Countdown (7 page)

Attleboro, Massachusetts

“Come to me, Debi baby. . . .” Pony used his mouse like a pistol, his fingers flying over the keyboard of his trusty Ponyrific computer. He'd named it Ponyrific because he'd made it himself, from the best parts of the best machines out there, to suit his special needs.

He paused to reach for a slice of pizza, which he demolished in two huge bites. Pony was a skinny, perpetually starving hacker in black glasses, an old pro at nineteen. He wore his long hair pulled back in a ponytail, away from his face. His “mournful hound-dog face,” as Nellie had once called it. He smiled, thinking of Nellie. She was one crazy-cool chick.

He'd been given a lot of tough assignments since signing on to work for the Cahill kids, but this was a new one. Amy had asked him to find a link between Debi Ann Pierce and a Deborah Starling, or any Cahill connection at all. Amy was convinced they were one and the same person, and Pony trusted Amy. She was one sharp kid. He would have thought it was amazing that she was only sixteen, if he didn't know so many computer prodigies who were the same age.

Normally, this assignment would be a piece of cake for a digital cowboy — his preferred term — like Pony. Beneath him, even. But as he scoured the Internet, looked behind every mention of Debi Ann Pierce, he was beginning to get discouraged. He was coming up with nothing. There was a lot of stuff about Debi Ann, mostly puff piece magazine interviews about her favorite recipes and her vast collection of teddy bears. In places where it would seem obvious to ask her about her family background, there was a strange silence.

And then it dawned on him. Someone had done a scrub. A very thorough scrub.

His Pony Sense started tingling. Anything that could be used to connect Debi Ann and the Cahills had been deleted. Completely.

That was almost impossible to do. The Internet was a vast sea of words and images, uncontrollable, full of hidden corners of the past.

That was the conventional wisdom, anyway. You weren't supposed to be able to scrub the Internet.

A scrub meant someone was hiding something big. It meant there was a juicy bit of info out there somewhere to be rustled up. And he was just the cowboy to rustle it. Yippie-yi-yi-ay.

Pony cracked his knuckles, tipped the brim of an imaginary cowboy hat at an imaginary pretty schoolmarm, muttered, “Evenin', ma'am,” to the imaginary schoolmarm, and went to work.

Now that he'd figured out what had happened to any hint of a link between Debi Ann and the Cahills, Pony was pretty sure he could find a way around it.

With one hand he felt around the pizza box for more sustenance. Nothing but cardboard. The pizza was gone. He frowned and went back to work. Here he was working in the ritziest digs he'd ever seen — the command center on the Cahill estate — where they had everything a hacker could want: a private satellite, top-of-the-line equipment, custom security, and airtight firewalls . . . everything. But they couldn't seem to get enough pizza to feed the crew.

Pony had his own private corner in the command center, across the vast room from where the Cahill dudes did their thing. It was a strange new experience for Pony, working with other people, being part of a team. That wasn't the Hacker Way, and it took some getting used to. Ian Kabra, the slinky Brit, wasn't the friendliest guy Pony had ever met but he was a quick thinker, good at coming up with sneaky strategies. Pony gave Hamilton Holt a wide berth — Ham was a big dude and quick to throw a punch, which Pony was eager to avoid. But he had to admit Ham had a nose for security and was even a decent hacker in his own right. Pony liked Jonah Wizard the best. Jonah was laid-back but smart, and he understood that Pony wasn't just a computer scientist — he was an artist. It took a highly refined sense of rhythm and finesse to surf the web the way Pony did. He'd been a hip-hop fan forever, and Jonah was one of his favorite rappers. Too bad the guy was on hiatus. But now that Pony was inside the Cahill compound, he understood why Jonah wanted to drop out of the limelight. For this family, the limelight was nothing but trouble.

Pony did a search of the Starling family until he found an old photo on a genealogy site. It was labeled
THE STARLING FAMILY, 1975
, and it showed fifteen people, adults and kids of all ages, who looked as if they'd gathered for a birthday or some other big occasion. But, weirdly, Pony noticed as he looked closer, they were all in costume. A boy tagged
FRANK STARLING
wore a white fright wig, glasses, and a big white mustache à la Albert Einstein. There was a woman, Candice Jones Starling, dressed as Marie Curie, with green paint on her hands — to indicate radiation poisoning, Pony assumed. She held a beaker in her hand. A gray-haired man tagged as Eustace Starling posed on an old-fashioned tricycle with a huge front wheel, dressed as Thomas Edison. They were all, every last member of the family, dressed up as famous scientists, and each one was tagged with a name . . . except for one little girl, about five years old, holding binoculars to her eyes while a toy chimp rested at her feet. Her costume, Pony guessed, was young Jane Goodall. She was the only one without a Starling name attached to her. Maybe she was a neighbor's kid, not part of the family, but that was unlikely, since she was dressed up in costume like the others. Pony had a hunch.

There was only one other person — besides the digital cowboy himself — with the skillz to pull off this kind of hacking operation. April May.

Pony hacked into Boston City Hall files to check on Debi Ann's maiden name. There it was in black and white: Debi Ann Stapleton. But when he looked into that, he found that the name had been “corrected” recently.
By Her Supreme Highness, no doubt.

He sat back to admire her work. She was a genius, and she was thorough. She let nothing get past her. That was why Pony was suspicious that she'd let him follow her trail this way. What was she up to? Was she trying to tell him something?

Or was she trying to lead him astray?

Jonah Wizard passed through the command center, looking for something to eat. “Yo, man, you ate all the pizza?”

Pony shrugged. “I've been working ten hours straight. I need something to keep me going.”

“Looks like I gotta eat sushi again.” Jonah left in a huff. “Keep at it, whatever you're doing.” Jonah gave Pony's hand a casual slap as he walked away. Pony tried to act cool about it, but whoa — Jonah Wizard just gave him five. Like it was no big thing.

Teamwork had its upsides. Sometimes.

It's a new world, P-Man
, he said to himself. He gave another tip of his imaginary cowboy hat and went back to work.

Tikal, Guatemala

“Atticus, how much farther?” Dan slapped another mosquito on his arm, then wiped the sweat from his forehead. It was only nine o'clock in the morning, but the sun was already burning the back of his neck as he slogged through the humid jungle air.

Amy, Dan, Jake, and Atticus had set out at dawn in search of the temple that held the riven crystal, following the map Atticus had drawn by connecting the dots in Olivia's book. Two and a half hours later and there was still no sign of the temple.

“From what I can tell of the distances on this map, we're almost there,” Atticus said. “Another half hour or so, maybe.”

Dan groaned. It had been exciting to hike through the jungle at dawn, seeing howler monkeys, exotic birds, strange plants, and huge colorful flowers, hearing the distant roar of pumas and jaguars. But now that the sun was higher in the sky, the heat was punishing. His hair was damp under his Red Sox cap, and his skin was like candy to the mosquitos. The jungle was deep green and stretched for miles in all directions, as far as Dan could see. He tried to imagine what it had been like to live in this place thousands of years ago, when it was a thriving city. They passed a sign that said,
GROUP F
. Beyond it was a large plaza and a stone pyramid.

“That's Temple III,” Atticus told him. “It was the last structure built here, in
A.D.
869, and archaeologists think that the last ruler of Tikal, Chi'taam, might be buried there. But if he is, they haven't found his tomb yet. By the time he died, this city was on the decline and would soon be abandoned.”

“What happened?” Dan asked.

“No one's really sure,” Atticus replied. “But it's likely that the city was overpopulated, and there was a drought, which brought on water shortages and famine. Thousands died and the civilization never recovered.”

They crossed through the grassy plaza, a shortcut to the next trail.

“This was once a marketplace. Farmers sold their produce here, and during Tikal's heyday, traders from all over the Mayan world came to sell their goods. Maybe the riven crystal we're looking for was sold to a priest right here in this marketplace.”

Dan tried to entertain himself on the long hike by imagining the priests in their temples, wearing fierce animal masks to please the gods, and warlike Mayan kings ruling from their palaces, heavy feathered headdresses weighing on their heads. They didn't have time to study the ruins closely, but every time they passed a set of ancient stairs, the crumbling wall of a town square, or a tunnel leading to rooms where people lived thousands of years ago, he got a chill. And in this heat, chills of any kind were welcome.

The clayey mud sucked at his feet. There were a lot of ruins in this jungle. A
lot
. And when you're hot, sweaty, and tired, after a while the ruins all start blurring together into one big, stony mess.

“Atticus, are you sure you picked out the right temple?” Amy asked. Normally, her questioning Att would have bugged Dan, but he caught the same uncertainty on Att's face that she must have seen.

“I'm pretty sure,” Atticus admitted. “But there was one key glyph in the book I couldn't decipher. Unless I misunderstood it, it didn't fit with the
pok-a-tok
theme. I was hoping we could get by without it . . . .”

“Which one? Show it to me,” Amy said.

She and Atticus were leading the group, following the map to the letter, being very careful to mark their way. Getting lost in this dense jungle would be a disaster. They traveled light and fast, carrying only their backpacks, Olivia's book, and some water. Dan wished they'd also brought a couple of gallons of soda.

The trail they hiked was nothing more than a narrow dirt path, overgrown with ferns and vines that they had to hack out of the way. Up ahead was the stone entrance to some kind of ancient house. It had only been partially excavated, but it looked cool and dark inside.

“We'll stop there and rest for a minute,” Amy said.

“You're going to let us rest? That's kind of you,” Dan snapped.

Amy's eyes flashed at him angrily. “We've got to get the crystal and get back before dark, Dan. You know that.”

“I know,” he said, pushing aside his guilt. They sat down to rest in the shade of the stone entrance.

“Look, we're almost there. You'll feel better after you've had a little water and something to eat.”