The Crown of Fire Read online

  “It stays with us for now,” she said.

  “Agreed.”

  Finally, the waiting was over, and the two were rushed into a limo, then a car with tinted windows, then a fuel truck, until they were crouched in the rear half of a moving van filled with barrels and cartons of olives.

  “I wouldn’t eat too many of those.”

  Darrell looked up from the wooden carton he had opened. “I’m hungry. Aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I just wouldn’t eat too many of those.”

  Lily’s eyes were fiercely downcast, and she was nodding her head as if having a silent conversation with herself. He could guess what both Lilys were saying—“This is it.” “You said it. I’m so done with crazy.” “Let’s say good-bye to every bit of this.” “Me first.” “Then me.”—and he found himself crawling over to her, glad to have her both there, if only for a little while longer.

  She shifted a bit and laid her head on his shoulder.

  It must have been three or four slow meandering hours later—daylight no longer seeped through the cracks into the compartment—when the rear doors squeaked open.

  The smell of olive oil was quickly replaced by boat fuel and sea salt. They had arrived at the docks of Marseille.

  Someone who looked like a sea captain limped over to the truck. “Dis way. You hide below deck. Four, maybe six days. Tiny cabin. You hurry.”

  Lily gasped. “Six days! We’re going to be locked up—together!—for six days!”

  “Or eight. Can’t tell. You hurry.”

  “Oh, man,” Darrell groaned, pretending disgust. Actually, it sounds all right to me.

  Keeping Lily as near as possible, he followed the captain across the pier to the giant hulk of a rusted antique freighter. They hurried up the ramp together, then he took a breath. The night air was a blend of salt, fried food, fear, crushing doubt, and the sting of ship fuel. It was a nauseating combination; but it would be four, six, maybe eight days before he breathed real air again, so he drew it in as deeply as he could.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Gran Sasso, Italy

  June 15

  Midnight

  Paul Ferrere climbed crabwise among the rocks, trying once more to discover a way into the nuclear facility buried below. The picturesque crags hid an overwhelming force of Teutonic knights, Italian police investigators, and well-armed nuclear inspectors, all in one another’s pockets, working cozily together under the ruse of a nuclear accident.

  It was no accident.

  Galina Krause had kidnapped Roald Kaplan, Terence Ackroyd, and a dozen other nuclear physicists and engineers, and very likely forced them to accomplish a task he couldn’t begin to wrap his head around: rebuilding a five-hundred-year-old time machine that he’d seen trucks deliver to the mountain’s entrance days ago.

  “No,” he mused. “Leave astrophysics to the experts. I need to get inside this hill—”

  A figure darted among the rocks below, and he crouched instinctively to his knees. It wasn’t a guard, but someone moving as he himself moved, snakelike, solo. He kept low for a minute or so, then shifted, when a barrel of cold steel touched the back of his neck.

  “Turn around slowly.”

  A woman’s voice.

  He turned. She was tall, in her thirties, muscular, dressed in a dark leather jumpsuit. Her hair, what he could see of it, was wrapped in a black scarf.

  He tried to smile. “You are . . .”

  She did not smile. “My name is Mistral.”

  The name. He’d heard it. “The thief from Monte Carlo? The one after the da Vinci spectacles? Sara Kaplan told me about you. You’re here because of Ugo Drangheta, the billionaire.”

  She lowered her pistol. “He is inside this mountain.”

  “So are friends of mine,” Paul said.

  She looked down at the twinkling lights surrounding the entrance to the facility, barely visible below. “Ugo and I were following the time machine to this place when he was taken.”

  “Galina Krause has kidnapped a dozen or more nuclear scientists. I believe they’re trying to reassemble the machine. She ordered their capture.”

  “If she has killed Ugo, I will avenge his murder. As soon as I locate a way in.”

  Paul Ferrere had always been wary of allies. They have a habit of turning on you when you least expect it. But he’d been at this for days, and doing it by himself wasn’t working. “Then we two are on the same side.” He put out his hand. “For the duration?”

  She nodded once, took his hand, and shook it. “For the duration.”

  He pointed toward a ridge some yards away. “I saw mist rising before. There could be a vent.”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  Paul watched his new partner, the vengeful thief Mistral, slither away like a serpent among the high grass. He followed close behind.

  In the CERN laboratory a mile beneath the mountain, Roald Kaplan stared at the device rising in front of him. Emerging from a mess of bars and struts and pipes and beams was a spherical creation of unutterable beauty and obvious power.

  The Eternity Machine of Nicolaus Copernicus.

  It was an ancient astrolabe able to voyage the length and breadth of time itself. Twelve unique niches were spaced evenly around the large wheel that gave it its shape. In each niche would stand a strange device—a relic—vital to the machine’s power and maneuverability.

  Just yesterday—or was it the day before?—he had discovered that one of the slots was deeper than the others and more central to the pilot’s chair. Could the relic belonging to that slot be the main one, he wondered, somehow binding the others to it?

  “These relics, Roald. I wonder if we shall ever see one.”

  Roald turned. A bushy-haired scientist from Cambridge named Graham Knox stood behind him. Bespectacled and athletic, Knox bit his lip as his eyes ranged along the great wheel. “They are the navigational devices. At least I suppose they are.”

  “Possibly,” said Roald warily.

  After many days of imprisonment under the mountain, Roald had begun to suspect that some of his “colleagues” had surrendered to Galina by informing on the others. He’d heard notions that in another part of the lab, some physicists, using their discoveries about the Copernicus device, were working on improving Kronos III, the Order’s most advanced time machine. Roald had learned to be cautious, saying only what he was sure Galina already knew. Knox alternately shook his head and nodded.

  A few moments later they were joined by five or six others.

  “My husband and children will be frantic and come for me,” said Jesminda Singh from the Strasbourg Institute. “I know they will.”

  Some days before, Jesminda had showed Roald a small ringlike seal among the astrolabe parts. It was intended to be positioned near the slot for the central relic, she had said, but out of all the parts, it alone appeared to have no actual function. The ring was impressed with the tiny figure of Apollo, the Greek god, strumming a lyre. The icon, Roald knew from his reading, was the personal seal of Nicolaus Copernicus.

  But what did it mean, that an object with no purpose was part of the astrolabe?

  Finally, it was knowing that Jesminda hadn’t shared her discovery with anyone else that cemented his trust in her. So the two of them had agreed to work like Penelope, the heroine of the Odyssey. One helped to build the astrolabe, while the other unbuilt it wherever possible. In that way, they hoped to keep from finishing the machine before the conditions for their escape seemed right.

  “They will all come. Our families, the authorities. NATO.” This was Hiro Shimugachi from Tokyo. “They must be planning to extract us. They simply must be. I know it.” His eyes were ringed with sleeplessness and fatigue.

  Knox snorted under his breath. “You’ve seen the hazmat teams. This Galina Krause is using the director Petrescu to tell the world there is a spill of some kind. ‘Keep away! We will take care of it!’ Nonsense. Even if there is a spill, no one’s coming for us. The world is biting its n
ails, perhaps, but not coming any closer.”

  “My sons will come,” said an engineer from China. “They’ll do anything to find me.”

  Knox looked around and walked away. “Either way, he’ll be here soon. That gray-faced zombie, the colonel. Better get back to work.”

  The colonel.

  Roald’s chest burned with anger at the mention of him. The colonel was Radip Surawaluk, Darrell’s biological father. In some insane way—Roald had no conceivable clue how—the colonel had joined up with Galina. He’d become one of her pawns, but a pawn with power. He led an army of several thousand paramilitary assassins.

  Most of the scientists got back to the business of fitting the final parts together, but Jesminda Singh stayed. “Roald,” she whispered. “I heard something. Project Aurora. Does this mean anything to you?”

  “Project Aurora?” He rolled the words over in his mind. “I wonder . . .”

  During their imprisonment and forced rebuilding of the machine, Roald had studied it closely. The mystery of the hole in the sky had always troubled him, but when he examined the positioning of the relics in the machine’s frame, he could see that the energy produced by the relics might very well be what made the timehole possible.

  Why Galina had a deadline for her launching of it was unclear, however.

  And why she had assembled a dozen powerful nuclear devices in a sunken tanker off the coast of Cyprus was still a dark mystery, though a mystery he had to solve soon.

  Her deadline was coming fast.

  “The devil enters,” Jesminda whispered.

  The ghostly figure of Galina appeared, surrounded by several security guards. Like every other time he’d seen her, she wore black from neck to boots. Not quite twenty years old, with long raven hair and skin as pale as ivory, she strode to the astrolabe. Everyone stood back like serfs in the presence of their empress while she examined the machine. Then Roald saw in her hands what he had never expected to see.

  Crux. The amber cross Becca and the others had discovered in London. So! The Order had invaded the vaults of the British Museum. Seeing it here meant Galina had three relics so far.

  “Kaplan, keeping working!”

  The gruff voice of the colonel.

  How this man, whom Roald had met but once after he and Sara were married, had become barely human in the last five years, and a stone-faced, emotionless thing, was beyond him. Another dark riddle of the Copernicus mystery.

  Roald bowed slightly. With trembling fingers he inserted a bolt through a beam and hand tightened the nut on the other side. He nodded to Jesminda, who dutifully used a sixteenth-century wrench to secure the connection.

  One more section of the astrolabe was complete.

  How long before it would be ready to fly into time?

  Out of the corner of his eye, he now saw the wily assassin, Markus Wolff, stroll casually over to Galina. He lifted his hand out of a leather satchel over his shoulder, and Roald was stunned a second time.

  Wolff held a piece of paper ripped along one side as if torn from a book. Roald recognized the size and color of the paper. It was from Copernicus’s secret diary!

  “I was able to retrieve only one of the pages,” Wolff said.

  Sara! Kids! What happened? Are you all right?

  Galina took the page and pressed it to her chest.

  Roald felt a sharp strike on his arm. The colonel’s eyes burned him. “Keep working!”

  Leaving the floor of the lab, Galina climbed the stairs to the gallery office once occupied by the facility’s director. Her arms and legs seemed made of heavy metal, as heavy as the ancient gold of the astrolabe itself. She felt on fire. She froze.

  She tapped a button on a console, and a wall of bulletproof blinds sealed her away from the floor below. The diary page felt cold in her fingers. Its ink was flecked with silver and gold and was deeply figured and devilishly encoded.

  For the next hour she pored over the letters and numbers, finally urging them to give up a riddle.

  The talons are tamed by the daughter of Rome

  “The talons are tamed by the daughter of Rome,” she said aloud. “Daughter of Rome? In the sixteenth century, Rome was ruled by . . . the pope.” She smiled to herself. “And what pope of Copernicus’s time had a daughter? Alexander VI. The pope from the infamous Borgia family.”

  Remembering the name of the pope’s daughter, Galina tapped out a secure message to the archivists at the Copernicus Room in Madrid.

  Everything on Lucrezia Borgia. Immediately.

  She closed her eyes, and once again, the images came.

  Bronze-faced men with harps. A writhing serpent. Tangled blossoms. A blue griffin.

  “I need Ebner now,” she said to herself. “He must be released.” Opening her eyes, Galina searched her phone for a long-unused number on her contact list.

  Nineteen hundred kilometers north-northwest of Gran Sasso, in Room 411 of Ward 4F—the Adult Critical Care Unit (“Two-only visitors allowed at a patient’s bedside at any one time”)—of the Royal London Hospital, lay a man mummified in bandages.

  A Medusa’s head of wires and tubes tied him to an array of blinking, buzzing, beeping machines. As he breathed in, out, in, out, his vitals monitor pulsed a slow rhythm. He was the once-dead but surprisingly revived working-class assassin known as Archie Doyle.

  In Archie’s small flower-decorated room stood not a phalanx of armed knights of the Teutonic Order, but a plump woman in a floral housecoat and a small child—the “two-only visitors” specified.

  They were Sheila Doyle and her four-year-old son, Paulie.

  Sheila looked on the sad, bandaged figure of her husband, daubing her nose with a tissue she took from the sleeve of her housecoat. It had been months since Archie was shot by that brute Felix Ross. Months since Archie’s “death” on the street outside the church of Saint Andrew Undershaft was reported in the newspapers. Weeks since his revival by a couple of semi-medical blokes assigned to Group 6 of the East London section of the Teutonic Order.

  “Mum?” said Paulie, tugging the hem of her dress.

  She patted the boy on his head. “Yes, dear?”

  “Is Daddy a vegetable?”

  “No more than he was before, dear,” she replied.

  Paulie was quiet awhile, then he tugged her hem again. “Mum?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Will he wake up?”

  “When that phone rings, I expect he will,” she said.

  Paulie stared at the lifeless phone on the stand next to Archie’s bed. “Ring, please. It’s me dad in there.”

  Forty seconds later, the phone rang.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Bologna, Italy

  June 23

  Evening

  On. Off. On. Off. The dim yellow light flickered.

  Becca wanted to scream—“Stop doing that!”—until she realized the flickering was coming from her own eyelids, opening and closing painfully. Apparently, she was trying to wake up.

  “Can you sit?”

  She knew the voice. “Wade?”

  “Yeah. Try to sit up.”

  With all her strength, she forced her eyes to focus on his face. “I might need help. . . .”

  Sliding his hands under her shoulders, he lifted her toward him and propped pillows behind her. She was on what appeared to be a cot, low to the floor. Her side ached, and her upper arm felt on fire and was bandaged tight, with the pressure equal to the pain underneath the bandage. There was a musty smell, of damp stone or cement.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Bologna,” Wade said. “You remember. The tiny car? Last night?”

  “I guess.” Her long sleep—like every sleep for the past few days—had been heavy, deep. Her mind was still hazy.

  A candle floated across the room to her, banishing the dark along the way. Sara’s face was behind it, and now Wade was in the light, too. Sara knelt beside the cot, which was no more than a narrow mattress on a platform of wooden pal
lets.

  “We’re safe for now,” said Sara. “They finally arrested the three knights from the airport terminal.”

  “Of course Markus Wolff has vanished,” Wade added. “So has Julian. We haven’t heard from him since the airport.”

  The airport, yes. Suddenly Markus Wolff’s stony face appeared in her mind, and it came to her crushingly. “Oh, what did I do? The diary! We lost a page didn’t we?”

  “It would have been more except you clawed the rest away from him,” Wade said. “You fought like a tiger. We’ll work around the lost page.”

  Pain ran up her arm into her shoulder and neck. “Sorry, I’ve been so out of it for the last . . . what is it, two weeks?”

  “Nearly,” said Sara.

  Becca tried to gauge how she felt. All right for now. She’d been resting for days, not really going completely unconscious, but not so conscious, either, having to drag herself out of sleeps so deep they seemed like comas. But as she felt more awake, she remembered more of the journeys by car and truck, the quick trips to doctors who said that without tests, it was impossible to say she was suffering from anything besides exhaustion. She felt she could slip off at any moment, but the search for the relics couldn’t afford any funny business like that, so she was trying to pull herself together.

  Sara insisted she be hospitalized—Becca remembered that—which was the sensible thing, after all. But Becca had argued against it. It was way too close to the finish now. She wouldn’t be sidelined. She was there to find the first relic, in the sunlit cave in Guam. She wanted to be there when they found the last. Whatever and wherever that was.

  “So. Okay.” She sat up and felt for the diary. It was next to her pillow. “I think the best thing for me to do is translate every last word of the diary into my notebook. If anything ever happens to me—”

  “To the diary, you mean,” he said.

  “At least you’ll have it. We’ll have it.” She held it close. “My notebook?”

  Sara reached over to a small table. “I actually worked on some diary pages while you were sleeping just now. They were in French, which I know pretty well. I hope you don’t mind.”