by Dave Barry
“You have a better idea?” said Suzana.
“He has an iPhone, right?” said Victor.
We all looked at him.
“Find My iPhone!” said Suzana. She looked at me. “Does he have that?”
“I dunno,” I said. “But even if he does, what if it’s not turned on? Or the weird guys turned it off?”
“We have to hope they didn’t,” said Suzana.
I said, “Don’t we need a password or something?”
“We do,” said Victor.
“You don’t know the password?” said Suzana.
“No,” I said.
“Could you figure it out?”
“I could try.”
“All right,” said Suzana. “When we get back to the hotel, we work on that.”
I was starting to realize that Suzana was the kind of person who really liked having a plan.
We finished eating—or, in my case, watching Cameron eat my squirrel sandwich—and then we walked to our next thing, which was, surprise, a giant stone building. I wouldn’t be surprised if the rotation of the Earth got messed up from all this stone being dug up somewhere else and moved to Washington.
This particular giant stone building was the National Archives, which is where they have the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and a bunch of other historic important things. I’m sure it’s great as far as archives go, but I don’t really remember anything about it, because the whole time I was thinking about Matt. I kept wondering whether he was okay, and what I should be doing, and what I’d want people to be doing for me if the weird guys took me instead of him.
We finally got out of the Archives and walked back to the bus. Mr. Barto did another head count, but Suzana tricked him using exactly the same trick she did the first time, making her eyes big and pretending she couldn’t work her window.
Girls have this power. To be honest, it’s a little scary.
Once the bus was going Victor motioned for me, Cameron, and Suzana to talk with him, so we all leaned in.
“Okay,” he said. “My dad called me when we were in the National Archives. I sent him a picture of that thing, and he—”
“What thing?” said Cameron, still filling in for Matt in the role of idiot.
“The electronic box those guys were after,” said Victor.
“Ohhh,” said Cameron.
“What’d your father say?” said Suzana.
“First of all, he wanted to know where I saw it. He really wanted to know where I saw it.”
“What’d you say?” I said.
“I lied. I said it was a picture I saw on the Internet, and I wondered if he knew what it was. And he did, right away.”
“So what is it?” I said.
“It’s a jammer. It uses a laser to jam laser-guided missiles so they miss their targets. My dad says it’s super high-tech and restricted, and only the U.S. military is supposed to have it. They use it over in Afghanistan and around there.”
“Those guys aren’t U.S. military,” I said.
“No,” said Suzana.
“Why would they want to jam missiles?” said Cameron.
My stomach turned over.
“I know why,” I said.
They all looked at me.
“Matt was right,” I said. “They’re targeting the White House. That’s why they were looking at aerial photos on the plane. And that’s why they were hanging around the White House.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” said Suzana. “The box doesn’t shoot missiles. It jams missiles. How can it attack the White House?”
“It can’t,” said Victor, seeing it now. “But it can jam missiles coming from the White House.”
“Why would missiles be coming from the White House?” said Cameron.
“To defend it,” said Victor.
“From what?” said Cameron.
“From another missile,” said Victor. “Or a plane. Or whatever those guys are planning to attack it with.”
“Ohhh,” said Cameron.
“This is bad,” I said. “This is really, really bad. We have to tell somebody now.”
“What about Matt?” said Suzana.
I pictured his face, when he was in the weird guys’ van. Scared to death. I shook my head, trying to make the picture go away. “We have to do something.”
“Okay,” said Suzana. “Here’s what we do.”
We looked at her. I could tell that she—or at least part of her—was absolutely loving this. It almost made me mad, except I was glad that somebody had a plan.
“We have two days,” she said. “So we use them to try to find Matt and rescue him. If we can’t, we have to tell the police. But we do everything we can to find Matt first.” She looked around at the three of us. “Everybody okay with that?”
We nodded. We had a plan:
Rescue Matt in two days.
Or…
I didn’t want to think about it.
We didn’t have much time when we got back to the hotel, because we had to get ready to walk to dinner, which was at an allegedly Italian restaurant near the hotel. We had pizza. Usually, this is a good thing. Most kids like pizza because it’s always pretty much the same and not weird, so you’re usually safe ordering it. But this “Italian” restaurant made the worst pizza in the history of the universe. I’m pretty sure that the tomato sauce was actually ketchup, and I am almost positive that the cheese—I bet if you tried this in Italy they would put you in jail—was Kraft Singles. The worst part was the pizza dough, which I think they got from Home Depot. It was a weird combination of rubbery and hard. It was like biting into a Frisbee. I gave mine to Cameron. I wasn’t really hungry anyway.
After dinner it was dark and we went on our evening activity, which was a Historic Ghost Walk, led by Gene. He took us through a bunch of neighborhoods, and every now and then he’d stop in front of some random old building and tell us about some spooky thing that supposedly happened there a long time ago. He did his best to sound scary, but I couldn’t really get into it. First of all, I had a lot of stuff on my mind. Second, people my age grow up playing video games where we fight these really gory battles against realistic monsters that squirt green blood when you decapitate them, and we watch movies where people’s eyeballs explode or they get eaten by giant alien insects or they’re captured by a lunatic with a basement dungeon laboratory where he surgically turns them into human lobsters or whatever. So we’re not going to get too scared about some house where the ghost of President Zachary Taylor’s daughter allegedly sometimes closes a door.
The Historic Ghost Walk lasted a long time, so we didn’t get back to the hotel until almost ten p.m. Maybe a minute after we walked into our room Suzana tapped on the window and climbed in, carrying her iPad. She was already on the Find My iPhone site.
“What’s Matt’s Apple ID?” she asked.
“Same as his e-mail,” I said. “MightyMatty.”
She looked at me. “Seriously?”
“Yup.”
She rolled her eyes and tapped it in.
“Now,” she said. “Any luck with his password?”
“Not really,” I said. I’d been thinking about it, but I hadn’t come up with anything.
Cameron said, “I read that the most common password people pick is the word ‘password.’”
“Yeah,” I said, “but you’d have to be a complete idiot to…” Then I remembered this was Matt we were talking about. “Try it,” I said to Suzana.
She tapped in password.
“Nope,” she said.
Cameron said, “Another one is the first five keys on the keyboard: qwerty.”
Suzana tried that. “Nope.”
We also tried 123456 and 654321 and 123123. All nopes.
Suzana looked at me. “Does he have a pet?”
“No.”
“Maybe some singer or movie or video game he really likes?”
Before I could answer Victor said, “Do we know where those guys are f
rom?”
“Why?” I said.
“I’m just thinking, while you guys are trying to figure out the password, maybe I could see what I could find out about them.”
“Well, they’re foreign,” said Cameron.
“Wow,” said Suzana. “That’s a brilliant observation.”
“Really?” said Cameron.
“No,” said Suzana.
But Cameron had reminded me of something. “On the plane,” I said, “the air marshal asked the little weird guy where he was from, and he told him.”
“Where was it?” said Victor.
I tried to remember. “It was something stan,” I said.
“Afghanistan? Pakistan?”
“No, not them. It was one I never heard of.”
Suzana went to Google maps. “Okay,” she said, “Here’s the stans…Kazakhstan…”
“No.”
“Kyrgyzstan…”
“No.”
One by one she went through the stans, but none of them sounded familiar.
“That’s all of them,” she said. “No, wait.” She zoomed in. “Here’s a little tiny one: Gadakistan?”
“That’s it!” I said. “Gadakistan.”
“I’ll look it up,” said Victor, tapping his phone.
Suzana was back on the password problem. “So?” she said. “Matt’s favorite singer?”
“He’s not really into music,” I said.
“How about video games?”
“He likes Halo,” I said. “He sucks at it. He gets killed in like twenty seconds. But he plays it a lot.”
Suzana tried Halo and halo. “Nope.”
“Okay,” said Victor, looking at his phone. “According to Wikipedia, Gadakistan is this brand-new country. They just had a war of independence, and the head military guy, Gorban Brevalov, declared himself the leader. Nobody knew much about him, but he declared that he was an ally of the United States, which apparently was a big deal.”
“So they’re friendly to us?” said Suzana. “So why would they—”
“Hang on,” said Victor. “Brevalov is friendly to us. But there’s this rebel group that’s still fighting him, called Ranaba Umoka. It means Dragon Head.”
“Okay,” said Suzana, “but I still don’t see why…”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Dragon Head?”
“Yeah,” said Victor. “Their symbol is a picture of a dragon’s head.”
“That’s what the little weird guy had in their backpack!” I said. “On the plane. A dragon head. Remember?”
“That’s right!” said Suzana. “So you think the weird guys are part of this Dragon Head group?”
“Why else would they be carrying a dragon head around?” I said.
“Okay,” said Victor. “So what we have is guys who belong to a group fighting against an ally of the United States, and they have a missile-jamming device they’re not supposed to have, and they’re here in Washington poking around the White House.”
We all looked at each other, letting it sink in.
“They’re planning something bad,” said Cameron.
“Wow,” said Suzana. “Again, a brilliant observation.” She looked at her watch. “We do not have a lot of time to find Matt. We really need to figure out that password.” She looked at me. “Think hard, Wyatt. What else is Matt into?”
I thought hard, then snapped my fingers. “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
“Seriously? He still watches that?”
“Every single day. Try SpongeBob and SpongeBob SquarePants.”
She tapped her iPad. “Nope…and nope. What else?”
I tried to think, but nothing came. For a while nobody said anything. I was starting to realize how tired I was, how tired we all were. We just sat there, staring at nothing. A bad feeling was filling the room, a failure feeling.
Then Cameron said, “Did you use a capital B?”
“What?” said Suzana.
“When you typed ‘SpongeBob’. It’s one word, but the ‘Bob’ part has a capital B.”
“And you know this because?”
Cameron blushed. “I’m a huge SpongeBob fan myself.”
“Why am I not surprised,” said Suzana. She tapped on the screen. We waited, watching her.
“That’s it!” she said.
Victor, Cameron, and I jumped up and went over to look at the iPad. The screen showed a compass with an arrow moving back and forth, over the word Locating…
“Let’s hope he has it turned on,” said Suzana.
Suddenly the compass disappeared, and there was a map.
Then a green dot appeared in the middle of the map.
“There’s Matt,” said Suzana.
We stared at the dot for a couple of seconds.
Then Cameron said, “Where is that?”
Suzana zoomed the map out a little.
“It’s near the Capitol,” she said. She switched to satellite view and pointed. “There’s the Capitol dome, see?” She zoomed in. The green dot was on the roof of a smallish house to the east of the Capitol in a neighborhood made up of a whole lot of smallish houses all squeezed together in blocks.
“How far away is that?” I said.
She moved the map and pointed. “Our hotel is here.” She zoomed partway back out. Now we could see our hotel and the green dot.
“That’s not that far,” I said.
“Maybe a mile,” said Victor.
We stared at the map a little more, nobody talking. Then Suzana looked at me and said, “Ready?”
“For what?” I said.
“To go get Matt.”
“You mean now?”
“Yes, now, while we know where he is. You ready?”
The truth was, I didn’t feel ready at all. I felt like crawling into bed and pulling the covers over my head and closing my eyes until this whole mess went away. But there are some things you just can’t do, and one of them is tell Suzana Delgado, who you are discovering is basically a Navy SEAL disguised as a hot eighth-grade girl, that you’re afraid to go with her to rescue your friend.
“Yeah, I’m ready,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. She looked at Victor. “You stay here.”
“Why?” said Victor.
“In case Wyatt and I get into trouble,” she said. “You can help us get out of it. If we’re all there together and something goes wrong, we have no outside help.”
My stomach did not like the way that sounded.
Victor nodded. Cameron said, “So I’ll go with you guys?”
Suzana looked at him, and I could tell what she wanted to say, which was something like, We’d really rather you didn’t go, because you’re kind of an idiot and a lot of the time you smell like a badly maintained public restroom. But—give her credit—she didn’t say that to Cameron. What she said was, “I guess.”
“What’s your plan for getting Matt out?” said Victor.
“Depends what the situation is,” said Suzana. “We’ll figure that out when we get there.” She seemed really confident about that.
We made sure everybody had everybody else’s phone number. Suzana snuck back to her room and told her roommates she was sneaking out and they should cover for her, which of course they would because she was Suzana. Then she came back to our room. We turned out the room lights and I opened the door and peeked into the hall.
“Nobody out there,” I said.
“Let’s go,” said Suzana.
The three of us stepped into the hall; Victor closed the door behind us. I started toward the elevator.
“No,” whispered Suzana. She pointed the other way. “Stairs.”
We trotted down to the end of the empty hallway, past a bunch of rooms full of sleeping kids who were having a normal class trip and not sneaking out of the hotel in the middle of the night to try to save their friend from Gadakistani terrorists planning to attack the White House.
We went down the stairs, which let us out in the back part of the lobby. It was empty; there
wasn’t even anybody behind the front desk. We walked fast across the lobby and went out of the hotel and down the driveway to the sidewalk. The weather was definitely cooler than it had been, and the wind was picking up. Suzana was in front, walking fast, so Cameron and I almost had to run to keep up with her. She turned right, walked to the end of the block, and stopped. She took out her phone and went to Find My iPhone.
“That way,” she said, pointing.
“We’re gonna walk?” said Cameron.
“Yeah,” said Suzana. “It’s only one-point-two miles, and if we take a taxi they might see it pulling up.”
“Why don’t we take a taxi part of the way?” said Cameron.
“Look,” she said, “if you don’t want to do this, you can go back to the hotel.”
“No, I just…”
He didn’t finish, because Suzana had turned around and was already walking. I followed her, and Cameron followed me. There was no question who was in charge of this operation.
We moved fast, Cameron and I half-trotting to keep up with Suzana. There was hardly any traffic, and hardly anybody on the sidewalks; the stores and businesses were almost all closed. After about ten minutes we could see the Capitol dome. Suzana veered down a street to the right. We made a few more turns, Suzana watching her phone screen, and soon we were in a neighborhood of the smallish row houses we’d seen on the map. The streets were darker now, and there was nobody on the sidewalks.
Suzana stopped and pointed to her phone. “It’s in the next block.”
“So what now?” I said.
“First of all, we stay totally quiet. Totally.”
At exactly that moment, Cameron farted.
“Sorry!” he said.
“If you do that again,” she said, “I will kill you.”
It didn’t sound like she was kidding.
“I’m not kidding,” she said, removing all doubt.
“Okay,” said Cameron.
“We’re going to walk past the house,” said Suzana. “We don’t stop. We check it out and keep walking. We’ll stop at the other end of the street and figure out a plan. Okay?”
Cameron and I nodded.
“Okay, let’s go.”
She started walking, checking her phone every few seconds. After maybe fifty feet she slowed a little and pointed to her right. I looked, and my stomach jumped: parked at the curb, facing us, was a silver minivan.
