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  Horse Spy

  RL: 5, ages 009–012

  HORSE SPY

  A Bantam Skylark Book / September 2000

  “The Saddle Club” is a registered trademark of Bonnie Bryant Hiller. The Saddle Club design/logo, which consists of a riding crop and a riding hat, is a trademark of Bantam Books.

  “USPC” and “Pony Club” are registered trademarks of The United States Pony Clubs, Inc., at The Kentucky Horse Park, 4071 Iron Works Pike, Lexington, KY 40511-8462.

  All rights reserved

  Text copyright © 2000 by Bonnie Bryant

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82599-5

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Skylark is an imprint of Random House Children’s Books. SKYLARK BOOK and colophon and BANTAM BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc., Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1

  Special thanks to Laura Roper of Sir “B” Farms

  I would like to express my thanks to Special Agent Kingsley C. Chimene of the Secret Service, Vice President Protective Detail, for his technical help. Everything that is correct about protective services is due to him. Any errors are all mine.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books You Will Enjoy

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  UNEXPECTED VISITORS

  Three black sedans drew to a stop in the parking area. Twelve car doors opened at once and from each emerged a man dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie, wearing the same completely blank expression.

  Steve froze, wondering what on earth was about to happen.

  One of the men strode toward her.

  “We’re looking for someone named Carl,” he said in moderately accented English.

  “Nobody here by that name,” Stevie said. “No Carls at all.”

  “Not Carl,” the man said, ever so slightly annoyed. “Carl.” He emphasized it as if saying it more loudly would make it clearer.

  “There is no man here named Carl,” Stevie told him firmly.

  “Not a man. A girl,” he said, the late-afternoon sun glinting off his reflective sunglasses.

  “A girl? Carl?” And then it struck her. “Carole? You mean Carole Hanson?”

  “That’s what I said. Carl.”

  And then he held out his hand to show her something. It was paper. It had pictures of horses on it. And Stevie understood everything.

  She signaled the man to follow her back to the schooling ring. As Stevie approached, Carole and Lisa stared intently at their friend, who was being followed by a very sinister-looking man in a black suit and shiny sunglasses.

  “Oh, Carole!” Stevie sang out. “These guys have something to say to you!”

  “LOOK AT THIS GUY!” Carole Hanson held out the glossy magazine to her two best friends. “He’s so good-looking!”

  Lisa Atwood took the magazine. “Handsome!” she said. She passed the picture on to Stevie Lake.

  “What a body!”

  “What a face!”

  “Have you ever seen such legs?” Carole asked.

  “I bet he’s a great jumper,” Stevie agreed.

  “He’d better be,” Lisa said, looking at the caption. “His owner has him entered in every major show in the country.”

  “And I bet he wins them all—at least in jumping,” said Carole. “Have you finished that article in Modern Rider?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Lisa said. “Swap you that for the new Young Horsemen, okay?”

  “Deal,” Carole said. “How are you doing, Stevie?”

  Stevie looked up from her copy of Rider and Trainer with a big grin of contentment on her face. “I am so glad you know how to save your allowance and use it for magazine subscriptions,” she said. “Otherwise I’d never have seen this article on longeing. It’s going to do wonders for Belle’s balance. Mine too, I think.”

  The three girls were sprawled on the furniture in Carole’s room, combing through back issues of all her horse magazines and enjoying every minute of it. They were in the right environment to enjoy horse magazines, too, because Carole’s room was simply filled with horses. Every inch of the wall was covered with horse posters—every inch, that was, except for the several square yards that were specifically devoted to photographs of horses—and some riders.

  The girls often said that it would be hard to find three people who were less alike than they were, but they were firmly joined by their shared love of horses. In fact, they were all so horse-crazy that they’d formed their own club and called it The Saddle Club. It had only two rules. The first one was that all the members had to be horse-crazy. That was easy. The second rule wasn’t always so easy. It was that the members had to be willing to help one another out, no matter what.

  It often seemed that the one who needed help the most often was Stevie. She was an expert at getting into trouble, often brought on by schemes and practical jokes, two of her favorite things (right after horses). She was a fair student at school, and she claimed that she’d do much better if her teachers didn’t always want to send her to the principal’s office and make her miss class time. Her teachers and the principal didn’t see eye to eye with Stevie on the root of that problem. One of Stevie’s favorite targets for jokes and schemes was her brothers. She had three of them: one younger, one older, and one twin. She frequently felt a need to equalize her three-to-one disadvantage with jokes on her brothers. The results often got her in hot water at home as well as at school.

  Lisa, on the other hand, was almost never in hot water. She was a straight-A student who had never been sent to the principal’s office. She was always organized. Her homework assignments were handed in on time. Her clothes were always clean and ironed, which contrasted with Stevie, whose idea of clean when it came to clothes usually meant something rescued from the top of her laundry pile.

  Lisa had a brother, Peter, who was much older and was living abroad. This meant that her life was similar to that of an only child. She got a lot of attention from both of her parents, but especially from her mother. Mrs. Atwood wanted to be absolutely certain that Lisa learned all the things a proper young lady should know. Lisa swore she’d taken lessons in everything that anyone could teach—from the obvious, like piano and ballet, to the more obscure, like embroidery and etiquette. Lisa went to all these lessons obediently, but the only ones she cared about were her riding lessons.

  Clearheaded Lisa could often
straighten out the tangled threads of Stevie’s thinking and help solve the problems that their knots had caused. Lisa was the oldest of the threesome and also the newest to riding. In spite of the fact that her friends had years of experience beyond her own, she’d applied her cool thinking, her logic, and her determination to the subject of horses and before too long had become nearly their equal in skills.

  Of the three horse-crazy girls, Carole was the horse-craziest. She’d been raised on Marine Corps bases where her father, now a colonel, had worked. They’d lived in many places, but the one thing all the bases had in common was that they all had stables. Carole often observed that the one true constant in her life was horses. She’d always had them, and she swore she always would. She knew she would work with horses when she grew up; she just hadn’t decided what she’d do with them, whether she’d be a vet or a trainer or a breeder or a rider or a stable manager—or maybe all of those.

  Carole’s mother had died a few years earlier of cancer, leaving Carole and her father to live alone in the first house they’d ever owned. All through her mother’s illness and Carole’s grieving afterward, horses remained a source of comfort. Carole missed her mother every day, but she adored her father. In fact, she thought he was just about perfect. He didn’t even mind that every surface in her room was totally covered with horses.

  Carole flipped the pages of Modern Rider and got three sentences into the lead story when she realized she’d already read it. She tossed the magazine aside.

  “So, what do you think about our new visitors?” she asked.

  Her friends both knew what she was talking about. Pine Hollow, the stable where they rode together, was going to have two visiting champions.

  “Polaris and what?” Stevie asked, forgetting the second horse’s name.

  “Jennie’s Blue,” Lisa supplied. “I think she’s called just plain Blue, though.”

  “Right,” Stevie said. “I didn’t get why it is they’re staying at Pine Hollow, though.”

  “It’s because of Dorothy,” Carole explained. Dorothy DeSoto was a former student of Max Regnery, who was The Saddle Club’s riding instructor and the owner of Pine Hollow Stables. Dorothy herself had been a competition rider, probably headed for the international show circuit and the Olympics, when she’d been thrown in a bad accident that had hurt her back.

  The good news was that she’d recovered. The bad news was that her doctor had explained that her back would always be vulnerable and she could never ride competitively again. One more injury and she might not be so lucky at all. Dorothy had taken the bad news in stride and made the decision to become a trainer. She had a farm on Long Island, New York, and two of her young students were fast becoming excellent riders. Those were the owners of Polaris and Jennie’s Blue.

  “Max said that Dorothy’s back was acting up and she’s confined to bed for a while,” said Carole. “She asked Max to fine-tune the horses’ training before the show in Washington in two weeks. Their owners can’t do any work over the next two weeks—except for next weekend, maybe—so the horses will stay at Pine Hollow and get VIP treatment. Plus training.”

  “All the horses at Pine Hollow get VIP treatment,” Lisa commented.

  “Well, VIP-er,” said Stevie.

  “How could that be?” Lisa asked, applying her usual logic.

  “I think what Stevie means is that we’ll be responsible for some of the care they get, and what could be better than that?” Carole said.

  “Well, do you suppose if we take the VIP-est care of them, Max will let us watch the training? It would be really good for all of us—and just plain fun,” Stevie said with a grin.

  “He might let us cool them down after a training session,” Lisa said, imagining herself holding the lead of one of Pine Hollow’s valuable visitors.

  Carole was shuffling through the magazines again. “You know, I think I saw an article about young champions somewhere in here. I wonder if the writer mentions anything about these horses or their riders. What are their names?”

  “Polaris and Jennie’s Blue,” Lisa said.

  “I know the horses’ names,” Carole said. “I meant the riders’.”

  Stevie laughed. “Come on, Lisa, you know that Carole could forget where she left her own head, but she’d never forget a horse’s name!”

  “Silly me,” Lisa teased, reaching once again for a magazine from the stack.

  For a while there was only the sound of pages flipping.

  “Not here,” said Stevie.

  “Nothing in here,” Lisa said. “Except for a pretty interesting article about some president’s daughter …”

  “Oh, right. I started to read that one,” Carole said. “Then I figured it couldn’t be real.”

  “Sure it is,” Lisa said. She held up the magazine and showed her friends the smiling picture of a girl their own age. “Karya Nazeem,” she said. “Pretty name. Anyway, it says her father’s just been elected president of this little country in the Middle East. It’s called the ADR, the Arab Democratic Republic.”

  “I’ve heard about that place,” Carole said. “Dad was talking about it. He said her father’s a really good guy and he’s trying to do all sorts of progressive things—”

  “Not to hear Karya talk about it,” said Lisa. She ran her finger along the column of type as she scanned the story. “She’s complaining here about how nobody ever lets her do anything for herself anymore now that her father’s the president. She says that being the president’s daughter is mostly fine, but … Here it is: ‘Sometimes I just wish they’d let me muck out my own horse’s stall!’ ”

  Stevie hooted with laughter. “I guess I should have picked my parents more carefully!” she said. “They, and everybody else, will always let me muck out anything!”

  “Just the places that get really messy, like Belle’s stall and your closet!” Lisa teased.

  Stevie laughed, too. “Well,” she started to protest, and then thought better of it. Her friends had seen her closet.

  “Imagine never having to do any of the dirty work that has to do with horses,” Stevie said.

  “It would mean being just like Veronica!” said Lisa. Veronica diAngelo was a snooty rich girl who rode at Pine Hollow and always seemed to manage to get out of any kind of dirty work. In fact, she seemed to think that her only responsibility with regard to her horse was to ride him—when she felt like it.

  That wasn’t the Pine Hollow way—at all. Max believed that riding a horse was just one of the things that was important about horsemanship, and he insisted that all his riders look after the horses they rode as much as they could. The Saddle Club might have complained about mucking out stalls and cleaning tack from time to time, but they all agreed that these were important parts of horse care. Not only did they learn more about horses from the care they gave them, but their pitching in also meant that Pine Hollow could keep its costs down and make riding accessible to more people—including The Saddle Club.

  “Well, we could invite the girl—what’s her name?”

  “Karya,” Lisa said.

  “Karya, right, and her horse is a chestnut Arabian with three white socks and a blaze on his face, right?” Carole asked.

  Lisa laughed. “You’re right, Stevie. Carole remembered every single detail about the horse, but not his owner’s name!”

  “Well, at least I know what’s important!” Carole huffed, pretending to be annoyed. “Anyway, we should invite her to come ride at Pine Hollow. I’m sure Max will find a few stalls for her to muck out, and Mrs. Reg will no doubt have a saddle or two that she wants to be able to see her face in.”

  Lisa looked down at the magazine again. “We could, you know.”

  “We could what?” Stevie asked.

  “Invite her to Pine Hollow,” said Lisa.

  “To muck out stalls?” Carole asked.

  “Well, that, and I guess she could do some grooming, and I bet you could show her a few things about the fine art of picking hooves,” L
isa said to Stevie.

  “Wouldn’t that be a dumb thing—to invite her here?” Carole asked.

  “Not really,” said Lisa. “Says here that she’s looking forward to coming to Washington on a trip with her father. It doesn’t say when, but I think it’s pretty soon.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Stevie.

  “No, I mean it. Look at this,” Lisa said, offering the magazine to Stevie.

  “I’m sure you’ve read it right,” Stevie said. “I just think it’s silly to offer some president’s daughter the honor of picking out Prancer’s hooves.”

  “Let me see that,” Carole said, reaching for the magazine.

  Lisa handed it to her. “Carole, you’re not really considering inviting her to visit Pine Hollow, are you?”

  “No way,” said Carole. But she put the magazine down, walked over to her desk, and began shuffling through a pile of papers. After a few seconds she sat down at the desk, a pen in one hand and a sheet of her best stationery in front of her.

  “Looks like you’re writing a letter,” said Stevie.

  “I am,” said Carole. “I’m writing to Karya Nazeem to invite her to come for a ride with us.”

  “Carole!” Stevie said. “She’ll never do it.”

  “I know she won’t. But she just might answer me. Or she might have one of her father’s secretaries answer me, and then I’ll have what I really want.”

  “Huh?”

  “If they answer the letter, I’ll get a stamp from the Arab Democratic Republic on the envelope, and that’ll be a great present for Dad. He has a stamp collection, you know, and he was talking about this country and this girl’s father. He’d think that was cool.”

  “Great idea!” said Lisa.

  “Isn’t there someone else there you could write to?” Stevie asked.

  “You think I should invite President Nazeem to pick Prancer’s hooves?” Carole teased.

  “No, I guess it’s okay. You might just get an answer in time for your dad’s birthday. It’s what—four months?”