The door slid shut behind her as she descended the stairs, keeping an eye out for the heavily armed guards who could be lurking around every corner. She was looking for Sammy Mourad.
Sammy was a brilliant young grad student, a Cahill cousin of Dan and Amy’s, with a genius for biochemistry. He’d been working at Columbia University when Dan asked him to make a sample of the Cahill serum for him. The formula had gotten into the wrongest of wrong hands — Pierce’s hands, to be specific. And of course, Pierce wasn’t about to let such a useful researcher get away so easily.
Nellie had stumbled upon these secret basement labs and found Sammy working there. He was being held prisoner, but he refused to be rescued.
“Don’t you see,” he’d told Nellie. “I’m in the perfect position to stop him. You and I both are. We’re inside.”
“I know that,” Nellie had said. “But he’s holding you captive . . . .”
“Believe me, I’d love to get out of here,” Sammy had said. “But I can sabotage his work from the inside, or try to, at least.”
Nellie sighed a funny kind of shivery, happy/sad sigh. He was so brave, risking his life for the good of the world, and for her kiddos, too. Courage plus dark good looks and nerdy charm — that made for irresistible Nellie-bait. Of course, Nellie was risking her life, too, but she was used to that.
They hadn’t figured out a secure way to communicate yet, so Nellie sneaked downstairs to check on him every chance she got. The basement was a white labyrinth, hallways branching off hallways and circling back on themselves in a way that seemed deliberately confusing. Crouching under windows, flattening herself against walls to avoid cameras, Nellie made her way through the maze to Sammy’s lab. She took a left through an unfamiliar door and wandered past a row of one-way windows. She peeked carefully inside and saw lab after lab, each more sophisticated than the last, with one or two white-coated scientists working doggedly around the clock, blind to anything happening outside the tiny world of the lab they were locked in.
She paused outside the lab where she’d last seen Sammy and peered through the window. A shade had been drawn over it, but she could just barely see through a crack left open at the bottom. . . .
The lab was empty. Lights out. Sammy wasn’t there. And it looked like nobody was working in that lab at the moment.
She panicked. A shot of adrenaline burst through her bloodstream and raised her pulse. Where was he? Was he all right?
Nellie heard footsteps — heavy, booted footsteps — coming in her direction. Frantically, she tried a door. It was locked. She tried another. They were all locked. She spotted a swinging door at the end of the corridor and pushed through it. She waited, holding her breath, until the footsteps stomped by, fading as they went down the corridor.
She looked around. She seemed to be in a men’s room. Better get out of here, she thought. Then she noticed another door beyond the last toilet stall. Probably just a janitor’s closet. But if a soda machine could lead to a secret basement, who knew what lay behind a janitor’s closet door?
She tried the knob and, miraculously, it opened. It was a closet, holding a rolling bucket and a mop. But the mop, she noticed, was dry and bleach white. It hadn’t been used. Maybe it was new. Or maybe it was a decoy.
She pressed against the back wall of the closet. It didn’t move.
Okay, so maybe it was just a janitor’s closet after all.
Dr. Nadine Gormey doesn’t give up that easily.
She lifted the mop and put it down. She rolled the bucket out of the closet. Nothing. She picked up a dust pan and a brush, then tried brushing the back of the wall. She said, “Open Sesame!” It was a long shot, but you never knew what might work.
In this case, however, nothing worked.
She took a moment to look around the men’s room. It wasn’t as if she’d never been in a men’s room before — the bathroom line at the Rat in Boston got so long that girls took over the men’s room all the time, shouting, “Revolution!” in true punk-rock fashion. And this one didn’t hold anything unusual that she could see. Toilet stalls. Urinals. Sinks. Soap. Paper towel dispensers and hand dryers. Nice that they gave the guys a choice.
She pressed on the soap dispensers, pulled out paper towels, pressed on the hand dryer. Nothing but soap and hot air.
Back to the closet. She stared into it as if it were a mysterious cave holding a secret. Something was not right about that closet.
Then she noticed a hook with a broom hanging from it. Some instinct, honed after two years of wild adventures with Amy and Dan, told her to tug on the hook. Sure enough, the back wall of the closet slid open to reveal yet another hallway.
Nellie stepped over the bucket into this new, even more secret area. Trilon Labs had more layers than an Indonesian thousand-layer cake. All in the service of hiding stuff.
The place had a lot of secrets.
At the end of the short corridor was a windowed door. She walked toward it and peered through the window.
There he was. All alone, dropping a chemical onto a slide and peering at it through a microscope, his handsome features stern and serious with work. Sammy.
The door was locked. Nellie tapped on the window. Sammy looked over. He lit up, his face transformed by happy surprise.
Open the door, dummy! Nellie thought. He ran to the door and opened it, pulling her inside.
“I was hoping you would find me,” Sammy said. “Sometimes even the guards can’t find me here. They forget to bring my meals.”
“Are you okay?” Nellie asked.
“I’m okay. Any news from the outside world?”
“Amy and Dan are in Guatemala — one step closer to making the antidote, I hope.”
“When they find it, we’re going to need it,” Sammy said. “I just got crystal clear orders to speed things up. Pierce wants a safe, mass-produced serum ready to go in the next week.”
“Before he announces his candidacy.” Nellie shuddered at the thought of all those Patriotist idiots in their tricorne hats . . . enhanced and superpowerful. Ruling the world.
“And the people who are against him . . .” She didn’t have to finish the sentence. It would be impossible to oppose him. He would have absolute power.
“Yeah.” Sammy nodded sadly. “I’ve been working as slowly as I can. I’ve managed to bluff and stall so far, but I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up. If I don’t come up with some results soon . . .” Sammy swallowed. “I’m trying to find a way to sabotage the research without anyone noticing right away,” Sammy explained. “But it’s tricky. I want you safely out of here before they figure out what we’re up to.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Nellie said. “Just stop Pierce.”
There was a noise outside the room. “Someone’s coming!” Sammy whispered. “Get out of here, quick!”
Nellie ran to the door. She peered through the window and heard the sound of boots in the corridor. “Too late! I’ve got to hide somewhere in here.”
Sammy set a rack of lab coats near the door. “When they open the door, hide behind it, using the coats for cover.”
“This is the first place they’ll look!”
“Shhh!” The footsteps stopped just outside the door. There was a sound of keys rattling.
Nellie threw herself against the wall and wriggled behind the coats as the key turned in the lock and the door flung open. A guard dressed in a dark khaki combat uniform and armed with a machine gun stepped into the lab. “Everything okay in here?”
“Everything’s fine,” Sammy said. “But, oh, do you think I could get more nacho chips with my lunch tomorrow? And maybe a spicier flavor, like Mexican Fiesta?”
The guard grunted. “I’m not in charge of your lunch.”
“Oh. Sorry. I just thought maybe you could convey the message to the kitchen, or wherever the slop you feed me com
es from. It gets pretty boring down here all by myself, and food’s just about the only thing I have to look forward to.”
He likes food, she thought. She was holding her breath and praying that this huge, muscular, armed guard wouldn’t catch her, but that didn’t stop her from melting a little over Sammy. He doesn’t just like it, he’s particular about it. Like me. Maybe someday, if we ever get out of this mess, I’ll cook a meal for him that will make his taste buds fall in love.
“Look,” the guard said. “I don’t want to know anything about your food or how bored you are. I’m just supposed to make sure everything’s okay, and to see if you made any progress today.”
“Progress? Hmm, let’s see . . . .” Through the screen of coats Nellie could see Sammy pick up his microscope and move it to a table facing the back wall of the lab, away from the door. Good thinking, Mourad, she thought. If he could distract the guard for long enough, maybe she could slip through the door.
Sammy peered into the scope. “Oh, my gosh!”
“What? What is it?” The guard hurried over to him.
“I’ve just made the most amazing discovery!” Sammy cried.
That’s my cue. Nellie slipped out of the room, leaving the door ajar so it wouldn’t be heard. She crept down the short corridor and through the false wall of the janitor’s closet. As she was closing the wall-door behind her, she heard Sammy say, “Whoops. Sorry. False alarm.”
Sammy was her kind of guy. They’d find a way to stop Pierce, between the two of them. But it had to be soon, before Pierce realized Sammy was not cooperating — and made him pay.
Attleboro, Massachusetts
“Come to me, Debi baby. . . .” Pony used his mouse like a pistol, his fingers flying over the keyboard of his trusty Ponyrific computer. He’d named it Ponyrific because he’d made it himself, from the best parts of the best machines out there, to suit his special needs.
He paused to reach for a slice of pizza, which he demolished in two huge bites. Pony was a skinny, perpetually starving hacker in black glasses, an old pro at nineteen. He wore his long hair pulled back in a ponytail, away from his face. His “mournful hound-dog face,” as Nellie had once called it. He smiled, thinking of Nellie. She was one crazy-cool chick.
He’d been given a lot of tough assignments since signing on to work for the Cahill kids, but this was a new one. Amy had asked him to find a link between Debi Ann Pierce and a Deborah Starling, or any Cahill connection at all. Amy was convinced they were one and the same person, and Pony trusted Amy. She was one sharp kid. He would have thought it was amazing that she was only sixteen, if he didn’t know so many computer prodigies who were the same age.
Normally, this assignment would be a piece of cake for a digital cowboy — his preferred term — like Pony. Beneath him, even. But as he scoured the Internet, looked behind every mention of Debi Ann Pierce, he was beginning to get discouraged. He was coming up with nothing. There was a lot of stuff about Debi Ann, mostly puff piece magazine interviews about her favorite recipes and her vast collection of teddy bears. In places where it would seem obvious to ask her about her family background, there was a strange silence.
And then it dawned on him. Someone had done a scrub. A very thorough scrub.
His Pony Sense started tingling. Anything that could be used to connect Debi Ann and the Cahills had been deleted. Completely.
That was almost impossible to do. The Internet was a vast sea of words and images, uncontrollable, full of hidden corners of the past.
That was the conventional wisdom, anyway. You weren’t supposed to be able to scrub the Internet.
A scrub meant someone was hiding something big. It meant there was a juicy bit of info out there somewhere to be rustled up. And he was just the cowboy to rustle it. Yippie-yi-yi-ay.
Pony cracked his knuckles, tipped the brim of an imaginary cowboy hat at an imaginary pretty schoolmarm, muttered, “Evenin’, ma’am,” to the imaginary schoolmarm, and went to work.
Now that he’d figured out what had happened to any hint of a link between Debi Ann and the Cahills, Pony was pretty sure he could find a way around it.
With one hand he felt around the pizza box for more sustenance. Nothing but cardboard. The pizza was gone. He frowned and went back to work. Here he was working in the ritziest digs he’d ever seen — the command center on the Cahill estate — where they had everything a hacker could want: a private satellite, top-of-the-line equipment, custom security, and airtight firewalls . . . everything. But they couldn’t seem to get enough pizza to feed the crew.
Pony had his own private corner in the command center, across the vast room from where the Cahill dudes did their thing. It was a strange new experience for Pony, working with other people, being part of a team. That wasn’t the Hacker Way, and it took some getting used to. Ian Kabra, the slinky Brit, wasn’t the friendliest guy Pony had ever met but he was a quick thinker, good at coming up with sneaky strategies. Pony gave Hamilton Holt a wide berth — Ham was a big dude and quick to throw a punch, which Pony was eager to avoid. But he had to admit Ham had a nose for security and was even a decent hacker in his own right. Pony liked Jonah Wizard the best. Jonah was laid-back but smart, and he understood that Pony wasn’t just a computer scientist — he was an artist. It took a highly refined sense of rhythm and finesse to surf the web the way Pony did. He’d been a hip-hop fan forever, and Jonah was one of his favorite rappers. Too bad the guy was on hiatus. But now that Pony was inside the Cahill compound, he understood why Jonah wanted to drop out of the limelight. For this family, the limelight was nothing but trouble.
Pony did a search of the Starling family until he found an old photo on a genealogy site. It was labeled THE STARLING FAMILY, 1975, and it showed fifteen people, adults and kids of all ages, who looked as if they’d gathered for a birthday or some other big occasion. But, weirdly, Pony noticed as he looked closer, they were all in costume. A boy tagged FRANK STARLING wore a white fright wig, glasses, and a big white mustache à la Albert Einstein. There was a woman, Candice Jones Starling, dressed as Marie Curie, with green paint on her hands — to indicate radiation poisoning, Pony assumed. She held a beaker in her hand. A gray-haired man tagged as Eustace Starling posed on an old-fashioned tricycle with a huge front wheel, dressed as Thomas Edison. They were all, every last member of the family, dressed up as famous scientists, and each one was tagged with a name . . . except for one little girl, about five years old, holding binoculars to her eyes while a toy chimp rested at her feet. Her costume, Pony guessed, was young Jane Goodall. She was the only one without a Starling name attached to her. Maybe she was a neighbor’s kid, not part of the family, but that was unlikely, since she was dressed up in costume like the others. Pony had a hunch.
There was only one other person — besides the digital cowboy himself — with the skillz to pull off this kind of hacking operation. April May.
Pony hacked into Boston City Hall files to check on Debi Ann’s maiden name. There it was in black and white: Debi Ann Stapleton. But when he looked into that, he found that the name had been “corrected” recently. By Her Supreme Highness, no doubt.
He sat back to admire her work. She was a genius, and she was thorough. She let nothing get past her. That was why Pony was suspicious that she’d let him follow her trail this way. What was she up to? Was she trying to tell him something?
Or was she trying to lead him astray?
Jonah Wizard passed through the command center, looking for something to eat. “Yo, man, you ate all the pizza?”
Pony shrugged. “I’ve been working ten hours straight. I need something to keep me going.”
“Looks like I gotta eat sushi again.” Jonah left in a huff. “Keep at it, whatever you’re doing.” Jonah gave Pony’s hand a casual slap as he walked away. Pony tried to act cool about it, but whoa — Jonah Wizard just gave him five. Like it was no big thing.
Teamwo
rk had its upsides. Sometimes.
It’s a new world, P-Man, he said to himself. He gave another tip of his imaginary cowboy hat and went back to work.
Tikal, Guatemala
“Atticus, how much farther?” Dan slapped another mosquito on his arm, then wiped the sweat from his forehead. It was only nine o’clock in the morning, but the sun was already burning the back of his neck as he slogged through the humid jungle air.
Amy, Dan, Jake, and Atticus had set out at dawn in search of the temple that held the riven crystal, following the map Atticus had drawn by connecting the dots in Olivia’s book. Two and a half hours later and there was still no sign of the temple.
“From what I can tell of the distances on this map, we’re almost there,” Atticus said. “Another half hour or so, maybe.”
Dan groaned. It had been exciting to hike through the jungle at dawn, seeing howler monkeys, exotic birds, strange plants, and huge colorful flowers, hearing the distant roar of pumas and jaguars. But now that the sun was higher in the sky, the heat was punishing. His hair was damp under his Red Sox cap, and his skin was like candy to the mosquitos. The jungle was deep green and stretched for miles in all directions, as far as Dan could see. He tried to imagine what it had been like to live in this place thousands of years ago, when it was a thriving city. They passed a sign that said, GROUP F. Beyond it was a large plaza and a stone pyramid.
“That’s Temple III,” Atticus told him. “It was the last structure built here, in A.D. 869, and archaeologists think that the last ruler of Tikal, Chi’taam, might be buried there. But if he is, they haven’t found his tomb yet. By the time he died, this city was on the decline and would soon be abandoned.”
“What happened?” Dan asked.
“No one’s really sure,” Atticus replied. “But it’s likely that the city was overpopulated, and there was a drought, which brought on water shortages and famine. Thousands died and the civilization never recovered.”
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