Criminal Destiny

by Gordon Korman

  We gather around the iPad. There’s a picture of the smiling mob boss in a nightclub, surrounded by Las Vegas showgirls, and another of him lighting up a big, fat cigar directly in front of a No Smoking sign. He’s grinning even wider in a photo from his 2001 trial, and in the shot from his first day in prison, he’s practically beaming. The guy must be crazy. The worse his life goes, the bigger the smile on his face. It’s not happiness, of course; it’s defiance. He’s showing the world that no matter what happens, it doesn’t bother him in the slightest.

  Eli scrolls down to the final picture on the web page. It’s a black-and-white close-up image of a teenage Gus Alabaster with a black eye and a crooked smirk. The caption reads: Mug shot from first arrest, age 15.

  Four identical gasps threaten to suck all the air out of the room. I’ve seen this face before. I’m looking at it now, hanging over my left shoulder.

  It’s Malik.

  Eli, Tori, and I take a step backward. I’ve had my problems with Malik, but I feel so awful for him. How will he react to learning that he’s cloned from this despicable gangster?

  “I knew it!” Malik cackles gleefully. “I just knew my guy would turn out to be somebody cool!”

  We stare at him. “Cool?” I echo. “He’s a ruthless criminal who’s spending the rest of his life behind bars!”

  Malik is undaunted. “But when he was out he had six houses, fourteen cars, two yachts, and a private jet!”

  “According to this, the government took a lot of it away,” Eli reminds him.

  “The government,” Malik snorts. “Who listens to them? We’re living proof of that. They said no cloning. And what did they get? Cloning. Anyway, gangster’s not so bad. It’s way better than that Bartholomew Crossword guy. At least he’s not a serial killer.”

  “Only because he had hired guns to do his killing for him,” I put in.

  Eli studies his sneakers, waiting for his own identity, and nervous it might come up Bartholomew Glen. At least we girls have been spared that possibility.

  Tori sighs. “Let’s just move on. I kind of doubt this is the biggest shock we’re going to get today.”

  Brother Juan Antonio Lanterna turns out to be a monk who was arrested for running a major counterfeiting operation in the cellar of his monastery. He died in prison in 2010. There’s no picture of him as a kid, but his intense burning eyes and long pointy nose look a lot like Robbie Miers.

  “He’s one of us,” Tori confirms, as if we need reminding. None of us will ever forget the names on the eleven whiteboards—the eleven Osiris clones.

  Eli pounds the tablet’s virtual keyboard. “Miers is peace in Latvian.” All our fake last names mean things like peace, love, and brotherhood in other languages.

  “Robbie.” I let my breath out and realize I’ve been holding it. We weren’t friends, exactly. Still, when you grow up with only twenty-nine other kids, everybody is kind of close. Robbie’s quiet, a little on the shy side.

  “Go, Robbie,” Malik says with a laugh. “He’s the last person I’d ever expect to be printing funny money—”

  “He didn’t,” Eli interrupts him. “The guy he’s cloned from did that.”

  “I wonder what happened to him and the others when our parents shut down Osiris and took off,” I muse.

  Nobody has an answer for that. We don’t know—and have no way to know—what’s been done with our fellow clones.

  Archibald Barrett is a doctor who went to jail for trafficking in human organs for transplants. Eli is able to track down his high school graduation picture online. He looks exactly like Ben Stastny. Stastny—Czech for contentment. Chalk up another one on our happy list. Poor Ben.

  Next is Mickey Seven. She had this long Russian name, but people started calling her Seven because she was the seventh person busted in a march on the Virginia State Capitol protesting cuts to homeless shelters. According to the internet, she spent her whole life protesting something, and the older she got, the more violent her activism became. She was arrested sixteen times over the next eight years, serving several short prison sentences. In 1991, while protesting the First Gulf War, she led a group that blew up the armory at Brannigan Naval Base. She was declared a terrorist and sent to prison. Even in jail, she still spends most of her time riling up the other inmates to riot against the guards. The woman is a toxic mixture of anger, mule-headedness, and zero fear. She has absolutely no conscience. No wonder the courts extended her sentence to life. The last thing anyone would want is a rabble-rouser like that loose on the streets.

  The web page has a reproduction of a newspaper article of her first arrest. I take in the picture. The Plastics Works tilts and I almost crumple to the floor.

  I’m looking in a mirror.

  In the photograph, Mickey Seven is older than I am—probably about eighteen. But there’s no question that her face is my own. In the image, she’s in the process of ripping a riot shield away from a cop and hitting him over the head with it. It’s an action shot—her blond hair is flying; her eyes are ferocious. That’s the part I recognize even more than her appearance—her intensity, her 100-percent confidence that she’s doing the right thing.

  I’ve felt like that, and I remember exactly when. It was the day I learned about Project Osiris and how my entire life was a lie. At that awful moment, I’m sure I looked just like the wild animal in the photograph.

  Malik beams at me. “Welcome to the club, Laska. You might even be worse than me.”

  “Shut up,” I mutter, but I’m too deflated to manage any volume. I wanted to know who I am. And now that I do, I wish I didn’t.

  Tori puts a sympathetic arm around my shoulders. “Sorry, Amber.”

  I bristle. “Don’t ‘sorry’ me! There’s nothing to be sorry about! I’m not this person. From now on, I’m going to do everything opposite from the way Mickey Seven would do it!”

  Malik nods in amusement. “That’s probably what Mickey Seven would say.”

  My eyes are slits. “Just wait and see.”

  We move on. Q. Sinjin Lee has to be the DNA donor for Aldwin Wo. Wo—a Chinese word for peace. It’s hard to imagine him as an exact copy of the guy who ran one of the largest smuggling operations in American history. By the time the government added up all the charges against Lee, he was sentenced to over three hundred years behind bars. Not that he got to serve much of it. He was stabbed to death by another inmate last year.

  We finally get to Tori when we research Yvonne-Marie Delacroix. There’s no mistaking it. The website actually has a middle-school graduation picture. I’ve had sleepovers with the girl in that photo. We kept drawers of clothes at each other’s houses. I called her parents pseudo-Mom and pseudo-Dad. The two are identical.

  Everyone sees it except Tori herself. “It’s impossible,” she says firmly. “Yvonne-Marie Delacroix is a bank robber! I won four honesty badges last year!”

  Eli tries to explain. “She’s not just a bank robber. She’s a genius at getting in and out of places. Doesn’t that sound kind of familiar? Who got us into the Plastics Works that first time? You. Who got us out of the Medical Arts building? Who broke into the Campanellas’ house?”

  “But I didn’t steal anything!”

  “Not if you don’t count clothes, food, backpacks, and a Jeep Wrangler,” Malik agrees.

  “I didn’t steal that! I just rode in it!”

  “Calm down,” I urge. “Yes, we’ve done some bad things. It was the only way to survive.”

  “Right!” Tori clings to that. “I stole because I had no choice! Yvonne-Marie Delacroix did it for the money!”

  “And she was pretty good at it too,” Malik reads on. “She was at her villa in Tuscany by the time Interpol caught up with her. Her 1985 Fort Knox robbery is still a required class in FBI training.”

  “I don’t want to be a required class in FBI training!” Tori wails.

  I put a sympathetic arm around her shoulders. It was hard enough learning we were exact copies of terrible criminals. B
ut that doesn’t compare to the horror of finding out which ones—to seeing that picture of someone who’s you, and yet not you, along with details of the awful crimes this person has committed. Mickey Seven is a radical extremist and a mad bomber! And the fact that we share a lot of the same beliefs makes it scarier! She was protesting a war. Who’s more anti-war than me? Does that mean it’s in me to do the kind of things she has?

  It’s even harder for Eli. For better or worse, we now know who we are. He hasn’t found a match yet, and it’s becoming more and more obvious who he’s going to be.

  We identify Farouk al Fayed, the kidnapper, as seventh grader Freddie Cinta (love in Indonesian). Last on the list is C. J. Rackoff, swindler, embezzler, and Ponzi schemer. We agree on him right away, even though the youngest picture of him shows him in his twenties.

  “Hector,” Malik barely whispers. “Wouldn’t you know he’d wind up a scuzzy little cheat, using his brains to rip people off.”

  Believe it or not, he says it kind of fondly.

  “At least we don’t have to tell him what a stinker he is,” Tori offers.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Malik murmurs sadly. “Hector was smart. He would have known what was in his own heart. Maybe that’s why he was such a sad sack—just like this Rackoff guy. Look, according to this, his biggest complaint in jail is that he never gets any visitors.”

  “Like people should be lining up to spend time with a low-life con artist like him,” I put in.

  “But that’s exactly Hector,” Malik insists. “Always bent out of shape because he was being left out, or he wasn’t getting his fair share of something. Poor shrimp.” He lapses into a melancholy silence.

  Eli’s attention is still on the iPad. “There are three left,” he observes in a flat tone. “Margaret and Penelope”—he takes a deep breath—“and me.”

  I understand what he’s talking about. We don’t have all the names, but the last remaining male could only be the clone of Bartholomew Glen. We’ve learned pretty grim things about ourselves, but Eli’s lesson must be the toughest. Nothing could be more awful than finding out you’re an exact copy of the Crossword Killer.

  I want to say something to him, make him feel better, but the right words won’t come. It’s not my fault. Mickey Seven isn’t the touchy-feely type.

  Tori places a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “You’re not your DNA,” she offers gently. “None of us are.”

  Eli nods, but you can tell he’s really devastated. “Maybe that’s why my dad was so strict with me. He knew who I was and what I might turn into.”

  “When it comes to bad, our parents don’t take a backseat to anybody,” Malik assures him.

  Even though nothing has changed, it suddenly comes over me: What are we doing in this sick town? “Just because there’s nobody here doesn’t mean they won’t come back. Let’s get out of here.”

  “The factory?” Tori asks.

  “No, Serenity. This isn’t our home anymore, and it never really was. Let’s go.”

  Malik nods. “I’m with Laska. We’ve already learned everything we’re going to. I vote we bounce. Happy Valley gives me the creeps.”

  “We don’t have anywhere to bounce to,” Eli reminds us. “We came here for proof. We picked up a lot of information, but none of it proves anything.”

  We turn to Tori.

  “What are you looking at me for?” she demands.

  “Yvonne-Marie Delacroix would know what to do,” says Malik.

  “But I’m not her!”

  “You’ve been the best at figuring out our next move,” I tell her. “I don’t care where we go so long as it’s out of Serenity, and soon.”

  Tori seems stricken for an instant, and then a focused intensity takes over. “Poor C. J. Rackoff doesn’t get any visitors,” she muses. “I’ll bet it would make his day if we stopped by and introduced ourselves.”

  “C. J. Rackoff?” Malik is incredulous. “Doesn’t it feel bad enough to lose Hector without having to go look at his middle-aged evil twin?”

  “Think,” Tori prompts. “Rackoff goes back to the very beginning of Project Osiris. Maybe he knows about it. And even if he doesn’t, he still might remember the day someone came and took a piece of him to make Hector.”

  She has all our attention now. The trail, which seemed completely cold just a few minutes ago, has several new possibilities. The DNA donors—of course!

  Eli’s fingers dance over the tablet. “C. J. Rackoff is serving seven consecutive twenty-year sentences at the Kefauver Federal Detention Facility in the Texas panhandle, near a town called Haddonfield.” He opens a map program in a small window. “A little more than three hundred miles from here.”

  I may be the reckless one, thanks to Mickey Seven. But for once, I have something cautious to say. “We can’t take the pool truck all that way. It must have been reported stolen by now.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” grins Malik. “I’ve got it covered.”

  20

  MALIK BRUDER

  By the time we roll out of Happy Valley that night, the blue Splash! truck is white. Cardboard has been taped over the hole in the glass we made breaking in. The F in the license plates has been changed to an E, and the 6 is now an 8. On the side is the logo of the New Mexico Pinto Bean Consortium, which Frieden found on the internet. Hats off to Torific—she really is great at art. If some nosy cop happens to pull alongside us on the highway, no way he’ll be able to tell it’s not the real thing. I wonder if Yvonne-Marie Delacroix could do that.

  We leave Happy Valley pretty much the way we found it, except we take a load of clothes and some pillows and blankets in case we have to sleep in the truck. One other difference: the Laska house has its windows bashed out, courtesy of Amber, who likes to make a statement. Mickey Seven would be proud. The pool stuff is crammed into the Pritels’ garage, along with a note apologizing for stealing the truck. Frieden has a thing about sorrys. Maybe he’s trying to make up for being the clone of you-know-who.

  I’m at the wheel, since I have the best chance of passing for old enough to drive. The minute tiny Serenity disappears from my side mirror, I know this is good-bye forever. In the back, I can hear Torific sniffling a little, but not much compared to the water works from the last time. It’s not that long since we first broke out of Happy Valley, but we’ve changed a lot since then. It’s not so much that we’re tougher, although the outside world isn’t as alien to us anymore. We’re just not who we used to be, when our families were the most important things in our lives. Eli, Amber, and Tori will figure more in how I turn out than Mom, Dad, or anyone from Serenity ever will. I’m not an adult yet, but the kid part of my life is definitely over. For most people, this probably happens very gradually. We’re not most people. In the normal sense, we’re barely even people. We blasted out of childhood on a runaway cone truck.

  Old County Six is so deserted that it seems like a waste of time that we bothered to paint the truck. Eventually, though, we get on Route 412 and pass the occasional car. Nobody looks twice at a home paint job on the Pinto Bean Express.

  We’ve brought along a lot of snacks—everything we could scrounge out of four houses, mostly junk food. The idea is the fewer times we have to stop, the less chance someone will notice that we’re four kids without a driver—a real licensed one, anyway. The problem is that most of that stuff is so salty that we’re dying of thirst before we’re even halfway to the Texas border. Then Laska gives us this long lecture about proper hydration that makes us even thirstier. We tough it out.

  Although we can go without water, the truck likes a little gas every now and then. As we watch the needle edging toward E, it starts to sink in that we need a pit stop.

  We pull into a service station just past a town called Clayton. I make a point of being nowhere near the wheel by the time the attendant saunters over.

  He’s an older man in greasy coveralls, and he looks me up and down as he pumps the gas. “Where’s the driver?”

&nbs
p; I motion vaguely toward the bathroom. “How much do we owe you?”

  The pump clicks off, and he works the trigger until the readout shows an even eighty-two dollars. I hand over the cash, wondering if Tamara Dunleavy might have been a little more generous in what her driver stuck into our backpacks. Nobody thought much about the price of gas in Happy Valley, where a half-mile walk got you anywhere you wanted to go and then some.

  I pay up and wait for the guy to bug off. In alarm, I realize that he’s looking toward the bathroom door, waiting for “our driver” to appear, which clearly isn’t going to happen. He’d better not be holding his breath. In the mirror, I catch sight of Eli, flashing me a “what’s-the-holdup?” glance.

  At that moment, the bathroom door opens and Tori steps out.

  The attendant shoots me an arched eyebrow. “That’s your driver?”

  I’m starting to sweat. “No, of course not.” I raise my voice to Tori. “Where’s Dad?” Just to let her know we’re in trouble. I hope she gets the message. Yvonne-Marie Delacroix would.

  “He’s around here somewhere,” Tori replies glibly. “Dad . . . Dad?”

  Amber jumps out of the truck and heads for the bathroom.

  “How many of you kids are there?” the man demands.

  “Four,” I manage. “Our dad’s taking us to Oklahoma to visit our grandma.”

  “In a pinto bean truck?”

  I draw myself up with dignity. “This is the only car we have.” If you don’t count the quarter-million-dollar Bentley we ditched in Taos.

  Amber enters the bathroom and pulls the door shut. Tori joins Eli back in the truck. A couple of minutes later, Laska returns and climbs aboard, casting the attendant a dazzling smile as she passes us.

  The man looks exasperated. “Listen, son, I wasn’t born yesterday. If you don’t think I’ve got the brains to recognize a bunch of joyriders—hey!”