“Easy, sir. We’ll give you credit wherever we set up a power grid. Everywhere we go, we’ll say, ‘This electricity? Moise Kabila helped us bring it to you.’ All we ask in exchange for all this power is three things. One, you stop destroying solar panels. Two, you stop working for the mining company.”

  Hatred burned in Kabila’s eyes. “I already have.”

  “Yeah. We heard. Weber fired you and gave the job to Roland. Tough break.”

  “He is a coward and a clown!”

  “Which brings me to the third of my three things.”

  “Go on.”

  “Help us show the mining company what a major mistake they made by putting Roland in charge of their security instead of you.”

  “How?”

  “Easy. Lead a raid. Make Roland turn tail and run away. Help us rescue two of our friends who are being held hostage at the cobalt mine. So, do we have a deal? I hope we have a deal. I love good deals.”

  Kabila narrowed his eyes. Max could tell he was thinking.

  She just hoped he was thinking about the offer.

  And not about how to kill her.

  66

  Max watched Kabila’s jaw joint pop in and out for what felt like an eternity.

  She looked to Keeto and Tisa.

  She was so happy to be doing this with friends. They gave her a strength and courage she’d never felt before. Neither one showed any sign of the panic they had to be feeling in the pit of their stomachs, because that’s exactly where Max was feeling hers.

  “Who kidnapped your friends?” Kabila finally asked.

  “A weasel named Yahav.”

  Kabila nodded. “The evil-eyed one who works for Dr. Zimm.”

  Max swallowed hard, even though her mouth was dry. “You’ve heard of Dr. Zimm?”

  “I’ve met him,” said Kabila. “A very nasty man.”

  Behind her, Max heard two car doors open. Charl and Isabl were climbing out of the Land Rover.

  “Where did you meet Dr. Zimm?” asked Charl.

  “At the mine. He is the one who advised the owners to replace me.”

  “Why?” asked Isabl.

  “Because I told this Dr. Zimm he was twisted and sick. He wanted me to deliver village children to him. Not for mining. No. He said needed them for certain ‘experiments.’ I may be le diable, the devil. But even I am not that evil.”

  “Well,” said Max, “if Dr. Zimm is still at the mines, I guess that gives you one more reason to lead our rescue raid. Maybe you’ll have a chance to bump into him again.”

  “Yes,” said Kabila, with a devilish grin. “Maybe I will. I would enjoy that. Greatly.”

  “Deal?” said Max.

  Kabila extended his hand.

  “Deal.”

  They shook on it.

  “Awesome,” said Max. “Okay, my friends Tisa and Keeto will stay here to start setting up your solar panel and wind turbine. They might need a little help. Those solar panels are kind of heavy…”

  “Two of my men will remain behind to offer assistance,” said Kabila. “The rest will come with us to the mine. I know exactly where to find your kidnapped friends.”

  “Really?” marveled Charl. “From the satellite photos I’ve seen, the mine company complex is quite sprawling.”

  “True. Many buildings. Many shafts and pits. But if Dr. Zimm and Yahav are involved, I am confident they can only be holding their hostages in one place: the laboratory building.”

  “How can you be so sure?” asked Isabl.

  “Easy,” said Kabila, wiping sweat from his brow. “It is the only building with central air-conditioning.” He turned to his soldiers. “Weka! Tunakwenda vita! Load up, my friends. We go to war!”

  67

  The convoy of vehicles rumbled across the Congolese hills like an invading army.

  Kabila’s heavily armed men rode in Jeeps and pickup trucks. One of the trucks had a machine gun mounted in its cargo bed.

  The CMI Land Rover—with Charl, Isabl, and Max—brought up the rear.

  “Let’s hope we can do this without firing a single bullet,” said Max. She was hoping that some good old-fashioned Newtonian physics would shape the day. Newton’s third law of motion said, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

  The invasion by Kabila and his massive force of soldiers would be the action.

  Max hoped a massive retreat by Roland’s weaker force would be the reaction.

  The hood of the lead vehicle in Kabila’s caravan was fitted with a wedge-shaped steel plow—like the front of a freight train. It smashed through the mine’s gates, ripping the posts right out of the ground.

  The guards thought about firing at the invaders until they realized how many there were.

  They decided to run instead.

  Kabila’s vehicles spread out into a swarm formation and swung around to the western side of a cluster of buildings, crushers, and conveyor belts. In a flash, all their weapons were trained on an isolated corrugated aluminum building that was tucked between a pair of rock piles. Roland and two of his men were out front. All three had rifles slung over their shoulders.

  None of them, however, raised those rifles or took aim.

  They were too busy running away.

  “I told you he was a coward!” boomed Kabila as he watched Roland and what was left of his security detail flee.

  They actually scurried under the fence like dogs escaping from their pen.

  Klaus and Vihaan came running out of the lab.

  And skid to a halt the instant they saw Kabila standing right in front of them, laughing heartily.

  “Run back inside, Vihaan!” shouted Klaus. “It’s the devil!”

  “No,” shouted Max, jumping out of the Land Rover. “He’s the one who just rescued you.”

  “Seriously?” said Vihaan.

  “Yeah,” said Max. “We have a deal. Where’s Yahav?”

  “Inside,” said Vihaan. “With Weber, that maniac Dr. Zimm, and another spooky guy who tried to tell me how much I would like building computers for the Corp. They have a very good benefits package.”

  “They just let you go?” said Max.

  “Yeah,” said Klaus. “Right after the front gate guards radioed them about the arrival of an invading army.”

  Suddenly, Max heard the heavy whump-whump-whump of rotor blades.

  A helicopter?

  Apparently, the bad guys had pre-planned their escape.

  68

  The noisy helicopter rose up from behind the lab building.

  It hovered about thirty feet off the ground. Max shielded her eyes and could make out a man who looked a lot like Yahav sitting up front in the cockpit, working the controls. Two other men that Max didn’t recognize were seated in the open cargo bay behind him.

  “Shall I shoot it down, little girl?” asked Kabila. “We have RPGs. Rocket propelled grenades.”

  “No,” said Max. “Let them go. Peace cannot be attained through violence.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, sir. Please don’t blow anything up.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Kabila gestured to his troops. They lowered their weapons.

  When one of the men in the rear of the helicopter, a stick-thin one, saw the weapons being lowered, he yelled something to the pilot.

  The helicopter swooped forward and descended until it was hovering, maybe twenty feet off the ground, right in front of Max. The thumping noise was deafening.

  The skinny man with a toothy smile too big for his head leaned out of the cargo bay. He was holding what looked like a radio microphone.

  “Be careful, Max,” shouted Charl. “That’s Dr. Zimm.”

  “Hello, Max,” the creepy Dr. Zimm said into the microphone. His amplified voice echoed out of speakers attached to the chopper’s landing skids. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “Again?” Max shouted up at the helicopter. “Have we met before?”

  “Yes. When you were very, very young. We spent a good deal of time together.”

  Dr. Zimm tossed out a rope ladder. “Come with me, Max. I know who you are! I know where you came from! I know everything you’ve ever yearned to know!”

  Max froze in shock. This man, this greedy doctor, knew who she was?

  Max looked to Charl and Isabl. They were shouting something but she couldn’t hear what it was. The helicopter din was just too deafening.

  “Come with me, Max!” Dr. Zimm repeated through his microphone. “Climb up and you will have all the answers you’ve been searching for your entire life.”

  Max slowly raised her hand.

  The first rung of the roped ladder bounced against her fingertips.

  If what Dr. Zimm said was true, then she was inches away from discovering everything she had ever wanted to know. Who she was, who her parents were, where she came from, how she ended up in New York City, and why her last name was Einstein. She could finally solve the mystery of who she was.

  “Grab hold and I will pull you up!” coached Dr. Zimm. “I can tell you all about your past.”

  Max almost did as he instructed.

  But then she looked to her friends. Charl and Isabl. Klaus and Vihaan.

  She thought about the Change Makers Institute and her idea for bringing renewable energy to all the places in the world where it was needed most. How reliable electricity might even change the warlord Kabila’s life. How it might spare the village children from a doomed life in the cobalt mines.

  She lowered her hand and let the rope ladder flap in the whirlybird’s breeze.

  “Maybe some other time, doc,” she shouted up at Dr. Zimm. “Today, I’m much more interested in the future than the past.”

  Dr. Zimm looked furious.

  “How dare you speak to me like that? Do you know who I am?”

  “Yeah,” said Max. “You’re the guy who’s about to be blown out of the sky if he doesn’t take off, like, right now.” She turned to Kabila and shouted through cupped hands. “You still have those RPGs you were talking about?”

  “Many!” Kabila shouted back.

  He signaled to his men.

  “Fire a warning shot!”

  A small rocket whizzed out of a shoulder-mounted tube and streaked past the helicopter’s rear rotor.

  Dr. Zimm raised a pistol and aimed it at Max.

  Max froze, and Kabila tackled her from behind.

  They hit the dirt together, but there was no gunshot.

  The helicopter engine roared. Dust swirled as the angry bird lifted straight up into the air. Zimm’s pistol was now casually pointed at the sky and he smirked at Max like pointing a gun at her was a funny joke.

  “We’ll meet again, Max!” cried the mad doctor’s amplified voice as the helicopter dipped its nose and sailed off to the horizon. “I promise you! We will meet again!”

  69

  Max and her CMI team spent another two weeks in the Congo, setting up “solar spinners” in three different villages.

  Vihaan and Klaus perfected their design and engineering of the solar-panel-coated turbine blades the day after their rescue.

  “We had time to do some thought experiments on the project while in captivity,” said Vihaan modestly.

  “We’re geniuses,” added Klaus, not so modestly.

  Kabila and his militia, who loved the small power plant Tisa and Keeto had set up for them in their hilly hideout, helped Max and her crew set up their micro-grids in the village of Kasombumba.

  “Soon you will all need cell phones,” Kabila declared to the villagers. “You may also want televisions and toaster ovens. I can provide them all for you at a steep discount. And stay out of those mines, kids. They’re bad for you!”

  The coming of power and light to the village of Kasombumba had already created its first small business: Kabila Electronics. He’d even printed business cards.

  Tisa’s father arrived with a team of Kenyan investors. They brought their seed money with them.

  “To the future!” shouted Tisa.

  “The future!” echoed Emmanuel.

  The village celebrated its new tomorrow with a feast, complete with music, food, and lots of dancing.

  Max felt terrific.

  And not just because the music and food were so good.

  She was out in the world doing good. Even if she didn’t know any more about who she was or where she came from or why her last name was “Einstein,” she had a pretty good idea about where she was headed: on more missions to do more good.

  “It’s time for everybody to head back home to spend time with their families,” Isabl told her that night at the party. “We’ll regroup in a few weeks, set off on our next CMI mission.”

  “Slight problem,” said Max. “I don’t have a home or a family.”

  “You have us,” said Charl. “We’re your family now.”

  Max nodded. “Okay, that part’s taken care of. But I still don’t have a home.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Isabl. “It’s in New York City.”

  “Another foster care situation?”

  “No. A home of your own. An apartment in a recently renovated building. The benefactor set it all up for you.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “The benefactor is very pleased with you, Max,” added Charl. “He texted us this morning. He asked us to tell you that you passed your first test.”

  “This was a test?” said Max.

  “Yes,” said Charl. “The benefactor said your work in the Congo was a baby step but a very important one.”

  “Really? Does he know we risked our lives down here? That Vihaan and Klaus got kidnapped? That we had to strike a deal with a very scary warlord to rescue them?”

  “Yes. He is aware of all that has transpired since we left Jerusalem.”

  “And he still calls what we accomplished a ‘baby step’?”

  Charl nodded.

  “This benefactor is kind of a jerk, isn’t he?”

  Charl and Isabl both laughed.

  “Yes,” said Isabl. “I suppose, sometimes, he is.”

  “Don’t tell him I said that,” said Max. “After all, the guy did find me a New York City apartment, so I guess he can’t be all bad. Tell him thanks.”

  “You can tell him yourself,” said Isabl.

  “Huh?”

  “He looks forward to meeting you, Max. When you land in New York. He wants to be the one to give you the keys to your new apartment.”

  70

  The next morning, each member of the team was given a commercial airline ticket out of Lubumbashi International Airport for flights back to their home countries.

  “We don’t get the pilotless plane?” asked Keeto.

  “Sorry,” said Charl. “Too many final destinations. Besides, the benefactor recalled the plane to the States.”

  “He just summoned it and it flew home?” marveled Siobhan.

  Charl grinned. “More or less.”

  “Crikey. The thing’s like a homing pigeon… or a remote-controlled drone…”

  “We’ll regroup in a month,” announced Isabl after everyone had unloaded their luggage from the bus they’d hired for the trip to the airport from the village. “Max and the benefactor will be meeting in New York to plan the nature and scope of our next mission.”

  “Make it about botany,” urged Hana.

  “Astrophysics,” suggested Toma.

  “Robots!” shouted Klaus.

  Everyone else laughed.

  “Have a good break, guys,” Max told her team. “I think our first challenge was just that. The first of many. We’ve still got a whole lot of work to do.”

  Everybody hugged, promised they’d keep in touch, and said good-bye.

  Charl and Isabl returned to Jerusalem, to check in at CMI headquarters.

  Max flew to New York solo.

  When she arrived at the airport and passed through customs, she saw a shaggy-haired boy in jeans and a black turtleneck standing in a crowd of chauffeurs. The boy was holding up a sign with MAX EINSTEIN written on it.

  “Uh, hi,” she said. “I’m Max Einstein. Are you my driver because, sorry, you don’t look old enough to drive.”

  “I’m not,” said the boy. “I’m fourteen.”

  “Oh. So why are you holding up that sign?”

  “Because I know where your car and driver are parked, which is a good thing, since I paid for them.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m the benefactor. Actually, my real name is Ben. That’s short for Benjamin Franklin Abercrombie. ‘The benefactor’ sounds much more mysterious though, right?”

  “Uh, yeah. You paid for everything? The Institute? The pilotless plane? The solar power project in the Congo?”

  “Yes,” said the benefactor, taking hold of Max’s battered suitcase and leading the way out of the terminal to the parking garage. “And I intend to keep on paying for things as long as you and your team keep doing good work out in the world.”

  “Oh, we’re just getting started,” said Max. “I believe our efforts in the Congo were merely the first baby step.”

  “Is that what I called them?” said the benefactor. “A baby step?”

  Max nodded.

  “I apologize for my awkward social skills. See, I received a huge inheritance when I was ten. My parents died. Left me all alone.”

  “You’re an orphan, too?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. It’s one of the reasons I liked you so much. But, as you may know, that kind of trauma can stunt your emotional development. Your social skills, too.”

  Tell me about it, thought Max.

  “Anyway, I spent one whole year spending money on toys, gizmos, and gadgets. Anything and everything I ever wanted. Then, one morning, it hit me. What I really wanted to do was to use my newfound wealth to make the world a better place. To honor my parents’ legacy. And for reasons we won’t discuss right now, I only trust kids to help me do it. Of course, I also trust Charl and Isabl and that funny old gentleman with the questionable British accent, Lenny Weinstock—all the folks who started the CMI before I gave it my massive cash infusion. But mostly, I trust kids.”