“I’m on it.” Cheater went to the laptop and pulled up a satellite view of Philly. He zoomed down and started scrolling around. “How’s this.”
I leaned over his shoulder and looked at the screen. He’d found a baseball field. It looked like it was next to a school. “That would work,” I said. It was also close enough for us to walk there. I’d realized that every time we took a cab, we left a record. And it was tough cramming all five of us into one cab.
“I like it,” Flinch said. “I don’t want us to do this indoors, or anywhere crowded where we can’t see everything that’s going on.”
“Well, that brings up a tiny little problem,” Martin said. “If Bowdler has a disrupter, we’re just five kids with no way to fight back. What if he pulls a gun, or uses another of those gas bombs? What if he has someone hiding with a rifle?”
“I did find this,” Cheater said. He opened a file on the hard drive. A diagram filled the screen. “It’s a schematic for the disrupter.”
“Does that help us?” I asked. “Is there a way to block it or something?”
Cheater shook his head. “Nope. Not as far as I can tell.”
“We’ll figure it all out,” I said. If we had to, we could rush him. But I didn’t want it to get down to that. Some of us would get hurt. I remembered how he’d kicked Martin. “There’s no way I’m letting Lucky stay with him.”
“Whatever it takes,” Flinch said.
“No matter what happens,” Martin said, “we keep going until we rescue him.”
Cheater and Torchie nodded in agreement. I knew all of them would fight to their last breath.
Another hour passed. I checked the phone to make sure it was still on.
“Why don’t you call him,” Torchie asked.
“It’s better if he calls.” That’s one of the things I’d learned from my dad. In any negotiation, it’s best to let the other guy say what he wants first. That was our only advantage. Bowdler had weapons. He had resources. We had time. But not as much as I’d like. A couple days with Bowdler might break Lucky beyond repair.
“All this waiting is making me hungry,” Torchie said. He wandered into the kitchen, rustled around in a cabinet, then shouted, “Hey, there’s popcorn!”
A moment later, he yelled, “I can’t get the microwave to work.”
“I’ll go,” I said. I joined him in the kitchen. The microwave seemed to be dead. There wasn’t even a display on the clock. I checked the plug. It was in. “Looks like no popcorn.”
“Watch this.” Torchie stared at the bag. In a couple seconds, I heard popping. A few second after that, the bag was almost full. And a few seconds after that, it burst into flame.
I slid it into the sink and turned on the faucet.
“I haven’t quite gotten the timing right,” Torchie said. He tore open the bag and grabbed a handful of soggy popcorn. “Mmmm. Not bad. Sorta like buttery Jell-o. Want some?”
“Maybe later.” I went back to the living room to wait for the phone to ring.
By four o’clock, I was starting to get worried.
“He’s not going to call,” Cheater said.
“He will,” I said. “He has to.” I looked around at the guys, hoping they agreed.
“I think he’s waiting until tonight,” Martin said. “Rats love darkness.”
“Yeah,” Flinch said. “A guy like Bowdler doesn’t like to slither out into the sunlight.”
At eight, half an hour before sunset, the cell phone finally rang.
elsewhere …
THE MORNING HAD been a nightmare of angry calls. Three separate experiments had somehow gone badly wrong, causing considerable damage. There’d also been a mishap on a corporate jet. Worse, Bowdler had seen a story on the news about a devastating explosion at one of Ganelon Corp.’s facilities. That disaster hadn’t been tied to his equipment yet, but he was sure a call was coming sooner or later.
It couldn’t be coincidence. Eddie was behind it. He’d been picked up on cameras at the airport and the toll bridge. Bowdler smiled. This just reinforced his belief that Eddie had the potential to become a priceless resource. Imagine what he could do once he was properly trained.
The damage was bad, but Eddie was worth a thousand times more than all of the Roth-Bullani contracts. And Eddie would be under control soon. His inexperience made that inevitable.
Bowdler placed a call to Santee. “I have four locations I know he’s visited beside the airport.” He read off the addresses.
“I’ll have my men check taxi records. It’ll take some time.”