The Project (7 page)

“What for?”

“You know. Warm bath, hot chocolate, and a nap.”

“My grandmother likes warm baths, hot chocolates, and naps,” Luke said.

“You seriously still want to break into the library?”

“Absolutely. As soon as the floods go down, that book will be locked away in the basement and all the electricity and security cameras and alarms will be turned back on. It’s now or never.”

“What if we get caught?” Tommy asked.

“It’s a library,” Luke said. “What are they going to do—tell us to shush? Come on.”

They made sure the coast was clear, then headed toward the library. The rain was heavy and constant, but Luke didn’t mind because it washed away some of the muck and the stench of the river water.

“Look at it this way,” Luke said as they walked. “The hard bit is over now.”

He was wrong about a lot of things that night.

R
ed lights of fire engines reflected off the wet roads and strobed the walls of the library. There were other colors, too, orange lights of emergency vehicles and the red-blue lights of police cars all intermingling. The rain caught the lights so that it seemed even the air around them was dancing in a crazy circus disco of colors and patterns.

Police officers, firefighters, and security guards stood around in groups, talking and gesturing at the river, paying no attention to the rain.

“We’ll never do it,” Tommy said. “We’ll never get in. There are people everywhere.”

Luke said nothing as he watched the movement of a group of emergency workers inspecting a sandbag levee that had been built across the entrance to the library’s loading dock. Seemingly satisfied, the group moved on, disappearing around the side of the building.

“The loading dock,” Luke said after a while. “That’s our way in. Easy as, bro.”

They were crouched among some trees in a small park just across a narrow road from the library’s main entrance. The loading dock was on the other side of the road, nearer to the river. Most of the emergency workers were congregated to their right, over on Madison Street.

“Just move slowly,” Tommy said. “We’ll be hard to see in these dark raincoats, but movement attracts attention.”

They advanced carefully toward the river, away from the flashing lights, and crossed the road, skirting along the railway line and heading for the loading dock.

A long ramp that led down into the underground dock was blocked off with the sandbag wall, but they bypassed it, climbing over the side and onto the ramp.

Water gushed around Luke’s feet, pouring over the edges of the ramp and flowing down into the loading dock.

Lights appeared along the narrow road, and they both dived down behind the sandbag wall, flattening their backs against it, not worrying about the water that now flowed all around them.

A conversation sounded above, indistinct through the rain, and flashlights played down into the cellarlike loading dock.

Luke held his breath, and after a moment, the lights moved on.

“Let’s go,” he said, and got to his feet.

His sneakers skidded on the wet ramp and slid out from under him. He hurtled down the steep ramp into the water
as if on a waterslide at an amusement park, emerging, coughing and spluttering, in the slowly filling swimming pool that was the loading dock.

Luke just had time to call out, “Watch the ramp, it’s slipp—” when Tommy landed right on top of him, pushing him back down under the water.

Luke came up choking, spraying water out of his nose, grateful that it was clean rainwater they were in, not the scungy stuff that was flowing down the river.

Tommy popped up next to him and spat out a mouthful of water.

“Are you okay?” Luke asked.

“I was already soaking wet,” Tommy said. “Couldn’t get any wetter! At least this stuff doesn’t smell so bad.”

“I think it’s rainwater,” Luke said. “The drains must be blocked.”

A wobbly wooden step led up from the loading dock to a concrete platform where there was a door set into the wall. Luke tried the door.

“It’s locked,” he said.

“What did you expect? A red carpet and Hawaiian dancing girls?” Tommy asked.

“Would’ve been nice,” Luke said.

Tommy opened a waterproof backpack, taking out a small gun-shaped gadget.

Luke watched in amazement as Tommy inserted the thin probe at the end of the object into the keyhole of the door and squeezed the trigger. He turned the handle and the door opened. Easy as.

“It’s a lock pick,” Tommy explained. “It’s what locksmiths use to open doors when people have lost their keys. I bought it off the Internet.”

“Don’t you have to have a license to own one of those?” Luke asked.

“Yup.”

“So, do you have a license?”

“Nope,” Tommy said, and handed Luke another item out of his bag of tricks. A tiny pen-shaped flashlight.

Luke followed him into the building and pulled the door shut behind them.

They were back in the corridor that ran beneath the library. If it had been strange and mysterious by day, with the lights on, the corridor was eerie and unsettling in the dark, with just the pencil beams of their flashlights for illumination. Spidery shadows chased each other behind strange objects on the ceilings and the walls, scuttling away from their lights as they played them around the long underground tunnel. Shapes on the walls seemed to reach out toward them as they passed.

Luke had an uncomfortable feeling that they were not alone down here. Maybe it was the spirits of the thousands of dead authors whose books were buried in these subterranean vaults.

The overhead conveyor belt system that had been fascinating to him that afternoon now seemed like some infernal engine, a contraption of torture and evil.

There was a slushing noise as they walked in water that was about two inches deep.

The walls and the ceiling seemed to be closing in on Luke. He looked at Tommy, who appeared to be enjoying himself in this creepy cave, and tried to shake the feeling off. At least the smell of the river was mostly gone, washed from their clothes by their bath in the loading dock.

They passed the storage rooms, their doors sheathed in plastic and sandbagged against the coming flood. At the far end of the corridor, they came to a set of double doors that swung open easily and led to the narrow staircase back to the library’s main entrance. They crept to the top of the stairs and looked out through the big glass doors of the entrance.

More flashing lights intermittently gave the library’s interior a devilish glow. Luke watched for a moment to make sure that nobody was looking in before scurrying across to the main stairs, Tommy behind him.

“Luke,” Tommy said quietly, and Luke turned to see what the problem was. Even in the low strobing light inside the library, their footprints were clearly visible across the gray carpet of the floor.

“It’s just water,” Luke said. “It’ll dry before anyone comes in here tomorrow.”

“You sure?”

Luke wasn’t but said he was.

There were books stacked everywhere upstairs, safe from the reach of the floodwaters. They sat in piles, with large handwritten labels giving the unit and shelf number they had been taken from.

Luke cast his light around. There were books everywhere. It could take all night to find the one they were
after. “This is going to take forever,” he said.

“No, it won’t,” Tommy said. “You said you saw the book just before we were evacuated. That means it will be in one of the last piles. All we have to do is figure out where they finished stacking, and work backward from there.”

Luke looked around. It seemed that they had started stacking deep in the interior of the library and finished at the entrance.

“Okay, let’s start at this end,” he said. “I’ll take the left; you take the right.”

Tommy nodded and moved toward a stack of books.

Luke dried his hands by rubbing them on the carpet, then began with the nearest pile and scanned the spines. Some of them were blank, which didn’t help, so he moved the books off one by one, stacking them neatly so he could replace them later in the right order.

He went through five stacks in that manner and was starting to wonder if he had dreamed seeing the book when Tommy asked, “This it?”

Luke was squatting down. He spun around in excitement, losing his balance and reaching out to steady himself with a hand on the wall.

It
was
it.

It was definitely the book he had seen in the bucket brigade. The picture of the
Vitruvian Man
leaped out at him from the old gray cloth cover, just as he had remembered it.

The words above it were brown and faded, so much so that they were almost impossible to read until Tommy shone his flashlight on them.

Leonardo’s River
.

Luke’s heart seemed to stop for a second. It really was it. The two-million-dollar book. The most boring book in the world.

Tommy handed it to him, and he ran his fingers over the picture on the cover.

“That’s the one,” he said.

There was a sudden loud crash, echoing around over the sound of the rain.

“What was that?” Tommy asked.

Luke thought he might have heard footsteps. Somewhere
inside
the library.

“Give me your bag,” he said.

He stashed the book inside Tommy’s waterproof backpack, in among a bunch of gadgets, and sealed the top.

There were voices now, coming up the stairs from the lower level. He could hear them indistinctly but enough to recognize that the language being spoken wasn’t English.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said to Tommy.

They ran as silently as they could into the interior of the library, away from the voices, flicking off their flashlights as they went.

Luke glanced back as two dark shapes appeared at the top of the stairs. He grabbed Tommy’s coat and pulled him flat against the wall. “Don’t move,” Luke hissed.

Two men, large and bulky, were silhouetted in scarlet by the lights coming in from outside. Another man appeared behind them, moving more slowly.

The men all had flashlights, too, but the beams from theirs were an eerie blue.

“Is there another way out?” Luke whispered.

“There’s another level above us,” Tommy said. “And stairs at each end of the corridor. We could use the back stairs, go along the top corridor, and sneak down the main stairs behind them.”

The men were still on the landing, but if they moved farther into the building, Tommy’s plan could work.

They were shining their strange lights over the piles of books. Then, just like Luke and Tommy, they set to work; however, unlike Luke and Tommy, they just discarded the books into jumbles on the floor, kicking over piles and searching through the debris. It was clear they were looking for something, but Luke couldn’t quite believe they might have been after the same book. Nobody else knew about it.

Then it struck him.

Nobody except a couple hundred people in the human chain that had rescued the books from the basement.

If just one other person in that line knew the story of
Leonardo’s River
, then that might well explain the heavies making a mess at the end of the corridor.

Luke realized the men were working their way toward them. “We’d better move,” he said, pulling slowly away from the wall.

It wasn’t slowly enough.

There was a sudden shout from the group of dark, silhouetted men, and first one, then three blue lights were aimed at Luke.

One of the men pointed a dark shape toward them—a dark shape that looked a little like a gun.

“Run!” Luke shouted, but Tommy needed no urging.

They ran down the corridor through the center of the library, using their flashlights just enough to avoid tripping.

Behind them, Luke heard shouts in a language he didn’t understand.

“Hinterher!”

“Wer sind sie?”

“Bringt sie her!”

“This way,” Tommy whispered, and turned left through a set of double doors toward another flight of stairs.

They went up two steps at a time, clutching at the handrail to keep from tripping.

Thundering footsteps sounded behind them.

“In welche Richtung?”

“Nach links!”

They reached the top of the stairs. Luke grabbed a thick encyclopedia off a nearby shelf and jammed it into the twin handles of the doors just as the two big men appeared at the glass.

Their pursuers slammed into the door, and the encyclopedia jolted and almost slipped.

It held, but it wouldn’t for long.

Luke and Tommy sprinted along the corridor.

Luke heard the doors burst open behind him as they reached the main staircase and hurtled down, two or three stairs at a time. As they approached the main landing, though, he realized they were not alone. One of the men, the oldest one, had remained behind.

Luke’s flashlight flicked up and caught his face. It was
not a face you could forget. He was bald, his forehead low and flat, his nose and jaw protruding, and his eyes deep black pools. It was a face to give small children nightmares. It was the face of a vicious attack dog.

The man grabbed Tommy’s backpack as he tried to dodge past, hauling him to a stop.

Luke was a few paces behind and didn’t even think; he just dropped a shoulder and barreled straight into the man.

If Dog-Face had been younger or sturdier, it wouldn’t have worked, but as it was, Luke’s shoulder rammed right below his rib cage, bursting all the air from his lungs in a harsh bark, and he fell backward, arms flailing.

“Come on!” Luke yelled, and leaped down, three stairs at a time, Tommy right behind him.

They hit the main entrance and spun around toward the basement stairs. Down the first flight and onto the small landing, and there Luke stopped.

The stairs to the basement were gone.

He was looking straight into a murky well of water.

Not far behind them, Luke heard running footsteps.

“Go!” Tommy said, and without further thought, Luke dived headfirst into the dark water.