Installment 11

            Two hours passed, and both Clara and I were astounded that we were still sitting there.

            “You’re certain he saw you?” she asked.

            “Positive,” I answered.

            “How?”

            “He waved at me. I know he saw me.”

            “But…The police cars could have caught up with us long ago. Why are we still here?”

            The landscape rolled by through the windows of the bus. Mostly fields so far, along with…wait. I can’t tell you that.

            Well, let’s just say the landscape wasn’t so interesting, and Clara Stone and I were occupied with our dilemma.

            “Will we make it?” Clara asked, worry coloring her voice.

            I shook my head. “I don’t know. But I do know that if we’re going to get caught, I’d rather we get caught in Washington than on this bus.”

            Clara thought about it, then nodded. “True. It’s more crowded in D.C.”

            Now I know that you’re wondering why I can tell you that we were going to D.C. That’s easy -- because it’s nothing new to my enemies and it can’t hurt you to know. If the information won’t help them, it won’t harm you or me, and that’s what counts right now. Now stop interrupting me and let me go on.

            “But that doesn’t answer the question. Why weren’t we chased down?”

            Clara rummaged through her backpack. “No one else saw you?”

            “No.”

            “Then we have to assume that Travis didn’t tell anyone that we left.”

            I frowned. “I don’t really like that assumption.”

            “He knew our bus number, he could have figured out in seconds where we were going. There’s no other explanation. But just to make sure…”

            Finally, she found what she was looking for in the purple backpack -- the sunglasses from earlier. Clara plopped the backpack between us on the dark blue leather lining and put the sunglasses on.

            A moment later, she said, “He’s not on here.”

            “What?” I grabbed the glasses and put them on, mimicking the blinking patterns I had used before.

            She was right. I could not find Travis Thatcher’s tracking number or little red dot. He had disappeared.

            “I don’t like that,” I muttered. “At all.”

            Clara folded her arms across her chest. “Neither do I, but we don’t have anything else to do right now. It’ll be another hour or so before we reach another station. We could transfer there.”

            I glanced out the window. It had started to rain -- big, heavy droplets that fell down the window like teardrops.

            “I don’t know. We’ll see what to do when we get there.”

            Half an hour later, Clara shook me awake.

            “Nathan!” she whispered. “Nathan!”

            “What?” I muttered back, still partly asleep.

            “There’s a car that’s been following us for the past ten minutes!”

            That jolted me awake. “What? Who? Travis Thatcher?”

            She shook her head. “No, but he’s obviously following the bus.”

            “If he were the police, he could have stopped us.”

            “I know,” Clara said nervously. “I don’t think it’s the police.”

            That shook me. It suddenly hit me that we were not dealing with anyone predictable here. The police had rules, laws -- you could at least know you were safe with them, even if it meant going to jail. But if it wasn’t the police…

            Clara and I could get seriously hurt.

            Then again, that wasn’t really anything new, was it? From the moment I had come home from school nearly twenty-four hours ago to find policemen sitting in my living room, I knew that I was in trouble.

            And this mysterious girl sitting next to me had decided to come with me.

            I felt a sudden burst of warmth toward Clara Stone.

            “We could just get off at the next stop,” I suggested.

            She pursed her lips. “We might be safer on the bus.”

            The look on her face -- a frightened, worried look -- sent a shudder through me. But I barely had time to be surprised of my reaction, because I suddenly realized that the emotion was not sympathy, fear, or anything in between.

            It was anger.

            These people had accused me of hacking into a system I had never heard of before in my life, were following me, and had most likely murdered Clara’s parents.

            I grabbed Clara’s arm. “Come on,” I said in a low, strained voice.

            “What?” she said, shocked. “We’re in the middle of nowhere on a bus. What are we supposed to do?”

            “Exactly what they won’t expect,” I said.

            “What’s that?”

            I pointed out the window, and she saw what I saw -- a tunnel up ahead, and a fairly large one.

            “Come with me,” I insisted. “Over to the seat at the front.

            Crouching low so that we wouldn’t draw attention through the window, we made our way to the seat right by the door. I spotted the lever that opened the door.

            “When I say go,” I whispered, “Jump.”

            Clara’s eyes widened in horror as she realized what I had in mind. “No! Nathan, that’s crazy!”

            “Trust me,” I said quietly.

            “Why?” Clara sounded like I had asked her to jump off the Empire State Building.

            “Because I trusted you. You owe me one.”

            She made a disparaging noise. “I owe you one? I rescued you!”

            “Then let me return the favor.”

            Our eyes met, and I knew this was the moment of truth. The tunnel was coming up fast, and in a moment we would have no time to decide.

            Clara shut her eyes tight. “Okay,” she whispered. “But if I die, you are dead.”

            She clung to her purple backpack, as I kept my eyes on the lever to open the door. Finally, we entered the tunnel, and the world outside the bus windows was plunged into dim darkness. I also felt the bus slowing down slightly. I knew this was our chance.

            I sprang toward the lever and pulled it. The doors opened with a sound like steam coming out of pipes as cold wind blasted into the entryway.

            “Hey!” the driver shouted. “What d’you think you’re doing?”

             “Jump!” I shouted to Clara. She hesitated, then leapt out of the doorway.

            I coiled my legs, then sprang out after her, cold air rushing against me.

            Luckily, we were close to the ground -- but that didn’t soften the impact as much as I thought it might. As soon as I hit the ground, though, I rolled to the side, which kept me from landing with all my force on just one part of my body.

            The lights and whooshing sound of the bus died away quickly as it kept on moving through the tunnel. We were left in semi-darkness, with only the faint orange light of the tunnel ceiling to guide us.

            But I knew we weren’t safe yet. I looked around for Clara, and as soon as I saw her, I grabbed her arm and pulled her flat up against the wall.

            Moments later, a car zoomed past us -- without slowing down, or, apparently, noticing Clara and I.

            Breathing hard, I turned to Clara.

            “Are…you…okay?” I asked, panting.

            Her eyes were screwed shut, and her hair, having fallen out of its neat ponytail, was disheveled, fallen over her eyes -- but she still had a death grip on her purple backpack.

            “Don’t,” Clara murmured, shaking all over, “ever make me do that, ever again.”

            I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

            “We did it!” I exclaimed. “We’re out of there!” I glanced her over. “You didn’t get hurt, did you?”

            Clara slowly shook her head. “No. I think we’re both extraordinarily lucky. I landed on the backpack and probably crushed everything in it. You?”

            “I rolled,” I told her. “Check the backpack.”

            We both unzipped the backpack and swiftly examined the contents. When she had landed on it, Clara didn’t appear to have smashed anything, but there was no telling the exact damage. I reached for the sunglasses and put them on.

            “By the way,” I said as a thought hit me, “Why didn’t you use these when you first pulled me out of the police station?”

            Clara sniffed. “I thought I knew where I was going, obviously.”

            By remembering the course of blinks that was becoming familiar to me by now, I first checked for Travis Thatcher. “He’s back on now,” I announced.

            “What?” Clara tried to pull the sunglasses off me. “Where?”

            I managed to keep them away from her, and examined the map. By trial and error, I figured out how to zoom out and find out his exact location. “He’s in a city somewhere around here…I’m not sure how close, though, this thing is kind of hard to figure out.”

            “For goodness’ sake, just let me!”

            Clara took the sunglasses and was silent for a moment. “He’s not at our next stop,” she said slowly. “Funny…I thought he would be waiting for us.”

            “This whole thing is funny,” I said dryly. “First Travis doesn’t tell anyone where we’re going, then apparently he does, because they start following us, and then he’s gone off somewhere completely different.”

            “He could have been reassigned,” Clara pointed out. “There’s nothing saying that they didn’t just decide he was doing a terrible job and sent him somewhere else.”

            “Maybe,” I said, not at all convinced. “I suppose Larson could have been driving the car. Or someone else. It sounded like there are quite a few agents in their system, whoever these guys are.”

            “Operation 497?” Clara suggested.

            I stared at her blankly.

            “If the bad guys have to have a name, why couldn’t we call them Operation 497? It’s all we have,” she pointed out.

            “Bad guys?” was all I had to say.

-Nathan T. Dalton