Chalk one up for fart noises.
The vent finally came off, and I let out one more massive faux fart, and just for good measure, I groaned a little.
Outside the door, Flopsy backed further away.
“I … uhhhh … I think I might be a minute,” I called.
Flopsy was too traumatized to reply. Excellent.
I set the vent cover down and boosted myself into the air duct. All things considered, it was a minor miracle that thisbuilding had air ducts big enough for me to fit into. Most modern buildings didn’t, and honestly, you would think that if a person was planning on being an evil mastermind, he would invest in an office that didn’t provide his enemies with a convenient route of passage through his wannabe lair.
Once I was inside the duct, I started crawling. It was dark, but my eyes adjusted quickly, and I made my way as fast as I could toward the kitchen. My brilliant performance in the bathroom had probably bought me a couple of minutes (Flopsy wasn’t exactly going to be anxious to break down the bathroom door), but I couldn’t count on more than that.
I counted inside my head, imagining how fast I was going and calculating the distance between the kitchen and the bathroom, and finally, I stopped over another vent. There, right below me, was Cottontail.
He was bigger than either of the guards I’d already seen, and he looked significantly more deadly. Someone who’s had as much martial arts training as I have can spot another master a long way off, and the guy below me was good, no question. Very quietly, I reached for my spirit stick blow gun. I’d been instructed to use it as a last resort, but time was passing, and the only way to ensure that I didn’t engage the enemy was to take him out now. Besides, if Ross wasn’t going to advertise the fact that he’d lost his prototype and acquired a decoy, I doubt he’d take out billboards announcing that one of his guards had fallen asleep on the job.
As for Cottontail, from what I understood of the darts, he wouldn’t remember a thing.
Positioned directly above someone this dangerous, I wasstruck by a momentary fear that he would look up, but just as he began to gaze unwittingly toward me, I heard a voice from the other room.
“Hey, Merv? You want any cookies?”
If he said yes, I wouldn’t have to go against orders and dart him. And even if he said no, at least the question distracted him long enough to allow me just enough time to double-check my aim.
“No,” Merv barked. “No cookies.”
All right, I thought. One … two … three!
Pffft. Pffft.
I shot two darts in close succession, and both of them hit Merv in the side of the neck. He dropped to the floor. I winced at the sound and hoped that they hadn’t heard it in the other room.
“The lion sensation is taking the nation—blue and gold … let’s go!”
Brooke’s voice carried and I breathed a sigh of relief. Her cheerleading antics would hopefully keep Mopsy and Ross occupied long enough to let me disarm the security and swap in the decoy.
I pushed the vent aside and dropped down from the ceiling, landing in a crouch on the floor. First things first, I retrieved the darts from Merv’s neck and checked to make sure there was no visible sign that they’d ever been there.
Excellent.
I began sweeping the room. Of all of the aspects of the mission, this one—locating the security panel—was probably the one I was least qualified to do. My basic training hadincluded several sessions on sweeping a room, but I hadn’t done it enough for it to be automatic, and right now, I didn’t have time to think.
I just had to act.
If I was a hidden security panel, where would I be? I walked along the length of the walls, looking for a loose panel, uneven paint, or anything that might give me the answer I desperately needed.
Think of it as a code, I told myself. A giant, living code. Where’s the aberration? Look for natural repetitions in the room and find something that breaks the pattern. Think of everything you know about Ross, about this room.
I continued searching the room manually and visually with no luck, until I opened the refrigerator. No way should a mad scientist’s fridge have been this neat and tidy. And what was with having multiple kinds of milk in one refrigerator? I reached up to examine the milk, and when I tried to pick one of the containers up, I encountered some resistance. I pulled harder, and with a pop, the back of the refrigerator opened to reveal a security panel.
In a twisted way, it made sense. If the guy had laser-sensors to protect a safe in his oven, of course the security system would be based in his refrigerator.
Now that I had access to the security panel, I concentrated on disarming the system. I pulled my black box out of the bag of tricks I’d brought with me. With a little technological ingenuity, I hooked it up to the hardware inside the panel and keyed in what I could ascertain about the make of the system.
Luckily, the black box came equipped with pictures, andonce I narrowed the choices down, it quickly recognized what kind of system we were dealing with, which meant that it knew how many digits the password was. The box heated beneath my hand, and I waited as it accessed a satellite that would hopefully allow it to hack directly into the security provider’s system.
I looked down at my watch.
