“Whatta guy!” he cried in admiration as he watched Scale imprison the boys live on the security cameras, in full digital color. Since they had emerged from the tunnel, he had been monitoring Nat Carver and the Wolven’s progress enthusiastically.

Angelo and Vincent Spaghetti also watched, but not in admiration. They cringed in shame as they watched the two boys lose their futile struggle against Lucas Scale.

Gruber was too busy whooping and jumping up and down like he was on some sort of game show to notice Angelo’s and Vincent’s increasing unease.

“Take a bow, fellas!” He beamed. “You helped bring him home!”

Vincent and Angelo followed Gruber from the room, tight frowns on their handsome faces.

Had anyone been paying attention to the security cameras as they scanned every other sector in the facility at ten-second intervals, they would have seen a number of interesting sights. The cameras flipped from one room to the next, as if possessed. They zoomed in on the face of an old professor, his long gray beard rising and falling on his chest as he slept in his prison bed. They visited the locked room of a young blond woman of noble birth who did not sleep; instead she paced up and down, hoping for a miracle. They flipped out to the grounds again, zooming in on two smudgy patches of movement at the bottom left of the screen. If anyone had been monitoring the security cameras during those crucial ten seconds, they would perhaps have taken the time to investigate just what those patches were, but ten seconds passes quickly, and the cameras flipped off again to another location, starting their search from the beginning.

“Not much farther,” panted Ophelia Tate. “We’re looking for an old air-raid shelter.”

She had briefed Mick Smith on the situation as thoroughly as an army general, and they both agreed they could not afford to wait for Sergeant Beechgood to obtain a warrant to search Helleborine Halt. If they were going to help Nat and Woody, they had to act fast, before it was too late.

Alec had declined to accompany Mick and Ophelia, staying to protect Apple and Jude. But after a few minutes fretting about his wife, he decided that more action was required. He leafed through the Yellow Pages and made a series of telephone calls that would have made Ophelia proud.

The shelter was one of the many disguised entrances to the tunnels under the Halt, and it was where Ophelia had last seen her cousin. Professor Robert Paxton had carefully placed Woody, then only a tiny white ball of fluff, into a cardboard box and handed it to her, sadness in his eyes. The tunnel had been in disrepair even then, and Ophelia was praying that it had not fallen in.