The Ministry of SUITs (30 page)

The man in the cap moved to the right. The Tooth Fairy adjusted his steering again.

“You can't run him down!” Jack shouted.

The Tooth Fairy looked at Jack. “Yes, yes I can.”

“Okay,” said Jack, “I said that wrong; what I meant was you
shouldn't
do it.”

“That's probably true,” agreed the Tooth Fairy. “But he shouted at me when I drove up the hill, and I've got a very bad attitude.”

The man was now zigzagging back and forth, but it didn't do him any good. The Tooth Fairy was an excellent, if psychopathic, driver. No matter where the man in the cap ran, the Tooth Fairy adjusted the wheel so the car remained pointing at him.

Jack got ready to close his eyes. The man with the cap had given up and had stopped running. He had put his hands together and appeared to be praying now.

At the last minute the Tooth Fairy pulled the steering wheel hard to the right. The car spun in a balletic circle and stopped inches before it hit the man. The man looked around. “I'm not dead.”

The Tooth Fairy leaned out the car window and punched him in the face. “Maybe that'll teach you not to shout at people.”

The man sailed through the air and landed with a thump on the ground.

“You aren't a very nice person, are you?” said Jack.

“Not particularly,” said the Tooth Fairy.

The Tooth Fairy dropped Jack outside the front of the museum. “Cheers,” said Jack as he leapt out of the car and ran up the steps.

The Tooth Fairy called after him. “Make sure your mum buys some soup and ice cream on her next weekly shopping trip.”

Jack was puzzled. “Why?”

The Tooth Fairy held up the pincers. “Because you'll want to have food that you can eat with just your gums.”

A shudder passed through Jack's body. The Tooth Fairy laughed and then roared away in a cloud of black smoke.

MINISTRY
OF
S.U.I.T.S
HANDBOOK

TIGER'S TEETH

H
OW
Y
OU
S
HOULD
R
EMOVE
T
HEM
FROM
A
T
IGER'S
M
OUTH

Very, very carefully.

 

45

“WE MUST DO SOMETHING IMMEDIATELY”

 

Jack zipped through the museum, headed straight for the Takabuti room. Once there he pressed the three fingernails on the stone hand that caused the sarcophagus to slide open and darted underground.

Jack found Grey in what seemed to be a Ministry common room. The walls were lined with leatherbound books and long velvet curtains. Ruby-red wingback chairs sat spaced across the floor.

“G-Grey, something awful's happened,” Jack panted.

Grey looked up from the book he had been reading. “What?”

For a moment Jack couldn't speak. It was as if saying the words out loud would choke him. “It's Trudy,” he croaked. “She's dead.”

Grey looked stunned. “Then we must do something immediately.”

“What?” Jack asked.

“Well, for a start we must let Trudy know.”

“Huh?”

“We have to let Trudy know that she's dead. She's sitting over there having a lemonade and looking at some maps. And if she's dead, she probably shouldn't be drinking any kind of fluid.
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She won't be able to digest it and it'll just get messy.” Grey pointed to a chair across the room.

Jack turned to look and saw Trudy sitting in a chair, looking over a stack of maps. She looked remarkably lively for someone who had fallen from the tenth story of an office building. Jack coughed to try and attract her attention. Trudy looked up, annoyed that someone had interrupted her work. For a minute Trudy looked as confused as Jack felt. Then her eyes focused and she seemed to realize what she was looking at.

Trudy bounded out of her chair and launched herself at Jack. He was knocked backward with a hug of awesome power.

“Jack. It's you!”

“Trudy,” Jack gasped, trying to catch his breath. “I'm fairly sure that hugs aren't meant to be this painful.”

Trudy apologized for her enthusiasm and helped Jack to his feet. “I'm sorry, but we thought you'd been captured!”

“I was captured,” Jack confirmed. “But I managed to free myself with a pillow.”

“You must be one hell of a pillow fighter.”

Jack looked solemn and nodded. “I killed three scouts at cub camp once.” Jack went on to explain that he was only joking and briefly told them how he had escaped from his imprisonment at Scrabo Tower.

“But never mind me being captured. I thought you were dead. They threw you out of a tenth-floor window.”

Trudy nodded. “I thought I was a goner myself for a minute. But then I remembered the quartermaster.”

Jack thought back to their meeting with the diminutive quartermaster. “You mean you fell all that way two feet at a time.”

“Perhaps I wasn't quite that good—you must need to practice to get to that level. I think I fell a floor at a time, but it stopped me from ending up as an omelet when I hit the pavement.” Trudy rubbed her ribs as if they still hurt.

“That's amazing!”

“It isn't. It was awful. I was badly hurt and knew I wouldn't be any good to you so I ran to get help.” Trudy looked ashamed of herself. “I abandoned you, Jack.”

“You didn't. You did the right thing. There was no point in both of us getting caught.”

There seemed to be a tear in the corner of her eye. “It was wrong of me. Abandoning people is never right. I don't care what anyone says.”

Jack knew that that wasn't all there was to it. But he also knew that now wasn't the time to pressure Trudy into telling more.

“Okay, so what do we do now? Unless we stop Mr. Teach, he'll sail Northern Ireland into the middle of the ocean. We'll all be at his mercy.”

Trudy grabbed the paper that she'd been studying. “I've pulled together these maps of where kids have gone missing. Grey helped me to use the map to draw up a plan of where the tunnels are under the ground all around the island. I thought we might be able to use them to find a way of attacking.”

“Brilliant, Trudy. One slight problem: I was away overnight and we've missed two days of school. Therefore I might not be able to participate in thwarting Teach's evil plans because my parents will almost certainly have grounded me.”

Grey stepped forward. “Don't worry about that, Jack—it's all been sorted. I called the school and said that you had to take a few days off because your dog had died.”

“I don't have a dog,” objected Jack.

“Well, not anymore you don't,” said Grey, irritated at being interrupted, “because he's dead. I also phoned your parents and pretended to be Trudy's father. I told them you were sleeping over. Incidentally, your father has a very impressive mustache.”

“You could hear my father's mustache over the phone?”

“It is a
very
impressive mustache,” Grey reiterated. “Your parents were happy enough and I sent them a car over to pick up your school uniform.” Grey handed Jack his uniform. “Not that you're going to need it today.”

“Of course I'm not going to need it today. Today's the day we're going to rescue David.”

MINISTRY
OF
S.U.I.T.S
HANDBOOK

FALLING FROM HEIGHTS

I
NVENTION
OF
THE
M
ODERN
P
ARACHUTE

Many people have claimed that the first modern parachute was invented by a Frenchman called Louis-Sébastien Lenormand. This is not true. He was the first person to invent an
effective
modern parachute.

*   *   *

The names of the people who invented the ineffective parachutes are not recorded by history. All we know about them is that generally they were buried in very flat coffins.

 

46

REINFORCEMENTS

 

“We need reinforcements,” said Jack. “We couldn't take down eight pirates at the offices. There could be dozens more underground.”

“We don't have time to round any up, Jack.” Trudy was shaking her head. “Every minute we waste brings David closer to having to learn how to write left-handed.”

It was a stark reminder of what was at stake.

“The first thing is to try and rescue all the kidnapped children. Then we've got to destroy the digging equipment. If Teach detaches Northern Ireland from the rest of the island, then there'll be nothing more we can do.”

“What about the enforcer thing he mentioned? He seemed pretty confident about that.”

Trudy frowned. “That was the only part of the plan I didn't get figured out. I mean, everything else seems to have fallen into place. But I have no idea what the enforcer might be.”

Jack thought hard. “Well, the only loose ends I can think of are the stolen dinosaur bones and the school boiler. Maybe it's something to do with that?”

“Maybe,” Trudy agreed, “but we'll just have to deal with whatever it is when we come to it. Hopefully we'll manage.”

Jack smiled. “I think we can do a little bit better than just manage. I've got an idea. Maybe we can get us some cavalry after all. Pass me the maps, Trudy.”

As Jack spread the maps out across a tabletop, Grey and Trudy gathered around to listen to his idea. “Now this might be a little bit of a longshot,” he confessed, “but if we can pull it off, I think they'll probably write poetry and sing songs about us.”
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*   *   *

Trudy and Jack took a Ministry car to the school. Grey had left them to work on the second part of Jack's plan.

“Do you think that the plan's going to work?”

“That's a bit like asking if the one parachute you have is going to work, Jack,” said Trudy. “It's the only plan we have. So we're going to have to pull the ripcord and just accept the consequences.”

“That's a cheery metaphor, Trudy. Thanks.”

When Jack and Trudy arrived at the school, all the pupils and teachers had already gone home and so they easily sneaked through the corridors, despite the fact that they were carrying a ridiculously long rope ladder. Trudy peeked around the corner of the boys' changing room.

“Is it all clear?” asked Jack.

Trudy nodded for Jack to take a quick look for himself. He poked his head around the corner and saw four security guards standing at the end of the changing room. They wore blue uniforms that looked like something that the army would wear if they ran fast-food restaurants. They didn't have guns on their belts, but they did have crackling walkie-talkies, handcuffs, and small cans of what Jack assumed was pepper spray.

“Okay, Jack, you're going to need to be faster than you ever have been. Think of the saddest thing you can.”

Jack closed his eyes and thought. He needed to summon up something
really
sad. At first he thought of the fact that his dog had just died. Then he remembered that it had only been an imaginary dog that had died and that didn't seem so sad anymore.

Then Jack thought about the day of his grandfather's funeral. He had been seven at the time and hadn't been entirely sure what had been happening. He had known that his grandfather had died. But there was an enormous gulf between knowing the word
dead
and really understanding what it had meant. It certainly wasn't something that the death of his goldfish had prepared him for. His mother had bought him a new goldfish. You couldn't buy a new grandfather.
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The entire day of the funeral adults kept making jokes with him, hugging him, and calling him brave. His mother had promised him a trip to the toy store if he behaved himself.

Overall, the day of the funeral hadn't seemed that sad. But there was a moment … when they lowered the coffin into the ground and he had looked up at his grandmother's face. She had looked so sad, and weak and alone. Before the funeral Jack would never have seen his grandmother without his grandfather hovering around in the same room. But now it was different. He looked at his grandmother that day and saw her completely differently. It wasn't the way she looked, it was more the way the grandfather-shaped hole beside her had looked.

As they lowered the coffin into the ground a single tear had rolled down his grandmother's cheek.

Jack felt truly miserable as The Speed descended on him. He didn't think anyone could have felt any sadder. However, when he opened his eyes and saw Trudy's face he realized he was wrong. Jack was astonished to see that she looked even more wretched than he felt. The single tear he had remembered trickling down his grandmother's face was running down Trudy's face. It made Jack feel impossibly sad to see Trudy, who was normally so strong, look so wretched.

“What did you think of?” Jack asked.

Trudy tried to say something, but her voice broke. She took a few seconds to pull herself together before she mumbled, “Now isn't the time. We have to save David.”

Trudy sprinted around the corner of the changing rooms and blurred toward the guards. The four security guards turned to look at her. One dropped a cup of coffee as Trudy leapt up and ran along the wall before jumping onto the ceiling. She dived from the ceiling above the guards, lashing out with feet and fists. The first guard fell after three quick jabs to his jaw. Trudy then spun in mid-dive, stretching out with her feet, and kicked two of the other guards, knocking them backward. One staggered back into the shower area and fell, smashing his head on the tiles. The other crunched into a wall and slid down into a slumped position.