by Paul Gamble
“Leave Jack alone. He’s allowed to have a friend.”
“Thanks, Mum,” said Jack as he ducked out of the room.
Jack ran up to his room to think about getting changed. But what would he choose? Just what was the well-dressed burglar wearing this season? After going through his closet a number of times he came up with a pair of black tracksuit bottoms, a black T-shirt, and a black sweatshirt. It seemed appropriate.
Jack was standing outside his house when the Ministry car pulled up. He scrambled into the back beside Trudy and was greeted with loud laughter. “Why are you dressed all in black?”
“Isn’t it obvious? We’re burglars. We’re going burglaring.”77
“I don’t think burglaring is a real word.”78
Jack looked at what Trudy was wearing. She had on a light blue polo shirt and a pair of navy tracksuit trousers. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail.
“You don’t look like a burglar.”
“That’s the point. I tried to dress like an office cleaner. That way if someone sees me in the offices of Chapeau Noir, they won’t give me a second glance.”
“Oh,” said Jack. Realization dawned on him.
“Yes. Oh. If we’re in the offices and they see you, they’ll realize you’re a burglar. Because you look like a burglar. In fact you could only have made it worse if you’d brought along a black eye mask and a bag marked ‘swag.’”
“Sorry,” said Jack. “This is my first burglary.”
“It shows. Hopefully you’ll improve.”
* * *
Jack was slightly disappointed when they arrived at the headquarters of Chapeau Noir Enterprises. He had been expecting a skyscraper of black glass, black stone, and silver metal. In point of fact, the building was red brick with ordinary windows and a welcoming-looking foyer.
“What were you expecting?” asked Trudy. “A hollowed-out volcano lair?”
“Well, no, but I was hoping that it would at least be a little sinister.”
Jack and Trudy clambered out of the Ministry car and stood in front of the building.
“Since you’re the expert, how do we get in?” asked Jack.
Trudy pulled a rucksack off her back and rummaged around in it. Jack was expecting her to take out a lock pick, a grappling hook, or perhaps a magical collapsible ladder. He was therefore surprised when she took out a clipboard.
“Follow me.”
Trudy walked confidently through the office’s sliding doors. She strode up to the reception desk as Jack hurried to keep up.
“We’re here to check the air vents on floor eight,” Trudy said to a bored-looking security guard who sat behind the reception desk.
The security guard looked skeptical at first. After all, why would a child be sent to look at air vents? “Really, look…” Then he caught sight of the clipboard. “Umm, okay, the elevators are over there.” He pointed.
Jack was astonished and followed Trudy over to the elevators. “How did that work?” he asked her once they were safely inside one. “Is that a magic clipboard?”
“Perfectly ordinary clipboard. But it works like magic. You see, people assume that if you have a clipboard, then you also have some documentation attached to it. And they then imagine if you have documentation you must have offices somewhere. And they then imagine at the office there are lots of people working. And they then imagine that you must be a person in authority if the imaginary people at the imaginary office gave you a clipboard. So then they believe anything that you tell them. It’s the power of the human imagination coupled with the authority of the clipboard.”
“That doesn’t sound like it could really work.”
“Oh, it does,” said Trudy. “In fact, I’ve got a survey saying it does right here.” She tapped the clipboard.
“Oh. Okay then,” said Jack, who found himself strangely convinced by this argument.
“Now what we need is to figure out where we want to go next.”
Jack pressed the highest-numbered button in the elevator. “Up. We want to find the office of Mr. Teach himself. And the best offices are always at the top of buildings.”
* * *
In one corner of the tenth floor there was an enormous office with a nameplate on the door, “Mr. Teach—Chief Executive.” They could see inside the office as one of its walls was made entirely out of glass. It was sparsely furnished, with only a few filing cabinets and an enormous oak desk at the far end. Unlike normal office furniture, the desk was made of rough, worn planks and Jack could have sworn that the decorative studs along the sides were made from barnacles.
Trudy tried the door handle. “Locked.”
Jack looked around other offices and picked up a heavy glass paperweight. “I’ll use this to smash a small hole in the glass wall and then we’ll be able to reach inside and open the door that way.”
“I’m not sure that’s a great idea,” said Trudy. “If we smash a hole in that window, they’ll know we’ve been here.”
Jack thought. He saw a potted plant in the corner of the office. “We can just move a potted plant in front of the hole. Then, hopefully, they won’t notice.”
“Do you think that’ll work?”
“Do you have a better plan?”
Trudy conceded that she didn’t.
Jack went over to the glass wall and looked through it. He could see the handle on the other side of the door. He aimed with the paperweight so that the hole would be right beside the handle. The paperweight made a loud crack as it made contact with the wall, which shuddered but didn’t break. The paperweight hadn’t even chipped the surface.
“I’m going to need to hit it harder.” Jack pulled his arm back and hit the wall as hard as he could. An enormous crack appeared in the glass wall. It started spreading outward from where Jack had struck, looking like an enormous spiderweb.79
Jack nervously took a few steps back from the wall. Trudy hid herself behind a desk. There was an ear-splitting shattering noise and the wall collapsed into a million shards of glass.
Trudy came out from her hiding place behind the desk. She dragged a potted plant in front of the pile of shattered glass. “There you go. No one will notice now.”
Jack didn’t think he would ever see anyone being more sarcastic than Trudy had just been. However, Trudy was not one to rest on her laurels and very quickly managed to exceed her recently set high level of sarcasm.
“So, Jack. Are you going to reach through the small hole and open the door for me?”
Jack thought she was joking, but realized she wanted him to go through with the action. Stepping over the shattered glass wall, he unlocked the office door from the inside.
Trudy walked through the door even though it would have been just as easy to step through the enormous hole where the glass wall had recently been.
“Right, we’d better hurry up and check these filing cabinets before you destroy the entire office building.”
The filing cabinets were locked, but Jack smashed them open with a few blows from the paperweight. Luckily they were made of metal and so didn’t shatter into a thousand pieces.
Most of the records contained nothing interesting or at least nothing that Jack and Trudy could understand. Generally they contained graphs, numbers, and incomprehensible spreadsheets.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anything interesting,” Jack said.
Naturally enough, this was the cue for Trudy to find something very interesting indeed.
* * *
MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK
POWER OF IMAGINATION
EFFICACY OF CLIPBOARDS
Occasionally you will find yourself in a situation where someone will not believe what you are saying even if you are holding a clipboard. In this situation you should resort to putting on a white coat. People will always believe what you are saying if you are holding a clipboard and wearing a white lab coat. If you are wearing a white coat, people will believe you have some kind of science degree. At university
graduation ceremonies people are given diplomas to show how smart they are. It would be much better if they were given white coats.
* * *
41
SPIN ME RIGHT 'ROUND
“Jack, look at this!” Trudy lifted a bundle of papers out of a filing cabinet and took them over to the desk.
“What is it?” he asked as Trudy spread out the papers.
“I’m not sure but I think it’s a plan for where they’re digging.”
Trudy had spread out what turned out to be a map of Northern Ireland. It showed that Chapeau Noir Enterprises had dug around the border area where it joined onto the rest of the island.
Trudy looked through the papers. “There doesn’t seem to be anything here that indicates that they’re looking for gold or oil.”
Jack looked through the papers himself. “Wait a minute—what do these mean? There are little dots around the edge of the map. Hundreds of little green dots.”
Trudy pointed to the key of the map. “They’re wind turbines. Supposedly for energy generation.”
“But we know that isn’t right. The wind turbines at the school aren’t used to generate electricity. Otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered with the new carpets and polyester uniforms to generate static electricity for lighting the mine.”
Trudy was rifling through other papers. “Look at this. I think this must be an early design drawing for the wind turbines.”
From the papers it was apparent that the design of the wind turbines had been based on an existing design of a ship’s propeller. And the ship that the propeller had been based on was named the Titanic. The propeller had been altered as each blade was longer and thinner, but the basics were the same.
Trudy audibly gasped. “Do you realize what this means?” she said, turning to Jack.
Jack turned to Trudy and fixed her with a deadly serious gaze. “Frankly, I don’t have a clue.”
“Jack, it’s quite simple. What this means is…”
Suddenly a voice called out from behind Jack and Trudy. “What this means is that it’s the end of the road for you two.”
Even before Jack turned, he recognized the voice. It was the old woman from the museum.
“Nice to see you again.” The old woman smiled. “Just a pity that this is the last time anyone will ever be seeing you.”
Behind her stood eight pirates. Jack wondered where all these pirates were coming from. Surely if there were this many pirates in the world, he would have noticed them before.
“You know too much for us to let you live.”
“Umm, just on a point of information, I still don’t really know what’s going on,” said Jack.
“Boys,” the old woman growled, “get them.”
Trudy dived into the fight with enthusiasm and verve. Jack was more reluctant. There had to be a better way to defeat the pirates other than fighting. After all, the last fight in the museum had almost ended in disaster. Violence was wrong, immature, and brutal. And quite apart from anything else, Jack wasn’t very good at it.
And yet despite all this Jack couldn’t let Trudy down. He needed to conjure up a sad thought immediately if he was going to survive this. One popped into his head with only minimal concentration—the time his mother had been taken to the hospital when he was six. Even to this day no one had told him what had been wrong with her. He just remembered an immense feeling of sadness. He knew that something was badly wrong, but everyone was pretending to be cheerful. But he had been six, not stupid. He knew that things weren’t right. It had all worked out in the end and after a few months his mother had come home, although even to this day no one ever spoke about what had happened.
The Speed descended on Jack in the nick of time. Two of the pirates were right in front of him. They sliced at him with their cutlasses and hacked with their hooked hands. Jack desperately dived into a narrow space between the pirate’s blades.
Two other pirates raced at him. He leapt up and threw a flurry of punches directly into the stomach of one. The second one tried to grab his neck, but Jack twisted away, throwing an elbow into the pirate’s ribs as he did.
Jack turned to see that, as usual, Trudy was doing much better than he was. Four pirates were slashing at her, but she effortlessly ducked and dodged. One pirate brought his cutlass scything from the side, but missed Trudy and slashed across another’s stomach.
Trudy stepped on the thigh of one of the pirates. Using this to get leverage, she pressed a foot on the breastbone of another and catapulted herself upward and out of the center of the pirates.
Of course, Jack couldn’t just watch Trudy fight as four pirates were closing in on him. He sprinted across the room and rolled over the enormous desk. The pirates lined up on the other side of the desk. He would be safe: Whichever way they went he could go around the desk in the other direction.
Then two of the pirates went around one side of the desk, one went the other way, and one jumped up on top of the desk.
Jack realized it was obvious that this was what they would have done. He certainly wouldn’t get a promotion in the Ministry if he carried on the way he was going. Of course, now was definitely not the time to be thinking about his career prospects.
The first problem was the pirate striding across the desk. Just as he was about to step off the desk and onto the floor Jack pulled out one of the drawers. The pirate put his wooden leg onto it and it smashed through the bottom. The pirate fell over and there was a sickening crack as his upper thigh bone broke into two pieces. The noise made Jack retch. However, he was far too busy to consider vomiting. The three remaining pirates were nearly on him. Jack clambered on top of the desk and started kicking out at the pirates when they moved close to him. He needed to think of something fast.
Two of his kicks landed perfectly and the pirates went sprawling, but the third had managed to grab Jack’s foot and pull him off balance. Jack twisted in the air as he fell. He reached out his hand and tried to catch the edge of the desk. His hand missed by inches, but his head didn’t. It struck the edge of the desk with a loud cracking noise.
Jack continued to fall and could feel himself blacking out. He looked across the room as his vision clouded.
Trudy had managed to floor two of the pirates who had been attacking her, but the other two had gotten ahold of her. She lashed out at them, punching, scratching, and kicking. One pirate let go and fell backward, clutching his head. The other threw her away from him.
Trudy crashed into the office window. The glass shattered and she fell through it. There was a ten-floor drop outside the window. Ten floors straight down.
Jack’s vision had almost completely clouded over. He found himself thinking that he didn’t really care anyway. First David had been kidnapped and now Trudy was gone. It was all over. This was his last thought as unconsciousness overtook him.
* * *
MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK
PIRATES
STORAGE OPTIONS
Many people over the years have wondered how there can be so many pirates in the world and why we don’t notice them. The reason for this is simple: Pirates are very easy to store. Traditionally pirates used to be stored in hammocks. But then one day a Ministry operative pointed out that their hook hands looked almost identical to the ends of wire coat hangers.
Since then it has become de rigueur to store pirates on clothing racks when they aren’t in use. This isn’t cruel to the pirates, as they’re used to hanging off rigging in their pirate ships. They also tend to rock backward and forward on the rails. This motion gently reminds them of the rocking motion of the sea and they find it very relaxing.
As with clothes, the hanging motion also has the advantage of smoothing out wrinkles overnight. This is why so many pirates look so youthful.
* * *
42
A P.E. TEACHER’S HISTORY LESSON
Jack opened his eyes. The light hurt. He hadn’t been moved out of the office, but there were no signs of the struggle that had
taken place. A new window had been put in place, the desk had been repaired, and behind it sat the annoyingly smug Mr. Teach himself.
Jack tried to leap forward to attack him but didn’t move an inch. He looked down to see that he had been tied to a chair.
“I’m going to get you,” snarled Jack. “I have friends.”
“Yes, one of them fell out of the window, didn’t she?” said Mr. Teach. “And as for the rest of the Ministry, I’ve escaped from their clutches more than once. I don’t see why this time should be any different.”
Jack was stunned. “You know what the Ministry is?”
“Well, of course.” Mr. Teach stood up. With his left hand he reached to pull off his black glove. However, he didn’t just take off the glove; he unscrewed the entire hand, revealing a gleaming metal hook underneath.
“You … you’re a pirate too!” gasped Jack.
“Well, quite,” chuckled Mr. Teach. “In fact I am the pirate. I am a direct descendant of Edward Teach or, as he is more commonly known, Blackbeard. But I thought you would have figured that out. After all, my name is Teach and my company is called Chapeau Noir. Which is French for Blackbeard.”
French wasn’t Jack’s favorite class, but he could remember some of the vocabulary. “No, it isn’t. It’s French for Black Hat.”
Mr. Teach looked slightly confused for a minute. “What … no … really? Oh … French never was my best subject.”
“Moron,” laughed Jack. A gleaming hook was put under Jack’s chin, the point drawing blood. He quickly reconsidered how funny Mr. Teach’s mistake was.
“Good idea to stop laughing. After all, soon you’ll be completely at my mercy.”
Jack looked down. “I’m tied to a chair here. I’m pretty much already completely at your mercy.”