Disclaimer:I do not own Zach, Joe Solomon, or Cammie the Chameleon, although I wish I did. Me and my sister wish we own Zach and Solomon to share.

I know this has probably been done before, but I promise I didn't steal the idea from anyone, although AMessofPicklessort of did inspire it with her amazing Kat/Hale fics. Read them if you get the chance. Anywho, this will all be from Zach's PoV. All the times in the books he is around Cammie or any time I have an idea what he was doing when he wasn't with Cammie. I need to re-re-read these books again. :)

Enjoy!

I watched the girls we were supposed to be following without their knowledge from the park bench. I watched them trying not to be seen. The girl with the dark hair was spinning around smiling while surveying her surroundings as discreetly as possible at the same time.

The other girl seemed tired and a little bit discouraged.

Well, you couldn't have made it any easier for them. You are sitting in plain sight,I thought to myself.

But as every spy ought to know, especially us boys from Blackthorne, was that hiding in plain sight was the best possible position.

Suddenly the darker-haired girl hung her arm around her friend and looked right at us.

Oh no. I thought. They've made us.

Beside me, Grant stiffened but only slightly. It would have been imperceptible to anyone but me, and possibly the girls staring at us, who I had been told were almost as good as us.

The other girl just shook her head at the dark haired one and they were on the move again.

For some reason the other girl interested me in a way she hadn't before. She looked as though she had seen more of the world than the other girl.

Not literally. I don't know how far she had ever traveled geographically. However, something in her eyes as she steered her friend away from us, made me wonder what her story was.

Of course that wasn't why I followed her, I followed her because that was my mission. To challenge these...girls.

Grant and me moved through the crowds, laughing as they thought they had made their tails. An older woman with a baby.

The woman, we knew, lived around here and liked to do various outdoor activities which was just a lucky coincidence, I though to myself. For us.

Those girls were expecting friends of Solomon. They would never have suspected teenage boys. Our cover couldn't have been more perfect.

They merged with a group of giggling girls as they descended into the metro station and me and Grant simply followed them. Not even trying to hide at that moment.

We could've been getting on the train. We could've been following the girls they had merged with because we thought they were cute.

We could've come up with a million different cover stories if they had asked us to. And yet, they made it too simple.

We watched as the two girls slipped underneath the escalator and me and Grant sat unobtrusively on a bench in a shady corner.

The train sped away, with the girls previous cover, but the girls just watched for a few minutes before the dark-haired girl came out of hiding, looked around, and ascended on the escalator to the surface again.

Grant stood up and looked from the escalator taking one of our subjects away from us, and then back to the shadows underneath it.

"You go." I told him very quietly. "I'll stay."

Grant nodded and hurriedly left, before the other girl had a chance to see him.

I didn't want to admit it, but I was intrigued by this girl. The one hiding in the shadow.

The Gallagher Girl, I was supposed to be following.

Gallagher girl, quietly, stepped from her hiding place and casually looked for all the world like she belonged there.

I probably wouldn't have taken a second look at her if she didn't have a certain quality. A quality that told me, she knew quite too much for her age.

I knew that, after all she went to for a school for geniuses. She just seemed to know more than, well, than her friend. At least in the ways of the world.

So instead of following her the whole way, I just closed the short distance between us, and pressed the up button on the elevator.

She pressed the up button again even though it was already lit, looked up at me under her eyes, and began to fidget. Only slightly.

"Hey." I said, nodding my head in a greeting.

"Hi." She replied, pushing the button again, avoiding my gaze.

I smiled, might as well have some fun.

The elevator doors opened with their tale tale ding and we both stepped inside.

I casually leaned against the wall, smiling at her as she tried to covertly check me out. In a totally non-interested way, of course. Not.

I realized I should probably stick to my cover before I let the truth about my mission slip out in my know-it-all smile. I needed to throw her off my track, not that she'd ever been on it.

"So. The Guggenheim Academy-"

She cut me off. "Gallagher Academy." She corrected me.

"I've never heard of it."

"Well it's my school." She said, fidgeting nervously and trying to end the conversation. She looked up and down and seemed to be trying to avoid looking at me while simultaneously praying that the elevator ride would end.

"You in a hurry or something?" I asked, trying to make small talk and get her to look at me.

She seemed sweet and knowledgable, but then again she also seemed naive at the same time. Hmm...how can she seem so street-smart, when I know she's not a seasoned operative.

At her school, well, let's just say they didn't send them on any really life endangering missions until they were in their senior year. Some of them didn't even see action until they'd graduated. Still the Gallagher Academy had a stunning reputation, which I'd been able to read all about in my mission folder from Mr. Solomon that had been printed on evapopaper with the instructions to eat it as soon as we had read it. Which actually meant, memorize it the first time through or else.

"Actually I'm supposed to meet my teacher at the ruby slipper exhibit. I've only got twenty minutes, and if I'm late, he'll kill me." She said, answering my question.

"How do you know?" I asked, trying to get her to trip up.

"Because he said, 'Meet me at the ruby slipper exhibit.'"

"No." I smiled and shook my head. "How do you know you only have twenty minutes? You're not wearing a watch." I was trying to point out the obvious while also giving her a clue. Another chance to realize, I was not a normal boy. I was the person she was supposed to be avoiding and she had already slipped up and told me where she was supposed to meet up with Joe.

"My friend just told me." She told a plausible lie, one I might've believed. If I hadn't known better. If I hadn't known she was special and had been counting the seconds in the back of her mind the entire day.

"You fidget a lot." I pointed out, because operatives shouldn't fidget unless it's part of their cover and it was starting to annoy me.

"I'm sorry." She said, even though I could tell she wasn't really sorry. "I have low blood sugar. I need to eat something."

I didn't know if she meant it or not, but I didn't really want to wait for her to have an episode or something, so I handed her my M&M's. "Here. I ate most of them already."

"Oh...um..." She looked nervous, like I was some creep trying to poison her. A perfectly normal reaction for someone who was so abnormal. "That's okay. Thanks, though." She handed the M&Ms back to me and I pocketed them shrugging.

Rule #1: If you tell a lie, stick to it. Didn't she know she should've taken a couple of M&Ms to make the lie look like the truth?

"Oh, okay." I said.

The elevator stopped and the doors dinged open onto the mall where the sun was setting, turning the clouds a brilliant orange-pink.

"Thanks again for the candy." She said, rocketing out of the elevator like a torpedo. "Where are you going?" She said suddenly, spinning around quickly to face me.

"I thought we were going to meet your teacher in the wonderful world of Oz." I said, smirking.

"We?" She asked in disbelief.

"Sure. I'm going with you."

"No you're not." She snapped, annoyed now.

"Look, it's dark. You're by yourself. And thisisD.C. And you've only got," I counted in my head from the time she'd told me she only had twenty minutes to meet her teacher and said, "fifteen minutes to meet your teacher."

Of course she didn't realize I wasn't wearing a watch. Wow, Gallagher girl was not living up to her schools reputation.

"Fine." She said, quickly hurry towards the exhibit.

It couldn't possibly be this easy. Could it?I hurried after her.

"You can really walk fast." I said, a little sarcastic sounding in my head. She didn't say anything, didn't even look at me. "So, do you have a name?"

"Sure. Lots of them." She said vaguely.

"Do you have a boyfriend?" I asked, trying to catch her off guard and even taking myself by surprise.

She stopped walking and turned to me. "Look, thanks for the chivalry and all, but it really isn't necessary." She said quietly. She looked down for a second, a little bit of sadness and maybe, regret, in her eyes? Then she looked back at me and her eyes gave me the impression that she was really tired. Weary, was the word that came to mind.

"It's just up here." She pointed to the building she was headed for. She couldn't have made it easier for me if she tried. "And there's a cop over there."

"What?" I asked, glancing at the cop on the street corner, as if I hadn't seen him there all along. "You think that guy can do a better job protecting you than I can?" I smirked inside, knowing she was underestimating me. My cover was intact.

"No, I think if you don't leave me alone, I can scream and that cop will arrest you."

I smiled, but knew this was the time to back off. I didn't need to get picked up by some cop. I still had a mission to finish. Plus I wasn't entirely sure she was joking. I stepped back and smiled at her. Then turned to go.

"Hey, thanks anyway." She told me.

I nodded and watched her walk away. She didn't look back and I realized I still needed to shadow her to the ruby slippers.

She seemed to be muttering to herself and I knew her comms unit wasn't working. She looked around the great oval room and stepped towards the shoes, inching closer and closer. She seemed to be arguing with herself about something. She stared at the shoes with awe, all the while I knew her thoughts were keeping her alert to her surroundings. Just not alert enough.

Joe stepped out from hiding behind her and said, "You're four seconds late."

She spun around and said, "but I'm alone."

I smirked from my place in the shadows and stepped forward as Joe said, "No, Ms. Morgan. You're not."

I smiled at her and said, "Hi again, Gallagher Girl."

She looked like I'd just given her a round house kick right to the stomach.

"Nice work, Zach." Joe told me.

Praise was rare and since I was feeling fine and dandy, I gave her a cheeky wink. Partly because her shock was sort of cute and partly to tease her.

Then she seemed to recover and said, "Hi, Blackthorne Boy."

I felt my jaw drop as she spoke my "schools" name out loud. She wasn't supposed to know about us.

Joe recovered more quickly than me and said, "very good Ms. Morgan." Then he looked at me and I closed my mouth. "But not good enough." He said as she turned red.

"Your mission was...what?" She asked, disappointed in herself. "To keep us from achieving our mission."

I tilted my head to the side and raised my eyebrows. "Something like that." Then I smirked at her and chuckled. She did not look happy with herself, or me for that matter.

"I thought I could just make you late for you're meeting. I didn't think you'd actually tell me where it was and walk me halfway there."

Just then a group of tourists got between her and me and I slipped back into the shadows and through an emergency exit, the same way I'd come in, after disabling the alarm. Time to get back to Blackthorne.

I knew one thing, I was looking forward to seeing her again. Hopefully she'd be more up for the challenge on her home turf.

So what'd you think? Zach is sort of hard to write, but I hope I capture their first meeting well. He seems so much more like a kid in "Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy" than in the 3rd or 4th book, so I tried to write him that way. He's way cute and fun to write though. I figured he'd be critical of her skills since he'd want her to be as prepared as she could be. Not to mention, if he could beat her, who else could? Tormenting thoughts for a boy with a crush, even if he doesn't know that's what it is quite yet.

Anyways, please review and let me know what you thought. Should I continue?

Thankies,
OSK