Hero Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Also by #1 Bestseller Mike Lupica:

  Travel Team

  Heat

  Miracle on 49th Street

  Summer Ball

  The Big Field

  Million-Dollar Throw

  The Batboy

  AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC.

  PHILOMEL BOOKS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group.

  Published by The Penguin Group. Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.). Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England. Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd). Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India. Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd). Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa. Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

  Copyright © 2010 by Mike Lupica. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. Philomel Books, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lupica, Mike. Hero / Mike Lupica. p. cm. Summary: Fourteen-year-old Zach learns he has the same special abilities as his father, who was the President’s globe-trotting troubleshooter until “the Bads” killed him, and now Zach must decide whether to use his powers in the same way at the risk of his own life. [1. Heroes—Fiction. 2. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 3. Politics, Practical—Fiction. 4. Death—Fiction. 5. Family life—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 6. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.L97914Her 2010 [Fic]—dc22

  2010001772

  eISBN : 978-1-101-19837-7

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This one is for Michael Green.

  I could never have written this book—or any

  book—without the love and support of Taylor,

  Christopher, Alex, Zach and Hannah.

  They are my heroes, the ones who make

  me believe in magic.

  And Esther Newberg, who always just believes.

  1

  THERE were four thugs, total gangsters, in front of the house with their rifles and their night-vision goggles. Four more in back. No telling how many more inside.

  So figure a dozen hard guys at least, protecting one of the worst guys in the world.

  Not one of them having a clue about how much trouble they were really in, how badly I had them outnumbered.

  Hired guns, in any country, never worried me. The Bads? They were the real enemy, worse than any terrorists, even if I was one of the few people alive who knew they existed.

  Even my boss, the president of the United States, didn’t know what we were really up against, how much he really needed me.

  When he talked about our country fighting an “unseen” threat, he didn’t know how true that really was.

  When my son, Zach, was little, I used to tell him these fantastic bedtime stories about the Bads, and he thought I was making them up. I wasn’t.

  The snow was falling hard now, bringing night along with it. Not good. Definitely not good. I didn’t need a blizzard tonight, not if I wanted to get the plane in the air once I got back to the small terminal near the airport in Zagreb. Which was only going to happen if I could get past the guards, get inside, and then back out with the guy I’d come all this way for. It meant things going the way they were supposed to, which didn’t always happen in my line of work.

  My official line of work? That would be special adviser to the president. A title that meant nothing on nights like this. On assignments like this. The real job description was fixing things, things that other people couldn’t, saving people who needed saving, capturing people who needed to be stopped. Dispensing my own brand of justice.

  Sometimes I had help, people watching my back.

  Not tonight. Tonight I was on my own. Not even the president knew I was here. Sometimes you have to play by your own rules.

  On this remote hill in northern Bosnia, near where the concentration camps had been discovered a few years before, I had managed to finally locate a Serb war criminal and part-time terrorist named Vladimir Radovic. He was known to governments around the world and decent people everywhere as Vlad the Bad because of all the innocent people he’d slaughtered when he was in power, before he was on the run.

  To me, he was known by a code name, which I thought fit him much better:

  The Rat.

  I was here to catch the Rat.

  Me, Tom Harriman. About to blow past the guns and inside a cabin that had been turned into an armed fortress.

  Almost time now. I didn’t just feel the darkness all around me, as if night had fallen out of the sky all at once. I could feel another darkness coming up inside me, the way it always did in moments like this, when something was about to happen. When I didn’t have to keep my own bad self under control. When I could be one of the good guys but not have to behave like one.

  The me that still scares me.

  Time to go in and tell the Rat his ride was here.

  I should have been cold, as long as I’d been waiting outside. And I knew I should be worried about what might go wrong. Only I wasn’t. Cold or worried, take your pick.

  As I moved along the front of the tree line, seeing the smoke coming out of the chimney, seeing both levels of the house lit up, I did wonder if it had been too easy finding him. Wondered if the Bads had wanted me to find him, as a way of drawing me here, making me vulnerable.

  But that was always part of the fun of it, wasn’t it? The finding out.

  Someday when Zach is ready, when it is Zach’s time and not mine, I
will have to tell him the truth about the Bads and about me, tell my kid that the most fantastic story of all was me.

  But for now it was time to be the unknown hero again, with the jeep waiting for me on the access road, over on the other side of the woods, with the jet waiting a few miles away in Zagreb. This wasn’t the Tom Harriman who testified in front of Congress and briefed the intelligence agencies.

  This was the Tom Harriman who did whatever it took to get the job done.

  I began to move toward the left side of the house, my boots not making a sound, even on the frozen snow. One of my many talents, gliding like I was riding an invisible wave.

  The front four men were fanned out about fifty yards from the cabin, carrying their rifles like they were looking for any excuse to use them. They didn’t know what I knew, that even if they did get to use them, the guns wouldn’t do them much good.

  And just like that I changed the plan, called an audible on myself, came walking out of the woods, in plain sight, talking to them in their native language.

  “I’m lost,” I said. “Can you help me out?”

  Every gun turned toward me as the guards shouted at me to stop. But I just kept smiling, moving toward them, asking how to find my way back to the main road. I was such a stupid, they probably never met such a stupid in their lives.

  The guy in charge just shook his head, turned and said something I couldn’t hear, and they laughed, all of them dropping their guns at the same time, like a fighter dropping his hands.

  I was on them before they knew it.

  It was as if I’d covered the ground between us in one step. Another of my talents. Michael Jordan or LeBron never had a first step like this.

  I put all four of them down before any of them could get his gun back up. Wondered if they could hear the roar inside my head, the one I always heard. It was never adrenaline in times like this, it was something more, something I’d never been able to understand. Or control very well once the bell rang. Most people only see it happen in action movies, one against four, one guy using only his hands and feet for spins and kicks and jumps. Only this was no movie.

  It was over quickly, the four of them laid out in the snow, arms splayed like snow angels. Done like dinner, as Zach would say.

  It was then that I heard the crackle of the walkietalkie from inside one of the guards’ parkas. Heard a voice full of static, asking Toni why he wouldn’t respond, that if he didn’t respond right now, he was going to come looking for him.

  I didn’t know whether the voice was coming from behind the house, one of the four back there that I’d seen earlier, or from someone inside with the Rat.

  Someone on the roof trained a huge searchlight on the front yard, making night as bright as day. The first shot was fired then, from somewhere off to my left. Then another. I ducked and rolled and went in a low crouch in the direction of the front door. They were probably wondering how I could still be moving like this, how they’d possibly missed me from close range.

  I didn’t have time to tell them they probably hadn’t missed, that if they were going to put me down, they simply needed bigger guns.

  They weren’t putting me down and they weren’t stopping me. I’d come too far to get the Rat, to take him to the people waiting for him in London, the ones who wanted to either hang him or put him away for the next ten thousand years.

  I made it to the porch, the gunfire still crackling all around me.

  First floor or second?

  He was on the second floor. Don’t ask me how I knew; I just did. Call it a sixth sense. So instead of crashing through the door, I jumped up to the second-floor landing.

  Don’t ask about making a jump like that. You either can or you can’t.

  I smashed the window and burst through. There he was, the fat slob, trying to make it to the door, turning to fire a shot with the gun in his right hand. But I was across the room before he could do anything, slapping the gun out of his hand, putting my hand behind his neck, finding the spot, putting him out.

  I dragged him the rest of the way through the doorway, the two of us in the second-floor hallway. Here came two more of his guys, coming up the stairs with their guns raised but afraid to take the shot because I had pulled the Rat up in front of me, like one of those Kevlar vests you see on the cop shows. I wondered if the vests ever smelled as bad as he did.

  It was the stink guys got on them when they were caught.

  “Boys,” I said to the guys on the stairs, “I’d love to stay and chat, but we’ve got a plane to catch. And I don’t have to tell you what security is like at the airport these days.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” the first one said.

  “Well, yeah, actually I am,” I said, and kicked him and his friend down the stairs. Then I was over them, flying toward the front door.

  I had the Rat under my arm now. I’d played lacrosse in high school, had heard a story once about Jim Brown, who ended up becoming the greatest running back in pro-football history. Brown had been a lacrosse star himself in high school and later at Syracuse. He was so much bigger, stronger and faster than everyone else that he’d just pin his stick and the ball to his body, run down the field and score, again and again.

  They’d had to change the rules so guys like him couldn’t do that.

  I pinned the Rat to me like that now, backing away from the house as more guys with guns appeared from every angle, all of them afraid to shoot because they might put one in the boss.

  I thought about dropping him in the snow so I could go back and finish them all off, because when I got going like this, sometimes I couldn’t stop myself.

  But we really did have a plane to catch.

  So I turned and ran into the woods, not worrying about the hidden trees or branches. I could see in the dark, even without those fancy night-vision goggles the Rat’s boys had been wearing. Even with the hard snow pelting my face.

  When I got to the other side of the woods, I looked down to the lights of the jeep, making sure that no one was waiting for me there.

  It was just when you thought the hard part was over that the real danger began.

  Nothing.

  I threw the Rat in the backseat and peeled away, hearing the sound of cars starting up behind me. I tore off down the road toward Zagreb, taking the first turn like it was NASCAR.

  My ride out of here, a Hawker 4000, was waiting on the runway, which was already covered in snow. I had told the kid who helped run the little terminal for his father that I worked for his president. I didn’t tell him why I was here, just told him enough to pull him into tonight’s action movie, like the two of us were playing Bond or Bourne.

  I’d overpaid the kid by a lot for fuel and maintenance and told him what time I thought I’d be back and told him to have the wings de-iced. If not, the whole mission was a waste of time. Doomed to fail.

  His eyes grew wide as plates when he counted the money. Then he nodded and promised me he’d do whatever I needed him to do. I told him that when the plane was in the air to take the money and the jeep he’d loaned me and keep driving until daylight because if he didn’t, the guys I’d gone after would be going after him.

  I saw two sets of headlights now. They looked to be a couple of minutes behind me, maybe less.

  I pulled the jeep up to the plane, untied the Rat, dragged him out of the backseat.

  “Him?” the kid said. “It was him you were after?” He crossed himself. Twice.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “He killed two of my uncles,” the kid said. “In the war. Can’t you just kill him here and let me watch?”

  “Not my brand,” I said. “Sorry.”

  Brand.

  Another of Zach’s expressions.

  The Rat started to wake up. Must be losing my touch, I thought. Usually the claw was good for a few hours. This time I just slapped him hard, twice, and back out he went.

  Headlights from the first jeep appeared at the far end of the runway as I got behind
the controls and started taxiing away from them. Soon enough the other jeep came barreling behind.

  It was then, in the lights of the Hawker, that I saw a figure walking onto the runway. A man. He wasn’t trying to stop me, wasn’t carrying a weapon. Wasn’t doing anything except standing in the lights, like all he wanted was for me to see him, hair as white as the falling snow showing underneath the old cap he wore down low over his eyes.

  What are you doing here? I wondered.

  You’re supposed to be on the other side of the world.

  Not here.

  I didn’t have time to find out. The plane was already bumping down the runway, shimmying on the ice and snow. And we were airborne, the Rat and me, through the first level of clouds.

  Gone.

  I tried to focus on flying the plane, getting above the weather, flying until I had to refuel, as I knew I’d have to, between here and London.

  But in my mind I kept seeing him on the runway, just standing there.

  And that was the problem.

  It was never what you thought, never who you thought.

  I wanted to feel the rush you felt after you’d won, that feeling the great guys in sports told you they never got tired of. I should have felt great, really, bringing down the Rat, delivering him to people who’d been chasing him a lot longer than I had.

  So why did I feel as if I were the one being chased? Even up here, all alone in the night sky?

  2

  ZACH Harriman needed to get home.

  Not take his time crossing Central Park the way he usually did. Not stop at his favorite bench and read a book the way he sometimes did. Not try to kill a little more time before his dad came home.

  Now.

  He hadn’t slept much the night before. He’d been feeling anxious. He always got this way before his dad came home from one of his “business trips.”