The Serpent's Curse (33 page)

W
ade remembered 1568. He had scratched the number on the wall of his Lubyanka cell. It was the year Albrecht von Hohenzollern died.

By this sad time, Copernicus is dead. Albrecht von Hohenzollern is an old man, and yet we see him, struggling through the storm to a small abode on Gołębia Street, in the shadow of the great university, the university that Copernicus himself attended.

Albrecht's spies have told him that a man, one Georg Joachim Rheticus, lives in an upper room. Also in that room is one half of a jeweled serpent, given to Rheticus by Maxim Grek. It is the fragment Albrecht has sought for fifty long years.

It is now within his grasp.

“Wait,” Lily interrupted. “Albrecht had the head, and Rheticus had the body. Are you saying . . . they met?”

“Met, knew each other, and on this night saw each other for the very last time. . . .”

Albrecht is accompanied by a handful of men.

One of them is his sole surviving nephew. It is from him we have this story. The men break down the door, mount the stairs. All this happens in moments!

In pain, near death, Albrecht coveted the relic. It is the curse of Serpens, the bloodlust of the relic, which makes all who know of it covet it beyond all things!

Rheticus rises from his lamp-lit desk. He is a younger man by years, but his burdens have reduced his health. The door swings wide. Albrecht enters. Rheticus takes up his rusted sword. They fight. One a Guardian, the other the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order!

Such a battle would be monumental, but they are two old men! They hack away at each other with swords far too heavy for their weak arms. The knights with Albrecht do not intervene. His one surviving nephew watches, catalogs, remembers.

And then the blow. Albrecht's blade across Rheticus's face. The Guardian is blinded, falls. Albrecht grovels on his knees, tears the room apart until he finds the Serpens relic.

He seizes upon it.

He takes it.

Wade couldn't help himself. “So Albrecht had it all.”

“Yes!” Alek said. “The Demon Master brings it back to Königsberg. There he connects the two pieces, head and body. The relic moves . . .”

It breathes! Tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . It is said that Serpens stings him. Perhaps, perhaps not. Either way, within a few short months, Albrecht himself is dead.

“What happens to Serpens?” asked Lily. “Is it still at Königsberg?”

“Ah, no. Because, you see, fortune turns. The history of the relic is as twisted and cursed as the serpent itself. The journey to the finding of it is long, as long as . . . But now we must travel forward in time . . . to April 1945. . . .”

My father, Sergei Rubashov, is a private in the Soviet army. He is a weary foot soldier, harnessed to the great engine of Mother Russia.

By April 1945, you see, the Great Patriotic War against Germany is nearly over. My father is sent with his company to take the castle at Königsberg. To search for Russian art treasures the Germans have stolen since the war began.

Bullets and flames fly on the battlefield, but my father makes it to the castle. What Private Rubashov discovers, however, is no mere Russian treasure. It is a discovery beyond belief. Half of a jeweled serpent, a winged body crafted of silver and diamonds beyond worth. It is the Serpens relic. Incomplete. The body only, headless, unnatural. He does not find the head. But this fragment alone is priceless beyond comprehension.

My father is overtaken by its beauty and power.

He cannot control the greed of his eyes, his heart, his hands. He hides the relic in his rucksack. He says nothing to anyone. He brings it home with him, after the war ends.

Father learns soon that the serpent is cursed. He uncovers its terrifying history. Not only its origin with Copernicus, but how it imprisoned Maxim. How it blinded Rheticus. How it killed Albrecht himself.

To save his soul, my father becomes a Guardian.

The Teutonic Order, high in the Soviet government after the war, learns of his theft. They try to force him to reveal where the serpent is. But he is now a Guardian and will not speak.

He never reveals its hiding place. He is sent to Lubyanka prison, then to Vorkuta. Two years later, he marries an inmate, has two sons. Aleksandr and Boris. Mother dies. Father labors for decades in the mines. He never reveals his secret. For more than fifty years, he never gives it up. Boris becomes a Guardian. I become a Guardian. Still, Father never gives it up. Until his deathbed . . .

He took a breath, listened at the door, and went on.

On his deathbed, father gives me the body of Serpens.

He says, “Keep it safe.”

I say, “Upon my life I will.”

Yet with Father's last breath, already I cannot control my heart and my hands. Even as a fragment, Serpens is magnificent beyond belief. I take it. I hide it. Boris leaves Russia, goes to the West. He is a dissident and must leave to be free. Me, I am already under the yoke of the government. My clinic at Greywolf is my prison. I am forced to stay in the east wing, the surgery. I develop serums, medicines. They work. They cure.

Then, four years ago, a bent little man comes to Greywolf. With him is a girl, young, frail, dying. The man brandishes a pistol. “I am from the Teutonic Order. We have friends in Russia. Many friends. You will cure this girl,” he says to me.

“Ebner von Braun,” said Wade.

Lily shot a look at Wade. “Galina was dying? Of what?”

“Cancer,” Alek said, rubbing his fingertips as if to clean something invisible from them. “But a very rare and almost unknown modality of cancer. I had never seen its like, not until my microscope identified it without question.”

Here I am, a Guardian face-to-face with the Order. I am fearful. Yet I cannot refuse to do the operation. I do not want to reject a child of the Order.

The operation is a success. I beg to leave Greywolf, to join my brother in London. The German man refuses, keeps me under lock and key. “Ensure her recovery. We need this girl!” Then, one night the girl rants in her delirium. Tortured words about a jeweled object in her possession. An object she foraged from Königsberg.

This is both honey and poison to me!

In this way, I become aware that this young girl possesses the legendary head of the very same serpent! Its double eyes are said to be as large as human eyes, blue diamonds of exquisite cut and quality.

“How did Galina get the head?” Lily asked.

Aleksandr paused again to listen at the door. “How does Galina Krause do many things?”

“But you knew what it was?” Wade said.

“Of course I knew!” Aleksandr said sharply. “The serpent my father brought home from Königsberg had already devoured me with its beauty!”

“Why didn't your father find it when he was there in 1945?” Wade asked.

Aleksandr brushed his burned fingers across his forehead. “One legend says that Albrecht hid the two parts separately. The real reason is lost in the past. But do you understand the gift given to me at that moment? If I let my hands do the bidding of my soul, I could possess the entire Serpens relic, as no one has since Copernicus himself!

“I begin to think, with one relic I can find another. And another. I knew how Serpens was said to move in the palm of your hand as if it were alive.
Tick . . . tick . . .
And how it points its head to the south, and its blue eyes begin to glow, and it moves across your palm as if to join with another. Already it is seeking the next relic!”

Aleksandr paused, falling inside himself for an instant before he went on. “I stole the head of Serpens from her. Even from her recovery bed, the girl ordered that they force me to tell where I put it. They set fire to the clinic. . . . Did you know there existed a morgue at Greywolf? Below the surgery, a small room where the bodies of those who perished were taken. My colleagues and I made errors, you know. Experimental surgery . . .”

Wade tried to follow this new idea. “Yes, I understand. But did you escape with Serpens?” He knew how blunt the question was, but he had no time, and the man was beginning to ramble.

“I escaped! Yes, I did. But the head of Serpens? After so many victims over so many years, Serpens is bathed in the blood of the dead,” he said.

“What? Where?” Lily looked ready to jump out of her skin. “Where, Alek?”

“Still this is but half of the story,” Alek said. “Fleeing Greywolf, I stole across Russia to Vorkuta, where my father died. I returned to his mine, where I had hidden the beast. I retrieved the body of Serpens. Realizing that I had sinned with greed, I entrusted the Serpens body to a Guardian far nobler than myself. I bid him hide it away. Since then I live in this mine, the mine that killed my father, and I wait. I knew one day she would find me. She has. Now . . . I will kill her.” He raised the scalpel in his hand.

“Alek, no,” said Lily. “Let's just escape, get out of here.”

“Never!” he said.

“Alek, the Protocol has begun,” said Wade. “The relics need to return to Frombork. We have one already. Vela. It pointed to Serpens, as Serpens will point to the next one. Aleksandr, can you help us find both halves?”

“I am the
only
one who can, but . . .” Aleksandr's breath was like the sound of a car wheezing its last. His lungs were damaged, that was plain. “I am at the end now. I will not come with you. But I will tell you. . . . Did you know that below the surgery was a morgue?”

It was maddening, and Wade turned away. “You told us already, Aleksandr. Where are the two parts of the relic? You had them both. We've traveled half the world to find them. Can you just tell us where they are?”

The man drifted off for a moment, as if falling once more into a trance. Then, stirring, he studied their faces closely and said, “Bathed in blood—”

Three shots exploded suddenly in the passage outside. The door bolts flew across the room like shrapnel. The cabinet toppled away. The iron door to Aleksandr Rubashov's lair crashed open.

M
inutes earlier, Galina stalked through the dusty tunnels like a panther on the hunt. Her scar stung as if it were a raw incision. Her memories cut just as raw. She recalled every moment of the operation Aleksandr Rubashov had performed on her at Greywolf. A hundred thousand precise moments of agony.

“We must be near,” Ebner whispered.

“We are,” she said. “I sense him.”

Now, after four years of her thinking him dead, could the good doctor actually be hiding here? In this . . . tomb?

The servers in the Copernicus Room had cross-referenced thousands of fragments of data about the Rubashov brothers, reducing them to a list of thirty-eight possible origins for the encrypted message meant for Boris. The moment one of those fragments—the name Vorkuta—had been identified as the mine where the Rubashovs' father had died, Galina had been certain. No doubt her failed episode in Venice had given the same information to the Kaplans, if they knew enough to decipher whatever code Aleksandr had used.

“How ironic life and death are,” Ebner mused. “A man
we
believed to be dead sends a message to a man
he
believes to be alive. Curiously, we were both wrong.”

She slowed and turned to him. “Ironic, Dr. von Braun? We have been wrong far too many times for it to be ironic. We are in Russia, where I nearly perished four years ago. Is
that
ironic?”

“No, no, of course not,” he said. He resumed his stumbling, four steps behind her. Cassa strode three paces after him, the heavy weapon slung over his shoulder, so primed she could smell the petrol.

“Once we locate what I have come for, nothing remains,” she said. “Cassa, you will use the torch to end it all. Then we leave.”

“Indeed,” said Ebner. “And not a moment too soon. We must return to Greywolf. Midnight is barely five hours away.”

The lengths Galina had to travel to find doctors to supply her the drugs she needed to kill the pain, to repel the black shadow of death into remission. A trail of agony that spanned the world and brought her right back where it began.

She stopped. Her hand shot up. The door to some machine room or other. There were voices behind it.
Voices!
She turned to Bartolo Cassa and nodded. He fired three rounds from his automatic. The door bolts exploded.

And suddenly there was the doctor's face, more dead than alive.

“Rubashov!” she gasped despite herself. “So it's true! You
did
survive.” Then she saw the children, and she felt a small part of her brain burst. “Here. Always here. This must end.
You
must end. Cassa, restrain them!” He forced the children against the rear wall of the machine room.