The White House
Washington, DC
February 11
1600 hours
This time I was deemed too big a threat to be left in the White House jail. Instead, the Secret Service decided to remove me from the property immediately. I was yanked back to my feet and hustled away amid a scrum of agents.
“I’m not an assassin!” I protested. “I’ve been set up!”
“You just tried to blow up the president,” an agent growled in my ear. “That looked like an assassination attempt to me.”
I cased the West Wing desperately, searching for the president, hoping he would come to my rescue and admit that he’d brought me on board as a covert agent, but Courtney and another set of Secret Service agents had already rushed him off somewhere else. Either they were concerned that another bomb might go off, or they simply didn’t want him to get wet from the sprinklers and catch cold.
I was rushed outside, into the wind tunnel between the White House and the EEOB. The photographers and journalists were no longer merely lounging around. The explosion was big news, and they were doing all they could to record it. A hundred cameras were documenting the flaming wreckage, though they quickly shifted to me as the Secret Service dragged me past.
“I didn’t try to blow up the president!” I argued. “Someone else did. I saved his life!”
No one responded. It was possible no one had heard. The agents were all talking among themselves and were now being barraged with questions from all the reporters: “What happened?” “Was that boy responsible?” “What’s his name?” “Is the president hurt?”
One agent, an older woman who appeared to have some seniority, stopped to inform the reporters that the president was fine—“thanks to the brave actions of the Secret Service”—but that no further questions would be answered at this time.
A black sedan with tinted windows skidded to a stop in the driveway between the West Wing and the EEOB. I was tossed into the backseat and locked inside.
The car was quite luxurious, but there was no doubt that I was trapped in the back. There was that same plate of thick, impenetrable glass between me and the front seat, but this time there were no locks or handles on the inside doors for me to let myself out. I was basically in the world’s fanciest squad car. After the cacophony outside, it was surprisingly quiet. The din of the reporters was now only a distant murmur.
In the new silence, I realized my ears were still ringing from the explosion. There was a low, constant hum inside my head.
A tough-looking agent in his mid-twenties with a crew cut and sunglasses, despite the fact that it was cloudy and gray outside, sat at the wheel of the car. Another agent, this one looking older and even tougher, slid into the passenger seat. “Go,” he ordered.
The driver hit the gas and the car lurched forward. Two black SUVs, identical to the one I’d been in with the president, swerved into position in front of us and behind us. Sirens on them wailed and the traffic in the street obediently pulled over. Our small motorcade raced off the White House property.
I swiveled around to look out the back window. The Oval Office was still on fire, sending clouds of smoke billowing into the sky. A gaping hole had been torn in its famous curved white wall, like a handful gouged out of a wedding cake. A flaming footstool, flung out by the explosion, was lodged in the branches of a jacaranda tree.
Oh boy, I thought. I’m really going to be in trouble for this one.
The previous fall, I had accidentally blown up the school principal’s office and had been punished with immediate expulsion from spy school. Now I’d blown up the most famous office in America. For all I knew, I’d get kicked out of the country for that.
Hundreds of passersby had become spectators. They crowded the sidewalks, taking pictures with their phones. Thousands more were coming, pouring out of office buildings and rushing over in waves from the nearby monuments to see what had happened. Some paused to photograph my motorcade, thinking it might be important, then went right back to photographing the burning Oval Office again.
I scanned the crowds, hoping that Cyrus or Erica might be among them, but I didn’t see a single familiar face.
The motorcade raced past the Ellipse to the south of the White House grounds and hooked a right onto Constitution Avenue, skirting the edge of the National Mall.
“I didn’t try to kill the president,” I said to the agents in the car. “I was only used as a pawn by people who did want to kill him.”
I figured they probably wouldn’t believe me, but it couldn’t hurt to try. I didn’t even know if they could hear me through the glass barrier between us.
They could. The older agent in the passenger seat turned to face me. Despite the dreary day, he was wearing sunglasses too, but I could tell he was glaring at me from behind them. “Who are you working for?” he asked.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell him the truth. My mission for the CIA was unofficial, my status as an agent-in-training was classified—and chances were, he’d never believe it anyhow. Instead, I said, “I’m not working for anybody. I’m a friend of Jason’s.”
“You two didn’t look like friends to me.”
“Whoever did this planted a bomb in my jacket,” I insisted. “I’m guessing they waited until they knew I was inside, then used a remote radio trigger. That means they were probably close to the White House, keeping an eye on me. If you don’t act now, they’ll get away!”
“Remote radio trigger?” the older agent asked suspiciously. “You know an awful lot about how bombs work for someone claiming to be innocent.”
“I am innocent! The real bad guys are still out there!”
“I’m sure they are,” the older agent agreed. “No kid could mastermind an operation like this. Which is why you need to tell us who you’re working for. Now. If you don’t . . . there will be consequences.” He said the final word as ominously as he could.
“Consequences?” I repeated. “Like what?”
The agent didn’t reply. Instead, he gave me a malicious smile.
The motorcade veered past the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and onto the road that looped around the Lincoln Memorial.
Which meant we were heading out of Washington, DC, and toward Virginia. Most of the U.S. government operated inside the city, but there were several departments located on the other side of the Potomac. The Secret Service worked for the Department of Homeland Security, which was headquartered in the Pentagon, which I could see across the Potomac River in the distance: an enormous squat building surrounded by acres of parking lots. The CIA also had its headquarters a bit farther away in Virginia, at Langley.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
“Where we can get the truth out of you,” the older agent replied.
“I’m telling you the truth,” I pointed out. “You’re just not listening to it.”
The motorcade passed the Lincoln Memorial, veered onto the Arlington Memorial Bridge—and stopped dead in traffic. A massive road construction project was under way, doing repair work to the bridge. Two construction cranes loomed overhead, maneuvering heavy loads of metal and cement. One side of the bridge was completely shut down to traffic and was instead filled with dozens of trucks and hundreds of workers. Traffic was forced onto the other side of the bridge, which narrowed to one lane in both directions. Even though we had our sirens on, there was no shoulder for the cars ahead of us to pull over on.
“Instead of dragging me all the way to Virginia,” I said, “why don’t you call Cyrus Hale at the CIA? He’s a friend of mine. He’ll vouch for me, and we can get this whole thing straightened out.”
Once again, the older agent didn’t reply. Although this time, he wasn’t doing it to make me uneasy. He was distracted by the traffic. “Why’d you go this way?” he asked the driver angrily. “You know this road’s a mess.”
“I was following them,” the driver said, pointing at the big black SUV in front of us. “If you’ve got a problem with the route, talk to those guys.”
“There’s like a hundred apps that tell you the fastest way from place to place,” the older agent griped. “Those guys can’t figure out how to use one of them? There’s a national security crisis happening and we’re stuck in traffic.”
I began to grow nervous, and it wasn’t merely because I’d been framed for the attempted assassination of the president and arrested by the Secret Service. All that was bad enough, but now we were sitting ducks. We were out over the river, boxed in on both sides by our own SUVs, and SPYDER was on the loose. Given everything that had happened that day—and Erica’s concern for my safety that morning—it seemed our current position was a very bad place to be.
I glanced all around us, on the alert for trouble. The roadwork appeared to be progressing normally, with trucks hauling loads and construction workers jackhammering and welding. . . .
Except for one spot. Behind us, on the mainland, by the base of one of the cranes, some of the workers were looking about worriedly, as though something had startled them. I caught a glimpse of someone darting through the construction equipment.
I turned back to the front seat, where the agents were still bickering about the traffic.
“We should’ve taken the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge,” the older one was saying. “This one has been a disaster for months.”
“Then why didn’t you say something before we got onto it?” the driver asked.
“I was busy intimidating the suspect!” the older one exclaimed, then pointed to the SUV ahead of us. “They were supposed to be driving! If they wanted me to do the driving, they can feel free to do the intimidation.”
“Uh, guys,” I said. “I really think we need to get out of here.”
“That makes two of us,” the older agent said. He leaned over and pounded on the car horn.
“What’s that gonna do?” the driver asked. “We’ve got all these sirens going already. We’re obviously government vehicles. You think now that you’ve honked, all the other drivers are going to say, ‘Oh, now I see it’s an emergency’ and drive off the bridge?”
The older agent simply honked the horn again.
All the other drivers started honking too, pounding on their horns in frustration. The bridge became a cacophony of car horns.
Amid all the clamor, I heard a dull thud right beside me.
I spun around to see a web of cracks spreading across the car window, radiating out from a central divot in the glass.
A year before, I wouldn’t have had any idea what could have caused that. But now that I’d lived through multiple action sequences, I knew all too well.
In quick succession, several more objects thudded into the windows of the car, making a series of webs across the passenger side.
The Secret Service agents instantly forgot all about the traffic.
Someone was shooting at us.