Jake Atlas and the Hunt for the Feathered God Read online

  If we just had a clue to the next tablet, things would be different. Mum and Dad wouldn’t be able to stop themselves from going after it. I had a back-up plan to make that happen, a last resort. If it didn’t work, Mum and Dad would probably never trust me again. But they never really had anyway, so I had to try.

  I slid from bed and strapped on the utility belt loaded with Sami’s tomb-hunting gadgets. Wearing it felt like putting on a favourite T-shirt, and gave me confidence I shouldn’t have had for such a crazy plan.

  I crept barefoot along the hallway, stopping, listening. Kit’s house was several hundred years old; it reminded me of stately homes that my parents used to take us to at weekends, with a grand, sweeping staircase that looked great but was totally rubbish for sneaking. Getting to the bottom was like a tomb-training exercise: seeking out the route with the fewest creaks to wake my parents.

  I waited again at the bottom of the stairs, but all I heard were thundering snores from down the hall. Sami was fast asleep in his workshop.

  I kept going to Mum’s study and slid a gadget from my utility belt, a device the size and shape of a lipstick tube. As I held it to the lock, a laser beamed into the keyhole, where it scanned the grooves for lock pins. A thin pick slid from the gadget and opened up like a claw inside the lock. I heard a clunk and a thunk, as the skeleton key picked the lock. Grinning, I stepped inside and closed the door.

  Just enough moonlight fell through the leaded window to see the holosphere table screen, piles of Mum’s books and a mess of papers fanned out across the floor. I slid my smart-goggles from their slot in my belt, and put them on.

  “Ultrasonic,” I whispered.

  The goggles switched view to an echolocation soundscape – a graph pattern of squiggly lines made by sound waves bouncing from empty spaces. Sami had invented it to help us to see things in tombs that our eyes couldn’t, like secret passages or cracks behind rock walls. Right then I needed it to find something else.

  I turned, breathing slowly… There!

  “Torch,” I said.

  A super-lumen beam, as bright as daylight, shone from the frame of my goggles. I rushed around the holosphere screen and removed a painting from the wall. Behind it was a safe. It didn’t take long to open with the skeleton key, and then I rose to tiptoes and shone the torch inside.

  “Looking for this?” a voice asked.

  I whirled around, yelping in fright.

  Pan stood behind me. She had the emerald tablet in her hand! “Get that light out of my face,” she snapped.

  I yanked my goggles off.

  Pan wasn’t wearing her utility belt, so didn’t have a skeleton key – but she’d got in here somehow, and locked the door behind her. Did she have the actual key? I stared, confused.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  She sat at the holosphere and tapped a code into the screen. Half a dozen holograms rose into the air, archaeological reports and ancient documents that I was sure Mum had already checked. Pan was double-checking.

  “Mum said I could look at this stuff,” she explained, “to see if I spot anything she missed.”

  “Wait. She lets you come in here?”

  “Sometimes, so I know where she hides the key. She’d be furious if she knew I was here this late, though.”

  I nodded like I understood. I did understand; it was sensible of Mum to let Pan look at the tablet. Pan was smart enough to find a clue, which was what we wanted, after all. But it stung to hear that Mum had trusted her to look at it. She’d barely allowed me to touch the thing since I stole it from the Snake Lady in Egypt.

  “So what was your big plan?” Pan asked.

  “Plan?”

  “You just broke in here.”

  “Oh. I was going to steal the tablet and send it to the British Museum. It would be on the news, and the Snake Lady would see. She’d try to get it back, and we’d be waiting with a—”

  “That is a dumb plan, Jake.”

  It wasn’t my best, but I was desperate. “You heard what Mum said at dinner?” I asked.

  Pan nodded, her eyes still glued to the hologram files. “That’s why I’ve got to find a clue tonight.”

  I glanced around the piles of reports and plans, wondering if it was worth having a look, but I didn’t even know what I’d look for. Instead I stepped up to a corkboard, which displayed the few clues we actually had on the Snake Lady. Sami had searched for her face in the background of photos on social media sites. He’d had over fifty hits, but we were only sure that three were the Snake Lady. In each photo she wore a crimson wig to hide her snow-white hair, but she couldn’t disguise her sharp cheekbones or arrogant smile. She looked smugly satisfied, as if she’d just watched a noisy dog get run over in a street.

  “Horrible witch,” I whispered.

  I remembered how she had left me and Pan to die on an island in Egypt. Then, after we’d escaped, she’d actually asked us to work for her. I couldn’t help wondering what might have happened had we agreed. We’d know everything about her organization, and be out there hunting for emerald tablets. We’d be treasure-hunting, not hanging around this mansion doing nothing.

  “She goes to cool places,” I muttered.

  “Eh?”

  “The Snake Lady. These photos were taken all over the world.”

  Pan flicked away several hologram files to see me better. Her face in the projected light was deathly pale, but her eyes were wide and shiny.

  “Where are they taken?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, but look at the car number plates, and the shops’ signs.”

  Pan rushed to join me at the corkboard. “Jake, that’s it! We’ve been so busy trying to decipher the tablet, we never properly studied the clues we had.”

  Pan loved these moments, deliberately drawing out a discovery to wind me up. I wasn’t going to beg, so I turned away to watch the rain patter against the window.

  “Reckon it’ll brighten up tomorrow?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Wonder what’s for breakfast…”

  “Jake! We’ve just made a big discovery!”

  I whirled back. “Well, why don’t you just tell me?”

  “I was about to!”

  “No, you weren’t. You never just tell me!”

  “Just wait here.”

  And then she ran off!

  I waited for a minute in the dark, unsure if she was even going to return. I was about to put the tablet back in the safe when she rushed back, dragging a sleepy-looking Sami by the arm. Sami wore boxers and a T-shirt, and as he staggered into the room he waved a closed umbrella wildly around in the dark. I knew that the umbrella wasn’t just an umbrella: it was another of Sami’s gadgets, a stun gun in disguise.

  I stood back from its aim. “Don’t shoot!” I cried.

  Sami lowered the weapon and stared at me, confused. “Where’s the burglar?”

  “I lied about that to get you to come,” Pan replied coolly.

  “Are you crazy? This stun gun is loaded with concentrated midazolam. It would have knocked Jake out for twelve hours!”

  Pandora waved away his concern as she rushed back to the corkboard. She was so excited about whatever she’d discovered that her words came out in gasps.

  “Sami, we need your help.”

  Sami set the stun gun on a side table and rubbed his eyes to clear away the last of his sleep. “I’ll get your—”

  “No. You can’t tell our parents. We won’t leave this room, Sami. And if we find a clue, I promise we’ll tell Mum and Dad.”

  Sami sighed and muttered something in Arabic, but he wasn’t as torn as he was acting. In Egypt he’d talked Mum and Dad into letting us become treasure hunters, and he knew how close they were now to giving up.

  “What do you need?” he asked, finally.

  Pan tapped the images on the corkboard. “These photos of the Snake Lady. Where are they from?”

  “Social media accounts,” Sami replied.

&nbs
p; “But which accounts?”

  “I don’t know. I found them using a biometric interception programme. It extracts facial recognition matches from the web. The Snake Lady is only in the background of these photos. Whose actual accounts they are isn’t relevant.”

  “It’s totally relevant,” Pan insisted. “Not whose accounts, but where they took the photos. Can we find out?”

  “Well, yes, but only by hacking into those accounts. That’s illegal.”

  “So you can do it?” I asked.

  Sami stared at me. “Did you hear the part about it being illegal?”

  “I thought you were on our side, Sami,” Pan said. “Not Mum and Dad’s.”

  “Pan, there are no sides. You’re a family.”

  “Tell that to them. You know they’re going to give up, don’t you? What will happen to us then? I’ll return to that gross school for the gifted.”

  “School for geniuses,” Sami said.

  “For freaks, Sami. I hated it. And what about Jake? He’ll go back to being a troublemaker and a thief. He’ll probably end up in jail, Sami, for life, without the possibility of parole. If you visit him, you’ll look into his broken eyes and know that all of his misery, as well as that of his victims, was caused by you right now, not helping us in our hour of need.”

  I tried not to laugh. From the way the wrinkles curled up even tighter around Sami’s mouth, I suspected he was fighting a smile too. Sami had become part of our family over the past few months, and Pan had him wrapped around her little finger.

  “Sami,” Pan pleaded. “Can you do it or not?”

  Sami did another groan-sigh-Arabic-mutter combo, but I knew he’d help us: not just because we needed to find a clue, but also because of how we hoped to find it. He couldn’t resist the challenge. We were testing his skills.

  He typed on the holosphere screen, and dozens of files projected into the air. Most were home pages from social media sites, but one was different. It looked like a creature from an old computer game, a Space Invader, and it was flashing. Sami gazed at that file in wonder, like a pilgrim visiting holy relics in a church.

  “This is an extremely aggressive parasite,” he explained. “A program that hacks social media accounts.”

  “Which social media accounts?” I asked.

  “All of them.”

  Light from the holograms gleamed off Sami’s bald head. His hand trembled as he touched the Space Invader with two fingers and slid it into one of the flashing files.

  It was as if someone had pulled the plug from the holosphere; everything just vanished. We stood for a moment in the dark, breathing hard. I was about to ask if it had gone wrong, when a million files suddenly shot up from the screen. I know people say “a million” and don’t mean it, but it was at least that many. Each was a dot of light, so it looked like we were staring at a galaxy of stars.

  “What are they?” I gasped.

  “Every social media account on the internet,” Sami explained. “Two and a half billion of them.”

  The files began to move, shooting sideways and vanishing, replaced by thousands more and thousands more, gathering speed until they were a white blur.

  For a moment we stood in silence, mesmerized by the stream of rushing light. I noticed Sami glance at me, and then at Pan. He was one of the world’s leading experts in future technology, with qualifications from top universities, but when it came to speaking his mind Sami was … well, not so clever.

  “You know,” he said finally, “I mean, listen, guys… I was just thinking, really, that maybe, well – and don’t take this the wrong way or anything because I think you’ve got real promise as treasure hunters – maybe your parents might be right about—”

  “They’re not,” Pan said.

  “Right,” Sami said.

  A single file shot from the stream. It floated by Sami’s face as if it were in orbit around his head. Two more files followed it, and hovered beside the first. The light stream vanished, leaving just those three little glow-fly files.

  “Those are the accounts that caught the Snake Lady in their photos?” Pan asked.

  Sami nodded. He expanded the files with finger swipes. Two Instagram pages, one Facebook. “You sure you want to open these? It’s a gross invasion of privacy.”

  Pan and me spoke at the same time.

  “Definitely.”

  They were pretty normal social media accounts – filled with photos of meals and holidays, mostly. After several minutes of searching, we found the snaps with the Snake Lady in the background. All three were selfies of the account owner, tagged with a location and date.

  “Where were they taken?” Pan asked.

  “This one was in New York,” Sami said. “This one in Vienna, and this third photograph was taken in Shanghai.”

  “So why was the Snake Lady in those places?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” Pan replied. “Sami, can you cross reference the dates, see if any similar events took place in those three cities?”

  I was still amazed by the speed with which Sami worked the holosphere. He was a bit older than my parents – so properly old – and often moaned about his bad back and aching knees. But when it came to tech stuff, Sami had the energy of a child. His fingers worked like a concert pianist’s across the table screen, and web pages whooshed up into the air.

  “There were several similar events in each of those cities,” he said. “Music festivals, movie premieres, auctions—”

  “Wait,” Pan said. “What auctions?”

  Sami enlarged the websites of three auction houses. “This is interesting,” he muttered. “They were sales of antiquities.”

  I edged closer. “So the Snake Lady was buying ancient stuff at sales? Do the auctions have lists of what they sold?”

  “Yes, auction catalogues,” Sami replied.

  “Cross reference the catalogues from those three auctions,” Pan said.

  Sami was on it already. More taps on his screen, more projections, and this time he couldn’t fight the grin that creased up his whole face. He’d discovered something.

  “Have you guys heard of the Aztecs?” he said.

  “The burrito restaurant in High Wycombe?” I asked.

  He looked at me. “No, not the burrito restaurant in High Wycombe.”

  “He means the ancient Mexican civilization,” Pan said.

  “That’s right,” Sami agreed. “Each of the auctions the Snake Lady attended was selling an Aztec codex.”

  Pan answered my question before I could ask. “A codex is an Aztec document with writing and pictures.”

  “I knew that,” I lied.

  Sami scrolled through the web pages. “The auction houses sold three of four codices recently found in Mexico. They all date from the Spanish Conquest.”

  “The time when Spanish soldiers invaded Mexico and conquered the Aztecs,” Pan whispered to me.

  “I knew that too,” I mumbled. “Sami, you said there were four of these documents. So is the fourth on sale too?”

  “I’ll check.”

  “If it is, that’s where we’ll find the Snake Lady,” Pan said. “And I bet those Aztec codices are a clue to the next emerald tablet.”

  Sami flicked several files away, like he was swatting flies, until he was staring at a single web page. He suddenly looked confused, as if he’d hit a surprisingly tricky question in an otherwise easy quiz.

  “I don’t know whether this is good news or bad news,” he muttered.

  “What is it?” Pan asked.

  “The auction where the fourth codex is being sold is here in England, in London.”

  He looked at us through the hologram, and I really couldn’t tell whether he was smiling or grimacing about what he’d discovered.

  “The sale is tomorrow,” he said.

  5

  “What in blue blazes is going on?”

  I grabbed Pan and Pan grabbed Sami and Sami grabbed me, and we all yelped.

  Mum stood in the doorway. She wa
s in a “blue blazes” mood – the phrase she saved for her very angriest moments. Her sleep mask was pulled up over her head, but her eyes were wide awake and full of fury. Dad stood behind her in his dressing gown, looking a little less sharp.

  “I asked you a question,” Mum snapped.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Pan replied. “We were—”

  “Don’t answer back,” Mum barked.

  “But, Mum, we—”

  “Sam,” Mum continued, “I am astonished that you are involved in this. I thought you were on our side.”

  “Sami is on our side,” Pan insisted. “Aren’t you, Sami?”

  Sweat glistened on Sami’s head. Right then he looked like he’d rather not be on anybody’s side.

  “No one has to take sides,” he said. “Jake and Pan have found—”

  “Enough, Sam,” Mum said.

  Dad stepped past Mum and into the study. He placed the emerald tablet back in the safe and rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses.

  “We can talk about this in the morning,” he said.

  “But, Dad—”

  “I said, in the morning.”

  Dad locked the safe. He saw Sami’s umbrella stun gun on the side-table and sighed, as if it somehow confirmed his worst fears about Pan and me.

  “Look,” he said, “your mother and I understand your enthusiasm. But we have studied that tablet for weeks. There is simply no way that we can locate the Snake Lady, or—”

  “She’ll be at an auction in London tomorrow,” Pan blurted.

  Dad stared at her, his glasses slipping down his nose. He nudged them back up and glanced at Sami, who nodded to confirm our discovery. Then he looked at Mum, and they had one of their silent conversations – a whole argument in nods, headshakes, widening and narrowing eyes.

  Mum must have won, because she spoke next.

  “Jake. Pandora. Your father and I are … delighted by your interest in our old lives.” She said delighted like she meant disgusted. “But we were hasty in suggesting it could continue. Isn’t that right, John?”

  Dad sounded less sure, but it was obviously something they had talked about – giving up the hunt for the emerald tablets, and going back to our old lives. “I… Yes. Perhaps we got carried away.”