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:
What should Louise say if Tristan asked how they knew that the bomber was Mr. Kessler? Should she admit she contacted the FBI? Did he think that she knew where Mr. Kessler went? Why was he still following them? What did he want?
They rode in strained silence to their station and got off.
As they walked down the steps to the street level, Louise realized there was nothing keeping Tristan from following them the whole way home. That they couldn’t go into their house and keep him out. It scared her, and that made her angry. If he wanted to pretend he was nine years old, she’d act like he was nine years old.
She spun to face him. “Listen, you stupid booger head! You’re making me mad! Are you some kind of pervert?”
“Booger head?” He took a step back, surprised by the attack. “What? I’m not a pervert!”
