“Number Twenty-seven, you’re a genius!” said Andrew “Danger” North as #27, the ultrasecretive weapons designer, showed off his latest creation. To the untrained eye, it looked like an ordinary whistle.
“Give it a try,” invited #27.
Agent North pointed the whistle at #29, the agent whose job was to fix the pinball machines at headquarters.
Zzzzzap!
A beam of light shot out at #29 and hit him square on his belt loop. The belt unbuckled itself as if by magic, and #29’s pants fell to his feet.
“Works every time!” said #27.
Cheese bags everywhere were going to have to be careful around Agent North now!
When I left school that day, I walked past Storage Room B, which was in the second-grade hall, but Mr. Gormulka was there, whistling while he mopped up the floor outside the room. That creepy kind of whistling.
Since the whole afternoon had gone by and I hadn’t heard any explosions, I wondered if maybe Ryan was wrong. Maybe Mr. Gormulka wasn’t really a spy; maybe he was just a scary-looking jerk who kept some sort of deep dark secret in Storage Room B. Maybe he wouldn’t mess with the calculator. I still had to get it back before Jack found out it was gone, of course, but at least I didn’t need to worry about getting blown up. I just had to worry about screwing up the solo.
That’s what I told myself, anyway. But all the way home, there was a little voice in the back of my head saying, “What if Ryan’s right? What if Mr. Gormulka is just waiting for prime time so he can go on TV and brag about blowing up the world?” If I’ve learned one thing from all of Dad’s spy movies, it’s that supervillains usually don’t want to blow up the world before they’ve bragged about it a little. Maybe Mr. Gormulka was just biding his time, waiting for the right opportunity to strike.
As I walked home, I took a shortcut through this little tunnel that went under Tanglewood Parkway. It had a really neat echo when I practiced my solo there. The tunnel was part of a bike path that went up to the pond near the Flowers’ Grove neighborhood, but Jack told me that the tunnel was originally built as an escape route during the Civil War. They didn’t fight any battles in our state, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t build escape routes just in case, right?
Jack used to tell me all sorts of secrets like that. There are guys who used to work for the Russians, back when they were the bad guys, living in the Flowers’ Grove neighborhood. One of them is our mailman now. And there are dead bodies buried in a house a few houses down from ours, which is on Sanders Street. Jack showed me the exact spot in the backyard where they’re buried. I held my breath as I walked past that house, since it’s bad luck to go by a cemetery (even a secret one) without holding your breath.
There’s weird stuff everywhere in Cornersville Trace. Some of it is pretty obvious, like the statue of the naked angel on a trike at the mall. But most of the weird stuff looks totally normal to people who don’t know better. Like Wayne Schneider’s house, for instance. It doesn’t look like a place where an old rock star who faked his own death would live. It just looks like a regular suburban house. Only people who are in on the secret, like me, would ever suspect that it was anything else.
And my house doesn’t look like a spy’s house at all. It looks as normal as any other house on the street. I was pretty sure there had to be a pool, a gym, a target range, an obstacle course, a sauna, and all those other things hidden inside someplace—probably deep underground. Spies always have stuff like that in their houses. Besides, that would explain where Jack and Dad really go when they’re “at work” or “studying”—they’re really working out in our state-of-the-art gym! When I go pro, they’ll tell me where the secret passage to get there is. I’ve looked and looked around the house for it myself, but I haven’t found anything.
When I got home, I spent a long time poking around in the cabinets and the basement, trying to find the secret entrance to the underground stuff once and for all. There had to be gadgets in there, some tool I could use to get into Storage Room B and rescue the calculator. But I didn’t find a thing.
My mom’s not a spy. At least, not anymore. I think maybe she used to be, but she gave it all up when Jack was born. She’s probably still on the payroll, but now she’s a realtor by day. At night, her job is to make our house and family seem as normal as possible. If any bad guys get a clue that Dad or Jack is a spy and try to watch us through the windows, they’ll just see a normal family eating casseroles. Mom does a great job of making the house seem normal.
But Dad and Jack are still really, really careful not even to talk about spying. Bad guys might have microphones in our walls and telescopes pointed at our windows. That’s why I never, ever change clothes with the shades up.
The only time they really talk about spying is when they’re watching spy movies. They do it a lot, but I’m hardly ever allowed to watch with them, because Mom thinks they’re too violent for me. She makes them wait until I go to bed to turn them on.
But sometimes, when Mom is out late cleaning up a house she’s trying to sell the next day or something, they’ll let me watch with them. It’s awesome. We just sit around eating popcorn and talking about spy stuff.
I remember one time we were watching an old movie from twenty or thirty years ago, and the spy was using this laser flamethrower thing. It was the size of a vacuum cleaner and was attached to a backpack that he had to wear.
“Ha!” said Dad. “Look at that clunky thing.”
“They probably make those things a lot smaller now, huh?” asked Jack.
“Heck, they fit in the palm of your hand now,” said Dad. “All the stuff they needed to lug around in backpacks when they made this movie fits on the head of a pin today!”
That’s about as close as he ever came to admiting to me that he’s a spy. How else would he know how big laser flamethrowers are these days?
I feel like I’m really part of the team on those nights. Most of the time, though, I just have to listen to them hanging out from my bedroom. Then I feel totally left out.
But once I go pro, even Mom will probably let me stay up past nine. And once I’m actually using laser flamethrowers, she won’t mind letting me watch movies about them.
Jack was having some friends over to play video games that night, so we ate dinner earlier than usual. While we ate our casserole, Mom talked about how hard it was to sell houses that were more than a year old out in the subdivisions west of Eighty-second Street, and Dad talked about how no one was buying insurance that week, either.
Halfway through dinner, Dad turned to me. “Speaking of insurance, guess what, Andrew?” he asked. “My boss is going to be at your music program!”
I couldn’t believe it! This was huge! I knew that Dad wasn’t really an insurance company big shot, so his boss had to be the head of the spy company!
“Oh, really?” I asked, trying to act casual in case any evil spies were listening in.
“Yeppers,” said Dad.
He says “yeppers” a lot. It’s a good way to keep anyone from ever guessing that he’s actually a spy. When people hear him saying dorky things like “yeppers,” they’d never dream he’s actually a really slick undercover agent. It’s actually pretty clever.
“What’s he coming for?” I asked.
“He’s working on a deal to sell life insurance to Mr. Cunyan, and he thinks showing up to the big night will make a good impression on him.”
I knew that couldn’t be true. See, the idea of life insurance is that the customers pay some money to the insurance company every month, and then when the customers die, the company pays their relatives a bunch of money. But they don’t sell insurance to people they think might die before they’ve made a lot of payments, and Mr. Cunyan looked like he might keel over any minute. No company would sell him life insurance!
Dad’s boss was obviously coming to the program to check me out and see if I was ready to start my official training to be a spy.
Oh God! Maybe I somehow did manage to send the message I’d typed into the calculator! The one inviting them to see me at the program. That meant I really had to nail the solo!
Then it got worse.
“Aunt Brianna is coming, too,” said Mom.
“Oh, really?” asked Dad. “What’s her latest project?”
“I didn’t ask,” said Mom with a laugh. “I’m sure we’ll find out.”
“Just as long as she’s not trying to sell that weird detergent that made the dishes smell like paste,” said Dad.
Aunt Brianna is my mom’s little sister. She isn’t married yet, and she’s never had the same job for more than a couple months. When she came over for Labor Day, she’d decided to become a dancer. By Thanksgiving, she said she’d given that up because she’d found a way to get rich selling cleaning products. She was done with that one by Christmas, though.
“Andrew,” Mom said, “you can wear that sweater she made you tomorrow night.”
“No, I can’t,” I said. “I’m wearing my suit.”
“That suit you have in your closet must be way too small for you by now,” said Mom. “You can’t wear that.”
“Then let me get another one,” I said. “We can go to the store right after dinner!”
“Calm down, Andrew,” said Mom. “You don’t need to wear a suit for the program. The sweater will look really cute!”
I gave Dad a sort of desperate look, like, “Come on, you can’t really expect me not to wear a suit in front of the head of the spy organization, can you?” but he didn’t do a thing. He just kept eating chicken casserole. He sure can be sneaky when he wants to!
I think Dad and Jack try not to tell Mom about any spy stuff. She probably doesn’t want to know. The less she knows, the less reason any bad guys have to try to get information out of her. So neither of them would tell her that wearing the sweater Aunt Brianna made on an audition to be a professional spy was a bad, bad idea. And believe me, it was! It made me even more nervous. My stomach felt like a pancake that someone was flipping around on a griddle.
See, one thing my mom and Aunt Brianna have in common is that they’re both into stuff that’s cute. And as cute stuff goes, the sweater Aunt Brianna made me was a real prize. It had a fluffy squirrel on it with cotton balls for a stomach. It would look adorable on a little kid, but it wasn’t the sort of thing third graders go around wearing. Especially in front of the head of the spy company!
But the subject was closed. There was no talking my way out of it. Mom and Dad had already changed the subject. They had started nagging Jack instead.
“Remember, Jack, you still have some chores to do,” said Mom. “I want you to clean up the living room before your friends get here.”
“We’re just gonna be in the basement,” said Jack. “Who cares what the living room looks like?”
“That’s a good point,” I said.
“Shut up, Andrew,” said Jack.
“Hey!” I said. “I’m on your side!”
I hate to say this, but sometimes I really hate Jack’s guts. Sometimes to cover up the fact that he’s a spy, he has to act like a real jerk. He’s hardly paid a bit of attention to me since he turned thirteen. I knew it was because he was busy with spy stuff, but it still stank. I missed hanging out with him.
“Just clean up the living room, Jack,” said Dad. “What’re you guys going to be doing?”
“Nothing much,” said Jack. “We’ll probably just listen to music and play Blood Suckers Three.”
Dad raised an eyebrow.
“It’s a video game,” I said. “You have to kill vampires in it.”
Dad nodded. “Yeppers,” he said thoughtfully. “You’ve got to watch out for those vampires. They’ll suck the blood right out of you.”
“Hence the name Blood Suckers,” said Jack impatiently.
“That’s what they do, all right,” said Mom. “They’ll suck your brains out like they were eating snail out of a shell!”
And she and Dad started making slurping noises and laughing. Jack looked up at the ceiling and sighed. A minute later, he cleared his plate and disappeared up to his room.
“He sure eats fast these days,” I said, hoping maybe they’d let it slip that he had to eat quickly so he could get back to work on saving the world. I knew it was almost definitely true that Dad and Jack were spies, but I really wished they’d admit it just once so I’d know for sure.
“He’s a teenager now,” said Mom with a sigh. “He’ll start eating us out of house and home soon.”
“And don’t forget this one,” said Dad, pointing at me. “Four years from now, we’re going to have two teenagers in the house.”
“Don’t remind me,” said Mom.
“Well, sor-ry!” I said. “It’s not my fault I’ll be a teenager soon!”
Parents are always doing that—acting like it’s not their fault their kids were born or something!
A few minutes later, just before Jack’s friends showed up, Jack came back downstairs.
“Have you guys seen my calculator?” he asked. “I can’t find it in my room.”
I gulped.
“Gee, Jack,” said Mom sarcastically. “How in the world could anything get lost in your clean, clean room?”
Jack sighed. “Just keep an eye out for it, will you?” he asked. “I’m really going to need it this weekend.”
“Do you need it right now?” I asked.
Jack shrugged. “Not really,” he said.
“Do you need it tomorrow?” I asked.
Jack shrugged again. “I’m not really going to need it until this weekend. Why? Have you seen it?”
“No,” I said. “Just curious.”
“You better not have taken it!” said Jack.
“He wouldn’t do that, Jack,” said Mom. “Andrew knows not to mess with your stuff.”
“Yeah!” I said. “Maybe you left it at school or something.”
“I hope so,” said Jack. “If I don’t have that thing back by the weekend, I’m dead. Really, really dead.”
Gulp. Jack must need it for some really important mission over the weekend!
Even if Mr. Gormulka didn’t use the calculator to blow something up, the fate of the world depended on whether I could get it back the next day!