Sam smiled. “Marty, you’re crazy. Seriously. I mean, okay, you do talk a lot—no, wait, I’m sorry; I didn’t mean it that way. It’s good, all the talking, all your facts. Who knew about Yorktown and ‘Yankee Doodle’? Who knew that Delaware was the first state to sign the Constitution? Who knew how to fix Theo’s shoulder? We wouldn’t be alive right now if you didn’t know all this crazy stuff.”
Martina looked up, meeting Sam’s gaze, and smiled back, a little weakly.
“He’s right,” Theo said.
“And I’m sorry I keep calling you Marty,” Sam added. “I won’t do it anymore.”
“No, it’s okay,” Martina said. “I’m starting to like it now. Nobody’s ever given me a nickname before.”
Somehow Sam doubted that, but it didn’t seem the best time to say it.
“Come on, then,” Theo said, and reached down to pull Martina to her feet. “Can you walk?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Now let’s get out of here!”
Sam felt confidence sizzling inside him. He liked arguing with Martina, but it was possible that it might be even more fun not fighting with her. At least, not all the time.
One after another, Sam, Martina, and Theo walked through the open iron door. “Don’t touch the sides!” Martina warned. “It’s still connected to the generator.” Sam pulled his elbows in close to his ribs, wishing he could make himself skinnier as he eased through.
Beyond the doorway, they found themselves on a small landing before a steep wooden set of stairs leading up into darkness.
“There’s no way to shut this door behind us,” Theo muttered as he turned back to look at it.
“Flintlock’s still locked in the workshop,” Sam told him. “Don’t sweat it.”
“How can you be sure?” Martina asked.
“If he blasted his way through, we’d hear it,” Sam said. “But he could use the armonica, like— What’s that, Theo?” Sam looked at Theo in surprise as he pulled a folded piece of parchment from his pocket—the sheet music for “Yankee Doodle.”
“I grabbed it on the way out,” he said.
Sam grinned. “All right, Theo!”
They started up the stairs. It felt good to be heading upward, even if it was into darkness. But after thirty steps—Sam was counting—Martina called out.
“Guess what?”
“A door?” said Sam.
Martina’s head lamp showed him he was right. “Well, here goes nothing,” she said. She reached for the handle, then grabbed it firmly.
To Sam’s surprise, it opened. Martina walked through.
Once he got to the top, Sam paused in astonishment. They were standing on one side of a circular room, perhaps twenty feet across. It looked like something you might find in a big, fancy hotel—shiny wooden door, walls painted white with gold trim. It had a slickly polished wood plank floor, like some kind of nineteenth-century dance hall. It was bright too—lit by natural daylight, if he wasn’t mistaken.
And on the other side of the room, there was an open door.
Another open door? Could it possibly be that easy? They’d just cross the room and . . . go?
Sam looked around, trying to figure out the trick. Then he looked up.
The ceiling overhead arched into a dome with a round glass window set into its center, and above that there must have been some opening up to the surface, because light from the sun filtered through. Martina was stowing her head lamp away in her backpack.
After spending so much time in dark tunnels lit only by Martina’s head lamp, the dim, dusty sunlight felt as good on Sam’s face as morning light on the first day of summer vacation.
But by far the strangest thing about the new room was what hung above them. A diamond-shaped metal frame was suspended across the ceiling, just below the window. Filaments of wire were fastened to it like strands of spider’s silk. Dozens and dozens of keys hung from the end of these wires, dangling just above their heads. Sam could have easily reached up and touched them.
Big keys and small ones. Iron keys, brass keys, copper keys. Elegant keys that looked more like jewelry than tools to open doors, and plain keys with not a remarkable thing about them.
“Okay,” Sam muttered. “Anybody else got a weird feeling about this?”
Martina rubbed the back of her neck as she stared up at the collection of keys. “Definitely.”
She lifted a hand toward a golden key with an eagle carved on its handle, so realistic it looked like it was about to soar away on outstretched wings.
“Hey, Marty, don’t touch that!” shouted Theo.
She snatched her hand back.
“You’ve had enough shocks for one day,” Theo said. “I think this whole thing is connected to the generator on the other side. See?” Sam’s eyes followed a cord draped from the side of the metal frame. It ran down the wall and through the doorway they’d just entered.
He felt it now too—a slight prickle on the back of his neck, as if the air were supercharged.
Martina, a little paler than before, shoved her hands in her pockets. “I should have guessed right away,” she said, her head tipped back. “Keys. Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment. That metal diamond is like the kite, and the keys—that’s just what he did, hanging a key from a kite. Electricity from the lightning was transferred to the kite, and then to the key. And when Franklin touched the key . . .”
“Ben Franklin’s key,” Theo said, staring up just like Martina at the maze of keys above his head. “One of these is his. I’m sure of it. And it’s what we’re here to find. Evangeline called it the Eureka Key. We just have to choose the right one.”
“Or we could just . . . go,” Sam suggested. “Through that door. The open one. Over there.”
“And leave the Eureka Key here? For Flintlock to find? After everything we’ve been through?” Theo sounded shocked. He didn’t look away from the suspended keys.
Why not? Sam wanted to ask. Why shouldn’t he walk out, right here, right now, and take Martina with him? Let Theo do whatever he wanted. Why should Sam stay and solve one more deadly puzzle if there was an easy way out?
“Sam,” Martina said quietly. “We’ve come this far. We have to find the answer. Can you really leave a puzzle like this unsolved?”
Theo drew his eyes away from the hanging keys toward Sam. Sam couldn’t read the expression on his face. Their gazes met for one heartbeat, then another.
“You lied to us, Theo,” Sam told him. “You and Evangeline both did. We don’t owe you a thing.”
“Go if you want to, Sam,” Theo said. “I won’t stop you.”
Sam looked sideways at Martina. Her eyes were moving back and forth between Sam and Theo; her lower lip caught between her teeth. Sam might not owe Theo anything, but he did owe Martina. She’d risked electrocuting herself to get them through that last door. Was he going to walk out on her?
No.
He’d told his mom that this trip would change him. That it would make him better somehow.
Well, this was his chance.
Sam didn’t have to do anything for Theo or Evangeline, or even for old Ben Franklin and the Founders. But what if he chose to? If he was willing to use his brain for an Internet puzzle contest or a school prank, wouldn’t he do the same to save his country?
“Theo, you better be straight with us from now on,” he said. “I mean it.”
“You’ve got it,” Theo said with a curt nod.
Sam blinked. He’d expected something more, a bit of an argument, maybe? But Theo, gazing back up at the keys, seemed to think everything was settled.
Sam sighed. For better or for worse, he’d thrown in his hand with these Founders—so he’d better get cracking on this puzzle before it was too late. He began trying to get his head around this final challenge. “Okay. So, we just have to choose the right key? And if we get the wrong one . . . zap?”
“Zap,” Theo agreed, his mouth set in a straight line.
“How kind of you to explain
,” said a voice behind them.
Sam whirled around. Flintlock stood at the top of the stairs with a gun in his hand. Sam felt his stomach drop all the way down into his hiking boots.
“It’s been quite the game of Follow the Leader,” Flintlock said as he walked slowly into the room. Somehow his suit had escaped the worst of the underground ordeal.
The same couldn’t be said for the four grumpy-looking men who followed him up the stairs and into the room. They were all wet and looked as if they hadn’t enjoyed their day so far at all. But none looked as bad-tempered as the guy with a badly swollen nose. Sam guessed he must have been the one Martina had nailed with her flashlight back on top of the mountain. The thug glared at Martina with the beginning of two black eyes.
Sam frowned. “How’d you get through the workshop door?” he asked. Sam had seen the look in the Flintlock’s eyes back up on the mountainside—this man knew about puzzles too. But how had he figured out the trick of the glass armonica without the sheet music and without a walking history textbook like Martina by his side?
“Why, you told us what do to, Mr. Solomon.”
“What? Me?”
“You and Miss Wright. A very musical pair. We heard you singing quite clearly.” Flintlock’s unpleasant smile widened. “And Jed here”—he nodded at the body-builder type next to him, with a frown on his face and a scar that ran from his eyebrow to his jaw—“is actually quite the flautist. He can pick out any tune by ear.”
Sam’s stomach continued down past his boots, through the floor, and ended up halfway to the Earth’s core. One look at Martina’s face told him she felt the same.
“Not your fault,” Theo told them both.
Flintlock gestured to his men, waving them farther into the room.
“You three—see what’s through that door,” he told them, and they quickly ran off into the open doorway. “Jed, keep an eye on these kids.” Jed, the muscle-bound flautist, moved a little closer to where Sam, Martina, and Theo stood in the center of the room. “Now let me see,” Flintlock went on. “What do we have here?” He wandered around the circular room, peering up but keeping an eye—and his gun—on his prisoners as well. “Benjamin Franklin’s key. A real piece of history. But which one is it?”
He had stopped beneath the key that Martina had nearly touched earlier. It spun a little in the air, as if the electricity humming inside it made it move. Light glinted off the golden surface.
“An eagle.” Flintlock’s smile was more of a sneer. “How patriotic. Something tells me this is the one. Jed, get it down for me.”
“Huh?” Jed looked startled. “Me? I mean . . . sure, Mr. Flintlock.” The large man with the scarred face looked up at the keys a little nervously as he crossed the room. He reached up slowly, and Sam glanced over at Martina.
She was frowning. As Sam met her eyes, she shook her head very slightly.
Pop!
Sam was sure he could hear electricity leaping from the key to Jed’s hand. The instant his huge fist closed around the key, he was flung across the room, so quickly he didn’t have time to cry out. He crashed to the floor and lay still.
Rusty metal squealed. The two doors in the walls of the circular room began to slide closed.
Sam grabbed Martina’s arm and took two steps toward the way out, only to have a bullet blast into the wooden floor in front of him. They both leaped back, nearly knocking Theo over.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Flintlock growled.
“But the doors!” Sam said. “We’ll be locked in!”
“Yes, we will.” Flintlock kept his gun steadily on the three children as the doors clanged shut, the echo ringing in Sam’s ears.
“Mr. Flintlock!” On the far side one of the doors, his men were shouting and hammering. “We’ll get it open! Just wait!”
“I don’t think I’ll need to wait long,” Flintlock said with confidence. “I think the three of you are going to get that door open for me.”
“But we don’t know—” Martina started to say.
“Somehow I don’t believe that.” The gun didn’t waver. “You’ve figured out four of Franklin’s puzzles already. Clearly, I didn’t have the right idea with that eagle-headed key. Now it’s your turn to try.”
Theo had moved a small distance away to kneel down by Jed’s side. “He’s alive,” he said, rising back to his feet. “Just unconscious. If you care.”
“Not that much.” Flintlock shrugged. “Now choose.”
Sam looked up at the keys. There must have been fifty of them dangling from above. Maybe more. “Okay, so if this is the key that Franklin used in his experiment,” Sam said, thinking out loud, “we can eliminate all the really big keys and really tiny keys. We’ll be looking for something relatively average-sized.”
“Right,” Martina agreed. “But looking at these keys, that still would leave us thirty or so to choose from. We need to eliminate more. Even if we limited the choices to only the silver, copper, and gold keys—which are the best conductors of electricity—that still leaves too many.” She shook her head. “It’s impossible,” Martina said. “How are we supposed to pick the right one?”
“No, it’s not impossible. It’s a puzzle, just like all the others,” Sam said. “It won’t be random—so we’ve got to keep thinking it out.”
And the puzzle master here was old Ben Franklin himself. Sam, Theo, Martina, Flintlock—they were all pawns in Ben Franklin’s game. To figure out this puzzle then, Sam would have to figure out Ben Franklin. He’d have to think like the Founder.
“Marty,” he called out. “Tell us about Ben Franklin.”
“Why?” Martina was wandering under the keys, her face turned up, just like Sam and Theo.
“Just do it,” he said, echoing Martina’s plea in the generator room. “Trust me.”
“Okay.” Martina started talking. “Um, well—he lived in Philadelphia. He was a printer. He ran away from home when he was seventeen.”
“So maybe the seventeenth key?” Sam asked.
“Where would we start counting?” Theo ducked under a low-hanging key. “Which is number one?”
“Yeah, right. That won’t work.” Sam shook his head. “Keep going, Marty.”
“He wrote Poor Richard’s Almanac,” Martina went on. “It had sayings, words to live by. Like ‘Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.’ And ‘God helps those that help themselves.’ And ‘Fish and visitors smell in three days.’”
“Seriously? Not if they take a shower. I mean, not the fish. They wouldn’t need to . . . never mind. Go on.”
“He wasn’t born rich, like a lot of the other Founding Fathers—Jefferson, Washington.” Martina paused under a giant silver key with stars on its handle that glittered like diamonds and dismissed it. “They had big homes and estates. Not Franklin. He never liked dressing up and showing off. He didn’t even buy a wig when he was the ambassador to the French court.” Martina’s voice was livening up; she sounded almost like she was going to laugh. “He was supposed to wear a powdered wig to court, like all the aristocrats, but he didn’t. He just showed up with his bare head, and everybody was shocked. But they loved him for it. All the people in Paris called him ‘Le Grand Franklin.’”
Franklin didn’t like showing off, Sam thought. So he wouldn’t have a fancy key. Sam mentally crossed out all the expensive, sparkly keys he saw. But that still left more than a dozen possibilities.
Sam stopped below a simple brass key, about as long as his hand, similar in design to the one that had knocked out Jed. Carved into the handle was another bird with outstretched wings. This bird, however, looked more likely to waddle than to soar.
“Turkey?” he asked in disbelief.
“Do you have to talk about food right now, Sam?” asked Martina. “I’m trying to concentrate—wait. Did you say a turkey?” She hurried over to his side. Sam pointed up to the key he had noticed. “That reminds me of another fun fact,” Martina murmured, staring at it. “Franklin thought
the turkey should be our national bird instead of the bald eagle.” From across the room, Theo stopped and turned, listening. “Turkeys are native to America, see. Eagles aren’t. And the eagle is a thief; it steals food from other birds. Turkeys don’t. Franklin approved of that. He thought turkeys had courage because they always defended their homes from invaders. But I guess nobody else liked the idea, so we ended up with the eagle.”
Despite the locked doors and Flintlock and his gun, Sam had to smile, imagining the dollar bill with a turkey on the back, or the seal of the president with a turkey holding an ear of corn, instead of an eagle with an olive branch. “Well,” he muttered, “Franklin and his descendants sure went to a lot of trouble defending this place from invaders, didn’t they?”
“So that’s it?” Theo said to Martina. “You think that’s Franklin’s key?”
She nodded. “I think it’s our best bet.”
“Prove it.” Flintlock had been listening intently. Now he stood up straighter, his eyes narrowed. “Go on, girl. Get the key.”
Theo took a step forward, but Flintlock held up a hand, ordering him to stay where he was. Martina’s eyes moved from the hanging key to Jed’s unconscious body.
“No way.” Sam put a hand on Martina’s shoulder, pushing her back. “I’ll do it. I don’t know if you’d survive another shock.”
Flintlock shrugged. “I really don’t care which of you gets it,” the man told them. “If you’re wrong, I’ll still have two more chances to find the right one.”
Sam stared at the key. What if old Ben had just put this here as a double bluff? Jed had survived the shock of touching the wrong key, but he was a grown man, a big one. Sam was probably half his size. The electric current that had knocked Jed out might kill Sam with one touch.
“Sam . . . ,” Martina whispered, wide-eyed.
“Hey, don’t worry, Marty.” Sam tried to give her a reassuring grin, but it felt a little shaky around the edges. “But promise me one thing.”
Martina bit her lip. “Of course. What is it?”
“If you have to give me mouth-to-mouth—just don’t tell me about it when I wake up.”
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