by Tony Abbott
“We guessed that,” said Becca.
“Two, his neck was broken from behind.”
“From behind?” My stomach poured up into my throat. “The killer reached over the seat and killed him? While I was sleeping there?”
Darrell nodded. “It’s not safe to sleep on a plane.”
“What was the third thing?” asked Lily.
He bit off a chunk of candy bar. “Mr. Chen’s hand was missing.”
There was a minute of stunned silence as we watched Darrell chew.
Dad narrowed his eyes. “Darrell . . . what?”
“Mr. Chen had a fake hand,” he said. “What do you call those?”
“A prosthetic. He had a prosthetic hand?” Dad replied. “I didn’t notice it.”
“Well, he had one, and now it’s gone. The police figure someone stole it, because it’s not, you know, attached to him anymore.”
Mr. Chen had had his left hand in his pocket the first time I saw him, and I remembered how he’d already covered himself with a blanket when I took my seat next to him. No wonder we hadn’t noticed.
“But why on earth . . . I don’t understand this,” Dad said, hoisting his carry-on over his shoulder and moving away from the gate. “Anyway, we can leave now. The police have my number if they need to ask any more questions.”
We followed him quietly along the concourse and down the escalator to the baggage claim area on the ground floor, when he paused as if he’d just thought of something.
“Is Leathercoat here again?” Lily asked, swiveling her head around.
“No,” Dad said. “And that’s the point. Before we go, there’s something I want to do. Kids, I think we should leave Vela and the daggers here at the airport.”
For a minute, I thought I’d heard him wrong. “Dad, what? Leave Vela. And the daggers? No way. They’re all far too valuable—”
“Which is exactly my point,” he said, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Now that we know that the German is here in San Francisco, whether he followed us here or not, I think Vela—and all of us—will be safer if we store it in a secure public place. A place that we’re going to come back to, but one that’s well protected.” He nodded behind us.
A sign on the wall next to an office door read: Airport Travel Agency Baggage Storage.
“I’ve used this kind of service before,” Dad explained. “We can leave a bag here with Vela and the daggers locked up inside. It’s one of the safest and most anonymous methods of storing something.”
“Don’t they search everything?” I asked.
“They’ll x-ray our bag to make sure there’s nothing dangerous inside, but not hand-search it. The special holster will hide the daggers, and Vela will look like any sort of jewelry. Only we can retrieve them. Look, it’s an international airport, so their security has to be tight.”
“You’re right, Uncle Roald,” said Lily, looking up from her cell phone. “There’s a website that rates these things, and it says this is one of the best. Besides, if Leathercoat already left the airport, he won’t know we hid the stuff here.”
“I agree,” Becca said with a quick nod, “but I’m keeping the diary. It’s disguised as a schoolbook anyway.”
It felt so wrong to leave Vela behind after we’d searched half the world to find it, but I remembered what Leathercoat had said to me, and Dad’s plan made sense. Besides, I didn’t want to believe that the San Francisco airport was in the pocket of the Teutonic Order of Ancient Prussia.
“Yeah, okay,” I said.
Lily had a small bag that could be zipped closed and locked with a tiny padlock. We holstered up both daggers in there, and we left Vela in its velvet wrapper, twisted inside one of Dad’s sweaters. We handed it over the counter to a pleasant older woman. At the last minute, Darrell decided to stuff his spare Snickers bars in. He whispered to us that they would distract any thieves. Thieves like him, I thought.
It took a few minutes, and it was done. I clutched the baggage-claim ticket in my hand and then shoved it deep into my jacket pocket.
Walking away from the storage office felt strange and still a little wrong. I turned to look back. A young couple was stowing a folding baby stroller with the same woman who had helped us. She said something to them and they laughed. I felt better.
Then through the windows I saw the gurney being rolled along the sidewalk to an ambulance. It had a black body bag strapped on it. I felt worse again.
Outside the terminal, it was morning, and the air was different—colder, grayer. It was raining, as the pilot had predicted. A wet Sunday morning. Mr. Chen had said it would be Sunday when we woke. The beginning of a new week. Not for him, it wouldn’t. I felt heavy inside. I barely knew him, but a man I had talked to was now dead.
Why?
Had Vela brought a Guardian and a Teutonic Knight to San Francisco, or was there another relic here? Would we find out, or get to New York before anything happened? Would anyone else die?
I only knew one thing. We couldn’t let Galina Krause win.
As we headed for the taxi stand, I found that the rain was steadier and harder than I’d thought, and that every single cab was taken.
Every cab but one.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A beat-up old car idled at the end of the covered taxi area, its driver leaning back as if he were the only thing holding it up. He was a short, round man with a grizzly-bear beard. The car was big and black, from years ago, and dinged up from bumper to bumper.
“That’s an old hackney cab,” my father said. “Like they have in London. It’s strange to see a vintage one here.”
“The driver looks pretty vintage, too,” Lily commented, “which means he probably knows his way around and will get us to our hotel so we can sleep and eat but mostly sleep, which I need to do.”
“Let’s snag him before anyone else,” said Darrell. He led us at a brisk trot to the end of the taxi stand, where Dad told the driver our destination.
The guy squinted at us up and down and tugged on his scraggly beard. “I don’t drive kids around.”
“Excuse me?” said Dad. “You can’t mean that.”
The man scowled. “Sure I do.”
“Oh, now please. You’re the last one, it’s raining, we’re tired—”
“So sleep,” the man mumbled. “Go on. Beat it.”
We were all stunned. No one had ever talked to us that way. Finally, Dad turned back to the terminal. “We’ll find the shuttle.”
“Rude!” said Lily.
“Yeah, thanks a lot,” Darrell grunted as he spun around with us. Then he froze. He stared into the passenger window of the cab at—of all things—an electric guitar belted in the seat like a living person.
“A vintage Strat!” Darrell gasped. He plays guitar, and knows all the famous ones. “Can I take a look?”
The cabbie said, “No!” but Darrell’s hands had a mind of their own. They reached in through the open window, formed a chord on the fret board, and strummed it. It sounded awful.
“Hey, this is strung all wrong—”
“You’re all wrong!” the driver said, swatting Darrell’s hands away. “Get your fingers off that. It’s strung for a lefty.”
“Darrell, come on,” Dad said, his hand on Darrell’s shoulder.
“Oh, like Hendrix,” Darrell said, spinning away from Dad.
“You wish. Now get! Get!” The scruffy man flicked his fingers at us dismissively and then plopped down into the driver’s seat—which because it was an English car was on the wrong side, too—then threw the cab into gear and put-putted off in a cloud of blue smoke.
“What a . . .” Becca didn’t say the word, but I guessed it. “That was the last cab!”
“Was that the weirdest thing ever?” Lily hissed through her teeth. “Why does that guy even drive the junky old taxi if he’s not going to use it as a taxi?”
“Never mind, never mind.” My dad let out a deep sigh that ended in a sort of laugh. “If he doesn’t want to drive
us, he doesn’t want to drive us. I’m sure there’s a shuttle that will bring us downtown.”
We backtracked to the shuttle platform, where Darrell stomped back and forth, shaking his head, until the bus finally swung around the corner toward us. The shuttle was already crammed with passengers, so Darrell and I stood until seats opened up at the next stop.
It would take, the driver said, “only about forty-five or fifty minutes to reach your hotel in the city.”
“Only,” Becca grumbled, setting her bag on the floor tightly between her feet. “Let’s just call it an hour.”
It turned out to be longer than that. After an endless series of looping roads that took us past all the airport’s terminals at least once, we coasted onto a multilane highway heading north. Picking up some speed, but not much, the shuttle skirted a range of dirt-brown hills with scrubby tufts growing here and there. Then we split off in the slowest way possible to a highway that crossed the lower end of what Dad said was San Francisco Bay.
“I’ve never been to San Francisco before,” Lily said, gazing through windows that were still streaming with rain. “Anyone?”
Dad nodded slowly, turning from the windows to us. “Darrell, your mom knows this city well. She wanted me to visit, so we spent our first anniversary here.” He smiled a sad smile. “Sara really loves San Fran.”
Darrell wiped his nose. We all felt some Sara grief coming, but this wasn’t the place or time, so we stared out the window for a while.
“That’s the Golden Gate Bridge, isn’t it?” Becca pointed to our left, where we could just see the huge structure looming out of the mist.
“Sure is,” the driver called back to us. “Weather here changes by the half hour. It’ll clear up this afternoon. You’ll get a good view.”
The rest of us only knew the basic stuff that everybody knows about San Francisco. The Gold Rush put it on the map in 1849. Cable cars ran up and down the crazy-hilly streets. Its Chinatown was enormous; there were some nifty skyscrapers, cool painted houses, and, of course, Alcatraz, the old prison on an island in the bay.
Outside of Dad, none of us had ever been there before, so technically it was a strange city. Still, after a week hopping around Europe and the Pacific, it was a relief to be back home in the US.
Even if we were stranded here.
And the Teutonic Order knew it.
The driver seemed to be weaving a giant loop, letting people off every few blocks. Finally, he circled back to Sutter Street, where he stopped in front of a narrow, five-floor, yellow-brick building, and we piled out onto the sidewalk. The Hotel Topaz had window balconies on the facade and a fire escape zigzagging down the front to the street.
“I chose the Topaz because it’s under the radar,” Dad told us as we entered. “And it was where Sara and I stayed.” Which seemed as good a reason as any. Sara was a huge part of everything we did now.
The ponytailed guy at the registration desk said we were early for check-in time, but luckily our rooms were available. He gave us keys. The girls were in the room right next to Dad, Darrell, and me, with a door connecting us. We’d had that arrangement in Berlin, too.
Becca and Lily checked out their room to wash up and to look at Becca’s cut. When they came back, Dad called us together for a talk.
“Kids, listen. The Order is here for us or for something else. Either way, none of you goes anywhere without the others, and not unless I know about it. No repeats of Honolulu.” He glared at me and Darrell.
We all nodded.
“In the meantime, I’ll pick us up something to eat,” he added. “I’m starving and I’m sure you are, too. Don’t leave the room, and don’t let anyone in. I’ll call only if I have to tell you something.”
“What about Mom?” Darrell asked. “Can we call the investigator or Terence Ackroyd? Get an update on what’s going on?”
“Definitely,” said Dad, opening his phone. “I was going to call Terence when I got back anyway, but you can. I’m forwarding his number to you. It’ll be good for you to talk to him. Tell him our flight’s delayed until morning and that I’ll call him right back.”
He gave Darrell a tired smile that I figured was meant to be encouraging. I needed that, too. I couldn’t stop seeing Mr. Chen lifeless in his seat. One person was dead already. One person so far.
“Okay, Dad,” I said. “Hurry back.”
He smiled at each of us separately, opened the door, slid out, and closed it gently behind him.
Everyone was quiet for a few minutes before Darrell nervously dialed Terence Ackroyd. We watched his face wrinkle as the call went to voice mail, but he actually seemed relieved. He flipped the phone shut. “He’s probably out investigating,” he said.
“You know it,” said Becca.
I slipped my hand into the right pocket of my jacket to check on Vela’s baggage-claim ticket. I felt a moment of panic when my finger poked into a little hole in the lining.
“Oh, no—”
“What?” said Lily.
A moment later, I felt the ticket . . . and something else.
I slid off the jacket. “There’s something in here. . . .”
“He bugged you!” said Darrell. “I knew it. Leathercoat put something in your pocket when you were in the go room, and now he knows where we are!”
I spread the jacket on the bed. “He never got near me. Not that you or your Snickers would know.” The object, whatever it was, was caught in the folds of the lining, and I worked it up through the hole and out into my fingers. “Whoa, what’s this . . . ?”
It was a flat, round piece of something hard and shiny like ceramic, and it had a vein of pale green stone coiling through the design.
“Omigod, that’s white jade,” said Lily, snatching it from me. “I have earrings made from jade like that. This is beautiful. Where did you . . . Wade, are you a secret shoplifter?”
“What? No!”
“Then where did you—” She gasped. “Is this a gift for Becca?”
“What?”
“Lily!” Becca screamed.
“Give it to me!” said Darrell. He swiped it from Lily’s palm and held it out for all of us to study. The piece was highly polished and perfectly circular, about two inches across. The jade design on the top appeared to be the body of an animal, but it wasn’t all there. The flip side was crisscrossed with metallic fibers, and the edge of the bottom side was ridged with tiny teeth, like the edge of a quarter, only much deeper.
All this time, Lily was tapping on her phone. “Hang on, I’m looking it up . . . looking . . . and . . . here. It’s Chinese, and it’s called a tile.” She turned the screen around so we could look at some photos. “These are a bunch of others.”
“Those are not new,” said Becca. “They’re works of art, from museums. Is yours valuable, Wade?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “And it’s not mine. I don’t know how it got in my jacket.”
“So then where did it . . .” Darrell stopped and stared at us. “Whoa!” he said. “Whoa! Mr. Chen! He slipped it into your pocket before he died, then he died, and now you have it. That’s it. I solved it!”
“Darrell, wait.” I thought back to the shuttle ride, the airports, the flights, the crowds. No one had touched me, brushed up against me, done anything near me, except my family. The only time I was even close enough for a stranger to get into my jacket pocket was on the flight from Honolulu.
“Actually, you’re right,” I said. “Mr. Chen must have slipped this tile to me when I was sleeping.”
CHAPTER NINE
Dominic Chen.
Now his death was frightening in a whole other way. As nice as he had seemed, as friendly as his smile had been, I felt so creeped out imagining his fingers in my jacket pocket while I slept. The fingers that would soon be dead.
“Wade, are you all right?” Lily was searching my face.
“He’s fine,” said Darrell. “He always looks a little sick.”
“If he did slip this to me,
how did he know for sure I was, you know, one of them?” I said. “We’re not wearing signs, are we? It doesn’t say ‘Guardian’ on my forehead, does it?”
Darrell leaned close to examine my head. “I make out G-E-E-K—”
“Ha. Ha,” I said.
“Maybe Guardians know about us through their network, or from Carlo in Bologna,” Becca said. “Or maybe Mr. Chen didn’t know for sure about us, but he was in danger, so he hid the tile on you.”
“Right,” said Lily. “If he hadn’t been . . . if he hadn’t died, maybe he would’ve found us and told us all about it once we landed.”
I turned the piece over in my fingers. It was cool to the touch, and it certainly felt old, like Lily’s web search suggested. But it gave off none of the same feeling that Vela did.
Touching a true relic of Copernicus’s astrolabe was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. When I’d held Vela in the cave, the tingle across the surface of my skin and into my chest was like I’d been plugged into an outlet. I could barely take in air. Vela in my palm had felt heavier than heavy, and it made perfect sense—I was holding part of an ancient time machine! Here, no. It was a tile, maybe old, almost definitely a clue, but not one of the relics.
But there was a chance it was also a key that would lead us to one. Like the Copernicus dagger had led us to Vela.
As I studied the tile by the window, I saw that our bus driver had been right. The rain had stopped, and the mist was beginning to burn off, now that it was getting close to noon. I turned to the others.
“Here’s what I think,” I said. “I think Leathercoat is after this tile, whatever it means, and if he wasn’t on our flight, then another agent of the Order killed Mr. Chen for it. We have to think that both that killer and Leathercoat are after us for both Vela and this tile.”
“Which kind of explains why Leathercoat just warned you in Honolulu,” Becca added. “And didn’t try anything worse—”
The room phone buzzed loudly on the desk by the window.
We stared at it like it was a tarantula.