The Inside Job
Authors: Jackson Pearce
THE
INSIDE JOB
(And Other Skills I Learned as a Superspy)
Also by Jackson Pearce
The Doublecross (And Other Skills I Learned as a Superspy)
For Mom,
who likes Hale best
CONTENTS
I'm a spy.
I speak eight languages fluently and am conversational in another three. I can rewire a car and disarm most explosives. I've been building up my tolerance to poisons since I was four years old, and I can pick a lock in less than a minute and break into a safe in less than threeâusually. (The giant safes take a little longer, obviously.) I've spent my entire life studying, training, and practicing to be the best spy I can possibly be.
And yet, I was about to be chucked over a fence.
Mission: Break into a highly secured building
Step 1: Make it through the exterior fence
It was at least seven feet tall, with another few feet of barbed wire across the top. My little sister, Kennedy, was
able to spring up the fence and slip under the barbed wire like some sort of redheaded lemur. But Walter, my best friend, was too big to fit between the barbed wire and the fence. So, his plan was to climb the side of a nearby delivery truck, jump from there over the fence, latch on to a drainpipe, and then leap from the drainpipe to the ground.
It was a pretty athletic plan. But Walter was a pretty athletic guy.
“What about you?” Walter asked as he bounded from the ground to the hood of the truck in one swift movement.
“Let me think,” I said. Like Walter, I couldn't fit between the barbed wire and the fence. Unlike Walter, there was no
way
I could jump far enough to reach the drainpipe, much less cling to the side of it.
I was a pretty unathletic guy.
Well, no, that was putting it too mildly. Imagine a bowl of pudding. Now imagine a boy who is as athletic as that bowl of pudding. That was me. Which meant I had to be creative sometimes.
“Kennedy, is there anything in that Dumpster?” I asked, motioning behind her. Kennedy frowned, then hurried to the Dumpster. She lugged out a few garbage bags, crinkling her nose at them.
“Do I want to know what's in those?” I asked, looking at the fat black bags through the chain-link fence.
Kennedy untied the top of one and made a face. “Probably not.”
“Great. Put them in a pile for me?” I heaved myself onto the hood of the delivery truck.
“You're going to jump over the fence and straight into those bags?” Walter asked as I rolled up onto the roof like a loose potato. I found my footing and stood.
“Nope. I can't jump that far.”
“You're going to hot-wire the truck and move it closer?” Walter asked, sounding excited.
“Noâ Well, I guess I could, but with the angles of the alley, I don't know if I can maneuver the truck closer, anyhow.”
“You're going toâ”
“You're going to throw me,” I interrupted.
Walter's eyes went wide. He looked at the pile of trash bags, then back at me, then at the trash bags again. “What if I miss?” he asked hesitantly.
“Don't,” I said. “And we're already at six minutes, so we need to move. Come onâI'll run and jump. I just need you to throw me to make up the difference, is all.”
This was a sentence I'd never really imagined myself saying.
Kennedy shoved a bunch of the trash bags close together. Walter stood just beside me and gripped my arms. (Did his
fingers
lift weights? Because no one should have muscular
fingers
, but Walter Quaddlebaum did.) I took a deep breath and counted to three, and we charged forward across the top of the delivery truck. My foot hit the edge, I pushed off, and Walter shoved me upward and
farther into the air. The barbed wire fence passed beneath me, and I had just enough time to see Kennedy's fearful expression as I came down. I smashed into the garbage bags. One broke, and something leaked out of it onto my feet. I wanted to get up, since that was pretty disgusting, but my body seemed to feel that if I was going to allow myself to be thrown over a fence, I deserved to be frozen for a few moments.
“Hale!” Kennedy squealed, shaking my shoulders frantically. I blinked at the clouds above me and finally sat up, coughing. I was going to have a bruise on my . . . well. On my everywhere, probably.
“You okay?” Walter called out just before he jumped from the truck to the drainpipe to the ground, finishing it all up with a slick forward roll into standing.
“I'm fine,” I said, wincing as I stood and dusted myself off (bad ideaânow there was garbage juice on my hands). Walter lifted part of a banana peel off my shoulder and tossed it away. “Let's move,” I said and limped toward the door by the Dumpsters.
Step 2: Go through a locked door
Kennedy and Walter looked on while I grabbed what appeared to be one of those bingo-stampers from my belt. I stamped a large circle of red dots on the door with it. Nothing happened for a few beats, but then with a bright
hiss, the dots caught fire and ate at the metal. We had to step back to avoid the flames, but when they finally died down, I nodded to Walter, who gave the circle a solid kick right in the center. The metal broke away and clattered to the ground.
“Door oneâseven minutes, forty-three secondsâand remind me to talk to Ben about the amount of fire that thing puts out,” I said, checking my watch. I led the way through the door and into the building. Kennedy and Walter immediately turned and walked sideways, so we had eyes in all directions. Outside, we were pretty safeâeven if we didn't make it into the building, we weren't in any serious trouble. But inside? Guards, alarms, trip wires, cameras . . . It was dangerous in here.
Step 3: Navigate to the central computer
The hallway was lit by a handful of flickering, bug-filled fluorescent lights. There were dozens of doorsâall lockedâon either side, but I knew where we were headed; I'd been up since before dawn going over the building's blueprints. Walter and Kennedy, much to their dismay, had been woken up
at
dawn to go on the mission with me. But hey, everyone's always breaking into places under the cover of darkness. I'd figured morning light meant we had the element of surprise,
and
that only a handful of the building's occupants would be awake.
We made our way down the hall, right turn, left turn, third right, and eventually found ourselves peering through the windows of double doors leading into a space that looked like it may have been a conference hall at one point. On the opposite end of the room was a tower of beeping, flashing, outdated technology. The central computerâthe thing we'd come for. I scanned the ceiling. Four cameras, all swiveling around seemingly at random. I knew the patterns, thoughâI'd taken an identical model apart ages ago, and the camera movements weren't random, exactly. Each was just following one of four complex patterns. It wasn't the most sophisticated system, but they got the job done.
“Door three,” I said under my breath. “Eleven minutes, fifty-one seconds. Ready?”
Kennedy sprang up onto Walter's shoulders and stood tall and perfectly balancedâhe was her reluctant cheerleading partner, so this was a well-practiced move for them. Walter held my sister's left ankle with one hand and then put his other on my shoulder to stay close. The cameras had very, very few blind spots, and the ones they did have were only a few feet wide. To stay hidden, we had to take up as little horizontal space as possible, which meant Kennedy on Walter's shoulders and Walter right behind me. I pushed the doors open, and we crept in.
I jumped across the floor, Walter immediatelyâand I mean
immediatelyâ
behind me. Hopped to this tile, then
across, then
one, two, three
, then back, and
duck
. Our legs lifted and we pushed off the floor in perfect timeâit was like a dance. A really, really weird dance. Kennedy was using one arm to hug her hair to her neck so stray pieces wouldn't be seen when camera three's view swept just over her head. I held my breath, worried about the alarmâif Kennedy had grown even a half inch in the last few weeks, the camera would see her . . .
Nope. The camera cleared us; I nodded, and off we went again,
one, two
â
big jump
â
three
, pause for a count of fourâ
move
.
Finally we slid behind the central computer, which was bulky enough to hide us from the cameras. Kennedy flipped off Walter's back and spun to the side to keep a lookout.
Step 4: Get the hard drives
“Time?” I asked as I grabbed a screwdriver off my belt. Walter took it from my hand and immediately began unscrewing the computer chassis.
“Thirteen minutes,” Kennedy answered after checking her neon pink watch. The second hand was shaped like a unicorn and was circling a garden of rainbow-colored flowers. Walter finished up with the chassis cover and heaved it to the side. The two of us coughed in unison as a thick layer of dust rolled out at us.
“I can't believe they're still using this piece of junk,” Walter said, hacking.
“It still works, though,” I said and reached in. I grabbed a handful of wires and unplugged them. The first hard drive slid out easily, but the second jammed. I frowned, tugged harderâwas it glued in? I fought with it for a moment, then yanked
hard
.
The room fell dark.
It was quick. One loud click and everything shut off, even the central computer. Walter pressed close; I heard Kennedy crack her knuckles, bracing for whatever was coming next. I took a deep breath.
A net dropped down from the darkness, startling all three of us. It pinned us to the ground; we smashed around one another, looking for the edges, but mostly there was just a bunch of kicks to the stomach and elbows to the chin. I winced as Walterâwho was panicking a bitâthrashed around and walloped my nose.
The lights came back on.
They did so one at a time, hissing and popping as the power returned to the room. I looked around, assessing the situationâKennedy was a mass of red hair. Walter was curled into a ball. High-stress situations didn't bring out the best in him.