by Roland Smith
We went into the master suite in the rear and that’s where I found one thing Boone and the others missed. I opened Roger’s closet. All of his clothes were hung neatly organized by color, the shirts on the left-hand side, the pants on the right. His shoes were lined up on the floor like soldiers standing at attention. There was a little shelf on the side of the closet that held his belts, neatly rolled up and stored. I looked at Angela and she nodded.
“That’s my dad,” she said. “I think that’s where I get my organizational skills.”
I opened my mom’s closet. It looked just like Roger’s, with clothes, shoes, belts, and accessories neatly stored. Which made it all wrong.
I removed a couple of Mom’s blouses from their hangers and wadded them up, tossing them on the closet floor. I mixed up the hangers so the pants and dresses were intermingled. And I kicked her shoes around a bit so that no single shoe was next to its mate.
Boone chuckled and Angela just shook her head.
Done with the closet, I headed into their bathroom. Her makeup and hair products on the sink must have fallen to the floor. Whoever replaced them set them neatly on the sink, next to one another. I scattered them all over the place the way Mom normally did. And for the crowning touch, I took her bathrobe, which had been hanging on a hook on the door, wadded it up, and tossed it on their bed.
“There,” I said. “Now she’ll never suspect a thing.”
Avoidance
The hotel lobby was chaos again. Word had filtered out that Match was staying there and the lobby was filling up with paparazzi and looky-loos. And since Mom and Roger and everyone had just returned from a round of media appearances and were standing in the lobby, everyone was getting an eyeful. And an earful from Buddy T.
We rode back to the Four Seasons with Pat, Boone, and Vanessa in the new intellimobile 2.0—as X-Ray had christened it. He sat in the back at his console and looked prepared to spend the next several months there without leaving. I had to admit it was a huge upgrade over the original. The seats were leather and comfortable. Felix and Uly ran countersurveillance on the intellimobile 2.0 as we drove the Chicago streets to the hotel. It made me wonder when any of them ever slept. Vanessa had stayed behind to guard the new coach and supervise the disposal of the old coach with the president’s clean-up crew. Given that Boone could poof all over the place, I started wondering if his entire SOS crew might have superpowers of some kind, because they never seemed to tire. Probably not. But you never know.
We went into the hotel first, with Agent Callaghan. Mom, Roger, Heather, and Marie and Art were standing off to one side of the lobby. Buddy T. was being Buddy T. His face was red, and he was waving his arms all about. All we could hear over the lobby noise was “off schedule,” “over budget,” and “losing money.” Buddy T. was at his loudest when it came to anything involving money.
Mom spotted us and looked relieved.
“Q Angela! How did the studying go?” she asked, interrupting Buddy T. in mid-tirade.
“It went fine, Mom, we’re almost caught up,” I said. Angela was behind me and gave me a little punch in the kidney. Mom’s eyes squinted at me a little bit.
“Um. Yeah. I mean. We’ll be caught up real soon,” I said. I had no idea when we would be caught up because I hadn’t been the one doing most of the work. Like I said, I’m a horrible liar, especially when I’m put on the spot.
Mom started rummaging through her purse. “I know it’s here somewhere,” she muttered, just loud enough for me to hear over the noise of the lobby.
“What’s here?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“Oh. Here it is.” She pulled the boarding-school brochure out of her purse. The same one she showed us on the plane that morning.
“You do remember what Roger and I said, don’t you?” she said.
“Uh. Yeah. But we’re getting caught up and—”
“Blaze, really, we’ve got to deal with the schedule issue,” Buddy T. interrupted. “If Q and Angela can’t keep up on their homework, why don’t you just send them to the school and get it over with?”
That was a mistake. Agent Callaghan, who had been talking to Heather, overhead Buddy T. being a buttinksy. Agent Callaghan didn’t like Buddy T. He took the opportunity to get in Buddy T.’s personal space. Buddy T. gulped and took a step back.
“Hmm. Maybe you ought to leave what happens to Q and Angela to be decided by—you know—their parents instead of an obnoxious music manager,” he said. Agent Callaghan was quite menacing when he wanted to be.
“Who are you …?” Buddy T. sputtered, but his words were cut off as Agent Callaghan took a step closer to him.
“I’m somebody you really don’t want to mess with.”
Buddy T. was saved by Boone’s arrival. “Hey, y’all,” he said. “How’s it hangin’?” Good-ole-boy Boone was back.
“Boone!” Blaze said. She gave him a hug. “We’re glad you made it.”
“Hey, Boone,” Roger said. Roger did not hug Boone. Roger was not the hugging type.
Buddy T. took the opportunity to dodge around Agent Callaghan and turn his ill temper on Boone. He started right in on Boone, trying to recover from his humiliation at the hands of Agent Callaghan. “It’s about time you got here. What took you so long? I’m not paying you to work banker’s hours. You need to—”
Croc growled at Buddy T.
“And get that mutt out of here, I’m sure the hotel isn’t going to want a stinky mutt staying in rooms that cost five hundred dollars a night. I’m not paying you to lollygag around or to clean up after some filthy dog and—”
“Actually, Buddy,” Heather interrupted him, “you aren’t paying Boone at all. Roger and Blaze are. So maybe you need to switch to decaf and take a break. Everyone is tired and we’ve got a long night ahead of us.”
“I don’t need this.” Buddy waved his hand in the air and stomped off. Buddy T. was always storming off somewhere.
“That’s my girl,” Agent Callaghan said, beaming. I wasn’t sure if Heather was really his girl or not, but she blushed anyway.
“I’ve got an idea,” Agent Callaghan said. “Let’s have a pizza party before we leave for the concert. There’s a great Chicago-style pizza place close by, and they deliver.”
“Do they have vegetarian?” Roger asked.
“I’m sure they do,” Agent Callaghan said.
“Y’all go on without me,” Boone said. “I gotta catch some z’s.” He and Croc headed for the elevator. Angela made a little frustrated hissing sound because she’d been waiting for an opportunity to get Boone’s attention. She wanted more answers but he’d escaped her clutches once again.
“I could go for pizza!” I said. Hoping my mom would forget about the boarding-school issue. No such luck. I got her stern mom look. The one she busts out when she can’t believe I’d really try and test her resolve.
“No pizza parties until homework is caught up,” she said.
And so Angela and I passed the next few hours in our rooms. Listening to the sounds of laughter and smelling pizza coming from our parents’ suite. We were stuck doing more homework.
Roger ordered us salads from room service.
Yuck.
Everybody Talks About the Weather
X-Ray was busy “redecorating” the intellimobile 2.0. It was parked on the street outside the hotel. He used a Chicago Public Works parking credential that clipped on to the visor to keep the van from being towed. One by one he transferred data from his rescued hard drives to the new units inside the new command post.
X-Ray was overjoyed with the new equipment. Boone must have pulled some giant strings. X-Ray was pretty sure the computers he was now using were highly classified. You certainly couldn’t pick one up at your local electronics store.
Once all the data had been transferred from his old hard drives, X-Ray ran a special program he’d written to wipe them completely clean. Nothing entered on a computer was ever truly erased. Except with his program. Once it ran, the har
d drives were effectively destroyed. He set them aside. Later he would completely disassemble them and have them melted down for scrap.
After he restored all his files from the hard drives, he turned his attention to the data he’d stored on the cloud. Only X-Ray’s cloud was not like a normal person’s, where music and movies were stored. It was more like a part of his private atmosphere.
And that was when the idea hit him.
Atmosphere.
X-Ray reached into his duffel bag, where he kept a spare laptop and other gear. He found the iPhone Q had filched from Miss Ruby at the Firebrand Ranch in Texas. The phone logs, contacts, and call records were all encrypted. X-Ray had uploaded all of the phone data several hours earlier. He was running it all through a decryption program. Given his previous experience with the ghost cell, he realized it was unlikely he’d uncover anything usable. The numbers would be to burner phones or public phones in airports or bus stations. But he still went through the exercise.
However, the interesting thing about Miss Ruby’s phone was that it contained several dozen photographs of Chicago. Images of the buildings, streets, and parks were intermingled with pictures of some of the city’s most famous skyscrapers. In addition to the ordinary photographs that looked like they could be from a normal sightseeing trip, there were a couple that stood out.
Somehow Miss Ruby had gotten aerial views of the rooftops of the Sears Tower, the John Hancock Center building, and several other pictures of Chicago’s tallest skyscrapers. Why the rooftops? What was so interesting about the tops of these structures?
Atmosphere.
The word kept tugging at X-Ray’s thoughts. The ghost cell thus far had used a variety of explosive devices, mostly car bombs. Could they be planning an attempt to take down a building? How? The logistics, the security issues, and access to the buildings would be difficult to overcome. A car bomb was mobile, could be parked anywhere and positioned to create mass causalities.
Unless.
The atmosphere.
X-Ray scrolled through the photos again.
Chicago was nicknamed the Windy City. Most people mistakenly thought it was because of the strong winds that blew off of Lake Michigan. And that was part of the reason. But the nickname actually came from the nineteenth century. Back then America was growing and cities competed against each other for businesses to locate in their area. Chicago sent out politicians, bankers, and city boosters to try and attract investment in their burgeoning city. But rival promoters from cities like St. Louis or Cincinnati would tell investors anyone from Chicago was “full of wind.” The nickname stuck.
X-Ray studied the photographs again, pulling up only the ones showing the rooftops of the skyscrapers. In all of the images, the sparkling blue lake was clearly visible in the background. The lake. Where the wind came from.
X-Ray had earned his nickname from Boone. Until he’d worked with the SOS crew, his colleagues had just referred to him as Ray. But Boone once said, on a job many years ago, that Ray could “see through data, like an X-ray machine.” And the nickname stuck.
The wind. The atmosphere. The data.
X-Ray bent over the keyboard and pulled up weather maps. He dug into the National Weather Service database and started studying average wind velocity, wind patterns, and the seasonal effects of temperature and precipitation in Chicago.
The photos on Miss Ruby’s phone meant something.
X-Ray was going to find out what it was.
Clueless
Listening to everyone have fun (and even worse, smelling pizza) was making me nuts. It didn’t seem to bother Angela. I guess we still had a lot of homework. I had sent all my photos and videos from my phone to Angela. For the last few hours she had been working on updating the website.
Being caged up in the hotel room was driving me bananas. As I may have mentioned, I was no longer comfortable in hotel rooms. A good kidnapping from a hotel room will change your views on them completely.
While Angela worked at her laptop, I paced in my room. As I wore a groove in the carpet, I did coin tricks with my magic coins. And that led me to compiling a list. Making up lists is another thing I do when I get antsy. I don’t know why I was so jumpy. Aside from the terrorists and stuff, I mean. Right at that particular moment, I shouldn’t have been so uptight. Mom always tried to teach me that sometimes you’re able to calm yourself if you make a list of what’s bothering you. Then you try to work your way through it.
So I mentally compiled a record of things that had bothered me the last few days:
Being kidnapped.
Having a knife pointed at my throat.
Held at gunpoint by some really scary terrorists. Twice.
Getting pigeon poop on my hands.
Being threatened with boarding school. (This might move nearer to the top. School is bad enough. But this is a school where you actually have to live there. All. The. Time.)
Traveling down the interstate behind a car loaded with about a gazillion pounds of high explosives.
Being drugged by terrorists.
Stuck in a coach for long hours with the world’s smelliest dog.
Having to eat Roger’s vegetarian diet. (One that might also get moved closer to the top.)
A knock sounded at the door to Angela’s room.
“Would you mind getting that,” she muttered from her desk.
“Yes,” I said.
“What? Why?” I hollered at her, a little annoyed. “Because the last time I answered the door in a hotel I got kidnapped.”
“No, the last time you answered the door it was Agent Callaghan. Remember?”
Oh yeah. Details.
I sighed and went to the door. Through the peephole I saw my mom and Roger waiting out in the hallway.
“Who is it?” I said.
“Open up, Q. It’s your mom and Roger,” she said.
I wanted to ask them for ID. Seriously, I knew it was Mom and Roger. But jeez-o-pete, with my luck, since we’d learned that Boone and Croc could poof all over the place, how was I to know the ghost cell didn’t employ shape-shifters? Maybe shape-shifter Mom and Roger had taken out Marie and Art. Not-Really-The-Real-Roger was here to feed us kale until we confessed. Or something.
I opened the door and they strolled in. Mom was happy and smiling. Roger was not frowning.
“Mom, Roger, I’m glad you’re here. We’ve gotten a lot of our homework done. How was the pizza? We could smell it, you know,” I said.
Angela was suddenly overcome by a loud coughing fit. For once it was my turn to give her the stink eye. After all, I had taken all the photos and video.
“In fact,” I said, “we can show you the updated—”
“You’ll never guess who we just heard from,” Mom interrupted. The thing is, with my mom, I can never tell what she’s up to. She didn’t look mad or unhappy, but … careful, Q.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’ll … never …” I tried to speak cautiously. Maybe Mom had found out something she wasn’t supposed to know. If I said one wrong word, our carefully constructed deception could come tumbling down.
“Your teacher, Mr. Palotta! He just e-mailed us. You’re all caught up on your homework. Not only that, he says it’s a ‘spectacular’ effort. That was his word—spectacular.”
“We are?” I asked.
Mom and Roger looked at me quizzically and Angela coughed again in warning.
“Are you getting a cough, sweetie?” Mom asked.
“Oh, no,” Angela said, kind of glaring at me. “Just swallowed wrong is all.”
“I meant we did,” I said. “Work really hard. To get caught up. With the assignments. And … stuff.” I had no idea we were caught up. Because I thought Angela, who had been tapping away on her computer forever, was still catching us up. If she’d already sent in the work, what had she been doing all the rest of the time? And why hadn’t she given me a heads-up?
She could have clued me in. If our homework was done, we could have snuck down to t
he lobby restaurant for real food while everyone else was scarfing down pizza next door. I wouldn’t have had to eat a salad that tasted like feet. Or stalk back and forth making lists of why my life had been so—interesting—the last few days.
“So we just wanted to come over and tell you we’re proud of you. You kept up your end of the bargain,” Mom said. Roger nodded.
“We’re heading over early to do the sound check and some more interviews. We probably won’t see you until the concert, but Boone will check in in a while and I guess you guys are free until then.”
“That’s great!” I said. I had visions of finding the nearest cheeseburger.
“Okay, we’ll see you at the United Center,” Mom said. Everybody hugged and they left.
When the door shut behind them I spun around and looked at Angela.
“Clue a dude in once in a while, would you?” I said.
“Sorry, I finished it,” she said. “Should have told you.”
“If you weren’t doing homework, what have you being working on all this time?” I asked.
“Boone,” Angela said, “or also known as General Antonio Beroni. Colonel Anthony Berton. And Anthony Borneo. Among other aliases. Had a very interesting e-mail from P.K. a while ago. P.K. is not like any ten-year-old I’ve ever met, I might add. But nevertheless. You aren’t going to believe what he found out.”
I was pretty sure I wouldn’t.
Change of Plans
Ever since her return to the safe house the previous day, Malak had been pondering the strange appearance of the envelope. Try as she might, she could not escape the sensation that someone was toying with her. While she puzzled it over, she paced, did calisthenics and yoga, and finally slept fitfully for a few hours.
As always whenever she was somewhere unfamiliar, she did not use the bedroom or the couch in the living room. To the Leopard, there was no such thing as a “safe” house. In her line of work alliances, friendships, coalitions, and cooperation shifted like the wind. There was always the chance that whoever she was working with at the time would turn on her. It had happened several times. Those who sold her out quickly came to regret it. She trusted no one except Ziv.