Chapter 65: Hijacking the Bus
"Dr. Araide, what a coincidence—back again so soon." Xia Xi called out a greeting as the doctor stepped onto the bus.
Only when he drew near did she realize he hadn't boarded alone: trailing just behind him was a blonde foreign woman.
"Oh? So you're not on your own today, Doctor. Out on a date with your girlfriend?" Xia Xi asked.
Watching "Dr. Araide"—Vermouth, in disguise—come aboard with a bespectacled blonde at his side, Xia Xi finally understood why the scene had felt like déjà vu. This was the very bus from Akai Shuichi's first appearance.
Dr. Araide had given the Teitan Elementary students their medical checkup only a few days before, so Mitsuhiko, Genta, and Ayumi all knew him—and catching sight of what looked for all the world like a date in progress, they crowded in with curious questions.
He waved his hands in hasty denial—they had it all wrong. He and this Ms. Jodie Saintemillion had simply bumped into each other by chance. Taking the opportunity, he introduced her as an English teacher at Teitan High; the two of them were strictly colleagues.
Conan knew Ms. Jodie as well, and chimed in that she was the new English teacher for Ran and her classmates.
"Aw~ so it's not a date?" At the news that the two weren't an item, Mitsuhiko, Genta, and Ayumi deflated in a chorus of disappointed sighs.
Dr. Araide didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the sight of them.
After a few more pleasantries—and with fresh passengers streaming aboard—the group excused themselves and took the seats directly in front of Xia Xi.
Xia Xi, seated ahead of Conan and Haibara, had taken one look at Dr. Araide and remembered exactly who he was: Vermouth in disguise. And from everything she'd seen, Haibara was exquisitely sensitive to anyone from the Black Organization—never mind that the girl hadn't made a sound since boarding. Uneasy, Xia Xi turned around to check on her.
"Haibara, you okay? Did you catch the Professor's cold?" The girl had pulled up her hood and sat hunched over, head down, shivering. Vermouth's presence, Xia Xi guessed—fear had her trembling. To keep anyone from reading too much into it, she reached for the most ordinary excuse she could think of.
Even so, her mind wandered off on an ill-timed tangent: was Haibara's scientifically impossible radar a sixth sense? Did it react only to Black Organization members with codenames, or to low-level members without them as well? And what about people who simply had heavy contact with the Organization? Kaeya, for instance—what would Haibara's reaction be if she ever met Kaeya, she wondered?
"Eh? Ai caught my cold? Ah-choo! Ai-chan, are you feeling all right? Anything bothering you? Ah-choo!" At the news that little Ai might have picked up his cold, Professor Agasa twisted around in his seat to fuss over her from across the aisle.
Conan caught on at once—sickness was the perfect cover for Haibara's strange behavior. "Ah, Haibara's just a little chilly," he told the Professor and Xia Xi. "Probably coming down with a cold, but she'll be fine as long as she keeps warm."
When Dr. Araide offered to give her a quick examination, Conan scrambled for an excuse to turn him down.
By then the passengers had just about all boarded. Xia Xi noted that a man in a face mask who looked suspiciously like Akai Shuichi had brushed past her and settled into the very last row.
Come to think of it, the bus from Akai Shuichi's first appearance was the one that got hijacked—which meant the two odd men in ski suits who'd boarded after him were the hijackers of this incident.
And besides those two, there was supposed to be an accomplice among the passengers. Xia Xi had forgotten the face, but not the fact that it was a woman. Besides, a lookout would need a seat with a view of the entire bus, and only one spot offered that: the back row. Xia Xi stole a glance behind her. Well, well—exactly one woman sat back there. So that was the hijackers' mole. Something to watch from here on out.
By now the two men had each drawn a gun from their ski bags. One engaged the driver, ordering him to flip the destination sign to "Not in Service" and start circling the city; the other fired a shot into the ceiling to cow the passengers, then demanded that everyone hand over their mobile phones.
Truthfully, even staring down a bus hijacking with guns involved, Xia Xi wasn't especially tense. Just consider who was aboard: one Black Organization member, two elite FBI agents, Conan—that "little kid" who could punt a satellite right out of the sky—and herself, a Traveler who had beaten down more than one dragon.
These hijackers? Ha!
That said, there were bombs in those ski bags, and with a busload of civilians looking on, flexing anything too outrageous wasn't really an option. Xia Xi decided to play it by ear for now.
When one of the hijackers stopped in front of her, she made no move to resist—she simply took out her phone, ready to drop it into the bag he held open, exactly as instructed.
But she had only just pulled the phone out—hadn't even dropped it into the bag—when her ringtone went off.
In a flash, every gaze on the bus locked onto Xia Xi. How embarrassing. She had just resolved to keep a low profile, and not a minute later she'd made herself the center of attention. The only way out of the spotlight was speed: she killed the call, powered the phone off, and handed it straight over to the hijacker.
She'd caught the caller ID on the way down—Kaeya. She didn't think much of it. If it were truly urgent, he could message her directly through the System in his head; a plain old phone call meant it could wait. She'd ring him back once this was over.
Seeing that the hijackers said nothing about Xia Xi's little episode, the Professor and the children nearby let some of their worry go.
The hijacker moved on past her toward the back of the bus.
It was then that Xia Xi noticed: while nearly everyone else's eyes were glued to the gunmen, Dr. Araide was quietly, unobtrusively watching her. She gave no sign of having caught him, and simply filed the question away for later.
BANG!
The sudden gunshot shattered her train of thought, and Xia Xi whipped her head around, half convinced the hijackers had finally laid hands on a passenger.
What she found left her speechless: the gunman had fired at his own accomplice. To be fair, no one was hit—the bullet had buried itself in a seatback—but that did nothing to resolve her confusion.
Because the whole thing was completely unnecessary. If the goal was intimidation, the first shot had long since done the job: anyone too frightened to resist certainly wasn't going to find their courage after learning the guns were live, and anyone planning to act wasn't going to abandon the plan over a second bang.
And if the shot was meant to make it look as though the woman had nothing to do with the hijackers, it was doubly pointless. Whatever might have escaped notice before, after that little scene most everyone on the bus was bound to remember the woman who'd dared talk back to the hijackers.