39 Clues _ Cahills vs. Vespers [03] The Dead of Night (9 page)

Nellie felt Phoenix Wizard’s neck. His breathing was steadier now. She tightened the tourniquet on his right arm. When they’d thrown his unconscious body down the dumbwaiter shaft, the poor kid had landed on a metal gear. And then Reagan had landed on him. The sound of the impact had been awful.

Why did I let them do it?

Nellie went over the sequence of events. She could not get it out of her mind. It was a stupid idea. She and Phoenix had talked it over as if it could work. She had convinced herself it was brilliant. Foolproof.

And then she had allowed a twelve-year-old to climb into the belly of the beast.

“How are his wounds?” Alistair asked.

“Bad,” Nellie said. “That was a hard fall. But thanks for ripping off your sleeve, Al. It’s stopping the flow. He’s going to need stitches, though.”

Fiske leaned over Phoenix and swabbed his facial scrapes with alcohol-soaked cotton. He’d stashed away some from when Nellie was shot.

“Owwww,” Phoenix moaned.

Nellie winced.

“Can’t you fix him?” Natalie said, curled up against the wall in a fetal position. “Must we hear him groaning in pain?
I can’t sleep!
”

Nellie spun on her. “Will do, Nat. I’ll tell Phoenix not to let his pain interfere with your beauty rest.”

“Hey, at ease, guys,” Reagan said, her voice breathy from an aching chest bruise. “I’ll sew him up, good as new . . . push-ups again by Sunday.”

“You can’t sew him,” Nellie said. “You broke your wrist!”

A series of odd clicks made her spin around. Ted had poked his head into the dumbwaiter’s small opening. He was making the noises with his tongue.

What’s going on with these people?

“Yo, Ted — I can bind a wound but I’m not so good with decapitations!” she shouted. “Get away from there!”

“I’m gauging the exact distance of Phoenix’s fall, by listening to the echo of the clicking,” he said, pulling out of the gap. “From the floor above to the roof of the elevator, I’m thinking nine feet and . . .”

He stuck his head back in. The pole, which was still holding the gap open, shifted. With a sickening groan, the dumbwaiter inched upward.

Ted’s body twitched. His feet left the ground.

Nellie sprang to her feet and leaped across the room. She put one hand on the top of the dumbwaiter and pushed downward. With the other, she pulled Ted out of the hole.

He fell to the floor, gasping. The pole snapped, hurtling back into the room, end over end. It landed on the floor with a dull
clank
.

The dumbwaiter thumped upward, closing the gap.

“It’s a good thing you couldn’t see that, Ted,” said Reagan.

Nellie’s shoulder felt like it had been cleft open with an ax. She sank to her knees, screaming. All around her, faces blinked in and out of her vision.

“Dear girl, are you all right?” she heard Fiske ask.

“Nell, you’re a hero,” Alistair exclaimed.

A hero who sent a sweet kid to his possible death!

Tears streamed down Nellie’s cheeks. You didn’t get many chances in a place like this. You had to make them count. Not do anything stupid. Not harm others with an act you weren’t ready to take yourself.

“Please . . .” she said with a grimace. “Just shoot me.”

Alistair leaned close to her. “Nellie, come. You need to lie down.”

“This is my fault,” Nellie said.

“It was a calculated risk,” Alistair said. “A brave one.”

“Hey, we’ll get ’em to fix the dumbwaiter like new and send us supplies!” Reagan said.

“Are you crazy? They will not be taking requests anymore!”
Nellie shouted. “Be real, people! Exercise will get us nowhere. Trying to outwit the Vespers with tissues and bed poles — comic-book stuff! Either we kill these clowns or they will kill us!” She turned her face to the ceiling.
“Come and get us, you cowards!”

A dead silence fell over the room. Nellie’s shoulder throbbed. She found herself wavering at the edge of consciousness.

Natalie uncurled herself from the floor. She stood, her eyes red and her face flushed. In a voice that seemed to well up from her toes, she shrieked:

“I want my mother!”

“Hurry!” Dan shouted.

“I’m going ninety.” Amy leaned forward in the driver’s seat, peering over the steering wheel in a way that reminded Dan of Aunt Beatrice.

The car jerked to the right, causing Dan’s phone to slide off his lap. He managed to catch it, avoiding a hang-up on Sinead, who had placed him on hold while she confirmed their flight to Samarkand. “Ninety
kilometers
, Amy! That’s like fifty miles an hour! And if you have to go slow, at least be smooth!”

“It’s fifty-six miles an hour,” Amy said. “It’s also the speed limit. After all we’ve been through, we don’t want to be stopped for a ticket.”

“Hello?” came Sinead’s voice over the phone speaker. “Are you all right?”

Dan held the phone between himself and Amy. “I’d probably get to the airport faster on foot. Were you able to switch the flight? Luna Amato knew the flight number! We told her! She’s probably got word out to the Vespers.”

“Dan, listen to me,” Sinead said. “
Interpol
wants to stop you. The Vespers need you to get to Samarkand.”

A realization settled over Dan like a cracked egg. “You mean . . .”

“Luna wanted you to escape,” Sinead said. “That’s why she sprang you from jail. She was
planning
to let you go.”

“So we didn’t have to do what we did. . . .” Amy murmured. “Great. Once again, they’re pulling the strings. We get in trouble, they free us so we can run around for them and break more laws.”

“At least we got a nice meal,” Dan said.

“Your disguise and identifying documents will be given to you by an undercover Cahill, who will find you,” Sinead replied. “You’ll be boarding the nine twenty-one commercial flight as Shirley and Roderick Cliphorn.”

“Roderick Cliphorn?” Dan groaned. Only someone with a name like
Sinead Starling
would have considered that normal.

As the two girls jabbered on, making plans to notify Atticus and Jake, he stared out the window. It had started raining. In the pale streetlamp light, the trees looked like people dancing.

He thought about Amy’s reaction:
We didn’t have to do what we did
.

She was right.

They could have done more
.

The pitcher was heavy,
he thought.
I should have aimed for the area between the eyes.

With Luna out of the way, the Vesper Council of Six would have been reduced by one. It would have sent the perfect message, right to the top of the Vesper chain.

For a moment, Dan spotted his own image reflected in the car window. Over the last few months, people had been telling him how much his face had changed, how much he’d grown up. Usually he hated that kind of talk. But in that window, he saw for the first time the shape of a face he knew only from an old photograph long since lost in the Paris subway.

He was beginning to look like his dad.

Amy bolted around the corner and looked at the arrival screen. “Boarding in ten minutes. Come on, slowpoke!”

Dan was skulking along the wall, his wig’s floppy red hair falling over his face. “You didn’t tell me
I
would be Shirley,” he hissed.

“It wasn’t my idea,” Amy whispered, pulling her brother close. Her hair had been yanked upward into a floppy cap, and her upper lip stung from the spirit gum holding a small mustache. “We had to match the fake documents Erasmus gave us. Look, if Vanek tracks us, we’re in that Turkish jail till we turn thirty. So until we’re in Samarkand, Shirley —”

“If you call me that name one more time,” Dan said, “I will scream.”

Amy grinned. “I think you look kind of cute.”

At the gate, Atticus and Jake were scanning the small crowd frantically.

“Pssst, it’s us!” Amy said.

Jake did a double take. “What on earth . . . ?”

Atticus let out a spray of lime-flavored Doritos. Then, with a squeal of delight, he jumped on Dan, smothering him in a big hug. “We were so worried!”

Jake stepped toward Amy. She shrank back, bracing for ridicule, or a scolding for being captured. But he wrapped her in a hug. “Glad you’re okay.”

For a moment, Amy was stunned. As he drew away, Jake’s face was neither mocking nor stern. He was smiling like a little boy. She’d never seen him like that.

Warily, Amy filled in the details of the last few hours. Atticus and Jake had been updated by Sinead, but they listened in rapt attention.

Jake shook his head as if he had been ripped apart by worry. “I had suspicions about that old guy at the hotel. I shouldn’t have let him take you.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Jake,” Amy said.

He looked at her, his eyes seeming to ask for forgiveness. Amy looked away uneasily.

But she didn’t not like the feeling.

The boarding call for Samarkand echoed through the terminal. Dan started for the gate. “Let’s go, Rod.”

His phone buzzed a moment later, stopping him in his tracks. He pulled it out to read the screen.

Ashen, he turned it to Amy:

Enjoy your freedom, Shirl and Rod. It’s later than you think. And tell the dear little Guardian to watch his back. I never forget.

Amy’s stomach knotted. “How does he always know?”

“‘Later than you think’ — what’s that mean?” Dan asked.

“Maybe . . .” Atticus said softly, “he’s already killed the hostages. . . .”

Amy caught Dan’s eyes. The very suggestion was barbaric. Inhumanly callous. And exactly the kind of thing Vesper One would do.

“Ask him!” Jake urged.

“We can’t,” Amy said.

“Um . . . yes, we can.” Dan reached into his pocket and pulled out a familiar-looking pink cell phone.

Amy was stunned. “You took Luna Amato’s phone?”

“Sorry. I couldn’t resist,” Dan replied with a shrug.

Atticus hooted. “Shirley, you rock!”

Dan typed quickly:

’Sup, Vespy? Our turn for a demand. If u expect to get next item, show us proof that the hostages r alive.

They waited a moment in tense silence until an answer appeared:

Nice touch. Proof to come. But hurry. You have 2 days and 5 hours. As for G, I’ll let the timing be a surprise.

“Watch it, Amy!” Dan cried out.

Amy looked up from her notes about Samarkand, inches away from colliding with a barrel full of melons. As she stopped short, a woman carrying a box of red peppers detoured around her. The Siab Dekhkhan Market, just outside the hotel, was busy with shop-keepers setting up for the morning.

“Sorry . . . sorry . . .” Amy murmured.

They had arrived in the dark after a flight delay. Amy couldn’t sleep and had started her research before sunrise. Till now, Samarkand had been a progression of the senses. In the dark, it was different aromas — warm bread baking in the wee hours, coffee brewing. As morning broke, so did a choir of sounds — prayer ululations, taxi horns, delivery trucks rumbling into the market. Daylight brought the sights of an ancient Muslim market — an ocean of colors from spice vendors.

She elbowed through the already crowded plaza in the shadow of the massive Bibi-Khanym mosque. Its blue and gold tiles glinted impossibly bright in the sunlight. At this pace, she felt like one of the elephants that had lugged stone from India to build the massive structure. Vendors shouted offers of peppers, breads, rice, fruits — the best prices! She wanted to identify it all. To soak up every bit. But not now.

She looked around for Atticus and Jake, who had run on ahead to get a taxi. Dan lagged behind her, practically drooling over a display of disc-shaped breads that were flattened in the center. “Look, little naked pizzas!” his voice piped up.

“Sorry, Mr. Pokey, we’re not stopping,” Amy replied. “The observatory opens in a few minutes.”

“Mr. Pokey?”
Dan said with a groan.

Amy grinned. “At least you’re not Shirley anymore.”

As they rounded a corner, Jake Rosenbloom waved to her, holding open the door of a white taxi. In moments all four were zooming up the street toward one of Samarkand’s most famous sites, Ulugh Beg Observatory.

Looking out the window, Amy saw a flat desert city ringed by mountains. The architecture was boxy and colorless, punctuated by the pale gold of minarets. It was as if all the creative energy had been spent in ancient times. She squinted, imagining a plain with tents, a wide avenue rutted from horses and oxen.

“Okay, Amy and I did research, and here’s what we know,” Atticus said. “From the fourth to the fourteenth century — Samarkand, whoa.
The
place. Center of the Middle East, which is the center of the world. A Muslim coolness millennium!”

“The fifteenth, really,” Amy corrected him. “So eleven hundred years.”

“Uh, right, if you’re being picky,” Atticus went on. “So the Silk Road busts through here, everybody tooling around to trade stuff. Silk, food, jewelry . . . they’re like, ‘Beep beep, here come Indians! Russians! Chinese, Mongols, and Burmese!’ Well, probably not ‘beep beep,’ but more like camels grunting and spitting —”

“Persians, too,” Amy interjected. “From Mesopotamia. They were a huge part of this.”

“Will you let him talk?” Dan demanded. “
He’s
interesting.”

Atticus pointed to a distant hill. “Picture this monster building over there. Traders on their yaks, talking away — ‘Forsooth, Mohammed, wazzat?’ ‘Lo, Vladimir, it’s our observatory! Why, it’s the envy of the world!’ Only I guess in actuality they spoke different languages —”

“Wait. Who are Mohammed and Vladimir?” Dan said.

“I’m just painting a picture!” Atticus said.

“Maybe we should let Amy speak,” Jake suggested. “Not that she’s smarter, of course. Just quicker.”

“Thanks, Jake.” Even though his compliments were insults, she felt blood rush to her cheeks. “Samarkand was the capital city of a khanate — sort of like a country. Its leader’s name was Taragai, but he was called Ulugh Beg, which means ‘Great Ruler.’ He was also a genius — both a mathematician and astronomer. His school is still standing, and his observatory was the greatest in history.”

“Hello?” Dan said, raising his hand in the backseat. “Before I drift off? I’m thinking, we’re looking for some kind of orb, right? And that’s what Ulugh Beg measured — orbs. Planets, stars, the moon?”

“Yes! Dan is right!” Atticus said. “So, Beg is obsessed with this stuff. He wants to plot the movements of celestial bodies. He wants to count all the stars in the sky — which only this Greek guy named Ptolemy had ever tried. But Beg is like, ‘Hark, my sextants and handheld astrolabes are the ultimate in coolness, but not precise! Thus, I must rock the astronomical world!’ So he builds this observatory —”

“Whoa, pause button, please,” Dan said. “You’re missing my point. The ‘Medusa’ led us to Rome, where we found the Marco Polo manuscript. It had the map, and the map led here. So far, everything has been about maps and locations. Astrid’s list, McIntyre’s list —
places
. Now we have to find . . . a stale orb? What does an orb have to do with locations — unless the location is, like, outer space?”

“I say we go in with an open mind,” Amy said. “Beg made this Olympic-sized sextant — built right into the rock of the earth. The light came in through a hole in the roof. An enormous pendulum hung over these huge, semicircular stone tracks running due north-south. Astronomers would line up the stars and then record their positions on a curved wall. Over time they’d trace out paths, orbitals. Kind of like a planetarium, only upside down. The famous Fakhri sextant.”

“I thought Famous Fakhri was a falafel place,” Dan said.

“It’s like this hundred-eighteen-foot roller-coaster track,” Atticus said. “Made out of polished stone.”

Dan’s face lit up. “Sweet. Are we there yet?”

“Deep within Gurkhani Zij

Lies Taragai’s unfinished prize:

The unperfected instrument,

Though vast in power, small in size!”

The tour guide, Salim Umarov, had a deep and dramatic voice. The hot wind blew his salt-and-pepper beard as he walked across a circular plateau, high over Samarkand. At the poem’s last word, he paused and took a small bow under a crooked, stunted desert tree. In the distance behind him, the dappled stones of a cemetery stretched out below to the horizon. With his embroidered vest and loose, flowing white garments, he looked to Atticus like an ancient sage.

“This anonymous poem,” he said, “is a recent archaeological find, procured for our library. Some think Ulugh Beg wrote it. But
Taragai
is actually his real name, so I do not think so.”

Atticus felt his eyes closing. He’d barely slept the night before. He hadn’t wanted to do all the research, but Amy was going strong, so he wanted to match her. Now he regretted it.

A flash of gold caught his eye and suddenly he was wide awake.

A familiar head of blond hair hovered above the heads of the crowd, coming closer to him.

Casper.

Backing slowly away from the crowd, Atticus tried to catch Dan’s attention — Jake’s, Amy’s — but they were all rapt as the guide continued his speech.

How did he find me?

Why weren’t the others noticing him? He was almost on top of them! Atticus opened his mouth to warn them, but no words came out.

“Young man! Be careful of the plinth!” Umarov called out.

Atticus’s calf caught against a low wall. He hurtled backward to the ground. Jake was running toward him. The crowd was opening up. Casper was raising something in his hand — something that glinted in the sun. . . .

“Watch it, Jake!”
Atticus shouted.

His brother lifted him to his feet. “’Sup, Att? Are you feeling all right?”

Behind him, the man with blond hair snapped a photo. He lowered the camera, revealed a bone-thin, grandfatherly face.

“I thought . . . that was Casper. . . .” Atticus said.

Jake turned. “We need to get you new glasses.”

Dan was dusting off the back of Atticus’s pantlegs now, and he picked up some coins that had fallen from Atticus’s pocket. “Hey, I know how it feels. When really bad stuff happens, it’s hard to shake it off.”

“If Casper even thinks of coming within five miles, he’s toast,” Jake said. “We’ve all got your back, Att. Well, I do, at least.”

“We do, too,” Amy snapped.

Atticus nodded. He headed back to the group with Dan, taking deep, cleansing breaths.

“Plinth?”
Dan said. “Is that like
plinth and needlth
?”

Atticus smiled. “It means the original foundations. That’s what those low walls are. The library and stuff, they’re all new — including that big fancy door, which leads to the Fakhri sextant.”

Umarov led the group toward the door, walking between two low, calf-high walls that traced rectangles. “Imagine this empty plateau in the fourteen hundreds, well outside the firelight of Samarkand. So much pure darkness, bright stars! Ulugh Beg cataloged one thousand eighteen of them. Well, some scholars say one thousand twenty-two . . . but who’s counting?”

The guide pulled the door open. Atticus and Dan raced to the front of the group to get in first. The temperature immediately dropped inside the door, as if the cold of outer space itself had been trapped over the centuries. A narrow stone path led to a wide railing overlooking a deep black hole.

Atticus’s breath caught in his throat, and it wasn’t because of the temperature. He had seen plenty of photographs of the Fakhri sextant, but they didn’t do justice to the massive sweep of the stone slopes. They plunged into the earth like giant mammoth tusks, with matching stone stairs on either side. He wondered how slabs of such weight and size had been shaped so precisely, polished to a perfect circular curve. He imagined hundreds of slaves hammering through rock, carving stone in the arid heat, using specifications of the tiniest fraction of a circle — using
pi
! Then somehow they had to carry the slabs up a curved slope. And if it was just a centimeter off, the whole thing fell apart. “Whoa . . .” he said.

“Dude, you could make serious bank with a skateboard rental!” Dan said.

Amy, who had positioned herself near Dan, jabbed him in the side.

Umarov cocked his head, bemused. “A gnarly idea, indeed, as they say. Especially as the Fakhri sextant rose much, much higher.” He gestured from the floor way upward behind them. “It curved up past where we are standing . . . into a building with a large dome.”

Dan craned his neck upward. “Cool.”

“It traces the north-south meridian exactly,” Umarov said. “Ulugh Beg’s measurements of stars and planets were accurate to one six-hundredth of a degree. This would be the width of an American penny at a distance of a third of a mile.”

Atticus gazed at the battered, rough walls. Any kind of writing they could have read was gone.

“So that was it?” Dan said. “They hung out and waited for stars to move?”

Umarov struck another pose and recited:

“What of this work of Ulugh Beg,

Who dared to count infinity?

His catalog, though vast in scope,

Yet of divisions, had but three.

When listed in descending rank,

The Fakhri apex as a start,

Descend and rise, descend again,

And stand thee o’er my ruler’s heart.”

“What the heck does that mean?” Dan asked.

Umarov shrugged. “Theories abound. It may have been a key to how he worked. The sextant was indeed Ulugh Beg’s heart. The pendulum descended and rose. The astronomer would stand at the bottom and look up along the shaft, visually lining up the star positions. The bodies were observed each day over many years, and each position was marked. Of course, stars orbit on many planes, so the formulae were complicated. So the ‘divisions’ could be the original buildings of the observatory. ‘Descending rank’ could be the position of the star as the light descends the pendulum. Or a reference to Beg’s many smaller instruments, such as parallactic lineals, armillary spheres, handheld astrolabes —”

“Astro who?” Dan said.

“An astrolabe is a small version of a sextant,” Umarov said. “Not as accurate, of course, but of great importance in early astronomy, for its portability. Many were exquisitely crafted, a perfect marriage of science and art.”

Atticus peered down the length of the curve. What could Vesper One want — the enormous, heavy tracks themselves? “Excuse me,” he said, “but if I said anything about a stale orb, would you know what I was talking about?”