Curious Minds (Knight and Moon 1)

“I know how to canoe. It’s pretty much like that, right? Except the kayak paddle has two blades, one on either end. That seems one more than necessary.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Emerson said. “How hard can it be?”

Riley and Emerson left their shoes at the boathouse, slipped on their rented life jackets, and climbed carefully into the little lozenge-shaped boat that was resting in ankle-deep water. Emerson got in front, and Riley took the backseat. The attendant shoved them into deeper water, and they bobbed around for a moment, establishing their balance.

It took a few tries to coordinate their paddling rhythm, but soon they were cruising off downriver, in pursuit of Maxine. Moving quickly through the clusters of red rowboats with their fishing rods dancing above the water, Riley was struck with how different kayaking was from canoeing. In a canoe, you felt like you were riding on top of the water, but in the kayak you felt like you were sitting right in the water and cutting through it, like a hot knife through butter. She liked the sensation.

They followed a bend in the river and left most of the fishermen behind. In the woods along the riverbank, a bearded homeless man watched them sail past. Clothes tattered and worn, a slouch hat on his head, a crazy look in his eyes, he stared at them accusingly, a silent reminder that they were still in a metropolitan center after all, pastoral surrounding notwithstanding.

Up ahead, they could see Maxine. Her orange canoe was moving through the water toward an isolated rowboat, where two middle-aged men in fishing vests sat with their casting rods dangling over the side.

Emerson stopped paddling, so Riley stopped too. There were three other rowboats looking strategically placed at intervals around the two fishermen. With their dark suits under their orange life vests, their sunglasses and earpieces, the occupants of these boats looked awkwardly out of place in the idyllic surroundings. They might as well have been wearing big signs around their necks that said PROTECTIVE GOON SQUAD.

All the men in black touched their earpieces and kept their eyes on Maxine as she approached the fishing boat. No one seemed to notice Emerson and Riley.

Emerson steered their kayak toward the riverbank. “Look like you’re fishing,” he whispered.

“I don’t have a fishing pole,” Riley whispered back.

“Imagine the fishing pole,” he said, pulling an odd pair of glasses from his jacket pocket and slipping them on. They were huge and black and looked like a visor that a robot warrior from space would wear.

“What the heck are those?” Riley asked.

“They’re ‘zoomies.’ They work like binoculars.”

“Why don’t you use binoculars?”

“These are less conspicuous,” Emerson said.

“Are you kidding me? You look like RoboCop.”

Emerson sat tall and cocked his head. “Really? I don’t usually think of myself in that way, but it’s an appealing comparison.”

He’s sort of charming, Riley thought, in an out-of-the-box, geeky-twelve-year-old-boy kind of way.

Emerson maneuvered the kayak into a stand of cattails while in the distance Maxine steered her canoe up to the rowboat. The two men greeted her in a friendly manner. One of them had a ring of gray hair around a shiny bald head. What hair he had was cut in a military style around his ears, and he carried himself with the bearing of an officer on parade, even sitting in the fishing boat. The other man was smaller and softer. He was wearing a tan brimmed fishing hat and a matching fishing vest. Something about both of them looked familiar to Riley, but they were far away and she couldn’t put names to the faces.

Words were exchanged between Maxine and the men, and the mood went from friendly to wary. Maxine dragged her duffel bag out and opened it. The men looked in and recoiled. The man in the hat pulled back and looked around, as if he was worried that the guards could see what was in the bag. The bald man went on the attack, grabbing for the bag. Maxine snatched the bag back, then the man lunged out of the boat and struck her across the face.

Their boats bobbed and lurched about in the water. Maxine righted herself in her canoe and the men in the rowboats converged on her.

“Holy moly,” Riley whispered.

“Holy moly, indeed,” Emerson said. “Do you recognize him?”

Riley shook her head and Emerson removed the robot glasses and slipped them onto Riley’s face.

“The one in the hat. That’s William McCabe,” Emerson said.

Riley adjusted the focus with a knob on the temple of the glasses. That was McCabe, all right. She knew the face from numerous appearances on CNN and MSNBC. William McCabe, chairman of the Federal Reserve. Like many other central bankers currently working at the Fed, he was also a former employee of Blane-Grunwald.

“The other man is Hans Grunwald,” Emerson said.

“I bet she showed them the gold bar,” Riley said.

“Most likely.”

The men in the rowboats had guns drawn and were almost on top of Maxine. McCabe waved the men off, and Riley let out a breath she didn’t even realize she’d been holding. Maxine wasted no time putting distance between her and the men, moving the canoe upstream to the boathouse.