Mr. Nakagawa flicked his fingers, indicating that they could sit down. “No talking.”
Tristan watched them with eyes narrowed, stylus poised over the questions. Surely he was just making a show at struggling with the test. He was old enough to get a doctorate degree. Why was he even taking the test? He’d only been in class for a day!
Mr. Nakagawa tapped on his desk loudly. “Eyes on paper.”
Tristan focused back on his test, answering faster than before.
The twins sat down and Louise texted Jillian what she had figured out.
“Obviously we turn Kessler over to the authorities and let them deal with him,” Jillian texted.
“We need evidence,” Louise texted back.
“We could restore the data and then send it to the police,” Nikola offered.
Louise eyed her phone. She hadn’t thought it was possible for someone to “overhear” text messages between two people, but the babies were bored. They’d obviously figured it out. “Yes, do that.”
Jillian eeped in surprise, earning a loud knock from Mr. Nakagawa. She pressed her mouth tightly shut on any other exclamations and texted furiously, “If you restore the data, the plans for the magic generator and the decoy Tinker Bell spotlight will also be restored.”
“We need to know if he made more than one trigger,” Louise typed. “There could be a second bomb.”
Jillian flinched as if hit. “Okay, okay, restore the data but don’t send to police!”
“We could delete our stuff back off,” the babies offered.
It seemed like a simple fix, but most likely the FBI would seize the printer and examine it every possible way including under the microscope because they would need evidence to convict Mr. Kessler. If the twins turned Mr. Kessler in, then the magic generator would be found. Erasing the info would only make them look guilty—guiltier.
Louise shook her head. “We need something else as evidence. Something that ties him to Roycroft or the bomb.”
Jillian leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling a moment before texting, “Maybe we could get him to confess. If he told the police that he was involved, they don’t need evidence.”
“He’ll never confess,” Louise texted. “He’d be facing a death penalty.”
“New York doesn’t have the death penalty,” Nikola stated.
“It’s an act of terrorism,” Louise texted while Jillian replied with, “It’s a federal case.”
But perhaps Jillian had the right idea.
“We could send Kessler an anonymous letter saying that if he didn’t confess to creating the trigger to the bomb on his 3D printer, that we…”
Her tablet was suddenly jerked out of her hands. She yelped in surprise as Tristan glanced at the screen and his eyebrow rose in surprise.
“Kessler?” He said it like he was only mildly surprised.
Mr. Nakagawa knocked loudly.
Tristan handed back her tablet and went back to his seat.
* * *
Flying Monkey knew.
He only glanced at her tablet for a moment. Nikola’s text had scrolled out of view. The babies were safe from him, but Mr. Kessler was a walking dead man.
Maybe. Assuming that Ming didn’t want him to make another bomb.
They had to act faster than she wanted to. Tristan had taken his own tablet out and was typing something.
“We need to restore the data on the printer,” Louise texted.
“We’re doing it,” Nikola replied.
“As soon as we get a copy we need to send it to the FBI so they’ll act now.”
“He got the printer’s memory deep-scrubbed but the programs were automatically copied to the administration system.”
Louise assumed that he’d deleted those too. “He didn’t wipe those?”
“No. He doesn’t have clearance to do that.”
Neither did the twins but that didn’t stop them. Was Mr. Kessler really that stupid that he couldn’t hack the school’s system? Or did he think that the school board simply wouldn’t understand the code that they were looking at?
She gasped as the log showed that he’d printed three triggers, one day after another, during the first week of March. According to the media, Roycroft’s business promised to deliver all packages during the next Shutdown. He could only make the guarantee because of a well-exploited loophole in the treaty that let US customs prescreen shipments and then keep them in guarded storage areas prior to Shutdown. The EIA then would do a cursory check on the seals and pass the shipments quickly through the quarantine zone. Using Roycroft’s records, the FBI had tracked all the thinly disguised bomb components to Elfhome. None of them should have gotten past the US customs, as the treaty banned them. In addition to the quarantine zone expansion, the UN was also debating closing the loophole so that all goods would pass through EIA. Since Ming controlled the EIA, then he would effectively control everything in and out of Pittsburgh.