by Stuart Gibbs
It felt like five years, though. Five long, cold, terrifying years.
Eventually, I felt the blessed sensation of something solid under my feet. It was a tiny metal platform without a safety rail over a thousand feet in the air, but still, it was better than where I had just been. I grabbed a random piece of transmission equipment and hugged it tightly before letting go of the parachute.
Catherine slid down two seconds later and alighted next to me with the casual grace of someone who hadn’t done anything more life-threatening than coming down a playground slide. “Let’s go, Benjamin,” she ordered. “No time to lose.”
Catherine waved good-bye to Alexander, who promptly banked away, so we were no longer being thrummed by the rotors.
One of the French police helicopters went after him in pursuit. The other bore in on us. It hovered in the air so that the pilot and the police inside could give us nasty looks. One spoke to us over a loudspeaker.
“You are breaking the law,” she said in French. “Please remain where you are. The authorities are coming to arrest you.” That was certainly a concern, but I had other, more pressing things to deal with.
I turned my attention to the array of electronic equipment around me. There was a startling assortment of things I didn’t know anything about. There were metal boxes with antennas and blinking red lights; big, round, humming things; weird lumpy objects that looked vaguely like robot porcupines, bristling with metal prongs; and all sorts of other technical thingamabobs and doohickeys.
And if all that wasn’t enough to deal with, the tower was moving. The wind at high altitude was considerably stronger than it was at ground level, even on a bright spring day, strong enough to make the tower wobble. It was very subtle, so subtle that maybe the tourists below us didn’t notice it, but up on the roof, with no railing, I was very aware of every tiny shift of the tower. It felt like I was at sea, which combined with my already anxious state to make me feel like I was going to throw up.
So I sat down. I sat and took deep breaths and focused.
“What are you doing?” Catherine yelled at me. She was anxious too, and her usual calm state had given way to near panic once more. “We need to find that EMP generator immediately! This is no time for tantric meditation!”
“I’m not meditating,” I told her. “I’m thinking.”
Catherine started to say something else, but Erica held up a hand, signaling her to be quiet. “Don’t bother him, Mom. This is what Ben is best at.”
I didn’t quite have Erica’s confidence in myself, but I also knew that scrambling around the top of the tower hunting for something I had no idea how to recognize wasn’t going to do us any good. The far better use of my time—what little there was left—would be to take what I knew of SPYDER and try to imagine where they would have hidden the EMP generator.
Unfortunately, I had only two minutes and thirty seconds left to figure it out.
I found myself thinking about Murray Hill.
Murray was the quintessential SPYDER operative. Not in the way he dressed or behaved, but in the way that he thought. Murray never took any risk he didn’t have to. He avoided putting his life on the line at all costs.
Being up on top of the Eiffel Tower where I was now, at the mercy of the wind and the elements and gravity, wasn’t safe. It was also off-limits to the general public, which meant visiting it would draw the attention of the police—just as our arrival had done. Therefore, coming up there to bolt an EMP generator to the tower didn’t sound like something anyone at SPYDER would do.
“I don’t think it’s up here on top,” I said.
“It has to be up high, though,” Catherine argued. “So that it can broadcast farther.”
“Then it must be on one of the tourist levels,” Erica concluded, scrambling down a ladder off the platform.
Catherine and I followed her.
The ladder led us down the exterior of the three-story dome at the top of the tower, until we reached a large opening that allowed us inside the dome itself. The interior of the dome was also filled with electronic equipment, as well as the motors and giant spools of cable that lifted the elevators, but it still seemed too difficult to access and exposed for SPYDER’s tastes.
There was a trapdoor in the metal floor of the dome, leading to the lower levels. Erica twisted the handle and popped it open.
“Stop!” the policewoman in the helicopter shouted at us. “You were told to stay where you were! Do not violate the perimeter of the tower!”
We ignored her. We had plenty to worry about besides the police.
A metal staircase spiraled down into a small maintenance room. It was unheated and cold, but being out of the wind made me feel a thousand times better. The room was cramped and windowless. Another, larger spiral staircase led downward, to an exit, while a door to the side had writing on it in French. I could read it, though: EIFFEL APARTMENT. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
I had learned somewhere along the line that Gustave Eiffel had kept a small apartment at the top of the tower for entertaining guests, and it was now a museum. The door to it had a simple key-based lock. Easy enough to pick for someone who knew what they were doing—like a member of SPYDER.
“Let’s check this out,” I said.
Even though Erica could have picked the lock in only a few seconds, that was still a few seconds we didn’t have. Instead, she lashed out with a karate kick. The dead bolt tore from the jamb and the door flew open, revealing Eiffel’s apartment.
It felt as though we had just gone through a hole in space and time.
The apartment was like a tiny piece of Victorian France that had been transplanted into the sky. It was designed to look like it had when Eiffel had used it in the late 1800s, with dowdy wallpaper and carpeting, antique wood furniture, an original phonograph, and light fixtures with Edison bulbs. Three mannequins were there in period dress: Eiffel himself sat at a table with Thomas Edison, while Eiffel’s daughter hovered in the background, relegated to the corner.
Around the room there were windows that looked out onto the exterior tourist deck. Lots of tourists were now pressed against the windows, gaping at us in surprise, rather than at the view.
Behind all of them, I caught a glimpse of Alexander zooming around Paris, trying to ditch the police helicopter that was chasing him.
We had ninety seconds left to save the world.
The apartment seemed more like SPYDER’s kind of place. It was more easily accessible than the roof of the tower, and it was cozy. Yes, it was visible to the public, but SPYDER had a penchant for hiding things in plain sight.
“How big is this thing we’re looking for?” I asked.
Erica said, “If it’s big enough to take out the East Coast of the USA, it’ll have to be at least a hundred pounds. Probably more.”
“About the size of an average human,” Catherine said.
The moment the words were out of her mouth, we all had the same idea at once.
We looked more closely at the mannequins.
Despite being on display for tourists, the room hadn’t been cleaned too recently. There was a thin film of dust on everything, including Thomas Edison and Claire Eiffel. Edison even had a strand of spiderweb running from one of his eyebrows to the table.
But Gustave Eiffel wasn’t as dusty. And now that I looked at him, he seemed considerably newer than the others, his plastic skin shinier and his suit less worn.
Erica punched him in the face.
His head flew off—eliciting gasps from the tourists outside—and caromed off the wall.
We peered through the hole in his neck where his head had just been.
His body was filled with high-tech electronics.
We had found the EMP generator.
But we still had to stop it from going off. And now there were only fifty seconds left.
“Is there a plug for it?” Catherine asked.
“No,” Erica replied. “Looks like it has its own power source.”
“Is there a switch?” I asked.
“Like an on/off switch?” Erica asked. “I doubt it.” She started to unbutton Eiffel’s vest to get at the electronics.
This produced more gasps from the tourists. Not only had she beheaded the designer of the tower; now she was undressing him.
My mind was whirling. I had no idea how to shut off an EMP generator, and even if I did, it seemed like it would take a while to do that properly and possibly even involve a lot of tools that we didn’t have.
But then it occurred to me that we didn’t really have to shut it off. We just had to stop it from working.
We had to break it.
And I had a pretty good idea how to do that.
Unfortunately, I needed to be outside to put my plan into action. There was no door out onto the viewing platform, and even if there had been, the platform was surrounded by a metal cage to prevent people from falling off it. Which meant we had to go back the way we had come.
“Help me get Eiffel upstairs!” I exclaimed.
Erica didn’t question me. It was possible that in that moment she understood exactly what I intended to do—but it was also possible that she was simply trusting me.
I grabbed the headless body of Gustav Eiffel under the arms while she grabbed the legs and we raced out the door, accidentally knocking over the phonograph on the way.
Then we ran up the staircase. Dragging a body up a spiral staircase isn’t easy. The EMP generator was heavier than a hundred pounds, and the mannequin it was encased in was bulky and unwieldy, but we were cruising on adrenaline now.
We had nineteen seconds left.
We emerged through the trapdoor into the base of the dome and dragged Eiffel to the closest railing.
“Throw him over!” I ordered.
So Erica and I did. We tossed Eiffel as hard as we could over the railing.
It was only after we heard the tourists shriek on the level below us that I realized anyone who hadn’t seen us steal the body might have thought it was a real one. So there were definitely some poor tourists who thought they had just seen someone fall off the tower. Someone without a head, no less. Which was probably a good way to ruin a family vacation.
I didn’t have time to think about that, though. I leaned over the railing, forgetting all about being scared of the height, desperate to see if my plan worked. And hoping (a little belatedly, I admit) that Eiffel’s body didn’t land on any unsuspecting tourists.
Throughout my life, whenever I had broken something by accident, gravity had usually been involved. I had accidentally dropped glasses and plates, knocked things off shelves, and crashed model airplanes into the ground, and I figured there was no better way to break an expensive piece of equipment like an EMP generator than the sudden deceleration that came after dropping from a very high place.
And in Paris, there was no place higher than where I stood right then.
The route to the ground from the top of the tower wasn’t exactly a straight shot, though. The tower curved away slowly beneath us, and there were two wider tourist levels before the ground.
I hoped that would be far enough.
Eiffel’s body smacked off the metal girders of the tower and spun as it fell, like a man tumbling down an incredibly steep hill. The moments of friction slowed it slightly, but it still gained speed, the same way a real body would have. Those bounces off the tower, combined with the wind, pushed Eiffel away enough that he almost cleared the lower tourist level—although not quite.
Instead, the body slammed into the railing, traumatizing a whole new group of tourists, then flipped over and dropped another 200 feet, until it smashed into the ground and burst apart.
The timer in my mind had three seconds left.
I stared out at the city and waited.
The seconds ticked down to zero.
Nothing happened.
Or rather, technically, everything kept happening.
The traffic lights and neon signs far below us continued shining. The helicopter with the angry police hovering near us didn’t drop out of the sky. The tourists who hadn’t been traumatized by the sight of a falling person continued taking selfies and uploading them through a cellular network that still appeared to exist.
Catherine emerged through the trapdoor behind us, holding Alexander’s phone triumphantly. “It’s still working!” she exclaimed. “You did it!”
Before I even knew what was happening, she and Erica and I were all hugging one another, thrilled we had succeeded.
And then, as my adrenaline drained and the strength went out of me, I sank to the iron grating and sat, exhausted, looking out at Paris.
Erica and Catherine sat next to me. They didn’t look nearly as exhausted as I felt, but it still seemed that everything that day had taken a lot out of them.
Catherine called her own phone from Alexander’s and turned on the speaker.
Zoe answered excitedly. “Alexander?”
“It’s Catherine,” Catherine said. “Along with Erica and Ben. I believe we’ve destroyed the EMP generator. How do things look on your end?”
“Fantastic!” Zoe exclaimed. “The countdown ended at three seconds and said that Operation Wipeout had failed, and now we have access to all Ms. E’s files again. Nice work, guys!”
Behind her, I could hear Ms. E’s distinct voice shouting very angry things at us.
“Ms. E says hi,” Zoe reported. “She’s not happy. I think we have more than enough evidence here to put her and everyone else at SPYDER away for a long time.”
Erica, Catherine, and I all were overcome with relief—which lasted an entire half second.
“There’s just one problem,” Mike said, joining the call. “Remember all those dangerous people who were gathered outside Ms. E’s house when we showed up? Well, they all took off the moment you flew away in the helicopter.”
“Did you see where they were heading?” I asked nervously.
Mike said, “Unfortunately, I think they’re all headed toward you.”
20 SELF-PRESERVATION
The Eiffel Tower
Paris, France
April 1
1625 hours
“Think they’re coming to kill us?” I asked.
“It’s a definite possibility,” Erica said.
“Why?” I cried, exasperated. “We’ve already defeated their evil plans. There’s no point in killing us now. That’s just bad sportsmanship.”
Catherine said, “They might not realize their plans have been thwarted yet. Besides, it was never going to be easy getting off this tower. The French police are still after us. I’m sure they’re on their way up here to arrest us by now.”
“Yes, but I figured you could just call MI6 and have them explain everything to the French police,” I said. “They’re all on the same side, right?”
“As far as I know, MI6 still considers us criminals,” Catherine explained. “Now, I’m sure we could sort everything out eventually, but I’d prefer not to let them capture us in the meantime. If they do, we’ll be sitting ducks for SPYDER.”
“We just saved Western civilization!” I exclaimed. “How can people still think we’re the bad guys?”
“That’s just the way things go sometimes,” Erica told me. “Point is, we need to get off this tower, fast. The police and the bad guys all know we’re here, and right now where we’re sitting is a literal dead end.” She got back to her feet and headed for the trapdoor.
I got to my feet as well, although I was so worn out, even that was exhausting.
Catherine cupped a hand under my arm to help me. “I know this is disheartening, but rest assured, we’ll do our best to persevere.”
“Do our best?” I repeated. “Don’t you mean, we will persevere?”
“Right,” Catherine said, though I knew she was trying to cover her mistake. “That’s correct. We will persevere.”
I took a deep breath, trying to steady my nerves, and wondered how we were going to get out of this.
I started for the spiral staircase to head down it again, but Erica caught my arm. “Not that way. We can’t ride down the elevator. The police will be expecting that.”
“You’re not planning to rappel down the tower?” I asked, worried.
“No. We don’t have any rope.” Erica steered me to another trapdoor, this one set between the huge spools of cable that controlled the two elevators. “But we do have this.”
There was a small window in the trapdoor, allowing me to see below us. We were standing directly over the elevator shaft.
Unlike most elevator shafts in buildings, this one wasn’t a closed tube. The elevator simply rose up on a track that was open to the elements, but the basic idea was the same: Should the trapdoor give way, we’d have a nice long way to fall to our deaths.
The elevator was on its way up, rising toward us quickly, while the one in the neighboring shaft was on its way down. Both spools of cable were turning, one winding while the other unwound.
I understood what Erica intended for us to do. We weren’t going to ride down in the elevator. We were going to ride down on the elevator.
I wasn’t thrilled about that, but given everything else I had done that day, this practically seemed cautious.
Catherine and I stepped back from the trapdoor while Erica popped it open. Cold air gusted up from the shaft and whipped around us.
The elevator slowed as it neared the top of the tower, then came to a gentle stop a few feet beneath us. We all carefully lowered ourselves onto the roof, taking care to not make any noise so we didn’t alert the people inside the car.
As it was, the elevator roof wasn’t thick and had vents in it, so we could hear the people inside as they were exiting. They were police. I could tell, because they shouted, “Police! Step aside!” to the crowds as they rushed out of the elevator. Then we heard them racing off, asking anyone if they had seen the terrorists who had landed on top of the tower.
I presumed that meant us.
