The 39 Clues: Cahills vs. Vespers Book 2: A King's Ransom (12 page)

She died anyway.

At first, he thought he was overhearing her dreams.

“
V-One. He’s V-One! Vespers …”

Then she’d come fully awake. He was holding her hand when he felt his being squeezed.

“Mom!” Tears spurted into his eyes when he saw her smile.

“Atticus.” She wet her lips. “So thirsty.”

He gave her a sip of water. “I’ll get Dad.”

“No! You must listen. Last chance.”

“You’re going to get better.” Atticus choked back tears.

She squeezed his hand. “Listen. Very carefully. Remember the bedtime story? The one I used to tell you?”

Atticus nodded. He didn’t remember the story very well, not really, but he wanted her to calm down.

“The ring. The ring. Do you remember? They can help you. But they don’t know who we are! I am passing along guardianship to you.”

Guardianship? Of who? Jake? Jake was seven years older than he was. Of course, Atticus always told Jake he was way smarter, but he was joking. Half joking.

“You are a guardian. You must continue. Tradition. So much at stake. Follow the sparrow to the Mad King’s castle.”

It was strange how calm and focused she seemed, even though her words were crazy. “Sure, Mom,” Atticus said soothingly. His gaze darted toward the door. He wished his father would get back. “The Mad King’s castle. Got it.”

“Darling boy …” Suddenly, her gaze unfocused and she tightened her grip as the pain came.

“Nurse!” Atticus shouted.

“Promise me,” she whispered.

“I promise, Mom.”

“My papers. Look in my papers. Promise.”

“I promise.”

“Grace,” she whispered. “I need grace.”

His mother had never been religious. “Do you want me to get the chaplain?”

She shook her head, frustration and pain on her face. “Vespers,” she whispered through cracked lips. “The oldest of enemies. Guardian, promise me.”

“I promise,” he said, for the last time.

One last, gasped sentence. “Stay friends with Dan Cahill.”

She closed her eyes, and her hand went limp. She died two hours later.

Now the agony of that night swept over him again, and he wanted to crash to his knees and sob. He wasn’t over his mother’s death.

But he had to be strong. He had to figure this out. Deathbed promises, made in a swirl of words he didn’t understand. The pain in her eyes. The way she gasped for breath.

What if those things she was trying to tell him … were real?

Stay friends with Dan Cahill
. He’d thought she was just reassuring herself that her son would continue his only friendship after her death. But now, in his head, he heard her voice. He heard the
urgency
of it.

He glanced desperately at his brother. How could he find the words to tell him? Jake would never believe him about Astrid. He’d say she was delusional, that she was full of painkillers… .

Jake was already dialing.

“
Please,
Jake!”

The desperate emotion in his voice made Jake stop.

Atticus thought fast. He had to give Jake a reason to go find Amy and Dan. His brain was suddenly firing with connections, and he had a feeling that only Dan and Amy could answer his questions.

“Interpol won’t listen,” he said. “Maybe you’re right — what if Dan and Amy are after something else? And they’re using Dad’s name. What if they implicate him in the crime?”

“All the more reason to call the authorities,” Jake said.

“No,” Atticus said. “All the more reason to go to Prague.”

Kutná Hora was a picturesque city that had once sat on top of Europe’s most prosperous silver mine. Back in medieval times, it was second only to Prague in importance. St. Barbara’s Cathedral was renowned for its Gothic magnificence, and the town was popular with tourists. Amy and Dan milled with them as they exited the train station. Most headed for the cathedral or the mining museum in a fifteenth-century castle.

“Do you know what the Czechs used to do with people they didn’t like back in ye olde medieval days?” Dan asked Amy. “Throw them out the window. Really, I read it on the train. It’s called
defenestration.
It happened in the fourteen hundreds. And there was this event called the Great Defenestration in the sixteen hundreds, where this one group of guys threw this other group of guys they didn’t like out the window of Prague Castle. They actually lived, because they landed in a dung heap. Now, there’s a soft landing. But it started a trend. There’s actually an
index entry
for defenestrations in the guidebook. Isn’t that crazy?”

“Since when are you interested in history?”

“I’m not. I’m interested in wild acts of defenestration. Do you think we could arrange to meet Casper Wyoming in Prague Castle?”

“Sure. Keep thinking, Dan. Come on, let’s find the bus.”

Amy bought bus tickets at a
tabac
and asked directions to the bus for Sedlec. It was an easy walk to Masarykova Street.

The ride to Sedlec wasn’t long, and soon they were pulling up in a small suburb. They jumped off the bus with several other passengers. A tourist with a camera and a backpack approached them. “Is this the way to the bone church?” he asked Amy.

“You mean All Saints?” Amy asked. “I think it must be that church up ahead.”

“The
bone
church?” Dan murmured as he walked away.

Tucked next to the side of the church was a cemetery. Dan saw a skull and bones, like a Jolly Roger, at the entrance.

A real skull. With real bones.

“Cool,” he breathed. “It’s like the Church of Pirates.”

They paid their money and walked in. There were a few others in the chapel, walking back and forth, studying the decorative garlands, the splendid white chandelier, and the sculptures against the walls.

It was all fairly magnificent — and then you noticed what everything was made of.

“It’s all bones,” Dan said in awe. “Human bones! Is this the coolest thing in the world, or the creepiest? Or both?” He glanced over at a skull sitting on a pile of finger bones. “Dude? Can you lend me a hand?”

The skull stared back, its lower jaw missing. “Cat got your tongue?” Dan asked.

Amy grinned. She was always glad to see the goofball in Dan reappear. She consulted the pamphlet. “There are the bones of at least forty thousand people here. Lots of them died of the plague. When they built the church above us, they turned this chapel into an ossuary — a place for bones. But there were so many that in 1870 they finally asked this guy to … uh, arrange them. So he did this.”

“What a cool ye olde spookmaster dude,” Dan approved.

They walked around in awe. What Amy had thought were carved stone garlands hanging from the balconies above were arm and leg bones. A skull stared at them blankly, a leg bone clamped between its jaws.

“The chandelier is made up of every human bone,” Amy whispered to Dan as they looked above their heads.

Despite the creep factor, there was something so beautiful about this place, Amy thought. The fluttery edges of the hip bones looked like enormous flowers. The lineup of finger bones was a delicate necklace. A carved, painted cherub blew into a golden horn while casually balancing half a skull on its knee.

Dan wandered over to an alcove. Behind a wire screen was a mound of bones stacked in perfect rows. Alternating rows of skulls sat on the arranged bones. Their hollow eyes stared out. Some almost seemed to have expressions. One leaned over, resting on the next one, and Amy found herself drawn into those black, black eyes.

Somehow the creepy feeling left her. Death surrounded her, but here she and Dan were standing, living and breathing, and all these bones were just evidence of many lives lived before hers.

Dan gripped the wire grating. He moved closer to the skulls, staring, staring. His lighthearted mood was suddenly gone. Amy felt a flutter of alarm. What was he seeing?

“We’re breathing in death,” he murmured. “Every day.” He half turned to Amy. “Everybody dies. Why do we run away so hard and so fast, when it’s always there?”

“We run away hard and fast because
we don’t want to die
,” Amy said.

Dan seemed mesmerized by the black holes in the skull. Amy was afraid of his expression.

Dan shook his head. “It all seems so … futile.”

“Futile?” Amy had never heard Dan use that word before. “You mean, pointless?”

“Yeah. I know the meaning of the word, Amy. I’m not quite as dumb as everybody thinks I am. I know, I’ve got the photographic memory, but you’ve got the brains, right?”

Dan’s tone was sarcastic. Not teasing, but flat and almost mean.

“Not right,” Amy said, shocked. Was that what Dan really thought? “Nobody thinks that.”

Dan turned his back on her to gaze at the bones. “Futile. Stupid and pointless.”

Amy took a breath. She felt the hurtful sting of Dan’s tone, but she had no urge to stamp off. There was something heading for Dan, something that cast a huge shadow, and her first instinct was to grab his arm and pull him away from the darkness she saw. But that would just make the darkness grow.

“It doesn’t seem that way to me,” she said. She kept her voice quiet. “It seems to me that we’re doing what all these people did. Just … trying to live in the best way we can. Protecting the people we love. We give it everything we have. Just like these people probably did.”

Dan didn’t say anything. It was like he hadn’t even heard her.

“And I don’t think you’re stupid,” she added fiercely.

She felt her cell phone buzz in her pocket. She checked the ID. Sinead.

“Are you in?” Sinead asked.

“We’re in. Nothing to see. Nothing but old bones.”

“Listen, I have another lead. We’re certain now that the text that Cheyenne got was not from a mobile device.”

“Meaning it was from a computer? In the church?”

“Exactly. And we figured out the
altitude
of the computer. It’s about six feet down from where you’re standing.”

Amy looked around. The church and chapel were up a slight rise and looked down on the cemetery. She walked a few feet away so that no one could overhear.

“So there must be a room below us,” she whispered.

“Exactly. Look around. And keep the line open, okay?”

“Okay, we’re moving.” Amy slipped on her earpiece and motioned to Dan. She saw with relief that he seemed to have shaken off his mood.

They walked around the perimeter of the church, under the fantastic ropes of bones. They cruised down the opposite side. A door had a sign in Czech, and they hesitated.

“It could say
welcome
, or it could say
keep out
,” Amy said.

“Maybe we should do a spell-Czech,” Dan said, opening the door.

The door led to a narrow flight of stairs made of large pieces of stone. They were worn in the middle from the thousands of feet that had traveled down and up over the centuries. Dan closed the door behind them, and immediately they were plunged into darkness. Amy got out her penlight and shined it on the stairs. They crept down. The place smelled ancient and damp. The roof was low above their heads. It dripped.

When they reached the bottom, she swung the penlight along a narrow passageway. Even here, bones hung in garlands and were arranged in displays. Skulls lined a shelf that ran the length of the passage.

“I can’t see anything on the video feed,” Sinead said. “What is it?”

“It must be the passage to the cemetery,” Amy said. “I can’t imagine keeping a computer down here.”

“Amy? Look at this.” Dan stood in front of a metal grate. Behind it was a small room. He pushed open the grate and walked in. It was like a mini-amphitheater, only with dead people as patrons. Skulls were arranged in piles around the room, stacked atop leg bones and hip bones. Flat, narrow ledges ran around the room, serving as seats. There was a clear, flat, raised space along the far wall. Over it was an arrangement of bones in the shape of a giant letter.

“Maybe the original guy who did the chapel — maybe he was a Vesper,” Amy whispered. Somehow, whispers seemed appropriate here.

Dan moved around the space. “Look at this candle.” He held out a candle with wax dripped down into the holder. “It’s been used recently — there’s no grime or dust in the wax.”

“But there’s no computer here,” Amy said. “Please don’t tell me we have to dig through the bones.”

“No, look how they’re arranged — it would be impossible to move them and stack them again so perfectly. I think you’re right — it must have been a laptop.”

“But there had to be a power source,” Sinead insisted in Amy’s ear. “Can you find an outlet anywhere?”

Dan and Amy shined their penlights on the walls close to the floor. Suddenly, Dan caught sight of something. He knelt on the floor. “Whoa. This would be
so
easy to miss. Did they have USB ports in the Middle Ages?”

“Try it!” Sinead said quickly.

Dan fished in his pack for a cable and hooked up his computer to the USB port. He scanned the drive. Nothing came up. “It’s been wiped.”

“I’m going to hand the phone to Evan — he’ll talk you through it. You might be able to scrape something off it.”

Dan settled with his back against the wall, computer in his lap. As Evan read out a list of codes, he typed them into his computer. The USB icon flashed.

“I think something’s coming through … it’s a file.” Dan clicked on it. “Some kind of report. But it’s only a few sentences.”

“Save it to your hard drive and then e-mail it here.”

Dan read the document as he pressed
SAVE
. “It won’t save,” he said. “Or send. It’s encrypted somehow. And parts of it are blacked out.”

V-1 report

infiltrated family w/two children. Left MA w/mission complete. Information successfully destroyed. No suspicion from G. Coverup successful. Mother deceased. Children are

“It’s disappearing,” Dan said. “The words are disappearing!”

“It’s an automatic wipe!” Sinead cried. “There could be an alert attached to it. You’d better get out of there.”

Dan flipped over onto his knees to quickly stuff the computer in his backpack. He held his penlight in his mouth. As he zipped the pack, the light wavered on the old stones. He stopped. Someone had carved their initials into the wall.

Amy stood at the door. “Come on, Dan!”

He ran his fingers over the carving.

“Let’s go!”

Dan wrenched himself away.

As he followed Amy’s wavering shadow down the passageway, it seemed to flicker and then fade. And the shadow behind him seemed to grow.

infiltrated family

two children

MA

information successfully destroyed

Mother deceased