The Curse of the Ancient Emerald Read online

I looked at Joe. “We have to make a run for it.”

  He nodded. “When you’re ready.”

  “Let’s go.”

  We jerked away from the door and clattered down the series of fire-escape ladders leading to the ground. Each time we hit a metal landing I would shove the ladder back up again and push the latch into place. It wouldn’t stop anyone, but it might give us an extra minute or two.

  We landed on the street behind the town hall just as the Phantom was sprinting away, heading away from the police station. We set off after him, putting our athletic prowess to good use.

  Just as we started to catch up with him, we heard more sirens blaring, closer this time.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw two squad cars screech around a corner. Joe grabbed me and we ducked into a narrow alley, leaving the Phantom in clear view.

  The squad cars shot past us. We moved deeper into the alley, emerging one block over. Now we were on the same street we had used to get to the town hall in the first place. That meant our parked car wasn’t far away. If only we could get to it.

  More sirens. We ducked back into the alley, hunkering down in the shadows as they sped past.

  “You think they’ll catch him?” asked Joe.

  “I doubt it. He’s too slippery. Speaking of which . . .” I pulled off my mask and stuffed it into my backpack, wiping the sweat from my face.

  “You think this is a good idea?” asked Joe, taking his off as well.

  “Better than getting caught wearing them. At least like this we can come up with an excuse if we need to.”

  My phone beeped, indicating an incoming message. It was a text from Amber.

  EVERYTHING OK? WE MADE IT OUT. DROPPING CHET OFF AND HEADING HOME.

  I quickly texted back. SO FAR SO GOOD. THE LOCKER @ 11 A.M.?

  SEE YOU THEN.

  “Chet and Amber are clear,” I said, putting my phone away.

  Joe breathed a sigh of relief. “One less thing to worry about.”

  “Let’s get back to the car,” I said. I peered out of the alley and saw that the street was deserted. We slipped out and headed along the sidewalk. I wasn’t sure if we should run as fast as we could or just walk calmly. Running meant we got away faster, but if we were caught, it would look suspicious. Walking meant it took us longer and there was more chance of being discovered, but if that did happen, we could try and talk our way out of it.

  We couldn’t even dump our masks, because our DNA was all over them. I wasn’t sure if the Bayport police had DNA profiling kits, but better to be safe than sorry.

  We heard sirens a few streets over as we turned onto the road where we had left our car. It was still there, and even better, there were no police waiting for us.

  I climbed behind the wheel and rolled down the window. The sirens were coming from the east, so I started the engine and headed west.

  “Where are you going?” asked Joe after a while. “Home’s the other way.”

  “We’re not going home.”

  • • •

  Half an hour later, I hopped out of the car and knocked on Trethaway’s door. Nothing. I knocked harder, but there was no answer. I headed around the back and tested the window Joe had opened yesterday.

  “What are you doing?” asked Joe, now standing behind me.

  “Looking for evidence. And if I don’t find that, waiting for Trethaway to get back.”

  “Are you serious?”

  I paused and looked back at Joe. “Yes. I’m tired of all these games. Our families have been threatened, we almost got busted by the police tonight, I nearly fell off the roof, and who knows what he stole from the museum. I want this finished before he decides it’s over. Which means we have to do it tonight. Tomorrow is the last riddle, remember?”

  I climbed through the window and headed into the bedroom, where the pile of magazines still sat. I picked up a few of them, but I couldn’t see any that had words and letters cut out.

  Next I went for the computer while Joe hung around the front door, shifting from foot to foot.

  “I don’t like this,” he said. “If you’re so sure it’s him, we should call the police. Maybe they’ve already caught him!”

  “We can’t call the police. If they haven’t caught him, he’s still free to carry out his threats. We’ll wait here and confront him when he comes home.”

  Then I heard an ominous click, like a gun being cocked.

  “Confront me about what?” growled Trethaway.

  I looked up and saw that Joe had stiffened. Trethaway was standing behind him, and from the look of it, he had a gun shoved up against Joe’s back.

  THE FINAL COUNTDOWN

  12

  JOE

  TRETHAWAY PRODDED ME IN THE back with what felt like a pistol. “Next to your brother,” he said.

  I moved to stand next to Frank and turned around. The living room was still dark, but Trethaway reached out and flicked the light switch. He stared at us curiously.

  “What are you doing in my house?” he asked. “I don’t have anything to steal.”

  “We’re not here to steal from you!” I protested.

  “No? Then you won’t mind if I call the cops?” He reached into his jacket, and that was when I saw that he wasn’t holding a gun at all, but a small cardboard tube of what looked like . . .

  Candy? I’d seriously thought a cardboard tube was a gun? In my defense, the candy tube was about the same circumference.

  Trethaway upended the tube into his mouth. He tossed it onto the couch and took out his cell phone, crunching away while he studied us.

  “Seriously. What do you want?”

  “Like you don’t know,” I said.

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Where were you tonight?” Frank demanded.

  “The movies. Late show.”

  “Hah. A likely story,” said Frank. “Any proof?”

  Trethaway fished in his pocket and pulled out a ticket stub. He handed it over and I inspected it. It was dated today. And it was for the ten p.m. show.

  “That means nothing. You could have bought the ticket as an alibi and slipped out again.”

  “An alibi for what?”

  “For impersonating the Phantom and stealing from the Civil War exhibit at Bayport’s town hall.”

  Trethaway’s eyes grew wide. “Seriously? Kruger’s at it again? This is great! Well . . . obviously, not great. But great for my book! What did he steal? Has there been more than one robbery? Why isn’t it in the news?”

  He ran over to his desk and scrambled around for a notepad and pencil.

  “Uh, Frank?” I said.

  “Yes, Joe?”

  I held out my hand. Frank sighed and fished around in his pocket until he found a ten-dollar bill.

  “I’ll owe you the rest,” he said, handing it over.

  “Don’t feel so bad. At least we know it has to be Kruger now.”

  • • •

  I woke up the next day ready to take on the world. Well, to take on Kruger, at any rate.

  The first thing I did was check the mail. No riddle. Which was a bit worrisome, because this was the final day. If we didn’t catch the Phantom in the act tonight, we’d never catch him.

  Frank was already up. He had the car keys in his hand when I entered the kitchen to grab some breakfast.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “For breakfast? Always.”

  “No. To go see Kruger.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “But—”

  “Come on, Joe. We don’t have much time.”

  I sighed, then grabbed a couple of apples from the fruit bowl, and we headed out to the car.

  Sunday traffic was light; it didn’t take us long to get to Kruger’s. His home wasn’t anything impressive. A small, one-story house with a neatly trimmed yard. It looked deserted.

  “You think he’s flown the coop?”

  “No,” said Frank. “Still one more riddle. One thing I’ve learned
over the past couple of days is that this guy has an ego. He won’t leave without finishing what he started.”

  As we sat there, an old pickup truck pulled up. It was Kruger. He got out and stretched.

  We hurried across the street. Kruger saw us coming and, I have to say, did not look happy.

  “Boys,” he said, “I’m in a bit of a hurry. Have to drop some parts off at the shop.”

  “On a Sunday?” I asked.

  “Need them for tomorrow. Rush repair job. I had to head out of town yesterday to get the parts.”

  “Wait,” said Frank. “You’re saying you’ve been out of town?”

  “Uh . . . yeah.”

  “Last night, too?”

  “Yes!”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Why?” he demanded.

  “We’re curious,” said Frank.

  Kruger sighed. “Last night I was about two hundred miles away. Sleeping in a horrible motel, if you must know.”

  “Can you prove it?” I asked.

  “Why should I?”

  “Please, sir,” said Frank. “Just do this for us and we’ll leave you alone.”

  Kruger muttered something I couldn’t hear and fished around in his wallet. He pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me.

  “I’ll do it since you’re Fenton’s sons. This is a receipt from the motel, so I can claim expenses.”

  I studied the receipt, then handed it to Frank.

  “Sir,” he said. “We’re really sorry. We . . . we messed up.”

  “Can I go now? I’m tired.”

  “Of course.” Frank handed back the receipt, and we both hurried back to the car.

  We sat in our seats and stared out the window at Kruger. There was movement inside as someone—a guy who looked to be a few years older than Frank—flicked back a curtain to see who was outside. Kruger waved up at the window, and the boy waved back. I figured it must be his son, the one he’d mentioned when we first interviewed him.

  “So . . . ,” Frank began.

  “Both have alibis,” I said.

  “Yup.”

  “Which means we’re no closer to knowing who it is than we were yesterday.”

  “Yup,” said Frank.

  I pulled the ten-dollar bill out of my pocket and gave it back to Frank. “Better hold on to this then.”

  Frank took the money and started the car. “Where to?”

  “Home. I want a proper breakfast, and then I need to sit down and think this case through.”

  “Me too,” said Frank with a sigh.

  No chance of that, though. As we pulled into the driveway, both of us saw an envelope sticking out of the mailbox.

  “Here we go again,” I muttered, running to grab it while Frank drove the car into the garage.

  When he joined me, I tore the envelope open. It was two pages long this time. The first was a note to us, made once again from letters and words clipped from magazines and newspapers.

  Tick-tock, boys. Midnight tonight is the time. See you there?

  I turned to the next page. It was filled edge to edge, top to bottom, with the numbers one and zero handwritten over and over again in random patterns.

  I turned it over. Nothing on the back.

  Frank took it from me. “This looks like binary code,” he said. “It’s used in computing to encode instructions.”

  “Can you read it?”

  Frank laughed. “No.”

  “So what are we supposed to do with it?”

  Frank tapped the paper to his chin. “Maybe we scan it into a JPEG, then use text recognition to turn the scan into actual numbers again?”

  “And then?”

  “Then we search on the Internet for what those numbers mean,” he said, hurrying through the door.

  “Okay. Sounds like you know what you’re doing.”

  Frank already had the letter in the scanner by the time I got to his room. We waited while the scanner buzzed and whined. Then the numbers flickered to life on Frank’s monitor.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “Now I search for a handwriting recognition website.”

  I flopped onto his bed and leafed through a graphic novel. I knew from past experience it was best to let Frank do his thing with computers. He tended to get irritated if I hovered at his shoulder.

  “Done,” he announced about ten minutes later. “I ran the scan through a website, and it sent me a Word file.”

  “And what’s next, O Wise One?”

  “Now I copy and paste the binary numbers into a converter.”

  “And you’ve managed to find a binary converter?”

  Frank looked at me. “Binary isn’t some kind of rare, magical language. It’s computer code. Pretty well known.”

  “If you say so.”

  Frank returned to his work. After a minute I heard a sigh of frustration.

  “It’s just gibberish! There’s no meaning here.”

  I glanced at the screen. The converter had turned the ones and zeros into a series of meaningless letters and numbers. We sat there and scanned each line, but there wasn’t anything that made sense.

  “So much for that,” said Frank.

  My phone rang. “Hey, Amber.”

  “Hi, Joe. We still on for the Locker at eleven?”

  “Yep. We got another clue this morning—a page filled with ones and zeros.”

  “Oh, you mean binary?”

  “Uh, yeah. Binary.” I turned away from Frank. “That was my first thought too.”

  I heard Frank snort behind me.

  “So have you translated it?”

  “We tried. It’s just nonsense. Random letters and numbers.”

  “Well, send it to me. Chet, too. Four heads are better than two, remember?”

  I smiled. “Sure, we’ll send it over.” I turned around, but Frank had already e-mailed it. “It’s on its way to you now.”

  “Thanks. See you at eleven. We’ll compare notes.”

  After I had hung up the phone, I examined the physical letter. I had a feeling we didn’t need all the fancy stuff Frank was doing. Surely the puzzle had to be solvable from this single piece of paper?

  “Can we somehow add the numbers up? Maybe each line? Then each line might correspond to a letter of the alphabet?”

  Frank grinned at me. “Isn’t that the code we used when we were six years old?”

  I nodded. “You never know.”

  Frank spent the next twenty minutes adding the numbers on each line, then using that number to pick a letter of the alphabet. When he had finished he turned to me in amazement. “By Jove, I think you cracked it!”

  “Really?”

  “No.” He handed me the paper he’d been writing on, which read, fhdiosfnsoortndangnvangopapqnvcncnspavvgngoo.

  “Maybe it’s a Scandinavian work of art.”

  “That’s exactly what it’s not. Nice try, though.”

  He turned back to the screen. I grabbed a blue tack from his desk and stuck the riddle on the wall. I paced, staring at it, trying to figure out what it could mean.

  An hour later Chet and Amber both e-mailed to say they had come up with nothing.

  “I’m going to the kitchen,” I said with a yawn. “Want anything?”

  “Orange juice,” said Frank absently, not taking his eyes from the screen.

  I headed downstairs and made myself a sandwich. Then I poured two glasses of orange juice, balanced one on my plate, grabbed the other in my free hand, and climbed back up the stairs.

  Frank’s room was at the far end of the hall, so I could see into it as soon as I hit the landing. As I approached, my eyes fixed on the riddle stuck on the wall.

  I stumbled to a stop. I blinked, moved back a few steps, then forward again, making sure I wasn’t seeing things.

  “Frank,” I said, carefully putting down the food and drinks. “Look.”

  “You okay?” he asked, and stood up. “You look weird.”

  “Turn around,” I said cal
mly, “and look at your wall.”

  Frank did so, and when he gasped in surprise, I knew he’d seen what I had seen.

  The riddle—the puzzle made up of ones and zeros—was actually a picture!

  The ones and zeros imitated shading in the image, but the pattern they formed could only be seen from afar.

  And the picture Frank and I were staring at? The image formed from all those ones and zeros?

  It was the Emerald of Astara!

  ENDGAME

  13

  FRANK

  WE HAVE TO CALL THE police,” I said for the hundredth time as we were driving through the twilit streets of Bayport on our way to the museum. We’d finalized our plans with Chet and Amber earlier. “This jewel is worth millions. It’s too big to keep to ourselves.”

  “No,” insisted Joe. “The Phantom has been leading up to this the whole time. And if he was willing to harm us when he was after swords and Civil War artifacts, just think about what he’d do to get his hands on this. He might have someone in place ready to hurt anyone we know if we go to the police. We can’t risk people’s lives. We have to finish this. That’s what you said yesterday, remember?”

  I sighed in frustration. In a way, I agreed with Joe. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were pawns in a game we still didn’t understand.

  “I mean, why even send us the riddle? Why not just steal the jewel?” I asked.

  “That’s easy. He wants to prove he’s better than us.”

  We parked a few blocks away from the museum. Still close enough to keep it in view, but far enough away so that it wouldn’t look suspicious. It was only five o’clock, but we didn’t want to be left in the lurch like last night. If the Phantom showed up early, we’d be ready.

  We got out of the car and crossed the street. Since the museum was closed on Sundays, the place was deserted. We entered the empty parking lot and approached the glass doors, peering inside. Everything looked the same as it had on our school trip. I checked the walls close to the ceilings, spotting the telltale blinking red light of a motion sensor. I could also see the alarm-system keypad just inside the door. The Phantom would have to disable all that if he wanted the jewel.

  We checked around the back. There was a delivery entrance there, the doors secured with a key-card reader. Huge steel trash cans and empty crates lined the walls of the lot.