The secret passage out of the falls began in a long-forgotten storage room and tunneled to a trapdoor hidden deep in a large clump of trees. We emerged and set off after the lone crew of Odd Squad agents still hunting for us. There were six of them, but they were spread out in three groups of two, and after hours of repeatedly wandering the same area without finding so much as a trace of us, they had decided this was a pointless assignment and dropped their guard. It was very cloudy and there were plenty of shadows to lurk in, so O'Cyrus and Orica were able to quickly reduce the number of conscious agents to four, then two, and then none.
Oshton and I tied them all up, then stripped them of their gadgets and badge phones.
The Odd Squad had commandeered a Coast Guard vessel along with a Coast Guard captain, who didn't look very happy about the assignment. He was sitting in the bridge, playing a game on his phone. He didn't pay much attention when Oshton wandered onto the boat until Oshton jammed his stolen yeast infection-inator in the guy's ear and ordered him to take us back to Cherry Beach. The captain quickly agreed and even dismantled his radio himself so we understood he wasn't going to try anything stupid and get himself killed.
On the way, I borrowed Orica's phone and dialed Ozo. I never forgot a phone number. Especially that of the one person in the whole world I was certain I could trust.
She answered groggily, roused from a nap. "Hello?"
"Hey," I said. "It's OJ."
"Smokescreen?!" Ozo was instantly awake. She had lowered her voice to a whisper as I assumed she had fallen asleep while in the Academy's library, but I could still hear the mix of excitement and concern in it. "What's happening out there? The word is you and Orica have joined the dark side. I don't believe it, of course, but the rest of the Odd Squad seems to."
"Believe it," I said. "I have joined the dark side."
"No, you haven't. If you'd really joined the dark side, you certainly wouldn't be telling me that you had. You'd be telling me that you hadn't."
"So if I said I hadn't joined the dark side, then you'd think I had?"
"Never. I know you, OJ. Better than any of these other idiots do. No matter what you tell me, I know you're not a traitor."
"I am, Ozo. I swear. I'm a traitor to the Squad and very, very dangerous. So I need you to alert the school administration that you know exactly where I'm going to be 10 minutes from now."
Confusion now edged into Ozo's voice. "I'm not going to do that. You're my friend. Why would I turn you in?"
"Because I'm working with a group of evil ex-Odd Squad agents, and we're about to launch missiles at The Big Office."
"What?!"
"Get a pen. I'm going to give you the exact coordinates."
I heard Ozo fumbling around her desk for a few moments. "Okay."
I gave her the exact latitude and longitude of Hidden Forest, which O'Cyrus had calculated while keeping an eye on the place. Then I had her read it back to me, just to make sure she had it right. I didn't want her to send an Odd Squad team to attack an innocent gated community by mistake.
"I need you to report this right away," I told her. "Tell your resident adviser and have her get the principal and every professor she can find. Don't tell them that I asked you to turn me in, though. They'll be suspicious of that. Tell them that you figured out where I've been. Tell them you always suspected I was no good, and so you put a tracer in my old training badge phone. You've known where I've been all along, but you didn't know I'd joined the enemy until you heard the news a few hours ago. And now you're tracking me and you know I'm heading back to my secret headquarters."
"They'll never believe that I was suspicious of you," Ozo argued. "I'm always going on about how great you are."
"Which you only did so that I'd drop my guard around you and let you get close to me. Very sneaky of you, really. Probably worth some sort of commendation when the Odd Squad follows up on your tip and captures me. By the way, just so the Odd Squad doesn't get confused when they get there,my top-secret headquarters looks like a gated residential community."
"You're kidding, right?"
"Nope. You know how sneaky I am."
The boat was pulling up by the beach. It was deserted.
O'Cyrus thwacked the captain on the back of the skull with his gadget and the man collapsed in a heap. Orica trussed him like a rodeo calf.
Ozo said, "OJ, this is crazy."
"Not really." I thought back to everything that had happened since I'd had to steal a bulldozer that afternoon. "Honestly, it's not even in the top three craziest things I've done today. But I need you to do it. You have to convince everyone you know where I am and that they need to send a big force out there to stop me. Let them know that Orica's family and I are holed up inside our base and that we're plotting something very big."
Orica signaled me to move quickly.
Ozo asked, "Can you at least explain what's going on?"
"It'd take way too long," I said, scrambling off the boat. "You'll just have to trust me. I need you to do this right now. Every second counts."
"All right," Ozo said. "I'll turn you in."
"Thanks. You're a good friend."
Just past our tube entrance, there was an enormous construction site making something underground. There were four large bearing machines, mountains of steel beams, and a fleet of a dozen cement trucks.
And a large sign proclaiming: LEW BROTHERS CONSTRUCTION.
I froze in midstride.
Until that moment, I'd assumed that Lew Brothers was a tiny company created by THE ORGANIZATION solely to build Hidden Forest. But now I realized what it really was: a huge corporation that did was capable of doing underground construction.
"I have to go," I told Ozo.
I had just figured out the rest of THE ORGANIZATION's plan.