“Precisely. And if I were her, if I’d stolen these plans and then led boys down to my secret lair, I would need someplace new to lay low. The boys might tell people about the dungeons. They could be searched. I could be caught. I need a place no one can find me.”
“But where?” Finn asked, feeling as if they were talking in circles.
“We’ll need all five of you to dress as cast members. You’ll meet me at the Transportation and Ticket Center, bus stop number five, at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Can you make that?”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday. Probably. I suppose so.”
“Make sure you do,” he advised.
“What did you mean by ‘two birds with one stone’?”
“We’re going to use her own tactics against her. If you manage to get the plans, she’ll come after you. She’ll want to stop you from getting them to me, especially now that she knows you have the pen.”
“So?”
“You’re going to lead her into a trap.” His old eyes brightened.
“You’re going to use us as bait?”
Wayne looked at Finn. His features softened. “How terribly impolite of me. It has been so long, you see. We’re so close now. So very close.” He straightened up and looked Finn in the eye. “I need your help—yours and the others’—in catching Maleficent. It is a task not without risk, but one I assure you well worth the effort, if you’re game. This is, I believe, what Walt had intended all along—the capture of an Overtaker, the beginning of the end for them.” He paused and allowed Finn to think through his proposal. Then he asked, “So? Will you help me?”
At nine the next morning, Finn stood with the others in line at bus stop number five at the Transportation and Ticket Center.
A large bus pulled up. The door swung open, and from behind the wheel Wayne motioned them inside. “Well?” the old guy said, “Hurry it up!”
The kids piled on, and Wayne shut the door and drove off. They were all alone in the otherwise empty bus.
“There isn’t time,” Wayne said. “There’s a bag for each of you.”
Finn’s name was written on one of five grocery bags. Inside was a costume.
“Put it on,” Wayne instructed. “Ladies to the back.”
Some blankets had been strung across the rear seats to provide the girls privacy.
“Gentlemen up front.”
Wayne turned the bus at the next corner, and the boys, all in various degrees of undress, had to hold on to keep their balance.
Wayne picked up the microphone and announced so the girls could hear as well, “I’ll bring you in around the back of the park at Frontierland. You’ll enter the tunnels from there.”
“Tunnels?” Finn asked.
“After that, it’s up to the five of you, I’m afraid.”
When the boys were dressed, Charlene and Willa came forward. Willa wore an old-fashioned blue-striped dress and a puffy-sleeved blouse printed with pastel flowers, the uniform of food-service workers in Frontierland. Charlene wore a skirt and top of a deckhand on the paddle wheel steamboat that circled Tom Sawyer Island.
“Listen, all of you! There’s a schedule in place we must keep to in order for this to work.”
Wayne was one of the worst drivers Finn had ever met. The bus nearly sideswiped two cars, then veered left and scraped its wheels against the curb, before smashing back down to the roadway.
“Okay, we’re listening,” Finn said, realizing that the old goat was agitated.
Philby was dressed as a boatman on the Jungle Cruise. Finn was a newspaper boy from Main Street. Maybeck wore a turban-topped outfit from the Magic Carpets of Aladdin.
Wayne pulled the bus over and threw open the door. Amanda boarded.
“She is necessary to our plans,” Wayne announced.
Amanda looked Finn in the eye and then, without saying anything, took a seat in the middle of the bus.
Wayne explained, “Amanda has the run of the place. She’s not on the DHI watch list. She’ll act as sentry and guide when you need her.”
Now inside the Magic Kingdom, Wayne slowed the bus next to a large white building that, according to its sign, had something to do with waste disposal. A wide metal tube, connected to the building, extended out from an earthen bank. A paved road led up the rise to a very large double gate in the wooden wall. Flowers and shrubs covered a small hill that bordered a tall wooden fence, which was behind Frontierland.
Wayne spun to face them, still behind the wheel. He nervously checked his wristwatch. “You’ll wear these ID tags around your necks at all times. But turn them so they face in, so the ID picture doesn’t show.” Wayne had borrowed some ID tags for them.