Squirrel spies? Seriously?
I’d heard plenty of crazy things since Nanny X started taking care of us. And those things turned out to be true. But a squirrel guilty of espionage? Besides, we were supposed to be looking for fish, and for someone who liked fish enough to sculpt them. We didn’t have time for squirrels. But I knew we had to get Nanny X’s computer back, especially if NAP had any doubts about her skills as a special agent. She had something to prove. All of us did. And enlisting Howard actually seemed like a decent idea.
I should probably explain that Howard is a chimp. He helped us solve our last case. Jake got kind of attached to him, but we weren’t allowed to bring him home because A, we had Yeti, and B, Nanny X said chimps were meant to live in the wild. As a compromise, Howard went to live at the David T. Jones Primate Sanctuary.
“Can we get him here quickly?” Boris asked.
“Transportation can be arranged,” Nanny X said. She reached into the diaper bag and pulled out a diaper.
“Aha!” yelled Jake. He’d yelled that almost every time Nanny X pulled out a diaper this week, thinking it was going to be a new diaper phone, but every time it was a regular diaper. This time she opened it up to reveal three rows of silver buttons. She dialed.
“X here,” she said. “Permission to use Operation Baseball.”
Jake’s ears pricked up when she said “baseball.”
“Right,” she said. “It’s the most efficient way. X out.”
She had started to dial again when Jake yelled, “Squirrel on the move!”
The tree rattled and the squirrel came down the trunk and started running, with Jake right behind him. Stinky and Boris started running, too, but I wasn’t sure if they were keeping track of the squirrel or keeping track of Jake.
I got stuck playing with Eliza near a cement circle by a sign that said L’Enfant Plaza while Nanny X talked to the primate sanctuary.
There was some concern at the other end of the phone, I could tell. Nanny X tried out a bunch of words like “government request,” “service to country,” “patriotism,” “important,” “matter of national security,” “hero chimpanzees.” She used another word, too: “please.” That one seemed to work.
“Oh, you see it now? Wonderful. Yes. It’s perfectly safe. Don’t forget the seat belt.”
A moment later she folded up the diaper and put it back in the bag.
“So how is Howard getting here?” I asked Nanny X.
“He’s flying.”
Nanny X pulled out a toy radio—the wind-up kind with pictures on it. Usually the pictures are of a cow jumping over the moon, but on this one there was a picture of a spaceship. Nanny X turned the knob. Then she opened the back to reveal a control panel. She punched in a few numbers.
“Nanny X?” I said.
“Our coordinates,” she explained. “He’ll be here soon.”
Meanwhile Jake, Boris and Stinky had disappeared down the hill. They must have followed the squirrel between some buildings. I paced around the cement circle with Eliza and Yeti. Nanny X paced with us.
After about ten minutes she gave us the countdown: five, four, three, two, one. We heard a whirring sound. “Ah,” said Nanny X as something that looked like a yellow crab with propellers on it appeared overhead. Its legs clutched a large, white ball that was way bigger than a baseball.
The flying crab thing was a drone. I’d seen an article about drones in the paper, when a company used one to deliver a pizza. But the white ball was way bigger than a pizza, too. I hoped it had lots of padding, because the pizza had ended up splatted in the middle of the Capital Beltway.
When the drone reached the ground, the legs released the ball, which was about the size of a Hippity Hop, and landed beside it. The ball rolled back and forth for a second before stopping. A panel opened. Nanny X reached inside and clicked a seat belt that was restraining something brown and furry.
“Eeeee, eeee,” said Howard. He was wearing a crash helmet, but as soon as Nanny X helped him take it off, he put on her old gardening hat, which he was holding carefully in two hairy hands.
“Very fashionable,” said Nanny X. She handed him a banana from the diaper bag. There were at least a dozen more in there.
I reached out my own not-hairy hand to shake Howard’s. But the chimp lifted his arms, the way Eliza does when she says “Up, up.” I lifted him and he gave me a big, wet chimpanzee kiss, right on the mouth. Yeti jumped up on both of us. I’m pretty sure he was just saying hello.
Just then, a couple of tourists wandered up the hill to take in the view of the river below. But none of them even glanced at the river. They were all staring at us. Nanny X punched in some more coordinates and the drone lifted off again. While the tourists looked up to watch it, Nanny X grabbed the stroller and Eliza. I offered Howard a piggyback ride, and we went down the hill in search of Jake.
If we found him, we’d find that stupid squirrel. And if we could find the squirrel, we could get on to our real assignment, which was finding The Angler before something besides Nanny X’s computer disappeared. I had another assignment, too, but that one wasn’t official: solving the case before Stinky and Boris did, so NAP would know the Pringles were meant to be special agents. And then they’d know our nanny was meant to be one, too.