted to the top of a hill, not once allowing myself to think about Mr. Solomon or the woman or Agent Townsend. I just kept running—toward the lake, toward the fence, toward help.

It was a trap.

At the top of the hill I could hear the sounds of the park floating across the lake. All I had to do was keep running, keep fighting, but then I saw them—the agents who had been in the crowd all day—following me, watching my every move. They were descending through the woods—emerging from behind the tall trees and the roller coaster’s massive pillars, rushing past me.

Past me?

Not a soul tried to usher me to safety. And in that moment I knew that they weren’t protectors. They were hunters. And me? I was the bait.

It was a trap
.

I heard footsteps behind me, hard and fast.

“Zach,” I called to the boy who was running toward me.

“Where is he?” Zach yelled, out of breath. I lunged forward and grabbed him. “Let me go, Gallagher Girl. I have to—”

“Do you want them to take you too?” I shouted, shaking him. When he stopped fighting I held him tighter. “They have him, Zach.” I heard my mother’s words coming back to me. “He’s gone.”

Mr. Solomon lay on the ground in the clearing below, bloody and bound, while agents still swarmed from all directions. I remembered how, once on a helicopter en route to Ohio, Mr. Solomon had told us that often the hardest thing an operative can do is nothing. Standing there that day, I knew that it was true—that Joe Solomon was always right.

“Stupid!” Zach yelled. He banged his hand hard against the trunk of a tree, and I couldn’t tell whether the hand or the tree got the worst of it. He turned to me. “What happened?”

“CoveOps exercise. I tailed a man here. And then Mr. Solomon was there, talking about the Circle, saying I was in danger. And then there was a woman. I thought she was the woman from Boston.”

“That wasn’t her, Cammie.”

“I know that now.”

He grasped my shoulders. I could see a kind of fear settle into his eyes as he whispered, “There’s no way Joe Solomon would ever be with
her
.”

The roller coaster roared overhead, and I felt the ground vibrate beneath my feet.

“Why would he come here?” I asked. “It was a trap. Joe Solomon walked into a trap.” Believe it or not, of all the things I’d seen and heard since London, that was what surprised me most of all.

“You.” Zach sounded almost amazed that I didn’t know. “If he thought you were going to be here—virtually unprotected . . . There’s nowhere he wouldn’t go to save you.”

“Why would he do that?” I snapped, trying to pull away, but he just held me tighter. “That doesn’t make any—”

“It’s in the journal, Cammie.” Zach’s gaze bore into mine. “It’s all in the journal.”

“Cammie!” someone said.

“I think I see her!” someone else called.

I could hear my classmates’ voices in my ear. I knew they had crossed the fence and were running closer, but Zach’s gaze never left mine.

“Look at me.” Zach’s hands felt like a vise. “Read the journal, Gallagher Girl. Read it all.”

And then he pulled me closer, squeezed me so tightly that I could barely breathe. He pressed his lips hard against my forehead for a split second—nothing more—and when he finally let me go and disappeared back into the trees, I thought that I might fall.

“Oh my gosh, Cam, are you okay?” Eva Alvarez was screaming. “Are you—”

I heard Eva stop, breathless. I watched her pull up short and turn to stare with the rest of my classmates at the scene that lay behind me. The agents. The chaos. The blood. And the way our former teacher lay on his stomach in the middle of it all, hands bound, legs shackled. Unconscious.

“Is that Mr. Solomon?” Anna asked.

“Yes.” Bex’s voice was low.

“What . . .” Tina’s voice caught. “What is that?”

“It was a trap.”

Y
ou may think that it would be impossible for a van full of teenage girls to be completely quiet for the duration of a two-hour drive, but that night I didn’t hear a single voice. A soft rain fell, and only the sloshing of windshield wipers—the sound of water splashing against the undercarriage of the car—could break the stifling silence on the long ride back to school.

I recognized the sound. I’d heard it once in our Arlingtontown house as neighbors brought casseroles and condolences. I’d felt it at the ranch as relatives I barely knew spilled onto my grandparents’ porch, the four walls of the house too thin to hold us and the news that my father was never coming home. The junior CoveOps class was mourning, and one by one, every girl in the van came to realize what my roommates and I had known for weeks—that Mr. Solomon hadn’t been on a mission. Mr. Solomon was a whole different kind of gone.

When we pulled through the gates that night, it seemed like every light in the mansion was on. I could imagine girls inside, laughing and heading downstairs for supper, talking about papers and tests. But as we crawled from the van and watched Agent Townsend stride through the front doors, we all stayed perfectly still, a heavy drizzle and the memory of all we’d seen settling down around us, no one wanting to carry it all inside.

“I never knew,” Anna Fetterman said. “I never even guessed. I’m making a mistake, aren’t I?” She looked right at me as if I should know. “I shouldn’t be on the CoveOps track. I shouldn’t . . . I never knew.”

“No one knew.” Eva Alvarez placed an arm around Anna’s shoulders. “No one knew what he was.”

“
Is
.”

No one heard me whisper, but that was just as well. After all, no one else had stood in the amusement park graveyard and heard him say the Circle was coming. No one else had felt his warm hands on the bridge. I might have been the only Gallagher Girl in the world at that moment who knew that Mr. Solomon wasn’t in the past tense.

So I walked toward the doors and stepped inside, certain of one thing: Joe Solomon was very much alive.

Well, actually, technically, I
tried
to step inside.

Girls filled the entryway and covered the stairs, and it took all the strength I could muster to press out of the rain and into the crowd that was staring as my mother and Agent Townsend stood in the middle of the foyer floor.

“What’s going—”

“Shhh,” a senior hissed, stopping Tina midsentence.

“You’re welcome, by the way,” Townsend said, turning toward the stairs, but my mother blocked him, looking anything but grateful.

“You had no right to take my daughter out of my school—”

“
Your
school?”

He should have been afraid. The last time I’d seen my mother look that way had been on a street in Washington, D.C., as her sister lay bleeding.

He should have been terrified.

“My daughter is not some pawn to be used on a whim!”

“Now, Rachel, don’t think of her as a pawn. It’s more like . . . what is it you Americans say . . . we dangled an apple out in front of Joe Solomon and—”

“The term is
carrot
,” my mother corrected. “And it doesn’t apply to teenage girls.”

There was a knowing gleam in Townsend’s eyes as he smiled. “Oh, is it? Maybe you use apples for something else.”

Some people think the key to strength is knowing how to hit—how to shift your weight, time your blow, land the punch just right. But that’s not it. As I stood peering through the crowd at my mother and the man who had taken me out of the safety of the mansion, I knew real strength is
not
hitting when what you want to do most is kill.

Townsend must have sensed it too, because something changed in him then. “We had thirty agents in the park’s interior and another sixty on the perimeter grid. We had eyes on her the whole time. We knew Solomon would show himself, and as soon as he did, our agents were on him. She was fine.”

He leaned closer to my mother, not blinking, not teasing, not even mocking. He laughed, but not like it was funny. It was closer to a laugh of disbelief.

“Ms. Morgan, we got him!”

“If you ever put a student at this school in danger again—”

“Oh, I thought you Gallagher Girls were immune to danger.”

Despite the hundred girls that filled the foyer, no one moved or gasped or tried to defend our honor. We stood silently, waiting for our headmistress to say, “Oh, we are quite used to being underestimated, Agent Townsend. In fact, we welcome it.”

That conversation probably violated every spy code and teacher code and headmistress code known to man, but that didn’t matter. They couldn’t see the hundred girls who stood watching. Despite their training, they didn’t hear the way we held our collective breath. This fight was like the tide: it had been a long time coming and there was no way to hold it back.

“Joe Solomon agreed to take this job only when he knew he would be teaching your daughter, isn’t that right.”

Mom folded her hands in front of her. “I’ve already answered that question in great detail for people with far more authority than you.”

“And that didn’t strike you as odd? A man like Joe Solomon coming
here
?” He laughed again. “But of course the Circle has always liked to recruit agents young. What is it they say, the greener the fruit, the easier it turns?”

“Yes,” my mother admitted.

“He was here a year and a half?” Townsend asked, but my mother’s voice was calm, as if he’d asked about the weather.

“He was.”

“That’s a long time—long enough to recruit anyone he might need. Turn someone?”

“As I already informed your superiors, Agent Townsend, if the Circle has any allies here, they’d better pray that you find them before I do.”

Agent Townsend was a large man, for covert operations. He was at least six inches taller and seventy pounds heavier than my mother (and that wasn’t counting his ego), and yet there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that he knew she was exactly right.

He watched her slowly turn and start up the stairs. She was almost gone when he called, “Joe Solomon isn’t going to hurt your daughter, Ms. Morgan. You don’t have to worry about him hurting anyone ever again.”

I realized in that moment that he believed it—he really did—and for a second I wanted to believe
him
. He was a good spy, after all. A senior operative. A teacher. And standing there, surrounded by my sisterhood, I might have convinced myself that it was true—that I was safe.

But then my mother stopped and turned.

“I’m sorry, Agent Townsend, but Joe Solomon is the least of Cammie’s worries.”

* * *

Our chef was making my favorite soup for dinner, but my roommates and I didn’t run to the Grand Hall. We stood silently side by side while the rest of our school slowly drifted down the halls and up the stairs, carried away by a wave of gossip and fear and disbelief.

“Sublevel Two.” I didn’t whisper. I know that was foolish now, but at that moment, I, Cammie the Chameleon, didn’t have the strength to hide. “We’re
going
to find a way into Sublevel Two.”

HOW
NOT
TO BREAK INTO SUBLEVEL TWO

(A list by Cameron Morgan, with help from Macey McHenry)

• Digging:
  Because a person would have to dig . . .
  a lot
  . And besides, the maintenance staff would totally notice any big holes that appeared in the middle of the lacrosse field. (Plus, it can totally ruin a manicure.)
  
• Anything involving an elevator shaft:
  Sure, every Gallagher Girl gets her very own crowbar on the first day of eighth grade, but it’s not as simple as prying open the doors and shimmying on down to the subs. (Besides, in our experience, doors at the Gallagher Academy aren’t exactly pry-able.)
  
• Sweet-talk:
  Because sweet-talking might make the
  sweet-talk
  ee
  suspicious about the sweet-talk
  er
  ’s plans
  and motivations—not to mention that even the
  burliest members of the security staff are probably
  afraid of taking us into the sublevels and getting . . .
  you know ... killed.
  
• Teleportation:
  Sure, Liz says she has an excellent
  working theory, but she doesn’t have a prototype yet,
  and without a prototype it’s pretty much a moot point.
  
• That thing Bex’s parents did in Dubai with liquid
  nitrogen, an earthquake simulator, and a ferret:
  Because we don’t have a ferret.
  

* * *

It only took three weeks.

I know that sounds like a lot of time—and it is. But also, it isn’t. Because . . . well . . . in the clandestine services, nothing ever happens quickly (except when it does). Nothing is ever, ever easy (except when it is). And, most of all, nothing ever goes perfectly according to plan (except in the movies).

It’s dirty work that is almost universally slow, tedious, repetitious, mundane, morose, and just in general boring (except for the parts when people might die).

We could have done it sooner and it still wouldn’t have felt soon enough. We could have planned for years and we still wouldn’t have felt ready. So, yeah. It took three weeks.

For Liz to crack the code. For Macey and Bex to gather the gear. For me to plan our way inside.

By one a.m. on the night in question, we were making our way down the third-floor corridor as quickly and as quietly as we could without making it obvious that we were trying to be both quick and quiet.

The Operatives fully understood that the first step in Denial and Deception Operations is denial. And it’s way easier to deny being involved in some rogue, undercover operation if you’re wearing jammies.

“There’s something I still don’t understand,” Liz whispered. “If Mr. Solomon is so desperate to have this book or whatever it is that is located inside Sublevel Two, then why did he make it impossible to access Sublevel Two?”

“Because he wanted to make it impossible for the
wrong
people to access it,” I said, peeking around the corner, where, as if on cue, Agent Townsend bounded down the stairs.

I threw myself against the wall, forgetting that we hadn’t broken any rules at that point and there were at least a dozen perfectly valid reasons we might have been there. But I’m a chameleon. I’ll take being invisible over being justifiable any day.

His footsteps echoed like thunder in the empty hallway.

I didn’t watch him as I whispered, “It’s time.”

At 0135 hours, The Operatives proceeded to the small stairway beneath the Grand Stairs, but they didn’t stop at the mirror that concealed the elevator to the sublevels.

At 0136, Operative Morgan’s stomach began to growl, and the entire team realized the importance of not skipping meals prior to incredibly important covert operations!

Bex led us to the small closet at the base of the stairs and pulled out a backpack stocked with utility belts, cables, and a very handy gadget that Macey had made in her Intro to Accessories class (which is never about what new students think it’s going to be about).

And as we stepped outside, I realized that it was warmer. Spring was coming, but I had barely noticed.

“Look.” I stopped and looked at my three best friends in the whole world. “We’ve only got three minutes until the guards are going to patrol this sector, and I totally understand if you don’t want to go. I don’t know if this is going to work, and even if it does, we don’t know exactly what we’re going to face down there.”

From the look on Bex’s face, I knew there was no way she was going to be left out of anything this covert. And dangerous. And utterly gray in the black-and-white spectrum of right and wrong.

Still, I had to go on. “If anything ever happened to any of you . . .” I started, but then I couldn’t finish.

“So if there’s a computer down there that we’ve got to hack into in sixty seconds, you’re going to do it?” Liz asked, strapping a belt on over her pajamas.

“And you really think I’m going to miss this?” Bex pulled her belt from the top of the pile.

We all looked at Macey. “You need me,” she said, reaching for her belt like a queen taking her scepter.

As I leaned down and disabled the security devices around the small grate, I felt Bex watching over my shoulder.

“I always thought the elevators to Sublevel Two put us out somewhere over there.” She pointed in the opposite direction.

I smiled up at her. “But we’re not going to the elevators, are we?”

At precisely 0147, The Operatives tested their theory that the mirrors in the new compacts from McHenry Cosmetics are the appropriate size to slide over and deflect the laser beams that cover the opening of all ventilation points.

(The Operatives were correct.)

At precisely 0207, The Operatives tested the new Electromagnetic Signal Reallocator (Official Name and Patent Pending) that Operative Sutton had developed for the occasion.

(It was successful.)

At precisely 0208, Operative Baxter said a prayer. And jumped.

The airshaft was small. Crazy small. I’m-really-glad-I-skipped-dinner-after-all small. There was no way a grown man could have fit. It was an entrance that was only suitable for a girl. A Gallagher Girl, I thought as I slid down the cable like it was a fireman’s pole, the clamp in my hand growing hot, searing into my gloves as I zoomed into the depths of the ground.

I knew Bex was below me, but I couldn’t see a thing. Macey and Liz were above me, and I hoped that was why I couldn’t see even the faintest hint of light above me as I hurtled into what felt like the world’s tiniest volcano.

Deeper and deeper I went. Faster and faster I fell. I felt the air rushing past me, my hair blowing away from my face, the cable burning hotter in my hands until . . .

“Look out!” Bex yelled, as suddenly I broke free of the shaft. My arms felt as if they might pop out of their sockets when I squeezed the clamp and slammed to an almost instantaneous stop. I was dangling from the cable, looking down into the cavernous space of Sublevel Two.

“I can’t believe that worked,” I admitted, breathless.

“Cam!” Bex shouted, stopping me before I could release my hold on the cable. “Don’t. Move. A muscle.”

We were suspended thirty feet above the hard stone floor of a room that, despite a semester of studying in Sublevel Two, I’d never seen before. The subs are a vast and winding maze of classrooms and offices, resource libraries and storage for some of the covert world’s most highly classified secrets. And right then, Bex and I were looking through the dim glow of security lights at a massive room filled with hundreds of shelves and filing cabinets, a complex system of wiring and explosives. . . .

And the most complex laser grid system I had ever seen.

“So,” Bex said, smiling up at me through the pulsing glow of the emergency floodlamps, “wanna hang out?”

A moment later, the vibrations on the cable grew stronger, and I looked up in time to see Liz hurtling toward me through the air, stopping just above me.

Macey was close behind and out of breath as she asked, “What is all this?”

Bex and I looked down at the rows of top secret information and the high-grade explosives that ran the length of the room, neither of us able to hide the awe in our voices. “It’s a burn bag,” we said in unison.

“What’s that?” Macey asked.

“It’s the stuff that can’t fall into the wrong hands. Ever. It’s the stuff that’s rigged to blow up in case . . . in case the worst happens.”

Which was true. But scary. Because at that moment, technically, the worst that could happen was us.

Bex was the first to drop to the floor, nimble as a cat, landing between the red beams, then flipping and jumping through the air, navigating her way to the small panel on the side of the room. If it hadn’t been so utterly terrifying, it would have been beautiful. Like ballet. But with a way higher casualty rate.

“Now, Liz,” she yelled, and Liz pulled out her crossbow and took aim at the wall six inches above Bex’s head.

“Uh ... Liz...” Macey started.

“Sorry,” Liz said, and raised her aim about a foot.

I don’t think any of us could draw a breath as the arrow sailed through the air, a small cable trailing behind it, then landed perfectly just above the panel on the wall.

“Awesome,” I said. “Now, just like we practiced—take the extra clip on your harness and put it on Bex’s cable. Yeah. Just like that. You’re doing—”

“Whoopsie daisy.”

And that’s when Elizabeth Sutton, supergenius, forgot that her bag was unzipped and let her Advanced Encryption textbook fall, end-over-end, into the heart of the laser field below.

“Liz!” I yelled, but it was too late. Lights began to pulse. Below us, the lasers began to move, red lines snaking over the ground, and I realized our only option.

“What do we do?” Macey yelled.

“We run!”

As we dropped to the ground, I couldn’t hear my own thoughts—much less the footsteps of the girls who ran beside me. Red lights swirled. Sirens screamed. It was as if Sublevel Two were burning as Liz carried her laptop to where Bex stood waiting by the electronic nerve center that controlled all of Sublevel Two’s modern defenses.

But modern . . . yeah, modern was the least of our problems.

At the far end of the room, there was a massive window made of stained glass. For a second I stood there, wondering why anyone would install a window in an underground room. It would have been far more weird and way less terrifying if the space behind the glass hadn’t been quickly filling up with water.

“So that’s coming from . . .” Macey started.

“The lake.”

“So if we don’t stop this . . .” she started again.

“We drown,” I said, but Macey was already gone—sprinting across the room.

“What do we do?” she cried. She was searching the walls, pushing on stones—frantically looking for a way to make the water stop rising. “Where’s the switch? I thought Mr. Solomon told Zach there was a way to turn it off.”

As the water rose, the stained glass seemed to sparkle. The light looked different the higher the water went, and I couldn’t help but remember the very first assignment Joe Solomon had ever given me: notice things.

“I’ve seen this before,” I said, still staring at the familiar images in the glass—brightly colored shapes and lines. “Macey, have you seen it before?”

“Sorry, Cam,” she said, still searching. “I’m a little busy here.”

“It’s like the one upstairs. You know, the big one? Except . . . different. It’s almost like . . .” I trailed off. My voice caught. And I knew what we had to do. “It’s not a window—it’s a puzzle!”

The glass was cold to the touch when I reached for it. The device was at least a hundred years old, and when I pushed on a deep blue section of glass, at first it didn’t budge, and I thought I was wrong. But I pushed harder and . . . movement. The window was like a kaleidoscope, a moving, swirling mass of glass and hidden gears as I slid the blue section smoothly into place in the center of the massive frame.

“Macey, help me,” I said, and together we went to work, our
eyes and hands feverishly flying over the window’s hundreds of sections as quickly and deftly as we could, trying to duplicate the upstairs window that I had never truly looked at until Joe Solomon came to our school.

All around us, though, the sirens kept blaring. The lights kept swirling. And, worst of all, the water kept rising.

“Lizzie?” I heard Bex yell behind me.

“Almost . . .” Liz said, her fingers flying over the laptop’s keys. “Almost ...
got it
!”

Instantly, the sirens went silent. The lights stopped swirling. From the corner of my eye, I saw Liz and Bex give each other a high five, but the water level kept rising.

I thought of what Mr. Mosckowitz had told Agent Townsend that night in the shadowy halls—that every generation had added a layer of defense to that honored place—and I knew that the original Gallagher Girls were in many ways the wisest.

“Got it!” Macey yelled, pushing the final piece into place, but nothing happened.

It felt like an eternity before a shrill mechanical voice sounded through the echoing space. “IDENTIFY. IDENTIFY. IDENTIFY. WHO GOES THERE?” it asked.

And then instinct must have taken hold, because the four of us shouted the first words that came to mind: “We are the sisters of Gillian!”