Spy School by Stuart Gibbs Read Free Book Online

worth a shot.
    And for half a second it almost seemed to work. The assassin hesitated, slightly confused, then asked, “Then who are you?”
    “Jonathan Monkeywarts.” I winced. It had been the first name to pop into my head. I made a mental note to be better prepared the next time this happened.
    I didn’t even see the assassin move in the dark. I only felt it. He snapped my bedsheets so hard that I was catapulted out of bed. I landed hard, whacking my head on the night table. “You think that’s funny?” he growled. “You think this is all a game?”
    “No, I don’t.” I’d been completely caught off guard by the attack. The room spun around me and sparks of light danced before my eyes. If this guy could cause that much pain using only a sheet, I was terrified what he could do with a gun.
    I’d landed on my suitcase, which I hadn’t finished unpacking before bed. Its contents had spilled to the floor beneath me. Clothes and books, mostly, though I had a dull sense of something hard digging into my thigh.
    “Then let’s try this again,” the assassin said. “And if you try anything else, I will shoot you. What . . . is . . . Pinwheel?”
    My pain-clouded brain suddenly realized what the hardthing was. My tennis racket. The one Alexander Hale had suggested I bring to use as a weapon, just in case. At the time, I’d thought he was making a wry, offhand quip, but now it seemed he’d been eerily prescient.
    I grasped the handle, sat up to face the assassin, and tried to stall for time. “Who told you I knew about Pinwheel?”
    “What do you think? It’s in your file.”
    That didn’t help at all. I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say, seeing as there were several million wrong answers that would get me killed. “The thing is . . . it’s a . . . well . . .”
    “Stop stalling or I’ll shoot you.”
    I had a sudden flash of inspiration. Maybe this guy was after the same thing in my file that had interested Chip. “It has to do with cryptography.”
    The assassin didn’t shoot me, which I took as a good sign. Instead, he snapped, “No kidding it has to do with cryptography. I want to know what it does .”
    I racked my brain, desperately trying to recall my conversation with Chip. “It helps you circumvent a rotating sixteen-character daisy chain.”
    “Really?” The assassin actually sounded a tiny bit impressed.
    “Yes.”
    “How?”
    Nuts. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to talk my wayout of this one. But I tried. Maybe if I threw big words at the guy and sounded confident about it, he’d think I was way smarter than he was. “First, you have to set up a quadrilateral subnet matrix, then ossify the syntax and fibrillate the coprolites. . . .”
    “Before you say anything else, there’s two things you should know,” the assassin said. “I’m not an idiot. And I’ve run out of patience. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
    Moonlight glinted off the gun as he raised it toward me.
    My primal instincts kicked in once again. Only this time, they did a better job.
    Before I even knew I was doing it, I’d ducked to the left while bringing the tennis racket around.
    It caught the assassin on his wrist, knocking his gun free just as he fired.
    I felt the heat of the bullet as it passed over my shoulder and shattered my window.
    The gun disappeared into the shadows. We both heard it skitter across the floor and thud into the wall someplace behind me.
    I swung the racket wildly, not caring what I hit as long as it was painful. I heard the crack of graphite against bone and the startled yelp of the assassin.
    “Help!” I screamed, hopefully loud enough to wake the hall. “Someone’s trying to kill—”
    The assassin lunged at me before I could finish. My eyes had adjusted enough to the dark room to see things now.
    I leapt onto my cot, slipping past him as he tried to land a karate chop, which instead cleaved my bedside table in half. I’d intended to bolt for the door, but my