The 39 Clues: Book 8 (19 page)

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hadn't been talking about the peak at all! He'd meant the Janus serum--and the one place on earth where it would be safe.

Her energy was nearly gone, sapped by the altitude and the herculean feat of digging at twenty-nine thousand feet. Hands trembling, she clutched the vial, final proof of the collaboration between two Cahills separated by thousands of miles. The conspirators could not possibly have been more different. One an emperor, the last of a glorious dynasty that dated back centuries; the other a simple British schoolteacher who climbed mountains as a hobby. What had it taken to bring them together? Nothing less than the 39 Clues.

"Ten seconds!!"

"Come on, Amy!" Dan grabbed her arm, jolting her out of her reverie. The two dropped to the snow, scrambled under the ultralight's whirling rotor, and dived through the opening in the bubble.

"Go! Go! Go!" Dan croaked.

The pilot worked the controls. There was a grinding sound, and the A-Star resisted for an instant, its rotor struggling to coax some lift from the nonexistent air. At last, the ultralight slowly began to rise from the world's highest peak.

"I can't believe we did it!" breathed Amy.

And then a very large gloved hand closed on the A-Star's left runner.

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CHAPTER 24

Their ascent halted. The chopper began to shake violently.

"What is this malfunction?" the pilot yelled.

Roaring with effort, Eisenhower Holt pulled down on the runner, preventing their departure.

"It's not a malfunction, it's a Holt!" Dan cried. "Keep flying! He'll have to let go!"

"He is too heavy for this altitude!" the pilot insisted. "He wastes our fuel! We must depart now if we are to get home at all!"

Still holding on with one hand, Eisenhower swung his ice ax and wedged the sharp point in the gasket between the ultralight and its bubble. Then he pried with all his remaining strength until the Plexiglas popped open. A split second later, his enormous frostbitten, wild-eyed head loomed directly over them.

"The clue!"
he roared. As Amy sat petrified with fear, her Holt cousin snatched the vial from her nerveless fingers. He backed off, releasing the chopper.

He got three steps from that spot. Four Sherpas

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appeared out of the ice plume and grabbed him, two on each arm. A fifth figure, the space-suited Ian Kabra, staggered up against the wind and wrenched the vial from Eisenhower's glove.

What happened next would remain burned in everyone's memory. A blast of wind seized the A-Star and pitched it around. Dan tumbled from his seat, whacking his head on the Plexiglas bubble. Amy was tossed clean out, landing in the snow. The tail of the chopper swung over earth's pinnacle, whacking Ian across his back, knocking him off the summit.

He flailed for a handhold, digging the arms of his space suit into a snow cornice. Screaming in horror, he clung to the edge, dangling over the massive Kangshung face, a drop of eleven thousand feet.

Amy grabbed for his hand and found herself holding not Ian, but the vial containing the Janus serum.

Her first thought was jubilation.
I've got it back!

But then she looked through the space suit helmet at the terrified face of the teenager inside.

Suddenly, the ledge of packed powder that was supporting Ian crumbled under his weight.

There was nothing beneath him for nearly two miles.

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CHAPTER 25

Amy's decision was instant. She dropped the Janus serum and clamped both hands on Ian's arm. The vial plunged down the face, disappearing from sight long before it shattered far below. The Sherpas joined her, and Ian was hauled back to the safety of the summit.

Amy had no more breath. Even as she sprinted for the ultralight, she knew it was too late. She was running on empty, already collapsing, the snow of the summit swinging up to meet her....

Dan clamped his arms around his sister and hauled her bodily into the A-Star. As they tumbled aboard, the pilot reached up and closed the bubble. With a lurch, the little craft left Everest behind.

"The serum!" Dan asked anxiously.

Amy shook her head, awareness returning. "Smashed." She regarded her brother apologetically. "I couldn't let him die."

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized the importance of what she'd just said. "Dan-- I had a choice! And I saved Isabel Kabra's son!"

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"Don't remind me," Dan said through clenched teeth. "The next time Ian and Natalie feed me to a lollipop machine, I'll know who to thank."

"Don't you get it?" Amy persisted. "If the Madrigals were as bad as everybody says, I would have saved the bottle, not Ian! I did the human thing." She looked at him earnestly. "We don't have to be evil just because we're Madrigals. Madrigals are horrible--but we can change our destiny."

"What about Mom and Dad?" asked Dan.

"I don't know...." If Amy had learned one lesson from the Clue hunt and its many deceptions, it was to value truth above all. She would have given anything to believe that their parents were good people. But her eyes met Dan's, and the name beamed between them as if by radar:
Nudelman.

"I wouldn't have let Ian die, either," Dan admitted after a solemn pause. "I just hate losing the serum. Especially since we didn't even get a clue out of this."

Amy smiled broadly. "Yes, we did. We've had it since the Forbidden City," She told him. "I just didn't understand it until now. Alistair translated Puyi's poem:

'That which you seek, you hold in your hand,

Fixed forever in birth,

Where the Earth meets the sky.'"

"I understand the 'Earth meets sky' part," said Dan. "But holding it in your hand? The only thing you could

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be holding is the sheet with the poem on it."

"Which is silk," Amy added, eyes alight. "Silk is spun by the silkworm, which is really--"

"The
Bombyx mori
caterpillar," her brother supplied, thinking of snack time at the Shaolin Temple. "It tastes like chicken."

She gave him a strange look and went on. "The stuff comes out liquid and solidifies into silk filament when it hits the air. But the ingredient is 'fixed forever in birth.' In other words, the silk in its liquid form--raw silkworm secretion."

Dan shook his head in wonder. "And Puyi didn't have a freezer, so he got Mallory to stick it up on Mount Everest for him. Wow!"

Amy nodded. "Can you imagine what must have been going through Mallory's head when he planted that vial on the summit eighty-six years ago? He'd just conquered Everest --and he did it twenty-nine years before Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953." She paused ruefully. "Little did the poor guy realize that he was going to die on the way down. He's still on the mountain, you know. His body is frozen solid, so he's always going to be there."

"Cool," said Dan. "I mean, not the being dead part. But, you know--the spot of his greatest triumph becomes his final resting place. It makes sense."

Amy regarded him with disapproval. "I'd forgotten how weird you are."

The pilot's voice intruded on their conversation.

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"Since neither of you American hotshots bothered to ask if we have enough fuel to land, the answer is yes. Barely."

"That's great news!" Amy exclaimed, embarrassed. "Thank you for the -- uh -- ride."

"De rien, mademoiselle.
You have powerful friends. At least, your companion with the nose ring does."

"Yeah, what's up with that?" Dan mused. "How many au pairs could make a phone call and score you a ticket up Everest in an experimental chopper?"

"She's definitely more than a regular au pair," Amy agreed. "You should have seen her at the Great Wall. She picked a lock like a pro." Her expression softened. "But whatever else she is, she's on our side. I think."

They looked back at Everest, silent and severe in its powerful majesty.

"Did you ever dream of being up there?" Amy asked in a hushed tone.

"Sure," Dan enthused. "All the time. One day I'm going to climb it."

She made a face. "Be sure to send me a postcard."

They were low enough to make out the village of Tingri now, a small collection of ancient buildings on the vast Tibetan plateau. A mile or so outside of town, the helipad came into view, and, standing outside, Nellie was shading her eyes as she scanned the sky. Not far from her, a tiny gray dot--Saladin.

Family, waiting to welcome them home. For two orphans, that was something you couldn't put a price on.

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CHAPTER 26

In the underground parking garage of the Bell Tower Hotel in Xian, China, Jonah Wizard emerged from his limo just in time to see a six-foot terracotta warrior figure being loaded carefully onto a truck by two uniformed workmen.

"Hey, where'd you get--?"

The words were barely out of his mouth when a second warrior was toted by, this time under the supervision of Cora Wizard.

"Mom--where did these come from?"

"We're the Janus," she explained. "Do you really think we can't whip up a few statues to replace the ones you broke?
Careful with that!"
she snapped as one of the porters sideswiped a pillar. "It's supposed to look two thousand years old, not two million!"

She turned back to her son. "I've been thinking about your request to be relieved of your responsibilities in the clue hunt."

"And?" he prompted anxiously.

In answer, her hand came around and slapped him

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across the face hard enough to send him sprawling.

He scrambled up again. "What's up with that, yo?"

"I am not 'yo,'" Cora Wizard said through clenched teeth. "I am the head of this branch, which is bigger than you or I or Mozart or Jane Cahill herself. The future of our kind, from Spielberg to the lowliest juggler on a unicycle, lies in the thirty-nine clues, and I won't allow my son or anyone else to take the Janus out of the running for this prize. Especially now that we know there are Madrigals involved."

"Are you sure about that?" Jonah challenged. "What if the kid was just blowing smoke?"

"I should have figured it out years ago," she berated herself. "No wonder Grace and her oh-so-perfect daughter never allied themselves with one of the branches. We all thought it was part of their high-and-mighty routine--always above the fray, never dirtying their hands. And all this time, they were the lowest of the low."

"I'm not cut out for the clue hunt, Mom," Jonah pleaded. "I'm not good at it."

"You are Janus," his mother said firmly. "You are more gifted and brilliant than all the Lucian, Tomas, and Ekat troglodytes put together. For centuries, we have played second fiddle to those Lucian butchers, when our qualities dwarf theirs. And do you want to know the reason?"

He stared at her, totally abashed.

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"The reason is that Lucians stop at nothing to achieve their goals. They lie, they cheat, they steal." Her laser-guided eyes locked with her son's. "And they kill."

Jonah Wizard had spent his entire life in service to the Janus branch. On their instructions, he had become a rapper, a TV star, and an international mogul.

He had no doubt what was expected of him next.

* * *

With the fall climbing season over, Tingri wasn't much of a tourist attraction, so they had the guesthouse all to themselves. Amy, Dan, and Nellie sat around the open fire pit in the kitchen, completely exhausted, but too excited to sleep. Saladin had no such problem. He was curled up on the hearth and hadn't moved for hours.

"This is
wonderful,"
Nellie murmured contentedly. "The heat of the fire, the cold, dry air. Someone ought to open a resort in Tingri. Even the smoke smells richer, earthier. Maybe it's the altitude."

Dan laughed without humor. "Maybe it's the yak poop. That's what they heat with up here."

"And cook, too?" Amy asked in dismay. She pushed away her cup of sweet aromatic tea.

They had spent the evening filling each other in on their separate adventures throughout China, marveling at how such different paths had brought the two of them to the foot of Everest at almost the same moment.

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Dan howled with delight at Amy's description of Saladin's plunge off the Great Wall. And Amy laughed just as hard when Dan tried to convince her that their cousin Jonah wasn't all bad.

"Seriously," he insisted, "you've got to feel sorry for someone who's trying to live up to guys like Mozart and Rembrandt. And that mother! He could sell a trillion CDs, and it would never be good enough for her. She's like a cross between Aunt Beatrice and Medusa. Man, she practically swallowed her own head when I told her we were Madrigals."

Amy drew in a sharp breath. "You told her that?"

"I couldn't help it. I was just too mad."

She nodded. "I hear you. But you know how the Cahills feel about Madrigals. The other teams will be gunning for us twice as much as before. We have no idea where to look for the next clue. And which of our darling cousins will be willing to trade information with us now? Nobody would form an alliance with a Madrigal."

Dan looked crestfallen, then suddenly leaped to his feet. "Wait a minute! Maybe we're not so dead in the water. Remember the Beard Buddha from Grace's house? Well, the real thing is on Mount Song. In a cave behind it, I found these ancient burned-up pieces of lab equipment. Wasn't Gideon Cahill's lab destroyed in a fire?"

Amy nodded, intrigued. "Where's all that stuff now?"

"It was too much to bring, so I re-hid it. But there

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