by Alan Gratz
“Just like Lindsay Lohan,” Jimmy said.
“We don’t know where he is, but we do know that he’s alive,” Aaliyah said. “If you and Mickey are right, and he is in America …” Aaliyah shook her head.
“If he is here, why? What’s his target?” Dane asked.
“Ansari’s trademarks are intricate plots and false clues. It’s all about misdirection,” Aaliyah said. “Which is why I agree with Mickey—he meant for us to uncover the Women’s World Cup plot. He wants us to think we’re safe. That’s when he’ll strike. And it’ll be big, whatever it is. He wants an audience. He wants to scare as many people as possible.”
“And if he is in America, he’ll want to do it soon, before he’s discovered,” Dane said.
“Here’s something that might help,” Jimmy said. He turned his computer around. “Mickey just sent us your brother’s latest music video.”
ANOTHER VIDEO FROM DARIUS?
We all gathered around Jimmy’s computer. Darius read another prepared statement off a piece of paper. He looked older. More tired. His beard was long now. I almost didn’t recognize him. There was almost nothing of the old Darius I knew and loved there on the screen.
Is this how Haydar Ansari’s wife and children felt as they watched him transform into a terrorist? Watched him become someone they didn’t know anymore?
I tried to focus on what Darius was saying. It was the usual death to America stuff. And then Darius dropped two Rostam clues.
The first was Rostam versus Godzilla, a story we’d made up after watching a bunch of Japanese monster movies on cable one afternoon.
The other was the bit about the Joker’s goons again.
I sat back on the rock-hard bed, deflated.
“What?” Jimmy asked. “What is it?”
“It’s the same code he used before,” I said. “The one about football.”
“But the other clue is new, isn’t it?” Aaliyah said. “About Godzilla?”
“Yeah. Rostam and Siyavash have to fight Godzilla. We couldn’t beat him, so we lured him into a rocket ship full of hot dogs and blasted him into space.”
Jimmy snickered.
“We were little kids,” I argued for what felt like the millionth time. “What I want to know is why Darius is still talking about the Women’s World Cup.”
“To make sure you got it,” Dane said.
“But we took care of it already,” I said. “The CIA. The army. Whoever. They stopped it.”
“Maybe they haven’t heard,” Jimmy said. “Maybe they’ve got their heads buried too far in the sand.”
“No,” Aaliyah said. “I refuse to believe Ansari doesn’t know. Even if their contacts didn’t tell him, it was all over the news, in every newspaper in the world. It was even on ESPN. Haydar Ansari knows—his World Cup bomb plot was foiled. But I think he wanted it to be.”
“Plans within plans?” Dane asked.
“Precisely,” Aaliyah said. “Give the CIA a bomb plot in Canada to throw us off the scent of what he’s really up to here in America. Something he’s kept so secret not even Darius knows about it. Unless there’s a clue to it in your Godzilla story.”
“Ansari’s going to fire a rocket full of hot dogs at us!” Jimmy joked.
“Yes, it doesn’t sound very helpful,” Aaliyah said.
“But why give the Joker’s-goons clue again?” I asked.
Aaliyah shrugged. “I suspect your brother’s access to information from the outside world is more limited, and he doesn’t know that the Women’s World Cup plot was foiled. As Jimmy says, he’s just making sure we get the message. And as long as Darius doesn’t know anything, we don’t know anything.” She bit her lip. “We really needed a new clue right about now, but this video is worthless.”
“No,” I said. “No, it has to mean something. The Godzilla clue is new.”
I had Jimmy play the video again for me. I stared at Darius as he read. What are you trying to tell me, Darius? What are you trying to say? I know you’re trying to tell me something!
He came to the part again about the Joker’s goons, and I remembered playing football with him that day in the backyard.
And then, suddenly, I had it. What Darius meant the first time, and what he meant now. What Haydar Ansari was doing in America. What he was going to attack.
“Oh my God,” I said. I hopped up and started pacing the room. “Oh my God! We were so stupid!”
“What?” Aaliyah asked. “What is it?”
“Okay. So. Okay,” I said, still pacing. Thoughts were coming at me like a quarterback blitz. I couldn’t find the words. Where to begin. “Okay. Yes. Sorry. So, what if Darius does know there’s another plot? What if the thing about the Joker’s goons did mean the Women’s World Cup the first time, but means something different this time?”
“Something different?” Aaliyah said. “But it’s the same story. The same reference.”
“The clue was all about a bomb in a football,” I said. “Mickey thought that meant football like soccer.”
“It was,” Dane said. “They found the cell with stadium plans and everything.”
“But you said Ansari was all about misdirection. Tricks. He’s clever, and he likes to show it. So what if this attack’s the same, but different?”
Everybody was frowning at me. I wasn’t explaining it right.
“Look. Okay. We know Ansari’s in America, right?”
“We think so, or we wouldn’t be here right now,” Aaliyah said.
“So he’s here in America. In Arizona. And he wants a big target, you said. Something with an audience,” I said.
I waited for them to get it, but they just stared at me. In frustration I grabbed the remote control and turned the TV on. Instead of one of the news channels, I clicked over to ESPN.
“And welcome back to SportsCenter,” an announcer said. “With Super Bowl Forty-Nine just a week away, all eyes are on host city Phoenix, Arizona, where the teams met the media today. For more on the press conference, we go to Emily Reed live at the University of Phoenix Stadium. Emily?”
“Oh, frak,” Jimmy said.
Emily Reed, microphone in hand, started talking about the upcoming Super Bowl. I turned to face the others in the room.
“You want a big audience?” I said. “You want to scare the most people you possibly can? What about setting off a bomb in front of a hundred million viewers on TV?”
Aaliyah got up and started pacing. Dane stared at the floor.
“No,” Jimmy said. “No. Way. The security on that building the day of the game will be like the Pentagon. And trust me, I know what that’s like. We’re talking barricades, metal detectors, dogs, a thirty-mile no-fly zone patrolled by F-16s. That place is a fortress. Nobody’s crazy enough to hit the Super Bowl.”
“It makes sense, though, doesn’t it?” I asked. “Why bring Darius to America if the target is in some other country? Because it’s not. It’s right here. And it’s always been about football. Mickey thought that meant soccer. Darius, too, at first. That’s the distraction. The misdirection. But it’s always been about American football. Darius must have figured it out!”
“A plan within a plan,” Aaliyah said.
“You can’t possibly be serious!” Jimmy said. “I’m telling you, it’s impossible.”
“Impossible or not, we need to get DHS on this,” Dane said. “FBI. CIA. Tell Mickey.”
Jimmy tossed his laptop on the bed. “I need another Red Bull.” As he dipped his plastic cup into the ice bucket, Dane grabbed his wrist.
“Who got ice?” Dane said. His voice was low and scared, like having ice in the room was the worst thing that had ever happened in the history of the world.
“Me,” I said, confused.
Dane’s dark eyes turned on Jimmy like he’d just betrayed us all. “You let him out of your sight?”
Jimmy yanked his wrist free and rubbed it. “I had to go to the can!”
Dane turned on me, his eyes still smoldering,
and I shrank back. “Did anybody see you?”
“I—I don’t know. Maybe,” I said. “There was this guy going into a room, but—”
Dane hurried to the front window and peeked out behind the curtain. Red lights glinted on the glass.
“Everybody down!” Dane cried, and a tear gas cartridge trailing white smoke came crashing through the window.
A WHITE CLOUD WAS ALREADY STARTING TO FORM in the room as I dropped to the floor. I could feel my eyes tearing up, my nose and throat beginning to burn.
Dane dove between the beds for the smoking cartridge. He came up with it in one hand, the other arm wrapped around his face. It looked like a Roman candle, one end of it burning bright and pouring white smoke. I couldn’t believe it—who grabbed tear gas cartridges? What was he doing? The smoke was making me hack up a lung and I was halfway across the room.
Dane stuffed the smoking cartridge into the ice bucket flame-first, and it fizzled out. “We don’t have much time,” he said, his voice ragged. “Bathroom vent.”
Jimmy disappeared into the bathroom, and seconds later I heard the fan running, drawing out the tear gas still in the air.
Bullets shattered what was left of the window, and I hit the deck. Dane grabbed one of the mattresses and flipped it up against the broken window. I threw my hands over my head and tried to become one with the sticky motel carpet.
Dane tossed Aaliyah a smaller duffel bag. “Back wall,” he told her, and she hurried to the bathroom vanity at the back of the room as Jimmy came out. Dane flipped the other mattress up against the far wall, like a pillow fort. “Get him underneath!” he yelled.
Jimmy grabbed his laptop, then me, and together we scrambled for the space between the mattress and the wall. I didn’t see how it was going to help. The bullets were shredding the mattress up against the window.
They were shooting at us. I couldn’t believe it. “They’re shooting at us!” I said.
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “They tend to do that when you shoot your way out of a Department of Homeland Security facility.”
“I only shot a fire extinguisher!” I said.
A bullet hit the TV, and Emily Reed disappeared with a spark and an electric sizzle. Dane yanked the busted TV off its base and chucked it against the door, piling the table and chairs on top of it. He didn’t want the soldiers getting in, and clearly that wasn’t the way he was planning on getting out.
Jimmy hastily stuffed his computer into his backpack. “They’ll be through that door any second now,” he said.
Dane pulled his pistol, flipped the safety off, and pointed it at the door.
“He’s not going to shoot them, is he?” I asked. “The point here is to prove I’m not a terrorist, right?”
Dane heard me above the gunfire and pulled his gun back. “Aaliyah?” he called.
“Explosives set!” Aaliyah cried.
“Explosives?” I said.
Dane pushed me and Jimmy under the mattress propped against the wall and Aaliyah crammed in with us.
THOOM. The room shook as the explosives went off, taking out the whole back wall where the bathroom had been. Water from the broken pipes sprayed little fountains among the shredded wooden studs and broken drywall. Out the back, through the hole, was the rear parking lot—and in it, our van.
THE VAN’S TIRES HUMMED ON THE BLACKTOP, ITS headlights cutting a dozen yards of road and trees and hills out of the darkness. Dane was at the wheel, driving so fast it felt like we were flying. None of us spoke for a long time, each of us, I think, listening for the sound of more gunshots. But eventually, there was nothing but the rattle of the van. We wouldn’t stop again that night, I knew. Not after the debacle at the motel. If it were up to me, we wouldn’t stop again until we got to Arizona.
“Call Mick,” Dane said at last, his voice waking us all like an alarm clock.
Jimmy flipped open his laptop and went through an elaborate series of windows and screens until one of them finally showed a sleepy-eyed but still fully dressed and awake Mickey Hagan. He was somewhere with a lot of bookshelves behind him. Maybe his house.
“Kamran, Aaliyah, Jimmy,” he said. “Is Dane with you? Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Aaliyah told him. “But just barely. We were made at the motel.”
“I know,” Mickey said.
“You knew?” I said. “And you didn’t warn us? They were shooting at us! Tear gas! Real bullets! We could have been killed!”
“I’m sorry,” Mickey said. “I knew they were coming for you, but I couldn’t warn you. They let me find out about it in advance—‘accidentally on purpose,’ I think—to see if I was a leak. To see if I was really in communication with you.”
I still couldn’t believe it. There had to be some way Mickey could have gotten us word. Tipped us off.
Jimmy saw the anger and confusion on my face and laughed. “Welcome to the spy business, kid. It’s all part of the game.”
“What bothers me is that they were so obvious about it,” Mickey said. “Nobody includes you in briefings for twenty years, and then all of a sudden you’re pulled out of the hospital and driven to Langley. What a load of bollocks.”
The hospital? Mickey’s leg. Of course. Dane had shot him! The image of that bullet punching a bloody hole in Mickey’s leg would be forever stuck in my head. “Is your leg okay?” I asked.
Mickey smiled. “It’s kind of you to ask. Yes. Hurts like the devil, but I’ve had worse. Dane knows his business. It was a clean shot, straight through. No broken bones, nothing that won’t heal. It is what it is. All part of the game, as Jimmy says.” He held up a cane. “On the plus side, now I have something to shake at the neighborhood children when I tell them to get off my lawn.” He smiled weakly. “I’m just knackered, is all. It’s been a long day. Did you have a chance to watch the new video from your brother?”
Aaliyah and I told Mickey all about our guess that the football clue was really about the Super Bowl, and the story of Rostam and Siyavash versus Godzilla. When we were finished, he looked as horrified at the thought of an attack on the Super Bowl as we were.
“It does make sense,” Mickey said. “Though Jimmy’s not wrong—the security around that stadium on game day will be better than what the president got when he visited Afghanistan. But that shouldn’t stop us from investigating it. I’ll pass it along as though I’m putting my own interpretation on it. If they don’t buy it, we’ll have to trust Super Bowl security to stop whatever it is. And the Godzilla story?”
“Hot dogs,” Aaliyah said. “Maybe something to do with food services at the Super Bowl?”
“Aye. That’s good. Gives me a place to start, anyway. I’ll look into it. In the meantime, try to get to Arizona as quickly as possible without getting yourselves killed.”
THE ADRENALINE RUSH FROM THE ATTACK ON OUR motel room kept me awake for a little while longer, and I spent the time memorizing the phone number Mickey had given me. After about an hour, though, I crashed. Hard. When I woke on the roll-out foam mattress on the floor of the van, I was stiff and sore, and the sun had already come up. Jimmy was now at the wheel, Aaliyah had her eyes closed listening to music on headphones in the passenger seat, and Dane sat on one of the benches in the back, eating an apple.
“Hungry?” he asked, holding a banana out to me.
I realized I was famished, and took it from him greedily. It took a little while for the grogginess and stiffness to wear off, but the banana helped. So did the silence.
“Where are we?” I asked at last.
“Just past Louisville, Kentucky,” Dane said. “Making good time. You drink coffee?”
I didn’t. Dane passed me a bottle of grapefruit juice instead. Dane and I had been together now for almost a full day, and I hadn’t really looked at him. In fact, I was always doing anything I could to look away from him. He was big, strong. His biceps seemed as big as my thighs. His hair was cut short on top, almost close enough to make him bald, and he had a black mustache. The main thin
g about him was his stillness. He never seemed to move unless he had to.
His nose was bandaged with taped white gauze.
“Sorry about your nose,” I told him.
His head turned. It was as unsettling as watching a statue’s head swivel slowly to look at you. “Don’t be,” he said. “Initiative is good. Sometimes it’s the only thing between life and death. You didn’t know I was there to help you, so you helped yourself. But you’re not always going to have a metal tray around. You’ll learn more when you’re a cadet at West Point, but I can teach you a few quick and dirty defensive moves now, if you want.”
“I—Yeah. Yeah, that’d be great,” I said. “But I’m not going to West Point.”
“Mick said you were.”
“Well, I was. But I’m pretty sure I’m not going now.”
“You’ll get back in after we clear your brother’s name,” Dane said.
I was touched. “You really believe Darius is innocent?”
“Of course,” Dane said. “He’s a Ranger. Rangers don’t quit, and they don’t turn. ‘Surrender’ is not a Ranger word.”
And that was that. Dane believed down in the core of his being that my brother was innocent for no other reason than because he was a United States Ranger. It was unthinkable to him that a Ranger could ever turn on his own country. I wished everybody thought that way.
Dane ejected the cartridge of bullets from his pistol and cleared the firing chamber, clicking the trigger a few times with the gun pointed down and away at the floor just to be sure.
“Let’s say somebody’s got a gun on you,” Dane said. “You don’t want to die. What’s the first thing you do?”
“Try to take it away.”
“No,” Dane said. “You do nothing. You don’t want to die, you do what they tell you. You’re being robbed, you give them whatever you’ve got. Your life is always worth more, and trying to disarm somebody else is the number-one way to get yourself shot. Second, if you can, you run. Get as much distance and obstacles between you and the gun as possible. You engage, your odds of getting shot go way up. Got it?”
