The Junior Intelligence Agency: Book 3

By Alyssa Lesho

With the battle at the castle still fresh in her mind, Special Agent Alex has a host of new challenges. Is her partner a traitor? Is her supervisor lying? And why has DIRECTOR stalled with no end in sight?

Still reeling from the aftermath of the last few months, Alex finds herself stuck in the middle of an agency turf war, unable to save her friend or herself. Unsure where to turn or who to trust, she must decide for herself how to finish the mission and get everyone home safe. This is her last chance to discover the truth about the Junior Intelligence Agency, and to decide whether the path chosen for her is the one she’s really wanted all along.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329645103

Alyssa Lesho

I am eighteen years old and live in Maryland with my parents and two sisters. Follow me on Twitter @alyssalesho or Tumblr (thejiaseries.tumblr.com) or email me at [e-mail].

Book preview

The Junior Intelligence Agency: Book 3

The Junior Intelligence

Agency: Book 3

By Alyssa Lesho

Copyright

© 2015 Alyssa Lesho. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-329-64507-3

And for those who will simply

carry on

in the end.

Prologue

I understand I might have left you with a teensy cliffhanger at the end of the last book.  And I’ll get to that, I promise, but first a quick review:

The JIA is a secret spy organization with agents between the ages of 14 and 21.  The JIA also trains engineers and researchers to support the agents.  Children are chosen between the ages of 5 and 6 to participate in the training program to become agents, engineers, or researchers.

The Director is a wealthy young man in charge of an organization that will use science and brutality to bring about a new world order where everyone is under the Director’s control.  He’s the bad guy.  He may or may not want to clone JIA agents.

Blake is at the Director’s castle.  And possibly a traitor.  At the end of the last book, he admitted to me he was working with the Director, and then I ran out and left him there.

I’m conflicted about this whole Blake is a traitor thing.

Skylar is on leave from the JIA, living in Virginia with a foster family.  She’s been gone a while, and I don’t know why she hasn’t come back.

The CIA, NSA, and JIA are at odds over how to dispose of the Director.  The CIA wants the threat neutralized.  The NSA wants the information and then wants no one else to have it.  The JIA…well, I’m getting to that part.

This was the hardest book to write.  I began by just telling you a story.  Who, what, when, and where.  A little bit of how.  I wasn’t incredibly concerned about giving you the why, because that’s not the reason I started writing. But now I’ve reached the end, and it’s important that you understand why we all did what we did.

I’m picking up the story in Sara’s office.  I’ve just come from the airport, praying that Sara has some explanation for what happened at the castle.  The details don’t make sense, and I’m scared of what I don’t know.

When you work in intelligence, you see and hear things that only a few people in the world will ever see or hear.  You also understand exactly how much you don’t, and will never, know.  This is a vast and paralyzing amount of information.  This is the way my world works.

And this is how it ends.

Chapter 1

From the beginning, when you first got into the castle, Sara said gently, but the urgency in her voice was unmistakable.

I looked past her at the slits of light coming through the blinds on her window.  It was difficult to discern the time from the narrow beams.  I pulled in a deep breath and bit down on my tongue.  It felt good – the pain grounded me.

I didn’t want to start from when I pulled the bars from a castle window and hoisted myself into a cool, dark room.  I wanted to start months earlier, when Sara gave me the DIRECTOR assignment, and I wanted Sara to talk, to tell me exactly what was going on, because Sara always knows what’s going on and she always tells me.

That’s not true.  But I thought it was for a long time.

I don’t know when I lost communication with Blake, I began.  Probably immediately.

I told her about breaking into the castle, disabling the cameras, finding the Director’s office and the safe, the grenade explosion, the stolen gun without bullets, seeing Blake with the Director, Blake’s speech, my confusion, running, a gas chamber, almost dying, not dying, escaping again.  The man in the courtyard who had let me go.

It began to dawn on me how much I should not be alive.

Why did he let me go?  Who let me out of the gas chamber?  Why did I escape so easily?

Sara typed out every word, I assumed, into a mission statement form, which would go in my file.  When she finished, she leaned all the way back in her chair and let out a long breath she’d held in.

Blake is not working with the Director, she said, looking down at the papers on her desk and resting her chin on her hand.  I wanted to tell you this immediately, Alex, but I was asked to wait until I had your statement.  Agency policy.

She spat out the phrase, still not looking at me.

What are you saying? I asked.  "Blake?  Blake is the undercover agent?  But…that’s not possible.  He…"

Blake has been undercover since the islands.  He saw a chance to get inside, and he took it. By the time we found out, Blake was already following someone to the castle.  I refused to let him tell you, because then you would have insisted on going under too, and you’d already blown your cover, literally.

Skylar and I had exploded the planes on the island.  No way the Director would have believed we wanted to work for him after that, but Blake could claim innocence.

So he lied to me?  In the castle?

Yes.  I guess he saw it as a way to get you out safely.  The look on your face would have been convincing enough for…

And you lied to me.  You made him lie.

Sara looked unmoved by my accusation.

Alex, I had to.  Be honest – if you’d known the plan, would you have behaved differently?

Of course!  I would have…I…

Honestly, I don’t know what I would have done.

"You’re not that good an actor. If you’d known, you would have given Blake away.  The Director needed to know that Blake was lying to you to accept he was telling him the truth."

I rested my head in my hands for a moment, letting this sink in, sink all the way to the bottom of my stomach and stay there, heavy and dark and painful.

"You were using me."

What?

I told Luke, back in Sweden, that I felt like I was being used on this mission, just to get everyone closer to the Director.  He told me I was too smart for that.  But he was lying, and I was right.

A terrible thought occurred to me.

Does Luke know?

Luke knows.  I told him a month ago, when I went to review his research in Sweden.

Suddenly his question made sense to me.

That was always the one thing I couldn’t answer about you…If you were handed a mission with a pilot you barely knew, would you trust him enough to get close to him?  Would you use him to finish your mission? …Would you keep him safe?

He needed to know if I’d sacrifice the mission to avoid leaving Blake behind.  But Blake had answered that question when he convinced me of his false betrayal.

Tell me everything, I demanded.

"At the JIA Help Center in Morocco, Blake contacted us. I agreed that you and Skylar needed to be taken off the mission.  In Italy, I asked him to poison your food to get you out of the way.  Skylar was already weak from the experiments, so it didn’t take much.  He tried to poison you too, but either you didn’t eat enough or we’ve made you very immune to what he used.

"Blake allowed the Stalker to be stolen.  He expected it to lead him to the Director, but instead it went to the factories.  When Blake realized the Director wasn’t there, he stole the plane back – a mistake in a moment of panic when he saw that you’d been captured.  Thank God, you did your job and got him to the right place.  It ended up being a strike in Blake’s favor, because it proved he was better than the Director’s men, or at least you were, and that made him valuable.

"Blake met the Director for the first time right before you did.  Blake convinced him that you had to stay in the dark about his cover, otherwise he would be locked out of the agency and totally useless.  The Director agreed, but he still tried to talk you into his plan.  You only reinforced Blake’s story.  Blake was released so he could get you out of the castle and keep up his second cover.  Later, he had a lot of apologizing to do about the Director’s arm.  I think he convinced him it was an accident – that he was aiming for you.

You two got back, and then we tried to distance Blake from the Director.  It didn’t work.  We began feeding Blake somewhat useless intelligence, but it wasn’t enough.  When we brought you two back together two months ago, Blake was already completely entangled in the Director’s plans.  He blew up the labs on purpose, and told the Director it was to keep the CIA from getting his work.  He would not fire on the Director’s plane carrying the bomb – he let someone else do it.  He spent the month in England feeding the Director false information about the mission.  He was supposed to meet briefly with the Director at the castle and escape with you, but when you walked in on them he had to improvise.

Black spots appeared in my vision, and I realized I’d stopped breathing.  I was frozen in my chair, my limbs too heavy to move.

I actually left him behind.  He didn’t choose to be abandoned.  He lied to me to save my life.  He let me get out.  He’s not a traitor.

Oh, God, I whispered.

What?

I shook my head slowly.  I bit my tongue again to keep from crying.  Sara swiveled her chair to the side, looking away.

When I was in the gas chamber, and I was about to die, someone shut it down, I said, in an effort to break the silence.  Do you think, maybe, Blake threatened to stop working with the Director unless I was allowed to live?

Sara twisted the ring on her finger.

It’s possible.

She didn’t sound surprised or moved by my theory.  Uncharacteristically, I was having a strong reaction to what I could only see as a fact.  How else could I be alive?

So, what now?  We have to go get him back.  We should be back in Sweden figuring out how to get him out of the castle.  Why did you bring me home when he’s –

Sara was shaking her head.

We need to go, now! I insisted, standing up, as if that would make her stop.  Blake isn’t safe in there.

Blake can take care of himself, and having him in the castle, close to the most valuable intelligence, is something we could have used a long time ago.  He’s been trained for this.  He knows what he’s doing.  Okay?

"He has not been trained for this!  He’s an engineer for God’s sake…"

I am so sorry.  I should never have left you.  I should have known you were lying.  I should have had more faith.

He’s not completely unprepared, Sara said dismissively.  I need you to do one last thing before you go.

What?

She handed me her phone.

Call Skylar.

The silence in the room was so definite I could hear boots crunching on the concrete outside, several floors below us.

No.

It’s time she came home, Alex.  I know you want her back.

There’s