"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…
"Oh. My. Gosh." For the first time I couldn't fault Bex for being overdramatic.
Moonlight fell through the windows. Someone had left a desk lamp shining in the corner of the room. I pulled off my goggles, letting my eyes adjust to the dim light as I looked around the room. Liz's hopes of scientifically analyzing typical teen-boy behavior was going to have to wait, because one look at this space was enough to tell us that these were not typical boys.
"Are all boys so …" Liz started, but couldn't seem to find the words to finish.
"Clean?" Bex suggested, sounding pretty disgusted, because (take it from someone who has lived with her for four years) no one appreciates the "lived-in" look more than Rebecca Baxter.
There were eight suites, where we found freshly shined shoes and beds made with hospital corners. Books and notebooks were stacked neatly on desks. There were no socks on the floor; no girlie calendars or back issues of Sports Illustrated. It seemed more like the barracks of soldiers than the rooms of boys, and I instantly regretted leaving Macey outside to serve as our lookout, because if we'd ever needed the Gallagher Academy's resident boy expert, that was the time.
Everything was temporary. And sterile. And with every step I felt more sure that the Blackthorne Boys were simply passing through. Which was both a little comforting—and a lot confusing. Why were they here?
Liz settled herself at the first computer she saw, pulled a disk from her pocket, and started uploading a spyware file that the NSA has been trying to buy from her for years. "One-hundred-and-sixteen-bit encryption?" she said, sounding shocked and a little disappointed when she reached the machine's firewall.
"Maybe they'll challenge you next time, sweetheart," Bex said as she ran to the first bathroom she saw, pulled a pair of tweezers from her utility belt, and started yanking bristles out of toothbrushes for DNA analysis (just in case the boys were really biologically engineered spying machines or something). I stared at the empty walls and the barren desks, looking for family pictures or letters from home—the things that, more than fingerprints and DNA, would tell us who these boys really were.