J.M.J.

A/N: Thank you so much for continuing to read! Thank you especially to Candylou, ErinJordan, Drumboy100, max2013, EvergreenDreamweaver, angelicalkiss, and Cherylann Rivers for your reviews on the last chapter! There will be two more chapters after this one.

Chapter X

Chet stared down into the passageway. It was dark and narrow, and he was beginning to feel that he would really rather not go down in it by himself without even so much as a flashlight. For all he knew, Marius could have been lying about the passage leading outside. It could be a trap, either leading straight back to the masked revolutionaries or into an impenetrable maze or to a giant pit. He couldn't see any reason for Marius to try to kill him, but there was also no apparent reason for him to run off the way he had. He hadn't said anything before that about anyone whom he had to go back for. Why would have he left this person in the first place?

Chet knew he was just being paranoid because he was alone. If there was only Frank or Joe or Iola or Biff or Jerry was with him, then he wouldn't be nearly as nervous about going down in here. Still, what else was he going to do? He might as well have stayed back in that dungeon if he wasn't going to go down into the tunnel now. He took a deep breath, straightened his shoulders, and started down.

He wasn't a moment too soon, but he was nearly a moment too late. He had only just pulled the trapdoor back down before he heard footsteps come into the room. Opening the trapdoor a crack, he peered out. The soles of several pairs of heavy, black boots were visible, and the sound of male voices was clearly audible. They were speaking in the Laurenian language, but, oddly enough, Chet caught three definitely English words: "the four winds".

Then he closed the trapdoor and plunged himself into total darkness. His heart hammered, and he was afraid to even move lest he step into a hole. He was out of choices now, though. The only thing he could even do now was to try to find his way out of the tunnel. He took a few tentative steps forward and found the floor smooth and even and solid.

Just as Chet was beginning to relax a little, the walkie-talkie in his hand crackled. His eyes bulged and he frantically tried to turn it off as Joe's voice came over it. Even in the dark, he found the switch and turned it off. Then he waited, listening for the sound of the trapdoor opening.

A minute passed. Then another. It sounded like the conversation from the room above had grown more excited, but there was no sign of pursuit. Chet breathed a little easier as he remembered how difficult it had been for him and Marius to find the trapdoor and the catch that opened it. Chances were good that these masked men wouldn't be able to do the same, at least not very quickly. By the time they found it, if they found it, Chet could be well on his way out of here. He just needed to figure out where to go.

He stretched out one of his hands and soon found a wall. He wasn't sure which way to follow the wall, but he figured that if he took the wrong direction, he'd figure it out pretty quickly when he ran into another wall or something. He made his choice and started forward.

After a few minutes, he came to a dead end. Even though he felt around over the wall he had run into, he could not find any sign that the tunnel went farther in this direction. Confident now that he knew which way to go, he turned around and began feeling his way in the opposite direction. However, he had scarcely been walking for ten minutes before he ran into another wall. This one, too, seemed to be a dead end.

Chet sank down to the stone floor. Marius had led him to a trap after all.

HBHBHBHBHB

"Do you think this is good enough?" Biff asked as he placed the last piece of furniture he and his friends could find in front of the door to the cell block.

"It won't stop machine guns if they decide to try shooting this door down like they did with the security booth," Jim said. "It might hold them out for a little while, though, if they don't use their guns."

Phil shook his head. "That's not good enough. We can't get everybody out of their cells, so we have to make sure they're not going to get hurt when we leave."

"Let's look at that map again that Sonja gave us," Tony suggested.

Jerry had been holding onto it, and he now flattened it out so that they could all examine it. It wasn't overly detailed and certainly didn't show any secret passages or any other parts of the castle that were not open to tourists, but it did give the general layout of the castle, as well as all the exits.

"It's not much good," Jerry complained. "There's only the one main exit and then several emergency exits. They're all bound to be guarded, and even if they weren't, an alarm will go off if you open one and who knows what would happen then."

"True," Tony agreed, "but what about a window? This is a castle, after all, and some of the windows are pretty big. Could we climb out through one of them?"

"If we can find a window that opens, possibly," Phil said. "That's not something we can count on."

"You know, Sonja's a real psycho, but even she couldn't be crazy enough to try something like this without a backup plan to get out," Jim said. "You know, in case she sets off an alarm she wasn't counting on or someone notices that the pendant is gone before she has a chance to get out. If one of those things happened, they'd be searching everyone leaving the museum. She'd have to have some other way out in that case."

Biff groaned. "You mean, talk to her again? You can count me out of that. I've had enough of her."

"Come on, Jim; it's your idea," Phil said. "You and I will go talk to her."

They had locked Sonja in their former cell. More than one of them had had misgivings about this, since they had no way of unlocking the cell again once they had closed the door for real. Still, most of them felt that it was really their only choice. Letting Sonja loose might very well end in disaster for them.

After they had locked Sonja up, the boys had gone to work building the barricade in front of the door while Callie and Iola had gone around to their classmates and any other prisoners who spoke English and explained that they had no means of unlocking any more cells but that they were working on an escape plan. They were just rejoining the boys when Jim suggested talking to Sonja again.

Jim glanced toward the cell where Sonja was imprisoned and swallowed hard. "Maybe it's not such a good idea. She probably won't tell us."

"Aw, come on. She won't bite." Phil grabbed him by the arm and steered him toward the cell.

Sonja was standing in the middle of the cell with her back to the door and her arms crossed in front of her.

"Um, excuse me," Phil said. Sonja ignored him. "Sonja, you've got as much of an interest in this as any of us. Do you know another way out of the castle?"

Sonja glanced over her shoulder. "Maybe, maybe not. It doesn't really matter to you anymore. You blew your chance when you locked me in here. It'll suit me just fine if the revolutionaries come in here, because I know who has the Pendant and I can offer them that information in exchange for my freedom. If that's the best I can do, it's a pretty disappointing day, but it's a whole lot better than helping you folks put me in a Laurenian jail. You have any idea what those are like? Oh, no. You're young and innocent American teenagers. You wouldn't even be able to imagine anything like that."

"Maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to steal that pendant in the first place," Jim pointed out.

"Maybe, but then where would y'all be? Dead, that's where. Those revolutionaries wouldn't have had to ask your buddies to help them find the Pendant, so they would have just shot all of you. Of course, if that's what you prefer to someone breaking one, tiny little law by stealing something from someone it doesn't rightfully belong to in the first place, then go ahead with your righteousness."

"What are you talking about?" Phil asked. "You're saying the Pendant doesn't belong to the Laurenian government? Who would it belong to then?"

"Oh, I don't know, the last surviving member of the Laurenian royal family, possibly," Sonja said.

"You're not…" Jim began, but he shook his head. "Then I'd know you were out of your head if you were claiming to be some kind of princess."

Sonja laughed. "Wouldn't that be cute? Personally, I think I'd make a great princess. I've got all the qualifications I need: smarts, looks. Everything, in fact, except having a drop of royal blood. No, I'm no more the lost heir to the throne of Laurenia than you are the lost heir of the Emperor of China. But I know who is."

Phil and Jim glanced at one another, unsure whether to believe her or not or if they believed her, then what they should do about it.

"So, you're saying that you stole the Ruby Pendant to give to some lost princess?" Jim asked.

"Or prince," Sonja corrected him. She feigned surprise. "Surely, you didn't think I'd steal it for myself? You must think I'm a terrible person. Well, I guess I did sort of threaten to slit your friends' throats, so I don't exactly blame you. Still, murder and stealing something like the Ruby Pendant are two very different things."

"Yeah, and murder is a lot worse, so don't think you're going to convince us that you're not so bad after all," Phil said. "Anyway, you just said you'd be willing to trade the Pendant for your freedom, so I suspect you're lying about this."

"Hmm. My sources were sadly mistaken about all of you," Sonja said. "They said all the Hardy Boys' friends were complete idiots, but it turns out you're possibly not complete idiots."

Jim rolled his eyes. "Thanks. We're so flattered."

"Why were you researching Frank and Joe?" Phil asked. "You couldn't have known that we'd turn up at the museum at the same time as you."

"Actually, I could know that," Sonja told him. "I almost thought about switching the whole plan to a different day because of it, but that would have been so much work. See, I had a couple of partners in this whole thing. One of them was that silly Marius, and the other is an employee here at the museum. Lest you think the worst of them, they weren't too willing, so I sort of had to twist both their arms. Anyway, through the one partner, I learned that a group of American tourists was scheduled to come here today, and there's so much bureaucratic red tape in everything here in Laurenia, I was able to get a list of the exact names. So I did my homework."

"You must have also done your homework on your extraction plan," Phil said.

Sonja snorted and bent over double laughing. "Did you really just say that with a straight face? Okay, maybe my sources weren't so wrong after all, huh?"

Phil gritted his teeth in annoyance. "Did you or did you not have a plan for getting out of this building?"

Sonja stared at him, a little bit of a smile flickering on her face, but she said nothing.

In the stillness, Iola caught a sound from the other side of the door and stiffened. "There's someone out there."

"Then our barricade is probably just about to get tested," Biff said. "Everybody get out of the way!"

They all stepped back from in front of the doors and into the protection of the stone walls. There was a rattling at the doorknob, angry voices, and then something was rammed into the door, causing it and the makeshift "barricade" to shudder.

HBHBHBHBHB

"If Chet's in trouble, we've got to go get him out," Joe said, all set to run out to the rescue.

"Hold on." Frank put out a hand as if to hold his brother back. "Chet might not be in trouble at all. His radio might have run out of batteries, or maybe he's in the tunnel and can't pick up the signal from our radio."

Joe relaxed a tiny bit. "I guess that could be," he admitted. "Still, aren't we going to make sure?"

Frank glanced around at the other people in the room. Vanessa was sitting on a trunk, trying to compose herself, while Kristen was still sulking in a corner. Mr. Byron was pacing back and forth with his hands behind his back. Illya Láska looked the most unconcerned as he sat on the one chair in the room, doing nothing except clasping his hand over the pocket where he was keeping the Pendant.

"I don't think it's a good idea to split up even more," Frank said, speaking quietly so that none of the others could overhear him. "I don't like the thought of Chet being alone, and I'm worried sick about Callie and Iola, of course, but what can we do on our own? We don't even know what's going on."

"Then I think it's high time to figure that out," Joe replied. "What do we have so far?"

"We know Sonja stole the Pendant, but we don't know why," Frank said. "We also know that Marius knows something about her, and that she needed someone like him to pull the theft off."

"So, Marius and Sonja working together could be one thesis." Joe folded his arms as he thought it over. "It works pretty well. Marius could have figured out how to disconnect the alarm, or he might have even insisted on the museum disconnecting the alarm themselves while he and his men worked. Then he could have easily made sure that everyone was late this morning. The secret passage that he knew about could have been their planned escape route. Then maybe Sonja's the really crazy one of the pair who is willing to do whatever it takes, while Marius never actually wanted to hurt anyone. That could be why he was so insistent that Sonja wasn't going to let the girls go even if we cooperated with her. Then the person he went back for could have been Sonja herself."

Frank nodded. "It holds together pretty well. The problem is that there's not a shred of evidence to back it up."

"Yeah," Joe agreed. "I don't know that I like Marius going back for Sonja, anyway. It's hard to tell over a radio, but it sounded to me more like he hated her than that he'd go back into the fire for her."

"Maybe Sonja was forcing Marius into helping her by holding someone else captive."

"Then why wouldn't he have said anything about it?"

"He might not have trusted us," Frank said. "You've got to admit, none of us have exactly been acting like normal teenagers thrown into a situation like this. I mean, we know that this isn't our first time in a situation like this and we've got to stay calm and cool about, and it's the same for Chet and the rest of the guys. You know how much Illya's complete lack of emotion of any kind has been weirding us out. Maybe we're doing the same to Marius."

"Okay, that makes sense," Joe admitted, "but I'm still going to maintain that Illya is way weirder than we could ever be."

"Whatever." Frank gave a small shake of his head. "Anyway, that would mean that there's a third person involved in this, and that that third person must be in the castle, since Marius presumably went back for them."

"Right. But they couldn't have been locked in the dungeon, since Marius wouldn't have left them then. That narrows it down to one of the museum employees, which makes sense. They'd be able to help Sonja in their own right, possibly because she was threatening Marius, too. I have a hunch I know which one it was, too: Natalia."

"Why her?" Frank asked.

"She knew something when we were interviewing her," Joe said. "I don't know what she knew, but it was something that Illya didn't want her to tell us. Which, I guess, means that Illya must know what it was. I would assume that the only information that Illya would be particularly opposed to us getting would be something to do with where the Pendant was. Illya also cooperated with Sonja pretty easily."

"You think Sonja and Illya are working together, too?"

Joe shrugged. "Stranger things have happened. I don't know. There's another thing, too, though, about Natalia. She was scared of something when she first came in. At first, I figured it was, you know, the masked guys with machine guns who were threatening everybody, but from the way she stood up to Demyan and was arguing with him, I don't think so. She must have been scared of something else. Sonja, maybe?"

"Could be," Frank agreed. "So, we've got Sonja working with Marius and Natalia as her unwilling partners. Then there's Illya, who may or may not be involved in that whole scheme. Now, how does Demyan and his people fit in?"

"They seem pretty straightforward," Joe said.

"But is just a coincidence that they planned their invasion or whatever you want to call it for the same day that Sonja planned her burglary? It would be a pretty weird one if it was."

Joe began to respond, but at that moment, they heard footsteps outside the door in the hallway. Vanessa jumped to her feet and everyone looked toward the door.

Frank glanced around the room for possible hiding places. There was no other chance in going up against armed opponents. Unfortunately, there was nothing that could provide really good cover, except for a door at the opposite end of the room.

"Van, go see what's behind that door," Frank said. "If it's a way out of this room, it looks like we'll have to take it."

"Right," Vanessa agreed. She sprinted to the door and opened it a crack to peer through. "It leads into another hallway, all right. I don't know which one. I'm so lost in this place."

"No time to worry about that," Joe told her. "Let's go!"

First Vanessa and then Kristen slipped through the door. The others were about to follow them when there was a loud splintering sound and someone kicked open the other door. Joe pushed the one that the girls had escaped through closed with his foot just as two men in black masks stepped through the opposite door.