Spy School: Chapters 1–4

As part of the continuing investigation into Operation Creeping Badger, the following pages have been transcribed from 53 hours of debriefings of Mr. Benjamin Ripley, aka Smokescreen, age 12, a first year student at the Academy of Espionage.

Mr. Ripley's acceptance to the academy, while unprecedented, was sanctioned by...and..., Director of the CIA, as part of the operation.

That day had been a prime example: day 4,583, seven months into the twelfth year of my mundane existence.

Alexander Hale looked exactly like I’d always imagined a spy would. A tiny bit older, perhaps—he seemed about fifty—but still suave and debonair.

Alexander looked the tiniest bit intrigued.

Usually you merely play the games on the kids’ page—at which you performed very well, by the way—but you’ve also browsed the employment and internship pages with some regularity. Ergo, you’ve considered a career as a spy.

“...I’ve never heard of the CIA’s Academy of Espionage.”
“That’s because it’s top secret. But I assure you it exists. I graduated from there myself. A fine institution, dedicated to creating the agents of tomorrow today. Congratulations!”

I have a gift for mathematics—and, as a result, an uncanny ability to always know exactly what time it is—although for much of my life, I hadn’t realized this was anything special.

I stammered a bit; there were still a hundred questions tumbling around in my brain, vying to be asked at once.

When I got there twenty seconds later, he already had my suitcase open and was casting a disdainful eye on the contents of my closet. “Not a single decent suit.”

I wanted to be just like Alexander Hale. I wanted to be suave and debonair.

I wouldn’t have even minded a rakish crossbow scar on my chin.

Instead, it looked like a dowdy old prep school that might have been popular around World War II but had long since lost its mojo. It was located in a similarly dowdy, rarely visited corner of Washington, DC, hidden from the world by a high stone wall.

And beyond the buildings stood a large, pristine swath of forest, untouched since the days when our forefathers had decided a fetid, malaria-ridden swamp on the Potomac River was the perfect place to build our nation's capital.

And beyond the buildings stood a large, pristine swath of forest, untouched since the days when our forefathers had decided a fetid, malaria-ridden swamp on the Potomac River was the perfect place to build our nation's capital.

Though braced by flying buttresses and dotted with gargoyles, they were still gray and uninteresting, designed so that anyone who accidentally stumbled upon St. Smithen’s Science Academy would turn his back and never think of it again.

I arrived with Alexander at an inauspicious time, minutes before nightfall in the dead of winter.

The light was bleak, the sky was leaden, and the buildings were shrouded in shadow.

(Though he’d warned me to keep my hands off them for fear of launching heavy artillery into rush-hour traffic.)

But Alexander had quelled their anxiety by promising I could return home to visit soon.

(When they’d asked if they could visit me on the campus, he’d assured them they could, although he’d artfully avoided telling them exactly when.)

Each knee pinioned one of my arms to the ground.

Now that the voice was inflected with sarcasm rather than aggression, it was higher than I’d expected.

“Apparently, we’ve had a security breach. There was an assembly on diplomacy for the entire student body this afternoon. The enemy infiltrated the campus during it and surrounded the assembly hall. All students and faculty are being held hostage inside.”

I’d ditched the assembly. I could give a hoot about diplomacy.

I followed her, my head ducked below the windows, fearing imminent attack.

Were we cleverly circumventing them, or were they waiting to ambush us?

Inside, the passage we’d come down tunneled into a towering entry hall flanked by sweeping grand staircases.

One more flight up brought me into a long, wide hallway lined with imposing office doors.

He had a slight tic—a twitch in his left eye—which seemed to be exacerbated by his anger.

“I think we’re all in agreement that your performance today was deplorable,” the principal continued.

“You’ve displayed amateur-level skills or worse in virtually every arena: unarmed combat, elusiveness, savoir faire...”

I was under the impression that I'd utterly failed at them, but perhaps they'd been designed to detect some latent skills that even I didn’t know about.

My room was on the top floor of Armistead Dormitory. All first years were sequestered up there.

The top floor was basically an attic that had been haphazardly divvied into cramped little rooms.

The walls were thin enough to hear through, and the ceiling, which was really the peaked roof of the building, slanted so precipitously that I could stand upright only in half the room.

There was a small dormer window set into the slant, which let in a tiny bit of light and a staggering amount of cold air.

“Yeah. Every student gets full dossiers on all the new meat. Yours was better than most, though.”

He flashed a disingenuous smile.

While I dithered about this, Chip started out the door.