The Blazing Bridge
Page 6
“It’s like some kind of postapocalyptic zombie video game world,” I said. “Or a museum of boringness.”
“Is the air in here even safe to breathe?” Sammy covered his mouth.
“Sure!” Dawkins sucked in a big lungful and then sneezed. “Just avoid the dirty parts of the room. There’s a mopped path on the floor right along the edge here.” He carefully picked his way through the trash on a clean strip of mottled black linoleum, and we followed.
In a pristine corner were four desks from this century—sleek and clean—outfitted with new computers that purred in sleep mode. Bolted above them were five widescreen monitors and a router.
“Why don’t you guys ever work in new places?” Sammy asked.
“The Blood Guard prefers to be surrounded by history,” Dawkins said.
“More like the Blood Guard prefers to save money. Abandoned sites are cheap,” I said.
“And also anonymous,” Dawkins said. “This is the Blood Guard way station for Manhattan. Diz will know to check in here when she can’t raise us on the phone. And while we wait for her, we are going to track down—”
“Does this godawful hole have a restroom?” Greta asked. “I need a bathroom.”
“Through there,” Dawkins said, pointing down another mopped-clean strip. At its far end was a narrow set of steps. “I’m sure it’s clean, but fair warning: the facilities date from 1905 or thereabouts, so don’t expect fancy.”
Without another word, Greta marched across the room and disappeared. The sound of a door latching carried across the musty room.
It was time to call for help; and that meant calling my mom. The Guard were still a few hours away, but that didn’t mean we shouldn’t bring them up to speed so that they could come to our aid as soon as they arrived. I took out my cell phone.
But there was no signal.
“There’s no cell phone service?” I said.
Dawkins looked at his phone. “I don’t see any bars, so … I suppose not.”
“Poor Greta,” Sammy said. He rolled a chair back from a desk and sat in it. “This whole operation is such a mess.”
“I know,” Dawkins said, tapping at the keyboards and waking up the computers. “But we will get her mom back.”
“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why my dad took her mom in the first place. I mean, we were all there. Why grab Greta’s mom?”
“Because in the dark, he thought she was Greta, obviously,” Sammy said. He opened up a browser on the computer. “We have Internet service down here. Is there wifi, or are these computers hard-wired into the net?”
“Why would he want Greta?” Dawkins broke into a wide, skeptical smile. “More likely Mrs. Sustermann was the easier target, Sammy.”
“Come on,” Sammy whispered, “how stupid do you think I am? He wasn’t after Greta’s mom; he was after Greta. Because she’s a …” He fluttered his hands in the air and mouthed the word Pure.
“Keep that theory to yourself,” Dawkins said, pointing at him.
Across the room, a toilet flushed.
“Theory,” Sammy repeated. “Right. Anyway, Greta and her mom are the same size, they were both wearing hoodies, her mom was sitting where Greta had been before the lights went out … he just made a mistake.”
Greta came back out, red-eyed. Something had changed; she didn’t look shell-shocked anymore.
She looked angry.
“What were you guys whispering about?” she asked.
“Your mom,” I said. “We’re going to find her, don’t worry.”
“Is that supposed to be reassuring, Ronan?” Greta asked, jabbing a finger in my chest. “Because I am worried. What’s the great plan now—to sit in this rank old subway station and hope she shows up?”
“Um, probably not,” I said.
“This old subway station is key to finding her.” Dawkins tapped one of the flat screens, which now showed a coiled mess of colored lines. After a moment I realized it was the subway system. “We’re going to use the transit computer network to find your mum’s cat.” He typed something into another of the keyboards, and a second flat screen woke up and started cycling through images of people standing around on subway platforms and boarding trains, and even of trains barreling through tunnels. Live feeds from all over the city.
“Grendel?” Greta snorted. “Your genius plan to rescue my mom is to find her cat?”
“That hideous jeweled collar Grendel wears,” Dawkins said. “I noticed it has a charging port. Why is that?”
Greta stared at him for a moment, then laughed. “Oh gosh. It’s called Cat-o-Grapher. The collar sends out a cellular ping, and Mom can log on to a website that tracks where Grendel goes in the neighborhood, or use the site to find him when he doesn’t come home.”
“So if we locate the cat, we locate your mom.”
Greta shot up off the desk and wrapped her arms around Dawkins. “That’s a great idea!”
He blushed. “Thank you. Now, if they’ve exited the subways, we’ll get a ping no problem. But if they haven’t … we’re going to need to access the private transit network. Which is the other reason we’ve come here.”
“What do you need me to do?” Greta asked, rolling a chair over and sitting down next to Sammy.
He opened up a log-in window. “First we’ll need your mom’s password to access the Cat-o-Grapher site—”
“But I don’t know it!” Greta said.
“That’s okay, we can figure it out,” said Sammy, cracking his knuckles and typing in a Web address. “Parents never pick tough passwords. Just tell me all her personal things—favorite food, color, that sort of thing. Let’s start with her middle name and birthday.”
“Millicent,” Greta said, “and her birthday is in a few weeks: September twenty-fourth.”
Sammy’s fingers flew over the keys. “No, and no. What about your birthday? What about the cat’s birthday? Let’s just make a list …”
Dawkins draped his arm around my shoulders and steered me over to another computer. “While they work on that, I need you to visit that gamer website where you and your dad last communicated.”
“ILZ?” I said. “You think he’s back on ILZ?”
“Absolutely,” Dawkins said. “He will have realized very quickly that he grabbed the wrong person. So he’ll want to make a trade. And he’ll want to do it soon. Remember, he’s desperate. The whole reason he was in that subway station was because the Bend Sinister were out in force above ground. He didn’t want to be caught by them any more than we did—at least, not until he has a prize to bring them.”
“Greta,” I whispered.
“Greta.”
“If Sammy was able to figure out Greta is a Pure,” I said, watching the two of them working, “how long until Greta wises up?”
Dawkins rolled his eyes. “Oh, she’ll never put it together. Even if it occurred to her, she’d never believe it. People are blind about themselves. For an opinion that completely misses the obvious, nothing beats self-appraisal.”
I logged on and tabbed over to my mailbox. The only things in it were the email exchanges with my dad. First the ones where my mom pretended to be me. And then, later, the ones where he and I were actually writing to each other.
“There’s nothing new here,” I said. “It’s a dead end.”
“Nonsense,” Dawkins said. “Send him a note. You know, ‘Hi Dad, You stole my friend’s mum and I want her back.’ That sort of thing.”
“You want me to email that?”
“No, Ronan,” Dawkins said. “That was me making a little joke. Just keep it short.” He strolled back over to Greta and Sammy. “How are you two progressing?”
“We got in easy,” Sammy said, pumping his arms in victory. “Her password? Name of her first cat from when she was a kid.”
“Well done! So where is the little beastie?”
“It’s not really clear,” Sammy said. The screen showed a street grid of lower Manhattan, bound on three sides b
y the blue of the water. “The last pings were an hour ago in the East River, kind of halfway between the tunnel and the Brooklyn Bridge.”
“Could they have, you know, thrown the cat off the bridge and into the river?” I asked.
“Oh god.” Greta gulped. “Poor Grendel.”
“Probably not,” Sammy said. “The website’s just confused. Geolocation gets sloppy over big bodies of water. Not enough cell towers to triangulate.”
I turned back to my screen.
To: Sisyphus79
From: DorkLord2K1
But after that, I had no idea what to write. We know you have Mrs. Sustermann. Let her go—or else! Nah. I wasn’t really in a position to threaten my dad. But I wasn’t going to get all chatty with him, either. We were past all that, and we both knew it. So I wrote a single line
Tell us what you want.
and before I could second guess myself, I hit Send.
Then, feeling queasy, I sat back and stared at the screen. There was a second email I had to send. I wrote it quickly.
To: ArmaGide0n
From: DorkLord2K1
Thanks again for the help, d00d. We got out of there okay, and it is all because of you. Your friend, R.
Please be alive, I wished as I hit Send.
My inbox dinged right away with a reply.
But it wasn’t Gideon. It was my dad.
His email was one line, too; in fact, it was just one word.
Skype?
CHAPTER 8
A PINK FLUFFY UNICORN
“You look a little … green,” my dad said first thing.
So did he, but I didn’t tell him that. There was a faint greenish light cast on his face from below, like on a TV show villain. The dark marble walls and big flowering plants behind him only added to the eeriness.
“It’s because of the fluorescent lights,” I said.
“And that gray wall behind you,” he said, squinting. “What are those things stuck to it—pieces of tape?”
They were pieces of tape. Forty-year-old tape.
My chair was parked in an empty corner of the room, balanced on a crinkly pile of office bulletins about dress codes, vacation days, fire codes, smoking areas, and a faded calendar forever stuck on August 1974. “We can’t have him see any clues as to where we are,” Dawkins had said, frantically tearing things off the barest wall we could find in the room.
From behind the laptop, Greta, Sammy, and Dawkins watched and gave me signals—Greta rolled her hands over each other, and Dawkins mimed cutting his throat with his finger. It was more confusing than anything, so I ignored them.
“Who cares?” I said. “Can we cut the small talk?”
“Sure, son,” Dad said. He had changed his clothes since the subway. Now he was dressed in a nice dark suit and a gold tie and might have looked like a newscaster except for a long pair of scratches on his left cheek. “I assume your friends are there with you—Greta and that other kid, as well as that Overseer?”
I stared at his tie. It was a single Windsor knot—I knew that because he’d taught me how to tie one myself. I didn’t want to look in his eyes, because I feared I couldn’t be tough if I had to see his anger and disappointment in me. Lifelong habits die hard; even though he was an evil man, he was also my dad. “What do you want?” I asked.
“A simple trade,” he said. “You want Mrs. Sustermann, and I want …”
“Me!” I shouted. My dad stopped talking, confused.
We’d been idiots to let Greta observe. He was going to demand Greta, and if she heard him say that, even she would be able to figure out why her mom had been targeted: because her daughter, Greta, is a Pure.
But what would happen after that? Would Greta die? Would the world begin to end? Would she become evil like Agatha Glass had been after being zapped with the Damascene ’Scope? Dawkins had told me that if a Pure learned she was special, she would “lose that essential goodness” and stop being a Pure, but what did that even mean?
Dawkins must have been thinking the same thing, because he raised one hand and covered his eyes.
“Evelyn?” my dad was saying. “Are you still with me? No, I don’t want you. You had your chance, and you squandered it.”
“Don’t call me Evelyn,” I said. “And yeah, I’m still here. I was just thinking.”
“That was obvious. You never did have much of a poker face.” He smirked. “I’ll hand her over in return for the Damascene ’Scope.”
“The Damascene ’Scope?” I repeated, surprised and relieved and afraid that I looked like Gideon had when I’d shown up on his doorstep. Even Dawkins looked surprised.
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“The Damascene ’Scope,” I said again, still processing. “Sure.”
“And I want it to have three of those Verity Glasses in place so that it’s functional.”
Dawkins gave me a thumbs-up and wrote TELL HIM OK on a notepad.
“Okay,” I said, then added, “but we’re going to need something in return.”
“That’s not how this works, Evelyn.”
“Put Mrs. Sustermann on-camera.”
“She’s safe,” he said. “I give you my word.”
“I want to talk to her,” I said.
“That is not going to happen, Evelyn.” He breathed in and out a few times, something he always did when he was trying to control his temper. “You are not the one dictating terms here. She is safe. Even that foul cat of hers is safe.”
The scratches on his face.
“Fine,” I said, “so then show me the cat.”
“Stop with this foolishness, Evelyn!” he snapped. “I am not going to show you the damn cat any more than I am going to show you a pink fluffy unicorn.”
“That’s because you don’t have him, do you?” I said. “He probably got away.”
“Why all this nonsense about a cat?”
“Because I don’t believe you!” I almost shouted. “You lie all the time. Why should I take your word for anything?”
He did his phony chuckle—the one that meant there were things in the world I didn’t understand and never would. “Evelyn, whether you believe me or not, I have Mrs. Sustermann, and if you’d like her back alive, you are going to bring me what I want.”
Greta isn’t the sort of girl who cries easily, but she turned away.
“Okay, okay,” I said. I was all out of fight; now I just wanted to get moving on the next part, whatever it was.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Dad said, smiling. “Let’s say we meet in Times Square in two hours, in that spot where we went that time. You pestered me for ages to take you to—”
“I remember,” I said, cutting him off.
“Don’t be late, don’t forget the ’Scope, and don’t bring anyone else, or we will kill Mrs. Sustermann.” He winked. “And her cat. Bye, son.”
He disconnected, and Dawkins pushed down the lid of the laptop.
“We don’t have the Damascene ’Scope with us,” Greta said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Dawkins said. “Even if we did, we wouldn’t give it to the Bend Sinister.” At the startled hurt on Greta’s face, he rushed to add, “I don’t mean we’d risk your mum’s life, just that we’d find a way to dupe him and rescue your mum. We’ll disguise some junk and tell him it’s the ’Scope, and by the time he discovers it’s not, we’ll be far away.”
“I’m not feeling so hot,” Greta said, walking toward the back of the room. “I’ll be on the bench in the ladies’ room.”
“She seems kind of upset with this plan,” I said, once she’d disappeared into the back hallway.
“And why shouldn’t she be? It’s her mum’s life in the balance.” Dawkins looked over his shoulder at a dusty clock mounted on the wall. “He wants you there at eleven forty-five p.m. Times Square is going to be teeming with tourists.”
“But it’s a Monday,” Sammy said.
“No matter the day or time,” Dawkins said, “Times Square is a
lways jam-packed.”
“Big crowds are good, right?” I said. “Lots of people makes it difficult for them to nab me.”
“And makes it difficult for us to nab them,” Dawkins said. “But at least we’ll be able to spot the Bend Sinister easily. With their business suits and blank-eyed stares, they’ll stand out from the Times Square tourists. Thank goodness the meet wasn’t on Wall Street.”
“I really wish the rest of the Blood Guard were here,” Sammy said, dropping back into his chair. He refreshed the Cat-o-Grapher screen. “They’d have our backs.”
“Unfortunately,” Dawkins said, “they won’t arrive until early morning.”
“Never mind them,” said a voice. “You have me.”
Diz was in the doorway, her beehive and lipstick perfect, looking like she’d just stepped out of a 1960s movie.
“Oh!” Dawkins yelped. He dashed across the room, threw his arms around her, and twirled her so that her feet left the ground. “You’re okay! You’re okay!” he cried. “I was worried!”
“Easy, champ!” she said, laughing. “You’re going to tear the dress. Vintage Chanel doesn’t come cheap!”
He slowed and set her back on her feet. “How did you get away?”
She swaggered over and set down her dinky purse and white angora sweater. “First, I stunned them senseless with one of my cab’s ‘Schlock and Awe’ security features.”
“The bright light and noise from the advertisement boards,” I said. “We saw that from down the street.”
“That knocked four of them out flat.”
“And then you just sped out of there?” Dawkins asked.
“I would have, but one of their SUVs was following me, so I led them on a merry chase to Coney Island. That’s where I lost them.” To me and Sammy, she said, “Never try to outdrive a cabbie. We know all the short cuts.”
“I really did fear the worst,” Dawkins said.
“It’s okay, honey,” she said. “But why didn’t you answer your phone?”
“We’ve been underground,” Dawkins protested, and told her everything.
Diz sagged against the desk. “You lost her? After all that?”
“I’m afraid so,” he said.