CHAPTER 9

The next thing Scott remembered was waking up to a striking dark-haired woman tapping on her phone in the corner of a bedroom. “Hello,” he said uncertainly.

She ignored him. “Who are you?” he asked. “Have you been standing there watching me sleep this whole time?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because the last time you were here you stole something.” She put her phone away and looked at him.

“Oh.” Scott knew where he was now. In the old man’s house. The bed was nice, the room was nice, but he wanted to get out. He couldn’t stay there. “Hey, look,” he said, throwing back the covers and swinging his feet off the bed.

That’s when he noticed the carpet around the bed was crawling with ants. Huge ones. “Whoa!” He pulled his feet back and stared down at them.

“Paraponera clavata,” the woman said. “Giant tropical bullet ants ranked highest on the Schmidt pain index. They’re here to keep an eye on you when I can’t.” She paused to let that sink in. “Dr. Pym’s waiting for you downstairs.”

“Who?” She left without saying anything else. “Hey,” he called after her. “Um, whose pajamas are these?”

She didn’t come back, and the carpet was still covered in bullet ants. Scott didn’t know what the Schmidt pain index was, but if these ants rated highest on it, he was pretty sure he didn’t want them to bite him. “How am I supposed to do this?”

She’d said Dr. Pym was waiting. Then she’d left. Therefore, Scott reasoned, she must want him to follow. So the ants would…

Gingerly he lowered one foot to the carpet. The ants crawled out of the way. Scott put his other foot down. Same deal. “Just one step at a time,” he said. He walked slowly through the ants, talking to them on the way. “You don’t bite me, I don’t step on you—deal?”

He found the old man—Dr. Pym—sitting with coffee at his dining room table, reading the paper. The woman was there, too. “I could take down the servers and Cross wouldn’t even know,” she was arguing as Scott walked in. “We don’t need this guy.”

Pym saw Scott coming in. “I assume that you’ve already met my daughter, Hope,” he said.

So that was her name, Scott thought. “I did.” He paused, feeling like he should say something else. “She’s great.”

“She doesn’t think that we need you,” Pym said.

“We don’t,” she said. “We can do this ourselves.”

Scott sat as Pym said irritably, “I go to all this effort to let you steal my suit, and then Hope has you arrested.”

“Okay,” she said. “We can try this and when he fails I’ll do it myself.”

Fails at what? Scott wondered. He hadn’t had a chance to fail at anything yet, if you didn’t count trying to return the suit. “She’s a little bit anxious,” Pym said. “It has to do with this job, which, judging by the fact that you’re sitting opposite me, I take it you’re interested in.”

Whoa, Scott thought. Not so fast. “What job?”

Ignoring the question, Pym nodded at the cup in front of Scott on the table. “Would you like some tea?”

Oh. Not coffee. “Uh, sure,” Scott said.

“I was very impressed with how you managed to get past my security system. Freezing that metal was particularly clever.”

How far back did the setup go? Scott already knew the job wasn’t on the up and up, but Pym was basically saying he’d maneuvered Scott through the whole process. “Were you watching me?”

“Scott, I’ve been watching you for a while, ever since you robbed Vista Corp. Oh, excuse me, burgled Vista Corp.” He tapped one of the newspapers on the table. Scott saw his face under a headline about the Vista job. “Vista’s security system is one of the most advanced in the business. It’s supposed to be unbeatable but you beat it. Would you like some sugar?”

“Yeah, thanks.” Ants started pushing sugar cubes across the table and Scott changed his mind. “You know what, I’m okay.” The ants turned around and pushed the cubes back the way they’d come. “How do you make them do that?”

“Ants can lift objects fifty times their weight. They build, farm, they cooperate with each other.” Clearly this Dr. Pym had a thing for ants.

“Right. But how do you make them do that?” The ants were putting the sugar cubes back in the little cup. Scott figured this trick had a name, but he didn’t know what it was.

Pym tapped a little earpiece Scott hadn’t seen until just then. “I use electromagnetic waves to stimulate their olfactory nerve center. I speak to them. I can go anywhere, hear anything, and see everything.”

“And still know absolutely nothing,” Hope said. Man, Scott thought. This is not a close father-daughter relationship. “I’m late to meet Cross,” she added, standing to leave.

Scott raised his hand. “Uh… Dr. Pym?”

“You don’t need to raise your hand, Scott.”

“Sorry, I just have one question. Who are you, who is she, what the heck’s going on, and can I go back to jail now?” That was four questions, but the last one was the most important. Scott had been played like a fish up to this point, and he felt like he was in way over his head. He wanted out while he could still get out, and before someone got mad at him and sent a horde of telepathically controlled bullet ants after him or something. Jail had to be better than that.

Pym looked at Scott for a long moment without answering any of his questions. Then he simply said, “Come with me.”