The 39 Clues Book 7: The Viper's Nest (2 page)

Irina's poisons,
Amy thought.

Alistair took the pouch and walked away, tucking it into his pocket. He was so calm. So logical.

But ... she died. These were her things. This is stealing.

Amy looked at Dan, but he was already running ahead, following the trail marks.

"Dan?"
Nellie yelled.
"Yo, Indiana Jones, sound off so we know you're alive!"

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They stopped. A few seconds of tense silence were followed by a shriek.

"AAAAAAGGHHHH! SNAKES! GET OFF ME!"

Amy raced ahead. Her ankle caught on a rain-slickened vine and she tumbled over a bush and down a steep, sandy decline.

She landed in mud at the bottom, stopped by Dan's filthy Converse sneakers. He loomed above her, grinning, leaning against the prow of a large, two-level motorboat. "Found it first."

Amy scrambled to her feet. "I thought you were being attacked!"

"That was my Indy imitation. Good, huh?"

Amy smiled and then shoved Dan backward into the water. "That," she said, "was my Darth Vader."

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CHAPTER 3

Standing at the rail, Dan Cahill looked over the roiling sea and thought:
He who is responsible for the fate of the world does not lose his lunch.

He held tight, feeling like the time Aunt Beatrice had let him ride the Whirl-a-Cup after three helpings of French fries. The results weren't pretty.

The boat lurched on giant swells. The rain had let up, but that just made the volcanic ash worse. Between the ash and fog, Dan couldn't see the island where last night he and Amy almost became roast sibling stew. Arif had evaded the police by finding a channel behind the island. After circling south, he was now heading back to Jakarta. Well,
bouncing
back was more like it. The trip would take three hours. Which meant three hours of Radio Silence between Dan and his sister. Amy was mad at him.

He who is responsible for the fate of the world does not think about his sister while trying not to lose his lunch.

Usually, you could count to ten and Amy would start jabbering about some fascinating topic like the growth rate of flax in Uruguay. But this anger was different.

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Sticky. Amy was mad at everybody--Alistair, Nellie, him.

Not that he blamed her. Everything was confusing, and confusion made Amy mad. Even their motto --
Trust no one
-- couldn't be trusted. Irina was bad, then good. Nellie was good, then (maybe) bad. Alistair was in a class by himself. Plus, they didn't know where they were going next. And the ride was nauseating.

Take deep breaths. Think cheerful. Think funny.

A lot of help that strategy had been. No one was laughing at his jokes. But jokes were the only way to get relief from yesterday. From the memory of Irina.

He couldn't stop hearing her last words --
"Everything is up to you and Dan. Go!"--
or seeing her face. She was reaching up from under the sea, staring down from the storm clouds, crying on the wind.

Tickling his ankle.

"GAHH!"
Dan gasped, jumping away.

"Mrrp?" said Saladin, looking as confused as he felt.

"Didn't mean to scare you, little guy," Dan said, lifting the Mau into his arms. He felt Saladin's heart beat against his own chest. "How do you do it? How do you make me feel so much better? I try to make everyone feel good, and I just get them mad. With you, it's like, hey, everything's situation normal."

Dan smiled.
Situation normal
was his dad's expression--one of the few things he remembered.

"Dude, I have someone I want you to meet," Dan said. He reached into his pocket and took out his father's old Australian passport. It had a faint musty,

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sweet smell. Dan imagined the smell was his dad's cologne, but Amy claimed it was just passport paper. Flipping open the blue cover, he looked at the photo and the fake name beneath: ROGER NUDELMAN. Dad had hidden his identity, probably to deceive rivals in the hunt. But the goofiness of the name always made Dan smile.

"Say hi, Rog!" he said softly. "He was a jokester, too, Saladin --I know it. Like me. Family tradition."

The boat lifted sharply up on a wave and then slapped down. Rain was beginning to fall again, so Dan quickly slipped the passport back into his pocket.

With a crack of thunder, the skies emptied hard. Dan cowered. Saladin jumped away and scampered toward a small glassed-in cabin. Dan followed, the rain so thick he could barely breathe.

"Ya, saya mendengar mereka --"
Inside, the skipper, Arif, was shouting into a cell phone while at the wheel. He spun around suddenly. "No come in!"

"Urn, rain?" Dan gestured outside. "Wet?" He shook his head, spraying water on the floor. "Towels?"

Arif muttered something into the phone in Indonesian, then pointed toward a hinged wooden chest that ran the length of the cabin's back wall.

Saladin was already scratching at something in the space between the chest and the wall. He managed to slide out a small oval-shaped tin. A rancid, fishy smell wafted upward and Dan felt his stomach lurch. As Saladin eagerly began licking out the slimy black

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contents, Dan noticed the tin's label: Genuine Russian Sevruga Caviar.

Irina's snack.

Why did Russians like such disgusting food?
Breathe. In. Out. You will not get sick.

Dan opened the chest and found a stack of white towels, along with ropes, blankets, and notebooks. As he pulled out a towel, he stopped cold.

Next to the stack was a leather shoulder bag engraved with the letters INS.

Irina N. Spasky.

Dan pulled it out and quietly shut the top.

The door to the cabin flew open, startling Arif. Amy barged in, soaked and angry looking. "There you are! I thought you'd hurled too many chunks and fallen off the edge of the boat."

Glancing at Arif, Dan tucked the shoulder bag under his arm. He pulled Amy outside to a rain-sheltering overhang. "Before you say anything that makes me feel even more special, look at this," Dan said.

Amy gasped when she saw the bag. "It's Irina's!"

Dan opened it and riffled through the contents -- some makeup, a telescope shaped like a lipstick container, some suspicious-looking vials, a leather notebook...

"What's this?" Amy said, pulling out a thin leather wallet. Tucked inside was a stack of rubber-banded cards. Quickly, she unwrapped the bands and thumbed

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through. The top card made her flinch -- a copy of her own United States Social Security card.

Under it were copies of Ian's and Natalie's school IDs, an ID card for each Holt, a Burrit-Oh! Business card with a photo of a much-younger Alistair...."Dan, this is scary. She had IDs for everyone on the hunt!"

From the bottom of the wallet, she pulled out three small ziplock plastic bags. Each contained thin plastic squares resembling microscope slides. "What the--?"

But Dan was intent on the leather notebook. "Check this out!" he said, examining a page full of scribbled phone numbers, calculations, and notes in Russian.

Amy repacked the wallet and stuffed it into her backpack. "I don't understand a word of this...." She leafed through to the very last page and stopped.

Cregytow,ee mecmo 39 Katoru? Om mempagu RCH.

I'm with you and you're with me and so we are all together.

"We know what the 'thirty-nine' means," Dan said. "She was collecting information about the clues. Maybe this involves our next destination. Maybe she was going to give this to us --to help us!"

Amy's eyes watered. "She was on
our side,
Dan. How is that fair? Why hadn't she told us? Was she just pretending to be bad, or did she have a change of heart?"

Dan tried to smile. "Typical Lucian, huh? Sneaky and unpredictable."

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"I can't believe you said that!" Amy snapped. "She saved our lives!"

"Hey," Dan said, "I was just kidding--"

"Lucians are liars," Amy went on in a mocking, singsong voice. "Tomas eat broken glass for breakfast, Ekaterinas are smart enough to build computers out of toe jam, Janus can write novels in their sleep, blah blah blah. Do you really think all of that is true, Dan? Then what about you and me? We're not like any of those. But we are in
one
of the branches."

Amy was in a mood. She needed a dose of lighten-up. Dan picked up Saladin and turned his face toward her, imitating a cat voice. "And what branch am I, the brave Saladin?" Dan purred. "E-CAT-erina? To-MOUSE?"

Amy turned away and began pacing, as if she hadn't even heard him.

The boat rode a steep swell again, and Dan felt his insides dance. He let out an involuntary
glurp.

"Whoaaaaa --AARRRGGGGGGGHHHH ... shove two fingers down my throat and pull out my heart
... to
prove you love meeeee ... !"
Clutching her iPod, Nellie emerged from the hatch and lurched toward them, like a creature put together from spare parts --a motion that Dan and Amy recognized as dancing. Pulling out her earbuds, she raised her face to the sky and let the rain pelt her for a few seconds. "Woo-hoo, that is better than a facial!" she cried, running to join Dan and Amy under the overhang.

"Stick around," Dan said, "for a lava treatment."

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Nellie shook her hair dry and leaned against the wall. "Are you guys okay? Down below, I had a long talk with your uncle. He filled me in on all the details. What happened last night... what you saw ... that was a lot to handle for a kid."

Dan nodded. "For anybody."

Amy wandered by, barely acknowledging Nellie.
"I'm with you and you're with me and so we are all together..."
she murmured under her breath.

Nellie burst out laughing.
"What
did you just say?"

"Some weird note," Dan began. "It was in--"

"Nothing!" Amy interrupted, whirling around. She was staring at Dan, the look in her eyes unmistakable:
We can't tell her. We can't trust her anymore.

Dan glanced back helplessly.
If we don't trust Nellie,
he said with his eyes,
how will we get around? Who'll drive us --and pay for food and flights, and cover for the fact that we are two underage people traveling the world by ourselves? We have to tell her!

Dan took a deep breath and looked away from his sister's piercing glance. "Okay. We saw that you had a bunch of coded e-mail messages."

"Dan!"
Amy blurted.

"They were from someone named clashgrrl," Dan barged on. "The subject line said 'Status report' or something. And we also saw a text message. 'Keep them close.' Plus, we think it's weird that someone who can fly a plane has to work as an au pair."

"Whoa. You
spied
on me?" Nellie said.

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"It wasn't like that--" Amy began.

Thunder echoed again. The boat tilted. Dan, Amy, and Nellie grabbed on to the metal poles that supported the overhang.

"You little sneaks!" Nellie practically had to shout to be heard over the rain. She shook her head and shrugged. "Well, at least you're honest. Okay, you really want to know? Clashgrrl? That's my homey from high school. We, like, talk about
everything?
Like, stuff that shouldn't be read by
nosy little kids?
Plus, she's an IT manager--total geek. She knows how to code messages and she does it with everyone. And FYI, she thinks I'm in the States, and 'keep them close' means two CDs of photos she gave me, to keep from her boyfriend, for reasons I don't want to tell you, thank you very much. And why I'm not, like, a
real
pilot yet is because my dad has this crazy idea I should be twenty-five before I even think of flying commercially. And that's why you got so lucky to have me. Any other questions?"

Dan felt like a total idiot. Amy was shuffling her feet, looking at the deck. "Sorry," Dan squeaked.

"Trust issues," Amy said.

"Apology accepted," Nellie said, glancing at Dan expectantly. "Your turn."

"Okay," Dan said, "the thing Amy said --'I'm with you and you're with me' -- it was a message Irina left. Probably a code, I'm thinking."

Nellie laughed. "Shut
up!
Irina said
that?"
She began flipping through her iPod playlists.

"You know it?" Amy asked incredulously.

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"Voilá!" Nellie said, holding out the iPod screen.

Dan squinted at the album. "Velvet Cesspool...?"

"The best. Band. Ever!" Nellie contorted her face into a pained expression and began to sing: