“We’re leaving, Hector!” Otter said.
“But I want to be a clown!” I wailed as he dragged me along, nearly dislodging my earpiece with his enthusiasm. The clown snatched the wig off my head as I passed them; I glanced back to see him and the ringmaster watching us go with some combination of fear and pity. Otter hauled me back down the path, past confused visitors; I tried to wipe my face off as we went but only succeeded in smudging all the makeup around. When we finally got into the car, it looked like I’d rubbed my face in pastel purple icing.
“Hale? Agent Otter? Are you still there?” Beatrix asked.
“Director Otter,” Otter corrected.
I ignored him. “We’re here. We’re out. On our way back now.”
Beatrix said, “Perfect. By the time you get back, I should have Twinkles Meatloaf’s financials and history pulled up and ready.”
“Is he still a . . . uh . . . practicing clown?” I asked.
“Looks that way. Though, whoa. Dude is old and craggily looking.”
I pulled up the edge of my shirt and made another attempt to wipe some of the face paint off (it didn’t work) and then said, “Perfect. Because we’ll need to book a performance.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
On the flight home, we were upgraded to first class because the lady at the gate desk thought my still slightly blue face was a symptom of some serious medical condition and felt sorry for me. I wasn’t about to argue, since first class meant better snacks and less arm-to-arm contact with Otter. He sat down and immediately ordered two glasses of wine that smelled like cheap pink candy. I got a Coke and ate some cookies, watching England vanish into the English Channel.
“Your English accent needs work,” Otter said. I rolled my eyes and didn’t say anything, because frankly, my English accent was better than his. He was just good at making his sound more London than I was. Otter went on, “We should hit up Twinkles’s house tomorrow. Then we’re ready for the bank.” One day was a quick turnaround, but seeing how quickly the trip to Wookey Hole came together, a simple break-in couldn’t be out of our reach.
As we crossed over into France, Otter removed a yellow legal pad from his bag and began to write up a mission report on Wookey Hole. No one would be reading it other than him, of course, but he still did them for every mission, even the practice ones we did back at League headquarters. I wasn’t sure if he ever went over them, or if he just did it because it was what he would’ve done at SRS. I sort of understood, to be honest. Writing up a mission report was like putting the period on the end of the sentence. Get all the details down and boom, you’re done—you can forget about it and focus on finding some dinner. I hadn’t done it since starting at The League, but I sort of wanted to. I always stopped myself, though—in part because Otter would want to collect and read them, just like any agency director would, and in part because it felt too much like SRS creeping back into my life, dictating my likes and dislikes and habits and schedule.
“Don’t you worry about doing that?” I asked.
Otter looked up at me and then frowned. “Huh?”
I did my best to keep my face even, to hide any trace of emotion—like I was just asking the answer to a math problem. “Don’t you worry about doing things the way SRS did them? Like writing up mission reports. You don’t have to do that, but SRS trained you to do it.”
“So do I worry I’m still an SRS puppet?” Otter asked, and there wasn’t any trace of sneer in his voice, which surprised me a little. I nodded, and Otter flipped his notebook over and exhaled. “Here’s the thing, Jordan, the thing that no one wants to say—SRS is good at their jobs. They’re the best spies in the world. They create the best spies in the world. You think most nine-year-old girls understand the finer points of explosives engineering? No, but Kennedy does. There’s a reason SRS was able to ruin The League all those years ago, and it’s because they’re better than The League. So to beat SRS, we’ll have to use what we learned there. They’re the best.”
“Okay, sure, using what we learned. But you’re writing mission reports. You don’t have to write mission reports for anyone, but SRS is in your brain, they’ve made it so you have to do that when you finish a mission,” I said.
Otter stopped and then looked at his notebook. He raised his eyebrows a little and then shrugged. “I do mission reports for myself. But maybe you’re right. Maybe I don’t know the difference between myself and the SRS agent.”
That wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear, and it tugged at my nerves that Otter sounded so cavalier about the whole thing. I turned away so he couldn’t tell all that from my face, but I suspected he figured it out anyhow.
A flight attendant in a sharp red uniform came by, refilling drinks. When she had passed, Otter dropped his voice and said, “Let’s arrange a performance from that clown tomorrow so we can scope out his house and get the books. If we’re right, if they’re there . . .” He shook his head. “Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe we shouldn’t have tried a bank heist so early on. I figured it was actually easier, since it didn’t involve uncovering SRS’s current missions—it just involved figuring out a bank’s weak points. But it’s impossible to plan anything here. I think, oh—we’ll get three agents on the job, give them a few tanks and an armored car—but wait, no. We don’t have tanks, and we have to rent cars. Or I think, okay, we’ll set up a giant fake server—but wait, we don’t have the server power to duplicate the Russian Internet. Or I think, hey, it’s fine, I’ll sleep on it and ask for someone else to weigh in. But wait, there is no one else.” He downed the rest of his wine and then put the plastic cup on his tray table and stared at it.
“Eventually some other agents will come over, I’m sure,” I said. “That’ll help.”
“What, like Walter’s mom?” Otter asked warily. In a weird way it was a relief to see he thought Mrs. Quaddlebaum joining us was just as unlikely as I did. Otter went on, “You know, I actually thought once we got out, your parents would swoop in? They’d take you and Kennedy and Walter, and then I’d go into hiding somewhere, and Clatterbuck and the twins could go be normal in . . . I dunno. Pittsburgh or something. No, someplace where people wear lots of weird costumes. New York. Clatterbuck’d be at home in New York.”
I turned away from him and looked straight ahead to answer. “Well. I thought that too. About my parents, I mean.”
Otter shook his head and sighed. “They’ll come back eventually though.”
“When is eventually?” I asked.
Otter raised an eyebrow at me, like he wasn’t sure we should be having this sort of conversation. “When they can, Jordan.”
I scoffed. “Well. Let’s hope they can get around to it sometime soon.” I immediately felt a little bad for saying that out loud, but Otter wasn’t like Kennedy or Walter—I didn’t have to pretend to be all hopeful for him. We sat in silence for a few minutes.
“Well. I’ll say this, at least—I never thought I’d hope for the day Katie and Joseph Jordan would walk through my door,” Otter finally muttered, sounding disgusted with himself.
“Never hoped for the day I’d be on an overseas mission with you as my partner,” I answered, and Otter pretended to clink his empty plastic cup against my empty Coke can in cheers.
Clatterbuck was waiting for us at the airport, dressed as a chauffeur and holding a sign that said INTERNATIONAL SWISS CLOWN COMMITTEE. I wasn’t entirely sure why he couldn’t just meet us in the parking lot with the car, but that was really just Clatterbuck’s style. Plus, I think he liked wearing the chauffeur’s hat. We arrived back at the farmhouse just as Ben and Kennedy finished half burning a frozen pizza in the oven.
“It’s not my fault! I got distracted because, Hale, I taught Annabelle a really great trick!” she said, beaming—then coughing a little from inhaling the burnt pizza smoke.
“Did you teach her to order delivery pizza?” Otter asked flatly.
Kennedy’s enthusiasm couldn’t be dampened. “No, watch!” She picked off a particu
larly crispy piece of pizza crust. Annabelle, having already jumped at me and Otter gleefully, was now standing by with pleading eyes and smacking lips. “Annabelle, lie down,” Kennedy said calmly. Annabelle obeyed, though her eyes got somehow even more pleading.
I smiled supportively and nodded. “You taught her to lie dow—”
“We’re not done,” Kennedy said. “Annabelle, play dead!”
Annabelle rolled onto her back and stuck all four feet in the air. It was an impressive enough rendition of “dead” that even Otter made an approving noise.
“How’d you teach her that?” I asked.
“It was easy! She’s not really in great shape, so after we brought her back in from chasing the ponies, this is what she did for about an hour. I just started giving her treats and then adding commands.”
Otter sighed and pulled the least-charred slice of pizza away from the other pieces. The rest of us fixed our plates (and opened a few windows for the smoke) while Otter and I explained our next steps.
“You’re breaking into Twinkles’s house tomorrow?” Beatrix asked when we were finished. “Isn’t that a little fast? If you give me a few days, I bet Ben and I can piece together house blueprints based on satellite photos. Or we can probably find the actual blueprints, if they’re still on file with the city.”
“It’s a simple smash-and-grab job, I’m sure,” I said, shaking my head at her. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll call and say we have an emergency birthday party or something. Twinkles comes here, we’ll go in there, find the helium chamber, grab the books, and go.”
“It’s best if you move them into another helium chamber. Maybe I can rig up something in the trunk? But overnight . . . huh. Well. I can just skip sleep,” Ben said thoughtfully.
“I’ll arrange a rental car for you to drive there in, since having priceless books on the city bus is probably a bad idea,” Clatterbuck said.
“What about cameras? Or alarms?” Kennedy asked.
“Cameras won’t matter—he can’t call the police, because he stole the books to start with—but sure, we should be prepared for them just in case. And alarms . . . Well, if he’s here, it’ll take him at least an hour to get back and check the alarms if they signal him,” I said.
“But what if they’re just regular house alarms you set off, the sort that call the police, because he doesn’t have the books?” Clatterbuck asked.
“He has them,” I said.
“Well, most likely, but I still think it’s a little strange that a clown would steal priceless books and store them for years,” Clatterbuck said.
“He has them,” I repeated, and turned to face him. “All signs point to this guy, okay? It makes a lot more sense for a third party to have them than SRS, anyway.”
“Okay,” Clatterbuck said, nodding. I could tell he wasn’t entirely convinced. That he still thought SRS might have the books, that my parents might have been the ones to steal them so many years ago.
But no. SRS already had my parents and my past and my foreseeable future. SRS even had my stuff—my house, my bedspread, the rocks Dad brought me back from that mission to a Peruvian volcano.
They couldn’t have the books too.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mission: Steal back the Runanko Books from Twinkles Meatloaf
“We’re letting this guy in the farmhouse?” Kennedy said, staring at the website. Twinkles Meatloaf—er, Kevin Stroganoff—looked like his skin was melting off his face. His makeup was patchy, and even his wig seemed to have thinning hair. There were no photos of him without his clown getup, but if the made-up versions were any indication, he wasn’t exactly a looker. I wasn’t especially afraid of clowns, but this guy could very well change all that.
“We won’t need much time,” I said, pulling a shirt over my old SRS uniform. This was just a simple break-in, but still, I felt like it was wise to have the uniform on under my clothes—or maybe it just made me feel more like a real spy. Kennedy and Walter were wearing theirs as well; Kennedy’s had become a bit snug, given her growth spurt over the summer. She closed the laptop she’d been looking at and handed it to Beatrix. We were clearing all of Beatrix’s computer stuff out of the kitchen so Twinkles wouldn’t see it when he arrived.
The back door opened, and Ben, Clatterbuck, and Otter walked in, Annabelle trailing them with what looked like a dismembered robot arm in her mouth.
Ben grinned. “It’s from one of my older model robots, don’t worry. Anyway, helium tanks are installed in the back of the car, Hale. Should be all set to safely hold the books until we can get them back to Hastings.” He motioned for me, Walter, and Kennedy to gather around him. “All right, so, chances are that the books are in a helium chamber, just like they were at Hastings’s. If you can get into the tank legitimately—pick the lock or something—it’ll probably turn the helium pump off. But if you have to just shatter it or bust it up, the mechanism won’t flip the helium off, and it’ll fill the whole room with helium. Depending on the size of the room, that can be really dicey—the helium will rise to the top of the room, just like a helium-filled balloon floats up. Assuming the room has an average height ceiling for the homes in the area, that means, you”—he pointed to Walter—“will be too tall to stay in the oxygen. You’ll be breathing pure helium.”
“And that’s bad,” Walter said.
“Very. You’ll suffocate. So I made you this out of scuba gear and some vacuum tubes,” Ben said. He reached to the side of the couch and grabbed a little canister with a long hose attached to something that looked like a hacked-up scuba mask. “Put this over your mouth. The pump takes the air—the oxygen, really—from around your feet and sends it up the tube to your head. It’s called the B(reathe)-EN.”
“Whoa,” Walter said. “Thanks.”
“I went ahead and put together your belts with the stuff I think you’re most likely to need—the basics, of course, and then a few odds and ends. You’ve got the CariBENer, the DustBEN, the BEN of All Trades. There’s also a can of spray paint, just in case he has cameras you need to take out.”
That wasn’t really how I would take out a camera—I’d likely just unhook it rather than blacken the screen—but a lot of Ben’s spy knowledge still came from movies. I nodded and took my utility belt from him. Kennedy had fewer items on hers—since she was usually the one who had to slink in places, she couldn’t carry around a lot of tools. Walter’s belt was nearly entirely taken up by the B(reathe)-EN, which made him look a little like he’d decided to go all high fashion and wear a garden hose as a belt. I was surprised he didn’t look embarrassed by that, but I guess when a device is going to help you not suffocate, you don’t blush at the thought of it.
“Let’s go rob a clown,” Walter said, grinning.
Step 1: Break into Twinkles’s house
“There he goes!” Kennedy said. We were parked down the street from Twinkles’s house, and had been for nearly an hour. I looked up just in time to see a sketchy-looking car swerve away, driven by a man who either had terrible red hair or was wearing an enormous clown wig.
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“Of course! Come on!” Kennedy said. Otter and Walter slipped back into the front seat of the car, leaving Kennedy and me to jump in the back. We didn’t have anyone running mission control from the farmhouse—everyone there would be too busy at the fake birthday party we were holding to get Twinkles away—which made my ears feel strangely quiet. I wondered if we should have packed two comms just to communicate with one another, in case we somehow became separated—
“That’s it,” Otter said quietly as he slid the rental car into a street parking spot. He pulled out a map and made a show of opening it as we surveyed the house.
This wasn’t going to be easy. The house didn’t have much of a backyard, so there wasn’t a lot of tree cover. There was a fence, but it was just chain-link, so it wouldn’t hide us from the neighbors. We’d need to get inside and out of sight quickly.
The three of u
s walked slowly up the driveway, at first
acting casual. Then, when we were sure no one was looking, we darted around the side of the house, to the hopefully more secluded backyard—
I groaned. The backyard got brilliant sunlight and was almost entirely consumed by a giant deck. We were practically breaking into this place on a stage. I grabbed ahold of a piece of patio furniture and sat down. Walter and Kennedy plopped into other chairs immediately. Kennedy leaned all the way back in hers, as if enjoying the sun. Anyone who happened to see us would just think we were out enjoying the weather on our porch.
I surveyed the back of the house. Nothing special, except that there was one room just off the deck with a window air-conditioning unit. I removed one of Ben’s inventions from my belt—the BENchwarmer—which was basically a pocket-size battering ram. I extended the BENchwarmer—it looked like one of those toy swords, the kind that zips out—then leaned over the deck railing and lined the BENchwarmer up with the air-conditioning unit.
Bang. The BENchwarmer knocked the unit cleanly into the house, leaving a rectangle about one foot by two feet wide open. Before I could even put the BENchwarmer down, Kennedy had sprung over the side of the deck, balancing herself on first the ledge of the deck, then the windowsill. She pushed off the deck and, without the slightest wobble in balance, slid neatly through the window. I went back to looking casual but held my breath; from the looks of it, Walter was holding his too. What if we’d been wrong, and Twinkles was still home? What if—
“Welcome,” Kennedy said smartly as she opened the back door, grinning. Walter and I exhaled at once and then hurried in.
I sort of wished we hadn’t. Twinkles’s house smelled like cheese. I made a face.
“I know. I think it’s the trash,” Kennedy said, frowning. She didn’t mean the trash in the trash can. She meant the trash everywhere. The coffee table was covered in food takeout boxes. The floor was covered in laundry—some of it old and dingy underwear, which I knew I’d never be able to unsee. The kitchen was flooded with dirty dishes.