This time I was deemed too big a threat to be left in the Big Office jail. Instead, the security force decided to remove me from the property immediately. I was yanked back to my feet and hustled away amid a scrum of agents.
"I'm not an assassin!" I protested. "I've been set up!"
"You just tried to blow up the Little O," an agent growled in my ear. "That looked like an assassination attempt to me."
I looked around desperately searching for the Little O, hoping she would come to my rescue and admit that she'd brought me on board as an undercover agent, but Orkney and another set of security agents had already rushed her off somewhere else. Either they were concerned that another bomb might go off, or they simply didn't want her to get wet from the sprinklers and catch a cold.
The agents pulled me into the tube lobby." O'Doyle send us to the..." said the security agent before pausing. The tube lobby was bathed in darkness and the squishinating mechanisms were frozen in place. The tube operator who controlled it was frantically leafing through the user's manual while on hold with tech support.
"What happened here?" the security agent demanded.
"It just went down," the tube operator said.
The security agents glared at me accusingly.
I was rushed outside, into the wind tunnel between the Big Office and the BOB. The photographers and journalists were no longer merely lounging around. The explosion was big news, and they were doing all they could to record it. A hundred cameras were documenting the flaming wreckage, though they quickly shifted to me as the security agents dragged me past.
"I didn't try to blow up the Little O!" I argued. "Someone else did. I saved her life!"
No one responded. It was possible no one had heard. The agents were all talking among themselves and were now being barraged with questions from all the reporters: "What happened?" "Was that boy responsible?" "What's his name?" "Is the Little O hurt?"
One agent, a girl who appeared to be very important, stopped to inform the reporters that the Little O was fine—"thanks to the brave actions of the Big Office Security Force"—but that no further questions would be answered at this time.
A black sedan with tinted windows and the Odd Squad seal on its side skidded to a stop in front of us. I was tossed into the backseat and locked inside.
The car was quite luxurious, but there was no doubt that I was trapped in the back. There was that same plate of thick, impenetrable glass between me and the front seat, but this time there were no locks or handles on the inside doors for me to let myself out. I was basically in the world's fanciest squad car. After the cacophony outside, it was surprisingly quiet. The din of the reporters was now only a distant murmur.
In the new silence, I realized my ears were still ringing from the explosion. There was a low, constant hum inside my head.
A tough-looking agent with a crew cut and sunglasses, despite the fact that it was cloudy and gray outside, sat at the wheel of the car. Another agent, this one looking even tougher, slid into the passenger seat. "Go," he ordered.
The driver hit the gas and the car lurched forward. Two black SUVs, identical to the one I'd been in with the Little O, swerved into position in front of us and behind us. Sirens on them wailed and the traffic in the street obediently pulled over. Our small motorcade raced off the Big Office property.
I swiveled around to look out the back window. The Little O's office was still on fire, sending clouds of smoke billowing into the sky. A gaping hole had been torn in its famous white wall like a handful gouged out of a wedding cake. A flaming footstool, flung out by the explosion, was lodged in the branches of a tree.
Oh boy, I thought. I'm really going to be in trouble for this one.
Last month, I had accidentally blown up the school principal's office and had been punished with immediate expulsion from The Odd Squad Academy. Now I'd blown up the most important building in The Odd Squad. For all I knew, I'd get kicked off the planet for that.
Hundreds of passersby had become spectators. They crowded the sidewalks, taking pictures with their phones. Thousands more were coming, pouring out of office buildings and rushing over in waves to see what had happened. Some paused to photograph my motorcade, thinking it might be important, then went right back to photographing the burning office again.
I scanned the crowds, hoping that O'Cyrus or Orica might be among them, but I didn't see a single familiar face.
"I didn't try to kill the Little O," I said to the agents in the car. "I was only used as a pawn by people who did want to kill her."
I figured they probably wouldn't believe me, but it couldn't hurt to try. I didn't even know if they could hear me through the glass barrier between us.
They could. The tougher-looking agent in the passenger seat turned to face me. Despite the dreary day, he was wearing sunglasses too, but I could tell he was glaring at me from behind them. "Who are you working for?" he asked.
Unfortunately, I couldn't tell him the truth. My mission for the Odd Squad was unofficial, Instead, I said, "I'm not working for anybody. I'm a friend of Jason's."
"You two didn't look like friends to me."
"Whoever did this planted a bomb in my jacket," I insisted. "I'm guessing they waited until they knew I was inside, then used a remote radio trigger. That means they were probably close to the Big Office, keeping an eye on me. If you don't act now, they'll get away!"
"Remote radio trigger?" the tougher-looking agent asked suspiciously. "You know an awful lot about how bombs work for someone claiming to be innocent."
"I am innocent! The real bad guys are still out there!"
"I'm sure they are," the agent agreed. "No single person could mastermind an operation like this. Which is why you need to tell us who you're working for. Now. If you don't . . . there will be consequences." He said the final word as ominously as he could.
"Consequences?" I repeated. "Like what?"
The agent didn't reply. Instead, he gave me a malicious smile.
"Where are you taking me?" I asked.
"Where we can get the truth out of you," the agent replied.
"I'm telling you the truth," I pointed out. "You're just not listening to it."
The motorcade veered onto the Ellington Avenue Bridge—and stopped dead in traffic. A massive road construction project was underway, doing repair work to the bridge. Two construction cranes loomed overhead, maneuvering heavy loads of metal and cement. One side of the bridge was completely shut down to traffic and was instead filled with dozens of trucks and hundreds of workers. Traffic was forced onto the other side of the bridge, which narrowed to one lane in both directions. Even though we had our sirens on, there was no shoulder for the cars ahead of us to pull over on.
"Instead of dragging me all the way to a torture chamber or something," I said, "why don't you call agent O'Cyrus? He's a friend of mine. He'll vouch for me, and we can get this whole thing straightened out."
Once again, the tougher-looking agent didn't reply. Although this time, he wasn't doing it to make me uneasy. He was distracted by the traffic. "Why'd you go this way?" he asked the driver angrily. "You know this road's a mess."
"I was following them," the driver said, pointing at the big black SUV in front of us. "If you've got a problem with the route, talk to those guys." "There's like a hundred apps that tell you the fastest way from place to place," the tough-looking agent griped. "Those guys can't figure out how to use one of them? There's a crisis happening and we're stuck in traffic."
I began to grow nervous, and it wasn't merely because I'd been framed for the attempted assassination of the Little O and arrested by the Big Office Security Force. All that was bad enough, but now we were sitting ducks. We were out over the Don River, boxed in on both sides by our own SUVs, and THE ORGANIZATION was on the loose. Given everything that had happened that day—and Orica's concern for my safety that morning—it seemed our current position was a very bad place to be.
I glanced all around us, on the alert for trouble. The roadwork appeared to be progressing normally, with trucks hauling loads and construction workers jackhammering and welding. . . .
Except for one spot. Behind us, some of the workers were looking about worriedly, as though something had startled them. I caught a glimpse of someone darting through the construction equipment.
I turned back to the front seat, where the agents were still bickering about the traffic.
"We should've taken Leslie Street," the tougher one was saying. "This one has been a disaster for months."
"Then why didn't you say something before we got onto it?" the driver asked.
"I was busy intimidating the suspect!" he exclaimed, then pointed to the SUV ahead of us. "They were supposed to be driving! If they wanted me to do the driving, they can feel free to do the intimidation."
"Uh, guys," I said. "I really think we need to get out of here."
"That makes two of us," the agent said. He leaned over and pounded on the car horn.
"What's that gonna do?" the driver asked. "We've got all these sirens going already. We're obviously Odd Squad vehicles. You think now that you've honked, all the other drivers are going to say, 'Oh, now I see it's an emergency' and drive off the bridge?"
The older agent simply honked the horn again.
All the other drivers started honking too, pounding on their horns in frustration. The bridge became a cacophony of car horns.
Amid all the clamor, I heard a dull thud right beside me.
I spun around to see a brick had slammed dead center in the middle of the window leaving a web of cracks spreading across.
In quick succession, several more bricks thudded into the windows of the car, making a series of webs across the passenger side.
The security agents instantly forgot all about the traffic.
Someone was trying to kill us.
A/N: Good to be home again. Back to updating the fic and pretending Odd Squad isn't canceled :)