The Flight of the Silvers (Silvers #1)(154)

Hannah shook her head at him as he hustled toward the fair. “That kid is unreal. Nothing scares him.”

“He’s amazing,” Mia said, with sheepish self-consciousness.

Zack tapped a nervous beat on the steering wheel. “He was right. Amanda should have never come here. I should have helped him convince her.”

“You wouldn’t have stopped her,” Hannah said. “You know how she gets when someone’s hurting. She was always like that, even as a kid.”

“Why didn’t she become a doctor then?”

Hannah hesitated to reply. It seemed crass, especially now, to talk about her sister’s stillbirth, a devastating trauma that had knocked Amanda’s whole life off trajectory.

“It’s complicated,” she sighed.

Zack shut off the windshield wipers. Soon the outside world drowned away. Nine minutes passed before a wet and winded David hurried back into the car.

“They’re okay. The agents used some kind of sleeping gas on them.”

Hannah covered her mouth. “Oh my God.”

“Did anyone say where they were going?” Mia asked.

“The Deps? No. But I think Theo might have.”

“What?”

“Start from the beginning,” Zack said. “What did you see?”

Through hindsight, David had seen everything. As he walked the crowd with his hooded face lowered, he scanned the past in his thoughts. He watched the entire federal ambush from setup to takedown, then stood at Theo’s gurney as the augur mumbled something odd. David had placed his ear near Theo’s retrospective lips, parsing every syllable of the message.

“Archer Lansing Private School?” Hannah asked.

“That’s what he said. I replayed it three times.”

“But why? Who was he talking to?”

David smirked in bright amazement. “Strange as it sounds, I think he was talking to me.”

Soon Mia returned to the library and sat at a terminal. She learned through Eaglenet archives that Archer Lansing was once a small but prestigious boys’ academy in Charleston, West Virginia. A cross-reference search of the address revealed that the building was now a regional office for the Broadcast Crimes Division of DP-9.

When Mia brought her results back to the car, Zack brimmed with guarded optimism.

“That can’t be coincidence. That has to be where they’re holding them.”

David nodded excitedly. “Theo knew I’d come to ghost him. He gave me the future through the past. It’s kind of brilliant, actually.”

“It’s just one future,” Mia cautioned. “We don’t know if it’s the right one.”

Zack scoured the road atlas he found under the passenger seat. Charleston was eighty miles south of here, a straight shot down Highway XLI.

“It’s the only lead we have. If they’re not there, we’re screwed.”

“And if they are there?” Hannah inquired. “What then?”

The cartoonist matched her uncertain expression, then told her to ask again later.

Two hours after sunset, on the chilly balcony of a West Virginia high-rise, she did.

—

The Kanewha was the oldest and most prestigious hotel in the state, a blond brick high-rise in the center of the capitol district. History buffs knew it as the place where President Irving Dudley died of a heart attack just days after his 1960 reelection. Had David sprung for the $4,200-a-night penthouse suite, and had he felt the urge to push his ghosting talents, he would have learned the death wasn’t entirely natural.

He sat on the patio of his decorous new room on the fourteenth floor, keeping a binocular vigil on the DP-9 building in the hilly distance. He could spy the familiar frame of their Royal Seeker in the parking lot. He’d caught Melissa Masaad, the exotic-looking leader of the Marietta raid, sneaking a cigarette behind the generator towers. Now he watched Ross Daley push Theo up the wheelchair ramp of the building. David smiled at the augur’s serene expression.

“I’ll never doubt that man again. He’s a true prophet.”

The Silvers in the living room didn’t share David’s cheer. They still had no confirmation that Amanda was inside, nor did they have a rescue plan. Shortly after check-in, Mia visited the business center and printed every online photo she could find of the old private school. Hannah and Zack raided the department store, purchasing black clothes and radio transmitters for everyone.

Now the cartoonist rooted through their bag of dark keepsakes from Terra Vista, finding Czerny’s small electron chaser (dead), the Salgados’ stun baton (dead), and the imposing revolver that Rebel had painfully introduced into their lives. It looked quite functional, with five .44 caliber bullets remaining in the chamber.

Hannah paced the carpet, nervously eyeing the gun. “Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?”

“No,” said Mia.

Zack chucked a hopeless palm. “I’m open to alternatives.”

“This is our best chance,” David insisted. He returned through the sliding screen and closed it shut behind him. “It’s a small building, isolated from its surroundings. From what I can see through the windows, there are only nine or ten agents in there.”

Hannah scoffed. “Oh, is that all?”

“You seem to forget we have talents they don’t. We also have the element of surprise.”