Cross my heart and hope to spy* by Ally Carter* (bill gates book recommendations .TXT) 📕

/> Josh stood five feet away, staring at me, but he didn't say hi. I've thrown enough punches in my life to know when someone is hurting.

I stepped away from Zach as if I could make Josh forget what he'd just seen, but then I noticed the reflection in the window behind me--Josh's reflection--and I knew that Zach must have seen him. Immediately, my mind raced with a thousand questions--was that why Zach had tried to kiss me? Why did Josh look so sad?

There were no fewer than twenty things I simply had to ask Macey McHenry! I started scanning the crowds, looking for my friends, but instead I saw a man across the street.

An ordinary man. I'd seen him buying brownies and looking under the hood of a Model T.

But no one on the street was talking to him, and his shoes were too dressy for a parade. I remembered what my father used to say about counter surveillance: Once is a stranger; twice is a coincidence; three times is a tail.

And this made time number three.

As the four of us started down the sidewalk, I couldn't shake the feeling that I needed backup for an entirely different reason. Josh and DeeDee walked a few steps ahead, so I whispered to Zach, "Hey, you're gonna think I'm crazy."

"A little late for that, Gallagher Girl." At the word Gallagher, two women on the sidewalk turned to give us the Gallagher Glare, but I didn't have time to worry about my school's reputation.

"You haven't seen anyone following us, have you?" I asked. Zach laughed.

"You mean besides your roommates?"

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah. Besides them."

"No. I haven't seen anyone on our tail. Why?"

"The guy. The blue jacket." DeeDee glanced back at me, so I altered my words. "Don't you think he's toasty in that heavy coat?" which is spy-slang for an operative who is about to get caught, but DeeDee didn't know that. Luckily, Zach did. He turned, casually taking in everything from the sight of the convertibles carrying the Founders' Day Princess and her court to the way DeeDee said hi to almost everyone we passed.

"What about him?" Zach asked.

"The jacket's reversible. Ten minutes ago he was wearing it the other way. Do you think a lot of regular guys in Roseville take the time to reverse their jackets?"

We stopped to look in a store window's wavy reflection.

"Look at that guy, Gallagher Girl," Zach whispered as the man bought a corn dog. "He's a mustard disaster looking for a place to happen. I bet you anything he's got a big stain on the other side."

It sounded like a good point--it felt like a good point, but then Zach laughed, and something...was strange. I knew it wasn't paranoia. I knew it was bigger than me and bigger than Roseville and bigger than any parade.

"Now what are you two chatting about?" DeeDee teased.

"Oh, Cammie was trying to convince me that I should recognize that guy in the blue jacket." Zach looked at me, and I knew the words were for me--not Dee Dee--as he said, "But I've never seen him before in my life."

And it would have been good news. I may have relaxed. But then I looked down at the ring I was wearing, felt the subtle vibration, and knew that he was lying.

CHAPTER 25

I'm not exactly proud of what came next, but Mr. Solomon himself has told me that spies do bad things for good reasons, so I smiled, I gripped DeeDee's arm, and I used that unsuspecting girl for cover as I announced, "I've got to go to the bathroom!"

"I'll walk with you," Zach started, but I didn't let him finish.

"No," I said, smiling at DeeDee. "It's a girl thing."

As we pulled away from Josh and Zach, DeeDee giggled and wrapped her thin arm in mine. It probably seemed like fun to her--two girls setting off on their own down the crowded sidewalks. But I was entrenched in another kind of adventure as I scanned the crowds, looking for friends and enemies on the bustling square.

"We can go to the pharmacy," DeeDee yelled over the roaring siren of a passing fire truck covered with cheerleaders--the end of the parade.

"What?" I asked.

"The pharmacy has bathrooms," she said again, and I nodded.

"Okay, we'll go to the pharmacy," I repeated loudly, hoping my friends would hear.

Something was wrong--Zach was lying, and a man I'd never seen was stalking Gallagher Girls in Roseville. And that's the kind of thing that never happened before the Blackthorne Boys came to the Gallagher Academy and brought a Code Black with them.

"So, Cammie, I'm really glad I ran into you," DeeDee said, as if I had time for girl talk. "I was wondering if things are...you know...serious? With you and Zach? You guys seem happy."

Despite everything, I stopped and turned to her. Was I happy with Zach? Could I ever be happy with Zach? Two minutes before I might have had a different answer to that question, but in a spy's life, two minutes is all it takes for the whole world to change.
"Cammie!" Bex was rushing toward me, waving. "Oh," she said with a quick glance at DeeDee. "Hi." Then she looked at me and rolled her eyes. "I just got a call on my cell phone," she lied. "We've got to go back to school." She sounded disappointed--annoyed. Nothing in her tone reflected any of the panic I felt.

I looked back at DeeDee. "Sorry," I said, already stepping away. "I've got to--"

"Okay," DeeDee said, but her usually bright smile seemed to fade. "Cammie," she called just as I started to turn, "I really hope you and Zach are happy."

Any other day I might have pondered that sentence for hours, dissected it with Macey, searched for hidden meaning in the words. Was that DeeDee's way of telling me that she and Josh weren't happy? Was I a threat to their seemingly perfect love? Or was DeeDee just the kind of person who wanted everyone to be as happy as she was?

If I'd been a normal girl I might have replayed every second of that day--my almost-kiss, the hurt look on Josh's face. But I wasn't a normal girl. As Zach himself had reminded me time and time again ... I was a Gallagher Girl.


"We had two guys on us, too," Bex said as she fell into step beside me. I stopped in the street and turned to check behind us, but she rolled her eyes. "I said had." She shook her head. "I knew we couldn't trust boys who keep their rooms that clean. It's not natural!"

Liz was a half-step behind her, already out of breath. I looked around. "Where's Macey?"

"Telling as many girls as she can find about the tails," Bex answered.

"Wait! Cammie," Liz panted, "you can't just leave in the middle of your date! What if Zach gets worried about you? What if he thinks you've been kidnapped?" Then she gasped. "What if he thinks you don't like him?"

"Liz," I snapped, "protocol says that we're supposed to report any suspicious activity to the security department immediately! We were being tailed in Roseville!" The words felt heavy. "And Zach recognized one of them." I took a deep breath before I finished, "And he lied to me about it."

I remembered the expression on my mother's face as we'd sat in the red glow of the emergency lights during the Code Black. Someone or something had already threatened our school once this semester, so I didn't worry about Zach's feelings or what Madame Dabney would say about leaving a boy during the middle of a date. I didn't ask my friends if they knew the reasons why a boy might try to kiss a girl, and all the reasons a girl might let him.

We'd had a tail in Roseville--that was all that mattered. I felt my feet pounding the pavement. As we reached the mansion, I finally turned to see almost the entire sophomore class running down the lane behind me. "You were right," Courtney told us, swallowing hard, gasping for air. "We had a tail, too."

And whatever hope I'd had that I was wrong--that it was all some bizarre misunderstanding-- vanished in the wind.

We pushed open the mansion's doors, and I immediately felt the silence that's usually reserved for the days before classes start and after they end, when I'm the only Gallagher Girl there to roam the halls.

"Mom!" I called, but my voice echoed in the empty corridors.

Courtney and Eva went into the Grand Hall. Mick and Tina started for the library. I headed for the Hall of History.

"Mom!" I called again, but my voice was swallowed by screeching sirens as the lights went out and the words "CODE BLACK CODE BLACK CODE BLACK" filled the air.

Gilly's sword disappeared into its impenetrable case, the bookshelves around us became vaults, and metal shutters covered the windows.

"Cammie!" Bex called over the sounds of the sirens and my raging thoughts. "Cammie, come on!"

My best friend took my hand and pulled me toward my mother's office, but my mother wasn't there. No one said, "Hey, kiddo," and no one told me everything was going to be okay.

We turned and ran down the Grand Staircase while the mansion transformed itself into a tomb.
"Cam, where's your mom?" Liz said, as if I knew but wasn't telling.
"Where are the teachers?" Bex said, spinning, looking in every direction. Tina and Eva came running down the hall. Mick, Kim, and Courtney came out of the Grand Hall. Soon, almost the entire sophomore class was standing in the echoing foyer, but there were no teachers. No guards. The entire school must have been out, savoring their freedom in Roseville. We seemed to be entirely alone.

Then I saw a shadowy figure moving down the hall, stumbling, holding the wall to support himself.

"Mr. Mosckowitz?" Liz yelled, then rushed forward with Bex.

Our teacher fell into their arms. Blood stained the side of his face, and his voice was faint as he lay on the floor and said, "He got it."

"Got what?" I asked through the roar of the sirens.

"The list--a disc with the alumni list." He sat up and gripped my shoulders. "He got it. And it's...out there."

And then Mr. Mosckowitz passed out cold.


It's easy to look at the Gallagher mansion with its tall stone fences and ivy-covered facade and imagine the riches it must hold. Even people who know the truth about who we are and what we do probably think about the science labs where some of the world's greatest inventions have been born. Our library has been described as priceless. Still, our most precious resources aren't behind our walls at all-- they're out in the world. Undercover. The real legacy of the Gallagher Girls lives not behind stone and glass but in flesh and blood. The other stuff--that's just for burn bags.

As we carried Mr. Mosckowitz to a cushy chair and checked his pulse, I couldn't shake the feeling that an entire sisterhood was riding on our shoulders.

The last rays of sunlight were disappearing from the mansion, so Tina pulled a lantern from the wall and struck a match. "Will somebody please tell me what's going on?" she demanded in frustration.

"The boys," I said. Even