Agents of the Glass (21 page)

Andy's heart threatened to burst right through his ribs, but somehow he managed not to show how freaked out he was by Winter's casual remark.

“What do you mean?” he asked. A fast-motion film ran through his head, narrated by Winter's voice:

I know who you are.

I know who you're working for.

I know what you're trying to do.

I know all about the Agents.

I know what they told you about me.

I know…

“I know it was you…that day at the bank. You're the one who almost got killed and then gave the money back.”

From the confident look in her eyes, Andy knew that there was no point in denying it.

“How did you find out? The police weren't supposed to tell anyone. That was part of the deal.”

“It wasn't the police. I just put two and two together. The bandage on your head. New school, everybody being super nice to you. The bank never said who returned the money, but they did release a picture of the backpack, and guess what? It's the same one you have.”

“You're not going to tell anyone, are you?” Andy asked.

“I don't understand why you're being so…humble about it all.”

“Because I didn't really do anything except almost get killed and give back something that didn't belong to me in the first place.”

“Well, that's better than actually
getting
killed, isn't it? I heard there was a homeless guy who disappeared, like it was a magic trick. Kablooey and—pffft—he's gone!”

“It's not funny,” said Andy, realizing for the first time that Winter's name was perfect for her: She was cold as January in New Hampshire, as his mom would say. “Geez. Maybe he was homeless, but that was a person. He was somebody's friend. Maybe even somebody's brother. He
died.
I don't think we should be joking about that.”

He thought for a moment that he had made her mad by criticizing her, but she just laughed it off. “Oh, right. Sorry. Sometimes, I just blurt out stuff like that without thinking. No, you're absolutely right. I probably shouldn't do it. I mean, I
definitely
shouldn't.”

She didn't sound convincing at all to Andy.

“Anyway, back to you and the money. I mean,
why
? What made you want to give it back? You're not, like, filthy rich, are you?”

“Psshhht. No. Definitely not.”

“Then…I don't get it. I'm trying to understand, really, I am.”

Andy couldn't help noticing the expression of utter confusion on her face at that moment. The thought of doing something that had no direct benefit to her was completely foreign to her.

“You sound like my dad,” he said. And then he did something unusual: He lied. Or, as he would tell Silas later, he merely “stretched the truth” about his father, letting Winter believe that the Howard Twopenny she heard on the radio was the same person as Howard Llewellyn. “He doesn't get it, either. After I gave the money back, he cut off my allowance completely. He won't even give me money for lunch. Luckily, my mom sneaks it into my backpack when he isn't around. I don't know what else I can tell you. The money didn't belong to me. It belongs to the people at the bank and their customers.”

“Yeah, but you could have been killed! One step closer and you'd have been a goner.”

“It's not the bank's fault that some wacko decided to blow himself up in their lobby.”

“Look, Andy, Ms. Albemarle really likes you. She says you're perfect for the control room. If we're going to be working together, we need to get to know each other better. So here's the thing: I want to do a news story about you. I already told Deanna Decameron about you, and she said it sounded like a great piece. If we do a good job, they'll run it on the network! That's national television, Andy. You'll be famous.”

“No way. I am not going on TV. Ever. Even if I wanted to, my dad would kill me.”

“Don't forget—he works for NTRP now. I'm sure he could be talked into it.”

“It's not going to happen.”

“But, Andy, you're a
hero.
The people want to hear your story. They need stuff like that to give them hope that the world isn't as bad as they think. They need
you.
”

“Yeah, to humiliate me. They're not looking for people who do good things. Look around, Winter. The most popular show on TV right now is
How Far Will You Go?
Last week, the woman who ended up in second place—and I only know this because my dad told me about it—shaved her own kid's head and forced her to pretend that she had cancer so she could start this fake charity. And she was only
second
place! Do you know what that means? There was somebody worse than her! So, no thanks.”

“Wow, you're serious, aren't you? I like this side of you. Kind of fierce, you know? But I'm not giving up. I am
so
going to talk you into this.”

At the end of a long day of classes, Andy sat cross-legged on the floor next to his locker, weeding through a stack of textbooks and corresponding notebooks. “Don't need. Need. Need. Need. Don't need,” he chanted. When he finished, he stuffed the need pile, which was nearly a foot high, into his backpack and returned the don't-need pile to the bottom shelf of the locker.

“Having a nice chat with all your friends?” asked Jensen, who had been watching and listening from a doorway a few yards away.

Andy closed his eyes and swore under his breath; he had hoped to sneak out of the building without running into anyone he knew. All he wanted was to go home, take Penny for a walk, and then get started on the several hours of homework that lay ahead. It was a few more seconds before he got Jensen's little poke at him. “Oh. All my friends. That's funny.” He was too tired to smile.

“What's
your
problem?”

He held up his planner, pointing to the list of assignments.

Jensen shrugged. “Welcome to Wellbourne. So, remember that woman I met at that stupid NTRP conference?”

“No. Should I?”

“If you're serious about being a journalist, yes. Jill Clermont. From 233dotcom. She started the company with a couple of friends when they were still in college. But here's the thing: I asked her what the
233
stood for, and she didn't know. It was called GlobalBooks when she owned it. Anyway, things were going well, they were starting to make money, and then NTRP came along and bought the whole company. And changed the name to 233dotcom.”

“So?”

“So, I met with her yesterday, and she was very cool. I mean, I'm still not crazy about the idea that books are going to disappear when the computer grid crashes, but when GlobalBooks started out, they actually had some good intentions. The only books they were replacing were the older, less used ones that had been sitting on the shelves for years without anybody checking out. The schools traded the old books for digital copies, and then GlobalBooks sent the paper ones to schools all over the world. Anything newer or more popular, they left alone.”

“But
all
the books are gone from our library,” said Andy.

“That's just it. When I told her about that, she
freaked
out, and it was the real thing. Nobody is that good an actor. She went
white—
like, even whiter than you. NTRP had promised to keep doing the old-book exchange and leave all the new stuff alone, but they obviously have other plans. So come on. Get your stuff. It's time.”

“Time for what?”

“We're going on a little field trip.”

“No. We're not.”

“Yes. We are. Our school library is now in the hands of the network that proudly fills every hour of the day with the worst garbage imaginable. Do you really trust them to do
anything
that they say they will? Either to provide the digital books they say they will or to do something worthwhile with the ones they boxed up? And don't worry, you'll be home in plenty of time to get your homework done. Scout's honor.” She held up her left hand, fingers spread in the Vulcan live-long-and-prosper salute.

“I don't think that's the Scout…I really can't go. I'm already…and my parents…”

He went.
^*

Which explains how Andy came to be trespassing at a warehouse on Willis Avenue in the Bronx—standing on a Dumpster and looking through the grimy windows—on a school night. It had taken twice as long to get there as Jensen had promised, and Andy was already anxious about the time.

“I don't get it. Why are we here?” he asked. “So what. It's a warehouse.”

“Remember all those boxes of books in the library?”

“What about them?”

“There they are.”

“What are they doing here?”

“We're about to find out. Keep your head down—someone's coming.”

“How did you
find
this place?”

A sly grin appeared on Jensen's face. “While they were loading up their truck, I, uh…
borrowed
their clipboard for a few minutes, long enough to get the address. Hey, what's going…Oh…my…God.”

Andy stood on his tiptoes and pressed his face against the glass. A man in gray coveralls with the NTRP logo embroidered on the front was using a box cutter to open a carton of books labeled
B
. He held up a copy of Charlotte Brontë's classic novel
Jane Eyre,
smirking at the art on the cover that marked it as a work of serious literature. Meanwhile, another worker in the same coveralls, along with a pair of fireproof gloves, opened the heavy iron door of an incinerator, stepping back as the blast of heat hit him in the face.

“No. No, no, no,” Jensen cried, loudly enough that Andy thought for sure that the men inside would hear. They watched in horror as the first man wound up as if he were on the mound at Yankee Stadium and pitched
Jane Eyre
into the fire. “They can't…That's my favorite book. Why are they doing this?”

Wuthering Heights
went into the flames next, followed by an armful of books by
B
authors: Blake, Browning, Buck, Byron, Burns, Boswell, and on and on. When the guys in coveralls got tired of digging in the box, they dumped the rest on the floor and began to toss them, three or four at a time, into the fire raging within the incinerator.

“I swear to God, if I could get in there, I would kill them both with my bare hands,” said Jensen, and Andy believed her.

One of the men returned to the stack of cartons, accidentally kicking a dog-eared paperback across the floor. Around and around it spun, finally coming to rest directly beneath Jensen and Andy.

“ ‘
Fahrenheit 451.
Ray Bradbury,' ” Andy read from the front cover.

As angry as she was, Jensen laughed almost involuntarily. “Now,
that's
ironic.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you read it?
Fahrenheit 451
? It was dystopian before dystopian was cool. It's set in the future, and the government has outlawed books. They have these guys called firemen who go around burning all the books they find. Four hundred and fifty-one degrees is the temperature where paper starts to burn.”

“Why did they outlaw books?”

“Because they want people to be stupid,” said Jensen. “Stupid people don't question…Oh, my God. I think I just…” She took her phone from her pocket and tapped furiously for a few seconds. “You're not going to believe this. Guess what temperature four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is in Celsius.”

She and Andy answered at the same time.

“Two hundred and thirty-three.”

Jensen Huntley wasn't the only one piecing together a story. When Andy told Silas what he had witnessed at the warehouse in the Bronx, and about the realization that 451 degrees Fahrenheit is equal to 233 degrees Celsius, something clicked in Silas's brain. The company, 233dotcom, had been mentioned, he was certain, in an article in the
New York Inquirer
a few months earlier, but when he searched online, the story had disappeared without a trace. That made him even more curious, so an hour later, he was once again pressing the buzzer to Ricky O'Day's apartment. He was the only person Silas knew who actually read the
Inquirer,
and even better, he never threw them out. In addition to being a computer genius, Ricky was a world-class hoarder.

“Now what?” he asked, opening his door.

Silas pointed at a stack of newspapers that reached the ceiling. “Are those organized?”

“Of course. They'd be kind of useless if they weren't in order.”

“I'm looking for something from a few months ago. Probably April or May. Maybe March.”

Ricky, his head tilted, glared at him. “I thought you said this was all a waste. That I would never need it. In fact, you said, and I quote, that
no one
would ever look at them, that ten minutes after they found my dead body, the entire contents of my apartment would be in a Dumpster. You called me a hoarder and inferred that I needed psychiatric help.”

“I assume you mean that I
implied
it, but that's not right, either. I have
begged
you to seek help on a number of occasions. But now I see just how wrong I was, judging you like that. And, more important, how
right
you were, Ricky. I should have listened to you. You're not crazy. Now just show me where to look.”

“That's all I wanted to hear,” Ricky said with a triumphant grin. He patted a six-foot-tall pile of yellowing
Inquirer
s. “Here ya go.” He returned to his sagging, smelly couch and within minutes was snoring loudly.

Silas went through twenty-three newspapers before he found what he was looking for, a short piece on page seventeen, under the byline Zhariah Davis. “Yes!” he shouted, waking Ricky, who jumped to his feet faster than one would have thought possible for someone his size.

“Oh, it's you. Forgot you were here,” he said, breathing heavily.

On his way out the door, Silas turned and said, “You don't mind if I take this, right? Great. See you around. Oh, and one more thing. I
was
right. For Pete's sake, Ricky, get some help. You look terrible.”

Ricky swore at him and threw a half-full plastic soda bottle across the room, which Silas blocked with the door. “And get rid of all those newspapers!” Silas shouted before ducking down the stairs.

Pausing on the stoop of Ricky's building, he called Andy. “Sorry to call so late, kid, but it's important. Tomorrow morning, go to your locker and open up your history textbook. There's a section about John Paul Jones, the first—”

“I know who he is.”

“Right. Of course. The model ships. You know your naval heroes. You're going to find an envelope with a copy of an article from the
New York Inquirer.
I'll make it look like something
you
printed out from a website. I want you to read it and then share it with your friend Jensen, but nobody else, okay? But here's the thing: You have to make her believe that you found it online, even though that would be impossible. This article has somehow disappeared from the paper's online archives.”