The 39 Clues: Cahills vs. Vespers Book 2: A King's Ransom (7 page)

Basel, Switzerland

Dan woke in a panic, forgetting where he was. He lay for a long moment taking in the room, the flowered duvet on the twin bed, the flowered wallpaper, the flower painting on the wall, the vase of roses… .

Gartenhaus.
The small inn on a side street in downtown Basel. Mr. McIntyre — Mac — had left them here last night, urging them to get some sleep. He had to head off to see a client in Rome.

Dan glanced at his sister, curled up like a comma in the other bed. A perfect time to grab a shower before Amy monopolized the bathroom.

He stood under the spray. Despite its warmth, he still felt chilled. Every time he closed his eyes he saw Nellie’s face, white with pain.

No more deaths,
he thought.
If I have to live through one more death, I’ll fall apart.

He knew what he had to do. Change the odds.

When he emerged, he gave the smell test to a T-shirt in his pack and pulled it on, along with his jeans.

He heard a groan from the other room and stuck his head out the door.

“I’m so hungry,” Amy said sleepily.

“Hey, you stole my line,” Dan said.

There was a soft knock at the door. They both tensed.

“Breakfast,” the landlady called softly.

Amy opened the door and Frau Stein bustled in, carrying a tray laden with rolls, cheese, sausages, eggs, jam, a pot of coffee, and a pitcher of hot chocolate.

“I heard the stirring. I don’t know what you like, so I brought everything,” she said.

Dan took the tray. It smelled like paradise on a plate. “Thank you a bazillion times.”

“I don’t know this
bazillion
, but you are welcome.” She smiled and walked out.

Amy and Dan attacked the food. In mere minutes, the plates were clean and they were sitting, stuffed, with cups of hot chocolate. The food and sleep had helped. They were raring to go. But where?

“We’ve only got three days left,” Amy said.

“And counting.”

Amy spread out the paper she’d taken from the auction house. She ran her fingers over the names. “A professor, a socialite, an art dealer, a guy with a private library. Just what you’d expect. And they all have money. So why would one of them steal it?”

“And why would it stay hidden?” Dan asked. “It’s been eighty years. Why hasn’t someone found it? Why hasn’t someone tried to sell it? It doesn’t make sense.”

Amy frowned. “Attleboro has probably researched these names already.” She reached for the computer. In a moment they saw Evan’s concerned face. Sinead was right at his shoulder.

“McIntyre told us that he brought you to a safe house,” Evan said. “I’m glad you got to crash. We have some background information. Are you ready?”

“Ready,” Amy said.

“Let’s see … Marcel Maubert and Reginald Tawnley both died during the war. But this is interesting — the German professor with all the dough? He became a big guy in the Nazi party. He killed himself — or maybe someone killed him — after the Allies took Berlin in 1945. And Jane Sperling — she was a socialite — her father was Max Sperling, who had a chain of department stores in the Midwest. She was also a medieval scholar — studied at the University of Chicago and then went to Germany. We’re betting that she knew Hummel, because she studied in Heidelberg at the university there.”

“Heidelberg,” Amy said. “Wasn’t that where the family who owned the de Virga was from?”

“That’s right. Interesting coincidence, isn’t it?”

“What happened to Jane Sperling?”

“She moved to London. During the war she worked for the War Department as a secretary. Later, after the war, she married a GI in Maine. Led a quiet life.”

“So there’s not much there,” Dan said.

“We’ll turn up something,” Sinead said. “We just have to keep digging.”

“Have we heard anything from Vesper One?” Dan asked.

“Nothing,” Evan said. “As far as we know everyone is still okay.”

They were silent for a moment. Remembering faces. Remembering how far Vesper One was willing to go.

“Well,” Amy said. “Let’s get moving.”

Dan hung up the phone. Amy bent over the paper, her finger moving back and forth over the names.

She looked up at him. “We’re on the wrong track.”

“I didn’t know we
had
a track.”

“We keep focusing on the map itself. We should be thinking about the world
around
the map. What was going on in Europe at the time? What did all those names have in common?”

“They were all rich,” Dan said.

“The war,” Amy said. “It was 1932. World War Two was still years away. But the world was gearing up for it. The Nazis were coming to power in Germany.”

She accessed a search engine on the computer. Dan looked over her shoulder. “What are you looking for?”

“No idea,” she murmured. “But sometimes you have to go fishing.”

He saw her type in
Jane Sperling
, then start to scroll through material. “Interesting,” she said. “Jane Sperling was Jewish. Did she know her teacher was a Nazi? Hang on.” She tapped a few more words into the computer and then turned back to Dan. “Just what I thought. The Nazis took over the government in 1933. Jewish students were pressured to leave universities as early as 1932. Eventually, the Nazis expelled Jewish students from every university in Germany.”

“I didn’t know that part,” Dan said. “Those guys were nasty dudes.”

Amy looked up. “Why was she at the same auction as her Nazi professor? Coincidence? I just don’t buy it.”

He tried to follow Amy’s logic. He’d learned about World War II and the Nazis in school, had read books about it. But to put himself in the heads of the people who actually lived the horror of it — that was harder. Amy had a gift for it.

“She was a young girl alone — she was only nineteen,” Amy continued. “You can bet her parents wanted her to come home. Germany was turning into a scary place for Jews. But she stayed. She stayed, Dan!” Amy smacked the pillow next to her. “She had courage. So, maybe she knew that her Nazi professor was coming to bid on a famous historical document. The family who owned the de Virga was Jewish. Maybe she was trying to protect it!”

“So why didn’t she just buy it? She was rich.”

“Maybe she was planning to. That’s why she came to Lucerne — to outbid Hummel and the others. But somebody got to it first,” Amy said.

“Hummel?”

Amy’s fingers flew as she typed an e-mail. “I’m asking the Attleboro group to research Hummel. Then we’ll dig a little deeper into Jane Sperling. I just have a feeling these two are connected somehow.”

Dan knew better than to argue with Amy’s feelings.

“Look, research isn’t my strong suit,” he said. “How about I go out and gather some more supplies for us?”

Amy waved a hand. She was already gone, lost in the 1930s and the lives of people she’d never meet.

“Back in an hour,” Dan said.

He had already done a quick search on the train, using his smartphone. He knew he didn’t have much time. He’d managed to gather seven ingredients in Italy. If he could find a few here in Basel — three, at least — he’d have one-quarter of the serum ingredients. And some ingredients he could save for last, things he could pick up easily at any grocery store: salt, mint, honey … those would be easy.

He blended in like a tourist in his jeans and jacket and baseball cap. He stopped in a pharmacy and in five minutes flat had left with a small bottle of iodine.

Amy would be furious — and concerned — if she knew he was assembling the serum. She was afraid of it. She would never allow him to take it. She would say it would change him — possibly kill him.

What she didn’t understand was that he didn’t care.

The darkness was just … there. Sometimes it scared him. Sometimes it made him angry. An anger he didn’t know he was capable of, something bottomless. Seeing Nellie wounded and scared had seared him. Just days ago he’d held a dying girl in his arms, a stranger who had trusted Vesper One.

Amy didn’t realize that you had to fight with everything you had. Not just your nerve and your courage, but the secret, hard, dark places inside you.

He plugged the next address into his GPS. He had found a place, a chemistry supply company willing to sell mercury and phosphorus. He hopped on a tram and took it to the outskirts of the city, an industrial area with warehouses and office buildings.

He found the address and rang the bell on the steel door. A moment later the door opened. A man, probably in his twenties, peered out and asked him something in German.

“Guten morgen,”
Dan growled.

“Oh, you’re American. And a Yankees fan.”

Dan touched the bill on his cap nervously. “I’m the one who contacted you about the …”

“Yes. Come in.”

He was led into a small office. The man held up a glass vial. Dan saw the molten mercury.

“Toxic,” the man said. “You know this? You must be careful how you handle it.”

“I know,” Dan said. “You wouldn’t have liquid gold, would you?”

“Colloidal gold? Yes … how much would you need?”

“Quarter ounce should do it.”

The transaction was completed in minutes. Dan shifted as he counted out the bills. He could feel the man’s eyes on him.

“So. You must be a New Yorker,” the man said. “I love New York.
The Lion King
— excellent show!”

Dan turned to go.

“I don’t think I caught your name,” the man said.

“I didn’t throw it,” Dan said.

He left the place and walked quickly back to the tram stop. On the way, he tossed the Yankees cap into the trash can. Too many questions. The guy was probably harmless. But he couldn’t take a chance.

Vesper Two read the text message and smiled.

Dan Cahill had made several interesting purchases while in Basel. Sending out that alert to all chemical supply houses had been a brilliant stroke. Amazing what the promise of a little money could do. If someone comes asking to buy odd items, please let us know. We will make it worth your while.

So, just as Vesper Two had thought. He was collecting the Clues, thirty-nine ingredients for the serum.

The serum could change everything. And the only one who had the formula was Dan Cahill.

Vesper One didn’t have to know just yet. He wasn’t convinced that Dan could be turned. Not yet. He didn’t realize completely that the ties of blood could work in their favor.

Not yet. But soon.

Amy leaned back and rubbed her eyes. She had window after window of research stacked on her computer. She’d spoken to Evan and Ian and Sinead. They’d thrown theories at each other, random facts, odd bits, wild guesses, hoping something would stick. Nothing did.

“Talk to me, Jane,” she said aloud. “You were a rich girl, used to comfort. London was being bombed. Why did you stay? Why did you stay in Germany so long in the thirties?
Who are you?
”

She typed in
Jane Sperling
and
World War II
and scrolled through the results. She clicked on a page called Down Easterner, a small-town paper in Angel Harbor, Maine. Amy quickly scanned the article, an obituary for Jane Sperling. She had died at age ninety-two. The obituary documented her early life, her studies at the University of Chicago, and then the war years.

“
Yes, I stayed in London during the Blitz. Oh, heavens, I was never heroic. Just a secretary for the OSS — I translated documents and things from German to English. Because I’d lived in Germany before the war. I never look back. The things I did are done now. All down the drain.”

“OSS,” Amy muttered. She did a quick word search. The Office of Strategic Services was the spying arm of the American government during the war!

Amy clicked back to the research Evan and Ian had sent. Professor Hummel had turned out to be one superbad Nazi. He’d risen to major and had been involved in a group called the
Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg
, which, as Evan put it, was quite a mouthful for “dirty despicable thieves.” They were also known as the ERR, Hitler’s special group that stole art and artifacts and property from Jewish families. The artworks were shipped to Paris and stored at a museum called the Jeu de Paume. There, the art was cataloged, inventoried, and crated, then sent to Germany. Hundreds of thousands of looted treasures from world-famous artists: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Van Gogh. Hummel was a high-ranking officer in charge, valuable because of his knowledge of medieval art.

“So, Herr Hummel,” Amy murmured, “you were a thief.”

Near the end of the war, as the Allies began bombing German cities, the Nazis got nervous. They moved the art to salt mines and caves and castles in the Bavarian Alps. It all would have worked except for a few inconvenient facts. One: The Nazis lost the war. Two: In 1943, a section of the Allied army was formed called the Monuments Men. After the invasion they traveled with the front lines, charged with finding the artworks and returning them to their rightful owners.

“The Nazis were evil, but what made them so especially chilling is that they were really
organized
about it,” Evan had explained. “They kept records of everything they stole. So when the Allied armies moved in, they found everything — hidden caches of priceless paintings and artifacts… . If Hummel had the de Virga, there should have been a record of it. But there’s nothing. It’s another dead end.”

“Maybe,” Amy murmured now to herself. She typed
Monuments Men
and
Otto Hummel
into the search engine. If the US Army was chasing stolen art, they must have known about Hummel.

A document popped up on Hummel’s death. His body had been found by a group of Monuments Men as the war was ending. He had been shot and was still sitting in a gilt chair in the ballroom of Neuschwanstein Castle, the famous site built by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, often called the Mad King.

The Monuments Men had been acting on information from one American spy, code name Sparrow, who had traced thousands of artworks looted from Jewish families all over Europe to Neuschwanstein Castle.

Amy read through a record of a soldier who had served there.
“We had a strong suspicion that Sparrow had killed Hummel,”
he said
.

Amy rubbed her forehead. Everything was jumbled together in her head. Spies and stolen art, Nazis, heroes, victims. A medieval map. How was it all connected? Was it connected at all?

She just
knew
the answer was here.

She contacted Attleboro again. Ian answered.

“Can you help me out with some research?” she asked. “I need to know the identity of a spy at the end of the war called Sparrow. He might lead us to Jane.”

“You know,” Ian said. “That’s a funny coincidence… .”

“What?”

“Sparrow is
Sperling
in German,” Ian said.

“Of course!” Amy sat up. “It’s Jane! It’s got to be! We need confirmation.”

“I’m on it,” Ian said.

Amy checked her watch. Where was Dan? He’d been gone for way over an hour. Just as she had the thought, he walked in.

She examined him briefly as he tossed his backpack on the floor. That mask was there. He had gone deep inside himself. Whenever she saw it, it chilled her. It was like she had lost her brother.

“I think we found the connection between Jane Sperling and Hummel,” she told him. “I think she killed him!” Quickly, she explained that she thought Jane Sperling had been a spy for the OSS.

“Sparrow was chasing Hummel. I think she was still tracking the de Virga. What if the de Virga was at Neuschwanstein Castle? They were both there at the same time — that can’t be a coincidence!” Amy insisted.

Ian broke in. “We just got a confirmation from a Cahill in the field — our government source. He’s confirmed that Jane Sperling was Sparrow.”

“Yes!” Amy exclaimed.

“Neuschwanstein Castle is a Janus stronghold,” Sinead said. “We can definitely get you a schematic of the interior and send it to your wrist GPS.”

“And we’ll send Hamilton and Jonah in for backup,” Ian said. “They’re already in the air flying back to Europe. We’ll have them fly into Munich.”

“I don’t know about this, Ames,” Evan said. “You’re building a case just based on guesses.”

“Not guesses,” Amy said. “Instinct.”

“And I trust Amy’s instincts,” Dan said. “I say we go.”

“Dan’s right,” Sinead said. “We trust you, Amy.”

Apprehension suddenly bloomed in Amy. Despite their confidence — or maybe because of it — she was afraid.

Sometimes this felt so surreal, like she’d walked into an alternate universe. Maybe the real Amy was back in Attleboro, Massachusetts, a nerdy grind who got excited over research papers and whose idea of a big day was whipped cream on her chai.

That Amy didn’t lay everything on the line and say
we have to do this.
And that Amy didn’t have a gut-wrenching fear staring her in the face every moment — that she wouldn’t be smart enough, or brave enough, to save the lives of the people she loved.