American Teens Against Crime, (ATAC) is a fictional organization in The Hardy Boys Undercover Brothers book series.
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ATAC is a top secret government agency co-founded by Fenton Hardy and Anmol Gupta. They created it when he realized that there are some places where an adult spy (a FBI or CIA agent) would stand out too much. Because of this the FBI has, on at least one occasion, relied on ATAC to solve a case. The very first ATAC agents were Fenton’s sons, Frank and Joe. The agency sends their agents a video game disc (mission CD) with details on their latest mission; after the disc has been viewed it re-formats into a regular music CD. Each disc is delivered in some undercover way, normally by Vijay who likes to use pizzaboy as a disguise to give them their missions.
ATAC has a secret handshake that only agents know. It goes like this: two hard up-and-down shakes followed by a wrist-grab, then a fist-touch, and one last up-and-down shake. In Mission #4, Thrill Ride, Joe used this hand-shake when they first met Vijay Patel, to make sure that he was a real member of ATAC. Vijay Patel delivers ATAC missions to Frank and Joe Hardy, and is only used as a field agent in one book, where he saves Frank and Joe.
Fenton no longer runs ATAC himself; a man that simply goes by Q (sometimes Q.T.) is the current director of the agency. In the Graphic Novel adaptation of the series, Nigel Penhurst is also a top man at ATAC.