The Secret of Rover

by Rachel Wildavsky

  “That’s very cool,” said David, impressed despite the circumstances: His mom and dad had made that.

  “And that’s not all,” said Alex. “You know, a person’s scent isn’t the only unique thing about them. It’s not the only thing you can use to search them out.”

  “Fingerprints,” said Katie.

  “Yes. But those are pretty hard to detect from a distance. Not that we didn’t try.”

  “So what are we talking about?” said David.

  “Well, each face is different,” said Alex. “That’s easier, because while fingers point down, faces point up and out. So Rover can see them better. And not just faces, either. Each eye is different. And each gait.”

  “Gait?”

  “Yes—meaning the way you walk. If you give Rover a video of someone walking, it can pick that person out on a city street, miles away, by their gait.”

  “OK, I’m impressed,” admitted David.

  Katie was not surprised. After all, she had recognized Trixie’s distinctive heavy footfall from across the street. But she didn’t pause to consider this. She did not want to be distracted with their parents not yet found. “Is that all?” she asked.

  “Not quite,” said Alex. “Voices work too. They’re just as unique as smells and faces and gaits. And they’re unique from the first day of life, by the way. Each and every baby, even, has his or her own special cry. If you feed that cry into our Rover, Rover can find that baby.”

  “Theo!” said Katie. “What about her cry?”

  Uncle Alex’s face had begun to brighten as he pursued the distracting subject of Rover. Now it collapsed again into gloom.

  “Well, that’s just it,” he said. “We don’t know Theo’s cry. There’s no recording for Rover to work with. It can’t find what it’s never heard. It has to have something to recognize.”

  “Mom and Dad have socks and shirts,” said David. “Lots and lots of socks and shirts. And most of them are still at home.”

  Uncle Alex nodded. “We’ve been trying that,” he said. “We’ve been back to the house—we’ve been all over it. But everything we’ve found has been corrupted.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Corrupted . . .” Alex searched for words. “Messed with; touched. It’s got other people’s smells on it now. Rover can’t get a clean read of your parents’ scents. Those animals,” he added angrily. “They’re thieves; they’re snoops; they’re rummagers. They handled every single object in your house.”

  “Keep looking,” said David fiercely. “Don’t give up.”

  Alex shifted unhappily in his seat. “Well, that gets me to the problem,” he said in a miserable voice. “I’m sorry to say that it’s getting rather late. The kidnappers won’t negotiate forever.” From the struggle on his face, Katie and David could see that he had reached a part of his story that was very hard to tell. “They’ve given us a deadline, kids. They’ve named a date and a time, and they’ve said if we don’t meet their demands by then, well—”

  Katie screamed, and buried her face on her knees. “When?” demanded David.

  “When is this deadline?”

  “The deadline is tomorrow,” said Alex bluntly. “Tomorrow morning at six.”

  Now Katie lifted her head and rose to her feet. Her hands were balled tightly into fists and her face was a mask of fury.

  “And you’re telling us now?” she demanded. “Our parents and our baby sister are supposed to die tomorrow—and you’re telling us now?”

  “If there was anything we could have used . . . ,” said Alex.

  “All this time we’ve been begging! Begging for news. And you said nothing?”

  “A movie of them,” continued Alex helplessly. “A recording on an answering machine. Or—”

  “Or a song?”

  Both of them turned at David’s words. He, too, had risen and was frantically pacing the room. Now he wheeled around to face his uncle.

  “Uncle Alex, we do have something. We have a song.”

  “Your parents recorded a song?”

  “No, we did. Katie and me.”

  Alex was bewildered. “We’re not trying to find you,” he said.

  “Uncle Alex,” said David. “My mom and dad have our song with them. If we find it, we find them.”

  Katie leaped to her feet, elated. “Oh!” she cried. “Oh, David! That’s brilliant!”

  “Somebody’s going to have to explain,” said Alex.

  “Our parents’ cell phone plays a recording of Katie and me singing. It’s their ringtone. We’re playing the piano and singing this dumb song. The phone is in Katkajan, and the original recording is here, at home. So if we load that recording into Rover and then call the phone, then it’ll ring and Rover can find it—”

  “And wherever it is, our parents will be there. Oh, David!” said Katie excitedly.

  “It’ll be easy for Rover,” continued David, “because it’s a perfect match. It’s the same recording! And it’s—”

  “And you could have had it days ago, Uncle Alex, but you didn’t tell us! You didn’t think we ‘needed to know’! You didn’t—”

  “Katie, stop,” said Alex. “Where is this recording? Where’s the original?”

  “It’s on our mom’s computer.”

  Alex collapsed backward onto the sofa. “Then kids,” he said miserably. “I’m afraid it’s gone. Your parents’ computer—it was wiped out.”

  “I don’t get it,” said David.

  “I mean they wiped out the hard drive,” said Alex. “We looked there. We figured your parents would have stuff stored there—video, audio, something. So we looked. We found absolutely nothing. Trixie—she took what she wanted from that computer and she destroyed the rest.”

  David felt as if he had been slugged in the gut. The wild hope that had propelled him to his feet drained from his body and he collapsed back onto the sofa. But through his pain he heard his sister’s steely voice.

  “Did they take us?” she asked.

  Both of them looked at her.

  “Did they take our voices? Because we can sing it again. We did it once; we can do it again.”

  David came back to life at his sister’s words. “Perfect!” he said. Rising, he rushed to Katie’s side, seized her by the shoulders, and shook her from sheer joy.

  But for some reason, Uncle Alex did not share in the children’s excitement. He looked, if anything, more dismayed than before.

  “Our voices haven’t changed, Uncle Alex,” said David. “The ringtone’s only a couple months old!”

  “And we’ve heard that recording a million times,” added Katie. “We know it by heart—we can even make the same mistakes on all the same notes!”

  “It’s not that,” said Alex slowly.

  Katie felt her panic returning. Maybe their parents’ phone was not in use. Maybe its battery had run down. Maybe the kidnappers hadn’t even kept it. “Their phone,” she asked. “Is it their phone? Is it still—?”

  “Their phone is fine,” said Alex. “We’ve used it—we still use it—to contact their kidnappers. It’s just . . .”

  “Then what?” demanded Katie. If the phone was good, there was no problem. “Uncle Alex, this will work!”

  “It’s not your idea, kids. The idea is good. I’m just worried that we don’t have time.”

  “You said six o’clock tomorrow morning. It’s only seven p.m. now!” she said.

  “Six fifty-seven,” David corrected his sister. “To be exact.”

  “Six fifty-seven! So we have eleven hours!”

  “Katie, that’s six o’clock Katkajanian time.” Alex’s anguished words stopped her in her tracks.

  “What?!”

  “They’re nine hours ahead of us. We have two hours, not eleven.”

  At this David exploded. “Well, thanks for letting us know!” There were daggers in his voice. At this moment, he hated his uncle. “How long does it take?” he demanded. “To use Rover—how long? After we get the
song, how long does it take to load it in? After we load it in, how fast does that dog hunt?”

  “Depends,” said Alex. “The closer the match, the faster the search.”

  “So we’ll make it exactly the same,” said Katie desperately. “We can sing it with the piano—we can go back to the house, even, and use the same piano. Are pianos like voices, Uncle Alex? Is each one different? Because we can use exactly the same one!”

  David paced, ticking off the remaining time on his fingers. “We have two hours,” he said. “We can be at the house by seven thirty, seven forty. Give us half an hour to record the song—but it won’t even take that long. Fifteen minutes! Then we’re back at the War Room by—”

  “But kids,” said Alex. “Once Rover finds your parents, it’s still not over. Finding’s only the first part. The other part is the rescue. Your mom and dad aren’t saved until the Katkajanian police can get to wherever they are. That’ll take time, too.”

  “How much time?”

  “Again, it depends. For a while we thought the kidnappers were holding your parents in the mountains. If they’re still there, then it’s certainly too late. It’s just so remote and there are no police—”

  Alex broke off, seeing the anguish on the kids’ faces. “But we think they aren’t there anymore,” he said hastily. “With the cooler weather coming, we think they’ve been moved back to Taq—to the capital. And if they’re right there, well, it’s not that big a place. But I figure you need thirty minutes at least. If we find them by”—he calculated quickly—“if we find them by eight thirty our time, we might have a chance. Any later than that and I’m afraid—”

  “Stop talking!”

  David and Alex both stared at Katie. “Uncle Alex, you can tell us in the car! Would you get your keys and drive? Would you hurry?!”

  Yet in the maddening world of adults, some things, it seemed, could not be hurried. They could not be hurried even when lives were at stake. And it soon became clear, to their deep consternation, that the hardest thing to hurry was their uncle Alex himself.

  He meant well; there was no question about that. And he certainly could move fast. They had not forgotten how quickly he had whipped out that pistol back on the mountain.

  But now they began to see that the Uncle Alex they had met in Vermont was one man, and this Uncle Alex was another. They had already learned that here in the city Alex tended to worry. Now they saw that worry made him dangerously slow.

  Katie had asked him to get his keys, but Alex felt that the safest way to travel would be under police escort. With cruisers in front of them and cruisers behind them—blue lights flashing—they could move at top speed and rip through intersections, disregarding red lights without risking an accident.

  David and Katie reluctantly accepted. But that meant they had to wait for the police to get there. And then when they did, their uncle was on the phone with the War Room, arranging for a recording crew to meet them at the house.

  So for four agonizing minutes after the police arrived, Katie and David sat while Alex talked. Unbelievably, he had placed his call from a landline.

  Five police cars were idling outside the door, motors running. Almost fifteen minutes had passed since Alex had given Katie and David the dreadful news that they had just two hours to save their parents’ lives. But they could not leave the safe house until Alex had finished his conversation.

  “4556 Lilyview Lane,” he was saying. Then he fell silent, listening. “No,” he said, in response to an apparent question. “‘L’ as in Larry. L-I-L—”

  Katie thought she would go mad. “Uncle Alex, have you heard of cell phones?!” she hissed.

  “I’ll call you from the car,” he said abruptly, and hung up.

  Katie and David were already there when Alex slid into the cruiser beside them. The cop behind the wheel was a wiry guy with a deeply lined face, forearms like steel ropes, and a seen-it-all expression that gave David hope. While waiting for Alex, David had had a talk with this cop about the need for speed. They had understood each other perfectly. The man began pulling forward before Alex had even shut the door.

  “Wait!” barked Alex. “Stop.”

  The cop stopped sharply, causing all three of his passengers to lurch forward.

  “Katie, David, fasten your seat belts.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said David.

  “Certainly not,” said Alex. “We’re going to be moving very fast.”

  “Uncle Alex,” said David, his voice tight, “our driver—he used to race motorcycles. Professionally. We won’t have an accident.”

  “David, just do it,” begged Katie, fastening her own. She was almost in despair.

  “I am still in charge here,” said their uncle. “We aren’t going anywhere without seat belts.”

  Katie reached over David’s lap and snapped his belt for him. “I did it. Drive!” she ordered.

  “He jumped motorcycles,” David said, fuming as the cruiser peeled away from the curb. “Tell him,” he begged the driver. “Would you please tell him, Tyrone?”

  But Alex was not listening. He was back on the cell phone, finishing his instructions about the recording equipment they would need at the house. And Tyrone, so talkative while the car had been idling, was now hunched over the wheel and silent, his eyes locked on the road ahead.

  David looked at his watch when they finally peeled away from the curb—7:13. The movement of the clock was relentless and terrifying.

  On the other hand, none of them had ever traveled the way they did then up the famed avenues of Washington DC.

  The rush-hour traffic was still thick enough that in an ordinary car, they would be moving at stop-and-start speed. But not tonight. They were in a pack of five cars, and they were at its dead center. A cruiser rode on either side of them, a third cruiser rode behind and a fourth ran ahead of them. The lead car’s job seemed to be to clear a path, like the tip of a wedge. Every car in their pack had its lights on and its siren wailing. Katie and David watched in awe as the thicket of traffic parted to make way for them, peeling to the sides of the road like a zipper opening up.

  David’s heart swelled with admiration. The government had messed up big. A few cracks were turning up in their uncle Alex. But the cops—the cops were great.

  And then they hit trouble.

  They had left downtown behind and were on their way to the suburbs. The office buildings and embassies that had lined the road had turned into houses and the road itself had slimmed. Now there were just two lanes: the left one where their convoy of five could travel single-file, and the right one, where all the other cars could go to get out of their way.

  But up ahead, that right lane was blocked.

  For someone on that all-important avenue, today was moving day. A gigantic van was stationed at the curb in front of a house. The van’s back was open, its ramp was down and fastened onto the pavement, furniture was everywhere, and no one was behind the wheel.

  The moving van took up half a city block. Cars scrambling to get out of the way of the oncoming police convoy had no place to go. They clogged the left lane where the convoy needed to travel, their horns blaring and their drivers looking frazzled.

  The car bearing Katie, David, and Alex was second in the convoy line. The police car in front of them stopped short. The cop inside it must have flipped a switch, because his siren launched into a different and more threatening wail. The cars in their path shifted nervously under this pressure, but the logjam packed itself in even tighter.

  “Tyrone!” cried Katie, dismayed. She seized David’s wrist and looked at his watch—7:22.

  But Tyrone did not break a sweat.

  Wordlessly, he swung his wheel and pointed the cruiser down a side street to their right. The three police cruisers behind him followed his lead. A detour!

  “Yes,” said David softly.

  But unfortunately, the sleepy residential street down which they were now racing had not been built for a high-speed car
chase. And unfortunately, Tyrone’s motorcycle-jumping right foot had the gas pedal on the floor.

  Just a few hundred yards ahead was a corner where he would have to turn left. It was a tight corner, a narrow corner, a square corner. It was a corner that could not be taken at sixty miles per hour.

  Tyrone did not take the corner. He took somebody’s lawn. And jumper that he was, he took it in a flying leap.

  Ugh! They all grunted and lurched as the cruiser hit the curb with a bump, bounced into the air, and flew across the front yard of the house on their left. Crunch went the front wheels of the cruiser as it returned to the ground, digging deep tracks in the grass.

  Apparently tomorrow was trash day and the unlucky family who lived in this house had already put out its cans. Smash went the cruiser into the nearest one, sending it flying and releasing a rain of garbage bags in its wake.

  “Hey!” cried the owner of the house, who was standing on his porch and saw the whole thing.

  But Tyrone did not stop. He was headed for the lawn next door. That would be the lawn with the beautiful cherry tree planted firmly in its center. That would be the tree with the heavy, low-hanging branch, from which a child’s empty red plastic swing dangled innocently in their path.

  Alex, white as a sheet and speechless, flung out his arms over Katie’s and David’s bodies. Katie covered her face with her hands. But David watched in sheer glee as the cruiser slipped beneath the branch, just catching the swing on its windshield and sending it flying after the garbage cans.

  “Sweet,” David murmured happily as they zipped, swaying, down the road, with three cruisers close behind them.

  The next left turn brought them onto a wider street, so this time Tyrone was able to keep all four wheels on the ground. A few screeching seconds later they had returned to the main road they had left just seconds before, where a right turn put them back on their path with the moving van safely behind them.