The Serpent's Curse Read online

  If it was possible to know, the Copernicus Room would tell them.

  And yet, Ebner mused as he strolled among the Orcs, at such a cost.

  The rush of the Order’s recent renaissance, their rebirth at light speed over the last four years under Galina’s leadership, had not been without blunders. The unprecedented and impatient Kronos program, the Order’s secret mission to create its own time machine, had resulted in catastrophically botched incidents:

  The ridiculous Florida experiment, an ultimately insignificant test that was still trailing its rags publicly. The spontaneous crumbling of a building in the bustling heart of Rio de Janeiro. And, perhaps worst of all, the strange, half-promising, half-calamitous episode at the Somosierra Tunnel, a mere hour’s drive from where he stood right now.

  Somosierra was particularly troublesome.

  Ebner drew the newspaper clipping from his jacket.

  The incident remains under investigation by local and federal crime units.

  Of course it does! A school bus vanishes in a tunnel and reappears days later, bearing evidence of an attack by Napoleonic soldiers from 1808? To say nothing of the disappearance of two of its passengers or the subsequent deadly illness of the survivors?

  To Ebner, these mistakes meant one thing: only Copernicus’s original device—his Eternity Machine, as a recently discovered document referred to it—could ever travel through time successfully.

  Every effort otherwise seemed doomed to failure. That was why he had issued a moratorium. No more experiments until further data was amassed and analyzed.

  Meanwhile, the workers worked, the researchers researched, and the Copernicus Room, Ebner’s beloved brainchild, hummed on.

  For example . . . him . . . there . . . Helmut Bern.

  The young Swiss hipster sat hunched over his station as if over a platter of hot cheese and sausages. With an improbably constant three days’ stubble, an artfully shaved head, and a gold ear stud, Bern had just been relocated from Berlin. The man was now dedicated to uncovering the errors in the Kronos program, and especially Kronos III, the time gun used in the Somosierra mess.

  Ebner was strolling over to question him on his progress when the thousands of fingers stopped clacking at once. There was a sudden hush in the room, and Ebner swung around, his heart thudding wildly.

  It was she, entering.

  Galina Krause—the not-yet-twenty-year-old Grand Mistress of the Knights of the Teutonic Order—slid liquidly between the elevator doors and strode into the Copernicus Room.

  As always, she was dressed in black as severe as raven feathers. A silver-studded belt was nearly the only color. But then, who needed color when the different hues of her irises—one silver, one diamond blue, a phenomenon known as heterochromia iridis—took all one’s breath away, made her so forbidding, so strangely and mysteriously hypnotic? The very definition, Ebner mused, of dangerous beauty. Femme fatale.

  Draped around her neck was a half-dollar-sized ruby carved into the shape of a kraken, a jewel once owned by the sixteenth-century Grand Master Albrecht von Hohenzollern. Galina’s personal archaeologist, Markus Wolff, had found that particular item, though he, Ebner, had been the one to present it to her last week.

  Ebner bowed instinctively. Anyone standing did the same.

  Observing the attention, Galina waved it off with her hand. “Vela will inform the Kaplans where the next relic is,” she said, her voice slithering toward him as she approached. “If they are intelligent enough to decipher its message. Where are they at this moment?”

  “Newly arrived in New York City,” Ebner said. “Alas, after Markus Wolff left them in California, they are once again safe and sound. Our New York agents got nothing from them but the blade of Magellan’s dagger. We have dispatched a more seasoned squad from Marseille.”

  “The Kaplan brood is learning to defend itself,” Galina said. “Continue to have them watched closely and every movement entered into these databases. Assign one unit specifically to monitor them, but do not stall them. We may need their lead, if all of this”—she flicked her fingers almost dismissively around the vast chamber—“does not offer up the names of the original Guardians.”

  “It shall,” Ebner said proudly. “No expense has been spared. One hundred interconnected databases are now online.”

  “Alert our agents in Texas to watch their families, too, and ensure that they know they are being watched.”

  “Ah, an added element of fear, good,” said Ebner. “On another matter, we have traced a courier working with the present-day Guardians.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Prague. He recently returned there from somewhere in Italy. We do not have his Italian contact yet, but the courier’s identity is known to us.”

  “Curious,” she said softly. “I have business in Prague. I will . . .” Galina suddenly looked past Ebner at a tall, broad-shouldered man with a deep tan stepping off the elevator. He wore wraparound dark glasses.

  Who the devil is this, thought Ebner, a film star?

  The man approached. Ebner raised his hand. “You are?”

  “Bartolo Cassa,” he said. “Miss Krause, the cargo from Rio is now on Spanish soil.”

  Galina studied him. “The cargo from South America. Yes. Sara Kaplan. Have it transferred to my hangar at the airport.”

  “Yes, Miss Krause.” He bowed, turned, and left the room the way he had come.

  Good. The fewer minutes this “Bartolo Cassa” is around, the better. Something about him is simply not quite right. Not . . . normal. And those sunglasses? Is he blind?

  Galina gazed across the sea of workers. Her voice was low. “Despite all this data gathering, Ebner, there are holes in the Magister’s biography. We require someone on the ground.”

  “On the ground? But where?” he asked, gesturing to the tiny lights glowing on one of two giant wall maps. “From Tokyo to Helsinki, to London, Cape Town, Vancouver, and everywhere in between, our agents span the entire globe—”

  “Not here. Not now,” Galina said. “Then. There. We need someone in Copernicus’s time to follow him. One hundred databases, and yet there are far too many gaps in our knowledge of the Magister. We must send someone back.”

  “Back?” Ebner felt his spine shudder. “You do not mean another experiment?”

  “One that will succeed,” she said, her eyes piercing his.

  “With a human subject?” he said. “A subject who can report to us? From the sixteenth century?” Ebner found himself shaking his head, then stopped. It was unwise to deny one so powerful. “Kronos Three is by far the most successful temporal device we have constructed, yet you see the untidy result at Somosierra. Two souls were left behind in 1808! These experiments are far too risky for a person. The possibility of simply losing a traveler is too great. You must realize, Galina, that only the”—he barely whispered the next words—“only Copernicus’s original Eternity Machine has been proved to navigate time and place accurately. The Kronos experiments are far from foolproof—”

  A desk chair squeaked, and Helmut Bern hustled over, breathing oddly. “Miss Krause!”

  Helmut Bern! Always Johnny-on-the-spot, lobbying for Galina’s blessing.

  “What is it?” Ebner snapped.

  “Two things. Forgive me, I heard you discussing the Kronos program. I believe I have just pinpointed the central error of the devices. A rather long and twisted string of programming. A difficult fix, but I can manage it. Three days, perhaps four.”

  “And the second thing?” Galina asked.

  “A bit we’ve just picked up,” Bern said, grinning like an idiot. “Copernicus sent a letter from Cádiz in May of 1517. It mentions a journey by sea. Much of it is coded, but we have begun to decrypt it.”

  “Cádiz,” Galina said, studying the other large map in the room, one illustrating the sixteenth-century world of the astronomer. “Fascinating. The Magister sails the Mediterranean. Good work, Bern. Continue with all due haste.”

  “
Yes, Miss Krause!” Bern returned gleefully to his terminal.

  “There. You see, Galina,” Ebner said. “There is no need for another Kronos experiment. This information will help us track—”

  “Send her.”

  His eyes widened. “Send . . .”

  “You told me our recent experiments were too risky,” Galina responded. “A trial, then. A minor experiment. With someone expendable. Send Sara Kaplan.”

  “No experiment in the physics of time is minor!” he blurted, then caught himself. “Forgive me, Galina, but that woman was to have been our insurance that the Kaplans would give us the relics.”

  “All the family needs to know is that we have her,” she said. “Fear will do the rest. What actually happens to the woman is of little consequence.”

  “But, but . . .” Ebner was sputtering now. “Galina, even assuming we manage to get the woman to report to us, how would she do it? By what mechanism? To say nothing of the havoc she might create five centuries ago. Any tiny misstep of hers could shudder down through the years to the present. Her mere presence could cause a greater rupture—”

  “Ready Kronos Three for her journey. In the meantime, I go to Prague to persuade this courier to reveal his Italian contact. A message was delivered. I want to know to whom.” Galina turned her face away. It was a face, Ebner knew, from which all expression had just died. She was done listening. She had issued her command.

  So.

  Sara Kaplan would go on a journey.

  A journey likely to result in her death.

  Or worse.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  New York

  “That didn’t just happen,” Becca heard someone saying.

  She turned. It was Darrell.

  “Oh, it happened,” someone else said. That was Wade, who was looking at her when he said it. There was a hand on her arm, urging her gently out of the town car and onto the street. Even at night, New York City was noisy. And cold, bitter cold for the middle of March. But she hardly registered those things. Her head buzzed. Her eyes could barely focus enough to keep her from smashing into stuff.

  She had just attacked a man.

  Stabbed a man.

  No matter that he was a thickheaded creepy goon, or that he had mauled poor Lily and threatened to toss her off a bridge, or that three days ago his boss, Galina, had shot Becca herself with a gas-powered crossbow, giving her a wound that still hadn’t healed. Forget all that. Becca was a girl who read books, a girl with a loving family, a girl who was just a girl. The Hummer goon was maybe a goon, but he was also a human being, and she had stabbed him. With a dagger.

  She glanced at her hands. One was shaking like a leaf in a storm, but at least there was no blood on it. She would have freaked if there’d been blood on it. The other hand? Lily was holding it. Tightly. Comfortingly.

  “It’s okay, Bec,” Lily said, pulling her along the sidewalk by her unhurt arm. “You saved my life. You were awesome. Really. Thank you doesn’t begin to cover it. I was so scared and . . . well . . . I guess you knew that and that’s why you . . .”

  Becca’s cell phone vibrated suddenly, and she didn’t hear the rest. She pulled it out and glanced at the screen. She saw who was calling her. She let it vibrate.

  Before they had departed the San Francisco airport that morning, Uncle Roald had picked up new phones for each of them. Despite the danger of their phones being tracked, he said it was unrealistic to think that the five of them would always be in the same place at the same time. They needed to be able to communicate with one another at a moment’s notice. Though Lily had immediately cross-programmed the phones with all their numbers as well as family numbers, they all kept their batteries out most of the time. The first thing Becca herself had done was to call her mother to say she was safe. Her mother hadn’t answered. No one had answered. So she’d left a voice mail. She realized now that she must have forgotten to remove the battery, because someone was calling back.

  The dark screen was lit with four large white letters.

  Home.

  But how could she answer it? She had just . . . she had just . . .

  The phone stopped vibrating, and Becca watched the number 1 appear next to the voice mail icon. She slipped it back into her pocket. Lily was still talking.

  “. . . are definitely my hero, and I so owe you one, or probably way more than one, but we’ll round it off to one big one . . .”

  “Uh-huh,” Becca said. “Uh-huh.”

  What would Maggie say if she knew what I just did? Becca’s younger sister was the reason for so many things in her life. After nearly dying two years ago, Maggie was always on her mind, and when that creep grabbed Lily on the bridge, Becca saw Maggie in the thug’s powerful grip. How could she not jump at him? And if her hand went to Magellan’s dagger first, well, she couldn’t stop herself. But no way could she talk to anyone at home. Not yet.

  The doors of the Gramercy Park Hotel whisked open, and warm air engulfed them. After raising his hand to the man and woman behind the check-in desk, who smiled warmly, Terence Ackroyd led the Kaplans into the elevator, pressing the button for the seventh floor.

  It was Mr. Ackroyd who’d originally told them that Sara had disappeared. Sara was supposed to fly from Bolivia to New York to meet him, but her luggage arrived without her. His rescuing them in the car, not an instant too soon, was their first actual meeting with the famous writer, though Becca had started reading one of his books, The Prometheus Riddle. The spy thriller she’d picked up in Honolulu was like their lives now. Full of death and near death. She wondered where the novelist got his ideas. He didn’t look like a spy as much as a rich man. He was tall, casually dressed, with longish dark hair, graying at the temples. He moved easily among all the glitter and obvious wealth in the lobby, as if he owned the place.

  Maybe he did.

  She was coming back to herself now. Observing things. Beginning to remember stuff and hear things in real time. Happily, their limo driver was all right, just shaken up, and had already retired to his own room on a lower floor. Darrell’s forehead was gashed slightly from the limo’s ceiling light and had been bandaged using the first aid kit in Mr. Ackroyd’s car. There was talk about getting a doctor to look at her arrow wound, which she hardly felt at the moment.

  They entered the elevator. It was warm. Her breathing was slowing down, her breaths becoming deeper. She took her place between Lily and Wade at the back of the glass-and-wood-paneled car and clamped her elbow tightly on her shoulder bag. The bag held not only the cracked hilt of the Magellan dagger, but something even more priceless. The secret diary of Nicolaus Copernicus.

  Written by the astronomer and his young assistant, Hans Novak, from 1514 to about a decade later, the diary was the main source of what they knew about the time-traveling astrolabe. The book was composed in several languages and was heavily coded. Thanks to her maternal grandparents, Becca had a gift for foreign languages, and with the help of Wade’s science and math smarts she had already translated pretty good-size chunks of the diary into her red notebook. In fact, it was on the jet here from San Francisco that they’d discovered what Copernicus had come to call his time-traveling device.

  Die Ewigkeitsmaschine.

  The Eternity Machine.

  It seemed the perfect name for something so mysterious, and so deadly.

  “Here we are,” Terence Ackroyd said as the elevator opened directly into his suite.

  Whoa. The suite was huge, a multiroom apartment with broad windows looking out over lower Manhattan. It was furnished like a billionaire’s home, with a combination of antique chairs painted gold and white and modern leather sofas, two of which shared a lacquered Japanese coffee table that Mr. Ackroyd went straight to. He motioned for them to sit. “Please, rest, while we brew some fresh tea.”

  We?

  “I have it, Dad.”

  A boy entered the room, carrying a tray with a steaming teapot and several cups on it. He seemed a couple of years older than the kids, a
nd had long, sandy-colored hair and very blue eyes. He set the tray on the table between the couches.

  “I’m Julian,” he said.

  Terence smiled. “My son. Excuse me for a moment.” Then he slipped off into a room with double doors, leaving them open. It was a study, from which a keyboard suite by Handel was playing softly from hidden speakers.

  Is that where he writes his thrillers?

  “I have to apologize for your welcome to New York,” Julian said with as pleasant a smile as his father’s, which he kept while they introduced themselves. “The Knights of the Teutonic Order have been violent since their first appearance in Jerusalem in 1198. Lawless in Poland and other northern European cities after the Crusades. Copernicus himself fought them several times. They were finally abolished by Napoleon in 1809, but a sect related to Albrecht von Hohenzollern has continued underground since then, hanging on through bloodlines, mostly, and has grown suddenly very wealthy.”

  His way of speaking was a bit PBS, Becca thought, but he went straight to business, which was what they needed right now.

  “But Mr. Kaplan, I’m sorry,” he said, suddenly bouncing to his feet. “Of course you want to know about Mrs. Kaplan. Let me bring her luggage.”

  “Thank you. And call me Roald, please.”

  Julian trotted down a hall as his father returned from his workroom. “Becca, the hotel doctor is on his way up to take a look at your arm,” Terence said. “In the meantime, Dennis, our driver, sends his heartfelt regards.” He breathed out. “Now . . . you’ve been through—are going through—a terrible shock, and I’m very sorry.”

  “We appreciate anything you can tell us about Sara,” Wade said, with a look at Darrell. “About Mom.”