The Great Gold Robbery (14 page)

He stood up, but his foot was still asleep and was like limp spaghetti under him, so he had to sit back down. He looked at his watch again. 2:43. He had exactly seventeen minutes until the
appointed time. He pulled a little bottle out of his pocket:
DOCTOR PROCTOR’S FROST FLUID
. He opened the bottle and downed the contents. Then he made a face and
reminded himself to ask the professor to add a little more sugar next time.

Then he stood up again, and this time his foot held him, if only just barely.

He turned right down the hallway the way they’d planned, and sure enough: The hallway turned twice to the left and then once to the right, just like in the diagram. He heard a whirring
noise that was steadily getting louder, and he realized he was getting closer. And there—at the end of the hallway—he saw something on the wall that looked like a normal light switch.
But he knew it wasn’t. Nilly stopped suddenly. Even though he couldn’t see anything, just an empty hallway, he knew that there, right in front of him, lurked an invisible threat. Nilly
took out the cigar he’d gotten from Alfie Crunch, lit it with the lighter he’d gotten from Doctor Proctor, and steeled himself. Then he inhaled the smoke and exhaled quickly and
vigorously, straight in front of him.

And then he could see them.

The laser beams.

He inhaled and exhaled several more times, until the space in front of him was full of smoke and he could see the whole pattern the beams made. They were coming from the walls, the floor, and
the ceiling and formed a thorny thicket so thick and dense that it would be impossible for even the smallest boy anyone had ever seen to make it through without touching one of the beams. He could
only just barely see the switch on the other side through the web of laser beams.

But there
was
a tiny little opening there.

Nilly checked his watch. Fourteen minutes left. He plunged his hand down into his other pants pocket and pulled up the blue aiming mitten and the three darts, put on the mitten, and aimed
through the opening.

He threw.

THUNK!

The dart made it through the thicket but missed the switch by half an inch.

Nilly grabbed dart number two.

It was not particularly warm in the bank basement, and yet he felt sweat trickling down his back. The dart was trembling in his hand.

“Come on, Nilly,” he whispered to himself, and threw.

THUNK!

The dart was stuck in the wall a hairbreadth from the switch, vibrating. But it had bumped the first dart as it went in, and Nilly could see the yellow end of that first dart slowly starting to
sag.

It was going to fall out of the wall! And if it did that, it would hit one of the laser beams, which ran right under the switch!

Nilly grabbed the third and final black dart and didn’t even have time to aim. He just threw it as fast as he could. The yellow dart came loose from the wall right then. Nilly followed it
with his eyes. It felt like it was falling in slow motion. Toward the beam below.

And it
hit
the beam.

At least, it hit where the laser beam
used
to be.

Then it hit the floor.

Nilly stood there staring straight ahead.

The laser beams were gone.

And the black dart was stuck in the middle of the switch, quivering.

Nilly wiped a hand across his sweaty forehead and looked at the clock. Thirteen minutes. Then he started running again.

THIS IS SO exciting it must seem like complete idiocy to end the chapter here, but that’s exactly what I was planning on doing.

BACK SO SOON?

Okay, so Nilly made it past the laser beams, which he had managed to turn off, and ran into the room in front of the world’s most secure vault with the door made of authentic Uddevalla
steel and a lock with a combination that was thirteen numbers and four letters long.

And as he entered the room, he noticed a clock on the wall that had already begun to count down. He knew that the motion detectors had detected him and that if he didn’t open the steel
door within thirty seconds, the system would decide he was a burglar—which would actually be a completely correct assumption. Then the alarm would go off. In twenty-seven more seconds.
Twenty-six . . .

Nilly knew there was no way he could correctly guess thirteen numbers and four letters. So instead he unbuttoned his pants and aimed at the lock on the steel door. According to Doctor Proctor,
the ice-blue frost fluid took only three minutes to blend with your stomach acid and pass through your liver, spleen, kidneys, and other innards before it was ready to be peed out. Nilly strained,
trying to start the flow.

Twenty seconds.

“Come on,” he mumbled.

Sixteen seconds.

He pushed harder, groaned. But it’s not always so easy to pee when you know that you
have to
.

Nilly had heard that it helps to think about running water when you’re pee shy. So he thought about a trickling faucet, rainwater burbling out of a downspout, a babbling spring stream. But
nothing came.

Twelve seconds.

An average-sized river. A big river. A waterfall. Nine seconds. Niagara, Vøringsfossen, and Victoria Falls all in one.

Seven seconds. Something had to happen. ASAP.

“Okay, reverse psychology,” Nilly muttered to himself, closing his eyes and thinking as hard as he could about how he absolutely
couldn’t
pee, not here in a public
place, not inside the Bank of the Very Rich.

Four seconds.

What a scandal that would be! He would be the laughingstock in the newspapers. Headline:
BOY PEES ON WORLD
’
S MOST SECURE STEEL DOOR. MAYOR OF
UDDEVALLA FURIOUS
!

A yellow beam, straight as a laser beam, squirted forth, hitting the steel door and the lock.

Nilly didn’t dare look up at the clock; he just peed as fast as he could. The beam stopped, and he raised the foot with the wood-chopping shoe and kicked the lock.

It sounded like falling icicles crashing onto a sidewalk, the tinkling, singing, crashing, crushing sound of something shattering into a thousand pieces.

Nilly grabbed the handle on the iron door and pulled it toward himself.

It had to open!

It
did
open.

Nilly glanced up at the clock on the wall. It had stopped at 0.5 seconds.

He shuddered and pulled the door open wide.

He saw exactly what he’d been hoping to see.

The vault contained a pile of gold bars glittering dimly in the light from the doorway. And there was a gigantic diamond the size of a soccer ball on top of the pile, sparkling like a disco
ball.

Nilly looked at his watch. He had eleven minutes to find the Bank of Norway’s gold bar and get out of there.

He hurried into the vault and was about to move the diamond when he remembered that he couldn’t touch anything, that that would trigger the alarm right away. So instead he squatted down
and read what it said on the gold bars that he could see in the pile.

Banco Central do Brasil. Banco Central do Brasil. Banco Central do Brasil. Banco Central do . . . What if the gold bar from the Bank of Norway was somewhere in the middle of the pile and he
couldn’t find it? Should he just grab one of Brazil’s gold bars instead? Nilly listened to the voices inside his head. His mother’s voice said, “What difference would it
make? Gold is gold, and Brazil obviously has plenty.” And Lisa’s said, “No, Nilly! Taking from others is stealing, no matter how desperate you are!”

Nilly looked at his watch again. Six minutes to three. He hated clocks!

But then he saw something! It was partially hidden in the pile, but some of the letters were visible. —
NK OF N
— something. The next letter looked curvy.
Probably an
O
. He wanted to fling aside the gold bars that were in the way, but he knew the guards would be there a few seconds after the alarm went off, so he had to be completely sure he
had the right bar first. —
NK OF NO
— That couldn’t be anything other than the Bank of Norway. Or could it?

Nilly started rattling off countries as fast as he could. However, the only “NO” possibilities were Northern Cyprus, North Korea, Norfolk Island, Northern Marianas, or Norway. And of
those, only North Korea and Norway had their own currencies. Which meant his chances were quite good that it said
BANK OF NORWAY
on it.

He stood up. It was two and a half minutes to three. He had an appointment at three o’clock, and if Doctor Proctor hadn’t made any mistakes when he estimated how long it would take
Nilly from here, now was the perfect time for him to get going!

As Nilly pushed the first gold bar aside, he heard the alarm start screeching. Yowzers, gold was really heavy! He knocked two gold bars off and picked up the one he’d seen. And let out a
little “Yippee!” because, sure enough: It said
BANK OF NORWAY
on the side. Nilly stuffed the gold bar down into the little sack he had on his back and ran out of
the vault. He ran back the same way he’d come, but when he passed the room with the safety-deposit boxes and the three steel doors, he turned left instead of right and came to a door that
wasn’t made of steel, but of normal wood. It said
CLOCK TOWER
. Nilly could hear shouts and boots running, clattering and rattling down the stairs from the bank offices
up above.

Nilly raised the wood-chopping shoe and kicked fast and furiously so that the door was quickly a pile of shavings and bits of wood. Then he started running up the stairs as fast as those tiny
legs could carry the little boy with the heavy gold bar.

Three hundred thirty-four steps, Doctor Proctor had said. It hadn’t sounded like all that many when they’d discussed it in the hotel room, but if he was going to make it, he needed
to cover at least two steps a second! His thighs were burning and the stairs seemed like they would never end, but Nilly didn’t give up. Upward, upward, around in circles, ever higher.

And when the steps did finally end, he found himself on a landing with a bunch of gears of all possible sizes, which were whirring and spinning and ticking and tocking. Nilly found the little
hatch in the wall he was looking for, opened it, and leaned out.

The wind hit his face.

“Ho, ho!” he said with a smile.

Because when he looked down, he saw little ants running back and forth and gesturing and screaming down below. And when he looked across at the other side of the Thames, he saw the sun gleaming
in a window that he knew was the window of the hotel room where Doctor Proctor and Lisa, elegantly dressed in a penguin jacket and faux mink stole, were watching him through the binoculars. Then he
looked up at the blue sky, where the contraption that had flown almost to Denmark would soon come to snatch him up, right under the snouts of Rublov’s dogs. Come fly away with the
world’s best, bravest, most brazen, and most attractive bank robber! Nilly looked down. He hoped the news that the Bank of the Very Rich was being robbed had spread and that the TV cameras
would be in place quickly enough to witness the Great Escape.