Ally Carter - [Gallagher Girls 02 ] - Cross My Heart & Hope To Spy

"Last semester, some of you"—he looked directly at me—"proved that you're pretty good at not being seen when you don't want to be. Well, today you go from being tailers to tailees. And, ladies…" Mr. Solomon paused. My classmates were so still, so quiet, I could almost hear our pounding hearts. "…this is harder."

I thought about our first mission last semester, how Mr. Smith had used every countersurveillance measure known to man simply to enjoy a night in the Roseville town square. It had been exhausting just watching him, and I knew Mr. Solomon was right. The bad guys could be anyone, they could be anywhere, and the odds would always be in their favor.

"Split up into four teams of two—and remember— I don't know exactly how many operatives are out there waiting today, ladies, but if they're good—and you should assume they're very, very good—then it will take every trick you know and every ounce of luck you can muster to identify them and lose them and make it to this location before five o'clock." He pulled an envelope from his coat pocket and placed it in Tina's hands.

He eased toward the back doors of the van. "Oh, and ladies, surveillance might help you do your job, but countersurveillance keeps you alive. If this Op is hard"—Mr. Solomon's voice trailed off, and for a second he wasn't just a teacher, he was my father's friend—"it's supposed to be."

The doors swung open, bright sunlight streamed inside, and by the time we heard the heavy metal clank of the doors again, Joe Solomon was already gone.

We could have flown two hundred miles, or we could have gone in circles and were now back in our school's driveway, twenty feet from where it had all began. Anything was possible, but one thing was sure: this quiz wasn't about grades—nothing at the Gallagher Academy ever really is.

"Do it, Cammie," Bex said. I eased toward the doors and opened one a crack.

A sliver of bright light sliced through the dim van as I peered outside and let my eyes adjust to what I saw. "It's the Mall."

"Cool," Bex said, sliding toward me.

I threw the door open wider. "Not that kind of mall."

Chapter Eight

We crawled, one by one, out of the back of the van and stood for a long time, staring down the grassy promenade that ran between the Washington Monument and the United States Capitol, the heart of Washington, D.C. A lot of people think the Smithsonian is a museum, but it's actually a lot of different museums, and right then we were in the center of them all. We could have gone to see everything from the U.S. Constitution to Fonzie's leather jacket, but somehow I knew that, of all the school groups that take field trips to the National Mall every year, ours was very different.

A man in black stretched his hamstrings on a bench before taking off in a jog. A long line of women wearing matching sweatshirts that said "Louisville Ladies do D.C." milled in front of a Metro stop. And I couldn't help thinking, Oh, Mr. Solomon is good.

After all, he'd been telling us for weeks that surveillance is all about home-court advantage, and that the more limited a location's access is to the public, the easier it will be to see someone who doesn't belong; but that day, Joe Solomon had brought us to a place where tourists converge from all over the world, a place that's home to everyone from panhandlers to politicians (Macey, by the way, swears there isn't much difference). And before I knew it, Kim was saying exactly what I was already thinking.

"We're being watched…"

"By friends of Mr. Solomon's," Mick Morrison added with a crack of her knuckles.

"And they could be…" Anna started, but her voice broke and she swallowed hard.

"Anyone," Bex finished, her voice as excited as Anna's was terrified.

Beside me, Tina was opening the envelope Mr. Solomon had given her.

"What?" Bex asked. "What does it say?"

Tina held up a folded brochure from the National Museum of American History and pointed to a picture of a tiny pair of bright red shoes. There was a message scrawled across it:

There's no place like home.

5:00

Well, the girl in me has seen The Wizard of Oz approximately one billion times, so I knew that Dorothy's ruby slippers must be on the other side of the grassy lawn with the rest of our national treasures.

But the spy in me knew that getting there, tail-free, by five o'clock would be a whole lot harder than clicking our heels together and wishing for home.

"And…flip," Bex said an hour later.

We stopped midstride in front of the museum, then pivoted and started back in the opposite direction. The guy in the red baseball cap who had been following us since we passed the National Gallery of Art kept walking as if he didn't care that the two girls in front of him had just done a total about-face. And maybe he didn't. Care, I mean. But then again, maybe another member of his team had rotated into position and taken his place. There was no way to know. So we kept walking.

"We could be clear," Bex said, sounding wishful. "There might not be anyone on us."

"Or maybe there's a team of twenty CIA all-stars out here, and we're just not good enough to see them."

"Yeah," Bex said. "There's that, too."

I love being a pavement artist; seriously, I do. It's like when guys who would normally hate being freakishly tall discover basketball, or when girls with abnormally long fingers sit down at a piano. Blending in, going unseen, being a shadow in the sun is what I'm good at. Seeing the shadows, it turns out, is not my natural gift.

"I can't believe I haven't seen anyone!" I said in frustration.

"Look at the bright side, Cam." Bex flung her arms out wide like a girl who'd cut class or run away from a school group. To the people around us, she no doubt looked beautiful and exotic—but not at all like a highly trained operative who was memorizing the faces of every person who lingered within a hundred feet.

"We could be in Ancient Languages right now," she said, which was a very good point. "We could be locked in the basement with Dr. Fibs." Which was an excellent point. (Since the X-ray goggles incident, our chemistry professor's lack of depth perception had made him even more accident-prone.) "And here the view is infinitely better."

I wish I could say she was talking about the Washington Monument or the Capitol or any of the sights that drive tourists to D.C. But I know Bex well enough to know she was really talking about a pair of boys who were sitting on a park bench thirty feet away, staring at her.

"Oooh," Bex said, throwing an arm around my shoulders. "I want one."

"They're not puppies."

"Come on." She grabbed my hand. "Let's go talk to them. They're really cute!"

And … okay … I admit it: they were really cute. But this wasn't the time to encourage her. "Bex, we have a mission."

"Yeah, but we can multitask."

"No, Bex. Talking to civilian boys during a CoveOps exercise is a bad idea. Trust me." I forced a smile and added a singsong lilt to my voice as I said, "It's all fun and games until somebody gets their memory erased."

"Wow," Bex said. She blinked against the sun. "You're really …"

"What?" At that moment I knew there were at least nineteen security cameras trained on our path. I knew the Japanese man behind us was asking his wife if she still wanted a T-shirt from the Hard Rock Cafe. I knew a lot of things, but I didn't have a clue what my best friend was trying to say.

"I'm really what?" I asked again.

Bex glanced away, then back, and for one of the bravest people I know, she seemed almost afraid to say, "Not over Josh."

Josh. We'd been back at school for more than a week, but so far no one had said his name. And hearing it, to be honest, sounded strange.