by Jeff Hirsch
“. . . and for more news on those globe-trotting troublemakers, Dan and Amy Cahill, we now turn to senior international crime correspondent Chet Waterdam. Chet?”
“Come on, Amy,” Dan said. “We don’t need to see this.”
A leathery-looking man with orange skin and bright red suspenders appeared on the screen.
“Thanks, Wes. The Cahill kids! At first, we here at CVB News thought it was all fun and games, but now we have learned that what we are looking at is actually an international criminal conspiracy of staggering proportions. But first, the Cahills — who are they!?”
The dopiest picture Dan had ever seen of himself popped up on the screen.
“Dan Cahill!” Chet exclaimed. “Second in command. A fanatically loyal but weak-willed and dim-witted hanger-on.”
“Hey!” cried Dan.
“The real power of the Cahill cabal rests here.”
Dan’s picture was replaced by a grainy one of Amy at the mouth of a seedy-looking street in some unnamed city, looking mysterious and furtive.
“Amy Cahill! A reckless thrill junkie in the guise of a librarian in training.”
“Well, they got you there,” Dan said, hoping for a laugh, but getting a glare instead.
“Ms. Cahill is cruel. Never willing to get her own hands dirty, though, she has a history of luring boys into doing her bidding.”
The TV screen filled with a shot of a smiling Evan, standing in the sun. Dan looked back at Amy. She was transfixed, eyes wide, skin pale.
“Amy,” he said. “Seriously. Turn it off.”
“Evan Tolliver,” the voice-over intoned. “Brilliant student and beloved son of Terrence and Letitia Tolliver. But why don’t we let them tell you about him . . .”
Evan’s picture faded, replaced by a gray-haired man in a white T-shirt and a woman in a prim blue dress. They were sitting side by side on a sunlit porch with a farm stretching out behind them.
“Our son loved Amy Cahill,” Letitia Tolliver said in a pain-racked voice. “He loved her more than anything.”
Terrence Tolliver drew his wife close as she pulled off her glasses to wipe a single tear from her cheek.
“That’s right,” Terrence said. “He loved her and she killed him. Sure as if the girl had held the gun in her own hand. She drew him into her world, and this poor boy, our only son, never made it out alive. And she runs around the world like she doesn’t have a care.”
“Amy . . .” Jake said, but even he went quiet as the camera moved closer to Mr. Tolliver’s face. He and his wife each looked far older than they used to. An off-camera voice spoke up.
“And what would your message be to anyone associating with Ms. Cahill now?”
“Get away from that girl as fast as you can,” Letitia said. “She looks innocent, but she’s a snake.”
Amy was motionless, leaning forward in her chair. In the flickering light of the TV, her eyes were dark hollows.
“Strong words,” Chet continued. “Ones that lead to perhaps the most important question of all — has Amy Cahill already found her next victim?”
The screen faded to another picture. It was Jake, caught standing in that medina alley. He wore an angry sneer and his fist was cocked, ready to strike the reporter who sat bleeding at his feet. Amy stood in the shadows behind him, watching it all with a look on her face that, had Dan not known her, he would have read as distinctly pleased.
“Jake Rosenbloom — star athlete, honors student, a young man with a bright future ahead of him. How long until Amy Cahill takes all that away, too? For more on this —”
Something zipped through the air by Dan’s head and the TV screen exploded in a shower of glass and plastic and electrical sparks. Dan jumped out of his seat as a crystal ashtray hit the floor and shattered. Dan turned to see Amy standing at the edge of the table with tears in her eyes.
“It’s Pierce that’s doing this,” Dan said. “You know that. This is meaningless.”
“It’s not meaningless to me!” Amy cried. “Maybe you can just run away, Dan, but I can’t. I have to stay! I have to deal with this!”
“I’m not running away!”
“I must have been crazy,” Amy said. “I don’t know why I thought this would work. Dan, call the pilot. Tell him he’s taking Jake and Atticus home. Tonight.”
“Amy,” Jake said. “You can’t think I believe any of this.”
Amy whirled on him. “It doesn’t matter what you believe! We are done talking about this. Dan and I will find the silphium and the police will find your father and that’s it.”
“No,” Jake said. “Amy, that’s not how this is going to work.”
“This is crazy,” Dan said. “You can’t expect them to —”
“That is an order!” Amy roared.
Dan felt himself knocked backward, the sting of Amy’s words like a punch. Everyone in the room went silent. They were like four statues, frozen in opposite corners of the room, muscles tense as steel, vibrating with anger.
“I am the leader of the Cahills,” Amy said, her deadly calm more frightening than a scream. “I don’t want to hear any more thoughts or any more discussion. This is how it’s going to be and that’s it.”
Before anyone could say another word, Amy threw open the door to her bedroom and slammed it behind her.
Jake and Dan and Atticus didn’t move.
“Dan,” Jake said. “You have to talk to her.”
Dan nodded but he didn’t turn back to Jake or Atticus, he just kept staring at the smashed TV.
Amy sat on the floor of her shower, searing water falling over her head and shoulders and filling the room with steam. She had turned the water so hot, her skin was red and aching, but she couldn’t stop shivering.
The faces of Evan’s parents haunted her. It was as if they had been printed with phosphorescent ink on the back of her eyelids, inescapable no matter how hard she tried to block them out. For so long, Amy had drowned out the guilt that raged inside her with the voices of all of the people who told her that it wasn’t her fault. That Evan knew the risks.
Now a few words from Evan’s parents, and the wound was raw again. Evan had gotten involved because of his feelings for her. Amy could have stopped him, but she hadn’t.
Amy shut the water off and went into her bedroom, wrapped in a towel. It was quiet on the other side of the door. She could only imagine what the boys must have said when she left the room. What they must think of her. Amy fell across her bed just as her cell phone began to ring. She wanted to ignore it, but the caller ID showed up as coming from Attleboro. She took a breath and made herself answer it.
“We’re thinking it must be drugs.”
Amy almost smiled with relief at the rich lilt of Ian Kabra’s voice.
“Some sort of truth serum–like compound —”
“But not one that makes you tell the truth!” Hamilton shouted in the background.
“I said truth serum–like, Hamilton. Now please, I’m trying to talk. Tomas,” Ian grumbled and then turned back to the phone. “We think Pierce must have slipped some kind of will-weakening drug into their water so when the reporter suggested what he wanted the Tollivers to say, they said it. Simple, really.”
Amy was on her back, staring at the pressed-tin ceiling. The heat from the shower had dissipated and a chill was snaking up her legs. She felt distant from herself, like she was watching from above.
“Amy?” Ian said. “Amy, are you there?”
“It wasn’t drugs,” she said.
“You can’t believe that these people would honestly think —”
“How often do you think about Natalie?”
Now it was Ian’s turn to go silent. Amy’s ear was filled with the soft in and out of his breathing.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate to . . .” he started with his usual brusque energy but then his voice faltered. “I think about her all the time,” he admitted.
Amy turned onto her side, pressing the phone between her ear a
nd the pillow.
“But sometimes is it like you . . ” Amy struggled with an idea that seemed to retreat from her even as she grabbed at it. “Forget?”
“Forget what?”
“That she’s really gone? Like one day you’ll just turn a corner and” — Amy’s voice caught in her throat but she pressed on — “she’ll be there? Or you’ll look at other people and for a second you see her in their place.”
“I hear her voice sometimes,” Ian confessed. “I mean I think I do. There’s always this split second when I think, Oh, no, what does she want me to do now? but then I catch myself.”
“I guess that’s what other people don’t get. That people who are gone aren’t really gone.”
“No,” Ian said. “They never are.”
A lump grew in Amy’s throat.
“Yo, Ian!”
Amy could hear a scuffle for the phone.
“Jonah! Unhand me!”
“Go get me a spot of tea, old man,” Jonah said in his best Ian impression. “Gotta holler at the boss a minute.”
Amy heard Ian harrumph and then Jonah’s swaggering voice filled her ear.
“Yo! Amy K-to-the-Hill.”
“Hi, Jonah,” Amy said. “How are things there?”
“Never mind that. This is wisdom-dropping time. What those two said on TV was cold.”
“I really don’t want to —”
“I know. I know. I’m not here to discuss your feelings. I’m here to make a knowledge deposit.”
“Oh, yeah, and what’s that?”
“All those people crowding around you with cameras and little notebooks? Those reporters.” Jonah said the word with obvious disgust. “They are nothing but dogs looking for a bone to chew on.”
“Well, unfortunately that bone is us.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be. See, all a dog wants is something between its teeth. It doesn’t care what it is. Reporters are the same way. All they’re trying to do is make a buck by keeping a lot of bored people entertained.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that if you want a dog to drop one bone, all you gotta do is give him a new one.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?”
“When I want to get reporters off my back, I call in an anonymous tip that Justin Bieber is getting a crew cut on the other side of town.”
“Somehow I don’t think they’re going to buy that over here.”
“I don’t know, Cahill, that little dude gets around.”
Amy surprised herself by laughing. “All right. Thanks, Jonah. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Hard-won knowledge, Amy. Hard. Won.”
Amy said good-bye to Jonah and then stared at the door. She couldn’t hide in here forever. Amy got dressed, then stood with her hand on the doorknob listening to the quiet shuffle of Dan and Atticus and Jake on the other side. Her stomach did flips as she remembered the sound of her voice as she barked orders at them.
You did what you had to do, Amy told herself. What you should have done long ago.
Amy caught her breath and forced herself through the door. No one said a word, but every head in the room turned as Amy stepped through the door. Jake was down on one knee by the bed, stuffing clothes into a gym bag. Dan sat by the window, watching her with a kind of guarded interest. The way you’d look at a stranger before you’ve decided if they’re friend or foe.
“I didn’t call the plane,” he announced. “We don’t have the right to tell Jake and Atticus to go.”
“But don’t worry, Your Leaderhood,” Jake said. “We’re leaving. Atticus and I will stay at Dad’s place while we keep looking for him. You and Dan can find the silphium. When something comes in from Pierce on Dad, Dan will forward it to me.”
All Amy could do was nod. This was what she wanted, wasn’t it? She caught a glimmer of glass on the rug by the TV, and the buzz of nerves in her stomach swelled.
“I’ve been going over Olivia’s journal,” Atticus said. He sat by the door, Olivia’s notebook in front of him, his own bag at his feet. He turned the notebook around and showed it to her. He pointed at a shiny smudge at the top corner of one page.
“You remember we were eating lunch? Well, that’s the last grease smudge from his thumb, so this is where Dad stopped right before he ran out. I thought maybe he saw something about the silphium but . . .”
Amy studied a jumble of what looked like names. Critias. Timaeus. Hermocrates. At the bottom there was a single sentence. The twentieth Hafsid claims to keep the testament of the failed strategoi.
“What does it all mean?”
“Well, the sentence is gibberish to me,” Atticus said. “But the first three are names.”
“Who are they?”
“Nobody,” he said. “Like literally nobody. They’re characters Plato used in his dialogues.”
“Dialogues?” Dan said. “This guy was a playwright?”
“No, Plato was a classical Greek philosopher around the fourth century B.C. The dialogues were a literary form he used. Instead of him writing a book explaining his ideas, he’d create characters and have them discuss stuff. These three were the main speakers in a projected trilogy of dialogues.”
“Projected?”
“Plato completed the first one, called Timaeus. The second one, Critias, was half done. Hermocrates was supposed to be the third, but he never wrote it.”
“Makes sense,” Dan said. “Sequels are never as good as the original.”
Amy couldn’t help but smile. She looked back at Dan, but he turned away as soon as their eyes met.
“So why’d your dad get so freaked by it?”
“No idea,” Atticus said. “And I don’t see any connection to silphium, either. Plato’s dialogues never mention it, and they never even talk about Carthage.”
Jake grabbed his bag and turned to Atticus. “Come on, bro. We should get moving.”
Atticus handed the notebook over to Amy and then slung his bag over his shoulder. “Good luck,” he said. “See ya, Dan.”
“Yeah,” Dan said, fighting back the emotion Amy could hear in his voice. “See ya, Att.”
It’s for the best, Amy thought. One day they’ll understand.
Jake and Atticus started to go, but before they could leave, there was a crisp knock on the door.
“Excuse me, please,” came a harried man’s voice from the other side of the door. “This is the hotel manager. I am most embarrassed but we have just been informed of a small fire on the top floors of the building. We must ask that all residents evacuate immediately.”
“A fire?” Dan said.
Jake quickly backtracked to the window. “Guys,” he said. “Look.”
“Just a moment!” Amy said to the manager, and crossed the room.
Jake pulled aside the curtain and nodded out into the dark. “I’m not from around here,” he said. “But those sure don’t look like fire trucks to me.”
Several nondescript cars and a large minivan loitered below. All were black and seemed to have more than the usual amount of antennas and lights. Bulky men in suits stood around smoking cigarettes and keeping a sharp eye all around.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last year,” Jake said, “it’s that no matter where you go, cops pretty much look the same.”
“That’s all for us?” Dan asked.
“We’re the Cahill kids,” Amy said. “International criminals.”
“Stealing that boat probably didn’t help,” Jake said.
Dan looked at Amy. “You guys stole a boat?”
“It’s not just cops, either,” Amy said.
She pointed to another cluster of men. They were mixing with the Tunisian police but they were Westerners, broad shouldered and lean with crisp military haircuts. Official-looking badges hung around their necks, but Amy knew they weren’t the Feds.
“Pierce’s men?” Dan asked.
Amy nodded. “Probably pretending to be FBI or US Marsha
ls.”
“Excuse me!” the manager called again, his accented voice slurring with panic. “Miss! It is most important that you come down to the lobby immediately. This fire, it is very dangerous!”
“What do we do?” Atticus asked.
He looked to Amy and something locked up inside of her. “Maybe . . . maybe we go with him. Once we’re out we slip away, go out the back . . .”
“The other hotel exits will be covered by now,” Jake said. “Besides, he’s probably got cops standing right next to him. Atticus, block the door and get our things!”
Atticus stuck a chair under the door handle and grabbed their backpacks. Jake hit the light switch and the hotel room went dark.
“What are you doing?” Amy asked.
“Dan, give me a hand!”
Jake pulled the window shades open and then Dan rushed over to help. The window was heavy, but with a giant yank, it flew open and a hot gust of wind blew into the room. There was a thin concrete shelf just below the window that encircled the building.
“Miss, please!” the manager pleaded. “The fire, it is quite big now!”
There was a click as the manager unlocked the door, and then a thump as he tried to open it. Jake grabbed the windowsill and climbed up onto the ledge.
“Jake, wait!” Amy said. “We can’t!”
But Dan was already following him out, with Atticus close behind. A wall-shaking boom came from behind her as someone began trying to break the door down. There was no other choice. Amy leaped up onto the windowsill and out into the night.
Pony was deep in the jungle and there were tigers everywhere.
He could feel their eyes on him at every turn, crouching at the edge of firewalls and lurking, ravenous, within system registries. Pony had no doubt that he was one of the very best, but Founders Media had withstood years of attacks from everyone from Anonymous to Mafiaboy and possibly to April May herself. It wouldn’t give up its secrets without a bloody fight, hence the tigers — sentries made of code ready to pounce if he made one wrong move.
As soon as Pony had seen the last news story from Founders Media, he knew he had to try something. He started by reaching into relatively unprotected file servers and deleting articles and photo and video files. They always came back, though, sometimes within minutes.
