Treasure Hunters: A National Treasure Fanfiction

Chapter Six: Listen To Riley

"Ben!" A shocked-to-say-the-least Riley and Alex hurried after Ben, chasing him outside the Archives building.

"Wait, hold up, time out," Alex said. "Isn't that exactly what we're trying to prevent Ian from doing?"

"Yes, and if he succeeds he'll destroy the Declaration, so the only way to protect it from him and stop him from stealing it is stealing it ourselves," explained her brother. "It's upside down, see? I don't think there's a choice."

Riley and Alex exchanged a glance.

"This is huge," Riley said. "Like, prison huge. You will go to prison, you know that right?"

"Yeah probably." Ben nodded.

"That would bother most people." When Ben made no reply Riley cried, "for God's sake Ben, it's like stealing a national monument, it's like stealing him!" He gestured to the statue of President Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial. "It can't be done. Not that it shouldn't be done, it can't be done. Here, let me prove it to you."

"You thinking what I'm thinking?" said Alex. Riley nodded.

He and Alex escorted Ben to the Library of Congress and took him to the reading room. Ben sat and waited for a few minutes flipping through various books while his sister and friend scouted out their own books before both bringing over an armful each.

"Okay, Ben, pay attention," instructed Riley. "We've brought you to the Library of Congress. Why? Because it's the biggest library in the wold, over twenty-million books. And they're all saying the same exact thing: listen to Riley." He nodded to Alex who had already opened a book to the desired pages and she passed it to him. "Thank you. Now see here, my friend, we have an entire layout of the Archives, including builders blueprints, construction orders, phone lines, water, and sewage. It's all here! Now, when the Declaration's not on display it's surrounded by guards and video monitors, visiting families, little kids on their eighth grade fieldtrip. And beneath an inch of bulletproof glass is an army of heat sensors that will go off if someone gets too close with a high fever. Now, when it's not on display, it's lowered into a four-foot-thick concrete steel-plated vault that happens to be equipped with an electronic combination lock and biometric access-denial systems." He finished on that note, looking to Ben and looking proud of himself.

"You know," Ben stated casually. "Thomas Edison tried and failed nearly two-thousand times to design a carbonized cotton-thread filament for an incandescent lightbulb. When asked about it he said, 'I didn't fail, I just found two-thousand ways not to make a lightbulb. But I only needed one way to make it work.'" He set the book he had been flipping through before them on the table. Alex peered over Riley's shoulder from where she stood behind him. "The Preservation Room, enjoy. Do you know what the Preservation Room is for?"

"Delicious jams and jellies?" Riley guessed sarcastically.

Ben ignored his sarcasm. "It's where they clean, maintain, and repair all the documents and the storage housings when they're not on display or in the vault. Now, when the case needs work they take it out of the vault and directly across the hall into the Preservation Room. Now the best time for us, or Ian, to steal it would be at the gala taking place this weekend, when the guards are distracted by the VIPs upstairs." He tapped the page title Preservation Room with his finger. "So we'll make our way here to the Preservation Room where there's much less security." On that note, Ben sat back, looking pleased.

Alex and Riley exchanged another glance. Then Riley scoffed. "This might be possible."

Ben nodded. "It might." Then he looked at his sister who had been very quiet this whole time. "Sis?"

Now it was her turn to scoff. "You guys are crazy. Insane. Do you even hear yourselves? This'll never work. We'll never make it without being caught." She had always followed her brother, always trusted him. But this was going too far.

They left the Library, Alex still extremely flustered.

"Remember what we promised Grandpa," Ben reminded her.

"Yeah, but it's not like he meant this. He would have never wanted us to do this."

"You're not thinking of giving up on the hunt are you?"

"No of course not I just-" She wanted the treasure to be real, she wanted it to be so bad, but they had been searching for so long. "It's taken a serious turn now-" She sighed. She and her brother met eyes. Then she huffed and threw her arms up into the air in defeat. "Oh fine! And if I lose my job because of this - which I probably will - I'm blaming you."

(Well, you tried Riley ;) Thanks so much for reading! Bye for now!)