Spy School - Back to Basics [2]

17: Exchanging

Donlon Point Staging Area

Vienna, Virginia

May 10

1400 hours

I stared in awe as SKITTLE's lackey, aka Lacy, and three guards fell to the ground, unconscious, darts sticking out of their necks.

Four more guards left.

As the four remaining guards were taken out just as quickly, I realized the one thing Cyrus had been relying on: Elizabeth had either been too vain to say that the explosion had failed to kill anyone, or she herself didn't know yet.

Either way, it gave Cyrus the element of surprise, and he concealed Mike, Trixie, and the Mogilevsky twins in the trees, arming them with dart guns.

Soon, the ties on mine and Erica's hands were undone, and I rubbed my wrists. The amount of zip-ties I had on my hands was starting to rub my wrists raw.

Then, we had to deal with the eight sedated SKITTLES members and their van. We couldn't drive it away, because SKITTLES could track it. Eventually, we decided to lock all of them in the van, and rig it with sleeping gas if they tried to open the doors once they woke up. Of course, we stripped the van of communication devices and emptied the fuel tank first.

After that, we squeezed in Cyrus' car and drove down the street where some suburban houses were and parked near the driveway of one.

"Aren't we going to go back to the inn?" Mike asked.

"No, we have to keep an eye on these guys. We shouldn't go too far off, just in case," Cyrus replied.

"Just in case what?" Mike pressed.

"Well, right now we have to cripple SKITTLES-" Cyrus cringed at the childish name- "and then go for the kill."

"Well, how do we do that?"

"The same way we did with SPYDER. The reason we were able to destroy them so easily was because they were bankrupt, so they had less resources, plus Joshua had the USB," I realized. "Earlier today, I saw Elizabeth doodling something and then frantically erase it the moment when she saw what she was writing. It was a number- and if we have any amount of good luck, it was a bank number. It has the same number of digits as a Virginia bank number."

"Well what was it?" Cyrus asked gruffly. "Don't say it out loud, write it down!"

Erica, who was sitting in the passenger seat, looked through the dashboard compartment until she found paper and pen, then handed it to me. I was in the very back of the van. Because there were so many of us, there was barely any room, and with my luck, I got the trunk along with Mike and the Mogilevsky twins.

I grabbed the pen and paper and using my knee as a desk, I wrote the number that I had committed to memory: 731031181.

I then threw the paper back to Erica as a wadded ball and missed miserably, but she still reached for it, opened the wadded ball and read what was inside. She then handed it to Cyrus to read.

"Well," he said quietly, "looks like we'll have to contact Orion."

I almost saw the frown forming on Alexander's face, despite the fact that he was in one of the middle rows, with the back of his head towards me.

"Why do we even need his help?" Alexander pouted.

"Well, we have to make our transaction untraceable. SKITTLES was the organization that stole all the CIA's money in the first place, and now we're simply taking it back, while simultaneously stopping them from accessing their funds," Cyrus said.