The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone

by Tony Abbott

  “It’s fine,” Darrell said, pretending to limp across the small room but grinning all the same.

  Lily grinned back, pushing lightly against the door. It opened a sliver. A heavy, warm farmyard stink rushed through. She peeked around the door. “Oh . . .”

  “Oh?” said Darrell.

  She nodded. “Oh, as in, ‘Oh, we’re at the zoo.’”

  “No way.” Darrell pushed the door wide. Before them stood a long, wide corridor, dimly lit and lined with vertical bars on both sides. Cages. There was little movement from inside the cages. At the opposite end of the corridor stood another door. A chatter of voices was coming from behind it, mixed with the occasional sound of a car or scooter motor.

  “This could be our way to freedom,” Darrell whispered. “As long as we don’t wake up the animals—”

  The steps creaked as Becca and Wade crept to the top.

  “More footsteps in the tunnel,” Becca said. “I guess Kurt couldn’t hold those guys off forever. We need to get out. Now.”

  Without a choice, they entered the caged corridor as quietly as they could. Wade tried to close the door firmly behind them, but thanks to Darrell, the knob was gone.

  It took a single step for them to realize that they were in some species of ape house. There were enormous hairy gorillas curled in lumps and sleeping under pale pink light, while smaller chimps and spider monkeys scurried up and down fake trees or lolled on mounds of artificial grass.

  Dr. Kaplan raised a finger to his lips and eased forward to the far door. Darrell crouched behind him, followed by Lily, with Becca and Wade behind her. For once, thought Lily, she wasn’t the last one.

  Halfway to the door and breathing through her mouth, she remembered why she hadn’t been in a zoo for years and realized she didn’t miss it.

  Just then, a motor scooter zipped by outside, beeping. A monkey shrieked in response, jumping up and down. Before they could get all the way down the corridor, the hall erupted with screeching, and things were suddenly flying through the air.

  “They’re throwing poops!” Lily shrieked. “Get out of here!”

  They plowed full speed into the far door and burst through it, butting their way through a squad of zoo guards who had converged on the ape house.

  “Hey!” the guards yelled. “Halten Sie! Es ist verboten!”

  “We’re sorry!” Dr. Kaplan called out as they ran.

  “No need for a refund—thanks!” Wade added.

  A guard blew a shrill whistle and alarms went off in three locations as they raced down the paved paths to the nearest exit. Just as the perimeter lights began flashing, Roald helped them over the fence and dragged them down the sidewalk. He whistled at the first cab that came down the street. It shrieked to a stop. “Get in! Hurry!” he cried.

  “St. Matthew’s cemetery,” Becca said as they jumped in.

  “Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof!” Lily added in what she felt was a pretty decent accent, until the driver replied, “Certainly, Miss.”

  The cab took off as a half dozen zoo security carts jerked to a stop on the sidewalk and more alarms rang. Guards swung their fists and shouted after them, but they were already spinning around the corner.

  They had made it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sitting on the padded seat in a warm cab was heaven after what Lily was already calling “the rat and monkey–poop adventure.” She wanted to enjoy the warmth, but as usual, the others were brainily rushing ahead of her, connecting dots, making guesses, whatever.

  “So, Dad. Copernicus,” said Wade. “Sixteenth century. Tell us everything you know about him.”

  “Yeah, and don’t skimp on the legacy and the twelve relics part,” Darrell added, nudging Roald while nodding at the taxi driver. “And you should probably whisper.”

  “Is the Copernicus Legacy even a historical thing?” asked Becca. “I mean, I know we’re being followed, so there has to be something, but now that we know it’s Copernicus, does the first message mean more? The kraken and the relics?”

  “Hold on,” Roald said, obviously trying to pull himself together. He slipped his notebook from his pocket and held it up to the passing street lights. “Good thing I kept this. Heinrich’s course in the history of astronomy was my first of many with him. He covered it all. Here it is. Copernicus,” he breathed. “Copernicus . . .”

  For the next seven minutes, as the cab roared from street to street in the dead of night, they listened to what he knew.

  “He was a mathematician, born in 1473, in Toru´n, Poland. There are blanks in what we know about him, what kind of person he was. Mostly we have public documents. He did most of his calculations on the movement of the stars and planets based on his knowledge of mathematics, and on unaided observation. The telescope hadn’t been invented yet.”

  “That was Galileo, right?”

  “Good memory, Wade. Yes. Sixty or so years after Copernicus. There were instruments, of course. Astrolabes and sextants and compasses used by sailors to plot the movement of stars, and Copernicus knew all about those, I’m sure.

  “The key thing he discovered was that Earth moves around the sun. Before he figured that out, everyone believed that Earth was the center of the universe, and that all the planets, the sun, the stars, everything, revolved around it. Copernicus proved, through math and simple observation, that it couldn’t be so.”

  “The Earth moves in the Haus of Kupfermann,” Becca said.

  “Exactly.” Roald flipped over a page, then another. “Earth really had to orbit the sun for any of the numbers to make sense. It was the only way to explain the movement of the stars and other planets.”

  Lily’s heart was still ka-thumping too hard from their ape encounter to make complete sense of it all. She knew about Copernicus. That was basic astronomy. Before Copernicus, astronomy was a kind of cult science, right? Astrology. Alchemy. Almost a kind of magic. She’d heard of all that in school. Copernicus was a big deal because he finally said that we weren’t the center of the universe. Which must have bothered a lot of people.

  “Copernicus was one of the truly modern thinkers,” Roald was saying. “His students called him Magister—Master—and we call him a revolutionary for a good reason. Nothing was quite the same after people really understood what he had discovered. That Earth is just one of many planets. Not that special.”

  Becca had been looking out at the wet streets when she turned to them. “Didn’t he only publish his discovery just before he died? Isn’t that part of his story? That he was worried what people would say?”

  That sounded really familiar. Lily turned on her tablet.

  “That’s true,” Roald said as the taxi entered a patch of slow traffic. “He was troubled about the effect on society of his revolutionary discovery. The Catholic Church was very powerful, and he was a canon, a kind of church teacher. He was finally convinced on his deathbed by a young astronomer to publish his work. I forget his name—”

  “Rheticus,” said Lily, holding up her tablet so that everyone could see. “He showed up near the end of Copernicus’s life and—” Without a warning, the screen went black. “Hey!”

  The cab driver braked the car abruptly, nearly sending Wade into Becca’s lap, as a large silver SUV roared past them at high speed.

  “My apollo cheese!” the driver said. “Some pipples is rude and do not sink of uzzer pipples!” After the silver SUV sped by, a second black one, then a third, shot after it as if they were part of a caravan. They tore around the corner and disappeared.

  Lily stared aghast at her blank computer screen. “Please don’t die on me now.” She swiped her fingers across the glass.

  Just as the driver pulled back onto the street, the screen blinked twice and glowed as before.

  “And we’re back!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Nestled in the plush backseat of her powerful silver SUV, Galina Krause fixed her eyes on the computer image of a man in a canoe on a river in the jungles of Brazil.r />
  The canoe was in one piece. The man was not.

  “Fool!” The driver with no name screamed to the taxicab he had just forced off the street. “Idiot—”

  “Silence,” she said. “Continue to Unter den Linden.”

  Ebner von Braun glanced at Galina as she studied the computer screen with her gray and blue eyes. He wondered what his illustrious grand-uncle would have thought about him. A theoretical physicist of such brilliance having gone over to—what did they call it?—the dark side?

  He probably would have scolded me, Ebner thought, and rapped his gold-tipped baton across my knuckles. At which point, I imagine, his eyes would have twinkled as he offered me a glass of cognac.

  “To power!” he would have toasted.

  Perhaps, someday, we shall toast together . . .

  Pushing back the dark hair from her cheek, Galina cooed into her cell phone. “You have been careless, Mr. Cassa. I will give you twelve hours to settle your affairs in Rio and bid farewell to your family. By”—she paused to check the computer time—“six a.m. your time you will be dead.” She ended the call smoothly, turned to Ebner, and said, “Make it so.”

  He bowed his head, and his words—“Of course, Miss Krause”—sent a wave of nausea into his throat. Ebner had something to tell her that she would not enjoy hearing. It wasn’t good news, and he was hesitant even to bring it up. Yet when she found out later on her own—and she always found out—he would be in more than one piece himself. He was suddenly aware that her eyes were no longer on the computer screen. They were on him.

  “Well,” she said, “spit it out.”

  Ebner cleared his throat. “The elevator incident in Paris was a necessity, I’m afraid. The victim, a minor sort of man, was not merely a writer at the newspaper, but an inseparable part of the secret organization Vogel had built. Le Monde had hired the man seventeen years ago. His name was Bernard—”

  “Spare me his name,” Galina snapped. “How did their system work? Was there a failsafe? A backup?”

  Ebner went on. “We believe that the simplicity of their method was responsible for its success. There was a system of rotating keepers of the secret. One led to another and another and another and finally to the Frenchman. A brief message was sent from Vogel on the evening of the second Monday of every month. Ber . . . this man in Paris published each coded message in print and online in Le Monde editions throughout the world. This was how the various members of the organization were notified.”

  “The message?” she asked.

  “Simple. The letters RIP. In English, Rest in Peace,” Ebner said. “The letters would be positioned in the puzzle according to a series of ever-changing number tricks based on the number twelve.”

  She breathed in sharply. “Twelve. Of course. Vogel was informing the others that the legacy rests in piece. Because we must assume that his death launched the Protocol, this is now no longer true.”

  Ebner shuddered slightly. The word Protocol was a terrifying piece of terminology. As he understood it, it meant that the twelve relics, no matter where they were across the globe, were destined for their final, irreversible journey.

  “No other communication seems to have been made among the participants. To increase security, most members are unaware of one another. Only Vogel, as their communications chief, knew all of the . . . the Guardians.”

  “The Guardians,” Galina repeated softly. “And the man in Paris gave resistance?”

  “Naturally, at first,” said Ebner. “We had to convince him to speak. He told us about Vogel not on the threat of his own death, but on that of his family. He said it was a miracle we found him. It was. But miracles end like everything else. He told us what we needed to know. Then he died. Tragically.”

  “And the Paris police? The newspaper?”

  This was it. The big messy problem. Two of their agents in Paris had been slipshod. Because it was a death of a journalist, one of Dufort’s colleagues was now burrowing deep into the tragedy. So far, he had discovered only a small fragment of evidence, but it was enough. “A cover-up will be possible, of course, but it will cost money,” he said. “I have wired the Banque Nationale—”

  Galina moved her head slightly. Her eyes bore into him. “I will go to the top, the director-general of the sûreté. In the meantime, discipline the Paris agents. Permanently.”

  “As you wish, Miss Krause.”

  “You hesitate?”

  Ebner sucked in a cold breath. “It is only that too many bodies are not invisible. Neither are collapsed buildings or sinking ships.”

  “Time is against us.”

  “Which is why we are working already on several fronts to achieve the Order’s ultimate goal. The experiments, the laboratories, as well as this search for the twelve—”

  “You are not saying the challenge is too great for you, Ebner von Braun?”

  “Galina, please. Not at all. Only that we are doing everything we can while maintaining secrecy. We must remain an Order of ghosts, after all.” He was suddenly aware that his choice of words could have unfortunate connotations. “An invisible presence, I mean.”

  She lowered her magnificent eyes to his chest. “Discretion, then,” she said. Then she turned her face to the window. The rain had changed over to thick wet snow somewhere on their drive. “This family who visited the tomb? Who are they? What do they know? Could Vogel have shared the secret with them?”

  “A man and his brood of children? I doubt it,” Ebner said. “But we are running their identities through our databases even now.” Ebner flexed his bandaged fingers. “If anything turns up on Vogel’s hard drive, we shall know by morning.”

  “By . . . morning?”

  “Before morning,” Ebner said. “Much sooner than morning.” Note, he thought, Helmut Bern at Station Two must quicken his reconstruction of the hard drive.

  “And the old man’s apartment was cleared of evidence?”

  “Every stitch,” said Ebner. “We left it exactly as his housekeeper normally does.” Or had they? He had not been there to supervise the work personally, always a risk. That was ever the problem faced by a global organization with—what had he called it?—a singular alignment of causes.

  Galina narrowed her gaze at Ebner. He glanced away, couldn’t look directly into those eyes. They were stronger than a death ray. And he should know about death rays. Those experiments had been completed at Station Three in Mumbai just last month.

  “And if you are wrong . . .” she started.

  “I know,” said Ebner, swallowing hard. “My own elevator accident.”

  Chapter Twenty

  As Wade stepped to the cemetery gates a hand touched his arm.

  “Wait here,” his father whispered. “I’ll find a way inside.”

  Yeah, inside the park of death!

  He watched his father trot down the sidewalk. He knew his dad had run track in college, and he admired all the trophies in his study at home, but now he wished the man weren’t so quick. In seconds he was around the corner and gone, and Wade felt strangely abandoned. It being the dark of night, frigid, and now snowing didn’t help either.

  It also occurred to him that his father, being an adult, was taking a far bigger risk than he and Darrell and the others. Running from men in cars, rushing through foreign streets, fleeing in underground passages! The kids might be thought of as just fooling around, being carefree tourists. But not his dad. What did it mean that he was doing this?

  That this is life-and-death stuff.

  The gates appeared so much taller at night than they had that morning. And the gnarly spikes at the top seemed left over from a medieval weapon factory.

  Maybe because they were far from home, it was night, the snow was wet, or the lights from passing cars floated like ghosts through the trees, but the dark graveyard seemed suddenly haunted.

  “Someone’s probably following us right now.”

  “Darrell, come on,” Wade said.

  “I can feel it,” he s
aid, twitching as he looked in every direction. “I’ve always been able to feel those things. I’m sensitive to changes in the air or something. I was that way even when I was small. Things like movement in the dark. Footsteps. Whispers. Eyes staring at you from behind stuff. It all goes in my brain and creates a total sense of doom. It’s happening right now. And it’s getting worse.”

  “You’re getting worse,” said Wade. “And I mean that in the politest way possible. You’re freaking everyone out.”

  “It’s not me freaking everyone out,” Darrell said, shifting from foot to foot like a tennis player waiting for a serve. “It’s that we’re breaking into a cemetery at night. A cemetery. At night!”

  “Okay, already!” said Lily. “Becca’s scared enough.”

  “We’re all scared enough.” Becca shivered as she huddled under the arch. “Plus this suddenly seems extra insane, to be out here like this. I feel sick to my stomach. Not to mention exhausted. Maybe we should just go back home. All the way home. To Texas.”

  Wade wondered if he agreed with that, when his father appeared at the same corner he had vanished around, waving them over.

  “It’s basically like Fort Knox here,” he said, “but I found an opening in a hedge along the side wall. There’s a gate, but it’s only a little over waist high. We can climb over it.”

  Ten minutes later, after a lot of back-and-forth checking from Darrell and waiting until there were no passing cars, they had vaulted over the low gate onto a pathway. In the park of death.

  “Keep close to the wall,” said Darrell, crouching like a secret agent on a mission. “And whisper.”

  They crept along the inside of the wall until Lily, enlarging a map of the cemetery on her tablet, located the path they had taken earlier in the day, and they hurried through the trees to it. The snow had turned back to rain by the time they arrived at the Kupfermann tomb.

  At night the tomb looked even sadder than it had that morning. A small peaked house of black stone, it was crowded over by vines, its door columns were cracked, and its walls were hairy with moss.