“Come on!” Tahoe shouted.
She and Wolfie had climbed aboard one of the motorcycles. Kate sat on a second bike, waving Chance over. Come on, she mouthed.
Chance leapt to his feet and bolted to the bike. Wolfie and Tahoe peeled away as Chance swung his leg over the seat. He wrapped his arms around Kate’s stomach.
Desmond and Scarface burst from the back of the restaurant, guns jabbing in front of them.
Kate gunned the cycle, wheels spinning in a cloud of dust. They peeled away from the restaurant and caught an edge on the pavement, barely managing to right the bike.
Gunfire erupted — pop-pop-pop!
Chase ducked instinctively, as Kate gunned the engine into gear.
In a squeal of rubber, they sped north toward Panama City.
TWENTY-FOUR
The man dialed the number from memory. It rang three times before an audible click signaled that someone had picked up.
“It’s done,” the man said.
“The girl?” the voice on the other end asked.
“Taken care of.”
“Where are the rest of them now?”
“Headed to Panama City.”
“And from there?”
“I think you know.”
“I guess we’ll see.”
“So far,” he said. “Everything has gone to plan. No reason to believe anything will change.”
“Like I said, I guess we’ll see.”
“So we’re good?” he asked.
He heard a deep exhalation on the other end of the phone. “We’re good. Time to initiate Stage Three.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Panama City was the largest city in Panama home to just under a half-million residents. Since its founding in 1519, Panama City served as one of the most important transportation hub in the southern hemisphere. Spanish and Portuguese explorers used the city to launch their conquest of the mighty Inca Empire. It was destroyed by fire in 1671 by the renowned pirate hunter Henry Morgan and rebuilt, five miles from the original site, two years later. The charred remains of the original city are still visible in Panama Viejo.
Panama City was still a major crossroads for global commerce. The famous canal began on the eastern side of the city on the Pacific Ocean before it dredged northwest 48 miles to the Atlantic. Nearly 15,000 ships made the eight-hour journey through the channel each year. The man-made marvel was considered one of the seven wonders of the modern world.
It wasn’t the ruins of Panama Viejo nor the famed canal, but another important hub for travelers and explorers that brought Chance and the others here.
The Tocumen International Airport was the largest airport in Central America. As one of the busiest airports in the Americas, Tocumen served as a hub for flights between North and South America. Ten million passengers traveled in and out of Panama City every year on 141,000 flights. The airport was a dizzying maze of terminals and gates, customs desks and immigration stations. It was, Chance hoped, a perfect place to lose themselves in a crowd.
They had sped north on the motorcycles, covering the 200 kilometers from Meteti to Panama City in three hours. Luckily, Bigfoot had fueled up in when they had first reached the southern frontier town, so they didn’t have to stop at all on the way. But their trail would not be difficult to follow. Desmond and Scarface would not be far behind. Chance figured they had maybe a 20-minute head start. They couldn’t risk losing a single minute.
They roared up to the Departures Terminal, left the bikes at the curb and hurried inside. Dozens of airline counters filled the terminal. Copa Airlines, Aero Mexico, American Airlines, Delta. Even Turkish Airlines had a representative here. Lines of people snaked slowly toward check-in, headed south to Rio and Buenos Aires, north to Houston and Miami. A bleary-eyed high school group, Americans, all wearing the same blue-and-gold Riverdale High School Track and Field T-shirts, staggered through the terminal, pillows clutched to their chests.
“We’re going to take the first flight back to the States,” Chance said. “No matter where it’s going. Speed matters more than the destination.”
“Excellent plan,” said Tahoe. “Just two problems.”
“Just two?” Wolfie added. “I can think of 50.”
“What are the problems?” Chance asked Tahoe. “And make it fast, we don’t have much of a head start.”
“For starters,” she said. “We don’t have any money.”
“I’ve got that covered,” Chance said. He pulled his debit card from his pocket and showed it to them.”
“You’ve got enough money to cover international flights for all four of us?” Tahoe asked incredulously.
“No,” he admitted. “But I have overdraft protection. It’s like a credit card.”
“Okay, but the second problem isn’t so simple,” she continued.
“No?”
“None of us have passports. How in the world are we going to get on any of these flights without one?”
Tahoe was right, this one was trickier. They technically shouldn’t even be in this country, and recounting a tale about being trapped on a cargo ship for nearly 24 hours before they escaped in a lifeboat and landed on a remote beach in Colombia wasn’t going to sound believable to the airline personnel. The best plan he had come up with was to tell a story about getting mugged in El Chorrillo and losing their passports, then feigning ignorance about why there was no record of actually entering the country.
“Even if that plan worked,” Tahoe said, after Chance shared his thoughts, “which it almost certainly won’t, it will take way too long to get through our stories, even with Kate helping us with the Spanish. Those two lunatics are right behind us. If we don’t get on a plane in the next 30 minutes, we’re in real trouble.”
“What are they going to do, kill us right here in the check-in line?”
“Yes. Maybe. Either way, I’m not willing to take that chance.”
Wolfie slumped onto a bench, head in hands. Kate wandered off, heading toward the Riverdale school group. Chance and Tahoe stared at each other, as if their mutual perplexed looks would somehow spawn a neat and tidy solution. Wolfie looked up suddenly. “We can’t fly. So what if we try to stow away on one of those cargo ships passing through the canal? I’ve seen pictures of that place. Those ships get super-close to the walkway. We can just jump onboard.”
“What are we, ninjas?” Chance said. “I’m sure security is swarming all over that place. Threats of terrorism and all.”
“Wolfie is right,” interjected Tahoe. “Flying isn’t an option. No way they let us on one of these planes. We need to get out of here.”
Just then, Kate reappeared. Her face betrayed a hint of something Chance had not seen in days: a wry smile. She grabbed Chance by the elbow. “Pick an airline,” she said. “Right now. Pick a destination and buy our tickets. We don’t have that much time.”
Chance protested, “Kate, we can’t buy the tickets without —”
Kate slapped something into his palm. “— passports,” she finished. “I know.”
Chance looked down at his hand. He was holding four navy blue booklets embossed with official coat of arms of the United States — a mighty eagle clutching a sheath of arrows in its claw.
“I don’t … understand,” Chance stammered, showing the passports to the others. “Where did you get these?”
“High school kids,” Kate said, gesturing towards the Riverdale group. “They really should be more careful with their belongings while traveling in a foreign country.”
Tahoe and Wolfie stared at the passports incredulously. “You … stole them?” Tahoe asked.
“Is there a problem?” Kate asked.
“Hell, no,” said Tahoe. “You’re my hero!”
“They’re not perfect,” Kate said. “But at least they’re the right gender and race. We need to hope for an impatient security agent, staring out at a long and growing line of unruly passengers.”
Wolfie looked at his new passport. “This guy is 10 s
hades lighter than me,” he protested.
“Okay, you can stay behind.”
He reexamined the passport photo. “Not as good-looking, either.”
They hurried to the Departures monitor and surveyed their options.
“New York City on Delta leaves in a half-hour,” Tahoe said. “We can make that.”
“Or Miami on American,” Wolfie read off the screen. “Same departure time.”
Chance looked at each of them, then at Kate. “What do you think?” he asked her.
“Flip a coin,” she said.
TWENTY-SIX
Cruising at 32,000 feet on Delta Flight 87 to New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, Chance finally felt the muscles in his shoulders loosen.
They had purchased tickets at the Delta counter with trembling hands. The counter agent seemed to eye them suspiciously when they handed over the stolen passports. Chance’s was for a guy named Edward Gillespie.
Edward Gillespie … Edward Gillespie … Edward Gillespie …
Edward wore glasses and his hair, while the same brown color, was close-cropped. The fact that they had no luggage, not even a carry-on, was surely going to raise even more suspicion. And even though they had cleaned themselves up a bit in the airport bathroom, the foursome looked like bedraggled refugees.
Maybe the counter agent took pity on them, figured they were four kids who had a rough go in Panama just looking to get home, because she gave them a sympathetic smile as she handed over their boarding passes.
The security agent merely checked to make sure the names on the passports and the boarding passes matched before lazily waving them through. But even past security, Chance did not allow himself to relax. They couldn’t get four seats together, not at the last minute. Chance found his seat in 14A, next to a window. The others were all within a few rows, close enough for Chance to see the tops of their heads, anyway.
He spent the next 15 minutes anxiously eyeballing the galley at the front of the plane. He studied the faces of every boarding passenger, expecting each one to have the disfigured face of Scarface and the dark visage of Desmond. Even after the flight attendant secured the cabin doors and the aircraft taxied toward the runway, Chance still did not relax, certain that he had somehow missed the killers board. He turned and searched every face again, straining to see the line of heads that stretched back 22 rows behind him.
But it wasn’t until they reached cruising altitude that Chance’s muscles relaxed, that his mind finally stopped racing in loops, and he was just left with one thought.
Jenny.
He couldn’t shake the image of Jenny’s lifeless body lying in the Panamanian dirt. He couldn’t shake the image of Desmond and Scarface standing over her body, the barrels of their guns still hot. Chance pressed his forehead against the window.
Jenny is gone.
“Are you alright?”
It was the passenger seated beside Chance. She was an older woman, a thick hardback opened on her lap. She gazed at Chance with concerned eyes, and a small clump of tissues in her hand.
Chance hadn’t even realized he was crying. He sniffled, nodded and politely accepted the tissues. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m good. Just a rough, exhausting day.”
Once he had composed himself, Chance felt something in the inside pocket of his jacket.
Jenny’s notebook.
He had slipped it from her body as they were fleeing Desmond and Scarface in Meteti. Chance stared at the cloth cover. He excused himself from his row, clumsily stepping over the woman in the middle seat. He found Tahoe in 22B. She looked up at Chance with a puzzled look. From the looks of it, she had managed to doze off.
“Excuse me,” Chance said, tapping the passenger in the aisle seat on the shoulder. “Do you mind switching seats with me? I’ve got a nice window seat in 14.” The man agreed, and Chance sat down.
“What’s up?” Tahoe asked.
“This,” Chance said. He placed the journal onto the seatback table. “Jenny’s notebook.”
“What about it?”
“Look for yourself.”
The entries in the notebook were labeled chronologically: Day 1, Day 2, all the way up to Day 8. It was surely no coincidence that this was the eighth day since they arrived at the escape room. It seemed obvious to Chance that Jenny had made notes after each day. There were no other entries.
Each entry was further divided into subsections, marked with underlined headings that Chance couldn’t decipher. S1R, S2M, S3C and S4K.
DAY 1 – S2M
Resolute adherence to opinion and idea.
Reax negatively when challenged.
Contr limited to P2 and P4.
DAY 1 – S4K
No observation.
Tahoe looked up at Chance and shrugged. “Flip ahead,” he said.
Day 5 – S3C
CFT2 Results – Positive; approx. 50 secs; no apparent numeric def.
Day 5 – S4K
CFT2 Results – No observation.
“I don’t understand what these abbreviations are supposed to mean,” Tahoe said.
“I’m not sure, either,” Chance said. “But look at these here. S1R, S2M — I think they refer to us.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Look at the last letter in each abbreviation. I didn’t see it at first, but the M is for you, Margaret. K for Kate, C for Chance. These indicate us.”
“Margaret,” Tahoe said. “Did you tell her my real name, Chance?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then I don’t see how that M could refer to me. And what about the R?”
“That’s Wolfie. Robert is his real name, remember?”
“So the S at the beginning stands for …?”
Chance shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“If you’re right, and these three digits refer to each one of us, and assuming the K is for Kate, then why aren’t there any observations about Kate? Look, for every entry on every day, it just says the same thing.” Tahoe flipped the pages. “No observation. No observation. No observation.”
“I have no idea why Jenny would be making notes about any of us,” Chance said.
“What happened on Day 5?” Tahoe asked. She pointed to the entry. “What are the ‘results’ from that day?”
“We were in the jungle,” Chance said. “I don’t remember much about that day in particular. They all blended together.”
Tahoe stared at Chance; he could feel the weight of her gaze. She looked away, then back.
“Out with it,” Chance told her.
“How did they find us?” she asked. “We were in Panama, Chance. In the jungle.”
Chance stared at the journal. “I don’t know. We don’t have cell phones, so that’s not it.”
“Could there be another way to track us?” Tahoe asked, suddenly straightening in her seat. “What if we’ve been bugged somehow?”
The idea hit Chance like a slap. It simultaneously sounded laughable and entirely plausible. Yes, they must have been tracked, all this time. It was the only reasonable explanation for how Desmond and Scarface had found them in Panama.
“Holy shit,” he seethed.
Chance and Tahoe slipped out of the row, hurried down the aisle and found Kate and Wolfie. They gestured for them to follow them to the back of the plane. When they had all gathered in the aft galley, Tahoe said, “One of us is bugged. We need to find it and get rid of it.”
“Whoa,” Wolfie said. “How did they manage to do that?”
“Doesn’t matter how,” Chance said. “We just need to find it before we land. Wolfie, you and Tahoe go in first. Check each other, thoroughly.”
Wolfie smiled widely. “This just got interesting.”
“Don’t get any ideas,” Tahoe smirked.
“Hey, this was your idea.”
They disappeared into the bathroom. Kate looked nervously at Chance, who timidly stared at his shoes. They heard laughter from the bathroom, and thumps, as though
something had bumped against the thin restroom door.
When they emerged, Tahoe and Wolfie looked a little rumpled, a little guilty. “Nothing,” Tahoe said.
“You sure?”
Wolfie grinned. “We inspected each other pretty thoroughly.”
“If we weren’t on a plane, I’d need a cigarette,” Tahoe quipped.
Kate stepped past them and into the bathroom. “Our turn.”
Chance slid the bolt shut, locking them inside the cramped restroom.
Kate immediately ran her fingers around Chance’s collar, then down the front of his chest, around to his back and down to his waist. She was frisking him like an expert TSA agent, screening for weapons. She patted down both pant legs.
“Take off your clothes,” she said.
He did. He stripped down to a pair of boxer briefs.
Kate turned the pants inside out and searched the seams. Then she did the same on Chance’s shirt. Finding nothing, she looked down at Chance’s briefs.
“I’ll check these myself,” he said.
He did, and found nothing. He checked his shoes with the same result.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m clean.”
Kate took a half-step backward and pulled her top over her head. She handed it to Chance. There wasn’t much to it, nowhere to plant a bug, but he searched it anyway. Nothing. Kate stared at Chance as she unbuckled her jeans and let them fall to the floor. He stooped to pick them up, trying and failing to avoid looking at her bare legs.
He searched quickly, examining the seams, the front button, finding nothing. He shook his head. Kate stood before him in nothing but a white bra and a pair of black cotton panties.
“I’ll check these myself,” she said.
There was nowhere else to look in the cramped space, but Chance turned to give her some modicum of privacy.
“Clean,” Kate said when she had finished. When he turned back around, her shirt was back on and she was pulling her jeans back on.
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