Free Crisis Zero by Chris Rylander

with chunks of some sort of “meat” in it onto my tray.
    â€œWhat about you?” I asked.
    â€œI think I can officially cross off Mrs. Food and Tyrell from my list,” Danielle said. “Tyrell definitely isn’t our guy. He has a solid alibi. Turns out he and his family were all away on vacation the past two weeks, visiting some spy museum in Washington, DC. I even saw the date-stamped pictures of them in front of the White House and Lincoln Memorial and at the museum.”
    â€œWhat about Mrs. Food?” I said.
    â€œI asked her about some of her old CIA–KGB double agent missions at gym today.”
    â€œReally?” I asked.
    â€œIt’s no big deal,” she said. “Kids do it all the time. She loves telling those stories. I’d never really paid attention to them, of course, since I never had a reason to andalways figured they were totally made up. Anyway, she spun off a few, one that I’d heard before about fighting off a twenty-seven-foot anaconda while snooping around inside the State Kremlin Palace in Moscow looking for a secret borscht soup recipe that doubled as the blueprints for creating a fusion bomb.”
    â€œUhghghg.” I shuddered. I hated snakes. Even more than swirlies.
    â€œYeah, well, that’s the thing,” Danielle said. “She said this was back in nineteen fifty-eight, but the State Palace at Moscow’s Kremlin wasn’t even built until 1961.”
    â€œPlease tell me you had to look that up?” I said.
    Danielle grinned at me and then shrugged.
    â€œHey, I like Cold War history, so sue me,” she said. “But the point is none of the facts in her stories hold up. A bunch of other things she’s said in the past don’t add up either, like how Khrushchev was supposedly training a platoon of ferocious timber wolves to parachute into the US to wreak havoc.”
    â€œHey, that could technically be true,” I said. “You can’t verify that it isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds.”
    â€œMaybe not, except that she said Khrushchev got the idea from the opening scene of an old movie called Red Dawn , but that movie didn’t even come out until nineteen eighty-four.”
    â€œSo?”
    Danielle sighed as if she were talking to a wolf instead of a person.
    â€œSo, Khrushchev died in seventy-one! She’s making it all up—she just likes to have fun with the kids, make them gasp and ooh and ah and all that.”
    â€œOkay,” I said, as we headed toward our usual table. “But that doesn’t prove much, does it?”
    â€œWell,” Danielle said, “it means she probably never was a spy, for one. And even more telling was when I snuck into her office during her off period. I saw her talking on the phone and she was talking to her granddaughter in, like, baby talk and telling her how she would make her cookies that weekend. Which proves she’s lying about her whole backstory—she always tells us she never had kids. But she does—I saw pictures on her desk of her with a big family. And old pictures of her wearing a college cheerleading outfit and wedding photos and pictures of her with all of her kids when they were babies. She’s just a strange old lady who likes to make kids do military drills in gym class while telling outlandish stories. Nothingmore. At least, not as far as Medlock is concerned.”
    I nodded, impressed with her work so far. It made me feel sort of bad. I had two maybes and one complete unknown. She was definitely down to one name.
    â€œWhat are you guys whispering about?” Dillon asked as we sat down at the table. “You guys plotting against me? Are you going to try and steal my brain during the night and use it to power your new PlayStations?”
    Dillon was convinced that his brain generated its own powerful electricity and could be used as an everlasting battery should it ever be removed from his head. Well,