“Then what?” Ruby said.
“Attention,” Jackson said. No one challenged him. Braceface was an expert on getting attention, having once been the most popular kid at Nathan Hale Elementary. “If you’re trying to be inconspicuous, you don’t rob a bank with a herd of squirrels. He wants us to see him. He wants us to know he’s still alive and plotting something new.”
YOU’RE BACK. GOOD.
NOW LET’S START TRAINING
YOU FOR YOUR LIFE AS A
SECRET AGENT. WHAT? YOU
WANT TO KNOW WHEN YOU GET
TO LEARN THE COOL STUFF.
YOU MEAN LIKE JUMPING OUT
OF A BURNING PLANE, FIRING
A BAZOOKA WHILE RIDING A
JET SKI, AND KNOCKING A BAD
GUY OUT WITH A KARATE CHOP
TO THE NECK? WHOA . . . SLOW
DOWN THERE, BUDDY. FIRST,
LET’S FOCUS ON A BASIC SKILL
EVERY SPY MUST KNOW: THE
ABILITY TO READ AND WRITE
SECRET MESSAGES.
SOUNDS EASY, HUH?
WE’LL SEE. THIS IS
A LITTLE SOMETHING
WE CALL THE ALPHABET.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
HOPEFULY, YOU RECOGNIZE
IT. AND THIS IS A LITTLE
SOMETHING WE CALL
A CIPHER CODE.
T D N U C B Z R O H L G Y V F P W I X S E K A M Q J
EACH LETTER IN THE
ALPHABET CORRESPONDS TO
THE LETTER IN THE CIPHER
CODE PRINTED BENEATH IT.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
T D N U C B Z R O H L G Y V F P W I X S E K A M Q J
SO I’M GOING TO SEND
YOU A VERY SENSITIVE
AND SECRET MESSAGE
WRITTEN IN CIPHER CODE.
THEN IT’S YOUR JOB TO
TRANSLATE IT INTO OUR
ALPHABET. YOU READY?
AGAIN, THIS MESSAGE
IS JUST FOR YOU.
YOU MIGHT WANT TO GRAB A PIECE OF PAPER TO WRITE DOWN YOUR ANSWER.
SRC XYCGG FB QFEI BCCS OX YTLOVZ YC NIQ
LISTEN, SOMEBODY HAD TO
SAY SOMETHING. YOU CAN’T
BE A SPY WITH THAT KIND
OF FUNK. THE BAD GUYS
WILL SMELL YOU
A MILE AWAY.
OH, GOOD JOB ON THE
CIPHER, TOO . . . STINKY.
Albert looked down at the business card. Then he looked up at the abandoned entrance of the South Arlington Botanical Garden. The garden had been closed to all but vermin for nearly a decade. Albert had visited many times as a child. The place had once been glorious, but now was overgrown and wild. Someone had vandalized the gate, pulling it off its hinges and leaning it against a wall. Anyone could walk inside.
“This can’t be the place,” Albert said. He looked at the business card once more. There was no mistake.
He wondered if he was the victim of some elaborate hoax. There were people at Big Planet Comics whom he would call rivals. He had once gotten into a heated conversation with Ivan Purlman about whether Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, or Tim Drake was the better Robin to Bruce Wayne’s Batman. Could Ivan have decided to teach him a lesson by concocting this silly prank?
Albert always had trouble making friends, and his mama was to blame—Mama and her stupid plans. When he was just three months old, his mama had made a chart that plotted out his entire life. Some of the highlights were: winning the National Spelling Bee at age ten; going to Space Camp at fourteen; early admission into an Ivy League college at sixteen; graduating with a full doctorate by twenty-one; and at twenty-five, marrying a woman she introduced him to, followed by lots and lots of grandbabies.
She planned for every possible obstacle and even allotted for a short puberty-fueled struggle for independence when he was fifteen. She figured Albert would need only a couple of weeks before he came to his senses and realized he should put all his faith in his mama.
How her little baby would get to such personal success was a little hazy, so she paid close attention to what the other mothers on the block were planning for their children. Tommy Beacon’s father was pushing his son on the swings and toward a career as a marine biologist. Nikki Mock’s mother was laying the groundwork for her daughter to be appointed as Secretary of Education. Mark Killian’s parents had their son sleeping with a catcher’s mitt. Mama knew she had better decide quickly before all the good careers were snapped up, so after much debate she decided that Albert would be a brilliant scientist, and because she loved him so much, she set about brainwashing her son into doing just that.
Each night, when Albert was ready for a good-night story, Mama would forgo Harry the Dirty Dog and Where the Wild Things Are in favor of Einstein’s theory of relativity or the latest article on climate change. She emptied his room of toys and filled it with alkaline test strips, microscopes, and fossils. She hung the periodic table of the elements on his wall and made a mobile for his crib featuring her favorite igneous rocks.
Holidays were just another opportunity to immerse the boy in his would-be career. Every Christmas, Albert would wake up early to find Santa had left a Bunsen burner or a petri dish filled with molds under the tree. On Easter, instead of searching for eggs, Albert hunted for test tubes that Mama had hidden throughout the yard. Halloween was a chance to dress up as different kinds of scientists. At seven Albert was a paleontologist carrying around a plastic dinosaur bone. At ten he went as a mineralogist dragging a lump of quartz from house to house. At twelve he went “trick-or-sleeting” as a meteorologist. It didn’t seem to matter to Mama that each year her son’s costume was nearly identical to the previous year’s.