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.
"Of course I'm over him." I shrugged and started walking, scanning the crowd. "I broke up with him. Remember? It wasn't a big deal."
Bex fell into step beside me. Her voice was almost timid as she said, "You don't have to pretend, Cam."
But that's what spies do—we pretend. We have aliases and disguises and go to great lengths to not be ourselves. So I said, "Of course I'm over him," and walked on, clinging to my cover till the end.
Bex probably would have argued with me; I'm sure she would have pointed out that Josh had been my first boyfriend, my first kiss; that he had seen me when to the rest of the world I was invisible, and that's not the kind of thing a girl—much less a spy—forgets so quickly. Knowing Bex, she probably would have pointed out a lot of things; but at that very moment… twenty feet ahead of us … we saw a woman in a beige business suit sitting on a bench, talking on a cell phone. There was nothing unusual about her—not her hair, not her face. Nothing except for the fact that fifty minutes before, she'd been wearing a jogging suit and pushing a baby stroller.