The Impossible Clue

by Sarah Rubin

  ‘I’m Andrew, Mr Delgado’s Personal Secretary, and I will be supervising your tour of the facility.’ He put emphasis on the words ‘Personal’ and ‘Secretary’ as if they were capitalized, like a royal title.

  Dad cleared his throat.

  ‘And Mr Jones, so nice of you to join us too.’ Andrew turned his professional smile on my father. Then he stepped behind the reception desk, shooed the woman working there away from her computer and began pressing buttons on the free keyboard.

  I could sense the hostility coming off the shooed receptionist like some kind of force field. I actually felt a little bad for Andrew. No one likes it when you’re better at their job than they are, but what was he supposed to do? Pretend to be stupid? A printer whirred and Andrew presented us with our ID badges. I was surprised to see the badges had our photos on them. One of the security cameras must have taken our pictures while Dad and I were waiting for someone to buzz us in. Next to the photo the words One-Day Authorization and the date were printed in big bold letters. Sammy wasn’t kidding when he said his dad took security seriously.

  ‘If you’ll wear those and come with me, I will show you to Dr Learner’s lab.’

  We pinned on the badges and followed Andrew into the elevator. I could tell Dad was disappointed he wouldn’t be able to use his pass to get back into the building later on, but he did his best to hide it. Andrew swiped his ID card and pressed the button for the first floor. I was surprised to see that we were going down.

  ‘The building is built into the hillside,’ Andrew explained before I could ask. ‘Reception is at the top, all the labs are underneath. It makes the building very energy-efficient.’ Andrew launched into what sounded like a pre-prepared speech about the merits of Delgado Industries’ state-of-the-art building, timed perfectly to take us to the bottom floor.

  The elevator doors behind us opened on to a long corridor. The wall in front of us, which ran along the length of the corridor, was glass. On the other side a long lawn, more manicured than a golf course, sloped away from the building until it reached a thick line of red maple trees.

  Dad and Andrew started walking down the corridor, but I opened the file Mr Delgado had given me and found the copy of the floor plan. Dr Learner’s lab took up most of the first floor. Only two of the other offices were labelled on the plan. A small space for Graham Davidson and a much larger office for Mr Delgado. I would have thought Mr Delgado’s office would be somewhere on a top floor. But maybe he and Dr Learner liked to be close to each other. They were old friends, after all.

  There was a fire exit to the left of me, at the end of the corridor, but a large sign warned that opening the door would set off an alarm. I walked towards the wall and put my face against the glass, turning my head to the side. Judging from the seam where two panes connected, the windows were about five centimetres thick. I checked the edges. They were fixed in position. There was no way to open the window. Dr Learner didn’t get out that way either. I wiped my faceprint off the pristine pane with the sleeve of my shirt and ran to catch up with Andrew and my dad.

  It was the kind of place nightmares were made of, a long white hallway with endless identical doors and no way to tell them apart. Andrew appeared to be hesitating.

  ‘I’m sure it was this one,’ he said, half under his breath. It was the first time I’d seen him less than one hundred per cent efficient. It made him seem almost human.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ I asked.

  ‘Graham Davidson,’ Andrew said. He was the one in the security footage, I remembered. The one who discovered Dr Learner was missing. ‘Mr Delgado has ordered new nameplates for all of the doors, but there’s been a delay. We were expecting them last week. Maintenance took off all the old nameplates, and then nothing.’ You could tell that Andrew was personally affronted by the inefficiency of the whole situation. He took a breath and knocked on the door. If it was the wrong one, I wondered if he might self-destruct.

  ‘What?’ someone yelled from the other side. ‘It’s open.’

  No sparks flew from Andrew’s ears. I assumed we were speaking to the right man. Andrew opened the door.

  Graham Davidson’s office was slightly larger than a cupboard. His desk was wedged against the back wall, piled high with papers and books. There was one small space clear for his keyboard; everything else was chaos.

  Graham Davidson sat hunched over his keyboard, copying data from a notebook into a large spreadsheet. He was built like an upside-down trapezoid. The way he hunched over made his 19-inch computer monitor look like a toy.

  ‘Davidson. Alice Jones is here about Dr Learner.’

  Dad cleared his throat.

  ‘Excuse me. Alice Jones and her father, Arthur.’

  Graham didn’t turn around. ‘Yes, yes, just let me finish this column.’

  ‘I was hoping you could accompany us to Dr Learner’s office and answer any of the more technical questions that they have.’

  Andrew waited for a response. All he got was the click of keys.

  ‘Davidson?’

  ‘There. Done.’ He snapped his notebook shut. ‘Yes, I’ll show your blasted guests around. Data entry, group tours. I do have a PhD, you know.’

  Graham Davidson spun around in his chair and glared at us. He had the lid of a black biro in the corner of his mouth. At least I think that’s what it was. He’d chewed it to a pulp. I guess typing numbers into a computer wasn’t Graham’s idea of a fun time.

  He pushed himself out of his chair and stalked down the corridor. ‘Follow me,’ he said without looking back.

  Dad and Andrew were fine, but I had to jog to keep up.

  ‘So Andrew,’ Dad said, ‘where is Mr Delgado today? I was hoping I could ask him a few more questions.’

  ‘Mr Delgado is a very busy man.’ Andrew spoke with the pride of a father, even though Delgado must have been a good twenty years his senior. ‘He’s at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s the graduation speaker. They’re awarding him with an honorary doctorate.’ He paused for a moment, savouring the words.

  ‘Honorary doctorate,’ Graham scoffed. ‘I spent eight years hunched over a microscope in a lab that smelt like wet towels before I got my degree. Not that it did me much good. Glorified errand boy. But donate a new science building and hey presto, you’re a doctor. Right, here we are.’

  He stopped in front of an industrial grey door and pulled a bunch of keys out of his lab-coat pocket.. All the doors looked the same to me. I made a mental note that Dr Learner’s was the fifth door from the elevator, just in case I needed to find it again.

  On the wall across from the one door to Dr Learner’s office a small square surveillance camera pointed down at us. It was secured to the wall with an iron bracket and pointed directly at Dr Learner’s door.

  ‘Is that the camera that recorded Dr Learner’s disappearance?’ I asked.

  Andrew flicked his eyes up over my shoulder, then looked back at me.

  ‘Yes, that’s the one. Aren’t you clever?’

  I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or serious, so I ignored him and took a closer look at the camera. It was fixed firmly in position, so no one could have adjusted the angle or tampered with where it was pointing. Besides, if anyone had moved the camera, we would have seen it on the recording.

  I turned back to Graham as he found the right key and opened Dr Learner’s door.

  ‘Who works in all of the other offices?’ I asked.

  ‘No one. The whole area past my office is Dr Learner’s. He needed more space, so they took out the walls between the offices and made it all one lab. And, before you ask, all the extra doors were sealed shut. There’s no way you can open them.’

  Dr Learner’s office was a large rectangle, about four times as long as it was wide and crammed full of large metal machines. The one closest to me looked like a giant telescope, but the label stuck to the side read ‘A33zx series, blue Ultron laser’. There were no beakers or test tubes or vials of strange coloured
liquid. Just wall-to-wall machines. I could almost feel the power coursing around the room.

  Andrew stepped inside and stood with his back to the wall, like he was afraid he might break something. But that didn’t bother Dad. He stalked about in his usual restless way, picking up anything that wasn’t fixed to a table or too heavy to lift. Graham Davidson followed him, putting everything right with more than a little exasperation. Dad flicked a switch, and a large dangerous-looking piece of equipment started humming.

  ‘So how long have you been Dr Learner’s assistant?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Mr Delgado hired me about a year ago.’ Graham turned the switch back off quickly. ‘Dr Learner was looking for someone to mentor, someone who would carry on his research once he retired. It was a dream job. I should have known it was too good to be true.’

  ‘That’s a real shame,’ Dad shook his head. ‘What kind of research is it?’

  ‘Physics.’

  Dad waited, but Graham didn’t elaborate.

  ‘What about you, Andrew? How long have you worked for Mr Delgado?’

  While Dad was keeping Graham and Andrew busy with easy questions, I moved to the far end of the office and started opening drawers and looking in cupboards, trying to find a clue as to what mysterious project Dr Learner was working on.

  I didn’t get very far. All I could find were small metal tubes, wires, little mirrors and a shelf full of protective gloves and goggles.

  I was just about to give up when I saw something at the back of a metal cabinet. A square of blackness that was just a little bit darker than the rest. I reached in and pulled out a box covered in soft black velvet.

  I opened the lid.

  The inside of the box was covered in black velvet too, and a small flap of the fabric lay loose across the bottom. I lifted it and gasped. There, lying on top of the cloth, were ten of the biggest diamonds I’d ever seen.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Graham demanded. He took a pair of tongs carefully out of my father’s hands. ‘This lab is full of precision equipment. Andrew, watch him. Make sure he doesn’t touch anything else.’

  Graham came across the office to me. He held out his hand and I put the box in it.

  ‘Are those real diamonds?’ I asked.

  Graham glared at me. ‘They’re industrial. They’re for the lasers, not jewellery.’

  He opened the box and counted the jewels, like I’d be dumb enough to steal something with everyone watching me. Besides, I’m not exactly a diamond necklace type of girl. I’d rather have a new scientific calculator.

  ‘Do they make the laser more accurate?’

  Graham looked at me like I’d said something incredible. ‘Not exactly, but you’re close. They increase efficiency and make the laser stronger. You can do a lot more with less power.’

  I looked over his shoulder. Andrew was watching us suspiciously, and my dad was messing about with some papers next to Dr Learner’s computer.

  ‘Can you show me?’ It was the first solid clue about the nature of Dr Learner’s research. But I also wanted to see how it worked.

  Graham grumbled, but it wasn’t his best effort. I could tell he wanted to play with the lasers as much as I did.

  ‘Well,’ he said after a minute, ‘I guess I could show you some of the equipment.’

  He opened the side panel of one of the smaller machines that looked like a mini-fridge with a missing door. Graham fitted one of the diamonds inside and closed the panel.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Andrew appeared behind Graham’s shoulder. He didn’t look happy.

  ‘Keep your shirt on. I’m just showing her how the invisibility cube works. It isn’t top secret. You can see videos on YouTube.’

  Graham got four pairs of safety glasses off the shelf and handed us each a pair.

  ‘I need something small. This only works on a very small scale.’ He patted his pockets like an old man looking for his keys. ‘Ah,’ he smiled, then took the ruined pen lid off the biro in his pocket and put it inside the box. ‘Are you ready?’

  I put on the glasses and nodded.

  Graham flipped the switch. The machine started to hum and the cap was gone. Instantly, like it had disappeared off the face of the Earth.

  ‘Wow.’ It was all I could say. It was still only invisibility on a small scale, but it was a lot bigger than I thought was possible. Maybe Sammy hadn’t been exaggerating about how smart Dr Learner was after all.

  ‘Touch it.’ Davidson nudged my shoulder.

  I reached out my finger towards where I last saw the lid. I could feel it. It was still right there inside the cube. But I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see the tip of my finger either.

  We see things because light bounces off them and back into our eyeballs, which is why you can’t see in the dark. No light, no sight. Normally, light moves in a straight line, but Dr Learner’s machine must have been bending the light around the pen lid. It was making it invisible. It was so cool I didn’t even care that I was touching something that had been in Graham Davidson’s mouth.

  ‘Is this related to the breakthrough Dr Learner had?’ I asked. ‘Was he trying to make this work on a larger scale?’

  ‘What?’ Graham turned off the machine and the black lid popped back into view.

  ‘Mr Delgado said Dr Learner had a breakthrough. He had a press conference yesterday to unveil the results. Well, he would have if Dr Learner hadn’t gone missing.’

  ‘A breakthrough?’ Graham looked confused. ‘Not that I knew about, not that Dr Learner would share any of his important research with me. Oh, no. I don’t know why he wanted a lab assistant in the first place, unless it was to have someone to get him coffee. He never had any appreciation of my skills. He never even let me babysit experiments for him. He’d be here all hours of the night because he couldn’t bear to leave an experiment unfinished and he refused to let me help. And that was before he got super paranoid.’

  ‘Wait.’ I held up a hand to stop Graham’s rant. ‘Did something specific happen to spook Dr Learner?’

  ‘It wasn’t anything I did, if that’s what you’re implying.’ Graham searched me for an accusation. ‘But maybe you’re right. He did get a lot worse about six months ago. He even started taking his notes home in a locked briefcase every night.’ Graham trailed off as if he’d thought of something important.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  Graham shook himself. ‘What? Oh, nothing. I just remembered I have to do something. Are you just about done here?’

  I wanted to ask what Graham had remembered. I was pretty sure it had something to do with that briefcase, and I wanted to know what it was. Maybe Dr Learner had figured out how to make the invisibility cube work for larger objects. But Andrew butted in first.

  ‘Yes, I think we’re just about finished here.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I need to go collect Mr Delgado from the unive— Mr Jones!’ Andrew spoke sharply, and my dad quickly put down a small soldering iron.

  Andrew took a calming breath and herded us all out of the room. Graham Davidson left too, locking the door behind him. I wondered if he was allowed to go into Dr Learner’s lab without supervision. If it was me, I’d spend all day playing with that invisibility cube. But I guess the security camera meant he couldn’t sneak in, even if he did have the key.

  I looked at the camera one more time as we walked past. Something about it bugged me, but I couldn’t figure out what. I wanted to stop and take a closer look, but Andrew must have been in a real hurry to fetch Mr Delgado. He was already at the end of the hall, tapping his foot like that would make me move faster. I took a quick picture so I could look at it later, and then I ran the rest of the way down the hall.

  I climbed into the car and slammed the door behind me.

  Dad slid behind the steering wheel, grinning like a kid in a candy store. ‘What a scoop!’

  I was only half listening. I’d figured out why the security camera was bothering me. It was too small.

  I pulled ou
t the photos from the file Delgado had given me. There. In one of the shots taken from inside Dr Learner’s lab, you could see the security camera through the open office door. I took out my phone and looked at the picture I’d just taken.

  In the picture from the Delgado file, there was an L-shaped bracket hooked to the side of the camera. Two small clips came out of the foot of the L. They looked like they were designed to hold something flat. Maybe a mirror to see around corners, or something to block out glare if the camera was near a window. But the camera outside Dr Learner’s office wasn’t near a corner or a window. So what was the bracket for? And since there was no bracket on the security camera when we were in the office today, where had it gone?

  ‘Alice, didn’t you hear me? I said, what a scoop!’

  The car shuddered to life, coughing up black smoke as we pulled out of the Delgado Industries car park and back on to the road. Dad is a reckless driver, so I expected to hear at least a couple of horns sound off as he pulled into traffic without slowing down. The silence was so unexpected, it made me turn around. A silver Mercedes with a New York number plate was right behind us. It must be a rental, I thought. Either that or their horn was broken. There was no way a real New York driver would let Dad get away with cutting them up like that.

  ‘This story has everything!’ Dad changed lanes to pass someone doing the speed limit. ‘We already had a mysterious disappearance and some sort of top secret invisibility project. Now we’ve got a four-million-dollar government contract, possible corporate espionage, and – best of all – that invisibility project? It was a suit! Dr Learner was working on an invisibility suit!’

  ‘Wait, how do you know all that?’

  ‘Ah, well, I may have taken a little peek at Dr Learner’s computer while you three were messing about with that machine. Nice work, by the way.’ Dad took a sharp corner without signalling and kept talking over the blaring horns.

  ‘How did you even get into his computer? Didn’t he have a password?’

  ‘Yes, well, fortunately for me Dr Learner was the forgetful type. He wrote all his passwords down on a handy little Post-it and stuck it under his keyboard. His computer is about as secure as a brown paper bag.’