by Roland Smith
Angela had a thoughtful look on her face for a moment.
“We do have homework. I could tell Blaze we need an actual library instead of the Internet. And I’ve always wanted to go to the Newberry Library,” she said.
“Good call. It’s not too far from here,” he said.
Nobody asked me where I would like to go. A library wouldn’t be my first choice. But then again, they might have some magic books or Harry Houdini biographies I hadn’t read yet. And then there was my recently developed aversion to hotel rooms, so getting out would be good. Pat’s phone buzzed. He answered it and spoke for a short time.
“That’s Eben. He’s in position. We can leave as soon as you talk to your parents,” he said.
We used my phone on speaker and called my mom.
“Hey, honey!” she said. My mom was almost always cheerful when she wasn’t threatening me with boarding school.
“Angela is here with me and so is Agent Callaghan,” I said.
“Hi, Blaze!” Angela did her best to sound cheerful and nonchalant.
“So, we’ve made a big dent in our homework. But we found out that there’s some stuff on Chicago history we can only get at the Newberry Library. Is it okay if we head over? Boone asked Agent Callaghan to check in on us and he said he’d go with us.”
“Hello, Blaze,” he said.
“Hello, Agent Callaghan,” she said. She was quiet a minute. My mom is good at sniffing things out.
“Can’t you wait until Boone gets here? I don’t like imposing on Agent Callaghan’s time and—”
Pat interrupted her. “It’s really okay, Blaze. Heather is tied up on conference calls for the next couple of hours. And Boone has been to the White House a lot with other groups and he’s helped me out with concert tickets before. So I owe him a favor. I don’t mind keeping an eye on Q and Angela at all.” He gave us thumbs up.
Mom was quiet again. I could almost hear her thinking, wondering if we were up to something. But it would be pretty hard for us to get into any kind of trouble with a U.S. Secret Service agent watching us.
“As long as Agent Callaghan is okay with it … I guess it’s all right. But you two remember our conversation from this morning, don’t you?” She said it sweetly but we knew exactly what she was referring to. Get caught up on your homework or it’s off to boarding school.
“Sure do, Mom,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Angela said. I looked at her with my eyes wide. Ma’am! She doesn’t call my mom “ma’am”! It’s always “Blaze.” That was totally going to tip Mom off that something was up!
There were several seconds of silence. I started to sweat.
“All right,” she finally said. “But listen, try to be back before we leave for the concert. I want to spend some time with you guys. I miss you.”
“We will, Mom. Love you!” I said, and disconnected the call before she could change her mind.
“What conversation was she referring to?” Agent Callaghan asked.
“What with all the bombings, kidnappings, and other assorted terrorist plots, we fell a little behind on our homework. If we don’t get caught up we’ll be taken off the tour and sent to boarding school,” I explained.
Agent Callaghan was quiet a moment while he considered this.
“Hmm. Bummer. Get your stuff. Let’s go.”
We got our stuff. And we went.
Walking Tour
The Newberry Library sits across the street from Washington Square Park in downtown Chicago. It took us about forty-five minutes to walk there from the hotel. It should have taken ten, but Agent Callaghan preferred a roundabout route. Every so often he would stop and pretend he was showing us something in a store window. We visited a coffee shop and he got a coffee and bought us vanilla steamers. I knew he was watching for anyone who might be following us. His sunglasses hid his eyes, but I had no doubt they studied the face of every person we encountered. But if you didn’t know he was a Secret Service agent, you’d never believe him to be anything other than a dad out for a stroll with a couple of teenage kids. I started thinking he would make a pretty good magician.
Eventually we arrived at the library.
“Lots of people come here to do genealogical research,” Angela said. Angela is smart and does really well with her schoolwork. If we weren’t smack dab in the middle of a national security emergency, I’m pretty sure she would have been swooning. I do okay in school. But mostly I find it gets in the way of other things I like to do. Like practicing magic, eating nonvegetarian food, and avoiding being kidnapped by terrorists.
“Fascinating,” I answered. “I wonder if they have any magic books.”
“Seriously, Q, this is one of the world’s great research libraries. Research. You know. For our school projects.”
I knew Angela was referring to Boone and not our schoolwork. In addition to being smart, she’s also a little obsessive. I guess we all are in our own way. I wanted to ask her, even if we found out more about Boone, how would that keep us from getting tossed into boarding school? But I decided against it. She didn’t look like she was in the mood to be questioned right now.
We found a room full of tables where we could work. Angela had her laptop out and was typing away in seconds. Agent Callaghan gave us some space, sitting a few feet away, pretending to be interested in a book.
“I did some research on the Civil War picture P.K. sent us,” Angela said quietly.
“Yeah?”
“It took some digging, but he comes up as Colonel A. Bertoni from the Fifth Massachusetts Regiment.”
“Didn’t he use a different name in the World War Two picture?”
“He did. It was Beroni. So I ran a search on Bertoni and got a couple of hits. I found an A. Bertoni on the muster roll at the Alamo. But there was no one by that name listed among the dead. Also an A. Bertoni was a clerk to a delegate at the Constitutional Convention. I ran those names through a historical-image database and guess what?” She turned the laptop around so I could see the screen. “The A. Bertoni name stops there, in the 1780s. I figure Boone changed up his name slightly every so often. Which means he must have some reason for not wanting to be found out.”
“So how were you able to find it out?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. But the only evidence we have is what we’ve seen with our own eyes. Boone moving from point A to point B either like you think—by magic, which is absurd—”
“Hey!” I interrupted.
She held up her hand. “Or he moves incredibly fast. Maybe fast enough to travel through time.”
“Time travel? Really? That’s your guess? You pooh-pooh magic but you’ll buy the idea of a time-traveling super spy?”
“Lots of scientists have theorized it’s possible. And it has to do with speed. We talked about it in my introductory physics class last year. You see me sitting here because your brain processes all of the light that reflects off, around, and through me into an image on your retinas. According to some theories, if you could travel fast enough you could outrace the images out into space and see ‘me’ sitting here doing what I was doing a few minutes ago. Does that make sense?”
“Not at all. Are you saying Boone travels faster than the speed of light?” I asked. This particular theory was depressing. Unless I could learn faster-than-light travel, I could never pull off Boone’s trick.
“I don’t know. But the theory would essentially be that he moves really fast. We look up in the sky at night and see stars. What we’re really seeing is the light from those stars traveling across space. Some of them are so far away the light is just now reaching us. In some cases the stars are so far away they’ve already gone supernova and died. But we still see the light. So the theory is, if you could travel faster than light, you could outrace what we think of as time and see us from any point….”
“Still doesn’t work. Boone doesn’t go back in time. He just goes from place to place. So the time-travel thing doesn’t hold water.”
Angela sighed. “I know. It’s not a solid theory but it is a theory. And how do we really know where he goes? When he poofs away he could go back and have lunch with Leonardo da Vinci, for all we know.”
I guess Angela wasn’t going to stop until she figured this out. Finding out anything she could about Boone had replaced worrying about her mom being in danger. I couldn’t really blame her for that. And time traveler was no worse a theory than space alien or magical wizard or any of the other explanations we’d come up with. Best just to let it go for now.
“So I’m going to start researching names similar to Beroni, Bertoni, and others. I’m guessing Boone probably had to change his name every so often to keep people from figuring out he was the same guy, when he never aged.”
“Um. Angela?”
“What?”
“This is all really interesting, but we’re supposed to get caught up on our homework or we’re going to get sent to boarding school.”
“What do you want to do, Q? Homework or Boone?”
“What do you want to do, Angela? Tour or boarding school?”
“All right. But they have a lot of genealogical records here. I need to check something.”
“Angela. Seriously. I don’t think my mom is joking around,” I said. I pulled my own laptop out of my backpack. “I’ll help you upload stuff to the website, but we need to get caught up.”
“But what about Boone?” she complained.
“I know someone who can probably help us out there,” I said.
I pulled out my phone and called P.K.
Changing It Up
When they pulled into the deserted warehouse Boone saw that J.R. was as good as his word. There waiting for them was another Marathon coach. It would need to be examined carefully, but at first blush it looked identical to the one they were driving, minus the bullet holes and broken windows.
The ride to Chicago had been quiet and tense. Felix and Uly had spent the entire time in the master suite, taking turns staring out the rear window. They kept their rifles handy, but saw no suspicious vehicles.
While Vanessa drove, X-Ray sat at the dining table with his hard drives stacked in front of him. His arms were crossed and he muttered to himself. Lines of fury were still etched in his face. Boone kept his shotgun seat while Croc found a spot nearby and curled up to sleep.
Now they had something else to focus on. Along with the coach was a new Range Rover. Uly and Felix moved all the tactical equipment off the coach and into the new vehicle. X-Ray was not happy.
“What am I supposed to do, Boone?” he asked, pacing across the floor. “I can’t work on the coach and the Range Rover doesn’t—”
Then he saw it. The coach had hidden his view of the new intellimobile. But when he spotted it his eyes lit up. “Is that—did you—am I getting a new van?” Words failed him as he rushed to the brand-new vehicle and threw open the rear door.
Inside was a large console that sat against the wall on the driver’s side. The console included four flat-screen HD monitors, multiple keyboards, and more blinking lights and equipment than anyone on the SOS team had ever seen.
Felix whistled. “Whoa, X,” he said. “I bet you could invade Canada with that thing.”
“Canada? I could take over the European Union,” X-Ray said gleefully. He climbed into the back and sat in the black leather captain’s chair in front of the console. Spinning the seat around, he grinned like a little kid. “Look!” he said excitedly. “It has a retractable satellite tower and even a periscope!” He spent the next several minutes gleefully taking inventory of his new toys before racing back to the coach for his salvaged hard drives. Once he’d retrieved them he busily went about making the new intellimobile operational.
All of them smiled, remembering X-Ray’s outraged charge toward their ambushers with loaded pistols just a few hours ago. Now he was back in his element and happy. In a few minutes, monitors and lights started blinking and whirring computer noises could be heard from inside the van. X-Ray made “oohing” and “aahing” noises as the new equipment came to life.
He stuck his head out of the back of the new van and said to Boone, “You should have gotten me a rig like this a long time ago. I’ve been keeping everything together with bobby pins and Scotch tape.” Then he disappeared inside the new intellimobile and a few seconds later they all heard him whistling as he tapped away on the keyboards.
Boone gathered the others between the two coaches.
“Okay. We need to transfer everything off the old coach. I realize things got a little shaken up during the firefight, but we have to be careful. We need it to look as close to the old coach as humanly possible. Use the cameras on your phones. Take pictures of the way the contents are arranged in each drawer. Then use the photo as a guide for putting everything away on the new coach. I know it’s a lot of work, but we can’t let Roger and Blaze get wise to anything. If they notice something is amiss and start asking questions—”
“Boone, even with the four of us, it’s going to take a long time to move everything. We need to get some shut-eye,” Uly interrupted him. Uly wasn’t complaining. No one on the SOS team ever complained about anything serious. He was just stating facts.
“Don’t worry,” Boone said. “I was just about to call for help.”
He pulled out his phone and called Pat Callaghan.
On the Move. Again.
Here’s the thing. I had my laptop out, sitting across the table from Angela. To anyone observing, it would look like we were engrossed in homework. Actually it was Angela engrossed in homework. I was searching for any explanation as to how Boone could do his little poof! trick. So far I hadn’t found anything. That was annoying.
Agent Callaghan sat down next to us.
“We’ve got a situation,” he said.
Whenever a Secret Service agent sits down next to me and says, “We’ve got a situation,” it makes me really nervous. Who could blame me? For all I knew, the entire library could be surrounded by ninjas. Of course, since ninjas are invisible we’d never know if they surrounded us. I couldn’t help it. The last few days had made me a little jumpy. I wondered if everything in a Secret Service agent’s life was “a situation.” If they had dirty clothes, “We’ve got a laundry situation.” If they needed to go to the bank, “We’ve got a banking situation.” My mind was racing again. I needed to learn Bethany Culpepper’s yoga breathing or something.
“Boone and the crew just arrived at a warehouse. The old coach was shot up in the ambush and is not repairable. He managed to secure a new, identical one. But we need you guys to go over to the warehouse now. Boone wants you to look it over. Make sure it’s as close to the old one as possible,” he said.
“We can do that,” Angela said.
It sounded fine to me. I was happy to get out of there. Maybe it was being in a library that long that was giving me the heebie-jeebies. We packed up our stuff and a few minutes later were outside on the curb while Agent Callahan hailed a cab.
The cab dropped us at a location about six blocks from the warehouse where Boone and the others were waiting. I’d learned that being a spy involves a lot of walking. Not to mention the fact that Agent Callaghan had us double back and circle a couple of blocks a few times just to make sure no one was watching us. And even though I looked for him, I never saw Eben. So on we walked. Good thing I always wore comfortable shoes.
The building was nondescript. A battered sign that read “Security Storage” hung on the side. It looked like every other old, run-down warehouse in the area. We had to enter through a small office door at the front. Inside, it was really weird seeing the two coaches side by side. The old one looked like a brick of Swiss cheese. After seeing all the bullet holes, it made me wonder how anyone had survived.
“Wow,” Angela and I said at the same time. I was instantly happy Boone and the others hadn’t been injured. Looking at the coach, it seemed like a miracle.
Everyone was busy doing something and Boone stepped out of the
old coach, followed closely by Croc.
“Hey,” he said, smiling. “Glad to see you guys made it okay. Thanks for lending a hand, Pat.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Agent Callaghan said. “Jeez, Boone. What the heck happened? More importantly, how did you get through it? I’ve seen Humvees come through actual combat in better shape. Must have been some ambush.”
“It was a little hairy,” Boone said. Only he said it the same way he might have described how he’d nicked himself shaving. If Boone ever shaved, that is.
“Just tell me you got them all,” Callaghan said through gritted teeth.
“Yep. J.R. sent a clean-up crew. They’re taken care of. And we’ve got most of the personal items transferred to the new coach,” he said. “Angela and Q, I need you guys to go through your berths and in particular your parents’ room and see if everything looks okay. I’m trying to come up with a way to keep Roger and Blaze off the bus for a few days. But eventually they’re going to be back aboard. Don’t want to tip ’em off that anything’s different.”
Angela and I climbed aboard and did a thorough inspection. The new coach looked exactly like the old one. Boone and the SOS crew had been busy. Everything appeared to be in place. Angela’s bunk was neat and orderly, the bed made. My blanket and sheets were wadded up in a mass in the middle of the bed, just how I liked them.
“Everything looks pretty good,” Angela said.
“Take your time and make sure,” Boone said. “Blaze is suspicious by nature, don’t want her noticing anything that might make her ask questions. And some of the stuff got tossed around quite a bit in the firefight. We tried to replace everything as closely as I could remember it. Pay special attention to your parents’ room. The coach was fishtailing all over the place. Anything that wasn’t in a drawer went flying. Clothes got tossed around in the closet. It was a mess. It’s got to be right.”