Spy School

Spy School is a 2012 middle grade action novel by Stuart Gibbs. It is the first in an ongoing series of books that follows Benjamin Ripley, an ordinary middle schooler, who is suddenly recruited to the CIA’s academy for espionage. The book was well-received and nominated for several awards, including the South Carolina Picture Book Award, the Nutmeg Book Award, the Volunteer State Book Award, and the Edgar Allan Poe Award. It was listed on the Colorado Children’s Book Award Master List, the Virginia Readers’ Choice Award List, and the CBC Best Children’s Books of the Year. The second book in the series, Spy Camp, was published in 2013.

Plot Summary

One ordinary day, middle-schooler Ben Ripley comes home to discover a strange man in his house. The man introduces himself as Alexander Hale, a CIA agent who is there to recruit Ben to the CIA’s academy of espionage. Alexander explains that the CIA builds evaluative questions into the nation’s standardized tests, and that Ben has scored very well on those; he also cites Ben’s numerous visits to the CIA’s website as a measure of his interest. Ben agrees to enroll in the school, but things start going wrong immediately. He finds himself in the middle of what he thinks is an attack on the school as soon as they drive onto campus. He is intercepted by a girl, Erica, who Ben thinks is beautiful. Erica thinks Ben is a useless idiot, but she sends him upstairs to make an emergency call for back-up anyway. When Ben reaches his destination, he discovers that the whole thing was a test—and one on which he did not perform particularly well. As soon as he gets to his dorm room, another student, Chip, shows up with knowledge of Ben’s file and tries to intimidate him into hacking into the CIA’s mainframe. Ben is saved by another student, Murray Hill, who electrocutes Chip and takes Ben to the mess hall for dinner.

That evening, a trained assassin breaks into his room on the first night to interrogate him about something called Pinwheel. Ben manages to fight the assassin off, but he struggles to get the principal and administrators to believe that it even happened. They relocate him to “the Box,” a secure CIA cell on the property. That night, Erica, who turns out to be Alexander Hale’s daughter, comes to the Box and tells Ben that he’s a patsy, just convenient bait for a mole in the school that the CIA has recently become aware of. The cryptography skills that everyone keeps praising Ben for are made up, planted into a falsified file to lure the mole out of hiding. Ben agrees to help Erica with her investigation and determines that he will prove himself and be accepted to the academy on his merits after all.

During his first day of classes, Ben draws the attention of Professor Crandall, who locks Ben into the lecture hall and sets three ninjas on him. He wakes up from the attack in Alexander Hale’s secret on-campus apartment. Alexander recruits Ben as a partner in a private investigation for the mole. Ben suspects Chip, which he tells Alexander. He realizes after the meeting that Alexander offered no intel of his own and only asked Ben what he knew.

The novel picks up during a war game the students are playing on campus. One of Ben’s new classmates and sort-of friends, Zoe, has convinced most of the student body that Ben is merely pretending to be bad at spy skills so that no one will know how good he really is. She has nicknamed him “Smokescreen.” During a plan with Zoe and her friend Warren to capture the opposing team’s flag and win the war game, Ben notices Chip and his friend Hauser sneaking off into the woods. He follows them and discovers a network of tunnels beneath the school. Ben trails Chip and Hauser to what appears to be a bomb, but before he can get a good photo, Chip and Hauser realize he’s there and chase him. Ben and Chip are caught by the principal, who summons them both to his office to yell at them. Erica speaks up on a hidden earpiece that she’d planted on Ben earlier; she tells Ben to make the principal angry enough that he puts Ben into total probation. The principal must send an email to do this. Erica instructs Ben to watch the principal does closely, and Ben observes that the principal must check the inside of a dictionary for his password before he can log in.

Later that night, Erica breaks into the Box again and tells Ben that she went to look for the bomb, but it was removed. They decide it’s time to start phase two of their plan. To Ben’s surprise, this phase involves sending an email to a select list of people that claims he’s invented an incredible new password-cracking tool. This puts an even larger target on Ben’s back, which makes him angry, but he still agrees to cooperate with Erica. The email Erica sent also scheduled a presentation of the new tool, called “Jackhammer,” on campus the next day. The CIA upgrades Ben’s protection for the day. Chip approaches Ben’s table during lunch and hints that he knows what Ben is up to. After he leaves, Ben finds a note in his pocket; the note requests a midnight meeting in the library, and Ben suspects it’s from Chip. Murray tells the table that Chip and Tina, Ben’s resident advisor, are dating and this answers some questions Ben had about how Chip got his file in the first place. He goes to share the news with Erica but is intercepted by an agent who says they’ve picked up on ‘chatter’ and need to move Ben to a more secure location.

Alexander escorts Ben to the academy’s secure command center and explains that they picked up Ben’s name and other related chatter in Arabic on Twitter. After a few hours of waiting and watching security monitors, they spot someone breaching the campus. Alexander takes the command center’s two guards with him to pursue the intruder, who Ben eventually realizes is his friend Mike from back home. With most of the agents distracted by Mike, enemy agents assault the command center and kidnap Ben. He wakes in a van but is quickly rescued by Erica. Together, Erica and Ben make their way through more underground tunnels and climb to the top of the Washington monument, which Erica explains is part of the city’s defense system. During this time, Ben asks if Erica’s father Alexander is a fraud. She confirms this and tells Ben stories about times Alexander caused tremendous political and diplomatic difficulties.

Ben and Erica return to campus when it’s safe. Erica takes him to Professor Crandall’s apartment. Ben discovers that Crandall’s image as a doddering old man is a false one, and that he uses it as a smokescreen so that other people will underestimate and speak freely around him. Crandall tells them that the CIA is considering activating Project Omega—a total close-down of the academy. A meeting of officials, administrators, and CIA higher-ups is scheduled on campus that night. They talk about the investigation and agree to investigate Chip and Tina more but are quickly located by CIA agents. Erica flees into the woods, but Ben is captured and taken to an interrogation room. He tries to get the agents to listen to him, but they only want to ask him questions about his loyalties. Alexander helps Ben escape and gives him another earpiece from Erica.

Erica instructs Ben to tail Tina, who is leaving campus. Ben follows her to a bank but is intercepted by Mike, who wants to know the truth about what happened the night before. Mike tells Ben that he came to break him out of school to attend the party of a girl Ben had a crush on at his previous school. Ben tries to blow him off to keep following Tina, but Mike is angry and says Ben is being a bad friend. He tells Ben that he came to get him after Ben texted and asked him to.

When Ben sees the text message and when it was sent, he realizes the mole is Murray. He tries to tell Erica this, but she is knocked out before he can give her the name. Following a tracking signal that Erica activated, Ben finds her unconscious, Murray, and a huge bomb in a furnace room beneath the school. If the bomb goes off, it will kill all the officials and agents currently meeting about Project Omega. To Ben’s surprise, Murray tries to recruit him to join an international consortium of double-agents called SPYDER. Ben pretends to go along with the idea, intending to knock Murray out when he’s distracted, but Murray anticipates the technique and gets the drop on him. Before he locks Ben and Erica into the furnace room and leaves, Murray activates the bomb and puts it on a five-minute timer. Ben cannot wake Erica and does not have bomb defusal skills, but he recognizes the clock’s timer as his own broken alarm clock and is able to stop it with only seven seconds to spare. Erica wakes and defuses the bomb. They escape the furnace room and pursue Murray.

Ben calls Zoe to see if anyone has seen Murray, and to mobilize the rest of the student body to help search for him. They all chase him through the woods, but Ben realizes that Murray will trick them again to double back for a different exit. With only Chip behind him, Ben runs back in the direction they came. He spots Murray and chases him, trying to place him under arrest. Murray shoots at Ben and grazes his arm. Ben still does not have good marksmanship, so he shoots the ice on the roof of the building Murray is next to, dropping a weight of snow and ice onto him and knocking him out. Alexander emerges and takes credit for neutralizing Murray, but Erica tells Ben he did good work. The novel ends with a classified and redacted letter that grants Ben full admission to the academy and hints at further information that would make Ben “flip out” if he knew about it.