Vespers Rising (The 39 Clues #11)(39)

Besides the men in uniform, the only other sign that the mansion had become an army installation was the large city map spread out on a vast dining table. A number of locations were marked with colored tacks — headquarters itself, the officers’ billets, and troop deployments. There were pins all over town, except for a central district not far from the beach, filled with very narrow, winding streets. It was surrounded by a solid line on which someone had scribbled the word WALL.

She squinted. The area had a name, printed on the paper in paler ink:

ANCIENNE MEDINA

She recalled from Madame Fourchette’s French lessons that this meant the old Arab quarter, or casbah.

Her heart began to pound. Ancienne Medina — AM!

So it doesn’t mean morning. When the message said White House AM, it was a reference to Casablanca’s old casbah!

She had to inform the general!

“I’m sorry, Miss Grace,” said Patton’s aide. “He’s tied up with military matters. I don’t know when he’ll be available again.”

She returned to her room, growing more restless by the second. The Morse code pointed to the Ancienne Medina, but Patton didn’t know that. And by the time she had a chance to tell him, it might be too late. There could be a Vesper in town at this very moment. And the Vespers knew about the bull’s-eye, which was a lot more than Grace could say for herself. How could she be certain of what bull’s-eye might mean in the middle of a shooting war fought with weapon scopes, rifle sights, crosshairs, and targeting systems?

She was positive that the answer lay somewhere in the casbah.

But the general had said her part was over….

Well, that was then; this is now.

She could not stand idly by, giving their rivals a chance to find the bull’s-eye first while Patton was distracted by military matters. She had to help. She owed it to the general; she owed it to her family; and she especially owed it to Drago, who had lost his life getting her here. Somehow, she had to make that meaningful.

She’d never be able to explain this to the sentries stationed about the mansion. Luckily, Grace was an expert at sneaking in and out of places — training from her role as the younger sister of tattletale Beatrice.

She opened the shutters and eased herself over the windowsill, contemplating the eight-foot drop. Hanging on with her good hand, she lowered herself as far as she could and then jumped the remaining distance to the ground. Keeping to the shrubbery, she sneaked across the property and vaulted a low wall.

For a place that had just been seized by foreign invaders, Casablanca seemed very much business-as-usual. The streets were bustling with veiled women, turbaned and white-robed men, and visitors of a wide variety of nationalities. With war raging on the continent to the north, this part of Africa had been the first stop for many civilians trying to escape the conflict. People went about their business, heads down, never making eye contact. It was perfect for Grace’s purposes — nobody looked at her. But it contributed to an overall sense that something secret was going on.

She had memorized the route between headquarters and the Ancienne Medina, although she questioned her navigation skills more than once along the way. The roads did not appear to be laid out on any kind of grid. They twisted and turned, and the exotic arabesque architecture, with its elaborate designs, made it impossible to fix on any landmarks.

She was relieved when at last she arrived at the stone wall, weathered by centuries of sand and dust storms, surrounding the Ancienne Medina.

She had made it — but where to go from here?

Inside the casbah’s gates, the neighborhoods were older and more crowded. Some of the alleyways were so narrow that the upper floors of the Moorish buildings almost met above the road, creating a tunnel effect. There were no cars here, just swarms of pedestrians and a few bicycles and carts. Tiny stalls and shops sold everything from live chickens to expensive jewelry. Saloons, restaurants, and cafés lined both sides of the street as far as the eye could see.

1001 NIGHTS proclaimed a pink neon sign. Open shutters revealed tiny tables and dim flickering candles that made it nearly impossible to see the food. This, thought Grace with a shudder, might be a plus. Two men were playing darts in the back room, and money was changing hands.

Grace stared. A dartboard.

Bull’s-eye — the center circle of a dartboard!

Flattening herself against the crumbling stucco, she waited until the two gamblers finished their match and stumbled off to the bar. Then she slipped into 1001 Nights and made her way to the dartboard in the rear.

She peered at the bull’s-eye. There were just a few holes, some of which looked like they had been made by knives and not darts. She reached behind the board. Nothing but wall — rough plaster, no secret compartment.

Okay, wrong dartboard. But there had to be plenty of others in the Ancienne Medina. Too many. And the only way to find the right one was a door-to-door search.

A voice too close to her ear said, “Would the young lady care to challenge an expert?”

Grace was back out on the street before she could formulate a refusal. She wasn’t sure why she was so scared. After all, hadn’t she just crash-landed a plane in the desert? Yet it took all her resolve to get her into Scheherazade next door. Belly-dancer music spilled out from a broken window. Oh, joy.

The next three hours saw her in and out of some of the sleaziest nightspots in all of North Africa. She examined dartboards of various shapes, sizes, and degrees of disrepair, stained with food, grease, and even, she suspected, blood. The bull’s-eyes yielded nothing.