YOU’RE BACK. GOOD.

NOW LET’S START TRAINING

YOU FOR YOUR LIFE AS A

SECRET AGENT. WHAT? YOU

WANT TO KNOW WHEN YOU GET

TO LEARN THE COOL STUFF.

YOU MEAN LIKE JUMPING OUT

OF A BURNING PLANE, FIRING

A BAZOOKA WHILE RIDING A

JET SKI, AND KNOCKING A BAD

GUY OUT WITH A KARATE CHOP

TO THE NECK? WHOA . . . SLOW

DOWN THERE, BUDDY. FIRST,

LET’S FOCUS ON A BASIC SKILL

EVERY SPY MUST KNOW: THE

ABILITY TO READ AND WRITE

SECRET MESSAGES.

SOUNDS EASY, HUH?

WE’LL SEE. THIS IS

A LITTLE SOMETHING

WE CALL THE ALPHABET.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

HOPEFULY, YOU RECOGNIZE

IT. AND THIS IS A LITTLE

SOMETHING WE CALL

A CIPHER CODE.

T D N U C B Z R O H L G Y V F P W I X S E K A M Q J

EACH LETTER IN THE

ALPHABET CORRESPONDS TO

THE LETTER IN THE CIPHER

CODE PRINTED BENEATH IT.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

T D N U C B Z R O H L G Y V F P W I X S E K A M Q J

SO I’M GOING TO SEND

YOU A VERY SENSITIVE

AND SECRET MESSAGE

WRITTEN IN CIPHER CODE.

THEN IT’S YOUR JOB TO

TRANSLATE IT INTO OUR

ALPHABET. YOU READY?

AGAIN, THIS MESSAGE

IS JUST FOR YOU.

YOU MIGHT WANT TO GRAB A PIECE OF PAPER TO WRITE DOWN YOUR ANSWER.

SRC XYCGG FB QFEI BCCS OX YTLOVZ YC NIQ

LISTEN, SOMEBODY HAD TO

SAY SOMETHING. YOU CAN’T

BE A SPY WITH THAT KIND

OF FUNK. THE BAD GUYS

WILL SMELL YOU

A MILE AWAY.

OH, GOOD JOB ON THE

CIPHER, TOO . . . STINKY.

Albert looked down at the business card. Then he looked up at the abandoned entrance of the South Arlington Botanical Garden. The garden had been closed to all but vermin for nearly a decade. Albert had visited many times as a child. The place had once been glorious, but now was overgrown and wild. Someone had vandalized the gate, pulling it off its hinges and leaning it against a wall. Anyone could walk inside.

“This can’t be the place,” Albert said. He looked at the business card once more. There was no mistake.

He wondered if he was the victim of some elaborate hoax. There were people at Big Planet Comics whom he would call rivals. He had once gotten into a heated conversation with Ivan Purlman about whether Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, or Tim Drake was the better Robin to Bruce Wayne’s Batman. Could Ivan have decided to teach him a lesson by concocting this silly prank?

Albert always had trouble making friends, and his mama was to blame—Mama and her stupid plans. When he was just three months old, his mama had made a chart that plotted out his entire life. Some of the highlights were: winning the National Spelling Bee at age ten; going to Space Camp at fourteen; early admission into an Ivy League college at sixteen; graduating with a full doctorate by twenty-one; and at twenty-five, marrying a woman she introduced him to, followed by lots and lots of grandbabies.

She planned for every possible obstacle and even allotted for a short puberty-fueled struggle for independence when he was fifteen. She figured Albert would need only a couple of weeks before he came to his senses and realized he should put all his faith in his mama.

How her little baby would get to such personal success was a little hazy, so she paid close attention to what the other mothers on the block were planning for their children. Tommy Beacon’s father was pushing his son on the swings and toward a career as a marine biologist. Nikki Mock’s mother was laying the groundwork for her daughter to be appointed as Secretary of Education. Mark Killian’s parents had their son sleeping with a catcher’s mitt. Mama knew she had better decide quickly before all the good careers were snapped up, so after much debate she decided that Albert would be a brilliant scientist, and because she loved him so much, she set about brainwashing her son into doing just that.

Each night, when Albert was ready for a good-night story, Mama would forgo Harry the Dirty Dog and Where the Wild Things Are in favor of Einstein’s theory of relativity or the latest article on climate change. She emptied his room of toys and filled it with alkaline test strips, microscopes, and fossils. She hung the periodic table of the elements on his wall and made a mobile for his crib featuring her favorite igneous rocks.

Holidays were just another opportunity to immerse the boy in his would-be career. Every Christmas, Albert would wake up early to find Santa had left a Bunsen burner or a petri dish filled with molds under the tree. On Easter, instead of searching for eggs, Albert hunted for test tubes that Mama had hidden throughout the yard. Halloween was a chance to dress up as different kinds of scientists. At seven Albert was a paleontologist carrying around a plastic dinosaur bone. At ten he went as a mineralogist dragging a lump of quartz from house to house. At twelve he went “trick-or-sleeting” as a meteorologist. It didn’t seem to matter to Mama that each year her son’s costume was nearly identical to the previous year’s.

By Albert’s thirteenth birthday, Mama finally realized what her son’s true calling was—computer science. Her revelation had nothing to do with anything he had mentioned or hinted at. In fact, Albert had shown very little interest in computers, but his mother saw the kind of money a computer mogul made and gave her son a laptop computer for his birthday.