But when would it come? That was the most pressing question now, for they needed to be ready when it did.
The Ten Men were standing up, their briefcases repacked and buckled closed, and were shaking hands all around as if they’d just concluded an agreeable meeting. Milligan still had not appeared. McCracken stuck a pencil behind his ear and walked over to the children. “Guess what?” he said in a tone of cheerful excitement. He knelt in front of Constance, who shrank away, avoiding his gaze. “You’re a lucky ducky, little one! You get to help McCracken!”
“Help you?” Constance asked.
“Oh, yes! You see, I’ve been going over things in my mind, and I’m still not satisfied with the way your story all fits together. I think you’re hiding something from old McCracken, you naughty things, and I’m going to find out what it is!”
“If you don’t like my story,” Reynie said, “then why aren’t you talking to me?”
McCracken didn’t take his eyes from Constance. “Because in my experience the smallest child is the one most likely to tell you what she isn’t supposed to.” He put a finger under Constance’s chin and lifted it so that she was compelled to look up. “Am I right, little one? Do you think I might be able to convince you to give me your secrets?”
Constance stared at the sharp pencil behind the Ten Man’s ear, and her lip began to quiver. Rather than cry, however, she screwed up her face and screamed furiously at McCracken — screamed loud enough to make him wince and step back. She screamed until her breath ran out, and then she glared at him, panting hard, her face purple as a plum.
McCracken looked at Constance as if he were disappointed in her. “Now why would you do that, muffin? Why would you want to make old McCracken angry? Don’t you realize your little adventure is over? Don’t you see there’s no one to help you now?”
“That’s what
McCracken wrinkled his brow. Narrowing his blue eyes, he fixed the tiny girl with a cold and penetrating gaze. Constance looked as if she’d swallowed a scorpion and was praying it wouldn’t sting her on the way down.
“Why, I don’t believe that’s the way you’d speak about someone like Risker,” McCracken observed. “Oh no. Not that sorry fellow far away in his boat. You’re expecting someone else, aren’t you?”
“Yes, we are!” Reynie said, hoping McCracken would think he was lying out of desperation. “We’re expecting —”
“You be quiet,” McCracken said, pointing a warning finger at Reynie. “None of your trickery.” He turned to the other Ten Men. “Any ideas about this?”
Crawlings’s eyebrow shot up. He snapped his fingers, reached inside his suit coat, and took out Milligan’s flare gun. “The skinny bald one dropped this! I thought the children were using it to signal one another.”
“Is that right?” McCracken said, scratching his head. “A flare gun? Well, that was silly of you, Crawlings! They wouldn’t need a flare gun to signal one another — they were all right here in the village. So who was our friend
“Nobody. He dropped it before he could fire the flare.”
“Perhaps, Crawlings, but don’t you think our blowing up the tunnel entrance will have acted as a substitute?” McCracken pursed his lips. “You’d better climb on up into the rafters. Sharpe, you unbar the door. We’ll want to make it easy to get inside.”
Crawlings winked at the children with his right eye — the one without an eyebrow — which made his face look bizarrely lopsided. It was an unsettling sight, but far more unsettling was the way he skittered up one of the beams like a spider and disappeared into the shadowed rafters.
The Ten Men were setting a trap.
Reynie looked anxiously at his friends. Kate was clenching and unclenching her fists, not meeting anyone’s eye, too upset for words. Constance had begun to cry, and with a pained expression Sticky was telling her not to feel bad, that they were in this mess because of him, not her.
“That’s true,” Constance sniffed. Then she straightened into an attitude of attention, as if she’d sensed something, and a moment later they all heard the rumbling of the Salamander outside.
“There’s Garrotte and Martina,” said Sharpe, backing away from the door and loosening his tie.
“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,” said McCracken. He turned off the lantern, throwing the room into blackness. “We’ll just wait and see who walks through that door.”
McCracken soon had his answer: No one would walk through the door at all. In fact, to the surprise of everyone in the shelter, the door itself ceased to exist.
The Standoff in the Shelter
With a tremendous cracking and squealing, the thick wood of the shelter door splintered into a hundred pieces; the iron bolts tore free of their fastenings; stones toppled down all around, sending a fine powder into the air — and the nose of the armored Salamander filled the space where the door had been. Someone inside the Salamander threw a switch, and the room was suddenly flooded with light. Masonry dust hung in the light like an amber-colored fog.
“Move!” Kate yelled, slipping free of her handcuffs and grabbing Constance. With the boys at her heels, she ran straight for the Salamander, coughing against the dust and squinting in the floodlight. She passed directly over the spot where McCracken and Sharpe had stood an instant before. Like roaches at the flip of a light switch, the Ten Men had scattered and were nowhere to be seen.
Milligan seemed to drop from the sky. He landed a few feet in front of the Salamander, silhouetted by the floodlight, with masonry dust roiling about him like billowing smoke. He knelt and aimed his tranquilizer gun into the shelter’s strange grove of wooden beams. First to the left, then to the right. He’d seen which beams the Ten Men had disappeared behind and was covering them both. “Help the others get in, Kate! Quick now! Into the Salamander!”
