Liana, beaming with pride, was signing the final, official CBC contract for the Johnny Chase serial. She was celebrating the cover. Percy, playing quietly on the floor, was on a secure line with Mr. Harding.
"The Perseus Star Trust is active," the lawyer confirmed, his voice stiff with worry. "However, the initial $25,000 deposit is highly irregular for a 'small inheritance,' Mr. Wainwright. It invites scrutiny. If you deposit one more dollar without a verifiable, professional paper trail, you risk an audit that will uncover everything."
Percy hung up. He knew the $800 profit had to be set aside. The cash engine—his great high‑risk gamble—had to be shut down immediately. The next phase, the Forgery Blueprint, had to begin to create the necessary paper trail before nervous lawyers triggered a financial investigation. The adventure was shifting from the streets to the university archives.
Percy told Liana he wanted to play outside and, bundled up in his parka, walked the ten blocks from their Annex apartment straight toward the gothic spires of the Gerstein Science Library. He used Liana's staff key and slipped into the restricted, cold sub‑basement. He rummaged through dusty, oversized reports until he sensed a presence. Dr. Victor Tassos, Liana's most jealous senior colleague, materialized, examining Percy with undisguised suspicion. Tassos was notoriously obsessed with the forgotten "McConnell reports."
"You're Wainwright's boy, aren't you?" Tassos sniffed, his eyes darting toward the volume of Minor Geological Surveys, 1937 Percy had pulled out. "Keep your California hands off Canadian history."
Percy, wearing a wide, innocent smile, dropped the heavy volume with a theatrical thud and feigned a dramatic fit of noisy sneezing. While Tassos coughed and ruffled through the dust cloud, Percy slid a handful of acid‑free 1930s‑era blank flyleaves from a damaged volume into his coat pocket. Library heist: successful. The forged paper had to be genuinely old.
Back in the apartment, Percy locked the bathroom door—the only room Liana would assume he was using for normal three‑year‑old business. The air filled with the strange, thrilling smell of turpentine and aged paper. He laid out his score: the yellow crayon sketches of the cargo bay (now retired) and the fragile, aged flyleaves from the library.
He began the slow, delicate work of preparing the paper, using a blend of instant coffee and the faintest trace of old, yellowing heating oil to replicate the patina and smell of a 1930s archive. He unwrapped a new pen nib and uncorked a bottle of expensive sepia ink Liana had packed but never used. Studying a photocopied sample of Richard George McConnell's signature, Percy knew the forgery had to be perfect—subtle enough to look like a forgotten discovery, yet authoritative enough to convince Liana, a professional geologist, that the golden vision was rooted in academic history. The Forgery Blueprint was underway.