The Golden Vendetta

by Tony Abbott

  Mistral glanced ahead, then checked the message on her phone. “Less than an hour. Are you certain we are following the astrolabe?”

  “We will find out. In less than an hour.”

  He was downshifting in anticipation of the famous hairpin when he caught sight of a large truck with German license plates parked in the otherwise deserted lot of Ristorante il Focolare, a boarded-up pizza restaurant situated at the very apex of the hairpin.

  “Ugo? No, no. It cannot be.”

  He braked to a crawl, snarling the traffic behind him. His suspicion kicking in, he drove slowly past the lot, saw that the truck’s cabin was empty, and continued up the road. A half mile or so later, he pulled over, let the traffic by, and reversed. He carefully returned to the restaurant and pulled into the lot. Mistral removed two pistols from the glove box in front of her. They were for her. Ugo had his own brace of handguns and pulled them out from under his seat.

  “Wait here.”

  “No, Ugo, I am with you in everything.”

  He looked at her, kissed her, and exited the car. She went out her side. They rounded the large truck. It was indeed empty, though the rear compartment was locked.

  “Shh, listen,” Mistral whispered.

  He froze. Someone, a man, laughed inside the abandoned restaurant. Another two or three men answered with more laughter.

  “They’re taking a rest,” he said, his heart pounding. If he could stop this, if only he could . . . Ugo didn’t know what. His plans had not yet had a chance to form themselves, except to insist that any disruption of Galina’s plans was good.

  He raised both guns—she did, too—and he nodded to her to go around the patio to the right of the parking lot. “On my signal,” he whispered.

  There was more laughter and the sound of glasses clinking as she scurried past the boarded windows around the corner, then peered back around—her beautiful face—giving him a nod.

  He drew a breath, waited three seconds, and returned the nod. Both firing, they blasted open the doors and burst into the restaurant, to be confronted with what could only be described as a firing squad of two dozen men. The barrage was horrendous: Ugo fell to the ground outside, struck in the face, the torso, his already wounded arm. In desperation, he fired back into the restaurant doorway.

  He watched Mistral fire over and over, then disappear back out the side door onto the patio and into the valley below, pursued by ten, twelve gunmen.

  “Mistral . . .” His voice was a whisper. He heard the woods erupt with a chaos of bullets, hundreds, thousands, then stop abruptly. My Mistral. She must be dead.

  Ugo crawled back to the SUV, dragged himself to its footrest, to the door handle, to the seat. He slid painfully behind the wheel, bleeding from his head, his stomach, his arm. He saw—or thought he saw—a khaki-wearing Asian man with a black pistol standing in the doorway of the restaurant, his face a thing of stone.

  Ugo pressed the ignition, blood streaming down his hand; then a resounding blast came from the doorway, and the windshield exploded into his eyes.

  After trudging up the endless stairs to the open roof of Kizil Kule in Alanya, Turkey, Ebner von Braun, trailed by Oskar Gerrenhausen and the skinnier of the two unspeakable agents from Tunis, felt his stomach tumble. He had tinnitus, a constant ringing deep in his ears like a horde of cicadas living inside his head. Here, with the ocean grinding below and the wind screaming across the bricks at such a pitch, he felt nauseous.

  “Some view,” said Emil, who had scrounged up a replacement needle to pick his teeth with. He waved the encrusted thing around like a pointer.

  Ebner wheeled away from him, shuddering. “Oh, for the love of Albrecht!”

  “Take these,” said the bookseller, opening to him a tin of small white pills. “For seasickness. I, too, suffer.”

  Remembering Galina in the ruins of Carthage, Ebner drew out several of the pills, popped two, and saved the rest for later. “It is all this running around, you see.”

  “I do,” Gerrenhausen said to him. “It was I who identified this tower to Miss Krause as the location of the third Triangulum key.”

  “Care to narrow that location down a little?” Ebner replied. “It’s rather a big place. We are but several feet away from discovering the key, but several feet in which direction, my little friend?”

  “Alas, the key was not that specific.”

  “You two talk like a book,” said Emil, who broke wind loudly and walked away.

  It was absurd to Ebner, their need to rely on the blasted Kaplan family for clues. All this skulking around, waiting for “breaks.” Galina’s two-month absence had created a situation that was cosmically unnatural. Back in March, the order had been simple: Kill the Kaplans. Then the mess in London, Crux, the old church, evidence of time travel, the death of Archie Doyle, all led to the command being rescinded. The waffling bred its own kind of seasickness. And yet . . .

  The family’s record of success was dismally clear. After locating two relics already, they were well on their way to finding a third. Was it partly because of the poor quality of the Order’s far-flung agents? Of the sort exemplified by the fat man and this thing? My Lord, he thought. Give me Helmut Bern or even the late, lamented Archie Doyle over these creatures.

  Gerrenhausen held out the key. “Perhaps a new set of eyes will find a clue?”

  Ebner was reaching for it when someone screamed from below. Moments later a young French boy, perhaps five years old, rushed up the stairs to the roof, crying, “A giant fat man is chasing people with a gun!”

  So. The Kaplans had been found.

  Eight minutes before the screaming boy, Darrell’s head split in half because he wasn’t Wade. Wade would have worked on the puzzle until—voilà!—he found an elegant and stunning way to open the priceless puzzle box and reveal the actual location of the third Barbarossa key. But, no, Wade was in France, which left Darrell to make do with twisting and turning and shaking and rolling the stupid thing in every conceivable way, while it just looked back at him smugly and said, “Ha!” So while his mother was on a lower level, and Lily on the level above, Darrell gripped the puzzle and smacked it lightly against the nearest wall. Nothing happened. He hit it again, a little harder.

  Twice. Nothing. Nothing.

  Finally, his anger took over, and he slammed it at the wall hard. It split.

  “Uh-oh.”

  He’d just destroyed a work of sixteenth-century Ottoman craftsmanship. That was probably a sin, at least a crime, at best unforgivable, but . . . the bead, a small wooden ball painted silver, of course, rolled across the floor and bounced away down the stairs. And there in the broken fragments of the puzzle were tiny silver paint marks that the rattling bead had made.

  Darrell knew where the third key was hidden.

  He breathed out. “Okay, then. Okay—” He listened. Footsteps were coming up the stairs from below. Footsteps he knew. Not his mother’s. She was down on another level somewhere and, he hoped, safe. No, these were the light, dancing footsteps of a very heavy man.

  “Lily, get down here!” he cried overloudly. “The key’s in a chamber on the lowest level of the tower!”

  Lily rushed down the stairs to him. “Really, you solved the puzzle?”

  “Sort of—”

  She spied the splintered wood. “Darrell!”

  That’s when some French kid started screaming. He tumbled up the stairs inches from Bigboy, who pranced nimbly up after him, waving his pistol around. Darrell jumped away from the stair opening as the gun went off. The centuries-old brick exploded behind his head. Darrell pushed Lily back toward the upward steps. Another shot exploded on the wall next to his face. He was terrified, moving without reason, just moving.

  Lily scrabbled around on the steps and suddenly hurled a five-inch square of broken brick right past Darrell’s head. It struck Bigboy in the face, tearing open his wide pink cheek. The guy squealed, slapping his bloody face with one hand as he tumbled to the stone floor, falling forward
like a whale. The gun went off beneath him, and he let out a horrible groan.

  Lily went white in the face, faltered as she tried to get up. “What did I do—”

  “Lily, come on.” Darrell jumped two steps up the staircase.

  “But you said it was downstairs!” Lily said.

  “I lied. I guessed someone was listening. It’s near the top of the tower—”

  Lily leaped past him up the steps, then without warning pushed him backward into a deep cutout in the side of the wall and slapped her hand over his mouth. It was close in there. She was very close to him. He felt her breathing as if it were his own lungs doing it, but when he tried to shift away, she pressed against him harder, pinning them deeper in the shadows, until he saw why.

  Fish leaped down the stairs right past them.

  Ebner trailed him down the staircase, pushing screaming tourists out of the way with the barrel of his gun. He was on the phone, muttering and spitting in German. The bookseller skipped down after Ebner.

  Darrell and Lily waited in the scanty shadows, pressed against each other until the three men had disappeared onto the level below.

  “Uh . . . ,” Darrell said.

  “Just come on,” she said as she jumped up the stairs. “And don’t say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “Anything.” She shook herself as if shaking off bugs. “Now go!”

  Darrell took the lead, bounding up to the second-highest level. Holding the important piece of the shattered model, he veered left at the top of the steps and pushed through to one of the outer chambers. There was a cutout in the brick with a view of the sea. He lined it up with the model. He ran his finger down the wall from the sill until he saw a tiny silver mark on the corner of one of the bricks.

  “Whoa, Darrell . . . ,” Lily whispered.

  He smiled. “Come on. Help me.”

  Together, they pried the brick out.

  The third key was lodged securely behind the brick. As with the one they’d discovered in Tunisia, the dense design work identified the key unmistakably as the work of Leonardo da Vinci.

  “There’s a big M, and writing on the shaft,” Lily whispered. She traced her fingers over the inscribed letters. They were crudely written, identifiable barely as letters at all, and were strange: partly Latinate, partly something else. The accents were ones that neither of them had ever seen before.

  L-aħħar għargħar

  As usual with Darrell, he had to speak them aloud—try to speak them aloud—the way a child might try to sound out unfamiliar words.

  “Lahar garrr gahhh rrrr,” he said. “El ahar gargar? What kind of language is—”

  Lily started shaking. “Darrell . . .” She closed her hands over her face, then dropped them. “Darrell, this is what the old woman said to me and Becca in Austin. The Mother. She said, ‘Lahar gaharr.’ We thought she was just trying to breathe, but she was saying words. My translator. I need my translator!”

  “My phone?” he said. “Or yours?”

  “Mine. My apps. But my fingers are shaking—”

  He took her phone. “What’s your pass code?”

  “Zero nine two three.”

  He started to tap it in. “Wait. September twenty-third? That’s my birthday—”

  “So?”

  “And you disabled your phone and messaging?”

  “Just do it!”

  He did, finally hitting the translator app on her home screen. There were noises on the level below. “This is dumb,” he said. “We need to get out of here.”

  “If we lose the key, at least we’ll have one clue. Hurry up!”

  “Got it. But how do I do this. I can’t key in those accents.”

  Growling, Lily took the phone from him. “If we’re lucky, it’ll still translate it.”

  Selecting the button that read detect language, Lily typed in the letters in English—L-ahhar gharghar. A few moments passed before anything happened; then two words popped up.

  Maltese detected

  “Maltese!” Lily said. “Darrell, the old woman was from Malta. The women Leonardo talks about. The one who came to us. The Mothers who protect the relic. That’s what the M on the key means. The Mothers are in Malta! Guarding Triangulum!”

  “Lily, look at what the words actually mean,” Darrell said. “L-aħħar għargħar means ‘the final flood.’”

  She was staring at the screen, her mouth open, when his mother suddenly appeared. “I managed to slip past them, but there are more now. At least ten of them entered the tower, and they’re clearing it, floor by floor. We need to go up.”

  “Is there a helicopter up there?”

  “No, but there’s no going down,” she said. “You found it?”

  “Here.” Darrell gave her the key. “Come on.”

  Lily outpaced them both, rushing up the steps two at a time.

  It was hot on the roof of the tower, but there was a haze darkening the sea.

  “Now what?” Lily said.

  All Darrell could think of was the flood. The deluge. The Mothers of Malta. “The key tells too much. The words. If Galina finds out . . . Mom, the key.”

  Before she could actually release it, he snatched it away, went to the parapet, and scraped the shaft across its sharp stones, wearing down the words.

  “That’s an original da Vinci you’re defacing!” said Sara.

  “And it breaks my heart.”

  Ebner von Braun flew up the last stairs and was on the roof of the tower with them. He wasn’t alone. Ten, maybe twelve others, as well as the two thugs from Africa and the little antiquarian bookseller, surrounded them.

  “You will give me the key,” Ebner said, waving his pistol to shoo the children to the edge of the roof. Meanwhile, Bigboy, breathless and sweating, with a large bloody stain on his vast shirt, dragged Sara roughly from them. Fish raised a surprisingly wide butcher’s knife to Sara’s neck.

  “You see? No choice.” Ebner approached. “Galina wants what she wants.”

  “He is correct,” the bookseller said. “She always gets it, too.”

  Ebner set the end of his pistol barrel against the center of Darrell’s forehead and slid the key from his hand. He glanced at it and handed it to Gerrenhausen.

  The bookseller studied it, then smiled. “Yes, identical craftsmanship. It is of a kind with the Budapest key. We now have two of the three.”

  Of the four, thought Darrell.

  Ebner took it back and slipped it into the pocket of his coat. “Hendriks, Emil, detain them.”

  “Kill them?” said Bigboy.

  “Alas, not yet. Detain them only.”

  Ebner and the bookseller stormed out of the tower into a waiting car. It took them to the dock, where they boarded a motorboat that took them in an hour and a half the fifty nautical miles south to the yacht of Galina Krause.

  Galina, he thought. Galina, we are nearly there. He was about to place a call to her when his fingers felt the shaft of the key in his pocket. Yanking it into the daylight, he spied the horrifying defacement.

  “What the devil! They know where the relic is!”

  “The boy mangled a genuine Leonardo!” Gerrenhausen cried, pounding his fists on his thighs. “I should have shot him on the train when I had the chance!”

  All at once, Ebner’s phone tinkled with a harp arpeggio. Galina! He could decline the call. No, he could never. Dreading the coming conversation, he swiped the screen to answer and howled silently to himself.

  No, no, no!

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Trembling from fear and exhaustion, Lily realized that staying alive was sometimes just a matter of timing. In this case, perfect timing.

  As soon as Bigboy and Fish pushed her, Sara, and Darrell at gunpoint out of the tower toward a battered black car, Silva appeared out of the dusk. The grizzled, thick-armed, beret-wearing man in combat fatigues wormed his way through the crowd leaving the tower, with several large friends in tow.

  “We are agents of the Te
utonic Order,” Bigboy said right away. “Perhaps you do not realize who you are dealing with—”

  “In fact, I do,” said Silva. “Two men who might be dead in”—he checked his watch—“twelve seconds, if I don’t tell my friends here not to kill you. And right now, I’m forgetting what language they speak.”

  “Eh?” said Fish. “All I got from that is twelve seconds.”

  To make it clearer, Silva’s friends surrounded the two agents, who released their captives. Silva peeled the gun out of Bigboy’s fat fingers. He took Fish’s carving knife, too. Then he hurled them off the side of the nearest wharf into the water.

  “Oops,” Silva said. “Littering. My bad. Go get those, will you?”

  “Eh?” said Fish. “In the water?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Galina Krause will not appreciate your treatment of official agents of the Teutonic Order of Ancient Prussia,” Bigboy said.

  “Would she appreciate digging them up out of the ground?” Silva said.

  “She’ll come for you,” said Fish, and he waved his arm out to sea. “She’s got herself a small army of less than fifty—”

  “Hush, Emil!” Bigboy snarled. “They will find out soon enough.”

  Silva looked south across the water. “Thanks for the tip. Now pinch your noses and dive!”

  Lily watched Bigboy and Fish slide off the side of the wharf into the water. “Thank you for the show, Mr. Silva,” she said.

  “It’s just Silva,” he said.

  Ten minutes later, they were sitting around a crowded table in a market café.

  “Silva, you saved our lives, again,” Sara said, pressing her hand over his. “You have a pretty perfect sense of timing.”

  Lily could see a pinprick of blood on Sara’s neck where Fish had stuck her.

  “My job,” he said. “And my pleasure. Seriously, you’re so much more polite than my usual bosses.” The grazed forearm he had suffered in Casablanca didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. “By the way, that fish-faced goon back there did us a service. My men spotted a mega-yacht about fifty nautical miles off the coast. Now we know it belongs to Galina.”