Flashpoint

  Amy had the means to save herself. Yet she refused to use it until she’d delivered the antidote to Pierce Landing. The question remained: Would she have the time to get it here before her looming fate caught up to her?

  Chapter 25

  The posted start time of the All-American Clambake was three o’clock. According to the run-of-show sneaked to them by Cara, J. Rutherford Pierce would take center stage to make his candidacy official at three-thirty. The Cahills needed him and his goon army dosed with antidote before that could happen.

  “Three-fifteen is our zero hour,” Amy decided. “Everyone will be out where Jake and I can spray them before Pierce has a chance to open his big mouth.”

  “Hold on,” Atticus said, “there’s nothing in the antidote that can stop him from running for president. What if he makes the announcement anyway?”

  “Then his enhancement will be gone,” Amy replied readily, “and even his goons will be ordinary muscle-heads. He can run, but he won’t have any chance of winning. He’ll just be the candidate who said he was Superman, but turned out to be not even Clark Kent.”

  Working backward from that three-fifteen zero hour, estimating wind direction and the top speed of an old crop duster, Sammy and Amy calculated the biplane’s departure time from the Penobscot airstrip: two-fifty.

  Roslyn was fueled up and ready, the spray tanks full of aerosolized antidote. At two-forty-five, Sammy and Atticus hugged Amy and Jake — the mission team — and withdrew to watch the takeoff.

  “We’ll be right here, waiting for you,” Atticus called, his voice quavering just a little.

  Jake flashed him a thumbs-up filled with the confidence no one felt.

  Amy and Jake’s final walk to the cockpit was maybe fifty yards but seemed much farther. The tremors in Amy’s right leg gave her a pronounced limp, but her focus was absolute.

  There was only one remaining distraction, a single detail that needed to be taken care of before she could give herself over entirely to the operation.

  She gestured in the direction of the Penobscot home. “Jake — look!”

  And when he turned to see what had caught her attention, she clasped her hands together and brought them down hard on the back of his neck. He hit the tarmac and lay there, stunned.

  She allowed herself just an instant of regret. Nobody else saw her the way Jake did — not as a living, breathing command-and-control center, but as a sixteen-year-old girl. And how had she rewarded him? By knocking him unconscious.

  Still, it had been the right thing to do. Jake had his whole future ahead of him, and it was a brilliant one. He shouldn’t have to pay with his life for his devotion to her.

  She ran to the biplane, hopped up to the cockpit, and slammed the door. She started the engine, which drowned out the cries of protest coming from Sammy and Atticus. As the propeller picked up speed in front of her windscreen, she taxied out onto the strip and began to accelerate into her takeoff run.

  Suddenly, there was thud against the fuselage of the biplane. The passenger door was wrenched open, and there was Jake, scrambling along the runway, trying to haul himself into the seat.

  “Let go!” she shouted. Her voice enjoyed a serum boost, too.

  “No!”

  She never would have believed him capable of what he did next. As Roslyn’s front wheel left the tarmac, Jake hurled himself in through the hatch, landing upside-down in the seat. He righted himself, slamming the door behind him just as the crop duster took to the air.

  “What did you hit me for?” he demanded.

  “I was trying to save your stupid life!” she shot back.

  He was enraged. “You want to do this alone, and I’m the one who’s stupid?”

  “I have to go! It’s my family — my responsibility! Why would you put your life on the line for this?”

  Jake glared at her as they gained altitude. “If you have to ask me that, Amy, then you don’t know me very well!”

  She stared at him — this handsome teenager, who was not even officially her boyfriend, yet seemed determined to follow her to the ends of the earth.

  “If it didn’t say Rosenbloom on your passport,” she told him, “I’d swear you were a Cahill.”

  “Keep your eyes on the road,” he advised her.

  The biplane banked east, heading for the Atlantic. Amy blinked, trying to disperse the fireworks and sunbursts that filled her field of vision. This was no time for hallucinations! She gritted her teeth and concentrated on the landmarks she knew were really there — farms sectioned into geometric shapes, the curling ribbons of roads, the rocky coast giving way to sparkling water.

  The ride was hardly smooth. The engine’s cry filled their ears and the craft shook with a vibration Amy could feel deep inside in her vital organs. As they bore down on the shoreline, a relentless headwind kicked up, buffeting the crop duster’s nose this way and that. Weighed down by seven hundred gallons of liquid cargo, it was like flying through molasses, not air.

  Jake’s attention was on his watch. “Can’t this thing go any faster?” he complained, shouting to be heard over the motor. “We haven’t even passed over the beach yet.”

  “We didn’t allow enough time for wind resistance,” Amy called back anxiously. “I hope we’re not too late. If Pierce goes indoors after his speech, the antidote might not reach him!”

  Then something happened that made her forget her nervousness at the possibility of missing her shot at Pierce. The interior of the crop duster around her disappeared and she was completely surrounded by boiling walls of lava. There was no heat, but the magma prison was closing in on her. . . .

  “Amy!!” The voice seemed to be coming from a long way off.

  The next thing she knew, she was back in the cockpit. She was aware of the free-fall sensation in her stomach, that roller-coaster feeling. Jake was shaking her by the shoulders. “Wake up, Amy! Pull out of it!”

  “Pull out of what?” Her own voice sounded reedy in her ears.

  A glance through the windscreen answered her question. Instead of blue sky, the rock-bound coast of Maine was screaming up at her at dizzying speed.

  She heaved back on the yoke in a desperate bid to bring the craft out of its dive. The biplane resisted, shaking violently as it hurtled toward the ground.

  Hanging on to the controls for dear life, Amy reached down deep within herself — all the way back through the centuries to Gideon. The yoke began to move, slowly at first, and with much protesting and groaning. The shore swung away, to be replaced by the sea, and finally, the horizon.

  She heaved a sigh of relief, which ended in a sharp intake of breath when she glanced over at Jake. He was ashen. In his trembling hands he held a syringe of cloudy liquid. Antidote.

  “What do you think you’re doing with that?” she asked harshly.

  “I got Sammy to make an extra dose. You have to take it, Amy.”

  “And I will,” she promised. “When we’re done.”

  He would not back down. “How do you know that what just happened wasn’t your last warning, and the next time, you won’t wake up again?”

  He thrust the syringe at her arm.

  “No!” The serum made her so much stronger than him, and so much faster, that the hypodermic was bashed out of his hand even before he expected her resistance. It sailed over the seats and landed with a clink somewhere in the back of the plane.

  He was almost insane with rage and grief. “What did you do that for? You just killed yourself! And there’s no way I can save you!”

  “You think I want to die?” she cried. The truth was that the closer she got to the end, the more acutely she felt everything she’d be giving up. It wasn’t just a funeral; it was the prom she’d never attend, the brother she’d never watch grow up. . . .

  With resolute effort, she forced away those awful thoughts by concentrating on
her flying.

  Poor Jake, she reflected. He had no idea that the stakes were now so high that the fate of one teenage girl didn’t amount to anything at all.

  Chapter 26

  “Stay tuned for coverage of a CNN Live Event. We bring you to the private island of Pierce Landing, thirty miles off the coast of Maine, for an event billed as the All-American Clambake. . . .”

  Fiske Cahill sat up in an easy chair in his Manhattan apartment. “It’s begun, my dear,” he called, the nervous edge clear in his voice.

  Nellie joined him from the kitchen. She picked up the remote and began flipping channels. The clambake was on everything but Nickelodeon.

  “Pierce may be a demented megalomaniac,” Fiske commented, “but he certainly knows how to throw a party. There must be two thousand people there.”

  The island was a natural jewel clad in red, white, and blue in the sparkling expanse of the Atlantic. Yet even more striking than the beauty of the setting was the air of vitality and power. Something extremely important was about to happen on that stage. If Pierce’s aim had been to focus attention on his announcement, he had succeeded beyond his wildest expectations.

  Nellie moved closer to the screen, scanning the sky over this magical place.

  No sign of the plane. At least, not yet.

  Dan and Hamilton were at the top of the lighting arc, on a narrow access catwalk, when the ceremony began. It was more like the Academy Awards than a political rally. It would have been pretty cool to have this inside view of it, if Dan hadn’t been so nervous about what they were trying to pull off.

  The VIP seats were filled with celebrities. The Cahills had become used to Jonah and his red-­carpet lifestyle, but never could Dan have imagined so many famous faces packed into one place. The singers who performed the national anthem had won fourteen Grammys between them. A four-star general served as emcee. They all took turns coming onto the stage to declare support for the Patriotist Party and J. Rutherford Pierce — war heroes, movie stars, dignitaries, athletes, Nobel laureates, and luminaries from every imaginable field of human endeavor.

  Hamilton leaned over. “Is that what this whole thing is going to be?” he whispered in amazement. “A bunch of big shots lining up to say nice things about that creep?”

  Dan nodded tensely. “Too bad we didn’t bring a lie detector.”

  “Wouldn’t help,” Hamilton decided. “They have no idea how evil he is. They honestly think he’s going to be the next face on Mount Rushmore.”

  A Medal of Honor winner claimed that only Pierce could restore America’s glory after the weak bumbling of the current president. A chess master with an IQ of 212 swore that Pierce once beat him in eleven moves. The CEO of a multinational corporation got so emotional that he actually burst into tears. The message was always the same: The country is in terrible shape; the world is falling apart. Only one man can save us: Pierce. Pierce! PIERCE!!!

  Dan caught the worried looks from Ian and Jonah at the tech station below. Ian was tapping his wrist where a watch would be. Dan shrugged helplessly. No sign of the plane.

  Dan spotted the source of Ian’s urgency. In the family box where the candidate himself sat with his wife, daughter, and son, bathing in torrents of praise, Cara was signaling Ian with three fingers. Could that mean three minutes before Pierce’s announcement? Once he completed the transformation from Citizen Pierce to Candidate Pierce, he’d be in a cocoon of media and Secret Service. They’d never reach him then!

  Come on, Amy! Where are you?

  Dan forced down his dread that something even worse had gone wrong, and concentrated on the race against time. Cara was down to two fingers. Two minutes to go.

  “What’s going on?” Hamilton hissed. “Are we running out of time?”

  Cara held up one finger. Sixty seconds!

  “. . . and that’s how J. Rutherford Pierce brought down a twelve-point buck with a homemade crossbow. In these days of paper shufflers and talk-show phonies, what we need in the Oval Office is a real man!”

  It got an enormous ovation.

  “Thank you, Senator,” the four-star emcee called jovially. “And now we’ve come to the highlight of our afternoon — besides a hundred thousand pieces of quality seafood, that is.” Waves of laughter. “It’s time to hear from the man himself —”

  Cara dropped her last finger. They were out of time.

  “The most successful businessman in the history of American media —”

  Frantic, Dan began to unscrew one of the heavy spotlights. If he dropped it on the dais, surely they would have to postpone the proceedings long enough to sweep up the broken glass. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was the only one that came to mind.

  “The next president of the United States —”

  A blue-coveralled figure vaulted up onto the stage from the rear. With a flourish, the newcomer shed his jumpsuit and ripped off his mustache to reveal hip-hop’s biggest star, the legendary Jonah Wizard.

  Jonah snatched the microphone from the emcee’s hand and bellowed, “Wassup, Pierce Landing? The Wiz is in the house!”

  Chapter 27

  Fiske was on his feet in front of the TV. “What on earth is Jonah doing? This wasn’t part of the plan!”

  “He’s stalling for time!” Nellie shrilled. “Look — the Piercers don’t know what to make of him!”

  There was an element of confusion in the cheer that greeted the superstar’s arrival. This wasn’t exactly a hip-hop crowd, and Jonah Wizard was nowhere on the long list of celebrities who were to attend the clambake.

  The broadcast cut to a close-up of the Pierce family box. The candidate himself was under tight control, although his face seemed to be glowing a little more than usual, and there was a vein throbbing in his temple. He kept a fatherly arm on his son, Galt, who looked like he was about to rush the stage and commit murder.

  “Legit, I’ve got some things to tell you about my man, J-dog,” Jonah harangued the crowd. “Not too many people understand how respected he is in the hip-hop community. You know the expression ‘like a boss’? Well, that was invented just for him, yo. And wait till you hear about this —”

  “Uh-oh.” Nellie was worried. “He’s got absolutely nothing to say. He loves Pierce about as much of the rest of us.”

  “The Janus have the gift of gab,” Fiske reminded her. “He could go on forever — but I don’t think they’re going to let him. Look.”

  A wide shot showed Pierce’s serum-enhanced musclemen converging on the stage.

  “And even though my record label is owned by his biggest competitor” — Jonah was floundering now — “I still consider J-dog my mentor — because — because — Wow, don’t those clams smell great?”

  The first of the goons climbed up on the stage and made for Jonah.

  “This is bad,” moaned Fiske.

  Nellie’s eyes were fixed on a tiny dot that had appeared in the blue sky above Pierce Landing. “That better not be a bird,” she whispered.

  The island lay dead ahead, but Amy Cahill was coming apart at the seams.

  She clung to the yoke of the biplane like a drowning sailor hanging on to a life preserver, her arms quaking. At least her grip provided some stability. More than half of her body was completely beyond her control.

  The fireworks display that distorted her vision had only grown stronger. She squinted down at Pierce Landing through a haze of pyrotechnics, willing herself to see past the hallucinations. Big rockets roared by, missing her wings by inches, and warplanes filled the air, jockeying for position like race cars.

  No! The sky is clear! I’m alone with Jake in the cockpit!

  She looked over at Jake and instead found her grandmother in the other seat.

  “Of course you can do it,” Grace told her confidently. “You’re a Cahill. You can do anything.” But then, before Amy’s eyes, her grandmother’
s serene smile twisted downward into a scowl, and she was not Grace any longer, but her older sister, Aunt Beatrice. “You’re really in it now, Amy Cahill, and with no one to blame but yourself! I told you you’d end up just like your mother!”

  “Amy — are you okay?” It was Jake again, no sign of Grace or Beatrice.

  Even though she knew he’d been there all along, she was bizarrely glad to see him, as if he’d just come back after a two-year absence. She had a flashback to the first time she’d laid eyes on him, standing with Atticus outside the Roman Colosseum. He was gorgeous then, and he was even more gorgeous now — dark-fringed brown eyes and perfect chiseled features.

  “I’m sorry about everything, Jake. You’ve been so great to me, and I’ve been so awful —”

  “The plane, Amy! Fly the plane!” Jake almost screamed. “The other stuff we can talk about later!”

  They approached Pierce Landing from the west. They could see the stage and the huge crowd around it. The moment had come to ease up on the throttle. That would decrease their altitude, enabling them to cruise low over the island and spray the antidote. Her hand was on the stick, ready to cut speed.

  “Amy — now!” shouted Jake.

  She could not move. Of all times, of all places, her body had shut down right here. She had an oddly detached thought:

  So this is what it feels like to die. . . .

  “Do it!” Jake urged.

  “I can’t,” she said, strangely calm.

  “Why not?”

  “My arms don’t work anymore. You’ll have to take over.”

  “What? Are you crazy?”

  “You helped fly that helicopter in Tikal,” she reminded him. “You can do it. I need you, Jake.”

  It might have been just her imagination, but she would have sworn he sat up a little straighter as he took the controls from her.

  Amy could feel five hundred years of Cahill history guiding her every thought. Death was staring her in the face, yet she was completely focused and clear in her instructions. “See that stick on the floor? Pull it toward you . . . that’s right.”