The Golden Vendetta

by Tony Abbott

  “Look here. There is the barest tab, a lever of sorts, on the edge of the back side. My fingers, you see, are so very sensitive.”

  He pressed the lever gently. It pushed in, then fell out onto his palm. The lever was actually a tube, hollow and no wider than a needle. And it contained something. He held it up to his lips and blew hard. A tiny fragment of paper fell out into his palm. He unrolled it. It was a quarter-of-an-inch square. One side was blank. The other contained a very small colored image.

  “A compass rose,” Galina said. “But no map to identify its origin.”

  “No,” Gerrenhausen murmured as he closed his eyes and moved the tiny paper gently between his thumb and forefinger, “no map . . . but the cartographic paper it is painted on—that, perhaps, is the clue. My fingers know it. The paper is not European, Miss Krause. Not Western European, at least.”

  “From Budapest?”

  He brought the fragment up to his nose and sniffed it several times. “No. Beyond. It is Greek, perhaps. Or Egyptian. No . . . Turkish.”

  “Ottoman!” she said. “Yes. And what else?”

  He nodded, a smile teasing at his lips. He was on home ground now, she in thrall to his peculiar mastery of the history of paper. “It is a compass rose from a Turkish map produced in the first part of the sixteenth century. . . .” He handed the paper to her, then withdrew a narrow notebook from the breast pocket of his coat. He consulted page after page and then stopped. Holding it up, he took the cartographic fragment back from Galina and held it next to the notebook page. “Ah, yes. Piri Reis. A cartographer for Suleiman the Great of Istanbul. This is a fragment of a printing of maps he made of the coast of Alanya, a port city in the Antalya Province of Turkey.”

  Galina breathed. “Excellent. Anything else?”

  “With that as a clue,” the little man went on, “I can now offer a guess as to the image on the front of the key. The back-to-back double K emblem is not the Russian letter, but identifies the octagonal building as the tower of Kizil Kule, a formidable structure that guarded that same portion of the Turkish coast for over eight centuries. That, my dear Miss Krause, is where another Barbarossa key is located!”

  She turned immediately from him. She seemed happy with his work. Perhaps now she would reconsider her threat to his grandson.

  “Gerrenhausen, come. You are needed.”

  The words were music to him. He followed Galina across the hangar to her jet and watched her press an icon on her phone. Ebner von Braun’s face came up, the blue of ocean water behind and below him. He was on the deck of a ship. The tumblers in Gerrenhausen’s brain turned. He is on her yacht near Turkey. Ebner was very near the next key.

  “Ebner, the third key is hidden in the tower of Kizil Kule in Alanya,” she said. “Notify our newly arrived agents in Istanbul to meet you there. Direct others to the nearest airport. I am sending Gerrenhausen with the second key.”

  This was unexpected. “Me?” he said.

  “The relic may be close by. We must be ready with the key. Ebner, the Kaplans could have beaten us there. Descend on the tower now!”

  “Of course,” Ebner said. “And will you join us, Galina?”

  “Once my other business is done,” she said. “Do not fail me!”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China

  June 8

  7:28 p.m.

  In the Marco Polo suite at the Peninsula hotel, Markus Wolff looked up from the desk and out across Victoria Harbor at Hong Kong Island.

  Twilight was coming. The mix of yachts, tall-masted sailing craft, traditional junks, and assorted barges and dinghies streamed in and out of the wharves even at this late hour. It was a scene he had viewed nightly for the last two days, and now it was time. He glanced at his phone: 7:28 p.m.

  At seven forty-five, with dusk finally settling over the harbor, he would board the Star Ferry for the island. From the dock he would then walk to his appointment on Wing Lok Street. Strange, he thought, having an appointment with a man who expected someone else. Feng Yi was a traitor to the Order, a clever man so obsessed with the authentic Scorpio relic that he had finally located it, after killing nine people who stood in his way. He was now arranging to smuggle the relic into North Africa. To a buyer who had expressed sudden and lucrative interest. A man by the name of Ugo Drangheta.

  The alarm on Wolff’s phone rang. It was seven thirty.

  Time to go.

  Wolff closed his edition of the late poems of Emily Dickinson and rose from the desk. He arranged the items on it as they had been before he took the room. He slipped on a pair of tight gloves, entered the bathroom, and returned with a damp hand towel, which he used to wipe down the surfaces he had touched. As the hotel’s recycling notice suggested, he tossed the towel on the bathroom floor.

  After picking his satchel up off the bed, he smoothed the bedspread with the flat of his gloved hand. One more look around. He left the room. In the lobby, he nodded once at the concierge, who returned the nod and said, “Good day, Mr. Ambler.” Ambler was an identity Wolff used often in the Far East.

  On the street, he took his bearings, walked to the ferry docks, boarded the seven forty-five, and was on the island by eight. A ten-minute stroll brought him to the corner of Wing Lok and Man Wa Lane, where he waited under an awning behind an illegally parked van.

  Last night, he had sent Feng Yi a text from a burner phone:

  Central Island Exports, 71 Wing Lok St., 8:30pm. Bring package. Transport arranged, destination Casablanca, 48hrs. 2mill euros. Come alone.

  Feng Yi had responded. Prove you represent who you say.

  Wolff had then transferred a photograph from his phone, as if it were a picture of his own wrist, an image courtesy of Oskar Gerrenhausen.

  He had repeated the message. Come alone. This received no response. So now, under that awning, Wolff waited to see if his trick had worked.

  At 8:28 p.m. a taxi rolled quietly to a stop at the far end of the street. A man struggled out of the backseat. He held a small brushed-aluminum briefcase. He said something to the driver, closed the door behind him, and began to limp toward number 71. The man had long black hair, much as he had in San Francisco, where Wolff had shot him for trying to steal the Scorpio relic. But like all failed seekers of that poisoned device, Yi had succumbed to a death lust. He had become ill from the radiation, and still he couldn’t drag himself along the sidewalk for a minute without rechecking the radioactive contents of the suitcase.

  When the moment came, Wolff could say something clever to him, but with the end so near, the words one said had to bear so much more weight than mere cleverness. A soul would die soon, leave the world, his journey done.

  He thought again of the words he had been reading in the hotel.

  He lived the Life of Ambush

  And went the way of Dusk

  Wolff wondered which of the two of them the poem might refer to.

  But there was no sense in waiting. The street was quiet. He wouldn’t break the air with the concussion of an unsilenced gunshot. He drew the noise suppresser from inside his leather coat, screwed it onto the barrel of his Walther, took seven steps, and raised it at the limping man.

  “Mr. Yi.”

  Feng Yi raised his face. “You? But no—”

  The report from the Walther was quick, dense, dull. Feng Yi fell to the street with a groan, his expression puzzled, his face a question, a worry, as if he didn’t quite understand his own ambush and was unable to comprehend what had just been done to him. The second shot removed the worry, removed everything.

  At the far end of the street, the taxi backed up, drove away. Wolff stood over the body, watched its stillness for a few seconds. Dusk fell into night.

  He removed the silencer, pocketed both it and the gun, then opened the suitcase for a fraction of a second. The jade scorpion lay fitted tightly inside.

  “And that is done.”

  He snapped the case shut. “Dear Galina, the scales are ev
en once more.”

  Some nine thousand kilometers to the northwest, an armored convoy approached the route to the central Apennine range called the Monti della Laga, the mountains of the lakes.

  Marius Linzmaier glanced out of the corner of his eye. The colonel sitting next to him had worn the same somber face the entire trip.

  “Pull over,” the colonel said, his first words since before the Austrian border crossing. Linzmaier slowed and parked on the shoulder, and the following vehicles did the same. They idled there while the colonel removed his phone from his jacket pocket and placed a call.

  “We are one and one-half hours from arrival,” he said into the phone. There came a few words of response the driver couldn’t hear. The colonel nodded and hung up.

  “We wait here.”

  Linzmaier turned off the engine. “May I ask for what?”

  “Our people at Nowa Huta report seeing a man and a woman surveilling the steelworks.”

  “Did our people intervene?”

  “No. That will be our job. We wait here.”

  Confused as he was, but knowing that the conversation with the colonel was unlikely to continue, Linzmaier left the cabin, went around to the rear compartment, and unlocked the doors. One by one a troop of armed guards left the compartment and stood by the side of the road, stretching, smoking. The driver studied what he had been transporting: a monster of unconnected fragments, a skeleton of girders, rods and struts coiled into the shape of claws, levers and pistons and pipes and gears in frightening disarray—a thing unbuilt, unformed, unborn. It terrified him. The looks on the guards’ faces told him they felt the same. They were gray and grim and, in a word, horrified to have been locked up with that mess for so long.

  The one thing that joined the pieces in some kind of symmetry was that down to the very last bolt and gear, they all seemed to be crafted of a single substance.

  Gold.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Tours, France

  June 8

  Late afternoon

  Becca was the first to spot Julian outside the Val de Loire airport in Tours, waving to them from the driver’s seat of a rental car.

  In Budapest, they had decided that Sara would go to Turkey with Lily and Darrell, and that Becca and Wade would meet Julian in France as soon as they were able to get there—which was Sunday afternoon. They would have with them the ocularia, the first key, and the diary safely in Becca’s indestructible go-bag. As usual, Julian would provide a new set of secure phones for them.

  Sara had also called Silva, asking him to please meet them in Turkey, if he was able to. She told Silva that since Galina possessed not only the second key but also the powerful resources of the Copernicus Room to assemble the tiniest fragments of data, it was practically ensured that the Order would be waiting for them. Silva told them he would meet them as soon as he could.

  There was no reunion chatter when Becca and Wade got in the car and Julian started it up. “Still no word from my dad,” he said. “Paul Ferrere’s on-site now but so far as he can tell Roald and my dad are already inside, and Paul can’t get near the facility. One more day, we’re going to the police.”

  Wade nodded, then shared a look with Becca.

  She knew what he was thinking. Sara was great, supersmart and careful, but with his father unreachable, at best a critical member of the team was out of action. At worst, his father was in grave danger.

  Julian drove speedily onto the highway and headed southwest toward Château d’Amboise, on the grounds of which stood Leonardo’s smaller house. “It could simply be that the mountain lab is out of range of phones, for security reasons. Paul doesn’t think so, but I’m hoping that’s all it is.”

  “Us, too,” Becca said. “Your father and Roald are smart. They can deal.”

  “They can. And my dad can make a deadly weapon out of a toothpick, so there’s no reason to panic. Still . . .” He didn’t finish, just let it end there, and concentrated on the driving.

  After one quiet roundabout hour they drove through the gates and up a winding road to the main château.

  From where they parked outside a sprawling complex of ornate stone mansions, it was a brisk seven-minute walk to the much smaller Château de Cloux, now known as Château du Clos Lucé.

  “I’d always thought that Clos Lucé could mean something like the ‘castle’ or ‘keep’ of ‘light,’” he said. “It was really no stretch at all to think of the château where da Vinci died as a lantern.”

  “A big lantern,” Wade murmured when they finally saw it.

  True enough, Becca thought. The house was small only when compared to the city-size immensity of the nearby Château d’Amboise. Da Vinci’s mansion was three stories of red bricks, white limestone, and tile set in a sweep of rolling lawns. Leonardo died when he was sixty-seven on May 2, 1519, a little over a month after he returned from . . . wherever it was that he and the others hid Triangulum.

  “I love these quiet places,” Becca said. “Like Bletchley Park in England. Quiet places where we learn incredible things.”

  “Maybe not so quiet,” Wade whispered, pausing on the path toward the house. “Julian, I maybe see an agent. Bearded, tall. On the left. His hand is buried in his jacket pocket.”

  “He could be château security,” said Becca. “Or not. I see his short friend.”

  Julian pulled out his phone and brought it to his ear as if receiving a call. “Pretend you don’t see them. We’ll have a tiny advantage.”

  “We could take them,” Becca whispered, only half joking.

  “Oh, I know,” Julian said. “We totally could. But we don’t want to scare the museum guides, do we?” He turned away as if to speak on his phone. “You go on the tour. I’ll try to lead our friends on a little chase. Remember to find the key.”

  “That’s the idea,” said Becca.

  Julian slipped away, still pretending to be on a phone call, and in a matter of seconds had gone around the side of the house. The taller of the sketchy men pursued him, followed a few moments later by his shorter colleague.

  “Julian’s good,” said Becca. “Professional.”

  “Yeah. Easy to forget he’s only seventeen. Come on.”

  As soon as they identified themselves inside the house as Americans, a perky young woman trotted over to them, a student intern from Massachusetts named Lucy. Which seemed appropriate to Becca, because, after all, the intern’s name meant “light,” too.

  After giving them a solid overview of Leonardo’s last years in France, she swished them through several rooms and finally into the master’s final workshop. Because the tour was near the end of the day, Lucy’s presentation to them and the three other visitors became more relaxed and informal, and more informative.

  “We’re interested in Leonardo’s work while he was here,” Wade said, during a gap in the discussion.

  “Especially his work with silver,” Becca added. “And especially from 1517 to the end. Kind of specific, I know, but . . .”

  “Well, he was a renowned silversmith,” the guide said. “And in the last years, he was deeply into the study of mirrors. Mirrors use silver, of course, for the reflection; they always have. But Leonardo worked on, or wrote about, what he called a three-sided mirror, or lo specchio con tre lati.” Her accent was good.

  The two shared a look. They knew exactly what that looked like.

  “Interesting,” said Becca.

  Lucy smiled. “You probably know that Leonardo was a hopeless experimenter. He sketched out thousands of proposed plans and never went through with them. I think he simply had to understand how something worked, but then became bored when he figured it out. Who knows how the mind of a genius works?”

  “They called him the spy of nature, didn’t they?” said Wade.

  “Exactly!” Lucy said. “Well, feel free to look around, but obviously don’t touch anything. Wouldn’t want to break an original da Vinci!”

  As the intern wandered off, Wade and Becca scoure
d the workshop for anything that might be a clue to the location of the last key. While no one was looking, Becca took the ocularia from her bag and slipped them on, hiding them under a pair of dark glasses.

  As he usually did, Wade seemed to need to talk out everything they knew so far. “Leonardo and Copernicus met here in 1517—that much we know,” he whispered. “Copernicus asked him to be a Guardian, but Leonardo was too old. So Nicolaus looked around, saw all the silver, all the mirrors, maybe he saw designs for armor; whatever it was, something clicked in his memory. He remembered his old pirate friend, the man who had lost his forearm saving Hans Novak. It all came together for him. He asked Leonardo, ‘Make a silver arm for my friend, the pirate Baba Aruj, called Barbarossa.’”

  Becca liked the way it all sounded, laid out like that. It struck all the right notes. “Leonardo used his knowledge of silver and mirrors, and he made a new arm, a silver arm, with Triangulum inside to power the fingers like a motor. It was the first mechanical prosthetic arm.”

  Wade looked at her. Becca liked that he was smiling. The two of them together had pressed at the problem until it gave up an answer.

  Part of an answer.

  “But there’s still a question,” said Wade, looking out to the garden from a window made of wavy glass. “If Leonardo said that the fourth key doesn’t exist, why would he tell Guardians to come here to his lantern? What did he mean?”

  Becca imagined the scene in the stony place where the silver arm rested. Leonardo was there. Copernicus. Barbarossa Two. She suddenly felt a wave of awe fall over her. “These men, three famous people in the same place, talking as friends, trying to save the world, protecting something of great power from falling into the wrong hands . . . oh . . . oh!”

  He smiled at her. “What is it?”

  Her eyes were wide, staring at him through the shaded ocularia. “Wade!”