M Is for Mama's Boy Page 4

  “Welcome, agents. Prepare for transport to the Playground.”

  The floor disappeared beneath Duncan, and the chubby boy was spun, shot, flipped, flopped, twisted, and turned through a series of tubes, shafts, and loop-the-loops until he finally plopped into a leather chair at the center of a huge subterranean chamber.

  All around him in the cavernous room were scientists in white lab coats, working on complicated experiments that pushed the limits of imagination: robotic pets, exploding lunch boxes, sneaker silencers, even a new underwater breathing prototype called Scuba Gum. No wonder they called the place the Playground. To Duncan it was heaven on earth—filled with cool inventions and brilliant people who loved science and technology as much as he did. He would have to leave NERDS when he turned eighteen, but he was already considering a job working here as a researcher when he retired.

  The rest of the team arrived, landing in their own leather chairs. They were seated at a glass table made up of thousands of wires, circuits, and blinking lights. At its center was a hole. Duncan reached into his pocket and removed the blue orb he called Benjamin. It floated out of his palm and hovered over the hole.

  “Let’s get started,” said a voice from behind the kids. They turned to find a tall man in a tuxedo. His name was Alexander Brand, and at one time he had been America’s greatest secret agent—dashing, fearless, staggeringly handsome. He was the man the government called when no one else could get the job done. But then he had been injured in the line of duty and forced to use a cane to get around; his life as a spy had come to an abrupt halt. Still, his mind was as dangerous as his body had once been, so he was the perfect person to become Director of the National Espionage, Rescue, and Defense Society, though it was clear to Duncan and the others the man wasn’t completely comfortable managing a group of fifth-grade superspies.

  Duncan was incredibly curious about Brand. He was a mystery. Duncan had used Benjamin to try to track down information about him but had found nothing. There were no clues to how he had been injured, where he grew up, or even the names of his mother and father. It was as if the man did not really exist, and though Duncan was tempted to hack into Brand’s government file, he knew the former spy would be furious if he discovered the breach. He was not the kind of man who liked to share. In fact, he spoke very little, unless, of course, he was angry, which was frequently.

  “So, boss, what’s the trouble—”

  Brand raised his hands to silence Ruby. “Heathcliff Hodges.”

  The children looked at one another in stunned silence.

  “He’s back,” Brand said.

  “That’s not possible,” Ruby said. She began to feverishly scratch her leg. She was allergic to impossibilities.

  “Pufferfish is right,” Jackson replied. “I saw him fall into the ocean. There’s no way he could have survived.”

  “Apparently, no one told Heathcliff,” their director said. “Benjamin, could you be so kind as to replay the bank footage we received?”

  The blue orb hovered on the glass table before them. It let out a few odd chirps and suddenly a dozen television monitors lowered from the ceiling and flickered to life. The screens showed a young boy in a black mask with a white skull on it using a herd of squirrels to empty cash drawers. The boy took off his mask to reveal his enormous teeth. Duncan watched the security guards and Heathcliff’s hostages suddenly calm down, then follow his commands like sheep.

  “Aarakdhgyyg!” Flinch said, then turned a knob on his harness. “Sorry, too much sugar at lunch. How many banks has he robbed?”

  “This is his fifth heist,” another familiar voice said. From one of the passages came a stunning woman with blond hair and blue eyes. She wore a cashmere sweater and a wool skirt. Stylish glasses sat on the end of her button nose. Ms. Holiday was the school’s librarian, but she was also the team’s information specialist. “We estimate that he’s stolen nearly a hundred thousand dollars so far, focusing on the tellers. He also hypnotizes the customers into using their ATM cards to empty their accounts.”

  “Why not head for the vaults?” Matilda said. “That’s where most of the money is kept.”

  “Modern bank security systems make the vaults nearly impenetrable. They’ve made a guard with a nightstick obsolete,” Ms. Holiday said.

  Duncan had read a lot about banks in magazines and books. He was fascinated with how their security systems worked. He spoke up. “Even if Simon were to break into a vault, he would find a steel wall blocking his exit, then sleeping gas knocking him out until the cops could arrest him. If he managed to get past all that, many banks have a program that drops the vault into a chamber dozens of feet below the ground, making it nearly impossible to escape.”

  “What do you think that little runt wants with the money?” Matilda asked.

  Jackson shook his head. “It’s not about the money.”

  “Then what?” Ruby said.

  “Attention,” Jackson said. No one challenged him. Braceface was an expert on getting attention, having once been the most popular kid at Nathan Hale Elementary. “If you’re trying to be inconspicuous, you don’t rob a bank with a herd of squirrels. He wants us to see him. He wants us to know he’s still alive and plotting something new.”

  YOU’RE BACK. GOOD.

  NOW LET’S START TRAINING

  YOU FOR YOUR LIFE AS A

  SECRET AGENT. WHAT? YOU

  WANT TO KNOW WHEN YOU GET

  TO LEARN THE COOL STUFF.

  YOU MEAN LIKE JUMPING OUT

  OF A BURNING PLANE, FIRING

  A BAZOOKA WHILE RIDING A

  JET SKI, AND KNOCKING A BAD

  GUY OUT WITH A KARATE CHOP

  TO THE NECK? WHOA . . . SLOW

  DOWN THERE, BUDDY. FIRST,

  LET’S FOCUS ON A BASIC SKILL

  EVERY SPY MUST KNOW: THE

  ABILITY TO READ AND WRITE

  SECRET MESSAGES.

  SOUNDS EASY, HUH?

  WE’LL SEE. THIS IS

  A LITTLE SOMETHING

  WE CALL THE ALPHABET.

  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

  HOPEFULY, YOU RECOGNIZE

  IT. AND THIS IS A LITTLE

  SOMETHING WE CALL

  A CIPHER CODE.

  T D N U C B Z R O H L G Y V F P W I X S E K A M Q J

  EACH LETTER IN THE

  ALPHABET CORRESPONDS TO

  THE LETTER IN THE CIPHER

  CODE PRINTED BENEATH IT.

  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

  T D N U C B Z R O H L G Y V F P W I X S E K A M Q J

  SO I’M GOING TO SEND

  YOU A VERY SENSITIVE

  AND SECRET MESSAGE

  WRITTEN IN CIPHER CODE.

  THEN IT’S YOUR JOB TO

  TRANSLATE IT INTO OUR

  ALPHABET. YOU READY?

  AGAIN, THIS MESSAGE

  IS JUST FOR YOU.

  YOU MIGHT WANT TO GRAB A PIECE OF PAPER TO WRITE DOWN YOUR ANSWER.

  SRC XYCGG FB QFEI BCCS OX YTLOVZ YC NIQ

  LISTEN, SOMEBODY HAD TO

  SAY SOMETHING. YOU CAN’T

  BE A SPY WITH THAT KIND

  OF FUNK. THE BAD GUYS

  WILL SMELL YOU

  A MILE AWAY.

  OH, GOOD JOB ON THE

  CIPHER, TOO . . . STINKY.

  Albert looked down at the business card. Then he looked up at the abandoned entrance of the South Arlington Botanical Garden. The garden had been closed to all but vermin for nearly a decade. Albert had visited many times as a child. The place had once been glorious, but now was overgrown and wild. Someone had vandalized the gate, pulling it off its hinges and leaning it against a wall. Anyone could walk inside.

  “This can’t be the place,” Albert said. He looked at the business card once more. There was no mistake.

  He wondered if he was the victim of some elaborate hoax. There were people at Big Planet Comics whom he would call rivals. He had once gotten into a heated conversatio
n with Ivan Purlman about whether Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, or Tim Drake was the better Robin to Bruce Wayne’s Batman. Could Ivan have decided to teach him a lesson by concocting this silly prank?

  Albert always had trouble making friends, and his mama was to blame—Mama and her stupid plans. When he was just three months old, his mama had made a chart that plotted out his entire life. Some of the highlights were: winning the National Spelling Bee at age ten; going to Space Camp at fourteen; early admission into an Ivy League college at sixteen; graduating with a full doctorate by twenty-one; and at twenty-five, marrying a woman she introduced him to, followed by lots and lots of grandbabies.

  She planned for every possible obstacle and even allotted for a short puberty-fueled struggle for independence when he was fifteen. She figured Albert would need only a couple of weeks before he came to his senses and realized he should put all his faith in his mama.

  How her little baby would get to such personal success was a little hazy, so she paid close attention to what the other mothers on the block were planning for their children. Tommy Beacon’s father was pushing his son on the swings and toward a career as a marine biologist. Nikki Mock’s mother was laying the groundwork for her daughter to be appointed as Secretary of Education. Mark Killian’s parents had their son sleeping with a catcher’s mitt. Mama knew she had better decide quickly before all the good careers were snapped up, so after much debate she decided that Albert would be a brilliant scientist, and because she loved him so much, she set about brainwashing her son into doing just that.

  Each night, when Albert was ready for a good-night story, Mama would forgo Harry the Dirty Dog and Where the Wild Things Are in favor of Einstein’s theory of relativity or the latest article on climate change. She emptied his room of toys and filled it with alkaline test strips, microscopes, and fossils. She hung the periodic table of the elements on his wall and made a mobile for his crib featuring her favorite igneous rocks.

  Holidays were just another opportunity to immerse the boy in his would-be career. Every Christmas, Albert would wake up early to find Santa had left a Bunsen burner or a petri dish filled with molds under the tree. On Easter, instead of searching for eggs, Albert hunted for test tubes that Mama had hidden throughout the yard. Halloween was a chance to dress up as different kinds of scientists. At seven Albert was a paleontologist carrying around a plastic dinosaur bone. At ten he went as a mineralogist dragging a lump of quartz from house to house. At twelve he went “trick-or-sleeting” as a meteorologist. It didn’t seem to matter to Mama that each year her son’s costume was nearly identical to the previous year’s.

  By Albert’s thirteenth birthday, Mama finally realized what her son’s true calling was—computer science. Her revelation had nothing to do with anything he had mentioned or hinted at. In fact, Albert had shown very little interest in computers, but his mother saw the kind of money a computer mogul made and gave her son a laptop computer for his birthday.

  Much to Mama’s great satisfaction, Albert was immediately hooked. Within a matter of months, he knew everything there was to know about the machine—the bits and bytes, the boards and binaries. Soon he had taken his computer apart and rebuilt it to make it not only more efficient, but also incredibly powerful.

  Mama couldn’t have been happier. She sat back and marveled at her cunning, wondering if perhaps she should write a book on making young boys into successful men. Unfortunately, Mama’s dream was soon to wither. Despite all her careful planning, she was unprepared for the distraction that would ruin everything. It wasn’t girls—the poor boy was a physical mess who rarely saw the sunshine, let alone a girl’s approving gaze. It wasn’t cars. She had seen dozens of mothers lose their sons to hot rods and motorcycles, and wouldn’t allow auto magazines past the door. No, the thing that brought her house of cards crashing down around her was comic books. At the age of fifteen, a neighbor lent Albert a copy of The Amazing Spider-Man #159. Albert read it cover to cover, then read it again. And again. And again. And again. Mama gave it little attention at first. After all, she had noticed that the issue he was reading contained a character known as Doctor Octopus. He had a PhD. Mrs. Octopus must have been very, very proud.

  Unfortunately, Spider-Man was just the beginning of Albert’s obsession. When he returned the well-worn comic to his friend, he was told he would have to buy his own from then on out. He promptly went home and took a hammer to his piggy bank, which was stuffed with money for college, and squandered Mama’s dreams on Batman, the Green Lantern, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Avengers, and of course, Superman. Albert read everything his local comic shop sold and spent his weekends at garage sales patrolling for back issues of Sgt. Rock and golden age Justice League. And quite soon, Doctor Octopus, as well as Doctor Fate, Doctor Doom, and Doctor Strange, were taking up more space in his imagination than Dr. Nesbitt—future computer scientist.

  Mama was horrified. If her son did not grow up to run a multinational software corporation, what would she brag about with Linda Caruso from next door? Linda had been preparing her son for a career as a lawyer, dressing him in pinstriped suits and taking him to wine country on vacations. If Albert didn’t give up his ridiculous love of funny books, Linda would look down her nose at Mama forever! Something drastic had to be done.

  So, one day, when Albert was at school, she packed up his comic book collection and put it on the curb. As she watched the garbage men toss the boxes into the back of their truck, she told herself she was doing her son a favor. One day, when he was flying around the world in his private jet, he would thank her.

  When Albert got home from school and realized what she had done, he got on his scooter and tore through town until he tracked down the garbage truck that had stolen his treasures.

  The next day, after rescuing his collection out of a landfill, he moved all his belongings down into the basement and had a locksmith install tamper-proof deadbolts on the door. Mama’s relationship with him was never the same. They rarely spoke except at mealtimes. More than twenty years later he was still down there. What he was doing, Mama could not say, but she gave up on his career in science when she found his microscopes in the trash can.

  Despite his appearance and his rather smelly secret lair, Albert was not lazy. He had put his scientific training to good use. He had conducted hundreds, thousands of experiments with a single aim: to acquire real superpowers. He’d bombarded spiders with radiation in hopes of gaining their abilities, landing in the hospital instead. He had poured toxic waste on himself in hopes of enhancing his senses, and ended up being scrubbed with wire brushes by men in hazmat suits. He’d even tried to build a flying suit out of iron, only to trap himself inside for several days.

  Now, as he stood in front of the abandoned garden with its rusting gate and potholed parking lot, he debated with himself. Should he turn away from almost certain ridicule, or should he listen to the rhythmic knocking of destiny? He chose destiny and entered the botanical garden.

  It was a jungle inside. With no one to manage them, the trees were taking the grounds back, slowly erasing the park from existence and returning it to forest. They had grown tightly together, their branches intertwining and creating a lush green canopy that blocked out the sun. Many of the buildings had trees growing out through their windows and roofs. Leaves were scattered everywhere.

  Suddenly, a rope ladder fell from the trees above, almost knocking Albert in the head. Albert looked up to find out who had nearly killed him and saw the man he had met at the comic shop. He was looking down at him from what appeared to be a huge tree house.

  “The boss is waiting,” the goon said.

  “The boss is up there?” Albert said, eyeing the rope ladder with doubt.

  The goon nodded. “And he doesn’t like to wait.”

  Albert frowned but hoisted himself onto the ladder. He climbed the best he could, but it wasn’t easy. He grunted and puffed, occasionally whining, until he got to the top, where the goon helped him
stand. What he saw shocked him. Stretching out for acres was a palace formed from the trees’ intertwining limbs. They had created a floor firm enough to stand on, and there was furniture too, made from both plant life and stuff you would find in a store—including a refrigerator, a microwave, and beds. And everywhere Albert looked there were squirrels—dozens of them, leaping from tree to tree as they patched holes in the branches with trash and leaves. They were building a nest—only on a gigantic scale.

  “Boss,” the brute called out, ignoring Albert’s bewilderment.

  Suddenly, a spotlight appeared, shining on a small figure wearing a skull mask. He was sitting in a high-backed chair, enjoying a bowl full of nuts. He had lifted his mask up just enough so that he could eat, revealing two gigantic front teeth, like posts on a white picket fence. Albert could not take his eyes off of them.

  “Albert Nesbitt, it’s good to meet you,” the masked figure said between bites. His voice was young—that of a boy. “I am Simon.”

  Albert eyed the figure closely. “You’re just a kid.”

  The squirrels seemed to sense his disrespect. They leaped at him and scratched at his face and hands. He fell to the floor, screaming for mercy.

  “Minions!” Simon shouted, and the squirrels scurried back to his chair. “Please forgive them. They are very protective of me. After all, you’ve caused me a great number of headaches recently. You’ve been meddling in my affairs, Albert.”

  Albert knew at once the boy was talking about the bank robbery. He was preparing to run when the goon clamped a giant hand on Albert’s shoulder. Albert couldn’t move an inch.

  The boy smiled. “Welcome to my secret lair. It’s just temporary. As soon as I have the funds I will build something a little more permanent and with a lot fewer termites. For now, it’s the perfect hiding place and it keeps my friends happy.” One of the squirrels hopped on to the boy’s shoulder and twittered something in his ear. The boy laughed as if he had just heard a hilarious joke.