“Well, you must have low standards when it comes to smart and amazing,” I said.
Brent chuckled. And I noticed, maybe for the first time, that Brent had two dimples when he laughed. Dimples!
“You just need to understand how things are. Sometimes, when things are this tense, you need someone to tell you how it is. Mr. Kim will figure out what to do with the new kid. Don’t blame yourself,” he said. Brent smiled and shuffled his feet so he was standing to the side of me, staring off into space, like he was looking for something far off in the distance but couldn’t quite see it.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m not sure how to say this next part,” he said.
“You can tell me anything, Brent. I know I’m a blabbermouth, but I promise I won’t tell anyone anything if you don’t want me to.”
“It’s not that, it’s just …” He was reverting to his quiet demeanor. “It’s not even about me. It’s about you. I don’t want you to be upset, about any of this. You just need to know that whatever you do, no matter what happens, you’ll always do the right thing. I know it. I need to know you understand that. Trust your instincts. We’ve got your back.”
I snorted a laugh. “I don’t know why you have such faith in me; I usually screw everything up,” I said.
He turned back to me and smiled. I wish he smiled more often. His smile was pretty awesome.
“I have faith in you. We all have faith in you, because you’ve earned it,” he said.
Very quickly, he leaned in and kissed me softly on the cheek, so lightly that I almost didn’t feel it. When I opened my eyes, he was gone, leaving me alone in the room with my thoughts.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The New Kid on the Block
IN THE END, we had no choice but to add Rinteau to the team. It would have been one thing if he found out about Top Floor. We probably could have come up with some reasonable explanation, like it’s a special wing for the drama club or something. Yeah, that’s it. We’re all theater arts students and we practice shooting commercials and music videos up there. We could have sold that one. Mr. Kim was our P. Diddy record producer and we were doing a reality show for a cable network. No problem. I would have believed that myself.
But, like me, he’d discovered Mr. Kim’s situation room. And that wasn’t so easy to explain away.
Besides, Mr. Kim, user of big words, who likes to put a positive spin on everything, pointed out to us that Mr. Rinteau’s “life experience” brought a certain “skill set” to the team.
What he meant was that Rinteau had street smarts. Because of how he’d lived, he’d been in a bunch of tough scrapes. He had a certain point of view about the world that Mr. Kim thought might come in useful. He had an attitude that neither Alex nor Brent—and I say this with all possible kindness—could pull off. Street cred. Thug mentality. Bad boy image. Whatever you wanted to call it, Rinteau had it.
Blackthorn Academy was great and all, but it kept everyone so busy that we didn’t have a lot of time for normal teenager stuff like listening to music, hanging out, and keeping up to date on essentially useless pop-culture phenomena. Even though I’d only been there a few short months, I felt myself being slowly pulled down the slippery slope of un-hipness. I hadn’t had time to surf the Net in weeks and I was pretty sure my subscription to This Week in Entertainment had expired.
So Rinteau started working with us. Mr. Kim told us that he’d filled Rinteau in on most of what had happened to our team the past few months. He’d explained that he consulted with the FBI occasionally, and that the FBI sometimes needed some of his best students for certain operations. He’d told him a little bit about Blankenship: that he was a former agent gone bad who was trying to get his hands on some very valuable antiquities and we were currently concentrating on trying to stop him.
He didn’t tell him everything. He said nothing about Blankenship thinking I was Etherea and the weird little incident when my hand went all Statue of Liberty in the cave in Hawaii. Which was good, because I was trying to forget about that myself.
(I know, I know. Most people would think, “Hey, superpowers! Awesome!” But the whole thing was still creeping me out, so most of the time I just tried to forget all about it. Besides, I wasn’t sure the “powers” were all that “super.” I could recharge a flashlight with my hand? Great! That’s very handy in confronting villainy. Why couldn’t I fly or have superstrength or something? But I digress.)
Mr. Kim built a set in Top Floor that was identical to the room at the Devereaux estate holding the Firehorn. It was an exact replica, with the same security systems and our copy of the Firehorn in place on the pedestal in the center of the room.
One of these days I was going to have to ask Mr. Kim about this whole Top Floor thing. I mean, how he managed to pull all this stuff off. A lot of the Top Floor never changed, but in certain sections he’d build these elaborate replicas of places that seemed to be identical to the real thing.
We weren’t up there every day, of course—we spent a lot of time in the situation room and in class or the do jang—but a few days would go by and when we went back up there a whole new set would be created.
The only thing was that I couldn’t figure out how he did it. He’d had a replica of the Mithrian temple built sometime after we came back from Hawaii. When he uncovered the news about Devereaux and the upcoming party, he’d ordered us to meet in the wing and—presto!—there was a replica of Devereaux’s trophy room. Same kind of security systems and everything.
Brent was the one who was most curious, and the only thing he could come up with was that most of the “sets” were built offsite, maybe at an FBI facility somewhere. They were brought into the school in component sections and assembled. It would take far less time than building them from scratch on site.
That seemed like the most likely scenario because we definitely never saw construction workers, carpenters, or electricians, the people you’d need to build stuff like this. But workers could unload stuff at one of the loading docks and move it up to the Top Floor after hours.
I knew Mr. Kim had way high connections in the government, the FBI, the CIA, the DIA, the DEA, and all of the other acronyms, but it still was strange how he could pull all this off. It must have taken major resources. I’d ask Mr. Kim about it and he would just smile and say that “he had cooperation and resources at his disposal to aid him in fulfilling the mission of the school,” and leave it at that. Just something else I’d have to add to my list. Mr. Kim was very big on letting us figure stuff out on our own. Like I didn’t have enough to do.
The party was three weeks away. Mr. Kim had us review everything over and over again. Since the catering company was an FBI front, he’d gotten a copy of the guest list. We even left the school on a couple of weekend nights to work at real parties in Philly so we could learn to pass as waiters.
The plan was simple enough, in theory. Brent and Mr. Kim would be in a catering truck outside the main house. Pilar and I were working the party as servers, and at some point, the two of us would have to slip away to the trophy room, where we’d bypass the alarms, snag the Firehorn, and pass it to Alex. Alex would be in the kitchen working as part of the prep staff, but he would also be there to provide a backup diversion if we needed it. Rinteau was working the main party as a server and it was his job to watch the crowd and make sure no one came after us. If he saw someone headed to the trophy room, he would send us a signal and we’d have to hightail it out of there.
For the simulation, everyone except Pilar stood off to the side and watched while I went through the exercises. I took off my glasses.
“I’m hearing a little humming noise,” I said. I shook them before handing them to Brent.
As part of our waiter uniforms, Pilar and I wore glasses. They were fake, but they had a mini-cam built into the frame that sent a video feed back to Mr. Kim and Brent in the van. They also had tiny microphones and transmitters built in so we could communicate with each other.
<
br /> “Stop sweating so much,” Brent said. He started adjusting the glasses with a tiny screwdriver.
“I don’t sweat,” I said. “Women don’t sweat; we glisten.”
“Stop glistening so much. You’ll fry the circuits,” he grumped.
The trophy room had several “cascading” security systems. The video system was easy for Brent to bypass. The room had two wireless video cameras in opposite corners. Mr. Kim had secured a prototype transmitter from an FBI lab. It would allow Brent to lock on to the wireless frequency the cameras used. He would intercept their signal and substitute it with a continuous video loop of the empty room. The signal was sent to the guardhouse on the estate grounds. But with this device, Brent would be able to insert a new signal showing them nothing but the empty room. He practiced with and adjusted the gadget constantly. He was in heaven.
“I think you’ve passed glistening to full on sweating,” he said, using a Q-tip to clean part of the glasses’ frame.
“Well, hello, have you seen this suit? It’s hot,” I said.
“It traps your body heat,” he said. “Of course it’s hot.”
We needed to bypass the thermal heat sensors in the room. They continuously monitored the temperature of the room. If an unauthorized person entered without disabling the alarm on the keypad, their body heat set off the sensors and the alarm sounded.
Mr. Kim came to the rescue again. He’d gotten a special jumpsuit made with some kind of space-age material that shielded your body heat. The suit was about an inch thick and the interior of it looked like a series of honeycombs. The design drew your body heat away from your skin, and then transferred it back and forth within the honeycomb system, so the outer skin of the suit stayed at room temperature.
“I know it’s hot,” he said softly. “Maybe I can adapt it to give you a little more relief.”
There were two drawbacks to the suit. Since it was thick, it was a little bulky and hard to move in. The second problem was that it only disguised your body heat for about five to seven minutes. Brent explained how the heat moved through the honeycomb system in the fabric, essentially bouncing back and forth off the angles, but that eventually the heat used up all the available space and would begin to leech out through the suit’s surface. When the outside of the suit became hotter than room temperature, the alarm would go off.
Another hurdle was the one perfectly positioned motion detector in the room. It was laser activated and covered the doorway—a single-beam unit, and all I had to do was go over the beam without breaking it. But that left the last system in the room and potentially the biggest problem.
“Okay, Rachel, let’s try this again,” Mr. Kim said. He held up the stopwatch. “We need to move a little more quickly.”
The security system included pressure sensors all over the floor, built into the rubberized tiles. If someone stepped on them without deactivating the keypad, the alarm went off. This was the one thing still giving us problems: how to get around those pads. The tiles were too small and placed too close together to try tiptoeing through them.
We had to go over them. There was no other way to gain access to the room. The ventilation ducts were too small. There was only the main doorway and no windows. The pedestal holding the Firehorn was in the exact center of the room.
Finally, again, Brent came up with a solution.
I pulled a small CO2 pistol out of the pocket of the suit. It launched what looked like a tiny harpoon. Brent had adapted the gun with a laser sight, which took a lot of the guesswork out of aiming.
Above the pedestal in the center of the room was a stainless steel light fixture, with several spokes radiating out from the center. I aimed the pistol, pulled the trigger, and with a barely perceptible whoosh, the harpoon shot out and flew through one of the spokes on the light fixture. After it went through, the harpoon popped open into a grappling hook, which lodged securely in the spoke of the light.
“Now!” Mr. Kim said, hitting the button on the stopwatch.
I handed the gun to Pilar. She pulled a small titanium rod out of her fanny pack. It telescoped open and she wedged it into the frame of the doorway. Quickly she attached the other end of the cable to the rod, which had a small winch in the middle that pulled the cable tight.
“Go!” she said.
There was a harness and clip sewn into the outer lining of my suit. It hooked to a small, motorized device running along the cable. In a few seconds the motor started and pulled me along the cable several inches off the floor, safely over the beam of the motion detector. Pilar reached in and handed me the bag with our copy of the Firehorn.
“How much time?” I asked.
“Thirty seconds,” said Mr. Kim. I felt like a snail creeping along. It seemed to take forever to travel the length of the cable. Brent said the motor had a max speed and if it went any faster it would burn out and I’d be stuck in the center of the room hanging there like a side of beef in a meat locker.
“Give me counts in fifteen-second intervals,” I said.
“I still don’t see why we’re going to all this trouble,” Rinteau observed as he watched from the doorway. “Why not just have the van ready, barge in, grab the thing, and take off?”
I couldn’t see because I was hanging upside down on a cable, but I bet Alex was glaring at him.
“If Mrs. Devereaux realizes it is stolen, she and others will spend considerable time and resources looking for it. It is best for everyone if our deception is successful. One minute, Rachel,” Mr. Kim said.
A few seconds later, I was hovering near the pedestal. The trick was to get the Firehorn switched, and not drop anything to set off one of the sensors. And to do it before the suit could no longer shield my body temperature. Keeping in mind that the suit was new equipment and hadn’t been fully tested. The humidity and temperature of the room could make it set off the alarms before five minutes was up. Mr. Kim wanted me out of the room in less than four minutes to be safe.
I pulled the fake Firehorn out of my bag, hefting it in my right hand. It weighed about five pounds and I switched it with the “real” Firehorn on the pedestal.
“Two minutes!” Mr. Kim said.
“Yeah, well, still seems like a lot of bother. So, they know it’s missing. You could make sure they don’t get it back,” said Rinteau.
“You know, Rinteau, Mr. Kim has been running operations like this for longer than you’ve been alive. I’m sure he’s more than interested in your input—not!” I heard Alex say. Quite snarkily, I might add.
“I’m just sayin’,” Rinteau said, not rising to the bait. I heard Alex snort.
“Two minutes, thirty seconds,” Mr. Kim said.
The “real” Firehorn was in my bag, and I reversed the switch on the cable motor, slowly inching my way back toward the door. This was the part I feared. Even though the suit was keeping me disguised from the heat sensors, it was still hot inside it. Sweat was beginning to form on my face and I was worried that the alarm would go off. It was excruciating.
“Three minutes. Almost there, Rachel,” Mr. Kim said.
A few seconds later, I was at the doorway. I slipped off the bag with the Firehorn inside it and handed it to Pilar.
“Three minutes, thirty seconds,” Mr. Kim said.
Careful not to break the beam of the motion detector, I grasped the titanium rod in both hands and lifted myself off the cable and through the doorway, landing lightly on my feet.
“Three minutes, forty-seven seconds. Excellent, Rachel,” Mr. Kim said. He held up the stopwatch to show me, a big smile on his face.
Pilar gave me a double high five. I unzipped the suit and pulled it down off my shoulders, the heat escaping immediately.
“You realize what this means?” Mr. Kim asked.
And I did.
Showtime.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Well of Course It’s Going to Go Wrong. Horribly, Horribly Wrong. This Is Me We’re Talking About.
MR. KIM ARRANGED FOR US to be
absent from school. He’s the headmaster, so he can do those kinds of things and make it all sound official and educationally useful and such. We were to tell anyone who asked that we were attending a conference on expanding and encouraging peer-driven cultural diversity in secondary education at a college in California. Whatever. Mr. Kim had a motto: never use one word when thirty-seven would do. What a kidder. We arrived in L.A. the night before the party, having flown out on an FBI jet. We got rooms at the Beverly Hills Rivermont Hotel—very chichi. Wow. This crime fighting stuff was not so bad.
We spent the next day in briefings, checking and rechecking equipment, and basically just chilling out. It was weird being back in California for the first time since I’d left back in the fall. For a moment, I thought about giving my former best friends, Boozer or Jamie, a call, but for some reason I couldn’t make the call. What would I say? “Hey guys, it’s Rachel. Remember when we used to be friends? Thanks for all the cards and letters you sent me at Blackthorn; they really helped keep me from getting homesick. Well hey, would love to chat, but I gotta go prevent the destruction of the world as we know it. Ciao.”
The real reason I didn’t call was that there hadn’t been any cards or letters. From anyone. Charles—my dad—hadn’t even found out about my hacking into the Buchanan Enterprises computer system so I could use their resources to get us to Hawaii. When Mr. Kim had found out what I’d done, he’d had Mr. Quinn go back in and erase all of the records and restore the money.
Nope, as far as my old life in Beverly Hills was concerned, I might as well have been abducted by aliens or shown up on the side of a milk carton. So much for any trips down memory lane. The funny thing was, despite everything that had happened to me at Blackthorn in the last couple of months, it felt more like home to me than Beverly Hills ever had.
I wasn’t being stupid. Yes, there were the moments of abject fear and sheer terror, especially when I was seeing creepy bull-like things and fighting off reanimated skeletons. Those parts, not so great. But the other parts—the times with Pilar, Alex, and Brent, the times when Mr. Kim was watching over me—well … those moments felt right. Like I had family. It was sometimes dysfunctional, sometimes maddening, and on some days I still felt an overwhelming urge to grab my stuff and just hit the road, but I didn’t. Despite all the pressure, I stuck it out. And it felt good. I’d never had that before.
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