The Crown of Fire Read online

  “Good. Good. Can I read them?”

  Sara handed her the red notebook, and Becca read the translation side by side with the original pages in the diary. When she was done, she smiled. “Really good. Just a couple of details. Here’s how I would say it.”

  “September 1514

  “This island—I dare not write its name—was Paradise when Nicolaus and I arrived some months ago. White sand. Dense forests. Plentiful water. Verdant hills.

  “The two of us—joined finally by Nicolaus’s brother, Andreas—work night after weary night, week after draining week, until Ptolemy’s device is complete.

  “No sooner do we finish connecting the twelve relics than the dragons of light appear. The sky beasts. The battle in the heavens shakes overhead. At the same instant, the relics begin to move, all in different and strange ways, as if they are living things, tethered in their places. Light bursts out and up from the machine. Then the sky itself breaks apart, as if to show us a tunnel through it. It is a fiery crown of golden light amid the deep black, a ring of fire, a crown of flame.

  “‘A hole in the sky!’ Nicolaus cries. He throws the main lever.

  “The astrolabe roars around the two of us huddling in its center. A great rush of wind threatens to crush us, and we are launched on our first mission into the tunnel of time.”

  “And here’s the second passage,” Becca said. “From a year later.”

  “September 1515

  “The second voyage is horrifying.

  “Our ‘hole in the sky’ has multiplied a hundred times. A thousand. Where once we saw groves of apple trees, trickling creeks, and the music of angels, now there is death, flood, ravaging fire, the wail of lamentation.

  “‘We’ve done this, Hans, you and I,’ Nicolaus cries. ‘Our travel has wounded the universe!’

  “Upon our return we vow to destroy the machine.

  “But as we raise our hammers against Vela and Scorpio, Triangulum and Crux, our instruments are shattered to dust. No matter what we do, the relics remain alive, intact, unbreakable!

  “‘Then we’ll unbuild the machine and hide the relics where none can find them,’ Nicolaus says. ‘And may God have mercy on our souls!’”

  The three of them sat there stunned.

  “These are brand-new passages about the first voyages,” Becca said. “Amazing.”

  A soft tap sounded from across the room. Sara crept over and lifted a squeaky latch. A door opened. Another candle. Another face.

  Becca stared. “Isabella Mercanti?”

  Isabella was a scholar and the widow of Silvio Mercanti, a college friend of Roald Kaplan and a Guardian. Isabella had helped them often in the past.

  “How are you feeling, dear?”

  “Pretty good,” Becca said. “We’re at your house?”

  “No. But of course you were very tired when we arrived last night. You are in one of the safe houses my husband, Silvio, owned across Europe, where he did his Guardian work. I am discovering things in them. Come. The coast is clear.”

  Together, they climbed a narrow set of stairs into a bright kitchen. Sunlight flashed through the windows.

  “Thanks for taking care of us, of me,” Becca said. “I’ve been kind of out of it. But I feel stronger now.” She didn’t exactly feel stronger, but she hoped she would soon.

  “You rather have to be strong,” Isabella said. “There is so much left to do.” She led them into a small windowless library, where they sat at a large oak table, spread with maps and charts and several old volumes in different languages.

  “First, let me say that your friend Maurice Maurice managed to send a message to me this morning. Terence had once told him of me, he says. Lily and Darrell are safe. Or they were safe two weeks ago on their way to Gibraltar. They have since vanished.”

  Becca frowned. “Vanished?”

  “This is not as bad as it sounds,” Isabella said. “The Order is murdering Guardians all over. Being ‘vanished’ is a good strategy. Our own best plan is to remain so ourselves. Now, two riddles. One or perhaps both are about the twelfth relic.”

  Becca felt a jolt of electricity, and found herself completely awake. “Markus Wolff said the twelfth relic was the answer to everything. He told us this in San Francisco.”

  “It may be,” Isabella said. “The first thing I found among Silvio’s papers is a poem by Michelangelo.”

  “The artist?” said Wade.

  “Sì. Many know him as a painter and sculptor,” Isabella said. “He was also an excellent poet whom I have spent a lifetime studying. For thirty years, I have catalogued and edited his entire work. Yet this sonnet is completely unknown to me. I have begun to translate it, but there are severe difficulties because of his strange language. I have only part of it, and it is very rough. Tell me what you make of it all.”

  She set a stiff sheet of paper on the table and read them her translation.

  “My friend, I see you suffer from a wound

  And offer you my lustrous southern cloak.

  You say your life and soul were here marooned

  Until a better soul espied a drifting barque.”

  “This is all I have so far. It is very rough,” Isabella repeated. “Later, there is a phrase, the only Latin words in the otherwise colloquial Italian poem. Scientiam temporis. The knowledge of time. I believe there is a secret here, but much of his phrasing is new to me. It is undoubtedly by Michelangelo, but the language is mystical.”

  Becca felt weak. A wave of heaviness seemed to crash over her, eddying in her mind, darkening her sight as if a blanket had been thrown over her head.

  The wave receded, lifted away—instantly, she thought—but some minutes seemed to have passed, because Wade, Sara, and Isabella were now hovering over Silvio’s second clue, but staring at her.

  On the desk was a wrinkled envelope, singed around the edges.

  “My husband kept several secret safe-deposit boxes at various banks in Bologna. This was in one of them. Becca, I believe you should open it.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “Because of this.” Isabella held up the envelope. Scrawled on it were the words:

  For Rebecca Moore

  —November 1975

  “It’s impossible, of course. You weren’t even born yet,” said Wade.

  “Impossible or not, look inside,” Isabella said.

  With trembling fingers, Becca opened the sealed envelope. Inside was a single paper note of French currency, dated 1959. It was folded crisply in half and appeared unused.

  The nineteenth-century French poet and novelist Victor Hugo appeared on both front and back. The front of the note showed Hugo before a building called the Panthéon. In the sky above the dome, tiny numbers and symbols were scribbled.

  @24@7@5

  The back showed a row of buildings, also in Paris, that Isabella said was in a square called Place des Vosges. Above one of the rooftops were more numbers and symbols.

  @2@8@9@6

  “Why is this addressed to me?” Becca said. “I don’t know what it means. This money isn’t even good anymore, is it?”

  “Not since the euro replaced the French franc more than fifteen years ago,” Sara said.

  Becca slipped on her reading glasses and held the bill close, studying it for other clues, when she felt her head grow heavy again. Her arm throbbed with a dull pain, and she sank back into her chair. “I’m so tired. I think I need to sleep a bit more.”

  “Becca? Bec—”

  But if Wade said any more, she didn’t hear it. She slipped away into a kind of waking sleep. It was very much like the blackouts she’d suffered in London months ago, though that was clearly impossible here, unless . . .

  Something was moving, darkening across her vision, and there he was, the astronomer himself, Nicolaus Copernicus, entering the fog of her mind in a whirl of green cloak and stern dark eyes. In one hand he clutched a painting, swimming in pinks and blues and browns, of a young woman, or a man with flowing dark hair. It wa
s too blurry to make out details.

  Nicolaus was speaking, but his words weren’t clear, either. Trying to pierce the dense air of her dream, she listened intently, and a single word floated to her.

  “Hope . . .”

  “Hope?” she said in her mind. “Is that what you said? Who is in the picture? Nicolaus, is it Galina?”

  But the fog rolled over Nicolaus and over his picture and over her, and if Wade spoke again she didn’t know, because everything faded into darkness.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Gibraltar, Spain

  June 27

  Morning

  Gibraltar is a peninsula hanging off the bottom of Spain, and it has a huge enormous rock sticking up out of it. The thing is a boulder as big as a mountain, and it just sits there glaring down on all the stuff happening beneath it like an angry parent.

  After not four, not six, not even eight, but thirteen days on that grimy freighter, which apparently had to stop at every port in the world before Gibraltar, Darrell and Lily had finally been smuggled off. Except that kicked off was more like it. The captain wanted nothing to do with them, though he dutifully gave Darrell a hundred British pounds when they docked, courtesy of Maurice Maurice.

  Darrell had to admit that thirteen days with Lily had been just all right. The long days and longer nights had been no picnic, but he wasn’t about to bring that up just now. For some reason Lily was on the brink of exploding, so he decided to be upbeat Darrell.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said as they wandered through the narrow streets under the shadow of the big rock.

  “About what we do next?”

  “Well, sure, but also that if everything wasn’t actually terrible, it would actually be okay.”

  Lily jerked to a stop on the hot sidewalk. The way she stood frozen there, framed by that enormous angry rock, made him suddenly regret saying anything.

  “Really? It’s okay?” she said. “Is that what you just said?”

  “What I meant to say was . . .” But he suddenly couldn’t think of what he meant.

  “That awful boat? That gross and smelly floating iron hotbox with a ‘room’ no bigger than a filing cabinet? Not to mention my lunk of a roommate? That was okay? Not knowing where in the world we were, not knowing about Becca or Wade or anyone? That was okay? Being completely silent for, what, a year?”

  “Thirteen days.”

  “Thirteen endless days. That was okay? For me?”

  “Well . . .”

  “And why did the captain give you all the spending money?”

  “Because I’m taller?”

  “Barely. And I’m obviously the bright one here.”

  “You are?” he said. “I mean, you are, but how could he know that?”

  “Because I don’t even want to be here!”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Not to mention the month we’ve been in Gibraltar—”

  “Three and a half days.”

  “—not to also mention that our friends—my Becca and your Wade and your mother and Uncle Roald and Terence and Julian and everyone else—in the world are probably dead? That’s okay?”

  “I really didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “Or any way. I take it all back. I just meant that we’ve got each—”

  “Or the sea-sickness-throwing-up contest, which, by the way, I think I won?”

  “Mine was mostly olives.”

  She continued down the street. “And stop humming. It’s annoying.”

  Darrell wasn’t aware he had been humming, but he said “Sorry” anyway. She was so touchy these days—maybe girls didn’t like being cooped up in small cabins on freighters for nearly two weeks—and he didn’t want to set her off again. They passed through an alley and came out on a narrow street with a café at the far end.

  “I mean it,” she said. “I know you’re a guitar player and all, but if that’s one of your songs, it’s boring. Nnnnnn. Nnnn. Stop humming.”

  He paused. “I wasn’t humming. Seriously. I wasn’t making any noise.”

  She took a breath, poised to snap at him again, when she stood stock-still, closed her eyes, and listened. “It’s not you.”

  “Which I also thought—”

  “It’s coming . . . from behind us.” She stepped back into the alley and tugged him in after her. The humming grew louder. NnnnnNNNNN!

  An electric scooter suddenly zipped past the alley. Crouched on its seat was a figure aiming a machine gun that was mounted on its handlebars.

  “Who in the world is that?” she whispered.

  Darrell tensed up. “All my training as a spy—”

  “What training?”

  “—from Rome to Guam to London to Russia and everywhere else tells me to surprise the surpriser by luring him into an ambush. Turn the tables on the attacker. Here, take Triangulum and wait right here.”

  “Darrell, I don’t know about this. . . .”

  Giving her the bulletproof backpack anyway, Darrell slid out of the alley and instantly felt the sharp poke of a machine-gun barrel between his shoulder blades.

  “Hands to the sky!”

  Darrell groaned. “Seriously?” He raised his hands and turned slowly. He had been poked not by the barrel of a machine gun, but by the tip of an aluminum cane. Sitting on the electric scooter behind the cane was a middle-aged man with a round face and smiling eyes, blinking through a pair of tinted sunglasses.

  Lily jumped out of the alley. “Simon? Simon Tingle!”

  “My indescribable self!”

  Simon Tingle was the research assistant—and shooting victim—of Sir Felix Ross, a knight of the Order, both of whom they’d met in London when searching for the Crux relic.

  A brilliant man with a vast memory for everything he’d ever seen or read, Simon had turned out to be a member of the British secret intelligence service known as MI5. Like just about everyone else, he’d taken a few bullets for the Guardian cause.

  “As soon as I heard of your escapade in Nice, I came running,” Simon told them. “Well, scootering.”

  “Any news about Becca and Sara and Wade?” Lily asked.

  “Markus Wolff attacked them at the airport,” Simon said, with a glance up at Darrell. “But they were unhurt.”

  “Thank God!” said Lily. “Really, they’re okay? I’ve been worrying like crazy.”

  “They are,” said Simon.

  Darrell laughed with relief. “Great, so great. Good. You just can’t stop us!”

  “That nasty egg Wolff stole a bit of the diary, I hear. Not much. A page. Your family are in hiding with Isabella Mercanti.”

  “Isabella!” said Lily. “Good. She’ll take care of them.”

  “I should tell you that Ebner von Braun was able to steal Crux from the British Museum. He did get himself arrested, but Galina’s got her hands on the relic you spent so long locating.”

  “Dang!” said Darrell. “She’s turned it around. Galina’s got three relics to our two.”

  “She has three for the moment,” Simon said. “That number will rise, I’m afraid. Your man Silva is in hospital in Nice. He’ll survive, as he always seems to. The housekeeper is in a bit of a coma, though bit of a coma sounds wrong. She’s expected to pop out at any moment, scowling, no doubt. Let us meander to the waterside. I have much to tell you.”

  He steered his scooter around and zipped down the street at a clip. They made their way through a number of short streets fronting the shore. Simon slowed and finally parked on a promenade overlooking the vast blue Mediterranean.

  “Now,” he said, “you need to know that the Order began a purge of Guardians around the world some weeks ago. So far over seventy agents, from the lowest-level courier to communications chiefs at many Guardian hot spots, have been eliminated. Your contact in Budapest. A very old, very tough Guardian in Miami, the last of them from the nineteen forties. These attacks were calculated, bold, and horrific.”

  “Oh my gosh!” Lily gasped.

  “Indeed,” Simon said. “
This assault signifies a new ruthlessness on Galina’s part. One person, Papa Dean, your poet friend from San Francisco, is presumed dead. Isabella Mercanti was herself a target but remains unhurt.”

  Lily hid her eyes. “Galina is killing our friends! Our family!”

  “We have to . . . we have to . . .” Darrell began slapping his fist into his palm. “Galina has to be stopped. We have to end this!”

  “Alas, that isn’t all,” Simon went on. “CERN has issued a stern warning, under Galina’s orders, of course, about a critical nuclear leak at Gran Sasso. They, CERN, insist they will clean it up if left alone to do it. British intelligence isn’t buying it, of course. The leak is no accident. But too much is at stake to make all this public. Naturally, we’re working undercover to free the prisoners.”

  Darrell paced the seawall. “What about Galina’s nuclear arsenal off the island of Cyprus? She plans to blow up the Mediterranean. We saw the bombs. Or reactors or whatever they are. Is anyone going to do anything about that?”

  Simon frowned. “Not at the moment. And the reason is . . . in a word . . . politics. Moving on a nuclear nation, which is what the Teutonic Order is now, needs a coalition of willing states. None of this is in the public’s eye, you understand. Not a word. The intelligence folks in the UK and your lot are in, but not Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt. Galina has too many people in governments around the world. Even France and Italy are on the fence. Why? Protecting their land. If an assault on either Gran Sasso or Cyprus goes the tiniest bit wrong, the Mediterranean countries would suffer catastrophically. So, Galina achieves a stalemate. She knows we are too cautious for our own good. In the meantime, she collects more relics.”

  “I can’t believe they won’t all agree,” said Lily.

  “Same reason they can’t agree on climate change,” Simon said. “Just the other day, while you were on board your pleasure cruise, a chunk of ice the size of Scotland broke off at the South Pole. It’s happening, my friends. And we’re all sitting watching it.”

  Coalition. It sounded great to Darrell. Everyone working together to stop the Order. Except that no one was working together. And Galina kept murdering people.