The Project

by Brian Falkner

  “And Mullins—I mean, Mueller—made millions from magnets? What did he do, invent the smiley face fridge magnet?”

  Tommy shook his head. “Computers. They use neodymium magnets for the motors in computer hard drives. Mullins got in early on and got rich during the personal computer revolution back in the 1980s.”

  Luke stared at the stack of books open in front of them, trying to make sense of it all. From Leonardo da Vinci to computer disks. From America’s first library to the Vitruvian Man.

  Somewhere among all this was the solution to the puzzle. But the harder he stared at the books, trying to find it, the more elusive it became.

  17. THE BRIEFCASE

  The next phase of the operation was to stake out Mullins’s—Mueller’s—hotel suite. They had no intention of breaking into it, just observing it from a safe distance.

  But plans change.

  Tommy, who seemed to know every building in Iowa City, led the way through the library to a back staircase. It was locked, but his handy little lock pick took care of that.

  The stairs led up to a heavy metal door that had a sliding bolt on the inside but wasn’t locked. It opened out onto the roof of the library.

  “Stay low,” Tommy said. “We don’t want anyone to see us.”

  They both crouched as they scurried across to the northwest corner of the building, overlooking the pedestrian mall. Diagonally opposite was the Central Hotel.

  They sat on the concrete roof in the gap between the two library clocks and looked across at the hotel.

  “How will we know what room he’s in?” Luke asked as Tommy removed some equipment from his backpack.

  He smiled an evil, lopsided grin. “Just call him. I’ll do the rest.”

  Luke glanced at the device that Tommy had extracted from his bag. It looked like a camera but with a long, thin zoom lens.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “It’s my new laser audio surveillance system,” Tommy said.

  “What does it do?”

  “You aim it at a glass surface, like a window, and it picks up minute vibrations in the glass and converts them into sound waves. Basically, it picks up any noise inside the room.”

  He plugged a headset into it and put it on.

  “You ring the room, and I’ll scan the windows, see if I can hear the phone ringing.”

  “What do I do if he answers?” Luke asked.

  “Hang up.”

  Luke got the hotel number from the directory service and dialed it.

  “Central Hotel, Iowa City,” a smooth female voice answered.

  “Hello, I’d like to speak to James Mullins,” Luke said, disguising his voice with his best imitation of an American accent.

  “Just a moment.” There was a brief period of recorded music. “Putting you through now.”

  “It’s ringing,” Luke said.

  Tommy was scanning along each floor of the building, listening intently but shaking his head.

  It rang four times and then there was a click, and a gruff male voice said, “Hello?”

  Luke pressed the END button on his cell phone. “Did you find him?”

  Tommy shook his head. “Ring him back.”

  Luke pressed REDIAL.

  “Central Hotel, Iowa City,” said the same smooth voice.

  “Hello,” Luke said, “I was ringing for James Mullins, but I got cut off.”

  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry.” She sounded a bit embarrassed. “I’ll put you through again.”

  The phone rang just twice this time before it was picked up, but that was enough.

  “Got it,” Tommy said. “Corner room, level three.”

  Luke disconnected before the voice even had time to say hello.

  “Here,” Tommy said, handing Luke his pair of tiny binoculars.

  Luke put them to his eyes and adjusted the focus, and the wall of the hotel came into clear view. He counted up three levels and found the corner room.

  The window’s drapes were pulled almost shut. He could make out figures moving around inside but could not see who they were or what they were doing.

  “What are they talking about?” he asked.

  “They’re speaking in German,” Tommy said. “They’re discussing the phone calls they just got. One of them sounds a little nervous.” He listened intently for a while.

  “Anything else?” Luke asked.

  “Shush,” he said, reminding Luke that they were still in, or at least on, a library.

  “No, nothing,” he said after a while. “I can hear computer keys. I think someone is using a laptop. There are a couple of voices that I can’t make out. They may be in another room.”

  “No mention of the book?” Luke asked.

  “None.”

  Luke let the binoculars wander to the left. He found himself looking into the hotel corridor. Light was reflecting off the glass, which made it hard to see, but he could just make out the elevators halfway down the passageway.

  “Hang on, they’re leaving,” Tommy said. “Mueller told someone to go and get the car.”

  “All of them?” Luke asked.

  “Not sure,” Tommy replied.

  Luke watched the corridor as one of the heavyset men emerged from the room and went to wait by the elevators. He disappeared, and a few moments later, the other man appeared in the corridor, followed by Mueller.

  “They’re leaving,” Luke said. “Let’s follow them.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Tommy said, holding up his lock pick.

  They walked into the hotel lobby as if they owned the place.

  “Act like you belong,” Tommy had told Luke, “and nobody will question you. That’s the first rule of successful spying.”

  They checked the lobby for any sign of Mueller or his thugs, then took the elevator to the third floor and headed for the corner room.

  They passed a service cart covered in towels and sheets and packed with little plastic bottles of shampoo and rolls of toilet paper. A few wire coat hangers hung from a handle on the end of the cart. Beside the cart, a door was propped open, and Luke could hear humming and bustling sounds from within.

  The room they wanted was at the very end of the corridor and was number 300, according to the brass numbers stuck to the door. A DO NOT DISTURB sign hung from the handle.

  “Crap,” Tommy said, staring at the lock.

  Set into the top of the handle was a slot for an electronic door key.

  “Don’t you have a gadget for that?” Luke asked.

  “There is one, but it costs five hundred dollars, and I haven’t bought it yet. Maybe we can ask the housekeeper,” he suggested. “Pretend we’ve locked ourselves out of our room.”

  “I’m sure they’ve heard that one before,” Luke said, and looked at the handle closely. “Keep a watch out for me.”

  He strolled casually back to the service cart and borrowed one of the wire coat hangers, untwisting the neck as he walked back to Tommy. Luke straightened out the coat hanger, leaving just the round hook in the end. At the other end he made a handgrip, twisting the wire around into a right angle. Then he pushed the wire underneath the door, up on the other side, and slid it along where the handle should be. He pulled down, there was a click, and the door sprang open.

  “That was awesome, dude,” Tommy said in amazement, looking at the bit of bent wire and no doubt thinking about that five-hundred-dollar electronic lock picker.

  They slipped quietly into the room and closed the door behind them. There was a closet built into one wall, and a door close to the window opened into a small bathroom.

  A table and two chairs were in one corner. On the table sat a hotel service directory, a notepad, and a brown plastic pen. The power cord for a laptop computer ran up onto the table, but there was no sign of the laptop. A double bed was in the center of the room, and a single bed was pushed up against the window. The bedsheets on both were rumpled, as though they had been slept in and the maid had not yet come to make up th
e room.

  An open door led into an adjoining room, 302, in which there were two more beds.

  “Luke,” Tommy whispered. “If Mumbo and Jumbo sleep in here, and that’s Mueller’s bed, who sleeps in the bed by the window?”

  Luke smiled at Tommy’s names for the two thugs. “Maybe there’s a fourth man,” he whispered back, looking around.

  “Then let’s not take too long,” Tommy said.

  They searched in the cupboards, and the drawers, and the closets, but all they found were clothes, socks, and underwear. Men’s and women’s.

  “Maybe the fourth man is a woman,” Luke said.

  Mueller’s bathroom was tidy, while the thugs’ was a mess, with towels lying in the middle of the floor and shaving cream spattered across the mirror.

  There were some suitcases stacked in a corner, but they were empty.

  Luke even checked the pockets of some jackets hanging in the closet, in case there were any clues in there, but to no avail.

  There were footsteps outside the door. They froze, but they heard a door open on the other side of the corridor.

  “Dude, we gotta get out of here,” Tommy said.

  “One more minute,” Luke said, checking his watch. He tried the bathroom cupboards, with no success.

  It was Tommy who found it.

  “Look at this,” he said, pulling out a flat black briefcase from under a bed.

  Luke looked at the door, wondering how much time they had left, then turned his attention back to the briefcase. It was locked, but Tommy said briefcases were easy. Still, it took him a couple of minutes of fiddling with some small metal device before eventually popping open each of the two locks.

  The briefcase was full of papers, mainly in German, although there were also some letters in English that appeared to be business transactions. There was also a small cardboard box containing business cards, with Mullins’s name on them, and at the very bottom of the case was a plain manila folder.

  Luke opened it.

  There were papers inside, the first having nothing on it except for a strange symbol:

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Beats me,” Tommy replied.

  Inside were diagrams—plans for something, but Luke had no idea what. The titles and descriptions were in German. According to Tommy, it was technical vocabulary that he didn’t understand, but even stranger than that, they were all written backward. All the words and numbers were mirrored.

  “Why would they do that?” Luke wondered.

  “Ask Leonardo,” Tommy said.

  There were about ten pages of plans, and Luke went through them one by one, studying them, holding them up to the mirror on the hotel wall and memorizing the diagrams and numbers.

  He was on the last page when they heard voices in the corridor outside.

  “Luke!” Tommy hissed.

  Luke thrust the folder back into the briefcase, slammed the case shut, and shoved it underneath the bed where they’d found it.

  There was a beep from the electronic lock on the door.

  Luke pointed toward the adjoining room, 302, and they ran into it just as the door to 300 opened.

  Guttural voices, speaking in German, filled the room behind them.

  They waited until they heard the door to room 300 click shut before opening the door to the corridor as quietly as they could. They ducked out into the corridor and pulled the door shut behind them. Hearts pounding, they took off down the hall, desperate to get out of there in case Mueller and his thugs noticed anything was different.

  It was a huge relief when the elevator doors finally shut behind them.

  “What were those plans?” Tommy asked.

  “Dunno, bro,” Luke said. “But if you lock something in a briefcase and hide it under your bed, then it’s not exactly going to be instructions on how you like your morning coffee, is it?”

  “No.” Tommy looked thoughtful as they exited into the lobby and walked calmly out onto the pedestrian mall.

  Luke wondered if he’d remembered to relock the briefcase.

  His heart was still racing as they left the front entrance of the hotel. How close had they come to getting caught? Everything in the street seemed extra bright and vivid; every detail burned into his brain with the rush of adrenaline that had not yet subsided.

  An elderly woman was approaching the hotel through the mall, past the fountain with its six looping jets of water. She looked a little unsteady—from age, Luke guessed, or possibly the bulging bag of groceries she was carrying.

  As she got to the fountain, a guy on a skateboard shot out from behind a crowd of people gathered farther up the mall and raced past, just in front of her. He didn’t collide with her—in fact, he missed her by about six feet—but it was close enough to startle her. Her foot slipped on a paving stone, wet with runoff from the fountain. She went down onto one knee, then sprawled over onto her side. Groceries spilled out into the fountain area.

  The skateboarder looked back but didn’t stop. Some of the crowd drinking beer outside a bar in the pedestrian mall glanced over, then looked away. Maybe they thought she was drunk. A homeless bag lady. Something like that.

  “Come on,” Luke said, and ran over to where she lay on her side, clutching at her knee.

  “I’m all right,” she said in short breaths. “I just slipped.”

  She wasn’t all right, Luke thought, but that seemed like the wrong thing to say, so instead he said, “Happens all the time around here. The fountain makes the pathway slippery.”

  Tommy and Luke each took an arm and helped her back to her feet. Her groceries had rolled in and around the fountain, so they ducked into the water spray, getting wet but collecting the stray items and packing them back into her bag.

  “Thank you, boys,” she said with an odd expression when they finished. “You are very kind.”

  She fumbled in her purse and brought out two ten-dollar bills.

  “Not on your life,” Luke said firmly, and Tommy shook his head also.

  Luke took her arm, and Tommy carried the grocery bag as they helped her into the hotel. She limped a little on her injured leg.

  The bellboy looked up as they entered, wet and dripping, and came running over, recognizing the woman. The reception clerk also came out from behind the desk, and they both took over from there, assisting the woman toward the elevator, fussing over her.

  Just before the door closed, she glanced back at Luke and Tommy and smiled.

  “Tommy,” Luke said as they left the hotel, “that’s a bit odd, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Those hotel rooms don’t have kitchens.”

  “Not the ones we saw,” Tommy agreed.

  “So what was she doing with all those groceries?”

  18. MEMORY

  Luke walked into the university’s College of Engineering building and found the reception counter unattended. There was a bell, though, and that eventually brought a gray-haired lady scurrying out from a back room. Her name tag said Laura Crisp.

  “Hello, sonny, are you lost?” she asked, getting Luke’s back up instantly.

  “No,” he said. “I need some advice on a project, and I was hoping to speak to one of your professors.”

  It was Monday. Tommy and Luke had gone in different directions. Tommy had gone back to the public library to look into that strange symbol, and Luke had gone to see if he could find someone who would know what the plans were.

  Mrs. Crisp looked doubtful. “They’re all very busy people,” she said. “I’m not sure they’d have time to help you with a school project.”

  “I’d only need a couple of minutes,” Luke persisted. “To see if they could help me identify a diagram.”

  She had that expression people use when they really want to just say no but are trying to be polite.

  “Which department?” she asked. “We have lots of departments.”

  “I don’t know,” Luke said. “Any, I guess.”

  “Why
don’t you phone in and arrange an appointment,” she said, finding an easy way out. She scribbled a number on a piece of notepaper. “Go to our website”—she added the URL to the note—“and decide who you think might be the best person to speak to. Then we’ll see what we can do.”

  Luke had the feeling that it would never happen, but he said “Thanks” and took the note.

  He backed out through the doors into the corridor and headed for the entrance. The main doors opened just as he was nearing them, and a man with thick glasses, a beard, and an ill-fitting jacket entered.

  On a hunch, Luke said, “Excuse me, sir, are you one of the professors or lecturers here?”

  The man shook his head, which made his glasses slip down his nose, but he stopped. “Sorry, mate, I’m just a technician.” He pushed his glasses back into place and started to walk on.

  “You’re an Aussie!” Luke said, recognizing the accent.

  He stopped again and looked at Luke sideways. “Kiwi?”

  “G’day, I’m Luke,” Luke said. “My dad works over in the agricultural college.”

  “I’m Heath, g’day,” the man said with a quick grin. “I don’t hear that around here very much. Who were you looking for?”

  Luke explained about the diagram, without telling him where he had seen it.

  “So do you have a copy?” Heath asked.

  Luke tapped his head. “In here.”

  “You memorized the entire diagram?”

  Luke just nodded.

  Heath shrugged. “I’ll find you some paper. Draw it for me and I’ll show it to a few of the profs. See if anyone recognizes it. Come with me.”

  He led the way into his office, which was a tiny room tucked at the end of a long corridor, beside the men’s bathroom. He unlocked the door with a swipe card and indicated that Luke should sit.

  Heath’s desk was covered with notes, thick sheaves of paper, and three-dimensional models of strange things with boxes and balls all interconnecting by small tubes. A sign identified him as HEATH THOMPSON, LABORATORY TECHNICIAN.

  Heath fished a few sheets of paper out of a box marked RECYCLING and made enough space on the desk for Luke to draw.