Secret Weapons (7 page)

Thinking about all those elections, Carlos grinned ruefully. It wasn’t that Bucky didn’t believe in democracy. Not really. It was only that he didn’t believe in a democracy where anybody won except him. But this time it might be a little bit different. This time there were going to be eight voters instead of three. And one of them was Kate Nicely. Carlos’s grin widened. This might turn out to be very interesting. “Hey,” he said, “how about president? Who’s going to be the president?”

“Yeah, good question, Garcia,” Bucky said. “How about having some nominations?” He gave Carlos a look that said, “Go on, nominate somebody, Garcia, and it better be me.”

Carlos pretended not to get the message. Instead he looked around waiting for someone else to say something. Nobody did. Time passed and everybody went on looking from one person to another. On second thought Carlos was beginning to get an uneasy feeling that this election might be way
too
interesting. The thing was, Bucky was never going to allow Kate to be president. Not if his life depended on it. And Kate obviously felt the same way about Bucky. So, whichever way the election turned out, it looked like somebody’s life was going to be up for grabs.

It was Kate who spoke first. “Okay,” she said, “I want to make a nomination.” Carlos winced. She was going to nominate herself and then—
look out!
He could just imagine what would happen next. But Kate didn’t say what he expected her to. “Aurora,” she said. “I nominate Aurora.”

“Me?” Aurora’s head went up and, behind a wispy curtain of curly hair, her huge gray eyes widened. She looked, Carlos thought, like a startled deer peeking out of a thicket. “But I don’t want to be president.”

“If you get elected you’ll have to be,” Kate said firmly. “I’ll help you.”

“Well, I won’t be president.” Aurora looked around frantically. “I nominate—Athena.”

Athena looked pleased. “What, Aurora?” she asked. “What did you do to me?”

Everyone laughed uneasily—and then waited. They were waiting for someone else to make a nomination, but no one did. Bucky kept glaring, first at Carlos, who was still pretending not to get the message, and then at Eddy. Eddy didn’t get the message either. Carlos wasn’t going to nominate Bucky but he didn’t quite have the nerve to nominate anyone else. And apparently Eddy was feeling the same way.

At last Kate said, “Well, I guess that’s it. Let’s vote. How many for Aurora?”

Athena won the election. Ari and Susie and Kate voted for Aurora, but everyone else voted for Athena. Including Athena.

“This is crazy,” Bucky said. “That baby can’t be president. I wouldn’t have voted for her if I thought she could win. Let’s have another election. How many for another election?”

Nobody raised their hand.

“Okay,” Bucky yelled. “You’re president, kid. Start presidenting.”

“Presiding,” Eddy said. “The word is
presiding
.”

“Okay, presiding.” Bucky marched up to Athena, bent down and glared at her. “Start presiding, kid.”

Athena stared right back into Bucky’s face. “Okay,” she said, “I will. What do I do first?”

“You call the meeting to order,” Kate said. “You bang on your desk with a gavel to get everybody’s attention and then you say, ‘I call the meeting to order.’ And that means everyone has to sit down and shut up.”

“What’s a gravel?” Athena said.

“A gavel. It’s like a wooden hammer.” Kate grabbed a Ping-Pong paddle and handed it to Athena. “Here. This will do.”

“Okay,” Athena said. She banged on the coffee table with the Ping-Pong paddle. “I call the meeting to order.” Then she glared at Bucky and added, “So sit down and shut up.”

S
O ATHENA WAS PRESIDENT
of the A.T. Club, and as soon as she heard that a president got to choose a vice president, she chose Lump. Of course everybody laughed, including Bucky. And they laughed some more when Athena told Lump he was vice president, and he got up and bounced over and kissed her so hard she tipped over backward. After that things got a little less tense, and once the meeting really got started it turned out that having Athena as president worked better than anyone had expected.

The way it worked was that someone, usually Kate or Bucky but not always, would say, “Madame President, I think the next order of business should be …” And Athena would stand up on a chair and say, “Okay. The next order of business is …” And then everyone would chip in with their ideas. So the way it turned out, it was as if everyone got to be president, at least now and then.

One of the first orders of business was to choose a club headquarters, and even though it was Kate who suggested they ought to have one, it was Eddy who came up with the best idea about where it should be. It was Eddy who suggested the Pit at Dragoland.

Dragoland was the mysterious vacant lot where, a long time ago, some people named Dragoman had started to build a big house, and then stopped and went away. And the half-dug basement—the Pit, as it had always been called—was a favorite place for Castle Court kids to play all sorts of games and dig clubhouses.

“I mean, it’s in the perfect location for our headquarters,” Eddy said. “Right between our house and the Andersons’, and no one ever goes there except kids. So we could have our meetings in one of the old clubhouses and keep some antiterrorist equipment there, and—”

“Hey, yeah,” Ari said. “And we could have an observation outpost in that big old tree out front. You know, the one right near the sidewalk at Dragoland. Big trees are great places for observation outposts.”

Then Eddy said he had some flashlights the club could use. And Bucky said he might be able to bring a lot of beepers so all the club members could get in touch with each other. Then Carlos volunteered his Boy Scout tent so the equipment wouldn’t get wet in case it rained. Kate said she’d bring some old karate practice mats for people to sit on inside the tent. When it was Susie’s turn she said she didn’t have any spy equipment but she could bring a lot of stuff from her dad’s restaurant for people to eat while they were on duty in the headquarters tent.

“Hey! Great idea!” Bucky jumped up and headed for the stairs. “I’m starving. Everybody meet in the Pit in fifteen minutes. And bring lots of stuff to eat. I’ll bring some popcorn.”

“Wait a minute,” Kate said. “Athena has to adjourn the meeting first. Athena, say the meeting is adjourned.”

“For fifteen minutes,” Eddy added. “Say the meeting is adjourned and will resume in fifteen minutes.”

Athena climbed back up onto her chair. “The meeting is injured and will go boom in fifteen minutes,” she said.

Everybody laughed and started for home. “And bring Lump,” Athena called back over her shoulder as she started down the stairs. “Don’t forget to bring the vice president.”

It wasn’t much more than fifteen minutes later that the Garcias climbed down the steps into the Dragoland Pit. Three Garcias. Carlos, Susie, and, of course, Lump. Carlos was holding Lump’s leash and carrying the rolled-up tent, and Susie was loaded down with stuff to eat. Carlos picked out a nice flat spot near the center of the Pit, took Lump off his leash, and began to unroll the tent.

A few minutes later Eddy arrived carrying a big plastic garbage bag. After he’d unloaded two different kinds of flashlights and two bags of potato chips, he helped Carlos finish putting up the tent. One of the flashlights was a big lantern type, the kind you could put on a table or hang up on the wall, and it would light up most of a room.

“That’s great,” Carlos said. “We can hang that from the ridgepole and it will light up the whole tent. It’s really dark inside the tent without something like that.”

“That’s what I thought,” Eddy said. “But I had a hard time getting it. It was in the workshop and Web wouldn’t let me in. I had to tell him I really needed it before he’d even open the door.”

“Hey. Did you see the secret weapon?” Susie asked. “When he opened the door did you see inside?”

Eddy shook his head. “No. They just opened the door a crack and held it out. Carson was there, too, and they shoved the door shut before I could see anything.”

Kate Nicely and the three Pappases were the next ones to arrive. Kate and Aurora were carrying the karate practice mats and Ari had a bunch of bananas and a jar of peanut butter. Athena had a big wooden gavel. A real one, like presidents use to hammer on their desks to call meetings to order.

“Hey, that’s neat,” Carlos said to Athena. “Where’d you get that?”

Athena waved the wooden hammer in the air. “It’s a gravel. For presidents to hammer with.”

“I loaned it to her,” Kate said. “It’s my dad’s, actually. From when he was president of his fraternity a long time ago. He won’t miss it.”

“What are you going to do with it?” Susie asked Athena. “There’s no table here to hammer on.”

Athena looked around the tent. Then she shrugged and said, “That’s okay. I can hammer on people who don’t sit down and shut up.”

By the time Bucky showed up, everyone else, all seven of them plus Lump, were in the tent. It was a tight squeeze but nobody minded because they were all having fun pretending to be animal trainers in case any terrorist spies were hanging around listening to their conversation. They had been working on teaching Lump to sit, but he hadn’t made much progress. He just kept shuffling around, stepping on people and trying to eat their snacks.

“I know what,” Eddy said. “Let’s see how he does with a different trick. I’m going to teach him to drool.” Eddy held up a potato chip and said, “Okay, Lump. Drool!” And Lump obeyed—instantly. Everyone was laughing when Bucky stuck his head in the tent and said, “What’s going on in here? I could hear you guys clear out to the street. Great bunch of secret spies you are.”

So Bucky squeezed into the tent, too, and brought out a pair of binoculars, a big bag of popcorn, and a whole bag of beepers—little black boxes with buttons at the top. He was really excited about the beepers. Some of the beepers were on neck chains and others had pocket clips. Bucky began passing them out, the clip-ons to the boys, the ones on chains to all the girls. Even Athena got one.

“Neat,” Carlos said. “Where did you get these?”

“They’re my mom’s,” Bucky said. “Or at least they used to be. All the agents in her company used to wear them so when they got beeped they would call in to the head office. But they all just got cellular phones instead so these were just lying around in her office. And look at this.” Bucky turned a couple of the beepers over and there on the backs was a list of eight different phone numbers. “See, these are the numbers for all the beepers. If you phone all these numbers everybody’s beeper will go off. And they don’t stop until you push this button right here.”

“So what do we do if we get beeped?” Eddy asked.

“We all meet here at the headquarters,” Bucky said. “Like if anyone sees the terrorists they just call all these numbers and—ta-da! Everybody meets here to decide what to do next. Okay?”

“Okay, great,” Kate said. “Now how about getting this meeting started before it’s time for dinner and we all have to go home. Go on, Athena. Call the meeting to order.”

So Athena hammered on a tent pole and called the meeting to order. They’d just started making plans for their next meeting, when Lump suddenly cocked his head to one side and barked. One short, sharp
woof
and then silence. Everyone stopped talking and listened—and then almost stopped breathing. Because they all heard it too. They all could hear the soft, shuffling sound of footsteps coming nearer and nearer across the floor of the Pit.

A
RI WAS STILL HOLDING
his breath when a hand reached in, jerked the tent flap open—and two faces appeared. Web Wong and Carson Nicely. Web’s sharp black eyes darted around the tent, seeing everything in a flash. Ari had the feeling that if someone blindfolded Web immediately and took him away, you could ask him tomorrow and he would remember every person and thing that had been in the tent. The eight people, and Lump, and all of the flashlights and karate mats, and maybe the beepers, too, even though some of them weren’t out in plain sight. And he would probably even be able to remember who had been eating what. Web was like that. But no one blindfolded him and he didn’t go away. Instead he just nodded slowly and said, “What are you guys doing in here?”

“Yeah,” said Carson, who was peering around Web’s shoulder with his bristly hair standing on end and the light from the flashlight reflecting off his glasses. “Yeah, what?”

Ari looked around at the other members of the A.T. Club. They were all looking at each other, obviously waiting for someone else to decide what to say.

“Well?” Web said.

Kate spoke first. “We’re having a club meeting.”

Athena waved her gavel in the air. “Yes. We’re having a club meeting. And this is my gravel because I’m the president. I already called the meeting to order so you better sit down and shut up.”

Web nodded solemnly. “Okay, we will,” he said. “Come on, Carson. Sit down.” Web sat down in front of the tent flap and pulled Carson down beside him. Everyone stared at them. “Please pass the popcorn,” Web said.

Someone started the popcorn toward Web, but when it got to Bucky he stopped it. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “This is an official meeting of the A.T. Club and you twerps aren’t members.”

“All right.” Web stood up. “Come on, Carson.”

Looking hungrily toward the popcorn, Carson got slowly to his feet. Web lifted the tent flap and went out, but then he put his head back in and asked Bucky, “What is A.T. an acronym for?”

“A
what
for?” Bucky said.

“What does A.T. stand for?”

“Ohh,” several people said at once. “Animal Trainers. It means Animal Trainers.” And then Kate added, “We’ve been training Lump to do tricks.”

Everyone nodded.

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “Eddy’s been teaching Lump to drool. Show them, Eddy.”

Everyone was smiling when they looked at Eddy, but after a second they stopped. Because Eddy wasn’t smiling, or anything like it. What Eddy looked like was—worried and determined. “Listen, you guys,” he said. “I think we ought to tell them the truth. I mean, Web and Carson ought to know if anybody does. They’re the ones in the most danger.”