* * *
Ackers stood outside Johnny’s front door. He looked nervous, and took frequent quick glances around to see if anyone was watching him. This was preposterous; no one knew he was here. Ackers tried to stop looking so out of place, he had to focus on the task at hand, compartmentalize each step, and follow through to his goal.
He glanced at his next objective, getting past the front door. In all likelihood, there was no one at home. Johnny B. Fast would be at school, and his dad would have gone to work. The lack of a car on the driveway confirmed this. Ackers gave himself a moment to pat himself on the back for his acute, observational skills.
So now the next step had to do with bypassing the locked door. Ackers reached out his hand and tried to turn the door handle, it didn’t move. It was definitely locked. Of course it was, but Ackers couldn’t take it for granted. Some things had to be investigated instead of assumed, and now that he knew for sure the door was locked, he knew exactly how to proceed. He checked the driveway again to make sure the car was still gone.
Ackers gave out a loud sigh; he was stalling and he knew it. Then he glanced around the street quickly to see if anyone saw him sigh and would think that he was out of place. Then he berated himself for acting so foolish and amateurish. He tried to turn the handle again, just to be sure. Still locked, and still no car in the driveway.
Enough of this, it was time to get down to business. Ackers took the backpack off his shoulders and put it on the ground. Zipping it open, he dug through a series of gadgets and food rations, looking for a particular device.
Having found it, he brought out what looked like a large thermometer with handles. It had a line of blue, instead of red, liquid trapped inside a see-through tube. Ackers carefully inserted the device into the crack on the door, and then he squeezed what looked like the blue mercury down the tube, out of the device and into the door. He kept squeezing until there was no more blue liquid in his device. Then he got back up and waited, watching as a stream of smoke came out of the door.
“Now, I should have applied just enough that the liquid will bypass the lock’s structural integrity for a matter of moments, allowing me to bend it like rubber and open the door before the lock returns to a solid state,” Ackers thought out loud.
As he was thinking, he realized there was a presence behind him. He froze. He couldn’t believe it; there was definitely someone standing behind him on the porch.
He was caught already! How did this happen? The United Order wasn’t supposed to know any of their real identities, let alone where Johnny lived. Perhaps Ackers had slipped up on security somewhere? Was that even possible?
Ackers slowly turned around to see a paper delivery boy standing on the porch with his mouth hanging open in surprise. Ackers immediately sprang into action, using nothing but words to try and confuse and misdirect the potential assassin.
“What are you doing there?” Ackers said.
The boy held out the paper in answer, his mouth still open as he looked at the weird gadget sticking out of the front door.
“Yes, thank you, I was looking for this,” Ackers said as he took the paper out of the paper boy’s hands and then dropped it to the ground.
“You’re a little late, aren’t you? Isn’t this supposed to be delivered first thing in the morning? While it is morning, it most certainly is not first thing,” Ackers rambled, trying to get some sort of information out of the paper boy while confusing him at the same time.
The boy continued to stare at the gadget. Ackers had a sneaking suspicion that this wasn’t an assassin after all.
He was so relieved he almost fainted right there. But then he was immediately proud of himself. Look how well he had handled the situation! Of course the boy was nothing but a civilian, and there really wasn’t much of a situation to handle, but Ackers was too relieved to think about any of these things.
“I am just locked out of my house. Don’t worry, the situation will resolve itself in a moment,” Ackers said, thinking quickly that he now had to appear as normal as possible so as not to arouse too much suspicion and have the paper boy call in any authorities.
Ackers gave the front door a small push. The bolt from the lock bent like rubber and allowed the door to swing open into the house.
“You see? I’m back in my house, not a problem to concern yourself with,” Ackers said with his biggest and most uncomfortable looking smile. It almost looked like Ackers was straining his facial muscles to spread his lips far enough across his face. Ackers rarely smiled, and it was entirely possible that his muscles had atrophied from lack of use. His face started twitching with the effort of keeping his lips spread wide enough to hold the smile.
The paper boy became slightly more alarmed the longer he stayed with Ackers. He started taking a few steps back off the porch.
There was a high-pitched sound coming from somewhere inside the house. Ackers turned away from the paper boy and peered into the house. What was that sound?
“The alarm!” Ackers yelled to the paper boy as soon as he figured it out. “It is most likely giving me a thirty second delay to enter the proper code to let the computer and the alarm monitoring station know that I have returned home to the house that I live in.”
Ackers was simply no good at this, but he thought he was doing a splendid job of putting the paper boy at ease. If anything, the paper boy would have probably been less alarmed if he had stumbled upon a group of people wearing masks and trying to openly burglarize the house.
The paper boy took a stumbling step back, and then another, and ended up almost tripping and tumbling down the stairs. Ackers turned his attention back to the alarm. He stepped inside the house, and then went back outside again to pick up the paper that was just delivered and the thermometer gadget he had just used to open the door.
“Don’t want to forget this,” Ackers held up the paper as he called out. The paper boy hurried away. Satisfied that he had done his best to appear like he lived in the house, Ackers went back inside and slammed the door behind him.
He approached the alarm keypad that was emitting the noise and inspected it from a distance. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a square box that had its own keypad on the front of it. He placed the box over the alarm keypad, completely covering it, and then started entering random number combinations on his own keypad.
He worked methodically, trying all different sorts of numbers in different orders and observing the display on his box as he typed. Soon the display told him that he had three out of four numbers correct. Ackers didn’t have much time left, the alarm was about to go off. He got the fourth number! Almost there, now he had to find the right order. Perfection! The job was done and the high-pitched noise stopped.
Ackers slumped against the wall, exhausted. No wonder he stayed back at the base; how was anyone supposed to think clearly when they were out in the field with all these distractions?
He got a good look at the combination of numbers that he had just used to turn the alarm off.
“Four, three, two, one? What kind of a code is that? They might as well have left the door open.”
Ackers detached his keypad box and threw both it and his lock picking gadget into his backpack. Now that he was inside, his next step was finding the Super Chip.