Mission Hurricane

by Jenny Goebel

  Back when she and Dan had been hunting for the Clues, all Amy’d had to do was think like her grandmother, and most often, the solution would present itself. Locked box? Ancient riddle? No problem. Amy would draw inspiration and courage by imagining Grace’s presence beside her, helping her along.

  Now when she listened for Grace’s voice, all she heard was silence. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to keep her grandmother’s memory so vividly alive after all that she’d learned. But Amy did want to find the black files, even if she was afraid of what they might contain.

  “Where did you hide them, Grace?” Amy whispered as she peered around the hangar, trying to see past her memories.

  Her eyes swept across the concrete floor and landed on her grandmother’s plane. It had been draped with a tarp. “Help me uncover the Flying Lemur II?” Amy asked the boys. They stopped looking around and sprang into action, tugging the drab gray sheet off Grace’s plane.

  The Flying Lemur II was painted a cheery yellow color. Grace had commissioned someone to custom-build an exact replica of the old-fashioned original. Fancy oriental rugs that Grace had collected from her travels were spread beneath the propeller plane’s wings, and an aircraft tug was parked just in front of it. The airplane may have looked antique, but the tug—the tractorlike vehicle used to guide the plane to the runway—was cutting edge.

  While her friends ran upstairs to the loft, Amy walked the perimeter of the plane. There wasn’t much in the way of things to be rifled through. The hangar was spacious and uncluttered, with mostly plush creature comforts upstairs—a padded sofa and a kitchenette—and aviation memorabilia downstairs and hanging from the rafters. When she heard the refrigerator door creak open in the loft, Amy called out, “I’m pretty sure Grace didn’t keep the files in her freezer.”

  “What?” Hamilton answered. “Jonah ate all my Funyuns and I’m still hungry.”

  Amy was revolted. “Don’t forget to read expiration dates!” she called back.

  The files weren’t in the fridge, and Grace hadn’t kept a single filing cabinet on the premises. Amy was starting to fear that Fiske had been wrong.

  Perhaps Grace had hidden the black files back at the estate, or even somewhere else. She had houses and hiding spots tucked away around the world. Maybe Cara could find a way to hack into Grace’s bank records and see if they’d missed a safety deposit box in her name. Amy clenched her teeth in frustration. Dan was on the other side of the world staring down a tsunami, and she was on a cold trail. Still, she couldn’t resist climbing into the cockpit of the Flying Lemur II. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get another chance.

  She gripped Grace’s control wheel and placed her other hand on the throttle lever. For a minute, she let good memories wash over her—flying over rolling green fields and gazing out at endless blue skies. Amy had thought her grandmother to be the best and bravest woman in the world. She wished she still felt that way. Tears prickled against the back of her eyes. It’s like she died again, Amy thought.

  As Amy was about to hop out of the plane, something the Outcast had said came back to her. He’d been quoting Grace at the time, his image projected on the screen in Grace’s own house as he vied for control of the family. If your best instincts are your worst enemies, take your hands off the controls. Find someone else to fly the plane.

  The Outcast had twisted the meaning of Grace’s words in order to use them against the younger generation of Cahills. He’d claimed that the Cahill kids were amateurs, untried and unfit to lead. That the family should find someone else, meaning the Outcast, “to fly the plane.”

  Grace may not have been the person Amy thought she was, but she couldn’t imagine her grandmother ever thinking like that. She was always the first one to take charge of a situation, and she’d encouraged Amy and Dan to do the same—to assess their surroundings and do what needed to be done. Take your hands off the controls. Grace, what are you really saying?

  Then it hit her. She was sitting in the wrong place. Amy bolted out of the pilot’s seat and over into the copilot’s position. She felt under the seat. She looked for anything on the dashboard that didn’t fit and ran her fingers along the underside of the control panel. Sure enough, her racing fingers found their mark—a small button hidden from view.

  Amy pressed it, her expectations high. But nothing happened. She pressed it again. Still nothing. Disappointed, she shook her head and climbed out of the cockpit.

  What a waste of time.

  “Let’s leave before the Outcast realizes we’re here,” Amy called up to her friends. They started down the stairs as Amy moved toward the front of the plane. When she reached the end of the rug, it buckled beneath her.

  “Amy!” Jonah cried in surprise. “Are you okay?”

  Amy had fallen to her knees on the unstable ground. She quickly rolled to one side, then pulled back the Persian rug. Pressing the button had worked after all. It had activated a hidden door. Amy gaped through the open hole at a staircase plunging into darkness.

  * * *

  Alek Spasky stewed while he sat hidden by a thicket in the woods just beyond Grace Cahill’s hangar. He regretted not hitting at least one of the children with his emei piercer when he’d had the chance.

  If Alek had maimed just one of them before they’d entered the hangar, it would’ve made the wait far more bearable. Granted, the Outcast had ordered him to hold off until the children led him to the files. But the Outcast wouldn’t begrudge Alek a little fun in the meantime, would he?

  As it was, he was nothing more than an overpaid babysitter. The thought galled him. He was tired of lurking in the shadows, when today was supposed to be his day to rise. Alek’s right hand, his spear-hurling hand, twitched.

  Watching a video feed from inside the hangar, he noticed that Amy had climbed into the cockpit of the plane. Hate and loathing ate at Alek like acid. He longed to make her suffer.

  The Cahill girl took bold steps with all the self-assurance of an older sister. Alek’s own sister, Irina, had operated the same way. He’d spent most of his life trying to impress her. Trying to prove himself worthy of her love and attention.

  Alek had been following in Irina’s footsteps when he joined the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopanosti—the machine that was the KGB. But Irina had treated him with disinterest as she outshone him in every manner and rose to the top of the secret spy agency. She’d been cool and aloof, bestowing him with nothing more than an indifferent smile when he finally attained the highest rank alongside her.

  Irina had been ice.

  She’d never cared for him, never shown him any softness. And any hint of feeling in her had died with her son. But perhaps her coolness was a blessing in disguise. Her rejection finally caused Alek, too, to turn away from his family. And when he did, he found something extraordinary. Until the hubris of the Cahill family took it away from him.

  And for what?

  Then Irina went and threw her life away, too. One moment of tenderness, and it was wasted on the Cahill children.

  They had cost him too much.

  Today Amy and Dan would atone for two lives cut short, for acts of kindness imparted on the undeserving. They would pay him back with blood.

  The media would speculate on the origin of the nuke in the Netherlands and which terrorist group was responsible for its detonation. True, it had been the most brilliant, tinkering Ekaterina minds that had made the bomb operational once again, but without Alek none of it would have been possible.

  Alek would make sure the entire world knew that he was responsible. He would contact the media himself. He’d need his own alias, of course. How about “the Steel Rod Assassin”? No, that was ridiculous. It was far too long and comic-book-sounding. Unlike “the Outcast,” which was all at once threatening and concise. Alek’s own father had been called “the Scalpel.” Could his alias be “Son of the Scalpel”? No, that also was horrendously long.

  Alek would have to give it more thought. He’d meditate on it after he dealt with
the children. Glancing again at the video surveillance, he noticed Amy clambering back out of the cockpit. Boring, Alek thought. Then she stumbled and pulled back the rug. When he saw the hole that had opened up in the floor, he smiled.

  And so it begins.

  Attleboro, Massachusetts

  The worst traps in life are set by the ones we love.

  Amy and her friends cautiously descended the steps leading into Grace’s underground bunker. The stairwell was narrow and the darkness enveloping as they dropped deeper into the earth. “Be careful,” she warned Hamilton and Jonah. “I don’t think this clue is one Grace ever intended us to find.”

  “Would now be an okay time to mention that your grandmother always freaked me out?” Hamilton said.

  “Me too,” Jonah confessed. “Grace was wicked smart, but you never knew where you stood with her. One day she could be lavishing you with compliments, and the next she’d be serving your head on a platter to the rest of the Cahills.”

  Amy bristled and goose bumps rose on her skin. She sucked in cool air only to find that it was stale and musky, like that of an ancient tomb. How had her perception of Grace been so far off the mark? Had everyone been able to see what she’d apparently missed?

  Once her foot connected with the bottom step, Amy heard a loud click and the door above them quickly glided shut. Completely blinded by the darkness, Amy swallowed the urge to scream.

  Instead, she charged back up the steps and frantically felt for a button or a release lever for the door. There wasn’t one—much like the outside had been, the inside of the door was entirely smooth—a solid, sliding panel.

  They were trapped.

  A wave of claustrophobia washed over Amy, but she heard a buzz and a light flickered on.

  “Found a switch,” Ham reported as Amy made her way back to the bottom landing. She blinked her eyes, adjusting to the fluorescent overhead lights.

  “Thanks, Ham.” Now that the corridor was illuminated, Amy once again took the lead.

  A series of framed photographs hung on the thick concrete walls. Starting with the Wright brothers’ first flight, it seemed to be a time line of aviation. Each photograph was hung in precise alignment except for a black-and-white photo of a jet fighter. The jet fighter was hanging slightly askew.

  Jonah reached out to straighten it, and Amy’s arm instinctively shot up. She caught Jonah’s hand a millisecond before it landed on the frame. “Don’t touch it,” she said. Her voice sounded cutting even to her own ears.

  “Why not?” Jonah asked.

  “Something doesn’t feel right. Give me a minute to think.”

  “A lot doesn’t feel right to me,” Hamilton muttered.

  Jonah dropped his hand to his side and Hamilton meandered farther down the corridor. The hallway ended in a sharp turn. Not one of them could see what was beyond the corner.

  Amy stared at the photo. A faded memory was being pieced together. Grace had swatted her arm away from a crooked frame once. “Don’t ever do that,” Grace had warned. Then she’d taken Amy to an air museum and shown her a plane just like the one in the photo. It was a Messerschmitt—Me 262—the most common fighter jet used by the Germans in World War II.

  “It’s a trap,” she told Jonah. She repeated the story her grandmother had told her. “During World War II, German engineers rigged crooked picture bombs to target high-ranking officials. They hollowed out walls and set explosives behind pictures in abandoned buildings. The pictures were left crooked, and then when Allied forces set up shop in the buildings and someone straightened the frames, it tripped the bomb and everyone nearby was killed.”

  “Whoa. So you’re saying that Grace’s bunker is, like, booby-trapped—that we need to watch out for trip wires and stuff like that?” Jonah shook his head. “That’s trippin’, yo, in more ways than one.”

  “Maybe not trip wires exactly, but motion—”

  Just then, an alarm sounded and a faint, sweet odor filled the air.

  Hamilton came barreling back around the corner. “Oh man, I activated some—” His head slumped forward and his body followed. He hit the floor. Hard.

  “Ham!” Jonah sprang ahead, but Amy yanked him back, her arm nearly wrenched out of its socket.

  “We can’t!” Holding her breath, she pulled her shirt collar over her mouth and nose and indicated for Jonah to do the same. They ducked close to the ground, watching Ham’s limp body for signs of life. He never so much as twitched.

  Be okay. Be okay. He has to be okay.

  The wait was agonizing, but the saccharine scent eventually left the air. They rushed to check on him.

  “Do you think he’s all right?” Jonah asked worriedly.

  Amy lifted Ham’s head and pressed her fingers to the carotid artery just left of his windpipe. “I don’t know,” she said, but she picked up a slow beat and some of the tension left her shoulders. “But at least he still has a pulse.” Perhaps Grace wanted to merely incapacitate intruders—not kill them. The realization might have been reassuring if it wasn’t overshadowed by one clear fact: Hamilton was hurt because he’d been caught in one of Grace’s snares.

  Jonah breathed a heavy sigh of relief. “What are we going to do with him?”

  Amy glanced around. “I think we have to leave him here. He’s too heavy to take with us.” After gently laying her friend’s head back on the cement, she stood up. Every nerve ending in her body was on high alert as she and Jonah inched around the corner Hamilton had cleared.

  The hallway opened up into a larger room entirely crisscrossed with laser beams. At the back of the room, a sizeable black safe was embedded in the concrete wall.

  Jonah turned his head to look at Amy, his eyes bulging. “Are you kidding me?” he said. “There’s gotta be some serious dirt in those files.”

  “There must be a way to shut the lasers off,” Amy said. “Look for a panel.”

  “Yeah, let’s just not bump any picture frames while we’re at it,” Jonah mumbled. Amy could barely hear him over the sounding alarms.

  It didn’t take long for Amy to locate a keypad on the wall. It consisted of both numbers and letters. But what if it was another trap? If she entered the wrong passcode, she and Jonah could end up in the same boat as Hamilton. Or worse.

  Full of dread, her fingers shook as she punched in the address for her grandmother’s estate. They weren’t the right keys, but at least a pendulum blade didn’t swing out from the wall. She tried the address for the hangar next, followed by Saladin’s name and his birthday. Then she did the same for herself, for Grace, and for Dan. She tried her parents’ names and their wedding anniversary.

  With the alarms pounding in her ears, it was extremely difficult to concentrate. What else could she try?

  Then she knew.

  She hit N376S, the tail number she’d just seen printed on the Flying Lemur II.

  Nothing.

  Amy shook her head, ashamed of her own stupidity. Whenever Grace retold the story of how the original Flying Lemur had crashed, she’d grumbled about the one thing that couldn’t be replicated exactly. The Flying Lemur II had to be given a unique tail number; it couldn’t legally be registered under the same one that had been painted on its predecessor.

  Amy had never personally laid eyes on Grace’s first plane, but she had noticed a photo of a bright yellow propeller plane hanging with the other framed pictures in the corridor. She blew past a bewildered Jonah, back around the corner, past Hamilton—still collapsed on the floor—then found what she was looking for near the end of the hall.

  When she returned to the keypad and punched in N237W, the ringing stopped. The laser beams shut down. The door to the safe swung wide open.

  Mount Fuji, Japan

  The vault door was ajar. The hulking form of Magnus Hansen stood hunched in front of it with his back turned to Nellie and Sammy. He was blocking their view of what lay inside.

  Before Nellie could think to question why the Tomas leader would be breaking in to his own b
ranch’s vault, he rose to his full, formidable height and swung around. He turned his ice ax on Nellie and the expression on his face was emotionless—as stone-cold as his gray-blue eyes.

  Nellie gasped, grabbed Sammy protectively, and looked frantically around for a tactical position, for a way to defend themselves from the machinelike man towering before them. Her eyes caught on the bag at Magnus’s feet. They’d interrupted him as he was pilfering items from the vault. Interestingly, the rugged tunnel carved into the side of the mountain was littered with Super Bowl rings, expensive medallions, and gold trophies. But the items poking out of Magnus’s gym bag—a fresh, fleshy leaf from an aloe plant, a human femur, a quartz crystal the size of a baseball—were not ones that your average person would expect to be secured deep inside the heart of a stronghold.

  A tingle ran up Nellie’s spine and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. She wasn’t your average person.

  Nellie took a step backward, nudging Sammy along with her. “The clues,” she said, her voice ringing with accusation. “You’re stealing Tomas clues for the Outcast, aren’t you, Magnus? It’s never been about the disasters. The disasters are just a distraction!”

  Magnus continued to stare at her blankly. Nellie knew that in his eyes, she wasn’t a threat—just a pesky fly to be dealt with when she swarmed too close. Good. She could use that to her advantage. She took another step back and kept talking.

  “The Outcast made you leader of the Tomas for this very purpose, didn’t he? So you could force an evacuation of the stronghold. The ‘punishing’ of the Cahill kids—it’s all a cover. The Outcast just wants to keep them out of the way while he steals the thirty-nine clues.” Nellie’s face grew hot. “Don’t tell me he actually plans on using the serum.”

  Still no reaction from Magnus, even though Nellie knew she’d hit on the truth. One thing didn’t fit, though, and Nellie found herself wondering out loud. “But why didn’t you have the combination to the lock on the vault? Why the ice ax?”