The 39 Clues Book 10: Into the Gauntlet

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  "Get on the highway," Amy said.

  "Toward ... ?" Nellie asked.

  "Not sure yet. Got any scissors?" Amy asked.

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  "On my Swiss Army knife," Nellie said. "Bottom pocket in my bag, right-hand side."

  Amy pulled out the knife. Then she reached into her own bag for a Boston College T-shirt that had gotten kind of ragged during the Clue hunt. She began cutting off a spiral strip of the shirt from the bottom up. She made the strip extra long, just in case. Then she leaned over the front seat and handed the cloth and a thin marker to Dan.

  "Start writing," she said.

  Dan let out a deep breath.

  That's why he wasn't talking, Amy thought. He was holding his breath, trying so hard not to forget.

  She'd noticed on the Clue hunt that Dan's photographic memory wasn't completely effortless. He just acted like it was.

  "Done," Dan said a few minutes later.

  He held up the strip. Its edges curled up because of the way it'd been cut.

  Curled, Amy thought. A spiral. Like...

  "I still don't get it," Dan said. "I can remember the letters from the ribbon. I'm even pretty sure I got the wacko spacing right, all the gaps between the letters. But I can't figure out what any of it means."

  "Wrap the cloth around the pole," Amy said. "Because back in Shakespeare's time, English villages always had these huge midsummer parties where girls would dance and wrap ribbons around a maypole in particular patterns. The midsummer

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  festival would have been a big deal in Stratford, something Shakespeare probably missed when he moved to London. Something that reminded him of home."

  Home, Amy thought. That's what this clue is about. It's calling Cahills back home. Like in the hint we got in London: "Everything can come full circle."

  "One of Shakespeare's plays is called A Midsummer Night's Dream," Nellie said as she jerked the steering wheel left and right. "It's kind of bizarre, with--"

  "Stop it!" Dan yelled. "Both of you --stop trying to tell me stuff!"

  "I just thought it might help you solve that," Nellie said, sounding offended.

  "But I already have," Dan said, holding up the pole. "It's numbers, after all. Just spelled out as words!"

  Amy hung over the front seat so she could see. Dan had lined up the edges of the strip of cloth with the words spiraling around the pole: Madrigal Stronghold * Cahill Ancestral Home * Madrigal Stronghold * Cahill Ancestral Home...

  With the strip of cloth wrapped all the way around the pole, the nonsensical list of letters did indeed spell out words on one side.

  '"Fifty-three oN Six oW'?" Amy said. "What's that mean? Oh--"

  "That's not 'oN' and 'oW,'" Nellie said, glancing toward the pole. "That's--"

  "Degrees north," Dan said.

  "And degrees west," Amy said.

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  "Latitude and longitude," Nellie finished.

  They'd all figured it out at the same time. The ribbon gave them the precise coordinates of the Madrigal stronghold.

  Nellie yanked the portable GPS unit off the dashboard and tossed it back to Amy.

  "Good thing I sprang for the deluxe rental package, now that you both know we're spending Madrigal money," Nellie said as Amy punched in the coordinates. "Where to?"

  Amy stared at the glowing screen.

  "Somewhere that might take a lot more Madrigal money," Amy muttered. She shifted to dialing Nellie's cell phone. "Hello, Mr. McIntyre? We need to rent a helicopter."

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  CHAPTER 18

  Fiske paced while Mr. McIntyre talked on the phone.

  "Amy and Dan know where they need to go," Mr. McIntyre reported, his hand cupped over the phone. "They're in a hurry. They want to rent a helicopter."

  "But we haven't heard from our man at the church about how things went there?" Fiske asked.

  Mr. McIntyre shook his head and went back to talking on the phone. "Do you feel that you and the other teams have reached a proper, ah, rapprochement?" he asked. "You believe that your actions in Stratford--and from this point forward -- will lead to the achievement of all our goals?"

  Fiske could always tell when Mr. McIntyre was nervous. He started sounding more and more like a lawyer.

  "Yes," Mr. McIntyre continued. "I am talking about the reunification of the Cahill family, and the end of five hundred years of hostility, enmity, and outright war."

  Fiske passed close enough in his pacing that he could hear Amy's voice coming through the cell phone.

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  "Mr. McIntyre, we're doing the best we can," she said. "Dan kind of has a plan."

  Grace had told Fiske once that Amy reminded her of him. Because of that, Fiske had spent the entire Clue hunt trying to imagine himself in Dan's and Amy's shoes.

  They're braver than I am, he'd thought, again and again. They're always so sure of themselves.

  But now, hearing the worry and fear in Amy's voice, he knew that wasn't true. Amy was terrified. She had no certainty of success. But she and Dan had always tried their hardest, done their best, from the very beginning.

  Could Fiske say the same about himself?

  He would have to do his best now.

  Fiske grabbed the phone from Mr. McIntyre's hand.

  "We trust you, Amy," he said hoarsely into it. "You won't be able to contact us once you get there, but --we'll trust your judgment. It's all up to you."

  Mr. McIntyre was staring daggers at him. McIntyre was a cautious man. He didn't like having to trust people -- especially not children who were too young and erratic to be predictable.

  "Don't worry about the expense," Fiske found himself saying into the phone. "Don't worry that you'll tip off the others that you're connected to us. This is the final stop. It's almost time for everything to be revealed."

  On the other end of the phone, Amy gasped.

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  Fiske wanted to keep talking. This was strange -- he wasn't used to wanting to explain, to comfort, to encourage. But he couldn't think of anything comforting or encouraging to say. All he could think of were warnings.

  Hastily, he shut off the phone and dropped it onto the table. Mr. McIntyre watched him.

  "We'll need to make our own travel arrangements," Mr. McIntyre said.

  Fiske just stood there, staring out at the darkness that had enveloped the river Avon.

  The phone rang again, rattling against the table. Mr. McIntyre answered it.

  He was silent for a few moments, then he cried, "What happened? Who stole the lead?"

  The phone slipped from his hand and fell to the floor.

  Fiske reached for it.

  "This is too dangerous!" he said. "We have to stop--"

  "We can't stop anything," Mr. McIntyre said. Now he was the one staring out into darkness. "It's out of our control."

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  CHAPTER 19

  "I'm telling you," the pilot insisted. "There's not going to be anything there!"

  "And I'm telling you," Nellie said, standing almost nose to nose with him. "We're paying you tons of money to take us there anyway!"

  The pilot pointed at the computer screen.

  "Let me explain again," he said with exaggerated patience. "The map reading of fifty-three north, six west is in the water." He zoomed in on the computer, so the screen showed nothing but blue. "It's off the coast of Ireland, yes, but there's not an island there. There's not even a big rock. There's nothing to land on!"

  "We'll take parachutes," Nellie said.

  The pilot snorted.

  "Do you know what kind of trouble I could get into, dropping two kids and a teenager off in the middle of the Irish Sea?" he asked. "I could lose my license!"

  "I am not a teenager!" Nellie said furiously. "I am twenty years old!"

  It felt like the two of them had been arguing forever,

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  back and forth, while Dan and Amy ate a very late improvised dinner from the heliport vending machine. Dan c
rumpled the last bag of Crispy Bacon Frazzles.

  "What if we throw in an extra two thousand dollars for you to take us there?" he suggested.

  Everyone turned and looked at him.

  What? Dan wondered. Can't I be the calm, reasonable one in the room?

  He realized that he never would have been before the Clue hunt.

  Of course, before the Clue hunt, he'd also never had access to huge sums of money he could use to bribe people to do what he wanted.

  "Fine," the helicopter pilot snapped. "I will take you on this crazy mission. Just to look. We will not land on the waves. You will not jump out in parachutes. You will not even unlatch a window unless I say it's safe!"

  It was a tense flight. Nellie told Amy and Dan to sleep if they could, but every time Dan closed his eyes he saw the mob of his enemies back at the church. He kept dozing off and jerking awake from nightmares about the other Clue hunters chasing him with pitchforks and torches, or nightmares about the coffin from Shakespeare's grave rising up and zooming after him, or nightmares about Isabel Kabra suddenly showing up to ... to ...

  "There it is!" Nellie shrieked.

  Dan jerked upright. He blinked at the sudden light: The sun was just coming up over the sea. And

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  down below in the bouncing waves there was a small black dot.

  "See? What did I tell you? There is an island," Nellie said, grinning triumphantly.

  "Oh, no, no, no," the pilot said. "That's just--" He glanced down at his instrument panel. He flicked one of the dials. He glared at a screen that seemed to be the helicopter version of GPS. "This is impossible! There isn't an island there on any map!"

  "Typical Cahill setup," Amy muttered beside Dan. She was speaking too softly for the pilot to hear her over the whir of the helicopter blades. "They've probably been bribing mapmakers for five hundred years to keep that island secret. Wonder how many ships have crashed into it because of that?"

  "It's like with Lester," Dan said softly.

  Staring out at the roiling water, Dan could imagine shipwreck victims reaching up desperately from the waves, just as Lester had reached from the quicksand back in Jamaica.

  "This is why we have to win," Amy whispered back.

  She'd said the same thing the day Lester died: That they had to finish the hunt on behalf of all the ordinary people who'd been hurt or killed by Cahills fighting to take over the world. Dan agreed, but ... he didn't want to be ordinary himself. It was more fun to be in control, to have thousands of dollars to throw around to get his own way.

  It was easier not to think about any of it.

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  And, Dan told himself, it didn't matter what their reasons were --for Lester, for the Madrigals, for the memory of Grace or Dan and Amy's parents, just to keep the other teams from getting too much power.... No matter what, Amy and Dan had to win.

  "And look, the island is big enough to land on." Nellie was gloating in the front seat.

  Without saying a word, the pilot let the helicopter drop toward the island. Dan's stomach lurched upward --he had a feeling the pilot could have made a much smoother descent if he'd wanted.

  "Wait!" Dan yelled. "There! That's where we need to land!"

  The island consisted of a broad, flat, pebbled beach leading up to a field of tall grasses, and then one huge, sheer cliff with only a narrow flat space at the top. Dan couldn't begin to imagine what weird natural forces could have created that setup -- maybe it wasn't anything natural. Maybe the layout of the island was a Cahill invention. Dan knew that what he'd seen wasn't natural: a metal-framed doorway at the top of the cliff. And, beside the doorway, a metal panel with pushbutton numbers.

  "Land beside that door!" Dan yelled.

  The pilot let out an exasperated burst of air.

  "Do you know nothing about helicopters?" he asked. "If I try to land there, my blades will hit the door and we will topple off the cliff and die."

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  "Then lower us down to the door on one of those little rope-ladder things people always use in the movies," Amy said.

  Dan couldn't believe it was Amy suggesting this.

  "Don't you know how long people have to train to do that?" the pilot asked. "Someone like you, without experience, you would be caught in the draft and blow away and die."

  "If we don't hit the cliff and die that way instead," Dan muttered under his breath. This guy was just a bundle of laughs.

  "Then the idea of parachutes--" Nellie began.

  "You would be blown out to sea," the pilot said. "And you would expect me to come and rescue you."

  "With the rope ladder, and then we'd get blown off the cliff and die," Dan muttered again.

  Amy frowned at him and shook her head.

  "Please," she said, leaning forward. "Isn't there some way--"

  "I will land on the beach. Nowhere else," the pilot said emphatically. "That is much more than I originally promised."

  There was nothing they could do.

  The helicopter landed. Dan walked toward the bottom of the cliff. The grasses whipped against his legs and chest. Then his foot struck something hard.

  "Ow! Oh!"

  He jumped back and saw what he'd hit: a tall, thin stone that had been hidden by the grass.

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  Beside him, Amy had brushed back grasses from a similar stone.

  "Dan, these are tombstones," she said. "This is another cemetery." The color drained from her face. "Oh, no. Oh, no. When Fiske said this was our final stop did he mean ..."

  Dan's head spun, and for a moment he couldn't hear anything Amy said. Now he could see regular breaks in the grasses -- signs of a whole row of tombstones.

  Death, he thought. This whole clue hunt's been about death. Dead parents, dead grandmother, dead ancestors, all those clues in graves and tombs and crypts...

  He shook his head, as if that could drive all the death-thoughts away.

  "Get a grip," he told Amy harshly. "Stop acting like you've never been in a cemetery before. When Fiske said this was our final stop, he meant this is where we're going to find the last clue. Where we're going to win."

  He reached out and touched the tombstone before him, which was so weathered and ancient it was impossible to read. But Dan could feel what was left of the inscription; he could make out dates with his fingertips.

  "Amy, this is from, like, 1432 or 1482 --something like that," he said.

  "Then it's the original Cahill family cemetery," Amy said. She stepped back, looking at the tombstones, then looking at the expanse of empty grasses just beyond. "Gideon and Olivia Cahill's house was over there.

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  There was a fence around it. I saw pictures in those family history books Alistair had back in Korea."

  "But the house burned down five hundred years ago," Dan said. "So you think the last clue is somewhere over in all those grasses?"

  "No," Amy said. "There were always arrows pointing up in all the pictures. I didn't understand it then, but now ... Remember how Fiske said, 'It's all up to you'? The way he said 'up'? That was a hint, too."

  She turned her gaze to the cliff, looking up and up and up. The cliff was as tall as a skyscraper--the top blocked out the sun.

  "We're going to have to find some way to get up to that door," Dan said.

  Amy nodded.

  "I guess we'll have to go back for climbing equipment," she said. She grimaced. "Or a pilot who will drop us off on a rope ladder without telling us we're going to die."

  "That'll take forever!" Dan objected.

  Amy looked out at the empty water surrounding the island.

  "Maybe we've got time," she said. "None of the other teams saw that ribbon."

  Dan shook his head --not disagreeing, just impatient. He wanted to finish the Clue hunt now. He looked over at the helicopter, where Nellie and the pilot were arguing again. How long would it take to get the pilot to agree to a new plan?

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  Just then Dan heard the putt-putt of
a motor.

  He squinted off into the distance. The water around them wasn't empty anymore. Something was moving toward them.

  A boat.

  Amy peered off in the same direction.

  "That's probably just a fishing boat," she said. "It probably doesn't have anything to do with us or this island or the clue hunt."

  Dan squinted harder. The boat got closer.

  "Is that why Hamilton Holt is hanging out one of the windows, waving at us?" he asked.

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  CHAPTER 20

  The Holts had come with climbing equipment. They swarmed out onto the pebble beach carrying ropes, carabiner clips, even pickaxes.

  "How?" Amy asked, standing there flabbergasted. It was torture to watch the other team move so efficiently toward the cliff. "How what, Amy?" Hamilton asked. He paused for a second in the midst of checking knots in his rope, "How did you solve the puzzle so fast when you didn't

  have anything but thread?" Amy asked. "And how did you know to bring the ropes and everything?"

  "Amy, we didn't solve any puzzle," Hamilton said. "We just followed you."

  "We put a tracking device on Nellie's rental car," Madison said, leering.

  "And then it was easy to check your flight plan at the heliport," Reagan gloated.

  No, Amy wanted to protest. That's not fair! This was our lead!

  But they'd been in too much of a hurry leaving

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  Stratford to look for tracking devices. They never would have been able to convince the safety-obsessed pilot not to file a flight plan. They hadn't had a chance.

  "Anyhow, we take climbing gear pretty much everywhere we go," Hamilton added. "Doesn't everyone?"

  He seemed to take in the stunned look on both Amy's and Dan's faces.