“I think I see what’s happened,” Reynie said. “The Ten Men were carrying sealed instructions—to be opened in certain circumstances, maybe, or else just when they got here.”
“It makes sense,” said Sticky. “Mr. Curtain knew they couldn’t use radios or phones, and he doesn’t trust anyone to know all his plans ahead of time.”
“He was careful enough to be pretty vague,” said Kate. “I know ‘2100 hours’ is nine o’clock, and ‘rendezvous’ means to meet somewhere—but where? And who or what is this ‘Abbot Edifice’? Is it a person or a place?”
Sticky furrowed his brow. “It’s kind of both. An edifice is a building, and an abbot is the superior of an abbey or—”
“Slow down,” said Kate. “An abbey’s a kind of church, right?”
“It can be,” Sticky said, speaking slowly. “‘Abbey’ usually refers to a convent or monastery under the supervision of an abbess or abbot. But sometimes the church in one of those places is called the abbey, as well.”
“Okay!” said Kate. “So they’re going to meet up again at nine o’clock at a certain convent or monastery—”
“Definitely a monastery. The note says ‘Abbot,’ not ‘Abbess.’”
“A monastery, then, and they’re going to search one of the buildings,” Kate said. “But which monastery and which building?”
“Wait!” Reynie said, jumping to his feet. “A monastery is where monks live, right? So isn’t the abbot a monk, too? Mr. Curtain isn’t just being vague—he’s using code words!”
“Of course!” Sticky said. “So Abbot Edifice is code for—”
“The Monk Building!” Kate cried.
“But why search there?” Reynie said, his eyes darting back and forth. “Unless… Okay, Mr. Curtain must know that Mr. Benedict has a connection to the Monk Building. So maybe—if the Ten Men didn’t find everything they expected to find here—”
“Then Mr. Curtain’s instructions would send them to look there,” Kate said, and glancing at the wall clock (which fortunately was battery powered), she added, “in fifteen minutes! We need to tell Milligan!” And she dashed from the room.
Reynie and Sticky followed as quickly as they could, but Reynie stumbled over Sticky’s bag in the hall, and Sticky stumbled over Reynie, and by the time they got downstairs Kate was waiting for them, bouncing up and down impatiently. “We’re too late! He’s off with his sentries already!”
“What about Mr. Benedict?” Reynie said. “Or Rhonda or Number Two?”
“They’re all surrounded by officials, and Mr. Bane’s right there with them—and, oh, we don’t have time for this! It’ll take ages just to get Mr. Benedict by himself, but if the Ten Men are looking for something important, then we need to get there first!”
With a jolt of alarm Reynie realized that Kate meant to go to the Monk Building herself. But before he could argue how crazy this was, she held up the key Milligan had given her.
“I can take the secret passage! They’ll never see me. I’ll check the peepholes first, so if they’re already in the office I won’t blunder in on them—and if they are there I can spy on them!”
“Whoa, slow down, Kate,” said Sticky. “We need to—”
But there was no slowing her down. She was off to the front door before Sticky could finish.
Reynie said, “If we can’t stop her—”
“I know,” Sticky said, hurrying after her. “We’ll have to go, too.”
When they reached the front door Kate was halfway across the courtyard and heading for the gate. Striding along with her (though none too steadily) was the bedraggled Ms. Plugg. The police officers had moved off to usher neighbors back inside their homes, and the dazed chamber guards still sat on the steps. No one appeared to question what Ms. Plugg and her young charge were doing.
“… said you were to stand guard in the yard,” Kate was saying as the boys caught up to them. “And absolutely no one else is to know.”
“What is it you hope to find down there?” asked Ms. Plugg, who seemed grateful to have been given a duty.
“I can’t say, but it’s important! And you’re not to say anything or let anyone come down there. And we have to keep quiet ourselves—”
“We?” Ms. Plugg turned and saw Reynie and Sticky behind her. “Oh, hello, boys—”
“So don’t bother calling down to ask if we’re all right,” Kate continued, and when the guard’s brow wrinkled she added quickly, “Sorry, Ms. Plugg, I’d explain more, but we have to hurry! The car gets here in half an hour.”
“Half an hour,” Ms. Plugg repeated, and checked her watch. They were across the street now and hastening toward the cellar doors.
Sticky was pleading with his eyes for Reynie to stop them, and Reynie wanted to, yet he couldn’t bring himself to do it any more than Sticky could. All it would take was one word to Ms. Plugg about what Kate really intended. But then what? Confusion, argument, delay; the Ten Men would get there first; and then what might be their only chance to stop Mr. Curtain would be lost. Reynie couldn’t fathom living with that knowledge. So despite the warning bells in his head and the revolt in his belly, he held his tongue, and down into the cellar the three of them went.
“Glad you’re coming,” Kate whispered, “but you know I can’t wait for you. I need to run fast.” Holding her flashlight under her arm, she directed it at the metal door and inserted the key into the lock. “If I’m in trouble when you get there, you can hurry back here for help.” She turned to reassure them as the door swung open. “Don’t worry, though, I won’t be in trouble.”
“Wait!” Sticky said, jumping forward to catch her by the arm. He missed—she was already several paces down the secret passage—but she stopped and turned expectantly. “Your flashlight! Remember to turn it off before you go into the anteroom—if it’s dark in the office your light will show through the peepholes!”
“Gosh, glad you thought of that,” said Kate. “Thanks!”
And then she was gone.
It was more than a year since they had been in the secret passage, and the boys entered the dank, narrow, gloomy tunnel with no little trepidation. Their crisscrossing flashlights swept not just the floor but the walls and ceiling, too, annoying several spiders and centipedes into skittering retreat.
Reynie swallowed hard. “Ready?”
“Not really,” said Sticky, “but I suppose it doesn’t matter.”
Together they counted to three, took a deep breath, and ran into the gloom after Kate.
Reynie and Sticky stopped at the end of the passage to catch their breath, then again when they neared the top of the dark, winding, seemingly interminable stairs. It wouldn’t do to be panting and wheezing when they crept into the secret anteroom, located on the Monk Building’s seventh floor. Mastering his breath as best he could—knowing perfectly well that under the circumstances it would never fully settle, nor his heartbeat stop racing—Reynie kept up the count he’d begun in the back of his mind almost fifteen minutes ago. Almost fifteen minutes, but not quite. The Ten Men shouldn’t have arrived yet, which meant Kate should have had her chance to search the office. So why hadn’t the boys met her coming back in the passage? He feared he knew the answer, and a minute later Kate confirmed it.
“I stuck around to spy,” she whispered when the boys appeared at the top of the stairs. She was kneeling by the far wall of the anteroom, her eye to a peephole. She had set her flashlight on the floor lens-down, so that only a dim glow emerged from around its rim. Kate tapped the flashlight. “Don’t worry, I only turned that on for you two. I’ll turn it off when they show up.”
“When they show up?” Sticky breathed. “Are you out of your mind? Did you search the office or not?”
“There was nothing there. Nothing at all. Empty file cabinets, empty desk drawers. It’s all just for show. Or else the Ten Men got here early and took everything, but it doesn’t look that way. The place doesn’t look ransacked—just empty. I want to hear what they say when they d
iscover the same thing.”
“But… but…,” Sticky stuttered, trying to think of a way to change Kate’s mind. The Ten Men were probably already in the building! They were probably coming up the main stairs! But he didn’t want to leave Kate behind. “That wall isn’t very thick,” he finally managed. “You realize that, don’t you? If they heard us in here, they could smash right through it.”
“Oh, no doubt,” Kate agreed. “So you’d better get settled. They’ll be here any second.”
Reynie hurriedly glanced around to get his bearings before Kate switched off her flashlight. As long as he avoided the stairs there was nothing to trip over or bump into; the floor was barren. So was the entire anteroom, save for the various garments, wigs, and hats hanging on the side wall (these were the disguises the adults donned on errand days) and a lever near Kate’s head that opened the secret entrance into the office.
Don’t bump that, Reynie told himself as he knelt at one of the peepholes. Whatever you do, don’t bump that!
Sticky must have been thinking the same thing; he veered so widely around the lever it might have been a cobra. Then he took his position at the final peephole, Kate switched off the flashlight, and everything was suddenly, impenetrably black.
As if conjured by darkness, there came the sound of footsteps.
The footsteps were followed by a thoughtful grunt, then a man’s muted voice. “This one isn’t marked. It would appear to be 7-B, though.”
“Open it,” said another, deeper voice.
Peering through the tiny hole Reynie saw a red glow in the darkness, like a hot burner on an electric stove. The lock, he realized. A Ten Man had just aimed his laser pointer at it. The glow faded as quickly as it had brightened, Reynie heard the doorknob turn, and with a thump and a heavy shudder the office door opened. Flashlight beams swept across the office. Reynie instinctively drew back. When he pressed his eye to the hole again he saw two men. One of them, a huge, powerful figure with shining, well-coiffed brown hair, was undoubtedly McCracken—the leader of all the Ten Men, and by far the most formidable.
McCracken made an adjustment to his flashlight and stood it upright on the empty desk, where it shone like a lantern. With his intelligent eyes narrowed, he turned his head slowly from left to right, surveying the office. Beside him the other Ten Man—a familiar bespectacled man named Sharpe—was doing the same, with exactly the same expression and movement of the head, so that the two men looked eerily like robotic figures you might see in an amusement park ride.
Again at the same moment, the men set down their briefcases.
“Not terribly promising,” Sharpe observed.
“I never trust promises anyway,” said McCracken in his too-familiar, cool bass tones.
“It’s clearly out of use. Why does Benedict keep it?”
“Perhaps he hasn’t found anyone to take it off his hands. Times are hard for the gainlessly employed, my dear Sharpe. In fact Benedict used to maintain several offices here, but now he’s down to just this one. At any rate, it only makes less for us to search—and search we must, if only as a matter of form.”
By “we” McCracken clearly meant Sharpe, who cheerfully set to yanking out file cabinet drawers. As he did so Reynie studied the office himself, wondering if Kate had overlooked anything. He recognized the room, of course. 7-B had been the site of one of Mr. Benedict’s tests. How well he remembered peering through these very holes with Sticky—they had only just met—as Kate negotiated a challenge the boys had passed moments before. The floor then had been painted in a checkerboard pattern, and the secret entrance had been a regular door. Now 7-B resembled exactly the sort of dull office found behind every other door in the Monk Building, with a desk, file cabinets, bookshelves, a wastepaper basket, and a potted ficus tree that had seen better days. Reynie saw nothing important in it at all.
Nor did Sharpe, who appeared to enjoy the search nonetheless. With a satisfied smile he upended the desk, tossed file drawers here and there, ripped pastel paintings from the wall and punched his fist through them. For good measure he roughed up the ficus, whose last remaining leaves fell to the floor like sad confetti. Then he took a cloth from his briefcase and polished a scuff from one of his gleaming black shoes. “When will the others come?” he asked, breathing hard.
McCracken checked his large silver wristwatch. Then he checked his other one. “Crawlings and Garrotte arrive in two minutes. The others hold their positions, of course.”
“I do hate to wait,” said Sharpe. “Mightn’t we get on with the instructions? It will save time.”
McCracken laughed. “Sharpe, what a fellow you are! All of us have to be present or the number won’t come out correctly. Would you like to follow the wrong instructions? Do you think Mr. Curtain would be pleased?”
Sharpe rapped his knuckles on his head as if sounding for contents. “Excellent point, McCracken. Well taken. No, since you put it that way, I believe we should wait.”
Two and a half minutes later Crawlings and Garrotte strode into the office.
“You’re late,” said McCracken.
“Sorry,” said Crawlings. “We thought we might have seen one, but no such luck.”
“And no sign from the roofs?”
“No.”
“Very well,” said McCracken. “Let’s cite our numbers, beginning with Crawlings.”
Each Ten Man spoke a number aloud. McCracken nodded. “The sum is odd. That indicates you, Garrotte.”
Garrotte reached inside his suit coat and took out a sealed envelope. He handed it to McCracken, who had already unsheathed a wicked-looking letter opener. McCracken slit the envelope, removed the letter, and let the envelope fall. As an afterthought he sliced the envelope in two as it drifted to the floor—he didn’t even look at it—before unfolding the letter and looking it over.
Read it aloud, Reynie pleaded in his mind. Read it aloud!
But McCracken only said “Ah,” and passed the letter around for the other Ten Men to read.
“Excellent!” said Crawlings, the last to have a look. He crumpled the letter and tossed it toward the wastepaper basket. “That gives us plenty of time for coffee and scones. I don’t know about you fellows, but I’m famished.”
“You forget,” said McCracken. “We have to make another sweep for the girl. But take heart, my dear—if we don’t track her down this time we’ll set up a watch in the neighborhood, and you can have something then.”
Sharpe looked hopeful. “Do you think she’ll turn up before we have to go? I would so love a bonus! But of course we can’t miss the rendezvous.”
“With luck she’ll go crying back to Benedict’s house well before then,” said McCracken.
“With real luck we’ll track her down right away!” said Crawlings, and with a comical smile he pantomimed drinking from a coffee cup and rubbing his belly. The other Ten Men chuckled.
“As for that,” said McCracken, “I have a few more ideas. Let’s signal the others and get moving.”
The Ten Men filed out of the office, leaving it in darkness, and the young spies listened to their footsteps fading away. Not daring to whisper, Reynie mentally willed his friends to be silent until they were sure the Ten Men had gone for good. For a long time he listened with straining ears, and was just about to switch on his flashlight when Kate switched on hers.
“Did you see that?” Reynie whispered excitedly. “Crawlings left the instructions!”
“I saw it, all right,” Sticky said. “Let’s go…” He trailed off, distracted by the sight of Kate heading for the stairs—and by the crumpled letter in her hand. “Wait, you already got it?”
Reynie was staring, too. “I didn’t even hear you!”
“I’ve been practicing,” Kate whispered, already starting down the stairs. “Now come on! We’re going to be late!”
It was agreed Kate would run ahead in hopes of showing the letter to Milligan or Mr. Benedict as soon as possible. And for the first time in ages, Reynie actually had
hopes. From the Ten Men’s discussion it sounded as though they wouldn’t make their next rendezvous for some time, and Reynie felt sure Mr. Benedict could decipher his brother’s instructions—whatever they were—quickly enough to act. It was a most promising turn of events, and Reynie couldn’t help feeling proud of his part in it. Nor was he alone: Kate’s feet had flown even faster than usual, and Sticky, puffing along beside him in the secret passage, kept spontaneously breaking into a grin.
The boys’ high spirits were diminished considerably, however, when they staggered up out of the cellar to find a miserable-looking Kate being chastised by Ms. Plugg, who had her by the elbow. A short black limousine with its lights on idled in the street—this must be the armored car—and from Mr. Benedict’s house, in tones of rising alarm, the adults could be heard calling their names.
“They’re here!” roared Ms. Plugg, and relieved faces appeared in several windows.
The guard plunged back into her tirade without missing a beat: “—looking for you, and no one seems to have had any idea of these orders Milligan supposedly gave me! And what was I to do? Even though I began to doubt your word, what if I was mistaken? No! I had to keep my mouth shut! I had to shrug and play it off as confusion! Meanwhile the Washingtons are panicking! Miss Perumal is worried sick! Her mother had to take a pill! Do you know how it felt for me to stand here not saying anything to console them? Do you realize—”
“I said I’m sorry!” Kate cried. “And I really am, Ms. Plugg! I can’t explain how important it was, or why we had to do it that way, but—”
Ms. Plugg was hardly mollifed. “Did Milligan give those orders or not? Did you or did you not have to search for something important down in that cellar?”
As the exact truth would surely have released fresh torrents of recrimination, Kate simply held up the crumpled letter. “I have to show this to Milligan or Mr. Benedict—it’s urgent, Ms. Plugg!”
Ms. Plugg snorted like a bull, glancing at the letter in Kate’s hand. “What is it? No, let me guess, you can’t tell me.”