by Paul Aertker
“Like what?” Alister asked.
“Mostly diamonds, Bunguu’s diamonds to be specific. And supposedly a massive collection of illegal ivory.”
“How much is it worth?” Jackknife asked.
“Close to a billion dollars. US.”
Lucas was confused. “So where is this container?
“It’s all over the world.”
Nalini set Gini up on the table. “You’re not making a drop of sense, Alister.”
Gini began eating doughnuts with both hands. Alister pointed at Gini.
“Case in point,” Alister said. “You all have some sort of baby book or birth chart or file. Right?”
Everyone nodded.
Gini burped, “Right.”
“Well,” Alister said as he glanced over his shoulder. “Sometimes parents hide messages to their children in the kids’ baby books.”
Nalini said, “Go on.”
“The codes to finding these accounts,” Alister said, “are hidden in Lucas’s birth file.”
Astrid said, “Those two Curukians who are in the infirmary wanted Lucas’s chart, didn’t they?”
“You heard about that?” Lucas asked.
“Everybody did,” said Travis.
Alister moved an empty plate and plopped his briefcase onto the table. The kids craned their necks to see what was inside.
The bottom was covered in financial spreadsheets with thousands of little numbers. There were maps of sailing routes and timetables for airplanes, trains, and ships. On top of these papers were little plastic pouches filled with tiny tools, a small computer, an orange keyboard, a watch-sized screen, and a handful of colorful wires.
Jackknife pointed at one of the pouches. “That’s a locksmith’s toolkit, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
Travis pointed at the bright orange keyboard. “Is that a Kano computer?”
“It is,” said Alister. “But modified to crack some fairly sophisticated encryption software that can easily hack into . . . well . . . a lot.”
Lucas saw the plan in his head.
“Hey, Nalini,” Lucas said.
“Yeah?”
“Do you have some of Gini’s drawings?”
“I do,” she said. “Why?”
“Since Gini doesn’t have a birth file,” Lucas said, “I wanted to start a file for her, and I thought we should start with her artwork.”
“Oh that’s a great idea.”
“Could you get them together?”
“Yeah sure, but when do you want them?”
“Now?” Lucas said hesitantly. “And could you put it in a file outside my room?”
“Sure, we got it.”
“Got it,” Gini said, clapping.
Astrid asked, “What do you need Gini’s drawings for?”
“I may need a decoy,” Lucas said.
“For what?” Astrid asked.
“Alister and I have to pick the lock on the file room and have another look at my birth chart.”
“What?” Astrid shook her head. “No way.”
Jackknife asked, “Can you get in?”
“Whatever it takes,” Lucas said.
Alister shut the lid to his briefcase and snapped the locks. “Trust me,” he said. “There’s nothing I can’t get into.”
“To me,” Astrid said, “it sounds like the only thing you’re getting into . . . is trouble.”
A MOTHER IS A MOTHER IS A MOTHER
Siba Günerro looked out the window as her black Suburban with tinted windows sped past the security booth at the Good Production Company in Los Angeles, California. The license plate read SALL GOOD. The CEO of the Good Company had just starred in her own marketing infomercial entitled “Rich Like Me.”
Ms. Günerro settled in her seat. “Take the scenic road,” she said, talking to her driver.
She pushed a red button on the console, and the privacy window between the front and backseat closed with a swoosh.
The driver’s name tag read GOPER BRADUS | NUUK, GREENLAND. Goper clicked on the radio and shook his blond mop of a hairdo. He hit the gas and steered the big car through Century City. Once they were on the open road, he twisted the radio knob and turned up the polka music.
Immediately his front-seat passenger began humming along with the song. Goper glanced at his partner, Ekki Ellwoode Ekki, who was rubbing his belly like a pregnant woman. The big man then added a few choice snaps of his fingers to punctuate the drums in the song. He was way off beat. When Ekki started dancing in his seat, Goper had to force a change.
“Give me a doughnut, Ekki,” he said.
Ekki slowly stopped humming. He pushed up his round glasses and opened the box of glazed doughnuts sitting on the seat between them. He shoved a glazed cruller into his mouth and handed a chocolate-covered doughnut over to Goper.
With his left hand on the steering wheel, Goper slipped the doughnut onto his right index finger and then gnawed on the edges of the fried dough like it was an edible ring.
Within an hour, the doughnuts were gone, and the Suburban was speeding across the California desert and heading into the rising sun. For another August day the summer heat burned the surrounding countryside, splattering it with the full spectrum of yellow. Traveling ninety-nine miles—one hundred sixty kilometers—per hour, the Suburban blasted into the day.
They stopped at Love’s Travel Stop just east of Palm Desert. Ekki got out and bought a six-pack of chocolate milk and four bags of Twizzlers while Goper gassed the car up. They drove east and then turned due north through the Mojave Desert. The summer morning superheated the air, and a haze hovered over the highway. They drove through a national park, where mile after mile of Joshua trees dominated a landscape filled with ocotillo and jumping cacti.
From the backseat Ms. Günerro looked out the window at the scenery.
“I love cacti,” she said.
“Yes,” said the woman sitting next her. “They’re beautiful.”
“It’s not about beauty,” said Ms. Günerro. “A landscape flooded with cacti would make for a perfect natural prison wall.”
“Yes,” said the other woman. “Or torture field.”
“T,” said Ms. Günerro, “you’ve taken cruelty to a new level.”
“Plants are organic,” T said, “and I like being natural.”
“Traveling gives people such good ideas,” Ms. Günerro said. “The only thing better than this would be my namesake, Siberia—a frozen desert, but topped with ice cacti!”
“Good pun,” T said, chuckling. “Desert/dessert!”
The sound of the tires on the highway changed to hollow tones as the heat warmed the asphalt. Intermittent rays of sun slapped the window, and Ms. Günerro’s reflection flashed in the glass, highlighting her salt-and-pepper hair and her cat-eye glasses.
“The sun is dreadful, isn’t it?” Ms. Günerro said.
“I’m constantly putting on sunscreen to protect my beauty.”
Ms. Günerro chuckled under her breath. Her subordinate was no beauty.
Far from it. T, or Ms. T, as everyone at the Good Company called her, looked like she had been old ever since she was young. The nickname, T, stood for something.
Some thought the name came from the tea she liked to drink, but most in the Good Company assumed T stood for something Terrible. Some said T stood for Trash. Others said it was Toxic for the shipload of chemicals that she once capsized in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Still others insisted that T’s name stood for Torture, and they had the scars to prove it.
Whatever the letter stood for, it was clear that it was not good. She wore glasses thick as Coke-bottle bottoms, and when she smiled, she showed a mouth of teeth that most resembled a horse.
“Do you think we hold on to so much of our beauty,” T said with a grin, “because we never had children of our own?”
“I’m confident of it,” Ms. Günerro said. “Children turn beautiful women into old hags.”
“Speaking of...” T said. “How is the ‘mo
ther'?”
“Magnus has her now.”
“Hmm,” T mused. She spoke rapidly, almost nervously. “I can still remember taking that boy’s mother out into the Drake Passage. Oh it was cold that day.”
“It was Antarctica,” Ms. Günerro said. “And you were in international waters.”
“What was her name again?”
“Luz Kapriss,” Ms. Günerro said as she closed her eyes. “She was a fool.”
“All we wanted was a little information.” T said. “I still don’t understand how we haven’t been able to trace those deposits. It’s beyond comprehension for those monies not to be in a bank or in a safety-deposit box somewhere.”
Ms. Günerro said with her eyes now wide open, “What I don’t understand is how a cleaning lady was able to come up with a plan to steal my money.”
T asked, “There were precious stones also, no?”
“Diamonds galore!” Ms. Günerro said. “And gold and massive quantities of ivory and who knows what Bunguu put in there.”
T horse-smiled, cracking the makeup on her face. She had so many layers on that she looked like she had fallen into a cake, and the icing had stuck to her skin.
“So you think the boy will just join us?”
“No,” said Ms. Günerro. “I offered him a job with the Good Company already, in Paris. But he fled.”
“So what’s the plan now?”
“If he thinks his mother is here . . .” Ms. Günerro said.
“Then he’ll follow his mother.”
“All boys are mama’s boys. They’re weak. And they live off hope and not facts.”
The Suburban rounded another bend, and the sun suddenly grew brighter in the car.
“But, Siba, we’ve checked every bank in the world,” T said. “The fortune has to be somewhere.”
“The boy will tell us,” Ms. Günerro said. “As soon as he sees the mother, he’ll melt. As they all do.”
“What is the boy’s name again?”
“Lucas.”
“Won’t Lucas know it’s not his mother?”
“A mother is a mother is a mother,” Ms. Günerro said. “They’re all the same. In fact I would bet that a lot of children would love to have another mother anyway. Change things up a bit. You know? Day in and day out. The same breakfast. The same rules and lectures. Mothers are despicable. They are living proof that foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
T took out her compact cosmetic mirror and caked on another layer of makeup.
“No,” Ms. Günerro said. “The only person still alive who knew what Lucas’s mother really looked like is Madame Adrienne Beach at the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris.”
“That’s why you had me go to Paris last week,” T said. “Ha! I failed to report to you that Madame Beach had an accident.”
Ms. Günerro turned up the air conditioner. She gazed out the window at the passing sign. It read LAS VEGAS 100 MILES.
THE PLAN
Since the beginning of time, human beings have been protected by a sixth sense. It was the feeling, the knowing, you got when you met someone and they made you feel uncomfortable—it was a feeling some people called the heebie-jeebies.
Lucas’s sixth sense was on high alert, but he didn’t know why.
During lunch Lucas followed Alister back to their hotel room to unpack Alister’s bags.
They hadn’t been in the room but a few minutes when Nalini and Gini knocked at the door.
“Here’s the file you wanted,” Nalini said.
Lucas took the folder and opened it.
Inside there were hundreds of pages of Gini’s colorful drawings, scribbles, doodles, diagrams, and even some pages that looked like cryptic doctor notes. Some were written in crayon, others in pen and pencil.
“Perfect,” Lucas said, putting the folder on the bed. He motioned for the others to follow him out.
Cloudy was sleeping next to a cleaning cart just outside Travis’s room. As Alister passed by the cart, he snatched a blank key card from the bottom shelf.
When the stairwell door screeched open, Cloudy growled, a hint of distrust in his eyes.
Wrapped in a white Mexican serape, Mac MacDonald lumbered down the hall. The big kid was eating a doughnut and smelled like a swimming pool.
“Pew!” Gini said.
Mac snarled at the baby in the stroller.
“You been for a swim?” Lucas asked.
“I love to swim,” Mac said. “I used to go down to the Dead Sea in Jordan and race.”
“That’s cool,” Lucas said.
“The water there is really salty,” Nalini said.
“I heard,” Alister added, “that people read books while floating on their backs in the Dead Sea. Is that true?”
“Not everyone floats,” he said.
That uncomfortable feeling—the heebie-jeebiescrept up Lucas’s spine and settled into his shoulders. Something was just not right with this kid supposedly from Syria.
Cloudy circled behind Mac, sniffing the doughnut in his hand.
Mac ignored the dog and changed the subject. “So,” he said. “I hear you’re named after your mother.”
“Yeah,” Lucas said hesitantly.
“She was a cleaning lady, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Lucas said, “but that’s not in my school bio. How would you know that?”
“I know a lot of things,” Mac said.
It was definitely time for this conversation to end.
Suddenly Cloudy leaped at the half-eaten dough-nut. As Mac swatted him away, he fell backward and onto the floor. His serape flapped open in the front, exposing his cowboy boots, a Speedo swimming suit decorated with the Syrian flag, and a black stone necklace.
Nalini shrieked at the sight, and Gini broke out in laugher. Mac MacDonald quickly covered himself and stood back up.
“Not funny, Benes,” he said, and took off down the hall.
As soon as Mac was gone, Travis cracked his door open. “Did Mac just ask you about your mother?”
“Yeah, and I have no idea how he knew that,” said Lucas.
“He gives me the creeps,” said Nalini.
“More than that,” Travis said. “I was hacking into some old databases this morning, and the information in Mac’s school application doesn’t match with his past. It’s like he has no history.”
“That’s like Kerala,” Lucas said. “She just showed up one day at the Globe Hotel Luxembourg.”
Nalini asked, “How would he know about Lucas’s mother?”
“I don’t have an answer for that,” Travis said.
Lucas asked, “Did you tell my dad about the misinformation in Mac’s application?”
“I did,” said Travis. “He said if Mac was going to be a problem, then we should keep our friends close and our enemies closer.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nalini asked.
“It means,” Travis explained, “that if you keep your enemies close, you can keep an eye on them.”
“It also could mean,” Alister said, “that Mac and the Curukians that Lucas met in the parking lot are here for the same reason.”
“To steal Lucas’s birth file?” Travis said.
“Yes.” Alister picked up his briefcase. “Which is why Lucas and I are going to get it before they can.”
Lucas and Alister fled down the stairs, skipping two and three steps at a time. They passed the infirmary where Tall Boy and Muscle Shirt were being taken care of. Lucas took a shortcut through the laundry area and stopped at the file room door.
Alister inspected the locks. He set the briefcase on the floor, opened it, and pulled out his tools.
“Boot up that Kano computer,” he said. “And hook up the wires, would you please? This first lock will take a second longer than I thought.”
“Why?”
“This is a seven-cylinder pin-and-tumbler lock,” Alister said. “Normally there are only five.”
While Lucas got the co
mputer ready, Alister picked the lock. He inserted a small wrench into the bottom of the dead bolt and began raking the cylinders.
The lock clicked open.
“Amazing,” Lucas said.
“Now for the electronic lock,” he said.
Alister inserted a wire into the DC power socket on the base of the lock.
“This is used to program the lock with the hotel’s site code, but it also gives us access to the thirty-two-bit key from the lock’s memory.”
He inserted the blank key card into the door handle slot, and then typed on the keyboard. “Now we just send the same code back to the lock itself, and ...”
Click.
The door to the file room unlocked.
“How do you know this stuff?”
“I want to work in international banking, and if you’re going to know something, you need to know all sides. How people make money and how people steal money. And every two-bit thief knows how to pick a lock. That’s why I’m a hacker and a member of The Open Organisation of Lockpicks. They call us TOOOLs.”
“You said it, not me!”
“Ha-ha.”
Alister loaded the stuff back into the briefcase and took out a flashlight. Lucas opened the door, and they stepped into the dark room.
MILES OF FILES
The file room was so quiet that Lucas could hear his heart beating. He knew he was breaking the rules, but he had to keep information away from the Curukians. He calmed his breath and closed the door gently so the blinds wouldn’t clack against the glass.
Alister scanned the room with the flashlight.
There was a sitting area that looked like a doctor’s office with chairs and tables and magazines. Behind a counter there were rows and rows of files.
They tiptoed into the back, and Alister shone the flashlight on the tops of the cabinets. The first one read A-B. The other side read C-E.
“Benes or Kapriss?”
“Benes,” Lucas said with a shrug. “But they may have moved it.”
“You don’t even know who you are, do you?”
“I’m working on it.”
They slipped between the two giant cabinets, passed the As, and stopped at the Bs. Crammed in side by side were thousands of file folders with different colored tags on the ends.
Some of the files were big fat books, like baby books jammed with pictures of grandma and first birthday parties. Some were so thin that they had to pull them out just to read the names.
