Blades of Winter (18 page)

Considering Camp A-Go-Go’s intensity, the first day was pretty soft. It was eight years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday. My class of recruits was introduced to the rest of the school at the first day ceremony. Some of the instructors and advanced students gave short speeches, and then we plowed through a ton of pizza, hot dogs, and sodas. It was like a birthday party for seventy-five kids all at once.

Camp is actually a well-known secret government training program. Its real name is Authentically Gifted Operatives General Education. Since it’s a government institution, it was abbreviated to the annoying-to-pronounce acronym AGOGE. None of us could agree how to say AGOGE, so we called the place Camp A-Go-Go or simply Camp.

There are actually quite a few Camps. The government operates a bunch of these schools to maintain an optimal number of students at each facility and to let the kids live near their families.

Speaking of families, before a recruit is accepted into the AGOGE, all of his or her relatives are dragged through a bureaucratic jungle of prodding, poking, and background checks. The process is so labyrinthine that by the end people are just glad they aren’t going to prison for something.

The families are sworn to a secrecy the government knows most of them won’t keep, but it establishes a behavior pattern for the family. You see, everybody knows that Camp is where secret agents and other government spooks are trained. But those are the
regular
secret agents
and spooks. Those guys stop at Standard Training. Nobody is told about Advanced Training. Nobody is told about the Levels.

If your family members demonstrate that they know how to keep their traps shut, your file is moved to a different filing cabinet with much higher ass-kicking potential. I knew all about Levels already because I’d been raised as a spy brat.

Even so, when I got to Camp, Advanced Training seemed very distant. All of us punks started as Unranked Recruits pending rank testing for physical coordination, interpersonal skills, and reflexes. Most of the other entering students were thirteen or fourteen years old. I was only twelve, but what was painfully obvious was how much smaller I was than the rest of my class.

Fortunately for me, size didn’t matter for rank testing. I did well on the coordination sequences where they had us run across beams, climb ropes, quick crawl through a long pipe, and jump from a high board into a swimming pool. I bombed the interpersonal skills section because I hadn’t realized you’d ever
talk
your way through anything here. My dad’s stories never mentioned talking to his targets.

Then came the reflexes sequence. It was designed to test how quickly you made decisions and acted on them. The instructor called me into an office and guided me to the guest chair in front of a big desk. He walked behind the desk and sat down. He stared at me for a couple of minutes. By this point, I had figured out to sit still and stare back. Fidgeting was sure to lower your scores. The instructor opened a drawer, pulled out a black revolver, and placed it on the desk in front of him. He closed the drawer and said, “I want you to tell me how you would get this weapon from—”

I lunged forward and spit in his face. He squinted his eyes shut and jerked his hand up to wipe my spit away. I nabbed the gun, dropped back into my seat, and pointed the pistol at him. His hand hung in front of his face while he looked at me through his fingers.

After several seconds of silence, he asked, “What if it isn’t loaded?”

I cocked the hammer back.
Click
. “Then my grade isn’t as high.”

They promoted me to the highest rank, Recruit Rank 9, passed me out of Recruit Initiation, and accepted me into Initial Training. Who needs talking? By being the first recruit ever promoted to Initial Training before her thirteenth birthday, I left the rest of my entering class in the dust. I was half the height and weight of the senior student in Initial Training, who had started at Camp A-Go-Go almost three years earlier.

Mornings in Initial Training were like a regular school. We took required classes in history, English, foreign languages, math, and science. I liked history and foreign languages, the others not so much. After lunch was when the difference between Camp and a normal school became obvious. Our afternoons were entirely devoted to physical education classes. We practiced martial arts, competed in team and individual sports, ran for endurance, and trained in gymnastics. I was eager to begin firearms classes, but those are only for recruits in Standard Training and up.

Most of the trainees, including me, liked the martial arts classes best. I’d imagine that I was my dad and fight the bad guys with head kicks and sucker punches in the gut. We would practice our moves as a group, then form up in sparring lines to practice at half speed with minimal contact to avoid injury.

One day our instructor rolled in a cart full of padded gloves, boots, vests, and helmets. He laid them out by size—small, medium, and large—and told us to suit up. When we were all decked out in our fighting apparel, he formed us in sparring lines as usual. This time, however, we were to fight at full speed and full contact until he whistled the fight was over.

We fought hard. Our bodies spun and leaped, glad to fight flat-out and not worry about hurting one another.
All that padding made us feel invulnerable. I wound up across from a much bigger girl (naturally) with a few years of martial arts training under her belt. Her name was Janice. She knocked me around, but I put up a lot more resistance than she expected. Our fight seemed to last longer than the others. By the time the whistle sounded, we were both drenched in sweat and breathing like furnaces. Janice won on points, but given the size difference, she should have blown me right out of the room.

Our instructor had us square off against the same people again and told us we would fight a second round that would count toward our rankings as Initial Trainees. He told us to imagine that we would be kicked out of AGOGE if we lost. This time I fought Janice to a standstill. She had me on technique and hit me with an array of maneuvers and combinations I’d never seen before, but I was faster and blocked everything she threw at me.

I knew I couldn’t stay on the defensive forever, though, so I watched her carefully, looking for an opening. Just as I caught a tendency of hers, she faked me out with a great move. I blocked for a kick, but she got me with a punch right in my solar plexus. The whistle blew, and Janice had won again, but by even fewer points than in our first round together.

I was pissed, and I wanted another shot at redemption because I’d figured out her weakness. Once Janice was in her spin, she was too fast and unpredictable for me to go on offense, but I’d seen my chance. To set herself up for that move, she would plant both feet and counterwind her body a bit to spring into the spin. During that counterwind, Janice was wide open.

The rest of the class finished their second-round fights, and the scores were tallied for our rankings. The instructor set us up for a third round. This time we were told to imagine that if we lost, we would be killed. This was a shock to us first-year kids. I don’t think it occurred to any of us that we wouldn’t live forever. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it, so instead I imagined
that I was my father on his last mission and that I would fight for my life so I could go back home to see me and Mom again.

I set up opposite Janice. We were both still gassed from our last round, so we faked and feinted for a minute, catching our breath while we looked for an opportunity. Then she planted both of her feet. As she wound herself up, I leaped forward and kicked through the front of her knee. Her leg bent backward and snapped like a celery stick. Janice screamed and tumbled to the floor, both hands on her knee and her eyes squeezed shut. I crouched down and then launched myself over my opponent. I aimed my feet so they’d come down on Janice’s neck. Time seemed to slow down. The room fell silent except for the wind whistling past my ears. Suddenly I realized that the sound in my ears wasn’t from the wind; it was from my instructor frantically blowing his whistle to signal us to stop fighting. My toes brushed Janice’s chin as I spread my feet apart to avoid breaking her neck. Janice’s eyes popped open as my foot landed barely an inch from her face.

Time came back to normal speed as the instructor pulled me out of the way and gently picked Janice up. Everyone in the class followed him out of the gym as he carried her to the infirmary. Everyone except me. I stood there, looking down at my feet.

Jesus, was I really about to do that?

After a minute, I joined my classmates at the infirmary to see if Janice was okay. We all hung around outside for a while, but the nurses wouldn’t let us in. Eventually, we went back to our rooms, me last of all.

I opened my closet and pulled my clothes out to pack since I was sure I’d be expelled. Half an hour later, there was a knock at my door. It was the same tall woman who’d come to my house the year before. She walked me out of the dorm, but she didn’t take me back home.

I had been promoted all the way to Advanced Training.

The pucker factor goes way up in Advanced Training at Camp A-Go-Go. Hollering, cursing, intimidation, all that in-your-face bullshit. The nonstop noisefest is designed to weed out the trainees who can’t take it—whatever “it” is. The anxiety level was nothing compared to growing up in my parents’ house, but most of the other kids washed out. By this point, a class with an initial enrollment of seventy-five will have graduated fifteen students into Advanced Training. Among those fifteen Advanced trainees, only two or three will become Levels at Extreme Operations. The rest will return to Standard Training, where they can become unenhanced agents, case officers, analysts, or Squad guys. What they can’t do is quit. They’ve seen too much highly classified information. They must work and live within the warm, tender embrace of the federal government. And the families keep quiet since their son or daughter is essentially held hostage.

Advanced Training was constant stress and unrelenting pressure, and it started immediately. The tall woman led me into my new dormitory, took my bags, and shoved me into an elevator by myself. The doors closed and the lights went out, leaving me in total darkness. The tall woman’s high heels clicked on the floor as she walked away.

I had overheard one of the older kids in Initial Training talk about how much it cost to develop a recruit into an agent. The training became dramatically more expensive each time you got promoted. It didn’t take a genius to know that this was a test to see if I was a potential asset or just some teenage sociopath.

It was pitch black in there, so I had to feel my way around. I pushed all the buttons, tried pulling the doors open, and felt around for loose panels. Nothing. No way out. I leaned on the small handrail that ran around the perimeter of the car and tried to imagine what a grown-up would do. After taking a few deep breaths to calm down, I said to myself aloud, “They’d climb out the roof.” But they’d be able to reach the emergency escape hatch in the ceiling. I put both hands on the handrail and pulled as hard as I could. It was firmly bolted to the wall. Perfect.

I hoisted myself onto the rail and leaned my back into the corner. Then I leaped across the car and punched at the center of the ceiling as I sailed past. I felt a panel in the ceiling move. After repeating this sequence a couple of times, I got the panel knocked out of the way. On my next attempt, instead of punching, I slid my fingers along the ceiling and caught the lip of the emergency exit. After I stopped swinging back and forth, I heaved my body though the square hole and clambered out of the car and onto its roof.

Unlike the darkness inside the car, the darkness on top of the car was accompanied by the stink of oil, mildew, and rat shit. I hoped I wouldn’t touch anything gross while I blindly groped around. I sighed in relief when I found a maintenance ladder bolted to the wall of the elevator shaft. The ladder ran very close to the elevator car, too close for an adult to fit. I think the ladder was for getting around in the shaft above or below the car but not past it. My small frame allowed me to squish myself down between the greasy shaft wall and the outside of the dusty, grubby elevator car.

There was one terrifying moment when my shirt got caught on a bolt or something and I almost got stuck. My imagination was very clear about how mangled I’d get if the elevator car moved while I was jammed between it and the ladder. I exhaled as completely as I could, pressed my face and body against the dirt-crusted rungs of the ladder, and slithered past the obstacle, tearing
a long rip in my shirt. I had never been so filthy. I emerged below the elevator car and quickly climbed down to the bottom of the shaft. Now for a gimmick my father had told me about.

He’d had to pull this kind of shit before. In one of his stories, he was cornered in an office building, so he crawled down the elevator shaft and snuck out the basement. What made it work was how easy it is to open an outer elevator door from inside an elevator shaft. It’s just a matter of hauling them open an inch at a time.

This building at AGOGE had the kind of elevator with two doors that meet in the center. I pressed my fingertips into the gap between the doors and slowly pried them apart. Then I slipped both my hands into the gap and pulled until there was enough room for me to squeeze through.

I ran upstairs to the lobby, covered in grease, scrapes, and triumph. I crept up behind the tall woman who had brought me and smugly said, “Excuse me, ma’am.”