The Challenge

by Ridley Pearson

  “Then stay there and act as guard. If the preacher shows up, you’ve got to stall him. You’ve got to buy me some time. FIDOE is incredibly accurate, but it’s not exactly fast.”

  “Now you tell me!”

  “Cool it. We’re going to be fine. Just watch that door.”

  To Steel’s amazement, Kaileigh cooperated. Through the overhead speaker, the minister reviewed the schedule of the ceremony. As long as he kept talking, as long as Steel heard him over the speaker, then all was well.

  Steel set down his sniffing robot next to the briefcase and switched it on. When its lights blinked, flashing in several different colors, it looked like a miniature flying saucer. He moved the briefcase next to two small holes drilled through the plastic in the front of the contraption. These holes served as FIDOE’s “nose.” Steel held down two buttons until the red and green LEDs stopped flashing. Then he stepped away from the robot so its incredibly sensitive sensors didn’t pick up his smell as well. It took approximately one minute for FIDOE’s computer (a modified laptop) to process and record the scents. Until those lights started flashing again, Steel couldn’t get near the device without risk of spoiling the sample.

  “Someone’s coming!” Kaileigh announced. She hurried into the office and then spun in a full circle in the center of the room.

  Steel heard the hallway door thump. Then he heard something far worse: nothing. The overhead speaker carried the rumble of lots of people talking, but the preacher’s voice was not among them.

  He eyed FIDOE. The robot was on the left side of the big desk, partly hidden by the briefcase. There was no time to move it. He grabbed Kaileigh’s hand and pulled her with him behind the desk. Now, down on all fours, he nudged the office chair out of the way, and he and Kaileigh balled themselves up under the desk. He pulled the chair back and tried to slow his breathing so he wouldn’t give himself away. Kaileigh looked terrified. Steel held his finger up to his lips to indicate silence. She nodded.

  The door hinges whined and the floor squeaked as someone walked across the room. Steel held his breath. Had the person spotted FIDOE? Was it the preacher?

  Without the warning of more squeaking, a pair of black leather shoes appeared next to the desk chair. Another few inches and the left shoe would step on Kaileigh’s fingers. Steel motioned for her to move her hand; she’d been too terrified to move at all, but now she snapped out of her spell and adjusted her hand.

  “Where is that blasted thing?” said the preacher, talking to himself. He stepped forward, and the toe of his shoe landed right where Kaileigh’s hand had been.

  If he tries to sit down… Steel thought.

  The preacher shuffled papers on the desk, moved the phone, and clunked down a paperweight.

  “Aha! There you are!”

  Kaileigh’s face went white with fear.

  Busted!

  But then Steel heard the rustling of paper immediately followed by the sound of the preacher’s footsteps moving away from the desk. A moment later, the preacher’s voice came over the ceiling speaker.

  “Sorry about that! Now, where were we?” the preacher asked his rehearsal group.

  Steel and Kaileigh hurried from beneath the desk. Steel reached for FIDOE, seeing that the lights were blinking once again.

  “It’s programmed,” he said.

  “Let’s get out of here!” Kaileigh whispered.

  But Steel hesitated, drawn once again by the need to possess the briefcase. It was his, after all. He’d been the one who’d saved it in the first place. Furthermore, if FIDOE lost the scent, he might need to reprogram its sensors. He grabbed the case by its handle.

  “Are you nuts?” Kaileigh said.

  “Insurance,” Steel said.

  He tucked the robotic device under his arm. He and Kaileigh hurried out of the office—without first looking. Too excited after having been missed by the preacher, neither had checked out the hallway. They faced a bone-thin woman, quite old, who immediately reminded Steel of the woman tied up in the photograph. Her mother, perhaps.

  “We…ahh…” Steel experienced a rare brain fart: he couldn’t think.

  “I’m a flower girl,” Kaileigh blurted out. “I…left something in the car…and someone said we could get to the street from here.”

  Steel saw the woman eyeing the briefcase. “My father wanted me to put this in the trunk for him.”

  “First door on the right,” the woman said. She eyed FIDOE tucked tightly under Steel’s arm. “That’s not some kind of music machine, I hope. We don’t allow recorded music in our church. Organ and the human voice: those are God’s angels.”

  “No, ma’am,” Steel said. “It’s a robot. I built it.”

  She gave Steel a look like he was the one from Mars, not FIDOE. “I’ve never seen a robot,” she said.

  “Maybe another time,” Steel said, now being pulled past the woman by an anxious Kaileigh.

  “First door on the right,” Kaileigh said, repeating what she already knew.

  The older woman turned and followed the kids with her eyes as they hurried toward the door. Perhaps she’d sensed Kaileigh’s fear. Or maybe she disliked the idea of robots. Or maybe she’d seen through Steel’s fibbing. But she kept her eye on them.

  They practically ran down the hall and fled through the side door.

  “I am so glad we’re through with that!” Kaileigh said, bending over and catching her breath out on the sidewalk.

  “Through?” Steel said, checking FIDOE’s blinking lights to make sure everything was running correctly. “We’re just getting started.”

  59.

  The boy’s disappearance caused Larson another setback. Judy Trapp had gone hysterical when Steel melted into the hotel lobby and failed to return. There seemed to be several possibilities: Steel had been kidnapped by Grym or his gang; he’d taken off on his own, having sensed Larson’s plan to send him home; or he’d thought he’d seen his father again and had pursued him. No matter what, his vanishing moved to the top of Larson’s priorities: though he was in communication with FBI agents trying to close the door on the possibility of a lottery fraud, he wasn’t directly a part of it.

  Hoping to remain involved in the wider investigation, he sent Hampton back to the offices to work the phones and appeal to their superior to let them explore the broader crime. As marshals, their job was to protect the innocent or find the guilty; they weren’t, by training or charter, investigators. If they were to remain a part of the hunt for Grym, Hampton was going to have to do some quick talking.

  “We need to contact your husband,” he told Judy Trapp, who’d returned to her hotel room in the hope that Steel might call. “Tell him that Steel may be following him.”

  “When he’s on assignment, he calls me, not the other way around.”

  “There must be something you can do.”

  “I can call his handlers at the FBI. Is that what you want?”

  “It’s not my first choice,” Larson admitted. He didn’t need the FBI taking over everything. “But what if Steel was right about seeing your husband backstage at the challenge?”

  “I doubt that.”

  “What if your husband is part of an FBI undercover team investigating this gang—this connection to terrorists? It’s not impossible, you know? You told me yourself that he failed to make this trip with your son. What if that’s because he was after the same person my partner and I are after? Believe me, it wouldn’t be the first time two government agencies were working the same case without the other’s knowledge. That would explain Steel’s seeing him. And it also might explain why, if Steel had seen him, he couldn’t make contact. If he’s on the job, he can’t reveal himself.”

  Judy Trapp looked up at Larson for the first time since their return to the room. Cairo thumped her tail furiously in her crate.

  “The thing is…” Larson said, “if Steven is trying to catch up with his father, he could get himself and your husband into some real trouble, and your husband should know
about that.”

  “Okay, I’ll call.”

  “You can use my cell phone,” Larson said. He answered her pained look. “My cell is secure. Hotel phones are not.”

  She nodded, accepted the phone, and dialed in a number. He hated tricking the woman—especially someone as torn apart as Judy Trapp. But the truth was, he needed to reach Judy’s husband without her knowing it. No one was going to let him in on an undercover FBI operation.

  But by using his phone to dial, she’d just given Larson the number to call. It was now in his phone’s memory—a memory almost as good as Steel Trapp’s.

  60.

  Steel placed FIDOE down onto the sidewalk outside the church and stepped back, pulling Kaileigh with him. The device spun several times to the left, and then repeated the procedure to the right.

  “Is it broken?” Kaileigh said.

  “It’s searching for a matching scent,” he explained. “It follows a pattern generator I developed by studying scent dogs. They usually work in ever-expanding circles—loops that take them wider and wider out. FIDOE does basically the same thing. But it comes across thousands of scents, of course, and it has to eliminate each one. I call this the progressive assessment stage—or PA. It can take anywhere from one to fifteen minutes to attach to the target scent. But once it locks on, it’s able, ninety-eight percent of the time, to stay on the scent at a walking pace. Admittedly, I usually help it out by washing down the environment and putting out a single scent for it to follow: something strongly acidic, like lemon juice or garlic—”

  “Are you telling me this is not field tested?”

  “It is…in a way. But you might call this its first ‘street test.’”

  “There’s a woman’s life at stake.”

  “Have you got a better idea?” he asked.

  “No! But you could have—” She didn’t finish her thought. She was, instead, interrupted by the robot making a loud beeping sound. It spun sharply to the left, moved forward three feet, and stopped, only its green light blinking.

  Steel stepped forward, kneeled beside the machine, and said, “Go!”

  The robot took off down the sidewalk.

  He turned to Kaileigh. “Voice recognition,” he said proudly. “From here on out it will follow commands.”

  The kids walked behind the blinking machine.

  “Are you telling me,” Kaileigh said in astonishment, “that it’s following the man who delivered the briefcase?”

  “The probability is in the high nineties,” he answered. Again, he hurried to get close to FIDOE. “Stop!” he commanded.

  The robot paused at the curb, facing across the street at a crosswalk.

  Steel said, “We go this way.” He bent down, picked up the robot, carried it across the street, and set it down on the other side. FIDOE spun around once, moved three feet forward, and paused, its green light unblinking.

  “Go!” said Steel.

  The two kids followed. Other pedestrians stepped out of the way of the strange machine beeping and blinking its way down the sidewalk. More than a few slowed and looked at FIDOE curiously. Steel followed proudly behind, Kaileigh at his side.

  “Let me tell you something, Steel Trapp: you definitely would have won the challenge,” said Kaileigh.

  They stayed behind FIDOE for three more blocks. Twice the machine paused, spun in several loops, and then picked up the scent again. Kaileigh and Steel kept their heads down, following FIDOE and making sure it didn’t run into any obstacles. Each time it reached a curb, Steel would pick it up and carry it across the intersection, starting it again on the other side. Sometimes it picked up the scent right away, and once it had to be restarted but soon found its way down the sidewalk again. Finally Kaileigh looked up.

  “Uh-oh,” she said.

  Steel looked up, half expecting to see the guy or maybe the woman from the train. Instead he looked across the next intersection to see the black METRO sign: a subway stop.

  “This is not good,” Steel said.

  “It’s horrible,” Kaileigh said. “If he used the Metro, FIDOE will never be able to follow.”

  “Never say never. There’s a solution—”

  “—to every problem,” she said, completing his sentence for him. “Did your science teacher tell you that? Mine did.” Steel nodded. “And I hated him for it,” she continued. “Always making us think of ways around stuff, and giving you a worse grade if you couldn’t come up with something.”

  “Yeah, but it’s true: there are solutions to almost any—”

  “But I don’t want to hear it.”

  Steel understood computers and a good deal of math; but he didn’t understand Kaileigh. Girls ran on different frequencies than boys.

  Again, Steel carried FIDOE across the street. The robot led them to the impossibly long stairway that descended alongside the motorized escalators. The Metro station was some eighty feet below the surface.

  “I don’t get it,” Kaileigh said. “What do we do now?”

  At that very moment, FIDOE emitted a pulsing tone that sounded like an alarm clock. A red light flashed.

  “Oh no,” Steel said, bending down to pick up his invention. “Its battery is running low.” He cradled FIDOE in his arms like a baby. “If it loses power, or I have to turn it off, we’ll have to reprogram it.”

  “Okay,” she said, “so I was wrong about the briefcase. Now I see why we needed it.”

  “Slight problem,” Steel said. “Minimum time for a full charge is three hours.”

  “The thing runs fifteen minutes on a three-hour charge? How practical is that?”

  “I’m in beta: the weight to operational time ratio is critical. It was invented to win challenges, not hunt terrorists.”

  “We don’t have three hours,” she said, reminding him of the obvious. “Besides, fifteen more minutes of run time isn’t going to help us much.”

  Steel racked his brain, pacing back and forth: FIDOE in one hand, the briefcase in the other. They were so close—on the path of the person who’d delivered the briefcase. He couldn’t quit now.

  People streamed by, stepping onto the escalator of the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station. One nice woman stopped to ask if they were lost.

  Kaileigh answered, “Sort of, but we know where we are.”

  Steel smirked.

  The woman looked at Kaileigh curiously and then continued on, mumbling to herself as she joined the escalator.

  “Well, it was a good plan while it lasted,” Kaileigh said. “And FIDOE worked in the field, which is more than most of us at the challenge could say about our inventions.” She patted Steel on the shoulder. “We almost had him.”

  Steel turned away from her, unable to accept defeat. In doing so, he faced a dog walker who was coming down the sidewalk with five dogs on tight leashes. Finally, defeat gave way to inspiration. He turned around quickly, now facing Kaileigh, and said excitedly, “How stupid can we be?”

  She looked at him, perplexed.

  “Who needs FIDOE when we’ve got the real thing?”

  61.

  With the dead FIDOE tucked under his left arm, and the briefcase in the other, Steel climbed the hotel fire stairs to a door marked fourteen and peered through the small, safety glass window into the hallway. The long, dimly lit corridor stretched ahead of him, lined with a million doors. It was currently empty, but he waited patiently. He would know any second now if his plan had worked.

  62.

  On the lobby level, Kaileigh (who had pulled her hair into a ponytail in an attempt to change her looks) approached the front desk, all the while alert for the marshal, Miss Kay, or anyone else showing an interest in her. Forced to wait in line behind a sweating businessman, she stepped forward to hide herself among his luggage. The lobby hummed with conversation, and there were people everywhere; it felt to her as if everyone were staring at her, from the bellman to the concierge to a little old lady dressed all in pink. She wanted to shrivel up and hide.

  Challenge
contestants and their parents paraded past, some looking nervous, a few in tears. The process of elimination had begun. She ached for Steel, who had given up all of that and now had so little to show for it.

  Then, disaster: the dreaded Miss Kay. She entered the lobby from the elevator area—she’d probably been up in the room, waiting to surprise Kaileigh and drag her, kicking and screaming, back to suburban Chicago. But what to do? Kaileigh cowered, digging herself deeper behind the sweating man. He turned and looked down on her, his face florid, a sheen of perspiration clinging to his upper lip like a shelf of ice. He didn’t smell so great either; he’d doused himself with cologne trying to disguise his true odor, and the combination was horrid.

  The man moved forward in line. He was called to the registration desk. Kaileigh felt exposed. She missed the woman waving at her from behind the counter.

  “Excuse me, miss?” the desk clerk called out.

  At that moment, whether it was the clerk raising her voice, or just plain blind luck, Miss Kay looked over in that direction. She spotted Kaileigh immediately.

  Kaileigh hurried to the counter, though most of her attention remained on Miss Kay, steadily approaching—working her way through the crowd.

  “KAILEIGH!” Miss Kay called out.

  “I think that woman—” said the desk clerk.

  “Never mind her!” squawked Kaileigh. “This is for room 1434.” She laid an envelope down on the counter. “It’s very important—”

  “Kaileigh Augustine, don’t you turn your back on me!” Miss Kay yelled at about one hundred decibels.

  “—that you tell Mrs. Trapp this has to do with her son. Please! It’s of the utmost importance.” She didn’t wait for an answer. There was no time.

  Miss Kay got tangled up with someone who thought she was cutting in line. Since Miss Kay rarely did anything outside the world of decorum, it was beyond her not to stop and explain herself. In that interim—that pause of a few precious seconds—Kaileigh made eye contact with the desk clerk, asserting her instructions, and then took off at a run.