The Crown of Fire Read online

1:33 a.m.

  Middle of the night. Narrow streets draped in shadows. An hour and place you’d think everything would be quiet and one would be alone.

  Everything was quiet.

  But the twenty-something, ex–Teutonic Order, once-brilliant nuclear engineer named Helmut Bern wasn’t alone.

  Several ghostly shadows lurked nearby. He’d been seeing them for some time now. Just out of direct vision, just out of sight. He’d come to regard them as friends since they were always there. Besides, they made the journey not so lonely.

  “I have to find the door, you see,” Helmut said aloud. “It’s here somewhere. I’m dizzy, I know. Traveling in time for five hundred years—well, almost five hundred—all the way from the sixteenth century can leave a brain a little mushy, you know?”

  No response.

  Of course not. He had carefully instructed the shadows not to speak.

  Taking as deep a breath as his damaged lungs could manage, Helmut pushed from street to street until his sense told him left, and he wandered through a quiet maze off the Plaza Conde de Barajas and stopped dead.

  “Number thirty-three. Finally!”

  Once the home of an early-eighteenth-century Spanish composer of operas on mythic themes, it was now an average building with a bland facade. The perfect headquarters for what would—decades from now—become Galina Krause’s Copernicus Room, the world’s single greatest concentration of computer power, dedicated solely to discovering the twelve relics and original Guardians of Nicolaus Copernicus’s time machine.

  An old taxicab rumbled through the Plaza Conde.

  Helmut stepped back into the darkness and watched the headlights cast their weak yellow beams on the cobblestones. The cab slowed, stopped. An old man, stooped over like Helmut himself, emerged. The taxi drove off.

  “Hide yourselves,” Helmut whispered to the shadows. Again, no response.

  This second man, older than he, planted his feet on the stones and stared at the very same building. Surely he has no idea of the Copernicus Room, Helmut thought. No one can. I am the only one in this time. . . .

  Without turning his head, the shriveled man addressed Helmut in a voice like gravel. “Me siento atraído aquí. No sé por qué. ¿Entiende español, señor?”

  “I feel drawn here. I don’t know why. Do you understand Spanish, sir?”

  Helmut stepped toward him. “Solo un poco. Habla alemán? Inglés?”

  The man faced him. His face was sickening gray and deeply pocked with sores. The tip of his nose looked eaten. “Sí, sí, inglés. Lo aprendí en la escuela. I learned in school. My old school . . .”

  An uneasy feeling rose in Helmut’s gut.

  This man is diseased as I am diseased. Is he the victim of radium poisoning also?

  Helmut’s hideous scars and sores, his cancer, were the result of the signal difference between Copernicus’s astrolabe and the Order-built Kronos machines. It was a subject he had given, well, hundreds of years to puzzling out. The Copernicus relics were not only capable of pinpointing the exact time and place of one’s destination in an instant. But he had proved—proved!—that the energy produced by even a single relic creates a force field protecting the machine’s passengers from radiation exposure.

  “Excuse me, sir, you look ill,” Helmut said. “What is your name?”

  “Fernando. I am ill, yes. This is, what, nineteen seventy-four?”

  “Seventy-five,” Bern said.

  “Ah. I was born more than twenty-five years . . . from now.”

  “From now?” Helmut shuddered involuntarily. “Fernando, you say?”

  “Fernando Salta. I will be born in the region of Somosierra.”

  The immensity of the word Somosierra fell heavily on Bern. “Fernando Salta? Salta! Then, you are he. The schoolboy lost in time!”

  Salta’s gray skin seemed to brighten. “You know me?”

  “Your school field trip was hijacked in the Somosierra Pass,” Helmut said. “You went back to some battle. Napoleon. That’s it. Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in eighteen hundred and eight. You were sent back there!”

  “I was!” The voice of a young boy emerged from the old lips. “Yes! The battle was a bloody mess. Some horrible man on a stallion said I was a spy. I ran from him and found the hole. You see, a hole is made when you travel in time, Señor—”

  “I know this!” said Helmut. His heart swelled as if he’d discovered a friend in an alien world. “And you followed it back, yes? The hole, you followed it back to now, unaided?”

  Salta couldn’t nod his head fast enough. “The machine was gone. The bus was gone. I saw its poor old driver killed in battle. No one else could see it, but the hole was fading so quickly I had no choice. I came out in nineteen thirty-six. Another battle. I tried to go back in, but the hole closed then. I have been stuck in the past for three decades now. Mad. Alone. An outcast. I will die before I am ever born!”

  Helmut wanted to embrace the sad old man. “You were the victim of an experiment, Señor Salta. The person who ordered it to be done to you is named Galina Krause. Some forty years from now she rules what is called the Teutonic Order. They built a time machine called Kronos Three. It was faulty. Alas, I helped them. It should have brought you back. Instead it left you there in eighteen hundred and eight. I’m so sorry.”

  “You . . .” Salta’s eyes, his face, underwent innumerable alterations as Bern stared at him. “You threw me into the oblivion of time? My life, lived in the horror of the past?”

  “It’s not so good in the future, either,” Helmut said, trying to make a joke, but Salta wasn’t laughing. “Yes. I am sorry. You can blame me. I was marooned once, too. In fifteen thirty-five. In London. A . . . a friend saved me.”

  “But you did not order the experiment,” Salta said. “It was the woman.”

  “Yes, it was her,” said Bern. “I am returning to the present to do something about that.”

  “But time travel kills! It is killing me. And you, too.”

  “In Kronos, yes! It is a killer. I lost an ear to the poison. Two fingers of my right hand. To speak nothing about the inaccuracies of the machine. I’ve been thrown into the middle of the ocean. The center of a mine shaft! The scaffold of a guillotine once! But no more. Look what I have!”

  Helmut took from his belt a leaden object in the shape of an arrow. It was partially blackened by fire. Holding it aloft, he allowed the point of the arrow to spin and the charred metallic feathers to extend several inches out from the shaft.

  “This is magic!” Fernando said.

  Bern shook his head. “Mechanical. It is called Sagitta. It is a relic of the original time machine of Nicolaus Copernicus. My friend, this arrow will save our lives.”

  “Where did you find it?” Salta asked. “And when?”

  Suddenly, the door of number 33 opened. Helmut urged Salta back among the shadows. A man in a bulky overcoat and slouch hat exited the building carefully, looked in all directions, then reached back. A small boy followed him out onto the step.

  Helmut felt instantly nauseated.

  He knew both the man and the boy. The man’s face was known to any student of nuclear physics. He was the aged Wernher von Braun, the rocket specialist hired by the United States after the war to help with its budding space program. But it was the boy’s identity that nearly choked Bern. The pinched features, the timid bespectacled eyes, the too-soft chin. The child was obviously Wernher von Braun’s great-nephew.

  A boy by the name of Ebner von Braun.

  The two scurried off into the street as Bern observed them closely.

  “So,” he whispered to Salta, “the Teutonic Order already possesses the building. Even so, Fernando, let us enter. I need to hide something inside.”

  “The arrow?”

  “No, no. The arrow travels with us. I must leave a message for someone in the future. It coils strangely, time does, as you will see. And afterward, I’ll take us both back to the present. Kronos One is nearby. I have worked on it
. Sagitta will help protect us from further injury. It may be a tad crowded, but it will take us back to our present.”

  Salta’s eyes glowed like a schoolboy’s. “Good. I have revenge in my heart.”

  “Revenge is everywhere, my friend,” said Helmut. “Everywhere.”

  Leaving the shadows behind them, the two men headed across the street to number 33.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Nice, France

  June 10

  Night

  As Lily and Darrell searched for a gangster along a narrow alley of dim streetlamps and deep shadows, she felt her chest slowly being crushed. Markus Wolff’s eerie phone call terrified her. Was Becca hurt? Was she even alive? What had Wolff and his assassins done to her best friend in the world? What kind of crazy horror had happened at the airport?

  “We’ve never been this alone,” Darrell said.

  He slowed at a corner that seemed to mark the end of the residential district and the beginning of a neighborhood of seedy warehouses and derelict garages.

  As much as Lily didn’t want to go where they were going—the worse it looked, the more they went there—they really needed help. Assuming, of course, Maurice Maurice didn’t just murder them and put them in an oil drum—or, she supposed, two oil drums—and dump them into the Mediterranean.

  “But,” Darrell added, “we’ll find people to ask about Maurice. We’ll find him.”

  She suddenly wanted to hug him—or something—for saying such a thing softly and nonironically. Maybe Darrell was human, after all.

  “We’ll see people who don’t look too criminally. That street over there looks safe-ish. Let’s take it down to the water.”

  And he wasn’t saying things that required a response from her. Which was also good, because if she opened her mouth, she would probably cry. And if she cried, he’d get even more nonironic, and the last thing Lily wanted to do was to get back into that all-too-painful conversation with Darrell about the future. She’d already told him that after Triangulum was safe, she was leaving. Too much danger, violence, and death for her.

  But then?

  Then the strangest thing had happened.

  It was crazy, sure, but when she’d pushed away from the window frame earlier that day and flown in the air across that alley like a bird, landing on the terrace of that other apartment, followed seconds later by Darrell, whose fall she softened by grabbing his shoulders . . . well, that was pretty amazing. It was dangerous, yes. It was insane, sure. But it was dangerous and insane in a fairly spectacularly awesome way.

  If there was such a thing.

  But I’ve already decided to leave. So now what?

  Not knowing what, she followed Darrell past innumerable hangar-like structures, dark warehouses, marine repair shops, dented trucks, random piles of oily chains, puddles of black gunk, stacks of steel beams, as many storage drums as you could count, and almost as many sad-looking stray dogs.

  “Hey! You!”

  The voice was like a rock grinding another rock.

  “Uh-oh,” Darrell whispered. “Keep walking.”

  “Stop right zhere!”

  “Okay,” said Darrell.

  They turned together slowly. A man in grimy overalls leaned against a warehouse door, holding a small paper cup to his lips. “You kids Americains?”

  “How did you know?” said Lily.

  “Only Americains sink it is safe here. Is not safe.”

  “All right then,” said Darrell, “we’ll just leave—”

  “We’re looking for Maurice Maurice,” Lily said. “Have you heard of him?”

  The man unleaned himself from the door. “So. You’re not interested in safe, after all. Oui, I know him. I take you to him. Come zis way.”

  Nice man, thought Lily. Or maybe a killer.

  “Be on your guard,” she whispered.

  “On it?” he said. “I’m never off it.”

  The man with the paper cup strolled down several dark and ever-narrowing alleys in nearly a full circle. Then he turned a corner, turned another at the end of that, and started backtracking. Lily was ready to grab Darrell and bolt when the guy took an abrupt left, cut through an alley, and came out in an inner courtyard. Parked outside a low office building was—and she knew this because Darrell nearly croaked when he told her—a silver-gray Aston Martin DB5 sports car.

  “Wait inside,” the man growled.

  “The car?” said Darrell.

  “You wish. Ze office.” He gestured with his cup to the door, then slipped away.

  They entered and sat in two leather chairs in front of a wide desk. The office was small but very rich, with several Chinese vases full of some bushy purple flower Lily’d never seen outside that “jewel in the heart of Austin,” the Zilker Botanical Garden. They reminded her of home, and her nose stung. Do not go there.

  A few minutes later, Maurice Maurice appeared from a back room.

  The man was absurdly muscular. He was dressed in an exquisite beige suit, navy shirt unbuttoned at the collar, tan loafers, and dark glasses. He lifted the glasses onto his forehead and studied the two children. “But I know you.”

  “Um . . . last week,” said Darrell. “Monte Carlo. You gave us a wire to film an auction.”

  “I remember!” he said, bending over and hugging them both with a grip like a vise. “Wait! You’re not wearing a wire now, are you?”

  “We are so totally unwired it’s not even funny,” Lily said. “No phones or anything.”

  Maurice Maurice laughed. “Good. Good. What can I do for you?”

  Darrell told Maurice Maurice a half-true, half-sketchy story, but it hit all the right notes and seemed to convince the man. Even before he finished listening, Maurice Maurice sat at his desk and reached for his phone.

  “I know exactly what you need. Hello? Is Jacques there? Yes. Good.” He paused a few seconds. “Jacques, I need favor. Friends of Terence and of mine”—he glanced over at them, smiling—“need travel out of Nice. No roads. Yes? Good. Tell me where. Uh-huh. Terminal Seven? Isn’t that where we buried . . . yes. Fine. Friday night? Perfect.”

  Lily stole a look at Darrell as if to say, What in the world are we getting into?

  His expression replied, I’m too young to die.

  Maurice Maurice hung up. “It’s all fixed. We hide you until Friday nighttime. Then we take you to Marseille down the coast. There you board freighter for Gibraltar. From there, you hook up with family. Maybe. Either way, if we are careful, the Order will not find you. Because you are friends with Monsieur Terence, I waive my usual escape fee.”

  Lily breathed more easily. “Thank you, Maurice.”

  The man rose gracefully from his desk and went to a cabinet against the wall. Opening it, he drew out two small pistols. “You want? You may need. The Order kills.”

  “Uh . . . ,” said Darrell, “we’re . . . no. Thank you. We’ll be okay. Right, Lil?”

  She nodded over and over. “Absolutely. No firearms.”

  “Suit yourself,” the man said, returning the pistols to their case. “But you want a bulletproof backpack for that box you have?”

  “Yes. Great!” said Darrell. “And maybe an extra belt?”

  “You got it. In the meantime, I’ll try to discover what happened at the airport. I hope your friends and mother aren’t dead.”

  Dead.

  Lily felt her insides collapsing like an office building they blow up to make room for a bigger office building, though she was pretty sure no one could build anything inside of her.

  Becca, are you alive? Please be alive!

  Maurice Maurice gave Darrell a belt and a small stiff backpack for Triangulum, then he left the room to organize their transport to Marseille. Darrell’s thoughts reeled from the grim bluntness of the man’s word.

  Dead.

  No. Not my mom. Not Wade. Or Becca. Or Julian. No. Not them. Never them.

  But there wasn’t any real reason to hope, either. There was so much killing in their lives right no
w, it was no wonder Lily wanted out.

  “Maybe we should . . . I don’t know,” he started to say, then he felt water rushing up behind his eyes, stinging them. He had to look away. “Lily, are we up for this? Because maybe I’m not. Going to Gibraltar, not knowing what happened to any of them—”

  “Darrell, please stop,” she whispered. “Try to toughen up, will you?” Then a long pause. “Please. I’m trying to be tough, but I’m really shaky here, and we can’t have both of us like that, so we need to take turns or it’s all going to fall apart. It just is. We’ll take turns, but right now, you be the tough one. Just be it.”

  She was shaking like a leaf in the wind.

  He sucked in, tried to harden himself as if he’d just been given an order. “Sure, sure, I was just saying it’s going to be different for a little while. But we’ll make it, I’m pretty sure. I mean, of course we will.”

  So, all right. He would toughen up. Which would probably be easier with Lily than with anyone else, because Lily was so strong and muscular and whatever. What “toughen up” actually meant, he had no idea, but he could probably start by focusing. On the relics. On stopping Galina. On saving Triangulum. On doing what needed to be done. He’d keep focusing on the next thing and the next until . . . well, all the way until that strange thing called the Frombork Protocol.

  The Frombork Protocol was the mysterious set of instructions Copernicus supposedly wrote on his deathbed in 1543. It was said to command that all twelve relics be brought together and destroyed. How and where and why, he had no clue, but it wasn’t time for that yet. There were a bunch of relics to find. Darrell would focus on finding them.

  “So. First stop, Gibraltar,” he said, trying to sound upbeat.

  “Gibraltar,” she said. “Okay. Good.”

  The next half hour was a hustle from the office to a safe house to another safe house then another, each seedier than the one before. Several nervous overnights were followed by exhausted days of doing nothing but waiting. He and Lily debated about whether to try to find a safe home for Triangulum, but something told them that even if they could find a secure place, they might not be able to retrace their journey to it. Besides, having a priceless relic might be their only bargaining chip, in case things got hairy.