Countdown

by Natalie Standiford

  “Why? Are we meeting with the queen of England or something?” Dan asked.

  “Speaking of the queen . . .” Jake turned up the volume on the TV. The footage showed a handsome man shaking hands with Queen Elizabeth, his airbrushed blond wife curtsying beside him.

  “American media mogul J. Rutherford Pierce met with Queen Elizabeth at a reception yesterday on the last leg of his European tour,” the news announcer reported. “Pierce has been meeting with world leaders in a clear indication that he’s preparing to run for political office. Pundits are expecting him to throw his hat into the ring in the race for US president very soon.”

  “President Pierce,” Dan said. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “It does have a sinister ring to it,” Amy agreed.

  “The way Pierce operates, it’s a short step from president to dictator,” Dan said.

  Amy watched Pierce’s wife, Debi Ann, who hovered in the background. The contrast between her and her husband was striking. She looked dull and bleached out next to her vibrant, glowing husband, almost like a different species of human.

  Because he’s taking the serum, Amy realized. And Debi Ann isn’t.

  Pierce took a modified version of the serum, a very weak, diluted dose. Enough to enhance his power, but not enough to kill him. “What do we know about his wife?” she asked Jake.

  “Not much. Wait — they’re cutting to an interview with the two of them now.”

  The news showed a clip from an interview taped in the Pierces’ elegant home in Boston. Debi Ann sat beside Pierce on a blue silk sofa, smiling and nodding mechanically. “What about you, Debi Ann?” the interviewer asked. “I read that you grew up in a family of scientists. What was that like?”

  Debi Ann nodded. “We had a chemistry lab in the basement.” She smiled at the memory. “That was our playroom. We Starlings were all talented scientists.”

  Dan and Amy jumped at the same time. “Starling?” Amy gasped. “Did she say Starling?”

  “Did you see the look on Pierce’s face when she mentioned it?” Dan said. “He was furious!”

  Amy had noticed a flash of anger cross Pierce’s serenely tanned face at the mention of the name Starling. Although it’d mean nothing to 99 percent of the audience, he clearly didn’t want Debi Ann to mention that very important fact. The Starlings were related to Amy and Dan. If Debi Ann was a Starling, it could only mean one thing. She was a Cahill, too.

  “She’s Pierce’s link to the serum!” Dan exclaimed.

  “He must know all about the family, the branches, and everything, through his wife,” Jake said.

  “But I researched her,” Amy protested. “Both her and Pierce, relentlessly. I scoured the Internet and no Cahill connection ever came up. How could that be?”

  “Ask Pony,” Dan said. He dialed Attleboro, putting his phone on speaker.

  A smooth British voice answered. “Dan? You made it to Tikal, I see.”

  “Yes,” Amy cut in. “We all made it. Just barely.”

  “Amy, so glad you’re all right,” Ian purred. “Everyone else present and accounted for? Dan? Atticus? That other one . . . what’s his name? Joke?”

  Amy turned red, her eyes involuntarily cutting over to Jake, who scowled. “That’s beneath you, Ian,” Amy said. “Listen, we need you to put Pony on a deep search for information about Debi Ann Pierce. Try searching for Deborah Starling as well.”

  “I’m on it.” More purring. This time it wasn’t coming from Ian but from an actual cat. “Ugh, get away from me, you filthy feline!” Ian grumbled.

  “Hi, Saladin!” Dan called out.

  “Meow!” the Egyptian Mau replied.

  “Are Ian and Hamilton feeding you well?” Amy asked. “Ian, is Saladin getting enough red snapper?”

  “We’re not pet-sitting here, you know,” Ian grumbled. “We’re actually busy helping you save the world, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “And we appreciate it,” Amy said. There was a knock on the door. “We have to go. Tell Pony to get on the Debi Ann thing stat.”

  Jake opened the door to a tall, dark woman in a safari skirt suit.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m Dr. Casanova. An Amy Cahill arranged to meet with me?”

  “Come in.” Jake stepped aside to let her through. “We’ve been expecting you.”

  “Thank you.” She nodded, glanced around the room, and sat down in the one chair that didn’t have boys’ clothes strewn over it. “I’m not usually available for private consultations, but when El Presidente asks for a favor . . .” Amy had pulled some Cahill strings to get a private meeting with Guatemala’s leading expert on Tikal, hoping to make quick work of locating the riven crystal. “I understand you have some questions about one of the temples here?”

  “Yes — only we don’t know which temple,” Amy said. “We’re looking for something called a ‘riven crystal,’ or shocked quartz.” She showed the archaeologist a photo of shocked quartz, taken through a microscope. The stone had waves of rainbow-colored layers striated by sharp black lines that looked almost like lightning bolts. It was strange and beautiful.

  Dr. Casanova nodded. “That’s not native to this area, but it is found in the Yucatán. The people of Tikal traded with the Yucatán and could easily have gotten some of this crystal. I’ve never seen it here, however.”

  “The stone only looks this way under a microscope,” Atticus explained. “It would be hard to spot it among other stones, since it looks like ordinary quartz to the naked eye.”

  Dr. Casanova eyed the eleven-year-old Atticus warily. He was so smart and mature for his age that some adults found him threatening, as if they were afraid of being shown up by a kid. Amy hoped Dr. Casanova was not that kind of adult.

  “Nevertheless,” the archaeologist said. “The temples that have been excavated have all been thoroughly examined. A piece of quartz, shocked or not, would have been noticed in all the limestone.”

  “But there could be a piece of shocked quartz in one of the unexcavated temples, right?” Amy said.

  “Anything is possible,” Dr. Casanova conceded. “Even landing a helicopter on a pok-a-tok court, from what I hear.”

  Dan started to laugh, but it died in his throat when he saw the stern look on the archaeologist’s face. “Yeah, sorry about that. It was an emergency landing.”

  “You might have crashed into priceless archaeological treasures,” Dr. Casanova said. “You could have ruined them forever.”

  “Uh, yeah. We also could have died,” Dan pointed out.

  “That’s not my concern,” Dr. Casanova sniffed.

  Amy caught Dan exchanging an oh, brother look with Atticus.

  “I know pok-a-tok is something of a mystery to us,” Atticus said. “But have you learned anything new about it?” Amy wasn’t sure whether he was changing the subject to be diplomatic, or it was just natural curiosity spilling out. Either way, she was grateful.

  “We know it was very important — like baseball and football are to you,” Dr. Casanova replied, her face softening slightly. “There are relics depicting men playing pok-a-tok all over the Mayan world. You’ll see it as you explore the park — the parts that are open to the public, that is.”

  Amy cleared her throat. “I believe we have permission to explore the unexcavated ruins as well.” She took an official-looking piece of paper from her bag and showed it to Dr. Casanova. The same strings she’d pulled to get a private meeting with the archaeologist had also convinced the government to pressure park officials to break the rules for them. Or at least, that was what the paper said. In fact, she’d gotten Pony to rig up some phony forms that looked very real.

  The archaeologist frowned. “I can provide a guide to make sure you do nothing to harm the artifacts.” Amy suppressed a grimace. A guide was the last thing they wanted. They didn’t want to harm anything,
but if they found the riven crystal, they were going to take a sample of it. She felt a little guilty about desecrating ancient ruins, but it had to be weighed against the greater good. Without that crystal there would be no serum antidote, and without the antidote . . . well, it would be Pierce’s world, literally. They’d all just be living in it, Dr. Casanova included.

  “In any case, it would take years — decades — to search the entire lost city of Tikal for one stone,” Dr. Casanova said, getting up to leave. “It hardly seems worth the effort.”

  “It is to us,” Dan said.

  “Why?”

  “School science project,” Dan lied smoothly, just as he’d been doing for years. Lying to security guards, librarians, Interpol agents — anyone who stood between the Cahills and their mission.

  Dr. Casanova looked skeptical but apparently decided not to pursue it any further. This was one of those times when being “just kids” was helpful. “If you have any more questions, feel free to call my office. Good-bye.” She left.

  “We don’t have years to find that crystal,” Amy said. “We need it now! There must be a way to find it quickly. Something in the book. Some clue . . .”

  Their eyes all turned to the book. It contained all the answers they needed, if only they could decode them.

  They left their rooms and went to eat in the hotel restaurant. Everyone ordered pepian de pollo, a rich, spicy, dark red chicken stew, sprinkled with roasted squash and sesame seeds and served with rice and corn tortillas.

  “Have to try the national dish while we’re here,” Jake said, sounding more like someone’s goofy dad than a shaggy-haired hipster. Although Dan hated to think about his sister’s boyfriends, he had to admit Jake would’ve been a good fit — one ubernerd deserved another. Or at least, they would’ve been a good fit until Amy decided to shut down and cut ties with everyone who cared about her.

  “I’m learning a lot about myself on this trip,” Dan said, matching Jake’s cheerful tone. “For example, if it comes with tortillas, I like it.”

  “What about you, Att?” Jake asked. “Do you like the pepian?”

  Atticus took a bite of stew and nodded. “Delicious.”

  That’s not like him, Dan thought. He and Atticus usually lived as if life were one big eating contest. But Atticus seemed distracted. He stared at everything, from the pictures on the restaurant walls to the menu, as if they might hold the keys to the universe. After lunch, he barely nodded when Dan asked if he wanted to go for a walk.

  “The answer is right in front of our eyes,” he told Dan. “I know it is. If I can just see it . . .”

  They stopped in the museum gift shop. “There’s not much here,” Dan said. “Just a bunch of dishes and woven fabrics —”

  Atticus was staring at a large platter decorated with glyphs. Dan saw a scowling face with a large nose, a glyph that could have been a bird or a hand with the thumb up, and others that just looked like squiggles. Atticus took a small notebook and pen from his pocket and began copying the images on the plate.

  “What?” Dan asked.

  “That’s it . . . .” Atticus shook his head. “Come on!”

  He ran back to the hotel, his shorter legs moving so quickly, Dan had trouble keeping up. When they reached their room, Atticus burst inside and opened Olivia’s book, flipping carefully through until he got to the page he’d been staring at on the chopper, the one with strange glyphs that he hadn’t been able to make sense of. Between each glyph were two letters and a number, such as NE224, SW305, and so on. He pointed to a square containing a foot and a circle, and another that looked like the face of a monster.

  “I didn’t know if Olivia had copied these figures from somewhere, or if she’d made them up, or if they were just doodles,” Atticus said. “Now I’m sure she copied them from the Maya.” He studied the page intently, and then began scribbling in his notebook.

  “Atticus, what is it?” Dan demanded. He stared at the page, trying to make sense of the figures on it. It didn’t look like a language. They were almost like drawings, but very abstract. If they were drawings, Dan didn’t get what was happening in them.

  “The glyphs,” Atticus said.

  “What about them?”

  Atticus kept scribbling. “I’ll tell you if I’m right — but I’m pretty sure I am.”

  Dan went to get Amy and Jake, brooding alone in their rooms. “Atticus is onto something. He thinks.”

  By the time they all gathered back in Dan and Atticus’s room, Atticus had stopped writing. “I’ve got it,” he announced. “The glyphs in the Codex are based on the game. Pok-a-tok!”

  “What do you mean?” Jake asked.

  “The symbols in Olivia’s book refer to different aspects of the game.” Atticus opened his laptop and searched for a painting showing Mayan pok-a-tok players. They wore large, fancy headdresses made of feathers, bracelets and earrings, skirts or kilts, and in front of them bounced a large black ball. Then Att showed them the glyphs in the book, which looked mostly like squiggles to Dan. But if he tried hard enough, he could see a man in a headdress bouncing a ball off his shoulder in one image, a ball going through a stone hoop in another, and so on. “In actuality, they form a code. If I follow the symbols almost as if I were following a ball game — first this player hits the ball to that player, who knocks it to that part of the field, etcetera — the code forms a map.” He had drawn a graph on a piece of tissue paper and plotted dots along the graph. Each dot represented a ball player. “The numbers and letters between each glyph tell me the distance between each player, and which direction they’re standing in. For instance —” He pointed to a glyph of a player in a headdress, next to the number N873. “This man is passing the ball to the next player, who is standing 873 feet to the north of him. Of course, in a real game the players would never stand that far apart. The court isn’t anywhere near that big. But these glyphs don’t depict a real game. They’re a code.” Atticus shook his head. “It took me forever to figure out what those numbers were supposed to mean.”

  He’d printed out a satellite map of the entire Tikal park, showing every hill, every ruin, excavated or not. “When I lay this paper over a map of Tikal —” He set the paper over the map. Many of the dots Atticus had drawn corresponded to temples, pyramids, and other ruined landmarks on the satellite picture.

  “It works!” Dan cried.

  But Atticus frowned. “Wait — there’s nothing on the satellite to correspond with this dot.” He pointed to a “player” on his map that seemed to be sitting in the middle of the jungle. “Or this one, either.”

  Jake leaned over the map, tracing a line from one dot to the next. “We need those landmarks to get us through the jungle without getting lost.”

  Amy pored over the map. “Wait a second — maybe there are ruins there. We just can’t see them on this satellite map. Most of them haven’t been excavated yet.”

  “I think I see something whitish gray there.” Dan used the magnifying glass app on his phone to look more closely at the picture. “See? There is a temple or something there. It’s just mostly covered in vegetation.”

  Amy pointed to the final dot on the map, a spot deep in the jungle, the site of some unexcavated ruins believed to be a second-century temple. “That must be where the crystal is,” she said. “Atticus, you’re a genius!” She gave him a congratulatory fist bump.

  “We already knew that,” Jake said proudly.

  Dan looked out the window. “It’s getting dark out.”

  “And it’s late,” Amy said. “We don’t want to get lost in the jungle tonight. We’ll leave at dawn.”

  Trilon Laboratories

  Delaware

  Nellie Gomez sat in her small office, pretending to read research reports on the genetic effects of radiation on rats. She was waiting for her coworkers — that is, her employees, sort of, since she was the manager of t
his particular department — to leave. Go home already, drones! she thought. She stared at the last two research chemists left in the lab — Gerry Wentworth and Brent Beckelheimer — willing them with her brainpower to leave. It wasn’t working.

  So much for my psychic abilities, she thought, hiding a copy of Punk Rock Confidential behind The Journal of Genetic Research. It still shocked her when she woke up in the morning to realize she’d be spending her day as the head of a sterile lab in a corporate pharmaceutical complex in Delaware. She wasn’t quite sure how she — a punk-rocker-slash-aspiring-chef from Boston — became Dr. Nadine Gormey, the boss of a bunch of brainy chemists with PhDs from Hopkins and MIT, but it was lucky that she was. Because something dangerous and very secret was happening in this lab, and the fate of the world depended on her stopping it.

  Beckelheimer stuck his head into Nellie’s office. “Uh, excuse me, Dr. Gormey, I guess Dr. Wentworth and I will be going now.”

  “All right, Dr. Beckelheimer. I suppose you can’t work twenty-four hours a day. You’re only human after all, right? Of course, I’ll be staying late as usual.” Nellie waved the scientific journal she was pretending to read at him, just catching the music magazine before it slipped out and revealed how seriously she was goofing off. “Got to burn the midnight oil again tonight. See you in the morning.”

  “Good night, Dr. Gormey.” The two scientists finally left. Now Nellie could start her real work: snooping.

  She waited awhile, listening to the sounds of the building, waiting for that level of absolute quiet that meant everyone had gone. Then she crept through the dark hallways, lit now only by emergency lights, and up to the fourth floor, until she came to a vending machine. She took a special “A” ID she’d stolen from a sales rep, a more trusted worker (and rightly so, she thought with a snicker), from a chain hooked to her pants pocket and slipped it into the machine. The machine opened like a door. In fact, it was a door — a secret door that led to the basement labs where the serious research was being done. If the regular work of Trilon Labs was top secret, the basement lab work was on the level of If I told you, I’d have to kill you.