In the fourth book in the New York Times bestselling Spy School series, Ben Ripley enrolls in ski school, where the slopes, and the stakes, get really steep. Thirteen-year-old Ben Ripley is not exactly the best student spy school has ever seen—he keeps flunking Advanced Self Preservation. But outside of class, Ben is pretty great at staying alive. His enemies have kidnapped him, shot at him, locked him in a room with a ticking time bomb, and even tried to blow him up with missiles . And he’s survived every time. After all that unexpected success, the CIA has decided to activate Ben for real. The Mission: Become friends with Jessica Shang, the daughter of a suspected Chinese crime boss, and find out all of her father’s secrets. Ben might not be able to handle a weapon (or a pair of skis), but he can make friends easy-peasy. That is, until his best friend from home drops in on the trip and jeopardizes the entire mission… "Readers will be glad they strapped on their boots and went along for the ride." ― Kirkus Reviews Stuart Gibbs is the author of five New York Times bestselling series: Spy School, FunJungle, Moon Base Alpha, Charlie Thorne, and Once Upon a Tim—as well as the new nonfiction series Spy School Secret Files. 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: Activation 1 ACTIVATION Bushnell Hall CIA Academy of Espionage Washington, DC December 6 1130 hours The summons to the principal’s office arrived in the middle of my Advanced Self-Preservation class. Normally, I would have been pleased to have an excuse to get out of ASP, as it was my worst subject. I was only getting a C in it, even though, in real life, I had been quite good at self-preservation. Over the past eleven months, my enemies had kidnapped me, shot at me, locked me in a room with a ticking bomb, and even tried to blow me up with missiles—and yet I’d survived each time. However, my instructors at the CIA’s Academy of Espionage never seemed very impressed by the fact that I was still alive. They just kept giving me bad grades. “There’s a big difference between running away and being able to defend yourself,” my ASP instructor, Professor Simon, had explained, shortly before the call from the principal came. Professor Georgia Simon was in her fifties and looked like someone my mother would have played canasta with, but she was an incredible warrior, capable of beating three karate masters in a fight at once. “So far, all you have done in the field is run.” “It’s worked pretty well for me so far,” I countered. “You’ve been lucky,” Professor Simon said. And then she attacked me with a samurai sword. It was only a fake sword, but it was still daunting. (The academy had stopped using real swords a few years earlier, after a student had been literally disarmed in class.) I did my best to defend myself, but it was only twenty seconds before I was sprawled on the floor with Professor Simon standing over me, sword raised, ready to shish kabob my spleen. Which was all the more embarrassing, as it happened in front of the entire class. ASP took place in a large lecture hall. My fellow classmates were seated in tiers around me, watching me get my butt kicked by a woman four times my age. “Pathetic,” Professor Simon declared. “That’s D-grade work at best. Would anyone here like to show Mr. Ripley how a real agent defends himself?” No one volunteered. My fellow second-year students weren’t idiots; none of them wanted to be embarrassed like I had been. Or hurt. Luckily for them, at that moment, the announcement from the principal came over the school’s public address system, distracting Professor Simon. There were plenty of other, far less outdated ways to deliver urgent messages to the classrooms at spy school, but the principal didn’t know how to use any of them. In fact, he wasn’t very good at using the PA system, either. There were a few seconds of fumbling noises, followed by the principal muttering, “I can never remember which switch works this stupid thing. This darn system’s a bigger pain in my rear than my hemorrhoids.” Then he asked, “Hello? Hello? Is this thing on? Can you hear me?” Professor Simon sighed in a way that suggested she had even less respect for the principal than she had for me. “Yes. We can hear you.” “Very good,” the principal replied. “Is Benjamin Ripley in your class right now? I need to see him in my office right away.” A chorus of “ooohs” rippled through the room: the universal middle-school response to realizing that someone else has just gotten in trouble. Professor Simon gave the class a warning glare and the “ooohs” stopped immediately. “I’ll send him right now,” she replied. Then she looked down at me and said, “Go.” I leapt to my feet and hurried for t