by Mark Levin
The family ducked out a side door and ran back to the funicular.
“Why so fast?” Rebecca said. “You gave them the MGF, right?”
Roger stopped, winded, scared, but strangely exultant. He grinned mischievously. “Well, not exactly.”
Rebecca’s eyes went wide. “What?”
“What’d you give them then, Dad?” Benji asked.
Roger shrugged. “Listerine.”
“Listerine!” Maddy said. “Where’s the MGF?”
Roger held up his leg. “Strapped to my ankle.”
Unfortunately, as Roger showed his family what he had done, Harry Huberman demonstrated that he had figured it out as well. Just then the Hitchcocks heard his voice echo through the empty monastery.
“Find them!” he cried. “Find those Hitchcocks!”
Chapter Twenty-one
The Hitchcocks ran for their lives, wildly improvising with every step. Seeing that the direct route to the funicular was blocked by Harry Huberman, Mr. Chen, and their bodyguard, Roger led the family back through the side door of the chapel. And just as Huberman burst in behind them, Benji noticed a stairwell.
Soon the family found itself running down a haphazard series of underground tunnels with damp walls and low ceilings. It was the kind of place that Benji imagined was used to film horror movies. Around each corner, he expected to come upon a skeleton or a family of hungry rats. But either would have been preferable to what was following them. Turning down a wide hallway, Benji heard the unmistakable sound of machine-gun fire.
“Oh, God!” he said.
“We’re so going to die!” Maddy called.
Rat-a-tat-tat!
“Just keep moving!” Roger cried.
“Where to?” Rebecca asked.
Before them was a path that appeared to lead even farther into the bowels of the monastery.
“This way!” Maddy said.
The family sprinted behind her.
“It’s no use, Hitchcocks!” Huberman called down the long corridor. “We’ve got you trapped.”
Rat-a-tat-tat!
The bullets hit the top of the tunnel, sending down a spray of dirt and dust. Rebecca slipped hard in a puddle. Roger dragged her to her feet.
“Keep moving!”
Out front again, Maddy saw her only option was a narrow stone stairway that descended quickly into the darkness.
“Follow me!”
Feeling the walls for balance, the family went down, down, down into the underbelly of the monastery. Soon the stairway bottomed out into a pitch-black hallway. The air smelled damp and old.
“I can’t see a thing!” Rebecca called.
“Cell phones, everyone,” Benji said.
“Cell phones?” Roger asked.
Benji flipped his open, emitting a dim light.
“Good call, wingman!”
A moment later each Hitchcock had their phone open, producing just enough light to make out a twisted path of dirt walls and low ceilings. A thin line of water ran down the middle of the tunnel.
Taking the lead, Benji followed the path, first to the left, then back to the right. Then the path widened slightly. Maddy gasped.
“Is this . . . a dungeon?”
Benji held up his cell phone, illuminating a row of cells with rusted metal bars.
“Sure seems it,” he said.
Then he gasped. Had he brushed against an actual skeleton?
“Keep moving!” Roger said.
A rat—a big one, too—scurried across Maddy’s feet.
“Ahhh!”
Up ahead, Benji gasped again. There was another skeleton, this one sitting upright in a chair, smiling, almost as if watching people go by from its prized seat on the front porch of a lovely house.
“Hitchcocks!” Benji shouted. “Let’s move it!”
Directly ahead, the route split. One path went straight, the other veered to the left and up. Benji felt his mother come up behind him.
“Where to?” she asked.
“Up!” Benji said. “Let’s get out of here.”
He took the lead again. To the sound of a not-so-distant rat-a-tat-tat, the family sprinted up the tunnel. The path soon intersected another. By now Benji had a gut feeling about how to get out.
“This way!”
The family put their fate into Benji’s hands and followed. As the path rose upward, a stream of light flashed down from above.
“Hurry!” Benji said.
He led them up a narrow set of stairs. Soon the family spilled out of an underground tunnel to the front yard of the monastery. Bull’s-eye!
The funicular was twenty feet away.
“Go! Go!” Roger yelled.
Benji and Maddy took the lead, sprinting like they never had before while Rebecca hurried behind as quickly as she could. Once his family was on the funicular, Roger stopped at a control panel by the edge of the cliff.
“Take us down, Dad,” Maddy yelled.
If only it was that easy. On the way up, Vadim had worked the controls. But there were a good ten switches on the panel. Which one started the thing? With nothing else to do, Roger started madly flipping switches.
“Come on,” he shouted. “Start!”
A round of gunfire pierced the air. Mr. Chen, Huberman, and the bodyguard burst out of the tunnel.
“Press them all!” Maddy cried.
Desperate, Roger ran his hand across the entire control panel. Then, a miracle—the motor turned over.
“It’s moving!” Rebecca yelled.
More than moving—moving quickly.
“Jump on!” Maddy said.
Rat-a-tat-tat!
More machine-gun fire. Here came the bodyguard, traveling like a powerful locomotive, gun raised.
“Jump!” Benji said.
Roger leaped into the air just in time to grab on to the edge of the funicular by his fingertips. Slipping fast, he felt the strong hands of his family grab on to his wrists and pull with all their might. Roger slithered his way into the funicular and rolled onto his back, panting, as exhausted and helpless as a fish who has been brought onto a boat after a long and furious fight.
“We did it.” He gasped. “We’re free!”
Whomp!
The family froze. Had Roger spoken too soon?
“What the hell was that?” Rebecca asked.
“I’ll tell you what!” Benji cried. “Someone jumped on!”
Then came gunfire ripping through the funicular roof.
“It’s the bodyguard!” Roger pushed his family against the wall. “Stay here!”
With that, he began to shinny up the side of the funicular.
“God, Daddy! What are you doing?”
Roger was acting on pure instinct. With a primal shout, he grabbed the bodyguard’s leg and pulled for all he was worth, dragging the heavy man onto the funicular floor with another loud whomp. But the moment he hit the metal, the bodyguard was up on his knees, gun aimed. Roger pushed the barrel aside at the last possible second, and the burst of fire rocketed against the cliff, shredding loose vines. Roger glared down at his assailant.
“No one shoots at my family!”
He pulled up hard on the gun, flipping the bodyguard backward and off the funicular. With a helpless scream, the man fell fifty feet to the rocks below. Roger turned to his family, bursting with a sort of nervous exultation. Had he really done it? Saved them all from the clutches of a certified killer?
“Oh my God!” Maddy said. “Daddy! You’re the Terminator!”
“A terminator who almost wet his pants,” Roger said.
“Who cares?” Benji said. “You did it!”
Roger looked at his wife. Her face was marked with equal parts disbelief and pride. As Roger took a step toward Rebecca, arms outstretched, a grinding whirr filled the sky above them. Roger looked up. The helicopter!
“Not over yet, Hitchcocks,” he said. “Everybody out!”
By that point the funicular was five feet from the ground. Mad
dy and Benji jumped off easily. Rebecca fell hard but rolled to her side and stood. Roger went last. Hitting the ground, he grabbed the bodyguard’s gun and aimed at the helicopter. Huberman was at the controls.
“It’s over, Harry!” Roger called.
He pulled the trigger.
Disaster. He was out of bullets.
Then they heard Huberman’s voice.
“Come in, Roger. We need to talk.”
Roger panicked. Where was it coming from?
“There, Dad,” Benji said.
Roger looked down. Ten feet away, the bodyguard’s body was sprawled out on the rocks, neck broken. Huberman was speaking through his radio. Roger picked up the headset and pressed it to his ear.
“Is that you, Huberman?”
“Give me the test tube, Hitchcock.”
Roger was now grimly determined. “You’re going to have to rip it out of my bare hands.”
Huberman laughed. “Nothing would please me more.”
Roger saw at once what he had to do: Destroy the MGF. And there was only one way. On the path up he had passed a fifty-foot cliff. Roger took off at a sprint.
“Roger!” Rebecca called. “No!”
But Roger was a man on a mission. So was Huberman. He maneuvered the helicopter expertly and was soon flying directly after Roger, the lights of the chopper bearing down on Roger’s back.
“Don’t throw the MGF!” Benji yelled, running behind. “We don’t even know what it is!”
“He’s right,” Maddy said, sprinting as well. “It might blow up the whole country!”
Roger didn’t care. He had seen a way to end Harry Huberman once and for all. Up ahead was a tangle of what looked like telephone wires. If he could only get Huberman to fly into it . . .
Holding the MGF over his head, Roger ran for the edge of the cliff. Huberman swooped closer, laughing triumphantly. He lowered the helicopter’s front and flew low and hard.
“Duck!” Maddy cried.
Roger did—and not a moment too soon. The chopper swooped low, narrowly avoiding taking off his head. Huberman calmly circled back around and spoke into his headset.
“You think you can outmatch me, Roger Hitchcock? You’re nothing. A stain on my windshield.”
Roger was fully invested in his new self—a brave, almost stupidly courageous man who wouldn’t back down from anyone or anything. He had been through too much. Just then he heard a high-pitched buzzing—the hum of wires. He looked over his shoulder. He was right. Telephone wires.
Roger wheeled back around to face the helicopter. Standing now at the very edge of the cliff, he held out the vial.
“Come and get me, Huberman!”
The great green machine rocketed straight toward his head. Once again, Roger ducked at the last second.
“Give it up, Roger,” Huberman said. “It’s over.”
He had spoken too soon. In seconds his propellers were entangled in the telephone lines. Sparks flew into the air. Then the nose pointed down and the chopper smashed into the ground and exploded. Thrown backward, Roger found himself staring up at the sky.
“Daddy!” Maddy called. “Are you OK?”
“Speak to me!” Rebecca said.
“Come on, wingman,” Benji said.
Roger was overcome. Tears flowed down his face—tears of joy and relief. He looked up at his family, realizing as if for the first time how much they meant to him.
“I love you guys,” he said. “I really, really love you guys.”
Then a ghost rose from the helicopter wreckage. At least that’s what it looked like to Roger—a ghost who was holding a dismembered helicopter blade, wielding it like an oversized machete. By the time Roger realized that the ghost was actually the still living and breathing Harry Huberman, the killer was already swinging for his throat.
“Daddy!” Maddy called.
Benji threw himself at Huberman’s knees. The man went down hard but lurched back up to his feet.
“You don’t decide when it’s over, Hitchcock!” Huberman said. His face was matted with blood. The arm not holding the helicopter blade was clearly broken. “I decide when it’s over!”
Huberman raised the blade high.
Then came the gunshot. Huberman clutched his chest, looking for a split second as handsome as he had atop the Eiffel Tower, then fell hard to his right, dead. As one, the Hitchcocks looked back up the hill. There stood Xavier Vadim, holding a gun, his family by his side. Before Roger could so much as wave, a squad of Interpol agents burst out of the woods, guns trained on the Vadims. A split second later a bright light pierced Roger’s eyes. Four more agents stepped out of the trees, pistols drawn. The leader stepped forward.
“Where is the MGF, Mr. Hitchcock?”
As Roger opened his hand, revealing the small glass test tube, he couldn’t help but laugh.
“All of this for a little jar of light-blue liquid. Crazy world, huh?”
Chapter Twenty-two
“Monatomique glycolinate formule.”
It was a day later. The Hitchcocks sat in an office at Interpol in Paris, across from Benji’s old friend the Elevator Man, Jules Camus.
“Otherwise known as MGF,” Jules went on.
“But what was it?” Benji asked.
Now that Benji knew Jules was a good guy, he found his pierced eyebrow cool, not scary.
“Part of a top-secret project of the French government,” Jules explained. “Synthetic fuel made in a lab.”
“I get it,” Maddy said. “The answer to the world’s energy crisis.”
“Exactly,” Jules said. He looked at Rebecca. “You have a bright girl here.”
Rebecca nodded. “I know.”
Maddy couldn’t hold back a smile. It wasn’t often that she was the one who was called bright.
“In any case,” Jules said, “Vadim was selling it to the highest bidder. He and his accomplice, Monsieur Truffaut, have confessed everything.”
“And the whole house swap thing?” Roger said. “It was somehow part of their plan?”
“Ah, yes!” Jules said. “Truffaut learned that Vadim was planning the swap, so he approached the professor with the idea that Vadim steal the formula while the Truffauts used the house swap as a diversion. Then they would all begin new lives together in Buenos Aires.”
Benji smiled. “Which wasn’t quite the way it went down.”
Jules nodded. He looked at each of the Hitchcocks. “We owe you all a great debt. If this MGF had fallen into the wrong hands, the balance of world power might have been tipped.”
“Cool,” Benji said.
Jules smiled. “Yes, Benjamin Hitchcock. Very cool. There aren’t many families who can say they went on vacation and saved the world, eh?”
A night later the family Hitchcock was on a plane headed home to Chicago. As opposed to their trip overseas, they flew direct. The long wait on the Philadelphia runway was ancient history, as were the greasy cheesesteaks, the connecting flights, and the arguments. Indeed, the Hitchcocks traveled back in style, first class, their reward from the French government for helping track down the MGF.
Best of all on this trip, when an exhausted Roger and Rebecca slept, it was with their hands entwined and their heads on each other’s shoulders. Halfway across the Atlantic, Benji couldn’t resist rubbing it in to his sister—just a little bit.
“Told ya,” he said, nodding at his parents.
A row ahead, Rebecca sighed and pressed her head more closely against Roger’s neck.
Maddy shot her brother a look. “First of all, no one likes a know-it-all. And second of all, it’s not like the signs weren’t all there to—”
“Come on,” Benji interrupted. “Just admit you were wrong.”
Maddy smiled. “I admit that you’re a dork.”
“Wow,” Benji said. “Some things never change.”
His sister turned back to her magazine. “Nope. Certain things never do.”
Late that night the family pulled up to the house in t
heir old minivan. Before swinging into the driveway, Roger idled on the street. Everything appeared to be as it always was: the grass, the trees, the mailbox, the driveway. But something felt different. Finally, Maddy broke the silence.
“Does anyone other than me think our house looks really strange?”
Roger nodded. “It does, doesn’t it?”
“But it’s still the same old house.”
“It is,” Benji said. “But we’ve changed. That’s why it looks funny.”
The family was silent. Benji had nailed it. Yes, the home itself was the same, but the people they had once been no longer existed.
“Well, Hitchcocks,” Roger said. “Should we go inside and survey the damage?”
A moment later Roger pushed open the front door. The family held their collective breath, expecting the worst—instead the living room looked pretty much as they had left it.
“Not bad,” Rebecca said.
“Yeah,” Benji said. “Maybe we should do a house swap next summer.”
“Not,” Maddy said.
As the rest of the family headed toward their own rooms, Maddy walked down the hall to hers. At her door, she paused. Six days wasn’t all that long. But it was plenty of time for a stranger to destroy her room—especially someone like the freak girl with tattoos who had stayed there. Had the so-called Chicago Veronique painted her walls black? Drawn a picture of a skull on the ceiling? Signed her name on the floor in blood? Anything seemed possible.
OK, Maddy thought. Here goes.
By the time she pushed open the door, Maddy was so certain that her room would be going to be trashed that it took her a moment to realize that it looked good. In fact, the girl with tattoos was even neater than she was. Maddy threw her suitcase on her bed, then couldn’t resist quickly logging on to her computer. She had been out of internet touch for the past week, a veritable lifetime in the fast-moving life of a teenage girl. Indeed, she had more than three hundred emails. Even better was the subject line on one of the most recent: Noah!!! Top Secret!!! Maddy was about to click on it but then stopped. Before she jumped back into the world of Noah and the pool, there was something she wanted to do first.
True, her mother could still be annoying. But wasn’t that the way with all mothers? Besides, her mother could be lots of other things, too. Good things. Over vacation, Maddy had seen her mom hang in there against all odds and drive like an action hero on a mountain road. She had even heard her admit how hard it was for her to watch Maddy grow up. Ironically, now that she was home, Maddy felt as though she wanted her mother more than ever: not necessarily to talk about boys—she had her friends for that—but to, well, just talk.
