Some shopping trip.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It’s Complicated
EVEN A MONTH LATER, the incident at the mall was still kind of a blur. The police and ambulances came and Mr. Kim and I followed them to the hospital in his car. In the emergency room we had a lot of trouble finding out what was happening to Rinteau, because we weren’t his next of kin. Finally, Mr. Kim pulled a badge case from his pocket and flashed it at the nurse. We were told he was in surgery.
“How many badges do you carry?” I asked Mr. Kim.
“Seven,” he replied.
“FBI?”
He shook his head. “US Marshal. People will examine FBI badges closely, but most people don’t even know what a US Marshal does. It sounds very official, so they don’t give it a second glance.”
I nodded, filing the information away for future use.
“And Rachel, just for your information, my Marshals badge is legitimate. I have an appointment by the attorney general. So promise me you won’t try to use a fake US Marshal’s badge to get out of trouble.”
Pfft. Mr. Kim always thinks I’m going to get in trouble. But that was useful badge information. “What year did the attorney general graduate from Blackthorn Academy?” I asked, innocently changing the subject.
“1987,” he replied.
“Wow, 1987. That would make him …” I tried to figure out his age, but I was never very good at doing math in my head. Or math in general. “Gosh, an attorney general of Pennsylvania graduating from Blackthorn Academy. That’s very impressive.”
“He is the attorney general of the United States, not Pennsylvania,” Mr. Kim replied with a frustrated sigh.
“Really? All fifty of them? That’s impressive. I’ll bet he has to put in a lot of hours,” I replied.
“Rachel, why do you insist on doing this?”
“What’s that?”
“You know full well that I was referring to the attorney general of the United States. You’re attempting to change the subject and distract me, hoping I’ll forget I told you about my US Marshals badge and no doubt planning some way to acquire it for one of your future escapades. I can assure you, there is very little chance of you finding any of my badges, so let’s focus our attention on more pertinent matters, shall we?”
Well la di da. Of course, Mr. Kim was totally right about everything. I really wanted a US Marshals badge now. In the worst way. Another project for another day.
We waited for what felt like hours, until finally a doctor came out of the operating room.
“Your friend is very lucky,” he said. “The cut on his hand took thirty-eight stitches, but the stab wound wasn’t as bad as it looked. The knife hit his hip bone, and didn’t hit any vital organs.”
“What about his teeth?” I asked. The doctor looked confused.
“His teeth?”
“Yes, he had perfect teeth before the incident. They weren’t damaged, were they?” I tried to keep the concern out of my voice.
“I’m a thoracic surgeon, not a dentist,” the doctor said grumpily, “but his teeth look fine to me.”
Mr. Kim interrupted. “Thank you, doctor. How soon may we see him?”
After that, Michael Rinteau had no chance of going up against Mr. Kim. Once he was out of the recovery room and released from the hospital a few days later, he was enrolled at Blackthorn. Mr. Kim really didn’t give him much of an option. He told Rinteau he was distressed to learn of his involvement in two violent incidents so close together. Perhaps a change of scenery was needed. He would hope Mr. Rinteau would consider coming to Blackthorn Academy, otherwise he would have to involve the authorities to ensure his welfare. And that would be most unfortunate, but he could take no other action in good conscience. Undoubtedly, these authorities would take a dim view of Mr. Rinteau’s situation and he would likely be remanded to a youth home or foster care facility, if one could be found. Otherwise, he may be held in juvenile detention as a material witness to an attempted kidnapping. Also, given his lack of a permanent address, and the fact that Booker and his associates were intent on doing him harm, it really wasn’t safe for him to continue on his current life path.
When Mr. Kim really got going, he threw around a lot of big words and phrases like remanded and youth facility and material witness. It was quite amazing to watch, actually. Rinteau never stood a chance once Mr. Kim worked up to a full head of steam. Look at me as an example.
He offered Rinteau a scholarship at Blackthorn Academy, which he could accept for a trial period of one month. (The old “Just give it month, if you don’t like it, then you can leave” trick. Ha! As if.) At the end of one month, if Mr. Rinteau was still not convinced that attending Blackthorn was in his best interests, Mr. Kim said he would be happy to make arrangements with a state agency to secure him a reputable foster home and see to it that he was enrolled in the public school of his choice. It was the least he could do in light of Mr. Rinteau’s kindness to his students.
Rinteau saw the writing on the wall and agreed to the one-month trial. He was probably just tired from Mr. Kim talking so much. I always thought these serious, martial arts types were supposed to be quiet all the time so that they could reflect their thoughts inward and all that other stuff. Not Mr. Kim; he was president of the Chatterbox Club.
Rinteau took a room down the hall from Alex and Brent. He didn’t have a roommate yet—there were an uneven number of male students in our grade level. He walked around a little gingerly for the first couple of weeks, but he healed quickly and appeared to take to Blackthorn much easier than I did. Compared to living on the streets, my guess is Blackthorn would have to be way better.
Of course, the big drama was Alex’s reaction. Pilar, Brent, and I tried our best to make Rinteau feel welcome, but Alex would not thaw at all. He wasn’t outright rude to him, but he was distant and whenever he spotted us with Rinteau he went in the other direction. If he came into the cafeteria and “the new kid,” as Alex referred to him, was at our table, Alex sat somewhere else.
One lunch hour, Alex came bopping in and saw the four of us at a table in the corner. He started in our direction, but when he laid eyes on Rinteau, he made an abrupt turn and stalked across the cafeteria and sat with a couple of other kids. He kept his back to us and attacked his food like he had thirty seconds left before the world ended and he would never be fed again. His arms moved back and forth in a blur as he shoveled it in.
Rinteau saw Alex make the detour, and he knew why.
“I see that Axel is being his usual friendly self,” he said.
“Why do you do that? You know that his name is Alex,” I said. The friction between the two of them bothered me for some reason. Not enough to distract me from the second oatmeal-butterscotch cookie I was eating at the time, of course. I want my friends to get along, but Mrs. Clausen’s oatmeal-butterscotch cookies are really, really good. I have my priorities.
“Why do I do what?” he asked. He smiled when he said it. That smile. Devastating.
“You know. Make fun of him all the time. You could try extending an olive branch. Maybe reach out to him. You never know, you might become friends,” I said.
“Me and Alan? Friends?” He snorted.
“Alex,” I said. “And yes. Face it. Alex takes a while to warm up to people. Heck, I’ve been here four months now and he doesn’t even like me. Yet. Maybe if you talked to him, told him a little about yourself, he might chill out,” I said. There. That’s me: Rachel Buchanan, bringing people together. Maybe I should have my own talk show.
“Yeah, and wouldn’t that be sweet—me and Axel, all buddy-buddy,” he snorted again. “Save it, little sister, he and me ain’t simpatico. But I don’t want to get in the way of your friendship. I’ll just start hanging elsewhere,” he said.
No! Don’t do that! Don’t take the devastating smile and the perfect teeth elsewhere! Keep them here! Where I can enjoy them!
“I don’t think that’s necessary. Look, just give him time. He’ll
work out whatever is bugging him eventually. Underneath the macho bluster, Alex is actually a good guy.” Did I really just say that?
Pilar stared at me with her mouth open. I’d actually said something nice about Alex in front of her.
“You think?” Rinteau looked at me. “Well, I gotta tell you, I ain’t seen it. So I’m gonna have to take your word on that one. But hey, if you like me so much, I’ll make sure I stick around. I wouldn’t want you to miss me.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me when he said it.
It is impossible to describe the amount of blushing I did at that moment. Imagine the most vigorously waxed and polished bright-red fire engine that you’ve ever seen, and you still wouldn’t have an inkling of what my face looked like. Oh boy. And another thing: Why is it always so dang warm in the cafeteria? What are they doing? Trying to smelt steel or something? Is there a welding class here that I don’t know about?
Pilar was chuckling. Rinteau seemed pretty pleased with himself. Brent’s face held this weird look that was a cross between concern and puzzlement. Sort of like his normal expression, which so rarely changes.
It was time for a snappy, face-saving comeback. Except I didn’t have one! I desperately flipped through my mental file folders of snappy zingers and one-liners. And even two-liners. I had nothing.
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t miss you. Don’t think much of yourself, do you?” I said. Oy. If I were walking across a floor covered in thumbtacks, I couldn’t be any lamer than I was at that moment.
Rinteau just chuckled and didn’t say anything. But it turns out he wasn’t through tormenting me yet.
“So where do the four of you disappear to all the time?” he asked.
She covered it well, but I heard Pilar just ever so slightly take a sharp breath. Brent’s facial expression never changed, but his eyes grew a little brighter.
“What do you mean?” I asked. My pulse quickened and it took every bit of concentration to keep my voice from cracking.
“Where do the four of you go all the time? Every evening, after Tae Kwon Do class, you guys disappear. Alex and Brent come back to their rooms and change and then leave. I’ve never seen you two anywhere after you leave the do jang. Not in the library or the rec room. None of the labs. You can’t be in your rooms all the time,” he said.
“Hmmm. Well, I’m sure we must be somewhere. Maybe you’re just missing us,” I said, feeling a little more under control and less blushy. “Although Pilar and I do spend a lot of time studying in our room. Pilar has been having some difficulty with her classes this term and I’ve been trying to help her out. As for Alex and Brent, if I know Alex, he’s making Brent come back to the do jang for extra push-ups or to practice breaking cinder blocks with his earlobes or something,” I said.
Pilar gave me a grade-A grimace. She’s a major brainiac who runs circles around me academically. Still, she went along with it.
“Is that right, Brent?” Rinteau asked. “You guys go back to the do jang, do you?”
Brent shrugged. “We … go … different places. … And yes, the do jang. And around,” he stammered.
“Around where?” he pressed. Brent finally got his legs under him, so to speak.
“I’ve been helping Alex a little with Advanced Mic-Elec this semester. We’re probably on our way to the lab when you see us,” Brent said. Whew. It was good to know Brent would and could lie when necessary. It might become important at some future point in our battle with worldwide villainy.
“Huh. I’ve been in the electronics lab a lot the past week. I haven’t seen you guys there once,” he said.
Rinteau was not one to give in easily. Which was not a good quality in this case.
“Well, not so much this past week,” Brent said. “This past week we’ve been … Alex and I, I mean … having extra class time with Mr. Turner for Advanced Calculus. We’ve been studying for the AP Calc Test, and that’s really taking up a lot of time.”
Okay, it came out a little awkwardly, but it sounded like Brent. And he was so earnest all the time that it would be hard for anyone to not believe him. If you knew him for five minutes you knew he was about the most sincere person ever.
But it still wasn’t good enough for Rinteau.
He picked up his tray and stood at the table for a second. An expression of deep thought came over his face. He looked at me with the devastating smile.
“You know that’s bull, don’t you, princess? You all are up to something. If you don’t want to clue me in, that’s fine. But let me warn you, I have ways of finding things out,” he said.
He wagged his eyebrows at me, turned on his heel, and left.
CHAPTER NINE
Sort of Like a Really Cute, Bad Penny
RINTEAU WAS RIGHT. We were up to something. Something big. Well, semi-big. Not exactly on the scale of forging documents, sneaking out of school, scamming a flight to Hawaii, and recovering a priceless artifact, but still a huge something.
Mr. Kim was actually training us for a real-life sanctioned secret mission. Even though we weren’t officially Top Floor students yet, Mr. Kim had finally given in. We were Top Floor students in our minds, at the very least. He knew the four of us were easily his best pupils. We’d shown initiative and courage, not to mention the ability to think our way out of serious jams. (Of course we—okay, I—was the one who got us into the jams in the first place, but I decided not to remind him of this.) Finally, Mr. Kim gave in and commenced training us in mission ops. That’s what he calls it. I love the word ops. It sounds so spy-like.
I’ll admit, part of me was a little suspicious because Mr. Kim had been so adamant about us “not being fully trained” and needing to “have more seasoning” before we could take part in anything like this. When he explained what we were going to do, it seemed like he caved a little too easily. And frankly, it had me on alert. It wasn’t like him to change his mind like this, or give in without a lecture. This only led me to believe he was holding something back. But really, what was new about that?
I just had to put that down on my to-do list for later. And my to-do list was getting longer by the day:
1) Discover mole in our midst.
2) Stop Mithras from taking over the world.
3) Don’t fail Languages class.
4) Find a way to throw Rinteau off the scent.
5) Get Criminology notes from Mr. Quinn.
6) Find out what Mr. Kim is hiding.
7) Get nails done. Seriously. Four months since my last mani-pedi!
My plate was full. But I decided not to worry about some of this because we had an honest-to-goodness op to get ready for. (I just love saying that! Op, op, op.)
Mr. Kim uses his Top Floor students in very un-dangerous and very unlikely-to-get-you-killed simple operations most of the time. Say an undercover agent left some evidence or something in a locker at the bus station. Mr. Kim would have one of his students, maybe dressed up like a Goth, or a burnout, or something else, go in and retrieve the info. If the lockers were being watched, it might confuse someone to see a kid going to pick up the package when they were expecting to see an adult. Or sometimes Top Floors were used for surveillance. They might hang out in a coffee shop and follow a suspect somewhere and report back to Mr. Kim or whichever FBI agent was assigned to the case. There was nothing really dangerous happening, always plenty of fully trained backup close by, and very little chance for harm to come to anyone, but it was excellent training. As Mr. Kim said, a lot of the spy biz was pretty boring and one needed to learn the basics if he wanted to be good at it.
He had bigger plans for us. Something that would not only give us a real test to see if we could pull off this spy stuff, but, if we were successful, also give Mithras a real boil on his … Well, never mind. But on a mighty sensitive area.
For the last few weeks, Mr. Kim had been having us meet in the Top Floor section of the school after Tae Kwon Do. We’d stopped practicing in the fake temple for the time being and were working some simulations on
another part of the floor. He had decided it was time to make a move in our little cat-and-mouse game with Mithras. An opportunity had presented itself and Mr. Kim didn’t feel we could let it pass. Truth be told, I think he knew we were ready.
We were going to steal the Firehorn. It was one of the seven artifacts of Mithras. A very wealthy and reclusive private collector at a huge estate in Los Angeles owned it. The collector was a multibillionaire by the name of Jennifer Devereaux. She fancied herself a real-life Indiana Jones kind of girl, who liked to travel the world looking for all kinds of antiquities and artifacts. Years ago, she had come across the Firehorn in a cave in England that was full of Roman bling. Swords, shields, armor, gold roman coins, and precious gemstones.
She had given up all of the other treasure to the British government in exchange for being allowed to keep the Firehorn. At first, no one knew exactly what it was, but when she eventually had it appraised and tried to insure it, word got around among people who knew about this stuff. It was the Firehorn of Mithras. The original, just as it was described in the Book of Seraphim. And we were going to steal it from her.
Devereaux had been offered money for the Firehorn. She wouldn’t sell it. Mr. Kim said that numerous high-level government officials had asked her to surrender the Firehorn in the interests of national security, but she was rich and got a team of lawyers and the litigation was still ongoing. No dice. Mr. Kim even went so far as to use his influence with the government to make it so that she couldn’t get the Firehorn insured. But since she was a gazillionaire, instead of giving it to the Smithsonian or something, she just installed the most sophisticated security systems available. Her house was like a … what was the name of that fort somewhere that was supposed to be really hard to break into? Knocks? Knots? Whatever it is, her estate was like that. There were armed guards all around. Dogs patrolling the grounds. Motion and heat sensors everywhere. Un-break-in-able. But Mr. Kim wanted to get to it before Simon did.
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