To Zephraim Turnbull’s eyes, this was a killer if there ever was one. The farmer took aim and fired.
The blast drowned out Aiden’s demented “No-o-o-o-o!” and knocked the big FBI agent flat on his back on the turf. He lay there, unmoving.
Aiden was practically hysterical. “That’s not the right guy! You just shot a federal agent!”
“Drop it!” Agent Lucy Batista leaped onto the porch, pistol in one hand, ID in the other.
The farmer leaned his shotgun against the porch rail and backed off meekly. Batista snatched the weapon and jumped down to kneel over the fallen Harris. She pulled out her cell phone, activating the walkie-talkie function. “I’ve got an agent down in Aberdeen off Rural Route 6! I need an ambulance pronto!”
A smaller figure appeared beside her and bent over the fallen FBI agent.
A cry was torn from Aiden’s throat. “Meg!” He took a step toward his sister.
Like a serpent from the shadows, a black-clad arm wrapped around Meg’s midsection, hauling her upright and pulling her away from Harris and Batista.
Batista reacted instantly, swinging her pistol around and training it on the attacker. But by then, Hairless Frank had Meg in a headlock and was pressing the barrel of his gun to her ear.
“Let her go!” Batista ordered.
The assassin’s voice was steady, measured. “Stay back or she dies.”
Aiden started forward, but the FBI agent froze him with a bark of “Stop!” He realized in a flood of horror that there was absolutely nothing he could do. Frank Lindenauer was outnumbered, yet he was the one in control. The slightest twitch of his index finger and Meg’s life was over.
For the Falconers, it was the ultimate nightmare — to be at the utter mercy of the man who wanted them dead.
Batista tried to reason with Hairless Frank. “You can’t win this. I’ve got backup on the way.”
The assassin was unmoved. “Don’t push me. I hold the only card that matters, and we both know it. Here’s the plan — I’m going to walk right out of this, and you’re going to let me.”
“Leave the girl with us,” Batista tried to bargain.
“Don’t insult my intelligence.” The killer grinned, a smile that did not extend to his ice-cold eyes. “Don’t worry — I’ll take good care of her.”
“No!” Aiden shouted.
“Mind your own business, kid!” Hairless Frank advised harshly. “You’ve had a nice run, and I’ve got the scars to prove it. But you never really had a chance.”
Aiden would not back down. “You’re not taking my sister!”
The assassin gestured in Batista’s direction. “You think this fed will let me get thirty feet without a hostage?”
“You’ll still have a hostage,” Aiden argued. “Me.”
The agent stared at him, although her weapon remained on its target. “Stay out of this, Aiden! You don’t know what you’re saying!”
Aiden ignored her, directing his words at Hairless Frank. “We’ll do a switch. Meg goes free. I come with you.”
For the first time in the standoff, Meg spoke up. With the assassin’s bear-trap grip on her neck, her voice was barely a terrified quaver. But her message was classic Meg — brave, strong, and not open to negotiation: “Forget it!”
Hairless Frank laughed — a mirthless chuckle that chilled Aiden to his trembling core. “You Falconers are such a bunch of do-gooders! Maybe I should let you each fight it out for the privilege of sacrificing yourself to protect the other one. Just like your parents — what a couple of Boy Scouts! Do you know how easy it was to sucker two college professors into working for HORUS? When I told them I was CIA, and they’d be helping their country, they were like puppy dogs, eager to do anything I asked.” He snorted in disgust. “Patriotism is a pathetic emotion. It makes you weak and stupid.”
He began to back away, pulling Meg along with him.
“Don’t move!” ordered Batista. Her pistol arm was as rigid as a steel rod.
“Go ahead — shoot,” Hairless Frank invited coolly. “Even if you do hit me and not the girl, what are the chances that I won’t squeeze the trigger?”
“Don’t let them go!” piped Aiden. “As soon as he’s out of range, he’ll kill her!”
“Nobody’s going anywhere!” insisted Batista, not quite as confidently.
But Hairless Frank sensed his advantage and continued to press it — retreating with careful baby steps.
“That’s far enough!” Batista exclaimed.
Aiden watched the standoff, appalled. How could he allow his sister to be carried off and murdered? Yet what could he do to prevent it? If the FBI couldn’t handle Hairless Frank, what chance did a fifteen-year-old kid have against this irresistible force of nature?
Drowning in dread, he didn’t hear the rumble of hoofbeats until it was too late.
Bernard burst out of the surrounding darkness, three hundred pounds of charging livestock in a state of high agitation.
Zephraim Turnbull spotted the guard pig first. “Bernard — no!”
Bernard tried to stop, but he had too much momentum. The animal careened into their midst, narrowly avoiding the prostrate body of Emmanuel Harris. A meaty flank collided with Agent Batista, sending her sprawling to the grass.
Aiden experienced a jolt of electricity as if he’d taken a direct hit from a lightning bolt. With Batista out of the picture —
There’s nothing to keep Hairless Frank from killing Meg!
There was no time for words, or even thought. It was pure instinct. Aiden flung himself across the porch, arms outstretched in a desperate grab for the object he hoped would be where he remembered it. He felt the nail gun in his hands, pointed it at Hairless Frank, and fired.
The crack hurt his ears. The recoil tossed the power tool from his grasp and knocked him flat on his back.
The nail tore into the assassin’s leg just above the knee. With a cry of shock and pain, Hairless Frank grasped his thigh, releasing the headlock that imprisoned Meg.
Meg dove for freedom. She hit the ground and scrambled on all fours in an attempt to put as much distance as possible between herself and the killer as he wheeled furiously around to fire the shot that would end Meg’s life. The sharp report of a pistol rang out.
Aiden gawked through tears of grief. His sister was still moving, crawling madly away from her captor. Then Aiden’s eyes found Agent Batista. She was up on one knee, her smoking gun leveled at the assassin. An expression of stunned disbelief was frozen on Hairless Frank’s face. A crimson blood-stain had appeared on his shirt.
As if in slow motion, the stocky, powerful frame of the traitor Frank Lindenauer crumpled to the turf of the barnyard.
Meg sprang up and threw herself at her brother, seizing him by the collar. “Did you get it? You got it, right?”
“She got him,” Aiden replied, indicating Batista. “He’s dead.”
“No — his confession!” she gasped. “The tape recorder! You were right! He said it all — everything about how he framed Mom and Dad!”
The color drained from Aiden’s face, leaving him white and shaking. In the heat of the standoff, with Meg so close to death, the tape recorder had been the last thing on his mind.
“No,” he said finally. “I couldn’t get to it.”
The agony on his sister’s face was a knife in his heart. “But he’s dead!” she wailed. “He won’t ever be able to say it again!”
Throughout these horrendous weeks on the run, the Falconers had never known a moment of such complete despair. No matter how great their suffering, how terrifying their circumstances, there had always been hope — the chance, however slight, that they might one day help their parents. Now that chance lay dead at their feet.
The words that would have saved John and Louise Falconer were now nothing but smoke in the wind.
They fell toward each other and clung together, too devastated to be aware of anything but their sorrow. There were no words, no tears. Aiden and Meg were
completely empty. They had given every atom of their existence to this quest, and it had not been enough.
Sirens heralded the approach of the ambulance. Tires crunched on the dirt drive — FBI backup, local police. Aiden and Meg noticed none of it. Any chance of getting their lives back had been destroyed with Frank Lindenauer.
Mom and Dad would remain in prison for the rest of their natural lives.
The Falconer family was over.
Jail.
They were right back where they’d started.
No, worse than that, Meg decided bitterly. Sunnydale Farm had been a minimum-security detention center. She and Aiden had loathed it.
It was Disney World compared to here.
There was nothing minimum about the Danforth Juvenile Correctional Facility outside Roanoke, Virginia. There were high stone walls and fences with razor wire. Searchlight towers ringed the perimeter. And the guards weren’t called supervisors or counselors or teachers. They were guards and they were armed.
It had all happened so fast after the showdown on the Turnbull farm. She and Aiden had been bounced from the FBI to the Denver police to the Department of Juvenile Corrections with dizzying speed. Deputy Director Adler himself had come all the way from Washington to escort them to Danforth.
Meg would never forget his cold words as the car had approached the forbidding gray ramparts of this place of no hope: “You’re not going to burn this one down.”
Back then the shock was still so fresh, the horror at the failure of their quest so painful, that all they could do was repeat the obvious questions: When can we talk to our parents? When can we call our lawyers? Why are we being locked up without a trial?
“If I were you two,” was Adler’s acid response, “I wouldn’t be asking for favors. You destroyed one of our facilities. And the cost in manpower to chase you down could have run a small country for a year. Excuse me for not just turning you loose until trial. I guess I’m not the trusting type.”
Trial. They had lived through their parents’ trial. Now it would be their turn.
Meg dreaded hearing the charges read out in open court. They had broken so many laws in their efforts to stay free so they could track down Frank Lindenauer. No one would ever understand how hard they’d worked to minimize their crimes, to steal as little as possible, and only when they’d had no choice. No one would believe how they’d made mental notes to someday pay back what they owed.
Worst of all, no one would ever see that they had done it all in pursuit of justice for their poor parents. There would never be justice now. Any chance of it had died with Hairless Frank. Agent Batista and Zephraim Turnbull had heard Lindenauer’s confession. But in the heat of a life-and-death moment, words could be confused, misunderstood, forgotten. Whatever the reason, it had not been enough.
It’s almost like Mom and Dad really are guilty, because there’s no way to prove it isn’t true.
She and Aiden would no doubt be found guilty, too. They were Falconers, fruit of the traitorous tree. They had to be locked away for the good of society.
For how long? She could not even hazard a melancholy guess. And once they got out — what future would they have then? No family, their name reviled. That was the craziest part. They were in maximum security. But, terrible as it was, Meg didn’t have the slightest desire to escape. Not now, with no hope for their parents, no quest to follow.
Nothing to escape to.
The one person who might have been persuaded to believe them was the architect of all their misfortunes, Agent Emmanuel Harris. Meg had no way of knowing, but she suspected Harris was probably dead. He had neither moved nor uttered a sound since Turnbull had shot him down.
That was another disaster. The farmer, who had only been trying to protect Aiden, was probably in jail for killing an FBI agent. He would lose his farm to Holyfield after all.
Everything the Falconers touched turned to mud.
As awful as she felt for herself and her parents, what really worried her was Aiden. Meg was angry and bitter and depressed. She would find herself crying in her cell one minute; the next, she might be clawing the bars in a blind fury.
Aiden showed none of these emotions. He was like a zombie. She only saw him in the afternoon in the exercise yard, and they were separated by a chain-link fence. But each day, he seemed a little more distant and withdrawn. Like Meg, he had devoted his entire soul to proving their parents’ innocence. Now that the quest was gone, he had no soul.
He was an empty shell.
* * *
Aiden was ready to lie down and die — but Miguel Reyes wouldn’t let him.
Miguel had been with the Falconers at Sunnydale. They had run together from Nebraska all the way to Vermont. Miguel had been recaptured there and had been in Danforth ever since.
“This is hard time, yo,” he told Aiden. “The guards are nasty mean, and I got nothing good to say about the class of people in here.”
In his opinion, the one positive thing that had happened to him was that Aiden — his best friend in the world — had turned up in the very same cell block.
Aiden didn’t point out that he and Miguel had never been friends. They had, in fact, been pretty close to enemies. But Aiden was glad to know somebody — somebody streetwise and tough — in this very scary place.
There were convicted murderers in the facility, armed robbers, and gang members galore. Violence was an everyday occurrence. There would be a sudden outbreak of shouting, and pretty soon somebody was being hauled off to the hospital wing, bloody and beaten.
These were not just fistfights. There were homemade weapons here — knives, shanks, clubs.
“Should have stayed put at Sunnydale, yo,” was Miguel’s opinion. “This is no place for you and your little sis.”
Every time Aiden thought of Meg in this hideous lockup, his depression grew blacker.
At first, he had barely dared to breathe for fear of drawing the attention of his dangerous fellow inmates. He drew their attention anyway. The prison population had been following news coverage of the Falconer fugitives — and cheering as the brother and sister left hordes of frustrated police officers in their wake.
On day one, he’d walked into the mess hall to a standing ovation. He was a hero — for now. But how long would that last? He was younger than most, and weaker than all. Even with Miguel’s help, he couldn’t see himself surviving here.
It’s no more than I deserve, he reminded himself listlessly. This was all his fault. If I had found a way to get to the tape recorder, everything would be different.
He had blown their only chance.
“You got to pull yourself together, Falcon,” was Miguel’s advice. “Place like this — the sharks smell blood in the water a mile away. You don’t want it to be yours.”
“Maybe I’ve got it coming,” Aiden told him.
* * *
There were school classes at Danforth, but they were a joke. No one — neither teachers nor students — believed any of the inmates would have a use for education. These were lifetime criminals. Most would graduate to adult prison at the age of eighteen.
There was no future here. In that way, Aiden fit in perfectly.
The largest portion of each day was spent on work detail.
“That’s how they keep down the violence,” Miguel explained as they trudged through the main gate, rakes on their shoulders. “Work you so hard you’ve got no strength left for beating on people.”
Which was fine with Aiden. Exhaustion was what he craved — anything to make him too tired to feel.
That’s a plus when your only feelings are misery and dispair.
Today’s job was both backbreaking and mind-numbing. The crew was required to rake leaves from the six-mile stretch of road that linked Danforth with the interstate.
If the workers harbored any thoughts of escape during these trips outside the walls, the guards were carrying high-powered rifles. Badges on their uniforms proclaimed them to be expert marksmen.
Aiden never even considered running. With the evidence that would clear John and Louise Falconer forever out of reach, even freedom seemed pointless.
They worked for five hours with only a twenty-minute lunch break, and started back just before four P.M. The procession was a quarter mile from the prison when they began to hear strident shouts. As they drew closer, they could see a car stopped at the main gate. The hubbub of voices resolved itself into the urgent rhythm of a heated argument.
“Hold up!” called one of the work detail guards.
Aiden squinted at the group of people gathered at the sentry hut. He recognized the warden himself there, and two other officials from the prison office. Everyone else was in uniform, except —
The rake dropped from Aiden’s hand with a clatter. It was the last person he had ever expected to see again. A familiar silhouette straightened up to tower over the other men.
Agent Emmanuel Harris — alive!
One arm was in a sling, but otherwise Harris seemed unhurt. And he was furious, as usual, waving a manila envelope and bellowing, “My authority beats your authority! You never had any authority — not over my prisoners!” He turned and caught sight of the work crew. “There’s one of them now!”
It was amazing. The warden of Danforth was the king of that tight little world. Yet all it took was a few documents from the envelope. On the spot, Aiden was released into Harris’s custody, and Meg was brought from the girls’ wing and given over as well.
Meg gawked at the six-foot-seven agent. “But — but you’re dead!” she blurted.
His expression was unreadable. “Disappointed?”
She glared back at him. “No.”
Aiden was surprised at the degree of his relief at the sight of Harris alive. So many horrible things had happened. One less casualty had to be a plus — even if it was J. Edgar Giraffe.
The Falconers were handcuffed together and then handcuffed again to the inside of the rear doors of Harris’s rental car. The FBI man started up the engine.