The Golden Vendetta (21 page)

“W
here are we now?” Becca asked. “The sand is so red.”

It was solidly afternoon, and the sky was a cloudless dome of white heat. The desert had changed color, darkening over the last hour.

“Ah, deep in Algeria now,” said Bingo. “Red sand is one of the peculiarities of the Algerian desert. And now”—he pushed the control stick forward, and the nose of the Flitfire dipped—“it's time to refuel.”

Becca clung to the struts framing the inside of the fuselage. The plane banked gently over a flat stretch of sand. Approaching below was a collection of little shelters made of tin. Two or three battered cars stood
in haphazard relation to one another. Bingo identified a large fuel pump near a vintage gray plane that was parked outside one of the buildings.

“That old Spartan down there may have just arrived for fueling, too,” he said. “You can still see the imprint of its tires in the sand.”

Their landing was rough. The tracks that rutted the flatness of the ground were by no means a proper airstrip. The plane nearly tipped over twice on its way to a standstill. The boys seemed to love it, while Lily grumbled to herself.

Becca glanced over her shoulder. Sara sat in her makeshift seat, gripping the sides to keep from falling forward. She gave Becca a tight-lipped grin. “I'll be okay. Once we're on solid ground.”

Sara was putting up a good front, but Becca saw the worry about Roald etching her features. During the flight she'd tried several times to contact him, and the uncertainty of no reply was taking its toll on her. Becca knew Wade felt the same. They all felt it.

“A half hour to get topped up, people,” said Bingo. “Then we're off again.”

Attached to the largest building, which seemed a hangar of sorts, was a low structure, tilted away from the roadside, with a broad awning supported by two
stacks of crates. When they hopped out of the plane, the breeze blew at them like a constant hot exhaust, a wall of white sand-filled air. The low structure provided shade, but the moment they entered it they realized that the corrugated tin roof acted like a pot lid. It was stifling inside.

The place was empty except for a stick of a man behind a café counter, and two men in crumpled suits made of linen that had once been white. They sat at a small round table in the back of the room, a bottle of something brown on their table, surrounded by tiny glasses.

The smell of the café was wretched.

Becca felt the acidic contents of her stomach rising up her throat, burning it. She only kept herself from vomiting by pinching her nose tight and breathing through her mouth.

A tinny melody just shy of complete static surged in and out of a radio powered by an electric cord dangling from the ceiling fan. The fan rotated as slowly as possible.

“I say, chaps, need to fuel up my Piper,” Bingo said to anyone listening. “Is Freddy still around these parts? We're rather in a rush.”

“And water?” asked Darrell. “Do you have water?”

The man behind the counter, who hadn't moved except to watch them stumble in, opened his mouth as slowly as possible. “Freddy gone. Water, twenty dollar.”

“Seriously?” Becca snapped. “We're dying here. Twenty dollars?”

The man shrugged. “Twenty-five.”

There came a chuckle from the back of the room. The far larger of the two men fanned his wet face with a grimy straw fedora. He set it back on his head for a moment, then removed it to fan some more. He had a face completely without wrinkles—boylike, thought Becca—and she guessed that Lily, if she hadn't been so quiet for the last hour, would give him the name Bigboy, so that's what she called him in her head.

“Some vater for our guests, Prince Ali,” Bigboy said unpleasantly in a Northern European accent that Becca guessed might be Dutch. “Put it on the company tab, along with the petrol for our Spartan out there. Chop-chop.”

It was insulting and racist, thought Becca. Bigboy was like a throwback to a nasty old movie about linen-suited jerks in Africa. The man behind the counter shrugged and produced a plastic jug of warm water. Darrell took a cup of it to his mother, while Bingo went with the counter man outside to supervise the
refueling of their plane.

“Thinks are different here,” Bigboy said, without explaining what he meant. He seemed of indeterminate age. His skin was pink and very smooth with a hint of fuzz above his upper lip. His suit consisted of yards and yards of fabric.

Wade turned away from them and whispered to Becca from the corner of his mouth. “Do you think, I mean, that they were waiting for us?”

Becca frowned. “Except who knew we'd be landing here?”

“They always know,” Darrell said under his breath.
“She
always knows.”

Which was normally true. But here in the middle of the Algerian desert? Was it really possible that they'd known of their arrival, had flown here to be on-site when they arrived? Even Galina wasn't that clever.

The man with Bigboy was his complete opposite: a slender, almost two-dimensional guy with no waist or chest or shape at all, but whose face was stubbly and brown and as long as a sad mask at a theater. He wore a pair of goggles pushed up on his tall, sloping forehead. His mouth remained open the whole time, as if he were singing, “Ohhhhh.”

He was Fish.

Bigboy rose nimbly from his chair—weightlessly, Becca thought—and wove between the tables over to them, while Fish just leaned up against the wall, picking his teeth with what appeared to be a needle.

“Hello, my frents,” Bigboy said to them. “I say to myself, it is odd to espy such a grouping as yourselves in the desert, is it not? Then I realize. Of course! You are the Kepelens, yes? You are. You would like to esk me how I know? I will tell you how I know. My name is Hendriks. Dutch, yes? Dutch, of course. My colleague here is Emil. You will never guess what.”

“Guess what?” asked Darrell.

Bigboy laughed. “Emil is Polish! Just like your Magister Copernicus!”

The room went silent, except for the radio's crackling static.

“Your expressions tell me you
are
the Kepelens! Emil, we were correct.”

Fish spoke. “We were.”

“You're with Drangheta?” said Sara. “Or the Teutonic Order?”

“This name Drangheta we do not know,” Bigboy said with a wide grin that produced no wrinkles in his face.
“But yes, Emil and I are knights of ze Teutonic Order. Naturally, we will kill you ze moment you try to exit outside zis café.”

Becca looked at Wade and Darrell, then at Bigboy. “Really?” she said. “You just come right out and say it? That you're a killer with the Order?”

Emil paused from picking his teeth. “It is too hot for banter.”

“Ha! Ha!” Bigboy said, his brow pouring sweat into his eyes, which he wiped almost constantly with a splotchy brown handkerchief. “My colleague spiks the truth. It is too hot to beat round bushes. Beating round anything is
très
exhausting. So let us just come out and say it. We all relax sooner when you are dead.”

“Not us so much,” Darrell grumbled. Becca saw his eyes searching every inch of the café. Probably to find something to throw at these two goons.

“The genius of Galina Krause,” Bigboy said, “is that she alerted everyone in North Africa. Agents are strung from city to city along the entire Mediterranean. She knows the next relic is near. When you left Casablanca, we were notified. We were
all
notified. If you are not tracked, your plane was.”

Lily laughed wickedly. “City to city, huh? So how did you rate this dump?”

Bigboy's fat grin died in an instant. “I
could
just kill you now—”

“Hendriks,” said Emil. “Remember.”

Bigboy growled to himself. “Ah, yes. The telephone.” He lumbered over to the counter and fished beneath it. He pulled up an old telephone and dialed it.

Becca had an idea. It wasn't much, and it depended on all of them picking up on it without her being able to tell them. There was no finger clue, so she made one up. She held up the index finger of her right hand, and drew a slithery line across her forehead.
Snake, get it?
She hoped they would.

She moved slowly in front of the others, nudging Wade in the process.

“I'm sure we can resolve this,” she said softly. “Your boss . . .”

“Miss Galina,” said Emil, his eyes lighting up as he spat blood onto the floor near his feet. “What about her?”

“We have something she wants. It's in the plane.”

“Becca,” said Sara.

At that moment, the counter man reentered the saloon, leaving Bingo outside to finish the refueling by himself.

Lily stood up. “Becca, what are you doing?”

“It's in a tin box under one of the seats,” Becca said.

Wade raised his eyes to her. He'd understood, even if Lily hadn't yet. “You can have it,” he said. “As long as you let us go free.”

“You guys are crazy!” said Lily. “There's the—”

“Relic in the tin box,” Wade jumped in. “Yeah, we know. But we have to, Lily. To save ourselves.”

Lily got it. She looked at all of them, one after the other, and pretended she was shocked at their betrayal. She put her head in her hands and began to fake-sob. “I can't believe . . . the relic that we've been searching for . . . and we're just giving it away!”

“Becca, it's too precious.” Sara was in on it now, too. “You can't. We can't.”

“To delay your deaths, you will!” Bigboy said with a chuckle. “But it is true. The slightest pressure of the Teutonic Order gets results, does it not, Emil?”

“Mmm,” Emil grunted. “It's that Galina. She scares people.”

“As do we, Emil. As do we.”

“Let me get the box for you,” Darrell said. He stepped toward the door.

“Ha!” Emil growled. “Nothing doing. You'll alert your pilot. The little girl leads. I go with.”

“While I,” added Bigboy, “hold the rest of the family
hostage.” He removed a handgun, which, by the look of it, hadn't been fired in years. “No moving. You, either, Aladdin.” He referred to the counter man with another insult.

A few minutes later, Lily stumbled back into the room, followed by Fish, who held the dented tin box in both hands and said, “Guess what? They have a book open to a page about Carthage!”

Bigboy beamed. “Galina, she will love us. Now, bring me the relic box!”

“I'll open it for you,” said Sara, reaching for it.

“Ha! Not!” said Bigboy. He pranced over to Emil, undid the latch, and lifted the lid. Corky hissed and sprang out of the box. Bigboy screamed. He clutched his face, and Emil lurched forward. Darrell pushed Fish at Wade, who kicked him behind the knees. Both men were now on the floor with Corky, screaming at the top of their lungs.

Bingo rushed in. “Out!” he yelled, shooing the kids and Sara to the plane.

They scrambled into the Flitfire, all of them, and Darrell spun the propeller. It caught the first time. He swung in through the cockpit door as the plane started to roll, and they sped down the airstrip, finally skimming the crests of the dunes in a zigzag pattern
to evade any retribution.

Wishful thinking.

The distinctive
pop-pop-pop
of gunfire crackled in the air, and there was Bigboy holding his face with one hand while he fired at them like an angry brat.

The engine sputtered.

The old Flitfire dipped.

The desert came rushing up at them.

“B
last it all!”

Bingo wrenched the stick back, but the plane lost altitude so fast, Lily's empty stomach slid into her throat.

“That baby-faced blighter hit our engine and our lovely fuel tank. Sorry, chaps and ladies. You'll have to catch another sort of ride from here. Hold on!”

The engine continued to sputter until it died out, then caught again, then sputtered. The sand Lily had found so exhilarating before was getting way too close. “Should we bail out or something?”

“I'd pray or something,” said Bingo. “We're fresh out of parachutes.”

After a few miles, the Flitfire finally dipped too low to stay aloft. It bounced down onto a flat stretch of sand and grass, skidding roughly and nearly tipping over twice, but Bingo held it more or less steady until it jerked to a violent stop. The engine gasped out a puff of black smoke and died.

They climbed out. Bingo inspected the engine and the fuselage, but the plane was essentially finished, because the tank was, as he said, “Swiss-cheesed!”

“Bingo, can you tell where we are?” Sara asked, unfolding a map that had tumbled out from under her seat during landing.

“Well,” said Bingo, looking in every direction, then at the map. “The desert, for sure. But to be more accurate, I'd say we're . . . here!” He pointed to a large unmarked area between Casablanca and Tunis. “Which is to say, nowhere in particular, but we're not back there with Babyboy and the Edge, and that's progress!”

“They have a plane,” said Darrell, “and are probably already on the way to Carthage.”

“But they don't need to see us. Help me drag the mesh over the plane,” said Bingo, climbing back into the cockpit. He tugged out a large folded tarpaulin that had the mottled look of desert camouflage. With all of them helping, and Darrell and Wade balanced on the
wing, they were able to shroud the plane enough, Lily hoped, to obscure it from the air.

“Do other planes land here?” asked Sara.

Bingo consulted the map again, frowned and scratched his chin, and finally grinned. “By Jove! We're actually in Tunisia, after all. Crashed, of course, but alive. I think I can get us out of this mess. Eventually.” He hauled himself back into the cockpit and cranked up the radio. He soon raised a signal from Médiouna.

“Oh, I say, Pinky? We've encountered rather a spot of bad luck here. No, no, safe and sound. And not far from Tunis as it happens. But listen, can you send a car, a large toolbox, a new fuel tank, yourself and Gussie, and a snake rope to these coordinates?”

He glanced at the map and gave the numbers to his friend. “Splendid! And ring up Jendouba for any old thing that rolls. Our passengers need to keep moving pronto. No hurry for me! Oh, and bring a pile of sandwiches and maybe a pistol or two, would you? There's a good chap.”

Bingo settled himself on the sand in the shade of the wing to wait. “I suggest you get out of the sun, too. There are birds, you know. They sniff folks in trouble.”

Darrell snorted. “Let me guess. Egyptian vultures?”

“You're quite the naturalist, you are!” Bingo said, as
they all crawled in under the net. “Yes. Big red birds. Rather like condors.”

Even in the shade the heat was stifling and heavy. Lily closed her eyes, felt herself drifting off. For nearly two hours, she slept. They all did, apparently. It was finally deep afternoon when they woke up to the sound of a rumbling motor. An old fenderless, roofless Jeep bounced over the dunes toward them. Driving it was a woman in colorful scarves that flew behind her like a hundred banners. She wore a scarf draped tight over her face.

“Oh, what luck! It's Alula!” Bingo waved her down. “She's a dear. You'll be in old Carthage by whenever she gets you there. I'm sure of it!”

Sara quickly negotiated a ride with Alula, who promised to drop them in Tunis, “in two hour, no less, maybe more.”

“We really want to be there by nightfall,” said Darrell.

“Certainly, maybe. Come!”

They crammed into the Jeep, Sara in the passenger seat, the rest of them in various positions in the stripped backseat. Because the Jeep was open, and the sun still high, the heat was incredible, but Darrell noted that it was “dry heat, so we don't sweat so much, except for
maybe Wade because he's got such a head start on the rest of us,” a remark that made no sense to any of them.

They did need to drink as much as they could, and Alula had stocked plenty of water bottles for them. When a hot wind blew at them out of the northwest, she began to tell them about desert winds. Lily loved their romantic names.

“Simoom
is one,” Alula said musically. “There is also the
harmattan,
and the dry
ghibli,
and the sweet and salty
imbat
that comes mostly from the water. There is the
solano,
too . . .”

The first hour came and went. They were quiet, exhausted. Lily ached all over. The attack at the villa, their chase through the medina, the terror at the desert café—they were wearing her down. But more than everything else was the persistent worry about the phone call she'd have to make but couldn't bring herself to face.

Whatever her parents said would change everything.

To Becca, the terrain in Tunisia was so different from the dune-filled deserts in Algeria. Here there were waist-high grasses and weeds, wind-tossed flowers, and the remains of what looked like stalks of wheat. The landscape greened up the farther east and north they
drove, reminding her of the olive tree in the drawing.

She slid on the
ocularia
and tried to read more words on the silver page, but no matter how she arranged the lenses, the rest of the story was locked away.

“These glasses are like a key, too,” she said. “Or many keys. There are so many combinations of the lenses, but only one that will unlock the next passage. Something in Tunis may tell us. I hope.”

“Not long to Tunis,” said Alula. “One hour. No less.”

Soon the land began to slope down to the sea, the day faded, the white sky turned blue and purple in the east, and the kids finally spotted the outskirts of the sprawling metropolis of Tunis. The giant Mediterranean beyond lay out to the horizon like a great flat darkness.

They stopped to get gas, which Sara paid for. While they were waiting, Becca had one more idea and drew the diary from her bag.

“Alula, excuse me, but would you have any idea what this means?” She opened to the page with the drawing of Carthage. “We know it says ‘Carthage,' and that it's probably about when the city was destroyed. But the olive tree? And the sun? Do you have any idea what it means?”

The woman leaned her head over the picture. “Well, it is an olive tree. It's growing out of a column. They
say that all the marble from Carthage was used to build new things.”

“I knew it!” said Wade. “That was my idea. But what did they build?”

Alula shrugged. “Old things in Tunis. I don't know. But look. I show you the word of
column.
Here.” She wrote it down in Becca's notebook. “The word for
sun
is this. And
olive
is this.”

Becca studied Alula's fluid finger motions as she wrote the words in her notebook, although she realized that “wrote” was hardly the correct word for what she had done on the page. It was painting. “That's beautiful. Thank you.”

“I hope it helps,” the woman said.

“It all helps,” said Sara. “Very much. If you can, would you please drop us off at the American embassy? I'll call my husband from there, and we can use their services to narrow our search even more.”

Alula smiled. “It is but minutes away. No less.” Ten minutes later, she left them outside a gray building complex in a large fenced-off area.

“Here. American embassy. I hope you find what you're looking for.”

“Thank you, so much,” Sara replied.

“That is
shukran jazeelan,
in Arabic,” Alula said.
“Thank you for an adventure!”

Once they were inside the embassy—using their real passports for the first time in days—Sara placed a call to Roald while Becca and the others searched out the tiny library. Since the outline of the allegorical drawing led them to think that what they were looking for might be an old mosque, Becca asked the young man behind the counter for information.

“As you can guess, we have several very old ones,” he said, setting them up at a computer. He unfolded a map of the city. It was printed in both English and Arabic. He circled the many mosques. Lily slid into the seat in front of the computer, Becca spread out the diary and her notebook, and Wade brought out his own notebook, with Darrell leaning over his shoulder.

They began to work.

“Out of the seventeen mosques,” Becca said, “two are modern, and eight others were built later than the fifteen hundreds. That leaves seven.”

Seven mosques.

Between yawns, Lily dug at the internet, following one link, finding nothing, backtracking, then moving forward again. She followed
olive
and
olive tree,
then
allegorical drawings,
which only made her crazy. From
there, she jogged back and forth between
Carthage
and
marble,
until she found actual internet confirmation of what they had guessed.

“A lot of building material from Carthage was brought to Tunis,” she said. “They built some of the oldest buildings built. Some of them are still standing.”

“What about buildings from Hijri 84?” asked Darrell.

“That's a little harder to find,” she said. “It's not like they have a list of the year a building was born. Built. Whatever. I'm so tired.”

“I can take over, Lil, if you want,” Wade said.

“Please,” she said. “I'd better call home.”

She turned her phone on for the first time since Casablanca, wondering if it would ring the moment it powered up. It didn't. But there were three text messages waiting for her. They were group texts, sent from two phones to all three of them.

The first, from her mother, said,
Please call, dear.
Then her father texted,
Good news.
Finally, her mother added,
We think it's good news.

She nearly dropped the phone, her hand was trembling so violently. The roller coaster of it made her want to scream. She drew a long slow breath and started to tap in her mother's phone number. There was every
reason to call home now
—right now
—and only one reason not to. She was afraid of what “good news” could possibly mean, and who it was good for. She glanced over at the others. They were all bent over books and maps, absorbed in deciphering the drawing. Darrell flicked his eyes over at her, then buried his head again. She drew another breath and blinked her eyes dry. She disabled her phone from accepting incoming calls—an easy hack, after all. She powered off the phone and went back to the others.

“So, what did you find out?”

Darrell grumbled. “Not much. If we're right that the drawing refers to a mosque near Carthage, we still don't know what the olive tree and the sun are supposed to mean.”

“We're going around and around, hoping to get closer, but not hitting on the critical clue,” Becca said, rubbing her eyes. “We need help. Human help.”

“I have an idea,” Lily said. She slid Becca's notebook off the table and marched over to the clerk's desk. “Excuse me, we have this picture that we're trying to figure out. . . .”

He brightened as he looked at Becca's rendition of the drawing. “Mostly I research passports and things. I rather like this.” He glanced at the drawing and spoke
the same words Alula had, as he looked at the picture.
Column
and
sun,
and then he came to the olive tree.

“The Arabic for
olive,”
he said, “is pronounced ‘zy-toon.'”

Lily nodded. “Okay . . .”

“‘Zy-toon,'” he repeated, coming out from behind his desk. “Didn't you see? The mosques I circled for you on the English map.” He led her back to their table, scanned the map, then tapped his finger on one of the circles he had drawn. “Al-Zaytuna Mosque,” he said. “The mosque of the olive tree. It is one of the oldest in Tunis. And yes, it was built with marble from Carthage. The guides always tell you so!”

Becca jumped up from the table. “Thank you! Thank you!”

Lily took a breath. She had to keep going to keep her mind off . . . the other thing. “Intelligence officer coming through,” she said, nudging Wade from the computer. Her fingers blurred over the keyboard; then she punched the Enter key.

“Okay. Al-Zaytuna. Something, something . . . The marble of the columns and the arches and the main courtyard, as well as—ha!—a famous
sundial,
were built with marble from the ruins of Carthage.” She spun around in her chair and faced them, beaming a
big smile. “The first Barbarossa key, the first key to Triangulum, is in this mosque. Copernicus and Barb Two hid it there. And that's where we're going right now!”