The Doublecross (26 page)

Ben was suddenly in my ear again. “Hale, hurry. By my watch you've only got a few seconds left!”

“Till what?” I shouted back.

“Go!” Ben roared, and now he sounded scared. I finally threw the final handful of Groundcover papers over my head. They rained down behind me like confetti. It wasn't the neatest way to try to tell people about Groundcover, but it would work. At least, I hoped it would. Surely, if news of me doing an impression of Mrs. Quaddlebaum could get around in an hour, news that SRS was kidnapping kids and trying to kill off their own agents could get around even faster? I threw my weight against the doors to the garage and ran past sports cars and trucks and a tank some department was refurbishing.

The garage doors. They were being lowered, slowly. I only had a few seconds to get to them before this exit would be useless. I squeezed my eyes shut and somehow, impossibly, sped up. It felt like every cell in my body was exploding, every bit of blood was hot and angry. The crack of sunlight under the garage grew slimmer, slimmer, slimmer . . .

I flung myself at the ground and tumbled out into the sun.

I was out.

But I also couldn't move. There were footsteps, footsteps I wanted to run from but couldn't because suddenly my arms weighed entirely too much for me to lift. But then Clatterbuck and Walter were lifting me up, running with me. There was the school bus, and there was Kennedy.

And then there was just blackness.

“Hale! Do! You! Hear! Me!”

Yes. I hear you. Stop yelling.
I was trying really hard to say that out loud, but it wasn't working.

“I think he's in shock.”

“He's not in shock.”

“He might be in shock.”

“You don't know.”

“Guys, be quiet. I think he's waking up.”

“He can't wake up; he's in shock. What'd you put in that thing?”

“It's sort of a super-adrenaline spike. So you burn fast, but short. That's why it's a last resort. I used all the caffeine I could legally buy.”

“I'm in shock.”

“See! I told you he was in shock!”

It took me a moment to realize I'd finally said something out loud. I winced and opened my eyes very, very slowly. The twins, Kennedy, and Walter were gathered around me, and the overhead lights were incredibly bright. Or so they seemed, anyway. It took only a moment for them to fade into regular gym lights. We were back at League headquarters.

“Seriously,” I said, “I'm in shock. What happened?”

Walter answered first. “You passed out. We got you. We brought you here. But you've been totally out for almost a day and a half. Kennedy's the one who drew the unicorns on your arm—”

“What about Creevy?” I felt frantic, like my mind was still all HellBENdered but my body wasn't listening. “Oleander—she's Creevy—”

“We know, Hale. We know everything. Hey, I think you should eat something. That should help you feel normal faster,” Ben said.

“Did it help when you tested the HellBENder?” Beatrix asked as Walter helped me stand. Ben didn't answer, which told me he hadn't actually tested it. That wasn't surprising.

What was surprising, however, was what I saw when we got to the cafeteria. There, eating a sandwich with Clatterbuck, was Agent Otter. He looked thoroughly disgusted by the entire place and kept inspecting his bread as if he thought he'd find mold on it. Walter helped me limp over to him; he didn't look up till I was only a few feet away.

There were a lot of things I wanted to say, but I settled for the thing begging to be asked. “How did you get out?”

Otter gave me a sour look, like he was really very annoyed that I was conscious again. “I took a page out of the Hale Jordan book and cheated. They chased after me, and I took them out one by one using whatever I could find. Took a few shortcuts, threw around a few empty water jugs. Beat them to the door by a hair, but they didn't want to risk exposing the facility by chasing me into the street.”

“I don't cheat,” I said, because I had to make sure that was clear, but I smiled at him a little. I expected Otter to sort of smile back, maybe because we'd pretty much been through a lot together at that point. Instead he scowled, threw his sandwich into its plastic wrap, and walked away.

“Huh,” Beatrix said, watching him go.

“You get used to him after a while. A long while,” Walter assured her. He handed me a different sandwich, and we sat down. Well.
They
sat down—I sort of slumped into my chair uselessly.

“Who else is here?” I asked. “Other than Otter? I threw as many of those papers out as I could, but I don't know how many people saw them.”

Kennedy and Walter looked at each other a little nervously. “No one,” Kennedy finally answered. “
Yet
. Leaving SRS will be hard for them, Hale. Maybe they'll need more convincing than we did.” She gave Walter a pitying look as she said this—this meant his mom was still back at SRS.

“But,” Walter said, like he was trying to look on the bright side, “all the recruits are on their way back to their homes. And we figured out Groundcover.”

“So that means . . .” I looked over at Kennedy. “Mom and Dad can come home.”

She nodded at me, beaming, and then did a walkover out of her chair.

“They're going to hear about it any day now, don't you think? I mean, I know they're lying low, but I'm sure they're still keeping up with things. I bet by Friday,” she said as she righted herself.

Friday came. Friday went. Our parents still hadn't contacted us.

The League, however, had a very good week. Not only did the government give them all sorts of funding back—they had, after all, stopped an SRS world takeover—but they named a new director: Agent Otter. I wasn't saying they chose him because he was literally the only choice available, but . . . he was literally the only choice available. Also, he needed a job, and it was hard for a former spy from a top-secret organization to just get a job at a sandwich shop or something.

“What do you expect me to do, Jordan?” he snapped at me. We were in his office. Amazingly, he'd managed to make it Otter-y in a matter of hours. Gone were Oleander's orchids
and pictures of sunsets. In their place were already-dying houseplants and empty nail hooks.

“The League just got all sorts of funding back! I expect you to use that money to help find my parents.”

“Just got funding back after years and years of
nothing.
The government wants us to take out SRS, one mission at a time, but we don't even have a decent computer. We definitely have to buy new servers. And we have to somehow recruit and train new agents—other than Clatterbuck, who, let's face it, isn't exactly a shining example of a spy, there's not another agent in this entire building.”

“There's me. And Walter. And Kennedy. And Beatrix and Ben, even if they aren't field agents.”

“You are not a junior agent,”
Otter said, pointing a finger at me.

“Will you
get over that stupid physical exam
?” I yelled—really, yelled—and leaned over the desk. “It's just a pointless test! I'm a good field agent, Otter; you know I am! What am I going to have to do to prove it to you?”

“The physical exam!” Otter yelled back, waving his hands at how obvious this was.

I clenched my fists. “Look, believe me—
believe me
—I did not think we'd end up having to work together. I thought I'd leave SRS, and Mom and Dad would come home, and to be honest, I never thought for a second what would happen to you because . . . whatever. But here we are. I'm not asking
you to pay me—I'm not asking you to even be nice to me—but I am asking you to
help me find my parents.
”

I sat back down. It felt like I was experiencing some sort of anger high, and it took a few moments for me to stop shaking.

Otter seemed to be experiencing the same thing. He rolled his tongue around his mouth for a while and then balanced his pencil on its tip. Finally he reached into his drawer and pulled out a newspaper, which he dropped on the table in front of me.

“Here. I don't know what it is, but I think it's for you.”

Then he got up to leave the office. Just after he passed me, he stopped and spoke without looking at me. “It's not a pointless test, Jordan, any more than the other junior agent tests are. It's there to keep you safe. To prove that when it all goes down in the field, you'll be able to make it out alive. I don't like you, Jordan, but that doesn't mean I want to send you off to get killed.”

I waited a moment, considering this. He was right. I knew that. And yet . . .

“Don't worry about me getting killed, Agent Otter. My friends wouldn't let that happen.”

Otter made a gruff sort of noise and then left his office. I thought I heard him muttering something about entitlement in the hall.

I opened the newspaper carefully and went to the classifieds. I knew exactly where to look, because a half dozen
ads had been circled and then crossed out—I guess Otter was looking for codes or ciphers in them. One ad was simply circled, an ad for a lost pet. It read:

LOST hedgehog. Answers to Tinsel.
$1,523 reward
646-961-4253 for more info.

I was holding my breath, but it wasn't until I had to gasp for air that I realized it. This was a message for me, all right. If the hedgehog named Tinsel were there alone, I might get worried it was some sort of SRS trick, but there was the code, our code—1523, my birthday and Kennedy's birthday together. I grabbed the phone—it was taupe—off Otter's desk and frantically dialed the number.

It rang. It rang a thousand times, it felt like, before finally there was a click, and it went to voice mail.

“Hi, Hale and Kennedy,”
my mom's voice said, and I closed my eyes. I hadn't heard her voice in a long time.
“We know you've been waiting to hear from us, and we're sorry it has to be over a voice mail like this. We're so proud of both of you. Hale, what you pulled off at SRS . . . Well . . . we always believed in you, but you took ‘believe' to a whole new level. Groundcover is dead, at least for now—SRS won't risk putting any more agents on it since you and The League could expose them. And I know you think that means your dad and I will get to come home.

“I wish it were that simple. But the truth is, Groundcover
was just the biggest project we knew about. When we suspected SRS wasn't exactly what they'd always told us, we started investigating, and, guys, it's bigger than one project. There are hundreds of agents, hundreds of missions, and hundreds of SRS facilities, and not one of them is up to any good.

“Right now you're safe at The League because SRS is afraid if they hurt you two, your father and I will retaliate and expose them. If we came there, though, they'd have everyone capable of exposing them under one roof. SRS has always been hesitant to attack The League outright, what with them being in the middle of a city and all, but all of us together . . . I'm not sure they'd be able to ignore that.

“What I'm saying, Hale, Kennedy, is that we're safe. And you're safe. And we love you, and we're glad to see you working with The League—though I did hear that Steve is running that show now, so sorry about that. But we can't come back to you just yet, which . . . Well, it's hard for me to even say that out loud, because I know how much you both wanted it. Dad and I wanted it too.

“We'll keep an eye on you two, and the moment it's safe to come home, we will. In the meantime stick with The League. They were the only spy organization ever brave enough to stand up to SRS, and I think with a little work, they can be great again.

“We have to go—we bounced this call off a mess of different servers, but someone can probably trace it if we're here longer than two and a half minutes. So be safe, be strong, and remember to be careful out there. We love you.”

She sniffed, and I heard my dad say something in the background, though I couldn't tell what. And then she hung up.

A prompt asked me if I wanted to repeat the message. I did. Again and again, until I could recite it pretty much by heart. Without meaning to, I began analyzing where I thought the call came from. There was a car engine in the background, something loud, and I thought I heard a bird . . . If I could work out what sort of bird, and cross-reference that with car models popular in different areas . . .

No.

They were right. It wasn't safe for them to come back yet.

So I hung up the phone.

Mission: Become a Superspy
Step 1: Find an acceptable home base

“Where did you
find all this
?” Kennedy squealed. Seriously, she squealed. Her voice sounded like car tires did right before they gained traction.

It was endearing.

“This store at the mall. Ben and Beatrix wouldn't go in with me,” Clatterbuck said, giving them a dark look.

“I could smell the pink. I'm serious. You could actually
smell
pink,” Ben said. Beatrix nodded in agreement.

We were in Kennedy's bedroom—her new bedroom, which was one of the League dorms. It had a pink rug, a pink bedspread, and so many kitten cheerleading posters on the wall that it looked like she was building a kitten army.
It wasn't exactly like her room in our apartment back at SRS, but it was close.

“Look, I put this in,” Ben said, and he pulled a purple lever beside the door. The mattress rose and flopped over on its side. I thought something had gone wrong for a second, but then it flopped open again, and I realized it had turned itself into a tumbling mat. Kennedy reached levels of excitement that only dogs could hear, and hugged Ben and then Beatrix and then Clatterbuck and then me and then Walter, who hadn't had anything to do with this stuff and was really confused by all the pink.