The Golden Vendetta

by Tony Abbott

  To Wade, Becca looked as if she were going to blow to pieces, and Sara didn’t look much different, but she put her hand on Becca’s arm, smiled grimly, and said, “We understand, of course, sir, and we thank you for listening to us.”

  “But, Sara, please . . . ,” Wade started, then paused. They had no right to mess around here.

  Even if Galina ripped the place to shreds looking for it, they themselves would not. The mosque was holy. A shrine and a place of worship. He’d felt it the minute they entered. Since he and his family weren’t Muslim, they had little right to be there at all. Wade felt Abul-Qasim would kindly shoo them out, case closed.

  Instead the man held up his hand as if he knew what Wade was thinking, and right then another, different tone entered the conversation.

  “I understand your desires,” he said. “And how strong, and perhaps, good, they may be. But you must realize that I have a very important . . . phone call.”

  Abul-Qasim then fixed his eyes on his grandson. He put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “Karim, if you would be so kind as to show our visitors the way? I may be gone some minutes. On my important phone call. Ten minutes.”

  Then Abul-Qasim looked at Wade, his mother, and the others. “Perhaps even longer. It may be a long call. Now, please forgive my rudeness as I take my leave of you. Karim will show you the way. . . .”

  He slipped off his shoes, turned, and strode off quickly across the matted floor of the prayer hall. The room was dusky with candlelight. He was gone.

  “What just happened?” Darrell whispered.

  “You mentioned his name,” said Karim, smiling.

  “Barbarossa?” said Lily.

  Karim shook his head. “Copernicus. My grandfather is, or was, a scientist. He knows all about time and space and physics. He taught cosmology. Besides, you heard him. He asked me to ‘show you the way.’ Not the way out. Just ‘the way.’ We live in different cultures, but I’m pretty sure that means the same to both of us. Wink, wink. So. Let me show you the way . . . to the sundial!”

  “You are awesome!” said Wade.

  “Everything around here is. Come on.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Wade and the others followed Karim, backtracking along the gallery to the main entrance. They passed through a pair of wooden doors set into a low wall and entered a large open courtyard—the sahn.

  The instant they did, a great flock of pigeons swept up from the stones and circled the floodlit minaret.

  “Like Saint Mark’s Square in Venice,” said Lily.

  “Yes!” said Karim. “Well, I’ve seen some movies of it.”

  The sun had dipped below the horizon, and the sky overhead was dark, a deep purple splashed with flickering stars, but waves of heat still rose up from the tiles as if the entire space were underwater. Some of the pigeons settled back on the stones.

  In the center of the yard three stone discs were set on low pediments some ten to twelve feet apart. A higher, rectangular column of stone on which four iron gnomons jutted up like blades stood in more or less equal distance from the discs.

  “Are there three sundials?” Lily asked.

  “No, no,” said Karim. “The three pediments are openings to wells. During prayer times, when the courtyard is full of people in the middle of the day, it gets very hot. So, there is water. This sundial, however, is far older. My grandfather knows his astronomy. He taught me a lot. Show me what you have.”

  Becca took the mirrored spectacles out of their case, adjusted them, and read the passage in the diary, translating it to him.

  Karim frowned. “So, you’re really looking for a number. The letters you read at the end. LdV? I wonder if this is a clue also.”

  “It stands for Leonardo da Vinci,” Darrell said.

  “But could LDV also be a Roman numeral?” asked Becca.

  Karim shook his head. “The letters, yes, but not in that order. The proper way to say it is DLV, which equals five hundred fifty-five. A number that does not occur on any of these sundials.”

  “Five hundred fifty-five.” Lily looked directly at Becca. “Five-five-five.”

  “It could be right,” said Becca.

  They checked the number five on the sundial, but there was nothing to make it seem as if something was hidden there.

  “Maybe he means to add them?” asked Lily. “Fifteen?”

  “Possibly.” Karim asked to see the drawing again. He pointed to the word Sol beneath the face on the olive tree. “Did Copernicus write this word?”

  “It’s not his handwriting,” said Becca. “I’m guessing that since most of the words are Arabic, they were written by the younger Barbarossa brother, Heyreddin. We call him Barb Two. They were both very old at the time, and Copernicus was ill. He died just weeks later.”

  Karim smiled. “That’s it, then. Sol is the answer.”

  “Sol is Latin for ‘sun,’” said Sara.

  “Of course it is,” the boy said. “But if this is Heyreddin’s handwriting, the clue is not in Latin, although the letters are. He was an Ottoman and a Turk. It is Turkish. Sol means something quite different in Turkish, the language that Barb Two knew best.”

  He folded his arms across his chest and kept smiling.

  “Uh . . . Karim?” said Darrell. “Are you going to tell us?”

  “Sol means ‘left’!” he said. “Your clue means to search the left of the sundial!”

  They stood in front of the sundial and went over every inch of the left side, particularly the leftmost of the four gnomons, but they could find nothing there.

  “What did we get wrong?” said Wade.

  “What if . . . ,” Lily began, “what if the five-five-five has to do with the time of day? Five o’clock, ten o’clock, and maybe fifteen hundred hours, three o’clock in the afternoon. I don’t know . . .”

  Karim smiled. “Yes, yes! Where would the left gnomon point at those times of day? Let’s try.” He ran his fingers along the outer edge of the sundial and suddenly stopped at the tile marking the five o’clock position. It sank below the surface of the sundial. “Oh, yes!” The same thing happened at the ten o’clock position, and again at three.

  The moment the last tile sank, they heard the sound of stone sliding against stone on the left side of the sundial near the base. A portion of the column had slid outward.

  Darrell laughed. “You found it!”

  “See what it is!” said Karim. “Miss Sara, please.”

  Sara knelt and drew out the stone. Behind it lay a slim box of marble approximately two inches wide and six inches long. It had two small openings, one at either end, which appeared to be finger holes, allowing the marble piece to be lifted out.

  Wade’s heart was thumping. “The first key is in there.”

  “We hope,” said Becca.

  “Karim?” said Sara. “I think it’s most proper for you to do this.”

  He beamed at them. “Thank you for the honor.” He inserted his small fingers into the holes and pulled up on the lid.

  Inside, fixed tightly within the walls of a shallow indentation, was a large key, nearly six inches long and made of rough, thickly cast iron.

  The entire surface of the key was engraved with interlocking loops and delicate swirls of ornamentation. They were the marks of a key made by da Vinci.

  The shaft was more or less plain, even rugged, and the bit—the part that fit into the lock—was thickly made, with a complex arrangement of angled parts. But it was the bow of the key, the part you gripped when you turned it, that was the most amazing and intricate. Wade took a photograph and enlarged it on his phone.

  The face of the bow was wide, perhaps two inches across and a quarter-inch thick, and it was incised with numbers all around the perimeter, in the manner of a clock. There was an Arabic word scratched into the center. The back of the bow was coated in silver.

  “The numbers around the edge are wrong,” said Darrell. “There are two twelves.”

  “Karim, what does the wor
d on the key mean?” Sara asked.

  He studied it, pronounced it silently with his lips, then asked for something to trace it on. Wade gave him his notebook. Finally, Karim said it aloud. It sounded like “ascent.”

  “I would translate it as ‘azimuth,’” Karim said. “It’s the direction between one point and another. Wade, you know astronomy, so you know azimuth, yes?”

  He nodded. “Not well. I have to refresh my memory, but I think it’s the degree of an angle from a vertical line, isn’t it? The way to measure the position of stars?”

  “Yes, but it’s also used in navigation. Seafarers used azimuths to keep on course. There are three hundred sixty degrees in a circle, with zero and one hundred eighty as the north and south poles. The numbers on this key would seem to give you a direction. Not a distance, but a direction.”

  “So the total of all the numbers should give us the degree, right?” asked Darrell.

  “Already got it,” said Lily. “The numbers from one to ten, with two twelves and no eleven, equal seventy-nine. So what is seventy-nine degrees from here?”

  “I have to find true north first,” said Wade.

  “What’s this line?” asked Becca, pointing to a straight line of stones that ran from one side of the courtyard to the other. “Is it north?”

  Karim shook his head. “No, no. That is our qibla. You see the cupola in that wall? That is the entrance to the prayer hall. Against the back of that is our qibla wall. It is the direction to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. We pray facing Mecca. It is one hundred twelve degrees from true north.”

  “Which is that way,” said Wade, lining up his phone’s compass. “Seventy-nine degrees would point somewhere east-northeast of here.”

  “You’ll need a map and a calculator,” Karim said, “but it could be somewhere like Istanbul. On the other side of the Mediterranean. In Turkey.”

  “Which makes sense,” said Becca. “Heyreddin lived there later in life, and he probably started from there when he took the journey with Copernicus. Sara?”

  Sara drew a long breath. It was plain to Wade that she was worried about the next leg of the journey without his father. “Istanbul . . .”

  Abul-Qasim raced into the courtyard, his robes flying. The pigeons fluttered off again. “You must leave! They have found you. Don’t ask me how. There is an exit to the streets in the medina.”

  “Who is it?” said Sara, as they rushed across the courtyard to the far side.

  “A large man, and his slender companion who looks like a—”

  “Fish!” said Becca. “It’s Bigboy and Fish!”

  “Are you serious?” said Lily. “They must have tracked our new phones. They flew their plane after us. It’s the only way they could have found us so soon! Hide the key!”

  Darrell pushed it deep in his pocket and ran for the exit.

  A shot boomed across the courtyard, and the pigeons swept up again, a wall of wings and feathers. The fat man from the desert rushed under the qibla colonnade toward them, waving his pistol like a madman. “Shtop right there!” Fish was racing around the other side. He had a long dagger gripped in his hand and held it out straight like a sword. Abul-Qasim swept his arms around Karim and pulled him back behind him.

  Bigboy’s next shot struck the stones near Wade. He jumped out of the way, lost his balance. When he fell, his phone crashed out of his hand to the ground and clattered across the stones out of reach. Darrell was suddenly there, pulling him away before he could crawl for it.

  “The photo! The photo of the key is on there—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Darrell, as bullets crackled over his head. “You do.”

  Karim tore out of his grandfather’s grasp and sprinted across the courtyard. He scooped up the phone, ran between the columns toward the prayer hall, but Fish bolted after him like a rocket and wrenched the phone from him. Abul-Qasim leaped across the stones toward his grandson, but Bigboy twirled around and grabbed him with one hand and pressed his gun into his ribs. Abul-Qasim yelled over his shoulder, “Go! Go!”

  Wade wanted to rush to their aid, but Darrell wouldn’t let him into the line of fire. He yanked Wade’s arm until it felt as if it were going to fall off, and they were out, racing under the colonnade and down the steps into the bustling street.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Night had fallen heavy, fast, and hard.

  Lily powered down the street ahead of Sara and Becca, with Darrell and Wade right behind. She hated being breathless, shaken, afraid because of Galina and her assassins. The crazy woman would find them wherever they went. As soon as Lily and the others woke up in the morning, Galina’s knife was already at their throats.

  Sara waved down a taxi, and they threw themselves in. “Airport! Please. Fast!”

  “Oui, oui!” the driver said, jamming the engine into gear and flying off into the traffic of a wide boulevard.

  “Those creeps are minutes behind us. We need a map of the Mediterranean,” Becca said, almost choking on her breath. “Double-check if we’re really going to Istanbul.”

  “And I know the phones are compromised, but I need one for a second,” Wade grumbled. “I have to determine an azimuth. Once I find north, or zero degrees, we’ll know where the angle of seventy-nine degrees actually points to.”

  Lily brought up a map on her tablet, but Sara shook her head. “No. A map of the Ottoman Empire is what we need. The world in 1543, the year of Nicolaus and Heyreddin’s journey to hide the keys.”

  Lily shook off a shiver and tapped her fingers ferociously on the tablet’s screen. “The closest I can do is 1580. Wade, here.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  On the screen was the familiar Mediterranean region, outlining the usual countries, but highlighting the extent of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe at the height of the empire’s dominance.

  Using the compass direction in the map’s legend, and from a starting point of Tunis, Wade traced the azimuth of seventy-nine degrees from true north. “It could be in Greece,” he said, “but the city it points to directly is what Karim said: Istanbul, Turkey.”

  “They were hiding the keys in Ottoman locations,” said Becca.

  “And right where I pointed Bigboy and Fish,” he groaned. “Because of the stupid, stupid, stupid photo I took and practically gave to them, they’ll discover the location of the second key and tell Galina, and they’ll all get there before us, and snatch it up, and we’ll be left with nothing!”

  Darrell held the key tightly in his hands, trying to close his ears against the rush of noise and danger and open them to what Wade was saying, but something else was going on. The key was going on. It was going on his fingers.

  “My fingers are turning silver. What is this stuff? Paint? Ink? Whatever it is, it’s coming off on my hands. There’s a triangle on the back of this key. Becca—”

  “Becca, the glasses, hurry,” whispered Sara, with an eye on the driver to make sure he wasn’t looking. “Maybe there’s something to read.”

  “Before Darrell smudges it to oblivion,” said Lily, taking a picture of the back of the key and enlarging it. The numbers inside the triangle were three, six, and four.

  Becca adjusted the ocularia and, holding her head down, slipped them on. She blew the crumbs of silver ink away.

  “More Arabic. How are we . . .” She quickly traced the characters as accurately as she could in her notebook and leaned over the backseat to the driver. “Excuse me, sir? Can you read this?” She held the notebook out to him.

  The driver slowed the cab, glanced at it. “Is two words,” he said. “It says ‘from qibla.’ You know what is qibla?”

  “We do!” said Sara. “Kids, do you know what this means?”

  “Not exactly,” said Becca.

  “That it’s not seventy-nine degrees from true north,” she said. “It’s seventy-nine degrees from a hundred and twelve degrees. It’s not Istanbul at all. Wade—”

  “That’s . . . thirty-thre
e degrees from north,” he said. Using the phone’s compass again to estimate the direction on the map on Lily’s tablet, he traced his finger along a much narrower angle, northeast from Tunis, across the Mediterranean.

  “It’s not Italy,” said Becca. “The Ottoman Empire didn’t extend to Italy.”

  A line drawn at exactly thirty-three degrees clockwise from north of al-Zaytuna mosque in Tunis pointed directly to one great European city.

  “Budapest?” said Lily. “The Ottomans really went all the way up to Hungary? Is there anything left there from the Ottoman days?”

  “Hey,” said Darrell. “Instead of Turkey, it’s Hungary? Am I the only one thinking of food right now?”

  “Voici l’aéroport!” barked the driver, pulling up to the departure terminal.

  After paying and dragging everyone out, Sara took over the tablet from Wade and scoured the internet even as the rest of them cased the outside of the terminal, then they quickly entered the building.

  “Some things are still around from the sixteenth century,” she said, one eye on the crush of people inside. “And that’s where we’ll have to start looking. Becca, can you read the next silver passage in the diary? You have the numbers.”

  “As soon as my head stops spinning,” Becca said. “But Wade, you know, it turned out all right anyway. You only took a picture of the front of the key. Bigboy and Fish—and Galina—will think the second key is in Istanbul. We’re pulling away. We’ll find the relic!”

  Wade grumbled under his breath as they headed to the ticket counter. “Thanks, but it was still a dumb move. And Galina’s smart. She’ll figure it out. She always does. She’s only a half step behind us.”

  The next available flight to Budapest was on Air France the following morning. So they stayed under false names at one of the airport hotels. After a two-hour stopover in Paris, their jet would arrive at Budapest Ferenc Liszt International Airport by late afternoon of the next day, Saturday, June seventh.