Andrew North Blows Up the World (5 page)

And my house doesn’t look like a spy’s house at all. It looks as normal as any other house on the street. I was pretty sure there had to be a pool, a gym, a target range, an obstacle course, a sauna, and all those other things hidden inside someplace—probably deep underground. Spies always have stuff like that in their houses. Besides, that would explain where Jack and Dad really go when they’re “at work” or
“studying”—they’re really working out in our state-of-the-art gym! When I go pro, they’ll tell me where the secret passage to get there is. I’ve looked and looked around the house for it myself, but I haven’t found anything.

When I got home, I spent a long time poking around in the cabinets and the basement, trying to find the secret entrance to the underground stuff once and for all. There had to be gadgets in there, some tool I could use to get into Storage Room B and rescue the calculator. But I didn’t find a thing.

My mom’s not a spy. At least, not anymore. I think maybe she
used
to be, but she gave it all up when Jack was born. She’s probably still on the payroll, but now she’s a realtor by day. At night, her job is to make our house and family seem as normal as possible. If any bad guys get a clue that Dad or Jack is a spy and try to watch us through the windows, they’ll just see a normal family eating casseroles. Mom does a
great
job of making the house seem normal.

But Dad and Jack are still really, really careful not even to talk about spying. Bad guys might have microphones in our walls and telescopes pointed at our windows. That’s why I never, ever change clothes with the shades up.

The only time they really talk about spying is when they’re watching spy movies. They do it a lot, but I’m hardly ever allowed to watch with them, because Mom thinks they’re too violent for me. She makes them wait until I go to bed to turn them on.

But sometimes, when Mom is out late cleaning up a
house she’s trying to sell the next day or something, they’ll let me watch with them. It’s awesome. We just sit around eating popcorn and talking about spy stuff.

I remember one time we were watching an old movie from twenty or thirty years ago, and the spy was using this laser flamethrower thing. It was the size of a vacuum cleaner and was attached to a backpack that he had to wear.

“Ha!” said Dad. “Look at that clunky thing.”

“They probably make those things a lot smaller now, huh?” asked Jack.

“Heck, they fit in the palm of your hand now,” said Dad. “All the stuff they needed to lug around in backpacks when they made this movie fits on the head of a pin today!”

That’s about as close as he ever came to admiting to me that he’s a spy. How else would he know how big laser flamethrowers are these days?

I feel like I’m really part of the team on those nights. Most of the time, though, I just have to listen to them hanging out from my bedroom. Then I feel totally left out.

But once I go pro, even Mom will probably let me stay up past nine. And once I’m actually
using
laser flamethrowers, she won’t mind letting me watch movies about them.

Jack was having some friends over to play video games that night, so we ate dinner earlier than usual. While we ate our casserole, Mom talked about how hard it was to sell houses that were more than a year old out in the subdivisions west of Eighty-second Street, and Dad talked about how no one was buying insurance that week, either.

Halfway through dinner, Dad turned to me. “Speaking of insurance, guess what, Andrew?” he asked. “My boss is going to be at your music program!”

I couldn’t believe it! This was huge! I knew that Dad wasn’t
really
an insurance company big shot, so his boss had to be the head of the spy company!

“Oh, really?” I asked, trying to act casual in case any evil spies were listening in.

“Yeppers,” said Dad.

He says “yeppers” a lot. It’s a good way to keep anyone from ever guessing that he’s actually a spy. When people hear him saying dorky things like “yeppers,” they’d never dream he’s actually a really slick undercover agent. It’s actually pretty clever.

“What’s he coming for?” I asked.

“He’s working on a deal to sell life insurance to Mr. Cunyan, and he thinks showing up to the big night will make a good impression on him.”

I knew
that
couldn’t be true. See, the idea of life insurance is that the customers pay some money to the insurance company every month, and then when the customers die, the company pays their relatives a bunch of money. But they don’t sell insurance to people they think might die before they’ve made a lot of payments, and Mr. Cunyan looked like he might keel over any minute. No company would sell him life insurance!

Dad’s boss was obviously coming to the program to check
me out and see if I was ready to start my official training to be a spy.

Oh God! Maybe I somehow
did
manage to send the message I’d typed into the calculator! The one inviting them to see me at the program. That meant I really had to nail the solo!

Then it got worse.

“Aunt Brianna is coming, too,” said Mom.

“Oh, really?” asked Dad. “What’s her latest project?”

“I didn’t ask,” said Mom with a laugh. “I’m sure we’ll find out.”

“Just as long as she’s not trying to sell that weird detergent that made the dishes smell like paste,” said Dad.

Aunt Brianna is my mom’s little sister. She isn’t married yet, and she’s never had the same job for more than a couple months. When she came over for Labor Day, she’d decided to become a dancer. By Thanksgiving, she said she’d given that up because she’d found a way to get rich selling cleaning products. She was done with that one by Christmas, though.

“Andrew,” Mom said, “you can wear that sweater she made you tomorrow night.”

“No, I can’t,” I said. “I’m wearing my suit.”

“That suit you have in your closet must be way too small for you by now,” said Mom. “You can’t wear that.”

“Then let me get another one,” I said. “We can go to the store right after dinner!”

“Calm down, Andrew,” said Mom. “You don’t need to
wear a suit for the program. The sweater will look really cute!”

I gave Dad a sort of desperate look, like, “Come on, you can’t really expect me not to wear a suit in front of the head of the spy organization, can you?” but he didn’t do a thing. He just kept eating chicken casserole. He sure can be sneaky when he wants to!

I think Dad and Jack try not to tell Mom about any spy stuff. She probably doesn’t want to know. The less she knows, the less reason any bad guys have to try to get information out of her. So neither of them would tell her that wearing the sweater Aunt Brianna made on an audition to be a professional spy was a bad, bad idea. And believe me, it was! It made me even
more
nervous. My stomach felt like a pancake that someone was flipping around on a griddle.

See, one thing my mom and Aunt Brianna have in common is that they’re both into stuff that’s cute. And as cute stuff goes, the sweater Aunt Brianna made me was a real prize. It had a fluffy squirrel on it with cotton balls for a stomach. It would look adorable on a little kid, but it wasn’t the sort of thing third graders go around wearing. Especially in front of the head of the spy company!

But the subject was closed. There was no talking my way out of it. Mom and Dad had already changed the subject. They had started nagging Jack instead.

“Remember, Jack, you still have some chores to do,” said Mom. “I want you to clean up the living room before your friends get here.”

“We’re just gonna be in the basement,” said Jack. “Who cares what the living room looks like?”

“That’s a good point,” I said.

“Shut up, Andrew,” said Jack.

“Hey!” I said. “I’m on your side!”

I hate to say this, but sometimes I really hate Jack’s guts. Sometimes to cover up the fact that he’s a spy, he has to act like a real jerk. He’s hardly paid a bit of attention to me since he turned thirteen. I knew it was because he was busy with spy stuff, but it still stank. I missed hanging out with him.

“Just clean up the living room, Jack,” said Dad. “What’re you guys going to be doing?”

“Nothing much,” said Jack. “We’ll probably just listen to music and play Blood Suckers Three.”

Dad raised an eyebrow.

“It’s a video game,” I said. “You have to kill vampires in it.”

Dad nodded. “Yeppers,” he said thoughtfully. “You’ve got to watch out for those vampires. They’ll suck the blood right out of you.”

“Hence the name Blood Suckers,” said Jack impatiently.

“That’s what they do, all right,” said Mom. “They’ll suck your brains out like they were eating snail out of a shell!”

And she and Dad started making slurping noises and laughing. Jack looked up at the ceiling and sighed. A minute later, he cleared his plate and disappeared up to his room.

“He sure eats fast these days,” I said, hoping maybe they’d let it slip that he had to eat quickly so he could get back to
work on saving the world. I knew it was almost definitely true that Dad and Jack were spies, but I really wished they’d admit it just once so I’d know for sure.

“He’s a teenager now,” said Mom with a sigh. “He’ll start eating us out of house and home soon.”

“And don’t forget this one,” said Dad, pointing at me. “Four years from now, we’re going to have
two
teenagers in the house.”

“Don’t remind me,” said Mom.

“Well, sor-ry!” I said. “It’s not
my
fault I’ll be a teenager soon!”

Parents are always doing that—acting like it’s
not
their fault their kids were born or something!

A few minutes later, just before Jack’s friends showed up, Jack came back downstairs.

“Have you guys seen my calculator?” he asked. “I can’t find it in my room.”

I gulped.

“Gee, Jack,” said Mom sarcastically. “How in the world could anything get lost in your clean, clean room?”

Jack sighed. “Just keep an eye out for it, will you?” he asked. “I’m really going to need it this weekend.”

“Do you need it right now?” I asked.

Jack shrugged. “Not really,” he said.

“Do you need it tomorrow?” I asked.

Jack shrugged again. “I’m not really going to need it until this weekend. Why? Have you seen it?”

“No,” I said. “Just curious.”

“You better not have taken it!” said Jack.

“He wouldn’t do that, Jack,” said Mom. “Andrew knows not to mess with your stuff.”

“Yeah!” I said. “Maybe you left it at school or something.”

“I hope so,” said Jack. “If I don’t have that thing back by the weekend, I’m dead. Really, really dead.”

Gulp
. Jack must need it for some really important mission over the weekend!

Even if Mr. Gormulka
didn’t
use the calculator to blow something up, the fate of the world depended on whether I could get it back the next day!

London. Midnight has come and gone. The DJ sits in his booth at the trendiest nightclub in the United Kingdom.

Fog everywhere. Fog on the club’s dance floor, mingling with the dancers, who jostle one another, pretending not to be blinded by the strobe lights. Fog flowing into the VIP room, shrouding the face of the young man with the excellent suit and perfect hair.

No one on the dance floor knows that the club is owned by Dr. Cringe, who is secretly testing a strange new drug on the dancers. Anyone who orders a cranberry juice from the bar will find—too late—that their drink has been spiked with a strange potion that will cause them to cluck like a chicken for several hours. If he can perfect the drug and introduce it into the world’s water supply, Dr. Cringe will turn all of humanity into a bunch of clucking idiots!

Back in his disguise as Thaddeus Arthur III, heir to the Arthur Badminton Equipment fortune, Agent North does his best to look tired, bored, and cranky, like everyone else in the nightclub. He has been trained to fit into any group.

Then, one of the dancers, the tiredest and crankiest of them all, looks at Andrew.

“Hey, kid!” he says. “Get out of here! Didn’t Mom ask you to take the garbage out?”

An hour later, Jack and his friends Jason and Todd were downstairs, playing video games—something he used to do with
me
before he turned thirteen. I could understand why he couldn’t tell me spy secrets now that he’d gone pro, but I was pretty annoyed that he wasn’t even playing games with me anymore, since he was obviously still allowed to play them with his friends.
They
weren’t all pro spies. They couldn’t be!

I could tell they were having a pretty good time down there, but I didn’t want to interrupt. Instead, I just sat down at the piano and tried to figure out how to play “Kids Are Music.” After a while, I’d managed to pick out the melody pretty well. I had never had any piano lessons, either! I’ll bet if I had one or two, they’d say I was a musical genius.

“That’s such a happy song,” said Mom when she heard me playing. “Jack had to sing it one year, too. And now listen to the stuff he likes! That music they’re playing down there is depressing.”

“So is one of the other songs we’re singing,” I said. “It’s a really sad old parlor song.”

“Yeah,” said Mom. “There’s always one really depressing song in the program, isn’t there? When Jack was in third grade, he had to sing some old song about a girl whose brother dies waiting for their dad to come home from a bar!”

“Sounds like the stuff Mr. Cunyan likes,” I said.

“It still can’t be as bad as that music Jack likes,” said Mom. “There’s not a happy song in his whole collection.”

“Mr. Cunyan’s stuff is worse,” I said. “Believe me.”

“I doubt it,” said Mom. “Go down there in the basement and listen to whatever they’re playing on the stereo. I’ll bet you a dollar to a donut it’s more depressing than what you’re singing tomorrow!”

I sighed. “I don’t think Jack wants me down there with all his friends.”

“Yeah?” said Mom. “Well, Jack doesn’t have a choice. I bought the Mountain Dew they’re drinking, so if I say you can be down there, you can be down there. Go ahead.”