The Stolen Vault Read online

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  Published by Penguin Young Readers Licenses, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

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  Ebook ISBN 9780593095270

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  INTERSTATE 5, CALIFORNIA

  “Outta the way, slowpoke!” Tony Toretto yelled into the comm system of his sleek race car. With a wide grin, he pushed down on the gas pedal, swerving past the heavy, multiwheeled armored hauler that served as his team’s base of operations. The same hauler that was currently cruising at a ridiculously slow 40 miles per hour up Interstate 5 in California.

  “You know we gotta go slow!” shouted Frostee through the speaker. “Ms. Nowhere was super clear, man! Slow wins this race!”

  Three other cars whipped around the hauler—Echo Pearl’s slim, flat race car was first. Then came Cisco Renaldo’s big-wheel truck, veering off the road and bouncing easily over the large rocks that littered the side of the highway. Last up was Layla Gray’s white sports car, the side thrusters open and ready to blast off.

  “Is that the best you guys got?” Tony yelled. “Come on, we’re on open road here! It’s just begging us to race!”

  “Tony!” Layla hissed through the comm. “You know I’d leave you in the dust if I wanted to. But we have a mission!”

  Tony shook his head. “The hauler has to go slow.” He grinned. “And the autopilot can drive it down this boring road any day of the week. No one will know if we cut loose a bit.”

  Echo zoomed up, slammed on her brakes, and spun backward, racing alongside Tony as she did so. “If you really do want to race, could you maybe not drive with training wheels this time? Let’s do this!”

  And then suddenly both their cars started slowing down.

  “What?” Tony said, incredulous. He hit the gas pedal as hard as he could, but it pushed back against him and the car continued to slow. “Why?” he added, uselessly.

  A holographic projection of Ms. Nowhere’s face popped up over the dashboard. And she looked very displeased. “Tony Toretto! You have strict orders to stay with the hauler! You’re supposed to be running an escort mission. Save the speed for when you need it.”

  The projection winked out, and the cars automatically stayed at a calm cruising speed of 40 miles per hour.

  “No one will know, huh?” Layla laughed through the comm.

  Tony sighed and stared out the window at the desert. It was going to be a long and very slow drive to the Bay Area.

  CHAPTER 2

  EL SOBRANTE, CALIFORNIA

  “You see why I came to you,” Red said. “It’s a big job. And I need people with skills to pull it off.”

  José pulled the metal door to his auto shop down and twisted the heavy locks that held it in place. He flipped the switch on the neon Open sign to OFF. It was still an hour before closing time, but it would be better if no one walked in on the business meeting that was about to occur.

  Red leaned over the small kitchen table and licked his lips greedily. He was a thin man, with a close-shaved head and dark eyes, and his face was always red and angry—hence the nickname.

  “You think you’re gonna retire here? In El Sobrante?” he asked José and the others. “This town is dead. The people here got nothin’ and won’t ever be nothin’. But this job . . . I’ve been watching that bank for months. They’re moving stuff in and out all the time. We could hit it and never have to work again!”

  José glanced around at the other two in the room with him and Red. Like him, they had lived in the neighborhood their entire lives. Jonathan Chan owned the locksmith shop just down the street. And Traci Hui worked as a train operator for BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, basically the closest thing to a subway you’d find in Northern California.

  All four also happened to be criminals. Petty theft. Small scams. But now it was time for a big score. One that would let them all retire. This would be their one big and final job.

  They were going to rob a bank.

  “I don’t know . . . ,” José replied, the hesitation in his voice clear.

  Red pushed back. “You can’t walk now. I mean, what you gonna do? Rat the rest of us out?”

  “You know I won’t,” José replied quickly. “But a robbery—”

  “You know I need this!” Red hissed. “We need this. I got debts! We all got debts. This is easy money, and you’d be stupid to pass it up!”

  “Okay,” José said calmly, giving in. “Let’s do it.”

  “Yeah, I thought so,” Red said as he unrolled a map of downtown Berkeley, a larger city about ten miles south. A circle was drawn on the map. José leaned in closely, though he already knew what he was going to find.

  “Let me tell you the plan,” Red said, a dangerous grin on his face.

  CHAPTER 3

  BERKELEY

  SPY RACERS SECRET HEADQUARTERS

  “Hmm,” Ms. Nowhere said, studying a string of numbers that scrolled across a data pad. “You managed the drive in just under twelve hours. I’m impressed.”

  It had been a lengthy and boring drive up from Los Angeles, and Tony was restless.

  When he and his crew had signed on with Ms. Nowhere and her secret organization to work as undercover spy racers, it had been kind of a given that their missions would involve dramatic car chases and furious explosions. Instead, they had woken up this morning with instructions to drive the hauler up Interstate 5 at the most absurdly slow speed possible, just to deliver a high-tech contraption that was no larger than the engine of a car. It was grunt work that a shipping company could have done!

  To make matters
worse, the “bank” that the team had delivered the package to was just an empty series of fake offices above an empty fake bank with one large vault on its lowest floor. The vault was the only real thing in the building worth mentioning. Everything else was as dull as you would expect a fake bank office to be.

  Looking around at her team’s faces, Ms. Nowhere frowned. “No, seriously. I just love leaving LA and waiting at the other end of these missions away from my real office. Just so I can lecture you. I absolutely adore it.”

  “It’s only three hundred miles from LA!” Tony found himself grumbling. “We should have been here in a third of that time! This—this thing—”

  “A highly sensitive miniaturized transflux particle accelerator,” Frostee added helpfully.

  “The transflux thing didn’t even show a blip of activity,” Tony continued. “There was no need to go so slow!”

  Ms. Nowhere raised an eyebrow. “There might have been. This ‘thing’ could change the way we distribute energy across the globe. The ‘thing’ is worth over ten million dollars and, until the Berkeley tech team gets to work installing the new CPU they manufactured, is highly unstable at high velocities. And you all kept it safe. I’m very proud of you.”

  “You installed limiters on our cars,” Cisco replied dryly.

  “We couldn’t have gone over forty miles an hour if we wanted to!” Echo added.

  “Was my sarcasm unclear when I said the word proud? My apologies. Let me try again.” Ms. Nowhere raised her hands, holding up two fingers on each for air quotes as she spoke. “I was ‘proud.’ There. Is that better?”

  Tony shook his head stubbornly. “You should have trusted us.”

  Ms. Nowhere smiled as she tapped quickly on her data pad. “That’s an interesting idea. Let’s just see . . .” The screen of the data pad flickered rapidly. “It only took you thirteen and a half minutes driving under the established speed limit to try and have a little race?” With a flick, Ms. Nowhere deactivated the pad. “It doesn’t matter that you wanted to drive fast. What matters is that I needed you to maintain a security patrol. Just because no one tried to steal this machine doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have happened!” Ms. Nowhere leaned close to Tony’s face. “So yes, Tony. I can see that you are the very definition of patience and restraint. That was sarcasm again, by the way,” she added.

  “But we’re racers!” Tony said, rolling his eyes. “Why get us involved if we’re not going to race?”

  “Not every mission involves speed!” Nowhere snapped. “There will be times when you must exercise patience, finesse, and use restraint. This trip was a good reminder of that!”

  “Little late in the day for school talk, though,” Echo replied.

  “Come on, everyone! So it was a dull drive?” Frostee said excitedly. “We’re in the Bay Area! This town is the dopest! They got everything here! I mean, Lawrence Livermore Labs is, like, right here! Silicon Valley, home of the Internet! There’s so much fun we could have!”

  “There’s a street fair in Emeryville!” Cisco added, waving his phone around. “It’s not just an art exhibit or science stuff, but they have, like, DJs and a classic car show and Froyo trucks!”

  Layla had been mostly quiet since they’d arrived, but her deep frown quickly brought the room to silence. “The transflux particle accelerator . . . it’s really going to be safe in this bank? I was reading the specs . . . and that thing could be really dangerous.”

  “That’s no joke,” Frostee added, running his fingers through his thick hair. “That thing gets disturbed, you’re gonna get disruptive EMP pulses, followed by a thermonuclear meltdown. I mean, a little one, sure . . . but—”

  “This bank is hardly what it seems,” Ms. Nowhere replied, pressing a button on a wrist device she was wearing. A large monitor sprang to life. “The vaults below are specially designed to hold dangerous and quarantined cargo. The offices above are outfitted with surveillance equipment built by Livermore Labs. This place? It’s state of the art.”

  Cisco yawned. Tony struggled not to follow suit.

  Ms. Nowhere’s frown deepened. “Don’t believe me? Take a look. The system is so refined it can detect the slightest variable! Like this! This line here . . .” Ms. Nowhere trailed off, frowning even deeper. “Gary, what am I looking at?”

  Gary adjusted his glasses “Ah. That’s a level-five disturbance.”

  Ms. Nowhere glanced back at the kids. “See? A level-five disturbance. Wait—”

  Gary tapped a couple of buttons. “You know that safe we just brought in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” Gary said. “Looks to me like someone is stealing it.”

  CHAPTER 4

  BART TUNNELS,

  UNDER THE CITY OF BERKELEY

  Deep underground, below the fake bank building, in the tunnels of Berkeley’s public subway system, the crime was well underway, and José had to admit Red’s plan was pretty slick.

  The team used Traci’s passcodes to gain access to the BART tunnels. Once they were underground, they closed off multiple sections for repair. To avoid suspicion, they wore official BART uniforms supplied, again, by Traci.

  That’s when José went to work. The concrete wall leading to the bank floor was sturdy and thick. But José was prepared with a jackhammer and a blowtorch, and soon the wall was ready to crumble.

  The lock system on the vault was a triple-lock device that used retina and fingerprint ID, as well as a vacuum pressure seal. It could be opened . . . eventually. But even an accomplished locksmith like Jonathan would need time. And that was a low commodity.

  So instead, Jonathan deactivated the sensor triggers that were installed at the vault base, and José attached heavy anchoring chains to the floor bolts. The entire process was over in the blink of an eye, and judging by the lack of alarms or armed guards, they had avoided attention. But José knew that would end as soon as the next stage of the heist was initiated.

  In the tunnel below, lights flashed. They were the headlights of a BART train, one that was labeled OUT OF SERVICE and being driven by Traci. But this wasn’t a regular BART train. It had been modified by José to pull a train-car-length platform, perfect for hauling a stolen bank vault.

  It was Red’s idea. Why sit at the scene of the crime opening a vault while waiting for the police to show up? Why not just steal the entire vault and open it during the getaway?

  The chains pulled taut, and with a thunderous shock the entire vault was ripped from its moorings, dropping down to the ready platform.

  Everything was going according to plan.

  José let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

  They were really going to get away with this.

  CHAPTER 5

  BERKELEY,

  SPY RACERS SECRET HEADQUARTERS

  At the same time, Nowhere paced back and forth furiously. “That reactor is one-of-a-kind! It would take months to rebuild!” She stomped a foot, further highlighting her frustration. “They won’t get away with this!”

  “Hopefully not. Wait . . . look,” Gary replied, tapping the monitor.

  Frostee leaned in. “Man! They destabilized it. That sucker is primed to blow!”

  Gary nodded. “He’s right. The safe getting wrenched out of its moorings damaged the safety protocols. The accelerator is fully active now.” He glanced at the monitor again. “Those guys have no idea what they just stole. They’re gonna get themselves blown up!”

  “We can stop them!” Tony said, jumping in front of Ms. Nowhere.

  Ms. Nowhere shook her head. “Our security systems—”

  “Are offline,” Gary interrupted. “These guys may not know what they’re stealing, but they’re good at stealing it.”

  Tony couldn’t wait any longer, pushing past Ms. Nowhere before she could object again. “That’s it! Come on, let’s go stop ’em
!” he yelled, and ran out the door to the garage elevator. With a shrug, Echo and Layla followed.

  “Tony!” Ms. Nowhere yelled. “I have not given you permission to engage! Your presence could make everything worse!”

  Tony turned backward and waved as he ran. “It’s just some bad guys trying to escape on an old train. How hard can it be?”

  “Wait a minute,” Frostee said, grabbing Cisco’s arm. “I have an idea.”

  CHAPTER 6

  BART TRAIN TOWING PLATFORM

  Jonathan worked over the vault lock with practiced ease, slowly drilling through the outer layer of the lock’s protective steel. Bit by bit, they were getting closer to unlocking the wealth within.

  That was when José saw the headlights. Two sets of headlights coming up behind them. And they weren’t from a train.

  Cars. There were cars in the BART tunnel!

  “Better hurry, Chan,” José warned his neighbor. “Looks like Red didn’t plan things tight enough after all.”

  CHAPTER 7

  BART TRAIN CONDUCTOR CABIN

  “We need to go faster!” Red yelled as he looked out the driver’s-side window and saw the headlights of the pursuing cars.

  Traci pulled back on the BART train’s throttle. The path across the Bay was clear, but it was still a thirty-minute trip to their destination—a small access shaft for emergency evacuations in the case of a flood of the Transbay Tube.

  Traci frowned. The train’s speedometer was already edging past the safety margins. “Any faster and we risk—”

  “What do you risk if we get caught?” Red asked. “It’s too late to play it safe now!”

  Traci pulled further back on the train’s throttle. The vehicle shook hard, and the speedometer display changed from a pleasant green to an angry red.

  “That’s what I thought. We could have done this nice and slow, but some wise guy decided to send cars down here. Cars! In a train tunnel . . .” The red-faced Red let out a slow breath and began fishing through a large duffel bag he’d brought. A moment later, he pulled out a heavy and dangerous item.