by Jenny Goebel
A rush of pride filled Dan’s chest. “Yeah,” he said. “Neither of us are helpless kids anymore.”
The smile Amy gave him was bittersweet. She held his gaze a while longer before turning to Ian. “Sounds like a plan,” she said.
Just then, Cara entered from the next room. She laced her arm through Ian’s with her hand coming to rest upon his waist. “So, we’re off to Amsterdam?”
Ian tensed, but didn’t move away from Cara’s embrace. He gave a curt nod.
For his part, Dan couldn’t keep track of when the two were swooning over each other and when they hated each other’s guts. But the crack in Ian’s pretentious facade that they’d all seen after the airship went down seemed overall to have drawn Cara closer to him. Like his vulnerability was in some way appealing.
The whole thing made Dan want to puke.
“Great,” he whispered in his sister’s ear. “My team has a date with disaster and I’m the third wheel.”
Mount Fuji, Japan
Temperatures had dipped well below freezing, the peak was wrapped in heavy clouds, and the icy wind was unrelenting. But at least the path remained more or less solid for the rest of Nellie and Sammy’s trek to the summit.
All Sammy wanted to do when he reached the top of Mount Fuji was stay collapsed in the snow forever. But Nellie had other plans. “Please,” she said. “I know you’re tired, but we can’t rest just yet. Help me move this boulder aside. I don’t like the look of those clouds, and we didn’t survive an avalanche just to get stuck in a blizzard.”
Sammy widened his eyes at her. “I think you’re greatly overestimating my ability to heave aside heavy objects. I spent all my time at Columbia in the labs. I don’t even know if there was a gym on campus.”
“More lifting, less talking.”
He let her help him back to his feet. Then he sized up the boulder. “Are you sure this is the way in? This seems like an odd entrance for the stronghold of a wealthy and influential branch. I mean, what do the Tomas have against doors?”
“Nothing,” Nellie said. “But we’re not going in through the front door. We’re sneaking in the back.”
Sammy assessed the boulder once more. It was as tall as he was and twice as wide. He understood quantum physics. He could solve complex math calculations in his head. He could not roll aside a giant rock the way Hercules, or a Tomas, could. But he’d seen enough of the brawny branch members to know that showing up unannounced at their front door didn’t constitute a great idea, either.
Squatting down, he got a decent grip on the rock and threw his back into it. At the same time, Nellie pushed from the side.
He huffed and heaved for what seemed like forever, then collapsed to his knees. “It didn’t budge an inch,” he said, wheezing with exhaustion. It took all he had to shout over the winds whipping around them, “We’re never getting in this way!”
“Uh-uh, I don’t like you just for that pretty face of yours,” Nellie yelled over the snow. The storm was really picking up. Flakes clumped together on her eyelashes as she spoke. “You can figure out a way to get past this boulder. Just put that brilliant mind of yours to good use.”
Sammy grinned. “Show me what you brought, then, but I can’t make any promises.”
Nellie slid a pack off her shoulders. She’d lugged all the “worst-case-scenario” stuff up the mountain. Sammy’s own pack was jammed full of electronic devices and a “secret weapon” to bypass the security measures once they were inside the stronghold.
Digging through the pack Nellie handed him, he pulled out a handful of carabiners and a few ropes. He measured the weight of them in his hands. “These might just work,” he said.
Nellie charged him with a hug, and Sammy’s face flushed behind his balaclava. “Might. I said might,” he reminded her as they pulled apart.
Sammy was rapt with determination as he set about weaving the ropes through the carabiners and creating a complex system of pulleys. Fifteen minutes later, his fingers were frozen, but the boulder was all rigged up. “Ready?” he asked Nellie.
She nodded and gripped a rope between her gloved hands.
“Go!” Sammy tugged hard. Nellie tugged harder.
The boulder jerked, then slowly rolled aside. Nellie whooped with joy as the tunnel to the Tomas stronghold opened up before them.
* * *
“For some reason I didn’t expect the Tomas to have portraits hanging in their hallways,” Sammy said. He listed the names of the famous people depicted in the paintings as he meandered forward. “Ulysses S. Grant. George Washington. Annie Oakley. Neil Armstrong. Seriously? Isn’t hanging art more of a Janus thing? Where are the skis, the surfboards, the trophies, the gold medals, the—”
“Lower your voice,” Nellie whispered. “We may not know exactly what we’re looking for, but we don’t want anyone to know we’re here while we figure that out. Got it?”
The passageway behind the boulder had been a narrow tunnel carved through rock. No one could’ve caught them in it unaware. Now that they’d passed through a vent and were walking down an open hallway, they were much more vulnerable to detection. Sammy nodded, embarrassed that he’d lost his head for a moment. He blamed it on the altitude.
“Good. The scanner should be just up ahead,” Nellie said.
Sammy reached over his left shoulder, grabbed hold of his pack, and then pulled it forward. The hallway was more or less a reception area. They’d sneaked in, but they weren’t truly inside the stronghold yet. Sammy wasn’t worried, though. Bypassing the fingerprint scanner would be a cinch.
Earlier that morning, he’d hacked into the Tomas files and pulled fingerprints of a high-ranking leader. Then he’d whipped up a batch of ballistic gelatin.
“This stuff is so cool,” he told Nellie. “It’s a little like Jell-O, and awesome for simulating human tissue. I just imprinted the fingerprint onto the gel and, voilà—synthetic thumb!” Having gently tugged it from his pack while he’d been talking, he now proudly held it out for her to admire.
“Best secret weapon ever,” Nellie said.
He smiled and carried the thumb gingerly cupped in his hands. He was still admiring his handiwork as he approached the scanner.
“Um, Sammy? You can put that away,” Nellie said.
Sammy at last glanced up. “What? Nooo!”
“Sorry.” Nellie shrugged. “Don’t you hear the sirens? Keep it out if you want, but the door is already open.”
Sure enough, the bank vault–like hatch was swung all the way open on its hinge. Even weirder were the flashing lights and the humming sound of sirens coming from inside. He’d been too busy geeking out over his ballistic gel to notice.
Nellie and Sammy shared a look, then stepped through the doorway together. The space around them opened up a hundredfold. Sammy had never seen anything like it. The magnitude of the inside arena was insane. Every type of court, field, and sports track imaginable spread out beneath them as they stood on a steel balcony overlooking the enormous space.
Other than a row of plush box seats affixed at the same level as the steel balcony, the walls of the stronghold were bare natural rock. Everything else was super-high tech. The Tomas had made good use of the inside of their mountain, and had spared no expense when it came to outfitting their headquarters with all the latest and greatest sports equipment.
A glass-domed roof provided natural lighting for the arena, and an indoor ski slope made up one entire side of the stronghold. On the opposite side, a giant LED screen was rolling footage of athletic challenges from around the globe. But there was no one, save Nellie and himself, around to watch it.
A chill ran up Sammy’s spine. Here was this amazing space, but it was utterly vacant.
A gondola was running up the indoor snow hill, but there weren’t any snowboarders or skiers getting off at the top today. Nor were there any skiers or snowboarders on the well-groomed slope, or basketball players on the painted concrete courts. There weren’t boxers in the ring, or soc
cer players on the artificial turf fields. There weren’t any gymnasts or go-kart racers, either.
The emptiness was uncanny, and it made no sense.
The entire Tomas stronghold was deserted. Other than the constant, eerie buzz of the sirens, it was as quiet as a ghost town.
Amsterdam, Capital of the Kingdom of the Netherlands
Any hotel that included hagelslag as part of its breakfast buffet was top notch in Dan’s book. The chocolate sprinkles were apparently a breakfast staple in the Netherlands.
Dan scooped up a second helping and dumped the sprinkles on top of his buttered bread. “This totally needs to catch on, like, everywhere. I mean, who wouldn’t want to eat chocolate for breakfast?”
Cara smiled, but Ian was brooding. “I specifically requested rooms with canal views. My window overlooks a building site. The bathrooms are tiny, the tea is weak, and don’t get me started on thread count.”
Cara whipped her head around to face Ian. “Right. Because when the levees fail, and the entire hotel is submerged under water, the thread count on sopping wet sheets is really going to matter.”
Suddenly, the table for three felt rather cramped. Dan stood up abruptly, taking his slice of bread with him. “I think me and my chocolate sprinkles will go for a walk, maybe check out the flood prevention systems on the canals. It couldn’t hurt to start scoping things out.”
Team A, as Dan had decided to call Ian, Cara, and himself, was starting its hunt for the sabotaged levees in Amsterdam. Being the capital and the most populous city of the Netherlands, it seemed a likely choice for the Outcast to target.
As Dan wandered the streets and polished off his hagelslag, he soaked in the sights and sounds of the capital. Amsterdam was absolutely brimming with life. Honking horns, the whir of bicycle pedals, the voices of flower vendors hawking buckets of brightly colored tulips, and boat engines puttering up the canals filled his ears.
It was one of the most awesome cities he’d ever visited. In fact, with all its energy and salty, humid air, it reminded him of one of his other favorite cities by the sea—San Francisco. Like San Fran, the buildings here were slim and towering with colorful, eye-catching facades. The gables on the narrow houses were steep and pointed. Some were made of intricately carved stone, and others had scalloped cornices.
As Dan immersed himself in the city, he noticed that the Dutch language wafting through the streets was husky and full, and that the Netherlanders seemed hardy, helpful, and courteous, as well as remarkably tall. Or maybe they just seemed staggering in height because they had so much to be proud of. A quarter of the country was actually below sea level. The Dutch had battled the sea for every inch of their land for centuries and, so far, they’d come out on top.
A great sinking weight fell in the pit of Dan’s stomach. He couldn’t fathom the magnitude of devastation that water rolling through the city would cause. He pictured a violent surge crashing in, lapping at the gables of the soaring buildings and entangling bicycles, boats, vehicles, people—everything—in its foaming wrath.
A short section of the Outcast’s poem came back to him.
The Gateway floods when autonomy fails,
The torrent erases the Dutch king’s trail.
If the levees failed here in Amsterdam, the torrent would erase more than the king’s trail. It would erase history and culture, and so many lives—the way Katrina had in New Orleans.
Dan thought the key to stopping the levee failure might be buried in this particular couplet. It was the most confusing, but perhaps the most laden with clues as well. “The Gateway floods,” for starters. There were a whole bunch of gateways in the Netherlands—places where the North Sea’s entrance was regulated—not just one specific channel or entry. So why had the Outcast capitalized the G in Gateway?
And the word autonomy? Autonomy basically meant the same thing as independence. Even though the Netherlanders had a king—some dude named Willem-Alexander—he wasn’t a dictator or anything. His role was more symbolic than political. Dan couldn’t see how something like freedom could cause a flood in the first place.
The “king’s trail” part wasn’t helping, either. From what Cara had gathered on the Internet, the king wasn’t some aloof monarch holed up in a castle somewhere. He traveled all over the country and didn’t have a set route when he did so. Had Willem-Alexander walked down this very sidewalk?
Dan took in the busy streets again—the pedestrians, the cars, the bicyclists. He scanned all the boats on the canals, the people sitting inside cafés, and those heading in and out of museums. He wanted to scream out an evacuation order from the high gabled rooftops. But he still had no idea when and where exactly the attack would occur. Not to mention how. It was, as the weather forecasters had predicted, a bright and sunny, storm-free day.
More than half of the country was at or below sea level. And the North Sea was hungry to reclaim its territory. One little breach, and …
Dan decided the best he could do for now was focus his attention on waterways leading into the area. But there were so many. One hundred and sixty-five grachten, which Dan learned was the Dutch word for canals, infiltrated Amsterdam in a complex, weblike system. Not that the city was short on defenses or anything. A ring of big earthen dikes circled the entire perimeter. Just one of the dams alone, the Afsluitdijk, was twenty miles long.
Overwhelmed, Dan took a seat on a nearby bench. He had to think. What would Amy do if she were here? When they’d said their good-byes, she’d still been in a funk—all cut up about their grandmother. The whole business of Grace ordering the assassination of their grandfather had really gotten to her.
It made him question his own feelings. Sure, he’d loved Grace. She’d taught them things, taken them to interesting places, bought them ice cream—but that didn’t mean she was beyond reproach. Amy’s memories of Grace were a lot to live up to, and Dan knew that the two of them always fell short in Amy’s eyes. She thought they’d never be as sharp and skillful as Grace when it came to leading the Cahill family.
But with everything that had come to light, Dan thought he and Amy were actually doing a pretty decent job, especially compared to the previous generation of Cahills. Even if they weren’t as cunning as Grace, at least he and his sister tried to take a higher road. He and his sister were always trying to do the right thing. He wasn’t sure the same could be said for Grace.
Dan’s gaze wandered to the museum just across the street. That’s what Amy would do if she were here, Dan thought. Amy would want more information, and what better place to find it than inside a museum?
Dan paid the entrance fee and picked up an exhibit guide. Unfortunately, there wasn’t an exhibit titled “How to Prevent a Flood Disaster Sprung by an Angry Outcast from the Past,” but there was one on the history of the Netherlands that sounded promising. Dan headed to the second floor.
He blew past most of the exhibit, but it was clear that floods were as intertwined with the history of the Netherlands as backstabbing was with the Cahill family.
The country was built on a flat river delta, and all the windmills were originally used to pump water out and expand areas of land. Yet all the water they extracted was constantly threatening to come back in.
Dan stopped at some old photographs with a sign above them that read:
They showed houses ravaged by a storm, a frightened horse belly-deep in water, and people rowing boats through flooded streets. The most haunting was of a child and his mother, tears in their eyes and faces sagging with misery, as they both stared at something not captured in the photo.
From what he could gather, watersnoodramp literally meant “flood disaster.” More than half a century before Katrina, a similar storm tide had overwhelmed the Netherlands’ sea defenses. Homes and roads were destroyed and many people were caught unaware when the dikes were breached and the water came pouring in. Eerily, there had even been approximately the same number of fatalities—around 1,800—in both of the storm surges.
&nbs
p; Dan balled his fists. They had to stop the Outcast. They had to stop history from repeating itself yet again.
A few feet down from the photographs of massive flooding were photos of the Delta Works—the Netherlands’ response to the 1953 catastrophe. Dan tried to wrap his mouth around some of the names of the dams and barriers: Markiezaatskade, Veerse Gatdam, Grevelingendam, Maeslantkering. Even more impressive than the names was the amount of land the barriers protected.
According to the sign, the Delta Works was one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. It was said to rival the Great Wall of China.
Dan’s stomach turned over. Finding the sabotaged levee wasn’t going to be like finding a needle in a haystack. It was going to be like finding a needle somewhere on a forty-acre farm.
He left the history exhibit feeling even more overwhelmed than before. In fact, when he saw a sign for a special exhibit on weapons of mass destruction, he took a detour. Maybe Ian had been right. Maybe their best bet was to go nuclear on the Outcast before he had a chance to strike again.
Dan checked out photographs of mushroom clouds and nuclear submarines. He walked by a model of an aircraft called the B-52 Stratofortress—a jet-powered, strategic heavy bomber. Now, that’s what we need. The heavy bomber could level the house in Attleboro and the Outcast with it, no problem.
Then Dan came across a sign that read BROKEN ARROWS, and his blood stopped pumping in his veins. His throat went dry as he read the placard.
Dan’s blood started pulsing again—too quickly. He almost couldn’t think through the pounding in his head.
What if the Outcast hadn’t been referring to the Cahill kids when he’d mentioned broken arrows in his riddle? Maybe he’d been talking about nuclear warheads that had gone missing. If the Outcast had recovered one, could he be planning to detonate it underwater?
Dan tried to picture what a nuclear bomb exploding in the North Sea would look like, and the image hit him like a wall of water. It didn’t matter one iota that the weather patterns were clear.