A true leader always keeps an element of surprise up his sleeve, which others cannot grasp but which keeps his public excited and breathless. — Charles de Gaulle
4 FEBRUARY 2008
HIGHWAY ONE, CALIFORNIA
15:48 PST
“ETA on Walker?” Casey asked as he jerked the Crown Vic’s steering wheel a little too hard, nearly sending the beast of the car into the other lane. Since the other drivers on the freeway had long before learned to fear Casey’s driving, there wasn’t much of a danger of hitting anybody. Chuck thought that was impressive, especially for Los Angeles.
He checked the face of his watch, which also served as a GPS tracker for the team since Casey and Sarah had started wearing matching watches in D.C. “About thirty minutes.”
“With traffic?”
“Yeah, I included traffic in that.” Chuck’s knee jiggled. He felt weird, sitting in the passenger seat of the Crown Vic, a gun rubbing uncomfortably at the lower part of his back. Casey hadn’t even questioned him when he had shown up at Madame Cotillard’s. There had been no hemming and hawing about rescuing Bryce from Casey. The man had simply tossed Chuck a Sig Sauer and asked if Chuck had a way of tracking Bryce.
“As long as he’s got his watch, yeah,” Chuck had replied.
Which was why they were now wrestling with Los Angeles traffic, heading towards Malibu. The watch signal from Bryce’s watch stayed strong. Chuck hoped they hadn’t just tossed it in some random car to keep anybody who might try to follow them guessing. When he’d asked Casey about the possibility, Casey had only shrugged.
“Any idea where they might be headed?” Chuck asked.
“Bartowski, is there something about me that magically tells you I came up with a brilliant solution in the last five minutes?” Casey asked, a growl in his voice as he swerved into another lane to pass a slow-moving Winnebago.
Chuck eyed his partner. “Uh, yes?”
“Well, I didn’t. Any change in the signal?”
“No, it’s still ahead, heading southeast.”
“Disrespectful morons, don’t they know how much gas costs?” Casey groused.
Chuck didn’t blame him; Bryce’s signal had headed northwest from Los Angeles out of Madame Cotillard’s, battling through lunch hour traffic for a little while. At Ventura, however, the signal had taken a sharp turn for the south instead. They were traveling along Highway One now. The view of the ocean would have been stunning if it weren’t for the fact that they were tracking a hostage situation on wheels.
He’d had stranger days. That much he was sure of, though sometimes he couldn’t remember when.
“They must have been after...well, I can’t figure it out.” Chuck’s brow wrinkled as he tried to put it together. “Were they tracking Bryce? I mean, he’s been researching the company pretty hard, they could have caught onto him.”
“Probably did,” Casey said, swerving yet again. Derision flavored his voice.
“But Andy’s just as likely a possibility, don’t you think? I mean, he was onto something. I just don’t know what. But it was something.”
“I’m betting on Larkin.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like his face?”
“That’s fair,” Chuck said. He glanced down at the tracking device on his watch and frowned. “Wait a second...”
“What?”
“They’re definitely turning into Malibu. Seriously? Their destination was Malibu?”
“Could’ve driven straight there,” Casey said, glaring at the road. “Gas doesn’t grow on trees.”
“They’re professionals,” Chuck felt the need to point out. “They get paid more than we do.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“This route looks familiar.” Chuck frowned and dug for his phone, pulling up a map of Malibu and enlarging it for a better look. He compared his watch face to the map and his frown deepened. “No, that can’t be right.”
“What can’t be right?”
“Casey, they just turned onto Sergei Ezersky’s street.”
“Are you sure?”
“Tiny robots of death? Not something I’m likely to forget, scary Russian robot-juice-induced amnesia aside.”
“Well, we knew there were ties between Krolik and Kanichen,” Casey said. He jerked the car into a hard right, boldly cutting off a tractor trailer. “Guess this proves everything. Get on the horn to Walker, let her know the update. This just got tricky.”
“No kidding,” Chuck said as he moved to do as Casey ordered.
4 FEBRUARY 2008
SERGEI EZERSKY’S ESTATE
16:07 PST
They had to park a good distance from Sergei Ezersky’s house and make their way up the beach, a prospect that made Casey grumble. Sand and combat boots, Chuck figured, didn’t mix. He kept quiet so as not to exacerbate Casey’s temper, but mostly, he was dealing with his own thoughts. Andy had been snatched from Madame Cotillard’s, and Bryce, too. They had been taken to the same estate Chuck and the others had breached back before their trip to D.C., the same estate that still made Sarah shudder just a tiny bit whenever it came up in conversation. Chuck didn’t blame her; the robots might have been cool, but they were freaky as hell.
And now Andy Kohlmeier and Bryce Larkin were being held hostage among those very same robots. For what purpose? What did Sergei Ezersky want with them? Maybe he really was the mad scientist Chuck suspected he might be, and he needed experimentation subjects. Too many late-night science fiction shows had Chuck wincing over the thought of Bryce and Andy being strapped to tables and experimented upon.
“Shouldn’t we be calling for back-up?”
“And risk Fulcrum having an inside man and knowing we’re onto them?” Casey kicked his boot outwards and sent sand spraying in an arc. “We’ve breached this place before, we can do it again.”
“They probably beefed up their security,” Chuck said. “It’s what I would’ve done.”
“Well, you’re smart. You’ll get around it.”
“Casey, did you just—”
“Chuck! Casey!”
Both men turned, Casey instinctively going for his gun. But it was just Sarah, jogging across the sand with her shoes in hand and the other hand tucked into the small of her back, likely on the hilt of her Smith & Wesson. The sunlight caught her hair perfectly for one still moment, causing almost a halo effect.
“About time, Walker,” Casey said even as Chuck didn’t move, just staring as Sarah approached. “What, were you worried we were going to have fun without you?”
“Always.” Sarah reached them and paused, as though uncertain. Her eyes hadn’t left Chuck’s, but he couldn’t read them or tell exactly what she was thinking. All he knew was that he was glad she was there. He was confused as hell as to why she’d left, and hurt that she had, but she was there now. And the beach, which had seemed endlessly huge and almost a little daunting, became just a beach. “Um, hi.”
Chuck didn’t reply. He stepped forward and hugged her, hard. “You’re back,” he said against her hair, not caring at all that Casey was probably watching them. “You’re back.”
Sarah had tensed at first, but now she relaxed. “I’m sorry,” she said, and stood on her tip-toes to give him a kiss that went on long enough for Casey to start making growling noises. She leaned back and seemed to be searching his face for something. For what, Chuck didn’t know. “I’m sorry that I took so long to get here. Do you know anything? Any updates?”
“No, we’re just going for a walk on the beach, Walker,” Casey said. “Of course, three’s a crowd.”
“I’m sorry, Casey, but you just can’t have my boyfriend,” Sarah deadpanned.
Chuck wisely stepped between the partners. “No, no updates,” he said, looking from Casey’s stormy countenance to Sarah. “I was just telling Casey that—oh, my God, you look good, you really shouldn’t leave for that long ever again. Am I babbling? I’m babbling. Right, before I was babbling, I was telling Casey that I’m not sure I can crack the security on this place twice. We got lucky the first time.”
Sarah just laughed and put her hands on either side of his face and looked at him for a long moment, so long that Chuck nearly began to squirm. The look on her face was impossible to decipher. “I’ve missed you so much. Let’s do this.”
“Did you not just hear—” Chuck started to say, but Sarah simply grabbed his hand and started pulling him along the beach, like they were just a couple—and their scary friend—out for a stroll.
“So, fill me in,” she said. “What’d I miss?”
“Oh, you know, the usual. Larkin screwed up, Bartowski here only got away because he’s good at throwing vegetables.”
“And serving bowls.”
“And you’re positive they’re here?”
“My watch was linked up with Bryce’s,” Chuck said. “We were using it to record my conversation with Andy, so that he could hear. There was, you know, a possibility that they could have ditched the watch, but it led us here, and we know our record with coincidences.”
“The watch is still on Bryce,” Sarah said, nodding. “Well, this ought to be fun. Have we called for backup?”
“And let the bosses know we left Bartowski alone with Larkin?”
“Point, again. All right, what are our resources?”
One by one, they listed off everything they were carrying on them, from Chuck’s wits to Sarah’s hairclip (he wasn’t sure why this was included in the weaponry list, but Sarah likely had a good reason). Casey had also grabbed one of the mini-computers from Castle before he’d gone to Simi Valley that morning.
When the others gave him puzzled looks, he fidgeted—as much as it was possible for Casey to fidget—and admitted that he’d wanted to double-check the security at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, make sure nothing bad had happened to Reagan’s resting grounds.
It made sense.
“Which one did you grab? Becky or Bob?” Chuck asked.
Sarah and Casey stared at him. “We need to talk about your habit of naming everything, Bartowski,” Casey said at length, and then added, “Becky. She’s faster.”
“Bob’s got a bigger hard drive, but I can work with that. Hand her over.”
While Casey and Sarah discussed the weak points they’d observed in their initial assessment of Ezersky Manor, Chuck booted up the computer and opened the various programs that they might need—though it was likely a suicide mission, going up against that security again. No matter how many times he pointed out that the security was going to be a problem, Casey or Sarah shrugged and countered that he’d figure it out.
They were going to need to have a talk about their unrelenting faith in him, and how misguided that was.
Finally, they reached Sergei Ezersky’s private beach. Walking in single file to hide their numbers, they climbed away from the water and up into the dunes that would provide some marginal cover. Chuck cringed whenever Becky got too close to the sand, but there wasn’t much he could do about the environment.
Sarah was elected to be the one to crawl to the top of the dune and get a good look out, as her blonde hair would blend in better with the sand.
“That’s a ridiculous argument,” she told Chuck.
“It’s either that or I hope your skivvies can double as a bikini, Walker,” Casey put in. “Feeling up to the Suzie Q scenario?”
“Actually, we should go with that plan, whatever Suzie Q means. I am intrigued by the possibilities.”
“Shut up, both of you,” Sarah said, but she smiled as she shucked off her coat and crawled to the top of the dune, keeping low. Casey and Chuck waited a few feet below her, Chuck still fussing with the computer even as his brain raced. He was now familiar with Fulcrum’s security algorithms, thanks to their little fiasco at the Heartbrake Hotel and everything that had come from that. Would that be of use? Or would Sergei Ezersky have changed everything on him?
The Russian toymaker was paranoid, after all.
“Okay, I’ve got what looks like an active patrol going on,” Sarah reported. “Two guards, no, three. They’re moving in Tetron Formation, semi-autos on all of them, but I can’t spot a fourth.”
“Camera situation?” Casey asked.
“It’s definitely changed since we were here last. I’ve got what looks like eyes on the southwest and southeast corners, another located squarely between them. There might be a blind spot, but I can’t get a close enough look to tell.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Chuck said, and had to crawl up the dune to Sarah. He was a lot less graceful about it. When he reached the top, he hunkered down out of sight and handed Sarah a cord. “Here, plug that into your binoculars, and hold please.”
“Isn’t that just like IT support?” Casey grumbled from below them.
Chuck pulled up the program he was looking for and loaded the specs from his Becky’s memory. “Okay, try and get a clear picture of each of the three cameras. Tell me when you’ve got the first one sighted.”
“Got it.”
Chuck took a screen-grab, and they repeated this for every camera Sarah could find. “Now what?” she asked.
“Dave and I were working on this program while I was in the bunker,” Chuck said, explaining even as he typed, “that could evaluate what a security camera might be seeing based on the lens type, aperture width, things like that. I’ve pulled up a map of the estate, and if the program works the way it’s supposed to, it’ll give us a detailed look at where we might find some blind spots.”
“Did you ever actually get any of your regular assignments done while you were in that bunker?” Casey asked.
“Sure. Mr. Carver was strict. Okay, here we go, the map is loading now. Huh, interesting.”
“What?” Casey and Sarah asked together.
“The apertures are all closed. At least, I think they are. If the program’s working right.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Cameras are off,” Sarah said. She peered hard into the binoculars again. “Chuck, how confident are you that the program’s right?”
“Uh, fifty-fifty? It’s never been field-tested, other than Digital Dave’s office.”
“Could explain why there are guards patrolling,” Casey said.
Sarah slid down a couple feet so that she was level with Chuck and chewed on her bottom lip, obviously contemplating the odds. She had dark circles under her eyes, Chuck noticed, like she’d had just as much trouble sleeping over the past few days as he had.
He didn’t know how he felt about that.
“Something’s definitely up,” she said. “Thoughts, Chuck?”
“I don’t know anything. Why are you asking me?”
“Because you were there, you saw how they operated. Anything that you remember might help now.”
“Oh. Um...” Chuck scrunched his eyes closed so that the computer screen wouldn’t distract him. “They were professional. Professional Security Goon was wearing Italian shoes.”
“And that matters why?”
“Well-dressed, could be high-paid.”
“Couldn’t ditch a tail,” Casey said, scowling. “Led us straight here.”
“To be fair, they probably aren’t used to their kidnapping victims having super watches from next century,” Chuck felt the need to say. When Casey made that noise in the back of his throat, he shrugged. “Just being fair.”
“Well, don’t be fair. Think.”
“Yeesh, yeesh, fine.”
“You two really missed me, didn’t you?” Sarah asked, looking from one to the other.
“Yes,” Chuck said as Casey shook his head no. When the partners glared at each other for a second, Chuck turned his attention back to the computer. “Okay, keep the binoculars trained on the guards for a minute, Sarah. I want to see if this motion tracking program we created will integrate in and give us a better idea of their patrols.”
“Or you could just type in Tetron formation,” Casey pointed out.
Both Sarah and Chuck looked at him.
“What?” he asked. “Even a nerd’s going to know what a Tetron formation is, I don’t care if he’s CIA or not. It’ll be in your program. Alter it to three guards instead of four.”
Chuck shrugged, opened up an input field, and typed it in. “Okay,” he said when orange lines spread across the three-dimensional topographical map. “That’s a little spooky. Here, we’ve got the layout. If they’re sticking to formation, these should be the weak points.”
Casey and Sarah studied the screen for a minute in silence. “Won’t be enough of a gap to get three people through at once and still provide cover,” Casey said at length. “We’ll have to split up. Walker?”
“I’m with Chuck.”
“I figured. You take the route closest to the access point? I’ll head north, come in forty seconds behind you.”
“Sure.”
“Wait, what, what’s going on?” Chuck asked, but Sarah and Casey were already synchronizing their watches. He fumbled to keep up and ended up tucking Becky into his pants pocket so that she wouldn’t be too sandy from all of the grit Casey and Sarah were kicking up. “Where are we—”
“C’mon,” Sarah said, and took off down the beach, headed south toward the rear of the estate. They’d come in from the back road when they had breached Sergei Ezersky’s estate last time, using the cover of night and city worker uniforms. Unless Sarah’s underwear really did double as a bikini, there was no cover now, no role they could possibly play. Unless Ezersky was willing to buy a well-armed, amorous couple that had wandered right past a bunch of “No Trespassing” signs and onto his lawn.
Plus, the Professional Security Goons had at least glimpsed Chuck at the restaurant.
“What are we doing?”
“You and I’ll get to the security node, you hack in, and then we’ll wait for the opportune moment.”
“And then?”
“Then we get inside, get Bryce and Andy, and figure out an escape plan from there.”
“Oh. Why do our plans always sound so simple when you sum them up?”
“Because you’re the troublemaking factor,” Sarah said, but she was smiling. “Stay on my six. The guards don’t seem to be patrolling around the node, so we should be pretty clear there.”
“Seems kind of sloppy.”
“They’re running a Tetron formation with three people instead of four. There are bound to be holes.”
Belatedly, Chuck remembered the poor doomed Mickey, whom he’d tranqued and left sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk. He must have been the fourth guard that was supposed to be on patrol. Even as the thought of tranquing somebody made him wince—he’d probably never forget the look on Sarah’s face from the Santa Monica Pier—Chuck did have appreciate the fortuitous circumstances. It meant that he and Sarah could sneak across the grass to the same security console they’d broken into back in November without being caught.
They loped along the security fence—the same one they’d scaled months before—and around the estate. The security console was out by the road that wrapped around Ezersky Manor, still near enough to the beach to give them easy access. It was hidden from most pedestrians by a grove of palm trees that also provided ample cover for both Chuck and Sarah to break into it.
“Whoa,” he said when he saw the waist-high silver box. “Holy upgrade, Batman.”
“Looks like it,” Sarah said, and they crouched down to avoid being spotted by a guard. She leaned back against a palm tree. “Can you work with that?”
“If we can get it open, maybe.” Chuck eyed the lock doubtfully. “Given the fact that it was rather obvious we were here last time, they’ve leveled up in their security.”
“One thing at a time,” Sarah said, and pulled her hairclip loose, shaking her head so that the blonde hair cascaded down. Chuck experienced a brief intermission in thought that thankfully ended quickly, given that they were about to break into the most fearsome estate he’d ever encountered.
“We’re going to break in with hair utensils?” he asked, blinking at the clip.
“Yes. Keep a look out, and hope I don’t burn my fingers off.”
“Why would you...” But Sarah nudged him to the side, moving in close to the lock and wrapping her hairclip around it with hesitant fingers. Chuck kept an eye out for the guard, but he couldn’t deny that he was fascinated by what was happening in front of him. Sarah, moving carefully now, pulled out a small pin near the clip handle that he hadn’t noticed before. Instantly, the smell of burning filled the air. Chuck let out a mostly-silent yelp, but Sarah didn’t seem at all fazed when her hairclip melted through the solid metal lock in no time at all. “Holy crap!”
“Shhh.”
“Holy crap, Sarah, you kept that thing by your head?”
“Shh, they’ll hear us.” Sarah, careful to avoid the hairclip acid eroding the door, eased the door open a quarter inch. She slipped a bobby-pin from her hair and ran it through the space between the door and the concrete below the security box. “Doesn’t look like they rigged it. Here you go. Careful, don’t let any of the acid touch your skin.”
“Trust me, I’ll do my best.” It was an interesting workaround, but most of the acid had been used up inside the door and hadn’t landed on the concrete, allowing Chuck to wriggle into the security box. He got one over-warm, pleasant flash of memory, of Sarah pinning him to the ground to calm him from their last visit to casa Ezersky. He shook that off and focused.
“Okay, the lock wasn’t the only new thing,” he said, squirming so that he could pull Becky free. The console was just as cramped as he remembered, but there was a new monitor on the wall and a new set of wires running along every corner of the box. “They’ve got a new console in here and while the nerd in me appreciates just how shiny it is, I’m a little frightened by it, too. It’ll take a minute.”
“That’s fine. Casey just beeped me; he’s sitting tight.”
“Really? I didn’t hear him on the channel.”
“I don’t think he can talk right now. Guard must be nearby.”
It was a tense, humming five minutes while Becky ran the diagnostic on the Ezersky security system; Chuck felt every tendon and cord in his body flex at least once. His heart was in his throat, but at least his hands weren’t shaking as he fed a series of commands into Becky’s interface.
“Okay,” he said. “Good news.”
“Yeah?”
“Still the same Fulcrum interface as earlier. Means I should be in fairly quickly, even quicker if I had something to cut with.”
Sarah’s hand appeared over him, through the opening. It was clutching one of her slim throwing knives. “Like that?”
“You sure you want me to—I mean, we know what happens when I touch one of your—”
“Chuck.”
“Okay, okay. It’s just, I haven’t had any good experiences with your knives.” Gingerly, Chuck used the dull edge to pry open the panel next to his head. Inside was a mess of wires, a lot less organized than he had expected from professional work. His research on Ezersky’s estate, however, held up, allowing him to remember which wire to cut into. Unfortunately, it was painstaking and exacting work, which required his full attention.
“How’s it going in there?”
“Oh, you know. Just a party and a half.”
“I’m sure. Anything I can do to help?”
“I think I’m okay.”
“Okay.”
Chuck pulled his wallet out of his pocket so that he could use his spare wire splicers. “Why’d you leave?” he heard himself ask, the words out of his mouth before they were even realized inside his head.
There was a long pause outside the security box. “I’m still here, Chuck.”
Chuck took a page from Sarah’s book and didn’t reply. She’d been quiet too long; she knew exactly what he had been asking. And he was burning up with curiosity, a curiosity he had mostly managed to ignore in a video-game fueled oblivion since Sarah had taken off.
But now, once again in Sergei Ezersky’s security console box, he was all but dying to know. At least Casey wasn’t there to growl at him for not being a professional.
Finally, he heard a sigh. “I needed to think.”
“And you couldn’t think in Burbank?” he asked, echoing her words to him at the Grand Canyon. He pushed the last bit of wire into place and closed his eyes, praying that no alarms would go off.
None did.
“I couldn’t, no,” Sarah said. “It’s been a long four months, Chuck. And that’s not your fault, but ever since I got that call from Dave—”
“What call?”
Another pause followed, this time longer. Chuck entered a new line of code into Becky and checked his work. A pre-loader bar popped up on the screen. “What call?” he asked again.
“The...let’s just say since we left the bunker together,” she said. “It’s been a long four months, and I just, I needed a break.”
Sergei Ezersky’s interior security cameras popped up in quadrants on Becky’s screen. As Chuck had suspected, there were no outdoor cameras.
But the alarm inside the house was still active. Dammit.
“I wish,” he heard himself say as more and more feeds began taking over Becky’s tiny screen, “you would have told me you needed to get away.”
“I know. I didn’t know I did until I was practically on the road and I’d already written the note to you.”
Though it was playing with time Bryce and Andy likely didn’t have, and that made nerves gnaw away at his stomach lining, Chuck went silent. The final feeds from inside the house popped up, making Chuck experience a moment of déjà vu. He still didn’t remember everything that had happened the night he and Sarah had breached the estate, but the decor didn’t look like it had changed from those patchy memories he did have.
There weren’t any guards patrolling around inside the house. That was odd.
“Chuck?” Sarah asked. “Did you hear me?”
Chuck opened his mouth to reply that he had, but perhaps the question had been rhetorical, for Sarah just barreled on. “Things really haven’t ever slowed down, you know? And it’s not your fault, it never was and won’t ever be, but I just...after that thing with Beckman and Graham...”
Chuck’s brow furrowed. Why weren’t there any guards in the house? And where was Bryce? If he was in the house, he realized, he had to be in the room with the trapdoor. The one that would be impossible to breach without letting everybody in the house know they were coming.
Dammit.
“And I felt awful lying to you the whole time, I really did, but I just didn’t know how to tell you, and I didn’t know how you’d take it—”
“Uh, Sarah...”
“What?” Sarah’s voice went instantly into Spy Mode.
Belatedly, her words caught up to him. Had she been about to tell him something about herself? The guard thing could wait. Casey was sitting tight, after all.
“I already forgave you,” Chuck said. “It’s okay. I just...”
“Yeah,” Sarah said, surprising him. “I know.”
“I missed you,” Chuck said. He finally crawled free of the security box, careful to avoid his flesh being burned from his bones. “I didn’t like being away from you like that.”
“Me either. But I’m back and I won’t go away like that again.”
“I’m glad. Bad news, though.”
“What, you found a new girlfriend while I was away? That was quick.”
Chuck laughed without much humor in the noise. He was still confused, he realized, about Sarah’s motives for leaving, but he couldn’t precisely blame her, not when he’d pulled the same stunt himself. And he was hurt as well, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that, so it was easier pushed to the back of his mind and best forgotten.
“No,” he said. “I’m pretty sure you’re it for me. The bad news is that I can’t get into the in-house security from here. I need to get to the panel by the front porch. Sarah? You okay? You’re staring at me.”
Sarah jolted hard, as if he’d woken her from a daze. “Wh—the panel by the front porch?” she asked, sounding puzzled. “That’s open territory, you’d only be able to work for twenty or thirty seconds at a time.”
“I know, but it can’t be helped.”
“Dammit,” Sarah said without heat. She touched her ear. “Casey, change of plans. Sit tight.”
The light on their watches blinked in what Chuck assumed was a confirmation.
“Okay, wait for my call,” Sarah said as they crouched behind the acid-ridden console. “You know where it is?”
Chuck nodded.
“I’ll follow your lead, then. Wait for it, wait for it—and go!”
The minute the guard, a different goon, had rounded the corner of the estate, Chuck and Sarah took off sprinting. Adrenaline jumped through Chuck’s veins, but he didn’t even so much as stumble as they hurtled the fence—much easier this time—and dashed across the manicured lawn. He couldn’t help but observe that the place seemed much different and somehow friendlier during the day.
Holding his best friend from college hostage aside, of course.
He reached the bushes just ahead of Sarah and dove for it, letting out a small grunt when she crashed right into him. They had one short, terrified moment where the guard, a different one, came around the corner while the bush was still shaking, but it proved for naught. They weren’t noticed.
“Whew,” Chuck breathed, raising an eyebrow at their rather compromising position together in the bushes.
Sarah shushed him.
It took a few tries to get to the security console, just beside the wide, wraparound front porch. And it took them even longer for Chuck to open the panel, splice his iPhone to the wires, and open the Fulcruminator app that he and Dave had tweaked. Then it was a matter of crouching down in the bushes next to Sarah and waiting. Every minute felt more like an eternity.
“Okay, biggest window you’ll have, in twenty seconds.”
“How long?”
“A little less than a minute.” Sarah checked her watch. “Ready? As soon as he’s around the corner, go for it.”
Chuck counted to twenty and then lunged for the control panel. The Fulcruminator app, Chuck noticed, started up a little slow. He’d have to talk to Dave about it. They hadn’t considered it a problem when they had been beta testing it back in November, but now that his life was kind of on the line, every single second seemed to matter in a way it never had before.
“Casey still good?” he asked as he tapped a sequence into his phone.
“He’s fine, you focus on that.”
“Okay. But, just out of curiosity, how do you know for sure?”
“I’m magical,” Sarah said. “Now focus.”
“When you put it that way...” Chuck turned back to the iPhone and the application. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a clock ticked on and on, counting ten seconds, twenty, thirty, ninety, two hundred.
“Thirty seconds,” Sarah said.
“Wait, really?”
“Yes. Focus, Chuck!”
The app returned the pinged data, making Chuck frown. The security for the trapdoor room, the Room of the Scary Roborabbits, was a whole different branch in the program. It was accessible, but it couldn’t be hacked.
The rest of the house, however, could be compromised, and almost astonishingly easy.
“Ten seconds,” Sarah hissed.
As a team, though, they were useless unless they could break silently into that room.
“Five!”
“Fine, fine, okay, yeesh.” Chuck closed the console over his iPhone and dove back next to Sarah in the bushes just in time for the guard to come around the corner on his sweep. They both stayed silent, barely breathing, as the idea continued to percolate in Chuck’s head.
The guard finally ambled out of sight, taking his dear, sweet time about it.
“Hey, Sarah, is your watch the SOMX-Ten or Eleven?” Chuck whispered when the guard was out of earshot.
Sarah frowned. “I have no idea. Hey, warn me before you do that,” she said as Chuck grabbed her wrist to check out her watch face. ”What are you thinking?”
“Oh, good, it’s the Ten. That’s good. I was worried Dave might have given you the Eleven.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just a difference in upgrades. I’m going to set up the configuration to take down the security, give me a minute.”
The idea was brewing hard and fast now, and Sarah and Casey really were not going to like what he had in mind. But they couldn’t get into that vault room without a distraction, and Sarah’s watch alone couldn’t take out the signal. When the idea had fully formed in his head, Chuck winced.
Here goes nothing, he thought, and stood when the guard was finally out of sight. Running the Fulcruminator app to do what he needed it to do only took about five seconds; there was a blinking green light at the bottom of the app to assure him that the security had been looped and knocked out in the manor. He opened up the notepad function and typed furiously.
If he tried to explain, Sarah would only veto him.
“Chuck!” Sarah tugged on his pant leg. ”Get down! The guard’s coming!”
“Please work,” Chuck said, mostly to himself. He hurriedly disconnected the iPhone. “Please work, please work.”
“Chuck! Hurry!”
But Chuck didn’t move. Instead, he stayed facing the console, flinching a little inside as though Sarah’s gaze burned him. And he knew from previous experience that it actually could.
“Did you not hear me? Get dow—oh, sh—”
Just as the guard came around the corner, Chuck dropped his cell phone, and kicked it to the side. He had one split-second to regret every part of his latest hare-brained scheme before the guard spotted him and let out a “Hey!”
“Whoa!” Chuck said, jumping back and clear of where Sarah was hiding in the bushes. “Whoa, please don’t shoot, please don’t kill me—”
The guard had his gun raised already and was running towards Chuck, looking annoyed. “This estate is private property and—you! Hands up!”
Well, that answered the question of whether or not the guard had been one of the goons at the restaurant. They must have seen him before Chuck had taken off into the kitchen. When the gun twitched in his direction, Chuck threw dignity to the wind and scurried out of the bushes, far away from Sarah and his dropped iPhone. She had to know by now, he figured, that he’d done this on purpose.
Boy, was he going to hear about this later, assuming they all got out of this alive.
The guard reached out a hand and shoved Chuck to his knees. “What are you doing here?” the guard asked, keeping the weapon trained on Chuck.
Chuck’s mouth went completely dry at being so close to the AK-47. “I—I followed you. Mr. Kohlmeier seemed like he was in trouble, and I wanted to help.”
“What, you think you’re some kind of superhero?”
“N-no. Just a normal guy.”
The guard’s eyes narrowed. “You call the police?”
“No—no, I thought I’d just see what was going on, I didn’t call anybody, I swear. I just followed your—your van, and then I was going to hack the cameras before I called the cops!” Was his voice normally that high-pitched? He wasn’t afraid of the guard so much as he was afraid the guard was going to do something foolish, like pistol-whip him and get an eye-socket full of throwing knife for his trouble. “What’s going on? I don’t understand. What do you want with Mr. Kohlmeier? He’s a good guy!”
“Shut up.” The guard kept the gun trained on him and touched his ear. “Justin, Brett, we’ve got an intruder. Same guy from the restaurant.”
A pause.
“No, not the snotty waiter. The goofy-looking one, with the hair.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Chuck asked, feeling insulted.
“Ten-four.” The guard reached down and roughly yanked Chuck to his feet, his glare deepening when Chuck deliberately tottered like a building about to fall. Before Chuck could fully regain his bearings, he found himself being towed toward the house. “Move it.”
“Hey! Hey, where are we—no, hey, wait, I have rights!”
“You have the right to shut the hell up. My boss doesn’t like intruders.”
“Who the hell is your boss?”
“Shut up.” The guard hauled him up onto the porch, past the post Chuck vaguely remembered grabbing when the not-real earthquake had ravaged the Ezersky manor, and inside the house. Chuck picked up more detail this time, as the room wasn’t pitch black. Most spies would have picked up more, he imagined, but the guard was frog-marching him through pretty quickly, down the hallway, up the stairs, to the computer room that looked deliberately bland. “You keep your mouth shut, you hear me? My boss doesn’t tolerate much, and I’d hate for you to get shot before all of this is over.”
“Wha-what are you talking about?”
The guard moved around Chuck, keeping the gun on him, and bent at the waist, pulling up the trapdoor. Flop sweat immediately sprouted down Chuck’s back.
He really, really did not want to face the roborabbits again.
The guard didn’t notice. “Get down there. And keep your mouth shut.”
“Why is there a trapdoor in the floor?” Chuck asked. The glare he received in reply made him weakly pantomime zipping up his lip and throwing away the key. Carefully, he sat on the edge of the trapdoor hole so that he could get his feet aligned. He made a big show of slipping—and when the guard grabbed him in exasperation, pushing the green button on the side of his watch.
“Oops, sorry, butterfingers—”
“Just get down there.”
Chuck clambered down the rest of the ladder, his stomach roiling, the guard following him down. When Chuck turned, he blinked.
The shelves, the same ones that ran all the way alongside the walls of the weird vault/trapdoor room, were completely empty of little robots. What the hell? Not a single Tyrannosaurus or thermal-detonator-roborabbit in sight. Even the robot arm that had neatly clocked him on his first visit had vanished. The shelves and floor panels still lit up with that eerie white light, though.
It felt abandoned. Or it would have, if there weren’t three people handcuffed to various shelves. Chuck recognized two of them right away: Bryce Larkin, chained closest to the ladder, lifted his head and gave Chuck an inscrutable look. Andy Kohlmeier, about four feet behind him, had a more obvious reaction. “Chuck! What are you doing here?”
Chuck opened his mouth to reply, but the guard smacked him on the shoulder blade with the butt of the rifle. “Shut up. Feet apart, face the wall.”
“What for—ow! Okay, okay.” Chuck didn’t dare look at Bryce as he obeyed the guard and was subsequently patted down. The guard pulled out the gun. “Hey, computer security can get rough. I’m licensed to carry that.”
“Is there some connection between your brain and your mouth that’s broken? Shut the hell up.”
When Chuck had been fully searched—the guard didn’t take his watch, praise be—he was handcuffed, just like the others in the room, to one of the shelves, nearer the back. The guard gave them all one final glare and, taking Chuck’s tranq gun, headed out.
Instantly, Andy rounded on him. “What have you done? Why are you here?”
“I don’t know! I saw them grab you and I followed, but the guard grabbed me when I was trying to hack through the security—”
“You were trying to what?” the third man, the one Chuck didn’t know, asked. He gave Chuck a scandalized look. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
Chuck held his hands up, as best as he could with one being handcuffed to the shelf. “Me, I’m nobody, just some computer security guy. Who are you?”
The man stared back at Chuck for a full minute. He was short, barely rising to Chuck’s shoulder, and Chuck would place him somewhere on the side of comfortably just past middle age. A trim goatee and a full head of cloud-white hair contrasted easily with the tanned skin of somebody who spent a great deal of time outdoors.
“I, my dear boy,” he said, “am Sergei Ezersky, and that’s my security you were trying to break.”
Chuck looked from the paranoid Russian toymaker to the handcuffs chaining him to the shelf and said the only thing that came to mind: “Okay, now I’m officially confused.”
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