The Viper's Nest Read online

  “Yeeee-ahhh!” came Kurt’s voice — and Dan was rising over the top, coughing.

  “Hhhhhhh … hhhhhh …” His breaths were contracted wheezes, papery-sounding in the night.

  “Bring him inside!” the old man’s voice said.

  Asthma. Sometimes, in emergencies, adrenaline kicked in and prevented the symptoms. The way it had happened in Seoul. But asthma was unpredictable. And now he felt as if someone had put a cloth over his nose and mouth.

  He felt himself being carried inside and set down on a sofa. “Chew on this,” Kurt said, handing him a tube-like, cactus-ish object, broken to release a white liquid.

  It tasted bland and oozy. Dan gagged at first but forced himself to swallow. Amy sat by his side until he was breathing easy again.

  And then she freaked.

  “How could you have done that?” she said, then glared at Nellie. “And you — you’re supposed to take care of us, not encourage Dan’s stupid ideas!”

  “But —” Dan sputtered.

  Amy wasn’t letting him have a word. “Don’t you get it? We’re all we have, Dan! Just you and me!”

  “I — I found Churchill’s message!” he said.

  “You what?” Kurt said.

  “You what?” Amy repeated.

  Dan reached into his back pocket and took out the rubbing. “It was on the wall of the mine shaft!”

  “Ex-mine shaft,” Kurt said. “A big sinkhole of rocks and soil now.”

  “A sinkhole!” Amy echoed.

  Kurt lifted a powerful flashlight from a window ledge and shone it out over a section of sunken earth.

  “I — I would have been buried in that?” Dan said.

  “Don’t think about that, my friend,” Kurt said. “Let’s have a look.”

  Dan glanced at his sister. “Aren’t you going to repeat what your new boyfriend said?” Before she could react, he spread out his wall rubbing on the table:

  Dan stared at it in silence, reading it over and over.

  “WLSC …” Kurt said.

  “Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill!” Amy added.

  “You guys make a great team,” Dan remarked. Once again, Amy blushed.

  The old man was beaming. “Will you look at that! We didn’t even know he’d been hiding in that shaft!”

  “Well, some of us did,” Kurt murmured. “But … what does the writing mean? It’s completely daft. Like the ravings of a madman.”

  “Word,” Nellie agreed. “The dude was shut up for weeks in a mine shaft. Who wouldn’t go a little postal?”

  Kurt burst out laughing. “ ‘We hit a shark’?”

  Churchill going postal. Madman. Daft ravings.

  Dan did the only thing that made sense.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said, holding up the sheet. “Total nonsense. Let’s forget any of us ever saw it.”

  As Amy and Nellie stared, open-mouthed, he ripped the secret message into small pieces.

  Amy couldn’t believe it.

  Something had happened between her and Kurt. She couldn’t really explain it. Yes, they’d played chess. But there had been more to it than that. Like her senses had all been suddenly plugged in.

  For the first time in weeks, she had been able to think about something other than the hunt.

  Then, just like that, she had to go.

  There was barely time for a good-bye.

  “Good luck,” Kurt had told her.

  But all she felt was the bad luck of the moment.

  And then there was Dan’s destruction of Churchill’s message.

  “How could you do that?” she asked as Nellie sped them away from the Witbank mine … and Kurt.

  Her brother looked at her in disbelief. “Come on, Amy. You didn’t think that just because I ripped it up —”

  “I know, I know, you memorized it!” Amy said. “It’s the Dan Cahill Mental Gymnastics Show. But that’s not the point! How could you have taken that incredibly stupid risk in the mine? You could have died! Again!”

  “I found what no one else has found in a hundred years,” Dan said, “so maybe you say, like, thanks?”

  “He also tricked those two guys into thinking the paper meant nothing,” Nellie said.

  “You’re just as bad as he is!” Amy shot back.

  Dan held up a finger. “Winston Churchill once said, ‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’”

  “How do you know that?” Amy asked.

  “It’s right there, on the page your book is open to,” Dan said, pointing to the biography on the car seat. “Churchill was all about hidden messages. He worked with spies. I locked this baby in my head, dude.”

  On the other blank page Nellie had given him he wrote out what he had found in the mine:

  “Churchill wasn’t crazy,” Dan said. “And he wasn’t drunk. I’m betting this all means something.”

  Amy stared at the words. “ ‘We hit a shark’?”

  “I’m buying the nutcase scenario,” Nellie said.

  “Okay, okay, it sounds a little weird, but let’s think,” Dan said. “Isn’t that what you do when you’re attacked by a shark — hit it on its snout?”

  “Churchill just escaped from prison, right?” Nellie said. “So maybe it’s some English expression for victory. Like, ‘Ho-ho, we really hit a shark there, didn’t we, old chap?’ Very Kabra, don’t you think?”

  “Dan?” Amy said. “Remember that code we had to solve on Uncle Alistair’s estate, to open the hatch in his backyard? Where the hint was actually a play on words? What if this thing is actually two parts — the top part is the code, and the bottom part is the instructions for decoding it?”

  “Hmm …” Dan looked at the last few lines of the message. “So, ‘O confused letters’ would be part of the instructions.”

  “Yup, and ‘confused’ could be a code for ‘scrambled.’ Scrambled letters means an anagram,” Amy said. “And ‘flee’ — that means the same thing as ‘leave’ in Uncle Alistair’s puzzle. You have to take something away, like a letter or word …”

  “Lover!” Dan said. “That’s it. He doesn’t mean a real lover. He means the word l-o-v-e-r! And ‘from these lines’ — five letters, five lines! — wait, I think I know …”

  Dan slapped his forehead. “Agggh, it’s in Dutch.”

  “I don’t think so,” Amy said. “Churchill was a Brit, not a Boer. So now we unscramble. Okay, that second to last word is easy—with.”

  “Shaka!” Dan blurted out. “That’s the last word! So the final words are with Shaka! Okay, I’ll get the rest of it in two minutes. Time me. Go ahead.”

  But Amy was staring at the first word already. “Dan, I think we hit the jackpot.”

  Dan’s face lit up, the way it did whenever the supermarket stocked Red Sox ice cream. Slowly, he attacked the puzzle and didn’t stop until he’d finished:

  “Tomas ingredient in the ground with Shaka!” Dan blurted.

  “That was three minutes seven seconds,” Nellie remarked.

  “He knew!” Amy said. “Churchill knew the location of the Tomas clue!”

  “He must have found out while in prison,” Dan said. “Or maybe there was a Cahill running the mine.”

  “So … the clue must be buried with Shaka’s corpse,” Amy said.

  “Now we’re talking!” Dan replied.

  “Ew,” Nellie called from the front seat. “We have to dig up a body?”

  “Dan?” Amy asked. “Where is Shaka buried?”

  Dan took out his Shaka book and leafed to the end. “Well, no one is one hundred percent sure. But legend has it he was killed in a place called Durban, which is in the KwaZulu-Natal province.”

  “Which is, uh, where?” Nellie said.

  “Past the Mpumalanga province,” Dan replied.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  But Dan was looking at the bottom of the code sheet. “One thing. What about these lotto numbers?”

  Amy looked at
them closely. “They look like longitude/latitude coordinates. Can we find out where it is?”

  Dan began fiddling with the GPS. “Have Carlos, will travel.”

  The phone rang just as Professor Robert Bardsley was listening to the final strains of the Mahler “Resurrection” symphony. “Oh, dear, Winifred?” he said, wiping away a tear as he picked up the receiver. “You caught me at an emotional moment.”

  As he listened to the voice at the other end, his tears dried. He turned off the music. “You met who? Yes, I know she had grandchildren — how old? — that’s wonderful. How sad she’s gone. So you showed them the Churchill letter? Aha … yes, I don’t know why the secrecy, either. A rather tepid love poem, if you ask me. Oh, I’m sure they are remarkable children. Pah, not to worry, neglecting to give them my contact info was fine. Why would they want to meet a tired old academic like me? Thank you for the call … tea indeed, perhaps when I’m in Joburg in July. Yes, good night.”

  Hanging up the phone, Professor Bardsley packed a few CDs, a telescope, a pitchpipe, and a set of infrared glasses into a canvas bag and peered out the front door. The street was clear, as far as he could see. But he would need to take precautions.

  He ducked back in, dialed a number, and reached voice mail. “Hello, Nsizwa, this is Bardsley. I will need you to take over rehearsal tomorrow morning, as I have been called away for the day.” Pausing a moment, he added, “Come to think of it, I may need the group. You shall hear from me soon….”

  On his way out, he lifted a floppy hat from atop his closet shelf, and a hunting knife.

  “Ending a sentence with a preposition,” said the official at the Shaka Museum in Durban, “is something up with which I shall not put!”

  “Say what?” Dan was not in the mood for this. The ride the previous night had taken hours. And now, after a few hours sleep in Durban, the center of the KwaZulu-Natal province, and a trip to the museum, all he had asked for was the bathroom. Not a grammar lesson.

  The guide smiled. “You are Churchill people, no? You don’t recognize your hero’s quote? He was famous for saying it to someone like you. You said, ‘Where’s the bathroom at?’ This is ending a sentence with a preposition! Very bad!”

  “Um, I gotta go, Mister …” Dan said.

  “Cole,” the man said. “First door on your right.”

  On the way in, Dan nearly collided with an ancient guy whose face was nearly skeletal. “Sorry, dude.”

  When he was finally relieved, Dan skipped back outside. The old man, moving very slowly, hadn’t even made it across the room.

  “Over the years, from time to time,” Mr. Cole was saying to Nellie and Amy, “some people have inquired about the relationship between Churchill and Shaka Zulu. Father doesn’t like those visitors very much.” He gestured toward the old man.

  “Well, Churchill couldn’t have had a relationship with Shaka,” Amy pointed out. “He was born almost fifty years after Shaka died.”

  “Indeed,” Mr. Cole said. “We told this to our visitors time and again. Then, one day, after a visit, one of our prized possessions disappeared — a very large shield that belonged to Shaka. My father was on duty at the time, and he has never forgiven himself.”

  “The shield these guys took?” Dan said, pulling his Shaka card out of his pocket and turning it toward the man. “Did it look like this?”

  Mr. Cole nodded. “Very much so.”

  “And this group — did they happen to be, like, big?” Dan asked. “And, like, loud and bossy?”

  He couldn’t help noticing that the old man had almost reached them. The man was scowling, and when he spoke, his voice was a whispery rasp. “Why do you want to know about Churchill?” he demanded.

  “Father, please, these are children, not thieves.” Mr. Cole smiled apologetically. “My great-grandfather— my father’s grandfather—knew Churchill.”

  “Churchill was sneaky,” the old man said. “Obsessed with Shaka. That is why he traveled to South Africa. Not to report. Not to fight. To find out about the isipho.”

  Dan glanced warily at his sister, then back at the old man, whose eyes were reddening. “Isipho?”

  “It is something Shaka gave to the Europeans,” the old man said. “They saved his life with their medicine, and he thought they had magic powers. But they were looking for something, too. Something the Zulu had. Something the Europeans took and transformed into a potion. It was said to have magnified his powers.”

  Amy’s eyes were saying exactly what Dan was thinking. Sounds like Cahills.

  “A p-potion?” Amy asked.

  “Nonsense, of course!” the old man shot back. “But they said Shaka could be one of them — their family. Shaka trusted them! He should have trusted no one! Shaka should have given Fynn the aniklwa!”

  “Father, please, let us not start again,” Mr. Cole said. As he led his father back to the exhibit, he gave Dan an apologetic shrug. “Feel free to explore.”

  “The Tomas!” Amy said as Nellie turned onto the highway. “That’s who Mr. Cole was talking about.”

  “Big meatheads asking about Shaka and Churchill,” Nellie said. “That’d make sense.”

  “And stealing a shield that just happened to have the Tomas crest on it,” Dan remarked, his nose buried in his Shaka biography.

  “Remember what Mr. Holt was whining about,” Amy said. “The other Tomas finding the clue, blah blah blah? I thought he was being paranoid, but maybe he was right. Maybe the thieves who visited this museum were the ones who eventually found the clue.”

  “Fynn — okay, here he is!” Dan said, pointing to a page in the Shaka biography. “This is the guy the old man was talking about — Henry Francis Fynn. After a battle, he gave Shaka medical help and weapons. Shaka was so grateful he allowed the Brits to hang out in the Zulu kingdom. Then things started going bad. Way bad. Years later, Fynn was dissing Shaka in some book. Saying he was a monster.”

  Amy nodded. “England was trying to colonize South Africa, mostly because of the diamonds.”

  “Right!” Dan said. “And anyway, even without the European rifles Shaka was a superstar. Before him, tribes would throw long spears at each other and wait. Like, ho hum, arrow arrow in the air, hey, want some coffee? Shaka said no way, José — well, maybe not José but the Zulu equivalent — short spears are better! Then you can go right up to your enemy’s ugly face and wham! Stab! Arrrrgghh!”

  “Have you considered a writing career?” Nellie said.

  “Does your book say what an isipho is?” Amy asked.

  “Negatory,” Dan said, shaking his head.

  “Dan …” Amy said. “Fynn and the other Europeans … they told Shaka he was one of the family. That’s what the old man said. Maybe Shaka was a Cahill after all. Not by birth, but because of something they exchanged. The isipho.”

  Following Carlos’s guidance, Nellie drove out of Durban going northwest toward -29.086341 / 31.32817. Small villages dotted the countryside, each a cluster of circular mud-brick huts with tightly thatched roofs. In one village, a group of men herded cattle into a rickety wooden pen. In another, Dan exchanged waves with a team making bricks out of mud, stacking them in perfect red-brown piles. Nellie had to swerve to avoid a group of women walking along the road, each balancing what looked like an entire tree’s-worth of branches on her head. And an outdoor classroom of small children looked up idly as the Yugo passed, just as bored as American kids.

  “Road not detected,” Carlos was saying now. “Make a right turn when possible.”

  Nellie stopped. To their right was a crowd of people spread out among blankets covered with clothes, beads, crafts, and containers of food. Around the perimeter people sang and danced, children ran around playing games, and older people sat like kings and queens as the others rushed to entertain and feed them. Most of the villagers wore everyday Western-type clothing, but a few were dressed in colorful feathers, calfskins, and beaded dresses.

  “A street fair,” Dan said, “without the street.�
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  “Sawubona! Welcome!” one of the vendors called out, a young man dressed in what looked like leopard skin, complete with a leopard headband. He gestured to the bounty around him and spoke in a clipped, heavy accent that sounded vaguely British. “We have beads, statues, food! Join us! I am Mondli—Mondli, the Zulu word for one who feeds! And you?”

  “Dan,” Dan said. “The American word for one who eats. What’s the occasion?”

  “Pension day! The elders in our community receive pay every month. And we respect our elders. So we celebrate, and they buy!” Mondli let out a laugh and then held out an elaborate beaded skirt toward Amy. “For the young lady?”

  “It’s more … Nellie’s style,” Amy said.

  But Nellie was looking off into the distance. “Um, guys? According to Carlos, we’re going there.”

  Dan followed her gaze. Beyond the fair, a sloping field rose steeply upward, dotted with rugged rock formations. At the top, a distant herd of long-horned antelopes grazed quietly. A wooded area stretched down a slope to the left. But Nellie was looking at a squat white building at the top of the hill.

  “There?” Mondli said. “Are you certain? May I ask, what business do you have?”

  “We’re … um, researching Zulu culture,” Dan said. Amy shot him a lame-o look.

  “Ah, well, in that case, stay with us here,” Mondli said. He gestured toward the hill and frowned. “The people who built this place are not Zulu.”

  “Who are they?” Dan asked.

  Mondli shrugged. “White people, yellow people, dark people — a factory. They told us they would bring jobs. But the people who went to work there—they changed.”

  “Changed?” Nellie said. “In what way?”

  “Secrets,” Mondli said with disgust. “They never would tell us. Very important. They said our people will benefit, but we have not seen that. Some of our young men and women disappeared. The company said they have been transferred. To secret locations.”

  One of the elders, who had been sitting close by in a beach chair, now walked toward them. He was barefoot and wearing plain, loose-fitting clothes. “Tokoloshe!“ he said, a shaky finger pointing up the hill. “Tokoloshe!”