As he leaned over the pit, he could clearly make out the shapes now. They weren’t bones at all. They were golden cylinders, some as big as fists or even forearms. Each shape was a thick shaft surrounded by a coil, like a screw with the caps and pointed tips shaved off.
Max shut off the phone, jammed it into his pocket, and reached down into the pit. His fingers closed around one of the odd objects. It was warm. As he lifted it upward, it seemed to glow with his touch, but that might have been the reflection of the sun. Quickly he shoved it into his pocket.
A moment later, Sergei was pulling him back by the shoulders. “We have problem,” he said.
“The coils, Sergei—they’re at the bottom of the pit!” Max said.
Over Sergei’s shoulder, Max could see that neither Fyodor nor Alex nor Bitsy was paying him a scrap of attention. They were all looking forward, over his shoulder.
“Bravo,” Sergei said. “But we have to go.”
Max spun around. Looming out of the dusk, as if arising from the stones themselves, was a group of men and women dressed in ragged gray robes. All Max could see of their faces were eyes staring out of blackness. He assumed they were wearing face masks or had covered their faces with tar, until they drew closer.
That was when he realized the covering was hair—hair across cheeks, hair tufting on noses and foreheads.
In their arms were wooden clubs embedded with sharp, jutting stones.
27
MAX leaped to his feet. “We come in peace!” he cried out.
Alex pulled him back from the rim of the pit. “Let’s assume they don’t understand English!”
The robed gang approached the other side of the hole and stopped, looking like hairy Druid priests. Fyodor was talking to them in Russian now, his arms extended to the sides, palms up.
“What’s he doing?” Bitsy asked.
“I don’t know, but at least it’s not fists,” Max said. “Fists would be bad. Let’s just go.”
“Go where?” Alex said, glancing up the cliff wall. “We’re trapped.”
“Wolf people . . .” Sergei called over his shoulder. “Amazing, no? Like Donner said!”
When Fyodor finished speaking, one of the gang answered him in a sharp, high-pitched voice.
Sergei let out a loud snort. “Haaaa! Oh. Sorry. Sorry.” He turned away, with his hand over his mouth. “Woman with beard! Is just funny.”
Alex stared at him, aghast. “Are you serious?” Alex said. “Did you just diss her to her face?”
“Guys . . . maybe we can slip away?” Max said. “Walk down the banks . . . ?”
“OK . . . OK . . . I’m sorry.” Sergei swallowed back another laugh as he stared at Fyodor, listening hard to the old man’s conversation. “Fyodor says these people very primitive, living here in caves for many generations. These coils . . . they all fall from sky one day, like holy rain. They do things—make people sick, punish for bad hunting season, blah blah blah, the usual local superstitions. Before this, the tribe looked like everyone else. After, they changed.” Sergei turned to Max. “Aha. Probably radioactive, no? Giving mutations! So what do these people do? Destroy coils like normal people would? No! They think coils are sacred. They believe they must protect holy coils from intruders. They are angry. Because someone else come here yesterday. English man. Very nice. Ate food, learned how to do sacred dance, and so on. Then boom, he stole from this pit.”
“Sacred dance?” Bitsy repeated.
“Sounds like Nigel,” Alex said.
“Ni . . . gel,” one of the wolf people grumbled. A couple of others nodded.
Max’s jaw dropped. “I don’t believe this. He got here first . . .”
“Friend of yours?” Sergei asked.
Max took a deep breath and choked on the acrid smell of ammonia. Ammonia came from betrayal. Nigel had tricked them. “He stole from us,” Max said. “Now he stole from these people, and he’s probably on to the next place, and our mission just blew up in our faces . . .”
“Max, we still have a chance,” Alex said. “Nigel hasn’t taken it all, and we can find him.” She turned to Sergei. “Look, Fyodor knows these people. They trust him. Talk to him. Maybe he can convince them we’re friendly, nonflying humans. There are so many of these coils. They can spare one or two.”
“But—” Max protested.
“Shhh,” Alex said.
“I will negotiate directly.” Sergei took a deep breath and sucked in his ample gut. “I have best words. I am best negotiator. It is what I do.”
He stepped toward the pit and yelled something in Russian that was more a bark than a sentence. Fyodor let out a gasp. Across the pit, the wolf people glared back in stony silence. Now several of them were speaking at once. Some were waving their arms in a way that did not seem friendly.
“Sergei, what did you say?” Bitsy asked.
“A joke about hairy monster, just to lighten things,” Sergei said. “Humor is important step in negotiating.”
“Let’s just go!” Max said, digging into his pocket.
“Will you stop it, Max?” Bitsy said. “We still need—”
Before she could finish, Max held out the golden coil he’d swiped.
Alex and Bitsy fell silent. Max glanced at Sergei. The guide was training his phone on the group now, taking a video. “What is he doing?” Max said.
“Getting the wolf people angry, it looks like,” Bitsy said.
“Tell him what we have!” Bitsy said.
“What if one of them understands English?” Alex said. “They’ll come after us.”
“If they don’t go after him first!” Max cupped his hands over his mouth and yelled, “Sergei, stop negotiating! Let’s go! I have a you-know-what!”
Sergei spun around. “You took coil? Now you tell me?”
He shoved his phone back in his pocket. But the people were moving around the pit, coming closer. Fyodor’s face was ashen, his eyes darting from the gang to Sergei. With a tight smile, Sergei threw them a salute and called out, “Do svidaniya!” As he turned to run away, someone from the back of the crowd threw a fist-size rock. It rose and fell across the orange disk of the sun, in a straight path for Sergei.
“Duck, Sergei!” Max shouted.
With a soft thud, the rock hit the back of Sergei’s head, and he dropped to the ground. The wolf people were surrounding him now. Max, Alex, and Bitsy rushed in, but they hadn’t gotten more than a few feet when Sergei sprang to his feet. He turned to his attackers and bellowed a honking cry. With a leap, he decked one of the wolf people with a solid martial-arts kick to the jaw. He spun through the air, grunting and kicking like an overweight kung fu film star. The wolf people backed away, looking more baffled than scared.
“Some negotiator,” Alex remarked.
Max leaped at Sergei, trying to grab his arm. But the guide was spinning again, and he landed a kick that sent one of the robed people staggering toward the hole. It was a kid whose face was only lightly tufted with fine hair, who was now windmilling arms, panicking.
As the kid fell in backward with a scream, Max knew by the sound that it was a girl. He sprinted toward the hole as Sergei continued his whirling display. Leaping over a fallen man, Max dropped to the ground as a splintered wooden club flew by his face.
“Max, what are you up to, are you crazy?” came Alex’s voice.
Max ignored the plea, crawling the last few feet to the rim. The pit wasn’t very deep, but the young woman had fallen badly. She writhed on a bed of golden coils, crying in pain.
Max leaned over the edge and reached down. “Grab on! Take my hand!”
Tentatively, the girl rose to her feet. With a grimace, she lifted her arm, but the other one dangled by her side. Max stretched until he was able to clasp her hand. “I’ve got you! You don’t need the other hand. Just dig in to the wall with your legs!”
She just stared back blankly, so he tightened his grip and yanked hard. Letting out a shriek, she planted the soles of her feet on the side of t
he hole.
Max rocked back to a sitting position. Leaning backward, he pulled as hard as he could. “Heave . . . ho!”
The girl scrambled over the top. But she wasn’t looking at Max now. Her eyes were the size of saucers, staring at something over Max’s head. She yanked her hand free and then used it to swat Max aside. He yowled in surprise, tumbling away.
From behind him, a club thudded to the earth, sending up a cloud of dust. The girl leaped at the attacker, yelling at him, smacking him with her good arm. Max had no doubts about her toughness now. He bolted through the mob—and ran smack into Bitsy and Alex.
“What did you just do?” Bitsy shouted.
Max kept running. “What I had to do. Hurry!”
Now Sergei was lumbering toward them, moving faster than Max imagined he could. “We go now!” he commanded.
“Excellent idea!” Alex yelled.
They sped along the rocky bank, their panting breath sending up clouds of white into the darkening sky. Max looked over his shoulder. The sun was almost to the horizon now, and the scene was still chaotic and confused near the pit. Some of the wolf people were tending to the injured girl, some arguing with Fyodor, others fighting among themselves.
“There is place to climb—not far away!” Sergei shouted. “Is not cliff there. Just rock scramble!”
The bank was narrowing now, and Max had to veer to avoid stepping in water.
Water.
He stopped short, feeling the cold wetness seeping into his shoes. The words of their original mission shot through his brain: Add the salubrious and catalytically marvelous effects upon this substance, derived from the following water sources . . . Preserved with the tincture of coil dust from the Kozhim River . . . “Wait!” he said. “We’re not done. It’s not just the coil. We need the water source. Like we had with the hippo bones.”
He unhooked his pack and removed one of the empty vials. Kneeling, he scooped up water from the river, then dropped the coil inside.
It began to glow.
“My cousin is a genius,” Alex said.
With a smile, Max tightened the top and put it back into his pack. “How much farther?” he asked Sergei.
The guide thought for a moment. “In kilometers?” he asked. “Or hours?”
“I’m already in pain,” Alex groaned.
With a leap and a whoop, Sergei began running along the edge of the cliff. Alex, Bitsy, and Max trudged behind, as the color began to drain from the sky.
28
IT felt like someone had snuck inside Max’s legs and was twanging each muscle as if it were a guitar string.
Sergei’s route included a two-hour hike to a break in the wall, followed by a rock climb in the dark. By the time the sun was dropping below the horizon, they’d all banged their knees and elbows and ankles, and by the end of it Bitsy nearly had to be carried aboard the helicopter.
Now, on the chopper flight over the night-blackened landscape, Max struggled to sleep. But the pain in his body wasn’t allowing it. And his brain reeled.
The vial in his backpack was glowing. There was no doubt about that. Max opened the pack every few seconds to check. The coil had sunk to the bottom, and it was now a dull gray. But the water around it pulsed and churned orange, as if there were some life force inside. There had to be an explanation for this. Some kind of chemical reaction. The wolf people thought it was magical, but Max didn’t believe in magic. In life, magic was just facts in disguise.
In the cockpit, Sergei was muttering in rapid-fire Russian through his headset. Bitsy was looking over the list of locations, and Alex was deep in thought. “You awake, Max?” she said.
“Yeah,” Max answered.
“I’m feeling guilty,” Alex said.
“I’m smelling garlic,” Max said. “So, yeah, me too. I mean, I’m really happy we got this. I keep thinking about Evelyn in the hospital. And now we’re a step closer. So that’s good. But those wolf people . . . this stuff was so important to them. And we just wrecked their world.”
“Whatever is in those coils, it’s affecting them in a strange way, Max. Changing their hormonal balances, something. I don’t think they’re healthy, not really. I’m thinking that if we succeed, if we get all the ingredients to this serum, we can return and bring it to them. We owe them that.”
“Yeah, good idea. Maybe you can use my glider.” Max thought a moment. “The garlic is fading.”
“That’s the spirit,” Alex said.
Bitsy looked up from the list. “I won’t even begin to try to understand that last bit of conversation. But are we agreed that our next stop should be the closest one as the crow flies?”
“Kathmandu,” Max said. “Just south of the Himalaya. Most people say ‘Himalayas,’ but himal means ‘mountain’ and aya means ‘range.’ So Himalaya means ‘mountain range’ and you don’t have to add an s. Kathmandu is in one of the three major valleys of Nepal. Also, you know someone there. You said so when we first translated this message.”
“You amaze me,” Bitsy said.
“God is in the factoids,” Max replied.
Bitsy took a deep breath. “I have been educated in international schools. Many I.S. teachers migrate from one country to another, so my former teachers are now all over the world—and one of them runs a British school in Kathmandu. If you let me use one of your phones, I will contact her. Have you reached Brandon? Can he meet us in Perm with the jet?”
“I texted him,” Alex said. “He says the Perm airport is very tight about scheduling outside private craft. We’d have to meet him back in Moscow.”
Bitsy blanched. “No. Absolutely not. I refuse to take that tedious Trans-Siberian Railway ride all the way back!”
Alex called to the front of the chopper: “Sergei, are there direct commercial flights from Perm to Kathmandu?”
Sergei snorted. “Big passenger planes? Not Perm. You would have to go through Moscow. Although there is faster way—charter flight yourself. If you have money.”
“We have a jet,” Alex said with a sigh. “But our pilot is in Moscow too. And they won’t let in private craft from the outside.”
From the side, Max could see a smile sprouting on Sergei’s face. “Well,” he said, “he is not only pilot in world . . .”
They were on the ground in a half hour. In another half hour, Sergei had negotiated a small private jet. And a half hour later, they were high above Siberia, heading south. The plane had two seats up front. The copilot seat was empty, Bitsy and Alex shared the bench seat behind Sergei, and Max was alone on the rear bench. The seats were made of slightly worn plastic, and the cabin had the faint smell of old underwear.
“Comfy?” Sergei said.
“Nothing that a little Febreze couldn’t improve,” Bitsy said.
“Or a nice bed, maybe with lacy curtains,” Alex replied. “It’s been a long day.”
It wasn’t until Bitsy and Alex were fast asleep, pretzeled together on the long seat, that Max began to feel the tiniest bit tired. As he stretched out, yawning, he caught a glimpse of Sergei’s old-fashioned TV-screen navigation system. And he saw something familiar on the screen.
His own face.
Max’s eyes sprang open. It wasn’t just him. Bitsy’s and Alex’s faces were there too. A voice was speaking very urgent-sounding Russian. Max had no idea what it was saying, but a large phone number was flashing at the bottom of the screen.
And somewhere in there he heard another familiar name—“Pirgos Dirou.”
Max tapped Alex on the shoulder. Before she could react, he put his finger to her lips, shushing her. Quietly Max pointed to the screen. Alex’s eyes widened.
While the image played, Sergei was on his walkie-talkie, droning in Russian. Max could hear the words “Kozhim” and “Kathmandu.” He was telling someone where he’d been and where he was going.
Alex nimbly extracted herself from her seat and squeezed around it to join Max. “That looks like a wanted poster!” she whispered.
; “I guess we’re criminals,” Max said.
“But why?”
Max checked if Sergei could see them, but the pilot was still busy talking. “The voice on that broadcast said something about Pirgos Dirou . . . the caves,” Max whispered.
“The police were after us, and we escaped,” Alex whispered back. “Stealing the artifacts is one crime. Evading the law is a whole other one. Someone must have tipped them off that we went to an airport—”
“Frangitsa, at the rental place! Or Nigel.” Max shook his head in confusion. “So we’re international fugitives? Because of a hippo bone that we don’t even have anymore?”
Alex glanced again toward Sergei. “We can’t trust him. I’ll wake up Bitsy. She needs to know. We have to make a plan to ditch him.”
“There are parachutes in the back,” Max said.
“Ha-ha, Max,” Alex said, glaring at him. “Just ha-ha-ha.”
29
THE Hotel Himalaya had a grand breakfast, with a spectacular view of a courtyard filled with palms. Outside it was hot, polluted, and crowded, as always in Kathmandu. But how refreshing to be in a place where the climate was cool and the impeccably dressed staff greeted you by name.
“Good morning, Mr. Hanscombe,” said the maître d’ with a courteous bow. “The gentleman from Interpol is waiting. Follow me and watch your step.”
Nigel was a sucker for a big entrance. He took the steps at a leap and finished with a little pirouette. A man at the table by the window looked up from a folded newspaper, startled by the move. Despite being indoors, he was wearing a trench coat and a brimmed hat.
“Hrrm,” he said.
The nice maître d’ pulled out the opposite seat, and Nigel handed him a crisp ten-dollar bill. It was always good, he thought, to be generous with the help. Turning to the rumpled man, he said, “Are we expected to have a password of some sort?”