The 39 Clues: Book 8 (16 page)

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as they were both on the trail of the 39 Clues, they were not truly separated.

The likes of Cora Wizard or Isabel Kabra could not be offered a chance at world domination.

I
have to get to Mount Everest!

The arcade had a bank of computer workstations. Dan raced to an unoccupied one and opened the Internet browser. The manager rushed over and began yelling at him in Mandarin. Dan tossed a ball of crumpled Chinese bills onto the counter, hoping it would be enough to buy him some computer time.

Mount Everest... Mount Everest... there it was, on the border between Nepal and Tibet. And--okay, Tibet was in the southwest corner of China. Not close exactly, but at least he was in the same part of the world.

He Googled further. It was good to be back online. Amy felt comfortable surrounded by a stack of dusty books, but Dan was most at home surfing the web.

A railroad timetable came up on the screen. There it was -- a train from Beijing, China, all the way to Lhasa, Tibet. One of the stops, about halfway along, was Xian. He grimaced at the schedule. Thirty hours?!

I'll go nuts!

Travel by air would be a lot faster, he reflected. But he had no passport and very little money.
And you can't stow away on a plane.

* * *

"... I'm in -- well, I guess that doesn't matter, because I

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have to find you guys now. Uh ... see you later--I hope."

Nellie stepped back from the pay phone at the Beijing airport, exhaling in sheer relief. The message was ten hours old, but Dan was alive! A little shaken up but okay. She couldn't wait to tell Amy.

The marathon that had brought them to this spot had been dizzying. A seven-mile sprint along the Great Wall to the bus staging area; an hour bus trip, which took three hours thanks to Beijing traffic; and a taxi ride out to the airport. All this carrying one very ticked-off cat.

Amy stepped out of the ladies' room and began to make her way through the crowded concourse. "Did you get the tickets?"

Nellie nodded grimly. "Brace yourself, kiddo. We can't get there till tomorrow."

"Huh? Why not?"

"You need a special travel permit for Tibet," the au pair explained. "They're letting us fly as far as Chengdu tonight. We can pick up the permits there tomorrow morning and grab the next plane to Lhasa. But there's bigger news. We got a message from Dan."

Amy's whoop echoed throughout the soaring curves of the terminal building. Heads turned their way. A security officer craned his neck to investigate the source of the disturbance.

Quickly, Nellie put an arm around Amy's shoulder and marched her to the pay phone so she could listen to the recording herself. She replayed the message four

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times before finally hanging up, trembling with emotion. "He sounds scared."

"Hey," Nellie's voice was kind but firm, "this is
good
news, remember? Of course he's scared. It looks like he's split with the Wizards. That's not so bad, either. Did you trust those sideshow freaks?"

"But he's all alone," Amy lamented. "Why didn't he tell us where to come and get him?"

"He had no way to be sure we'd get the message. For all he knew, he'd be waiting around for people who weren't going to show. We have to take him at his word that he's trying to find us." She shook her head helplessly. "God only knows how he's going to do that."

"By following the clue hunt," Amy said positively. The process of forcing herself to think logically was helping her control her emotions and focus her mind.

"Yeah, but you're talking about going to Mount Everest!"

Amy nodded grimly. "The mountain shape from the feng shui room --that's Everest--steep on one slope, more gradual on the other! Remember the list of headlines from the early twenties? George Mallory died high on Everest's north ridge in 1924! A lot of people believe he actually got to the top --that he was killed on the way down, not the way up."

"I've read about him," Nellie told her. "He was the guy who said he was climbing Everest 'because it is there.'"

Amy nodded. "I think he was climbing for another

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reason, too. What if he was a Cahill, just like Puyi? In 1924, Puyi made some kind of breakthrough in the clue hunt. But he knew his days in the Forbidden City were numbered. So he arranged to have another Cahill hide the clue for him 'where the Earth meets the sky.' In other words, on top of the highest mountain in the world. Is that so impossible?"

"It's
totally
impossible!" Nellie raved. "It's the flimsiest, most insane fairy tale I've ever heard!" An odd expression came over her face. "In fact, it's just crazy enough to be the kind of thing that actually happens in your family. A regular hiding place isn't good enough for you Froot Loops; you have to use Mount Everest!"

"There could have been other factors," Amy suggested. "Everest is very cold; the air is thin; the atmospheric pressure is low. Puyi might have needed safe long-term storage."

"Well, here's something you might not have thought of," Nellie challenged. "Getting to Mount Everest is one thing. Getting to the top is another. You can't just (walk) up and start climbing. Even if the mountain doesn't stop you, the altitude will. People spend weeks acclimatizing(.) You go up too soon and it'll kill you!"

Amy smiled uncertainly. "I think I might have an idea about that."

* * *

In the search for the 39 Clues, Dan Cahill had been manhandled, half drowned, blown up, buried alive,

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and poisoned. But this was the most perilous of all.

He was being bored to death.

A thousand-mile journey on the slowest train in Asia, creeping across the continent one rattle at a time.

It had started out pretty well at the station in Xian. While the passengers were loading up the front coaches, Dan had managed to slip into a boxcar and hide behind sacks of rice. There he cowered, barely daring to breathe as a crew carried on more cargo.

Don't get caught.
If they threw him off the train, there wasn't another one until tomorrow. He had no time to waste. This trip took long enough as it was.

Soon, though, the train was underway, and reality set in. Thirty hours stuck in this car, in the company of rice, a sleeping dog in a carrier, and --what was that over there? Oh, man, a coffin! His traveling companion was a dead guy.

With the passage of time, the casket became less creepy and more intriguing. By the fourth hour, Dan had convinced himself that he owed it to the dear departed to pay his respects by looking inside.

Empty. He was first relieved, then disappointed, then bored again. He checked his watch. Twenty-five and a half hours remained in the journey.

(The) worst part--even worse than the crushing boredom--was the fact that, while he was going out of his mind on the Turtle Express, the Holts were climbing Mount Everest in search of the Clue.

As the trip progressed, the train made a gradual

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ascent onto the Tibetan plateau. Dan could not actually feel himself going up, but he did sense it in other ways --a splitting headache, fatigue, and a roaring thirst. The railway's website had warned about this. Lhasa, Tibet, the (end) of the line, was above eleven thousand feet. That took some getting used to for a Boston native who had lived most of his life at sea level.

He was also starving--to the point where he reached into the cage and stole a biscuit from the sleeping dog. It was disgusting -- a meat-flavored cookie, with tons of salt, which parched him even further.

The slow ride became even slower, and the train squealed to a halt in yet another station. A second later, he heard voices and someone fumbling with the lock on the sliding door.

It left him with no time and no options. In a panic, he crawled into the coffin, pulling the lid shut after him. He was just in time. The boxcar door screeched wide, and footsteps and conversation filled the car. He lay there in abject misery, praying that he wouldn't have an asthma attack.

It was really no more than a few minutes, but it felt a lot longer. Finally, the heavy boxcar door slid shut and the train started off again. He pushed against the lid.

It didn't budge.

They locked me in here!

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CHAPTER 21

Blind panic surged through him. He scrambled to his knees and began to push against the top with the strength of his entire body.

All at once, there was a clunk, and the resistance was gone. Dan exploded out of the casket as if he'd been fired from a missile silo. He landed in a heap on top of the rice bag that had been leaning on the coffin lid.

He tried to laugh it off. It wasn't funny.

He took stock of his surroundings. The dog was gone. No more meat cookies. In the pet carrier's place stood three tall stainless steel canisters. Something was sloshing inside of them. If it wasn't sulfuric acid, he was going to drink it.

He pried off the seal. Milk. Probably goat's, maybe even yak's. Definitely unpasteurized. Gross.

Nothing had ever tasted better.

* * *

At an altitude of 26,000 feet, the South Col of Everest was already higher than all but a handful of the world's

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mountains. This barren, rocky, storm-swept platform in the sky was formed in the place where Everest met its neighboring peak, Lhotse, creating the loftiest, coldest, least hospitable valley on the face of the earth.

It was a typical night on the Col -- eighty below zero, with sustained winds that would have counted as a category two hurricane anyplace else.

"Isn't it beautiful, Ham?" shouted Eisenhower Holt over the howling of the gale. "A wind like this would toss an Ekat or a Lucian clean off the mountain! Finally the clue hunt comes around to something we Holts are good at!"

It was almost time for them to begin their push for the summit. On Everest, a team headed for the top in the middle of the night in order to arrive around midday with plenty of time to get back down again in daylight.

The Holts were looking forward to this with the joy of true athletes anticipating a monumental physical challenge. For most of the contest, they'd been out-maneuvered and outsmarted by their competition. Yet the Tomas had long known that George Mallory had been in cahoots with Emperor Puyi when the legendary mountaineer disappeared on Everest in 1924. What none of those smarty-pants branches had ever figured out was that Reginald Fleming Johnston, Puyi's tutor, had not been just a Janus scientist but also a cunning Tomas spy. Too cunning -- Johnston had never revealed to anybody, not even his Tomas handlers,

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what Mallory had been carrying to the summit. It had taken some Holt-style persuasion, but Johnston's grandson had finally spilled the beans about what was up there. This prize would be more than enough to catapult the Holts into first place in the Clue hunt.

"I'm pumped!" Hamilton barked, and father and son bonked climbing helmets. "Reagan!" he bellowed at their tent. He switched on his flashlight and shone it in through the flap.

His sister Reagan, nearly as big and brawny as he was, crawled out onto the Col, zipping her wind suit. "Let's do this thing!" she cheered, and choked up momentarily. "I only wish poor Madison could be with us tonight."

"No, you don't!" Eisenhower boomed. "You're tickled pink that your sister got altitude sickness so you can hold it over her head forever!"

"She's not dead," Reagan defended herself. "A couple of days in a hyperbaric bag, and she'll be good as new."

"Save your breath," Eisenhower advised. "You're going to need it. They call it the Death Zone up here. Above twenty-five thousand feet, you're slowly dying -- one cell at a time!"

It brought a cheer from his son and daughter. The Holts were all about living on the edge. And you couldn't get much more edgy than the Col, where, if you missed a step, the next one was more than a mile straight down.

"Oxygen!"

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The three of them put masks over their noses and mouths and started toward Everest's looming summit pyramid, their crampons scraping on the barren rocks.

Greatness awaited above. The windchill was unimaginable; the altitude made every step a gasping, painful effort. But Eisenhower Holt might as well have been dancing through a garden of hyacinths. Gone was the humiliation of washing out at West Point. Gone was the myth that the Holts lacked the smarts to keep up with their illustrious family. Tonight, they were reaching for the sky. And nobody, Cahill or otherwise, stood between them and the top of the world.

They had not yet even reached the slope of the summit pyramid when another team passed them by, moving quickly across the Col. Four of the members were Sherpas--the stalwart Himalayan climbing guides who lived in the Khumbu Valley, the region around Everest on the Nepal side. They were accompanying a figure wearing what looked like a space suit.

Accompanying? They were practically carrying him! As the incline began, they were actually hoisting him under the arms as he moved forward. His high-tech costume pumped in oxygen and maintained the atmospheric pressure of sea level. Without it, anyone not acclimatized to Everest's thin air would have passed out in minutes.

The space-suited climber turned and waved at