Scholastic Canada | On the Run

On the run, by Gordon Korman

On the Run #3: Now You See Them, Now You Don't Sample Chapter -- On the Run #2: The Fugitive Factor
ISBN 978-0439651370

Had the desk clerk been paying closer attention, he would have seen the teenager jog not to a waiting car but around the side of the building to the narrow ravine behind the motel. There, Aiden Falconer found his sister, Meg, crouched in the underbrush.

“It’s a no-go,” he reported sadly. “The guy’s a stickler.”

“It figures.” Meg pulled from her pocket a weathered photo that showed a young man a woman sunning in lounge chairs on the pool deck of this very hotel.

The man had long red hair and a beard. Frank Lindenauer – Uncle Frank, they had once called him. He was much more than a family friend. He was their parents’ CIA handler. Frank Lindenauer had convinced the husband-and-wife criminologist team of John and Louise Falconer to develop profiles to help American agents identify terrorist sleeper cells.

Meg shuddered at the thought. What had gone wrong? How had the Falconers’ profiles fallen into the hands of the very terrorists they had been designed to defeat?

Maybe Lindenauer knew. He was the only person who could prove that the Falconers had been working for the CIA the whole time. They weren’t traitors…they were patriots. If only they could have found him before the trial.

Stop! Meg commanded herself. That kind of thinking was useless. It made her sad. Worse, it made her weak – the one thing she and Aiden couldn’t afford to be if they were going to get their parents out of prison and clear their names.

“Listen,” Meg said determinedly. “The information we need is on that computer in there. It’s our only lead. Without it we’re dead in the water. If that desk clerk was a thousand-pound grizzly bear, we couldn’t let him stop us!”

“I agree,” Aiden said readily. “But what can we do? Knock him out with a tire iron?”

Meg was stubborn. “If that’s what it takes.”

“Be serious!”

Meg thought it over. “Stay hidden, but keep an eye on the office. When the guy leaves, that’s our chance.

Aiden looked dubious. “But what if he doesn’t leave?”

“He’ll leave. Trust me.”

Meg walked along the narrow dirt lane that separated the back of the motel from the woods. She kept an eye on the row of identical bathroom windows in the façade of cedar shakes.

Closed…closed…closed…jackpot.

The metal sash was raised a couple of inches. Meg peered inside. No toothbrushes or toiletries on the vanity. Beyond the bathroom door, two made beds.

Nobody home.

She pushed the window open and hoisted herself up and in.

Smoke detector right over the bed. Perfect.

She pulled a box of matches from her pocket, struck one, and held it to the corner of the yellow pages under the nightstand. There was instant combustion. She climbed onto the bed and held the blazing directory like a torch to the smoke alarm.

The siren went off almost immediately. Meg jumped down, rushed to the bathroom, and tossed the flaming phone book into the toilet bowl. Then she wriggled back out through the window and hit the ground running.