The Viper's Nest

by Peter Lerangis

  “What was in that box, Nellie?” Amy said. “What did we have to cut away? What was growing all over the place?”

  “The clue we were looking for …” Dan said, gently touching his aloe dressing, “is saving my life!”

  “Aloe …” Amy said. “It was right in front of our noses. The Kabras must not have decoded the Churchill letter. Maybe we’re the first to do it!”

  Nellie hooted. “Take that, Dragon Lady!”

  Dan sank wearily in the sofa. “We’re good, yo,” he said, a peaceful smile spreading across his face. “Now all we need to do is figure out where to go next.”

  The house fell silent.

  But Amy was fixated on the message in Grace’s notebook. “Uh, Dan …” she said. “What do you think this means? ‘I have written Deng Xiaoping, who has agreed to grant visit to A & H when he discovered that they, like him, are M.’”

  “Deng — he was, like, the head of China, right?” Nellie said.

  “A and H …” Dan said. “Arthur and Hope — Mom and Dad. They met the leader of China? Cool. Let’s go there next.”

  “Maybe,” Amy said. “But read it again — Deng agreed to meet them because he realized they were …”

  “M,” Nellie said. “What’s M? Mandarin? Uh, wait …”

  Dan stood and limped over toward a rear window. “Where’s Professor Bardsley, guys?”

  He stubbed his toe on the foot of the piano and his knees buckled. Nellie ran to him as his hand landed hard on the piano keys. “OW!” he cried as an ugly sound echoed through the room.

  Amy ran to him, still holding Grace’s book. “Can’t you sit still?”

  “The book …” Dan was grimacing. “Read me some more …”

  Amy flipped all the way to the end, where there were a dozen or so empty pages — pages Grace would have filled had she lived.

  The last page of writing contained only one entry. “Listen to this,” Amy said, reading aloud: “ ‘I am feeling melancholy today, thinking about my dear A & H and missing them so. I cannot even bear to listen to my beloved di Lasso, because of the reminder …’”

  “Reminder?” Nellie asked. “Reminder of what?”

  Dan was staring at the piano, his face was ashen. “Oh, no …” he murmured.

  Amy panicked. “Dan, sit! You are very, very sick!”

  “Orlando di Lasso …” Dan murmured. “That’s the guy Professor Bardsley specializes in. Loves the music and all. Look.”

  He lifted some sheet music from the piano and showed it to Amy and Nellie.

  Amy glanced at the title, a complicated name in French. “That was the piece Professor Bardsley’s guys sang after we defeated the Tomas, right?”

  “He said Grace loved it,” Nellie said.

  “A reminder, guys,” Dan said. “Grace wrote that his music was a reminder of something sad.”

  “Uh … I’m not following,” Amy said.

  “Amy, you want to know what branch we belong to?” Dan said. “Well, it would be the same one as Mom and Dad, right?”

  “Yeah …”

  “And they were M, Amy! They were able to see this Chinese leader because they were M. And Grace couldn’t look at this music because it made her think of them.” Dan’s face grew red, his raspy voice rising. “Did you read this cover sheet? Did you read this closely? Do you want to know who we are? Look at the third line!”

  He held the music up to her face:

  Mon coeur se recommande à vous

  by Orlando di Lasso

  A Madrigal, in Four Parts

  Madrigal.

  Amy blinked, gathering her senses, and closed Grace’s book.

  Placing it on the table, facedown, she noticed a photo had been laminated onto the back cover.

  Arthur and Hope, looking young and happy, with their arms around a gaunt, unsmiling man.

  From head to toe, he was dressed in black.

  The Hunt Is On

  The race for the 39 Clues continues with more dangerous missions, top secret break-ins, and treacherous double-crossings. Stay one step ahead of the competition by following Amy and Dan’s next adventure.

  Turn the page for a sneak peek! (Just make sure none of your enemies are watching …)

  The sneezing began the instant the pet carrier passed the passenger’s nose.

  A-choo! … a-choo! … a-choo! …

  Frozen in the aisle of the British Airways 777, Amy and Dan Cahill waited for the spasm to end. It never did. Instead, the sneezes grew in intensity, each wheezing explosion shaking the poor man’s entire body.

  “It can’t be that bad!” Dan said impatiently.

  Inside the carrier, Saladin looked around anxiously, unnerved by the ruckus. “Mrrp?”

  Nellie Gomez, the Cahill kids’ au pair, came up behind them. With her iPod blaring the Ramones full blast, all she saw was the man squirming in watery-eyed distress. “I told you the taco stand was serving habanero peppers!” she announced too loudly.

  Her booming voice drew the flight attendant to their row. She spoke to the sneezer in Chinese and then turned to Amy and Dan. “It seems Mr. Lee is allergic to cat hair. Your pet will have to ride in the cargo hold.”

  “But they let us keep him on the connecting flight from Madagascar,” Amy protested.

  By this time, Nellie had switched off her iPod. “Can’t Mr. Lee move to another seat?”

  “I’m sorry. The flight is completely full.”

  Saladin did not go quietly. The Egyptian Mau’s outraged mrrps resounded through the cabin until the boarding door was closed.

  Mr. Lee blew his nose as Amy and Dan squeezed past him into their seats. Nellie settled herself one row behind them, lost once again in her iPod.

  “How lame is this?” Dan complained, already fidgeting, even though the plane had yet to pull back from the gate. “Our second million-hour flight in a row, and we don’t even have Saladin. What could be worse?”

  Their eyes met for about half a second, and then they both looked away. It was a stupid question, and Dan knew it. What could be worse? This was the definition of worse — the real reason Dan’s mood was misery-minus, and why Amy had no patience for him. It had nothing to do with long flights and cats.

  Madrigals!

  After all these weeks, Amy and Dan had finally solved the mystery of which branch of the Cahill family they belonged to. Not the scheming and brilliant Lucians, masters of strategy. Not the creative geniuses, the Janus. Not the physically dominant Tomas, descended from warriors. Not the innovative Ekaterinas, the greatest inventors the world has ever known.

  No. All these weeks circling the globe in the hunt for the 39 Clues, Amy and Dan had been Madrigals.

  Madrigals. The worst of the worst. Madrigals had slaughtered the Russian royal family in the course of a killing spree that spanned continents. Their tools of the trade: stealth, sabotage, deceit, murder, and above all, terror. Even the Lucians feared the Madrigals — and everyone was afraid of the Lucians.

  It’s like living your whole life without ever looking in a mirror, Amy thought, and suddenly you see your reflection, and you’re a monster.

  How could they have been Madrigals without knowing it? All the way from Africa they had repeated that question, hammering themselves with it, hoping against hope that if they asked it enough, the answer might change from the awful truth.

  But Madrigals were so secretive that they even kept secrets from themselves. Amy and Dan’s grandmother, Grace, must have been a Madrigal, too. After the death of their parents, she’d been their closest relative in the world. Yet she’d never said a word about it to them.

  Now Grace is gone, too, Amy reflected sadly. She and Dan were alone — except for Nellie. And, of course, Saladin, their grandmother’s cherished pet.

  They had barely gotten used to the idea that they were members of the illustrious Cahill family. The search for the 39 Clues still seemed unreal to them — a chance for two Boston orphans to become the most powerful people in human history! Ye
t this was the ultimate shocker. Their mom and dad must have been Madrigals, too. Did that mean they were evil?

  Amy had been soul-searching a lot lately, trying to see clearly what was inside her own heart. It wasn’t all sweetness and light. Anger at the dirty tricks of the hunt. Isabel — just the name of her parents’ killer kindled a heat shimmer that distorted her vision.

  Isabel, who had held her as a child. Who had called her dear and played the part of the loving aunt.

  Isabel, who had taken two happy kids and turned them into orphans …

  Revenge!! It was more emotional surge than rational thought, the revving of a supercharged engine. It was so automatic, so pure, that it could only have come from the Madrigal at her core.

  When you’re evil, can you recognize it in yourself?

  Aloud, she said to her brother, “Try to sleep. We’re going to be jet-lagged like crazy when we get to China.”

  “I slept all the way from Africa,” Dan grumbled.

  The plane backed away from the gate, and the safety demonstrations began. “Shortly after takeoff, we invite you to enjoy the video entertainment on your seat-back screen,” came the announcement. “Our first feature film is entitled Terminator Salvation.”

  “Yes!” Dan plucked the headphones out of the seat pocket. “Finally, something goes our way!”

  “Your dweeb-hood will be studied by future generations,” Amy informed him solemnly.

  “Don’t knock it,” he lectured. “Good luck is like a rash. It spreads. Maybe we’ll get on a roll.” He popped the phones over his ears as the 777 taxied through the airport traffic, rumbled down the runway, and took off.

  London fell away beneath them, yet another city. Mr. Lee clutched his armrest, knuckles whitening with every bump and roll. But Amy and Dan were now experienced flyers who barely noticed the turbulence. In the space of weeks, two kids who had never left New England had visited more than a dozen countries on five different continents.

  Dan reclined his chair and focused on the entertainment system in front of him. But when the screen came to life, it showed not the heart-pounding opening of Terminator Salvation but scenes of an ornate palace.

  “What the —” Dan flipped through the channels. The palace was on every station.

  “What’s the problem?” Amy hissed.

  “Where’s the Terminator?”

  Amy activated her own screen and peered at the palace scene. “I know this movie —” All at once, her expression softened. “It’s The Last Emperor. I’ve seen it two or three times — with Grace.”

  A lump materialized in her throat. In the heat of the Clue hunt, it was easy to forget that it had been less than two months since Grace Cahill’s death.

  Grace … Madrigal … It was no misunderstanding. They’d even seen her secret Madrigal hideout.

  I don’t care! I loved her … still love her …

  Dan was in no mood for sentimentality. “Man, they put on the wrong movie!” As he reached for the flight attendant call button, he caught sight of the monitor in front of their allergic neighbor. There was the Terminator, in all his futuristic glory.

  In dismay, Dan climbed halfway over the seat back and gawked at the upside-down cyborg on Nellie’s screen. “Everybody’s getting Terminator but us!”

  Amy frowned. “Why would only two seats be showing something different?”

  “There’s an international conspiracy to bore me,” mourned her brother.

  Beneath the passenger concourses of Heathrow churned a beehive of activity. Down at the tarmac, an army of mechanics and baggage handlers kept one of the world’s busiest airports humming.

  Several maintenance people were enjoying a tea break when they noticed a new man in the locker room. He was older than the others — probably in his late sixties. As he shrugged out of his coverall, they observed that he was very well dressed in a cashmere blazer, turtleneck, and slacks, all black. Careful scrutiny would have revealed that his ID badge was counterfeit. He did not work here. He did not work anywhere.

  Although none of the employees recognized the man in black, Amy and Dan would have. He had dogged their footsteps across more than half the globe.

  To Dan, The Last Emperor was as boring as the ten-hour flight to Beijing.

  “You should pay attention,” Amy advised. “This will be good preparation for our trip to China.”

  “Mmm,” he murmured, eyelids heavy. The only good that could come from being cheated out of Terminator would be if this lousy film put him to sleep.

  He had just dozed off when Amy suddenly dug her fingernails into his arm. “Dan!”

  “What’s the big idea?” His bleary eyes focused on his sister, who was pointing at the screen. “Come on, Amy. I went to sleep to get away from The Last Emperor!”

  “Look!” Amy insisted. “On that wall!”

  Dan squinted. The scene showed the three-year-old Puyi, emperor of China, playing in the Forbidden City, the vast imperial complex. There were hundreds of ornately decorated palaces, temples, and statues. And there, painted on the side of a small building —

  “The Janus crest!” he exclaimed in amazement.

  Amy frowned. “Why’s it in The Last Emperor?”

  “A lot of showbiz people are Janus,” Dan suggested. “Maybe the guy who made this movie was one of them.”

  “Maybe,” his sister said grudgingly, “but I doubt it. The Last Emperor was shot in the eighties. The paint on that wall looks a lot older than that.”

  “But who else could have —?” Dan goggled. “You mean him?” He pointed to the toddler clad in royal robes on the screen. “Pee-yoo?”

  Amy was disgusted. “The name is Puyi, and he was emperor of China, not a bad smell.”

  “And you think he comes from one of the Asian branches of the Cahills?”

  “It doesn’t have to be Puyi,” Amy reasoned. “The Forbidden City has existed for centuries. And a lot more people than just emperors have lived there. Don’t forget the imperial court, attendants, monks, eunuchs —”

  “What’s a eunuch?” Dan interrupted.

  “Well …” Amy blushed, choosing her words carefully. “You know how Saladin was neutered to keep him from making any cat babies —”

  “Yeah, but they don’t do that to people —” Dan’s face drained of color. “Do they?”

  “In ancient China they did,” his sister replied.

  Dan was wary. “But they stopped, right?”

  She rolled her eyes. “A lot of cultures used to do things we’d consider weird today. Including our own. And anyway, China is where our parents went after they left Africa, and Grace traveled there, too. The movie is even more proof that we’re on the right track. Ours are the only two seats on this plane getting The Last Emperor. Somebody wanted us to see the Janus crest.”

  “Yeah, but what if it was the competition sending us on a wild goose chase?” Dan asked. “Or the Madrigals, trying to …” The skin around his lips tightened to a grimace.

  “It’s a chance we’ll have to take,” Amy decided. “At least we know our first stop in Beijing: the Forbidden City, home to China’s rulers a half century before Gideon Cahill was even born.”

  Eyes on the prize. It made sense.

  It was also a very Madrigal way of thinking.

  The new Beijing terminal was one of the most advanced airport buildings in the world. It was ultramodern, yet distinctly Chinese, the curves of its soaring glass ceiling incorporating ancient colors and designs.

  “According to the guidebook, the whole place was inspired by the form of the Chinese dragon,” Amy told her travel companions.

  Dan’s eyes were set on the signs leading to baggage claim. “Let’s hope the airline didn’t send Saladin to Antarctica.”

  The pet carrier circled a luggage carousel, partly hidden by much larger suitcases, boxes, and trunks. Outraged mewing could be heard halfway across the international arrivals lobby.

  Dan dug the carrier out from beneath a bag of golf clu
bs. He peered in at the cat. “Chill out, buddy.”

  He received a sharp mrrp of admonishment in return.

  As they left the baggage claim, the cat’s agitation grew. He clawed nonstop at the mesh of the carrier.

  Amy was worried. “What’s wrong with Saladin, Dan? Is he sick?”

  “He’s probably just stir-crazy,” Dan replied. “I’m going to cut him loose, let him stretch his legs.”

  “You can’t do that,” Nellie protested. “We’re in the middle of a crowded airport.”

  But Dan had already sprung the door.

  Saladin burst from the carrier like he’d been shot out of a cannon, claws skittering on the tiles. He spun around, getting his bearings. Then, before their horrified eyes, he launched himself at a tall, lean older man seated on a nearby bench, reading a newspaper.

  “Saladin!” Amy gasped. “No!”

  A cry of shock escaped the victim, and he leaped to his feet, sending his hat flopping to the floor.

  Dan grabbed the cat. Amy picked up the fallen hat and held it out to its owner. “Sorry, mister —” Her eyes fell on his diamond-handled walking stick.

  He accepted the hat with a sheepish smile. It was Alistair Oh, Cahill cousin and competitor in the search for the 39 Clues.

  “Ah, hello, children. You’re looking well.”

  The Egyptian Mau hissed at him from Dan’s arms.

  “You were spying on us!” Amy accused.

  “Spying?” Uncle Alistair repeated. “No. I’m merely here to welcome you back to Asia and offer my assistance. The language barrier can be quite a hurdle in China, but my Mandarin is excellent.”

  Nellie’s eyes narrowed the way they always did when she suspected her charges were being taken advantage of. “And you’re making this offer out of the goodness of your heart?”

  “Of course! Although”—Alistair’s gracious smile began to seem slightly forced — “it would be an excellent opportunity to bring one another up to date on our progress on the clue hunt.”