Chapter 1: Arrival 1 ARRIVAL Shanghai, China August 28 0500 hours Erica Hale pointed at the tallest building in all of China and said, "That's where my grandparents are being held captive." There were a lot of skyscrapers arrayed before us, on the eastern side of the Huangpu River, but Shanghai Tower dwarfed them all. It was a sleek, beautiful spiral of glass, so tall that its top floor disappeared in the clouds above, as though the building had punched a hole in the sky. "I don't suppose they're being held captive down on the first floor?" I asked hopefully. "Or possibly even in a basement level? Someplace that would be easy to access?" "Sorry, Ben. According to the address Orion gave us, they're on the one-hundred-sixteenth story. Just below the observation deck." I'm gifted at math. My mind immediately converted the numbers. "That's over a third of a mile above the ground!" "Yes." Erica kept her eyes locked on the tower, considering it thoughtfully, as though she was intrigued by the challenge of getting to the top of it. On the other hand, I found the entire situation mortifying. "I know there's not really a good place for someone to hold your family captive, but... does it really have to be one of the highest floors in one of the tallest buildings on earth?" I waved toward the city around us, where there were thousands of two- and three-story buildings that looked like they would have been relatively safe to scale. "It couldn't have been any of these?" Erica shifted her attention to me, so that she could give me a look of disdain. "You think an evil organization is going to keep their captives in a cheap apartment block that's simple to mount a rescue operation from?" I shrugged. "I'm just saying, it'd be a nice change of pace. We've been through an awful lot lately. I was hoping something might actually be easy for once." Erica thought about that, then nodded agreement. The disdain in her eyes faded. "Yeah. It would be." Erica and I were both in our teens and were supposed to be spies-in-training at the CIA's top secret Academy of Espionage. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, we had recently been doing a lot less training and a lot more straight-up spying. Only a week before, we and our friends had ended up thwarting a computer hacker who had knocked out every power grid on the planet. Meanwhile, everyone back in my old neighborhood thought I was just off at science camp. That's one of the biggest problems with espionage: Everything you do is top secret. Even if you save the world on a regular basis, everyone you know can still think you're a nerd. At least Erica knew the truth. I had been smitten with her since the moment I first laid eyes on her--although it wasn't mutual. I was a brand-new recruit at spy school and she had felt I was an incompetent klutz who had gotten in way over his head--which, in her defense, was the truth. But over the course of our missions, I had eventually developed some skills, proven my worth, and won her respect. She was now my girlfriend. Civilization still hadn't fully recovered from the blackouts. When the power was out, there had been widespread chaos, panic, and crime. Some countries had resorted to martial law to keep the peace. In others, governments had toppled. Many places didn't have their electrical grids up and running yet, and even those that did were having problems: power lapses, rolling blackouts, big gaps in phone and internet service. Throughout the world, all air travel was still grounded while the air traffic and safety systems were brought back online. Fortunately, we had a yacht. It was called the Fishin' Impossible . We didn't own it. We had commandeered it via piracy in order to chase down the hacker, who was operating from a remote location in the middle of the Flores Sea. In our defense, we'd desperately needed it to save the world--and also, its owner was a real jerk. It turned out, he'd made his fortune through an internet confidence scam, bilking thousands of innocent people out of their hard-earned money by claiming to be a displaced Ugandan prince trying to raise an army to liberate his people when he was really just a minor-league Australian rugby player who'd been suspended for punching a referee. We had fully intended to return the yacht, but then some other problems had cropped up. Espionage was Erica's family business. In the same way that some people's families were full of doctors or lawyers--or, in my case, grocers--Erica's family was full of spies. Her grandfather, Cyrus, was a renowned undercover operative; her grandmother, Mary, was a highly regarded analyst; and her father, Alexander, had been a well-respected agent until recently, when it was discovered that he wasn't very good at his job and was actually quite incompetent. The hacker, who went by the code name Orion, had been concerned that the Hales would bust him, and so he had tricked them into going on a wild-goose chase. Cyrus, Mary, and Alexander had headed to an address in Shanghai where they believed they would locate the person responsible for the blackouts, but had instead found a mysterious enemy waiting to capture them. We had brought Orion, along with several of his henchmen, to the port of Mamudju in Indonesia and turned them over to the local division of the Indonesian State Intelligence Agency. During the voyage there, Orion had coughed up the address he had given the Hale family but truly appeared to have no idea who the mysterious enemy was--or why they wanted the Hales. All he knew was that they had contacted him through discreet channels and offered him a great deal of money if he could deliver the Hales to them. So we had taken the Fishin' Impossible to Shanghai in the hopes of locating the hostile party and rescuing Erica's family. Even though the yacht was powerful and fast, it had still taken a week to get there. We had burned through most of the fuel in the tank, as well as all the food we had in storage. (That evening, the only things we'd had left for dinner were peanut butter, salsa, and pickled asparagus, which did not go very well together.) Now we had come through the delta of the great Yangtze River and then turned onto the Huangpu, which cut directly through the heart of Shanghai. The city appeared to have weathered the blackout better than many other places. Not only was the power back on, it was being wasted. Even though few people were awake at five in the morning, Shanghai Tower and the neighboring skyscrapers were still brightly lit. Each had an ornate light show: Some twinkled; some changed patterns; others flashed advertisements. Shanghai Tower's was the most elaborate by far: Intricate ripples of color ran up and down it, following its curves. Erica and I were watching it from the forward deck of the Fishin' Impossible as the yacht cruised down the Huangpu. Our fellow spy-in-training Jawa O'Shea was at the helm in the pilothouse behind us. Everyone else was asleep. Although it was early in the morning, it was already uncomfortably muggy and humid outside. The movement of the yacht created a slight wind to cool things off, but I still felt like I was sitting in a sauna. I would have preferred to have been casing Shanghai Tower from the pilothouse, where it was nicely air-conditioned, but Erica had felt the view was better from the deck. Plus, I think she wanted to talk to me privately. I considered the top floors of Shanghai Tower. Or at least, I considered where the top floors were . I couldn't actually see them, as they were hidden in the clouds. "You're sure your family is up there?" "Well, no," Erica admitted. "I can't be sure of anything, really. But the address Orion gave them is the only lead we have." She recited it from memory. " '501 Yincheng Road, Lujiazui, Pudong Xin Qu, Shanghai Shi, China, 116-100.' I had thought the last six digits were some sort of zip code, but once we got the internet again, I found out that they're actually an office number in the building: floor 116, suite 100. It's registered to SkyTech Enterprises." I turned to her, surprised. "Your grandparents were kidnapped by a corporation?" Erica gave me a disappointed look, indicating that I was being slow on the uptake. This was a very common reaction from her; I often received several dozen a day. Because her family had trained her to be a spy since birth, she was much better at espionage than me--and better than most adults at the CIA as well. She was exceptionally skilled at all sorts of spycraft such as martial arts, bomb construction, tailing an enemy, and losing enemies who were tailing her. She was also far more suspicious of people than I was. "First of all," she said, "SkyTech Enterprises could easily be a front. An evil organization isn't going to rent an office suite under the name Evil Organization Incorporated. And secondly, corporations do plenty of evil things, generally on a much larger scale than individual people do. They pollute, they fix prices, they put toxins in their products and then lie to the consumers about them, they make people work in sweatshops and barely pay them a living wage, and on and on and on." "So which are we dealing with here?" "A real corporation." Erica tossed me the phone she'd been using to access the internet. It was her grandmother's. As spies-in-training, we weren't issued regular phones, as they could easily be traced. The CIA had specially designed phones that couldn't be traced, but we weren't issued those, either, because they were very expensive. However, Mary Hale had lent us hers before going off on her mission, in case we needed it. The phone's screen displayed the home page for SkyTech Enterprises. It was a satellite manufacturing company, although the Shanghai location was only a field office. Its headquarters were in Toronto. "They're from Canada!" I announced. "I figured that out," Erica said sarcastically. "I know where Toronto is." I ignored her remark. "Maybe there's a third option at play here. Maybe some evil organization is operating out of SkyTech's offices without them knowing." Erica gave me the disappointed look once more. "You think a corporation can't be evil because they're Canadian?" "Er... yes." "Why?" "Well... Canada's such a nice country. The people are very friendly." "Maybe that's just what they want us to think." Now I gave Erica a disappointed stare. "You really think everyone in Canada is only pretending to be nice just to lull us into a false sense of security?" "Not all of them. That'd be ridiculous. But lots of them certainly are." "Erica, most people aren't nearly as bad as you think." "Ben, in the last few weeks alone, people have tried to shoot you, kidnapped you, betrayed you, intimidated you, and threatened to feed you to sharks, hyenas, and Komodo dragons." "True. But I like to think that those people were the exception, rather than the rule." Erica rolled her eyes, as though I were arguing that leprechauns were real. "For the most part, people are not nice. They are sneaky, cruel, greedy, conniving, mean, arrogant, dishonest, selfish, rude, and nasty. And since countries are run by people, they're generally not very nice either. Especially Canada. I know that country has snowed everyone into thinking it's Miss Congeniality, but it isn't. Its residents are sneaky, its bacon is terrible, and its geese are mean." "Okay," I said. "I'll give you the bacon and the geese. But I think you'll find that you're not right about the people." "We'll see soon enough." "Why would a corporation that makes satellites even want to kidnap your family?" "I don't know. Yet." Erica shifted her attention back toward Shanghai Tower. I recognized the determination on her face. "You're trying to figure out how to get in there, aren't you?" "No. I've already figured it out." "That quickly? You really think it'll be that easy?" "Oh, it won't be easy at all. According to what I've found online, Shanghai Tower has extremely advanced security. The lobby, parking garage, and elevator banks all require personal security cards and fingerprint scans to access; there are over three thousand security cameras inside the building and another five hundred on the premises; when it's not standard office hours, they also deploy laser grid motion detection systems; and it's all run by SafetyMax, which is the most respected and expensive private security company in the world." I gulped at the sound of all that. "So then... it's going to be impossible to break into Shanghai Tower." "Almost," Erica agreed. "But not quite. There's one weakness--and we're going to exploit it." Excerpted from Spy School Goes East by Stuart Gibbs All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
