Too late. Whatever, or whoever, it was turned in my direction. I saw eyes. And a body . . . but something was wrong with it.

  It was as though two eyes were perched upon a wave running from head to foot.

  A stealth suit! Designed to mimic a bird’s wings, no doubt. We had been trying to develop something like this at Swift Enterprises for years, ever since my dad did work on the air force’s Skunkwork project utilizing stealth flying technology.

  Impressive.

  The person turned away from me, and I was left watching the apparent ripple of a bird’s feathers. The person wearing the suit didn’t see me, or at least they saw me and didn’t care if I was looking straight at them. Why? Because they were invisible to the naked eye. It was only because I was using my infrared goggles that I was able to make out any movement at all.

  No doubt this stealth suit—any stealth suit, in fact—could disguise the body’s natural heat: 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. If you could “see” them without a thermal sensor, like the kind I had incorporated into my night-vision goggles, the suit would be practically worthless. But I guessed that whoever developed it must not have taken into account external heat.

  Case in point: If you were standing next to a blast furnace with an open door, your body temperature wouldn’t rise immediately, but the temperature of your clothes would.

  And I guess that the heat of the hangar’s metal roof, warm from the sun pounding on it all day, had caused the stealth suit to pick up some additional degrees—external warmth, unregulated by the suit’s sensors, that took a while to shake off.

  That was just a guess, a hypothesis, a conjuncture at best.

  How did they get on the roof, though? Paraglide? Maybe. We’d probably be able to find the saboteur’s parachute in the morning. By that time, they’d be long gone.

  Darn! I wished Bud would answer. I punched his number again.

  The window of the hangar opened. By this point, the stealth suit must have cooled down, because I couldn’t see anyone beneath the window pushing it open.

  If I called security now, our Mr. Invisible might hear the noise and fly the coop unseen. If I sat there hoping Bud would stroll by, the saboteur might disappear back into the night.

  I couldn’t wait. I had to go in.

  Keeping low, I began to make my way to the window. At the side of the building I waited a moment before I crawled in. I took the night-vision goggles off my eyes and perched them on the top of my head.

  Then, as quietly as possible, I stepped up on a fifty-gallon drum and slipped through the window.

  There was some movement in the darkness, but I couldn’t see where; I could only hear the sound of sneakers on the hangar’s concrete floor.

  The noise stopped! Had I been seen?

  Then I perceived the sound of walking again, closer to Karim’s racer. Now whoever it was was picking something up off a metal tray. From the sound of the dull metallic click, it was probably something made of forged alloy steel, like a crescent wrench or a vise-grip. This was someone who knew their way around a tool set. If they were intent on simply destroying the racer, they would have picked up a hammer or a crowbar. This person knew exactly what to do, which was more than I could say for myself at the moment.

  I waited until I heard the sound of metal on metal and moved again, this time hiding behind a forty-foot ladder leaning against the wall. I was pretty silent in my movements. From the sound of it, I hadn’t yet been detected—the work on the rocket racer continued. I was grateful for this; now I was only about twenty feet from the racer. As softly as I could I began to draw in deep breaths of air to slow my heartbeat and get my nerves under control. I didn’t have many aces up my sleeve and acting rashly would probably get me killed. I slowly reached inside my coat pocket and took out a canister the size of a skate board wheel.

  I pulled the pin.

  The working stopped.

  I held my breath.

  Outside the hangar, I’d say about two hundred yards toward the grandstand, I heard a sudden sound of trash cans crashing to the ground.

  The intruder was spooked. I heard the sound of a dropped wrench, the rustle of sneakers across the floor.

  I made a quick calculation and figured that in ten more steps whoever it was would be out the window.

  With my free hand I grabbed the ladder and pushed it in the window’s direction.

  Direct hit! The top of the ladder fell precisely in the center of the pane, shattering the glass. There was a shout and I tossed my canister of Swift Stickygoo in the same direction. The can bounced off the wall and exploded in a mass of adhesive foam, rapidly expanding to cover the window, the floor below, and part of the wall.

  But my cover was also blown, and no one was caught in the Stickygoo.

  I sensed footsteps coming at me. I crossed my forearms in front of my night-vision goggles and waited.

  Boom! A blow to my stomach. I fell to my knees and began to roll into a ball.

  Boom! A kick to the top of my head.

  I waited for the pain. But there was none, and I heard only the sound of my Swift night-vision goggles shattering. It hurt, but the goggles took most of the force of the blow. And then I heard the noise of someone breaking down the door. I peeked out from between my hands and saw that the door was being kicked in.

  “Tom!”

  It was Bud!

  “Bud!” I shouted. “Someone in a stealth suit! Shut the door.”

  There was a flurry of movement as the intruder sprinted away from me. I grabbed another canister and pulled the pin.

  “Light won’t work,” Bud shouted.

  “Must’ve cut the power line on the roof. Watch yourself.”

  I heard the sound of a toolbox being picked up. The lid must have opened, because the tools scattered across the floor.

  Crash! The window on the far side of the hangar shattered.

  I lobbed my Stickygoo and a moment later a giant puff of the viscous goo exploded.

  “Did you get them?” Bud shouted.

  I didn’t know. I heard the adhesive foam as it began to expand, probably covering the broken window, but there was no sound of anyone struggling to get free.

  Then I heard a metal tool sliding across the concrete floor, and the sound of a person falling. I pounced.

  I landed directly on the intruder. The broken night-vision goggles were ripped from my head as two hands scraped at my skull.

  An elbow to my cheek. I instantly saw stars.

  But it didn’t matter. I had to keep this person from getting away. So wherever I felt him moving or trying to push or punch me off, I moved in the same direction.

  Fingers in gloves tried to gouge out my eyes. The pain was terrible and I shook my head wildly, trying to get whoever it was to quit. That’s when I found it.

  The last canister of Stickygoo in my jacket pocket. I pulled the pin, put it between my chest and what felt like the other person’s stomach, and locked my arms around the intruder.

  I held on tight and a moment later . . . pop! The can exploded. It felt like being kicked by a mule. Instantly the goo began to envelop us both. I didn’t let go until the force of the expanding foam forced us apart.

  I guessed that it was about two minutes before I saw the flashlights in my face.

  “Tom. It’s Bud. Don’t worry. It’s security. I notified them.”

  “You notified them?” I said, spitting bits of foul tasting goo out of my mouth. “Who notified you?”

  “Q.U.I.P. called me on my cell phone as I was about halfway between Andy’s hangar and Sue’s. He said you were trying to reach me before.”

  “Cool,” I said, exhaling.

  The security guards had already pried the intruder from the goo and slapped cuffs on him. The stealth suit didn’t work so well when covered in what looked like a tub of bubble gum.

  “I would have been here sooner, but”—Bud laughed—“I kinda encountered a trash can on the way over.”

  “That was what spooked the intruder.”

  “Whatever works,” he said.

  “Well played.” That was all the praise I could muster.

  We both laughed as he began to help me dig my way out of the goo. I had never before been the recipient of a canister of this stuff, and now knew how well it worked. But as we scraped the adhesive off, I noticed the police heading out the door with the saboteur in tow. Even in the scant moonlight of the open door, I could see that the suspect was considerably shorter than the police. I knew instantly that at least it wasn’t Andy.

  “Hey! Where are you going?” I shouted.

  “Sorry, boys,” one of the policemen answered. “Ms. Garcia’s orders. This has to be on the hush-hush.”

  Bud and I stared at each other. “Hush-hush?” we said simultaneously.

  But security was out the door, and so was our saboteur.

  9

  The Road Back (To the Airport)

  Bud bounded out of the police station. I was impressed at how lively he was despite the fact that we had each only gotten about three hours of sleep last night. Then again, he was always that way when working on a story. And the story of someone breaking into the hangar at night in a stealth suit to sabotage the rocket races was bound to be big—maybe even big enough to get him some recognition from one of the statewide newspapers.

  That was why he dragged us out of bed so early, so we could be the first to learn the intruder’s identify. Bud wanted the scoop and couldn’t wait.

  When he got to the curb, he noticed that Yolanda had moved up from the backseat to the passenger’s side seat. She had been working on the computer since the moment Bud went into the station nearly fifteen minutes ago.

  “Hey!” Bud called out. “I called frontsies!”

  Yolanda rolled her eyes. “What are you, six years old? Get in the back, Mr. Graceful.”

  “Tom!” he yelled, throwing his hands down at his sides. “Did you tell her about the garbage can?”

  “I don’t remember,” I replied. “Hop in.” The truth was that my mind was still a little fuzzy that morning. I suppose the excitement of the night before had worn me out a little more than I thought. I took another chug of Power It! soda and felt the caffeine kick in.

  Bud jumped into the back of the Speedster next to my sleeping sister, and off we sped.

  “Did you get his name?” I asked.

  “The name of the intruder is”—Bud paused dramatically—“da-dum: Talitha McIntire.”

  The car was quiet.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “You mean you don’t know?” Bud said.

  “How would I know Tabitha McIntire?” I shot back.

  “Talitha,” he repeated.

  “All right, who is Talitha . . .”

  “I don’t know,” Bud said sheepishly. “I was hoping you would. You usually have all the answers.”

  “ ‘Talitha Ogert McIntire,’ ” Yo said, reading from the computer screen. “ ‘Born: unknown. Country of birth: unknown. Profession: unknown.’ ”

  “I guess you don’t know who she is either,” Bud cracked from the backseat.

  “Talitha Ogert McIntire may or may not be her real name.” Yo scrolled down the web page. “ ‘Known aliases: Tricia Forks, Constance Ubanks, Drusella Van Meer, Janet Vachowski . . .’ ”

  “Drusella?” Bud said as though spitting out a fly. “Who would pretend that their name was Drusella? Man!”

  “Let’s see,” Yo continued. “She has been arrested in Bonn, London, Madrid, and Rome, every time for industrial espionage.”

  “Those are all the cities in Europe where Swift Enterprises has facilities. Either labs or warehouses,” Sandy said, suddenly leaning forward. I guess she wasn’t asleep after all. “Yo, where are you getting this information?”

  “Interpol posts its most-wanted criminals on their website on a weekly basis. Talitha isn’t in the top ten, but she isn’t far down the list either.”

  “What’s Interpol?” Sandy said.

  “Kind of like an international version of the FBI,” Bud answered. “What was she arrested for?”

  “One guess.”

  “Antitechnology terrorism,” I said. I glanced down at the clock on the dashboard of the Speedster: 7:30 a.m. I was eager to get to the hangar and check out the work Sue and Yo had done on the Manga-Racer the night before. I gave the Speedster a little more gas.

  “Bull’s-eye!” Yo shouted, snapping her fingers and pointing at the computer screen. “Ms. McIntire has been arrested over a dozen times, but never convicted of a crime. Although it says on the website that currently she is being tried in absentia . . .”

  “Absentia?” Bud interjected. “Where’s that?”

  “Real funny,” Yo shot back. “It means that her trial is going on even though she isn’t . . .”

  “There in the court or even in the country,” Bud finished. “I know what ‘in absentia’ means.”

  “It goes on to say that she may have been employed by the Shopton-based company Foger Utility Group.”

  “Andy’s dad’s company!” Sandy said excitedly. “That means you can prove that Andy is behind the rocket racer crashes.”

  “ ‘Fraid not, Sand,” Bud said. “It makes him a possible suspect, but not much else.”

  “It still means he has to be watched, though, doesn’t it?” she asked.

  “Hey, if you can stand looking at him, the job is all yours.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Sandy replied. “Did the police have all this information that Yolanda uncovered?”

  “I don’t think so,” Bud answered.

  “That’s a good thought, Sandy,” Yolanda said, clicking the mouse. “I’m going to e-mail them right now. Maybe this Talitha will talk and we’ll find out either who she’s working for, or working with.”

  “It’ll never happen,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “These Roadies—terrorists in The Road Back—won’t tell you squat. Sodium pentothal, scopolamine, sleep deprivation—nothing works. They work in incredibly small cells and always use aliases. They could be sitting next to their superior in a coffee shop and have no idea who the other person is. What little we know about them we know from a handful who have turned against the organization. A couple of years ago Swift Enterprises’ Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Yvonne Williams was kidnapped when she was doing a routine tour of our labs in Asia.”

  “Hey, I didn’t know about that,” Sandy said.

  “Mom and Dad didn’t want you to worry,” I replied. “One day she’s crunching numbers on our operations in Singapore, next day we get an e-mail saying she’s going to disappear forever if Swift Enterprises doesn’t close down and go away.”

  “I hope they appreciate the irony of using computers to spread their antitechnology goals,” Yolanda said.

  “They’ll use anything to further their twisted view of the world. They had a high-level computer programmer infiltrate Swift Enterprises one time. It took a team of twenty experts over three months to repair all the coding viruses he let loose in our systems.”

  “So what happened to Yvonne?” Bud asked.

  “Long story short: She was snatched off a street in Singapore and taken to some hidden location in the jungle, where one of her captors was bitten by an indigenous snake. Must’ve been poisonous, because he collapsed to the floor, he had a cardiac seizure, and his heart stopped beating. When the other guard tried to help him, Yvonne grabbed her pocketbook and pulled out her Blackberry. She took out the battery that she’d recently recharged and put it under the dead man’s tongue. I guess there was enough juice in the battery to give the man enough of a shock to bring him back to life.”

  “Wow!” Sandy marveled.

  “Yeah, great story,” Bud agreed.

  “So what happened?” Yolanda asked.

  “The guy made a full recovery. He was up and eating in an hour’s time. Later that night, Yvonne found that the room they put her in was unlocked, and that an old car was in the yard with the keys in it. She hightailed it out of the jungle and was back in America before twenty-four hours had passed.”

  “What happened to her captor?” Bud asked. “The one who let her get away.”

  “A few days later he showed up at a police station in Singapore, scared out of his mind. They put him in a cell to keep him safe. He told the chief officer what little he knew about The Road Back, but all he really knew was that his time was limited. He kept repeating, ‘They’ll get me! They’ll get me!’ ”

  “Did they?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “He disappeared. Maybe the terrorists got to him, maybe he changed his mind and went back.”

  Bud whistled one slow, low note.

  I took the exit ramp off the highway and downshifted to take a turn onto the old road that lead out to the airfield.

  “All right,” I said as Bud and I approached Andy Foger from behind. He was polishing the nose of his rocket racer. The painted-on fangs were just about sparkling.

  He had to have heard us coming, but he didn’t even bother to turn around. More to the point, he probably knew what I was going to ask next.

  “Who’s Talitha McIntire?” I said with more than a trace of anger in my voice.

  “I heard you had quite a night.” Andy chuckled. “Next time try fighting someone your own size—not a girl.”

  I let the insult pass. Bud pulled his pencil out from behind his ear and flipped his notebook open to an empty page.

  “How did you know the saboteur was a female?” I said. “They only booked her a couple of hours ago and it was supposed to be hush-hush.”

  Andy took a swipe of carnauba wax from the tin he held in one hand and smeared it on his racer with a terry cloth towel.

  “Had to be a girl,” he replied loudly. “You couldn’t beat a guy in a fight.”

  Bud shot me a glance.

  “Interpol said FUG has hired her in the past.”

  “Listen, Swift, Foger Utility Group has employed over three thousand people worldwide in the last ten years,” he says. “If she was employed by my father’s company—and I’m not saying she was—how is that any of my business?”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9