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“An outer wall, made of five-foot-thick concrete and topped with concertina wire,” said Jacques. “Guarded tout le temps by the tower’s best-trained stevedores.” His finger, unrestricted by the tower’s defenses, made its way past the gridded outline of the wall and into the square that was the building’s ground floor. “A state-of-the-art security system, linked to a closed-circuit video surveillance package on every floor. Stevedores here, here, and here,” he said, his finger tapping on each corner of the box. “And here. Access to the top floor is only viable through the elevator ici, here.” Tap. “Which is security-locked, accessible to only those whose handprints have clearance.”
“How do you know all this stuff?” asked Michael.
“I told you,” said Nico Posholsky, who was cast in the bulb’s dim light on the opposite side of the table. “A good man died to bring us this intel.”
“The blueprint we’ve had since December. The rest is stuff we’ve learned over months of hard recon work,” said Jacques.
“Who was it?” asked Elsie, Intrepid Tina held tight to her chest.
“What?” asked Jacques, surprised to hear the little girl speak up.
“Who died?” She looked at each man in turn, each black-bereted man who stood around the table staring at the stolen plans. She’d been thinking of the man who’d died bringing the “intel” ever since Nico had mentioned it back at the Forgotten Place, and it bothered her. She couldn’t help but imagine him, this man who wore a black beret too and was once as alive as the men who were now crowded around this table, talking espionage.
“Michel,” said Jacques, finally. “Michel Blatsky. A good man. Vraiment un bon homme.” He smiled at Elsie warmly. “It’s good you asked. Too soon we forget.”
“He’d posed as a stevedore, infiltrated their ranks. He had to gain seventy-five pounds to do it,” said Nico. “Ten weeks of work, reporting back to us every other night on the sly. In the end, it was too much. He slipped up, dropped some French into a casual conversation, and he was made.” He stopped talking here, as if overcome by the memory. “All that we found later was his maroon beanie.”
“Since then, our hopes of staging an attack on the tower itself have been abandoned,” said Jacques, still staring at the blueprint. “It was too risky. We’ve been hitting smaller jobs ever since.”
“How can you be sure that Carol and Martha are in there?” asked Rachel.
“Michel was there when the stevedores brought them in. They were escorted into the tower under heavy security. More than likely, they’re here.” He threw back the blueprint, revealing a stack of pages beneath. Flipping through, he found what he was looking for and spread it flat. It was labeled TITAN TOWER: TOP FLOOR DETAIL. His finger stabbed down on a small, closetlike room that branched off a rectangular space that dominated the surface area of the floor. “Wigman’s safe room, connected by a secret door to his office and trophy room. The man’s a paranoid, deep down. He had this room built as a safe harbor were the tower to come under attack. It’s the hardest room in the building to crack. In a building that’s impossible to crack. If he really cared about these two—and it appears he does—this would be the best place to keep them.”
“So how do you get in?” asked Michael.
“You don’t,” said Jacques. “Before Michel was nabbed, we were in the midst of an action called Operation: Urban Renewal. It was to be the biggest action in the history of the Chapeaux. A full-scale attack on the tower, detonations set at every floor. The whole thing—the tower, the stevedores, Wigman and his cronies—would all come toppling down in a glorious explosion. Needless to say, that wouldn’t necessarily work in a search-and-rescue mission.”
“The only way is to blow our way in,” said Nico. “Put enough C-4 on the outer wall to make a hole and hope that a few more guys can get through to blow the doors.”
“Security system then puts the whole building on lockdown,” said Jacques. “Elevators lock, doors lock. Alarms everywhere. And then you’ve got the entire stevedore security detail to wrangle with.”
Nico rubbed his chin. “But if you threw some decoy detonation on the east and north corners, just to throw ’em off . . .”
“So you’ve scattered the stevedores,” Jacques interrupted. “You’ve still got the lockdown and a stevedore threat that’s bigger than our team could handle, especially if we’ve got technicians on the east and north wall, laying bombs.”
“Say one of the bombs is lobbed at a generator,” said Nico. “Knock the power out.”
“Have you been listening at all during the council meetings?” asked Jacques disdainfully. “Generator’s underground. And there’s backup in the building.” A group of men began arguing these points across the table from Jacques and Nico; soon, the entire room became lost in a buzz of anarchist saboteurs, all heatedly discussing the minutiae of storming Titan Tower.
Elsie, standing next to Jacques, her arms folded on the lip of the table, was stroking the cropped hair of Intrepid Tina and trying to think how she could be of help. She’d been so accustomed, in her former life, before her parents’ abandonment, to sitting back and letting the adults handle the big decisions. But things had changed. She was now a parent to herself, her own mother and father, and the adult world now appeared to her less fortified than it had seemed prior to life as an Unadoptable. She now saw adults as incredibly fallible people, just like children. Their adulthood did not necessarily save them from constantly making bad decisions—in fact, she speculated, they were more likely to make bad decisions. Surely, Elsie herself should be able to come up with a reasonable plan to snag Martha and Carol from Wigman’s clutches. She was a nine-year-old girl, after all.
She bit her lip and thought. And thought. The swarm of voices around her became like a distant hum as she meditated on the circumstances. It seemed awfully familiar, the scene: There were two captives in a tall tower, surrounded by guards and a vengeful overlord. She realized that it was exactly the setup for the season finale of Intrepid Tina: Danger’s Foil, in which Sailor Steve, Tina’s sometime love interest, had been captured by the Robot Fiend and was being held prisoner on the Island of Doom, at the top of the Robot Fiend’s hideout, which was very towerlike. Elsie searched her memory, trying to recall how it was that Steve was eventually freed. Very suddenly, it came to her.
“Where does the air come from?” asked Elsie quietly.
Rachel looked askance at her sister. “What did you say?”
“Can you ask them where the air comes from?”
The noise in the room had become nearly deafening. No one had heard her; they were all much too busy arguing their own points, gesturing wildly at the plans on the table.
“Excuse me!” shouted Rachel, who had a deeper and louder voice than her sister.
No response.
“EXCUSE ME!” she screamed, and this time, everyone stopped talking. In the silence, Rachel cleared her throat. “My sister would like to know where the air comes from.”
“What?” asked Nico, perplexed. “What does that mean?”
