Blue Voyage Page 36

  “Mom. I’ve only had pomegranate juice tonight. I might have eaten something funny. I just want to go lay down for a few minutes and maybe it’ll pass.” I wrenched free of her grasp. “Besides, I thought you’d decided to trust me.” I winced as I said these words, realizing I was still lying. I wasn’t trustworthy. Sage was on the other side of that door, and my mom had no idea what kind of scheme we were really up to.

  She gave me a long look, then felt my forehead. “You do seem clammy. Go lie down. I’ll come check on you in a few minutes.” Her voice was softer, but she still didn’t seem convinced.

  I took my clammy, wobbly self into the stairwell and down to the Sultan’s Suite as fast as I could manage. Sage was there already, leaning against the door and massaging her temples.

  I fumbled with the ring of keys, dropping it twice on the rug.

  “I think I might need to sit for a moment before we search the rooms,” Sage whispered. “I’m not feeling too well. I’ve missed my workouts lately. I can’t even make it up the stairs without getting winded. Ridiculous.”

  I held her steady by the arm and peered at her anxiously. Sage looked oddly pale. Sweat beaded her upper lip.

  “We can’t sit right now,” I insisted. “There’s no time to rest.”

  “Of course not. You’re right,” she murmured. Her eyes fluttered, as if she might fall asleep on the spot.

  I got the lock to turn and pushed open the door to the Lobsters’ room. “Let’s go!”

  Milton and Maeve were not the neatest people, that was clear. Clothes and Maeve’s boundless shopping bags were strewn around the room. Sage seemed to rally a little. She pawed through Milton’s suitcase while I ransacked Maeve’s.

  “Nothing in Milton’s,” said Sage. “Want me to help look through Maeve’s?”

  Together, we rummaged in her second suitcase, through plus-sized lingerie and nightgowns. Both of us kept dropping stuff. Then I felt my hands hit something different. It was a jogging-suit top, zipped up, with something heavy inside it.

  “Unzip it,” whispered Sage, her eyes shining.

  I did, my hands trembling. Inside was a sweatshirt, balled up, the sleeves tied in a knot. I untied them and shook out the shirt, and into the suitcase slid the seahorse urn.

  “Maeve!” I said, my jaw dropping. “She had it all along!”

  Sage reached out and touched it. “She and Milton must have gone back to hunt for it, like we thought. I have to say, I didn’t suspect her at all.”

  “Same here,” I said. “She’s so sweet and grandmotherly.” I looked up. “But she’s obsessed with shopping, and bric-a-brac, and anything collectible. See those bags from the Grand Bazaar? She bought all kinds of crap there.”

  Sage nodded excitedly. “And at the cliff tombs, she seemed really interested in the urn, asking about the seahorse design.”

  “And Milton said she goes to rummage sales, and antique shops, anywhere. She’s like a hoarder. I don’t even think she had a clue this was the lost piece of the Karun Treasure. She just likes shiny things! I bet she and Milton did go back for it after our hike. She probably sent him crawling up the pile of boulders at the base of the precipice and rummaging in the bushes. I bet that’s why his arms and legs were all scratched up after lunch!”

  Sage nodded. “And he was always talking about being ripped off, and being owed something. Maybe this is the prize he thought he’d claim.”

  I held the urn up to the light. There were the smiling, winged seahorses, and the acorn lid, and the filigree. And a scratch I remembered seeing at the base. I lifted the lid and pulled out a piece of paper. It was the certificate, typed in both English and Turkish, saying the urn was a replica. A fake certificate for a real antiquity, I now knew. Beneath the paper were a few lingering rose petals from Uncle Berk’s proposal, ones that hadn’t fallen out during the scattering ceremony. I touched them softly, then replaced the paper and the lid.

  “Zan, we really should go now,” said Sage. Her voice sounded kind of slurry and far away, like an echo, as if we were still in the stairwell. “But we made such a mess.”

  “Leave it. And leave the door unlocked,” I decided. “Let’s let Milton and Maeve think they forgot to lock the door and some random party guest came in and stole the urn. They won’t report it missing because they won’t want to admit that they stole it first. Now let’s get you back to my room, and I’ll find Inspector Lale, and together we’ll look for Lazar or for someone who can take us to him!”

  We closed the door behind us, and hurried down the hall to the Harem Suite. Stupid floors, I thought. Why were they so uneven? It was like running on a freaking roller coaster. Or being on a boat all over again.

  “Zan,” said Sage, behind me. “I really feel weird. Are you sure there wasn’t any booze in that pomegranate juice?”

  I stopped in my tracks and leaned against the wall. Or what I thought was the wall. Now the wall looked like the Turkish floor runner. I gazed at the swirling patterns, the flowers and vines stretching and pulling and spinning around.

  The urn rolled out of my hands. The lid fell off, and I dropped to the floor. I crawled forward, unable to stand, reaching out to grab it.

  The pomegranate juice. Sage and I had each drank half of a tall glass of juice. Had Orhan spiked it first, in the kitchen? No. Orhan wouldn’t do that. He was a good man. A helpful man. At least I thought he was. But could he have spiked our drinks? Wait, “spiked” wasn’t the right word. Laced. Lacey. Lady. Lazy . . .

  Urn. Get the urn. Seahorse smiling at me. My fingers closed around the base.

  “Sage?” I called out.

  A man’s shoes appeared, a pair of tasseled loafers, the butter-brown leather gleaming. “I’ll take that, if you don’t mind,” said the shoes.

  Hands reached down and pried the urn from my fingers.

  My head hit the floor. And then everything went black.

  40

  Dark. Dank.

  These were the first words that came to my mind when my eyes finally fluttered open. I groped around, feeling for anything to orient me. Someone had replaced Aunt Jackie’s hall runner with a dirt floor.

  A dirt floor? I slowly sat up. The darkness was intense. Onyx black. No light at all.

  “Zan?” someone whispered. A hand clutched my arm.

  I screamed.

  “Zan, it’s me! Sage! Shhh! Calm down!”

  I turned to the right and squinted into the darkness. My muscles ached. I felt like puking. My tongue was thick and papery, and there was a sour taste in my mouth. “Oh my God,” I rasped. “Where the hell are we?”

  “I think we might be in a cave.”

  “A cave! There are no caves in Istanbul.” I’d read the whole Lonely Plant section about the city. There are cisterns under the street in Istanbul, but no dirt caves.

  “But there are thousands of them in Cappadocia,” said Sage.

  “Cappadocia!” I spluttered. “But how could we have gotten there from my aunt’s hotel?” I’d had to get all the travel details for the balloon company raffle, so I knew Cappadocia was at least an eight-hour drive from Istanbul, and an hour away by plane. “Sage, we are so not in a cave.” I stood up, and promptly whacked my head on the ceiling. “Oof. Ow.”

  “Feel around,” Sage said. “The walls. They’re crumbly. It’s a cave all right.”

  I ran my fingers over the rough surface of the wall. It scraped my skin, like an exfoliating scrub at a hammam. Little bits of wall skittered between my fingers and fell to the ground.

  “That’s volcanic rock, called tuff,” said Sage. “I’ve seen it before. I’ve been to caves in Cappadocia. With a light, though.”

  I walked in a circle, stooping, keeping my hand on the wall and taking mincing steps—I was still wearing Aunt Jackie’s gown and her high-heeled sandals. I walked as far as I could until I tripped over Sage an
d sat down again. “Cave,” I agreed. “Small. But how?”

  “We were drugged, Zan. Poisoned,” she said. “Laced drinks are a common scam in Turkey. In some of them, you can’t smell or taste the drug in the drink at all. Someone must have given us enough Nembutal or something to knock us out for a few hours. Long enough to get us here.”

  Shards of the evening came back to me in a jumbled rush. The party. Nazif’s hands holding mine. The shadow puppet show. Maeve’s suitcase. The urn.

  “We found the urn in Maeve’s suitcase, didn’t we?” I recalled. “We were taking it to my room. And then—then—Sage! Where’s the urn?!” I groped around frantically, my fingers scrabbling at the dirt.

  “Gone,” said Sage. “You fell and dropped it in the hall, right before we got to your room. And that’s the last I saw.” She stifled a sob. “We came so close to shutting down Lazar. All we needed was to get the urn to Inspector Lale—and she was in the building! How could all this have happened with a police officer in the hotel?”

  “She was talking to my aunt privately,” I said. “About my uncle’s murder. She wasn’t exactly patrolling the hotel at the time we recovered the urn from Maeve’s luggage.”

  “And who drugged us?” Sage asked in an ominous tone. “Or who drugged you?”

  “What do you mean? We were both affected.”

  “Yeah, but you shared your drink with me while I was hiding out in your room. I mean, no one knew I was there. Somebody wanted to take you out. I was just a side effect.”

  My stomach seized as I thought through the suspects. “It couldn’t have been Nazif,” I said. “He’s been on my side with this from the start. And not Orhan,” I added. “Even though he was in charge of food and drinks, he’s helped us so much. I don’t know why he’d drug me.”

  “Who handed you the drink?” Sage asked.

  “Judy Clarkson.” Suddenly I sat up straighter. “Wait a second. She went to the drinks table for a refill and came back with juice for me. Oh my God. Unless it was one of Orhan’s helpers in the kitchen, Judy could have laced it.” Then I remembered the shoe with the tassel I’d seen just before I blacked out. “And I think Ron was right on our tail when we got the urn. I’m sure I saw his shoes, and I’m sure he’s the one who took the urn!”

  “The Clarksons,” breathed Sage. “Oh my God. I never would have thought.”

  “You didn’t ever suspect they knew anything?”

  “No,” Sage insisted. “Riza said they were using a boat that Lazar owned, or probably stole—he’d gotten it in Greece through some chain of connections he had—and he said the Clarksons were real paying passengers. Lazar told me never to speak of the urn or any of our business around them. He didn’t want them to suspect a thing.” She paused. “Now I see he didn’t want me to suspect they all knew each other.”

  “They were lying, all of them,” I said. “Everyone on that boat was involved in Lazar’s smuggling ring. It all makes sense now. Nazif said there were two Americans at the Lycian Society meeting at my aunt’s hotel, the meeting where Lazar first showed off the urn and gave it to my uncle to make up those papers. I bet those Americans were the Clarksons.”

  “Not only that,” said Sage, “the Clarksons could be the ones who are buying the urn from Lazar once it’s packaged and ready to go! He probably told me not to say anything about the urn around them because he didn’t want them to know it had gone missing, that he’d screwed up the deal.”

  “Sage.” I swallowed hard. “If the Clarksons somehow figured out the urn went missing, maybe they came to the hotel to look for it themselves. They could have drugged me to get me out of the way.”

  “Yeah, but how would they have any clue that the urn might be at the hotel?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Lazar had a spy in the hotel who heard us talking about the plan.”

  “Nazif knew the plan,” Sage said slowly.

  I shook my head, and the earrings I was still wearing jangled loudly. “I can’t believe he’d betray us. He’s as scared of Lazar as we are. And he’s been helping me so much.” Nazif was the first person I completely trusted—I couldn’t believe he would be a spy. “But anyway, it doesn’t even matter how the Clarksons found out about the urn, because they have it now.”

  We fell silent for a moment, letting this horrible fact sink in. The urn was gone again. “Not only that,” I continued, counting off new problems on my fingers, “Lazar’s still on the loose, free to run his smuggling ring. The urn won’t be reunited with the Karun Treasure. No one will be held accountable for my uncle’s death. And, oh, yeah—we’ve been drugged, kidnapped, and left in a cave to die.”

  “Why would someone leave us here?” Sage moaned.

  “Because they knew we were a security risk for this whole operation. This was a way to silence us. I just can’t figure out how we got put somewhere so far away. I mean, if I couldn’t get four small gold figurines through airport security, how did they get through with two passed-out foreign girls?”

  “Lazar has access to a private plane,” said Sage. “That’s how I got to the coast for the Blue Voyage. His personal pilot took Riza and me. The pilot is involved in the smuggling ring, too. Transporting us wouldn’t be so hard at all, as long as he could sneak us out of the hotel without attracting attention.”

  My head throbbed. “How long do you think we’ve been gone?” I wondered if Mom and Aunt Jackie were frantic by now, looking for us. I wondered what Nazif was doing and if he’d told anyone about the plan, since it had clearly gone awry.

  “No idea,” said Sage. “And who knows if it’s day or night outside. If we did have Nembutal, that drug lasts several hours.”

  “Since when are you such a drug expert?”

  “I had to learn about drugs as part of my student orientation at the international school. And you know, having a brother who OD’ed made me extra cautious about drugs. So I’ve done my research. I can tell you that some other drugs they could have used might last a little longer, or he could have slipped us a second dose and we were too out of it to know. But one thing’s for sure. We have got to find a way out of here. We’re going to need water soon. All these types of drugs they can mix with drinks to knock you out are really dehydrating.” I felt her stand up beside me, and I heard her start feeling the walls with her hands.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Checking for exits. Ancient civilizations made entire underground cities in the volcanic rock. They’d retreat down here when intruders came. There are supposed to be about thirty-six of these underground cities in Cappadocia. But they all have interconnected rooms. That’s what I’m looking for.”

  I stood up too, wobbling on my heels. “Damn shoes,” I grumbled, kicking them off. “So if you find an exit, and we get out, then what?”

  “Riza told me the headquarters of Lazar’s smuggling ring is based in one of these underground cities,” she said. “One that hasn’t been fully excavated or opened to the public for tours. He told me they use caves and tunnels to store their loot. They take it to artisan workshops nearby to have the artifacts disguised as replicas, or to have them deceptively packaged. Then the goods come back to his headquarters, awaiting shipments or pickups.”

  “So you want to go spelunking in Lazar’s underground cave city?”

  “I’m just saying there has to be a way out,” she said. “Whoever put us in here had to use an entrance, right? They didn’t build the cave around us. And these cities were all warrens of rooms and tunnels. Sometimes long tunnels can even connect one settlement to another.”

  “You sound so sure. I thought you didn’t trust Riza anymore.”

  “It’s not just Riza,” said Sage. “I once went to one of the cave cities that’s open to the public, when I did some filming for that tourist video company. I had to do a whole narration about it. I know that some of the rooms have rocks that sealed the door
s or windows. Others have small holes for entry or exit points, where families used to push big rocks to seal themselves off from intruders.”

  “So there has to be an exit here.”

  “Exactly. You check the floor, and I’ll do the walls. See if you feel any cracks. If there’s any movement, if anything gives just a little, push as hard as you can.”

  We searched in silence, feeling every inch of floor and wall. I stretched my arms and felt around on the ceiling, wincing as the crumbly rock and dust fell into my eyes. Then I pushed on the ceiling and felt it give way. Like a hidden ceiling panel. “Sage! I think I found it!” I cried out. “Help me push this thing. It’s really heavy!”

  Together we pushed with all our strength until the panel heaved up and off. A round slab of rock had been covering a hole. By feeling around, we could tell that the portal was as wide as our bodies. Just wide enough to drop two girls in, cover them up, and leave them for dead.

  “They were trying to bury us alive!” I exclaimed in horror.

  “I know,” said Sage. “Still, they might come back to check on us, and make sure their attempt was successful. We can’t waste time. Let’s go.”

  41

  Sage gave me a boost, and I pulled myself up through the hole. Then I reached down and pulled Sage up. We found ourselves in an identical prison. No light. Same dimensions. Also, apparently, sealed off. But now we knew the kind of blocked portal we were feeling for. After a few minutes of scrabbling around, we found another rock seal that gave way when we pushed, this time in the wall. We found ourselves in yet another cave, staring into more inky blackness straight ahead.

  I went in a little farther.

  “Come back,” Sage called, her voice echoing off the walls.

  “It’s a tunnel,” I said. “We’ll have to crawl. I can’t stand up all the way.”

  “Wait,” she said. “It’s completely dark. We can’t just crawl off into darkness.”