The White House
Second Floor
February 10
1730 hours
I gave Jason a minute to calm down before I tried speaking to him again. “You know why I’m here, right?” I asked. “It’s for your father’s safety. We think his life is in danger.”
Jason snorted, annoyed. “People always think he’s in danger. They think all of us are. I can’t even go to the bathroom without having sixteen Secret Service agents follow me.”
“This time is different,” I said.
“Yeah, this time it’s screwing up my life worse than usual.” Jason blasted a few enemy agents indiscriminately. “I was supposed to have a real friend come by today. But now that’s been canceled and I have you instead.”
I looked around for a place to sit but couldn’t find one. The bed and the only chair were buried under Jason’s things. A pair of rancid socks was slung over the back of the chair; they reeked so badly, they could have killed a canary.
So I remained standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. “Look, I’m not thrilled I have to be here either. . . .”
“Yeah, right. I’ll bet they really had to twist your arm to get you to hang out with me at the White House.”
“If you don’t want me here, the fastest way to get rid of me is to help me find whoever is after your father.”
Jason blew a few pixelated birds out of the sky just to watch them explode into clouds of red mist. “If there really was some evil organization smart enough to get an assassin into the White House, how is some lame dork in secondhand clothes supposed to find him when the entire Secret Service can’t?”
I looked over my clothes, which were indeed mostly secondhand. I was dying to tell Jason exactly what I’d done before, so he’d understand what I was capable of: I had saved his own father’s life from a missile attack; I had engineered the destruction of SPYDER’s headquarters; I had prevented half of Colorado from being nuked. Only, I couldn’t tell him any of that, because all that information was classified. Sometimes security protocols really blew.
Instead, all I could offer was, “They wouldn’t have sent me if they didn’t think I could help.”
Jason gave another snort of disgust, then returned his full attention to his game, done speaking to me. His secret agent avatar was now moving through an abandoned warehouse, trading potshots with bad guys.
I was starting to get quite warm. The heat was cranked up to subtropical temperatures and I was still wearing my winter jacket. I shrugged it off and set it gingerly on the bed.
“I SAID DON’T TOUCH MY STUFF!” Jason roared. He threw his controller aside and whirled around, allowing me to see his face for the first time since I’d arrived. He was at an awkward spot in puberty where his nose had ballooned, his hair was getting greasy, and his skin was blotchy with pimples. “Are you too stupid to understand English?”
A year before, I probably would have turned tail and fled the room. But I’d learned a few things at spy school. First and foremost: When in an uncomfortable situation, imagine what Erica Hale would do.
So I stayed rooted to my spot and fixed Jason with as hard a stare as I could muster. “I know you’re very busy pretending to be a spy, but I actually have to be one. And real-life espionage isn’t anything like that game you’re playing. In the first place, no evil organization worth its salt would set up shop in an abandoned warehouse. And they’re not going to sic three hundred minions on you without teaching them to shoot straight. Meanwhile, any agent idiotic enough to run blindly into a place like that without backup would last thirty seconds tops before he got blown to pieces, no matter how lousy his opponents’ aim is. A real enemy organization is clever, elusive, and always trying to be three steps ahead of you, so if you want to beat them, you have to be smarter than they are. Which is why I’ve been sent in. I might not be the best shooter or the best fighter at the CIA, but I am not stupid. I have level-sixteen math skills, I can speak three languages fluently, and frankly, compared to me, you have the IQ of a hamster.”
Jason’s jaw dropped open. “Urk” was all he could manage. I couldn’t tell if he was cowed by my response, or stunned because people usually didn’t talk to him like this. Either way, I appreciated the effect.
“So,” I went on, “I’d really appreciate it if you’d can the pathetic ‘woe is me’ attitude and help me out. I could give a hoot about a stuck-up brat like you, but I’d really like to prevent these guys from killing your father.”
In response to this, Jason appeared to think about his behavior. He took a moment to consider how he’d treated me—and then went right back to being a jerk again. “That makes one of us,” he spat. “If anyone whacked my father, they’d be doing me a favor.”
With that, he picked up his controller again and resumed the game.
I walked out of the room. I wasn’t turning tail, though. I was just so annoyed at Jason Stern that I didn’t feel like being anywhere near him. Plus, I had to use the bathroom. It had been nearly two hours since I’d gone back at school.
Unfortunately, I was so distracted by Jason’s obnoxious behavior that I didn’t notice that something very important had changed about my surroundings.
The bathroom door was now closed.
It wasn’t locked, either. So the door opened when I turned the knob, and I barged right in on the fifteen-year-old daughter of the president of the United States as she sat on the toilet.
Jemma Stern was an awkward, gangly girl who had often seemed ill at ease when I’d seen her on television, so interrupting her in the most personal of moments didn’t go over well at all. She promptly screamed at the top of her lungs, a shrill, bloodcurdling shriek more attuned to someone who’d been physically attacked than merely caught with her pants down. Every Secret Service agent within earshot promptly came running. The closest one, a thickly built fireplug of a woman who’d been posted outside the presidential bedroom, charged around the corner and, before I could even try to explain what had happened, nailed me with a flying tackle.
We sailed into the wall by the stairs, hitting it hard enough to fracture the plaster and dislodge a stuffed eagle mounted there. The eagle toppled, landing on the Secret Service agent, piercing her back with its beak. Now she screamed. Then, perhaps mistaking the strike as an attack from behind by another assailant, she whipped around, grabbed the eagle, and flung it into the wall, where it burst into a cloud of stuffing and feathers.
Unfortunately for Jemma, all of this prevented me from doing what she probably wanted most: simply closing the bathroom door. It now swung all the way open, so that Jemma was still fully visible on the toilet when three more Secret Service agents came charging up the stairs. All of them had their weapons drawn, ready for action.
Jemma screamed again, then kicked the bathroom door shut in their faces.
The agents now shifted their attention to me, yanking me off the floor and shoving me up against the wall. Several pairs of hands roughly frisked me at once. I tried to explain what had happened, but the first Secret Service agent had knocked the wind out of me when she’d tackled me. All that came out was a wheeze of air.
“Miss Stern?” the biggest of the agents called through the bathroom door. “Miss, is everything all right in there?”
“No, everything isn’t all right!” Jemma yelled back. “That little pervert walked in on me!”
“It was an accident,” I gasped. “She hadn’t locked the door.”
“I shouldn’t have to lock the door in my own house!” Jemma cried. “This is the most secure building in the country! I wasn’t expecting a pervert to be on the loose here!”
The Secret Service agents all looked at me accusingly.
“I’m not a pervert,” I said quickly. “I’m a friend of Jason’s, here to hang out.”
This didn’t seem to convince the agents of anything. “I wasn’t informed of any playdate today,” the big agent said.
“It’s not a playdate,” I said quickly. “And it was kind of last-minute. Maybe they forgot to tell you.”
“Or maybe you’re a pervert who snuck in here to see Jemma Stern on the toilet,” the agent replied suspiciously.
The agent who’d tackled me was massaging her back where she’d been gouged by the stuffed eagle. She pounded on Jason’s door and said, “Jason, could you please come out here?”
“I’m busy!” Jason shouted back. I figured he had certainly heard all the commotion in the hall but was willfully ignoring it.
“It’s a matter of national security,” the wounded agent said.
Jason groaned, and then the sound of his video game paused. His footsteps slowly thumped across the floor.
“Could you all possibly handle this somewhere else?” Jemma asked through the bathroom door. “I could really use some privacy.”
“We’re taking care of this as quickly as we can, miss,” the female agent informed her. “Feel free to go on with your business.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” Jemma groaned.
Jason yanked open his door dramatically, as though we’d been asking a great deal of him to walk all the way across his room. “What?” he demanded.
The big Secret Service agent pointed at me. “We just caught this young man attempting to peep on your sister while she was on the toilet. . . .”
“I wasn’t peeping!” I protested. “I needed the bathroom and the door wasn’t locked!”
The agent ignored me and spoke to Jason. “He claims he’s a friend of yours, rather than an intruder. Can you confirm that?”
Jason looked at me, then turned to the agents and shook his head. “Never seen him before,” the little creep said. “Looks like a pervert to me.” Then he gave me a quick, smug smile and shut the door, leaving me at the mercy of the Secret Service.