0062120085. (C) (20 page)

I
THOUGHT WE WERE DRIVING TO THE SCHOOL, BUT THAT WASN’T
entirely correct. We did go to the school parking lot, but when we got out of the car, Agent Blue led us away from the school. Toward the sledding hill. It was pretty embarrassing, but he had to carry me, piggyback style, since I couldn’t walk on my ankles.

As we walked, he handed me a cell phone.

“Call your mom. Let her know you’re at a friend’s house and will be home later tonight,” Agent Blue said.

I called home and told my mom I was at Olek’s house,
that they were finally getting to move back in. She sounded happy for him, but I thought I detected a trace of sadness in her voice.

“Can I also call my friends?” I asked Agent Blue after I’d disconnected. “To let them know I’m okay?”

“Sure,” Agent Blue said as we descended the sledding hill.

So I called Danielle and before letting her ask too many questions I simply told her I was okay and home safely and would explain more the next day. Then I hung up before she could say much more than “okay.”

We went all the way down the sledding hill and around the base of it, right up to the exposed dirt hillside filled with tiny swallow nests. A small shed sat in a nearby grove of trees. A small building that I’d seen a thousand times before but never paid much attention to. I mean, it was a maintenance shed. What was there to notice about it, really?

Agent Blue opened the shed’s door with an electronic keycard.

“You mean all those winter days that we’ve been sledding down this hill, we’ve been sledding right near a top secret government agency entrance all along?” I asked.

“Yes,” Agent Blue said.

“But isn’t that kind of crazy? To put a secret entrance just a few hundred feet from where dozens of kids go sledding?”

“You all stay away from this shed, don’t you?” Agent Blue asked.

It was true. We all did. There was just something about it that made us stay away.

“We do,” I admitted.

“That’s not a coincidence,” he said. “You ever heard of an EMF?”

I shook my head.

“It means electromagnetic field. It’s a magnetic field that sometimes occurs naturally or around large metallic objects. Anyway, the theory is that really strong EMFs make people feel uneasy. So we’ve generated a very strong EMF within a hundred-foot radius of this shed.”

“Won’t our brains be fried?” I asked.

He shook his head as we stepped inside the shed.

“No, EMFs have no detectable permanent physical effects on humans.”

I nodded and glanced back outside at swallow nest hill and noticed that many of the nests faced the front of the shed.

“There are cameras in those holes, aren’t there?” I
asked, remembering Dillon’s claim.

“They’re extremely tiny and partially buried. How could you know that?” Agent Blue asked.

I debated telling him about my crazy (or not so crazy, apparently) friend Dillon’s theories but thought better of it.

“Lucky guess,” I said.

The inside of the shed wasn’t empty like I’d expected. It wasn’t very large, but it still contained everything you’d have expected it to if you didn’t know it was really a secret entrance to a government facility. There was a lawnmower, some gardening tools, a fuse box, a generator, stuff like that.

Agent Blue used a key to unlock and lift up the face of an old first-aid box on the wall. Underneath it was what looked like the normal contents of a first-aid box. But then he felt around inside and pulled open a false front to reveal a small digital pad. He placed his index finger on it and then leaned his face close to the box.

A red line of light passed over his eye, and the pad under his finger blinked green. An elevator-size square panel in the floor slid open. The platform beneath it was about a foot below the floor of the shed.

Agent Blue and Olek stepped onto the platform, with
me still on Agent Blue’s back.

“Keep your arms at your sides unless you want to lose them,” Agent Blue said to us.

Then suddenly we were moving down, the panel above us closed, and everything went black. We were in a more normal-looking elevator now. The keypad inside had only three buttons, all of them unmarked. But they were all a different color. Red, blue, yellow. Agent Blue put his finger over the yellow button. It lit up and blinked a few times.

“You might feel your ears pop a little bit,” he said.

Before I could even respond, the floor just dropped out on us. At least that’s what it felt like. The elevator zoomed downward so quickly that it felt like my stomach and face were still located miles above the rest of me. As he’d warned, I felt my ears popping, just like they did when I dived to the bottom of a ten-foot-deep swimming pool.

We must have zoomed down at an incredible rate for close to twenty or thirty seconds. I couldn’t believe that we were actually that far underground. We must have been close to a mile beneath the surface. Then, mercifully, the elevator finally slowed to a stop.

“How far down are we?” I asked.

“As far as is absolutely possible without putting the structure in danger,” Agent Blue said.

The elevator doors opened, and I was looking at a small entryway of sorts. It was basically a little room with marble floors and several other sets of elevator doors. But straight ahead of me, through a set of glass doors, there was a huge room, bustling with people. We exited the elevator. Agent Blue used a keycard to open the glass doors and we entered the massive atrium.

“Welcome to Agency headquarters,” he said.

T
HE HUGE ROOM WAS PROBABLY THE SIZE OF SEVERAL LARGE
gymnasiums with high ceilings, making it feel like a cavern. It was exactly what I would have expected the main room of some top secret government agency to look like.

It had marble floors, flags, plaques all over. On the left wall there was a huge projection TV screen that took up pretty much the whole space. On the right wall there were hundreds of framed portraits of men and women. Directly ahead of me were dual glass staircases leading up to some offices with glass walls. In between the
staircases was a huge American eagle sculpture flanked by an American flag and another flag I couldn’t identify. Everything looked new, clean, modern, high-tech, and expensive. People crossed the room and ascended and descended the staircases in a chaos of activity.

Agent Blue saw my face and said, “We call this room the Lobby. It’s the heart of the Agency. There will be time to look around later. Right now, though, we need to get you guys to the medical wing.”

I was still hanging on to his shoulders as we headed left, along the wall, toward a set of metal doors in the corner of the Lobby and adjacent to several rows of glass cubicles housing metal desks and expensive-looking glass computer monitors. Most of the people working didn’t even look up once as we passed.

The medical wing of the Agency HQ looked like pretty much every hospital I’d been in before. Except there were no windows and everything looked slightly more high-tech. I ended up getting a walking boot cast on one ankle, and a bandage on the other. Olek had two casts put on his hands, and his arms were secured in double slings. He looked pretty funny.

When we got back to the Lobby of the Agency HQ, Olek and I were led up the huge glass staircase overlooking
everything in the atrium. Agent Blue ushered us into a conference room and before leaving told us to wait there.

Olek and I took a seat at the huge wooden table in the center of the room.

“Like striking down two chicken with one boulder,” Olek said with a grin, holding up his dual casts.

“I’m not sure that metaphor really fits here, Olek,” I said. “Besides, it’s ‘two birds with one stone.’”

“Yes, this what I say,” he said. “Winner, winner, dinner of roast beef and potato.”

“We’ll have to work on that one, too,” I said with a grin.

“What I say wrong this time?”

“Winner, winner, chicken dinner,” I said.

“Ah, this make no sense!” he said. “Roast beef dinner taste much better than chicken dinner.”

I didn’t even bother to comment; instead I merely grinned. I would have laughed but I was honestly way too exhausted for that.

“Thank you again for coming for me,” Olek said.

“You would have done the same for me.”

Olek nodded. Before we could say anything else, the door opened and both Agents Nineteen and Blue entered. They sat across from Olek and me at the conference table.

“Did you get him?” I asked. “Medlock, I mean?”

“There was no one left in the building by the time we got in there,” Agent Nineteen said solemnly. “This Mule Medlock guy you said was the leader must have gotten away.”

“No way! How is that possible?” I said.

Agent Nineteen merely shook his head.

“We’d like you to fully debrief us, Zero,” Agent Blue said.

“Uhhh . . . ,” I said.

“That’s just a fancy way of asking you to tell us what happened tonight,” Agent Nineteen said.

So that’s what I did. I told them everything, about how Pancake Haus found out who Olek was, the staging of the package delivery. When Olek heard this part of the story he seemed both shocked and maybe even a little impressed at Pancake Haus’s ingenuity. I also told them how the Agent Orange I saw wasn’t the real Agent Orange. How my friends and I had pieced together that there was something fishy about the circus. And I told them what Medlock had said about wanting to take down the Agency.

“He really hates you guys for some reason,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s in line with the little bit we’ve been able
to get out of the apprehended agents so far. The real question is why?” Agent Nineteen said. “And how does he know so much about us? He shouldn’t even know we exist, let alone know that our headquarters is here.”

“So what took you guys so long to respond to the red button?” I asked.

“We’re sorry about that, Zero,” Agent Nineteen said. “The whole Agency was in overdrive trying to find out what happened to Olek. All available field agents were out exploring possible leads. Since you’d been relieved of duty, your transponder’s signal had actually been taken off the main grid here at HQ. It was somewhat of a fluke that Agent Blue even noticed you had sent the signal at all. After that, we got to the location as fast as we could.”

“But we thank you,” Agent Blue said. “You saved the mission. Without you, we would not have known Pancake Haus’s location until it was too late, if we would have ever found out at all. You’re a national hero.”

I felt my face grow hot.

“I was just trying to fix what I’d caused,” I said.

“
None
of this was your fault; we were simply duped by someone who knew more than we thought possible,” Agent Nineteen said. “I just wish we knew how Medlock managed to have the drop on us the whole time. How
did he know as much as he did? How did he get past the Agency encryptions in Agent Orange’s PEDD to plant that trap?”

Nobody spoke for a few minutes.

They eventually debriefed me on what they’d found at the circus that night. They’d managed to apprehend eleven enemy operatives, although they found the bodies of dozens more, apparently shot by Mule Medlock to keep them from talking. Mule Medlock was not one of the people apprehended or killed in the raid.

“The little guy you said was named Packard, we didn’t find him either,” Agent Nineteen said.

I shook my head. “So this isn’t over!”

“Zero, it’s never over,” Nineteen said. “Even if we had gotten Medlock, eventually another enemy would replace him. But we have dealt the Pancake Haus a major blow. It’s going to take a while for them to regroup and rebuild their resources, if they ever try at all. I would say we have at least a good two or three months before we need to worry about the Pancake Haus again.”

Even after all that I couldn’t believe it wasn’t over.

“But the important part is that we have Olek back,” Agent Blue said. “And we got word of his rescue back to our operatives at the ITDO. His parents testified at the
trial, and those three terrorists are as good as locked up. Forever.”

“Olek will be departing to rendezvous with them again soon,” Agent Nineteen said. “They can never go back to their home country, but at least they’ll all get to be together as a family in our Witness Relocation Program.”

“But why does he have to leave if they already testified?” I said, even though I’d known all along that he wasn’t going to get to stay here.

“Because for witnesses it’s never truly over,” Nineteen explained. “There will always be groups of people, associates of those three terrorists, who will be looking for revenge. Though, with the trial over, they won’t devote nearly as many resources to the effort. There won’t be groups like the Pancake Haus after them anymore. They’ll be safe in our Relocation Program.”

I looked at Olek. He was smiling. Which was great, of course. I should be happy for him. But I would mostly just miss him.

“You’ve done some amazing work, Agent Zero,” Agent Nineteen said. “Truly remarkable.”

Agent Blue nodded solemnly in agreement.

And I noticed that they’d actually called me Agent
for the very first time.

“But,” Agent Nineteen said.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“You’re still being retired,” Agent Blue answered.

“Retired?” I asked.

“It means you’re free to go,” Agent Blue said. “Olek was protected, his parents testified, you succeeded. Your services are no longer needed.”

I nodded, surprised at both how disappointed and shocked I was that they were letting me go, despite the fact that I’d saved the day almost single-handedly.

“Tracking down and eliminating the remaining factions of the Pancake Haus isn’t your problem,” Agent Nineteen said. “It’s ultimately too much responsibility for a thirteen-year-old. You need to be a kid, have fun, not worry about getting killed or captured for the rest of your childhood. Therefore, all records of your employment or involvement will be destroyed, and of course if you ever try to disclose any of this, it will be denied.”

I nodded. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

I was thinking about Dillon. I realized that given everything that had happened the past week, I’d probably never consider his theories completely crazy ever again.

“I want you to know, though, that we’ll always be proud to call you a fellow agent,” Agent Blue said.

Agent Nineteen nodded in agreement.

“Thank you,” I said, not sure what else I was supposed to say to that.

“Now, we’ll leave you two alone for a moment if you want to say good-bye one last time before Olek leaves,” Agent Nineteen said.

He and Agent Blue left the conference room.

I looked at Olek and suddenly found myself barely able to keep it together.

“I’m going to miss you,” I said. “I wish you could stay here.”

“Yes, me too, but we must go for protection. Keep hiding and stay in front of enemy. Is like game of panther and rat.”

“Cat and mouse,” I corrected him.

“Yes, this what I say.”

“Can’t you guys just stay here? I mean, this place is safe, right?” I motioned at the underground secret base we were in.

“Yes, this place like Fort Knockers,” Olek said. “Very secure.”

I laughed.

“But problem is this is terrible place to live. There is no sun down here. No Jimmy Buffett. No kidney bean ice cream.”

“Yeah, that’s a good point, Olek. But I’m going to miss this a lot. Well, at least you’ll be back with your family, right?”

He smiled wider than I think I’d ever seen before.

“Yes, is good,” he said.

“All right, well, bye, Olek,” I said, not sure that I could stay here much longer without breaking down. “Email me or something if you’re ever allowed to.”

Olek nodded.

“Thank you for everything,” he said. “I will not forget what you do for me. You’re even cooler person than Jimmy Buffett.”

I didn’t think I could even say anything back without bursting into tears like a little baby. So instead of talking, I just gave him a nod and left the room.