Public Enemies Page 8

  The police cruiser squealed to a halt behind the line of stopped cars. The officer wisely decided not to put any more citizens at risk by continuing pursuit.

  Instead, he reached for his radio.

  * * *

  It was more of a closet than an office, and it looked even smaller with the six-foot-seven Emmanuel Harris inside. FBI headquarters in Denver was overcrowded, and this little cubbyhole was the best they could manage. There was no room for a desk, so his chair was pulled over to a shelf. There he sat, buried in a mountain of paper, the FBI’s complete file on The People versus John and Louise Falconer — the trial of the new millennium, the most famous treason case of the past fifty years.

  He had promised those kids that their parents’ convictions would be reviewed. Sure, they hadn’t believed him, but he intended to keep his word.

  A local agent stuck his head in the door. “Hey, Harris, thought you’d like to know — Denver PD just put out an APB on a gold Corvette chasing a Harley.”

  Harris jumped up, whacking his head on a dangling bare bulb. “Kids on the bike?”

  The man nodded. “Idaho plates. Sounds like your Falconers.”

  When the two agents left the building, the Denver man was running to keep up with Harris’s long, purposeful strides.

  * * *

  The Harley’s fuel gauge was on dead empty now, and even the slightest upgrade caused the big engine to sputter. Hairless Joe was right on their tail, never more than a few yards back, waiting for the moment to strike.

  Aiden scanned ahead in a desperate search for a place where the Harley would fit and the Corvette wouldn’t. There was nothing — just houses, buildings, and small stores. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

  Meg pointed. “Look!”

  At first, Aiden thought it was some kind of botanical garden — tall wrought-iron gates, dense with lush greenery. Then he caught a glimpse inside. It was a cemetery, lined with an endless pattern of close-ranked grave markers. A muted mosaic sign declared the place to be Centennial Acres.

  Without hesitation, Aiden steered into the driveway. In a roar of four hundred horses, the Corvette followed. Aiden gritted his teeth. He felt bad for what he was about to do, but there was no way around it. It was their only chance to lose Hairless Joe.

  He wheeled off the pavement and began to snake between tombstones, breathing silent apologies to the people whose graves his tires were trampling.

  Meg gripped his arm from behind. “Oh, my God!”

  The Corvette was navigating behind them, wide, spinning tires spraying turf and mangled flowers in all directions. The gold car twisted and bounced like an airboat in the Everglades. Scratching and denting itself on some tombstones, knocking others flat, it lurched forward, slowed but not stopped.

  The Harley was the better off-road vehicle, but Hairless Joe was relentless and cared nothing for his car. Aiden kicked down into first gear in a desperate attempt for more speed as he searched the vast grounds for a spot too tight for the Corvette. It was working — the bike was beginning to open up a lead — when the engine sputtered, coughed, and died.

  Aiden jumped on the kick start once, twice. The Harley was still, its fuel tank bone-dry. He tried again — three times, four —

  Meg had to drag him off the motorcycle. “Forget the bike! Run!”

  They fled, pounding down the rows of graves in a ghoulish footrace. The Corvette was upon them in seconds. Hairless Joe stepped on the gas, determined to finish his dirty job here and now.

  It was the ultimate mismatch — two kids on foot versus a four-hundred-horsepower engine with a madman at the wheel. Aiden and Meg sprinted for their lives as the Corvette thundered up behind them.

  As one person, the Falconers dived over a large double headstone at the end of a row. They hit the ground beyond it and rolled.

  The Corvette slammed into the granite slab, hurtling metal against eternal stone. Stone won. The hood of the car flattened like an accordion. Hairless Joe disappeared behind the billowing white of an airbag.

  Aiden and Meg got up and ran, making for an area of the cemetery where there were stands of trees and brush that would provide some cover.

  “Think he’s dead?” Meg panted.

  “He’s never dead!” her brother replied. “Keep moving!”

  They could hear distant sirens all around. And — was that a helicopter overhead?

  We’ve been so worried about Hairless Joe that we forgot the cops, Aiden realized with a shudder.

  “We need a place to hide,” he said. “Now!”

  Nestled in a small grove of poplars stood the Schuyler family mausoleum, a white marble temple with a domed roof and pillars.

  They made for it, bounding up the stone steps and slipping inside through the heavy door. The place was empty and oppressively silent. One wall was lined with elaborately carved niches. At least half of these were filled with a variety of sealed urns, identified by brass plaques.

  Ashes, Aiden concluded. He wondered if he and his sister would be the next dead people in here.

  “It’s not as creepy as I thought,” Meg observed, and then dropped her voice to a whisper when she realized how sound echoed in the stone chamber. “I expected spiderwebs and bats and stuff.”

  “The family probably pays someone to look after the place,” Aiden whispered back. “Believe me, it’s plenty creepy!”

  In an instant, all thoughts of the mausoleum and its dead were wiped from their minds with the sound of a single footstep on the stairs outside.

  In a rush of shock and fright, Aiden scanned the room. There was no escape and no cover.

  He had always known that the odds were stacked against them. Yet this seemed like a particularly unpleasant place for it all to end.

  Mom, Dad — we tried —

  When the heavy door began to move, he pushed Meg into a shadowed corner in a pathetic attempt to protect her.

  He saw the bald head silhouetted against the bright sunlight outside. Aiden raised his arms to defend himself.

  Smiling wolfishly, Hairless Joe reached for his gun and pointed it at Aiden’s chest.

  In an act of total desperation, Meg picked up the only weapon available to her — the ashes of Theodore Schuyler, deceased since 1957. Without pausing for either thought or aim, she hurled the metal urn at the assassin’s pistol hand.

  It was a direct hit. Hairless Joe cried out in pain. The gun clattered to the stone floor. Meg leaped for it, scooped it up, and backed away to stand with her brother.

  Through his relief, Aiden understood this moment with sudden perfect clarity and wonder. This was what they had talked about after the near miss with Hairless Joe at the elevator shaft. Meg’s own words: You can’t tell me we’re not better off if that guy’s dead.

  Now the chance was right here. It was time to remove the threat of Hairless Joe for good and always. For their sake, but for their parents’ as well. Danger to Aiden and Meg equaled danger to their quest — and to Mom and Dad’s only hope for a future.

  His sister just had to pull the trigger.

  “Meg — ”

  “I hear you.” Her message had never been tougher, yet her voice belonged to the sixth-grader that she was still supposed to be.

  Of all the things this misadventure had demanded of eleven-year-old Meg Falconer, surely this was the most terrible. Her entire body was trembling, except for the hand that held the gun. That was rock steady.

  To their surprise, Hairless Joe seemed to relax. “You don’t have the nerve.” His voice was harsh and mocking. His sneer was ugly, half closing one eye and revealing long, crooked teeth. One of them had a chip out of it.

  Aiden’s fevered brain labored to make the connection. The chipped tooth … Oznot’s sketchbook …

  All at once, he was leaping in front of Meg. “No!”

  In that fraction of a second, Hairless Joe made a decision of his own. He spun on his heel and was out the door in a heartbeat, leaping off the steps and pounding through the tombst
ones. There could be no doubt in his mind that he was running for his life.

  By the time Meg got to the door, the man was fifty yards away. She rounded on her brother. “Are you crazy? I was going to do it!”

  Aiden grabbed his sister by the shoulders as their enemy escaped on foot. “Meg — we can’t kill him! We need him!”

  She stared. “Need him?”

  Aiden nodded, shattered with emotion.

  “Hairless Joe is Frank Lindenauer.”

  Meg gawked at her brother as if he had just announced that the professional assassin was Elvis.

  “What are you talking about? Why would you say that?”

  “Because it’s true,” he insisted. “That’s what Oznot was trying to tell us. The sketch of Uncle Frank and the sketch of Hairless Joe — they’re the same guy. In the drawing, Frank Lindenauer had a chipped tooth. I just saw that same tooth on Hairless Joe!”

  She was unconvinced. “But they look nothing like each other!”

  “He had tons of hair and a full beard,” Aiden argued urgently. “If you shave all that off, you change your appearance completely! He probably did it when HORUS got busted and he needed to disappear fast. Then he started getting rid of all the people who could expose him — people like Edith Wilkinson. And when he heard we’d escaped from Sunnydale, he knew we were a threat. So he came after us!”

  She was struck dumb. It sounded like the wildest fiction — something straight out of Mac Mulvey. And yet it answered so many questions about the mysterious bald killer who’d been stalking them. How had he tracked them to the lake house in Vermont? Because he’d visited there with the Falconer family. How had he created a poster of “Uncle Frank” to lure them in? Because he was using an old picture of himself. How could he anticipate their every move? Because he knew exactly who they were and what they were trying to do.

  And it solved the biggest mystery of all: Why had nobody found Frank Lindenauer, the only person who could clear John and Louise Falconer of treason? Because Frank Lindenauer had become another person.

  It was an earthshaking revelation, a discovery that turned reality on its ear. The man they were after was the same man who was after them.

  “We’re such idiots,” she moaned. “It was staring us right in the face. We knew Hairless Joe was a HORUS guy who wasn’t arrested with the rest of them. Why didn’t we put two and two together?”

  “It’s hard to think straight when you’re hanging over an elevator shaft,” Aiden said feelingly.

  “Yeah, but we had him,” Meg persisted. “And we let him get away!”

  “We have to get away,” Aiden reminded her. All around them, the sirens — dozens of them — seemed to be closing in. They counted at least three helicopters in the air.

  Meg forced herself to be all business. “The Corvette! You think it’s still drivable?”

  “I doubt it,” Aiden replied. “Otherwise, Hairless Joe would have taken it. But it’s worth a try.”

  Meg hurled the gun as far as she could into the bushes, and the Falconers ran to the scene of the collision between car and tombstone. The closer they got, the deeper Meg’s heart sank. The Corvette was a write-off, its front end bashed in, its windshield shattered, fluids leaking from a ruined chassis.

  The sound of the voice made them both jump. Had the police already found them?

  Then they heard the words: “This is the OnStar operator. We received a signal that your driver airbag has deployed. We have dispatched police and ambulance to the scene.”

  “OnStar?” Meg repeated.

  “Who’s that?” came the voice from the car. “Is somebody there? Can you hear me?”

  “The police know where we are?” Aiden asked in alarm.

  “We’ve reported your location,” the operator confirmed. “Are you hurt? Is there someone else we can call for you?”

  Meg stiffened like a pointer. “What, you make phone calls, too?”

  “Of course. Your OnStar operates as a telephone.”

  “Good,” she said. “Dial one-eight-hundred-U-S M-O-U-T-H.”

  Aiden goggled. “The Mouth of America? What are you doing? We have to get out of here!”

  “He said he’d help us,” she replied. “We need help.”

  The call screener came on. “Mouth line. What’s your beef?”

  “It’s Meg Falconer.”

  The delay was no more than a few scrambling seconds. The famous voice came out of the OnStar speaker.

  “Meg? Are you okay? What’s going on with you guys?”

  Meg leaned over the ruined hood, projecting through the empty space where the windshield had once been. “You said you’d help us. Did you mean it?”

  “The Mouth is as good as his word,” the shock jock told her. “Just name it.”

  “We’re at the Centennial Acres Cemetery in Denver,” she began.

  Aiden shot her a horrified look for revealing their whereabouts to millions of listeners. Meg ignored him. Secrecy was hardly the issue. Scores of police cars were out looking for them. And OnStar had just pinpointed their exact position by GPS.

  “There are a million cops out there and we’ve got to disappear! Can you help us?”

  In reply, the Mouth of America addressed his vast radio audience: “Listen up, everybody in Denver. If you’re a fan of this show, it’s because you believe in cutting through the garbage, exposing the phonies and idiots, and not letting the almighty powers that be dump all over the little guy. People say we’re just hot air. Now’s our chance to prove them wrong! How are we going to help these kids?”

  “We need an extraction!” Aiden piped up suddenly.

  The Mouth was all over that. “Aiden, right? What kind of extraction? What do you mean?”

  “Dead Is a Four-Letter Word — it’s a book by our father. Mac Mulvey’s trapped inside this building that’s controlled by the Russian mob. So he calls for a team to come and pluck him out. That’s an extraction.”

  “Can do,” said the Mouth. “Let me put you on hold.”

  “No!” screamed Meg, the sirens howling closer around them. “There’s not enough time — ”

  But the shock jock was already gone.

  Aiden ripped open the driver door, turned the key in the ignition, switched on the radio, and tuned it to the Mouth of America show.

  The Mouth was a notorious ranter. But he was in rare form today, bellowing across the airwaves, haranguing his Denver-area listeners to get in their cars and give the fugitive Falconers a lift.

  Meg was wound up like a coiled spring. “You think he can make this happen?”

  “Get down!” Aiden took hold of her shoulders, and the two of them dropped behind the Corvette.

  A police car was driving slowly along the cemetery’s main path. The officer peered out his window, scanning the grounds.

  It’s only a matter of time before he spots the Corvette, Meg thought with sickening resignation.

  At that moment, the voice returned from the OnStar system — not the Mouth, but the radio show’s call screener. “Can you hear me, kids? There should be a gate at the east entrance. There’s an angel with wings on top of the fence. Wait for a gray Chevy Malibu. Good luck!”

  Bent double, they set their sights on the winged angel and ran. As they darted from tombstone to tombstone, staying low, they watched the cemetery fill up with squad cars.

  There was a sudden burst of excited voices and running feet. Meg peered out from behind a marble marker. The cops were descending in force on the wreckage of the Corvette.

  Thirty seconds sooner and we’d have been standing right there!

  The east gate was about a thousand yards away. It felt like fifty miles. Their backs ached from their squatting posture and the tension brought on by fear of discovery. Every inch of the way, they braced themselves against the cry that might come — “There they are!” By the time they were at last crouching amid the concealing branches of a juniper bush just inside the gate, they were sweat-soaked and trembling.

/>   Meg peered out past the pillars to the road. No gray Malibu.

  “Do you think we missed him?” she whispered.

  “He’d wait,” Aiden replied.

  They both hoped that was true.

  “Are we nuts to get into some stranger’s car?” she asked timidly. “I mean, not knowing anything else about the person except he listens to the radio?”

  “Sure, we’re nuts. But we’d be more nuts to stay here.”

  A midsize gray Chevy drew up to the curb. A click signified the release of automatic door locks.

  “This is it!” Aiden hissed. “One, two, three!” They burst out of the shelter of the bushes, hit the sidewalk with a bound, and jumped into the back of the Malibu. The car pulled away from the curb.

  Lying low on the seat, the two could barely catch their breath.

  “Thanks, mister,” Aiden gasped.

  “Don’t sweat it,” said the driver, a long-haired young man with a ponytail tucked inside a Denver Broncos cap. He swung an arm back and handed Meg a cell phone. “The Mouth wants to talk to you.”

  Meg was barely able to come up with the word hello.

  “Good — you made it,” approved the shock jock’s familiar voice. “Okay, we’ve got seven cars on the road. We’re going to hand you off a few times to make sure you’re not being followed.”

  As Centennial Acres fell away from the rear window, police cruisers continued to converge on the cemetery. Officers were establishing roadblocks at the gates, and helicopters hovered over the grounds.

  All at once, the strain of the past hours caught up with Meg — the high-speed chase, the confrontation with a murderer, and the murder she herself had very nearly committed. Now this escape from the police — helped by strangers commanded by a man who had once called for their parents’ execution.

  Sudden tears stung her eyes. “Mr. Mouth,” she quavered, “I don’t know how we’re ever going to thank you!”

  For the second time in his career, the Mouth of America was speechless.

  When Agent Harris reached the cemetery, the search was over. It had produced one stolen motorcycle, one wrecked Corvette, and a nine-millimeter pistol that was already on its way to the crime lab.