The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Riddle of Ages, page 12
“I’m fine!” Kate growled, struggling in Sharpe’s grip. She shifted her feet to the left, then to the right.
“She won’t be for long, Milligan, I assure you,” McCracken said. “Honestly, I’m beyond annoyed at the trouble you’ve caused us. I suppose after these years of being locked up, I’ve quite lost my patience. I believe some punishment is in order.”
“You realize you’re threatening my daughter,” Milligan said.
McCracken chuckled. He put his hands on his hips. “Oh, I’m quite aware of what I’m doing. And if you think—”
“Excuse me for a moment,” Milligan interrupted, then called, “What are you waiting for, Kate?”
Kate grunted, still shifting her weight about. “Just getting… the right… angle!”
With that, Kate kicked the tranquilizer gun. It had been important to hit it just so—not only to aim it but to avoid damaging it. It was really more of a sideways sweep than a kick, and she executed it perfectly, sending the gun skittering lightly across the pavement into Milligan’s waiting hand. She heard Sharpe gasp with realization as she bent forward, lifting his feet off the ground, and turned so that his back was facing Milligan. She heard the familiar and most welcome swit! as the last dart in her gun found its home. Then Sharpe released his grip with a sigh and slumped to the ground, a feathered dart protruding from his rump.
Kate turned to see Milligan now aiming the tranquilizer gun at McCracken, who had, for once, been caught flat-footed. He stood on the ice-cream truck in a half crouch, arms outstretched in opposite directions, with absolutely no good place to go.
“I’m not the only rusty one,” Milligan observed.
Kate, who knew that the gun was empty, did her best to appear calm. She tried, in fact, to look as though the game were won. It seemed to work. McCracken, glancing at her face and then back at Milligan, made no move.
“Well,” the Ten Man said with a shrug of his massive shoulders, “let’s get on with it.”
“First I want to show you something,” said Milligan, and with the gun still leveled at McCracken, he reached inside his jacket (a canvas jacket much like Kate’s), produced a feathered dart, and shoved it into the tranquilizer gun.
McCracken’s shoulders drooped now. “You can’t be serious. It was empty?”
“Quite,” Milligan said, reaching into his jacket again. He loaded another dart into the gun, then a third, then a fourth.
“Come now,” McCracken chided. “Must I wait until—?”
“This will sting a little,” Milligan said.
A dart bloomed in McCracken’s left shoulder. Flinching, he uttered an angry growl. Then a look of uncertainty came onto his face. “I’m still standing,” he observed.
Kate felt her mouth go dry.
A moment passed. Then another. The corners of McCracken’s mouth twitched upward. He took a step forward, as if to jump down from the ice-cream truck, but Milligan pointed the tranquilizer gun directly at his nose.
“You wouldn’t shoot me in the face,” McCracken said, hesitating. “That’s not your style.”
“You’re right,” Milligan said, and fired a dart at the Ten Man’s leg.
“That hurts!” McCracken snarled furiously. He yanked the darts from his leg and shoulder and drew both his arms back to throw them. “If your serum isn’t strong enough—”
“Oh, those darts didn’t have any serum,” Milligan said. “I just wanted you to feel them.”
Feathers appeared in McCracken’s other shoulder. The Ten Man let loose a howl of rage, flung the darts down at his feet like a child throwing a tantrum, and collapsed onto the ice-cream truck with a tremendous bang.
Kate flew to Milligan’s side.
“How badly are you hurt?” she asked, grabbing his hand and kissing his cheek. “Are your legs broken?”
“Only very lightly, I think,” Milligan said, smiling. He brushed a stray lock of hair out of his daughter’s eyes. In the distance, they could hear sirens approaching. “You were really amazing, Katie-Cat. When did you know it was me?”
“Who else could it be?” Kate said. “I don’t know anyone else who could pull off that trembling-hand Morse code trick. But how did you happen to be here?” She was stretching out on the ground beside her father now, resting her head in the crook of his arm. “I thought there were spies in every airport in Stonetown.”
“Oh, there are,” Milligan said. “And when the one I encountered wakes up, I’m sure he’ll make his report right away. None of that matters now. I just wasn’t about to leave you here in the city without me. I heard Reynie’s bulletin on the radio, and I knew where S.Q. was supposed to leave messages—in fact, I was already on my way here to see what I could discover about that when Reynie put out the word.”
Kate looked at her father sidewise. “So it was you who got S.Q. safely away, wasn’t it? You’re the ‘guy from the city’ who raised the alarm about a gas leak.”
“Yes, I found him right away, told him he was in danger, and sent him off in disguise. You didn’t happen to see a limping clown, did you?”
“I did!”
Milligan grinned. “What better way to disguise those big feet than clown shoes, right? He found them very uncomfortable, though. The original clown had smaller feet. And we had no time to remove that poor fellow’s face paint, so I sent him off with a great load of flowers to hide behind.”
“I saw him, too!” Kate laughed. Then she grew serious. She reached over and swatted Milligan on the chest. “I can’t believe you shot those extra darts at McCracken just to hurt him! That’s not the way you taught me! I mean, I enjoyed it, but still!”
“Give me a pass on this one, Katie,” Milligan said. “He threatened my daughter.”
Kate gave him a reproachful look. But then she smiled and leaned back again. “There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”
Milligan chuckled. “The first two had broken ampoules. What was I supposed to do, let him know?”
The sirens were growing louder. Kate knew that some of Milligan’s agents would be arriving with the emergency professionals. Soon he would have medical attention, and the unconscious Ten Men would be taken into custody. The full significance of it all had hardly begun to sink in, she knew. For the moment, she let herself rest there, snuggled up against her injured father.
The two of them gazed upward, watching clouds move across the blue sky.
Milligan cleared his throat. “Kate,” he said quietly, “I hope you know how proud of you I am. You’re already as skilled as many of my agents—and even more skilled than some. And I want you to be happy. You get to choose what to do with your own life. It’s just…” He faltered.
“You just want to protect me,” Kate said, nodding. “I know. It’s okay, Dad.”
Milligan nodded, too. Kate heard him sniff, felt him wipe his eyes with his other arm. She kept her own eyes on the clouds.
“That one reminds me of Mr. Benedict,” Kate said after a moment. She pointed. “See the profile with the lumpy nose?”
“You’re right,” Milligan said with a little laugh. “And look at that one—it’s like a valentine.”
Kate squinted. “A valentine drawn by a kid, maybe. But I see it.”
Milligan gave her a squeeze. And for some time they lay there, a man trapped beneath an ice-cream truck, his legs lightly broken, and his daughter with an aching head, the two of them surrounded by unconscious men in elegant suits. The sirens grew louder and louder.
They both felt remarkably content.
In the moments after Kate Wetherall, disguised as Captain Plugg, faded from view on the motorcycle, the remaining Society members were at a loss. It was difficult to think of anything other than what might happen to S.Q., or Kate, or both—and yet there was a little boy in their midst, and they all felt the need to protect him from worry. So they tried very hard to compose themselves and clear their minds of anxious thoughts as they awaited word.
“Do you, um, want to go and check our clothes in the fumigator?” Sticky asked Tai.
“No, thanks,” Tai said, opening the drawer in Reynie’s desk that contained the peppermints. He took out the tin and looked at Reynie.
“One,” Reynie said.
“Do you have to be an orphan to be like me and Constance?” Tai asked as he fished out a peppermint. “Where you can hear people talking in their heads? Constance says she doesn’t know.”
The older three felt themselves relax a little. From Tai’s point of view, the Mysterious Benedict Society had saved the world, and he naturally assumed that they would be able to take care of the current situation as well, no matter what might be involved. In short, he wasn’t worried. As long as they kept relatively calm, it seemed he would be fine.
“We talked about the orphan angle on his way here,” Constance said, rolling up her suit sleeves again. “We can’t know about the Listener—she doesn’t know herself—but Tai and I are the only telepaths in the region, as far as we can tell, and we’ve both been orphans all our lives.”
“Could be a coincidence,” Reynie said. “But if so, it’s a really interesting one.” He looked at Sticky, who rubbed his scalp thoughtfully.
“We do know,” Sticky began slowly, “that certain kinds of stress—and the presence or absence of certain factors in one’s environment—cause different kinds of chemical reactions in the formation of the developing brain.…”
Tai took the peppermint out of his mouth. “What does that mean?” he asked brightly, then popped the peppermint back in.
“It means it’s possible,” Reynie said. “But hard to say.”
Tai removed the peppermint again. “Do you know there’s a country with my name in it?” he asked, changing the subject for no apparent reason.
“Do you mean Taiwan?” asked Sticky.
Tai, who had been returning the peppermint to his mouth, froze in mid-motion. “Yes!” he whispered, awestruck. His face lit up. “Do you want to see it on the globe? I can show you!”
Why, of course, the others assured him, they would be delighted to see Taiwan on the globe. And so, exchanging glances that betrayed mixed emotions, the older three followed Tai downstairs to the sitting room, where he carefully turned the massive globe with both hands.
Sticky and Reynie watched expectantly, knowing exactly when the globe would stop spinning, and Constance, who had always avoided studying geography, pretended to do the same.
“Here!” Tai proclaimed at last, jabbing his finger on the globe. “I told you!”
“You certainly did,” Reynie acknowledged genially. He had brought the two-way radio with him, and he looked around now for a good place to put it. His nerves were so on edge, he felt sure that if it squawked while under his arm, he would drop it with a yelp.
“My grandparents used to live there,” Tai observed. “It seems strange. My finger covers the whole word.” He lifted his finger from the globe, drew his eye close to the point he’d been covering, then put his finger back and shook his head.
Constance was peeking over his shoulder to get a fix on the country’s location. She was annoyed to discover how far off her own guess would have been. “How do you know where your grandparents were from?”
Tai shrugged. “I heard the headmaster thinking it once. I guess someone must have told him.”
“Do you know anything about your parents?” Reynie asked. He set the radio next to a stack of books on the piano.
The little boy was spinning the globe again, rather fast this time, evidently just to watch it spin. “I think they got something bad in the mail,” he said uncertainly. “That’s what the headmaster thought.”
“Tai, I think your parents were scientists!” Sticky exclaimed, to everyone’s surprise.
“Oh, yeah!” Tai said. He looked admiringly over his shoulder at Sticky. “The headmaster thought that, too! You really do know everything! But how did you know about my parents? That seems weird.”
Reynie and Constance wondered the same thing.
Sticky explained that he had read about them in newspapers and science journals. “They were well-known scientists,” he said, “a brilliant married couple working together on major projects. It came out after they—well, after the Emergency—that they had secretly been working on an invention that could track people from far away by tracing their unique chemical signatures. Basically, a sophisticated, long-distance bloodhound. Once it ‘smelled’—analyzed, you know—something that had belonged to someone, it would be able to locate that person almost anywhere. There’s been plenty of debate about whether their invention could have worked if they’d lived long enough to finish it. They had some good ideas, though, and were clearly determined to try.”
“Why would they do that?” asked Tai, who had stopped spinning the globe and turned to look at Sticky. He didn’t seem upset, only curious. This was not especially surprising to Constance or Reynie, who had always been orphans themselves. But Sticky felt a bit disconcerted talking about Tai’s parents, afraid of upsetting him.
“They, uh, your parents, I mean—I mean, I don’t know why, but—”
Constance cut in. “During the Emergency the Whisperer was telling everybody ‘the missing aren’t missing, they’re only departed.’ Just—up here, you know,” she said, tapping her forehead. “So people were confused. But lots of people were actually disappearing, thanks to Mr. Curtain and his thugs, and some people, anyway, were noticing—”
“People like us,” Sticky interjected. “People with an unusually strong love of truth.”
“Which means that some people,” Constance continued, with an annoyed look at Sticky, “really wanted to know where their loved ones were. Your parents were probably trying to help people like that. I think they were heroes, Tai.”
“Really?” Tai ran over and grabbed Constance’s hands, which, much to her surprise, caused tears to spring into her eyes.
“I mean,” she said in a choked voice, “I think so?”
“Yay!” Tai said, and hugged her.
Sticky and Reynie, meanwhile, surreptitiously wiped at their own eyes.
“Wow, you’re all feeling the exact same way!” Tai exclaimed. “It’s weird!”
“Oh boy,” Reynie murmured, and then in a louder voice he said, “George, what was this business about getting something bad in the mail, though?”
Sticky shook his head. “Just a tragic accident. They ordered some chemicals for their experiments, and one of them arrived mislabeled. In many cases it wouldn’t have mattered. But they were doing really unusual work, and they ended up mixing some things that… put them to sleep. And they… didn’t wake up.”
Sticky grimaced as he said this, and Reynie and Constance each held their breath, all wondering how Tai would respond to this account.
“It’s okay, everybody,” Tai said with a very grown-up-sounding sigh. “I never even knew them. Anyway, you’re my family now!”
At this, three backs straightened, three pairs of eyes widened, and three brains started racing. This was turning out to be a most complicated day.
Despite the day’s challenges, dinner was something of a celebratory affair. Captain Plugg, admirably brushing off the news of her damaged motorcycle, had made a rather less-than-successful squash casserole, which everyone—even young Tai, and in fact even Constance—was pretending to enjoy. (The kind guard had also brought up three tubs of ice cream for dessert, the knowledge of which somewhat softened the blow of dinner.) And here sat Kate, regaling them with her account of the Street Fair Melee (which was what she had termed her encounter with the Ten Men), relatively unharmed and indeed almost giddy. Milligan was safe and receiving proper care in the secret Security Hospital. McCracken and several of his cronies were already back in custody. Nobody had expected this turn of events, but all things considered, the day seemed to have gone rather well.
“He threw an ice-cream truck at Milligan?” Tai asked, not for the first time. He was enthralled by the story.
“Technically, he only threw the motorcycle at me,” Kate said laughing, “and pushed the ice-cream truck onto Milligan. Who, in his defense, was at the same time fending off Sharpe and trying to keep McCracken from getting to me. Plus, you know, he’s out of practice—otherwise, I’m sure, he would have avoided the ice-cream-truck attack.”
Reynie chuckled a little absently. He was pleased with the good news, of course, but there were still plenty of Ten Men out there (more than a baker’s half dozen, he thought), and the situation was still thoroughly precarious. He’d never stopped thinking about the message that Mr. Benedict had sent (where one who stands defies the name, where one who stands defies…), but at the same time he’d never been able to fully concentrate on it. The message was important; there could be no doubt. Yet Reynie’s brain felt pulled in a hundred different directions. His only consolation was that the Ten Men seemed to be in a holding pattern. Both sides were in a waiting game whose rules had yet to become clear.
Constance, meanwhile, was slipping a forkful of goopy casserole onto Sticky’s plate. It was the third such forkful, and Sticky (who was just as distracted as Reynie) had yet to notice. He just kept glancing down at his plate with concealed dismay, continuing to eat what was in front of him.
“Anyway,” Kate was saying, “once Milligan was sure that McCracken and company were properly dealt with, he sent every available agent to find that warehouse where Crawlings and the Listener were holed up. They weren’t crack agents, but five of them against one Ten Man made for decent odds, and this might be the best chance to get the Listener away from them—which could very well turn this whole thing around, you know. And sure enough, they found the warehouse—”
“But it was empty,” Constance interrupted. “We know.”
“Oh… you do?” Kate looked disappointed.
Sticky jerked a thumb at Constance. “She knew the moment the Listener sensed the agents nearby. The Listener was focusing all of her attention on them. Constance actually tried to distract her, but she failed.”
Constance gave him a withering look. “Really? You couldn’t find a better way to put that?”
