The Golden Vendetta (10 page)

B
y the time Wade and the others met up with Sara and Becca, then ran together back to the apartment on the Place du Palais, his father was deep in the middle of a private conversation on the phone—Wade didn't know who with. However, Terence had finally arrived and was firing up the computers in his study. After hearing about the photos and the recording, he took Becca's phone and attached a USB cord to it.

“Bad news, I'm afraid,” he said. “The results of our investigation into Olsztyn Castle reveal that the plane crash there was one of at least seven similar accidents through Poland, Germany, and Slovenia at the beginning of April. All the sites are associated with
Copernicus's life in one way or another.”

Sara frowned. “Not relics? Galina hasn't found more relics?”

He shook his head. “We don't believe so. But here's the thing that's worrying. Excavation equipment was present at all seven sites.”

“Galina is digging for something,” said Becca.

Sara nodded, keeping an eye on Wade's father in the other room. “She's started on some big operation. We'll need to find out what it is.”

Wade loved that his stepmother was so completely into the hunt for the relics. He shared a look with Darrell and found the same sense of awe on his face.

“Oh, man,” Lily murmured when Becca's photos of the sleek silver Mercedes flashed on Terence's monitor. “Evil guys get the best cars.”

Terence tapped the mouse and an array of audio controls appeared.

“Do you think you can get anything from Becca's recording?” Darrell asked.

“I'm certainly going to try,” he said, donning a pair of headphones. “Applying a series of filters should isolate ambient sounds, leaving only voices. Julian built this software. He'll be here later today, by the way, with a report about your folks, Becca. And yours, Lily.”

“Really?” she said. “Thanks.”

“Julian will be great, and we can use the help,” said Wade, peeking in the other room, where his father was listening intently to someone on the other end of the phone.

“All right,” said Terence, “tell me if this makes any sense to you.” He unplugged the headphones and turned up the speakers.

Becca's recording was a babel of odd noises, clunks, traffic, and garbled voices. They heard the whoosh and pop of wind, what could have been seagulls, the roar of buses. After several final adjustments, Terence canceled most of the conflicting sounds. “If this actually works, it's going into my next novel.”

There it was at last—a dull rumble of background noise, then four words—three from Gerrenhausen, one from Sunglasses.

“Brille . . . Silber tinte . . .”

“Carlo . . .”

“Gerrenhausen is speaking in German,” said Becca. “Can we play it again?”

They played the recording several times, just to be sure they had heard everything. They had. No other intelligible words came from the recording.

“Spectacles, silver ink,
and
Carlo,”
said Becca.

“They can't be talking about the ink used in the diary,” said Sara, “because they don't have the diary. So there must be silver ink somewhere else.”

“On the ledger that Gerrenhausen stole, maybe?” said Wade.

“Or the silver arm?” said Lily. “No, you don't read arms.”

“Unless they're tattooed,” said Darrell.

“Helpful. Really.”

“Well, what about Carlo?” Darrell said. “Do we think it's
our
Carlo? You said the old woman in Tampa said his name, too.”

“And
she had silver ink on her fingers,” said Becca. “We know that Carlo and the diary are connected, but ‘spectacles'? We can't read the silver pages. Maybe there are special glasses to read them . . . I don't know. Lily?”

“Yeah, X-ray glasses,” she said. “They'd be good.”

Terence stood from the computer. “Allow me to suggest a simpler explanation for ‘Carlo.' In this part of the world, it may simply mean Monte Carlo, a city twenty kilometers east of us.”

“Right. The playground of the super wealthy,” said Sara. “I've heard stories.” She turned to Darrell. “It's a bit of a spy capital, too.”

He grinned. “I'm ready.”

“So . . .” Wade stood now. His father was still on the phone in the other room.
What is it about? He'll tell us.
“So . . . Oskar Gerrenhausen steals something called the Voytsdorf Ledger from a dealer in Paris. A guy on the train tries to steal it from him, but Gerrenhausen kills him. Now we hear that there might be—
might
be—glasses that help with the ledger. And the bookseller and Sunglasses are going to Monte Carlo for them. Is that right?”

Sara listened. Pressing her lips together, she nodded. “We may as well make the leap. Let's assume that the silver ink the bookseller is talking about is the same silver ink used in the diary. And both of them have to do with the old woman's silver fingers, the pirate's silver arm, and the relic we think is inside it.”

“Then we should go to Monte Carlo to see what we find,” Wade said, looking at the others, then at his father, still on the phone. “Does everybody think so? It's not like we have a lot of other leads.”

He heard the click of the phone. When his father entered the computer room, his face was grim.

“Who were you talking to?” Sara asked.

“Partly talking, mostly listening to a message over and over, a very puzzling and encrypted message,” he
said, rattling a paper. “I finally worked it out.”

“From who?” Darrell asked.

“Dr. Petrescu. He's changing everything about the secret meeting. It's not going to be in five days. Instead, he wants me and several other physicists to come immediately. But not to CERN headquarters in Geneva. He's asked me go to Gran Sasso, their partner laboratory in Italy. Petrescu is afraid, and he knows something about what we've been up to. He's taking all kinds of precautions.”

“Roald, maybe you shouldn't go at all,” said Sara. “It could be a trap.”

He stood on the balcony, looking out, then turned back. “I don't think it's a trap. I mean, not one that he's setting. I don't know. But I think it's even more urgent that I attend. I don't know exactly what it's all about, but given the Uncle Henry connection, we know it concerns Galina and the Order. Whatever Petrescu knows, it's big enough to take these extra steps. I have to go.”

Terence paced the living room, rubbing his forehead. “I rather agree with Sara here. Something's fishy about this change of time and place. Geneva is very public; Gran Sasso is quite the opposite. Roald, I'd like to go with you, if you don't mind. Just to make sure of security. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say. Maybe ask
Paul Ferrere to come along as backup.
And
we absolutely should go now, to case it out as much as we possibly can before we go into the laboratory. Sara, what do you say I send Julian to Monte Carlo as soon as he gets in from the airport? He'll contact you there. I'll go with you, Roald.”

Wade's heart thudded. He didn't like having his father going off somewhere away from the rest of them. He felt he had to watch over his father as much as he knew his father watched over them. He watched his stepmother's eyes narrow to pinpoints. She wouldn't stop his father from going, not really, if Galina was involved, but she was processing what it might mean.

She went up to his father and, in front of all of them, kissed him. They held each other for a long time. But it wasn't uncomfortable—for Wade or, he realized, for anyone else. They were all bound in a strong way, as a family, and as Guardians.

“Take care of yourselves,” she said finally. “And you, sir, better call me every ten minutes.”

His father smiled at her. “Maybe every half hour.”

She brushed tears from her eyes. “Okay, then. All right.”

All right? Maybe. But a key team member was being ripped out of the lineup. Wade didn't like it and said so.

“I know,” his father replied. “It's not good. It's not the best. But this is the way we live now.” He paused, as if choosing whether to say what he was thinking. He did anyway.

“I hate what's happening to us. Sara does, too. It's not normal for people as young as you to live this way. Fearing and distrusting so many people. But then, our lives aren't normal. Not since Uncle Henry died.”

“Was murdered,” said Darrell.

Wade's father's face went dark, distant. “Yes, was murdered.”

But we're still kids.
Wade wanted his father to know that. They hadn't been ruined by the weird life they were leading, not yet. They were still hopeful, if that was the right word. They had gotten closer to one another in a way that was hard to define, maybe, but it was a good thing. Sure, the world was dangerous; at least
their
world was. And it was just common sense to be on the alert. It didn't have to mean that you lost hope. If anything, you celebrated good people and things more when you
did
find them. That was what he wanted to say.

What he came up with was simpler.

“We'll be okay, Dad. You have to be, too.”

His father hugged him and Darrell and Sara tightly
after that. A long minute or two. No words. And that was it. Their new style of reunions and good-byes. Back to business. Find the next relic.

“I'll ring for the car,” said Terence.

T
he airport nearest to the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy was Fiumicino in Rome, also known as Leonardo da Vinci airport—which, Darrell concluded, “totally means we're on the right track.”

Wade wasn't sure of anything just yet, but he'd long ago given up on the idea of coincidence. Everything meant something.

Just after a cab came to take Roald and Terence a few miles west to the Nice airport, a pristine and roomy 1972 four-door Citroën DS Super 5 appeared in front of the apartment. The car was black, shiny, long, and low, with huge windows and bug-eye headlights. A driver hopped out, leaving his door open.

“For Mrs. Sara to drive,” he said. “To Monte Carlo—”

“Shotgun!” said Darrell, settling in next to his mother as she slid behind the wheel, with Wade, Lily, and Becca piling into the roomy backseat. After accustoming herself to the dashboard, Sara pushed the car into gear, and they set off for Monte Carlo.

It was going on six p.m., and the traffic in the thick of Nice lessened slightly when they took the main road to the east. It curved up from the outskirts of the city's waterfront and climbed away into the foothills. Wade could see the wandering coast, lit up against the dark water.

“It's been a while since we saw the Mercedes,” said Becca. “It could be anywhere at this point. We might have lost it forever.”

“Or we could be incredibly lucky,” said Darrell. “I vote for lucky.”

Sara sped along as quickly as speed limits would allow. More than once, she was forced to stop short as vehicles lumbered carelessly onto the road from driveways hidden on the right. One tiny car popped out from a villa, nearly hurling them off the road into a mess of jagged rock and pine trees.

“Geez, French people, get a license!” Lily shouted out the window.

“Can you imagine a car chase on this road?” said Wade.

“And now you did it!” Darrell groaned. “You pretty much just
asked
to be in a high-speed car chase on the skinniest road known to man. Nice job, Wade.”

“That's soooo . . .” Wade started, but stopped. “Actually, it'd be fun.”

“Not with me driving, thank you,” said Sara.

Darrell grinned. “It would be fun! Like I said, nice job.”

“There's a faster road,” Becca said, scanning a road map on her phone. “The left after the next one will take us up onto a freeway. We'll make better time.”

“Good call.” Sara smoothly exited the slow coast road, and they were soon motoring far more quickly on the highway.

After a while, Lily, who had been quietly tapping away on her tablet, cleared her throat. “I've been searching on all kinds of image and language sites, and I think I found something about the tattoo, if your sketch is right, Wade.”

“It is,” he said. “Of course, I'm no da Vinci.”

“I should have traced it,” said Darrell. He never let anyone forget that he traced very well. “But I don't trace tattoos. Too icky.”

Lily shot him a look. “Anyway, the symbol you saw—an
O
with lines coming into it—seems to be very close to a letter from an old runic Hungarian alphabet. I can't find any secret society that uses it as a symbol, but it's a corporate logo belonging to a company called Drangheta Enterprises, a shipping company run by a rich guy named Ugo Drangheta. They do lots of stuff, but mainly shipping.”

“Ugo Drangheta,” said Darrell. “By ‘rich' let's assume he's super rich, and has armies of tattooed assassins doing his dirty work, which means this quest just went up a notch on the danger scale.”

Wade turned to him. “Armies? No one said ‘armies.' And ‘danger scale'?”

“I just invented it.”

Becca cleared her throat. “Lil, the triangle with the fives in it is a gift that keeps on giving. I just found another passage. I really thought I'd found them all, but listen to this.”

“I know what a prism is,” said Darrell. “I can't picture a three-sided mirror.”

“Unless it's like the kind you see in a dressing room where you can see behind you and on the sides at the same time,” said Lily. “Maybe?”

“Cryptologic lenses could be a way of describing spectacles,” said Sara.

“Yes, good.” Wade pulled out from his backpack the leather binder he kept his antique star chart in. He removed the chart. It glistened with gold and silver ink.

“Copernicus says it's ‘appropriately' three-sided,” he said. “There's a constellation called Triangulum. It's formed by the narrow triangle of its three brightest stars. It's between Andromeda and Aries in the northern sky.”

“Leonardo was fascinated by mirrors late in life,” said Sara, downshifting in heavier traffic. “In his villa at Clos Lucé he was supposed to have had a whole workshop devoted to his study of mirrors and their qualities. And their powers.”

“That could be it,” said Wade. “There have been a lot of triangles in the clues so far. I wonder if the relic is
simply Triangulum. . . .”

“Mom, take the next exit,” said Darrell.

They headed south toward the coast again. The narrow walled roadway was bordered by terraced hillsides, sprinkled with red tile roofs and marble steps on one side and daggerlike pines on the other. At last, the road wound down through the hills, past a handful of small villages, to the glittering coast of Monte Carlo, another magnificent jewel on the Mediterranean.

Magnificent, sure.

But Wade couldn't forget that they'd followed a pair of killers there.