Phantom Wheel

by Tracy Deebs

  The idea of what’s waiting for us at the next station has me searching even faster, scrolling through document after document as Mad Max leans over and starts whispering to the Lone Ranger about where he thinks we should stop the train. I try to tune them out, to stay in the zone, but just then the back door of the car opens, and Silver Spoon rushes in like the whole train has suddenly caught fire.

  “We have to move now,” he snarls at us.

  “We’ve got ten more minutes,” the Lone Ranger tells him, and he doesn’t even pause in his coding. “We can’t stop the train before that because there’s nowhere to get off. We’ll get fried on the third rail.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re going to have to figure out how to get around that,” Buffy says. “Because Shane is here.”

  “Shane? CIA Shane?” Mad Max squeaks.

  “Jacento Shane, whose real name is Daniel Davies?” the Lone Ranger asks.

  “Yeah, and he’s got three goons with him. They must have been searching the crowd with the cops, but we didn’t see them,” Snow White says.

  “Yeah, well, they obviously saw us.” Silver Spoon looks grim. “They’re working their way toward us, looking at every person on every car. I don’t think they spotted us, but—”

  “It’s only a matter of time before they do,” the Lone Ranger finishes.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Okay, new plan.” He turns to me. “Have you figured out how to open the train doors yet?”

  “Yeah, but what good does it—”

  “Shoot it over to me.” He looks at Mad Max. “There’s another train coming this way, right?”

  “Yeah. We can’t get off until it passes, man. Especially on this rail bridge. Forget the third rail. We’ll be pancaked.”

  “We’re not getting off.” The Lone Ranger goes back to whatever the hell he’s doing on his computer.

  “Then what are we doing?” Buffy whispers insistently. “Because I don’t really want to get in a fistfight on a train with Shane and his sidekicks.”

  “If we’re going there, I really don’t want to get in a fistfight with them at all,” Snow White says. “They’re very big.”

  Mad Max nods his agreement. “Not on a train or on a plane. Not in a house—”

  “We’re not fighting anyone, okay, Dr. Seuss? Get me the exact time that train passes and give me two minutes of peace to finish this freaking thing up, all right?” the Lone Ranger snarls.

  “I’ve already got it. If it’s on schedule, the train should start passing us in five minutes.”

  “Okay, good. Then just let me—” He freezes as the doors at the end of the car swish open.

  I don’t want to look. I really, really don’t want to look, but I can’t help myself. None of us can. As one, we turn to find Shane Not Shane standing there, three huge guys behind him and a gun in his hand. One that’s aimed straight at Silver Spoon.

  22

  Issa

  (Pr1m4 D0nn4)

  There are only about ten other people in the car with us, and they all freak out the second they see the gun. Not that I blame them. I’m freaking out too. We all are. Alika turns so white that I’m afraid she’s going to pass out, and Seth is giving new meaning to the word bug-eyed. Even Harper looks scared to death, and it’s almost impossible to know what she’s thinking pretty much ever.

  The only two people in the whole car who seem even a little bit normal are Owen—who is still focused on his laptop and working like the end of the world depends on the code he’s churning out—and Ezra. Although he’s the one with a gun aimed straight at his heart, Ezra seems totally cool. Like this is just any other ride on the train.

  I don’t know whether to be impressed by his courage or terrified by his insanity.

  “Really?” he asks, even as he moves a little closer to Shane. “You really want to wave a gun around on a train?”

  “I’m not waving it around. I’m pointing it at a known fugitive, one who is being chased by the police as we speak. There’s a big difference. My associates are bringing the other passengers in the car to the other end of the train to let them know they have nothing to fear, that we’re government agents apprehending wanted criminals.”

  My gut unclenches a notch when I hear that—the last thing I want is for some Good Samaritan to get shot trying to stop whatever it is that’s happening right now—but that doesn’t help the six of us.

  Ezra keeps walking, and I want to scream at him to stop, want to beg him to move back here with the rest of us. But even if I did, I’m smart enough to know that’s not going to happen. But I can’t just leave him on his own up there either. For better or worse, we’re a team.

  I move forward a little, trying to get close enough to help somehow. I mean, I don’t have a clue what I can do, but I know whatever it is won’t be possible if I’m cowering in the front of the car.

  “Well, you’re obviously not planning on arresting the ‘known fugitive,’” Ezra replies. “So what is your endgame here?”

  “I don’t need to arrest you,” Shane sneers. “The cops at the next station will take care of that. I just want the files.”

  “What files?”

  “Don’t!” Shane says, shaking the gun ever so slightly. “Don’t play stupid with me. You were on the eighteenth floor. There’s only one thing you could have been doing there.”

  “Really? You have footage of me on the eighteenth floor? Of what building exactly are we talking about here? Because I’ve been with my friends all day.”

  “I don’t have to have footage. I know it was you.”

  Ezra makes a big show of crossing his arms over his chest, of leaning casually against one of the poles running down the center of the car. As he does, he manages to make a bigger target of himself as he covers those of us behind him a little bit more.

  The idiot.

  Is Shane really crazy enough—or desperate enough—to shoot one of us with the rest of us here as witnesses? Unless they are crazy enough to shoot all of us?

  As if my thoughts brought it to fruition, the gun shifts a little to the left as Shane looks directly at Owen. “You. Give me that computer. Right now!”

  Owen doesn’t stop typing for a second. “Do you really think getting this computer is going to do you any good? If we did get into your files, and that’s a big if, don’t you think we’d be smart enough to upload whatever we found to the cloud? And to make about a million copies?”

  “You haven’t had time—”

  “How much time do you think it takes?” Owen demands. But he snaps the laptop closed before standing up and walking slowly toward Shane.

  Shane’s gun tracks his every move, at least until Ezra starts talking and draws everyone’s attention right back to him.

  “Tell me what’s really going on here, Daniel. What is it that has you so freaked out that you’re standing in the middle of a train threatening a bunch of kids—in front of cameras and witnesses? Is this whole song and dance because you’re worried about your job? Because that I get.

  “The questions are going to start rolling in about who we are and why we came after Jacento. Aren’t they? The big bosses are going to want to know. The police are going to want to know. And what are you going to tell them? That we’re just six kids you tried to con? I’m sure the police are going to love that story. As much as your bosses are going to love how poorly you covered your tracks. But come on, you had to know this was coming, right? Because if you didn’t, you’re even stupider than you look. I mean, what’s old Roderick Olsen going to think about this?”

  “Shut up!” Shane yells. “Enough of this. I’m not bargaining with you.” He waves the gun around, swinging it back and forth between Ezra and Owen. “Now give me the data.”

  The gun waving is making me really, really nervous. One wrong move, and he’s going to end up killing someone. And with the way they’re challenging him, I’m pretty sure that someone is going to be either Ezra or Owen.

  “You know what your big m
istake was, dude?” Owen asks as he gets even closer to Shane.

  “Not killing you all when I had the chance?”

  Shane’s focused on him now, the gun and his attention trained on Owen with a laserlike precision that makes me sick even as it gives me the opportunity to move in a little closer too.

  “Well, there is that,” Owen agrees. “But no. Your big mistake was thinking you could con people smarter than you. It was thinking we were just a bunch of stupid kids you could use and then throw away. And now you’re going to pay for that miscalculation—and for trying to use us to do your company’s dirty work. All of Jacento, including Roderick Olsen, is going to pay for it.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Actually, I know exactly what I’m talking about. And I’ve got proof.”

  Owen glances back at Seth, and it must be the cue Seth is waiting for, because suddenly he’s standing too—and ushering Alika and Harper down the aisle toward the rest of us.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time to hand over the laptop—and the backpacks,” Shane says. “And then I’m going to let my friends here take them from you.” He glances back and forth among us. “I think I’ll have them start with the girls. Wouldn’t want anyone to accuse me of not being a gentleman.” He nods to one of his guys who is standing at the back of the car guarding the door, and the guy moves forward, straight for Harper.

  Ezra moves to block his path. “That’s not going to happen, man.”

  “Screw you,” the guy tells him, and goes to push Ezra out of the way. It’s the distraction I was waiting for—the distraction we all must have been waiting for—because a bunch of things happen at the same time.

  Ezra pivots and kicks the guy, knocking him down.

  Owen hurls his laptop straight at Shane with all the power of a Division I–bound quarterback.

  Shane’s so desperate to get his hands on the computer that he actually drops the gun, which thank God doesn’t go off and shoot one of us.

  And Seth, using nothing but his phone and whatever code Owen managed to upload, hacks open both sets of doors on our train car.

  “Get ready!” Owen says, pushing us toward the open doors. I manage to grab Alika and Harper and pull them with me as the train starts to slow down significantly. Shane makes a one-handed grab for us, but it’s Alika’s turn to kick someone—and she does, hard enough that he falls to his knees, groaning. I grab the gun off the train floor and aim it straight at the guys coming at us.

  “Don’t move!” I shout, even as Owen, Seth, and Alika line up across the opening of one door and Harper and Ezra line up at the other.

  “Drop the gun!” Ezra yells to me. “Come on! It’s almost time!”

  I don’t want to jump with the gun, but I don’t want to leave it for them either. So I do the only thing I can think of—I empty out all the bullets and then hurl them straight at the closest bad guy. A couple hit him in the head. I throw the unloaded gun under a seat.

  “Come, now!” Ezra roars, grabbing my hand and dragging me into the doorway with him.

  “The train hasn’t stopped!” I yell.

  “It’s not going to stop!” he answers.

  “What?!”

  “Now,” Owen yells.

  “Jump!” Ezra tells me, and then he’s all but throwing me across the divide and into the open door of the passing train.

  I scream as I land, as does Harper, who jumped right alongside me. About one second later, Ezra’s there too, clinging to the right side of the open door as the train starts to speed up again.

  “Oh my God!” I scramble for him on my hands and knees and somehow manage to grab him. Harper and I tug him inside, seconds before we pass a BART sign that would have done its best to decapitate him.

  He lands on top of me as he falls, and for long seconds we do nothing but lie there on the dirty floor of the BART train. I turn my head to the left, make sure that Owen, Alika, and Seth are okay. They are, though they don’t look like they fared any better than we did.

  All around us, people are screaming and coming over to investigate, but as I struggle to catch my breath, I can’t muster the energy to care. Instead I put my head back down, close my eyes, and wonder how in less than three weeks I went from hacking the College Board and selling SAT answers to this.

  23

  Owen

  (1nf1n173 5h4d3)

  Maybe the whole jumping-out-of-a-train-and-onto-another-moving-train thing wasn’t such a good idea, after all. Every bone in my body feels like I just got hit by a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound linebacker with serious anger issues.

  “You okay?” I ask Seth and Alika, as we start to register that not only are we still alive, but we also still have all our fingers and toes. And our heads, which, for a minute there, is almost more than Ezra had.

  “Just dandy,” Alika answers as she pushes up to her hands and knees. She doesn’t even look freaked out. Instead, she seems energized by the fact that we almost died two different ways in just the last ten minutes. It’s nearly impossible to reconcile this girl with the one who was too terrified to cross the street against traffic less than an hour ago.

  I sit up, look around, and for the first time realize that everyone is staring at us. Some of them are even holding out their phones and recording. That’s the one thing I didn’t think of.

  I yank my hoodie down farther over my face and pull on my sunglasses, make sure the others see me and do the same. It’s not much of a disguise, but it’s the best we can do right now. Telling these people to stop making videos of us won’t exactly be effective. If I were them, I’d probably be doing the same thing.

  Turning my back to them, I reach into my pocket and pull out my phone—which has somehow remained unscathed through all of this. Thank you, OtterBox.

  After swiping in the passcode, I click on the link I sent myself earlier. Then I use it to slow our train down to a crawl as I look out the windows to make sure we’re not still on that damn bridge.

  We’re not—we’re in what appears to be an abandoned field. Not the homiest place to stop, but it will do. At this point, anything will.

  Seconds later, I stop the train completely, and the six of us jump off, all while doing our best to keep our faces hidden from the many cell phones trained on us. Before any of the other passengers can get the bright idea of jumping out and following us, I restart the thing, and we watch as it makes its way toward the station that started all this.

  “We’ve got about fifteen minutes before that train makes it into the station,” Seth says as we start walking.

  “That means we’ve got fifteen minutes to disappear,” I answer. But even that’s not necessarily the truth. If the people on that train start blowing up their social media with what just happened, we’re screwed. I just hope none of them decided to livestream it. And we won’t even talk about the calls from the other train about the “fed” with the gun who was apprehending fugitives.

  “I think we should split up,” Alika says as we start walking. “If Jacento is looking for a group of six people, we need to not be six people.”

  “Good point,” Ezra agrees. “I say we scatter—stay away from the trains and any other public transportation. And get someplace where there aren’t cameras every twenty-five feet so we can ditch these makeshift disguises. Shane and Jacento know what we look like, but until those videos back there get uploaded, the cops don’t, and I’d really like to keep it that way.”

  “What time are we meeting up?” Issa asks.

  Ezra glances at his watch. “Let’s give it three hours. Traffic’s bad, and we might have to walk the whole way, so…”

  “Three hours it is,” I agree. “If anyone’s going to be later than that, they need to text. Okay?”

  “Yeah. One more thing, though.” Harper looks really worried. “How are we going to make sure Jacento doesn’t give our names and descriptions to the police? If they do…”

  “If they do, they’re as screwed
as we are,” I assure her. “More, really. Besides, if they go to the authorities, we’re totally out of their reach. And that’s the last thing they want, especially considering they don’t know how much information we got off their servers.”

  “We don’t even know how much info we got off their servers,” Seth reminds us. “Once we make it back to Ezra’s, we need to dig in fast. See what’s there.”

  “We will.” Issa holds her hand out for a fist bump, and I connect, not wanting to leave her hanging. “In the meantime, stay safe and stay free.”

  “Amen to that,” Seth replies.

  And then we’re kind of breaking into pairs—Seth and Harper, Ezra and Issa, Alika and me. It happens naturally—we just kind of gravitate to each other—maybe because it’s how we were paired for the con we were running. I think Seth is probably the lucky one, given the mean right hook we now know Harper isn’t afraid to use.

  The thought of that makes me grin, but it also jogs my memory. “By the way, should we let anyone else know about the guy we left tied up in the closet? I really hate to just leave him there—who knows how long before someone finds him, with it being the holidays and all.”

  Issa looks at me like I’m crazy. “Oh yes, we’ll just call into the Jacento switchboard and let them know we left one of their employees tied up in his closet.”

  “I can make it anonymous, you know. I am fairly good at this hacking thing.”

  “I say we worry about that after we get back to Ezra’s place,” Issa says. “No use causing more trouble for ourselves when we’re being hunted by psychopaths.”

  I know she’s right, but it still makes me a little uncomfortable—and I can tell from the looks on Ezra’s and Harper’s faces that they feel the same way. Maybe it’s harder for us because we’re the ones who put that guy in the closest—he’s real to us, not just some abstract concept.