Priceless: Crime Travelers Spy School Mystery Series Book 3 Read online

  Crime Travelers—Book Three: Priceless © 2016 by Paul Aertker All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. No reproduction without prior permission. Discounts available at www.crimetravelers.com.

  Library Metadata

  Aertker, Paul

  Crime Travelers / Paul Aertker.— 1st ed.

  p. 240 cm. 12.7 x 20.32 (5x8 in) — (Priceless ; bk. 3)

  Summary: Lucas Benes faces his greatest challenge yet when he finds a secret message from his mother hidden inside a sunken cargo container. In a near-death scuba-diving experience, Lucas and the New Resistance kids learn that Good Company CEO Siba Günerro—along with her newest and most beautiful Curukians—is planning a massive art heist. Lucas and friends scour the Spanish countryside looking for clues. But to unravel the mysteries of both the robbery and the cryptic message, Lucas must first discover the only thing that is worth more than priceless.

  This is an edge-of-your-seat adventure. Strap your children in for this wild ride in the third installment of the best-selling middle-grade travel series. If your children love excitement, don’t miss this action-packed read! © 2016,

  FSP

  1. Travel—Fiction. 2. Language and languages—Fiction.

  3. Conspiracies—Fiction. 4. Trains—Fiction. 5. Bankruptcy—Fiction.

  6. Geography— Fiction. 7. Multicultural—Fiction. 8. Europe—Fiction.

  9. Spain—Fiction. 10. Alhambra—Fiction.

  I. Title. Pro 2016

  Edited by Brian Luster using the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition Cover design by Pintado | Maps by Paul Devine | Interior design by Amy McKnight | All designs, maps, graphics, photographs © 2016 Paul Aertker and Flying Solo Press, LLC

  ISBN-13:978-l-940137-37-7 / ISBN-10:l-940137-37-3

  eISBN 978-1-940137-38-4

  Priceless | Printed worldwide

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016953232

  CONTENTS

  1 Get the Kids

  2 A Hotel of Cards

  3 Whistling Champion

  4 Knock, Knock

  5 The Breakfast of Champions

  6 Righty Tighty, Lefty Loosey

  7 A Call to Fins

  8 The Newest Weapon

  9 I’m Watching You

  10 Diver Down

  11 Message in a Container

  12 The Most Important Things

  13 Thicker Than Blood

  14 Busload of Curukians

  15 An Old Friend

  16 La Rambla

  17 Tourists Tour

  18 Sagrada Família

  19 Up Is the New Out

  20 Safe and Sound

  21 Basement Discovery

  22 Plan B

  23 White Bird One

  24 An In-Flight Movie

  25 Money Is Behind Everything

  26 Madrid

  27 Field Trip

  28 Guernica

  29 Heist

  30 Dust to Dust

  31 Subway Surfers

  32 Boxcar Children

  33 The Train Stays Mainly on the Plain

  34 Refuge

  35 The Alhambra

  36 Hubris

  37 Café con Leche

  38 No Plan

  39 I’m Possible

  40 Call It Even

  41 Art Exchange

  42 Road Trip

  43 Super Puma

  44 The Best Things in Life

  45 The Rock of Gibraltar

  46 Epilogue

  You can travel by boat, by bike, or by book.

  Yet with your imagination you can go anywhere by any means at any time.

  —P.A.

  GET THE KIDS

  The Globe Hotel Barcelona sat on top of a hill overlooking a harbor filled with superyachts.

  It was an old stone palace that had seen better days. Vandals had tagged the walls with graffiti, some windows were missing panes of glass, and its multicolored roof had cracked and broken tiles. The main building had once been a megamansion fit for a king. Or rather, fit for a dictator, since Franco, the former Spanish ruler, liked to bring frenemies here for torture.

  It was fair to say that the Globe Hotel Barcelona was far from being the luxurious residence that Mr. John Benes had wanted. His hope had always been to renovate the place and turn it into a family resort with mud baths for parents and giant water slides for kids.

  In reality, many of the bathtubs were filthy, and the pool slide was ready to crumble into the water.

  Except for the colonies of mice that inhabited the place, the building had remained nearly empty for a decade. The few human guests who had actually stayed at the resort had written online that a single night’s stay at the hotel gave them nightmares for weeks on end.

  Since the number of negative reviews had turned off most would-be visitors, it was the perfect place for Mr. Benes and Coach Creed to create another hotel spy school.

  For their part, the kids of the New Resistance had been excited to spend an extended vacation in a near-abandoned palace. But when they saw the hotel for the first time, most agreed the entire property looked like a run-down roach motel.

  One of the first things Mr. Benes did to improve student life was to hire a butler. But not just any old servant.

  Rufus Chapman was a seventy-year-old British butler who knew what was proper and what was not. More than that, he had experience in turning derelict dumps into ritzy resorts.

  On Rufus’s first day at work, Mr. Benes had given him an order to pick up Lucas and his friends on the seventh floor.

  The conversation had taken place down in the hotel’s basement.

  As usual Mr. Benes was wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and tie when he opened the swinging metal doors that led to an enormous industrial kitchen.

  “Chapman,” Mr. Benes said. “Do me a favor and get the kids, would you?”

  Rufus was wearing an apron over his tuxedo, complete with tails and top hat. He looked up from a giant paella pan he was stirring.

  “Happy to oblige, sir,” Rufus said. “Any trouble?”

  “We may have some unwanted guests here at the hotel.”

  “Good Company?”

  “Possibly.”

  “I would be pleased to look into the matter for you,” Rufus said. “What time would you like for me to get the children?”

  “Soon,” Mr. Benes said. “Certainly by seven this morning. I want these kids to help put this hotel back together today because you and I will be busy with board meetings all day tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week, sir.”

  “It often is.”

  “Not to worry,” Rufus said. “We’ll get this place into tip-top shape soon enough.”

  “I hired you for more than that,” Mr. Benes said. “You know secrets about the Good Company that no one else knows.”

  Rufus cleared his throat. “I’ll help where I can.”

  The two men looked at each other and paused a second.

  “Sir? Should I also gather up Alister, Astrid, Kerala, Nalini, Paulo, Sora, Travis—”

  “It seems you’ve studied the student roster, Chapman.”

  “Indeed,” he said.

  “Paulo Cabral goes by Jackknife, by the way.”

  Rufus Chapman nodded. “Duly noted. People tend to respond more positively when you know their names.”

  “No hurries, Chapman. Astrid is headed to Lucas’s room now to share the
news about the Good Company possibly going bankrupt.”

  Rufus said, “Finally! Some bad news for the Good Company.”

  “Coach Creed and I certainly hope you can help us in that regard,” Mr. Benes said.

  “Consider it done.”

  “Great,” Mr. Benes said. “But first get the kids. And know that Lucas won’t get out of bed unless a grownup makes him.”

  “I have the remedy for that,” Rufus said. “My morning whistle will literally shock him out of bed.”

  “Nevertheless, get Lucas and anyone else in his room and bring them to the main ballroom for breakfast and an all-school meeting.”

  “Is Dr. Kloppers cracking the whip?”

  “She’s still in Las Vegas, but I know she’s anxious for me to get this academic year started on time.”

  “Very well,” Rufus said. “I shall mollify any rough situation I should encounter.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Benes said. “I hope you’re happy here.”

  “I’m delighted not to be working for Ms. Günerro anymore,” Rufus said. “The Good Company has a way of twisting things around, you know.”

  “Yes, they do,” Mr. Benes said. “We’re happy you’ve left them and joined us.”

  “One more thing, sir. The young man named Mac was on the roster from the trip to Rome. Is he not among us?”

  “He is no longer here,” Mr. Benes said. “He’s staying with his aunt.”

  “The one and only Siba Günerro,” Rufus muttered. “Very well, I’ll do as you say. Get the kids is a simple task.”

  Mr. Benes left the kitchen, and Rufus Chapman handed a wooden spoon to one of the sous-chefs who had just come in.

  Rufus hung his apron on a wooden peg. From another hook he took a silver medal that he had won at last year’s International Whistling Convention and draped the ribbon over his head.

  Rufus shuffled his patent leather shoes across the dusty basement floor, whistling a medley of national anthems. He cut through the overflow luggage room, around the hotel’s massive furnace, and headed up the back stairs.

  There was only one problem. With his head now full of music Rufus Chapman began to breathe more deeply. The constant whistling had the effect of draining his brain of oxygen, which seemed to make Rufus light-headed, a tad bit daft, from time to time.

  On the landing between the first and second floors, Rufus stopped and rubbed his brow. Something was not right.

  Unwanted guests here at the hotel?

  Rufus whistled up the stairwell and waited for the echo. He mulled the instructions over in his head. The expression Mr. Benes had used, “get the kids,” simply meant “pick them up.”

  To Rufus, who had grown up in London, the term had a positive meaning. His mum used to say to his dad, “Honey, would you be a buttercup and get the kids for me?” The buttercup part, he knew, was a bit cheesy. Still, the phrase had always been a well-meaning line.

  He considered the opposite. The Good Company has a way of twisting things around.

  The last time he had heard the expression “get the kids,” it had come from Ms. Siba Günerro. Her definition meant “snatch the children and torture them into telling her about some secret that would make her richer.”

  Rufus Chapman suddenly became very worried. He knew that if the Good Company was involved, things would not be as good as they seemed.

  A HOTEL OF CARDS

  Lucas Benes lay under a flowery bedspread at the Globe Hotel Barcelona having a nightmare.

  So many things were wrong with the world from his point of view. His mind struggled to make sense of it all.

  Lucas dipped deep into a dream where he was drowning in a sea of diamonds. As his body sank to the sandy seafloor, he felt as if he were chained in a dark dungeon. He tried to scream, but no one could hear him. He swam through a forest of seaweed and found a key and he jammed it into a lock and broke free.

  In the hotel bed Lucas tossed and turned, then was suddenly awakened by the sound of a big, giant fart.

  “Ah,” he said. “Cut it out, Jackknife.”

  “Don’t look at me, bro,” said the dark-haired Brazilian.

  “Alister?” Lucas asked. “Was that you?”

  “Not me, mate,” said the bow-tie-wearing kid.

  Lucas sat up in his bed and squinted. With one open eye he saw Nalini wearing one of her colorful Indian sarongs. She was rocking Gini, the baby, back and forth in a stroller.

  Gini said, “Whoopsie.”

  The almost-two-year-old then proceeded to stink up her diaper and the room.

  “Listen,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to wake up like that. Morning is for breakfast, not break wind.”

  Lucas sank back into his pillow. He had traveled so much in the last few months that his jet lag had almost lapped him and canceled itself out. He tried to shake off the slumber and weird dream as he ran his fingers through his bed-head hair.

  A slice of sunlight cut through a crack in the curtains, highlighting a quarter of the room. The place had been decorated so long ago that it had gone out of style and back in without ever being changed. It was clean and the sheets were new, but the daisy table nestled in the corner with its plastic retro chairs had clearly been there for decades. The old tube-filled TV looked like it had a swollen butt sticking out the back.

  Around him he could feel the small vibrations of the concrete building. Water rushed through pipes and an elevator dinged somewhere in the distance.

  Sleep faded, and Lucas breathed deeply with one open eye traveling across the room. Travis was already gone. Jackknife lay on the other bed reading a book. Nalini was unbuckling Gini from the stroller.

  In the corner a floor lamp cast a yellowed light on Alister Thanthalon Laramie Nethington IV, who was leaning over a giant house of playing cards. The kid from the Falkland Islands plopped a card into place and slowly crabbed around the back side of the table. He looked up, and his eyes connected with Lucas.

  “It’s a hotel of cards,” Alister said.

  “Hmm,” Lucas mummed.

  “Hey, mate,” Alister said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Some bloody bad dreams you had last night.”

  Lucas’s eyelid closed again as he slid into the dark of his mind. The nightmare wasn’t over. It was like a sickness that kept coming back again and again.

  He knew he was still in Spain. Or least he thought he was.

  Have we only been here three days? Lucas thought. Not even. Just three nights?

  In his mind Lucas replayed the film from the previous week.

  They were on a boat, a ship in the Mediterranean. Alister had cut a giant hole, a gash in a metal container, and Lucas had caused it to scatter diamonds across the sea floor.

  There was the kid, Mac, who was Siba Günerro’s nephew.

  “He was a traitor,” Lucas said aloud in the room.

  Alister, Jackknife, and Nalini looked at Lucas like he was crazy.

  Lucas sank deeper into his memory. The whole summer had been a series of tricks, ruses, and pure deceit. It had started when a boy with a scar on his neck had dropped off Gini (and her dirty diaper) in a shopping cart at the back parking lot of the Globe Hotel Las Vegas.

  “No,” Lucas said out loud. “That wasn’t the beginning.”

  Lucas crawled further into his past to a time when he was a baby and Astrid’s mom had put him in a Styrofoam ice chest to save him from an exploding ferryboat in Tierra del Fuego. He had wrecked the Good Company’s brainwashing bus in Paris. Then, last week, brainwashed Curukian boys had thrown him off a container ship in the Mediterranean. To drown.

  Everywhere I go, Lucas thought. Water, water, everywhere.

  He snapped his head forward and sat straight up in bed, the words from his half dream spilling out of his mouth.

  “We’ve got to do something different,” Lucas yelled into the room.

  Alister jumped, nearly flattening a quarter of his hotel of cards.

  “Who are you talking to?”
r />   “I was having a ...”

  “It’s called a nightmare,” Nalini said.

  Jackknife added, “He’s been like this three nights. Talking in his sleep.”

  “What’d I say?”

  “You kept repeating a line,” Alister said.

  “What?”

  “You kept saying,” Jackknife said, “‘Might be worse.’”

  “And,” Alister said, “you also said, ‘Might be better.’”

  Lucas pressed his fingers over his eyes. “I think I meant those boys. Everything seems so terrible for them and I know that’s why they’re bad, but it could be better for them. For the Curukians.”

  “Curukians in your dreams,” Nalini said. “Definitely a nightmare.”

  While still in bed, Lucas grabbed a pair of shorts and slipped them over his boxers. Just as he was sliding his feet into a pair of flip-flops, the door to the hallway opened.

  Lucas thought it was odd that someone was using a master key without knocking first. Even Coach Creed knew to tap on the door before entering. But Lucas was mostly worried that the rush of air might tornado through Alister’s hotel of cards.

  Jackknife flipped from his bed to the floor and pretended to prepare for a fight.

  Carrying a newspaper under her arm, Astrid burst into room 725, her blond hair trailing behind her.

  “You could knock,” Lucas said.

  “The electronic locks on all the doors in the hotel are not working.”

  “I think my hotel of cards,” Alister said, “might be in better shape than this place.”

  “Yeah,” Astrid said, “the one working elevator feels like it’s about to crash.” She pushed past Nalini and Gini. “Wow. It stinks in here!”

  “Yeah, Nalini,” Alister said. “Gini’s great and all. But why did you bring her up here?”

  Nalini turned the stroller. “I’m babysitting, so I can’t leave her,” she said. “But I came up here to see if you guys had met the new person yet?”

  “Good, I won’t be the new kid anymore,” Alister said.

  “It’s not a kid,” Nalini said. “Lucas and Astrid’s dad hired an English butler to put this place as he said, ‘into tip-top shape!’”

  “Did you meet him?” Astrid asked.

  “I overheard him talking to your dad in in the kitchen,” Nalini said. “He’s wearing a tuxedo with tails and a top hat.”