Down to the Wire (13 page)

That evening, Wirenut and I
knelt behind a gravestone, scoping out the back side of the Museum of History. Three entrance possibilities: front door, side window, rear door. No other entry points existed on the one-room stone structure.

To the untrained, the building had the lure of an easy job. The old
looks can be deceiving
held true in this instance. I’d learned a lot from Wirenut during this morning’s surveillance.

A camera mounted on the building’s upper-left corner pointed straight at the back door. A novice would avoid the back door and break in the side window because of that camera. Wrong decision. Everything’s about illusion in this business. A mere breath, change in temperature, or slight touch on that window would immediately set off the alarm.

“Any other night I’d go in that window,” Wirenut whispered. “For the sheer challenge of it.”

“Don’t get sidetracked,” I warned. But I totally understood. Nothing felt more satisfying than cracking a system no one had ever broken. The only difference was I had to have a reason. Wirenut would do it just to do it.

He shook his head. “Not tonight.”

Twenty feet of warm night air separated us from the mounted camera. Wirenut pulled out a piece of bamboo. He rolled some putty, pushed it into the end of the bamboo, then peered down
the length. He sucked in a breath, held it to his lips, and blew.

The putty whistled through the air and splatted right on the camera lens.

My jaw dropped. Wow. “You need to teach me that.”

He grinned.

Pulling our hoods down over our faces, we sprinted from the cemetery through the museum’s backyard and halted at the rear door.

Wirenut peeled down the right-index-finger portion of his leather glove. Placing the tip of his finger on the steel door, he closed his eyes and counted.

His eyes shot open. “Water pulse,” he whispered.

I blinked.
Water pulse?

“I didn’t expect that. Nobody’s
ever
penetrated a water-rigged security system. I’ve studied all about it. It came out after I joined the Specialists. Otherwise, I would’ve already tackled it and proven it faulty.”

Of course.

“Can you do it?” I had no doubt he could.

He rolled his eyes. “Please. Give me a second.”

Slowly, he rubbed his hands together. His gaze focused on nothing in particular as he drifted into deep thought.

“One wrong move, and the entire museum locks down. The building will flood with water stored in oversize pipes in the walls, trapping us and the display pieces. But the display items are protected. We’ll drown.”

We'll drown? Wait a minute…

“Pretty nifty security idea.”

I don’t think it’s too nifty we’re going to drown.

“Too bad I’ll have to be the first to prove it faulty.”

He’d better prove it faulty.

Wirenut reached for his tool pouch. “Okay, think. A building rigged with water will have 1009 proc-gauge wiring. Plastic-coated. It’ll be charged by aluminum cantver currents. The water and electricity will flow together, not against each other. Any sort of contact between the two will spark the release. So as long as there’s continuous motion of the two, the system will be fooled.”

He
sounds
like he knows what he’s doing.

“Let’s see.” He touched the tip of his finger to the door again and held it steady while he counted. He moved it up a fraction, held, counted. He slid it down, held, counted. “A five-second lead interrupts the inch intervals. Which means five-inch segments of black electrical tape, separated by five inches of space, connected by five thicknesses proc-gauge wire will do the trick.”

He winked at me. “No problem. What is it with the number five? The crown has five points, too.”

“They got a little theme going here.”

He took a roll of wire and electrical tape from his vest. He tore off segments of tape, stretched the wire across the door, and then secured the wire at exactly spaced intervals. As he smoothed down the last piece of tape, he gave me a confident nod.

A few seconds later, the door clicked, and Wirenut smiled.

Boy, he’s good.

He opened the door, we quickly scooted inside, and it closed behind us with a
click.

He glanced back. “Wasn’t expecting that. Five seconds to get in before everything locks down.”

“Good thing we’re quick.”

He did his victory shoulder-roll dance, and I shook my head at his silliness.

“Okay, don’t get too confident. Never know what might happen.” Wirenut pressed the talk button on his vest. “We’re in.”

“Lookout copy,” answered TL.

Wirenut took his fiber-lit goggles from his vest. “Let’s do this.”

In the southwest corner of the one-room museum sat a small wood table. A vault underneath stored the crown at night. According to our research, the crown was pretty much the only thing the museum had. People came from all over the country of Rissala to see it.

We fitted the goggles over our eyes, illuminating the skin-sizzling, yellow lasers.

From my vest I got out the small bottles of chemicals, then flipped open my mini-laptop and keyed the scrambler sequence.

YOU’RE IN, typed Chapling.

HI, I typed back.

From my spot at the back door, I watched Wirenut complete the steps to breaking the Rayver System: leaned at seventy-degree
angle, spied tunnel, engaged remote-control expander, wire snaked out and into vault’s lock, lasers flicked off, squirted control panel with nitrox, ripped out diversionary wires, red lasers flicked on, found opening tunnel, snipped remaining white one, vault popped open.

Wow, he’s quick.

He squatted down, reached inside the vault, and brought out—

A yellow ribbon? What the…?

A ribbon tied around a ruby and a piece of paper. No crown. The burglar had already been here.

Fisting the ruby and paper, Wirenut reared back to slam the vault shut.

“Shhh,” I reminded him.

He paused, closed it softly instead, grabbed his tools, and raced back across the tile. The yellow lasers flicked on behind him.

I threw the yellow ribbon aside and took the ruby. “See what the paper says.”

Quickly, Wirenut unfolded it. “My boss said to leave this gem behind.”

“Is it typed or handwritten?”

“Typed.”

“We’ll worry about it later.” Opening the bottle of barium gentrea, I squeezed out one drop. It glided over the gem. Holding it close, I scrutinized it, studying the chemically bonded numbers as they became visible. Five sets, separated by five
spaces with raised edges on every fifth number. Different than the last encrypted message.

“It might disappear on you,” Wirenut reminded me.

Like I would forget such a thing.
I quickly began keying in the numbers.

“Hurry.”

My fingers raced over the keys as I noticed the numbers beginning to disappear.

“Hurry.”

My fingers dashed lightning quick to keep up.

“Hurry.”

“Got it.” I pressed save and made sure Chapling had everything.

The gem went back to normal, appearing as if it hadn’t even been touched.

I closed my laptop. “Please don’t ever tell me to hurry again. It makes me nervous.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s all right. Let’s get out of here.”

He did the tape/wire thing to the door, deactivated it, and we slipped out.

Wirenut flung the yellow
ribbon and note on the hotel bed. “I can’t
believe
he got there before me. I can’t
believe
he penetrated the water pulse system.” He jabbed his chest.

“
I’m
the one who cracks new systems. Not other people.
I’m
the Ghost.”

I didn’t think it’d be wise to remind him that technically he was no longer the Ghost. He’d left that behind with his old life when he joined the Specialists.

TL picked up the ribbon. “Sounds like your ego’s talking.”

Wirenut flopped down on the bed and slung his arm over his eyes. “Leave me alone.”

In the months I’d known Wirenut, he’d always maintained a calm, cool demeanor with a spice of humor. I’d seen him irritated and upset more in the past week than I had since first meeting him. It worried me.

This mission was pushing at him from all angles: horrid memories resurfacing about his family, the burglar impersonating him, his meeting Katarina.

All I could do was be a friend, be there for him.

TL picked up the paper. “His boss? He has to be working for Zorba. How else would he know to leave that gem?” TL motioned me to the desk. “Let’s see what Chapling’s got.”

I opened up the laptop. WELL? I typed.

NO GO ON THE DE NUOWSI’T THEOREM, he responded.

“Huh.” Slipping on my glasses, I studied the sets of numbers on my screen. “The number five is the theme for this encrypted message. Give me a sec.” I took the numbers and rearranged them. Ran them through text identifiers. Cut through user markings. Tagged them defined. Changed the ELD spacing.
Wrapped the preformatted fragment. Deleted fixed processing. Soft-charactered the numerical breaks.

Bingo. “It’s code for an image.” I ran the code through my vortex imaging program.

OH YEAH. YEAHYEAHYEAH, Chapling typed. SO GOOD.

A 3-D image of a small island appeared. An old mansion occupied pretty much the entire area. The image rotated, and a room appeared. I plugged the coordinates of the island into GPS. “The island is located five towns north of here, five kilometers off shore. I wonder what it is about the number five.”

“I was the youngest of five children,” Wirenut mumbled from the bed.

I glanced back at him. He still had his arm over his eyes.
Was.
He
was
the youngest of five. How awful to have to say that in the past tense.

TL tapped my knee, and I looked at him. He shook his head slightly, indicating I shouldn’t respond to Wirenut.

Pushing my glasses up, I focused back on the laptop. TL was probably right. Wirenut needed to be with his own thoughts right now.

“Cue up the satellite, and let’s see what’s inside this mansion,” TL said.

I pressed a few keys. “According to the original note when the toxin was first stolen, there are three data-encrypted messages. We’ve retrieved two, so this is the last one. It has to be the sword.”

I keyed in the access code to the government’s satellite, and through the darkness of midnight, it zeroed in on the mansion. A few more key strokes and it switched to infrared. A couple of clicks and it X-rayed the roof. I zoomed in on the room. “The room is located on the fifth floor, behind the fifth door on the right.” I saw an object hanging on the wall and isolated it.

Wirenut sat up and scooted to the edge of the bed.

Beyond the various shades of infrared, a long object became visible.

Wirenut looked over my and TL’s shoulders. “Yeah. That’s the double-bladed, lion-engraved sword.”

The sword his uncle had used.

The laptop bleeped, and Chapling appeared in the lower-left corner. I waved, but he didn’t wave back. My stomach clenched with the devastation I saw in his eyes.

Something was wrong. Something was
really
wrong.

TL nodded. “Go ahead.”

“New intel. A message came over the line that whoever is looking for the stolen toxin isn’t working quickly enough. In two days the toxin will be released. You
have
to get that sword. You
have
to retrieve the last encrypted message. You
have
to find the stolen neurotoxin.”

I’d never heard Chapling so adamant.

“We leave at oh eight hundred hours.” TL reached for the laptop. “Signing off.”

No one said a word as we sat, digesting everything. People
were going to die if we didn’t retrieve the last encrypted message. And Wirenut’s uncle was behind it all. “How can someone be so sinister?”

“I can’t believe I’m related to this man,” Wirenut whispered. “Someone told me once that evil is genetic….” His voice trailed off.

The pain in it cracked my heart.

TL gripped the back of Wirenut’s neck. “You look at me, and you listen very closely. You wouldn’t be a part of the Specialists if you had that kind of blackness in your blood, in your heart. People like your uncle are driven by money and sickness. They get off on watching others suffer. They live to manipulate.”

TL let go of Wirenut’s neck and grabbed his shoulder. “You are a good man with kindness in your heart that one day will make you a great man.” TL released Wirenut. “Now, did you hear everything I said?”

Wirenut closed his eyes. “Yes, sir. Thank you. Excuse me.” He crossed the hotel room and walked out the door.

[8]