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Authors: Chris Rylander

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CHAPTER 44

A
SHORT TIME LATER, I WAS ESCORTED OUT BY AGENT NINETEEN
. As we approached the entrance of the Lobby, Agent Blue called out from the top of the glass staircase.

“Agent Nineteen, I need a quick word,” he said.

“Wait here,” Agent Nineteen said, and then climbed the stairs.

I wandered over to the huge wall lined with portraits of men and women. There were hundreds of them, all nicely framed in polished wood with small brass plates that displayed the person’s name and nothing else. Well,
their codename, that is.

There was an Agent Isotope. He was a skinny, pale guy with bulgy eyes. Then there was Agent 1100, a pretty girl who was probably only twenty-one years old or so. Agent Fuchsia was an older guy who looked like he could be someone’s sweet old grandpa. Agent Brown had bad teeth and long blond hair but looked like a body builder. His neck was about as thick as my whole torso.

Agent Smiles looked like she never smiled. Agent Bloodstone looked like he probably liked to use swords instead of guns. Agent 5 would have looked almost as young as I was if it wasn’t for his thick beard. And Agent Smith looked like some normal guy you wouldn’t look at twice if you passed him in the street.

There were so many, I probably could have looked forever. But the odd thing was I’d yet to see one for Agent Nineteen or Agent Blue. Or Agent Chum Bucket, or anyone I recognized at all for that matter.

“There are a lot of them, right?” a voice said beside me.

I jumped and almost fell over I’d been so startled. It was Agent Nineteen.

“Where’s yours?” I asked.

“I hope I won’t have one hanging up here for a long, long time,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“Carson, this wall is our tribute to agents lost in the field.”

It took me a few moments to really hear what he’d said.

“You mean, all of these agents are . . . dead?”

“That’s right,” he said. “Most of them were great agents, too. Don’t feel badly for them, though. All of them had moments before they were lost when they could have turned back, given up on the mission. Maybe they’d still be alive today, maybe they wouldn’t. But they all made a choice. And I think if you asked them, they wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

“Wow” is all I could manage to say.

“Well, are you ready to go home?” he asked.

“Yeah, I suppose,” I said, taking one last look at the wall of faces. I just couldn’t believe all these people were gone. I started to turn away but then stopped dead in my tracks.

“What is it?” Agent Nineteen asked.

“This guy,” I said, pointing at one of the pictures,
hardly believing what I was seeing. “This guy . . . it’s . . . it’s . . .”

I was pointing at a picture of someone named Agent Neptune.

“It’s . . . Mule Medlock,” I finished.

“That’s not possible,” Agent Nineteen said, taking a step back. “I saw Agent Neptune die myself.”

“It’s him. I’m positive,” I said. “I’ll never forget that smile for as long as I live.”

Agent Nineteen stared for a moment longer, then wiped at his eyes. It took him almost a full minute to collect himself.

“He was my partner and a close friend. He died in Indianapolis. Shot in the forehead. It just isn’t possible.”

Agent Nineteen was quiet for a while. Then when he spoke again, he seemed calmer. “It makes sense now—how he knows so much about the Agency. I just can’t believe he’s still alive. We will definitely look into this further. But that’s none of your concern. We better get you home, Zero. Let’s go.”

CHAPTER 45

R
IGHT AWAY THE NEXT MORNING, I RODE MY BIKE TO DILLON
and Danielle’s house.

“What the heck happened to you?” Dillon asked when he saw me limping in a walking cast. “What happened at the circus? What is going on?”

He seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I expected Danielle to try to calm him down, to be the voice of reason like usual. But she didn’t. This time, she joined him.

“Yeah?” she said. “What was that yesterday? What happened to you? Did you find Olek?”

I took a deep breath and then explained to them how I’d found out that Olek was some sort of secret agent in his home country and had gotten involved in international espionage. He’d gotten captured by the enemy spy cell operating with the circus for a front. I told them I was able to break in and save him, leaving out the parts where I’d gotten captured myself. I wanted to tell them about my involvement with the Agency, but I knew that it wouldn’t be the right thing to do from the perspective of an almost sort of secret agent. It was my cover; I still shouldn’t break it even though I wasn’t technically working with the Agency anymore.

What I told them was all in all a pretty ridiculous story, and I’m not sure if they really believed me. Well, Dillon definitely did, but Danielle still looked pretty skeptical. But, in the end, was it really any more ridiculous than the whole truth anyway? Either way, they stopped asking questions, which was the point.

About a week later things had pretty much returned to normal. I mean, as normal as is possible when you’re best friends with kids like Dillon and Danielle, and you know of the existence of a super–top secret government
agency operating literally right underneath your school, that is.

And for the first time in my whole life I was sort of okay with everything being normal. I was never happier to be living out a boring North Dakota routine. And it wasn’t because I’d learned my lesson or anything. I still craved action, excitement, something bigger and better than what existed on the surface. The difference now was that I actually knew better. I knew that beneath the boring and plain and predictable exterior of North Dakota life there really
was
more going on. That there were bigger things than I ever could have imagined happening right below and around us all the time. And that I had once been a part of that. And simply knowing all of that was enough to make even the most mundane North Dakota things, like going to the movies, feel anything but boring and mundane and routine.

Because even though nothing strange had happened since that night at the circus when I’d saved the day, it didn’t mean I wasn’t always watching. It didn’t mean I wasn’t always ready for anything at any time. And that’s why it wasn’t that shocking to me when one Wednesday I got another chunk of paper in my corned beef.

I unfolded it slowly. My hands shook, but only a little.
I looked down and read the message:

Agent Nineteen has 72 hours to live. Meet on the school track in six minutes
.

I looked up and saw Dillon staring at me.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said, grabbing my lunch tray and standing up. “I just have to go save the world again.”

BACK AD

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHRIS RYLANDER
is the author of the Fourth Stall saga. A fan of chocolate, chips, and chocolate chips, he lives in Chicago. You can visit him online at www.chrisrylander.com.

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www.AuthorTracker.com
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CREDITS

Cover design by Tom Forget

COPYRIGHT

Walden Pond Press is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Walden Pond Press and the skipping stone logo are trademarks and registered trademarks of Walden Media, LLC.

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All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

www.harpercollinschildrens.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rylander, Chris.

Codename: Zero / Chris Rylander.

pages cm

Summary: “When a desperate man in a nondescript black suit asks thirteen-year-old Carson Fender to deliver a mysterious package for him, the middle schooler discovers there’s something going on in his sleepy North Dakota hometown he had never expected”— Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-0-06-212008-3 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-06-232530-3 (int’l ed.)

[1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Spies—Fiction. 3. Middle schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Humorous stories.] I. Title.

PZ7.R98147Cod 2014

2013032327

[Fic]—dc23

CIP

EPub Edition © JANUARY 2014 ISBN: 9780062120106

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CG/RRDH
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