The Golden Vendetta

by Tony Abbott

  Becca was so thrilled, she nearly screamed. We’re needed! Yes, we are!

  As Terence handed the Moores a travel waiver, giving him permission to take both Becca and Lily—because they were acting as Lily’s temporary guardians—out of the country, the door opened. Terence’s son, Julian, entered the repair room. He hugged the girls. “We need to move. The Order’s slumber is over. They’re after us. All of us. Mr. and Mrs. Moore, Maggie, I’m Julian, by the way. You’ll need to come with me.”

  “Lily, do you want me to call your parents?” Terence asked.

  “They don’t care.”

  Becca’s mother practically launched herself at Lily. “They do care, dear; they do!” She pulled her into a tight embrace. “It’s very difficult for them right now. You know they love you. You’ve always known.”

  Lily hugged Mrs. Moore as tightly, then wiped her cheeks. “I know. But it’s better for them if I’m out of the picture for a while. Besides, the Legacy.”

  There was the sound of more than one car approaching the library.

  “Maggie, I’m sorry,” said Becca.

  “It’s okay,” Maggie said, trying impossibly to dry her face. “You’ll have more stories to tell me. You better keep safe.”

  Becca wrapped her arms around Maggie. “I will. I will.”

  “Come along now, please.” Terence slid his hand into his jacket and tugged out airline boarding passes to Paris made in the girls’ aliases.

  There came a shout from outside the building. It was followed by the racing of an engine and more squealing tires . . . and Maggie’s stifled scream.

  “Out, everyone, out!” Terence said as he and Julian spirited the girls and Becca’s family off in different directions.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Côte d’Azur, France

  June 4

  7:27 a.m.

  “It’s finally coming together.”

  “Not me and sleep. They’re not coming together. Not while you’re awake.”

  The clacking of iron wheels on the rails beneath his compartment on the train had kept Darrell awake for the last two hours, and it seemed that Wade should be awake, too. Why? Because it was finally coming together.

  “So you’re not sleeping.”

  “Yes, Dana. I’m not.”

  “Don’t call me Dana.”

  “I wouldn’t have to if I were asleep. Dana.”

  Lily and Becca had arrived in Paris the afternoon before. That night, they and Terence had met up inside one of the less chaotic corners of the vast Gare de Lyon train terminal in south Paris. There was two months’ worth of reunion in three minutes—all awkward hugs and looks and sweaty palms.

  Then, at precisely 10:14 p.m., Oskar Gerrenhausen, suspected of stealing a Polish document for Galina, appeared at the station. He presented his ticket for the Paris-Rome sleeper train and boarded. They did the same.

  Now, the morning after, the girls were still asleep in the compartment they shared with Darrell’s mother, while Roald was in the dining car assembling breakfast to bring back to them. The thief was in the compartment next door to the boys. Darrell, Wade, and his stepfather had listened in stages all night, but Gerrenhausen hadn’t emerged from his cabin since the train had left Paris.

  Darrell stood and stretched, though there was hardly room for either. As soon as the girls had arrived the day before, Becca had told them about the old woman at midnight and her incomprehensible words, “Har-har,” or something like that, before she fell unconscious, which was strange enough. But then Becca related how, after reading and rereading the diary pages on the plane halfway across the Atlantic, she and Lily had found something else, and it was big.

  “Look,” Becca had said, and she’d read out a bit about Copernicus meeting an old man in his workshop. “Together Lily and I found another passage about that meeting. There Copernicus says, ‘A good man lost something saving Hans once, but you, my Mechanicysta Mediolanu, have restored it to him again.’”

  “Of course, I instantly found out that ‘Mechanicysta Mediolanu’ means ‘the Mechanist of Milan,’” Lily had added. “Which refers to a particular person, who I will now show you . . .” She’d flipped open her tablet to a picture and grinned.

  Wade had frowned. “That’s Leonardo da Vinci. You aren’t saying—”

  “We are!” Becca jumped. “Leonardo da Vinci! Can you believe it? Leonardo da Vinci and Nicolaus met, and he actually made something for Copernicus!”

  Wade had nearly turned himself inside out. “Da Vinci is the greatest genius of all time! He invented the helicopter; he painted the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper; he made all kinds of weapons. He invented everything!”

  “Except whispering,” Paul Ferrere had said. “There. Look.”

  And that was when they’d seen the little bookseller head toward the train.

  Now Darrell raised the window shade. Leonardo and Nicolaus. Everyone was still stunned by that. Or not everyone. After the excitement of last night in Paris, Lily seemed to have crashed. Her parents’ divorce was draining her: of her perkiness, her usual sparkle, her bounce, if that was a thing.

  Darrell had been through a divorce. If only he weren’t so tongue-tied, he might have come up with something helpful to her. He joked around, as usual, thinking a dose of Darrell was good for anything, but the spell wasn’t working. He’d try harder.

  A sign flashed by: Nice 32km. The train was now on what he’d read was the Côte d’Azur—the blue coast—France’s southern shore that bordered the Mediterranean Sea. Dawn came on strong, with bold rays of sunlight glimmering over the fields and little towns visible from that side of the train. He was thinking how beautiful and peaceful it all was, when something crashed against the wall to his left.

  Wade sprang up. “What was—”

  “Shh!” whispered Darrell.

  A muffled voice shouted from the far side. It was garbled. Then came a second, high-pitched shout, which was cut short. This was followed by a deep, dull thump, then silence.

  Darrell’s mouth dropped open. “Dude, that was a gunshot!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Still staring at Darrell, Wade jumped to his feet, suddenly wide awake. His veins turned to ice. Gunshot. Murder. The Teutonic Order. Galina’s active again.

  There was a sudden, heart-wrenching groan from the compartment.

  “I’m texting Dad,” he whispered, switching his phone on and tapping in a text. As they went out into the hall, he saw his father running down the corridor to them. Darrell nodded toward the bookseller’s door and made the universal hand signal for shooting a gun.

  Urging the boys aside, Wade’s father tapped the door. “Hello? Is everything all right in there?”

  A small voice said, “Yes, yes. Come in.”

  Sharing a quick look with them, Wade’s father entered the compartment first, while they stood half in, half out. On the floor, amid a scattering of clothes and papers spilling out of a small roller suitcase, was the body of a large man. His arms were splayed across the space between the bunks, his suit was twisted around him, and his white shirt was stained with a growing island of deep red.

  Wade cupped his hand over his mouth.

  “No, no,” said the small voice. “It’s quite all right. He’s dead.”

  That much was obvious, and it didn’t help.

  The bookseller, quite a bit older and smaller than the man on the floor, was huddled in the corner, quivering like a leaf in a storm. He had wispy white hair and thick spectacles, and in one hand he held an automatic weapon, its barrel lengthened by a three-inch noise suppressor. In the other he had a cell phone, which he slid into a pocket the moment the boys and their father entered.

  The sharp smell of gunpowder hovered in the air. The scene inside the cabin was in complete contrast to the sunny day dawning outside the window.

  “I shot him,” the little man said, in a squeaky voice tinged with an Eastern European accent. “And he died. Just like that.” The little man’s shirttails were un
tucked. He wore only one slipper; the other foot was bare. It appeared that he’d been sleeping when the man entered his cabin.

  “We’ll call the conductor,” Wade’s father said.

  Wade found a small red button near the door. He picked out a word or two of French and guessed that pressing the button would contact the nearest conductor.

  Darrell stood quietly. “In the meantime, why don’t you put the gun down?”

  “Of course. Of course.” The little man stared at the gun in his hand but made no effort to put it down. “He tried to rob me. I had no choice but to kill him.”

  To kill him.

  Wade’s father removed a handkerchief from his jacket and used it to slip the gun carefully out of the man’s hand.

  “I am a bookseller,” the man said. Wade knew he was. Would he say he worked for Galina Krause? “Mostly a bookseller, that is. I locate other things upon occasion. He would have killed me, you see. I had no choice in the matter. He came at me. It is warm in here. But perhaps it is only me. . . .”

  He’s in shock, Wade thought. Trauma does that to you. The bookseller had just killed a man, the man on the floor covered with blood.

  Wade stifled a second impulse to be sick.

  “Boys,” said his father, “why not go and find the conductor?”

  “Okay.” Wade didn’t move.

  Even in the circumstances—a dead man, a gun, a crime—there was something Wade couldn’t put his finger on, and he didn’t want to leave before it came to him. The relic hunt had made him like that. An observer. But what bothered him?

  The compartment was as small as theirs, and beyond the single piece of upset luggage, there were only the five of them in there—the dead giant, Darrell, himself, his father, and the old man. Somewhere in the compartment might be the Polish document he had stolen in Paris. But where? There was a leather messenger bag hanging in the closet. Then it came to him.

  What was bothering him was the gun.

  “Did you use this other man’s gun?” he asked.

  Gerrenhausen studied the pistol lying on the bunk next to Wade’s father. “The Beretta? No. This is mine. Often I travel with valuable items, so . . .”

  “So you had a silencer?” Darrell asked.

  And that was it. Darrell had asked the question. You only have a silencer if you’re a killer. Maybe this man really is a bookseller, but he’s also an agent of the Order. Wade liked that he—and Darrell—had noticed the details.

  “The conductor’s taking his time,” Darrell whispered. “The button’s not working. I’ll get him.” He slipped past Wade and his father into the corridor.

  Because the man on the floor was clearly dead, Wade didn’t want to look at him, but he noticed something anyway. A small tattoo on the upper side of the man’s left wrist. It was nearly obscured by the cuff of his shirt. It resembled a circle with four small bars crossing into it, but not meeting in the center.

  Odd for such a big man to have such a small tattoo, he thought.

  Darrell arrived a few minutes later with the conductor and two railroad security officials, who questioned them. Some minutes after that, Sara came down the corridor and took them aside.

  “We need to stick close to this man,” she whispered. “We all remember what Becca learned in London. The horror that Copernicus saw, the horror of letting Galina do what she wants. We have to follow this bookseller.”

  Wade’s father nodded slowly. “They’ll take him off the train at Nice. Terence has a flat there where we can stay. It’s simple enough to fly from Nice to my meeting in Switzerland. Agreed?”

  Agreed.

  Oskar Gerrenhausen was handcuffed in nylon zip cuffs by one of the security officers and taken into custody. His cabin, now a crime scene, was sealed and guarded, and the train rolled on under the rising sun toward the city of Nice.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Katha, Upper Myanmar

  June 4

  Afternoon

  A hole in the sky.

  A hole in her life.

  After becoming aware of when and where she was, Galina realized that her collapse and eight weeks in a coma had put her maddeningly and agonizingly far behind schedule. Yet her two months of oblivion were not without one victory. Her mind had continued to work, to dream, to create. Her coma had in fact left her mind free to wander. And wander it had. A long-buried memory had surfaced with a scorching vengeance. And her plan had birthed itself, fully formed, like Venus emerging from the sea’s foam.

  With only one hundred and eleven days left, the looming deadline rose like a great black poisonous cloud that enveloped everything in its path. She couldn’t risk losing any more time. She would move with terrifying speed, a scythe, hewing every obstacle, leaving nothing in her path.

  She would pursue a vendetta against the world.

  A golden one.

  Everything would come together in a single global operation.

  She spoke its name in her mind. Aurora.

  Aurora. Its first two letters the symbol for gold. Light. Dawn. The golden sun.

  She opened her eyes to see her slender-fingered, tawny-skinned doctor leaning back from the gurney she lay on. He smiled a lifeless smile. “Fully awake, then, are you? I must say, when your man Ebner brought you here in April, I had little hope.”

  “Did you?” she said, sitting up. “And now?”

  His hazel eyes scanned her face with no more emotion than if he were reading an EKG. “Miss Krause, the tissues at the site of your surgery are deeply inflamed. You have been on a regimen of Carbora thirty-one, high doses, but you are now beyond Carbora’s help altogether. The body can only endure so much abuse, and you have treated yours poorly. I cannot help you. In fact, I dare say your cancer has developed beyond anyone’s skill or capacity to—”

  “Wrong answer.” Galina slid the tubes off herself and took up her phone from the bedside table. She tapped out a message and sent it. An instant later there was a quiet bing from outside the door. The doctor swung on his heels and stared at the door as pair of jumpsuited militiamen pushed through it into the hospital room.

  “What is the meaning—” the doctor said.

  The men took hold of the doctor and pinned him roughly against the nearest wall. A third man, dressed in high-level military trappings, entered. He was short, powerful, a brick of a man in a uniform. He bowed slightly to Galina.

  “Colonel, meet the doctor,” Galina said. “Doctor, meet the colonel.”

  “What?” The doctor was wild-eyed. “Colonel? Help me!”

  The colonel’s face was cold. It bore the emotion of a corpse. He drew a small object from a pouch at his belt. It was a syringe. He raised it, pressed its plunger.

  Galina shook her head. “Wait a moment.”

  “You wish to spare him?” the colonel asked, glancing from the doctor to the needle in his hand. He tapped it again; a spout of clear liquid shot into the air.

  Galina walked up to the doctor, looked into his eyes. Such fear there. “No. Merely to do it myself. After two months in a coma, I am out of practice.”

  The doctor shuddered, screaming, “No!”

  Galina slid the syringe from the colonel’s hand and injected the doctor’s arm. He struggled for a few moments, then slumped to the floor. She heard the rain start up again, a light pattering.

  The two militiamen removed the body as efficiently as movers hauling a refrigerator. Operatives of Galina’s Burmese militia, a crack mercenary unit numbering six thousand, were headquartered delightfully nearby.

  “Colonel, shut down the lab, then go to Station Two in Berlin. A package is awaiting transport. I will notify you soon of its destination.”

  The man bowed silently. Galina donned a blue robe hanging on a rack by the door, swept a gold scarf around her face, and left the clinic. Outside, the world swept around her in a noisy mess. The air was a heavy fog dragging itself painfully up from the earth. Breathing was like chewing wads of cotton soaked in hot water.

  Katha was no
t large, a city bordered by the Irrawaddy River and haunted by the foothills that ranged across the country to the north. She made her way to the river, alley by alley, through narrow streets of tumbledown shacks and shops and houses where stray dogs scrounged for food.

  She was a stray, too, wasn’t she?

  Strays always found a way to live.

  Reaching the river, she turned north, when the insistent chiming of her cell phone tore her from her thoughts. She swiped away the lock screen.

  A message from Ebner, forwarding a text from Oskar Gerrenhausen.

  Killed man to protect ledger. I will be arrested in Nice. Auction tomorrow. Thief’s wrist wore this mark. Please advise.

  Galina’s pulse sped up at the sign. Who was this? Another player in the relic hunt? She did not know the symbol. She replied to the bookseller’s message.

  Our man in Nice will arrange your release. Proceed to Monte Carlo. Do not fail to acquire the item.

  She sent another text to Ebner—What is this symbol?— then studied the tattoo for a moment. It was the calling card, no doubt, of a new entrant in the relic hunt.

  “So the Kaplans are not the only ones interested in the relics? Fine. Let us play this game to the end.”

  She slid a hand beneath her flowing robe, reached for her Beretta Storm, patted it twice, and kept her palm on its grip as she pushed through the winding alleys along the Irrawaddy River and the rain-soaked bazaar.

  A dozen or so minutes northeast of Galina’s position, under the awning of a shop selling tin objects for home and office, the sunken-chested nuclear physicist Ebner von Braun studied a transaction between an old woman and a goat.