“This battle took place in 1396.” Gwen lowered the magnifying glass, scrunching up her brow. “The Black Prince’s Ruby was in England by then. And the Russian ruby was wreaking havoc on the Chinese emperors. Even if the three rubies did start out in a mine near Tamerlane’s capital, he would only have had the one piece. Why would he put all three on the flag?”
“And why does Tanner care?” asked Jack. “There’s another piece to this puzzle that we’re missing.” He picked up a candle and turned to his right, expecting to find the corridor where he had lost the professor. The wall was covered with a heavy curtain of dusty purple velvet. He reeled back. “I . . . I could swear there was a passage here.”
“There is. Look here, on the edge of the curtain—finger marks in the dust.” Gwen hauled the fabric off to the side. Behind it was a staircase. “After you two.”
Chapter Forty-One
AT THE BOTTOM of the staircase, Jack found a blue door marked DIMITRI A. LAZAREV, PHD.
“Our walletless archeologist,” said Gwen, drawing the ID card from her pocket. She slid it into a reader on the wall.
A green light. A beep. The lock clicked.
“Basement office. Windowless door.” Gwen pushed it open. “The Phantom couldn’t see inside to jump. That’s why Tanner needed the card.”
“But why would he come here in the first place?” asked Sadie. “He has all three rubies. Why not take over the world already?”
Jack nudged her into the room after Gwen. “Let’s find out.”
The three of them squeezed into a tight space—so tight that Jack had to tuck his elbows to keep from bumping his sister as he opened a filing cabinet drawer. “An archeologist who works in a broom closet in the basement of a church,” he said as he picked through the papers. “That’s a little odd, isn’t it? Doesn’t that ID say he works in a museum?”
Sadie lifted a shard of pottery from the desk, and Gwen quickly took the piece away, carefully setting it down again. “This is a museum, Jack. The Soviets confiscated Saint Basil’s from the church decades ago and gave it to the State Historical Museum. The new Russian government never gave it back.” She motioned for Jack to join her. “Over here. Have a look.”
In order to comply, he had to pirouette around his sister in a little scooting dance. Artifacts of all kinds covered the desk—old books, fragments of pottery and parchment, an aquarium chemical bath filled with ancient coins. Underneath it all lay a map of the world, heavily marked and dotted with Post-its. Gwen traced a line of arrows from Samarkand to India, then out into the Pacific. “Lazarev was tracking the Timur Ruby through history.”
“He tracked all three rubies,” said Jack. He pushed a notebook aside and exposed another line of arrows that ran from Turkey through Spain, up to England. “ ‘An eastern usurper to the Moorish throne,’ ” he said, remembering what the archeologist’s book had said about Abu Sa’id and the Black Prince’s Ruby. “That’s how the British crown ruby found its way to Europe.” On a hunch, he eased the aquarium back and discovered yet another set of arrows originating in China, tracking west to Moscow. “And this is the path of the Russian ruby.”
At the starting point of each line, Lazarev had pasted a picture. Jack tapped the one at the start of the western line, an illustration of a man dressed in furs and seated on a wooden throne. Above the throne was a long blue flag that bore a familiar device. “Check out this guy’s banner.”
“A triangle of red dots,” said Sadie, squeezing in between them. “Just like Tamerlane’s flag on the tapestry.”
“And over here, too.” He pointed out the picture at the origin of the Russian ruby’s line, thousands of miles away in China. The man in the second illustration was sitting on a golden throne with sparrows flitting about the peak. His banner was white, yet there was a triangle of red dots at its center exactly like the others.
Gwen drew her magnifying glass and studied the captions. She shook her head. “This can’t be right. The guy in Turkey with all the fur is Batu Khan, leader of the Golden Horde. And the man on the golden throne is Kublai Khan, ruler of China. How could both kingdoms, along with Tamerlane’s, share the same three-ruby emblem?”
As Jack took the glass to have a look, his sister lifted an ancient coin from the map. It left an oily blotch behind. “Ew,” she said, rubbing the piece between her fingers. “It’s all greasy.”
“Because it came from that chemical bath in the aquarium,” he said, reaching to snatch the coin away. “Sadie, that stuff might—” The moment the metal touched Jack’s skin, Tanner’s sinister face flashed in his mind.
The professor had held that coin.
Tanner’s smirk quickly faded, replaced by yet another circle-triangle symbol. This time it formed a three-dimensional structure. Jack could see a fractured impression deep within the metal, though time had wiped all visible markings from the surface. He saw all three circles, plus a fourth, much smaller than the rest and set at the very center. With the new addition, the triangle symbol looked exactly like the drawing he had seen in Tanner’s office two days before.
He dropped the coin back into the aquarium and watched the tiny waves it made in the chemical bath. A name wavered beneath the yellow ripples—a label taped to the bottom so that the writing could be seen through the glass.
Meanwhile, Gwen had her fingertips pressed against her temples, rocking side to side, deep in thought. Jack could see that the lack of space in the office was killing her. She preferred to pace when she was working things out.
“Three paths. Three kingdoms. Three flags,” she was saying. “All using the same three-ruby symbol. Why?” Then her eyes popped open. “Because it wasn’t their emblem. It belonged to a common ancestor who founded all three kingdoms. Jack, I know how the three rubies were separated. They were divided among the heirs of—”
Jack said the name with her. “Genghis Khan.”
Sadie giggled.
Gwen dropped her hands, looking disappointed. “How did you know that?”
“Those are coins from his empire,” said Jack, nodding at the aquarium. “And they’re stamped with a symbol that I saw in Tanner’s office.” He found a pen and paper on the desk and started drawing. “There were four rubies, not three, with the smallest one at the center. I’m betting the small dot faded from paintings and tapestries. Over time, it was lost entirely, like a piece of a message lost in the telephone game.” He held the paper up, pointing to the central dot. “This is why the professor came here. He’s still tracking the final ruby.”
Gwen took the pad from Jack’s hands, tracing her finger along the lines between the circles, listing off an attribute as she touched each one. “Loyalty, command, knowledge. Genghis Khan didn’t just divide up the jewels among his sons, he divided up the sources of his power. And the fourth ruby must link them all together.”
“Forty million people,” Jack said under his breath.
Gwen looked up from the pad. “Say again?”
“Forty million. I remember the number from our history courses. That’s how many people Genghis Khan slaughtered. He made towers out of their skulls.”
“Gruesome.” Gwen scrunched up her face. “Do you think Tanner would be capable of such things? You know, if he managed to claim the power in all four jewels?”
Jack shook his head, remembering Nicholas and the Duke of Alencon. “The question you should be asking is will the power of the jewels claim him.”
She stared at him for a long moment, then ripped the page from the notepad and stuffed it into her pocket. “We have to beat him to that fourth ruby.”
“But how?” interjected Sadie. “We don’t even know where to start.”
“Oh yes we do.” Gwen pushed Jack into another pirouette, scooting around him, and headed for the door.
Chapter Forty-Two
THE THREE HAD LEFT the urban streets of Moscow behind, heading out into the suburbs. Gwen had insisted on driving, and Jack had let her because, as usual, she wouldn’t tell him whe
re they were going. He was regretting it.
“You’re squishing me again,” complained Sadie, wiggling her shoulders against him.
The scooter really wasn’t designed for three people. Jack inched backward for the umpteenth time so that his rear end hung in the cold wind. He would get frostbite on both cheeks if they didn’t reach their destination soon. “Gwen!” he shouted over the wind whipping past his helmet. “Where are we going?”
“A library of sorts!” Gwen shouted back. “British. Centuries old.”
Jack tried to scoot forward again, but Sadie reached back a hand to stop him. She hadn’t even looked. Then she tapped Gwen on the shoulder. “Why is there an old British library here in Moscow?”
Gwen turned onto a long stretch of asphalt, running between swaths of snow-covered trees. “The Moscow of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was all kinds of British, Sadie. The tsarina was Queen Victoria’s granddaughter. The Muscovy Company—a division of the Ministry of Guilds—had the biggest trading post in the city. I could go on and on.”
“Well I can’t!” shouted Jack. “How much farther?”
She acted as if she hadn’t heard him. “There was this Scotsman, you see. Jacob Bruce. Astronomer and scientist extraordinaire. Favorite of Peter the Great and all that. The tsar made him a count and everything.”
“Gwen . . .”
“He granted Count Bruce an estate. And according to legend, all sorts of wonderment occurred there, generation after generation.” She finally slowed and turned down a gravel road, heading for a huge yellow house with lots of white pillars. “Wooden girls walked in the garden. Flying machines rose from the back lawn. The last Bruce was said to shoot lightning from his cane.”
They coasted to a stop in the circular drive, and Jack hopped off, poking his buns to check them for feeling. Gwen lowered the kickstand and removed her helmet. She gave him a freckle-bounce smile, taking on her now-you-fill-in-the-rest look.
“Flying machines?” asked Jack, helping his sister off the bike.
Gwen nodded.
“And lightning bolts from a cane.”
“Yep.”
He took off his helmet, frowning at her. “The Bruces were quartermasters. They were part of the Ministry of Trackers.”
Gwen waved her hand in a grandiose arc. “Welcome to Monino, Jack. Outpost of the ministry from the mid-eighteenth century until 1917, when the Bolshevik Revolution forced them to abandon it.” She shrugged. “Currently it’s a summer health spa.”
“You still haven’t told me how this will help us catch Tanner.”
“I was just getting to that.” Gwen lifted the jewel case from the bike and took a path toward the back of the house. “Of course, if you’d read the histories of the ministry I gave you,” she said over her shoulder, “I wouldn’t have to explain.”
The rear garden was quite large—pretty, in an unkempt sort of way, except for a rusty metal rail that ran down the middle. Jack stepped over it, following the girls up the porch steps.
Gwen set the jewel case down and examined a set of ornamental columns recessed into nooks along the back wall of the house. There were three, with arched doorways between them. She focused her attention on the center column. “The Bruces were station managers, Jack, and quartermasters to the Fowlers. Joe Fowler the Ninth set up shop here while hunting artifacts in the east. I suspect that’s where he met his wife Saraa—your great-great-grandmother and the world’s leading expert on Temujin.”
“Hold on,” said Jack. “Our great-grandmother?”
“Temu-who?” asked Sadie.
“Great-great-grandmother,” said Gwen, correcting Jack. And then she gave Sadie a little wink. “Temujin was the real name of the man the world remembers as Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan was just his title—universal king or some such rubbish.”
Jack looked out at the expansive garden, overgrown and abandoned for the winter. “If this place is still used as a summer health spa, then won’t all of Saraa’s—I mean my great-great-grandmother’s—research be long gone?”
“It’s copper.”
“What? Her research?”
“No, you wally.” Gwen had knelt beside the column. “This base. I thought it was stone like the rest of the column, but it’s oxidized copper. And to answer your question, the outpost isn’t inside the estate. It’s underneath. I’m trying to figure out how to get down there.”
Jack crouched beside her. Sure enough, the gray-green base, which had looked like the stone of the column in the dull light of the moon, was really copper. He pressed his fingers against one of three decorative bands, feeling the cold metal. It gave to his touch, turning in place. He tried the next one down. It turned as well. Each was etched with squiggly symbols. “This looks like a combination lock.”
“And if I had to hazard a guess,” said Gwen, “I’d say those are Mongolian letters. It’s written vertically. Perhaps we need to line them up to make the right word.”
Jack glanced over at her. “How many Mongolian words do you know?”
Gwen’s freckles went flat. “None.”
“So there’s that.”
She shot him a frown and then pulled Sadie over, showing her the script. “The Bruces loved codes and clues. They would have left some for us. Look around.”
While the girls searched, Jack listened to the night. There was a lot less noise this far from the city center—only the constant buzz still hovering in his mind and the white haze of the cold. But a dark, bumpy rumble had been forming beneath it all, still faint but getting louder. “I hear an engine,” he said. “A car on the outer road.”
“It’s a motorway, Jack.” Gwen lifted a dead potted plant and checked the underside. “People drive on it. Relax.” She set the pot down again, looking disappointed.
“Found one.” Sadie sat down in a rocking chair, rubbing one of its arms with her coat sleeve. “It’s covered in mold, but I think it’s one of those squiggles—a sideways U with two dots.”
Jack saw the same symbol on the top ring. He turned it until the U clicked into place at the front.
Sadie squealed.
Not in a good way.
Chapter Forty-Three
JACK JUMPED TO HIS FEET. The rocking chair was empty. It was also free of mold and grime—an exact copy of the chair his sister had been sitting in but definitely not the same one. He looked to Gwen.
She shrugged. “I was watching you turn the ring.”
“Jack?”
The call formed in his mind before he registered it as sound—a muted pink vapor rising out of the porch. That particular shade belonged to only one voice. “Sadie?”
“It’s really dark down here.”
“She’s below us. We have to get down there.”
“Then we’d better finish the combination.” Gwen looked from the chair to the house. “Sadie found the U symbol opposite the first column. That can’t be a coincidence.” She hurried past Jack to the last column and then paced outward, crouching down when she reached the porch rail. The balusters were shaped like saints and angels. “Eureka. There’s a fancy capital E on this angel’s right wing. Third column, third ring, right?”
The approaching car had reached the intersection of the gravel road. Jack willed it to pass on by as he turned the bottom ring. The E symbol clicked into place.
Nothing happened.
“Perhaps you need to set the middle ring first. There’s another symbol around here somewhere.”
“And it’s been right at my feet the whole time.” Jack rubbed away the dirt from the plank between his sneakers. Within the grooves of the white-painted wood, he saw a squiggle that resembled a squished horned animal. The same symbol appeared among the script on the rings. He turned the middle band until the squished-horned beast clicked into place.
Again, nothing—at least, not from the porch.
A string of crackles and pops sounded from the other side of the house, the distinct sound of tires on gravel. Headlights washed through the tr
ees.
“Gwen—”
“I see it.”
“That’ll be Ash and Shaw, and a car full of Russian police.”
She wrinkled her nose at him. “Stating the obvious isn’t making my brain work any faster, thank you. We lined up the symbols, top to bottom. It should have worked.”
“Top to bottom,” mumbled Jack. “You said Mongolian is written vertically, exactly the way the symbols line up on the rings.”
“Yes. So?”
“Still dark down here.” Sadie’s pink, disembodied voice floated up through the planks.
Jack gave them a stomp. “I’m working on it.” He pointed at each column in sequence. “We’ve been trying to read them left to right, like English. But what if . . .”
He closed his eyes, visualizing the items on the porch—the arm of the rocking chair, the angel wing, the squished-horned beast carved into the plank. The symbols from each one flew to the center of his vision, remaining at their respective heights. If he read them top to bottom instead of left to right, the last two symbols were reversed.
“I’m trying a different order,” said Jack, and turned the middle ring so that the funny E from the angel wing came to the center. “Watch out for a trapdoor.”
It worked. The baluster rotated, turning the angel’s face to the inside. There was a light click. “Ha! Missed me,” said Gwen, hopping backward. A trapdoor opened right where she landed, and she fell through the porch with a squeal just like Sadie’s.
The driver of the car on the other side of the house shut off the engine. The headlights went out, reclaiming the shadows from the pines. Time was short. Jack picked up the jewel case and turned the final ring, clicking the squished-horned beast into place. He heard a ratcheting of gears, and a section of the floorboards at his feet started down like an elevator. But it quickly ground to a halt, leaving him shin-deep in the porch.
A car door slammed.
Gwen’s face appeared at his feet, two eyes and a freckled nose. “Are you coming?”
The Fourth Ruby Page 15