The Inside Job (2 page)

The double doors swung open hard enough that they bounced off the back walls.

A man walked through. He was short and balding and looked kind of murderous. This was impressive because he was wearing pajamas, which don't really lend themselves to looking murderous, but Agent Otter could probably make an Easter Bunny costume look scary. He crossed his arms and glowered at the three of us.

“Nice try,” he growled. “You made it farther than you did last time.”

Two more figures appeared behind him—a boy and a girl, about my age. Ben's hair was sticking up in the back, and Beatrix, his twin, had pillow lines on her face.

“What was the time, Kennedy?” Beatrix asked.

“Sixteen minutes flat!” Kennedy answered triumphantly. Ben hurried over to the net we were trapped under and pressed his palm into the flat disks that were holding it to the floor.

“Cool, huh?” Ben said, his voice groggy with sleep. “They're magnetized! And the magnets reverse when I press them a certain way—” The magnet suddenly gave in, just as the boy had promised. The net went slack, and with a little fumbling, Kennedy, Walter, and I climbed out.

“What did we trip?” I asked the three newcomers, pausing to adjust the rear of my bodysuit. That's right. Bodysuit. I was wearing black spandex by choice these days, because it
was
a pretty effective outfit for spy work, no matter how ridiculous it made me look.

“Beatrix and I installed a fake hard drive last week. Drive two, I think?” Ben said, thumbing toward his sister and grinning. “When you grabbed it, it tripped the power grid and rang an alarm in the dorms. A really, really loud alarm—we weren't going to sleep through it like last time.”

“You wired something to trip the
entire
League power grid without telling me?” the bald man interrupted. He was growling again, but I'd known Agent Otter long enough to know that was just his voice.

“Sorry,” Ben said a little meekly.

I shook my head. “Don't be sorry. That was genius, Ben. The fewer people who know about the traps we set, the fewer chances for a security leak. The BENgo worked great, by the way,” I finished, motioning to the bingo-stamper device we'd used on the exterior door. Ben wrote his name into
all
his inventions' titles, so no one else could claim to have made them.

“So we did it, then?” Walter asked. He still looked a little shaken from that business with the net and the darkness.

Everyone's eyes turned to me. They were all watching, waiting for an answer. It was hard to think back to a few months ago, when most people were looking at me for a quick laugh at the fat kid's expense. Now they were all waiting for me to nod. To say yes. To say that we'd finally finished after months of trying to turn an office full of
outdated equipment into an elite security system that even SRS-trained agents couldn't break through.

I took a deep breath.

Step 5: Prove The League's security system is SRS-agent-proof

I grinned. “Mission accomplished, everyone.”

CHAPTER TWO

Here's a secret: life was easier at SRS.

I mean, it was and it wasn't. See, at SRS, I never questioned who I was. I was Hale Jordan, resident fat kid and wannabe field agent. My parents were SRS's top two agents. They were the good guys. The only thing between a world of innocent, unknowing citizens and The League, the world's most dangerous spy organization. I'd spent my entire life training, practicing, and studying, so one day I could be an agent—one of the good guys—just like my parents.

Of course, at SRS I was also known as Fail Hale, which wasn't easy, not by a long shot. And I was kind of a loser. And I was probably
never
going to get to be a field agent, since I couldn't pass the stupid physical exam.

But still—I knew who I was.

Then everything got turned upside down. I discovered that SRS were secretly the bad guys. The League were secretly the good guys. And my parents were stuck in the middle—on the run to keep from getting offed by SRS while also working to take them down completely, just like The League and I were.

But what did that all make me, exactly? I was a League agent now, sort of. I was in charge of my sister now, sort of. I was a spy now, sort of. And that last one was what I had always wanted, right? So it was wrong and terrible of me to feel, well . . .

Confused, I guess. Because as much as I hated SRS for everything they'd done—the lies, the crimes, putting a hit out on my parents—I still
missed
SRS. I missed my old life.

I missed my parents.

But,
I reminded myself whenever I missed them too much,
they're heroes—they walked away from SRS, from everything they've ever known, from their family, because it was the right thing to do. Nothing's ever easy for heroes. That's why there are so few heroes—and why it's so great that your parents are two of them. That's why you need to work harder to be one too, instead of wallowing around missing SRS like some sort of . . . wallower. Stop whining, you wallower. Stop it!

“Are you ready?” someone asked from my door—Walter. I sat up in bed to see him looking my room over, frowning. “Seriously, man. You've got to put up some posters or some . . . something.”

“What would I put up posters of?” I asked.

“I don't know. Cars. Sports teams. Bikini girls.”

I lifted my eyebrows.

“Okay, then, wiring schematics for SRS-localized missile-launch controllers. Just
something
. Your room is depressing,” Walter said, rolling his eyes at me. I ignored him, ducking to grab my shoes from under my bed. The truth was, Walter was right. We were all living at League headquarters now, and everyone else's rooms were decorated. Kennedy's was covered in neon cartoon animals and nine billion shades of pink. Walter's was covered in posters of the stuff he'd mentioned earlier—cars, sports teams, and bikini girls—even though I knew he had a stuffed frog hidden under his blankets. Ben's was full of wires and pictures of Nikola Tesla. Beatrix's was full of spare computer parts. Even Otter's room was probably decorated, though who knows what with—I didn't want to think too hard about what Otter looked at as he fell asleep at night.

And mine was white. White walls, white bedspread, white floor.

When we left SRS for good last year, I hadn't thought to take anything with me. In my head there wasn't
time.
I'd been so caught up in getting myself, Walter, and Kennedy out that I hadn't thought about taking
things
. Walter, however, had remembered to pack his stuffed frog, some T-shirts, and a telescope his parents gave him. Kennedy
had grabbed her favorite set of pom-poms, a few photos of Mom and Dad, and Mom's wedding ring.

I didn't have anything. I mean, I had
them
, and I knew that should have been enough, but still. I wish I'd grabbed something. Like one of Dad's ties, or maybe his grappling hook set . . .

See? Wallowing again.

“You're going to be late,” Walter said, nodding at my alarm clock.

“That's four minutes fast,” I said. “And besides, what's Otter going to do—give me pushups?”

Walter grinned as I finished tying my shoes. I joined him at the door, and together we walked down the hall and upstairs to The League's mission control room.

Mission control was looking good these days. Or better, anyhow. We'd spent ages sourcing old television sets and video equipment, Frankenstein-ing computers together under Beatrix's careful eye, and now we had a pretty decent control center. It still smelled a little like corn chips, but to be fair, most of the building did. Otter was sitting at a giant metal desk in the back of the room, poring over papers and maps and folders, while my sister and Clatterbuck—Stan Clatterbuck, to be specific, who was Beatrix and Ben's uncle—raced around in rolling chairs. Beatrix was at the command desk, typing hurriedly on her Right Hand, her name for a device that looked like three cell phones welded together but had more computing
power than anything else in the building. Ben, meanwhile, was sketching something on a legal pad, face mashed into hard, thoughtful lines.

“What's that?” I asked as we walked up.

“The BENdy Straw,” Ben said triumphantly, showing me the drawing. It looked like some sort of camera device on a wire, but you never could tell with his inventions. Sometimes stuff that looked like, say, a plastic boat, wound up being a miniature flamethrower. Walter learned that the hard way, when he went to play with the aforementioned plastic boat and lost three-fourths of his eyebrows.

“You're going to run out of words that have ‘Ben' in them, eventually. You know that, right?” Kennedy said, rising from her rolling chair after thoroughly trouncing Clatterbuck. She'd traded her black spy suit for a fluffy pink skirt and a shirt with a cartoon dog wearing sunglasses. Ben either ignored or didn't hear her because he was busy writing “The BENdy Straw” across the top of the paper.

“All right, all right—we're all here?” Otter grumbled, like he wanted to get this meeting over with as soon as possible. Everyone gathered around the desk.

“All right, boss man,” Clatterbuck said warmly. “What's our next move?”

Our
. That was the thing that made life here at The League worth it, even if it wasn't
easier
. SRS might have been a team, sure, but here? We were an “us.”

Otter cleared his throat, like Clatterbuck's enthusiasm grossed him out. “Well. I've gone over all the information we've collected. And now that we have our own security sorted out, I think it's time we strike SRS. See if we can knock them down a little further.” He waved to some papers on the desk, like we were supposed to make sense of them. “Now, we can't best them with manpower or artillery or influence. But what we
can
do is make sure they don't get any more of these things. Which is why we're going to hit them where it hurts. We're taking their money.”

We collectively blinked at Otter. Finally Beatrix said, “We're going to rob them?”

“We're going to rob their bank account,” Otter corrected. He pointed to a sheet of paper—it was a printout of some fancy-looking building. “This is the Central Bank of Switzerland. It's where SRS stores their wealth—some in cash, some in digital accounts, and some in gold bars.”

“How much money are we talking about?” I asked curiously.

Otter shrugged. “Between all three? Around ninety million. They have smaller accounts in Russia and Thailand, but this is their heart, money-wise. If we try anything else—stopping a mission, say, or interrupting their operations, they'll just be able to spring right back up so long as this account exists. We'll be playing spy Whac-A-Mole for the rest of our lives. But I happen to know the fake name they use for their bank accounts: Antonio Halfred.”

“How do you know that?” Walter asked. “You weren't in accounting.”

Otter looked indignant. “I dated an agent in accounting—”

“You dated Agent Bullwhipple?” Kennedy squealed, though I couldn't tell if it was in horror or delight. Having once accidentally caught Agent Bullwhipple tweezing her mustache at her desk,
I
was particularly horrified.

Otter slapped his notebook to calm the chatter that had erupted over the room. “My private dating life is irrelevant! My point is, we know the name. Once we're in Switzerland, we'll sort out how to pose as Antonio Halfred and—”

“We're going to Switzerland?” Beatrix shouted, and she and Kennedy jumped around in a circle together. Ben and Walter high-fived—

“Not for vacation! We're going for work!” Otter roared, looking like he wished he'd stayed in bed today.

“How are we even going to get ninety million dollars back into the country?” I asked. Even though we were a government agency, we operated more or less on our own—the government, after all, didn't want to admit to 1) having a secret spy agency or 2) the fact that there was a
second
secret spy agency, a bad one, that they couldn't stop.

Otter said, “I'm thinking that rather than sneak it back in, we just open our own Swiss bank account. Transfer the money from their account to ours.”

“We could afford new computers!” I said, getting excited. “And to run the air-conditioning all summer without dimming the lights! We'll be a real spy agency again!”

“Hey!” Clatterbuck said.

“It'll be enough that we can bring in some real agents too,” Otter said.

“Hey!” Walter said.

“Come on, Walter,” I said. “Let's be real—it'd be nice to have some actual funding here. Think about how long it took us to set up a decent security system, what with the ancient cameras and all.”

“I was thinking about how we
did
set up a great security system
despite
the ancient cameras,” Walter said darkly, and to my surprise, Kennedy, Beatrix, and Ben all nodded in agreement. Clatterbuck was staring at the ground, since he was a little wary of confrontation, but I could tell he agreed too.