Spy School - Back to Basics [2]

12: New Alliance

Edited 7/22/2021

A security room, about to die, probably

Vienna, Virginia

May 10

1200 hours

The door slammed shut on its own with a scary thud. I immediately ran forward and tugged on the handle, but it was no use. The door wouldn't move a centimeter. All the monitors had gone black except for the one displaying Elizabeth and Lacy.

"Shucks."

I turned to look at Erica; it was the first time I had ever heard her say something remotely close to a swear.

"Do you have your phone?" I asked.

"I do, but this deep underground I don't have any service," Erica said.

We were interrupted by Elizabeth again. "Three, two, one, launch!" She pressed a button that that Lacy gave her, and there was a loud roar as the missile took off.

I started to think. Where could the missile possibly go? Then it all clicked into place. The two coordinates that were on the computer screen where it calculated where the Jadeit was: they were pretty close to Robert E Lee. And of course, Elizabeth would be getting rid of Mike. It made perfect sense.

Ten minutes until my old school would be destroyed along with Mike, Trixie, and the Mogilevsky twins. My former teachers would be detonated, and although most of them weren't that good, there were a few ones form sixth grade that I truly enjoyed. Besides, there were about half a thousand students as well, and not to mention their devastated parents.

At this point, it was safe to say Elizabeth had lost all sense of morality. Or she simply ignored it, because revenge and the thirst for money was greater.

"Do you have any explosives? To detonate the door?" I asked Erica hopefully.

"No," she replied, her tone clipped. "Why do you think I said 'shucks'?"

I had always known every time I went up against evil, there was a good chance they would succeed, and a lot of people, including me, would die. That hadn't really sunk in until now. Until then, everything had eventually worked out, but now, a missile was racing towards my best friend and hundreds of others at impeccable speeds, while I was locked in a room not able to do anything other than wait for someone to come and kill me.

Its a feeling you can't put on paper, not that you would want to.

Suddenly, the door handle slowly started turning. I raced to hid behind one of the leather couches while Erica grabbed the nearest object she could find- a chair on wheels- and stood next to the door, ready to attack.

Then, the door swung open. Erica instinctively swung her chair, but it only hit air. Into view stepped Ivy.

"Don't attack me," she said, frantically raising her hands in the air. "I'm here to help you."

I peaked out from behind the couch.

"How can we trust you?" Erica said harshly. "One moment you're just our classmate and now you're in a secret passageway of an evil organization that rivals the goverment. How did you even get down here, anyways?"

"Fair point, but I can prove that I'm against Elizabeth's organization." Ivy ran a hand through her short, fluffy hair that curled like corkscrew Fusilli pasta. "Look over there, on the wall. You see that list, for guard shifts?" She pointed to the list I had noticed earlier. "You'll see a section for the 'Ivy Household'. They're blackmailing me with the threat of killing my family, unless I be part of their organization."

"Why? What do they need?" I asked, curious.

Ivy's eyes rapidly looked away. "We have less than ten minutes. Do you really want to waste time?" she replied.

"Alright, lets go then."

We walked out of the room as quickly as we could.

"Um, the hallway forward is blocked," I told Ivy.

"I know," she replied. As we approached the blocked area, Ivy opened a concealed panel embedded in the wall and pressed a button. The floor slid away and all the things blocking our path forward tumbled away, and then the floor slid back to it's original position. We could now pass through the formerly blocked hallway.

"How'd you know that?" Erica asked.

"I had to do some tests involving the pipe for the missile," Ivy said. "That was part of my job, so I needed the access this place."

As we sprinted down the hallway, I asked, "I am grateful you came, but couldn't you have intercepted us earlier?"

"My homeroom's bus got delayed, so we arrived really late for the field trip, and I had to sneak off from the tour group," Ivy said, still running.

We finally arrived at the end of the hallway, where there was door with a keypad and retina scanner.

"Behind this door is the missile room, where Pasternak is right now," Ivy explained. "What's going to be our game plan?"

Erica scowled at Ivy. She didn't like anyone else taking charge.

"We obviously can't go in there, there's no point in that. The main goal is stopping the missile from turning the school into ashes, then we can deal with Elizabeth and her croonies," Erica said, trying to keep her cool.

I started thinking about how to stop the missile. Maybe a grenade launcher? No, it would be encased in the pipe. There was no way of stopping the missile once it started going.

My mind started going a different direction. What if, rather than stopping the missile, we stopped it from hitting anyone by evacuation. And the quickest to evacuate the school would be to set a fire, particularly the grass. The protocols for when the grass was on fire was for everyone to go all the way down the hill the school was on and go to a park nearly a mile away.

I told Ivy and Erica my idea.

"Great," Erica said, "but we're half an hour away from Lee Junior High."

"That's why we're getting Mike to do it," I said.

"I already told you, I have no service this far underground, you can't call him," Erica replied.

"Yeah, but in a place this big, there should be more than one exit directly to the surface in a place this vast," I replied. "There would be a huge risk otherwise. This place is underground, so it could collapse, and if the missile system fails, everyone needs to exit quickly."

"There's an emergency exit in the missile room!" Ivy exclaimed, gesturing towards the door.

"So you grab my phone, use the emergency exit to get to the surface where there's service, then call Mike and tell him to set the grass on fire while Ivy and I distract Elizabeth and Lacy," Erica said, finishing off the plan.

"All set."

1129 words

the time bomb has been defused... for now

i feel like im really dragging this out: the past three or four chapters were supposed to be just one, but oh well