Day of Doom (19 page)

He looked at her but said nothing. Hecould see Sinead waiting for his answer.

Amy said again, “
Do
 
you have theserum? The real stuff?”

Dan said, “Yes. It was in my bag.”

“Meaning Isabel has it now,” said Sinead. “Great.” She looked down at the

man’s body and then listened for a moment

to footsteps heading their way.

“Unless we want to waste time

explaining why a dead body is in your compartment, I suggest that we get out of here. Now.”

Amy, Dan, and Sinead ran out of the compartment and headed away from the sounds of the onrushing feet and in the direction Jake had run.

As   they   were   running,   Amywhispered to Dan, “How did Isabel knowyou had the serum?”

Dan shrugged but then an idea hithim. “As she was pretending to send metexts as Dad, I . . . I might have mentionedsomething about the serum.”

“Might have or did?”

“Okay, did.”

“Because she asked you about it?”

“Yeah,” Dan admitted. “She reallyconned me.”

“She’s good at that, Dan. After all, she’s conned millions of people.”

They were suddenly hurtled forward and slammed into Sinead. All three went down in a tangle of limbs.

“Get off me!” wheezed Sinead. “You’re on my stomach. I can’t breathe.”

“What happened?” said Dan as he rolled off her.

“The train just slammed to a stop,” explained Amy.

“That I get. But why?” snapped Sinead.

“Trains usually stop when someone wants to get off,” replied Amy.

They all stood and Dan glanced out the window. “But we’re still in the tunnel. Who would want to get off in a tunnel?”

The train lights suddenly went out.

They were once more standing in the pitchblack.

“I can think of one person who might want to get off,” said Amy.

“Isabel,” added Sinead.

“And if she’s getting off, so are we,” said Amy.

“How?” asked Dan. “I can’t see a thing.”

“But I can,” said Amy.

“How?” asked Dan again.

“I  took  the   man’s   night-vision goggles. Dan, hold on to my hand. Sinead, take ahold of Dan’s shirt. Now let’s go. That woman is not getting away with Atticus.”

As they were trying to get off the train theyheard an announcement over the repaired PA.

“Ladies   and   gentlemen,   we’re experiencing some difficulties with our power system. Please remain where you

are  while   our  crew   addresses  the

problem. We should be up and running shortly. Thank you for your patience, and thank you for choosing Amtrak for your

travel needs.”

“Right,”   grumbled  Dan.   “Never again.”

“Amy?” The voice came at them from out of the darkness.

“Jake?”

Amy focused her goggles a bit better and saw Jake at the end of the corridor. He still had the gun in his hand. They hurried forward to join him.

“Jake, what happened? Did you find Atticus?”

“No,” he said miserably. “I lost them.”

The lights came back on and Amytook off her goggles.

She said, “If Isabel got off the train,we need to as well.”

Jake said, “We’re in a tunnel. Why

would she get off here?”

“I don’t know. But I can’t believe

that the train just happened to come to a stop here for no reason. She has to be behind it.”

“I was listening for any exterior door to open,” said Jake. “I didn’t hear any. And if there’s no power, can they even get the doors open?”

“There must be a way to do that in an emergency,” Sinead pointed out.

Dan piped in, “Look, we don’t know enough, okay? We’re just grasping at straws here. We need more information.

Like, why would Isabel want to be gettingoff at the Rocky Mountains in Colorado? Because that’s where we are. I checkedthe schedule. The Cascade Mountains are

a long way from here.” Even as he said it,

Dan looked puzzled, as though a curiousthought had just occurred to him.

Sinead said, “Dan’s right. Maybe thetrain really has broken down.”

“Who cares?” exclaimed Jake. “We

need to get Atticus back. He’s the last Guardian. She’s going to kill him.”

Dan looked to his right. “Hey, isn’t that your compartment, Jake?”

“I doubt Atticus is in there,” he barked.

“But your laptop is. Let’s get online and try to figure this out.”

“How will going online get Atticus back?” snapped Jake.

In response Dan pulled his phone out of his pocket and brought up the photos of the Lewis and Clark compass he’d taken in DC. “Before everything happened, I

was studying this.”

“Why?” asked Amy. “We already know what it says about the latitude and longitude.”

“Do we?” said Dan. “Do we really? I’m not so sure. I think we missed

something. Something potentially big. And we know Isabel was really interested in the compass. She wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble for nothing. There has to be something important about it.”

Jake said, “We know that. It told her the coordinates for the Cascades.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Dan mysteriously.

Amy looked at Jake. “I guess it won’t hurt to take a few minutes to look at this.

And it might help us figure out where theymight be taking Atticus.”

Sinead added, “And you running

around the train holding a gun will just get you arrested, Jake. That certainly won’t help Atticus.”

Jake looked down at the gun in his hand, engaged the safety, and then stuck it in his waistband and covered it with his shirt. “Okay, but let’s hurry.”

They went inside the compartment and Jake fired up his laptop.

Amy said, “If the train starts back up again, we all need to make a decision whether to stay on or get off.”

“How can we make that decision?”

asked Sinead. “If we get off and Isabel didn’t, we’re stuck inside a mountain.”

Jake said bitterly, “Yeah, but if we don’t get off and Isabel does with Atticus, we’ll never see him again. So we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place inside a

mountain. No stupid pun intended.”

Dan said, “Which makes it all the more important to get more information. We can’t stop Isabel or Vesper One, and get Atticus and the hostages back, without knowing more.”

Jake was clicking keys on his laptop. “Okay, I’m connected to the web. Now what?”

“Let me have your phone. The picture you took of the back of the compass is better than the shot I took.”

Jake dug into his pocket and tossed Dan his phone.

Dan quickly brought the photo up on the screen. He enlarged it and studied the markings on the back they had gone over before.

Sinead said, “Anything?”

Dan shook his head. “I still can’tquite make it out.” He shot Amy a glance. “Wait  a  minute.   Those  night-visiongoggles you took. They can magnifythings.”

“Yeah, when it’s dark. But it’s notdark, in case you hadn’t noticed,” said Sinead.

Amy said, “But we can make it dark. Quick, turn out all the lights in here. Jake,close your laptop.”

They turned off all the lights, drewthe door and window curtains closed, and Jake quickly pushed down the cover of hislaptop, shutting off the screen light.

Dan put on the goggles and fired themup. He leaned down close to the photo.

“Okay, I’m seeing something. Toobad the res on the picture isn’t better.”

“That’s the best a cell-phone camera can do,” barked Jake. “And if you don’t come up with something in, like, five seconds, I’m going to go look for Att with or without you.”

Dan adjusted the magnification on the goggles. “Oh, wow, that’s better. Okay, let me see.”

Sinead, who had not been with them in DC and did not know what any of this represented,   hissed,   “Why   is   this important? We’re wasting time.”

“No, we’re not wasting time,” Dan shot back. “I think we’re about to make a

huge breakthrough.”

He adjusted the magnification on the goggles again, revving them up to full power. He leaned as close as he could to the phone screen.

“Okay, we looked at these before and came up with the latitude and longitude coordinates for the Cascade Mountain

Range.”

“Right,” said Amy. “Latitude forty-seven degrees north and longitude onehundred and twenty-one degrees west.”

“Hey, wait just a minute,” exclaimed Dan. “ Someone has messed with thesenumbers. I can see it clearly with thegoggles. I don’t think that seven is really aseven. A line was scratched out. I think

it’s really a zero. And the one twenty-one number has been changed, too. The two and the second one have been altered. I think they were originally a zero and a six. And even from the photo it looks recently done.” He squinted. “Maybe someone used, like, a stain or dark paint to cover up part of the six and zero.”

“Recently done?” exclaimed Jake. “How is that possible? That compass is

over two hundred years old. It’s probably

been in that museum for decades.”

Amy   snapped   her   fingers.

“Remember the woman back at the

museum?”

“Dr. Nancy Gwinn?” said Jake. “The curator who showed Isabel the compass?”

“Exactly.”

“So that’s why you’re interested in it,” said Sinead. “Because Isabel was.”

“Right,” said Amy. “Anyway, Gwinn said that there was almost a disaster.”

Dan cried out, “She said Isabel dropped the compass and it bounced under a display cabinet.”

Jake took up the story. “And Isabel got under the cabinet to get it. She would have been out of sight of Gwinn at that point.”

Amy added, “And she could haveused a knife or even her grotesquely longfingernails to cut into the back of thecompass box, altering the numbers, thenbrushed off the wood shavings, andhanded it back. And she might have hadsome stain with her that she applied tochange some of the numbers. It wouldhave only taken a few seconds. Themarkings were so slight to begin with Gwinn probably never even noticed thechange. She was probably just happy theglass on the compass hadn’t broken.”