Treasure Hunters: Danger Down the Nile Read online

  I pulled Dad’s weather-beaten rain slicker out of my backpack, figuring I’d use it as a blanket.

  And I’d also make sure he hadn’t sewn several thousand dollars into the lining.

  Hey, it couldn’t hurt to look.

  CHAPTER 16

  Of course, none of us could really sleep.

  Trains kept rumbling into the station above us. Beck discovered an orphaned alligator in a nearby sewer pipe. Rats the size of wiener dogs were having some kind of karaoke dance party two tracks over.

  And we all kept thinking about Mom and Dad.

  Around three in the morning, the four of us huddled in a circle on the abandoned train platform and started swapping stories.

  “Hey, Bick, remember that time in New Zealand?” said Beck.

  “How could I forget it? Mom and Dad took us to that park where we flew across a canyon on a zip line. Best birthday ever.”

  “That’s because,” said Tommy, “we had the best parents ever.”

  I hugged the rain slicker a little closer. “We still have them, Tommy.”

  “Yeah,” said Beck, surprising me a little. “We just need to find them.”

  “And rescue them!” I added.

  Tommy nodded. “I’m down for that.”

  “You guys?” said Storm with a heavy sigh. “They’re dead. Both of them.”

  “No, they are not,” I said. “Would a dead man hide a rain slicker in a secret compartment?”

  “Maybe. Right before he was swept overboard and drowned.”

  “What about this?” said Beck, brandishing the thumb drive. “Mom wasn’t dead when she made that video.”

  Storm shook her head. “Odds are, she is now.”

  “Hey, Storm?” said Tommy.

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember that time when you were, like, nine and you were in that sea kayak race down in Guadeloupe?”

  “Yeah. I finished last. Three and a half hours after everybody else. It was the day I officially gave up all competitive sports.”

  “But who was waiting for you at the finish line even though it was dark and raining and everybody else had gone home?”

  “Mom and Dad.”

  “Exactly. So maybe we just need to wait for them a little longer, too.”

  “Maybe.”

  And that was about as close as you’ll get to a “Mom and Dad might not be dead” from Storm.

  That is, until six in the morning, when she surprised us all by bellowing out an excited wake-up call.

  “ ‘Reading is the key to all of life’s treasures!’ ” Storm shouted. “Remember? That’s what was written on the bookmark.”

  Beck pulled the decorated leather strip out of her bag.

  Storm yanked the thing right out of Beck’s hand.

  “And look what’s tied to the top of the bookmark!” She held it upside down so the tiny key would dangle. “A key! Maybe this is, literally, ‘the key to all of life’s treasures.’ ”

  “No,” said Tommy, pointing to the words punched into the leather. “According to the bookmark, reading is the key to everything.…”

  “Fine,” said Storm. “But this is a key to a safe-deposit box.”

  “Really?” I said. “How can you tell?”

  “Because I read it!”

  Storm was right.

  We’d found the key to one of the many safe-deposit boxes Mom and Dad kept scattered across the globe.

  Why’d they need so many?

  To safeguard all sorts of small treasures.

  And hopefully to hide treasure maps!

  CHAPTER 17

  First thing in the morning the four of us trooped into the extremely swanky lobby of the Park Avenue branch of First NYC Bank.

  Everyone in the building was wearing a suit or a nice dress.

  Well, everyone except us.

  It didn’t matter. We had the key, which we presented to a snooty man with either a very thin mustache or an extremely skinny caterpillar sleeping on his lip.

  “We, um, need to get something out of our, you know, box thingy,” said Tommy.

  We’d elected Tailspin Tommy to be our spokesperson for the bank excursion because he was the oldest.

  We may need to rethink that in the future.

  The snooty man sniffed and looked down his nose at our key.

  Finally, he said, “My pleasure!” in a British accent and slipped on a pair of starched white gloves. “Follow me.”

  The banker led us down a glass-and-marble staircase and into a vault where the walls were lined with cabinets of boxes that looked like wider versions of the mailboxes you’d see in the lobby of an apartment building.

  Each safe-deposit box door had two key slots. The guy with the white gloves inserted his key into one of the holes on the box labeled 1818; Tommy stuck our key into the other. When they both turned their keys, the door swung open. Tommy took hold of a handle and slid a long metal tray out of the box.

  “Would you like a room?” the snooty man asked with another sniff.

  “For tonight?” said Tommy. “That’d be awesome. Because right now we’re kind of—”

  Beck elbowed Tommy in the hip.

  “Right now we’re kind of in a hurry,” Beck said so Tommy wouldn’t tell the banker about our temporary sleeping arrangements underneath Grand Central Terminal. “So, yes, a viewing room would be nice.”

  “My pleasure.”

  After Sir Snobbypants set us up in a small conference room and quietly closed the door, Tommy raised the lid on Mom and Dad’s box.

  Inside were a paperback book, a stack of maps, and a purple velvet jeweler’s bag embroidered with loopy lettering that spelled out RONNY VENABLE’S JEWEL AND SOUP EMPORIUM. Tommy grabbed the bag, untied a braided golden string, and tugged open the top.

  “Whoa!”

  “What’s inside?” I asked.

  “Someone call the queen of England. I think Mom and Dad found her crown!”

  The jeweled headdress was covered with glistening diamonds, green emeralds, and bright red rubies.

  Storm moved in for a closer look.

  “Actually, Tommy,” she said, “I believe this diamond-encrusted diadem originally belonged to the czarina of Russia. It’s been missing since 1917, when Czar Nikolai the Second and his wife fled their palace and gave three wooden crates filled with the Russian crown jewels to some monks in the Ural Mountains for safekeeping. A few months later, Bolshevik revolutionaries overran the monks’ monastery. The Bolsheviks believed in workers sharing the wealth of the ruling class, so they took the crown jewels from the monks and gave them to a farmer. The farmer hid them and never told anybody where he had hidden the missing crates.”

  “But Dad found them?” I asked.

  “I’d say he found at least one.”

  “So what’s a crown with that many diamonds and jewels worth?” asked Beck, who’s usually in charge of all our Kidd family wheeling and dealing.

  Storm actually smiled. “Millions.”

  “Woo-hoo!” I shouted. “We’re rich again!”

  Beck and I high-fived.

  Then we did our special Twins-Only End Zone Dance: We rocked from side to side and did a few “raise the roof” moves.

  “Hey, hang on, you guys,” Tommy said as he pulled a folded piece of paper out of the bottom of the metal drawer. “This might be worth even more.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A letter from Dad!”

  CHAPTER 18

  Tommy quickly placed the letter on the table.

  “Check out the date,” he said. “That’s, like, a week before we sailed to Cyprus.”

  “Cyprus is where Mom got kidnapped!” said Beck, stating the obvious.

  (I’m sorry, Beck, but you did. Fine. Draw me with two heads in the next illustration. See if I care.)

  “Apparently,” said Storm, “Dad must’ve made a copy of the key we found attached to the bookmark. Then, he came here, right before we shoved off for Cyprus, to tuck that
letter into the safe-deposit box.”

  “Do you think Uncle Timothy sent us to that school so we’d find the bookmark?” I asked.

  “Or,” said Beck, “maybe Dad knew if he ever went missing, Uncle Timothy would automatically try to dump us in that awful place.”

  “Either way,” I said, “Dad knew—or at least hoped—we’d follow his trail of clues and find his letter.”

  “Come on, Tommy,” said Beck. “Read it.”

  “Uh, okay.” Tommy cleared his throat. “ ‘Dear brilliant children.’ ”

  “That’s us!” said Beck.

  “ ‘Dear brilliant children. I have never been more proud of the four of you. You have proved yourselves to be true treasure hunters. Congratulations on following the clues that brought you to this box. Unfortunately, I fear you will soon need almost every item inside it—especially if you are here at a time when both your mother and I have gone missing. If that is the case, move swiftly. We don’t have much time. And remember—you can trust your uncle Timothy to a point, but never trust him with your lives or turn your back on him for too long. Love, Dad.’ ”

  “That’s it?” said Beck.

  “No. There’s a P.S.: ‘Keep following the clues. Show the world what Kidds can do.’ ”

  “What clues?”

  Storm was sorting through the stuff Tommy had pulled out of the box. “There are four maps in here. All of them for the African treasures Mom and Dad mentioned. Hey, remember King Solomon’s Mines?”

  “The book!” I said, pointing to the paperback that had been tucked inside the box. “It’s King Solomon’s Mines!”

  “First published in 1885,” said Storm, our walking Wikipedia. “It was a bestselling novel by Victorian adventure writer Sir H. Rider Haggard and tells the story of a group of African treasure hunters led by Allan Quatermain.”

  “So that’s a clue,” said Beck. “Dad’s telling us to go to Africa and find the mines!”

  Storm spread out the treasure map leading to King Solomon’s Mines.

  “Fascinating,” said Storm.

  “What?” said Tommy.

  “Nothing,” said Storm. “At least—not yet. I need to do a little more research.”

  I turned over the velvet jeweler’s bag and pointed at the flaking gold imprint on it. “Here’s another clue. It’s the address for Ronny Venable’s Jewel and Soup Emporium here in New York City.”

  “Check out the shop’s slogan,” said Beck. “ ‘Always fair. Always beautiful wares.’ ”

  “That same slogan is on this business card,” I said. “It was tucked inside the bag. Looks like Dad made a few small edits.”

  The instant I figured it out, I shouted, “That says ‘always be ware’!”

  “Thanks for that, Captain Obvious,” said Beck.

  “Guilty. But look how Dad circled ‘always fair.’ He’s telling us to take the crown to this Venable guy because he’ll pay us a fair price. But we need to be extra careful because he might also try to cheat us.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Beck, our chief negotiator. “He might try, but he’ll definitely fail.”

  Storm grabbed the four treasure maps and the paperback book. Tommy slid the diamond-encrusted crown back into its velvet bag and stuffed the whole thing inside the hip pocket of his cargo shorts.

  We were off to 2½ Bond Street.

  If we could sell the Russian crown for a fair price, we’d definitely have enough money to fly to Cairo. And since Mr. Venable also sold soup, we wouldn’t have to Dumpster dive for doughnuts at dinnertime!

  CHAPTER 19

  The Jewel & Soup Emporium was on a pretty sketchy cobblestone street.

  We descended a steep set of stairs to enter a basement that reeked of chopped onions and boiled cabbage. Only a few seedy characters—most had scars, tattoos, and those pointy face studs that look like steel pimples—were slurping thick and chunky soups at the rickety tables scattered around the restaurant.

  There was no jewelry on display anywhere.

  A man I figured was probably Ronny Venable stood behind the cafeteria-style counter, ladling lumpy brown slop into bowls.

  The slop smelled like a wet goat. So did Mr. Venable, whose long black hair was greasier than raw strips of bacon.

  “What do you kids want? Soup?”

  Beck swaggered forward. “Not if today’s special is what it smells like: cream of horse manure. But, hey—at least you got our name right.”

  “What do you mean, kid?”

  “That’s right. We’re the Kidds.”

  “So?”

  “Dr. Thomas Kidd’s kids?”

  Now Mr. Venable’s beady black eyes darted back and forth, sizing us up.

  “We brought you something,” said Tommy, pulling the velvet bag out of his hip pocket.

  “It’s a very rare borscht,” said Beck, winking to let the shady dude know she was speaking in code.

  “Borscht? You brought me a bag of beet soup?”

  Beck rolled her eyes. “Noooo. Something much better. Much more Russian.”

  “Goulash?”

  “It’s not soup, okay?”

  Storm stepped forward. “You ever hear about Czar Nikolai the Second and his missing crown jewels?” she whispered.

  “Maybe,” Venable whispered back.

  “Well, sir,” she said, “some of them aren’t so ‘missing’ anymore.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Mr. Venable immediately escorted us into a back storage room. The shelves were filled with stacks of jumbo-sized soup cans and display cases filled with sparkling jewels.

  “Welcome to my jewel emporium,” he said. “Your father was one of my first and best customers. I’m sure we can come to… terms.”

  Tommy looked around the dingy storeroom. “Um, do you have any money back here?”

  Venable tapped a gallon can of cream of spinach soup. Its lid popped open to reveal a stack of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills.

  “We’re going to need several gallons of ‘spinach’ to let you have this,” said Beck, giving Tommy the go-ahead to pull the jewel-studded crown out of its bag.

  The sleazy jeweler gasped and, in no time, he and Beck hammered out a deal that, given our current circumstances, was pretty darn excellent.

  First, Mr. Venable agreed to pay us $1 million—fifty thousand in cash for “walking-around money” with the rest to be deposited in a numbered Swiss bank account that he set up using a hidden computer.

  “Here are your ATM cards,” he said, pulling them out of what looked like a saltine cracker box.

  Tommy took the cards and ran up the block to the nearest cash machine to make sure our new bank account wasn’t bogus. He came back with a stack of twenty-dollar bills.

  “Just in case somebody can’t break a Benjamin,” he said.

  Then, for a “small convenience fee,” Mr. Venable arranged first-class plane tickets and hotel accommodations for us in Cairo. Finally, for an additional “airport security fee,” the oily dude agreed to fly with us to Egypt as our legal guardian so we wouldn’t have to deal with the whole “unaccompanied minor” issue at the airport.

  “Do you children need passports?” he asked, eager to make one final sale.

  “Nope,” I said. “Mom and Dad gave us each a passport on our first birthday and made sure to keep renewing them. It’s sort of a Kidd family tradition.”

  “Then we are all set,” said Mr. Venable, rubbing his hands together like a greedy raccoon. “We leave for Cairo on Egypt Air tonight at six thirty. Now, then, who wants soup? No extra charge.”

  We politely turned down his generous offer.

  Hey, we had money again. We could find a Burger King. Nobody was really in the mood for Mr. Venable’s barnyard surprise stew.

  CHAPTER 21

  Okay, this is the part of the story where we, basically, fly to Egypt.

  It’s an eleven-hour flight and pretty boring unless you really, really, really like little bags of salty peanuts and reruns of old TV shows.
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  By the way, in case you missed it, those four African treasure maps in the safe-deposit box were for the same four treasures we already talked about:

  1. King Solomon’s Mines

  2. Kruger’s Hidden Millions

  3. The Ming Dynasty Artifacts from Zheng He’s Treasure Fleet

  4. La Buse’s (The Buzzard’s) Abandoned Pirate Treasure

  Where would you go if you were us? Go ahead, talk it over with your friends. Get your whole class in on the act. Take your time. Like I said, the flight to Cairo is going to take eleven hours.

  Oh, right. Duh.

  Beck is reminding me that this is a book. I don’t really have to wait eleven hours for it to be eleven hours later.

  I just have to start a new chapter.

  CHAPTER 22

  Mr. Venable checked us into a deluxe suite at the Mena House hotel in Cairo.

  “If you need soup,” he said, “give me a call. I packed a couple gallons of chicken noodle in my suitcase.”

  We told him thanks (but no thanks), and Mr. Venable headed off for the Isis Hotel, where the rooms only cost, like, nineteen dollars a night. “I will be in Cairo visiting friends,” he said. “Should you need further assistance…”

  Tommy finally slipped him a hundred-dollar bill so he’d go away.

  He did.

  The Mena House hotel cost a lot more than nineteen dollars a night. In fact, it used to be a hunting lodge for an Egyptian king named Ismail the Magnificent.

  We could actually see the Great Pyramid of Cheops from the balcony of our room. It was basking in the sun on the far side of the hotel’s golf course.

  Yes, it was good to be rich again.

  But we weren’t interested in playing golf or being pampered poolside. We were in Egypt for one reason and one reason only: to find Mom’s mysterious “aunt” Bela Kilgore.