“That doesn’t even make sense,” I told them. “You’re just replacing body parts with names of arcade games.”
They didn’t care. They were laughing like crazy, staggering all over the sidewalk like drunks. All around us, commuters from the train station were giving us a wide berth. Alf grabbed a lamppost to keep from falling over, and pretty soon I was laughing along with them. I couldn’t help myself. The guys were contagious.
“I don’t want to brag,” I told them, “but I did load a couple bytes into her accumulator.”
Alf stopped laughing. “What?”
“I don’t get it,” Clark said.
“It’s a machine language joke,” I explained. “An accumulator is a register where you store data—”
“Never mind that,” Alf said. Suddenly he was all business. “We’ve got a problem with Operation Vanna.”
We walked west on Main Street, past the travel agency and the bike shop, and then we arrived at our destination: General Tso’s Mount Everest restaurant. The name on the sign promised a sort of grandeur, but inside it was just a regular Chinese restaurant with red carpet, greasy noodle dishes, and paper place mats illustrating the Chinese zodiac.
We could see General Tso through the window, dressed in his usual black tuxedo, escorting some customers to their table. He was owner, ma?tre d’, and head chef of the restaurant, and he worked 365 days a year without fail. Years later I’d learn that his real name was Hiraku, he was born in Oregon, and he and his wife were both Japanese.
Alf and Clark led us through the narrow alley separating General Tso’s from the bike shop next door. There wasn’t much behind the buildings—just a few parking spaces for employees, a narrow access road, and then a much larger commuter parking lot, a sea of Buicks and Oldsmobiles. We ducked behind a Grand Marquis and then turned to study the rear of General Tso’s.
At the base of the building was a large metal Dumpster and a back door for deliveries. On the second floor were two curtained windows and a rusty fire ladder ascending between them. The sun was setting, but there was still plenty of daylight, enough to get a good look at everything.
“Last night, me and Clark took a practice run up the ladder,” Alf explained. “We wanted to get the lay of the land. Check out the rooftop. Maybe get a closer look at the hatch. See what tools we need to pack.”
“Only we never found out,” Clark explained. “We got five rungs up the ladder and Schwarzenegger freaked out.”
“Arnold Schwarzenegger?” I asked. “The Terminator?”
Alf pressed binoculars into my hands. “Second-floor window,” he said. “Take a look.”
I pressed the lenses to my face and scanned the building, but all I saw were red drapes ornamented with gold dragons.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Other window,” Clark explained. “The left window.”
I shifted the binoculars an inch. The left window had the same red-and-gold drapes, but squatting between them was a tiny black-and-white dog with a silky coat and a serious overbite. He was glowering at me, like we were making direct eye contact. Even from fifty feet away, the dog seemed to recognize me as a threat.
“That’s Arnold Schwarzenegger?” I asked.
“The General’s pet,” Alf explained. “He’s a Shit Zoo. It means little lion in Chinese.”
The little lion barked a warning—a series of short high-pitched chirps. He sounded less like a dog and more like a smoke detector. The sound was so piercing, it traveled two stories and across the parking lot, reaching us loud and clear. Schwarzenegger didn’t stop barking until I lowered the binoculars.
“So last night we’re climbing up the ladder,” Clark explained. “Total stealth mode. Super quiet. We’re not making a sound. But as soon as we reached those windows, the dog flips out. Yap-yap-yapping his head off.”
“The guard dog from hell,” Alf said.
I looked through the binoculars again. Schwarzenegger was standing in a tiny pillowed bed, growling and anxiously pacing in circles. As if he remembered Alf and Clark from the previous evening.
We walked around the block, studying the architecture, looking for another way to access the roof. There were no other fire escapes or ladders on the bike shop or the travel agency; the only way to access Zelinsky’s was the way Tyler had shown us. After viewing the building from every possible angle, Clark reached in his pocket for a pencil sketch of the downtown shopping district. He knelt on the sidewalk and drew a dog in the second-floor window of General Tso’s restaurant:
“I guess there’s only one option,” Clark said.
“Kidnap the dog?” Alf said.
“No,” I told him. “No one’s kidnapping anything.”
Clark nodded. “We have to distract the dog. Get his attention on something else.”
“Perfect,” I said. “How do we do that?”
“Leave that to us,” he said. “You keep playing with Mary’s software, and we’ll take care of the rest.”
900 REM *** CONTROL HERO ***
910 JS=PEEK(56321) AND 15
920 IF JS=7 THEN HX=HX+2
930 IF HX>255 THEN HX=255
940 IF JS=11 THEN HX=HX-2
950 IF HX<24 THEN HX=24
960 IF JS=13 THEN HY=HY+2
970 IF HY>229 THEN HY=229
980 IF JS=14 THEN HY=HY-2
990 IF HY<50 THEN HY=50
995 RETURN
THE NEXT MORNING I biked three miles to the nearest mall with a B. Dalton and bought my own copy of How to Learn Machine Language in 30 Days so I could study it during class. I didn’t get to school until eleven o’clock, so I headed to the office to pick up a late slip. Over the years I’d become an expert at forging excuse notes from my mother. Normally the school secretary barely looked at them; she’d just check my name off the attendance grid and send me on my way.
But this day, something was different.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said, pushing my note across the counter. “Doctor’s visit.”
The secretary raised her eyebrows. “Wait here.”
She left her desk, tapped on the door of the principal’s office, and ducked inside. A moment later, she returned. “Mr. Hibble wants to see you.”
“It was a doctor’s visit,” I repeated.
She nodded. “You can go right in.”
I hadn’t spoken to Hibble since the beginning of the school year, when my mother dragged me into his office to protest my class schedule. I found him seated behind his desk, rereading my note with a bemused grin. He was short, barely five four, and my classmates nicknamed him “the Duke” because he wore jacked-up cowboy boots and spoke with a southern-fried twang. His walls were decorated with numerous diplomas and a framed photograph of Hibble standing beside Kenny Rogers.
“Don’t just stand there,” he called. “Come in and sit, Billy. We’ve been waiting for you.”