Addison Cooke and the Ring of Destiny

by Jonathan W. Stokes

  Addison counted to eight in his head, led Molly in a feather step to a reverse turn, and they were off and running. He steered down the long side of the floor, maneuvering past spinning couples. Already, he was nearly halfway to the emergency exit. With growing confidence, he realized he wasn’t even going to need a distraction from Eddie and Raj.

  Unfortunately, Eddie and Raj had no way of knowing that.

  Raj was hard at work tipping over the stage light scaffolding. It was a decent plan that would easily cause a considerable distraction, albeit with several thousand dollars’ worth of property damage. He had rapidly removed two sandbags from a C-stand when Ivan spotted him. Raj found himself quickly surrounded by Russian gang members and had only one escape route: the dance floor.

  Raj scuttled across the competition floor like a mouse surprised by the kitchen light. Two men in dark suits charged him, preparing to pounce. Raj did a head fake to the left and a shake-and-bake to the right. The flying Russian duo tackled couples number two and three to the ground, with the loud ripping sound of a ballroom gown. Raj turned to flee and steamrolled couple number seven in the process.

  With couples suddenly dropping like cartoon anvils, Addison knew he had a decent chance at winning.

  “Addison,” Molly whispered, “let’s just run for it!”

  “Run for it?” Addison asked. “Molly, we’re the best couple standing!”

  Eddie spotted a fancy glass water dispenser in the on-deck area. Ice cubes and lemon slices floated on the surface. He hefted the ungainly jug with a vague hope of tossing it onto the electrical wiring of the floor lights and causing a short. But he only succeeded in dumping several gallons of water all over couple number five. Couples number eight and twelve slid in Eddie’s ice cube puddle, banana-peel style. Eddie panicked, tried to run, and fell down, too.

  Addison could see this was not going as well as some of his better plans. The crowd was in an uproar. The judges were on their feet, red-faced and shaking their fists. There were already more Turkish police on the floor than ballroom dancers. Things were moving a bit too fast for Addison’s taste. He stopped dancing. “Molly, run for it!”

  “But what about you guys? You’ll all be caught!”

  Addison surveyed the room as though it were a cricket pitch. If Molly was the bowler, the emergency exit was the batsman. The Turkish police were at short leg, fly slip, and gully. Addison saw there was only one way. “Molly, go now!”

  For once, to Addison’s amazement, Molly did exactly what he asked. She fled.

  Addison turned to stare into the stony-eyed gaze of a Turkish policeman. The angry, rotund man looked like he’d gotten up on the wrong side of the bed seventeen years ago and not gotten a wink of sleep since.

  He clamped a hand down on Addison’s wrist. “Is this him?”

  Ivan the Terrible appeared at the policeman’s side. “That’s the one.”

  Addison was pleased to see that Ivan was still tinged slightly purple from Raj’s smoke balls. He also noticed that Ivan was shaking. The man was clearly upset. He looked like he could do a four-day spa treatment in the Alps with tea baths, hot stone massages, and New Age music and still be hopping mad. He looked like he could throttle Addison forty-six times and still be furious enough to throttle him a forty-seventh time.

  Ivan brushed the greasy hair back from his face and glared down at Addison. “You have wasted my time today. I am going to make you regret it. Deeply.”

  “You should save your anger for whoever gave you that haircut,” said Addison.

  Veins pulsed in Ivan’s neck.

  Addison could see at a peek that Ivan was reaching the peak of his pique.

  “Give me the tablet,” Ivan growled.

  Addison’s thoughts flitted around like a moth in a lamp store. Eddie and Raj were zigzagging through the throngs of ballroom dancers abandoning the stage. Turkish police were holding the irate judges at bay. Addison was surrounded by Ivan’s men and didn’t have an abundance of options. All he could do was stall and hope that Molly—wherever she was—was making a brilliant escape.

  He unbuttoned his suit jacket and turned in a slow circle for Ivan. “I don’t have the tablet.” Addison knew things were not looking wonderful for him at the moment. But he was buoyed by the fact that his new ballroom jacket looked sensational.

  “Where is it?” Ivan’s frenzied eyes searched the room.

  Addison followed his manic gaze. He watched, horrified, as Malazar stepped from behind the judges’ dais. The Shadow’s white skin was shrouded by his black fedora and the upturned collar of his black trench coat. He held Molly squirming in a chokehold, her feet bicycling inches off the ground. With his other arm, he pinned Molly’s arms behind her back. Molly struggled, unable to fight or shout with an arm pythoned around her windpipe. No one in the panicked crowd seemed to notice her plight. Addison felt the hope wheezing out of him like air from a punctured tire.

  Ivan’s attention was split, and Addison knew he had to split, too. He jerked his wrist from the policeman’s grip and bolted for the emergency exit. “Raj!” he cried. “Eddie! C’mon!”

  The police tore after him. Addison saw Ivan’s men rushing to help Malazar. They clutched Molly’s hands and her kicking legs. Addison saw they were not just taking the tablet; they were taking her, too.

  He hesitated at the door, paralyzed, unable to think of a plan to rescue Molly. Eddie and Raj joined him at his side.

  Raj shoved open the emergency exit, sounding a fresh alarm. He yanked Addison out the door just as the police galloped up.

  Addison struggled against Raj’s grip. “We can’t just leave her!”

  “We’re completely outnumbered,” Raj shouted. “We can’t help her right now. You know I’m right!”

  Eddie grabbed Addison’s other arm and helped drag him down the service alley behind the hotel. “Addison, he’s right! We have to help ourselves if we’re going to be able to help Molly!”

  Addison broke into a run alongside his friends. Turkish police clattered behind them, catching up quickly. Addison shouted in anguish, “Why do I keep losing family members?”

  “C’mon, Addison!” Eddie pleaded. “We have to move!”

  Raj hung a right at the end of the service alley. “There’s a bazaar near the hotel. I spotted it from Malazar’s suite. We’ll lose the police in the alleyways.” Raj took another right onto a cobbled lane with high walls that led to a dead end.

  They were cornered. At this precise moment, Addison’s mind had the emotional stability of a Jenga tower. “I try to be a glass-half-full kind of guy,” he said, “but in this case, you two have smashed the glass entirely and stabbed us with its shards!”

  “How is this our fault?” asked Eddie.

  “You both managed to sabotage everyone on the dance floor except the people who were trying to kill us!”

  The Turkish police halted at the end of the alley and grinned. They formed a line, blocking Addison’s escape.

  “I don’t understand it,” said Raj. “This alley should lead straight to the bazaar.”

  Addison pulled out his pocket edition of Fiddleton’s Atlas and opened the local map. “We will see what Mr. Fiddleton has to say.”

  A stranger’s voice called from the end of the alley. “You should take a shortcut.”

  Addison looked up to see a man in rags hunched in the shadowed doorway of a crumbling tenement. He hadn’t noticed the man there a second earlier. Addison would have described the man as a poor beggar, but the beggar was so poor, he beggared description.

  “You should get out of here,” said Addison. “There’s going to be trouble.”

  The Turkish police formed a military line, loosened their batons, and marched down the cobbled lane.

  The beggar pursed his lips. “I can stand here if I choose!”

  “I thought beggars can’t be chooser
s,” said Addison.

  “Very funny, laddie,” said the man, speaking with more than a bit of a Scottish accent. “I am not a beggar. This is just my disguise so I may travel unnoticed. Few people look too closely at a homeless person, I’m afraid.”

  Addison frowned. He was not trying to be drawn into a conversation right now. He consulted his atlas. “Fiddleton says we can climb the fence at the end of the alleyway, as long as we avoid the guard dog on the other side.”

  “Actually, there is an easier way to the bazaar,” said the man. “But you must come with me.”

  The Turkish police drew closer and drew their batons.

  “I only trust one person to tell me where to go,” said Addison, stabbing the atlas with his finger, “and that is Roland J. Fiddleton, Esquire.”

  “I quite agree. We share a similar taste in cartographers. And so, I advise you to trust me.”

  Addison wheeled on the strange little man. “And why should we trust you?”

  The man straightened his mustaches with a flourish of his fingers and pulled back the hood from his head. “Because I,” he said, stepping forward into the light, “am Roland J. Fiddleton.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Roland J. Fiddleton

  ADDISON BLINKED A FEW times. It suddenly occurred to him to wonder why a beggar in Istanbul would speak in a thick Scottish accent. He looked down at the author’s photo on the book jacket of Fiddleton’s Atlas. He looked up at the mysterious man: same furry face of wiry white whiskers. The two pictures matched. There was no mistaking it: the man was Roland J. Fiddleton. “We’re coming with you,” Addison declared.

  Roland J. Fiddleton, Esquire, beckoned the group through the rear doorway of an abandoned tenement. Once inside, he shut the door and locked it with a crossbar. Turkish police pounded on the door with their fists. Roland calmly guided Addison’s team down a trash-cluttered hallway to the front of the building.

  Addison’s jaw hung open like a busted mailbox as he hustled to keep pace with his hero. “Mr. Fiddleton, sir. What are you doing in Istanbul?”

  “I’m here for the annual cartographers convention, of course. But your uncle called and said you needed an extraction. I waited at that dreadful fish kebab restaurant for thirty-five minutes and sixteen seconds.”

  The front door was boarded up, so Roland simply climbed out the first-story window. Addison climbed down after him and found himself immediately in the heart of the bazaar. Colorful booths sold all manner of silver and gold trinkets. A group of street buskers strummed ouds and banged on darbukas. A juggler with a forked beard tossed scimitars into the air. A toothless man hawked jars of leeches from the basket of his bicycle.

  Roland strolled into a merchant’s tent filled with aromatic spices. “Your uncle warned me you might not show up. He said, ‘Addison is so unpredictable, he never does the same thing once.’” Roland shed his costume of beggar’s rags and tossed them in a trash can.

  By the time they emerged from the far side of the spice tent, Roland was resplendent in a white three-piece suit, a white walking stick, and a white fedora with a black ribbon trim. His cheerful blue eyes, crumpled by the chubby cheeks of his smile, put Addison in mind of two blueberries in a well-buttered crumpet.

  “I sat there,” Roland continued, pinballing through vender stalls, “eating the most awful falafels and couldn’t help but notice all the Turkish police running in the same direction . . . the ballroom competition at the Grand Sultan Hotel. Naturally, I became a wee bit curious. The Turkish police are not famous for their foxtrot. Speaking of which . . .”

  Roland paused. A group of Turkish police froze at the end of the row of stalls. They spotted Addison, Eddie, and Raj, and yelped. They unhooked their batons and jogged along the aisle.

  Roland watched them with mild amusement.

  Addison shifted from foot to foot. “Shouldn’t we be leaving?”

  “Patience, laddie,” was all Roland said.

  A delivery boy with several cages of squalling chickens piled on his Vespa screeched to a stop in the aisle, completely blocking the advancing police. They collided with a spray of squawks and feathers.

  Roland removed a pocket watch from his vest pocket. “Precisely on time.” He tucked his walking stick under his arm like an umbrella and strolled ahead.

  “How did you do that?” asked Raj, amazed.

  Roland smiled. “I am a person who knows his way around.” He crossed into a vender’s stall and doffed his fedora to a carpet merchant in a red fez. The man immediately bowed, rolled back a floor rug, and swung open a trapdoor. Without missing a step, Roland proceeded to climb down the ladder.

  Addison looked at his friends and shrugged. They climbed down as well, the merchant closing the trapdoor after them.

  Roland flicked a Zippo lighter and held it aloft, guiding them across a storage basement stacked with marvelous handwoven Turkish carpets, until they reached a circular door with a wheel lock. Roland again pulled out his pocket watch and held up a flat hand signaling Addison, Eddie, and Raj to halt.

  The cheerful old man waited three ticks of his stopwatch. “There. That should do it.” He twisted the wheel like a submarine door. It swung open and he stepped through the portal.

  Addison’s group found themselves in an underground garage. An old-fashioned Yellow Cab squealed to a stop directly in front of them.

  The driver saluted Roland with two fingers to the brim of his cap. Roland peeled open the rear door for Addison and his team. They piled on board. Roland slid in after them and tapped his cane on the roof. The driver took off with a squeal of tires and a cloud of rubber smoke.

  Addison stared up at the man, utterly starstruck. “Mr. Fiddleton, sir, it is a huge honor to meet you. I have read all of your books.”

  “He sleeps with your atlas by his bed,” Raj put in.

  Addison did not feel this was helpful information, but Roland seemed to take it in stride. “Mr. Fiddleton,” he ventured to ask, “is it true you were once marooned on an island in the Seychelles and had to construct an escape raft out of rum kegs?”

  Roland raised one furry white eyebrow.

  Addison pressed on. “And what about the time you escaped a Somali prison by poisoning the jailer with a cobra?”

  Roland raised the other eyebrow. “It was a black mamba in Djibouti,” he said. “But yes.”

  “What about the time you were in Calcutta and were attacked by a man-eating tiger?”

  Roland rolled up his trouser cuff to show a nasty scar on his calf. “That was a day I would sooner forget.”

  Addison gazed at the man with worship in his eyes. He had almost forgotten his sister was in the clutches of a dangerous lunatic.

  The taxi whipped around the winding streets of Istanbul, bouncing in and out of potholes that had been deepening for centuries.

  “Wait a second,” said Addison. “Where exactly are you taking us?”

  Roland smiled airily as if he could drift peacefully off to sleep at any moment. “To the most disgusting, disreputable, and dangerous tavern in all Istanbul.”

  “Why not take us to the second-most disgusting tavern?” asked Eddie. “Or the third?”

  “Two reasons,” said Roland. “One: the Turkish police are unlikely to set foot in this type of tavern—it’s too dangerous for them. And two: the tavern is your extraction point. I am simply following your uncle’s instructions.”

  Addison, Eddie, and Raj digested this information.

  “They have my sister,” said Addison. “And they have the tablet.”

  “I know, Addison,” said Roland, his eyebrows crinkling up in concern. “I do not think the Shadow will hurt her right away. If I know the man, he will use her for bait.”

  The taxi gyrated down a cobbled street, heading toward the docks.

  “How do you know my uncle?” asked Addison. “Are you a Te
mplar Knight?”

  “I am afraid not,” said Roland J. Fiddleton. “But I do play tennis with a few of them. What few are left. Your uncle Jasper is a fellow member of the Explorers Club in London. I knew your parents as well.”

  The taxi rumbled to a stop where Istanbul’s warren of alleyways grew too narrow for cars. Roland opened the door and stood on the running board, searching out the watchful eyes of the city. Satisfied the coast was clear, he beckoned Addison’s team. They slunk out of the taxi and burrowed into the dark shadows of the dockside alleys.

  “Mr. Fiddleton, I have questions about the Templars,” said Addison. “And you’re not bound by any Templar rules of secrecy.”

  “Fire away, laddie,” said Roland.

  Addison’s mind was clogged with questions—they nearly formed a traffic jam on the way to his mouth. “Who are the Cookes? What are Tutores Thesauri? Why is my family crest carved into coffins from Paris to Istanbul? What are we after and what are we protecting?”

  Roland maintained a surprisingly fast pace along the curving lane that led down to the water. At points, the stone buildings grew so close together, they were forced to inch sideways like crabs. “Do you wear a medallion?”

  Addison pulled the bronze chain from under his shirt and handed it over to Roland.

  Roland examined the chain, pausing to run a thumb over the Latin words “Tutor Thesauri.” He turned, quickening his nimble gait. “Some Templar families are bankers, controlling what remains of the Templars’ wealth. Some Templar families are soldiers, though I have never met one myself. And you, my wee Cooke, are a Tutor Thesauri.”

  Addison nodded, wondering how many members of the secret society were still alive. Raj and Eddie, keeping pace behind, craned their necks to catch every word.

  Roland checked his pocket watch and picked up his pace still further. “Turkish soldiers accidentally blew a hole in the Greek Acropolis. The Temple of Artemis—the Seventh Wonder of the World—was burned down by an arsonist who wanted to become famous. For all history, barbarians, vandals, fortune hunters, and fools have done everything in their power to ruin the marvels of mankind. Your family is part of an ancient lineage, with a sworn duty to find and safeguard the treasures of history.”