Agent Q, or the Smell of Danger! Page 2

  “Now,” said Commissar Dlvlo, glowering and businesslike. “We suspect they will head north through the Montchanin Valley and attempt to cross the border at Guyencourt. This is the easiest route. I have called the border police at Guyencourt. I have spoken to them at length. I have given them instructions and descriptions of the children. Though I am in a lazy susan, I am not lazy.” She reached out, clutched the walls, and wheeled herself around. When she reappeared on the other side of the lazy susan, she had a computer printout on her knees. “We have stepped up the security in Guyencourt. It is a small town. No one can pass by there unnoticed. The monks and the children will walk right into our clutches.”

  “We need you, however,” said a crackly voice.

  “Who is that voice?” said Bntno.

  “That is Control, the head of the Ministry of Silence,” said Agent Mrglik.

  “Control is in the salt,” said Dlvlo.

  Mrglik picked up the saltshaker and adjusted it. “Control? Can you hear us? Greetings to Control.”

  The lid came off. Salt went all over the floor.

  “Pepper,” said Commissar Dlvlo. “He is in the pepper. I am of a hope I do not misremember and he is in the Parmesan.”

  Mrglik adjusted the reception on the pepper shaker, at which point Control said, “Informant Bntno, you will go north in a small plane with Agent Mrglik. You will drive up and down the Montchanin Valley, and there you shall assist the police and the border guards in finding these children and their monks. You know their faces. We wish you to find them for us.”

  “Do not fail us, Informant Bntno,” said Commissar Dlvlo, her arms, braced against the wall of the lazy susan, raised on either side of her as if she were casting some evil spell. “Do not fail us. We will be waiting here. We will be watching.” With a frightening look, she swung herself around and disappeared.

  Bntno nodded. He said, “Please do not eat all my Teddy Grahams.”

  Through the door, she explained, “We will not be waiting in your lazy susan. We wait in our headquarters. Our HQ. Understood?”

  Bntno nodded. He was sure he could capture those children.

  In an hour, he and Mrglik were taking off and flying over the jungle where he had last seen Katie, Jasper, and Lily. In two hours, he was passing over the Four Peaks, over Mount Tlmp, where no monastery now stood. He scanned the heights but saw nothing. It didn’t matter, he thought to himself; in any case, they’d find out where the monastery was soon enough.

  In three hours, he was high above the Montchanin Valley and, like the children, was headed for the border of Delaware.

  * Am I getting this right? I would hate it if my portraits of people from Delaware were in any way mistaken or misleading. If you are actually from Delaware, and you feel that there are inaccuracies in my portrayal of your state, I hope that you will write a note explaining the error, hop on your ostrich, ride through the jungle to the nearest mail rocket, have the Censor from the Ministry of Silence read your letter and cross out the illegal parts, clap it into the belly of the missile, and send it winging on its way into the civilized world.

  * I have translated all of the following dialogue from the original Doverian (the ancient tongue of Delaware). I had the help of a battered Doverian/English dictionary and a nice waiter at our local Delawarian restaurant, the Blue Hen Pantry. Prdo, the waiter, tells me my Doverian is not very good. The other day when I ordered a succulent Delawarian delicacy—flying squirrel on Triscuits—he slapped me with his order pad. I protested. He pointed out that I had dropped two syllables and switched a third, so I had not said, “Friend, please bring me the squirrel crackers,” but, “Hit me hard with paper, mister, special quick!”

  THE PLAN WITH THE VAN

  Winding their way down the north face of Tlmp, the monks passed through an oak savannah on a slant. The grasses were golden, the few trees hazy with light. Great boulders, larger than houses, reared up out of the meadow. The late afternoon sun caught on the crests of the duck-billed dinosaurs that browsed on the leaves.

  Lily was sorry they were leaving all this behind.

  She knew all the monks were sorry to leave Tlmp. They would walk on to their new home, where Vbngoom now rested, empty, somewhere in the impassable Newark Range to the northwest.

  The monks would wend their way up into new mountains. They would pass through new forests. They would find their ancient home crouched upon a new peak, its blue flames burning at its heart to welcome them.

  That is, this is what they would find if the Awful and Adorable Autarch of Dagsboro didn’t find them first. They knew he sought them.

  So, silent, brooding, the procession continued down the mountainside.

  When the evening fell, Lily sat listening to the lonely honking of the duck-billed dinosaurs from hilltop to hilltop. The gentle, lumbering beasts swished through the steep red pampas as the monks wove dinners out of grass.

  As Lily and Katie wandered around the camp, watching the preparations for the evening, Katie asked, “So what do you think of Drgnan? Isn’t he great?”

  Lily nodded. She thought Drgnan was very great. “He’s really nice,” she said.

  “I can’t believe he agreed to go to the dance with me.” Katie swung one of her arms around to get a crick out of her shoulder. “What do you think is the best thing about him? Of all the things?”

  Lily shrugged. She thought hard about Drgnan. “There’s a lot of great things about him,” she said. “I mean, he’s really kind, and he listens to you when you talk, and—”

  “He’s funny, too, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, he’s funny.”

  “And he’s really cute.”

  “Yeah. He is,” said Lily. She kept thinking about how good-looking he was.

  Katie said, “He really knows how to wear a robe. He never looks stupid or awkward in it. Like, if I had to wear a robe the whole time? I’d always be tripping over it. And I’d come out of the bathroom with the back of it tucked into my underpants.”

  Lily agreed, “He’s really graceful.” She frowned. “And he’s gentle.”

  “And he has those eyes,” said Katie. “It looks like he sees through you. Into your soul, you know? Your whole soul?” She put her hands together and made a kind of praying, pushing, diving motion with her hands, as if he were actually plunging into her soul from a high board and crashing into the blue, clear waters of her spirit.

  Lily said, “It’s really great that he thinks a lot about spiritual things.” She shrugged with one shoulder.

  “He’s amazing,” said Katie. “I could talk about him for another five hours.”

  “We should go find him and Jasper,” said Lily. “We need to set up our tents.”

  Later that night, as she lay in her sleeping bag, listening to the lonely cries of the dinosaurs on the savannah, Lily thought about Katie and Drgnan.

  Lily had never gone out with anyone. It was exciting to watch other people get crushes on each other, but it seemed like something that would never happen to her. Since fourth grade, she had occasionally had a little crush on some kid at school—Myron, for example, in her sixth-grade homeroom, whose thumbs were double-jointed and who could draw really amazing leopards; or, this year, Stuart, her study buddy from earth science class—but those were just stupid little pangs, and they didn’t matter much to her. She was too shy to really talk much to those boys. She hid behind her hair. She knew she wasn’t pretty, like Katie. Somehow, it seemed like only the pretty people really deserved to have their crushes work out.

  She hadn’t thought about it much before.

  And now it made her uncomfortable that she thought Drgnan was so great. So, so great. So amazingly, stupendously great. So great that she wished she could—

  But she had to be happy for Drgnan and Katie. They were two of her favorite people, and they really liked each other. Finally, here was a boy who Lily thought deserved someone as wonderful as Katie.

  So why didn’t she feel happier about it?

 
; Lily turned over and buried her face in the foam pillow. She made a silent vow that she would be absolutely thrilled for her two friends. No sulking. No wistfulness.

  After all, it was super for everyone.

  Outside, in the night, the duck-billed herbivores curled together beneath the oaks and succumbed to quacky, snoring slumber. Night was thick above the grasslands and the boulders, the foothills of the mountains. The stars turned in the heavens.

  The monks’ lookouts sat, staring into the night and eating apples.

  Everyone slept.

  The next morning they reached the great eucalyptus forests lower on the slopes, where they spied herds of centaurs watching their progress through the huge, spotted trees. The forest floor was woven with slivers of bark that smelled richly of earth and mint. In front of Lily, Katie and Drgnan were whispering and giggling, and Lily watched them with a kind of melancholy contentment. She told herself that she was happy for them. Jasper, of course, was in his element on a hike like this and kept putting his fists on his hips and taking measurements of the sun and the barometric pressure. He couldn’t wait to tell Lily his findings (“We’re headed north by northeast”), and she listened with pleasure.

  At one point, she asked him, “Jasper . . . do you and Drgnan talk?”

  She was wondering what Drgnan thought about Katie. She hoped Drgnan liked Katie back. For Katie’s sake. She really hoped it.

  Jasper looked at her oddly. “Of course we talk.”

  Lily said nervously, “What about? Like, personal things?”

  “Why, we talk about everything.”

  “Do you ever talk about . . .” Lily couldn’t make herself go on. She was too embarrassed. She just said, “Like what?”

  “Well, we have heart-to-hearts . . . about . . . you know . . . what you and Katie probably talk about: what tattoos we’ll get when we’re older. Which of us can slap higher on a wall. What the rules would be for a ball game with bikes that spit fire.”

  “Tattoos?” Lily said. She blinked in surprise, scraping away at her long bangs. “So what tattoos will you get?”

  “I’d like to have a bolt of energy. Or maybe an atom on my chest. Drgnan wants an infinity sign with googly eyes.”

  Lily thought about that for a minute. “You know,” she said, “he might be sorry about that one day.”

  “That’s what I told him,” Jasper agreed. “So I suggested he just get the infinity sign, and then he can use stick-on, adhesive googly eyes.”

  “That’s a really good idea,” Lily admitted, finding that the conversation had ended up in kind of a different place than she had hoped.

  Jasper hopped along until he was beside Drgnan. “Drgnan, my good fellow, Drgnan—I would give a silver solenoid to know where we’re going.”

  Drgnan explained to them, “Brother Grzo has not told me much. We are going down the mountain to reassemble the van. Brother Grzo himself shall drive it. Then we will head for the border.”

  “Which border?” asked Jasper.

  Drgnan explained, “There are three routes out of Delaware to the north.”* He counted them on his fingers. “There is a ferry from the great city of Wilmington that takes people to New Jersey. But the government watches carefully to see who comes and who leaves by this boat. The Ministry of Silence would stop us. This would be bad—very bad—because the Awful and Adorable Autarch of Dagsboro hunts always for monks from Vbngoom, to find out our secrets. So there are two other routes. One is the Newport Gap Pike, which leads through the Newark Mountains and across the Newark Steppe. It provides dangerous passage to hearty merchants from Kaolin who wish to take their wares to Elsmere and Minquadale. But it is a cold and a high road, and no van could drive across it.”

  “Why do we need the van?” asked Katie.

  “So we can pick up all the treasures scattered across the whole East Coast and return with them,” explained Drgnan. “We need a van. So we shall go straight north, up the Montchanin Road, and shall cross the border at the little village of Guyencourt, where the guards are sleepy and the dogs are fat.”

  He did not realize that in the previous chapter, the Autarch’s spies had guessed the monks would take exactly this route. He did not know he was describing an itinerary of catastrophe. He had not read the previous chapter at all.

  “Hey,” said Katie, who was always skeptical of something. “Why is it that most people’s names in this state don’t have hardly any vowels in them, but a lot of the names of places do?”

  Drgnan nodded sadly. “Since the Adorable Autarch seized power here, the other states have placed a vowel embargo on Delaware. For many years, no vowels—a, e, i, o, u, or sometimes even y—have come into this state. So no new names have those letters in them. The place names are old, but the people are young, and we have no vowels to spare.”

  “Okay. This is just stupid, because you’re using all kinds of vowels when you talk.”

  “N ’m nt,” said Drgnan, small-mouthed.

  “What?”

  “’m nt sng vwls.”

  Katie scrunched up her mouth and looked at him hard.

  Jasper started laughing.

  Katie thought about this for a minute. “Okay!” she said triumphantly. “Okay, what about this? If all the place-names have vowels because they’re old, then why does Vbngoom, the oldest place around, have missing vowels?”

  “It had vowels. Years ago.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “Yes, indeed. We gave them to the poor.”

  Katie scowled. “You . . . !” she declared indignantly.

  Drgnan looked off innocently into the blue sky.

  Katie whipped the back of his head with a strip of eucalyptus.

  By the next day, the wood had grown thicker, and so had the air. It smelled of some kind of laurel, which was (Lily sniffed) kind of like the smell of spicy food burnt. She loved the green. They were marching through the foothills of the mountains.

  Lily and some of the monks were getting apprehensive. They were approaching civilization. And soon they would come back within the view of the Autarch’s spies.

  Now, finally, there were signs of mankind. Occasionally they passed the huts of hermits. Then, a few hours later, they came to small farms where kids stood near split-rail fences and watched the silent monks in wonder. Then, an hour or two after that, they came to their first village.

  An old man in a straw hat joined them as if by some agreement. He led them to his barn. The procession walked into the barn on one side and right out the other door. But when they came out, they no longer had their pieces of the van.

  Without so much as a pause, they started to walk back into the forest.

  But they left several behind: among them, Drgnan Pghlik, Brother Grzo, Lily, Katie, and Jasper.

  From the barn came the sound of ratcheting and tinkering.

  A hundred and ninety-six monks, small and tall, walked away to the west. They spoke to no one. They were off to the Newark Mountains to rejoin their monastery on its new peak.

  “That’s that,” said Katie.

  Lily said, “I’m sorry to see them go.”

  “We’re on our way home, though!” Katie urged her, grinning.

  Lily nodded. “I’m glad,” she said. “I’m kind of tired.”

  “Sure,” said Katie. “But we’re almost out of here. We have the van. What could go wrong now?”

  “What, indeed, children?” said Brother Grzo, coming up behind them and putting his hands on their shoulders, smiling his crooked smile. “Once we have passed through the Pulaski Forest and the Montchanin Valley, as long as we are not attacked by bandits or trolls, and once we— . . . ah, or manticoras—bandits, trolls, or manticoras—or lions—bandits, trolls, manticoras, lions, wolves, bears, basilisks, flying squirrels, or nightmare dolls—”

  “Okay,” said Katie.

  “. . . and once we have eluded the government agents who will seek to arrest us and torture us to get us to tell them where the monastery has gone, and once we
have brought you across the border secretly without being recognized as monks or imprisoned deep in the dungeons of Fort Delaware with only a trickle of scum to drink and whatever toads leap in our lap to eat, and—”

  “All righty,” said Katie.

  “Well, then we shall be driving free as the plover flies, singing songs of ecstasy. Oh, joyous Brother Sun!”

  Suddenly, thought Lily, the odds didn’t sound so great.

  * You can see them on the map at the beginning of the book.

  ON THE ROAD

  Driving with monks was fun. Lily could not remember a better road trip. The four kids sat in the back of the van, playing cards. Katie kept losing and shrieking about it happily, punching Drgnan softly in the shoulder.

  Lily watched out the window as they came to the Delaware Canal. It was wide, brown, and smooth. They crossed a great stone bridge at a town called St. Georges, a collection of crazed half-timbered houses hanging over the river. Fishermen lay in hammocks slung between the stilts, their lines trailing. In a wide concrete plaza there was a market going on. People in robes and spiny hats sold citrus fruits from boxes. Bicycles loaded with geese joggled along muddy lanes.

  While the kids and the monks ate lunch at a barbecue stand, Brother Grzo questioned the people at the picnic tables around them about border security at Guyencourt. “We wish to cross the border. In these days, how firm is the fist of the tyrant there?”

  A merchant shrugged. “Not so bad. Unless they are searching for you. Then”—he shivered—“then I would not like to imagine. I watched a whole caravan drive into the security checkpoint and never come out the other side. I still, to this day, do not know where it went.”

  The monks and the kids did not stay long in St. Georges. After lunch, they got back in the van, waved out the window at a few friends in the market, then drove north into the depths of the Pulaski Forest. Soon the trees were tall and the wood was dark.

  One of the best things about road-tripping with monks is that monks are used to repeating chants over and over and over, so they really don’t mind songs like “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” or “The Song That Never Ends.”