Sensing the disapproval in his employee’s voice, Buchanan said, “You think it’s extravagant to erupt three volcanoes in order to buy an insurance company on the cheap, don’t you, Weaver?”
“I think some would call it extravagant,” replied the driver, choosing his words carefully.
“What would you call it?”
“I’d call it a rich man’s hobby,” he said.
“It’s lucky you made a copy of the instructions,” said Buchanan. “Talking of which, let’s have a look at that security video.”
The image of Weaver’s face slid to the side of the screen and grainy CCTV footage appeared showing three angles of the upstairs office in the lab. Across the bottom of the screen ran the time.
19:46:58
19:46:59
At 19:47:00 something about the size of a golf ball dropped into the room.
“It was rather bold of these thieves to use our own camera-neutralizer to break into the office,” said Buchanan.
“Luckily, as it was our own equipment I was able to isolate the scrambling frequency and recover the picture,” said Weaver. “The thief should be entering any second.”
Surprise was not something Brant Buchanan often experienced. He wasn’t surprised when Mrs Bigsby had told him the location of the VE 6.2 in exchange for a good job with a generous salary. He wasn’t surprised that Weaver’s remote-controlled mice had successfully stolen the weapon. He wasn’t surprised when the weapon actually worked, erupting the volcanoes and enabling him to make even more money.
But his jaw dropped as he watched the CCTV footage. From three different angles, he saw a real, live dragon drop into the office. The dragon glanced around, surveying the room. Weaver paused the footage on a close-up of the creature’s large face. It stared directly into the camera. An actual dragon. In spite of his childhood fantasies, Brant Buchanan had never dreamed that dragons actually existed, let alone that one could break into his office. But there it was in front of him. Evidence.
The billionaire leaned forwards to get a closer look. “What have we here?” he uttered.
“I’d say you have a new hobby,” replied Weaver drily.
About the Author
Gareth P. Jones is a Blue Peter Award-winning children’s author of over 40 books for children of all ages, including The Thornthwaite Inheritance, The Considine Curse and Death or Ice Cream. His series fiction includes Ninja Meerkats, Adventures of the Steampunk Pirates, Pet Defenders and Dragon Detective.
Gareth regularly visits schools all over the world as well as performing at festivals. He plays ukulele, trumpet, guitar, accordion and piano to varying levels of incompetence. He lives in south-east London with his wife and two children.
STRIPES PUBLISHING LIMITED
An imprint of the Little Tiger Group
1 Coda Studios,
189 Munster Road,
London SW6 6AW
www.littletiger.co.uk
Originally published in Great Britain under the title The Case of the Vanished Sea Dragon by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc in 2008
Text copyright © Gareth P. Jones, 2008, 2020
Illustration copyright © Scott Brown, 2020
Author photograph © David Boni
Additional images used under licence from Shutterstock.com
eISBN: 978-1-78895-288-0
The right of Gareth P. Jones and Scott Brown to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work respectively has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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