The Golden Vendetta

by Tony Abbott

  “You will be caught.” More subdued this time. The man was beginning to understand the futility.

  “No, Dr. Petrescu. This facility is mine.”

  Galina held her phone up to his face. Swiping the screen, she produced the image of a tanker full of nuclear devices—from raw materials to detonators to warheads to miniature reactors.

  “These devices are separately armed and connected in tandem. They can be detonated collectively within sixty seconds of my giving the command,” Galina said. “I assure you, I do not want this to happen, but your failure to assist me may force my hand. Will you be the one responsible for such destruction?”

  “But why the reactors? Why?”

  “You’ll discover that very soon.”

  “The world will rebel against your tyranny, your madness!”

  “You forget, Dr. Petrescu, that the world loves not knowing. People want to be ignorant. It’s simply too much trouble to know the truth. I have ordered the deaths of hundreds of men and women these last months, but no one has bothered to connect the dots. These deaths don’t affect them. People only want to feel safe. And by giving me the key to your laboratory, Doctor, you have made them safe. After you.”

  Roald stumbled down the same hallways he had days ago, his brain clearing with each step. His guards forced him down a set of concrete stairs to another hall. At the end of it they unlocked an oversize set of steel doors, pushed him through, then locked the doors behind them. He found himself inside the giant laboratory Dr. Petrescu had shown him when he and Terence had first arrived.

  Where is Terence? Is he here?

  He was not. But the lab was filled with people he knew or recognized: a nuclear-energy specialist from Taiwan; the foremost Brazilian researcher in subatomic particles. There were Monique Sené of GSIEN in France, Sir Reginald Benton of the University of London, Janet Conrad of MIT. He saw representatives from the Fermi labs in Chicago and Germany, the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, Brookhaven, and the nuclear-physics group from the University of Kyoto. They stared at him, stunned, silent. They were surrounded by perhaps fifty armed paramilitary troops. Maybe more.

  Knights of the Teutonic Order.

  On the wall of the laboratory was a large digital clock that hadn’t been there before. It must have just been installed. Oddly, the clock ticked backward—from one hundred four days, twenty-two hours, three minutes, seven seconds.

  Six seconds.

  Five.

  Among the scientists was a man he didn’t recognize. He was bound to a chair in steel cuffs. His face was gashed, sliced, bandaged, his arms and legs bloodied, blood soaking through his tattered suit. His expression was blank except for the eyes, which showed the fire of pain and rage. Even sitting, it was clear that he was powerfully built, though he needed a hospital badly.

  “I’m Roald Kaplan. Who are you? Why are we here?”

  “So. Roald Kaplan. We meet at last. My name is Ugo Drangheta. Why are we here? Me, to be killed. You for some other reason.”

  “You’re not a scientist?”

  “No. I was following you. I believed you to be the one who could help me. Then we were attacked.”

  “We?” Roald looked around the room.

  “My lovely Mistral may have been killed by the colonel. I don’t know.”

  The steel doors whooshed open. Galina Krause entered, followed by Dr. Petrescu, who looked haggard and shrunken. They were accompanied by a dozen armed men, who were wheeling in a large platform. The assembled scientists were pushed to the perimeter of the lab, away from the man cuffed to the chair.

  “What is all this? What is that junk?” one of Roald’s colleagues whispered. “Roald, tell me.”

  He couldn’t speak.

  The platform contained a great pile of girders, plates, rods, arc-shaped struts, stacks of levers, loose hinges and joints, gears and pipes, all gleaming with the color of a dark sun. Each item was wrought of the reddest gold he had ever seen.

  Roald recognized the fragments from the diary’s sketches.

  This was the broken skeleton of Copernicus’s original astrolabe. The bits and pieces found at Olsztyn and Kraków and Prague and elsewhere over the last two months.

  Galina Krause walked slowly up to it. Her face was drawn, her cheekbones prominent and razor sharp. Her two differently hued eyes burned like torches in the darkness around them. The doors sealed behind her.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “You will use your expertise to assist me in reassembling this device. If you do not . . .”

  She produced a handgun, aimed it point-blank at the man called Ugo Drangheta, and pulled the trigger. The scientists screamed. Two fainted dead away. Roald nearly fell, his head pounding with the blast of the gun in that room. He was horrified to see a man become a corpse with less than a second ticking off the clock.

  Sliding her pistol inside the flap of her leather jacket, she said, “You see I am serious. Oskar?”

  Roald was shocked to see the little bookseller emerge from behind the troops. “People,” he began, “you will have access to the Voytsdorf Ledger. This document will be used to aid your assembly of this centuries-old astrolabe.”

  “And soon,” Galina continued, “thanks to the generosity of Dr. Kaplan here, you will be able to consult the private diary of Nicolaus Copernicus himself. As we speak, it is being obtained.”

  “What?” said Roald. “No. No!”

  Galina stepped toward him, smiling coldly. “Oh, yes, Dr. Kaplan. The diary will be here this afternoon. Colonel?”

  Choking back anger and confusion, Roald watched a man in a military uniform emerge from behind the ranks of the troops guarding them. As he drew near, Roald felt his stomach convulse. He had seen the man once before, five years ago. He knew the face, although it had changed since then. Turned to stone.

  Colonel, she called him?

  He hadn’t been called Colonel five years ago.

  Five years ago, his name was Radip Surawaluk.

  He was Darrell’s father.

  At the Nice airport, eight men in black fatigues waited in parking area six. Twelve miles away, another six agents dressed in flowery sport shirts strode across the Place du Palais de Justice toward the Rue de la Préfecture. One of them carried a heavy green duffel bag.

  At that moment in London, Ebner von Braun secured the last straps of his bulletproof vest. It pinched. “On my signal,” he whispered.

  He stared as icily as he could at the twenty-four armed operatives crowding in an abandoned Underground tunnel under Bloomsbury. Ahead of them stood a hatchway leading into a series of passages beneath the British Museum, where the relic named Crux was secured.

  His phone buzzed. He opened it. A man in a navy-blue suit had sent him a text. His man inside. At the same moment, several locks on the far side of the hatch clicked in sequence.

  Taking a deep breath, his heart palpitating, Ebner whispered, “Now.”

  The hatchway swung back on its hinges, and the Order poured through.

  Back in Nice, Darrell waited on the balcony of the Ackroyd apartment for Becca, Wade, Julian, and Sara to return from the airport with his stepfather and Terence. Lily stood next to him, looking out over the square, her arms folded across her chest. The sun was rising in the sky. It was quiet up there, just the two of them, although Madame Cousteau was still on guard inside.

  Darrell decided to say aloud what he’d been thinking for a while.

  “Lily, we’ve escaped death way too often.” It was a dumb way to begin a conversation, but he went on. “Are we blessed? Or just lucky?”

  She nodded slowly, didn’t answer.

  “I mean, I was born blessed,” he said comically. “The rest of you guys, I’m not sure of. I’m just saying Galina could have killed us a million times over.”

  She turned to him. Her eyes were as blue as the Mediterranean. Her hair was going gold in the sunlight. She opened her lips to speak, then didn’t.

  “But that’s not what she’s after no
w,” he said. “You see that, right? The Teutonic Order will follow us to the ends of the earth, but not to kill us. That’s not the problem. That’s not what we have to be afraid of.”

  She didn’t offer anything, but he was on a roll, so he kept going. “We don’t have to be afraid of dying, at least not by her hand. It’s . . .” He didn’t want to say it, but did anyway. “It’s everyone else. My mom, my stepdad, Terence, Julian. Even Paul Ferrere and Silva and Carlo. All those people. They’re expendable. But we’re not, the four of us. Don’t ask me why, but Galina needs us. She proved that by not killing us, by letting us keep searching for the relics. We’re part of her plan, Lily.”

  He stopped there, then threw on the last little bit that seemed needing to be said. “Maybe one day she’ll realize that maybe she doesn’t need us. But right now she does. The question is for what? And the answer is what really scares me, you know?”

  He didn’t know the answer, so he backtracked. “Galina will keep us around until the end. It’s what she’ll do to everyone and everything we love. That’s the problem—”

  “Darrell, stop.” Lily searched his face with her blue eyes, and it seemed like she would say something or cry or laugh, but he didn’t know which. “No more.”

  “No more,” he repeated, then turned from her and watched the people crisscrossing the square below. His tongue felt thick. “Look, I know you don’t think I’m the sharpest at some stuff, but I know you’re not happy about your parents. You’re broken up about it, and—”

  “Darrell,” she said, stopping him again. “I’m not sure I can keep doing this.” She touched his arm. “You know, no. That’s not right. I am sure. I have to go home. My parents want me to come back. Need me to come home. To be part of a . . . it sounds so stupid . . . a new beginning with them.” She blubbered that out, crying through the words. “I hate it, but it’s probably right. They’re right. No more relics. No more of this stuff. No more Galina.”

  “Are you kidding me? Lily, no.”

  “I thought I could ignore it, just be with you.”

  “Me?”

  “You guys, all of you. But this will end anyway. The relic hunt will. Maybe if I go back now, my family won’t. Won’t end, I mean. Maybe we can stay together.”

  “But what are you going to do in Austin without all this?” he asked her.

  “Not Austin. Seattle. My parents and I are moving.”

  “Seattle? There are no relics in Seattle!”

  “You’re not listening to me,” she said. “Look, I’ve thought about it a lot over the last week. A lot. And I can’t do this stuff anymore. At least for now. I just have to say good-bye to it. I have to be with my mom and dad. I owe them to try. That’s all. That’s all.”

  Darrell felt his insides turn to water and his head go empty.

  “Lily, you can’t. In the tower . . .” He stopped there. Why did he go there? Nothing happened in the tower. They were squished together, and it was nothing. Yeah, it was nothing, but he shouted a curse inside his head and blurted it out. “In the tower, it was—I mean, I really like you.”

  “Darrell, please—”

  His phone buzzed. He ignored it. It buzzed again. He looked into her eyes, then at the screen. It was a text. Not from his mother. It was from Paul Ferrere.

  Gran Sasso in lockdown. Roald and Terence inside. Need Silva.

  “Wait, what?”

  There was a sudden dull snapping sound—once, twice. Darrell’s neck froze. A door slammed in the apartment behind him. Bolts slid closed.

  “No, no . . .”

  “What is it?”

  He spun around. The housekeeper stumbled in awkwardly from another room, clutching her hand to her side. There was blood soaking down her blouse.

  “Prenez votre relique!” she gasped. “Partez maintenant!” She thrust a small box at Darrell, then fell to the floor. “Allez! Go. Elevator. Go, now!”

  More gunshots. Silva shouted from the stairs. A stampede of boots pounded outside the door. The door frame shook; the knob flew across the room and clattered against the wall.

  Lily took Darrell by the hand. “Run!”

  TO BE CONTINUED in The Copernicus Legacy: Crown of Fire.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  From the beginning of this Copernican journey, it’s been great fun to mix fact with fiction in a particular way. Of the historical characters in this book, probably the most famous other than Copernicus himself is Leonardo da Vinci. While Copernicus is considered the originator (discounting Greek and Arab star watchers) of the heliocentric theory of our planetary system, published in book form in 1543, students of what are known as da Vinci’s “notebooks” have often remarked on the Italian artist’s much earlier statement, “The sun does not move.” I have explained the anachronism of this remark in two ways: first by imagining a conversation between the two men, and then by adding a simple question mark to the end of Leonardo’s statement. You’re welcome. It’s still Copernicus.

  Literature about da Vinci fills many libraries besides my own, but I want to single out a couple of wonderful volumes: Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind by Charles Nicholl and Leonardo: The Artist and the Man by Serge Bramly. About the Barbarossa brothers I found no full-length books, though entries in BrillOnline’s Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, as well as portions of Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World by Roger Crowley, were extremely helpful. An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 by Rick Atkinson and the novels The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, as well as the latter’s Points in Time: Tales from Morocco, aided my North Africa research.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, I want to thank Jane Abbott, my elder daughter, for her magnificent rendering of one of da Vinci’s Deluge drawings. It appears in chapter 53 of this book. Jane may have a career as a forger ahead of her, which, as her father, I will naturally support. I also wish to thank my younger daughter, Lucy, whose fellowship as an English guide at the Château de Chantilly some years ago inspired her namesake at Clos Lucé in this book.

  I’ve been privileged to communicate with a host of Islamic scholars during the writing of the story. I am grateful first of all to Professor Martin Nguyen in the Department of Religious Studies at Fairfield University for his more-than-kind assistance with the niceties of mosque behavior and Arabic language, translation, and spelling. He gave unstintingly of his time, at a time when I most needed it. I am also indebted to J. L. Berggren, professor emeritus in the Department of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University, for directing me to the Encyclopaedia of Islam and for his on-point research suggestions regarding the Tunisian portion of the book. Finally, Nidhal Guessoum, Mohammad Odeh of the International Astronomical Center in Abu Dhabi, Nabil Ben Nessib at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, and his gracious brother, Riadh Ben Nessib at the Cité des Sciences à Tunis, were instrumental with regard to features of al-Zaytuna mosque in Tunis.

  Travel to all the settings in which an international thriller unfolds is daunting and, given one’s writing schedule, often quite impossible. So I want to thank Christopher Socci for his colorful personal evocations of Morocco; they allowed me to conjure with more confidence a faraway place in word and mood. Naturally, all the errors and stylistic gaffes here are completely my own.

  I want to acknowledge my longtime agent, George Nicholson, who passed away during the final stages of revising this book. For over two decades George was my supporter, my reader, a thinker of great wit and compassion, an elegant gentleman, and a friend who I regret not being able to talk to anymore.

  To my wife, Dolores, always my first and closest reader, thank you for putting up with me and with this, my longest book to date. I feel as if we’ve been around the world, too. To all the hard-working people at Katherine Tegen Books—to Katherine, to my editors Claudia Gabel and Melissa Miller, to Alana Whitman, Lauren Flower, Ro Romanello, and Karen Sherman, t
hank you for flying with me—to the sun and back—on this Copernican sojourn.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo by Thomas Sayers Ellis

  TONY ABBOTT is the author of over a hundred books for young readers, including the bestselling series The Secrets of Droon and the novels Firegirl and The Postcard. Tony has worked in a library, in several bookstores, and in a publishing company and has taught creative writing. He has two daughters and lives in Connecticut with his wife and two dogs. You can visit him online at www.tonyabbottbooks.com.

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  BOOKS BY TONY ABBOTT

  The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone

  The Copernicus Archives #1: Wade and the Scorpion’s Claw

  The Copernicus Legacy: The Serpent’s Curse

  The Copernicus Archives #2: Becca and the Prisoner’s Cross

  PRAISE FOR

  THE COPERNICUS LEGACY SERIES

  “I had to keep reminding myself The Copernicus Legacy was intended for a young audience. Full of mystery and intrigue, this book had me completely transfixed.”

  —Ridley Pearson, New York Times bestselling author of the Kingdom Keepers series

  “The Copernicus Legacy takes you on a fantastical journey that is as eye-opening as it is page-turning. With mysteries hiding behind secrets coded in riddle, this book is like a Dan Brown thriller for young readers. The further you get, the more you must read!”

  —Angie Sage, New York Times bestselling author of the Septimus Heap series

  “The Copernicus Legacy has it all: a secret code, priceless relics, murderous knights, a five-hundred-year-old mystery, and a story full of friendship, family, humor, and intelligence.”

  —Wendy Mass, New York Times bestselling author of The Candymakers and Every Soul a Star