The 39 Clues: Unstoppable Book 2: Breakaway (13 page)

Nellie felt herself grow tense as she passed rooms of patients hooked up to pinging machinery and wheezy breathing machines. She had been promising herself for days that she’d come to see Fiske and had been avoiding it, telling herself that the Trilon investigation was too important. But finally the excuses didn’t hold anymore. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Fiske, it’s just that she hated hospitals. Even when they were as luxe as the Callender Institute, they still creeped her out.

She had been twelve when her grandma got cancer, and Nellie had never quite gotten over seeing her laid up in the stark white of that room. As if being sick wasn’t bad enough, Nellie’s grandma had to do it while being assaulted by fluorescent lighting and the nose-stinging smell of disinfectant. It seemed like the ultimate insult. And the food! Hospitals should be about love and healing and comfort, about beef stew seasoned with just the right amount of thyme and rosemary. Instead, her grandma got mystery meat and iceberg lettuce. Dessert was a sad little cube of green Jell-O.

How was someone supposed to embrace life eating that garbage? Why would they want to?

Well, it won’t be like that for Fiske,
Nellie thought, swinging the wicker picnic basket she had brought with her. She had waited too long to visit, but she was going to make up for it now.
I’m going to heal that man!

“Nellie Gomez!” Fiske practically leaped out of bed as she stepped into his room.

“Fiske!”

Nellie tried to hide her shock at seeing him. The report she had gotten from the kiddos was that Fiske was as gray as dishwater and wrinklier than a man ten years his senior. That certainly wasn’t the case now. Fiske practically glowed. His skin was smooth and ruddy, his eyes bright.

“You look amazing!”

Fiske laughed, loud and hearty. “As do you, as always. Is that a care package I see in your hands?”

“It is, but I think I should go find someone who’s actually sick and give it to them!”

“If it gets me some of your delicious cooking, I will endeavor to be appropriately moribund. Now, bring it here, Nellie! Bring it here!”

Fiske rubbed his palms together with the eagerness of a little kid as Nellie set the basket down and threw it open. “Okay,” she said, pulling out stacks of plastic tubs. “We have a big bowl of chicken and dumpling soup followed by an apple cider–brined pork chop, rice pilaf, mixed green salad, and for dessert . . .”

Nellie whipped the top off a tub.

“Banoffee pie!”

“Banoffee pie!” Fiske exclaimed. “My favorite! I barely know where to start.”

Nellie handed him a big silver spoon. “Chicken soup,” she said.

“With pleasure!”

Nellie found a seat next to the bed, smiling as Fiske dug in with obvious relish.

“Delicious,” he said through stuffed mouthfuls. “Marvelous. Now tell me the news. How are Dan and Amy? How is the hunt!?”

Fiske polished off the soup and moved on to the pork chop, not even bothering with a knife and fork. He picked it up in his hands and tore into it with his teeth.

“Uh . . . they’re fine,” Nellie said, distracted by the spectacle of Fiske eating like a hungry tiger. “They found the whiskers and are in Tunis now searching for the silphium. I think Amy is feeling the stress, though. She sent most of the team back to the States.”

“Excellent!” Fiske said. “Excellent.”

“Excellent? Why is —”

“Amy is feeling her power, Nellie. Her mastery. She is coming into her own. When a person does that, other people can start to feel like . . . how can I say it? Like anchors rather than sails. Do you catch my meaning? My word, this pork chop is delicious!”

“Fiske, are you sure you’re okay? You seem —”

“My dear girl, I haven’t felt this good since I was sixteen,” he said. “No! Scratch that. Even then I didn’t feel this strong, this fast, this . . .  attuned. I’m seeing things I’ve never seen before. The world is as clear to me as a pane of freshly washed glass.”

Nellie reached for the phone by Fiske’s bedside. “You know, maybe I should talk to your doc — OW!”

Fiske’s hand shot out of nowhere and clamped down on Nellie’s wrist. She cried out as her bones bowed under the pressure, ready to snap.

“Fiske, you’re hurting me!”

He yanked his hand back like he had been shocked. His mouth fell open and his eyes went cold and hollow. His shoulders fell. Suddenly, his hand that had the strength of a steel vise the second before was as weak as a kitten’s paw.

“Oh, Nellie. Oh, Nellie. I’m so sorry. No!”

Tears began to fill Fiske’s eyes. They coursed down his cheeks as he drew into himself like a piece of paper being slowly crumpled.

“I’m so sorry. I don’t . . . I don’t know what happened. It’s like I don’t know my own strength. I act before I even think. What’s happening to me?”

Nellie pushed the lunch basket out of the way and laid a comforting hand on Fiske’s shoulder. His face was beet red, his features scrunched together. He looked like a bewildered child.

“It’s okay,” she said quietly, stroking his arm. “You’re going to be fine. We’re just going to talk to your doctor. Okay?”

Fiske seized on the idea like a life rope. “Yes!” he said. “Talk to Dr. Callender. He always knows what to —”

Before he could finish his sentence, Fiske’s eyes fell shut and his breath evened out. He was asleep, his arms crossed over his chest, clutching himself tight. The hand just beneath his chin was shaking visibly.

Nellie tore out of the room toward a nurses’ station just outside. The nurse’s eyes went wide as Nellie strode toward her.

“Hey! You! I want to see Dr. Jeffrey Callender. Right now!”

Nellie stood outside Dr. Callender’s office, tapping her foot impatiently while he sat at his desk speaking with a young woman in a bright red blazer. Fiske had been one of the strongest, most in-control men she had ever known. When the kiddos went to see him, they said he looked tired and weak but they didn’t say anything about a reaction like this.

“Ms. Gomez?”

Nellie looked up as Dr. Callender waved her inside. The woman in the red blazer jostled Nellie on her way to the door.

“Hey!” Nellie said.

The woman in red didn’t say a word. She already had a cell phone stuck to her ear and was chatting away as she walked.

“Some people say excuse me!” Nellie called.

The woman didn’t even turn her head. Nellie rolled her eyes and was about to go in the office when she saw something familiar hanging off the back of the woman’s purse — a white key card imprinted with a large red A. Beneath it was the Trilon logo.

“Ms. Gomez?”

Nellie tore herself away and ducked into Dr. Callender’s office. He was a small man with stylish glasses and a thick head of dark brown hair.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “Meeting with pharmaceutical reps is sadly necessary. How can I help you? You wanted to talk about Mr. Cahill.”

“Yes, I need to know what’s going on and I need to know now.”

Dr. Callender held up his hands in surrender. “Of course,” he said. “Mr. Cahill has gone through a very difficult time, a great deal of stress.”

Nellie narrowed her eyes. “He’s dealt with stress his entire life.”

The doctor nodded his head sadly. “Sometimes the ones who seem strongest are most at risk. They take the world on their back, never imagining a time when they can’t handle the weight.”

“But what do we do? How do we . . .”

“Fix him?” Dr. Callender asked. “If only it were that easy. I’m trying different drugs and we’re doing intensive therapy, but it’s a matter of time.”

Nellie felt a sinking sensation. “Are you saying it’s possible that he’ll . . .”

“Stress is an insidious thing, Ms. Gomez,” Dr. Callender said. “It’s nearly impossible for us to ever really know its effects, or, once the effects take hold, the long-term outlook. As you said, though, Mr. Cahill is very strong. I’m optimistic.”

Nellie nodded, numb. She rose from her chair, still in a daze. “Thank you for your time.”

She stumbled out of the office and into the bustling hallway. “Sorry,” she said as she made her way through the nurses and visitors. “Excuse me.”

Thoughts of Fiske quickly turned to Amy and Dan. Was Fiske a vision of their future? Would a life of stress and danger break them, too? Nellie shuddered. Her kiddos had never felt so far away.

A laugh down the hall caught her attention. The woman in the red blazer came out of another doctor’s office. She waved and then headed down the hall in the same direction Nellie was going, her spiked heels click-clacking against the linoleum. Her purse hung by her side, the key card with its large red A swinging back and forth.

Nellie squared her shoulders, her eyes locked on the key card. She couldn’t be at Amy and Dan’s side right now because she had a mission to complete.

Nellie started down the hall, praying her back was stronger than Fiske’s.

Spitsbergen Island, The Svalbard Archipelago

Amy’s entire world was snow. She sank into it with every step and it blew so thickly through the air that Amy could barely see five feet in front of her. Not that there was anything to see. She had been walking for at least an hour now and the landscape around her was still nothing but fields of white, broken now and again by a gray pillar of rock.

Amy pulled a GPS device from the pocket of her heavy coat and wiped the snow off its face with her thick gloves.

Her position was marked as a blue dot moving slowly across the face of Spitsbergen, an island in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. It was part of Norway’s remote Svalbard territories and sat within the Arctic Circle, less than seven hundred miles from the North Pole. Her dot was creeping along the road that connected the Longyearbyen airport, where she had landed only hours ago, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

As small as the airport was, she could have gotten a taxi to take her to the vault. The pilot had gone to great pains to point out that while the thermometer claimed it was a balmy two degrees out, the winds would radically increase her risk of hypothermia, cold weather gear or not. Amy wasn’t about to take chances on a driver, though. The media might have already broadcast her location across the world. If they had, she was sure that Pierce’s men wouldn’t miss an opportunity to arrange a little accident for her, and she couldn’t let anyone else get involved. As difficult as it made getting into the facility, Amy was relieved when she learned the seed bank was only staffed twice a year to accept new seed shipments. There wouldn’t be another soul at Svalbard for months, and that meant there was no one she could hurt.

The screen of the GPS pulsed. She was almost there. The snowfall wavered in the wind and Amy caught sight of an undulating glow in the distance. She dropped the GPS into her pocket and trudged the last hundred yards up a rocky hill. Amy moved carefully, half bent over, gloved hands grasping rocks and her thick boots kicking into whatever crevice she could find. Finally, the jagged land gave way to a flat road covered by a thick sheet of snow.

Amy could just make out the gray lines of the entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It was a simple steel rectangle, about twenty feet high, standing at the edge of the road like an immense burial marker. A square at the top of the monolith glowed in shifting patterns of turquoise and blue. Amy had read about it on the flight over and learned that it was meant to evoke the skies above the Arctic Circle.

A steel corridor ran from the facility’s entrance into the snowbank behind. Beyond that, the structure plunged into the sandstone of the mountain, tunneling through nearly four hundred feet of solid rock before it branched off into the refrigerated seed storage areas. That they would need to refrigerate anything out here seemed insane to Amy, but it was to keep the seeds at a constant zero degrees. The idea was that the stored seeds would act as a kind of backup system for every plant on earth. If some tree in the middle of the jungle suddenly went extinct, no problem; with the seeds stored in the vault they could bring it back. They must have been thrilled to receive the silphium. A plant brought back from the dead!

Amy pulled a pair of binoculars from her backpack and scanned the area. The snow along the roadway and by the door was fresh powder, unmarred by any tracks. She checked the road behind her. No sign of Pierce’s men there. A few buildings sat a mile or so to the south, but Amy didn’t see any light coming from them. Amy wished all the isolation could put her mind at ease, but she knew how good Pierce’s men were. If they didn’t want to be seen, they wouldn’t be.

Amy pocketed the binoculars and crossed the road, leaning into the wind. Once she was at the entrance she brought out a handheld computer with a series of wires running to a key card. Amy slid the card into the reader on the door and the machine went to work. Soon there was a click and the door opened. Amy peered down the hallway on the other side. She looked for tracks inside the door, signs that someone had been there, but the floor was clean.

Amy pulled the door closed behind her, filling the gloom with the fog of her breath. She was out of the wind, but it was no warmer inside the facility. Luckily, she wouldn’t have to be there long. The seed vaults were about three hundred feet dead ahead, sealed off behind blast doors. Just to the right of the vaults was a small office for the staff. That’s where she was going.

Amy crept down the hallway with her nerves on high alert. She was painfully aware that she was in the perfect place to be ambushed. If Pierce’s men hit her now, there would be no escape and no witnesses.

The office was nothing more than a few desks and chairs with computers. A thermostat sat on one wall but there was no point turning the heat on. She’d be in and out before it even kicked in. Amy stripped off her gloves and hit the power button on the nearest terminal. The computer screen filled with unfamiliar icons and text in Norwegian. Not that it mattered. All she had to do was get online and download a program from a site Pony set up back in Attleboro. Once she did, the screen pulsed green three times and then a glowing green skull appeared along with the words
YOU. HAVE. BEEN. PWNED!!!

Amy rolled her eyes and waited until the skull vanished, replaced by a green cursor.

Connected
. Amy typed and hit
SEND
.

Minutes ticked by as she waited for a response. Amy cupped her bare fingers over her mouth and blew, eager for any bit of warmth.
Come on, Pony. Where are you?

She glanced out into the hallway. It was empty but her pulse began to thump anyway. The quiet was intense, like being at the bottom of the sea. She could feel the entire mountain pressing down on her shoulders. Amy almost jumped when the computer pinged.

What’s up?

“He may be a genius,” Amy said out loud. “But his memory could clearly use a little work.”

The vault doors,
she typed, with fingers already going stiff from the cold.
Remember? You need to hack the system and find out where the silphium is, then open the vault door so I can get to it?

Right! Of course! I’m on it.

Pony returned a moment later.
Vault #1-Row #8-Bin #63.
There was a metallic
ka-chunk
out in the hallway. Amy peeked outside as one of the blast doors swung open.

You’re the best, Pony!
Amy typed, but there was no response. That boy seriously needed to work on his social skills.

A blast of cold air hit Amy as soon as she stepped into vault number one. It was like standing in the middle of a supercharged freezer. Her breath rose in billows of white and the skin on her hands and face burned with the cold. Amy pulled her gloves back on and tightened the insulated hood across her face.
I just have to get in and out,
she thought.

The vault itself was as big as a football field, with thirty-foot ceilings. Blue shelving units ran the length of the floor and all the way up to the ceiling. Each one was packed with row after row of gray plastic bins.

Amy found her way to row eight and then ran its length until she came to bin sixty-three. Inside there were scores of aluminum packets, each one marked with the name of the seeds inside. Her cold fingers fumbled with the slick envelopes until she found what she was looking for. Amy pulled out the packet and held it up to read the label:
Silphium. Five (5) seeds.

Gotcha,
Amy thought.

“That was quite a stunt you pulled with those reporters.”

Amy whipped around to find a man standing at the end of the aisle, leaning casually against the shelves. He was tall and broad and dressed all in black gear, which made his shockingly blue eyes stand out all the more. Amy hid the silphium packet behind her. Her muscles tensed, ready to run.

“Luckily, we’re pretty adaptable,” he said with a shrug. “Traveling lighter now so we don’t raise any media eyebrows. Adapt or die. That’s the rule, right?”

The refrigeration units kicked on again with a loud blast of air, and the man turned. Amy exploded off the floor, swinging her backpack hard as she ran straight at him. It struck the man on his shoulder, taking him by surprise and knocking him back long enough for Amy to speed past him, arms pumping. The door was in sight. She’d be out in seconds and then she’d —

Amy hit what felt like a brick wall and went flying backward. She slammed into the floor and the package of silphium shot across the concrete. Another one of Pierce’s men stepped through the door, crossing his arms over his enormous chest.

The blue-eyed man laughed as he walked up behind Amy. “I said we were traveling lighter. You didn’t think that meant I was dumb enough to come all the way out here alone, did you?”

The mercenary by the door reached for the gun on his hip, but the blue-eyed man waved him away.

“Go get the truck.”

The massive man faded back into the corridor. Wind howled as the outer door opened and closed. The blue-eyed man took the package of silphium off the ground as he approached her.

“Why would you come all the way out here for a package of seeds?”

His eyes bored into Amy, but she said nothing. The man shrugged and tore the package open, upending it so the seeds fell out onto the concrete floor. He lifted his boot over the pile.

“No!” Amy rushed to stop him but it was too late. His boot heel fell. When he lifted it again, the seeds had been ground to dust.

Amy stared at the powder, a dark chasm yawning open inside of her. The next thing she knew the man grabbed her by the ankles and pulled her toward him. Amy struggled, but he was too strong. He held her down with one hand while he systematically stripped off her cold weather gear with the other.

“Now, let’s try and think of a good headline,” the blue-eyed man said as he gathered her gear into a ball and stuffed it into her backpack along with her phone and the rest of her supplies. “How about,
Internationally Known Troublemaker Vandalizes Famed Landmark Only to Get Trapped and Freeze to Death
.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Amy said as the man slung her pack over his shoulder and headed toward the door. “Please, listen to me. You can’t —”

The door slammed shut behind him. Amy leaped up and threw herself at it, pounding on the steel as the locks fell into place. “Wait! Please!”

The outer door closed with a deep boom and then there was silence. Amy slid down the length of steel door and hit the ground. The refrigeration system kicked on again, sending fingers of icy wind in all directions. The man had left her in a thin sweater and thermals. No coat. No hood. No gloves. No snow pants. She could feel her skin freezing and then the cold sinking deeper, reaching out for bone. Amy wrapped her arms around herself as she looked across the concrete-and-steel vault that would be her tomb.