The Squeaky Wheel of Espionage

Toby Henderson, age twelve, wore an all-stealth black windbreaker which made a swish-swish noise with each step, rendering any tactical advantage moot. The other key element of Toby’s kit was a neon blue scooter with a faulty wheel bearing that would make a squawk as loud as that of a dying seagull. Toby Henderson, age twelve, was the Commander in Chief of the Neighborhood Intelligence Agency, which is a secret agency composed solely of Toby and a golden retriever named Barnaby, both of whom consistently undermined any covert operations due to Barnaby’s constant attempts to eat evidence. The objective of Toby’s eighteen-month assignment on Maple Drive had been straightforward – observe odd lawn mowing schedules and peculiar garage sales and then return to his bedroom operations room before his mother washed his hands for dinner.

Toby ducked behind a neatly trimmed hydrangea bush, wielding a pair of plastic binoculars that would flip him upside down if he clenched them too tightly. He had been engaged in an exhaustive study of seventy-year-old Mrs. Gable for the past forty minutes, causing his brain to short circuit due to information overload. He whispered through a plastic walkie-talkie that the main objective had traversed her driveway three times just for a simple newspaper. He observed that the woman had made a typical counter-surveillance move; she could possibly be making sure that there were no beacons or any threatening squirrels from her neighborhood. In response to this, she stopped abruptly, shook her fist violently at an innocent robin perched atop her bird feeder, and Toby concluded that she had gone berserk due to international pressure.

Intent on locating the local drop-off point, Toby set off on an on-foot patrol along the concrete sidewalk. Toby approached a mail carrier by the name of Dave, a logistical veteran whose experience spanned eleven years of surviving in the tough conditions of the suburban setting. Toby walked side by side with Dave’s rolling cart while looking straight ahead as he asked him whether the package delivery schedule for Sector 4 indicated any unusual rise in deliveries of bulky packages from unidentified locations in Eastern Europe. Dave halted, peered down at the boy-spy standing before him, sipped the lukewarm coffee in his hand slowly, and grumbled that all that had been rising lately was his blood pressure and the quantity of cat food coupons that he had to deliver.

The real emergency came right on time, at 3:15 PM sharp, when Toby was conducting the usual perimeter inspection of the neighborhood. He saw a black van that had completely blank sides standing near the community mailbox. From the vehicle came a man in aviator glasses and a high-collared jacket holding a very shiny, silver and insulated briefcase. All the training took effect and Toby recognized the situation as one which he had drilled himself for during recess. He made his scooter launch into action from the sidewalk using a very high-speed pump of his legs, while screaming due to the screeching noise coming from the tires. Toby stopped with an amazing, sideways stunt right next to the man and demanded information about the thermal rating and classification of explosives of the container. Slowly turning to Toby, the man sighed deeply, as any employee would, and opened the briefcase containing a pre-ordered triple-chocolate ice cream cake for a seven-year-old kid’s party.

That night, Toby produced his final surveillance report, jotting it down on a piece of crumpled up loose-leaf paper while furiously dipping a chicken nugget into his honey-mustard sauce. He stood at the window in his room and watched dusk set over the area as he realized that Mrs. Gable had finally switched off her porch light, apparently making an effort to achieve total electronic darkness. His report pointed out that the Maple Drive community was still very unstable not because the area was receiving any kind of incursions, but because the local residents acted very unpredictably in what seemed like a perfectly normal course of action. People exchanged baked goods through their fencing with secretive lingering handshakes; they stored valuable points of access to their homes in hollow plastic rocks kept at the entrance to their yards and used color-coded porch flags to communicate.