J.M.J.

Author's note: Thank you for reading! Thank you especially to those who have left reviews! The next chapter will be October 1. God bless!

September 27 – Wednesday

It was hard to be patient any longer on this case. Both Pavel Morales and Gaspar Santana had virtually disappeared, and the rest of the cartel had made themselves scarce as well. Something had shifted in the case, and it was aggravating to be constantly only one step away from learning what, only to have everything shift again at the last moment. That was why, when the Mexican authorities had discovered Morales's most recent hideout in a small town not far from the U.S. border, Fenton had chafed at the fact that he and Sam were about a hundred miles away and wouldn't be able to make it in time for the raid. For the entire drive, Fenton was expecting his phone to ring with some news of what the authorities had found, but the call didn't come. Instead, Fenton and Sam had to content themselves with going into the local police headquarters and meet with Captain Lopez, who had been Fenton's contact throughout the investigation.

Lopez hadn't yet returned to headquarters when the private detectives had arrived, but they hadn't been there very long before he came up the front steps and into the building. There was a look of deep concentration on his face, but he smiled when he saw the detectives and shook hands with both of them.

"Thank you for coming," he said in perfect English. Both Fenton and Sam spoke Spanish well enough, but Lopez evidently felt it was more polite to speak to them in their native language. In any case, that's what he typically did. "It's a good thing you're here. I think we'll need some help making sense of what we found in that house."

"Was Morales there?" Fenton asked.

"No," Lopez replied regretfully. "We were a little too late again, but we must not have been too late by much. Morales left a notebook behind. It appears to be in code. I understand that both of you have experience in breaking codes."

"Yes, that's right," Fenton said. "We'll take a look at it."

Lopez led the detectives into an office where he gave them the notebook in question. Even when Fenton had been with the NYPD, codebreaking had been one of his specialties, and he had trained Sam in the skill. It didn't take them long to identify it as a simple substitution cipher and begin working it out. There were large blocks of encrypted text, which made it even easier, although more tedious, to decode, since frequently occurring letters and short words could be searched for. It wouldn't have taken an expert to decode it, but Fenton was glad to have something to do anyway. The text was in Spanish, which added a small additional difficulty, but even so, the detectives soon had it decoded and were reading through it.

"Fenton, what are you making of this?" Sam asked as he finished reading it in its entirety. "I thought it would make more sense when I could read the whole thing, but I think we're still missing a few pieces."

"I'm not so sure," Fenton replied, excitement rising in him. "I need to call Carson."

HBNDHBNDHB

Nancy had been quieter than normal all during supper. It was only herself and her dad and Hannah who were there, and Nancy was excited about the quickly approaching trip to New Zealand and seeing Ned again, which would have normally made her more talkative, but she had a strange feeling of apprehension about the trip at the same time. She wasn't sure if it was just because, despite all the traveling she had done in the last months, none of it had been for fun, and perhaps that was making it feel wrong to be traveling for the fun of it. Or maybe it was some almost superstitious fear that taking a vacation would end up like the Hardys' had. One way or another, she felt strangely anxious about the entire trip.

"New Zealand doesn't have giant spiders like Australia, does it?" Hannah was asking.

Carson chuckled. "Whether it does or not, I don't think that's something to worry about. The girls will have a lot of fun, I'm sure."

Nancy realized a moment too late that her father's comment was addressed partly to her. She nodded and said, "Yes, it will be a lot of fun."

"Is something wrong, Nancy?" Carson asked.

"I don't think so," Nancy said. "I just feel a little strange."

"You're not getting sick, are you?" Hannah asked in concern.

"No, not like that," Nancy assured her. "It's more like a premonition or something that something's going to go wrong."

Carson frowned thoughtfully. "That's odd."

"I know premonitions and all that sort of thing don't mean anything necessarily," Nancy started to explain, but Carson shook his head.

"It isn't that. It's just that I have the same feeling."

"Maybe the girls shouldn't go," Hannah said.

"No, we're not missing this, especially not just because of a feeling," Nancy protested.

Further discussion was cut off by Carson's phone ringing. When he saw that it was Fenton, he answered it immediately. After listening to Fenton for a minute or two while he explained the background of where the notebook had come from, Carson left the room to hear the rest of the story without distractions.

"Apparently, Morales wrote this as a way to get even with Devin Reynolds," Fenton explained. "It's very incriminating."

"I don't think I quite follow," Carson said. "Devin Reynolds? Brock Garret's agent? But he was killed."

"I know. I'm getting ahead on story. According to Morales, Reynolds is the one who has contacted him on several occasions over the years for hits, which I already suspected from the information on his laptop. This means that Reynolds was much more deeply involved in the Hawaiian gang than we suspected."

"It could even mean that Reynolds was the leader of the entire group," Carson pointed out. "Morales seems to be the only one who realized he was involved at all."

"Right. Morales seems to have been his secret ace for eliminating anyone else who was in his way. The arrangement clearly worked well for a long time, but then Reynolds hired him to eliminate Garret after Garret went to the police. Morales wasn't very interested in the contract, considering how by that time the case had so much publicity. When Morales turned him down, Reynolds tried to send an assassin after him. This assassin failed, clearly, and that's when Morales decided to get his revenge."

"Did he simply write down a record of his dealings with Reynolds or was he the one who killed him?"

"If Morales killed Reynolds, he doesn't admit to it in this notebook, and he's not shy about admitting to any other murders he's committed. So we still don't know who killed Reynolds or why. Morales or Garret makes sense, but then it could also have been a mistake. Reynolds might have hired another assassin to go after Garret, and this one got the wrong person."

"That would be ironic," Carson said. "But can we trust Morales's account? Or even that Morales really wrote it? There have been enough attempts to mislead us that I'm skeptical of any clue that just falls into our path."

"I know," Fenton agreed. "And the fact that the notebook is encoded only makes it more suspicious to me. If Morales wanted it to be read, he wouldn't have gone to the bother of putting it in code, and if he didn't want it to be read—or at least, not by the wrong people—then he would have used a more difficult code. Sam and I are a bit skeptical ourselves."

"Someone may be trying to pin all the blame on a dead man," Carson pointed out. "That's a fairly safe target, since he can't retaliate."

"It could be, or it could all be exactly the way Morales wrote it," Fenton said. "We won't know for sure until we catch him, and that's turned out to be pretty difficult."

"You say he's getting closer to the border," Carson said. "Do you think he's going to try to cross it?"

"Maybe. If he does, he'll probably get through. That could be why he seems to have partnered up with Santana. If there's one thing Santana knows, it's how to sneak people across the border." Fenton paused for a moment before he shifted the conversation's direction. "There is one other thing."

Carson's pulse quickened at Fenton's tone. "What is it?"

"Morales mentions that Reynolds also owned property in several different countries, under different names. He also owned a yacht registered to one of these other names. If that's true, it makes it look even more suspicious that Reynolds really was a criminal, and a wealthy one, at that. But here's the really interesting thing. The yacht is named the Red Streak, and I did some checking before I called you. It's in a marina in New Zealand right now."

"That's a strange coincidence," Carson said, although he wasn't convinced that it was a coincidence.

"I know. And here's another thing: it didn't arrive there until after Reynolds was killed. Until then, it was in Hawaii."

"So who sailed it to New Zealand?"

"I'm working on getting that information from the New Zealand government," Fenton replied. "Until then, I have a pretty good idea where they might be staying. New Zealand is one of the countries where Reynolds owned property, under the name Derek Rogers. I have the location."

"And would Nancy look into it while she's there?" Carson anticipated his friend's request.

"Would she?"

"I'll ask her, but I'm sure she will."

HBNDHBNDHB

The Hardys, Chet, and Biff had searched the island thoroughly on Tuesday, and they had found no sign that anyone else had been there. There were no boats or planes or anything else that someone might have used to arrive, but there was still a vague sense of something hanging over all of them. It might have just been that Joe's uneasiness had spread amongst the others, but they were all feeling more tense and restless than usual.

The tension was also making them more irritable than usual, and so most of Wednesday was spent with them snapping at one another. It was all over small things, such as items not being put back where they belonged or breakfast being late or lunch being early so that not everyone was there or even someone drumming his fingers in a way that annoyed one of the others. Katina must have been uncomfortable with all the tension, and so she stayed away most of the day, only coming back for meals, which she ate hastily and then would retreat back into the jungle for some solitude.

"I wish she wouldn't wander off by herself like that," Biff said as he started washing his plate after supper. "Even if there isn't anyone else on the island, there still could be other dangers."

"Oh, let her alone," Chet told him. "She's been looking out for herself longer than any of us have. She doesn't need us to babysit her."

"Well, maybe not, but that doesn't mean that she couldn't get into trouble by herself out there."

Joe rolled his eyes in annoyance. He was getting tired of all the bickering, even though he knew he wasn't doing any better than his friends. It was getting late; maybe it would be best to just go to bed. He tapped his foot impatiently while Biff seemed to take forever washing his plate. When he had finally finished, Joe hurried forward to splash some of the heated water over his own plate.

"Hey, leave some water in the pot," Tony told him.

"It's not like there's a floor to spill it on," Joe retorted.

"Then you can go get more water and heat it if you want to spill it all," Tony grumbled.

"I'm not trying to," Joe said.

"Just let it go for once, Joe," Frank broke in. "You don't always have to have the last word."

"And you don't always have to tell me what to do."

Phil was the only one who hadn't finished supper yet. As the bickering went on, he set his plate aside. "Guys," he said in a fairly quiet tone, but no one else was paying attention. "Guys," he repeated, more loudly this time.

"What?" several of them asked, finally turning to look at him.

"We've all had the feeling that something's about to happen," Phil said. "Maybe that doesn't mean anything; maybe it does. In any case, we know that people come to the island from time to time and have come at least once since we've been here, and that these people don't want to be seen. I'm thinking that maybe we should set up a watch on one of the hills. We can see basically the whole shoreline from either one. Nobody would be able to get to the island without us seeing."

There was a pause as they all tried to adjust from their petty arguments to thinking about a practical solution for their problems.

Finally, Frank nodded. "That's a good idea. Honestly, we should have been doing that all along. Then we wouldn't have missed the first time those people came."

"That's going to be pretty hard," Joe said. "We'll need someone on duty at all times, or it won't do much good. Actually, we'll need two people to make sure nobody falls asleep or anything. Katina can't help because we wouldn't have any way to make her understand what we want her to do, and so that means there's only enough of us to have three shifts a day. That's eight hours a day, just sitting there and watching for something that might not be coming."

"Well, then, that's what we'll have to do, because I don't think sitting here and being oblivious if anyone comes by is such a great idea," Phil replied. "For that matter, we should be ready to light a signal fire up there, in case we see someone who's just passing by and wouldn't stop otherwise. It might get us rescued."

"Or killed," Joe retorted. "What if we start signaling to the guys that tried to kill us?"

"If they are the guys who were here before, then they don't need a signal to know that we're here," Phil pointed out.

"What would we do if we even saw those guys coming?" Chet asked. "We wouldn't have any way to defend ourselves."

"We could hide," Tony pointed out. "It would be better than just sitting here and letting them find us."

There was still some disagreement about whether it was a practical idea or not, but in the end, they all agreed that it was the only thing to be done. With no clocks or watches, they didn't have any way to evenly divide up the shifts, which sparked further debate. They believed the daylight was approximately twelve hours each day this close to the equator. They thought they could approximate the daytime hours well enough from that, but that didn't help with the night. After nearly getting into an out-and-out fight over it, they finally decided that the only fair way to handle it was to do twelve-hour shifts, which had the added benefit that not everyone would have to do a shift every day or be stuck with night shifts all the time.

It was nearing sunset, so they decided that the next shift could wait until morning to set out instead of finding the way through the dark. They drew straws to decide who would be on each shift. Joe and Biff got the first shift, then Frank and Tony would have the second, and Chet and Phil would have the third. They would repeat the shifts in cycles.

"I hope that feeling I've been having is right," Joe muttered as he finally lay down to go to sleep.

Frank had been near enough to hear. "Why?"

"Because these shifts are going to murder," Joe complained. "I don't want to have to keep it up very long. But if our luck holds out the way it has, nothing's going to happen. Let's face it: we're probably never going to get off this island."