“Only a Cessna? Damn it, Michael, Misha, whatever. The government tracks that sort of thing, especially since 9/11.”
“No problem. It was a totally illegal and untraceable purchase. I have quite a few friends of that sort on the Internet, but that time I went to your friend Saul. I told him not to tell you, that it was a surprise. He thought that was pretty hilarious.” “Goddamn fucking hilarious” was what he’d actually said. “Then I found one of my friends from the Net who said there were a few people with flexible morals at the Burns Indian Reservation who would hide it for us in case we needed it.” Like now. With Raynor, we definitely needed a plane, because he was going to the same place we were: the Institute. Not that he’d think we’d go there. I imagined he thought that was the very last place we’d go. A man like him wouldn’t understand trying to save what you could own instead. No, he knew it was the best place to get his own fresh-fromthe-oven baked assassin, a special one, because he’d seen what I could do when merely annoyed by a fake tourist. He wanted to be prepared. He didn’t know I wouldn’t use what I had in me to kill . . . that I wasn’t like him or Jericho.
I hoped.
“What? They’re hiding a plane? Jesus, they’ll think we’re terrorists, and hauling around pipe bombs isn’t going to help with that impression.” His knuckles were bone white now, and he was going to get hoarse soon if his voice became any louder.
“No, don’t be ridiculous. I thought about that, so I told them we’re drug dealers,” I said with the complacent certainty I had in any of the plans I’d thought up. The Institute had taken my life, but they had taught me to plan like a son of a bitch. More cursing. It seemed I only needed adrenaline to bring it out in me. I probably shouldn’t have been pleased by that accomplishment, but I was.
“Drug dealers? And they believed you?” Now he was looking at me, not at the road, which wasn’t the best way to drive, and that amber I’d never seen directed at me was beginning to glint in his eyes.
“Why wouldn’t they?” I reassured him. He no doubt thought I’d made a mistake. Big brothers were like that . . . always questioning the younger ones and never letting them grow up. “I pay them to grow marijuana. It took them a while to get . . . the hang of it? Right, the hang of it, but last month they finally said they’d figured out the correct temperature, hydration, where to get better grow lights, and they said they have a great crop now.”
He blinked, his darker skin turning nearly as red as a sunburn. Pulling the car over into the emergency lane, he turned back and rested his forehead on the steering wheel and said nothing. I waited about five minutes. It was just a plane and some barely illegal drugs, which I thought should be legal. It was no worse than beer. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to drink beer yet as I wasn’t twenty-one and Stefan was as strict as a TV grandmother with things like that. Plane, drugs, only just illegal . . . and if I could’ve gotten a doctor involved, maybe not illegal at all—surely five minutes was enough to recover from my “surprise.”
I slapped him on the back and went on to be, admittedly, an utter ass. “Are you okay? Was the healthy breakfast too healthy? Did it upset your normal intestinal workings? Do you want a Three Musketeers to counteract the health?”
“Tui nemnogaya dermo,” he said without lifting his head.
I frowned. “You little shit? You called me a little shit. I am as tall as you now. I am not little.”
“But you are a shit. What happened to that agreeable kid who used to be afraid of grocery stores? Who only scared me when he wanted the sex talk? Where did the pipe bomb–building drug lord come from?” He leaned his head back against the headrest and covered his eyes. “Where did I go wrong?”
I wasn’t offended. In fact, if I’d known it would be this entertaining, I’d have told Stefan about all my plans—although some of the others might give him a heart attack—at least a year ago. I grinned, though he couldn’t see it, and punched him hard on the shoulder. “I grew up. I’m a genius, I was raised to be an assassin, and I’m trying to figure out a way to bring down an entire Institute of assassin-makers while curing the assassins they made. What did you think I did in my spare time? At least I didn’t build a nuclear bomb in the garage, which, by the way, is so beyond easy you wouldn’t believe it. . . .”
Stefan sat up and clapped his hand over my mouth. “Michael . . . Misha, you’re my brother and I love the hell out of you, but I think right now it would be a good thing if you didn’t talk. For a while. A couple of hours at least.”
I scowled at him, but this was brother stuff and I got it. I did. Stefan, despite killing a few people—a lot of people—to save me and being an ex-mobster on top of it, was delicate, apparently. I’d have to dole out the information in smaller bits so his brain wouldn’t explode. He knew emotion; I knew everything else—together we were unstoppable. Again, I hoped.
He took his hand away from my mouth. “I have only one more question and then silence. Okay? Silence, so I can escape having a stroke and not take that damn stinky-ass ferret and beat you with it. One question.”
I raised my eyebrows and looked interested. I genuinely was. What could he think I possibly left out of the plan?
“Do you know how to fly this plane? They taught you that at the Institute?”
Please. As if I would forget about that. I restrained myself from an annoyed snort. “No. I taught myself. There are classes for everything online. You can also order instructional videos, although of course they say those are only supplementary study materials and you can’t learn to fly a plane just from watching one.” Those who said this were nongeniuses. I had absolutely no doubt about that. “So yes, I can fly. Plus it’s a Cessna. It’s barely an airplane. More like a roller skate with wings.” I gave Godzilla, who did not stink . . . not too much anyway, a PayDay candy bar, and he crawled back under the seat.
Stefan was starting to turn redder. I needed to check his blood pressure. He wasn’t old enough to be worrying about that yet, but some of these things are genetic. “You really think you can fly a plane by watching something on the damn Internet?”
I grinned again. “Theoretically.”
He didn’t hit me with Godzilla, but he did seem intent on not speaking to me again for the conceivable future. I used the time on the computer, when I could get a connection . . . and when you hack into a satellite to control its orientation, you’d be amazed at how much your Internet connection can be improved. Others might suffer, but they could go to their local coffee shops. That wasn’t an option for me right now. I contacted Ariel in New York. We’d been in contact for two years now. She was twenty-two and went to the Weill Cornell Medical College. Well, she didn’t go; she was like me, a genius. She already had her MD and had started college at fourteen. She was a researcher at the college and after much surfing and looking and the thorough checking out of people at medical research sites, she was the one I thought who could help me the most. She had access to all the equipment that the money Stefan and I had couldn’t buy. She could do the experiments on the genetic material I provided. She could help me look for a cure, though she thought she was only helping another researcher at a facility with far lesser equipment write a paper on one of the wilder theories she’d heard.
She was pretty too. Not that that had anything to do with anything. She wasn’t blatantly sexy like Sara at the coffeehouse. More . . . cute. And I could talk to her because she was smart enough to understand me; sometimes I thought she might be smarter than I was. And that was hot. She had sleek pink hair that fell to her jaw, pale skin, and the tattoo of a tiny mermaid beside one of her blue eyes. When I asked her about it when we talked over webcam, she’d laughed and said being smart meant you had to try extra hard to see the fantasy in the world—the magic. And what was a world without those things?