The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Riddle of Ages, page 22
“Then we should just keep looking!” Kate said. “Sticky, in what direction did you expect the passage to be?”
“To the right,” Sticky said, already moving that way.
Kate caught his arm. “Remember, wherever there used to be a secret entrance, there was always a trap nearby.”
“Roger that,” Sticky said. He proceeded along the base of the hill with great caution, probing with a foot before every step, probing behind the drapeweed curtain with his hand. He found rock with his hand, solid ground with his feet. He stepped again, with the same result. After his fifth such step, his hand tapped against metal. He’d found the door.
Before anyone else moved, Kate knelt near Sticky’s feet to shine her flashlight at the ground all around. “There,” she said, pointing at a spot a few paces out from the hillside. “See where the drapeweed is kind of sagging a bit? That has to be the trap.”
The others had a hard time seeing exactly what Kate saw, but they had no reason to doubt her and every reason to avoid the sagging drapeweed. They edged along the base of the hill to join Kate and Sticky by the door, which was rapidly growing visible as those two worked together to clear away the vines. Only its size and rectangular shape identified it as a door, however. Made of a formidable-looking metal, it lacked seams, hinges, or a handle.
“Try kicking it!” suggested Tai, who had loved hearing about the secret entrances at the former Institute, especially how one opened them.
“Unfortunately, this isn’t that kind of door,” Sticky said, studying it closely. “It can’t be opened from the outside. See how the metal sits in a groove? It has to be slid to the left or right, but there’ll be some kind of locking system on the inside.”
Kate couldn’t resist trying to shove the door inward, then to the left and right, just in case. She might as well have been trying to budge a tank. “He’s right. It has to be opened from the other side.” She untethered herself from Sticky and edged past the others to get back to her duffel bag.
“Could I please kick it just to try?” Tai asked.
They let Tai kick the metal, which was so thick and heavy that it didn’t rattle or resonate at all. But he was satisfied to have made the attempt.
“Let me think,” Reynie said. “There has to be a way we can work this out using the vent.” As he spoke, he turned to look at the vent—they all did, and they all saw Kate, now wearing her parachute, poking her head through the opening again. Everyone froze.
“Oh, Kate, surely not!” Sticky hissed.
“Surely yes!” Kate replied, pulling her head back out to smile at them. “Don’t worry—I’ve done the calculations. I’ll see you all again in a minute or two. The trip down will be quick, of course, but then I’ll have to take the elevator back up.”
“You’re going to skydive under the ground?” Tai asked in disbelief. “You’re going to… ground-dive?”
“I guess you could call it that,” said Kate with a laugh. “Wish me luck!”
“Good—”
But Kate had already dived headfirst into the hillside.
Everyone scrambled to the opening. Kate had left her bucket behind for Tai, who used it as a step stool, and with their heads all bumping together, they peered down in time to see what looked like the top of a mushroom—but was actually the canopy of Kate’s parachute—sinking to the floor far below them. Within moments the mushroom wrinkled, folded, and collapsed to the side, revealing the minuscule figure of Kate Wetherall, who waved up at them with a broad sweep of her arm.
“Well, that made me feel like throwing up,” Constance remarked.
Sticky and Reynie had felt the same. There was no time to dwell on the fact, however. Even now Kate would be making her way to the elevator, and they decided they should replace the grate and see if they could pull enough drapeweed over it to hide it again. Sticky got on one side of the grate, Reynie got on the other, and together they lifted it several centimeters off the ground. They set it down again.
“Okay, this is really heavy,” Reynie said.
“It really is,” Sticky said. “Also, I think Kate has the screws and bolts in her pocket. Plus the tools. We might as well wait.”
“I didn’t think of that,” said Reynie, with evident relief. “Of course we should.”
“You won’t have to wait long,” Constance announced. “She’s getting close.”
Sticky gave a little jump. Something had occurred to him. “Those blueprints contained schematics for some alarm systems. What if there’s an alarm she needs to deactivate? What if she doesn’t realize it?”
“Can’t we tell her when she gets to the door?” Tai asked.
“That door is so thick,” said Reynie. Like Sticky, he was hurriedly digging for his walkie-talkie, which was zipped into a pocket of his flight suit. “She might not be able to hear what we’re saying.”
Sticky got to his own walkie-talkie before Reynie managed to extract his, but no sooner had he switched it on than a rumbling groan sounded from behind the door.
“Constance, warn her!” Reynie said, and Constance squeezed her eyes closed.
Too late. The metal door slid sideways to reveal a grinning Kate Wetherall.
A siren began to sound.
Kate’s grin vanished.
Sticky flew past her, his eyes darting all around. Locating the alarm panel and deactivating the alarm took him a few seconds—but only a few seconds—and in the ensuing silence they all looked at one another with wide eyes, daring to hope. The silence stretched into a full minute. They began to breathe again.
“Sorry,” Kate said. “I didn’t see it. Walked right past it and didn’t see it.”
“I should have warned you ahead of time,” Sticky said.
“I didn’t give you much chance, did I?” Kate said.
“Hush,” said Constance. She had closed her eyes.
Everyone looked at her.
Constance opened her eyes again, and the fear in them was plain. “They’re coming,” she said. “They’re coming, and they won’t be long.”
Across the still night, beyond the hill, over the water, a powerful engine started up. It rumbled loudly for a few seconds, then went abruptly silent—not in the usual manner of an engine shutting down, but as if it had simply vanished. All was still again.
“That’s the Salamander,” Sticky said. “They activated the noise-cancellation device.”
“Why didn’t they turn it on before they started the engine?” Tai asked, clutching Kate’s bucket as Reynie ushered him into the passage.
“Great question,” Kate said. “If Crawlings was responsible, that would explain it. McCracken’s always getting on him for being careless.”
“I think it was McCracken himself,” Reynie said grimly. “I think he wanted to send us a message.”
Kate narrowed her eyes. “Toying with us? Mocking us for setting off the alarm?”
“And letting us know he’s on his way,” Reynie said.
“What a jerk,” Kate grumbled, applying herself to a heavy crank near the door, which rapidly slid closed.
“Can you reactivate the alarm?” Reynie asked Sticky.
“Not this one. I had to permanently disable it with a universal shutdown code—a sort of digital skeleton key. Mr. Benedict included it in the schematic. I think the regular codes must change every day, like the one at the guardhouse.”
“Why would he make it so easy to disable?” Constance asked.
Sticky started moving down the passage and gestured for them to follow. “I wouldn’t say it was easy. I had to enter a string of twenty-three digits with no pauses between them.”
Tai, lugging Kate’s bucket with one hand, began punching numbers into an imaginary keypad with the other. He counted under his breath. After a dozen or so he shook his head, eyes wide.
The passage was cold, dimly lit, and featureless. After a short distance they passed the doors to the elevator, which Kate said was of the clackety-clack metal-cage variety.
“It rises up along the wall, giving you a view of everything,” she said. “I’ve never seen such a big indoor space. ‘Enormous’ doesn’t come close to describing it. But it’s entirely empty. Very weird.”
“I want to see it!” Tai said.
“Maybe later, sport,” Kate said, for they were hurrying on.
At the end of the passage, they came to a closed door. This one was a regular door, built of wood, painted gray, and with a plain-looking doorknob.
“Great, now what?” Constance said.
“Let me work my magic,” Sticky said, cracking his knuckles. Then he simply turned the knob and pushed the door open.
Constance rolled her eyes.
“There shouldn’t be any more obstacles until we reach the control room,” Sticky said, “only a rather long walk. Kate, do you want to give Tai a ride?”
They hurried down passage after passage, several of which gave on to other passages and closed doors. Just finding the way to the control room would have been a major obstacle itself if anyone other than Sticky had read those blueprints. As it was, Sticky had only to follow the map in his mind, and the others had only to follow him.
“If I’m right about that cavern being a secret assembly area,” Sticky said as they hustled along, “my guess would be that we’re passing through old storage spaces—all these rooms would have contained different parts that would get sent down to the assembly floor by way of the elevator.”
“What’s in the rooms now?” Tai wanted to know.
Kate opened a door at random. “Looks like dust and spiders,” she said.
They hurried on.
“That one takes you to what used to be the Memory Terminal,” Sticky said, indicating a door on their left. “We’re getting close to familiar territory now.”
“Right,” said Kate, who had an unerring sense of distance and direction. “We’re just east of what used to be the classroom building.”
“And several meters below, of course,” Sticky said.
“Of course,” said Tai, just to be involved.
At last they came to a door with a sign over it: SECONDARY CONTROL ROOM. It, too, had a simple knob, and with a somewhat dramatic “Here we go!” Sticky turned the knob and shoved against the door, only to thump into it and bounce back. With a sheepish look he tried again, this time pulling on the knob instead of shoving, and the door opened toward him.
“Here we go,” he mumbled.
The room was small and simple: a single desk, atop which stood a computer and some kind of control board; two security-camera monitors mounted on the wall above the desk; and a second door, currently closed. One of the monitors displayed a view of the front plaza and the bridge in the distance beyond it. Both were unoccupied. The other monitor showed the interior of the security door that Kate had opened to let them in. It was still in place. If the Ten Men had reached the island yet, there was no sign of it on the screens.
Sticky slid into a chair at the computer station. “Okay, according to the gold key, there’s an obvious first step now.”
“Which is what?” Constance demanded, although Sticky had clearly been about to explain.
Sticky bit his lip, took a breath, and recited:
“First learn all that you can learn.
Unlocking with the code
Will burn your chances of return
And blocked will be your road.”
Constance made an angry noise. “Another code? What code? How many codes are there, anyway?”
“I don’t know, Constance,” Sticky said, making an effort to speak calmly. “The gold key presents a kind of riddle we have to solve here, and I’m assuming the answer is the code. I can share the riddle in a minute, but can we agree that first I should race through whatever I can on this computer—you know, ‘learn all that I can learn’?”
“Fine,” Constance said. “Just hurry up.”
Sticky glanced at the others for confirmation. They all nodded, especially Tai, who did so with great enthusiasm.
“While you do that,” Reynie said, “why don’t I run through all the security-camera views? Whatever they have to show us is another thing we can learn, right?”
They all agreed, especially Tai, and Reynie took the chair next to Sticky. The control board operated the security cameras, as Reynie had correctly guessed, and in no time he had scanned the system and figured out how to work it. There were dozens of possible views to be displayed, and each camera could also be repositioned or made to zoom in on a particular frame. Reynie’s first move was to redirect the camera overlooking the plaza, scanning left, right, and below for any sign of the Baker’s Dozen. Finding none, he began switching to the views provided by other cameras.
“I’m in the system now,” Sticky murmured, and Reynie looked over to see him paging rapidly through screen after screen of information—schematics, computer code, and great blocks of text (some of it in different languages). “There’s an awful lot here. It could take me an hour to get through everything. What’s it looking like out there?”
“No sign of them yet,” said Kate, who, like all the others, was studying the monitors. The screens were now revealing views of long, empty, almost identical corridors.
“It’s the old classroom building,” Constance said. “How depressing.”
“So strange,” Kate murmured.
“Yes,” Sticky said, still paging through screens on the computer, “the classroom building now appears to be the administration area. It’s being renovated for use by general staff, guards, medical personnel, and so on.”
“They should have plenty of room,” Reynie said as more empty corridors appeared on the monitors. “I remember thinking that there must be miles of tiles here.”
“You weren’t wrong,” Kate said. “And some lead to the old Helpers’ barracks behind the classroom building. Is that where the security suites are located, George?”
Sticky tapped his nose and pointed in her direction without taking his eyes from the computer. He paged quickly through a few more screens, then turned in his chair to face them. “Okay, time is short, so let me tell you what I know so far. It’s enough to form a plan A. If we end up having more time, I can keep digging and maybe come up with a better one.”
Reynie switched back to a view of the front plaza—still empty for the moment—and left it there. They all kept an eye on it as Sticky continued.
“Between the blueprints I saw in Mr. Benedict’s house,” he said, “and what I’ve just learned here, I have a sense of how the KEEP is laid out. There are several layers of security—think horizontal layers rather than vertical ones. The first is the water, of course. Then you have the exterior of the buildings.”
“And the traps!” Tai reminded him.
“And the traps,” Sticky acknowledged. “But the walls of the buildings themselves have been fortified, along with the windows and doors, and they’re all rigged with an alarm system that will radio distress signals to the mainland if there’s any attempt to break through them. So that’s the second layer of security.
“The third is a system of barriers that are triggered in different ways,” Sticky said, rising from his chair. He went to the door through which they had entered, pulled it closed, and pointed at the ceiling just above it. “See that little gap between the doorframe and the wall? One of the barriers is up there and will drop down like a guillotine if it’s triggered. It’s made of glastanium—as clear as glass, as strong as titanium—and it doesn’t have a lock or a security code. In case of an attempted break-in or breakout, all the doors to the different sections of the KEEP get sealed off with barriers like this one, and they stay that way for twenty-four hours. That allows plenty of time for security forces from the mainland to arrive in sufficient numbers and assess the situation.”
Reynie gestured at the monitor displaying the KEEP’s front plaza. “So if the Ten Men break in through the front entrance…”
“Then this barrier falls,” Sticky said, “as will the barriers over every other entrance into this section of the KEEP.”
“So they won’t be able to get to us?” Tai asked hopefully.
“The barriers will definitely slow them down,” Sticky said. “I don’t know how many calculator bombs they have—evidently, not many—and it might take more than one to blast through a barrier. Their laser pointers won’t be of any use, because the barriers don’t have locks or door handles to burn through. They could probably burn a few tiny holes, but what good would that do them?”
“What if they burned hundreds and hundreds of tiny holes?” Tai asked. “Then they could make a big hole!”
“Smart thinking, pal,” Kate said. “But the laser pointers are only good for a single shot, and they don’t have many of those, either.”
“Whew!” Tai said, and it was suddenly apparent to the others that he’d actually been anxious about the answer. Kate stepped over and put an arm around him.
“So, what’s the bad news?” Constance asked.
“The bad news,” Reynie said, “is that Mr. Benedict is in a different section of the KEEP.”
“Exactly,” said Sticky. “The section we’re in includes this secondary control room, the old classroom building, and the secret passages leading up to it. Mr. Curtain’s security suite is in the old Helpers’ barracks.”
“You’re saying that the moment McCracken tries to break in, we’re going to be sealed off from Dad?” Constance cried. “What are we waiting for, then? We have to run!”
Sticky grimaced. “We can’t just run. First of all, what if we didn’t make it? There’s only one entrance to the barracks, it’s not exactly close by, and it’s a security door that requires a code. And just to get there we’d have to pass through three other security doors that require a code.”
Constance threw her hands in the air. “So that’s what the riddle is for! We solve it for the code! Let’s get on it! McCracken’s getting close—I can feel it!”
Everybody instinctively squinted at the monitors. Still nothing outside.
“Listen to me, Constance,” Sticky said, fixing her with a steady gaze. “This code from the riddle will have to be an override code rather than the normal one, which changes every day. And using an override code will drop the barriers. It’s another emergency measure.”
