by Lauren Child
Hitch and Ruby stepped out into the atrium.
‘So I was wondering,’ she said, ‘were you ever in the JSRP, you know, alongside Bradley Baker?’
‘What?’ said Hitch.
‘Did you train with him, you know, back when you were a boy?’
‘Just how old do you think I am?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Ruby, ‘fifty-five … fifty-seven.’
‘Kid, I’m forty-two.’ He shook his head. ‘Boy, never ask a child to guess your age; they’ll always have you pegged at just shy of decrepit.’
‘Didn’t mean to offend,’ said Ruby.
‘Don’t mind me, I got skin thicker than a crocodile’s,’ said Hitch. ‘But no, I wasn’t in the JSRP.’
She looked at him – if he was lying then he was the best in the business – he’s telling the truth, she thought.
‘Talking of crocodiles,’ she said, ‘what’s with that photograph?’
‘What photograph?’ asked Hitch.
‘The one of you looking into the eyes of that old croc.’
‘Oh, so you spotted that? I look good, don’t you think?’
‘It made me wonder.’
‘Made you wonder what?’
‘How you with your big fear of crocodiles could get up close and personal with such a huge reptile.’
‘Are you kidding?’ He began to laugh, really laugh. In fact, he laughed so hard that he didn’t look like he was ever going to stop.
‘What?’ she asked, annoyed that she wasn’t in on the joke.
‘That picture was taken at Disneyland,’ he wheezed. ‘He was made of rubber. Kid, you might want to get a new pair of spectacles.’ He stepped into the elevator.
‘Where are you off to? I thought maybe we could get a donut or something?’ said Ruby.
‘I’d love to, kid, but I’ve just got places to be.’ As the doors closed shut, he called, ‘See you later alligator!’
‘Funny,’ muttered Ruby, ‘real funny.’
She pulled on her parka, zipping it up ready for the cold she was about to step into, but just as she reached the door, she bumped into Hal coming the other way.
‘Thanks for the red bike,’ she said.
HAL: ‘I thought it was green.’
RUBY: ‘It’s red.’
HAL: ‘Ah.’
Pause.
RUBY: ‘You’re colour blind?’
HAL: ‘Yep.’
RUBY: ‘Priceless.’
HAL: ‘So you happy?’
RUBY: ‘Do I look happy?’
HAL: ‘I don’t know, do you? We’re not that well acquainted. Happy for you might be a whole different deal than for most kids.’
RUBY: ‘I’m not most kids, and I’m not looking happy.’
HAL: ‘Why not?’
RUBY: ‘Why would I want a red bike?’
HAL: ‘Because it’s jolly?’
RUBY: ‘I’m not a jolly type of person.’
HAL: ‘Because your name’s Ruby?’
RUBY: ‘Man, that’s lame. I would like the bike to be green. My bikes are always green.’
HAL: ‘You do realise the colour of the bike doesn’t affect your ability to ride it?’
RUBY: ‘In my case it does, in my case it has a pretty big effect on my ability to ride it.’
‘Leave it with me,’ said Hal, ‘I’ll have it resprayed.’
‘You know what, I think I’ll just do it myself,’ said Ruby. ‘I got a feeling if I leave it with you it might just end up purple, and then I really will be distressed.’
‘You not a fan of purple?’
‘What do you think?’ she said.
Ruby’s worry ran deeper than purple, of course. The real reason she wasn’t about to hand over her new and improved bicycle was because if one was in the business of needing some kind of getaway vehicle then a Spectrum bike fitted with hyper speed booster was a pretty good option.
‘Come with me,’ sighed Hal, ‘I’ll get you a can of green spray.’
She followed him down to the gadget room and waited while he got someone to fetch her exactly the right shade of green.
‘You’ll find it goes on really easily, no drips, dries instantly.’
Ruby thanked him a little grudgingly and turned to leave.
‘I’m meant to walk you to the exit,’ said Hal.
‘Oh come on, man, I can see myself out and you’ve got a ton of work to do, right?’
‘I got plenty,’ agreed Hal.
‘So I’ll skip along outta here and save you the trouble.’
‘OK,’ he said, ‘but no funny business.’
‘I can assure you of that,’ said Ruby, her expression angelic.
And off she went down the corridor, just like she should – only once she rounded the corner, she doubled-back, turned left instead of right, and sprinted along until she reached the violet door of room 324, the ‘Frog Pod’ as Blacker liked to call it – Froghorn’s office. She knocked, but there was no reply. She tried the door – it was locked, hardly a surprise – but Ruby had no difficulty getting past that little problem. She knew Miles Froghorn’s code because she’d had to figure it out not so long ago: it was pretty straightforward.
What she was looking for would surely not be on his desk. It would be locked away in his little safe underneath. She walked quickly around to the other side but her bag caught the pen-tidy on top of the table and its contents scattered across the surface and one by one each pen rolled off the desk and onto the floor.
‘Darn it!’ cursed Ruby, grabbing up the pens as they fell.
And there it was in her hand: the scytale cylinder pen. Froghorn had hidden it in plain sight right there in his neat little pen-pot. Ruby hesitated only for a second before snatching it up and slipping it into her pocket. Then she got out of there fast, aware that she needed to make it to the Prism Vault before Froghorn discovered that the decoder was gone.
The man looked down
at the bedraggled child and
wondered how the creature
had found him …
…‘so what do you imagine I can do for you?’ he asked. ‘Other than have you rounded up by the child-catcher … if only.’
‘I want to become your apprentice.’
He laughed at that. ‘I don’t take on worker bees.’
‘You should, I’m smart.’
‘I’m smarter than you and me put together,’ said the tall thin man. ‘Besides, I like to keep my own company. I have no trouble recruiting helpers when I require help. You’d be surprised how many upstanding citizens are prepared to sully their souls for the promise of a little money.’
‘I don’t want money.’
‘Everyone wants money.’
‘Not me.’
‘I’m intrigued by your naivety,’ said the Count. ‘Don’t tell me you are prepared to become my dogsbody and yet want nothing for your trouble.’
‘I don’t want nothing.’
‘I thought not. We all have our price – what’s yours?’
‘I want to know what you know.’
‘You want me to teach you the ways of the underworld? And what can you possibly give me in return?’
‘I know things you want to know.’
‘A wretch like you? I doubt that. Name a subject you might possibly know more about than I.’
‘Spectrum.’
He was silent for a moment.
Then:
‘So tell me, what’s your name?’
‘I have no name. I’m going to shed my past like a snake sheds its skin.’
‘How very poetic,’ said the Count.
Chapter 31.
Place of death
THIRTY-TWO MINUTES LATER and Ruby was standing inside the Prism Vault. She had expected to see her pencil lying there on the floor, but it had gone. Clearly someone had found it.
Question: if some other Spectrum agent authorised to visit the Prism Vault had found her pencil then why had they not notified security? Why had they not at
the very least checked to see who had Ghost File clearance?
Don’t think about that now, just find what you need and get out of here.
She tapped in the level two security code and wasted no time finding the Larvae files. What she hoped to find was the name of Bradley Baker’s would-be assassin. She wanted to know if it was possible that this young recruit had not let go of his murderous intention to rid the world of Spectrum’s brightest recruit.
The writing in the alley had implied this could be so.
Beware the child who yearned to be Larva,
disguised as a fly, but emerged a spider.
Perhaps this kid had bided his time and waited patiently for the perfect moment to bring his plan to fruition.
She read through the pages at speed, searching for information about the rapids incident and for the names of those there that day, but still she found nothing useful – only pages of encrypted text and blanked-out words with meaningless sections in between. She shook the file in frustration and then slammed it shut, and it was this action which seemed to dislodge a loose paper which had been tucked under the file sleeve.
It was a report of what had occurred that day at the rapids, and in it appeared two names which until then had been missing.
The first was the name of the child thought to be responsible for the attempted murder of Bradley Baker. A kid named Casey Morgan. Nothing could be proved – there seemed to be no witness to the incident – and if Art Hitchen Zachery had observed anything then he was possibly too traumatised to recall it. As for Morgan, he had run from the scene and had never been found, so his guilt was naturally assumed.
The second name in the report was of the child who had pulled Baker from the rapids, a kid named Loveday, that was it, nothing more.
Ruby had spent so long looking for this information that she was fast running out of time to search for the other thing she needed to know: why had Baker’s last radio contact been with Pinkerton? Pinkerton, an old man, retired and living quietly in leafy West Twinford? She had not a clue where to look for this information, and in any case she doubted what she hoped to find would be written in one of these files. She suspected that Baker and Pinkerton had communicated in secret. Perhaps they were aware of the presence of a mole even back then? As a last resort she decided to try the black files. Might they represent the dead? Was there some miniscule chance that one of these black files might contain information about Baker and Pinkerton, two Spectrum employees whose deaths were somehow intertwined?
It was a long shot, but long shots were all she had.
The black file was level three security and it directed her to the panel on the right-hand side of the door. She clicked it open and there found a narrow strip of paper which was printed with a long series of seemingly random letters. Next she took the cylinder pen from where it was tucked into her Superskin and wrapped the paper so the letters lined up. It said: cjk6xAsihX.
‘That can’t be right,’ she muttered.
She tried again, the letters made a word: Archilocus. The Greek poet who first mentioned Scytales.
Totally Froghorn, she thought.
She tapped the letters into the keypad and this time when she went to withdraw the file, it was released without problem.
What she found there nearly knocked her off her feet.
Black stood for space, not death, and what she read in this file filled in a lot of gaps.
Baker was part of the Spectrum Space Encounter programme. Space Encounter had top secret status, it said so all over the file and the main body of the document was still encrypted. She had heard not so much as a rumour about it within Spectrum’s walls; it was obviously a very well-kept secret.
The Spectrum Space Encounter programme had officially begun in 1961, the year President Kennedy had authorised the US space programme and its ambition to get to the moon.
She thought of Froghorn’s strange line, about Baker jumping from 14,000 feet: ‘It wasn’t a regular plane.’
Had it been a space craft of some kind? A shuttle?
She glanced at the clock.
Three minutes and counting.
Reading around the encrypted content, it seemed this ambition to conquer space had been in the planning for a number of years, tens of years in fact.
2
Spectrum had been selecting recruits for years, young recruits, very young … kids, in fact.
She turned the page: JSRP, the J the R and the P all pale blue, the S was black.
What does this mean? It means something, but what? Tick tock, tick tock, think Ruby think.
Pale blue was Froghorn’s code for kid, black was his code for space.
1
Got it!
JSRP did not stand for Junior Spy Recruitment Programme; it stood for Junior Space Recruitment Programme.
So where was this Spectrum space base?
She leafed through the pages as quickly as she could; the minutes were already gone, now it was the seconds that were ticking by.
51
50
49
48
No kidding.
44
43
42
Instead of a name, there was just that symbol. Three triangles interlocking. A skyline of mountains, the moon above.
Just like on Sven’s sweatshirt.
Bradley Baker had been flying somewhere in the Sequoia Mountains when someone had forced LB to choose between shooting down his craft or destroying, not a power plant … but the Spectrum space base.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
She had left it too late. There was a beeping and then the door began to close.
3
She scrabbled to her feet, pushing the file into place …
2
she ran for the exit,
1
threw herself through the gap, and
0
the door thunked shut.
She lay there for a minute, her heart racing, grateful to have made it out of the vault in time. She got to her feet and pressed the exit button, the door in the floor slid open and she climbed down into the tank. This time it was already full of water. That didn’t seem right.
The opening closed overhead and she began searching for the fly on the wall. She saw it and swam towards it but as she reached out her hand to touch it, so it moved. She tried again but again it got away from her, over and over she attempted to catch it but found it impossible. She was running out of air, she could hold her breath no longer.
Don’t panic. Think!
She felt for the breathing band. Five minutes of air, five precious minutes to figure this out.
She watched the fly as it moved from wall to wall, ceiling to floor, and figured there was a pattern to it. If she predicted its move before it landed, swatted it before it had settled, she would get it.
On the third attempt she did it, her hand slapped at the wall and the exit slid open, and Ruby kicked out into the ocean and up to where she could breathe. She swam slowly to shore and emerged from the black, dragging herself out of the water like some strange and half-dead sea creature. She lay there for a minute or two and when she looked up she spied a figure sitting on the rocks.
Her pulse quickened.
Not him, she thought, please not him.
She froze, wondering if it might not be best to head back out to Meteor Island. She was so exhausted she wasn’t sure she could make it that far, but she would prefer to drown than face whatever the Count might have in store for her.
The figure stood up and the silhouette alone told her it was not him. The Count would not be dressed in a modern puffa jacket and ear-flapped hat.
Darn it, Froghorn! Does it have to be you?
She had thought she might just be in the clear, that perhaps she had escaped undetected.
There was no point running, certainly not while she was wearing the Superskin
– so perfect for swimming, but useless for sprinting. So she got to her feet and trudged up the beach to face what was no doubt going to be a very uncomfortable barrage of righteousness.
But as she got closer she saw she was mistaken: not Froghorn but …
‘Clancy?’ she said.
Chapter 32.
Hit and run
‘HEY RUBE,’ SAID CLANCY. He sounded cold, his teeth chattering.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘Waiting for you.’ He shivered.
‘But how did you know I would be here?’
He shrugged. ‘A hunch, I guess. You did say you would be coming back and I tried to phone you a few times earlier and when you didn’t pick up I sort of supposed you would be swimming out to Meteor Island. I mean what else would you be doing at 5am?’
They rode their bikes back along the coast road and stopped in at Green-Wood House, so Ruby could change and pick up her school books. It was still early and the household was not yet awake, so the two of them slipped back out and made their way to the diner on Amster. Ruby ordered a double breakfast and Clancy listened while she described all that had happened.
And finally she told him of her mistake at having imagined Hitch could have been a junior recruit.
‘I think I might have offended him,’ said Ruby.
‘How?’ asked Clancy.
‘He asked me how old I thought he was.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Fifty-two.’
‘If you said that to my mom,’ said Clancy, ‘she would have you on double chores for the rest of the decade.’
School dragged a bit but it couldn’t be helped. Had she skipped another day’s schooling, Mrs Drisco would be well and truly on the warpath – it was becoming a challenge to think up reasonable excuses.
When the bell clanged, Ruby knew exactly where she was headed.
She found the City Library busy, but she bagged a place at one of the smaller tables towards the back of the hall. Dumping her coat, she walked up the steps to the newspaper archive room and started to go through the store of local news microfiche.
What she knew now was that Walter and Duke were right: there was a secret space base somewhere in the Sequoia Mountains and not so far from Little Mountain Side. She also knew that Bradley Baker had been flying there in some kind of space craft when he got shot down.