Beyond the Grave - - 39 Clues 04

by Jude Watson

  minibar, we'll be broke in no time." Nellie reached into the closet for a robe and settled her earbuds in her ears. "Go wild with the menu, I'm starving," she said in a too-loud voice as music no doubt blasted in her ears from her iPod. She waggled her fingers in a wave and closed the bathroom door. Amy heard the taps go on full blast.

  She walked into the living room. Dan was chewing on a candy bar while he stood facing the only closed door in the suite. He'd checked out all the closets already. "Dan, Nellie said not to raid the minibar. That stuff is so expen -- " Amy suddenly noticed that Dan was standing stock-still, staring across the room. He wasn't even chewing.

  "What is it, dweeb? It's a door. D-O-O-R."

  "Didn't the bellman say that there's one suite to each floor?" Dan said. "Okay, this place is palatial, but it doesn't take up the whole floor. We're in the east wing of the hotel. There were seven windows on this side, and we only have four." Amy didn't bother to ask how Dan figured that out. Her brainiac brother had a computer for a brain.

  So she didn't say anything as he walked toward the door, looking ridiculous in the oversize robe. He knelt down in front of it. It had an ornamental brass plate with an old-fashioned keyhole.

  "Look at the keyhole. Does it look familiar?" Dan asked her. "No," Amy said. She knelt down to look carefully at the hole. It took her a long moment, and then she said,

  "It's the Ekaterina symbol. The weird dragonlike thing with the wings." "Why is there a keyhole, when the rest of the joint uses cards? Must be some funky key that fits in there," Dan said. He looked around. "But where is it?" "Do you think it's here? In the room?"

  Dan suddenly sprang up. "Hey, Amy, remember all that boring stuff you read to me on the plane? What's the annual rainfall in Cairo?"

  "An inch," Amy said. "And most of it falls between December and March." "So why," Dan said, bolting to the closet, "is there an umbrella in the closet?" He reached in and took it out.

  "I thought the handle was some sort of Egyptian design," he said, showing it to Amy. "But look ..." He unscrewed the handle. It came off in his hand. Amy looked at the carvings on the handle. They matched the brass plate on the door. And the very end of the handle was configured like the lock.

  Dan slipped out of the robe. He took the handle and fitted it into the keyhole. It slid in easily. He looked at Amy. She nodded. He turned the knob, and the door opened. Slowly, they walked in.

  Plexiglass vitrines marched down a long, wide gallery. A series of archways connected more galleries, one after another. They saw glimpses of complicated machinery and blueprints. Framed drawings, photographs, maps, portraits, and texts lined the walls. As they crossed the threshold, lights in the ceiling blazed to life. The objects in the vitrines began to revolve. Three-dimensional holograms suddenly appeared and began to spin. In one of the vitrines, a foil-wrapped article rotated.

  "It's Alistair's microwave burrito!" Dan exclaimed. "This must be the Ekat stronghold!" There was a soft but final thud as the door swung shut behind them. Amy sprang forward. "It's locked," she said. "But at least we have the key." Dan looked down at his empty hands. "We do?"

  CHAPTER 5

  "Don't say it," Dan said. "I know, it's my fault. But this place is so yikes-worthy, I forgot about the key."

  "How are we going to get out of here?" "We'll figure it out. C'mon, let's explore." "I don't know about this," Amy said. "What if it's booby-trapped? " "We would have tripped it already," Dan pointed out.

  Amy lowered her voice to a whisper. "Why isn't anyone here? The other strongholds were full of people."

  "Because we got lucky. Come on.

  Don't be a weenie." Dan bounded forward. He couldn't resist the array of genius and ingenuity before him. Holograms shimmered, LEDs flickered. Over in a corner, a machine began to clatter, spitting out ticker tape, just like in an old movie. Blueprints of inventions projected down one wall. He charged down the gallery, calling back, "Oh, man. Thomas Edison was a Cahill! How cool is that? The lightbulb!"

  Amy walked more slowly through the exhibits. While Dan circled Robert Fulton's design for a steamboat, she stared at a schematic of a submarine weapons-delivery system. Dan let out a whoop. "The cotton gin! Eli Whitney was an Ekat. Genius!" Ahead, Amy saw a black curtain. It seemed to suck all the energy in the room. "Amy! We invented the bicycle!"

  Slowly, she walked toward it. As she grew closer, she realized that it wasn't a curtain but a wall of shadow that was somehow created by a machine aiming light -- or was it the absence of light? How was that possible? -- toward a corner of the room. "The sewing machine. Elias Howe, you rock!"

  Hesitantly, she moved through the shadow. Ahead of her was a white screen. As soon as she approached, it was activated.

  It took her almost a full minute to understand. At first, it was just blueprints flashing on the screen. Then numbers. She heard Dan crowing something about the internal combustion engine.

  "Way to go, Marie Curie! Radioactivity!"

  A slide show began, black-and-white photographs. She pressed her hands to her mouth.

  Dan was right outside the shadow. "These inventions are so radical. We changed

  history!"

  "Not we," Amy whispered.

  Another stream of images began.

  "Not we, Dan!" she suddenly shouted.

  Dan walked through the shadow curtain. "What's this?" he asked, studying the schematic and then peering at an old black-and-white photograph. There were more photographs to come in the slide show. Amy yanked Dan back into the brightly lit gallery.

  "Hey!" Dan protested. "What are you doing? I want to see!"

  "No," Amy said fiercely. "You don't. You don't want to see how we figured out a poison gas delivery system to kill millions." The color drained from Dan's face.

  "How we figured out how to split the atom and make a bomb that could annihilate a whole city!"

  Heat made Dan's face turn red. Except for the small scar under his eye, which stayed white. It was how he looked when he was really upset. She should stop. But she didn't. Couldn't.

  "Chemical warfare, Dan? Does that rock?" Amy didn't know why she was so angry at her brother. "Is genocide way cool?"

  Amy backed away, her hands shaking. For the first time since he was a tiny kid, she had set out to make her brother cry. Which was funny, because she was the one who wanted to wail. She wanted to stamp her feet. She wanted to scream. But her eyes were dry.

  "What if we're Ekats?" she whispered. "What if all that evil is part of us? Embedded in

  our DNA?"

  Seeing the fear on her face, Dan suddenly felt afraid, too. "Every branch had bad people in it," he said. "And there are plenty of good Ekats, too. I mean, where would we be without Edison? In the dark, that's where. Anyway, we don't know what branch we're in. We only know we're Cahills. If I had to choose a branch based on the bad guys, I wouldn't want to be part of any of them."

  Amy slumped to the floor and leaned her head against the wall. "What are we doing here?" she asked. "The more we find out, the more I have to wonder. Why would Grace want us to know that we were connected to so much evil?"

  "I was just babbling before," Dan said. "Saying that we were responsible for that" -- he jerked his head toward the black curtain -- "is like saying I invented the cotton gin."

  Amy gave a wan smile. "Good point. But Grace ... she always protected us. She loved

  us, Danny. Or, at least... I thought so."

  Dan was too stunned to even complain that she called him "Danny." That nickname had been off-limits since he was six. "You thought so? What do you mean?"

  "Ever since we started this, we've wondered why Grace didn't help us," Amy said. "She didn't leave us a private message. She didn't leave us anything. She just lumped us in with all the rest of the Cahills."

  "Like we weren't special to her," Dan said. He expected Amy to leap to Grace's defense

  like she always did. It annoyed him, but he depended on it, too.

  Instead, she nodded. "So did w
e really know her at all?" Amy asked. "Think about it. There was this whole huge thing in her life, and we didn't know. Being a Cahill was so much a part of her. How could we have known her, really known her, if we didn't know that?" Amy swallowed. "It just makes me feel so ... "

  "Dumb?" Dan asked. "Hey, speak for yourself."

  Amy didn't even get irritated. "Mr. McIntyre told us to trust no one. What if that includes ... Grace?"

  Amy closed her eyes. She hated saying these things. She hated thinking them. But she couldn't stop now. She kept trusting people who weren't worth it, and how dumb was that? Ian had played her for a sucker, and she sure had cooperated. If she was going to win this contest, she had to wise up.

  "Those field trips she took us on -- to museums and university libraries? She was showing me how real research was done. So that if I had to go into a place like that, I wouldn't be intimidated. What did she do after we went to the aquarium, Dan?" "Made me repeat the names of every fish I saw," Dan said. "Plus their Latin names. I thought it was a game."

  "She was training your photographic memory," Amy said. "All this time, she was preparing

  us." She waved a hand at the gallery. "For this! And why would she want us to know it? Already we've lied and cheated and stolen to get here. We've basically turned into criminals."

  "I know," Dan said. "Isn't it cool?"

  His voice was unsteady and he didn't meet Amy's eyes. She knew her little brother was trying to distract her. He was afraid of what she was going to say. But she had to say it.

  "What else will we do before it's over?" she asked. "Why would Grace want us to be exposed to this?" Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Was she evil, too?"

  "Don't say that!" Dan yelled. He'd had enough of this new Amy. He wanted to shake her until the old one came back.

  He could hardly remember his parents. Grace was all he had when it came to memories of feeling safe. Amy couldn't take that away from him. "Just shut up!" he told her fiercely.

  He never told his sister to shut up. He could call her a dweeb or a loser or a pain, but he never told her to shut up. They weren't allowed to say those words to each other. It had been a rule their parents had, and even if he couldn't remember their saying it, Amy could.

  But he wanted her to shut up. If he could have without looking like a baby, he'd put his hands over his ears. He could see by her face that she knew she'd gone too far.

  But his sister had suddenly turned into a district attorney. "Why hasn't she helped us? Why?

  Think about it. We were just lucky that Nellie could come with us. Did Grace expect us to travel around the world by ourselves? Put us in horrible danger? If she loved us, wouldn't she have wanted to protect us? And what about the branches of the family? She must have known which one we belong to. Everyone else knows their branch. Irina. The Horrible Holt family knows that they belong to the Tomas. Even Natalie and ... "

  Amy gulped. And he who shall not be named. "... her brother are Lucians. We're just... us."

  "Stop it," Dan said. His voice shook. It was okay for him to wonder why Grace hadn't left them some kind of message. He'd been angry at his grandmother, too. But for Amy to say that Grace had been some kind of monster grooming them for this ... that scared him.

  It couldn't be true. Something inside him would break into pieces if it was. Sometimes he had felt left out when Grace was still alive. Amy had been more like Grace, interested in history and museums. But now it was like she was speaking every dark thought he ever had since Grace's funeral. That wasn't what Amy was supposed to do. She was supposed to defend their grandmother. If Amy didn't believe in Grace anymore, what did they have left... of anything?

  He turned around, his eyes burning. He walked away.

  Amy stayed on the floor. She touched her jade necklace, the one she never took off that had belonged to Grace. She felt a sick sensation inside. Something hollow was there that hadn't been before. It was the absence of something she'd depended on --Grace's love. 41

  She's gone, Amy thought. She's not with me anymore.

  Her head in her hands, she heard Dan's footsteps echo as he walked down the gallery, trying to put distance between them. The noise stopped. A long silence made her lift her head. Dan had walked all the way down to the third gallery. He stood in front of a vitrine, unmoving. Something about the tension in his shoulders made her instantly alert.

  "What is it?" she called. He didn't answer.

  She rose and walked toward him. He stood in front of three vitrines lined up in a row. Each held an identical statue of the lion-headed goddess Sakhet. The statues were only about eight inches high and appeared to be made of solid gold. Only their eyes were different. One glittered with green stones, one with red, one with blue. Each statue floated and revolved in a pool of white light.

  "These must be what we're looking for," Amy whispered. She forgot the argument for

  now. The statues looked as coldly beautiful as jewels. "The Ekats already found them." Dan spied a computer monitor built into one of the vitrines. He placed a finger on a touch-sensitive panel.

  A hologram appeared. It was a diagram of the Sakhet. It revolved to show a cross section. On the computer screen they read:

  FIRST SAKHET DISCOVERED BY NAPOLEON'S EXPEDITION AT QUEEN'S PYRAMID AT GIZA. BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN LEFT BY KATHERINE. SENT TO LOUVRE AND

  RECOVERED. DRAWING DISCOVERED HIDDEN INSIDE.

  A drawing appeared on the screen.

  [proofreader's note: looks like a floor plan of some buildings]

  They crossed to the next vitrine, the one with the green-eyed Sakhet. Dan touched the screen.

  SECOND SAKHET FOUND BY EKAT HOWARD CARTER, 1916, IN HATSHEPSUT'S TOMB, THEBES. EARLY INVESTIGATION YIELDED NOTHING. STATUE HAS NOW BEEN INVESTIGATED BY ADVANCED NDT (NONDESTRUCTIVE TECHNIQUES) INCLUDING DIGITAL RADIOGRAPHY AND 3-D COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY. YIELD: STATUE IS SOLID, NO SECRET COMPARTMENT.

  They crossed to the next Sakhet. Again, Dan touched the screen.

  PURCHASED BY BAE OH, 1965

  SECRET COMPARTMENT DISCOVERED BY ALISTAIR OH.

  [proofreader's note: looks like a slightly different floor plan of some buildings]

  Amy returned to the second Sakhet, the one found by Howard Carter. She knew Carter was a famous archaeologist. Later, in 1922, he would go on to find King Tutankhamen's tomb.

  "It says here that they studied the maps for years," Dan said. "The two maps are similar, but they have differences. No one has been able to figure it out. They think they're maps of tombs. But they don't match with any that have been discovered." "But isn't it strange that this one doesn't have a secret compartment?" Amy asked. "Maybe Howard Carter found the wrong Sakhet. There could be another one out there."

  They were so intent on studying the statues that they hadn't heard the tap-tap

  of a cane. "That is exactly right, young lady," Bae Oh said. "That's what I believe. And I believe my nephew might have it."

  CHAPTER 6

  Where did he come from?

  Dan wondered. He didn't see a door anywhere. It was like he'd just appeared out of nowhere. Creepy.

  "I had the pleasure of hearing that you made a reservation in my name. I thought it might be my nephew. What a pity not to see him. I was looking forward to it." Bae smiled, but it was more like he'd bared his teeth at a dentist. "Not that it isn't delightful to see you two."

  Dan didn't believe him for a minute. He thought about the locked exit door. If they had to run, where would they go? He saw Amy's glance dart beyond Bae. She was looking for a way to escape, too.

  Bae's weird grin grew wider, as if he'd smelled their fear. "Do you like the stronghold of the Ekaterinas?" he asked, waving his jeweled cane. "I must confess I'm proud of it. I designed it myself."

  "It's not exactly standing room only," Dan said.

  Bae's grin vanished. "Even Ekats can be jealous of genius. They don't realize this has nothing to do with my own glory -- I designed it for all Ekats. Nevertheless, am I wrong to point out
that it was I who had the foresight to buy this hotel? It was I who had the vision? Cairo always had an Ekat stronghold, but it was nothing like this. A shabby house found for us by Howard Carter back in 1915, when he was searching for the second Sakhet. During the Second World War we had to hide the objects here and there, and I saw the wisdom of building a better stronghold. No one else understood the great need. It took me years. And as technology advances, I make improvements. This is as good as a museum, don't you think? Better. Such a fitting tribute to the many geniuses of the descendants of Katherine."

  "Including your nephew," Amy said. "Bah." Bae's thin mouth curled in distaste. "I thought your name was Bae, not Bah," Dan said. "My bad!" Bae turned his dark gaze on Dan. Dan felt a chill shudder through him. It was like having a close-up view of a shark's eyes. Right before he opened his jaws and cut you in two.

  "I have heard that you are something of a wise guy," Bae said to him. "I'm sure it will get you far in life." He returned his attention to Amy. "Alistair has been a grave disappointment to me. Such a brilliant mind and such a silly man."

  "Th-then why are you so interested in meeting up with him again?" Amy asked. She might be cornered, she might be scared, but she wasn't going to let this evil guy push them around.

  "I am his uncle. I promised my dear departed brother I would watch out for him. When Alistair was younger, he had such promise. He was the one to discover how to open the third Sakhet. Then he goes off to become an inventor, and what does he invent? A tasteless, indigestible piece of frozen cardboard masquerading as food!" "I heard he made a couple of cool million on that piece of cardboard," Dan said. Bae leaned on his cane. "You must understand something. Money is not a sign of achievement. Not to the Ekats. That's why we're superior to the others. What do we value? Not power, like the Lucians, or physical strength, like the Tomas. Not even the cleverness of the Janus. No. It is something greater. Ingenuity. Inspiration. And channeling it to usefulness." He waved his stick. "You see what we have done!" "We just saw some pretty horrifying examples of what Ekat ingenuity came up with," Amy said, gesturing back toward the black shadow-curtain. "I thought you were smarter than that, young lady. That remark was not worthy of you."