Capture the Flag (6 page)

“So why would Snake-Arm be after Senator Snickerbottom?”

Pacing back and forth in front of the big window of Gate B-16, Anna asked the question over and over. She kept having to step around Henry's GamePrism cord and José's feet, stretched in front of him as he leaned back in his chair watching the snow fall.

They'd crept along, following Snake-Arm following Snickerbottom past three more stores, then up to the door of a bar, where a bouncer guy stopped them and pointed to the sign that read
MUST BE
21
TO ENTER
.

“So what's the connection?” Anna was so wrapped up in the thought, she nearly tripped over Sinan, who was napping with Hammurabi as his pillow. No matter how unlikely it seemed, Anna could only come up with one answer.

“Snake-Arm has got to be involved in the crime,” she said. “I bet … I bet he stole the flag and knows that Snickerbottom's campaign team is helping with the investigation, so now he's trying to make sure they don't discover what happened.”

“That's dumb,” said Henry, putting his GamePrism earbuds into his ears.

“It's not.” Anna plopped into the seat next to him and pulled one earbud back out. “Think about it. Why else would he be following him?”

“Maybe Snickerbottom ate at the restaurant and forgot his doggy bag or something.”

Anna threw her hands into the air. “Like Snake-Arm would sneak up on him to return his leftover spaghetti?”

Henry unplugged the headphones from his video game, and a blast of gunfire came out of the speakers. His face lit up. “Hey!” he shouted, waking both Sinan and Hammurabi. “Hey! I bet I know what's going on!”

“What is it?” Anna leaned in to look, but all she could see was the yellow and white static of an explosion on the screen.

“Assassination,” Henry said, waving the game. “Snake-Arm is involved in a plot to assassinate Senator Snickerbottom!”

“Can you actually assassinate someone who isn't president yet?” Anna asked.

“Any murder with political motivations is an assassination,” Henry said with a firm nod. Anna stared. She would have expected José to pull that definition from his brain, but not Henry. “They talk about it in the secret agents meeting in my game, Shadow Rogue Assassin,” he explained.

Anna leaned in closer. “What else happens in that game?”

“Here, hold on.” Henry popped out his Super-Heist game cartridge and rummaged in his backpack until he found another one. He slipped it into the GamePrism and slid from his chair onto the floor so they could see better. “In Shadow Rogue Assassin, there's this evil guy named Maldisio, and he wants the crown prince dead, but he doesn't want to do it himself, so he hires secret agents to do it for him. Check this out.”

They huddled on their knees, leaning over the game screen. Even Hammurabi poked his head into the circle.

“These guys around the table here … they're the secret agents, and you choose which one you want to be, see? And then you get your orders from Maldisio. You can choose whether you want to stand guard or drive the escape vehicle or what. So here …” Henry pressed some buttons. “We'll be the lookout this time, so what we need to do is make sure that …” — he paused, eyes zeroed in on the screen — “that these guys …” — his thumbs poked at the GamePrism, and the avatar on-screen kicked and punched until the men who had appeared in the corner were all flat on the ground — “don't get in the way of the assassination.” He pressed a few more buttons. “There.”

“So … why does Maldisio want the crown prince dead?” Anna asked. Maybe it would give her an idea for why Snake-Arm would want to steal the flag.

“It's all about power,” Henry said. “Always. If you do everything right, then at the end of the game, Maldisio gets to rule the land.”

“Politics ruins the character,” José said, nodding. “That's from Otto von Bismarck,” he added before Henry could even ask.

“Otto-Man who?”

“Never mind.” José shook his head. “Let's think about your game as it relates to our situation. After you help this Maldisio guy get to be prince, Henry, what's in it for you? What do you get for helping?”

“You get to hang out with Maldisio and go to his parties.”

Anna sank back on her heels and stared up at the straight lines of window bars breaking the snow outside into perfect white rectangles. The puzzle pieces in her brain weren't fitting like that, no matter how hard she wished they would. “So … that could mean that Snake-Arm …”

Henry gasped. “Is going to kill Robert Snickerbottom so
he
can be president instead!”

Anna frowned.

José tipped his head.

It was Sinan who finally spoke up. “Are you not in the habit of electing your president by voting?”

“Oh,” said Henry. “Yeah. It was a cool idea, though.” He pulled the Shadow Rogue Assassin game from its slot and rummaged through his backpack. “Wanna play Super Larry Tennis?” he asked Sinan.

José pulled out
Harry Potter
. He read for a few minutes until the “Raindrops” song played from a few seats away, where his father had been reading his
WeatherWise
magazine. José leaped up so fast his book flew from his lap. He rushed to his dad's side, leaning in toward the phone.

Finally, Mr. McGilligan hung up and shook his head. “Nothing new. They're still keeping her.”

José sank back into his chair and opened his book, but he stayed on the same page for a long, long time.

Anna watched the tennis ball bounce back and forth across the electronic screen from Henry's side to Sinan's side. It reminded her of the ideas pinging around in her head. If she could just get one to slow down long enough to think about it, she'd be all set. It felt like the answer was there, right there, but moving too fast to see clearly. Things had seemed to make so much more sense back when they'd seen Snake-Arm following Senator Snickerbottom.

Anna sprung up from the floor. “I'll be right back. I'm going to the restaurant for a minute.” She looked for her dad to tell him, but he was huddled in a meeting with two of his staffers. She waved and pointed down the hallway, and he waved back. Part of her was glad her mom wasn't around to keep track of her, but part of her wished her father would at least ask where she was going.

Anna wandered back to the restaurant, where diners were mopping up ketchup with their last fries. She tried to freeze the scene, like pausing a movie on TV, so her eyes could take in everything.

The dark grain of the tables.

Waitresses hustling to finish serving dessert.

Crumbs under a high chair, from where somebody's little kid probably smushed a whole package of those saltine crackers that show up with the soup.

What was it that she should be noticing? Investigative reporters on TV always saw just the right thing, the thing that made all the pieces come together, made all the lines run straight and true, right to the answer. The door to the kitchen swung the tiniest bit but didn't open. Should she try to peek inside? Could Snake-Arm be back by now?

Anna flipped her notebook to an empty page, but her pencil felt stuck in the air over it, frozen in the muck of not knowing. She sighed, put her notebook down on the hostess stand, and looked up at the television blaring the news out over the crowded bar area.

There was an update on the storm; an excited weatherman announced that the snowfall had set a new record. He tossed it back to the news anchor, shuffling papers on her desk.

“And just in, we have new information on the Star-Spangled Banner theft.”

Anna stepped closer to the TV.

“Police now say it's possible that a gang of international art thieves may be involved. They're looking for this man.” The picture cut away to a mug shot of a slender man with tufts of gray hair sticking up over his ears, small wire-framed glasses, and a thin gray mustache. “His name is Vincent Goosen, and he's the reputed leader of the Serpentine Princes, an infamous group of illicit art collectors who are well known to police.”

The picture changed to show a side-view mug shot, and Anna sucked in her breath.

Curling around Vincent Goosen's neck was a tattoo of a fat, green-and-black-striped snake.

It wasn't exactly like Snake-Arm's. But it was close enough.

Anna grabbed her notebook and took off running.

The concourse was thick with travelers, looking sleepier, hungrier, and grumpier by the minute.

“Sorry!” Anna tripped over a purple suitcase being pulled along by a little girl, whose pink sneakers lit up every time she took a step.

“Excuse me.” She squeezed through the middle of the line at Cinna-Bunny, dodged one of those airport carts with the whoop-whoop-whooping alarm, nearly crashed into a woman who was waiting to use the restroom, and careened around the corner toward Gate B-16.

Then she stopped so fast that her sneakers squeaked on the shiny floor.

Dozens of people were gathered around a circle of glaring lights and television cameras. The crowd buzzed with an energy that had seeped out of the rest of the sleepy airport hours ago. In the middle of that circle, leaning in toward a cluster of microphones, was Robert Snickerbottom. He looked right into the cameras as he spoke, nodding emphatically, and at one point gesturing out toward the crowd with so much gusto that the reporter standing to his left, a young woman in tippy high-heeled boots, had to duck to avoid the sweep of his arm.

Anna strained to hear what he was saying, but she could only catch a few words.

“… dedicated the full resources of my campaign …”

“… disturbing developments …”

It had to be about the flag. Anna rose on her tiptoes, searching for José or Henry or Sinan. And where was her father? She jumped as high as she could, but her only view was of the wide shoulders of the man in front of her.

“Excuse me.” Anna wiggled through the crowd that had filled in behind her. She needed to get back where she could see what was going on. Over at the next gate, the seats were empty except for the skinny man in the cowboy hat who hung around with Snickerbottom. He was hunched over, talking on the phone. She'd ask him what was happening when he finished.

In the meantime, Anna climbed up onto one of the chairs to try and get a better view of the hubbub, but she still couldn't see past the crowd. She wished the man on the phone would hurry up, but he turned away from her and held the phone closer to his mouth.

“Doesn't matter, Zeke. They'll do it when we get to Vermont. That's what he said.”

Anna inched closer to him, then stepped up onto the top of the seats to take in more of the scene. Across the hall, she counted four TV cameras and about twice that many reporters scribbling in notepads. Snickerbottom must have called a press conference right here in the airport.

Anna jumped down from the seats, stumbling right into the man in the cowboy hat.

“Hold on!” he growled into his phone, and glared at Anna until she picked herself up and ran back to the crowd. She needed to get up to the front of all those people.

Anna darted through gaps in the crowd, dodging elbows and backpacks until she saw a familiar head of messy black hair in front of her. It was José, with Henry and Sinan in front of him. Sinan's eyes were huge. Henry's mouth hung open.

“Hey!” Anna tapped on José's shoulder.

José turned but put a finger to his lips. “Shhh!”

“What's going on?” she whispered. “Did something happen with the flag?”

He nodded but held up his hand for her to wait.

Anna was close enough to hear now. Close enough to understand why the boys were in shock.

“That's right.” Snickerbottom nodded. “We've discovered that the flag is here. Right here at the airport.”

“I was right all along!” Anna whispered.

José shushed her again.

“How do the police know?” the tippy-boot reporter asked. “Does that mean you have suspects?”

“Indeed we do.”

Anna gasped. “Do you think he knows about Snake-Arm?” She looked around, her heart pounding. Could Snake-Arm be here, too? She didn't see him, but that didn't mean anything. The crowd was too thick to see much at all.

Snickerbottom took a deep breath, and his eyes scanned the crowd. “My team has discovered that a number of … suspicious persons from outside the United States” — he paused and shook his head a little — “had access to our national treasure at a private function at the Smithsonian last night. Right before the flag disappeared.”

José turned to Anna. “Snake-Arm?”

“Maybe. I never saw him at the museum, though. And is he from outside the United States? He didn't have an accent, did he?” Anna tried to replay his voice in her head.

“What I don't get,” José said, “is how someone could have taken the flag the night of that reception.”

“I know,” Anna said. “Security was so tight. How could Snake-Arm steal it out from under everyone's noses?”

José shrugged. “How could anybody?” And he turned back to the news conference.

Tippy Boots stepped forward then. “So who are these people? And how could they have ended up at such an exclusive event?”

“Well …” Snickerbottom waited for the last camera to focus on him before he answered quietly. “They were invited.”

The reporters, for once, were silent. The crowd stared.

“Though the investigation is continuing, I can tell you that my team has evidence to suggest that special guests of the museum were involved in the theft.
Musical
guests.”

No
. Anna shook her head silently. He didn't have the right information at all.

“Sounds for a Small Planet?” Tippy Boots asked, her pen poised above her notepad.

“I'm afraid so. And as you know, members of that group are among us at the airport. They're currently being questioned by the police.”

No! How could he say that without any proof? Anna looked at Sinan, who hadn't moved or even blinked. But his brown eyes were shiny with tears. She couldn't stand it. “But, Senator Snickerbottom,” she shouted over the crowd, “what about the Serpentine Princes? And why would the musicians want to steal the flag?”

Snickerbottom frowned into the crowd. “There are people in this world who do not share our love for America, young lady. People who, given the opportunity, would seek to destroy this fine nation we've built. Our values. Our beliefs.” He turned away from Anna and looked back at the cameras. “And our flag. But we're going to get the Star-Spangled Banner back where it belongs. If you'll excuse me now, I have work to do.” He turned and started weaving his way through the crowd.

Anna needed to ask more questions. She'd been in such a rush to find out what was going on, she didn't even think to get it on tape. She never even took out her mini video camera.

She would have run after Snickerbottom and his men if she hadn't seen Sinan's face. He kept shaking his head.

“There is no one,” he said quietly. “No one who would do such a thing. No one in the group hates America. We are here for the music. Always the music and the people. Why would this man say such a thing?”

José pulled a rumpled Kleenex from his pocket and handed it to Sinan. “Sometimes, people just want someone to blame.”

“It is not right. We are being made into … what is the saying that you have for those who are blamed unfairly? Goats that get over the fence?”

Anna tipped her head. “Never heard that one.”

Sinan pulled out his sketch pad and flipped through the pages. “Here.”

José nodded slowly. “Yeah. That sounds about right.”

“But it's
not
right! It's so totally wrong. And we need to do something.” Anna watched Sinan add a few more details to his sketch. And then she remembered another drawing — not on paper, but on skin. On the arm of the man from Pickersgill Diner.

If
he was part of Vincent Goosen's art theft gang …

If
he was the one who stole the flag …

And
if
they could prove it, then the police would have to leave the orchestra people alone.

“I need to tell you guys what I found out.” Anna put an arm around Sinan. “Let's go find your mom and dad. We can talk on the way.”