The Crown of Fire

by Tony Abbott

  The floor creaked overhead.

  Driven by revenge for the pain Cassa had inflicted on his mother, for the way he’d struck Lily and Quirita, he made his way quietly up the stairs two at a time. His heart was pounding hard. He didn’t know what he would do; he only knew that Cassa couldn’t—wouldn’t—be allowed to steal the relic. He put his hand in his pocket and clutched the pistol tight.

  When he reached the landing, Cassa was halfway down the hall, facing him, his gun pointed at Darrell’s head. “Little fool. Why won’t you just die?”

  “You kidnapped my mother. You jerk.” Darrell knew he should move, raise his own gun, but he was frozen. “Give me the bird.”

  Cassa snorted, then pulled the trigger. Darrell’s heart stopped when the handgun clicked. Once. Twice. Three, four, five times. It was emtpy. Cassa threw the gun at Darrell, turned, and hobbled into the nearest room. There was a crash of glass. Darrell bolted after him, his own pistol in his hand now. Cassa had broken out a window and was climbing across the balconies on the front of the building.

  “Oh, come on!” Darrell knocked away the remaining glass with the barrel of his pistol and was out there, too. The rain was battering, a hot, hard, loud thunderstorm, pelting and stinging him. He couldn’t see. Pocketing his pistol, he climbed up to the balcony railing.

  Cassa was several windows away. Darrell steadied himself, then jumped to the next balcony like Lily had forced him to do in Nice. It was slick. He wiped the rain from his eyes. Cassa tried the windows of the room on one balcony. They were bolted. He jumped to the next. He was nearly at the corner of the building. He would get away. Cars roared down the street, splashing huge wings of floodwater.

  Darrell tried not to look down, but there was Lily. Her face was stark white and ghostly under the rainy streetlight. He scanned quickly for black cars, but Cassa was jumping to the next balcony. Then he was at the corner but stopped there, looking up and down. So, the corner wasn’t an escape? Darrell jumped to the next balcony and the next.

  “Darrell, don’t shoot!” Lily yelled.

  Cassa swung back, staring. He didn’t know Darrell was armed? Now he did. His left calf and foot dangled as if they were useless. Quirita’s shot had damaged him.

  “Give me the relic,” Darrell grunted, out of breath as the rain pummeled him. He tensed the muscles in his legs, his arms. He searched for a foothold on the next balcony.

  “You can’t win,” Cassa said. He held up the stone bird. “Even if you get this relic, Galina will kill your friends, your mother, all of you, everyone. Now that the deadline nears, she’ll kill us all. She’s mad—”

  That was all Darrell could take. He pounced through the air right at Cassa’s chest, knocking him to the floor of the balcony and cracking his head.

  The crow spilled out of Cassa’s hand and across the flooded floor. Darrell swiped the relic. Cassa lurched back up, swung out a long arm for Darrell’s gun, but the hard rain spat into his face. Darrell arched back, fell against the railing, and would have gone over if he hadn’t grabbed it in time. The relic slipped from his wet hands, fell to the street. There was no crash. Lily must have caught it! Cassa swung at him once more, tore his pistol from him, but Darrell pushed him back with both hands.

  Cassa slipped, struck his head on the railing. He toppled clumsily backward, hands clutching the wet stonework, then Darrell didn’t see him, hearing only a sickening thud.

  Horrified, he looked over the balcony.

  The body of Bartolo Cassa was sprawled awkwardly in the flooding street. There were sirens now. Lily ran away across the plaza with the crow under her arm. She stepped back into the shadows beyond the streetlights just as a black sedan and a pair of Cuban police vans entered the plaza. One of the vans opened its doors quickly, and four men in Russian military uniforms jumped out. Without looking up in his direction, they rushed to the unmoving body of Bartolo Cassa and carried him, dripping with water and blood, into the back of the van.

  “The Red Brotherhood,” Darrell said to himself. He was shaking all over. Then the two vans roared off out of the plaza, while the sedan pulled away slowly and stopped down the street.

  “What? Why aren’t they coming for me?”

  The rain continued to pound and pound.

  Darrell searched for his pistol. He found it on the floor of the balcony. He slid it into his soggy pocket and sloshed back through the room to the hallway and down the stairs to the street. He nearly collapsed with each step. He searched the streets until he found La Floridita, the club Quirita had told them about.

  Lily was waiting for him inside, soaking wet, cradling Corvus.

  “Thank God you’re safe!” she said, hugging him tightly. The sharp edges of the iron crow scraped and scratched the nape of his neck, but he didn’t say a word, just hugged her tight and tried not to cry or laugh or do anything stupid.

  “Darrell—”

  “I know, I know. But we’re here,” he whispered. “We’re both safe.”

  “Out the back,” she said.

  They wove through the tables, mostly empty now. The bartender, an older guy with long white hair tied into a bun, nodded as they passed.

  “Gracias,” Darrell said.

  When they opened the back door, he saw a black sedan idling at the curb.

  “That’s the Russians, the Brotherhood, I saw them. Oh, man, Lily.”

  “No,” she said. “There’s a Russian officer in there, but she’s not with the Red Brotherhood. She’s a friend of a friend.”

  “A friend of . . . of Chief Inspector Yazinsky?”

  Chief Inspector Yazinsky was a member of the FSB, the Russian secret police. He’d helped them find Serpens in Russia and worked with them in Italy. He was a friend.

  “He instructed his agents to get us safe passage to wherever we need to go next.”

  Darrell took a long breath to try to calm down. Cassa was out of the picture, at least for now. They had Corvus. “I guess we did all right today,” he said.

  “We did good work. Next stop, Paris, to find Floréal Muguet and her clock. Or his clock. Either one.”

  They darted to the black sedan. The rear door opened and out stepped a middle-aged woman in a Russian military uniform. “Greetings. The chief inspector has asked me to help you. Please get in. Time is fleeting.”

  After a brief few words, during which the friend of the inspector showed them a handwritten note from him, they were driven to the Havana docks. The rain pounded even harder as the two kids lingered in the backseat, and saw their safe passage. It was one of the Russian ships they’d seen when they first passed the harbor.

  Король Владимир Второй

  “And that means?” said Lily.

  “‘King Vladimir the Second,’” the officer said. “Now, please understand. The Red Brotherhood has new orders to kill you with or without the relic. However, if you agree, because I have diplomatic immunity, I can deliver the relic to the inspector within hours. He owns an impenetrable private vault and will hide the relic there until it is needed.”

  They shared a look. “Agreed,” they said together.

  “There is a single small cabin on this Russian freighter,” the officer said. “It leaves Cuba tonight for the North Sea. The journey will not be the fastest, but the first mate will hide you for a price. The inspector has already paid this. In the meantime, he asks you to call your friends on this phone. It uses an old Soviet encryption channel not even the Brotherhood is aware of. Completely secure. Call your family. Sara Kaplan also possesses such a secure phone.”

  Her fingers quivering, Lily dialed the number the officer gave them, then put the phone on speaker. Sara picked up right away, screaming to hear their voices. Wade and Becca were there, too.

  “We’re okay!” Lily shouted. “We have Corvus!”

  “We’re okay, too!” Wade yelled. “We’re hiding with Isabella, tracking down her husband’s clues about the twelfth relic!”

  “There’s another relic in Paris
!” Darrell said. “Meet us there, all right? There’s someone we need to track down. Also, Thomas Cook travel agencies are hot spots for British intelligence. Simon told us they were.”

  “Good! Great!” said Sara. “The sooner you’re with us, the better. Meet us at . . .”

  “A café,” said Becca. “A museum?”

  “No,” Sara said. “A park. The Square du Vert-Galant. Ten p.m.”

  “But what day?” Wade asked.

  Lily glanced at Yazinsky’s colleague. “At least a week,” the woman said. “Maybe longer.”

  “You heard that?” said Darrell. “It’ll be a while, I’m sure. Come every night, and we’ll get there eventually. What about Dad and Terence?”

  There was a heavy pause before Wade spoke. “No news. See you at Vert-Galant.”

  The phone clicked off. The call was short. Even with a secure line, it had to be. Darrell wanted to tell his mother about Cassa, and that the killer might even be dead. But he wasn’t sure how his mother would react, knowing her son fought with a brutal thug, so he saved it for later. He hoped it wouldn’t be too long before they were all together. But when he looked again at the dented and rusty Russian freighter that would take them to Europe, he knew it would take days.

  Many slow days.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  El-Alamein, Egypt

  July 15

  Midmorning

  “Faster!” Galina fumed. “Bring more men!”

  Markus Wolff raised his hand, and a second troop of workers rushed to join the excavators. The battery of picks and shovels had been pounding since dawn outside the squat desert city of El-Alamein, but those picks might all have been aimed at her head.

  Galina breathed through narrowed lips, hoping to dull the pain. It didn’t work.

  The surgery that removed the tumor at the base of her skull had given her four years, but time was running out. The moments rushed past her now. An hour wasn’t an hour anymore; it was mere seconds long. Time wouldn’t linger. It raced. It flew.

  The incessant monotonous thudding and cracking of iron and rocky soil deafened her, and still she was nailed to the spot.

  It had been days since Ebner had told her the astrolabe required only six of the twelve relics. Since decoding parts of her single diary page about the famous daughter of a pope, Lucrezia Borgia, she’d located additional and tantalizing references to Aquila, the taloned eagle. The relic had wandered since 1517, but a chance note uncovered by the Copernicus Room suggested that Lucrezia had met the wife of a trader, the same Tomé Pires who was responsible for hiding the relic known as Scorpio.

  In fear for her life, Lucrezia had passed Aquila secretly to Pires’s wife, who, in fear for her life, gave it to her husband. The trader was later robbed by bandits who reportedly swapped the relic for a pair of new camels. Aquila was then lost somewhere in the vast Egyptian desert. Until recent satellite imagery revealed a long-undiscovered trade route. It was a gamble whether a priceless relic could have remained buried here after centuries, but with time slipping away, Galina was forced to follow even the vaguest clue.

  A truck appeared from the east. When it stopped, the nimble little bookseller Oskar Gerrenhausen jumped out and loped over the dunes to her. He had just flown to Cairo from Bali. His face, wrought with wrinkles, was tight and tanned. He was smiling.

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  “I understand the children came away from Cuba with Corvus, the crow,” the little man said.

  “They had help,” Galina said. “A traitorous Russian officer, who the Brotherhood is dealing with.”

  “Indeed. And the previous Guardian’s great-granddaughter,” Oskar said, “if you can believe that.”

  “I believe in children, Herr Gerrenhausen, and so should you. They escaped Bartolo Cassa, after all.”

  “We rather all escaped that brute,” Oskar said. “He lies in a coma, not expected to recover. But let us not dwell on him. I have a present for you. One more of the twelve.”

  He unwrapped a cloth, and suddenly it was as if the blazing sun had dimmed and all that shone was the slithering mechanism of the Draco relic.

  Galina took it greedily into her hands. The cold warmed her skin. She studied the dragon-shaped construction of jade dotted with rubies and diamonds and connected by rods hinged with silver.

  So. Vela, Triangulum, and Corvus are with the Kaplans. But Serpens, Scorpio, Crux, and now Draco are mine. Only the final five remain to be found.

  “Ah! Ah!”

  A laborer stumbled up, babbling, from the depths of the pit. Others rushed to help him to the surface. Markus Wolff took the worker firmly by the arm.

  “Speak.”

  The man barked in a language Galina didn’t know. Wolff questioned him. It was a conversation of rough syllables and gutturals. Wolff let the man go and turned to her.

  “An artifact, Miss Krause. Not the relic, I fear, but come, please.”

  Miss Krause. Soon she would shed that invented name once and for all.

  Markus helped her down into the pit with the worker, who dug away at one corner of the excavated site with his fingers, uncovering a small, decorative brass plate some three inches in diameter. Markus took it, and blew away the dirt and sand of years. Engraved on the base of the plate was an array of stars in a distinct shape. A hook-beaked raptor with outspread wings and thornlike talons. In its grasp were a pair of stylized lightning bolts, jagged and pointed.

  Galina shivered in the heat. “It is an image of the constellation Aquila, the eagle that carried thunderbolts for the great god Zeus.”

  Wolff examined the plate, then passed it to Gerrenhausen, who also studied it, front and back. “The constellation may indeed be Aquila,” the bookseller said, “but Galina, if as you say Lucrezia Borgia passed the relic to the trader’s wife, who then gave it to her husband, who then lost it to thieves, this clue might have lain here for centuries with no more indication of where the relic is now than the surrounding grains of sand—”

  “Not centuries,” interrupted Wolff, on his knees now, scrabbling in the dirt near where the disk was discovered. He held up a small dark coin. “I should say, the brass plate you hold was deposited here no more than seventy-five years ago. This is a clue, perhaps, but not a Guardian clue. I believe this was left by a Teutonic Knight.”

  Standing over the pit, her head thudding, her heart pounding, Galina took the coin from Wolff. She focused on the tarnished object. She read its inscription. It was German, with a value of a single reichspfennig, a German penny. There was a large numeral 1 on one side.

  On the reverse were the words:

  Deutsches Reich

  1942

  “This caravan route may have been traversed by umpteen civilizations from the beginning of recorded time,” Galina said. “But this object narrows that time down. It is a Nazi coin from the Second World War. The German advance in Egypt was halted here in 1942. Markus, we must trace whoever was stationed on this spot during the battle of El-Alamein. Once we do, we shall be one step closer to Aquila!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Paris, France

  July 22

  9:14 p.m.

  Having disposed of the phone they’d used to talk to Lily and Darrell—even secure lines weren’t secure for long—Wade, Becca, and Sara left Isabella Mercanti to search among her late husband’s effects while they journeyed on to Paris.

  The first thing they did there was to make contact with the investigator Marceline Dufort, Paul Ferrere’s young dark-haired colleague. Marceline was a seasoned investigator, as well as the sister of a Guardian murdered by the Order, and she instantly set up a security program for the trio.

  “You will stay at a series of safe houses,” she told them on their arrival. “I will contact you in person twice daily.”

  At one of their very first meetings—this one among the Gothic statuary at the Musée national du Moyen ge on the Left Bank—Marceline showed them a schematic of the site they’d chosen to rendezvous wi
th Darrell and Lily.

  “The Square du Vert-Galant is good,” she said. “Isolated, not too busy in the evening.”

  “Escape routes?” Wade asked, scanning the map.

  “There are three. The stairs from street level, the embankment on either side, and the river itself. I will have a boat nearby, just in case. Your friends will arrive in a few days at the earliest, but my agents and I will visit the park each night from now on, to scope it out. In disguise, of course.”

  “Finally, we’re moving again,” said Becca.

  It had been almost two weeks since Lily and Darrell had stowed away on the Russian freighter. There’d been no communication since that single brief call. Dead silence. Wade could barely consider the next step until they were all safely together.

  The day came when Marceline got word that the Russian ship had docked in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and that they could expect Darrell and Lily to arrive at any time.

  That evening, Wade, Becca, and Sara left their latest safe house on the Rue du Bac. Though Marceline and her colleagues tailed the family everywhere, Wade never knew ahead of time which vehicles they were driving. Sometimes it was a simple motorbike, sometimes a compact car, other times a delivery van.

  “We have to be ready for anything tonight,” Sara told them. She wore a pale-blond wig and shades as they turned left into a narrow cut-through between two blocks to the north side of the Boulevard Saint-Germain. “Even if we’re not followed, Darrell and Lily could have been.”

  “I hope Marceline has a motorboat ready,” Becca said, tugging her baseball cap low. “We may need a quick getaway.”

  Wade pulled his hood tight and hunched his shoulders as he pushed through the crowds. “I’m ready for just about anything.”

  Street after street, they spread out, keeping sight of one another, slipping into cafés and shops, darting down alleys, until they finally arrived at the Square du Vert-Galant.

  It was a narrow triangle-shaped park, forming the western tip of the Île de la Cité, the island in the middle of the Seine and the birthplace of Paris. The park itself was low, flat, some twenty feet below the rest of the island and only a few feet above the level of the river. When they descended the stairs, they found it far quieter down there, cool, and strangely isolated. Chestnut trees were in full bloom, and the blue-black river flowed slowly on either side. It was the exact center of the great lighted city, but calm and almost serene. A long row of brightly painted houseboats was moored alongside the Left Bank’s embankment. The boats were lit up, some with spotlights, others with twinkling fairy lights. Music drifted across the water toward the park.