Priceless: Crime Travelers Spy School Mystery Series Book 3

by Paul Aertker

  GOOD COMPANY IMAGES

  WATCHING AND LISTENING

  SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO

  “Good Company,” Travis said. “Three o’clock.”

  “There’s another one on your left,” Astrid added.

  “Ten o’clock,” Nalini said.

  In the middle of the traffic circle, Cesar jammed on the brakes. The kids rocked forward. Cars screeched to a halt. The two Good Company buses swerved but kept going. Cesar punched it, cut in front of the traffic, and burrowed the van through an underpass.

  In a few minutes they came to the Mirador, the famous monument for Christopher Columbus and his first voyage to America.

  Packs of tourists poured out of tour buses and down the tree-lined street of La Rambla.

  Just beyond the palm trees and under a cloudless blue sky were the beaches and the Mediterranean Sea.

  Within minutes they came to one of Barcelona’s weird-shaped modern buildings at the Olympic village.

  Wearing shorty wet suits, the kids crawled out of the van. Nalini stuffed their T-shirts and running shoes into two plastic crates and closed the doors.

  Sunbathers, families under parasols, joggers, and tourists packed the beach. Some people were swimming. Boys on Jet Skis buzzed back and forth, and a few parasails floated overhead.

  The New Resistance kids unloaded the scuba gear and schlepped it across the sand to Cesar’s waiting boat.

  The nerves in Lucas’s spine tingled. For him, the group’s silence felt strangely uncomfortable, almost creepy. And it felt like someone was watching them.

  DIVER DOWN

  The kids finished loading the wooden fishing boat with scuba gear. They climbed in, and Cesar sat at the back by the outboard motor. Terry cast off the lines, pushed the boat from the dock, hopped in, and neatly coiled the ropes around the cleats.

  Cesar took off his knit hat, shook out his hair, and slipped on a pair of sunglasses. Then he spun the boat around and motored them out through the harbor, past sailboats, and around the superyachts.

  Jackknife stared at one with a blue hull. “That would be my dream boat,” he said as they came close to the stern of the yacht named Omega.

  “That,” Nalini said, “is an enormous boat.”

  “How big do you think that is?” Kerala asked.

  “About eighty meters,” Lucas said.

  “Two hundred and sixty feet,” Travis translated. “More or less.”

  “Look,” Terry said, pointing at a sign draped over the railing. “It’s for sale.”

  “Oh yes,” Jackknife said. “We should buy it.”

  Everyone laughed, even Cesar.

  “I wonder how much it costs?” Astrid asked.

  “You have to be super rich,” Alister said, “to buy a superyacht.”

  “Not true,” Cesar said in English. “They don’t have to be rich. When someone buys something expensive, all you know is that they spent a lot of money.”

  Cesar spun the boat past a rock jetty and into the Mediterranean Sea where the waves rolled in a calm and slow motion.

  Terry Hines moved around the boat. He was clearly making a point to do the best he could.

  It was midmorning, and the sun was already blazing hot. Terry mounted a tarp over their heads to keep the sun at bay. Then he set everyone up with their scuba gear. He toted tanks, defogged masks, and even breathed into each tank’s octo emergency-breathing tube to make sure it was working.

  When the kids had their gear, Terry held up an odd-looking scuba vest with two tanks.

  He shrugged. “No one wants to use this rebreather?” he asked.

  “We don’t need it,” said Nalini.

  “It’s overkill,” Jackknife said.

  “Put that thing up, Terry,” Astrid said as she adjusted her mask.

  “Rebreather regulators,” Terry said, “recycle your air. It’s good for the environment.”

  “It’s too expensive to use,” Cesar added. “It’s not worth it.”

  “And Robbie already told you,” Travis said. “You’re not supposed to go diving with us today.”

  Terry dropped his head. “I know.”

  Alister said, “You only need a rebreather tank if you don’t want to make bubbles.”

  “It doesn’t matter if we make bubbles,” Kerala said. “This is not a long dive.”

  Lucas didn’t say anything during this exchange. He stared out over the horizon. He was tired and trying not to look at the sea in which he had almost drowned a few days earlier.

  In less than half an hour Cesar slowed the boat as they approached the dive site.

  A thin slick of oil covered the surface of the water. A few diver-down buoys teetered on the waves, their flags flapping in the wind. A hundred meters away a boat with cables and hoses draped over the sides rocked back and forth.

  “That’s weird,” Travis said.

  “What?” Terry asked.

  “We were talking earlier,” Travis said, “about how many people were out here looking for the Kapriss diamonds.”

  “Maybe they got them all,” Terry said.

  “Possible,” Travis said, pointing at the boat just in the distance. “That trawler over there is using a vacuum.”

  “What for?” Kerala asked.

  “I guess,” Travis said, “to vacuum up any diamonds off the seafloor.”

  “But why have diver-down flags and no dive boats waiting?” Astrid asked.

  “This oil on the water,” Cesar said, “tells me that several boats just left here.”

  “Without their flags?” Lucas asked.

  “Maybe,” Nalini said.

  Lucas looked down through the dark water to see if he could make something out. It was just deep enough not to see the bottom.

  Dark water.

  Lucas knew he had to face his fears. It was the only way to overcome them. But he wasn’t quite ready to tackle his greatest fear. Not yet. Not this quickly.

  Jackknife fixed his fins and lowered his mask. “If we’re going to do this,” he said, “then let’s do this.”

  The Brazilian held his mask to his face and took a giant step off the back deck. He splashed into the water and immediately filled his BC, his buoyancy control vest, with air.

  “Travis has the GPS,” Cesar said. “He leads.”

  Cesar put a straw hat on his head and leaned back on the motor.

  “Terry and I will stay with the boat,” he said. “Okay?”

  One by one the kids dropped into the water. Travis and Lucas stepped off the back while Astrid, Nalini, and Alister flipped backward off the sides of the boat.

  As soon as the water gripped his wet suit, Lucas felt better. The sea was calm and warm, and he would soon read a message from his mother.

  Travis gave the okay sign and they all returned the signal. He dove, and they followed him below the surface. Behind them air bubbles rose as the kids vanished into the dark.

  Diver down.

  MESSAGE IN A CONTAINER

  Underwater it was brunch time. At least for the fish.

  Animals of all kinds swam out of the way of the New Resistance kids. A small school of spiny dogfish split in half, and a gray monk seal looked at the group and then darted into the distance.

  The kids kicked their fins and dove deeper. The water turned cooler and darker.

  For a moment it seemed they were moving through pure silence. Lucas looked at his friends. The expressions on their faces were tense and guarded.

  Something was here. He could feel it, and he knew his friends could too.

  A few meters deeper Lucas saw the sunken container. It was set sideways at an angle, with one edge jammed deep into the seafloor. Nearby a new fishing boat lay half-buried in the sand.

  As the kids approached the container’s doorway, they adjusted their BC vests and floated at neutral buoyancy.

  Lucas cleared some water from his mask. His eyes scanned the area.

  Discovery was often made by observing one’s surroundings, but sometim
es a person could understand a situation better by looking at what was not there.

  Lucas immediately noticed what was missing.

  The fact that there had been diver-down flags on the surface, a sunken boat, and no one at the container bothered him.

  Lucas glanced over his tank. His feeling of being watched hadn’t gone away. He twisted his wrist and scribbled on the underwater notepad. Where divers? he wrote, and showed it to the others.

  They fluttered their fins and shrugged their shoulders.

  Alister pointed at the giant gash he had cut in the container while they had been on the ship. The jagged slice was almost big enough for them to fit through.

  Travis shook his head and signaled for the others to follow. The locks on the doors had been sliced off, but the doors were closed. Jackknife wrenched one open and let it swing to the side, and the sound gonged into the waves. The New Resistance kids flicked on their wrist flashlights and swam into the container.

  Inside there was nothing. Sand from the seafloor had swept into the container and covered the bottom. Most everything had been taken out or vacuumed up except for a few broken pieces of wood left over from the crates that had held the ivory tusks. Scavengers had picked the place clean.

  Lucas was there not to find diamonds or ivory or gold coins. He was there to read a message from his mother, his late mother.

  There on the wall, spray-painted in bright red, was not one message, but two.

  The kids floated and read:

  My son will be named Lucas after Édouard Lucas the mathematician.

  I thought my name meant “light,” Lucas thought.

  The second message read:

  There are treasures far more valuable than priceless. Luz

  Lucas and the others floated in the water and stared at the cryptic message for what seemed like a very long time. A cold stream of water seeped into Lucas’s wet suit, sending shivers down his neck. He shook it off and racked his brain looking for a solution.

  Nothing is more valuable than priceless, he thought. It’s a riddle.

  Travis snapped a couple of pictures, and the flashes filled the container, blinding them for just a second.

  The nerves in Lucas’s spine tingled again. He quivered and suddenly knew it wasn’t just cold water nor was it just a feeling that someone was watching.

  He knew someone was watching them. He tried to look through the gash, but it ran into the sandy floor and he couldn’t see very far.

  Lucas fluttered his fins and spun his head toward the container’s doorway. A diver with a black-tinted mask was floating there using a rebreather regulator, making no air bubbles.

  Then six scuba divers also using recycled-air regulators charged through the opening.

  Lucas knew who they were.

  The Curukians moved like spears slicing through water, their fins creating trailing currents behind them. Six black masks zeroed in on the New Resistance kids as the divers charged with shiny knives leading the way.

  They came so quickly that Lucas had no time to pull his own knife from his calf sheath.

  He spun to alert his friends, but they had already seen the divers coming at them. Flashlights crisscrossed the metal cave. From the corner of his mask Lucas spotted a light shining on a metal blade as it cut through the water and suddenly sliced Nalini’s air hose.

  Oxygen burst from the tube, engulfing Nalini in a giant cloud of tiny bubbles. She signaled Travis, who yanked the octo from his vest and gave it to Nalini. Travis kicked his fins into two of the divers’ faces and knocked their masks loose as he and Nalini bolted from the container.

  Flashlights and knives jabbed at each other like swords.

  Astrid and one of the divers locked arms and rolled in an endless somersault across the container until they slammed into the wall.

  Lucas and Jackknife teamed up. They grabbed one of the diver’s wrists and tried to wrestle the knife away. Jackknife tried to kick the divers’ masks off, but these Curukians proved to be well practiced at fighting underwater. Jackknife and Lucas sank deeper into the container as the two divers backed them into the dark corner.

  There was another explosion of air.

  Lucas and Jackknife rolled away from the divers they were fighting.

  Jackknife’s hose burst into plumes of bubbles as a knife split it in two. Kerala gave him her octo, and they, too, sped toward the doorway. Kerala slapped two divers and knocked their knives loose.

  During the ruckus, Alister had crawled to the bottom of the container to try to slip out unseen through the gash. But it wasn’t big enough. A Curukian swooped in and stepped on him, ramming a fin into his neck. Then the diver turned off Alister’s air tank.

  As Lucas bolted to help, a gloved hand clawed his throat and jolted him backward.

  Lucas jammed the diver’s head down and leapfrogged over him. He grabbed Alister by the collar, opened his air valve, and pushed him toward the doorway.

  Lucas saw that he and Astrid were the only ones left. Hovering over them like a flock of stingrays were the six divers. It was then that Lucas noticed all six were girls.

  The Curukians dropped in close, and one of the divers grabbed Lucas’s wrist while another girl grabbed Astrid’s regulator hose and put a knife up to it.

  The diver wrote on Lucas’s notepad. Priceless treasure where?

  Lucas shrugged that he didn’t know.

  The girl took the notepad and showed it to Astrid while another Curukian cut Lucas’s regulator hose in half. Oxygen exploded from the tube as the tank released its air. Lucas spat out his regulator and breathed in as many bubbles as possible. He would have maybe two minutes to remain conscious, three minutes to live.

  The cloud of oxygen around Lucas’s head faded, and he could see Astrid trying to give him her extra octo. One of the girls knocked it away. Another diver put the notepad in Astrid’s face. She shook her head, and the Curukian sliced her air hose. Astrid gulped the remaining bubbles.

  Lucas tried to flee, but a girl kicked him to the sandy floor. He needed air. He needed his mother. He looked up at her message. The answer to the riddle was on the tip of his tongue.

  The Curukian girls swam over their heads and out of the container. They closed the door behind them and locked it, leaving Lucas and Astrid to drown.

  THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS

  Like robotic eels, two air hoses snaked through the gash in the sunken shipping container.

  Holding what could be the last breath of her life, Astrid swam to the door and desperately tried to wedge it open.

  For his part Lucas tried tunneling under the sandy floor, digging like a dog. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted the thin black tubes. At first they startled him. Lucas flinched, thinking they were sea snakes of some kind.

  A fraction of a second later he reached out, grabbed the regulator, and rammed it into his mouth. He inhaled the biggest breath he had ever taken. While he filled his lungs with oxygen, he banged on the metal wall. Astrid spun around toward the noise and swam. Lucas extended the hose to her, and Astrid bit at the mouthpiece, pressing it to her lips.

  For a full three minutes the two kids just floated and breathed.

  Lucas didn’t know who had put the hoses in through the hole, but it didn’t matter. For the time being, staying alive was his only concern.

  On the other side of the container Alister picked the lock and opened the door, and he and Kerala swam back inside.

  Kerala checked in with Astrid and Lucas to see if they were all right. They gave the signal that they were okay. Kerala handed her extra octo regulator to Astrid, who dropped the one coming out of the wall, took Kerala’s, and began breathing normally, the bubbles flowing. Alister gave his octo to Lucas.

  The two pairs swam side by side out through the open doorway. Floating near the gash in the container they spotted another scuba diver.

  Terry Hines was using the rebreather and making no air bubbles. He pulled the two extra breathing regulators through the opening a
nd reattached them to his BC vest. He joined Lucas, Alister, Kerala, and Astrid as they made their ascent.

  After a fifteen-minute safety stop they popped up on the surface only to find that Cesar’s boat was missing.

  Lucas counted heads. Friends were the most important things in life. Deep down that’s what Lucas really cared about.

  Lucas called the roll in his mind. They were all there floating in their BC vests in a circle. Kerala, Nalini, Astrid, Jackknife, Travis, Alister, and Terry. In the middle of them, wearing a life jacket, Cesar bobbed up and down.

  “What happened to the boat?” Kerala asked.

  “The diver girls took it,” Cesar said. “They are the same girls from yesterday who were blocking the container.”

  “That was so scary,” Nalini said. “Curukian girls? They scared me to death.”

  “Hey, Terry,” Astrid said. “Thanks for breaking the rules and bringing that rebreather to us.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “You saved our lives,” Lucas said. “Thanks.”

  “Make sure you tell Robbie and Sophia,” Terry said. “They think I mess up everything.”

  “I will,” said Lucas.

  A humming noise filled the air, and Lucas looked up squinting. A twin-engine airplane buzzed overhead. The sounds rose and fell away. Jackknife waved for a rescue.

  “So what are we going to do now?” Alister asked.

  Jackknife said, “We’ll have to swim.”

  “We’re miles away!” Alister said.

  “Your eyes,” Lucas said to no one in particular, “are about twenty centimeters, or eight inches, off the water. If you can see the horizon, that would mean we’re about one and a half kilometers, or one mile, away.”

  “But,” Travis said, “we can’t see it.”

  “The metric formula for the distance to the horizon is the square root of the height above the water divided by 6.752.”

  No one seemed to be following Lucas’s math.

  “So what does that mean?” Astrid asked. “We’re not exactly in math class right now.”

  Lucas kicked his fins and lifted his body halfway out of the water.