The Project

by Brian Falkner

  Then it struck him.

  Nobody except a couple hundred people in the human chain that had rescued the books from the basement.

  If just one other person in that line knew the story of Leonardo’s River, then that might well explain the heavies making a mess at the end of the corridor.

  Luke realized the men were working their way toward them. “We’d better move,” he said, pulling slowly away from the wall.

  It wasn’t slowly enough.

  There was a sudden shout from the group of dark, silhouetted men, and first one, then three blue lights were aimed at Luke.

  One of the men pointed a dark shape toward them—a dark shape that looked a little like a gun.

  “Run!” Luke shouted, but Tommy needed no urging.

  They ran down the corridor through the center of the library, using their flashlights just enough to avoid tripping.

  Behind them, Luke heard shouts in a language he didn’t understand.

  “Hinterher!”

  “Wer sind sie?”

  “Bringt sie her!”

  “This way,” Tommy whispered, and turned left through a set of double doors toward another flight of stairs.

  They went up two steps at a time, clutching at the handrail to keep from tripping.

  Thundering footsteps sounded behind them.

  “In welche Richtung?”

  “Nach links!”

  They reached the top of the stairs. Luke grabbed a thick encyclopedia off a nearby shelf and jammed it into the twin handles of the doors just as the two big men appeared at the glass.

  Their pursuers slammed into the door, and the encyclopedia jolted and almost slipped.

  It held, but it wouldn’t for long.

  Luke and Tommy sprinted along the corridor.

  Luke heard the doors burst open behind him as they reached the main staircase and hurtled down, two or three stairs at a time. As they approached the main landing, though, he realized they were not alone. One of the men, the oldest one, had remained behind.

  Luke’s flashlight flicked up and caught his face. It was not a face you could forget. He was bald, his forehead low and flat, his nose and jaw protruding, and his eyes deep black pools. It was a face to give small children nightmares. It was the face of a vicious attack dog.

  The man grabbed Tommy’s backpack as he tried to dodge past, hauling him to a stop.

  Luke was a few paces behind and didn’t even think; he just dropped a shoulder and barreled straight into the man.

  If Dog-Face had been younger or sturdier, it wouldn’t have worked, but as it was, Luke’s shoulder rammed right below his rib cage, bursting all the air from his lungs in a harsh bark, and he fell backward, arms flailing.

  “Come on!” Luke yelled, and leaped down, three stairs at a time, Tommy right behind him.

  They hit the main entrance and spun around toward the basement stairs. Down the first flight and onto the small landing, and there Luke stopped.

  The stairs to the basement were gone.

  He was looking straight into a murky well of water.

  Not far behind them, Luke heard running footsteps.

  “Go!” Tommy said, and without further thought, Luke dived headfirst into the dark water.

  9. UNDERWATER

  Luke felt strangely safe, despite the darkness and the grip of the water. Surely the men would not follow them. Not down here.

  Tommy tapped Luke on the shoulder, but Luke could not see him. Tommy was just inches away but the gloom underground, underwater, was absolute.

  Luke remembered the double doors and kicked in that direction, reaching out every few seconds to make sure Tommy was with him.

  The pressure in Luke’s chest became an ache as they pulled their way through the doors and into the long corridor. Once there, he pushed up to the surface, knowing that if the corridor was completely flooded, then they were in real trouble.

  It wasn’t. The water was flowing just underneath the ceiling-mounted conveyor belt. He clung on to it and felt Tommy latch on beside him. There was only a few inches of air left, and if the water was still rising, then they didn’t have long. He didn’t need to tell Tommy to hurry.

  Luke pulled himself down the corridor in the pitch blackness, his face upturned in the precious little air that remained. The corridor seemed long enough by day. In the dark, in the water, it was an endurance test. Luke’s shoulders began to ache after the first twenty yards and were screaming fire after the second.

  He shook off feelings of claustrophobia, knowing that if he let it get to him, he might start to panic. Hand over hand, he told himself. One more foot and then another.

  The air supply remained constant for now, a long, narrow bubble against the ceiling.

  It seemed to take forever but it was probably no more than ten minutes before his head cracked into a solid object. They had reached the end.

  He felt around and found the doorway through which they had entered. Taking another huge gulp of air, he pulled himself down and through.

  A moment later he emerged, puffing and panting, spitting out water, back in the high concrete walls of the loading dock.

  Tommy popped up beside him, coughing and treading water. “That was awesome, dude!”

  “Are you insane?”

  Tommy grinned. “Who were those guys?”

  “Buggered if I know, mate,” Luke said. “Was that German they were speaking?”

  “Yes,” he said immediately. “It was German.”

  “What were they saying?” Luke asked.

  “Just stuff like ‘this way, that way, chase them,’ ” Tommy said.

  “We’d better get out of here,” Luke said. “In case they come outside looking for us.”

  He didn’t think that was likely, considering all the police and the emergency workers around, but he didn’t want to take any chances.

  The more he thought about it, the more he was sure that the dark object he had seen in the man’s hand had been a gun.

  10. BLACK FRIDAY

  The floodwaters crested that night, Friday the thirteenth, and the town that had been Luke’s home for the last three months became a lake.

  The river sneered at the pathetic attempts to hold it back with rows of sandbags and plastic, spewing over or around them. The floodwaters did not simply flow and settle over the town; they rampaged in a torrent through the streets, dragging slime and debris through buildings as if they were an open sewer.

  The president turned up the next Thursday, as the floodwaters were receding. He rolled up his sleeves and looked as though he was ready to jump on the end of a shovel and start helping with the cleanup, although of course he didn’t.

  Because of the flood, many roads were closed. The last week of school for the year was canceled, which was lucky, since Luke and Tommy never had to report back to Mr. Kerr about the book. Luke hoped that by the end of the summer vacation, the fuss about the statue would have died down.

  But because the school was closed, nobody knew that Ms. Sheck had been kidnapped for almost a week.

  PART II

  THE DETECTIVES

  The knowledge of all things is possible.

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  11. GODZILLA THE SQUIRREL

  “Something about this book don’t smell right,” Tommy said.

  Luke nodded his agreement as he removed the book from its hiding place, shook off dust and ashes into his garden, and slowly unwrapped the plastic liner that protected it. Even if it was worth a couple million bucks, that still didn’t explain the German-speaking thugs in the library, or the gun.

  There was more to this book than met the eye, he was sure. Perhaps some long-lost document was sewn into the binding.

  He had hidden the book in their ash dump. It was outside the house at the back of the living room chimney, where they emptied the old ashes from their fireplace. It seemed like a nice, safe place for it. It was dry, his house was well outside of the flood area, nobody would use the fireplace u
ntil next winter, and who would think of looking there? To be extra safe, he had covered the plastic bag with a layer of old, crumbly ashes.

  Nobody knew it was there except Luke, Tommy, and Godzilla the squirrel.

  Godzilla sat on a branch of the oak tree by the corner of the house and watched them as Luke unwrapped the book. He was huge. By Luke’s reckoning, he was at least half as big again as any other squirrel he had ever seen. He hadn’t seen many, as there were no squirrels in New Zealand. With the exception of the drunken squirrel that ruined their prank, Luke thought squirrels were kind of cute, with their bright little eyes and bushy tails. They were usually shy, timid creatures, but you could walk right up to Godzilla while he was sitting there chewing on a nut, and he’d just stare at you and offer you a bite.

  Godzilla’s head twitched as he watched them walk back inside with the book, as if he were listening to their conversation. But Luke wasn’t worried. Who was going to listen to an oversized squirrel?

  The floodwaters had come and gone, and so had the president.

  Tommy and Luke had talked about little else over the last week except the mad chase through the library and the men who had tried to attack them.

  “What could be so important that they’d break into the library in the middle of the night to steal it?” Tommy wondered.

  “We did it, too,” Luke pointed out. “But what I can’t stop thinking about is how quickly they got there. We saw that book about four o’clock, give or take, and less than six hours later, armed thugs were searching the library.”

  “How did they even know about the book?” Tommy asked.

  “There must have been someone else in the line who recognized it,” Luke said. “Tipped them off.” He stared at the book in his hands. It didn’t look like it was worth all the fuss. It just looked like an old, dusty book. “What are you hiding?” he asked the book.

  They had spent hours during the week examining the book, looking for clues. They had even scanned it with one of Tommy’s gadgets, an ultraviolet scanner, but if there were any clues there, they hadn’t found them.

  The encyclopedia had been right, though, about its being the most boring book in the world. It was totally unreadable. Luke tried reading it, but after less than a page, he went cross-eyed and his mind wandered. The Last of the Mohicans was sounding better and better by the minute. Except he couldn’t shake the idea that this book was a clue to some vast mystery.

  Both of them pored over the book again, even turning it upside down and trying to read it backward.

  Tommy had the idea of x-raying the book to see if there was anything hidden in the binding. He knew someone at the university who might be able to help. Luke liked the idea but thought they had to be careful. The fewer people who knew about the book, the better.

  “Maybe we should tell the police,” Tommy said after a while. “This whole thing is getting a bit serious for us to deal with.”

  “Yeah.” Luke nodded, but then shook his head. “But how are we going to explain what we were doing in the library? And if they find out we stole the book, then we’ll be up to our ears in it.” That thought terrified Luke. But so did the thugs from the library. He said, “And what if Dog-Face catches up with us? If they were there looking for the book and couldn’t find it, they’ll probably assume that we have it.”

  “You think Dog-Face knows who we are?” Tommy asked.

  “I hope not,” Luke said.

  “And if they do?”

  “We’ll worry about that then,” Luke said, and looked Tommy straight in the eye. “Let’s not do anything in a hurry. I gotta be careful. My dad’s on a working visa in the States because of his job at the university. If I get arrested, they’ll cancel that visa and we’ll all be on the next plane home.”

  He didn’t go into details with Tommy, because it was a family matter, but after they’d been forced to sell the farm, his father had scraped by on casual farm labor work, which was both exhausting and humiliating for him.

  Then the job had come up at the University of Iowa, with free housing, free private schooling for Luke, and all travel expenses paid. It had seemed like a dream come true, and so far it had been.

  Luke just hoped it wasn’t about to turn into a nightmare. All because of a stupid, harebrained decision.

  Why did he always have to do things like that?

  12. VACATION

  The first day of summer vacation, Saturday, was strange. Not just because Americans called their holidays vacations or because summer was in the middle of the year. And not because they had already had a week off school because of the flood.

  Brown putrid water still covered the town. Most of the businesses were closed, and a lot of roads remained blocked off. You couldn’t go visit your friends or go to the movies or to the Coral Ridge Mall. You couldn’t do any of the things that Luke had been looking forward to in his first-ever U.S. summer vacation.

  It was strange to be stuck at home on the first day of vacation, but it wasn’t a disaster.

  The second day of summer vacation, Sunday, was a disaster.

  Bryan Brown, the son of the principal, was in their class, and he was the first one with the news. “Ms. Sheck is missing,” he posted on Facebook. His dad had rung all his staff to see if they had been affected by the flooding and to check that they were okay.

  Ms. Sheck hadn’t answered her home phone or her cell, so Mr. Brown had driven around to her house. He discovered that the house had been ransacked, and Ms. Sheck was gone.

  Luke had heard all kinds of stories from texts and chats—that Ms. Sheck had been arrested, that she’d been murdered, that her entire house had disappeared into the flooded river. But he hadn’t heard anything official, and it wasn’t until the next day, when it was all over the front page of the local newspaper, that he had any idea what was really going on.

  LOCAL SCHOOLTEACHER ABDUCTED, the headline shouted at him. It continued in smaller letters on the next line: EVIDENCE OF VIOLENT STRUGGLE AT HOUSE.

  “Holy crap, dude!” Tommy said on the other end of Luke’s cell phone. “Do you think it has anything to do with the book?”

  “How could it?” Luke asked. “She wasn’t even there.”

  “It does seem strange,” Tommy said.

  “It’s just a coincidence,” Luke said. “We saw some strangers in the library when we weren’t supposed to be there, and they chased us away. What has that got to do with Ms. Sheck? She probably got in a fight with her boyfriend or owed money to the Mafia in Las Vegas. Why get ourselves in trouble for nothing?”

  “I suppose,” Tommy said.

  “Let the police worry about Ms. Sheck,” Luke said. “What we need to worry about is this book. Who wants it so badly, and why? We need to do some digging around.”

  That perked Tommy up immediately. “Yeah, dude,” he said. “That’d be awesome! We can try out my new laser.”

  “Bro, it’s not space aliens we’re up against,” Luke said. “At least I don’t think so.”

  13. THE LIBRARY

  Gradually, the waters began to recede and the summer rains washed the putrid slime into the drains, clearing away a lot of the sewer smell that had hung over the city.

  By Friday, many of the roads had reopened.

  The best place to start “digging around” seemed like the university library. That was where everything had happened. And they didn’t have anywhere else to start, so they cycled over there from Luke’s house, making only a slight detour to Tommy’s place to pick up a few gadgets.

  Tommy stuffed a few electronic things in his backpack and said he’d explain later what they did.

  The police had been at the library.

  The doors were open, but yellow plastic tape saying POLICE LINE: DO NOT CROSS blocked off the stairways to the second level. The same tape blocked the stairs down to the basement while cleanup crews and health inspectors made it safe.

  From the first level, Luke could see piles of overturned books scattered haphazardly up agains
t the railings. An avalanche of books tumbled halfway down the staircase, reaching almost to the landing.

  A fine white powder covered the handrails and walls.

  “The police have been dusting for fingerprints,” Tommy said quietly beside him. “Do you think we left any?”

  Luke thought about that for a moment. “Nah. The only things we touched were the books, and hundreds of people touched those in the bucket brigade.”

  “They wouldn’t have our fingerprints on record anyway,” Tommy said with a sigh of relief. “So I think we’re safe.”

  They’d have mine, Luke thought, but didn’t say so. In order to get their visa, his whole family had been fingerprinted at the U.S. consulate in New Zealand. And then again at immigration in Los Angeles. He tried to think of anything he might have touched in the library but could think of nothing that wouldn’t have been touched by thousands of library users.

  “Luke.” A cheerful voice came from behind him, and he jumped. It was Claudia. “And I’ve forgotten your friend’s name.”

  “Tommy,” Luke said, turning around to face her.

  “I’d like you to meet someone,” she said brightly. “This is Mr. James Mullins from New York. He’s a book enthusiast and has his own wonderful collection of rare books. He heard about the fantastic job you all did rescuing the collection from the basement before the flood and came down here personally to thank everyone. As it was your idea for the bucket brigade, I thought he’d especially like to meet you.”

  Luke knew the name, and he knew the face, but he forced his own face to remain calm.

  James Mullins was the name of the man who had once offered two million dollars for a copy of Leonardo’s River. You couldn’t forget something like that. Nor could you ever forget his face. The protruding jaw and the snoutlike nose. The deep-set black eyes and the ears that seemed impossibly high on the sides of his head and unnaturally pointed. James Mullins was Dog-Face.