Lily and Jasper were in a corridor full of monks. There was a lot of monastic excitement in the air. The monks conferred. They agreed: They had to get outside to safety, beyond the reach of the mob.
As they went down the hall, Jasper asked one of the older monks, “Your Holiness, are you sure you don’t know the whereabouts of Bobby Spandrel? The leader of the gang? Just a little taller than me? Round, silver, featureless head? No hands or feet?”
“All of the gangsters have had faces,” answered the monk. “Except inside their hearts. There they have no faces whatsoever.”
“This way,” one of the monks ordered.
Jasper nodded. “We’ll get everyone out of the monastery, and then I’ll slip back in to look for that villain Spandrel.”
They all hurried along the passageway toward the exit. Lisa Buldene was snapping pictures as fast as she could. “This is amazing!” she said. “I’m almost being shot at! Now I’m really alive!”
The passage came out at a flight of steps that led down the side of the volcanic crater to a little bridge. The monks poured down the steps.
And stopped.
There were ten gangsters in one big clump in front of them. Waiting.
The monks poured back up the steps.
“Secret door! Secret door!” they said, giddy with motion. Lily, Jasper, Lisa Buldene, and the monks scurried down a hall to a domed, circular chapter house. One slid a lectern aside and pointed at a secret passageway that led down.
They all ran down the cramped staircase—a hundred monks or more. They came out in a courtyard. They started to run for the exit.
And then saw, coming to block them, the same parade of ten toughs.
So the group ran back through the secret door, up the steps, out of the domed chapter house, down the hallway, and tried a bridge.
But now the mobsters were on the other side of the bridge, waiting for them.
So the group turned and ran back.
“To the spoons! To the spoons!” the monks called. They charged up stairs and arrived on the roof of a tower. There was one of the vaultapults there, with a trigger to pull it back and release it.
“Two by two!” a monk called. “We will be shot over the gangsters’ heads to that tower, where we shall make our way…”
The words died on his lips. He was pointing at another tower, but mobsters poured out of a trapdoor there and stood, arms folded, waiting to receive whoever landed there.
Lily looked at the other towers.
Mobsters. Mobsters. Mobsters.
“Pyramids of Snefru!” Jasper swore. “We’re trapped, chaps!”
“It’s like they knew where we were going!” said Lily.
“It’s like someone was…” Jasper stopped talking.
“Like someone was what?” said Lisa Buldene.
Jasper looked down. “Like someone was telling the gangsters which direction we were going in all the time.”
“Who would do a rotten thing like that?” said Lisa Buldene.
Full of rage, Jasper looked her in the eye. He said, “I should have known—the moment I saw your pants.”
“My pants?”
“No human being would willingly wear pants that zipped off at the knee—no normal human being—unless they had rocket-thrusters in place of their detachable feet.”
Lily stared aghast at the New Yorker. Could it be?
Lisa Buldene’s hand was on her own throat. Her fingers were plucking at her skin.… Scrabble, scrabble, scrabble… Pulling on her chin… Yanking off her face!
Her real head was a foot-and-a-half-wide silver sphere that rang with energy and static. She cast off her rubber hands.
“Bobby Spandrel,” said Jasper, with disgust.
“We meet again, Boy Technonaut,” said the international arch-criminal. “But this, I believe, will be the last time.”