The Royal Stones of Eden (Royal Secrecies Book 1) (28 page)

While Mattie sat in her room, observed on video by sexually frustrated security guards, David and Tom in their borrowed uniforms stepped into the cleaning supply room, just inside the building. Tom carried an oblong toolbox, and David pushed a wet vacuum. When they shut the door, they began their communication.

“Mattie! Can you hear me?”—David talked while Tom opened his suitcase and examined the contents.

“Yeah…loud and clear,” she said as she smacked her rigid chewing gum.

“Don’t worry about the room having sound. I wired it myself a few years ago. I’ll let you know when I’ve looped the cameras.”—David caught the annoyance of Tom’s smiling face.

“Don’t say it, Tom!”—David ignored Tom’s smirk because he knew what Tom was thinking. Tom was thinking that David should be glad that Mattie came along. David had previously thought that she would be too much of a distraction and liability, but Tom convinced him that he was wrong.

Before the trip, Mattie had disclosed to David her desire to be a modern woman. She wanted to feel valued, she had told him—she wanted to feel needed. Tom had overheard their argument and persuaded the indecisive David to bring her with him. David, not knowing if he should, sometimes unable to weigh the pros and cons of a situation in a timely manner, followed the strong urging of Tom’s advice, despite not being fully convinced.

David opened the fake vacuum cleaner canister, turned on a monitor screen, and raised an antenna on the back. Then he plugged a USB stick in on its left side and touched a keypad that awakened lights on the right side. They flashed purple and red alternately. It was less than a minute before David spoke to Mattie again.

“Mattie, once they have figured out that you have no actual appointment—and that Peter is not in the office today—you know what to do!”—David had ensured that Peter’s car was not in the parking lot before they started their plan. Had he been there, they would have taken a different approach—they would have entered from the roof. That was a plan that Tom had wanted to avoid.

In a few minutes, the same awkward escort arrived to tell Miss Smith that her appointment must have been in error. He had verified that she did not have an appointment after all. Mattie thanked him and asked directions to the restroom. In between her words, she annoyingly popped the gum bubbles in an open mouth then she stepped out of the room and walked back to the front security desk. The restroom was conveniently located inside the security perimeter and behind the security desk.

“I’ve really got to go!” Mattie blurted as she turned on her most nauseating and charming southern accent. It was aimed it the two guards that were about to change places and their shift at the front desk.

The timing of this raid had been planned extremely well. Mattie’s purse, with the effort of a slight flick of her fingernail against a small unnoticeable flap, discharged two tiny magnetic balls. They rolled casually toward the front metal detectors. They bounced several times, but a few loud taps from Mattie’s heels masked their sound. As they rolled toward the detectors, Mattie turned away from the desk after she placed her visitor badge on it. She walked to the restroom doors. She turned her head back just before she entered. As she gave one last wink, she entered and closed the door, and the balls triggered the loud metal detector alarm.

In another nearby section of the building, Tom exited the supply closet, seemingly alone, as he carried his toolbox and walked casually down the hall toward an elevator.

“Stay behind me, the floors will look awkward enough, with you being invisible and all!”—Tom was emphatic but whispered indifferently to an invisible David, who held the stones of invisibility that Tom had shown him in California. In David’s left hand, he held the green and gold stone, and in his right hand was Cali. It quivered with anticipation and excitement.

The guards at the end of the hallway saw Tom enter the elevator but no one else. Once inside the elevator, Tom cursed with a surprised gasp. He demanded that David separate the stones immediately and become visible because David’s invisible aura made the floor beneath him seem to be nonexistent. It made the appearance of a hole in the elevator. Tom could see straight down to a basement parking lot.

David reappeared, and the hole faded as he placed the stones into separate pockets. The floor became visible again under David’s feet.

“You afraid of heights? Glad we didn’t have to go to the roof?” David laughed as the sword began to shake wildly in his hand. David looked at Tom for direction. “Talk to it?”

Tom nodded, “Talk to it. Like a pet.”

“Maybe
you
should hold it!”—David gladly took charge of the toolbox as Tom took the sword.

“That a boy! Just like old times, right?”—as Tom spoke, he caressed and held the sword against his cheek with affection while David looked at him with dubious and expressive eyes.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Mattie went to the back of the restroom and stood on a closed toilet seat, in the stall at the end of the room. She placed her left foot on top of the automatic lever and then reached down and unwrapped the sandal straps that were attached to her shoe and winded around her foot, ankle, and lower leg. The straps were, in fact, a type of stretchy putty that David had provided for her. After she had unraveled the black putty strap from her left foot and leg, she tossed her shoe’s plastic bottom on the floor. She then stuck the putty on the wall above the toilet. She switched the position of her feet and then unwrapped the strap on the right leg and kicked the other shoe down. Then she stood with both bare feet on the toilet seat. She rolled and mixed both putty straps with her hands. She formed a black ball of putty. She stretched upward, with the ball of putty in her right hand, but she found that she could not quite reach the ceiling. So she flung the ball up to the ceiling with her right hand. The force almost caused her to slip off the toilet seat. The ball somehow stayed. She cringed. She thought it might fall, but it didn’t. Mattie then stepped down and went to the sink. She washed her hands, per the prior instructions given to her by David. Her job was done.

It was true that David had invented fantastic exploding putty. It was one of the many reasons that David had thought that he was an employee of the government. He thought, who else but the government would want to hide the existence of this explosive. It was a mixture so harmless that it could be held by the hands of a child. But it was so powerful, after mixed, that it could cause an explosion that would make a three-foot hole in a concrete wall. The putty, after hand molded and mixed, usually took about two hours to explode, under normal circumstances.

She exhaled and smiled calmly at her accomplishment, and she never truly realized the potential energy for destruction that had been wrapped around her feet. She walked confidently and barefoot out of the restroom, and the one remaining security guard gave her a look of curiosity as he saw her walk out of the building without any shoes and indifferent to the alarm.

Neither guard found the camouflaged metal balls that were magnetized and stuck to a nearby metal table leg. After a reset to the detector, the guard who took over, after the shift change, sat down and sneaked a sip of his mixed water and vodka in his thermos. Little did he know—there was an explosive planted not more than thirty feet away from him.

Not too far away, Tom exited the ground floor elevator. He gestured his goodbye to the guards at the end of the hallway on the east side of the building. They had seen him before when he had entered the elevator with the invisible David. Since he was alone again, they dismissed him as harmless while he walked off toward the building’s exit.

Meanwhile, David had managed to climb on top of the elevator, just after he had disengaged the elevator below. His handheld scanner had detected an unusually high-energy source, and he suspected it to be the source of a large force field. It made sense to David that Haj was inside or at least near the force field, according to his monitor. He had to be there, David thought.

David used specially prepared elevator cable ascenders during his dangerous climb. He used two of them, one for each hand. He depressed a button to lock and unlock each ascender as needed. First, he pulled himself up with one hand and then locked it. Then he released the other ascender and slid it upward on the cable, locking that one. He repeated these actions continually and climbed quickly to the next level.

Tom walked back to the closet to collect their equipment. He still had his toolbox, and Cali was in it. Cali had done the job very well. Earlier Tom and David had pretended to clean in an office where there was a safe. Tom had swung the sword to break the safe open. That break-in allowed David access to all of the backup keycards to all of the secured rooms in the building. Some intelligence information about this that Sam had shared with David had paid off. Between David’s knowledge of the building and its systems, and Sam’s information, this seemed almost too easy.

Mattie was back in the Cavalier and still in the parking lot. She acted as if she waited for a signal as she tapped her nervous fingers on the beat-up steering wheel. She considered the notion that David should indeed get rid of his old car, but it was his baby. She was startled when she heard a tapping on the passenger window, and she almost screamed. Her heart started to race as she quickly glanced at the visitor.

She looked and saw that it was only Tom. He gave her a thumbs-up signal, and then he walked away. Was she finished? Is this all I was here for, she thought. “Big deal!” she mumbled. “But I can’t leave. He might need me.”

Tom, back at the van, closed the back doors and secured the vacuum cleaner and toolbox in the rear. Then he got into the driver’s seat. He looked at his watch as if he waited for something. The toolbox started to rattle. He yelled back, “David is going to be fine, Cali! Settle down!” Then he mumbled, “I’m talking to a bloody sword, in a bloody toolbox!”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Haj did not respond as David talked to him and shook him lightly. David had found Haj, but again, David was suspicious of how easy all of this was. Perhaps this was nothing more than a trap, he thought.

“Haj, old buddy! Wake up! Snap out of it, man!” David said.

Slowly Haj’s eyes started to open and roll. It took a moment to get used to the light. David had opened the padded room with his keys and had dragged him into the hallway, just feet away from the door. There was no one in the area because it was one of the most secure and less frequented locations in the building.

David rolled up Haj’s sleeve and grabbed a pre-filled syringe from his jacket pocket. He injected the clear colored juice into Haj’s upper arm, and he tossed the syringe to the side.

“We got to get out of here, Haj! Wake up!” David repeated.

It was another minute before Haj became aware of his surroundings. Haj stared intently at something behind David’s back. Haj pulled himself up on his right side. He grabbed David’s left knee for support, but he continued to focus intently on a figure that approached David from behind. Haj saw a man armed with a crossbow aimed at David’s skull. It was Robbie!

“The dead has arisen it seems!” Robbie said as he moved closer to them. David then spun around and saw Robbie and his readied projectile. Both David and Haj were in front of Robbie’s loaded weapon. It was a crossbow with a loaded arrow that both Haj and David assumed had poison on its tip.

They were instructed to place their hands behind the heads and to interlock their fingers, but David concentrated on something else at the same time. David deliberated in his mind about his exploding putty. He wanted to look at his watch to calculate how much time he had before it exploded downstairs. The bathroom was just below the electrical fuses that controlled the lighting in the building. David hoped that the fuses and wiring would be close enough to be affected by the intended explosion. If an explosion successfully hit those fuses, the entire lights of the building would go off. The event would trigger a generator that would provide backup lighting—if everything worked correctly.

In truth, David and Tom
had
made sure that the generator would not work correctly. The generator power had been cut, just before they entered the building. A few minutes in the dark would provide a better escape out of the building that had few windows and lots of artificial lighting. And David had the torch that would light the path of escape. He had the same watch that he had worn when he had visited Peter, about a week earlier, the same night that David had found out that Haj was a prisoner. That watch had recorded his path into the laboratory that night to provide a type of GPS tracking out of the plant—an escape in the shadows.

However, all of David’s plans of escape had to wait as David and Haj looked steadfastly at the weapon that was upon them. Usually, a single crossbow was not a threat to two targets at once, but this crossbow was a repeater. There was a boxed mechanism, and it was ready to autoload a new arrow into place after each arrow fired. The box held several arrows, and could fire rapidly. The weapon, designed by Robbie, was a significant improvement from an earlier version he had used in another time.

“You didn’t come alone, most likely. Get up!” Robbie assumed as he led them both down a long hallway. David stabilized Haj as he staggered along. They walked toward the same lab area where Peter had shown David the purple stone field. The lights came on automatically as they entered, and David saw in the back corner of the lab, behind an opened door, the familiar curtain in front of the purple and red field of energy.