Dust hung heavy in the tunnel. My shoulders grazed old stones and rough wooden beams. Light fell through gaps in the stones as the passageway widened, and soon I was looking for my mother through the cracks—but seeing Mr. Solomon. "Do you think any of the girls have guessed?" he asked.
"About Blackthorne?" Mom asked, and Mr. Solomon nodded.
"No. But if one of them knew the truth, then they'd all know the truth."
Mr. Solomon laughed. "You're probably right." He straightened out on the couch. "You still think this is a good idea?"
Mom walked to her desk. "It's what we have to do." She turned and looked into the distance. "For everyone."
On the way to our suite I avoided the busy staircases and crowded hallways—not because of the stares and whispers, but because I wanted to think about the way Zach looked during the Code Black; I wanted to remember the long, quiet ride from D.C. and my mother's worried face. And more than anything, I wanted to ask myself the question that had been looming in the back of my mind since I'd first seen Zach in D.C.: Who were those boys, really?
All we had was a picture of Mr. Solomon in a T-shirt and my mother's word that we needed to forge friendships for the future. That didn't change the fact that the Gallagher Academy hadn't had a Code Black since the end of the cold war—until they showed up. That didn't change the fact that Zach had looked Tina in the eye and lied.
Twenty-four hours before, I'd stood in that cold, empty corridor and thought that Zach knew me; but I didn't know him. I didn't know any of them. And I didn't like it. At all.
I pushed open the door to our suite and announced to my roommates, "We've got work to do."
Chapter Nineteen
I know what you're thinking. And the truth is, I might have thought it, too. I mean, it's not like we had a lot of free time on our hands and were looking for an extra project. It's not as if I enjoy getting summoned to D.C. and debriefed by the CIA. I don't go looking for trouble, but I couldn't shake the feeling that trouble might have found us—walked through our front gates and moved into the East Wing. So even though there were about a million reasons to forget the whole thing … we didn't. Instead we waited, and we watched, and a week later we were ready. Sort of.
"Tell me again why this isn't an incredibly bad idea," I muttered in the dark passageway. Cobwebs clung to every inch of me. My equipment belt was on too tight, and Liz kept stepping on my heels and making high-pitched squeaks (everyone knows she's afraid of spiders).
"Well, I think it's bloody brilliant," Bex replied. It was also bloody risky, and that, I knew, was part of its appeal for Bex.
I hadn't meant for it to come down to this. Seriously. I thought we might look up their birth certificates or do other least-intrusive-means-necessary things. But as I stood in the secret passageway that led to the East Wing, I couldn't help but feel pretty intrusive.
"Guys, maybe breaking about a dozen rules isn't a good way to … you know…prove I didn't break any rules," I suggested.
But Bex just smiled through the dusty dim light. "It is if we don't get caught." She stepped over one of the thin motion-sensing lasers that the security department must have installed over winter break. "And I don't plan on getting caught."
I stopped in the corridor, felt Liz, then Bex bang into me as I listened for something—anything—to give us an excuse to turn around.
"But what if they aren't really gone?" I asked.
"They are," Bex said.
"But shouldn't we wait? We've only had a week of prep work. We don't know their patterns of behavior yet. We don't—"
"Cam, I told you," Liz said. "Dr. Steve is making the boys do some kind of group-bonding thing. It has to be tonight."
And she was right, as usual—but that didn't make me feel better.
Summary of Surveillance The Operatives undertook a high-risk operation that could lead to answers … or expulsion … or both.
"Don't worry, Cam," Bex whispered. "It's not that different from when we broke into Josh's house."
I crouched at the air vent that would take us into the boys' rooms and reached for the tiny bottle of hair spray that I keep for emergencies (just not of the hair variety) and sprayed the area around the grate. A grid of tiny motion detectors flickered in the fumes.
"Yeah," I whispered. "Just like Josh's."
Liz hooked a device up to the laser circuits, and I watched the red beams disappear. Then there was nothing standing between us and the forbidden wing—between us and possible answers.
But here's the thing about black bag jobs. 1) You don't actually have to carry a black bag to break and enter and obtain covert information (even though they do come in handy). And 2) No matter how clear your objectives, you're never one hundred percent sure what you're looking for. After all, it might have been nice to find a file labeled TOP-SECRET PLAN TO INFILTRATE AND DESTROY THE GALLAGHER ACADEMY, but I would have settled for some clue about the boys who now shared our classes; I would have been happy with a snapshot that showed me the real Zach Goode.
As we slid through the vent and dropped to the floor of the common room, Bex said, "Okay, Liz, start on the computers. Cam, you and I can…" But then she trailed off. She stopped and stared. The three of us had officially gone where no Gallagher Girl had ever been before, and standing there, I couldn't shake the feeling that nothing in our training had prepared us for … that.
We'd been to these rooms only weeks before, but everything seemed smaller now. Greener, too (but that's probably because we were wearing night-vision goggles). And…