The Falcon's Feather Read online

  “We’ve got another problem.”

  “Besides the fact that he’s still alive?”

  “Jaguar says the boy has access to the journal—”

  “What? I thought you said you’d searched the ship.”

  “We did. I don’t know how he’s doing it—”

  “Just finish the job,” barked Prescott.

  “I’ll need a little more time to sort it out.”

  “A little is all you’ve got.”

  “I’m taking a big risk here.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “I mean, I’m jeopardizing everything I’ve worked for.”

  Prescott stiffened as the realization set in. “You want more money.”

  Zebra didn’t confirm it. Or deny it.

  “How much?” clipped Prescott.

  “Twenty percent. Lion can handle that.”

  “You’re playing with fire, Zebra.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  Prescott ended the call. This was all he needed. Not only had their plans unraveled, but now Zebra was getting greedy. Brume was going to be furious. Prescott knew he should probably get back to Washington, D.C. However, before he left Hawaii, he had one last place to search for the journal. Prescott headed downstairs and through the lobby, turning left out of the hotel. Breaking into a business at night was tricky. The Goofy Foot was on the first floor. If he could have a look around now, see what kind of alarm system he was dealing with, it could be done.

  A few blocks down, he spotted the purple sign on the other side of the street. In the front windows, tanned mannequins in sunglasses modeled wet suits, shorts, and tees, while coolly leaning against their surfboards. He stepped inside the corner shop, a tiny bell on the door announcing him.

  “Good afternoon,” said a muscular, dark-haired man behind the counter. He wore a lime-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt that was so bright it stung Prescott’s eyes. “What can I do for you?”

  “Do you rent surf equipment?”

  “We do, when surfing conditions are safe, as they are today. What are you in the market for? Shortboard? Longboard? Hybrid? Foil board?”

  “Um…I have to confess, I’m sort of new at this.”

  “I figured,” he chuckled. “We don’t get cowboy boots in here too often.”

  “You must have heard my story a million times: High-powered business executive trades in the pressure-packed corporate world for the simple life in paradise.”

  “Know it?” He threw out his arms. “I’m living it.”

  Prescott gave an easy grin. “I hope to do the same.”

  “Anything’s possible, if you’re willing to work for it. That’s what I always tell my son.”

  “You have a son? Me too. He’s twelve.”

  “No kidding? Mine is twelve, too, though he’ll be thirteen soon.” He made a terrified face. “Teenagers!”

  Laughing, Prescott held out his hand. “Tom London.”

  The man took it. “Marco Coronado. By the way, I give surfing lessons, if you’re interested.”

  “I am,” said Prescott. “I definitely am.”

  STANDING at the top of the gangway, Cruz gazed out at the fishing village of Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Orion had reached the northernmost point of human civilization! Being only about 650 miles from the North Pole, Cruz had expected Longyearbyen to be a lonely place: cold and icy and barren. It wasn’t. It was beautiful, just as Bryndis had said. And colorful, too.

  His eyes swept from the dark teal waters of the harbor to the cocoa-colored tidal flats to the steep, snow-covered hills that surrounded the port town. And everywhere, the color red—red roofs, red homes, red buildings. Cruz wondered if the bright red was meant to help the villagers brave the dark winters. It was not yet 3:30 in the afternoon, but the setting sun was already painting the flat-topped mountains a rosy pink. They’d only had daylight for about six hours today. In geography class, Dr. Modi had explained that in another two weeks, there would be no sunrise at all in the Arctic. During the polar night, the sun would remain below the horizon until mid-February. It was a stark contrast to the polar day of the spring and summer months, when the sun never set here. How weird it must be, Cruz thought, to live in a place with no sunlight in the winter and no darkness in the summer. Weird, but fun. No one to tell you when to go to bed or when to wake up! A gust of Arctic wind sliced through him, and Cruz zipped up his hide-and-seek jacket. He was wearing it camouflage side out, as were the rest of the explorers. The temperature, which had barely gotten out of the teens during the day, was quickly plummeting. Cruz heard a muffled voice. Next to him, Emmett was bundled up in his jacket, too. He also wore a thick butter yellow knit cap with a mouth covering, a matching bulky scarf, and a pair of gloves that could have doubled as catcher’s mitts. The only thing visible was his glasses: two fogged-over powder blue trapezoids.

  “Did you say something?” laughed Cruz.

  His friend pulled down his mouth mitten. “I said what are you waiting for—sunrise? I’m freezing back here!”

  “Sorry!” Cruz hurried down the gangway to the line of four small, self-driving electric SUVs parked next to the dock. His team had been assigned the first one. When he opened the door, Sailor and Dugan were already seated in the rear section. Bryndis was at the other end of the middle seat. Cruz scooted in next to her, and Emmett slid in beside him. They clicked on their seat belts. A few minutes later, Dr. Ishikawa got in the front passenger seat. Cruz watched his aunt get into the SUV behind his. Once the cars were full, the automated vehicles set off through Longyearbyen.

  Bryndis had been correct when she’d said the seed vault wasn’t typically open to the public. However, Dr. Ishikawa knew an oceanographer who knew a zoologist who knew an archaeologist who had worked on the team that had designed the vault. As luck would have it, that scientist was in town that very week and had volunteered to give the explorers a private tour.

  Bryndis was staring out the window. She’d taken off her black gloves. Her right hand rested on her knee, her index finger tapping out her own beat.

  Cruz leaned over to whisper to her, “I’ve been meaning to thank you, dive buddy.”

  Turning from the glass, she brushed a strand of white blond hair from her face. “I’m just glad we weren’t on our own down there. I had trouble getting your helmet off. One of the latches was stuck. Sailor got to us first and helped me get it undone.”

  “Good thing your roommate can swim faster than mine,” joked Cruz. He nodded to Emmett, wrapped up like a caterpillar in his chrysalis of clothing. Emmett was a great guy and all, but he was no superhero.

  Bryndis wasn’t laughing. In fact, her pale blue eyes were glazing over. She was on the verge of crying.

  “It’s okay,” he quickly tried to reassure her. “I’m all right, see?”

  “I was so afraid, Cruz. I’ve never been so scared in my life. I thought we were too late. I thought you were going to…to…”

  Cruz didn’t plan on doing what he did next. It just sort of…happened. His hand, resting on the outside of his leg, slid to touch hers. Bryndis curled her pinkie around his. Cruz could hear his heart thumping. Could she hear it, too?

  “There!” called Dr. Ishikawa. “See the lights? That’s the vault.”

  On the hill a few hundred feet above them, a square of bright turquoise and white lights glittered in the twilight.

  “The art piece is titled ‘Perpetual Repercussion,’ ” explained their professor. “A Norwegian artist created it with steel, glass, and mirrored triangles, along with hundreds of LED lights to make it glow at night.”

  “You’re right.” Cruz leaned toward Bryndis. “It does look like they captured a thousand stars and put them in a glass box.”

  That got her dimples to appear. She wiped her eyes.

  The car turned left off the main road at a simple white sign that
read GLOBAL SEED VAULT, and came to a stop in a parking lot barely big enough for a dozen cars. Everyone piled out of their SUVs and tramped through the snowy lot toward the tall, thin steel rectangle sticking out of the side of the mountain. The vault reminded Cruz of the back end of a semitruck, if a truck were 20 feet tall. The square of twinkling triangles took up the top third of the back of the truck-like entrance. The aqua and white lights illuminated a pair of locked doors below, along with the short steel bridge leading to them.

  A snowmobile was cutting through the parking lot. The driver expertly swung into a small space next to the group of explorers, sending up a fan-tail of snow, then cut the engine. Throwing back the fuzzy hood of a black jacket, a man ran a tan hand through a head of thick wheat blond hair. “Welcome, Explorer Academy!” His booming voice could have set off an avalanche. “I’m Archer Luben, tour guide to the seeds.”

  Everyone laughed.

  Dr. Luben got off his snowmobile. Dr. Ishikawa introduced himself and Aunt Marisol. They shook hands. “Thank you for showing us around inside the seed bank,” said Dr. Ishikawa. “It’s an amazing experience for our explorers.”

  “Happy to do it.” The archaeologist grinned broadly, revealing a set of teeth as white as the snow at their feet. Dr. Luben had vivid green eyes with deep creases at the corners, a stubbled square jaw, and a slightly bent nose. He struck Cruz as a guy who’d be into outdoor sports with more than your usual amount of danger, like cave diving or BASE jumping.

  Dr. Luben led the way up the short ramp and brought out a key to unlock the door. “You know, I was once a student at the Academy myself. If it weren’t for many an intrepid explorer taking time out for me, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

  “Freezing your butt off in the Arctic?” muttered Dugan.

  Sailor smacked him.

  Cruz sucked in his lips to keep from grinning.

  The explorers followed Dr. Luben inside the vault and huddled inside the entry to the tunnel. Cruz craned his neck to see around his classmates. He spied a couple of benches, a rack of hard hats, and a trolley cart. Straight ahead, a long hallway sloped gently downward. Every 10 feet or so, a grid of white lights dangled from the ceiling to light the way.

  “A bit of history for you as we go,” said their guide, walking backward down the narrow corridor. “Svalbard was chosen for this Doomsday Vault because the temperatures and permafrost here in the Arctic make it a prime location for cold storage. The vault rooms are located almost four hundred feet into the mountain, so even if the cooling system fails or we see dramatic climate change outside, the vault rooms will remain naturally frozen. Most of the seeds stored here should be viable for many centuries…”

  Cruz felt a hand on his right shoulder. Aunt Marisol had her other hand on Emmett’s shoulder. She was signaling them to slow down, to let the others go by. They did. Sailor hung back, too.

  “Once we get into the vault room, look for the U.S. bins,” Aunt Marisol whispered to the three of them. “It’s not a big place but it’s extremely cold, so we won’t be able to stay long. Inside the bins, the seed samples are stored in foil pouches. The cipher could be anywhere, tucked in a corner or even inside a seed packet. Sailor, I think you and I ought to run interference and do our best to keep people out of the area while Emmett and Cruz conduct their search.

  “All right,” said Sailor.

  Aunt Marisol looked from Emmett to Cruz. “Remember, you won’t have much time—ten minutes, tops.”

  They nodded.

  The explorers had reached a security checkpoint. Dr. Luben slid a card through a black box that resembled a credit card terminal. He punched a code into the keypad.

  “Looks like a graphene door,” Emmett hissed to Cruz. “Virtually impenetrable.” In other words, there would have been no way the two of them could have gotten inside on their own.

  The door led into a large, round corrugated-steel tunnel. They continued farther into the mountain, their path lit by eerie blue lights. A couple hundred feet later, the tunnel opened to a sandstone chamber. The ruddy walls sparkled with ice. Cruz shivered. It was getting colder.

  “Almost every country in the world stores seeds here,” explained Dr. Luben. “There are three vault rooms, which can hold a total of more than two and a quarter billion seeds.”

  Cruz whistled quietly. That was a lot of seeds!

  “Only the middle room is stocked so far.” The archaeologist held up a hand. “Ready to go in?”

  “Yes!” cried the explorers.

  “Thank goodness we have our jackets to keep us warm,” Emmett said to Cruz.

  “I wonder what their maximum cold temperature is,” answered Cruz.

  “I think we’re about to find out.”

  “The optimum temperature for seed storage is minus eighteen degrees Celsius, or zero degrees Fahrenheit,” said Dr. Luben, his gloved hand opening a gray door frosted with ice.

  Cruz felt his pulse quicken. He put his hand to the hunk of rock hanging around his neck. In a few minutes, they would be inside the vault room, and a few more minutes after that, he would have the second piece of his mother’s cipher. The suspense was killing him!

  They went through one more door and a locked gate before they finally got their first peek at the storage room. Aunt Marisol was right. It wasn’t big—maybe 30 feet wide by 80 feet long—with five rows of metal shelving that reached almost to the top of the 20-foot domed ceiling. From what Cruz could see, almost all the shelves were filled with boxes and bins.

  “These containers may look ordinary enough, but their contents are as valuable as gold—maybe more.” Dr. Luben’s voice echoed through the icy stone cavern. He stepped into the middle aisle. “You are standing among the most diverse collection of food crop seeds in the world. Next to me is a box of maize from Africa, and over here, eggplant from South America, and there, rice from Asia. Did you know that biodiversity in crops has decreased to the point that only about thirty crops provide ninety-five percent of the world’s food supply? The U.S., for example, has lost over ninety percent of its varieties of fruits and vegetables in just a little over a century. This lack of biodiversity makes crops more susceptible to threats such as drought, frost, and disease. It’s one of the many reasons why this seed bank is so crucial. Feel free to walk the aisles yourself and read the containers, or you can come with me and I’ll show you some of my favorite samples. It’s quite cold in here and you’ll start to feel it pretty soon, if you haven’t already, so we won’t be staying long…”

  Cruz and Emmett sped for the first row. Cruz went down the right side, and Emmett the left. They moved as quickly as their eyes could scan the labels on the containers. Cruz saw bins marked SOUTH KOREA, COLOMBIA, IRELAND, SWITZERLAND, and PERU but no UNITED STATES. Aunt Marisol was keeping an eye on them from the opposite end of the row. When Emmett and Cruz headed to the second row, his aunt and Sailor did the same. Femi started to come their way, but Sailor said something to her and Femi turned back. Whew! That was close. Cruz and Emmett kept searching. CANADA, KENYA, ISRAEL, AUSTRALIA—there! The American flag! About a dozen white bins and one black one on the bottom shelf were marked UNITED STATES, each stamped with a sticker of the Stars and Stripes.

  “Psssst!” Cruz alerted Emmett, who was still a good 20 feet back, to join him. Kneeling, Cruz reached for one of the white bins.

  In seconds, his friend had closed the distance between them. “No, not that one! The black one with the yellow top from the Archive.”

  Cruz’s head shot up. “What did you say?”

  “I said…uh . . pick the black one.”

  “From the Archive. How do you know about the Archive?”

  Emmett cocked an eyebrow. “How do you?”

  “My aunt let it slip…Hey, I asked you first.”

  “I just know, okay?”

  Cruz scowled. Emmett had said the same thing when they had stu
mbled into the Synthesis lab back at the Academy. His friend sure seemed to have a lot of secrets, not to mention being pretty secretive about how he’d come to have such secrets. Cruz was getting tired of all the games. They were supposed to be friends.

  “So what is it?” pressed Cruz.

  “Explorers!” called Professor Ishikawa. “Gather back up here, please.”

  “No!” yelped Cruz. Yanking out the black bin, he flung open its hinged top. The container was full of foil seed packets. They were organized into several rows.

  “You start on that side; I’ll take this one,” said Cruz, peeling off his gloves.

  Emmett did the same. “What am I looking for?”

  “I don’t know. Her name or maybe mine or my dad’s?”

  “Cruz, there’s not enough time. There’s got to be a hundred packets here—”

  “Just go!”

  They began flipping through envelopes.

  “Nope,” said Emmett with every flick. “Nope, nope, nope…I can’t feel my fingers anymore.”

  Cruz’s hands were going numb, too.

  Sailor was rushing toward them. “You guys, come on!” she hissed.

  “We’re not going to find it, Cruz,” said Emmett. “There are too many.”

  Cruz froze when he saw the words on the top of a package: HERE COMES THE SUN.

  “Cruz, did you hear me? We have to get out of—”

  “Got it!” Cruz plucked out the pouch.

  “No way. You couldn’t possibly have—”

  Cruz swung the label toward Emmett.

  He frowned. “I don’t get it.”

  “Mom’s favorite song.”

  “Good thing you got that row. I would have gone right past it.”

  “My lucky day,” said Cruz. Ripping off the pull seal, he opened the zip-top closure with his thumbs. Cruz turned the packet upside down and waited for the little black stone to drop into his palm. It didn’t.

  “Come on, explorers!” Dr. Ishikawa was clapping his hands. “Time to go!”