A Boy Called Hawk (Annals of Altair Book 1)

by Kate Stradling

  Oliver scoffed heartily as Wilkes slammed the phone back on its receiver and made for the door. “Are you crazy?” he said, following close behind. “She’s not devious enough to go rogue. It’s more likely she got herself kidnapped by some local thugs because she dangled some money in their faces.”

  “You stay here,” Wilkes told him at the doorway.

  “I certainly will not,” Oliver said, and he shoved past him into the hall. Three other agents emerged, talking frantically into their phones.

  Emily, that idiot, would have a lot of explaining to do.

  Emily’s consciousness surfaced from beautiful images of multicultural festivals and children singing songs of peace and love. She’d been riding a sleek, beautiful unicorn amid beautiful fields of wildflowers, while dewy-eyed animals scampered among the beautiful festival goers. Everything was beautiful, she thought as she deeply inhaled the beautiful perfumes around her.

  A musty, sour smell invaded her nostrils instead and her eyes flew open in confusion. She was lying on her side, her face plastered against some rough, industrial-grade carpet. Sickly sunlight filtered in through the opposite window, and the room felt unnecessarily warm.

  Emily tried to move and speak at the same time, only to discover with horror that she could do neither. How had she…? She cast her mind back, trying to recall what had brought her here. There had been four children in her dream, the four West children…

  That had been no dream.

  Her heartbeat escalated. She had found Honey West and then, like a fool, had allowed the little girl to lead her to this unknown location. Had she really believed it was a game? Impossible!

  In vain she struggled against the duct tape, but it only pulled at her skin painfully. How could being tied up have seemed so comfortable before? Mixed with her fear was an underlying indignation. She, Emily Brent, had been manipulated like a puppet and then completely abandoned. She had no idea how long she had slept, or how long it would take someone back at the GCA to notice that she was still gone.

  After all, she’d told them she was perfectly fine even while she was being trussed up like a hog for market. Memory of that phone conversation flashed into her head. A man had called. She didn’t know who he was, but he had been verifying her present activities, and she had cheerfully lied.

  Sweat broke along her brow. Not only was the room unnecessarily warm, but she was in a whole heap of trouble. Trying to calm her nerves, she told herself just to breathe. She couldn’t worry about consequences until after she got out of this situation.

  But panic continued to well within her. Hadn’t the older Wests’ handlers been turned out of the GCA for failure of duty? No one would believe this wasn’t her fault.

  She still had time to figure something out. She had to. She had to get out, to redeem herself. Maybe the Wests hadn’t gone very far. It might’ve only been a few minutes since she had fallen asleep under their watchful eyes…

  If only she’d taken Oliver with her, none of this would have happened!

  Much as the logical side of her brain may have wanted to remain calm, the emotional side demanded hysteria. She’d been kidnapped, left in an abandoned building, and even if she were rescued, she was facing massive disciplinary action if not complete termination of her internship with Prometheus.

  It was only supposed to be a short, stupid errand.

  She fought back tears and struggled against her bonds again. It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. The Wests weren’t even supposed to be in Flagstaff anymore.

  She had to get out of here. There was no telling when anyone would come for her, and she didn’t want to die in a too-warm abandoned office in the middle of Nowhere, USA, not like this.

  She rolled to her other side and assessed the door, so close and yet so far off. If she exerted enough effort, she could make it over there, and she might even be able to lever her body up to reach the doorknob with her chin. Turning it would be another task entirely, but she’d worry about that when the time came.

  Only halfway to her goal, though, she was winded and quickly sinking into despair. What her mind thought should be a simple task proved to be excessively difficult thanks to the simple restrictions imposed upon her by a few pennies’ worth of duct tape. She stopped, panted heavily through her nose, and rubbed her cheek against the carpet with hopes of dislodging a corner of the tape that covered her mouth. It stuck tight. She felt claustrophobic, trapped and helpless, with salvation lying elusively beyond her grasp.

  Just as she was mustering her strength, a blissful sound caught her ears: footsteps in the hallway beyond. Emily raised a muffled yell through the duct tape and watched in growing hope as the doorknob jiggled.

  It was locked. Shock suffused her. She’d been locked in here.

  Those vicious little brats!

  Something hit the door with a heavy thud. It swung wide with a crack, and three dark-suited GCA agents poured through the opening. They stopped in surprise to discover Emily staring back at them.

  “Idiots,” said a cold, blissfully familiar voice, “don’t just stand there. Untie her already.” Oliver stood in the doorway, looking on with a calmness that seemed a little too forced. Emily had never been so glad to see anyone before.

  Someone ripped the tape from her mouth, and the next moment it was cut away from her wrists and ankles as well. Stiff and sore, with tears leaking from her eyes, she nevertheless surged forward to throw her arms around Oliver’s neck in a relieved embrace.

  “I’m never leaving you again, I swear,” she said to the boy, who stood stiff as a board in her embrace. “That was awful. No one should be able to control people like Honey West can!”

  She was openly crying, her jumbled whirlwind of emotions too powerful to contain. The room around her had fallen into a deathly silence, and Oliver was the first to break it.

  “You met Honey West?” he asked quietly.

  “On my way to the store,” said Emily, nodding into his shoulder, “back on the street. She… she… took my money!” she realized with outrage, and she pushed the boy away to check her pockets. They were empty. Not just the bills she had originally given to Honey, but her entire wallet was gone. Her voice pitched upward. “That… that little thief!”

  “We’re going to need a full report,” one of the GCA agents said, and he stepped forward to pull Emily toward the door.

  “No, wait!” she cried. “My phone! They must’ve left it behind here somewhere. They were talking about how it was bugged. You might be able to get something—”

  “We’ve already posted an alert on your user account,” he said. “We’re searching this whole building as standard procedure. You’ve had a rough ordeal, and it’s best we get you back to headquarters as soon as possible.” The words were meant to sound compassionate, but his voice was wholly devoid of that emotion. Instead, suspicion played about his face. Emily’s gaze flitted to the other agents to discover that they each wore a similar expression.

  She stiffened in anger. “You don’t really think…” she started hotly, but a hand clamped around her wrist and jerked her to the door.

  “You heard what they said, idiot,” Oliver drawled as he pulled her behind him. “There’s been enough time wasted already. If we’re going to catch the Wests, we need the resources back at the office.”

  For the moment, Emily shut her mouth and followed. She heard one of the agents whisper something unpleasant to another, but she couldn’t quite catch the words. Oliver headed for a bay of elevators beyond the abandoned office space, and Emily cast her eyes back to one side to glimpse the stairs she must have come up—they were tucked out of place, so that the other occupants of the building probably didn’t use them very much.

  An elevator car was waiting. Oliver shoved her in and pushed the button for the door to shut before any of the three agents could join them. Emily heard one of them shout for him to wait as the doors slid together.

  “Tell me everything you can,” Oliver said. “You have t
hirty seconds. They’re going to pull you into an interrogation room for the next four hours at least, and I don’t feel like sitting around twiddling my thumbs while they do.”

  “Four hours?” she repeated in horror.

  “Emily,” he growled in warning, and he shot her a glare that commanded her to squelch her anger and follow his instructions.

  “They were holed up there, as far as I can tell,” she said. “Where are we? I had my eyes closed while Honey led me from the street, so I don’t really know—”

  “That’s not important,” Oliver hissed.

  “Hawk said something about needing to change locations,” said Emily, “at the end, right before I fell asleep. They had bags packed. They must be here in Flagstaff for a reason.”

  Even though she was suddenly certain of this statement, Oliver only grunted. The elevator pinged, and the doors opened on the ground floor, to reveal a panting agent, who had bolted down the stairs to meet them.

  He grabbed Emily by the arm and glared down at Oliver. “We’re in the middle of an investigation. Neither of you is supposed to be out of our sights for the time being.”

  “How are we going to disappear from an elevator?” Oliver asked. “You think that after being tied up on the ground for two hours, she’s in any condition to climb the shaft? And she’s way too weak to lift me up to the access panel when it’s all the way up there.”

  “So you’ve thought about escape routes,” the man sneered.

  Oliver rolled his eyes, but said nothing.

  Had he thought about escape routes, then? Emily mulled over this idea as she was led to a waiting vehicle outside the building. Oliver had told her more than once that Prometheus children had nowhere but Prometheus to go, that running away was a futile effort. While his loyalty was self-interested at best, she’d never bothered to wonder whether he’d ever considered escape. Obviously he knew something about the logistics of it. At least, she had never thought to look for access panels when she entered an elevator.

  The drive back to the local GCA headquarters was surprisingly short. Emily was astonished by how close they were. Had the Wests known that, or had they chosen their location arbitrarily? Her brief, rapture-infused encounter with them had shown them to be quick-thinking and organized, but she didn’t know how calculating they were. Logically, they should try to avoid contact with any government organizations, but then why would they hide so close to the one that was searching for them?

  It made no sense.

  She felt like she was coming down off of anesthesia as the agents led her back into the GCA office and upstairs to a small conference room. Perhaps the stress of her situation was finally hitting her. Her limbs began to shake and her body shivered. Someone brought her a blanket and a hot drink, and Agents Marsh and Wilkes entered the room to sit across the table from her. Both wore grim expressions.

  “Tell us what happened from the moment you left our office,” said Agent Marsh.

  Emily swallowed and glanced at the clock. Her four hours had begun.

  Article VI

  Vanishing Into the Blue

  July 6, 4:13pm mst, GCA regional office, Flagstaff

  Oliver studied the screen in front of him, a frown on his face. Getting into the computer system for the local train station had been ridiculously easy, because the GCA always had covert access to such things. Searching through their digital surveillance archives was tedious, though, especially since he was only doing it on a hunch.

  He’d chosen a computer in the back corner. Several other agents were in the same room, typing away furiously as they searched for any vacant or abandoned properties where the Wests might have moved their hideout. Oliver should have been doing the same thing, but the task didn’t sit right with him.

  Hawk and Hummer were too shrewd to state their true intentions in front of an enemy. Why they had stayed in Flagstaff he did not know, but surely if they had meant to remain they would have said something about leaving in front of Emily, so that the GCA would focus their attention on the train station and bus depots. Instead, they had merely mentioned changing locations, and now everyone assumed that they were here for a specific reason, and that they were determined to stay until it was carried out.

  It had to be intentional misdirection. That was why Oliver pursued the less popular but more logical option that they had bolted. He’d already ruled out air travel, given the ridiculous amount of security the kids would have to go through to get to a plane and the lack of escape routes they’d have once they boarded. The buses had been a more likely scenario, but with much the same problem: they would be sandwiched in among a multitude of passengers, any of whom might recognize Happy or Honey, and they would have scant means of escape should the situation turn sour. Private transportation seemed the most likely option but, short of commanding that checkpoints be established at every road that led from the city (which Oliver didn’t have the authority to do anyway), there was no way he could track them. Hence, he’d turned his attention to the trains.

  The Wests had traveled by train before, a fairly anonymous mode because most people tended to mind their own business. Even though there had been other passengers, interviews after the fact revealed that most were oblivious to the presence of children on the train, let alone that two of those children had been prominently featured in news alerts all week.

  Oliver had already reviewed the afternoon surveillance stream for the station’s main entrances, eyes peeled for any children at all. After two hours of searching, though, he had caught no sign of the Wests and was beginning to think that his hunch was more of a waste of time than anything else. In desperation, he flipped over to the archives for the cameras that overlooked the train yard itself.

  The first camera feed he clicked into overlooked several sets of tracks and the back fence. There was no movement of note, except for a row of crows that sat along the fence, and some pigeons that plodded along the rail yard, pecking at whatever garbage they could find. The presence of birds made him immediately suspicious, but none of these birds were doing anything out of the ordinary.

  Impatiently he sped up the video. The birds on the ground strutted quickly from one place to the next, only to scatter when a train zoomed past on one set of tracks. In the wake of the great machine, the birds returned, pecking among the pebbles and dirt.

  Suddenly, the screen went dark.

  Oliver’s heart quickened as he stopped the video feed and backed it up slowly. A pigeon’s beak and beady eyes dipped into the frame, and the bird pulled away in reverse, its wings flapping smoothly. Oliver resumed the video in its real time: it showed the train yard, the birds, and then out of nowhere that one pigeon fluttered up to the lens and blocked everything from view with its belly. Shadows played back and forth for about thirty seconds. He could make out a flash of wings and a gnarled little talon, but little more than that. From all reasonable accounts, the pigeon looked as though it was trying to peck something just above the camera.

  Oliver knew better. After the thirty or so seconds had elapsed, the bird flew off again. It had blocked view of the yard just long enough for someone—or four someones—to jump over the back fence and bolt across the rails.

  “Gotcha,” Oliver said smugly.

  He had to give Hawk credit for using his resources well. The security guards at the station might have cursed the pigeon in that moment, but they probably never suspected anything beyond. He checked the time signature on the recording. It read 12:05. They must have taken a roundabout way to the station after leaving Emily stranded, probably wary that they were being followed. If they had snuck into the train yard, chances were they stowed away on a cargo train rather than a passenger car. Either way, there were only a limited number of escapes they could have made from there.

  As he searched for the train schedule, a commotion sounded at the doorway. He looked up, expecting Emily to come from her interrogation.

  It was not Emily who appeared trailed by four other agents. It was Wilkes,
and he looked none too happy.

  Oliver stared in open curiosity as Wilkes wove his way between the computer desks, back to the corner. “Someone just delivered this to our front door,” he said with an ill-concealed sneer, and he slapped an envelope down on the desk.

  Oliver picked it up gingerly. His own name was emblazoned on the front, with the GCA office’s address listed beneath. There was no postage stamp or other evidence of official delivery, and no return address. The back flap had already been torn open so that they could screen the message before they brought it to him.

  “Who delivered it?” he asked as he pulled out the single sheet from within.

  “We’re questioning him right now,” said Wilkes tersely.

  Interest piqued, Oliver flitted his eyes over the short contents of the letter. It was written with a strong hand in plain black ink and on nondescript paper. It read,

  Dear Oliver,

  Tell your handler we’re sorry about how we had to leave so suddenly. Honey went a little overboard. After we’d left, we realized that the thermostat was off, but we knew you’d get there in plenty of time. Next time, we’ll be more careful. Know of any good hideouts? See you soon!

  Hawk

  The capital letters of each sentence in the main paragraph were retraced a couple of times to make them especially conspicuous, spelling a message that had Oliver’s blood pressure rising.

  “Thanks? For what?” He lifted his outraged gaze to discover several piercing glares fixed upon him. “What do you make of this?” Surely they didn’t think that he had helped the runaways in any capacity, did they? His pulse spiked, his hands clammy. “I mean, obviously they’re baiting me, and trying to undermine my position here while they’re at it.”

  “Maybe,” said Wilkes in a noncommittal voice. He took back the letter and its envelope, folding the one inside the other. “Or maybe there’s a deeper game going on here. You waited more than two hours after your handler left to start looking for her. Was that intentional? Did you know she would encounter the runaways, and were you giving them time to escape before an alert could be set up on her cell?”