My friends, I am not ashamed to tell you that I did just that. And to make it as believable as possible, I raised my voice and even held up my fist to show my, admittedly exaggerated, anger.
“Fine!” I shouted. “If that is your decision, then you can count me out.”
With that, I stormed out of the room, making sure to knock my shoulder into Teo as I passed him. Before I slammed the door, I looked back at Rex and Cai and saw the surprise and shock on their faces.
My scheme had worked.
6.1
My friends, I had to be deceptive to protect Rex and Cai!
As I left the room and ran down the stairs to the lower level of the opera house, my heart was thundering in my chest with worry.
I did not hear them chasing after me but moved as quickly as I could regardless. If Rex had caught up with me and tried to convince me to come back, I feel as though my resolve might have crumbled.
For my plan to work, I needed to get away quickly.
Though I was deeply upset at seeing Rex so heartbroken and betrayed, I knew that working with Terminal, especially considering that Teo was part of their organization, was going to be very tricky. We would need some outside help. And there was no one that needed help more than me.
I realized as I barreled through the employee entrance out into the night that I was putting them in a difficult situation. Dural said that she needed my expertise to unlock the information at the Beijing black box lab, but I also knew that Rex and Cai would be able to pull this off without me. Especially since I would, of course, still be helping—just not in sight of Teo and Terminal.
Luckily for me, the rain had stopped and traffic had slowed. I went to the nearest intersection and grabbed my cell phone from my pocket. Now I just had to pray that the next step would work.
I called Rodger Dodger.
I was not sure she would answer a random call, but then again, Cai had said she had agreed to help and had given us this number. The phone rang three times, but just before I hung up and considered my other options, she answered.
“Tunde?” she said.
“Yes,” I replied. “How did you know it was me?”
“I’m good at what I do. Is everything okay?”
I said, “I need to meet with you. Are you available?”
Rodger Dodger took a moment, then replied, “Things have gotten pretty hot around town. Painted Wolf told me you’re being followed. I’ve already taken a lot of risks meeting you guys earlier. Not sure I can do it again.”
“It would just be with me,” I said. “I apologize for pulling you into this, probably deeper than you anticipated going, but we are on the cusp of something quite significant and I need your help very badly. This is momentous.”
“Define momentous.”
“Well,” I said, “it involves Terminal.…”
Rodger Dodger was silent for a second. “Are you kidding?”
“No,” I said. “Will you help me?”
“I can be at your location in about twenty-five minutes. Stay right where you are. Is everyone else okay? They are not with you?”
“Yes and no,” I said. “I have a lot to explain.”
True to her word, Rodger Dodger showed up in a taxicab exactly twenty-seven minutes later. As I waited, I watched the crowds, looking for the young people who had been following us. Thinking back, I realized the last time I had taken a moment to really observe my surroundings in such detail was on my way to the Game so many days back! My friends, it felt like ancient history.
I climbed into the backseat of the cab beside Rodger Dodger, and she told the driver a few words in Mandarin. This gentleman had quite the lead foot, and the car immediately sped off into traffic at a ridiculous rate of speed. My stomach nearly leaped out of my mouth!
“Tell me what is going on,” Rodger Dodger said in English.
I glanced up at the taxicab driver.
“He only speaks Mandarin,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
I told Rodger Dodger of the plan with Terminal and my deception. She understood my plan and agreed that I had done the right thing. While it would not have been so much as a moral quandary for her, she thought it was quite wise of me to provide that “outside man” angle. It would be, in her words, crucial.
As the cab ascended a ramp onto an elevated highway, Rodger Dodger handed me an encrypted and untraceable cell phone. She told me that she kept many such phones and that while they were quite expensive, she saw them as a necessity for her line of work. I understood completely and thanked her profusely.
After logging in to a secure messaging app that the LODGE had used in the past, I composed a message intended for Cai and Rex only.
It was quite simple:
Dear LODGE—I am not truly angry. The fight was a fake. I stormed out of the room merely to convince Teo that I was not going to help. But I am. I will do it from outside. Please contact me as you learn more about what you are going to do. Rodger Dodger and I will help you. Please do not worry. Everything will be okay! You can do this! But be very, very careful. See you soon.
Eleven minutes later, the taxicab pulled up at a massive apartment building.
We exited the car, and as we walked into the foyer, Rodger Dodger explained that this was the place where her aunt lived. The good news was that her aunt traveled frequently—she was a steward for an airline—and that the apartment would be empty for at least another few days.
“The best part,” Rodger Dodger said, “is that my aunt has something of a sweet tooth and the apartment is well stocked with ice cream and candy.”
I could think of nothing better right then.
7. CAI
6 DAYS UNTIL SHIVA
Rex and I were shaken by Tunde’s sudden departure.
After he’d stormed out of the room, we assumed he would reappear in a matter of minutes. When those minutes passed and he hadn’t come back, we started to worry. I was also worried about Rex. He was furious with Teo. Before, it had been about his brother’s deception, but now it was also about Tunde’s hasty departure.
“He’ll be fine,” Teo said, as though that might smooth things over.
“You can be a real jerk,” Rex told his brother as we made our way downstairs to talk to Dural and tell her we had agreed to carry out the black box lab mission.
Dural was, as expected, happy to hear of our decision.
“Excellent,” she said. “The right choice.”
Dural produced the briefcase she’d handed me before and proceeded to unlock it. Inside was the 3-D key she told us had been printed; it was a skeleton key and it looked quite ordinary, except it wasn’t made of metal and there was a clear plastic disk embedded in the top of the key—the disk was about an inch in diameter. Other than the key, there were blueprints of the Beijing black box lab. Dural told us they were exceedingly hard to come by but that they were accurate.
Rex, Teo, and I looked over the drawings. Rex said that the building closely resembled the one he had been inside in India. It had a very similar layout with an equivalent number of rooms. That meant a similar number of staff.
“I’m guessing,” Rex said, “that most of the people in here are going to be from Kiran’s brain trust. The ones I met in India were real hangers-on. They never doubted a thing that Kiran said or did. No doubt word has spread about my time in India; chances are if they recognize me they’re going to sound the alarm.”
“Maybe we use disguises,” I suggested.
“Well,” Rex said, looking around the room, “we are in a theater.”
“You won’t need them,” Dural said as she walked over to us and looked at the blueprints. “The black box lab will be empty. While we can’t access the material inside the building, we are quite skilled at everything leading to it. We’ll arrange for an early morning ‘accidental’ gas leak in the buildings nearby. The police will shut down the entire neighborhood as a precaution, and they’ll empty out the black box lab. So, once you’re in, you’ll be free to ge
t the data for us.”
Rex looked at me, catching the same thing I did.
“Hang on,” I said. “When exactly do you expect us to do this?”
Dural grinned. “Tomorrow morning, obviously.”
“Doesn’t give us much time to plan,” I said.
With everything that had happened, I needed the bedrock of my strategizing time. I wasn’t sure that having a single night, barely five hours, would suffice.
“I think you’re more than capable,” Dural said. “The LODGE thinks fast on its feet, right? We both have something we want. No point in delaying it. You can sleep here, rest up, and then in the morning tackle the black box. If anything, I think you’ve got something of a luxury of time. You’ve been running across the globe in a panic—take the rest of the night to recover. By the way, Cosmo told me that Tunde left a little bit ago. Seems he was in a bit of a huff. A real shame, that. You three think you’re capable of doing this without him?”
“Do we have much of a choice?” Rex asked.
“Good point,” Dural said. “See you in the morning.”
As Dural turned to leave, I asked, “What exactly will we be looking for?”
Dural didn’t answer.
As she stepped out of the room, Rex, Teo, and I returned to the blueprints. Even though they laid out the interior of the building, the plans gave no hint at how the data was stored inside. Books? Microfiche? It could be anything.
So that left us with a few hours to come up with a vague plan and get some much-needed sleep. Being forced into this arrangement with Terminal made me anxious. Not only did we have to pull off our original objectives, but we’d have to double-cross Dural on top of it. Having Tunde storm out only made things that much more unstable. Strategizing the next twenty-four hours was going to take every ounce of skill I’d ever developed.
At that moment, both Rex’s and my cell phones buzzed.
It was a message from Tunde.
After reading it, Rex glanced over at me and grinned.
7.1
We strategized as best we could for two hours, then we spent a fretful three trying to sleep on the floor.
Just before dawn, Dural drove us personally to the site.
Her car was, oddly enough, a minivan. Gray and very dull, it seemed the perfect vehicle for someone hiding in plain sight. Rex, Teo, and I climbed into the back of the van with the few tools Dural offered us—our cells, lock picks, screwdrivers, magnifying glasses, and flashlights.
We drove in silence. I knew the sections of the city we were passing through, and it was strange seeing them at that hour under such odd conditions. I thought about my mother. It had been several days since I’d contacted her, and I was certain she was worried. I made a mental note that regardless of what happened at the black box lab, I would call her in the morning.
As the traffic cleared and the van picked up speed, Rex reached over and put his hand on mine. I squeezed his hand and worried that mine was clammy. We’d been under so much stress, I was half-surprised my hands weren’t shaking.
“We got this,” Rex whispered, leaning in.
“We’ve spent enough time around Tunde to have picked up a few skills.”
“Mostly he just seems to design outrageously overcomplicated machines.”
I laughed at that, thinking back on the highwall machine.
Then, my thoughts returning to the mission at hand, I said, “I just need to get my father out of this mess. Seeing him in that detention center was … It was horrible. I want to make sure I never see him like that again.”
Rex squeezed my hand.
Five minutes later we arrived at the neighborhood, an industrial block of the city, and were ushered through a roadblock manned by a multitude of police officers after Dural waved an ID badge. As we drove past the cops, Dural looked at us in the rearview mirror and held up the ID.
“We could teach you guys a thing or two.”
I declined to acknowledge that.
The Beijing black box lab was a rather plain-looking building. Brick and steel, it was two stories tall and had no windows. It resembled nothing more than a big brick box, and it sat on a corner, squeezed between two glass office buildings.
“The one in India look like this?” Dural asked Rex.
He leaned forward to get a better look.
“No,” he said as she stopped the car. “That one was fancier.”
Dural hit a button and the back door of the minivan slid open, letting the humid night air waft inside. “When you’ve got it,” she said, “you call me.”
Dural handed me a scrap of paper with a phone number on it.
“You never told us what we’re looking for,” I said.
“You’ll know it when you see it.”
Rex, Teo, and I got out of the minivan and made our way toward the building. I had the 3-D printed key in my hand. Rex lifted up a strip of police tape so we could duck under it and head toward the black box lab’s front door.
“Power’s out,” Rex said, pointing to dark streetlamps.
“I think we can assume the cameras are down, too,” Teo added. He motioned to several camera arrays mounted on the outside of the building.
“I would not assume anything,” I said.
I pulled one of the flashlights out and shined the laser pointer at the camera array, hitting each of the cameras’ light sensors. If they were recording, they weren’t now. Rex turned and gave me a wink.
We mounted the stairs, and I pulled the 3-D key from my pocket. I was shocked the lock on the front door wasn’t a biometric or a retinal scan lock. It was a good lock, solid, heavy, but still a mechanical one that I could pick. I suppose the whole concept of keeping the Beijing black box lab analog extended to the front door. An electronic lock could surely be hacked—if anything, Kiran was consistent.
The 3-D key didn’t work.
“This isn’t the right one,” I said.
“Must be for something else, then,” Teo added.
It took me two minutes and six seconds to pick the lock on the door.
That was a surprisingly long time.
It wasn’t nerves and I wasn’t getting rusty—the lock had a few tricks up its proverbial sleeve. For starters, it was upside down; a simple but effective deterrent for a less-than-patient picker. Second, the pin tumblers inside were sticky. No doubt that was intended.
Regardless, I got it open.
Before going in, I turned to Teo. “Can you stand guard?”
He scoffed. “Seriously? You want me to wait out here?”
“Given everything that’s come out,” I said, “I think it’s best.”
I looked to Rex. He put a hand on his brother’s shoulder.
“Teo,” he said, “you lied to us. Besides, we need someone on the lookout. I don’t trust Dural, and I never would have gotten as far as I have if I believed everything everyone told me. Please, just keep an eye out for us.”
Teo mulled it over as though we were giving him a choice.
“Fine,” he said. “But you call me if anything comes up that you can’t handle.”
“Of course,” I said.
Rex and I stepped in, flashlights out, to find a narrow hallway that led to a larger room. Inside, the lights were already on.
7.2
The place seemed to be empty, however.
As Dural had told us, the neighborhood and all of the surrounding buildings had been evacuated on the pretense of a gas leak. When the black box lab had been cleared out, it was done so in a hurry. First thing I noticed when we walked in was a cup of coffee sitting on a desk by the front door. There was a half-eaten croissant sitting next to it. Still looked fresh.
“Okay,” Rex said, “this is different.”
The blueprints were wrong. I doubt that Dural had messed up and gotten the wrong plans. More likely, whoever built this place for Kiran had submitted different blueprints to the government before construction began; either that or they’d been really busy remodeling the plac
e.
There was only one room: one giant, two-story open room that resembled a library. Everything was beige. The carpets, the walls, the furniture, even the lighting fixtures—all a dull, washed-out sand color. And that made it nearly impossible to pick out particular objects—it was like a fun house gaff, the kind where someone wears a shirt the same pattern as the wallpaper and “hides” right in front of you.
“So where do we even begin?” Rex asked.
Though there were desks, chairs, and some couches along the walls, the central area of the room was filled with row upon row of bookshelves. On the bookshelves were books, all bound in identically colored beige leather covers. Every book, from first glance, appeared to be approximately the same size. Each shelf held at least three or four hundred books. That meant there were thousands in the room.
I pulled the 3-D key back out.
“We start with this.”
First thing, we explored the perimeter of the room. We had to make sure there weren’t any additional side rooms that we couldn’t see, any alcoves or places where they might have hidden something. We couldn’t find any. It looked as though the room was the entirety of the building and that meant that the key was intended to unlock something we’d already seen.
“Hang on.” Rex put out his arm to block me from taking another step.
We were on the far side of the room from the door, and I didn’t see anything in front of me that looked worrying. Just a beige couch, a small desk with nothing on it, and a standing lamp.
“Look,” Rex said, crouching down and pointing at the ground.
Three inches above the carpet was a wire. It was metal, not clear fishing line, but it was nearly invisible. It stretched across the floor, taut, from the wall to a bookshelf. If there was one, that meant there were likely many others.
“How’d you even see that?” I asked.
Rex said, “Honestly, it was kind of an accident. I thought my shoelace was untied, and when I glanced down to look, I noticed it.”
“What do you think it does? Alarm system? Trap?”
Genius--The Revolution Page 5