The Project Read Free

bustling around with shovels and sacks full of sand. Small front-end loaders were shifting pallets of sandbags toward the beginnings of a wall along the riverbank that would hopefully hold back the floodwaters.
    A horn honked behind them as they approached, so they hopped off their bikes and moved to one side to let a truck pass. A fine drift of brown powdery grit was falling from beneath the rear tailgate. The truck stopped and dumped a load of sand in the middle of the street, near a pile of sacks that were bound together with wire.
    An old guy with a Nike shirt, Converse sneakers, and a baseball cap on backward was directing the truck with hand signals.
All it would take are a few gold chains and he could be the world’s oldest rapper
, Luke thought.
    The man noticed them arrive and walked over. Luke had seen him around the campus and the city center before and thought he was probably a professor of some kind. He seemed to be in charge, at least at this bend in the river.
    “Volunteers?” the old guy asked.
    Tommy nodded a little reluctantly. Physical labor wasn’t his strong point.
    Luke said, “What can we do?”
    “Fill sandbags,” the man said. “We could use some help.”
    “No worries,” Luke said. “Where do we start?”
    The man pointed at a pile of red-handled shovels lying near the sand heap. “There are work gloves in the cardboard box.”
    Luke looked at Tommy. “Let’s give it a good kick in the guts and see if it moos,” he said.
    “Kick what? Where?” Tommy shook his head.
    Luke grinned.
    Tommy locked his bike and Luke’s to a post using a high-tech chain that opened with his thumbprint, and they each grabbed a pair of gloves from the box.
    “Don’t forget to text your folks and tell them where you are,” Tommy said.
    “Yeah, in a sec,” Luke said.
    A long wooden tray system stretched from the pile of sand over toward one of the University of Iowa buildings. Spaced out along it at regular intervals were big funnels made out of orange witches’ hat–type traffic cones, upside down, with the tops cut off.
    The volunteers were working in pairs—one shoveling sand into the base of an upside-down cone, and the other holding a sandbag underneath. When the sandbag was full, they cinched it closed with a plastic tie. Then the two of them carried it over to a pallet. Every now and then, a front-end loader would arrive and pick up a pallet, then carry it down to the river, where a long line of sandbags lay side by side, starting the wall.
    “Here, take this,” Tommy said, handing Luke what lookedlike an MP3 player but, knowing Tommy, probably wasn’t. Tommy was wearing a matching one, slung around his neck on a lanyard.
    Tommy Wundheiler was going to be a spy someday. He said he was going to work for the CIA, or the NSA, or the DIA, or possibly even the MIC. Luke hadn’t even heard of half of those organizations.
    Two years ago, when Tommy was thirteen, he had even applied to the CIA to see if they had any positions for spy kids, but they had written back and said they had no openings at the moment. Luke suspected they were just being polite.
    Tommy was always buying spy gadgets online.
    Luke thought some of the stuff was quite funny, like the Green Gas. You put one drop in someone’s food and it made them fart uncontrollably. Or the Sky Spy, which was a kite with a built-in video camera that you flew over your enemies to see what they were up to. Then there was the Brief Safe, designed to hide money or important documents. It looked just like a pair of men’s undies and came complete with skid marks so nobody would want to touch it.
    It took Tommy a couple of months to save up his allowance for each spy gadget, so there were a lot of things he wanted but hadn’t bought yet. It had taken him a whole year to save up for a pair of night-vision goggles that let you see in the dark.
    Luke had suggested that when he got his job with the CIA (or the NSA, DIA, MIC, etc.), they would give him