Tunnel of Secrets (8 page)

“What are we going to do?” Scott said, panicking.

“I told you to shut up,” Keith said. “It doesn’t matter what they know. It’s not like they’ll get a chance to tell anyone. The Grandmaster will make sure of that.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

“Um, Grandmaster?” Frank squeaked. Apparently he didn’t either.

“So you don’t know everything, huh? Well, we’ve got some surprises in store for you.” Keith jabbed me in the ribs again, shoving us down one of the tunnels. “You like showing up uninvited, but this is one party you’re going to wish you hadn’t crashed.”

“I’m enjoying it so far,” I said, trying to hide the fact that I was scared witless. “This underground lair has to be one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. How did you find it?”

“It’s awesome, right?” Keith said, unable to hide his excitement. “This place is ancient. No one knows exactly who built it—early Native Americans, probably—but it was used as a hideout for pirates during Colonial times.”

My tactic had worked. Keith was so caught up in the thrill of his discovery, he had dropped the tough-guy act. I knew Keith was a devoted urban explorer at heart and that he wouldn’t be able to resist talking about it.

Scott wasn’t so thrilled, though. “What are you doing, man?” he asked Keith. “That stuff is supposed to be a secret.”

“Stop worrying so much,” Keith said. “These guys won’t see sunlight again unless the Grandmaster wants them to.”

“So who’s this Grandmaster guy, anyway?” Frank tried to sound casual, but the crack in his voice gave him away.

“He’s the one who discovered this place. Or rediscovered it, really,” Keith said. “This used to be run by Admiral Bryant himself. But after he vanished, it was forgotten. That is, until the Grandmaster reclaimed it for the Knights’ descendants.”

The Knights? I didn’t know what he was talking about, but Frank seemed to be a step ahead of me on this one.

“The Knights were the Admiral’s secret society, weren’t they?”

Keith seemed surprised. “The Grandmaster is going to want to know how you found out about that, but yeah. The Secret Order of the Knights of the Bay.”

“Keith, I really don’t think you should be—” Scott began to protest, but Keith cut him off.

“If I want to know what you think, I’ll ask.”

Keith was playing right into our hands. I had a million questions, but I wasn’t sure how much time we had before we reached where they were taking us. I wanted to know what had happened with the sinkhole and what this Grandmaster had to do with it.

“So what’s the deal with stealing the Admiral’s key anyway? You guys almost killed me twice trying to nab it.”

“Yeah,
sorry about that,” Keith said, not sounding very sorry at all. “But your showing up at the last minute messed with our plans, so we had to ditch you. The tunnels weren’t supposed to cave in like that.
Someone
put one of the explosives in the wrong place.”

Keith whacked Scott on the back of the head.

“Ow! Jeez, Keith, I said I was sorry.”

“Wait, so you guys created the sinkhole that swallowed the Admiral with a controlled demolition?” Frank said in disbelief. “That’s like a crazy feat of engineering. If one thing went wrong, you could have brought down the entire square.”

“Yeah, the Grandmaster is a genius. He designed the whole thing himself,” Keith gushed. “He had the tunnels all mapped out and knew exactly where to set the charges. He could even identify the statue’s weak points so I could cut off the key superfast. I would have been back here with it before the smoke cleared, but I got caved in and then you showed up again.”

Keith couldn’t resist giving me another jab with the cane.

“What can I say?” I said. “I have impeccable timing.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Keith said ominously. I could practically hear him smirking as he led us into an open space that looked like an underground coliseum carved out of stone.

Three balcony levels wound their way around the chamber’s circular walls, looking down on a main amphitheater
below. Each level was lined with stone dwellings of different sizes. Some of them had portals for windows and looked like they might be ancient dorms or apartments. Others had iron bars and looked like cells.

More masked figures had gathered around a creepy-looking altar at the center of the amphitheater. Behind the altar were steps leading to a large stone vault with a giant keyhole. The keyhole looked just the right size and shape for the Admiral’s bronze key.

A large eye was engraved in gold over the vault, and something was written under it in another language. Frank took a moment to translate it.

“It’s Latin,” he whispered. “It means . . . Sacred Temple of the Secret Order of the Knights of the Bay.”

“I think we found the Secret City,” I murmured back.

“Tell the Grandmaster we apprehended two spies trying to infiltrate the city through the South Wall,” Keith ordered the others, who immediately scattered.

“You!” He pointed to the shortest one in the group. “Come here. I need you to help escort the prisoners to their cell.”

With Keith momentarily distracted and Scott busy trying to scratch his face under his mask, I saw our chance. I quickly made eye contact with my brother and gestured at the chain running from our shackles back to Scott’s free hand. Frank got it right away, and we both yanked as hard as we could at the same time.

Scott yelped, falling onto his butt as the chain flew out of his hand. We took off running . . . which would have been a lot easier if we hadn’t still been shackled together with a chain dragging behind us.

“Stop them!” Keith yelled.

We knocked over the short one, who had been standing frozen in place, and lowered our heads to bowl over another one like a two-headed running back. We might have made it too, if Keith hadn’t managed to grab hold of one end of the chain. We tumbled into a heap on top of the ghoul in front of us and found ourselves staring at the end of Keith’s cane—which now had a retractable blade sticking out of it.

Behind Keith, the short one we’d knocked over was still on the ground, fumbling to pick up a mask that had been knocked off in the scuffle, which allowed me a good look at its face. Or I guess I should say
her
face.

“Layla?”

I
LOOKED UP THE INSTANT
I heard my brother say Layla’s name. And there she was, like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar as she hurried to slide the mask over her face.

“Go to your room now!” Keith yanked her away by her robe, but the damage was done. She glanced quickly back at us before running off, but there was no way to read her expression beneath the mask. I had no problem reading my brother’s expression, though: confused and betrayed.

Layla Hixson was one of them? Had she kidnapped herself? Had we risked our lives trying to save one of the bad guys?

I was trying to make sense of it as Scott and another one of Keith’s masked lackeys led us up to a cell overlooking the altar.

The iron gate clanked shut, locking us in a dank stone cell barely large enough for two people. One of the walls had a small barred window into the empty cell next door.

Joe tested the gate’s lock. “It’s solid. I might be able to pick it if I had my tools, but they took my bag.”

“At least they didn’t search us,” I said, motioning to Joe’s pocket, where the small skeleton key remained safely hidden.

“Too bad it’s not the right size for this lock,” he said, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. “Do you really think she’s part of this? I know it looks bad, but I can’t believe Layla would put her family through this.”

“Her mom could be a part of it too,” I reminded him. “For all we know, she, Sal, and Layla are in it together. Whatever
it
is.”

Joe flung a pebble against the wall. Finding out that the girl you like might be part of a bizarre criminal conspiracy is a hard pill to swallow. We still didn’t have all the facts, though, and the facts we did have didn’t make a lot of sense. We’d managed to solve part of the mystery, but that just made it even more mysterious.

I started to review what we’d learned so far. “We know for sure the missing kids are connected to the sinkhole that swallowed the Admiral’s statue, but we don’t know how. We know how Keith and his accomplices caused the sinkhole and that they did it to steal the Admiral’s key, but we don’t know who’s really behind it or what they need the key for. And we know it has something to do with the resurrection of an
early American secret society started by Admiral Bryant, but we don’t know why or what the master plan is.”

“And we know we’re locked in a cell a few hundred feet beneath Bayport, where no one will ever find us,” Joe huffed.

“We’ve squeezed out of tighter spots than this.” I tried to reassure him, but I had to rack my brain to see if it was true. Sure, we’d wrangled out of some tough situations before, but none as tough as this. The Admiral had spent about two hundred fifty years down here waiting for someone to find him!

Joe must have seen the doubt creep across my face, because he jumped to his feet.

“No, you’re right. If Layla is innocent, we’re going to help her. And if she’s guilty, well, I’d hate it, but it’s our job to prove it. Either way, we’re going to make it out of here. After all, you’ve got a cute journalist to impress.”

That was one of the great things about being partners with my brother. One would never let the other give up, no matter how dire the situation. It was a big reason why we
had
made it out of so many tight spots.

“Okay, we have to come up with a plan . . . ,” I started to say, but I was interrupted by footsteps.

“Someone’s coming,” Joe hissed.

That someone was Layla.

She was still wearing her mask, but as the shortest of the cult members we’d seen, she was easy to recognize. Joe’s eyes narrowed as she approached the cell door, carrying a tray of food and water.

She looked around.

“I’m not supposed to be talking to you. If they caught me, I could be in a lot of trouble, but I was able to convince the guard to take a break and let me bring your lunch. Or maybe it’s dinner. It gets so confusing down here without any sunlight.” Layla paused for a second and looked at Joe. “Did you really come all the way down here looking for me?”

Joe didn’t answer. I could tell he was still figuring out whether she was the victim or the villain.

I nodded to Layla. “And we almost got killed a few times doing it, so I think you’d better tell us what’s going on.”

“Thank you guys so much,” she said. There was no way to read her expression through her mask, but she sounded teary. “I didn’t think anyone would ever find me.”

“So you’re not with them? Then why are you dressed up in that awful costume?” Joe asked, not bothering to hide his skepticism.

“They made me, I swear. You’ve got to believe me,” she pleaded.

“Keep talking and we’ll see,” Joe said.

“Two of them grabbed me off the street after school. I think they drugged me, because at first I thought I was just having a bad nightmare, but I woke up down here. They told me there was no way to escape and that I’d die if I tried, so I went along with it until I could figure something out.”

“Went along with what?” I asked.

“I don’t know if you’ll believe me. It all seems so crazy,
I don’t even know if I believe it myself,” she said.

“Try us,” Joe said. “You’d be surprised what we’d believe at this point.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay, well, these guys, the Knights of whatever they call themselves, they’re supposed to be the direct descendants of an old secret society that was started by that Admiral guy from the statue in the town square.”

I nodded.

“So this weird Grandmaster person is the boss, and he gives orders to that Keith creep and some of the others and they give orders to us. Keith said they were recruiting the other descendants to claim some kind of birthright. I told him kidnapping wasn’t exactly recruiting, and he said that some people needed more convincing than others, but according to him, everyone came around and joined the club when they heard what they had to gain.”

“Which is . . . ?” I prodded her.

“Pirate treasure!”

Joe and I exchanged glances. All the myths and legends Mr. Schneider had told us about in the library were turning out to be true.

“I know, it’s wild!” Layla continued. “They say there are loads and loads of it. Enough for everybody to be superrich. I think it’s a bunch of baloney, but who knows? I mean, this place exists, and I never would have believed that if you had told me before I was dragged here. And it does have a big vault. I guess anything’s possible.”

More pieces were starting to click into place. If the Knights thought the Admiral’s treasure was locked in the vault and the vault wouldn’t open without a giant skeleton key roughly the same size as the Admiral’s “key to the city,” well then, the theft of the key from the statue might finally make sense. And if they were targeting descendants of the original Knights, then Layla’s kidnapping made sense too. That is, assuming Sal was right and they were related to the Constable Foreman from the old book Mr. Schneider showed us.

I was tempted to interrupt with questions, but Layla was on a roll.

“But what do I need a treasure for? I’m in high school! And my dad’s practically the sheriff. Like I’d really go behind his back and be a part of some crazy conspiracy. I’d be grounded until I was thirty!” Layla looked around nervously and lowered her voice. “But that’s why they wanted me so badly—because my dad
is
deputy sheriff. They say they’re going to use the treasure to fund some master plan to take control of all of Bayport. They want me to follow in my dad’s footsteps and rise through the police force so that they can have a Knight to pull strings from inside the department. Nuts, right?”

I nodded, encouraging her to keep talking.

“They say they already have other important people in the mayor’s office, as well as the kid of a city councilman.”