Hunter's Hope

by M. J. O'Shea

  “He said he was going to go to my house.”

  “Is anyone there?” Jack asked.

  “No.” Alo’s parents had gone out to a romantic dinner while he’d met with Jack. Their favorite restaurant had a set four courses. It was still hours before they’d be back.

  “Is he going to find the letters?” Jack asked.

  “No. They’re hidden really well. No place anyone would even think to look.” At that moment Alo loved his old house. Even more, he loved the loose panel in the back corner of his closet floor that was hidden under the wall-to-wall carpet. He had been pulling up the corner of the carpet for years, hiding random little things he’d found, and shoving the carpet back underneath the baseboard. It was the perfect place for the letters. Nobody would find them.

  “Then I think you should not be there. I have a nice couch and some spare sweats.”

  Alo didn’t know what to do. He was... yeah. Jack had probably just saved his life. Alo sure as hell couldn’t have done that alone.

  He nodded, completely shaken and ready for someone, anyone, to swoop in and protect him. Even if it was Jack Hunter. Alo didn’t want to go home; he didn’t want to go to the police; he didn’t want to do anything. So he decided to follow Jack. Hell, maybe it was an awful decision. Alo didn’t exactly have a lot of experience dealing with being scared out of his mind.

  “Okay. I’ll come with you.”

  Chapter Four

  Alo couldn’t calm down—which wasn’t a big surprise. He sat in the back of the cab, shaking. Jack had a hand on his shoulder, and Alo didn’t even think about how he didn’t know Jack and people who didn’t know him sure as hell didn’t touch him. He was grateful for the human contact.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Jack said.

  “How am I going to be okay? Those people were following me. How am I supposed to know if they were following my family as well?”

  Alo grabbed his knee and squeezed until his nails dug into the fabric of his pants. It should hurt, but it didn’t. He supposed his adrenaline was too high, or maybe he was just numb from shock. There were men out there. Or at least a man. A man in a creepy-ass black outfit who’d tried to strangle him. Alo would’ve thought it was crazy if he hadn’t just been there to experience it himself.

  “You’re going to be safe at my house. Your parents are in a crowded restaurant. Really, it’ll be fine.” Alo found himself liking the guy’s deep gravelly voice. “Is there anywhere else you could go that would be safe?” Jack asked gently.

  “I don’t know. The library at school?” Alo wracked his brain. The library was stupid. But maybe he could lock himself in his office. His office door had a big old window, though. Not a good idea. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “My place. It’s settled. I’ll make you some coffee, and we’ll talk.”

  “Why’s your place any better than anywhere else?”

  “It might not be,” Jack said. “But whoever that was doesn’t know who I am or where I live, and if nothing else, you won’t be alone.”

  True. Alo thought about spending the night in his damn office with a stapler in his hand aimed at the door and nearly burst into panicked terrified giggles. Attack by stapler.

  That couldn’t happen. He’d die for sure.

  “I need to call my parents. They need to get out of the city,” Alo said as soon as they got out of the cab.

  “I agree,” Jack said. “Do they have somewhere they can go for a few weeks until we get this sorted out?”

  We. Jack was assuming that Alo wanted his help. All he really wanted was to make the situation go away. Go the hell away. It was starting to look like that might be impossible.

  “Let me call them,” he murmured.

  Didn’t even question. He turned to follow Jack to the door of his building while he pulled up his mom’s cell. Alo’s hand was trembling, but he managed to get her name in his contacts and press dial.

  “M-mom?” he said with a shaky voice when she answered.

  It was loud in the background. They were still at the restaurant.

  Good. Alo took a deep breath and tried to decide how he was going to confess to his parents that he might have gotten them in a lot of trouble.

  “Alo? Are you on the way home from your meeting? I ordered you a macaroni and cheese from Raoul’s, so don’t eat too much. I know how much you like those.”

  “Mom, can you and Dad go to Florida for a few weeks? Visit the family?” Alo blurted out. Better to get it over with.

  His mom was silent for a couple of moments before she answered warily. “Why?”

  “I just think it would be a better idea. There are... some weird things happening. I need to deal with them.”

  “Weird things like what, Aloysius Green?”

  “A man, um, tried to grab me tonight. He wanted the letters.”

  “Get home this moment. We’ll get the check.”

  He might have been twenty-two going on forty, but Alo still started at his mother’s tone of voice. Didn’t mean he was going to listen, of course. He wasn’t going anywhere near his parents’ house until they were out of it and safe.

  “Mom, I need you and Dad to finish dinner, then pack up as quickly as possible and go visit Grandpa. Please. Don’t stay in the house long. I’m going to deal with this, but I won’t come home until I know you’re out of there.”

  “Alo, darling, this is insane. You don’t have any way of ‘dealing with this’ as you said. You’re just a boy.”

  Of course she thought he couldn’t handle it. She was right. Alo swallowed hard.

  “I’m not alone, okay? And I’m going to go to the authorities. I promise.” Maybe. He didn’t know what he was going to do. He wanted his parents on a plane to Florida no matter what. “Just pack a bag. Book a flight tonight, okay?”

  “I’m not leaving you.” Charlotte Green was her usual brand of protective and a bit stubborn.

  “Yes, you are. It’s dangerous here. Please. Just go. This is my fault, and I need to find a way to fix it. I have help, or, well, I’ll find it. I just want you and Dad to be safe.”

  Alo hung up his phone and ignored it when his mother called right back.

  “Do you think she’ll listen to you?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t know. But I can’t draw anyone over there. Are you sure you don’t mind me leading them right to you?”

  “Nah.” Jack smiled, maybe a bit of bravado along with the actual bravery. “I’m not as useless as I look. Plus, I own a shotgun.”

  Something about that made Alo, who’d always been violently opposed to guns, feel a hell of a lot better. “Okay. Thank you. I need to figure out what I’m going to do to make this better.”

  Jack Hunter’s apartment was nothing like Alo expected. He didn’t know if he’d imagined the walls covered with alligator skins and maps of the world, but it was surprisingly sophisticated. It was on the top floor of a building fairly close to Alo’s school and had deep colored walls, lots of woodwork, books everywhere, and warm cognac-colored squishy leather furniture. The place was huge and clearly expensive. Jack Hunter might have been down on his luck television-wise, but it was obvious he hadn’t been in the past.

  “This is nice,” Alo said. He was lucky he could talk at all, he’d been so shaken, but he was happy to be somewhere, even if he’d made the wrong choice.

  “Thanks.”

  “What am I going to do?” He’d thought about calling the police, but other than provide him a guard, which he wasn’t even sure they’d do, they’d be useless. He flopped down onto one of Jack’s armchairs.

  “You know my answer.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Get the damn treasure yourself,” Jack said like it was painfully obvious. “That’s your leverage. When the letters are useless and the treasure is found and taken to the right places, very publicly, you’re of no use to them. You’ll be free.”

  “To get rid of the goons, you want me to go on a treasure hunt all through cou
ntries I have no familiarity with?”

  “It would be what I’d do.”

  Alo snorted. “I’m not Jack Hunter.”

  Jack shrugged. “I’ll let you in on a little secret. Neither am I.”

  He couldn’t believe they were going straight to his house. Less than two hours after the attack and he was going right where they were looking for him. But at least he wasn’t alone.

  Alo didn’t know if Jack Hunter was really the best person to be dragging into all this, but really, what choice did he have? And Jack did have a point. Once the treasure was found and returned to its rightful owners, or at least the nearest museum, then it was out of his hands, and he couldn’t be of any more use to the people who were after him.

  Alo wondered if they were planning to get more and more aggressive until they got what they wanted. Either someone new had entered the scene, or whoever had been watching him was escalating quickly.

  “You sure you’re okay with this?” Jack asked.

  “Oh, now you ask,” Alo tried to joke. It came out desperate and a little breathless.

  “Of course you’re not okay. I wouldn’t be either. Let’s just get the letters, grab some clothes, and we’re out. Okay?”

  “Yeah.” Alo didn’t say any more, quite aware of the driver who could easily hear anything they said. Jack nodded and relaxed against the seat silently.

  The rest of the drive to his family’s house was quiet, but not uncomfortably so. Alo was content to watch the buildings stream past and think about what the hell he was getting into. There were people after him, he was in a cab with a television star, and he might just be taking off to Europe in the morning. At least classes had ended for winter break. Probably a dumb thing to be thinking, but it was important to him.

  It still felt like he was in some sort of movie. A movie with a creepy billionaire, a hero in cargo pants, a plucky female assistant he had yet to meet, and him—hapless Alo who happened to have the possible key to the biggest treasure of their age. No problem. It was probably exactly how the rest of his colleagues were spending their holiday break as well, right?

  It had started to snow by the time they got to his house, nothing huge, just little cold flakes that floated past the cab’s windows and made Alo follow them with his eyes.

  “You think your family left?” Jack finally asked quietly.

  “I hope so.” Alo didn’t know what he’d do if his parents were sitting there waiting for him with unimpressed looks on their faces.

  The house was, in fact, silent when he got there, and the heat was turned down to keep things from freezing, but not to make it comfortable. His parents’ bedroom door was shut, like they only did when they’d planned to be gone for at least a couple of days. They’d left. Alo felt a quick rush of relief.

  “My family’s gone. They won’t get in the way.”

  He and Jack rushed up to his little third floor apartment, which was really only a bedroom and a bathroom. It was nice up there, more masculine and less fussy than the other floors.

  “This is a great place,” Jack said. He didn’t look like he was mocking Alo.

  “Yeah. I like it. I figured I might as well not rack up a bunch more debt by moving out. My grant is covering a lot, but an apartment in Manhattan would be stretching it.”

  “I feel ya. I’m worried about the payments on my place too if my show goes down the drain. It’s far from paid off.”

  “Not exactly modest either,” Alo joked.

  Jack shrugged. “Unfortunately, I have expensive taste. Listen, I may have scared that one guy off, but I’m not exactly equipped to fight off someone with real skill. Can we get a move on?”

  Alo’s eyes widened at the thought of some martial arts master scaling the house and breaking through his window. He grabbed his computer bag and a carryall and started shoving things in them. Clothes, laptop, charging cords, toiletries. The last thing was the most nerve-racking. Alo must’ve looked around the room a hundred times before he crept into his closet, peeled back the rug, lifted the loose floorboard and grabbed the letters. Just to be safe, he put them into his waistband and smoothed his sweater over the top.

  “Got it,” he said quietly.

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here,” Jack said. He didn’t look any more at ease than Alo felt.

  “Couldn’t agree more.”

  When they were rushing out the front door, Alo found a note from his mother on the hutch in the main hall.

  Alo,

  We’re not on our way to Florida. I would never go that far when you’re in trouble. You have twenty-four hours to come up with a plan, and then your father and I are coming back. Call me.

  Love, Mom

  “We’ve got twenty-four hours before my mom gets involved,” Alo said.

  Jack glanced over the letter. “Then we have some work to do before morning.”

  It wasn’t like Alo would’ve gotten any sleep anyway.

  “So which one of these letters are you most sure of?” Jack asked.

  They’d just returned from the world’s most unsettling trip to the library for Alo to grab the stack of notes he’d kept locked in his desk there. Jack had never liked being in libraries late at night—or ever. But there was something creepy about them in the dark. And tall, skinny, and unathletic over there didn’t do much to make him feel better about it. Especially when he kept expecting the old lady ghost from Ghostbusters to float around the corner at any minute. He supposed he was lucky Alo at least had a key. It had made both of their lives a lot easier.

  “This one. It was the first one where it hit me that Ira really was doing something. I’d noticed that they all had odd patterns. Random capitalized letters, these numbers, some little symbols here and there. But this is the one where I figured out what he was doing.” Alo made a face. “It was so simple. I’d been overthinking it.”

  “The street names, right?” Alo hadn’t put many of the street names in his paper, only one or two. Jack guessed he’d judged quite cleverly which ones he could put without giving too much away.

  “Yes, I felt so stupid. And they all worked out to be streets once I started using that as a template.” Alo opened up the top one on the stack. The one he’d said he figured out first.

  “All you have to do is look at the letters. See for example, in this letter P,E,R,S,A,L,Z,I,R,T,P are all capitalized when they don’t need to be. I looked into customs of the time to make sure there weren’t any old rules for capitalization that would throw me off. I know I’m right.”

  “So what do you do with those letters?” Jack said.

  That one hadn’t been in the paper he read before his meeting earlier that night. Jack couldn’t even believe it was the same day. He was used to a lot of activity, but attacks, escapes, dark libraries, treasure, and thin, beautiful boys all shoved into a few brief hours was enough to wear him out.

  “I put them through one of those scrambling programs, you know, looking for words and phrases containing those letters. Obviously they weren’t coming up with street names, but the scrambler threw out the word ‘platz’ and it was like a lightbulb. That’s when I realized the capital letters were street names. I mean. Shit. It makes sense. There were three letters that talked about Berlin. I think there are three hiding places there. This is just one of them.”

  Alo showed Jack the unscrambled letters.

  “So we’re looking at Pariser Platz. I remember there were numbers involved in it too.”

  “Yes. He did that as well, although with some of the streets he practically didn’t need to. I just checked different variations of the sets of numbers combined with the street names until I found places that had significance. He wasn’t going to hide any of this in an apartment building. That wouldn’t ever work. If Ira was smart enough to do what we think he did, he was smart enough to pick buildings he thought would still be there when he came back for them. Public places he could still get into.”

  Alo pointed at the address.

  “L
ike this. 10117 Pariser Platz.” He hauled his laptop out and searched the address.

  Brandenburg Gate. The thing was huge, imposing, and while according to Wikipedia it had been isolated and damaged for years, it was returned to its former glory. And the important part—still standing.

  “Look. He wrote the word halskette over and over in this one. That means necklace. None of the other letters contained that word so many times. I swear it has to be a key word.”

  “So you think we’re looking for a necklace. In the Brandenburg Gate somewhere.”

  “I think so. Unless he was being even more cryptic and that means something else.”

  Jack shrugged. “We have a better start than I could’ve imagined. You think you’ll be ready to fly out tomorrow morning?”

  Might as well get away from the people who knew where Alo might be. They’d have a much harder time finding him in Germany than they would on the Upper West Side.

  “I have what I need, but Jack, do you really think this is the best way to make this whole thing go away?” Alo asked.

  Jack shrugged. “Can you think of anything else?” He didn’t want Alo to think of anything else, but, between the two of them, he was the brains of the operation. Jack hoped he was too flustered to use his gazillion IQ points.

  “The cops?”

  Good. Not really a valid option. “But what happens when you tell them? How is that going to get these people off your back?”

  Jack knew he needed to get the kid on a plane with his team. He didn’t know if there was a better plan or not. All he knew was he needed this. And as far as he figured, Alo needed it too. Neither one of them had much other choice.

  Alo didn’t know what to think of Kendra and Brad. Kendra seemed okay at first glance—perky and well put together with a high ponytail and khakis tight enough to keep most of the male viewers interested. Alo wasn’t sure if he liked her, but he assumed she was harmless enough.

  Brad was just a guy, as far as Alo could tell. Nothing unusual about him. Nothing remarkable either. They both smiled at him cheerfully, as if he wasn’t holding a ticking bomb in his inner coat pocket. He’d slept with the letters on him, tucked in his coat, buttoned up around him on Jack’s couch. Nothing about his situation made any other option doable.