by Stuart Gibbs
“Give me a moment,” Erica said. “It’ll take a little while to load.”
“In that case,” Mike said, then turned to Catherine, “is there a men’s room around here anywhere? I really need to go.”
“There’s a water closet right around the corner ahead,” Catherine replied.
Mike looked confused. “Why do you keep water in a closet? And am I supposed to pee in it?”
Catherine tittered. “No, you silly goose. In the British Isles, we call a bathroom a water closet.”
“Ah,” said Mike. “Well, I need to stop there. I’ve had to go for a while, but I didn’t want to hold up the investigation.”
“I could stand to pop in there myself,” Alexander said.
I was thinking it might not be a bad idea to make a pit stop when Murray said, “Do any of you smell something strange?”
“Besides you?” Zoe asked.
“Ha ha.” Murray sneered. “I’m serious. There’s a strange smell down here. It’s familiar, but I can’t quite place it.”
Catherine stopped, concerned, and sniffed the air. “A sort of floral scent?”
Alexander inhaled. “I believe that’s Eau de Luxuré. It’s a very expensive French perfume. One of my main contacts in France wears it all the time.”
“I know that perfume too,” Murray said, suddenly growing worried. “Jenny Lake wore it.”
“Your evil ex-girlfriend?” I asked him.
The same thought occurred to everyone at once. “Take cover!” Erica yelled, but we were all doing it anyhow.
Which was a good thing, because at that very moment, Jenny and seven other heavily armed enemy agents stepped around the corner ahead and opened fire on us.
5 ESCAPE PLANNING
The British Museum
London, England
March 31
0845 hours
One of the things I had become very good at as a spy-in-training was taking cover.
This was a talent I had already possessed upon arriving at spy school, honed by years of eluding the bullies, creeps, and other assorted miscreants at my middle school. But now, after a year of being suddenly attacked, ambushed, waylaid, and blindsided—both in class and on missions—I truly excelled at fleeing at the first sign of trouble. If taking cover had been an Olympic event, I would have been a serious contender for the gold.
The moment the enemy force began rounding the corner, I turned tail and fled for my life. By the time anyone managed to get a shot off, I was diving around a corner. Thankfully, my fellow spies were doing the same thing, even Murray, who generally had the reflexes of a sloth in a coma. If nothing else, he had an exceptional sense of self-preservation and stayed right on my heels as I ran.
Our flight wasn’t sheer cowardliness. One of the early things we had learned at spy school was Prybil’s First Law of Self-Preservation: The best way to avoid being shot is to not be in the path of a bullet. Though it seemed glamorous to stand one’s ground, whip out a gun, and fire back, this usually kept you in the very place that the bad guys were aiming. Besides, most of us didn’t have weapons to whip out and fire back with anyhow.
So we all dashed around the corner as bullets tore up the hallway behind us. Although I had started out slightly ahead of the others, Catherine quickly flew past me. (Perhaps I would only win silver in Olympic Cover-Taking, being edged out by Britain.) “Follow me!” she ordered, then led the way around yet another corner.
Mike was right beside me as we ran, a slightly pained look on his face. “They couldn’t have waited until after I got to the bathroom?” he moaned.
We could hear the pounding of enemy footsteps behind us. Jenny was our age, but the rest of her team were adults: powerful, intimidating men and women. “You can run, Murray!” Jenny Lake shouted. “But you can’t hide! I’ll find you soon enough!”
“You picked a real winner there,” Zoe told Murray. “Is she working for SPYDER now?”
“I’m not sure,” Murray said. “She’s extremely fiendish and immoral. There’s a lot of evil organizations that would want to hire her.”
“What did you even see in her?” I asked.
“I’m extremely fiendish and immoral,” Murray replied. “You need to have common interests to make a relationship work.”
“This way!” Catherine shouted, shoving through a doorway. We all piled through it behind her just as a fresh fusillade of bullets ripped through the air.
We were in a stairwell, which we quickly ascended to the floor above.
As we did, alarms began to sound. Klaxons echoed through the museum and red lights flashed.
We emerged into an enormous gallery filled with breathtaking Egyptian sculptures. There were giant sphinxes, towering pharaohs, and a granite orb the size of a refrigerator delicately balanced on the point of a squat stone obelisk. At the far end was an entire temple that had been uprooted from the Nile and rebuilt inside the museum. The gallery was the sort of place I would have been thrilled to visit had I not been running for my life. Zoe must have felt the same way, because I heard her gasp in awe despite our dire circumstances.
Sadly, we couldn’t even pause for a moment to take in the spectacle. Not only did we have people chasing us, but the alarms had triggered an emergency lockdown. Huge steel plates were quickly descending in the doorways. They were dropping like the portcullises in old castles—only, instead of keeping intruders out, these were designed to lock people in.
“Run!” Catherine shouted—as though that hadn’t occurred to any of us—but we were too late. The steel plates came down with ominous thuds, cutting off our escape.
There was only one place to take shelter: the Egyptian temple. We blatantly ignored the signs that told us to stay off the antiquities, jumped over the protective railing, and ran up the steps, slipping behind the ancient columns of the entrance just as Jenny and her cohort of fellow evildoers emerged from the stairwell.
Although we needed to stay quiet, Alexander couldn’t help himself. He was freaking out about the security system. “Why on earth are there steel doors on the exits?” he gibbered. “What possible reason could there be for a security system like that?”
“It’s to deter thieves,” Catherine said, calmly removing a small, stylish handgun from a holster on her ankle. “The idea is, if they trip the alarm, they won’t be able to escape from here with anything.”
“But we aren’t thieves!” Alexander said desperately. “And now we’re trapped in here with the enemy!”
“Yes. I don’t think the security system was designed with this scenario in mind.” Catherine tossed a second gun to Erica. “Use that wisely, dear. There are only six sedation darts in it.”
Erica frowned. “Sedation darts? You didn’t bring a real gun?”
“You know I don’t like killing people,” Catherine said sharply.
“I doubt those guys feel the same way,” Zoe pointed out.
“They’re evil,” Catherine reminded her. “We should do our best not to sink to their level. Plus, with bullets, if we miss one of them, we could damage one of the artifacts in this room, and I would really be dismayed if I did that.”
“You’re worried about the artifacts?” Alexander whined. “If we don’t take out these people, we’re going to be dead. Did you bring a gun for me?”
“Of course not,” Catherine replied. “The last time you had a sedation gun, you shot yourself in the foot and slept through your entire mission.”
“You know about Budapest?” Alexander asked, surprised.
“I know about everything,” Catherine replied.
Meanwhile, Mike was crouched behind the column closest to me, his legs crossed tightly over his privates. “Could you guys just take care of these people quickly?” he asked. “I really need to go.”
I peered out from behind my column. This was the first time I’d had a decent look at our pursuers. For a brief moment, I was struck by the absurdity of the fact that I was hiding in a six-thousand-year-old temple inside a
whole other building, but I forced myself to focus on the issue at hand.
There were eight of them, including Jenny. They were dressed for action rather than style, with protective Kevlar vests and running shoes, and they were moving deliberately through the gallery toward us, slipping from the cover of one statue to the next, trying to stay protected from any weapons we might have. All wore helmets with mirrored visors, so I couldn’t see much of their faces except their mouths, which made it hard to tell them apart. Jenny was recognizable only because she was talking the most.
“There’s no escape,” she taunted. “We know you’re in the temple. You might as well just give yourselves up.”
“Jenny!” Murray shouted. “I know things ended badly between us, but do you think you could find it in your heart to not kill me?”
Jenny said, “I’d be happy to let all of you go free if you’ll just hand over what you found today.”
“Really?” Murray asked excitedly. “Well, if that’s the case, I’ll bring it right out.” He turned to Erica and said, “Hand it over.”
Erica didn’t take her eyes off the approaching enemies. “No way. She’s bluffing, you pinhead. Ben, figure out how to get out of here, fast.”
“Really fast,” Mike corrected. “Or I’m going to wet myself.”
“I’m working on it,” I told them. Which was true. In addition to checking out the approaching enemy, I had also been casing the room. There were four entrances blocked by the steel doors. There were no windows and the walls all appeared to be a good foot thick. The only other exit was the door to the stairwell, which was now on the opposite side of the gallery and had eight enemy agents cutting off access to it.
The agents were now halfway across the room, fanning out to approach us from all sides, still moving from the cover of artifact to artifact. Jenny peeked out from behind the obelisk that held the giant granite orb and yelled, “Are you guys handing over the goods or not?”
“We’d be happy to!” Erica yelled back, doing a bit of bluffing herself. “Just drop your weapons, and we’ll hand it right over.”
“I’m afraid that’s not an option,” Jenny said. “You see, we have to…Ow!” She reeled backward as Catherine plugged her in the neck with a sedation dart, then called to her team, “They’ve got sedatives and they’re really fast acting…Unnngghhhh.” She collapsed to the floor.
“One down, seven to go,” Catherine noted.
Erica looked at me expectantly. “Well? What’s the escape plan?”
“Er… ,” I said. “I don’t quite have one yet.”
“You don’t have a single idea?” Erica asked, annoyed.
“Well, I have one,” I said. “You could sedate all the bad guys and then we could just wait for the police to come.”
“That’s the best you’ve got?” Erica snapped.
“It could work, couldn’t it?” I asked.
“I don’t think that’s very likely,” Catherine told me. “They’re more heavily armed than we are, and they’re going to be far more cautious now that I’ve taken out Murray’s girlfriend.”
“Ex-girlfriend,” Murray corrected. “She had issues.”
One of the seven remaining enemy agents dashed from behind a sphinx, racing to the cover of a sarcophagus. Erica and Catherine both fired at him, but the agent ducked away just in time and they missed.
“See what I mean?” Catherine asked, sounding upset with herself.
That meant we were down to nine darts for seven bad guys. And at the rate they were moving, the bad guys would have us surrounded within minutes.
I cased the room again, desperately trying to come up with something.
“Erica,” Zoe said, surprisingly calm given the circumstances. “While you’re busy fending off the bad guys, why don’t you let me look at your phone? I can see what’s on Joshua’s flash drive.”
Erica didn’t say anything, but she must have thought the idea was all right, because she removed her phone and slid it across the floor of the temple to Zoe.
I noticed Mike sneaking back into the far recesses of the temple. Unfortunately, Catherine noticed him too. “Michael,” she said sternly, “please tell me you’re not heading off to relieve yourself in the temple.”
Mike froze, obviously caught in the act. “I’m checking to see if there are any secret passages out of here,” he lied.
Catherine sighed heavily. “I understand that this is a dire situation, but I will not have my agents urinating on the antiquities.”
“The bad guys are shooting the antiquities!” Mike exclaimed. “I’m just going to pee on them! I’ll bet thousands of ancient Egyptian boys peed on this temple! Maybe it’s really a giant ancient water closet!”
“Michael,” Catherine said. “Please show some decorum.”
“I need to go so badly, my eyes are turning yellow,” Mike said desperately. “If I don’t get out of here soon, I’m going to burst!”
The moment he said this, an idea seemed to strike him. He turned to me, so excited that he appeared to have momentarily forgotten his urgent need to pee. “Ben! I have an idea about how we can get out of here!”
I looked to him expectantly. “What?”
“Remember when my brother accidentally backed the car through the garage door?” he asked, then pointed across the gallery.
I considered what he was pointing at, grasped what he meant, then looked to Catherine. “Do you have any idea how thick those steel plates are?”
“About an inch, I think,” she replied.
I made some estimates about mass and inertia, then quickly did some calculations in my head. “I think that would work.”
“What would work?” Catherine asked, sounding slightly worried.
I didn’t answer her, though, because I knew she wouldn’t like what I had in mind.
An enemy agent bolted from his hiding place behind a stone elephant. Erica fired two shots at him. The first bounced off his Kevlar vest, but the second caught him in the arm. He yelped in pain, then angrily opened fire on us as he collapsed into unconsciousness. Bullets pocked the hieroglyphics on the opposite side of my pillar.
“You heathen!” Catherine shouted at him as he passed out. “These are priceless relics!”
Meanwhile, Zoe didn’t seem much happier as she examined Erica’s phone. “Um, Erica. It looks like this flash drive was booby-trapped. When you jacked in, it activated a worm and fried your phone.”
Erica cursed under her breath. She sounded more annoyed about this than she did about the approaching bad guys.
“Is that bad?” Alexander asked.
“Yes,” Erica said with a sigh. “I should have predicted that. Now we still don’t know what’s on that drive, and I’ve sacrificed my phone.” She looked at me. “What’s the plan for getting out of here?”
“I’m going to need a laser pointer, a good-size rock, and a way to throw it hard,” I told her.
“Benjamin,” Catherine said. “Is this escape plan going to do damage to any of these priceless artifacts?”
“Possibly,” I replied. “But on the positive side, it will keep the bad guys from doing damage to any of us.”
“I don’t approve,” Catherine said.
“Mother,” Erica said, “we don’t have a choice.”
“Where are we supposed to get a rock?” Murray asked. “We’re in a museum, not a quarry.”
Erica considered that for a moment, then ran from her pillar to mine. I couldn’t be quite sure, but it appeared that she moved a fraction of a second slower than she was capable of, giving the enemy agents the tiniest bit more time to react.
Three of them sprang from their hiding places and opened fire. Bullets tore into the pillar as Erica dove behind it.
Catherine hit one of the enemy in the arm with a dart. She collapsed with a groan, thwacking her head on a caryatid.
Five agents left. Six darts.
A few large chunks of pillar, loosened by the bullets, tumbled to the ground.
Erica picked one up and showed it to me. “Big enough?”
“Yes,” I said, impressed.
“Good,” Erica said, then tossed her gun to Mike. “You’re on guard duty. I’ll get the other supplies.”
“You trust him with a gun but not me?” Alexander asked, hurt.
“Yes.” Erica removed a small black device from her utility belt and slapped it into my hand. “Laser pointer.” Then she reached under the top of her sleek black outfit.
“Erica!” her mother gasped, horrified. “What are you doing?”
“We need a way to throw this stone hard,” Erica said. “I’m getting a sling.” With that, she deftly removed her bra.
I averted my eyes.
“Please,” Erica said. “It’s just underwear. Now, let me know where you need me to throw this.” She dropped the stone into one of her bra cups and began to whirl it around.
I aimed the laser at the exact point I had calculated the stone needed to hit. I wouldn’t have trusted anyone else to make the shot, but I was quite sure Erica could handle it. She was the student-body champion in every single marksmanship competition. Whereas I was lucky to ever come within eight feet of the target.
Catherine, who was already upset that her daughter was using her underwear as a weapon, now paled when she saw where I was aiming. “Oh no. I don’t like any of this one bit.”
Erica leapt from behind the pillar once again, whipping the stone around in her bra.
The enemy agents made a sudden, coordinated attack, all leaping from their hiding places at once and opening fire.
Erica let go of her bra and tumbled across the floor to the cover of another pillar. The stone sailed through the hail of bullets, flew across the room—and nailed the giant granite orb at the exact spot I had marked.
The orb rocked slightly, but that was all it needed to dislodge from its delicate perch on the top of the obelisk. There was a crack like a gunshot as it broke free, and then it crashed to the floor and began rolling across the gallery.
The noise caught the enemy agents by surprise. They reflexively looked that way, which allowed Catherine and Mike to shoot two more of them.
The remaining agents found, to their dismay, that they were directly in the path of the giant orb. While they scrambled out of the way, we raced from the temple and fell into line behind the ball, keeping it between us and our enemies as it rolled through the gallery.
