The Dangerous Transmission Read online

  “How interesting,” the guard said. “I shall be sure to check him out.”

  The door closed behind Joe and Jax. There was no light except for a bit coming from a crescent moon and from the few security lamps on the Tower grounds.

  Joe checked his watch. “I wonder what happened to Frank,” he said. He reached for his cell phone and dialed the familiar number.

  “Hey, bro, what’s up?” he asked when Frank answered the phone.

  “I was just going to call you,” Frank whispered. “I’m in this church, St. Martin-in-the-Fields—down in the crypt.”

  Joe knew there was no point in asking his brother to speak up. If Frank was whispering, there was probably a good reason.

  “So are you still with the mysterious woman?” Joe asked.

  “Yeah, but I’m not sure why anymore,” Frank said, his voice still low. “She’s doing some art project in this small area down here. I’ve been watching her since we got here, and there’s nothing weird going on. I’m walking right now to an area where I can talk better.”

  “He says he’s in a church called St. Martin’s something,” Joe said to Jax while he waited for his brother to relocate. “The woman’s doing some sort of art project.”

  “St. Martin-in-the-Fields,” Jax said. “The London Brass Rubbing Centre is there, down in the crypt. They’re famous for having a great collection of brass castings and moldings. They also supply colors and paper. People go in and make rubbings of these castings that they can take home, frame, and hang on their wall.”

  “What do you mean, ‘brass rubbing’?” Joe asked.

  “You place a paper over the casting, then rub it with a chalk crayon. The design from the casting appears on the paper.”

  “Oh, right—I know what you mean,” Joe said. “We use that technique sometimes in detective work. You can use it with ID tags or coins or tombstones—anything on which the words or numbers are hard to read. You put a piece of paper over the object and rub a pencil over the paper, and the information just appears.”

  “Exactly,” Jax said.

  “Are you still there?” Frank asked in Joe’s ear. This time Frank’s voice was accompanied by a low hum of chatter and an occasional ringing noise, as if glasses were being clinked together.

  “Where are you?” Joe asked. “I thought you said you were in a crypt. It sounds more like a restaurant.”

  “There’s a café down here too,” Frank said. “They’re setting it up for some kind of party or something. I’m still walking down a hall, and now through some arches.” Another pause. “Okay, it’s quieter here. I can talk without someone hearing me. How’s the interview going in the Tower?”

  “It’s over. And I gotta tell you, they were kind of rough on Jax. They treated him as if he were somehow responsible for the fire or something.”

  “Who are you? Why are you here?” Joe heard a strange man’s voice with a heavy accent filtering through the earpiece of his phone. His heartbeat seemed to stop for a second. Through the phone he could hear Frank and another man talking.

  “Hey, man, take it easy,” Joe heard Frank say. “I’m just talking on the phone here.”

  “No—you are causing trouble,” Joe heard the strange voice mutter. “But not any more.”

  “Frank!” Joe yelled into the phone. His voice seemed to echo around the massive empty Tower of London fortress. “Frank! What’s happening?”

  “Mmmgmfph . . . crckkkk . . . uumph . . .” The sounds that Joe heard were not good—and they could mean only one thing. Frank was in trouble.

  7 The Eyes Have It

  * * *

  “Joe! You’re white as a ghost!” Jax said. “What is it? Who’s on the line?”

  “Frank!” Joe yelled again into his phone. But he heard nothing. He stayed on the line just in case and sprinted to the gate of the Tower of London with the cell phone next to his ear. “Come on!” he yelled back to Jax. “Frank’s in trouble!”

  Joe and Jax left the Tower and raced across the street to the Underground. They jumped on the train and streaked through the tunnels of the Tube to the Charing Cross station. While Joe listened to his phone, calling to Frank in an effort to reconnect, Jax called the security number for St. Martin’s. As they rode through the city, they caught pockets of phone reception.

  They emerged from the Underground at the world-famous Trafalgar Square. The National Gallery of Art was across one street. Forming another side of the square was St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

  Jax led Joe into the side entrance of the St. Martin’s crypt. Occupying the basement of the church, the crypt had been a burial ground centuries ago. Now it had become a tourist attraction with a gift shop and café. But the remnants of the crypt were still evident. Embedded in the floor were tombstones labeled with the names of the bodies buried below the feet of visitors to St. Martin’s.

  Joe darted ahead when he heard his brother’s voice. He and Jax wound through the arches in the crypt until they found Frank talking to three men.

  “Hey,” Frank said. He flashed a smile at Joe and Jax. “Did you call for this posse?”

  “It sounded like you needed some help,” Joe said. “Jax called these guys before we got into the Tube. I knew they’d get here faster than we could.”

  Frank let the medic check over his arm, but Joe could tell that his brother was feeling restless. “I’m fine,” Frank said. “I need to—”

  “Sir, you don’t look fine,” the man said. The man’s name tag identified him as an employee of St. Martin’s. The other two wore white jackets with the name of a London hospital printed on the back.

  “Just have a seat, sir,” the man with the medical bag said. “Let me take a look at your arm.”

  “Can you tell us how you got this injury?” the St. Martin’s employee asked.

  “Um, I work in the café,” Frank answered. “I’m new. I was taking a break and bumped into someone coming around the corner. The collision sent me into the edge of the archway and I jammed my shoulder.”

  “So it was an accident?” the medic asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, you seem okay, except for that shoulder,” the medic concluded, closing up his bag. “Looks like you might have injured your rotator cuff. You’ll probably want to have that X-rayed, just in case. Take it easy for a while—no lifting with that arm. Don’t swing it around, especially up or back. It might take some time for it to heal completely.”

  “Actually, I’ve had a rotator cuff problem before,” Frank said. “Injured it in a soccer match. So I know what to watch for.”

  “Very well, then,” the St. Martin’s man said. “I guess we are no longer needed.” With smiles and nods all around, he and the other two medics left.

  Joe waited until he could no longer hear their footsteps in the hallway. Then he turned to his brother. “How are you really?” he asked Frank.

  “I’m fine, really,” Frank said, getting up from his seat. He made a few tentative passes through the air with his arm. When he’d gone too far, he felt a familiar twinge of pain. “If it feels like I need more tests, I’ll go in for them,” he added. “But I’m okay for now.”

  “So what happened?” Jax asked, following Frank into the hall.

  “I’ll tell you in a minute,” Frank said. He led Jax and Joe past the café tables and on to the Brass Rubbing Centre. As he’d expected, the mysterious woman was gone.

  “We lost her—and the guy,” Frank said.

  “You mean the woman you followed here, right?” Jax said.

  Frank nodded.

  “But who’s the guy you’re talking about?” Joe asked.

  “When you called me,” Frank said, “I was watching the woman in the Brass Rubbing Centre. I walked back into the hall where I could be alone to talk, but some man followed me. He asked who I was and what I was doing here.”

  “I heard that on the phone,” Joe said.

  “Right. Well, I told him I was just talking on the phone,” Frank contin
ued. “But he didn’t believe me. He grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back. He wouldn’t tell me who he was, of course. And he said he knew I’d been following someone and had to stop—that if I didn’t, I’d pay. He gave my arm a final twist, and then dropped it and started to run away. When I grabbed his jacket, he wriggled free. I started after him, but the medics stopped me.”

  “The woman is the key, don’t you think?” Joe guessed.

  “Yes,” Frank said. “And she looks familiar.”

  “I know,” Joe said. “Let’s work on figuring that out—we’re bound to place her if we really rack our brains.”

  “Maybe some fuel will help,” Frank said. “I’m suddenly starving.”

  “Hey, I still need some dinner too,” Jax said. “That Tower interrogation left me weak. Now I know how the royals must have felt before their beheadings on the Tower Green. How about some food? There’s a place near my flat that I can’t wait to show you.”

  Jax, Frank, and Joe grabbed the Tube. While they rode, Frank told them about the man who’d attacked him.

  “Obviously a friend of the woman who was following us,” Joe concluded.

  “Yeah. I wish I could remember why she looks so familiar,” Frank murmured.

  They got off the train in Jax’s neighborhood. At eight o’clock they rounded a corner onto a street of small houses. A black sign dangled out from the building on the corner. Painted on the sign were plain white words: BLACK BELT.

  “There it is,” Jax said.

  “No way,” Joe said. “Karate?”

  “Remember the fun we had taking lessons when I was staying with you guys?” Jax said, clapping Joe on the back. “You’re really going to like this place.”

  The club was full of young men and women sitting at tables and in booths. In the far corner was a small stage.

  “This place has karate exhibitions and amateur competitions at nine,” Jax pointed out. “If you want to, you can even participate. You just sign up, and you can either do a single demonstration or pair up with someone else.”

  Jax took a flyer from the stack on the stage. “How about it?” he asked. “Shall we show them what we learned? Check it out.” He handed the flyer to Joe.

  Jax’s cell phone rang while the Hardys read the rules for the amateur karate exhibition. Jax talked for a few minutes, then hung up.

  “It was Nick,” he told the Hardys. “He’s on his way. I’m going to run to the flat and pick up a raven for him.”

  “Stuffed, right?” Joe said, grinning.

  “Indeed,” Jax confirmed. “It’s an extra one for the exhibition. Nick will be surprised when he sees it. I told him I wouldn’t get it done in time.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Frank said. “I want to get some heat on this shoulder. I brought some sports salve that’ll do the job.”

  “Hold our table,” Jax said. “We’ll probably be back before Nick gets here.”

  “I’ll even save a chair for the raven,” Joe said.

  When Frank and Jax got to the flat, Jax went into his taxidermy shop and Frank went upstairs. His shoulder was really aching, so he headed right for the guest bedroom. He got the tube of medicine from his sports bag and rubbed the cream into his shoulder.

  A rush of heat flooded his aching rotator cuff and radiated around his shoulder and up the side of his neck. For a second it felt like his skin was on fire. Then the feeling settled into a comfortable and soothing warmth. He tried a few flexes and was pleased that his arm was loosening up.

  He pulled on a fresh shirt and headed back down to the taxidermy shop.

  Just walking in the back door of the shop was an eerie experience. The only light came from a few tiny bulbs glowing in a couple of display cases, and from the streetlight beams through the shop windows.

  Hairy hides hung from hooks, a drawer of glass eyes stared up at him, and noses and ears poked out of cotton batting. Shadows of animal parts played across the walls like a freaky sci-fi film.

  Frank couldn’t tell which felt stronger: the radiating heat in his shoulder or the cold chills everywhere else.

  He heard a rustling noise in the front room of the shop, and then a click. “Jax?” he called out, walking toward the front.

  The moment he stepped into the room, the cold chills won out. Jax lay on the floor, a huge blue-black raven across his chest. Neither was moving.

  8 The Cavity

  * * *

  “Jax!” Frank yelled. “Jax—say something!”

  Frank smacked the stuffed raven away. It flew off Jax’s chest and slid on its back across the wood floor.

  An involuntary shudder rippled down Frank’s spine as he reached for Jax’s pulse. His own heart was beating so fast that he couldn’t feel his friend’s at first. Finally he felt the rhythm of Jax’s heartbeat. It was faint, but it was there. Frank knew he didn’t need to use CPR.

  He looked closely at his friend’s face. Jax’s eyes were closed, and his mouth was slightly open. There was a pink mark on his right temple.

  Frank went to the shop phone and dialed the emergency number that was stuck to the receiver. It was like dialing 911 in America. He gave the dispatcher the address of the flat and told her Jax’s condition. Then he hung up and called Officer Somerset.

  The policeman was not in, but Frank left a message saying there had been a forced break-in at the taxidermy shop, Jax had been injured and taken to the hospital, and Frank didn’t know what had happened.

  He went back to his friend, who was lying on the floor. The large welt on Jax’s temple had billowed up from the skin’s surface and was now a darker red. “Jax!” he called again. “Can you hear me? Wake up, man.”

  Ideas and images flooded his mind. He noticed an old-fashioned blackboard on the wall. On it, someone—probably Jax—had drawn a diagram of a fish with white chalk.

  Frank took the chalk from the ledge and drew marks around Jax’s body on the floor. He made the marks very faint so that they wouldn’t attract the attention of the ambulance crew that was on its way.

  Beads of sweat broke out on Frank’s face as he drew the outline. “This is just for the record,” he mumbled to himself. “For our investigation. Jax is alive—and he’s staying alive.”

  At last he heard the welcome two-tone siren of the ambulance. The vehicle skidded to a stop in the lane outside the shop. Two emergency medical technicians jumped out. One grabbed a medical bag from the back of the ambulance. The other carried in a gurney.

  Frank rushed to unlock the door. It opened easily, and he realized that the antique lock had been broken.

  While the EMTs assessed Jax’s vital signs, one of them asked Frank what had happened. He told them honestly that he didn’t know. He showed them the jimmied lock and explained that there had been recent burglaries in the area.

  “We’re going to report this call to the police,” she said.

  “I’ve already done that,” Frank assured her. “You can check with Officer Somerset.”

  It took only a few minutes for the EMTs to check Jax and get him loaded onto a gurney. Then they flipped the spring that dropped the wheeled legs of the bed. They were so preoccupied with their job that they didn’t notice the pale chalk line left on the floor when they raised Jax’s bed.

  The EMTs rolled the gurney out of the shop. Frank followed closely behind. Jax was still unconscious. The medics told Frank the address of the hospital and pushed the gurney into the ambulance. Then they sped off with lights blazing and siren whooping.

  Frank raced back into the shop and turned on all the lights. Then he carefully examined the floor where Jax had been lying. Little by little, he spread out his search to include the path from the door, and compared it to the location of Jax’s body.

  He felt the creepy sensation of dozens of eyes watching him as he moved among the stuffed creatures that inhabited the shop. As in the storage room above, the eyes seemed to follow him as he searched.

  The lighting in the store wasn’t good, and the floor wa
s distorted by weird shadows. “Probably helps sales to have it dim and spooky in here,” Frank whispered. He took out his penlight and aimed the beam at the floor around the chalked image of his friend.

  He widened the circle farther and farther until he reached the door with its broken lock. But he found nothing—no clue to the person who had broken in and attacked Jax.

  Frank wasn’t willing to give up yet. Beads of sweat crept down his back. He was determined to find out what happened to Jax.

  He’d learned from countless previous investigations that a second search can often solve the case, so he decided to reverse his search. This time he would begin at the door and move back to the chalk line.

  He moved the penlight beam into the dark corners around the door and the adjacent display cases. This time he moved the light slowly, inch by inch. And this time he saw something. A sudden sparkle like a micro-firework shot up into the penlight beam as it passed by—then it disappeared. Frank edged the light back, and there it was again. A shimmer.

  Frank grabbed a chamois cloth from the top of one of the display cases. Then he crouched down and reached for whatever was glittering, shielding his fingerprints with the chamois.

  What he found was a small round plastic case. It was about half the size of the container that holds a roll of film.

  He opened his hand to look more closely at the object that was nestled in the cloth. Inside the clear plastic case was a powder that looked like sand but emitted the rainbow colors of a crystal prism in the light.

  He moved the penlight beam back and forth across the case. The powder changed colors like a hologram. The bottom of the case was stamped with an odd symbol. It looked like a V.

  Frank wrapped up the case and dropped it in his pocket. Then he turned off the shop lights and closed the front door. Because he could no longer lock it, he pushed a heavy display case against the door.

  Except for the case of powder in his pocket and the chalk outline on the floor, he tried to leave the room exactly as he’d found it. Finally, before he left, he took one last look around and then exited the same way he had come in: through the back door of the taxidermy shop.