The Stowaway Solution

  The place was ordered chaos, total activity, a beehive with sea breezes. Barely a square foot existed without a forklift on it, picking something up and putting it somewhere else. Almost as busy was the water itself, where tugs and service boats chugged around the bigger craft like mice swarming at the feet of an elephant.

  Meg was dismayed. “How are we going to escape from here? The minute we set foot on the dock, we’ll stick out like sore thumbs! There isn’t another kid for miles.”

  “We don’t have to escape,” Aiden told her evenly. “We’re in a port. We’re leaving here by boat.”

  Meg regarded him in awe. It made perfect sense. If they couldn’t go by road, rail, or air, that left by sea. “You mean we just sit tight and get shipped out with these cars?”

  “Of course not. This cargo could be going to Hong Kong. Fat lot of good we’d do Mom and Dad from over there.”

  She bristled. “If you’ve got a plan, spit it out. It’s been a tough day.”

  “Listen — it’s after seven. Chances are they won’t unload this transport till morning. We wait for dark, find a ship that’s heading up the coast somewhere, and stow away on it. As long as we don’t leave the country, we should be okay to get where we need to go.”

  “Which is — ?” she prompted.

  “Denver,” he told her. “That’s where HORUS had their head office.”

  “Mr. Bass said HORUS is history,” his sister reminded him.

  “Frank Lindenauer is still on the loose, and that means HORUS isn’t dead. He can’t be the only one who escaped.”

  “And you think the others are in Denver?” Meg asked.

  “Maybe not, but that’s where the trail starts.”

  It wasn’t exactly a plan. But as long as there was a next step, a lead unexplored, it meant there was still hope.

  “Okay,” Meg agreed. “Denver.”

  The best thing about that city: It wasn’t LA.

  Aiden and Meg soon learned that full darkness never fell on the Port of Los Angeles. When the sun set, on came the floodlights, and the loading and unloading continued without interruption.

  Meg was distraught. “What kind of workaholic port is this? Doesn’t anybody go home?”

  “They change shifts,” Aiden guessed glumly. “It’ll probably quiet down after midnight.”

  “After midnight? I’ll die! I’ve already sweated a river. There’s no air in here!”

  “We’ll crack the door a little. I’ll take out the dome light first.”

  It helped with the heat but not the tension. Midnight approached, marking six hours that the Falconers had been stuck in the Honda.

  Meg was restless to the point of insanity. “I’ve got to get out of here, bro!”

  “Hang in there,” Aiden urged.

  Sure enough, on the stroke of twelve, longshoremen on the various projects began to drift away. A few job sites changed crews and continued working, but the majority of the floodlights were shut off.

  It was an agonizing decision for Aiden: Do we wait until the wharf is completely dark — which might never happen? Or do we risk it and go now?

  Meg was less conflicted. “Stay if you want, but I’m booking.” And she was out of the Honda, climbing like a monkey down to the ground.

  Aiden had no choice. He was right behind her. The clang of their sneakers against the metal frame of the car transport seemed like the ringing of a gong to them. In reality, it was all lost in the sounds of the harbor and the sea.

  They dropped to the shadows underneath the rig.

  “Stay out of the light,” Aiden cautioned his sister. “I can pass for an adult in the dark, but there’s no way you can. There must be security here. If they get a good look at you, they’ll ask questions.”

  Meg bit her lip and did as she was told. This was no time for wounded pride.

  They walked along the waterfront, steering clear of the brightly lit berths where the night crews were working.

  While Meg hung back, Aiden ventured out onto the piers — there were thirty-two of them in this part of the harbor alone. Each ship was marked by a small sign that identified the vessel moored there, its port of origin, and its principal cargo. The information Aiden needed was at the bottom: destination and date and hour of departure.

  The bigger the ship, the farther it seemed to be going — Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Manila. He targeted less impressive vessels, but even these seemed to be heading for South America. At last he focused on the smaller tramp freighters and bulk carriers.

  San Diego — too close. It was almost a southern extension of Los Angeles. The cops down there probably cooperated with the LAPD….

  Alaska — too far … Vancouver — no good. They’d have to cross an international border to get back into the United States.

  Perfect! The Samantha D was an independent freighter returning to its home port, Seattle, Washington. It was slated for loading at first light tomorrow, followed by a three P.M. departure. Cargo: 976 forty-two-gallon barrels of chili oil imported from Thailand.

  Squinting into the gloom, Aiden checked out the ship as best he could. It looked big enough to hide in — half a football field long, and broad across the beam. There was a high structure in the bow — the conning tower? Aiden was no sailor, but he recalled some nautical terminology from books and movies. Astern, he could make out the silhouette of some kind of cargo-handling equipment. From this angle, he could see nothing amidships. He assumed that the opening to the hold was located there. Nine hundred seventy-six large barrels of chili oil would take up a lot of space. But he was sure there would be enough room for two fugitives trying to get out of LA.

  The question is how to get on board without being seen.

  The sound of laughing voices jolted him out of his thoughts. He ducked behind a cluster of wooden pylons and peered out furtively. Four sailors appeared from the darkness and strolled down the pier, singing raucously. They turned in at the Samantha D and clattered up the gangplank.

  One of them said something about “taking the first watch,” and Aiden felt a jolt of dismay. The full weight of what he and his sister were about to do came crashing down on him. All at once it occurred to him that they understood less than nothing about shipping. This boat could have a crew of five sailors or fifty. The Falconers had no idea what security measures might be in place. For all Aiden knew, the harbor police inspected every vessel, looking for stowaways. Where did he get off thinking they could pull a stunt like this with zero experience and zero planning?

  The answer came as it had a dozen times since he and Meg had embarked on this insane adventure. They could do it because they had to. Because they owed it to their poor parents. Because there was no other way.

  With that, Aiden Falconer, landlubber, set out to teach himself a very quick lesson in Stowaway 101.

  He toyed with different possibilities, some of them unlikely, all of them bad — climbing up the mooring lines or scaling the hull from water level. As he weighed the options, Aiden suddenly remembered one of the main sources of his scant nautical knowledge. It came from a prison cell in Florida, more than three thousand miles away.

  In addition to being a college professor of criminology, Dr. John Falconer was the author of a series of detective novels. In Davy Jones’s Locker, the hard-boiled hero, Mac Mulvey, was investigating a ring of diamond smugglers in West Africa. In the exciting climax, Mulvey found the hot rocks by stowing away on a ship bound for New York City.

  Aiden frowned. Dad’s books were page-turners, but the wild plotlines tended to blend together. How had Mulvey gained access to a working freighter full of smugglers?

  Then he remembered — and wished he hadn’t.

  Mulvey hadn’t snuck onto the boat at all. He’d had himself loaded aboard with the cargo.

  “No way am I climbing into a barrel of chili oil!” Meg hissed in outrage.

  “It wasn’t chili oil in the story,” Aiden tried to explain. “It was a shipload of handwoven carpets. He just rolled hims
elf up in — ”

  “I don’t care if it was a vat of sulfuric acid,” his sister interrupted. “Mac Mulvey is a fictional character. What he does only works in books.”

  “Listen,” Aiden reasoned. “We’re not going to hide in real chili oil. We’ll get into two empty barrels, and they’ll load us up with the full ones. Yeah, it’s risky. But not as risky as staying in LA.”

  Meg had to agree. Aiden’s obsession with Dad’s cheese-ball novels drove her nuts. But she couldn’t deny that Mac Mulvey’s far-fetched escape techniques had squeaked them through some very tough spots in the past.

  According to the Samantha D’s documentation, its cargo was being housed in storage facility 13-Bravo, a single-story warehouse surrounded by a padlocked barbed-wire fence.

  Through the smudged safety glass of the windows, the Falconers could see the steel drums, four to a pallet, lined up across the cement floor. Each was identified by a large green label: BANGKOK.

  “That’s it, all right,” Meg confirmed. “Chili oil from Thailand.”

  “Yeah,” said Aiden, looking worried. “But how are we going to get in?”

  Wasn’t that typical Aiden? Long on plans, short on execution. Wordlessly, she began to climb the chain-link fence, leading by example.

  “But that’s barbed wire!” her brother protested.

  She swung a leg over the top, carefully avoiding the rusty barbs. “It’s not rocket science, bro. If you don’t touch them, they can’t cut you.” She jumped down to the ground. “See?”

  If this hadn’t been a matter of life and death for the Falconer family, Meg would have been laughing hysterically at the sight of her awkward, long-legged brother negotiating the fence. At the top, he was so terrified that his contortions actually put him in the way of the barbs. Pretty soon, he had one in his T-shirt and two in his jeans, and he was thrashing around, a fly caught in a spiderweb. Eventually, he worked his way loose but lost his hold on the fence in the process. He fell like a rock, landing in a heap beside his sister.

  He quickly sprang back to his feet, huffing and daring her to comment. She didn’t.

  The warehouse door was also padlocked, but one of the windows had been propped open for ventilation. Aiden was able to get his shoulder under it and widen the gap with the strength of his upper body. In a couple of seconds, the agile Meg was over the ledge and in. With a good deal of grunting, Aiden managed to squeeze himself inside, too.

  The two stood, breathing hard from the effort, staring at row after row of black shiny steel barrels. The drums were sealed, and yet the smell of oily hot peppers made their eyes water as if they were slicing onions.

  “Wow,” gasped Meg. “If this boat sinks, every fish in the Pacific is going to die of heartburn.”

  “Unless we collide with a tanker of Pepto-Bismol,” Aiden agreed.

  It sounded lighthearted, yet it was anything but.

  A million things can go wrong with this plan, Meg reflected, and none of them have to do with the boat sinking.

  Nine hundred seventy-six drums stood neatly in place on pallets, ready for loading. But the Falconers were more interested in the empties that were stacked and sometimes strewn around the perimeter of the cargo. They selected one that was in good condition and dragged it over to the pallets.

  That was where the problems started. A steel cask is heavy on its own. Fill it with forty-two gallons of dense chili oil, and you have an item that does not move easily. Both Falconers, pushing their hardest, could not budge a full barrel.

  “This is impossible!” gasped Meg. “Let’s get out of this place and find another way onto the ship.”

  It was just like Aiden to refuse to deviate from the plan. “This is the only way aboard,” he insisted, grunting with effort. “We’ve got to make it work.”

  She sensed a note of rising panic behind his stubborn determination. “Yeah, but if we can’t — ”

  And then, unexpectedly, the barrel moved. Not straight — instead, the drum spun on its circular base ever so slightly away from the other three.

  Aiden frowned. “How did we just do that?”

  Neither was exactly sure, but through trial and error they were able to wiggle the cask in alternating directions, “walking” it slowly toward the edge of the pallet.

  Soon they were both drenched with sweat. It was the most physically difficult thing Meg could ever remember doing. Every time they lost the twisting motion and tried to push the barrel in a straight line, progress would grind to a halt instantly. Yet after twenty minutes of backbreaking effort, the Falconers felt the heavy load begin to tip over the edge of the skid.

  “Get clear!” Aiden warned. It came out as a papery rasp.

  They both jumped back as the shiny black barrel hit the concrete floor with a teeth-jarring thud. It rolled a little, and both pounced on it, not wanting to waste its precious momentum. They kept it moving all the way to the wall and left it there among the empties. Aiden pulled off the Bangkok sticker and tax stamps and affixed them to the drum they had selected for themselves. Then he crouched down on the empty part of the pallet and tipped the open end of the cask over his head. He disappeared under it.

  “How does it look?” came his muffled voice from inside.

  Meg gawked. The warehouse was full of black barrels, and this was just another skid of four, exactly like the others. There was no way anyone would pick out Aiden’s drum as different.

  “Bro, you are one crazy genius! It’s perfect! Is there room for both of us in there?”

  The drum tipped up again, and Aiden struggled out. “Not unless we’re mice. We’ll have to free up another spot for you.” He looked thoughtful. “Probably on a different skid.”

  She turned pale. “Just because we’re in different barrels doesn’t mean we can’t go on the same pallet.”

  “Actually, it does. The full drums are a lot heavier than the empty ones. Even if we add in our weight, there’s still going to be a big difference. If we’re both on the same skid, somebody might notice that it’s much lighter than the others.”

  She looked so unhappy that he chided, “Come on, Meg. It’s not like we’ll be passing notes between our barrels.”

  But they both knew the real reason for her unease. The horrible black cloud that had settled over the Falconer family held only a single thread of silver lining — the fact that Aiden and Meg had managed to stay together.

  Separation, even by a few dozen feet in the same cargo, terrified them both.

  The Ninth Precinct house of the Los Angeles Police Department was built into the side of a hill. It was a modern structure, with ceilings so low that six-foot-seven Emmanuel Harris had to duck in order to avoid whacking his head on the door frame of the office.

  “Listen, Harris,” the captain was saying. “We had eighty people on this. From precincts all over town. That’s a ton of manpower.” He shrugged. “The kids beat us.”

  The tall agent took a sip of coffee so rancid it may as well have bubbled straight out of the LA sewers. “Because you gave up,” he accused.

  “Because the citizens of this city look to us for protection, and I don’t think two runaways pose much of a threat — even if their last name is Falconer.”

  “That’s not the point,” Harris insisted. “Those two are in danger. I told you, there’s a killer after them.”

  The captain was skeptical. “My men found no evidence of that.”

  “What evidence were you looking for — dead bodies?”

  The captain drew himself up to his full height — still a foot shorter than his FBI visitor. “Maybe you think we all live in mansions and drive Porsches out here. This is a big town with big problems. We don’t have unlimited funding like you feds. We have to pick our priorities.”

  Harris nodded sullenly. He knew the captain was right. Aiden and Margaret Falconer were news. If this kept up, they’d be almost as famous as their parents. But as a threat to public safety, they were pretty low on the totem pole.

  “
Tell me something,” ventured the captain. “You made out like a bandit, taking down the parents — big promotion, your picture in the paper, American hero. Do you really have to arrest the whole family? Is it some kind of obsession with you?”

  There was a lot Harris might have said to the LAPD man. Like: Do you know how it feels to lie awake nights, wondering if you put the wrong people in prison? That their innocent children are desperate fugitives, thanks to you?

  In the course of their weeks on the run, Aiden and Margaret had managed to unearth bits of evidence about the mysterious Frank Lindenauer — the missing piece of their parents’ story. It wasn’t enough to overturn two life sentences. But an FBI agent survived on hunches. Harris had an awful hunch there was more to this Lindenauer thing than met the eye.

  The case was closed, the traitors behind bars. If Harris didn’t go after the truth, no one else would.

  That was his “obsession” with the Falconers — not to harm them, but to help them.

  He had shattered this family. Now he was their only hope.

  * * *

  The loading of the freighter Samantha D began promptly at six o’clock the next morning.

  Crouched inside the upended barrel, Aiden listened to the clatter of the loading bay door rolling open. Next came the roar of the forklifts. Like worker ants, they picked up the cargo one skid at a time and delivered it to the wharf.

  When Aiden felt the jolt of the lift mechanism take hold of the pallet beneath his feet, he nearly jumped out of his skin. It was terrible enough to be facing the loading procedure, knowing that discovery and arrest could happen at any minute. But to do so in blind helplessness, never knowing what was coming or when, was sheer agony.

  Even worse was the thought that, a few pallets away, on another forklift, his little sister had to go through this torture.