by Roland Smith
Phoenix looked more closely into the crevice. There were dozens of grubs in the dead wood, pale and soft, wriggling and writhing and squirming. . . .
His stomach heaved at the sight of them.
He couldn’t do it.
Turning away, he took a step and stumbled on the uneven ground. His reactions dulled by hunger and fatigue and cold, he couldn’t catch himself, and fell to his knees. He felt tears coming into his eyes and let them roll down his cheeks unchecked.
At least they were warm.
Phoenix cried for a while. When he finally stopped and his vision cleared, he saw a slim stick in front of him. Almost a twig, really.
And he remembered something from another television program. On one of the nature channels. Chimpanzees and termites . . .
The edges of Phoenix’s poor frozen brain started to thaw a little.
I have to get out of here and get help for the others. And I’ll never be able to do that if I don’t eat something.
Phoenix picked up the stick. He chewed one end of it until it was frayed, then fanned out the wood fibers. Now it looked like a broomstick for a very tiny witch.
He pushed the stick into the crack in the stump and waited a few moments. Slowly, carefully, he pulled it out.
There were three nice, fat grubs clinging to the frayed wood. They’ll taste like chicken, he told himself.
Phoenix took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth.
Evan stared at the computer screen. This can’t be right.
Some time ago, Evan had put out a call to Cahill operatives all over the world, asking for their help in identifying a mole in the network. No one was above suspicion. Not Amy, not Dan, not himself.
The results of the search were in, and Evan couldn’t believe what he was seeing on the screen.
Something this big — I have to find a way to verify it. I need to be one hundred and ten percent sure before I tell Amy.
Evan shook off the shivers that were crawling down his spine, then shoved his ethical reservations firmly aside as he tapped into the suspect’s computer.
Where to start? E-mails and documents would be the obvious choice. Maybe too obvious . . . isn’t that where you’d expect someone to start looking?
Evan moused over the desktop icons.
Music . . . calendar . . . spreadsheets . . . photos . . .
Photos. One picture is worth a thousand words?
He clicked on the icon and, after only a few moments, found a password-protected file. It was quick work to figure out the password. Tsk, tsk — shouldn’t use the names of family members. Too easy.
The file opened. Evan frowned.
There were several copies of a photo of Nellie — the one sent by the Vespers, in which she was thrusting a lizard toward the camera. The copies were identical.
Evan leaned closer to the screen. “What the heck?” he said aloud.
Identical, except for one thing: The lizards were different.
Green lizard. Brown lizard. Spotted, striped, bug-eyed . . . There was no question about it: The photos had been manipulated. The lizard in the original photo had been swapped out for different ones. The last four photos showed the same lizard altered slightly for size and position.
A tegu lizard, from Argentina. That’s what she said.
Evan sat back and gulped for air, trying to settle the sick feeling that was roiling his stomach.
South America — where Ian was. She was trying to make us think it was him.
She, meaning Sinead.
Amy’s best friend.
Who knew everything — everything — about the Cahill operation. The damage she could do —
Evan was on his feet and headed for the door. He ran up the stairs and down a hallway, shouldered open a door, and hit the light switch.
Drawers gaping, closet ajar, clothes discarded on the floor — all the signs of a hasty exit.
He was too late.
Sinead was gone.
Evan spun around wildly and crashed into the door frame in his haste to get back to the comm center.
He had to tell Amy that Sinead was the mole. If Sinead got to her first . . . Evan’s heart was pounding.
Amy could be in terrible danger.
Dan, Amy, and Atticus all stared at Jake.
“What the heck is the Voynich?” Dan asked, followed immediately by, “What’s the four-oh-eight?” from Amy.
“It’s an old manuscript,” Jake answered, “kept by the Beinecke Library at Yale. In their collection, the Voynich is manuscript number four hundred eight. But I’m not sure what the seventy-four means.”
“How do you know all that?” Atticus asked.
Jake slumped against the seat back. “Mom,” he said quietly.
“Your mom had something to do with the Voynich?” Amy asked.
Jake scowled at her. Why does she have to question everything I say?
“That was her field,” he said with exaggerated patience. “Mostly the ancient world, but sometimes medieval, too. She liked old stuff. Is that okay with you?”
Amy held her hands up in mock surrender. “Sorry for asking,” she said.
Jake turned back to the group and said, “Get comfy, everyone. This is a long story.
“Mom always had a lot of different projects going,” Jake said. “But for years, no matter what else she was working on, she always went back to the Voynich. She used to talk to me about it.”
“Huh,” Atticus said. “She never told me about it.”
Jake was silent for a moment. “When she first got into it, you were really little,” he said. “And then — well, it was sort of our thing. Like, special, between the two of us.” Pause. “I think she was trying to make sure I knew it didn’t matter that she wasn’t my birth mom. . . .”
His voice trailed off.
Astrid had been his stepmother. His own mother —
his dad’s first wife — had passed away when Jake was only a year old. His dad had remarried two years later; Astrid was the only mom he had ever really known.
It had been more than a year since her death. The pain was duller now, but it was still there, and he was pretty sure it always would be.
“Okay,” Atticus said. “That’s cool.”
Jake nodded gratefully at his brother, then took the laptop from Dan.
“So, the Voynich,” Jake said. “It’s a whole book — I can’t remember exactly, but it’s over two hundred pages long. And it’s really old.”
“How old?” Amy asked.
“They weren’t sure, for a long time,” Jake said. “This bookseller named Voynich — that’s where it got its name — he found it in an old monastery in Italy. In 1912, I think. And he bought it from the monks. Ever since then, there have been all these theories. Some people thought it was from the thirteenth century, or it was from the eighteenth, or it was modern, a forgery. Then a few years ago, the Beinecke had it carbon-dated. Both the pages and the ink are fifteenth century, which proves —”
“That it isn’t a forgery,” Dan said.
“No, not exactly,” Jake said. “What it proves is that it’s a medieval document. I mean, a really determined forger could get really old vellum and really old ink, but they’re pretty sure that’s not what happened.”
“So what kind of document is it?” Amy asked. “What does it say?”
Jake snorted. “That,” he said, “is the problem.”
Jake went on to explain that the Voynich was
written in an unknown language — one never seen before.
“And nobody’s been able to figure it out,” he said.
He started clicking on the laptop. “Yale gets so many requests to see the manuscript that they couldn’t keep up with all of them,” he said. “So they finally digitized the whole thing, and now anyone who wants to study it can look at the pages online.”
A few clicks, and he had a digital image of one of the pages from the Voynich.
“Look,” he said. He turned t
he screen around so they could all see it.
“Is it in code?” Dan asked. “It looks like something you could figure out. I mean, not you you, but somebody.”
“That’s what everybody thinks when they first see it,” Jake said. “But hundreds of people have tried — maybe thousands. Even the government got into it. You know the guys who broke the Japanese and German codes during World War II? They worked on it for years and got nothing.”
“Wow,” Amy said. “That’s amazing.”
Jake glanced at her quickly. She was looking at the screen, not at him, and there didn’t seem to be any edge to her voice.
Girls. The oldest mystery in the universe. Amy was acting like their kiss had never happened. It wasn’t just me, Jake thought. She definitely kissed me back.
“What are the pictures of?” Dan asked.
“Three kinds of illustrations,” Jake answered. Click — “Botanical drawings” — click click — “astronomical charts” — click click — “and these weird ones. Mom always called them the plumbing pictures.”
“Hello!” Dan said.
The “plumbing pictures” showed water flowing through pipes, basins, and aqueducts. In almost all of them, there were naked women swimming.
Atticus nudged Dan and they both giggled.
“Oh, please,” Amy said. Jake could see that she was a little embarrassed. She changed the subject. “What about the botanical drawings? Wouldn’t they give a clue to where the book was written, or what it’s about?”
“You’d think so,” Jake said. “But the plants aren’t from real life. I mean, they think they’ve identified a couple of them, but even those have parts that aren’t real.”
Jake sighed. “All kinds of people have tried to figure it out. Historians, of course, like Mom. But also botanists, astronomers, linguists, mathematicians, philosophers, theologians —”
“Plumbers?” Dan said with a snicker.
Jake grinned. “Some scholars have spent their whole lives working on it,” he said. “And you wouldn’t believe the theories they come up with.”
“Like what?” Atticus asked.
“Aliens,” Jake said. “And angels. That’s just two of them.”
“You can’t be serious,” Amy said.
“I’m not, but they are,” Jake said. “And even some of the more credible theories are pretty out-there. Like, it’s an old form of Ukrainian, but you’re only supposed to read every fifth letter.”
Dan had sobered up now that the subject was not naked women. “What about the seventy-four?” he asked. “Do you think that means we’re supposed to steal page seventy-four?”
“Or maybe, the first seventy-four pages?” Amy guessed.
“But that’s not the most important question, not really,” Atticus said. “The question is, why do the Vespers want it? If they can’t read it, it’s no use to them.”
Jake frowned, thinking hard. “I get what you’re saying,” he said slowly. “If the Vespers are smart enough to read the Voynich, we’re really in trouble.”
They had been making decent progress from the airport through the borough of Queens, in taxi mode: mad spurts of shouldering through traffic alternating with a sulky crawl. Now, as they drove onto the Whitestone Bridge, the driver whistled through his teeth. “Look like trouble here,” he said.
A police car was parked across the lanes. An officer stood facing them, arm up, palm flat, in the classic “halt” stance. The taxi stopped, and within seconds, the bridge entrance behind them became a giant parking lot packed with cars.
Beyond the cop, the last of the cars that had been allowed through disappeared from sight. The bridge’s roadway was now completely clear.
“What’s going on?” Dan asked from the back.
“There’s a motorcycle —” Amy said. “No, wait, it’s like a motorcade, sort of.”
Three SUVs with motorcycles front and rear were coming toward them on the wrong side of the road. Celebrity? Amy thought. Or maybe some politician.
As if he could hear her thoughts, Dan said, “Must be somebody pretty important to stop a whole bridge’s worth of traffic.”
Then he gasped, and the heads of the other three swiveled to stare at him.
It was as if all four of them had the same thought at the same moment.
Who had that kind of power?
The Vespers!
“Move!” Amy said urgently.
They scrambled out of the car. The taxi driver began yelling at them.
“Hey! Where you going? You say Connettytuck, I taking you there!” He got out, too, and grabbed Dan’s arm.
“My backpack!” Dan said. “The trunk, open the trunk!”
He twisted out of the driver’s grasp, leaned inside the open door, and groped around for the trunk release. He hit the buttons for the warning lights and the gas cap before he found the right one, the driver scolding him in a language he didn’t understand.
“Dan, leave it!” Amy said. “We have to get out of here!” But Dan ran to the back of the taxi and grabbed the pack.
The motorcycle pulled over. The lead SUV made a U-turn and stopped near the police car. The driver-side door opened.
“RUN!” Amy yelled. “If we get separated, meet up at Yale!”
She glanced around wildly. They were on a bridge, with only two choices: forward or back. And forward was toward the SUVs.
Which meant they had no choice. Two minus one equals zero: Vesper math.
Amy turned and started running back the way they had come.
Copyright © 2012 by Scholastic Inc. All rights reserved. Published by
Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920.
SCHOLASTIC, THE 39 CLUES, and associated logos
are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012931144
e-ISBN 978-0-545-34470-8
Book illustrations by Charice Silverman for Scholastic
Photos of people: Ken Karp for Scholastic
Antikythera device: AAAC/TopFoto/The Image Works
Rock texture for star: CG textures
First edition, September 2012
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