Operation Holiday Cheer - A Spy School Story

Chapter 6: Caught

CIA Academy of Espionage

Washington, DC

Hammond Quadrangle

December 17th, 2015

1625 hours

Ben POV

I turned towards Catherine. "How do you know Professor Hudson?" I asked, curious.

She grinned and shrugged. "Past missions. That's all I can say," she responded.

"That reminds me: we don't have another mission, do we?" I asked, a little fearfully.

She shook her head, and I let out a sigh of relief. "So, what's going on?"

The smile dropped from her face. "Let's go somewhere quieter," she said, turning and beckoning me to follow.

Utterly confused, I obeyed. We walked in silence until we reached the Nathan Hale Administration Building. Surprisingly, we went to Alexander Hale's office.

She knocked on the door, to which he responded, "Come in!"

We opened the door to see Alexander disassembling and cleaning his Glock 19 sidearm while reading a manual on how to do so.

Let's talk about Alexander for a second.

When he first came into my life, he was everything I believed a spy would be: dashing, debonair, and all that. In other words, he was an American James Bond. At least on paper. In real life, he was so incompetent you couldn't trust him with a water gun, let alone a real one. He had no skills apart from deception, and even that was limited to stealing credit from others and putting on a fake appearance. The Hale talent had skipped him. After our mission to save the President, UK Prime Minister, and some other VIPs from getting blown up by a missile, Alexander was exposed by Erica and I in our debriefings.

After that, he got a black mark on his record and his high-level security clearances were revoked, reducing him to a mere desk jockey. However, he ended up helping on a black operation in New Jersey (the takedown of SPYDER's academy) and on the operation in Colorado (stopping Leo Shang from nuking a molybdenum mine). In a later operation, we found out that Alexander is actually a skilled helicopter pilot, something even Cyrus, Catherine, and Erica didn't know, and he ended up saving all of our lives.

Since then, he has been allowed to return to the field as an Operations Officer, but with Cyrus as his handler. Not that Alexander minds. He's become far more humble, and actually tries to succeed. He's even managed to refocus his talent for lying, and turn it into deception that an undercover operative needs. He's trained himself up to be a relatively competent agent over the years. While he is still outclassed by the rest of his family, he's actually around the same skill level as me.

He's still a bit weak in hand-to-hand combat, close-quarters weapons (e.g., knives, swords), and firearms, but he has shown incredible aptitude in helicopter piloting, languages, communication, interrogation, counter-interrogation, and disguises. At this point, he's become better at deception than everyone in our friend/family circle except for his own father, and even that is by a ridiculously small margin. Even Cyrus was slightly impressed by his son's vigor.

Throughout this saga, I've had mixed feelings about Alexander. On one hand, he was a cheat and a liar, and even got Erica a black mark. On the other, even in his days of incompetence, he still cared about his family, and would do whatever it took to keep them safe. Similarly to Catherine, he took on somewhat of a second father role in my life in recent years. These days, he was a mix of brightness and seriousness, sort of a halfway between Catherine and Cyrus in personality, but definitely leaning more towards Catherine.