by Tony Abbott
His eyes bounced back between Wade and Darrell. Did this old Russian see something in them, a kinship that proved they were all Guardians in this together? Or was he weaving a story like a spider weaves a web, drawing them in and snaring them before they realized it was too late? Words mattered, Wade knew. Words had power.
As boys we send message to each other, even in . . .
Boris said something then that Wade wrote in his notebook as log punked.
World-famous code is solved when we are boys. Is joke to us, yes? A and B? He send code to me, me send to he. Even when we grow up and go our ways, we send messages. Oh, the vastness of Russia. Me to Moscow, then here, never to return to dark circle of Mother Russia. He to Saint Petersburg, jewel on the Gulf of Finland.
Then the real horror begins.
Four years ago, Galina Krause appears out of the night. Alek works for her. What he does for the Order no one knows; he is doctor! But there is fire. Alek vanishes, is never heard from. Messages stop. I ask friends in Russia, what happen to my brother? They say the girl, Galina. His teeth are sent to me to prove he is dead. Me? I feel something break inside my heart. I cry—“Alek is dead! Galina has killed him!”
The restaurant hushed momentarily, then resumed its noise.
Galina Krause has murdered my brother, Aleksandr. In my heart, all is gone. Father, mother, Alek, even log punked is gone. But from London, I can do nothing. Until now today with you Keplens. We shield each other, yes? I have traced Red Brotherhood. I arrange gift for Galina. We go together in group, me to avenge my poor brother, Andreas . . . I mean Aleksandr . . .
The large Russian paused to wipe his eyes and his cheeks, then slumped back into his chair, making the table quake. “Me, I am nothing. I am like brother with disease. Leper. I am like dead languages that I study. My brother, he is the real one. He had pain. Much, much pain. He was the great one of these two brothers. Then Galina kill him.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In the silence that followed, even through her own misty vision Lily couldn’t help staring across the table into the Russian’s jiggling left pupil. Not that she wanted to.
Look away! she told herself. You really have to be more accepting of other people’s different little things.
Boris vacuumed in a long breath. “Russia is a grave, you see? Not only of fathers, not only of brothers. But of the past. But perhaps you tell Boris now what you know?”
Um, sure, Lily said in her head. We found out from the coded ribbon in the Magellan dagger that Copernicus wanted to give Serpens to a monk named Maxim Grek, who was invited to Russia, then thrown in jail. Serpens is maybe a two-part serpent-shaped relic representing the northern constellation of the same name. It fits into the big wheel of Copernicus’s astrolabe.
Lily didn’t say any of those words. Boris Volkov—which he said was not even his real name!—could simply be trying to trick them into telling what they knew.
I’ll try to be okay with the eye, but I’m not going to spill the beans to any old person. Or young person. Or anybody.
“We’ll let Uncle Roald tell you what we know,” Becca finally said.
“Ah? Yes, of course. Caution. This is wise.”
Lily surprised herself that she’d become as wary of others as Wade and Darrell had. Generally, she liked people, even if she made fun of some of them, like Darrell and Wade, but that was so easy to do, and anyway it was friendly, and sometimes they didn’t even get it until she explained it to them. This was new to her, meeting these kinds of people she’d never met before except in a movie or a book, but those were fake and this was real. Except maybe for one of his eyes.
“Well, thanks for the story,” she said, and Becca nodded with her.
“Is but story. A tale of long time past. Four years ago, sixty years ago, five hundred years ago, all same. The clock ticks many hours. The journey to the end of the sea is long, yes? Copernicus himself wrote these words. But what do we know? Who can say what is true, yes?”
You’re right about that, Lily thought. There were so many names and dates in his story that she wished she’d recorded it. The journey to the end of the sea is long? It sure is. Wade’s jotting things down, but somebody should be taping the whole thing. Wearing a wire. Like a real spy.
Roald finally wove his way back through the tables, off the phone now. “The dagger is secure, out of the country, but I think we can make some sort of deal, once we get into—and safely out of—Russia.”
Lily tried to read her uncle’s face. He was fibbing, right? She hoped he was. They should never give up the Copernicus dagger. Ever.
“Yes!” Volkov lifted his teacup as if it were a beer mug, chugged it down, then “cheered” the cup into the air. “To our journey, then. I shall close up my flat, then to Russia we go—”
He sucked in an enormous groan and lurched to his feet, like a sea monster rising from the deep. Silverware clattered to the floor because he had stuffed the tablecloth into his belt. His teacup hung out in the air, his sausage-like fingers dwarfing its tiny size, when it fell from his hand and crashed on the table.
“Kkkk—kkk!” Boris’s face twisted and bulged as if he were turning into a werewolf.
“Doctor!” Roald yelled. “Is there a doctor—”
The man’s cheeks went deep purple. He pawed his leg mercilessly. Roald struggled to wrap his arms around Boris from behind to give him the Heimlich maneuver while both Darrell and Wade held him up, but the Russian was too big, and now his arms were flapping straight out. Suddenly, his eyes ballooned, and he clutched his neck with both hands, gasping for air that wouldn’t come.
Customers at other tables were jumping to their feet, some rushing over to help. A waiter dropped his tray and raced back to the desk for the phone.
Boris spat out breaths, trying to form a word, but nothing would come. Roald held him up. “Boris, do you have any medication with you? Someone you want us to call? Anything I can get you?”
The huge man stared down at Lily. Right at her! Why? He suddenly blurted “Bird!” right into her face.
“Excuse me? What?” she said, backing up.
“Cage!” He seemed to want to fall on top of her. She stepped back again, saw a bloodstain on his pant leg where he had been rubbing it. She frantically scanned the chaotic room for someone who might be a doctor. On the far side of the restaurant, a calm-looking middle-aged man in a dark blue suit rose from his table. She beelined between the tables to him. “Are you a doctor?” she said. “Sir, can you help him?”
Boris bellowed, then slammed facedown on the table like a whale free-falling from the top of a building. The whole table went over, everything splattered, and Boris slumped to the floor, clutching at Wade for a moment, then slid away, motionless.
Lily screamed, grabbing the sleeve of the man in the dark suit. “Help him!”
“Alas, child,” the man said, gently removing her hand, then patting her arm. “I am not a doctor.” Tipping his bowler, he swung his umbrella toward the lobby and wove through the tables to the sound of sirens howling up the street.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Madrid
Galina Krause watched two men in overalls roll a shiny brown coffin across the floor of her private hangar at the Madrid-Barajas Airport. Her mind ticked with a hundred possible scenarios for what might happen over the next hours and days.
Ebner leaned toward her. “We will be in Berlin in three hours’ time,” he said. “We can take the coffin to Station Two, if you are still intent on sending the woman, which I would not—”
“Yes, Berlin,” Galina said.
But is Berlin the best destination after all? she wondered. She didn’t like that the Copernicus Room had come up with nothing useful so far except, perhaps, the astronomer’s supposed 1517 voyage south from Cádiz, a coastal city less than an hour’s flight away. The Kaplans were in London now, but what if they suddenly jetted off to Spain or other parts south? Berlin would put her that much farther away.
“¿Se�
�orita? ¿A dónde?” one of the men ferrying the coffin questioned. He pointed from one to the other of two small jets in the hangar.
“En el avión negro, por favor,” she replied.
They pushed the coffin to her dark, gunmetal-gray Mystère-Falcon and up a short ramp into its cargo hold. They collapsed the legs of the coffin stand like one would with a hospital gurney, secured the coffin in place, and left the hangar.
Ebner paced annoyingly. “Is he to be with us the entire time?”
Galina turned to see Bartolo Cassa stride into the hangar from the sunny tarmac. “You object? Do you think he cannot be trusted? He brought the cargo undamaged from South America. He removed three . . . obstacles to bring the coffin to us. Can he not be trusted?”
Ebner seemed to be debating his answer to that question when the breast pocket of his coat sounded with the tinkling scale of a frantic marimba. He reached for his phone, slid his thumb across the screen, and held it to his ear. “Speak.”
Hitching a long, box-shaped canvas bag over his shoulder, Cassa strode easily to the Falcon, walked up its stairs, vanished for a moment, then reappeared in the cockpit.
Galina fixed her eyes on Ebner. “Who is it?”
“Mr. Doyle with his report.” Ebner flicked his phone to speaker.
“. . . early this morning,” Mr. Doyle was saying in a clipped British accent. “The Kaplan family, all of them, met a gentleman, a native Russian known currently as Boris Volkov, for breakfast at the Dorchester Hotel. Papers were passed between them. As directed, I have not interfered with the family, but per protocol, Volkov has been removed. He suffered a leg wound laced with ricin.”
“Volkov? You mean the dissident scholar?” asked Ebner.
“Indeed,” chirped the Londoner, “although Volkov is not his real name. Up until he was expelled from Russia, he was known as Rubashov. Boris Rubashov.”
Galina breathed in suddenly, her eyes flashing. “Rubashov?” Her limbs stiffened for what seemed like an eternity before she said, “They are going to Russia.”
“Ah, that explains the papers,” said Mr. Doyle from the phone. “They had the look of tourist visas. In a rather curious turn, the smaller girl came up to me, thinking I was a doctor. The bowler, perhaps. I am tracking them, in case he gave them something I didn’t see. I am also monitoring the stages of poor Boris’s demise. Group Six has an agent in the hospital system.”
Ebner seemed to want Galina to speak, but she could not find the words. “Very efficient, Doyle,” he said. “This bodes well for your promotion in Group Six. Keep close to the family. Request backup if you need it.”
“I shall. Cheerio!”
The fingers of Galina’s right hand rose to the three-inch scar on her neck, then fell to her side. “The Kaplans,” she said, “have met this Russian for one reason only. Ebner—”
“Galina.” Ebner shuddered as if freezing. “Galina, the name Rubashov could simply be a coincidence.”
“—the Kaplans are going after the Serpens relic.”
Silver, diamonds, and hinges of sparkling wire swam in her vision.
“But surely they know nothing of the full story of Serpens,” Ebner said softly. “They could not. The two parts, where they may have ended up—and why. I am certain it is but a stab in the dark, consistent with all of their . . . advances in the quest.” He took a breath. “Still, I will inform the Copernicus Room to direct all their research on it now. But any more than that would be premature—”
“Alert the Red Brotherhood to follow the Kaplans wherever they go.”
Ebner now appeared to swallow with difficulty. “Galina, the Red Brotherhood are hooligans, gangsters, thugs. They cannot follow. They maim; they kill. That’s all they know. Let me bring in the Austrians.”
“There is no time. Alert the Brotherhood. Naturally, you and I must fly directly . . . there.”
“Not the castle—” The word escaped Ebner’s lips before he could unsay it.
“Have the Italian brought to the castle, too. And Helmut Bern, as well.”
“Tell me you do not mean . . .”
She turned her eyes on him. “I had hoped to wait, but there is no waiting. Ebner, we return to Greywolf immediately.”
Greywolf—the Order’s Station One—was an estate three hundred kilometers east of Saint Petersburg. It was a huge property: fifty square kilometers of steep, forest-thickened hills, at the summit of which stood a sixteenth-century fortress that the Order had abandoned to a destructive fire four years before.
“Galina, no. I beg you, another place. Kronos One lies in ruins after all this time. Lord knows if the main tower even exists any longer. If you are set on experimenting with Sara Kaplan, I beg you let me send for a newer device.”
She laid her hand gently on his and then began to squeeze it under her iron fist. “Greywolf. Kronos One. We go now.”
“All because of Rubashov,” Ebner muttered, sulking away to the jet.
At the mention of the poisoned Russian’s true name, and at the memory of Greywolf, the aircraft hangar around Galina began to vanish, and she soon saw herself laid out, comatose, on a vast slab of undifferentiated white, a wasteland of permafrost and tundra. She had hoped and prayed—bled, even—never to return to the monster country, and certainly not to the fortress. Serpens was in that bleak wilderness somewhere, or half of it, at least. But she was hoping to avoid ever entering that poisoned land to dig for it.
As she climbed the stairs to the Falcon, Galina realized that this flight to Russia was very nearly superfluous. In her mind, ticking like a geared clockwork, like a sequence of tumblers in a combination lock, she had never left.
Wherever she was, there would always be Russia.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I am moving.
Again.
Sara knew this as the cushioned walls so tight around her tilted side to side, inclined up, then leveled out, and stopped. Her moment of clarity wouldn’t last long. They’ll soon drug me again, she thought, and I’ll be out another I-don’t-know-how-many days. She tried to think, to process. She’d read Terence’s spy novels, his international thrillers. What could a kidnap victim do? What could a victim learn from her surroundings?
One thing was the conditions of the kidnapping. Here, there were elaborate measures taken, not only for her restraint but also for a kind of comfort. Her hands and feet were bound, and there was some kind of thick belt across her forehead, in addition to an impenetrable blindfold. She was gagged. But she also knew a tube was attached to a needle in her right arm. There was oxygen, pure and cool, being pumped into her nostrils. She was cushioned like an artifact in a box.
She was being cared for, if cared for could ever be the proper term.
Though the low pulse of an oxygen pump somewhere near her feet obscured most sound, her ears were open. Listen! She made herself still. Unless it was her own mind, she detected a murmur of voices nearby. Faint, almost like whispering. Then a whirring sound around her. And . . . bolts? One, two, three, four. Then the box jostled. Air—real air—swept over her face, her arms. The lid of her prison was open. Was it her keeper? The man with sunglasses, her handler from Bolivia? Handle me, and I’ll bite your arm—no, scream—no, both! She couldn’t, of course, do either.
“¿Está viva?” a voice said.
Yes, I’m viva! Sara snapped. Then she thought: Spanish. Spanish, yes, but not the accent of Bolivia or even of New York. Spain? Am I in Spain?
A sharp poke in the arm. Sara screamed—tried to scream—but the pressure went straight into her brain like a magician’s sword through his assistant in the box, and she was falling again. Quick. Remember. Spain.
Roald! Darrell! I’m in Spain! RoaldDarrellRoaldDarrellWadeDarrell . . .
The lid of her prison crashed shut, and the roar of an engine thundered through the cushioned walls so tight around her, and . . . and . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
London
Seemingly within moments of Boris Volkov’s thund
ering fall to the floor, the Promenade was invaded by squads of police and scurrying medical technicians.
In the chaos, Becca saw Uncle Roald sweep the envelope of documents from the table and subtly tuck it into his jacket pocket just before he was called away for questioning by several plainclothes policemen. Lily simply stood there, shaking her head, hands poised in the air as if not knowing what to do with them, her mouth gaping open, nothing coming out.
She’s terrified to death! Boris spoke to her. Why?
Becca wrapped her fingers around Lily’s wrist and pulled her gently to the far side of the room with the others. “Boris was telling us a lot. Too much,” she whispered. “Someone wanted him to stop talking, and stop him going with us.”
“That was no heart attack,” Darrell growled. “No way.”
Wade shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “Do you think we should try to find his flat? He practically told us where it was. Five floors, no elevator.”
Two police officers were standing in front of Roald now.
“Either Dad’s waving to us or he’s doing the code,” Darrell whispered. “Look. Five fingers. What’s five fingers? Create a diversion? Like a food fight?”
“No, that’s three fingers. Five fingers means get away from me,” said Wade. “Which I thought was just for us.”
“Apparently not,” said Becca. “He keeps doing it. We should leave.” Bowing her head, she urged them with the other guests toward the lobby just as the medical personnel loaded the giant man onto the gurney. It took three technicians plus two policemen, hissing at one another to make sure he didn’t fall off it. It was horrifying to see the once-animated Russian hanging limply over the sides of the gurney. Tables and chairs squeaked and knocked as a handful of remaining customers pulled them aside to make way for Boris to be wheeled to the ambulance.
“Where are we going to go?” asked Lily, still shaking. “What are we even doing?”