Nick and Tesla's Solar-Powered Showdown

by Bob Pflugfelder

  Nick brought the walkie-talkie close to his ear.

  “[Something something] that note [something something] be planted [something something] a trick,” he heard Agent Doyle say.

  “[Something something] don’t think so [something something] the laptop [something something] move fast,” said Agent McIntyre.

  “[Something something] find any malware [something something] best lead [something something] days,” Agent Doyle said. “[Something something] better call [something something] and LET THEM KNOW WHAT WE’RE BRINGING IN.”

  Nick yelped, dropped the walkie-talkie, and slapped his hands over his ears.

  Agent Doyle’s voice had gone from whisper-soft to foghorn-loud in the space of an instant.

  “He’s getting out of the SUV!” Tesla said. “Turn down the volume before he hears himself!”

  Uncle Newt snatched the walkie-talkie off the floor and fiddled with a knob on the side.

  For a moment, they heard no sound at all.

  “Oh, no,” said Nick, staring miserably at the walkie-talkie. “I broke it.”

  But then they made out an unmistakable sound: the slamming of a car door. It came in through both the window and the walkie-talkie.

  Everyone sighed in relief.

  “What’s going on?” Mr. Kuskie called from the kitchen.

  “It sounds like Doyle’s about to call headquarters,” DeMarco told him.

  “Oh, man,” Mr. Kuskie said. “I am in so much trouble.”

  “I don’t think it has anything to do with you, Dad,” Silas said. “He’s just, like, reporting in.”

  But they could hear Mr. Kuskie mutter “Oh, man” again, and then he began pacing.

  “He’s taking out his cell phone and moving away from the driveway,” Tesla reported from the window. “Now he’s stopping. He’s right under the branch with the birdhouse! We’re going to hear every word!”

  Uncle Newt and the kids traded triumphant smiles.

  Their plan was working! And if it kept working, they were about to learn some of the secrets the agents had been keeping from them.

  “Control, this is Doyle,” they heard the agent say. “You were right. The Scooby gang figured out that the laptop was hacked. But that’s not the worst of it. Martha Holt left a note for them when you cleaned out the Mountain View office. They know she was there … and now McIntyre knows it, too. Those kids have forced our hand with their meddling. We have to give Option A another try before McIntyre finally sees the big picture.”

  Everyone’s smiles faded.

  “Oh, no,” said Nick.

  “Of course,” said Tesla.

  “No way,” said DeMarco.

  “Yes way, I’m afraid,” said Uncle Newt.

  “He calls us the Scooby gang?” said Silas.

  The others stared at him.

  “What?” Silas said.

  “Don’t you get it?” said Tesla. “Agent Doyle is a traitor. He’s working for the bad guys!”

  A moment of stunned silence passed as reality sank in for the group gathered in the dining room.

  Agent Doyle was one of the bad guys.

  Even the walkie-talkie was silent. Apparently, Doyle was listening to whomever he’d called—the person he’d referred to as “Control.”

  “Perfect,” Agent Doyle said at last. “But hold off for now. I’m stuck at Newton Holt’s house because … hang on. Someone’s coming.”

  “Who is it?” DeMarco said to Tesla, who was still standing near the window.

  She peeked around the curtain.

  “No one’s coming up the driveway,” she said. “Maybe it’s—no! Not yet!”

  “What’s going on?” asked Nick. “Who is it?”

  Suddenly, another voice was heard over the walkie-talkie, providing the answer to Nick’s question before Tesla could supply her own.

  “You know what?” Mr. Kuskie was saying. “My mechanic told me that if I let the car sit for a few minutes, it should start right up. How about I give it try?”

  “Dad?” Silas said. “What’s he doing out there?”

  “He lost his nerve,” replied Tesla. “I don’t think he even heard that Agent Doyle is a double agent.”

  A car door opened and slammed shut, and a moment later an engine sputtered to life.

  “Well, what do you know? It worked!” Mr. Kuskie said. “I’ll just back out, and you can be on your way. Sorry if I caused you any inconvenience. It would never be my intention to come between a fellow citizen and his or her important business.”

  “Oh, Dad,” Silas groaned, hanging his head.

  Another car door opened and closed, and a second engine started.

  “They’re leaving,” Tesla said.

  “We’ve got to warn Agent McIntyre!” Nick cried.

  He bolted for the front door, with Tesla, Uncle Newt, Silas, and DeMarco fast on his heels. But they were too late. By the time they rushed outside, the black SUV was already off, cruising up the street. Mr. Kuskie was waving at it from his Rabbit, which he’d backed from the driveway and parked by the curb.

  “Have a nice day!” he called out, waving to the disappearing vehicle. “God bless America!”

  “With the pendants ruined, we have no way to contact Agent McIntyre again,” Nick said. “We can’t tell her about Agent Doyle.”

  “We’ve got to catch up to her, then,” said Tesla. “Now.”

  Uncle Newt leapt from the front porch and ran to the driveway.

  “To the Newtmobile!” he announced.

  The kids scrambled after him.

  As Uncle Newt slid behind the wheel of his homemade boat-car, Nick and Tesla climbed into the backseat. But when Silas and DeMarco attempted to follow their friends, Uncle Newt reached back and closed the door.

  “Sorry, guys,” he said. “I can only put my closest relatives in mortal danger, remember?”

  “Please, please, please let us come, too!” begged Silas, clasping his hands together.

  “You can’t make us miss a real-life car chase!” DeMarco protested indignantly.

  “Can and am,” replied Uncle Newt. And with that he put the Newtmobile in reverse and barreled backward down the driveway.

  Seconds later, he was whooshing up the street, heading in the same direction as Agents McIntyre and Doyle. But the SUV was nowhere in sight.

  “I don’t see them!” said Nick.

  “They’re probably headed for the interstate,” said Uncle Newt. “Whether they’re going north to San Francisco or south to San Jose, the highway would be quickest.”

  “But what if their HQ isn’t in San Francisco or San Jose?” Nick asked. “If we go the wrong way, we’ll lose them for good, and Agent McIntyre won’t know that Agent Doyle is a turncoat until it’s too late.”

  “Just go toward the interstate,” Tesla said, cutting in. She turned to Nick and gave him a swat. “And stop with the worst-case scenarios. They don’t help.”

  “Sorry,” Nick said, rubbing his sore shoulder.

  “Hold on!” Uncle Newt shouted (about a second too late to do his niece and nephew any good). “I’ve got to gun it if we’re going to get through this light!”

  They shot through an intersection—and out of Uncle Newt’s neighborhood—just as the stoplight changed from yellow to red. The Newtmobile swerved left, tires squealing. Half a minute later, it was turning right onto the winding, climbing, two-lane road that led from Half Moon Bay to the interstate a few miles away.

  Nick pointed at a boxy black vehicle about a dozen cars ahead. “That’s them!”

  “I think you’re right,” said Tesla. “Quick, Uncle Newt, get closer!”

  Uncle Newt flapped a hand at the cars zipping down the hill into town. “I can’t. This is a no passing lane, and there’s too much traffic coming in the opposite direction.”

  “Try to get Agent McIntyre’s attention,” said Nick. “The Newtmobile is pretty distinctive. If she looks back, she’ll know it’s us.”

  “Good thinking!” Tesl
a cried, patting her brother on the arm (though in her excitement, it was more like pounding), exactly where she’d whacked him a minute before. “Let’s make some noise!”

  Uncle Newt began honking the horn and flashing the headlights. It was impossible to tell if Agent McIntyre noticed, but plenty of other drivers certainly did. They honked back, flashed their own lights, and even made a few rude gestures.

  “I guess they think I’m complaining about the traffic,” Uncle Newt said.

  “That doesn’t matter,” said Tesla. “Keep it up!”

  Uncle Newt went on blasting the horn and flashing the lights, and Nick and Tesla stood in the backseat and began waving their hands over their heads.

  “Agent McIntyre! It’s us! Tesla and Nick!” shouted Tesla.

  “Look back! Look back!” shouted Nick. “Don’t you ever use your rearview mirror? Look back!”

  Unfortunately, at that very moment the road ahead curved to the left, and the SUV rounded the bend and disappeared from sight.

  Even more unfortunately, a California Highway Patrol motorcycle started following the Newtmobile, with siren howling.

  “Oh, great,” Nick moaned. “Just what we need.”

  “Don’t be so pessimistic,” said Tesla. “This might be exactly what we need.”

  Just as they reached a roadside antiques store on the right, Uncle Newt pulled into the gravel parking lot and stopped. The police officer did the same.

  The officer set the kickstand on his motorcycle, spoke on his radio for a moment, and then approached the Newtmobile with slow, swaggering steps. The expression on his lean face was unreadable, his eyes hidden behind a pair of jet-black sunglasses.

  “You’ve got to help us, Officer,” Tesla said as he stepped up to the car.

  The officer’s emotionless face did not change. He merely pointed his head in Tesla’s direction.

  Undeterred, she took that as a cue to keep talking.

  “We were chasing an SUV that has a government agent in it—we don’t know who specifically she works for, but it’s got to be the CIA or something like that—because we just found out that her partner is working for a group of spies that’s been trying to steal our parents’ work on space-based solar-power transmission, and if we don’t warn her, he’s probably going to sabotage it when she tries to trace the spies using the hacked laptop we just gave her and … and … You don’t believe a word of this, do you?”

  The policeman didn’t even bother to reply. He just turned his stony, blank expression to Uncle Newt and said:

  “License and registration.”

  Uncle Newt was cited for reckless driving, improper use of signals, and having un-seat-belted minors in a moving vehicle. (Nick and Tesla had removed their seatbelts in order to stand and wave in their failed attempt to attract Agent McIntyre’s attention.) He was also warned that the Newtmobile needed heavy-duty vehicle certification and a smog check. After all that, they were finally allowed to go on their way.

  The ticketing process had taken twenty minutes, so it was no use trying to catch up to the SUV. Agents McIntyre and Doyle were long gone.

  Uncle Newt turned the Newtmobile around and headed back toward Half Moon Bay.

  “The FBI must have a local office in San Francisco,” Uncle Newt said. “When we get home, we’ll call them.”

  “They’ll probably believe us as much as that cop did,” Nick grumbled.

  Tesla gave him another swat. “Hey, it’s worth a try,” she said. “We can call the CIA, too.”

  “And the Pentagon, and the National Security Agency,” added Uncle Newt. “The worst they can do is hang up on us, right?”

  “Right,” Tesla agreed. “In the meantime, Agent McIntyre will have someone working on that laptop. Maybe they’ll be able to trace the hack to the bad guys.”

  Nick shook his head. “The laptop’s probably useless now. Doyle warned Control about it, remember? They’ll have plenty of time to cover their tracks. And while they’re doing that, they’ll also be getting ready for Option A that Doyle mentioned on the phone. Whatever that is, I don’t think it’ll be good news for us, or Mom and Dad.”

  “We don’t know anything for sure,” said Tesla—though she suspected that, for once, her brother’s worst-case scenario was pretty close to accurate.

  Uncle Newt seemed to be thinking the same thing.

  No one spoke another word during the entire trip home.

  When they reached Uncle Newt’s house, Mr. Kuskie’s blue VW Rabbit was no longer out front. Even more surprisingly, Silas and DeMarco were gone, too.

  “I would’ve thought they’d wait around to see how the car chase turned out,” said Tesla.

  “We left the doors to the house unlocked,” Nick pointed out. “Maybe they’re inside.”

  That’s exactly where they were.

  And they weren’t alone.

  When Nick, Tesla, and Uncle Newt walked into the dining room, they found their friends lying on the floor, hands bound behind their backs, ankles tied together, mouths gagged. Standing near them were three women, one with short dark hair, the other two with identical gray perms.

  Nick and Tesla remembered the three intruders well. The last time they’d seen them, it was the women who had been the prisoners.

  That had been the day Agent McIntyre drove off with Julie Casserly, the next-door-neighbor spy, and her deceptively decrepit-looking lackeys, Ethel and Gladys—who dressed and looked like sweet old grannies but in fact were trained to fight like ruthless ninjas.

  And now they were back.

  “Hello, again,” Julie said as the women quickly fanned out, each one blocking an exit. “Miss me?”

  Uncle Newt seemed to think over her question. “No,” he answered finally. “Not particularly.”

  Nick and Tesla and Uncle Newt tried to resist, but there was no time for them to whip up a clever scheme or ingenious gadget to save themselves. They had to defend themselves—and it was soon obvious who were the professionals when it came to fighting: Julie and Ethel and Gladys.

  The women grabbed wrists, twisted arms, swept feet off the floor with lightning-quick kicks. Within seconds, they had Nick, Tesla, and Uncle Newt pinned, bound, and gagged.

  “We should have done this a long time ago,” Julie said with a smirk, gazing down on her prisoners. She dusted off her hands and then turned to Ethel and Gladys. “Bring up the truck.”

  Without a word, the gray-haired accomplices stalked out of the house. When they returned a moment later, between them they carried what appeared to be a rolled-up rug.

  Nick and Tesla looked at each other.

  Chuh? said the look in Nick’s eyes.

  Tesla could only shrug.

  “The big dopey one first,” said Julie.

  “Which big dopey one?” Ethel (or maybe Gladys) asked.

  Julie pointed at Uncle Newt.

  “Him. The grown-up.”

  “HMPH URMMPH!” Uncle Newt muffled into his gag.

  Julie chuckled. “Please, watch your language. There are children present,” she said.

  Ethel and Gladys dropped the rug next to Uncle Newt, rolled it out, and pushed him onto it. They then proceeded to wrap him up in it like a pig in a blanket.

  “HMPH URMMPH!” he said again, but the words were even more muffled this time, and no one bothered to reply as Ethel and Gladys lifted him up and lugged his squirmy body through the kitchen.

  The old women returned carrying only the rug. They repeated the operation with Tesla, then Nick, then Silas, then DeMarco.

  Once everyone had been unceremoniously dumped into the back of a small moving truck that was now parked in the driveway, Julie came out to inspect Ethel and Gladys’s handiwork (as the panting, visibly overexerted women glared at her).

  “You may as well get comfortable,” Julie told her prisoners. “It’s going to be a long, bumpy ride.”

  Then she reached up, grabbed the strap hanging from the bottom of the steel door, and yanked it down.

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sp; The door slammed shut with a deafening clang, sealing Nick and Tesla and the others in complete and utter darkness.

  Julie Casserly was right about the long, bumpy ride. What she hadn’t mentioned was how hot it was going to get.

  Despite the total lack of light, the back of the truck didn’t stay cool long. Tesla could feel the air growing warmer and staler by the minute, and soon her clothes were soaked with sweat.

  It was also growing harder to breathe through the gag.

  She rolled over on her side—it was impossible to lie comfortably on her back with her hands tied behind her—and tried to speak.

  “How’s everyone doing?” she asked.

  It came out sounding like “Hurr wurwurwur wuhwuh?”

  No one replied.

  But Tesla heard movement, and a second later she felt a sudden, uncomfortable pressure weighing down on her. It seemed like someone was trying to sit on her, and she began to squirm away—until she realized what that someone was really trying to do.

  Somebody was groping for her gag in the darkness.

  Whoever it was, it couldn’t have been Silas. She would have already been crushed to death.

  Tesla stopped struggling, and the fumbling fingers found her gag and yanked the cloth out of her mouth.

  “Thank you!” Tesla gasped.

  After sucking in a few deep breaths, she pressed her back into whoever had just helped her and began searching for a gag with her bound hands. After sticking her fingers into an ear, an eye, and a nostril, she finally found a mouth and pulled out the cloth stuffed within it.

  The first thing Nick said was “Ouch.” After catching his breath, he added, “But thanks.”

  “All right, Uncle Newt, Silas, DeMarco,” Tesla said. “Let us know where you are, and Nick and I will get your gags out.”

  Tesla heard grunting and banging on the truck’s metal floor.

  “OK, OK,” Nick said. “Here we come.”

  He rolled off into the darkness. Tesla tried to angle her body in a different direction and went rolling off as well.

  What followed was like the most uncomfortable game of Twister ever played. There was lots of writhing and flailing and poking people in the eye. But eventually everyone was able to speak and breathe freely.