London. Midnight has come and gone. The DJ sits in his booth at the trendiest nightclub in the United Kingdom.
Fog everywhere. Fog on the club’s dance floor, mingling with the dancers, who jostle one another, pretending not to be blinded by the strobe lights. Fog flowing into the VIP room, shrouding the face of the young man with the excellent suit and perfect hair.
No one on the dance floor knows that the club is owned by Dr. Cringe, who is secretly testing a strange new drug on the dancers. Anyone who orders a cranberry juice from the bar will find—too late—that their drink has been spiked with a strange potion that will cause them to cluck like a chicken for several hours. If he can perfect the drug and introduce it into the world’s water supply, Dr. Cringe will turn all of humanity into a bunch of clucking idiots!
Back in his disguise as Thaddeus Arthur III, heir to the Arthur Badminton Equipment fortune, Agent North does his best to look tired, bored, and cranky, like everyone else in the nightclub. He has been trained to fit into any group.
Then, one of the dancers, the tiredest and crankiest of them all, looks at Andrew.
“Hey, kid!” he says. “Get out of here! Didn’t Mom ask you to take the garbage out?”
An hour later, Jack and his friends Jason and Todd were downstairs, playing video games—something he used to do with me before he turned thirteen. I could understand why he couldn’t tell me spy secrets now that he’d gone pro, but I was pretty annoyed that he wasn’t even playing games with me anymore, since he was obviously still allowed to play them with his friends. They weren’t all pro spies. They couldn’t be!
I could tell they were having a pretty good time down there, but I didn’t want to interrupt. Instead, I just sat down at the piano and tried to figure out how to play “Kids Are Music.” After a while, I’d managed to pick out the melody pretty well. I had never had any piano lessons, either! I’ll bet if I had one or two, they’d say I was a musical genius.
“That’s such a happy song,” said Mom when she heard me playing. “Jack had to sing it one year, too. And now listen to the stuff he likes! That music they’re playing down there is depressing.”
“So is one of the other songs we’re singing,” I said. “It’s a really sad old parlor song.”
“Yeah,” said Mom. “There’s always one really depressing song in the program, isn’t there? When Jack was in third grade, he had to sing some old song about a girl whose brother dies waiting for their dad to come home from a bar!”
“Sounds like the stuff Mr. Cunyan likes,” I said.
“It still can’t be as bad as that music Jack likes,” said Mom. “There’s not a happy song in his whole collection.”
“Mr. Cunyan’s stuff is worse,” I said. “Believe me.”
“I doubt it,” said Mom. “Go down there in the basement and listen to whatever they’re playing on the stereo. I’ll bet you a dollar to a donut it’s more depressing than what you’re singing tomorrow!”
I sighed. “I don’t think Jack wants me down there with all his friends.”
“Yeah?” said Mom. “Well, Jack doesn’t have a choice. I bought the Mountain Dew they’re drinking, so if I say you can be down there, you can be down there. Go ahead.”
This sounded like an order. And of course I wanted to go down there; they sounded like they were having fun. Being ordered to was as good an excuse as any. I got up and headed to the basement door.
I know I was just going down to the basement, but it felt like I was going into the danger zone. Jack was down there, probably all ready to be a jerk. And Todd was in high school. High school! High schoolers aren’t always known to be very nice to third graders.
So I decided to keep a low profile, almost like spying. I opened the door to the basement really slowly so it didn’t make a single creak, and I walked down really slowly, without making a sound. I was pretty successful, if I do say so myself. Jack had taught me well. I’d been down there a couple of minutes, just watching them play video games, before he even noticed I was there.
“Get lost, kid,” he told me with a sneer.
“Mom sent me down here to listen to the music,” I said. “She thinks it’s depressing.”
Todd turned to me and made what I guess he thought was a scary face.
“It’s evil music,” he said in a low, creepy voice. “It’s all about demons! It’ll make you want to kill your parents!”
I shrugged, trying to act cool. “It still can’t be as bad as the stuff Mr. Cunyan likes,” I said.
“Oh man!” groaned Todd. “Mr. Cunyan? That guy’s not dead yet?”
“Man,” said Jason. “That guy was a wacko!”
“Is he making you sing a parlor song at the program this year?” asked Todd.
I nodded.
“Remember when we had to sing ‘Down on the Farm’?” said Jason. And he started singing, “How ya gonna keep them down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?”
Then Todd sang, “How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen you pee?” and everyone laughed.
“What about ‘The Pennsylvania Polka’?” asked Jason. And he started singing that one, too. “It started in Scranton; it’s now number one … the Pennsylvania Polka!”
“Man,” said Todd, “high school sucks, but at least nobody makes me sing old geezer music anymore.”
“The program is tomorrow night,” I said. “It’s gonna stink, too. All the songs are lame. And I have to sing a solo.”
“You poor kid,” said Todd. “If I had to do that, I’d just go hide somewhere they’d never find me.”
“Like Storage Room B?” I asked. I figured that while I had them talking, I’d see if they knew anything. It was some awfully good spying, if I do say so myself.
“Yeah!” said Todd. “Man, I know a kid who spent his whole life trying to get into that room. No one gets in there. Not even teachers!”
“It’s probably where Mr. Gormulka keeps all his stuff,” said Jason. “Is that guy still around, too?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They say he guards that room with his life.”
“Well, sure he does,” said Todd. “Everyone knows Gormulka’s stashing anything valuable that ever got lost in that room, anyway. I heard there’s some huge collection of comic books in there. He’s probably gonna sell it off when he retires and use the money to move to Florida.”
“Mark Brueggen once told me he had a secret spy headquarters in there,” said Jason.
“Mark Brueggen is a dork,” said Jack, rolling his eyes.
Jack and his friends started ignoring me and talking about everyone else they knew who was a dork besides Mark Brueggen, but at least no one was telling me to get lost. It looked like as long as I stayed out of the way and didn’t run up to tell Mom that they were swearing, I was okay. I even made a point of swearing along with them when someone got killed in the video game, just so they knew that I wasn’t some little kid who didn’t know how to swear.
I had been hoping one of them would tell me that Storage Room B was just a little closet full of old mittens and that there was an easy way to pick the lock, but no such luck. It looked like I was in just as much trouble as I thought I was!
I didn’t think they really knew much, though. Maybe Todd and Jason were their class’s version of Tony Zunker— people told them weird stuff just to see if they believed it, and they did!
But it was interesting that they’d both heard about the comic books being in there. A lot of people seemed to think that. It almost had to be true! If I got in there, maybe I could look through them a bit. A long time ago, I saw an ad in an old comic book offering pet monkeys for only $19.95, but I stupidly didn’t write the address down. The comic book was about forty years old, but I’ll bet I could still send money to that address. There’s no way they could go out of business offering a deal as great as that.
When I’d been down in the basement for about fifteen minutes, Mom came down with a load of laundry to toss in the washing machine.
“Are they giving you any trouble, Andrew?” asked Mom.
I shrugged. “Nah,” I said.
“Are they letting you play?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I played a lot.”
I hadn’t actually played at all, of course. I hadn’t even asked to. But I knew that if I said no, Mom would give Jack a talking-to right there, and he’d never forgive me for it.
“Good,” she said.
I noticed that Jack even gave me a tiny little thanks-for-not-getting-me-in-trouble nod at that point. And after Mom left, he didn’t even try to stop me from grabbing a can of Mountain Dew.
I had successfully infiltrated the group. That’s what spies call it when they break into a group and don’t get kicked out or discovered: infiltrating it. I sat back, sipped a Mountain Dew, and swore right along with them. It was awesome. It was like getting to be a teenager four years early!
After everyone had gone home, I started thinking up plans to get the calculator/communicator back.
I just needed to distract Mr. Gormulka. Maybe I could just eat some of the potato salad and puke it back up. Then, while Mr. Gormulka was busy cleaning up the puke, I’d escape from the nurse’s office, pick the lock to Storage Room B, and get the calculator back. Just like that!
But I didn’t kid myself: that plan wasn’t exactly foolproof. For one thing, eating the potato salad might not really make me puke. Other people ate it on Fridays, and they seemed to do okay. For another, if it did make me puke, it might make me too sick to escape from the nurse’s office in the first place. And what if I couldn’t get the lock picked? I still didn’t really have a plan for that.
I was just working on a plan B when Jack came into my room.
“Hey, man,” Jack said.
“Hey!” I said. I could hardly believe it. Jack hadn’t come into my room in months! Maybe he wanted to compliment me on my swearing.
“You wanna know the truth about Mr. Gormulka?” he asked. “It’s top-secret, but I think you should know.”
“Sure!” I said, sitting upright. Jack hadn’t told me any secrets about the town in months!
“That Mark Brueggen kid is a dork, but he’s also right,” said Jack. “Gormulka’s a spy. For the bad guys. He works at the school because he knows there are spies here in Cornersville Trace, and being a janitor makes it easy for him to spy on kids.”
I couldn’t believe it. Ryan Kowalski had been telling the truth!
“So why don’t the good guys arrest him?” I asked.
“He’s way too clever for that,” said Jack. “There’s no real evidence that will hold up in court against him. Everyone at the spy headquarters knows he’s a spy, but no one can prove it. You can’t just arrest people and send them to jail without proof!”
“So you’ve been to headquarters, then?” I asked, hoping that he’d finally admit it.
“No comment,” said Jack. “I shouldn’t be telling you all this. It’s top-secret stuff. But I have to warn you that you could be in big trouble.”
“Really?” I asked.
“I think Gormulka is zeroing in on someone at the school,” said Jack. “And it’s probably you. And the last time he attacked a student, it was during the music program.”
“No way!” I said.
“Seriously,” said Jack. He lowered his voice to almost a whisper and leaned in close to me. “It was when we sang ‘The Pennsylvania Polka.’ There was a kid in my class that year named Will Hannon who was always trying to break into Storage Room B. When I look back on it now, I’m sure that he was a spy. He told me he’d seen a bunch of comic books in there when he walked past while Mr. Gormulka was opening the door. On the day of the program, he told me he’d finally gotten inside and that he’d be telling me what was in there soon. But right before we went onstage, he disappeared. And he was supposed to be singing a solo, just like you’re doing tomorrow!”
“He just disappeared?” I asked as a chill ran down my spine.
“They never saw him again,” said Jack. “The school tried to cover it up. They said that he’d never shown up for the program at all and that his family had moved to Florida. But I know he was there that night… and then he was gone.”
“You think Mr. Gormulka got him?” I asked.
“Of course,” said Jack. “His family had to go into hiding so Mr. Gormulka couldn’t get the rest of them, too. I don’t know if he’s still alive or not. All I know is that when we were singing ‘The Pennsylvania Polka,’ I thought I heard him screaming out in the hall. No one in the auditorium noticed, because we were drowning out the screams with our singing!”
“Wow,” I said quietly. My knees were shaking. For a second there, I noticed Jack looked like he was almost smiling. I guess he was trying not to get me too scared.
“So I just wanted to warn you to be careful tomorrow night,” said Jack. “Watch out for Mr. Gormulka, and don’t try to take him on yourself! Even the best spies at headquarters think he’s too dangerous to fight!”
“What do you think he’s hiding in Storage Room B?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” said Jack. “Those comic books are probably just bait to lure spies into the place. Who knows what he’s really hiding? I want you to promise me you won’t try to get into that room, no matter what.”
I paused for a second. “What if I knew that something was in there?” I asked. “Something really important?”
“Forget it!” said Jack. “It’s not important enough to get killed over! Got it?”
I nodded. Jack nodded back, shook my hand, and then went back to his room without another word.
I had always known that Mr. Gormulka was kind of a jerk, but it was crazy that he was really that dangerous!
I had promised Jack I wouldn’t go in there, but now I knew I had to do it. I had no choice. A dangerous guy like Mr. Gormulka could use that calculator to take over the world if I didn’t get it back!