For Your Paws Only Read online

  Julius frowned at the mention of B-Nut’s rock band. “They’re untested,” he cautioned. “Greenest field agents we’ve got—well, besides Mr. Burner, of course.”

  Chagrined by this blunt assessment, Bunsen drooped slightly.

  Julius paced back and forth, considering. He shook his head regretfully. “I don’t know about the Acorns,” he said. “They’re wet behind the ears. And they don’t have Paws Only clearance.”

  “I’d trust them with my life,” said B-Nut.

  “Me too,” Glory agreed.

  “Hmmm,” said Julius. “Well, it’s a bit unorthodox, but I think I see where you’re heading with this, B-Nut. Might prove just the right tool for the right job. Let’s get a move on, then,” he continued briskly. “Computer gymnasts, find an empty keyboard upstairs and send out a worldwide alert. I want to keep our fellow intelligence agencies fully informed of every development.”

  Worried murmurs arose from the computer gymnasts as, round-eyed, they looked at each other. Find a keyboard? In broad daylight? With the museum staff arriving even now? This was truly unprecedented. If Julius was going to risk allowing them to be spotted by humans, he must be in deadly earnest about the magnitude of this crisis.

  As they filed out of the conference room, Julius continued barking orders.

  “We need intel, and we need it fast,” he said. “Lab mice, get that film of Bunsen’s developed on the double. I want it analyzed yesterday. Surveillance pilots, I want you aloft in ten minutes. Not a tail moves in this city but you track it.”

  B-Nut and the other pilots saluted smartly and followed the computer gymnasts out of the room. Julius turned to Bunsen. “Mr. Burner, you have my permission to take any equipment with you to New York that you may need. Deep Freeze is at your disposal. Chip, you and the rest of the foragers assist him.”

  The two mice nodded and hurried from the room. Glory started to follow, but Julius placed a paw on her shoulder. He waited until they were alone, then said, “Given this turn of events, I think it’s time we called in our special agents.”

  “Special agents?” Glory looked puzzled.

  Julius nodded gravely. “Contact the children,” he ordered. “We’re going to need their help.”

  CHAPTER 4

  DAY ONE • TUESDAY • 0850 HOURS

  Roquefort Dupont, Lord of the Sewers and supreme leader of Washington, D.C.’s rat underworld, squeezed his hapless aide’s throat in an iron-clawed grip. “Gnaw, sometimes you just plain disappoint me,” he snarled, thrusting his face so close that their whiskers nearly intertwined.

  Gnaw’s close-set eyes bulged in terror. His lone ear (the other lost long ago to Dupont’s razor-sharp teeth) quivered frantically as he struggled to free himself from his boss’s grip. He didn’t know which was worse, having his air supply slowly cut off, or being so close to Dupont’s mouth. Fueled by a steady supply of garbage, his boss had the most rotten, rancid, repugnant breath of any rat in Washington. And Gnaw was getting a full blast of it.

  “Sorry,” he managed to croak, his eyes watering.

  Dupont let go. Gnaw fell to the floor with a thud.

  “Your turn,” said Dupont, whipping around to where Scurvy, his other aide-de-camp, cowered beneath the desk in the Library of Congress’s Reading Room. The skinny rat’s droopy whiskers shook in terror as Dupont used his long, hairless tail to smack the book that lay open between them.

  Scurvy peered at the page. His brow puckered apprehensively. “Um, that’s an N, right? And—wait, don’t tell me! An E, and that’s a W. Let’s see . . . that spells, um . . . ”

  “ ‘New,’ Scurvy, ‘new’! As in NEW York! As in the Big Apple!” Dupont shook his head in disgust. “Idiots! I’m surrounded by idiots!” he complained. “I can see that I’m just going to have to do this myself.”

  Dupont’s tail began to thrash back and forth angrily. “Don’t you two understand the importance of what I’m trying to do here? It’s time to take this game of rat-and-mouse to a whole new level. It’s time to finally take what we deserve! And the only way we’re going to be able to do that is to beat those wretched small-paws at their own game.”

  The rat leader’s eyes gleamed fiery red in the shadows beneath the table. His aides drew back in alarm as their boss worked himself into a rage. “It’s time we rid the world of mice once and for all! And who better to do it than I, Roquefort Dupont?” He thumped his mangy gray chest with a powerful paw.

  Gnaw began to chew anxiously on the tip of his tail. The boss was angry, and when the boss was angry, he took it out on his underlings.

  Dupont stomped back and forth beneath the desk. “Rat scum, she called me! Me, Roquefort Dupont, the descendant of royalty! The great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Camembert Dupont, who lived in a castle! Well, I won’t be insulted any longer! I won’t be kept down, held back, or pushed around. I will take my rightful place in this world, and she can’t stop me!”

  Gnaw and Scurvy exchanged a glance. Their boss was off again, ranting about Glory Goldenleaf. Ever since Halloween, he had become increasingly unhinged. His hatred for mice—and for Glory in particular—had ballooned into an outright obsession.

  “She thinks rats are ignorant,” Dupont fumed. “Are we ignorant?”

  Scurvy quailed. Gnaw pulled his tail out of his mouth cautiously. “Uh, I dunno, boss,” he replied. “Are we?”

  “Of course not, you useless garbage trawler!” screamed Dupont. “We’re not ignorant—we’re illiterate! Don’t you know the difference?”

  Gnaw blinked, confused.

  “It means we can’t READ!” Dupont thundered, thrusting his snout at him. Gnaw flinched, then popped his tail back into his mouth and began sucking it vigorously. “But that’s about to change,” continued his boss, a crafty look settling over his hideous face. “Those wretched small-paws have a weak spot, you see. Just like that big human we saw in the movie—you know, that one in the cape and tights?”

  “Spider-Man?” Scurvy ventured.

  “Not him, you idiot!” screeched Dupont. “The other one!”

  Gnaw pulled his tail out of his mouth again. “Uh, Superman?”

  “That’s the one! Just like Superman. Kryptonite was his weakness. The short-tails have a weakness, too: words. If we can read, we can find out what makes them tick. Spy on their mouse plans, learn their mouse ways. And when we do? Well, you know what I always say.” Dupont’s thin lips peeled back in a cruel smile. “The only good mouse is a dead mouse. And the only world good enough for rats is a mouse-free world!”

  Dupont nodded to himself in satisfaction at this thought. “That Goldenleaf brat and the rest of her kind thought the Black Paw was bad. Wait until they get a taste of what I’ve got in store for them now.” He thumped his chest again. “Me! Roquefort Dupont!”

  There was a sharp creak as the door to the Reading Room opened. Dupont snapped his head around. “Quick,” he ordered. “Out of sight. No time to be tangling with humans. We’ve got a train to catch.”

  And the trio of rats slunk off into the shadows.

  CHAPTER 5

  DAY ONE • TUESDAY • 1300 HOURS

  “Hey, Oz.”

  “Hey, Herbie,” Oz replied, waving at the Spy Museum security guard. D. B. waved, too.

  “You kids are here earlier than usual,” Herbie noted. Oz and D. B. were a familiar sight at the museum. They hung out there nearly every afternoon after school, messing around in the exhibits, doing homework in the café, and waiting for Oz’s dad to finish work. The security guard frowned. “Not cutting classes, are you?”

  “Nope,” said Oz. “We got out early. D. B. and I won a trip to New York.”

  “Wow!” said Herbie. “Hope you have fun.”

  “Fat chance,” muttered D. B. to herself, following Oz as he cut through the lobby and headed for the hallway behind the Spy City Café. “Where are you going?” she called.

  “Dead drop,” Oz replied.

/>   D. B. looked surprised. “Why bother? Glory can’t help us this time, Oz. We’re on our own. We’re going to stupid New York, remember?”

  “I don’t care,” Oz said stubbornly. “I’m going to leave her a note.”

  He ducked down beneath the open grillwork of the hallway’s metal staircase and crouched in the shadows. The dead drop, located under the bottom tread, was the place where he and D. B. and their friends from the Spy Mice Agency left messages for each other. Oz pulled a scrap of paper and a pencil from his pocket and began scribbling. D. B. peered over his shoulder.

  “What are you going to tell her?”

  “That we need help,” said Oz. “That unless we come up with a plan, we are nothing but shark bait.”

  He fished for the small roll of tape he’d stashed in the shadows and secured his note to the underside of the bottom step. He’d just finished when he heard a sound from the vicinity of his shoes. A very tiny sound, like somebody scraping a pinkie nail on a piece of sandpaper. Or like a mouse clearing her throat.

  “Glory!” he cried in surprise, looking down to see his friend perched on the toe of his sneaker. “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you two,” Glory replied. “I was going to send you an e-mail, but this must be my lucky day. Something’s up, kids—something big. We need your help.”

  “You think you need our help!” blurted D. B. “Oz’s father entered us in some stupid contest, and tonight we have to go to stupid New York with stupid Jordan and Tank!”

  Glory’s ears pricked up at this piece of news. “New York?” she said. “Wait until Julius hears about this. Your trip might come in handy.”

  “Handy?” snapped D. B. “Didn’t you hear me? We have to go with Jordan and Tank.”

  Ignoring her, Glory leaped gracefully off Oz’s shoe. “The thing is, Dupont has learned to read.”

  “What?!” cried Oz and D. B. together, leaning toward their tiny friend so fast that they collided. They sat back, gingerly rubbing their foreheads.

  Glory nodded. “Bunsen and I caught him in the act a few hours ago at the Library of Congress.”

  Oz and D. B. exchanged a glance. This was not good. Not good at all. They could imagine only too well what a thug like Dupont could do once he got his ugly snout into a book or two. Knowledge was power, and the last thing the mice needed was for the rats to gain more power than they already had.

  “It gets worse, kids, believe it or not,” Glory continued soberly. “We got word this morning that just about every rat who is anybody in the rat world is heading for New York even as we speak.”

  “How?” asked Oz.

  “Stowed away on international flights,” Glory explained. “Rats say they don’t have much use for humans, but they sure love eating human food and they sure love using human transportation. You should see the underside of the Metro trains at rush hour. They look like fur coats on wheels.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  Glory shrugged. “We don’t know yet. I’m heading up a team to gather intelligence in New York. Once we know what the rats are planning, we’ll report back, and Julius will decide the plan from there. Meanwhile, I’ve been asked to recruit you two for a supply mission. Bunsen needs a few things.”

  Oz reached into his pocket and pulled out the small gold button that he kept with him at all times. Julius had presented it to him just a few weeks ago, when he’d made him and D. B. honorary Spy Mice Agency field agents. Glued to the back was a tiny safety pin; on the front, a pair of skillful paws had etched the Spy Mice Agency logo—the profile of a mouse wearing dark glasses.

  Once again, Oz thought, Glory’s problems far outweighed his. As annoying as Jordan and Tank were, they were hardly lethal. Glory’s world could collapse if Roquefort Dupont and the rest of the world’s rats harnessed the power of the written word. Oz squinted at the tiny line of script that circled the button’s rim. He needed a magnifying glass to read it properly, but he’d already learned it by heart: “The noblest motive is the public good.” The Spy Mice Agency motto, written by some old poet named Virgil.

  “Mission accepted,” Oz said solemnly, pinning the button to his lapel. “Agent Double-O-Levinson reporting for duty.”

  Beside him, D. B. put her button on too. “The only thing is,” she added, “we leave for New York in a few hours.”

  “So do we,” Glory replied.

  “We’ll have to move fast,” said Oz. He placed his hand on the floor, palm up.

  Glory shouldered her mitten-thumb backpack and climbed aboard. She looked up at the two children and grinned. “Well then, what are we waiting for?”

  CHAPTER 6

  DAY ONE • TUESDAY • 1345 HOURS

  Oz was bulging with mice.

  D. B. had had to bow out of the afternoon’s mission. Her dad had arrived early to pick her up, and she’d gone home to pack. That left Oz to ferry Glory and her team upstairs all by himself.

  “Hey, shove over, would you?” squeaked Tulip—who preferred to be known as Lip—to Romeo, as the two Steel Acorns jostled for more room.

  Oz’s colleagues had distributed themselves throughout his clothing: Glory and Bunsen were hidden in the pocket of his polo shirt, B-Nut and his rock band were in his pants pockets, and Julius was crouched under the bill of his baseball cap. He could feel tiny mouse paws clinging to the fabric of his clothing, and the tickle of tiny whiskers and tails. It felt a bit odd, but it was comforting, too. He was literally covered with his friends.

  “Dudes, keep still!” ordered B-Nut from the other pants pocket, as they entered the Code Breaking exhibit. “We don’t want any humans to spot us.”

  Giving a tour group from New Hampshire a wide berth, Oz slowly circled the large room. He passed the display on Navajo codetalkers, stopped briefly to examine the secret-code ashtray, then paused at Cryptology 101, where visitors could try their hands at deciphering coded messages.

  Bunsen, who was squashed in beside Glory—and who obviously didn’t mind; not only his nose but also his entire tail was bright pink with pleasure—scanned the display cases that lined the exhibit. In one paw he clutched a tiny clipboard (made from a scrap of wood and a foraged hair clip); in the other, the stub of a pencil. The lab mouse was in his element, and he fairly bristled with efficiency.

  “See anything suitable, Mr. Burner?” asked Julius.

  “I would give my whiskers for a crack at that,” Bunsen replied, gazing covetously at the glass case in front of them.

  Number one on Bunsen’s list of essential equipment was an encryption device. With Dupont now able to read, they couldn’t risk having him intercept their messages.

  “The soul of espionage is secrecy,” Julius had explained to Oz downstairs. “This mission must be strictly For Your Paws Only. And that means mouse paws, not rat paws.”

  Now, the Spy Mice Agency director nodded his grizzled head. “The Enigma,” he said admiringly. “The Cadillac of code machines. A real piece of history, too. Did you know that the Nazis invented it during World War II, Oz?”

  Oz nodded, and he felt Julius’s tiny paws scrabble in his hair as he bounced up and down under his baseball cap. “Thanks to the Polish secret service, the Allies got their hands on it,” the mouse continued. “Helped turn the tide of the war. Operation Ultra, the humans called it.” He shook his head admiringly. “They don’t make them like the Enigma anymore.”

  Oz peered doubtfully at the machine, which looked like a huge old-fashioned typewriter in a wooden box. Emphasis on huge. “Uh, Julius,” he ventured, speaking quietly so as not to draw attention to himself. The group from New Hampshire had left, so they were alone in the room at the moment, but the museum security guards were never very far away. “I don’t think I can hide that in my suitcase.”

  Once Julius had found out that he and D. B. were heading to New York for the Bake-Off, he’d enlisted them as mission couriers. Glory and her team would of necessity be traveling light, as pigeons couldn’t pack much of a load fo
r that long a flight. Oz and D. B. would transport the bulk of their equipment instead.

  “No, no, of course not,” Julius agreed. “It’s far too big and heavy. We need something much smaller.”

  Oz’s clothing fell silent as the mice racked their brains for a solution.

  “I have an idea,” said Oz. He ducked out through the Pearl Harbor exhibit and backtracked to the Secret History of History, a room devoted to the early evolution of espionage. Oz stopped in front of one of the display cases that lined the walls. He pointed to a round, flat object about the size of a silver dollar. “How about a cipher disk?” he suggested.

  He felt his pockets wiggle as the mice angled for a better view of the coinlike object, whose inner and outer rings were both rimmed with the letters of the alphabet. “It’s kind of an antique,” Oz admitted. “They invented it during the Civil War. You just set the code by lining up any two letters of the alphabet. Simple stuff, but it might be okay, especially since Dupont’s only just learned to read.”

  Bunsen’s pink eyes lit up. “Oz, it’s perfect!” he cried. “A portable encryption device!”

  “They sell them in the gift shop downstairs,” added Oz. “You wouldn’t even have to replicate them in the lab.”

  “We’ll need three,” said Bunsen, busily making a note on his clipboard. “One for you and D. B., one for our team, and one to leave here at Central Command. Can you get them for us?”

  Oz pulled his wallet from his pocket, being careful not to dislodge B-Nut and Nutmeg. “I should have enough,” he said, looking inside. “If not, my dad still owes me last week’s allowance.”

  “That’s it, then,” said Bunsen, scanning his clipboard a final time. “I’ve got everything else we need back at Central Command.”

  As Oz headed for the stairway that led to the gift shop, Lip gave a low whistle. “Dude, check out those cool shades!”

  “Where?” Oz felt his pockets wiggle again. The wiggling stopped when the other mice spotted the mannequin in a nearby display case. It was dressed in dark glasses and a trench coat.