Horse Spy

by Bonnie Bryant

  “I don’t think they’re worried about criminals,” said Carole. “My dad was telling me that someone really has threatened to kidnap Karya.”

  “Don’t politicians get that kind of threat sometimes?” Lisa asked.

  “Definitely,” said Stevie. “And the security guys have to take it seriously. See, Karya’s father was elected, but there are still people who wish he hadn’t been. And I learned something else.” She paused for effect. “I was doing some research on the Internet and I found the reason Karya speaks such wonderful English. Her mother is American. She was born in Virginia, really near Willow Creek, and her parents still live there. Karya’s actually spent a lot of time here and learned English when she was really little. Not everybody in the ADR thinks that’s a wonderful thing. It’s not that it’s bad, just that it’s … controversial.”

  “Oh,” said Lisa. “That explains a lot.”

  “All the more reason for those men in black to be supercareful.”

  “It’s going to be wild around Pine Hollow on Thursday, isn’t it?” asked Frieda.

  “In a way,” Lisa said.

  “What do you mean by that?” Frieda asked.

  “Well, everything to do with Karya and us is going to be wild. Metal detectors, lie detectors, spy detectors—you know, the usual. But as for anything else, well, I expect that somebody would be able to walk off with the Regnery family silver as long as they weren’t armed and didn’t have a criminal record!”

  “Well, I’ll just have to look after the silver, then,” Frieda said.

  “I’m sure Max will be grateful,” Lisa teased.

  “Uh-oh,” Stevie said, looking upward. “Where did the sun go?”

  “What sun?” Lisa asked, looking up as well.

  There, above them, a wide swath of dark clouds was suddenly gathering.

  “I think our lovely day is coming to a wet end,” Stevie said, standing up.

  Everybody else took her cue. They pulled on their socks and boots, collected the remains of their lunches, and stowed them in Lisa’s backpack.

  “We’d better hurry,” Carole said, urging Frieda to keep up with them.

  “So, we get a little wet,” Frieda said.

  “More than that,” said Carole. “I’ve seen some lightning in the distance. We want to be safely in the barn before there’s any lightning. It’s dangerous in the woods, as you know, and even more dangerous out in an open field, and we have to cross several fields before we get to the barn. There isn’t any time to waste.”

  As if to punctuate her remark, a big gust of wind blew through the clearing, carrying the last of the picnic papers with it. Carole chased the paper down and then hurried to where Starlight was waiting patiently.

  The riders mounted up and turned to the trail that had brought them.

  “There’s another way to go back,” Lisa explained to Frieda. “But it’s longer. We really have to get back to the stable as fast as possible.”

  Stevie led the way back as she had the way out, getting Belle to trot whenever the ground was clear enough for trotting to be safe. They could all hear the loud gong ringing at Pine Hollow. The gong was kept there to call riders back when the weather was turning bad. This was no time to dally.

  The first streak of lightning startled Starlight. Carole tightened up on her reins to let the horse know that she was in charge and everything was going to be fine. She glanced over at Frieda and was glad to see that the woman had learned her lesson earlier. Her reins had exactly the right tautness, and she held them in perfect form. In fact, Carole was pleased to see that she was using her fingers on the reins in the same way Carole just had.

  And then came the thunder. What Frieda didn’t know, and what the girls hadn’t prepared her for, was that sudden loud noises sometimes frightened Patch. The boom of thunder that followed that first streak of lightning qualified as a sudden loud noise. Patch bolted

  He left the trail, heading right down a hillside, around a rock, through some bushes, and out of sight before any of the other riders had a chance to react.

  Lisa and Stevie were ahead of Carole and Frieda and didn’t realize what had happened until Carole called them.

  “We’ve got to help Frieda!” she cried.

  Lisa and Stevie understood at once.

  They all followed Carole. The good news was that they were not far from the field, and they soon realized that Patch had run for the freedom of the field. He’d taken off at a gallop and would keep going until he wasn’t afraid anymore. That could be fifteen seconds or fifteen minutes, and if there was another boom of thunder—well, there was no telling. An experienced rider would know how to calm him down. Frieda, so recently riding with toes in, heels up, and reins flapping, hardly qualified as an experienced rider.

  The girls rode their horses as fast as they could go to the edge of the woods until they spotted Frieda and Patch in the field and then galloped to catch up to them.

  Carole was thinking about how they might circle around and cut Patch off. Stevie was wishing she had a lasso with her. Lisa was running through her first-aid basics, trying to anticipate the necessary steps to help someone who’d been thrown from a horse. None of that was necessary.

  Frieda drew Patch to a stop and held him steady, using a tight rein and a firm grip with her legs around his belly. Patch’s ears flicked nervously, but he obeyed and was completely still by the time the rescuers arrived.

  “Wow!” Carole said, truly impressed that Frieda had been able to halt Patch so quickly.

  “You might have told me what thunder does to this horse,” Frieda said, but there was a small smile on her face. She was fine.

  “We didn’t want to have to,” said Stevie. “We just wanted to get back.”

  “Well, then, let’s get back,” said Frieda. “And hope there’s no more thunder on the way.”

  “If you see lightning, you just have to hold the reins extra tight—like you’re doing—to calm him before the thunder,” said Lisa.

  “You were really great!” said Carole. “I would never believe you were just a beginner who didn’t know what to do with her heels an hour ago!”

  “Good instruction,” Frieda said. “From you girls, it’s the best.”

  “That must be it,” Carole said proudly. Her friends felt good about their teaching, too.

  And the better news was that there was no more thunder and lightning before they got back to the stable.

  BY THURSDAY AFTERNOON, Lisa, Stevie, and Carole were all too excited about Karya’s impending visit even to notice that they were still tired from their morning session with Polaris and Blue. Their fatigue was forgotten in the flurry of preparations for the visit from the First Daughter of the ADR.

  The girls had no trouble getting excused from school early, though, true to Stevie’s prediction, she was expected to write a four-page essay on some aspect of the ADR. She said she’d probably write about horseback riding in the republic.

  Colonel Hanson picked up all three girls at their schools to bring them to Pine Hollow. He didn’t intend to miss any of the excitement—and he wasn’t the only one. Stevie wasn’t in the least surprised to find that Veronica diAngelo really didn’t have the orthodontist appointment she’d used as an excuse to cut school. What she had was a bad case of the envies. She was at Pine Hollow, waiting, when The Saddle Club arrived.

  Veronica was not alone. There was no sign of Karya yet when the girls and Colonel Hanson piled out of the car, but there were plenty of signs that she was coming.

  “The place is swarming with men in black,” said Stevie.

  “Only they’re not in black anymore,” Lisa observed. Stevie nodded; what Lisa had said was true. The security forces were making a noble, but futile, attempt to blend in with the regulars at Pine Hollow and had all donned varieties of riding outfits. One was dressed in high boots and old-fashioned britches, the cotton kind with the balloon thighs, and carried a riding crop. He looked more like a movie director from the 1940s than a
contemporary rider. A few of them had decided to go Western, and one even had a fringed shirt that looked like something out of a Roy Rogers movie, with a neckerchief to match. A few were wearing riding helmets. The overall effect was that there was a costume party going on.

  “Look at that,” Carole said, pointing to one man who was wearing jeans and shiny black dress shoes. His chin was almost touching his collarbone, and he appeared to be talking to a black spot on his collar.

  “Miniature walkie-talkies,” Colonel Hanson commented. Even without their suits, they still had to be electronically connected.

  Two of the men were pacing the driveway and grounds of Pine Hollow with metal detectors. Another pair had bloodhounds on leashes that were sniffing at every bush and around all the corners of the buildings—until they came across a couple of Pine Hollow’s resident cats, which took exception to their sniffing. There was a hullabaloo of barking and cat yowling until the security guards pulled the bloodhounds away from the cats and Mrs. Reg shooed the cats back into the stable.

  “This place will never be the same,” Carole said, shaking her head sadly.

  “It’ll be back to normal tomorrow, just you wait,” said Lisa. “Maybe even tonight when all these characters go back to the city.”

  “Well, it’ll never seem the same, anyway,” Carole said. Her friends agreed.

  As they approached the stable, the secretary, Alek, stepped toward them from the doorway.

  “Names?” he asked. The girls thought he should have recognized them, but they decided not to make a fuss. They told him their names. So did Colonel Hanson. Alek made a great show of checking the information against the sheet of paper on his clipboard, whispered a password to each of them—it was Pegasus—and then allowed them to enter the part of the stable blocked off, as he explained, for the exclusive use of Karya and other authorized personnel.

  Veronica diAngelo was right behind them.

  “Name?” Alek asked.

  “Veronica diAngelo,” she told him.

  The Saddle Club paused to watch.

  Alek scanned his clipboard.

  “You are not on the list,” he said.

  “But I ride here. I keep my horse here,” she said.

  “Then you can go in the other door with the other riders,” Alek told her.

  “This is the door I always use,” she said. Stevie could barely contain her smile. It wasn’t often that she had the opportunity to see someone go toe to toe with Veronica diAngelo—especially when she knew Veronica would lose!

  “Not today, if you please,” said Alek quite politely.

  “I don’t please,” Veronica snapped back. “Let me in.”

  “You are not on the list,” Alek repeated firmly. “I cannot let you in here.”

  Veronica took a deep breath, rose to her full height, and posed the ultimate question: “Do you know who I am?”

  Alek shook his head. “No, I do not,” he said. “And that is the point. You are not on the list. And that is the reason I have to ask you to use the other entrance.”

  Veronica had no other comeback. Utterly deflated, she headed for the horses’ entrance to the stable and let herself in. She might have been effectively banned from meeting with Karya, but she was not going to let some foreigner with a clipboard know how deeply she’d been hurt. The Saddle Club ducked into the stable and watched, amazed, as Veronica collected her own tack, tacked Danny up by herself because Red was too busy grooming Barq for Karya, and rode out of the stable by herself. Pine Hollow had rules about buddy system riding, but nobody was stopping Veronica today.

  “At least she’s not taking the Regnery family silver,” Stevie joked to her friends.

  “At least she’s not going to bother us anymore,” said Lisa.

  “Or get in the way of Karya’s ride,” Carole added.

  The girls went on into the dressing area, which had been swept cleaner than they’d ever seen it. And the nicest part was that there were no security men in there because today it was a “girls only” zone. It took only a few minutes for the girls to change, after which they met up with Colonel Hanson and Max in the tack room.

  There were others in there, too: a small cluster of security men using metal detectors, which were beeping like crazy.

  “Of course they’re beeping,” Carole said. “The place is full of metal. These guys are nuts!” she declared.

  “Well, perhaps looking for metal in a tack room is a little foolhardy,” Colonel Hanson conceded. “But they’ve got a job to do. This young lady is the daughter of an important and controversial man, and there’s no doubt that she is at risk wherever she is, even though we don’t usually think of Pine Hollow as a hotbed of terrorism. You girls need to respect the fact that these fellows are just doing their jobs.”

  “Well, they’re doing them pretty weirdly,” Stevie said, glancing at one man who was scanning Starlight with a metal detector. Starlight’s shoes set the machine to beeping. Carole went over to explain about horses’ metal shoes and to calm the man down. He might know a lot about personal security, but he didn’t know the first thing about horses. Stevie thought Carole was probably exactly the right person to straighten him out on that subject and suspected that before they were done, he’d have learned a whole lot about horses. Stevie almost felt sorry for the man as she heard Carole launching into a history of horseshoes.

  While Carole finished up her lecture on horse hoof care, Lisa and Stevie went to check on Polaris and Blue, who were getting the afternoon off. It didn’t surprise the girls to see that neither horse seemed the least bit flustered by the flurry of activity at the stable.

  “They’re used to being in the middle of madhouses, aren’t they?” Lisa asked.

  “I guess they are,” Stevie said. “It can be pretty wild at a horse show. This pair is just taking it in stride.”

  “Well, they’re doing better than anyone else here,” Lisa said. “I can’t believe what’s going on.”

  “I wonder if it’s always like this around Karya,” Stevie said. “At first I envied the fact that she never had to muck out a stall, but if she’s always got this many people looking after her, well, I think I might feel sorry for her.”

  “It must be calmer in her own home,” Lisa reasoned. “I mean, like they’ve got a gate or something so the family can just be together, right?”

  “Maybe, but I bet every time they look out the window, there are men in black to remind them of the dangers outside.”

  “Weird,” said Lisa.

  “Makes me think that living with my three brothers isn’t the worst thing in the world,” said Stevie.

  “Well, let’s go rescue that guy from Carole’s forty-five-minute lecture on hooves and see if Red’s finished with Barq and then wait for Karya,” Lisa said.

  The security man seemed relieved when Lisa and Stevie called Carole away from him, although she was annoyed to be interrupted in the middle of an explanation of egg-bar shoes. Red was, indeed, finished grooming Barq, whose chestnut coat gleamed from his attentions. However, the girls did find a security guard there as well, demanding an explanation as to why they had not been informed that this was the horse selected for Karya.

  “We have no information on his background whatsoever!” the man declared explosively. “What if he is not satisfactory to Ms. Nazeem?”

  Carole interrupted the tirade. “Let me assure you that she will be allowed to choose whatever horse she wants. We thought she’d like this one because he’s a fine horse and an Arabian. It seemed like a good choice to us, but the ultimate choice is hers.”

  The man looked at Carole. Then he looked at Red, who nodded agreement. Then he left.

  “Weird,” Stevie said, echoing Lisa’s earlier remark. “You’d think these men had never seen a horse before.”

  “They definitely haven’t,” Carole said. “That other guy—with the metal detector—didn’t know the first thing about horseshoes!”

  “He does now!” Lisa teased.

 
“You bet,” Carole agreed.

  “Come on. Let’s go wait for our guest,” Stevie said, looking at her watch. “It’s almost two-fourteen.”

  The three girls trooped out to the parking area, delivering their password on the way out, though Alek told them they needed it only to get back in again, and settled onto the top rail of the paddock fence to await the diplomatic cavalcade they were sure would accompany Karya Nazeem to Pine Hollow.

  Eight cars went by, but none of them had flags and none of them was escorted by motorcycles or police vehicles.

  Someone rode by on a bicycle. Definitely not Karya.

  A dented station wagon came along the road. It slowed down at the Pine Hollow entrance, passed it, stopped, and then backed up. There was a woman behind the wheel, and a girl sat in the seat beside her. A man sat in the back. The station wagon had Virginia license plates.

  “Must be some new rider,” Lisa said, since none of them recognized the car or the girl.

  “No, it’s Karya,” Stevie said unexpectedly. The way she knew was that suddenly all the men in black—no matter what colors they were actually wearing—began to swarm around the driveway, lining up to protect the passenger who would emerge from the car.

  A girl about their own age, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, climbed out. She reached back in for a bag that must contain riding clothes and boots.

  “I’ll see you later, Mom,” she said.

  “Call me at Grandma’s when I should come pick you up,” said the mother.

  “I will—or someone else will,” the girl said lightly, glancing at the phalanx of guardians around her. She closed the car door and then looked around while her mother backed the car out of the driveway. The girl’s eyes lit on The Saddle Club, perched on the fence.

  “Carole Hanson?” she called

  Carole nodded.

  “I’m Karya!” The girl waved.

  AS SOON AS the words were spoken, and before Carole even had a chance to wave back, the security men swarmed, enclosing The Saddle Club and Karya in a tight circle.

  “This is weird,” said Stevie. “Do I keep saying that?”