Chapter 19

CHAPTER 19 "I'm telling you," the pilot insisted. "There's not going to be anything there!" "And I'm telling you," Nellie said, standing almost nose to nose with him. "We're paying you tons of money to take us there anyway!" The pilot pointed at the computer screen. "Let me explain again," he said with exaggerated patience. "The map reading of fifty- three north, six west is in the water." He zoomed in on the computer, so the screen showed nothing but blue. "It's off the coast of Ireland, yes, but there's not an island there. There's not even a big rock. There's nothing to land on!" "We'll take parachutes," Nellie said. The pilot snorted. "Do you know what kind of trouble I could get into, dropping two kids and a teenager off in the middle of the Irish Sea?" he asked. "I could lose

my license!" "I am not a teenager!" Nellie said furiously. "I am twenty years old!" It felt like the two of them had been arguing forever, back and forth, while Dan and Amy ate a very late improvised dinner from the heliport vending machine. Dan crumpled the last bag of Crispy Bacon Frazzles. "What if we throw in an extra two thousand dollars for you to take us there?" he suggested. Everyone turned and looked at him. What? Dan wondered. Can't I be the calm, reasonable one in the room? He realized that he never would have been before the Clue hunt. Of course, before the Clue hunt, he'd also never had access to huge sums of money he could use to bribe people to do what he wanted. "Fine," the helicopter pilot snapped. "I will take you on this crazy mission. Just to look. We will not land on the waves. You will not jump out in parachutes. You will not even unlatch a window unless I say it's safe!"

It was a tense flight. Nellie told Amy and Dan to sleep if they could, but every time Dan closed his eyes he saw the mob of his enemies back at the church. He kept dozing off and jerking awake from nightmares about the other Clue hunters chasing him with pitchforks and torches, or nightmares about the coffin from Shakespeare's grave rising up and zooming after him, or nightmares about Isabel Kabra suddenly showing up to… to… "There it is!" Nellie shrieked. Dan jerked upright. He blinked at the sudden light: The sun was just coming up over the sea. And down below in the bouncing waves there was a small black dot. "See? What did I tell you? There is an island," Nellie said, grinning triumphantly. "Oh, no, no, no," the pilot said. "That's just—" He glanced down at his instrument panel. He flicked one of the dials. He glared at a screen that seemed to be the helicopter version of GPS. "This is impossible! There isn't an island there on any map!"

"Typical Cahill setup," Amy muttered beside Dan. She was speaking too softly for the pilot to hear her over the whir of the helicopter blades. "They've probably been bribing mapmakers for five hundred years to keep that island secret. Wonder how many ships have crashed into it because of that?" "It's like with Lester," Dan said softly. Staring out at the roiling water, Dan could imagine shipwreck victims reaching up desperately from the waves, just as Lester had reached from the quicksand back in Jamaica. "This is why we have to win," Amy whispered back. She'd said the same thing the day Lester died: That they had to finish the hunt on behalf of all the ordinary people who'd been hurt or killed by Cahills fighting to take over the world. Dan agreed, but… he didn't want to be ordinary himself. It was more fun to be in control, to have thousands of dollars to throw around to get his own way. It was easier not to think about any of it.

And, Dan told himself, it didn't matter what their reasons were— for Lester, for the Madrigals, for the memory of Grace or Dan and Amy's parents, just to keep the other teams from getting too much power…. No matter what, Amy and Dan had to win. "And look, the island is big enough to land on." Nellie was gloating in the front seat. Without saying a word, the pilot let the helicopter drop toward the island. Dan's stomach lurched upward— he had a feeling the pilot could have made a much smoother descent if he'd wanted. "Wait!" Dan yelled. "There! That's where we need to land!" The island consisted of a broad, flat, pebbled beach leading up to a field of tall grasses, and then one huge, sheer cliff with only a narrow flat space at the top. Dan couldn't begin to imagine what weird natural forces could have created that setup— maybe it wasn't anything natural. Maybe the layout of the island was a Cahill invention. Dan knew that what he'd seen wasn't natural: a metal

framed doorway at the top of the cliff. And, beside the doorway, a metal panel with pushbutton numbers. "Land beside that door!" Dan yelled. The pilot let out an exasperated burst of air. "Do you know nothing about helicopters?" he asked. "If I try to land there, my blades will hit the door and we will topple off the cliff and die." "Then lower us down to the door on one of those little rope-ladder things people always use in the movies," Amy said. Dan couldn't believe it was Amy suggesting this. "Don't you know how long people have to train to do that?" the pilot asked. "Someone like you, without experience, you would be caught in the draft and blow away and die." "If we don't hit the cliff and die that way instead," Dan muttered under his breath. This guy was just a bundle of laughs. "Then the idea of parachutes—" Nellie began. "You would be blown out to sea," the pilot said.