Spy Camp

“‘You know what it doesn’t have?’ Tina asked sullenly. ‘Crime. It was ranked the second-safest city in the world last year. Its homicide rate is almost nonexistent. What kind of field experience am I gonna get there?’”

Tina’s negative reaction to being assigned to the city of Vancouver—rather than somewhere “dangerous. Mogadishu. Bogotá. Anywhere in Pakistan” (26)—

demonstrates the unique mindset of the Academy students. While Ben still wants to avoid danger and discomfort, the others see it as a symbol of the agency’s faith in them. Tina later laments, “I’m never going to get a death threat. […] Certainly not in Vancouver” (27). Interactions like this make Ben realize how different he is from his schoolmates.

“I’d assumed that all British agents would be well mannered and proper, forgetting that England was also the world’s number one producer of soccer hooligans.”

Ben’s reaction to Claire’s introductory attack at spy camp helps to establish his sense of humor in dealing with the strange developments in his life since his recruitment. Though he is often spoken down to, and many students assume that his “Smokescreen” persona covers actual ineptitude, Ben maintains a generally positive outlook and finds humor in his difficult situations.

“I knew what was going on. It was the first time any of them had been privy to an active investigation. It’s hard to act normal when you’re in circumstances that aren’t normal at all.”

Much of Ben’s time at spy school has been “in circumstances that aren’t normal at all” (69), but he has managed to thrive, making friends, improving his performance in class, and serving as a key agent on important missions. His ability to recognize the struggle in his peers shows that he is an empathetic person who can understand the perspectives of others.

“A few months before, I would have been thrilled by the attention, but since then, I’d learned that Alexander Hale wasn’t as great as he led everyone to believe he was. The man was a fraud, a middling spy at best, whose glorious reputation was built upon stealing the credit for other people’s work and exaggerating his own exploits.”

Ben’s negative experience with having Alexander steal credit for apprehending Murray Hill helps him to understand that adults cannot always be trusted or relied on. His thoughts about Alexander here reflect the growing-up that Ben is doing as he adapts to this formative realization—Ben is moving out of a childish time of faith in grown-ups and into a more mature understanding of the fallibility of adults.

“There may be no bigger motivator to a twelve-year-old boy than not wanting to look like a weenie in front of an attractive girl.”

Erica’s respect and approval are powerful motivators for Ben. Erica is the best spy Ben knows, adult agents included, and she’s also beautiful. His combined respect for and attraction to her drive him to earn her esteem. The fear of losing it motivates Ben to act even when he is terrified to move forward. (See: Quotes 15 and 25).

“‘I’m not even a single agent yet,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’m quite ready to be a double agent.’ I had thought about doing what Zoe suggested, but the mere thought of it was overwhelming and gave me a stomach-ache.”

An important theme in the novel is Courage Despite Fear. Passages like this one help to establish that Ben, despite his willingness to act in dangerous circumstances, does so with fear, not in the absence of it.

“The point is, I’m not going to get angry at you. That gets us nowhere. It only wastes time and energy—and if this were a true survival situation, we would not have time or energy to waste. The first thing you do in a life-or-death situation is figure out how to work together.”

Woodchuck’s pre-SPYDER-attack lesson on teamwork explicitly states one of the themes of the novel: Teamwork has far better outcomes than working alone. His words foreshadow the ways in which Ben, the Hales, and the other students will have to come together and work collaboratively in order to stop SPYDER.

“Perhaps [Woodchuck had] been clocked in the head by a piece of flying debris. Or maybe he’d simply fainted in fear. Whatever the case, he wasn’t going to be any help.”

Though the other campers have told Ben that Woodchuck is a “real” spy and worthy of admiration, Ben is not inclined to place his faith in the adults in his life. His dismissive comments here show that Ben has little to no expectation of real help from Woodchuck. This helps support the motif of incompetent adults in the novel.

“I didn’t know what to do. I normally wouldn’t have trusted Alexander, but now, in the heat of battle, he certainly seemed sure of himself.”

Despite Ben’s lack of faith in Alexander, the man’s confidence under fire inspires Ben to follow him. This connects to the theme of The Damaging Effects of Self-Doubt and The Value of Confidence, showing what a difference it can make when someone believes in themselves; though Ben knows Alexander is incompetent, he is still compelled to follow the man’s confidence in a dangerous situation.

“Erica seethed. She, too, looked nothing like her usual self under the circumstances. It wasn’t just that she was water-logged like the rest of us. It was that, for once, her unflappable calm was gone.”

Erica’s loss of control is more of an indication of wrongness for Ben than her scathing comments to Alexander are. He is surprised by her anger at Alexander—he notes earlier that “the level of contempt she showed him surprised me”—but what really alerts him to something being wrong is Erica’s loss of cool. She is always calm and collected under pressure, so her loss of temper is a serious indicator that something has happened. This also develops Erica and Ben’s relationship, as it shows that Ben knows her very well.

“Alexander sagged, even more ashamed than before. It was shocking to see how the man who had once represented all that was wonderful and glorious about espionage to me could now look so pitiful after a dressing down by his own daughter.”

Erica’s campaign of disparaging comments to Alexander affect the man profoundly. As his confidence collapses, so does his motivation. For the rest of their travels through the wilderness, Alexander is mopey and miserable, barely dragging himself along behind them. The effects of Erica and Cyrus’s cutting accusations of incompetence help to develop the novel’s theme of the harm self-doubt can cause.

“Virtually everything the CIA knows about SPYDER is what Murray told you. Everything else is mere speculation. In fact, that conversation was the first direct evidence the CIA ever had that SPYDER even existed.”

Though Ben does not necessarily see himself as a valuable member of the agency, Erica points out that he is the person who has gotten the closest to SPYDER in all of their years of operation. This makes Ben feel better about himself, but also makes him worry that the CIA has no way of protecting them from an organization they know so little about.

“I racked my brain, trying to think of any incredible thing I’d ever done. Yes, I could do somewhat complicated multiplication and division in my head, but as Erica had pointed out, anyone with a calculator could get the same answers. As far as I knew, I couldn’t instinctively crack codes or hack computers or disarm ninjas.”

Ben cannot figure out what special skill he could have that would make SPYDER want him. This shows his lack of confidence in himself, as well as his conviction that there is nothing about him that could be appealing to SPYDER the way he understands himself to be. At this stage of the book, he has yet to embrace his individual strengths of deductive reasoning, courage, and out-of-the-box thinking.

“In truth, I didn’t just want to figure out why SPYDER wanted me; I wanted to figure it out before Erica did. I wanted to impress her. For the past few hours, she’d been the hero, and I’d been the damsel in distress, constantly needing rescuing. It would be nice to remind her I wasn’t merely deadweight.”

Ben’s admiration for Erica makes him want to earn her respect and approval. Like with Quotes 6 and 25, this passage shows how Ben’s desire for Erica’s positive regard motivates him to perform better. Much of Ben’s courage is in defense of Erica or in search of her approval; this is not just because he likes her as a girl, but because he admires her as a spy and wants to be worthy of her partnership.

“‘What if he has to go to the bathroom?’ I asked.

‘According to Alexander, once when he was on a mission in Djakarta, he refrained from going to the bathroom for three days straight, so he ought to be able to handle another few hours.’”

This passage is an example of Erica using her father’s exaggerated boasts against him. In her anger at Alexander, she also refuses to collect food for him, saying, “He’s spent my whole life telling me how great he is at everything. I figure he can find his own” (144). Erica has long known that her father is a fraud, but her attitude toward him in this book is outright hostile as a result of his placing the blame for his own screw-up on her.

“Alexander frowned. His desire to do the right thing seemed to be battling his general tendency to make himself look good at all costs.”

In this observation, Ben is acknowledging that there is something good in Alexander—a part of him that desires “to do the right thing” (186). It’s one of the few positive assessments of Alexander that occurs before the conclusion of the novel.

“‘We here at Apple Valley strongly believe in ‘Reformation through Contemplation.’ The best way to make a child a productive member of society isn’t with the lash. it’s with love.’ Brandi beamed happily at the thought of this, and for a moment I thought she might burst into song.”

This passage effectively establishes the setting and philosophy of the facility where Murray is supposed to be imprisoned. Ben is astonished by the lax security and indulgent practices, noticing that inmates are playing sports and doing yoga in the minimal-security detention center.

“Sweat broke out on her brow. I’d seen the principal of spy school behave this way enough times to recognize it: It was the standard reaction of a government employee who’d just realized that a serious mistake had been made, and who was desperately looking for a way to pin the blame on someone else.”

This encounter adds to the novel’s motif of incompetent adults. Like Alexander and the principal of spy school, the prison representative is more concerned with looking good than she is with acting to fix the problem.

“‘Can the malarkey, will you?’ Cyrus snapped. ‘I’m your father, Alexander, not some knucklehead CIA director. I know when you’re lying.’”

One of Cyrus’s first harsh comments to Alexander works both to establish their father-son relationship and to support the book’s motif of incompetent adults. Cyrus hints that Alexander is useless, but also acknowledges the inefficacy of the top brass at the CIA.

“Apparently it was common for children to participate in the Civil War, and thus, lots of fathers had brought their sons along for a fun family weekend of simulated violence and bloodshed. As opposed to Erica’s family, who were bringing her along for a weekend of actual violence and bloodshed.”

Ben takes a moment as the team shifts into a new phase of the mission, recognizing what an unusual family the Hales are. Erica, as the youngest in a long line of spies, has the dedication and aptitude to live up to her family’s legacy, but moments like this remind the reader that the espionage business is not a “normal” one, even if it may seem that way to the students at spy school.

“Yes, Alexander was a cad, a phony, and an opportunist, but I got the sense that he’d spent a great deal of his life trying to impress his father and had never received so much as a smile in return.”

This observation helps build sympathy for Alexander and provides a way to better understand how Alexander became the kind of person he is. Having been deprived of approval from his father—and now, his daughter—Alexander has been desperate for positive attention. Feeling incapable of earning it on his own, partially due to his father’s lack of belief in him, Alexander has seized any opportunity to claim it for himself. This has included stealing the credit for the work of others, which is wrong, but Ben is able to understand some of why Alexander does what he does. Later, Alexander explains, “Nothing I ever did was good enough for him” (236), and describes a childhood spent failing to accomplish adult tasks, then being judged harshly for his failures. This explains what motivates Alexander as a character and puts his credit-stealing habits in the context of his childhood and insecurities.

“I leaned back against the cannon, feeling useless. All the things SPYDER had said about me had turned out to be lies. I didn’t have a secret, amazing talent. I wasn’t more valuable to them than Erica Hale. I wasn’t an incredible spy in any way, shape, or form. It had all been a ruse to lure a real incredible spy out of hiding.”

The realization that SPYDER is actually after Cyrus and not Ben really shakes Ben’s self-confidence. Where he’d been excited to think that he had some innate skill that SPYDER recognized, he now feels useless and foolish. This shows how self-doubt can be damaging and negatively affect a person. Ben, needing the outside validation of being seen as special by other people, is crushed when that approval is taken away.

“But then something occurred to me, something important about Alexander. ‘No,’ I said. ‘That can’t be true. That’s Erica talking. I mean, I know you’ve lied. I know you stole the credit from me for capturing Murray Hill... […] But you can’t build an entire career on that […]. You couldn’t possibly have the reputation you do without some talents.’”

Ben’s words of encouragement to Alexander help the man feel more confident in his individual skills. Alexander is wallowing in self-doubt and the cruel words of his family, but he regains some of his motivation when Ben tells him he has some value. This supports the novel’s theme of the Damaging Effects of Self-Doubt and the Value of Self-Confidence. It also supports the novel’s recurring idea of acknowledging and valuing individual strengths.