Flashback Four #4 Read online

  DEDICATION

  TO NINA, SAM, AND EMMA

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to the kind people who helped me with this project: Rosemary Brosnan, Adam Cartwright, Kathy Crispin Cartwright, Kristin Dyan Cutler, Andrew Eliopulos, Liza Voges, Nina Wallace, and all the folks at HarperCollins Children’s Books.

  EPIGRAPH

  Pictures or it didn’t happen.

  —early twenty-first-century catchphrase

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Good News and Bad News

  Chapter 2: The Museum of Historic Photography

  Chapter 3: Cosmic Pinball

  Chapter 4: Keeping Secrets

  Chapter 5: None of Your Business

  Chapter 6: A Mystery of History

  Chapter 7: The Hot Head

  Chapter 8: And Away We Go

  Chapter 9: Wednesday, July 11, 1804

  Chapter 10: Desperate Times

  Chapter 11: Meanwhile, at Hamilton’s House . . .

  Chapter 12: Over the River

  Chapter 13: Meanwhile, at Burr’s House . . .

  Chapter 14: Weehawken

  Chapter 15: Despicable

  Chapter 16: Rules for Duels

  Chapter 17: Ready . . . Aim . . .

  Chapter 18: . . . Fire!

  Chapter 19: I Am a Dead Man

  Chapter 20: Decisions, Decisions

  Chapter 21: Truth and Lies

  Chapter 22: The Last Good-bye

  Facts & Fictions

  About the Author

  Books by Dan Gutman

  Back Ads

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  THE DATE: JULY 11, 1804.

  The place: Weehawken, New Jersey.

  Picture this: It’s early in the morning. The sun has just risen in the east. Two men stand on a flat area next to the rocky cliffs along the Hudson River. They’re facing each other. Each of them has a pistol in one hand. Oh, and the guy on the left is the vice president of the United States.

  Yes, you read that right. The vice president of the United States, Aaron Burr, is pointing a gun at a man. And it’s not just any man. The gun is pointed at one of the most famous men in the world, Alexander Hamilton. He was a major general in the Revolutionary War and the first secretary of the Treasury. He was George Washington’s right-hand man. He founded the city’s first bank—the Bank of New York. Even though Hamilton was never a president himself, he was a signer of the Constitution and one of the Founding Fathers of our country. If you’ve ever held a ten-dollar bill, you’ve seen his face.

  Pretend you’re watching a movie in your head. Hamilton and Burr are ten steps away from each other. They’ve been bitter rivals for fifteen years, ever since our country was born. Finally, their hatred has boiled up to the point where they’ve agreed to a duel to decide once and for all which one should live and which one should die.

  Another man is there also. His name is Nathaniel Pendleton. He is acting sort of as a referee.

  “Are you ready?” Pendleton shouted loud enough so both men could hear him.

  “Present,” said Alexander Hamilton.

  “Present,” said Aaron Burr.

  According to the rules of dueling (and yes, there were rules for duels), each man could now fire at will. Hamilton and Burr put their fingers on their triggers and aimed their pistols. One of them was about to get shot.

  Oh, before we go any further, there’s just one thing I forgot to mention, reader. Four other people witnessed the scene at Weehawken that morning.

  CHAPTER 1

  GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS

  EVERY STORY MUST START AT THE BEGINNING, OF course. As the old song goes, it’s a very good place to start.

  To tell this story correctly, we need to go back—well, actually forward in time. Forward to the present day. And we need to go to a specific place—Boston, Massachusetts.

  Think of two boys and two girls. They’re all twelve years old and in sixth grade, but they go to separate schools. Until recently, these kids didn’t know one another.

  David Williams is tall, thin, and African American. Isabel Alvarez comes from the Dominican Republic. Luke Borowicz is a white kid with mild ADD. Julia Brennan is blonde and goes to the very expensive, all-girls Winsor School. Reader, I’m not trying to be all politically correct or multicultural here. It just worked out that way. They call themselves the Flashback Four.

  If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve read Flashback Four: The Lincoln Project or Flashback Four: The Titanic Mission or Flashback Four: The Pompeii Disaster. If you haven’t read those books, it’s okay. You’ll still enjoy this one. You really should read the first three, though. If you have read them, even better.

  But just in case this is all new to you, a little background information is in order: David, Isabel, Luke, and Julia were recruited by a billionaire named Chris Zandergoth, usually known as Miss Z. In her younger days, Miss Z dropped out of Stanford University and made a fortune by creating an online dating service called Findamate. It was so successful because she figured out a way to hack into the computers of the NSA (National Security Agency), which collects emails, texts, and lots of other information about every man, woman, and child in America. Using a very sophisticated algorithm, Findamate made it easy to match up compatible people. The NSA never even knew their network had been broken into. Either that, or they decided to keep it quiet to avoid public humiliation. Hackers don’t like getting hacked.

  You would think that starting a hugely successful dating site, making billions of dollars, and bringing together lots of happy couples would have been enough to make Miss Z feel satisfied with her life. But she wasn’t. So she spent a big chunk of her Findamate fortune—billions of dollars—to create a super-sophisticated, high-tech, state-of-the-art smartboard. You know the smartboards you have in your school? Well, this one makes those smartboards look like dumbboards. It’s a smarter board. Why? Because it functions as a time-traveling mechanism. It’s called, simply, the Board.

  Go ahead, laugh. You’ve seen it before. You saw that movie Back to the Future. You’ve seen countless TV shows about people who traveled through time. But this thing works. Don’t ask me to explain how. Don’t even try to understand the technology. It’s for super techies. With the Board, it’s possible to input any date, time, place, and voilà—the person standing in front of it will be sent there. It works. You’re going to have to trust me on this one, reader.

  Why would Miss Z invest her fortune in such a crazy device? Simple. She has two passions in life—history and photography. After developing the Board, she recruited the Flashback Four to travel back in time and shoot photographs of historical events that were not photographed when they first took place.

  For instance, Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address. There’s no photo of it. There were photographers there that day, but Lincoln was finished in two minutes, and the photographers didn’t have time to set up their cameras.

  Another example—the Titanic. There’s no photo of it sinking. One more—Mount Vesuvius as it was erupting, just before it buried the city of Pompeii in rock and ash. Photography didn’t even exist when that happened. So Miss Z sent the Flashback Four back to the year 79 to take that picture.

  Those missions weren’t easy. Luke, David, Isabel, and Julia experienced things that no kid should ever have to live through. They were almost blown up by a live bomb. They tangled with Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. They got arrested and thrown in jail. They were locked in a cabin on the Titanic and nearly went
down with the ship. They were forced into slavery in Pompeii. The boys had to fight for their lives as gladiators. The girls had to stomp around barefoot in a tub full of human urine (it’s a long story). Julia stepped in a pile of horse manure.

  The Flashback Four weren’t always successful in these missions. They did manage to get photographs of the Titanic sinking and Mount Vesuvius erupting. They did not get the shot of Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address. But as they say, two out of three ain’t bad. At least the kids survived all three missions and returned home safely. There were more than a few anxious moments in there.

  If you want to learn more about what happened on those missions, read the first three Flashback Four books. I don’t have time to repeat all the gory details right now. I’ve got another story to tell.

  It was Friday, right after school, when the members of the Flashback Four received this text on their phones . . .

  PLEASE COME TO PASTURE COMPANY ASAP

  Pasture Company. That was the name Miss Z had chosen specifically for her time-travel research. The slogan was “If I don’t see you in the future, I’ll see you in the pasture.”

  It had been a few weeks since they’d gotten back from Pompeii, and the kids were excited to hear from Miss Z again.

  “Maybe she has another mission to send us on,” Isabel said to herself when she received the text.

  Isabel had a couple of hours to kill before she had to be home for dinner, so she took the T—the Boston subway system—downtown to 200 Clarendon Street. That’s the address of the sixty-story John Hancock Tower. She punched the button on the elevator to take her to the twenty-third floor. Through the glass door up there, she could see that David, Luke, and Julia were already waiting in the reception area of Pasture Company.

  The door buzzed open, and the rest of the group got up to give Isabel a big hug. After three missions, these kids had bonded as a group. They had been through a lot together, and it is not an exaggeration to say they had come to love one another.

  “Where do you think Miss Z is gonna send us this time?” Julia asked the others.

  “I want to go meet Babe Ruth,” said Luke, a huge Red Sox fan. “He played for the Sox from 1914 to 1919, y’know.”

  “That was before they sold him to the Yankees,” David added.

  “Ugh,” Julia said with a snort. “Baseball is such a bore. It’s just a bunch of guys standing around, spitting and scratching themselves. I’d rather meet Susan B. Anthony.”

  “Who’s that?” asked Luke.

  “How can you not know who Susan B. Anthony was?” asked Isabel, incredulous. “She basically started the women’s movement.”

  “Luke would only know about her if she played for the Red Sox,” Julia said, cracking up the others.

  The kids were so caught up in seeing one another again that at first they didn’t notice a big difference in the reception area of Pasture Company. Up until now, the walls had been covered with framed photos of historical events—Neil Armstrong on the moon, Thomas Edison with his first phonograph, the Wright Brothers getting off the ground for the first time at Kitty Hawk, stuff like that. Now, oddly, all those photos were gone. The walls were blank.

  Miss Z’s assistant, Mrs. Ella Vader, came out and greeted the kids with her slight British accent and told them to wait five minutes. She seemed a little subdued. David picked up a copy of Sports Illustrated from the coffee table and leafed through it mindlessly. Finally, Mrs. Vader ushered the Flashback Four into the main office.

  The photos were gone from the walls there, too. It seemed very corporate and sterile without them. Miss Z’s large wooden desk was in the middle of the room, with a small nameplate on it that said CHRIS ZANDERGOTH. There were four chairs around the desk.

  On the other side of the room was the Board. It was connected to a laptop computer on a cart. The Board itself was on wheels, so it could be moved around.

  “What’s going on?” asked Luke.

  “Where’s Miss Z?” asked Isabel.

  “She’ll be with you in a moment,” Mrs. Vader told them quietly.

  The kids took seats and glanced at one another, concerned looks on their faces. Julia mouthed the words Something’s wrong.

  Finally, Miss Z rolled in on her wheelchair. She looked to be in her forties, with a round face and dark eyes. Miss Z seemed like she was older than she had been in their previous meetings. Her hair was grayer, her face more haggard. The sparkle that had been in her eyes seemed to be missing.

  “It’s so good to see you kids again,” she said, smiling. “It looks like you’ve recovered from your adventure in Pompeii.”

  “We won’t be going back there anytime soon,” said Luke. “David had to fight a tiger.”

  “Worse than that,” David said, “I had to fight you!”

  “Well, all of you did a great job,” said Miss Z. “I’m so proud of you for getting that picture. I wanted to show my appreciation. Mrs. Vader?”

  Mrs. Vader left the office for a moment and came back with four packages that were covered with fancy gift-wrapping paper and bows. She handed one to each of the kids. David asked if they should open them now, and Miss Z nodded.

  The kids tore off the wrapping paper. Inside each package was a picture frame with the photo they’d shot of Mount Vesuvius blowing its top in the year 79. The kids had gotten out of Pompeii in the nick of time, just as tons of hot ash and rock were starting to fall on the city.

  “It’s beautiful,” gushed Isabel. “Thank you!” The other three mumbled their thank-yous in agreement.

  Then, the kids looked at one another. No one was sure exactly what to do next. Should they get up and leave? Should they stay and talk about the Pompeii mission? Mrs. Vader usually gave out tea and cookies, but she wasn’t making a move to do that. There was an awkward silence that seemed to last forever.

  “There’s another reason why I asked you to come here today,” said Miss Z. “I have some good news and some bad news. Would you like to hear the good news first?”

  “I’d rather hear the bad news first,” said Isabel. “That way we can go home with something positive.”

  “Okay,” replied Miss Z. “Well, the bad news is that I’m dying.”

  CHAPTER 2

  THE MUSEUM OF HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHY

  O-KAY!

  Well, that was awkward. What do you say when somebody has just told you she’s dying? There’s really no appropriate response. It’s probably best to say nothing.

  There was stunned silence for a few tortured moments. The kids knew that Miss Z had been suffering from ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It’s a nervous-system disease that weakens your muscles. ALS is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, after the famous baseball player who died from it in 1941. There’s no cure for ALS, and it’s a progressive disease. Most people who are diagnosed with it only live between two and five years.

  The Flashback Four could see that Miss Z had declined since they last saw her. But they didn’t realize how advanced the disease had become. Mrs. Vader wiped a tear from her eye.

  “I’m sorry,” Miss Z told the group. “I didn’t mean to shock you. I knew this was going to happen to me at some point. And now it has. My doctor gave me the news last week. To be perfectly blunt about it, I have a few months left. Maybe more, if I’m lucky. But statistics don’t usually lie.”

  Miss Z had come to accept her situation, and she was quite matter-of-fact about the whole thing. That broke the tension, at least a little.

  “We’re so sorry,” each of the kids mumbled.

  “So what’s the good news?” asked David.

  “The good news,” Miss Z said more cheerfully, as she pulled four embossed envelopes out of her desk drawer and handed one to each of the kids, “is that the Museum of Historic Photography is about to open!”

  For much of her life, Miss Z had dreamed of building a museum and filling it with photos of the most important events in history. The museum, she hoped, would be her legacy. She didn’t want to
be remembered just for creating a silly dating website. So she had worked very hard over the last few years to secure a location for a museum, get the proper permits, hire an architect, and complete the necessary paperwork to turn the project from a dream into a reality. It had been a race against the clock.

  “That’s wonderful!” Isabel said. “Congratulations!”

  “Thank you,” Miss Z replied. “I knew that if I didn’t make it happen fast, it wouldn’t get done. You know, I have no children. After I’m gone, who knows what will happen to my estate? Even if I instructed in my will that my money should go toward building the museum, I’d have no confidence that it would ever be built. As long as I’m alive, I’m in control of where my money goes.”

  “So that’s why all the photos are gone from the walls in here,” noted Luke.

  “Exactly,” said Miss Z. “They’re being hung at the museum as we speak. It opens one week from today. You’re all invited to the ribbon-cutting ceremony, of course. It wouldn’t be right if the Flashback Four wasn’t there. I hope you can make it.”

  The kids looked at their invitations.

  “It says the ribbon-cutting ceremony is black-tie,” Luke said. “I don’t have a black tie. Actually, I don’t have any ties. I just borrow them from my dad.”

  Miss Z laughed.

  “Oh, black-tie doesn’t mean you actually have to wear a black tie,” she told Luke. “You can wear whatever you’d like.”

  Luke was still puzzled. Why would guests be asked to wear a black tie if they didn’t have to wear one? It made no sense at all. But then, except for Julia, none of the others had much experience in the strange habits of spectacularly wealthy people.

  The original plan had been for Miss Z’s museum to be a short walk from the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. But that hadn’t worked out, for various legal reasons. Miss Z had been able to acquire land on the Boston waterfront, a short walk from the Institute of Contemporary Art. She’d constructed a four-story black marble building with a large circular window poking out of the front of it, so the building looked a little like a giant camera. That was intentional, of course. A big sign on the grass out front said MOHP: THE MUSEUM OF HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHY.