by Tony Abbott
More groaning; then the window fell away. Snowflakes flew in on them. Becca expected to hear the glass shatter down the side of the wall to the courtyard below, but it clanked to a stop just under the window.
“Let me test the scaffold,” Roald said.
“It’s probably slippery. Be careful,” said Lily.
Roald clambered up to the sill, reached his arms through, and pulled himself outside. “It’s slippery as anything, but strong enough to hold us. Come on, who’s next?”
Wade and Darrell both boosted Becca up; she took Roald’s hand and slid forward through the window, scraping her wounded arm, though she tried to ignore the sudden pain. When she was out, she found herself standing on a slightly slanted scaffold running along the inside walls, with cold snowflakes whirling in her face.
An iron framework supported the narrow planks all the way to the corner. Lily crawled out next. Wade went after her, then Darrell, who immediately pointed to a green-topped tower midway between the nearest corner and the one next to it. “That’s Maxim’s Onion Tower.”
A rough voice yelled out suddenly from the courtyard below. “Do not go any farther. You have nowhere to run!” It was the rumpled-suited man from before. He was with three other men wearing lousy suits. One of the men held two phones and yelled into both. The men were soon joined by a half-dozen others, who started up the scaffold from the ground. Brother Semyon stood by helplessly.
“Never mind them,” Darrell snapped. “To the corner.” They made their way quickly along the planks as far as they could. Another stretch of boards ran along the outside walls from the corner to the Onion Tower.
“Dad, we can make it over the roof to the other scaffold,” Wade said. He didn’t wait for a response from his father, just crawled over the roof. Minutes later, they were all standing on the boards running along the outside walls.
Becca pointed to the parking lot. “Look. Our car. Uncle Roald, what if you got the car and drove it down the outside wall under the tower? We can get to the tower, find the relic, and get down from there. We won’t have to run into the guys climbing up.”
Roald looked both ways, down the scaffolding to the ground and back at the men slowly climbing up. He wagged his head. “All right. Five minutes. I’ll try to draw the men away. You be down there right below the Onion Tower. I’ll meet you. Go!”
As Roald carefully worked his way to the ground outside the monastery, Wade led the others to where the scaffolding intersected with the Onion Tower’s top floor, just below a set of high-arched windows. “I’m going to slide down to the gutter to get a foothold and open a window. Break it, if I have to.”
Once down there, he found one of the three windows unlocked. He pushed it in easily. Darrell was right behind him. They dropped down onto a wide-planked wooden floor. Lily and Becca slid in next.
They were in the Onion Tower.
It was empty; the walls were simple and bare. It had a wooden floor that looked, at most, a hundred years old—a bad sign, if Maxim hid something in 1556. Walls of plain gray stone led up to a wooden ceiling that was nothing more than the inside of the cupola.
“Not a lot of hiding places,” said Darrell.
Wade quietly lowered two planks that barred the doors. They were sealed in. “So now what?” he asked.
“Back to the picture,” Lily said, bringing it up on her tablet. “Maxim is pointing—I mean, Saint Dominic is—to the base of the middle window.”
“Do you think he was being that exact?” asked Darrell.
Becca looked around the small space. “Each side of the tower has three windows, but he’s standing on the ground in front of it, which eliminates the sides where the walls meet the tower. So there are only two walls where it could be—”
“Actually, one,” Lily said. “Dominic is obviously standing inside the monastery, because he was a prisoner like Maxim was. So it’s got to be on the inside wall.”
“It,” said Darrell. “I sure hope we’re talking about the relic. Either way, Maxim can’t have known how long his secret would need to be hidden, so he probably hid it in something made of stone.”
Wade peeked out the window. “Dad’s in the car. There’s a van in the parking lot now. Hurry this up.”
As quickly as they could, they went over the entire inside wall, and especially the window area, but saw nothing, until Becca, brushing away stone dust accumulated over the years, ran her fingers over the shelf at the bottom of the middle north window.
At the base of the mullion, the pillar between the windows, two small figures were scratched into the surface of the stone, deeply enough to have endured for a long time.
“Boots?” said Darrell. “A pretty gnarly pair of boots, if you ask me.”
“Or the gnarly outline of Italy,” said Becca. “Which makes perfect sense. Dominic was Italian. Maxim and Copernicus were in Italy at the same time.”
“But why two Italys, and why is one of them backward?” Darrell asked. “Italy against Italy?”
“Or . . .” Becca dug Copernicus’s diary from her bag and quickly leafed to the final pages—the Guardian Files—she had isolated. “Or . . . Italian against Italian?”
“Meaning what?” asked Wade.
“The coded passage,” she said. “Maybe it’s coded in the same language, only one of them is used backward.”
“I am so not understanding you,” said Wade. “Plus we need to hurry.”
Snow flew in the open window behind Becca. The storm was getting worse. She had to block it out. “What I mean is that two Italys, one facing the other, might mean that there aren’t two code languages, only one, and part of the message is backward.”
“Up there!” said Lily, searching the wall above the Italy drawing. “The boots are pointing to something. I’m not . . . tall enough to see what it is.”
Wade almost smiled. “The oldest cryptogram in the book. You point to the answer.” He reached up and slipped his fingers into a small gap between two stones. He carefully drew out a rolled-up strip of parchment. It was nearly black with dense writing. There was a date—xvii January 1556—followed by a brief passage in a language that seemed like gibberish. “Becca, can you read—”
Footsteps scraped the floor heavily in the passage outside the tower. Something slammed roughly against the door. A similar sound fell against the opposite door.
“They’re breaking in,” Darrell whispered. He moved to the far window. “We need to get down the scaffold to the car.”
More footsteps stomped down the halls outside the tower. The doors thundered. A hinge tore off one door frame and clanked to the floor.
“Out the window!” Lily said. “Now!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Wade crawled first out the window and onto the ledge along the wall. At that point, the scaffold was a single slippery board. He hated this, hated heights, and the snow didn’t make any of what they were doing smart or easy.
“Where’s Dad?” Darrell asked, sliding out next to him.
Lily was next. “They got him,” she said. “They got him, and they arrested him, and now they’re coming for us—”
Then there he was, his tiny car sliding around the corner too quickly for the snow, nearly crashing into the trees that edged the wall, but he managed to right it and skidded to a stop beneath the tower. They climbed down the scaffolding as quickly as they could, jumping the last five feet, where there were no more boards. Then the van appeared, roaring from the parking lot onto the snowy ground, until its driver realized it was too large to fit between the trees and the outer wall. The van slid to a stop. The doors opened, and several men bolted out.
“The Brotherhood!” Roald said from the open window of the car. “Get in!”
As soon as they were safely inside, Roald gunned the engine. The Aleko spun down the narrow strip of ground and around the walls, losing their pursuers as they slid and careened over the property. They finally thudded onto an actual road and bounded up the entrance ramp of the highw
ay. Roald swerved abruptly into traffic and crossed like a crazy man to the fast lane, gaining as much speed as the rattletrap could handle. It was approaching seven o’clock, the traffic was still heavy, but they were on their way back to Moscow.
“Good work, Dad,” said Darrell. “You were awesome.”
Roald grumbled under his breath. “I feel like a teenager,” he said. “And not in a good way. What did you discover in the tower? Not Serpens?”
“No. A small document,” said Becca. “And a decryption key. I think it’s a decryption key, maybe to the passage in the diary. I hope it is . . .”
“It’s a start, anyway,” his father said.
Which only reminded Wade of that line Boris had told them twice. The journey to the end of the sea is long. Well, their long day was ending, they had all risked their lives, and they had no relic, only a tiny scroll of paper that they hoped would be a part of the puzzle, but they weren’t even sure of that. Sara was still lost, somewhere in Russia. But Russia was enormous. Maxim Grek was looking like just the beginning of a very long journey. But they wouldn’t know for certain until they deciphered the scroll. Even if they did find something, it might be just one clue leading to another and another . . .
Is hidden, and is hidden, and is hidden like layers of onion.
Roald switched lanes suddenly, then switched again, just as abruptly.
“Dad?” Darrell said. “What is it?”
“They found us. The van parked outside the monastery. Hold on—”
He swerved boldly across the highway and took the nearest exit ramp onto a side road. They bounced onto the street at the bottom of the ramp and headed for the highway underpass, where Roald spun the car around. He switched off the headlights.
The large gray van screeched down the exit ramp after them, then paused when it spotted them hiding under the highway. It motored slowly toward them. A moment later, a black car appeared. They could see the man in the rumpled suit from the monastery behind the wheel.
“This is not good,” said Lily. “Should we get out and take cover?”
“We can take the little guy,” said Darrell.
“No way,” said his father, staring in each direction as if memorizing what he saw.
Suddenly the driver of the black car jumped out and approached them, his gun drawn. Wade’s father glared at him intently. “Wade, get in the driver’s seat, foot on the brake, put it in gear, and don’t take your eyes off me.”
“Dad, I can’t drive!”
“You might have to. The rest of you stay put.” His father jumped out of the car, leaving the engine running, and started talking, babbling really, as Wade warily shifted behind the wheel.
“I have what you’re looking for!” his father yelled. “We found it at the monastery. The monk tried to stop us, but we found it. You can take it. We don’t even know what it is, but you can take it. Just leave us alone. Let us leave in peace, and that’s it. We’ll go home.”
Wade knew his father was bluffing, but what else he was planning he had no idea, until he saw his father reach into his hip pocket and palm the little silver device the detectives had given him in New York. The stun gun.
“You are being smart,” said the man in a thick voice. He waved his gun casually, not at anyone.
Keeping the thick-voiced man between himself and the van, Wade’s father marched right up to him, still jabbering like a lunatic, waving his arms. All at once, he crouched and jerked the Taser into the guy’s chest. The man went spasmodic. He cried out and arched backward, dropping his gun. He fell in a quivering heap onto the snowy pavement. The goons from the van bolted over on foot.
“Wade! Now!”
He couldn’t believe his father actually wanted him to drive the car, but his father was obviously trapped. The only way he could escape was if Wade jammed his foot on the accelerator and plowed the car between the charging men and his father.
“Omigod, Wade!” Becca cried. “Do it!”
“I—ahhh!”
The squeal of tires and the groaning of the engine weren’t the worst things. Becca and Darrell both shrieked when he nearly ran his father down. At the last second, Wade stomped his foot on the brake. The car skidded ten feet toward the goons. They scattered. Lily reached over the seat and swung the front passenger door open. Wade’s father dived into the car.
“Heads down! Gas!” his father yelled. Wade pressed the pedal to the floor.
His father grabbed the wheel, and together they swerved at the men again. The air exploded with shots. The car skidded between the van and the black car, then back up the wrong way onto the exit ramp. Bullets thudded into the side panels and blew out the rear window. With a crazy turn of the wheel, they spun into traffic and righted seconds before they would have smashed into a tractor trailer.
“Good . . . good . . . ,” his father said, finally lifting himself over Wade and switching places with him. Under cover of quickly thickening snowfall, they tore back down the highway to Moscow.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Greywolf
Sara Kaplan woke up to ticking.
It sounded like the teeth of one gear joining with another’s. Or the rhythmical oscillations of a giant clockwork. Either way, it wasn’t normal.
“Where am I?” she mumbled through gagged lips. No answer. Blindfolded, she listened with every atom she could muster. No sound but the strange, loud ticking behind her head. The man who always seemed to be humming wasn’t nearby. She was alone, still caged in that horrifying machine.
It had been hours since the troll and the supermodel had had her removed from the coffin. While her brain was still oozing forward like sludge, making only the most obvious connections, Sara deduced that the coffin had been used to keep prying eyes away as they smuggled her from place to place. She also reasoned that she had taken a series of airplane flights since she was first drugged in La Paz and could be just about anywhere now.
It was cold here. What did that crazy witch call it? Greywolf? What in the world were the Copernicus relics, and what did her family have to do with them? And of all things, a coffin! What sort of people . . .
But Sara guessed what sort of people they were. Not what they were all about, of course, but the kinds of things they did. Evil things. Very expensive evil things.
This wasn’t your ordinary kidnapping for ransom.
At the thought of ransom and the image of her family around the living-room table waiting for a call, her eyes welled up. Then her brain sparked again. No. Not the living-room table. Roald had taken the children to Europe. Berlin. She’d received that message on her phone before she landed in Bolivia. A series of messages, even a couple from Darrell a few days later, put them somewhere—Italy?—with Roald’s niece and her friend. Seriously? What was going on? What in the world was her family doing, traveling across the globe while she was transferred from a coffin to a horrible ticking engine? At least there didn’t seem to be any more flights for her. She was where her kidnappers wanted her.
Greywolf.
Wherever that was . . .
Footsteps approached.
“Please tell me where I am,” she gasped, scarcely more clearly. The footsteps came closer. She took in a breath and tried again. “Where—”
“Hush, my dear. Quiet!” A woman’s voice, her breath hot and stale.
“Who’s there?” All at once, Sara’s blindfold was lifted and her gag removed. She blinked in the light, and the face before her clarified. The woman was her age, maybe a few years older. Her dark hair was limp, dangling over her face, her clothes filthy, stained. In one hand she held . . . a kitchen knife? Was there blood on it?
“Don’t hurt me, please,” Sara said. “I’ve been kidnapped.”
“What? No,” said the woman. She placed the knife carefully on the floor at her feet, then set about struggling with the chains that bound Sara into the machine, but her weak, bruised fingers could do nothing. “I must get you out of here,” she said. An accent. Italian?
“Who are you?” Sara asked the woman.
“You have . . . I heard them saying . . . two days only.”
“Two days? Before what? Who are you?”
The woman seemed half delirious, her thin fingers shaking, her eyes darting back and forth over the clockwork mechanism whose ticking had woken Sara. “Two days before the machine does what it does! The clockwork. Look. It counts down!”
“Who are you?” Sara repeated. “And these people? Where is Greywolf? Please, you have to get a message to my husband. His name is Roald Kaplan. His cell number is—”
The woman’s fingers froze. She stared at Sara. “Roald Kaplan . . . you said Roald Kaplan? You are Sara Kaplan! They took you, too! Because of the relics!”
“Wait, how do you know Roald—”
“I will try to find him. I have a friend at Moscow State University.”
“Moscow? We’re in Russia?”
Something clanked from outside the room. The door to the upper gallery swung open, and the humming man in the lab coat entered in a rush, holding a tray and focused on keeping whatever was on it from spilling. The woman quickly replaced Sara’s gag and the blindfold. Sara heard her pick up the knife and duck around behind the machine. Who are you? she wanted to scream, but she let her head drop to her chest as if she were still drugged. She’d read enough Terence Ackroyd stories to know to do that. When she heard the man in the lab coat humming as he trotted down the stairs to her, and smelled the hot coffee, she realized he hadn’t seen the woman. She had escaped.
Whoever she is, she knows Roald! She’ll find him. She’ll tell him where I am. He’ll come for me. Darrell and Wade, too. Soon they’ll come for me!
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Moscow
Strangely, to herself at least, Becca didn’t freak out after the insanity of the car chase. Even racing to Moscow in a smoking, sputtering, nearly windowless rental car with a bullet-riddled engine didn’t faze her. And while everyone else was either breathless (Lily) or crazy anxious (Wade) or jabbering his head off (Darrell) or staring zombielike down the road ahead (Uncle Roald), Becca was calm.