Read Online The Project by Brian Falkner - Free Book Online

they didn’t have long. He didn’t need to tell Tommy to hurry.
    Luke pulled himself down the corridor in the pitch blackness, his face upturned in the precious little air that remained. The corridor seemed long enough by day. In the dark, in the water, it was an endurance test. Luke’s shoulders began to ache after the first twenty yards and were screaming fire after the second.
    He shook off feelings of claustrophobia, knowing that if he let it get to him, he might start to panic.
Hand over hand
, he told himself.
One more foot and then another
.
    The air supply remained constant for now, a long, narrow bubble against the ceiling.
    It seemed to take forever but it was probably no more than ten minutes before his head cracked into a solid object. They had reached the end.
    He felt around and found the doorway through which they had entered. Taking another huge gulp of air, he pulled himself down and through.
    A moment later he emerged, puffing and panting, spitting out water, back in the high concrete walls of the loading dock.
    Tommy popped up beside him, coughing and treading water. “That was awesome, dude!”
    “Are you insane?”
    Tommy grinned. “Who were those guys?”
    “Buggered if I know, mate,” Luke said. “Was that German they were speaking?”
    “Yes,” he said immediately. “It was German.”
    “What were they saying?” Luke asked.
    “Just stuff like ‘this way, that way, chase them,’ ” Tommy said.
    “We’d better get out of here,” Luke said. “In case they come outside looking for us.”
    He didn’t think that was likely, considering all the police and the emergency workers around, but he didn’t want to take any chances.
    The more he thought about it, the more he was sure that the dark object he had seen in the man’s hand had been a gun.

10. BLACK FRIDAY
    T he floodwaters crested that night, Friday the thirteenth, and the town that had been Luke’s home for the last three months became a lake.
    The river sneered at the pathetic attempts to hold it back with rows of sandbags and plastic, spewing over or around them. The floodwaters did not simply flow and settle over the town; they rampaged in a torrent through the streets, dragging slime and debris through buildings as if they were an open sewer.
    The president turned up the next Thursday, as the floodwaters were receding. He rolled up his sleeves and looked as though he was ready to jump on the end of a shovel and start helping with the cleanup, although of course he didn’t.
    Because of the flood, many roads were closed. The last week of school for the year was canceled, which was lucky, since Luke and Tommy never had to report back to Mr.Kerr about the book. Luke hoped that by the end of the summer vacation, the fuss about the statue would have died down.
    But because the school was closed, nobody knew that Ms. Sheck had been kidnapped for almost a week.

PART II
THE DETECTIVES
    The knowledge of all things is possible
.
    —Leonardo da Vinci

11. GODZILLA THE SQUIRREL
    “S omething about this book don’t smell right,” Tommy said.
    Luke nodded his agreement as he removed the book from its hiding place, shook off dust and ashes into his garden, and slowly unwrapped the plastic liner that protected it. Even if it was worth a couple million bucks, that still didn’t explain the German-speaking thugs in the library, or the gun.
    There was more to this book than met the eye, he was sure. Perhaps some long-lost document was sewn into the binding.
    He had hidden the book in their ash dump. It was outside the house at the back of the living room chimney, where they emptied the old ashes from their fireplace. It seemed like a nice, safe place for it. It was dry, his house was well outside of the flood area, nobody would use the fireplace until next winter, and who would think of looking there? To be extrasafe, he had covered the plastic bag with a layer of old, crumbly ashes.
    Nobody knew it was there except Luke, Tommy, and