Time Snatchers (14 page)

“Hey man,” she drawls as I walk up. “Ready to rock out?”

“Uhh … yeah. I can … dig it,” I say.

Abbie laughs and says, “Groovy. You’re one hip cat!”

“Thank you,” I say. I don’t know if they actually said thank you in the 1960s, but my well of sixties slang has suddenly run dry.

“What’s that odor?” I ask, sniffing. There’s a strong scent of mango in the air.

“Ain’t it the most?” she says. “All the mademoiselles are wearing it.”

It seems kind of silly to me to walk around smelling like a piece of fruit, but I don’t say anything.

Three men wearing red suspenders, shorts and green kneesocks walk by. One of them is whistling a tune I don’t recognize. The breeze carries the sounds of children laughing, snatches of a dozen different conversations and the rumble of the minirail overhead.

“Let’s get on with things,” says Abbie. “We’ve only got twenty-seven minutes, and I want to fit in some time for souvenir shopping.”

But I hardly hear her. The feeling of being watched is back. Stronger than ever. I bend down, pretending to tie my shoelaces and then spin around quickly. There! Right next to the Information kiosk. I only see him for a split second before he ducks behind a group of tourists. It wasn’t much more than a glimpse, but it was long enough for me to see that he was tall and had dark hair. I try to tell myself not to jump to conclusions about the identity of my stalker. After all, there must be hundreds of tall people with dark hair walking around Expo today.

Maybe, but there’s only one person I can think of who would choose watching me over enjoying Expo.

Frank.

“Abbie, do you get the feeling someone’s watching us?”

“Yeah. I noticed it right after you arrived,” she says without turning her head. “Every time I try to ID him, he slips back into the crowd.”

I nod. “He’s fast. What do you think we should do?”

She turns and looks at me. As in stares at me. Then she says, “I think you should keep your hair long, Cale. You look good that way. And whatever you do, don’t ever cut this cute little thing here.”

She reaches out and tugs on a curl I never paid much attention to. As she does, her finger lightly touches my forehead and a warm shiver goes through me.

“Seriously, Abbie. What do you think we should do?”

“Seriously? I say ignore him. Whoever he is, it’s better if he doesn’t know we’re onto him.”

I feel a headache coming on. I don’t trust Frank. If it really is him, the fact that he’s here right when I’m about to perform what is quite possibly the most important snatch of my career has got to mean trouble.

We inch past a Chinese garden with sculpted bushes and low tables where women in bright red silk robes are serving food. The sign on the wrought iron gate says
JADE CAFé
.

There’s another surge forward, and along with a hundred others, we spill through massive red doors into the Republic of China Pavilion. For a moment, I’m dizzy. The hall is enormous. Twelve columns of red marble reach up to the high, ornamental ceiling. Floating near the ceiling are a dozen multicolored kites, including a dazzling one that looks like two birds joined together. A large mural
depicts a six-masted sailing ship tossing in a green sea, the waves made even more turbulent by the presence of a huge blue sea serpent. On the far wall is a floor-to-ceiling smiling portrait of the president of the Chinese republic, Chiang Kai-shek. Display cases house objects from ancient China, including a golden Buddha, musical instruments that I don’t recognize and beautiful jade carvings of an ox and a tiger. Soothing music fills the hall. Pretty, silky-haired Chinese women wearing red dresses with green sashes are performing a dance on an elevated stage at the center of the hall.

Beyond the stage, an escalator goes to the second level. But my feet are in no hurry to go anywhere. There’s so much here to see, and I want to take it all in.

“C’mon, Cale,” says Abbie. “We’d better get started.”

I check my fingernail. I can’t believe it. It’s already twelve minutes past seven. Not counting overtime, there’s only eighteen minutes left to do the snatch.

“Right,” I say. “Switching to mindpatch. First stop: the fuse box.”

She throws her shoulders back, gives me a salute and says,
“Oui, mon capitaine!”

We make our way to the far end of the pavilion and find the fuse box just where the briefing data said it would be, on the back wall of an exhibit called “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” It is at eye level, two feet behind a life-sized replica of a Sung dynasty emperor wearing a bright yellow
hanfu
. I slip between the wall and the emperor. The position of the emperor is a stroke of good luck. It will partially block the view of anyone curious enough to see what I’m up to. Abbie, with her back to me now, completes my cover.

I hold my hand out and nudge her gently. She fishes in her pocket, withdraws a thin wire and places it in my hand.
“Merci,”
I
whisper and insert the wire in the fuse box’s keyhole. After a few jiggles, the small door opens. At a glance I can see that it’s a standard setup, or at least standard for the 1960s: a control panel with sixteen switches that regulate the heating, cooling and electricity for the building. But it’s the lights that I’m really interested in. They’re on a timer, set to go off one hour after closing time.

I nudge Abbie again, and this time she hands me what look like two peanuts, one red and one green. But they’re not for munching. I slip the green one, a remote control, into my pocket. The red one has microcircuits that will override the timing mechanism for the pavilion’s electricity. As soon as I place its magnetized surface next to the right fuse, the lights in the pavilion will be completely under my control.

Just then she whispers, “Trouble at six o’clock.”

Palming the device, I close the fuse box and turn around just in time to see a pudgy man with a Rolleiflex camera hanging from a strap around his neck park himself in front of the emperor.

“Geez, will you look at that,” he says. “I almost thought he was alive.”

“I know,” says Abbie, breezily. “When I first saw him, I was sure he was going to sneeze all over me.”

Smooth.

The man laughs and his camera bounces up and down against his jiggling belly.

“Come on, Robert,” Abbie says to me. “Let’s go see the rest of the exhibit.”

We smile and move on. But after a few feet, she stops to admire a fuchsia
hanfu
with a phoenix pattern inside a glass display case.

“Now, that would look great on me.”

I’m only listening with one ear. Most of my attention is directed back toward the emperor.

The man has been joined by a tiny woman with big hair and a frown etched on her face. Judging from their matching blue and white little travel bags, I’m guessing it’s his wife.

“Don’t stare,” Abbie mindspeaks. “You’re making it too obvious.”

I turn my head so that now I’m only seeing them out of the corner of my eye.

“Hon,” says the man, taking a couple of steps back, “stand next to the emperor guy. Put your arm around him or something. Pretend you’re helping him rule the world.”

She shuffles over to stand beside the emperor. Neither of them is smiling.

Drops of sweat dot my forehead.

“It’s seven twenty-five,” I mindspeak. “If they don’t leave soon, we’ll have to do something.”

“I know,” Abbie says. “Let’s give them one more minute.”

“Move in a bit closer, Louise. Good. Now tilt your head this way … perfect. All right, say, cheeeeese … got it! Now, one more.”

I concentrate on my breathing. Have to stay calm.

“Sidney Halpern!” Louise roars. “I’m not going to risk missing the People’s Flying Acrobatic Troupe because of you.” She grabs his arm and leads him away from the exhibit.

Bless you, Louise
, I mouth silently, and Abbie and I move quickly toward the fuse box.

I finish attaching the device and program the override. At my command, all of the lights in the pavilion will go off. We will then have thirty seconds to do the snatch before the backup generator kicks in. There’s no going back now.

We hurry to the escalator. Abbie gets there ahead of me and scoots right up. I get stuck behind a man and a young, red-haired boy. I’d like to pass them, but they’re standing side by side and there’s no room to go around.

“Look, Daddy!” the boy shouts. “Those people are as tiny as my soldier!” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a plastic figurine.

The sight of the toy soldier triggers something inside of me; strong feelings and memories. For a moment, the escalator is gone and the mission forgotten. I am a young boy perched on Uncle’s lap, proudly showing him my toy soldier. I’m filled with forgotten feelings of warmth, of belonging, even of love.

I try to hold on to the moment, but it vanishes in an instant, and I’m plunged back into reality.

“They’re small because they’re far away,” his father says.

“How do they do that?” the boy asks.

The father laughs and says, “It’s not
them
doing it, Zach. It’s the laws of perspective.”

I glance down. Twenty-eight minutes past seven. I’m cutting it really close.

Finally, the escalator reaches the third level and I’m off, sprinting past an exhibit of stuff made from bamboo, including a wicked-looking crossbow.

Then I see it—encased in glass. The thing that Abbie and I have traveled ninety-four years back in time to snatch: the Xuande vase.

It looks more impressive in real life than on the holo-video that Uncle showed us. The dragon is beautifully detailed, and every scale on its body is exquisitely rendered. Right beside the vase is an old wooden crate with a miniature copy of the flying dragon etched on one side. The inscription beneath the two items reads:

“There’ll be plenty of time to admire it later,” Abbie mindspeaks.

She’s right.

My body is shaking. I can’t afford another failed mission.

I slip a hand inside my pocket and press the remote control. Immediately the lights around me start winking out. As I switch to night vision, the polite tourist chatter of a moment ago morphs into grumbling, yelling and swearing in a dozen different languages and people start running in every direction. All of this confusion is good.

But out of the corner of my eye, I see something that isn’t so good.

The boy from the escalator has invented a new game. It’s called “climb up onto the railing and see if you can reach the pretty kite that looks like two birds.”

His parents are looking the wrong way, toward the escalator.

In my mind’s eye, I picture what’ll happen if the boy falls. It’s not pretty. I figure it’s at least a forty-foot drop to the first level.

The boy is standing on the railing now, reaching for the kite. His left leg begins to wobble. He’s losing his balance!

The boy or the snatch? I only have a split second to decide.

In that second, I see my future flash before my eyes: if I’m good and do everything expected of me, I can look forward to years of nabbing innocent children and training them to steal things just to keep Uncle’s rich, greedy clients happy.

I race for the railing, bumping into screaming, panicking people running the other way in the dark. Where is he? There! I reach up and grab the boy by the back of his pants.

We collide and tumble down onto the floor together.

Abbie’s angry voice blasts across my mindpatch. “Caleb, what are you doing? Get over here and help me get this case off!”

It’s a fair request. After all, taking the glass case off the vase is definitely a two-person job.

But fair or not, all I can do right now is lie on the floor, knapsack beside me, and try to get my breath back.

The lights come back on, and there’s the boy’s father, rushing our way. He picks his son up and hugs him. I stand up just as the mother arrives. She joins in, making it a three-way squeeze session.

Abbie’s voice comes back. “Get out of there!”

“I … I can’t,” I say.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I can’t think of anything else to say. Anything that makes sense, that is. It’s the logical time to go. The boy is safe, and everyone (except probably me) is about to live happily ever after. But logical or not, my legs won’t move. So I just stand there, watching the hug.

At the edges of my mind, I feel storm clouds gathering. I’ve just done something very bad. Broken one of the biggies. “While on a mission, thou shalt not interact in any way with members of the local population except as necessary to perform the snatch,” is the rule in the Timeless Treasures Field Agents Handbook.

I swallow hard. Uncle doesn’t take kindly to anyone breaking a “thou shalt not.” If he finds out, the best I can hope for is a stint in the Barrens. Just thinking the word
Barrens
gives me the shivers. The place is an unforgiving wasteland. If the torturous heat doesn’t get you, then the scorpions and snakes will. Wiping a bead of sweat from my forehead, I stand up just as the long hug ends.

A small crowd has gathered now. A woman steps forward and says something to the father. She gestures to the rail and then points at me. He turns, sees me and begins to walk in my direction.

I should run now. Last chance, my brain is screaming at me. Or is it Abbie shouting over my mindpatch? Either way, I ignore the voice and just stand there. The father holds out his hand, and I take it in my own. His grip is warm and strong.

“Thank you for saving our son,” he says, eyes brimming with tears. “I’m Jim. Jim Rushton. This is my wife, Diane, and this is Zach.”

Diane also looks like she’s about to lose it. The only one with dry eyes is the boy, Zach. He’s staring at me like I jumped right off the cover of one of those old Superman comic books.

“I’m Ro … Caleb.” I’m surprised to hear myself say my real name.

We all stand around awkwardly for a moment, until Zach tugs at his mother’s hand and asks, “Mom, can Caylid eat ice cream with us at the café for my birthday?”