The Serpent's Curse (17 page)

The ticket was for an opera performance in Venice, Italy, the following evening.

“Mozart's
The Magic Flute
,” Becca said. “The last line of the ticket says, ‘The bearers are allowed entry to Box Three-Seventeen.'
Scatola del teatro
means ‘theater box.'”

What was so necessary about Boris attending an opera eluded Wade, and he wondered what would happen if the Russian didn't show up, but he lodged the question in the back of his brain anyway.
Everything is a clue. Everyone is suspicious. Nothing is coincidental.

“You first. Others stay,” a stern-looking immigration official barked at his father, who had been successfully keeping them together as a group. Glancing back, his dad went to the counter and spoke with the official, who looked past him at the kids. Finally the official nodded and let him through.

“Cool. We're in,” Lily said. “Saint Sergius monastery, here we come.” She was next with her documents, then Darrell, then Becca, and finally Wade.

As the others had done, Wade handed over his passport and the tourist visa that Boris had filled out in his name. His chest spiked with a sudden fear. Was there any way the officials could tell just by looking at them that the visas were “smuggled,” whatever that actually meant? And if not here, how long
would
it be before they were stopped, pulled off into a small room, and interrogated?

Or worse. You could be arrested, right? Jailed like Maxim? What was Boris's prison with the parquet floors? Kremlin? Red Square? No. Lubyanka. A somber word.

The official nodded him forward, and he breathed with relief, when a male guard with one hand on a holstered handgun stopped him abruptly. “No, no,” he said, planting his feet in front of Wade. “No, no. Step aside. Here.”

For a half second Wade imagined they had discovered the dagger, but he didn't have the dagger. Certainly not the tooth?

“Excuse me,” his father said, “this is my son—”

“Stand back, sir,” the guard snapped, shooting his father a look. Then, fingering Wade's passport and visa, he nodded at the officers tending the security gate. “Vade Keplen of America, step aside. Others go through.”

When they didn't move, the guard repeated, “Go through!”

Wade's heart misfired. The back of his neck froze. He watched blurrily as his father and the others stepped down the narrow hallway toward the terminal, staring back at him. He fought an icy stream of nausea coming up his throat.

Don't sweat, bro.

Yeah, that ship had sailed. His armpits were soggy; his forehead was beading up.

“I really didn't do anything . . .”

A heavyset woman with gray hair waddled through the mass of officers surrounding him. She smelled of boiled food. Her name tag read
I. LYUBOV
. She snatched his documents from the guard and flicked her eyes from them to Wade without raising her head. “You are Vade Keplen from Texes.”

If it was a question, it didn't sound like one, but he answered anyway. “Yes, ma'am. Wade Kaplan. From Texas.” A moment later he thought to add, “America.”

Another long minute of nothing. No movement or sign from the stony face. He wiped the sweat under his eyes, careful to raise his hand slowly in case they thought he was going for a weapon. His insides were turning to water. How had Darrell known? He glanced down the hall. His family was nearly invisible now among the crush of approved passengers.
Becca, is that you?
The woman shifted heavily from foot to foot. Her eyes told him nothing. Steel hatches bolted closed.
She's trying to get me to crack. That's what she's doing. She expects me to blurt out the name of the relic and its original Guardian and the monastery we're going to—

“Yes. Fine. Go now vis femily. Enjoy stay.” The woman handed him back his documents, spun on her low heels more lightly than he'd imagined she would, and slid into a glass booth, where she picked up a telephone.

Startled, he emerged into the hallway and into the arms of his father.

“What did she ask you?” his father asked him.

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Russia,” Lily said. “Our grandparents have stories.”

Wade swallowed hard. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

Becca wanted nothing other than to yank Wade away from the plump woman with the bun and the constant scowl. She saw his eyes find hers out of the crowd and tried to lock on to him, but things moved too quickly from that point on and didn't stop until they were out in the stale air of the main terminal, and the noise crashed in on her again.

“What was that all about?” she asked when they piled on an escalator down to ground level.

“I don't know.” He was shaking all over. His voice was hoarse. “I don't even know.”

“Maybe now we're tagged,” Lily whispered. “They tagged us.”

“Tagged?” said Darrell.

“Like when you take clothes into a dressing room,” she said. “Some stores scan the tags to make sure they know exactly what you went in with. There might have been something about your tourist visa. I saw Bun Lady make a phone call after she let you go. Maybe we're being followed by the Russian police right this minute.”

“Or KGB agents,” Darrell said. He glanced quickly around them. “They're in disguise, of course. Much better than Lily's umbrella killer. You never see them until they pounce on you; then it's too late. James Bond could tell you.”

“The KGB is called the FSB now,” Becca said, “and anyway, we should totally expect it. Duke Vasily was a friend of Albrecht's, remember. Maybe they're still working together. The Order and the FSB. As scary as Berlin was, or London, this is worse. So much worse.”

It was a lot of words for Becca, she knew that. But she felt she had to get it out there.

Because when you think about it . . . what just happened with Wade almost certainly means that the Order knows exactly where we are and what we're doing. The Russian safe house,
she thought.
How will we get there without the Order's agents tracking us? Even with Julian's untraceable phones, going to an airport tells everyone where you are.

They walked unhindered through the terminal and outside into the icy, smoke-thick, and diesel-clogged air. It was frigid, a new kind of iron cold that froze your bones.

“Even though we pretty much know that Umbrella Man killed Boris,” Lily said as Roald led them to the platform for the shuttle that was supposed to take them to the rental car center, “does it mean we automatically believe everything Boris told us? He did hide his real name from us. Could our trip to Russia be a setup?”

Darrell stomped his feet to keep warm. “Yeah, we have to think of that. Even though his visas got us in here safely. All except Wade, I mean. He's on borrowed time. Lubyanky, here you come.”

“Funny,” said Wade, splaying five fingers in Darrell's face.

“Calm down, everyone,” Roald said. “We'll talk when we get into our car.” He waved down the rental car shuttle bus like a soccer dad on the sidelines. The driver seemed to make the stop grudgingly, as if picking up passengers were voluntary. Scowling, he whisked the door open but didn't leave his seat or help them stow their bags.

“Let's keep focused,” Roald whispered as they mounted the steps to their seats. “The car ride to Saint Sergius will take us a couple of hours. But we have to remember, it's a holy place and a shrine, where Maxim and thousands of monks lived, all the way up to now. We are polite, we're tourists, we're Texans, but we watch our backs, stay together, and if we find ourselves against a wall, we
don't fight anyone
.” His voice grew louder with the last three words, but he lowered it again. “There's always another way to solve things. After Saint Sergius, we'll drive back to Moscow. We'll be here again before it gets dark.”

“If you ask me, it's already dark,” Darrell grumbled. “Let's go already.”

I
t was just after two o'clock in the afternoon when Lily and the others emerged from the rental car center under a grim sky swirling with gray clouds. Uncle Roald squeezed behind the wheel of a boxy blue Aleko sedan like a giant on a tricycle. The rest of them squished in wherever they could. The car stank of diesel fuel inside and out, but it drove perkily enough to push Lily back in her seat when Roald hit the accelerator.

“Finally, we're moving,” Darrell said with a sigh.

“Agreed,” said Wade. “Thank you, Boris.”

“And Terence Ackroyd,” Roald reminded them. “This car will free up our movements. Public transportation here is too public. There are CCTV cameras everywhere. After the monastery, we'll hole up in the Moscow safe house, but until then we have no footprint. We spend as little money as we can. We slip in and out of wherever we are like ghosts.”

Lily wasn't sure he expected or wanted a response from anyone, but she gave one anyway. “I'm totally into that.” She liked their new secrecy and felt safer because of the precautions, even the troublesome finger gestures.
But ghosts? I really like that.

The roads out of the airport were surprisingly simple. But the weather was turning grayer by the minute, more bitterly cold, and the clouds announced that serious snow was on its way. The Aleko's heating system was loud and ineffective.

“If, as we all pretty much hope, Maxim Grek
does
prove to be the second Guardian,” Becca said, turning to the double-eyed figure sketched in the diary's margin, “the monastery where he lived his last years might actually give me something to decode these pages, which I am now calling ‘the Guardian Files.'”

Darrell nodded, smiling. “Nice. I think we should name everything. It makes it seem more important that way.”

Wade turned. “I name you . . . Darrell.”

Darrell grinned. “I already feel important.”

For the next hour, Lily searched online encyclopedia entries about Saint Sergius on the tablet, covering as much history as she could. “Sergiev Posad,” she told them, “is the first stop on the western side of what is called ‘the Golden Ring,' a four-hundred-mile drive through a bunch of ancient monastic towns stretching northeast of Moscow. The monastery of Saint Sergius was founded in 1345 and is still the most important monastery in the country. It's also the center of the Russian Orthodox Church. It's called a
lavra
, which is a monastery including a bunch of cells for hermits. There are over three hundred monks there now.”

“An army, if they're all working for the Order,” Darrell said.

“Darrell, they're not,” his stepfather said.

There was little information about Maxim's stay there, except to say that cells from around the time of his death might still exist. “Which is good,” she said. “But the monastery's also under renovation, which could be a problem. The original cells were built inside the walls. We should start there and see where it takes us.”

After a good stretch of highway driving, Wade arched up in his seat. “I think I see it. The monastery.”

They were still miles from the city proper, but a cluster of towers rose over the landscape like beacons. The monastery seemed enormous, perched on a hill and surrounded by tall, powerful, whitewashed stone walls set at irregular angles. Some portions of the walls were fitted with scaffolding, while dozens of domed towers loomed over the walls, some dazzlingly blue and spangled with stars like the night sky, others brilliant gold, and every one of them dusted with a ring of fresh snow.

All told, the drive to Sergiev Posad had taken a little over two hours, putting them there at roughly half past four. The large parking area had only a few cars in it, a smattering of work trucks, and one police vehicle, idling at an angle to the front gate. Roald parked at the far end of the lot, and they got out. They walked quietly through the mounting wind toward the entrance gate in the shadow of the walls.

Then Roald paused and checked his watch. “Kids . . .” His voice was low, almost hoarse from not speaking. “This is a different land, one with centuries of history that Western visitors might not understand. Be on your guard, all of you. And I'll say it again. Absolutely
do not
confront anyone. This is serious. More serious than serious.”

As if the few birds and the roaring of traffic and even the movement of the air understood his words, the instant they passed through the massive monastery gate, quiet fell over them like a low, gray, heavy, ominous shadow.