City Spies

Sydney is ready to start training Brooklyn. She wakes Brooklyn up just before 5 o’ clock in the morning. Brooklyn is stunned and tired but wants to show up for her new team. Sydney has Brooklyn running to get her in top physical shape, Paris teaches navigation, and Kat teaches code breaking and similar concepts. When it comes time to work with Rio, Brooklyn finds herself rebuffed. Rio is angry that she humiliated him and his spying plan and tries to humiliate Brooklyn by playing cup and ball tricks with her and laughing as she gets them wrong. When Brooklyn points out that he only embarrassed himself and apologizes for any harm she caused, he warms up, telling her how magic tricks are like spy deception. After Rio teaches her several tricks, Monty takes Brooklyn to meet the final team member, Ben. Monty leads Brooklyn to a secret room underground originally designed for Catholic priests to hide during times of religious conflict. In the room, Brooklyn is met with a wall-to-wall supercomputer, quaintly referred to as Ben. She is in awe and thrilled at the prospect of working with it.

Brooklyn soaks everything in as Monty explains how Ben was named after a Spanish priest who accurately predicted tropical storm paths for the first time in the mid-1800s, whose name was Father Benito Viñes. Following her introduction to Ben, Brooklyn attends a conference with the entire team, and Brooklyn waits for everyone to sit down, having noticed Kat’s particularity about seating arrangements. Mother announces approval from headquarters for an upcoming assignment dubbed Operation Willy Wonka. A tech giant named Sinclair, who is rarely seen in public, is holding a youth summit, and giving away a million euros to a group of youths who manage to solve a pressing environmental concern. Every past summit has been attacked by a man known as the Purple Thumb, an extremist who disagrees with technology and who only leaves a purple thumbprint at his crime scenes. Mother explains how they are going to enter the competition and aim to place high enough to make the finals, but not high enough to win or draw attention. This year’s challenge is to create a sustainable artificial rain system, perfect for a group of people working at a high-tech weather research station. Upon hearing that there is another team from Kinloch Abbey, the school in which the children attend, they realize it must be led by Charlotte. Charlotte defected from the group, but no one explains why. Brooklyn suggests hacking Charlotte’s computer to prevent them from winning first place and fooling her into thinking they are helping her. The others doubt her ability to do so, but Brooklyn is fully confident.

Charlotte comes to Aisling on a train from school, dressed sharp and hacking the first-class passengers for amusement and practice on her way. Brooklyn answers the door upon Charlotte’s arrival and pretends to be childish, naïve, and a thief rather than a hacker. She leads Charlotte down to Ben, and when Charlotte is setting up her computer to download information off of Ben, Brooklyn slips an old key-logger of Charlotte’s that she found in her room into Charlotte’s bag. Before doing so, Brooklyn installed a hacking program onto it. Her hope is not to hack Charlotte, but to let Charlotte hack herself.

A research laboratory in France creates a virus known as XUHET. It is deadly upon exposure, and a tiny vat is sealed and transported by two inconspicuous men to another research institute. The men never make it there, however, as their bodies are found in the Seine River a few days later, each with a purple thumbprint on their forehead.

Brooklyn starts packing a suitcase for the mission before Sydney stops her and lets her know that she needs to share her suitcase with Sydney and Kat. Sydney helps Brooklyn pack lighter and more sensibly, and Brooklyn confesses that she thinks Kat hates her. Sydney explains that Kat is socially awkward but an amazing person, citing a time that Kat cracked a code for a sweepstakes and won £5,000, which she promptly donated to her old school in Nepal. Brooklyn asks why Charlotte left, but Sydney admits she doesn’t know. Monty interrupts their gossip to hurry them along, as the murder of the agents in France has brought Operation Willy Wonka to a new priority level. The team is to spend a week doing specialized training with the British Special Forces beforehand.

Before departing, Brooklyn finds Mother in the air control tower and asks him about a company called The Slater Loan Co. Mother is hesitant to discuss it at first, but Brooklyn persists, and reveals that she has been learning codebreaking from Kat. She used her new skill to crack the code in the company’s name as an anagram for Charlotte Sloane and believes that Charlotte used a fake company to steal money from banks. Mother confesses that this is exactly what happened, and the reason he asked Charlotte to leave the spy team. Mother explains that this is the fundamental difference between Brooklyn and Charlotte: Brooklyn uses her ability for justice and Charlotte uses it for greed. Mother told the other children that Charlotte quit to spare both them and Charlotte from the pain of the truth. Afterward, everyone boards a plane and departs across the North Sea, and Brooklyn realizes that her life is going to be full of firsts for a long while.

A senior MI6 agent and Mother’s supervisor, Gertrude Shepherd gives the team a tour of the famous Pinewood film studios. She reveals that it will be the location of their training, as the set contains several exact replicas of places at the headquarters of Sinclair’s company, including a lab, auditorium, and ballroom. Gertrude hopes that the team can protect Sinclair while avoiding danger, but everyone knows the possibility of danger is real. A fourth room’s blueprint was provided by Sinclair without information about what it contains, but it is believed to be a server room. Gertrude wants Brooklyn to break into it and hack the mainframe, as MI6 has reason to think that Sinclair is doing business with illegal companies. Gertrude comments on the fact that Mother described Brooklyn as already above the other children, which embarrasses Brooklyn and incites jealousy in the other children. She reveals that Brooklyn will have to scale the outside of a building to break in, and this scares Brooklyn, who recalls being locked on the roof at the foster home. She embraces her training anyway, and after a several days of training, is still only able to climb half the distance needed. She decides to train alone, and when Rio shows up to spot her for safety, Brooklyn tells him to leave, believing him to be plotting some form of revenge against her for what happened the day of her arrival.

The criminal mastermind and leader of international crime syndicate Umbra, known as Le Fantôme, sits in his apartment in Paris. Within his apartment is the missing vial with the deadly virus inside, and it is revealed that he is the very owner of the company that manufactured it. He thinks nefariously about the upcoming youth summit and how much his plans will change the world.

Brooklyn and the others are on a train called the Eurostar going through France on their way to the summit. Brooklyn’s mind is preoccupied with the thought of having to climb the wall; by the end of her training, she was only able to scale the wall completely twice. Sydney is caught up in a speech she’s writing for the summit. Mother sits beside them and senses they’re both stressed. He pulls one of Sydney’s crumpled drafts out of his pocket and assures her it is great; she simply needs to believe in herself. He tells Brooklyn that he called off her task to climb the building and hack the mainframe, and Brooklyn is ambivalent about this news. Kat joins them and explains how she figured out that the companies that have been attacked by the Purple Thumb are all related and are possibly even one and the same. Each company uses the same coding system, “SS2K” (216), to keep track of their inventory, and each company is named after a mythological figure. When Brooklyn realizes that the headquarters for Sinclair’s corporation is called Olympus, she deduces what Kat already had: Sinclair owns every company that has been attacked by the Purple Thumb. Furthermore, Kat believes that SS stands for “Sinclair Scientifica,” the name of his company. The only thing Kat cannot determine is why the virus was stolen.

Mother splits up from the group in Paris, but not before reminding Brooklyn that he will be nearby and to text him if she needs to talk. The team arrives at the inn where they plan to stay, which is owned by British Secret Intelligence and intentionally maintains a one-star rating to fend off customers. It is equipped with secret exits and bulletproof windows. Inside, they meet Reggie, the manager of the inn and a long-time MI6 agent. He shows them their rooms which are equipped with signal disrupters, steel-plated walls, and keys that become knuckle weapons. All of this reveals Reggie’s training in weapons and other tools. Afterward, the children go sightseeing and Paris shows them his favorite rooftop view of the city. They go up the Eiffel Tower and Monty asks Brooklyn to decide whether she thinks the tower is art or science. Brooklyn answers that it is “a work of art that is also an exhibition of science” (233). Brooklyn gets a text on her phone alerting her that her attempt to hack Charlotte’s computer was successful.