by Ron McGee
Grabbing the top brick, Ryan pulled. It came out and he looked at it in surprise; it wasn’t even a full brick, only the front half of one. He set it aside, his heart beating faster, wondering what exactly he’d stumbled onto here. The other three half bricks came out just as easily, and Ryan peered into the opening he’d created.
A metal handle was nestled inside the cavity. Ryan took a step back and finally got it: The brick wall was fake. He pulled the handle. It was heavy, but the wall pivoted straight up like a garage door. Behind it was a hidden room.
CHAPTER
09
NEW YORK,
USA
Against the back wall, a chest-height worktable had been carved from cedar, the smell of the old wood permeating the enclosed space. Ryan approached, passing a rack filled with equipment. He wasn’t a techie, but this looked pretty sophisticated: a high-quality laser printer and scanner, a laminating machine, and a couple of other devices that he didn’t recognize at all.
The worktable was covered with maps, photos, and piles of computer printouts. Ryan picked up the photos, which were grainy and taken from a long distance, like surveillance pictures. He didn’t recognize anyone in them. A map of Southeast Asia was open and had been heavily marked up. The map included southwest China, Laos, and Thailand. But the focus seemed to be on the country of Andakar.
Above the table hung a giant corkboard covered with tacked-up information. Train and airline schedules were pinned beside photos of parks and what looked like old Asian temples. Ryan noticed that the train schedules were all from Andakar and looked closely at the printed captions under the temple photos. Same thing—everything here was pointing toward Andakar.
Ryan had never been there, but he knew a hard-core military government ruled Andakar with an iron fist, imprisoning, torturing, and even executing citizens who spoke out against it. Ryan had read that they recently opened their borders to tourists and were trying to promote travel in order to make money. Which seemed like a terrible idea. Who’d want to vacation in a place that treats its own people like that?
On a shelf next to the table, Ryan noticed a stack of passports from various countries—Germany, England, South Africa, Canada. Ryan flipped open the top one, his stomach sinking as he recognized his father’s picture above the name Benjamin O’Hara. The others were all the same: Each one showed Dad with a different name.
Ryan glanced at the equipment on the rack, understanding its purpose now. His father had been making forged passports. Good ones, from what Ryan could tell. The next one showed a picture of his mother and another fake name. So Mom was involved, too. And there were others—a redheaded young woman and two different men Ryan didn’t recognize—all with passports made out to multiple identities. Ryan’s head was spinning, scrambling to process all this information.
When he opened the last one, an Irish passport, his heart nearly stopped. Looking back at him was his own photo and the name Thomas Dylan O’Hara. It said he lived in Dublin and that he was sixteen years old!
Ryan threw the passport down on the table and took several steps back. This couldn’t be possible. The people he loved most in the world—the people he trusted most—what kind of secrets were they keeping from him? The CIA agents had said his father was dealing with smugglers and known criminals. Seeing the fake passports, Ryan couldn’t help but wonder if it was true.
He had to find his mother. He’d make her tell him the truth, no matter how bad it was. No more lies. That was the one thing he knew: No more lies.
As he turned to leave the secret room, a scream from upstairs pierced the silence. It startled Ryan, but then instinct kicked in and he started running.
“Mom?” he yelled.
Ryan took the stairs two at a time as something crashed in the upstairs hall. His mother was in serious danger, and no matter what else was going on, Ryan would do everything possible to protect her.
Leaping up the last couple of stairs, Ryan burst around the corner to find grocery bags scattered on the ground in disarray and his mom struggling in the arms of an Asian giant, a dark-suited powerhouse of a man. In front of them stood a second man—the same Asian guy who had followed Ryan earlier!
The man held her chin with an iron grip, forcing her to look at him. “Where is Myat Kaw?”
“You’ll never find out if you hurt me!” Jacqueline was scared but defiant.
Just then, the giant holding her saw Ryan at the end of the hallway. “Aung Win—the boy!”
Aung Win turned. His eyes were so dark they were almost black.
“Let her go,” Ryan said, shifting instinctively into a fighting stance.
“No, Ryan—run!” The defiance was gone from Jacqueline’s voice. She was kicking, thrashing, fighting like a wildcat, but the man who held her was too strong for her to break free.
Ryan charged forward, trying hard not to be completely freaked out. His father always warned that if you lose your head, you lose the fight. Dad had mostly trained in a fighting style called Krav Maga, the same street-fighting technique used by Israeli Defense Forces. It’s brutal and effective—all about finding weakness and adapting to the situation, no matter how perilous or impossible it seems. And this seemed pretty impossible. Ryan had to take out at least one of the men quickly if he was going to stand a chance. He came in hard and fast with a throat strike.
But Aung Win sidestepped the blow; Ryan barely glanced his shoulder. Aung Win’s retaliation was swift and fierce, a hammer blow that caught Ryan right in his solar plexus. The hit knocked the air out of Ryan. He stumbled back, gasping for air. He grabbed a side table, trying to keep his balance.
“Leave him alone. I’ll tell you!” Jacqueline was desperate.
Pulling out a gun, Aung Win turned from Ryan as if he was insignificant. “I had planned to take your son. It’s convenient that he has come to me.” He pointed the weapon at Ryan, but his eyes never left Jacqueline’s. “You will tell me where John Quinn is. You will tell me where I can find Myat Kaw. If I think you are holding anything back, I will shoot your son.”
Ryan fought the panic rising in his chest. Aung Win’s moves were those of a practiced killer. Ryan struggled to think of something he could do to even the odds. He glanced at the side table and saw two carved jade candlesticks his parents had bought in China.
Jacqueline looked defeated as she said, “The last time I spoke to John, he was in Thailand. He was going to cross into Andakar.” Before she could continue—Bam! Bam! Bam!
“Dude, open up, it’s me!” came from outside the front door.
The adults all turned, but Ryan took the opportunity to grab one of the candlesticks. He slammed it down on Aung Win’s forearm, hearing bones crack. The gun clattered to the floor as the man gasped in pain.
“Danny,” Ryan yelled, “Call the cops!”
Aung Win reacted quickly, furiously striking out at Ryan with his left hand. The blow caught Ryan on the shoulder, hitting the nerves so that his arm fell to his side like a dead weight. He staggered back, spying the gun under one of the ornate legs of their kitchen table.
In their native tongue, Aung Win barked an order to the big man, who had moved to protect Aung Win like a bodyguard. The bodyguard shoved Jacqueline forward, turned, and opened the front door.
Ryan saw Danny on the front stoop, frozen at the sight of the Goliath who towered over him. “Look out!” Ryan screamed, snapping Danny back to his senses. Danny ducked just in time, using his smaller size to evade the bodyguard’s grasp, and jumped down the stairs.
In the hallway, Ryan saw Aung Win had Jacqueline by the throat. He winced, forced to use the arm Ryan had just injured to pull a plastic bag out of his pocket. Ryan dove for the gun as Aung Win ripped the bag open with his teeth and noxious fumes from the chlorophyll-soaked rag inside seeped into the air. Jacqueline jerked backward, but Aung Win held her tight with his good arm, forcing the rag over her nose and mouth.
“Let her go!” Ryan shouted, pointing the gun unsteadily at Aung Win as h
is mom lost consciousness. The man hefted Jacqueline in front of him as he backed toward the door.
“Go ahead and shoot,” he taunted.
Ryan tried to look confident, but he’d never shot a gun before in his life. Even worse, the blow from Aung Win had left his right arm limp, and he was stuck using his bad hand. There was no way he could risk taking a shot.
“Leave us alone!” Ryan said. “Just let her go and we’ll pretend this never happened.” He was trying to buy time. Maybe someone heard. Maybe Danny got to make the call. Maybe someone would come to help if he could just stall them long enough. Ryan took another step forward.
“Your family should not get involved where you don’t belong.”
“What are you talking about? We just moved here,” Ryan said. Aung Win ignored him, pulling Jacqueline out the front door and slamming it behind him. Ryan ran after them, but stumbled over the groceries that had scattered everywhere. He fell hard.
Hearing the screech of tires outside, Ryan jumped to his feet, dropping the gun so he could use his good hand to open the door. He threw it wide and saw his mother tossed into the backseat of a dark sedan. Aung Win followed right behind.
“No!” Ryan screamed, coming down the stairs. The car raced away down the street. “Stop!” But it was no use. In seconds, the car sped around the corner. Ryan watched helplessly as his mother disappeared.
CHAPTER
10
NEW YORK,
USA
For a few moments, Ryan stood in the empty street, frozen in shock. Only when Danny appeared at his elbow, urging him back to the sidewalk, did he notice that he was holding up traffic. Cabbies honked and swore and revved their engines, impatient to get by.
“Was that him?” Danny asked. “The guy that followed you?”
Ryan nodded, numb with fear. “They’ve got my mother.”
“Sorry I ran—I thought that guy was gonna squash me.”
“I heard them talking. They’re trying to find my dad. They think she knows where he is. She said something about him crossing over into Andakar.”
“That’s where it was from,” Danny said. “That license plate—it’s a diplomatic plate registered with Andakar’s embassy.”
“We need to call the police,” Ryan said, turning back to the house.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”
Ryan and Danny both stopped short, surprised to see a young woman now standing between them and the stairs to the brownstone. With her short, severe hairstyle and alabaster skin, knee-high boots, tight pants, and leather jacket, Ryan thought she looked at least twenty. Maybe older. She seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, but then Ryan recognized her—this was the woman whose picture was on one of the forged passports in the secret room!
“If you go to the police now, both your parents are as good as dead.” The woman spoke with calm assurance, but she radiated an aura of danger. Ryan wasn’t sure what to make of her.
“Who are you?”
“Tasha Levi,” she said, with a slight accent, scanning the street as she spoke. “I can help your parents, but I need some information. Information that’s inside your house.”
“What kind of information?” Danny asked.
Tasha glanced at him, as if noticing him for the first time. “We should really have this little chat inside.”
“No one is going inside or anywhere until I get some answers.” Ryan was getting over his initial panic, and his tone was firm. “Who were those men?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you know my parents?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Well, what are you looking for that you think you’re going to find in my house?” he asked, exasperated.
“The trip your father is on, I need to know exactly where he went. I need to find out everything I can about the route he was taking.”
“Why do you need to know that?” Ryan asked.
“How else am I going to find him and bring him back?” Her steady gaze was confident, and Ryan knew she was deadly serious.
“Come on,” he said, pushing past her up the stairs.
Danny leaped after him, grabbing his shoulder. “What are you doing? You trust her?”
“My parents did. And right now, I’ve got to trust someone.”
CHAPTER
11
NEW YORK,
USA
Holy crap.” Danny’s eyes were huge as he looked at the secret room in the study. “What are your parents into?”
“I don’t know. But I think she does.” Ryan showed Tasha the passport he’d found with her photo inside. “This has your picture, but it doesn’t say Tasha. It says Kathleen Connors.”
Glancing at it, Tasha frowned. “I hate that name. But I do look good with red hair.” She turned her attention back to the marked-up map of Andakar and all the notes, photos, and computer printouts on the worktable. She searched through everything, setting certain items aside.
“Are my parents criminals?” Ryan asked, afraid of the answer.
“Yes,” she said. “In at least eight countries around the world, both John and Jacqueline Quinn would probably be put to death if they were ever caught.”
Ryan felt as if he couldn’t breathe, but then Tasha’s expression softened, “But a criminal in one person’s eyes is a hero in someone else’s.”
“A hero?”
“You come from a long line of them, actually. Going back over seventy years.”
Ryan felt like he was on a roller coaster. “Can you please just give me a straight answer? What’s going on?”
“Have you ever heard of Varian Fry?” Tasha continued her search as she spoke.
Ryan exchanged a glance with Danny, both of them shaking their heads. “Who was he?” Ryan asked.
“In the beginning, nobody. An American journalist who was a foreign correspondent in Europe during the 1930s. But as the Nazis came to power in Germany, Varian Fry saw firsthand how the Jewish people were being treated. It sickened him, and it made him want to do something. To help in whatever way he could.”
“What does that have to do with Ryan’s parents?” Danny asked. “They weren’t born yet.”
“Shut up and you’ll find out.” Tasha gave him a withering look.
“Wow,” Danny said. “Harsh.”
“Over the next several years,” Tasha continued, “things in Europe went from bad to worse as World War II erupted and Adolf Hitler’s power grew. By 1940, the Germans had occupied France and anyone of Jewish descent was in danger of being sent to a concentration camp.”
As she told the tale, Tasha’s impatience faded. This was not merely history she was repeating, Ryan understood, but something deeply personal to her.
“As a foreign correspondent, Varian Fry was allowed to visit France after the occupation. On the surface, he appeared to be just another American reporter writing about the war. Secretly, though, he was working with a group of people who felt the same way he did. A group of regular people like himself who refused to sit back and do nothing while atrocities occurred all around them. They called themselves the Emergency Rescue Committee.”
Ryan looked back to the hidden room, to the map and all the information, starting to figure out where this might be heading. He looked back to Tasha. “My great-grandfather, I think he was in France during World War II.”
Tasha nodded. “He was. In fact, he was one of the first members of the Emergency Rescue Committee. It was formed here in New York, with the mission to save as many of the refugees as possible. Everyone knew that Hitler was intent on killing every anti-Nazi intellectual, artist, and writer he could get his hands on. People like Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst. All trapped in France, knowing they could be dragged off at any moment, never to be seen again. The committee’s goal was to help them escape.”
“Like an underground railroad,” Ryan said.
“Exactly. Over the next year and a half, Varian Fry, your great-grandfather, and a
network of allies managed to smuggle over two thousand people out of France to freedom in the United States. It was the most successful operation of its kind during the war.”
Ryan wanted to believe what she was telling him, but certain things still didn’t make sense. “But why wouldn’t they tell me that my great-grandfather was some kind of hero? I never heard anything about that.”
“Yeah,” Danny said, “and what does any of that have to do with Andakar?”
Tasha rummaged through the drawers of the worktable as she continued. “Eventually, politics and infighting brought about the end of the group. The last thing the American government wanted was a bunch of rebels off fighting their own secret war. Fry was forced to return to the United States and, publicly at least, the Emergency Rescue Committee was disbanded.”
Tasha leaned down and pulled open a drawer beneath the table, revealing rows of files, some of them quite old. She pulled a handful of files out as she spoke. “But your great-grandfather and a few others refused to let it go. If they couldn’t rescue people with the support of the American government, then they’d do it on their own. The Emergency Rescue Committee lived on—even if it had to exist in secret.”
She shoved the files into Ryan’s arms. “For over seventy years, your family has been part of a network that helps people escape from some of the most dangerous places in the world.”
She went back to the worktable as Ryan looked at the names on the files he held. Tibet—Cuba—North Korea—Sri Lanka. Each one held information and photos on another person rescued from imprisonment or death. Putting the pieces together now, Ryan realized that his father’s job as a diplomat had been the perfect cover, allowing him to go from country to country without being suspected. Until now. Now, something had gone wrong. He looked up, remembering what Aung Win had asked his mother.