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

  “Okay,” Atticus said. “That’s cool.”

  Jake nodded gratefully at his brother, then took the laptop from Dan.

  “So, the Voynich,” Jake said. “It’s a whole book — I can’t remember exactly, but it’s over two hundred pages long. And it’s really old.”

  “How old?” Amy asked.

  “They weren’t sure, for a long time,” Jake said. “This bookseller named Voynich — that’s where it got its name — he found it in an old monastery in Italy. In 1912, I think. And he bought it from the monks. Ever since then, there have been all these theories. Some people thought it was from the thirteenth century, or it was from the eighteenth, or it was modern, a forgery. Then a few years ago, the Beinecke had it carbon-dated. Both the pages and the ink are fifteenth century, which proves —”

  “That it isn’t a forgery,” Dan said.

  “No, not exactly,” Jake said. “What it proves is that it’s a medieval document. I mean, a really determined forger could get really old vellum and really old ink, but they’re pretty sure that’s not what happened.”

  “So what kind of document is it?” Amy asked. “What does it say?”

  Jake snorted. “That,” he said, “is the problem.”

  Jake went on to explain that the Voynich was written in an unknown language — one never seen before.

  “And nobody’s been able to figure it out,” he said.

  He started clicking on the laptop. “Yale gets so many requests to see the manuscript that they couldn’t keep up with all of them,” he said. “So they finally digitized the whole thing, and now anyone who wants to study it can look at the pages online.”

  A few clicks, and he had a digital image of one of the pages from the Voynich.

  “Look,” he said. He turned the screen around so they could all see it.

  “Is it in code?” Dan asked. “It looks like something you could figure out. I mean, not you you, but somebody.”

  “That’s what everybody thinks when they first see it,” Jake said. “But hundreds of people have tried — maybe thousands. Even the government got into it. You know the guys who broke the Japanese and German codes during World War II? They worked on it for years and got nothing.”

  “Wow,” Amy said. “That’s amazing.”

  Jake glanced at her quickly. She was looking at the screen, not at him, and there didn’t seem to be any edge to her voice.

  Girls. The oldest mystery in the universe. Amy was acting like their kiss had never happened. It wasn’t just me, Jake thought. She definitely kissed me back.

  “What are the pictures of?” Dan asked.

  “Three kinds of illustrations,” Jake answered. Click — “Botanical drawings” — click click — “astronomical charts” — click click — “and these weird ones. Mom always called them the plumbing pictures.”

  “Hello!” Dan said.

  The “plumbing pictures” showed water flowing through pipes, basins, and aqueducts. In almost all of them, there were naked women swimming.

  Atticus nudged Dan and they both giggled.

  “Oh, please,” Amy said. Jake could see that she was a little embarrassed. She changed the subject. “What about the botanical drawings? Wouldn’t they give a clue to where the book was written, or what it’s about?”

  “You’d think so,” Jake said. “But the plants aren’t from real life. I mean, they think they’ve identified a couple of them, but even those have parts that aren’t real.”

  Jake sighed. “All kinds of people have tried to figure it out. Historians, of course, like Mom. But also botanists, astronomers, linguists, mathematicians, philosophers, theologians —”

  “Plumbers?” Dan said with a snicker.

  Jake grinned. “Some scholars have spent their whole lives working on it,” he said. “And you wouldn’t believe the theories they come up with.”

  “Like what?” Atticus asked.

  “Aliens,” Jake said. “And angels. That’s just two of them.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Amy said.

  “I’m not, but they are,” Jake said. “And even some of the more credible theories are pretty out-there. Like, it’s an old form of Ukrainian, but you’re only supposed to read every fifth letter.”

  Dan had sobered up now that the subject was not naked women. “What about the seventy-four?” he asked. “Do you think that means we’re supposed to steal page seventy-four?”

  “Or maybe, the first seventy-four pages?” Amy guessed.

  “But that’s not the most important question, not really,” Atticus said. “The question is, why do the Vespers want it? If they can’t read it, it’s no use to them.”

  Jake frowned, thinking hard. “I get what you’re saying,” he said slowly. “If the Vespers are smart enough to read the Voynich, we’re really in trouble.”

  They had been making decent progress from the airport through the borough of Queens, in taxi mode: mad spurts of shouldering through traffic alternating with a sulky crawl. Now, as they drove onto the Whitestone Bridge, the driver whistled through his teeth. “Look like trouble here,” he said.

  A police car was parked across the lanes. An officer stood facing them, arm up, palm flat, in the classic “halt” stance. The taxi stopped, and within seconds, the bridge entrance behind them became a giant parking lot packed with cars.

  Beyond the cop, the last of the cars that had been allowed through disappeared from sight. The bridge’s roadway was now completely clear.

  “What’s going on?” Dan asked from the back.

  “There’s a motorcycle —” Amy said. “No, wait, it’s like a motorcade, sort of.”

  Three SUVs with motorcycles front and rear were coming toward them on the wrong side of the road. Celebrity? Amy thought. Or maybe some politician.

  As if he could hear her thoughts, Dan said, “Must be somebody pretty important to stop a whole bridge’s worth of traffic.”

  Then he gasped, and the heads of the other three swiveled to stare at him.

  It was as if all four of them had the same thought at the same moment.

  Who had that kind of power?

  The Vespers!

  “Move!” Amy said urgently.

  They scrambled out of the car. The taxi driver began yelling at them.

  “Hey! Where you going? You say Connettytuck, I taking you there!” He got out, too, and grabbed Dan’s arm.

  “My backpack!” Dan said. “The trunk, open the trunk!”

  He twisted out of the driver’s grasp, leaned inside the open door, and groped around for the trunk release. He hit the buttons for the warning lights and the gas cap before he found the right one, the driver scolding him in a language he didn’t understand.

  “Dan, leave it!” Amy said. “We have to get out of here!” But Dan ran to the back of the taxi and grabbed the pack.

  The motorcycle pulled over. The lead SUV made a U-turn and stopped near the police car. The driver-side door opened.

  “RUN!” Amy yelled. “If we get separated, meet up at Yale!”

  She glanced around wildly. They were on a bridge, with only two choices: forward or back. And forward was toward the SUVs.

  Which meant they had no choice. Two minus one equals zero: Vesper math.

  Amy turned and started running back the way they had come.

  A voice called out, “Amy!”

  It wasn’t the boys, they were still with her, but Amy knew that her instincts had been right: It was someone who knew they’d be here, on their way to Yale. . . .

  Dodging between the cars as fast as she could, Amy felt bewilderment mixed with fear. This is crazy! Vesper One needs us for this mission — why would he send people to stop us?

  “Amy! Amy Cahill!”

  A small part of her brain tried to free itself from the panic and think rationally. I know that voice — who —

  “AMY! STOP! STOP, IT’S ME, SINEAD!”

  Amy hugged Sinead, tears of relief in her eyes. “I was never so glad to s
ee anyone in my whole life,” Amy said.

  They walked back to the SUV. Sinead signaled the rest of the motorcade, and they departed.

  “Who are they?” Amy asked.

  “Private security firm,” Sinead said. “Mostly ex-SWAT or Navy SEALs. And our Lucian friends got in touch with the mayor, who helped out with the traffic.”

  Amy smiled in gratitude. “But why didn’t you call and tell me you were coming?”

  “It’s Yale, right?” Sinead said briskly. “Come on, we better get going.” She threw her arm around Amy’s shoulders. “It’s great to be together again!”

  “Ditto,” Amy said, and the thought that Sinead hadn’t answered the question faded from her mind.

  It had almost been like a game.

  A chess match that she had played perfectly, each move with patience and purpose. Sinead felt a tremendous amount of satisfaction thinking about the months that had gone by without Amy suspecting a thing.

  Now it was time for the end game, just three moves left. First, get the serum formula. Second, present it with a flourish to Vesper One, whose gratitude would surely be boundless. And third, the most important, reunite with Ned and Ted to give them the serum.

  The Starlings had given up all claim to the serum when the Clue hunt ended. But back then, the doctors still seemed to have plenty of strategies available in their attempts to cure Ted’s blindness and Ned’s headaches.

  It had been more than two years now. Nothing had worked, and they were out of options. Sinead was desperate. The serum had to be the answer; it would succeed where the doctors had failed.

  As for her friendship with Amy . . . Sinead felt a twinge, a vibration of regret that she tamped instantly.

  My family. My brothers. That’s what matters.

  Sinead’s hand slid to her pocket. She fingered the barrel of her new gun with both pride and tenderness.

  Are you the best ickle gun in the world? Yes you are, oh, yes you are. . . .

  A SwissMiniGun. The world’s smallest handgun, just two inches long. Sinead had briefly considered the eighteen-karat-gold, diamond-studded version — which cost more than forty thousand dollars — but opted in the end for the more practical stainless-steel model.

  Removed from the holster, the gun could actually be hidden in the palm of her hand, and it sounded pretty much like a cap gun when it was fired. The bullets were not much bigger than pinheads — dollhouse bullets that looked like they couldn’t hurt a flea.

  Sinead found this vaguely comforting, because the honest truth was that she didn’t want to hurt Amy. Only if I have to . . .

  The bullets were real enough, though, and exited the barrel at three hundred miles per hour. At point-blank range, they could penetrate human flesh and do plenty of damage to a vital organ or a major artery.

  Normally, getting that close to an adversary would be a tricky task. But not in this case.

  After all, she and Amy were best friends.

  “It’s not looking good,” Sinead said.

  She wasn’t talking about the road, which was blissfully empty for now, all the traffic ahead of them cleared by her stunt on the bridge.

  She was talking about the hostages.

  “We enhanced the last video feed so we could get a good look at everyone. Alistair is the worst off. I hate to say this, but he looks really awful. His eyes — I don’t know quite how to put it. It’s like he’s given up already.”

  Amy turned to meet Dan’s gaze and saw her own worry reflected in his expression. Alistair Oh was not the oldest hostage — Fiske Cahill was a few years older — but Fiske was in many ways like his sister Grace, Amy and Dan’s grandmother. Both seemed to have a thin core of steel running through them.

  Alistair, on the other hand, had shuttled back and forth between sympathy and nefariousness, alternately helping and hurting the Cahills. Although he had finally ended up on their side for good, his ambivalence was perhaps a symptom of a deeper weakness. The kidnapping and captivity seemed to be sapping not only his physical strength, but his will to live as well.

  Amy swallowed and forced out the next words. “Anything more about — about Phoenix?”

  Sinead shook her head. Silence all around.

  Phoenix, only twelve years old . . . It wasn’t like Amy could have done anything to prevent his death. But that knowledge didn’t help. Wretched. And like retching, that was how it made her feel.

  For a while Amy heard nothing but the muted sounds of traffic through what she guessed was the bulletproof glass of the car’s windows.

  “Amy.”

  Sinead had her eyes on the road, and Amy could tell that whatever was coming, it was serious.

  “No one wants to talk about this, but we have to,” Sinead said. She glanced back at Dan.

  Without asking, Amy knew what Sinead meant.

  The serum.

  The main reason that the Vespers were targeting the Cahills was a formula Gideon Cahill had invented in the sixteenth century. If all of its ingredients were precisely and painstakingly measured and mixed, the result would be a serum that gave its imbibers abilities and talents that made them superior to most of the human race.

  The thirty-nine components of the serum had been discovered, and Dan had memorized the exact formula before it was destroyed.

  “The one thing that could defeat them once and for all,” Sinead said. “I’m not saying we should use it, but I am saying that we need to think about it.”

  “I’ve been —” Dan started to speak, but cut himself off.

  Amy looked at him sharply. “You’ve been what?”

  Dan shifted in his seat. “I’ve been — I mean, I have been thinking about it,” he said. “I can’t help it, it’s stuck there in my brain.”

  “Exactly my point,” Sinead said. “Dan has the formula in his head. No one else knows it. On the one hand, that makes it safe from the Vespers. But on the other hand, it means none of us can get at it, either.”

  “And why would we need to?” Amy demanded. “We’re not going to use it. Not ever. It’s way too much power for any one person.”

  “I know,” Sinead said, “but supposing — worst-case scenario here — supposing the Vespers get hold of Dan somehow. And they torture him, and he gives up the formula —”

  “You think — Are you crazy?!” Dan spluttered indignantly. “They could pull out every one of my fingernails — I’d never give it up!”

  “Okay, okay,” Sinead said. “I said, worst-case scenario.”

  “Besides,” Atticus piped up, “I know you’d never give it up willingly, but what if they gave you truth serum or something?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I meant.” Sinead flashed a grateful glance in the mirror at Atticus. “And then — then something terrible happens to Dan, and now they’re the only ones who have it.”

  “So what are you saying?” Amy said. She couldn’t keep the testiness out of her voice. She hated the serum and everything it stood for. Not for the first time, she wished there was a way to go into Dan’s brain and vacuum out the cells that held the formula.

  “We need to store it somewhere,” Sinead said. “Somewhere really secure. Where we could get to it but no one else could.”

  “Fort Knox, maybe?” A lame response. Amy knew that sarcasm was not one of her strong points.

  “Amy, please. Listen to what I’m saying.”

  Sinead’s voice was steady. She’s being patient with me even though I’m hassling her, Amy thought, and felt a wave of warmth: It was so good to be with a girlfriend again after all the hours with just the boys.

  “I was thinking of a password-protected file,” Sinead went on. “Maybe on a secure cell phone.”

  “And who would have access to the password?”

  “Your call,” Sinead said immediately. “I mean, it would be good if more than one person had it, in case of — of Vesper interference. But it would be up to you, whoever you think you could trust.”

  Amy stared out the window for a long
time. The miles rolled by in silence.

  She glanced behind her once and saw that both Jake and Atticus were dozing off, Atticus with his head lolling forward, Jake leaning against the window with his mouth partly open. He looked cute in that awkward pose, maybe even cuter because of it.

  But Dan was awake and staring out the window, too. Amy could tell from his solemn expression that his brain felt like hers did: crowded with too many thoughts, too few of them pleasant.

  Who can I trust one hundred percent, besides Dan?

  Fiske and Nellie. Currently unavailable, she thought grimly.

  With a stab of pain in her gut, she thought of Erasmus. He would have been perfect for this.

  Amy could see water to her right now, an inlet of the Long Island Sound, and soon after that, they took the exit for Yale.

  As they drove onto the campus, Sinead broke the silence. “One other thing,” she said. “It’s too much pressure for one person.” She jerked her chin toward the backseat. “He shouldn’t be carrying that burden alone. As it is now, any decision about the serum, ultimately he has to make it all by himself. This way, other people would be sharing the load.”

  “It’s not a problem,” Dan said quickly. “I can handle it.”

  “No one’s saying you can’t,” Amy said. “I mean, it’s obvious — you’ve been handling it all this time. But Sinead’s right. Things are different now that the Vespers are active.”

  “Active” — now there’s a euphemism for you.

  Who was left?

  Sinead, of course. Amy felt relief coursing through her. Weird that I didn’t think of her right away. She’d take a bullet for me. What would I do without her?

  “Okay,” she said. She nodded at Sinead. “Let’s do it. As soon as we get to Yale.”

  As Sinead searched for a parking spot, Amy saw that Yale looked exactly like she’d imagined it would, autumn sunlight warming the pale honey-colored stone buildings, students everywhere. It was a New England postcard come to life. I bet the libraries here are awesome, she thought.

  Sinead eased the SUV into a space on a side street that led to the Beinecke Library. Amy took out her phone slowly, still thinking. She tapped idly at the screen to bring up her messages, then frowned.