The Last Great Adventure of the Summer

Summer is winding down in Odyssey, and on the last weekend before school starts almost everybody has crowded into Whit's End to talk over the past three months. John Avery Whittaker runs through the highlights for Terry Johnston: the tornado that smashed the front window, the vacation Bible school sketch Ned Lewis was sure would flop, the radio station that never quite turned out the way anybody expected, plus camps and trips and mysteries solved. It has been one adventure after another. Terry has not been part of a single one of them.

When Whit asks what he has been up to, Terry finally admits the truth. His summer has been terrible. His father, George, has not wanted to go anywhere or do anything, and the only outings they have taken have been to libraries to watch travel films and animal documentaries. It has been that way ever since Terry's mother died. Terry does not say any of this to his dad, because he knows people handle sadness in their own way, but it still stings. When his mother was alive, his father was always away for work. Now his father is home, and there is still nothing to do.

The two of them are only stopping in for a drink before that evening's film, and on their way out they offer to carry some of Whit's trash bags to the bins behind the shop. That is where a stranger in black gloves is waiting. He greets George as Cat's Paw, says he warned him he would be hunted down, and demands a formula. When George claims he has never heard of it, the man turns toward Terry - and George drops him with a single karate chop and shouts at his son to run.

What follows is the last thing Terry ever expected from a shoe salesman. In the car, George explains that Cat's Paw is a code name, because people do not use their real names in the CIA. He works for the government, he says, the same way a mailman does, though Terry points out that this is quite a bit different from delivering letters. The formula is something George cannot describe, only insist is vital to the nation's security. The man chasing them is Nigel, who belongs to no country at all but works for an international syndicate that sells military secrets to whoever pays the most. George has broken up enough of the syndicate's deals to earn a personal grudge.

They ditch the car at the train station and hide in a boxcar, and the boxcar starts rolling with the door stuck shut. Hours later, sitting in the dark, father and son finally talk. George tells Terry that he loved his mother very much, that he only understood how much after she was gone, and that Terry has become the most important thing in the world to him. That, he confesses, is the real reason for the dull summer. He was too frightened to let his son out of his sight. Then the train stops in a Manhattan rail yard, a hose in the ceiling begins to hiss, and both of them slide into sleep.

Terry wakes up on an airplane crossing the ocean with a pounding head, and George reassures him that the gas was only for sleeping. Nigel would never risk harming the man who still carries what he wants. Nigel himself strolls in to gloat. He never lost them at all; he simply took a faster route and waited. He is delivering them both to London, to his boss, Maxim.

Maxim's home fills the top floor of a London tower, reachable only by a private elevator, decorated with old shell casings and something like a hundred aquariums. He is polite in a way that is far worse than shouting. He explains that the formula comes in five parts, that his people have already taken the other four, and that George holds the last one. When George refuses to hand it over, Maxim invites Terry to admire a particular tank - piranhas - and wonders aloud what might happen if a man put his hand inside. Then he orders his men to bring George forward.

Terry does not wait. He stomps on a guard's foot, hurls the shell casing Maxim gave him straight through the piranha tank, and in the chaos he and his father are out the window and up the fire escape to the roof. Nigel and his men are waiting there. Cornered at the ledge, George tells Nigel exactly what he can do with his demands, and Scotland Yard's voice rings out from below: the building is surrounded. Nigel, beaten, decides he will at least take Cat's Paw with him, and shoves George over the side.

Terry is still staring at the empty ledge when his father's voice answers him from just below. George landed on the window washers' scaffold - and the window washers, it turns out, are two of the finest agents he knows. The whole chase was a setup. Nigel was allowed to catch up so he would lead the authorities straight to Maxim and to the four missing pieces of the formula, all of which are now safely recovered. The one part George never planned was Terry; he had hoped Nigel would strike while he was alone.

There is one more surprise. George wanted Nigel to believe he had truly gotten rid of Cat's Paw, because Cat's Paw is retiring. He meant what he said on the train, and from now on he intends to spend as much time with his son as he possibly can, and to make it more exciting than the summer they just wasted. Terry is not sure he can survive any more excitement, but he cannot wait to tell everyone at Whit's End about it. Which is when he learns the last hazard of getting mixed up with the CIA. Everything he just lived through is a secret. He has finally had the greatest adventure of the summer, and he is not allowed to tell a soul.