by Tony Abbott
“Excuse me, we need to fly to Tunis,” Sara said. “A friend suggested we might get there from here?”
The man raised his face. He had, Wade estimated, a good twenty years on his stepmother, or may simply have been in the sun too long.
“Tunis, is it?”
He spoke like an English actor.
“We need to get there in a hurry,” Becca added.
It was as if the man suddenly woke up. “Tunis? In a hurry? Do you, by Jove?” he said, bolting up from the desk and extending his hand. “Welcome! I’m Pinky Chamberlain. My partner, Bingo, will fly you to Tunis, every single one of you. If you can pay, that is.”
“We can pay,” Sara said. “But we need to get there as soon as we can.”
“You’re on desert time now,” Pinky said, waving them inside the hangar. The dog followed, wagging its tail slowly. “Tunis is quite a jaunt, after all. You didn’t happen to bring your own plane, by any chance?”
They stared at him.
“No? Well, no problem. We do have one, of course. It’s just that it’s a bit . . .” He trailed off. “I say, Bingo. Customers! You’ll love Bingo, you will. He’ll have the plane up and running in no time. Or, rather, running and then up, if you see what I mean. Oh, Bingy, do be sociable!”
The man named Bingo removed his head from an open panel under the engine of the cargo plane. He was tall and sticklike, and his hair, what there was of it, flew away from his head in all directions as if it didn’t want to be there.
Pinky explained what they’d come for, while Bingo shook their hands.
“Really?” said Bingo, his eyes wide with surprise. “Fly the old deathtra . . . mail plane, eh? I’d be delighted. Delighted, I say! You have life insurance, yes? No matter, let’s just be off! But seriously, we’ll need a list of next of kin.”
“We’re pretty much all here,” said Sara, introducing them all.
“Well, I call this a party!” Bingo boomed. “Last one on board is copilot.” When Wade laughed, he added, “No, son, I’m serious. Someone really will have to help with the whole mappy thing. The sand all looks pretty similar to me.”
“Oh, he’s just joking, of course!” said Pinky. “But if you could help him, naturally, it might make your trip a bit more . . .” He didn’t finish.
It was settled quickly. The only plane, a Piper J-3 Cub, had a normal range of a hundred and fifty miles. The distance to Tunis was “somewhere around a thousand miles.” But this “original Flitfire,” as Pinky Chamberlain proudly called it, had been equipped with two extra fuel tanks for long-distance mail service. “Which makes it pretty cramped inside, but it can make it to Tunis in five hours, including only one refueling stop. Or more, at the most.”
Bingo quickly finished working on the plane, then Pinky joined him, wielding a pair of hammers to help get the engine panel back into place. The dog barked with each rap of the hammer.
“All aboard!” said Bingo, and he and Pinky embraced as if it was the last time they’d see each other. It was a long hug. You could barely tell where Pinky ended and Bingo began. Finally, they pulled apart.
“Woof, woof, Gussie,” Bingo said, and the dog echoed him. “Off we go!”
With a symbolic point of his finger to the east—the direction they were flying—Bingo climbed into the pilot’s seat, lowered his goggles, and set the controls for starting. They piled into the cabin after him. It was even tinier than Wade expected. The six of them were jammed into one another, even when Wade decided to take his place up front in the copilot seat.
Meanwhile, on the ground, Pinky gripped the propeller with both hands and swung it down with a grunt. Nothing. He did it again. Nothing. Again. Again. Nothing. Nothing. Neither Bingo nor Pinky seemed surprised.
The seventh time, it caught.
It caught, but the engine at full power sounded like a cross between a go-kart and an electric can opener. It vibrated though the frame and rattled the fuselage. The way the plane tumbled out of the hangar was also not inspiring. Pinky waved exaggeratedly with one hand, wiping his cheeks with the other.
“We’ll make it, won’t we?” asked Lily.
“Sorry, headphones, can’t hear you!” said Bingo. He wasn’t wearing headphones.
And they were off. Mostly off. The airstrip was half smothered in drifted sand, and its borders were difficult to make out, even for Bingo. Until he lifted his goggles off his face. “Ah, there it is,” he murmured.
With the engines screaming like a chorus of cats, and the soft wheels bouncing like beach balls, the plane finally dragged itself up from the ground. They banked once over the airfield, where they saw the tiny form of Pinky waving both arms, and Gussie running circles around him, then headed east. Soon they were over the desert—the real desert of sand dunes rolling to the horizon like golden waves.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The noise was horrendous. Lily blocked her ears, but that didn’t do much. Everything around her hummed and rattled and shook. At least it was distracting. Only Bingo and Wade had normal seats. The others sat on three buckets turned upside down, while Sara clung to the rearmost contraption, which was a thing apparently made of bent rods with a “cushion” cut out of two slices of plank nailed together.
No one was anywhere near comfortable, but they were moving over the desert.
“Bingo, what do you know about Carthage?” asked Wade.
“Garbage?” he said. “Just chuck it in the back. But don’t hit your mum.”
“No!” he yelled. “Carthage!”
Bingo pulled back on the engine. The volume of noise lessened a decibel. “Ancient. Nothing much there now. Home of just about every civilization for a while,” he said. “You can check the book.”
“The book?”
“Behind Miss Rebecca’s seat there!”
Becca smiled, surprised to hear her full name. She reached behind her seat for a book, which she found sitting on top of a metal cash box. Once she grabbed the book, the box popped open, something slithered out, and she jumped off her bucket, screaming.
“A snake! A snake!”
Bingo half turned around. “Oh, that’s just Corky. She’s harmless. I say, Wade, take the control stick.” Bingo slid from his seat, leaving Wade to hold the plane steady. “Here, Corky! Cork, oh, do come on!” Using the cash box as a trap, he coaxed the wiggling brown snake to him, scooped it up with the jaws of the box and lid, and snapped it shut. “Sorry about that. Corky’s just a harmless little carpet viper.”
“Is she defanged?” asked Sara.
“Defanged? Is that a thing?” Bingo slid the box back behind Becca’s bucket. “Well, then, perhaps Corky’s not so harmless.” He took the control stick back from a terrified Wade and settled back in his seat, whistling to himself.
Soon they had left any grassy hills behind and were flying low over the sand, with great humped dunes loping one after the other as far as they could see.
The book, which Becca had dropped on Lily’s lap, was a beat-up copy of The Barbary Coast: Sketches of French North Africa. It was written by Albert Edwards and published in 1913.
“You don’t have anything more, uh, recent?” asked Lily.
“The past is the past,” he said over his shoulder. “Maybe there’s an eyewitness account of Carthage in there. Why are you interested, if I may ask?”
They told him in basic terms what they were looking for and showed him the drawing in Becca’s notebook.
“An ancient key? Well, that’s just spiffy!” Bingo said. “I’ll get you to Carthage as quickly as . . . as . . . ” Like Pinky, he didn’t quite finish his sentence.
After skimming the table of contents, Lily found a page with one paragraph about Carthage.
Three quarters of an hour’s ride from Tunis is the place where Carthage stood. A strange fate has overtaken the ancient city. The vengeance of Rome was complete, no one stone was left in place upon another. The site was sown with salt. A pagan Roman city, a Christian Roman city, a Vandal city, and an A
rab city have been built on the same site and have passed away. The archaeologists have not discovered with any certainty where a single one of the buildings of Punic Carthage stood. But beneath the many strata formed by the ruins of vanished civilizations they have come upon the graveyards of the ancient city.
“Graveyards of the ancient city,” said Darrell. “Great. Grab your shovels, folks.”
“I do not dig in graveyards,” said Lily.
For some reason, reading that aloud made her very sad. Nothing lasted. Everything went away. Even great things ended. She passed the book to Becca.
“Okay, but if Carthage was already a ruin when our friends went there in the sixteenth century,” Becca said, “why would they hide a precious key there?”
“Exactly,” said Wade. “People rebuild over ruins and probably cart the really good stuff away and reuse it anyway.”
“The book says the Arabs conquered it last,” said Sara, peeking over Becca’s shoulder. “Maybe that’s a clue. The ruined columns in the drawing might signify Carthage after it fell. And trees mean growth.”
“Good,” said Darrell.
“The year,” said Wade. “Hijri 84, or 84 Hijri. When is that, Bingo?”
“I say, this is fun!” he said. “If I remember correctly, year one of the Hijra is the first year of the Islamic calendar. It’s somewhere around our year 622. So add eighty-four to that and you get 706 or so. Ballpark, anyway. Hold on! It’s coming back to me now. According to whom you read, Carthage was destroyed by the Muslims anywhere from 698 to 703 or so. Your drawing could very well be about the fall of Carthage!”
While the others started debating that, Lily realized that she had was zoning out. She needed a break from head games. There was no service for the brand-new tablet Silva had picked up for her, it was only half charged anyway, and she didn’t want to risk having to answer—or ignore—a call from her mother on either the tablet or her phone, so she didn’t bother firing either of them up. Instead, she glanced out the rattling window next to her.
The sun was bearing down on them, making the plane hotter with every mile. Still there was something soothing about the engine’s rumbling around her, and once she let go of the possibility of talking with her parents, she found that flying a few dozen feet over the desert, skimming the grassy plains, then the dunes, was more freeing than anything she’d experienced before.
While the others kept up their humming conversation about Carthage, Lily wished she could just dip her hand out the window and skim the sand as if it were water outside a canoe. Just watching the ground flash by, her whole body throbbing to the grind of the primitive engine through her bucket, she’d never been so happy to be disconnected from the rest of the world. Being as far away as she could possibly be from the situation back home made her chest flutter, then pound with excitement. She dismissed her life, all of it, every bit, for this. Just this.
This was living: feeling the world move by, much more slowly than she had ever thought it could from a plane, riding the sand at a height of fifty or sixty feet, sweeping past the foothills of a range of mountains arcing to the north. The anger and the fighting and the emptiness had gone.
“What are those called?” asked Darrell. “Those mountains up there.”
“Those are the tail end of the Atlas Mountains, the ones that started all the way back in Casablanca, though we’re nearly in Algeria now,” said Bingo. “You know Atlas, the sorry chap who was cursed to tote the world around on his back? Well, those mountains are his backbone. They have marble quarries in there like you wouldn’t believe. Black marble and yellow marble. Famous the world over, as they say.”
“Marble,” said Wade softly, turning around to face the others. “Columns are made of marble.” He nudged Darrell aside, pinning himself between Becca and Lily. “Let’s say the drawing shows Carthage after the battle in 703. What happens to ruins? Trees don’t grow out of them, do they?”
“There are places so ancient that the stones and the trees become twined together,” said Sara. “Like at old temples in Cambodia. Other places, too.”
“Good, good,” Wade said. “Anybody know what kind of tree this is?”
“A tree tree,” said Darrell. “With a sun growing in it.”
Keeping one hand on the controls, Bingo turned nearly completely around to examine Becca’s drawing. “That there’s an olive tree,” he said. “Sol is Latin, of course, for sun.”
Wade chewed his lip, then shook his head. “So how about this? The ruined city becomes like a quarry. I mean, we do this in Texas and everywhere. People reuse stuff all the time. Well, if Carthage was such a great city, it must have had great stuff. Marble columns and all. What if this picture means that we should be searching for what grew out of Carthage?”
Becca turned to him. “I like that. Maybe what we’re looking for is a place that used the ruins of Carthage. A place that has something to do with an olive tree and a sun. And the outline. Bingo, what does the crescent moon on top mean?”
He glanced back at it. “Well, anything Arabic or Ottoman, I suppose. But the shape of the outline is like a doorway. A mosque, maybe?”
Wade was getting antsy now. “So after Carthage was destroyed in 703 or whenever, the stones were used to build something. Maybe a mosque. And if it is a mosque, the olive tree and the sun are the clues to tell us which one.”
They all sat there. No one seemed to have any more to add.
Not bad, thought Lily. “It could use some fine-tuning. We’ll get there. In the meantime, let’s just look. It’s beautiful out there.”
“It’s why I stayed,” said Bingo. “I love the desert. Well, that and Gussie and Pinky, of course. Love Pinky.”
“I think he loves you, too,” said Sara.
Bingo dipped even lower over the dunes. “And we all love all of this.”
Gazing at the rolling sand, Lily thought of where their journey was taking her, farther from her home than ever before. Especially now that her home was a question mark. She knew, she just knew, that there would be a message waiting for her the instant she turned on her phone. Lily, please call! We have to talk! She didn’t want to talk. Not now. Not yet. She was too busy being herself. In this otherworldly place, doing strange and wonderful and dangerous things, she was becoming someone new, and that was what she really needed now.
Finally, as the distance between her and them grew and grew, Lily wondered if she’d ever see her parents together again and what it would mean if she never did.
It was a question she couldn’t answer. She didn’t want to. All she wanted was to watch the dunes roll on and on.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Central Italy
June 6
Early evening
After waiting most of the day for Paul Ferrere, who was unavoidably detained in Paris, Roald and Terence made the decision to head to the immense facility at Gran Sasso without him. The both hoped it wasn’t a dumb move, but after yet another call from Dr. Petrescu, there seemed little choice.
Seven miles outside the underground laboratory, Terence pulled their rental car up to the first of several checkpoints. Four security guards came out of a pair of roadside buildings.
One said, “Please shut off the engine and leave the keys inside.”
“We will park it for you,” said another. “You will take an official car inside.”
Roald shared a look with Terence. “All right,” he said.
A few minutes later, a gray car appeared. A short middle-aged man got out of the rear and put on a large, nervous smile. “Dr. Roald Kaplan! And friend?” He extended his hand. “Pleased to meet you both.”
Roald tried to read the man’s face, but he couldn’t tell much. Dr. Petrescu seemed to be trying too hard to smile, but it was difficult to tell for sure.
“We must enter, but first security photographs, yes?” the man said. “In the hut.” He briskly led the way inside one of the checkpoint buildings, where both Roald and Terence stood for individual and
joint photographs.
“Perfect, perfect,” said Dr. Petrescu. “And now, we enter.”
The man was pleasant enough, but something was off. Roald didn’t like the feeling. “Doctor, your phone calls—”
“Not now,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Please. The car.”
A uniformed driver drove all three of them into an immense complex of buildings at the foot of the large forested mountain. There they entered a steel doorway, which closed behind them, and drove another twenty minutes, coiling downward, until they arrived at a subterranean parking garage.
“This way, gentlemen.” Dr. Petrescu used a card-access terminal and took them into an elevator, pushed a sequence of numbers, and had his handprint scanned. They descended several floors below the garage and exited into a long hallway.
Roald felt his senses go on alert. He made a note of everything, aware that Terence was doing the same. The walls of the hallway were brushed aluminum, the lighting recessed, the carpet beneath their feet dense and noise-suppressing. Roald shot a look at Terence. His friend’s face was grim.
Dr. Petrescu’s office was large, with a wide interior window overlooking a very large laboratory below. It was like something out of a James Bond film—a pristine lab bustling with activity—except that in this case, instead of a villain out for world domination, their host was a highly respected nuclear specialist.
Something was definitely off.
Roald’s senses tingled as they did when he felt the presence of one of the Order’s agents. The Order wasn’t there, at least not visibly, but something of Galina’s presence seemed to assert itself, and it worried him.
“You will see that we are nearly ready,” Dr. Petrescu said. “Some five of your colleagues are only hours away. Beyond them, I am awaiting only three nuclear physicists who had to alter their plans, you see.”
Dr. Petrescu looked around his office in a distracted manner.
“Doctor, please. Is everything all right?” Roald asked.