Project Gemini (Mission 2 Read online

  Contents

  Mission 2: Okinawa

  Call to Action

  Restricted Access

  Dedication

  Classified Mission Briefing

  Report Number 1

  Report Number 2

  Report Number 3

  Report Number 4

  Report Number 5

  Report Number 6

  Report Number 7

  Report Number 8

  Report Number 9

  Report Number 10

  Report Number 11

  Report Number 12

  Report Number 13

  Report Number 14

  Report Number 15

  Report Number 16

  Report Number 17

  Report Number 18

  Report Number 19

  Report Number 20

  Report Number 21

  Report Number 22

  Report Number 23

  Report Number 24

  Report Number 25

  Report Number 26

  Report Number 27

  Report Number 28

  Report Number 29

  Cast of Characters

  Glossary of Japanese Terms

  Maps and Documents

  Keep Reading

  Other Books By Jill Williamson

  About the Author

  Copyright Notice

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  MISSION 2: OKINAWA

  After an exhausting school year, Spencer is thrilled to discover that the summer training mission will take him and his fellow agents-in-training to Okinawa, a tropical paradise. But there's little time for R & R as Spencer must attend school, volunteer at a local martial arts training facility, and track and report a mysterious girl named Keiko. Spencer thinks he knows exactly what to do, but the more he discovers about Keiko, the more questions he has. All he really wants to do is protect Keiko from her ex-boyfriend and stay out of trouble, but where Spencer Garmond is concerned, trouble is never far away.

  YOU HAVE ACCESSED THE INTERNATIONAL SERVER FOR THE MISSION LEAGUE. THESE FILES CONTAIN CLASSIFIED INFORMATION ON THE ORGANIZATION, AGENTS, CRIMINALS, PROCEDURES, TRAININGS, AND MISSIONS.

  GOD HAS CALLED. YOU HAVE ANSWERED.

  To Kim Titus for being Bob to my Bill,

  for going to Okinawa with me,

  and for being the best friend a girl could have.

  Love you!

  CLASSIFIED MISSION BRIEFING

  JUVENILE MISSION BACKGROUND REPORT

  SUBMITTED BY: Agent-in-Training Spencer Garmond

  A LITTLE LESS THAN ONE YEAR AGO I was recruited into the Agent Development program of the Mission League, a secret branch of INTERPOL, whose primary objective is to follow the will of God in collecting, analyzing, evaluating, and disseminating intelligence against the rulers, the authorities, the powers of this dark world, and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

  Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: churchers. And I thought the same at first. But then I found out that my real name is Jonas Wright and I’m in a witness protection program of sorts, hiding out from my criminal dad, who was responsible for my mom’s death. Real nice, huh?

  So I went on a training mission to Moscow and met this woman, Anya Vseveloda, who was working with the Russian mob to get people hooked on drugs and into a cult called Bratva. I’d been having dreams about her for years and found out I was gifted in prophecy. I went after her, figuring that’s what God wanted me to do. Wrongo. Got suspended from extracurricular training activities until I get my points up.

  When I got back to California and started my sophomore year at Pilot Point Christian School, Beth Watkins offered to teach me League Combat Training (LCT) on her own time, which was awesome because I had a thing for her. But then Prière showed up—he’s the official intercessor for our group of agents-in-training. He told me that I matched the profile for a sixty-year-old prophecy and that some bad guys were after me because of what I did in Moscow. So some agents started following me everywhere to keep me safe. Two guys, Blaine and Tito, they guy-napped me after Homecoming last year, and Nick Muren and Katie Lindley helped them. Real nice to have such friends, right?

  But even though the agents nabbed Blain and Tito, there was still a traitor on the inside, so Prière asked me to enter the Regional LCT event—as bait to help catch the guy. And that’s where Beth humiliated me. But I did manage to figure out that the traitor was one of my bodyguards, the guy I called Gardener. But now he’s not talking, so we’re back to square one as to who is after me.

  Things have quieted down some for the past few weeks. I’m studying Japanese for this coming summer’s training mission, and I’m nearing the end of the basketball season. We’re poised to make the state game this year. [fingers crossed]

  So that’s the scoop on my life. Thrilling, I know. And if you really want to know more, read on.

  Spencer Garmond

  Agent-in-training

  Pilot Point Mission League

  REPORT NUMBER: 1

  REPORT TITLE: I Find Out My Friends Are Psychopaths

  SUBMITTED BY: Agent-in-Training Spencer Garmond

  LOCATION: Grandma Alice’s House, Pilot Point, California, USA

  DATE AND TIME: Wednesday, February 25, 5:14 p.m.

  I’D ALWAYS LOVED THE RUSH that came from being where I wasn’t supposed to be.

  Grandma’s bedroom smelled like lilac powder, Vicks VapoRub, and dust. I stood on the braided rug that took up what little open floor space was left, what with the double bed, two dressers, a file cabinet, and piles of fabric that lined every inch of the baseboard. The walls were painted dirty pink. Mauve, Grandma called it. She had white curtains with pink and red roses on them. I felt weird standing in there. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even crossed the threshold.

  The last few months had been intense with basketball, but finally the season was almost over. Today had been the first time I’d been home without Grandma here to keep me from snooping in her room. I didn’t know where she was, either—she could be home any moment—so I needed to move fast.

  I pulled open the top drawer of the file cabinet and studied the tabs on the folders inside: bank, credit card, electric, insurance, pay stubs, phone, retirement, taxes, water. I read them all twice. None looked like a folder that might contain a picture of my mom.

  The second drawer contained nothing but quilting books and patterns. The third drawer, more fabric.

  I sighed, scanning the room for other places Grandma might hide sentimental things. The closet? It was a two-walled walk-in filled with clothing, Grandma’s on the right, Grandpa’s on the left. She’d gotten rid of most his stuff after he’d died, but she’d hung on to his fancy suits. I spotted the one I’d worn to the homecoming dance last fall and shuddered at the memory of how Blaine and Tito had nearly gotten away with guy-napping me, and how for five hundred bucks my date had naively helped them do it.

  Couldn’t really blame Katie. For that kind of money, I probably would’ve helped too.

  I still wasn’t convinced that Nick had told Prière everything about his involvement with those creepers, though. But that was a problem for another time.

  I looked up at the shelves above the closet rods. Clear plastic Rubbermaid containers were stacked like bricks. I moved them around, glad I could see through their sides. They held things like thread, yarn, fabric paint, beads and bows, shoes, my old Thomas the Train set, and some Hot Wheels.

  Come on. Grandma kept all my old junk but nothing of my mom’s? No way.

  I searched the top shelf on the other side. It was more of the same. I found one container of pictures, but they were all of me. Little me. Ginger-haired kindergartener holding a basketball
that was bigger than my head. Sitting on Santa’s lap. Holding my finger on a quilt tie for Mrs. Daggett. The other picture packets showed older versions of me, but no Mom.

  I finished my search of the closet and walked back into the bedroom. There had to be another place to stash things. Under the bed?

  Nothing but dust bunnies and eight pairs of house slippers.

  Might as well try the dressers. I rummaged through Grandma’s clothes, wincing at the drawers that contained undergarments. So very eww.

  After I struck out in the drawers, I inspected the clutter on top. A couple of baskets with perfumes and powders. And on the big dresser, Grandma had an old wooden jewelry box with glass doors and two drawers. Nothing but a lot of bling tangled in knots. But there was a good three inches on the bottom that seemed like it should have another drawer. I pulled the jewelry box out and turned it, revealing a drawer on the bottom of the back.

  A secret drawer!

  A rush of heat ran over me. Come on, baby, give me what I need. I pulled open the drawer and found it filled with pictures. Score! A shiver ran up my arms as I gathered the photos into my hands. The first was of a little blond girl with pigtails, hugging a stuffed cat. Same girl a few years older, playing a clarinet. The next was a picture of a basketball team. Nice. The blond girl was kneeling on the end of the front row. Looked to be in about eighth grade. Then a young Grandpa Earl holding a baby. Another baby picture.

  I’d found it. These had to be pics of my mom.

  The last one was half of a wedding photo. It had been torn down the center. Of the groom, only the hands were still visible, clasped with the woman’s. She looked about twenty-two. Pretty. All fancied up and in the white dress, she looked like the chick that played Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings. Pale. Blond. Regal. Had my nose.

  Or I had hers. Whatever.

  It was her, though. The ache in my gut was all the proof I needed. Mommy dearest.

  A distant bang made me jump. Screen door. Grandma.

  I returned all but the wedding picture to the drawer and twisted the jewelry box back into place. I booked it out of Grandma’s room and into my own, carefully closing the door behind me.

  “Spencer? You home?”

  “Yeah!” I sat on the edge of my bed and studied my mom’s face in the photo. She looked really happy. Blissful, actually. But something had gone wrong in her life. Big time. Kimbal had said my dad was a traitor. Then later he’d said that everyone had liked my dad. But even I knew that no loving husband would let his wife get killed. None of this added up, and I was sick of it.

  But I didn’t want to just sit there and stew, so I turned on my MacBook and opened my file on prophecy. I’d been studying the subject, trying to figure out how it worked. There wasn’t much to go on. Forget current day stuff. Everything online was either New Age garbage, wacko psychics peddling their ability to “see,” or doomsayers who either claimed that anything bad that happened was God punishing people for their sins or a sign that we were in the last days, as prophesied in the book of Revelation.

  So I focused on the old stuff. The stuff from the Bible. There were a lot of symbolic prophecies back then. I’d never experienced anything like that. And no messengers had ever appeared to me, either. Unless Viktor, that mysterious guy in Moscow, had really been an angel …

  Me? I just saw the future. In biblical times, God had used visions and dreams to deliver messages to people back then. I guessed that was sort of the same thing for me, because Prière had told me that my prophecies were to be considered warnings. First John 4:1 said that prophets were supposed to test their prophecies, which was what the whole intercession report system in the Mission League was for. Prière had taught me how to keep my intercession journal and submit reports to Mr. S, who sent them to the international office.

  But that didn’t tell me anything about what I was supposed to do with these visions. How was I supposed to know when God wanted me to sit back and when He wanted me to act?

  I had no clue. And everyone I’d asked had said the same thing: Pray.

  Which was something I sucked at, apparently, because God never answered me.

  ● ● ●

  Rock Academy in San Diego had invited some bigger schools to their basketball tournament, including our hometown rivals, Pilot Point High. PPH wasn’t as big of a threat to us though. But the Rock Academy “Drillers” not only looked like a bunch of guys who worked on an oil rig, they fought like it too.

  After a traveling call, their point guard threw the ball at me, and I jammed my fingers trying to catch it. The same guy—who didn’t know how to steal without fouling—also gave me a set of scratches down my arm. I scored twelve points off bonus free throws, though, so I was good with it.

  Mike had a black eye from their center’s elbow. Kip sprained his knee. And Desh got thrown out of the game on his second technical foul for pushing one of their players.

  Despite how hard we fought, they beat us in the opening game, which knocked us into the loser’s bracket. So sad.

  That night, we camped out in a math classroom to sleep. I rolled out my sleeping bag in the far corner underneath a pi poster. We might not be able to win the tournament now, but we still had a chance at fourth, and I still had a chance at an all-star trophy, so I wanted to get some sleep.

  Some of the guys were wound up, though, trading dirty jokes and stories of their dating conquests. I popped in my ear buds and dozed off.

  ● ● ●

  “Let her go. Please?” I say. My hands are trapped. I’m trapped.

  Anya Vseveloda steps into my vision. She’s dressed all in white. A fancy suit of some kind. Her hair is down and wild. Her lips are blood red. They twist into a smile as she raises a knife to my face. She’s enjoying this. “Just seeing how much you want this delights me. I think she will help us get information from you. Yes. I think she will be very helpful.”

  I glance over and see two girls in a restaurant booth: one is the Asian swimmer I’ve dreamed of before, the other is slumped over the table, curly brown hair in a ponytail. Is she bleeding? I can’t see her face.

  I awoke, my heart thumping hard, irregularly, reminding me of that old Morse code stuff. Did some hearts beat harder than others? Was that normal? Maybe I had some sort of heart malfunction …

  I lay there wondering if I was going to die, but then I woke up enough to gather my senses. Voices. Laughing and whispering. I could barely see the poster of pi on the wall in the darkness. Right. We were in San Diego at the tournament. It had been a dream. Duh.

  I rolled over and dug my intercession journal out of my backpack. It had been a few weeks since I’d had something to log. Prière had taught me how to keep track of the glimpses and dreams I had. A “glimpse” was a prophecy that came when I was awake, while a “dream,” obviously, was a prophecy that came when I was asleep. A dream as freaky as the one about Anya torturing me and some half-dead girl was going to have to go into an official report too. Nothing like getting the Mission League bigwigs focused on little old me again. I only hoped the dream would act as a warning and not actually happen at some point.

  But the pretty Asian girl … I’d seen her before in my dreams. Swimming in the ocean. Was I going to see her this summer? Couldn’t say that I’d mind that.

  I sat up inside my sleeping bag and used My Precious—my iPhone—as a flashlight as I jotted down the facts of the dream. The air conditioning kicked on, rumbling in the ceiling and blowing a gust of chilled air down on me. I wasn’t wearing a shirt, so I shivered.

  Desh’s honking laugh pulled my gaze across the room. Kip, Desh, Chaz, Mike, and Wyatt were sitting in a group by the door, their faces lit by cell phones and Mike’s 3DS screen. The rest of the guys were asleep.

  “Let’s go, then.” Desh pushed up to a squatting position. “You guys coming?”

  Mike shut his 3DS. “I’m in.”

  “We’ll get busted,” Wyatt said.

  “Not if we’re quick.” This from Kip. He lo
oked at his phone, then leaned back and shoved it into his front pants pocket. “Megan said they’ve got a lookout.”

  Megan. Gag me. Kip and his girlfriend were like a pair of neodymium magnets.

  Kip saw me then and smiled. He got up and stepped over Alex’s sleeping form, then Dan’s. His foot whacked Dan’s leg. Dan groaned and rolled over. Kip froze until he saw that Dan was still again, then continued across the room and crouched beside my sleeping bag. His shaggy dark hair hung in his eyes. “We’re going to hang with some cheerleaders and the girls’ team,” Kip said. “The coaches are in a meeting. Come with us.”

  I looked at my iPhone. It was 1:36 a.m. “Dude, we have a game at eight.” Why were the coaches still up? Why was anybody up?

  Kip snorted. “Just Bishop. We can’t win the tournament anymore, anyway. Come on. It’ll be fun.”

  “We still need to play our best.” Don’t get me wrong, I liked girls as much as the next guy, but time and place, man. We were here to play ball. And if these knuckleheads messed up tomorrow’s game—and my chance at an all-star trophy—I was going to kick some heads.

  “Don’t be lame,” Kip said. “It’s just until the coaches’ meeting is over.”

  I said what I hoped would get rid of Kip. “Yeah, I’ll catch up with you. I’m not dressed.”

  “’Kay. Room 127.” Kip made his way back to the door where Desh, Mike, Wyatt, and Chaz were now standing. They all took off down the hall, whispering and punching each other.

  Morons.

  I rolled over and went back to sleep.

  ● ● ●

  “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!”

  Light flooded the room. I jerked awake, recoiling at the brightness. I pushed up onto one elbow and shielded my eyes with my other hand. Everyone was scrambling around, putting on shoes. I checked the time on my iPhone—2:43 a.m.? That couldn’t be right. There was no blaring alarm, though, so the place couldn’t be on fire.