The Challenge

by Ridley Pearson

He stopped, hidden partly behind a bashed and dented refrigerator that stood improbably on the corner like a phone booth. Click, click: he captured the rows of windows on the building’s north side and tried to match them with what he’d seen in the Polaroid of the preacher’s wife. He remembered to flip the image in his mind’s eye, knowing he was searching for the reverse image. Nothing he saw fit the pattern.

  He mentally grabbed them in groups of four—the number of windows behind the hostage in the photo. Grabbed them; flipped them; compared them. But the process was painstakingly slow, for he knew it could be any combination of any four windowpanes in a single line. His mind tired with the effort—it was worse than the memorization games he’d played to impress his friends and teachers. His brain was like an overloaded computer—it heated up. He got a headache.

  He looked ahead to the end of the road and the dark brown waters of the river, where a lonely barge moved slowly behind the effort of a tugboat. This was the only sign of human life. His anxiety burned a hole in his stomach. He thought he might puke. He looked the other way. No Kaileigh. No woman. No Cairo. Gone. Just an empty street lined with empty houses.

  What was he doing here? What had he been thinking?

  He came to the end of this block and crossed again, reaching a bent and twisted railing that rode a seawall at the end of an empty parking lot, the river’s water churning only a few feet away. He turned to look back at the south-facing wall of the abandoned brick structure and its row after row of vandalized windows.

  His eye picked it out like a string of letters in a word scramble. The kind where the word is spelled backward and the grouping of letters is tucked into the second line from the bottom. But his eye saw it without any kind of prompting for analysis: four windows that when flipped left to right created the exact geometrical pattern he’d committed to memory the first time he’d seen that Polaroid.

  And there, in the second window over: a pair of eyes. His eyes. Only the eyes. No face. No hair. No body to go with them.

  Steel felt his lungs freeze. He couldn’t have been more exposed: standing all alone against a railing in a crippled parking lot. It had been the only place from which to get a decent look at the east wall, but now that he saw where he was, he realized he couldn’t have been more stupid. It might have been okay had he just kept his head down and walked along—a dejected kid walking along the seawall. But he’d been caught facing the building—studying the building—drawn to it by his brain’s uncanny ability to decipher geometric shapes.

  He heard rapid footsteps to his left—a person running. He looked but saw no one.

  When he looked again for the eyes in the window, they were gone. Panic stung him. The man from the train was coming after him. He felt certain of this. He knew it with absolute conviction.

  He had to pick a way out from the dead end he’d put himself into: the subway station was a long way off. Which side of the building would the man use to try to intersect Steel’s escape route? Left or right? West or east? He had to outguess him.

  Wait a second! he thought. If it was the man from the train chasing him, then wouldn’t the hostage have been left alone? Wasn’t this the perfect time to go inside and find her?

  Steel caught movement out of the corner of his eye: a man running toward him from his left.

  It was much too soon to be the man from up in the window. Then who? Steel wasn’t going to stick around and make introductions.

  He sprinted for the nearest door of the abandoned building.

  72.

  Steel tried the door: locked. He kicked at it, but it held firm. He fought the urge to look back as he fled to his right.

  He rounded the corner, very much aware that the man was still behind him. It wasn’t a door he spotted, but a sheet of gray plywood, one corner warped and no longer screwed into the window frame. Steel yanked on the plywood and peeled it open just wide enough to slip through.

  He dropped down off a ledge and into a puddle of water. Light seeped in around the perimeter of each piece of plywood, leaving a dozen glowing frames on the wall. It was enough light to make out the immediate area, a lobby or large office space, with square pillars set at regular intervals. The squishy thing beneath his shoes was a soggy carpet. Light fixtures hung bent off the wall like beckoning fingers.

  The windows he’d spotted were five stories up. He hurried to the end of the room and pushed through a pair of swinging doors, entering into a dark corridor. Behind him he heard his pursuer kicking a door. It raised the hair on the nape of his neck. Then he heard the screech of plywood—the man was close….

  Steel tried one door after another—all locked—before finally spotting a rusted panel to the right of a steel door indicating a stairway.

  He leaned a shoulder into the stairway door and it came open, revealing a dimly lit stairwell. He pushed the door shut behind him and took off up the stairs.

  He passed cigarette butts, matchbooks, and fast-food litter. The light was dim, coming from somewhere high above. The air stank.

  Up…up…up he went, as fast as he could run. He passed an exit door at each level bearing a huge block-printed number:

  2

  3

  And then, from behind him, came the rapid slap, slap, slap of heavy feet.

  Steel took two stairs at a time. If he could just make it to the next level, maybe…His legs burned. His pursuer was moving fast now, quickly closing the distance between them.

  Steel knew what to do. He would surprise the man by turning and kicking out at just the right moment.

  He slowed enough to allow his pursuer to gain on him.

  Just as he reached the fourth-floor landing, he turned, grabbed the rail, and kicked out. He caught the man squarely in the chest with the sole of his shoe. His knee locked. The man didn’t simply lose his balance, he flew off the stair. Launched into midair.

  The man was carrying a small but powerful flashlight. Its beam wobbled, a circle of bluish white light danced on the dripping undersides of the stairwell above them. Then, as the man fell, Steel got a good look at the man.

  It was his father.

  73.

  Kaileigh regretted having left Steel behind. He was the only friend she’d had for days now. Walking along with the woman—a complete stranger—she worried she’d done the wrong thing. She couldn’t sort out what was wrong and what was right. If Cairo hadn’t been there, she’d have been even more scared, but just the presence of the dog calmed her some.

  “That’s about the twentieth time you’ve looked back,” the woman said.

  “I’m worried about him.”

  “He made his choice,” the woman said. “He’ll have to live with it. Or not.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I warned him.”

  “I should have stayed.”

  “Two wrongs…” the woman offered. “He’s the one making the bad decision, not you.”

  But Kaileigh wondered. She knew very little about this woman, and what she did know wasn’t the most reassuring: a gang member, a criminal. What had she done, agreeing to go off with her? What if the woman was trying to kidnap her?

  “I can find the station from here by myself,” she said.

  “In this neighborhood? I don’t think so.”

  She wanted to turn around and find Steel; she wanted to jerk on Cairo’s leash and take off. But how far would she get? The woman had longer legs and looked to be fit and athletic. She wouldn’t make it far.

  She looked around, searching for some way out of this.

  At that exact moment, two men jumped out at them. They had guns.

  “U.S. Marshal,” the taller man announced in a deep, thundering voice.

  “Hands on the back of your head!” said the other.

  74.

  “Dad?” Steel’s voice echoed in the bottomless chamber of the stairwell.

  His father’s face twisted into a knot of pain, where he lay head down on the stairs. His grimace tightened further as his hand jabbe
d beneath his back. Steel thought he’d torn a muscle or injured himself. But instead, his dad’s hand quickly came out from beneath him, holding a gun.

  “Steel! DUCK!” his father roared.

  It took Steel several milliseconds to process the command, but perhaps because it came in his father’s voice, he obeyed without a second thought. He allowed his knees to go weak, and, losing his balance, he tumbled forward.

  His father fired two rounds from the gun: right where Steel had been standing.

  As Steel rolled, he heard the door thump shut, realizing too late that someone had been standing right behind him on the landing. His father had just shot at the man, but the door was shut now, and Steel hadn’t heard the man scream with pain.

  His father had a gun. His father…a gun…He had fired the gun. His father, the salesman turned FBI agent, acting like Alex Rider.

  Kyle Trapp limped up the stairs and helped Steel to a sitting position. What his mother had told him about his father hadn’t fully registered until this moment. It was as if he had to experience it for himself.

  “I thought it was you! I nearly called out, but I only saw your back.…” his father said, panting. Beads of sweat ran down his face. “But it is you! And I need you to stay here.”

  “No!” Steel said, grabbing for his father’s arm. “The woman in the chair…the preacher’s wife…she’s in this building.”

  “Okay…I’m on it!” his father said.

  “You really are an FBI agent?” Steel said.

  His father couldn’t hide his surprise. “Your mother told you,” he said, making it a statement, not a question. “Listen, we’ll get to that.”

  His father continued up the stairs.

  “I promise!” he called back.

  “I am not staying here,” Steel called out, stopping him. “Besides, I know which room she’s in.”

  His father turned, out of breath. “This is what I do, Steel. It’s dangerous. You’ve got to—”

  “Come with you,” Steel said, interrupting, “because I’m sure not staying here alone.”

  “Which room?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Uncertainty hung between them: his father’s sense of urgency, Steel’s determination not to be left behind by his father yet again.

  His father yielded. “Okay, but you stay behind me. And if I say drop, you drop.”

  “Yes, sir.” Steel hurried up the stairs. “Not there,” he said, seeing his father’s hand on the door handle. “Fifth floor, facing east: the river.” He could feel his father’s eagerness to pursue the man he’d shot at—presumably the man from the train. And there was something else: a flicker of a father’s doubt, not believing Steel. But this was quickly overcome by the fact that it was Steel, not just any boy. His father nodded.

  “Fifth floor,” he said, repeating what Steel had said. “Facing east.”

  “If he was trying to get up there, we just cut him off. He’ll have to go to the other side of the building. We’ve got the advantage.”

  “Run,” his father said, taking off up the stairs at an amazing speed. Since when could his father move like that? It was as if his whole world had flipped upside down: his father an FBI agent, with a gun, chasing some gang lord in a bombed-out building in Washington, D.C.

  “Is this really happening?” Steel blurted out, wondering if maybe everything from the train ride on had been some mixture of dream and nightmare, and that he was still asleep, still stuck in dreamland.

  “Shh!” his father said.

  Only then did he realize how silently his father climbed the stairs. He was floating instead of clomping. They’d lied to him! His mother and father had orchestrated a lie that must have gone back years. A salesman. The thing about it was, Steel had never pictured his father as a salesman. It had never made any sense. He knew too much about so many things; he had a childlike sense of adventure; he was an expert camper and outdoorsman. Weren’t salesmen supposed to be boring and stuck in a rut? His father was anything but.

  “Spy Kids”! he blurted out. “This is just like Spy Kids!” He thought about that for a second. Only it’s real.

  His father had one hand on the door to level five. The other—the hand with the gun—came to his lips and indicated silence.

  He pulled open the door, peered out into the hall, and signaled Steel forward. Steel heard it before his father did: footsteps to their left. Steel signaled by pointing furiously. His father picked up on it, nodded, and used hand signals to indicate they would split up: Steel to the right, his dad to the left.

  Steel figured the footsteps were the man from the train—hurrying to beat them to the preacher’s wife. He got his bearings, recalling with absolute clarity the layout of the building from the outside. The tall panel of brick that rose in the middle of the east-facing wall would be the staircase they’d just left. The windows that matched the photograph were to the right. The same direction his father was sending him. Steel took off down the hall. His father ran off in the opposite direction.

  He reached a door and pushed it open: empty. No, not empty, he realized. Fresh cigarette butts on the floor; fresh fast-food litter and empty soda cans on the table. Another door to his right. He hurried over to it and—yes!—it was secured with a padlock. He shouldn’t have been so excited to find it locked, but the lock was new, and that could mean only one thing.

  He kicked at the door, but the lock and hasp didn’t budge. Again, but with the same results. He thought back to science class: leverage. He needed something long and strong to pry the lock’s hasp off the door. There was an old wobbly chair by the table—but it was too big and bulky. There wasn’t much else to the room—some junk piled in the corner.

  Bam! A gunshot from down the hall. Then loud noises like a chase. Steel froze at the sound of the shot, briefly unable to breathe, much less move. But then that gunshot served as a starter’s pistol for Steel. He raced to the far end of the room, kicked up at a broken window, and ripped a metal divider from the frame. He couldn’t believe the thing was in his hand—but there it was. He shoved it between the hasp and the door and pulled against it. The hasp bent like a coat hanger. He shoved the metal prod deeper between the hasp and the door and pulled again. The screws began to show. Again. The screws grew in length, literally ripping from the wood door. At once, a piece of the doorjamb broke off, the wood frame splintering. The lock—still locked—and the hasp tore free, and Steel threw open the door.

  The woman from the photograph, the preacher’s wife, was bound to the chair exactly as he’d seen her. The same geometrical pattern of broken windows were behind her on the wall. The room smelled of sewage—a disgusting bucket of filth next to a roll of toilet paper in the corner. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t seem to see. Then she blinked, and tears ran from her eyes.

  Steel said, “Don’t worry, it’s only me, Steel. My dad…he’s back there. He’s got a gun.” He immediately went to work on the duct tape on her forearms, not understanding why he was saying what he was saying, but his mouth just gushing all this stuff. “I found the briefcase. I have this dog, Cairo. We came on the subway. My friend Kaileigh and me.” He got her left arm free and started on her right, as she worked on the tape that covered her mouth.

  “My prayers…my prayers…” she muttered. She was crying something fierce, coughing and gagging in a wet, disgusting display, while Steel was on his knees clawing at the duct tape that bound her ankles.

  The noise from the hall grew closer: someone running.

  Steel worked furiously. The last piece of tape came free.

  When he pulled her out of the chair, the woman fell, and Steel caught her. He found himself hugging this older woman—his face in her chest, her skin all blubbery and soft. He nearly puked. She found her legs and came to standing, using Steel to support her.

  The men came through the door in the other room: his father and the guy from the train. A tangle of limbs. Fists flailing. They rolled on the floor. Steel saw his father take a ba
d blow to the face. Then another. Steel didn’t mean to do it—it was nothing he thought about—but all at once he let go of the preacher’s wife. She sank to the floor like a balloon sculpture losing air. He crossed into the room and headed straight for the wobbly-looking chair, picked it up and, as the man from the train wrestled into a position where he sat on top of Steel’s father, delivering one fist after another into his father’s swollen face, Steel hoisted the chair high over his head and lowered it onto the man’s back with all his strength. The man sagged and fell, then raised to his elbows and dragged himself toward the windows. He rocked his head once in Steel’s direction, his eyes filled first with rage and then disbelief as he seemed to gain focus.

  “You?” he said.

  Steel’s father struggled to his feet. So did the man from the train, who looked once at Steel and the chair, then at Steel’s father. And then, totally unexpectedly, he turned and dove out the window—glass shattering in an enormous splash.

  Steel and his dad ran to the window. The man was facedown in what had once been grass, far below. For a second it looked as if his right leg had disappeared, but then Steel realized it was broken at the knee and bent back beneath the man at an impossible angle. He rose to his elbows and actually started dragging himself toward the river.

  “Help her!” his father yelled as he ran, limping, from the room. Steel heard the clatter of metal: his father had retrieved his gun. And then the bang of the stairway door and the thundering thumping of his father descending the stairs.

  Steel got his shoulder under the woman’s arm and helped her to standing. “You’re going to be okay,” he said. “We’re going to get you out of here.”

  75.

  Steel, his dad, Larson, and Kaileigh all passed through the office building’s security. Larson and Mr. Trapp were required to remove their guns and run their sport coats through the X-ray machine. The building’s lobby was open and rose several stories overhead so that everything echoed inside, from footsteps to voices.