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  Contents

  Blimp Page

  Save the World!

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Sneak Peek

  Evidence

  Copyright

  Palm Beach, Florida

  The seasonal citizens of Palm Beach, Florida, shuffled beneath the neatly tended palm trees along the sidewalk, rushing to catch their dinner reservations. The Outcast checked his watch.

  4:45 P.M.

  Oh, how he loathed the average member of his generation! For the wealthy retirees who wintered in Palm Beach there was little to do but shop at the luxury stores along Worth Avenue, lunch at the Beach Club, then dine out at five before settling into the evening’s police procedural shows on television.

  The Outcast locked his sleek gray Lexus and strolled beneath the Spanish-style colonnade that welcomed visitors to a — Cheesecake Factory?

  He grunted. Chain restaurants. To his right and to his left, nothing but chain restaurants.

  What an ignoble place, he thought, for a Cahill to die.

  When he reached the gate he was looking for, he straightened his tie and pressed the buzzer.

  A long time passed until finally a sharp voice blurted through the speaker, “Who is it? I’m just sitting down to dinner.”

  “Beatrice,” the Outcast said. “I’ve brought you a gift.”

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out the small porcelain figurine he’d purchased for just this occasion, and held it up to the security camera. The statue was about the size of his palm, a smiling red-cheeked cat wearing small white wings, its paws extended as if in flight. A ghastly piece of “art,” but it was sure to do the job. Beatrice loved her porcelain cat figurine collection.

  A moment passed, and then the gate swung open. He strolled inside to a quiet courtyard where a sad cluster of potted plants had begun to wither. Beatrice had, no doubt, neglected to care for them herself and was too cheap to hire a gardener.

  She opened the door at the rear of the courtyard and stood in front of him with her hands on her hips and her painted-on eyebrows raised in surprise. Her lips bore the ghastly shade of hot pink that she had been wearing for decades, smeared clownlike over her too-thin lips.

  “I don’t like unexpected guests,” Beatrice told him.

  The Outcast smiled. “You recognize me after all these years?”

  She nodded slowly without moving to invite him in. “I didn’t at first. But now that I see you in person, I know exactly who you are. A psychic once told me that I am an excellent judge of character. Always have been, ever since I was a little girl. Faces change but a man’s character never does.”

  “And are you glad to see me?” the Outcast asked her.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Beatrice snapped. “Not after what you’ve done.”

  “Then you want me to go?” He raised an eyebrow.

  Beatrice acted as if she were studying her long false fingernails against the doorframe. Her voice rose to a mouselike pitch. “I didn’t say that. You’ve come all this way … and you say you’ve brought a gift?”

  The Outcast couldn’t help but smile. No, character never changes. He held up the winged cat figurine. “Why don’t we have a cup of coffee and catch up? I’d love to hear all the juicy gossip since I’ve been away.”

  Beatrice pointed at herself. “Gossip? Me? I never gossip….”

  The Outcast waited.

  “But it has been an eventful time.” She whistled. “Oh, the stories I have, you wouldn’t believe. You know I raised Grace’s two grandchildren and you’re surely aware of what ungrateful teens they’ve become. Oh, don’t just stand there, come in and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  The Outcast nodded.

  “But first, let’s have that Cupid cat,” Beatrice said, greed lighting her eyes. “It’ll go perfectly in my collection.”

  “It isn’t Cupid,” the Outcast told her as he crossed the threshold into her condominium. “It’s Icarus.” He cleared his throat, feeling ridiculous even saying it. “Cat Icarus.”

  “Icarus,” Beatrice repeated. She obviously had no idea what that meant.

  Beatrice had gone to the finest schools, but she had the intellectual curiosity of a three-toed sloth.

  He lifted the winged cat figure up. “From Greek mythology.”

  “Oh, of course,” Beatrice said. “Obviously.” The corner of her mouth twitched.

  “You know the story,” the Outcast said. “How Icarus and his inventor father, Daedalus, were imprisoned inside the Minotaur’s maze on the Greek island of Crete. To escape, Daedalus built two pairs of wings out of feathers and wax so he and his son could fly from the island together. He warned his prideful young son not to fly too high, for if he got too close to the sun, its heat would melt the wax that held the wings together. The boy, filled with the arrogance of youth, flew as high as he could on his borrowed wings. As he’d been warned, the wax melted, and the boy plummeted to his death in the sea.”

  “Well,” Beatrice muttered with a shake of her head. “I prefer less gruesome stories, but of course it is a nice lesson for young people, I suppose, to respect their elders.”

  “Indeed,” the Outcast agreed. He handed her the figurine. “Careful not to drop the little fellow. He’d shatter into a million pieces.”

  “The little ones are so fragile, aren’t they?” Beatrice said as she placed the statue carefully into her winter collection of cat figurines. There were at least fifty of them staring down from the shelves, farmer cats and doctor cats and spy cats and even a custom-made Beatrice cat, complete with hot pink lipstick. “I’ll go get that coffee,” Beatrice said with her back to him as she studied her cat collection proudly. “I only have instant. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Actually, Beatrice, I won’t be staying long enough for coffee,” the Outcast said. He pulled a syringe from his pocket as Beatrice turned to face him. Her jaw went slack, her eyes bulged.

  “Now, there’s no need for that …” she croaked out. “And anyway … I’ll — I’ll scream.”

  “No one will hear you,” he said calmly. “It’s dinner-time in Palm Beach and you can be certain all the televisions are cranked up very, very loud. You should have chosen somewhere else to winter.”

  He rushed for Beatrice, who swung to block him. Her long nails raked across his cheek, but he caught her wrist and spun her around with one hand, gripping her tightly against his body. She squirmed but could not break free.

  The Outcast pre
ssed the syringe into her neck as he whispered in her ear, “You shouldn’t have recognized me, Beatrice. It would have been so much better for you if you hadn’t.”

  Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California

  “Yo, I know that the first RoboGangsta movie broke a billion-dollar box office, which is why now’s the time to make my movie!” Jonah Wizard shouted over the phone. “I’ve told you a hundred times! It’s about a kid from the streets who just wants to be a mime!”

  He paced through his swank living room, gesturing wildly. Giant black-and-white photographs of Jonah gazed down from the walls of the room, and sunlight streamed in from the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked over his infinity pool. Beyond it, Los Angeles shimmered in the heat of midday.

  The sky over Los Angeles was turning gold and red with the sunset. The palm trees that ran along the city streets cast long shadows, and streaks of soft pink light painted the stark white walls of the Wizard crib with delicate stripes.

  As Jonah argued with his father/business manager, Amy, Dan, Hamilton, Ian, and Cara sat on the white leather sofa, staring at the deep-pile black rug on the floor. It seemed to change color the longer you stared at it, blue-black to black-blue to black-black to off-black.

  Amy hadn’t even known off-black was a color.

  “I do too know about the streets! Daaad!” Jonah’s voice grew shriller than Amy Cahill had ever heard it. The sound pierced through her exhaustion, through her worry, and made her want to toss her teenage superstar cousin’s phone out the window … but she couldn’t interrupt him. The money he made off his Hollywood career was the only money they had, now that an old man calling himself the Outcast had staged a coup to take over the Cahill family and cut off all of their access to the Cahill bank accounts, even the secret ones.

  Amy had been all too happy to hand over the reins of the Cahill family to Ian Kabra, who had been all too happy to take over leadership of the most powerful family in the world. He’d said it was the role he was born to play.

  He didn’t get to play it for long.

  The Outcast had kicked Ian out of Cahill headquarters in Massachusetts, turned most of the branches of the family against Ian and his friends, and vowed to re-create four famous disasters from history that the kids would have to stop, if they could. They’d already foiled his attempt to sink a re-creation of the Titanic. One down, three to go.

  Now all they could do was wait.

  Waiting was not something Amy enjoyed.

  “Would you please get off that infernal phone call!” Ian Kabra finally blurted. Apparently, waiting around was not something he enjoyed, either.

  “No!” Jonah yelled. “No way!”

  Ian’s face flushed. Amy tensed. When Grace Cahill, Amy’s grandmother, had been in charge of the family, she would never have allowed her authority to be so openly defied. She’d cast people out for less, even her own husband. And Amy knew for certain that Ian’s parents had killed people for less. Amy wondered what Ian might do.

  But Jonah kept yelling. “I will not add a werewolf to the story, Dad, no matter how much the fandom wants to see it!” Jonah ended the call. He hadn’t been yelling at Ian at all—he’d been yelling at his father.

  Amy relaxed.

  “Sorry about that, Kabra.” Jonah shrugged. “Show business, you know?”

  “I most certainly do not know,” Ian replied.

  “Jonah, you sure you want to make a movie about a mime?” Hamilton Holt asked his cousin. He was Jonah’s best friend, cousin, and bodyguard, and right now he looked genuinely worried about Jonah’s career choices.

  Jonah shrugged. “It’s a drama about the silencing of the artist in the noise of contemporary pop culture.”

  “Uh …” said Hamilton.

  “And RoboGangsta wasn’t my thing,” added Jonah.

  “But I like RoboGangsta,” Hamilton told him. “Stuff blows up.”

  “If you would both please!” Ian Kabra interrupted them. “Might we not discuss the relative merits of stuff blowing up? We have only just averted a disaster of ‘titanic’ proportions and we don’t yet know what the Outcast has in store next.”

  Just then Amy’s phone buzzed in her hands. She frowned down at it.

  “It’s Aunt Beatrice.”

  Aunt Beatrice was their grandmother Grace’s sister, but what Grace had had in charm, daring, and intelligence, Beatrice had in greed, gossip, and cheapness. She used her slice of the Cahill cash to spend half the year in Florida, as far from Amy and Dan as she could get without having to learn a foreign language. She spent the other half in Boston, disapproving of them.

  “What’s she want?” Dan asked.

  “She sent us a text,” Amy told him, more puzzled than ever.

  “That doesn’t sound like her,” said Dan. “She doesn’t even know how to text.”

  Amy held up the phone so Dan could see.

  The text contained only two words:

  Look up

  “I don’t think that is from your Aunt Beatrice,” Ian said as he looked up through the wall of glass, past Jonah’s infinity pool, to a blimp that had settled itself in the air over Los Angeles, framed perfectly in the center of Jonah’s windows, a public air show aimed at just the six of them.

  They rushed to the windows and looked at the blimp, which hovered in place, silhouetted against the darkening sky. The red glow around the edges of its black shadow looked like a bullet wound in the sky.

  “Maybe we should get away from the windows,” Hamilton suggested, thinking of bullet wounds and snipers.

  “I don’t believe our enemies would send a dirigible to neutralize us,” said Ian.

  “Neutralize,” Cara scoffed. “That’s a Brit-fuff-fuff way of saying you don’t think they’re trying to kill us. But you know, Kabra, they are.”

  Ian clenched his jaw. As leader, he needed to keep his emotions in check and not get riled up. However, no one could rile him up quite like Cara Pierce. She seemed to derive some kind of twisted pleasure from needling him at every turn.

  He smiled at her.

  Ian had once heard a $500-per-hour guru tell his father that the simple act of smiling, even a false smile, could alter one’s mood. By smiling, he hoped his mood would be altered from frustrated confusion to calm, cool, and collected confidence, as befitting a Lucian of his standing.

  Cara met his smile with one of her own.

  How she infuriated him! Her smile was so much better than his!

  “Amy.” Ian turned away from Cara, stiffening his back. Something was afoot, and it was his job as leader to do something about it, not to get distracted by Cara. “Does the text message say anything else? Anything about a dirigible?”

  “Stop saying dirigible,” Cara snapped at him. “Just call it a blimp like a normal person.”

  Ian frowned at her. He preferred the word dirigible, and it meant the same thing.

  “No, nothing about a blimp,” said Amy. “Just ‘Look up.’ ”

  “Well, perhaps you should call back, then,” Ian suggested.

  As Amy moved to press CALL, an LED panel below the blimp’s gondola lit up with bright red letters scrolling in a loop over and over again. Dan read the words aloud:

  “ ‘According to Brueghel

  when Icarus fell

  it was spring

  a farmer was ploughing

  his field

  the whole pageantry

  of the year was

  awake tingling

  near

  the edge of the sea

  concerned

  with itself

  sweating in the sun

  that melted

  the wings’ wax

  unsignificantly

  off the coast

  there was

  a splash quite unnoticed

  this was

  Icarus drowning’

  “A message from the Outcast?” Dan wondered.

  “That’s a poem, bro,” Jonah told them all. “ ‘Landscape with the Fall of I
carus,’ by William Carlos Williams. He was a great twentieth-century American poet.”

  “You memorize poetry?” Dan wondered.

  “How do you think I became the best hip-hop lyricist of our time?” Jonah said. “Tupac read Shakespeare. He was a Janus. When I was starting out, I studied all the poetry I could. So I know my boy W. C. Williams wrote this poem.”

  “I never had much fondness for the American poets,” Ian replied, dismissing Jonah’s boast. “Does the poem tell us anything useful?”

  Jonah shrugged. “It’s a poem about a painting by the sixteenth-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Well, it’s a copy of Brueghel’s painting style. No one knows who actually made it. There’s a lot of debate in art circles about the actual painter of this particular work of —”

  “Jonah!” Ian snapped. “We don’t need an art history lesson.”

  “Right,” said Jonah. “So, the painting in question shows a ship sailing out of a harbor and a farmer plowing in his fields. Everyone in the painting is looking in the wrong direction while Icarus drowns in the Aegean Sea. Only his tiny legs are painted in the corner, see?”

  He tapped a panel on the wall and one of his pictures turned into an image of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Every photo in the room was actually an LED screen. The high-resolution picture of the painting was so clear you could even see the brushstrokes on the canvas. Ian tapped the screen where Icarus’s legs kicked helplessly at the sky, ignored by the farmer who kept plowing his field.

  “So this is about looking in the wrong direction?” Ian suggested. “This message is a hint that we are looking in the wrong direction. Could your Aunt Beatrice be trying to warn us?”

  “Beatrice wouldn’t know that,” said Dan. “And probably wouldn’t warn us if she did. Anyway, where would she have gotten a blimp?”

  Ian pursed his lips. He would have preferred suggestions rather than just criticism of his idea. This had to be the start of the Outcast’s next threat. “What do you think, Amy?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I guess I can call her back.”

  “Speakerphone,” Ian snapped a little too forcefully. If Ian was going to prove to the others that he was the right leader for the Cahills, he couldn’t always be letting Amy figure things out. He had to be the one managing this situation.