Secret Scouts and The Lost Leonardo

by Mr.

  “Okay, I have a plan. You clean up here and close the bookcase. I’ll scan this in Sophie’s room and mail it to her. Then we can fold the sheet again and put it back in the frame so that it looks like nothing ever happened.”

  “And what about the ermine, where did the creature get to?” Jack asked.

  “No idea, but it doesn’t matter. It must have its own way of getting in and out of the house.”

  Tom ran upstairs, scanned all the pages, used the email option, and typed in Sophie’s email address. It seemed to take forever. When ‘Sent’ appeared on the screen he quickly pushed the print button. Four copies rolled out of the printer. He removed the sketch from the printer, picked up the copies, and ran back downstairs.

  Jack had shut the bookcase and was standing next to the desk waiting for his brother. “Did it work?” he asked anxiously.

  “Yep, no problem! The files might be a bit big, though. I accidentally scanned them high-res.”

  “Doesn’t matter, as long as you sent them,” Jack said.

  Together they pried open the frame and carefully slid the sketch back behind the glass. When they reached the kitchen a feeling of fatigue and emptiness overwhelmed them both. Breaking and entering had taken its toll. Tom reset the alarm and, with the copies in his back pocket, quickly scaled the fence. Jack followed and they walked back home together trying to act as normal as possible.

  Hans drove at high speed, but very carefully too, through the narrow streets of Paris.

  “Can you please tell me where we’re going?” their father asked.

  “Oh, nowhere special. I promised to stop by an old friend’s, that’s all,” Hans said.

  At the first bridge they turned right. On the other side of the Seine they immediately took another right, so that they were now driving back in the direction of the Louvre but on the opposite side of the river.

  As Sophie and Lisa stared at the enormous museum on the other side, Hans made an abrupt turn. They drove down a narrow street to the left of and parallel to the main road. He parked the car halfway up the curb next to an imposing building.

  “I’ll be right back, five minutes tops!” he said as he slammed the door shut. He retrieved a large brown leather bag from the trunk and ran towards the building in front of them with a funny hop, skip, and jump.

  “Where are we?” Sophie asked.

  “This is the Institut de France. The entrance is further up around the corner. I have no idea what we’re doing here and why Hans is using a side entrance,” her father said. He scanned the windows of the building hoping for a glimpse of Hans.

  “The what?” Lisa asked, not satisfied with her father’s answer.

  “It’s a scientific institute run by five well-known academies. It’s a real honor to be a member of one of these academies and Hans is definitely not a member!” he said with no lack of conviction.

  “Institut de France?” Sophie asked surprised. Not waiting for an answer, a smile appeared on her face. She knew why Hans had driven here.

  “Dad? Did you know there are Leonardo manuscripts in the institute’s library?”

  Her father turned around dumbfounded. “That’s right, the Paris Manuscripts. How did you know that?”

  Sophie laughed and shrugged her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry Sophie, but we can’t get in to see them. Without the right connections it’s impossible. As an art historian they might let me in, but only after getting the right introductions. Children though…”

  The car door suddenly flew open. Hans jumped in and tossed his bag onto their father’s lap.

  “This morning I told Sophie you’ve never held an authentic Leonardo manuscript, right? So there’s no way you can say anything meaningful about that sketch you have at home. You first need something to compare it with!”

  Sitting behind the wheel again, Hans laughed a very satisfied laugh. They drove away, tires squealing.

  The acceleration pushed Sophie and Lisa back into their seats.

  “What do you mean?” their father said.

  “Dad!” Sophie shouted towards the front. “Have a look in the bag!”

  Her father opened the bag and his mouth fell open.

  “No, Hans. This can’t be real. Hans… Hans! What have you done!?”

  “Calm down,” reacted Hans, grinning from ear to ear. “I made a deal with the director this morning, she’s an old friend of mine. She allowed me to look at some manuscripts… Okay, not Leonardo’s, haha. That one just happened to fall into my bag,” he said, pointing at the manuscript. They continued to speed along.

  Sophie and Lisa remained silent in the back. They couldn’t decide if all this was really cool or if things had now gone too far. They could get arrested! Sophie looked through the rear window just to be sure the entire police force of Paris wasn’t chasing them.

  “No big deal, girls. They’ll never know,” said Hans, seemingly able to read their thoughts. “It’s almost weekend and I was the last visitor for the day. I’ll be a good boy and bring it back on Monday. In the meantime, you can study the manuscript at your leisure. Just don’t tear out any pages or draw on it,” Hans joked.

  “And I’m supposed to be happy that my daughters can stay at your house if they decide to come and study in Paris some day? This could cost me my job, Hans!” their father said angrily.

  “Calme! Don’t be such a sissy,” Hans said suddenly and sharply. “Don’t make such a big deal out of it. You’re an art historian, one of the best around. Come on, Sophie and Lisa were raised très well. So you’ll be having a look at the manuscript, et puis? It’s not like you’re going to damage it or anything. And look at the bright side, you get to add to your vast store of knowledge and your two young girls get to develop an interest in l’art. Merde, I’m only trying to help.” Hans shot an irritated look at their father.

  Having got over their initial shock, Sophie and Lisa were now finding it hard to sit still.

  “Don’t tell your mother, okay? She’s capable of turning me in to the police,” Hans said.

  Their father looked out the window, his fists clenched in his lap. This was way beyond his comfort zone.

  After a long silence, during which time they drove through the city and managed to calm down a bit, Hans returned to being his usual happy self again.

  “I’m taking your parents out for dinner tonight. Wei-Wei will make something for you to eat. You’ll have plenty of time to look through the manuscript. You can have a look too, if you want,” he laughed, looking at their father. Hans slapped him on the shoulder with one hand while using the other to park the car on the sidewalk in front of the garage.

  Sophie felt her phone vibrating just as her parents were heading down the stairs with Hans. She looked at the screen and gasped when she saw who had sent the message. She gripped the armrest of the couch and blinked her eyes to make sure that what she was seeing was actually real. She stared at the screen. The mail was from her own scanner. A large mail full of attachments had been sent to her email address from her scanner that was sitting in her room in her house! She felt her stomach turn. The thought of a stranger in her house – worse still, in her room – at that precise moment made her nauseous. The intruder had accidentally turned on her scanner and given himself away.

  Her parents were probably still in the garage. She was just about to run to the stairs and scream down to them to call the police when Lisa suddenly appeared and held her back.

  “What’s up with you?” Lisa asked, grabbing hold of her sister’s arm.

  “Let me go. Now. I have to tell Mom and Dad. There’s someone in our house!”

  “In our house?” Lisa asked, feeling her heart make a little jump for joy in her chest.

  “I’m after getting an email from the scanner in my own room. My room! Get out of my way, we have to call the police.”

  “No!” Lisa said firmly. “Read the mail first, I’m pretty sure it’s not a burglar we’re dealing with here. I think we just found the missing pag
es from the codex. And you and I didn’t have to lift a finger.” Lisa was looking unusually pleased with herself.

  Sophie felt her eyeballs burning. “No way! You… what have you done this time?”

  “Just check your email. I bet I’m right and that the boys may need some help translating.”

  Sophie hesitated, but eventually did what Lisa asked. She scrolled down through the menu and opened her email. The high-res files were a nuisance. Downloading them to her phone seemed to take forever.

  Lisa stood on the tips of her toes peering intently over her sister’s shoulder. The first document opened and Sophie’s jaw went tense when she saw the attachment. Lisa read it too and then took a quick step backwards. With her hands on her hips she waited for her sister’s reaction.

  “How did Tom and Jack get into our house?”

  “Are those the missing pages?” laughed Lisa, avoiding the question.

  “Lisa! How did they get into OUR house?”

  “Don’t be such a pain!” Lisa said. “I gave Tom my key and the alarm code. I didn’t force them to do it! Actually, the fence was locked so they would have had to climb over that as well. They must have been really keen!”

  Sophie briefly covered her face with her hand. She counted to ten and tried to breathe normally again. It’s a good thing she hadn’t known about this beforehand; she would have convinced Jack not to do it. All this Leonardo da Vinci stuff was going to give her a heart attack.

  “Well?” Lisa asked impatiently.

  “I think they are…” replied Sophie. She opened all the attachments. “See here. This page looks like Prattle’s sketch!”

  “Yeah, I think so too! I already suspected the sketch was part of the book, and Dad said it looked like it was a folded sheet. I just hope they didn’t damage anything.”

  Sophie looked up startled. “How are we going to explain that to Dad? He will spot it immediately!”

  Lisa shrugged her shoulders. “Just hurry up with the translation! We can’t do much from here anyway.”

  Sophie opened the applications she needed as quickly as she could and then let her iPhone do the rest.

  Once the attachments had been translated, they sent the text to Jack. They titled their email: Cops seek teenage burglars.

  “One hour, food ready, okay?” said Wei-Wei, suddenly appearing at their side. They were so focused on what they were doing that they both got a terrible fright. Wei-Wei stuck a finger in the air. “One hour, okay?” she repeated.

  Lisa looked up, but Wei-Wei was already gone again. With the bag tucked under her arm she walked to the guest room and sat on the bed. She carefully pulled out the manuscript. She still felt a little bit like a criminal, but her conscience quickly lost out to her overwhelming curiosity.

  “So this is the real deal,” she said in a hushed voice to Sophie, who had followed her into the room and was now pacing back and forth, continuously checking her telephone.

  “Our codex and the sketch are the real deal, too. No doubt about it,” said Sophie.

  She had already forgotten that just a few minutes earlier she had wanted to strangle her sister. But, just like Lisa, she had only become more curious about the manuscript Hans had… well... borrowed. Only for a while, of course, no big deal. He’d return it first thing on Monday. That French institute was a kind of library after all, right? Sophie’s internal reasoning helped to calm her down.

  Lisa ran her hand lightly over the manuscript on her lap.

  “Looking at it, it’s exactly the same as the book we found. The same kind of paper, the same drawings, the handwriting in that crazy…”

  Sophie looked at her phone again, but she still hadn’t received confirmation that her message had been read. She hoped Jack and Tom would check their mailbox again today. Their father gave judo training on Friday nights, which meant they would be free to use the computer tonight. The question was whether they would actually do so. While she considered the situation, Sophie looked at the translated documents on her phone. After a few seconds she became irritated and tossed it onto the bed next to Lisa. “It’s driving me up the wall – how can anyone read such a large document on such a small screen?”

  Jack and Tom sat at their father’s computer, feeling a bit bored. They were home alone for the evening. They loved the freedom this gave them, even when they had nothing to do, like now. And right now they just felt like opening a bag of chips, even though there was enough food in the freezer for a whole week.

  “As long as they don’t try to send an automatic reply, because that will only send the mail to her own scanner,” Tom said.

  “Of course she won’t do that! Sophie’s the smartest girl in her class. She’s a super perfectionist, she’ll know what to do. She’s more likely to lecture us for sending large high-res images when it wasn’t necessary,” Jack replied.

  The boys stared at the screen, waiting for a sign of life from Paris. Jack regretted yet again not having his own phone. This would have been the ideal moment to contact Sophie directly. Instead here he was hanging out at home at his father’s desk with his brother, bored silly. They couldn’t continue their search without the translation. He shoved a handful of chips into his mouth.

  Ping!

  “WE GOT MAIL!” Tom cried.

  “That thirty million might sound cool, but we’ll still have to go to school,” said Lisa, reality coming back to bite her.

  “The difference being that we’ll be going to school every day in a limousine,” Sophie laughed.

  “Yeah, cool, but if all that stuff in the book turns out to be true…” Lisa hesitated before continuing. “If it’s true, man, how awesome would that be? You, me, Jack, and Tom traveling anywhere we like in any year we like! Let’s do that first and then we’ll sell the book.”

  Sophie stared off into space. “Lisa, if it’s true, we have to visit Leonardo. He wrote all this, we owe that much to him. We have to visit him and tell him he was right. Then we can also tell him that in the future he’s world famous and his work is on display in museums all over the world.”

  “Agreed,” Lisa reacted. “If he knows what a museum is. Did they even have museums back then?”

  Sophie shrugged her shoulders. “I hope Jack and Tom wait for us. Now that they have all the instructions and maybe even know how everything works,” Sophie said, feeling suddenly insecure.

  “The good news is that if they try to use the device without us, we’ll know straight away whether it’s dangerous or not,” laughed Lisa.

  “Lisa!” Sophie said, appalled by her sister’s complete lack of empathy.

  Sophie looked at her watch, got up, and stood in the doorway. “Wei-Wei will have dinner ready by now. I’m going to head upstairs. Will you put the manuscript back in the bag? Better still, put it in Hans’s study, that way Mom won’t see it when they come back tonight.”

  Lisa stood outside the door to Hans’s study. It was the only room in the house with a lock. She hesitated before going in. It didn’t feel quite right to enter without permission, but because she didn’t know where else to put the bag she decided to go in anyway. The door wasn’t locked.

  “Why even have a lock then?” she muttered to herself.

  She looked around the room, which was minimalist in the extreme. No horses with lampshades on their heads, no stuffed animals, nothing. Just a large, immaculately white desk, a white chest, a burgundy office chair, and a small painting on the wall. Piano music sounded softly from two tiny square speakers hanging from the ceiling. The room smelled of spices. Lisa lost herself in the music and peace and quiet.

  She studied the painting closely. It was of a man with long hair sitting next to a harpsichord on a chair with a bright red back. The lid of the harpsichord was open and richly decorated on the inside. Another large musical instrument lay on the black and white checkered floor.

  “Lisa!” she suddenly heard someone call from the kitchen. Her sister’s sharp voice startled her. She quickly put the bag down on the desk
and walked to the door. “I’m coming!”

  In the living room, Jack and Tom arranged the four freshly printed pages in front of them on the desk. Tom immediately began studying the text line by line. Jack retrieved the pages they’d already translated and placed those on the desk, too.

  Together they carefully inspected all the texts and drawings. For a long time they said nothing, each one busy puzzling, until Jack broke the silence.

  “Tom, I’ve got it! I know how the planetarium works! Look at this.” Jack pointed at the page they had decoded earlier. “Look, we already knew this:

  Dreams are made of this.

  History will never be the same.

  That refers to the planetarium. On the bottom it says you need light, remember?

  Deus ex machina.

  The answer: the orrery.

  Use wisely the light.

  The seas have extraordinary powers.

  The future is what I see.

  It’s just… we didn’t know how, until now!”

  Tom looked up expectantly at his brother.

  “It’s the bottle of water and light that make it work. That’s why he wrote that you have to use the light wisely. If you do that, you will see the future! It’s right here, just look!” Jack said, his voice skipping. He pointed to one of the freshly printed pages.

  “He says time travel is easy to explain; to succeed the only thing you need is to move faster than light.” Jack looked at his brother, checking whether he was still with him, before continuing. “Now that I think of it, we’ve talked about this stuff at school, too. Light travels at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. So if you…”

  “What?” Tom yelled. “One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second? That’s not possible. Some theory that is!” he said, screwing up his face.

  “It’s totally possible!” Jacked pointed to the text he was referring to. “It says here that the bottle of water doesn’t contain normal water. If you shine a light through the sphere from underneath…”

  Tom leaned forward. He read the text and inspected the drawing next to it. “If you’re right and everything written here is true, then we’ve got to wait for Sophie. We can’t do this without her,” Tom said. He tapped his finger on a part of the drawing in front of them. Jack saw exactly what Tom meant and nodded.