Donovan Meanwhile: Kings of Sparta

by Bierley, B. L.

  I don’t know much about the layout of the house, but I do know a thing or two about bowling alleys, so I choose to run for the maintenance entrance at the end of the last lane. It’s my only hope to hide, even for a little bit, and possibly gain myself a little advantage.

  As I crawl down into the service aisle that runs along behind all the pinsetters, I can hear her counting “seventeen, eighteen.” The area is dark, but I know my way around well enough to pick through it. If I really needed to, I could probably slip through one of the openings and run down one of the gutters (the lanes themselves would be too slippery with oil to run on). Buying those extra few seconds might be the difference between life and death.

  But there’s no time for that just yet. I hear her steps approaching the back area from the other end. No doubt she thought she could cut me off if I were just trying to run all the way through. The girl was crazy, obviously, but still clever. Except I wasn’t going that way. I was in here so I could hide, and hide I do.

  Most people in the world don’t know the layout of the guts of a bowling alley, but I’m one of the ones that does. And if you know what I know, you know where to find the best hiding spots.

  I crawl up a pin elevator into a gap above one of the lanes and pull my legs up close to my chest.

  I can see straight down to the walkway, and I can aim my gun well enough from this angle. Unfortunately, if she spots me and I miss my shot, I won’t have much of a chance to get out before she’ll be able to fire back. I’d be a fish in a barrel. A sitting, hiding, sweating duck, as it were.

  I realize I hadn’t spoken to nor heard from Bellamy in several hours.

  “Hello?” I say in a hushed tone. “Help. Help me.”

  I can hear Nadia walking closer. I imagine her steadily, methodically going from lane to lane, checking every crevice and nook.

  She’s going to find me.

  “I’ve been compromised. Get me the hell out of here.” When the lanes are powered up, the machinery is too noisy to hear much, but I’m still trying to keep my voice as low as possible just in case.

  “Get me the hell out of here!”

  “Who are you talking to?” Nadia asks. Her voice ricochets off the metal beams and struts.

  She’s close.

  I shut my mouth.

  Moments later I see her walk slowly into view. She’s looking straight ahead and sweeping her gaze from side to side. Evidently she doesn’t know that hiding “up” is an option.

  I hold my breath as she passes by underneath me, hoping that I could hold out long enough for her to get to the other end, and give me enough time to drop down and take off running.

  Or, even though I hated the thought of it, turning and firing one into her back while she was facing the other way. I’d never killed anyone before, but spies don’t get away with that for very long, do they? James Bond did have a license to kill, after all, and he used it. Often.

  She leaves my field of view again without incident, and I hear her steady footsteps growing fainter as she continues down the walkway toward the other end. The sound fades.

  Damning the consequences, I drop down to the walkway with a clang.

  She tricked me!

  She’s standing right there when I land, just out of my view but close enough to raise her gun and fire a nearly point-blank shot at my torso before I could even get my gun up.

  And it tingled.

  Yep.

  Tingled.

  Now, I’ve been shot a time or two. Ok, just one time, as you might recall, so I know what it feels like when it happens.

  It’s not a tingle.

  My gun buzzes and vibrates in my hand, and then makes a noise like an electronic pinball machine shutting down.

  Nadia smiles and laughs.

  “I knew you were up there the whole time,” she says with her gun down by her side. “You’re terrible at Laser Blast.”

  I look at my gun.

  It didn’t look like an actual gun that fired bullets, of course, but everything in this realm looks sleek and futuristic. How was I supposed to know it was just a game!

  She takes the gun from me and sets both of them down on a flat surface next to her.

  “Good game, though. What’s next?”

  I’m afraid if I said anything my voice would be shaky, so I just shrug.

  “Burke. Come on. I know what you really want to do. Just say it.”

  “What?”

  “You may know a few things about me but I know way more about you. Everyone knows what you’re into.”

  I think maybe I’m still going to see that rotating bed before the night is out.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to ask me for it all night. What, you don’t think I can handle you? Guess what? I can.”

  She’s got a look in her eyes I don’t particularly like.

  “Nadia, wait...”

  But she doesn’t. She takes me by my cold, clammy hand and leads me back out of the service area, to a spot on one long wall with a keypad on it.

  “Balls aren’t the only thing we keep down here.”

  She taps a code into the pad, and suddenly the wall begins to slide out of the way, revealing a giant, steel vault door.

  She looks into a retinal scanner, and the vault automatically unlocks based on her ID.

  As it swings open, I view a room even bigger than the bowling alley.

  This one, though, is filled with row after row of jet aircraft. They’re small, as far as jets go, I guess. Each about the size of a minivan or so, with sharp noses and stubby wings. All more or less identical to each other save for the paint jobs, which vary from drab green to bright pink to solid gold and chrome.

  Nadia explains to me that it’s her personal collection.

  “Daddy knows how much I like Rocket Racing, so he buys me a new one every year for my birthday.”

  I’m stunned. “You can fly these things?”

  She laughs. “Maybe not as well as you can, champ. But I’ve been practicing. I bet I could beat you in a race, if the conditions are right.”

  I’m about to laugh in her face and say I don’t even have a driver’s license, let alone know how to fly a jet. But then a terrible thought crosses my mind.

  She’s probably right.

  “Well,” I say with mock humility. “I wouldn’t call myself ‘champ.’”

  “Why not? You are a championship Rocket Racer. Several times over.”

  “Please, don’t say that.” I really, really don’t want her to say that.

  “How about it? Up for a little race?”

  I look at my watch without even really reading the time.

  “I’m really tired. Maybe another time.”

  She shoves me. “Of course another time, Burke. I’m not ready to hop in right now! In this dress?”

  The relief I feel at that moment is fleeting, lasting only until she says, “I figured tomorrow afternoon. Race the Potomac, on your home turf. I’ve already made the arrangements.”

  I had to tell her something. Make up some lie about why I couldn’t fly right now. Doctor’s orders? Death in the family? Sudden-onset vertigo?

  “Burke,” she says, leveling with me. “I don’t know who you were talking to back in there in the dark, asking for help and for someone to get you out, but it sounds like some spy stuff.”

  My pulse starts beating in my eardrums.

  I wondered if Bellamy could hear it, too.

  “Nadia—“

  “It’s fine. Like, one in every three people I meet is a spy trying to get to my dad for one reason or another. It’s boring to me now.” She looks longingly at the planes. “Flying, on the other hand, is fun. You race me tomorrow at 2 p.m., and if you beat me? I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Absolutely anything.”

  I know what Bellamy would say.

  I was going to have about ten hours to learn how to fly a Rocket Racer like a champ.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Bellamy has words with me when Olivia and
I get back to HQ.

  Olivia also has words with me.

  Apparently, according to them, I did a number of things wrong. They don’t seem to recognize the fact that I succeeded at the mission, which was to secure a relationship with Nadia Chevko and get her to ask to see me again.

  Check and check.

  Ok, yes, the relationship was strictly platonic, and slightly psychotic.

  And, yes, the second “date” was going to involve me flying a small jet-powered aircraft I’ve never seen before at high speeds a few meters above the icy waters of the Potomac River.

  Apparently it’s all the rage in the Meanwhile.

  Fortunately, I suppose, the fact that I could be facing my imminent fiery demise gave everyone a reason to cut short the diatribes about my skills as a secret agent, and instead turn their focus to my skills—or lack-thereof—as a jet pilot.

  “He has to cancel the competition,” Bellamy says across the conference table where we’re all sitting—she and I, Tez, Hanson, and someone named Cartwright whom I’d never met before.

  “No, he can learn,” Hanson says firmly in reply.

  “I’m flattered that you have my back, but honestly I’m with Bellamy on this one a hundred and ten percent. I can’t fly.”

  Bellamy shakes her head. “He can claim he’s sick or something, maybe schedule another laser tag adventure instead if she really wants to beat him at something. We can’t afford to lose him.”

  That was the nicest thing she’d said about me since we met.

  “Not yet, anyway,” she adds. “Not until we find out where the real Donovan went.”

  Ouch.

  The “real” Donovan?

  I’m the real Donovan, the guy I’m filling in for was at best some douchebag wearing my face.

  I can say that, it’s ok. I’m basically talking about myself.

  “We’re not going to lose him. Rocket Racers are incredibly safe,” Hanson argues. “I mean, mostly safe. Only three people have died.”

  “This year!” Bellamy shouts back.

  Tez makes a slight, almost inaudible cough and everyone stops and gives her their full attention. “If I may interject, I think I might have a solution that solves both of these problems. None of us wants Donovan to die, not when we’ve made it this far into the mission already.”

  Gee, thanks.

  “But maybe there’s a way he can still take part in the race, but he doesn’t have to fly.” She gestures to the other person, Cartwright. He’s a husky man, around forty years old, with a bushy beard and a trendy handlebar mustache. (I guess hipsters still exist in the Meanwhile?)

  Bellamy puts an elbow on the table. “What’s Cartwright got to do with this? He’s in fabrication.”

  “I’m also a helluva good pilot,” Cartwright quips with a bit of snark.

  “He nearly won the Mid-America ProAm Championship last year—for the fifth time in a row.”

  Eyebrows around the room go up. Cartwright folded his arms across his chest and leaned back smugly. He hooks a thumb at me. “Would’ve won, too, if it weren’t for this guy. Well, not this guy. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “Well,” Hanson said, “no offense, but I don’t think we can pass Cartwright off as Donovan, unless you’ve got some crazy-good disguise techniques to unveil.”

  “Actually, it will be Donovan in the cockpit.” Tez stands up as a technician came in holding a metal briefcase in what was obviously a rehearsed moment. She holds the case open and Tez pulls out what looks basically like an iPod: a small electronic device the size of a pack of cigarettes, with a little screen and some tiny buttons on it’s white, plastic face.

  “A TuneBox?” Hanson says.

  “Not exactly. Donovan, please?” I sense she wants me to volunteer for something, so I stand up and walk over to her. She plugs in a pair of earbuds to the TuneBox and instructs me to put them in my ears.

  “Do you hear music?”

  “I do.”

  She unplugs the headphones, leaving them connected to my ears, and walks across the room with the TuneBox itself. Cartwright takes it and holds it in his closed fist tightly.

  “Observe.”

  He stands, focused, and swings his right arm through the air like he was punching something.

  To everyone’s alarm—no one’s as much as my own—my right arm makes the exact same motion.

  Then he stomps his left foot on the floor.

  So do I.

  He does a jumping jack.

  I do a jumping jack.

  “That’s enough,” Tez says, and Cartwright sits down.

  And I sit down, missing the chair and landing on the floor.

  Everyone tries not to laugh. “You can take the headphones out, Donovan,” Tez says.

  Hanson nods slowly. “So we put Doonovan in the cockpit but he’s wired up with this...remote control device.”

  Bellamy continues his thought. “Meanwhile, Cartwright is somewhere nearby where he can observe from Burke’s point of view and do the actual piloting himself.”

  Tez nods. “Indeed.”

  Hanson stands eagerly. “We gotta get this kid suited up and ready to fly by noon tomorrow.”

  The meeting is adjourned and I’m sent back home to get a good night of sleep, if it were possible. Once again, nobody at the White House seems perturbed by my late night return. Being the President’s son certainly had its perks.

  The next day at noon I’m at the mouth of the Potomac River, climbing into he cockpit of a gaudy red, white, and blue Rocket Racer that the White House had in storage. They tell me it’s mine.

  Nadia wasn’t kidding about making arrangements. The aircraft carrier(!) perched at the mouth of the river has a total of thirteen amateur Rocket Racers on it from all over the world, ready to launch at the green light. (Cartwright was even invited, but had to turn it down for “reasons.”) Andrew Chevko wasted no opportunity for some publicity, so he even arranged for this to become a nationally-broadcast event.

  Dweeble, disguised as a pit crew worker, is helping me get strapped in.

  “The route is gonna take you along the river towards DC. That’s not exactly one straight shot. The Potomac’s a windy, narrow little river with high banks of trees on either side in some places.”

  “Tell Cartwright, not me. He’s the one flying.”

  I hear Cartwright’s voice in my helmet. “I know what I’m doing, you just don’t get in my way for once.”

  “Hey, I really don’t appreciate the attitude. I’m not that guy.”

  Cartwright’s in an unmarked van about ten miles away with the TuneBox strapped to his arm so it could still read his neuro-impulses, but his hands would be free to operate the mock-cockpit that had been built inside the van. A set of virtual reality goggles show him a view from the nose of my Racer.

  Nadia comes over before we begin and gives me a kiss for good luck, although it feels eerily like “goodbye.”

  I sit in the cockpit, sweating inside my helmet and my flight suit, waiting for the set of lights mounted the bow of the carrier to flash green. I don’t know why I’m so nervous. After all, I don’t have to do any of the flying. All I have to do is relax and let my muscles do what they were instructed by the TuneBox connection.

  No problem, right?

  The lights turn green and the jets roar off the deck of the ship. All thirteen planes are in the air within seconds, and all of us within just a few meters of each other. I marvel at my own reflexes, watching my hands work the throttle and the yoke, my feet tapping left and right to adjust the rudder.

  I started in seventh place by luck of the draw, but within two minutes I’m already in fifth. Nadia, naturally, is in first. Her bright pink Rocket was like a beacon at the head of the pack as we speed along the north edge of the river past Piney’s Point—or what is called Piney’s Point in my neck of the woods, anyway.

  “Damn, she’s good,” I hear Cartwright say in my ear. “I’ll need to pull out a few tricks, methi
nks.”

  “Don’t do anything crazy. I’m fine with letting her win if it means I stay in one piece.”

  “Don’t worry, pal, you taught me yourself.”

  As we approach Colton’s Point I saw a split in the river. Two of the jets ahead of me banked right to follow that fork, and I could feel my hands tipping the yoke to follow them. But my knowledge of the geography of the land—at least, how it exists in my world—came in handy in that moment.

  “No!” I shout. “That’s a dead end. Stay to the left.”

  “You sure?”

  “Unless the earth formed differently in this reality, yes!”

  A moment of hesitation, and then Cartwright steers us back on track. The other two jets continued on, though, and I knew they were out of the race.

  And just like that I’m in third!

  “Hey, I think we can do this!”

  “Yeah, we make a pretty good team I guess,” he says. “What’s next?”

  I try to remember the lay of the river from my geography classes. Luckily it did seem to be roughly the same in this world as in that one.

  “Morgantown is up ahead, I think.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Well it may not exist here. But just past that is going to be a major, hard left. We’re gonna be going southwest.”

  “No problem.”

  The turn comes up fast, and my augmented reflexes put us in a steep bank, pulling back on the throttle to point the noise in the right direction, and then kicking it back in to make up for lost speed. As we flatten out I’m neck-and-neck with the second-place Racer.

  “Another one of those coming up,” I say, but Cartwright is silent. We’re drifting dangerously closer to the the other jet. “Hey, watch our side there, Cartwright.”

  No answer. When I’m inches away from bumping the other racer’s wingtip I jerk on the yoke and pull us away.

  Something in the corner of my eye catches my attention and I turn to see a fireball rising in the distance. What are the odds that explosion had something to do with me losing contact with Cartwright?

  I could see Belvedere Beach up ahead and that meant I was in for the second sharp turn, this time heading northward.

  I couldn’t wait for Cartwright to get back online—if he was even still alive.