“Listen to what my boss has to say,” Nellie went on. “I really think it’ll be worth your while.”
He looked aggrieved but gestured toward the sat phone.
She punched in the numbers and waited for the satellite connection to be made.
“Sorry to wake you up, sir. Yes, I do know what time it is there.” Quickly, she outlined their situation and then passed the handset to the Frenchman. “He wants to talk to you.”
Amy and Dan watched intently as the pilot listened to the voice many thousands of miles away. His eyes widened; his expression grew increasingly awed. He did not say a single word; just handed the phone back to Nellie and announced, “We depart in ten minutes!”
As the man set about the preflight preparations, Amy sidled up to the au pair. “Who did you call?”
Nellie shrugged. “My uncle. He’s a pretty persuasive person.”
“But what did he say? Did he bribe the guy?”
“How should I know?” the au pair retorted. “I wasn’t part of the conversation.” She glared at them, as if daring them to question her further.
The Cahills knew better than to second-guess the person who finagled them a ride up Everest. Yet Amy couldn’t hold back. “Are you ever going to tell us who you really are?”
Nellie hesitated. “I’m your babysitter—”
“Au pair,” Dan corrected automatically.
She gathered them into her arms. “And your friend,” she finished. But the expression on her face was strangely guilty. “You’d better get ready. This is your one shot.”
The pilot helped brother and sister into GORE-TEX wind suits and provided them with boots and gloves. The temperature at the Everest summit could reach triple digits below zero, even without factoring in the wind, which averaged 120 miles per hour.
Breathing apparatus was next — face masks connected to cylinders that were harnessed to their backs. The rigs were awkward and uncomfortable. Dan couldn’t escape the feeling of a mild yet never-ending asthma attack, and Amy was unnerved by the sound of her own breath reverberating in her ears. But the equipment was absolutely necessary. At 29,035 feet, the air contained only one-third as much oxygen as at sea level. Without supplemental Os, they would not last thirty seconds.
Finally, the pilot carefully weighed them on a scale. In the impossibly thin air and low pressure, every ounce was critical. A few extra pounds could make the difference between a clean takeoff and being stranded in a place where no one could survive for long.
Nellie stepped forward. “My turn.”
“This is the famous American sense of humor, no?” the Frenchman exclaimed in disbelief. “We cannot accommodate another milligram. It is only because these two are children that I can take them both without risking all our lives.”
“It’s my job to look out for their safety!” the au pair protested.
“In that case, your incompetence is beyond measure,” the pilot told her without hesitation. “Where we journey, safety is a word truly without meaning. Now, do we go, or do we not?”
“We go,” Amy said, hoping she sounded decisive rather than just plain scared. “Otherwise we’re handing this clue to the Holts.”
They opened the hangar doors, and the A-Star was wheeled out onto the helipad on a rolling skid. It was so light that the pilot was able to move it on his own, mostly because he did not trust anyone else to touch it. The low-density metals and polymers were so delicate that “clumsy children might compromise the integrity of the craft.”
Their seats took up less space than the seat belts that buckled them in. The helicopter was as minimal and empty as it could possibly be.
Nellie turned to her charges. “Promise me you won’t do anything crazy.”
The Cahills were too cowed to respond. Besides, it was already past time for promises. It didn’t get much crazier than what they were about to do.
Nellie backed away, and the rotor blade began to turn, slowly at first, then picking up speed. The A-Star lifted off the Tibetan plateau.
Next stop: the planet’s zenith — a jagged spike of ice and rock nearly three miles above them.
CHAPTER 23
The Hillary Step was a fifty-five-foot cliff in the sky — Mount Everest’s last cruel joke on its exhausted, breathless, hypothermic climbers. At a lower altitude, it would have presented a minor obstacle to a seasoned mountaineer. But at nearly 29,000 feet — well above the summit of K-2, the world’s second-highest peak — each tiny movement was a guided tour through a world of pain.
The three bone-weary Holts watched in dismay as Ian Kabra’s Sherpa team dragged their Lucian rival up the Step, literally carrying him as they ascended the tangle of fixed ropes left over from decades of expeditions.
“No fair!” bawled Hamilton. What would normally have been a bellow barely made it past the plastic of his oxygen mask.
“Lucian cheater!” panted Reagan.
Their Tomas strength had enabled the Holts to acclimatize for the Himalayan ascent in a fraction of the usual time. Yet they were still subject to Everest’s merciless ravages. The three were exhausted, freezing, dehydrated, and oxygen starved. Ian, by contrast, was warm and comfortable in his space suit. And thanks to his Sherpa bearers, he probably wasn’t even very tired.
The summit ridge was blanketed in waist-deep snow from the recent blizzards. The Holts were swimming the mountain as much as climbing it. Reagan was now thinking enviously of her sister’s hospital bed. She knew she couldn’t go much farther.
Eisenhower Holt let out a howl of pure emotion that started a small avalanche on the Step. They were not going to lose to those Kabras again! When he spoke, the focus of a champion athlete was unmistakable behind his crushing fatigue.
“Kids, we don’t get much respect from the rest of the family. But we’re part of a great tradition, stretching back five hundred years to Thomas Cahill himself. Ham, stay with your sister. I’m going to show the world what the Tomas can do!”
He took off through the deep snowdrifts, a study in determination and raw power. He hit the ropes of the Hillary Step, climbing hand over hand without pausing for rest. Any mountaineer would have claimed it was physically impossible.
There were no such words in the Holt vocabulary.
At the top, he disappeared into the blowing snow, but they heard his booming voice: “Eat my dust, Kabra!”
“He’s ahead!” Reagan croaked.
Hamilton nodded in admiration and pride. He’d spent most of his life thinking of his father as kind of a boob. But here on Mount Everest, Eisenhower Holt was the boob you wanted on your side.
“No one can beat him to the summit now!”
The Ecureuil/A-Star 350 climbed higher and higher into the thin air, soaring past altitudes far beyond the ceiling of any other helicopter in the world.
For Amy and Dan, who had been through some pretty terrifying experiences, this was the ultimate terror. The A-Star was so tiny and insubstantial that they felt completely unprotected, as if this were some demented theme park ride, out in the open, six miles above sea level.
The brutal Himalayan winds buffeted the ultralight craft, tossing it around like a Ping-Pong ball in a hurricane. Amy and Dan clutched at each other because there was literally nothing else to hold on to.
The closer they got to the mountain, the more defined Everest became from its neighbors — higher, massive, with a distinctive white plume streaming from its peak.
“Is that a cloud?” Dan asked, shouting to get the words past his breathing apparatus.
Their pilot provided the answer. “The top of Everest reaches into the jet stream,” he called back. “What you see are millions of ice crystals blowing off the summit. I told you this was no sightseeing tour. Prepare for what you Americans call a bumpy ride.”
It was no exaggeration. The closer they got to the summit, the more ferocious the gyrations of the A-Star became.
“How are we going to land?” Amy shrilled in a panic. “We’ll crash into the moun
tain!”
The pilot’s upper body shook, as if the controls were manipulating him rather than the other way around. Except for the turbulence, they were barely moving now, trying to hover over the peak. Suddenly, the world disappeared as they passed through the ice plume. They were flying blind at the very edge of the atmosphere.
A sudden drop and bump drew screams from both Cahills.
“What happened?” Dan wailed.
“You wanted the summit; you are there,” the pilot informed them. He indicated the altimeter: 29,035 feet. There could be no higher reading. Not on earth.
“We — we made it?” Amy stammered. She had fully expected to be smashed to pieces far below.
“Vite! Hurry!” he ordered. “We have five minutes at the most! I cannot shut down the engine for fear it will not restart!” With a pop, he opened the bubble.
Amy and Dan wasted precious seconds unclipping their belts and struggling out of the A-Star. They’d had a zero percent expectation of making it this far, so there was no concrete plan of what to do now.
The search for the 39 Clues had brought them to some amazing places, but the summit of Mount Everest literally topped them all. The cold was indescribable, the wind an unrelenting onslaught. They had to crawl away from the chopper to get clear of the rotor blades. Even with supplemental oxygen from their masks, the effort left them gasping for air that simply wasn’t there.
Yet nothing could move Amy’s mind from the magnificence of this spot. “Everything’s down!” she exclaimed in wonder. “There’s no up anymore! Even the clouds are below us!”
The world’s pinnacle! No amount of research could have prepared her for this spectacular place. Gargantuan peaks rose all around, but their perch was the highest of all, dominating the planet’s loftiest neighborhood. Lhotse, at nearly twenty-eight thousand feet, seemed far beneath them. The sky was an incredible, unnaturally deep cobalt blue. At this altitude, they were at the edge of the earth’s troposphere, not far from the beginning of outer space.
As Dan’s boots crunched the snow on the roof of the world, he tossed over his shoulder at the pilot, “If you leave us here, that dude on the phone is going to be really ticked off!” He had no idea who “that dude” might be — obviously not Nellie’s uncle. But there could be no question about the person’s power and influence.
“Can you believe where we are?” Amy shouted over the roar of the jet stream.
“Awesome!” Dan tore his eyes from the view and concentrated on the terrain of the summit. The sight jarred him. “Hey, this is a garbage dump!”
A spaghetti of colorful Buddhist prayer flags flapped fiercely in the gale. There were also dozens of national flags. Empty oxygen cylinders were scattered everywhere. And buried in the snow was an oddball collection of objects and knickknacks, everything from framed family photographs to pieces of jewelry and even toys.
Dan was bewildered. “Who brought all this stuff up here?”
“They’re souvenirs,” Amy explained breathlessly. “Every climber wants to leave something on the summit. The question is, what did Mallory leave?”
Dan picked up a locket and opened it to reveal a faded snapshot of a fat baby. “How do we know which of this junk is the clue? We’ve only got five minutes, Amy! We’re probably down to four now!”
Amy thought hard. “Mallory was here first, so whatever he brought must be on the bottom. We dig.”
They began to scrabble at the snow, clearing away dense powder littered with hundreds of random items. Farther down, the snow was packed a little harder, and Amy grabbed a large picture frame to function as a shovel while Dan pounded with a spent oxygen bottle, using it as a hammer. Luckily, there were no major ice formations, thanks to the jet stream, which ripped off most of the moisture.
At this altitude, an ironman triathlon was packed into every simple movement. Within seconds, both were wheezing and coughing violently. Human bodies were not meant to survive in these conditions, much less work hard. Amy could sense her vision constricting as her brain screamed for more oxygen. She bit down painfully on the side of her mouth to stay alert and focused. On Everest, mental exhaustion could be just as deadly as the physical kind.
“If we dig much more,” Dan puffed, “K-2 may have to take over as the world’s tallest mountain!”
“I don’t think we need to worry about that,” Amy gasped. “Look — already there’s a lot less stuff buried here. We’re getting down to the layers from the very earliest Everest expeditions.”
“Two minutes!” came a shout from the ultralight.
Against all odds, they sped up. Dan pounded wildly with the cylinder, and Amy sifted with icy fingers, discarding amulets and St. Christopher medals. It had been difficult enough getting here. To run out of time before they could find the Clue was unthinkable.
“Stop!” she screamed suddenly.
Dan froze in midair, the cylinder poised inches from a small half-buried glass vial.
Delicately, Amy cleared away the surrounding snow and drew out the bottle. It was a thick glass container, tightly corked, its contents frozen.
On one flat surface was a Chinese chop that Amy recognized instantly. She unzipped her wind suit, reached inside her shirt, and pulled out the folded silk from the Forbidden City. The wind nearly ripped it from her hand, but she kept a death grip on it. Together, she and Dan managed to get it opened up.
“That’s the chop of Puyi, the last emperor!” she shouted into the gale. “It’s a perfect match, see? Puyi gave this to George Mallory to hide for him!”
“But what’s in the bottle?” Dan asked.
“Remember the vial from Paris — the one the Kabras stole? I think this might be something similar.” She turned over the bottle. Etched into the other side was the symbol of the standing wolf — the Janus crest.
The rush of discovery had blood pounding in her ears loud enough to drown out the howling jet stream. “Dan, I’ve got it!” She pointed to the pictures on the silk — the “equation” made from the family symbols. “This doesn’t mean that the family is the sum of its branches. Look at the shapes around those crests! They’re vials, just like this one and the one from Paris! There are four chemical formulas — one for each branch. And when you mix them all together, they make some kind of master serum! That’s what the thirty-nine clues are — the ingredients to that serum!”
“One minute!” bellowed the pilot.
Not even the fact that they were running out of time could distract them as the truth about the 39 Clues began to reveal itself.
“Think about the family branches and what they’re good at!” Amy went on. “The Lucians are masters of strategy and cunning; the Janus are creative and dramatic; the Tomas are athletic and strong; and the Ekats can invent anything. And those traits have been passed on from generation to generation, so the chemical effect must actually become part of your DNA. With the master serum, you’d be all those things at the same time! You’d be unbeatable!”
There was a silent exchange between the two of them. A formula that powerful in the wrong hands …
“Thirty seconds!” The pilot was practically hysterical. “If you are coming, the time is now!”
Dan helped Amy wrestle the blowing silk back into her wind suit and ran. Amy was about to follow him when the snow-reflected sun glinted off one more inscription on the bottle, this one much smaller than the others. She held it up to her goggles and squinted at the bottom of the vial.
The message had been scratched into the glass, probably by pen knife, or perhaps the edge of an ice ax. It read:
GM — George Mallory. Generations of adventurers had been inspired by his legendary words — that he was climbing Everest “because it is here.” But he 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.
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 a? 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 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.