Double Digit Read online

All of a sudden, a piece of paper emerged from the left side, slowly, like it was coming out of an ink-jet printer. I could barely see it in the dark room, but the feel of the paper was familiar and unmistakable. I reached into my backpack to pull out my phone and shone a little light on it. It was a five-dollar bill.

  For fun, I pressed 20 Enter. Vibrate, vibrate, twenty-dollar bill. I pressed 100 Enter. Vibrate, vibrate, one-hundred-dollar bill. I’d just made $125. I ducked my head under my blanket and turned on the flashlight app on my phone. In the brighter light, the bills looked absolutely real, including the 3-D overlay of the metallic eagle on the twenty-dollar bill. I remembered reading that, besides the linen paper, that eagle image was the thing that kept amateur counterfeiters out of business. The change in ink and printing process of that 3-D overlay made dollar bills nearly impossible to replicate.

  Where did Mr. Bennett get this money machine? I sat straight up as it hit me. Jonas Furnis has money now. And they have money because they have Adam Ranks.

  “What the . . . ?” Evidently my eureka moment had sent my backpack, laden with my laptop, flying over to John’s makeshift bed. He sat up too, rubbing his arm where he’d been hit.

  “Shhh. Come under here.” I checked to see that everyone else was sleeping and scooted over to make room for John under my blanket. Half asleep, he moved over to lie next to me, scooping his arm around me like it was the most normal thing in the world. I lay there for a second, smelling the John smell of his T-shirt and feeling the John feel of his shoulder underneath my head. It was a stolen moment, a cheap thrill at the expense of a sleeping man, but I’d take it. Because I was about to fess up to another lie.

  “So I saw your dad,” I whispered into his chin.

  “I know you love him, Digit. We’ll find him. Tell me about your dream tomorrow.” He was more than half asleep.

  I whispered an inch from his ear, “I mean, I saw him for real, at the diner. He told me not to tell you, said that we needed to keep roaming around to buy him time to defend me. He’s found Jonas Furnis. He said they have money. And I know how they’re getting it.”

  All systems were go. “You saw my dad? Is he okay?”

  “Shhh. He’s making his way back to Langley. He gave me this.” I pressed the calculator into his hand. “Name a meal you really enjoyed.”

  “Okay, osso buco in Boston. The last meal I had before the silence started.”

  “How much did it cost?”

  “I don’t know, maybe a hundred dollars?”

  I typed 100 and Enter, and out it came, a hundred dollars. “We’re even.” John ran his fingers over the bill and held it up to the light of my phone.

  I explained about the calculator and what it did. “And the reason everybody isn’t counterfeiting all the time is that the 3-D overlay is so hard to do. But Adam Ranks knows how to do it. They have him, and he’s given them this technology.”

  John kept running his finger over the new bill in the dark. “If they could print endless money and had someone who could hack into the U.S. government’s most secure divisions, they could take down the system. They could overthrow our government.”

  I pulled the blanket up over our heads so we were in our own cave. I whispered, “Which is exactly what the CIA thinks I’m trying to do anyway. Which is insane. I like the government and the roads and schools and stuff. Why would I ever mess with them?”

  “Obviously, to go to a toga party.” John still had his arms around me, as we lay staring at each other in the pitch-blackness. I had, as usual, a thousand things to say. All of them were going to make me vulnerable to having my heart ripped out again. John touched my face in a way that made me want to cry. “I can’t tell if you’re smiling or frowning,” he said.

  “Both.”

  “I know exactly how you feel.”

  Flashlights illuminated the room. I pulled our covers down to see what was going on and saw Danny sitting up, rubbing his eyes, and three men with guns surrounding us. Spencer was standing behind them so I figured they were the CIA or the FBI. Man, I’d really screwed up bigtime.

  John jumped immediately to his feet but was knocked flat on his back by the butt of a rifle. “Hang on!” I grabbed the smallest guy by the arm. “He’s with you guys. I’m the one that did the bad thing. Jeez, I’m coming.”

  “You’re all coming. You’ll come to work, and this guy and the clown in the skirt can come to die. Nice work, Spencer.” The one in the middle gave her a little nod.

  John got up, holding his stomach, and came to my side. Nothing made sense to me. Well, not until they bound our wrists with plastic handcuffs and marched us off to meet Jonas Furnis. Spencer gave her hair a little flip as I passed her.

  Bitch.

  TREE-HUGGING DIRT WORSHIPER

  IT WAS A PRETTY SHORT DRIVE from Spencer’s cabin to Jonas Furnis’s place. I should have known that she wouldn’t have spent summers in a crappy cabin like that. Stupid.

  She rode up in the front of the van with her thug buddies, and John, Danny, and I sat on a long bench in the back. They stripped us of cell phones, laptops, and my new magic calculator. Danny looked like his world had been turned upside down. “You carry a calculator now?!”

  “It’s a money-printing machine; it’s theirs.”

  “Nice move. Next time you get your hands on a money machine, stick it down your pants, will you?”

  “At least I’m wearing pants.” Danny looked a little vulnerable, cuffed in a grass skirt. It reminded me of the time he was cast as Mary in his second grade Christmas pageant. (This sort of thing only happens in Los Angeles.) “Danny, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry you’re here and part of this. So sorry you’re not going to get to go to college and teach everyone at BU how to hula dance.”

  “It’s okay, Dig. I wasn’t going to college anyway.”

  “What? When did you decide that?”

  “Forever ago. I just don’t have the heart to tell Dad. I mean, he’s Mr. College, but it’s just not for me. I want to do things, not read about them. Like maybe I could be an electrician? Or a carpenter. Or an actor.”

  I looked at Danny and totally saw him as the love interest in any teen drama. He had the hair, the steady gaze, and the authentic coolness that would melt the audience. And he had great comedic timing, actually. “Acting, yeah, I could see that.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve got to help me talk to Mom and Dad. I mean, what could Mom say? She’s an actress and she, like, breathes that stuff. But Dad . . .”

  John snapped, “Uh, seriously, guys? Reality check? We’re being marched to our deaths and possibly the death of our nation. How about this: If my dad gets back here soon enough to save us, I’ll talk to your parents myself? Okay?”

  Embarrassed, Danny and I shut up as asked. But shutting up can be so much work. I asked John, “So you knew about Spencer?”

  “I suspected.”

  “But why?” Maybe suspicion of natural blondes was a universal thing?

  “It was a lot of things. Her story about the director’s reaction to your little crime seemed really out of character for him. He wouldn’t have taken it personally; he’s very pragmatic. He wouldn’t have waited for you to get to Langley; he’s very impatient. And he definitely wouldn’t have cursed; he thinks foul language is a sign of a weak mind.”

  “How would you know all that about him?”

  “He’s my godfather.”

  Danny rolled his eyes.

  John went on: “And the Farm? No one in the CIA, certainly not the director, would call Langley ‘the Farm.’ The Farm is an offsite training center for covert ops. They only call Langley the Farm in the movies. Everybody knows that.”

  “Everybody. Right.” Danny looked at John like he was from a different planet.

  The van stopped, and we were walked single file, me first, toward a long, low building. It was constructed log cabin style, but with an aluminum roof covered in polka dots. As we got closer to the building, the polka dots stopped me in my tracks. They were act
ually sculptures of butterflies, inlaid with small pieces of glass that reflected the light of the rising sun. They reflected every possible color of the rainbow, depending on their angle, and were arranged randomly. Each one looked as if it had just landed on the roof and was ready to take off again. Beautiful.

  A voice from the doorway called to me, “They’re made of solar panels, young Digit. Like them?” I looked toward the voice and saw a completely bald man, very thin and maybe in his early sixties, in jeans and a poncho. “Please come in. I’m Jonas Furnis. I’ll be your host.” All the thugs, including Barbie Thug, laughed at his joke.

  The guns in our backs led us toward him. Jonas Furnis put his hands on my shoulders, maybe in lieu of shaking my bound hand. “Ah, Digit. You’ve caused us so much trouble. But now, now you are going to make it all better. In a matter of days, we will consider ourselves even. No hard feelings. Ready to get to work, or would you like to have a look around?”

  Because I knew the get-to-work part of this story was probably going to end up as the Torture Digit Show, I asked to have a look around. Jonas took us into a small entryway that led to a square pool. Above the pool was a ten-foot-tall iron sculpture of a woman, whose hands reached up as if to support the ceiling. Water trickled through the bottoms of her feet into the pool. “It’s our potable water system. Rainwater flows from the roof through Mother Earth’s hands into the cistern. We have more than enough water for all of our needs. Come.”

  He walked us through a busy kitchen. Five people (and I mean normal people, not crazy goons bent on world destruction) washed glasses, squeezed juice, and carried baskets of eggs from the small coop outside. They looked peaceful in their work, if thrown back a bit in time.

  Jonas led us outside and along the perimeter of the compound. The building had been constructed entirely of driftwood and fallen trees. It was insulated by old blue jeans that he’d found at the Salvation Army. All the metal and glass had been rescued from condemned buildings and repurposed to create a truly beautiful structure.

  The compound sat on a quickly moving river, which provided constant hydro energy and food for the twenty-four people who lived there. He showed us the geothermal energy system that in the winter moved the heat from the earth into the building and in the summer moved the cooler air up. What wasn’t provided by these energy sources came from the sun, via the butterflies. It was a completely off-the-grid, zero-impact, super-green haven. I was having a hard time remembering that I was there against my will.

  “You see, we are living here peacefully and are taking nothing from Mother Earth that she does not want to give us freely.” Jonas finished the tour of the ground floor in his office. John and I were each offered a seat, while Danny shifted nervously behind us, probably for the first time regretting the whole grass skirt look.

  Jonas Furnis addressed John first. “You can stay as long as you don’t speak. Nod to indicate that you understood me.” John nodded, and Jonas turned his attention back to me. “Are you wondering why your government doesn’t encourage this type of lifestyle for its citizens? Sorry, was I reading your complicated little mind?” Kinda. “It’s because there’s no money in it for them. They are so ingrained in their system, their outdated utilities, the tax revenue from manufacturing and selling plastic nonsense. They believe they need to keep raping Mother Earth to survive. And they think I’m sick!” Nods and chuckles from the thugs in the doorway.

  His desk was an old wooden door balanced on two sawhorses. He had an assortment of maps and weather charts sprawled out as if we’d caught him during exam week. Perfectly squared to the upper-right-hand corner of his desk was a paperback copy of Silent Spring.

  He caught me staring. “Have you read it?”

  “I had to for AP Environmental Science.”

  “What did you think?” Oh great, we’re in a book club now.

  “I found it kind of depressing. But I know it made a big difference in your . . . in the environmental movement.”

  “It did. It made all the difference in the world. It’s the only reason we have birds anymore. If you work quickly, I might let you read it again.” He leaned back in his chair and placed both hands, decisively, on the table. “Now that I’m flush with cash, we are going to start fresh. And I mean you, me, and Mother Earth. Plus whoever else survives. There will be fewer people, and they will have no choice but to live off the earth in a cooperative way. When you’re ready, we’ll get started. You see what we’re doing here?”

  “No?”

  “Have you ever seen Little House on the Prairie?”

  Danny jumped in. “I totally love that show; it’s on late night cable. I had the biggest crush on Mary, even when she went blind.”

  “My apologies. I forgot to tell you: You don’t speak either.”

  “No, I have never seen it,” I answered.

  Danny threw his arms down in disbelief. I could hear his disappointment loud and clear: How could you possibly not have seen Little House on the Prairie? It’s classic television. You and your crazy math stuff that no one cares about . . . I was half grateful that Danny wasn’t allowed to speak.

  “It’s just an example, maybe familiar to a few night owls, of how people used to live with nature. They did not try to control it. When the sun went down, they slept. When the sun came up, they woke. Nature is here to control us, and we are best served to honor it and live within the boundaries it sets for us. You and I, Digit, we are going to give the earth back to Mother Earth. Once she is no longer under attack, she can get back to taking care of herself.” I thought back to the trees by the highway, all surviving on their own. No pruning, no sprinkler system. “In doing so, we are going to give the human race back to itself. We are going to shut down all the noise of the modern world. If you want a toy, you can carve it out of wood. If you want entertainment, you can talk to another human being. Sick people will die, rather than being kept alive artificially, and they will leave room for new life. In this way we will control the population so that the burden placed on our Mother can be alleviated.”

  To be honest, I think the scariest part of this conversation was that he seemed like the sanest person in the world. I could totally see how his followers walked away from their lifestyles to embrace this. I had a thousand questions for him. How deeply did he think we’d already injured the earth? Did he really think people could be retrained to live that way? What if there was an outbreak of some horrible disease because there was no medicine? Would he let us move forward in time for a minute to produce some?

  I only asked this one: “Why can’t you just educate people? Can’t you just spread your message? I mean, I feel like taking responsibility for what we are doing to the earth is stuff that most people can agree with.”

  He shook his head. “It’s too late. Think of your veins, how they move blood through your body. You are a living organism. If someone threatened your life, you would fight back. The rivers are Mother Earth’s veins. She is a living organism. She has been poisoned for so long that this is her time to fight back. I am here, sent as her soldier. She calls me the Guardian. We will eradicate much of what is killing her and allow a new world to prevail. After you are done, Digit, the U.S. government will be broke. I am building a new treasury just beneath where you are now sitting, and I will be the new government. Things will be done my way, her way.”

  Okay. Hmm. Less sane now. We’d gone a little off the rails. She calls him the Guardian? Like when she speaks to him?

  “She told me that she would send me a squire. I waited for a long time, and when my work was foiled by a teenager, I knew that it could not be an accident. Squires, in more chivalrous times, were teenagers, you see. You, Digit, you are to be my squire. Mother Earth has brought us together as her warriors. We shall save her together.”

  Um, squire? “Um, squire?”

  “Mother Earth whispered it to me years ago. She promised me a young helper. She told me again when I was in despair over our failure at Disney World. And I knew that she
meant you when I saw the dozens of photos of trees you have on your laptop. In your heart, you are a friend of the earth.”

  “Yeah, I like trees. A lot. But mainly they’re there because I’m . . .” I looked back in time to see Danny making a curlicue with his finger by his head to indicate that I am, in fact, cuckoo.

  “Because you are my squire. I am the Guardian, knighted by Mother Earth, and you are my young squire. You will accept this truth, and we will be victorious.”

  Um, yeah, okay. But if you make me dress up in tights and armor and stuff, I’m gonna flip out.

  Honestly, as maniacal as he seemed, I wasn’t really that scared. John was sitting right next to me, and I knew that Mr. Bennett knew where we were and had gone to fetch an army. Add to that the fact that John realized that Spencer was a lying criminal (even worse than me!), and I actually felt okay. I’d been in worse spots for sure. All I had to do was act like some weirdo’s squire, work as slowly as possible, and wait for the cavalry to ride in.

  “And what is it exactly that I’m going to do to make the U.S. government go broke?”

  “Simple. You are going to hack into the defense systems, as I’ve seen you do, and fire U.S. missiles on our petroleum, natural gas, and nuclear power facilities. You can leave the windmills. They please me.”

  Spencer delivered the final blow. “See, Digit? You get to spend the rest of your life working for the new government. It’s a dream job.”

  Those words hit me hard. I checked my watch and saw that it was 7:55 a.m., almost time for my meeting with Professor Halsey. Was Bass standing around waiting for me to go to coffee, or did he know? Of course I’d been mad when I thought Spencer was trying to steal my boyfriend and lead me to slaughter and overthrow my government. But at that moment, knowing I was missing that job interview, it got personal. My flight instincts kicked back in, and the first thing I needed to know was where we were.

  “What’s the velocity of that river out there?”

  Jonas seemed surprised that I’d taken an interest. “About four knots.”