by Tony Abbott
“Breathe your last, old fool!” shrieked the pale man.
Vogel burst out with a cold laugh. “No. Not last . . .”
The woman glared at Vogel, then at the hearth. “He has told someone! There is something in the fire—get it!”
Without thinking, the pale man thrust his hand into the flames, screaming as he dragged the smoldering hard drive onto the floor. The photograph was already ash.
“Discover who he has told,” the woman said coldly. “I should have known. The key was never here. Finish him. Drop his body in the streets. Leave no clues—”
Choking, Vogel flailed frantically. He knocked over a music stand, hoping to grip its shaft. Instead, all that came to his hand was a battered silver pitch pipe.
As life ebbed swiftly from the old man, Galina Krause stared at him from two different-hued eyes. One blue. One silvery gray.
“Go ahead, Vogel. Play for us. Play your swan song. . . .”
Chapter Three
Austin, Texas
March 9th
8:03 a.m.
Wade and Darrell took turns yanking on the door of the observatory at the University of Texas.
It wouldn’t budge.
“And that’s why Dad gave you the key,” Wade said.
“Which I gave to you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I’m pretty sure I did,” said Darrell.
“When?”
“Before.”
“Before when?”
“Before you lost it.”
Wade grumbled. “I didn’t lose the key. I couldn’t lose the key. I couldn’t lose it because I saw Dad give it to you. In his office. When he dropped us off to run Sara to the airport.”
“Sara. You mean the lady I call Mom?”
“Sara lets me call her Sara,” Wade said. “Which is beside the point. The key? Remember, Dad took it from his desk drawer? He handed it to you? Do any of these images ring a bell?”
Darrell patted his pockets. “No bells are currently ringing, and I still don’t have the key.”
“You must have left it on his desk.” Wade shoved Darrell aside and retraced his steps down the narrow iron staircase to a small office on the third floor of Painter Hall.
Wade’s father—Darrell’s stepfather—was Dr. Roald Kaplan, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Texas in Austin, and Painter Hall was the home of an eighty-year-old observatory housing one of the largest telescopes that still operated by an intricate system of cranks and pulleys.
Wade sighed. “Darrell, you have to see this telescope. I can’t believe that after what, three years, we haven’t brought you in here. It’s total steampunk, all winches and gears and levers and weights.”
A flicker of interest flashed across Darrell’s face. In typical fashion, he responded off center. “I do enjoy the punk which is called steamy.”
It being spring break, both boys were looking ahead to a long week of no school. Which to Wade meant nine days of reading astronomy textbooks and nine nights of studying stars from the university’s observatory. He was pretty sure that to Darrell vacation meant some strange combination of hibernating and nonstop eating.
Or thrashing his Stratocaster at maximum volume.
Darrell had been trying to form a band for months with no luck. Wade felt there were two reasons for that. First, Darrell wanted to call his band the Simpletones, which was supposed to be ironic but maybe wasn’t. And second, he only wanted to play surf-punk, which Wade was pretty sure was not a thing.
They pulled up to their father’s office. Wade grabbed the knob, tried to turn it. That door was locked, too.
“Are you kidding me?” he said. “Dad won’t be back from the airport for another half hour. I have to show you this scope. I wonder where Campus Security’s office is. They’ll let us in—”
“Don’t move. I think I grabbed a campus map,” said Darrell, shoving his hands into his jeans pockets. “If Security is even up yet. It’s only . . . eight-ish. Which for some reason reminds me I’m hungry.”
“You ate a muffin an hour ago.”
“Exactly. One whole hour. You think Dad will let us go for an early lunch? How long do you think all this will . . . oh.”
“‘Oh,’ what?”
Darrell slid a dull brass key out of his pocket. “Is this what we’re looking for?”
“I knew it,” Wade growled. “Come on.”
“Fine, but are we still talking about nothing to eat?”
Wade laughed. “Sorry, bro.”
Darrell mumbled something, then hummed a raucous guitar solo as they made their way back up to the dome. Good, thought Wade. This is what Darrell did when he was more or less happy. Obsess about food and hum riffs.
Five minutes later, the boys pushed through the door of the old observatory, and the atmosphere of the large room washed over them like a wave of the past.
Darrell whistled. “You weren’t kidding, steampunk!”
Centered directly below a huge copper dome stood the famous Painter Hall telescope. A twelve-foot-long iron tube built in 1933, it was poised on a brick platform and was meticulously balanced by a giant weight, making it easily maneuverable into any position. Wade explained that the scope’s lens measured a mere nine inches across—compared to, say, the McDonald Observatory’s scope, whose mirror was thirty-six feet across. But this was a historical instrument, and Wade loved that. He loved the places where science and history crisscrossed. There was something exciting about lenses and gears and mechanisms that made exploration that much more, what was the word, human.
Wade had long had a thing for the old Painter Hall telescope, ever since his father first brought him into that round room. It was there he learned to locate the planets and constellations. It was in that observatory that he’d read the myths that lay behind their exotic names. It was there where he’d come to appreciate his own tiny place in the vast cosmos of space.
Where math and magic become one.
“Not bad, huh?”
“Not bad at all.” Darrell jumped up to the platform. “Cables, cranks. Levers. A clock drive! Mechanical future stuff. I love it! What awesome stuff can it do?”
“Not much in the daytime, but we’ll come back tonight for some real stargazing. Don’t mess with anything until I find the operating instructions. You’ll love the way it swings around with just a touch.” Wade plopped down at a small desk near the door. His father was writing a history of the telescope and had set up a research station there. “Just wait. Mars will be as close as a dinner plate.”
“I wish I were close to a dinner plate,” said Darrell. “Do you still have nothing to eat?”
“Since the last time you asked? No. But why don’t you check those pockets you never check?”
“Because I obviously don’t carry food with me . . . oh.” Darrell pulled a slender packet from his other pocket. “Gum is food, right?”
“It is if you swallow it,” said Wade.
“I always do.”
Before he’d met Darrell and his new stepmom, Sara, three years ago, Wade had hoped for the longest time that his real mother and father would get back together. He was crushed to realize they weren’t going to, and he was still having trouble accepting that the past was really the past. But he saw his real mom often (she lived in California now) and was coming to understand that you move on and learn to live with lots of stuff. He also had to admit that the new families were working out really well.
“Can you believe Mom’s going to be lost in the jungles of South America for a week?” Darrell asked from the platform. “Well, not lost, but hunting down some crazy writer?”
“I know, a week with no phones, no electricity, nothing.”
“Except bugs,” said Darrell. “Lots of bugs. Then she flies to New York. Then London. My jet-setting mom.”
“Sara’s supercool,” Wade said.
“Yes. My mother is.”
Any way you looked at it, the best part of the deal was Darrel
l himself. From the instant the two boys were introduced, he’d become the brother Wade had always wanted. They complemented each other in just about every way, but at the same time, Wade and Darrell couldn’t be more different.
Darrell had short dark hair, olive skin, and deep brown eyes that he got from his Thai father. Wade was fair-skinned, sandy-haired, and lanky. Darrell was five feet four and a guitarist of strange loud stuff that might be really excellent or might just be loud. Wade was three inches taller and owned an iPod full of Bach, because Bach was not loud, was the most mathematical of composers, and was someone his mother had taught him to love. Darrell was a junior tennis pro. Wade wore sneakers like a junior tennis pro. Darrell was comfortable with just about everyone. Wade felt more comfortable with Darrell than he did with himself. Finally, Darrell was usually smiling, even when he was sleeping, while Wade had invented neurotic worrying.
And he felt a sudden jolt of worry at exactly that moment.
While searching for the telescope’s operating manual on the desk, he’d accidentally moved the mouse on his father’s computer. The screen saver flickered away and an email message popped up. Without wanting to, Wade noticed the sender’s name.
Heinrich Vogel.
“No kidding?” Wade whispered. “Uncle Henry?”
“No. The name is Darrell,” said Darrell from the platform. “I thought being my stepbrother for three years you would know that.”
“No. Dad got an email from Uncle Henry. We were just talking about him. You know he’s not really my uncle, right? He was Dad’s college teacher in Germany. I haven’t seen him since I was seven.”
Darrell hopped down the stairs and peered over Wade’s shoulder. “Emails are private. Don’t read it. What does it say?”
Wade tried not to read it, but his eyes strayed.
Lca guygas eamizub zb.
Bluysna luynaedab odxx sio wands.
Juilatl lca Hyndblaub xanytq.
Rdse lca loaxma uaxdtb.
Qiz yua lca xybl.
Darrell frowned. “Does Dad read German? Or is that Russian?”
“Neither. It’s got to be some kind of code.”
“Code. Wait, is our dad a spy? He’s a spy, isn’t he? Of course he’s a spy, he never told me he was, which is exactly what a spy would do. I knew it. It’s that beard. No one really knows what he looks like under there.”
“Darrell, no.”
“He’s probably a double agent. That’s the best kind. No one’s a single agent anymore. Or, no, a triple agent. That’s even better. Wait, what is a triple agent—”
The door squeaked open. “So there you are!”
Wade shot up from the desk the moment his father entered the observatory. “Nothing!” he said.
Roald Kaplan had run track in high school, had been a champion long-distance runner in college, and still ran the occasional marathon. He was trim and tall and handsome behind sunglasses and a dark, close-cut beard. “Sara’s safely off on her flight to Bolivia. Thanks for hanging out here, while we did our last-minute zipping around. What are you guys up to?”
“Well,” Darrell piped in, “I found gum.”
“And I . . . ,” Wade said, “. . . didn’t?”
Darrell cleared his throat. “Wade’s odd behavior means he’s worried. Which, I know, is not breaking news, but he found something bizarro on your computer . . .”
Wade pointed at the computer screen. “Dad, I’m sorry, but it was an accident that I saw the screen at all. I know I shouldn’t have read the email, but I saw it, and . . . what’s going on? It’s from Uncle Henry, but it looks like code.”
Dr. Kaplan paused for a long moment. His smile faded away. He leaned over Wade and tapped the keyboard. The email printed out on a nearby printer. Then he deleted the message and shut the computer off.
“Not here. Not now.”
Chapter Four
“Can you at least tell us why Uncle Henry’s writing to you in code?” Wade asked when they got into the car. “Is he in trouble? Or in danger? Dad, are we in danger?”
“You worry too much,” said Dr. Kaplan, unconvincingly.
“Is Uncle Henry a spy?” asked Darrell. “Because if he’s a spy, that’s huge. A spy in the family would actually be terrific and awesomely cool. As you probably already know, I would make a perfect spy—”
“Boys, please,” Dr. Kaplan said, weaving through campus traffic and onto the streets. “I’m sure Uncle Henry is just fine, and I’m almost positive it’s some kind of joke message. In any case, it won’t make sense to you—or even to me—until we get home. There are a couple pieces of the puzzle I need to figure it out. Until then . . .”
Puzzle? Wade didn’t know what to say. He sat quietly looking out the window for the next twenty minutes as they drove from campus into the hills west of Austin.
Darrell did not sit quietly. “I think I have it. Uncle Henry is a professor in Germany, but he’s secretly doing spy stuff. He’s a master cryptographer, and he’s trying to recruit you to be a spy too. Dad, if you can’t do it, I’ll do it. Sure. I know professors make a good cover. They pretend to sit in their offices all sleepy over their books and stuff while secretly they’re running all kinds of spy missions. But middle school kids are even better. No one would ever suspect us. Wade, you could be a spy, too. Of course, you’d do the desk stuff while I go around the world with my band as a cover. Not that the Simpletones would be a cover band. We’d play all original stuff. They call that being in the field. I’d be a field agent. Agent being the technical term for ‘spy’ . . .”
Darrell hadn’t stopped talking, but as he was often forced to do when his stepbrother thrashed on guitar, Wade had to tune him out to be able to think.
Ever since Uncle Henry had given him the antique celestial map on his seventh birthday, Wade had been a fanatic about star maps and charts and the courses and routes of celestial bodies. He’d stayed up every night for weeks studying the map by moonlight and flashlight. Of course, he learned most things from his father, a brilliant astronomer, but it was probably Uncle Henry’s star map that stole his deeper imagination. The chart was old and strange and mysterious, and in his mind Wade associated all those qualities with the stars themselves. Between his father and Uncle Henry, Wade learned to love the night sky more than anything.
When they finally turned into the driveway of a sprawling home overlooking a shallow valley, Darrell practically exploded in the backseat. “Uncle Henry is a spy! Someone’s casing our house!”
As Dr. Kaplan slowed the car, a shape darted along the side garden and disappeared under the roof that hung over the front door.
Wade stiffened. “Dad, tear out of here—”
“Yoo-hoo!”
A girl in shorts and a stylishly slashed T-shirt strolled out from under the overhang to the car, wheeling an orange suitcase behind her.
It was Lily Kaplan, Wade’s first cousin, his father’s niece. “Surprise, people!”
“Lily? This is a surprise,” said Dr. Kaplan, rolling down the window.
“Like, what are you even doing here?” Darrell asked.
“Like, nice to even see you, too,” Lily said, snapping a picture of Darrell on her cell phone. “Oh, I’m posting that face.” Her thumbs flew over the phone while she talked.
“I’m supposed to be on vacation with my parents in Paris right now,” she said. “That’s in France. One of my school friends was even coming with me. We were going to shop. Well, I was going to shop. Big-time. But then Mom got the flu. Also big-time. Then Dad had to fly to Seattle for work. So good-bye France, and that’s why he called you, Uncle Roald, and . . . wait. You did talk to my dad? He said he was going to call you.”
Dr. Kaplan frowned. “I . . .” He fished out his cell phone and tapped it several times. “It must have run out of battery. I’m so sorry I didn’t get his message.”
Lily clucked her tongue. “No one should ever let his battery run down. I never let my battery run down. Your phone is like your brain. M
ore important, even. Anyway, my dad dropped us here for the week and—ta-da!—here we are.”
Something sparked in Wade’s head. “Us? We? Here we are?”
Lily turned and made a little wave toward the house. “Becca came with me. Wade, you remember Becca, right?”
Of course he did.
Becca Moore.
The instant Becca walked out of the shade of the overhang, Wade stood up like a soldier at attention. He couldn’t stop himself. It was instinctive and weird. He knew it was. But more than being weird, it hurt, because Wade was still in the car. You don’t stand up in cars. Even convertibles, which his dad’s car was not. As Wade jammed his head into the ceiling, he knew it must look epically dumb.
Guys didn’t stand up for just anyone.
But then, Becca Moore was not just anyone. She was . . . interesting. His brain wouldn’t let him go any further than that.
Interesting.
Becca was born in Massachusetts and had moved to Austin when she was eight. She was tall and fair and had long brown, almost black hair tied in a loose ponytail. Wade was a little afraid of her because she was so smart, but she didn’t broadcast it and was almost as quiet as he was, which was another cool thing about her. As she walked over to the car, she was wearing a faded red 2012 Austin Teen Book Festival T-shirt, slim blue jean leggings, and mouse-gray ballet flats so soft they made no more sound than if she were barefoot.
Interesting.
Dr. Kaplan got out of the car and hugged both girls. “Well, we’re glad to have you visit. Come on in!”
Darrell couldn’t stop laughing as Wade unfolded himself from the car and limped to the front door.
No sooner had they all piled inside than Lily spun around. “Pose!” She snapped another picture with her phone. “So awesome. Wade with his eyes closed. Darrell looking like . . . Darrell.” Then she found a seat in the living room, tugged a sleek tablet computer from her bag, and instantly began to type on its touch-screen keyboard. She looked up. “I’m writing a travel blog. But you knew that, right?”