From the beginning, Lynne could tell her latest contact was hiding something. Something was off about him, for sure. Lynne knew by just laying eyes on him. His shifty walk, his bad wig and hunched posture made him look like a low rent Riff Raff from a way, way off-Broadway production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or something you might see on public television, with their low budgets and limited resources. He was clearly hiding something, and Lynne felt like she could almost pin him from somewhere. He was goofy-looking but familiar. It had been years since she’d left the Agency, but her detective skills were autonomic, as natural and unstoppable as breathing. Her services were now provided to anyone who could pay the fee, and judging by Mrs. Whitfield’s lodgings, payment would definitely not be a problem.
Still, though, why all the secrecy? Why the private flight from New York, and why was there no cell phone service here? Lynne looked at her phone and saw she had zero bars—the same as it had been when she first arrived at the property.
Three months of cryptic e-mails and phone conversations, followed by a week of shadowy meetings with half-glimpsed figures in overnight parking garages, brought Lynne here. The person, or people, Lynne had met with had seemingly studied every trope from detective movies. Voice modulators, cryptograms, and a strange fixation on detailed maps—but curiously not on coordinates—were the hallmarks of their conversations. They had even managed to find long trench coats and fedoras to almost complete the look—all that was missing was a dense fog of cigarette smoke, but strangely, none of them smoked.
Lynne ordinarily wouldn’t have bothered with all the hassle, as she had much better—and much more profitable—uses for her time, but there was something strangely compelling about it all. It felt good to be back in the world of shadows again, following clues wherever they led. It was invigorating, the old familiar thrill, one that investigating bogus insurance claims simply could not match up to.
The man who had introduced himself as George motioned to Lynne that she could move into the next room, but she had no intention of turning her back on this guy.
“Lead the way, George,” she said.
He nodded quickly, which jostled his wig. He clasped a hand to his head and walked on through a long, featureless wood-paneled hallway, eventually leading them to a heavy oak door.
“Go ahead, madam,” George said. “Mrs. Whitfield is expecting you.”
“Yeah, I’d imagine so, seeing as she went through all this trouble to get me here. But I’ll tell you something, George, I’m not setting foot in there until you tell me what’s going on.”
“Mrs. Whitfield will—”
“Mrs. Whitfield will see me when I’m ready to see her, and right now I’m not, so why don’t you drop the act and let me know what this is about?”
George reached for his pocket, but Lynne grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back then shoved him into the door, knocking his wig off. The door swung open, loudly slamming into the wall. Lynne stepped into the room, pushing George ahead of her.
“Good work, gumshoe,” a long unheard voice said. Seated at a great mahogany desk was Lynne’s former boss.
“Chief?” she said.
“Right again—I salute you. Now, both of us want to know, would you mind letting Greg go?”
Lynne released her grip on the man’s arm. As he spun around, Lynne saw the man in the awful wig was actually Greg, her mentor and former senior agent in charge of training new recruits at the Agency. He had gotten older—they all had—but he was still recognizably Greg, a glimmer of playfulness in his eyes and a mischievous smile on his face.
“What is this?” Lynne said. “Chief, I thought you were dead.”
“Close, but not quite. There comes a time when you live in the world of cloaks and daggers when it eventually becomes more convenient if everyone thinks you’re dead. You can operate much more freely, to really do the things that need to be done. You can operate with impunity, if you have the proper setup. Or, if you’re like me, you can simply retire and rest your weary bones.”
“You faked your death so you could retire?”
“I’ve made my fair share of enemies over the years, the kind of people who wouldn’t mind settling old scores if given the opportunity. This was supposed to be a way to deny them that opportunity.”
“How do you afford a place like this?” Lynne asked.
“Why, from agents like you, of course,” Chief said. “Being the head of the Agency carries its bonuses when your agents are putting master criminals away for life.”
Lynne stared at the woman everyone had affectionately called Chief, grateful to see her again, and angry that she had been lied to. The conflicting emotions were not distracting enough, though, for Lynne to not notice Greg reaching for his pocket.
“Whatever you’re reaching for better be edible because I’m going to make you eat it.”
“Where’s the trust?” Greg said, goofy grin still on his face but his hand no longer in motion.
“Lynne, Greg has something to show you. You can trust us.”
“Why should I trust you? I went to your funeral, for God’s sake. It was an open casket.”
“It was inconvenient having to lie there during the service, and you gave such a wonderful, moving eulogy that I likely would have burst into tears if Greg hadn’t given me a death-mimic paralytic beforehand.”
Lynne remembered that speech. There were very few days when she didn’t think about it, about what Chief had meant to her, about what she had meant to the world. She kept us safe, Lynn had said, the way a mother cares for her children. She was enraged—how dare they do this to her? How dare they do it to the world?
“You’ve been lying to me for 20 years,” Lynne said. ”What makes you think I’m stupid enough to believe you’d stop now that I’ve found out about it?”
“Well, for one,” Greg said, “we let you find out about it, which means we wanted you to know, and for another, like you said, we’ve kept this secret for 20 years, so there has to be a particularly good reason to reveal it now.”
“Which is?”
“Before today, there were only supposed to be two people who knew I was still alive,” Chief said. “One was Greg, and the other was me. Three months ago, that showed up on the doorstep, addressed here, to me, not to my assumed identity, Mrs. Patagonia Whitfield. There is no mail service to this property. Whoever sent it was here, no more than a hundred feet away from me, and I didn’t even know it.”
Greg again reached into his pocket, and this time Lynne let him. He pulled out a Manila packing envelope, from which he took out a large chunk of granite. It was both smooth and weathered, as if carved with care the left to the elements.
“Is this what I think it is?” Lynne asked.
“Yes,” Chief said. “It’s a piece of Lincoln’s nose, stolen from Mount Rushmore.”
Greg handed the envelope to Lynne. She recognized the handwriting immediately—she had done exhaustive analysis on it at the Agency. It was hers, there was no question, and though the package had been signed, Lynne did not need to see it to know she was looking at the work of Carmen Sandiego.
“Oh, my God. She’s out?” Lynne said.
“Apparently, she escaped almost six months ago, just slipped right out,” Greg said. “Of course, she’s broken out before, but not since you caught her.”
“It was your arrest that really made them tighten down,” Chief said. “Armed guard and constant surveillance. Stealing the White House was the last straw—the authorities would take no chances after that.”
“Clearly, that’s not the case,” Lynne said. “So what happened? Who broke her out? Ivan Idea? Justin Case? Patty Larceny?”
At Patty’s name, Greg winced, just barely able to cover it up with a false smile. There was a wetness to his eyes, and though he had lied to her, Lynne was sorry she brought up Patty, who was obviously still a sore subject.
“None of them,” Chief said. “The old V.I.L.E gang disbanded without central leadership. They were nothing without Carmen’s intelligence and planning. This was obvious from their first post-Carmen heist. They tried to steal the Yellowstone Caldera. We don’t know for sure what happened, but we suspect several died in the attempt. Those we know for sure are still alive are inactive. Nothing of note is happening with their lives, except we hear that Top Grunge has sold a memoir of his life under Carmen’s thumb. We were able to secure an advanced copy. It’s tentatively title Where in the World is My Lost Innocence, and it’s shamelessly trading in 90s pop culture nostalgia, appealing to kids who grew up then and have no concept of the terrible crime wave Top Grunge and his ilk visited upon us. They find it cute, almost anti-authoritarian and harmless. We know better, those of us who lived and breathed it all those years ago.”
“Do you have security cameras?” Lynne asked.
“Of course. Deactivated for a period of 30 seconds on the day this was left. Just long enough to slip in and out.”
“Motion sensors?”
“They picked up nothing. Seismographs registered a low grade tremor, but that’s not unusual for this area.”
“Any chance she came by air?”
“If she did,” Greg said, “she did it using some sort of tech we’ve never seen before. We picked up nothing on radar or the security cameras.”
“You said they were down—any chance she got in and out in that time?”
“She would’ve had to be going supersonic, gumshoe,” Chief said. “And we definitely would have heard the craft if she were.”
“And she would’ve been moving way too fast for anything more than a flyby,” Lynne said. She was irritated with herself for not thinking her theory through before speaking. Even after all this time, she did not want to appear foolish to the Chief.
“Chief, obviously you’ve already thought this out, so why am I here? I mean, surely you didn’t go through this much trouble just to get me here so I can ask questions you’ve already answered.”
“It’s the questions we haven’t answered that we need your help with,” Greg said. “No one was able to think like Carmen the way you could. You were able to get inside her head.”
“I don’t do that kind of work anymore.”
“Neither do we,” Chief said. “Neither does anyone. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it needs to be done.”
Lynne tried to throw her mind back to that time, when she was a young agent. How had she done it, when no one else could? It wasn’t so much that she knew how to get into Carmen’s head—Lynne was sure no one in the world could think like Carmen Sandiego except the woman herself. It was more that Lynne was able to piece together the location of Carmen’s secret whereabouts from her underlings. Invariably, they’d slip up and get caught.
“Can I see that copy of Top Grunge’s book?” Lynne asked.
“Nothing at all in there about secret bases,” Chief said. “We’ve looked.”
Greg handed her the book, which had a truly ridiculous cover photo of Top Grunge riding his motorcycle, large plumes of dust kicked up behind him. He was outrunning a red-gloved hand in the skyline.
God, Lynne thought, I can practically smell him on the cover. She remembered how it had been a test of will to stay in the interrogation room long enough with him to get anything useful. That had been the big breakthrough in the Carmen case. In the end, it hadn’t been anything Top Grunge had said that led to Carmen, but rather something he hadn’t said, something he left behind. A lottery ticket, with Carmen’s own handwriting, telling Top Grunge where to bring the loot. It was a lucky break, nothing more. Lynne doubted it would be that easy this time.
Lynne opened the book and saw it was being published by a major publishing house. She turned to the dedication and was about to turn to the next page when something struck her as odd.
The dedication was To the lost, in reference to those that died during the Yellowstone heist. Then, underneath, there was Play your lucky numbers when you get where you’re going: 44, 4, 00, 01, 10, 70, 00.
“What do you make of that?” Lynne asked, handing the book over to the Chief.
“Not much. It’s a reference to the lotto ticket you found that gave us Carmen. These were the numbers on the ticket.”
The wall behind the Chief’s desk opened up, revealing a large monitor. In the top right corner flashed the words Incoming Transmission.
“Greg, did you butt dial again?” Chief asked.
“No, I didn’t.”
“No one has this number,” Chief said.
Lynne steeled her gaze. “I know someone who might,” she said.
Chief pressed a button on her desk and turned around to face the vidphone screen.
And there she was, like a sudden rush of memory. Her hair was white, and she had lines around her eyes, but there was no doubt Carmen Sandiego was calling them. Her red fedora cocked over one eye, that permanent grin in control of her lips.
“Chief,” she said. “It looks like you’ve recovered nicely from your dirt nap.”
“Where in the world are you?”
“In the world is specific enough, I think.”
“What do you want, Carmen?” Chief said.
“I just thought I would share—since we’re such old friends—that I’ve completed my masterpiece. I’ve stolen the world.”
“How’s that?” Greg asked. “How do you steal the world?”
Carmen pushed a button just out of range of the camera. There was a loud sound of machinery kicking into life behind her. “Anyone know how fast the earth’s rotation is?” she asked.
“Sure, that’s, um…carry the 2….” Greg said.
“1,040 miles per hour,” Lynne said.
“Exactly right! Now, use the display behind you and tell me how fast we’re going.”
Chief turned behind her, and on the screen where 1,040 MPH was normally displayed, there was 1,045.
“How is that possible?” Chief said.
“When you’ve stolen the earth,” Carmen said, “you can drive it at whatever speed you choose.” Carmen pressed the button again, and the rotational speed dropped back to where it belonged.
“You’ll never get away with this, Sandiego!”
“I already have, Chief. That’s what I do. I get away with everything.”
The screen on the vidphone went dark.
“That sticky-fingered filcher!” Chief cried. “She finally did it. She’s won.”
“No,” Lynne said. “She may have stolen the world, but she hasn’t won.”
“What do you mean?”
“We need to get a team ready, and fast,” Lynne said. “I know where she is.”
“What? How?” Greg said.
“She wasn’t lying when she said she was in the world—she just didn’t think we’d be smart enough to figure out what she meant.”
***
The Ultramax Security Prison does not allow visiting hours. Its location is undisclosed, and is kept a matter of international security.
Lynne was instructed to walk down the steel paneled hallway and to follow the magnetized corridor to the end. The walls were stark, with no adornment. At the end of the hall, enclosed in a laser grid of high-intensity beams and erratic, randomized lethal electric pulses, was Carmen Sandiego. Lynne was surprised to see they had let her keep her hat. Her trench coat had been replaced with faded orange prison issues.
“I tried to tell them orange just isn’t my color,” Carmen said. “But they didn’t listen.”
Lynne realized as she approached that she hadn’t really settled on what she was going to say. She had of a number of things, but none of them seemed right.
“Are you going to make me ask, or can we get right to it?” Carmen said.
“What do you mean?”
“Fine—I’ll ask. How did you know where to find me?”
“I pieced it together. The ‘lucky numbers’ in Top Grunge’s book, the same ones that were on the lotto ticket with your handwriting.”
“The GPS coordinates to the Yellowstone Caldera.”
“Right. Top Grunge was never the brightest star.”
“I would’ve settled for a human being. That was too hard for him, I suppose.”
“That failed heist when you were first busted wasn’t a failed heist at all, was it?”
“Of course not. V.I.L.E was preparing the area for me.”
“For 20 years?”
“Oh no,” Carmen said. “It only took a year or so to set up the base. What took 20 years was developing the way I was able to get to the Chief’s house without being detected.”
The lights went out with a thrumming pulse, but the lasers and the electricity stayed on. Carmen smiled as the ground began to tremble. Alert sirens blared in the background, but Lynne barely heard them. She was transfixed by what was happening in front of her. The ground next to Carmen pushed up, exposing a large drill tip, and then a large, cylindrical tube, on the side of which was written the name of the vessel, Rock-A-Fella.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” Carmen said, “the underground awaits.”
Carmen stepped into the hole the drill made and was gone. The power came back on, and guards came barreling into the room.
“What? How did she—” one of the guards started to ask.
“How did she do it?” Lynne said, interrupting. “She hid it. For almost 20 years, she hid it: Rock-A-Fella.”
Zach Davis is a purveyor of goofy tales masquerading as profound. His work has been cluttering the Internet and print anthologies for a decade now. Some of the places who decided to print his stuff include: Carve, Berkeley Fiction Review (upcoming, in collaboration with Christen Davis), The Offbeat (upcoming), Drunk Monkeys, Bartley Snopes, and The First Line. He and his wife are very excited for the new season of Vanderpump Rules.