Tommy was the first to put their disappointment into words. “That’s it? We just stand here and look at it?”
“We’re just hypnotists,” Jax shot back. “We don’t have X-ray vision.”
“We can bend the clerk into opening it up for us,” Kira decided, “but we can’t just push in front of all these people. The best we can do is get in line and wait our turn.”
They took their place at the back of the queue, inching forward at a snail’s pace.
Jax glanced over at the mailbox. “Mako’s box,” he murmured aloud. “He comes in here, takes out a key, gets his mail.”
“Or maybe not,” Tommy mused. “Maybe when Sentia closed up, he had to give an address, so he wrote down any old thing. And that box belongs to some little old lady who can’t figure out why she keeps getting Sentia’s electric bill.”
“It’s our only lead,” Jax decided. “Mako’s mail is a connection to Mako.”
Kira looked sad. “I still can’t believe what Dr. Mako has turned into. He taught me so much. I thought he was a great man.”
“I was just as fooled as you,” Jax soothed her. “Then he tried to kill my parents. And me. And he did kill Axel Braintree.”
“I was so stupid!” she lamented. “Even if I couldn’t see it in Mako, I should have known about Wilson. I thought he was just a bully who liked to throw his weight around.”
“Mako uses people,” said Jax bitterly. “Wilson was his muscle, we were his research, and Stanley’s his” — what had Brassmeyer called it? — “his doomsday machine. Stanley’s message is, anyway.”
“Have you still got that on tape?” Tommy asked.
Jax took out his phone, beckoned his friends close, and replayed the recording he had made of Stanley’s clip on FreeForAll.
“You will stay perfectly still until you hear this special word — the name of what I’m holding in my hand right now. Remember it well….”
“And what was it?” Tommy prompted.
“I didn’t dare look,” Jax replied. “The kid can bend me. If I’d watched it, I’d risk going under. Then I wouldn’t even have this much information.”
Kira leaned in closer to the phone. “Play it again.”
As the recording restarted, her brow furrowed. “Do you hear that in the background? Horses.”
Jax listened closely. She was right. There was definitely some kind of animal — more than one. “How can you be sure it’s horses?”
“I used to be big into horseback riding,” she explained. “I had to give it up when Dr. Mako recruited me for Sentia, but I was really good. When this message was recorded, there were horses in the background. I recognize the whinnying, and you can even hear the clopping of hoofs.” She looked up in excitement. “Horses. Definitely.”
“Central Park?” Tommy suggested.
She shook her head. “Then you’d hear city noises, too. This is more like a horse farm, or riding stable.” She turned to a well-dressed woman ahead of them in line. “Excuse me, are there any horse farms around here?”
The woman laughed. “Only about thirty.”
“Thirty,” Jax repeated faintly. It was like taking one step forward, then two steps back. Just when it seemed like they’d made a breakthrough, the task ahead of them became even more daunting than before. How could three kids, on foot, investigate thirty horse farms by tomorrow at nine AM?
“This is horse country,” the woman explained. “The United States Olympic team boards their mounts here. We have stud farms and racing stables. A lot of people keep horses on their properties. Why, there’s a huge spread just south of town belonging to that billionaire who died a few months ago — Avery Quackenbush.”
Quackenbush! Jax felt a rush of total understanding. Avery Quackenbush had been under Mako’s influence. It all made sense!
“That’s the one!” Jax whispered excitedly when the woman had turned away from them.
Tommy was bewildered. “How do you figure that?”
“Mako had his hooks into Quackenbush. Now that the billionaire’s dead, he’s using the property as a hideout and headquarters! That’s where Stanley recorded the message for FreeForAll.”
“We have to get out there,” Kira decided. “Do they have taxis here?”
“Too suspicious,” said Jax. “This is a small town where everybody knows everybody else. Three kids — outsiders — can’t just stand in the middle of town, waving at cabs. Not when my face is all over TV and the Internet.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Tommy challenged. “Walk?”
“Yes.”
“It could be miles,” Kira protested. “It’s already after four o’clock. We’ll never find the place once it gets dark.”
“We start off walking,” Jax clarified, “and when we’re out of town a little, we flag down a car and bend the driver.”
They began to push through the crowded post office toward the door. Jax was aware of a heightened buzz of conversation behind them. But he paid no attention until something squeezed his wrist. He wheeled to face the postal clerk. She grasped his arm with one hand; in the other, she clutched a printout that was all too familiar.
The Missing Boy poster.
He flipped up his glasses to bend her, but she would not meet his eyes. Why couldn’t he reach her? All at once, he had the answer: He couldn’t hypnotize her because she was already hypnotized — by Kira.
“Let go,” Kira said in a low but forceful tone.
The clerk complied, and they made for the exit.
A broad-shouldered man blocked their way. “What’s going on here?”
Before Jax could respond hypnotically, Tommy stomped on the man’s foot. The man hopped aside with a yelp, and the three New Yorkers slipped outside. No one was thinking about the Quackenbush horse farm now. All that mattered was getting away from the post office.
A squad car screeched up to the curb, and a uniformed officer leaped out. With a sinking heart, Jax realized that the postal clerk must have alerted the police before coming after him. He toyed with the idea of making eye contact with the cop, but quickly abandoned it. It was hard to bend a moving target at a distance. The only solution was to get moving himself.
“Run!” he bellowed, then followed his own advice, tearing off down the street. Tommy and Kira were hot on his heels.
The officer was an athlete, and matched them stride for stride, closing the gap. Jax hurdled a low hedge and pounded into the town square, plowing through a bed of chrysanthemums. Desperately, he scanned the area, looking for any possible means of escape. Pine Bough was a tiny town, so there was plenty of running room. But how would they ever lose the cop who was chasing them?
The letup in his concentration cost him dearly. With a crunching of tires on gravel, a second squad car jumped the curb and pulled directly into his path. It was too late for Jax to adjust his course. All he could do was hold out his arms to soften the impact. He bounced off the side of the car and hit the ground hard. As he rolled across the grass, he knocked the feet out from under his pursuer. The man went down like a sack of oats and lay on top of Jax, stunned.
The driver of the second cruiser was an older man, portly and slow moving. He reached for Tommy, who nimbly sidestepped him and sprinted away.
Kira tried a different approach. She locked eyes with the older cop, hoping to bend him quickly. But something blocked her, something she could not penetrate.
Though slow, the older cop was as strong as an ox. The instant he clamped on to her arm, she knew she was caught.
Jax tried to scramble back up, but the younger officer put a hammerlock on him.
“Cool your jets, kid! You’re not going anywhere!”
Utterly defeated, he spotted Kira, also in custody. And Tommy?
“Where’s the other kid?” the older cop wheezed.
Jax inclined his head, scanning the area. There was no sign of Tommy. He allowed himself the slightest glimmer of hope. As long as they had an ally on the loose, all was not completel
y lost.
Tommy ran flat out — up streets, around corners, and through backyards. He had not spared the time to see his companions captured, but he knew they had been. Things looked bad for them — or maybe not. Jax could get anybody to do anything.
Tommy had once been jealous of that ability; now he was counting on it. And Kira was a hypnotist, too. He would never understand their power, but he’d seen too much not to appreciate what they were capable of. They might be able to mesmerize themselves free again. That meant he had to stay free, too, to meet up with them when they got away. He had to believe it still wasn’t too late to stop Mako.
Tommy had no paranormal power. For him, the key to staying free was hiding. But where? Where could he lie low in a place where any stranger stood out like a sore thumb?
That was when he spied the construction site. An old house was in the process of being knocked down, probably to be replaced with some McMansion. Work seemed to be complete for the day — at least, the site was quiet. That made this the perfect place to chill out until Jax and Kira made their next move.
Slowing only a little, he placed two hands on top of the safety fence and vaulted up and over. He was already in midair when he saw the Bobcat mini-digger parked just inside the perimeter. It was too late to change direction. Gravity didn’t work that way. His head slammed against the raised metal shovel attachment. The impact was even more devastating than he expected it to be. His last thought before everything went dark was Why do I let Jackson Opus get me into these things?
Then he crumpled to the ground, and remembered no more.
In his office in the HoWaRD building at Fort Calhoun, Captain Pedroia was shutting down his computer for the day when the door was flung wide, and in burst none other than Colonel Brassmeyer.
Pedroia stood up. “Colonel?” This was highly unusual. If the commander wanted to see someone, he’d send his aide. It was rare for him to show up in person.
“The plane’s waiting for us on the tarmac, wheels up in fifteen minutes.”
“Where are we going?”
“Jackson Opus is in custody in Pine Bough, New Jersey, just west of New York,” Brassmeyer told him.
“New Jersey?” the psychiatrist repeated. “Surely we’ve got soldiers in the area who can scoop him up and bring him here.”
Brassmeyer smiled without humor. “I’d rather crawl there on broken glass than have to explain to anybody why they don’t dare look that kid in the eye.”
Pedroia swallowed hard. “I’ll get my jacket.”
The police station in Pine Bough was a little corner of the town hall on a short cul-de-sac off the main square. It had two desks, a locker room, and a single holding cell. Even the bathroom was shared with the Sanitation Department office across the hall.
Jax and Kira paced anxiously as the precious minutes before tomorrow at nine AM ticked away. They were watched over by the older cop, who turned out to be the local police chief. It should have been easy — one jailor, two hypnotists. He should have been bent, and they should have been gone by now.
But it wasn’t happening. Time and time again, one or the other would call the man over to ask an “important question,” and fix him with a practiced mesmeric stare. They would look at him, he would look back at them, but the hypnotic link — and the familiar PIP image — would not even begin to form. It was as baffling as it was frustrating — until the old officer called home to inform his wife that he’d be detained at work indefinitely to look after two “runaways.” The conversation soon turned to the old man’s upcoming cataract surgery, and Jax and Kira had their answer.
“Cataracts!” Kira lamented. “They must cloud his vision just enough to protect him from being bent.”
“Tommy’s still out there,” Jax whispered. “He’s our only hope.”
“He can’t stop Mako on his own,” Kira scoffed. “It’s a long shot for the two of us. He isn’t even a hypno.”
Jax bit his lip. He couldn’t picture Tommy going after Mako, but he also couldn’t see him giving up. There was a core of loyalty to Tommy’s character that would prevent him from getting on a bus back to New York and writing Jax and Kira off. It was no match for hypnotic ability, but it was a kind of mule-headedness that you could never count out.
On the other hand, the kid wasn’t Superman. Just because he was persistent didn’t mean he could defeat cops and rip open steel bars.
Come on, Tommy! Where are you?
The distant crowing of a rooster was confusing. They crowed in the morning, but it was dark. Pitch black, in fact. Then Tommy felt the vibrating in his pocket. His phone! The new ring tone, freshly downloaded, was the cock-a-doodle-doo of a rooster.
In order to reach into his pocket, he had to sit up. And that was definitely a bad idea. His head all but exploded. The word pain didn’t even begin to describe it.
It came back to him then, in reverse order: the crack of his skull striking the Bobcat’s shovel, his flight from the police, the capture of his companions. His memory took him all the way back to the moment last night when Jax had come in his window and told him about the terrible plan Dr. Mako was about to unleash on the world.
Dr. Mako, who was right here in Pine Bough, on a horse farm south of town —
The rooster was still crowing. But by the time he managed to pull out his phone, the sound had stopped. Good thing he hadn’t answered it. It was his parents, probably frantic by now because he hadn’t come home from school. They were going to kill him.
He thumbed a quick text in reply: Sorry to worry u. Forgot to call. Sleeping over at Ralph’s tonight. There was no such person as Ralph, and Mom and Dad probably knew it. But at least hearing from him was proof that he wasn’t, as Mom always put it, “dead in a ditch somewhere.”
He knew the message had reached Mom and Dad because, a few seconds after he sent it, the rooster started crowing again, and the word home appeared on the screen. This wasn’t fun for a guy with a really nasty headache. He had no intention of answering. With so much at stake, he couldn’t imagine a conversation with his parents doing anything but complicating an already messy situation.
An odd thought came to him. The very first time he’d been hypnotized, at a stage show, he’d been commanded to crow like a rooster. Could he be hypnotized now? Was that why everything seemed so weird? He raised his hand to his aching head. Blood. Hypnotism couldn’t make you bleed.
Speaking of hypnotism, why hadn’t Jax and Kira called? Surely they had bent their way out of custody by now. He checked the clock on his phone, and did a double take.
It was ten thirty! He’d been out for hours!
He brought up the call log. Nothing from the others. Could they still be in jail? Why? Something must have gone very wrong.
He stood, which brought on a head rush that very nearly knocked him over. Only his innate stubbornness kept him on his feet. When the world stabilized, he went back to his phone, and Googled Where is police station, Pine Bough, NJ?
An address appeared. He remembered the street name coming off the main square — Law Lane. He would find it. He had to find it.
He eased himself over the fence and started off through the darkened neighborhood. His head still throbbed abominably, but he felt more steady and alert with every step. There were a few lights on in houses, but the streets were deserted. Tommy was used to New York, where there were people out at any hour of the day or night. Here in Pine Bough, they rolled up the sidewalks after dinner.
There it was — Law Lane. Even if he’d missed the street sign, he would have seen the squad car parked outside. He approached cautiously, reflecting that he had already escaped the Pine Bough P.D. And now here he was, walking straight into their police station. What if Jax and Kira were already off battling Mako, and he was delivering himself on a silver platter?
There was only one way to find out.
The placard read:
PINE BOUGH MUNICIPAL CENTER
POLICE STATION
LAW COURT
r /> He pushed open the door and stepped inside.
The office was small and drab, with two desks head to head and, at the back, a holding cell with floor-to-ceiling steel bars. There, the picture of dejection, sat —
“Jax! Kira!” Tommy hissed.
Jax jumped up so suddenly that the chair he’d been sitting on overturned. “Tommy, what happened to you? You’re all beat up!”
“I bumped my head,” Tommy croaked. “Don’t worry. It hurts worse than it looks. But never mind that — where are the cops?”
“There’s only one — the older guy,” Kira explained briskly. “He went out to get us some food. Quick — find the keys and let us out of here!”
“Right!” Egged on by the prisoners, Tommy began to ransack the two desks. No key.
“Over there!” Jax pointed to a wall hook where a small key dangled.
Tommy raced over and grabbed it, then jammed it into the lock in the cell door. It wouldn’t turn.
“Keep looking!” Jax urged. “Hurry! He could be back any minute!”
Frantically, Tommy circled the room, scanning every wall and bulletin board. He even tried the Sanitation office across the hall, but none of their keys fit the cell. He was about to try the courtroom, when a voice announced, “I was able to scrounge up a couple of turkey sandwiches. Hope that’ll hold you —”
And then the police chief was frozen in the doorway, a white paper bag in his hand. His eyes fell on Tommy, who was in the process of rifling through a uniform jacket that was hanging from a coat tree.
“All right, son, no worries,” he said, almost kindly. “They can make another sandwich for you.”
In answer, Tommy made a bull run at the police chief. Dropping the white bag, the man reached for him. Tommy knew only this: Everything depended on him getting past the cop at the door. At the last second, he ducked low and squeezed out under the man’s elbow. The instant he felt the cool air of the night, he was up to a full sprint and gone, disappearing into the darkness.