Treasure Hunters--The Plunder Down Under

by James Patterson

  Those scurvy, cheating pirates never had a chance up against us Kidds!

  CHAPTER 9

  “Hoist the Q-flag, Bick,” said Dad as we pulled into the port.

  “Aye, aye!” I grabbed the yellow flag out of our crate of international maritime signal flags. I wasn’t sure why Dad was going with “Q” to celebrate our arrival in Sydney. Maybe because Australia has a state called Queensland. Or maybe because sailing at 30.8 miles per hour for four days across choppy waters will make anybody Queasy.

  “We are requesting a pratique,” Dad explained as I ran the yellow flag up its line. “Since this vessel is sailing under an American flag, we need to convince the Australian authorities that our ship is free from any contagious diseases.”

  “Several human and plant diseases have never reached these shores,” added Storm, our walking-talking Wikipedia. “It’s why Australia is home to the most vigilant quarantine officers in the world. They board every aircraft landing in Australia and spray the cabin air with insecticide and disinfectant. They won’t let you bring any food, animals, plants, or soil into the country.”

  “Seriously?” said Tommy. “Because I still have half a microwaved cheeseburger down in the galley and some potato chips…”

  “They call them potato crisps in Australia,” said Storm.

  “So? I bought them in Hawaii.”

  “Good point.”

  “Wait a second,” said Beck, as Tommy eased back on the throttles. “Charlotte Badger is flying an Australian flag. Her ship won’t have to go through the whole quarantine thing!”

  “Right you are, Beck,” said Dad. “I’m afraid our current lead in this treasure hunt might soon be erased.”

  And it was.

  A customs boat, a unit of the Australian Border Force, saw our yellow flag and came out to meet us in the harbor.

  “Welcome to Australia, Kidd Family Treasure Hunters,” said the very proper customs captain as he boarded The Lost. He was a very serious looking man with no hair and no smile.

  Turns out, Dad had notified the authorities about our arrival weeks ago, when we first set sail from Hawaii. But the paperwork and inspection were going to take a ton of time. They wanted our passports, visas, and all sorts of information about where we’d been, who we were, did we have any animals on board (yes, Beck almost told them I was a pig), and were we carrying any firearms. That led to some awkward reveals from hidden cupboards scattered around the ship. When you sail through pirate-infested waters, you need to pack a few defensive weapons.

  “You’ll need to leave those weapons sealed on board during your stay in Australia,” said the customs officer. “Even the crossbow. Now, then, we need to spray all cabins belowdecks with insecticide and disinfectant. We will also need to destroy any open food.”

  He motioned for some of his crew to start inspecting the cabins belowdecks.

  “There goes my cheeseburger,” mumbled Tommy.

  “You folks, of course, are required to stay on board your ship for twenty-four hours.”

  “What?” said Tommy. “That’s like a whole day!”

  “Too right,” said the officer. Then he pointed to the Q-flag overhead. “That’s why we call it a quarantine.”

  “Hang on,” Tommy said to the captain of the customs boat. “This quarantine dealio will give Charlotte Badger a whole day’s jump on us.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Charlotte Badger,” I explained. “She’s a treasure hunter like us.”

  “She’s also a pirate,” blurted Beck.

  “Right you are,” said the customs agent. “Charlotte Badger was the most notorious lady pirate in all of Australian history. However, if memory serves, she died in 1816.”

  We all looked at Storm.

  “I have a photographic memory, you guys,” she said defensively. “That doesn’t mean I know everything. Just what I’ve seen, read, or memorized.”

  “Of course it doesn’t, Storm,” said Uncle Richie. “I imagine our Charlotte Badger is only using that famous pirate name as an alias.”

  “We need to catch her,” said Beck. “We can’t waste time just sitting here in the harbor.”

  “The law is the law, Rebecca,” said Dad. “We’ll just have to make up for the lost time once we’ve cleared customs.”

  “We can do it,” said Mom.

  “We can do anything we set our mind to,” added Uncle Richie. “Once on dry land, let us strive mightily. For I would rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out!”

  “Bully!” shouted Storm. She and Uncle Richie were kind of kindred spirits.

  One of the customs agents, a lady who’d gone down below to search and spray our cabins, came back up to the deck holding a white paper bag in her rubber-gloved hand.

  “Chief?” she said to the captain. “I found something.”

  “My cheeseburger?” said Tommy.

  The agent shook her head. “No, mate. This is much more valuable. It’s also much more stolen.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “What’d you find, Charlie?” the captain asked his officer.

  “One of the missing Lightning Ridge Opals,” replied the officer, opening the top of the white paper sack so her boss could take a peek inside.

  “Crikey,” said the captain, looking and sounding amazed. “Call me a cough drop if that’s not the Black Prince of the Inland Sea. All one-hundred-and-eighty-one carats in a three-inch by two-inch stone.”

  “Black opals typically sell for fifteen thousand Australian dollars per carat,” said Storm, who knows stuff like that even if she doesn’t know all the Famous Pirates of Australia.

  “Whoa,” said Tommy. “That means that little rock is worth… a lot of money.”

  “Two million, seven-hundred-and-fifteen thousand Australian dollars,” said Mom, who, of course, is our home school math instructor on board The Lost.

  “Or one million, nine-hundred-and-sixty-five thousand US dollars,” said Storm, who, in her free time, memorized currency conversion rates.

  “This is just one of the missing stones,” said the customs boat captain. “It was stolen with two even more valuable black opals.”

  “Where’d you find it?” Tommy asked eagerly.

  “Down below,” replied the customs officer. “In a cabin decorated with a mural of a mermaid swimming with a dolphin.”

  Beck and I looked at each other. She was talking about The Room.

  “It was rattling around inside an antique clay pot,” the officer continued.

  “She put it there!” I shouted.

  “Charlotte Badger!” said Beck. “Or whatever her real name is.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “She probably used some pirate’s pickpocket-ish sleight-of-hand trick and plunked it into our piece of pre-Columbian pottery while she distracted us by fumbling around with the incense burner!”

  “That makes sense!” said Beck.

  “Thank you, sis.”

  “You’re welcome, Bick. It happens so rarely, we need to celebrate it when it does.”

  The two customs agents were looking at each other with very serious expressions on their faces. The captain slowly re-examined our stack of passports.

  “You are, of course, the Dr. Thomas and Susan Kidd?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Dad.

  “You’re world-famous treasure hunters, correct?”

  “We sure are,” said Tommy. “We’ve even been on TV a couple times. We might start our own YouTube channel someday, too.”

  “Well, then,” said the captain, rubbing his bald dome, “this is a bit of a sticky wicket.”

  “How so?” asked Dad.

  “You’re treasure hunters. That means you flit about the globe, hunting for treasure. Gold. Silver. Precious jewels. How’d you end up with one of the most famous opals in all of Australia?”

  “As the children told you,” said Mom, “we can only presume that Charlotte Badger, or whatever her real name is, planted it downstairs in that piece of potte
ry.”

  “I don’t like presuming things,” said the captain.

  “Besides, why would she do that?” asked the officer who’d found the stone. “Why’d she deposit a two-million-dollar opal in your crockery?”

  “To slow us down,” said Uncle Richie. “You see, officers, we are in a bit of a race with Ms. Badger. We’re both off to the Outback in search of Lasseter’s Lost Reef of Gold!”

  “You plan on stealing that, too, mate?” asked the officer.

  “We don’t steal treasures!” said Dad.

  The captain rattled the opal bag. “This little gem? It was stolen. Then we found it tucked away in one of your cabins.”

  “Sounds like stealing treasure to me,” said Charlie, the officer.

  “You only found it on our ship because that’s where the pirate lady stashed it!” shouted Tommy.

  “Right,” said the captain. “So you all keep saying. But I notice from your passport stamps, that you three adults have all traveled to Australia before. In fact, Dr. and Mrs. Kidd, your last visit was in 2002. Correct?”

  “So?” said Mom. “How is that significant?”

  “2002 is when the Black Prince of the Inland Sea and the other two opals went missing. Tell you what—you two can skip the quarantine here on your ship. Detective Superintendent Jonathan Michael Ruggiere will want to chat with you both.”

  “And who is Detective Superintendent Ruggiere?” asked Mom.

  “The officer who heads up the Lightning Ridge Opals case for the Australian Federal Police. Been at it for nearly twenty years now.”

  “The AFP is like America’s FBI,” said Storm, because that must’ve been another factoid rattling around in her ginormous brain.

  “We also need to confiscate any computers you might have on board,” said the captain.

  “Why?” demanded Dad.

  “They might contain evidence related to your theft of the black opals.”

  “For the last time, officer,” said Mom, “we’re not thieves.”

  “Right. You’re ‘treasure hunters.’ Tomahto, tomato. The rest of you lot stay here. We’ll be in touch.”

  His officers took all three of our laptops.

  Then one slapped handcuffs on Mom and Dad’s wrists!

  “Congratulations, Dr. and Mrs. Kidd,” said the captain, sarcastically. “You’re about to become prisoners in a country that started out as a penal colony!”

  CHAPTER 11

  “We should go bust them out of jail!” said Tommy, ten seconds after the customs boat with Mom and Dad aboard roared off to Sydney.

  “I don’t think these guys are going to let us,” I said, pointing to a second customs boat that was cutting across the first boat’s wake so it could come keep an eye on us—and the other ships flying yellow Q-flags.

  “We’re stuck here in quarantine for another twenty-two hours and forty-nine minutes,” said Storm. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “We can call our lawyers!” I said.

  “Bully,” said Uncle Richie. “What’s their number?”

  “Um, I don’t know…”

  “I don’t think Mom and Dad actually have, like, lawyer-lawyers,” said Tommy. “You know, the way people always do in TV shows.”

  “They do have a lawyer in New York City,” said Storm. “His name is Ken Joelson. But he only does wills and estate planning.”

  “Not the barrister you want when going up against the Australian equivalent of the FBI,” said Uncle Richie. “We’ll need to find someone local.”

  “Who should we call, Storm?” asked Tommy.

  She shrugged. “Sorry. I haven’t memorized the Sydney phone book. Yet. We’re stuck. We should make the best of this bad situation.”

  “A grand suggestion, Storm,” said Uncle Richie. “Turning lemons into lemonade and all that.”

  “Okay,” said Beck. “So how exactly do we make this lemonade?”

  “And what if we’d rather have limeade?” asked Tommy.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Or orange soda?”

  “Well,” said Storm, “we could do some sightseeing.”

  “Seriously?” I said. “We’re on a boat. In the bay.”

  “And right behind you, Bickford, is the Sydney Opera House. It was completed in 1973 after sixteen years of construction. Built on a large slab of granite on Bennelong Point here in the harbor, its shells are covered with white tiles that many say resemble sails on ships…”

  “I think it looks like a turtle traffic jam,” said Tommy, who wasn’t really enjoying our big sister’s floating tour of the city where our parents had just been arrested.

  “I’m going to make a few phone calls,” said Uncle Richie, grabbing the ship’s satellite phone and heading down to his cabin. “After all, I spent a good deal of time here in Australia a few years back. I still have friends. They may be able to help us out of this sticky wicket, as the surly gentleman from customs called it.”

  As he headed down the steps, Storm started regaling us with trivial factoids about the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

  “The bridge was first opened in 1932. It contains six million hand-driven rivets. It’s the world’s largest steel arch bridge…”

  Tommy raised his hand.

  “Yes, Tommy?” said Storm. “Question?”

  “Yeah. How much longer ’til we’re out of quarantine?”

  Storm glanced at her watch. “Twenty-two hours and thirty-seven minutes.”

  “Oh-kay. Think I’ll head down below and see if Uncle Richie needs help dialing his phone.”

  “We can help with that, too!” I said.

  “Yeah!” said Beck. “Good idea, Tommy.”

  “You want to help, too?” I said to Storm. “You’re good with numbers.”

  “The best,” said Beck.

  Storm sighed. “Sure. Fine. I can tell you guys more about Sydney tomorrow, when we’re actually there.”

  “Grrrrreat,” I said.

  Because I knew the instant the customs squad let us off The Lost, we wouldn’t have time to do any touristy stuff.

  We’d be too busy springing Mom and Dad out of jail.

  CHAPTER 12

  The next day, around two o’clock, after exactly twenty-four hours, the customs officials told us we were “free to disembark and enter Australia.”

  Then they told us that our boat was being impounded.

  “We’ll keep it locked up at our dock,” the officer manning the customs boat told us. “Part of our Criminal Assets Confiscation Program.”

  “Dude?” said Tommy, angrily. “We’re not criminals!”

  “Too right. So far, just your parents have been accused of criminal activity. Detective Superintendent Jonathan Michael Ruggiere might also need your ‘treasure hunting’ vessel for evidence when he files charges. From what I hear, your mum and dad could be looking at twenty years behind bars.”

  “And where exactly are Dr. and Mrs. Kidd right now?” asked Uncle Richie, planting his hands defiantly on his hips.

  The officer mimicked his moves.

  “At the Long Bay Correctional Complex, mate. Officially known as Her Majesty’s Australian Prison Long Bay, or, you know, Long Bay.”

  And so, the second we set foot in Sydney, we hailed a taxi and headed off to the prison, which was only about fifteen kilometers south of the harbor.

  “Visiting a prisoner?” the cabbie asked.

  “Yeah,” said Tommy, who was riding up front. “Two of them. Our mother and father.”

  “Strewth!” said the driver, sounding surprised. “Reckon that makes you lot orphans.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I shouted from the backseat. “They won’t be in jail long!”

  “They’re innocent!” added Beck.

  “One hundred percent,” said Uncle Richie.

  The cabbie nodded. “I reckon most of the other prisoners at Long Bay will tell you the same thing.”

  “Those are the Royal Botanic Gardens,” said Storm, pointing to the passing scenery and try
ing to change the subject. “Coming up on your right will be the Art Gallery of New South Wales…”

  Twenty minutes (and way too many landmarks) later, we arrived at the prison.

  “Right this way,” said the guard who signed us in. “Detective Superintendent Ruggiere is expecting you.”

  “He is?” said Uncle Richie. “How did he even know we were coming?”

  The guard shrugged. “The old crumbly codger is clever that way.”

  We were ushered down a dank cinder-block hall to an interview room. Through the tiny, wire-mesh-and-glass window in the door, I could see Mom and Dad sitting at a scarred wooden table with a withered old man who had three strands of greasy gray hair combed across the crown of his head. Mom and Dad were in orange prison jumpsuits. The old man was in a rumpled tweed suit that looked two sizes too big.

  The guard rattled and rolled his key ring, found the one he was looking for, and opened the door.

  “Mom! Dad!” We all hurried into the room.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “How do we get you guys out of here?”

  To tell you the truth, I don’t remember who said what. We were all kind of talking at the same time.

  CHAPTER 13

  Mom and Dad smiled.

  The old man looked at his watch. “Good on you. You took a taxi.”

  “Excuse me?” said Uncle Richie.

  “Your ship’s quarantine only ended forty-five minutes ago. It would take you ten minutes to be ferried from your impounded ship to the docks where, fortunately, you were able to hail a cab because it’s not rush hour in Sydney. If you had taken the bus, we’d still be waiting for you.”

  “You guys?” said Mom. “This is Detective Superintendent Jonathan Michael Ruggiere.”

  “Please, call me Des.”

  “All right. Des here has been working the case of the missing Lightning Ridge Opals for two decades.”