Hunted by Riley Clifford

 
    The Clue Hunt
     
    The walls of the watcher’s office were painted a stark, blinding white. Others found the endless lack of color unsettling, even frightening, but the watcher enjoyed her sterile environment. She didn’t need windows or paintings or trophies from past missions. She just needed one thing, the only thing in her office that broke the uniformity of the room — the panel of viewscreens opposite her desk. When they weren’t in use, they blended perfectly with the surgically clean walls, but the viewscreens were rarely turned off. She was the watcher. And there was always someone to watch.
    The watcher saw everything. She saw into the offices of politicians from every country. She observed five-star generals discussing strategy during top secret meetings. She heard the words and monitored the faces of thousands of unsuspecting people around the world. No one could escape the watcher’s eyes.
    Not even the Cahill family.
    The watcher had followed them throughout her entire career. All of her colleagues had. No one was a greater threat to her organization than the Cahills. And now they were on the move again.
    Not that they’d ever really stopped. The four branches of the largest, most powerful family in the world had been hunting for the 39 Clues for five hundred years. None of them — not the Ekaterinas, the Janus, the Tomas, or even the powerful Lucians — had managed to find all of the Clues.
    But that was about to change. Grace Cahill, the matriarch of the Cahill family, was dead. And her death had kicked off a new Clue hunt, with teams from all branches of the Cahill family competing. Whoever was the first to find the Clues would become the most powerful person in human history. Or so they thought.
    The watcher was sitting inside her office, looking through the latest reports on Cahill activity, a small smile playing across her face. Grace Cahill had been gone less than a week, and the Clue-hunting teams were already creating mayhem that rivaled anything their ancestors had caused. Which, of course, was why they so intrigued the watcher. The Cahills were the best inventors, athletes, artists, and leaders in the world, and they had spent centuries using their formidable talents to search for Clues. They were very good at what they did. And the watcher needed good people.
    It would be tricky, convincing one of them to abandon the Clue hunt in favor of other pursuits. But she knew that, to the right Cahill, the watcher’s offer would have considerable appeal.
    The trick was to identify the most promising candidate. Her employers needed someone malleable, someone who could be convinced to make the Clues a second priority.
    One of the Cahill children.
    They were more open-minded than their parents, and more talented, too. In spite of their young ages, many of them had already achieved far more than their adult counterparts. They were intelligent, strong, wealthy, and even powerful. Each one had the potential to make the watcher’s employers very happy. But more important, their youth made them vulnerable. They would be drawn in by the tantalizing promise of something greater than the Clues. The watcher would make the right candidate an offer that couldn’t be refused.
    First, though, she had to eliminate any candidate who might jeopardize her employers’ mission. She had to find someone with the right mix of talent and morals that were a bit . . . flexible. Someone her employers could count on to get a job done — no matter what that job might be.
    After all, the Vespers only accepted the best.

     

    Ted Starling felt a surge of victory as he pulled the car to a stop in front of the Franklin Institute in downtown Philadelphia.
    “There,” he said, pointing. “A Toyota hybrid.”
    “Lucky guess,” his brother, Ned, said from the backseat, but he was grinning.
    “The Cahill kids aren’t in it,” Ted observed. “Just their babysitter. Looks like they’ve been inside for a