On TV Somewhere

Metal handcuffs were ratcheted onto my bare wrists in front of me, a spectacle that both intrigued the people in the cafe and somehow amused me to no end. As I was walked outside the place and lead down the street to where I assumed there was a car waiting, Pratt was saying something aloud to me but it wasn't registering. The hilarity of being cuffed hands-in-front and the absurdity of being taken into custody in Austria for a murder I didn't commit two years ago was monopolizing the attention capacity of my brain.

It was all very inconvenient.

It was Thursday night, my flight home left early Friday, my mom was supposed to get home late Saturday or early Sunday. If this loony Interpol guy wants to keep me for the 24 hours he's allowed to, that would royally screw up my plans. Not to mention, if this guy is touched in the head enough to decide that I was a fifteen year old super assassin based on a blurry photo and a glance at me from across the street, maybe he could find some "evidence" to connect me to the death of Princess Diana or the crash of the Hindenburg. His hand around my arm, I was still walking down the street lined on both sides with cars. The other guy Pratt was with seemed to have disappeared. Pratt was still talking, probably going on about having captured his mega super secret killer man, but I wasn't listening. I was too busy thinking.

We turned down an unlit side street and eventually stopped at a small black car, a model that I didn't recognize. Pratt pulled a back door open and kind of slid me into the backseat and slammed the door shut. The car wasn't meant to be used for police work, or at least prisoner transport. The front seat was open to the back seat. Stupid.

I couldn't take my chances with being "brought in" again. The thought of having my name, face, and fingerprints listed in Interpol databases seemed a bit disgusting at the time, and I had a plane to catch. No time for any of this garbage.

Now I just have to figure out how to get out of this without driving any cars through any people.

Pratt got into the driver's seat and turned to look out side window as the second guy, Markus approached the vehicle and got into the passenger seat. I guess he didn't feel safe riding alone with magical underage ninja hitmen . I suppose I wouldn't either. The two men spoke to each other in German for a second, then Pratt started the engine. I toyed with the handcuffs on my wrists for a second. I thought of the events of the past few days, the fight on Thursday, the Principal's office on Friday, the shooting and pepper spray on Satuday, the FBI on Sunday, new cars and Chinese food on Monday, Quantico and email hacking on Tuesday, planes and hotels on Wednesday, naked principals and Interpol agents on Thursday. It was all beginning to blur together, predicament to predicament, no explanation for anything. I wanted this all to just go away, I wanted to be a regular teenager again; a guy who doesn't know the names of any FBI or Interpol agents and doesn't have a gun in his bedroom closet.

I was beginning to dislike cars; you feel so vulnerable in them. Someone could just walk up and blast you with pepper spray through the window, and all you can do is sit there. I thought of Amy sitting next to me for all that, me telling her about "up" and "down"; "up" meant to turn away and cover her face, in case the guy...Dingan used the pepper spray. "Down", that was for if he drew the gun and started shooting. She was supposed to drop the seat recline lever and drop backwards. That would have been bad, if he'd drawn the gun and not the pepper spray. I leaned sideways to look at the driver's seat in front of me, between the seat and the door. There was a long plastic lever, just like on my old car. Looking around, the car seemed older. I'd bet the seat reclined wildly in both directions just like my Civic's.

That gave me an idea.

Pratt pulled the car into reverse and slowly began to back out from the alleyway and waited for an opening to back onto the street. I turned my foot sideways and carefully slid it in the narrow space between his seat and the door. It was tight, and something was poking into my leg, but I could feel the plastic lever with the tip of my shoe. Markus glanced back at me, then looked away. I took in a long, deep breath.

I pushed my foot upward, but it slid off of the seat lever and kicked part of the door, sounding a short thud. Both men suddenly looked to the left and Pratt said something quickly in German. I brought my foot back down and kicked upwards again, not having to worry about stealth this time. I felt the resistance of the lever as I brought it nearly straight upwards. I felt the back of the seat in front of me lose tension and slip backwards, and I brought my right leg up and slammed the seat-back forward as hard as I could with my foot. Pratt's torso heaved forward with the force of the seat folding, and I heard his face smash into the steering wheel. His foot must have slipped from the brake, because the car began to creep backwards into the traffic of the main road. Markus, in the passenger seat, screamed something and turned back toward me, reaching his left arm into his jacket. I pulled my left leg free from between the seat and door, feeling something tear my pants leg, and pushed myself backwards enough for clearance enough to bring my left leg around in one short arc to connect with Markus' neck and bring it, and his head, into the window behind him. He stopped moving.

The car, however, didn't.

The inside door handles didn't work, probably disabled for "safety". The engine was idling, the transmission in reverse, the car was still creeping into the perpendicular street the car had pulled off of. Cars were honking and swerving to avoid us. I was trapped in the back seat, watching headlights through the window as they drew closer and quicker, praying they would turn away quickly enough. My left ankle started to sting dully, it would probably bruise and swell before morning. Why was I thinking about that? I tried crawling into the front seat to open those doors but it was too cramped and they were blocked by two disabled Interpol agents.

I sank back into the rear seat as the car continued its slow reversed crawl. More honking, more screeching brakes, more near-misses. I had to get out of this stupid little foreign car.

Well, I suppose it wasn't foreign to these people. Why was I thinking about that?

I tried hitting the window nearest me with my fists, then tried clanking the handcuffs against them, but that just dug them into my skin. I laid back across the bench seat and tried kicking at the window to no effect. I adjusted my position, put my back against the opposite door and pressed against it to counterbalance my kicks against the glass. I used both feet, felt a heat in my left ankle with each impact. Two more times I kicked both feet against the glass, the second time I felt it give away slightly. One last time I heaved all my strength through my feet and slammed them through the window. The glass broke into thousands of tiny fragments adhered to a sheet of clear plastic and folded forward slightly. Safety glass. I spun on my knees and used my elbows to push the glass and plastic away from the window frame. I reached my arms out and felt for the outside door handle, felt it, and pulled at it but accomplished nothing. The door must have been locked too. Rather than try to deal with that, I just used the handle to pull myself head-first through the rather small window. When my chest was out, I spun around and pushed against the roof of the car to drag myself out the rest of the way.

The car had moved through the two lanes on one side and was now into the opposing lanes. I cleared the window and fell flatly onto the street as cars were now heading straight for me, all honking and swerving much later than I would have appreciated. I pushed myself up to my feet, both hands pressing against pieces of glass scattered on the street. I turned and ran away from the street, passing the car I'd just escaped from as it gently brought itself to a stop by backing into a car parked against the sidewalk. I heard glass breaking behind me as I awkwardly ran down the sidewalk in the direction of my hotel, slightly limping to keep weight off my left ankle and my arms swinging weirdly bound together. It was probably around 5PM, traffic was getting heavy as people got off work and the sidewalks filled with pedestrians. I had to cut through a lot of people as I ran against the foot traffic to get away. I tried to hide my handcuffed wrists inside my jacket, when I felt something light and wiry in one of the inside jackets. I stuck a hand in the pocket to see what it was, and pulled out the pair of reading glasses I'd bought as part of a disguise.

Still limp-running, I gleefully bent one of the sides of the frame and tore it from the rims and dropped the rest on the street. Left with only a thin metal strip bent at one end to curve around the ear, I stuck the broken end into the keyhole of the cuff on my left wrist with my right hand and bent it sharply to the left, turned it around, then bent it to the right. This made the frame into kind of Z-shape at the end, which I stuck back into the keyhole and fiddled around, still running, until the ratchet of the cuffs came free. The cuff wouldn't come off, but it could get tighter. I spun the strip of metal around and fiddled in the opposite direction for a few seconds until the cuff came loose and slid off of my hand. I did the same thing with other cuff, deciding I must have seen this on TV somewhere, and dropped the cuffs onto the sidewalk once the other cuff came free.

Behind me, I heard a squeal of tires and a familiar slam of metal against metal and sheets of glass turning into a dancing rain of fragments against pavement. I stopped and turned around. I couldn't see the car anymore, but assumed someone had finally crashed into it. I hoped to myself that I hadn't just killed two more people. Presuming I didn't, I still needed to get back to my hotel and collect my things as fast as possible.

I packed my clothes together quickly and threw them into my small suitcase, and shut off my laptop and slid it into my backpack. I quickly circled the room that had been my home for the last twenty-four hours and made sure I had everything, then used the menu on the TV to check out, and was outside the building within two minutes. Pratt knew where I was staying, he knew my name, and he knew about my travel plans. I had to get to the airport and get outside of the country before he recovered enough to start hunting for me again. I realized that if he'd previously just assumed I was some kind of killer, I'd just confirmed that for him. I hadn't killed him, though. At least, I really hoped I hadn't.

I got a cab and went to the airport.

My flight wasn't for more than twelve hours, but I didn't feel like sticking around that long. I'd assaulted two officers, I gathered. If Pratt didn't have any concrete reason to hold me before, he at least had assault to get me on. For that, he could get the actual police on me. My passport would be flagged. I'd be a wanted fugitive. Why, oh why, did I not think about things before I started hurting people?

I was dropped off at the departures terminal of the Vienna airport and stood on the curb, checking out all angles. It was too soon for a search to be organized, but I felt like being cautious. If I hurried, I might be able to get on a plane before the wrong people knew my name. This could follow me back home, I realized. Interpol and the US Government worked together all the time I'd heard. I started to hope Pratt was dead.

I went into the airport and found an ATM, used it to withdraw a thousand Euros, not knowing or caring how much that was in dollars. I'd need one heck of a story to justify a kid my age paying cash for a flight to America. I also needed to not be me.

There was a gift store before the security checkpoint. I went there and looked at postcards until I heard someone speaking English. Behind me, looking at shot glasses with "Austria" etched on them, were two Americans. One was about my age, maybe older; the other was in his twenties. They were joking about some stupid thing having to do with drinking. The one closest to my age was wearing an orange and blue backpack, and his blue US passport was tucked neatly in a pocket on the side. I stepped around them to get a look at his face, his hair was shorter than me, and he was a bit pudgier than me, but he was close enough. I stepped back around, bumped into his backpack, and walked away without saying anything. I heard him call me an asshole under his breath as I walked away.

In the bathroom, I looked at Ryan Trillan's passport and compared it to my own. He was eighteen, according to his birthday, and was from North Carolina. His photograph wasn't exactly a striking resemblance to mine, but to someone who looked at thousands of passports per day it might just work. Flipping through the Visa pages in the back, it looked like he'd been to Germany, Switzerland, and France, and had just arrived in Vienna. It'd probably be over an hour until he'd need his passport again and find it missing.

I went back to the ticketing area and paid cash for a flight leaving in two hours for Reagan airport in D.C., not Dulles which I'd come from. I checked my bag as Ryan Trillan, passed through security as Ryan Trillan, sat around the gate as Ryan Trillan, and boarded the plane as Ryan Trillan. I took two of the sleeping pills I'd bought from a store as Ryan Trillan, and slept for most of the flight to Reagan. I went through US customs as Ryan Trillan, turned the rest of my Euros into the money I'd grown up with, and took a cab from Reagan to Dulles to retrieve my car.

It was Friday afternoon, by my best guess and according to the clock on my car's radio, when I got to my house and went straight to my bathroom and fell asleep in the shower.