Challenge (2 page)

FRIDAY, MAY 13,
TWO WEEKS BEFORE
THE CHALLENGE

Kyle Trapp’s heart soared. He loved flying, and he was currently piloting a single-engine Cessna five thousand feet above Lake Michigan. The sky shone blue above lake water of cinnamon gray. Kyle possessed information vital to the investigation, a secret so sensitive that he couldn’t trust telephones or e-mail; he could deliver it only in person. He checked his watch: another two hours.

The smell hit him first: a nasty, bitter taste at the back of his throat. It took him just seconds to realize it was electrical. The plane’s avionics—the flight instruments—all went dark simultaneously. He tapped the various dials. Nothing. Without electronics, he couldn’t set the plane to fly itself, so he steadied the yoke and double-checked the fuses by running his hand over them, feeling for one that might be sticking out. Again, nothing.

The motor coughed and sputtered, then caught back to life.

He stayed calm, as he’d been trained, and tried to determine the cause, and therefore the solution. He pulled his laminated checklists out of the door’s side pocket, flipped through the pages, and tried some circuit breakers, to no effect.

Every electrical instrument on the plane’s console was dead. Only the vacuum-assisted devices still worked: the altitude indicator and the compass.

He pulled a backup radio out of his flight bag, switched it on, and tuned to an emergency frequency.

A new smell: burning oil.

The motor was on fire.

Coughing, he set the radio down on the copilot seat and twisted open the small vent, letting in much-needed fresh air.

The altitude indicator informed him the plane was slipping to the right. Seeing this, he jerked the wheel too strongly, an amateur mistake. The radio slipped off the seat and banged out of sight.

A haze filled the cockpit, despite the vent. He coughed and gagged as it grew thicker.

He reached under his seat for the fire extinguisher—but where to aim? He couldn’t
see
any fire, only smell it.

With a fire raging on the other side of the console, he couldn’t use the supplemental oxygen without risk of causing an explosion.

The fuselage began to shudder. The plane picked up speed, now in a steep dive.

Gagging and coughing, he pulled on the yoke, worked the rudder, but everything felt wrong. It wasn’t just a dive, it was a spiral. The plane sank faster and faster, the whine of the wind in the side vent now a scream.
What to do?

He knew how to pull out of a “dead man’s spiral”—he’d not only studied it during his training, he’d practiced it—so why couldn’t he remember now? Then he realized why: his head was faint. He wasn’t thinking clearly. He was on the verge of passing out.

The motor coughed once more, and died.

His head swooned. He couldn’t see, couldn’t stop coughing, couldn’t think. And yet he pulled the plane out of the spiral. He leveled off and spotted a tiny island up ahead. Or was that the shore?

Holding the yoke one-handed, he unfastened his harness and lunged across the passenger seat, his right hand frantically searching for the fallen handheld radio. He felt something…
but no, that wasn’t it.
Again his fingers touched cold metal—but this was some part of the seat.
Not the radio.

One last try: he had it.

He depressed the button on the side of the radio, raised it to his dry lips, and managed to get out one word, over and over like a prayer:

“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!
…”

He forced his door open, battling the air pressure holding it shut. For a moment, the cockpit cleared, and he could see.

Sand…flat sand…

He set the flaps and gripped the yoke with both hands.

1.

THURSDAY, MAY 29,
TWO DAYS BEFORE
THE NATIONAL
SCIENCE CHALLENGE

“FIDOE stands for Fully Integrated Digital Odor Evaluator. It is to robots what a bloodhound is to the world of dogs. I recycled parts from the MITZ-AI-5, capitalizing on momentum components to conserve battery power.” Steel’s voice faltered and cracked above the steady hum of the train car’s ventilation system. The train stood at platform seven in Chicago’s Union Station, awaiting its scheduled departure.

“I’m not saying I understand it the way your father does, but you delivered it well,” Judy Trapp said to her son.

“I can’t do this.”

“Of course you can. You read that
very
well. You’ll do fine. Read some more.”

“Later,” he said. “If that’s all right.”

“Later is okay,” she said, “as long as we rehearse the whole talk. It’s going to be different with an audience. The more you practice, the easier it will be when the time comes.”

He knew she wouldn’t push him—his mother was in awe of his brain power. She was always defending him to his more demanding father. She pretty much gave him whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it. He didn’t overuse this power—or tried not to—but he knew she was there when he needed her.

“Can I go check on Cairo?” Steel asked. It seemed unfair that their dog had to ride in the baggage compartment.

“Ste…ven!” She used his given name rarely, but when she did, it was typically in a tone of voice that informed him he was on dangerous ground. The nickname, Steel, had been the work of his first-grade teacher, who, astonished by his photographic memory, had said in front of all his friends that he had “a mind like a steel trap”—making a play on words with his last name. But the nickname had been picked up by his classmates and had stuck, eventually finding its way into his home.

The scolding had a bit of his father in the sound of it, and for a moment it took Steel aback. Truth was, his mother was out of her element taking him to the National Science Challenge.

She didn’t belong here; she never paid any attention to his science projects.
So why now?
It occurred to him that she was there in place of his father because his parents were having problems. He wasn’t blind. He’d seen plenty of families self-destruct. But his own? It seemed inconceivable. Still
…the way she was acting…

“Ah, come on, Mom. Please?”

“You can visit Cairo only if the conductor is free to help you. He has to unlock the baggage car. You heard him. It wasn’t my idea.”

She used that excuse whenever handy: it was always somebody else’s idea if it amounted to denying him something.

He let his dark bangs fall over his eyes and brushed them away in time to give her the Steel look: a hint of childish sincerity, a touch of playfulness. Cairo gave him the same look when she wanted to go outside and play with her rope toy.

His mother didn’t respond in her usual way, so he sneaked a look at himself in the reflection off the window glass: his ears stuck out a little far; his new glasses looked too big—he hated them. His mouth looked small and his nose too big, all because of those stupid glasses. His mother claimed his face was “growing into itself,” whatever that meant. But combined with his stringy long legs and straw-thin arms, there wasn’t much to grow into. Sadly, he thought he looked like the geek he was. He was the walking stereotype of the human nerd, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. If he got zits on top of it all, he was going to go live on an uninhabited island.

“Seventy-eight,” he said.

“Seventy-eight what?” she asked. She always got suckered into these tricks of his, and he felt bad for messing with her, but he wanted to visit Cairo; if she wasn’t going to let him, then he was going to mess with her.

“The train car,” he said, “seats seventy-eight passengers. There’s space for two wheelchairs.” She looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language. He went on to recite every statistic about the train that he’d read off an Internet site two weeks earlier. He loved to impress her.

“Wow! You are truly amazing,” she said. So proud. So very proud. She couldn’t help herself.

“I read it on the Internet.” Steel had a photographic memory and total recall. He needed to read something only once, and even a year later he could recite it by heart. That was his secret: it wasn’t that he was so smart, he just never forgot anything. People assumed the two things were the same—but he knew differently. Smart was knowing everything
and
possessing the creativity to see beyond what you knew. His father was like that. His father had the gift.

“I could look for a conductor. If I found one, and he agreed to let me in, then I could go check on Cairo. What’s wrong with that?”

She lowered her voice. “She isn’t supposed to even be here, Steel, you know that. I fibbed to get them to allow her to come along. I don’t want to push it.”

“You think the conductor cares about any of that?” Steel asked. “I’ll bet they love having a dog on board. Rules don’t always make sense, Mom. Everybody knows that, even the people who make them.” He tried to work this logic on her whenever possible, since most of the rules he had to live by were hers and his father’s. He could tangle her up pretty well when he really put his mind to it. She wasn’t a bad debater, but her heart often got in her way.

“Well, it wasn’t me who made this rule,” she said. “It was the conductor, and we’re going to obey it. You can look for a conductor once the train is a half hour or so out of the city. The conductors have things to do, don’t forget, other than helping little boys go pet their dogs.”

“I’m not a little boy.” Steel gazed out the window at the steady stream of passengers arriving on the platform. His mind wandered to Cairo and what she must be going through. A cross between a German shepherd and a saluki hound, she was a decent-size dog with a dark blond coat and “feathering” on the backs of her legs. Her travel crate was big, but she was the type of dog that liked to run around and play. She had to be going crazy. He looked down and studied the page of his talk, taking a mental picture of it. Immediately it was committed to memory. He felt tempted to show off and recite it for his mom, but he thought he might wait and use it as a negotiating tool.

Her cell phone rang and she answered it. This was good: when she got into a good, solid phone call she mentally left the room.

He considered making a break for the baggage car. She wouldn’t follow, wouldn’t stop him. Probably wouldn’t even notice. And if she did notice, she wouldn’t make a scene. But he’d pay later, and it was going to be a long trip. He wasn’t crazy about the idea of spending nearly two days with his mother mad at him. Better not push it.

“Hold on, just a minute,” she said, cupping the cell phone. “Steel, I’m going to take this by the rest-room. It’s private.”

“Is it Dad?”

“No. Just private.”

She headed down the aisle and began talking again. Something weird was up: she didn’t usually keep secrets from Steel.

He looked down the central aisle at all the people settling in. He knew which head belonged in what seat. Had it memorized. It was just the way his mind worked; some people remembered songs or dialogue from films, Steel remembered anything and everything he saw: the plays of a football game, a math equation three lines long, or the backs of heads of seventy-six people in a train car.

So when the pretty woman with the dark hair and sunglasses left her seat and headed off the train and out onto the platform, Steel quickly jumped up, following her window to window, paralleling her movement
away
from the direction of his mother.

Mid car he looked up into the overhead rack and saw what he could picture so well: the briefcase. He’d seen her carry it on board, and now she’d left without it. He reached up. He found himself out on the platform, pursuing her. He struggled against the tide of late arrivals, the woman’s briefcase in hand.

“Hey! Lady!” he called out in his croaking, cracking voice. It was an embarrassment to even talk. Why couldn’t he be a year older right now? He hoisted the briefcase over his head—the thing was light as a feather.

She had to be ignoring him, for she certainly could hear him: everyone was looking in his direction.

“Excuse me! Lady!” he shouted even louder, still hoisting the briefcase.

He caught up to her at last.

“Lady! Lady! Your bag!”

She stopped and turned slowly, as if she didn’t want to turn around, as if she were one of those monsters in a horror movie that had the face of the devil. But it wasn’t true: she had a nice face. Spanish, maybe. Her eyes widened when she saw what he carried. “What are you doing?” She couldn’t take her eyes off the briefcase. “What the”—she caught herself—
“heck
are you doing with that?”

Winded, Steel blurted out at her, which was pretty much the way he talked, winded or not. Talking with anyone other than his mom and dad, his mouth became a bottleneck, an impediment to the speed at which his mind worked. The faster he spoke, the fewer words piled up waiting to get out, so he spoke very fast.

“You left this—and I saw you—and I started to follow—and I tried to catch up because I thought you’d forgotten it—and the train’s going to leave any minute now—and that would leave you
off
the train and the briefcase
on
the train—and so here I am.” He pushed the case toward her. She didn’t accept it, raising her arms.

“Not mine.”

“Yeah. Yours. You carried it on the train not five minutes ago. I saw you. I’m six rows behind you.” He squinted. “You were seven rows from the front, aisle seat, left side. You have a red squishy thing holding your hair in a ponytail. When you came in, you put the briefcase in the overhead rack and sat down.” Again he encouraged the briefcase toward her.

Her face remained impassive. “I’m sure you are mistaken.”

Steel knew himself to be many things—precocious, overconfident, intelligent, geeky—but not mistaken. Not now. Not ever. “No, actually. I’m never wrong.” He stated it for her just like that. He got a rise out of her, too. She took a step back. He said, “You boarded with this briefcase. You put it up in the overhead rack, and you left the train without it. You don’t strike me as a terrorist, and it isn’t heavy enough to contain a bomb.…”

She looked him up and down. “You have me confused with someone else, young man. And that means at the moment you’ve stolen someone’s briefcase, and I do not imagine this person will be happy about that.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “You’re lying to me. Why are you lying?”

Her impassive face broke, and she looked clearly uncomfortable. She glanced around the busy platform.

He repeated, “I saw you. I am
not
making a mistake. I don’t make this kind of mistake.”

“Well, you have made one now. You will miss the train,” she said. “Thank you for trying to help me, but honestly,
it is not mine.”
She delivered this with such overbearing, angry determination that he didn’t challenge her. Never mind that she was flat-out lying.

“Whatever,” he said.

“Good luck at the challenge,” she said. She answered his puzzled expression by pointing to his sweatshirt. It bore the logo for the National Science Challenge, Washington, D.C., and the dates June 6–8.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. She’d made her point: he wasn’t the only attentive one.

“Good-bye.” She said this in a definitive, final way. No room for discussion. She turned and hurried away.

Steel reentered the train car lost in thought. He absolutely knew what he’d seen. Wasn’t going to hear otherwise. So why had she lied?

He was about to return the briefcase to the overhead rack when he spotted his mother standing by their seats, nearly shaking from anger.

He walked down the aisle, past passengers readying for the trip, and joined her.

“Explain yourself, young man.”

When she was mad at him—really mad, like this—she scared him. He knew at these times he held no power over her, and that scared him even more.

He explained himself. What had started out as a good deed had ended in a confused muddle. His mother knew to trust his visual memory. She didn’t question for a moment if he was sure what he’d seen. She’d lived with him for fourteen years.

“Well,” she said, “I can hardly be mad at you for attempting to do a good deed, now can I?” She glanced up the aisle.

“I think we should mention it to a conductor. Unattended bags…it’s no different from an airport.”

“It’s not like she’s a terrorist or something.”

“Just the same, he’ll know what to do. We’ll mention it to the conductor,” she said.

And that was that.