Nick and Tesla's Secret Agent Gadget Battle Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Quirk Productions, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Number: 2013911823

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-59474-681-9

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-59474-676-5

  Hardcover Designed by Doogie Horner

  Illustrations by Scott Garrett

  Hardcover Production Management by John J. McGurk

  Quirk Books

  215 Church Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19106

  quirkbooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  About the Authors

  DANGER! DANGER!

  DANGER! DANGER!

  The how-to projects in this book involve motors, hydraulic power, hot glue, booby traps, and other potentially dangerous elements. Before you build any of the projects, ASK AN ADULT TO REVIEW THE INSTRUCTIONS. You’ll probably need their help with one or two of the steps, anyway.

  While we believe these projects to be safe and family-friendly, accidents can happen in any situation, and we cannot guarantee your safety. THE AUTHORS AND PUBLISHER DISCLAIM ANY LIABILITY FROM ANY HARM OR INJURY THAT MAY RESULT FROM THE USE, PROPER OR IMPROPER, OF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS BOOK. Remember, the instructions in this book are not meant to be a substitute for your good judgment and common sense.

  “It’s her,” Nick said. “She’s the spy.”

  “Who is?” said Tesla.

  She looked around. She and her brother were in their uncle’s backyard, about to test-fly the hoop glider they’d been working on that morning. There was only one other person in sight: a fortyish woman crouched over a bed of begonias about forty feet away. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and dirty gardening gloves. A sweat-soaked bandana was wrapped around her head.

  She didn’t look much like a spy to Tesla.

  “You mean Julie Casserly?”

  Nick nodded, eyeing the woman suspiciously.

  “I can feel it in my gut,” he said. “She’s always watching us. Always glaring.”

  “Well, of course she is. Wouldn’t you if you lived next door to Uncle Newt?”

  Nick and Tesla’s uncle was an inspired, ingenious, innovative inventor. Unfortunately, he was also a forgetful, dreamy, not-particularly-safety-minded one. Since the kids had come to stay with him a couple weeks earlier, his out-of-control creations had chewed up Julie’s flower beds, demolished one of her garden gnomes, set her lawn on fire, and splattered her car with thirty pounds of putrid bananas flambé. (Uncle Newt was convinced he could build an engine for a vacuum cleaner that ran on compost. So far, he’d only succeeded in building several extremely smelly time bombs.)

  Maybe Julie would have overcome her dislike for Uncle Newt and warmed up to Nick and Tesla—maybe—but the kids were wannabe inventors themselves. They could often be found in their uncle’s backyard testing out homemade hovercrafts and balloon rockets and robots.

  And, this day, a hoop glider.

  “What is that?” Julie said when Tesla lifted the glider and prepared to send it on its first flight. She’d turned from her begonias to shoot Nick and Tesla a wary glare. “A remote-controlled spear?”

  Tesla lowered the glider. It was just a couple hoops of stiff paper, a small one in front and a larger one behind it, connected by a straw.

  “No,” said Tesla.

  “A computerized javelin?” said Julie.

  “No.”

  “A self-shooting arrow?”

  “No.”

  “Some kind of missile?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a glider,” said Nick.

  Julie narrowed her eyes. “And what’s that supposed to do?”

  “Uhh … glide,” said Tesla.

  Julie cocked her head, her lips twisting into a tight, sarcastic smile.

  “Oh, sure. It just glides,” she said. She pushed herself up from her knees and began walking away. “Well, let me get inside before you set it loose. I don’t want to be here when it ‘glides’ someone into the hospital.”

  The woman marched around the corner of her house and disappeared.

  “Not very brave for a spy,” Tesla said.

  “Maybe that’s just her cover,” Nick grumbled. “Anyway, go ahead. I want to see if this thing works.”

  Tesla brought the glider up again, pointed it away from Julie’s yard, and launched it with a flick of the wrist. It shot away with surprising speed and flew smoothly over Uncle Newt’s lawn, arcing to the left as it went.

  “Whoa! Look at it go!” said Nick.

  “And go and go and go,” said Tesla.

  She’d expected the glider to fly five yards, tops, yet even after twenty it was still six feet off the ground and not slowing down. In fact, it was soaring toward some trees on the other side of Uncle Newt’s property, perhaps about to fly out of the yard altogether.

  “Hey, kids!” a cheerful voice called out. “Whatcha up to?”

  It was Uncle Newt’s other neighbor, Mr. Jones, stepping out onto his patio. The paunchy, gray-haired man was wary of Uncle Newt’s inventions—which was wise—yet he always had a smile and a wave for Nick and Tesla.

  Unfortunately, it was a really bad time for a smile and a wave.

  “Mr. Jones!” Nick cried out. “Duck!”

  “A duck? Where?”

  Mr. Jones looked up into the sky.

  The glider came swooping through the trees and smacked him in the face.

  Nick and Tesla ran to the old man as he staggered back into his house. He managed to find his footing again just as the kids reached him.

  “Where did that crazy duck go?” he started to say.

  Then he saw the hoop glider lying in the doorway.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “We’re sorry, Mr. Jones,” said Nick.

  “We had no idea it was going to fly this far,” said Tesla.

  Mr. Jones rubbed his bulbous nose—which was now slightly more bulbous and way redder than usual.

  “No harm done,” he said.

  He didn’t sound like he meant it, though, and the smile he gave the kids when he handed them their glider seemed strained.

  Mr. Jones closed the door on Nick and Tesla, muttering something about getting an ice pack.

  “Great,” Tesla said as she and her brother trudged away. “The one neighbor who’s nice, and we go and throw a paper airplane up his nose.”

  “It was an accident,” Nick said. “And who’s to say Mr. Jones is such a nice guy anyway?”

  “What?”

  Tesla looked over at her brother, thinking he might be joking.

  Nick hadn’t been joking much lately, though. And he never joked about this.

  “It’s him,” Nick said. “He’s the spy.”

  “Mr. Jones? He must be, like, two hundred years old.”

  “Spies get old like everyone else.” Nick threw a suspicious squint over his shoulder. “He’s always watching us. Always smiling.”

  “So now being nice makes someone a suspect?”

&n
bsp; “Why not? You remember what Mom said.”

  Tesla did remember, of course.

  She just wished she could forget.

  Nick and Tesla were supposed to go to Disneyland. They were supposed to take tennis lessons. They were supposed to see movies that were 99 percent special effects and explosions. They were supposed to drink too much Kool-Aid and go swimming at the local pool and hang out with their friends.

  They were supposed to have a normal summer.

  Instead, they’d ended up with their uncle and were having the weirdest summer ever.

  Their parents were scientists—agriculture experts for the government—and two days after school let out they were suddenly ordered to Uzbekistan to study amazing advances in soybean farming. Or so they said before putting Nick and Tesla on the plane to California, where the kids would be staying with an eccentric uncle they barely knew. After that, two weeks went by without a word from Nick and Tesla’s mom and dad.

  Then the message came. A voicemail from their mother.

  “Tesla! Nick! There’s so much I want to tell you, but there’s no time! Everything’s more … complicated than we led you to believe. We sent you to your uncle to keep you safe. But you’re not. The people we were trying to hide you from know where you are. They might even be there already. Whatever you do, don’t trust—”

  Then static, then a beep. Then silence.

  Nick and Tesla played the message again and again and again. And when their uncle got home, they tried to play it again. Only this time, instead of hearing “Nick! Tesla! There’s so much I want to tell you,” they heard this, intoned in a robotic drone:

  “No new messages.”

  “What?” yelped Nick, gaping at the phone in his hand as if it had just bitten him.

  “You must have hit the wrong button,” said Tesla.

  “I didn’t! I’m positive!”

  Nick began punching numbers on the keypad, hurrying through the voicemail options.

  Uncle Newt yawned. It was late, and he wanted to go to bed.

  “No new messages,” the robo-operator said again.

  “Oh, no … you must have erased it,” Tesla said to Nick.

  “No, I didn’t!” he barked back.

  “Maybe by accident.”

  “No way!”

  “Then what happened to it?”

  Nick thought a moment. Then his eyes went wide.

  “Of course,” he said. “He erased it.”

  “He?”

  “Or she.”

  “She?”

  “Or them.”

  “Them? What are you talking about?”

  “What do you think? The spies!”

  “Huh? Who? What?” said Uncle Newt, jerking his head up from the dining room table.

  He had just meant to rest his eyes and ended up falling asleep. Somehow, he’d instantly acquired a severe case of bed head. His graying hair was always a little wild, but now it looked like he’d stuck his finger in an electrical socket.

  “We can’t play you the message,” Tesla told him. “It got erased.”

  “Somehow,” Nick added ominously.

  “Oh, well. Don’t worry about it,” Uncle Newt said. “You told me the gist of it. ‘There’s so much to say,’ ‘things are complicated,’ ‘don’t talk to strangers,’ yada yada yada. That’s just the way mothers talk.”

  “What?” Nick said in disbelief.

  “Sure. Your grandmother used to leave me messages like that all the time. ‘Don’t forget to eat.’ ‘If you won’t do laundry, at least buy new underwear.’ ‘Maybe you shouldn’t keep all that industrial waste in your basement.’ Such a worrywart. Like all moms.”

  Uncle Newt suddenly perked up and cocked his head, as if he’d heard something disturbing outside.

  “What is it?” Nick said.

  “I just remembered,” said Uncle Newt. “I need to buy new underwear.”

  He stood and walked toward the stairs to the second floor.

  He was going to bed.

  “Uncle Newt, really,” Tesla said. “Mom sounded upset. And she definitely implied we’re in danger.”

  “She didn’t imply it!” Nick protested. “She said it!”

  “All right, all right.” Uncle Newt changed course, spinning on his heel until he was facing the back of the house. “I’ll make sure the doors and windows are locked, and I’ll activate the home security system. If anyone gets through all that, they’ll have to contend with my vicious attack cat.”

  “Gee,” said Tesla. “Thanks.”

  The “home security system” was the light on the back porch. (The light on the front porch was burned out.) And Uncle Newt’s “vicious attack cat,” Eureka, was hairless, wrinkled, and not known to attack anything other than whatever food he could drag off the kitchen counter. Tesla had once watched the cat ignore an entire family of mice darting across the floor because he was too busy mauling a jelly doughnut.

  “Sleep tight!” Uncle Newt said as he started up the stairs a moment later.

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “Right.”

  That night, Nick did not sleep tight. He did not sleep loose. He did not really sleep at all. Instead he tossed and turned and stewed on one question: Who?

  As he ran through his list of suspects—an extremely short list, since he and Tesla knew only a dozen people in town—he toyed with the star-shaped pendant hanging around his neck. His parents had given one to him and one to Tesla the day before they sent them off to California. Nick suspected the pendants were tracking devices. Which raised another question: Why? A couple plant scientists run off to watch beans grow on the other side of the world, but before they go they hang homing beacons on their kids? It didn’t make sense. Not if anything Nick and Tesla thought they knew about their parents was true …

  Tesla had a slightly easier time letting go of her worries and getting some rest. She’d always been bolder than her brother, something she attributed to her greater age and experience.

  Nick was eleven years, five months, two weeks, six days, twenty hours, and fifteen minutes old.

  Tesla was eleven years, five months, two weeks, six days, twenty hours, and twenty-seven minutes old.

  For twelve minutes she’d been an only child, and that kind of experience really toughens a person.

  Not that Tesla was immune to fear. Only a fool would be unconcerned after that message from their mother. (Which didn’t reflect especially well on Uncle Newt.) But what could she and her brother do except keep their guard up and their heads down?

  It would be up to the people their parents were hiding them from—whoever they were—to make the first move.

  Tesla awoke with a start. A dark shape was looming over her bed in the gray morning light.

  She balled a fist and got ready to punch it.

  “It’s Sergeant Feiffer,” said the dark shape—Nick. “He’s the spy.”

  “Geez, thanks for the scare,” Tesla groaned, fighting the urge to go ahead and use the fist on him. “How long have you been watching me like that?”

  “Just five or ten minutes,” Nick said. “Did you know you snore when you sleep on your back?”

  “No. I didn’t know. Because I was asleep. Which is how I’d still like to be.”

  Tesla turned on her side and closed her eyes.

  After a few seconds, she flopped onto her back again.

  Nick was still hovering over her bed.

  “Did you say Sergeant Feiffer’s a spy?” she asked him.

  Sergeant Feiffer was the town’s one and only cop. Nick and Tesla had done his job for him on a couple occasions, catching kidnappers and a local thief. So he didn’t strike Tesla as especially competent. He didn’t seem especially sinister either.

  Nick nodded, though.

  “He’s the person Mom was telling us not to trust,” Nick said. “I can feel it in my gut.”

  “Does your gut have any proof?”

  “No. But doesn’t it make sense? He’s it when it comes to local law
enforcement. If the bad guys had him in their pocket, we’d be at their mercy.”

  “Just because it makes sense doesn’t make it true,” Tesla pointed out. “I mean, wouldn’t it make just as much sense if the mailman were the spy? He’s here practically every day. It’d be the perfect way to keep an eye on us.”

  “Whoa,” Nick said. “You’re right!”

  “That was just an example, Nick. I don’t really think the mailman’s a spy.”

  “But what if he is? He’s always looking at us if we’re in the yard when he comes with the mail. Waving at us. Saying ‘How ya doing?’ ”

  “Very suspicious.”

  Tesla rolled her eyes.

  Nick didn’t notice.

  “I know,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Argh!”

  Tesla launched herself out of bed.

  “Do you know what I can feel in my gut?” she said as she stomped off toward the door.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  And she headed downstairs for breakfast.

  When Nick came down to the dining room a minute later, he was able to admit that he was being silly. It was ridiculous to think the mailman might be a spy.

  Especially, he said, when the real spy was obviously Uncle Newt’s new lady friend, Dr. Hiroko Sakurai.

  If Tesla hadn’t been enjoying her Pop-Tart so much, she would’ve thrown it at him.

  “Just think about it,” Nick said when he saw the look on his sister’s face. “She just showed up in town, like, a week ago and suddenly she’s hanging around with Uncle Newt all the time?”

  Nick waved a hand at the dusty old computers piled up in a corner, the ancient diving suit and telescope and stuffed polar bear in the hall, the brown-needled Christmas tree that stayed lit 24-7 even though it was nearly July. Wires protruded from holes in the wall here and there, and the floor was littered with abandoned circuit boards and actuators and science journals and bunches of gnat-covered bananas (which weren’t quite black enough for Uncle Newt’s compost engine yet).

  “Let’s face it,” Nick said. “Our uncle’s not exactly a catch.”

  “That doesn’t make Hiroko a spy.”

  “And that doesn’t make her not a spy.”