Chapter 1: Relocation 1 RELOCATION Spy School Satellite Facility Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska July 17 1000 hours Erica Hale dangled from her climbing rope on the cliff face, five hundred feet above the ground, and asked, "What do you smell?" I paused in the midst of rappelling beside her, quite sure that I hadn''t heard the question correctly. "Did you just say, ''What do you smell?''?" "Yes." I glanced at the ground fifty stories below us and instantly regretted doing so. From that height, even the tallest trees looked as puny as bonsai. Alarmed, I clutched the rock wall so tightly that my knuckles turned white. Meanwhile, Erica had the calm demeanor of someone sitting on a nice, comfy couch in a room full of throw pillows. "You don''t need to hold on to the cliff like that. The friction of your rope in your belay device is strong enough to keep you from falling.
" "I know that. But I still feel safer holding on." "You''re not safer. All you''re going to do is tire yourself out. So let go and relax." Erica kicked off the rock wall and swung out over the void, grinning like a toddler on a playground swing. Her rope groaned under her weight, as though it were thinking about snapping. Erica didn''t seem the slightest bit concerned.
She pendulumed back to the wall beside me, her boots thudding against the rock. A few pieces of stone flaked off and dropped down into oblivion below us. Despite what Erica had just told me, I clutched the wall even tighter. "Could we please head down?" "Answer the question first." "What''s the holdup down there?" a voice yelled. Forty feet above us, Zoe Zibbell peered over the top of the cliff. The grinning face of Mike Brezinski appeared beside her. "Is Ben freaking out?" "No!" I shouted back defensively.
Mike and Zoe shared a knowing look. "He''s definitely freaking out," Zoe said. "Of course I''m freaking out!" I exclaimed. ''We''re dangling off a cliff--and instead of rappelling down like normal people, Erica wants to know if I smell anything!" "The point is to be aware of your surroundings at all times," Erica explained. "Which requires using all of your senses. Right now, you''re hyper-focused on the rock in front of you and nothing else." "The rock is important ," I explained. "If I fall off of it, I die.
" At the top of the cliff, Zoe sniffed the air. "I smell fear." "That''d be Ben," Erica said. Which was true. Even though it was summer, it was only fifty degrees in Alaska, plus the windchill. And yet, I was still sweating buckets. I reeked so badly, it was possible that people a mile away could have smelled me. Mike inhaled deeply.
"I smell pine trees," he announced, "with a hint of seawater." "And a touch of fresh grass," Zoe added. "The fragrance is really delightful." "It is," Mike agreed. "This whole place is what air freshener is trying to smell like." Although they were perched at the top of an extremely tall cliff, neither of them seemed remotely worried or uneasy. I was the only one of the four of us with the common sense to be properly terrified about falling to my death. But it was evident that Erica wasn''t going to let me descend until I answered her question, which meant that the longer I took, the longer I would spend hanging above the abyss.
Despite my fear, I tentatively sniffed the air. Beyond my own body odor, I picked up on the pine, seawater, and fresh grass that Mike and Zoe had mentioned. And other things as well: the gritty, mineral aroma of the cliff; the hearty, mulch scent of the forest floor. and a musty, earthy odor I couldn''t quite place. Although something about it seemed important. So I used my other senses to figure out what it was. I pulled my gaze from the rock wall and realized that the view from my spot on the cliff was spectacular. It was a rare, cloudless day on the southern coast of Alaska, and I could see for miles in every direction.
The mountain I was dangling from was a knob of rock that jutted out of a verdant forest surrounded by a shimmering blue fjord on one side and a jagged range of mountains on the other. The mountains were capped by the colossal Harding Icefield, which was over seven hundred square miles in size and often a mile thick. Numerous glaciers extended from it, snaking down through dark-rock valleys to the water. It was an area so remote and inaccessible that few humans had ever seen it; the mountain my friends and I were on didn''t even have a name. We were completely off the grid. The closest town had only one thousand people and was four hours away by boat--assuming the weather was good. If the weather wasn''t good (which was often the case), then the closest town wasn''t accessible at all. We were staying in a few rustic cabins tucked into the woods on the edge of a glacial lake at the base of the mountain.
I could see them below me, although from my height, they looked as small as Monopoly houses. (They were also the same green color as Monopoly houses, so as to blend into the forest.) All our power was solar. Instead of indoor plumbing, we had a latrine. We had brought some dried goods with us to eat, like giant sacks of beans and rice, but for the most part we had been living off plants we foraged and fish that we caught. It was as though we had gone back in time. Until only a few weeks before, all of us had lived in a very different place: the gothic campus of the CIA''s Academy of Espionage in the heart of Washington, DC. For most of its history, the existence of spy school had been a secret.
The campus even had an alias: St. Smithen''s Science Academy for Boys and Girls. But the school''s cover had been blown by a former student turned enemy agent named Murray Hill. Murray was my nemesis. I had thwarted several of his evil plans; in retaliation, he had put a price on my head and leaked the location of the academy to hundreds of assassins. As a result, the CIA had decided the entire training program was compromised, shut it down, and sent all the students back to their normal lives. With four exceptions. Erica''s grandfather, Cyrus Hale, was a highly respected spy who had proposed a solution to keep at least a fraction of the program going: take a select group of students and spirit us away to an isolated location to continue our training, which Cyrus would oversee personally.
The operation was so top secret that only a handful of people at the CIA knew about it. Even our old principal didn''t know, although truth be told, our old principal had rarely known anything. The reason that Erica, Zoe, Mike, and I had been chosen, rather than anyone else, was that each of us had been accidentally field-tested. Normally, students weren''t supposed to go on missions until they graduated the academy after seven years of rigorous training--but circumstances had conspired against us. I had only ended up on my first mission through a series of mishaps, when the CIA selected me as bait to catch a mole and Erica had intervened to save me. After that, unusual events had led to Erica and me being on another nine missions together, in which the fate of the world had often hung in the balance. Luckily, we had prevailed. And so, even though I had only completed a year and a half of spy school--and had just turned fourteen a month earlier--I was one of the chosen few.
Zoe and Mike had been selected because they had ended up on several of my later missions. Zoe was also in my year, while Mike was technically a year below us, even though he was our age. (He had been my friend at regular middle school and had only been recruited to spy school after cleverly deducing that it existed.) Erica was easily the most qualified of all of us. She had completed four years of official training at the academy, but as a member of the Hale family, she had also received unofficial spy training since birth. The Hales had been spying for the United States since before the United States had even existed, and her mother''s family had an equally long history of spying for England. So espionage was the family business. (Erica''s first sentence had been "You''re under arrest for treason.
") Because of this, Erica had better spy skills than anyone else at school--as well as most of the adults in the CIA. Which was why she was currently teaching the rest of us, even though she was less than two years older than me. Erica also happened to be my girlfriend. I had fallen for her hard on my first day of spy school--both literally and metaphorically. She had tackled me in the midst of my first training exercise--and I had been smitten with her ever since. She hadn''t been the slightest bit interested in me for quite some time, but over the course of our missions, I had proven to her that I was actually a pretty good spy--and had even helped her become a better spy as well. Still, I was nowhere near as skilled as Erica was--and probably never would be. Erica had an exceptionally impressive array of talents.
To name only a few: She could battle multiple enemy agents in hand-to-hand combat at once, defuse bombs, speak sixteen different languages, drive a car at high speed--and had learned how to fly a helicopter in just the past three weeks. She also had virtually no fear of anything, as evidenced by her relaxed manner as she hung from the cliff face, and her senses were incredibly well tuned. I had seen her detect an enemy by merely catching a whiff of his cologne from a quarter mile away. She had always cla.