Riley Clifford

by The 39 Clues: Rapid Fire #7: Fireworks

  “And what?” Amy shot back. “Risk letting our enemies infiltrate when we take out a ‘Secret Bodyguard Needed’ ad on the Internet?

  “Jonah, you are in charge of public relations,” Amy went on. “We have to keep a strong hold on our public perception —”

  “Not gonna fly, cuz,” Jonah sighed.

  “All of this is mad!” Natalie cut in. “We aren’t on the Forbes One Hundred list. I refuse to work for an organization that doesn’t offer car service and corporate accounts.”

  “Dan and I will be in charge of the research department,” Amy said, not looking up for fear that tears would start to fall. This wasn’t going as she’d planned.

  Dan sighed heavily. “Amy,” he said softly, “we don’t even know who we’re researching.”

  “Well, does anybody else have any bright ideas?” Amy asked, throwing up her hands. “B-b-because I am all ears. I’ve put a lot of thought into this distribution of labor, but if you all think you can do it so much better, go ahead.” She searched the faces on the screens. “Please! If anybody has a better plan to try and stop the people out to kill us, don’t be shy.”

  The Cahill cohort was quiet. For a second.

  Then a chorus of chatter broke out on-screen, everyone talking over each other, cutting each other off.

  “Meathead!” Natalie shrieked at Hamilton.

  “Spoiled brat!” he shot right back.

  Ian was looking at Amy and muttering under his breath. She thought she heard him say “know-it-all.”

  Amy would have cried if she had the energy. Dan was jerking his head awake to keep from nodding off. Sinead was giving her the cold shoulder and recording everyone’s put-downs in the meeting notes.

  Amy slumped down in the swivel chair, tossing her notepad and pencil onto the operations desk. She eyed the rows and rows of secret file cabinets, containing all they’d learned so far, which wasn’t very much. The vaults were still mostly empty, the files all too thin. How would it ever be enough? There was so much to do. Not to mention that school would be starting up next week.

  Nice leadership, she thought to herself. Way to bring everyone together.

  “Hey, bros, can we wrap up this little family reunion? My publicist is saying I gotta bounce. Photo shoot,” Jonah said.

  “Ah, the lifestyles of the rich and shameless,” Ian quipped. Amy knew for a fact that Ian and Natalie had at least a cool two million in the bank, but ever since their mother had disowned them, they’d been moping around like they were slumming it.

  “Jealous much?” Jonah shot back.

  “Our family would never fraternize with the kind of new-money peons you pal around with,” Natalie said. “It’s beneath us.”

  “Right, I forgot. Daughters of Satan only meet on Thursdays,” Jonah said.

  “Guys, guys!” Amy cut in. “Can’t we just agree to the schedules I’ve assigned and check in again with progress reports in a month? Item two —”

  “Ian and I have to go. We’re throwing a fabulous party with our civilized friends. And there’s a menu to plan. And maids to fire.”

  “Later, peeps. No rest for the richest celebrity under twenty,” Jonah said.

  “Happy New Ye —” Amy started to say, but everyone had signed off before she could get it out.

  Sinead stormed out and slammed the door.

  Well, that went well.

  She looked over at Dan, who has unwrapping one of his bandages from his wrist. This was shaping up to be some New Year’s Eve, and the sun hadn’t even risen yet.

  Then a crackle of static caught Amy’s attention. An incoming call? She went over to check the switchboard and realized that the line was still connected and the audio still on. Dan started to push himself out of his chair, but Amy put a finger to her lips: “Shhh.”

  “It’s okay,” Ian was saying, over the sound of sniffles. “There, there, don’t muss up your five-thousand-threadcount Egyptian cotton kerchief.”

  “But it’s all so ghastly,” Natalie explained. “How did it come to this? No party, no parents, and our only relatives don’t even like us. Even the help has somewhere to go on New Year’s Eve!” she cried.

  Amy looked at Dan helplessly.

  “You and I will find some fun,” Ian tried. “We could break out the good china and hire a string quartet!”

  “Bah!” Natalie cried. “I wish we’d never learned of the clue hunt. I wish we’d never met the other Cahills.”

  Amy had heard enough. She shut down the connection. The faces of her other cousins flashed before her — Jonah’s exhausted smile, Ham’s jaw tensing as he tried to keep the peace. In their own ways, they were all trying very hard to do what was right. Each one was hurting just as much as Amy, but each one was pretending they were fine. Where in the schedules she’d just passed out had she assigned time for a break?

  “Amy,” Dan croaked from the corner, “I might need help getting down the stairs.”

  Amy nodded and got up. Was this going to be how they met the new year? Injured and depressed? Would the rest of their lives be like this? It wasn’t like any of them could take a vacation. Vespers didn’t give you two weeks off for R & R.

  Amy wished she could wave a magic wand and make it all go away. But she was only fifteen, after all.

  And then she got it.

  “Dan,” she said, “I have an idea. It’s super-risky, and probably counterproductive, and definitely a waste of resources.”

  “Sounds awesome,” Dan huffed, out of breath just from trying to lift himself up.

  Amy started pacing and talking fast. “How would we get to the mountain—we’d need a copter? And where could we reserve a site? We’d have to leave right now. Security, provisions!”

  “Amy, breathe,” Dan said. “Slow down. What are you talking about? What’s so urgent that you forgot to add it to the agenda?”

  “You’ll see,” Amy said, her face brightening. “Pack your bags, bro. It’s go time.”

  Jonah Wizard had been onstage for what felt like forever. He’d rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed for days. He hadn’t eaten any of the silver-domed, room-service breakfast that his New York hotel had laid out for him — the family meeting had been too upsetting. He was feeling a little dizzy from lack of food and lack of sleep and being attacked by a mob of thirteen-year-old fans the night before. His world tour would begin two days from now, and everyone around him, his dad, his publicist, was all nerves and tension. On top of everything, there were the usual cameras filming for Jonah’s reality show, capturing his every facial movement.

  “All right, from the top,” Jonah heard his director say from out in the cushy red seats. “This is our last rehearsal, people, so I want perfection.”

  The stage lights on Jonah’s face were too bright — it was causing his pancake-thick makeup to run, and it was bad enough that he had to wear makeup at all in rehearsal. But they wanted to test it against the lighting and camera angles.

  Jonah waited for his cue, the drum lead-in, before launching in on his hit track from the killer new album. He was not five words in before —

  “CUT. CUT. That was all wrong,” boomed a voice through the megaphone. The director sounded a little off — Jonah hoped he wasn’t getting sick.

  “For reals, yo?” Jonah said. He’d nailed the choreography perfectly and the lyrics had never been fresher.

  “This time, we’d like you to do something a little different,” said the megaphone voice. The lights were too bright for Jonah to see into his director’s eyes, but Jonah hoped he was glaring into the right spot of the empty concert seats. They’d rehearsed it a dozen times already. Seriously — did fame and fortune not buy anything anymore? Where was the respect?!

  “This time,” the voice said, “we’d like you to begin with . . . ”

 
Jonah waited. This was why you became your own producer. This was why teen stars burned out before their twenty-first birthday bash.

  “The chicken dance.”

  “Say what, yo?” Jonah must not have heard right. He was multiplatinum. He was a TV star. He had taught Michael Jackson’s son how to moonwalk. Was this some sort of publicity stunt?

  “That’s right. You know, the one old people do at weddings, where you flap your arms and waddle around like a chicken. Except we’d also like you to squawk.”

  “Bro, get serious.”

  “Jonah,” said the megaphone. “Remember, this is filming.”

  “Fine. Fine.” Jonah hoped that his director’s remarks would be left out of the reality show.

  And so, instead of his sick drum solo lead-in, the cheesy chicken music blared from the gorgeous, refrigerator-sized speakers, and Jonah squawked and flapped and gobbled his way around the stage, doing his best funky-chicken/wedding-chicken dance impression. Or whatever it was. What he didn’t know he made up, but he gave it everything he had, the full enchilada.

  Finally, the stage lights dimmed, and Jonah could hear peals of laughter echoing through the theater. It cracked up in a familiar way, the voice breaking and hooting. Jonah made a visor with his hands to get a better look out into the seats. The auditorium lights came up, and there, holding a megaphone and jumping up and down, was his cousin.

  “From the top!” Amy cried.

  “Amy?!” Jonah said, too stunned to be embarrassed.

  “Dude. That was great,” Dan said, holding his stomach. “Ah, the laughing hurts,” he cackled. “But it’s totally worth it!” Tears were streaming down Dan’s cheek.

  “Glad I could help,” Jonah deadpanned. That rare sensation, embarrassment, was starting to creep into his voice. The reality TV crew slapped his cousins five.

  “Yo, wassup? What are you two doing here?” Jonah sputtered. “Where is my director?”

  “He’s on a breakfast break. We told him we’d oversee the rehearsal till he got back. He left us his megaphone.” Amy giggled. “You’ve been punked!”

  “Oh,” Dan added, “and we got you the night off. You’re coming with us.”

  “But my world tour — we have to rehearse tonight. I have to talk to my dad —”

  “We think you’ve had enough rehearsal,” Amy said.

  “Oh,” Dan added, “and you have to do what we say, ’cause we got that chicken dance on tape.”

  Natalie and Ian Kabra were staring down the mouth of a torture chamber. As anti-festive as it seemed, it was their mother’s tradition to take her children to the Tower of London on holidays. Something about the gloominess of ancient armor and the gleam of creative weaponry put an extra spring in Isabel’s step. And even if their mother had technically disowned them, there was nothing that said Natalie and Ian couldn’t partake in the old Lucian tradition of morbid castle-going by themselves. The Tower of London was a Lucian stronghold, after all.

  It was a dreary day on the Thames, but everyone else was out gallivanting, preparing for the evening’s celebrations. Natalie felt that she’d reached the absolute lowest of the low. Unseemly as it was to admit, Natalie had made up the lie about the stupid party, because the truth was that since her mother had disowned them, she and Ian were all alone now.

  At that very moment, the lights went out. It was pitch-black.

  “Ian?” she said, her voice quavering.

  “Guards!” Ian called.

  A voice rang out, slow and robotic, like Darth Vader. Ian and Natalie couldn’t pinpoint where it was coming from.

  “Don’t move,” the voice snarled. “You shall obey exact orders. When the lights come up, you are to remain silent.”

  Natalie could feel the world circling in on her. The ceiling felt like it was starting to spin. She was just about to faint when —

  “Gotcha!” Amy cried, pulling off a gleaming gold helmet from the gift shop as the lights switched back on.

  “What on Earth?” Natalie shrieked.

  “How did you get here?” Ian asked, flabbergasted.

  “Being part of the world’s most powerful family has its advantages,” Amy said.

  “What in the world are you two doing here?” Natalie repeated, out of breath from her near hyperventilation.

  “We’ve come to kidnap you,” Dan said merrily.

  Hamilton was ready for the summit. They were going to make it up the Matterhorn faster than anyone had ever climbed it before.

  “Dad,” Hamilton said, checking his watch and quickening his pace, “we’re going to beat the record!”

  The sooner we do, Hamilton thought, the sooner he forgets what a giant letdown I am. This would bring back the Holt family pride.

  Only, it looked like someone, or someones, had beaten Ham and Eisenhower to the top. How was that possible? They’d seen nobody on the way up.

  “Who in Sam Hill are those folks?” Eisenhower asked.

  It was the first words his father had spoken to him all day. Ham knew that his father loved him, but the last few months, it hadn’t always felt like it. Since the Clue hunt, they no longer talked the way they used to, or watched sports together, or understood what the other was thinking during workouts, like most fathers and sons.

  “Got me, Dad,” Ham said. The people up ahead didn’t look like ice climbers. They looked like goat herders, carrying walking sticks and not outfitted warmly enough for the winter winds. Where was their Gore-Tex?!

  When they reached the top, Ham checked his watch. He was about to announce their time when the tourists turned around —

  “Protein shake?” It was Dan.

  “Energy bar?” And Amy.

  “Electrolyte replenisher?” And Jonah.

  Then Hamilton noticed the helicopter behind them. He wasn’t sure how he’d missed it. Natalie and Ian waved from the window. “How did — ?”

  “No time, we’ve got a ball drop to attend. Eisenhower, we’re taking Hamilton for the night, if that’s all right with you,” Amy said.

  To her surprise, Eisenhower nodded, defeated-looking, and said, “Be back for triathlon training.”

  “We’ll have him back for you by morning. Official Cahill New Year’s Eve business,” Amy affirmed.

  “Dad, I wanted to hang out with you tonight,” Ham insisted.

  “Son,” Eisenhower replied, “it’s all right. I’ll see you next year.”

  And his father laughed at his own lame joke, for the first time in forever.

  From the copter, the Eiffel Tower looked like a rocket ship of light. They circled up to the top to see it from every beautiful angle. Amy thanked the pilot, whom she and Dan had commissioned early that morning back in Attleboro, the first of many calls they’d made on the fly, frantically planning for this moment. She hopped down the step. The entire wraparound balcony was theirs for the night. Please don’t let this be lame, she prayed. It was so much easier to plan an agenda than to plan a party.

  Amy opened her arms, tilted back her head, and looked at the faces of her cousins, who were staring back at her, dumbfounded.

  “Tonight’s agenda is something of the utmost importance,” she began. “More important than anything we’ve talked about before. So important, in fact, that it’s the only thing on the agenda. Tonight’s objective: HAVE FUN.” She spun around to take in the 360-degree view. “Let the games begin!”

  Heat lamps were perched overhead, so the night felt like April and not the end of December. Waiters emerged, carrying trays of appetizers and sparkling cider.

  “Oooh, bacon-wrapped snails, my favorite!” Nellie said, filling up a napkin.

  “Got any burgers?” Ham asked, and Dan led him to the sliders bar, where there were mini burgers with every kind of topping — ketchup, ranch dressing, even Cheetos. D
an had made sure, during the insane hour when they’d made all the calls, that the party wasn’t going to be all frou-frou stuff. His appetite was back with a vengeance.

  “These truffles are actually quite passable,” Natalie whispered to Ian.

  “Natalie, follow me,” Amy said, grabbing her hand. Sinead had insisted on a trunk of clothes brought up from the Champs-Élysées.

  “Let’s see, here’s a tux for Ian,” Amy said, pushing hangers on the cart. “Black-and-white tracksuit for Ham, T-shirt that looks like a tux for Dan, leather suit for Jonah, and, voilà, ball gowns for us.”

  As Amy came out of the bathroom, wearing a red velvet gown, Natalie’s calm-cool expression morphed into one of pure shock. “You look quite nice!” Natalie said. “I hardly recognized you!”

  “Don’t act so surprised,” Amy said, swatting at her with gloves.

  “Well, anything is an improvement,” Natalie allowed.

  When they reappeared outside, everyone else already neatly changed, Ian was talking to Nellie, but he stopped midsentence when he saw Amy in her party dress, his jaw hanging slightly open. She smiled at him, and he nodded back approvingly.

  At the deejay booth, Jonah spun records beneath a mirrored disco ball that was timed to drop at midnight. The look on his face was pure magic — the pop star forgetting his fame and just rocking out to headphones, like no one was there.

  Ham was locked into the Wii they’d taken with them at the last minute — bowling up a storm for a new high score. “Super Soakers and firecrackers for everyone,” Dan said, breaking out a box of the special delivery he’d ordered back in Attleboro. Amy gave a sigh of relief. Dan was still bruised up, but clearly he was regaining his old self.

  “Yes, and crossword puzzles and board games for our ride back!” Amy chirped in. “And Polaroids to remember this night. And scrapbooks for the vault.”

  Suddenly, it was all too much. Amy didn’t know how all of this, how all of them, had come together, but she could barely contain her emotion. She raised a glass of sparkling cider.

  “Ahem,” she said softly, and everyone stopped to listen. Public speaking would never be her strong suit, but right now she’d give it a shot. “I know you’ve all been through a lot,” she said, searching each of their faces. “You’ve risked your lives.” There was Sinead, silently nodding. “Your closeness to your parents.” Ham caught her eye. “Your reputation.” Jonah regarded her gravely. “Your legacy.” Natalie and Ian lifted their chins. And then, to Dan, “And your chance to be a normal kid.” Amy hoped she could make it through without crying.