"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.
"Bex," I said as calmly as possible.
"I see her," Bex replied.
Here's the thing you need to know about detecting and losing a tail: to do it right—I mean really right—you'd need to cover half a city. You'd climb in and out of cabs and train cars and walk against the grain on at least a dozen busy sidewalks. You'd take all day.
But Mr. Solomon hadn't given us all day, and that was kind of the point. So Bex and I spent the next hour going in one museum entrance and out another. Going up escalators only to come down the elevator two minutes later. We made sudden stops and looked in mirrors and tied our shoelaces when they didn't need it. It was a virtual blur of corner-clearing and litter-dropping—everything I've ever seen, everything I've ever even heard of! (At one point Bex had almost talked me into crawling out the bathroom window in the Air and Space Museum, but a U.S. Marshal walked by and we decided not to press our luck.)
The seconds ticked by and the sun went lower, and soon the shadow of the Washington Monument was stretched almost the full length of the Mall. Time was running out.
"Tina," I said through my comms unit, "how are you and Anna?" But I was met with empty silence. "Mick," I said. "Are you there?"
Bex and I shared a worried glance, because there are reasons operatives go radio-silent, and most of them are not good.
We were cutting across the Mall, walking north, hoping anyone who wasn't intentionally following us would stick to the path.