The 39 Clues: Book 8 (3 page)

20

Was there such a thing as a Cricket Motel?

And then one of the insects
disappeared.

Huh? He paid closer attention. There must have been an opening in the roof tiles that the crickets were crawling in and out of.

He returned to the security gate and peered inside. The temple ceiling was low, almost claustrophobic. Yet the roof was a tall A-frame....

An attic! A secret attic!

With a furtive look around to confirm he was alone, he climbed onto the porch rail and began to shinny up the corner post to the eaves. A moment's hesitation--unobserved also meant there'd be no one to call an ambulance if he fell off the building. Mustering his strength, he reached past the overhang and hoisted himself onto the steep roof, holding on like Spider-Man to the ancient yellow tile shingles.

He clung there for a moment, catching his breath and listening to the steady pounding of his heart. No, wait --that wasn't his heartbeat! It was the
thrum, thrum, thrum
of marching feet. He flattened himself on the steep sloping roof and tried to disappear.

In the pathway below, a unit of six soldiers trooped by in close-order formation. Security? No, they were dressed in red silk tunics with matching hats -- like palace guards from back in the day when the emperors lived here. This was a ceremonial parade. The soldiers were trained to keep their eyes riveted straight ahead and never noticed the intruder on the roof.

21

As they disappeared into the maze of crimson walls, Dan allowed his body to relax. And that was something you should never do on a steep incline.

He was sliding before he even noticed. Frantically, he scrabbled for a handhold, to no avail. He was skidding slowly but inexorably toward a long drop.

In desperation, he tried to wedge his fingers into the gap in a broken tile --anything to gain some leverage. With the creak of rusty hinges, a section of shingles came away from the roof, opening like a mailbox.

He hung there, stopped at last, his astonishment turning to triumph. A trapdoor! This was the way in.

The discovery brought a hidden reserve of strength. Dan hauled himself up and over the lip of the opening and dropped down onto a dusty wooden floor.

The chirping was all around him like church bells, so loud that he felt it below the line of his gums. Crickets. Thousands of them. The floor and walls crawled.

Instinctively, he reached for the inhaler in his pocket.
No,
he told himself.
You don't get an asthma attack from being grossed out.

With effort, he forced away his revulsion and examined the hidden compartment.

The attic was narrow, with decent headroom only at the center. In the corners, he had to duck. The place was empty except for the crickets. Could crickets be the Clue? That made zero sense. There was no way these crickets could date back to some Chinese emperor.

Then he realized that the place wasn't empty after

22

all. On the floor in the far corner lay a piece of fabric about the size of a hand towel. He stooped and picked it up, shaking off several crickets and a puff of dust. It was a dull gold sheet of silk covered in Chinese calligraphy, with a large red signature stamp --a "chop," the tour guide had called it.

He looked closer in the dim light. It wasn't all Chinese characters. With mounting excitement, he recognized the symbols for the four branches of his illustrious family, as well as the Cahill crest.

His brow furrowed. The symbols were laid out like a mathematical equation:

There was no question about it. This object was what had brought them to the Forbidden City. He had to get it back to Amy so they could figure out what it meant.

"Later, dudes," he breathed to the chirping crickets. He folded the piece of silk and stuffed it into his shirt. Then he stretched for the opening above and hauled himself back onto the roof.

He was extra careful on the way down, pressing himself into the tiles as he shut the trapdoor. He practically oozed to the pillar that was his safe passage back to ground level. Perhaps he should have used some of that great care to scout the area first. For when he set foot on the pathway, he found himself in the grip of

23

a uniformed guard. And this one wasn't wearing the ceremonial garb of centuries past. His jacket bore the red star insignia of the Chinese army.

The man barked something in his own language, then took in Dan's Western features and switched to English. "This area is restricted!"

"I lost my tour group--" Dan began.

The officer began to pat him down, pausing at the soft bulge under his shirt.

"What is this?" He pulled out the folded silk.

Dan's mind worked at light speed.
If he sees the writing inside, he'll never let me keep it.

With a wheeze, he sucked back all the dust of the attic that had found its way into his nasal passages. Then he snatched the silk out of the officer's hand and unloaded a mighty sneeze into it.

The man grimaced. "Where are your parents?"

"Dead," Dan replied, sticking the silk back under his shirt. "I'm here with my sister, and I got lost."

"You lie. I saw you climbing down from the roof of this structure."

"I wanted a better view. I was trying to find the museum so I could go back."

The man scoffed and indicated the immense roof of the main palace towering over the Forbidden City. "The museum is difficult to miss."

"I've got a lousy sense of direction," Dan said.

"You are rude, young man. You are also -- how do they say it in your language? Ah, yes --busted."

24

CHAPTER 5

Amy walked with the rest of her tour group toward the Gate of Heavenly Peace, wondering if Dan had located the mysterious Janus crest they had spotted in the movie.

The tiny twists of fortune that spelled the difference between discovering a Clue and being left clueless could be so minor. It would almost be funny--if the fate of the world didn't hang in the balance.

As for the thought of her eleven-year-old brother on the loose in the Forbidden City--well, it made her nervous, but she was learning to live with it. Over the past weeks, the two of them had survived near misses that made this seem like playtime at day care. Anyway, they would be reunited when they met Nellie in--she consulted her watch --half an hour. She hoped the au pair had found them a decent hotel.

The thought made her frown. Lately, there had been hints that Nellie might be more than she seemed.

Or maybe I'm just getting paranoid....

She had no trouble believing that paranoia was very

25

Madrigal. Her parents had been paranoid --and with good reason. Everybody
had
been out to get them. And one had succeeded.

Yet even with their small children, Mom and Dad had been strangely secretive. Thinking back, there had always been rules--keep out of the basement or a certain closet; don't open that crate or that duffel bag. Only now did it occur to her to wonder what they'd been hiding--black-market grenades, a severed head, uranium 235, the Ebola virus, the lost remains of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. They were "Nudelmans," after all. She cringed as if shrinking from something horrible. She had so few memories of her parents, and now even the tiny scraps that were left had to be put through the Madrigal detector--every word, every gesture scanned for signs of evil. How pathetic was that?

A member of her tour interrupted her tortured reverie. "Excuse me, dear, but isn't that your little brother over there? Why does that soldier have him in handcuffs?"

Just inside the gate stood an angry-looking man in a military uniform, with Dan in custody.

Amy rushed forward. "What are you doing to my brother?"

The guard spoke up. "You are in charge of this boy? You yourself are a child."

"We're meeting our au pair in Tiananmen Square," Amy explained. "Dan, what happened?"

Dan winked at her and shrugged. "I couldn't find

26

you, so I climbed up on some temple for
a
better view. And this guy got all bent out of shape about it."

The guard reddened and unlocked the cuffs. "You will leave and never return."

"How about that," Dan said mildly as they were escorted through the Gate of Heavenly Peace, across the footbridge, and over the moat. "Forbidden from the Forbidden City. Oh, well, if you have to get forbidden, I suppose this is the place for it."

"Very funny," Amy hissed as they crossed the boulevard into Tiananmen Square. She shuddered. Considering the vast size of the square, it was packed with people. Amy didn't like crowds--and here she was in the most crowded place in the most crowded country on earth. "Now we can't go back and look for--"

"I've already got it," Dan said, removing the folded silk from inside his shirt. "Here, hold it by the edges. I had to blow my nose in it so Mr. Happy would think it was a handkerchief." He handed it to her.

Amy nearly dropped it. "You put
snot
on the clue?"

Dan was annoyed. "You want to see it or not?"

Amy unwrapped the soiled, wrinkled silk, keeping it hidden from curious passersby in the bustling square. In the bright sun, they could see that the pale gold silk was overlaid with a pattern of butterflies:

27

"Lucian plus Janus plus Tomas plus Ekat equals Cahill," she recited aloud. "What could that mean? That if you add up the branches you've got the whole family?"

"If that's the big message," Dan concluded, "then it wasn't worth getting arrested. That's like saying hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs make a deck of cards."

"What's this shape?" Amy traced a line that circled the Lucian crest. "There's one around each symbol, including the Cahill coat of arms."

Dan frowned. "I wish we could translate some of this writing."

28

"Uncle Alistair knows Chinese," Amy mused.

"No way!" Dan was adamant. "I'm never trusting that guy again! We
know
he was with Mom and Dad the night Isabel set the fire!"

Amy tried to choose her words carefully. "You know, Dan, I've been thinking about something that won't go away."

Dan was alarmed. "I don't like that look on your face. It usually means I have to do research on Mozart or Howard Carter or some other boring dead guy."

"Be serious," she chided gently. "There's something pretty big we have to face up to." She took a deep breath. "Mom and Dad were Madrigals. Did it ever occur to you that the fire had something to do with that?"

Dan was wide-eyed. "You don't think they helped Isabel burn their own house down!"

"Of course not. But who knows what kind of weird stuff a couple of Madrigals could have been into? We look at the other teams as the bad guys. But what if, back then, that's how the rest of the family saw Mom and Dad? A couple of loose cannons who had to be stopped?"

Dan was horrified. "You're saying they died because they had it coming?"

"Not exactly that, but-"

"You are! That's
exactly
what you're saying!" Dan reddened. "This clue hunt has turned your brains to cole slaw! That's our parents you're talking about! How can you even consider it?"

"You think it's easy for me?" Amy shot back. "You

29

were four when they died. You barely remember them."

"You don't own their memory!" Dan shot back. "Not even a four-year-old forgets when the fire chief tells him his parents are never coming back. If I close my eyes, I can still see the guy! He has a mustache and a big ring on his finger, and he's showing Grace what's left of that copper sculpture, the one with the bug on it!"

"Bug?"

"That's exactly what he said!" Dan insisted. "You know how things stick in my mind! I'd bet my life on it!"

"And you remember seeing a
bug?"
Amy probed.

"No. Only hearing the words. The bug must have burned up in the fire."

"Then how would the fire chief know about it?"

Dan stared at her. "Ask
him!"

"Don't you see?" Amy demanded. "He wasn't talking about an
insect.
It must have been a listening device! Our house was bugged --by Isabel, probably."

"So what?" Dan argued. "She burned the place to the ground with two people inside! She's sick! Planting a bug would be kid stuff!"

"The point is that our memories of our parents are so distant we can't rely on them," Amy said in a choked voice. "If a bug can turn out to be a listening device, there's no telling how much we got confused. Did we
really
know Mom and Dad? They were up to their necks in the thirty-nine clues; we had no idea. They were Madrigals, and even today, we don't understand how