You know how you can recognize someone’s voice? Well, I recognized my brother’s burp, right through the walls of the airplane hangar.
“That’s Jake,” I told Boris and Stinky. “They’re in there.”
“Then we have to get in there, too,” Boris said. He put his ear against the cold metal wall. I did the same. We could hear voices, although nothing was as distinct as my brother’s burp. There was a mumble that sounded like Nanny X, and a mumble that was definitely Jake. And then there was another mumble that sounded like “bwahahaha,” which had to be Big Adam.
“What is he doing to them?” I asked, not that I wanted an answer.
“They’re going to be okay,” Stinky said.
“Es!” Eliza seemed to agree with Stinky. I wished I could be that calm.
We pressed our ears to the side of the building again, and this time we heard an “eee eeee” sound—the same sound we had heard through the sippy cup. If only someone hadn’t stomped on the teething biscuit, we could use it again and really hear what was going on.
“At least we know Big Adam is working alone,” Boris said.
“No,” I said. I remembered where I’d heard that “eee eeee” sound before. And those bananas in Mr. Strathmore’s office? They weren’t just there by coincidence. “He has a partner. This is going to sound crazy, but I think he’s working with a monkey.”
Boris smiled. “In the spy biz, we call them rats, not monkeys, Alison,” he said.
“No,” I said. “He’s working with a real monkey. Eliza and I found banana peels everywhere, and that ‘eee eeee’ sound we keep hearing—I’m sure it’s a monkey.”
“The rock,” remembered Stinky. “Or the coconut or whatever. A monkey could have thrown it.”
“A real monkey?” Boris repeated. “Now things are beginning to make sense, no?” When he said “things” it sounded more like “tings.” “I’m going in. Let’s see if Big Adam can handle a NAP attack. Wait for my signal; I’ll let you know when it’s clear.”
“Can’t we come, too?” I said. I sounded like a whiny kid.
But Boris chose that moment to hand me Eliza. I got his point right away: It was safer if he went first. He was in NAP. And Stinky and Eliza and I, we were just the cover. We were the reason he got to carry around a bunch of explosives in a diaper bag.
“Wish me luck,” Boris said. He and Stinky did a handshake thing that ended with their thumbs pointing upward. Maybe Nanny X would teach us a secret handshake, too. If we got out of this.
I wondered if Nanny X would even want to stay out the week. I hadn’t been exactly nice to her since she started working with us. I’d yelled at her for letting Big Adam take Jake, and she’d given herself up to be with him. And Jake—he wouldn’t have been caught in the first place if I hadn’t fallen when I was trying to climb up the bathroom walls. It was my fault my brother and Nanny X and Yeti were all locked in that hangar. And I hadn’t even gotten any valuable information—all I’d seen over the stall was Big Adam rattling around with two coconut halves. Two perfect halves.
But wait.
Maybe that was important. He hadn’t been trying to take the coconut apart when I saw him. He’d been trying to put the pieces together. And what else had I seen? Not milk, not the white coconut flesh, but the glimmer of something shiny. “In the bathroom,” I told Boris, “I saw Big Adam with two parts of the coconut. He was fitting them together. Like those plastic Easter eggs.”
“A hiding place?” Boris guessed.
“I didn’t get a good look at what he was hiding in there,” I said. “But yeah.”
Boris took the bib, which he’d ejected from the car dashboard, and handed it to Stinky. “If I’m not out in seventeen minutes, you will contact the police, yes? Give them these coordinates. They’ll come.” He handed the diaper bag to me. “Eliza may need a change.” He cracked open the side door of the airplane hangar, and slid inside.
I jiggled Eliza up and down. Stinky looked like he’d been through this before. Lots of times.
“So how’d you get out of jail?” I said.
“That call from your mother. After she told them that thing she told them, she faxed them a letter. And she called the judge. And she mentioned a lawsuit. But she also said I wasn’t a flight risk and the nearest detention center was in Lorton, and couldn’t they just release me to my mother and Boris? Then the judge talked to me and I told her what you said, about how I couldn’t have thrown anything because my hands were full. She seemed to believe me. She didn’t drop the case because the mayor didn’t drop the charges, but she thought it was okay to let me out on bail.”
“How much?” I asked, putting Eliza on the ground. She picked up a stick and banged it. I was afraid she was going to poke her eye out, but even that seemed safer than handing her something from the diaper bag.
“Eight thousand dollars.”
“Whoa.” I had never known anyone worth eight thousand dollars before. But I was still mad at him for keeping his secret for so long.
“You always complained about Boris,” I said. “All of those lentils.”
“Yeah, well, if you had to eat as many lentils as I eat, you’d complain, too,” said Stinky.
“You mean the lentils weren’t just a part of his cover?”
“I wish.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about him? About you?”
“It was a secret,” he said.
“Well, why didn’t you tell me after you saw Nanny X? You knew she was in NAP, didn’t you, when you saw her at the park?”
“I suspected. But I was a little busy being arrested, remember? And you were only supposed to find out when your nanny thought you were ready.” Stinky looked at me and smiled. “I guess she decided you were ready pretty quick. Boris didn’t decide I was ready for two and a half years.”
“Yeah, but you were like three years old when your mom hired him,” I said. Still, I grinned back. “Where was he, anyway? While you were at the park?”
“He was checking out a pickup truck that was parked in the cul-de-sac. Someone stole some diamond necklaces from Bell’s Jewelers this morning, and Mrs. Bell said they got away in a red truck. My mom’s really mad he wasn’t with me, but it wasn’t all Boris’s fault. I’m allowed to go to the park by myself, usually.”
“They may not let you anymore,” I said.
Just then, a truck turned down the road and the three of us scrambled to the other side of a small hill, flattening our stomachs against it.
“That’s the same truck that was parked near our house,” Stinky whispered. “I know it is.”
The doors opened, then slammed, and we peeped over the hill to see what was going on. Two men got out. But that wasn’t all.
“Boris was totally wrong about Big Adam working alone,” I said. And I was wrong about the monkey. First because it wasn’t a monkey; it was a chimp. And second because it wasn’t one chimp; it was about twenty of them—enough to eat all of the bananas at Nolan’s Market. Enough to do some serious damage if they were under the control of an evil bad guy. Big Adam’s partners got them into formation, and they started marching toward the airplane hangar. They opened the door that Boris had sneaked through, and stepped inside, two by two.
I looked in the diaper bag to see if there was anything that could help us. But there were no baby objects labeled Press Here in Case of Chimp Attack.
“Has it been seventeen minutes yet?” I asked. Something in the diaper bag must have doubled as a stopwatch. But what? The pacifiers? Moo, Sweet Cow?
And worse than that: How were we supposed to even call the police if seventeen minutes had passed? I didn’t have my own cell phone—I wasn’t getting one until I started middle school. Stinky didn’t have a phone, either. Which meant that we had only one form of communication left, and I wasn’t sure how to use it: Nanny X’s exploding diaper.