Crimes of Magic: The Yard Sale Wand

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Crimes of Magic: The Yard Sale Wand Page 21

by Richard L. King


  “OK, let’s take a deep breath and make sure we have everything,” Rachel said.

  I took a deep breath. “We have the two homing beacons. I have my Snoozer. You have your Mojo. We are properly attired. I have glow sticks and museum putty. I think that’s sufficient.”

  “It sounds complete to me. I see you have the snap-back option programmed in the spell, so let’s hit it.”

  “Here, you hold a glow stick in case we need it. I’ll hold my Snoozer. Here we go,” I said as I put the last symbol card into place. The air shimmered; the room chilled; there was a flash of light; and we were in the dark. I held my thumb above the Snoozer’s trigger, and I heard Rachel crack and shake the glow stick. The room was filled with the eerie light of the glow stick. We were in Liu’s office but nobody was there.

  “It looks like the coast is clear,” Rachel whispered softly. “Let’s just wait for the snap-back.” Thirty seconds after we arrived, we were returned to my living room. I picked up a symbol card to break the spell and said, “Shall we go back?”

  “Let’s hit it,” Rachel replied.

  “I retrieved our cong from the steel box in my magic bag and put the cong in a deep pants pocket. I stepped back into the magic circle and replaced the symbol card. Shimmer, flash, shimmer, and we were back in Liu’s office.

  “Break the spell,” Rachel whispered as she stepped out of the circle using the glow stick to search around the office. Satisfied that we were alone, she flipped the wall switch to turn on the ceiling cove lights. We both went over to Liu’s desk.

  “He keeps that steel box in this top right drawer,” I said. I pulled on the drawer handle, but it didn’t budge. “Locked,” I said.

  Rachel grabbed the handle of the second drawer down, and the drawer slid open. She pulled it all the way out, lifted it and removed it from the desk. She did the same with the lower drawer. She set both drawers on the desk and we examined the contents.

  “We’re in luck,” Rachel said as she took a screwdriver and a hammer out of one of the drawers. “How nice of Liu to leave us some tools to break into his drawer.”

  “That lock looks pretty solid to me,” I said.

  “Yes it does, but nobody ever thinks about some breaking into a drawer from the bottom. The bottoms are usually pretty flimsy.”

  Rachel got under the desk with the hammer and screwdriver and began chiseling around the edges of the bottom of the drawer. Somehow she got the screwdriver up into the drawer and used the screwdriver like a crowbar to break a chunk out of the bottom. After another minute, she had another larger chunk broken out. She reached up and started tugging forcefully on the bottom of the drawer. All of sudden, the bottom broke entirely out of the drawer, and the contents fell to the floor. Rachel pushed all the contents out from under the desk and slid out herself.

  We both got down on our knees to examine the drawer’s contents. There was Liu’s steel box of business cards, the pencil, and the cong with some apparatus attached to it. I picked it up and placed it on top of the desk.

  “That must be the cong, but what’s all this other gear?” Rachel asked.

  “This is a small camera attached to a battery pack,” I answered. “The LED on the battery pack must be what provided the light inside the drawer.”

  “So he has a camera attached to the cong.”

  “That’s right. It detaches easily,” I said. “This is a neat little camera. Because it’s attached to an external battery pack, it must have been taking pictures for quite a while.”

  “That cong isn’t green like our cong,” Rachel observed.

  “You’re right. This isn’t Imperial jade. It’s a motley green, brown and red.”

  “That’s great. It’ll be easier to hide in the wooden screen.”

  “Before we do that, just give me another second with the camera. I don’t think its Wi-Fi, and the external pack is just a battery, so the camera must have a memory card.” I found a small sliding cover and managed to pop out a miniature memory card. “It must be storing pictures on this card. I’ll bet it’s programmed to snap a photo several times a minute.”

  “We’d better take that memory card then,” Rachel said.

  “Some of it won’t make it through the Spell of Translocation,” I said. “It’ll be ruined.”

  “Ruined is good,” Rachel said. “Put it in your pocket. Now let’s hide that cong.”

  We walked over to the carved wooden screen and examined it. “We should put it as high and out of the way as possible,” I said.

  “High is your department, Professor.”

  I found a spot that seemed to be perfect, and the cong fit into the intricate hole in the screen. I put some museum putty on two sides of the cong and then took our long cong out of my pocket. I held our cong by its second segment and looked through it. I could see Liu’s office clearly through our cong. I decided to test the bi-directionality of the Remote Viewer, so I looked through Liu’s cong. Sure enough, I could move our cong around and see the view change looking through Liu’s cong.

  I wanted to do one more test. I laid our cong on a table and looked through Liu’s cong one more time. It was like looking through a hole in the cong. I wasn’t seeing a remote view from our cong. I reached over and grasped our cong’s second segment, and once again, I was remote viewing through Liu’s cong.

  “It looks like Liu’s cong won’t work unless the big cong is activated. That’s why he was using a camera to try to grab a photo when someone used the big cong.”

  I hid Liu’s cong high up in the screen and looked through our cong while I adjusted Liu’s cong for the best view. “The spy cong is set,” I said.

  “OK then, let’s get out of here.”

  “What about all this mess?”

  “This is supposed to be a theft; it should be messy. In fact, I’m going to unlock the office door. That should confuse them.” Rachel unlocked the door and then stepped into the magic circle.

  “Where’s your glow stick?”

  “Here in the circle. And your Snoozer?”

  “In its holster. I have our cong and the camera’s memory card. Hold on, there may be a tiny bit of iron or steel in this memory card. If Liu finds any parts inside his magic circle, he’ll know magic was used to steal his cong. I have an idea.”

  I used museum putty to attach the memory card to one end of the string I had brought. “When we translocate, I want you to be swinging this memory card around over your head using this length of string. Centrifugal force will throw any small parts out of the circle.”

  “You’re always thinking, Professor. Give me the string.” Rachel tried swinging the memory card. “It’s too light. It won’t swing.”

  “OK, I’ll need to add some weight.” I took the string and picked up the pencil from the litter of the drawer’s contents. I tied the pencil to the string near the memory card and handed it back to Rachel. “That’ll work,” I assured her.

  With both of us in the magic circle that was woven into Liu’s carpet, I knelt down so that Rachel could swing the memory card and pencil. I put the symbol card back into position, and shimmer, flash, shimmer, we were back in my living room.

  Chapter 29

  “Easy peasy,” I said.

  “We pulled that off without a hitch. How often does that happen?”

  “Often enough to keep us from giving it all up and becoming truck drivers,” I replied. “Our plan seems to be progressing nicely. Let me see that memory card.” I examined the memory card that Rachel had been spinning around her head. “It looks perfectly normal. I wonder if it’s possible that it translocated without damage.”

  “Plug it in and let’s see,” Rachel said.

  “Unfortunately, it’s not a standard sized memory card. Either they don’t have the same standards in China, or this is a special Chinese government spy device that’s specially made. I’m afraid we’re out of luck.”

  “You’d better put it in your steel box then, just to be safe.”

  “
Good idea. We don’t want to be surprised by another stealth homing beacon being planted on us.” I put the memory card in the steel box. “What do we do next?”

  “Next, we spy on Liu’s office until Chan is in the room, hopefully with only Liu also there, and we swoop in and capture Chan.”

  “You mean we just sit here and look through the cong until Chan shows up? That sounds awfully tedious.”

  “So, you’re complaining about doing real P.I work. Think of it as a stakeout in the comfort of your own home.”

  “Well that puts a positive spin on the situation. We’re on a stakeout. We should go get doughnuts.”

  “Take it from a pro, when on a stakeout, minimize the sugar and caffeine. Otherwise, you’ll be too jittery and you’ll have to pee every half an hour.”

  “Hey, the bathroom’s right over there. How about some coffee?”

  “Let’s save the coffee for later when we have to stay up all night because China’s on the other side of the world,” Rachel said.

  “You just build a guy up with the stakeout story, and then knock him down with the prospect of no sleep for days.”

  “We’ll take turns spying on Liu so that we can sleep in shifts, but we should be ready to roll at a moment’s notice.”

  “I’ll just nap in these clothes and keep my Snoozer in its shoulder holster. I’ve got some big cable ties we can use for handcuffs. I’ll put them on the coffee table, and we’ll keep the SmartCar magic circle set up right here in the living room. We can translocate as soon as we’re both inside the magic circle. You always wear your Mojo, right?”

  “It’s always around my neck. I even sleep with it now.”

  Lucky Mojo, I thought. “OK then, let’s work out a schedule.”

  “It’s almost two in the afternoon here, so that makes it about four in the morning there, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Liu should show up in two to four hours, and I don’t think either of us could sleep right now, so let’s just see what develops for the next ten hours until it’s midnight here.”

  “OK. I’d better set my Spell Bell back upright to warn us if Liu somehow manages to follow us. I’ll have to take the homing beacon off the pivot point to keep the Spell Bell from chiming, but I’ll keep it on the coffee table close at hand.” I took care of all that and sat in an armchair holding the cong. Rachel slid another armchair next to mine and seated herself. We settled in for a stakeout.

  Whenever we used the cong, we had to put a hand on the Spell Bell to mute its chime. The Spell Bell detected magic every time the cong was activated. At five thirty, Liu returned to his office, and boy was he angry. Sometimes I thought I saw sparks flying off of his hair. Was that my imagination? After racing around the room, looking for who knows what, Liu examined the mess that was his desk and the floor around it. He crawled under the desk and looked under all the furniture until he finally must have decided that his cong was gone. Then he examined his spy camera and discovered the memory card was missing. He threw the camera across the room and literally jumped up and down. We didn’t have any sound, but I’m sure my ears would be burning if we could hear him, and could understand Chinese, of course.

  After he calmed down a bit, he made a call on his desk phone, and two uniformed men quickly showed up. Liu did a lot of yelling, and the officers, either security guards, police or military, did a lot of bowing until Liu sent them running out of the room on some sort of mission. It seemed to never occur to Liu that his cong might still be in his office. At one point, Liu took his steel box of business cards behind the wooden screen where we couldn’t see him. He returned a minute later without the box.

  It was clear that Liu didn’t have a security camera in his own office. I’m sure with all his magic and translocating, he didn’t want a recording of his activities that his bosses could get possession of. He probably sent the officers to look at the recordings of other security cameras to see if they could find any suspicious people in the building.

  We had been passing the cong back and forth for a couple of hours, observing Liu’s desperate activities, when Rachel said, “I’ll bet Liu catches Hell for losing that priceless cong.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be him right now,” I said.

  “I don’t think that this is going to make him any easier to deal with when we have to give the jade artifacts to him. Plus, we’re going to arrest his henchman. Things may not go as smooth as I thought.”

  “I never thought they would go smoothly,” I said. “I think we’re going to have to remove Liu from the picture.”

  “Professor, this isn’t some Mission Impossible movie where you can just blast the bad guys left and right. Liu is a real person who’s just trying to help his country. I feel sorry for the guy. We’ve made his life a living Hell. We’ve stolen his Snoozer and his cong. We’ve set him up for a big fail with his government bosses. We caused him to burn down Seth’s mansion and make a new enemy with Seth, and we’re going to arrest his right-hand man.”

  “So we should put him out of his misery.”

  “Professor! Stop that! You’ve never killed anybody. You’ve never even shot a gun. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve killed two people, and I have to live with that every day. It’s not something you want to deal with, believe me.”

  “I’m so sorry, Rachel. You’re right. I don’t know what I’m talking about, and I’m an insensitive, arrogant, lout. I’ve lost touch with reality. I didn’t mean to bring up our past like that. You’ve had to do things that most people never have to face. You’ve saved my life, and you’re a role model for me. I absolutely know that you’re right, and I’ll try to never say anything like that again.”

  “I know, Professor. It’s all too easy to slip into vigilante mode. Especially since you’ve played so many first-person shooter computer games. I know you’re a good person. We’ll just have to deal with Liu when the time comes.”

  “We should make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

  “So now you’re the Godfather? Really, Professor, I can’t take you anywhere.”

  “Sorry.”

  We kept spying on Liu. He had a few visitors, but none were Chan, and none seemed to rank higher than Liu. They all seemed to be working under Liu’s direction and carrying out his orders. We ate a dinner of burgers and potato chips and kept our eyes on Liu.

  At nine o’clock, Liu left his office, probably to eat lunch. “Why hasn’t he called in Chan?” I asked.

  “Chan is probably his assassin or field agent,” Rachel answered. “Liu doesn’t have any intel he can use to make proactive plans. He doesn’t have a need for a special agent until he has a plan of attack.”

  “We should have left more clues—false clues, of course.”

  “Maybe it’s not too late,” Rachel said. “What can we do to make him mount an attack of some sort?”

  “It better not be an attack on us. The last time he attacked, you tricked him into attacking Seth. Can we do that again?”

  “That’s a great idea,” Rachel said. “How can we arrange that? After all, he doesn’t have to actually attack Seth; he just has to call in Chan to prepare for an attack.”

  “That means they would have to prepare to translocate somewhere. He would have to have a homing beacon.”

  “Or something he thought was a homing beacon,” Rachel said.

  “I’ll bet that a magician of Liu’s stature has a way of telling if a homing beacon is real or not.”

  “You’re probably right, but it doesn’t have to be a homing beacon that would take him anywhere significant. He just has to recognize it as a homing beacon. What if the thief planted a homing beacon in Liu’s office so that he could return to the scene of the crime?”

  “He would already have a homing beacon to translocate to Liu’s office.”

  “Sure,” Rachel said, “but maybe that homing beacon was Liu’s cong itself. The thief stole the cong so he had to leave behind another homing beacon.”

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p; “Would we, I mean the thief, have had the foresight to bring a homing beacon with us, I mean with him?”

  “Maybe, or maybe the thief used something of Liu’s.”

  “A serendipitous homing beacon,” I said. “I’ve got it. Look at this,” I said as I picked up the string Rachel had used to swing the memory card. “We stole Liu’s pencil. And look, it doesn’t have an eraser, and it has Chinese characters on it. How cool is that?”

  “Way cool, Professor. The thief could have broken the pencil in two and hidden half in Liu’s office. We just have to hide one half where Liu will be sure to find it, and find it soon.”

  “Here, take the cong and see if you can see a place to hide it.”

  Rachel gazed intently through the cong. “In all the time we’ve spied on Liu, did you see him search his office?”

  “He initially ran around looking for something. He looked under the furniture for the cong, but I didn’t see him perform an exhaustive search.”

  “I’ll be he soon realizes that he should have done that,” Rachel said. “We’ll just hide half the pencil where he’ll look for a hidden homing beacon. What do you think about putting it under a couch cushion?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “OK then, let’s do it.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes now—while Liu’s at lunch.”

  “OK,” I said hesitantly, “I’ve got my Snoozer.” I broke the pencil in two and put half in my steel box and gave the other half to Rachel. I turned my Spell Bell on its side and looked through the cong one last time to be sure the coast was clear. I hid the cong under my own couch cushion and put the homing beacon for Liu’s office on the pivot point. We stepped into the circle, I put the final symbol card into place, and shimmer, flash, shimmer, we were in Liu’s office.

  Rachel quickly stepped out of the circle and hid the half pencil under a couch cushion. She stepped back into the circle, and thirty seconds after we arrived, we were back in my living room. I picked up a symbol card and the homing beacon and put them on my coffee table.

 

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