The Serpent's Curse (29 page)

“When Boris and Aleksandr were boys,” said Becca.

“It is a wonder to watch you work,” the inspector said. “You are rather amazing.”

“Thanks,” said Lily. “We're learning.” She hit another link, then another, started scrolling and scrolling, then stopped. “Yes, oh, yes! This is it. The message inside the clock is written in Linear B. Look.”

She flipped the tablet around for everyone to see.

“The note for Boris uses the symbols of Linear B,” she said. “Each symbol translates to the sound shown underneath each character.”

The four characters of the message . . . translated to . . .
wo ro ku ta
.

“What's
worokuta
?” Becca asked. “Lil, again, please?”

She typed that in. “There's ‘Wirikuta.' It's a site sacred to the Wixárika Nation, Indians in Mexico. It's supposed to be the place the world was created—”

“No,” Becca said.

“It's
not
where the world was created?” asked Wade.

“No,
worokuta
is not
Wirikuta
,” she said, “because there are actual Linear B symbols for ‘wi' and ‘ri,' but the message uses the ones for ‘wo' and ‘ro,' which means that whoever sent it was saying something else to Boris.”

They looked to the inspector. “I am sorry. I wish I could tell you what
worokuta
means, but I studied criminal justice, not dead languages. It means nothing to me.”

They all went quiet. Their most recent rest had been on the flight to Venice, many long hours before. Since then, the attack on the Guardian messenger at the opera, the canal chase, the enigma of the clock's strange code, and Darrell's gloomy message had left them drained and exhausted.

They really needed to rest.

But Wade knew they never would.

Saint Petersburg

March 24

D
arrell stared from the windows of the arrivals hall at Saint Petersburg's Pulkovo Airport as he had without pause for nearly three hours, hoping every incoming flight would be his brother's jet from Venice by way of Moscow.

His stepfather was pacing as usual, but Darrell found himself frozen to the spot, unable to do anything but scan the sky for incoming aircraft. He feared that the moment he left his post, or moved a single atom of air, the last three hours of fruitless waiting would reset and begin again.

Greywolf was a centuries-old fortress buried in evergreen forests and rocky terrain more than two hundred miles from where he was standing. His mother was a prisoner there, trapped inside a device that was ticking down to midnight that night, a mere fifteen hours away.

But if Galina Krause had kidnapped his mother as ransom to force them to give her Vela—and Serpens, if they had it—why, Darrell asked himself, why was his mother in a machine ticking down to something horrible?

Why kill my mother?

What does the machine do?

A flurry of people broke into the baggage area. Looking exhausted, dragging luggage, they swarmed across the floor. Then he saw three people weaving through the crowd, running when they could, followed by a tall mustached man. There was Lily's worried face. Then Wade's. Finally Becca's. There was no reunion, no time for one.

“Terence will be here soon,” Darrell said, hurrying to meet them. “Flying one of those NetJet thingies, a private plane from London. He's a pilot. A good one, they say. Anyway, Greywolf is an old castle, two hundred miles outside the city. An hour's flight. Once we get started.”

“Darrell found the fortress,” Roald told them. “We confirmed and double confirmed it, but he found it first.”

“It's that brain.” Wade gave Darrell a soft punch in the arm. “Every once in a while, he blows out the cobwebs, and it works. It even surprises him. Not us, though.”

Darrell wanted to laugh, but he couldn't make himself. All he saw was his mother's face and
it
—a giant clockwork machine . . . gears and wheels . . . “Greywolf is a horrible place. But we have help.” He nodded toward the two investigators, who were busily checking their computers. “They're coming with us.”

Terence landed at noon, two hours later than expected. He'd had to switch jets at the last moment, for one with a greater flight range.

“So sorry,” he said. “But the delay gave me time to consult with the archivist at the Ministry of Defence in London. She discovered a rare aerial snapshot of the area taken in 1941. It's apparently the last clear photo of the place before the Soviets completed camouflaging the grounds. The image indicates a private landing strip on the Greywolf property.” He enlarged it on his phone. “Pray that the strip is still functional.”

As soon as his jet had refueled, the Kaplans, Paul, and Marceline took their seats in the cabin and Terence in the cockpit. The jet was a sleek winged missile with a single large cabin, and a half-dozen swivel chairs and low tables. According to Terence, it was quite fast and nimble.

“There's an arctic blast roaring down from Finland,” he said from the cockpit. “We've no time to lose if we're to stay ahead of it.”

Within minutes, the jet was speeding down the tarmac. It lifted off into a bleak gray sky, even as the first wave of snow moved in from the west. Darrell checked his watch. It was 1:07 p.m. Ten hours and fifty-three minutes to midnight.

Republic of Karelia, Northwest Russia

N
ow that they were on their way to Greywolf—all eight of them—Lily wondered if they would bust into Galina's creepy lair with guns blazing and bombs booming. Well, guns, anyway. The two private investigators were huddled together, checking and rechecking their weapons.

“The Red Brotherhood will be in force,” Paul Ferrere said. “We must expect a battle.”

“We will shield you to do your work,” said Marceline.

Our work,
Lily thought.
We know that Sara's there, caged up in a machine with gears and wheels and junk—whatever that is. But is the relic there, too? And what about
worokuta
?

Becca and Wade were furiously consulting their notebooks to put that latest clue into place. Lily knew that soon her digital fiddling wouldn't cut it anymore. The relic hunt, the
Sara
hunt, would soon become physical. Analog. Trekking through the trees and rocks and snow. Not Lily's area of intelligence officering.

But right now she was ready for the next digital problem they might throw at her.

“Anything?” she asked.

Wade tapped a page in his notebook. “There are words I must have gotten wrong when Boris was talking. He said ‘log punked.' Remember that?”

“I do,” said Darrell. “He and Alek sent messages to each other ‘even in log punked.'”

“Well, I know I got it wrong,” said Wade, “but does anyone remember it better?”

Lily had forgotten
log punked
. Probably because she'd been too busy deciding which of Boris's eyes to respond to.

But Uncle Roald tilted his head as if searching the air between their seats. “You told me Boris said he grew up in a labor camp, because that's where his father was sent after the Second World War, right? Well, the Soviet system of labor camps was called the gulag. It's an anagram of some kind, but the ‘ag' in Russian is a common thing. Maybe Boris was saying
l-a-g
something, not
l-o-g
something. Whatever that might mean.”

“Is that enough to start?” Becca asked Lily.

“Since you asked so nicely . . .” But no sooner had Lily keyed in the letters
l-a-g-p-u
than the search window filled in the remaining letters.

l-a-g-p-u-n-k-t

Holding her fingers up to get everyone's attention, she hit Enter.

The plane bucked once, and her screen froze. The connection was severed.

Terence came on the address system. “Sorry about that. The storm is moving down really fast—” Another slight loss of altitude shook the cabin. “I'm trying to fly south of it. It'll increase our flying time, but maybe we can gain time later. Hold on.”

A few rough minutes passed before they were cruising more steadily. Lily tried again. The connection was restored. She rekeyed the search on
lagpunkt
and hit Enter for the second time. The screen refreshed.

“‘A
lagpunkt
is a subsection of a forced labor camp,'” she read. “Which is helpful but not too specific.” She hit a second link, which featured an excerpt from a book about the history of Siberian labor camps. She silently scanned a paragraph about the day the inmates received the news of Josef Stalin's death in 1953—Stalin being the guy who'd exiled many of them to the labor camps in the first place. It said that Stalin would be buried with honors in Red Square. Boris had told them that, too. Lily quickly read the rest of the piece, then nearly jumped out of her seat.

In a very slow voice, she said, “There is a reference here to . . . to . . . Hey, are you all listening? There is a reference here to a . . . ‘Vorkuta
lagpunkt
.'”

Becca gasped. “Vorkuta!
Worokuta!
Lily, you—are—brilliant!”

“I know, right?” Lily said. “There's got to be more.” Which there was. Again, thanks to the nifty feature that filled in the letters of a possible search even before you keyed it all in, she typed
v-o-r-k
and, boom, the term was identified.

“Vorkuta is a Russian industrial city in Siberia, about eleven hundred miles from Saint Petersburg. We're actually flying in the same direction right now. It was a big coal mining area from the nineteen thirties. There was a prison camp there until the nineteen seventies. Now it's a giant city with a shrinking population and not much coal. . . .”

“So what are we saying?” asked Darrell. “That's where the relic is? Or part of it?”

“Maybe,” said Roald. “But if there were any records, we
might
find that Vorkuta is where Boris and his brother grew up, and where they sent coded messages to each other.”