Only the Good Spy Young (Gallagher Girls) (7 page)

* * *

“This is useless,” Liz exclaimed, her voice echoing off the high-vaulted ceiling of the P&E barn.

“No it’s not,” Bex said, grabbing the crossbow out of her hand. (Oh yeah, I said
crossbow
.) “All Gallagher Girls have to be proficient with two weapons, and I’m telling you the crossbow is—”

“Not
this
,” Liz said, grabbing the weapon back and giving it a good shake (at which point both Macey and I dropped to the floor and took cover).
“Operation Townsend,”
she whispered.

Outside, a fresh blanket of snow was falling over the grounds, and the tall windows were covered with fog. Sophomores fenced on the mats below us. A group of seventh graders were braving the climbing wall, while the whole barn echoed with the thuds and cries of girls who had been locked inside for way too long.

“The man is a ghost, guys,” Liz said, her voice low. “I mean, seriously ghosty. He went to some ritzy boarding school in England on scholarship—”

“Good call on that, by the way,” Bex told me, but Liz never even slowed down.

“Then he joined MI6 right out of college. I’m pretty sure he was stationed in eastern Europe, because he did that big sting operation in Romania ten years ago.”

“The one with the vampire bats?” Bex asked, eyes wide.

“Yeah,” Liz said, eyes wider. “And I’m pretty sure he was the one who took down that group of KGB generals who were smuggling old Soviet missiles using a traveling circus as cover.”

“Operation Big Top?” Bex exclaimed.

“Uh-huh,” Liz said. “But then ... after that ... it’s like he disappeared. I mean . . . nothing.”

“Which means something,” I said, and Liz nodded slowly.

“Something big.”

“Bex, what does our surveillance tell us?” I asked, turning to the girl beside me.

“He never takes the same route twice; barely eats, barely sleeps, and confides in absolutely no one.”

“He’s up to something,” I said. “This guy doesn’t do anything by accident, so if he’s here, it’s for something big, and it doesn’t have anything to do with teaching.”

“Liz,” Macey said, panic in her voice. “Liz, you’re going to want to hold that—”

“Sorry!” Liz yelled to the girls on the rock wall, who now had to navigate around an arrow.

“Hey, Morgan!”

I turned and saw Erin Dillard walking through the barn, as if members of the senior class regularly came up to talk to juniors, which, let me tell you, they don’t. “We need to talk.”

“Hi, Erin,” I said. “Did you have a nice winter—”

“Where’s your mother?” As soon as Erin spoke, I knew this wasn’t a chat. It was a mission.

“I’m not sure.”

“Do you know how to get a message to her?” Erin asked. “Dead letter drop? Cutout? Anything?”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“What do you think? Townsend. I’m a senior, Morgan,” Erin said with a cautious look around the barn. “I got offered a spot in the MI6/CIA Cross-Agency Deep Cover Training Program.”

“That’s awesome,” Bex said, but Erin merely shrugged.

“Thanks. I got the letter over break. I’m supposed to report to work—
to work
—in June, and do you know what our Cove-Ops homework was this weekend?”

We all shook our heads.

“We didn’t have any.”

“No!” Liz exclaimed.

Erin nodded. “A few months from now I’m going to be in deep cover somewhere, and
this
is how I’m supposed to get ready?”

She was right, of course. Mr. Townsend’s class wasn’t just a waste of time. It was dangerous.

Erin shook her head, then turned to stare out the window and together we watched our newest teacher walk across the grounds then disappear without a trace into the falling snow. “What’s he
really
doing here?”

Erin’s a great student. She’s going to be an awesome spy. As she turned and walked away, her whisper seemed to echo, settling down on the four of us. Our mission was clear.

“He’ll be a hard target,” Bex said.

“I know.”

“We’re talking this-guy-makes-Mr.-Smith-look-like-a-candy-striper hard.”

I nodded. “Yeah. That’s right.”

“So the question is,” Bex said slowly, “how far are you willing to go?”

I looked at my three best friends in the world. “How far is there?”

• Agent Townsend never sleeps past eight or goes to bed before two.
  
• The Target runs five miles every day and was seen doing 500 sit-ups in a row (which, according to Operative Baxter, isn’t nearly as impressive as it sounds).
  
• The Target strictly avoids both sugar and caffeine (which, according to Operative Morgan, is every bit as crazy as THAT sounds).
  
• Despite two weeks on the Gallagher Academy faculty, The Target has acquired zero friends.
  

I’ve had a lot of memorable meals in five and a half years at the Gallagher Academy, but that was one of the few times when I didn’t actually
eat
anything.

“He’s not coming,” Liz said, her gaze glued to the big double doors at the back of the room. Bex and Macey and I stayed quiet, glancing around the Grand Hall, the two of them picking at their food as we took turns staring at the doors.

Liz was the one who voiced what we were all thinking. “What if he doesn’t come?”

“Hey, Macey, can I have that—”

“No!” the four of us cried in unison. Macey grabbed a banana out of Courtney Bauer’s hands, which might have looked kinda strange. And, okay, so maybe the fact that, between the four of us, we’d taken one of everything on the buffet
was
kinda strange. But at the Gallagher Academy, “strange” is a completely relative thing.

“Sorry, Courtney,” I said, trying to explain. “It’s just that we’ve got this experiment we’re going to do later with . . .”

But then I couldn’t finish because Agent Townsend was standing at the entrance of the Grand Hall, taking a long drink from a bottle of water. His dark curly hair was wet with sweat. In his black running suit, he looked as if he could have just gotten back from breaking into an embassy, parachuting behind enemy lines, meeting with a particularly shady informant in the darkest alley of the most dangerous city in the world. As much as I wanted to hate Agent Townsend, there was one thing I didn’t dare forget: he was probably a very good spy.

I looked at my roommates, knowing that for the next hour, somehow, someway, the four of us had to be better.

“Who has eyes?” I whispered as I felt the man pass behind me.

“He’s going to the buffet,” Bex said, but unless you could hear her you would have sworn she was talking about the weather.

“What’s he doing?” Liz asked. (Her face and voice, I’m sorry to say, were significantly less covert.)

“Apple,” Macey said. Her blue eyes seemed especially big and bright as she looked at me and whispered again, “Apple.”

It took four seconds for Liz to take the syringe from her bag. Her hands were shaking as I pulled the apple from my tray and held it beneath the table.

“You do realize this is probably illegal, right?” I asked, but Liz looked up at me and smiled as if I were the most naïve girl in the world.

“It can’t be illegal, Cam. It’s
research
.” So that was it. Our teacher’s fate, my safety, and Liz’s GPA
all hinged on what we were about to do.

“You’re doing great, Lizzie,” Bex said, but still Liz’s hand trembled.

“Liz . . .” Macey started.

“Got it!” Liz said, and in the next second the apple passed beneath the table from Liz’s hand to Bex’s.

In a flash, Bex was up and walking toward the door while Townsend did the same. Three seconds later my best friend was stumbling into him. The apple he’d been carrying slipped from his grasp and tumbled through the air, right into Bex’s outstretched palm.

“Mind where you’re going, Baxter,” he said as she handed one apple back to him. But there was a glint in Bex’s eyes as she turned her back to us, pulled another apple from behind her back, and took a big bite.

I just sat there wondering what Grandma Morgan would say if she knew what we were doing—no doubt something about forbidden fruit.

The Operatives engaged in a basic four-man rotating surveillance detail, tracking The Target through the Gallagher Mansion.

It would have been nice to have had comms units. Every operative in the world can tell you the extreme disadvantages of tailing someone who knows what you look like. And to be perfectly honest, it’s always easier when your co-agents are all well-trained and confident field agents and not . . . well . . . Liz.

“Oopsy daisy,” Liz whispered as she missed a step on the big stone staircase that led to the old chapel.

I could hear Townsend’s steps in the corridor above me. After forty-five minutes of following him through the library and watching from a window while Bex trailed him across the grounds—not to mention one very scary moment involving Liz, a suit of armor, and Professor Buckingham’s black cat—my roommates and I paused on the steps, listening as Townsend walked faster, but toward what or who, I didn’t know until I heard him call, “Mosckowitz, a word.”

“Oh, hello, Agent Townsend! Out for a run, I see. I tried running for a while. It wasn’t really a good . . . fit for me.”

Which was sort of an understatement if you ask any of the girls who remember the semester we had to have encryption lessons on the ground floor because Mr. Mosckowitz sprained both his ankles by falling into a ditch.

I watched Bex ease ahead, then signal to the three of us to follow her up the stairs. Crouched on the landing, I could see two shadows—Agent Townsend’s much longer and leaner than Mr. M.’s—as they stretched across the floor.

“Look here, Mosckowitz,” Townsend said. I didn’t hear a footstep but I saw his shadow move. “I was told you were a codes man.”

“I . . . I am,” Mr. Mosckowitz said, but he sounded like he didn’t quite believe it.

“I was under the impression that you were the best.”

“I’m . . . pretty good,” Mr. Mosckowitz said, which was perhaps the understatement of the century.

“So why haven’t you cleared up this mess with the sublevels? They’re used for the instruction of Covert Operations, are they not?” Townsend said.

“Well, yes...”

“And I am the Covert Operations instructor, am I not?”

“Someone needs to instruct
him
,” Bex whispered, but my best friend didn’t move. We all stayed silent, staring at the two shadows on the floor.

“Well, see, it’s . . . complicated,” Mr. Mosckowitz said.

“
Un
complicate it,” said Townsend.

“Every generation adds a new level of defenses, and while the new ones are . . . well, they’re
good,
the old ones are . . .”

“What?” Townsend snapped.

“Old,” Mr. Mosckowitz said simply. “Dr. Fibs and I have been working on a theory about how some of the older mechanisms might work, but to tell you the truth, most of them weren’t meant to be overridden. If they were ever activated, it was supposed to be . . .” He made a gesture with his hands. “Ka boom.”

Townsend gave a slow laugh. “And you and Buckingham wouldn’t be slow-playing this process, would you?”

“We could override the more recent safety protocols, and you could go down there tonight, but . . .”

“What?”

“Some of the most top secret artifacts in the world might be destroyed, and . . .”

“What?”

“You’d probably die.” Mr. Mosckowitz’s shadow moved across the floor, easing away.

And then the longer shadow tossed something high into the air. I saw it tumbling, spinning. The hand that reached out to catch it moved as fast as light.

“I want access to those sublevels, Mosckowitz.” There was a sickening crunch as Townsend took a bite. “Make it happen. Make it happen soon.”

“Liz!” Bex hissed twenty minutes later. “How much did you put in there?”

Liz shrugged and looked slightly guilty. And slightly wicked. It was a terribly evil combination. “I couldn’t be sure he’d eat it all, and if he just took one bite, that might not be enough to—”

“Liz,” I whispered, needing her to get to the point.

“Five times more than recommended!” she blurted.

At the end of the hall I heard a crash. Our four heads peered around the corner just in time to see Agent Townsend stumble away from the shards of a shattered vase.

We looked at Liz, who whispered, “Maybe six.”

When we turned back to the hall, Townsend was standing thirty feet away, staring at us. I was sure we were busted. But then Agent Townsend stopped and gave a sloppy wave.

“I’m going to my room!” he called, and then he turned and collapsed onto the plush cushions of one of my favorite window seats. He tried to pull the red velvet curtains around him like a blanket.

“What are you doing in my room?” he snapped as I appeared beside him. And then he seemed to realize that his “room” was two feet deep and three feet long. “Is this my room?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Oh.” His blue eyes had warmed somehow, as though something in that apple had caused all of his defenses to thaw.

“Should we ask him something to...you know...test it?” Macey asked.

When my roommates looked at me, I realized we hadn’t had interrogation training yet. Not even Mr. Solomon had taught us how to do this.

Fortunately, as with most things covert, Bex was a natural.

“Is there really a Loch Ness Monster?” she asked.

Townsend shrugged. “Of course there is. Chemical warfare training went awry in the thirties. Had to lock the thing up somewhere.”

“Were the crown jewels really stolen and replaced with fakes in 1962?”

He smiled. “Only the rubies.”

“Where is Mr. Solomon?”

“That, I do not know.” He raised his eyebrows. “Yet.”

“Why are the CIA and MI6 after Mr. Solomon?”

“Oh, you know that, Ms. Morgan.” Despite the slurred speech, the words were enough to make my heart race. “Anyone who has been a part of the Circle since the age of sixteen is someone we would like to have a chat with.”

“Why did you come here?” Bex asked.

“To track a fox, you start at its den.”

“What do you know about my mother?”

Townsend turned his head toward the window. His breath fogged up the glass. I was beginning to think he hadn’t heard me when he whispered, “They won’t hurt her.”

And with those words, a dread like I had never known filled my chest. “Someone has my mother?” I grabbed his shirt and pulled him closer, forced him to look at me. “Who?” I shook him. “Who has her?”

His smile was oddly vacant.
“We do.”

My hands went rigid, forming fists around his collar.

“We? Who’s ‘we’?
Where is my mother
?” I yelled, but Townsend was drifting. His eyelids fluttered. He stared out the wavy glass as if he’d never seen a window before.

“It
is
beautiful here,” he said, then closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.

I released my grasp, watched him land against the pillows. He looked as peaceful as a baby.

And then Liz slapped him. Yes, actual slappage.

He shuddered awake, his eyes clear for one brief second.

“No!” Liz yelled, slapping him again. “You’re wrong!” she snapped.

“Liz . . .” Bex reached for her, but Liz lashed out again.

“You’re wrong!” she yelled. “Mrs. Morgan is going to come back, and we’re going to clear Mr. Solomon’s name, and then this school will have a real teacher again.”

“Oh now, I doubt that.” There was something of the man from London creeping back into his voice. He smiled. “I don’t think Rachel Morgan would want to work beside the man who killed her husband.”