Secret Weapons Read online

  But Aurora didn’t say anything more and only a few seconds later Kate said, “Well, where are you going, twerp? I thought you were still asleep.”

  Ari pushed aside a particularly prickly branch and peeked out in time to see a small, pigeon-toed, bristly-haired figure trudging up the sidewalk. Carson Nicely. “I’m going to Web’s house,” he heard Carson say. “To see Web.”

  Just before Ari turned loose of the holly branch so he could stick his punctured finger in his mouth, he saw Carson start on up the sidewalk. But a moment later he heard Kate’s voice again. “Wait a minute. Come back here. I want to ask you something. Did you see anybody running out from behind the Pappases’ house just now?”

  There was a long pause. Ari pushed the dangerous branch aside again and saw Carson peering nearsightedly down the driveway. “No,” he said finally. “Who was it?”

  “Holy cow!” Kate said in an exasperated tone of voice. “That’s what I was asking you. We don’t know who it was. But somebody just tried to spy on our science project. Or else sabotage it.”

  “Sabo … what?” Carson said.

  “Sabotage. You know. Blow it up, or steal it, or stuff like that.”

  “Ohhh,” Ari heard Carson say. “Ohhh.” He didn’t say anything more but Ari could see that he was nodding his head slowly up and down and his eyes, behind his round glasses, were wide and glassy.

  “Oh for Pete squeaks,” Kate said. “You’re no help. Come on, Aurora. Let’s go look for clues. Maybe whoever it was left some clues.”

  Ari scrunched down again as Kate and Aurora’s footsteps went past him down the driveway. But he didn’t hear Carson’s going anywhere, so after a minute he peeked out again. Carson was right where the girls had left him—in the middle of the sidewalk. He was standing very still and his eyes were even more glassy-looking.

  As Ari watched, Carson caught a deep, shaky breath and muttered something that sounded like “Terrorists.” He glanced from side to side, quickly and nervously, as if he expected to see something sneaking up on him. “It’s the terrorists,” he said again before he blinked, swallowed hard, and added, “Web. I gotta tell Web.” Then he started on up the sidewalk at top speed, which in Carson’s case was a kind of lopsided trot.

  “Hmmm!” Ari said. “Terrorists?” His hand was reaching back automatically for his fanny pack before he remembered about the prickles and stopped. But a couple of minutes later, when he was sure Kate and Aurora had had enough time to get clear back to the old studio, he crawled out of the holly bush and started up the sidewalk in the direction of Web Wong’s house.

  Ari was almost to the Wongs’ driveway when he stopped for a minute to get out his notebook and pencil, in case he might want to do some spur-of-the-moment writing about terrorists. It was while he was trying to get his fanny pack unzipped that he heard an odd thumping, scuffling noise and looked up in time to see Susie Garcia jumping rope down the sidewalk right at him. He ducked quickly to one side, but not quite quickly enough. Susie’s jump rope hit him on the shoulder, and a second later she hit him again. With her fist this time.

  Susie Garcia, who was in Ari’s third-grade class at Beaumont, was like that. She hit people a lot, particularly boys. But Ari had always figured it wasn’t her fault. Growing up with lots of older brothers could probably do that to a person of the opposite sex.

  “You made me miss,” Susie said. “Why didn’t you get out of the way? I was almost to five hundred.”

  Ari grinned at Susie. He liked the way her funny baby-rabbit face looked when she was angry. In fact, he pretty much liked the way Susie looked anytime. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I guess I was too busy getting out my notebook.”

  Susie’s frown changed from plain old mad to slightly curious. “Why?” she asked.

  “Why was I getting out my notebook?” Ari thought fast. If he came up with a really interesting answer, maybe she’d stay and talk for a minute. It was a long shot, he knew. Susie never talked to boys if she could help it. “Well …,” he said. And then suddenly he had it. “Well, it’s because of the terrorists.”

  “Terrorists?” Susie’s huge black eyes seemed to grow even bigger.

  “Yeah,” Ari said. “Haven’t you heard about them?”

  Susie shook her head.

  Ari took a deep breath. “I don’t know too much about it yet, either, but I know it has something to do with Web Wong.”

  “With Web? Why would a terrorist want to …”

  Ari racked his brain. Why would a terrorist be after Web Wong? his brain asked itself—and almost immediately came up with an answer. Web, who along with Ari and Susie and Carson Nicely was in the third grade at Beaumont, was a genius. A scientific genius. Web was always doing absolutely amazing scientific things, and right at the moment he and Carson were doing a special project for the science fair. Ari knew that for sure because he was supposed to be part of their team. But after he’d talked to Ms. Nelson about how basically unscientific he was, she’d agreed to let him write about the science projects instead of doing one. So he didn’t really know what Web and Carson were doing. Except that Carson had said that he had to tell Web about the terrorists. So …

  Lowering his voice to a whisper, Ari said, “It’s his science-fair project, I think. It’s like—some kind of secret weapon and these terrorist guys probably want to steal it.”

  “Ohhh,” Susie said. “Ohhh, wowee!”

  Chapter 4

  WHILE ARI WAS HAVING his ladder disaster, and then running into Susie, Carlos Garcia was at home. In the Garcias’ game room, actually, and Bucky Brockhurst and Eddy Wong were there too. Eddy and Bucky were there that day because the three of them—the three PROs—were supposedly working on their science-fair project. Supposedly! Except at the moment, Eddy was about to walk out.

  Eddy was lucky, Carlos thought. It was a lot easier to walk out when you lived someplace else.

  “Look, Brockhurst,” Eddy was saying. “I’m outta here. It’s not going to work.”

  But Bucky, who was fooling around with an eggplant he’d swiped out of his mom’s refrigerator, wasn’t listening. He never listened when the three of them were trying to choose a subject for their science-fair project. Instead he just came up with an idea and that was it, no matter what the other two guys thought.

  Like his first idea, for instance, which had been that their experiment would be shooting free throws. They would take turns shooting one hundred free throws and see how many baskets they each got.

  Eddy and Carlos had looked at each other and rolled their eyes. “Oh sure, Brockhurst,” Eddy said. “And what would our hypothesis be?”

  “What’s a hypothesis?” Bucky said.

  Eddy and Carlos groaned. Mrs. Davis had been talking about practically nothing else for days. “It’s an educated guess,” Carlos said. “Like when you guess how a certain experiment would turn out, and then you do it to see if you’re right.”

  Bucky shrugged. “Okay, that’s easy. My educated guess is that I’d beat the pants off you two dudes.”

  It had taken a whole lot of arguing to convince Bucky that beating someone’s pants off wasn’t exactly a scientific experiment.

  Bucky’s next idea had been the “air” athletic shoes thing. What Bucky wanted to do was to compare all kinds of pump-ups by seeing if wearing a certain brand made a difference in how high you could jump. That idea had been a little less dumb than the free-throw one, but not much. The dumbest part about it was that each of them would have had to buy five or six pairs of humongously expensive pump-ups.

  After that there had been one about different ways of popping popcorn. Bucky had a thing about popcorn. He ate lots of it and he had at least a half dozen different kinds of corn poppers at his house. They’d actually gotten started on that one, but the batches of popcorn kept mysteriously disappearing before they could be weighed and measured. So that had been the end of that idea.

  And now there was this thing about cooking un-punctured eggplants and potatoe
s in a microwave oven. While Eddy was putting on his jacket Bucky went on fooling with the eggplant.

  “It won’t work,” Eddy said again. “And even if it does, what’s it supposed to prove?”

  “I don’t know,” Bucky said. “We can figure that out later. Maybe we’ll just prove that blowing up an eggplant makes a bigger mess than blowing up a potato.” He grinned at Carlos. “How’s that for a hypothesis, Garcia?”

  “Pretty lame,” Carlos said. “And besides, my mom is going to hate it a lot. Why can’t we do it at your house?”

  “I told you,” Bucky said. “Because compared to my mom, yours is a pushover. My mom has a real attitude about putting things in her microwave.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “Besides, your mom isn’t home right now.”

  Carlos’s mouth was open and he was just getting up his nerve to say that he was leaving with Eddy, and if Bucky was going to mess up the Garcias’ kitchen he’d have to do it all by himself. At least he was hoping he’d have the nerve to say that—when all at once he was saved by the bell. Actually, what he was saved by was the door from the garage slamming open and his little sister, Susie, coming in.

  Susie burst through the door, gave the three PROs a blank stare, and marched on past without saying anything. Normal behavior for Susie. But then she did something that definitely wasn’t normal. Halfway to the stairs she stopped and started talking.

  What Susie said, in a strange, tense-sounding voice, was, “I think I saw them. I think I saw the terrorists.”

  The three PROs stared at Susie and then at each other.

  “What are you talking about?” Carlos asked.

  Susie looked at Carlos and then around at the other two guys. For a minute she looked as if she were surprised that she’d actually spoken to them. Then she hurried on toward the stairs to the kitchen.

  But before she could get there Bucky swaggered over and blocked her path. “What are you yapping about, twerp? What terrorists?”

  Susie glared at him. “The ones that are trying to steal Web’s science-fair project.”

  “Web’s science-fair project?” Bucky’s lip curled up in one of his famous sneers. “Gimme a break, kid. Why would a terrorist, or anybody else, be interested in anything that little third-grade twerp is doing?”

  Susie’s forehead scrunched up in a fierce frown. “Web is not a twerp. Web’s a genius. Everybody says Web’s a genius.”

  Bucky laughed loudly. “Oh, is that so? Well, let me tell you something. Everybody doesn’t say dumb, un-cool stuff like that, because I don’t. What I say is that Web is a little third-grade twerp.”

  Susie’s fists clenched and, just in time, Carlos got between her and Bucky. Just in time to get socked in the stomach. Which was no fun but better than letting her hit Bucky because Bucky would have hit her back, even though she was a smallish eight-year-old girl and Bucky was an overgrown eleven-year-old Rambo wanna-be.

  “Oooof,” Carlos said. He grabbed Susie’s wrists and pushed her backward away from Bucky. But Susie was pretty strong and she was just about to get away from him when Eddy came over and helped by holding one wrist while Carlos held the other. Susie squirmed and twisted and tried to kick.

  “What makes you think terrorists are after Web?” Eddy asked. When Susie just clamped her lips together he went on, “Look, kid, if terrorists are after my little brother, I need to know about it. Right?”

  Susie quit struggling and glared at Eddy. Finally she nodded. Lowering her voice to a whisper, she said, “It’s because of the secret weapon. Because Web is building a secret weapon.”

  As Eddy and Carlos turned loose of Susie’s wrists and stared at her, Bucky shoved past them. “Yeah? Is that right, Wong?” he said to Eddy. “Your brother’s building a secret weapon for the science fair?”

  Eddy shook his head hard. “Not that I know of,” he said. “But who knows. With Web”—he grinned and shrugged—“you never know.”

  Just then Carlos remembered something else Susie had said. “Hey,” he said. “What did you mean about seeing them? About you seeing the terrorists?”

  Susie nodded. “I saw them. I didn’t think about it being them when I was talking to Ari—”

  “Ari? The Pappas nerd?” Bucky interrupted. “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “He told me about it,” Susie said. “Ari knows all about it. But when we were talking I didn’t think about it being those guys I saw. But I’m pretty sure they were the terrorists. And I saw them. Just before I got to three hundred.”

  “Three hundred?” For a minute Carlos felt sure Susie had really lost it this time. Or else he had. “Before you got to three hundred what?” he asked cautiously.

  Susie looked disgusted. “Three hundred jumps. Without missing. I was just jumping past the Andersons’ when this big black van came up and parked and two guys got out.” She nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah. I’ll bet it was them, all right. I’ll bet those guys were the terrorists.” Then, before anyone could stop her, she darted out the door and up the stairs to the kitchen.

  Bucky was the first one to break the silence. “Go get her, Garcia. Go get your crazy little sister and bring her back down here. We got to find out what she’s talking about.”

  Carlos gave Bucky a cold stare. “Forget it. She’s probably locked herself in the bathroom by now. And besides, I just heard the garage door open. My mom’s home …”

  Several more seconds of silent staring followed before Bucky said, “Okay, Wong. It’s up to you then. Go get Web.”

  “Forget that too, Brockhurst,” Eddy said. “Web’s out in the workshop. Locked in the workshop. And nobody gets in except Carson.”

  Bucky gave Eddy a disgusted stare. “What a wimp,” he said. “Break in then. Kick the door down, or break a window or something. I sure would if that little jerk was my brother.”

  Eddy’s grin was sarcastic. “Thanks for sharing that with us, Brockhurst. That’s a big help. That workshop belongs to my dad and I don’t think he’d appreciate me kicking the door down. But if you want to try it, feel free.” Then he laughed. “Besides, if Web really is making a secret weapon, he might need someone to try it out on.”

  Carlos’s mom came in then and told Carlos she needed him to help carry in the groceries. “Run on home now, Bucky,” she said. “I think your dad’s looking for you. And you too, Eddy. We’re expecting guests tonight, and I’m going to need Carlos to give me a hand for a while.”

  So the bad news was—the chance to find out anything more about the terrorists was over, for that evening at least. With all that company (a whole lot of aunts and uncles and cousins) in the house, Carlos didn’t get a chance to ask Susie a single important question. But the good news was—it was also the end of the exploding eggplant experiment.

  Actually, Carlos wasn’t too worried about the terrorist thing. Susie tended to get all excited about nothing at times. Carlos figured that either Ari had just been trying to scare her, or else she’d kind of exaggerated the whole thing. And besides, he felt sure that Eddy would have called him if he’d found out anything important from Web. So that Monday night Carlos felt pretty sure the whole terrorist-secret-weapon scare was pretty much over.

  Chapter 5

  EVEN THOUGH SUSIE HAD seemed to be very interested in what Ari told her about Web’s secret weapon and the terrorists, she didn’t hang around very long to talk about it. Right after she said “Wowee!” she rolled up her jump rope and dashed off across the cul-de-sac toward the big Spanish-style house where the Garcias lived. Ari was disappointed.

  Ari went on watching for a minute after she’d disappeared from sight, before he sighed and started up the Wongs’ driveway. As long as he’d come this far he might as well go on investigating for a little longer. Even though Web and Carson probably weren’t building a secret weapon, they might be doing something that was worth finding out about. At least Web might be. And Ari was pretty sure he knew just where he’d be doing it—in the workshop at the back of the Wongs’ garage where Web work
ed on all his scientific projects.

  Sure enough, when Ari stopped just outside the workshop door he could hear a thumping, shuffling noise and a faint mumble of voices. After getting out his notebook and pencil, he stopped for a minute to think about which of his investigative techniques to use. There was, for instance, the very careful and sneaky secret-agent technique that had to be used around people like “Karate Kate” Nicely, not to mention Bucky “Kapow!” Brockhurst. But that wouldn’t be necessary with two unmuscular types like Web Wong and Carson Nicely.

  And then there was the innocent-little-kid technique that worked great on grown-ups and other unsuspicious people. The big-eyed bit that went like, “I’m asking you these questions because I know you haven’t any reason not to answer me, because, after all, I’m just a little third-grade kid.” But, of course, that wouldn’t work with Web and Carson either.

  So that left the direct approach. Like—“Hey! What are you guys doing in there, anyway?”

  That would have to be it. Ari knocked loudly on the workshop door, and got ready to start writing.

  But the door didn’t open. Instead the sound of voices stopped suddenly and the shuffling, thumping noises too. Several seconds went by before Web’s voice said, “Who’s that?”

  “Just me,” Ari said. “Just Ari. Can I come in for a minute?”

  “No,” the voice said quickly. “Nobody can come in.”

  “Oh yeah? Why not, Web? Why can’t I come in?”

  “It’s a secret.” This time it was Carson’s voice. “A big secret. Isn’t it, Web?”

  And that was it. Even though Ari knocked two or three more times, and tried out several other techniques, nothing worked. Not even the sneaky secret-agent approach, which might have worked if someone hadn’t pulled down the blind on the workroom window. Finally Ari had to give up and go on home.