The Outlier #4: Zappers Read online

license plate ABL 5792. He ran the number and found it heading towards Queens, on a direct route to New York's JFK international airport. He would get there in less than fifteen minutes, given current traffic conditions. Dillon could have it intercepted before it even arrived. He could have the man picked up and arrested for practically any crime he could imagine. Dillon felt both rage and shame building up inside him simultaneously. I can do this, he told himself. I shouldn't be doing this, he replied. He sat there, willing but unable to proceed, well aware of right and wrong and how the two of them at that moment were perfectly canceling each other out.

  A familiar face flickered onto his laptop screen, and then another. He heard an old man speaking.

  “You really want this guy.” It was his grandfather, Wilkins Sharif, looking pretty sharp for an old man. His wife sat beside him, the legendary Kintara Soh. She too was smiling.

  “Consider it done,” she said.

  “I don't know what to do,” Dillon confessed, misunderstanding her.

  “You don't have to do anything,” Wilkins reassured him. “Janssen happens to be a very wanted man in Norway. He's been a bad boy. Extradition is waiting for him at Gate B-43.”

  “He thinks he's going to Brazil,” Kintara smiled.

  “It'll be a bit colder than that where he's really going,” Wilkins added.

  “But how did you know?” Dillon asked, genuinely baffled. “I didn't do anything, not yet. I only looked him up.”

  Wilkins and Kintara exchanged glances. They were a lovely old couple, both slender and graceful, growing perfectly wrinkled and gray together.

  “You're watching me,” Dillon said. “You're watching me all the time, aren't you?”

  “We do have some alerts in place,” Kintara confessed. “After all, we worry about you.”

  “We got a notification when it happened.”

  “When he zapped me? How?”

  “Your heart,” Kintara said. “It stopped beating there for a moment. That must have been scary for you. I know it was for me.”

  “You're monitoring my heart?”

  “Well, we love you, honey,” she said.

  “But ...” Dillon couldn't think of anything else to say. They had always been rather over-protective, and it was understandable. They had been the only parents he'd ever known and he was their one and only heir. Big Brother may be watching everyone, but not nearly as closely as a hovering mom and dad.