by Rene Fomby
Almost as soon as he said the words, Tommy’s collar pings, and the collar starts talking to us in a squeaky, high-pitched voice, in a tone way out of range of human hearing, handicapped as they are.
“Turn left, stay on the sidewalk for two blocks…”
Shedd Aquarium, 1:30 p.m.
E
ven though the aquarium isn’t all that far away as the crow flies, it seems like forever on my four little paws, especially since I’ve already gotten in more walkies today than I usually get in a week. On a good week when it isn’t raining. And I can’t help but notice that my breakfast from earlier this morning is already starting to wear a bit thin.
Tommy’s collar has us sneaking into the aquarium through a loading dock, then up some stairs to what appears to be the top floor. Some yellow tape is stretched between the stair rails on either side of us, blocking off the top of the stairs, but we slip easily underneath it and make our way down a short hallway to a nondescript set of double doors blocking the entrance to the building. Tommy and I have stopped to consider exactly how we are ever going to get the doors open, when all of a sudden a high-pitched voice—not from Tommy’s collar, but from a speaker mounted overhead—announces ‘Enter’ and the doors slowly swing open. With one quick glance at each other, Tommy and I hurry inside. I get a brief whiff of some kind of cheese coming from the other side of the doorway, but it might just be my imagination.
The room we walk into is all stark white, and completely empty except for one other door set into the opposite wall. We’ve only made it a few feet into the room when I hear a sudden noise behind us and spin around just in time to see the double doors slam shut with a loud CLICK, a sound that echoes off the blank white walls in the room, making it crystal clear we are now trapped like two little mice in a cage. I try the handle on the door, but no matter how hard I pull on it, the handle refuses to budge. And, not meaning to brag or anything, but I gotta lot of muscle on me for a ten pound dog, so it’s clear the door is securely locked. “Maybe we should try the other door?” I suggest.
No sooner had I voiced that thought than the other door slowly opened, and a tall, furry white dog stepped through. Her eyes were a deep shade of blue, and almost almond in shape.
“Samoyed,” Tommy whispers beside me, and I nod briskly in reply. I don’t usually go in for cussing, and for the life of me I have no idea what “smoid” means, but if ever there was a time for dropping a few S-bombs, now would be it.
The fluffy white dog closed the door sharply, and once again a loud click rang through the room.
“Zo, you must be little Moose and his fee-line friend Tommy, no?” she asks, clearly not expecting an answer, so I didn’t give her one. Tommy, though, wasn’t nearly so quiet.
“You must be Tatiana. Q’ute told us you have something important to share with us. Some information about SPECTER.”
“Yas,” she says, drawing out the word. “But I think she may have misunderstood me a little. Maybe it was my accent, no? What I said was, I have someone I want to share you with…”
With that, Tatiana steps over to her left and opens a well-concealed panel mounted next to the door behind her. In the dead center of the panel is a large red lever. Without any hesitation she grabs the level and pulls down hard on it. There’s a deep growl of gears grinding on gears, and a large hole slowly begins to open up in the middle of the floor in front of us, stretching from the left wall all the way to the right.
“Welcome to ze new Great White shark display at ze aquarium, Mr. Moose, Mr. Tuxedo. They have come all this way from Australia just to make your acquaintance today. Oh, but I’m afraid someone very naughty has been altering their feeding schedule over ze past few days, so I assure you, ze poor little sharks are ravenously hungry right about now. But don’t worry, I’m told they’ll take fresh meat any day over another boring bucket of cold dead fish. And you’re just ze dog and cat to take ze edge off their little appetites.”
Turning back to the panel, she reaches over to press down on a large red button set just below the lever, and the wall behind us immediately starts moaning, the deep moaning sound of almost certain death. I check over my shoulder to see where the sound is coming from, and I can’t miss it. The wall is moving toward us, inch by deadly inch!
Tatiana smiles at us, and I swear I can see blood dripping from her fangs. “By ze way, Double O, while you’re down there swimming with ze sharks, you might want to take a second to see if there are still any remains left of all ze other agents who’ve made friends with our lovely little kettle of fish. But make it quick—a second will be just about all the time you’ll have to look around before you are consumed by ze majesty of swimming around with all those beautiful sharks. Or, I suppose I should say, consumed by ze sharks…”
Her shrill laughter shrieked off the walls surrounding us, even as she stretched out her left leg and a claw almost a foot long and two inches wide at the base popped out of her left rear paw.
Shedd Aquarium, Shark Tank
I
’ve got to give it to Tommy, he thinks on his paws faster than any cat I’ve ever known. That’s probably how he’s managed to become so successful over the years, beating all of his competitors to the punch on all those business deals, working his way out of countless tight spots in the process. But I got no idea how he’s gonna think his way out of this particular tight spot we’ve got ourselves in. Or, I should say, think our way out of this.
Tommy takes one long hard look at the wall, which is slowly closing the distance between the back of the room and the gaping hole right in front of us where the sharks are no doubt already washing up for dinner. Or whatever they do when it’s din-din time. We now have only about three or four feet left before we’re both shark bait, so I’m desperately hoping Tommy’s got one last good idea left in him right about now.
“Moose!” Tommy’s shout gets my attention right away. “Make a step with your front paws, like this!”
He shows me how to link my paws together, kind of like Killer used to do in the old days to help boost me over a tall fence. But I don’t get it—the wall that’s moving toward us goes all the way to the ceiling, and there’s no way he’s limber enough to jump all the way across the shark tank—
Tommy grabs me roughly and positions me pointing toward the left wall. I’m just about to ask him what’s going on when suddenly he races to the very edge of the tank, then turns and heads my way at full tilt. Leaping and landing with both hind paws on my make-shift booster seat, he scrunches down tight and then blasts out of my arms toward the back wall, a wall that’s now almost upon us. Just before he hits the wall, he spins impossibly in mid-air and slams into the wall at full speed, almost near the very top, then springs back way out over the shark tank, landing hard on the other side just inches from the edge.
But Tommy isn’t done yet. I’m being shoved ever closer to the tank by the moving wall, my short life starting to flash before my eyes, even as Tommy rolls quickly to his feet and leaps for the control panel on the wall, hitting the red button in full stride.
Immediately I hear the wall that’s pressing painfully on my backside grind to a halt, my feet now planted just six inches from eternity. I look up at Tommy, thinking he’s gonna grab the red lever and close the tank, but he’s got a whole bunch of other issues to deal with at the moment. The Russian dog clearly isn’t happy about what just happened, and has turned on him with that deadly-looking claw of hers.
“Da. Ty umnyy, a?” she growls at Tommy in what I guess is Russian, a sound that oozes out of her mouth smoothly, like a purr. She snarls. “A smart one, indeed. So now we get to have a little play date together, no? Why should ze sharks have all the fun?”
With no warning she kicks her left leg sharply in Tommy’s direction, and even though he manages to jump back just in time, her claw catches him right across the chest, leaving a bright red line of blood dripping slowly to the floor. I swear I can hear the sharks below us already sta
rting to thrash around, the bright copper smell of Tommy’s fresh blood reaching them even down in the water.
Tommy smiles back at her, his canines (or do cats call them felines?) shining dangerously in the harsh light of the room. “My dear Tatiana, I’m afraid I was unaware you were so—into—cats. But I’m flattered that you care. Shall we dance, then?”
Tatiana growls and leaps at him once again, and once again Tommy steps nimbly aside just in the knick of time. Again and again she attacks, but after that first cut, none of her slashes with the deadly left claw of hers find pay dirt. Tommy seems to be moving in a wide circle, avoiding her parries, and suddenly I realize what he has been plotting all along. Just a few more steps and he will be back in front of the control panel. And the red lever to the shark tank.
Tatiana apparently saw it, too, and with a quick glance my way, she makes a deft double move and dashes for the panel herself, one paw outstretched for that tiny red button that could put a quick end to my tiny little life.
“Nooo!” I yell, alerting Tommy to the maneuver, but I’m too late. The crazy Russian had gotten the jump on him, and there was no way he could get to her in time before she reactivated the button—and the moving wall pressed right into my back!
I tense for the inevitable, and can’t help but hear the sound of sharks leaping out of the water in anticipation of their upcoming meal—ironically, Australian sharks planning to feast on the small but I hoped quite bitter appetizer of a fellow Australian—when suddenly Tatiana’s right foot slips on a slick puddle of Tommy’s blood. She tries to correct her fall with her left foot, but the giant claw throws her off, stabbing into the floor and refusing to bend an inch, and instead she slams into the base of the rear exit door headfirst, sending a loud thwack bouncing off the walls.
To his credit, Tommy wastes no time taking full advantage of the situation. Grabbing her right rear leg and keeping a sharp eye on the deadly left claw, he swings her around his head in a wide arc, letting go at the very last moment to send her tumbling through the air. And into the shark tank.
Her piercing screams last only a few seconds as the hungry sharks make quick work of the tasty Russian morsel Tommy had just fed them. I can’t help but shudder a bit at the sound of them thrashing around down there, enjoying their late lunch, before Tommy turns to the control panel and pushes the red lever back to its original position, and the doors to the shark tank grind mercifully to a close.
Outside Shedd Aquarium
M
y legs are still feeling a little shaky as Tommy and I make our way out of the aquarium, heading back to Tony’s place.
“Too bad she—tanked—before we could get anything out of her about where the Russians are holing up,” I complain lightly to Tommy, who smiles lightly at my feeble joke.
“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, my canine friend.” He holds up some kind of bulky black box, the back of which is etched with the image of what looks to me like a fat red carrot. “We got this. Tatiana’s Beet ePhone. I managed to grab it from her just before I tossed her to the sharks.”
Beet phone? Never heard of it. Tommy must have read the confusion on my face, because he leans in closer to me to explain. “It’s a Russian knockoff of an Apple iPhone. Ironically made in China, just like most of Apple’s products. But a whole lot cheaper. And, as they say, you get what you pay for.”
He fiddles with the phone while we walk, almost stepping into an open manhole in the process.
“Hmm, there seems to be some kind of facial recognition security on this thing. Would have been nice to know before the sharks left her face completely—unrecognizable. But maybe Q’ute can make something out of all of this. Unlike her claw, this phone’s not exactly cutting edge. But it just might wind up being the breakthrough in the case we thought Tatiana was going to hand us, after all.”
“So, a side trip back to the labs?” I suggest. All this back and forth is starting to wear me down a bit, but I can see Tommy’s point about the Beet phone. If Q’ute can figure out a way to hack into it, it might just cough up one of the few clues we’ve been able to uncover over the past two days. Or it might cough up nothing more useful than a nasty wet hairball. Hard to really tell with these things.
Q’ute Branch, 2:15 p.m.
Q
’ute leads us back into the Sniff room, keeping a close eye out all the while to make sure we aren’t being spotted
“A Beet ePhone, eh? Can’t say I’ve ever tried to crack one of those, but I found an XDA forum on the Internet that explains exactly how to do it—those guys can pretty much hack into anything. Let’s take a look…”
Glancing back and forth between the phone and a printout of instructions she’d gotten off the web, Q’ute had the phone unlocked in less than a minute.
“So, what do we have here?” she asks herself, clicking quickly through a list of contacts stored on the phone. Finally, near the end, she apparently finds exactly what she was looking for. “Vladimir Kitin. We now have both his cell number and his private pee-mail address. This should be fun!”
Fat Tony’s Office, 3:00 p.m.
T
ony, Tommy and I are back huddling around the conference room in Tony’s office. Everyone else has been cleared out for security’s sake.
Tony doesn’t look like he’s completely buying into the plan yet. “Okay, I guess it makes sense to hit Kitin with the double whammo, where he gets the same message from both Tatiana’s phone and from the spy at Q’ute Branch, but why don’t we just send him a text message from the phone? Why run the risk of his catching on that it’s not Tatiana?”
“We’ve been over all that, Tony,” Tommy answers, a growing irritation starting to show in his voice. “If Kitin has even the slightest suspicion that Tatiana’s been compromised, the confirmation message from the mole won’t make a bit of difference. He’ll just look for an independent source to confirm the whole thing, like calling Boss Dawg directly. And if he does, our plan is doomed from the very start.”
“Plus, Q’ute has a program she loaded onto the phone that automatically translates everything that’s said from English to Russian. And back,” I explain once again. “Just in case Kitin decides to go native on us. And it also changes Tommy’s voice to make it sound virtually identical to Tatiana’s.”
“Plus we’ll make the call in front of a really large fan, so Kitin will think it’s just the wind garbling everything that’s said,” Tommy adds. “That will give us cover in case Kitin asks something that I won’t have an immediate comeback for. I’ll just say I couldn’t hear his question because of all the background noise.”
Tony has been gnawing at his bottom lip so much I’m beginning to worry about it starting to bleed out. With blood now fresh on my mind, I check on Tommy by reflex, and see that his chest has finally started to scab over, even though we still haven’t had a single free moment to get him over to see a doctor. But I’m not sure he cares about that, to be honest. As long as it doesn’t get infected, he might just like having a big scar across his chest to show all the ladies.
Tony finally seems to have come to a conclusion. “Okay, I don’t like it, but I guess I’ll have to go along with the field agents on this one. What’s our next step?”
Tommy steps over to a whiteboard hanging on the wall and picks up a marker. The whiteboard is almost immaculate, and I can’t help but grin a little when I think about what Tony did to the old whiteboard last year when we were plotting our assault on Southside Prison. I wonder what his master thought when he came in the next day and saw all of the diagrams and mission assignments Tony had laid out on the thing with a nice black permanent marker…
Tommy has started sketching something out, and I need to move over a little so I can see.
“The key to all of this is, we’ve got to figure out some way to lure both the Russians and the CCs someplace where they’ll create a huge problem for the humans, a problem big enough to attract a full-scale response fro
m Chicago Animal Control. If we can get them both together in one place at one time, then bring the humans down on top of their heads, there’s a good chance we can kill two birds with one whack. Something I’m pretty good at, actually,” he says with a slight smirk.
I have an idea. “So this place, you mean like a dog park or something? That’s the only place I’ve ever seen large groups of dogs wandering around free.”
Tommy shakes his head. “No, Moose. It needs to be somewhere that only allows service animals, and no other pets. The airport would be perfect, except I can’t see getting two large packs of dogs—especially big dogs—through any of the security checkpoints.”
“How about a mall or something?” Tony suggests. Easy for the dogs to get inside, and there’s a lot of free space—”
“I think you’re on to something,” Tommy says. “But instead of free space, we need something fairly confining, something that will cause complete chaos. A place where a big dog can’t even turn around without crashing into something. Someplace like—” Tommy suddenly goes quiet. He’s staring over Tony’s shoulder out the picture window, and as I turn to see what he’s focusing on, I see it too. A giant sign just a few blocks away. Macy’s.
Mullin’s Grocery, 4:45 p.m.
T
ony and Tommy are busy back at HQ working out the last gritty details of the plan, while I drew the assignment of lining up our team of decoys. And that meant hunting down my old allies, Ike from down on the South Side of Chicago, and Fisheye Martinez, alleyway entrepreneur. Whatever that means.
