I KNEW MR. LEPSING WOULDN’T BE IN HIS CLASSROOM AFTER school. He was an odd guy, sure, but he was also somewhat predictable. Every kid knew he had a routine that he always stuck to: Every day after school, he went out to his small car parked across the street, off school property, and smoked a pipe. He smoked a really long pipe with a small bowl at the end, kind of like the one Gandalf uses. It looked kind of ridiculous. Once the first kid in school saw him out there years ago, the word spread quickly. Now every kid in the school had taken the time to go see him smoking his wizard pipe by the end of their sixth-grade year—it was sort of like a rite of passage at Erik Hill Middle School.
Then he’d come back in and grade papers or do other work until 5:00 p.m. All teachers pretty much stayed at school until 5:00 p.m. It might have been some sort of rule. Not that all of the teachers followed it all the time. But, either way, I knew that from 3:16 p.m. to around 3:39 p.m., Mr. Lepsing would be in his car, smoking his weird pipe.
Danielle had agreed to help me make sure the hallway stayed clear by causing some sort of commotion around the corner. As I lurked near Mr. Lepsing’s classroom, I heard a few kids talking to each other as they hurried her way.
“Dude, some girl is giving away prewritten essay papers and book reports.”
“Hurry up,” the other kid said as they rushed past. “I got one due in a few days.”
And then I was alone in the hallway. For now. Her distraction probably had an expiration date. Most things did.
Mr. Lepsing’s classroom was locked, but my skills picking standard locks were getting pretty sharp. It didn’t take very long to get inside. I closed the door behind me and kept the lights off.
I moved toward his supply closet. Up until this point, picking a school lock had never been a problem. Every interior door in the school had the same type of lock: a simple four-pin tumbler lock, which is both common and easy to pick.
But Mr. Lepsing had installed a custom lock on his supply closet door to help conceal whatever was hidden inside. It looked slightly different from all the other standard school doorknobs. I inspected it. Just because it was a different model didn’t mean it would be any harder to pick.
I got to work and quickly identified that one of the pins was a spool pin, which can make picking it a lot harder, especially for a relative beginner like me. Agent Nineteen had given me a little bit of spool-pin training, but not nearly as much as with standard tumbler pins.
I cursed even though nobody was around to hear me.
The trick was to release all tension on the lock in order to get the spool pin past the shear line. I gave it a few tries. They were unsuccessful. I silently wished that I had an Agency fruit roll-up with me. Not for a snack, of course, but for blowing this lock up. But that wasn’t going to happen now. They’d made those things specifically for me and I didn’t even know if they had any left, let alone how I could get my hands on one. There weren’t any in the stash of other gadgets I’d gotten from Chum Bucket’s storeroom the day before either.
I closed my eyes and tried to envision the inside of the lock. It was pickable. I knew that because I’d seen Agent Nineteen do it a few times back during my initial training. I’d also watched YouTube videos of people doing it. If some yokel who had time to post videos on the internet could do it, then so could I—I was a secret agent, with a codename and everything.
A few deep breaths later, I was back at work. I tried it again and again with varying levels of tension and angles, but just couldn’t get the pin to move. If only I had some graphite powder to loosen everything up . . . sometimes that’s all a tricky lock needed.
That’s when it hit me.
Everything Mr. Lepsing had was old. Which mean he likely still had good old-fashioned graphite pencils in his desk. I dug around in the top drawer and found a few ancient, yellow number two pencils.
I scraped one rapidly across the wood grain of his desk for five or six seconds until two parallel lines of graphite powder developed. I used a piece of paper to gently scrape them onto a notecard. Then I made a single crease in the notecard down the center, creating an upside-down tent so all the graphite powder collected in the valley of the fold.
I slowly moved back toward the door, cradling the notecard in front of me like a tiny cup of radioactive waste. I steadied my hands as I positioned the front of the crease right next to the lock opening.
A very slight inhale was followed by a gentle exhale into the notecard’s valley. I watched as most of the graphite powder disappeared into the key slot. I was still shocked it had worked, when, a short time later, I heard a click as I got all of the pins to finally slide into place. I grabbed the doorknob, careful not to move my equipment inside the lock, and turned. My heart leaped at the unlikely success of my makeshift lock lubricant.
Mr. Lepsing’s supply closet door swung open in front of me, and then I was face-to-face with darkness.