Note: The restaurant is real - or it was, at least. I think they went out of business. Anyway, it was located on the road to Hawk's Nest State Park, near Anstead, not in Fayetteville. (And if you're going to Hawk's Nest, you must, must, must pay a visit to The Mystery Hole, easily the greatest tourist trap ever created. I have been there, and it is always a blast, but I could not for the life of me work it into this fic.) The furniture is based on that of a bar one of my dad's WV friends used to own, except the chairs there were actually tree stumps. Classy.

And our final one-shot character debuts in this chapter; unlike Team Raptor, he's a good ol' Season One bad guy.

Berto had long since lost track of time. As the day wore on, the trade show filled up, with more and more people arriving every second - and they all seemed to beat an immediate path to N-Tek's proverbial door. Somewhere in between keeping track of all the merchandise orders, the occasional employment application (mostly from boasting jocks looking to join Team Steel), the endless demonstrations, the more formal conversations with prospective large-scale buyers, keeping the boasting jocks from rioting due to Josh and Kat's absence, and playing nice to the roaming media hounds, the exact hour just seemed to slip away from him.

So when Carlie stood up and said, "Where should we go to eat?" he could only blink at her and repeat, blankly, "Eat?"

"Yeah, eat." One of her eyebrows quirked up in amusement. "You know, that little meal called 'lunch'?"

He checked his watch and found that it was, indeed, late in the afternoon. But he could've sworn that he'd had a meal in there somewhere... "Lunch?"

She crossed her arms over her chest; both eyebrows were up now. "It's almost three o'clock, Berto."

"Wow." He shook his head. Jefferson's orders or not, it was time for him to get away from the trade show. Usually he didn't forget things like meals unless he was in the middle of a project. "Okay, I really need to get out of here. And I'll buy, wherever we go."

Carlie laughed and they started shutting down the booth, securing everything that might be tempted to walk away while they were gone. "An offer you might regret. There's a restaurant down the street that serves authentic West Virginian cuisine, and it is fabulous."

Berto, an international citizen if ever there was one, hadn't known there was such a thing, or that it was fabulous. What he'd seen of the eating in West Virginia seemed like standard flavorless Anglo food, with the requisite fast-food joints and terrible imitations of foreign meals on the side. Not that he'd refrained from eating. "What's that?"

"About six thousand calories per bite." She gave him a sunny smile. "Thus explaining the locals."

It was said so cheerfully, with so little hint of malice, that it took him a minute to realize she was being a bit too honest. To be honest himself, he'd noticed that a lot of the natives were rather on the large side - a far cry from the slim, trim Californians he was used to seeing. West Virginia was, in fact, the most obese state in the nation, something that alarmed him as a (sort of) medical doctor but that didn't seem to overly bother anyone else. Certainly it didn't interfere with their penchant for hosting crazy jumping-off-a-bridge festivals.

Putting aside caloric value for the moment, they made their way out of the hotel and down the street, winding in and out of the crowds. The entire town was buzzing with excitement, it seemed, and the sidewalks were full of people sightseeing and windowshopping in the strong afternoon sun. The weather forecast had been right - it was topping out at around seventy degrees, and a cool breeze blew down the street, ruffling hair and t-shirts.

Berto was surprised when Carlie grabbed his arm, but she just said, "I don't want to get separated." Still, it was a little - different, walking down a busy street arm-in-arm with a girl. Add to that the fact that he was about to buy her lunch, and it was frighteningly like a date.

The restaurant loomed up ahead, tucked in between two larger buildings - an intentionally rustic affair of wood planks in a pioneer-style building. A faux-hand-lettered sign proclaimed, in big black letters, that it was "The Ain't U Et Yet Cafe." A group of people, all beefy local men, were climbing the fake porch's steps, looking equally rustic.

"Authentic," he said, his own eyebrows raising this time.

"It's a tourist trap, but who cares? I ate here last night with Trip and Ethan. You should see the menu," she said, tugging on his arm. "Everything comes with gravy."

He opened his mouth to make some protest about his usual eating habits and how this mountaineer food drowned in disgusting slime was definitely not on the list, but then one of the men going into the restaurant caught his attention. For a moment Berto stared, startled and not believing the evidence of his own eyes. The ladron was in jail - Berto had sent him there personally. So how -?

It couldn't be. It really couldn't be. But it was.

"Hello? Berto?" Carlie snapped her fingers in front of his face, sounding genuinely concerned. "Are you okay?"

"Fine," he said, distracted. He'd been right; there were villains afoot in West Virginia. A villain, at least. The bad guy wasn't on the New River with Josh and Kat, though. Instead, contrary to all expectations, he was right in the middle of Fayetteville, wrecking Berto's lunch plans.

"What are you looking at?" She followed his line of sight, standing on her toes to do so. "Who's that?"

"A fellow spear carrier," Berto said, making sure Lance Breamer had entered the building before he started moving again. Carlie's arm disentangled from his, but he caught her hand instead, pulling her through the crowd on a fast track to the restaurant. "I'll explain. Come on."

She followed without protest until they'd climbed the porch steps and Berto came to a screeching halt, trying in vain to peer through the fake-dirty, tiny panes of glass posing as windows.

"Who's that guy?" she asked, mercifully keeping her voice down.

"Lance Breamer," he answered in the same low tone. Abruptly, with the kind of belated instinct that had doomed him to a career of watching spies, he realized that they were too conspicuous in their current location and tugged Carlie off the porch again.

The buildings on either side of the restaurant were set some distance apart. There was enough space in between for two elongated driveways - wrapping around the restaurant - that led back to a parking lot common to all three buildings. Berto headed down one of these driveways; headed up, actually, as Fayetteville, like most of the state, was built on the side of a mountain.

"Okay, Lance Breamer," Carlie said as she was summarily dragged along with him. She sounded impatient and curious all at once - more curious than anything else. "So do you owe him money or what?"

Berto owed him, but not money. He shook his head, pausing at the corner of the restaurant, where he could see the street and the parking lot both. What he wanted was a window with a good clear view of the interior, but there didn't seem to be many of those; like the front, the few windows were decoratively grimy. "He's a genius, but he's also crazy."

Carlie's already high level of curiosity climbed visibly higher; she looked at the restaurant, then back at Berto. "Wild. A mad scientist?"

"A mad engineer," Berto corrected. "He built a flying fortress, but it got turned into scrap metal after he was arrested." Uncertain as to how much he should tell, he added, "I, uh, had the 'lucky' opportunity to meet him and his plane in person."

"How so?"

He hesitated, even more uncertain about how much to tell, and settled on, "He took me hostage."

"Well, at least he had good taste." She dropped onto one of the concrete bumpers framing the parking lot spaces, frowning. "If he was arrested, what's he doing here?"

"I don't know," Berto said, trying to stay on task even as he wondered about the "good taste" remark. "But it can't be anything legal. He should be in jail. The government locked him up in Leavenworth and threw away the key."

Carlie straightened, an idea blossoming across her face beneath the baseball cap. "Oh! I bet he escaped and he's on the run. Like those nutso abortion-clinic bombers and militia guys. They all hide out in West Virginia, right?"

Berto certainly was willing to credit Lance with enough intelligence and chutzpah to mastermind, execute, and succeed in an escape from a federal penitentiary. He gave the windows one last look, then gave up and just kicked at the scrubby, brown grass that was pushing through the crumbling edge of the asphalt parking lot. "Sure."

"We should call the police," Carlie said after a few moments.

"No," he said immediately. If anything, the first distress call would go to Max - or rather, Josh - but Berto wasn't sure where his teammates were, and whether or not it would even be necessary to yank them off of their river trip. It might - might - be possible to talk the former self-crowned "King of the Sky" into some kind of peaceful surrender.

And the force of Earth's gravity might stop being nine-point-eight meters per second squared. All it would take was one cosmic realignment.

"Lance is dangerous," Berto told her, ignoring the fact that he was embarking down a road of thought and action that was not quite logical nor safe. "He could have all kinds of weapons. I can't - The cops here just aren't prepared for him."

She stood up, brushing off her hands, obviously going into a managerial mode that had been practiced many, many times on her fractious star athlete. "And the alternative is?"

He took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses before saying, "I'll go in myself and find out what he's doing."

There was silence for a long moment, broken only by the sounds drifting back from the street, and then she said, "That's the most idiotic thing I've ever heard, and considering the people I work with, buster, you can bet that's saying something."

"Carlie -"

"If he's so dangerous, then why do you think you can handle him alone?" she exclaimed, cutting him off. Behind her own glasses, her eyes were flashing anger.

He opened his mouth, then shut it again. Why indeed? He usually had Max and Kat at his back - out in front, to be more accurate. He could count on one hand the number of times he'd personally taken charge of an action situation, and he hadn't really enjoyed any of them. Field work, for him, went better as a spectator sport. "Because... I don't know. Look, I'm not going to the police, no matter what."

"Do you have to go right up to his face and confront him?" she challenged. "Can't we just... follow him around for a while?"

"We?"

"Yes," she said firmly, despite the fact that she looked pale and scared at the idea. "You and I. Call it extreme manager solidarity, but I'm not letting you do this alone."

He weighed the options. He really didn't want to go after Lance alone. But Carlie didn't have any experience with this kind of stuff, and he didn't want to jeopardize her safety. Still... how safe would she be if he left her alone? How safe would anyone in Fayetteville be if he didn't get this tied up as quickly as possible? Lance was a terrorist, had been known to use destructive force, and in two days, there were going to be over two hundred thousand potential victims lined up on a bridge like sitting ducks.

"We can go in and confront him. No," Berto said, forestalling the objection he knew was coming. The objection he would've made if Josh or Kat had proposed this idea. "It's more dangerous to sneak around behind his back. Trust me."

Of course, he had no idea what they were going to do after confronting Lance. It wasn't like Berto could wrestle the guy to the ground, or perform a daring sneak attack. He was hoping for a bolt of inspiration on that front.

Maybe habitually skipping Mass for the last few years had been a bad move.

She hesitated for a long few seconds, then finally nodded, looking troubled. "Okay. But I still don't like this."

"Would it make you feel better if I told you I'd done crazier things?"

It was a sorry excuse for a joke, and it fell rather flat because he was too unsure of his own reassurance, but she gave him a faint grin. "Yeah, actually. Let's go."

They made their way to the front of the restaurant again, attracting some looks from passers-by but not getting any real attention. The crowds were clearly at their peak and only getting worse as tourists scrambled to get their shopping done before heading home for the afternoon. Not a good time to be chasing fugitives. Carlie took his hand, and this time, he was more focused on the fact that her palm was clammy and her pulse was fast than the fact that she was touching him.

She gave him a slightly apologetic look. "I don't know whether to be scared or excited."

He suddenly remembered that there was a mandatory orientation meeting at 8:30 PM for all jumpers, which meant he had something like five hours to wrap this up and get there on behalf of Team Steel or risk the wrath of the officials. As if he needed more pressure...

Berto mustered up something approaching a grin, trying to pretend this was bothering him less than it was. "Me neither. Here goes nothing."

As they entered the restaurant, the people Lance had gone in with were exiting. Berto let go of Carlie's hand and brushed past them as they went through the swinging double doors, holding his breath and hoping that Lance was not two seconds away from bumping into him.

But Lance was nowhere to be seen.

The restaurant was dimly lit by dusty lanterns hanging from equally dusty roof beams. Fake-hillbilly artifacts lined the rough plank walls, obviously going for the Appalachian version of Planet Hollywood. Rustic-looking tables - really, nothing more than the large wooden spools that telephone lines were stored on - and rickety wooden chairs filled every available foot of floor space; they were in turn filled with people and food, and the restaurant was filled with the bustling noise of a lunchtime crowd.

None of those people, however, were Lance, no matter how many times he looked.

Berto's fear changed to something new: that Lance had spotted them and had gotten away during the time that he and Carlie were talking. He hesitated in the middle of the restaurant, Carlie beside him, trying to figure out what to do next. But for once in his life, he had no idea what that might be.