The Inside Job (25 page)

I opened my mouth in either surprise or to argue (I hadn't decided which), but Beatrix cut me off. “Hale—are you still on your comm? Hale?” I confirmed I was, and she went on, “How did you trip the dye packs? What'd you build the transmitter out of? Or was it some button at that bank guard station?”

“Huh? I didn't trip them. Hastings did.”

“Dye packs either get tripped by a radio signal or because someone handles them. He couldn't have handled them since he was driving, so it had to be a radio signal. In fact, I can actually find the radio signal . . . Hang on. Yep. Right here.”

“I didn't do that. Seriously. I figured Hastings was just going to get away with the cash,” I said, finally clambering to the front seat and buckling in.

“Hold on. I'll trace it,” Beatrix said.

Clatterbuck swerved to avoid yet more police cars. I noticed a few news helicopters buzzing overhead. I guess it's not every day that a bank gets robbed, much less that it gets robbed and the culprit winds up stumbling around in neon pink. I
almost
felt bad for Hastings. He'd helped us rob SRS, after all. But then, he'd also meant to
sell us out, and then he robbed the bank himself, and he was also kind of a crummy person in general, so . . .

“There's a Morse code layered into the dye pack signal. Hang on. I'm translating,” Beatrix said. She mumbled letters, pulling them together to form words. Then she went silent.

“What? What is it?” I asked.

“It says . . . ‘Happy Early Thirteenth Birthday, Hale. Love, Mom and Dad.'”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

So, here's something that's difficult: getting more than a ton of gold bars out of a country without raising a few red flags. Which meant that all the gold we stole from SRS and scuba-dived out of the river? We left it in Switzerland in a new account we created at a
different
bank—Archimedes St. Claire's father's bank, as a matter of fact. In the end, we took only seven bars back to the United States—one hidden in each of our luggage—with one extra bar used to pay for the plane we took home. Clatterbuck flew, though Otter offered a lot of commentary on his piloting skills and Ben kept pulling panels off walls to look at plane-wiring schematics, making everyone nervous.

“Finally,” Beatrix said as she threw open the back door to League headquarters and inhaled deeply. “Oh, wow, it
still
smells like corn chips!” She didn't sound sad about this at all.

“Trust me, that's never going away,” Clatterbuck answered.

“We're home, Annabelle! Are you excited?” Kennedy asked the dog. Annabelle responded by bounding among all our rooms, working out the shortest route between each. Otter went off to make spreadsheets or something, and Clatterbuck hurried around, turning things like the air-conditioning and water back on. Ben and Beatrix went back and forth between the car and the building, carefully unloading computer and inventing equipment.

“Want help?” Walter asked as I struggled with my gold-bar-containing suitcase on the steps. I nodded, and Walter slung the suitcase over his shoulder. Then he navigated both mine and his up to the hall where our bedrooms were. He slid mine into my room and then nodded curtly and started toward his own.

“Walter. Don't you want to know?” I called after him. My voice bounced down the long hall. Walter turned around.

“What?”

“If she took the envelope. If she said anything. If she did anything?”

Walter spun his suitcase around under his palm for a second and then shook his head. “No. Well, I do, but
only if it's good. If she was . . . If she was all SRS agent-y then . . . no. I'd rather not.”

“She took the envelope,” I told him, and he nodded.

“Well. It's a start. Maybe she'll . . .” Walter sighed heavily and looked down. “I can't believe after everything, SRS still has a hold on her.”

“They had a hold on all of us once. But we chose to leave, so they don't
really
own us—it just feels that way. Your mom will break out eventually. And when she does, she has to take a room down at the end of the hall where Otter stays, because otherwise you'd always be grounded.”

“For what?” Walter asked, grinning.

“Well, the music, for one. But also those bikini girl posters.”

Walter blanched. “Oh, wow. I'd have to get rid of those.”

“Yep.”

“Speaking of, I got you something for your birthday. It's not a secret message encoded in a dye pack release signal or anything, but it's something,” Walter said, then motioned for me to follow him to his room. Once inside, Walter flung his suitcase on the bed and then opened it; he tried and failed to quickly move the stuffed frog from the suitcase and tuck it underneath the blankets. When he looked back to see if I'd noticed, I pretended like I'd
just been looking at some origami cranes folded on top of his dresser.

Walter reached to the bottom of the suitcase, where he had something folded up tightly. He pulled it out and handed it to me. I lifted an eyebrow, took it, and carefully unfolded it. It was a world map—a giant one, bigger than I was. There were dots all over it—most in yellow, and a few in bright green.

“What are these?” I asked.

“The green ones are where you've been on missions,” Walter said, pointing—most of the dots were around League headquarters, but then there was one in Geneva and one in Somerset by Wookey Hole. “And the yellow ones are where your parents have been on missions. Recently, anyway. Kennedy had to help. I thought it might be cool, though, to see where you've been that your parents have been? Maybe see where they go a lot? So you can . . . you know. Know you've all been in the same places. That sort of thing.”

I stared.

“It's . . . Sorry. It's dumb. It's all I could afford. Well, it was, anyway. I guess technically I now have a half-million-dollar gold bar—”

“It's awesome, Walter. Thanks,” I said, still staring, because it was basically the perfect birthday present, but I didn't want to get all sappy with Walter. Now I didn't
know what to say, except, “Thanks. Again. It's . . . It's really awesome.”

Walter looked pleased. “I'm glad you like it. Especially because I'm pretty sure Otter got you coupons.”

“Wow.
Otter
got me a birthday present?”

“Coupons, Hale. He got you coupons. Did you hear that part?”

“Still,” I said, and grinned as I left the room. Once I was back in my own, I hung the map up over my bed. It took up the entire wall, and I had to steal a whole bunch of push pins from the bulletin board to make it stay. It made the entire room look brighter, what with the blue oceans and bright pastel countries. I sat at my desk and stared at it for a long time.

Where were my parents now? Surely, not Geneva, not anymore. Maybe not even Europe. I let my eyes wander across countries and continents, waiting to feel some sort of pull, some sort of click that told me I was looking in the right spot. Except, it didn't come. I didn't know where they were.

But they knew where I was. They were watching. They were there, even if I didn't notice, even if there were no messages in the paper, even if birthdays were now accompanied by bank heists and dye packs. It was
dangerous
for them to stick so close to me. It was dangerous of them to send a message to me on my birthday. They'd done it anyway.

Because they didn't
always
think of the mission. They were former SRS agents, after all, but they were also just Mom and Dad.

Everyone at The League threw me a surprise party when my actual birthday rolled around a week later.

Only, it wasn't really even close to a surprise because, for a group of elite spies, they were really terrible at keeping it a secret. Still, there was cake and ice cream, and Clatterbuck bought a piñata that I was terrible at hitting, but Walter pummeled it so well, I felt bad for the piñata. Beatrix and Ben rigged some fireworks to go off the roof in celebration (and by fireworks, I mean explosives that Ben mixed together), so that night we all gathered on the roof and watched them spiral into the sky.

My parents weren't there, but all in all, it was a pretty excellent birthday. Plus, since we were at The League rather than at SRS, I could eat the cake again for breakfast the next morning. SRS would never have allowed that.

“So, what's on the list?” I asked Otter as we sat in the cafeteria post-fireworks show. Kennedy, Walter, and the twins were playing with Annabelle among the remains of the piñata, and Clatterbuck was dozing off in the corner, legs splayed out like a dropped marionette. Otter gave me a questioning look instead of answering my question,
so I clarified. “The money. What's on the list of stuff we're doing with the money?”

“You're not the director, Jordan. You don't need to know—”

“You got me coupons for my birthday,” I reminded him.

“Those are good—”

“Three of them are already expired.”

Otter rolled his eyes, but at least he looked a little embarrassed. “Fine. One million goes to repairs on the building—apparently we need a new roof. One million goes to getting a few essentials—better security, mostly, since now that we've robbed SRS we might want to put some laser wires around the doors. And the rest . . . well. The rest we'll use. Travel, mostly. We'll need it, with the missions I've got planned.”

“What missions?”

“Hale, it's your thirteenth birthday. Go take another whack at that piñata Walter killed. Eat some more cake. Stop being a spy for a minute.”

I rolled my eyes at him, but I got up anyway and joined everyone near the piñata carcass. Annabelle was there too, snuffling around on the floor for stray pieces of candy.

“Show Hale!” Ben shouted to Kennedy.

“Okay, okay. I taught Annabelle a trick. Plan B, remember? Training her to make money on her own?” Kennedy asked.

“You trained
this dog
to do something useful?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yes! Watch.” She grabbed a paper plate and then quietly walked across the cafeteria till she was on the complete opposite side, near the buffet lines (that hadn't actually held food in years and years). She reached into her jacket pocket and removed a little can of dog food, which she popped open and dumped onto the plate. She sat it down, then—

“Annabelle! Dinner!” she called.

Annabelle, who'd been sleepily gnawing on the piñata's dismembered ear, leaped to her feet and ran—I mean
ran
—to the plate of food, smacking at it like it was a gourmet meal. It was gone in seconds.

“You trained her . . . to eat?” I asked as Kennedy walked back, grinning. Everyone applauded.

“To eat beautifully, every time, like she
loves
it,” Kennedy corrected me. “I posted a video of it online and two dog food companies are interested in her for commercials. They pay four hundred dollars per commercial, and free food for two months!”

“Four hundred dollars. Whatever did we steal the gold for?” Otter asked drily, but his eyes betrayed him—he was impressed. “All right, everyone—if we're done with the birthday thing, we should head to bed. We've got to be on the mission control deck at zero eight hundred hours.”

“For what?” Beatrix asked.

Otter was already walking away, but he responded over his shoulder, “For another mission. What'd you expect? You're spies, aren't you?”

Copyright © 2016 by Jackson Pearce

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First published in the United States of America in July 2016 by Bloomsbury Children's Books

E-book edition published in July 2016

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pearce, Jackson, author.

Title: The inside job : (and other skills I learned as a superspy) / by Jackson Pearce.

Description: New York : Bloomsbury Childrens Books, 2016. | Sequel to: Doublecross.

Summary: Together with his friends, twelve-year-old Hale, an overweight and non-athletic double agent against SRS, the corrupt spy organization he was raised in, travels to Switzerland to destroy the SRS bank account.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015025273