Breakaway Read online

  The words had barely left Dan’s mouth when it hit him like an avalanche.

  “Plato,” Dan said. “He was totally from Athens, wasn’t he?”

  “A born-and-raised Athenian,” Atticus said, and waved his hands like he had just performed a magic trick. “Making Atlantis his island and where we’ll find silphium.”

  Another astounded silence descended on the room. Dan felt as if his head was buzzing. Jake turned to Amy with a smirk.

  “So,” he said. “Looks like we’re headed to the same place.”

  Amy was on a ladder high above the library floor when her cell phone hummed. She set aside the book she was looking through and pulled it out.

  Carthage Museum, read the text message.

  Atticus and Jake had gone back to their father’s to look for clues, while she and Dan stayed behind and researched Uthman and his reign. Looked like the others had hit on something first. Amy packed up the notes she had been taking and then slid down the ladder.

  She went to the study room Dan had been in all morning, but her brother wasn’t there. The table was covered with a clutter of books, papers, and candy wrappers. Dan, she thought. She could remember a time when his messiness drove her crazy but now . . . .

  Amy neatened the books and threw the wrappers away. She was about to put Dan’s notes in his backpack when she saw a sheaf of brightly colored papers sticking out from it. Curious, Amy pulled one out.

  It was a brochure advertising something called Bartleby’s World-Famous Clown Academy. There was another for a baseball camp, and another for an astronaut camp. An application for the American School in Rome sat at the bottom. Each page was printed in bright jewel colors and covered with pictures of boys Dan’s age. Boys running through parks or juggling torches. Boys sliding into home base.

  Amy felt a dark hole open up inside her.

  He’s already making plans to leave.

  She leafed through the brochures again. How long had Dan been hiding these? She’d tried to convince herself that his talk of leaving was a passing thing, but now . . . her last family member, the person she trusted most of all, had one foot out the door.

  “Amy?”

  Amy stuffed the brochures back into his pack and turned around.

  “Everything okay?” Dan asked.

  “Y-yeah,” she stuttered, unable to meet his eyes. “Jake texted. They’re at the Carthage Museum.”

  Amy pushed past Dan before he could say a word, nearly running into the hall outside. It was like the sheaf of papers stuffed inside his pack was a bomb, and she had to get away before it went off.

  Amy stepped out of the gloom of the library, shielding her eyes from the Tunisian morning light. The buzzing sound of the call to prayer seemed to come from every direction at once. Everything seemed overloud and overbright. Dan appeared behind her and raised a hand out over the traffic until a cab skidded to a stop at the curb. Dan told the driver where they were going and the car pulled away from the library and joined the Tunisian traffic.

  “Amy?” Dan asked. “You find anything helpful?”

  She shook her head, eyes fixed out the window. “I just took some notes. Whatever seemed worthwhile.”

  They left the city traffic and moved onto a highway that spanned Lake Tunis. The glare of the sun on the steely water hit Amy’s eyes like spikes and she had to look away.

  Dan was sitting across from her with his arms wrapped around his backpack, holding it close to his chest as he looked out the window. A corner of bright blue paper stuck out the top of the pack. She wanted to say something to Dan, but what? Don’t go? How could you? For the first time, there was something between them too immense for words. He’s really going to do it. He’s really going to leave. Amy couldn’t breathe.

  The rest of the trip passed in a blur. The cab lurched to a stop and Dan piled out and headed up the sidewalk to the museum, his backpack bouncing on his shoulder. Jake and Atticus were waiting. Everything suddenly snapped back into focus. They had work to do. Amy shook herself and paid the driver.

  “What have you got?” she asked when she joined them at the museum’s entrance.

  “We found this in Dad’s living room,” Atticus said, handing over a scrap of paper. “When we thought he had been kidnapped, we figured all the mess was just Pierce’s goons ransacking the place, so we missed this.”

  Amy unfolded the piece of paper. “Dr. Abdallah, two P.M.”

  “He’s a researcher here,” Jake said. “We called and told him we were coming.”

  Jake pulled open the glass door to the museum and they were met by an elegant Tunisian man in the lobby.

  “Jake! Atticus! I’ve heard so much about you both. Everyone here was terribly worried to hear you don’t know your father’s whereabouts.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Abdallah,” Jake said. “We think you were our father’s last appointment before we lost track of him.”

  Dr. Abdallah signaled the receptionist, who buzzed them through into a long hallway lined with offices.

  “Of course,” the doctor said as he led them down the hall. “But we didn’t talk for more than a few moments. Your father seemed . . . agitated. Excited! More excited than I’ve ever seen him, in fact.”

  “What did he say?”

  “We will soon be exhibiting a large collection of fifteenth-century artifacts,” Dr. Abdallah said as he unlocked a heavy door at the end of the hall. “He wanted an early look at the collection.”

  “Can we see it as well?” Atticus asked. “We’ll be very careful.”

  Dr. Abdallah showed them into a large room full of tables covered in artifacts and stacks of old books.

  “Does anything relate to Uthman?” Jake asked.

  “Ah, like father like son!” Dr. Abdallah smiled. “Dr. Rosenbloom asked the same thing. Right over here.”

  Dr. Abdallah showed them to a back corner of the room, to a table displaying clay vases and gleaming metalwork. Atticus went immediately to a small stack of books and opened the first one.

  “There are English translations to the side,” Dr. Abdallah said. “I will be in my office if you need me.”

  As the doctor left the room, Atticus leaned into one of the translations like he was trying to dive in.

  “What’s it say, Att?” Dan asked.

  Atticus ignored him and read, flipping pages, his face getting closer and closer to the book. “Aw, man!”

  “What is it?” Jake asked.

  Atticus turned another page and shook his head. “This doesn’t make sense!”

  “What?” Jake asked.

  “Well, it’s sort of a diary,” Atticus said. “Uthman’s talking about meeting a traveling merchant who claimed to possess a copy of Hermocrates. It sounds like Uthman wasn’t a hundred percent sure the guy was legit, but he says the book went into more detail about Atlantis. All about its history and culture, but nothing about where it actually was. All he says is that in older times, it was called by another name.”

  “What other name?”

  Atticus turned the page and found a footnote passage. “Tartessos.”

  “Tartessos?” Dan said. “Never heard of it.”

  “Me either.” Jake frowned.

  Dan sighed, frustrated. “Okay, I guess we’ll look at old maps and try to find an island called Tartessos.”

  “Wait!” Amy tore through her notebook, running her finger along each page.

  “What is it, Amy? You have something?”

  She dropped the notebook on the table and riffled through the pages.

  “It was here,” she mumbled. “Right here.”

  “What was?” Dan asked.

  Amy turned the pages until she came to a map. A notation below indicated that it depicted the world as it was in the fourth century B.C.

  “It’s not really the right century, but I thought it was interesting and wanted a copy.”

  Amy stabbed her finger at the coastline of what was now Tunisia, then drew it west past Morocco and across the Stra
it of Gibraltar. To the north lay the borders of a country they all recognized as Spain.

  Just inland from the southwest coast, there was a large region marked with a circle. In that circle was written a single word:

  Tartessos.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Dan said, breaking the silence. “It looks like we have just discovered Atlantis.”

  “Awesomesauce!” said Atticus, and pumped his fist.

  April May wondered how to bill her clients in a way that really captured the scale of the work she did. Not by the hour or per project, but by the empty two liter of Electroshock Cherry Limeade Caffeine Blast. One glass consumed meant an amateur job — breaking into a gmail or Facebook account. Breaking into the Cahills’ systems had been a three-bottle project and she would charge handsomely for it.

  And now here she was sitting in front of her two gleaming monitors, surrounded by six empty bottles. A seventh was in her hand and half empty already.

  Finding out what J. Rutherford Pierce was up to was the biggest project of her career. Part of the problem was that before a certain time, there barely was a J. Rutherford Pierce. Oh, he existed, but hardly in the form he was now. He was a second rater, a loser.

  How did he become the man he was? And more important, what kind of man is he planning on becoming next?

  It had seemed so innocent in the beginning when he hired her to get some dirt on a couple of rich brats. Easy. Harmless. But then she saw the picture. Some thick-necked goon holding the business end of a hypodermic needle to Amy Cahill’s neck. Pierce didn’t want to embarrass Amy, he wanted to kill her. And probably her friends, too.

  April May tried to tell herself it was a mistake. A muscleman who jumped the gun and went in for an unsanctioned kill. It worked for a while as a reasonable theory, but the more April May learned, the more it sounded like something else — wishful thinking. She needed to know for sure. And if a man like Pierce was trying to kill a couple of kids, what was the endgame?

  April May put her fingers to the keyboard and soon that delicious feeling of becoming one with the networks washed over her. She avoided all of the obvious places information might be. Pierce’s e-mail. His cell phone. He was too smart to store anything important somewhere so obvious. No, anything worthwhile would be on the Founders Media network, hidden away on a remote hub. Since she had built a great deal of the security protocols for Founders, she was going to get past them. It was just a matter of time.

  April May slithered through human resources and accounting, then dipped in and out of a few isolated terminals. She searched the hard drive of a reporter in Bogotá, Colombia, and the Twitter account of a Founders Media intern in Des Moines, Iowa. April found a few juicy secrets here and there — some even worth filing away for later — but nothing that explained what Pierce was up to.

  There was a ping as April moved through the system. She ignored it at first but the sound grew louder each time, and finally she forced herself to break the trance and look over at her second monitor.

  There, in pale green letters, were the words: There’s a mouse in the maze.

  April May almost spilled her Electroshock Cherry Limeade. Interesting.

  An old security subroutine had been activated. She had created it to watch for invaders on the network, and it looked like it had just sniffed someone out. April May delved into the system logs. This particular mouse had been poking around for a few days now, but the strange thing was, it hadn’t done any damage. No viruses. No downloads of sensitive data. That eliminated blackmail, corporate espionage, and most black hat hackers.

  “Who are you?” she asked the little mouse.

  April May turned her attention to the second monitor. She tracked the mouse for a few minutes, a funny feeling growing in her stomach. The mouse was very good and very familiar. A few minutes later, and she was positive. She was staring at the Cahills’ very own pet hacker.

  April May smiled. The mouse was good, nearly as good as she was. She took another slug of soda and inspiration struck. Searching Pierce’s systems could take weeks and might not work. But sitting right in front of her was one of the Cahill team. Did the Cahills know why they were targets?

  “Stay right there,” she said, staring at the screen. “Stay right where you are.”

  April spent the next hour building elaborate security protocols, all the while keeping an eye on her mouse. Once she was satisfied, she opened the chat interface. She was about to start typing but stopped herself. No reason to miss an opportunity. April May wove a very clever and nearly invisible bit of code into the chat system. The mouse would see nothing but text, but if it responded, she would get a tiny foothold into the new Cahill system. Once she was done, April May cracked her knuckles and set them on the keys.

  What do I say?

  She felt a strange bundle of nerves in her stomach as she thought of the real live human behind the lights of her system. She paused, then lowered a single finger and typed two words.

  Pony sat in front of his computer, staring at two words in glowing type.

  Hi there.

  He looked behind him, expecting to see Ian or one of the others messing with him, but the command center was empty. Just him, the darkness, and the words. He set his fingers on the keys and then pulled them back again. This was strange. Too strange to not be careful. He moved to his second machine and did some tracing.

  “Unbelievable,” he whispered. “Un-freaking-believable!”

  He had never seen such a complicated routing. And so masterfully done! The signal was coming from outside the command center but it was impossible to tell from where. Whoever was contacting him could be in the house next door or at a cyber café in Mumbai.

  The really interesting thing, though, was that the routing was almost too complicated. There was no reason to go that overboard unless you were trying to send a message. But what message?

  Who do you know that’s this good? And to that question there was only one answer. April May.

  Pony scrambled for his phone. Someone had to tell him what to do! He called Ian, and then Hamilton and Jonah, but got no response. It’s four A.M.! Who goes to bed this early!? He was about to run downstairs, but a thought checked him. What if she was gone when he got back?

  Apparently, this one was up to him. Pony checked the communication stream again. Definitely nothing coming through but plain text. April May wasn’t sending a virus or anything like that. She only wanted to talk. Pony decided to keep his response simple, too.

  Hi.

  His reply sat on screen for a moment. He started to think that maybe April May had gotten spooked, but there was another ping.

  You know who I am?

  Sure, Pony typed. You’re the Queen of the Universe.

  Flattering, April responded. Wanna fill me in on you?

  They call me Pony.

  You’re not bad.

  Pony grinned. He was really doing it! He was talking to the great April May! He was afraid his brain was going to rupture from pure fanboy glee. His fingers shook as he resumed typing.

  What can I do for you? Pony typed.

  Something’s been bothering me lately, April typed. Thought you might have an opinion about it.

  Pony frowned.

  I won’t give you anything that will hurt my friends.

  I’m not asking for any, April May replied. I’m just asking a question. Freelance genius to freelance genius.

  Pony flushed with pride, but thought a moment before he answered. What do you want to know?

  April May stared at the words on the screen, a jolt of nerves in her stomach. She grabbed her bottle of soda and drowned it in caffeine. The ping of an e-mail notification came from her secondary system.

  April glanced up. One e-mail stood out from the others, bold and highlighted in red, like it was screaming at her. It was from Pierce, demanding to know where the Cahills were. What they were doing. How he could find them. April took a swig of Electroshock Cherry Limeade Caffeine Blast and began to type
.

  Who’s the bad guy? You? Or me?

  “But how can Atlantis be Spain?” Dan asked as the Mediterranean slipped beneath their small plane. “Last time I checked, Spain wasn’t even an island!”

  Atticus was sitting in the back, wedged between Amy and Jake, his lap full of books. He had been immersed in his research ever since they left the museum. After their chase through the streets of Tunis, there was far too much media and police interest in the Cahills for them to go to the airport, so Jonah’s pilot had made a last-minute switch-up. The four kids had rented a boat and met the pilot and his seaplane a mile offshore. It would be another hour still before they landed near the Spanish coast and were picked up by another boat.

  “In actuality, it matches up pretty well with what Plato wrote,” Atticus said. “Atlantis was supposed to be to the west of the Pillars of Hercules, which we know are the rocks on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Spain is definitely west of that. And apparently Plato’s not the only one who thinks this is the place. A scientist named Richard Freund has been studying the possibility for years.”

  “So why haven’t we heard about him?” Dan asked.

  Atticus shifted in his seat. “Well . . . most people think he’s nuts.”

  “Sounds like our kind of guy.”

  “But he’s found some interesting stuff,” Atticus said. “According to him, there used to be a huge bay in southern Spain. He says Atlantis was built right on the water in a series of concentric circles with amazing temples and ports and everything. And what we know about Tartessos definitely matches up with the legend of Atlantis. It was incredibly rich, largely from the ores it mined from the surrounding area. But then, thousands of years ago, a massive tsunami swept into that area and would have wrecked the entire city. Over the years, it was covered with dozens of feet of silt. Eventually, the whole thing became a big marshland and Spain made it a national park.”

  “So does this guy have actual, you know, proof?” Dan asked.

  Atticus’s voice got high and squeaky. “He has some interesting images on ground-penetrating radar,” he said carefully. “And some people agree that some sites look like they could, maybe, be memorials to the lost city. There’s something down there all right, but the whole area is too marshy to do a lot of excavating. I don’t know! It’s why we’re checking it out, okay?” Atticus plunged back into his books.