by James Ponti
“Wait here while I get Lucy,” she said.
The moment Agent Sanchez left, Margaret turned to the rest of us. “This is amazing!”
“Agreed,” said Kayla.
“Have you ever been here before?” I asked Marcus.
“Just on the tour when I was in middle school.”
The room was oval and got its name from the curtains, rug, and fabric on all of the chairs. Each was the color of a bright summer sky. Three windows looked toward the Washington Monument, and on a wall were the official White House portraits of James Madison, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. It was beyond impressive. And intimidating.
“I heard Florian Bates was in the building,” boomed a voice from behind us.
We turned and were shocked to see who it was.
“Oh my God, Florian,” whispered Kayla. “You know the president.”
“Yes, he does,” said President Mays with campaign enthusiasm. “Now, who do we have here?”
It took me a second to realize that he was looking at me to handle the introductions. “Mr. President, this is Special Agent Marcus Rivers of the FBI.”
They shared a firm handshake and Marcus said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”
“Likewise,” replied the president. “Thank you so much for your dedication and service to our country.”
“And this is Special Agent Kayla Cross.”
“It’s an honor, Mr. President,” she said.
“No, the honor’s all mine, Agent Cross.”
He reached Margaret and it was the first time I think I’d ever seen her speechless.
“And you must be Margaret,” he said before I could even introduce them. “Admiral Douglas has told me about you. I’m a huge fan.”
I thought she was going to faint right then and there.
“Yes, sir,” she managed to say slightly above a whisper. “I’ve heard a lot about you, too.”
This made everyone laugh. Sensing her embarrassment, the president turned it on me. “Well, Florian, I see you really know how to dress up for the White House.”
It was only then that it dawned on me that I was still in the outfit I’d picked out for the symphony. Although it had looked a lot sharper before I spent a day chasing clues all around Washington and racing up and down the Potomac in a Zodiac.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I always try to make a bold statement.”
“Please, everyone have a seat,” he said warmly.
We moved to a group of chairs and a couch arranged around an antique coffee table.
“Florian, in a moment my daughter’s going to come down here and you’re going to have to be honest with her about who you are and why you’ve been at Chatham Country Day.”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
“She’s not going to like it.”
“No, sir.”
“She’ll be mad at Agent Sanchez and me, too, because we knew the truth and didn’t tell her,” he continued. “But I’m her dad, and Agent Sanchez’s job is literally to step in front of a bullet to save her life. So we’ll be forgiven pretty quickly.”
“But I won’t be,” I said.
“No, I don’t suppose you will,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to give you a little help.”
“You’re going to talk to her for me?” I asked hopefully.
“Not on your life,” he joked. “My job’s already hard enough. But I thought I might give you a secret weapon.”
He reached over and pressed something into the palm of my hand. It felt like a quarter, and when I looked down I saw that it was the Jefferson peace medal I’d found for him.
“Why don’t you hold it while you talk to her,” he said. “FDR used it to battle the Depression and World War Two, and those are only slightly less difficult to manage than Lucy when she’s angry.”
I read from the back of the medal. “Peace and Friendship.”
“Try to maintain those if you can.”
“Thank you.”
Moments later Malena came into the room with Lucy. She looked surprised to see us all waiting for her.
“What’s going on?” she asked accusingly.
“Florian needs to talk to you,” said the president. “It’s important.”
“Who are these other people?” She turned to Marcus and Margaret. “You were the agent in Yin’s dressing room today. And you’re the other exchange student from Alice Deal.”
“They both work at the FBI,” I said. “With me.”
She looked confused. “What does that mean? How can you work at the FBI?”
“I’m what’s known as a covert asset.”
“You mean a spy?” she said, her voice rising. “You were spying on me?”
“No, I’m more a detective than a spy,” I tried to explain.
“Oh, that’s so much better,” she said.
“But I wasn’t investigating you, at least not directly. My assignment was to identify Loki.”
She gave us a skeptical look. “You’re here because of some stupid pranks?”
“No, that’s why we came to Chatham,” I said. “We’re here because of Yin.”
For the first time there was another emotion on her face. In addition to the anger that was directed at me, she showed a flash of concern. “What about him?”
“Ask her what you asked me?” suggested Malena.
I took a breath and squeezed the peace medal in my hand. The next few questions would determine if I was on the right track or not. “Did you ask Agent Sanchez to take you to the Sculpture Garden after the concert today?”
She shot Malena an angry look. “You told him? What about our confidentiality? I thought you never told.”
“She didn’t tell me anything,” I said, redirecting her anger back at me. “I figured it out. Or at least part of it.”
“What did you figure out?” she asked.
“That the message on the sticky note was for you,” I said. “Yin knew that if he was missing, you’d be the one who’d have to replace him. You’d need to take his sheet music, which meant you’d get the message to look in the bridge. And then you were supposed to figure out that he would be waiting for you by the sculptures of the girls in the garden.”
I stopped and all eyes were on her. She looked like she might cry, but she fought through it and said, “Why would I do that?”
And finally I had an answer to one huge question that had been eluding me. “Because you’re Yin’s one great friend. Believe me. I know how important that is to have. It’s priceless.” I stopped for a moment and gave a quick look at Margaret, who smiled back at me. “And what’s so amazing about that is that nobody else seems to think the two of you have ever even spoken to each other.”
For the first time she smiled. It’s not that she was suddenly happy, but it was from the satisfaction of having fooled everyone and finally being able to gloat a little.
“Nobody knew,” she said. “Not even Malena. That’s part of what made it so special. You have to understand that no matter where I go or what I do, people are watching me, staring at me. Everyone who wants to be my friend has a hidden motive. You’re proof of that.” She paused for a moment to let that sting sink in. “And the same is true for Yin. Wherever he goes people are staring at him. Mrs. Chiang is always watching over him. So we have a lot in common. Then one day he slipped a note into my locker. His was right next to mine, so it was easy to do. In the note, he complimented my cello playing. It wasn’t something basic like, ‘you’re good’ or ‘that was pretty.’ He complimented me one musician to another, and coming from someone as talented as him, it meant the world to me. So I wrote him a note and put it in his locker. Slowly we became friends. Secret friends.”
“How’d you communicate?” asked Margaret. “By passing notes in your lockers?”
“That’s how it started. But we also came up with code names on Chat Chat and talked to each other on message boards.”
“And then one day one of you discovered the secret passage that
connected the practice rooms,” I said.
She gave me a surprised look. “You found that?”
“I’m good at what I do. I even found the sticky goo on the trophy case. But I never could figure out what it was or why it was important.”
“Cello rosin,” she explained. “That was our signal. If one of us wanted to talk face-to-face, we’d just smear a little on the case. Then during practice we knew to sneak to the back hallway. When we met there we usually talked just about music or our crazy lives. It was the only time I didn’t feel like a goldfish. The only time I felt normal.”
I looked at the president and could tell he was sorry this was how his daughter saw her life. He asked her, “Did you know that he was planning to run away?”
“No,” she said. “I just knew that he was unhappy.”
“Why?” I asked.
“He found out they were going to move him to Berlin next month,” she said.
“Who? The Chiangs?” asked Margaret.
“No, the Chinese government,” she explained. “They like to use him to show off. Before he came here, he lived in Tokyo and Sydney. He thought the next move would be to go home and live with his family again. He only gets to see them two weeks every year. But then they told him he was going to move to Berlin and after that either Paris or Moscow. He was so discouraged.”
“Wow,” said Margaret. “That’s a pretty grueling life for a thirteen-year-old.”
“Did he tell you about the songbirds in China?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“He told me it’s common there to keep songbirds as pets,” she said. “Only, people don’t just keep them in their houses, they take them to the park in little bamboo cages and hang them from branches where they sing for everybody. He said he felt like he was one of those songbirds.”
Suddenly I realized something. “You gave him the baseball cap, didn’t you? Because the oriole is a songbird.”
“For his birthday,” Lucy said. “And he gave me one for mine.” She considered this for a moment. “You really are good at this.”
Margaret shot me a smile.
“Anyway,” Lucy continued. “He wasn’t happy when he found out he was going to have to move again. So I told him that if they were never going to let him move back home he should just defect.”
“Oh, Lucy, you didn’t,” exclaimed the president.
“What’s ‘defect’?” asked Margaret.
“It’s when someone gives up their citizenship and asks for protection from a foreign government,” explained Marcus.
“I was just joking,” said Lucy. “But every now and then we’d talk about it like it was a possibility.”
“Do you know what would happen if a celebrated Chinese citizen defected to the United States at the suggestion of the president’s daughter?” asked President Mays. “Do you understand how big a deal that would be?”
“Yin said it would be a huge scandal and would cause problems for US-China relations,” she responded icily.
“He’s right,” said the president. “They’d be furious at us and take all sorts of countermeasures. They’d blame me personally. Accuse me of putting you up to it to make them look bad.”
“He also said that the US government would probably reject him.”
The president hesitated for a moment before answering. “He’s right. It would be too embarrassing for the Chinese government. It would cause way too many problems. If he asked for asylum the State Department would turn him down.”
Lucy shot him an angry look and I realized how difficult it must be to balance the duties of being the president with those of being a father.
“Do you think he was planning to go through with it?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Lately I’ve gotten the sense that he’s wanted to tell me something, but we haven’t had a chance. We’ve been so busy getting ready for the concert, and all our methods of communicating have been cut off. First, I had to change lockers, which meant we couldn’t pass any notes. Next Chat Chat went down, so we lost our message board. Then they put a camera up in the back hallway, so our meetings had to stop.”
“So you had no idea he was going to disappear today?” asked Marcus.
“None,” she said. “I didn’t know anything was up until we were all in his dressing room and I saw the note about the bridge.”
I ran through everything in my head one more time.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’d like to apologize. I’m sorry that I misled you about who I am. I know it must be hard for you to trust people and I’m sure I made that more difficult. It wasn’t intentional on my part.”
She didn’t respond, and after an awkward silence, Kayla spoke up.
“Mr. President, I understand why the State Department wouldn’t want Yin to defect because it would embarrass China,” she said, “but wouldn’t it look bad for our government to turn him away? A thirteen-year-old boy asks for help and we say no?”
“It would look terrible,” he said. “Which is why it would be kept a secret. No one would ever know.”
“Unless he made keeping it a secret impossible,” I said, “by finding a way to defect that was too public to hide.”
“You mean like disappearing in the middle of a big concert?” said Margaret.
“And then showing up at the White House with the first daughter,” I added.
“It’s a smart plan,” said Marcus. “I imagine if he arrived here and asked to stay it would be much harder to refuse.”
The president nodded his agreement. “That would change everything.”
“So that was his plan,” I said. “The songbird escapes his bamboo cage and takes flight. But what happened at the Sculpture Garden? Why wasn’t he there when Lucy showed up?”
“Dad, you didn’t do this, did you?” asked Lucy. “You didn’t have someone pick him up and return him to the embassy.”
“Of course not,” he said. “I would never do that.”
“Then what happened?” asked Marcus.
“Maybe we’ve gotten this wrong,” said Kayla as she looked at her phone. “I think he might have been kidnapped after all.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I just got a text from one of the members of the CARD team. They’ve received a ransom demand for Yin’s safe return.”
32.
The Ransom
“THIS DOESN’T MAKE SENSE,” SAID Margaret. “If Yin ran away, how can there be a ransom demand?”
“There’s no if,” I said. “We know he ran away because he hid the message in his composition. We found it. Lucy found it. That meant he planned it ahead of time. And we know that he followed through because we found his baseball cap at the Sculpture Garden.”
“Someone else must have figured it out too,” said Lucy. “Someone else knew that he was going to be there, and that’s where they kidnapped him.”
I thought through the steps in my head and nodded my agreement. “That makes a lot of sense. Maybe he ran away planning to defect but was kidnapped before he had the chance.” I looked over at Lucy. “You’re pretty good at this too.”
For a second I thought she was going to smile, but she didn’t.
“Why would someone kidnap Yin?” asked Kayla.
“We don’t have to know why,” I said. “We just have to figure out who could’ve deciphered the message hidden in the music.”
“Who else saw the note?” asked Kayla.
“The conductor found it and got me,” said Malena. “After that it was Lucy and Mrs. Chiang. And then the FBI. And all of those people were at the Kennedy Center until the end of the performance. None of them could’ve been out kidnapping him.”
“Was anyone alerted by phone?”
Malena and Marcus shared a look. “Mrs. Chiang called the Chinese embassy, but other than that we kept it a secret until the CARD team arrived,” he said. “And I guarantee they didn’t tell anyone.”
“Nic the Knife says that
the key to figuring out what’s behind a kidnapping is to ignore everything except for the ransom demand and how it relates to the victim,” said Margaret.
“Who’s Nic the Knife?” asked the president. “And why were you speaking to him?”
“Actually, I don’t think you want to know the answer to that,” she replied. “But he’s an expert, so I think it’s probably good advice.”
Marcus turned to Kayla. “What’s the ransom demand?”
“I’ll find out,” she said.
She sent a text to the CARD team member and all of us waited anxiously for a minute until we heard the beep of a response. She looked down and started to read the reply.
“Wait,” I said before she could. “I think I know what it is. I bet I can tell you the ransom demand.”
She looked at it again and then at me. “I’ll take that bet,” she said. “There’s no way you can guess this.”
“The kidnapper is demanding the release of the West Lake Five.”
She looked at me, shook her head, and then turned to Marcus. “Remind me never to bet against Florian.”
“That’s it?” said the president. “That’s the actual ransom demand?”
“Yes, it is,” she replied.
“Who are the West Lake Five?” asked Malena.
“A group of journalists being held in a Chinese prison for writing articles critical of the government,” I explained.
“That’s the group Henry Lu writes all the articles about,” said Margaret. “Getting them freed is a big cause for him.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“So Henry Lu’s the kidnapper,” she reasoned.
“Actually . . . no,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“But you’ve been suspicious of him the whole time,” said Marcus.
“I know. And all the evidence reinforces it. He was at the zoo. He left the concert early. And now the ransom points to him too.”
“Then why don’t you think he’s guilty?” asked the president.
“Because of what Nic the Knife said. Ignore everything except for the ransom and how it relates to the victim.”
