Doom at Grant's Tomb

by Marcia Wells

  “Big Red is secure,” she says into the phone. She guns the engine and pulls us into traffic. “Yes, he’s okay. We need a team at the airport. Heinrich is there. International flights. Yep. We need a bomb squad at Grant’s Tomb. I’ll deliver Big Red to the precinct and—”

  “We can’t go to the precinct,” I interrupt. “Are you talking to Bovano? Tell him I know how to diffuse the bomb. O’Malley made it different from the others. The cut-wire isn’t green—it’s red!”

  She frowns and says into the cell, “Did you catch that?”

  I can hear Bovano’s gruff voice on the other end, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. Paula pauses, then says, “Frank, we’re on our way. There’s still time. Yes, I’m bringing him. We’ll stay in the van, away from the blast zone. Don’t cut until we get there!” She hangs up and tosses the phone into her purse. “There’s still time,” she repeats to me. “Frank is en route to Grant’s Tomb. We’ll meet him there.” She rolls down her window and slaps a red strobe light on the roof of the van. A siren blares and cars start to pull over in front of us.

  I look at my watch. Twenty-five minutes until the bomb explodes. Yes, there’s time, but not much. We still have to deal with New York City’s traffic.

  “Hang on!” Paula shouts. She speeds up, weaving from lane to lane, honking the horn if people don’t move fast enough.

  I clutch my door as we race through three intersections. We’re approaching Amsterdam Avenue. “Take a right here,” I say, but she’s already doing it.

  “I know.” She yanks the wheel. “I studied that map you gave me.”

  We drive on, the siren blaring in my ears. “Hey, Paula,” I yell over the wailing noise.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks for changing my code name.”

  Chapter 21

  Boom at the Tomb

  A FEW MINUTES LATER

  The streets are a blur of people clutching coffee cups while walking their dogs and pushing baby strollers. With a screech of tires, Paula makes a sharp left turn and pulls onto the curb, the van bouncing all over the place. We come to a shuddering stop and I realize we’re a few hundred feet down the road from Grant’s Tomb. Her phone rings. Quickly she talks with Bovano, then hangs up.

  She kills the engine. “Frank’s already inside. He said it’s a small bomb. He’s got a camera that’s linked to a monitor here.” She points to the back of the van. “The closer we are, the clearer the picture.” Opening the partition to the back of the van, she gestures with her head. “Let’s go.”

  I scramble into the back and sit in the chair where Bovano usually sits. My watch reads 8:52. Eight minutes left.

  Paula puts on a headset and I follow suit. Quickly she shows me the buttons that zoom the picture in and out, left and right. “Frank?” she says into the headset. “We’re here and in position.”

  “Copy.” Bovano’s voice is loud in my ears. Suddenly his face appears on the monitor in front of me. A black-and-white monitor. “Eddie?”

  “I’m here.” My heart is pounding in my ears. How are we going to do this with a black-and-white screen? How can I tell the red wires from the green?

  “Glad you’re okay,” he says. He clears his throat. “Here’s the bomb.” He shifts the camera and the bomb comes into view. He’s made a mess of the wires, the orderly rows of green and red now pulled into a tangled clump. The flashing numbers on the bomb read 6:52 . . . 6:51 . . .

  “It’s usually the fifth green wire,” he says. “Lucky number five. Only . . .”

  “Only this bomb is different,” I say, moving closer to the screen. My nose is practically touching the glass when I realize I can press a button and zoom the camera lens in closer. “I saw O’Malley put it together. It’s the middle red wire, red for Eddie Red.”

  “You’re sure?” Bovano asks. “I have a bomb squad here who can move it to the Hudson River. The water should contain the blast.”

  “If it blows, it will set off other bombs around the city,” I explain. “We have to diffuse it.”

  “Hold this,” he says to someone. The camera bounces around and a knife comes into view, along with Bovano’s stout fingers. “This is the middle red wire,” he says, holding up a wire. “There are two more—here, and here.” He points to two other wires.

  Sweat beads on my neck and face. From where I’m sitting, all the wires are the same shade of gray. When I don’t respond, he slides his knife beneath that middle wire.

  “Wait,” I say. Something’s not right. O’Malley said the red wire started in the middle and looped left. This red wire starts in the middle but it seems to loop right. Is it the wrong wire, or has Bovano made such a tangled mess of things that it’s impossible to tell?

  Beside me, Paula starts to whisper. I think she’s praying.

  “Eddie, you’ve got to be kidding me!” Bovano’s voice is boiling with anger. “This is life or death, do you understand?”

  I wipe the sweat off my forehead and close my eyes, envisioning the three red wires. The cut wire started in the center with the rest of them, wrapped around a coil of green, and then veered left, plunging into the back of the bomb. There’s only one red wire that wraps around a bunch of green wires, and it’s not the one he’s holding.

  Sixty seconds left. Fifty-nine. “It’s the second one you pointed to,” I say. “The one on the left.”

  There’s silence on the other end. Bovano moves his blade away. “It’s time to clear out,” he says. “We’ve done all we can.”

  “Why don’t you ever listen to me?” I yell. “When have I ever been wrong? When it really counts, I mean.”

  A heavy sigh fills my ears. Just as a wave of panic rolls over me, the knife comes back onto the screen. “Okay,” he says. He shifts the blade so it rests beneath the new wire. “It’s been nice working with you, Edmund,” he says.

  And cuts.

  Chapter 22

  Fallout

  3:34 P.M., SUNDAY

  My mother won’t stop crying. And my father won’t stop hugging me. The three of us are squished together on the couch in a parent-and-Edmund sandwich. “I’m okay, guys,” I manage to wheeze. Dad’s got me in a vise grip that has me struggling for air.

  “We have to leave the city,” Mom says in a thick voice. “They’ll be coming for you.”

  I’m not sure who they is in her imagination. “The police caught the whole gang,” I say against Dad’s shoulder. “Lars, O’Malley, and the others. They’ll be in jail for a long time. We’re safe.”

  After we stopped the bomb, Paula and Bovano whisked me to the precinct for a debriefing. They told me all of the stolen goods were recovered, including the artwork from the Met and the duchess’s diamond crown. There was no talk of reward money, but Chief Williams promised he’d give me a special award for my bravery. He also gave me his cell phone number and told me to call day or night if I had an emergency. I think my mother’s meltdown qualifies, so I called him twenty minutes ago. He said he’d be right over to calm her down. She likes him and I think she’ll listen to him.

  Mom rubs her tired eyes. “I don’t know what to do. I need time to think. We’ll go to New Jersey, stay at Grandma’s for a while. You can go to school there.” As she speaks, her voice tapers off. She knows this is a ridiculous plan. She works in the city and just got promoted to senior agent at her real estate firm. She can’t leave.

  Finally I wiggle out of my father’s arms and stand to face them. “Dad, tell her! There are no more bad guys! We won!”

  He stares at me as if I might vanish any second. “We thought we lost you,” he whispers.

  “Those men could have friends,” Mom says. “People you don’t know about. Criminals stick together, they form alliances.”

  A knock sounds on the door. “That’s Chief Williams,” I say. “He wanted to talk to you personally, to reassure you that I’m safe.”

  “You don’t know if that’s him,” Mom hisses. “Use the peephole, use the peephole!” I’ve never seen her like thi
s. I need to put the brakes on the Motherly Panic, immediately.

  I open the door (after using the peephole and confirming that it is, in fact, Chief Williams) and am tempted to throw myself into his arms. Finally a sane person has come to rescue me from freaked-out parents! Instead I shake his hand and thank him for coming. He nods in his grandfatherly way, and immediately takes charge of the situation, parking himself on the couch between my parents and speaking in a calm voice. He has Mom cracking a smile within two minutes. Once I’m sure that everything is under control, I excuse myself to go take a nap. I’ve spoken to enough police officers today.

  My room is blissfully quiet, although it’s a complete disaster. My desk drawer is open, papers are scattered on the floor, the pencil jar is tipped over, and there’s a dried-up, half-eaten peanut butter sandwich on my dresser. Jonah Schwartz strikes again.

  After I straighten up the mess, I lie down on my bed. I wish Jonah were here. I saw him at the precinct a few hours ago, grinning while being fingerprinted. They arrested him for the parade stunt he pulled. He was in a great mood, viewing his arrest as a badge of honor.

  He said that when the cops realized I’d been kidnapped, they shut down the carnival and canceled the dance, claiming there had been a chemical spill on a nearby street. Nobody else knew I was gone.

  Jonah knew. The moment he saw Paula’s face, he knew what had happened. He went straight to my apartment and searched my room, reading my notes for any clues he might have missed. That’s when Madame Ling called my mom. Jonah figured out what my Plaza message meant and told Bovano about it, who actually listened this time, although he ordered Jonah to stay away from the rescue operation.

  Jonah wasn’t going to take no for an answer. He thought a distraction might help with my escape, so he convinced our gym teacher, Mr. Reiner, that Senate was going to be part of one of those flash mobs on national TV. Mr. Reiner is gaga for flash mobs—and also not the sharpest tool in the shed—so he agreed to drive the float. Then Jonah told Milton that this was all a huge undercover operation for Bovano, so Milton helped round up a bunch of kids to do a “practice run” for Homecoming.

  Bovano was pretty mad this morning at the station. There was a lot of yelling and scolding and threatening jail time. I came to Jonah’s defense, claiming his horse decoy was instrumental in my escape. It’s true. If it weren’t for him, then Snaggle wouldn’t have been so distracted. Who knows what would have happened.

  In the end the cops decided not to charge Jonah with disturbing the peace or endangering the lives of children, but he may have to do some community service. He’s also grounded for at least a month. Speaking of jail time, I feel bad that O’Malley was arrested as well. I told Bovano how O’Malley had let me go, and Bovano promised they’d go easy on him. Maybe I can visit him in jail and thank him personally for his help.

  I take off my glasses and rub my face. I know I’m supposed to be resting, but my brain won’t turn off and my eyes refuse to shut. I stand up and start to pace. One question remains: Who is the Fox?

  It has to be someone I saw that day at the library. Someone who was watching me research lost treasure. I flip through images in my mind: the old man walking, the plump woman shelving books, the group of giggling kids. They were all busy doing other things when I received that first text. But the girl at the table . . . she had a magazine open and her hands were in her lap, hidden from view. Could she have been texting me? And now that I think about it, she walked behind me a few times while I was doing research.

  A girl my age . . . she’s the Fox? Why would she be working with Lars? Is she his daughter? Granddaughter? I didn’t see much family resemblance, but Lars has had so much plastic surgery, who knows what he truly looks like.

  A girl connected to Lars . . . and she’s still out there, on the loose. Has she sent me any more texts? I grab my phone where it’s charging on the nightstand. The police found it in the hotel room and returned it to me, but the batteries were dead so it’s been charging for the past hour. I press the On button and the screen springs to life. There’s one new text, sent this morning at 9:32 a.m. Just about the time Lars was being arrested at the airport.

  I recognize the Fox’s creepy 000–000–0000 number. With trembling fingers, I type in my password and a message pops up:

  You ruined everything.

  THE END?

  How to Be a Cryptographer

  BY EDDIE RED

  A cryptographer is a person who studies codes. There are tons of different kinds of codes out there. Some just use letters, some use numbers, and some use a combination of both. The one thing they have in common is that they need a key to unlock their meaning.

  Staring at groups of numbers can be uber-frustrating. For example, what could these numbers mean?

  1 15 12  13 8 1  10 8 1

  Each number represents a letter. But how to get started? How do you figure out the key? There are a million tricks and complicated formulas that cryptographers use. Here are a few basic techniques that all good code crunchers should know:

  Look for single-letter words. They are almost always a or I.

  Look for two-letter words. They are almost always of, to, in, on, is, or it.

  Look for repeating letter patterns. These words will probably rhyme.

  Look for three-letter words. The most common are the, and, and for.

  In the example above, there are three three-letter words, but the last two rhyme (the “8 1” pattern repeats). So those two words are probably not the word the. But could “1 15 12” be the word the? If T = 1, does H = 15? If T = 1, then U = 2, V = 3, and so on. So does H = 15? Yes! And if I plug in the rest of the letters into our code, I get this:

  1 15 12  13 8 1  10 8 1

  T H E  F A T  C A T

  To try something trickier:

  5 16 23  17 1  2 16 13  14 23 6?

  It looks like a question. There are three three-letter words, one two-letter word, and no rhyming words. Could the first word be the? If T = 5, does H = 16?

  No, H would be 19 in that case. Let’s look at the two-letter word. Could it be the word of? If O = 17, does F = 1? No, F would be 8.

  I’m going to stick with the short word since it has fewer letters. How about the word is? If I = 17, does S = 1? Yes, it does! We cracked the code. Assign all of the numbers letters, and you come up with this:

  5 16 23  17 1  2 16 13  14 23 6?

  W H O  I S  T H E  F O X?

  Here’s one last code:

  8 15 23  4 15 5 19  12 1 18 19  11 14 15 23  20 8 5  6 15 24?

  I spot three three-letter words and no rhymes. I guess we’ll start with the first word. Could it be the? If T = 8, does H = 15? No, it would be 22. How about the word “20 8 5” Could that be the? If T = 20, then yes, H = 8! We’ve cracked the code.

  8 15 23  4 15 5 19  12 1 18 19

  H O W  D O E S  L A R S

  11 14 15 23  20 8 5  6 15 24?

  K N O W  T H E  F O X?

  Good question—wouldn’t I like to know. Here is my picture of the Fox. Be on the lookout—I have a feeling she’s dangerous. Or at least very, very clever.

  Acknowledgments

  Writing a book truly takes an enormous team effort. I would be completely lost without my Team Eddie. A huge thanks to my husband, Ben Wells, and my writing partner, Beth Charles, for reading and rereading countless versions of this story. To my editor, Ann Rider—thank you for your brilliant insights and your patience. To my agent, Kristin Nelson—thank you for swooping in and saving the day on this one!

  A special thanks to my mom, Jeanne Williams, who is the founding member of the Eddie Red fan club, and whose love and support I lean on every day. Love you, Mom!

  To my illustrator, the incredible Marcos Calo: Muchas gracias por todo.

  Thank you, thank you, to my amazing team at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Scott Magoon, Mary Magrisso, Alison Kerr Miller, Candace Fin
n, Rachel Wasdyke, and all the other terrific folks who have helped Eddie along the way.

  And finally to Riley and Allison, my family, my friends, and all the wonderful people I’ve met because of Eddie Red. I couldn’t do this without you.

  Visit www.hmhco.com to find all of the books in the Eddie Red Undercover series.

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  About the Author

  MARCIA WELLS is the author of the Edgar-nominated series Eddie Red, Undercover. She holds a master’s degree in Spanish literature and was influenced by the brilliant crime writing of Jorge Luis Borges in crafting the Eddie Red books. She lives with her husband and two young children in Vermont.

  Visit her website at www.marciawellsauthor.com