The Eagle's Quill

by Sarah L. Thomson

  Also by Sarah L. Thomson

  Secrets of the Seven: The Eureka Key

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Postscript

  Washington

  May 1, 1804

  To my dear and trusted friend Josiah Hodge, greetings.

  My thoughts and hopes will travel westward with you, Captain Lewis, Lieutenant Clark, and the other members of the Corps of Discovery. How I wish I might accompany you, to discover the length and breadth of our land, to encounter tribes unknown to us, and to come face-to-face at last with the distant and mighty Pacific. The trials and difficulties of life here in the President’s House seem petty and unimportant compared with the quest that you and your companions are undertaking.

  And you, my friend, bear a responsibility that no other member of the expedition can share. With this letter, I entrust the Eagle’s Quill to your care. The Quill penned the Declaration that gave our nation its birth; it will now help to protect that nation from enemies within and without. You know that our enemies are many, some even in our own midst.

  Keep the Quill safe at all times. When you reach your destination, hide it in a most secret and protected location known only to yourself. Reveal its existence to no one except, as your life nears its end, to one of your own family whom you can trust to carry on the charge. I pray, as do all the Founders, that we will never be called upon to use the secret the Quill protects. But that is for the ages to decide.

  Farewell, my friend. In this life, we shall not meet again. But our shared duty to our newborn country will keep our hearts and minds close for as long as our lives last.

  With most sincere esteem and regard,

  Thomas Jefferson

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sam took another bite of his Snickers bar and chewed slowly, unable to take his eyes from the view outside the helicopter window.

  For the past few hours, he’d been watching the flat, dry, dusty landscape of Nevada sort of crumple and heave itself upward, first into gentle green hills, then into taller slopes. After a stop to refuel, they had finally reached Montana, where towering peaks stabbed up through pine forests into a sky that was so blue it practically glowed.

  Sam had never seen mountains this big before. This steep. This . . . this . . . mountainy. The sheer size of it all was making his brain reel. He could almost hear a soundtrack playing in the distance: “O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain. For purple mountain majesties . . .”

  And to make things even better, nobody was trying to kill him or any of his friends. Right this minute, anyway. Lately Sam had learned not to take that kind of thing for granted.

  The person sitting next to Sam poked him with a finger. Sam turned to glance at Martina—Marty—Wright. Her eyes were lit up with excitement behind her glasses, and her black hair, chopped off at the level of her chin in a line so straight you could use it for a ruler, swung beneath her headset. Under a fleece jacket she wore a purple T-shirt that said THE PAST, THE PRESENT, AND THE FUTURE WALKED INTO A BAR. IT WAS TENSE.

  “Did you know that Glacier National Park was the tenth national park to be established?” Marty asked. She was speaking into the headset; Sam wore a similar one. The noise from the helicopter rotors was so loud that without the headsets on you couldn’t hear a word anybody said.

  “Nope,” Sam said. He didn’t add that he didn’t care much either. Marty knew a lot of stuff, and she liked to share it. Sometimes it could be irritating, but there had been times in the past few days when the things Marty knew had saved Sam’s life.

  Still, that didn’t mean he had to listen to her twenty-four/seven, did it?

  “And did you know—” she started to say.

  “So, listen,” he interrupted her. “What do you think we’re going to be looking for when we land? Got any ideas about what our old pal Ben Franklin would have wanted us to find in Montana?”

  “Do tell us some more about Glacier National Park, Ms. Wright,” cut in a cool voice, one that belonged to Evangeline Temple. She was seated across from Marty, and when Sam glanced at her, she skewered him with her gaze and nodded toward the helicopter pilot. Obviously she wanted Sam to stop talking into his headset when the guy could hear.

  “Well, it has one of the largest remaining grizzly bear populations in the lower forty-eight states,” Marty said with enthusiasm. “Did you know that some scientists consider polar bears to be a subspecies of grizzly bears? And how about this . . .”

  Sam scratched behind his left ear, and while his hand was up there, pressed the button that turned his headset from on to off. Marty’s voice went silent, although her mouth kept moving. Sam smiled and nodded, wide-eyed and eager, which seemed to make Marty happy. She kept on moving her mouth as Sam turned his face back to the window.

  This time, however, he focused his gaze not on the landscape whizzing past, but on the faint reflection he could see of Evangeline and the person next to her.

  Tall and slim, her dark hair streaked with white and very smooth under her headset, Evangeline seemed to be listening to Marty, but it was hard to tell. For all Sam knew, she’d switched off her headset just as he had, and she was busy daydreaming about Betsy Ross singing a karaoke version of “Yankee Doodle” with some steel drums for backup.

  Next to her, Theo—Theodore Washington—slouched in a seat that looked too small for him. But everything looked too small for Theo. He made the whole helicopter seem like something from a kid’s G.I. Joe collection.

  Theo was staring out of the window just as Sam had been, without a word to say. That wasn’t unusual. Sam had known Theo only a few days, and the one thing he knew for sure about the big guy was that Theo didn’t speak up unless it was to say something that mattered.

  As Sam watched, Theo frowned, and his fingers began to tap out a restless rhythm on the armrest of his seat. And for some reason that Sam couldn’t quite put his finger on, Theo didn’t look like a guy who was staying quiet because he didn’t have anything to say. Instead he looked like a guy who had plenty to say but wasn’t saying any of it.

  Weird. But then everything had been weird for days now, when it hadn’t been terrifying, astonishing, or just plain impossible to believe.

  And life didn’t show signs of getting back to normal anytime soon.

  Sam kept watching the two faces, Evangeline’s pale ivory and Theo’s dark brown, both superimposed on a rushing landscape of conifers and rocky peaks and cloud-swept sky. He really wished he knew a bit more about the things Theo wasn’t saying. Evangeline too. The pair of them had not always been exactly up front about what they knew and what they were planning.

  In fact, there were times when they had straight-out lied.

  Evangeline had pretended to be running a puzzle contest, the kind of thing Sam loved to enter. The American Dream contest. Sam had been so excited when he’d gotten that letter in the silver envelope, the one that said he’d won. His prize? The trip of a lifetime.

  Well, Evangeline sure hadn’t lied about that part.

  What she hadn’t told him—not at first, anyway—was that this trip of a lifetime would involve a crazy trek across the entire country, trying to find seven artifacts hidden in seven secret locations. Those artifacts were the key to finding some bizarre super-weapon from way back in Revolutionary War times, something Ben Franklin himself had invented. That’s what Evangeline claimed, anyway.

 
Sam dug around in his pockets and fished out a crumpled receipt and a chewed-up ballpoint pen. He smoothed the receipt on his knee and wrote, Any idea what kind of weapon Ben F. would dream up? Death ray? Nuclear bomb? Photon torpedo?

  He passed the note to Marty. She looked down at it and frowned, shook her head, snatched the pen from his hand, and wrote until she ran out of receipt.

  She handed the note back. Really, Sam? Nobody in Revolutionary Days even knew what an atom was. How could Ben Franklin come up with—

  Marty found a little notebook in the inside pocket of her jacket. She flipped it open and finished what she had been writing.

  —a nuclear weapon?

  Sam took the notebook from her and wrote. So no bomb. What else could it be? Ideas?

  Insufficient data, Marty wrote back. For now we have to concentrate on finding the next artifact.

  Sam opened Marty’s notebook to a new page. Quickly, he drew a sketch of the picture that had sent them to Montana—a mountain, a goat, a black foot, and a guy with a flat head. It had been Marty who had figured out what the images meant; she was nearly as good at puzzles as Sam was. Nearly.

  The mountain and the goat together meant the Rockies, and the body parts stood for the Blackfoot and the Flathead, Native American tribes who lived near Glacier National Park. If Marty was right, and if they were very, very lucky, they should be able to find their second artifact somewhere inside that park.

  The things had been hidden—way too well, as far as Sam was concerned—by a secret society called the Founders, descendants of the Founding Fathers themselves. There were two of them right here in this helicopter—Evangeline, a descendant of Benjamin Franklin, and Theo, the several-times great-nephew of George Washington.

  The Founders had stashed the artifacts, and then they’d filled their hiding places with puzzles and traps, making sure that only the right people would get their hands on stuff like the key that Benjamin Franklin had flown from his famous kite. The key that, yesterday, Sam had actually held in his hand.

  And Evangeline and Theo had not mentioned any of this. Not right away, at least. Sure, they’d come clean now—after everything that had happened in Death Valley, where Sam and Marty and Theo had fallen down flooded mine shafts and solved deadly underground puzzles and nearly been electrocuted—Marty had actually been electrocuted!—and escaped scary guys with guns.

  But did that mean, Sam wondered, that Evangeline and Theo had told him and Marty about everything? Or did those two have more surprises in store?

  Sam shook his head, shoved the notebook back at Marty, lifted the last of his Snickers bar to his mouth, and felt his teeth close on paper. He’d eaten the whole thing, barely tasting it. What a waste. He licked a smear of chocolate off the wrapper just as the helicopter tilted, and his stomach squeezed itself up against the back of his throat. The ground outside his window swooped closer. They were coming in for a landing.

  Marty put the notebook back in her pocket, and then she reached toward Sam’s head and pressed his headset’s on button. “So, like I was saying”—she zapped a pointed look in his direction—“Lewis and Clark wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without Sacagawea. And all she gets is one dinky little dollar coin that won’t even go in most vending machines. Totally unfair. And—”

  “We’ll be hitting the ground in Whitefish in about ten minutes or so,” crackled the pilot’s voice, cutting off Marty midsentence. He’d probably figured out that waiting for Marty to be done talking was like waiting for the sun to be done shining. It would happen eventually, but could you really hold out for several billion years?

  Sam listened to Marty’s fifty most fascinating facts about the Lewis and Clark Expedition while the helicopter got lower and lower, finally touching down on a landing strip. Sam was the first one out the door.

  It wasn’t much of an airport, he thought as he jumped down to the tarmac. A couple of little planes and choppers like theirs were scattered here and there, and one low building was in the distance. He drew in a deep breath of the fresh, cool air and shivered a little. Quite a difference from the blazing heat of Death Valley, where he had woken up this morning.

  But it wasn’t just the chill in the breeze that made that little hint of uneasiness creep up Sam’s spine. One of the many things that Evangeline and Theo had failed to mention early on was that the four of them weren’t the only ones trying to get their hands on the Founders’ artifacts. They had competition in this race. The other team was headed up by a scary guy named Flintlock, who worked for a man called Gideon Arnold.

  Sam remembered Arnold’s pale, almost colorless eyes, and the icy way they had looked at Sam and his friends over the barrel of a gun. The guy knew how to hold a grudge, that was for sure. He was still furious about what had happened to his who-knew-how-many-times-great-grandfather, Benedict Arnold himself. America’s most infamous traitor. And, more important, Gideon Arnold was ready to kill anybody who got between him and the Founders’ artifacts.

  Could Arnold be here right now? Watching them? Sam brooded about that while the four of them hauled their suitcases through the airport and Evangeline waved a hand at a taxi waiting by the curb. Could some of Arnold’s spies be hanging around in baggage claim? Could the taxi driver be in Arnold’s pay? It wasn’t impossible. One thing Sam had learned on his little jaunt through Death Valley was not to ever, under any circumstances, underestimate Gideon Arnold.

  The taxi swept them along a highway and into the little town of Whitefish. They rolled over a bridge with a shallow river flowing underneath and piled out of the cab when their driver announced that they had made it downtown.

  It didn’t look like much of a downtown to Sam. No skyscrapers, maybe two traffic lights, about a dozen wooden storefronts lining either side of the street. One sign declared that its building was the WILD, WILDER, WILDEST WEST SALOON!!! With three exclamation marks. Sam counted them. Next door was a store with a wide window full of ten-gallon hats and intricately tooled cowboy boots.

  Evangeline paid the cabbie (who didn’t seem to be an agent of Gideon Arnold’s after all) and asked him where they could find a good outdoor supply store. “We will need to do some shopping,” she said as the driver took off. She pointed up the street. Marty headed in that direction, in front of Sam. Evangeline and Theo trailed behind.

  “Just look at those mountains,” Marty gushed, pointing to the view at the end of the street. She tipped her face up to appreciate the snow-covered slabs of rock, glowing in the amber light of early afternoon. “Quite a change from the desert, right, Sam? Sam?”

  “Uh-huh,” Sam grunted. Marty was staring around like a tourist, and Evangeline and Theo were muttering together, so it looked like it was up to Sam to keep an eye out for the bad guys. Trouble was, he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. It wasn’t like Arnold’s employees wore little name tags announcing, “Hi! My name is Bob, and I work for a homicidal maniac!”

  Anyway, every other person in this little town seemed somehow out of place to Sam’s eyes. It was because most of the people walking by were tourists, he realized. They wore hiking boots and fleece jackets and multipocketed fishermen’s vests, and they were consulting maps or guidebooks or looking around like Marty, marveling at the scenery.

  Sam followed Marty down the sidewalk, passing a drugstore, a gallery full of Native American artifacts, places advertising helicopter tours and white-water rafting, and a bakery selling cinnamon buns that smelled so good Sam nearly forgot he was supposed to be watching out for sinister henchmen.

  “We have to—” Sam heard Theo say from behind him, but he didn’t finish the sentence.

  “We have to go where the clues take us,” Evangeline answered, her low voice full of meaning. “No matter how hard it is.”

  Bang!

  Without a second thought, Sam threw himself at Marty, dragging her down behind a car parked by the curb. Heart pounding, he craned his neck, trying to see around a muddy tire to where the gunshots were coming from.

/>   “Sam! Would you get off me now?” Marty said from underneath him. “Ow!”

  “Mr. Solomon?” Evangeline’s startled voice came from above.

  Sam lifted his head. Theo gave him a funny look. Everybody seemed to be giving him funny looks. Tourists had stopped to stare and a little kid in a stroller was giggling madly.

  Bang!

  Somebody on the far side of the street was laughing—a guy right in front of the Wild, Wilder, Wildest West Saloon, decked out in a cowboy suit complete with a bright-blue hat and boots the size of Texas.

  “Sorry I startled you there, pardner!” the guy called out, letting off another burst of explosions from his cap pistol. “Show starts in ten minutes, folks! Don’t be late, it’ll be great! Right here in the wildest saloon this side of the Mississippi!”

  Kids around him shouted and jumped in excitement. One boy in a black T-shirt with a pirate’s skull on the back doubled over with laughter, pointing at Sam and Marty.

  Sam felt his face heating up. He struggled to get off Marty without squashing her further. She helped by shoving him to one side and getting up herself, while the stupid fake cowboy waved and hooted and ushered a group of tourists into the saloon.

  “You’re not hurt, Ms. Wright?” Evangeline brushed a bit of sidewalk grit off Marty’s jacket while Theo, straight-faced, offered Sam a hand up.

  “I’m fine,” Marty said, settling her glasses back on her nose. “But Sam—that was a total overreaction. Do we need to get you checked out for post-traumatic stress disorder or something?”

  “Give it a rest, Marty,” Sam muttered as they kept walking down the sidewalk, with Evangeline and Theo in front this time.

  She put a hand on his arm. “Sam? Really. You’re okay, right?” she asked, too softly for the other two to hear.

  Sam gave her a sideways look. “Just a case of terminal embarrassment,” he told her, keeping his tone light, and glad that Marty had no way of guessing how painfully his heart was still hammering inside his rib cage. He sought for a way to change the subject and found one. “Where do you think we’ll find the next clue?”