Louise felt Tristan’s stare. She made the mistake of glancing up and meeting his eyes. He looked puzzled. She realized that her reactions to what she’d found must have shown on her face.
She ducked her head, heart pounding. Mr. Kessler was a horrible, self-centered man but she didn’t want to be responsible for getting him killed. What were they going to do?
First period, they had their final in Math. Louise raced through the questions, scribbling out the work with her stylus. She turned in the test slickie ten minutes into class.
“What? No artwork this time?” Mr. Nakagawa asked. Normally she spent the entire class doodling in the margins when they had a test; it amused her that the software allowed an array of colors and line thicknesses.
“Can we use our tablets?” Jillian joined her at his desk. For some weird reason they weren’t allowed to use their phones at school, but tablets supported the same texting software.
Mr. Nakagawa flicked his fingers, indicating that they could sit down. “No talking.”
Tristan watched them with eyes narrowed, stylus poised over the questions. Surely he was just making a show at struggling with the test. He was old enough to get a doctorate degree. Why was he even taking the test? He’d only been in class for a day!
Mr. Nakagawa tapped on his desk loudly. “Eyes on paper.”
Tristan focused back on his test, answering faster than before.
The twins sat down and Louise texted Jillian what she had figured out.
“Obviously we turn Kessler over to the authorities and let them deal with him,” Jillian texted.
“We need evidence,” Louise texted back.
“We could restore the data and then send it to the police,” Nikola offered.
Louise eyed her tablet. She hadn’t thought it was possible for someone to “overhear” text messages between two people, but the babies were bored. They’d obviously figured it out. “Yes, do that.”
Jillian eeped in surprise, earning a loud knock from Mr. Nakagawa. She pressed her mouth tightly shut on any other exclamations and texted furiously, “If you restore the data, the plans for the magic generator and the decoy Tinker Bell spotlight will also be restored.”
“We need to know if he made more than one trigger,” Louise typed. “There could be a second bomb.”
Jillian flinched as if hit. “Okay, okay, restore the data but don’t send to police!”
“We could delete our stuff back off,” the babies offered.
It seemed like a simple fix, but most likely the FBI would seize the printer and examine it every possible way including under a microscope, because they would need evidence to convict Mr. Kessler. If the twins turned Mr. Kessler in, then the magic generator would be found. Erasing the info would only make them look guilty — guiltier.
Louise shook her head. “We need something else as evidence. Something that ties him to Roycroft or the bomb.”
Jillian leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling a moment before texting, “Maybe we could get him to confess. If he tells the police that he was involved, they don’t need evidence.”
“He’ll never confess,” Louise texted. “He’d be facing the death penalty.”
“New York doesn’t have the death penalty,” Nikola stated.
“It’s an act of terrorism,” Louise texted, while Jillian replied with, “It’s a federal case.”
But perhaps Jillian had the right idea.
“We could send Kessler an anonymous letter saying that if he didn’t confess to creating the trigger to the bomb on his 3D printer, that we—”
Her tablet was suddenly jerked out of her hands. She yelped in surprise as Tristan glanced at the screen and his eyebrow rose.
“Kessler?” He said it like he was only mildly surprised.
Mr. Nakagawa knocked loudly.
Tristan handed back her tablet and went back to his seat.
Flying Monkey knew.
He’d only glanced at her tablet for a moment. Nikola’s text had scrolled out of view. The babies were safe from him, but Mr. Kessler was a walking dead man.
Maybe. Assuming that Ming didn’t want him to make another bomb.
They had to act faster than Louise wanted to. Tristan had taken his own tablet out and was typing something.
“We need to restore the data on the printer,” Louise texted.
“We’re doing it,” Nikola replied.
“As soon as we get a copy, we need to send it to the FBI so they’ll act now.”
“He got the printer’s memory deep-scrubbed, but the programs were automatically copied to the administration system.”
Louise had assumed that he’d deleted those, too. “He didn’t wipe those?”
“No. He doesn’t have clearance to do that.”
Neither did the twins, but that didn’t stop them. Was Mr. Kessler really so stupid that he couldn’t hack the school’s system? Or did he think that the school board simply wouldn’t understand the code that they were looking at?
She gasped as the log showed that he’d printed three triggers, one day after another, during the first week of March. According to the media, Roycroft’s business had promised to deliver all packages during the next Shutdown. He could only make the guarantee because of a well-exploited loophole in the treaty that let US customs prescreen shipments and then keep them in guarded storage areas prior to Shutdown. The EIA then would do a cursory check on the seals and pass the shipments quickly through the quarantine zone. Using Roycroft’s records, the FBI had tracked all the thinly disguised bomb components to Elfhome. None of them should have gotten past the US customs, as the treaty banned them. In addition to the quarantine zone expansion, the UN was also debating closing the loophole so that all goods would pass through EIA. Since Ming controlled the EIA, he would effectively control everything in and out of Pittsburgh.
What wasn’t clear was how many bombs had been made with the goods sent to Elfhome. The EIA paperwork claimed that Roycroft only transported one crate, but it also claimed that the crate contained a large ironwood chest. Had there been more than one bomb? Where were the other two triggers?
Louise created a temporary e-mail account, making sure it couldn’t be traced back to them. She composed a short message that stated simply that Mr. Kevin Kessler of Perelman School for the Gifted had printed the enclosed program on a 3D printer at the school to create the trigger. She hated that she hesitated at sending the message once she was done; the lives of hundreds of people might be at stake. Still, it was putting Jillian and Nikola and Joy at risk, and it scared her.
Was she doing the right thing? There was no sense of right or wrong. Pure logic said that she had to act, and quickly. Steeling herself, she hit “send.” The message vanished into the Internet and she felt nothing but continued unease.
Mr. Kessler vanished that afternoon. He’d left his phone on his desk in the annex, rushed down twelve flights of stairs, careened through the seventh-graders returning from lunch, and bolted out of the building. The FBI arrived an hour later with warrants. They started to dismantle the technology annex with frightening thoroughness. When they discovered the triggers in the storage room, school was hastily dismissed.
It was chaos on the street. The bomb squad was assembling outside as teachers herded out the students. Louise kept a firm hold on Tesla’s leash as the twins headed toward the subway. She hoped that they could slip away unnoticed by Tristan, but he fell into step with her before they reached the station. The platform display had Mr. Kessler’s photo; it was captioned: Police search for teacher bomber; bombs found at private school.