For Jay
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
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4
5
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Also Available
Copyright
AMALGAMATED PRESS
BALTIMORE, MD.
Doctors John and Louise Falconer are home again. Fourteen months into life sentences for aiding foreign terrorists, shocking new evidence proved they had been framed. HORUS Global Group, a front for the terrorists, has been found responsible. All HORUS agents are believed to be either dead or behind bars at this time.
The Falconers are joined by their children, Aiden, 15, and Margaret, 11, who achieved almost as much notoriety as their parents in recent months. The two escaped from juvenile detention in Nebraska and became fugitives for eight weeks, logging more than 7,000 miles as they eluded the FBI, the juvenile authorities, and dozens of state and local police forces. All charges against them were dropped upon their parents’ release.
The family declined an interview, stating only that they intended to put the episode behind them. “We’ve had enough of headlines,” Dr. John Falconer told reporters. “What we want — what we pray for — is just to get back to normal.”
Normal.
Meg couldn’t hold back a bitter laugh. Like anything would ever be normal again, after Mom and Dad had been locked up for more than a year, and she and Aiden had been hunted like animals by the police, not to mention a professional killer. After their pictures had been displayed in newspapers and on TV. After the name “Falconer” had been turned into a synonym for traitor.
She surveyed the bustling playground. This was normal. Lunch recess — seventh grade. A babble of animated voices, hundreds of middle schoolers playing sports, running, wrestling, shouting …
And me in the middle of it, reflected Meg, trying to pretend that I care about a pickup baseball game when I’ve lived through things other kids couldn’t imagine in their wildest nightmares.
“Strike one!”
Lost in her thoughts, Meg didn’t even see the first pitch sail by. There were snickers around the diamond.
It was hard to believe that this group had once been her friends. They had shared classes and summer camps, birthday parties and sleepovers. Now they seemed so clueless, so innocent. Like kindergartners, almost …
“Strike two!”
She stepped out of the batter’s box as the catcher threw back the ball.
“Hey!” stage-whispered Wendell Butz from third base. “Let’s watch the traitor strike out!”
White-hot anger exploded inside her chest. Bad enough that Mom and Dad had suffered so much in prison. Bad enough that their children had been turned into out-laws …
But it’s supposed to be OVER!
It was a rage too powerful for Meg to control. She drew back the bat and let fly. Spinning like a boomerang, the aluminum projectile missed Wendell’s head and spiraled into foul territory. It smacked into the flagpole, knocking off the rusted metal cleat. The flag plunged forty feet to land in a heap in the grass.
There were three sharp blasts on a whistle.
* * *
The principal’s office. Once upon a time, she’d been afraid of it. That fear seemed ridiculous now. How could a pudgy middle-aged guy intimidate her after she’d faced a killer?
Dr. Barstow did not look friendly. “I hope you have an explanation for what happened today, Meg.”
She studied the carpet. “I lost my cool.” What would be the point of ratting out Wendell, even though the jerk deserved it?
“The flag is the symbol of our country,” the principal said sternly. “It must never be allowed to touch the ground.”
Wait a minute — I nearly took Wendell’s head off, and all Dr. Barstow cares about is the flag?
“That wasn’t on purpose!” Meg defended herself. “If I could hit a doohickey on the side of a pole with a baseball bat from twenty yards away, I wouldn’t be here; I’d be at the Olympic trials.”
“That’ll do,” the principal admonished. “I’d think that somebody from your family would take special care to be respectful of the flag.”
“My parents are innocent!” Meg stormed. “And even after everything that’s happened, they still love their country. If that’s not patriotism, what is?”
One glance at Dr. Barstow’s cold granite expression, and Meg just knew. There were Falconer haters out there — people who would never accept that Mom and Dad had been cleared. And Meg’s own principal was one of them.
Will we ever get our lives back?
* * *
With great concentration, Aiden Falconer formed the coarse yarn into three rings and began to loop the free end through them. At that moment, the bus hit a bump, and the plant hanger he’d been working on converted itself to a tangle of twine in his lap.
Macramé, he thought in disgust. It was impossible to do macramé in a moving vehicle. The only reason he was in this stupid class was because he’d started school late. Macramé had been the only elective still open.
Last year, his elective had been Enriched Science Independent Study. He and Richie Pembleton had been building a Foucault pendulum for the science fair. It had only been half finished when the Falconer family nightmare had whisked him away. Even working alone, Richie had managed to place third at district. If Aiden had been there, Richie was sure they would have won.
Aiden craned his neck to look at his onetime best friend a few rows back, hidden beneath the Greenville Cubs baseball cap the boy never took off. It was not the science fair that bothered Richie. It was the Aiden Falconer who had returned from his ordeal — experienced, hardened, bitter. Aiden found it impossible to slip back into the regular comfortable ways with his buddy. The chess club held no interest for someone who had once gambled on strategies with his own life and that of his sister hanging in the balance. The old shared jokes weren’t funny anymore.
Nothing’s funny anymore.
Richie was still Richie, but Aiden was forever changed.
It was one more thing his family’s disaster had cost him. Not the biggest, certainly. But it was still sad.
The bus swung into the driveway of the middle school and lurched to a halt. He watched the newcomers filing aboard.
“Hey, bro.” Meg took the empty seat beside him. She indicated the spaghetti of limp yarn in his lap. “Hang yourself yet?”
“If I hang myself with macramé,” he assured her darkly, “it won’t be by accident.” He noticed the redness of her eyes behind the joking smile. “What?”
Barely concealing her anger, Meg told him about the incident at recess. “The minute that flag hit the ground, Barstow acted like I did it because all Falconers must be terrorists.”
“Take it easy,” Aiden soothed. “People get crazy about flags. There are complicated rules about how to fold them and handle them. If they touch the ground, that’s a definite no-no.”
She was bitter. “How was I supposed to know that cleat was rusted through?”
“It’s not your fault the guy’s sensitive.”
“He’s not sensitive — he hates us,” she shot back. “Why can’t people accept that Mom and Dad are innocent, and our family isn’t the enemy anymore?”
Nowhere was that question more resounding than inside the Falconer home. The CRIME SCENE t
ape had been removed. There was a new front door replacing the one that had been bashed into toothpicks by an FBI battering ram. John and Louise Falconer had been reinstated as professors at the college. But they were on “research leave.” Which really meant that nobody wanted to study criminology with professors who had once been called the worst traitors in half a century.
In the meantime, Mom was throwing herself into the task of getting the house back in shape. Dad had returned to his writing. In addition to his teaching career, he was the author of a series of detective novels. But he was plagued by writer’s block. Even the action-packed adventures of his main character, Mac Mulvey, seemed blah after the Falconer family’s wild ride.
After midnight, Aiden lay in bed, trying to think the shadows back into the corners of the room where they belonged.
You can tell yourself that it’s all over; that Mom and Dad are free; that HORUS is gone. But after a while the fear has become part of you, even if there’s nothing left to be afraid of.
The headlights on the street outside made the shadows on the wall move. Suddenly, there was a screech of tires, running footsteps on the walk, and a loud crash.
The sound of shattered glass was replaced by the howl of the house’s security alarm.
Aiden still had split-second reaction time, part of every fugitive’s instinct for survival. He was out of bed and running down the stairs before the siren reached full power. At that, he was two steps behind his sister. John and Louise Falconer brought up the rear.
“Stay back!” Mom yelled. “You don’t know what’s down there — or who!”
At the bottom of the steps, Aiden pulled up short beside Meg. All four Falconers stared at the center of their living room. There, in the wreckage of the picture window, sat a cement brick.
Dad, who was wearing hard-soled slippers, crunched through the glass shards. Using a piece of ripped curtain to protect possible evidence, he reached down and picked up the chunk of concrete. Written across its gray surface in stark black Magic Marker was a single word: PAYBACK.
* * *
Officer Kincannin regarded the smashed window and hefted the brick experimentally in his hand. “Vandalism.”
“Vandalism?” echoed John Falconer. “Look what it says. This act was directed at our family because of who we are.”
“It’s still a brick through a window,” the officer reasoned. “That’s vandalism.”
“It’s a pattern of harassment,” Dad argued. “Abusive phone calls, nasty notes stuffed in our mailbox, and now this. The perpetrators get more daring with each incident. What’s next — a fire bomb?”
“We’re citizens of this town,” Mom put in. “Innocent people who need protection. There are two children living in this house.”
The officer cocked an eyebrow. “From what I’ve heard, your kids can look after themselves.”
Aiden winced. It was true that he and Meg had shown incredible daring during their time as fugitives. But that was when we were desperate, running for our lives with nothing to lose. Now everything is supposed to be back to normal. We’re trying to be kids again….
Dad folded his arms in front of him. “Are you going to help us or not?”
Kincannin shrugged. “We can maybe put an extra squad car in the area.”
“How about stationing an officer to watch our house?” Mom demanded.
He shook his head. “Not enough manpower. I’ll have dispatch ask the cruisers to swing by a few times a night, keep an eye on the place. Best I can do.”
* * *
Later, as Aiden and his father taped plastic sheeting over the gaping hole in the window, Aiden asked, “Do you think that officer was telling the truth? Are there really not enough cops, or was he just sticking it to us because of who we are?”
“I think he’s probably on the level,” Dad told him. “It’s just a local force, after all.”
“So there’s nothing we can do?”
“There’s one other possibility.” John Falconer took a deep breath. “The FBI.”
Aiden knew his father wouldn’t consider contacting the Bureau unless he was really worried. The FBI had arrested the Falconers in the first place, and then hounded their children across the country. True, the feds had come through for them eventually. But that could never erase a mountain of bitterness and resentment.
“You mean” — Aiden could barely bring himself to speak the name aloud — “Agent Harris?”
“What?” Meg’s voice cried from the kitchen. She stormed into the hall to confront them. “Harris? J. Edgar Giraffe?”
“He could get us protection,” Dad pointed out.
“I’d rather stay up all night, guarding the house with my toenail clippers,” Meg said with conviction.
“He worked pretty hard to get Mom and Dad out of jail at the end,” Aiden offered grudgingly.
“Yeah, after putting them there in the first place. That guy ruined us, Aiden. Then he chased us for seven thousand miles.”
And we’re still running, Aiden thought.
Aiden moved through the halls of his high school like a zombie. It was just so hard to care about English and math and geography now. Like the friendship with Richie that had once been so important to him, classes, grades, even getting into a good college were no more than fluff to the new Aiden.
Life on the run had been horrible, but everything had been incredibly urgent and meaningful. They did what had to be done to survive. It was all that mattered in the world. What was macramé compared to that?
It’s the class I’m failing, that’s what.
Each day, he’d sit on the bus, fiddling with his snarl of twine, trying to will it into the shape of a plant hanger.
“Forget it, bro,” Meg advised. “You’re capital-H Hopeless.”
“I don’t see you acing seventh grade,” he retorted.
She regarded him earnestly. “Can you sit through a whole class? I can’t anymore. When we were fugitives, we were like jack-in-the-boxes, coiled up under pressure, ready to fly. Well, I’m still that way. But in school, all they want you to do is sit still and listen to some boring teacher.”
Aiden nodded. “Why do you think Richie hates my guts? It’s not everybody else who changed. It’s us.”
“Sometimes I almost think that other life made more sense,” Meg admitted.
“Trust me, it didn’t,” her brother assured her. “This is perfect by comparison.”
But it didn’t feel like that.
How long would this go on? They’d been back at school for a month and a half. Surely things should be getting easier by now. Were he and Meg doomed to be outcasts and misfits forever?
An image of the brick appeared in his mind. PAYBACK, the message had said. Maybe that was exactly right. This was punishment for Mom and Dad helping HORUS. Innocent or not, they had done it. They’d been tricked into it, but their work had aided terrorists.
At least there’s no HORUS anymore.
Richie Pembleton was one of the handful of kids who got off at the Falconers’ stop. For at least the twentieth time, Aiden felt the impulse to talk to his old friend, to set things right between them.
But what for? he reflected glumly. We’ve got nothing in common anymore. I’m not the kid who built that Foucault pendulum. I’d give anything to change that, but I can’t.
He put his head down and swallowed his words of greeting. Richie did likewise, the brim of his Greenville Cubs hat concealing whatever he might be thinking.
Richie and the others headed straight into the new subdivision. Aiden and Meg were alone as they followed the path that led past the condo development to the older part of the neighborhood.
A battered white van was idling slowly along the road as if searching for an address. Meg pointed at the sign stenciled on its side: WILLIS EXTERMINATING. “Oh, gross — I hope they aren’t looking for our house. It could have mice after standing empty for so long.”
Aiden nodded grimly. “It could have gazelles after standing emp
ty for so long.” That would be just their luck. Despised and infested.
All at once, the van came to life, bald tires burning rubber. It lurched toward them, closing the distance in two breathless seconds. The front tires jumped the curb, and the vehicle squealed into a tight quarter-turn, blocking their path.
It happened with such astonishing speed that Aiden could only stand and gape. The sliding door was thrown open, and out burst a man dressed entirely in black. A rubber Spider-Man mask covered his head. He was upon Meg in an instant. Roughly, he took hold of her shirt collar. A huge gloved hand covered her nose and mouth with a handkerchief. Meg struggled for a moment before her body went limp, and she sagged in her attacker’s arms.
Chloroform! The thought jolted Aiden into action. The only weapon at his disposal was his macramé project. With a cry of “Let her go!” he sprang at the assailant, wrapping the plant hanger around Spider-Man’s neck and yanking hard.
The man rasped his outrage, but he released Meg, who slumped to the ground. Aiden hung off the black-clad back, pulling on the tough yarn with all his strength.
A second figure — slimmer, and wearing a Mickey Mouse mask — jumped out of the van. He picked Meg up under her arms and began to drag her inside.
“No-o!!” Aiden bellowed.
The lapse in concentration cost him. His opponent bent double, throwing the smaller Aiden up and over his shoulders in a midair somersault. Aiden hit the sidewalk with a jolt. Dazed and helpless, he watched in horror as his sister was stuffed inside the van.
The gravity of the situation came crashing down on him. A vehicle lying in wait. An unprovoked attack on a deserted walkway. Brutal assailants who hid their faces.
This was a kidnapping!
The realization electrified him to the core, clearing the cobwebs from his brain.
Spider-Man advanced menacingly. Aiden rolled away to the right and scrambled to his feet. He snatched a potted geranium from the half-wall surrounding the condo complex and flung it at the mask. The assailant managed to duck the pot, but plant and dirt flew in his eyes. He swore in fury and barked, “Help me!”
Mickey Mouse emerged from the van and moved to join the battle.