Phantom Wheel

by Tracy Deebs

  Sound of a door opening, then Alika Izumi appears on security camera MH22A.

  Izumi: Are you planning on getting your butts in here anytime soon? Or am I tossing you off the balcony?

  Surveillance ceases twenty-three seconds later, when Torres and Prentiss practically trip over each other trying to get in the door.

  31

  Owen

  (1nf1n173 5h4d3)

  “I think we should go over the plan again,” Alika tells us.

  The rest of us groan because we’re going on forty-eight hours without sleep here, and tomorrow’s going to be a big day.

  “We know the plan,” Seth says. He’s stretched out on his back on the floor, elbows bent so his forearms rest over his eyes.

  “Yes, but do we know what we’re going to do when the plan goes south?”

  “Um, no?” Issa is curled up on the couch, injured hand propped on her knees and eyes barely open. She looks exactly how I feel. Like crap.

  “Exactly!” Alika crows. “We should think about what we’re going to do—”

  “We’re going to improvise,” Ezra says around a yawn. “Like we always do.”

  “This is our only shot at this.” Alika’s pacing now, eyes bright and words coming faster and faster. “We can’t afford to screw it up. We can’t afford—”

  “It’s going to be okay,” I tell her, pushing myself to my feet. My injured side and biceps protest the movement, but I ignore them as I cross the room to her. She’s working herself into a tizzy, and it’s obvious someone has to step in—and since I don’t want that someone to be anyone else, looks like I’m elected.

  “You don’t know that!” she exclaims.

  “You’re right, I don’t.” I wrap my uninjured arm around her shoulder and pull her gently into my body. She’s so small I barely notice her slight weight against me, but the way she closes her eyes and kind of sinks into me makes the nightmare of the last two days feel almost worth it. “But I know that freaking out about it right now, when we’re all so exhausted we can barely stay conscious, isn’t going to help anything. In fact—”

  I break off as the hotel suite phone rings.

  We all turn and stare at it like it’s some kind of foreign object. Which, to some extent, it is. It hasn’t rung since before the attack. Ezra even orders room service with an app on his brand-new cell.

  It rings a second time, and I start toward it. But Harper gets there first, picking up the handset with a hoarse hello.

  In the space of a few seconds her face changes from curious to concerned. I feel my own heartbeat start to speed up, even before she says, “I’m sorry, Roderick. Where did you say you want to fly us?”

  His name snags the attention of everyone in the room, and suddenly we’re all crowded around her, straining to listen to what’s being said on the other end of the phone. I’m too far away to hear anything but her sporadic uh-huhs and ooooooookays.

  “We’re going to have to think about that,” she finally says. “I have to discuss it with my partners.”

  My eyes meet Ezra’s across the coffee table. Partners? he mouths to me.

  Think about what? I mouth back.

  Harper says a few more things that make almost no sense from our side of the conversation, then hangs up the phone with a very formal sounding good-bye.

  Seth pounces first. “Was that Roderick Olsen?”

  “What did he want?” Alika adds barely a second later.

  “How does he know where we are?” Issa asks, sounding terrified.

  “Where else would we go after they destroyed the penthouse?” Ezra replies. “They obviously know who we are. All they had to do was call the hotel and ask for my room.”

  “Who cares how they found us!” I growl, impatience gnawing at my insides. “What did Olsen want?”

  Harper’s eyes meet mine, and she’s paler than I’ve ever seen her. Which is saying something, considering the girl normally has the whitest skin I’ve ever seen on a person. “He thinks we can”—she makes quotation marks with her fingers—“‘work things out in a mutually beneficial manner.’”

  “Work things out?” Alika exclaims.

  “Mutually beneficial?” Issa chimes in. “He tried to kill us!”

  “Yes, well, he says he wants to let bygones be bygones. He’s flying us to the launch in Helsinki, so we can talk this out in person.”

  “No, we’re flying ourselves out there—” Seth begins, but Harper cuts him off with a look.

  “It wasn’t a request. It was an order.”

  “Give me a minute,” Ezra says several hours later as he leads me out to the balcony. “I want to talk to you, but I need to do something first.”

  I watch in shock as he walks to a dark corner of the balcony and pulls down a camera. He fiddles with it for a few seconds, messing with the audio feed, before putting it right back where he found it.

  “Are you telling me we’ve been under surveillance since we got here?”

  “Looks like,” he says, a lot calmer than I’d expect in these circumstances. “Your parents?” I ask when he doesn’t say anything else.

  “No. They never want cameras in their hotel suites. Too easy to document their affairs.”

  Alarm skitters down my spine. “Jacento.”

  He looks thoughtful. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then who?”

  He glances inside, where the others are sleeping.

  “You think it’s one of them? Why would they do that?”

  “Lots of reasons.” He shrugs. “I don’t think it’s anything to worry about, though.”

  “You don’t think it’s anything to worry about? Someone we’re working with is spying on us! What the hell?”

  “Whoever it is, I’m sure they have a good reason.”

  “What good reason could any of them possibly have? It’s a total betrayal of—” Who it is suddenly hits me. Of course. “Oh.”

  He nods. “Yeah.”

  “You think it makes her feel more secure?”

  “I do. And if that’s what she needs…”

  “Then that’s what we’ll give her.” Still, it grates a little. “You think she’s been doing this all along?”

  “I think she’s been doing it since that first day in L.A. An information-gathering op.” He shoots me a look. “It’s not like she’s the only one.”

  “That was different. I had to try to figure out who you guys were and what you’d say if I contacted you.”

  “I’m sure she thinks she has things to figure out too. I mean, she’s already figured out a lot, don’t you think?”

  “I guess.” Unwilling to talk about it anymore until I’ve had a chance to get my thoughts in order, I lean on the balcony railing and look past the city lights to the ocean beyond. “You know this whole Jacento thing is a trap, right?”

  “Yep,” Ezra responds. “And you still think we should go.”

  “Yep. And so do you.”

  He sighs, shoving a hand through his hair in obvious frustration. “It’s suicide.”

  “It’s just as much suicide if we don’t go. At least if we’re in Helsinki, we have a small shot at stopping this thing before Olsen kills us.”

  “Don’t hold back, Heath. Tell me how you really feel.”

  “Come on, Ezra. You know I’m right. We’re just as dead here as we are in Helsinki. We might have blown smoke up everyone else’s asses, but you and I both know that we were dead the moment we showed up on Olsen’s radar. Now it’s just a matter of when.”

  “Unless we somehow manage to stop the rollout of those kiosks and expose Olsen and Jacento to international scrutiny.”

  “Yeah, unless we do that.”

  He’s silent for several long minutes, but I don’t mind. There’s a lot to think about and nothing to think about all at the same time. It’s a strange position to be in, but it’s the way things are. Olsen’s boxed us into a corner, and we don’t have a choice. Not that we ever had a choice. From the minute we found out
what Jacento was up to, we’ve been hurtling toward this moment. Toward this one final shot to somehow make things right.

  I accepted it hours ago, but then, I’ve spent years living with the knowledge that you can’t fight fate, no matter how much you want to sometimes. For Ezra, whose world has always been a pretty fantastic place, the lack of choice and the all-but-inevitable bad outcome are a lot harder to wrap his head around.

  “If we do this, we’re taking them down,” Ezra finally says, his voice harsh against the soft darkness of the night. “No screwups, no can’ts, no almost good enoughs. If we’re going down, we’re taking those bastards with us.”

  “Damn straight we are.”

  Ezra reaches a hand out and we bump fists, which seems a little anticlimactic considering we just agreed to launch a final strike against a corporation, and a man, determined to grind us into dust.

  “And we take our own transportation,” he says after a minute. “No way am I giving that bastard a chance to kill us one second earlier than I have to.”

  “Normally, I’d agree, but—”

  “But what?” He leans forward, face incredulous. “You can’t seriously be thinking of taking the plane that bastard provides for us, can you?”

  “I think it’s the only way to keep him from figuring out what’s coming.”

  “That’s crazy—”

  “Is it? If he knows we’re coming on our own, he’s going to be paranoid. He’ll be looking for the trap every second. But if we let him fly us in, he’ll think he’s in control. Sure, he’ll be wary, but he’s a huge egomaniac, and he’ll assume he’s got us under his thumb.”

  Ezra starts to argue, but then he shuts up and just thinks about what I said for a few minutes. “It’s a big risk,” he finally says.

  “All of this is a big risk. Didn’t we just agree on that?”

  “Yeah, but what keeps him from putting a bomb on the plane and detonating it halfway over the North Pole? I mean, if I were him, that’s how I’d solve the problem.”

  “With the daughter of the American secretary of state on board? I guarantee they’ll go after the fuselage of the plane, and when they find the bomb—”

  “It’ll be an international incident, at the very least.”

  “Exactly.” He’s finally getting it.

  “But it’ll be an incident if she dies at Jacento’s international headquarters too. You really think the how and why matters that much?”

  “Yeah. Because an unprotected girl getting killed on the streets of a foreign country because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time is one thing. An airplane crash is something else entirely.”

  “I still don’t like it.”

  I laugh. “Who does? But do we really have any other choice?”

  He glances back at the glass doors into the suite. “What are we going to do about the others?”

  “Whatever we have to do to keep them safe.”

  “Do you think it’s going to work?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, me neither.” He turns to stare at the seemingly infinite ocean. “But I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

  32

  Issa

  (Pr1m4 D0nn4)

  “They chartered a plane to take us to Helsinki.”

  “It’s really not as bad as you make it sound,” Ezra replies.

  “They chartered a plan to take us to Helsinki. There’s only one way for that to sound. This is crazy.” I stare at the plane in question and wonder how the hell my life has spun so quickly and so completely out of my control.

  I swear to God, at this point if I could kick my own butt, I would totally do it in a heartbeat. Maybe then I could wake up from this nightmare and be back in San Antonio with Chloe and the rest of my family. Except, if I did that, there’d be no Ezra. No Seth or Owen or Harper or Alika. And crazy and disastrous as these last few days have been… I’m not sure I’d trade them. Not when it means having to give up the people who are rapidly becoming my closest friends.

  It’s a weird feeling to have, considering how hard it’s been for me to trust anyone or anything since my mom died. The way she was there one minute and gone the next… the idea of getting close to anyone new after that—except for Chloe—has been nearly impossible for me to imagine.

  And yet, here I am, contemplating getting on a jet that seems way too small to make it across the country, let alone to another continent.

  “Think about how much faster we’ll get there.” Ezra’s still trying, unsuccessfully I might add, to persuade me that this is no big deal. “It’s a direct flight with no layovers, and we’ve got no waiting here at the airport. We just need to walk onto the tarmac and get on the plane. We didn’t even have to go through security.”

  “This is crazy!”

  He sighs, then rubs the bridge of his nose like he’s in actual physical pain. “Are you really going to keep saying that over and over again?”

  “I think I am, yes.”

  “Fine.” He throws his hands up. “Are you going to keep saying it while we stand here staring at the thing, or are you going to at least let me take you onto the tarmac so we can get going?”

  “I don’t know.” I mean, that plane is small. Not tiny or anything, but compared to the giant planes that fill up the rest of the airport, the Gulfstream isn’t exactly awe-inspiring. Or, more important, confidence inducing. “What if we hit turbulence?”

  “What do you mean? The pilot will deal with it just like every other pilot of every other plane in the world.” Obviously frustrated, he shoves a hand through his hair. “Come on, Issa. Let’s just get on the plane. You can argue with me the whole way there if it will make you happy.”

  “I vote for listening to lover boy,” Seth says as he walks by. “I mean, if my vote counts at all.”

  “It absolutely does,” Ezra says at the same time I tell him, “It doesn’t.”

  “What’s the big deal?” Owen asks, picking up his backpack and heading for the door out to the tarmac. “We need to get to Helsinki quickly. This plane will do that. I don’t see what the issue is.”

  “See!” Ezra says as he all but drags me onto the tarmac. “You know if Owen and Seth don’t have a problem with it, then there’s no problem to be had.”

  “They both want to get to Helsinki pretty badly,” I tell him. “I’m pretty sure they’re putting everything else on hold.”

  “You could try doing the same thing,” Alika says as she walks by eating a pack of Skittles on her way to the plane. “For simple expediency if nothing else.”

  “Et tu, Brute?”

  “Oh, sure.” Ezra has given up on cajoling and has started dragging me toward the door. “That’s the quote you know.”

  “Hey, just because I don’t watch bad eighties movies and I go to public school doesn’t mean I haven’t read Shakespeare.”

  “Sometimes you just have to go for it, Buffy.” Harper slips my backpack off my shoulder and heads toward the plane with it. “So put on your big-girl panties, pick up your big stake, and let’s go kill some vampires.”

  “Kill some… Did she just call me Buffy?” I ask Ezra. When he only grins, I start to follow her. “Hey! Did you just call me Buffy?”

  She doesn’t bother turning around. Instead, she dangles my backpack over the railing as she climbs the stairs to the plane. “Get on the damn plane and find out. Or don’t, and stay here in San Francisco alone without your new phone or laptop or any money. Your choice.”

  Well, when she puts it like that… I shake off Ezra’s guiding hand and make my way across the tarmac and up the stairs under my own power.

  “You just called me Buffy,” I tell her once I actually make it onto the plane, because obviously I’m stuck in some kind of bizarre time loop tonight, where I have to repeat everything over and over again.

  “Welcome aboard,” she answers as she gestures to the seat next to her.

  “Is that my real nickname, then? Not Tinker Bell? Or did you chan
ge it because you knew I hated the first one?”

  She laughs. “I can’t believe how serious you guys are taking these stupid nicknames,” she says as we buckle ourselves in. “I made them up the very first day I met you. They’re no big deal.”

  “But you still think of us that way, so they are. So just tell me the truth. Was I Tinker Bell first or was I always Buffy?”

  She grins. “You were always Buffy. Which is why I knew you’d get on this stupid plane, because Buffy never let fear dictate her actions.”

  “Wait. That whole thing out there was because you were afraid?” Ezra says.

  “Come on, Ezra,” Seth says as he settles onto one of the couches and pulls out his laptop. “What did you think it was about?”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” He sinks into the chair next to mine. “I couldn’t have handled that any worse, right?”

  “Sure, you could have. You could have dragged me kicking and screaming onto the plane. That would have been worse.”

  “Not going to lie. I was thinking about it.”

  I roll my eyes. “Of course you were.”

  “Now that that’s settled, you two want to join the rest of us in working on the plan?” Owen demands. “We’ve only got ten hours before we land, and this code needs to be finished.”

  “Jeez, put a guy in charge of one little plan, and the whole thing goes to his head,” I tease even as he helps buckle me in and gets my laptop out for me, since my hand and arms are still a mess.

  “I’d tell you to bite me,” Owen says with a wink, “but then Ezra might be tempted to beat me up.”

  “Yeah, right,” Alika snorts.

  “Hey!” Ezra tells her. “What exactly does that mean?”

  “Oh, did I say that out loud?” The look she gives him is all wide-eyed innocence. “I meant to just think it.”

  “You people are mean, you know that?” He finally fastens his seat belt and pulls out his laptop. “I could totally take Owen if I wanted to.”

  He mutters the last to himself but it’s loud enough for us to all hear. And to everyone’s credit, no one cracks up. Though I’ve got to admit, it’s a close thing. Not that Ezra doesn’t look like he could handle himself against almost anyone, because he totally does. But Owen outweighs him by a good fifty pounds… and those fifty pounds are all muscle.