"Targets acquired, ten o’clock.” My best friend’s voice was as cool as the wind as it blew off the Thames. Her resolve was as solid as the Tower of London’s ancient stone walls that stood twenty feet away. I could see the night getting darker —the lights grow brighter —and my best friend’s confidence was almost contagious. Almost. But staring at the crowd in the distance, I couldn’t help but think I am not prepared for this.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I am prepared for a lot of scary situations. After all, in the last year and a half I’d been fake kidnapped once, almost truly kidnapped twice, targeted by one international terrorist organization and two incredibly cute boys. So, scary? Yeah, scary and I go way back.
But at that moment Rebecca Baxter and I were standing on ice skates on a rink that used to be the moat around the Tower of London. We were outnumbered and outsized. So something about that moment was . . . terrifying.
Even though my best friend was beside me. Even though our school had trained us well.
Even though we go to a school for spies.
“Ooh, Cam. They’re looking this way.”
Part of me hoped Bex was talking about her father, who stood by the skating rink’s concession stand, or her mother, who was by the rink’s east exit. I totally wished that Bex was talking about the agents in the crowd, whose job it was to protect me—like the woman with the backpack who had been trailing us all afternoon, or the man who was posted at the top of Tower Bridge, as it spanned the Thames and offered a birds’-eye view of all transportation routes for a half mile in any direction. But I knew Rebecca Baxter well enough to know that she wasn’t talking about the spies. She was talking about . . . the boys.
