The 39 Clues: Cahills vs. Vespers Book 5: Trust No One

by Linda Sue Park

  It hurt. A lot.

  “Atticus,” Jake said quietly. “Let’s go to the car.”

  Amy gave Jake a look of gratitude, but he had already turned away.

  Dan was leaning forward as he sat on the bench, head down, elbows on his knees, picking aimlessly at a loose thread in his jeans. He spoke without looking at her. “Nellie said that he said our names at the end. And ‘brave.’ Do you think he meant ‘Be brave,’ or that he thinks we are brave?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “Both, I bet. Pretty cool of him.”

  Yes. Yes, but —

  Amy closed her eyes against the heat of her tears. “Dan,” she whispered, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

  Dan was silent for a few moments. “I know,” he said at last. “It’s — it’s awful. But, Amy —”

  She could feel him shifting his weight, leaning toward her, so she opened her eyes and looked at him.

  “Two things. First, it’s not like we have a choice,” he said. “I mean, what are you gonna do — just give up and abandon the hostages? And second, remember what you told Ham, about how Erasmus and Phoenix would have wanted us to keep going? It’s not just something you said to make Jonah feel better. It’s the truth.”

  “But I feel like — like I’ve got nothing left,” she said, “and even that nothing is all beat up and kicked around and trampled on. . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. They sat there for what seemed like a long time, their silence a bubble of sadness surrounding them.

  Finally, Dan straightened up a little. “I know what we need,” he said. “Microwave burritos.”

  Amy smiled weakly at the mention of Alistair’s most famous invention.

  “Remember that party he gave at the house?” Dan went on. “Mini-burritos for appetizers, burritos for the main course, and ice-cream burritos for dessert!”

  “We took the leftovers to the soup kitchen — how many was it?”

  “Eighty-seven,” Dan said. “I counted. Alistair was bummed that there were so many left, but man, we were all stuffed — we’d eaten as much as we could!”

  “He was a funny duck, for sure,” Amy said. “And it took him forever to make up his mind about us. Even though I think he liked us right from the beginning.”

  “Except for that time he nearly got us blown up.” Dan barked out a laugh. “It was almost worth it, to see the look on his face when he saw us again!”

  “He was with us during some tough times,” Amy said. “Really, he ended up helping us a lot more than — than he hurt us. And after the hunt was over . . .” The rest of her thought stayed clogged in her throat. He was like an uncle to us. And that’s how we thought of him. Uncle Alistair.

  Amy couldn’t hold back the tears any longer.

  Dan hesitated for only a moment. Then he put an arm around her shoulders as her body shuddered with sobs that only he could hear.

  It was a source of satisfaction to Jake that Sinead had left the keys in the SUV’s ignition. He had taken them, so now they had a car and she didn’t.

  It was only a small thing, but it was worth a gloat.

  Jake and Atticus sat in the front, Jake in the driver’s seat. They were quiet, both thinking about the Cahills and their Uncle Alistair. Jake tried to think of what he could say to Amy to make her feel better.

  But that’s dumb. When Mom died, I didn’t want to feel better — not at first. It really bugged me when everyone kept trying to cheer me up. People need to feel bad for a while.

  He wished they could take a walk, just him and Amy. Not gonna happen anytime soon, not with all this craziness.

  And it struck him that this was the way to help her: to figure out the next step.

  “Weren’t you saying” — Jake tapped Atticus’s knee — “that you had an idea about what to do next?”

  Atticus perked up. “Yeah, listen. I remembered something else Mom said when she was sick. I thought she was saying voyage, but now I know it was Voynich. And at the same time she was saying LaCher —”

  “Siffright,” Jake broke in. “That’s twice her name has come up.”

  “So she and Mom were studying the Voynich together,” Atticus said. “And I thought — hang on.”

  He dug into his backpack and took out his laptop. Atticus’s laptop had belonged to Astrid; he had taken it for his own after she died. All her files were still on it; he had never erased anything of hers. Jake remembered the early days following her funeral, sitting with Atticus and looking at the computer — reading things she’d written, listening to her playlists, looking at photos.

  Which were mostly of himself and Atticus. Almost none of her, as she had always been the one wielding the camera.

  “Look,” Atticus said. He clicked the Gmail icon. “Dr. James said she and Mom e-mailed each other. Maybe Mom e-mailed Dr. Siffright, too.” He sat with his fingers poised over the keyboard. “Username?”

  “I know that!” Jake said. “She used it for almost all her stuff. Her first initial and last name —”

  “Okay, so ‘arosenbloom’ —”

  “— except she made it a pun, like this: ‘a-r-o-s-e-I-n-b-l-o-o-m.’ Get it? ‘A rose in bloom.’” Jake grinned. “Hey, that could be your username, too.”

  Atticus made a face. “Yeah, right.”

  He typed in the username. “What about a password?” he asked.

  Jake groaned. “Don’t have a clue. It could be anything. Try her birthday.”

  No good. They tried other dates: their dad’s birthday and their own, and Atticus even managed to remember the date of their parents’ wedding anniversary. Address, zip code, phone number.

  More no good.

  “Classics stuff, maybe?” Atticus suggested. He tried several famous Greek and Latin names and titles of works that Astrid had loved. “Homer” and “Iliad” didn’t work. Neither did “Plutarch,” “Sophocles,” or “Herodotus,” “Electra,” “Orpheus,” and every Greek god they could think of. All epic fails.

  “Any one of those could be right, but if she added numbers to the end, we’re screwed,” Jake said.

  Atticus frowned. “Mom wasn’t a numbers person. She always said names were easier for her to remember than dates.”

  Jake sat up straighter. “In that case —” He reached over and turned the laptop toward him so he could type on it. Eleven dots filled the password space. He hit RETURN.

  Bingo — her inbox!

  “Cool!” Atticus exclaimed. “What was it?”

  “Your idea,” Jake said. “You said names, so I typed in ours.”

  Astrid’s password was JAKEATTICUS.

  The brothers smiled at each other, more happy than sad.

  “Dan! Amy! Come quick — we found something!”

  Atticus was hanging halfway out of the car window, waving wildly.

  Amy and Dan broke into a run.

  Amy hadn’t thought it possible for her to feel any more urgency about the hostages than she already felt. But Alistair’s death had doubled her dread.

  They got into the backseat and Atticus shoved the laptop at them.

  “Do these numbers mean anything to you?”

  It was a long list of numbers separated by colons:

  1:2

  5:1

  10:3

  12:3

  12:6

  20:2

  26:3

  4:2

  25:2

  33:3

  9:1

  36:1

  40:5

  44:5

  38:1

  5:2

  40:2

  46:1

  27:1

  Amy shook her head. Dan shrugged. “What are they?” he asked.

  “We don’t know, either,” Atticus said.

  “Wait,” Jake said. “We need to back up a little.” He explained about getting into Astrid’s e-mail account. “And we found some e-mails from LaCher Siffright. She sent them right before Mom died. Look.”

  Jake toggled to the inbox and clicked on one of th
e messages.

  Time for me to go on vacation! How are you? I realized that I need a break, so I’m hunkering down at one of my favorite spots. I’ll send you some more info about this lovely site. Promise me you’ll take care of yourself!

  Cheers, LaCher

  “And then she sent this one, with the numbers, on the same day.”

  Astrid: Here are the figures you requested. Hope these work for you. Cheers, LaCher

  P.S. Don’t forget the lucky horsemen!

  “Lucky horsemen? What’s that about?” Amy asked. It was almost as if she had spoken automatically. Or as if only a part of her had asked the question. The other part was still with the hostages . . . and Uncle Alistair.

  On the one hand, it felt wrong to be torn so quickly from thinking about him; on the other, she was grateful to have something that took her thoughts away from his death.

  Always complicated. Will things ever be simple again?

  “No clue,” Jake answered. “Mom didn’t have anything to do with horses or racing or anything like that.”

  “Anyway, I typed all the numbers into a document,” Atticus said. “We thought it might help us figure out what they are. But so far, no luck.”

  “Bible verses?” Dan said.

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Atticus said. “But without the names of the books?”

  “They look like ratios,” Jake said.

  “What about longitude and latitude?” Amy wondered.

  Dan shook his head. “That’s usually commas, not colons,” he said. “I’m sure both Dr. Siffright and your mom knew that.”

  Amy frowned, thinking hard. “Read them aloud,” she said.

  “The whole list?” Atticus asked.

  “Not the numbers. The e-mails.”

  “I’ll do it,” Jake said. He read the first one, slowly and clearly.

  Amy closed her eyes in concentration. Jake finished reading; she opened her eyes to see him staring at her. She felt a tiny thrill and blinked rapidly to banish it.

  “I get it,” he said. “It’s weird, right? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  Well, not exactly. But she nodded and furrowed her brow, bringing her mind back on task. “The ‘How are you?’ seems out of place, for one thing,” she said.

  “And why would you write about a vacation without saying where you’re going?” Jake pointed out.

  “Did you find anything where your mom requested numbers from her?” Amy asked.

  “No, nothing like that,” Atticus said. “She was already sick by then — in bed most of the time, and she couldn’t do any work. She never replied to either of these. Besides, look at the time stamp.” He tapped back and forth between the two messages. “Dr. Siffright sent the second one right after the first.”

  “What about e-mails before those ones?” Dan asked.

  “There’s a few from when they went to see the Voynich,” Atticus said. “Just normal stuff, like what time they should meet. And one more — after Yale, Dr. Siffright went to Italy and wrote that she was poking around in old monasteries there. And that’s all. If there was anything else from her, Mom didn’t save it.”

  “Okay,” Dan said and took a breath. “I’m guessing that the two e-mails are, like, related. In some kind of code.”

  “Yeah, I could see that,” Atticus said. “So what have we got? The first number in each pair is almost always bigger. But the second number —”

  “All single digits,” Dan said. “And random. Or at least, they look random.”

  Atticus dragged the two e-mails so they were side by side on the screen. He passed the laptop around, and each of them studied the screen in turn.

  “I think we should concentrate on the first e-mail,” Amy said. “There’s more to work with. We have to figure out why it’s so weird — why she wrote it the way she did.”

  Jake stared at her, but this time, she could tell that he wasn’t seeing her. He took the laptop and his gaze flicked between the two e-mails.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I was wondering . . . what Dan said. If the numbers have some kind of relationship to the words.”

  “That’s it!” Atticus almost shouted. “The numbers go with the e-mail!”

  “How?” All three of the others spoke at once.

  Atticus laced his fingers together and stretched out his arms, cracking his knuckles. “Prepare to be amazed, people,” he said. “Paper and pencil, please? Or, Dan, your laptop.”

  Looking at the two e-mails, Atticus called out letters that Dan typed into a new document.

  “I get it now!” Dan exclaimed. “The first number is the word, and the second number is the letter!”

  “Elementary, my dear Cahill,” Atticus said gleefully.

  1:2. First word, second letter. I.

  5:1: Fifth word, first letter. G.

  When they finished, Dan had a string of letters on his screen:

  I G U A Z U V O Y F A L L S P O O L S

  And a few clicks later, Atticus looked up from his screen. “Anyone speak Portuguese?” he said. “Next stop, Brazil!”

  The text message had been brief in the extreme:

  AS DISCUSSED.

  It meant that the plan was a go.

  Vesper Two peered out of the hotel room window. The hotel itself was acceptable. The city in which it was located was not. Of course, very few cities met Vesper Two’s standards for luxury, convenience, and culture. London, of course. Paris, if it weren’t for all those French people. New York, ditto Americans.

  This city was none of the above, and Vesper Two could hardly wait to leave it.

  A most excellent plan. V-1 should have credited my genius for more. As if calling me his little scorpion is enough.

  Vesper Two’s jaw clenched, and it took a few deep breaths before calm returned.

  Yes . . . calm. A cool head.

  Just another couple of days, and I’ll be able to make my move. Once this task is accomplished, the rest of the Vespers will all fall in behind me. Take care of the Cahills, and V-1 will go down with them.

  And the new V-1? That would be moi, of course.

  Vesper Two opened a suitcase and began packing.

  Iguazu. Iguaçu. Iguassu.

  The name was spelled several different ways, but all the Internet sources agreed on one thing: Iguazu had spectacular waterfalls. Foz do Iguazu, the falls of Iguazu.

  IGUAZU. VOY. FALLS. POOLS.

  It was a long trip: First the drive back to New York, then a flight to São Paulo, and finally a puddle-jumper from São Paulo to Foz do Iguazu.

  On the last flight, Amy sat next to Jake, with Dan and Atticus a few rows ahead of them. As they took their seats, Amy reminded herself firmly to keep her mind on the mission — not on the fact that Jake was sitting only inches away from her.

  Jake started talking about Dr. Siffright’s message. “The P.S. to the second e-mail — we still haven’t figured that out,” he said. “‘Lucky horsemen.’ It has to mean something. Champion jockeys?”

  “Fortunate ranchers,” Amy responded, relieved to have something to focus on.

  “Cowboys who win the lottery?”

  They smiled at each other, but only briefly.

  “Okay, so let’s try another approach,” Amy suggested. “Break it down. Start with ‘lucky.’ Four-leaf clovers.”

  “Rabbit’s foot.”

  “Horseshoe.”

  “The number seven —” Jake’s eyes widened.

  “Seven,” she echoed. “So we would need a four —”

  He was right there with her. “To make seven-four, seventy-four.”

  “Horsemen . . . and the number four —”

  It hit them both at the same time.

  “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!” they said together.

  Amy held up her hand for a high five. Jake slapped it, then turned the slap into an awkward handshake that lasted a whole lot longer than normal.

  Is he trying to hold my hand?

  Am
y’s heart sped up a little as she pulled her hand away and pretended to fiddle with her seat belt.

  Disembarking, Jake and Amy told the younger boys about their discovery.

  “Wow,” Atticus said. “That confirms it. She was really smart about it. Even if you decoded the message, it still only says ‘VOY,’ not Voynich. And then she made the clue about Folio Seventy-four separate. So someone would have to know exactly what she was talking about to figure out the whole thing.”

  For the first time since Alistair’s death, Amy’s spirits lifted a little.

  Brave — Dan was right. He was proud of us for being brave, but he was also telling us to keep being brave. I’ll try, Uncle Alistair, I really will. . . .

  The Iguazu airport was a small one. The arrivals hall was lined with booths offering tourist services — hotels, taxis, tours. At a currency exchange booth, Amy changed dollars into Brazilian reais; the clerk told her it was pronounced something like “hey-ice.”

  That’ll take some practice, she thought, and repeated the word a couple of times. The word for the local currency was an important one to know.

  They headed outside to catch a taxi. About a dozen people were standing in line.

  To the right of the line was an empty stretch of pavement. Two young men and a woman emerged from the arrivals hall; they were dressed all in white, loose trousers and T-shirts. Amy recognized the pants as martial-arts gear, similar to what Sensei Takamoto wore for lessons. The two men were shaved bald; the woman had her dark hair in a braid down her back.

  One of them set up a boom box on the pavement, and Latin-sounding music with a syncopated drumbeat blared from the speakers. Taking up positions in a triangle, the threesome began an impressive display.

  They kicked and twirled in a mock fight, using techniques that seemed drawn from every kind of martial art: kickboxing, tae kwon do, karate. Mixed in were acrobatics and hip-hop-type dance moves.

  It was amazing. At one point, one of the men did a handstand and held it for at least a minute, changing the position of his legs, hopping around on his hands, piking so his shoulders almost turned inside out, then straightening again into a perfect vertical.