by Tony Abbott
They led into a deep chamber whose ceiling was high enough to stand under. “I think we’re back under the church floor here,” I whispered up the steps.
Wade was at the top of the stairs now. Crouching, he took out his phone, tapped the flashlight app, and scanned around. I did the same. Then he pointed his light over my shoulder at several silvery-gray stones set flat into the walls. They had inscriptions on them. “There. Vaults. Crypts. Becca, I think we found them.”
I picked my way to the crypts. Wade started down the stairs to me. Then we heard a sound from upstairs in the church. A plate crashed. Someone ran. Jeremy yelled something, and doors slammed one after the other.
Wade started back up. “Is it Lily and the others already?” he whispered.
Sara was there at the top of the stairs. “Someone’s just come in—”
Neither of them could get down to me before a light flashed across the floor behind them. They ducked back behind a wall of fallen rafters. I flattened behind a stone bench, flicked off my light, and heard the crunch of gravel under shoes. A single set of feet approached from across the upper room. They came down the steps. They were too heavy to be Lily’s.
I held my breath as an intense white light shot past me to the stones on the wall and focused on them. A tall figure followed the light and stood before the stones. I peeked over the bench. My eyes adjusted to the shadows. I shivered.
Markus Wolff was in the chamber with me.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Wolff studied the wall lit by his flashlight. I was behind him. In my mind I heard Wade screaming: Becca! What are you waiting for? Get out of there!
It was true. I might have slipped to safety. Wolff hadn’t seen me; the door at the top of the stairs was still open. But I couldn’t move. I was terrified. Of course I was. But more than that, I wanted to see—had to see—what Wolff would find.
Maybe I moved, or maybe I was just thinking too loudly, because Wolff suddenly spun around, flitted past me up the stairs, and kicked the door shut.
Then he bolted it fast.
“Strange to have a bar on the inside of the door, no?” he whispered in nearly unaccented English. It was a cold voice. “Come out where I can see you.”
When I stood from behind the bench, he smiled slightly.
“Rebecca Moore. On the trail of another relic, are you?”
That surprised me. Another relic? Didn’t he know that the relic was Crux? And what else would I be doing if not looking for it? More important, if he wasn’t after Crux, why was he in the crypt? Why had he been at the river that morning?
“But of course you are.” He relaxed, but kept his gun on me. “The great relic hunt.” He said those words with a tone of . . . not disgust, but . . . annoyance?
“Alas, you are on the wrong track, Miss Moore. Crux was stolen by the astronomer Kratzer in 1535. He brought it to Albrecht. Galina will soon find it.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
There was muffled shouting from the other side of the door. Wade and Sara. The Larkin men, too. But I was trapped, and Wolff wasn’t about to let me go. He turned abruptly and blew dust from one stone, revealing letters inscribed on it.
JOHN, KNOWN AS HANS HOLBEIN
1497/98–1543
PAINTER
“His vault,” Wolff said. Without moving the gun, he did the same to the inscription on the vault directly alongside it. I couldn’t read it, but he traced its letters under his slender fingers. He glared at it, as if he had suddenly become stone, too. Then he took out his phone and photographed the inscription. He pressed the screen once, twice, and I heard a whoosh as he sent the picture.
“To Galina?” I said. “Of course to Galina.”
He stood aside for me to see the inscription.
JOAN ALEYN HOLBEIN
ORPHAN, FOUNDLING, WIFE
BORN 21 DECEMBER 1515
DROWNED 6 JULY 1535
My head buzzed. I nearly fainted. My good daughter Joan Aleyn . . .
That sweet little imp, Joan, died the same day as Thomas More?
So that was why the day was coded into Holbein’s puzzle!
“But when did she become Joan Holbein?” I asked, despite myself.
He turned to me, his eyes pinpoints. “So, it is true. You have seen her. How else would you know of her existence? Galina would be quite interested.”
I’d spoken before I realized. I wasn’t going to tell him anything. “I read about her. Thomas More’s last letter. She was Margaret’s friend. Thomas adopted her.”
“He did adopt her,” Wolff said quietly. “Hans Holbein met her there, in More’s household in Chelsea, in 1526 or so. Some eight, nine years later, she became his wife. Joan was younger than the painter by two decades, but this was common. They say she could not speak. And here. You see? The very day Thomas More was executed. Strange, yes? That this young woman should die the same day as her adopted father?”
Wolff then did a horrifying thing.
He cast a look around the chamber and found on the floor a heavy piece of iron. Slipping his pistol back in his pocket, and with his back to me, he used the iron rod to pry open Holbein’s vault like a door. The shrieking was horrendous, criminal—iron and stone squealing—until there was a small explosion as the tomb coughed up five hundred years of dust. The stone now angled out about one foot. Wolff shone his light inside and reached his hand in.
I nearly vomited.
“Bones and rags,” he said. “Nothing of value.”
“That’s Holbein’s resting place,” I said. “How could you do that?”
Ignoring me, he pried Joan’s stone out next, producing the same excruciating clash of chisel and stone. I quickly looked around me, found a brick, and held it behind me, waiting. He swung Joan’s stone out nearly completely. This time he didn’t find even the traces of clothing or bone dust.
Also, no algorism box. No relic. Nothing at all. So where was Crux? Had Wolff been telling the truth? If it wasn’t in Holbein’s crypt, then where was it?
Wolff stood and sighed, his back still to me. “So,” he said. “So.”
There was no reason not to stop Wolff right here, I thought. I could, if I wanted to. And I wanted to. I took a silent step forward. I raised the brick over my head.
Then, as Wolff stood back, such an easy target, I saw something on the inside face of Joan’s stone. An inscription, but not of words. It was a circle of complex designs carefully etched into the surface of the stone.
I knew instantly what it was. The top wheel of the Holbein puzzle! The wheel that Mavis Gorley said we needed. My brain screamed. Ten seconds before, I had thought Crux lost forever. But there was still a chance!
Wolff didn’t linger over the design. He didn’t even appear to see it. He searched both vaults once more, to be complete. “Alas. A dead end.”
The brick was heavy in my hand. “Why do you care about the girl?”
“Is it not amusing, that of the hundreds of ships that left Prussia in 1517, one is of particular importance to you, Rebecca, another to me? One ship carried Copernicus. The other brought the child of Albrecht to London.”
I shuddered, and the brick fell to the floor with a thud. The child of Albrecht?
“Are you saying that Joan Aleyn was Albrecht’s daughter?”
“A legend says”—he used the German words, eine Legende besagt—“that Albrecht von Hohenzollern had a child, orphaned when its mother died.”
It was like he slapped me.
We had heard that story in London just over a week ago. In a taped recording that we’d discovered after Archie Doyle had murdered him, Boris Rubashov said that the wife of Albrecht von Hohenzollern, the Grand Master of the Order, had died, leaving behind a child. That was in February 1517.
“The astronomer Nicolaus Kratzer brought her here from Albrecht’s court,” Wolff said, “accompanied by Albrecht’s nephew. He brought the child to More, who adopted her.” Wo
lff slid his hand into a side pocket and brought out a small round object. He handed it to me. It was a locket.
Inside was a miniature painting of a teenage girl.
I knew it was Joan Aleyn. It was the same mute girl who had clutched Thomas’s robe years before in that small room in Bucklersbury. Her expression here in the portrait was full of sorrow, grief, loss. Her eyes were dark enough to be black, looking—staring—off beyond the edge of the frame at something she could not bear to see but could not take her eyes from.
“Holbein painted it of his young wife,” he said. “Alas, as you see from her dates, she died before reaching the age of twenty. Galina will be extremely disappointed.”
“Why? Why is Galina interested in Joan Aleyn?”
Then the answer came to me. One answer. Maybe. If Holbein engraved a part of his puzzle inside Joan’s vault, she might have taken on the algorism box from Meg. Because of the strange twists of history, Joan Aleyn—daughter of the infamous leader of the Teutonic Order himself—might have been a Guardian, even if only for a day!
How wonderful would that have been?
“So you are looking for the relic!” I said.
He seemed to smile, but maybe he didn’t. “As to that, there is no end to searching for relics.”
When he held out his hand for the miniature, I noticed that the back of the frame was hinged. Not caring that I might give him a clue, I dug open the back cover. There was nothing but a rough brown lining. I ran my finger across it.
“Look at us,” he said softly. “So deep in the quiet of the past. What is it?”
“Paper,” I said. “The back is lined with old paper.”
As if he knew that any secret I discovered there would instantly be his, Wolff let his hand drop. “Is there anything on it? A map, perhaps? Or a message?”
Inserting my fingernail at the edge of the frame, I pried up the edge. It was stiff and nearly crumbled in my hands. The paper was crusted through with dried brown dust, dried paint, maybe, but I found an edge, and carefully lifted it.
“Words,” I said. “English words. But I can only make out two of them.”
“Yes?”
“It says . . . ‘the evil’ . . .”
With the breath he had been holding while I unfolded the crusted paper, he said, “Just so. An omen. Or a judgment upon us.”
The evil.
Copernicus had said it. Even if a good thing happens, there is always . . . the evil. But how did he know what was written inside Joan’s locket?
Raising his hand, as if our moment in the past had died, Wolff gently slid the miniature from my open palm. He reinserted the paper and pocketed it. “In the long thread of history, perhaps the young woman and Galina are related. All things have consequences, yes? A life here, a death there. The strange connections over time?”
It’s all connections, I thought.
“For instance,” he went on, “have your people told you that the remains of Kronos have been discovered in the cellar of an abbey in the Netherlands? Egmond, it is called. Our agents are right now removing it. Naturally, the monks had no idea what it was, but there you go. The oddities of time travel.”
The oddities of time travel? I could tell you a thing or two!
When Wolff turned to gaze at the tombs, I stooped and picked up the brick. I could throw it at his gun, knock it from his fingers. Or better, smack his head as I had planned. Then his phone rang. Yes!
I threw the brick.
He moved like lightning. The brick crashed to the wall, knocking the phone from his hand. He swung his pistol hand out, struck my face, and cut it, and I fell backward to the floor. But his phone was in my reach. I snatched it up.
“Your evil orders!” I said, holding it in the air. “I should smash it—”
“Why don’t you, Becca Moore?”
I was seriously going to crush the dumb thing when her image appeared on the screen. The face I had seen so many times. Galina Krause. In that fraction of a second, he twisted his phone away and read the text.
“I have an appointment,” he said.
He suddenly looked tired, resigned. Like a soldier going into the horror of battle. Like someone who realized that today might be his last on earth. Or worse—like someone going into battle and realizing it was not his last. That he’d remain alive to do the same thing again and again and again.
“How do you do it?” I asked him. “How can you stand being a shadow? It hurts to be alone, doesn’t it? It hurts me. Unable to connect with other people.”
Wolff’s features thawed for a brief moment. “I have my joys. My flat in Cheyne Walk. The keyboard works of Bach. Bartók’s quartets. My Walther”—he lifted his handgun an inch—“and my son, Dieter. He will be twenty-seven this year.”
I felt like I’d been slapped across the face again. “You have a son? A child?”
He smiled. “You are surprised.”
“Well, yes!” I said. “You kill people for a living.”
A slight nod of his head, almost a bow. His eyes searched the air between us. “When you live in the shadows, it is not so difficult to do the horrible thing.” And the iron gaze was back. He climbed the steps and unbarred the door. Wade and Sara, who had been trying to get in, stumbled down to the floor at his feet.
“Are you going to kill us now?” Sara sneered up at him.
He seemed surprised by the question. “One tries not to kill on one’s home ground. Unless ordered to.” He gestured to his phone. “Your blood is on someone else’s hands. For now.”
Then, pocketing his Walther, Markus Wolff pushed past the astonished building manager, and his openmouthed son, Jeremy, and was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I rushed up the stairs and out of the chamber, gasping for breath. By the time I had my brain back, Darrell and Lily were in the church. Roald and Julian were huddling with Tim and Jeremy, who were this far from calling the police, while Julian busily pulled pound notes from his wallet.
“Simon’s going to be all right,” Darrell told us. “The shot missed all of his vital organs.”
“Thank God,” I said. “Listen, another part of the wheel is down there. We have to go back. We need to go into the crypt.”
They all followed me down the steps. While Lily shone her light inside Joan Aleyn’s tomb, I wedged myself as close as I could and copied the design into my notebook, line for line, while telling them everything Wolff had said.
“Galina’s interested in the girl?” said Darrell. “What could that mean?”
“Galina might be related to her,” I said, my hands shaking. “I can’t think about it right now. This might be the last piece we need to lead us to the relic. Once we fit this wheel over the one we have, we’ll know. We’re almost there.”
Without leaving the crypt, I ripped the drawing out of my notebook and tore the excess away to make a circle. Then I punched out three obvious holes through which the upper wheel would identify characters on the lower wheel.
“If the key is July sixth, 1535,” said Darrell, “we have to use those numbers. Seven, six, one, five, three, five. The day Thomas More died.”
“The day Joan died, too,” I said. “That’s why Holbein chose the day. He loved both of them and must have been crushed when they died on the same day. The algorism box went to Thomas’s ward, then to Meg, to Joan, and finally, I hope, to Holbein—all on the same day. The complete puzzle will tell us where it is now.”
“But how?” Lily said. “There are three holes in the top wheel but we have six Roman numerals on the bottom wheel, and out of the numerals on the outside there is no seven, six, one, three, or five, the numbers that make up July sixth, 1535. So how do we do it? Wade?”
I saw him trying to focus, studying the wheels. “Three holes, six numbers. We could start by combining the six numbers into three. July sixth is seven and six, or seventy-six, which is on the wheel. Then fifteen and finally thirty-five.”
I took the bottom wheel from my bag, pinned the two
wheels together, and lined up the bracket at the edge of the top wheel to seventy-six. All three holes were blank. “Uh-oh . . .”
“Wait,” said Darrell. “This is England. Instead of July sixth, they call it the sixth of July. Instead of seventy-six, try sixty-seven.”
I did. Three images showed through. A crown, a legless stick figure with its hands up, and a ball with ears on it. “These are alchemical symbols. Lily?”
“Searching.” She quickly found a list of symbols reproduced on a website. “‘A Table of Chymicall and Philosphicall Charecters,’ from 1651. Close enough.” She looked up the three symbols. “Well, I don’t know what they mean, but they all begin with R—Realgar and Regulus and Retorta.”
“Try fifteen, then thirty-five,” said Wade.
I dialed the wheel to fifteen. All the symbols were ones that began with A—Acetum, Alembicus, and Aqua Fortis.
At thirty-five, the three symbols all translated to Hora.
“So the first three symbols start with R,” said Wade, “the next with A, and the last one with H. Which spells R-A-H. Is that a German word?”
Lily looked it up. “It means ‘yard.’ But maybe the answer isn’t in German?”
Julian interrupted us in the chamber. “My dad followed the black car to the Tower of London. Markus Wolff’s there, too, poking around the Bell Tower.”
“This could be it!” said Wade. “Two dead in the shadow of the tower. Maybe there’s a tower yard, a courtyard, or something to make it come together. Becca?”
The theories were coming like machine-gun fire. “The relic isn’t here, so Wolff went to the Tower for the relic. Let’s go!”
We gathered ourselves and raced over to the Tower in Julian’s limo. As we bounded out of the car, I saw the great hulking castle, a high-walled prison, lit up with spotlights. Terence was inside its walls somewhere. So was Markus Wolff.
The Tower was closed, but a yeoman warder in a red uniform and slouch hat was waiting for us. “The Ackroyd Foundation has arranged this. Follow me.”
He took us briskly across the stones to the entrance gate, where we passed under an arch and inside the walls of the Tower. The moat—now a grassy yard outside the wall—was on our left, and it was huge.