by Paul Aertker
Magnus pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to Agent Janssens. She peeked in and saw hundreds of American one-hundred-dollar bills.
“What about the diamond?” she asked.
“You keep it,” he said, handing it to her. “If your information is correct, then we’ll have plenty more for the Good Company.”
“Thank you,” she said. “But I’ve only given you partial information. I don’t know which container the diamonds are in or on which ship.”
“That’s okay, we know where the container is now,” he said. “And the boy will tell us the rest.”
“And how do you know he’ll take the bait?”
“In two days, I’ll have some Curukians at his hotel in Las Vegas. They’ll plant a seed that the boy can’t resist.”
Agent Janssens nodded. “For a backup plan, I’ll put him in our database as wanted for questioning. What’s his full name again?”
“Lucas Kapriss Benes.”
“Interesting.”
The waiter returned to the table with two cups. Magnus smiled as he slurped his coffee.
A STRANGE FLASH OF COLD
Charles Magnus said good-bye to Agent Janssens and left the cafe in the Good Hotel Buenos Aires.
He marched across the lobby and spoke to the concierge. The man behind the desk nodded and picked up his phone. Magnus then walked past the reservations desk, and without stopping, he headed straight into the housekeeping office.
Fifteen minutes later he and a woman with long black hair left the room. They exited the hotel through a back door and got into a waiting hotel van.
The driver took them out of the alley, turned right, and headed into town. They passed the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada, where Evita Perón gave her famous “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” speech. Outside the Cabildo, the old town hall, a line of soldiers marched in red-white-and-blue uniforms. The driver took Magnus and his guest thirty-five kilometers southwest of downtown through heavy traffic to the Ezeiza International Airport.
Magnus opened the passenger door and stepped out with a leather satchel draped over his shoulder. He opened the side door to let the woman out.
Police officers directed traffic with ear-piercing whistles, and the air smelled of jet fuel. Magnus offered the woman a hand, and they walked into the airport, where they picked up tickets at the Copa Airlines counter. They checked no bags. They proceeded through the airport past several restaurants, information booths, and duty-free shops.
After security, they headed to gate number three on the international concourse. Three hours later they boarded a flight for Panama, where they changed planes. They sat in first class. On the second flight they ate steak and lentils for dinner, and after coffee, the woman fell asleep. Magnus stayed awake.
The flight attendant’s voice came over the PA system.
He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, as we begin our descent, please make sure your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright and uncomfortable position. We’ll be landing in Las Vegas in a few minutes.”
For the first time on the flight Magnus and the woman spoke.
Magnus asked, “You do know why we’re here, don’t you?”
“Yes,” the woman said, “we’re going to a hotel conference. And I’m going to be made head of housekeeping at the Good Hotels in America.”
“That’s partly true,” Magnus said. “But Ms. Günerro has one more test for you.”
The woman wrinkled an eyebrow.
Magnus rubbed his beard. “It’s an acting job.”
“What do you mean?” said the woman with long black hair. “I’m not an actor.”
The passengers began taking their carry-on bags down from the overhead bins. When it came time for the woman with long black hair to get up, Magnus stood first and took a white binder from his satchel.
“Everything you need to know,” he said, handing her the file, “is in here.” He leaned across the seat. “Read everything in this handbook. And memorize it. And then destroy it.”
“Then what?”
“You play your part,” he said. He grinned under his beard. “And you will meet someone who thinks he knows you. A boy.”
“And if I don’t go along?”
“Do you remember Luz Kapriss?”
“Of course I remember Luz,” she said. “Everyone knows what Ms. T did to her.”
“T didn’t do anything except take her on a boat ride.”
“And Luz never came back.”
“Luz was a free spirit,” Magnus said. “She wanted to see the world. But like Icarus, she flew too close to the sun and got burned.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“You can either follow the plan,” Magnus whispered, “or you can take a boat ride with Ms. T.”
The woman with long black hair winced in fear and bowed her head like she was trying to curl up and disappear. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.
“And you know exactly where he is?” she asked.
“I have Lucas’s room number.”
“How did you get that?”
“I have friends on the inside.”
“So,” she asked, “how will I know when it’s over?”
“It’s over when we have the codes and the information from the boy’s file.”
Half an hour later the woman with long black hair left the airport and hailed a taxi to take her to the Good Hotel Las Vegas. As she walked in the Nevadan heat, she felt a strange flash of cold.
A BODY IN MOTION
Lucas Benes woke in a cold sweat.
Lying in his sleeping bag on the roof of his father’s hotel, Lucas felt connected, somehow tethered to another world, another life. He focused on the cloudless Nevada sky and tried to remember what he had seen in his sleep.
Dreams always seemed to fade as quickly as they came, leaving behind only fragments. Lucas figured his mind must be jumbling fiction and reality.
He wasn’t sure what to make of the dream.
At hotel-school there were old arguments about the meaning of dreams. Ms. Dodge, the science teacher, called dreams “nighttime cerebral visions.” She said they were a way for the body to flush out the unused information in the brain. Lucas’s English teacher, Dr. Sherman, differed. He said that dreams were a form of time travel, which helped you make sense of the here and now.
Lucas preferred Dr. Sherman’s version.
Sleep slowly came again, and Lucas traveled back in his mind. He drifted into picturing his most recent “nighttime vision.” He felt like he was remembering what had happened to him when he was a baby at the Good Hospital in Tierra del Fuego. There had been icebergs in the sea off Tierra del Fuego, but he hadn’t been there since he was two—when the ferryboat accident nearly killed him.
Half-awake, half-asleep, Lucas flipped through the details in his memory. Kate Benes had only been his mother for a day. She had gone to southern Argentina to adopt him and some other babies from the nuns at the Good Hospital. She had saved his life by putting him in an ice chest just before their boat hit a freak iceberg.
And then the boat exploded.
So Lucas technically had had two mothers before he turned two years old. His adoptive mother and his birth mother. Both were now dead, which was why he could only dream about them.
But Ms. Günerro had promised that his birth mother was alive.
Part of Lucas knew it was a lie. On the surface this news couldn’t be true. It just wasn’t logical. Still, somewhere in his heart there was a tiny sprig of hope that his birth mother was alive. Just maybe.
He sat up, patted down his bed-head hair, and looked around the rooftop. As usual he was alone, which was why he slept on the roof in the first place. To get away from the drama of the Globe Hotel and the New Resistance Hotel-School. Slowly his brain filled with data.
It was the first day of school for the new term. Lucas secretly wanted some great tragedy to happen, some awful storm that would cancel school for days. The Glo
be Hotel was located in the desert, in Nevada—a Spanish word that meant “snow covered.”
The irony was not funny to Lucas. There was definitely no chance of a snow day. Not in Las Vegas. Not on August first.
Six weeks earlier he’d dreamed about his mother and had found a baby lying in a shopping cart in the back parking lot. Lucas flung open the already unzipped sleeping bag and peered over the concrete wall.
This particular morning was turning out to be equally as odd. At that very moment a bowling ball began rolling across the asphalt. The heavy ball crunched across the loose grit and gravel and rolled into a pile of construction sand, where it made an indentation and stopped.
Weird, Lucas thought.
He scanned the back parking lot to see where the ball had come from. Surely it had been left over from the van that had picked him up six weeks ago and spilled Busball balls all over the place.
Newton’s laws of physics flashed in Lucas’s brain. A body (or a bowling ball, in this case) at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an external force. It had to be a person. Someone was in the back parking lot.
Maybe, Lucas thought, it’s the guys I met in June. The Curukians who were helping me and the New Resistance.
Lucas’s internal clock told him he was already late for breakfast. As he was stowing his sleeping bag, he heard the stairwell door to the roof crash open. A pair of sandals slapped across the rooftop.
Holding a hairbrush, his fourteen-year-old sister, Astrid, called out, “Put on some clothes, would you, please?”
“I’m getting dressed,” Lucas said, picking up a pair of sport shorts.
“Are you wearing boxers?” Astrid asked. “You wear boxers to bed?”
“Uh, yeah,” said Lucas. “I’m fourteen. What do you expect me to wear to bed? Pajamas? Turn around!”
Astrid faced the other way and brushed her hair while Lucas put on the shorts and a T-shirt.
“Are you finished yet?” Astrid asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Lucas. “I just had the weirdest dream, but it made me remember my mother. It’s hard to believe she might be alive.”
“We know, Lucas,” Astrid said, running the brush through her hair again. “You’ve been talking about Ms. Günerro telling you about your mother being alive for a month and a half now.”
“I have not.”
“Did you write your summer essay on it?” Astrid said.
“Yeah, sure.”
“You’re lying,” she said. “And not to be harsh, but so is Ms. Günerro.”
Lucas’s mind populated with a cast of characters and places from Paris: the Good Company, a French kid named Hervé, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop. Jackknife and Travis in the Notre Dame Cathedral at Ms. Günerro’s weird brainwashing ceremony. He remembered Charles Magnus on a motorcycle, chasing him through the streets of Paris. And the Curukians—Siba Günerro’s boys who would do anything she asked.
Lucas rolled up his foam mattress and stowed it with the sleeping bag in the plastic bin he kept for himself on the roof.
“Hey, Astrid,” he said. “Where’s Gini?”
“Dad’s worried about her,” Astrid said. “So Nalini’s taking care of her now.”
“Why?”
“Apparently,” Astrid said, “someone broke into the nurse’s office at the Globe Hotel and stole some birth charts and then tossed them in the dumpster.”
“Who would do that?”
“We don’t know.” Astrid turned to leave. “Coach Creed sent me up here to get you,” she said. “The next term is about to start and the new kids are coming this morning. That means you get a roommate.”
“I thought they were going to live in the dorms downstairs.”
“They are,” Astrid said, “when the dorms are finished. But there’s something wrong with the concrete or something like that. So until then you have to share a room.”
“I don’t want a roommate,” Lucas said. “I’m kind of tired of everybody.”
“Yeah, me too,” said Astrid. “Well anyway, the hall monitors are moving the girls to the eighth floor and the boys to the seventh floor. You’re going to be late if you don’t hurry.”
“I know,” said Lucas.
“You don’t wear a watch or know where your phone is,” she said. “How do you know what time it is?”
“I have a clock in my head.”
“What time is it?”
“Seven oh three.”
Astrid glanced at her phone. She turned it so Lucas could see. It said 7:02, and then it changed to 7:03.
“I’ll be right there,” Lucas said as Astrid headed into the stairwell.
Yeah, he thought. As soon as I find out who’s signaling me with that bowling ball.
LET’S MAKE A DEAL
From the Globe Hotel roof, Lucas could smell coffee and hot chocolate coming through the kitchen vents. And doughnuts, too. They were classic combinations. But the sweet fried dough meant that it was the first day of class, and deep down Lucas just didn’t want to go to school.
Ever.
Summer was never long enough.
Never.
The new school year didn’t start for a whole nother fifty-seven minutes. Lucas figured he had plenty of time to find out who was in the parking lot.
Lucas looked over the wall again and eyed the bowling ball. He wondered if it wasn’t a signal, but rather a trap. In Paris he had helped destroy part of the Good Company’s kidnapping ring. Ms. Günerro would surely come after him, and she would send Curukians first. No doubt.
Lucas tamped down his self-doubt and prepared to rappel down. He stepped on the climbing platform, let out some line, and dropped. As he descended, he bounced off the exterior wall of the hotel. He sprang out three, four times and swung wide, like he was on a kite board. Lucas Benes had mastered the solo rappel.
Two minutes later he landed on the ground and eased around the side of the hotel. He couldn’t hear much except for the jackhammering in the construction site below ground. Behind a lumber pile workers in hard hats loaded stones into a massive rock crusher.
Someone wrapped in a white Mexican serape cut between a stack of two-by-fours and then disappeared.
The laundry vents on the back of the hotel were blowing a sweet, clean smell into the air, and Lucas considered sneezing. But then he noticed that the bowling ball was now missing.
Lucas moved diagonally across the parking lot toward the dumpsters. He rounded the pile of sand and cut behind a stack of lumber. The workers he’d spotted earlier were nowhere to be found. Strangely, the rock crusher spun in a slow circle, chewing on bits of stone.
If someone wanted to meet him, Lucas reasoned that he should make himself available. He stepped around the lumber and now found himself boxed in by the dumpsters on one side and the rock crusher and a muddy area behind the basketball hoops on the other. A vulnerable spot. The hairs on the back of his neck rose up.
Sometimes being scared to death was better than being bored to death.
“Hello?” Lucas called out to no one he could see.
He heard footsteps. Two pairs of shoes.
Lucas spun around.
A bowling ball came flying straight at his chest. Lucas flapped his arms, jumped back, and let the ball bomb into the puddle of muddy water.
“What did you do that for?” Lucas asked as he slurped his shoe out of the mud.
“I heard you were quick,” the tall boy said.
“You know me?”
“Are you Lucas Benes?” said the short boy.
Lucas sized up the two guys. They were definitely Curukians.
All-black clothing. Peach-fuzz mustaches. One tall. One not. The shorter one wore a muscle shirt.
They were perfect examples of the expression “birds of a feather flock together”—like they never even thought for themselves. Maybe that was what being brainwashed really was all about. People not thinking for themselves. There were so many like that. People who just did what others did and thou
ght the way other people thought.
Brainwashed.
Lucas said, “Who wants to know?”
“Every Curukian in the world,” said Tall Boy.
Lucas heard an Eastern European accent.
“So where are your accents from?” Lucas asked.
“Raffish, Curuk.”
“Oh, right,” said Lucas, reminding himself that Curukians said they were from the fictitious place made up of the initials of the five United Nations Security Council countries: the US, the UK, Russia, France, and China.
Both boys were twitching and fidgeting. When people were anxious, they normally did a bad job of hiding what they wanted.
In his mind Lucas could hear Coach Creed telling him to let the other guys make the first mistake. All Lucas had to do was hold on, and they would tell him everything he needed.
He waited a total of seven seconds.
“We heard about what you did in Paris,” Muscle Shirt said.
“Ms. Günerro is meta mad,” Tall Boy said. “You wrecked her bus.”
“She told the cops,” Muscle Shirt said, “and they’re looking for you. Your name is all over Interpol.”
Lucas could have argued with them about who really wrecked the bus, but that would serve no purpose. He could just as easily walk or run away. But Lucas wanted to know why they were visiting the Globe Hotel Las Vegas.
“Ms. Günerro has a bounty out for you,” Tall Boy said.
“But we’re here to make you a deal,” said Muscle Shirt. “Your birth chart from Tierra del Fuego is missing, and Ms. Günerro believes there are some account numbers and codes in that file that will tell us where your mother hid the Good Company money.”
This wasn’t going to end well. Lucas knew as much.
Muscle Shirt said, “Before Ms. Günerro and Mr. Magnus find you, we thought we’d offer you an arrangement.”
