I'm not completely sure, and this isn't scientific or anything, but I think the most exciting words in the English language might be CoveOps class, let's go. Or at least that's what I thought as the elevator opened into Sublevel One that day, and I saw Mr. Solomon walking toward us, pulling on a jacket.
He didn't tell us to open our textbooks; he didn't have us take our seats; instead, he led us upstairs and through the open doors, into the crisp cool air toward one of the ruby-red shuttle vans with the Gallagher crest on its side. I know this might sound a little anticlimactic after the helicopter thing, but to be honest, being in a helicopter with seven of my sisters was relaxing compared to the feeling of sitting in the back of the van…with boys.
Grant sat beside Mr. Solomon at the front of the van. Zach was on the other side of Mr. Solomon, his breathing steady and even, and I knew that the Blackthorne Institute had either trained him very well or very poorly, because he seemed indifferent to the fact that he was locked in the back of a van with eight expertly trained teenage girls, a man who (according to Tina) had once strangled a Yugoslavian arms dealer with a pair of control-top panty hose, and … Dr. Steve.
"I say, Mr. Solomon," Dr. Steve droned on, "you've done an excellent job with these young ladies. Just excellent."
Mr. Solomon had lectured on rolling exits the week before, and for a second I wondered if he'd brought us here to illustrate how to throw someone out of a moving van; but then I remembered that Dr. Steve was driving.
"You ladies need to pay attention to this man," Dr. Steve said. "He's a living legend."
"Just as long as they remember the most important part of that is the living," Mr. Solomon said.
I felt the van stop at our front gates then turn right and start down a road I knew well.
"Today's about the basics, ladies and gentlemen," Mr. Solomon said easily, as if the gentlemen had always been there. "I want to watch you move; see you work together. Pay attention to your surroundings, and remember—half of your success in this business comes from looking like you belong, so today your cover is that you're a bunch of private-school students enjoying a trip to town."
I thought about the Gallagher Academy logo on the side of this particular van, then glanced down at my uniform— made a mental note of what version of myself I was supposed to be, while, beside me, Bex asked, "What are we really?"
"A bunch of spies"—Mr. Solomon pulled a quarter from his pocket and gave it a flip—"playing tag." Before the quarter had even landed in his palm, I knew it wasn't a matter of heads or tails.
"Brush pass, Ms. Baxter," Mr. Solomon said. "Define it."
"The act of covertly passing an object between two agents."
"Correct," Mr. Solomon said. I glanced at Zach, half expecting him to roll his eyes or something, because, frankly, brush passes aren't that much more complicated than learning to waltz with Madame Dabney. If you want to be technical about it, brush passes are about as low tech as you get; but they're important, or else Mr. Solomon wouldn't have loaded us into the van that day. "The little things can get away from you, ladies and gentlemen. The little things matter."
"So right you are," Dr. Steve chimed from the front seat. "As I was telling Headmistress Morgan just this—"
"It's you and the street today," Mr. Solomon said, ignoring Dr. Steve. "Today's test might be low tech, but this is trade craft at its most essential."
He pulled a small box from beneath his seat, and I instantly recognized the cache of comms units and tiny cameras that were concealed within pins and earrings, tie clips and silver crosses exactly like the one I'd worn last semester.
"Watch. Listen," Mr. Solomon said. "Remember to communicate. Observe."
Kim Lee was struggling to pin an American flag-pin-slash-camera onto her coat, and then Grant said, "Allow me," and Kim batted her eyelashes and swooned a little (yes—actual swoonage) as he helped her.
"Pair off," Solomon continued his instructions as the van stopped. "Blend in, and remember, we'll be watching."
I looked at Bex and started for the doors, but before I could put a foot outside, Mr. Solomon said, "Oh no, Ms. Morgan. I believe you already have a partner."
It shouldn't have been that hard—not the brush passes, not the questions Mr. Solomon fired through our comms units at regular intervals. None of it. But as I climbed out of the van I knew this was going to be one of the toughest assignments I'd ever been on. Because, for starters, at eleven a.m. on a Friday morning, there isn't a lot of pedestrian traffic on the town square in Roseville, Virginia, and everyone knows pedestrian traffic is key when trying to covertly pass something between two agents.
Also, despite the bright sun and cloudless sky, it was still pretty cold outside, so I could either wear gloves and potentially inhibit my quarter-handling ability, or go gloveless and allow my hands to freeze.
And, of course, there is the fact that your partner is your lifeline during covert operations, and at that moment, my partner was Zach.
"Come on, Gallagher Girl," he said as he headed for the square. "This should be fun."
But it didn't sound like fun—at all. Fun is movie marathons; fun is experimenting with fourteen kinds of ice cream and creating your own custom flavor. Fun is not hanging out in the place where I had met, kissed, and broken up with the world's sweetest boy. And participating in a clandestine training exercise with a different boy who wasn't sweet at all.
The gazebo still stood in the center of the square. The movie theater was behind me, and the Abrams and Son Pharmacy—Josh's family's business—was exactly where it had been for seventy years. Things are supposed to look different when you come back, but despite the sight of my classmates walking two by two down sidewalks, everything was exactly as I'd remembered. Not even the purses displayed in the Anderson's Accessories window had changed; for a second it felt like the past two months hadn't happened.