Secret Scouts and The Lost Leonardo

by Mr.

  “One of the richest men on earth!” shouted a boy sitting at the front.

  “In 1994 Mr. Gates paid almost thirty-one million dollars for the codex!”

  Sophie didn’t dare look at Jack, but out of the corner of her eye she could tell from the way he was sitting that he had gone completely stiff. Suddenly realizing that the entire class was looking at them, she slid her bag closer to her under the desk. She grabbed the strap and slowly lifted the bag onto her lap, all the while looking straight at Hackett.

  “That’s almost 20 years ago, just imagine,” said Hackett, completely oblivious to Sophie’s rummaging. “If another codex by Leonardo da Vinci was found, it could fetch several times that amount. Did you happen to find one, Sophie?” He laughed at his own joke.

  Sophie held her bag even closer, pulled the drawstring tight, and wrapped her arms protectively around it. She tried to make eye contact with Jack.

  He was grinning from cheek to cheek. She’d never seen him look so happy.

  “Okay everyone, pay attention. Let’s carry on where we left off. If there are no more questions about old books, I’d like to focus on the next sum.” Hackett wrote a new assignment on the board.

  After school, Sophie was sitting next to Jack at one of the picnic tables in the corner of the schoolyard. Her bag was safe on her lap. Just to be sure, she had transferred her water bottle from her bag to Jack’s. The book had to avoid damage at all costs. Jack was sitting unusually close to Sophie. Comrades in arms, like knights charged with defending their castle.

  “Hey! Over here!” Jack yelled as loud as he could when he saw Lisa and Tom walking across the schoolyard. He whistled loudly to grab his brother’s attention. Tom and Lisa began running quickly towards them.

  “Hey, are we going to go back to the secret room this afternoon?” Tom asked. “Lisa said that old Prattle’s sketch is still in there.”

  Jack and Sophie looked at them absentmindedly.

  “Hello, earth to...” Lisa waved her hand in front of her sister.

  “I heard you.” Sophie sounded a little distracted.

  “We’re definitely going to your house,” Jack said. “And after that you and I are going to buy ourselves a smartphone, little bro,” he added, grinning from ear to ear.

  “Sshh.” Sophie looked furiously at Jack. “Shut up, we’ll talk about it at home.”

  “What will we talk about at home?” Lisa asked, looking very serious all of a sudden. “Come on, tell us, what’s going on? Did you two discover something?”

  Jack nudged Sophie. “What difference does it make if we tell them now or later?”

  Sophie looked around nervously to see if anyone could hear them. “Okay,” she said softly, leaning in towards her sister and Tom, “but you have to promise – no, swear on your lives – that you won’t say a thing, okay?”

  “I swear,” Lisa said quickly.

  “Yeah sure, me too.” said Tom, nodding his head furiously.

  “No, really!” Sophie poked her fingers into Tom’s chest.

  “Really, really – I swear!” Tom said, somewhat taken aback.

  “Stop being such an idiot and tell us. What’s going on?” said Lisa, who was never charmed by her sister’s bossiness.

  “We know who the book belongs to, who wrote it, and what it’s worth.” Sophie spoke quietly and with an air of mystery.

  “Leonardo da Vinci!” Jack interrupted.

  Tom didn’t immediately grasp the significance of this, but Lisa raised her eyebrows and looked at her sister with a mixture of surprise and expectation.

  “It’s true, Jack’s right! Hackett explained to us that it’s a codex by Leonardo da Vinci!”

  “You actually showed him the book?” asked Lisa startled.

  “Are you kidding? No way, we were totally strategic about it, but... whatever. What matters is that we know what we need to know. It’s an extremely old book, written by Leonardo da Vinci in Italy. It turns out the guy wrote more books like this.”

  Sophie leaned in even closer to Tom and Lisa. “And apparently, it’s really rare. His books are in museums all over the world! He was a mega famous painter, but also a sort of inventor, and almost everything he thought up he wrote down in these books.”

  Sophie paused for a moment to make sure she had their undivided attention. “I also asked Hackett what something like that was worth. He didn’t know exactly, but twenty years ago one of these codices was sold to Bill Gates and that guy is super rich,” Sophie exclaimed triumphantly.

  Jack jumped up from the table. “It sold for THIRTY-ONE MILLION DOLLARS!” he screamed under his breath.

  Lisa grabbed her sister’s hand in disbelief. “You mean we could be rich? Richer than rich even?!” she stammered.

  “Scooters!” screamed Jack.

  “You said that yesterday, too, but what’s the use in having a scooter when you can’t ride it until you’re 16? No matter how rich you are.” This brought Jack back down to earth with a bang.

  “Stupid rules,” Jack muttered angrily.

  “You got the book in your bag?” Lisa whispered to her sister, who hadn’t moved the entire time and was clinging to her bag.

  “Yep, and believe me, I’m so excited I could jump in the air too, but I don’t dare to move.” Sophie looked nervously around her. “Should we head for home? I want to put the book somewhere safe, and then check out the room again and get the sketch.”

  When they got home Sophie headed straight for the stairs with her bag. “Go on ahead, you might find some more books lying around. I’m going to put this one away in my desk drawer. And,” Sophie shouted from the stairs, “don’t forget the sketch!”

  “We won’t!” Lisa hollered across the room. The brothers followed Lisa into the study and over to the bookcase behind the desk. “Okay guys, help me push.”

  This time it rolled smoothly into the wall. Lisa stepped into the space first and turned on the light.

  Unsure what they were actually looking for, they all began searching around.

  Feeling a little on edge, Sophie sat down at her desk and stared at the pages of the codex in front of her. She should have been elated at their discovery and the thirty-million-dollar bonanza, but she wasn’t. She wondered if something was wrong. Why wasn’t she excited? Why was she so tense? What was this thing lying on her desk? Was it really a codex? How did such an old book end up in their house? Was someone just playing a colossal prank on them? And if it was real, what did Leonardo describe in the book? What had he written?

  She pushed the book to one side and snapped open her laptop. With a few clicks she opened Google and quickly typed in the words ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ in the search engine. She scanned the screen. Leonardo da Vinci. Codex Leicester. Anatomy. The Last Supper. Flying machines. Musical instruments. This all sounded pretty real.

  Leonardo had been ahead of his time. He discovered and envisioned things long before others did. He had designed things on paper that wouldn’t be made until hundreds of years later. He had sketched muscles and organs in meticulous detail long before the technology required to know what they looked like existed. He even designed a bridge that wasn’t built until nearly five hundred years after he died.

  Sophie opened the book again and felt her heart beating hard in her chest. She flipped through the pages for the umpteenth time. What did it all mean?

  Suddenly she knew what to do. She took her phone from her back pocket and swiped her thumb across the screen. When she reached the App Store she searched for ‘scanner’. Several scanners appeared in the tiny screen. She scrolled down, dismissing most of them with a frown of frustration.

  “QR scanner, no.”

  “Barcode scanner, no.”

  “QR scanner, no.”

  “QR scanner, no-ho!”

  “Genius scanner, yes!”

  Sophie tapped the screen and read the information accompanying the app. “Turns your telephone into a portable scanner.”

  “Yes!” she cried. This
was exactly what she was looking for!

  Okay. Click. A box appeared on the screen asking for her Apple ID. Her parents had always said not to purchase apps without asking first, but fortunately this one was free. She entered her password and the download appeared. After a few seconds the scanner icon popped up on her screen. That was easy!

  Now she had to find a translation app. She returned to the App Store and, after finding the app she wanted, repeated the process. Click. Download. Done.

  However, when she opened the app she realized she had chosen the wrong one. This was a special translation app that recognized spoken words and automatically translated them in real time. The app could even read back the translated text aloud. Super cool, but not exactly what she needed. She wanted an app that could translate written text and so she resumed her search. The second download was the right one, she figured. Sophie opened the app and read the description. According to the information, the app was not able to recognize handwritten text.

  The frustration caused her to chew off so much of her thumbnail that it started to hurt. But she was determined to translate the book’s text and wasn’t about to give up now. However, she also knew that typing out the text would take weeks. She had to find an app that could recognize handwritten text and immediately translate it into a form that could be processed by a computer. She had no idea what something like that was called and so she grabbed her laptop.

  After several failed search attempts she found the term she was looking for: Optical Character Recognition. “Never heard of that before,” she muttered to herself.

  She typed the words into the App Store’s search box. The screen filled up with app options. She randomly chose a free version. Click. Download. Done.

  An entire page of her screen was now filled with her newly downloaded app logos. She was proud of herself for having gotten this far. Nothing could stop her now. She was determined to find out what was written in the book. She took a few deep breaths. She must have been holding her breath unconsciously all the time she had been looking for the right app.

  “Okay, stay calm Sophie...” she said quietly to herself. She grabbed the book and began flipping through it. Where to begin? She had to hurry. After turning a few pages her eye was drawn to a sketch on the left-hand page. The blood drained from her face. She felt her stomach turn and had the feeling someone had pressed a freezing cold washcloth against the back of her neck. Why hadn’t they seen this before? How could they have missed this yesterday? With a trembling hand she grabbed her phone, opened the scanner app, and scanned the page. She flipped the images using a photo-editing app that was already on her phone. At the same time she opened the app that could translate handwritten text into digital text. Finally, she selected Italian to English in the translation app.

  A small hourglass appeared on screen, slowly filling up. The slowest hour glass in the history of humankind, Sophie thought. She felt a surge of aggression towards her sluggish phone.

  She examined the page in excited anticipation while waiting for the text to translate. The drawing was of the exact same spherical device that they had found in the secret room.

  She jumped at the sound of her telephone’s loud ping. The words ‘Download complete’ appeared on the screen. She tapped to access the long text. Her screen was too small to be able to read it easily, so she emailed the text to herself so that she could read it on her laptop. She set her phone aside, picked up her laptop, and pushed her chair away from the desk and rolled backwards into the room. She read the translated text from the computer on her lap:

  The magic of the seven seas.

  I went searching.

  For something.

  The unknown.

  The truth.

  Time.

  This guy was bonkers, Sophie thought as she continued reading. The page was filled with enigmatic theories and calculations. A line written in capital letters above the drawing of the spherical device said: TIME TRAVEL.

  Sophie knew that time travel wasn’t possible, but she was curious enough to read on. Underneath the drawing of the device were the words:

  Dreams are made of this.

  History will never be the same.

  Sophie felt her shoulders go tense. The writer seemed pretty sure of himself.

  She continued reading:

  Deus ex machina.

  The answer, the orrery.

  Use wisely the light.

  The seas with their extraordinary powers.

  The future is what I see.

  “What’s an orrery?” Sophie asked herself out loud.

  She realized the answer to the question had to be on the next page. But as she was grabbing her phone to scan the right-hand page, she saw a line of tiny slivers of paper protruding from the book’s spine. This can’t be happening, she thought. The pages missing from the book were the exact same pages she wanted to read. She rolled her chair back to her desk, yanked open the drawer and, feeling extremely irritated, tossed the book inside.

  “Stupid fake inventor,” she said. She walked to the door but then stopped all of a sudden. Something was wrong. Everything Leonardo had ever imagined had turned out to be true. She couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to all this than met the eye. Her thoughts swung from excitement to doubt and back again. Leonardo had said that time travel was possible using an orrery. But what the hell was an orrery? She had to find out. Sophie walked back to her laptop and typed in the word ‘orrery’.

  “Enter, stupid!” she said, angry with herself for not having the backbone to accept that this was probably all just pure fantasy.

  The results filled her screen. She looked at the images in bewilderment and felt the blood drain from her face again. Her bedroom seemed frozen in time. She looked at the pictures on the screen and thought about the page in the book. The translated text flashed into her head: Dreams are made of this. History will never be the same.

  She leapt up out of her chair, and it crashed to the ground behind her as she ran as fast as she could through the hallway and down the stairs. She skipped the last few steps. Her shoulder scraped against the wall as she turned the corner and lurched into her father’s study, gasping.

  “STOP!” Her high-pitched scream was aimed at the secret room. “Stop, stop, stop! Don’t touch it! Don’t go near the orrery!”

  Tom turned around, startled.

  “I didn’t touch it,” he said, holding his hands in the air as if someone was pointing a gun at him. “Seriously, I didn’t.”

  Lisa looked at her sister, wide-eyed with alarm. “What’s wrong with you all of a sudden? We didn’t do anything.”

  “You too!” yelled Sophie. “Move! Jack! Move away from that thing!” Jack took a quick step backwards.

  Sophie was bent over and out of breath, hands resting on her knees. She’d never run so hard in her life. It took her a few seconds to catch her breath. “That thing...” Still panting, she pointed at the spheres. “That thing... is an orrery. Don’t touch it, it’s extremely dangerous!”

  Wednesday, June 18th, afternoon

  “What’s the matter with you all of a sudden? The thing’s harmless.” Jack sounded a little shocked. Everyone stared at Sophie, waiting for her reaction.

  Waving her arms wildly, Sophie ushered everyone towards the opening.

  “I’ll explain in a second. First we’ve got to get out of the room! Now!”

  “But... calm down. First tell us what’s going on. Why is that orry suddenly so dangerous?” Lisa was trying to make it clear that she didn’t like being bossed around.

  “Trust me, okay? If you don’t listen to me you might never be able to tell anyone what I’m telling you now... and by the way, it’s orrery not orry.” Sophie gave her sister a withering look.

  “But...” Jack stammered.

  “Fine, don’t listen to me!” Sophie interrupted angrily. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you!” And with that she stomped out of the room.

  Tom decided to follow Sophie, just
to be sure, and Jack did likewise. Lisa crossed her arms and stood her ground. She turned her attention to the device with the spheres. She didn’t believe it could be dangerous. Suddenly she heard a noise nearby. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. She felt something hairy touch her ankles and she stifled a scream. “Help! I’m going to die!”

  Something white shot along the wall and out into the study towards the hallway. The others ran back into the secret room and stared anxiously at Lisa.

  “What’s wrong? Well, you’re still breathing... you actually look quite good for a dead person,” said Tom teasingly.

  “There,” screeched Lisa, pointing to Mrs. Prattle’s pet ermine, which had escaped like lightning out through the study.

  “I think she attacked me!”

  “Lisa, don’t be so dramatic, that creature has sharp claws and teeth. If it had attacked you, you’d know all about it. No blood anywhere, right?” asked Tom.

  “What’s it doing in here anyway?” Jack asked surprised. “Very weird,” he said, trying to figure out where the ermine had come from.

  Sophie was lost in her own thoughts. They had to close the bookcase before something bad happened.

  “Yeah, really weird. I didn’t see her come in when we were here,” said Lisa. “But I remember Mrs. Prattle saying something yesterday about it having run away. Let’s catch it and bring it back!”

  “No way, there’s no time! Come on, close the bookcase!” Sophie commanded them.

  Together they pulled the bookcase shut until it was back in place.

  Now that the danger had passed and they were no longer in the vicinity of the orrery, Sophie was able to calm down a bit. “Let’s go upstairs to my room. I’ll tell you everything. I’ll show you... Lisa, don’t forget the sketch!” She looked back at Jack, who was following behind, looking more than a little bewildered. “Sorry I scared you like that. I’ll explain upstairs. Can you please make me and Lisa a cup of tea?” Sophie gave Jack a sweet look.