by Gary Urey
The Doctor made chase. He hurried after her over the picket fence, stepped onto a cedar deck, and looked into the backyard. A dog inside the house was barking. He watched as Daisha scaled another fence and disappeared over the other side. The Doctor ran back to the car.
“She’s running toward Marion!” he hollered. “Hurry!”
While the chauffeur sped away, the Doctor frantically dialed the Satellite Warp Lab. Pinchole’s mousy mug popped up on FaceTime.
“I want a dozen men on the corner of Cowper and Waverly Streets in downtown Palo Alto in ten minutes!” he roared.
“Why?” Pinchole asked.
“I just saw the girl! She’s in Palo Alto!”
“But…”
“Just shut up and get those men here! Start tracking her. There’s plenty of sunshine. We’ve nearly cornered her.”
“I’ll send the men. But we can’t track her.”
“Why not?”
“Because the Pursuers trying to capture her in Ohio just showed up on our doorstep. They’re both in pretty bad shape. From what they told me, Daisha kicked the living daylights out of both of them and took their tracker.”
“Impossible. She’s a thirteen-year-old girl, for crying out loud. Those men are the most highly trained bounty hunters in the world.”
“It’s true. And without that tracker, we can’t pinpoint her location. Each tracker is specific to one GeoPort. Understand?”
The Bentley flew through a red light, nearly causing a collision, and tore down Waverly. The Doctor spotted Daisha again. She had appeared from a driveway and was now sprinting down the sidewalk in the direction of Hoover Park.
“We just got sight of her!” the Doctor exclaimed, nearly hyperventilating. “We’ll talk about this later. Forget Cowper and Waverly. I want the men to assemble in Hoover Park. She’s headed that way.”
He ended the call and gripped the back of the front seat. His knuckles turned white as the car sped in Daisha’s direction. The rush to capture the girl was so great that neither the Doctor nor his chauffeur saw the silver Ford Focus ease out of its driveway. The front end of the Bentley rammed directly into the Ford’s rear. Chunks of metal and plastic exploded into the air. The front airbags inflated like giant balloons. Smoke poured from the Bentley’s radiator, while gasoline gushed from the Ford’s fuel tank.
Within seconds, both cars were on fire.
Hot fumes seared the Doctor’s lungs. He struggled frantically to open the car’s door, but it wouldn’t budge. Fortunately, his window was down and he managed to crawl from the crumpled car into the street. The driver of the Ford Focus, a middle-aged woman with a bloody gash on her forehead, had also escaped the wreckage. Both of them stood there, pale and shaken over the crash.
The chauffeur frantically untangled himself from the seat belt and air bag. He kicked open the driver’s side door and escaped just as both cars exploded into a massive fireball. The smell of burning tires and flaming gasoline permeated the air. Onlookers gasped in horror. The Doctor turned and saw Daisha standing among the crowd.
She had witnessed the whole scene.
Chapter Eighteen
DAISHA
Voices cried out.
“Oh my God!”
“Somebody help!”
“Call 911!”
People crossed themselves. Others wept.
Daisha stood on the sidewalk with the shocked crowd. The sight and smell of the two cars burning made her want to throw up, but watching the Doctor stare at her from across the street sent her fleeing back toward Hoover Park.
Police cars, fire engines, and ambulances whizzed past her with sirens blaring. She didn’t stop running until she saw the Hoover Park picnic area and collapsed under a shady tree. Her lungs heaved and sweat poured down her temples, the scene of the car crash replaying in her brain on an endless loop. Another thought quickly followed: If only the Doctor had exploded into a fireball, then all of this would be over.
And then her mind turned to Axel.
She sat up, wiped the sweat from her face, and sprinted across the baseball field. Twenty-four hours had passed since their separation in Vietnam. That meant Axel would have put their emergency plan in motion and Warped to the dog run just as she had done.
37.4302° N, 122.1288° W
The latitude and longitude coordinate numbers were more valuable to her than a million-dollar lottery ticket.
A half dozen people milled around the dog run, some tossing balls to their mutts, others sitting on benches texting on phones. There was no sign of Axel. She had no idea where his GeoPort had sent him yesterday. Hopefully, it was a safe and cloudy part of the world so the Pursuers couldn’t track him.
But what if he hadn’t been so lucky? What would happen to him if the Pursuers followed his trail at night like they had done to her? She had no way of knowing his fate, and that was killing her inside. A roar of car engines caught her attention. Three Hummers raced down Cowper Street and screeched to a stop next to the playground. A bunch of burly men wearing the uniform of the Pursuers stepped out of the vehicles.
She strained to listen as two of the men approached a man pushing a toddler on a swing.
“Have you seen a teenaged black girl with long dreadlocks?” one of them asked.
That was all Daisha needed to hear. She tore out of the dog run, hopped a chain-link fence, and was on the run again. As she ripped across the street, she turned to see if the Pursuers were coming her way. Her chest swelled with relief; they hadn’t noticed her.
Thirty minutes later, Daisha was standing in front of the Palo Alto Main Library. She could have gotten there much faster but had decided to skirt far around the scene of the accident to avoid detection by the Doctor’s men. She walked into the library, took a long drink from the water fountain, and sat down at a computer station.
“You need to sign up first,” a woman behind the lending desk said.
“Huh?” Daisha mumbled.
“If you want to use the Internet, then you need to sign up. You can reserve a computer for one hour. May I see your library card?”
“I don’t have one.”
The woman raised her eyebrows. “Do you live in Palo Alto?”
Daisha shook her head. “I’m just visiting a friend of my mom’s.”
“Then you can use a guest pass.”
The woman handed her a piece of paper with the login password. Daisha typed in the digits and hit Enter. Google’s search engine popped up on the screen. Without hesitation, her fingers pecked out the names Axel Jack, Daisha Tandala. There were 80,403 web references to them, as well as over one thousand videos about the two missing Jordan Middle School students and their murdered Stanford University professor parents. Nearly every news outlet in the country had run their story. Cable networks like Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and Investigation Discovery had aired several stories about them.
“We were a national obsession without even knowing it,” Daisha said aloud to herself, astonished that with such intense media coverage no one had recognized them, probably because they were mostly outside the country.
She clicked on the first link—a San Francisco Chronicle Magazine story titled “Mystery and Murder in Palo Alto”—and started reading. By the time she skimmed past the third paragraph, she realized how far off the police were, along with everyone else. The authority’s number one theory was that their parents were part of a Mexican drug cartel. Their killing and the subsequent disappearances of Axel and Daisha were all about drugs and money.
The article showed a picture of their parents’ messy lab. A police detective in a jacket and tie was holding bags of white powder and pointing to several jars filled with liquid. The caption under the photo read: Palo Alto detectives uncover Roswell Jack and Jodiann Tandala’s methamphetamine operation in the basement of Stanford University’s Varian Physics Building.
“My mother does not make meth!” Daisha blurted out.
The librarian looked up from her desk. “Quiet, please.”
Daisha’s cheeks flushed with heat. She sank deeper into the chair and continued reading. Doctor Lennon Hatch’s name appeared in the article on page two. The author had praised him for offering a reward of one million dollars for any information leading to the safe return of the two children.
“It was a setup,” she hissed under her breath. “The Doctor orchestrated the whole thing to make it look like my parents were making drugs in their lab. Then he made himself look like a freakin’ hero.”
A ball of hot rage formed in the pit of her stomach. Her muscles tensed; her teeth clenched. She was ready to scream at the top of her lungs when a man looked up from another computer terminal. He was older, with thinning gray hair, deep wrinkles, and slouching shoulders. The man stared at her intently. Daisha realized who he was: Mr. Perry, the retired custodian from her old elementary school.
Daisha’s heart froze. She turned away, not wanting to look him in the eye. She was three years older and had dramatically changed physically. Did he recognize her? Not wanting to take any chances, she sat up from the computer and walked by the librarian’s desk. She saw a pair of scissors sticking out from a pencil holder. The librarian was busy arranging books in the stacks. As quick as a cat swatting a feather toy, Daisha grabbed the scissors and rushed into the women’s restroom.
The dreadlocks that had sprouted from her head since the age of three had to go. The Doctor had seen her with them, and now Mr. Perry was eyeballing her. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she snipped away the first lock. Snip…snip…snip. When she was finished, a pile of black hair lay at her feet on the tile floor.
She stared at herself in the mirror. The person looking back at her was completely unrecognizable. Her mother’s face flashed in her mind.
“Capillum,” Daisha muttered. “The Latin word for hair.”
Chapter Nineteen
AXEL
Pinchole flicked off the video monitor. “You’ve seen your father,” he said. “He’s alive. Now, answer my questions about Warp travel.”
Axel leaned back on the couch and rubbed his eyes to keep from crying. The dated video of his father proved that Pinchole and the Doctor were lying to him. Daisha and he were not hallucinating. They had seen their parents assassinated in Hoover Park. The Pursuers were not trying to rescue them; they were trying to capture them.
But Pinchole and the Doctor did not know that he knew the video was old. That was his ace in the hole, a hidden advantage. His only choice was to play dumb and go along with their plans—for the moment.
“The first thing to know about Warp travel is that it sucks,” Axel offered.
“In what way?” Pinchole asked.
“Just imagine jumping feet first into an endless hole with the most spectacular special-effects laser show in the world flashing all around you. It’s a mind freak.”
Pinchole scribbled something on a legal pad. “What do you feel physically during the Warp?”
“Your head throbs, and your stomach flip-flops like a Frisbee tossed by a first grader. Daisha and I have blown chunks a lot of times after flying through the Warp.”
“Delightful,” Pinchole said with a grimace. “Do you experience any other ill effects?”
Axel shrugged. “Why don’t you ask the people who were chasing—I mean, trying to rescue—us about their experience? They went through the Warp as many times as we did.”
Pinchole smiled. “Again, our men were only following you through the Warp. There is a huge difference between you setting the coordinates and traveling through the Warp, and our men simply sniffing out your trail.”
“How?”
“Well, to use the sniffing analogy, it’s the same thing as a bloodhound using his nose to track a person down. You run through the woods, leaving nothing but footprints and invisible scent particles. The dog just follows those invisible scent particles. It cannot replicate your exact experience of running through the woods. Make sense?”
“I guess so. Now that you have my GeoPort, you can just set coordinates and see for yourself.”
A sullen expression washed over Pinchole’s face. He scribbled more on his legal pad and then said. “Unfortunately, we cannot use your GeoPort to enter the Warp. We attempted to do that the moment you arrived at our headquarters, but the experiment proved futile.”
Axel knew Pinchole would never be able to make it work because of the DNA security coding. To work properly, the scanner on the GeoPorts had to recognize his DNA.
“Why?” Axel asked, wanting to hear Pinchole’s reasoning.
“The genius of your father and Daisha’s mother is why. They somehow programmed the only two GeoPorts in the world to work in tandem with each other. We think that they communicate via highly sophisticated chips embedded in each GeoPort. We have surmised that after twenty-four hours of physical separation, the function of both GeoPorts completely shuts down.”
Axel’s heart swelled with relief. Pinchole hadn’t yet discovered the real reason why the GeoPorts failed to operate.
“You know the twenty-four window for the Warp to reset,” Pinchole continued. “That window has passed, and if she hasn’t Warped somewhere by now, she isn’t going to without your GeoPort.”
Axel stood up and glared at Pinchole. “Then just pop down to the Varian Physics lab and ask my father to fix the problem. He’s alive, after all.”
Pinchole quickly turned away, his eyeballs darting nervously around the room. Axel beamed inside. His ace in the hole had worked perfectly, and he loved watching the lying scientist squirm.
The ringing of Pinchole’s cell phone broke the uncomfortable silence. “It’s Doctor Stain…Hatch,” he mumbled and left the room.
Axel walked over to the door and turned the handle. Locked. His thoughts drifted toward Daisha. What if she was already in Palo Alto, and the Doctor and Pinchole didn’t know it? There was no way of knowing. The only thing Axel could do was wait and hope that the Doctor didn’t kill him before he could see her again.
He realized Pinchole would never let him die—at least not until the guy figured out that the only thing needed to make the GeoPort function properly was Axel’s or Daisha’s DNA. Pinchole was a Warp nerd to the utmost degree. Only Axel knew what coordinated Warp travel was like, and that gave him all the power. He could buy time by spooning out Warp facts in little sips and swallows, just enough to keep Pinchole on edge but never telling him everything.
Axel debated giving up one of the Warp’s most amazing secrets. The one he and Daisha had discovered while Warping away from Stonehenge in England. They had spent two days in London. When they were able to lose the Pursuers, they visited sites like the Tower of London and Buckingham Palace. On a whim, they had decided to take a train to see Stonehenge, the famous prehistoric megalith. The ancient boulders were huge and, according to the program guide, positioned around 3000 BC with no one knowing for sure who had built the structure. Axel remembered a brisk wind blowing through the stones, making an almost ghostly music. He marveled at how ancient people could have manipulated the fifty-ton rocks without the help of modern equipment. Daisha, on the other hand, didn’t care about how they made the thing; she wanted to know why it was built.
When the Pursuers inevitably tracked them at Stonehenge, the Warp answered all their questions about the medieval stones.
The moment the Pursuers rushed after them across the Salisbury Plain, they punched matching coordinates into their GeoPorts and exploded into puffs of smoke and electrical discharge. Axel reached out and grabbed Daisha’s hand as they tumbled into the ethereal void.
Then they saw something amazing. The normal psychedelic light show of the Warp turned into a series of flashing images. They watched dozens of men dressed in animal skins laying out seven or eight large tree trunks and then rolling a heavy stone along the very same plain Axel and Daisha had Warped from just moments ago. With brute force, the men then lowered the bottom of the massive stone into a predug hole and levered the stone into a standing position.
The images playing before their eyes suddenly hit fast-forward. Stonehenge was now complete. Men in elaborately decorated robes chanted while lifting a deceased man onto a wooden scaffold. Then, with great reverence and high ceremony, they lit the scaffold on fire.
“Stonehenge is an ancient burial ground!” Daisha exclaimed.
They both realized with utter astonishment that the Warp had the power to show them the past.
Chapter Twenty
DOCTOR STAIN
“It may take up to eight weeks for your wrist to heal,” the emergency room physician explained. “Try not to get your cast wet.”
The Doctor nodded, slipped his arm into a sling, and met two police officers in the hallway of the Standford Hospital emergency room. His statement to them was simple: his chauffeur began to accelerate at a high speed down a residential street, a car suddenly backed out of a driveway, and the cars collided. He could say nothing more. The officers accepted his description of the events, and he was free to go.
News reporters were waiting for him outside the hospital. A massive two-car crash was a hot story on its own, but considering the Doctor’s wealth and prestige in the community, the press frenzy was intense.
“I have no comment at this time,” the Doctor said into a microphone that a reporter had shoved in his face. He then slipped into an awaiting limousine and drove away.
The Doctor had never broken a bone in his body before, and despite the prescribed painkillers surging through his veins, his wrist still throbbed. He thought of the lawsuit that would surely follow. The woman in the Ford Focus would be lining up a lawyer to go after a piece of his money. Of course, he knew she would settle out of court. He’d give her a lump sum, and the whole thing would go away.
But the GeoPorts would never leave him. Even with the shock of the accident, his skin tingled with excitement as his plan grew closer to fruition. His men had already captured Axel, and finding Daisha, now that she was in Palo Alto, was just a matter of time.