The Tomb of Shadows, Page 7

  He turned away. I felt a lump in my throat. I still remembered the day, the way it smothered everything in my life.

  Aly pressed my hand harder, closing her fingers around mine.

  “I never heard from Bhegad again,” Dad went on, his voice barely audible. “I was devastated. Furious. I thought about tracking him. But that wouldn’t have brought her back. So instead I doubled down—I became obsessed with finding a way to save you.”

  “Which is why you were out of town so much,” I said. “You were setting up this place. In secret. But why here?”

  “This country is paradise for geneticists,” Dad said. “Mongolians share more common genes than any other human beings on the planet. Statistically, almost all descend from one ancestor dating to about 1200. We believe this to be Genghis Khan, one of the greatest conquerors in history. His achievements were superhuman. If anyone in history was a Select, he would be it. And he lived way past the age of fourteen. Which means there must be others like him, still alive.”

  “So you came here on a guess?” Cass said.

  “I came here after a lock of the Genghis’s hair was discovered,” Dad said, stepping out of the car, “and genetic analysis suggested some abnormalities in the G7W area. An incredible finding! The problem was, the DNA was degraded. When I visited, I discovered a country with great natural resources, isolated from the rest of the world. It appealed to me as a location for a secret project. It wasn’t easy, but we were able to collect more hair and bone samples. We have just completed a thorough mapping of the great khan’s genetic code and are waiting for the findings. If we find the mechanism that kept Genghis Khan alive, maybe we have the cure for you.”

  As we all piled out, Aly said, “I’d like to see the genome.”

  “It’s bewildering to a layperson,” Dad said, walking toward the building. “A human genome has billions of lines of code. I’ll show you when we get inside. But I have a few questions myself.” He pulled a cell phone from his pocket. “What are your phone numbers? While we’re waiting to hear about Bhegad, I’ll call your parents.”

  “No!” Cass and Aly shouted at the same time.

  “They can’t know,” I said. “If Aly’s parents find out about the Karai Institute, they’ll come after her.”

  “Jack, I’m a parent, and you mean everything to me,” he replied. “I can’t not call these other parents, knowing what they’re going through.”

  “But she’ll miss her treatments,” I said, “and—”

  “Treatments?” Dad stopped and turned toward us. “What exactly was Bhegad doing to you?”

  Before I could answer, Dad’s phone beeped. “McKinley,” he said. “He what? Be right there.”

  He shoved the phone back in his pocket. “There’s been a complication,” he said. “Professor Bhegad has had a heart attack.”

  I’d seen Torquin fuss, fight, joke, and operate machinery, but I’d never seen him fret.

  He had taken Cass’s worry beads and was flipping them, one by one, down their string. I was feeling pretty worried myself. Bhegad was in the operating room and we were helpless in a small office down a glass-walled corridor. I sipped from a cup of warm liquid Dad called milk tea, but I could barely taste anything. My head ached, my stomach burned, and my legs felt weak. Dad had told me the tea would make me feel better, but it wasn’t true.

  “Bhegad strong . . .” Torquin was muttering to no one in particular. “Very strong . . .”

  Cass and Aly were hunched over a desktop monitor, where Dad was showing a section of Genghis Khan’s genome. The letters and numbers looked blurry to me and I had to blink a few times. “All these tiny combinations of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs?” Dad said. “They’re amino acids—adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine. The building blocks of life.” He pointed to a spot on the screen. “Here’s where the G7W gene resides. If our scientists are correct—”

  “They’re not,” Aly said.

  “Beg pardon?” Dad said.

  “Your scientists are wrong.” Aly was scrolling down the screen. “It is the general area of the G7W group, but you’re off a few million places on the chain. It’s . . . here. And right off the bat, I’m seeing a guanine where a cytosine is supposed to be, and a whole lot of discrepancies in this area at the top of the screen. I could go on. Khan may have been king of conquerors, but sorry, he has nothing to do with G7W.”

  Dad’s jaw dropped open. “But—how would you—?”

  “Because Aly is a Select,” I said. “She can hack into any computer system, analyze data, break any firewall. Marco’s an amazing athlete—”

  “I nac kaeps drawkcab,” Cass piped up. “Osla I have a photographic memory. I can tell you how to get anywhere from anywhere else. Try me.”

  “What on earth—?” Dad sputtered.

  “Seriously,” Cass said. “Anywhere.”

  “Okay . . .” Dad thought a moment. “New York City. Fifty-Third and Fifth. To, um, parking lot three at Jones Beach. I used to work there as a lifeguard.”

  Cass thought a moment. “Uptown on Fifth. Right on Fifty-Ninth to the Queensboro Bridge. Queens Boulevard to either the Grand Central or the Long Island Expressway to the Meadowbrook Parkway to the end, where you veer left onto Ocean Parkway and find the parking lot. You may have to go around a rotary. But I think in New York they call it a traffic circle . . .”

  Dad nearly dropped his milk tea. “That’s right. That’s absolutely right.” He glanced at the screen and immediately took out his cell phone. “I need to have my team check your work, Aly. If you’re correct . . .” His face suddenly looked years older.

  As he called the genetics team and told them what Aly had said, I sat in a chair. My head throbbed. “Jack?” Aly said. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded. “Guess the crash kinda shook me up.”

  “You kinda might have a concussion,” Cass said.

  “After they’re done working on Professor Bhegad, I’ll mention something to Dr. Bradley,” I said.

  “What? Are you sure?” Dad blurted out, his voice suddenly loud and animated. He hung up the phone and set it down on the table. “The head surgeon just cut into my other call with an update on Bhegad. He pulled through.”

  “Yyyahhhh!” Torquin bellowed, leaping up from his chair.

  I felt a jolt of relief. Cass shot me a smile and said, “Emosewa!”

  As Aly gave me a tight hug, Dad headed for the doorway. “And he wants to see you four. Immediately. Follow me to the recovery room.”

  We raced out of the room, down the hallway, and through a set of doors. Professor Bhegad was lying on a slanted bed, dressed in a white hospital gown that looked like a tent on his skinny frame. His face was papery white, his hands spotted and even more wrinkly than usual. “Hello . . .” he said, his voice hoarse and whispery, barely audible above the beeping and whirring of the machines.

  Aly took his hand. “You look great, Professor!”

  He managed a pained half smile as his head rolled to the side and his eyes fluttered shut. “He’s still fragile,” Dr. Bradley said. “Asleep more than awake. We found a lot of internal trauma. Bleeding. We’ll monitor him and do what we can. But there’s only so much we can do.” She sighed. “He’s an old man.”

  “Not exactly cause for great yoj,” Cass said.

  Dr. Bradley lowered her voice, casting a quick eye toward Dad. “The professor told me he’s concerned you move as swiftly as possible in your quest.”

  That seemed to rouse Bhegad. “Go . . . g . . . go . . .” he said, crooking a gnarled finger to us, gesturing us to come closer. We sank to our knees in order to hear his soft voice. “Neck . . . lock . . .” the professor rasped.

  “Next Loculus?” I said. “Is that what you want, Professor?”

  “Yes . . .” he said, staring at me with an expression of urgency. “H . . . h . . . he . . .”

  “Jack?” Aly said. “He meaning Jack? What about him?”

  “L . . . l . . .” Bhegad swallowed and tried again.


  I leaned closer. “What are you trying to tell us? Go slowly.”

  “Ling,” he finally said.

  “Ling?” Cass said. “Is there someone here named Ling? Dr. Ling?”

  Bhegad’s eyes fluttered and his body gave a sudden jerk. The room resounded with piercing beeps. “What’s happening?” Aly exclaimed.

  “Heart arrhythmia,” Dr. Bradley said. “Get the pads, stat!”

  We backed away fast. Medical workers swarmed into the room. Dr. Bradley lifted a pair of pads like small catcher’s mitts and applied them to the sides of Professor Bhegad’s chest.

  The old man’s body lurched upward like he’d been poked with a dagger.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  NEWTON SPEAKS

  ALY TURNED AWAY. “I can’t watch this.”

  The surgical team was closing around Professor Bhegad, along with Dad and Torquin. With each electrical jolt, I could hear a deep, unearthly-sounding cry. My head, which was already hurting, began to throb.

  I felt Aly’s head settling into my chest, her arms wrapping around my waist. Hug her back, a voice screamed inside my head. But that was ridiculous. We had to move. The doctors needed room. So I backed away with Aly hugging me, and me not hugging back, which was awkward beyond belief. I tried to wrap my arms around her but they collided in midair trying to find a place to settle, until my back plowed into the side of an open door.

  “Are you two all right?” Cass said. “Or is this Zombie Dance Night at the hospital?”

  Aly and I let go of each other. I could feel my face burning. We stepped into the hallway, leaving Torquin, Dr. Bradley, and Dad inside with the medical team.

  Cass began pacing up and down. He had the worry beads now and was flicking beads down the necklace-like cord. “He can’t die.”

  Click . . . click . . .

  I glanced back into the room. “We have to contact this Mr. Ling,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s not a Mr.,” Aly said. “It could be a Ms. Or a first name.”

  “Or linguini?” Cass shrugged. “Maybe he was hungry.”

  Click . . .

  “Is there a ‘Ling’ in any of the names of the Seven Wonders we haven’t been to?” Aly said.

  “The Great Pyramid of Giza . . .” I said. “Lighthouse at Pharos . . . Mausoleum at Halicarnassus . . . Temple of Artemis at Ephesus . . . Statue of Zeus at Olympia.”

  “All Ling-less,” Cass said.

  Click . . . click . . .

  “Will you please stop that?” Aly cried out.

  “They’re worry beads!” Cass protested. “I’m worried.”

  Click . . . click . . . click . . .

  “Give me that!” Aly grabbed for the string, but Cass yanked it back. With a soft snap, the clasp pulled open. The beads smacked downward against the lower part of the clasp. Cass held up the other half.

  Jutting out of it was the end of a flash drive.

  Aly’s face brightened. “Cass, you are my hero.”

  “I am?” Cass said.

  “Let’s see what’s on this thing.” Aly took the beads and ran them down the hall to the room where Dad had shown her the genome. Its image still glowed on the screen.

  Aly inserted the USB into the port at the side of the monitor. The screen went black, then showed a login screen. “Okay, let’s hack this thing. Accessing a password generator from my VPN . . .”

  The screen was going crazy with scrolling numbers and letters, error messages flashing at blinding speeds.

  “Is this going to take a long time?” Cass asked.

  The craziness on the screen abruptly stopped, revealing a folder. “Got it. Eight seconds. Owner of this drive is . . . him.”

  She showed us the screen.

  “Yiopyos?” Cass said.

  I thought back to Rhodes. The Greeks called it Rhodos, and you saw it written everywhere as POΔOΣ.

  “I think that p is actually an r sound in Greek,” I said. “This says Yiorgos Skouras.”

  Cass made a face. “Yiorgos knows how to use a flash drive?”

  “He’s like the nasty cousin of André the Giant,” Aly said.

  “Who?” Cass asked.

  “You know . . . ‘Anybody want a peanut?’ From The Princess Bride?” Aly said. “Don’t you two know anything about American cinema?”

  “If I watched as many old movies as you, I’d be fat and bald and using dial-up,” Cass said.

  Aly ignored him, scrolling through a folder of documents. “Seven folders,” she said. “All the labels are in Greek but I’m guessing each folder is dedicated to one of the Seven Wonders. Let’s start with this one . . . it looks like it says pyramid.”

  She clicked on a folder marked ΠYPAMIΣ. As she clicked through a trove of documents—architectural reports, images, Wikipedia entries, Cass exhaled. “This isn’t helping. It’s just research. Bhegad will be dead in the ground by the time we read all this!”

  Dead in the ground.

  I caught a blast of decay, a memory of the awful smell in my dream. “Let’s think positively, okay?”

  “Okay, I’m collecting everything that’s in English,” Aly said. “The rest we can show Torquin later. He knows Greek.”

  I watched documents fly by, and some images. One of them was a stately building overlooking a cliff. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus,” Aly said.

  I leaned closer. Something about it seemed familiar. “Creepy looking,” I said.

  “Should be. Dead people are buried there. Some ruler named Mausolus. And his wife, Artemisia.” Aly clicked on the folder titled MAYΣΩΛEION.

  Like the Pyramid folder, it contained tons of files. She opened all of them at once. We looked at a cascade of Greek words, every document complete gibberish.

  Except for one.

  “Whoa, go back,” I said. “I think I saw something in English.”

  Aly toggled through the documents, pausing at one and then printing it out.

  “Who’s Charles Newton?” Aly asked.

  “Turkey is pretty famous for figs,” Cass said. “Maybe he named a cookie after himself.”

  She clacked away on the keys again, running a search on CHARLES NEWTON. First hit was a Wikipedia entry. Cass and I leaned over to read it. “Here we go,” Aly said. “Newton is the guy who discovered the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. Well, the remains of it.”

  My heart started to race. “Okay, I’m looking for the word ling. It would be great to find a connection . . .”

  “Well, not here, anyway,” Aly said. “Badly written letter. What person would write ‘all hopes I had of ever my seeing’? Wouldn’t you say ‘my ever seeing’?”

  “Maybe English wasn’t his first language,” Cass suggested.

  “With a name like Charles Newton?” Aly said.

  “He could have changed it,” Cass said, “from Charles Ling.”

  I stared at the words “The 7th, to the end.”

  “Do you see what I see?” I said.

  Aly nodded. “Sevenths. The Atlanteans loved that ratio of sevenths. We used it on the island and in Babylon.”

  One-seventh: 0.142857.

  Two-sevenths: 0.285714

  Three-sevenths: 0.428571.

  The same digits, in the same order, only starting in different places. They were part of the codes we’d used in the Mount Onyx labyrinth and in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

  Cass took a sheet of paper and a pen from the desk and began writing. “So let’s take the first, fourth, second, eighth, fifth, and seventh letter of the message . . .”

  “Helpful,” Aly drawled.

  “Maybe it’s an anagram?” Cass said.

  Aly scratched her head. “FWONTY? As in, ‘Don’t go in the backy, go in the fwonty?’”

  I took a deep breath. “There’s another name there—Harold Beamish. Anything on him?”

  Aly did a quick search. “Nothing.”

  “Okay,” I said, rubbing my temples, which were starting to ache. “Ok
ay. Maybe we’re overthinking this.”

  “Maybe it’s not one-seventh,” Cass said.

  “What if we just take every seventh letter of the message?” I suggested.

  I took Cass’s pen and carefully circled the letters of the message:

  I wrote out the letters one by one:

  “‘Where the lame walk, the sick rise, the dead live forever,’” Cass read.

  “It makes no sense,” I said. “A mausoleum is where you bury the dead.”

  I leaned back in the chair, my thoughts in total chaos. “Did Professor Bhegad say anything else?”

  “He called you over to his bed,” Cass said. Flipping into a croaky Professor Bhegad imitation, he said, “Jaaack!”

  I shook my head. “No. He didn’t say ‘Jack.’ He said ‘He.’ Bhegad looked at me and said ‘He.’ That’s why we thought this Ling character must be a guy.”

  “Right,” Cass said. “And when you leaned closer he said that name. Ling.”

  “He . . .” I said. “. . . Ling.”

  The answer hit me like a wooden plank. “Oh. Oh, wow . . .”

  Cass and Aly looked at me blankly.

  “He wasn’t giving us a name,” I said. “He was telling us about the next Loculus!”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  DAD TAKES MORE WEIRD

  HE. LING.

  Healing.

  I hoped I wasn’t wrong.

  “Jack, you can’t just barge in here like that!” Dr. Bradley said. “He just had a highly painful procedure!”

  “Sorry, Dr. Bradley, it’s important.” I darted around her toward Professor Bhegad’s hospital bed. In the time it took to run from the office, my tiny headache had grown. Now it pounded. The old man was flat on his back, his eyes open but glassy and red. Dad, Cass, and Aly were huddled in the doorway, watching. Torquin was sitting in a chair in a corner holding a ukulele.