The Crown of Fire Read online

  With a swiftness that clearly surprised Mr. Wall, Oskar spun the towel off the edge of the hammock and wound it twice around Wall’s neck. Pulling it tight, he forced a tiny wet gasp from the man’s throat. Wall then slipped back into the hammock as if he had nestled in for a long sleep, as indeed he had. The longest sleep ever.

  Oskar tugged the hotel key from the man’s shorts and trotted up the nearest stairs to the resort, heading for—what was the number?—Room 327. Balcony. Ocean view.

  Moments later he was in the room. He unlocked the poorly hidden safe, in which he discovered a teak box. His heart thumped as he set it on the desk, decoded its intricate inlaid security combination, and opened the lid.

  Draco was a thing of partially carved, partially jagged jade, dotted with innumerable miniature rubies and sporting two large diamonds for eyes. Even as he stared at it, the green dragon seemed about to leap out and lunge for Oskar’s throat.

  “The thing is alive!”

  He snapped down the lid, clutching his neck as he did.

  “And thus, Galina, I have found Draco. You’ll be pleased with your little bookseller.”

  Oskar tucked the wooden box under his arm. Casting a last look around, he left Room 327 and strolled down to the lobby, where he passed two policemen running toward the beach. He was pleased to discover that the hotel bar revolved slowly to give panoramic views of the water. He sat and ordered an exotic cocktail.

  “Something with a tiny umbrella,” he said to the bartender. “And fruit. Lots of fruit.”

  Twelve thousand kilometers northwest of Jimbaran Bay, a building in South Central London exploded.

  Thames House, the seven-story, steel-gray, prison-like home of MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence service, shuddered with three sequential detonations. Statues on either side of the giant arched entrance on Millbank flew in pieces across the sidewalk. Large inlaid stone lozenges crashed from the roof overhead onto the drive below, while glass exploded from the side windows, and all four globe-topped streetlamps in the entryway burst into shards of white.

  Seconds later, a bent, wiry man scurried out from the flaming building and darted into an idling van.

  The bent, wiry man was none other than Ebner von Braun. Breathless and terrified as he tumbled into the van, he was handed a pair of glasses and an envelope by a heavily bandaged fellow in a wheelchair secured by bolts to the van floor.

  “Who the devil are . . . ,” Ebner began, then stopped. “Is it . . . Archie Doyle?”

  “It will be, once I get me legs to work” came the muffled reply. “Here. She asked me to give you this. And by ‘she,’ I’m guessing you know who I mean.”

  Aside from his momentous scientific discoveries, Galina Krause had been, in fact, Ebner’s sole mental focus during his entire incarceration. He slid the spectacles on his face and took the envelope from poor Archie’s alarmingly shaky hand.

  Inside the envelope was a cell phone. He turned it on.

  After a moment, Galina’s face appeared on the screen. His shaken heart was shaken further. My dear! Her skin was the color of ash from a long-ago fire. Her lips were thin and blue. There was a broad streak of white in her raven hair, while the scar on her neck burned bloodred.

  “I need you to find out everything you can about Helmut Bern,” she said. “He is making his way back to us. Somehow he reconfigured Kronos One to bring himself forward from fifteen thirty-five. I need you to follow his path—”

  “But Galina, my dear,” he said, “Galina, I have important news! Six. You need but six relics to fly the astrolabe! They are enough to create the energy that produces the hole in the sky, the wormhole! I have proved it!”

  There was a pause. “Then we are close, Ebner. So very close. I will meet you soon. Go. Find Bern. Now.” She hung up.

  Staring at the black screen, he was dimly aware that Archie Doyle was handing him several other things out of a briefcase: a passport, a wig, an outlandish top hat.

  “We’re back in the game, you and me, ain’t we?” said Archie Doyle, slipping a red necktie over his head and presumably smiling beneath his bandages.

  “Mmm,” said Ebner. “It is hardly a game, however.”

  As the van zigzagged the warren of Chelsea streets, lurching past the church of Saint Thomas More and bouncing west toward the airport, Ebner was stricken above all by the sight of his brilliant, dear, exquisite, and utterly ill Galina.

  No. It was not a game at all.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Miami, Florida

  July 5

  Before dawn

  As their jet descended toward Miami, Darrell felt it tumble into a solid wall of that kind of invisible turbulence they always talk about, never seem freaked-out about, don’t know how to predict, and which scares the life out of you.

  So he clamped the armrests like a vise.

  “Stop that!” Lily yelped.

  “That’s the armrest that goes with my seat!”

  “No. That’s the arm that goes with my shoulder!”

  “Oh. Sorry.” He let go and tried not to die.

  By the time the jet touched down, Darrell was ready to kiss the ground. But he figured it was dirty, so he didn’t. He just stumbled after Lily up the Jetway and into the terminal, wondering if she’d thought any more about leaving the hunt for the relics but not wanting to bring it up.

  So not wanting to bring it up.

  “I’d say we’re back at square one,” she said, slinging her bag of clothes over her shoulder as she scanned the direction signs at the gate. “Except we’re not, not really. Ponce de León has got to be huge in Florida, so were the Guardians, which means we have places to start.”

  Darrell scanned the concourse. “Maybe too many places.”

  Lily turned to him. “I know you’re thinking about if I’m going to go back home.”

  “What? Me? No way. How did you know?”

  “Your face, Dimitrios. When you puzzle over something, you twitch your eyebrows. Anyway, I haven’t decided yet. And, frankly, you so need me on this search.”

  “I do. I mean, we all do. That’s what I meant.”

  “So, I’ll let you know, okay?”

  “Okay, Miss Bronte. Thanks.”

  “In the meantime, I say we start with Ponce in Miami, then work outward. If Simon was right about hiding out extra days in Gibraltar before we got here, we shouldn’t be on the Order’s radar. Still totally off the grid, which is a good thing.”

  “So you’re getting used to being unplugged?”

  “Only to keep the goons from tracking us. I spy a public computer. Come on.”

  Lily beelined to a long counter of laptops and slipped into the empty seat in front of one of them. Other users were clicking away rapidly, some with headphones on, singing quietly to themselves as they waited for their flights.

  “And now . . . I’m at home.”

  “Go, girl.”

  Darrell was glad she had brought the whole question into the open. Now he didn’t have to worry that she’d just bolt without warning. She wouldn’t lie; she’d tell him.

  He watched her swiftly swipe away the screen saver only to find that the last user had left a whole slew of big documents open without clearing or deleting them.

  She growled. “Seriously, how inconsiderate can people be? What part of ‘public computer’ don’t they get?”

  One by one, she dropped the files into the trash and deleted them—two superlarge text documents, a raft of emails, ten windows of websites, and three image databases. Then she typed in the words Ponce de León Miami Florida.

  It took but a few seconds to come up with an answer.

  “There’s an old post office built in nineteen thirty-seven that has a Ponce mural on the wall. It was painted in nineteen forty.”

  “Sounds about right,” Darrell said. “Simon told us that Galina’s agents killed the last Guardian here. She was from the nineteen forties. Let’s hope they didn’t find out what she was hiding. Lil, we are on our way
. Order-less, if you know what I mean—”

  “Order-less? I like it.” Then she frowned at something behind him. “Although maybe we spoke too soon. Bandit at ten o’clock, zeroing in on us. He’s armed.”

  Darrell tensed and turned to face a man with a flat face, a large mustache, a red nose, and an upswept wave of oily black hair.

  “Vhat in the vorld are you doink?” the man grunted. “Hoo ze devil are yoo?” He shook a small paper bag in their faces.

  Darrell stood protectively in front of Lily. “Look, pal,” he said in a low voice, “keep your gun in your bag. We don’t want any trouble here. We have an airport full of witnesses—”

  “Vitnesses? Ya! Und they all saw you mess vis my computer!” He searched the screen. “Vhere are my files? Vhat have you done vis my fife-hundred-page novel?”

  “Your novel? Your computer? Do you own everything around here?” Darrell asked.

  Lily clutched his arm suddenly, her jaw dropping. “I think he might mean that this isn’t exactly a public computer.”

  “No, is not PUBLIC computer! Is MY computer! Vhile I get my doffnut,” he said, shaking his bag again, “you delete my entire novel!”

  “Sorry,” Lily said. “Sorry about that. Really. So sorry . . .”

  While everyone stared at them, Darrell edged away from the computer counter, Lily with him. The guy began pounding his keyboard and storming around shouting, and was still doing it when they lost sight of him. As soon as they could, they ran to the end of the concourse and lost themselves in the crowds.

  When they squeezed onto the packed downward escalator and rushed out to ground transportation, Lily said, “It was actually a pretty nice computer. Very fast. After I deleted all his stuff, I mean.” They hurried down the sidewalk to the taxi area.

  Darrell felt bad. “How long does it take to write a five-hundred-page novel anyway?”

  “Two, three weeks?” she said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Lily flagged down a shuttle bus. “I do love this weather,” she said, almost smiling. “Warm American weather.”

  “We may only be here a little while,” Darrell said.

  “I know. It reminds me of Tampa and Becca. And Austin, of course. My parents.”

  “We’ll see Becca soon. Your folks, too,” he said. “As soon as we stop Galina.”

  “I hope so. To all of those things.”

  They got on the shuttle bus and hopped off at the next terminal to search for ground transportation to take them into the city. Then they spotted a taxicab.

  The taxicab, in fact.

  “Wait. Is that what I think it is?” Darrell said. “Lily, look.”

  An old black car was cruising the lanes that circled the terminal, slowing every few feet, reversing, moving ahead, slowing again. But as odd as its stop-and-go travel was, what caught Darrell’s eye was the car itself. “We’ve seen that cab before. In San Francisco.”

  It was a big old bulbous London taxi, with wide fenders, round headlights, huge windows, and tiny little tires. In San Francisco it had belonged to Papa Dean, the millionaire-hippie-poet-Guardian who protected the Scorpio decoy.

  “I thought Simon said Papa Dean had been killed on his houseboat,” said Lily.

  “If he was, his ghost is driving.”

  “Maybe he’s nicer.”

  The taxi puttered slowly in front of the terminal, sighing a puff of blue exhaust. The man at the wheel—which was on the right side of the dashboard—wore a slouchy beret cocked over one eye from which tufts of wiry gray hair curled. His beard was long and gray, too.

  The wild man slowly cranked down his window and groaned. “I was so hoping it wasn’t you. But here you are, big as life.”

  “We could say the same thing,” said Lily. “We won’t. But we could. We were sure you died. Twice.”

  “Same to you.”

  The last time the kids had seen Papa Dean, he’d been bleeding to death—they thought—sprawled on the living room floor of his funky houseboat in Sausalito. After having given them a lecture on how incredibly dumb they were, he’d grudgingly provided a clue to the whereabouts of the Scorpio relic. They left him bleeding out and thought him a goner, especially after what Simon Tingle had told them in Gibraltar.

  “Well, don’t stand there gawking,” the guy snarled. “I’d help you in—no I wouldn’t—but your dumbness last time got me all shot up and nearly dead.”

  No. Papa Dean was not their favorite Guardian.

  When they got in, Dean threw the old cab into gear, and it rumbled away from the terminal into early-morning traffic.

  Darrell was mystified. “How did you turn up here in Miami after all this time?”

  Papa Dean paused before answering. “Look, Galina’s been killing Guardians anywhere she can find them around the world. Maybe you heard. She nearly got me. You won’t know it to read the papers, but over a hundred of us have disappeared or been murdered in the last three weeks.”

  “A hundred?” Lily let out a long breath. “Darrell, that’s more than Simon told us about. More are dying every day. What in the world is happening?”

  “Galina Krause is cleaning house,” Dean said. “Our house. Miami’s chief Guardian, in command since the nineteen forties, was among the recent victims. I’m her replacement.”

  Darrell felt sick. “Lily, this is . . . you’re right. Maybe we should get out, both of us.”

  “You can’t,” Dean said. “All the Guardians are dying for you.”

  Lily glanced at Darrell. “For us?”

  They stopped at a red light. The morning streets were beginning to jam up. Papa Dean half looked over the seat at them. “What’s left of the Guardians of the Astrolabe of Copernicus have only one purpose now. And it kills me to tell you this, but it’s to help the Novizhny. That, apparently, is you two. And those buffoon friends of yours.”

  Novizhny was a Russian word meaning “new followers of Hans Novak,” Nicolaus’s assistant. The name had apparently been given to them by the Guardian elite sometime in the past.

  “Word on the street is that a relic called Draco’s been found in Bali, so Galina has four, double what we have. I take it you weren’t followed to Miami?”

  Darrell nodded. “We hope not. Maybe. I don’t know. We have fake passports and no electronics, so probably not yet, maybe. I think so, anyway.”

  “Great. Lovely. Clear answer,” Dean growled. “Let’s assume you were followed and that I’m going to get killed again before the day is over. The Miami Guardian was murdered before I got here, so I’m in the dark. Do you even have a single clue?”

  Lily told him how Triangulum led them to Ponce de León and Florida. “All we have right now is the old nineteen-thirty-seven post office.”

  “I know the one. It’s a start,” Dean said.

  “That’s what I said!” said Darrell. “Let’s go!”

  “Keep your pants on, buster. I want to make sure we’re not being tailed. Hold on to your seats; this buggy can fly!”

  He punched the gas pedal. The car stalled. When he got it started again, they rumbled down a street lined with short fat palm trees.

  The day was bright, hazy, humid, and because the cab had no air-conditioning, hot. The roar of traffic through the open windows made it seem hotter. Forty minutes later, Papa Dean slowed two blocks down the street from a large stucco-faced building with a round turret in the front and a curved sweep of stairs leading to a tall black door.

  “The old US Post Office. Feel free to get out anytime.”

  As hot as it was inside the cab, it was blistering on the sidewalk.

  Lily felt Darrell lean over to her as they walked up the steps to the post office. “Isn’t it weird how everybody’s helping us?” he whispered. “The Novizhny thing. Are we really so special? I mean, anyone could bumble along like we’re doing, right? The worst Guardian has to be way better than us.”

  Lily had been thinking the same thing and was trying to make sense of it, but hadn’t got
ten far. The big question—why us?—just hung out there.

  “Do you think we’re chosen or something?” she asked. “That the four of us are a big deal and they all know it? Even from Hans Novak on down?”

  “Like we fulfill a secret prophecy? ‘There will come a handsome boy and his three friends’?” Darrell shook his head sharply. “I don’t believe that stuff. There’s got to be another reason.”

  “I don’t know,” Lily said. “They seemed to be waiting for the Novizhny to come along. And Becca sort of time traveled. She knew stuff that was impossible to know otherwise.”

  “You’re saying that because Nicolaus and Hans time traveled, they knew something special about us? Like maybe we’re alive at the end, so that everyone’s forced to help us to make it come true because it has to come true?”

  She shrugged. “Something like that. Or to quote you, I think so. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Ha. Yeah.”

  To Lily, the old US Post Office was really a museum. Post offices were places she normally wouldn’t visit for any practical purpose because, let’s face it, physical mail was for old people. This particular post office did have some nice architecture, the monster turret and all, and the big doorway. They were nice. And best of all was the mural painted in 1940, showing Ponce de León meeting the local Native Americans on Easter 1513.

  The whole mural stretched some fifteen or twenty feet from end to end and was secured to a curving inside wall of the turret. It was divided into three sections. All three panels were of events in Florida’s history, but only the first featured Ponce, who was dressed in typical conquistador armor and was greeting some peaceful Native Americans.

  It was a beautiful piece of art, so the post office kind of was a museum.

  For Guardians, at least.

  “If we’re right,” she said, “Ponce was one of the twelve original Guardians. The question is, was the artist who painted the mural also a Guardian, and did he leave us a clue.”

  “From almost eighty years ago.”

  Three students of about college age appeared to have arrived just ahead of them. While two were opening ladders in front of the mural, the third set down a large bin filled with folded white cloths. Paintbrushes of various sizes were stuck in all their work belts.