Spy Mom

by Beth McMullen

  Right now, when I really should be downstairs monitoring LEGO World War III instead of sneaking around in Will’s office, I’m simply unwilling to accept the possibility of an alternative reason for Righteous Liberty’s request. The list of things I’m obligated to be stressed over is long and includes where to send Theo to kindergarten and how to explain to him that telling his friends it’s okay to jump from the play structure to the roof at school is, well, not okay. The list doesn’t include kidnapping, conspiracy, and possible bodily harm. I’m too busy for that.

  Glancing over my shoulder to make sure I’m alone, an old habit I cannot seem to kill, I type in an address consisting of twenty-seven letters and numbers, humming the ABCs tune as I go. As soon as I hit Enter, the computer screen goes black, a single green cursor flashing in the upper left-hand corner. Normally, this would be cause for concern, but now, it’s exactly what I want. I enter a password stolen from Simon Still while he suffered from malaria-induced hallucinations in an inhospitable jungle years ago, hit Enter again, and wait.

  ACCESS DENIED flashes across the screen in red letters. I half expect a skull and crossbones to appear underneath the words.

  “What? You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say, reentering the password.

  “ACCESS DENIED—PLEASE CEASE ALL ATTEMPTS TO ENTER HERE OR YOU WILL BE DETAINED FOR QUESTIONING.”

  This is very inconvenient but calling up tech support and lodging a service complaint will not improve my situation any and might even get me “detained for questioning.” I continue to tell myself that the more I know about Yoder, the more evidence I’ll have in support of my theory that Righteous Liberty could have asked for any agent, but they just happened to ask for me. And the only place to get information on Yoder is from the USAWMD network.

  I need to know what they know. However, when it comes to computers, I’m a realist. While I can perform a mean Google search, anything beyond that requires professional intervention.

  “Mom, are you looking at pictures?” Theo stands in the office door, trying to summon up his angry face. I jump as if I just got caught watching porno at the office. “Because you said I could look with you the next time.”

  One of the problems of not letting my child watch too much television is that whenever he can get in front of a screen of any sort for any reason, he will. He claims his favorite place on the planet is Times Square at night even though the last time he was there it was broad daylight and we were heading to see Mary Poppins. He climbs up onto my lap.

  “I promise you I’m not looking at pictures,” I say.

  “Well, then what are you doing?”

  Sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong. Not following the rules. Not being a very useful engine.

  “I’m looking for something,” I say.

  “This is boring.”

  “If it’s so boring, why don’t you go back downstairs and play? I’ll be done in a minute.” He looks at me as if I have lost my mind.

  “No way. I’m staying.” Theo is a firm believer in miracles happening. He snuggles down in my lap, ever hopeful that my fingers will accidentally pull up an episode of Scooby-Doo or SpongeBob SquarePants. I shift him a little bit to the left, trying to reach the keyboard.

  “Theo,” I say, “I can’t move.” “Okay.” He pulls himself up on the arm of the chair and balances precariously, a bird on a wire. A large bird.

  “What does that say?” he asks, pointing to the flashing message.

  “It says ‘Go away,’” I explain. “Where are all the pictures and movies and stuff?” He grabs the mouse and starts racing it around. The cursor looks like a passenger on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. I pull it from his hand.

  “There aren’t any,” I say. “This is a network for grown-ups. For big people.”

  “You mean old people?” he asks. “Like you, Mom?”

  Gee, honey, thanks for that. “Yes. Kind of like me.” He pops up on his knees and starts combing through my hair, doing his best impression of a momma gorilla searching for nits.

  “What are you doing?” “Finding more of those white hairs. I can pull them out like you do.”

  That’s it. Even I have my limits. I gather him up and toss him onto the floor.

  “Go find something to do,” I instruct.

  “This is boring anyway,” he says, stalking off. I hit Escape and enter “Richard Yoder” into Google. My search generates thousands of hits and none of them seem useful. I search for “Righteous Liberty” and come up with the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all of which are lovely but not much help.

  In my old world, if I wanted to indulge in a little technological espionage, I would escape the USAWMD Underground, the affectionate name for our subterranean office space, and head up into the daylight. I’d walk out of my building, down the street about two blocks, and into another big brick building that resembled an old-fashioned mental hospital. There, I would negotiate my way through security as if my life depended on it, travel to the fourteenth floor, wind my way through a maze of cubicles, and eventually end up in front of a converted conference room with blacked-out windows and a keypad entry system designed to keep the riffraff out. I was not privileged enough to know the code, so I would just bang on the door until Elliot opened it.

  Elliot was malnourished to the point of resembling a skeleton covered in masking tape and worked for another agency, although he was less than forthcoming about which one that was. He wore a black T-shirt and black jeans that his skinny little hips could do nothing with. His eyes, behind thick plastic glasses, were always bloodshot. If I handed him a large Starbucks Frappuccino with whipped cream and a generous caramel swirl, he would let me in. If I came empty-handed, I was more likely to secure an audience with the Queen of England than gain entry to Elliot’s conference room. We had our own technical experts at the USAWMD, but everyone knew Elliot was better.

  But I have no Elliot now. The closest thing I have is Leonard the pot-smoking barista at the Java Luv. I lean back in the desk chair and stretch my arms above my head, kind of wishing Will hadn’t convinced me that aluminum-containing deodorant was going to kill me and possibly poison all the groundwater in California. I put my arms back down. Theo reappears in the doorway.

  “Are you done yet?” he whines. “I am soooo bored.”

  “Do you even know what ‘bored’ means?” I ask. Bored is riding on a Nepali bus full of angry roosters and burning incense for fifteen hours and covering barely one hundred kilometers in that time. That’s bored.

  “No. Yes. It means that you won’t play.”

  “Okay,” I relent. “I’ll play.” Perhaps a round of Star Wars or BIONICLE or NERF guns will help distract me.

  I push Theo out of the office and toward the stairs and again a whiff of hibiscus floats up from his hair. I really have to get this kid a different shampoo. I’m not sure how much more I can take because here my mind goes once more, right back to Nepal.

  On my hard mattress at the Hotel Kathmandu, Ayushi continued to play with my hair and hum a tune that sounded like an off-key “Star-Spangled Banner.”

  Suddenly, she stopped singing and stared at me with her huge brown eyes.

  “You should go now,” she said.

  The hotel was two stories high, but they were uneven stories, and the side of the building my room happened to be on was a little lower than a normal second story would be. Which was a good thing because I was about to jump out the window.

  “Ayushi, thank you,” I said, clutching her face between my hands and kissing the top of her head. “I owe you one.” She gave me a smile and a gentle curtsy, sitting back down on my bed to watch what would happen next. A weird little kid but as long as she was on my side, I was just fine with that. I pulled on my backpack, thinking for a second how nice a shower would have been, and climbed up on the windowsill. The cheap wood splintered under my shoes as I positioned myself to take the leap. Down below was nothing but dirt. Not even a s
hrub to cushion my fall. Oh, well. Broken was better than dead.

  I hit the ground, not altogether gracefully, and rolled in an attempt to absorb the impact, stopping only when I bumped into a pair of worn flip-flops attached to a pair of legs belonging to Min, my tour guide.

  “Come on,” he whispered, pulling me to my feet. I groaned and began to sink back toward the ground.

  “Let’s go,” he said again, tugging at my shirt. “This is not the time for slacking.”

  “Are you accusing me of being a slacker?” I asked, my mouth full of dust, my body feeling great sympathy for the street in Pamplona after the running of the bulls. Min gave me a disgusted look and more or less dragged me to his waiting car. There, I gamely climbed into the backseat of the disintegrating Toyota, thinking I should probably figure out which side Min was on before we went very far.

  “Who are they?” I asked. “The guys back at the hotel?”

  “They work for the king. Secret police. But they are more like a goon squad, if you ask me.”

  Min turned to face me, driving with one hand and no eyes on the road.

  “I was determining a plan to come in and get you when you jumped,” he said.

  Sure you were.

  “Do you know why they want to kill you, my friend?”

  The list of possible reasons was long but distinguished. “I don’t know,” I said, folding my feet up under me to keep them from being ripped off by the road flying by where the floor mats should have been. I’d only been in the country for about four hours and yet I’d totally lost control of things already. I wondered how much of this I could keep from Simon and not get caught. With my luck, he was videotaping the whole affair from a polite distance and smirking all the while.

  “Well, you must have done something. But I am no friend of the new king. In my mind he is nothing more than a murderer. So I’ll help you. For my country. For my true king.”

  “Thank you. Can you look at the road now?” I said. Min swiveled his head back around and faced the road.

  “What is your name, friend?”

  “Allison,” I said, although I couldn’t be 100 percent sure without checking my passport. As I stared out the window at the dust cloud being kicked up by the Toyota, I couldn’t puzzle out how they knew I was coming. Later, after many more unexpected greeting parties in every corner of the world, I started to believe I was cursed. But in Kathmandu, it was still an isolated incident, something I could attribute to bad information or bad informants and not necessarily to my own personal cloud of bad karma.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To catch a plane to Lukla and start walking. You still want to go to Namche for your pictures?” Boy, things must have been tough in the tour guide business for him to willingly accept a client from hell, as I was turning out to be.

  “Absolutely,” I said. My statement was punctuated by a loud noise coming from the Toyota’s rusted-out trunk, as if a tiny jackhammer were pounding away on the back of my seat.

  “Pull over, Min,” I shouted. “I think someone’s in your trunk.” Min slammed on the brakes and I went flying over the seats, landing right in his lap.

  “Oh, my, Miss Allison. My apologies.” The loud knocking sound continued. I untangled myself, jumped out of the car, and tried, with limited success, to pop the trunk.

  “When was the last time you opened this?” I asked. Min shrugged.

  “Never?” he said.

  “Great.”

  “Try this way,” he suggested. With that, he climbed into the backseat and pushed a fist through one of the gaping holes in the upholstery. A second later, from the hole he produced the slim, tan leg of a child.

  “How did you get in here?” he roared, pulling the rest of Ayushi from the hole. “This is dangerous. You could have died.”

  Not to mention she would have had to move at the speed of light to get from my hotel room into the trunk of the car without notice.

  Ayushi took a second to stand up and straighten out the now torn and filthy skirt of her uniform. She fixed her liquid eyes on us.

  “I would rather be dead than stay with Kirin for one more minute,” she said with a conviction I’ve not often heard since then. Min and I looked at each other. It was hard to argue with her but it didn’t explain her apparent power to teleport herself from one place to another undetected. I put my hands on my hips in my best imitation of an irate mother and waited. Under my gaze, Ayushi kicked the ground. A little cloud of dust floated up between us.

  “The drain pipe,” she said quietly, “through the other window, in the back.”

  “And you didn’t mention this to me because of … why?” I asked, thinking I really could have done without jumping out the second-story window. I dreaded the bruise I’d have by nighttime.

  “You didn’t ask,” she said, jutting her chin out in defiance.

  True.

  “This is ridiculous,” Min interrupted. “We’ll take her to my cousin’s wife’s brother-in-law. She will be safe there.”

  Ayushi pulled on my shirt.

  “You owe me one,” she said, as if I needed reminding.

  My luck was now officially classified as awful. Where was my sprinkling of fairy dust when I needed it? Hung up in customs? I was not suited to mind a child. In fact, keeping a cactus alive was a stretch for me. But what she said was true. I owed her for saving my life. And in my business, that wasn’t something to be taken lightly.

  “Listen,” I said, kicking the dirt. “Min’s cousin is the safest place for you to be. Being with me isn’t always that safe.” What an understatement. I hoped she was old enough to read between the lines.

  Ayushi crossed her arms and glared at me.

  “I’m coming with you,” she said. “If you leave me, I’ll follow you.”

  She was beginning to remind me of a baby duck that accidentally imprints on a fox or some other totally inappropriate animal. Min glanced at his watch, tapping his foot in case I missed his point.

  “Okay,” I said finally. “She comes with us.”

  “This will make things complicated, Miss Allison,” Min said, already looking tired.

  “If you haven’t noticed,” I said, “things are already complicated.” Simon was going to kill me or, at the very least, send me to count snowflakes in Mongolia for six months.

  Back at the airport, we headed toward a plane I think was actually a 1973 VW minibus with wings. The pilot heaved plastic chairs and irrigation tubing out onto the runway to make room for our bodies. When he was done, he shook each of our hands enthusiastically and welcomed us aboard.

  “Nice weather for flying,” the pilot said. “No rocks in the clouds today.”

  Oh, dear. I recited what I remembered of the Lord’s Prayer, which was not a whole lot, and closed my eyes. The plane lurched and sputtered and eventually was airborne. All around us were steep hills covered in dense green foliage. Steel gray rivers cut their way through, pulled by gravity to an unknown sea. In a matter of minutes, we appeared to be crashing right into the side of a mountain.

  “You’re hurting me,” Ayushi said, as I grabbed her arm in a terrific imitation of panic. “It’s just the runway.”

  “Sorry,” I whispered.

  “You can open your eyes now,” she said. “We’re on the ground.”

  “Right. I was just resting.”

  “Okay,” she said, “if you say so.”

  “What?” I said, assuming the nonchalance of a cat that has just fallen flat on her face.

  Ayushi laughed and her small round face lit up as if she held the warmth of the sun inside her. I felt my heart constrict just the tiniest bit. She was not a cactus. Maybe I could save her.

  “You were scared. You were scared,” she sang, dancing between Min and me. The skirt from her school uniform twirled with a joy that seemed alien to this dark, dreary place.

  As far as the eye could see, in every direction, there was nothing but mud. A few yards from the landing strip was a row
of rudimentary houses, haphazardly constructed and leaning precariously on one another for support. A foul stench belched from their chimneys.

  “Yak dung,” Min said, turning up his nose. “No wood left to burn up here.” I nodded as if it were a perfectly ordinary thing to burn yak shit for fuel and followed Min into the five-inch-deep mud. It was aggressive mud, grabbing onto my boots and requiring a Herculean effort for each step forward. Ayushi clung to my neck, baby koala style, and I said a silent thank you that she was small for her age. During my time with the Agency, I’d have many good ideas. Bringing a child into this environment was not one of them.

  10

  Theo dances around the kitchen. His shiny silver shin guards are strapped to his forearms, part of an imaginary superhero outfit that includes a baby-blanket cape and a child-sized San Francisco Giants batting helmet. He speaks Kung Fu, sounding exactly as he might if he were being strangled. I try to pack a bag with enough snacks to cover the morning, which isn’t as easy as one might think.

  “Cheese sticks?” I ask.

  “Blah. Cheese sticks make me sick.” An Academy Award–winning fake barfing scene follows.

  “Stop that right now,” I say. “And cheese sticks do not make you sick.”

  “Yes, they do. I’m allergic.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Well, Zach is, at school. He turns funny colors and has to stick himself with a pen. Allergic to cheese sticks and broccoli.”

  “Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean you are allergic to it. It’s okay not to like every food. But if you don’t even give them a try, how will you know?”