The Challenge

by Ridley Pearson

  “WAIT!” Miss Kay shouted, now raising her voice so that everyone in the lobby heard. “SOMEONE STOP THAT CHILD!”

  It is a universe designed against children, Kaileigh thought, as not just one, but many, adults tried to grab on to her. Thankfully, she was about three times faster than any adult would ever be, so not one of them laid their hands on her. She cut left, considered the ladies’ room, but decided it was the worst possible choice—a dead-end trap.

  EXIT, read the red sign pointing to the door. Next to the two elevators—elevators she didn’t know existed—another sign: TO GARAGE PARKING.

  She took the stairs. She’d meet up with Steel at the rendezvous. In the meantime, she didn’t put it past Miss Kay to chase her all the way back to Chicago, on foot if necessary, so she increased her descent, taking two stairs at a time, and broke into the underground garage at a full sprint.

  63.

  Steel looked on gleefully as his mother came out of their room at a near run. She headed away from him and the stairs. He assumed the front desk clerk had called, announcing the arrival of a note that concerned her son. The rest was pure motherly instinct.

  She turned and disappeared, heading down another hall toward the bank of elevators. Steel made his move. He pushed through the stairwell door, ran down the hall, and reached the room. His hand trembled as he inserted the key card, wondering what he’d do if Marshal Larson had waited inside. Thankfully, he found the room empty—or, more accurately, not quite empty.

  He slipped FIDOE into a drawer, hoping his mother wouldn’t look there. He then got what he’d come for and hurried back to the stairwell. He had no way of knowing what Kaileigh had gone through, but he felt an internal panic. They’d been crazy to try this.

  Crazier still if they actually got away with it.

  64 .

  Grym paced anxiously along a row of gray, rain-stained windows. On the other side of the wall a woman was tied to a chair, her hair disheveled, her cheeks stained with a mixture of tears and mascara. For the time being she was asleep—her chin touching her collarbone—a peaceful state she no doubt cherished.

  Soon, Grym had to decide what to do with her; how to handle her. Where some captors might show mercy, Grym had other plans. Her existence offered him nothing but bad choices.

  A faint voice at the back of his head told him he could let her go when this was over. She and her husband might report her kidnapping—although they’d be fools to, since his threat would be to come back and finish what he’d started—but even then they couldn’t prevent the outcome without a great deal of proof that they did not have. The Power Poker lottery would be won by a person having no ties to any Chicago street gangs or terrorists—Joe Normal. Grym’s brother was the only one who knew the man’s identity. They compartmentalized such information whenever possible, in case of arrest. Grym awaited the phone call informing him that their person on the inside of the lottery commission had made the substitution. Their gang had leverage over such people, the result of complicated networking, underworld contacts, and the paying of favors. They’d been owed, and now they’d been paid. Or soon would be. That phone call would sound a starter’s pistol in his head: once the switch was made, there was only one possible outcome: Joe Normal, with no traceable connections to their gang, would win more than forty million dollars. In six months’ time that forty million dollars would be broken into eighty different parts and transferred several times before heading to the Middle East. But during that six months, the forty million would produce nearly one million dollars in interest—and this money was his gang’s reward, theirs to keep. A million dollars could buy a lot of trouble, a lot of weapons—they’d be in business for years.

  It might have occurred to him to try and keep the forty million for himself, but even Grym didn’t know the identity of Joe Normal—didn’t know how the code at the bottom of the Polaroid played into this. And besides, he would never cross his brother. It had been his idea, his plan—Grym was just implementing one part of it.

  He turned and paced in the other direction. But what to do with the preacher’s wife? Until that money was transferred, six months from now, she and her husband presented at least a faint threat to the success of the operation. Could he allow such a thing? If not, was he prepared to do what was necessary?

  He continued pacing, his knees and the soles of his feet sore from it already. She didn’t deserve to die: she’d done nothing to harm anyone.

  But he wondered: Is there any other choice?

  65.

  Natalie Shufman was starving. By nothing more than blind luck she’d spotted Grym—whom she knew by face but not by name—at the science challenge. Having warned the mother to get the boy away from here, she’d then done the only thing that she could think of: she’d followed Grym. He’d tricked his way into a hotel room—the boy’s or an accomplice’s? From there he’d gone to Union Station.

  At Union Station he’d located the briefcase—a discovery that had shocked her. From the train station he’d traveled by subway to this place. She’d spent the night in the same abandoned car as she was sitting in now. This morning he’d ventured out to a church—again, by subway—briefcase in hand.

  He’d left the church without the case.

  All this while she’d had nothing to eat.

  Now she was hiding inside the abandoned car in what looked like a bombed-out neighborhood, where she doubted even the police went without backup. The street pavement was cracked and heaving; what had once been sidewalks were now weed patches. Most of the brick homes were abandoned, their windows busted out, their front doors covered with plywood, and the plywood spray painted with graffiti. A very old, and very thin three-legged dog gimped across the street, sniffing a dead squirrel in what looked to be its second week of decay. The only sounds were distant: traffic, a helicopter, and just beneath that, the unrelenting pulse of rap music.

  Third building to the right was the one he had entered. It looked like an old mill or factory building: brick and glass and boarded up. He had been in there for two hours. It seemed a desperate place to hide. The heat had to be overpowering in there—windows all shuttered, many covered with graying plywood. She could imagine rats and spiders and the foul smells of stale air and rot.

  She assumed there would be men coming to deal with the boy. She believed they would check in with this man first. She never questioned her determination, her resolve, to protect the boy. Had she been objective, she would have recognized the futility of it all. But it was a defense of innocence, more than anything: the boy didn’t deserve whatever they had planned for him. She blamed herself for his involvement. Her own innocence had been stolen from her by people just like Grym; she wasn’t going to allow the boy to be hurt.

  That Grym knew about the science challenge, knew about the hotel, troubled her. His venturing inside the hotel room perplexed her. What did he have planned?

  And what, if anything, could she do to stop him?

  66.

  “You’re brilliant,” Kaileigh said.

  “I try,” Steel said immodestly. Connected to the end of Steel’s arm was a strap of purple nylon mesh—a leash—and attached to the leash was Cairo. “She has the nose of a bloodhound—that’s the saluki in her—and the brain of a German shepherd. I got the idea for FIDOE from watching her sniff out rabbits in our backyard. The really good thing is, she doesn’t run on batteries.”

  “But when your mom finds out…”

  “Yeah, but I’m already in so much trouble it doesn’t count.”

  “I think it will count,” Kaileigh said with a smile.

  “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  They arrived back at the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station and stood in the exact location where FIDOE had run out of power. Steel scented Cairo on to the briefcase and then passed the briefcase to Kaileigh.

  “We can throw it out now,” Steel said.

  “What?”

  “We can’t carry it when Cairo’s trying to scent it. I
t’ll confuse her. There’s nothing in it we need.”

  “We can’t just throw it out,” Kaileigh said in a hush. “What if they need it later as…evidence?” She said this word in a complete whisper.

  “Then set it down,” Steel said. “Leave it here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this close to the entrance, they’ll treat it as a threat: an unattended bag. They’ll probably call the bomb squad or something, but you can be sure they’ll take notice of it, and they’ll lock it up somewhere.”

  She considered what he’d said. “You really are smart, you know?”

  Cairo became excited.

  “We can’t keep it,” he said.

  Kaileigh walked over to a bench and set the case down. After all their efforts to find and hold on to it, it was difficult to just leave it behind. Both she and Steel glanced over their shoulders to look back as Cairo led them onto and down the moving escalators, straining at the leash.

  Once into the station, Cairo roamed in big, loopy circles, clearly having lost the scent, and for a moment Steel allowed himself to believe this had all been for nothing. But then her tail began wagging, her nose went lower to the concrete, and Cairo made for the turnstiles. The L’Enfant station was enormous, with several interconnecting lines. Steel glanced up: Cairo was pulling to enter the green line, which terminated at Branch Avenue.

  “What tickets do I buy?” Kaileigh asked, panic rising in her voice. She stood in front of a sleek vending machine with blinking lights. The options proved intimidating. “How do we know where we want to get off? She’s going to lose the scent once we’re on the train.”

  “Buy two for the end of the line,” he said. And she did.

  Steel’s plan took shape on the first stop: he and Kaileigh and Cairo got off the train. He walked Cairo from one end of the platform to the other, and he made sure to give the dog a good whiff of the exit. When Cairo failed to show any interest, it was pretty clear she’d lost the scent, because when Cairo had the scent you could barely hold her back.

  As a precaution, they walked her over to the opposite platform and repeated the routine—up and down the platform. With the dog still showing no interest, they reboarded the train in the original direction, and got out at what was their second stop: Navy Yard.

  The train departed, leaving them there. Steel patiently walked the dog from one end of the platform to the other.

  Kaileigh said, “I understand the logic, Steel, but this could take forever.” Another train arrived, and she said, “Let’s get on. Please don’t tell me we have to wait for another.”

  Steel said, “We can’t. It’s not scientific. We have to do the exact same procedure at each station, or the formula is flawed and the results will be inconsistent.” Unable to tell if she’d heard him above the roar of passengers leaving the train, he turned toward her, worried she might board against his wishes. Above all, he didn’t want to get separated.

  Kaileigh hadn’t been listening. She was staring up at a huge advertising poster. She had her head tilted back and her mouth was open, slack jawed. “Kaileigh!” Steel called out, but she didn’t respond.

  He glanced up at a sign: NEXT TRAIN: 2 MINS. She would insist they take this second train, so he hurried Cairo to the stairs that led to the bridge connecting the two platforms, determined to let Cairo sniff the other side. But halfway up the stairs, as Steel’s attention remained on Kaileigh, the leash tightened, jerked, and pulled out of Steel’s hand.

  Cairo bounded up the stairs in a blur—at a full run. She tore across the bridge, following the exit signs, ignoring his repeated cries. “Cairo, Come! CAIRO, SIT!” But the dog headed straight for the escalators, her nose to the concrete.

  She’d picked up the scent, he thought.

  “KAILEIGH!”

  Kaileigh remained staring up at the poster with a stupefied look on her face. From Steel’s angle, he couldn’t see which poster, but it hardly mattered. He had no choice but to follow Cairo—and to run as fast as he could. The dog entered the right-hand escalator, squeezing past people, flying up the stairs.

  Steel hit the escalator running, the glow of daylight seen at the very top. But whereas Cairo didn’t seem to even notice she was climbing eighty feet of stairs, Steel’s legs quickly stiffened and became two lead weights. After only a short distance, his mighty effort had died and he was barely running at all.

  That was when Kaileigh ran past him taking two stairs at a time. She even had enough wind to apologize to the people she’d slipped past and to scream once loudly: “Somebody stop that dog!”

  Steel wasn’t about to lose this particular race. He found a reserve he didn’t know he had, his heavy legs back in action and—one stair at a time—he climbed the escalator. When he finally reached the top, his legs were throbbing. To his horror, Kaileigh had not waited for him; she was nowhere to be seen.

  Cairo was gone.

  Steel found himself alone, at the top of the Metro station, in an unfamiliar place, his plan gone astray, just like his dog.

  67.

  Larson descended the escalator at the Waterfront-SEU Metro station at a full run, Hampton right behind him. He’d gotten the call only minutes earlier: just after Larson’s Be On Lookout, a young boy and girl and a dog—with no adults—had been spotted by a transit cop monitoring a closed-circuit television.

  “It has to be them,” Larson said over his shoulder.

  “Look where you’re going!” Hampton called back. One slip at this speed and Larson would go head over heels down fifty feet of steel stairs.

  They were met at the bottom by two men in blue uniforms. The transit police introduced themselves, and one quickly said, “False alarm. When we called, we thought we had them crossing to the north platform. But they came back and got back on the southbound train.”

  “They what?” Hampton blurted out.

  Larson tried to make sense of this. “You’re sure there were three of them, and they were traveling together?”

  “A young boy with a girl and dog. Just like the BOL you put out,” the officer said.

  “They got off the train,” Hampton said. “Went over to the other platform, came back to the southbound platform, and got back on? What’s that about?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. We called it in because we thought we had them. Mike, here—” he said, indicating his partner, “he headed up to the top of the tube to cut ’em off. But wham, there they were getting back on the dang train.”

  “What are they up to?” Larson muttered, trying to think this through. Then he said under his breath, “Why does this kid have to be so smart?”

  Then he answered his own question. “The dog! They’re trying to use the dog to—” He cut himself off. “The kid was concerned about the woman in the photo.”

  “But if they’re trying to go after her…they’re headed for trouble,” Hampton said.

  “So we’d better stop them.” Larson studied the station, trying to make sense of the kids’ movements. “They were being thorough: that’s why they checked the other platform. They were using the dog to try to pick up a scent. That makes everything fit.”

  “That dog was not on a scent,” the transit cop said. “I’m a hunter. I got bird dogs. I know when a hound is on a scent, and that dog may have been looking, but he wasn’t getting anything.”

  “They’re going station to station,” Hampton said. “Somehow—don’t ask me how—they know the guy took this line, and they’re trying to pick up the scent again.”

  Larson tugged on one of the cops to join him. Together, they sprinted for the escalator. Larson instructed, “Call down the line, station to station, to be looking for them: a dog and two kids. They can’t be too far ahead. We’ve got to find them.” He reached the escalator, Hampton right behind him.

  The transit cop watched the two men bounding up the long, long rise into the glowing circle of light above them.

  “Did you hear me?” Larson hollered back down. “We’ve got to find t
hose kids!”

  68.

  Steel had to find them: Cairo and Kaileigh had disappeared off the face of the earth. A few blocks from the Metro station the neighborhood turned dirty and run-down. The sidewalks were cracked, the streets in horrible shape—the kind of place where, in Chicago, his mother always locked the car doors and rolled up all the windows. He tried to look confident, but his anxiety overcame him as he walked past houses with small, unmowed lawns of brown grass sprinkled with litter. He passed a gleaming red convertible that held a couple of white guys smoking cigarettes in the front seat. They were covered in tattoos, and they looked at Steel like he was some kind of afternoon snack.

  Where’d they go? he wondered. How could a girl and a dog disappear so quickly? What if they were in trouble?

  He was drawn by the sound of barking—a sound that kept moving. It wasn’t Cairo’s bark, but it could have been the result of Cairo passing by. First he heard it to his right, so he moved a block in that direction. He found some dogs behind a chain-link fence. They didn’t bark as he passed, and he wondered, Do they only bark at other dogs? Then more barking came from up the street, and Steel ran to catch up.

  He found these dogs as well, both German shepherds, one on a leash tied to a metal stake, the other on a front porch, too old and gray to go anywhere. Now, more barking in the distance. He looked out at old sofas on porches. A chair with the stuffing bubbling out of it. Houses in total disrepair, many of them boarded up. Did he dare to keep following the sounds of barking dogs deeper and deeper into this wasteland? He looked behind him; at least he wasn’t lost: he had the ability to remember each and every turn he’d taken to get here.