Spy School Revolution by Stuart Gibbs

Spy School Revolution by Stuart Gibbs

Author:Stuart Gibbs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00


14 CHEMISTRY

“The Agency”

Vienna, Virginia

April 17

0745 hours

Catherine Hale was waiting for us on the ground below the tree house. She had sent Mike up to see if I was there, while she stood guard down below, keeping an eye out for the Croatoan. It had never occurred to her that our burrow might have been compromised.

As I had hoped, she and Mike had managed to escape their pursuers on horseback, although Mike hadn’t enjoyed it one bit. “I don’t get why people like riding horses at all,” he muttered to me as we climbed down from the tree house. “It feels like someone spent an hour kicking me in the crotch.”

I noticed he was walking bowlegged due to his sore nether regions.

Jawa and Chip were excited to see Catherine; both had major schoolboy crushes on her. Suddenly, neither was in any hurry to leave. Instead, they stayed to hear what my revelation was, despite the fact that Chip had Zoe’s unconscious body slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

“We need to read between the lines,” I explained, holding up Washington’s message so that everyone could see it.

“You mean, look for a hidden meaning?” Mike asked. “Because the message seems awfully straightforward to me. The Croatoan has been captured and destroyed.”

I shook my head. “There’s no hidden meaning. We need to literally read between the lines. I think there’s another message here. An invisible one.”

“Of course!” Jawa exclaimed, grasping what I meant. “It’s like what we learned in History of Spying!”

“You learned something in History of Spying?” Chip asked blankly. “I fell asleep in every class.”

“Me too,” Mike agreed. “Professor Weeks is a bore.”

Jawa gave Catherine a sly Aren’t these other guys idiots? look and then tried to impress her with his knowledge of espionage. “Washington and his spies used invisible ink on a regular basis throughout the Revolutionary War and the early days of the country. Although they referred to it as ‘sympathetic ink.’ ”

“But how do you know there’s anything invisible written on this message?” Chip asked me. “Since it’s, well… invisible.”

“I can’t guarantee there’s anything,” I admitted, “but it would explain why Washington went to so much trouble to hide this message. There’s not too much to the part you can see. So maybe there’s something important in the part that we can’t see.”

“Very clever, Benjamin,” Catherine said in an admiring tone that made Chip and Jawa give me dirty looks. “If there truly is an invisible message here, then this document would be quite a clever bit of deception. If the Croatoan intercepted it, they’d mistakenly believe that Washington’s spies thought they had been vanquished. Which would then trick the Croatoan into dropping their guard.”

“And it would also explain why Washington used such a sucky code,” Mike added. “Because he’d want the Croatoan to be able to crack it.”

“Right,” I agreed.

Chip snatched the message from my hands. “So how do we find out if there’s anything invisible here?” He squinted at it, as if that would somehow make the words appear.



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