The Flight of the Silvers (44 page)

Melissa cracked another jagged laugh.

“I don’t know how he did it, but Theo got a message to the others. They’re right here in Charleston. And they’re coming for their friends.”

—

On the dark and chilly patio of a fourteenth-story hotel suite, between the empty lounge chairs and the potted cherry trees, four weary travelers stood side by side at the guardrail. The DP-9 building rested a thousand yards to the east. The Silvers could see lit windows between the trees, and the occasional glimpse of moving figures within.

Hannah stowed away her cheap binoculars and looked to Mia, Zack, and David. Like her, they were dressed in black from neck to toe, and wore their worries openly.

“Okay,” said the actress. “Now what?”

TWENTY-EIGHT

Their last hour in Nemeth had passed with creeping dread. Between the
plink-plink-plink
of the rain on the windows and the
tick-tick-tick
of the grandfather clock, David drummed a one-finger beat on the face of his wristwatch. Mia tapped a pen against a page of her journal. Zack paced the hardwood floor in clomping worry, the handphone clutched tightly in his grip. He’d left two texts and a voice mail for Amanda. She had yet to respond.

At the stroke of one, a ringing chime sliced through the house, startling everyone. Zack raised an angry palm at the wooden clock. Suddenly the hands spun like fan blades and the glass turned gray with dust. The oil on the gears dried away to nothingness until the inner workings creaked to a halt. A four-year demise condensed to five seconds. A timepiece choked to death on time.

The cartoonist looked to David and Mia with grumpy contrition. “I’ll fix it later.”

Suddenly the handphone chirped in announcement of a new text message. Hannah sped down the stairs in a windy blur, de-shifting at Zack’s side.

“Is that her? Is she all right?”

Zack furrowed his brow at the screen. “I’m not sure . . .”

“What do you mean?”

“Just read it!” Mia yelled.

“‘Sorry, Zack. They made me power off my phone in the exam tent. No news yet. I’ll call when I know more.’”

Now the others landed on Zack’s uncomfortable perch, caught between their doubts and their wishful thinking. Before anyone could speak, Zack aged the handphone to a husk, then chucked it to the floor. It shattered into rusty fragments.

Hannah grabbed his arm. “What are you doing?”

“When have you ever heard her say she ‘powered off’ something?”

“Okay, that sounded strange, but that doesn’t mean—”

“I’m sorry, Hannah. We’re out of rosy scenarios. That wasn’t Amanda. That was a Dep.”

Hannah glared at Zack. “But why destroy our last phone? If that was her—”

“They wouldn’t have tried that trick if they didn’t want us to stay here. They’re tracking us. We need to go.”

“Go where?”

“Go
how
?” Mia asked. “Amanda took the van.”

“Our only choice—”

“Stop.”

David hadn’t said a word in two hours, fearful of the furious invective he’d unleash. He’d warned them all what would happen if Amanda took Theo to the health fair. No one listened. Now Zack was about to leave an oral trail of bread crumbs for the Deps to follow.

“Everyone stay quiet until I finish.”

The others watched blankly as he paced back and forth across the living room, adjusting his gait each time. After three treks, he shuffled his way back to the sofa.

“All right. Now gather around me. Sit closely.”

They clustered around the coffee table. David closed his eyes. Suddenly the first floor teemed with the recent ghosts of himself, a busy crowd of self-projections that walked, skipped, and hopped in every direction.

David formed a small bubble of space around the four solid Silvers. “This is the only way we can safely talk. If they see us in their ghost drills, they’ll read our lips.”

Mia wished she was in a state of mind to enjoy the new scenery. Her voice creaked with strain. “Are you sure that wasn’t her, Zack? I mean if you’re wrong—”

“I’m not.”

“—we’ll be leaving them. They’ll come back to an empty house with no way to find us.”

“He’s not wrong,” David said. “They’re in federal custody. There’s no time to debate this.”

“So what do we do?”

Zack bounced his busy gaze between Hannah and Mia. “You two pack our stuff. As much as you can. David and I will be back to pick you up.”

“Pick us up in what?”

Seeing Zack’s grim expression, the boy nodded with understanding. “Something borrowed.”

—

They cut through the rain in long-legged strides. Their closest neighbor lived a half mile down the road, in a humble wooden A-frame that was overdecorated with American flags and crucifixes. The owner’s Dixon Tumbril rested in the driveway, a boxy white minivan filled with clutter.

While David kept a wary eye on the lit windows of the house, Zack reversed the car doors to an unlocked state. They slid into the Tumbril in quiet synch and pulled down their rain hoods.

“Smells like dog in here,” Zack muttered.

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“I wouldn’t call this begging. I’m wondering if we should just offer them cash.”

“We don’t have time to broker a sale, Zack, or soothe your criminal guilt.”

“It’s not guilt. I’m just afraid this won’t work.”

“It’ll work.”

During his nine days of power practice, Zack had conducted a few casual forays into temporal duplication, otherwise known as tooping. He learned thirty years after the rest of the world that metal objects cloned better than most, acquiring unseemly patches of rust but keeping most of their structural integrity.

He concentrated on the keyhole until it shimmered with a faint white glow. Soon a splotchy metal construct grew from within, forming the tip of a key, as well as a broken piece of key ring.

Zack marveled at his new creation. “Holy shit. That’s surreal.”

“Closest thing to magic I’ve seen yet.”

“Yeah, I’m the Merlin of car thieves. My mom would be proud.” His face crinkled with disgust as he touched the key’s surface. “It’s slimy.”

“You probably cloned some of the driver’s hand.”

Zack didn’t want to picture the mass of insentient goo that would result from a fully tooped human. He cleaned the key with his sleeve.

“All right. I’m ready. Do your thing.”

David looked to the house. “On my signal. Three . . . two . . . one . . .”

With a flick of his hand, the property was consumed in a booming rumble, a perfect echo of the thunder that had blanketed Nemeth ten minutes ago. Zack started the engine under the loud noise cover, then checked the front window of the house.

“Good job.”

Now it was David’s turn to marvel. “Wow. I’ve never thrown thunder before. That was like something out of Norse mythology.”

On a better day, Zack would share in his godly thrill. All he wanted to do now was scream. The federal posse on their trail kept pushing them into becoming bigger and better criminals, larger and meaner threats. Zack could only imagine the cycle would spin faster and faster, until he and his friends were killing just for the privilege of living.

—

Mia and Hannah waited quietly on the porch swing, their collective belongings stuffed into duffels with little semblance of order. They’d packed their bags in grim silence, refusing to speak for fear of ghost drills, refusing to cry for fear of never stopping.

“The Deps wouldn’t hurt them,” Mia insisted. “I mean they still have rules.”

The actress nodded her head, scrambling for the sunniest scenario. “They’re probably sedated. I bet they’re just sleeping right now.”

Mia cast a dismal glance at the lightning. “She called it a storm.”

“Who?”

“The girl Theo and I met in the library. She said everything that was happening right now was a storm and we just had to weather it. Maybe that means we’ll get them back.”

Hannah hoped to God she was right. She’d just made peace with Theo. She’d finally started getting along with Amanda after ten years of thorny distance. Now the two of them were probably in a government plane, speeding away to some top-secret lab in the middle of nowhere.

Soon the stolen Tumbril pulled into the driveway. The Silvers threw the bags into the back, then sped away in a splashing screech.

The moment he crossed the intersection, Zack glimpsed headlights in the rearview mirror. A trio of ash-gray vans hung a sharp left behind him, speeding toward the lake house. His heart hammered.

Seconds,
he thought
. We missed them by seconds.

—

Three hours after the dramatic capture of two federal fugitives, the Marietta health fair returned to its normal chaos. A lone Dep remained at the scene, patrolling the grounds as a volunteer organizer. Melissa didn’t think Zack and the others would be foolish enough to come here looking for their friends, but then she’d underestimated their recklessness before.

For all the same reasons, Hannah was not a fan of the current plan. While their stolen Tumbril idled in the library lot, she studied the tempic structures at the far end of the park.

“It’s all right,” David assured her. “I’ll be in and out before anyone can spot me.”

“That’s just what my sister said to you.”

“Yes, well, I plan to be more careful.”

“Just watch out for cameras,” said Zack.

“Watch out for everything!” Mia added. “Please.”

David exited the car, tightened his rain hood, then shined a breezy smile through the window.

“Don’t you fret, Miafarisi. You won’t lose me today.”

Hannah shook her head at him as he hustled toward the fair. “That kid is unreal. Nothing scares him.”

“He’s amazing,” Mia said, with sheepish self-consciousness.

Zack tapped a nervous beat on the steering wheel. “He was right. Amanda should have never come here. I should have helped him convince her.”

“You wouldn’t have stopped her,” Hannah said. “You know how she gets when someone’s hurting. She was always like that, even as a kid.”

“Why didn’t she become a doctor then?”

Hannah hesitated to reply. It seemed crass, especially now, to talk about her sister’s stillbirth, a devastating trauma that had knocked Amanda’s whole life off trajectory.

“It’s complicated,” she sighed.

Zack shut off the windshield wipers. Soon the outside world drowned away. Nine minutes passed before a wet and winded David hurried back into the car.

“They’re okay. The agents used some kind of sleeping gas on them.”

Hannah covered her mouth. “Oh my God.”

“Did anyone say where they were going?” Mia asked.

“The Deps? No. But I think Theo might have.”

“What?”

“Start from the beginning,” Zack said. “What did you see?”

Through hindsight, David had seen everything. As he walked the crowd with his hooded face lowered, he scanned the past in his thoughts. He watched the entire federal ambush from setup to takedown, then stood at Theo’s gurney as the augur mumbled something odd. David had placed his ear near Theo’s retrospective lips, parsing every syllable of the message.

“Archer Lansing Private School?” Hannah asked.

“That’s what he said. I replayed it three times.”

“But why? Who was he talking to?”

David smirked in bright amazement. “Strange as it sounds, I think he was talking to me.”

Soon Mia returned to the library and sat at a terminal. She learned through Eaglenet archives that Archer Lansing was once a small but prestigious boys’ academy in Charleston, West Virginia. A cross-reference search of the address revealed that the building was now a regional office for the Broadcast Crimes Division of DP-9.

When Mia brought her results back to the car, Zack brimmed with guarded optimism.

“That can’t be coincidence. That has to be where they’re holding them.”

David nodded excitedly. “Theo knew I’d come to ghost him. He gave me the future through the past. It’s kind of brilliant, actually.”

“It’s just one future,” Mia cautioned. “We don’t know if it’s the right one.”

Zack scoured the road atlas he found under the passenger seat. Charleston was eighty miles south of here, a straight shot down Highway XLI.

“It’s the only lead we have. If they’re not there, we’re screwed.”

“And if they are there?” Hannah inquired. “What then?”

The cartoonist matched her uncertain expression, then told her to ask again later.

Two hours after sunset, on the chilly balcony of a West Virginia high-rise, she did.

—

The Kanewha was the oldest and most prestigious hotel in the state, a blond brick high-rise in the center of the capitol district. History buffs knew it as the place where President Irving Dudley died of a heart attack just days after his 1960 reelection. Had David sprung for the $4,200-a-night penthouse suite, and had he felt the urge to push his ghosting talents, he would have learned the death wasn’t entirely natural.

He sat on the patio of his decorous new room on the fourteenth floor, keeping a binocular vigil on the DP-9 building in the hilly distance. He could spy the familiar frame of their Royal Seeker in the parking lot. He’d caught Melissa Masaad, the exotic-looking leader of the Marietta raid, sneaking a cigarette behind the generator towers. Now he watched Ross Daley push Theo up the wheelchair ramp of the building. David smiled at the augur’s serene expression.

“I’ll never doubt that man again. He’s a true prophet.”

The Silvers in the living room didn’t share David’s cheer. They still had no confirmation that Amanda was inside, nor did they have a rescue plan. Shortly after check-in, Mia visited the business center and printed every online photo she could find of the old private school. Hannah and Zack raided the department store, purchasing black clothes and radio transmitters for everyone.

Now the cartoonist rooted through their bag of dark keepsakes from Terra Vista, finding Czerny’s small electron chaser (dead), the Salgados’ stun baton (dead), and the imposing revolver that Rebel had painfully introduced into their lives. It looked quite functional, with five .44 caliber bullets remaining in the chamber.

Hannah paced the carpet, nervously eyeing the gun. “Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?”

“No,” said Mia.

Zack chucked a hopeless palm. “I’m open to alternatives.”

“This is our best chance,” David insisted. He returned through the sliding screen and closed it shut behind him. “It’s a small building, isolated from its surroundings. From what I can see through the windows, there are only nine or ten agents in there.”

Hannah scoffed. “Oh, is that all?”

“You seem to forget we have talents they don’t. We also have the element of surprise.”

“How do you know they’re not expecting us?”

“They can’t possibly know we’ve divined their location,” David insisted. “We have the advantage. It’s just a matter of using it. I can create a distraction that lures most of them outside. While I keep them blind, you and Zack can look for the others.”