Boone called X-Ray. He found it a little spooky that X-Ray always seemed to answer before Boone even heard the phone ringing.
“You got a signal outside the coach?” Boone asked.
“Yeah, it’s headed east of your location. Pretty quickly, actually,” X-Ray said. “Like something’s chasing it. What is it?”
Boone ignored the question. “Good, do whatever you need to do so we can track that signal on Angela’s laptop and all of our phones. We’re near an outlet mall. Q needs a new phone and you need to clone it so Blaze can call him.”
“I texted Felix to send me a photo of the serial number on the box as soon as he buys it. I’ll have it powered up and ready in no time.”
“Good. Are you still reading the signal outside?”
“Yep, it’s about a half-mile from your location now, next to US 64. What are you tracking, Boone?” X-Ray asked.
“I’m not sure,” Boone said, disconnecting the call. A few minutes later, Croc hopped into the coach through the open door. In his mouth was a plastic bag full of the contents of Q’s pockets. Croc ran out through the door again and a few seconds later returned with Angela’s tattered backpack. A few hours earlier, they had been forced by the terrorists to empty their pockets and leave their stuff behind. After chasing Speed off, Croc must have remembered and hunted it down. Boone was certain that if it were possible, the old dog had a smile on his face.
“Good dog,” Boone said.
Shopping for Answers
The rain had eased somewhat, but with the recent horrible weather the outlet mall was nearly deserted. I thought this was a good thing, given the way Felix looked. Essentially he was six-seven and nearly three hundred pounds of scorched skin, leather, and cotton. Even his face was darkened where the explosion had actually abraded his skin, embedding dirt and grit where it wouldn’t be scrubbed out for a while. His right eyebrow was singed almost completely off and he was limping, but only slightly. He was also wet, making him smell like something burned, and feeling a little moody.
Angela was giving me all kinds of looks. I could tell she was dying to know what had taken place in the coach with Speed. When I was sure Felix wouldn’t notice, I put my finger to my lips and nodded my head toward him. Angela gave me the stink eye again, but finally gave up. She would have to wait until Felix was out of earshot.
We entered the store looking like a couple of drowned rats. A clerk who was Felix’s polar opposite met us at the door. The man stood no more than five-six and had thin wispy gray hair and a stringy mustache. He wore Coke-bottle eyeglasses perched on his nose and couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred fifty pounds. He must have been nearsighted because he pounced on Angela and me the minute we walked in. Invading our personal space, he studied us intently, looking us up and down as we dripped water on the store carpet. He hadn’t seen Felix holding the door behind us. Yet.
“Can I help you?” he asked. There was an edge to his tone, and he probably thought since we were neither big nor tall we were probably there to shoplift or make trouble of some kind.
“I need new clothes,” a voice said.
When Felix stepped through the door from the gloom outside and the clerk could see him clearly, the poor man physically jumped. To say Felix towered over him was an insult to towers. It was like a Great Dane looking down at a Chihuahua.
“Eh … hah … yes … yessir,” the man stammered. “Your name is Stan…. I mean, my name is Stanley. What exactly are you looking for?”
“Everything,” Felix said.
“Uh, sure. We can do that. Do you know your size?” Stanley asked. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead even though it was chilly in the store.
“Five XL,” Felix said.
“All right,” Stanley said, “let’s start with shirts, shall we?”
Stanley led Felix to the back of the store while Angela and I waited near the front.
“Tell me everything,” she said as soon as Felix was out of earshot.
“There’s not much to tell. He locked Speed in the bathroom and then he made me leave. As far as I know, he’s still in there,” I said.
Angela bit her lower lip, which is what she does when she’s thinking hard and working her way up to a question she doesn’t necessarily want to ask. I had seen her mother, Malak, with the same tic a few hours earlier.
“Q, what do you think Speed was doing there?” Angela asked. “I thought we ditched him.”
I shrugged. Angela had a suspicious streak. She likely got it from her mom and it’s probably what makes Malak a great agent. You learn to suspect everything when you’re in charge of protecting people.
“I don’t know. He made up some story about wanting to spend time with me. Which is a total load. My guess is he wanted to find my mom and see if he could spoil her day. That’s what he loves to do more than anything.”
“Maybe. It’s just weird, him showing up out of the blue like that,” Angela said.
“I know. Boone said the same thing. But spending time trying to figure out Speed Paulsen is an exercise in humility,” I said.
Angela laughed. “I think you mean futility. And you did that on purpose.”
“I know.” I admit I enjoyed teasing her.
“Boone sure went medieval on him, though,” she said. “He doesn’t like him, that’s for sure.”
“Speed Paulsen has to pay people to like him. According to everyone we’ve met on this tour, Boone has been a roadie forever. They’ve probably clashed before. But that’s not surprising. My dad has managed to pretty much alienate everyone in the music business except his hired help.”
We spotted Felix in the back, shaking his head at a polka dot shirt Stanley was holding up for him. The shirt was roughly the size of a circus tent. I could feel my mind going into acceleration mode and reached into my cargo pants for a deck of cards. I had forgotten that a few hours earlier a now-dead terrorist had made me empty my pockets. My cards, my magic coins, all my stuff was in a plastic bag by the side of the road somewhere several miles back. For a moment, I didn’t know what I was going to do. Shuffling my cards and splitting and cutting the deck was how I calmed myself. It annoyed Angela and virtually everyone else, which usually made it that much more enjoyable for me.
Now all I could do was clench and unclench my fists. Angela didn’t seem to notice, or if she did, she didn’t say anything about it.
“Okay, ever since right before we got nabbed by the terrorists and saw Boone do whatever it is he did, we haven’t had a chance to discuss it,” Angela said.
“What did we see?” I asked.
Angela punched me in the shoulder. “You know very well what we saw. The traffic jam where he covered all that ground in seconds. And in the coach, just now with your dad, he was up at the front, then he was all the way in the back and I never saw him move.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking down at my empty hands. I mimicked fanning a deck of cards open in my right hand. It didn’t help. “There’s more. At the house Boone popped out of thin air right behind one of the shooters outside. Croc moved like a greyhound on steroids while we stood watch on the overpass. Croc knew Bethany and your mom were in that seafood truck. Just now he jumped up and down on the dining room table like a jackrabbit. And …” I stopped. It sounded crazy. And I was starting to get hyped up. I tried to take deep breaths so I wouldn’t talk so fast.
“Don’t forget the cemetery, and then when we got to the house Croc was already there, across all that water! And what did Boone mean when he said they killed the last vampire one hundred years ago? There’s no such thing as vampires.”
“Millions of teenage girls would disagree with you,” I said with a chuckle.
“Q!” Angela was getting agitated and it was hard to blame her. Her mom was who knew where, doing who knew what. Malak was most likely surrounded by very dangerous people.
“What can I say? He disappears and reappears out of thin air. I’ve studied magic since I was little. I have no clue how he do
es it. It’s got to be an illusion. The only other possibility is that it’s not magic, and he can travel through time and space.” There. I said it.
Angela is more practical than I am. “How is that possible? It defies the laws of physics and … everything,” Angela said, looking at me like I was from outer space.
“True. But he did it. In the coach and during the traffic jam. We both saw it and we can’t both be hallucinating. And when Croc went after Speed, it looked to me for a second like Croc got … younger. He’s old and smelly and sleeps all the time. Then the next thing you know he’s bouncing around like an alpha wolf trying to bite Speed’s head off or something.”
Angela crossed her arms. This was a new posture for her. I fake-shuffled the invisible deck again. Angela pretended not to notice. I was going to have to go to the gas station or somewhere and see if I could find a deck of cards.
“When we get back on the coach we’re going to confront him,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. “Maybe we should just wait and observe.”
“Wait for what? Do you really think Felix and the other SOS members don’t know about Boone and his mysterious power? And besides, you had the perfect chance to interrogate him in the coach just now and you didn’t. We’re wasting time.”
“Are you forgetting the Speed-Paulsen-being-there part? What was I supposed to do, ask Boone a bunch of questions and risk Speed hearing? I don’t see how this is my fault. I told you I saw him appear right outside the house minutes before the raid. He looked right at me. Knowing me like he does, he realizes I’m not going to keep that to myself. So he knows you’re also aware of everything I saw. Besides, he warned us we were going to see him do weird stuff, remember?”
Angela sighed and uncrossed her arms. “I guess you’re right. But it’s just so frustrating not knowing what’s going on.”
The difference between me and Angela is that she likes to know every detail of what’s happening every single second. I don’t mind being left in the dark. It requires less thinking. But right then, a part of me was dying to know how Boone pulled off his magic trick. I closed my eyes and tried to zip away—or whatever it was Boone did. I opened my eyes. No luck. I was still standing in the same place.
“What did you just do?” Angela asked me.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You just tried to disappear like Boone, didn’t you?”
“No,” I lied, because I had so totally tried that very thing. It was amazing that Angela and I were still getting to know each other, but she already knew me so well.
Trying to get her attention off of me, I looked past her toward the rear of the store and the dressing rooms. It worked. She looked over her shoulder to see Stanley, the tiny haberdasher, pacing nervously in front of the dressing rooms. Felix was apparently trying on clothes.
“As I was saying, let’s watch and observe,” I said. “He’s been in the music business a long time. He had to leave a trail. Maybe we can find out more about him on the Internet or something. To me it just doesn’t feel like the right time. I say we ask around for more info first.”
“And how are we going to get more info?”
I shrugged and did a pretend one-handed cut of the nonexistent deck of cards.
Angela nodded toward the rear of the store, where Felix was coming out of the dressing room in a whole new outfit. He pushed a big pile of burned clothes into Stanley’s outstretched hands. The poor clerk looked like someone had handed him a bag of cow manure.
Felix reached back into the dressing room and removed a bunch more shirts and pants before heading toward the register. As Angela and I followed him, she said, “I think I know who would be a good place to start for some information.”
Farther In
Malak helped the doctor move Number Four, now unconscious, on a stretcher from the garage into an examination room. She did not ask his name and he did not give it. The room was fully stocked with medical supplies. But it was certainly not a usual doctor’s office. The Leopard marveled again at the ghost cell. She wondered how many facilities it could possibly have like this one, hidden deep within everyday American society, and how many of them went unnoticed.
The doctor worked quickly and efficiently. Once they placed Smailes on the examination table, he had an IV and plasma hooked up and flowing within minutes.
“What happened?” the doctor asked.
“A single gunshot to the shoulder. A .40 caliber, I believe,” Malak said. She provided no more detail than was necessary. Using surgical scissors, the doctor cut away the gray sweatshirt Smailes was wearing and uncovered the wound.
“How long ago?” the doctor asked.
“An hour, maybe a little more.”
“He’s in shock.” The doctor maneuvered a portable X-ray machine over Smailes’s chest. “Step over here,” he said. He guided Malak behind a divider in the room while he snapped the X-rays. There was no need to wait for film. Images appeared on a monitor attached to the wall.
“This is not good,” the doctor said.
“What?”
“The bullet must have deflected off the clavicle or rib cage and collapsed his lung. Given the damage, he’s going to need more treatment than I can give him here,” the doctor said.
“No,” Malak said. “You will treat him here. We cannot risk exposing him to a hospital and the questions that will follow.”
“I can stabilize him, but I’m not equipped for such delicate surgery. If we come up with a story—”
“No. If you need assistance, you bring others here. He does not leave here until he is well.”
The doctor opened his mouth as if to explain again, then seemed to think the better of it. He understood that Malak was highly placed in the cell. She very clearly outranked him. With a sigh he left the divider and hurried to his patient’s side. Taking a hypodermic needle from the tray next to the examination table he started filling it from a small vial.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Inducing a medical coma. If I can slow his heart and respiration rate, perhaps I can get him stable enough until we can get him to a trauma team …”
The doctor visibly started when Malak drew her gun and pointed it at him. She needed information from Number Four, so he couldn’t remain unconscious.
“No,” Malak said. “No coma. In fact, wake him up. We need to talk. I need to discuss an urgent matter with him.”
“He’s barely holding on. If I give him a stimulant, he could—”
The sound of Malak pulling back the hammer of the automatic with her thumb interrupted the doctor. “Do it,” she commanded.
The doctor returned the needle to the tray and picked up another one. His hands shook nervously as he filled it with a clear fluid. He injected it into the IV. Nothing happened for a few minutes, then Number Four came awake suddenly.
“Where am I?” he asked, his voice a grating rasp.
Malak lowered her weapon, but kept it in her hand. “Leave us,” she ordered the doctor, who scurried away into the outer room. When she was sure he was out of earshot she turned to the injured man.
“You were wounded. Do you remember?”
“Vaguely. You … it was … you shot those men. You saved my life.”
“None of that matters. The doctor says you are unable to travel. I need to know what I am to do. What are my instructions?”
Smailes closed his eyes and swallowed. “San Antonio. There is a plane arriving shortly at Manteo airport. Take my phone. Press Star 99. The pilot will answer and give instructions….” His voice trailed off.
“Why San Antonio? What do I do when I get there?” Malak raised her voice, trying to cut through the fog shrouding the wounded man.
“You’ll meet … the rest of the Five … is … there. The plane … take … you,” he managed and then lapsed back into unconsciousness.
“Wake him up,” Malak called out to the doctor in the other room.
The doctor r
ushed back in, putting his stethoscope on Number Four’s chest.
“If I try waking him up again he’ll die. He might still die,” the doctor said, now clearly worried that his patient might in fact pass away and he would be blamed for it.
Malak returned the pistol to her waistband and tapped her hand on her right thigh while she considered her options. She could not get on the plane without letting Ziv know where she was going. An idea came to her. Removing Smailes’s phone from her pocket she watched while the doctor ministered to his patient. It would help with her plan. She pushed the numbers as Smailes had told her to.
A man answered.
“Mr. Smailes gave me this number. He is unable to come to the phone,” she said.
“We’ve been expecting you. We’re currently inbound to Manteo airport. There is a private hangar, number 23, at the far west end of the field. We’ll be waiting. After the jet is refueled we’ll depart.” He disconnected.
“Can you … hello?” she said. For the doctor’s benefit she shook the phone, pretending to press the button again and holding it to her ear.
“The weather must be interfering with the cell service. Do you have a landline?” she asked the doctor.
“In the next room,” he said absentmindedly as he worked on Smailes’s shoulder.
Malak walked into the next room. The phone was on a wall next to a cabinet full of medical supplies. Taking a deep breath, she paused a moment to think. After years on the trail of the ghost cell, she was closer to destroying it than she had ever been. In the last few hours she’d learned their leadership council amounted to five members. Number Four now lay on a gurney, barely alive. In her experience, the cell watched and seemed to know everything. They were the most cautious and careful terrorists she had ever faced. They had eyes everywhere, countersurveillance and resources such as medical clinics all over the country. The security around their top leadership would be even more impenetrable. From now on, she had to remember that she was likely being watched or at the least listened to in every vehicle, every room, and anywhere she went. The next few hours would be critical, not only to her mission, but to remaining alive. The Leopard would need to stalk her prey more carefully than ever.