The Icarus Project (9 page)

He listened to my story intently, and when I was done, he said, “Sounds like we have only one option.”

“And what’s that?” I asked.

“We get inside that private room and see what Katsu found that was so convincing.”

I hesitated, knowing that once I agreed, I couldn’t turn back.

Kyle wiggled his eyebrows at me.

“I’ll do it, but we really shouldn’t try to break in.” But I couldn’t keep from smiling. “Who knows? The private room might be cursed like a king’s tomb,” I said, and we both laughed.

I was relieved. I didn’t have to investigate this alone.

Kyle and I were on a mission. Break into the
secret room like two black-clad, stealthy panthers. Except we weren’t wearing black, unless we counted our boots, and the boots were not stealthy—more like clunky.

The plan was set. Unlike Dad, who had theorized that the room was probably just a cozy library where Randal could put his woolly socked feet up and wiggle his toes in front of a toasty fire, I suspected something else entirely. I was willing to bet that Randal had bigger secrets. Billionaire secrets.
Privacy
was another word for hiding place. Katsu had discovered something, and I needed to know what.

While Kyle went to borrow an extra set of keys from the mechanic he had been working with that morning, I waited outside Randal’s private room, making sure Katsu didn’t return. Finally, red-faced and panting, Kyle came racing around the corner, skidding down the hall in his nonstealthy boots.

“Slow down,” I said, casually glancing around, like I wasn’t looking. I was the lookout, which meant I stood outside the room and acted nonchalant.

“I thought you said to hurry,” he countered, a line of sweat trailing down his temple.

“I did. But it’s the first law of spying—act like you belong, and no one will question that you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing. Running just makes you look suspicious, like you don’t want to get caught.”

“Right … spymaster.” He dangled the keys, a wry smile on his face.

“How did you get the guy to give them to you?” I asked.

“I told him that I needed to get into the supply cabinet for extra toilet paper. I don’t think he believed me, but no guy questions another guy’s need for toilet paper.”

Kyle tried three or four keys before finding the right one. He glanced up and down the hall one last time and then carefully unlocked the door. Together we slipped inside. The smell of rubber cement filled the room. I felt for the light switch and turned it on. Immediately, my heart sank. The room was nothing more than a comfy nook, complete with bookshelves and a gas fireplace.

This was terrible! Dad had been right. Two leather wingbacks sat in front of the hearth. Nothing strange. Nothing secret. But we were inside now, so I closed the door behind us in case someone came down the hall.

I groaned, utterly mortified. “It’s just a plain old library. Randal probably comes in here to read and relax. What a waste of a locked room. How could I have been so wrong?”

“You give up fast.” Kyle smirked and studied the room.

“I wasn’t giving up,” I said. “But look around. It’s pretty obvious that this is not a great secret.”

He tapped his temple. “To the untrained eye, maybe.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Something isn’t right.” Kyle crept around the perimeter, examining the walls and the floor.

The space didn’t seem that unusual. It contained all the library essentials—bookshelves, two chairs, and a fireplace.

The only strange thing was the size. “It’s smaller than I expected.” I walked from one side of the room to the other, and it took me only a few steps.

“Exactly.” Kyle pointed at me. “And Randal doesn’t do small.”

“Randal does big—really big. And what is that rubber-cement smell? It really stinks.” I wrinkled my nose.

Kyle sniffed. “It’s coming from somewhere close.”

The heat kicked on. A vent rattled, causing me to jump.

“Nervous?” Kyle asked.

“No,” I lied. I was hoping he couldn’t hear my heart pounding in my chest.

“Let’s scope this place out. Something seems fake, like a stage.”

There was a needlepoint pillow with seals stitched on it placed on one of the chairs. A knitted mauve throw was crumpled up on the ottoman. I ran a finger along the edge of a brass lamp.

“What if this isn’t the whole room?” Kyle stepped over
to the bookshelf. “There could be an entire other room behind it.” He ran his hands down the shelving unit.

“You mean … there’s a room within a room?” I pictured the map of the station I’d drawn in my notebook this morning and realized he was right. According to the layout, this room should be as big as the rec room—twice as big as it was.

Kyle shifted books around, trying to see behind them. “It should be on the other side of the shelves.”

“How do we get to it?” I asked.

Kyle shoved the books back. His face twisted up in concentration. “There has to be a trigger. Some way to get behind the wall.”

“A secret panel?” Excitement filled me. This was a puzzle—like a real-life video game. “How do we find the trick to opening it?”

“See anything that looks strange or out of place?” Kyle asked.

I studied the room again. Totally normal. It even had a fake fireplace.
That
was it. “The fireplace is gas. It’s not real,” I said. “Randal seems like he would have a
real
fireplace, with wood. Not a fake one. Unless he didn’t have a choice.”

I shifted the items on the mantel, but the fireplace didn’t budge. I flicked a switch on the wall and the flames in the hearth jumped to life. “See? Gas. Makes lighting a fire a cinch,” I said. I turned off the artificial flames and kept looking. But nothing budged.

“Wait—the switch,” I said. “There are two of them.” One turned on the fire. But what about the other one? Kyle reached over and flipped the switch.

Silently, the fireplace swung forward, revealing a secret door and a small opening.

My heart raced. “This is it!” I couldn’t believe it. “We’ve found a secret room!”

“Hurry up. We don’t have much time.”

Kyle and I slipped through the small door and into Randal’s secret room.

This was more like what I had expected. There was a giant polar bear rug on the floor, its mouth wide in a vicious roar. A huge stuffed tiger was mounted on a giant log suspended from the ceiling in the corner of the room. Randal had displayed a collection of his kills. Tiny golden plaques labeled the trophies: caribou, snow leopard, and an arctic fox.

One wall was covered with shelves filled with strange fossils. There were also dozens of sharp teeth and claws. Dad had told me once that a lot of rich collectors buy up fossils from different dig sites and keep them as souvenirs. Randal had his own treasure trove.

But the fossils weren’t the main attraction. A table about the size and shape of a Ping-Pong table dominated the space. On top of it was a huge model of a miniature world: a winter wonderland. In this snowy landscape, tiny people wore fur coats and were surrounded by dozens
of tiny animals. The fake snow glittered. There was a glassy water area with ice floes and polar bears and seals swimming and resting on the chunks of floating ice. At first I thought the model was cute. Maybe creating miniatures was Randal’s hobby. But then I saw the creatures with curved tusks. The woolly mammoths. This landscape was from the past—a reenactment of a long-ago world populated with giant beasts.

“Weird. I guess Randal has a lot of time on his hands,” Kyle said.

“Wait—look at this sign.” There was a hand-painted sign at one end of the table. It read “Clark’s Mammoth Park.”

“He has a great imagination.” Then Kyle asked the question we both were thinking. “You don’t think this is meant to be a real park? Do you?”

“It seems more like a fantasy.” I reached down and ran my finger over the icy water and stroked the back of a majestic polar bear. “There are no more mammoths. They don’t exist.”

“Yeah, but this whole station is a fantasy.”

I was still admiring the model of the Arctic when I said, “Maybe that’s what Katsu was talking about with the DNA.”

“What do you mean?” Kyle looked at me dumbfounded. “What DNA?”

“DNA is a map, a blueprint of an organism’s makeup,” I said.

“Duh, I know what it
is,
but what would Katsu want it for?”

Dad and I had watched
Jurassic Park
like a million times. We had even watched the sequels.
Jurassic Park
was his favorite movie. It was about scientists who collected dinosaur DNA that had been trapped in amber. They used the DNA to create live dinosaurs for a zoolike park where people could come and see the formerly extinct creatures. In theory, it was pretty cool. Who wouldn’t want to see real-live dinosaurs up close? But in the movie, the dinosaurs escaped from their enclosures and ran wild, attacking the scientists and totally destroying the park. The lesson was that dinosaurs were extinct for a reason. Except, of course, not everyone got the message.

Dad had told me that some Russian scientists had dreamed of creating a park with live mammoths to help the local economy in Siberia. It was a way the scientists could bring tourists to the area, even though I couldn’t imagine the icy tundra being a popular vacation spot.

That must have been why Katsu was after the mammoth’s genetic code.

“He wants to make mammoths,” I said.

“You mean bring back mammoths, for real? That’s crazy.” Kyle leaned forward and fingered a miniature beast.

“Is it really that crazy?” I asked.

With genetic material, Katsu could clone a mammoth. From the look of this model park, Randal wanted to bring
back the mammoth. This miniature scene wasn’t the past. It was the future.

“That’s impossible.” Kyle’s brow creased. “It would mean some
serious
science.”

“Katsu was talking about DNA on the phone with someone. It sounded like he had already gotten a lab ready. People are waiting for him to return from this trip. My dad once told me that scientists have been trying for years to gather enough viable DNA to clone a mammoth.”

“So it
could
happen? He could really do it?”

“I guess he could,” I said. “I can’t really imagine a park full of mammoths. But look at this model. Randal has a lot of money. And with his money—and his ambition—it sure looks like he plans on trying.”

Kyle picked up one of the miniature mammoths. Whoever built the model had created whole herds, including adults and their young. The snowy wonderland was also covered in caribou and polar bears. It was beautiful, but it looked eerie, hemmed in by fences and viewing platforms. Keeping all the mammoths contained would be a huge feat. They were migratory animals, and they wouldn’t want to stay in one place.

“It’s like a zoo,” Kyle said.

“I can’t see keeping giant mammoths in a zoo. Even one like this,” I said. The model was beautiful but sad. I didn’t want there to be living mammoths. They would be the
only ones of their kind, kept in a pen, alone, out of their own time.

“Randal’s crazy if he thinks he can really pull this off.”

I remembered how Katsu had talked about Randal on the phone. He didn’t think too highly of Randal, either. “Maybe this is a big scam, and Katsu is trying to steal the genetic material out from under Randal, preying on his dreams,” I said.

“I could believe that. Legacy is really important to Randal. This park would be a whopping legacy.”

“He has to know how crazy it is. Scientists have trouble cloning common animals that are alive today. It would be almost impossible to clone a whole extinct herd. He has to realize that this park could never happen.”

“Guys like Randal don’t know the meaning of the word
impossible.
Look how he built this station. And now that he’s found a mammoth, who knows what he’ll do?” Kyle said.

“I still don’t believe it,” I said. “If Katsu said he could do it, he must be lying. It’s got to be a scam.”

I almost felt sorry for Randal. Then I saw the claw of the polar bear skin rug and the room filled with trophy fossils, and I didn’t feel so bad for him. Scam or no scam, he was used to getting his prizes, whether fossil, skin, or fur coat. Now he wanted the real thing.

I imagined that Randal, with his drive, would do whatever
it took to build a park. But something still didn’t make sense. Randal had just found the mammoth. How could he have planned all of this so fast—built a model and everything? Something didn’t add up.

A banging sound filtered into the room.

“Did you hear something?” I asked.

Kyle peeked into the library. “Someone’s unlocking the door!”

“Shut the fireplace!” I cried.

Kyle swung the fireplace closed, and we scrambled to hide under the model table. I dropped to the floor and crawled like a crab. My heart banged against my chest. It was hard to be stealthy and brave when you were about to get caught for breaking the rules. We were in big trouble.

I slowed my breathing, trying to calm myself. Kyle and I stared at each other as we heard the secret fireplace panel creak open, and then footsteps scuffed across the floor. A voice hummed a tune right there in the room with us. To me, it sounded like Katsu. Kyle put his finger over his lips, and then he held out his hand. A tiny mammoth sat in his palm. He had forgotten to put it back! I hoped Katsu didn’t notice that one of the herd was missing.