Mutation Read online

  Grace held the Moleskine out at arm’s length, but it didn’t do much good. “You’re kidding me.”

  Marty took a second sniff. “Definitely rhino pee, maybe with a dash of pond scum thrown in. I don’t know what you’re complaining about. While you were lounging around the pool at the mansion, I was risking my life trying to save you.”

  “I didn’t need saving,” Grace said.

  “You didn’t know you needed saving,” Marty said. “If you don’t want it …” He started to put the other Moleskine back into his pack.

  Grace stopped him. “I’ll take it,” she said. “I just wish I had rubber gloves and a clothespin for my nose so I could read it.”

  The landing gears dropped, and the Moleskines and Rose’s trunk were forgotten as Phil brought the former bomber in for a perfect landing. As they began their slow taxi, they were joined by a car with flashing blue lights and Aduaneiro Internacional written on the side.

  “Cops,” Marty said.

  “International customs,” Grace corrected.

  “I can read Spanish,” Marty said.

  “It’s Portuguese. That’s what they speak in Brazil.”

  “Spanish, Portuguese, customs, cops, what’s the diff? A cop is a cop, and it’ll be interesting to see their faces when we tell them we’re carrying three kidnapped panda cubs and two baby dinosaurs.”

  A look of shock and dismay crossed Ms. Smarty-pants-I-speak-a-dozen-languages’s face. Marty unbuckled and stood up. Luther and Dylan were sitting in the two seats across the aisle from them. Marty leaned over and looked out their window. An identical car was on their side.

  “Cops,” Luther said.

  “Customs,” Marty said. “Can’t you read Portuguese?”

  “Whatever language they speak, and whoever they are,” Luther said, “we’re busted. I wonder what Brazilian prisons are like.”

  Marty looked up toward the bulkhead where Wolfe and Ted were sitting. Their seats were tilted back, and it looked like they were asleep. He hurried over to them. Wolfe had the aisle seat; Ted had the window seat. They both had their eyes closed as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

  “Uh … we’ve landed,” Marty said.

  Wolfe opened one eye. “And?”

  “And we’re sandwiched in by customs agents.”

  Wolfe opened his other eye, brought his seat into the upright position, then leaned over Ted, who didn’t budge, and looked out the window.

  “What do you want us to do?” Marty asked.

  Wolfe stretched and yawned. “What do you mean?”

  “We could empty a couple of crates and hide the hatchlings and pandas inside. You think they’ll check the crates?”

  “Unlikely,” Wolfe answered.

  Marty had traveled all over the world and had been interrogated by dozens of customs agents. He knew the routine.

  Wolfe has lost it, he thought.

  “They’ll want to check our passports and our visas,” he said. “They’ll want to go through our stuff and make sure we aren’t smuggling things into the country.”

  “They won’t be asking for your passport, or your visa,” Wolfe said. “They won’t be getting on the airplane, and you won’t be getting off the airplane until after they leave the hangar.”

  “What hangar?”

  “The empty hangar they’re escorting us to.” Wolfe reached under his seat and pulled out a duffel bag. He unzipped it and took out a bundle of hundred-dollar bills.

  Marty could see there were a lot more bundles where that one had come from.

  “You’re going to bribe them?”

  “I guess you could call it that,” Wolfe admitted. “But I prefer to think of it as purchasing very expensive private visas. We can’t let them see the hatchlings or the pandas. We can’t advertise the fact that we’re here. Blackwood may still be at the Ark, but he’s going to come after us. I don’t want to make it too easy for him.”

  The window darkened as they taxied into the hangar. Wolfe unbuckled, stood up, and stuffed the cash into his pocket.

  A half hour later he came back on board and said the coast was clear. They had the hangar all to themselves.

  It took them until well after midnight to unload the jet, reassemble the helicopter, then reload everything into the helicopter and the Rivlan. While they worked, Phil and Phyllis slept on a couple of cots in the corner of the hangar so they would be rested for their long flight to China. Marty wished he could join them on a cot. He regretted not catching some shut-eye like Wolfe and Ted had. The short nap seemed to have done them good. They buzzed around the hangar like bees around a hive.

  “Guess that does it,” Wolfe said. “Gather around, everyone. I have some things to report before we head out on our different paths.”

  Marty and Dylan jumped down from the Rivlan, where they had been stowing the last of the equipment. There was so much stuff aboard that they would probably sink when they got the Rivlan to the Amazon. Grace stepped out of the jet, where she had been saying good-bye to the panda cubs. Luther came out the helicopter, peeling off a bloody pair of disposable gloves and oblivious to the smell coming off him. Phil and Phyllis wandered over holding steaming cups of coffee. Ted was the last to join them, at least in body. He was so completely absorbed in something on his Gizmo that he bumped into Phil, causing him to spill his coffee.

  “First of all, thanks for all your hard work,” Wolfe said after everyone had settled down. “It’s not easy getting an expedition together this quickly. As soon as I’m done here, Ted, Marty, and Dylan will get the Rivlan on the Amazon and head west. They’re mostly moving the Rivlan under cover of darkness so it doesn’t attract too much attention. The last thing we want is attention.” His gaze lingered on Marty and Luther.

  “What?” they both said simultaneously.

  “Just be cool,” Wolfe said. “We all need to get to the jaguar preserve without incident. We have important work to do there.”

  Marty and Luther gave him a firm nod.

  Wolfe rolled his eyes as if he didn’t believe them and continued, “Grace, Luther, and I will take off at first light in the chopper. If all goes well, we should be at the preserve this afternoon.” He looked at Phil and Phyllis. “Are you two ready to head to China? Did you get enough sleep?”

  “Plenty,” Phyllis said. “Where do you want us to go after we drop the cubs off?”

  “Fly back to Cryptos. You’ll need to be on standby 24/7. If Noah shows up in Brazil, we may need a lift out of here in a hurry.” He looked at Ted. “Want to share your news?”

  “It’s good news,” Ted said with a grin. “And it might keep Noah busy and off our backs for a while. Looks like Grace’s outtakes of Wildlife First hit the airwaves, at least in some markets. Noah Blackwood is in full-on damage control mode, which should keep him close to home, talking to the press for the next several days. He’s pulled the bogus episode from distribution, claiming that he was hacked and that the fake footage was put together by an anti-environmentalist group, not mentioning who this group is, of course. The outtakes have gone viral on the Internet, and there isn’t a thing he can do about it. Bottom line, he’ll slither out of this, but until then it’ll be fun watching him squirm.”

  Wolfe nodded and looked at his watch. “Time to go.” He shook Ted’s hand, then gave Marty and Dylan short hugs. “See you in the jungle. Good luck.”

  Under the bright lights of the hangar, the Rivlan looked like a bucket of corroded scrap metal.

  “We are going to die,” Marty said under his breath as he followed Dylan and Ted up the rusty ladder to the deck.

  “I heard that,” Ted said. “Ugly is only skin deep.”

  “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” Dylan said.

  “A stitch in time saves nine,” Marty said.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Dylan asked.

  “Not a thing,” Marty said.

  The deck was stacked with battered crates. Ted had made them string hammocks betw
een the crates to make the boat appear more Amazonian. “The Rivlan’s distressed look is intentional,” he told them. “So we don’t attract too much attention on the river.”

  Marty started up the short steps to the pilothouse, or bridge, but Ted stopped him. “Wrong way. We’re going below deck. You’re headed up to the fake bridge, which is actually functional, but we’ll only be using it during daylight hours.” He walked through a hatch and down a short set of steps.

  Marty and Dylan followed. They had both been below to check it out, and if anything, it was in worse shape than the deck.

  Ted led them through the greasy galley to the chart room, which consisted of a single table piled with mildewed navigational charts that looked like they’d been last used by Magellan, and a rickety chair that didn’t look like it would support a glass of water.

  “This is the real bridge?” Marty asked.

  “Hardly.”

  Ted tipped the chair backward, then set it straight. A second later the wall in front of them slid open, revealing a brightly lit room that looked like it belonged on a starship.

  “Whoa!” Dylan said.

  Marty wasn’t nearly as surprised, having been in the Orb Ted had built to pursue the giant squid. But he was still impressed, and relieved they weren’t heading up the Amazon in a complete bucket of bolts. The room looked nothing like the other parts of the Rivlan. It was shaped like a dome, and the walls, ceiling, and floor looked like they were made of black glass. There were four high-tech leather chairs equipped with seat belts and shoulder harnesses — one chair in front and three behind. The front chair, with the flashing buttons, switches, and levers, was clearly the captain’s chair.

  “Dibs on the captain’s seat!” Marty called out.

  “In your dreams,” Ted said, settling into the front chair. “Buckle up. Let’s get this show on the road, or rather, on the water.”

  Marty took the right chair, Dylan the left, leaving the seat in the middle empty.

  “Ready?” Ted asked.

  Marty and Dylan braced themselves. The lights dimmed and the dome came to life with a 360-degree high-definition view of the inside of the hangar.

  “If you want to see what’s behind us, all you have to do is lean left or right or back,” Ted said.

  The boys leaned … a little too far. The chairs whipped completely around several times before they were able to get them under control. Marty thought he was going to be sick. He glanced over at Dylan; he didn’t look much better.

  Ted had swiveled the captain’s chair around to face them. “Takes a little while to get the hang of it. The technology is similar to what they use in the Segway, but more responsive. All you really have to do is think right, left, up, down, stop, and it will happen. There are sick bags in the right-hand pockets of the chairs if you need them.”

  “Thanks for letting us know that before we sat down,” Marty said.

  Ted grinned. “No problem. Ready to go?”

  Marty and Dylan nodded.

  Ted hit a button. There was a slight humming noise, then complete silence.

  “Is it working?” Dylan asked.

  “Perfectly,” Ted answered. “The engine runs silent. In fact …” He hit another button on the panel. The chugga-chugga-chugga of an old diesel engine echoed through the bridge.

  “Fake sound,” Marty said.

  “Yep, and take a whiff of this.” He hit another button. The bridge was filled with the smell of diesel fumes.

  Marty and Dylan started choking.

  Ted laughed. “That’s your brain telling you that you’re breathing in diesel fumes. It smells like diesel, but it’s harmless.” He hit another button and the air cleared, as if the noxious smell had never been there. He pointed to the top of the dome. The exhaust pipe on top of the fake bridge was belching out nasty black smoke.

  “I take it that that’s not diesel smoke,” Dylan said.

  “Fake fumes,” Ted said. “Smoke and mirrors,” Ted said. “The Rivlan has virtually zero environmental impact.”

  “Unless it’s in bulldozer mode,” Marty pointed out.

  Ted nodded. “Which I hope we don’t have to use.”

  They watched Wolfe walk over to the huge hangar door and slide it open. The streaming video surrounding them was so clear, it looked like they could reach out and touch everything in the hangar.

  “We’ll wheel out of the hangar, then move into hover mode. The tricky part will be getting to the river without anyone seeing us.”

  Actually, the tricky part turned out to be getting over the airport’s fence. Ted switched to hover mode right out of the hangar, keeping the Rivlan low to the ground. Aside from its being slightly quieter, Marty didn’t feel much difference. Ted stuck to the shadows, maneuvering the Rivlan behind the hangar, across an access road and a secondary runway, then following the fence along the west side of the airport. The engines, or fans, or whatever Ted had invented to make the Rivlan fly, kicked up so much debris in front of the cameras it was hard to see where they were going.

  “What are you looking for?” Dylan asked.

  “Some place to get over the top. The highest I’ve had this thing is about eight feet. The fence along here is about twelve — topped by three feet of razor wire. The higher we go, the more power we’ll need. With the added cargo, I don’t think we’re going to make it over.”

  “We could dump Dylan off,” Marty said.

  “Very funny,” Dylan said.

  “Just an idea.”

  “Uh-oh,” Ted said, pointing. Flashing blue and red lights were racing up behind them. “We must have tripped a motion sensor along the fence. They aren’t close enough to see us yet, but that’s going to change in about twenty seconds. Hang on.”

  Marty felt his stomach drop to his knees as Ted pushed the throttle to its limit. The bow jerked up at a forty-five degree angle, then fell like a rock. The Rivlan bounced on the ground with a loud bang.

  “No worries!” Ted said, although he sounded pretty worried.

  He backed the Rivlan fifty feet away from the fence, then shot it forward again twice as fast as before.

  “That’s more like it!” Ted shouted. “Get ready!”

  Before Marty could ask what he was supposed to get ready for, the bow tilted up again, but instead of stopping it kept going and going and …

  Ted swore, then shouted, “Lean forward! Lean forward! Lean forward!”

  Marty gave it his best shot, but he discovered that leaning forward while tipping backward and being buckled in with a seat belt and harness was impossible. He glanced over at Dylan. His face was bright red, his jaw was clenched, and every muscle and tendon in his neck looked like it was going to burst. For a second, the Rivlan froze in space as if it were making up its mind about which way to go, then it began to tilt forward again.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” Ted yelled. “Go, baby, go!”

  There was a loud scraping sound underneath them.

  “What was that?” Dylan shouted with alarm.

  “The top of the razor wire,” Ted answered, frantically pushing buttons and pulling levers. “We’re over the top.”

  The bow dipped sharply. Marty felt like his seat belt was going to cut him in two. A millisecond before the Rivlan buried itself nose-first into the dirt, the bow popped back up, and they shot across open ground at 132 miles an hour. The flashing lights behind them disappeared. Ted slowed the Rivlan down to 50 so everyone could breathe again.

  “That could have gone a different way,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Dylan said. “We could have all been killed.”

  “Nah,” Ted disagreed. “Maybe a couple of broken bones and some bruises, but you wouldn’t have died. If we had slammed into the ground, the airbags would have deployed. It’s not often you’re given the opportunity to test the upper limits on a new device like this right out of the box.”

  And to live through it, Marty thought. His heart was slamming in his chest, but he couldn’t help but
grin at the mad inventor. Ted’s cup was always half full regardless of the circumstances.

  Ted slowed the Rivlan to a crawl. Then he maneuvered it down a dark street in an upscale residential area, through an alley, and past a swimming pool in someone’s backyard.

  “If they’re looking out their window right now, they’re going to report a UFO,” Dylan said.

  Beyond the pool was a dock with sailboat tied to it. Ted headed for the water, flipping switches and pushing buttons. Fifty feet past the sailboat, he set the Rivlan onto the water. A couple more switches and the chugga-chugga-chugga sound effects started. Fake gray smoke belched from the rusty stack, from a diesel engine that wasn’t there.

  The sun was just coming up.

  “The Amazon,” Dylan said with awe.

  “Not quite,” Ted said. “This is a tributary. We’ll be on the Amazon in about half an hour, at which time I’m going to turn piloting duty over to you two while I get some shut-eye.”

  “We’ll pilot it from down here?” Marty asked.

  “I guess piloting isn’t exactly the right word. At slow speeds the Rivlan pilots itself. You’ll run the show from up top to keep an eye on things and, more important, to be seen. It would look a little strange if the Rivlan was heading upriver with no one behind the wheel.”

  Ted got out of the captain’s chair, stretched, and looked at Marty. “I’m hungry. How about some breakfast?”

  Marty unstrapped himself. “I’ll have to clean the galley first so we don’t die from toxic waste exposure, but yeah, I can whip something together.”

  The galley wasn’t nearly as dirty as it looked. In fact, it was perfectly clean. The dirt and grime were all smoke and mirrors, just like the fake engine sound and fumes. Ted’s technicians on Cryptos had painted the grunge on the stovetop, counters, and fridge.

  Tainted paint, he thought with a laugh.

  As he waited for the butter to melt in the omelet pan, he checked everyone’s location on his Gizmo. Phil, Phyllis, and PD were headed west toward China at forty thousand feet. Ana and the others at the jaguar preserve were moving around in a tight cluster, no doubt putting together the hatchlings’ new enclosure. Doc and Laurel looked to be about ten miles west of the preserve. And Grace, Luther, and Wolfe were flying up the Amazon in the stolen chopper.