Chapter Eight
We crawled, one by one, out of the back of the van and stood for a long time, staring down the grassy promenade that ran between the Washington Monument and the United States Capitol, the heart of Washington, D.C. A lot of people think the Smithsonian is a museum, but it's actually a lot of different museums, and right then we were in the center of them all. We could have gone to see everything from the U.S. Constitution to Fonzie's leather jacket, but somehow I knew that, of all the school groups that take field trips to the National Mall every year, ours was very different.
A man in black stretched his hamstrings on a bench before taking off in a jog. A long line of women wearing matching sweatshirts that said "Louisville Ladies do D.C." milled in front of a Metro stop. And I couldn't help thinking, Oh, Mr. Solomon is good.
After all, he'd been telling us for weeks that surveillance is all about home-court advantage, and that the more limited a location's access is to the public, the easier it will be to see someone who doesn't belong; but that day, Joe Solomon had brought us to a place where tourists converge from all over the world, a place that's home to everyone from panhandlers to politicians (Macey, by the way, swears there isn't much difference). And before I knew it, Kim was saying exactly what I was already thinking.
"We're being watched…"
"By friends of Mr. Solomon's," Mick Morrison added with a crack of her knuckles.
"And they could be…" Anna started, but her voice broke and she swallowed hard.
"Anyone," Bex finished, her voice as excited as Anna's was terrified.
Beside me, Tina was opening the envelope Mr. Solomon had given her.
"What?" Bex asked. "What does it say?"
Tina held up a folded brochure from the National Museum of American History and pointed to a picture of a tiny pair of bright red shoes. There was a message scrawled across it:
There's no place like home.
5:00
Well, the girl in me has seen The Wizard of Oz approximately one billion times, so I knew that Dorothy's ruby slippers must be on the other side of the grassy lawn with the rest of our national treasures.
But the spy in me knew that getting there, tail-free, by five o'clock would be a whole lot harder than clicking our heels together and wishing for home.
"And…flip," Bex said an hour later.
We stopped midstride in front of the museum, then pivoted and started back in the opposite direction. The guy in the red baseball cap who had been following us since we passed the National Gallery of Art kept walking as if he didn't care that the two girls in front of him had just done a total about-face. And maybe he didn't. Care, I mean. But then again, maybe another member of his team had rotated into position and taken his place. There was no way to know. So we kept walking.
"We could be clear," Bex said, sounding wishful. "There might not be anyone on us."
"Or maybe there's a team of twenty CIA all-stars out here, and we're just not good enough to see them."
"Yeah," Bex said. "There's that, too."
I love being a pavement artist; seriously, I do. It's like when guys who would normally hate being freakishly tall discover basketball, or when girls with abnormally long fingers sit down at a piano. Blending in, going unseen, being a shadow in the sun is what I'm good at. Seeing the shadows, it turns out, is not my natural gift.
"I can't believe I haven't seen anyone!" I said in frustration.
"Look at the bright side, Cam." Bex flung her arms out wide like a girl who'd cut class or run away from a school group. To the people around us, she no doubt looked beautiful and exotic—but not at all like a highly trained operative who was memorizing the faces of every person who lingered within a hundred feet.
"We could be in Ancient Languages right now," she said, which was a very good point. "We could be locked in the basement with Dr. Fibs." Which was an excellent point. (Since the X-ray goggles incident, our chemistry professor's lack of depth perception had made him even more accident-prone.) "And here the view is infinitely better."
I wish I could say she was talking about the Washington Monument or the Capitol or any of the sights that drive tourists to D.C. But I know Bex well enough to know she was really talking about a pair of boys who were sitting on a park bench thirty feet away, staring at her.
"Oooh," Bex said, throwing an arm around my shoulders. "I want one."
"They're not puppies."
"Come on." She grabbed my hand. "Let's go talk to them. They're really cute!"
And … okay … I admit it: they were really cute. But this wasn't the time to encourage her. "Bex, we have a mission."
"Yeah, but we can multitask."
"No, Bex. Talking to civilian boys during a CoveOps exercise is a bad idea. Trust me." I forced a smile and added a singsong lilt to my voice as I said, "It's all fun and games until somebody gets their memory erased."
"Wow," Bex said. She blinked against the sun. "You're really …"
"What?" At that moment I knew there were at least nineteen security cameras trained on our path. I knew the Japanese man behind us was asking his wife if she still wanted a T-shirt from the Hard Rock Cafe. I knew a lot of things, but I didn't have a clue what my best friend was trying to say.
"I'm really what?" I asked again.
Bex glanced away, then back, and for one of the bravest people I know, she seemed almost afraid to say, "Not over Josh."
Josh. We'd been back at school for more than a week, but so far no one had said his name. And hearing it, to be honest, sounded strange.
"Of course I'm over him." I shrugged and started walking, scanning the crowd. "I broke up with him. Remember? It wasn't a big deal."
Bex fell into step beside me. Her voice was almost timid as she said, "You don't have to pretend, Cam."
But that's what spies do—we pretend. We have aliases and disguises and go to great lengths to not be ourselves. So I said, "Of course I'm over him," and walked on, clinging to my cover till the end.
Bex probably would have argued with me; I'm sure she would have pointed out that Josh had been my first boyfriend, my first kiss; that he had seen me when to the rest of the world I was invisible, and that's not the kind of thing a girl—much less a spy—forgets so quickly. Knowing Bex, she probably would have pointed out a lot of things; but at that very moment… twenty feet ahead of us … we saw a woman in a beige business suit sitting on a bench, talking on a cell phone. There was nothing unusual about her—not her hair, not her face. Nothing except for the fact that fifty minutes before, she'd been wearing a jogging suit and pushing a baby stroller.
"Bex," I said as calmly as possible.
"I see her," Bex replied.
Here's the thing you need to know about detecting and losing a tail: to do it right—I mean really right—you'd need to cover half a city. You'd climb in and out of cabs and train cars and walk against the grain on at least a dozen busy sidewalks. You'd take all day.
But Mr. Solomon hadn't given us all day, and that was kind of the point. So Bex and I spent the next hour going in one museum entrance and out another. Going up escalators only to come down the elevator two minutes later. We made sudden stops and looked in mirrors and tied our shoelaces when they didn't need it. It was a virtual blur of corner-clearing and litter-dropping—everything I've ever seen, everything I've ever even heard of! (At one point Bex had almost talked me into crawling out the bathroom window in the Air and Space Museum, but a U.S. Marshal walked by and we decided not to press our luck.)
The seconds ticked by and the sun went lower, and soon the shadow of the Washington Monument was stretched almost the full length of the Mall. Time was running out.
"Tina," I said through my comms unit, "how are you and Anna?" But I was met with empty silence. "Mick," I said. "Are you there?"
Bex and I shared a worried glance, because there are reasons operatives go radio-silent, and most of them are not good.
We were cutting across the Mall, walking north, hoping anyone who wasn't intentionally following us would stick to the path.
"Forty-seven minutes," I announced, as if Bex weren't fully aware of that fact.
She turned around to glance at a man walking too fast behind us, and I didn't know whether to take it as an insult or a compliment that a team of CIA pros didn't care if they stood out anymore. They just wanted to stay with us.
When a crowd of girls filled the sidewalk in front of us and started down the long, steep escalator to the Metro station below, I looked at Bex. "Do it!" she said, and we merged into the crowd. The girls were wearing white blouses almost exactly like ours. Their name badges bore a logo from something called Mock Supreme Court, They were almost identical to us from the waist up, so Bex and I slipped off our coats as we descended into the cavernous, echoing station.
"I love your bracelet!" I said to the brunette next to me, because, while most girls are on to the whole strangers-with-candy thing, the strangers-with-compliments strategy is still remarkably effective.
"Thanks!" said the girl, who, according to her badge, was Whitney from Dallas. "Hey, are y'all with the group?"
"Yeah," Bex said. Then she looked down at her chest. "Oh my gosh! I left my name tag in my senator's office—we took them off to have our picture taken," she explained.
"Really?" another girl said. "That's cool. Who's your senator?"
And then Bex and I each said the first name that popped into our heads: "McHenry."
We looked at each other and shared a very subtle laugh as the escalator carried us deeper and deeper beneath the city.
One of the girls, Kaitlin with a K, whispered to another girl, Caitlin with a C, "Are they back there?"
C peered back up the escalator, then grinned. "They are so following us!"
Bex and I might have exuded a panicked vibe about then, because K leaned in to explain, "These two hot guys have totally been checking us out."
"Oh," Bex said, as she and I used this as an excuse to check behind us. Sure enough, red-baseball-cap guy was back there (by now he was dressed like a navy lieutenant). And ten feet in front of him we saw the boys from the bench.
The C(K)aitlins started to laugh. It was hilarious. It was fun. Cute boys were on their tail, and maybe they thought they were being covert or cool, but all that really mattered was that once they got home they'd have a story they could tell. And it wouldn't be classified.
As the escalator entered the cavernous room, a train was already at the station. "Let's run and get it!" Bex screamed.
And everyone was off, racing to the bottom of the escalator, then dashing to the end of the train. The girls piled inside as the doors closed, and red-baseball-cap-slash-navy-officer guy jumped forward, barely making it into the next to last car as the train pulled out of the station, and away from where Bex and I stood underneath the escalator, waiting for our new friends and old shadow to disappear.
Bex and I watched the man in the train press himself against the glass as the train sped into the tunnel.