The Golden Vendetta

by Tony Abbott

  What in the world?

  She slipped behind a row of already-crowded market stalls and found herself in a small shaded alley. She opened her bag and looked inside.

  As Becca watched, she felt her breath leave her body. A spark, a speck of silvery light, flew from the diary to the box with the ocularia inside, where it sizzled and was returned. Back and forth, forth and back, a miniature bridge of sparkling light formed between the two objects in her bag. It wasn’t magic. No. It was electrical. A charge existed between the two objects. Between the silver of one and the silver ink of the other.

  “They’re connected. They are,” she whispered. And there, in the quiet of a narrow alley in Morocco, she discovered what she had been hoping to find.

  A way to read the diary’s silver pages.

  Her fingers trembled as she removed the glasses from the box, unfolded them, and gently slipped them on her face. She hooked the curved arms over the tops of her ears one at a time so as not to put strain on them. The last thing she wanted to do was bend the framework of the old device.

  I must look silly. Like a character in a comic book.

  Blinking through the three-sided, mirror lenses, she discovered that by shifting one or another of them by almost infinitesimal degrees with a dial on each side, you could obtain any number of different combinations. Wade could have told her how many exactly, but with six actual lenses it must be quite a lot.

  She turned the diary pages until she found the silvery ones. Even with the glasses, they were illegible.

  You have to set the lenses to the right combination to read the silver ink.

  She took off the glasses and studied the gears on each side of the frames. They were numbered, so you needed to know the numbers to set them at—three number settings from one to ten on each side. But how did you know how to set them?

  The only three-number sequence she had found so far was the five-five-five of the tiny triangle on the Leonardo page. Would it work?

  The dials were so small, like watch winders, and so difficult to read that she was forced to do what Lily laughed at, put on two pairs of reading glasses. Squinting through the double glasses, she turned the tiny dials with her fingertips. Five, five, five on one side, five, five, five on the other.

  She put the ocularia back on and looked at the first silvery page.

  Her blood pumped in her ears as letters seemed to float out, finally visible against the tangled mesh of crisscrossing lines. It was handwriting, but the handwriting was not Copernicus’s, nor Hans Novak’s, both of whose styles she knew. The letters were inked back to front, and they were in Italian.

  Everyone knows Leonardo wrote backward! He must have written in Copernicus’s diary!

  Translating the words as she went along, Becca read the first passage.

  Two years ago, in the spring of 1517, I was asked by Nicolo Copernico to create a mechanical arm made entirely of silver.

  Inside the arm would be a motor of sorts. I will not say what it was, but it was an engine of power. The arm itself was given to a pirate.

  Yes, a pirate! It was Nicolo’s friend Baba Aruj, known as Barbarossa. He saved Nicolo’s other friend, young Hans Novak, and thus the gift of the replacement arm. Sadly, Baba perished. Well, what do you expect? A pirate’s life is a dangerous life.

  Now it is 1519, the month of March. I am old and dying myself.

  Still, Nicolo has called on me and on Baba’s younger brother, Heyreddin, also called Barbarossa. Together the three of us are to bury Baba’s silver arm.

  I will not say where we bury the arm—that is for Nicolo alone to tell—but it is an arduous procedure to get there, and even more wearying to create the resting place.

  Still, my calculations are so precise that all is accomplished in the hours before sunrise. My fine saws nimbly remove the great stone. While Nicolo and Heyreddin do most of the work, I doodle. Finally, I lay my creation within the space they make for it. Stout steel cables are driven deep below, coiling fast into the bedrock.

  “The room will flood if the cables are broken,” I say. “The floor will sink. The walls around us will collapse—”

  There is a sudden sound from above. A stamping horse. A gruff command.

  “We are found!” says Barbarossa. “Quickly, withdraw the three keys! We must run!”

  Then they appear from the shadows.

  Twelve women in death-black robes edged with silver, hooded to hide their faces from the light. They speak in unison.

  “We are the Mothers, and shall evermore be Guardians of your legacy, Magister. We shall be here, generation after generation, even unto the end of days!”

  Her breath caught in her throat. “Oh . . . Lily! The woman in Florida! ‘Generation after generation’? She was one of those Mothers! Five hundred years later, they’re still around?”

  The Mothers reveal swords with wide steel blades and curving double-edged points, each weapon a wing of steel.

  “Away!” say the Mothers. Half of them stream up the stairs before us while the other half show us a different way back up and out to the shore.

  My chest aches with pain; my head swims. I hear the clash of blades. But soon we are in our dinghy and rowing swiftly away.

  Together we three hid the silver arm. But to find the three keys of Barbarossa, you must follow Nicolo himself. For he and Heyreddin must themselves hide them.

  Me? Alas, I am not long for this world.

  —LdV

  That was all that Leonardo had written on the silver page that used the five-five-five combination of lenses. In Nicolaus’s hand, however, were three minute scratches:

  1’43

  These numbers were different. They were the shaking writing of a very old man. “He wrote these later. Much later,” she said to herself. “When exactly?”

  She then wondered if the numbers were not only the next combination of the ocularia, but also a date.

  “One, forty-three. January 1543? He died in May of that year. Could this be when he and Heyreddin hid the keys? He was practically on his deathbed!”

  She quickly reset the lenses to the new combination and put the glasses back on. The frames bit into her face, burned her cheekbones like hot wire. But there it was. A second level of the code suddenly became visible.

  Only this time it wasn’t writing. It was a drawing.

  Before she removed the ocularia and put them back into their box, she copied the drawing into her notebook as closely as she could. Her heart was fluttering so quickly, she thought she might faint.

  Copernicus, da Vinci, and Barbarossa together did this amazing thing. And she was practically there with them, reading their words, their images, their codes. If what had happened in London had changed her in any way, it was this: to know that the past is right here with us, inside us, all around us, everything we are.

  Practically laughing, she spoke aloud to the empty street.

  “I found the first part of the story. We have the directions to the first key. We’re on our way!”

  Setting the diary and the glasses back into her bag, she looked both ways and tried to take stock of where she was. Casablanca and the noise of a hot morning. Okay, then—soon they would be on their way. For now, she was still very much alone.

  Sara Kaplan had no idea where in the medina she was, but she’d never been so terrified in her life. Not even in the coffin. Of course she was scared, and the reason was easy to see. She wasn’t an operative, a secret agent, a soldier, or a spy. She’d just been trying to act like one. Yet somehow she’d become the head of a spy unit . . . of children. She was a mother, a stepmother, an archivist, and a wife. But did those things keep her from losing her children?

  No.

  She ran from street to street, using all the French she knew, but no one confessed to seeing any Western children wandering or running. She hoped Becca was still free, still in possession of the priceless diary—and the stolen ocularia—and that Silva was keeping her safe. The others, the others had been s
wallowed up by a black car. She knew she had to keep herself from being snatched or there would be no hope at all, so when there’d been a chance, she’d slid away. Now it seemed like the stupidest and most careless thing to have done. Not being with her family, even if they were in danger, drove her crazy.

  Like a mother should always be, when thinking about her children.

  And then, among all the faces in a sea of faces, she spied one she knew. Silva. Alone. Limping, cradling his arm, coming for her, and calling out, “I know where they are!”

  The city was coming more and more alive around Becca. The tinkle of tiny bells and a fragrant aroma of cooking floated down from the open windows she passed. There was the odor of exhaust, too, but that was as beautiful in its way as the sunlight and the music weaving through the air.

  It was serene, almost peaceful. She moved along the streets, carefully tracing and retracing the same ways, hoping to find her friends. She had discovered a huge clue to the location of the relic. The ocularia and the diary did work together. It was monumental! It took her breath so suddenly that she had to pause. She leaned against a wall on the shaded side of the alley, and felt the blocks cool her burning shoulder blades.

  “Une matinée chaude, non?”

  Becca looked up. A girl, maybe fourteen, peered down at her from an upper window, a lazy smile on her face. As differently as she was dressed and as strange as their seeing each other was, they both smiled at the same time.

  A hot morning? “Oui, très chaude,” Becca replied. “Bonjour.”

  “Vous êtes perdues?”

  Am I lost? Becca wondered. “Yes. Oui. Un peu. Pourriez-vous me dire comment se rendre à l’Hôpital d’Enfants?”

  The girl’s face turned serious. “Vous n’êtes pas blessées, êtes-vous?

  Am I hurt? “Non, non. Mes amis sont là.” My friends are there. I hope.

  She smiled from the balcony. “Ah, oui. Je peux vous amener. Il n’est pas loin. Avez-vous faim? J’apporterai quelque chose.”

  “Hungry? Yes. Oui, oui, merci!”

  The girl vanished inside the room and was out the door on the street in minutes with a small glass of tea and a hot roll wrapped in a cloth napkin, which she gave to Becca. “Je m’appelle Reyah.” She turned toward the end of the alley. “Par ici. Allons-y!”

  “Reyah. Reyah. Merci.”

  Becca tucked her bag tight under her arm and wove with Reyah to the end of the alley and out across the nearest square.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The sun was directly overhead now, burning down on the streets.

  Wade eventually did lead the way through them, but it was only because Lily let him. She seemed tired. Tired of everything, actually.

  When he asked her what was up, she said, “Nothing.” A few seconds later, she said, “Well, not nothing. A text from my mom. She wants to talk to me. They both do. Together.”

  “What about?”

  “I didn’t get to answer before the goons busted my phone.”

  “It could be good.”

  She shook her head. “No, it couldn’t. I know why she’s calling. It’s about how to split visitation. Who I want to live with which days, and who doesn’t want me which days. Splitting me between them. Anyway, that is as far away from all of this as possible. I can’t think about it. But I also can’t lead. These streets all look alike to me. You lead.”

  So he did.

  After a thousand false starts and blind alleys, they finally made it out of the crowded medina and scraped enough coins together to pay for three tram rides, the last of which they left when it stopped at Boulevard Abdelmoumen. From there, a twenty-minute zigzag walk due east brought them to the Hôpital d’Enfants.

  Wade ran when he saw Becca waiting for them, and didn’t mind what anyone thought when he wrapped his arms around her. She must have felt the same, at least partly, because she hugged him back, then Darrell and Lily, too. Even so, it was the new-style reunion. Short, sweet, back to the business at hand.

  “Meet Reyah,” Becca said, introducing the girl with her. “She helped me and fed me and brought me here. We can trust her. I think she can help us, too. Sara’s just inside—”

  “Here!” Sara ran out from an office, dirty, her face smudged and bruised, but happy to see them together. Silva, suffering a minor bullet wound to his arm, had escaped his captors—who didn’t want him anyway—seen the kids on the tram, then had found Sara and accompanied her to the hospital.

  Knowing Julian would want the kids and Sara to have new phones, Silva then went out to purchase one for each of them and a tablet for Lily. He also drew on his bank account to provide Sara with a thick pouch of dollars, euros, and Moroccan dirhams.

  Lily right away powered up her new phone and the tablet, downloaded her favorite apps, and checked her remotely stored data and found it all there. After that, she texted her new number to her parents, then paused and turned both devices off—unheard of for her.

  “They stole our passports, too,” said Darrell with mock regret. “I think we should use our real ones now. Galina knows we’re in the game. We can’t hide forever.”

  Sara seemed to think about that for a moment, then nodded. “Agreed. There are miles to go before this is over. We’ll need to be us again.”

  “Drangheta asked us about Dad,” said Wade. “He’s hot to get to him for some reason. And he said Galina is, too. We need to warn him.”

  Sara asked them exactly what Drangheta had said, then made the call, while Becca told them what the glasses did and what she had discovered in the diary. She showed them all the drawing she’d made in her notebook. “Reyah, this is what I wanted you to see.”

  Reyah was bewildered but interested. “Très fascinant. Il est vieux?”

  “Yes, very old,” said Becca.

  Wade wanted his brain to piece everything together, but it wasn’t all there yet. “In 1517, Nicolaus asks da Vinci to make a silver arm for Barbarossa. But he dies, so they bury the arm with the relic still inside. You can only find it with three keys, which Nicolaus and Barbarossa Two hide when they’re old. This drawing tells us the location of one of the keys, is that right?”

  “Right,” said Darrell. “But how do we decode the drawing?”

  After Sara left a message for Roald, she studied the picture. “It’s an allegorical drawing. The sun, the ruined columns. The tree coming out of the column. And there are words. Reyah?”

  Reyah squinted and studied the tiny writing. She told Becca that the Arabic word beneath the broken column on the right was Hijri, which was like a version of “AD” or “BC” for the Islamic calendar. Combined with the number it would mean Hijri 84 or Year 84. She didn’t know exactly what that translated to, but it was a long time ago. The word beneath the central column was Carthage.

  “Which means what?” asked Darrell.

  “Ruins. Old city. Very old,” Reyah said in English.

  “Where is Carthage?” asked Wade.

  “Tunis. Coast of Tunisia. Two thousand kilometers, maybe. Far from here.”

  “We need to get there,” said Sara. “We need to get a flight.”

  “Not at the major airports,” Silva said. “Your enemies—all of them—will be watching for you. You have the glasses they both want. You’re the target.”

  “So we need to fly under the radar,” Wade said.

  “Fly? Plane?” said Reyah, flapping her hands like wings.

  “Oui, mais secrètement,” Becca said.

  “Voilà! Médiouna. Vous pouvez voler à Tunisie de Médiouna!” The way she said it, Médiouna sounded like a fantasy city in a tale of genies and flying carpets.

  Silva frowned. “Médiouna is an airfield. That is, it used to be one, and I heard about a club of British flyers who used to keep their rigs at the place. I’m not sure if any of them are still there, or even alive, but if they are, Médiouna might be the best field to fly from, after all. I’ll drive you out there—”

  “No you won’t,” said Sara, like a de
n mother. “You’re bleeding. You’re going straight into this hospital and, child or not, you’re going to get fixed up while we find ourselves a nice taxicab. We’re ahead of the game so far, we have the glasses, the diary. Kids, come on.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  One hour, three cab rides, and fifty euros later, the five of them arrived at a ghost town of wooden shacks, broken strips of pavement, and fields of weeds and dirt, which was—so their final driver insisted—an airport.

  “Where in the world are we?” Wade asked.

  “Is Médiouna!” said the man behind the wheel.

  “This can’t be right,” said Becca.

  “Yes, yes, is Médiouna Airfield. You fly from here.”

  In his mind, Wade watched the relic drift so far from their grasp that it vanished in the sandy distance. How long a journey did they have ahead of them? They didn’t even have the first of the three keys. Did Triangulum still exist? Plus, where in the world were they?

  “Médiouna!” said the driver. He took their money and left.

  “Seriously, there’s nothing here,” Darrell said. “I mean no . . . thing.”

  “There’s flat . . . ness,” said Becca.

  “No, you know, this is good,” Lily said surprisingly. “If the first of the keys is in Tunis, then we need to get there before Galina does. She doesn’t know where to look yet, so we have a real chance. Either way, we shouldn’t waste any more time.”

  Wade was glad to hear Lily step up. She was feeling bad about her parents, but she had a spark. It was enough to get them moving.

  They hiked through the weeds and outlying sand to the only hangar that had a sign of life. A transistor radio was playing. Darrell identified the tunes as British rock from the 1960s. Maybe that was new music here. Half in and half out of the hangar stood what appeared to be a broken-down wreck of an old single-wing cargo plane. A wrinkled man sat at a small desk just inside the doorway. He was bent over it, doing paperwork. He wore a desert cap with a flap down the back to protect his neck from sunburn. A large dog lay sleeping at his feet.