Brainwashed: Crime Travelers Spy School Mystery Series Book 1 Read online

  CRIME TRAVELERS

  BOOK 1

  BRAINWASHED

  A LUCAS BENES SPY MYSTERY NOVEL

  PAUL AERTKER

  FLYING SOLO PRESS

  ROME | SEATTLE | LONDON | NEW YORK | PARIS | DENVER | HONG KONG | CAPE TOWN | LOS ANGELES | SAN JOSE

  For Katherine, Mary, and Andrew

  Crime Travelers—Book One: Brainwashed © 2014 by Paul Aertker All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. No reproduction without prior permission. Discounts available at www.crimetravelers.com.

  Library Meta Data

  Aertker, Paul

  Crime Travelers / Paul Aertker.— 3rd ed.

  p. 288 cm. 12.7 x 20.32 (5x8 in) — (Brainwashed ; bk. 1)

  Summary: While sleeping on the roof of his father’s hotel, thirteen-year-old Lucas Benes finds a baby alone and learns that the Good Company has restarted its kidnapping business. Brainwashed (Crime Travelers #1) tracks the secret urban adventures of the New Resistance, a network of international teenage spies. Headquartered in Las Vegas’s posh new Globe Hotel, the New Resistance sends its Tier One kids to Paris on its biggest mission to date. Lucas leads a group of friends through the hotspots of Paris—from the catacombs to the Eiffel tower—in an all-out effort to sabotage a brainwashing ceremony that could potentially turn them all into “Good” kids.

  Publishers Review: “Reluctant readers rejoice! Ripped from the headlines of the “world’s leading news outlets, this realistic middle-grade novel “weaves actual life events into action-packed fiction for ages eight plus. Readers are transported to Paris “without ever leaving the sofa. With one-hundred thirty-six geographic references, this story serves as both fiction novel and travel guide. Crime Travelers: Brainwashed stands as a travel-adventure book that kids and adults will devour. Multicultural, multilingual, international travel, teen action-adventure: this book has it all.” © 2014, FSP

  Travel—Fiction. 2. Language and languages—Fiction. 3. Conspiracies—Fiction. 4. Kidnapping—Fiction. 5. Brainwashing—Fiction. 6. Geography—Fiction. 7. Multicultural—Fiction. 8. Europe—Fiction. 9. Paris, France—Fiction.

  Title. Pro 2014

  Paul Aertker | Flying Solo Press Publishing Company | Edited by Brian Luster using The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition | Cover Design by Pintado | Interior Design by Amy McKnight

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940137-11-7 / eISBN: 978-1-940137-12-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013955080

  US Copyright Registration Number: TX 7-981-676

  CONTENTS

  1 The Hotel, the Boat, and the Secret

  2 A Call to Legs

  3 You Can’t Always Follow the Rules

  4 Elevator Down

  5 Baby

  6 Bat Cave

  7 The Flying Office

  8 Child Trafficking

  9 The In-Flight Movie

  10 Curukians

  11 Who’s Watching Whom?

  12 The Point of No Return

  13 Master Key, Master Plan

  14 Room Service

  15 The Lucky Office

  16 Curukian Proposal

  17 Duck in the Duct

  18 Green Is Good

  19 A City Crawling with Curukians

  20 Stink

  21 The Tour de Paris

  22 The Last Best Hiding Place

  23 The Empire of Death

  24 Hostile Hostel

  25 A Meeting of the Minds

  26 The Truth Behind the Lie

  27 The Database

  28 Riding on the Metro

  29 Pompidou

  30 A Never-Ending Supply of Curukians

  31 Carnival of the Animals

  32 Notre Dame Is Our Lady?

  33 The Brainwashing Ceremony

  34 Shakespeare in Paris

  35 The River Seine

  36 Carnival

  37 A New Way to Kidnap

  38 Busball

  39 Good Things Happen to Bad People

  40 A Hotel Is a Home

  No matter how bad your past is,

  you still don’t want it erased.

  THE HOTEL, THE BOAT, AND THE SECRET

  Lucas Benes lay in a sleeping bag on the roof of his father’s hotel, dreaming about a past he couldn’t remember.

  On this particular morning a strange sound woke him and pulled him from the dark. With his eyes still closed, Lucas stayed quiet and tried to take it all in. He could hear the distant hum of tires on the freeways around the city. From somewhere close by a car engine cranked several times and then conked out.

  Lucas strained his ears and unzipped the sleeping bag.

  Slowly he rolled over, got on one knee, and peered over the rooftop. With his bare chest leaning against the concrete wall he stared down thirteen floors. Lucas watched as the lights in the back parking lot flickered then dimmed. His eyes traveled across the empty, unfilled spaces to the center of the blacktop. There, parked like a regular car between the white lines, was a shopping cart with a baby lying in it, alone.

  “What the—” he muttered.

  Lucas knew what it felt like to be abandoned. When he was two, his mother died just hours after she had adopted him. If he could help it, he wouldn’t let another kid be left alone.

  Besides, a baby by itself was creepy. And the sooner he got to the kid the better. The stairs would take too long, and everyone in the hotel would slow him down.

  Rappelling would be the quickest way. Without wasting a second more he pulled a pair of jeans over his boxers, rolled up his sleeping bag and foam mattress, and stowed them in a camping bin.

  He heard the odd noise again.

  Behind his basketball hoops and partially hidden in the shadow of a construction dumpster was a dark-colored van. The motor sputtered and struggled to start, a thin cloud of exhaust puffing from its tailpipe. Lucas squinted and tried to commit the license plate to memory. The numbers were dirty, but he was sure he recognized Canadian tags.

  Lucas had clocked the last eleven of his thirteen years living in the Globe Hotel, and this parking lot was his backyard. During that time he had seen plenty of older kids join the New Resistance safe houses that were hidden in some of his father’s hotels. But he had never witnessed an actual drop-off of another kid.

  No one had.

  All of a sudden a sliding door slammed shut. With a blast of black smoke the van coughed to a rumble and started moving. It peeled out through piles of construction sand and spun into the parking lot. A single working headlight bumped in the early-morning darkness and appeared to head straight for the baby. The van swerved around the shopping cart, crashed through a wooden barricade, and fishtailed down the street.

  In the distance the famous lights of Las Vegas were still shining, with the miniature Eiffel Tower capping the weirdness of his whole life.

  Lucas zeroed in on the baby.

  If he was fast enough, he could grab the kid and maybe not get in trouble for breaking the “no climbing alone” rule. Nobody broke Coach’s rules.

  Coach Creed was a giant East Texan with a big hat and boots and a voice to match.

  But at that moment, a baby alone in a shopping cart was more important to Lucas than some made-up rule.

  Besides, Coach Creed would most likely show up for morning climbing practice in a few minutes and find something Lucas had done wrong anyway.

  When he was too quick, Coach would say, “Lucas! Yo
u’ve got to think before you act.” The next time Lucas would take too long to think before he acted, Coach would bark, “Lucas, get your head out of the clouds.”

  The smell of bacon rose from a nearby kitchen vent, and Lucas knew everyone in the hotel would soon be awake. He hurried toward the climbing section and popped open a plastic bin, slipped on a T-shirt and climbing shoes, and strapped on his waist harness. Then he stepped onto a metal platform and grabbed the ropes.

  He would rappel down, get the baby, and winch himself and the child up to the roof, hopefully before Coach Creed arrived. He clipped a hook from the winch motor to a carabiner on his harness and unlocked a ratchet.

  At the side of the hotel, the morning garbage trucks rolled in and clanged the dumpsters on the concrete pads. The trucks’ backup beepers always made Lucas think about his mother dying.

  “Focus, Lucas,” he mumbled to himself. “Don’t think about that accident.”

  Thirteen floors to the ground.

  Lucas had to concentrate. He stepped backward over the ledge, fixed his feet to the outside wall, and settled into the harness.

  It was his first solo rappel. His mouth dried to the point where he could taste a new filling in his back molar. Lucas calculated the distance to the parking lot.

  Fifty-two meters. One-hundred seventy feet.

  He flexed his biceps, wrapped his fingers around the rope, and set the line in the harness to free-fall.

  In climbing, there was always a fraction of a second between the security of being locked in and the freedom of an actual rappel.

  His heart skipped as he rappelled down the outside wall. The rope began to hum. At the seventh floor he passed the window of his assigned hotel room. When he landed on the ground, he stepped out of the harness and hooked it to the winch that would hoist him back up.

  Lucas crept around the building to the back parking lot. And there it was, just like he had seen from the roof—a baby lying in a shopping cart. Lucas’s mind went negative.

  What if the kid was not alive? He tried to think if he had ever seen a dead person before. He’d never been to a funeral, and he knew he had never seen a dead baby, and he definitely didn’t want to.

  His heart pounded in his chest.

  Lucas walked, tiptoed, toward the shopping cart. The last of the parking lot lights flickered out, leaving only the early morning sun. He moved across the blacktop, making sure not to step on a white line. At this moment he needed all the luck he could get. As he got closer to the cart, he held his breath and swallowed.

  He gripped the shopping cart handle and looked over into the basket. He gasped.

  The van he had seen only moments earlier came flying back into the parking lot. The tires screeched across the asphalt, burning a cloud of white smoke. Lucas’s eyes doubled in size as he watched the van’s single headlight come barreling directly at him.

  The baby, he thought.

  Lucas unglued his knuckles from the shopping cart handlebars and pushed. He watched as the wheels wobbled, rolling the cart just out of the way. He turned back to see the van. Three seconds, he calculated, and he would be dead.

  Lucas could see the driver’s face. A teenager.

  At the last second the boy jammed the brakes and cut the wheel.

  The two-ton vehicle dipped in the front and then spun one hundred eighty degrees so that the back doors faced Lucas.

  He couldn’t believe his luck—but in Las Vegas luck was not always good.

  The rear doors crashed open and two dark figures, maybe boys, grabbed Lucas and pulled him into the van.

  Lucas hit his head on the metal wall and dropped to the floor.

  There he rolled into a pile of balls—basketballs and footballs. He settled on what felt like a clump of golf balls jamming him in the back.

  The two boys were wearing black shirts and pants, and they both seemed to have thin fuzzy mustaches.

  One boy got behind Lucas and put him in a full nelson while the other stretched a piece of duct tape across Lucas’s mouth.

  The boy gripped the roll of tape in his fist and leaned over Lucas. “Don’t say a word,” he whispered.

  Duh, Lucas thought. I’ve got duct tape on my mouth.

  “You stupid,” said the other boy. “He can’t talk.”

  The second boy then let Lucas out of the full nelson and ripped the tape from his face.

  “Ah!” Lucas yelped as his cheeks burned. “Who are you?”

  “Don’t worry about who we are,” said the second boy.

  Lucas licked his lips, working the tape glue from his skin.

  “What’s going on?” asked Lucas. “You trying to kidnap me? And why did you drop that baby off like that?”

  The two boys looked at each other.

  “I told you he had seen us,” said the first boy. “Listen,” said the second boy. “We’re not kidnapping you.”

  The other boy added, “We just want to make sure you don’t tell anyone.”

  “Tell anyone what?” asked Lucas. “About the baby?” “No,” said the first boy. “We left a note about the baby. It’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

  “You can read it when we’re gone,” said the other. “It’s just that no one can know we are here now.”

  “Why?” asked Lucas.

  “We’re working in secret,” said both boys.

  The first boy added, “If you tell anyone you saw us, we’ll never be able to help again.”

  “But why?” asked Lucas.

  “Why?” repeated the boy. “Why? Because she’ll kill us.”

  “Or worse,” said the second boy, “brainwash us like the others.”

  Lucas was confused. “Who are you talking about?” The two boys laughed.

  “Siba Günerro,” said the first boy, shaking his head.

  “Head of the Good Company.”

  Lucas closed his eyes.

  He wanted to forget about what had happened the last time he had a run-in with Ms. Günerro. The Good Company was, after all, the suspected world leader in kidnapping children.

  Everyone at the New Resistance believed Siba Günerro and her Good Company were responsible for blowing up the ferryboat that had killed his adoptive mother some eleven years earlier.

  Lucas sat up. “If you didn’t want me to see you, then why did you come back into the parking lot?”

  “I spotted you spying on us from the roof,” said the first boy. “We had to make sure.”

  The other boy asked, “What were you doing on the roof anyway?”

  Lucas was getting tired of this game. “I live in a hotel and go to hotel-school with the same people that I’ve been with since I was two,” he said. “The roof is the only place to get away around here.”

  The driver yelled into the back of the van. “He’s lying.”

  Immediately the van clunked into gear and lurched forward.

  The balls rolled around as Lucas and the two boys flipped over and fell into each other.

  Kidnapping was Lucas’s second greatest fear.

  A CALL TO LEGS

  As the van drove through the parking lot, it skidded sideways.

  A cardboard box tipped over and hundreds of new balls flooded the back of the van. Lucas slapped a basketball out of his way as he turned his attention to his escape.

  The van’s tires bumped over the broken barricade. They were leaving the parking lot. He really was being kidnapped. Or detained. Either way he didn’t like it. The van sped up again and all three boys lost their balance and slid down the floor and into the balls bobbing around the back doors.

  One of the boys panicked and yelled to the driver, “Stop!”

  The van came to an abrupt and jarring halt. For Lucas, it was an opportunity.

  He rolled over and jammed his feet into the doors, kicking them as hard as he could.

  The back doors flew open. The driver hit the gas, and Lucas, the two boys, and hundreds of balls crashed into the parking lot.

  Lucas glared at the
two boys. He noticed one of the boys had a huge scar on his neck.

  “If you’re not trying to kidnap me,” Lucas said, “then why did you just try to drive off with me still in the van?”

  “That’s our driver,” said the boy with the scar. “He’s worried we won’t make our flight to Paris.”

  “We’re on your side,” the other boy said. “You’ve got to believe us.”

  “You can’t tell anyone you saw us,” said the boy with the scar. “Promise?”

  Maybe it was something in their voices, the way they were pleading, hoping for a win of some kind—for whatever reason Lucas believed them.

  “I promise,” he said.

  The two boys nodded and took off sprinting after the van that was now speeding away from the hotel.

  Lucas hurried toward the shopping cart. He didn’t know what he would do with the baby once he got there. He spotted a wadded blanket of some kind under the cart. Lucas squeezed the handle and peered into the shopping basket.

  The baby appeared to be breathing. She or he looked like someone’s little brother or sister. Lucas still didn’t know what to do. He reached for the note.

  From the rooftop he heard Coach Creed’s voice blasting out. “Lucas!”

  “I am in so much trouble,” Lucas muttered as he left the baby and the note behind. He raced back to the climbing section, where he quickly slipped on the waist harness and hit the UP button on the winch motor.

  “Ugh,” he groaned.

  Failed again. Climbing solo was an automatic F.

  The winch motor began to churn, hoisting Lucas back to the roof. He looked up and saw Astrid, his fourteen-year-old sister, her blond hair draping over the roof’s edge like Rapunzel.

  Behind her Coach Creed stood with his beefy arms folded.

  As soon as Lucas was back on the rooftop, he dropped his head and prepared for yet another lecture. Astrid crossed her arms. She looked so mad that she couldn’t even talk.

  Coach Creed picked up a bag of climbing chalk. He waited for a second and then tugged on his belt and shook his head.

  “Lucas,” he said. “You’ve got to think before you act.”

  “I did think,” said Lucas, defensively. “I thought I should help that baby.”