It was just so — so sad!
And I refuse to give this Big Mouth the satisfaction of hearing me cry!
With immense effort, she swallowed the bowling ball in her throat and steadied her voice. “So yeah, we’ll turn ourselves in. But only when we’ve got enough evidence to overturn the conviction and get Mom and Dad out of prison. After that, if the police want to charge us for all the bad stuff we had to do to save our family, then I say it’s worth it.”
Her expression was not visible over the radio. Yet eleven million listeners and the Mouth himself had no trouble picturing the tough, righteous determination on the face of a heartbroken young girl. “That’s how I see it,” she said hoarsely. “You got a problem with that?”
She slammed down the pay phone and slumped against the wall, completely spent.
Had she remained on the line a moment longer, she would have heard something very rare on the Mouth of America Show: the legendary shock jock at a complete loss for words.
The Harley tooled along Federal Avenue past strip malls and subdivisions. Aiden drove slowly and carefully in the light traffic, resisting the bike’s natural impulse to fly. Now, with HORUS Global Group’s former headquarters just a few miles up the road, was no time to risk getting pulled over.
Denver Executive Center North looked like aliens had dropped a huge mirrored cube in the middle of a sprawling suburban neighborhood — an ultramodern twelve-story office building in a place where the next tallest features were trees.
They parked the motorcycle where it was hidden by much larger vehicles and walked to the main entrance. When the automatic doors slid shut behind them, both were confident that they had attracted little attention.
They were mistaken.
In a corner of the parking lot, a burly man sat in a gold Corvette Stingray, watching them disappear inside. If not for the Colorado Rockies baseball cap covering his completely bald head, the Falconers would have recognized him in a heartbeat.
This was the man Aiden and Meg called Hairless Joe. He had been pursuing them for thousands of miles, but he was no policeman or juvenile corrections officer. He had already tried to kill them three times.
Today he aimed to finish the job once and for all.
Dressed in the tan coveralls of the maintenance staff, he got out of the car and entered the lobby. He’d always known they would be coming here sooner or later. This plan had been in his mind ever since the Falconers had eluded him in California.
Normally, a gun was his weapon of choice — simple, quick, and deadly. But he couldn’t risk that here — not so close to HORUS’s former home.
This time it had to look like an accident.
* * *
Aiden and Meg stepped out of the elevator into a long hallway of medical and legal offices. Each practice had its name stenciled into the frosted glass window in the door.
Suite 1108 was blank.
“I thought it would be, you know, bigger, fancier — something,” Meg whispered.
“What did you expect?” asked Aiden. “A neon sign that says WELCOME TO TERROR CENTRAL?”
“No crime-scene tape,” Meg observed. “Are you sure this is the right place?”
“One way to find out.” Aiden tried the door. Locked.
Meg’s eyes fell on a fire extinguisher mounted in a recessed enclosure on the wall. “We could break the window, reach in, and flip the lock.”
Aiden looked around. The hall was empty, but a lot of people worked here. And it might get a whole lot more crowded at the sound of shattering glass.
On the other hand, we didn’t beat the odds just to stand around staring at a closed door….
“Let me try something first.” Aiden took the charity flyer from his pocket, folded it for strength, and inserted the edge between the lock and the frame. There was a click, and the door swung wide.
“Mac Mulvey,” Aiden explained. The detective hero was also an expert burglar.
Meg was not a fan of their father’s writing. With a nervous groan, she followed her brother into the suite where their family’s horrible fate had been sealed.
* * *
The man called Hairless Joe rode the elevator to the twelfth floor, one higher than HORUS headquarters. With practiced expertise, he inserted a lock pick into the keyhole at the bottom of the control panel. The elevator car lurched and stopped dead. It was now frozen in place.
He strode to the stairwell and walked down to eleven. He approached the left elevator — the stalled side. A foot-long section of crowbar was concealed in his tool belt. He used it to jimmy open the metal panels. Then, grunting with effort, he pushed the doors wide, revealing the darkness of the empty shaft.
It would be a very long fall to the basement. A fatal fall.
His next stop was the janitorial closet. He pulled out a heavy floor polisher. The machine roared to life, buffing the terrazzo with three rotating brushes. The assassin positioned himself outside suite 1108. He knew the Falconer kids were on the other side of the door, but he dared not go in after them. The feds had been in control of that office for more than a year now. Who knew what surveillance equipment they might have in place?
Besides, Aiden and Meg would have to come out sooner or later.
It would be the last thing those two ever did.
* * *
Aiden and Meg looked around the HORUS offices in dismay. Suite 1108 was practically empty. There was furniture — desks, chairs, filing cabinets. But the drawers were bare, the files cleaned out. Whoever had searched this place had done a very thorough job.
Meg’s frustration bordered on frenzy. “How can there be nothing?” She pulled out a file drawer, feeling behind and underneath it for lost or forgotten papers.
Aiden tried to be reasonable. “We’re not CSI, Meg. The FBI was here before us. They’re professionals at this kind of thing.”
She got down on all fours to search the bottom of the cabinet. “We can’t walk out of here with zero!”
Her brother nodded glumly. The two had known every kind of misery and despair since the arrest of their parents. Only the fact that there was a next step — somewhere to go, a clue to search for — had kept them from giving in to the terrible fate that had befallen their family. Meg was right. Leaving empty-handed was simply not an option.
A sudden gust from outside rattled the window. Two pairs of eyes followed the buzzing sound. They saw it at the same time.
Something had been jammed between the frame and the sash.
Meg frowned. “What’s that?”
Brow furrowed, Aiden opened the window and reached for the small object. At first he thought it might be chewing gum. But when he touched it, he realized it was a piece of thin paper, folded down to the size of a postage stamp. The space was too tight for him to get a grip on the wadded-up sheet, so he worked it back and forth with his finger. The instant it was loose, the rattling noise became much louder.
“Cheap window,” he decided. “The only way to keep it quiet was to wedge something in there.” He drew the paper inside the room. Heads together, they watched as his trembling hands carefully opened it.
It was faded and ink stained, but it seemed to be a carbon copy of some kind of government form. The date read 2003.
“What is it?” Meg asked breathlessly.
“I’m not sure,” Aiden replied slowly. “But I think it’s a list of all their employees and their social security numbers.”
She scanned the page. “Where’s Frank Lindenauer?” she exclaimed in bitter disappointment. “He’s not on it!”
“He works undercover, Meg. He wouldn’t be on any list. Even Mom and Dad’s lawyers couldn’t track him down. But,” he added with determination, “I’ll bet one of these people knows who he really is — and where.”
“Then let’s get out of here,” Meg urged. “There’s nothing else to find in this dump.”
Aiden folded the paper and added it to the cache of leads in his pocket. Meg opened the door and peered into the
hall. “Coast is clear,” she whispered. “Just some janitor polishing the floor.”
They left the office and stepped around the coveralled man and his buffing machine.
Powerful arms grabbed both Falconers by their throats.
Aiden flailed his arms in an attempt to free himself, but the grip was too strong. In the course of the struggle, the janitor’s baseball cap toppled off a clean-shaven head.
A subzero chill flooded every capillary in Aiden’s body.
It was Hairless Joe — the mysterious bald assassin who’d been tracking them since Vermont. The cold professional killer who — for reasons they could not fathom — wanted them both dead.
“Hey!” Aiden began.
The pressure on his neck intensified, a paralyzing vise that squeezed the sound from his vocal chords and dimmed his vision around the edges. Meg tried to scream, but Hairless Joe silenced her with a tightened grip around her neck.
Dragging the Falconers, the assassin bulled toward the elevators at the end of the corridor. Aiden gawked in horror at the open doors and the emptiness beyond them.
He’s going to throw us down the elevator shaft!
Aiden pounded frantically at Hairless Joe’s head and shoulders. In response, the crushing clinch on his throat grew tighter, until he began to wonder if he might die of strangulation before he could be thrown to his death.
Amazingly, the thought of dying wasn’t nearly as awful as the thought of failing — leaving Mom and Dad in prison with no hope of ever getting out.
Desperately, he kicked at the coveralls, but in his weakened state he could not slow the bald killer’s progress. He could see the shaft now, yawning dark and deep before them. The bottom was invisible from up here. It would probably remain so until just before the impact that would extinguish their young lives.
Hairless Joe reared back to fling them into space.
Meg wrenched her head free and sunk her teeth into their attacker’s hand until she felt bone and tasted blood. Hairless Joe howled in agony, releasing the siblings. She scrambled up and grabbed the only weapon within reach — the floor polisher.
It was too heavy to lift, so she swung it in an arc along the terrazzo. It clipped the assassin across the back of both ankles, knocking his legs out from under him. As he went down, the momentum of the blow pitched him face-first into the shaft.
It was a split-second impulse, as natural as breathing. Aiden’s arm shot out, grabbed a fistful of coverall fabric, and yanked.
It made all the difference. Instead of falling forward into the abyss, Hairless Joe slammed into the elevator door frame and sprawled back onto the floor, dazed. As he struggled to his feet, ready to come at them again, Aiden whirled around, grabbed the fire extinguisher, and shot a stream of foam into the bald man’s face. It stopped the assassin in his tracks. Bellowing with rage and pain, he tried to clear his eyes of the stinging chemicals.
Office doors opened all down the hall. Concerned faces peered out, investigating the disturbance. What they saw — two unruly juveniles attacking a hapless janitor — was quite different from the reality.
Aiden dropped the extinguisher, and the Falconers took off into the stairwell. They scrambled and stumbled down the steps, propelled as much by gravity as by the impulse to escape.
“Faster, Meg!” Aiden urged. He barely dared to glance over his shoulder for fear he’d be greeted by the sight of Hairless Joe in furious pursuit.
They did not stop running until they reached the Harley in the parking lot.
As the big bike roared off, leaving Denver Executive Center North behind, a pair of angry chemical-reddened eyes watched from an eleventh-floor window.
* * *
Meg clung to her brother’s midsection, holding on as if the motorcycle’s tires were navigating a tightrope over boiling lava. There hadn’t been much to cheer about in this horrible misadventure. The one bright spot had been the fact that they’d given Hairless Joe the slip in California.
Or so we thought!
Now he was back, and more vicious than ever.
Stopped at a light, with the thunder of the Harley down to a dull roar, she leaned into Aiden’s helmet. “How do you think he found us?”
“We’ve seen his fake police badge,” her brother called back. “He can probably get cop reports, maybe even monitor their radio.”
“Yeah, but the police don’t know we’re here,” she countered. “Besides, Hairless Joe had more info than just Denver. He had the right building and the right floor and the right office. He didn’t follow us; he was waiting for us — like he read our minds.”
The light changed, and Aiden pulled over to the side of the road to let the traffic pass. “It has to be HORUS,” he concluded. “He must have figured out that we’re following up on our parents’ case.”
“What else does he know about us?” she asked worriedly. “The more he knows, the more he can anticipate what we’re going to do.”
Aiden pivoted on the seat to face her. He looked exhausted, almost gray — which was pretty much what you’d expect from someone whose only rest in the past two days had been a half-hour catnap in a bathroom. “We can’t even anticipate what we’re going to do most of the time, Meg. How easy can it be for a stranger?” He shrugged wearily. “We’ll be more careful.”
Meg hesitated. It was an awful thing, but it needed to be said. “We wouldn’t have to be more careful if you hadn’t saved the guy’s life in the elevator shaft.”
“I thought of that,” Aiden admitted. “It just kind of happened. It was almost a reflex to grab him.”
“Three times we got away from Hairless Joe,” Meg told him, “and three times he came after us again. You can’t tell me we’re not better off if that guy’s dead.”
Aiden was appalled. “He’s the murderer, not us!”
“That doesn’t mean you have to go out of your way to rescue him! Finding Frank Lindenauer is hard enough without having to worry about Hairless Joe!”
“I thought we were the good guys,” Aiden said bitterly.
“Mom and Dad were the good guys, too,” Meg pointed out. “And look where it got them.”
That settled it for Aiden. Mom and Dad were all that mattered.
“You’re right. If we get another chance, we’ll —” His voice cracked. He couldn’t speak the words — that they might willfully act to end the life of another person. Even a person who wanted them dead.
Meg understood his conflicted feelings. It was okay to escape from a prison farm because they never should have been there in the first place. It was okay to break the law to preserve their freedom because that was the only way to help their parents. It made perfect sense, but where did it end?
Would it ever be okay to kill?
Back at the Hillsdale branch library, Aiden and Meg huddled in front of the computer monitor. Free Internet access had been the deciding factor in returning there. It was the only way to research the people on HORUS’s Social Security form.
Aiden typed the first name into the Google.com home page. The search engine coughed up thousands of hits. Aiden clicked on the first link.
It was a news story dated February 21 of the previous year.
SWEEPING ARRESTS MADE IN HORUS TERROR CASE
I was a normal sixth-grader then, Meg thought in wonder. It was hard to believe she’d ever had a regular life of school and homework and family. That old Meg Falconer had no way of knowing that just two weeks later — on March 7 — an FBI battering ram would reduce her front door to toothpicks and her parents would be hauled away in handcuffs.
Aiden investigated the other links. A series of articles described the arrest, trial, and conviction of HORUS Global Group’s president. He was currently serving his sentence in Leavenworth Prison.
“Try another guy,” Meg suggested.
But this man was in jail as well, another part of the plot to funnel money to foreign terrorists. The Falconers worked their way down the Social Security form, receiving similar resu
lts. Police raids, court trials, jury verdicts. All the names on the list seemed to be mixed up in the conspiracy. Guilty … guilty … guilty …
Prison … prison … prison …
Meg frowned. “If these people are in jail, how are we going to talk to them? We weren’t even allowed to visit our own parents.”
“We couldn’t do it, anyway. We’re wanted fugitives. We wouldn’t last five seconds in a prison before somebody identified us.” He typed in the last name on the list: EDITH WILKINSON.
A handful of links appeared on the screen. The first was a news story from the Denver Post. It was dated just a few weeks before the FBI raid on HORUS Global.
GRANDMOTHER DIES IN AUTO ACCIDENT
DENVER: A local grandmother was swept to her death when her car crashed through the guardrail of the Galveston Street Bridge and quickly sank in the icy waters of the South Platte River. Edith Wilkinson, 61, a part-time secretary for the Denver-based HORUS Global Group, was pronounced dead on arrival at Denver General Hospital.
“She’s dead!” Meg gasped in shock. “Just our luck!”
“It wasn’t great luck for her, either,” Aiden reminded her gently.
Meg flushed. “I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that she was the only person we might have been able to talk to.”
“Wait —” Aiden was reading ahead in the article.
The official cause of the accident has not yet been determined, but police suspect excessive speed and driver error. Mrs. Wilkinson is survived by her daughter, Mrs. Jessica DeSouza, a science teacher at Liberty High School in suburban Glendale.
Meg was confused. “The daughter wasn’t the one who worked for HORUS. How can we trace Frank Lindenauer through her?”
“She might remember stuff her mother told her. A month after this accident, HORUS got raided by the FBI. Your own family working for terrorists — that’s not the kind of thing you forget.” Aiden took a deep breath. “Anyway, she’s all we’ve got.”