Big Adam stood in front of us with his blender.
Behind him, I noticed something moving in the shadows near one of the doors to the outside. Boris! Stinky’s nanny! Nanny X must have seen him, too. I could tell by the way she tried to keep Big Adam focused on us.
N.A.P. Nanny Action Patrol. I guessed Boris was a member, too. He seemed like he was pretty good at the secretagent stuff. He made it halfway across the room without Big Adam seeing him. Three-quarters of the way. He had almost reached Big Adam when the door to the hangar opened and two huge men walked in. It didn’t look like they were on our side.
“Oy!” one of them said.
Big Adam turned toward the voice, and of course he saw Boris. The two men went charging toward Stinky’s nanny. They were followed by a whole army of chimps. I had named the smoothie chimp Howard after Howard Wallace, my favorite baseball player. If I was stuck there long enough, I would have to come up with names for the new chimps, too. And it looked like we were going to be stuck: The men, who were Big Adam’s assistants, I guess, tied Boris to a chair like the rest of us. Boris didn’t look worried, though. He looked almost happy.
He caught Nanny X’s eye and gave her a wink, the Don’t worry kind.
The new chimps weren’t as nice as Howard. When they started screaming “eeee chee chee” it didn’t sound like they were making conversation; it sounded like they were out for blood.
Big Adam stood in front of Boris. “Who are you?” he said. “How did you get here?”
Boris didn’t answer.
He just sat there looking happy and mysterious, which made Big Adam crazy.
Finally Big Adam gave up, and he and his two assistants started loading some coconuts into the back of his small, orange plane. That’s when Ali came in, carrying my little sister. She hadn’t gone home and taken the Keep Out sign off her door. She’d tried to find me. She had found me. Stinky was with her, too. On the bright side, if he was free, that meant we’d successfully completed one of our missions. But there was a bad side, too, because he was about to be trapped by somebody else.
Ali ran straight for me with Eliza, who was carrying a giant stick and waving it around like she was getting ready to hit a home run, or at least a double. She was still waving it when Alison set her on the ground and began to untie me. “Doofus,” she whispered. But she didn’t say it like the new, keep-out Ali; she said it like the old Ali, the one who was ready to do something fun or crazy and thought it was okay for me to come along. The one who was not a Super Snot.
“Well, well,” called Big Adam, because unfortunately, Ali wasn’t invisible. “Who do we have here? Really, Nanny Dearest, you’ve brought me such delightful company today.”
“That’s enough, Adam,” said Nanny X. “The game’s up.”
“That’s right,” Boris said. “Even as we speak, dozens of police officers are on their way to this very hangar. They have our coordinates.”
He smiled and nodded at Ali, who got that same look she gets when our mother asks her if she’s remembered to put out the recycling. She leaned over and whispered something to Nanny X, who whispered back and gave her a small smile.
Big Adam shook his head and made a tsk-tsk noise.
“The police,” Big Adam said. “Please. The girl hasn’t called them. And even if she has, we’ll be gone long before they arrive.” He spun the propeller on his plane.
“Seize them!” he yelled. The chimps surrounded us. A few of the bigger ones moved in on Ali and Eliza.
“No,” I said, standing up, since Ali had undone all of my knots. “Leave us alone.”
The chimps ignored me.
Then, all of a sudden, I heard a shriek. It was Howard. “Eeee,” he said. “Eee-ee-ee.”
The chimps stopped moving forward. They looked at my sisters. They looked at Stinky. They looked back at Howard.
“Eee,” Howard said again.
And then the chimps backed away. They climbed on top of a pile of coconuts and clapped their hands, like they were watching a play. Howard followed them.
“Seize them or I’m cutting you off,” Big Adam said. “No more bananas. No more coconuts. I’m cutting you off, I’m telling you.”
But the chimps just kept sitting and clapping. Howard looked over at Big Adam and blew him a giant raspberry.
Big Adam turned to one of his assistants. I nicknamed them the Rhinos because that’s what they looked like charging across the room that first time. Plus, the place was already kind of like a zoo, with all of those chimps.
“Get ’em, Francis,” Big Adam said.
The Rhino charged. But Stinky charged, too. He ran straight at Francis like a kid who had been falsely accused of a crime, handcuffed, stuck in a tiny room at the police station, and gotten his geode taken away as evidence, and was really, really ticked off about it. While Stinky charged, Ali used her knot-untying skills to free Nanny X, Yeti, and Boris.
“The bag! The bag!” said Nanny X. “Quickly.”
Ali slid the diaper bag toward her, and Nanny X pulled out a diaper—the diaper. She handed it to Yeti as if it were a bone.
“Airplane, Yeti,” she said. “Airplane. Go.”
Yeti stood there with the diaper in his mouth and looked at me. I wasn’t sure what Nanny X had in mind, but I was glad she had some sort of plan. “Go on, Yeti!” I said, pointing at the plane. “You can do it.”
Just then Mr. Strathmore created a diversion (another reading connection word) by regaining consciousness. “You won’t get away with this, Adam,” he said.
“Oh, but I already have,” said Big Adam. He lifted another crate of coconuts and looked at Mr. Strathmore, just as Yeti dropped the diaper inside the open door of the plane.
“I should have known you couldn’t be trusted,” Mr. Strathmore said. “I don’t even like coconuts. But all I saw was money.”
Big Adam smiled. “We’re not so different, you know,” he said. “That coconut was meant for you, by the way. Hitting my close friend the mayor was a mistake. But it worked out for the best. Because now they’re blaming him.” He took one hand off the crate and pointed at Stinky, who was stuck in an armlock with Francis.
“Personally, I never cared for coconuts, either,” Big Adam said, moving toward the cargo hold of the plane. “But I’ve acquired a taste for them because I like their shells. Oh yes, I do like their shells.”
“Smuggling,” Boris called, as Ali finished untying his feet.
“I prefer the term ‘distribution,’ ” said Big Adam. “And right now I’m going to be distributing a few things to my private island.”
“Diamonds,” guessed Nanny X.
“You catch on fast,” said Big Adam. “Not that it will do you any good. I think it’s time to distribute you to my private island as well. I’m sure you’ll manage very well there. I recently acquired a geologist who is aiding in my mineral operations. Mr. Snavely could use some help. I hope you like spiders. The island is full of them.”
I guess Mr. Strathmore didn’t like spiders; he looked like he had the willies.
Francis the Rhino got Stinky in a headlock with one arm, and picked up a coconut with the other. He aimed it right at our nanny’s head.
“No, you imbecile, not that coconut!” Big Adam yelled. His face looked pale, like coconut milk. But Francis had already started his windup. I grabbed the stick out of Eliza’s hand and stood in front of Nanny X. I choked up as the coconut came hurtling toward us. Whack. The coconut soared through the air and landed at Big Adam’s feet. The two halves split apart, and small, shiny things spilled out. They scattered on the floor like frozen tears. Diamonds! My Fantastically Freaky book says that some diamonds came to the Earth in meteorites, but it doesn’t say anything about coconuts. My new secret-agent brain told me that these were the stolen Gudula diamonds, and that the person who had stolen them was Big Adam.
Eliza crawled over and picked up a diamond like it was a raisin. “Pity,” she said. It sounded like she felt sorry for Big Adam, but I am pretty sure that was just her word for “pretty.”
“Those are mine!” Big Adam yelled. His face turned the color of a strawberry, and I wondered if he had a button on him someplace, because he looked like he was about to explode.