Payback

by Gordon Korman

  I’m still pretty freaked out about falling off the motorcycle, but at least now nobody’s chasing us. I consider suggesting that slowing down might be a good idea, but decide that putting distance between ourselves and Jackson Hole is an even better one. We may have slowed down the bikers, but Ms. Dunleavy’s security people must still be searching for us somewhere.

  The girls are dead ahead, ghostly pale in the glow of our headlight. After a few more minutes of riding, I’m even starting to get the hang of the Harley a little. The key is to lean whenever Eli leans as we take the curves. It’ll never match the comfort and style of the Bentley, but at least I don’t feel like I’m about to be launched into orbit with every bump in the road.

  Just when I’m starting to relax a little, Frieden pulls even with the girls and motions them over to the side.

  “What’s the big idea?” I complain over the idling of the bikes. “No pit stops!”

  Eli pulls the laptop out of his backpack. “We need to figure out where we’re going.”

  Yeah, okay, I admit that would help. We set the computer on the seat and huddle around the screen as he calls up a map.

  The northwest corner of Wyoming isn’t quite the one-horse whistle-stop Happy Valley is, but it has to come in a close second. If you’re on pavement, chances are it’s a straight shot to just about everywhere around. Frieden plots the route to Driggs and makes sure we all know it, in case the two bikes get separated.

  He’s just about to close the laptop when a notification sounds, and a pop-up window opens. Tamara Dunleavy is peering out at us, one angry CEO. “Eli—kids—listen to me—”

  Frieden closes the pop-up. But as soon as it’s gone, a new one appears, and she’s ticked off at us from a slightly different angle. Eli puts his thumb over the webcam, blocking her from seeing where we are—not that she could pick up much beyond the fact that we’re in the middle of nowhere in the pre-dawn gloom.

  Ms. Dunleavy tries again, kinder this time. “I know you’re only trying to help your fellow”—she hesitates—“the others who are like you—”

  “Fellow clones?” Laska cuts her off. “Whose fault is it that there are any clones at all?”

  Ms. Dunleavy flushes a little. But being rich means never having to say you’re sorry. “I can’t change the past. But if you trust me, I can help the others.”

  “You’re not going to help them,” Tori accuses. “You’re going to ruin it for them.”

  “No.” The CEO is coming back.

  All this is tearing Frieden in two. He’s her clone, her flesh and blood, complete with the family hacker skills and the resemblance to the kid in California. Eli never had a mother, not even the fake Serenity kind. This old billionaire is the closest he’s ever going to get to a real one.

  “You’ve been fantastic,” Eli manages. “But those kids at Poseidon—I wish I could explain it better. They’re—us. We already abandoned them once. We can’t let them down.” He slams the laptop shut.

  If there was a point where we could crawl home to Ms. Dunleavy and beg forgiveness, we just passed it. I miss the Tater Tots already.

  The sky is beginning to lighten as we get back on the bikes heading for Driggs. Twenty minutes later, when we pull into the airport, it’s full dawn.

  We look around in dismay. The sign says DRIGGSREED MEMORIAL AIRPORT, but it’s nothing more than an open field, with a couple of hangars that look more like barns and a single dinky square building marked TETON AVIATION CENTER. There’s a handful of small planes scattered around the tarmac, and a grand total of two cars in the parking lot.

  “Where’s the ticket place?” I ask.

  Nobody answers. Jackson Hole airport wasn’t big, but it was pretty clear where you had to go to catch your flight. Here, there’s nothing.

  “Maybe that guy knows.” Tori points across the gravel drive to a lanky young man dozing on a wooden bench in front of the one and only building. The peak of his baseball cap is pulled low, hiding most of his face, and his head rests on a battered canvas backpack.

  We park the motorcycles and walk over.

  Eli does the talking. “Uh—mister? Sorry to disturb you, but where do we go to buy tickets?”

  The guy stirs, opens one eye, and then sits up to take us in. The name Shanahan is stitched onto the knapsack. “Where did you kids drop from?”

  Tori takes over. “We need to get on the next flight. Is the ticket counter inside?”

  Shanahan’s reply is an elaborate yawn that lasts several seconds. He pulls a pair of round wire-rimmed glasses from his pocket and settles them on his nose. “Where are you trying to get to?”

  Tori is reluctant to offer too many details. “Well, where does the next flight go?”

  “Depends.”

  We stare at him.

  “This is a private airfield, guys,” Shanahan explains. “Mostly for rich ranchers and fat cats in the oil business. United Airlines couldn’t find this place with a telescope. So if that’s the kind of flight you’re looking for, you’re out of luck.”

  He must notice the look of horror on our four faces. We’ve stolen a Bentley and two motorcycles to get to an airport that isn’t a real airport. The most important thing we’ve ever tried to do is circling the bowl. It’s not good.

  “Sorry,” he adds.

  “So why are you here?” I ask.

  He yawns again. “Waiting to be chartered. Pete Shanahan, Shanahan Air Services. Hey, are you four in trouble? Running away from home or something?”

  Eli cuts him off. “We want to hire you.”

  “What—a bunch of kids?”

  “You’ve got a plane; we’ve got someplace to go,” Eli tells him. “What more do you need to know?”

  Shanahan’s brow jumps all the way to his hairline. “I need to know who’s after you—and therefore me. I need to know what to tell the cops when they arrest me for kidnapping.”

  “We’re eighteen,” I pipe up.

  He laughs in my face. “You could pass for sixteen—maybe. The others—uh-uh.”

  “We have money,” Tori volunteers.

  His eyes narrow. “How much?”

  You know how guys like Torque are experts when it comes to pinpointing your weaknesses? Well, suddenly, I sense a little vulnerability in Shanahan. Young pilot, probably the low man on the totem pole at Driggs, struggling to get his business going. In a way, he’s almost as desperate as we are. He needs money.

  “Don’t worry about that, hotshot,” I bluster. “Just gas up your plane and let’s rock and roll.”

  I’m doing my best to sound like Gus’s crew, but in reality, there’s a lot to worry about. The only reason we had money before was Ms. Dunleavy’s credit card number. But we can’t count on that anymore. She figured out we were going to Jackson Hole airport, which means surely she checked into how we bought our tickets. Besides that, we’ve got barely a hundred bucks between the four of us.

  He frowns at me. “Where exactly are you kids going?”

  “We’ll let you know once we’re up in the air,” I assure him.

  He shakes his head. “It doesn’t work that way. I have to know how much fuel to take on. I have to submit a flight plan to the tower. Should I go on?”

  “There’s an island in the Bahamas called West Cay—” Eli begins.

  “You’re not serious!” He looks us over, one by one. “You’re serious! So not only am I flying a bunch of kids; I’m flying them out of the country? When they lock me up, they’ll throw away the key!”

  “How much?” probes Tori.

  Shanahan’s flustered. “You’re talking thousands of miles! Plus hazard pay for the risk I’ll be taking—twenty thousand.”

  I actually feel my jaw dropping open.

  “Dollars?” Laska gapes in amazement.

  We’ve learned a lot since escaping Happy Valley, but I guess we’re still kind of clueless about what things cost in the real world. So much for chartering a plane for our piddly hundred bucks.

  But E
li just says, “Done.”

  He unzips his backpack, and I swear the girls and I are gawking at him as if he’s about to pull out fistfuls of cash. But no, it’s the laptop. He flips it open and pounds the keyboard. “I’ll need your bank account number. I’ll transfer the money in, and you can check on your phone to make sure it’s there.”

  I’m positive he’s blowing smoke to fool the guy, but when I look over his shoulder, the computer is going crazy. It’s like sign-in screens for a million different websites are flashing all over the place, and passwords are magically appearing to fill them in. Next thing I know, the monitor is spitting out columns of numbers—big numbers. I read the name at the top—DUNLEAVY, TAMARA—and it hits me. Frieden has found a way to hack into her bank account to use her money to help us escape from her. It makes perfect sense. Who has a better chance of penetrating her cyber defenses than her own clone, whose brain is made up of her DNA, cell by cell?

  I’ve got a little DNA of my own, and it has a suggestion. “Give him half.”

  “Half?” Shanahan repeats.

  “Half now,” I explain. “You get the other half when we land in West Cay.”

  Eli nods and hits the return button.

  There’s a beep, and a message appears: TRANSACTION COMPLETE.

  “Check,” Eli prompts Shanahan.

  The pilot taps away at his phone for a while, and looks up in astonishment as he sees the brand-new deposit in his account. Believe me, he isn’t half as amazed as I am. If poor Gus had realized it was this easy to get your hands on big money, he never would have wasted his life shaking down small-time storekeepers.

  “Let’s get Brutus,” Shanahan says finally.

  Brutus turns out to be his plane, not a guy. The only aircraft we’ve ever been on is Ms. Dunleavy’s Gulfstream jet. Brutus is a big letdown. It—he?—is a six-seat propeller job that has seen better days. Or maybe it hasn’t. Maybe Brutus was this crummy straight off the assembly line.

  Riding in Brutus is like putting your head in a blender and setting it on liquefy. The floor shakes, the seats shake, the bulkheads shake, and the wings shudder as if they’re about to fall off. But you don’t worry about crashing. Between the nausea and the scrambled brains, you can’t string two thoughts together.

  “You get used to the vibration!” Shanahan shouts over the racket of the propellers.

  I’ll bet you don’t.

  It’s a miserable flight. Did I say flight? How about flights—plural? This fantastic piece of aeronautic engineering can’t make it all the way across the country in one jump. Brutus has to stop and refuel every time the wind blows—once in Topeka, Kansas, and once in Meridian, Mississippi. Actually those stops are the only things keeping me going. Just having my feet on something that isn’t shaking and roaring for a few minutes is a good trade-off for any delay in our trip. This isn’t worth twenty thousand dollars—not even somebody else’s twenty thousand dollars. It isn’t worth twenty cents.

  We eat vending machine pretzels, the only thing our sickened stomachs can keep down.

  “Aren’t you guys hungry?” mumbles Shanahan, chowing down on an enormous hero sandwich, gripped in oil-stained hands.

  On top of it all, the trip takes forever. Brutus isn’t just the lousiest plane that was ever built; it’s also the slowest. We’ve been on the go for more than twelve hours when the land just sort of stops. Beyond it, stretching as far as the horizon in all directions, is water.

  I thought I was too nauseated to care, but I’ve never seen anything like it before. “Is that the ocean?”

  “First time?” Shanahan calls over his shoulder.

  “It’s beautiful!” Tori exclaims in awe. “The color! The texture!”

  I swear if she turns this into an art lesson, she’s going out the cargo bay.

  “Didn’t you guys see it in California?” asks Amber.

  Eli shakes his head. “We went straight to Atomic Studios. There wasn’t any time for sightseeing.”

  During this conversation, Brutus executes a wide, banking U-turn. All at once, the land is ahead of us instead of behind.

  “Hey!” I shout to our pilot. “Why are we going back?”

  He pivots in his chair. “Bad news, you guys. I just heard from the tower in West Cay. Our clearance to land has been revoked.”

  “What?” I choke. “Why?”

  He shrugs. “You’d know better than me.”

  “How would we know?” Eli demands.

  “Someone doesn’t want you kids to get to the Bahamas,” Shanahan explains. “Someone with a lot of clout.”

  And it hits us. Ms. Dunleavy. Who has more clout than a billionaire? We escaped her and her people in Jackson Hole, but she always knew what our final destination had to be. She couldn’t call the cops on us—not without having to answer a lot of uncomfortable questions about our connection to Project Osiris and her connection to us. So she did the next best thing: she used her wealth and her reach to keep us from making it to Poseidon.

  “That’s your problem, man!” I shout at the pilot. “You took our money to fly us to West Cay! If you want the other half, you’d better get us there!”

  Frieden does me one better. “I can take back the ten thousand you already have too. You saw how easy it was.”

  “You don’t understand,” Shanahan pleads. “If I touch down on that island, I could lose my license. I could be arrested. Brutus could be impounded.”

  “Also your problem,” I shoot back.

  “It’s kind of our problem too,” Tori muses. “Ms. Dunleavy already has two investigators on West Cay. If we land, they’ll be at the airport waiting for us.”

  Laska’s face is reddening. “We have to get there. I don’t care how.”

  “I never should have agreed to take you kids,” Shanahan laments. “Not for any money. Now I’m on the wrong side of the country with no place to land, and I have no choice but to take you home to your parents.”

  “Then you’re off the hook,” I growl. “We’ve got no home. And no parents either.”

  He stares at me.

  “We’re not going back to Wyoming,” Amber says with deadly certainty.

  “Well, make up your mind, guys,” the pilot warns. “We can’t just circle up here. Our fuel won’t last forever.”

  Frieden points straight down. “What’s this place?”

  “Florida—north of Fort Lauderdale.”

  “We’ll get off here,” Eli decides.

  “I know a private airstrip,” Shanahan tells us. “Used to be a hangar for the Goodyear Blimp.”

  I have no idea what that is, but we have a more pressing problem. “What good is being here?” I demand. “There’s still a lot of ocean between Florida and the Bahamas! How are we supposed to get there?”

  “In one of those,” Eli replies.

  As the plane banks, we catch sight of the expanse of water. There’s the beach and, way offshore, several sleek shapes moving through the blue, leaving white wakes behind them.

  Boats.

  19

  TORI PRITEL

  If you ever want to be looked at like you’re crazy, use a laptop to call a taxi to pick you up at an abandoned blimp base.

  By the time the cab jounces across the broken parking lot, Shanahan and Brutus have flown off into the sunset and we’re draped across concrete benches in the long shadow of the hangar. Bone weary, Malik and Amber are out cold and snoring. The only reason why Eli and I are still upright is we’re leaning against each other. But neither of us has the energy to talk. We haven’t slept in more than a day and a half. And our real mission (the hard part) hasn’t even started yet.

  “How did you kids get here?” the driver asks in amazement, startling Amber awake. “It’s a long story,” Eli tells him. “We need to get to the nearest marina.”

  Amber slaps Malik on the side of the head, and he sits up with a start. “I’ll take a second helping of Tater Tots—” he murmurs, still half in a dream. Then his eyes open and he takes in h
is surroundings with a disappointed, “Oh.”

  The driver shakes his head with a mixture of disapproval and admiration. “You party animals. You get younger every year.”

  The motion of the taxi brings Malik the rest of the way back to life. (At least he’s alert enough for complaining.) “I can’t believe you paid that crook Shanahan,” he mutters to Eli. “Even after he flew us to the wrong place.”

  “I didn’t pay him,” Eli defends himself. “I just let him keep the money he already has. What choice did I have? The online account has been frozen. That means Ms. Dunleavy knows we hacked into her bank.”

  “Another bonehead move by you,” Malik accuses. “Why didn’t you transfer out a few mil for us while you were in there? She never would have missed it. That’s chump change to a billionaire.”

  “Because we’re not our DNA,” Amber says staunchly.

  “Frieden hacking into bank accounts is exactly his DNA,” Malik retorts. “And how about the Bentley and those two motorcycles?”

  “That’s not my DNA,” Amber reminds him.

  “Okay, so we haven’t blown anything up. But the day’s not over yet.”

  “Quiet, you guys.” I point to the driver and drop my voice. “The main thing is no more bank transfers.” We have to be aware of our changing situation if we’re going to have any chance of putting together a plan to get to West Cay. The odds are already stacked against us. “That means the only money we have left is what’s jammed in our pockets. And that’s not much.”

  “So how are we going to charter a boat to the Bahamas?” Malik asks in dismay.

  “We’re not,” Eli replies evenly. “We’re going to steal a boat and sail it there ourselves.”

  Amber closes her eyes. “More stealing.”

  “How are we supposed to find the Bahamas?” Malik demands. “We’re not sailors. We grew up in New Mexico.”

  Eli pats his backpack. “The laptop has built-in GPS. I disabled it so Ms. Dunleavy couldn’t track us. But by the time we’re in the water, it’ll be too late for her to catch up.”

  “You said in the water,” Malik grumbles. “I hope you meant on the water.”