"Come on," Tina said, "I heard Madame Dabney telling Chef Louis that your mom was working on him all summer to get him to take the job. You had to hear something!"
So Tina's interrogation did have one benefit: I finally understood the hushed phone calls and locked doors that had kept my mother distracted for weeks. I was just starting to process what it meant, when Joe Solomon strolled into class—five minutes late.
His hair was slightly damp, his white shirt neatly pressed—and it's either a tribute to his dreaminess or our education that it took me two full minutes to realize he was speaking in Japanese.
"What is the capital of Brunei?"
"Bandar Seri Begawan," we replied.
"The square root of 97,969 is …" he asked in Swahili.
"Three hundred and thirteen," Liz answered in math, because, as she likes to remind us, math is the universal language.
"A Dominican dictator was assassinated in 1961," he said in Portuguese. "What was his name?"
In unison, we all said "Rafael Trujillo."
(An act, I would like to point out, that was not committed by a Gallagher Girl, despite rumors to the contrary.)
I was just starting to get into the rhythm of our little game, when Mr. Solomon said, "Close your eyes," in Arabic.
We did as we were told.
"What color are my shoes?" This time he spoke in English and, amazingly, thirteen Gallagher Girls sat there quietly without an answer.
"Am I right-handed or left-handed?" he asked, but didn't pause for a response. "Since I walked into this room I have left fingerprints in five different places. Name them!" he demanded, but was met with empty silence.
"Open your eyes," he said, and when I did, I saw him sitting on the corner of his desk, one foot on the floor and the other hanging loosely off the side. "Yep," he said. "You girls are pretty smart. But you're also kind of stupid."
If we hadn't known for a scientific fact that the earth simply can't stop moving, we all would have sworn it had just happened.
"Welcome to Covert Operations. I'm Joe Solomon. I've never taught before, but I've been doing this stuff for eighteen years, and I'm still breathing, so that means I know what I'm talking about. This is not going to be like your other classes."
My stomach growled, and Liz, who had opted for a full breakfast and a ponytail, said, "Shhh," as if I could make it stop.
"Ladies, I'm going to get you ready for what goes on." He paused and pointed upward. "Out there. It's not for everyone, and that's why I'm going to make this hard on you. Damn hard. Impress me, and next year those elevators might take you one floor lower. But if I have even the slightest suspicion that you are not supremely gifted in the area of fieldwork, then I'm going to save your life right now and put you on the Operations and Research track."
He stood and placed his hands in his pockets. "Everyone starts in this business looking for adventure, but I don't care what your fantasies look like, ladies. If you can't get out from behind those desks and show me something other than book smarts, then none of you will ever see Sublevel Two."
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mick Morrison following his every word, almost salivating at the sound of it, because Mick had been wanting to hurt someone for years. Unsurprisingly, her beefy hand flew into the air. "Does that mean you'll be teaching us firearms, sir?" she shouted as if a drill sergeant might make her drop and do push-ups.
But Mr. Solomon only walked around the desk and said, "In this business, if you need a gun, then it's probably too late for one to do any good." Some of the air seemed to go out of Mick's well-toned body. "But on the bright side," he told her, "maybe they'll bury you with it—that's assuming you get to be buried."
My skin burned red. Tears filled my eyes. Before I even knew what was happening, my throat was so tight I could barely breathe as Joe Solomon stared at me. Then, as soon as my eyes locked with his, he glanced away.
"The lucky ones come home, even if it is in a box."
Although he hadn't mentioned me by name, I felt my classmates watching me. They all know what happened to my dad—that he went on a mission, that he didn't come home. I'll probably never know any more than those two simple facts, but that those two facts were all that mattered. People call me The Chameleon here—if you go to spy school, I guess that's a pretty good nickname. I wonder sometimes what made me that way, what keeps me still and quiet when Liz is jabbering and Bex is, well, Bexing. Am I good at going unnoticed because of my spy genetics or because I've always been shy? Or am I just the girl people would rather not see—lest they realize how easily it could happen to them.
Mr. Solomon took another step, and my classmates pulled their gazes away just that quickly—everyone but Bex, that is. She was inching toward the edge of her chair, ready to keep me from tearing out the gorgeous green eyes of our new hot teacher as he said, "Get good, ladies. Or get dead."
A part of me wanted to run straight to my mother's office and tell her what he'd said, that he was talking about Dad, implying that it had been his fault—that he wasn't good enough. But I stayed seated, possibly out of paralyzing anger but more probably because I feared, somewhere inside me, that Mr. Solomon was right and I didn't want my mother to say so.
Just then, Anna Fetterman pushed through the frosted-glass doors and stood panting in front of the class. "I'm sorry," she said to Mr. Solomon, still gasping for breath. "The stupid scanners didn't recognize me, so the elevator locked me in, and I had to listen to a five-minute prerecorded lecture about trying to sneak out of bounds, and…" Her voice trailed off as she studied the teacher and his very unimpressed expression, which I thought was a little hypocritical coming from a man who had been five minutes late himself.
"Don't bother taking a seat," Mr. Solomon said as Anna started toward a desk in the back of the room. "Your classmates were just leaving."
We all looked at our recently synchronized watches, which showed the exact same thing—we had forty-five minutes of class time left. Forty-five valuable and never-wasted minutes. After what seemed like forever, Liz's hand shot into the air.
"Yes?" Joe Solomon sounded like someone with far better things to do.
"Is there any homework?" she asked, and the class turned instantly from shocked to irritated. (Never ask that question in a room full of girls who are all black belts in karate.)
"Yes," Solomon said, holding the door in the universal signal for get out. "Notice things."
As I headed down the slick white hallway to the elevator that had brought me there, I heard my classmates walking in the opposite direction, toward the elevator closest to our rooms. After what had just happened, I was glad to hear their footsteps going the other way. I wasn't surprised when Bex came to stand beside me.
"You okay?" she asked, because that's a best friend's job.
"Yes," I lied, because that's what spies do.
We rode the elevator to the narrow first-floor hallway, and as the doors slid open, I was seriously considering going to see my mother (and not just for the M&M's), when I stepped into the dim corridor and heard a voice cry, "Cameron Morgan!"
Professor Buckingham was rushing down the hall, and I couldn't imagine what would make the genteel British lady speak in such a way, when, above us, a red light began to whirl, and a screaming buzzer pierced our ears so that we could barely hear the cries of the electronic voice that pulsed with the light, "CODE RED. CODE RED. CODE RED."
"Cameron Morgan!" Buckingham bellowed again, grabbing Bex and me by our arms. "Your mother needs you. NOW!"
Chapter Three
Instantly, the corridors went from empty to overflowing as girls ran and staff members hurried and the red lights continued to pulse off and on.
A shelf of trophies spun around, sending the plaques and ribbons commemorating winners in the annual hand-to-hand combat and team code-breaking competitions to the hidden compartment behind the wall, leaving a row of awards from swim meets and debate contests in its place.
Above us, in the upper story of the foyer, three gold-and-burgundy Learn Her Skills, Honor Her Sword, and Keep Her Secrets banners rolled miraculously up and were replaced by handmade posters supporting someone named Emily for student council president.
Buckingham dragged Bex and me up the sweeping staircase as a flock of newbies ran down, screeching at the top of their lungs. I remembered what those sirens had sounded like the first time I'd heard them. It was no wonder the girls were acting like it was the end of the world. Buckingham yelled, "Girls!" and silenced them. "Follow Madame Dabney. She's going to take you to the stables for the afternoon. And ladies"—she snapped at a pair of dark-haired twins who seemed to be especially frantic—"composure!"
And then Buckingham whirled and raced up the staircase to the second-story landing, where Mr. Mosckowitz and Mr. Smith were trying to wheel a statue of Eleanor Everett (the Gallagher Girl who had once disabled a bomb in the White House with her teeth) into a broom closet. We swept through the Hall of History, where Gillian's sword slid smoothly into the vault beneath its case like Excalibur returning to the Lady of the Lake, and was replaced by a bust of a man with enormous ears who was supposedly the school's first headmaster.
The entire school was in a state of organized chaos. Bex and I shared a questioning look, because we were supposed to be downstairs, helping the other sophomores check the main level for anything spy-related that someone might have left lying around, but Buckingham turned and snapped, "Girls, hurry!" She sounded less like the soft, elderly teacher we knew and more like the woman who had single-handedly taken out a Nazi machine gun on D-day.
I heard a crash behind us, followed by some Polish expletives, and knew that the Eleanor Everett statue was probably in a billion pieces; but at the end of the Hall of History, my mother was leaning against the double doors of her office, dropping an M&M into her mouth as calmly as if she were waiting to pick me up from soccer practice, acting like it was just an ordinary day.
Her long dark hair fell across the shoulder of her black pants suit. A wisp of bangs brushed across a flawless forehead that she swears I'll have, too, just as soon as my hormones stop waging war with my pores.
Sometimes I'm seriously glad that we live ninety percent of our lives inside the mansion, because whenever we do leave, I have to watch men drool over my mom, or (ick) ask if we're sisters, which totally freaks me out, even though I know I should be flattered that anyone would think I was related to her at all.
In short, my mom's a hottie.
"Hey, Cam, Rebecca," she said before turning to Buckingham. "Thanks for bringing them, Patricia. Come inside a sec."
Inside her office, thanks to its soundproofed walls, the mayhem of the rest of the school completely faded away. Light streamed through leaded windows and flashed upon mahogany paneling and floor-to-ceiling bookcases that were, even as we spoke, spinning around to hide tomes like Poisons Through the Ages and A Praetorian's Guide to an Honorable Death, replacing them with a flip side of volumes like Educating the Upper Echelon and Private Education Monthly. There was a photo on her desk of the two of us on vacation in Russia, and I watched in awe as we hugged and smiled in the frame while, in the background, the Kremlin was replaced by Cinderella's Castle at Disney World.
