Read The Great Brain Robbery for Free Online

communicate with?
    The crackling sound turned into a series of pips and long beeps. Gadget had found what it was looking for. The beeps grew louder and the toy glowed a bright luminous blue as the tips of his ears
began to send pulses of light out into the night sky. Frankie frowned. Gadget wasn’t receiving, it was transmitting. It was sending signals to something, to someone, way off in the distance.
But who? The pulses grew more powerful and frequent. The same rhythm of pips and beeps, over and over again, rippling through the night like a wave machine. As he felt the waves pass through his
body, Frankie felt quite sick. He flattened himself against the damp grass and jammed his fingers in his ears . . .

    That was all Frankie could remember. He rubbed his head and crawled out from under his blankets. Daylight was now flooding through the window giving the objects in his room a
reassuring brightness. He walked to the cupboard and opened it cautiously. There was Gadget, propped up neatly on the shelf. Frankie picked him up and inspected him. He seemed as plastic and
lifeless as any other factory toy. Frankie sighed. ‘Another nightscare,’ he said to himself out loud, ‘just another nightscare.’ Frankie stretched out his arm to place
Gadget back in the cupboard, but as he did so something caught his eye. Something that made his heart stop still. On the elbow of his pyjama top was a patch of muddy green. Frankie looked down at
his trousers. There were two more patches just below the knee. Grass stains.

 

    Alphonsine sucked thoughtfully on her morning coffee as Frankie breathlessly explained what he had seen in the night.
    ‘Slow down, Frankie!’ said Eddie, feeding Colette a sneaky strip of bacon under the table. ‘I can hardly catch a word!’
    ‘Sorry,’ said Frankie, taking a deep breath. ‘But you see what I’m saying, right?’ Alphonsine inspected the grass stains closely.
    ‘You say ze bunny was peeping and blipping.’
    ‘Pipping and bleeping, yes,’ said Frankie.
    ‘And do you remember what it sounded like?’
    Frankie had no trouble remembering the sequence. It was as if it had been printed on his eardrums. He hummed it out loud for Alphonsine to hear. Alphonsine narrowed her grey old eyes and pursed
her lips so tightly you could have sharpened a pencil between them.
    ‘Something most fishy is afloat,’ she muttered. Eddie nodded in agreement. ‘I do not know what it is. But I have not smelt anything this fishy since Colette gobbled Mrs
Popper’s kippers.’ Colette blushed with shame.
    ‘Why do you say that, Alfie?’ asked Frankie.
    ‘Ze rabbit was sending messages in morse code. It is a very simple code of bips and pleeps. I learnt it during ze war. Very good for sending tip-top secret messages.’
    ‘What was Gadget saying?’ asked Frankie, alarmed that his toy bunny could do such a thing.
    ‘It said,
“Project Wishlist – stage one complete”.
’
    ‘But what does that mean?’ said Frankie, trying to get his head around what had happened.
    ‘I haven’t the foggiest,’ said Eddie, ‘but I’ll tell you one thing. That Marvella is not to be trusted. We need to look into this.’
    ‘True!’ said Alphonsine, holding a finger in the air. ‘We must go to the Marvella shop and sniff it out.’
    ‘But it doesn’t open till tomorrow,’ said Frankie, ‘and today is the school visit. I don’t have permission to be there.’
    ‘Permission?’ scoffed the old spy. ‘Pffff! We is working tip-top secret undercover! We do not need nonsenses like
permission.
We must be silent. We must be stealthy.
We must rummage in the dustbins.’
    ‘Rummage in the dustbins?’ said Frankie, wrinkling up his nose.
    ‘But of course!’ said Alphonsine, widening her eyes at such a silly question. ‘Dustbins is the best place to start. People is always throwing away things they don’t want
anyone to see.’
    ‘No one knows how to rummage through a bin like my Alphonsine,’ said