The Inside Job (12 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Because it was a weekday, we couldn't talk to Hastings about the clown until that evening, when he'd arrived home from the bank. There wasn't much to do on the
poney
farm other than look at the aforementioned ponies, so we—everyone but Beatrix and Ben, who stayed behind to source uranium for something or another—got to Hastings's early, broke in, and made sandwiches. Clatterbuck worried Hastings might be mad at us, using up his groceries. Otter wasn't worried; he said Hastings owed us a break-in and a few sandwiches, given that we'd been in Switzerland for a week now just for him.

“Cheese is Annabelle's favorite,” Kennedy said fondly, feeding the dog another cheese sandwich. I think this was number four. Maybe five? It was hard to count, since Annabelle had smashed her entire body onto my lap and
her giant head blocked most of my view. Annabelle swallowed her sandwich, then looked back at me with wistful eyes; I patted her head again, because even though she was sort of suffocating me, it was sort of impossible to say no to those eyes.

“What's the next trick you're teaching her?” I asked.

“Fetch, maybe? She'll run after the ball, but she won't bring it back. Watch—”

Kennedy grabbed a tennis ball from the ground, and before I could stop her, she reeled her arm back. Annabelle leaped off me in a flurry of oh-my-gosh-time-to-play! enthusiasm, kicking me squarely in the stomach as she did so.

“Oh! Sorry, Hale—
ah!
” Kennedy crumbled to the ground as Annabelle grabbed for the ball in her hand. They wrestled for it, and Annabelle won, pinning Kennedy to the floor and licking her face happily.

“I liked her better when she was a floor cushion,” Otter said. I would have argued that Annabelle would probably like
him
better as a floor cushion, but I was pretty sure the dog had rearranged my internal organs with that jump, and I was having trouble finding my lungs.

The front door opened; everyone stood except for Kennedy, who rolled Annabelle off her and was just scrambling to her feet when Hastings walked in.

“Finally! Tell us everything you know about the clown!” I said.

Hastings leaped into the air, flinging his briefcase to the ceiling. It cracked when it hit the ground, and papers flew up, then drifted down slowly like office-themed confetti.

“How'd you get in here?” he asked, clutching his heart. I guess arriving home to seven people in your kitchen can be a little disarming, especially when you're working for a major crime organization.

“Spies? Remember?” I said. “Anyway, there was a clown at your birthday party. We cleared everyone else who was there, and your old staff, but the clown—”

“What are you eating?” he asked, frowning.

“We made you one,” Kennedy said without answering the question, and shoved a cheese sandwich I was certain she'd made for Annabelle his way.

Hastings gave her a strange look, then took it as he collapsed into an expensive-looking leather recliner. “Okay, clown. A clown.
The
clown. I . . . I don't remember. I was twelve!”

“I remember
my
twelfth birthday,” Walter said, looking bitter. He'd spent most of the afternoon watching French television. But since his French wasn't so great, he'd been unable to understand more than a few passing words.

Hastings scowled at him. “That's because you're what, thirteen, at the most? I remember he was a
clown
!”

“Perhaps in your grandmother's financial records, we can find where she paid him?” Otter said, his voice tense.

Hastings shrugged. “I don't know. I don't really understand financial stuff.”

“You're a
banker
,” Walter and I said at the same time.

“I know how to move money around accounts! But my grandmother always handled
our
finances!” Hastings said, throwing his hands into the air.

“It's amazing you still have a dime,” Otter said drily. “Fine—do you remember
anything
else? What sort of car did he drive? Was he from a company, or more of a self-employed individual clown?”

“I think he was just an individual. I remember his makeup? Sort of . . . red here . . . white there . . . purple . . . ,” Hastings said, waving his hands a bit. “I'd know the makeup if I saw it again, I'm sure.” Annabelle, who'd been watching his sandwich carefully, dived forward and glommed her mouth onto it. Hastings recoiled, looking disgusted. “Hey! Bad dog! Cheese is bad for your fur!”

Kennedy's eyes widened. She edged the nearly gone block of cheese behind some canisters.

I lifted my comm mic to my mouth. “Beatrix, are you there? Can you tell me how many photos of Swiss clowns there are on the Internet? We've got to somehow find a photo of this clown.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, I'm here—hang on, Hale, I'm trying to steady this tray of aluminum pegs. Okay . . . okay . . . all right, here we go—Swiss clowns?” Beatrix asked. I heard Ben muttering in the background, which usually meant
the invention was coming along nicely. “There are about a billion photos when I search for ‘Swiss clown.' ”

“What about ‘Swiss clown makeup'?”

“There are . . . huh. A little less than a billion. Sorry, Hale, it's just that lots of random stuff gets tagged with the word “clown.” Why?”

“Isn't there some sort of clown database or registry or something that you can hack?” Otter asked, pacing back and forth in front of Hastings.

“Searching . . . ,” Beatrix said. “Yes! There . . . oh.”

“‘Oh' what?” I asked.

“Well, there
is
a clown database. But it's physical. I can't hack it,” Beatrix answered. “It's in Somerset.”

“England?” I asked.

“Will one of you tell me what she's saying?” Hastings said, pouting. Without a comm, he couldn't hear Beatrix.

I sighed—Hastings had never been a very sympathetic guy, but the whining was pushing me over the edge.

“Beatrix, I'll get back to you,” I said; then to Hastings, “There's a registry of clown face paintings, but it's in England.”

“So you're going to England?” Hastings said, sounding pleased.

“No,” Otter said firmly. He took a few steps toward Hastings, and for a moment I thought Otter might slap the guy. Instead Otter put his hands on his hips and lifted his chin—a technique that made him look taller than
he actually was, one that we learned back at SRS. “Mr. Hastings, I'm growing a little tired of being your personal loss recovery department, all on the promise that if we find these books, you'll give us information so we can
hopefully
rob SRS's bank account.”

“You offered!” Hastings protested, throwing his hands around again. Annabelle looked up, but seeing there was no longer a sandwich to gobble, she snorted and leaned so hard against Kennedy, they both toppled over.

Otter shook his head. “We offered to find the books, sure—when we thought it was a simple research job. But we're not going to England without some sort of guarantee that when this is done, you'll come through on your end.”

“Well, maybe then, maybe I'll just say never mind and you can go home and I'll just stick with Annabelle,” Hastings said haughtily.

Now, look: I'm not proud of this. But I
already
didn't like Hastings much, what with how he sold all his grandmother's stuff, and how he basically just wanted the books back so he could have even
more
money when he was already making a half million dollars per puppy off Annabelle. All that combined meant Hastings's threat didn't really sit too well with me.

So, while Kennedy, Walter, and Otter were looking shocked and offended, I said, coolly, “You're forgetting,
Mr. Hastings, that we
also
can tell the world about Annabelle's heritage.”

Hastings blanched. “What? No! You wouldn't. You're supposed to be the good guys! That's what you told me!”

“And we are. Which is why we have to get those account numbers, Mr. Hastings. We're willing to help you in order to get them, but we are not willing to let you walk away entirely,” Otter said.

“Well . . . I . . .” Hastings fumbled between words and emotions—first he looked angry, then upset, then panicked. Finally he shouted, “
Fine.
Just
fine
. What do you want, then?”

“Annabelle. As collateral,” I said, folding my arms.

“The
dog
?” Hastings said. “She's worth millions!”

“Then she's excellent collateral,” Otter said. “We'll take good care of her, right, everyone?” He turned to Kennedy and Walter as he said this. They looked a little uncomfortable with the whole exchange, but they nodded.

“She likes us, Mr. Hastings. We'll take good care of her,” Kennedy said earnestly.

“She doesn't like anyone—she hardly even does anything,” Hastings argued grumpily. “Fine. Take the dumb dog. But you'll go to England, then?”

Otter sighed and put his fingers to his forehead, which was something he did more and more these days. “We'll send a team to England to look at the clown registry, and we will be in touch with you.”

The fact that Hastings didn't seem sad at all about Annabelle coming to the farmhouse helped the niggling guilt I felt burrowing around in my gut over the fact that we'd basically just kidnapped the guy's pet. I'd hoped his reaction would sway Kennedy and Walter as well, but they looked a little testy on the bus home.

Annabelle, on the other hand, looked like she'd just won some sort of dog lottery. Her eyes were big, her mouth was open and panting, and she kept laying her head in our laps, going from person to person like she was inspecting us each for general petting abilities.

On Annabelle's second pass, I rubbed her ears together and looked up at my sister. “Okay, Kennedy. I get it. But I don't think Annabelle is sad to leave Hastings. I mean,
look
at her. He didn't even like her, and I don't think she liked him, either.”

“That's not it, Hale,” Kennedy said hesitantly, like she didn't want to argue but couldn't keep the words in for long. “It's just . . . well. Taking the dog as collateral is just . . . it's something SRS would do. We're not supposed to be like them.”

Otter jumped in. “That man would have had us go to England—go all over Europe, really—to find his books. We're not messengers, and we're not personal assistants. We're spies. Sometimes deals have to be made,” Otter said, keeping his voice low—we were on a public bus, after all,
and the Swiss people all around us already looked kind of perplexed by the giant dog in their midst.

Walter and Kennedy went quiet. I stayed quiet. Because I hadn't even thought about that—that taking the dog was something SRS would do. I'd thought of the mission. I'd thought of how we had to do something to keep from being Hastings's voluntary treasure hunters. I'd thought of how we had to move faster, to rob the bank. I'd thought exactly like SRS had trained me to think, but . . . it was what had to be done, wasn't it? Were we allowed to act like the bad guys in order to be the good guys in the end?

When we got home, Kennedy fed Annabelle all the sausages Clatterbuck had been planning to make us for dinner. Otter shouted at her, then I shouted at Otter, and then Annabelle started to howl, and then Ben's newest invention—the TurBENate—exploded in the yard, and we had to spend most of the evening convincing the couple who owned the pony farm that it was just a meteor, not dynamite strapped to a station-wagon bumper. When they left, we all reconvened for a moment in the kitchen to eat crackers and the buns that were supposed to go with the sausages.

Otter said, “Beatrix, I need everything you've got on that clown database. How to break in, how to—”

“Oh, you won't have to break in. They're all on display!”

Otter blinked.

“At . . . a place in Somerset called Wookey Hole Caves?”

We all blinked.

“That's what it's called! They're on display there. You can buy tickets. We could all go! There's a dinosaur exhibit!” Beatrix said, growing more excited. Ben was nodding enthusiastically.

“It's not a game!” Otter snapped. What was strange about this is that he didn't yell. He just said it,
bam
, like a quick punch, and it threw everyone. He put his fingers to his temples. “I'm going to bed. Jordan and I are going to Somerset tomorrow. Clatterbuck, set up a transport, please. Ben, we'll need hidden cameras, and Beatrix, we'll need a live feed at Hastings's. Got it?”

Everyone nodded without saying anything.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Our team was
always
pretty quick (we had to be, since it was just the seven of us), but the trip to Wookey Hole Caves came together in record time. Before bed, Beatrix and Ben had put together a new round of fake passports. By the next morning, Clatterbuck had arranged for a flight to Bristol, and a rental car for when we arrived—something sporty, which I think he got to try to improve Otter's mood. Annabelle had greeted each and every one of us that morning—including Otter—by leaping onto us and licking our faces.