The Golden Vendetta (20 page)

T
he noise was horrendous. Lily blocked her ears, but that didn't do much. Everything around her hummed and rattled and shook. At least it was distracting. Only Bingo and Wade had normal seats. The others sat on three buckets turned upside down, while Sara clung to the rearmost contraption, which was a thing apparently made of bent rods with a “cushion” cut out of two slices of plank nailed together.

No one was anywhere near comfortable, but they were moving over the desert.

“Bingo, what do you know about Carthage?” asked Wade.

“Garbage?” he said. “Just chuck it in the back. But
don't hit your mum.”

“No!” he yelled. “Carthage!”

Bingo pulled back on the engine. The volume of noise lessened a decibel. “Ancient. Nothing much there now. Home of just about every civilization for a while,” he said. “You can check the book.”

“The book?”

“Behind Miss Rebecca's seat there!”

Becca smiled, surprised to hear her full name. She reached behind her seat for a book, which she found sitting on top of a metal cash box. Once she grabbed the book, the box popped open, something slithered out, and she jumped off her bucket, screaming.

“A snake! A snake!”

Bingo half turned around. “Oh, that's just Corky. She's harmless. I say, Wade, take the control stick.” Bingo slid from his seat, leaving Wade to hold the plane steady. “Here, Corky! Cork, oh, do come on!” Using the cash box as a trap, he coaxed the wiggling brown snake to him, scooped it up with the jaws of the box and lid, and snapped it shut. “Sorry about that. Corky's just a harmless little carpet viper.”

“Is she defanged?” asked Sara.

“Defanged? Is that a thing?” Bingo slid the box back behind Becca's bucket. “Well, then, perhaps Corky's not
so harmless.” He took the control stick back from a terrified Wade and settled back in his seat, whistling to himself.

Soon they had left any grassy hills behind and were flying low over the sand, with great humped dunes loping one after the other as far as they could see.

The book, which Becca had dropped on Lily's lap, was a beat-up copy of
The Barbary Coast: Sketches of French North Africa.
It was written by Albert Edwards and published in 1913.

“You don't have anything more, uh, recent?” asked Lily.

“The past is the past,” he said over his shoulder. “Maybe there's an eyewitness account of Carthage in there. Why are you interested, if I may ask?”

They told him in basic terms what they were looking for and showed him the drawing in Becca's notebook.

“An ancient key? Well, that's just spiffy!” Bingo said. “I'll get you to Carthage as quickly as . . . as . . . ” Like Pinky, he didn't quite finish his sentence.

After skimming the table of contents, Lily found a page with one paragraph about Carthage.

“Graveyards of the ancient city,” said Darrell. “Great. Grab your shovels, folks.”

“I do not dig in graveyards,” said Lily.

For some reason, reading that aloud made her very sad. Nothing lasted. Everything went away. Even great things ended. She passed the book to Becca.

“Okay, but if Carthage was already a ruin when our friends went there in the sixteenth century,” Becca said, “why would they hide a precious key there?”

“Exactly,” said Wade. “People rebuild over ruins and probably cart the really good stuff away and reuse it anyway.”

“The book says the Arabs conquered it last,” said Sara, peeking over Becca's shoulder. “Maybe that's a clue. The ruined columns in the drawing might signify
Carthage after it fell. And trees mean growth.”

“Good,” said Darrell.

“The year,” said Wade. “Hijri 84, or 84 Hijri. When is that, Bingo?”

“I say, this is fun!” he said. “If I remember correctly, year one of the Hijra is the first year of the Islamic calendar. It's somewhere around our year 622. So add eighty-four to that and you get 706 or so. Ballpark, anyway. Hold on! It's coming back to me now. According to whom you read, Carthage was destroyed by the Muslims anywhere from 698 to 703 or so. Your drawing could very well be about the fall of Carthage!”

While the others started debating that, Lily realized that she had was zoning out. She needed a break from head games. There was no service for the brand-new tablet Silva had picked up for her, it was only half charged anyway, and she didn't want to risk having to answer—or ignore—a call from her mother on either the tablet or her phone, so she didn't bother firing either of them up. Instead, she glanced out the rattling window next to her.

The sun was bearing down on them, making the plane hotter with every mile. Still there was something soothing about the engine's rumbling around her, and once she let go of the possibility of talking with her
parents, she found that flying a few dozen feet over the desert, skimming the grassy plains, then the dunes, was more freeing than anything she'd experienced before.

While the others kept up their humming conversation about Carthage, Lily wished she could just dip her hand out the window and skim the sand as if it were water outside a canoe. Just watching the ground flash by, her whole body throbbing to the grind of the primitive engine through her bucket, she'd never been so happy to be disconnected from the rest of the world. Being as far away as she could possibly be from the situation back home made her chest flutter, then pound with excitement. She dismissed her life, all of it, every bit, for this. Just
this
.

This
was living: feeling the world move by, much more slowly than she had ever thought it could from a plane, riding the sand at a height of fifty or sixty feet, sweeping past the foothills of a range of mountains arcing to the north. The anger and the fighting and the emptiness had gone.

“What are those called?” asked Darrell. “Those mountains up there.”

“Those are the tail end of the Atlas Mountains, the ones that started all the way back in Casablanca, though we're nearly in Algeria now,” said Bingo. “You
know Atlas, the sorry chap who was cursed to tote the world around on his back? Well, those mountains are his backbone. They have marble quarries in there like you wouldn't believe. Black marble and yellow marble. Famous the world over, as they say.”

“Marble,” said Wade softly, turning around to face the others. “Columns are made of marble.” He nudged Darrell aside, pinning himself between Becca and Lily. “Let's say the drawing shows Carthage after the battle in 703. What happens to ruins? Trees don't grow out of them, do they?”

“There are places so ancient that the stones and the trees become twined together,” said Sara. “Like at old temples in Cambodia. Other places, too.”

“Good, good,” Wade said. “Anybody know what kind of tree this is?”

“A
tree
tree,” said Darrell. “With a sun growing in it.”

Keeping one hand on the controls, Bingo turned nearly completely around to examine Becca's drawing. “That there's an olive tree,” he said.
“Sol
is Latin, of course, for sun.”

Wade chewed his lip, then shook his head. “So how about this? The ruined city becomes like a quarry. I mean, we do this in Texas and everywhere. People reuse stuff all the time. Well, if Carthage was such a
great city, it must have had great stuff. Marble columns and all. What if this picture means that we should be searching for what
grew
out of Carthage?”

Becca turned to him. “I like that. Maybe what we're looking for is a place that used the
ruins
of Carthage. A place that has something to do with an olive tree and a sun. And the outline. Bingo, what does the crescent moon on top mean?”

He glanced back at it. “Well, anything Arabic or Ottoman, I suppose. But the shape of the outline is like a doorway. A mosque, maybe?”

Wade was getting antsy now. “So after Carthage was destroyed in 703 or whenever, the stones were used to build something. Maybe a mosque. And if it
is
a mosque, the olive tree and the sun are the clues to tell us which one.”

They all sat there. No one seemed to have any more to add.

Not bad,
thought Lily. “It could use some fine-tuning. We'll get there. In the meantime, let's just look. It's beautiful out there.”

“It's why I stayed,” said Bingo. “I love the desert. Well, that and Gussie and Pinky, of course. Love Pinky.”

“I think he loves you, too,” said Sara.

Bingo dipped even lower over the dunes. “And we all love all of this.”

Gazing at the rolling sand, Lily thought of where their journey was taking her, farther from her home than ever before. Especially now that her home was a question mark. She knew, she just knew, that there would be a message waiting for her the instant she turned on her phone.
Lily, please call! We have to talk!
She didn't want to talk. Not now. Not yet. She was too busy being herself. In this otherworldly place, doing strange and wonderful and dangerous things, she was becoming someone new, and that was what she really needed now.

Finally, as the distance between her and them grew and grew, Lily wondered if she'd ever see her parents together again and what it would mean if she never did.

It was a question she couldn't answer. She didn't want to. All she wanted was to watch the dunes roll on and on.

Central Italy

June 6

Early evening

A
fter waiting most of the day for Paul Ferrere, who was unavoidably detained in Paris, Roald and Terence made the decision to head to the immense facility at Gran Sasso without him. The both hoped it wasn't a dumb move, but after yet another call from Dr. Petrescu, there seemed little choice.

Seven miles outside the underground laboratory, Terence pulled their rental car up to the first of several checkpoints. Four security guards came out of a pair of roadside buildings.

One said, “Please shut off the engine and leave the keys inside.”

“We will park it for you,” said another. “You will take an official car inside.”

Roald shared a look with Terence. “All right,” he said.

A few minutes later, a gray car appeared. A short middle-aged man got out of the rear and put on a large, nervous smile. “Dr. Roald Kaplan! And friend?” He extended his hand. “Pleased to meet you both.”

Roald tried to read the man's face, but he couldn't tell much. Dr. Petrescu seemed to be trying too hard to smile, but it was difficult to tell for sure.

“We must enter, but first security photographs, yes?” the man said. “In the hut.” He briskly led the way inside one of the checkpoint buildings, where both Roald and Terence stood for individual and joint photographs.

“Perfect, perfect,” said Dr. Petrescu. “And now, we enter.”

The man was pleasant enough, but something was off. Roald didn't like the feeling. “Doctor, your phone calls—”

“Not now,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Please. The car.”

A uniformed driver drove all three of them into an immense complex of buildings at the foot of the large
forested mountain. There they entered a steel doorway, which closed behind them, and drove another twenty minutes, coiling downward, until they arrived at a subterranean parking garage.

“This way, gentlemen.” Dr. Petrescu used a card-access terminal and took them into an elevator, pushed a sequence of numbers, and had his handprint scanned. They descended several floors below the garage and exited into a long hallway.

Roald felt his senses go on alert. He made a note of everything, aware that Terence was doing the same. The walls of the hallway were brushed aluminum, the lighting recessed, the carpet beneath their feet dense and noise-suppressing. Roald shot a look at Terence. His friend's face was grim.

Dr. Petrescu's office was large, with a wide interior window overlooking a very large laboratory below. It was like something out of a James Bond film—a pristine lab bustling with activity—except that in this case, instead of a villain out for world domination, their host was a highly respected nuclear specialist.

Something was definitely off.

Roald's senses tingled as they did when he felt the presence of one of the Order's agents. The Order wasn't there, at least not visibly, but something of Galina's
presence seemed to assert itself, and it worried him.

“You will see that we are nearly ready,” Dr. Petrescu said. “Some five of your colleagues are only hours away. Beyond them, I am awaiting only three nuclear physicists who had to alter their plans, you see.”

Dr. Petrescu looked around his office in a distracted manner.

“Doctor, please. Is everything all right?” Roald asked.

“Oh?” He turned to him as if he had just realized there were people in the room with him. “Oh, yes. Of course. Certainly. It's just that . . .” He trailed off and didn't finish, his fingers drumming the armrest of his chair.

He's waiting for something,
Roald realized.
Or someone.

“Dr. Petrescu,” Terence said, picking up on the same feeling, “you seem distracted. Are you in trouble? Or not
trouble,
but, perhaps, danger? Is there something we can help you with?”

“I . . .” Petrescu tapped a gold letter opener on the rim of his coffee cup, seemingly unable to make his fingers do anything else. “Let me put it this way. Galina Krause. The young woman with the eyes? You know her, certainly you do. That is why I asked you here. Well, she knew about my little meeting.”

“Wait. Are you saying you've seen her?” Roald asked.

“That is why I changed the time and place! And still I fear I will not be able to tell you all I have discovered. Temporal disturbances that cannot be reversed! Already perhaps it is too late.”

“Tell us,” Roald said. “Dr. Petrescu, you must.”

“How did Galina Krause know about my meeting? I have no idea.”

“I don't like it,” said Terence. “We're not equipped for this, Roald.”

“There is something the woman is trying to do,” Dr. Petrescu said, setting the letter opener down. “Something terrible will happen. A disaster. A flood. She spoke of a flood. I hope we are safe here. But this is why I changed the place and time of the meeting. She was going to push her way in. I have fooled her, but I don't know for how long.”

A flood? It sounded like the disasters Copernicus had told Becca about in London. “Can you be more specific, Doctor?” Roald asked. “I'm more sympathetic than you might guess. I know a lot about Galina. I've seen her power and the evil she's capable of.”

“Dr. Petrescu, has Galina actually threatened you?” said Terence. “We can go to the authorities.”

“Me? I care not for myself.” Dr. Petrescu shook his head firmly. “We cannot risk angering her. No. I have
arranged with a private security firm for our protection. We may not need it, perhaps, but there you are. The firm is said to be very fine. They have sometimes worked with the Vatican.” His expression was a mixture of fear and desperation. “Perhaps you had better follow me to your rooms, Dr. Kaplan, Mr. Ackroyd. While we await the others to arrive.”

As they followed Dr. Petrescu from the office, Roald saw Terence slide the letter opener from the desktop and slip it sideways into the lining of his coat.