The Secret of Rover (31 page)

Alex and Alicia exchanged anxious looks.

“Soon,” said her uncle painfully. “We know you're waiting and—and I'm sorry.”

There was nothing that either Katie or David could say to that. So moments later, Alicia said good night, and the three residents of the safe house headed off to bed.

“I should be happy,” said Katie gloomily as she and David climbed the stairs. “I mean, we did this huge thing today.”

“What?” said David sarcastically. “You're not happy?”

She ignored the sarcasm. “I know he said ‘soon,' David, but did you see their faces? What was that about?”

“I don't know.”

“Does ‘soon' mean tomorrow, or the day after that? Does it mean, ‘Soon we'll tell you they're dead?'”

“Look, I don't know,” her brother repeated. “But I do know this: This can't go on forever.”

“Which means . . . ?”

David sighed. “Which means I don't know if it'll be tomorrow, or the next day, or next month, for that matter. But eventually, we're going to find out. Eventually, they have to tell us
something
.”

But they did not find out the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. Instead, the most frustrating part of living in the safe house—the information blackout—continued.

If anything, in fact, it was worse. Before the capture of the Katkajanians it had been aggravating not to know what was happening. Now it was scary, too. David and Katie had seen too much. They could no longer assume that the adults who were managing this crisis knew what they were doing. They could no longer simply trust.

What they saw in their uncle did not reassure them. Alex looked weary and tense. He tried to come home for dinner, and most nights he did. But he was never there on time, and he never seemed to finish his meal before rising
from the table with a distracted face and returning to the War Room to resume the search.

Then came a night when Alex did not go back to the War Room.

For the first time since they had been at the safe house, he joined Katie and David for dinner on time. He sat down to eat with them, and tried to ask them questions about their schoolwork. But his conversation and his smile were strained. Though they tried to answer what he asked, they sensed his mood and soon a gloomy silence fell over the table. At last Alex put down his fork, pushed back his chair, and sat staring at the floor.

Katie and David exchanged a look. “It's not going well, is it, Uncle Alex?” asked David bluntly.

“No,” said Alex after a moment. “No, David, it's not.”

Katie flushed with fear. “Are they—are they—”

“They're not dead,” said her uncle woodenly.

“Then there's still a chance!” said David.

“They're not dead,” Alex repeated, and his voice was terrible. “But Katie, David: I'm afraid we're running out of time.”

“Uncle Alex,” said David fiercely, “what is it? What is—”

“They're our parents!” cried Katie. “We need to know—”

“You're right,” said Alex, interrupting her. “You're both right. You do need to know. Kids, it's time we talked about Rover.”

None of them could eat, so they retreated to the living room for this all-important and long-delayed conversation. Outside the window the autumn sky was just beginning to darken. Alex sat tensely on the edge of the sofa, and Katie and David pulled their chairs up close, trembling with anticipation.

Their uncle spread his fingers wide and ran both palms through his hair. Then he sighed, lowered his hands to his knees, and plunged in.

“I'd better start from the beginning—the beginning of this search,” he said. “Which means the night you met Alicia.”

“
Weeks
ago,” Katie broke in.

“Correct,” said Alex gloomily. “Kids,” he continued, “when we first told our story to Alicia, you warned her that she had to hurry. You remembered what the kidnappers told you on the phone the day you discovered your parents were taken. You remembered that they threatened to kill their captives if you told anybody what they'd done.”

“Right.” We know this part, thought David.

“You said to Alicia, Find them fast, because now we've told.”

“And Alicia said they would,” said Katie. “She said they'd hurry.”

Alex nodded slowly. “She did hurry,” he said. “That very night, our government spoke to friends of the kidnappers in Katkajan.”

“We know their friends?” Katie was aghast. “We know who they are?”

“It turns out we had a pretty good idea,” said Alex grimly. “We knew there was political trouble in Katkajan, we knew who was behind it, and we'd been watching 'em for a while. So we asked some people on the fringes of that group to pass a message to the guys who have your parents. The message—well, it hinted that we'd negotiate. We sort of implied that we'd cut a deal. You know”—he searched for words—“we let them think America would do what they wanted, politically, if they'd give back your mom and your dad and your sister.”

David was both relieved and confused. He wanted his parents and Theo back, of course. But could this be right? “Great,” he said uncertainly.

“We won't really do what they want,” added his uncle hastily, seeing David's confusion. “We never do, with kidnappings. You can't. You encourage these people, and then there's no end to it. They kidnap again and again and again—”

“We get it,” said Katie miserably.

“But if they
think
you might negotiate, then you've bought some time. That's the idea, anyway. You
pretend
to negotiate. You do it slowly. And while you're going back and forth, you're quietly searching for them. You figure out where they are, and then you pounce.”

“How do you search?” said Katie, beginning to see.

“Rover,” said David eagerly. “Uncle Alex, I bet you use Rover.”

“You're right,” said Alex. “You're absolutely right. David, Katie, Rover is in the War Room, and we've been working with it to find your parents.”

“Working how?”

“I'm getting to that. Kids, do you know how they used to find missing people in the old days? How they still do, in some places?”

David and Katie were silent.

“They used dogs,” their uncle said. “They used a special kind of hound that was trained to sniff people out. The reason hounds can do this is that no two people are alike. Each of us has our own unique smell, and the dogs perceive that. So you give the hound something that belonged to the missing person—a shirt, for instance, or a jacket. The dog sniffs the thing, registers the smell, and follows the scent to wherever the person—”

“Rover!” cried Katie. “That's why it's called Rover!”

“Exactly,” said her uncle. “Our invention is called Rover because it's like a hound dog—a very high-tech one.”

“It smells?” Despite himself, David was impressed.

“Yes, actually,” said Alex with modest pride. “As far as we know, it's the only thing like it that does smell. But it's better than that. A dog can only smell what's in front of its nose. Our Rover, though, can smell what's miles and miles away. You just have to load in the scent you want
it to find—from an old sock or whatever you have—and then it sends out its sensors and matches that smell to the real person, wherever that person may be.”

“That's very cool,” said David, impressed despite the circumstances: His mom and dad had made that.

“And that's not all,” said Alex. “You know, a person's scent isn't the only unique thing about them. It's not the only thing you can use to search them out.”

“Fingerprints,” said Katie.

“Yes. But those are pretty hard to detect from a distance. Not that we didn't try.”

“So what are we talking about?” said David.

“Well, each face is different,” said Alex. “That's easier, because while fingers point down, faces point up and out. So Rover can see them better. And not just faces, either. Each eye is different. And each gait.”

“Gait?”

“Yes—meaning the way you walk. If you give Rover a video of someone walking, it can pick that person out on a city street, miles away, by their gait.”

“OK, I'm impressed,” admitted David.

Katie was not surprised. After all, she had recognized Trixie's distinctive heavy footfall from across the street. But she didn't pause to consider this. She did not want to be distracted with their parents not yet found. “Is that all?” she asked.

“Not quite,” said Alex. “Voices work too. They're just as
unique as smells and faces and gaits. And they're unique from the first day of life, by the way. Each and every baby, even, has his or her own special cry. If you feed that cry into our Rover, Rover can find that baby.”

“Theo!” said Katie. “What about her cry?”

Uncle Alex's face had begun to brighten as he pursued the distracting subject of Rover. Now it collapsed again into gloom.

“Well, that's just it,” he said. “We don't know Theo's cry. There's no recording for Rover to work with. It can't find what it's never heard. It has to have something to recognize.”

“Mom and Dad have socks and shirts,” said David. “Lots and lots of socks and shirts. And most of them are still at home.”

Uncle Alex nodded. “We've been trying that,” he said. “We've been back to the house—we've been all over it. But everything we've found has been corrupted.”

“What does that mean?”

“Corrupted . . .” Alex searched for words. “Messed with; touched. It's got other people's smells on it now. Rover can't get a clean read of your parents' scents. Those animals,” he added angrily. “They're thieves; they're snoops; they're rummagers. They handled every single object in your house.”

“Keep looking,” said David fiercely. “Don't give up.”

Alex shifted unhappily in his seat. “Well, that gets me
to the problem,” he said in a miserable voice. “I'm sorry to say that it's getting rather late. The kidnappers won't negotiate forever.” From the struggle on his face, Katie and David could see that he had reached a part of his story that was very hard to tell. “They've given us a deadline, kids. They've named a date and a time, and they've said if we don't meet their demands by then, well—”

Katie screamed, and buried her face on her knees. “When?” demanded David.

“When is this deadline?”

“The deadline is tomorrow,” said Alex bluntly. “Tomorrow morning at six.”

Now Katie lifted her head and rose to her feet. Her hands were balled tightly into fists and her face was a mask of fury.

“And you're telling us
now
?” she demanded. “Our parents and our baby sister are supposed to die tomorrow—and you're telling us
now
?”

“If there was anything we could have used . . . ,” said Alex.

“All this time we've been begging! Begging for news. And you said nothing?”

“A movie of them,” continued Alex helplessly. “A recording on an answering machine. Or—”

“Or a song?”

Both of them turned at David's words. He, too, had risen and was frantically pacing the room. Now he wheeled around to face his uncle.

“Uncle Alex, we do have something. We have a song.”

“Your parents recorded a song?”

“No, we did. Katie and me.”

Alex was bewildered. “We're not trying to find you,” he said.

“Uncle Alex,” said David. “My mom and dad have our song with them. If we find it, we find them.”

Katie leaped to her feet, elated. “Oh!” she cried. “Oh, David! That's brilliant!”

“Somebody's going to have to explain,” said Alex.

“Our parents' cell phone plays a recording of Katie and me singing. It's their ringtone. We're playing the piano and singing this dumb song. The phone is in Katkajan, and the original recording is here, at home. So if we load that recording into Rover and then call the phone, then it'll ring and Rover can find it—”