The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Riddle of Ages Page 2

  “That’s okay,” Reynie whispered back. “I know you were trying to be careful.”

  The radio squawked again. Reynie hauled himself to his feet. Tai followed suit, and together the two of them stood looking at the radio. “Sometimes it takes a second or two,” Reynie whispered. He opened a drawer in his desk, took a peppermint from a tin, and handed it to Tai. “Don’t run or jump while you have that in your mouth, okay?”

  Tai nodded happily, slipped the peppermint into his mouth, and went back to staring at the radio, which rewarded him with yet another squawk. This one was followed by the sound of a young woman’s voice.

  “Secret password!” said the young woman. “Are you there?”

  Reynie adjusted a knob on the radio, pressed a button, and replied, “Roger that.” To Tai he explained: “‘Secret password’ is our secret password. It’s just a joke.”

  Tai giggled.

  “Confirming all clear?” came the young woman’s voice.

  “Copy that. Confirming now.” Reynie released the button and hailed Sticky’s office on the intercom. “We have her!” he called. “How’s the frequency?”

  “Checking,” came the reply. And then: “All clear!”

  “All clear,” Reynie said into the radio.

  “Well, great!” said the young woman. “What’s the word?”

  “Both major airports and all private airports compromised. Still awaiting word from Grand Central.”

  “I got the word from Grand Central myself. Also compromised.”

  “No, no, no,” Reynie muttered. Then, remembering Tai, who was following everything with riveted attention, he glanced down and explained, “I’m just a bit frustrated, Tai. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Oh, good!” Tai said brightly. He made a loud sucking sound on the peppermint, which seemed to fill his whole mouth.

  After a long pause, during which Reynie made various private calculations, the radio squawked again, and the young woman’s voice returned. This time she sounded as if she was shouting in a windstorm. “Stand by for ETA!”

  “That means ‘estimated time of arrival,’” Reynie said to Tai, who nodded agreeably, though without evident signs of comprehension. “We’re not exactly sure where she is right now,” Reynie went on, “but my guess is that by tonight or tomorrow morning—wait. Why did it sound so windy?”

  “I wondered that, too!” Tai said.

  “Oh boy,” Reynie whispered, just as the radio sounded again.

  “ETA three minutes,” shouted the young woman. “Give or take thirty seconds. Going silent now. Will update you shortly.” The radio went quiet.

  “Did you get all that, George?” Reynie said, as if into the air.

  “I got it. Do you think it means what I think it means?”

  “I don’t think it can mean anything else, do you?”

  A long sigh issued from the intercom speaker. “At least we won’t have to wait long to see how this turns out.”

  Tai tapped Reynie on the elbow. “Why don’t you just ask her what it means?”

  “Good question,” Reynie said. “Did you hear her say she was ‘going silent’? That means I couldn’t get through to her even if I tried. We just have to—”

  The radio squawked. “Hi again!” shouted the young woman. She rattled off a string of data. “ETA two minutes. Meet me on the roof?”

  “Roger that,” Reynie replied, shaking his head.

  “What were those numbers and things?” Tai asked.

  “Coordinates and altitude,” came the voice from the intercom, followed by another sigh.

  “Here,” Reynie said, removing the kaleidoscope lens and ushering Tai to the window. “See? It’s actually a spyglass—probably the best in the world.” He handed the instrument to the astonished boy and showed him where to aim it.

  “She’s coming from the sky?” Tai exclaimed.

  “Evidently,” Reynie murmured. He put a hand on Tai’s shoulder. “And that, my friend, pretty well sums up what you need to know about Kate Wetherall.”

  Reynie returned to his desk, amused to hear the little boy repeating him in a whisper (“pretty well sums up…”) but also troubled by something he had yet to lay a mental finger on. He began flipping rapidly through various piles of paper and folders on his desk. What was he forgetting, he wondered, and why did it matter?

  “Is she going to land way over there?” asked Tai, for Reynie had directed his aim to the northeast.

  The intercom speaker, with a crackle, explained that a projectile possesses both vertical and horizontal velocities, to which Tai responded by asking if those were real words.

  “She’ll be coming in at an angle,” Reynie muttered. “And quite fast.”

  Tai, meanwhile, had lowered the spyglass, which had grown heavy. When his thin arms had recovered, he raised it again and gasped. Far away, against the backdrop of blue sky, he could see a figure falling.

  “I see her!” he squealed, and started jumping up and down.

  “Good job,” Reynie said distractedly. He glanced over his shoulder. “Hey, what did I say about jumping? Also, please be careful with that spyglass—it’s actually Kate’s.”

  Tai had already stopped jumping, anyway, in order to hold the spyglass steady. The distant figure was now coming into focus: a young woman in a black flight suit, plummeting at a steep angle, arms tight against her sides. Yellow hair streamed like flames from the back of her visored helmet, which was fire-engine red.

  “There’s a dot following her,” Tai said. “Oh! It’s a bird! There’s a bird following her! It’s diving just like she is!”

  “Stooping,” said the intercom speaker.

  “Stooping?”

  “That bird is her peregrine falcon, Madge. When falcons dive like that, it’s called stooping. ETA one minute, Reynie. Shall we head up there or not? I’m thinking it might be better not to watch.”

  Reynie snapped to attention, realizing what had made him uneasy. “Stick—I mean, George!” he cried, fanning the pages of a bulky day planner. He found the page he wanted and jabbed his finger on an entry that read “Experiment 37-B: Effects of Decreasing Atmospheric Pressure, etc.”

  “What is it?” the intercom speaker asked. “More trouble?”

  “Well, on the night of the evacuation, you were scheduled to run your chemical experiments on the rooftop patio, but then everything went haywire. I don’t suppose you cleared—”

  The answer to his unfinished question was the banging open of a distant door, followed by footsteps charging down a hallway.

  Reynie flew to the window. An elderly neighbor had emerged to work in her flower bed, and a mail carrier was whistling down the sidewalk, depositing letters in mailboxes. The street was out of the question. It would have been a risky option, anyway.

  He jumped back to the radio. “Hey, can you slow down at all?”

  “Copy that,” came the reply. “Only a little, though.”

  “She was doing this,” said Tai from his place at the window. He clapped his hands to his sides, narrowly avoiding striking the spyglass on the windowsill. “But now she’s doing this!” He threw out his arms and legs as if to do jumping jacks.

  Reynie was already hurrying from the study. “That’s great! Please be careful! I have to go to the roof now!”

  “Wait for me!” Tai exclaimed, racing after him.

  Reynie ran pell-mell down the hallway, turning the corner just in time to see a large square section of the floor settling into place. He ran over to stand on it. “Sticky’s already up there,” he said as Tai caught up. “Hang on—this is a shortcut.” He stomped the floor four times, then grabbed Tai by the shoulders to steady him.

  A trapdoor in the ceiling fell open, and suddenly, with a terrific rattling sound, they were racing upward. Tai, thrilled, shouted something Reynie couldn’t make out. They passed through the trapdoor and kept going, up and up, through a gloomy attic filled with seemingly infinite contraptions and oddments scattered in all directions, through yet another trapdoor in the attic ceiling, and at last into fresh air.

  “We’re on the roof!” Tai exclaimed.

  “Yep!” Reynie cried, leaping to an open instrument panel nearby. He threw a lever to secure the platform, then spun to face Tai. “Promise me you’ll stay right there!”

  Tai looked utterly amazed to be asked. “I promise!” he said in a reverent tone, and clutched the spyglass to his chest.

  The rooftop patio, a flat expanse situated between two of the house’s gables, was about half the size of a tennis court. Kate would have had little room for error under even the best of circumstances—and these were hardly those. Wind gusted fiercely from what seemed like every direction, sending scraps of paper dancing in the air like a wild mob of butterflies. Even worse, Reynie realized, those scraps were labels that had come loose from innumerable stoppered beakers arrayed on folding tables all across the patio. Every single one of those beakers, he knew, contained a different substance or mixture of substances, some of them quite dangerous.

  Reynie glanced at the sky to the northeast. His eyes detected what might have been a tiny insect hovering a few inches above him, but he knew it was actually a far-off Kate. She hadn’t even pulled her parachute yet. He glanced at Tai to make sure he was staying put. Yes, the boy was rooted to his spot, safely out of Kate’s line of approach, and staring past Reynie with an expression of excited fascination.

  That expression was more than warranted, Reynie knew, for moving frantically among the tables, snatching up beakers and placing them into a wicker basket, was George “Sticky” Washington. The young man looked exactly as the young boy watching had expected him to look: naturally slender and muscular (this was easy to determine, as Sticky wore a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops), wit
h light brown skin and a well-shaped, perfectly bald head. Tai had also expected Sticky to be wearing unusually stylish new spectacles, and sure enough he was. So stylish were the spectacles, in fact, and so well did they suit the young man’s features that under different circumstances Tai would have thought him an altogether dashing figure. Under the current circumstances, however, Sticky looked slightly ridiculous: His face was awash in panic and self-reproach, his feet shuffled awkwardly in their flimsy sandals, and his basket was beginning to overflow with beakers—as if he were an overgrown, desperate child on some bizarre variety of Easter egg hunt.

  “There’s no time to clear all of them!” Sticky shouted as he worked. “I’m just getting the lethal ones!”

  “The lethal ones?” echoed Reynie. (He’d been thinking “dangerous,” which seemed more than sufficient.) He glanced at the beakers on the nearest table; only a few still had their labels. Two days of rain and now this wind had done their damage. “What can I do?”

  “I set it all up like a chessboard!” Sticky yelled, shoving a stopper into a beaker. “Eight tables, eight beakers per table—”

  “Got it!” Reynie cried, seeing the pattern. Each table represented a row on the chessboard, each beaker a space. “So, which ones?”

  Without looking up from his work, Sticky shouted chess notation instructions: “A2, D4, and C5! I’ve got the rest!”

  “A2, D4, and C5!” Reynie repeated, already hustling to grab A2, a stoppered beaker in the first spot on the second row. It contained a liquid of an alarming vermilion color, which Reynie tried not to think about as he scrambled around to the fourth table. D4 contained a colorless liquid that looked like water but moved like sludge when Reynie picked up the beaker. He shuddered. Fortunately, this one was stoppered, too. He ducked under the table and came up next to C5, an open beaker full of what looked to be harmless black pebbles. “Uh, should there be a stopper for C5?”

  “Oh, yes! Believe me, you don’t want those to spill! Use the one from C6! It’s fine!” Sticky shuffled past with his precariously full basket. “This is all of them!” he panted, his eyes swiveling skyward. He gave a yelp and doubled his pace. “Reynie! Here she is!”

  Reynie, still shoving the stopper into the last beaker, didn’t even have time to look up before he heard Kate’s voice from shockingly close by.

  “Get down, boys, I’m coming in hot!”

  Reynie, clutching the beakers, dropped onto his back.

  In the next instant his vision was filled with Kate Wetherall, a parachute, a glimpse of sky, a falcon with wings widespread—and then the rooftop seemed to explode. Kate’s boots, having cleared the first four tables, caught the fifth and sixth in quick succession. Two rows of beakers shattered in a fraction of a second; the air was suddenly filled with glass, powder, liquid, and Kate—and still she continued, crashing through the seventh and eighth tables, her parachute, dragging behind her, gathering wreckage. And still she crashed, right across the end of the rooftop patio, through the low railing, and out of sight. Her parachute, full of debris, dragged after her to the broken railing, where it caught and held.

  Reynie sat up. He glanced at Sticky, who was crouching with the basket in his arms and his jaw hanging slack, and then at Tai, whose eyes seemed too huge for his head. Reynie peered back across the rooftop patio. A purplish haze, not exactly smoke, shifted this way and that in the contradictory breezes. For a moment, the three of them stared at the parachute in shocked silence.

  And then they found themselves staring at two gloved hands, which had appeared from beyond the patio edge, clutching at the parachute silk. The hands were followed by a fire-engine-red helmet, and finally a figure in a black flight suit. Boots crunched on broken glass, gloved hands went up to remove the visored helmet, and there stood Kate Wetherall, grinning.

  “Hi, boys,” she said, brushing glass and splinters from her broad shoulders. She gestured at Tai. “Who’s this little guy?”

  Reynie and Sticky, neither recovered enough to speak yet, exchanged a look.

  Tai, on the other hand, was bouncing up and down. “I’m Tai!” he squeaked excitedly. “Reynie let me hold your spyglass!”

  “I see that,” said Kate, leveling an accusing look at Reynie before bursting into a laugh and striding forward to greet him.

  Reynie, who had long ago learned that Kate’s greetings could be painfully enthusiastic, was quick to show her the beakers. “We’re holding dangerous chemicals, Kate!” he said, climbing unsteadily to his feet.

  “Why would you be doing that?” Kate asked, laughing again. “You boys need to be more careful!” She gave him a peck on the cheek, then swooped over to Sticky (who flinched) to do the same.

  At the sight of Tai raising his own cheek expectantly, Kate put on a dubious look. “Let’s get you a bath first, mister. Have you seen your face?”

  With a worried expression, Tai shook his head.

  Kate pretended to be shocked. “What? Never? You’ve never seen your own face?”

  At this Tai giggled, and with a quick “Fine, one kiss for the dust bunny,” Kate swooped in on him, too.

  After Reynie and Sticky had very carefully put down their burdens, the three friends stood regarding one another. Despite having grown at different rates, they had all arrived—perhaps only temporarily, but still much to their amusement—at precisely the same height. Thus, Reynie’s and Sticky’s brown eyes were at the same level as Kate’s familiar ocean blues, but that was not the reason they communicated so much, and so easily, without speaking. The three of them had been through more together as children than most people experience in a lifetime, and they had been best friends for years. So it was that everything they had been through, not just over the years but also in the last few days, everything that remained to be done, everything still at risk—these things and more passed among them without a word.

  “Boy, am I hungry,” Kate said, breaking the silence. She reached up to retie her ponytail; a sprinkle of debris fell from her hair and was carried off by the wind. “Are we under imminent attack, or is there time for a sandwich?”

  “We don’t think they’re making a move today,” Reynie said. “They’re holed up in different parts of the city, awaiting some sort of message—most likely instructions from Mr. Curtain, though we don’t know how they’re going to manage that. It’s not like he’ll be granted permission to make a quick phone call to his former henchmen.”

  “I should say not. And Mr. Benedict?”

  “He’s safe at the moment as long as he stays put.”

  “Super,” said Kate. “How about we have some lunch and catch up, then? I especially want to know how you”—this she said to Tai, who stood in the middle of their little circle, gazing up at their faces—“came to be here.”

  “I want to know the same thing,” said Sticky. “By the way, Tai, it’s nice to meet you in person. I’m… um, George,” he said with some hesitation (for, like his friends, Sticky still thought of himself as Sticky, despite his recent declaration to the contrary). He extended his hand, and Tai, beaming, shook it so energetically with his free hand that his other one almost dropped the spyglass.

  “How did you come to be here, anyway?” Kate pressed Tai, kneeling to be on eye level with him (and reaching, ever so subtly, to take hold of the spyglass).

  Tai shrugged and scratched his chest. “She told me how. She told me all about you, and she gave me directions, and she kept me company the whole time!” Lowering his voice secretively, he added, “Even though I couldn’t see her!”

  Kate raised an eyebrow. “Even though…”

  “Oh boy,” Sticky muttered.

  “I wondered,” said Reynie, nodding. “I mean, I figured.”

  “That’s right!” called a strident voice from behind them. “I told him. I brought him here. If not for me, he’d be in hot water right now. But I guess you’re all having your happy reunion on the roof without me? You don’t even send the platform back down—you make me take the stairs?”

  By this point everyone had turned toward the stairwell doorway, in the frame of which stood—with arms crossed and eyes flashing—a very angry-looking girl.

  “Hi, Constance,” sighed Kate.