The Golden Vendetta

by Tony Abbott

  “What?”

  Without taking the glasses off, she started scanning the room. “It’s not just that the fourth key doesn’t exist. Wade, what if . . . what if . . . Leonardo never made the fourth key? That could be why no one would ever find it. That’s what his riddle is. Three keys lock the relic away, but you need four keys to unlock it. So why didn’t he make the fourth key? Because he didn’t need to. Only the Guardian who collected the relic would need to. That’s us! We need to make the fourth key! It’s totally the best kind of security!”

  Wade looked at her through the glasses. Her eyes must have seemed all broken up into fragments. “Okay, Becca. That’s actually kind of brilliant. But how does it help us find it?”

  “Because the fourth key is here!” she said. “It’s like Lucy said. He designed it, he drew it, but he never made it. We need to find his design. And then we need to find someone to make the key for us. That’s what any Guardian would have had to do!”

  He looked straight through the silver lenses into her eyes.

  “You’re pretty amazing,” he said. “You know that, right?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Searching frantically in every room in the château that was open to the public, Becca felt her heart ready to explode.

  “Even assuming we’re right,” she whispered to Wade as she peered through the ocularia hidden under her dark glasses, “and the fourth and final key has to be made from scratch before we can unlock Triangulum, how are we actually going to make it? Could Julian help us?”

  Wade looked out the nearest window to the garden, then turned to her. “I hope so. Should I call him? Maybe he’s in trouble.”

  “Let’s find the design or whatever it is first,” she said. That’s when she realized something she hadn’t before. “Galina’s not as light on her feet as we are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That we’re a team,” she said. “We can spread ourselves across countries and work independently and at the same time. While Lily and Sara and Darrell are off in Turkey finding the third key, we’re finding the fourth.”

  “Galina has the Copernicus servers,” he said. “And Ebner and Wolff.”

  “But she doesn’t trust anyone, not really. You see that, right? And she’s not well. That’s easy to see, too. Galina has a serious weakness. She’s alone.”

  Wade nodded. “You’re right. Being alone isn’t the way to find the relics. You need a team. We have a team. You, me, Lily, Darrell, Sara, my dad . . . when he gets back . . .” He trailed off, then added, “And Julian and Terence, Silva, Karim and Abul-Qasim, Carlo, and Bingo and Pinky and Alula. That’s how we find the relics. That’s the way we’ll win.”

  An image of Lily’s face flashed into Becca’s mind. Her best friend was hurt. She should be there with her. “Let’s find this thing.”

  Wade headed back into the workshop. “Except that I don’t know what we’re actually looking for. Even if Leonardo was making a pun on lantern, maybe he really means lantern. But I don’t see any. At least not one that could be from the early sixteenth century.”

  “Keep at it.” Becca entered the bedroom where Leonardo died. She hoped to find a crusty old lantern overlooked in a niche in the wall. Maybe it no longer held a candle, but in its secret compartment were the designs for the final key.

  No such luck.

  Becca felt her excitement slipping away, like the sun was doing right now in the late afternoon. The sky was clouding up. The museum would close in less than half an hour, and they had nothing. Julian was still out there running interference—she hoped he was, and hadn’t fallen into the clutches of the Order.

  “Let’s . . . let’s look at the drawings and paintings. Maybe there’s something there,” she said. “A lantern in one of his paintings. It could be a code. Maybe?”

  The museum shop had a good selection of art books covering the full range of Leonardo’s drawings and sketches. They each took a massive collection and scanned it for work done after 1517. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Then, something.

  Wade leaned over a page in a catalog of late drawings. “Bec . . . look at this. It’s from one of his famous notebooks of sketches and writings called Codex Atlanticus. A drawing from 1515 or later.”

  It was a lantern, but not the usual type of lantern. The caption noted that it was a kind of primitive slide projector called a camera obscura or a magic lantern.

  “I don’t get that it’s a design for a key, though,” he said.

  She lifted the ocularia and sunglasses off and replaced them with her reading glasses. She studied the drawing. “Leonardo said, ‘not without the lantern.’ Like Lily said, ‘not without’ could mean ‘within.’ The lines inside the lantern aren’t very clear. They might be different when you look through the ocularia. I’m going to use the combination five-five-five. It’s Leonardo’s number, after all.”

  “Go for it.”

  Making sure no one saw, Becca adjusted the lenses as she had before—five-five-five on one side, five-five-five on the other. Taking a breath, she slipped them on.

  Under the lenses, the crosshatched lines inside the lantern reformed themselves and took on the look of a schematic. It was the design for the fourth key. She took off the glasses, held her new phone behind the lenses, and snapped a photo. Then another. Six photos in all.

  What she saw in the decoded lines was a clear image of a key.

  A key. Similar to but more intricate than the others. It bore the same telltale ornamentation on its shell, but it also had gears and struts and linkages and silver wires extending from it. It almost looked like a weapon or an engine, and reminded her that Leonardo had designed many military machines in his career.

  “The fourth key,” she whispered. “We found it!”

  But Wade was fixed on another page in the book of drawings. He turned the book around to her, to one of several sketches depicting a cataclysm of water.

  “Becca, the flood. There’s a whole series of these drawings under the same title: Deluge. The flood my dad told us about . . .”

  “What’s the date of the drawings?”

  He read the caption. “Between 1515 and 1519.”

  She shivered in the sunlit room. These drawings from five centuries ago seemed as fresh and terrifying as if they had rendered something that had just happened today. Or would happen tomorrow.

  Or . . . at whatever deadline they knew Galina was obsessed with.

  “What if Leonardo drew these because Copernicus told him about the horrors of time travel?” she asked. “The ones he told me about in London? Wade, maybe Copernicus saw a flood and told Leonardo. But it hasn’t come yet. It’s coming now. Your father knows about it, and it has to do with Galina.”

  Wade pulled out the phone Julian had given him. “I’m calling Sara—”

  Julian raced in, followed by the intern, who was angry. “There’s no running allowed in Leonardo’s house!” she said.

  “Sorry!” said Julian. “If I break something, I’ll buy it.” He drew Wade and Becca quickly from the room. “I threw off our friends—finally—but a couple of black cars just pulled into the lot. You know what that means. I hope you found what you were looking for.”

  “We have the design for the fourth key,” Becca said, pocketing her phone.

  “And that’s not all,” said Wade. “But first, we need the best jeweler you know!”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Alanya, Turkey

  June 8

  Evening

  Because of all the near-death experiences they’d racked up so far, the uneventful flight to Antalya airport was just long and boring and foodless, but Darrell couldn’t care about any of that after he deplaned and got Wade’s call.

  “I have good news and bad news,” Wade had told him.

  And as good as the good news was—“Becca and I found the design for the fourth key”—the bad news was crazy bad: “We also found a bunch of flood drawings.”

  Darrell
told Lily first, hoping she would actually talk with him. She was quiet to begin with. “Hmm,” she said. Then she got quieter.

  His mother was quiet, too, but for a different reason. “I keep thinking about your stepfather’s secret meeting,” she said softly. She was going to say more, he was sure of it, but she swallowed the rest. “But first, we get the third key.”

  “You bet we do,” he said. He glanced over at Lily, who just nodded, which was better than nothing.

  Of course, it made sense to Darrell to connect the Copernicus horrors—we should have a better term for that—with the flood that his stepfather had told them about. But it was a kind of grim, end-of-the-world sense. The bad news was drowning the good news.

  His mother had sat next to him all through the flight, trying, hopelessly, to unlock the secret of the puzzle box of the tower, to find the exact location of the third key, but she was getting nowhere.

  When he’d tried to be polite—“Don’t drive yourself crazy with it” and “Do you want me to try?”—she shook her head. “I just want to try one more thing.” So he’d turned to Lily, but every time he looked at her, he’d found himself tongue-tied.

  His mom and dad had broken up, so he kind of knew what she was feeling, but he’d been a lot younger when his father had drifted out of their lives, and Darrell and his mother had always been together, so yeah, he didn’t really know what she was feeling at all.

  Maybe I can just tell her that. Maybe someone can let me do something!

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot announced, “we have begun our descent into Antalya airport and will arrive in approximately twenty minutes. Flight crew, please begin your cross-check and prepare the cabin for landing.”

  He glanced at Lily. Say something neutral, he thought. “I hope Silva is there,” he said. “Or a hundred of his friends. I think we’ll need protection.”

  “Well, you will,” she said.

  Ah! Good old Lily! He decided not to wreck it with a quip. He just laughed.

  Turning to the window, he saw how the ultramarine blue of the sea contrasted with the brown earth and beaches of the coast that spread out beneath them.

  “It looks like a vacation place,” his mother said, still fiddling with the puzzle.

  “That’s what makes it so dangerous,” he said.

  “Meaning what?” asked Lily.

  “I’m not sure.” But he made a mental note to use it on Wade.

  The airport was large, but not jammed at that time of day. Because Becca and Wade had the first Barbarossa key, Darrell, Lily, and Sara didn’t need to hide anything in a locker, but he came up with the bright idea to rent one anyway, just to have a decoy locker key.

  “Uh-oh,” Lily whispered. “Some guys just walked into the terminal. Not the good kind of guys.”

  Darrell saw them. A trio of plainclothes Europeans, beefy, hands in pockets, on phones, obviously packing sidearms, heads swiveling around the room. He didn’t want to be seen watching, but he couldn’t wrench his eyes away. Big mistake. His stare connected with one of them. There was a flash of recognition.

  His mother saw. “Get out of here!” She rushed them both back through the crowded concourse, searching for the nearest exit. Darrell “accidentally” dropped the locker key, and Lily “accidentally” kicked it across the floor, sending one of the agents skittering after it.

  “Good fake,” she said. “Now run!”

  They were out on the sidewalk before the men, and bolted into the car at the head of the taxi line. Darrell said, “Driver, please get us out of here. We’re being followed!” But the driver apparently wasn’t familiar with spy movies, because he just turned in his seat and shrugged, until Darrell’s mother held out a huge wad of euros. The man grabbed the bills, punched the gas, and the cab screeched away from the curb. Two of the three agents stumbled out of the terminal, shouting. The third was probably checking the lockers, Darrell thought. So there!

  When Sara told the driver their destination, his foot lifted off the gas pedal.

  “Kizil Kule? Is over hour away.” The man sighed, as if he’d heard the request a billion times before, but Darrell’s mother folded over another few euro notes, and he was all smiles. “Yes, yes.” He pressed his foot on the gas again and got on the highway.

  It was over an hour away. Not less. Close to two hours after the airport-key incident, the driver dropped them at the water, stuffing the remainder of the fare into his pocket and shaking his head as he left.

  Kizil Kule was a squat polygon, and the model in his mother’s hands right now was indeed accurate. Darrell thought its many sides must have helped deflect direct artillery strikes, like the angles on a stealth fighter deflects radar. It was, even after seven or eight centuries, fresh and stout, and a perfect place for Copernicus and Heyreddin to have secreted the third key to Triangulum.

  In fact, because of Heyreddin’s high esteem and position in the Ottoman capital, it probably meant that the hiding place was especially clever.

  Great, Darrell thought. Another challenge. His mother had relinquished the puzzle to him, and he realized why she hadn’t been able to solve it. It was a heavy block of wood with a taunting little rattly thing inside. No matter how you rotated its moving sections, the only thing that happened was that the rattle kept rattling, and the puzzle kept its secret.

  “Better go in,” his mother said. “Maybe inside the tower there’s a clue to the puzzle that will give us a clue to where the key is inside the tower. In other words, a clue to the puzzle, so the puzzle can give us a clue.”

  “A Darrellism,” said Lily. “I fear for you, Sara Kaplan.”

  Lily found a few Turkish words on her phone and, after guessing how to pronounce them, told Sara, who bought three tickets into the tower museum. Ten minutes later they entered the cool air of its lowest level, the bottom of a labyrinth of stairways and ramps and levels and shadows. Plenty of shadows.

  After escaping from Clos Lucé, Julian, Becca, and Wade jetted to Rome, where, hours later, they found themselves hurrying down a warren of narrow passages off the Via Borghese.

  Julian had earlier linked to his father’s computers in Nice and dug up the name of a black-market jeweler his father had interviewed for one of his novels, The Vatican Directive, a book Julian thought deserved a far more exciting title.

  “Her name is . . . ,” Becca said.

  “Adriana Nissi,” said Julian, searching the street. “Via della Torretta. Number sixty-nine.”

  “Does ‘black market’ mean she’s really good, or really bad?” Becca asked.

  “A little of both, I think,” said Julian. “We’ll find out soon.”

  Entering the ground floor of number 69, they found the jeweler listed as residing on the top floor.

  They rang for her. No answer.

  “We can’t wait.” Julian bounded up the staircase from the street.

  The door to the flat was open. The interior was illuminated by a bank of open windows along the rear of the building. A warm breeze blew out to the landing.

  Julian knocked. “Ciao? C’è qualcuno?” he asked.

  “Sì. È aperto,” came the muffled reply. “Come in, door is open.”

  They pushed in and found a tattooed middle-aged woman wearing goggles, a halter top, low-slung work pants, and no shoes, leaning over a high bench. Her tattoos, Julian noted silently, seemed to wander from her neck to her toes, and might have been everywhere in between. A long blue snake coiled down the outside of her bare left arm, its bloody fangs inked out over her two middle fingers. She held a miniature blowtorch in one hand and was alternately dipping it at and removing it from a length of gold pipe. An electronic cigarette hung from her lips, and she wore a jeweled nose ring and earlobe studs. Looking over her shoulder at them, she extinguished the blowtorch. The snake rippled when she moved. She removed her goggles, then blinked. “You are Julian!”

  “Yes!” he said. “Thank you for seeing us.”

  “But of course. I know your mothe
r from pictures.”

  This surprised Julian, and for a moment he brought up his mother’s face. “Did you really?”

  “Sì, sì. You look so like her. I am sorry you lost her very young. Come for kiss.” He didn’t have to because she lunged across the floor to him and kissed both his cheeks. He turned red instantly.

  Shaking the kids’ hands, she added, “So, amici miei, what can I do for you?”

  Her eyes lit up like a child’s when Wade said the name Leonardo, and she gasped repeatedly when Becca showed her the photos of the key she’d taken through the ocularia.

  “O, dio mio!” she said under her breath. Pressing her temples, she walked over to her workbench and studied the phone under a jeweler’s loupe as if she were holding a priceless artifact and not a digital copy of one. She sent the best image to a computer across the room, and printed an enlarged photo of the design. She taped it in place on the workbench.

  “I suspect you need this key pronto?”

  “Sì,” said Wade. “If you can.”

  Adriana Nissi smiled. “I can. You wait.”

  She quickly assembled tools and materials from all over her workshop, bringing them to the bench. When she finally dropped her goggles back over her eyes, and the blowtorch flashed, her toned arms flexed and her biceps bulged.

  Julian swore he saw that blue tattoo snake slither slowly down her arm as the sparks flew like stars to the studio floor.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Central Italy

  June 8

  Evening

  Ugo Drangheta powered his SUV swiftly down the Vocabolo Angelica, just north of the well-known hairpin between Papigno and Marmore, where the road sank in a sharp V, changed its name to Vocabolo Rancio, and drove sharply north. His rage had boiled for so long, it was now seething in his blood.

  Galina Krause would die, and he would have her empire.

  “How far behind are we?” he asked his passenger. He was on the trail of a convoy of five black vehicles, including one large transport, that his brother-in-law had spotted leaving Salzburg, Austria.