The Golden Vendetta

by Tony Abbott

  “Her agents stole the Kizil Kule key,” said Sara. “They now have two, and maybe both are on that yacht. We assume that Galina doesn’t know yet where Triangulum is, or she’d be off to Malta.” She whispered the last word.

  “I bet she’s not even on the yacht,” said Darrell. “She wouldn’t have left a key to Ebner or those two jerks from the desert if she had been. She’s somewhere else.”

  “Now that those goons are out of the way, it’s only Ebner and the bookseller,” Lily added.

  “Only Ebner, the bookseller, and the forty others who crew a yacht that size,” Silva said.

  “She doesn’t know about the fourth key, either,” said Darrell, “so we have the advantage, which may not be too much of one, but she can’t actually get to the relic without us, but on the other hand, if we steal the keys back, we can find the relic without her.”

  Silva seemed a little annoyed by the time Darrell finished his long sentence, so he just laid his thoughts out in his simple paramilitary way: “We’ll launch an assault on the yacht at twenty-three hundred hours.”

  Which Darrell translated as, “Eleven tonight. Two plus hours from now.”

  Since the events at Kizil Kule, Lily had pretty much decided to see it to the end. She knew there was nothing else to do, because there was far too much at stake now. They’d go after the keys, steal them, and escape to Malta before the Order knew what hit them. After that? Well, she’d think about that later.

  Silva made a few calls, then told them that his associates would meet them at the docks within the hour. “They’ll have your scuba gear with them.”

  “Wait, our scuba gear?” said Sara.

  Silva brought out a nautical chart and, moving his coffee mug aside, spread it out on the table. He narrowed his eyes and traced his finger from approximately where they were on the shore to the position of the yacht his men had spotted. “My friends are chartering the fastest motorboat they can lay their hands on, and it’ll be a surprise attack, but someone will have to identify the package—the keys. My men and I can’t do that. We need your eyes on-site.”

  “Well, I’ve never scubaed in my life,” said Lily.

  Silva took a breath. “You’re a diver, aren’t you?” he asked Darrell.

  “Darrell?” Lily couldn’t stifle a laugh. “No, he’s not.”

  “As a matter of fact, I am,” he said. “My father taught me when I was young. Mom dives, too.”

  “Whoa. Glub-glub,” Lily murmured. “A scuba family. I’m impressed.”

  “Darrell’s not going in the water,” Sara said, taking out her phone. “I’ll be our eyes on-site. I’m texting the others through Terence’s server to meet us in Malta.” She paused. It was at the point, Lily thought, that she would have said something about Uncle Roald. She went on. “One way or another, Malta is where all this ends.”

  “Any word from Terence?” Darrell asked.

  Silva shook his head. “Terence and Roald are MIA in Italy somewhere. Paul Ferrere and his team are still on the hunt for them.”

  MIA. Missing in action. Lily wanted to read any sign of hope in Silva’s tone or expression, but the soldier gave up nothing. Sara simply nodded. It was almost too much to watch her go coolly about the task of being a Guardian and a mother while hurting so much inside. Lily knew what that hurt felt like, and though Sara was strong she couldn’t shed the hollow stare of separation. Lily knew all about that, too. She’d seen it in the mirror every day since London.

  “Two hours, seven minutes,” Silva said, ordering a cup of strong coffee. “Until then, we plan.”

  Two hours and seven minutes, Lily thought. It’s time. She excused herself and went to find the restroom, if there was one. On the way she turned on her phone.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  Two hours later the dark Alanya docks were sleeping. Fishing boats, tourist cruise vessels, coast guard patrols, charter boats, and every other kind of vessel were tied up at the pier for the day.

  The air was warm, but Darrell was freezing, shaking at the thought of what the next hour would bring.

  An attack. Armed men against other armed men. His mother in the middle. Why he hadn’t felt the same in Casablanca at Drangheta’s villa, he didn’t know. Maybe because he hadn’t known about the flood then. Now something dark was moving toward them, like a huge wall of water, and it just plain scared him.

  He tried to think of an excuse for his mother not to go with Silva, but the guy was right. They needed one of them to identify the keys for sure. There was only going to be a single shot at this.

  Darrell walked up and down the wharf. Other than Silva and the sketchy man at the harbormaster’s hut he spoke to, no one said a word. He paced. They all paced. They watched and waited it out. At seven minutes past eleven, a motorboat putted noisily over to them. It was decked out as a fishing boat, with thick nets draped over it. Darrell remembered Bingo’s plane and guessed the nets might be a kind of camouflage. Silva caught a rope tossed to him, pulled the boat, and tied it up to the dock. One of the men jumped up on the boardwalk and handed Silva a cell phone.

  Silva studied the screen silently, then turned to them. “Take a look. The first shot is Galina’s yacht yesterday morning. The second is now. Notice anything?”

  Darrell studied the two photos of the yacht. They were taken at different times of day, so it didn’t strike him at first what Silva was hinting at.

  When Lily took the phone and swiped back and forth between the two images several times, she saw it.

  “The waterline?” she said. “The waterline changed from yesterday to today. The yacht was deeper in the water yesterday, by several feet, but now it’s not. So it was heavier when it arrived? It unloaded something?”

  Sara turned to Silva. “What do you think it means?”

  “I think it means we now have two missions,” he said. “Extract the keys, and find out what the Order is unloading in the water between here and Cyprus. Let’s move.”

  Mist rolled over the dark water.

  Lily’s heart ached as they motored into the eerie blackness. She knew she’d been falling deeper into herself from the moment she and Darrell were crammed into that niche at Kizil Kule. Why? Being smashed up against him didn’t mean anything, did it? No, of course not. Then why was she so . . . so . . . not here?

  Because of “the news” from home.

  Two hours ago she’d enabled her phone, tapped in her mother’s number—it was early afternoon in Austin—and the wail that greeted her and the torrent of tears and her mother’s shaky and near-inaudible whisper crushed her. Then the news.

  “Honey, Lily, we decided to try to make this work. Your father and I—put it on speaker, would you?”

  Lily heard the phone toggle. “Dad?”

  “I’m here, honey,” said her father, drawing in a sharp breath. “Okay, so, we decided that the only way to do this, to be a family again, is to start new. Fresh. Completely. With you. The three of us. The way it was at the beginning.”

  “And it has to be away from here,” her mother continued. “From Austin. There are shadows here, but there are better places. And you have to be with us, Lily, honey. That’s the way it will work. Will you come home, honey? Now? We want you home—”

  “We need you home, honeybunch,” said her father.

  She’d had no chance to say anything so far, and now didn’t know what to say. “Away from Austin? What do you mean?”

  “Should I tell her?” her mother said. “I will,” her father said. “In Seattle, honey. We found a house.”

  “You can’t go around the world like this,” her mother said. “It’s crazy and dangerous, and we need you here—”

  “No,” Lily said.

  “—and seriously, Lil, it’s the only way this is going to work. You know, we could come to you, pick you up—”

  “No,” she said. “Didn’t you hear me? I can’t just up and leave.”

  “Lily, this is serious,” her father said. “Whatever you’re doi
ng there is just wrong, some kind of dangerous fantasy. The Moores are crazy worried about Becca, and we are about you. We’re coming to get you. Just tell us where you are, and we’ll—”

  She hung up.

  She was going to say that she would call them back, but she hung up. She powered off her phone and stuffed it away.

  A family. Fresh start. Seattle. Just wrong.

  Now, hours later, she was still dumbstruck. She clasped the boat’s side railing with both hands, afraid that if she didn’t steady herself, she’d throw up or be sucked into the water or both. Just be here now, she thought. Be here.

  When the boat was within a half mile of the yacht, Silva said, “Good,” and the captain cut the engine. They were in position, bobbing on the waves. Her throat tightened. She felt dizzy.

  Sara placed her hand on Lily’s arm. “Are you all right, honey?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Let’s get those keys.”

  As they drifted in the darkness, the stone-faced crewmen—silent so far, though most of them didn’t speak English anyway—dressed themselves in scuba gear and checked their handguns, which they then wrapped in plastic sheaths. Silva pulled out his infrared riflescope and trained it on the yacht in the misty distance.

  “They’re still unloading,” he whispered. “Look now.”

  Sara used the scope, then passed it to Darrell, who gave it to Lily. She saw a large crate lowered from the deck, down the side, and into the water. Four scuba-wearing divers took hold of the chains supporting it and descended with it.

  “What could it be?” Lily asked. “Are they dumping something?”

  “The divers have single tanks,” Silva said. “They’ll have to surface soon.”

  “In less than an hour,” said Sara. “At the longest.”

  It wasn’t long at all. Not even twenty minutes elapsed before the chains came up dangling and empty. The divers were not there.

  “Where did they go?” Darrell asked. “What’s down there?”

  “Wait, where exactly are we?” Lily asked. Silva told her: halfway between Turkey and Cyprus. She sucked in a sudden breath. “Oh my gosh. The chart. I need to see the chart.” Silva gave it to her. She called up the remote server where she stored her data, found what she was looking for, and studied the chart side by side with her phone. Her heart skipped a beat. “Oh man.”

  “What is it?” asked Sara.

  “At the beginning of March we got that coded message from Uncle Henry.”

  “It’s what started all of this,” Darrell said. “What about it?”

  “Uncle Henry said ‘tragedies’ would begin all over the world, remember? Well, one of the very first ones we found—I think it was me who found it—was an oil tanker sinking in the Mediterranean. Off the coast of Cyprus. At the time, it was just one of the weird things going on, but last week, when Becca and I were being bored in Florida, I looked up all the tragedies again and marked the coordinates here. I didn’t remember it until now, but look.”

  35°50′35.76″N

  31°57′53.68″E

  Silva located their boat’s coordinates on his phone. “That’s here,” he said. “The tanker sank right here.”

  “The wreck of the tanker,” said Sara, “the wreck three months ago, is part of Galina’s plan? What on earth is she doing down there?”

  Darrell looked from Lily to his mother, at her face, into her eyes. What he read there shook him. Dr. Sara Kaplan, senior archivist at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, had been changing right in front of them. He’d noticed some of what was going on—her leadership, of course—but not all of it. The researcher, teacher, administrator, and mother he loved had—while still being all of those—become a person of action.

  A Guardian, sure, but also an operative and a soldier.

  Her bronze forearms had muscled over the last months since her abduction to Russia. Her face had taken on a kind of strength since London that he hadn’t seen before. And now, she was forcing the mystery of where his stepfather was to take a backseat to stopping Galina and protecting the Legacy.

  Then, when Silva offered her a pair of oxygen tanks, saying, “We need to see what’s down there before we go for the keys, and we need you with us,” his mother slipped on the harness like a pro.

  “Ooh, Sara, take the wire,” said Lily, tugging the camera and audio contraption out of her bag. “I threw it in here after Monte Carlo. Remember, that nice man Maurice Maurice told us it’s waterproof. We’ll sync it to watch on Darrell’s phone and see what you see. I’d use my phone, but it’s nearly out of power.”

  “Great idea,” Darrell said. “We need to keep tabs on you, Mom.”

  She gave him a flat smile, then hooked it on and tested the connection to their phones. “Keep the boat behind the fog bank,” she said to the one man who would remain with them. “We’ll be back as soon as we see what’s down there.”

  Darrell tried to give his mother a reassuring smile, but the muscles of his face wouldn’t cooperate. As she hugged him he blurted, “Don’t die.”

  “Keep your bubble stream out of sight,” Lily said. Sara hugged her, too.

  Darrell watched three crewmen slip over the side, then his mother, and finally Silva. They let their belt weights pull them down below the surface. Soon the bubbles cleared enough for Darrell to see on his phone what his mother was seeing. She mingled with the divers, and they were on their way down and toward the yacht.

  Lily murmured something so low it might have been praying. Darrell found himself doing the same. The image on his phone was tiny to begin with, but as his mother sank from the surface, the water became murkier, until it was almost black.

  “Lily,” said Darrell, “what did I do? Sending my mom down in the water like that. Am I crazy? My mom!”

  “Darrell, she can do it. She’s not as fragile as you or me, or any of us. She’s the one person holding us together here.”

  Which was both good to know and not so good. He was supposed to step up, wasn’t he? Ever since his real father had vacated the scene, it had been Darrell and his mother, and he felt responsible for her. Be the man of the house. Her being close meant that he could be a goofball sometimes, but not when she was risking her life. “Lily, I—”

  “Shh. Look.”

  A sudden stream of white shot through the thick darkness on the screen. His mother’s camera jiggled, then steadied and moved in. There it was, tilted under a rocky shelf two hundred feet under the surface. The wreck of a giant oil tanker that had capsized and sunk three months before.

  Only it wasn’t a wreck anymore.

  It was no longer on its side, and it had been shifted under a great rock shelf, hidden from the surface and probably from any kind of satellite surveillance. It was enormous in length and breadth, and it was lit up like a huge underwater factory.

  A gigantic secret base.

  “So for the last three months,” he whispered, though he didn’t have to, “ever since the tanker sank, the Order has been building . . . this? What in the world for? Lily, it’s enormous. How could the world not know about this?”

  She stared at the screen of her phone. “The Order sent in a salvage crew, maybe, or hijacked a real salvage crew and pretended to cut the tanker up, but they built a base instead. Darrell, it’s kind of James Bondy.”

  “Yeah, but we’re looking right at it! How could they do this?”

  “Because the Order has people everywhere,” she said. “Because a whole bunch of corrupt people and agencies were involved. They must have been bribed or somehow forced to cooperate. Galina knows how to force people, that’s for sure.”

  “But why?” he whispered. “What is it for?”

  Outside the tanker, and going in and out of a series of loading platforms, were what appeared to be dozens of divers. His mother saw—and so could they—that the upper decks inside the ship were intact, and that there was oxygen, since the personnel visible through portholes did not wear oxygen tanks.

  �
��Sara, if you can hear me,” Lily said. “That crate we saw being lowered from the yacht. Can you see it now and find out what it might be?”

  Sara must have heard, because she swam lower and aimed her camera through the porthole at one of the holds that was sealed and had oxygen. The image came back: a crate marked with several characters. Lily took a stab. “Korean? We’ll take a screenshot and check it later.”

  “And there’s something Russian,” Darrell said, pointing to his screen. “There’s a red star and it says K-twenty-seven. We’ll look it up to see what that means.”

  Through his mother’s camera, they watched one crate after another move into the tanker’s cargo bay. But that wasn’t all. Some crates had been unpacked, and there were what appeared to be missiles or rockets on platforms, a rigging of thick cords connecting them, a wall of computer screens, and several giant concrete canisters lined up in tandem. The onetime wrecked tanker was now an extraordinary high-tech laboratory—or war room. It seemed impossible, but there it was.

  Silva came into view on the screen and gave the thumbs-up.

  “They’re returning,” Darrell said. “Good. Get my mom out of there. We’ve seen enough.”

  They had all seen enough to make their blood run cold.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  “The tanker is filled with an array of nuclear devices,” Silva said as he climbed over the side of the motorboat and helped Sara in after him. “Some I’ve seen before, others not. A few of them are not the most modern. If I’m correct, K-twenty-seven is a Soviet submarine that sank in the nineteen eighties. But no matter how old they are, those guys are hooking them up in sequence. There are also eight, maybe ten large concrete-encased miniature nuclear reactors. Bottom line,” he said, “the Teutonic Order appears to be building its own nuclear warehouse.”

  Lily watched the blood drain from Silva’s face, as if he had just realized the implications of what he’d just seen. For a soldier of his war experience, it was frightening.

  “But what for?” Darrell asked. “Why are they stockpiling nuclear bombs?”