Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation

by Stuart Gibbs

  “So how’d you find us?” Charlie yelled over the sound of rending metal.

  “I came back to the safe house and kept an eye on it,” Dante explained. “It wasn’t long before the Mossad showed up. Then they left in a big hurry, so I followed them. I figured there was a decent chance they were heading to you. I just didn’t expect them to arrest you.”

  Charlie sent the last car on the street skidding into a storefront. The Mossad was gaining on them, as Charlie had cleared the road for them.

  Dante leaned out the window and fired a few shots their way. “When they took you down into that tunnel, there was no way I could follow, but it wasn’t hard to figure out which way it went. Downhill. Out of the city. So I followed the line, came across those two Mossad guys with this Humvee, and guessed they were waiting for you.”

  “Lucky guess,” Milana observed.

  “Looks like I was right though . . . Charlie!” Dante screamed as the Humvee swerved around a corner into an open-air market.

  The market was small, crammed into a narrow plaza, and the Muslim stall owners and shoppers were prone on the ground, answering the call to prayer. They scattered as the Humvee barreled through, smashing the stalls into splinters and upending tables laden with figs, cucumbers, and sacks of grain. A crate full of chickens burst apart and the birds scattered away, leaving a cloud of feathers in their wake.

  “Would you watch where you’re going?” Dante demanded.

  “I’m doing my best!” Charlie yelled back. “This is my first car chase! And this thing handles like a cinder block!”

  Another line of bullets stitched the rear gate of the Humvee. Milana responded, firing back out the window.

  The right front tire of the first Mossad Humvee blew out and the vehicle lost control, smashing through a vegetable stall and embedding itself in the front wall of a restaurant.

  The second Humvee sped past it and dropped in right behind Charlie. In her rearview mirror, she could see Semel behind the wheel, glaring at her, seemingly immune to the pain from his gunshot wound.

  Charlie blasted out of the market and onto yet another narrow road, leaving a horde of angry people yelling after her.

  “Were you telling the truth this time?” Milana asked her. “About Denmark?”

  “No.”

  “Then where is Pandora?”

  “Mind if I concentrate on not crashing for right now?” Charlie veered around a corner and found herself on a slightly wider street. Unfortunately, there was a camel standing in the midst of it. To Charlie’s astonishment, it was wearing a sombrero. Hand-lettered signs dangled on both sides of its hump, making it a living message board for a local restaurant.

  “A freaking camel???” Charlie exclaimed. “Are you kidding me?” She pounded on her horn. “Move, you stupid ungulate!”

  Despite the Humvees bearing down on it, the camel remained unfazed. It stayed rooted right in the middle of the street, staring blankly at the oncoming cars.

  Charlie considered plowing right over it, but she didn’t want to kill an innocent animal—and she worried that a camel that weighed half a ton might do some serious damage if it came flying through the windshield. So she yanked as hard as she could on the steering wheel. The Humvee skidded around the camel, which didn’t so much as blink, then clipped the side of a flatbed truck bearing a load of enormous cement pipes, each one several feet in diameter. The side of the truck tore off, releasing the pipes, which clattered into the road.

  Between the pipes and the camel, Semel had nowhere to go. He tried to thread the gap between them, but a pipe slammed into the side of his Humvee so hard it knocked the car sideways. It crashed straight through the corner of a store and flipped over into a ditch.

  Dante turned to Charlie, trying to remain stoic but unable to hide the respect in his eyes.

  “You can say you’re impressed,” Charlie told him. “I bet they don’t teach defensive driving against camels in the CIA.”

  “More Mossad will be coming soon,” Dante warned. “And they certainly have this Humvee tagged on GPS. We need to ditch it and move by foot.”

  “Right,” Charlie said. “Let me just put a little more mileage between us and Semel.” Having finally got the hang of driving the Humvee, she gunned the engine and raced through the narrow streets. Upon spotting a sign for the highway to Tel Aviv, she turned that way.

  “We can’t go all the way to Tel Aviv,” Milana cautioned. “We need to find a place to lie low before the Mossad finds us.”

  “No way,” Charlie argued. “We have to get out of the country. We have to get to Pandora before Russo can.”

  “Russo?” Dante repeated. “John Russo?”

  “Oh yeah. He’s still alive and he’s working for the bad guys,” Charlie told him. “You missed out on a whole lot while we thought you were dead.”

  “That’s our theory about Russo, at least,” Milana corrected, then added, “The Mossad controls this entire country. We won’t be able to get out via the airport. We’ll have to slip over the border.”

  “That will take way too long,” Charlie said. “I know a much faster way. I just need to get to a phone.”

  “Who are you calling?” Dante asked skeptically. “The president? Because we’re going to need someone awfully powerful to get us out of here.”

  “Oh, we need someone more powerful than the president,” Charlie said. “I’m calling my banker.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Tel Aviv

  Buying an airline ticket only an hour before the flight was expensive, but John Russo wasn’t concerned about money.

  In the months before he faked his death, he had slowly shifted most of his assets out of his true bank account into a subsidiary, doing it in a way that wouldn’t set off alarms at the CIA. In addition, he had also been carrying several thousand dollars in a money belt for the last week.

  All the fake passports that the CIA had issued John over the years were hidden in the money belt as well. John selected one for an alias he had never even used—one the CIA had probably forgotten they had ever created—as he climbed out of the rent-a-car shuttle at Ben Gurion International Airport.

  In his new clothes, showered, and shaved, John looked enough like a diplomat to avoid much scrutiny. Even so, he had stopped at a thrift store and purchased a properly aged suitcase and enough clothing to make it appear as though he would be traveling for a few days. Buying a one-way ticket in cash slightly before flight time would raise eyebrows, especially in a suspicious country like Israel. However, if you bought a round-trip ticket and acted as though you were leaving on a sudden diplomatic mission, those concerns faded. And while Israel was infamous for being excessively cautious at customs, that tended to be primarily for people entering the country rather than leaving it.

  John had no trouble convincing the ticket saleswoman at Ben Gurion that he was an average, everyday American diplomat, stationed in Jerusalem but hurrying back to the States for a meeting that somebody, somewhere had decided he absolutely needed to attend just before it took place. In fact, he was convincing enough—not to mention charming enough—to get the saleswoman to bump him up to business class for free, seeing as it was a fourteen-hour flight and all.

  It still took a while to get through customs. By the time John did, he had to rush to make his flight. He was hurrying through the airport when his phone rang. Alexei. He answered expectantly, hoping for good news.

  But it wasn’t.

  “The CIA and the girl escaped from the Mossad,” Alexei reported.

  John grimaced, then asked, “How is that even possible?”

  “I don’t know. We just heard it on their radio. The Mossad doesn’t even know where they are. They’re combing the entire country for them.”

  John was so distracted he almost ran into a stupid tourist who had left her bags right in the middle of the walkway. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The Mossad was one of the most elite spy agencies in the world. He had never heard of anyone escaping
from them. Not when the Mossad had them completely outnumbered. What on earth had happened? Who was this Charlie Thorne, and how did she keep weaseling out of every trap he had set for her?

  His gate was just ahead. Business class was already boarding. For a brief moment he considered not getting on the plane. He could stay in Israel and take care of Charlie Thorne himself.

  But that was crazy. He was so close to Pandora. There was no sense in turning back now. Even if Charlie managed to elude the Mossad and his men, there was no way she could possibly crack Einstein’s code and beat him to Pandora.

  Still, he couldn’t just let her go. “I know where she’s heading,” he said. “You need to get there first and kill her.”

  “Kill her?” Alexei echoed. “But she’s just a girl.”

  “I don’t care!” John shouted, so loud that other passengers turned to him in surprise. He lowered his voice and said, “She’s the only thing that can stop us. So we need to get rid of her. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Alexei said.

  “Good,” John replied. Then he told Alexei where to go and boarded his plane.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Jerusalem

  It took only one call.

  Charlie made it from a pay phone at the back of a pizza parlor, one of the last remaining pay phones in Israel, it seemed. She had the phone number committed to memory. There was no need for a credit card or any form of ID that could be traced; any calls to this number were collect.

  Before she had robbed Lightning, Charlie had done a lot of research on banks. Up until that point, she had assumed that most banks were like the one on the corner near her house, where people went in, set up accounts, deposited their paychecks, and got money from the ATM on occasion. Her mother had helped her set up a bank account there when she was six so she could save her allowance. The problem was, a young girl couldn’t just go to a bank like that with millions of dollars and open an account. The government tended to notice things like that.

  But it turned out there were other kinds of banks, far more covert ones that catered to people with large amounts of money that they wanted to keep secret. Banks that asked no questions about who was starting the account—or how they had obtained the money. These banks tended to be located in countries with lax financial laws like the Bahamas, Grand Cayman, and Macau, though Switzerland was the most famous place for them. So Charlie had gone with Switzerland.

  It hadn’t been too difficult to set up an account. She had simply called a telephone number and spoken with a person who was very eager to help take care of her money. No one had ever asked her age. (Swiss policy was to keep the owners of all accounts a secret, even to the banks themselves.) Once the account was established, Charlie funneled her money into it and let it accrue interest. She had never touched it since. In fact, she had never even called the bank again until now.

  The woman who answered at the bank was very discreet. She didn’t ask questions about what Charlie requested, no matter how unusual it might have been. She simply checked Charlie’s account to make sure there was enough money to cover the cost, then assured her everything would be taken care of immediately.

  While Charlie was doing that, Dante was swiping a car for them. Dante wasn’t proud of himself for doing it; as a CIA agent, he was supposed to uphold the law. But they were in desperate straits. They had to get out of Jerusalem fast, and they couldn’t take a cab or use any ride-hailing services. The Mossad would doubtlessly be monitoring those. But Dante couldn’t just smash the window of a car and hotwire it either. That might attract the police.

  So he had watched the valet service of an upscale restaurant next to the pizza place. A person sitting down to a fancy meal probably wouldn’t notice their car was gone for a good two hours, by which time Dante, Milana, and Charlie would hopefully be out of the country.

  The valets hadn’t been paying close attention to the keys in the key box. Dante watched a wealthy jerk drive up in a new SUV and mouth off to the valet, who obsequiously took the insult and parked the car in a lot on the corner. When the poor valet came back, Dante nicked the keys, walked down to the lot, and easily swiped the jerk’s car.

  Minutes later he, Charlie, and Milana were heading down the highway to Tel Aviv. Dante and Milana sat in the front seats, while Charlie was in the back. Like they were a normal family rather than three fugitives from justice.

  Night had settled by now and the desert sky was full of stars.

  “So, care to enlighten me about this brilliant plan of yours?” Dante asked Charlie. “Where are we heading?”

  “Ben Gurion Airport.”

  Milana looked at Charlie like she was an idiot. “The Mossad’s going to be crawling all over that place.”

  “Maybe at the main terminal. But we’re heading to the one for private jets.”

  Milana’s gaze remained disdainful. “They won’t let us get back on our CIA jet. They’ve probably impounded it.”

  “We’re not taking that jet. I ordered us a different one.”

  Dante’s eyes met Charlie’s in the rearview mirror. “You ordered a private jet? From your bank?”

  “Yes.”

  “Exactly what kind of bank is this?” Milana asked.

  “The kind that likes to keep its clients happy.”

  “Are a lot of those clients criminals?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” That was the truth, although Charlie could make an educated guess. There were a lot of incredibly wealthy people in the world who had gotten rich through illegal means. Like her. And, like her, they needed a discreet place to park their money.

  “All I ever got from my bank was a toaster,” Dante observed. “They gave it to me for opening an account and it was such a piece of junk it caught fire after two days. You’re only twelve and you can get a freaking jet delivered whenever you want?”

  “The jet is only for emergencies,” Charlie said. “And it’s not a freebie. I paid for it.”

  “How much?” Dante asked.

  Charlie didn’t answer. Instead, she said, “It’s coming from Ankara. It should be here by the time we get to the airport.”

  “How much did you pay for this?” Dante repeated.

  Once again Charlie ignored the question. “The way I figure it, the private terminal is the last place the Mossad will expect us to go. They’re probably not expecting us to head to the airport, period, because that’s the most obvious way out of the country. But they’ll still post agents there to cover their butts. Around the commercial terminal, at least. But the private terminal? You need big bucks or high diplomatic status to go in and out of there, and as far as they know we don’t have either of those things right now. So why waste agents there when they could be better used looking elsewhere for us?”

  “Semel still might take that chance,” Milana warned. “He must have hundreds of agents at his disposal.”

  “Then I guess we need to stack the odds in our favor,” Charlie said. “I need another phone.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Mossad headquarters was a heavily fortified but unmarked building in central Jerusalem. Isaac Semel was now running the show from there. The bullet wound in his arm had been padded and wrapped in gauze, but he had refused medication, wanting to keep his mind sharp. He was working through the pain, doing his penance for allowing himself to be bested.

  He had already placed every available agent into the field. Israel wasn’t an easy country to get in and out of—its borders were fenced, walled, strung with barbed wire, and seeded with land mines—but no system was perfect. The only land routes out of Israel led to countries that were increasingly hostile to Americans, but good CIA agents would have contacts and be able to navigate their way. Plus, even a small country like Israel had several hundred miles of border. And now it was night. It wouldn’t be easy to police it all.

  Semel had agents fanning out to the ferry terminals and every airfield in the country. He had men posted at Ben Gurion, too, although he couldn’t imagine that Dant
e Garcia would even try to book a flight.

  The private terminal was still an issue, though. Because the private terminal catered to the rich and powerful. It didn’t really matter if you inconvenienced thousands of tourists in the name of a manhunt—but if you aggravated one billionaire, heads could roll.

  As Milana Moon had suspected, Semel had already ordered the CIA’s jet impounded. He had done it hours before, as a precaution, shortly after learning that the CIA was after Pandora. Semel had also filed a request for the private terminal to enact security procedures, but he had no idea if that had been done. It was possible that his orders hadn’t filtered through the extra layer of political bureaucracy. To be on the safe side, he had sent an agent to Ben Gurion to liaise with security. It might take an hour, but in Semel’s estimation, there was no way his targets could line up a jet any faster than that. They were CIA agents, not billionaires.

  An aide came racing across the room. “We’ve got the girl!”

  “How?”

  “She went into a convenience store five minutes ago. The security cameras got a match on her face. She bought a phone. Dumb kid probably thinks it’s a burner that we can’t trace, but we’ve got it. We’re locked in on her right now.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Twenty-two kilometers southwest of us and moving.”

  “Was she with Garcia and Moon?”

  “We don’t know. They didn’t go into the store. But still . . .”

  “Bring her in.”

  “We already have teams moving in, sir.”

  Semel suppressed a smile, not wanting to assume any success yet.

  For the hundredth time, he wondered who this girl was. She was smart, no doubt. But she was also almost a teenager. Semel had children of his own. He had faced some of the most dangerous people on earth in his job—and none of them were as frightening as a preteen on a bad day. Even the smartest ones made bad judgment calls all the time. So maybe Charlie Thorne had grabbed a phone while the others were gassing up the car, thinking it couldn’t be traced, that it couldn’t hurt to call her boyfriend or her best friend back home or maybe even her parents to tell them that she was all right.