The Project (10 page)

• • •

He caught up with Tommy a couple of hours later.

“You go first,” Tommy said, with the look of someone who has really big news to tell.

Luke consulted his scrappy notes. “I looked into the other library first, the Franklin Public Library, where the book was donated to. It opened in 1790 in Franklin, Massachusetts, not far from Boston. It’s still a library today.”

“Might be worth a visit,” Tommy said.

Luke had no idea how Tommy thought they were going to get to Boston. In Luke’s experience, flying off to another city was not something you just did on a whim. But Tommy seemed to have no problem with the idea.

“The university library here in Iowa City was established in 1855,” Luke continued, “but get this—in 1897 lightning struck a chimney and started a fire, which burned down the library! About twenty-five thousand books were destroyed, along with all the catalogue cards.”

“You mean their book records?” Tommy asked.

“Yeah. All the information about all the books.”

“So if they did have the book—say they’d borrowed it from Franklin—and it was one of the books that survived the fire …,” Tommy said slowly.

“Then they might not know they had it, because the records were destroyed.”

“They would have made new records, though,” Tommy said.

“Yeah, but in the confusion of the fire and everything, maybe they just missed it.”

“I wonder if Franklin still wants it back,” Tommy said.

Luke laughed, loudly enough that people looked at him. “It must be the most overdue library book in the world,” Luke said.

“And Benfer?” asked Tommy.

“He was Italian. A bit of a nobody, really. Had rich parents and fancied himself as an inventor. But he never invented anything worthwhile. He was really fascinated by the idea of flight, which may be why he was interested in the da Vinci drawings. He spent years trying to invent a flying machine but never succeeded. Now your turn.”

“Okay.” Tommy got out his organizer and scanned his notes. “Let’s start with the
Vitruvian Man.
”

“The da Vinci picture,” Luke said.

“First of all, his name wasn’t da Vinci. It was Leonardo.”

“We know that,” Luke said. “Leonardo da Vinci.”

“Nope,” Tommy said. “Apparently, they didn’t have last names back in the fifteenth century. They called him Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, which basically means ‘Leonardo, the son of Piero who comes from Vinci.’ Calling him ‘da Vinci’ would be like calling you ‘from New Zealand.’ His name was Leonardo, and that’s how he signed his paintings.”

“Leonardo it is, then,” Luke said.

“Here’s something weird,” Tommy said. “He used to write in reverse, you know, mirror writing, so you’d have to see it in a mirror to read it.”

“Some kind of code?” Luke wondered.

“Not a very smart one if all you needed was a mirror,” Tommy said. “And he didn’t do it all the time. Sometimes he wrote the normal way.”

“Why?”

“Nobody really knows.”

“What about the nude dude in the circle?” Luke asked.

“A circle and a square,” Tommy said. “It’s supposed to be some kind of study of the proportions of the human body—you know, how long our arms and legs are in relation to the rest of our body. That kind of stuff. Leonardo’s version is full of precise measurements.”

“Does that help us?” Luke asked.

“Not really,” Tommy said.

He opened a large book with glossy pages filled with illustrations.

“Here are some of Leonardo’s inventions.”

They pored over them. They looked sketchy and old, but Luke could barely tear his eyes from the pages. Here was a guy who imagined submarines, helicopters, tanks, and other things that weren’t to be invented for hundreds of years.

“Look at this one,” Tommy said. “Leonardo invented a robot. Dude!”

“He had a good imagination,” Luke said. “But does it help us?”

“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “But one thing I did find out is that he didn’t let anyone see his drawings. They didn’t find them until the nineteenth century.”

“That’s when Benfer was doing his inventing!”

“Yup. Leonardo kept his drawings private because he was worried that someone might use them for the wrong reasons.”

“Good on him,” Luke said.

“Get this. He had a hidden laboratory in a monastery in
Florence, and it was so secret that it stayed hidden for over five hundred years. They just discovered it in 2005!”

“What about Mullins?”

“He is from Germany, as we thought. His real name is Mueller—Erich Mueller. He is a world-famous collector of art and rare books, but that’s not how he made his money.”

“How did he get rich?”

“Rare-earth magnets.”

“Which are?”

Tommy took another book and opened it. “The most powerful permanent magnets in the world. Discovered, or rather invented, in 1925. They’re made of an alloy, sintered neodymium, whatever that is. They are incredibly strong but also incredibly brittle.”

“And Mullins—I mean, Mueller—made millions from magnets? What did he do, invent the smiley face fridge magnet?”

Tommy shook his head. “Computers. They use neodymium magnets for the motors in computer hard drives. Mullins got in early on and got rich during the personal computer revolution back in the 1980s.”

Luke stared at the stack of books open in front of them, trying to make sense of it all. From Leonardo da Vinci to computer disks. From America’s first library to the
Vitruvian Man
.

Somewhere among all this was the solution to the puzzle. But the harder he stared at the books, trying to find it, the more elusive it became.

T
he next phase of the operation was to stake out Mullins’s—Mueller’s—hotel suite. They had no intention of breaking into it, just observing it from a safe distance.

But plans change.

Tommy, who seemed to know every building in Iowa City, led the way through the library to a back staircase. It was locked, but his handy little lock pick took care of that.

The stairs led up to a heavy metal door that had a sliding bolt on the inside but wasn’t locked. It opened out onto the roof of the library.

“Stay low,” Tommy said. “We don’t want anyone to see us.”

They both crouched as they scurried across to the northwest corner of the building, overlooking the pedestrian mall. Diagonally opposite was the Central Hotel.

They sat on the concrete roof in the gap between the two library clocks and looked across at the hotel.

“How will we know what room he’s in?” Luke asked as
Tommy removed some equipment from his backpack.

He smiled an evil, lopsided grin. “Just call him. I’ll do the rest.”

Luke glanced at the device that Tommy had extracted from his bag. It looked like a camera but with a long, thin zoom lens.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s my new laser audio surveillance system,” Tommy said.

“What does it do?”

“You aim it at a glass surface, like a window, and it picks up minute vibrations in the glass and converts them into sound waves. Basically, it picks up any noise inside the room.”

He plugged a headset into it and put it on.

“You ring the room, and I’ll scan the windows, see if I can hear the phone ringing.”

“What do I do if he answers?” Luke asked.

“Hang up.”

Luke got the hotel number from the directory service and dialed it.

“Central Hotel, Iowa City,” a smooth female voice answered.

“Hello, I’d like to speak to James Mullins,” Luke said, disguising his voice with his best imitation of an American accent.

“Just a moment.” There was a brief period of recorded music. “Putting you through now.”

“It’s ringing,” Luke said.

Tommy was scanning along each floor of the building, listening intently but shaking his head.

It rang four times and then there was a click, and a gruff male voice said, “Hello?”

Luke pressed the
END
button on his cell phone. “Did you find him?”

Tommy shook his head. “Ring him back.”

Luke pressed
REDIAL
.

“Central Hotel, Iowa City,” said the same smooth voice.

“Hello,” Luke said, “I was ringing for James Mullins, but I got cut off.”

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry.” She sounded a bit embarrassed. “I’ll put you through again.”

The phone rang just twice this time before it was picked up, but that was enough.

“Got it,” Tommy said. “Corner room, level three.”

Luke disconnected before the voice even had time to say hello.

“Here,” Tommy said, handing Luke his pair of tiny binoculars.

Luke put them to his eyes and adjusted the focus, and the wall of the hotel came into clear view. He counted up three levels and found the corner room.

The window’s drapes were pulled almost shut. He could make out figures moving around inside but could not see who they were or what they were doing.

“What are they talking about?” he asked.

“They’re speaking in German,” Tommy said. “They’re discussing the phone calls they just got. One of them sounds a little nervous.” He listened intently for a while.

“Anything else?” Luke asked.

“Shush,” he said, reminding Luke that they were still in, or at least on, a library.

“No, nothing,” he said after a while. “I can hear computer keys. I think someone is using a laptop. There are a couple of voices that I can’t make out. They may be in another room.”

“No mention of the book?” Luke asked.

“None.”

Luke let the binoculars wander to the left. He found himself looking into the hotel corridor. Light was reflecting off the glass, which made it hard to see, but he could just make out the elevators halfway down the passageway.

“Hang on, they’re leaving,” Tommy said. “Mueller told someone to go and get the car.”

“All of them?” Luke asked.

“Not sure,” Tommy replied.

Luke watched the corridor as one of the heavyset men emerged from the room and went to wait by the elevators. He disappeared, and a few moments later, the other man appeared in the corridor, followed by Mueller.

“They’re leaving,” Luke said. “Let’s follow them.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Tommy said, holding up his lock pick.

They walked into the hotel lobby as if they owned the place.

“Act like you belong,” Tommy had told Luke, “and nobody will question you. That’s the first rule of successful spying.”

They checked the lobby for any sign of Mueller or his thugs, then took the elevator to the third floor and headed for the corner room.

They passed a service cart covered in towels and sheets and packed with little plastic bottles of shampoo and rolls of toilet paper. A few wire coat hangers hung from a handle on the end of the cart. Beside the cart, a door was propped open, and Luke could hear humming and bustling sounds from within.

The room they wanted was at the very end of the corridor and was number 300, according to the brass numbers stuck to the door. A
DO NOT DISTURB
sign hung from the handle.

“Crap,” Tommy said, staring at the lock.

Set into the top of the handle was a slot for an electronic door key.

“Don’t you have a gadget for that?” Luke asked.

“There is one, but it costs five hundred dollars, and I haven’t bought it yet. Maybe we can ask the housekeeper,” he suggested. “Pretend we’ve locked ourselves out of our room.”

“I’m sure they’ve heard that one before,” Luke said, and looked at the handle closely. “Keep a watch out for me.”

He strolled casually back to the service cart and borrowed one of the wire coat hangers, untwisting the neck as he walked back to Tommy. Luke straightened out the coat hanger, leaving just the round hook in the end. At the other end he made a handgrip, twisting the wire around into a right angle. Then he pushed the wire underneath the door, up on the other side, and slid it along where the handle should be. He pulled down, there was a click, and the door sprang open.

“That was awesome, dude,” Tommy said in amazement, looking at the bit of bent wire and no doubt thinking about that five-hundred-dollar electronic lock picker.

They slipped quietly into the room and closed the door behind them. There was a closet built into one wall, and a door close to the window opened into a small bathroom.

A table and two chairs were in one corner. On the table sat a hotel service directory, a notepad, and a brown plastic pen. The power cord for a laptop computer ran up onto the table, but there was no sign of the laptop. A double bed was in the center of the room, and a single bed was pushed up against the window. The bedsheets on both were rumpled, as though they had been slept in and the maid had not yet come to make up the room.

An open door led into an adjoining room, 302, in which there were two more beds.

“Luke,” Tommy whispered. “If Mumbo and Jumbo sleep in here, and that’s Mueller’s bed, who sleeps in the bed by the window?”

Luke smiled at Tommy’s names for the two thugs. “Maybe there’s a fourth man,” he whispered back, looking around.

“Then let’s not take too long,” Tommy said.

They searched in the cupboards, and the drawers, and the closets, but all they found were clothes, socks, and underwear. Men’s and women’s.

“Maybe the fourth man is a woman,” Luke said.

Mueller’s bathroom was tidy, while the thugs’ was a mess, with towels lying in the middle of the floor and shaving cream spattered across the mirror.

There were some suitcases stacked in a corner, but they were empty.

Luke even checked the pockets of some jackets hanging
in the closet, in case there were any clues in there, but to no avail.

There were footsteps outside the door. They froze, but they heard a door open on the other side of the corridor.

“Dude, we gotta get out of here,” Tommy said.

“One more minute,” Luke said, checking his watch. He tried the bathroom cupboards, with no success.

It was Tommy who found it.

“Look at this,” he said, pulling out a flat black briefcase from under a bed.

Luke looked at the door, wondering how much time they had left, then turned his attention back to the briefcase. It was locked, but Tommy said briefcases were easy. Still, it took him a couple of minutes of fiddling with some small metal device before eventually popping open each of the two locks.