Adrenaline Rush

by Cindy M. Hogan

  My next meeting with Sterling, he wore bright yellow accents, and breakfast was egg and bacon quiche. He took his time getting down to business, finishing everything on his plate first.

  “Like I started to tell you another time you were here, I would like to know what you’d do in the following circumstance. It has come to my attention—through that same friend I mentioned before—that the President of the United States has been taking bribes from a pharmaceutical company, called Harward Pharmaceutical, throughout his career. He has been hiding the money as campaign funding. In return, he has been making sure laws and rulings go their way. You know, he tampers with the FDA findings and pressures judges to rule in their favor.

  “Why would he do this, you ask yourself. The reasons are many. Like I told you before, I don’t like to get involved in politics, but when my friend brought this to my attention, I studied it out, watching show after show highlight everything about it. I sent in detectives to enlighten me on the finer points that were hard to understand. You know, Misha, if you dig deep enough, you will most assuredly find the motive behind the action.

  “The President has not waffled on his decision to take these bribes. It seemed he did not go against our indecision mantra. However, he has helped get FDA approval for drugs that cause major problems in people who take them, and he has helped Harward Pharmaceutical conduct illegal human testing from a building in DC. What’s more, the company hides its illegal testing behind the façade of a hospital, and the President actively participates in hiding this facility. Many people suffer at their hands. They promise their subjects good compensation for their drug trials, but if you end up deaf, blind, or dead, the money means little.

  “This flies in the face of justice for those who need help. Completely lawless. But, his actions also show intense greed. He doesn’t think about all those people who are unknowingly taking drugs that could kill them or hurt them in some way. He just wants to have full campaign coffers. Don’t you think?”

  “Sure. He wants to remain president. But won’t all of that be lost once the truth comes to light?”

  “In politics, it’s always a crapshoot, so I can’t answer that. But, we must act.”

  Why couldn’t politicians just be honest? “Can’t you just put whatever it is he’s hiding from the people out there for everyone to see? You’d be exposing him and—”

  “Oh, but that wouldn’t be quite as fun as coming up with an amazing poetic death, now would it?” He smiled like a Cheshire cat. “How might we go about giving him a poetic death?”

  “I’ll need more information before I can hope to help you.”

  “Good answer. Knowledge is power in these things.” He pushed a button and a picture of the President of the U.S., Benton Hillsdale, popped up on the screen. “I don’t like how this man looks. He has no color. His hair is gray. His eyes are gray and his skin…what color is that, Misha? Gray again?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Yes. Yes. We must rid this land of gray.” He stared thoughtfully at the screen.

  He was off his rocker.

  Then he went off on a rant about how there wasn’t enough color in the world today.

  My tablet buzzed. I needed to head for class. “Sir,” I said. “I’ve got to get to class.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said absentmindedly, still staring at the screen but waving me out with one hand.

  I left feeling a bit overwhelmed. Why did he want me to brainstorm poetic ways to kill a president? I wondered if Sterling had had this same little powwow with the guy he’d killed a while ago, the one Zoey told me about. Or was this a new tactic for him? It seemed he only planned on killing me if I crossed him. I couldn’t make it easy, but I couldn’t make it too hard, either. My change of heart had to seem real. Little by little I’d let him think he’d convinced me.

  I was amazed at how much I’d learned over the last several weeks. Even though everything was twisted in a way to enable it to be used for evil, I thought it could all be turned around to be used for good. I also searched and searched for things that would help me get out and save all these kids. I wouldn’t allow myself to be pessimistic.

  While sitting in class on Friday, I came up with a way to kill the president. I wanted to tell Sterling, so I went to his dining room at dinner. I tried the door, and it opened. A bit shocked, I looked around. No one was near, so I went inside. I heard his voice and someone else’s through a crack in the door he’d used to enter the room both times I’d been in there.

  The voice sounded familiar. I thought about eavesdropping, but I couldn’t quite make out any words. Then I saw the gold fork next to Sterling’s plate that had been set for his dinner. I needed that fork to gain the trust of the subversives.

  I didn’t want to get any closer than I already was. How would I explain the fact that I was so deep into his dining area without his permission? The fork seemed to gleam in the light, and I had to chance it. It had been two weeks since Adam had challenged me to get it. I probably wouldn’t get a better chance. I moved quickly, silently, and grabbed the fork just as I heard Sterling say, “Just get it done!” to the person he was talking to. I shoved the fork in my pants pocket and hurried back to the door I’d entered through. I turned and called out, “Hello?” as if I’d just arrived.

  I heard some shuffling behind Sterling’s door, and then Sterling called out, “Be right there.” I heard urgent whispers, and then he opened the door fully and walked in.

  “Was I expecting you?” he said, looking around the room.

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “Then how did you get in here?” I could hear the worry etched in his voice.

  “I just tried the knob and it opened. I could hear you talking to someone and didn’t want to surprise you, so I called out.”

  He looked at the door and at my neckband, then said, “No matter. What is it?”

  I don’t think I was supposed to be able to walk right in. “I think I figured out how to orchestrate the president’s poetic death.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Take a seat. I’ll order dinner. You talk.” He pulled out the drawer under the table and typed furiously for a minute.

  “I think you’ll like this,” I said. “What if we told one of the president’s advisors that we knew about the hospital where they do illegal testing and that we would be leaking the information to the press in one week’s time?”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “Hear me out. It would give him a week to ‘fix’ the hospital in question so that he can use it to his benefit. Of course, he’d only be repairing the obvious things and with only a week, he won’t be able to do a good job of it.”

  “I’m waiting for the punch line…” He scowled at me. The man came and undressed him as I talked.

  “Patience,” I said, smiling broadly. “When we release it to the press, he’ll set up a big press conference to tell the world his accusers are off their rockers and that while he supports pharmaceutical companies, he’s never condoned illegal human testing. He’ll also contend that the hospital clinic was exactly that, a hospital clinic.

  “Meanwhile, we will get poison that transfers through touch on the podium and microphone he will be using for the press conference. We’ll have ‘reporters’ set up to ask the president if he’d ever go there and push him on it.

  “He’ll be forced to say he would go there. About this same time, the drug we put on the podium and microphone will start taking effect. It will, of course, be one of the drugs from one of the companies he accepts bribes from. He’ll announce to the world that he would indeed go to that clinic and in fact, he was feeling a little under the weather and would go there after the press conference to get checked out. He’ll have to do it to save face.

  “They will try to get his personal physician in, but we will have made it impossible for him to come in. His backup physician will be called and allowed to come.

  “His advisors and security will try to tell them they can’t do it,
but he’ll be so bent on not looking the fool, he’ll give them an hour to make it secure for him, but he’ll tell them he would be going.”

  There was a dramatic pause.

  “I must say,” Sterling cooed, “that’s a great plan. How did you come up with it?”

  “It popped into my head in class today.” A smug smile danced across my face.

  His eyes pierced mine. Our dinners lifted out of the table. He reached for his fork, but found nothing. He looked around, punched something into his keyboard and waited, staring at me while I dug in.

  The man who’d undressed him hurried in. “Sir?”

  “Where is my gold fork? I can’t eat without my gold fork.”

  The servant looked at the empty spot on the table and said, “I put it there myself before your dinner.” He searched all around King Sterling’s throne, even under the table. It was not there.

  I tried not to feel guilty. The servant would definitely be punished. “I will go back into the kitchen and find it, sir.”

  “See that you do. And hurry up! I’m starving.”

  I kept eating while Sterling repeated my plan back to me. I corrected him when necessary. Five minutes later, a defeated servant reentered the room. His head hung as he whispered, “The fork is nowhere to be found, sir. I take full responsibility for its loss.”

  Sterling growled. “Then you will sit here and feed me with my golden spoon and knife. See how well you do.”

  Was he kidding? Bring him a different fork for goodness sake.

  The servant quickly pulled up a chair and fed him. I guess he wasn’t kidding.

  It was disgusting to see a perfectly able man be fed by someone. It ruined my appetite.

  Once finished with dinner, I said, “Well, goodnight. I need to study up on chemicals. It’s not an easy subject.”

  “No, it isn’t, is it?”

  I shook my head as I walked to the door.

  “Misha, next time you need to contact me at a time other than our scheduled visits, do so over your tablet.”

  He had me punch in his address and test it. It worked.

  “We’ll need to start meeting twice a week soon in order to get all the finer details of the assassination hammered out. Why don’t we start meeting on Fridays for breakfast, too? Next week will be our first Friday.”

  “Okay,” I said and left, knowing this was a turning point. I was plotting to kill the President of the United States.

  That night I dreamt of Dakota. He told me to walk across a ravine, but there wasn’t a bridge. He told me to trust him. There was an invisible bridge that would carry me across. After much persuading, I took the step and fell to my death.

  I woke up in a heart-pounding sweat—I lurched out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. My hands shook, and I had to grip the edge of the sink for support.

  Get it together, I thought. I took a deep breath and banished the dream from my mind. I had work to do. I went back to my bedroom and immediately sent a coded message to Adam, the subversive leader.

  That day we had hands-on training and it included Chemicals, The Hunt, Disguise Thyself, and Run for Your Life. I made a point of talking to as many kids as I could and congratulating the ones that did well. I wanted to appear nice, approachable, like a team player. When I returned to my room after classes, I saw I had gotten tons of messages from kids I had befriended that day. I scanned through them quickly, then found the one I’d hoped for: a coded response from Adam.

  He wanted to meet out in the English garden by the fountain at eight. I was to bring Zoey and Frankie.

  I enlisted Zoey easily, but Frankie had plans with her boyfriend and didn’t want to come. I begged, reminding her of how I’d gone to the circus with her and she relented, but brought Xavier with her. I hoped Xavier wouldn’t make Adam abandon the plan. When we got there, Adam and four others were already there.

  “Hey guys,” he said. “You want to play hide-n-seek with us? We needed a few more players.”

  “Sure,” I said. “You guys okay with that?” I asked the three I’d come with.

  They all shrugged their shoulders like they didn’t care either way.

  After explaining the rules, Adam said he’d be ‘It’ first. He winked at me. Everyone scattered, and he closed his eyes and counted. I pretended to go hide, but then came back and sat down in an obvious place for him to find me. He opened his eyes and, seeing my hiding place, walked directly to me. He said nothing, but held out his hand expectantly. I fished the fork out of my pocket and handed it to him, glad to be rid of it.

  His eyes sparkled in the moonlight.

  He walked away and said, “You’re in.”

  Nothing changed the next few days, and I was antsy to know what benefits being in with the subversives afforded me.

  That weekend, I met Adam by the bonfire again.

  “Normally, we’d make you jump through a few more hoops to join, but Zoey’s vouching for you, and since she’s your helper, she knows more than anyone else about you. We trust her judgment.”

  “How many of you are there?” I asked.

  “More than you’d think,” he said. “I can’t give you details, it’s too dangerous. We’ve been gathering information for almost two years now, but we’ve been unable to use the information to secure an escape. We need fresh eyes, a fresh take on things. Are you willing to enter our secret covenant to bring Sterling and this place down?”

  “Yes,” I said. I had no problem with that.

  “We will pass information to you so you can help us out. We only use our tablets to set up meets. No sensitive information is ever passed through messaging, coded or not.”

  That was a good decision, considering the code he’d used to set up this meet was ridiculously easy.

  He was telling me this with humor in his voice like he was saying a joke, when suddenly, he said. “Time for you to laugh for the cameras. We can’t be too serious, it’s the weekend.”

  I laughed, and he did too. Now that I knew what we were doing, I relaxed and pretended for the cameras, too.

  “How can I get you out? I can’t even save myself,” I said, trying not to choke up at voicing the concern.

  “We believe we have all the information you need. You just need to make sense of it.” He smiled at me reassuringly. “We’ve devised a system of note delivery within our group. Everyone has assignments. Anyway, you need to memorize more code a girl named Jenny will be giving you in a minute. Now you have to memorize the drop locations.”

  He went over them all, and I remembered them easily.

  “The code will come by way of your tablet, of course. There are a few words you have to know in order to communicate with us.” He went over the rules. I recited them back to him.

  “Jenny will finish your training. I’m headed off to bed.”

  After he left, Jenny came over with hotdogs. We laughed and chatted for a minute, keeping up appearances, and then she quizzed me on what I’d learned from Adam.

  “We’ll trickle the information out to you. We can’t give it all to you at once because we don’t know how you will respond to Sterling’s conditioning. Expect your first drop to be in two weeks.”

  We both laughed for the cameras, but I didn’t feel like laughing. “Two weeks? I’m ready for it now.”

  “You’re getting the code now,” she said, a light tone to her voice. “Two weeks. Remember, patience is a virtue. Kramer, our secret weapon, has been working on getting us into the computer systems but has been unsuccessful so far. We believe in him just as we believe in you. You’re here to find what we’ve missed. We’ve been watching you in class. You’re amazing, probably a genius. I feel it, just like Zoey does.”

  A tremor went down my spine. “Where are we, Jenny?” I asked. If I knew that one thing, I could free us.

  At first, she looked at me like I was crazy then understanding dawned and she said, “Oh, we don’t really know. Some say western Tennessee, others say Alabama. It’
s all conjecture, though. We inventoried leaves from all the different plants as well as how often it rained and how hot it got. Who knows? It’s humid enough to be either of those.

  “As far as the information drops go,” she said. “We all rotate through them. That way no one is seen with anyone too often. We keep ourselves pretty separate.”

  We laughed and talked about something else for a minute.

  “We only meet in person when it’s totally natural, like now, or completely necessary.” She then explained the code to me. It was pretty complicated with certain words and letters meaning something totally different than normal, but I created pictures in my mind to help me remember.

  “You’ve got it,” she said after about an hour. “Remember, you can’t fudge on the code. It has to be 100% accurate or we don’t act. I’m sure you can understand why.”

  “It could be someone trying out code in order to find us. Yep. Safety is our top concern. We don’t want to lose you, like we lost the last guy.”

  “What guy?” Was she talking about the guy Zoey had referred to?

  “A guy we thought would lead us to freedom but ended up dead instead. Be super careful, Misha. No mistakes.”

  “No mistakes,” I said.

  “You’ll know who members of the resistance are by our handshake. We fold our pinkies in and wiggle them three times when we shake hands. Like this,” she said. She took my hand and shook it. I could feel her pinky wiggle, one, two, three times. “Make sure they only do it three times. Well, see ya later,” she said, taking off.

  Sterling and I made a lot of progress on planning the death of the president during our breakfast chats over the next month since we were meeting on both Mondays and Fridays. It didn’t seem real, though. It seemed more like a game. I’d discover a solution, and he’d come up with a potential problem. The demise of the president was taking form.

  On our last Friday of the month, we tackled the problem of the president’s personal physician. We decided we’d drug the president’s personal physician and his backup physician to make them unavailable to the president. It was the easiest solution. We discussed possibilities about causing a blackout of all the hospitals around except the target one. Sterling brought up the fact that he wanted me to brainstorm ways of making sure there was plenty of coverage on TV, cell phones, cameras, and all other personal and professional devices. It would need to be spontaneous coverage with cell phones, iPads, personal cameras, as well as the professionals all snapping pictures and recording video.