Hunting the Hunter Read online

  For David Levithan, who gives On the Run its legs

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  About the Author

  Also Available

  Copyright

  Aiden Falconer was milking cows again.

  He had come full circle. This nightmare had begun at a juvenile prison farm in Nebraska. That was where he and his sister, Meg, had been sent after their parents had been convicted of treason and locked away for life.

  Back then they had been inmates, prisoners — before the fire, the escape. Now they were fugitives, wanted by the FBI, the juvenile authorities, and dozens of state and local police forces.

  But the cows — they were the same. Uncooperative, cranky, and with a stink that would choke a sewer rat.

  Everybody else could milk a cow. Meg could fill a bucket in no time. Why was it that every cow shut down milk production as soon as it sensed Aiden’s fear?

  It shouldn’t take a PhD to do this!

  That started a new train of thought, a much more unpleasant one. Mom and Dad both had PhD’s. And their expertise had been used to frame them and destroy the Falconer family.

  The lapse in concentration cost him. The cow lifted its rear hoof and delivered a hammer blow to Aiden’s stomach. The wallop sent him off the stool and into the soft straw.

  In despair, Aiden gathered his gear and steeled himself for another attempt.

  There was a purpose to all this, he reminded himself. This job as a farmhand — it wasn’t a career move; it was a hiding place. For Aiden and Meg to show their faces in Denver right now would be to risk instant arrest. But on this farm, just twenty miles east of the city limits, they could disappear for a while, with Aiden posing as the hired worker and Meg keeping out of sight. They could lie low until the heat was off and prepare themselves for the awful thing they had to do.

  Six big cows, one piddly little bucket of milk. How was he going to explain that to Mr. Turnbull? The farmer had a broken leg, not brain damage. How long before it dawned on the man that his “experienced” hired hand was a suburban fifteen-year-old who didn’t know the difference between a cow and third base?

  The next order of business was taking the herd out to pasture. It was a slightly more pleasant task. He still had to deal with the cows, but at least the paralyzing stench of the barn could be left behind for a few minutes before shoveling time.

  God, I hate farming!

  The collision came from behind. It was so powerful, so devastating, his first thought was that he’d been hit by a car. The impact knocked the air out of him, propelling him six feet forward. Then his attacker was upon him, three hundred pounds of rooting, snarling rage.

  He had seen the pig from a distance. It was the size of a Volkswagen, easily four times bigger than the other pigs in the sty. Hooves like sledgehammers pounded down at him. The huge drooling snout battered him about the head and face. Aiden struggled, but the crushing weight pressed down on his rib cage.

  The thought was as horrifying as it was absurd: This animal is killing me!

  He had escaped manhunts covering thousands of miles. He had survived murder attempts and life-and-death struggles. Was he really going to die here in this pasture, cut down by an enraged swine?

  Wham!

  The flat of the shovel connected with the pig’s hindquarters in a home-run swing. With a squeal of shock, the beast rolled off Aiden and squared off against eleven-year-old Meg Falconer, an attacker barely a quarter of its weight.

  Aiden leaped to his feet, muddy and bleeding, his clothes torn. “Meg — run!”

  But his sister faced the danger like a gladiator, brandishing her shovel. “Don’t even think about it, Porko, or you’ll be bacon bits before you can say oink!”

  Aiden watched, amazed, as the giant animal backed off, whining like a whipped puppy. The other spectators, the cows, looked on, chewing disinterestedly.

  “What are you doing out here?” Aiden hissed. “If Mr. Turnbull sees you, how long do you think it’s going to take him to figure out who we really are?”

  “What was I supposed to do — hide in the loft and let this thing crush you? Fat lot of good it’ll do Mom and Dad if one of us gets killed.”

  That was the goal of these weeks on the run — to prove that their parents were innocent of treason. They had finally tracked down the man who had framed Doctors John and Louise Falconer, only to find that he was a vicious killer. It was the end of one problem and the beginning of an even bigger one — how could two kids capture a professional assassin?

  Meekly, the pig backed away and trotted off in the direction of the sty.

  Around the corner of the barn, the farmhouse’s screen door creaked open, then slapped shut.

  “Scram!” Aiden whispered urgently.

  Meg beat a hasty retreat into the barn and up the ladder to the hayloft.

  Aiden didn’t add, “Thanks for saving my life.” Over the past weeks, both Falconers had rescued each other so often that one more time didn’t bear mentioning.

  We’re turning into hard cases, a couple of action heroes who don’t think a brush with death is worth a thank-you.

  Meg needn’t have rushed into hiding, because it took a long time for Zephraim Turnbull to thump his way on his crutches out to the pasture and his bleeding hired hand.

  Mr. Turnbull looked like every picture Aiden had ever seen of a leather-faced American farmer — stoic, weather-beaten, and humorless.

  “I see you’ve met old Bernard,” the farmer observed drily. “Suppose I should have warned you about him. Nasty piece of work.”

  Aiden brushed at his sleeve, which removed about one percent of the mud that covered him. “I can take care of myself,” he said defensively.

  Turnbull looked him up and down. “I can see that. You sure you’re eighteen?”

  Aiden straightened, setting aside his many aches and pains. “Absolutely. I’m just trying to make some extra money for when I start college in January.”

  “Suppose I can’t fault you for not being ready for Bernard,” the farmer decided grudgingly. “He comes on pretty strong, but that’s why I keep him around.”

  “You mean he’s a guard pig?”

  Turnbull nodded. “You can’t be too careful with Holyfield and his lawyers nosing around.”

  It had all been explained to Aiden the day Turnbull had hired him: Mountain View Homes, the land developer, owned every single property as far as the eye could see … except one. The Turnbull farm was not for sale.

  Actually, it was for sale. But Turnbull still had seventeen years to go on his family’s ninety-nine-year lease. And he didn’t intend to be begged or bribed off his farm.

  “I guess Mr. Holyfield wants to sell pretty bad, huh?” Aiden said.

  Turnbull nodded. “You should have seen his face when he found out I was in a cast for six weeks. If the land isn’t farmed, the lease is null and void. That’s where you come in. A good, experienced hand to tide me over until I’m on my feet again.” He regarded Aiden dubiously. “Eighteen, huh? Well, follow me. We’ll have to get those cuts cleaned up. That’s a lot more than mud, you know, with all these animals around.”

  The farmer thumped his way back to the house with Aiden trailing along behind him.
As he stepped up to the wooden porch, his foot nudged something metal, knocking it off the platform to the grass. The loud report that reached Aiden’s ears needed no identification.

  It was a gunshot.

  Life on the run had sharpened Aiden’s response time. He hit the dirt before the echo died and rolled under the porch.

  When Zephraim Turnbull turned to investigate the source of the noise, his hired man had disappeared.

  “You okay, Gary?” he asked. Gary Graham was Aiden’s alias.

  “Get down!” Aiden hissed. He was absolutely convinced that Frank Lindenauer, the man who had framed their parents, was shooting at him from cover. Five days before, Aiden and Meg had barely escaped him in a Denver cemetery.

  Meg — Aiden thought of his sister, hidden away in the barn, completely unprotected. How could he reach her without making himself an easy target?

  “My fault. Sorry,” came the voice of Zephraim Turnbull. “It’s just a nail gun. Shouldn’t leave it lying around.”

  Pale and shaking, Aiden emerged from the shadows under the porch. Not Frank Lindenauer. Not this time. “A nail gun?” he repeated in a daze.

  Turnbull nodded. “I’m replacing some of these rotted planks.” He flashed Aiden a satisfied grimace. “That’ll show Holyfield I’m not planning to go anywhere. If he wants this farm, he can have it — in seventeen years.”

  Aiden picked up the device and handed it to the farmer, who rested it on the porch rail. That explained the percussive cracks that reached the Falconers in the farmhand’s apartment attached to the barn. They had been awakening each dawn to what sounded like a gunfight.

  Aiden stood patiently on the porch while Turnbull washed his face and painted his cuts with dark orange iodine. “Don’t trust those newfangled ointments,” his employer said flatly. “The old ways are the best. Wouldn’t be using that blasted nail gun, but my bum leg makes it hard to get squared up to swing a hammer.”

  The front door was open, and Aiden could see inside. The house was very much like its occupant — simple, harsh, and spare. Much of the furniture was unpainted wood, and even the upholstered living room couch had a severe, sit-up-straight quality to it. A brand-new computer, still in its factory packing, sat in an open box by the wall.

  Turnbull noticed Aiden’s interest in the Dell system. “From my nephew in New York City last Christmas,” he explained. “He figured we could stay in touch through e-mail.”

  “You haven’t taken it out of the box yet,” Aiden observed.

  “You got that right.”

  All at once, there was a loud squealing noise, and Bernard stampeded past, an enraged pig closer in size to a buffalo. Hooves thundering, he scrambled around the corner of the house and charged down the dirt drive.

  A few seconds later, a car door slammed, and a gray sedan screeched away from the farm and out of sight, burning rubber.

  The incident produced the closest thing to a smile Aiden had yet seen on his employer’s lips. “Show me a private investigator with the belly to tangle with Bernard, and I’ll show you a man without fear.”

  Aiden didn’t share the farmer’s good humor. Weeks on the run had taught him that mysterious spies watching from a distance were nothing to joke about. Maybe it had been just a snoop hired by Holyfield to force Turnbull out.

  Maybe.

  But with Frank Lindenauer out there somewhere, and with hundreds of cops on the alert for the Falconer fugitives, a private investigator would be the least of Aiden’s worries.

  * * *

  At six feet seven inches tall, FBI Agent Emmanuel Harris was an intimidating presence. Yet he could not intimidate the Denver office’s coffeepot to percolate any faster. It bubbled and glubbed, taking its own sweet time, while Harris watched with his empty cup, glaring.

  Slow-brewing coffee was not the cause of his foul mood. He had lost the Falconer kids again. This was nothing new. The young fugitives had been dodging him for weeks, appearing from thin air and then vanishing just as quickly. But never before had they remained out of sight for so long. Six days ago, Aiden and Margaret had eluded Harris, not to mention half the Denver police department. They had not been heard from since.

  While waiting for the kids to resurface, Harris was reexamining their parents’ court case — all nine-teen thousand pages of it. The towers of paper barely fit inside the tiny converted closet he was using as an office here in Denver.

  Doctors John and Louise Falconer — the respected criminology professors convicted of aiding and abetting foreign terrorists. The most notorious traitors in half a century. Only the longer Harris gave the documents a second look, the flimsier the case against the Falconers seemed to be. The professors were in prison not because of overwhelming evidence against them. They had been found guilty simply because they had been unable to produce one witness — a CIA agent named Frank Lindenauer.

  The CIA insisted there was no such person.

  “We should have looked harder,” Harris mumbled aloud to the coffeepot. He was the agent who had “cracked” the Falconer case. It was his fault that Aiden and Margaret’s parents were in maximum security. It was his fault that Aiden and Margaret were now fugitives.

  The kids claimed to have found new evidence. They said Lindenauer not only existed, but he had framed their parents. Could that be true?

  The pot had no opinion. It continued to percolate at its maddeningly slow pace.

  “Hey, Harris —” A white-coated lab tech leaned in the doorway. “I knew I’d find you here. You spend more time in the coffee room than your office.”

  “What have you got for me?” Harris interrupted.

  “Washington was able to lift a couple of partial fingerprints off the pistol they found at the cemetery. One print belonged to the girl — Margaret.”

  “And the other?” The second could only belong to the owner of the gun — “Hairless Joe,” the mysterious bald killer who had been stalking the Falconers for thousands of miles.

  “It’s all right here.” The lab tech handed over a file folder and disappeared down the hall.

  Breathlessly, Harris opened the manila cover and examined the contents. Terence J. McKenzie. He frowned. The name didn’t ring a bell.

  According to the file, Terence J. McKenzie had been a low-level CIA operative, working in anti-terror. Back in 1995, his bosses had become nervous that he was becoming too friendly with the terrorist groups he was supposed to be investigating. But just when McKenzie was about to be fired, he disappeared. This fingerprint was the first sign of him in nearly a decade.

  Harris turned the page. Pasted at the top of McKenzie’s personnel record was a photograph of a young man with long, thick red hair and a full beard.

  Harris gawked. He knew this face! He had seen it on the street posters that had been designed to trap the Falconer kids in Los Angeles. That man was Hairless Joe!

  It all fit — Terence McKenzie had shaved his face and head in an attempt to elude his former colleagues in the CIA. He was the missing piece of this puzzle, the phantom who had eluded the powerful magnifying glass of the trial of the new millennium.

  Terence McKenzie was the man John and Louise Falconer knew as Frank Lindenauer.

  The Rocky Mountains were growing taller, lengthening from an uneven line of gravel along the flat horizon.

  Zephraim Turnbull’s pickup truck rattled west along County Road G-17, Aiden at the wheel. The farmer had given him forty bushel baskets of turnips to take to the Denver Produce Terminal. After a week of lying low in the country, the Falconers had decided to use the trip to test the waters. Seven days before, they had been front-page news in this city. Would they be able to move about without attracting attention from the public? And, more to the point, the police?

  Meg was confused. “We’re going to hawk turnips?”

  Aiden laughed. “They’re already sold. We just have to deliver them to the supermarket guys. Mr. Turnbull put me through Turnip 101 when I got the job.”

  Meg glanced dubiously
out the back window at the payload. “It would take a lot to get me to eat one of those.”

  “Better to eat them than lift them. Those baskets weigh a ton.” Aiden’s body still ached from loading the truck.

  The countryside was flat and boring, but Meg was surprised to find herself enjoying the ride. It was a crisp, clear day with a nip of fall in the air. When she closed her eyes, it was almost possible to imagine Mom and Dad waiting for them at home.

  The vision clouded. Serving life sentences at his and hers maximum security prisons in Florida, Mom and Dad hadn’t been waiting at home for more than a year.

  No — don’t think about that….

  Well, at least she was out of the barn. She’d spent most of the past week skulking in the Turnbull hayloft. Agriculture wasn’t fun, but it gave Aiden something to do. She had taken over some of the milking duty because he was so hopeless at it. But at the first sign of the farmer, she’d had to run and hide. She was quietly losing her mind from the inactivity.

  To loll around with a bunch of cows, killing time while the days turn into weeks, while Mom and Dad are suffering in prison….

  She could imagine no greater torture.

  Denver Produce Terminal was like a city in itself, a vast, bustling farmers’ market. Meg had never seen so many trucks in her life. Workers swarmed around them like armies of ants. The sound was a symphony of urgent shouts, mingling together into a babble that assaulted the ears. It was pure chaos, yet there was an underlying order to it. Food shipments arrived; their cargoes were unloaded. It all happened somehow.

  A hard-hatted foreman waved Aiden in through the gate.

  He regarded his sister. “Ready?”

  She adjusted her sunglasses. “Let’s go.”

  If the Falconers were about to be identified … if the pointing fingers and cries of recognition were about to fly … if 9-1-1 was about to be dialed, it would surely happen in the next few minutes.

  Meg had dyed her hair dark brown and cut it razor-short. The new appearance didn’t thrill her, but it made a lot of sense. Her most recent pictures in the media showed a blond girl, not a brunette boy. There wasn’t a whole lot Aiden could do to disguise himself. A complete makeover would be suspicious to Mr. Turnbull. Still, the sight of two boys was very different from a boy and a girl.