Hunted (3 page)

The guards on the ground gave one final yank, but Jonah was free. He launched himself forward, away from the window, and turned around just in time to see the grappling hook disappear over the sill.

Shouts could be heard from downstairs, and Jonah dropped his duffel bag onto the floor. He had only a few seconds before they found him.

Reaching into the bag, Jonah pulled out a pair of white slacks, a red jacket, and a black hat with a fluffy red feather sticking out of the top — the uniform of the Pantheon guards. Jonah pulled it on as fast as he could, not even stopping to remove the harness. Then he pulled the hat low over his face and descended from the tower at a run. He hoped the odd creases and bumps in his uniform wouldn’t be obvious.

He nearly barreled into a guard on the stairs. Jonah yelled in Spanish, “The man went downstairs! Come on!”

The guard didn’t even hesitate. He wheeled around, following Jonah’s instructions. Relieved, Jonah pelted after him. But as they went down, his thudding heart slowed, worry turning into dread as they entered the ground floor of the Pantheon and Jonah looked toward the old altar.

The side aisles of the Pantheon held the tombs of many famous Venezuelans, and great columns stretched overhead into arches. Several guards and at least twenty people in Venezuelan police uniforms stood throughout the vast space, and about half of those were crowded onto what used to be the altar, guarding Bolívar’s tomb. The vast marble floor stretched out before Jonah, leading up to the front of the Pantheon, where the bronze coffin of Simón Bolívar, the Liberator of Venezuela, was displayed on a white marble plinth, elevated several feet off the floor. Behind the sarcophagus, rising high above the floor, was a great white statue of Bolívar himself.

The lid of that tomb must weigh a ton
, Jonah thought desperately.
I’ll never be able to lift it by myself!

The idea came to him so fast that Jonah didn’t even think — he just yelled.

“¡Bomba, bomba! ¡Hay una bomba en el sarcófago del Libertador!”
Jonah cried. He hoped his Spanish was correct. He’d attempted to tell the guards and police that there was a bomb in Bolívar’s tomb.

Chaos erupted in the Pantheon. The police spit out rapid-fire instructions so fast that Jonah couldn’t understand them. But he saw them forming up, preparing to lift the top of the heavy stone sarcophagus off.

Jonah pushed himself into a gap on the other side of the sarcophagus, jockeying for position as Pantheon guards and police continued removing the shroud over Bolívar’s remains.

And then, there he was. Jonah gasped involuntarily, staring down at the skeleton of the most important man in Venezuela’s history. It was mostly brittle, rotting bones, but some hair still clung to the famous leader’s head. As Jonah stared at the skull, he felt as though the empty black sockets of Bolívar’s eyes were staring right back at him.

Jonah Wizard wouldn’t let himself be scared off by a dead man.

“¿Dónde está?”
he cried out, hoping to keep the police in a frenzy.
“¿Dónde está la bomba?”

Flashlights were shone into the tomb, and Jonah stared into it, looking for anything that might be a Clue. He had to find it. He
had
to, or all this would be for nothing.

His eyes flashed over the remains. There were scraps of old leather that must have been boots, the remnants of red and blue fabrics, faded and dusty. But then his eyes landed on Bolívar’s hand — or rather, a carving on the coffin, just beneath the hand. Jonah couldn’t see exactly what the symbol was. He would have to move the bones to get to it.

Jonah reached into the coffin and grasped Bolívar’s skeletal wrist. A tingle shot up Jonah’s arm and straight down his spine as his fingers touched the bones. He tried to move the arm out of the way, but the stiff old bones wouldn’t budge. Gritting his teeth, Jonah grabbed one of the fingers and pulled. The bones were dry, almost like dusty, brittle paper against Jonah’s skin, and he shuddered in horror. Then, with a loud
CRACK
, one of the fingers snapped off in Jonah’s hand.

An uproar of shouts echoed through the Pantheon. Jonah flung Bolívar’s finger bone away. Several police reached for him, but he pointed straight into the coffin and bellowed,
“¡Está aquí! ¡La bomba, la bomba!”
The officers hesitated, and that was all Jonah needed. For a split second, he had a perfect view of the symbol on the coffin — the symbol for lead. He’d found the next Clue! He could already imagine the excitement in his mother’s voice when he told her.

He leaped backward and vaulted over the altar’s railing, landing hard on the marble floor and crashing through the velvet ropes around it. Then he was running down the aisle, dodging the guards who tried to grab him and slamming through the doors into the night. His feet pounded against the pavement, legs burning, lungs gasping for air, until he reached a motorcycle parked just down the street, waiting for him. He jumped on, turned the key, and roared off into the night, the shouts of the Pantheon guards fading into the distance.

Even when he was undercover on a Cahill mission, Jonah Wizard traveled with style.

Jonah Wizard’s escape from the National Pantheon was most impressive. The watcher had to admit that her expectations had been far exceeded. Especially since she was the one who’d alerted the guards that an intruder was attempting to break into the Pantheon.

The young Wizard had surprised her by passing the test. This Janus had far more than money and an appreciation for the arts to offer the Vespers. He had outsmarted armed guards and officers of the Venezuelan police force, performing well under intense pressure.

Perhaps he would make an excellent Vesper after all.

Everywhere Hamilton Holt looked, there was nothing but white. The snow stretched across King William’s Island in every direction, endless. And he’d thought Beechey Island looked barren. That place was a paradise compared to where they were now — the middle of nowhere.

Ahead of him, his mother and father were making their way through the deep snow, their snowshoes scraping across the icy surface with every step. Ham’s own snowshoes were old, with several broken strings. Even though he was fifteen, several years older than his sisters, he was having a hard time keeping up with them. Every so often, one of them, he wasn’t sure if it was Madison or Reagan, yelled back that he was a slug, but their teasing had slowed as the day went on. Even suited up in their thick purple parkas, all of the Holts were freezing.

The cold didn’t bother Hamilton. What made the Arctic difficult to bear was how there was nothing to distract him from his thoughts. He kept seeing things flash across his mind — kids tied up in the back of a van, the blackened husk of a burned building, the murderous looks on the faces of fellow Cahills as they tried to steal Clues from one another.

The Clue hunt had changed everything. At least it had for Ham. His sisters still seemed content to follow their father, Eisenhower, around the globe, sabotaging the other Cahill teams and doing whatever was necessary to get the Clues. But Ham wasn’t so sure anymore.

“Team! Halt!” The command from his father took Hamilton by surprise. The Holts weren’t big on rest stops.

“What is it, sugar muffin?” Ham’s mother, Mary-Todd Holt, asked.

“Binoculars!” Eisenhower barked, extending his thick, gloved hand. His wife dutifully reached into her pack and produced a pair, which Eisenhower rammed against his eyes. But he’d forgotten to remove his ski glasses first, and there was a yelp of pain and a muffled curse from beneath his balaclava.

The family waited in silence as Eisenhower adjusted the binoculars and peered into the distance.

“There!” he yelled suddenly. “We’re not alone out here.”

“Who is it?” Madison demanded.

“They’ve got a tent,” said Eisenhower, “and a fire. We’ve been followed!”

Hamilton stomped forward on his snowshoes and took the binoculars from his father. Through them, he had a good view of three people, all sitting on tiny camp chairs around some sort of glowing orange device.

“It’s a heater,” he said, “not a fire.”

“They’re obviously after the Tomas clue!” Eisenhower yelled. “They followed us here so they could steal it from us.” He took the binoculars back from Ham, stared through them one more time, and then passed them back to Mary-Todd. “All right, team! Battle formation! We’re going in.”

“Going in, dear?” Mary-Todd asked.

“We must stop the enemy.” Eisenhower pulled his ski glasses back over his face.

“Dad, wait.” Hamilton was surprised that the words were coming out of his own mouth. Eisenhower was, too.

“Wait?” Eisenhower said. He leaned forward, glowering at his son. “You’re not afraid of these Cahills, are you?”

Hamilton rolled his eyes, knowing his father couldn’t see his face through the ski glasses. “They probably aren’t even Cahills, Dad. We should just keep going.”

Eisenhower drew himself up to his full height. Hamilton could see him flexing meaty fingers through his winter gloves. “No son of mine is going to act like a cowardly shrimp! Holts! Move out!”

Madison, Reagan, and Mary-Todd all fell into formation, but Hamilton’s legs refused to move. He stood there, staring down his father.

“They could be innocent backpackers,” he said. “Or scientists. Or — or explorers. You don’t know they’re Cahills.”

Eisenhower leaned forward and put his face very close to his son’s. “Of course they’re Cahills,” he snarled. “No one else would be out here! Now get moving!”

Something hot was boiling inside Hamilton, something that wouldn’t let him back down. He had done a lot of things he wasn’t proud of during the Clue hunt, most of them on his father’s orders. Grace Cahill’s mansion was burned to the ground because of him. One of the funeral attendees had been taken away in an ambulance. And that hadn’t been the last time one of Eisenhower’s strategies had landed people in the hospital.

“You want to attack those people, fine,” Hamilton snapped. “But I won’t help you.” He turned his back on his father and started to walk away.

Hamilton expected to hear his father’s enraged shouts as he left, but instead, the air was silent for several seconds. And then, so quietly he almost missed it, Hamilton heard Eisenhower say one word.

“Traitor.”

He almost stopped. His footsteps slowed, but something pushed him on. The word echoed in Hamilton’s ears for a long time as he trudged away through the snow. He forced himself to focus on getting as far away as he could.

It wasn’t until he started shivering, even underneath his huge parka, that Hamilton realized it was getting dark. He looked up at the sky and then scanned the horizon in all directions. Nothing but the bleak snowscape, a few icy-looking mountains rising in the far distance. Leaving his family had been stupid. If he’d stayed with them, he could have controlled the situation, maybe scared the backpackers off before Eisenhower could do them any real damage. And then a worse thought occurred to Hamilton.
What if those backpackers really are Cahill agents?
They could be dangerous. His family might have needed him, and instead, here he was, stomping around the Arctic by himself.

Hamilton immediately turned around. He started following his footprints back, but it was dark and the snowshoes didn’t leave very deep tracks. Wind was blowing the top layer of snow around in all directions, and soon Hamilton had lost his path entirely. All he could do was keep walking and hope that he’d pick up the trail again. Hamilton’s stomach clenched. If he couldn’t find his way back to his family, he’d be in trouble. His mother had been the one navigating the snowy terrain. He had no compass or GPS of his own. The skin on the back of his neck prickled as he thought of all those past explorers who had come to the Arctic like him searching for a Clue, only to freeze to death before they could return.