Arkie Sparkle Treasure Hunter: White Fright Read online

  This treasure hunt just got stranger and stranger. But until she found the seven treasures, she couldn’t find her mum and dad.

  The Bugster was still hovering around the bookcases, carefully checking each book for bugs.

  Arkie surveyed the THinc Tank despairingly. Books, maps and travel mementoes were sprawled from one end to the other. It was the perfect place to hide a bug. It might be in the ceremonial urn they had brought back from the ancient city of Petra in Jordan. Or maybe it was tucked behind the Zulu war mask. This search could take a while. And Arkie hated waiting.

  She got up and walked over to the corkboard on the wall – her dad’s Noticeboard of Thoughts.

  It was littered with newspaper headlines, torn pieces of maps, tickets, travel itineraries and faded post-it notes curling at the edges.

  The board was as messy as Arkie’s mind – cluttered with odd bits of half information and news, none of which seemed to go together.

  There was a newspaper report about a shipwreck discovered off the shores of Cuba.

  There was a postcard from Edie, sent in September last year:

  Arkie reread the postcard. It didn’t make any sense. Be where? Stab Siena? Who was Siena? And was Edie really telling her dad to stab her?

  Maybe Edie had caught some kind of brain sickness, thought Arkie. She travelled around the world a lot and they never knew where she was. Postcards often turned up from faraway places with weird notes on them. But none had ever sounded as weird as this.

  Arkie read another headline about a gold altar lifted through the roof of an Italian museum. The newspaper said it was one of the ‘most daring and audaciously executed treasure heists of the 21st century’.

  She saw that her dad had underlined the words ‘daring’ and ‘audaciously executed’. In the corner of the clipping he had written:

  S.Arkie repeated the letter in her head. Could it be Siena? But Siena was a ‘her’ – not a ‘he’. Wasn’t she?

  Arkie got out her Treasure Hunter’s Notebook and wrote STAB SIENA in it. Her dad was always reminding her to Observe and Record – even things that didn’t seem to make any sense at first. ‘Sense comes later,’ he said. ‘When there are enough crazy pieces to make a crazy pattern. Even nonsense forms a pattern eventually.’

  She closed her notebook and was continuing to work her way around the board when one of the post-it notes caught her eye. It was the only one not curling up at the edges.

  She breathed in quickly and pulled the note off the board.

  That definitely hadn’t been there a few days ago. It was a new note. A message from her dad.

  When Arkie was eight, she had invented a game called ‘When I’m eight you’ll be thirty-five’ with her dad. When they had got to ‘When I’m fourteen’, they had discovered something momentous: when Arkie was fourteen, Ted Sparkle would be forty-one. If they put their ages together, they would be a numerical palindrome: 1441 – the first time in their lives that this would be so.

  Her dad said it was too auspicious an event not to use it in some way so they gave themselves palindromic names and developed a code – a code that was just for them.

  Arkie became HANNAH 14, and her dad (who was already a palindrome through and through, as he always liked to say) became OTTO 41.

  They had left palindromic notes around the house for each other for weeks but they hadn’t done this in ages.

  Until now.

  Arkie knew straightaway what the note meant. She went to the painting of the Temple of Artemis – one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – and pulled it open to the left.

  In the wall behind the painting was the THinc safe. Her dad changed the password every week. He was big on security.

  She keyed in OTTO1441 and the safe popped open.

  Arkie reached inside and pulled out the safe deposit box that held their passports, assorted foreign currencies, THinc IDs and vaccination cards.

  On top of the box was an envelope.

  Here a Clue, There a Clue

  Arkie was trembling.

  She tore open the envelope.

  The letter was dated five days ago.

  Before her parents were kidnapped.

  Before this treasure hunt had begun.

  She started to read.

  Arkie reread the last two points in the letter. STAB SIENA. There it was again. And what did the last point mean?

  She looked up as TJ and Cleo came clanking back down the stairs. TJ shook her head at Arkie and mouthed the word, NOTHING.

  Arkie checked the progress of the Bugster. It was at the far end of the THinc Thank, dipping in and out of her mum’s collection of antique Syrian vases.

  She handed TJ a Lexi and clipped one on her own ear. Then she wrote on the piece of paper:

  Lexi’s THink was another of Quincy’s inventions. Through a series of electrical impulses, he had managed to reroute the words formed in the vocal cords so they went via the ear canal, not the mouth. It was just like reading each other’s thoughts.

  Then she gave TJ the letter from her dad to read.

  ‘Interesting,’ said TJ, moving her mouth as normal but instead of her words being spoken aloud, they went straight to Arkie’s ear. ‘So your dad was feeling uneasy about things before all this happened. But I think he was feeling plain loopy when he wrote the last two points. It could have been induced by a sugar high. Uncle Ted’s very partial to chocolate. I’ve seen him demolish a whole block of it. Does STAB SIENA or E042 D1988 I82 E7 mean anything to you?’

  ‘No,’ said Arkie slowly. ‘But the weird thing is I found a postcard from Edie on Dad’s Noticeboard of Thoughts and that said STAB SIENA as well.’

  ‘I can’t see Uncle Ted and Aunt Martha stabbing anyone,’ said TJ. ‘But remember what your dad said: “Things are not what they seem.” I really like the palindrome code, though. It’s lucky you don’t have aibohphobia.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m relieved too,’ said Arkie. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a made-up word for the fear of palindromes,’ said TJ. ‘Mum told me about a man she knew called Bob who couldn’t ever say his name to anyone, or even write it down.’

  ‘Why didn’t he just change his name, then?’ said Arkie.

  ‘Because that would involve either saying his name or writing it down,’ said TJ. ‘See, it’s like a Catch 22 – an unsolvable logical dilemma. He was in a circle of consequence so he couldn’t do anything.’

  Arkie looked at TJ. She had no idea what TJ was talking about sometimes.

  The Bugster landed suddenly in Arkie’s lap, and she picked it up. It was glowing green for CLEAN. ‘Well, the room’s free of bugs,’ said Arkie. ‘But I don’t understand. Bugster’s the latest in surveillance detectors. If there’s a bug in here, the Bugster would find it.’

  ‘Maybe someone’s invented a bugless bug?’ said TJ.

  ‘But who?’ said Arkie. ‘Quincy’s the best inventor in the world. No one could invent a bug that could be undetected by Quincy’s Bugster.’

  ‘So how are they watching us?’ said TJ.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Arkie. ‘And I don’t know what STAB SIENA means either or what Dad’s trying to tell me in his letter.’ Her thoughts were so muddled.

  ‘I just need to think about one thing for a while,’ she said, trying to clear her head. ‘Let’s focus on the seed and the poem. I reckon we should break it down and brainstorm some ideas.’

  She took out her Treasure Hunter’s Notebook and started to write:

  TJ was reading over her shoulder. ‘So we’ve got three somethings, two somewheres and five question marks,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Arkie. ‘So we just need somewhere in the world that ticks all of these clues.’

  ‘Three somewheres,’ muttered TJ.

  Arkie glared at her. ‘Are you going to be helpful, TJ?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, sorry,’ said TJ. ‘It’s just that vagueness makes me nervous. I like questions and answers. Straight lines are more pred
ictable than curves.’

  But some problems don’t travel in straight lines, thought Arkie, remembering her dad’s words: A problem can have more than one angle.

  Arkie looked at her notes. ‘We need to make some kind of pattern out of these so that we can see them more clearly. What’s the most important clue here?’

  ‘Well, I guess it would have to be the end of the world,’ said TJ. ‘That’s about as big as you can get. And “something that makes the seas rise” fits into the end of the world because if the ice caps melt it’ll be the end of the world as we know it.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Arkie. ‘The end of the world it is. Mum says word associations often help to figure things out. Let’s key all the clues into DATAMAX to make a clue map. Then, it will automatically scan in any words we might say that fit the search criteria and link all the clues together.’ Arkie typed the words in and turned to TJ. ‘Ready? Just say the first thing that comes into your head when you think of the end of the world.’

  ‘Well, it’s something I don’t like to think about too often,’ said TJ. ‘You know that geniuses have very fluid personalities and slide quickly from one end of the mood scale to the other. It makes me a bit motion sick actually.’

  ‘We won’t stay at the scary end for too long, I promise,’ said Arkie. ‘But, please, TJ. I need your big brain.’

  ‘Well, okay,’ said TJ, closing her eyes. ‘Thinking of the end of the world now, depressing thoughts come upon me … yes, here they come … all I can see is … BLACK.’

  ‘Locusts,’ said Arkie.

  ‘Plagues,’ said TJ.

  ‘Famine,’ said Arkie.

  ‘Hunger,’ said TJ.

  ‘Despair,’ said Arkie.

  ‘Death,’ said TJ.

  ‘Heaven,’ said Arkie.

  ‘Hell,’ said TJ.

  ‘Fire,’ said Arkie.

  ‘Judgement Day,’ said TJ.

  ‘Doomsday,’ said Arkie.

  DATAMAX suddenly played the opening bars of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.

  ‘Mum’s favouite piece of music,’ said Arkie excitedly, ‘and when we hear that it means DATAMAX has got a match.’

  They both leaned forwards to peer at the screen.

  Vibrating lines were joining all the clues on the clue map, and they were revolving around two words:

  ‘This has got to be it,’ said Arkie, reading from DATAMAX. ‘The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, commonly called the Doomsday Vault. It’s a seed bank in an old coalmine dug into a mountain on an island halfway between Norway and the North Pole. “Bank on seeds when the end is nigh,”’ she said, quoting from the clue poem.

  ‘But I’ve never heard of it,’ said TJ.

  ‘Maybe it’s not in the encyclopedia yet,’ said Arkie. ‘It only opened in 2008. It’s full of seeds from all around the world – so if there’s a major global catastrophe like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, we can get replacement seeds from the vault to grow crops again. Anyone can store seeds there. And I bet that’s where we’ll find more chickpea seeds.’

  ‘But why did they put the seed bank near the North Pole? It’s not exactly down the road.’

  ‘It needs to be somewhere really cold – at -18 degrees Celsius – to keep the seeds well refrigerated and it’s also above sea level so if the ice caps melt, the seeds will still be safe and dry. “Safe from seas that rise up high”,’ said Arkie. ‘See, it all fits.’

  ‘The North Pole,’ said TJ. ‘As in one of the coldest places on Earth?’

  ‘It’s not as cold as Antarctica,’ said Arkie.

  ‘Well, that’s something, I guess,’ said TJ. ‘So that’s why they said to pack a thermal. Or two. I might take three. Or four. And a woolly vest for Cleo.’

  Cleo barked.

  ‘Cleo’s a dog,’ said Arkie, patting her on the head. ‘She’s already wearing fur.’

  ‘Fur!’ said TJ, jumping up. ‘That’s a brilliant idea, Arkie. I haven’t got an extensive polar wardrobe for obvious reasons, but Mum went to Russia last year to inspect her pickled herring factory and bought a couple of fake furs that she doesn’t wear anymore. I’m going to adapt them for us. That means we don’t have to sacrifice style for warmth.’ She smiled. ‘I’ll just need half an hour,’ she said looking at her watch, ‘so let’s ETD in BLUR at 0900 hours, Alfa Sierra.’

  ‘You could just say let’s leave at 9 o’clock this morning, Tango Juliet,’ said Arkie.

  ‘I could,’ said TJ, ‘but I don’t think international treasure hunters should sound so ordinary.’

  TJ’s Style File

  HOT TIPS FOR COLD CLIMATES

  Ensure your style sizzles

  White World

  BLUR was speeding through the atmosphere towards the North Pole.

  It was more than 12,000 kilometres away, but in the supersonic mini-jet they would be there in just a few hours.

  As they headed north towards the top of the world, across the Indian Ocean, passing over Africa and Europe, Arkie followed the map on the screen in front of her.

  They were travelling to a place of ice and snow, filled with mountains, icebergs, polar bears and reindeer.

  When Arkie was five, she had begged her parents to take her to the North Pole. She wanted to visit Santa Claus in his snowy mansion, burning bright with lights and swelling with music. She could almost see the Christmas joy swirling and twirling across the bleak landscape, sprinkling like snowflakes through the world.

  And now she was actually going there.

  But without her mum and dad.

  As she thought of Christmas and her parents, Arkie could feel tears filling her eyes.

  How can this be happening? she thought. Mum and Dad have been kidnapped.

  How could these six words – not even a paragraph, or a page – be so devastating? Words were supposed to mean something, to make sense. But these words didn’t. They were swollen with questions and fear and too enormous to fit in her head. They looked like a simple straight line with a beginning and an end, but they were curved and angled and wrapped in barbed wire. How could she ever get near them?

  She needed to concentrate on something she could reach – something she could solve: Clue No. 3:

  • They would find the vault.

  • They would find the chickpea seeds.

  • Then they’d be three treasures down and four to go.

  They were inching towards her mum and dad, treasure by treasure.

  TJ flicked the automatic pilot switch on the dashboard and picked up DATAMAX. ‘The Doomsday Vault is on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, near a town called Longyearbyen,’ she read. ‘Coordinates: latitude 78° 13’ North, longitude 15° 39’ East.’

  ‘Copy that, Tango Juliet,’ said Arkie, keying the coordinates into the screen to get a fix on their location. ‘Longyearbyen – that’s a funny name for a town,’ she said. ‘It’s like they ran out of ideas for names so just strung a random phrase together like Hotsummerthisyeareh.’

  ‘An unusual name suits it,’ said TJ. ‘It’s one of the northernmost towns in the world. And nearly 1000 kilometres from the North Pole.’ She checked the flight path on BLUR’s dashboard. ‘Beginning our descent in three minutes.’

  Arkie could already glimpse the landscape below – a patchwork of sea ice covering most of the Arctic Ocean for as far as she could see. It was one of the coldest times of year to be in this part of the world.

  ‘Visual on Longyearbyen in three seconds,’ said TJ. ‘Two, one and … visible at 12 o’clock.’

  They looked out the window at the town appearing directly below them. A collection of brightly coloured houses – red, blue and orange – were dotted along the bare, grey land and nestled at the foot of a valley. Steep mountains on either side reached into the sky.

  Arkie thought of all the buildings in a city, towering into the sky, shadowing the streets and tiny people below; crowding out nature.

  In this Arctic landscape, nature was the king of everything.

 
A river ran through the centre of the town, but it was frozen solid. Some children were ice-skating on it, while others dragged toboggans around the outside.

  The roads were covered in ice and transport in and out of the town was mainly by boat, skis, dog sleds or snowmobiles.

  ‘It’s still pretty dark,’ said Arkie. ‘But the local time is midday?’

  ‘The polar night – when the sun stays below the horizon all through the day – has only just ended,’ said TJ. ‘I think we’ve just missed the aurora borealis. This is what it’s like for four months in the middle of winter. And then in the summer, it’s light for 24 hours of the day for about five months.’

  This is the hardest hunt yet, thought Arkie. It’s not just us against the kidnappers. It’s us against nature too. And nature’s tough.

  ‘I don’t think we should use the parabrellas,’ she said. ‘Quincy said the rotor motors don’t work well in temperatures below -7 degrees Celsius.’ She checked the temperature on her THinc ring. ‘It’s -10 already and I guess it’s only going to get colder.’

  ‘Roger, Alfa Sierra,’ said TJ. ‘There’s a small airstrip just outside the town where planes bringing shipments to the vault unload their cargo. We can land BLUR there.’

  The airstrip was a short road with lights on either side. Snowmobiles were parked outside the only building at the airstrip, and a couple of snow scooters sat beside them.

  ‘Activating CamOp 7a,’ said TJ. ‘We’re a stratocumulus. It’s already very misty so we should just blend in.’

  She landed BLUR smoothly on the airstrip and came to a stop before the building, parking to the side of it so no one would bump into BLUR by mistake.

  ‘What’s our plan, Alfa Sierra?’ said TJ as BLUR’s engines idled to a stop.

  ‘We’ve got to get into the vault somehow,’ said Arkie, ‘so maybe we can intercept a shipment?’

  ‘According to the international airwaves there’s a shipment for the vault arriving soon,’ said TJ. ‘I just heard them requesting landing clearance.’