Luck counts too.
— Rule Number 31 from Rules for a Successful Life as an Undercover Secret Agent
County sheriff’s officers swarmed the museum once they heard the crash. Stella had a few warrants out for her arrest, which didn’t surprise me at all. Apparently, she liked to use other people’s credit cards.
“My aunt Gertie is hurt, and she’s at the abandoned warehouse outside of town,” I said to one of the officers. “Do you know if help has reached her yet?”
“He’ll know,” the officer said, pointing to a guy in a blue suit.
The man in the suit looked more like a college student dressed up in his father’s clothing than a police professional. With short black hair pointing in different directions and a huge grin on his face, he walked right up to me. “Gertrude’s en route to the hospital. Frank Baies and Montgomery have been taken into custody. Other members of Montgomery’s organization were arrested this afternoon.” His deep voice was so familiar.
“Roy?” I asked.
“Tweedledee,” he whispered.
I breathed in deeply. “Tweedledum.” I handed Victoria’s purple smartphone to Roy. “I recorded everything.”
“Sunfl—” Roy started to say. He glanced over at Victoria sitting on the museum floor amid shards of glass. He led me outside to the front porch. “Mabel. I am so proud of you. Your parents will be so proud of you.”
“You found them?” I asked.
“Thanks to you,” he said. “Yes, we did.”
The bewildered look on my face made Roy laugh.
“The phone your mother hid in the basement is actually a tertiary emergency distress beacon,” he said. “Like a third wall of defense.”
“A what?”
“When other systems fail — which they did this time — that phone automatically calls for help when you dial the Agency’s normal operative number for dependents,” Roy said. “Your father rigged that phone so that it not only activated the Agency’s highest priority distress signal, it also began the emergency extraction protocol for your parents.”
“What took so long?” I asked.
“It was rather weird,” Roy said. “Once the beacon started the emergency extraction protocol, someone — we don’t know who yet — tried to stop it. However, your father had a password protection on the computer code so the beacon immediately kicked itself up to the top commander of the Agency. And the commander wanted answers before she’d send us, especially since your parents were not supposed to be in the field.”
“Montgomery did it,” I said, feeling certain, even without a shred of evidence. “He’s a double agent.”
Roy looked confused, so I repeated myself.
“Montgomery said he works for the Agency. He claims he sent Mom and Dad to Paraguay and then somehow erased their orders so that it will look like they went on their own accord. And he said he knew Grace K.’s father from a long time ago.”
Before he could question me further, Roy’s phone rang. As he listened to the person on the other line, his shoulders sagged. After hanging up, Roy said to me, “Montgomery, or Cedric Hawkins from the fingerprints, is the mastermind of an international smuggling organization that deals primarily in early American artifacts.”
A sheriff’s officer wrapped a quilt around Victoria and escorted her out of the museum.
“Victoria, wait. Where are you going?” I asked. I may not have been her biggest fan in the past, but she was family now.
“Just to the hospital,” she said, pointing to cuts on her arms and knees. “Relax. I’m not being arrested.”
“You’re right, Mabel,” Roy said once Victoria was out of hearing range. “He’s a double agent. Instead of working for another government, he was working for himself.”
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“Gets worse,” Roy said. “Somehow, just minutes ago, Montgomery escaped from custody.”
“What?” I almost shouted. “I practically handed Montgomery over to the authorities — handcuffed and tied up — and they let him escape?”
“They thought he was unconscious, and they assumed he was a Washington State Border Patrol Officer named Al Montgomery,” Roy said, “so they uncuffed him to lay him on the hospital gurney. He was gone without a trace within seconds.”
“How?”
“Cedric Hawkins is a known mastermind of escape — he’s broken out of three maximum-security prisons without ever leaving a clue behind.”
“Whoever he is, he told me that he was part of the gang my grandparents, Carl and Mabel Baies, belonged to. He said he was a courier at the time. That’s why he came back to Silverton. He was looking for forgotten items.”
“And now he’s the boss,” Roy said.
“What about the helicopter?” I asked. “After you dust it for fingerprints, can you track its registration to the Agency or one of its shell companies?”
“What copter?” Roy asked.
“The blue Robinson R22 Beta II behind the warehouse,” I said.
Roy got back on his phone. Within a minute, he was shaking his head. “It’s gone.”
I tried to recall exactly what Montgomery looked like so that I could describe him to a sketch artist, but I had a feeling capturing him again would be difficult even so — especially if he was an Agency-trained spy. “What else do you know about him?”
Roy looked at his little flip notebook. “Montgomery was known to make counterfeit copies of rare letters that he would sell to private collectors for extra profit.”
“Mementos from presidents.” I pointed to the red suitcase. “Thomas Jefferson’s gold-handled spoons are in there. And some of his letters.”
“How many?” Roy asked.
“Sixteen spoons.”
“No. Letters. How many?”
I shrugged, trying to recall the wad of papers. “Maybe ten or fifteen.”
Roy let out a low whistle. “If they’re authentic, each letter might sell for $100,000 at auction.”
I felt a little lightheaded for second. “I used more than a million dollars worth of American history to hit Stella?”
“You saved more than a million dollars worth of American history.” Roy grinned.
“Why was the silverware case in our basement in the first place?”
“Your dad found it a few months ago in your attic when he was installing —” Roy stopped talking suddenly.
“The satellite dish.” A thought hit me. “Dad installed a second dish on the Spoon’s roof in July, mumbling something about better reception.”
“Did he?” Roy looked uncomfortable. “The silverware case was hidden in your rafters for decades.”
“And there’s more stuff in our house too.” The blueprint would pinpoint all of the secret nooks. “It’s from my grandparents, right?”
“Tracking the last known legal owners has been a low priority item for the Agency,” Roy said. “Your parents received permission to do it during quiet periods and return the goods as unobtrusively as possible.”
The Great Reverse Heist.
Montgomery must have been waiting to get his hands on the stuff all this time. He’d even used Grace K. to track my movements. That must’ve been how Frankenstella knew that I’d jumped off the bus. I owed Victoria an apology.
“The important thing is that you kept the museum safe from prying eyes,” Roy said.
Did I? I wondered. “When Victoria and I were in the Spoon, she couldn’t take a clear photograph next to the black file cabinet. It buzzed, like a transmitter.”
Roy said nothing, but thoughts churned in my head. “The museum’s satellite is for that, not television shows,” I said. “All of those black boxes that lead to the warehouse — it’s all connected to Mom and Dad’s work for the Agency, right?”
Roy looked at me in amazement.
“That’s why the Agency didn’t want anyone in the Spoon,” I said.
“I can’t tell you much, except it’s a top secret prototype of a brand new way to transmit highly classified intel. The computer software was designed by your father.”
“I was in the Spoon all summer long and never noticed it,” I said. “How long has it been there?”
“Your parents began testing it about eight weeks ago,” Roy said. “There’s a transmitter — looks like a weathervane — on top of that supposedly abandoned warehouse.”
That’s what the topological map was really showing — Dad’s work for the Agency.
“The transmitter didn’t appear to be the target of Frank and Stella’s theft,” Roy said. “Montgomery’s smuggling ring, however, could have recognized it for what it was.”
“What’s his real name?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Roy shook his head. “Not Cedric Hawkins, even though he’s used that for years. Is Montgomery real or code? Who knows? We should all be grateful he didn’t discover the transmitter. With his Agency training, he could have used it for his own illegal operations.”
And I was the one who came close to doing just that. “How does the transmitter work?”
“That’s classified,” Roy said. “Way above my level.”
“How did Frank and Stella get involved with Montgomery?” I asked.
“Montgomery is clever. He ran into Frank some years back and must have realized Frank didn’t know where the red suitcase ended up. More than anyone else alive, Montgomery knew the museum, or the house — had unknown gems. After the June visit, which was instigated by Stella’s greed, Montgomery investigated your parents. Their odd traveling schedules tipped him off that they were smugglers like him. Or Agents. He must have been straddling both worlds for a long while.”
“And no one ever noticed that Montgomery was an odd sock?”
“I guess not,” Roy said.
“My parents —” I paused, not sure exactly what I wanted to ask.
“Montgomery sent them on a real Agency mission, which they successfully completed. He just wanted them out of the way for a while so he could install Frank and Stella in the house.”
“The documents giving Frankenstella legal guardianship over me and the warrant for Aunt Gertie’s arrest were counterfeit, right?”
“First-class forgeries.” Roy whistled again. “We’re going to learn a lot from this case. Sunflower, you played a huge role in cracking this smuggler’s ring wide open. And it will lead us to Montgomery — whoever he really is.”
“How will we explain this to the sheriff?” I asked. “And Victoria? And my friends?”
“Stick as close to the truth as possible,” Roy said. “Frank and Stella Baies were trying to steal the museum’s silver spoon collections with help from Montgomery.”
“Who’s PNW Security?” I motioned to the control panel, which someone had finally ripped out of the wall, making the alarm stop.
Roy scratched his head. “I don’t know. Local company, maybe?”
“If PNW Security isn’t from the Agency, and it wasn’t Montgomery, then who is it?”
“You can ask your parents when they return from their Monaco spoon-buying trip.” Roy winked. “In fact, they are on a plane right now.”
“They’ll be here by tomorrow?”
“On your eleventh birthday.” Roy grinned. “Happy early Halloween.”