Priceless: Crime Travelers Spy School Mystery Series Book 3

by Paul Aertker

  Little kids cried. Husbands and wives hugged. Old ladies and old men crouched on the floor in tight balls of horror. A man in the center of the room stood and clenched his fists and yelled at the girls in Spanish. He spoke so fast Lucas couldn’t understand him. Then a Curukian girl jabbed him in the ribs with the handle of her jackhammer, and the man fell to the floor.

  After this incident, the room fell into an eerie silence.

  An alarm cut through the calm.

  Three groups of new Curukian girls ran into the room carrying Miró’s Woman and Bird at Night, Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, and Solana’s Procession of Death.

  Then a horn blared throughout the museum.

  Arrrr! Arrrr!

  Deep and deafening.

  Strobe lights above the entryway to the room flashed, making it difficult to see. A metal security gate clanged down from the ceiling, barricading the room and imprisoning the Curukians even before they had finished the job.

  Thoughts raced through Lucas’s mind. Why did the thieves trap themselves? How will they get out? Hostages?

  The Curukian girls were fast. Ten jackhammers began to rattle on the wall around the Guernica painting. For a second, it sounded like phony gunfire.

  Brrrat. Brrrat.

  The people in the room covered their ears.

  The thieves worked quickly, moving up and down and around the painting. The wall surrounding Guernica began to crumble. Fragments of plaster and stone rained down and scattered on the floor.

  Behind him, Lucas heard more noise. He and Jackknife flipped over onto their backs.

  Bleach and another group of girls had started jackhammering the exterior wall.

  Bits and pieces of brick and concrete broke off and sprayed into the room.

  From both sides of the room tiny particles of wall were exploding, and dust was filling the room with a gritty mist. Coughs competed with the unnerving clatter of jackhammers.

  Lucas spotted the red light on the security camera blinking. The light sensors fired infrared lasers through the fog to get a reading. It was too thick. The cameras could see nothing; they could record nothing.

  White dust and black noise filled the air of the Guernica room. The alarm continued to screech and beep.

  Arrrr!Arrrr!

  Some of the children started getting up, screaming while holding their ears, until their parents pulled them back down to the ground to safety.

  Lucas had to do something. Like a soldier crawling through a marsh he snaked around the room toward Ms. Günerro. He worked his way through the deep powder on the floor, his feet scraping two long tracks behind him. Lucas spat, trying to keep from swallowing the powdery grit that was caking his lips.

  Suddenly a blue light shot through the thick fog, followed by a shriek. One of the Curukian girls had hit an electrical wire, and the lights in the room shorted out. For a second, the girl wavered on the stepladder; then with a bang she dropped her jackhammer and fell to the floor, moaning.

  The only light now in the room came from the bank of windows near the ceiling. The slanting rays cut through the glass, highlighting the dust in the air, making it even more difficult to see. The jackhammering began again as the Curukian crooks hurried their pace.

  Lucas worked his way into the heart of the tourists who lay scattered and scared on the floor. He cleared his eyes and briefly could see Ms. Günerro crouching behind a chair, a blanket covering everything but her cat-eye glasses.

  Armed with a jackhammer, Bleach stepped back as an entire section of the exterior wall tore free and fell into the street behind the museum.

  The jackhammers stopped, and the dust began to settle.

  Bleach and her girls had blasted the wall to smithereens and created a hole.

  Brilliant, Lucas thought. An escape route where one didn’t exist before.

  Another section of brick and concrete fell to the outside, and a breeze blew into the room, scattering even more chalky powder.

  Just outside this new hole in the wall, the last leg in the getaway was clear. The construction scaffolding that surrounded the museum provided the perfect escape route.

  As police officers banged on the other side of the locked metal security gates, some of the tourists got up and tried to open the gate for them.

  While there was still thick fog in the room Ms. Günerro stood and tossed her dust-covered blanket to the ground. She stepped through the opening in the wall and down the scaffolding and out of sight.

  Bleach and the Curukian girls followed, carrying Guernica and the other paintings down the ramp. They left the girl who had been shocked behind.

  Lucas hopped up and looked down into the street. There were six waiting construction trucks that looked exactly alike. He watched the girls lay the paintings in the back of only one truck.

  All six trucks sped away in six different directions.

  In a matter of minutes, several priceless paintings and the most famous antiwar painting in the world, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, were gone.

  DUST TO DUST

  The dust began to settle.

  Chatter filled the room as the witnesses to the theft unglued themselves from the floor. They looked like they had been bombed with bags of flour. They brushed the fine powder from their clothes and looked around. A group of men tried to unlock the barricaded doors.

  Lucas and the Tier One kids gathered by the giant hole in the wall. Rufus Chapman dusted himself off and joined the kids.

  “We knew exactly what was going to happen,” Rufus said. “But not how.”

  “The question remains,” Nalini said. “What are we going to do now?”

  For a second, no one answered. A warm breeze blew into the room formerly known as the Guernica room.

  “We don’t do anything right now,” Astrid said.

  Travis wiped his face. “Should we wait for the police?”

  “No one will believe a bunch of kids,” Kerala said.

  “Kerala’s right,” Jackknife said. “No one would ever believe a rich person like Ms. Günerro would steal.”

  “We have to do something,” Nalini said, brushing dust from her skirt.

  “It’s going to take some time,” Alister said, “for them to unlock those gates. They’re on special timers.”

  “We don’t have time,” Jackknife said.

  Outside the museum, police and ambulance sirens wailed. Deep in his gut Lucas could feel what was right.

  He shook his head. “If we wait around here,” he said, “the cops will come in and detain us and ask us questions for hours.”

  “While Ms. Günerro gets away with the paintings,” Rufus said.

  “Exactly,” Lucas said.

  “We’ll be here all afternoon,” Nalini said.

  “But that’s what you’re supposed to do,” said Astrid, “in this situation. We know who did it. We have proof.”

  Lucas suppressed his anger. “I know it’s what you’re supposed to do,” he said. “But this seems like one of those times that we should do what is best for this situation and not necessarily what is supposedly right.”

  Lucas wasn’t finished. “And,” he continued, “we’re the only ones who know for a fact who stole the paintings, and we know where they went.”

  “We don’t know where Ms. Günerro took the paintings,” Astrid said.

  Rufus folded his arms. “Seems Lucas may have an idea.”

  “All we know,” Nalini added, “is that they went through this hole in the wall and down into the street and into the backs of some trucks.”

  “That is true,” Alister said.

  “Except,” Lucas said, “I saw the same Day-Glo-yellow jackets in the railway yard. Some guys were painting shipping containers. And I know they belong to the Good Company.”

  “How do you know,” Astrid asked, “that they belong to the Good Company?”

  Lucas said, “The painters’ sign said ‘We Make the Good Things in Life ... Better.’”

  Everyone nodded.<
br />
  “Sounds like our friends at the Good Company,” Jackknife said.

  “What about the others in our group?” Nalini asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Rufus said. “I’ll get them.”

  Rufus grabbed Lucas’s arm. “Before you go,” he said. “Your father and Coach Creed and I will track you as best we can. We’ll get word to you so you’ll know where to find to us.”

  “How will we know?” Jackknife asked.

  “The message will be obvious to you,” Rufus said.

  “Map Boy,” Astrid said. “Lead the way.”

  SUBWAY SURFERS

  News and police helicopters thundered in the sky above the museum. The air still smelled of chalky concrete powder. And the kids of the New Resistance readied themselves for the next part of the mission.

  Lucas felt a burst of freedom as his mind mapped the way. He stepped through the hole in the wall and onto the scaffolding. Using the crossbars, he flipped down to the next level, where he landed on dusty boards. From there he jumped onto the sidewalk.

  People were running in all directions. No one seemed to know what had just happened.

  Behind him Lucas could sense that his friends were following.

  The group of kids wound its way down an old cobblestone street, past the KFC, and across a busy intersection. It seemed they were now going in the opposite direction, as everyone else was rushing to the robbery at the Reina Sofía. They cut through the waiting taxicabs and past an old woman with a white face playing with kittens.

  Lucas thought for a second it was Siba Günerro in disguise.

  The kids moved to go inside the Atocha train station. They darted through the tropical garden filled with exotic plants and palm trees that scraped the atrium’s glass ceiling. They stopped for a second at the pond located at the end of the indoor forest. People were leaning over a railing and looking at hundreds of turtles swimming in the water and climbing up the bank.

  The New Resistance kids snapped out of the turtle trance and met up underneath the train schedules.

  “Where do you think Ms. Günerro’s going?” asked Kerala.

  “Granada,” Travis said. “That’s where the monk boys, the Burmese painters, on the Thimblerig were being taken.”

  “Supposedly,” Astrid said.

  “Travis is right,” Jackknife said. “That’s the only place she’d go at this point.”

  The schedule board said there were several trains leaving that afternoon, but they would have to change later in the day at another station.

  “These schedules are only for passenger trains,” Alister said.

  “Ms. Günerro,” Travis said, “would have her own train.”

  “You would think,” Jackknife said.

  “And there are no freight trains at this station,” Nalini said.

  “Which,” Lucas said, “is exactly why it’s weird that there are train cars with Good Company shipping containers on them in the railway yard.”

  “Those are probably intermodal,” Travis said. “She could have them hooked to a train in no time.”

  “With the Good Company,” Astrid said, “anything is possible.”

  Lucas looked at his friends and took off running through the station, and the others followed. He rushed out to an empty platform where a single silver train waited on a track. There was a lone luggage cart stacked with suitcases but no passengers.

  Astrid put her hands on her hips. “We can’t run out onto the tracks, Lucas.”

  “It’s ridiculously dangerous,” Travis added.

  “And security’s tight,” Alister said. “This is the same station that terrorists bombed on March eleventh, 2004.”

  “Well then,” Lucas said. “It looks like we’ll have to do some subway surfing to get to the Good Company train cars.”

  Jackknife was already way ahead of him. He had taken a pile of travelers’ luggage and stacked suitcases into a step formation.

  The kids scrambled up the makeshift staircase and climbed on top of a train car. The train next to them slowly began to depart the station.

  Without warning Jackknife jumped and landed on the moving train. Lucas and the others followed. Ducking under the electrical wires, they scrambled on the roof all the way down to the front car.

  The train left the covered part of the station and crept into the railway yard. The sun was high overhead, and the metal rooftops began to sizzle.

  From this vantage point, Lucas pointed out the Good Company train cars in the distance. A group of Curukians was closing a door on one of the containers, and a locomotive was backing up to the train.

  In a few seconds’ time the kids hopped to another train that was slowly entering the station. This time they scurried to the last car.

  In the middle of the network of tracks a high-speed AVE train (known as El Pato—the Duck—because of its long beak) was sitting idle. The lights on the inside were off.

  From the top of their slow moving train, the kids leaped onto the Duck’s roof.

  On the other side of the railway yard the Good Company locomotive backed up to the train of containers. A metal clang rang out as the cars connected.

  “The Picasso train is leaving the station,” Jackknife said. “All aboard.”

  The kids slid down the slanted nose of the Duck and sprinted across the maze of tracks. The Good Company train lurched forward and began heading out.

  The Tier One kids were only one hundred meters, some 328 feet, away from the Good Company shipping containers.

  They sprinted on the railway ties, chasing down the train.

  Suddenly out of nowhere a horn blasted. Lucas looked up. Another train was coming directly at them. The locomotive was slowing down, but Lucas and his friends were directly in line to get crushed.

  The engineer flashed his lights and blew the horn again.

  The kids leaped over to the next track just as the train thundered past.

  They kept running. The Good Company train was now only twenty meters, sixty-five feet, away.

  Jackknife sprinted and got to the train car first. He unclipped the lock and flung open the container door. In one move he flipped himself up into the metal box. Jackknife lay on the floor bracing his legs against a pair of hooks on the wall. The train sped up, and the kids ran faster after it. Jackknife stretched out his right arm, and one by one his friends climbed up into the container.

  On the opposite end, an opening led to the other train cars. Sunlight flashed into the metal box that would soon be their temporary home. Kerala closed the back door that they had come through and latched it.

  The boxcar was as hot as an oven.

  The kids collapsed on the dusty floorboards. No one spoke. They were officially stowaways on a Good Company train.

  BOXCAR CHILDREN

  The train clicked and clacked along the tracks with a slow and methodical rhythm.

  Lucas could feel the metal wheels below as they thumped faster and faster down the two iron rails. The locomotive left the capital city and increased its speed, dragging the Good Company container cars through graffitied suburbs and into the golden Spanish countryside.

  Trapped inside this box, Lucas felt lost and needed some geographical orientation.

  Tiny rays of light entered the container through bullet holes in the metal walls. For Lucas the openings provided miniature windows to the outside.

  Fields and farms blinked by. Lucas stared at rows and rows of olive trees racing alongside the train. To him they looked like the long legs of a sprinter trying to keep pace.

  For hours the train stayed mainly on the plains, passing windmills and whitewashed villages. Lucas looked at his friends crashed on the floor around him as the train clattered along.

  Eventually Lucas gave in to sleep. His head rocked back and forth, and soon he settled in a corner and fell into a dream.

  Deep in the dark, the nightmare that Lucas had had so many times before came to life.

  Suddenly a banging sound pummeled through t
he container and woke everyone.

  The door on the train car just in front of their container creaked open. A gust of cool wind rushed in, and the noise of the train clunking over the tracks rattled Lucas’s mind.

  Several people stepped in, their silhouettes blocking the light from the other car.

  “Get up,” Bleach said.

  She led a team of girls to snatch the New Resistance kids and hauled them to the opening. A gap of maybe one meter, some three feet, separated their container from the next train car. Just below them the tracks clicked past in a blur.

  Two Curukian girls stood in the next compartment holding the door open. The choice was simple. Either jump to the next train car and live or resist and get pushed to the tracks, where the iron wheels would pulverize them.

  One by one Lucas and his friends hopped over the gap and into the next compartment.

  From the outside, this container on a flatbed looked like any other. The metal exterior appeared to be dented, with peeling and chipped paint. But with the Good Company, things were not always as they seemed.

  The inside of this car was far from being a simple shipping container. The New Resistance kids stepped into a full-blown, luxurious, private apartment-on-a-train. It looked like it belonged to a queen. Red mahogany wood paneling covered the walls. Persian rugs spread across the floor. At the far end, still wearing her tiara and perched in an ornate thronelike chair, was Siba Günerro.

  “Welcome,” she said, opening her arms. “Please join me.”

  The Curukian girls forced the New Resistance kids to sit on the rug at Ms. Günerro’s feet. Lucas flashed back to kindergarten reading time.

  Bleach and her Curukian clique left the room. Wearing brand-new security uniforms, Ekki and Goper stepped in and stood guard at the front and back doorways.

  “So glad you could visit me,” Ms. Günerro said. “Together I think we have just witnessed quite possibly the greatest art heist, ever. Wouldn’t you agree?”