The Crown of Fire Read online

  “My only sliver of good news is something I found among Sir Felix Ross’s papers after he died. I believe it may tell of a new relic. And collecting the relics may be our only sure way of defeating Galina and the Order.”

  Lily wiped tears from her face. “Great. Show us what you have.”

  “Not here. That café. At the back tables. Go in separately. You first, Mr. Darrell.”

  One by one, they drifted and scooted across a plaza to an outdoor café, where they sought out a shady table in the rear. Simon shifted into a wicker chair. When he was sure no one was eyeing them, he opened the seat of his scooter and removed a wooden cylinder about six inches tall with a large round emblem of a double-headed eagle on top.

  “This is the emblem of the Hanseatic League, the German merchant organization from the sixteenth century, which you know about from your time in London,” he said. “But the wood is not German. Rather, it is Spanish, which I think may be a clue. Now, the item is heavy enough to be solid wood, but after tinkering for a while, I got it to do this.”

  He pressed the emblem in a crisscross manner, first the tips of the wings, then the talons, then the beak of each eagle head. When he lifted his finger away, the top of the cylinder flipped up. Thousands of tiny numbers and letters were inscribed around the inside walls of the canister, and there was a three-sided outline on the floor of box.

  “Oh, man, a triangle,” Darrell breathed. “This could work with Triangulum. It could tell us where another relic is.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Simon said. “And my hope, too. Without Guardian help, we are rather on our own about what the next relics might be and where they are hidden.”

  Lily removed the aluminum box from the pack Maurice Maurice had given them. She opened it, gently slid out Triangulum, and carefully inserted the silver triangle within the outline inscribed on the floor of the box.

  The instant she drew her fingers away, it flashed brightly and began to spin so quickly it seemed like a circle of silver light. All at once, it stopped in place. Its three tips pointed to numbers on the inside wall. It spun four times, paused, then started the sequence again.

  “I’ll write them down,” said Lily, slipping a pencil from the bag and marking the numbers on a napkin. “The first time it spins, each triangle tip points to . . . a one. The next time it’s also one. The third time it’s . . . three. And the fourth is five. Then it starts over. One, one, three, five.”

  It did this several times before moving in the opposite direction. This time when Triangulum stopped, its points touched letters.

  A, A, C, P, S, U

  “These letters are scrambled,” said Simon. “And you know how I rather love scrambles! Let me work on the letters. Casa pu. Casa up. Paucas. Capaus. Caspau . . .”

  While Simon mumbled letter combinations, Darrell and Lily studied the numbers.

  “Whenever there are four numbers, I think of a year, right?” Darrell said. “And if there’s a five and a one among them, I always think fifteen.”

  She smiled for the first time in ages. “Because my birthday is June fifteenth?”

  “Which I did not know,” he said. “And I’m sorry we didn’t celebrate.”

  “We did. Barf party, remember?”

  “Right. Well, I always think of fifteen because everything about Copernicus, or most of it at least, is in the fifteen hundreds.”

  “Good start,” she said. “That gives us either one five one three or one five three one.”

  “Neither of which is great,” said Darrell. “Fifteen thirteen is before Copernicus discovered the astrolabe, and fifteen thirty-one is after he gave out all the relics—”

  “Aha!” Simon jumped a little in his seat. “The answer is . . . pascua.” He seemed to wait for a response from them.

  “Uh . . . ,” said Lily.

  “Spanish, meaning ‘Easter,’” Simon said, tugging a small tablet computer from under the scooter seat. “Since the wooden canister is Spanish, this makes sense. Now, perhaps the earliest primary source mentioning the feast of Easter is a homily from the mid-second century attributed to a chap named Melito, of the Sardis Melitos. Although Easter is a movable feast, it does signify a day in the year. If you have a year, perhaps we can find something.”

  “May I?” she said, eyeing the tablet greedily.

  “Oh, please, I rarely use the thing myself. Don’t need to. Have it all up here.”

  Lily fired up the tablet and entered the two dates—1513 and 1531—followed by the word pascua.

  It came nearly instantly.

  “Easter Sunday in fifteen thirty-one is just Easter Sunday in fifteen thirty-one,” Lily said, “but Easter Sunday in fifteen thirteen, which according to some calendars happened to be on April second, is the generally agreed date the Spanish explorer Ponce de León discovered Florida.”

  “Florida?” said Darrell. “To find the next relic we have to go to Florida? Simon? Florida? Because if you tell us we have to go to Florida, I guess we’ll have to go there. To Florida.”

  “Ponce de León and Florida, is it?” Simon said, rather to himself than to them. “I like that. Merely saying ‘Easter fifteen thirteen’ would work as a way of telling Guardians who had hidden a relic. Until recently, Florida was a Guardian hot spot in the States. I do believe this is a clue, a very definite clue. Ponce de León and Florida. Excuse me!”

  He slid from his chair onto the scooter seat and motored across the open plaza to an office. It read Thomas Cook on the sign above the door.

  “That’s a famous travel agency,” said Lily. “I know their name from before.”

  From before. Everything was from before, thought Darrell.

  “You were in Florida for a while, hiding out with Becca and her family.”

  “Tampa,” she said. “On the west coast. It’s kind of beautiful there. Beaches, lots of white sand, palm trees, sunshine. Becca liked it, too.”

  “Anywhere in the US sounds good to me,” he said. “But Florida especially.”

  Simon motored back as if on a mission, his suit jacket billowing in the warm sea breeze. “Two one-way tickets to Miami, Florida, for next week. Miami used to be the center of Guardian communications. I want you to hide in Gibraltar a few more days, though, while we make certain the Order hasn’t picked up your trail.”

  “Please, no,” said Lily. “No more hiding out in cramped rooms.”

  “Standard field procedure, I’m afraid,” Simon said with a smile. “I’ll find you when it’s safe to fly. Better to do things slowly than not at all because you’re . . . dead, eh? A new hotel each night, however. No chances shall we take.”

  Lily grumbled. “All right.”

  “Good show,” Simon said. “Also, here are a couple of passports. Every Thomas Cook storefront is, of course, an MI6 field office. If you need assistance anywhere in the world, just give them this.” He handed Lily a card. It was nearly blank, except for a large holographic S and a T intertwined in the manner of a Renaissance symbol on the front and the word Neckermann on the rear.

  “Our affiliate, you see,” he said. “Show this at any Thomas Cook or Neckermann, and they’ll know that you know me, and I know you. Otherwise, consider that you’ll be alone, and in significant danger. Now, about Triangulum. Would you like me to take it somewhere? And where, specifically?”

  Darrell shot Lily a look. “The Vatican,” he said.

  “Julian Ackroyd suggested it,” Lily said with a nod. “He says he knows someone there.” She told him the name.

  Simon’s jaw dropped. “I say, I’ve heard of that fellow. He’s rather high up, isn’t he? Well, very good.” He took his computer tablet back and slipped Triangulum in its box and secured it under his scooter seat with the wooden box. “I’ll protect the relic like a true Guardian. Upon my life, I will. In the meantime, you’d better nip along smartly.”

  “‘Nip along’ . . . ?” Darrell said.

  “Hurry up. It’s a figure of speech. Such as, the ice is melting as we speak!
Meaning, go!”

  Simon tapped his cane on the ground, steered his scooter away, and vanished into the streets as if he’d never been there. The giant rock loomed over them.

  “Miami,” Lily said with a breath. “The quest continues.”

  “We’ll be on our own again.”

  “But we’re getting better at that,” she said.

  “We are. But listen.” Darrell paused, wondering how to say it, then just plunging in. “We’re going to the States. You’ll be closer to your folks than ever.”

  “I know.”

  “So I have to ask. Are you going to go home? I mean, I know you want to. We all do, I guess, but you actually could.”

  She looked into his eyes. “I . . . I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

  He just nodded. What could he do? If people want to leave, you can’t stop them.

  “Of course without me,” she said, “you’d probably die soon.”

  He looked at her. “Oh, you think so?”

  “Pretty much, yeah. Come on. We’d better find another grungy place to hide out.”

  “Lead the way,” he said.

  Then, opening his passport, Darrell let out a laugh. “My new name is Dimitrios Bond. Can you believe it? Is that cool? Dimitrios Bond? It’s kind of the name I’ve always dreamed of. Exotic and very Bondish. Oh, yeah.”

  Lily flipped open her passport. “No way. Carlotta Bronte? Seriously?”

  “Carlotta. I like that. Come on, Carlotta.”

  “That’s Miss Bronte to you.”

  Under the stern gaze of that big ugly rock, they wandered back up the streets away from the water to find another hotel, and await the first safe flight to Miami.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Gran Sasso, Italy

  June 29

  Morning

  Galina stared at the nearly assembled astrolabe.

  “Clear the laboratory! Everyone out. I must be alone!”

  The colonel’s paramilitary troops quickly ushered the scientists back to their rooms, and soon the lab was empty, strangely quiet, and cold.

  She approached the machine, ran her fingers along its golden armature, the great flat open wheel that stretched nearly eight feet across. Then she slid inside and settled herself into the foremost of the four seats. The pilot’s position.

  The console in front of her was wide and populated with an array of meters and dials of various sizes, their needles pointing to zero. Alongside them were fixed twelve small rotors, disks that moved easily with the touch of a finger.

  The main maneuvering was done, she knew, by the single main lever—three feet from base to tip, secured to the floor—and twelve smaller individual levers attached by cables to twelve points around the circumference of the wheel. These controlled the twelve relics, either individually or in tandem.

  Several hoses of mesh-covered gold fed into the panel from the “engine” behind the pilot’s compartment by way of the base. The base itself was in fact a giant astrolabe, also eight feet from front to rear. A vertical wheel-shaped armature, identical in size to the horizontal one, bisected the sphere from the front center and created the mechanism of the dome overhead. All this was crafted of gold-covered steel, gold-covered copper and bronze, or simply gold.

  Galina so far had three relics.

  Serpens, Scorpio, Crux.

  “Less than ninety days left. I need more. More.”

  She gripped the main lever with such force that its edge sliced into her palm. Her phone vibrated. She swiped it on with bloody fingers. There was no message, only a video. She tapped the screen.

  Three agents of the Order trotted along a stretch of rural railroad tracks. They approached the camera operator who was filming from inside a car. The lens panned away to a train accelerating down a section of railway she identified immediately. It was ten kilometers south of Moscow.

  She knew who was on board this train. Over fifty officials from various first-world countries who had recently negotiated a landmark climate-change agreement. They were traveling to a state-sponsored celebration at a government villa outside the Russian capital.

  The train approached. A hand twitched in the camera’s frame. And the tracks exploded. The train derailed. The engine roared with flames. At the same time, thirty or more agents of the Order poured out of the nearby trees. They entered the cars, firing.

  Minutes later, the agents returned to the trees. The car drove away. The video ended.

  Galina knew that in the next hours, investigators of the horrifying incident would locate Turkish passports, cartridges from Iraqi-bought weapons, slogans of Mediterranean terrorist groups, and other invented evidence. The attack would surely disrupt any coalition being mounted against her.

  A second message came in, this one from the odd little bookseller Oskar Gerrenhausen. It was terse.

  On site

  She smiled and turned off her phone.

  With Nicolaus Copernicus’s great complex time machine surrounding her, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

  They were there again.

  The griffin. The monkey. The bronze-skinned dancing figures. The green serpent coiling above her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jimbaran Bay, Bali, Indonesia

  June 30

  Sunset

  “This old man’s whistling is annoying,” thirteen-year-old Putu Karja said to himself as he strolled along a sandy beach at sunset on Jimbaran Bay on the island of Bali.

  “But if you want a good tip, you learn to ignore irritating habits and move at the pace of those you are escorting.”

  Putu looked back every few moments to see if the whistling man was making it all right. “Sir, you are not used to walking the beach, yes?”

  “Heh-heh!” he snorted. “Not as such, no.”

  The man was short, with sparse gray hair, had a pair of thick glasses sitting on his nose, and wore a blue flowery cotton shirt, coral-hued shorts, and rope sandals. He was old, but wiry. Perhaps a cyclist?

  “I am as far away as it is possible to be from the cobblestones of home.”

  The man had a name too long to pronounce or remember, but he had a decidedly European accent. German, thought Putu. International tourists populated Jimbaran Bay, and the boy had taught himself to recognize their accents.

  “Berlin?” said Putu, slowing. “Or, no . . . Hamburg?”

  “Very good. My family originated just outside Hamburg. Eh, where is the place?”

  “Just around the cove, sir.”

  As Oskar Gerrenhausen, Galina’s private bookseller-slash-antiquarian-slash-killer-slash-thief stomped after this helpful lad—alternately kicking the sand from between his toes and double-stepping to keep up—the air was finally cooling after a day of blistering sunshine, with the sky just now going red on the horizon.

  So far from home, Oskar now found himself searching every corner of the known world for a handful of strange old relics that did something or other fantastical when you combined them. Yes, Galina had originally forced him into her service. But he had to admit, he’d rather taken to the cloak-and-dagger assignments she had since given him.

  “Careful of the driftwood, sir,” the boy said. “It washes up. We use it for firewood.”

  Oskar sidestepped a long muscled limb of drying wood. “Things wash up here, do they? Yes, I suppose they do.”

  The jade-based, diamond-studded construction called Draco that he’d been seeking for weeks appeared to have washed up in Bali after centuries of being lost to time. Galina’s inquisition of the French minister had given her that clue.

  The boy slowed, stopped. He motioned with his head. “That is the man, sir.”

  A fit youngish gentleman lounged in a rope hammock, soaking up the shade of a pair of palm trees outside a luxurious resort. Oskar adjusted his spectacles, slipped a smartphone from the pocket of his shorts, swiped it open, and consulted an image. Then he looked over the glasses and checked the man against the image. He smiled at the boy.

  “This i
s indeed the individual I wish to meet. Here you go.” He unfolded nine ten-thousand Indonesian Rupiah bills, amounting to some six euros, and put them in the boy’s palm, closing his fingers over it. “Here you go, young man. Buy your father a new fishing net.”

  “He’s a programmer, you racist,” Putu said, and ran away.

  Gerrenhausen chuckled to himself. “Racist? Ah, yes, among other things, I’m sure. Thief. Murderer. Et cetera.”

  Through the lightly waving leaves of the palm trees Oskar watched the hammock man. His name was Rinny Wall, and he was the CEO of the popular Silicon Valley photo-sharing startup called, tellingly, MeMe. Wall was obscenely wealthy, Oskar knew. You only get that way by being greedy. That’s where I will start, he thought.

  Pushing aside the fronds with a pleasing clatter, he approached the hammock.

  Mr. Wall had two cell phones lying on his bare chest, a glass of melted ice on a stand next to the hammock, a used beach towel hanging over the end of the hammock.

  The man’s eyes were closed, and Oskar made no sound as he flexed his fingers, his forearms, his biceps—still hard, forty years after serving in the Czech anti-Communist underground.

  “Ah, sir, excuse me.”

  The man breathed in long and loud. “Bring me another. Make it a double.” Sensing his questioner hadn’t moved, he opened his eyes and squinted. “Who are you?”

  “Jonathan Pinker,” Oskar lied. “I am a collector, and I am told you have located a lovely piece of jewelry at a local shop. It is in the shape of a dragon? I should like to purchase it.”

  Wall snorted through his nose and closed his eyes again. “Not for sale.”

  “But I am serious. I truly can afford to pay.”

  “Can you afford to buy me a new wife?” said Wall, squinting at Oskar through the shade of the palms. “Because that’s what you’ll have to do if I don’t come back with that ugly thing for her.”

  “Dear, dear, Mr. Wall. Why so hasty? You didn’t hear my offer.”

  The young man sat up in his hammock. “Here’s my offer, grandpa. Take a long walk off a short beach. If you turn your head, you’ll see one right over there—”