39 Clues _ Cahills vs. Vespers [03] The Dead of Night

by Peter Lerangis

  Instantly another message appeared. An Ekat in Kentucky.

  Reached out to SwampHamster1 at the Cincinnati zoo for reptile verification. — SneakyRed1.

  And another:

  Was there a sound file with that, ClueCommander1?

  The door flew open and Evan rushed in. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “My mom grilled me because the faculty adviser for speech club told her I wasn’t —”

  “ClueCommander1 — that’s your code name, isn’t it?” Sinead asked, pointing to the message on the screen. “You sent out the lizard image to the Cahill Command Message Board!”

  “Yup, from my cell phone,” Evan explained. “Don’t worry. It’s encrypted to two thousand forty-eight bits. Even the CIA doesn’t use that level.”

  Sinead couldn’t believe her ears. This was what you got when you trusted an outsider. “Evan, you never got clearance to do that!”

  “But it’s just you and me here,” Evan said. “I thought —”

  “And Dan and Amy don’t count — or Jonah, Erasmus, and Hamilton?” With a sigh, Sinead flopped back in her chair. “The Cahill Command Message Board has thousands of people, Evan. We can encrypt all we want, but we don’t know some of them very well. What if some renegade Tomas goes after the hostages alone, trying to be a hero? What if a dozen different Cahills come up with a dozen different lizard identifications? What if there’s a mole — a Vesper who reports this whole search back to the top? You’re supposed to clear message board use!”

  “Ouch.” Evan sank into a chair. “Okay, so, um, wait . . . I’ll send another message, taking it all back?”

  Sinead shook her head wearily. “Too late, Evan.”

  Time for some serious changes.

  Attleboro security was supposed to be state of the art, but in minutes, it had become a joke. This was not acceptable. She opened a file cabinet drawer and took out a small ankle bracelet. “Look, just for a week or so, I would like you to wear this under your socks.”

  “A GPS tracker?” Evan looked at her in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right? You’re treating me like a spy?”

  “I plan to give one of these to Erasmus and Jonah and Hamilton when they get back,” Sinead said.

  “But not Ian?” Evan asked.

  “Ian is gone,” Sinead shot back. “He went to New York on a moment’s notice, then canceled his flight back.”

  “But his mom is there!” Evan said. “Maybe it’s her birthday and he wants to surprise her.”

  “And maybe it’s snowing purple gumdrops,” Sinead said. “His mom is Isabel Kabra, Evan! The woman who killed Amy and Dan’s parents, who shot her own daughter! From now on, I need records of all of our movements. Not only for security, but for your own protection.”

  Evan stood abruptly, his face growing red. “I designed that bracelet, for use with enemies. I set up over two hundred safeguards for us. For weeks, I have been lying to my friends and family in order to come here. I spend every minute of every day thinking of ways to rescue the hostages and get Amy and Dan back home safe. I may not be a Cahill, but I’m the only one who knows how to do anything here.”

  “Evan, please,” Sinead said.

  “And I am not wearing a tracker bracelet,” Evan said as he stormed out the door.

  Vesper Four loathed privacy. It was for weak-minded saps. People with shaky self-esteem.

  But when you were a Vesper, you did what you had to do.

  The room was dark and quiet. Soon it would be necessary to return to the hubbub and excitement. To the world that suspected nothing.

  What a dark week. The Turkish stronghold had blown up, Vesper Six had failed, phone security had been breached, Interpol was still on the case, the hostages tried to escape, and the boy got his photograph.

  Vesper One would be angry. Heads would roll.

  But what a stroke of luck today had brought! The big man was going to love the news.

  Vesper Four smiled. The sounds were growing louder outside the door. In a moment, people would be knocking. This wouldn’t take long.

  V-1: Lucky break. Contact established with the Cahills. Exactly where you’d expect. Will track. Can kill. Awaiting instructions.

  — V4

  Evan Tolliver hunched over his phone. The duck pond in back of the school was deserted but the air was freezing. He had only a moment between the end of school and the beginning of Robotics Club.

  “Evan?” came Amy’s voice.

  She sounded so close. He could barely speak for the grin on his face. And the cold. “Hey, Ames! Just checking in. How’s it going?”

  “It’s late here,” Amy said.

  “I know. Sorry,” Evan replied. “I just — wanted to hear your voice. You sound great.”

  “Yeah,” Amy said. “Same here.”

  Evan frowned. He thought he could hear someone else in the room. “Is someone there?”

  “Dan,” Amy quickly replied. “It’s our hotel room. And . . . the Rosenblooms.”

  “Oh,” Evan said. “Um, well . . . Sinead and me . . . I mean, Sinead and I . . . we had kind of a fight. She wants me to wear a tracking device.”

  He could hear Amy sigh. “Oh, Evan. Look, just do what she says, okay? Ian’s not around, and she needs you there more than ever. We need you.”

  We need you. Evan loved the sound of that. “Okay, I’ll do it,” he said softly. “I promise. Good luck with tomorrow, Ames. I know you’ll find what you need. But stay safe. Because I need you.”

  “I will,” Amy said. “Bye, Evan.”

  “Bye.”

  He hung up and sat still for a long while, trying to feel positive. Trying not to obsess over the fact that he hadn’t heard what he’d been hoping to hear:

  I need you, too.

  Jake tapped Amy’s wrist gently. “Hey, your eyes are closing.”

  “No, they’re not,” Amy replied, shaking the sleepiness out of her brain. In the wee hours of the morning, only she and Jake were still up. Atticus had fallen asleep on the sofa. Dan had disappeared into the bathroom a half hour ago and most likely dozed off in there.

  “They were,” Jake said. “I was watching them.”

  Amy cocked her head. “You were watching my eyes?”

  “Well, not watching,” Jake said. “Checking. Just to make sure we were staying on track. That’s all.”

  She wasn’t totally sure, but she thought she could see his face turning red.

  It made her feel a slight tickle inside, like the flutter of moth wings. Stop that! Why was she even wasting a nanosecond teasing this guy? He was exactly the kind of guy she didn’t like, a hottie who knew he was a hottie. Thereby canceling the hotness completely.

  Well, not completely.

  She took a deep breath. She needed to stay on track.

  Astrolabe. They had the word. But they didn’t know what to do with it. She tried to focus on Umarov’s poem.

  “Bet you can say it by heart,” Jake asked. “Any progress on what it means?”

  Amy turned the paper so he could see. “Well, we know ‘Gurkhani Zij’ is the observatory. And ‘Taragai’ is Ulugh Beg’s real name.”

  Jake looked carefully. “So deep within the observatory lies his ‘unfinished prize, / The unperfected instrument . . . vast in power . . . small in size.’ I’m guessing that’s the astrolabe?”

  “Most likely,” Amy replied. “It’s a small instrument. But it’s not very powerful.”

  “What if Ulugh Beg was trying to perfect some kind of supercharged astrolabe?” Jake said. “A portable, totally accurate instrument, six hundred years earlier than the ones we have today?”

  Amy nodded. It made sense. “So, by studying the Fakhri sextant in its full size, he could learn how to miniaturize it. Right, Jake. A discovery like that would have been huge in the fourteen hundreds.”

  “The question is, why would Vesper One want it?” Jake asked. “It’s just an astronomical thingie.”

  “Let’s find the thingie first. After ten-fifty P.M. tomorrow, wh
en Uncle Alistair is safe, we can ask why.” Amy rubbed her eyes and pored over the poem again. “Okay, the ‘Fakhri apex’ is the top of the Fakhri sextant. Looks like we start there.”

  Jake leaned in to look. “‘His catalog, though vast in scope’ . . . What’s his catalog?”

  “The count he made of all the stars,” Amy said. “One thousand eighteen of them.”

  “‘Of divisions had but three’ — so let’s divide the number of stars into three parts,” Jake suggested.

  Amy turned a sheet of mathematical scribbles she’d made. “I tried that. But the number doesn’t have three factors. Only two.”

  “Yo, Att, wake up, we need all hands on deck,” Jake called out to his brother.

  Atticus sprang up from the couch and stumbled over. He glanced at the notes and recoiled. “Math. Very dangerous. Let Dan go first.”

  “Dan?” Amy called out to the bathroom door.

  A barely audible grunt responded.

  “Should I break in and get him?” Atticus asked.

  “No,” Amy said. “He’s been working hard today. Let him rest. And if he falls asleep and has a sore butt in the morning, at least he won’t be trying to slide down the Fakhri sextant.”

  Inside the bathroom, Dan was wide awake. The butt in question was cushioned by a fluffy hotel towel, folded and placed on the closed toilet lid.

  His eyes were glued to a message that had appeared on his phone screen ten minutes earlier:

  Okay, I know I need to be patient. But it’s been a while, Dan. I’m thinking maybe you’re angry? Or confused? Oh, well. I’ve been patient and hopeful for a long time. I can hold out a few more hours or days.

  Please understand that the endgame is coming closer. What you see isn’t what it seems. What appears to be cruelty is kindness. What seems needless pain is mercy. Maybe none of this makes sense now, but it will very soon.

  One last thing. You have to trust me if you value the future of the world. And the love between father and son.

  AJT

  A droplet of sweat fell from Dan’s brow. It splatted on the screen, mottling the words.

  My father’s words.

  Dan wiped off the moisture and looked at the message again. No mystery, no vague hints. AJT had said the things he’d only hinted at before.

  Father and son. There it was, in black and white.

  Since the fire, Dan had lived with a disease. It wasn’t anything visible, but he felt something had burrowed into his soul. He had learned to live with loss. He had protected himself. All his life, he’d turned away from the sight of boys playing catch with their dads, holding hands to cross the street. He fought against the envy, told himself that some things were simply impossible.

  Now, with three words, the impossible was a click away. An opportunity to climb a bridge into the past. Or into utter darkness.

  Or more likely, both.

  What’s happening to me?

  He had vowed to turn his back on the darkness. To set the bridge aflame. But now he sat there, thumbs frozen over the keypad. Again.

  He had composed a response but deleted it, three times. It felt like writing to a ghost. What happened when the dead became alive again? What happened to feelings that had been beaten down over nine years?

  How wide did a river have to be until it was too wide to cross?

  Who was Arthur J. Trent, anyhow?

  Cruelty is kindness . . . pain is mercy. . . .

  A Vesper, no doubt. That question had been settled in Dan’s mind now. Answering the message meant betraying the Cahills. Throwing aside the gauntlet and everything he believed in. Making a pact with the murderer of William McIntyre.

  A sudden pounding on the bathroom door made him jump to his feet.

  “Yo, what happened? Did you fall in?” came Jake’s voice.

  The door flew open, and Dan snapped the phone shut.

  Ian Kabra could not understand why people liked driving for themselves. It was needlessly complicated. It involved skill and attention. It made you sweat and caused your leg to cramp. It was an action best left to hired professionals. He was simply not cut out for maneuvering a rented Jeep in a godforsaken South American jungle that made upstate New York look like the Riviera.

  But necessity, Ian had decided, was the mother of combustion.

  “Turn right,” chirped the voice on his GPS device. “Now.”

  “Now?” Ian barked back. “All I see is a bloody narrow gap between trees!”

  “Recalculating,” the voice replied.

  Now Ian was detecting an attitude. Are we due for an eye exam, or did we fall asleep at that turn? I do have better things to do than recalculate every few seconds for the rest of my life.

  “Blast it,” Ian murmured, stepping on the brake. A buzz like a chain saw sounded in his ear, and he slapped a mosquito the size of a small nesting bird. At the airport, they had warned him to slather bug repellent above the neck. But he’d ignored them, and now his face felt like a Janus dartboard in a Lucian recreation room.

  Ian yanked the steering wheel and skidded into a U-turn, then backtracked to the turnoff. This time, he forced his way down the impossibly thin path. “I hope you’re happy now,” he muttered to the machine.

  “Destination reached,” the voice said.

  Ian slammed on the brake again. “Destination? Here?”

  He wanted to hurl the device clear to Venezuela. This couldn’t possibly be the South American headquarters of Aid Works Wonders. He was at the edge of a clearing in the forest — desolate, empty, neglected.

  Ian stepped out of the car, grabbing a camera off the seat — along with a photo printout from the Aid Works Wonders website. The remains of a fire smoldered in the center of the clearing. Stacked around the edge were several piles of wood and papers. A gray fox, warming itself by the fire, gave Ian a wary look and then loped away.

  As he stepped farther in, Ian could see the tottering frame of a hut, oddly lopsided. A broken sign dangled from the top of a door frame. Half of it was on the ground, the remaining part hand-painted with the words AID WOR.

  He held up the photo. It was the same building — the one with all the workers posed in front. But in the image, it looked strong and substantial, not slanted like this.

  Walking around the side, Ian saw why. It was only the frame of a building — a wall, a door. The rest had been propped up with rebar.

  The other huts in the clearing had long since fallen down, swept into the piles along the edge. Ian edged close to one of the piles. It contained a stack of papers, including the corner of a glossy photo. He slid it out carefully.

  The image of a young face smiled up at him — gap-toothed and impossibly cute. Two lines of text were stamped at the bottom: ROBERT J. RODRIGUEZ / REPRESENTED BY FILMKIDS TALENT AGENCY. But Ian knew the boy as someone else.

  “Carlos,” he murmured.

  A gunshot rang out behind him. Ian screamed, falling to the ground.

  “¿Quién es?” a voice bellowed. Three men came into the clearing. They were middle-aged and pot- bellied, wearing old shirts and straw hats. The man in the middle carried a pistol. Seeing Ian’s face, he smiled. “Americano?”

  Ian scrambled to his feet. “No, British! Look what you did to my trousers. These were custom tailored at Harrods. My tailor, Cedric —”

  He let the sentence go. In truth, he hadn’t seen Cedric in months.

  “If you prefer,” said the man in the middle, pointing his gun at Ian’s leg, “I can make the other side match.”

  “No!” Ian shrieked. “I didn’t realize you spoke a form of English. I am Ian Kabra. Ka . . . bra! Does that name ring a bell?”

  A flash of recognition passed across the leader’s face. He muttered something in Spanish to one of the other men, then lowered his gun. “I am Marcos. The woman . . . Kabra . . . she is your mother?”

  “Sí. Oui. However you say it. Yes.” Ian nodded, holding out the photo. “I came looking for this compound.”

  The three men
gazed at it briefly and broke into laughter. “Look, there I am,” Marcos said, pointing to a face in the image. “Also Miguel. And José. And all of our families.”

  Ian gazed closely at the picture. All three men were in the crowd, dressed in AWW uniforms. “You don’t work for the organization?” he asked.

  Marcos scowled. “Your mother did not let us keep the clothing. She told us we were going to be in movies. But she left and we did not hear from her again.”

  Ian took a deep breath. “My mother,” he said as he took the photo back, “lies.”

  Amy hit the ground hard, just inside the observatory wall. The pain shot up her leg but she shook it off. In the darkness, she could hear Jake, Atticus, and Dan drop on either side of her.

  She listened for the shriek of a security system. Nothing. “Good job, Dan,” she said.

  “Thank my security guru, Lightfinger Larry,” Dan said.

  Her watch now read 9:47. The hike through the cemetery that bordered the observatory seemed to have taken hours, but Amy had decided going by foot was the only way to avoid detection. “We have exactly one hour and three minutes,” she whispered.

  She darted up the hill, hopping over the observatory plinth. The door to the Fakhri sextant loomed overhead, silhouetted by a thick canopy of stars.

  “Do you think Ulugh Beg will forgive us for breaking in?” Atticus asked.

  “We’ll make him an honorary Cahill,” Amy said.

  “Stand back, guys.” Jake spun sharply, lashing his leg out in a powerful kick. He connected with the door, just above the latch.

  It cracked open.

  “Where’d you learn to do that?” Dan asked.

  “Thank my martial-arts guru, Heavyfoot Harry,” Jake replied.

  “Come on.” Amy pushed the door open and stepped inside. Jake shone a flashlight around the tunnel, focusing down the long slope of the sextant.

  The air was frigid and penetrating. Amy shivered. It felt as if ghosts were flying up her nostrils. She pulled a copy of the poem from her back pocket and held it near the light. “‘Deep within Gurkhani Zij / Lies Taragai’s unfinished prize: / The unperfected instrument, / Though vast in power, small in size’ — that’s our first hint. The astrolabe is a small instrument. Jake and I are thinking it’s hidden here somewhere.”