Spy School Read Online Free PDF Page B

slovenliness. His hair was unkempt, his shirt was untucked, his sweatshirt was stained a dozen times over—and was currently getting a fresh coat of spaghetti sauce. He had the posture of a piece of wet linguine and his socks didn’t match. He was obviously intelligent, though, and when he had something to say—as he did now—he was determined to say it. I was having a hard time getting a word in edgewise.
    “Wait,” I said. “You mean Chip was trying to—”
    “Kill you? No. Then he wouldn’t have anyone left to intimidate. What’d he ask you to do?”
    “Hack into the school mainframe.”
    “For what?”
    “‘Classified information.’ For one of his classes.”
    Murray nodded knowingly. “Test answers, most likely. Chip’s tried to force virtually everyone here into helping him cheat one way or another.”
    “And no one’s told the administration?”
    “Oh, the administration knows.”
    “And they haven’t kicked him out?”
    “This isn’t your average school. We’re training to be spies , not Boy Scouts. You can get an A for cheating here, as long as you do it cleverly enough.”
    I sat back, trying to make sense of that. “So I should have tried to hack the system?”
    “Oh, heck no. You’d never have got past the first firewall. The Security Council would’ve nailed you, Chip would have proclaimed his innocence, and you’d have been sacrificed as a lesson to your fellow students to keep their mitts off the mainframe.”
    “But you just said cheating was okay—”
    “If you do it cleverly enough. Hacking’s idiocy.”
    “But Chip coerced me into it.”
    “And thus would’ve kept his hands clean. Doing something stupid isn’t so stupid if you can get someone else to do it for you.”
    I shook my head, dumbstruck by all of this. “That’s insanity.”
    “They don’t call this place an institution for nothing. You gonna eat that?”
    I looked down at my own plate of spaghetti. It was untouched. After the day’s excitement, I didn’t have much of an appetite, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the food looked disgusting. It’s not easy to mess up spaghetti, but somehow, the kitchen staff had managed to do it. The noodles were barely cooked, and the meat sauce looked suspiciously like canned dog food.
    I slid my dinner across the table to Murray, who dugright in. “Big mistake,” he told me. “Spaghetti’s the best thing they make here. Word to the wise: Stock up on peanut butter and jelly. No one will admit it, but I think they make the food this awful on purpose. They’re building up our immunity so that if someone ever tries to poison us, it won’t work. Arsenic’s got nothing on the meat loaf here.”
    “Is there anything good about this place?” I asked.
    Murray waved around the room. “There’s a lot of hotness, girl-wise. And some of the classes aren’t half bad.”
    “Like what?”
    “The computer stuff’s all pretty solid. Good language programs. Oh, and I’d definitely recommend ISEA: Intro to Seducing Enemy Agents. I actually did my homework in that one.”
    “What about classes in weapons and combat?”
    Murray froze, a forkful of spaghetti halfway to his mouth. “Aw, nuts. Don’t tell me you’re a Fleming.”
    “What’s a Fleming?”
    “Someone who comes here actually thinking he’s gonna become James Bond.”
    I got the reference: Ian Fleming had invented James Bond—and thus created several generations of people who naively assumed espionage was a glamorous profession. Like me. I felt my ears reddening slightly in embarrassment, but I tried to play it cool. “This school is supposed to teach us how to be spies.”
    “Yeah. In real life. Which is different from the movies. Hollywood’s sold you a false bill of goods, that spying is all tuxedos and nifty gadgets and car chases in awesome places like Monte Carlo and Gstaad. When, really, it’s mostly grunt work in third world hellholes like Mogadishu and Newark.”
    I tried to hide my