Operation Firewall (Spycraft Academy, #1) (eBook, ePUB)

Noah Quinn was just another smart kid with a bad habithacking the school network for fununtil the day a black-suited agent showed up at his door with a scholarship and a secret.Welcome to Spycraft Academy, where the world‘s most gifted teens are trained to become the next generation of covert operatives. But behind the elite training programs and high-tech simulations, something dangerous is lurking in the system.When a classified AI known as Echo escapes its containment and begins rewriting the rules of the Academy, Noah and his new team must uncover the truth about its creator, a legendary agent turned rogue... and stop Echo‘s final protocol before it spreads beyond the walls.The mission? Break into a secure server core, outthink a digital ghost, and survive a betrayal from within. No pressure.For fans of Spy School and City Spies, this fast-paced adventure is the explosive start to a bold new series where the real enemy might just be the code that knows you best.Sneak Preview of Chapter One: The Hack Heard ‘Round the WorldNoah Quinn had always believed there was a right way and a wrong way to do things. And then there was the barely wrong way like hacking into your school‘s grading system at midnight on a Tuesday.He wasn‘t doing it for himself, which had to count for something. No, this was strictly for Marcus. Marcus, who had nearly aced every robotics tournament since fourth grade, who could build a functioning drone out of two paper clips and a plastic spoon but couldn‘t pass math to save his life.And if Marcus failed math, he‘d be off the team. Which meant Northview Middle would lose regionals. Which meant Noah would lose his best (and only real) friend to a sad spiral of after-school tutoring and social doom.So really, Noah was performing a public service.The glow of his laptop was the only light in his room, casting ghostly shadows on the cluttered desk and walls plastered with blueprints, gadget schematics, and sticky notes in a very specific color-coded system."Come on," he muttered, tapping the enter key. "Let‘s do the math, firewall. What‘s four divided by zero?"A second later, he was in. Sort of.A bright yellow warning pulsed on the screen: SECURITY VERIFICATION LEVEL 3 INITIATED.Noah frowned. That wasn‘t normal. Level 1 was standard. Level 2 was rare. He‘d never even seen Level 3. Not in any of the school‘s subsystems. Not anywhere."Okay, weird," he murmured. "Maybe they updated something."His cursor hovered over the pop-up window. He hesitated, then clicked Continue.Another line of code flashed.Access route: external node 6B-DC. Connection logged."What the heck is 6B-DC?" he whispered.And then his screen glitched.The cursor vanished. The terminal window froze. Then a new one appeared black background, lime green text and started auto-scrolling lines of unfamiliar code. It wasn‘t his code. He hadn‘t typed anything.This wasn‘t school code. It wasn‘t even in the same ballpark.The scrolling stopped. Another message blinked at him.Violation detected. Response protocol initiated.Noah‘s heart did a full gymnastics routine in his chest."Nononononono"He slammed his palm onto the power button. Nothing. The screen stayed black. He yanked the charger, unplugged everything, popped the battery loose old school style.Dead.Totally, irreversibly, terrifyingly dead.He stared at the blank screen in the dark, pulse racing, stomach doing cartwheels."This," he whispered, "is bad."And somewhere, far away from Noah‘s bedroom, a red alert lit up in a government server farm just outside Washington, D.C.