The Golden Vendetta

by Tony Abbott

  “Yes, Miss Krause.”

  Her phone rang. It was Ebner. “Yes?”

  “There is something new,” Ebner said. “Ugo Drangheta and Mistral the thief were sighted driving south across Poland. They were at Olsztyn Castle. Galina, he learned something there.”

  Galina closed her eyes. “Alert the colonel. Have him intercept the couple.”

  Four hundred kilometers north of the Hungarian capital, Marius Linzmaier downshifted the armored transport disguised as a delivery truck. They approached Nowa Huta, the easternmost suburb of Kraków, Poland. He was to make another pickup. Pickup? Yes, but of what, exactly? He had never actually seen his cargo, but it was heavy, he knew that. Their driving progress was being monitored; he knew that, too. His front-seat companion certainly didn’t tell him any more.

  The grim-faced military man hadn’t actually said anything at all for the last nine hours, and the cabin seemed to be getting smaller by the minute. The fifteen paramilitary agents of the Teutonic Order stuffed in the truck’s rear compartment guarding whatever it was didn’t know how well they had it.

  “Colonel,” said Marius, “we will arrive at the Lenin Steelworks in eighteen minutes.” He knew it hadn’t been called the V. I. Lenin Steelworks since the fall of Communism, but perhaps to get a reaction from the stone sitting next to him?

  No such luck. Nothing.

  “Then shall I notify our men in Building Forty-Three?”

  Without changing his expression, the colonel nodded once.

  And that was the whole of it. The man simply never spoke. Not so much as a word issued from his lips, as though his breath were too valuable to share with a commoner. Marius had to admit that there was something regal about how the fellow sat for hours without moving. As regal and uncommunicative as a statue of a German prince. The Teutonic Order, thought Marius, had been born in Germany, had faltered in Germany, had nearly disappeared in Germany, and since Galina Krause, had been reborn in Germany.

  The colonel was not German.

  That, if nothing else about the silent man, was plain to see.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Forty minutes of swift driving by the cabbie back and forth over several bridges between Buda and Pest seemed to have confused the drivers of the blue cars enough to lose them—nearly also losing Wade his lunch—but the family had lost valuable time, too. When they finally arrived at Gül Baba Utca, a winding, steep, moody, medieval lane on the western—Buda—side of the city, their cabdriver didn’t waste any more. He accepted the fare, told them in French the way up to the tomb, then tore off before any more blue cars could appear.

  “Just because we lost those cars doesn’t mean Galina won’t figure out where we are or where we’re going,” said Sara. “So let’s move it.”

  It was nearly seven p.m., the sky was still heavily overcast, and night was settling more and more over the city. A cool wind swept up the hill from the river as they began their hurried climb.

  Sara took the lead with Becca. Wade and Darrell followed, Lily trailing behind. She was in her own space but keeping up. Right now that was good enough for Wade and the others. His father, her parents. They couldn’t let anything more distract them.

  “When Gül Baba died,” said Sara, as they hurried upward, “they carried his body up to the top of this hill. One of the pallbearers was Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman emperor.”

  Darrell liked that. “So cool.”

  “Copernicus must have come this way, too,” Becca said. “And Heyreddin. Probably with Albrecht’s knights on their tail.”

  Wade imagined those knights on horseback or on foot treading up the street, clopping over the cobblestones, swords drawn as they climbed each breathless step up the uneven street. He looked back nervously. What he saw was a vast lighted city spread out on both sides of the river. Colored coral and pink, yellow, gray, and black, the houses on both sides looked as if they had changed little in centuries.

  “Searching for a tomb,” said Darrell. “There’s so much death on the hunt for the relics, we’re probably the experts on death.”

  Wade flashed on his father’s face for an instant, but pushed it away. Get to the top. Find the second key. His legs ached as they climbed a final, narrow stairway from the end of the street up to, of all things, Turban Street, another part of the diary’s joke.

  Türbe means tomb means turban.

  At the top, they hurried along a short street, then entered a garden surrounding a small octagonal tomb. It had a shallow dome on top, made of iron and painted wood. Standing outside was a statue of Gül Baba, slightly animated, as if caught at the moment of poetic inspiration.

  Sara kept watch. “The tomb is closed, and we’re not breaking in. Not this time. Gül Baba was a poet, not a dictator like Lenin, which was still wrong.”

  “We know,” said Wade. “And we won’t. . . .”

  They approached the tomb slowly. The breeze was constant, damp, and cool, with a fragrance of bitter coffee and wood smoke mixing with tens of thousands of blossoming roses surrounding them. The combination of dim spotlights, the overcast sky, and general darkness cast the structure in an eerie glow. In the momentary quiet, Wade heard the muffled striking of metal on stone. They froze. The sound continued for a minute or more before it stopped.

  A few seconds passed, then the sound of boots on the ground echoed from every direction, louder and louder, until a troop of armed men swarmed out of the trees and surrounded them.

  “No one move!” grunted one of the men. He took Sara roughly by the arms.

  “They were waiting for us!” said Becca. “How on earth—”

  A figure emerged from behind the octagonal mausoleum, silhouetted against the lights from the city below.

  Galina Krause. She had a gun in her hand. In the other . . . a large iron key.

  “How could you possibly have—” Lily started.

  “I can discover the smallest detail about you in moments,” Galina said, her voice low and hollow. “It was not difficult to determine that you had come to Budapest. After that, simple surveillance. Still the best way to leap ahead of someone. Once we identified your taxi and where it left you, we moved in. Strange you do not expect me to be several steps ahead of you.”

  Wade knew she hadn’t been ahead of them. She’d been following, but then had done an end run around them. They needed to improve their game.

  “We don’t have the first key with us,” he said. He might actually have done the right thing by leaving it at the airport. “That would be stupid.”

  “Search them anyway,” Galina said.

  The manhandling was rough and thorough, but her rude agents found nothing.

  “A pity,” she said. “Now, what on earth will I do with you?”

  From somewhere behind and above everyone came a single warning shot. It struck the stones at Galina’s feet. The goons swung around, trained their weapons on the source of the shot. A man yelled out from the woods surrounding the tomb.

  “In Ruhe lassen, Schlangenfrau! Sie haben was Sie wollen. Ich halte dich im Auge!”

  Leave them be, snake woman! You have what you want. I have you in my sights!

  Galina raised her hands as if in surrender, then pumped eight shots into the trees. There was a cry of pain. Her agents flew into the woods, their flashlights crisscrossing the darkness.

  “Run!” Sara dived for cover behind the stone ramparts surrounding the tomb, bringing Lily and Darrell with her. Becca and Wade jumped after them. Several shots thudded from the trees; then they heard shouting, another shot, then nothing, no sound at all, except for a lone siren wailing in the distance.

  Then Galina. “Leave them. We have the key. Go!”

  Seconds later, they heard the shriek of cars roaring away from the hilltop.

  After making sure the garden was clear, they bolted into the trees and found a young man in his twenties lying on the ground, one hand clutching his right side. He grabbed Lily’s arm and drew her nearer. Wade knelt, too.
The man’s voice was barely audible. Whispers, syllables, a word or two.

  “I em Guardian,” he said softly. “We watch every night at Baba’s tomb. Go, sixty-two Nagymező Street.”

  “Sixty-two,” said Lily. “Becca, write this down.”

  “Is it about the third key?” Wade asked. “Is that where it is?”

  The young man shook his head. “Two-four-zero-five. Not before, not after. Another will be there, waiting for you. Turn off your phones. They are not secure. . . .”

  His eyes went glassy, but he kept breathing.

  While Sara and Wade helped the man keep pressure on his wound, Darrell dashed around to the back of the tomb, but returned seconds later. “It’s gone. You can see silver marks on the stone and loose bricks.”

  The sirens were louder. Sara stood, her hands bloody and shaking. “We have no way of explaining this. We can’t be here. The ambulances will take care of this man. We go through the garden and over the wall, then down to the river. Does everyone remember the street? Nagy . . .”

  “Nagymező Street,” Lily said.

  “Then, come on,” Sara said. “Make sure your phones are off. Galina may have the second key, but we’re still a target. Make no noise. . . .”

  Wade and the others followed Sara between the rosebushes, scrabbling over the top of the wall before the first officers and emergency personnel entered the garden and the whistles began to blow.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Nagymező Street was only two miles away in Pest, across the Danube from the Turkish poet’s tomb in the Buda hills, but they didn’t want to be on the streets any longer than they had to. So they hailed a cab. Becca knew she made a hash of the street name—“Naggy Metzo, Nazsh Meza, Neggy Mezoo”—but the driver eventually waved them in. He had understood. It wasn’t far, but he would take the American family. When Sara asked to tour the streets around it first, he understood that, too.

  Except for Wade, who was running numbers aloud, they were all too shocked to speak, but Becca couldn’t stop thinking about how Galina shot the young man so viciously and emotionlessly. There’d been a glint in the young woman’s eyes outside the tomb, which maybe was only the glare from the streetlamps, but it had made Becca’s blood run cold. Galina was different somehow since the last time they’d seen her. Thinner and more electric, sure, but something else was going on.

  The woman was more direct. Less elegant.

  Just shoot, then shoot again.

  Not them, though. That was odd and confusing. Not them. Galina had had a gun, but not for them. To not kill people when you had the chance was to keep them alive. Galina wanted them alive.

  Why?

  After zigzagging the neighborhood and seeing no blue cars, they asked the cab to stop two streets away from their destination. The driver hadn’t seemed the least bit interested in why they wanted a roundabout way of getting someplace at night. He was tired, probably of Becca’s lousy Hungarian, and didn’t respond, even after she said, “Köszönöm”—thank you. He just looked at Sara’s fingers as she dug into her wallet and paid him. Then he was gone.

  Well, not the friendliest guy in the world, but he’d done what they wanted, and it was over soon. They walked to the corner of Nagymező and waited.

  A few pedestrians were visible on the surrounding streets, but not many. It was dark, and only some of the streetlights were lit. It was now close to nine.

  “At the poet’s tomb, did anyone else notice the scar on Galina’s neck?” said Darrell. “It was really red, all inflamed. It didn’t look good. I mean, she looked all right, because she always does, but that scar didn’t. I think maybe she’s sick.”

  Becca glanced at Lily. She’d normally snap at Darrell for something like that, and he’d probably said what he had so she would respond, but she didn’t.

  She just kept looking at her phone, which Becca knew was not on.

  “You’ll answer them, right?” she whispered. “I mean, when we get better phones?”

  “Don’t tell me what—” Lily stopped. “I’m sorry. I’ll call. Just not now. There’s too much happening. That’s all so far away from us, from this.”

  Becca let it go then, just smiled at Lily, put her hand on her shoulder.

  “Let’s move closer.” Sara led the way down the opposite side of the street and found an alley not quite straight across from number 62, but with a full view of the front door and the windows.

  The house was dark, no lights at all. An arched doorway was inset in the pink facade, next to two arched windows that had bars over them. There was a balcony on the second floor over the windows. The facade was narrow. There might have been rooms above the third floor—the roof was peaked—but you couldn’t tell.

  “I think I’ve got it,” said Wade. “The Guardian at the tomb said ‘two-four-zero-five,’ or twenty-four-oh-five. Which is . . .”

  “Nicolaus’s death day,” said Becca. “May the twenty-fourth.”

  “Right. But the man also said ‘not before or after.’ So I think it’s also a time. The problem is that twenty-four hundred is midnight, so there is no twenty-four-oh-five. Unless it’s supposed to mean five minutes after midnight.”

  Darrell checked his watch. “Three hours from now.”

  Becca looked up and down the dimly lit street. “Let’s just keep our eyes on the house and wait. See if anything happens.”

  A cool breeze smelling of the river came down the street. They settled down to wait. Darrell sat against a wall with his legs outstretched. Sara and Wade were speaking low to each other. Then Becca felt a pang when she realized they weren’t talking to each other but leaving a message for Roald from Sara’s phone. Poor Wade. Poor Sara.

  Families and the relic hunt. Talk about crazy.

  And Lily. Lily leaned on the wall across the alley from Darrell, not looking at him or at anyone, staring up between the houses at the sky. A horrible thought flitted through Becca’s mind then.

  What would all this be like without Lily? Could her parents tell her something that might change what we have here? Is there a relic hunt without Lily?

  Thinking about that now probably wasn’t helpful. Becca tried to empty her thoughts. Everyone had gone quiet. The hours passed. They rested, they paced, they said nothing for a long time, drifting down dark streets in their minds, until finally Darrell pushed himself away from the wall, his eyes on his watch.

  “Seven minutes. Get ready, everyone.”

  Those seven minutes dragged on and on, until, at precisely 12:05 a.m., the light in the middle window of the second floor of 62 Nagymező Street flicked on for a second, then off.

  If you weren’t watching, you would have missed it. They were all watching.

  While the light was out, the curtain ruffled briefly, then stopped, and the light came on again. This time, they saw a face framed in the window. The wrinkled face of a woman, like something from an old-master portrait. She was very old and had little or no hair on her head. She looked from the window the way you might expect a sightless person to, touching the glass with her fingers as if feeling the air in front of her face. The curtain ruffled back across her face.

  The light went out and stayed out.

  They stared up at the window. There wasn’t any more movement.

  “Was that the signal?” Wade whispered. “Just that little thing?”

  “I think it may have been,” said Becca.

  “Then it’s our cue to go in,” said Darrell. “The man in the garden said she’s a Guardian. Why are we waiting?”

  Sara didn’t move. She scanned both sides of the street, looked at her silent phone, but didn’t move a step toward the house. “I hear you. I suddenly like it a lot less than I did before. People sending us to places. On the other hand . . .”

  “Right,” said Wade. “What choice do we have? Besides, it’s not really Galina’s style. We all see that, right? The creeping in shadows. She doesn’t do that. Even her agents are all, ‘We kill you now.’ Plus, she had a chance to
do something at the tomb. I think she’s on her way to find the third key—”

  “If there is one,” said Lily.

  “There is, and she’ll find it,” said Darrell, getting agitated. “Unless we follow up on this. I agree with Wade. Can we just go and get the next clue?”

  “Darrell, cool it,” said Sara sharply. “You’re not bulletproof, you know; none of us are.” She cased number 62 up and down, then peered out of the alley both ways down the deserted street. She slipped her phone into a pocket.

  “All right. Quietly. Behind me.”

  The front door was not locked. A musty smell blossomed over them when Sara pushed it open. The stairwell was dark and heavy and utterly silent until the sound of heavy bolts and locks drifted down from upstairs. They climbed up the narrow, black staircase, Sara leading slowly. Slow was good, Wade thought. She was right. At the very least, she’s seen more spy movies and crime shows. She gets it.

  A door on the third floor opened as they reached the landing.

  The light inside was on again. It cast a narrow yellow glow down the steps and over them. In the door frame stood the squat silhouette of the elderly woman they’d seen from the street.

  “Idiots!” Her voice was angry and sharp, like two pieces of sandpaper scraping each other roughly. “So you are the ones who killed my son.”

  Sara stiffened. “Excuse me—”

  The woman flung the door wide. “Get in! Unless you want to kill me, too.”

  Visibly shaken, Sara entered; the others followed. Darrell closed the door timidly behind him. The large front room was bare except for a small desk, a chair, and bookshelves lining the walls.

  The old woman didn’t look at them, as if she couldn’t stand the sight of them, but she didn’t speak, either. Finally, Sara said, “Is he really dead? Your son?”

  “What! No! I have no son, except that all Guardians are my family, and no, he is not dead. He was taken to the hospital. He called me from there to expect you.”

  “Do you have a secret for us?” Wade asked boldly.

  “Secret? Secret!” she boomed. “You fools leave a trail of blood wherever you go! You are pathetically unprepared for the heavy work you have undertaken.”