The Subatomic Kid (21 page)

“Boy! What a bunch of backseat drivers,” John carped. “I risk life and limb, and all I get are complaints, complaints, complaints.”

“So! What does that mean? He rescued us from the evil scientist, just so he could kill us with his driving,” Kate whined skeptically.

“Children! Children!” Tex admonished. “Let’s play nicely. Now, John, are you by any chance using both feet to operate the controls?”

John stared into his eyes, trying to divine the correct answer. After taking a sufficient amount of time to prove he had no psychic ability whatsoever, he plunged on blindly. “Of course not, do you think I’m stupid?” he lied convincingly.

“No, I’m just playing devil’s advocado here,” Tex whispered softly, smoothing ruffled feathers.

“What’s an advocado? A green pear-shaped lawyer?” Cal wondered out loud with a soft chuckle.

Tex ignored him, and continued, “You see, when my dad was teaching my older sister to drive, they used to take me along in the back, and that tumble I just took was very reminiscent of the tumbles I took then. After each one I always remember my dad saying, ‘If you don’t stop using that other foot for the brake, I’ll chop it off.’ Which sort of left me with the impression that in driving, one foot is better than two.”

“Oh, brother!” Kate moaned, as she grabbed her seatbelt and buckled herself into it.

“Uh-oh, we’re in trouble,” Cal mumbled, buckling up also.

“I thought you were going to tell me something I didn’t know,” John said flippantly, turning back to the wheel and surreptitiously rearranging his feet.

This time he squeezed the accelerator gently and the car took off smoothly. Just for practice, he removed his foot and applied a slight pressure to the break. Everything was working so perfectly John really felt like bragging, but when he glanced at Kate sitting with her arms folded across her chest and staring stonily out of the window, he thought better of it.

***

Steve had hustled as fast as he could to get to the school, and even though he had exaggerated a little in telling Mr. Hunter he would arrive in fifteen minutes, he thought he could always invent a traffic accident that had slowed him up at the last moment.

The plain fact was his mundane and unexciting life prior to meeting Hunter was now thrilling and filled with adventure. Having to go off and do boring things like pick up a car only deprived him of his time with the man he had come to think of as his guru; his teacher in the art of subterfuge.

He was like a sponge, wanting to absorb everything, because in the life of a secret agent all things were relevant, and every circumstance was a rich vein of gold he could mine to discover its essence. He had learned that people were a complex set of emotional wants and needs, and if he wished to understand them better, he had to distance himself from his own emotions and examine every situation from a purely objective point of view.

Arriving at the ornate, wrought-iron school gates, he leaned out of his window and tapped the security code into the keypad. Then he sat back and waited for the cogs and gears to slowly pull the heavy metal gates open. Watching them swing apart, he was surprised to see a pair of headlights turn into the driveway and head toward him.

***

John was happy with the way things were proceeding; he was actually driving a car, and it was a big car too. His only experience of high-speed motion so far had been riding on his skateboard, but this was something else—this was kind of grownup. As they cruised around the perimeter of the school, everyone had an opportunity to calm their frayed nerves, but as they took a long slow curve into the driveway that led off the property, tensions rose once again.

John adjusted the speed of the car to what he imagined was the speed of the opening gates, and Tex, Cal, and Kate watched nervously as the car swept through them with just inches to spare on each side. Passing the other limo and heading out toward the open road, everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief. They had done it; against all the odds, they had escaped.

***

Steve watched the other limo snake by and he wondered why they were in such a hurry. Mr. Hunter had told him he should think about every situation in life on many levels; it was the only way to the heart of a problem. There was the visual, the audible, the emotional, and the hypothetical. All of them, he said, held clues to the true nature of an event.

Try as he might, Steve found it very difficult to get past the visual, and his hypothetical wandered all over the place and never came to any real point. He imagined it was one of those things that took a lot of practice to get good at, like pool. Pool was all about angles, and if you didn’t have the angles, you weren’t going anywhere except down.

He decided to run over the whole thing anyway just to see if he could draw any new conclusions. The driver of the car had definitely been in a hurry; of that there was no doubt because he had narrowly missed hitting the gates. So, that meant he was either an extremely good driver—a stunt driver, say—or a very bad driver who just got lucky.

The thought rolled around in his mind and began nagging at him like a fishwife. Suddenly he wasn’t thinking anymore, he was being goaded into listening to himself, and as he listened, a scenario began to unfold; an unbelievable scenario—so unbelievable, in fact, he didn’t even want to think it. He thrust the car into drive and hit the accelerator. Everything was going wrong, and he figured the quicker he found Mr. Hunter, the better.

***

Hunter sat on the floor listening to the guffaws and giggles coming from the laboratory. Every now and again a shot would ring out, and the bullet would thud into the wall above him, spraying more plaster dust into the air. It was an untenable situation; he couldn’t even launch an effective counterattack without killing Doctor Leitz stone dead, and he was pretty sure he didn’t have the authority to do that.

He leaned his head back against the wall and slipped a cigar out of his top pocket. He had secured the perimeter and contained the enemy, and now he considered cutting off supplies and essential services. Even though there were no supplies to stop, there was electricity, but that would shut everything down, even the lights, and he had no night vision goggles.

He came to the conclusion it was too much of a risk to do anything. He was in siege mode, and he just had to get used to it until daylight or reinforcements arrived. He rolled the cigar around in his fingers and considered lighting it. Maybe not, he concluded.

What he really wanted was some hot soup, a hunk of bread, and a glass of Spanish red wine. As far as he was concerned, they could keep the French stuff; to get a good glass of French wine cost a fortune. But even the cheapest Spanish wine was like a good woman: full-bodied, and full of promise.

He slipped the cigar back into his pocket and glanced up as the glare of car headlights swept along the wall, illuminated the whole hallway, and just as suddenly disappeared. He then heard the slam of a car door and the unmistakable sound of feet scurrying over tarmac—a series of sad events that irked him greatly.

If he had told Steve once, he had told him a hundred times: he should treat every arrival and departure in the same way—with stealth—because the element of surprise was the most important weapon in his arsenal. He surmised from the unnatural series of events that Steve was in some form of crisis mode, a supposition confirmed when Steve entered the doorway and stood looking around breathlessly for some clue to Hunter’s whereabouts.

“Over here,” Hunter called out from the shadows. Just then a shot rang out and whined through the doorway beside him, sending Steve diving headlong to the floor.

“What the hell!” Steve yelled as he slid ungracefully over the polished surface of the hallway floor and hit the wall.

Hunter smiled and wondered whether this real life lesson in the art of arrival might stick with Steve in the future. “Get over here, and stay down,” he warned.

Steve clung to the floor like a mop and snaked over to Hunter as fast as he could. “Your car just left the premises,” he said hurriedly, clambering up from the floor and propping himself against the wall.

The information wasn’t really a surprise; it merely verified Hunter’s thinking. The kid was good, real good. Not only had he managed to escape from a locked cell, he had left a trail of destruction in his wake, a very clever smokescreen to help cover his tracks and confuse his pursuers.

In all his years in the business he had never encountered anyone who could outthink him; the fact he was still alive proved that. But this kid held all the promise of being a worthy adversary; he had style and panache, and above all he had instinct.

Many things in life can be taught. Instinct, however, is not one of them. Instinct is a pure application of thought and will without regard for perceived rules of behavior. It was apparent from where he sat in this train wreck of Doctor Leitz’ laboratory that pure instinct had been at work here. There was no plan of action that could result in such a glorious mess; it was an improvised symphony of catastrophe.

Hunter blew out a soft stream of smoke. “I just know.” he said. It was as plain as the smile on his face. There was a game afoot, a whole new game, and try as he might he could not work out the ending, although he had a feeling it was going to be a game well worth playing.

FORWARD & REVERSE

The night clung to the sky like a life belt, and the moon and the stars hugged the heavens, as John piloted the stolen limousine out into the fast-moving traffic of the highway. Up until this point he had managed to convince himself he could drive, but once in the snarling, angry arena of trucks, vans, cars, and pickups that all seemed to be vying for the same space, he realized nobody could drive. The highway was organized chaos at its extreme; it was every man or woman for themselves.

Kate, Cal, and Tex clung onto anything they could squeeze for comfort. It was the white-knuckle ride of a lifetime as John wove indiscriminately from lane to lane, leaving horns blaring in his wake, and frustrated drivers resorting to their final line of defense—the ubiquitous one finger hand gesture.

“John, don’t you think we should stop this?” Kate asked through clenched teeth.

“No! I’m just getting the hang of it; this is gonna be fun,” he replied.

“When they point their fingers in the air like that, it doesn’t mean you’re number one,” Cal ventured, gripping an overhead handle, and the armrest. “It means you suck.”

“I know what it means, dummy, but they’re just jealous ‘cause I’m leaving them in the dust. Look at me; I’m getting ahead of everybody.”

“You’re getting ahead of everybody because you’re cutting them off,” Tex yelled, his huge hands gripping the seat, “and that’s pissing them off!”

It is the strange nature of being a passenger in any car to expect the worst at every moment. The driver remains immune from this phenomenon by nature of the steering wheel and an ability to change his or her mind at a moment’s notice. Meanwhile, the passenger imagines collision after collision. Tex, Cal, and Kate were knee-deep in the passenger syndrome, straining their eyes and necks to see the next disaster coming, and preparing their nervous systems for the inevitable crash.

John, of course, was narrowly avoiding every obstacle that presented itself, so by hairs, whiskers, and good old seat-of-the-pants luck, he was unwittingly driving their heart rates and their frustrations through the roof. They were spiraling ever upward on a staircase of foreseen danger and unfulfilled expectations of disaster that wound them as tightly as an old spring watch.

After a series of swift yanks on the steering wheel, and through a chorus of screeching brakes and blaring horns, it was inevitable that John would find himself in the fast lane. It doesn’t matter how high performance your engine is, or how fast you’re going, the dirty little secret about the fast lane is that there’s always someone on your tail who wants to go faster than you.

It is often the case that the machine bearing down upon you from behind is not the sleekest sports car to roll off the end of a production line, but the tallest, longest, ugliest, meanest big rig that ever sharked through the white lines of a black top, and this occasion was no exception.