The Mystery of the Russian Ransom Read online

  Travis and Dmitri bent low to get past the windows looking into the room with the machines and computers. There didn’t seem to be anyone there. It was late afternoon. Perhaps they had all gone for the day.

  Soon Travis was in an area he didn’t know. He let himself be guided by instinct. He came to one corridor, passed by it, and moved on to the next. It was as far back in the building as they could go.

  He peered down the corridor and saw several doors. One had light leaking out from below it.

  Without saying a word, Travis pointed and indicated to Dmitri that this would be the room they would try.

  They moved fast down the hall, still staying low, ready to bolt at any time.

  Travis was first to the door. How, he wondered, had the pounding of his heart not set off the alarms? It sounded like a marching band, his heart like the big drums the marchers wore on their chests.

  Dmitri was right beside him.

  They examined the door. It had a latch on the outside, just as Travis had hoped.

  He turned the handle slowly, then opened the door.

  The bright light blinded them a bit. Travis blinked, stared. He was looking at one of the two young men who had been coaching Sarah.

  The man said something in Russian. Travis knew it wasn’t “Welcome! Come on in.”

  24

  There was a message on the phone when I returned to my room and got out of my hockey equipment. It was Travis. He said they are in the building. Now all I can do is wait – and try to remember to breathe.

  I’m so scared and nervous. I may as well scribble while I wait, or else I’ll go mad.

  I thought I heard a door click, but I can’t look out to check. Still, I’m sure I heard something.

  Didn’t I?

  25

  Travis tried to speak, but some other foreign language – not Russian, not English – came babbling out. Dmitri brushed past him and stood between Travis and the Russian coach.

  This was a Dmitri that Travis didn’t know. Always so shy and soft-spoken back home, here he was being firm and confident and talking fast. Travis just had no idea what was being said.

  The young Russian coach talked back. He seemed angry at first, then thoughtful. More and more, the talking was being done by Dmitri.

  Finally, the Russian coach nodded hard, stood up, and walked over.

  Travis thought he was going to be hit. Or Dmitri was going to be slapped. At the very least, they were now going to be captured as well.

  The coach said something in Russian.

  Dmitri turned to Travis. “His name is Pavel. We’re to go with him.”

  Travis’s heart sank. They were caught.

  With sagging shoulders, Travis followed Pavel and Dmitri down the hall. All the Screech Owls had managed to do was create more trouble. If the ransom was ten million rubles for Sarah alone, it would now be thirty million. And if the others were caught, seventy million.

  Not even Mr. Petrov had that kind of money.

  They came to an office-like room. Pavel reached inside the door and unhooked a bunch of keys from their place on the wall. He turned, jangling the keys.

  We’re going to be locked up, Travis thought. Put in prison.

  They left the office and made their way along a short corridor. Here was a room where no light leaked out. A prison cell, thought Travis. A dungeon.

  Pavel stopped, inserted the key, and turned it. He swung the door outward and stepped back so that Dmitri and Travis could enter.

  Travis was crying as he stepped through. He couldn’t help it. His eyes were streaming salty tears.

  The light blurred in his tears. There was someone sitting on the side of a bed.

  It was a girl. She had a Screech Owls coat on – and a pink backpack.

  It was Sarah.

  “Trav!” Sarah shouted. “Dmitri!”

  She jumped off the bed and hugged Travis so hard he thought his chest was going to explode. He couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t seen her in days. At moments, he’d thought he might never see her again. But here she was. All ready to go – just as he had asked her to be. Now, all three of them would be locked up together.

  “How did you get in?” Sarah asked, still not understanding. “How’d you get the key?”

  Dmitri, who had said nothing, merely stood to one side and pointed out the doorway.

  Pavel stood there, looking in, his face crumpling. He said something in Russian, and Dmitri explained that they were to follow him.

  For a moment, Travis thought he had misheard.

  Pavel was going to show them the way out.

  The three Screech Owls – Sarah with her backpack, Travis, then Dmitri – hurried along behind Pavel as he led them in another direction, looping around through a large storage area in the old rink, and then back through a door that took them to the spot where Sam and Nish and Lars were waiting.

  The three waiting Owls looked shocked to see the group coming from the other direction. They, too, thought they’d been caught.

  Pavel said something to Dmitri, and Dmitri answered him. Pavel nodded, backing away. They knew their own way from here.

  “Pavel,” Sarah said quickly. “Wait.”

  She walked back toward Pavel, who looked as if he was expecting to be slapped. But Sarah had no such intention.

  She threw her arms around him and hugged him.

  “Spasiba,” she said. Thank you. “Spasiba, Pavel.”

  26

  The Owls came racing back to the Astoria just as Muck and Mr. D were arriving back from meeting with the embassy officials at the parents’ hotel.

  “SARAH!” Mr. D bellowed the moment he caught sight of her.

  She raced to the Owls’ manager and leaped into his arms for a huge bear hug.

  Muck hugged her, too. The Screech Owls’ coach was always awkward with emotion, but Travis could see the relief in his face and, for that matter, the tears in his eyes. Sarah was back. The world was all right again.

  “That was fast work,” Muck said. “Mr. Petrov just announced that the ransom had been paid. Did they drop you off here?”

  “No,” said Sarah.

  “What do you mean?” Mr. D asked. “How did you get here?”

  “The Owls rescued me,” she said proudly. “They found out where I was and came and got me. They’re heroes.”

  “I was the one who figured out how to get in,” said Nish proudly, almost as if he expected any minute to be spelling his name for the newspaper reporters.

  “But that’s impossible,” Mr. D sputtered. “We just met with the embassy people, and then Mr. Petrov and the Russian media showed up and he announced he had paid the ransom. He said you’d be released by the kidnappers tomorrow.”

  “Where were you?” Muck asked.

  As best she could, Sarah explained. She told them about the arena, about the tests, the scientists, the coaches, the girls. She told them how she’d been studied like she was some alien species. She said she hadn’t been treated badly and that, in fact, one of the young Russian coaches had been the one to get them the key and set her free. He was a hero, she said.

  The others filled in the blanks with shouts and boasts and laughter. Travis told about how they’d used Data’s phone and the GPS. Dmitri told how he had reasoned with Pavel, and how Pavel said he had come to respect Sarah so much he couldn’t stop them, how he decided, instead, to help.

  Nish just wanted to talk about his own role in the adventure, how he had been the one who figured out how they could get into the rink when all the doors were locked.

  “But who were they?” Mr. D asked. “Who would do such a thing?”

  “There was one guy who seemed to be in charge,” said Sarah. “I kept trying to see him, but I could never get close enough. He wore a hat really tight over his eyes. But I have this,” she added. From her pack she pulled out Data’s phone.

  “I’ll give it back to Data,” Travis said.

  “No,” Sarah said. “Wait.”

  She
fiddled with the phone and then held out the screen for all to see.

  “I smuggled it into the last practice. I pretended I’d had the wind knocked out of me and went to the bench to loosen my equipment and catch my breath. I managed to sneak a picture of him watching. It’s not very good, but that’s him.”

  Everyone looked at the mysterious man in the photograph. His face wasn’t very clear, but they could see he was tall. His fur hat was very distinctive.

  “I know that hat,” said Mr. D.

  “So do I,” said Muck.

  Muck looked at the picture one more time, then started nodding.

  “It’s Mr. Petrov.”

  27

  “We have a game to play,” Muck announced after the police had been called and Mr. and Mrs. Cuthbertson had raced over from their hotel to see for themselves that Sarah was all right.

  “We have a game to play … and we have our first-line center back.”

  There was no time for pausing. That evening, at the Ufa Arena, the Owls were up against Yekaterinburg, the top-rated Russian peewee team in the tournament.

  There wasn’t really a championship trophy – the gathering was supposed to be just a series of exhibition matches – but it was a tournament in the eyes and minds of the Owls. Winner would have “bragging rights,” just like back in 1972, which seemed a million years ago to the young Owls.

  The Owls scrambled to get their gear from their rooms and load it onto the shuttle bus that would take them to the rink. Sarah’s equipment was ready for her, as carefully packed as she had left it. It smelled like roses compared to Nish’s stinking equipment bag, which all the other Owls carefully avoided.

  Nish was still boasting about his vital role in Sarah’s rescue – “And then I remembered how the Zamboni had to dump its snow …” – as the bus turned in to the parking lot of the Ufa Arena. By then, every Owl on the bus was sick of listening to him. They’d tuned him out before the bus turned the first corner.

  Travis felt happy. Happier than he could ever remember being. He was on his way to play a game of hockey against a strong team. He had his line back – Sarah in the middle, Dmitri on the right wing, Travis on left.

  He thought about Pavel and why the young coach had decided to help them rather than turn them over to the bad guys. Pavel had been a bad guy himself, but then he turned out to be a good guy. Why? Was it just because he’d come to realize what an awful thing it was they were doing to her? Or had he been struggling with it all along?

  It was going to be a good game. Travis had kissed the inside of his jersey as he hauled it over his head. He had been the first player on the ice, his skates the first to draw a line on the new, freshly flooded surface. He had twirled his stick perfectly as he pulled away. He had been first around the net, digging in extra hard as he exploded down the far side of the rink, his skates singing and sizzling. His first shot had pinged off the crossbar and high into the netting at the back of the Owls’ net.

  He was set.

  “They’re good!”

  Sarah was gasping for breath. Her line had been trapped in its own end for the entire shift by the determined forechecking of the Yekaterinburg Dynamo. Travis had twice tried to clear the zone by firing the puck off the glass, only to have the tall defenseman for Dynamo leap into the air like a baseball outfielder and knock the puck down with his glove. But for the incredible goaltending of Jeremy – flopping this way and that, stacking his pads, moving quickly from post to post – Dynamo would have scored two or three times on that shift alone.

  “Dmitri!” Travis yelled across Sarah’s back. Dmitri leaned back and looked Travis’s way.

  “Use that speed of yours,” Travis said. “We’ll flip you the puck.”

  Dmitri nodded. The Screech Owl who had done all the talking when they rescued Sarah was again the silent Dmitri. Travis smiled, happy to be together with his line once again.

  Travis saw Muck reach and gently tap Sarah’s shoulder. The sign that her line was up next. Muck was going to double-shift them.

  Andy’s line came off after a puck went out of play, and Sarah jumped straight over the boards, not even bothering with the gate. She was ready.

  Sarah easily won the face-off, blocking the other center with her butt while sliding the puck back to Lars. Lars hurried behind Jeremy’s net, turned, and watched as everyone took up positions. The Dynamo forwards came over the blue line but swooped away like swallows, not challenging Lars.

  Lars hit Nish on the far side with a pass, and the closest Dynamo player charged at him, hoping to cause a turnover. But Nish deftly sidestepped the check and tricked the player by doing absolutely nothing with the puck. He simply lifted his stick, leaving the puck where it was, and the checker roared by, stopping suddenly in a high spray of snow when he realized he’d just skated past a free puck.

  Nish tapped a short pass to Sarah, who immediately wheeled and sent a hard backhand cross-ice to Travis. Travis had the open lane and moved fast over the Owls’ blue line.

  Dmitri was already away. Travis feared they’d be offside if he didn’t get the Hail Mary pass away fast, so he flipped the puck immediately and it sailed high over his checker’s head, over the reach of the tall defenseman, and landed smack on the blue line just as Dmitri crossed.

  Dmitri was in alone. Travis felt he hardly needed to watch to know what would happen next: forehand fake, backhand, and high into the roof, the water bottle flying.

  Muck never said a word. Just a light pinch of three players’ shoulders when the line came off. For Travis, Sarah, and Dmitri, that was enough.

  The highest praise possible from their coach.

  They were tied 2–2 going into the third – Nish scoring on a power play blast from the point – and still tied with less than a minute to go in the game. A small touch to Sarah’s shoulder from Muck sent her line over the boards again for the final shift of the game.

  Travis was pumped. This wasn’t a real tournament with a real championship to be won. It had been arranged by Ivan Petrov as an exhibition to show how good a peewee team could be with boys and girls playing together. It was to be an inspiration to girls playing the game in Russia, a country where girls were not allowed to play on teams with boys, and where many people still felt that girls were too delicate to play with stronger, larger boys. How silly, Travis thought. Find me a stronger Owl than Sam. Or a faster Owl than Sarah. Well, maybe Dmitri, but that would be all.

  It had turned out that Ivan Petrov had more in mind than an exhibition. But that was all settled now and the games were still on.

  The Owls wanted to win, badly.

  Sarah took the face-off but lost it. The Dynamo center sent the puck back, and the tall Russian defenseman blew a hard slap shot that would have gone in the Owls’ net had it not hit Jeremy’s stick handle.

  Was that luck? Travis wondered. Or was Jeremy that sharp tonight?

  Didn’t matter – the puck hadn’t gone in. It slammed into the glass, where it lay in the corner.

  Sarah was first there. She leaned down, placed the back of her stick blade on the puck, and scooped it up, causing a roar from the crowd.

  She flipped the puck over the two checkers moving in on her, then quickly darted to pick up her own pass.

  The crowd cheered.

  Cheered? Travis wondered why. They were all Russians, apart from a handful of Screech Owl parents. He had no time to look up.

  Sarah saw Travis cutting hard across center and threw a pass slightly behind him. Travis caught it in his skates and angled the puck up onto his stick. He slipped the puck between the skates of the closest checker and hit Dmitri with a perfect pass as Dmitri broke hard down the right side.

  Dmitri was past the final defenseman so fast it looked as if he had gone through him like a ghost. The defenseman, startled by Dmitri’s speed, turned so abruptly in pursuit that he fell over.

  Dmitri was in alone again. Travis could see it play out the way it always did: forehand fake, backhand, water bottle flying.
>
  Only this time it didn’t happen.

  Dmitri drew out the goalie, who was anticipating this exact move, and the goaltender kept sliding while Dmitri kept skating, holding the puck instead of going to his backhand, and flying around the back of the net.

  He could easily have scored on the wraparound, but Dmitri wasn’t even looking at the net. He was searching for Sarah.

  Sarah saw the play unfolding and charged to the net.

  Dmitri threw a light saucer pass over the stick of the fallen defenseman. Sarah picked up the puck, stepped around the skates of the downed defender, slipped past the goaltender, still slightly out of his crease, and dropped the puck into the back of the net as if it were a little hamster she was patting back into its cage.

  The crowd roared.

  Travis was sure he could hear “Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!” being chanted as he and Dmitri, Nish, and Lars, and then Jeremy, piled onto Sarah in the corner.

  He thought at first it must be the Owls still on the bench, but it sounded different, and it seemed to come from somewhere in the crowd.

  He broke away and looked for the sound.

  There, in the middle of the stands, was the entire Russian peewee girls’ team, all decked out in their red tracksuits, all on their feet, yelling and screaming.

  They were cheering for Sarah.

  28

  “What a devious plan.”

  Mr. Cuthbertson shook his head. Mrs. Cuthbertson was holding Sarah’s hand and dabbing at her eyes, unable to hold back the tears.

  All the Owls and the parents who had traveled to Russia had been called to a meeting in the Astoria to discuss the details of what had happened to Sarah.

  Ivan Petrov’s ambitions had taken control of his senses. He was fabulously wealthy thanks to his investments in oil – a billionaire several times over, as Mr. Yakushev said – but it was hockey that had made him famous in Russia. The money he had spent in support of Russian hockey had made him a much-loved public figure. And his stated intention to help develop women’s hockey until it was on par with Canada and the United States had been very popular with the people. His picture was regularly in the papers, and he was often quoted. His fame in Russian hockey circles gave him a power that money could never buy.