The 39 Clues: Unstoppable: Nowhere to Run (16 page)

It had never happened before. Never, ever, ever. Nobody had ever done it and many had tried.

Impossible. April May stared at her computer screen. She had just spent the last two hours running checks and counterchecks and rerunning them, and she kept coming to the same conclusion. She had to face the fact that just because she
thought
something was impossible didn’t mean it
was
.

April May had been hacked.

Not only hacked, but
beautifully
hacked. Such an elegant, simple program. If she didn’t feel like taking her computer and smashing it over Supreme Coder’s head, she’d buy him a Red Bull and hire him. Or her.

The
beauty
of it — the hacker had set up a completely false system. A Trojan horse, if you will — and wasn’t
that
an apt analogy, considering the Cahills’ next destination — that had mimicked the real system enough so that she had spent all her time monitoring it. And
then
, if she used fake information, the hacker trailed her
back
to her system. Which had firewalls and alerts and alarms, but he or she had managed to break in long enough to
maybe
discover some information that April May was not altogether happy about.

Like, for instance, that WALDO had access to the CCTV feeds in major European capitals.

It had been a stroke of luck that she’d been able to pass on the information that Amy and Dan were in King’s Cross station. She’d been able to hand off the information to J. Rutherford Pierce, which kept her demanding client happy for a nanosecond before he started breathing down her neck again.

Her e-mail alert chimed. April clicked on it. Another e-mail from Pierce, this one only three sentences:

What was it with this guy and threats? He lived for them. April fired back a reply.

April felt anger and resentment swamp her, two emotions she did not allow in life or work. She sat quietly, letting them build and crash and then recede. She pictured a breaking wave, then a tranquil sea. J. Rutherford Pierce had a way of tap-dancing on her last nerve.

The Cahill kids had been discovered in the west of Ireland. She’d researched news accounts. No paparazzi had appeared to photograph the Cahill crazies doing something risky. No pictures at all, or mentions. Wasn’t that why Pierce wanted to locate them? So he could deliver one of his “scoops”?

But while she’d searched she’d come across a random shooting off the Cliffs of Moher. A young woman had been out boating when suddenly, a bullet had slammed into the dashboard of her vessel. The boat had sunk and she’d been rescued by a Jet Ski. Some fishermen had complained about two boats racing through a harbor. . . .

April leaned forward and clicked through on her CCTV feeds. Multiple windows appeared, and she was able to follow each one carefully. When she found what she was looking for, she froze it. She zoomed in.

There were no paparazzi at the British Library. There was one heavily muscled man, and there was a glint of silver in his cupped hand. He was holding Amy Cahill’s neck with one hand, shielding the move from the crowd. And what was that glint of silver . . .

A hypodermic.

She zoomed in on the faces of Amy and Dan Cahill. Fear. Desperation. Anger. All there to see in the taut muscles of their faces, their widened eyes.

She let the tape roll. And look, how Dan and Amy keep eye contact throughout. Look, how Dan was on the balls of his feet, ready to attack this muscleman. These two were closer than close. Dan was ready to die for her.

The strains of Jonah Wizard’s hit began. April’s mouth twitched. She watched the flash mob form. She watched the joy and movement, but her eyes stayed on Dan and Amy and . . . oh, there they were, their friends. She isolated and clicked until they, too, were loaded into her software.

The e-mail dinged again.

“Not in my job description,” April said aloud. She hesitated, fingers over the keys. She was beginning to realize that this job wasn’t what it appeared. Her client was lying to her. Why? What did he want?

Was he trying to
kill
Amy and Dan Cahill?

A sick feeling grew inside her. April sat quietly, replaying the CCTV tape over and over. The silver hypodermic. The muscled thugs moving through the crowd.

April felt very cold. She discovered that she was trembling.

“Not in my job description,” she whispered.

Was Pierce involved in this? Did he know?

She had to find out. Which meant she might have to break precedent and do something she’d never done before: fieldwork.

Somewhere over the Mediterranean Sea

With a sack of cheeseburgers and some soft drinks in hand, they had piled onto Jonah’s plane. They had eaten, napped, and now they were an hour from Istanbul and ready to hear about Troy.

“I don’t get it,” Dan said, peeking at Atticus’s notes. “What’s legend, and what’s fact? This guy Paris falls in love with Helen and steals her away from her husband and takes her to Troy. So everybody gets really mad and there’s a war. Like, for ten years. Agamemnon is Helen’s brother-in-law so he gets up into Paris’s grille and camps out in this major siege. There’s a bunch of battles — heroes like Achilles and Ajax bite the big one. Even Paris dies, and he started the whole thing. Finally the Greeks get impatient and pretend to give up. They give the Trojans a gigantic wooden horse as a good-bye present, like — whoa, dudes, here ya go, we’re going home. Except they hide inside it and while the Trojans are partying they jump out and start a battle and this time, they win the war. Except basically everybody cool is dead, so what do they get anyway?”

“That’s the shortest summary of Homer’s
Iliad
I’ve ever heard,” Atticus said admiringly.

“And a great summary of most wars,” Jake remarked. “What do they get anyway?”

“V cool,” Jonah put in, nodding. He lounged back in the leather armchair, his eyes half closed. He had flown from California to Boston to London and now was almost to Istanbul. He was used to touring, but the Cahill schedule was worse.

“V cool, indeed,” Pony said. He’d practically repeated every utterance of Jonah’s since they boarded.

“Then some guy in the 1870s decides that Troy wasn’t legend, it was real, and he starts digging,” Dan went on.

“Frank Calvert,” Atticus said. “But Heinrich Schliemann usually gets the credit, even though he had no real archaeological training and kind of messed things up. But he
did
find that Troy actually existed. So now we know that it did. There are seven levels, I think —”

“Actually, nine,” Jake said. “Each of them comes from a different historical period. So for our purposes, the most recent would be the one at the top — level nine. Troy was part of the Roman Empire then. It had an aqueduct and water system, public baths, a central market, theater — quite an impressive civilization.”

“So how could it just . . . die?” Ian asked. “How could
all
of the cities die? What did the people do wrong?”

“There’s lots of reasons,” Jake said. “Sometimes it’s a natural disaster that they just don’t recover from. Or a dictator who bankrupts the treasury and starves his people. Or starts a series of wars that never end until the civilization is destroyed. It can be a combination of factors, too. Any civilization is vulnerable, no matter how mighty.” He nodded at Atticus. “Atticus and I have been brought up with dead civilizations. We’re used to taking the long view.”

“But it’s not like it could happen now,” Amy said. “I mean, here we are traveling from one great city to another. Cities full of taxis and theaters and restaurants and museums and people . . . it couldn’t all just go away. America couldn’t just go away.”

“Read the papers lately?” Jake asked. “Nuclear weapons, climate change, unstable governments . . .”

“One person,” Amy said. “One dictator with enough power making the wrong decisions . . .”

“Creating an army that is indestructible,” Ian put in.

“Could change the world,” Atticus said.

They fell silent. There was one name in each of their minds.

Pierce.

When the plane landed and they were taxiing to the terminal, Dan spoke up.

“At the risk of being a total buzzkill,” he said, “I have to ask. Do we have a plan?”

“I’ve been researching leopards,” Jake said. “They’re tremendous athletes. They can run up to thirty-six miles per hour and leap twenty feet forward in a single bound. They can jump ten feet up. They stash food high in trees. They can drag a hundred pounds or more. They hunt at night and have keen vision and hearing. They stalk their prey, then swat it silly and kill it with a bite to the throat.”

“Wow, thanks, Jake,” Dan said. “Something to look forward to.”

Jake grinned. “With any luck you won’t get that close, Dan-o. Anatolian leopards have been extinct for almost forty years. They once prowled the forests and hills of the Aegean and the Mediterranean. They were revered by the Etruscans and hunted by the Romans. Hunted by everyone, actually. That’s why they’re extinct.”

Amy was looking at a picture of a leopard on her phone. “That’s so sad. They’re so beautiful.”

“The last official sighting — they think — was in 1974. But I read a couple of accounts online from people who swore they saw one. A wildlife organization has set up some camera traps in the mountains — a constantly running camera, hoping to catch sight of something.”

Pony reached for his computer. “What’s the name of the group?”

“The International Wildlife Preservation Association,” Jake said. “IWPA.”

“There’s something else,” Amy said. “There’s a small museum in southwestern Turkey — on the way to the mountains — that has a stuffed leopard. We’ve sent e-mails to the address but they haven’t responded. They’re only open on weekends. Sketchy, but definitely worth checking out. We just have to hope that if there is a leopard, it still has its whiskers.”

“There’s a ton of folklore about leopard whiskers,” Jake said. “They’re supposed to have healing properties, or even magical properties.”

“So we find an extinct leopard, shoot him with a paralyzing drug, and pluck some whiskers,” Dan said. “No problem.”

“You only need six,” Jake said.

“Well, in that case,” Dan said, “piece of cake.”

Pony looked up. “I got in. Usually these kind of do-good organizations just don’t have the firewall protection they should. Because, let’s face it, why should they spend the bucks to hire someone like me? So it’s all crufty — it looks complicated, but it’s stupid. Gritch, gritch, I know.”

“Is he speaking English?” Atticus asked Dan.

“No, he’s speaking hacker,” Jonah answered, stretching and yawning. “The dude is awesome. Just listen.”

Pony flushed with pleasure. “I bet this frogger flakes out on a regular basis,” he said. “It’s so totally barfed out. Anyway, here’s my point. I hacked into their camera trap feed. Mostly a bunch of animals hopping by, right? But they also have an internal comments section on the feed. I snarfed up the file, did a quick word search program, and turns out there was a recent sighting that some dudes think is a leopard and some think is just a lynx, so some other wildlife dude went up personally to this spot and snapped a pretty clear paw print, but they’re all ‘we can’t release this info yet’ and so . . .” Pony turned his laptop around. A photo was blown up on the screen, a clear paw print in the dirt. “There’s your leopard.”