In the tenth book in the New York Times bestselling Spy School series, Ben Ripley races against time and across state lines—by car, train, boat, and plane—to avoid his new cyber enemies and track down Murray Hill. Ben Ripley’s longtime nemesis, Murray Hill, has put a price on Ben’s head and accused him of being at the center of a conspiracy on the internet. Now Ben finds himself in his greatest danger yet, on the run from both assassins and conspiracy theorists. Ben must find Murray before his machinations catch up to Ben—but with so much at stake, even some of Ben’s most trusted friends might not be at the top of their game, leaving Ben to be tested like never before. Stuart Gibbs is the New York Times bestselling author of the Charlie Thorne series, FunJungle series, Moon Base Alpha series, Once Upon a Tim series, and Spy School series. He has written screenplays, worked on a whole bunch of animated films, developed TV shows, been a newspaper columnist, and researched capybaras. Stuart lives with his family in Los Angeles. You can learn more about what he’s up to at StuartGibbs.com. Chapter 1: Self-Preservation 1 SELF-PRESERVATION Lyman Gymnasium The CIA’s Academy of Espionage Washington, DC June 11 1200 hours I had an emergency meeting with the principal. As if finals at spy school weren’t stressful enough. I used to go to a normal middle school, so I’m aware that exam weeks everywhere are difficult, but ours was brutal. Not just mentally—but often physically as well. For example, an algebra exam in regular middle school might have a few questions on working out parabolas—while an algebra exam at spy school entailed having live grenades lobbed at you. The grenades were loaded with paint instead of explosives, so they would merely color you blue, rather than blow your limbs off, but still, the test was so traumatic, it frequently left students gibbering in fear. I’m lucky enough to be gifted in mathematics, and yet, there’s a very big difference between doing a complex equation in a nice, quiet classroom as opposed to a muddy foxhole with paint-filled explosives raining down on you. And that was one of the easier exams. The most difficult was in Advanced Self-Preservation. It also happened to be the most painful. Well, it wasn’t painful if you were good at self-preservation. In that case, the exam could be rather hazardous for your instructor. But I wasn’t good at self-preservation at all. Everyone has their strengths. Mine happen to be more cerebral. I’m quite skilled at deducing what bad guys are plotting and then figuring out how to defeat them. This wasn’t only in a classroom setting: I had faced actual bad guys a surprising number of times, given that I was only in my second year of spy school. Due to some extraordinary circumstances, I had managed to prevent evil organizations from dismantling the planet’s electrical grid, destroying the Panama Canal, assassinating the president of the United States, and melting Antarctica. And that was just in the spring semester. Unfortunately, at spy school, we didn’t get good grades for successful missions. In fact, we still had to make up the homework we missed while we were away. To be honest, I’ve gotten much better at self-preservation since coming to spy school. I could probably defeat the average person in a fight. But when you’re a spy, you don’t get attacked by average people. You have trained killers come after you. And so, to properly prepare us for the field, the exams in Advanced Self-Preservation were extremely difficult. The final involved a little-known Tibetan style of martial arts known as Nook-Bhan-San, which loosely translates as “Wow, That Really Hurts.” Each student had to fight one of the academy’s many martial arts instructors. If we could defeat them, we would get an A. Personally, I felt that was highly unlikely. The best I could hope for was a D, which involved losing the fight, but not getting sent to the school infirmary. I would have been nervous enough about the self-preservation exam on a normal day, but the impending meeting with the principal made everything worse. The principal had two basic personalities, angry and incompetent, and he tended to swing back and forth between them without any warning at all, so being with him was never a pleasant experience. He also had said that my life depended on this meeting, which made me even more anxious. Then, to top things off, Professor Crandall had been late for the exam. Crandall was an elderly and doddering instructor with a big secret; in truth, he was very aware and capable, but only pretended to be in decline to throw off his enemies. (I was one of the few people who knew this, having learned of it during my first mission, and had sworn not to tell anyone.) Crandall was exceptionally good at the doddering act, and his lectures were famous for being incredibly boring and only vaguely coherent. In his final class of the semeste