The Golden Vendetta (2 page)

London, England

April 2

9:42 a.m.

W
ade Kaplan squinted toward the end of the long hallway.

His lungs ached. The air was chilly down there. Almost refrigerated. He counted the cold fluorescent bulbs ranged along the low ceiling. Twelve. They cast a pale white light on the inside walls, on his family—his stepbrother, Darrell; his father, Roald; his stepmother, Sara—and on the tall man in the navy-blue suit who stood facing them.

“Behind me is the steel-reinforced titanium entry
door to the vaults,” the navy-blue man said. “Each portal is equipped with multilayer encryption combinations that are refreshed at random. We are, in a word, unbreachable. Follow me, please. Bring your item.”

The man, whose name Wade hadn't heard clearly, was head of vault security at the British Museum in London. He spun around neatly on his heels and walked down the corridor.

“This is it,” Darrell whispered. “The official end of the London episode.”

“I hope so,” Wade said. They paused at the end of the hall.

After the man entered a key card, a thumbprint scan, and a voice command—“Five, seven, nine, four, two, eight”—Wade heard a series of electronic bolts releasing, followed by a whoosh as the heavy door opened. They passed through to the other side, where two armed security officers stood guard. Once inside, they heard a similar series of reboltings as the door closed, and they were among the warren of underground vaults.

“The vault level of the British Museum is among the most secure in Britain,” the man explained. “In the world, actually. Your box will be safe here.”

The box Wade's stepmother now held, an unassuming steel container the size of a large hardcover, housed
Crux, a mechanical cross crafted of amber, inside of which was some manner of mysterious, and heavy, internal mechanism. Crux was one of twelve relics that powered the time machine of Nicolaus Copernicus.

“We're nearly there,” Darrell said in his ear. “You can start breathing now.”

“Not yet.”

“You really should. In, out, in, out. It helps with the whole being-alive thing. I find it useful to begin breathing almost as soon as I wake up in the morning. The day turns out so much better. There have been studies.”

“I'll bet there have,” said Wade.

“Boys,” said Sara. They continued to the end of another blank corridor, which, the navy-suited man told them, “parallels Great Russell Street, running some twenty feet above us.” He helpfully pointed up.

It seemed to Wade that he'd been holding his breath for the last week. Or, actually, the last three weeks, for it was in early March that they'd first learned of the twelve mysterious parts of Copernicus's time-traveling astrolabe and gotten swept into the global search for them.

They had battled the deadly agents of the infamous Teutonic Order of Ancient Prussia—and their leader, Galina Krause—and had rather amazingly discovered
two of the relics so far. The first was a heavy blue stone called Vela, currently stored at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. Crux, the second, would be temporarily housed here, in Subvault 17 of the British Museum.

“Too many things aren't right,” Wade whispered as they entered the final room through yet another thick steel door. The room was empty except for a metal table and a chair, and a safe, built into the rear wall.

“This here is right,” said Darrell.

“Yeah, but not Becca.”

Becca Moore was currently recovering at Great Ormond Street Hospital—if, Wade thought, you could ever quite recover from what had happened to her. Becca had traveled through time.

Sort of.

The previous week Becca had had episodes, like visions, that shot her back in time—in her mind, if not her body—to the sixteenth century. It was her weird coiling paths back and forth in time that had allowed them to find Crux and thwart their dark pursuer, Markus Wolff, Galina's assassin. But it had cost her. Not only had Becca learned a terrible truth—that traveling in time opened the door to horrible catastrophes—but through the whole adventure she had suffered
blinding headaches and nosebleeds. She was finally too exhausted to see Crux to its new home.

“Yeah, and not Lily, either,” Darrell admitted.

Lily Kaplan, Wade's cousin, was supposed to have met her father at Heathrow last week. He was going to bring her home. They had all expected him. Then, at the last minute, he'd canceled his flight. Lily's parents were “going through a rough patch,” as Wade's stepmother put it. Very rough, it turned out. And it wasn't a “patch” so much as a plain old ugly divorce. Lily had become depressed and quiet (so unlike her) and was at that moment at Great Ormond Street, keeping Becca company in her hospital room. The past week had been an ordeal for everyone, but especially for the two girls.

The navy-blue man positioned himself in front of an alphanumeric keypad on the wall next to the safe door, where he input a long series of numbers and letters. Then he pressed his thumb to the scanner and entered a metal key.

Wade, Darrell, and their parents had examined Crux extensively but hadn't found any clues to the next relic. Each relic was known to hint at where the next one might be found, but technically they had located Crux out of order.

It was
Serpens,
the relic Galina Krause had stolen
from them in Russia, that would show where the very next relic lay hidden. Even so, they'd taken dozens of photographs and X-rays of the amber cross. They'd study them until Crux, too, gave up its secret.

The safe door opened slowly. “Any last words?” asked the navy-blue man. He beamed a distant but confident smile.

Wade's father glanced at them all, then shook his head. “It will be good knowing it's housed here.”

Sara placed the box into the safe. The man carefully turned the key, which had remained in the lock. The safe door clicked closed. Another few seconds of inputting into the keypad, rescanning his thumb, and removing the key, and the relic was secure. Wade breathed. In. Out.

“Well, then. There you are,” said the navy-blue man. “There is twenty-four-hour camera surveillance, and there are temperature scanners on every inch of the vault level, including each room.” He pointed vaguely to several lenses and grilles recessed into the ceiling. “Thirty guards patrol the vault system at all times. You are fortunate to have the influence of the Ackroyd Foundation, a major benefactor of the museum.”

Terence Ackroyd and his son, Julian, had become their close friends and essential team members in the
relic hunt. After the Kaplans and the Moores boarded their flight back to the States that evening, they would enter a kind of private witness-protection program designed to keep the Order from finding them.

They would, Terence told them, effectively vanish from sight. Until, that is, they had to begin searching for the next relic. As the man in the navy-blue suit led them away from Subvault 17, Wade hoped Crux would be safe there.

But something told him that nothing was really safe.

Not anymore.

Olsztyn, Poland

April 3

11:43 p.m.

T
he sky was a black shroud prickled with a smattering of stars, a slow-rising crescent moon, and a clearness that seemed to spread to the far reaches of the universe.

Galina Krause, the dark-haired, nineteen-year-old leader of the Teutonic Order, looked up to the heavens, and the valves in her heart fluttered.

“A hole in the sky,” she said.

Ten feet behind her, shivering in his thin coat, the pasty, bent astrophysicist Ebner von Braun raised his
face from his phone.

“Yes, Galina? You said?”

“Magister Copernicus uses those words just prior to the astrolabe's first entry into the flow of time. He writes of witnessing
a hole in the sky.”
Pain trembled from her throat to her chest, her arms. “What shall we make of it, Ebner?”

“Five servers at the Copernicus Room in Madrid are specifically dedicated to his riddles, this one in particular. Better now, perhaps, to focus on the business at hand. The plane will appear over the castle in seven minutes.”

Despite the streetlights and spotlights surrounding it, Olsztyn Castle rose up, a medieval darkness against the greater dark of the sky. Galina walked up a steep path toward its walls. Construction on the castle had been begun by the Teutonic Knights in 1347. Of greater interest to Galina was that at various times from 1516 to 1521, Nicolaus Copernicus lived and worked inside its walls. This was a matter of historical record. There was, moreover, a fresco of his astronomical research still visible in his rooms along the northeast wall of the castle.

What was not generally known, however, was that precisely during the years of his residence there, the
astronomer began dispersing not only the relics of his time-traveling astrolabe, but the machine's larger framework. From these Galina hoped to gather clues about the remaining relics. Her goal: to attach them to Kronos III, the most successful of the Order's own time machines.

According to a cryptic fragment in a recently located letter, one major section of Copernicus's Eternity Machine was buried beneath Olsztyn Castle's walls.

And so, naturally, they required a plane.

Ebner scurried up to her. “It is approaching.” He took from his overcoat a box and drew out its long antenna. “Delectable that something so compact can fly a sixteen-hundred-kilogram airplane with a twitch of a lever. The pilot will certainly be surprised when all instrument control is lost. Interestingly, besides being an expendable junior operative of ours, the pilot is—”

“Do not tell me,” Galina said.

He swallowed. “No. Of course. No.”

Footsteps sounded. She turned. It was Markus Wolff, just arrived from London. He approached the castle like a pilgrim to a shrine, and yet he was not so much a pilgrim as a spy waiting to be debriefed.

“Tell me about Crux,” she said. There was never small talk between them.

“A mechanical cross encrusted in amber. The Kaplans located it in a church crypt. It was transferred yesterday to a vault in the British Museum. Herr von Braun claims to have a man on the inside—”

“I do indeed!” said Ebner. “Do not doubt it.”

“We shall see,” said Galina.

“As it happens,” Wolff continued, “in 1517, Copernicus passed Crux to the martyr Thomas More. On his death, the relic went to his daughter and finally to his daughter's friend, or ‘sister' as she was called. You will want this back.”

From the inside pocket of his leather overcoat, he produced a small golden locket. Taking it from his gloved hand, Galina felt her palm go cold. Inside was a portrait of the sister, Joan Aleyn: mesmerizing, sorrowful.

Galina closed the miniature and pocketed it. “Her crypt . . . ?”

“Was a terminus of time change. The girl, Rebecca Moore, was deeply involved. There is a problem with removing the children just yet. I saw this.”

He drew out his phone, swiped the screen.

The image was hazy, taken from a distance at night, showing a church tower, a shattered window, a blur caught in haste. Still, what Galina spied in the glimmer
of crisscrossing flashlights and spotlights was unmistakable: a bronze disc inlaid with colored glass in a flower pattern. It hung from the belt of one of the children inside the tower, one whose face was in shadow. She had seen the item before.

“The rose window . . . ?”

“Of Westminster Abbey,” Wolff said. “A trinket from their gift shop. It is one of four purchased for the children by your former captive, Sara Kaplan.”

“Which of the children is this?” asked Ebner, hovering over the phone.

“It was dark,” Wolff said. “One of the boys.”

“One of the boys.” Galina turned away from both men. The sky was blacker still. “So he or one of the others will lose the trinket in the ruins of Albrecht's castle at Königsberg.”

Wolff tilted his head slightly. “Perhaps he—or she—already has. The past is such a curious creature. Has Serpens given up
its
clue?”

A sudden pain spiked in her neck. What began inside her as a tiny ripple in the middle of a vast ocean gained strength second by second and became a wave. She tilted her head, breathed the pain away.

“The legendary curse of the serpent has proved all too true,” she said.

As with every relic, this one was said to indicate the location of the next one, so when Serpens had pointed south, Galina had traveled south to Damascus. Once there, however, the relic had pointed west. She'd flown west to Tripoli. There it had pointed north to Eastern Europe. Then east. Then south again, circling the Mediterranean in a teasing, spiteful round.

“Serpens is unwilling to give up its secret. That is why we are forced to rely on secondary methods to find the relics,” she said. “Best keep the Kaplans alive for now. In the meantime, we will continue our search for the astrolabe's fragments. Also, we must obtain the Voytsdorf Ledger.”

“Which is?” asked Wolff.

“A coded document said to enumerate the various parts of the astronomer's original astrolabe. This will provide hints to the location of the remainder of the relics. Ebner, send the bookseller to find it—”

“The plane!” said Ebner.

A pair of blinking lights moved slowly toward them out of the northern sky. Ebner gently touched the control levers on the remote, and she saw the plane's wing lights wobble. Another touch, and the plane dipped. Ebner gave a final flick to the altitude lever, and the little plane dived. It slammed into the castle's northeastern
face. Galina stepped back. The blaze was horrifyingly sudden.

“One astonished pilot,” Ebner said, shielding his face from the fire. Minutes later several emergency vehicles accelerated up the road: EMS, fire, police, and others that could only be described as excavation equipment.

“If we are correct, the armature of the Eternity Machine lies buried beneath the crash site,” Ebner whispered. “This accident will screen our search for it. We'll soon see if our intelligence is valid. Move in,” he barked into his phone. “Remove the pilot's body. Find the astrolabe's frame!”

Galina shivered in the heat, stepped toward the blaze, then felt the trembling in her legs and knew. The air seemed suddenly airless. Clutching the miniature in her palm, she let it cut into her skin to stave off the wave of unconsciousness.

Ebner rushed to her. She barely felt his presence. In the midst of wailing sirens and grinding engines, the flames swept up the castle wall and into her mind. She saw them burning away the earth beneath the castle wall. And there it was, intact five centuries later: a vast ring, ten feet in diameter and crafted of iron, steel, bronze, and heavy gold.

“Ebner,” she said, her voice already distant, “discover
the other pieces. Send the bookseller to Paris. The Voytsdorf Ledger . . .” Before she could finish, she spun away and away into the dark, fluttering like an empty shroud.

As the flames began to recede under the assault of the fire hoses, and the excavators advanced, Ebner held her, held her close. He fixed on her eyes—one silver iris, one diamond blue—and saw them glint and flash at him before her eyelids closed and she sank away.

“Medic!” he cried out. “Medic!”