Free Double Crossed by Ally Carter Page A

cover cold against her skin. She felt very much alone in that big room, thinking about her dad and Uncle Eddie, about Porsche Speedsters and Monet.
    Hours passed. Her thoughts blended together until they were like an Impressionist painting, and Kat knew she was too close to see anything plainly. She thought about crime, as she so often had in her fifteen years—ever since the day her father had told her he’d buy her ice cream if she would scream, and keep screaming until one of the guards outside the Tower of London left his post to see what was wrong.
    She heard Hale’s words: He used to have you .
    Kat jumped from the bed and rifled through her bags until she found her passport. She flipped it open and saw the name Melanie O’Hara beside a picture of herself in a red wig. She dug again, flipped open another cover: Erica Sampson, a slender blonde. Three more tries yielded three more memories, until Kat found…herself.
    She tucked those other girls away. For now. Then she picked up the phone and dialed. “Marcus?”
    “Yes, miss,” he replied, seeming too alert for four a.m.
    “I think I may need to leave.”
    “Of course, miss. If you’ll look by the phone, you’ll see I’ve already taken the liberty.…”
    Then Kat saw it—an envelope. A plane ticket. Eight a.m. first class to Paris.



I suppose a lot of teenage girls feel invisible sometimes, like they just disappear. Well, that’s me—Cammie the Chameleon. But I’m luckier than most because, at my school, that’s considered cool.
    I go to a school for spies.
    Of course, technically, the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women is a school for geniuses —not spies —and we’re free to pursue any career that befits our exceptional educations. But when a school tells you that, and then teaches you things like advanced encryption and fourteen different languages, it’s kind of like big tobacco telling kids not to smoke; so all of us Gallagher Girls know lip service when we hear it. Even my mom rolls her eyes but doesn’t correct me when I call it spy school, and she’s the headmistress. Of course, she’s also a retired CIA operative, and it was her idea for me to write this, my first Covert Operations Report, to summarize what happened last semester. She’s always telling us that the worst part of the spy life isn’t the danger—it’s the paperwork. After all, when you’re on a plane home from Istanbul with a nuclear warhead in a hatbox, the last thing you want to do is write a report about it. So that’s why I’m writing this—for the practice.
    If you’ve got a Level Four clearance or higher, you probably know all about us Gallagher Girls, since we’ve been around for more than a hundred years (the school, not me—I’ll turn sixteen next month!). But if you don’t have that kind of clearance, then you probably think we’re just an urban spy myth—like jet packs and invisibility suits—and you drive by our ivy-covered walls, look at our gorgeous mansion and manicured grounds, and assume, like everyone else, that the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women is just a snooty boarding school for bored heiresses with no place else to go.
    Well, to tell you the truth, we’re totally fine with that—it’s one of the reasons no one in the town of Roseville, Virginia, thought twice about the long line of limousines that brought my classmates back to campus last September. I watched from a window seat on the third floor of the mansion as the cars materialized out of the blankets of green foliage and turned through the towering wrought-iron gates. The half-mile-long driveway curved through the hills, looking as harmless as Dorothy’s yellow brick road, not giving a clue that it’s equipped with laser beams that read tire treads and sensors that check for explosives, and one entire section that can open up and swallow a truck whole. (If you think that’s dangerous, don’t even get me started about the pond!)
    I wrapped my arms