“What, the rain forest thing?” asked Megan.
“Yes. That one chance we had to save it.” Her mom was almost crying, and Megan ran to give her a hug.
This was one of the weirdest environmental campaigns Susie Fisher had ever been involved with. It was a huge deal, involving a stretch of rain forest on Marisco, an island in the Indian Ocean. This was one of the last forests on that part of the planet that was still completely wild, and it had been kept that way by the government of Marisco until recently, when a group of generals seized power. A month ago, mice had found a document on the generals’ computers—a document that revealed their plan to sell the rights to the forest to Loggocorp, a huge international timber company.
“Maybe they won’t cut it all down,” Megan had said when her mom first got the news. “Maybe they’ll just take out a tree here and there.”
“What, log selectively?” said her mom. “Sustainably? Loggocorp doesn’t know what those words mean! They’re the worst. They clear-cut, every time.”
She had sent the news about the generals’ plans to a rain forest expert named Sir Brian Mason, a professor at London University. Sir Brian, in turn, got in touch with the ex-president of Marisco, the man the generals had kicked out—and the ex-president gave him a message of hope. According to a local legend that had passed down through many generations, a Mariscan ruler long ago gave the rights to the Western Forest to a mysterious Englishman, known only as Coconut Man.
“All we have to do is find who Coconut Man was,” said Susie one night at dinner. “And locate some of his descendants. Then those guys can claim the forest. Keep it away from Loggocorp. Keep it wild.”
Her husband, Jake, had hooted with laughter.
“Coconut Man!” he said. “Really? Hey, why don’t I save you some time and say he was one of my ancestors? So I can claim the forest.”
“Well, obviously his descendants will need proof!” said Susie. “Some sort of deed to show they own the rights.”
“And Sir Brian will find that proof, right?” said Jake. “Written on a leaf? Or carved on a coconut?”
“It could happen!” said Susie. “We have mice on our side, remember?”
Indeed, when there are billions of mice throughout the world who can overhear any human conversation, and search through any stack of papers, and read the documents on any computer, it is good to have them on your side.
The Big Cheese reported on the search for Coconut Man at one of the regular meetings that he held with his humans every Tuesday. It was great news. Hunting through the old palace archives, mice in Marisco had indeed found the identity of Coconut Man. Mice in England had dug up the name of at least one of his descendants—someone who could speak for the whole family.
“Does that guy have a name?” Jake had asked. “That descendant?”
Yes, but not one that the Big Cheese was ready to reveal.
“I am sure you will understand,” he said, “that the name of the family must be kept secret from Loggocorp at all costs. In my experience it’s easiest for humans to keep secrets if they don’t know them in the first place.”
And that was all they could get.
Susie told Sir Brian as much as she could. That he should summon a group of experts—and the ex-president of Marisco—to a meeting place near London. From there—thanks to Susie’s mysterious contacts—they’d be taken to meet Coconut Man’s descendant, so they could persuade him to claim the forest, and keep it wild.
“But now look!” said Susie. “It’s a disaster!”
Megan peered at her mom’s laptop, covered in iambic pentameters:
Miss Susie, too—and can we ask for more?
Is working to protect Marisco’s shore,
An island where—oh, spare the woodsman’s ax!
To save the forest we must not be lax.
Let loggers now not trash Marisco’s lands
Where many rare lemurs do roam in bands!
Are coconuts important in this plot?
Dread Loggocorp must hope that they are not!
Sir Brian’s meeting soon, is our belief,
In secret will to forests bring relief.
“Now Sir Quentin’s told the whole world about that meeting,” said Susie, her voice shaking. “Loggocorp will be watching Sir Brian all the time, hoping to find out who that guy is—Coconut Man’s great-great-grandson or whatever. Then, who knows—they might offer his family millions of dollars to give up their claim to the forest before they even hear Sir Brian’s proposal!”
Megan sighed with relief, because if it was only Sir Quentin, there was nothing scary there, surely. Nothing bad can happen if the only guys who learn your secrets are mice, because of that line in the treaty, the one that reads:
* Mice will never hurt humans.
There was no way mice would tell Loggocorp about secret plans to find Coconut Man’s descendants, and their claim to the forest, because that would hurt the humans who were trying to save it. Not to mention the lemurs that lived there.
Megan couldn’t blame her mom for being worried, of course. After all, it had been only a couple of months since she became the fifth Human Who Knew that mice had evolved. She was still learning to trust them.
“It’s okay,” she explained. “Sir Quentin can’t tell any humans about your plans because…”
“Because of your precious treaty?” asked her mom. “So what do you make of this!”
She pulled her phone out of her bag, clicked on it, and held it out to Megan. Her hand was trembling a bit, which made it hard for Megan to read the text, so she took the phone out of her mom’s hands to peer at the screen—and felt her own trust in mice take a hit.
The message was from someone called Doug. Her mom had mentioned him before—a biologist who worked for Loggocorp and hated what the company did to rain forests. Hated it so much that he’d started leaking information to Megan’s mom. This time he had texted:
Bosses know about meeting in England.
“And you think they found out from Sir Quentin?” Megan asked.
“Well, how else? From that dreadful poem! Maybe he put it online for everyone to see. Made a mistake with the privacy settings.”
“Mice don’t make mistakes!” Megan wailed.
Her mom usually listened to her on the subject of mice, but not this time.
“Well, they just did. And I’m going up to Headquarters right now to ask your Big Cheese and Sir Quentin to explain themselves, and if they don’t, then I will personally wring their necks.”
“Mom, you can’t! You can’t just go up to Headquarters!”
Indeed, it had been one of the first rules the Big Cheese had set up when he moved his Headquarters to the second floor of Planet Mouse a couple of months ago. No humans should ever penetrate his space except for the regular visits of Mr. Joey and Miss Megan, who took turns going just as far as the upstairs bathroom to empty the poop-tray, top up the water in the drinking fountain that Uncle Fred had invented for the mice, and leave fresh bags of mouse food.
There was no way to explore beyond the bathroom, because a phalanx of muscle mice armed with toothpicks always blocked their path, keeping humans out of the bedrooms where two thousand mice worked on their Thumbtop computers. Besides, there’d be no room in those bedrooms for human feet. Using pieces of balsa wood that Uncle Fred had cut for them, the mice had absolutely covered the floor space with a complex labyrinth of tiny cubicles and offices.
“Wish you could see it,” Trey had said one day. “It’s amazing. Even we get lost up there.”
And now, would Susie Fisher actually storm past the guards? Crunch those balsa wood offices underfoot? Stomp on mice as she rampaged through Headquarters, looking for Sir Quentin and the Big Cheese?
here was only one person Megan could think of who might slow her mom down, might keep her from roaring up the stairs at Planet Mouse to Headquarters.
“Let’s ask Jake—” she began, but got nowhere.
“Oh, you thin
k that just because I’m married now I need a man to take over?” said her mom, heading out the back door. “I didn’t exactly promise to obey him. Give me a break!”
She set off briskly down the path that led to the gate in the fence, and beyond it, Planet Mouse. The best Megan could do was to sprint ahead with Trey and Julia on her shoulders, reaching the other house just ahead of her mom so Trey could run up to Headquarters with his warning: Danger. Your humans are out of control.
Megan dashed into the office where Jake and Uncle Fred supervised the production of Thumbtops and their distribution to mice all over the world.
“What the…” said Jake, seeing her face.
“It’s Mom,” said Megan. “Stop her, stop her, stop her!”
Megan was just in time. Jake was waiting as Susie came into Planet Mouse, the massive figure of Uncle Fred just behind him. And yes, Jake did convince Susie to at least flop on the couch in the big front office instead of running up the stairs.
It all poured out. Sir Quentin’s poem. The leak about Sir Brian’s meeting. The need to find out what role mice had played. The need for vengeance.
Jake was great at calming Susie down, far better than Uncle Fred, who was her younger brother so she never seemed to take him seriously, even though he was twice her size. Jake persuaded her to wait and at least give the Big Cheese twenty minutes to prepare his defense and explain what was going on.
Julia and Trey took that message upstairs to the Headquarters television studio, where the Big Cheese went into “deadly calm” mode—the total stillness that told his followers he was thinking at lightning speed.
“Come,” was all he said in response to Julia’s message. “Follow me.”
The Big Cheese led Julia and Trey to the little office that had been set up for Sir Quentin when he was appointed Mouse Laureate, its walls decorated with pictures of human poets. Beneath their gaze sat a mouse who looked as if the stuffing had been knocked out of him.
“I meant no harm!” he protested, when the Big Cheese demanded an explanation. “Oh sir, how could you suspect that with all the admiration I feel toward our human collaborators—with all the reverence I display—”
“I simply want to know,” the Big Cheese interrupted, with slow, careful gestures, “whether a copy of your poem could have leaked into hostile hands.”
“Leaked? Not by me,” said Sir Quentin. “My electronic version was of course behind the firewall” (the security system that kept all but five humans away from the Nation’s Web site). “If any lines perchance reached hostile eyes, it could have been only after Miss Susie received the e-mail to which the poem was attached. Is it not possible that she printed up my ode and proudly showed it to colleagues who appreciate a good iambic pentameter? And that one of them…”
“You e-mailed your poem to Miss Susie?” the Big Cheese interrupted.
“Indeed, at her request,” said Sir Quentin. “I had hoped to entertain her with a full recitation yesterday, but she asked that I transmit my epic electronically in order that she might peruse it at her leisure and perhaps identify any quatrains that were less than felicitous.”
There was silence—stillness—as Trey and Julia gazed at their leader, looking for warning signs. But the Big Cheese kept his icy calm.
“Send the Director of Security to my office,” he ordered to a messenger mouse, then turned to Trey. “Go inform our humans that in eighteen minutes I will join them so that together we may lift the burden of suspicion from this mouse. And from us.”
It wasn’t at all like the regular Tuesday meetings between the Big Cheese and the five Humans Who Knew.
For one thing, there were only four humans, because Joey was out doing whatever Joey did. And another thing: normally, the humans who lined up on the office couch were clean and pressed, because that’s the way the leader of the mouse world liked it. Today there hadn’t really been time for the clean-and-pressed bit, and as often happened in the afternoons, Uncle Fred’s T-shirt showed traces of lunch.
It was Megan who went upstairs to fetch the little old birdcage that had originally served as a fake prison for mice but had since become a ceremonial mouse-throne and transport device. Today the Big Cheese had asked one other mouse to climb in with him, a mouse with the red thread around his neck that marked him as a director, a member of the Mouse Council.
Usually Sir Quentin rode in the cage to act as interpreter, but the Big Cheese was afraid that the sight of him might enrage Miss Susie. So it was Trey who translated, as the humans watched the leader of the Mouse Nation for any hint of his mood. Was there a droop of the ears that could mean embarrassment, an acknowledgment that the Mouse Nation had goofed? Was there a twitch of the tail that could mean anger? No, the Big Cheese stood tall in his cage, looking at them with the confidence of a mouse in control.
“As you all know,” he began, “this rain forest project is dear to the hearts of mice. We know the benefits of preserving the forest, on so many levels. It was an unfortunate coincidence that Talking Mouse Five referred to Sir Brian’s meeting in his ode just as the timber company was hearing about it from human sources.”
“Human sources?” said Susie sharply. “Not from Sir Brian’s group, that’s for sure! No way they would have told anybody!”
The Big Cheese bowed in her direction. “I agree that it was unlikely that they made such a disclosure voluntarily,” he said. “I defer to my Director of Security for an explanation.”
The director shuffled to the front of the cage.
“The generals in charge of Marisco routinely hack into the computer of ex-President Pindoran, whom they suspect of plotting to regain power. On one of those occasions they must have come across some correspondence with Sir Brian and the other experts with whom he has conferred. Their e-mail addresses were, we believe, passed to Loggocorp. Now their e-mail is probably being hacked. And their cell phones.”
“Mine too?” squeaked Susie.
“Yours too,” said the director.
Megan’s mom was leaning forward, her face in her hands. Then she looked up, with a sad smile at the Big Cheese. “We can’t win, can we?” she said.
“Of course you can win!” he said. “With mice on your side, how could you lose? We will put all our efforts into ensuring that from now on, plans for preservation of the forest can be carried out in secret.”
“But they’ll just keep hacking, won’t they?” said Susie. “They’ll find out even more about the meeting in London. They’ll stalk Sir Brian’s group.”
“For which reason,” said the Big Cheese, “you should take certain steps, now.”
He spelled out what the humans should do. Get a message to the ex-president of Marisco and all the rain forest experts, right now. Tell them that until further notice there should be no more mention of the Western Forest of Marisco, nor of Coconut Man, nor of the meeting in England, on their phones or computers.
“How on earth can we send them that message,” said Susie, “if they’re already being hacked?”
“Fortunately, according to our informants,” replied the Big Cheese, “the phones of your experts’ spouses have not yet been tampered with. I suggest that you borrow Mr. Fred’s phone to call them, perhaps starting with Sir Brian’s wife, Lady Valerie.”
Megan was glad to see the beginning of a smile on her mom’s face.
“You know their wives, their partners?” Susie said. “I suppose you know their telephone numbers?”
The Big Cheese bowed slightly, as if accepting a compliment. He pointed to the Thumbtop that an IT mouse had been working on at the back of the cage, and Trey read the telephone numbers off its screen for Susie to call. One by one, Susie secretly left a message for each expert: Heinrich, the zoologist from Germany; Martin, the climatologist from Ghana; Pierre, the French botanist. And Laura, the lemur lady from Australia.
There could be no more communication about the rain forest until they all gathered at a hotel near the London airport. From there, the group would be t
aken to a secure location where they would work on their proposal. When the guy from Coconut Man’s family showed up, they’d be ready to make the presentation that could save the forest.
After Susie had made the last call, she sank back into the cushions of the couch, her eyes closed.
“Do you know which humans are doing the actual hacking?” Uncle Fred asked the Director of Security.
“For legal reasons, it’s unlikely to be Loggocorp employees,” said the director. “They probably prefer to keep their hands clean, as it were. We think that they are using independent hackers—hackers for hire. I’ve queried the mice whose job it is to keep track of the most prominent networks of hackers—people who might provide such a service.”
“Like Faceless?” asked Uncle Fred, his beard dropping south.
Megan remembered seeing something on television about Faceless and the thousands of hackers who went under that name, including some who had found their way into the most secure government computers.
“Indeed,” said the director. “Faceless has recently made a change in its goals, its stated aims. Until now they hacked for their own entertainment, to demonstrate their power. But now I am informed that they do it for money.”
“Hacking for hire,” said Susie in a small voice. “For Loggocorp.”
“Have no fear,” said the Big Cheese. “There is one network that is bigger than Faceless, and far more intelligent.”
“Don’t tell me,” said Jake, with a smile.
The Big Cheese ignored him. “And we mice will focus on this problem like a laser.”
“So now what?” Jake asked.
“Now we wait,” said the Big Cheese. “My security team will continue to watch Faceless, of course. But I am hoping for a shortcut. When they find that no new information is coming in, Faceless may well make a rash move, and be revealed.”
Mouse Mission Page 2