Bringing Down the Mouse

by Ben Mezrich

  Crystal rolled her eyes.

  “You’re an idiot. The government doesn’t hire twelve-year-olds.”

  “How do you know?” Marion countered, huffing and puffing as he staggered along next to her, counting the numbered doors with moving lips as he went. “I have an uncle who’s a federal employee, and he once told me—”

  “Your uncle works for the post office,” Crystal cut in.

  “Okay, but he says that government agents are getting younger every year. Because of the hackers, you know. They need young people to infiltrate the hackers.”

  “Well, when they start trying to infiltrate chimpanzee gangs, I’m sure they’ll get you two.”

  “Hey, that’s not very nice.”

  Crystal stopped short, hands outstretched to block her fumbling escorts. Her hand bounced off Kentaro’s head and caught Marion right in the chest. She grimaced, noticing that his jumpsuit felt like it was made of velvet. Then she pointed to a numbered door.

  “This is the undergraduate file-backup room, according to your blueprints. Most of the data is electronic, so it’s in the cloud, but there should be some hard copies of things—registration forms, dorm leases, filed complaints, stuff like that.”

  She reached out and tried the doorknob, but it was locked, as she suspected.

  “You got a magic card for this one too?” Kentaro asked.

  “Magic is science for morons. I’ve got something better.”

  She started down the corridor again, passing two more doors and then stopping in front of what looked to be a ventilation grate planted about waist-high along the wall. As Kentaro and Marion followed, she retrieved a Phillips-head screwdriver from the side pocket of her overalls. She tapped the still-open blueprint with the head of the screwdriver.

  “You were right about one thing, Kentaro. MIT and the US military do have a close relationship, and a lot of defense department money flows through these buildings. Peaking around WWII, this place was like an engineering factory for the military. Just a few hundred yards from here is where geeks like us developed microwave radar, guidance systems for aircraft, sonar, even early computers and much of the hardware and software used in ballistic missiles.”

  “And this is relevant—” Marion started, but she shut him up with a look.

  “It’s relevant because it’s going to get us inside that file room. See, a lot of this architecture came about through military R & D grants, which meant there were certain safety precautions that had to be met in the case of an enemy attack, or some sort of homegrown sabotage. During the seventies, there were a lot of sit-ins that turned into near riots, on account of the military presence on a fairly liberal campus.”

  Kentaro and Marion’s eyes had glazed as she lectured them, so she poked the handle of the screwdriver against each of their chests.

  “Anyway, if either of you’d actually looked over these blueprints, you’d know that most of the rooms on this hallway were built with positive pressure ventilation systems. Basically, the air in these rooms is kept at a higher pressure than the environment surrounding it. Which means that if there’s some sort of chemical leak, the rooms can be vented immediately, keeping these rooms environmentally secure. To do this, there are powerful fans in large ventilation ducts leading in and out of all the rooms on this side of the hallway.”

  She tapped the grated opening.

  “This leads into a central air-pump room, with more ducts leading to each individual room. We get in here, we’re in the system.”

  Kentaro grinned.

  “Old-school hacking. A screwdriver instead of a wireless modem. I love it.”

  “I’m glad. Because you’re the only one who’s small enough to crawl through the ducts. Shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to get to the file room, and then you can open the door from the inside.”

  Kentaro’s curses and complaints were music to Crystal’s ears as she went to work on the screws that held the grate in place.

  • • •

  Ten minutes later, Crystal leaned back from the aluminum filing cabinet, her brows furrowing as her eyes followed a cone of orange light across a heavily lined sheet of paper. She was controlling the cone with her lips; a small flashlight hung from the corner of her mouth, and as she read through the text, she skillfully shifted the light down the page. It was a trick she’d picked up over many evenings spent scouring beaches, quarries, and even her own backyard—sometimes you found the best minerals at night, because the precise glow of a flashlight threw off sparklelike reflections you didn’t get from a blanket of daylight.

  At the moment, she was getting some pretty startling sparkles of a different nature; rather than the rainbow arcs of silicon, graphite, or quartz, she was seeing bright red flicks of ink and jagged daggers of a pen.

  Once she’d located the correct filing cabinet, it hadn’t taken long to track down Miranda Sloan’s undergraduate file. The drawers of each cabinet were segregated by department, and since most of an undergraduate’s life was now online, each folder of backup paperwork was quite small—some as short as a single sheet, like an insurance form or a signed tuition bill tucked inside a manila folder.

  But Miranda Sloan’s file was at least twice as thick as anyone else’s in the mechanical engineering drawer—and from the very first sheet Crystal pulled, it was easy to see why. The circled blank squares and Xs next to unsigned bars told a story that was surprisingly easy to file.

  “Unpaid tuition bills,” Crystal murmured around the flashlight as Kentaro and Marion crowded around her, trying to see over her shoulders. She didn’t feel a need to add their eyes to hers. She’d honed her investigative ability over a lifetime of analyzing rocks, ranging from some so small you could only see them under a microscope, to boulders you had to use a ladder to ascend. Compared to that, this was like finding silicon salt on a beach. “She’s at least three of her payments behind. Adds up to almost twenty thousand dollars. She’s on her third mailed warning; another letter like this, and she’s going to be out on her butt.”

  “Maybe that’s why she took a teaching job at Nagassack,” Marion tried. “I mean, that doesn’t explain why she lied to Charlie, but maybe she just needed a little cash.”

  “A teaching gig at Nagassack isn’t going to cover these bills.”

  Crystal kept scanning through the folder, looking for anything else that might be useful for Charlie. She was through to the last sheet of paper when she paused, the flashlight tight against her teeth.

  “What is it?” Kentaro asked, hopping from foot to foot in the darkness behind her. “A picture of her boiling rabbits for sport? Or holding a smoking gun?”

  “No. But now I’ve got her dorm-room number. Looks like she’s got a roommate. Maybe we should pay her a visit, see what else we can find out.”

  • • •

  It took about five minutes of aggressive knocking before Crystal heard movement on the other side of the door to Miranda’s dorm room, but she was pretty sure that had less to do with the late hour than with the loud music from behind the door. It hadn’t been particularly hard to find the modern four-story dorm building just a few blocks through Cambridge behind the Great Dome, nor had it been much of a task getting past the security desk on the first floor. There were some benefits to being twelve, one of which was that everyone pretty much believed any story you told them. The security guard looked like a college kid himself, probably making extra money on the side while catching up on his studies via the large textbook Crystal could see braced against his lap on the other side of the low security desk. He certainly didn’t want to deal with a crying twelve-year-old who’d snuck out of her sister’s dorm to buy some candy from the lobby candy machine, forgetting to bring her sister’s ID card with her. The guy didn’t even bother calling up to the dorm room to check her story; he just waved her by, as she’d suspected he would. Kentaro and Marion had given her thumbs-ups from outside the glass front entrance to the building, where they’d be waiting for her while she
completed her mission.

  Though it was a little scarier being on her own, it was better than letting the two goofballs loose in a college dorm building. When the door to Miranda’s room finally flung inward, revealing a two-bedroom suite, she was doubly grateful that she’d left Kentaro and Marion downstairs. The woman standing in the doorway, a plastic phone jammed against her left ear, was barely wearing any clothes. A little pink tank top, a pair of matching boy shorts, and nothing else. Her blond hair was rolled up on top her head, and her fingers and toes looked like they’d just been painted. Bright red and glossy, like the talons of a bird that had crash landed in a Ferrari-painting factory.

  The girl stared at Crystal, then raised an eyebrow, speaking into the phone while the pop music blared out around her from speakers lost somewhere in the chaotic room behind her.

  “No, Billy, it’s just some kid. You know you’re the only guy I’m interested in. No, don’t be stupid, you don’t have to come over here and beat anybody up. It’s just a little girl. Hold on a second.”

  The girl covered the phone with a palm and leaned toward Crystal.

  “Can I help you?”

  Crystal blanched, because there wasn’t much she hated more than being called a “little girl,” especially by someone who she doubted could tell the difference between a piece of marble and a chunk or rhyolite. But she wasn’t there to make a scene.

  “Um, I’m not sure I’m in the right place. My cousin, Miranda Sloan, told me to stop by after my family got to town, but our flight was crazy delayed, and my parents’ phone ran out of batteries so I couldn’t call first.”

  “Miranda isn’t here. She won’t be back until Monday, actually.”

  Crystal made her eyes wide.

  “Really? Oh no, I guess there was a miscommunication. She’s out of town?”

  “Florida,” the girl said hastily, obviously trying to get back to her phone call, and the “charming” brute on the other end of the line. “Wow, she’s quite the family girl this week. She’s down there playing Mother Goose to a nephew and a bunch of his friends. Knowing her, hitting every mall in the state, right?”

  Crystal faked a smile. A nephew. From what Charlie had told her, that had to be Finn. And combining the overdue tuition bills from Miranda’s file with the shopping comment, along with what Crystal could see of the dorm room—a jumble of expensive furniture and accessories right out of a catalogue or off a showroom floor—Crystal was getting a better picture of the woman Charlie was dealing with and her possible motivations.

  “I guess I’ll have to come visit another time,” Crystal mumbled, backing away from the door. The girl winked at her with heavy, overdone eyelashes, already bringing the phone back to her ear.

  “Sure, swing by next week! Miranda says she’s going to throw one heck of a party when she gets back in town. She says she’s finally going to pay off her missed tuition bills and her credit cards, so we can charge, charge, charge again another day! I don’t have to tell you, that girl has more lives than a cat, and the cat has got her claws into a golden goose!”

  With that, the girl disappeared back into the room, chatting away into the phone with Billy the Pig, shutting the door behind her. Crystal was left alone in the hallway, the pop music echoing around her head. It was late, she was tired, but she was also pretty pleased with herself. As Code Blues went, it had been a very successful night.

  Way better than the last Code Blue—although it would have been hard to do worse than a temperamental cat, bleeding hives, and a near beating with a lacrosse stick.

  • • •

  Twenty minutes later, Charlie hung up the iPhone and sank down against the bed, his mind whirling, Crystal’s voice still echoing in his ears. Jeremy was shaking his head as he paced back and forth in front of the bed; Charlie had turned the phone on speaker once Crystal had gotten into the meat of the story, and even Jeremy, who tried his best to see the good in most people, couldn’t ignore the obvious.

  Miranda had known about the money the whole time. It seemed clear now; the park employee with the scar was her accomplice, and she had worked with him to concoct the scheme. He was probably getting a cut—there was certainly enough money to go around. That’s what this was about, from the very beginning. There was no paper, the money wasn’t going to charity; it was going to pay off Miranda’s tuition and credit-card bills.

  Charlie was Miranda’s golden goose.

  Playing chaperone to her nephew and a bunch of his friends. Sam had said that Miranda and Finn seemed to have known each other a long time. That made sense, of course, since they were related. Which meant that Finn might have known all along what Miranda was up to. Certainly, he knew that she wasn’t a teaching student at Northeastern. In fact, she was an engineering student at MIT. She wasn’t writing a paper; she was running a scam. It wouldn’t have been hard for her to have fooled her way into the teaching position at Nagassack; crafting a fake resume and a few references would be child’s play for someone as sharp as Miranda. And a few hours a week away from MIT wouldn’t have been too difficult for her to pull off, even as an engineering student.

  She had probably figured out the math and science on her own, then trained the team to bring down Incredo Land to the tune of fifty thousand dollars.

  “She’s smart,” Jeremy said as he paced in front of the bed. “If you back out now, she’ll find another way to get the money. Maybe put Finn up in your place, pay off more park employees, I don’t know. She’s freaking scary.”

  Charlie didn’t think Finn had any chance of beating the wheel, but it didn’t matter, because Charlie wasn’t walking away from this. Not now. He’d already been used, lied to—heck, he’d lied himself, all for the group. He wasn’t going to simply run away.

  “I have no intention of backing out,” he said, a sudden steel in his voice. I’m still going to beat that wheel.”

  Jeremy raised his eyebrows.

  “You’ve got a plan?”

  Charlie nodded, his mind still whirling behind his eyes.

  Miranda had betrayed him, she’d betrayed all of them. But she’d also given Charlie and the rest a chance at doing something great; she had opened their eyes, let them in on a secret world. Charlie had become cool and confident in a way that would only grow with time. In a way, he owed Miranda.

  So he was going to beat that wheel for her. And then, somehow, he was going to find a way to give her exactly what she deserved.

  23

  THREE A.M.

  Flecks of moonlight glistened across the glassy surface of a meandering jungle pool as the artificial tones of an animatronic Macaw tore through the silent, humid air. Then a single figure cut like a serrated blade through the water—elegant, skillful strokes, arms sweeping in perfect arcs, legs kicking with practiced ease. The level of focus was almost frightening; from Charlie’s vantage point, it appeared that to the kid in the pool, there was nothing else. It was as if all of existence had shrunk down to that moment, flesh against fluid, muscles contracting and expanding at a cellular level. And then, at the very last second, his hands shot forward, fingers gripping the concrete, and he came up, out of the water. The smile on his face looked pure, unsullied by thought or pretense or even character. In that moment, he just was.

  Charlie watched from within the shadows of the vast dormant volcano that rose up beside the curvy pool as Finn shook the water from his ears. When he couldn’t contain himself any longer, he stepped out of the shadow of the volcano and sat on the edge of a reclining wicker patio chair.

  “There’s one thing I don’t get,” Charlie said, half to himself, as Finn turned to look at him. If Finn was surprised to see him there, it wasn’t evident on the older kid’s face. “I mean, I understand why Miranda set this all up. She needed the money, and she knew, with the right group of kids and enough practice, we could pull it off. And that nobody would suspect a bunch of middle-school kids of working a system like this—beating beatable carnival games.”

  Finn crossed h
is arms against the cement, resting his chin on a bicep, still watching Charlie, still smiling that pure, unsullied smile.

  “But what I still don’t get,” Charlie continued, “is what’s in it for you? A little piece of the action? Just helping a member of the family? It just doesn’t seem a part of who you are, to do all this for money. But without you, none of this would have worked. You recruited us, one by one. You convinced me to join. You gave her credibility. Why? What’s in this for you?”

  Finn ran a hand through his longish hair. Then he sighed.

  “You’re a good kid, Charlie, but sometimes you think too much.”

  Charlie listened as the artificial Macaw chimed in from his perch in a twiggy roost halfway up the volcano, a high, melodic birdsong.

  “I thought that’s why Miranda wanted me. Because I know how to think.”

  “Double-edged sword, eh? Yeah, you know, I should tell you, Miranda actually didn’t want to bring you in. She thought it would be easier just to take your project, reverse engineer it, and train one of us to pull it off. She was worried that you wouldn’t have the guts to do what needed to be done. From your school file, she thought you were too much of a geek.”

  The breeze felt wet against the back of Charlie’s neck, but he didn’t move, didn’t even shift against the wicker of the chair.

  “But I’d seen you around school,” Finn continued. “You and your friends, that chick with the rocks, the little guy, Mr. Allergies, Jeremy freakin’ Diapers!—and I convinced her otherwise. I could tell, yeah, you’re a geek, Charlie, I don’t think that comes as any surprise, but you’ve got a good heart, you’re incredibly loyal, and you’re stronger than you realize. I guess even I underestimated how strong.”

  “That’s not an answer, Finn.”

  Finn paused, then cocked his head to the side. His smile seemed to change, turning crooked at the edges. His chin dug deeper into his bicep, his shoulders relaxing.