Chapter 1

THE SWORD THIEF PETER LORANUS

CHAPTER 1 They were toast. Amy Cahill eyed the battered black duffel bag rumbling up the airport conveyor belt. It bulged at the corners. The sign above the belt said THANK YOU FOR VISITING VENICE: RANDOM PIECES OF CHECKED LUGGAGE WILL BE SEARCHED in five languages. "Oh, great," Amy said. "How random is 'random'?" "I told you, a ninja warrior must always keep his swords in his carry-on," whispered her brother, Dan, who had been operating on brain deficit for as long as Amy could remember. "Excuse me, Jackie Chan, but carry-on luggage is always X-rayed," Amy whispered back. "There are extra-special rules about samurai swords in backpacks. Even if they belong to scrawny, delusional eleven-year-olds who think they're

ninjas." "What was wrong with 'we need them to slice the veal parmigiana'?" Dan said. "It would have worked fine. The Italians understand food." "Can you understand 'five to twenty years, no parole'?" Dan shrugged. He lifted up a mesh-sided pet carrier, inside of which a very disgruntled-looking Egyptian Mau was eyeing him suspiciously. "Byebye, Saladin," he sang into the mesh. "Remember, when we get to Tokyo… red snapper sushi every night!" "Mrrp?" whined Saladin from inside the carrier, as Dan set it gently onto the conveyor belt. "Mmmm, hmm, ohh… aaaaaaaaghhhh!" came a strangled yelp from behind them. Although everyone else in the vicinity was turning with a look of alarm, Amy and Dan knew it was their au pair, Nellie Gomez, dancing to a tune on her iPod. She didn't care that she sounded like a dying meerkat, which was one of the many cool things about Nellie Gomez. Amy watched as the carrier disappeared

through the cargo window. If the officials did search the bag, there would be alarms. Screaming Italian cops. She, Dan, and Nellie would have to run. Not that they weren't used to that. They'd been running a lot lately. It began the day they accepted the challenge in their grandmother Grace's will. They'd had to go to her mansion in Massachusetts for that— and immediately afterward the mansion went up in flames. Since then, they'd nearly been killed in a collapsing building in Philadelphia, attacked by monks in Austria, and chased by boats through the canals of Venice. They'd been the target of dirty tricks from every branch of the Cahill family. Once in a while— like every three seconds— Amy wondered why the heck they were doing this. She and Dan could have opted for a cool million dollars each, like a lot of Cahill family members did. But Grace had offered another choice: a race for 39 Clues to a secret that had been hidden for centuries, the greatest source of power the world had known. Until then, Amy and Dan had been leading

pretty lame, ordinary lives. After their parents had died seven years ago, their crabby Aunt Beatrice had taken them in— and the only cool thing she'd ever done was hire Nellie. But now they knew they were part of something way bigger, a huge family that included ancestors like Ben Franklin and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It seemed like all the great geniuses of the world had been Cahills. That was pretty amazing. "Hey, Amy, did you ever want to, like, get on the conveyor belt and see what happened? Like, 'Hey, don't mind me, I'm just hanging with the cargo'?" And then there was Dan. "Come on!" Amy grabbed her brother by the arm and headed for the departure gates. Nellie was right on their heels, spinning the wheel of her iPod with one hand and adjusting her snake nose ring with the other. Amy eyed the airport clock. 2:13. The flight was scheduled to leave at 2:37. This was an international flight. You were supposed to arrive at the airport two hours in advance, not twenty

four minutes. "We're not going to make it!" Amy said. Now they were running toward gate 4, dodging other passengers. "Guess they didn't find Rufus and Remus, huh?" Dan called out. "Who are Rufus and Remus?" Amy asked. "The swords!" Dan said. "I named them after the founders of Italy." "It's Romulus and Remus," Amy hissed. "And they founded Rome. And don't ever say that word!" "Rome?" "No—s-w-o-r-d." Amy dropped her voice to a whisper as they pulled up to the rear of a very long security line. "Do you want us to go to j-a-il?" "O-o-p-s." "O-O-O-O…" Nellie wailed off-key to some unidentifiable punk track. The security line seemed to take, like, thirty- two hours. The worst part for Amy, as always, was having to take off her jade necklace to go through