The Serpent's Curse Page 4

  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.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Prague, Czech Republic

  March 18

  9:13 a.m.

  Galina 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.

  As Galina walked the winding, snow-dusted streets of Prague’s Old Town, she passed through deserted alleys and passages barely wider than a sidewalk. Finally, she entered into the somber “antiquarian district.” This section of Prague deserved its designation. A neighborhood forlorn, yet rich in history and the smell of a past carelessly abandoned by modernity. For that reason alone, she adored it.

  She halted three doors down from a tiny low-awninged shopfront on Bĕlehradská Street. Antikvariát Gerrenhausen appeared as it must have generations ago: crumbling, forever in shadow, hauntingly like those sad, cluttered storefronts in old photographs of a forgotten, bygone era.

  A man entered the street from the far end. He was tall. His close-cropped white hair cut a severe contrast with the stark black of his knee-length leather coat.

  Markus Wolff had recently returned from the United States.

  She moved toward him, though their eyes would not meet until the standard subterfuge was completed. Wolff approached her, passed by, and then, after scanning the street and its neighboring windows for prying eyes, doubled back to her.

  “Miss Krause.” He greeted her in a deep baritone, a voice that was, if possible, icier than her own. He unslung a black leather satchel from his shoulder and set it on the sidewalk at her feet. “The remains of the shattered jade scorpion from Mission Dolores. The Madrid servers can perhaps make sense of them.”

  “Excellent,” she replied. “Do you have the video I asked you to take in San Francisco?”

  “I do.” He pressed the screen of his phone.

  A moment later, a file appeared on hers. She opened it. A boy, seven and three-quarters years of age, ran awkwardly across a field of green grass, kicking a soccer ball. The camera zoomed in on his face. The tender smile, the pink cheeks, the lazy blond curls flying in the wind. She paused it. The boy was oblivious to his own mortality.

  “Splendid,” she said sullenly. “Wolff, take note of this street. This shop.”

  “I have.”

  “You may be asked to return here in the weeks to come,” she said. “For now, I want you to look into the Somosierra incident. Ease my mind.”

  “The stranded bus driver and student,” he said. “I will search for physical evidence.”

  She felt suddenly nauseated and wanted the conversation to end. “In six days’ time I will be in Istanbul. We will meet there.”

  Markus Wolff nodded once and left.

  Man of few words, Galina thought. How refreshing. Shouldering the leather satchel and drawing a cold breath, she entered the shop. A cadaverous gentleman, the seventh generation of Gerrenh
ausens, stood hunched and motionless behind a counter cluttered with books and rolled maps, yellowed file folders, and an assortment of wooden boxes. He listened as a gramophone on the shelf behind him emitted a scratchy yet plaintive string quartet movement. She recognized it as Haydn. The D-minor andante.

  “You have the item I requested?” she asked. The sound of her voice was nearly swallowed by the yearning violins and the thick, paper-muffled air in the old shop.

  The slender hands of the emaciated proprietor twitched, while his lips formed a smile as thin as a razor blade. “It has just arrived, miss.” He reached under the counter and withdrew a small oak box, burnished nearly black with age. He opened the lid.

  Nestled deeply in maroon velvet was a delicate miniature portrait of a kind common in the sixteenth century.

  The framed circular painting, two inches in diameter, was a product of Hans Holbein the Younger. “Incorrectly dated 1541, it was created actually between 1533 and 1535, during the painter’s years in England at the court of King Henry the Eighth, as you know,” the proprietor said.

  The portrait featured the face and shoulders of its sitter, a brilliant bloom of flesh in a setting of velvety black and midnight blue. It was a three-quarter view, in which the sitter, aged somewhere between seventeen and nineteen, gazed off, a sorrowful expression on the face, eyes dark, lips pursed, almost trembling. It was not a peaceful portrait, and Galina found herself shuddering at the sight of it. She closed the box.

  “The fee is one hundred seventy-five thousand euros,” the proprietor said softly, as if only slightly embarrassed by the number. “Its former home, a boutique museum in Edinburgh, will not soon realize it is displaying a forgery. Such workmanship is costly.”

  To Galina the miniature was worth ten times as much, a hundred times. It was not the money that mattered in this instance. She had become aware over the last years that she required the strictest loyalty and silence from an antiquarian such as Herr Gerrenhausen and knew how pitifully easy it was to gain such loyalty and silence when a loved one was threatened. Smiling at the old proprietor, she swiped her phone open to the frozen video. “Do you recognize this young boy?”

  The man squinted at the phone and beamed. “Why, yes! That is my grandson, Adrian. He lives with my youngest daughter and her husband in California. But why . . . how . . . why do you have a video of Adrian . . . ?” He trailed off. His face turned the color of white wax.

  Galina slid a list of several items across the counter to him. “This is what I need. You will acquire the items for me. There will be no end to our relationship until I say there is. Currently the boy is safe. But he is within our grasp at any moment. You do understand me.”

  Rapid nodding preceded a long string of garbled words, which the man punctuated finally with “I understand.”

  She felt her expression ease. “I am wiring the purchase fee for the miniature to your Munich account. The first item on the list is to be auctioned at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes in June. You will acquire it anonymously.”

  “Of course! I will. Yes, everything.”

  The Haydn andante ended morosely behind him.

  Galina swiped the image of the boy from her phone, then inserted the blackened oak box into her leather satchel and left the shop, short of breath and shivering, but not from the cold.

  CHAPTER NINE

  New York

  The morning after the discovery of the ribbon in the dagger’s hilt, Darrell woke early from somber dreams about his mother to hear his stepfather and Terence Ackroyd working out an elaborate plan for that morning, a ruse intended to throw off any agents of the Teutonic Order who might be watching the hotel.

  “The first of many new plans,” Roald had told him.

  “I hope they work,” Darrell grumbled to himself.

  The plan involved three cars, the family of the Gramercy Park Hotel’s assistant manager, two retired New York City policemen, a traffic officer, and a crew of window cleaners—all creating multiple distractions while the kids zigzagged uptown with Julian, and Roald and Terence headed on foot to the West Side to meet the detective Paul Ferrere.

  A half hour later, Darrell and the others were streaming up Madison Avenue, shielded by crowds of commuters and early shoppers. Since he had no sense whatsoever of anyone watching them, Darrell accepted that their plan had actually succeeded.

  Despite the latest storm having dumped nine heavy inches of snow that was now aging into black and crusty walls, narrowing the streets and the sidewalks to half their width, their walk uptown was brisk but still not fast enough for him.

  As soon as Darrell pictured his mother tied to a chair or pounding on a door or lying bound up in a locked closet, his mind went red, and blood rushed like waves inside his head until he couldn’t see straight.

  But he had to hope, right? He had to put his mother’s situation in a pocket and get on with what he knew he had to get on with. We’re doing everything possible. We have detectives. We have Terence’s assistance. Sooner or later, Mom will be where the next relic is, because that’s where Galina will take her.

  So fine. Get your head in the game.

  He managed to refocus himself in time to hear Julian saying to Wade, who was five steps behind him, “I was born in Mandalay, actually. Myanmar. What they used to call Burma. It’s where my mom died. I was four. I never had much time with her.”

  So. That was why Terence had given his son that look last night. Julian had lost his mother, too. How do you even deal with not growing up with your mom, having so little time to be with her? And Myanmar? Myanmar was right next to Thailand, where Darrell’s father had grown up.

  They came to the southwest corner of the intersection of Madison Avenue and Thirty-Sixth Street and waited for the light. Lily nudged him and nodded at two low-roofed Renaissance-style mansions—one of brown stone blocks, the other white—with a modern glass-and-steel atrium joining them.

  “We are going to get so much help here,” she said. “I have a feeling.”

  Becca nodded. “Like Wade said in San Francisco, the more relics we find, the more leverage we have.”

  “I know,” Darrel said, mustering up a smile. “I get it.”

  The truth was that he wanted to go after the next relic. Not as much as he needed to find his mother, of course, but a real close second. This was important. The Copernicus Legacy was life-alteringly amazing. It was cosmic. Time travel blew his mind, and if Galina wanted to reassemble the astrolabe, that was enough to make him vow she never would. He needed to be a part of what they were doing, no matter how dangerous or scary.

  We have to stop Galina. At all costs.

  Lily was very impressed. And, seriously, not a lot of stuff impressed her. But exactly as Julian had promised the night before, even though the Morgan Library and Museum was still closed to the public, its doors whisked open for them and sealed solidly after they entered.

  Wow.

  “You’ll be rather astounded at their collection,” Julian told them when they filed into the tall, glass-walled atrium. “And their security.” He nodded at a pair of hefty guards by the doors who looked more than a match for the oak-headed thugs from last night.

  “I should also tell you that your new tablet contains a slew of one-of-a-kind documents from the Morgan’s private holdings,” he added. “Sixteenth-century biographies. Maps. Astronomical treatises. Code books. It’ll take you months to go through it all.”

  “I could do it in a few days,” Lily said, shrugging.

  “I’m sure you could,” he said with a smile.

  Lily had felt special last night when the Ackroyds, both father and son, had recognized that she was, in Julian’s words, “the tech master of the group. The intelligence officer.”

  I so like that! Intelligence officer. That’s exactly what I am.

  “Good morning.” A slender man in a dark blue suit with soft-heeled shoes, who Julian whispered was one of the two chief curators, met them in the atrium. The kids took turns explainin
g why they were there.

  “Scytales and the vault,” the curator said, tapping his fingers on his chin. “Got it. Vault first. Please follow me.” He spun around and led them through several still-darkened galleries to a bank of elevators. They took one down into the library’s underground level. “Perhaps Julian has told you, but the lowest level runs beneath the entire length of both the library and Pierpont Morgan’s original residence.”

  “This is where my dad is suggesting you keep . . . the object,” Julian said. “For the time being at least. We have extensive vault privileges here.”

  After leading them through several passages, the curator paused at a large steel door. “When Mr. Morgan had the house built, he constantly rotated his collection between what he displayed upstairs and what was stored in the vault. In the century since then, security has been updated countless times. The vault is now virtually invulnerable. Even in the case of nuclear attack, which, surprisingly, is a factor . . . no matter how slight.”

  For instance, what if the Order . . . never mind.

  He opened the door with a pass code and a fingerprint scan. Inside stood a narrow entry hall leading to a second door. “Built into the side walls is a kind of electronic gauntlet,” the curator said. “You have to pass through it to reach the vault.”

  “You’ll like this,” Julian said to them as they entered. “Gates trip and floor tiles sink if you take the wrong route to the inner chamber. Any intruder would be trapped between the walls long before any theft or damage could occur.”

  The curator nodded. “For example, several infrared sensors are scanning us as we’re passing through right now—”

  Beeep!

  The curator turned to Wade. “Er . . . you appear to have something on you . . .”