Free The Project by Brian Falkner

halfway down the staircase, reaching almost to the landing.
    A fine white powder covered the handrails and walls.
    “The police have been dusting for fingerprints,” Tommy said quietly beside him. “Do you think we left any?”
    Luke thought about that for a moment. “Nah. The only things we touched were the books, and hundreds of people touched those in the bucket brigade.”
    “They wouldn’t have our fingerprints on record anyway,” Tommy said with a sigh of relief. “So I think we’re safe.”
    They’d have mine
, Luke thought, but didn’t say so. In order to get their visa, his whole family had been fingerprinted at the U.S. consulate in New Zealand. And then again at immigration in Los Angeles. He tried to think of anything he might have touched in the library but could think of nothing that wouldn’t have been touched by thousands of library users.
    “Luke.” A cheerful voice came from behind him, and he jumped. It was Claudia. “And I’ve forgotten your friend’s name.”
    “Tommy,” Luke said, turning around to face her.
    “I’d like you to meet someone,” she said brightly. “This is Mr. James Mullins from New York. He’s a book enthusiast and has his own wonderful collection of rare books. He heard about the fantastic job you all did rescuing the collection from the basement before the flood and came down here personally to thank everyone. As it was your idea for thebucket brigade, I thought he’d especially like to meet you.”
    Luke knew the name, and he knew the face, but he forced his own face to remain calm.
    James Mullins was the name of the man who had once offered two million dollars for a copy of
Leonardo’s River
. You couldn’t forget something like that. Nor could you ever forget his face. The protruding jaw and the snoutlike nose. The deep-set black eyes and the ears that seemed impossibly high on the sides of his head and unnaturally pointed. James Mullins was Dog-Face.
    “Hello, Luke,” he said. “I hear you did a wonderful job last week. Many of these books are irreplaceable, and it’s thanks to people like you that they were saved.” He held out a bony paw for Luke to shake.
    Luke took it, conscious of his breathing. “Yeah, no worries,” he said. “It was my pleasure to help.”
    “You too, Tommy,” Mullins said, shaking his hand also. “A job well done.”
    “You bet,” Tommy said with an embarrassed smile. He didn’t seem too concerned about Mullins, and Luke remembered that Tommy hadn’t seen Mullins’s face that night in the library.
    “What happened upstairs?” Luke asked. “What’s with all the police?”
    Claudia shook her head and shuddered a little as if she couldn’t possibly believe that anyone could treat treasured books so cruelly. “Vandals,” she said. “Can you believe it? Someone broke in here during the floods and trashed our rare book collection—the books we carried upstairs! Fortunately,there’s not much damage, but it’s going to take us a long time to get all the books sorted into the right piles so they can be put back in the storerooms.”
    “Let us know if we can help,” Luke said.
    “Thank you, Luke,” she said. “But it’s really a job for the librarians now. A big job, too.”
    Claudia and Mullins excused themselves and went off to meet someone else. Luke watched them walk away.
    “Why are you looking at him like that?” Tommy asked.
    Luke told him.

14. A LEAD
    “T hey’re up on the second level,” Tommy said, “having a look at the damage.” His eyes were glued to a pair of miniature binoculars.
    “That’s a joke,” Luke said. “He
caused
the damage.”
    They were on the second floor of the communications center, across the road from the library, peering in through the windows of the library.
    “Okay, now they’re heading back down to the first floor,” Tommy said. “I’ve lost them behind the wall—no, wait, they’re coming down the bottom of the stairs.”
    A thought struck Luke and he