Secret Weapons Read online

  Inside the enormous room Carlos immediately headed for the fireplace. “Brrr,” he said while he was getting some logs in place and turning on the gas fire lighter, “I almost forgot I was freezing to death while those terrorists were staring at us. But as soon as they pulled out I remembered. Brrr. Did I ever.”

  While Carlos was getting the fire started the other PROs collapsed on a couch near the fireplace. Everyone else drifted around the room for a while before they joined the group. Then Kate and Aurora sat down on a big leather footstool, and Susie and Athena on the floor. But Ari stayed where he was, standing near the pool table. Making sure that he kept the distance to the door a little shorter than the distance between him and Bucky.

  When everyone had more or less settled down, Kate said in a loud “may I have your attention” type of voice, “Well. So that guy was lying. Which means he isn’t a friend of Mr. A.’s. Which probably means that, whether they’re really terrorists or not, they were probably planning to do something against the law, like—”

  “Yeah.” The even louder voice was Bucky’s. “Yeah. Like stealing Web’s secret weapon. That’s what we heard. That those guys were hanging around because they wanted to steal a secret weapon that Web invented.”

  “We heard that too,” Kate said. “But you couldn’t prove it by me. Carson knows but he isn’t talking.” She looked at Eddy. “How about you, Wong? Did Web tell you anything?”

  “Nothing. Nada. Not a word. I don’t know about weapon, but whatever those dudes are doing it’s secret, all right. A big secret. Web’s even been sleeping out on the couch so I won’t hear him if he talks in his sleep.”

  Suddenly Susie jumped to her feet. “Hey. What I want to know is, if those guys are after Web and Carson, why are they hanging around the Andersons’?” She looked around the room triumphantly. “Why aren’t they hanging around the Wongs’?”

  Everyone nodded. “Good question,” Kate said. She bit her lip and rolled her eyes thoughtfully. “Unless—maybe they knew the Andersons were away, and they were going to take over one of those old dairy buildings on the Andersons’ property. You know, make themselves a kind of terrorist headquarters, where they could hide out until it’s time for the attack.”

  People said things like “Yeah” and “Sure” and “That’s it,” and then for a minute no one said anything. Eddy was looking worried. Ari could see why. He wouldn’t want to think that some terrorist killer types were spying on his house just waiting for a chance to attack his little brother—if he had one. Of course, he didn’t really have a little brother, but a little sister was more or less the same. And imagining a terrorist after Athena probably would have the same effect. Except … Ari grinned, thinking that somehow Athena didn’t seem quite as helpless as Web and Carson.

  “Hey,” Eddy said all of a sudden. “Maybe we ought to tell someone. Like maybe our parents or something.”

  “What!” Bucky was staring at Eddy like he’d just suggested jumping off a cliff. “Are you crazy, Wong?”

  “Well, why not?” Eddy began. “Why not tell our parents that—”

  “Because you just don’t, that’s why.” Bucky had jumped to his feet. “Because you just don’t tell adults stuff like that. Because …” Bucky’s mouth kept opening and shutting but nothing more was coming out.

  “Oh yeah? Why?” Eddy could really be stubborn at times.

  “I’ll tell you why.” To Ari’s amazement it was Kate’s voice. “Because in the first place they probably wouldn’t believe us. I mean, what proof do we have? My dad, the lawyer, would want to know what proof we had. And if they did believe us it would be even worse. Can’t you just imagine. I mean”—Kate threw up her hands and her voice got louder—“police snooping around, and the sheriff, and the FBI probably—and none of us allowed out of the house. And besides, what if they aren’t really terrorists? I mean, what if it turns out those guys were just meter readers or something?”

  When Kate finally ran down, everyone just sat there for a minute looking at her in amazement. But then Bucky said, “Yeah. That’s just what I was going to say.”

  Bucky was nodding approvingly and so was Kate, when suddenly they looked at each other—and their mouths dropped open. As if they’d just realized they’d agreed with each other. Ari giggled. And then Susie giggled. And then everyone laughed.

  “So okay,” Eddy said. “So we don’t tell our parents. At least, not immediately. So what do we do next?”

  Right after Eddy asked what they should do next, the game room door slammed open and Rafe Garcia and a bunch of his high-school football buddies came in. Carlos was just saying that maybe they could move the meeting up to his room, when the phone rang and it was Mrs. Wong and Eddy had to go home. So what they decided to do next was—nothing. At least not until Wednesday.

  “So we’ll meet here tomorrow,” Carlos said. “Right after school.”

  “Here in the game room?” Ari asked.

  “Sure,” Carlos said. “Unless it’s warmer. If it’s warmer we’ll meet out by the pool.”

  Ari hoped it would be warmer. Not that he had anything against the game room, except that it had only two doors. Out by the pool there would be more ways to make a quick exit in case of trouble. Like Bucky trouble, for instance.

  As Ari and his two sisters and Kate headed across the cul-de-sac a few minutes later, Kate said, “Well, we’ll decide tomorrow, I guess. We’ll meet and talk it over and come up with a plan of attack that everybody agrees on.”

  Ari couldn’t help grinning. “Sure we will,” he said.

  Chapter 12

  A LITTLE BIT AFTER three-thirty on Wednesday afternoon the A.T. Club had its first meeting on the swimming pool deck at the Garcias’. Everybody who had been present the afternoon before was there again. All eight of them. It was a nice warm day, for a change, and everyone was sitting around on deck chairs or, in Bucky Brockhurst’s case, sprawled out in the hammock. The first order of business had been to choose a name for the club, and it had turned out to be the A.T. Club.

  A.T. stood for Anti-Terrorist, of course, but that fact was a total, absolute secret. When other people were around they would just call themselves the A.T.s, and if anyone asked they were supposed to say it meant Animal Trainers. The Animal Trainers Club.

  The name was Kate’s idea and everyone except Bucky thought it was a good suggestion. Bucky wanted to call it the T.T.T.s, for Trash the Terrorists Club. “What’s with the animal-training thing?” Bucky said. “Who’s going to believe we’re training animals? Do you see any animals around here?” Bucky waved his arms so hard he almost tipped himself out of the hammock.

  “Yeah, I see one” Carlos said. “What do you call that?” Carlos was pointing down over the deck’s railing to where Lump, the Garcias’ huge, overweight Saint Bernard, was lying on his back on the lawn. “Come on up here, Lump,” Carlos called. “You get to be our official trainee.”

  Lump lumbered up onto the deck and when Carlos told him to lie down he did—immediately. Well, almost immediately. “See, he’ll be great,” Carlos said. “He really is in training, so that makes it not even a lie. Gabe’s been taking him to obedience school once a week ever since he knocked the mailman off the veranda and almost got us sued.”

  So that was settled, and the next order of business turned out to be what to do about Athena. Even though Athena had been at the first meeting nearly everyone agreed that a four-year-old was too young to be a permanent member of an antiterrorist organization. But she’d heard Carlos saying “tomorrow at three-thirty” and it turned out that she was learning to tell time. She’d already learned how to tell noon and midnight, and last night after the meeting, she got her father to teach her how to tell three-thirty. So when her brother and sister showed up for the meeting, so did she.

  “I mean, what can she do to help?” Bucky said. “How old is she anyway? About two or three?”

  “I’m four.” Athena stood up as tall as she could. “And I can read a lot of words, and w
rite my name and carry messages, and tell time and … and … and kick people too,” she finished, glaring at Bucky. Everyone laughed. Everyone except Bucky.

  Carlos laughed so hard he almost choked. He didn’t know why exactly. It was just that there was something big-time funny about watching a four-year-old get the best of Bucky Brockhurst. He was still laughing when suddenly he had a good idea.

  “Hey,” he said. “She’s right about carrying messages. If we had to send a secret message through the terrorists’ lines, or something like that, she’d be a good one to send. You know why? Because no one would believe that a little kid like that would be carrying an important message. Get it?”

  Everyone nodded and said things like, “Good thinking, Garcia” (that was Kate Nicely) and “Hey, you’re right” (Eddy Wong). Bucky didn’t say anything, but he didn’t start yelling either, so he must have more or less agreed.

  So the first two orders of business were taken care of without too much of a fight, but Carlos was sure the next one wouldn’t be as easy. The next one was choosing a president for the club.

  President of the A.T. Club of Castle Court. It had, Carlos thought, a nice sound to it. But he also thought he knew who was going to be it. The PROs were a kind of club, and over the years the three of them, Bucky, Eddy, and Carlos, had had lots of other clubs too. And you know who had been president of every single one. Bucky Brockhurst.

  Thinking about all those elections, Carlos grinned ruefully. It wasn’t that Bucky didn’t believe in democracy. Not really. It was only that he didn’t believe in a democracy where anybody won except him. But this time it might be a little bit different. This time there were going to be eight voters instead of three. And one of them was Kate Nicely. Carlos’s grin widened. This might turn out to be very interesting. “Hey,” he said, “how about president? Who’s going to be the president?”

  “Yeah, good question, Garcia,” Bucky said. “How about having some nominations?” He gave Carlos a look that said, “Go on, nominate somebody, Garcia, and it better be me.”

  Carlos pretended not to get the message. Instead he looked around waiting for someone else to say something. Nobody did. Time passed and everybody went on looking from one person to another. On second thought Carlos was beginning to get an uneasy feeling that this election might be way too interesting. The thing was, Bucky was never going to allow Kate to be president. Not if his life depended on it. And Kate obviously felt the same way about Bucky. So, whichever way the election turned out, it looked like somebody’s life was going to be up for grabs.

  It was Kate who spoke first. “Okay,” she said, “I want to make a nomination.” Carlos winced. She was going to nominate herself and then—look out! He could just imagine what would happen next. But Kate didn’t say what he expected her to. “Aurora,” she said. “I nominate Aurora.”

  “Me?” Aurora’s head went up and, behind a wispy curtain of curly hair, her huge gray eyes widened. She looked, Carlos thought, like a startled deer peeking out of a thicket. “But I don’t want to be president.”

  “If you get elected you’ll have to be,” Kate said firmly. “I’ll help you.”

  “Well, I won’t be president.” Aurora looked around frantically. “I nominate—Athena.”

  Athena looked pleased. “What, Aurora?” she asked. “What did you do to me?”

  Everyone laughed uneasily—and then waited. They were waiting for someone else to make a nomination, but no one did. Bucky kept glaring, first at Carlos, who was still pretending not to get the message, and then at Eddy. Eddy didn’t get the message either. Carlos wasn’t going to nominate Bucky but he didn’t quite have the nerve to nominate anyone else. And apparently Eddy was feeling the same way.

  At last Kate said, “Well, I guess that’s it. Let’s vote. How many for Aurora?”

  Athena won the election. Ari and Susie and Kate voted for Aurora, but everyone else voted for Athena. Including Athena.

  “This is crazy,” Bucky said. “That baby can’t be president. I wouldn’t have voted for her if I thought she could win. Let’s have another election. How many for another election?”

  Nobody raised their hand.

  “Okay,” Bucky yelled. “You’re president, kid. Start presidenting.”

  “Presiding,” Eddy said. “The word is presiding.”

  “Okay, presiding.” Bucky marched up to Athena, bent down and glared at her. “Start presiding, kid.”

  Athena stared right back into Bucky’s face. “Okay,” she said, “I will. What do I do first?”

  “You call the meeting to order,” Kate said. “You bang on your desk with a gavel to get everybody’s attention and then you say, ‘I call the meeting to order.’ And that means everyone has to sit down and shut up.”

  “What’s a gravel?” Athena said.

  “A gavel. It’s like a wooden hammer.” Kate grabbed a Ping-Pong paddle and handed it to Athena. “Here. This will do.”

  “Okay,” Athena said. She banged on the coffee table with the Ping-Pong paddle. “I call the meeting to order.” Then she glared at Bucky and added, “So sit down and shut up.”

  Chapter 13

  SO ATHENA WAS PRESIDENT of the A.T. Club, and as soon as she heard that a president got to choose a vice president, she chose Lump. Of course everybody laughed, including Bucky. And they laughed some more when Athena told Lump he was vice president, and he got up and bounced over and kissed her so hard she tipped over backward. After that things got a little less tense, and once the meeting really got started it turned out that having Athena as president worked better than anyone had expected.

  The way it worked was that someone, usually Kate or Bucky but not always, would say, “Madame President, I think the next order of business should be …” And Athena would stand up on a chair and say, “Okay. The next order of business is …” And then everyone would chip in with their ideas. So the way it turned out, it was as if everyone got to be president, at least now and then.

  One of the first orders of business was to choose a club headquarters, and even though it was Kate who suggested they ought to have one, it was Eddy who came up with the best idea about where it should be. It was Eddy who suggested the Pit at Dragoland.

  Dragoland was the mysterious vacant lot where, a long time ago, some people named Dragoman had started to build a big house, and then stopped and went away. And the half-dug basement—the Pit, as it had always been called—was a favorite place for Castle Court kids to play all sorts of games and dig clubhouses.

  “I mean, it’s in the perfect location for our headquarters,” Eddy said. “Right between our house and the Andersons’, and no one ever goes there except kids. So we could have our meetings in one of the old clubhouses and keep some antiterrorist equipment there, and—”

  “Hey, yeah,” Ari said. “And we could have an observation outpost in that big old tree out front. You know, the one right near the sidewalk at Dragoland. Big trees are great places for observation outposts.”

  Then Eddy said he had some flashlights the club could use. And Bucky said he might be able to bring a lot of beepers so all the club members could get in touch with each other. Then Carlos volunteered his Boy Scout tent so the equipment wouldn’t get wet in case it rained. Kate said she’d bring some old karate practice mats for people to sit on inside the tent. When it was Susie’s turn she said she didn’t have any spy equipment but she could bring a lot of stuff from her dad’s restaurant for people to eat while they were on duty in the headquarters tent.

  “Hey! Great idea!” Bucky jumped up and headed for the stairs. “I’m starving. Everybody meet in the Pit in fifteen minutes. And bring lots of stuff to eat. I’ll bring some popcorn.”

  “Wait a minute,” Kate said. “Athena has to adjourn the meeting first. Athena, say the meeting is adjourned.”

  “For fifteen minutes,” Eddy added. “Say the meeting is adjourned and will resume in fifteen minutes.”

  Athena climbed back up onto her chair. “The meeti
ng is injured and will go boom in fifteen minutes,” she said.

  Everybody laughed and started for home. “And bring Lump,” Athena called back over her shoulder as she started down the stairs. “Don’t forget to bring the vice president.”

  It wasn’t much more than fifteen minutes later that the Garcias climbed down the steps into the Dragoland Pit. Three Garcias. Carlos, Susie, and, of course, Lump. Carlos was holding Lump’s leash and carrying the rolled-up tent, and Susie was loaded down with stuff to eat. Carlos picked out a nice flat spot near the center of the Pit, took Lump off his leash, and began to unroll the tent.

  A few minutes later Eddy arrived carrying a big plastic garbage bag. After he’d unloaded two different kinds of flashlights and two bags of potato chips, he helped Carlos finish putting up the tent. One of the flashlights was a big lantern type, the kind you could put on a table or hang up on the wall, and it would light up most of a room.

  “That’s great,” Carlos said. “We can hang that from the ridgepole and it will light up the whole tent. It’s really dark inside the tent without something like that.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Eddy said. “But I had a hard time getting it. It was in the workshop and Web wouldn’t let me in. I had to tell him I really needed it before he’d even open the door.”

  “Hey. Did you see the secret weapon?” Susie asked. “When he opened the door did you see inside?”

  Eddy shook his head. “No. They just opened the door a crack and held it out. Carson was there, too, and they shoved the door shut before I could see anything.”

  Kate Nicely and the three Pappases were the next ones to arrive. Kate and Aurora were carrying the karate practice mats and Ari had a bunch of bananas and a jar of peanut butter. Athena had a big wooden gavel. A real one, like presidents use to hammer on their desks to call meetings to order.

  “Hey, that’s neat,” Carlos said to Athena. “Where’d you get that?”

  Athena waved the wooden hammer in the air. “It’s a gravel. For presidents to hammer with.”