The Inside Job

by Jackson Pearce

  But I didn’t see anything like what Kennedy was looking for—what we were both looking for every day: a secret message from our parents.

  Kennedy and I hadn’t seen Mom and Dad for months, since they left one morning to go on a mission for SRS and never returned. Last we’d heard from them was via a message hidden in the Castlebury classifieds, a message that led to a voice mail that explained how they couldn’t come back just yet, because it wasn’t safe. But that was it. No phone calls. No mail. No secret notes.

  “There’s nothing,” I told Kennedy, setting the paper down. Kennedy nodded, pulling her feet up under her in a show of flexibility that made my knees hurt, but that she didn’t even notice. She rocked back and forth for a second and then exhaled.

  “You think they’re okay, don’t you, Hale?”

  “Of course!” I said, furrowing my brow. “Of course I do. It’s just not safe, like they said in the last message. But I bet they’re keeping tabs on us. I bet they know we’re in Switzerland.”

  “You think they’ll send you something for your birthday?” Kennedy asked, her eyes lighting up.

  I forced a smile. To be honest, I was trying really, really hard not to think about the fact that my parents wouldn’t be around for my birthday. I hadn’t reminded anyone that it was coming up in a few weeks, even.

  “Maybe they will,” I said, but I tried not to sound excited—I didn’t want to get Kennedy’s hopes up. It was just a birthday, anyway. I was going to be thirteen—that’s too old to make a big deal out of the day you were born, right? And it’s not like they could make me confetti pancakes like they used to back at SRS or sneak me out of Basic Parkour early to go to the little movie theater in Castlebury. My parents were too busy being heroes to worry about stuff like that these days. They were probably too busy to even remember my birthday, really.

  I stooped and collected the newspaper, balling it up. “I’m going to bed, hopefully before Ben gets there. He snores. Does Beatrix?”

  “No, but she does talk to her Right Hand in her sleep sometimes,” Kennedy said thoughtfully.

  “Lucky,” I said, and left the room as Kennedy arranged a few stuffed animals along the top of her bed. I didn’t even realize she’d packed them, but when I noticed them, I noticed that she’d also brought her own pink leopard-print blanket and a stack of coloring books.

  Kennedy was always Kennedy—always neon and loud and sparkly. At SRS, at The League, even here in Geneva. I went back to my own room, where Ben had a thousand inventing things laid out on the spare bunk. I climbed up to look at Walter’s bunk, above mine, and saw that he’d brought his own pillow and that stuffed frog (which was looking really worn-out these days).

  And then I looked at my bed, which, like my room back at The League, was plain. There was nothing.

  Because outside of SRS, I was nothing.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Mr. Hastings, we’d like to help you find the jeweled books that were stolen,” I said the next morning from the banker’s front stoop.

  “Huh? You mean the Runanko books?” he said faintly. He looked rather disappointed—like he’d hoped we were just a dream.

  “If those are the ones that got stolen, yes. We’ll help you get your Runanko books back, and it won’t matter if your dog’s a fraud,” Otter responded.

  Hastings’s eyebrows lifted a bit as he shut the door. “I . . . Sure. I suppose. I mean, the police couldn’t help recover them, but—”

  “Let’s talk about the theft with Beatrix and Ben so they can make notes,” I said, and started into the house.

  “Those kids?” Hastings said, looking behind me.

  “That’s our tech team,” Otter said, his voice a combination of defeat and defense. It was hard not to be defensive about Beatrix and Ben. The SRS tech team was good, but they probably couldn’t create a laser gun out of toilet paper rolls and disposable cameras.

  Hastings shrugged and led us into the house. Clatterbuck and Kennedy rushed forward to find Annabelle, while Beatrix and Ben immediately began to set up their equipment in the living room. They removed a few books and plants off a wide coffee table and were buzzing around it, connecting things here, moving things there, unplugging lamps to plug in power cables. Beatrix looked up at me and then stuck her Right Hand into a port. The system sprang to life, far louder than any modern laptop but probably a thousand times more efficient.

  Hastings sat down on the leather couch, leaving Otter and me to pull two elaborately embroidered wingback chairs up to the table. Like the other rooms of the house we’d seen, this one reeked of money—marble busts and oil paintings and furniture with fancy little gold bits. There were giant windows along the back wall, but even the sunlight couldn’t compete with the dark burgundy rugs and heavy wood paneling. I felt sort of like we were in an old-fashioned movie, the kind with fox hunts and visits from the queen.

  “Shall I . . . get the investigators’ findings? My grandmother was utterly destroyed when they were stolen—she hired a private investigator and everything . . . ,” Hastings said, staring at Beatrix’s Right Hand. She was currently using it to open and control a half dozen windows on the various computer screens.

  “Not yet—let’s just start from the beginning. Tell me when the Runanko books were stolen, first off,” I said.

  “Almost twenty years ago.”

  Otter and I deflated at nearly the same moment. A twenty-year-old crime? This was already looking grim. Nonetheless, Beatrix nodded at Hastings and then typed something into her Right Hand. The computers lit up, flashing newspapers and memos and flight information from twenty years ago.

  “Do you remember the day?” Beatrix asked. “We can narrow it down.”

  Hastings nodded. “It was a few days after my twelfth birthday party, which is February seventeenth—so, between then and perhaps the twenty-first?”

  Beatrix typed in a bit more.

  “Don’t watch them, Mr. Hastings,” I said, drawing his attention back. I’d learned in Basic Interrogation class back at SRS that memories are tricky things. People like to think memories are like videotape, where you can just rewind and see a scene exactly as it was. Unfortunately, they’re more like clouds—you think you know what you see, but then something shifts, and suddenly it’s a whole different image. I worried that Hastings might see something on Beatrix’s screens that would alter the way he told his story. Then again, he’d likely been questioned about the theft so many times that his memory was already junked up . . .

  Ugh. Twenty years!

  “Right,” Hastings answered. “Well. My grandmother was still alive, of course. They were her books, something my grandfather had given her for her birthday. They were kept downstairs in the library along with our original Picasso and this weird Fabergé egg being pulled in a wagon by an angel. Russians. Strange taste, right?” We didn’t react, so he kept going. “Anyway, the books just disappeared one day.”

  He stopped.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  Hastings nodded. “They just vanished. Look, it may seem easy to break into this house now, since I can’t afford to pay a staff, but back in the day we had security. And there were all sorts of fancy weight-related alarms that should have gone off if the books were lifted, but they didn’t. Whoever came in got them and got out without us even noticing.”

  “Okay . . . you said you had a birthday party. Do you remember who came?” I asked. From somewhere farther inside the house, I heard Kennedy and Clatterbuck calling Annabelle’s name over and over. At first I thought they had lost her and were trying to get her to return, but then I heard Kennedy adding “Come on! Get up! You can do it!” and realized no, they were just trying to make her move. While I listened, Hastings ticked off the guest list on his fingers.

  “Let’s see—the upcountry Deans, Alabasters, the St. Claire sisters—I remember because they made fun of me for having a clown at my party when I was twelve years old—the Stonemans, Princess Ygritte—”

  “A princes
s?” Beatrix looked up, impressed.

  “Only of a little principality,” Hastings said, rolling his eyes. “Though if you ask her, I’m sure she’d give you some long boring history about—”

  “Any of them interested in the books?” Otter cut him off.

  “All rich people want pretty things,” Hastings said, shrugging.

  “What about household staff? Those security guys you mentioned?” I asked.

  Hastings shook his head. “The police cleared them all. But I can get you the names.”

  Beatrix and Ben had been hurriedly entering all the information—cross-referencing the family names Hastings had thrown out with arrest records, searching auction listings. I met Beatrix’s eyes; she gave me a “nope” sort of look and then went back to typing.

  Hastings led us downstairs to show us the room the books were stolen out of. The walls were entirely bare, save for a giant emblem of the Geneva Country Club, which hung above the fireplace. Lights shone down from the ceiling at empty platforms and vacant picture hooks. No wonder Annabelle was so valuable to him—from the looks of things, there was nothing left to sell.

  “What did they look like, exactly?” I asked.

  “There are three of them. Emeralds on one, rubies on another, sapphires on the last one. The pages are this sort of see-through material—vellum, I think it’s called—and they’re all hand painted. My understanding was that they were as valuable for their artistic value as for their jewels. Jeweled manuscripts are already rare, but that particular set is sort of famous. The Mona Lisa of jeweled books.”

  “And they’ve never appeared on the black market as far as you know?” Otter said, frowning.

  “Not a trace. Whoever has them must be holding on to them, I guess the same way Grandma Hastings did. You know, if she’d just left me a decent inheritance, these stupid old books wouldn’t even be an issue. But nooooo. She didn’t leave me a dime—”

  “She left you with a mansion and a million-dollar dog,” Otter said flatly.

  “Sure, sure. A million-dollar dog and a day job at the stupid bank my family started a billion years ago,” Hastings said, waving his hand in the air. “I’m not even an upper-level manager, you know! They say I have to get a stupid degree for that. But anyway, you really think you can find them?” Hastings asked as he led us upstairs. “I’d do anything to get them back. They’re worth even more now.”

  I tried to scowl at him—I could practically see him calculating how much money he’d make selling his grandmother’s prized possession.

  “It won’t be easy. But we’ll try,” I said. The truth was, this was getting more and more hopeless. Those books could have been divided up. They could have been broken down, the jeweled covers split into a thousand pieces and sold separately.

  On the way back upstairs, we crossed paths with Kennedy and Clatterbuck, as well as Annabelle, who was walking behind them so slowly that if you’d told me she was sleepwalking, I would’ve believed you.

  “She’s moving?” Hastings said, looking alarmed. “She never moves.”

  Annabelle looked up at him with droopy, tired eyes, then back at Kennedy. Her tail began to wag a bit. Hastings looked offended, while Kennedy looked delighted.

  “That’s right! Good girl!” Kennedy cried, and fed her a piece of a toaster waffle.

  “What are you—she’s a show dog! She can’t have waffles. Go to the kitchen—there are some t-r-e-a-t-s in the silver canister,” Hastings said grouchily.

  “We tried those. She doesn’t like them,” Kennedy said pointedly, like this was something Hastings should have known (and really, he should have). “Come on, Annabelle, let’s go find a toy.”

  Kennedy’s enthusiasm seemed to be rubbing off on the dog, because Annabelle trotted after her—actually trotted. Hastings looked like he was worried about her, what with all that movement.

  “Any luck with the books?” Clatterbuck interrupted Hastings’s alarm.

  “We’re getting there,” I lied. “Beatrix and Ben are putting together all the information from earlier. Mr. Hastings, why don’t you go see if there’s anything they’ve missed while the three of us talk this through?” I suggested. Hastings shrugged and walked off. The hair covering his bald spot flapped a bit as he went by the air-conditioning vent. Once he was out of sight, Otter and I sighed in unison.

  “That bad?” Clatterbuck asked.

  “There’s no point. There was only one solid team of art thieves working Europe twenty years ago, only one team that took things like books and furniture and statues instead of focusing on paintings, like most thieves.”

  “Who?” Clatterbuck asked.

  Otter laughed meanly and then looked at me. “Your parents, Jordan.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  My parents were not art thieves.

  They just weren’t. They were heroes, and it wasn’t like you could just rob a little old lady of some fancy books and not know that was a decidedly unheroic thing to do.

  “SRS did a lot of bad things, Jordan, and your parents were SRS agents. Art theft was their thing actually—that’s how they got partnered up,” Otter said smugly on the way back to the poney farm.

  “Your theory doesn’t make sense even if my parents were thieves. If SRS had the books, they could just promise to return them to Hastings to blackmail him. They wouldn’t need to bring Annabelle into it at all. There are a dozen way more likely scenarios, and probably thousands of art thieves in the world.”

  Otter snorted. “Sure. And most of them work for SRS.”

  No one else weighed in, not even after we got back to the farmhouse—I wasn’t sure if this was because they believed me, because they believed Otter, or because they just didn’t want to get in the middle of it. Instead we sat down at the kitchen table and sorted through the lists of birthday party attendees, Hastings’s family friends, and household staff. By dinner I’d memorized nearly all of them.

  “I just don’t see any history that makes me think these people would steal,” Beatrix said for the thousandth time, shaking her head as she looked at photos of the party attendees. She’d easily grabbed them off the Internet—as it turns out, famous people get their pictures taken a lot.

  “The friends, at least, are superrich. They can probably make a crime disappear,” I said. “Especially if they weren’t stealing the art to sell, but just to keep. There was some guy who stole two hundred paintings once just because he was trying to put together a personal collection.”

  “Right!” Kennedy said brightly—she hadn’t been able to contribute much, and seemed pumped to know something. “He got caught, and his mom tore them all up to try and hide the evidence!”

  Ben looked horrified. “Really? Two hundred paintings? I don’t know what I’d do if someone tore up all my blueprints. How do you two know all that?”

  My voice hitched, so Kennedy wound up beating me to the punch. “Our parents told us the story.”

  And then we all fell silent again, because by this point, everyone had heard Otter’s theory about my parents’ thieving past. No one believed it, of course—at least, I hoped no one did.

  “They knew a lot about a lot of stuff,” I said swiftly. “It doesn’t mean anything. Agent Otter never much liked my parents. I think he’s just trying to blame them, and we’ll end up wasting time following that, got it? Let’s focus.”

  Kennedy took a big breath and then looked around the room. “I think Hale’s right. Let’s go through the list and start clearing people who were in the house twenty years ago.”

  Walter clapped his hands. “All right, yeah. I trust you, Hale. You got us this far, right?”

  I tapped the table, trying to hype myself back up. “Okay, so—tomorrow. Kennedy, why don’t you visit the people who used to work in the house? Just nose around, get some preliminary information. Ben, want to go with her?”

  Ben whooped. “Yes! It’ll be perfect for me to test out the BEN-ray gun. It’s sort of an X-ray gun. It’ll send a digital X-ray photo
to Beatrix’s Right Hand. If we’re able to get into anyone’s house, we can X-ray safes or secret rooms to get a look inside. Plus I think I’ve gotten the misfires down to just one every ten shots, really.”

  “Good. Be careful. With the BEN-ray gun, I mean,” I said. Ben looked a little affronted but then nodded reluctantly. Kennedy gave me a thumbs-up and a grin.

  “And then, Beatrix—I’ll need you to run mission control from here for me and Walter. We have all the comm devices here, right?”

  “Yep, Ben and I packed them all,” Beatrix said.

  “All right. We need those, and we need suits or something.”

  “Suits? Are we going on a fancy date?” Walter asked, leaning his chair onto its legs. He balanced there for a moment and then tipped back to the floor.

  “We’re going to the Geneva Country Club,” I said.

  When Otter woke up the next morning, Kennedy and Ben were already on their way to visit the homes of a few retired Hastings employees—a maid or two, and the butler. Beatrix had rerouted a dry-cleaning delivery to the poney farm, so Walter and I had suits on the way, and she’d also secured us cover identities—we were going in as the sons of some sort of oil baron. By the time Clatterbuck finished cleaning up the waffles he’d made everyone for breakfast, Walter and I had pinned and tweaked the suits so they looked passable.

  “Not a chance,” Otter said when we came downstairs.

  “What? Why not?” Walter said, turning in a circle.

  “You look acceptable, Quaddlebaum,” Otter told Walter. “But, Jordan, that suit doesn’t and never has fit you.”

  “Obviously, but—”

  “A rich person is going to know the difference between a tailored suit and something off-the-rack. And the people at the Geneva Country Club are rich. You need a different outfit,” Otter said. I wanted to scowl at him, but then I got a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Otter was right. Walter’s suit looked off-the-rack. I, however, looked like someone had melted a suit onto me. The sleeves were too long, the neck was too small, and the pants went around my waist all right but then bunched up under my butt. I thought about the seamstress at SRS, Ms. Elma. Mean as she was, I wished she were here. She’d have the thing fitting perfectly in less than a quarter hour.