The Serpent's Curse (5 page)

“Just a minute!” she'd said.

Thinking it a hotel employee come for her luggage, she opened the door.

The man—broad shouldered, mean faced, in sunglasses—was on her in a flash. Hand over mouth, pushing her back into the room, kicking the door shut behind him. “Resist and your family will be killed. If they notify the authorities, you will be killed. Silence. Silence—”

She twisted away from him, threw herself at the bathroom door, and locked herself in. “Do not panic!” she'd told herself.
Look around, look around.
Her suitcase was in there. She'd been packing to return home. Her phone, her pocketbook, everything was there. No time to make a call. Futile to scrawl a message on the mirror—he would smear any message to illegibility.

Then, inspiration. The silliest thing in the world, but it made sense. Her charm bracelet. She slid it off, wrapped the skull in a stamp. It seemed idiotic, but Terence would recognize it. From his novel.
The Madagascar Codex.
No,
The Zambian Crypt
?
The Zimbabwe—

The door split open on its hinges as she stuffed the bracelet into the lining of her suitcase and pinned it closed. The face above her was flat and brutal. The eyes . . . the eyes were invisible behind those black-lensed sunglasses. She was screaming now at the top of her lungs, and couldn't imagine how she could not be rescued, when there came another thought: she was not screaming at all, but falling silently to the floor of the bathroom. There was a stabbing pain in her neck, and her cries, if they ever came out at all, were choked to silence. She stared up at the ceiling as she slipped to the floor, wondering if she would crack her head on the tiles.

Seconds passed. Minutes? Then there was the sound of a zipper coming from somewhere at her feet, and then flaps of black plastic were being folded over her face, and all the light was gone.

Darrell's face came to her then, in a swift sequence of his ages from birth up to when she saw him that last morning in Austin. And Wade. And Roald. What would they . . . what would . . .

Then all her thoughts faded, and she fell away to a place of no dreams.

Nothing for hours and days until today. She was unable to move. There was a freshness to the air in the . . . what
was
she in, anyway? A bag? A box? There were tubes in her arm. She couldn't raise herself or move her hands to find out.
I'm in restraints.
But there was air in there, so he wanted her alive, whoever he was. The man in the sunglasses . . . Zanzibar! That was it!

The Zanzibar Cryptex.

She wanted to scream that she was alive and being taken somewhere, but . . . The waves that had been falling over her became more rhythmic, and sleep took her, or what she thought might be sleep, but she wasn't very sure of that.

New York

E
ven under the Ackroyd living room's subtle lamplight, Vela shone as if it were its own star. Like a heavenly body not of this earth.
Which it might actually be,
thought Lily. What did any of them really know about the shadowy origins of the relics? Copernicus had supposedly found an old astrolabe built by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy. But that was all pretty hazy.

“Let's bring it into the study,” said Julian.

Julian seemed to be really bright. His father was kind of brilliant, too. How many books had he written? Ten? A hundred? She and the others were surrounded by smart people, so you had to think they really would get Sara back
and
find the relics.

The study off the living room was large and lined with thousands of books—not all of them written by Terence Ackroyd, thank goodness. It was traditional in a way, sleepy almost, but also equipped with a really high level of computer gear.

There was a long worktable with a wide-lens magnifying device perched on it. Several shelves of cameras, printers, and scanners were next to the worktable along with stacks of servers. On the wall behind them was a range of twenty-four clocks showing the current time in each of the world's major time zones. Except for a gnarly old typewriter on a stand by itself like a museum piece from another century, the room was like she imagined a secret CIA lair would be.

The only other thing I'd need would be . . . nothing.

“First things first,” Julian said, opening a small tablet computer that lay on the worktable next to five sparkling new cell phones. “These are for you. We've loaded this tablet with tons of texts and image databases that can help with the relic hunt.”

“Wow, thanks,” Lily said, practically snatching it from his hands. “I'm kind of the digital person here.”

Julian laughed. “Ooh, the tech master of the group. The intelligence officer. Very cool. I've modified each phone's GPS function with a software app I invented. The tablet likewise. Except to one another, and mine and Dad's, these units will emit random location coordinates, making them essentially blind to most conventional GPS locators.” He passed a phone to each of them, and turned to Roald. “Now . . . the relic . . .”

Roald set Vela gently on the worktable. When he did, Lily realized they'd been so completely focused on hiding and protecting Vela over the last few days that this was only the second time since Wade and Becca discovered it that they'd been able to bring it safely out into the open.

Wade and Becca,
she thought.

Wade had been giving Becca goo-goo eyes ever since Mission Dolores in San Francisco, where they'd discovered that the Scorpio relic was a fake. Maybe it was because of the stare the Order's assassin, Markus Wolff, had given Becca in the Mission. Or maybe Wade realized something about the twelfth relic that Wolff had been all cryptic about. Either way, something was up, those weird looks meant something, and Lily would find out. She could read Darrell. He was hot or cold. Not so much in between. And by hot or cold she meant either hilarious or ready to explode. Wade was a different story. Becca, too, for that matter, and . . .
Wait, where was I? Oh. Right. Vela.

Triangular in shape, about four inches from base to upper point, with one short side and two of roughly equal length, Vela was something Roald called “technically an isosceles triangle.” Except that one of its long sides curved in slightly toward the center like a sail in the wind. Which made sense, since Vela was supposed to represent the sail in the constellation Argo Navis. It also had a slew of curved lines etched into it.

When they examined the stone closely they saw that even though it was about the same thickness from the front side to the back—about a quarter of an inch—Vela was undoubtedly heavier in the middle than in any of the corners, a fact that she was the first to voice. “Look.” She placed it flat across her finger and it balanced. “Something's in there.”

“Maybe an inner mechanism,” Roald said. “Something hidden inside its heart.”

“Yes, yes,” Terence said, taking it now from Lily. “I can see the faint design on both sides of the stone and a series of very tiny, even infinitesimal, separations that could mean that the stone somehow opens up. It is far too heavy to be a normal stone.”

Passing it around, they gently tried to coax the stone to reveal its secret, but short of prying it open and maybe busting it, they couldn't find a way. Vela told them nothing.

“Have you considered that it's fairly dangerous to be lugging this around with you?” Julian said. “There are vaults in the city that are pretty near uncrackable, even by the Order.”

Roald nodded. “A good idea, I agree. But the legend says ‘the first will circle to the last,' meaning that something about Vela is a clue to the next relic or maybe its Guardian. We need to discover something soon or we won't know where to look.”

“There's also this.” Becca slid her hand into her shoulder bag and tugged out the cracked hilt of the Magellan dagger. “The handle cracked when I . . . you know. I'm sorry . . .”

“I'm so glad you did,” Lily said, shuddering to see the hilt again. “It was, well . . .” She was going to say that what Becca had done—stabbing the goon on the bridge and saving her life—was something so
beyond
amazing, but she felt suddenly on the verge of tears, which she never was, so instead she just closed her mouth, which was also pretty rare, and smiled like a dope at whoever, which turned out to be Wade, who, as usual, was staring at Becca with his googly eyes.

“That's quite something,” Julian said, drawing in a quiet breath when Becca set the hilt on the table. “Italian, by any chance?”

“Bolognese,” said Wade, finally tearing his eyes from Becca.

“Yes, yes.” Julian picked it up gently, but it suddenly separated into two pieces of carved ivory and fell back on the table. “Ack! I'm sorry!”

“Hold on . . .” Lily used her slender fingers to tug something out from inside the hilt. It was a long, narrow ribbon. “What is this?”

Terence stood. “Oh, ho!” He pinched one end of the ribbon and held it up. It dangled about three feet.

“Microscope!” said Julian. He snatched the ribbon from his father, then jerked away from the table to the far end of the room, where he sat at a small table. Not ten seconds later, he said, “Dad, we've seen this kind of thing before.”

They all rushed over to Julian in a flash, but Lily pushed her way through the crowd to be the first one leaning over the lens. “Letters,” she said. “I see letters. They're pretty faded, but they're there, written one under the other the whole length of the ribbon.”

Darrell moved in next. “
T-O-E-G-S-K
, and a bunch more. We've done word scrambles and substitution codes. Is this one of those? They look random.”

Terence took his own look and smiled. “Not random at all, actually. These letters are one half of a cipher called a
scytale
.” He pronounced the word as if it rhymed with
Italy
.

“Invented by the ancient Spartans, the cipher consists of two parts: a ribbon made of cloth or leather with letters on it, and a wooden staff,” he continued. “The staff has a number of flat sides on it, rather like a pencil. You wrap the ribbon around the staff like a candy cane stripe, and if the staff is the right size, the letters line up in words.”

Julian grinned. “The trick is that you always have to keep the ribbon separate from the staff until it's time to decode the message.” He paused and looked at his father. “Dad, are you thinking what I'm thinking? Two birds?”

“Two birds?” said Wade. “Is that code for something?”

Julian laughed. “It's a saying. Kill two birds with one stone. The Morgan Library up the street has an awesome vault for Vela. It also happens to have probably the best—and least known—collection of scytale staffs on the East Coast. I'll bet we can find one that works with this ribbon.”

“I suggest we hit the Morgan Library at eight tomorrow morning,” Terence said.

“Don't museums usually open later than that?” said Becca.

“Yes, but for Dad and me, the Morgan is never closed,” said Julian with a smile that seemed to Lily like the sun breaking out after a long darkness.

Prague, Czech Republic

March 18

9:13 a.m.

G
alina Krause kept her hand inside her coat, where a compact Beretta Storm lay holstered against her ribs. Its barrel, specially filed to obscure its ballistics, was still warm. She would be gone long before the police discovered the body of the Guardian's courier, Jaroslav Hájek, or the single untraceable bullet in his head.

She disliked killing old men, but the courier had refused to reveal his Italian contact, although his flat did contain a collection of antique hand clocks, which was likely a clue to how the message had been transferred. In any case, a dead courier working with the Guardians was never a bad thing, and one obstacle less in her overall journey.