In Too Deep - 39 Clues 06 (15 page)

The crew began bringing up supplies from the cabin. Amy sat up."Dan," she whispered. "I saw a rosemary plant! Remember Irina's clue?"Dan turned to Amy. "Okay, this is totally weird, but are you thinking wha
t I'm thinking?"

"That the guy on the island is a Cahill?"

"That the guy on the island is Robert Cahill Henderson!"

"That's impossible! He'd be ... about a hundred and forty years old!"Dan nodded. "Exactly. Maybe the great Cahill secret is eternal life. Or at least a life extender. Think about it, Amy. Wouldn't it make you the most powerful person in the world? Maybe Robert Cahill Henderson didn't go off to die. Maybe he came back here, and for the last fifty years, he's been working on the formula!"

"It's crazy," Amy said slowly."It could be true," Dan argued.

They both jumped up. "We're getting off here!" Amy announced. "We'll take the supplies!""But there's no hotel here!" Darma protested. "Nothing for tourists!"

"It's okay! We love to
camp!" Dan fished in his pocket and came up with more money. He pressed it on Darma. "Pick us up tomorrow, okay?" Dan asked. He slipped out of the boat into the knee-deep water. He picked up one of the boxes and balanced it on his head.

Amy slipped over the rail. She picked up the other box. "Bye!"

Darma hauled the rubber raft aboard. He looked confused. But he shrugged and waved at them. Within moments, his boat had rounded the end o
f the island and disappeared.

CHAPTER 23

Nellie ran her hands through her hair groggily. She looked at the clock.

She couldn't believe that she'd slept for twelve hours.Naturally, Dan and Amy were gone. And this time, they hadn't even left a note.

She checked her e-mail, and sure enough, there were two messages from clashgrrl.

She typed in the code and sighed.

KEEP THEM CLOSE. RED ALERT. ARRANGE IMMEDIATE DEPARTURE.

"Now you tell me," Nellie said out loud. Saladin mewed plaintively. "You, too?" Nellie asked. She scooped him up and petted him absent-mindedly.

She couldn't believe she'd lost Amy and Dan again.

She'd give them an hour or so before she started to tear her hair out.

Saladin squirmed out of her arms. She was holding him too tight. It was because she was worried. Something didn't feel right.

They were usually good about letting her know when they split. But s
he'd caught the looks between
them when they'd found out she could fly a plane. They were starting to suspect her. Poor little dudes. They couldn't trust anybody.

Another message popped up from clashgrrl
. The subject line read don't b
lame!
That meant the message was of the utmost urgency.

Nellie shut the laptop with one bare foot. She wasn't going to check in until she found them. She had a bad feeling about this.

* * *

Irina stayed behind as Isabel entered the shop. Isabel had hired a car, but Irina had been able to keep up on a motorcycle. She wore a disguise, but Isabel hadn't taken any of the usual precautions, which meant that she felt safe in Jakarta.

Isabel had a canvas shopping bag that had started out empty and was now bulging with items. Irina had been able to get close enough with the scope in her camera to see what Isabel was buying.

This last item sent a chill through Irina. It was just as she suspected. Isabel had cunning, but not much imagination.

And so here it was. Her last stand would take place here. The power of the 39 Clues could not rest in Lucian hands if Isabel Kabra was the head of the branch.

What would the consequences be if she acted against her leader? She knew very well. She would be cast out. Every Lucian would know that sh
e had betrayed the
branch. Isabel and Vikram would make sure of that.

They would make up a story, slant things their way. Everything she knew would be gone -- money, connections, purpose. The world would become an empty place, and she would become a ghost.

She had no choice. She had to try. What is the difference between you? Amy had asked.

This is the difference, Amy. There are some things I will not do. And there are some things I will not allow to happen.She turned and ran into Ian and Natalie.

Natalie smiled. Irina couldn't see her eyes behind the black sunglasses."Good news. My counter-surveillance indicates that your mother has not been tailed," Irina said. Not by a flicker of an eyelash would she allow these two hooligans to see they'd unnerved her.

"I have more good news," Natalie said. "Mother received new orders this morning.""And?"

Stealthily, Irina shot out a needle from each index finger.

It would be easier to operate if these two were out of commission for a nice long while.

Natalie moved with such speed that Irina had time for only a flicker of astonishment.

She'd
always thought of the sulky girl as incapable of zeal. Natalie's hand shot forward, grabbed Irina's finger, and bent it back almost all the way.

Irina felt white pain as her finger joint popped.
And then the needle sank in.

* * *

Amy and Dan dropped the boxes on the beach and trudged up toward the path.

"Why did we let Darma go?" Amy asked. "If we don't find anybody, we'll have to spend the night here."

"That would totally rock," Dan said. "Like Robinson Cruise-o."

"Robinson Crusoe," Amy corrected. They reached the lush tropical forest and struck out on the path."I bet Troppo will be glad to see us," Dan said. "We're just one big happy family, right?"Amy was filled with foreboding. The sun had gone down behind the hill, so the shadows were lengthening. She was suddenly afraid of what they would find.

Dan stepped out into a clearing. "Whoa," he said. "Look at this."The shell of a large building stood by a stand of palms.

Construction equipment still littered the ground, big concrete blocks, thick coils of wire, clay tiles. "It looks like they were going to build a hotel," Dan said. "Look, there are more buildings down there."

"Dan," Amy said. "Look."She pointed to the sand. Footprints were clearly outlined. Dan put his own foot next to one. The footprint was much larger, the footprint of a man. Amy's doubts about Dan's theory were sudd
enly crowded out by her fear.

They followed the footprints past the abandoned hotel and through the clearing. Down the path they could see a small crescent beach, the sand colored pink by the setting sun.

Tall palms surrounded it. The footprints disappeared, melded into the dimples of the soft sand.

Amy caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye.

A hammock was strung between two palm trees. It swayed back and forth gently. She couldn't see the person lying in it, just one bare foot gently pushing the ground to keep it rocking.They walked closer, hardly breathing.

As they reached the hammock, they could see a pair of perfectly pressed lemon-yellow linen shorts. A crisp white shirt. And, his eyes closed, a smile on his face
... their cousin Alistair Oh.

CHAPTER 24

Alistair opened one eye. If he was surprised to see them, he didn't show it."Welcome to paradise," he said.

He swung both legs down so that he was sitting up. "You look disappointed."

"We didn't expect to see you here," Dan muttered."I could say the same," Alistair said. "Except it wouldn't be quite true. I'm getting to the point where I'm never surprised when you pop up."

Dan wanted to punch a tree. He was sure he was on the trail of the oldest man in the world. Instead, he'd only found another Cahill cousin.

And he still wasn't sure how he felt about Alistair. Amy had cried when she'd thought Alistair had died in the cave-in back in Korea.

Even he had gotten a little damp. Well, okay, he'd cried. A little. But then it turned out Alistair was alive. Which meant he'd totally scammed them.

It hadn't been the first time, either. He was an Ekaterina, just as intent on findi
ng the 39 Clues as they were.

Still, he'd helped them in Egypt.

It wasn't his fault his submersible -- which he'd invented -- had sunk. Well, maybe it was his fault. They'd almost been fish food under the Nile.

"What are you doing here, Alistair?" Amy asked."Same thing you are, I expect," Alistair said. "Trying to figure out what Robert C. Henderson did here. A brilliant man. An Ekat, of course."

"We guessed that," Dan said. "We tracked him in Australia."

"Did you now." Alistair's eyes gleamed. "I'd hate for you to come all the way to Indonesia without satisfying a bit of your curiosity. How about another information exchange? You tell me what you learned in Australia, and I'll tell you what I've learned here. Deal?"

Dan and Amy exchanged a
glance.

They'd shared information with Alistair before. It usually worked out okay."You probably know he was a scientist," Alistair said. "Like so many of our branch, he had a brilliant and inventive mind. He ascended the ranks of the Ekat elite very quickly and attracted the notice of the branch leaders. He was headed for great things. And then he made a great mistake."

Alistair paused. "He fell in love with a Lucian."

Dan groaned. "Oh, please. Barf control! Not a love story."

"Yes, a love story. But many love stories are also ... betrayal stories. She wa
s highborn, a cousin of Queen
Victoria. Which gave the Ekats an idea. There had been a rumor -- well, more than a rumor-- that about sixty years before a highborn Lucian in the Russian monarchy had assembled most-- or even all -- of the thirty-nine clues.

The Madrigals destroyed his evidence in a raid. But he had retained one copy for safekeeping. It was passed to Lucian headquarters in London sometime in the 1880s. We suspect that the Madrigals killed Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918, searching for that list. But that's another story.

Only the Ekats knew that the list had been passed to London."Amy didn't look at Dan. Dan didn't look at Amy. They had found the evidence of the assembled Clues back in Russia, but they weren't about to tell Alistair that.

"However-- an
d this is so typically Lucian -
even if they had been able to steal and trick enough to get so many, they didn't have the skill to figure out amounts. That is a job for the Ekats.

So they gave Robert Henderson a choice. His fiancee's father was the branch leader of the Lucians.

If Robert didn't spy on him and try to ascertain whether the Lucians had the thirty-nine clues, he would be kicked out of the Ekats forever."Amy gasped. "That's terrible!"

Alistair turned his dark eyes on her. "After all this time, all this effort, you still don't understand how important this is, do you?"

"I do. It's just that-"

He shook his head. "No. If you truly understood what was at stake, you would know that it's sometimes necessary to be ruthless.

At any rate, Robert Henderson was torn. Apparently, he was deeply in love. But he was also something else -- a scientist. The temptation to find the clues and assemble them -- he couldn't resist that challenge.

So he successfully stole the only copy of the clues the Lucians had. Naturally, they knew perfectly well it was he who had done it, so ... the marriage was off.

The Ekats got him on a ship to the South Seas and made up a story about him following Darwin.

But he really went to Indonesia. Then, of course, he made his fatal mistake. He built his lab on a known volcano. There were reasons for it -- it was uninhabited, and he was able to harness its geo-thermal energy to power his lab.

He was an Ekat, after all. He was taking a chance, and he knew it. Of course, he lost the gamble."

"What happened?" Amy asked. "I mean, we know that Krakatau erupted, but where was he?"

"Ah, the Krakatau eruption. Who knows what triggered it? Some Ekats believed the Madrigals blew up Henderson's lab, which started a deadly geothermal chain of explosions.

But Henderson? He was lucky. He was on his way to collect a shipment he had ordered for the lab. He knew that the volcano was active.

There had been considerable activity on the island, earthquakes, steam ... he knew very well the danger he faced. But he was close.

So agonizingly close that he left187the island at the last possible second -- the night before the main eruption.

He barely made it out alive, and his laboratory blew up in one of the first eruptions. That's when he got burned. That next morning he was across the strait in the coastal town of Anjer when the tsunami came. He ran up into the hills to escape it. The population tried to outrun
this gigantic, overpowering wave a hundred feet tall ... can you imagine the terror? Hundreds were sucked back into the sea or pummeled against the rocks.

He saw horror and suffering and he made it out alive. We know he went to Jakarta. We know weeks later he booked passage to Sydney. We lost track of him after that. We think his mind was broken.