Perfect Getaway (3 page)

"FIRST WE TAKE care of business," Bob told the Hardys as he pressed the buzzer to the door of the mansion. Another man in fatigues and carrying an M-16 opened the door and waved them through.

The interior was a surprise. The outside of the mansion looked straight out of the South before the Civil War, but inside everything was strictly contemporary. The lighting was indirect, the walls were painted in soft pastels, the carpeting was thick and springy underfoot, the furniture was modern and sleek. It was like walking into an expensive international-style hotel.

Bob herded the Hardys into a room that had been turned into an office, where a pretty young woman was sitting behind a free-form desk. Its top was uncluttered except for a computer.

The young woman looked up at them, smiling automatically. When she saw two teenage boys approaching her instead of the middle-aged men she had expected, the smile wavered for an instant. She quickly replaced it. "Hi. I'm Sally," she said coolly. "If you'll tell me your names, we'll get you checked in."

Frank recognized her voice. She was the one he had talked to on the phone at Marcie's.

"Hi," he said. "I think I spoke to you before. I'm Frank. And this is Joe."

"Hi, Frank and Joe," Sally said suspiciously. She punched their names into the computer and looked at the monitor screen, which Frank and Joe couldn't see. Then she said, "Glad you arrived on time. Everything is so much simpler when our clients obey instructions. That will be one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars, please."

Frank put the attache case on the table and opened it. "Shall I count it out, or do you want to?"

"I'd be happy to, sir," Sally said.

As she picked up the first bundle of bills, her whole manner changed abruptly. The unconvincing smile vanished from her face, her eyes focused like high-intensity lights on the bills, and her fingers moved as quickly as if they were machine parts, flipping through the bills amazingly quickly. After she had counted the bundle, she separated several bills from the rest and examined them with a penlight and a magnifying glass, which she took from a drawer.

"What's the matter, don't you trust us?" Frank asked quickly, suddenly wondering himself about all those hundreds. Were they funny money?

"Nothing personal, sir, just routine," said Sally automatically, not bothering to look up. She took another bundle of bills from the case and repeated the counting and checking.

Frank and Joe waited. The only sounds in the office were the rustling of the bills and Bob clearing his throat behind them. Neither Frank nor Joe turned around, but both could picture the M-16 in his hands. And they could be sure he was holding it ready.

Finally Sally looked up from the bundles of bills piled neatly on the desk in front of her. Her smile was switched back on. Whatever doubts she might have had about Frank and Joe seemed to have vanished.

"Everything seems to be in order," she said. "Now, what do you want to do with your remaining cash?" She pointed to the bundles of bills still in the attache case. The case was still about three-quarters full. "Would you like to deposit the money in an account with us? Or do you prefer to keep it with you?"

"If it's all the same, we'll keep it with us," said Frank.

"I understand perfectly," Sally said. "In fact, most of our clients prefer to keep their cash on hand. We cater to a very self-reliant kind of person. Survivors, that's how we like to think of them."

"Yes, well, it's a hard, cruel world out there. That's why we want to get away from it all," said Frank, fishing for information. "Just like all your other customers, right?"

But Sally only smiled politely and said, "Bob will show you to your suite now. I'm sure you'll want to freshen up. I hope you don't mind, but you two will have to share a suite, since you're being given a discount. Of course, if you wish to pay a bit more — "

"One suite will be fine," said Frank.

"Well, then, I hope you enjoy your stay." Sally snapped shut the attache case and pushed it toward Frank.

Frank tried one last probe as he picked it up. "I hope this stay won't be too long. I mean, we've got to be moving."

"All in good time," she said. "There are a few formalities. But don't worry, I assure you that you won't be disturbed here. We are very secluded."

"Yes," said Joe. "I saw the fence out front. Can't say I liked it, though. Reminded me too much of a prison."

"It's for your own protection, sir." Sally smiled. "Bob, if you will escort our guests to their suite."

"Let's move it," said Bob. None of Sally's good manners had rubbed off on him. "You've got half an hour before your interview."

"Interview?" said Frank.

"What kind of interview?" asked Joe.

Bob cut off further conversation with a gesture of his gun.

He led them up a curving stairway and along a hall to a door on the second floor. "Make yourselves comfortable," he said. "I'll be back for you in half an hour."

Frank and Joe entered their room, and the door closed behind them. They weren't surprised to hear it being locked from the outside. They had already gotten the idea that they weren't totally trusted.

As soon as they were inside, Frank caught Joe's gaze, put his finger to his lips, then tapped that finger against his ear.

Joe got the message: just like the limo, the room might be bugged.

"You know, this place is gorgeous," Joe said in a loud voice as he began to check out one side of the room for listening devices, looking behind paintings, on the backs and bottoms of pieces of furniture, in vases, and under rugs.

"Perfect Getaway is really giving us our money's worth," said Frank, checking out the other side.

Working their way around the room, they met on the far side, where they both shrugged and gestured to signify that they had found nothing.

Frank's eyes darted around the room, checking to see if they had missed anything. Then he glanced up and pointed at the old-fashioned chandelier hanging from the high ceiling. Joe nodded.

"I think I'll get some exercise," Frank said. "I need to work out some kinks from the trip."

"Good idea," said Joe. "Me, too."

He watched Frank get a chair and position it under the chandelier. Frank stood on the chair, then squatted down and made a stirrup with his hands. Joe nodded, recognizing a gymnastic stunt they had worked up the year before in a skit for a school show. Joe backed up a couple of steps, propelled himself forward, and leapt when he was about a yard from Frank, his right foot landing in Frank's linked hands. Frank heaved upward as Joe pushed off from his hands, and a second later Joe was standing on Frank's shoulders. Careful not to lose his balance on the chair or disturb Joe's balance on his shoulders, Frank straightened up slowly. It worked. Joe was up high enough to inspect the chandelier. He peered into it and saw a miniature black receiving device.

Joe leapt down, hit the carpet, and did a neat somersault, just to finish the routine off right. "Good workout," he said loudly. He pointed to the chandelier, put his finger to his lips, and nodded.

"Time for a nice, hot shower," said Frank. He went into the bathroom, and Joe followed him.

"Great shower, needle-point spray!" Frank shouted, as if Joe were still in the other room.

He then closed the door and turned the shower up full force. The din of the water hitting the aqua-colored plastic shower stall filled the bathroom.

Frank put his mouth close to Joe's ear. "Whisper. I don't think any bugs they might have in here could pick us up."

"This looks bad for Marcie's dad," Joe whispered back. "This operation sure seems to be set up to help crooks skip out."

"Right—and maybe it does even more than that," Frank answered. "It looks too elaborate for just an escape outfit. But we can worry about that later. Right now we have to worry about ourselves. We're in these people's hands, and unless we convince them we're their kind of guys, they're going to start squeezing really hard."

"Yeah, we've got to get our story together," whispered Joe. "I bet that's why they put us in here before the interview, so that if we tried to come up with some story, their bug would pick it up."

"You just figured that out?" whispered Frank.

"Okay, okay," Joe said with more than a trace of annoyance in his whisper. "If you're so smart, how do we explain how a couple of teens like us are loaded with cash and on the run from the law?"

"They were expecting Marcie's dad," whispered Frank. "So I think we should tell them that we were in on his embezzlement scheme."

"Sure, we really look like corporate types," Joe hissed sarcastically.

"Come on, Joe, the answer was sitting right there on Sally's desk."

Joe sat patiently, waiting for his brother to get to the punch line of what he was sure was a joke.

"I'm not kidding. We can claim that we were hackers for hire," Frank told him. "We can say we helped Mr. Miller rig his company's computers so he could get the money out of the country."

"And that when the cops grabbed him, we grabbed our share of the money—" Joe exclaimed.

"And ran," said Frank, finishing his brother's sentence.

Frank turned off the shower and opened the bathroom door. "Hey, that was great, Joe," he shouted into the other room. "You want to take one?"

Joe left the bathroom, then called back toward Frank, "Nah. You took too long. We're going to have our interview in a few minutes. Hope it doesn't drag on — I want to clear out of here fast. I can practically feel Uncle Sam breathing down my neck."

"What could they want to find out?" Frank asked as he came out of the bathroom. "The color of our money should have been enough."

"You can't blame them for checking us out," answered Joe. "In an operation like this, you have to be extra careful."

A minute later Bob opened their door without bothering to knock and beckoned to them to follow.

"Wait a sec," said Frank, and went to pick up the attache case. "We'd better keep this with us."

Bob shrugged and said impatiently, "Let's go."

He led them down a hall to another room and opened the door. "Here are the two you wanted to see, sir," he said and gestured with his M-16 for the Hardys to go inside.

As they stepped into the room, they heard Bob leave and close the door behind them.

In front of them was a short, squat, balding man with a mustache. He, too, was wearing unmarked fatigues, but his whole presence indicated that he was an officer in whatever kind of force this was. He wasn't sitting behind his desk, but on top of it. One gleaming boot was tapping against the desk front as he looked the Hardys up and down.

"So you are Frank and Joe," he said. It was not a statement but a challenge.

"Right," said Frank.

"And who are you?" asked Joe.

The man smiled. "You can call me Alex."

"Glad to meet you, Alex," said Joe, extending his hand. "Now, how soon can you get us out of here?"

"Ah, you young people, always in such a hurry," Alex said with a sigh, ignoring Joe's outstretched hand. "In fact, you seem quite young to want to take one of our vacations, much less be able to afford it."

Frank had decided that the best way to weather this confrontation was to get this guy on the defensive, so he started talking fast and loud. "Look, I don't see why we have to go through this third-degree. The lady on the phone said there'd be no questions about our past."

Alex smiled. "It wouldn't be good for business to allow any undercover cops to travel along our underground railroad, would it?"

"If you lied on the phone," said Joe, "how can we trust you about anything?"

Alex sighed. "Come on, kid, you might be young, but you can't be that dumb. Who can you trust in this world? Nobody. But if it makes you feel any better, we'll keep our part of the bargain once we clear you. Not out of any sense of honor, but because it's good business. The only way we can keep getting customers is to have them pass the word that we give good value — a new start with a new name in a new place."

Frank pretended to think it over. Then he nodded. "Makes sense. Okay. Marcie Miller is a friend of ours. We met her father at a Halloween party, and he and I got to talking computers. When I told him about how some friends of mine had managed to get into the phone company's computers — "

Joe interrupted, continuing the story. " — he said that such a thing could never happen to his company's computers, that they were state - of - the - art. Later that night we tried it, and they were easy. They had a mainframe set up to take orders over the phone lines, and their security system was a joke. We could have wiped them out."

"But we didn't," interjected Frank. "We just got into the interoffice e-mail — that's electronic mail — system and left Miller a message. The computer wouldn't work for anyone in his company that day until — "

" — they said please," said Joe, laughing out loud.

"Sounds good," said Alex. "But that's nothing to make you start running."

"What came afterward wasn't just fun and games." Frank's face sobered. "Miller told us we were the answer to a businessman's prayer. Working together, with us slipping bogus orders into the computer at night and him moving the money during the day, we really took a bite out of the company. But it looks like he got too greedy and careless. We picked up our last payment just before the cops came to take him away.

When you called, it sounded like the answer to our prayers."

Frank smiled at Alex, then at Joe. When he and his brother were on the same wavelength, it felt as if nothing and nobody could beat them.

"Well, Frank and Joe, you seem to have — " Alex began.

Just then the phone rang. Alex picked it up and listened. Then his eyes narrowed and he said, "Thanks. I'll take care of it."

Without even a glance at the Hardys, he put down his phone, slid off the desk, and opened a drawer. Frank and Joe looked at each other uneasily. Alex's mood had clearly just changed— and it didn't look as if it had changed in their favor. When they looked back at Alex, they saw a .45 in his hand, pointed at them.