The Golden Vendetta Read online

“No one can see us,” said Becca. “Mirrored walls.”

  Lily seemed to shiver from her head to her feet. “Oh my gosh, I hate that creep. Let me go over there and pour hot café au lait over his head.”

  The man sitting next to Sunglasses lifted his face. It was the taller of the two fake porters from the train station yesterday. Instead of a jumpsuit and work cap he wore dark pants, a green polo shirt, and a narrow-brimmed straw tourist hat.

  “This is no coincidence,” Darrell said. “Sunglasses is after us again.”

  Sara entered the café from a side door. She now wore a green sundress and matching sun hat. The moment she actually laid eyes on the man who had kidnapped her, she turned red in the face. But she kept her rage down. “We spotted him from the balcony upstairs and sent the coordinates. Terence was delayed. He should be in Nice soon. He told us his police friend said to expect something we wouldn’t like.”

  “What won’t we like more than we don’t like Sunglasses?” asked Lily.

  “That.”

  Sara nodded toward the staircase outside the entrance of the Palais. Two policemen emerged from the building and hurried down the broad stairs to the plaza, holding a small man by the arms.

  “Oskar Gerrenhausen,” said Darrell.

  “Do you think they’re going to take him to prison?” asked Lily.

  Becca shook her head. “That’s not how they do it, is it? Not out the front door and right in the street like this. Don’t tell me they’re going to—”

  “They’re letting him go,” Darrell said. “He’s not even wearing zip cuffs. You can’t go killing people, even in self-defense, and then just get set free so soon.”

  “Not without help,” said Lily.

  “And we all know who helped him,” said Wade. “And who sent Sunglasses to be his bodyguard.”

  The two police officers paused at the bottom of the stairs, spoke with the bookseller for two or three minutes, handed him his messenger bag, then stepped back. They nodded in unison and hustled back up the stairs without him.

  Gerrenhausen rubbed his wrists and loosened his shirt collar.

  Darrell blew out a quick angry breath. “Galina has agents inside the French police. No more zip cuffs for this guy.”

  “Zip cuffs. Zip cuffs,” said Lily. “What even are they?”

  “Look ’em up,” said Darrell.

  “You bet I will.”

  Gerrenhausen adjusted his spectacles and scanned the tables at the café to his left. The railroad porter raised his hand. Soon the three men were sitting together, their backs to the Kaplans, drinking from tiny cups.

  “I wish we had a bug at that table,” said Becca.

  The three men spoke closely to one another for a while, then rose to their feet.

  “They’re leaving,” said Wade. “Sara, can we see where they go?”

  “From a long distance,” she said. “With all of you behind me.”

  They hovered inside the café until the three men left their table. Gerrenhausen passed over his messenger bag to the porter, who mounted a motorbike that was parked nearby and took off in one direction, while he and Sunglasses left the square together and walked the opposite way, south toward the beach.

  “Becca, come with me,” said Sara. “The rest of you meet us back at the flat.”

  “Mom, I don’t know,” said Darrell. “I think we should tag along.”

  “All right, but keep far out of sight,” she said sternly.

  “But why me?” Becca asked.

  “The bookseller didn’t see you on the train, at least not face-to-face,” Sara said, pulling her hat low. “And in case we get near enough to hear something, you can translate. Maybe we can find out where they’re going.”

  “Not into Galina’s secret lair, I hope,” said Becca.

  The two followed Sunglasses and the bookseller for several blocks to Promenade des Anglais, the wide, bustling avenue that ran by the beach. They walked on the inland side of the street for a little while, when Sunglasses tugged a set of keys from his pocket and pressed an alarm release. A sleek silver Mercedes nearby gave out a subtle beep-beep, and its doors automatically lifted from the body of the car, slowly, like a pair of wings.

  The men spoke for a while before getting in.

  Becca snapped several pictures of the car, including the license plate, then had an idea. “Sara, without a ride, we’re going to lose them. We need to get closer.”

  “Becca, don’t you dare—”

  But she slipped away and moved quickly out of whisper range. It was an odd thing to do. She was the least adventurous of them all and hated to disobey Sara. On the other hand, she’d gone five centuries into the past and returned to talk about it, so she could obviously handle herself. She ducked past several pedestrians, moving as close as she dared, but could hear nothing of their conversation. The street noise was too loud.

  Then another idea. Hoping the computer setup in Terence’s apartment was really as hard-core as it looked, she switched on her phone’s recorder and while they weren’t looking lobbed the phone into a nearby trash barrel, hoping it wouldn’t fall into something wet.

  The men spoke—in what sounded like German—for another minute or so, then slid into their seats, and the doors folded back down into the car. With a great roar, the Mercedes squealed away from the curb.

  By the time Becca rushed over and picked the phone out of the barrel—it was dry—the car was lost in traffic.

  “Oh, Becca,” Sara said. “That was just so—”

  “I know. Super dumb.”

  “Yes, but brilliant!”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Geneva, Switzerland

  June 5

  Six hours earlier

  A squat, middle-aged, balding gentleman in a lightweight gray suit, blue shirt, and red tie walked out of his apartment at 7 Rue Sismondi in Geneva and met a squat, middle-aged, balding gentleman in a lightweight gray suit, blue shirt, and red tie.

  The first man was the physicist Dr. Marin Petrescu, who had recently been named director-general of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. He stared at the second man. “Who the devil are you?”

  The second man, whose name was Johann, or perhaps Esteban, was an employee of the Teutonic Order and said nothing. His chief qualification for this encounter were his height, weight, and facial construction.

  “This is ridiculous!” Dr. Petrescu protested, trying to step away from the second man. “I have a meeting to attend. My car is waiting. Let me pass.”

  Petrescu then performed a neat twirl on his heels and pushed past the other man, making for the corner around which his private car and driver, François, usually waited. Before he got to the corner, however, he was pulled off the pavement by two large men in ski masks; then he was bound and gagged and dragged into a black van that drove up at that moment. At the same time, his impersonator entered the director-general’s private car, his head bowed. In a reasonable imitation of Dr. Petrescu’s voice he said, “Drive around the lake, François. To Montreux.”

  His driver flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror just as the divider rolled up. “Sir, that is two hours, round-trip. You’ll miss your meeting, Dr. Petrescu.”

  “It will wait,” his passenger said.

  “But . . . two hours?”

  “To Montreux, François.”

  Galina Krause stared at the bewildered man in the back of the van. Her agents were moving across the globe to effect Operation Aurora. One aim of the operation—a major one—was dependent upon the cooperation of Dr. Petrescu.

  The van motored slowly away from Rue Sismondi and took a left at Rue de Berne, which after several name changes finally became the Route de Meyrin.

  She loosened the gag and let him spout his outrage.

  “What is this? Who are you? Are you kidnapping me? No one will pay a ransom. I have no family, and no one will pay. My organization is instructed to ignore the demands of terrorists. You will not receive a single euro from killing
me. You are committing a serious crime. Let me out at once! I repeat—”

  Dr. Petrescu was indeed a man without a family. He was a man without a life, which made him fearless regarding his own safety. A man without fear must be convinced in other ways.

  “You do not recognize me, do you, Doctor?”

  His response was swift and dismissive. “I do not memorize the faces of terrorists.”

  “Doctor, this van will soon arrive at the CERN laboratories. I have two demands. First—”

  “Never!” he interrupted her. “Whatever it is—never!”

  “First, I will attend the meeting you have scheduled at CERN headquarters in five days’ time.”

  “Meeting? What meeting? There is no meeting. And if there were, I would certainly not—”

  “I understand that you are planning to inform the attendees at your secret meeting about certain temporal disturbances your instruments have discovered. That you have chosen your attendees for their expertise in atomic physics. That you can prove the existence of a rogue group undertaking experiments in time travel.”

  “How can you possibly know . . .” Dr. Petrescu paused. He scanned her face like a painter preparing to render a portrait. “Those eyes . . . that scar . . . I have seen you before. . . .”

  “Three years ago. I was sixteen. I asked you then for access to your laboratories, to Project ICARUS, to the Obelisk Papers. You dismissed me with a wave of your hand.”

  “You are she! Galina Krause. Your organization of thugs and hoodlums—”

  “You will not dismiss me now, Doctor. For my second request, I require complete and unrestricted access to your facilities and equipment in Meyrin and at your partner laboratories. I will need your data on every project, including DarkSide-Fifty, OPERA, the others, as well as your access to the intelligence services of world governments—”

  “I cannot be blackmailed!” He laughed a hollow, frightened laugh. “Murder me, go ahead. I will never give you such access. You don’t belong in a laboratory. You belong in an asylum! You are mad, little girl. Mad!”

  Galina smiled as she pulled her phone from her pocket. “Let us see how mad I am, shall we, Doctor? Do you know what this is?”

  She opened her phone to an image taken inside a Soviet submarine long buried in the arctic ice.

  His eyes grew wide. “How did you . . . You are toying with nuclear disaster!”

  “This warhead is one of several I am gathering,” she said. “Tell a soul, a single soul, and I will detonate it and flood countless coastal cities. Believe me, Dr. Petrescu. It is not my wish. I will be present at your meeting in Geneva. I will speak with your guests at the conference. I will have access to your research.”

  “No! No! I demand to be let go! I demand—”

  Galina slid the gag roughly over his twisting mouth. As she had expected, this was not the visit that would change his mind. This was merely to prime him for the next time they spoke. Dr. Petrescu would soon discover how quickly his estimation of her changed from “mad” to “she who would change his world forever.”

  She turned to the driver.

  “Drop the good doctor back home. Then drive me south to the Côte d’Azur.”

  One thousand thirty kilometers northeast of Geneva, if anyone were paying attention, he might have seen Marius Linzmaier, the driver of a gray, oversize, and somewhat beat-up delivery truck, depart Schwarzsee, Galina Krause’s lakeside estate in the forests northeast of Berlin, and travel south.

  The truck was loosely accompanied by three large old vans, one in front and two following, but all hundreds of yards apart. It barely looked as if there was any connection among them. There was.

  All four trucks carried what Marius could only call “strange cargo” and were attended by thirty-five knights of the Teutonic Order, not including Marius’s odd front-seat passenger. In addition, the convoy was on a strict timetable. They were to arrive at their destination at one p.m. Central European time on Tuesday the tenth, five days from today. Their first stop was Vestec, south of Prague in the Czech Republic, to pick up more strange cargo.

  In the truck’s passenger seat, with his eyes trained coldly on the gray road ahead, sat a cold brick of a man in the uniform of a colonel from some indistinct Southeast Asian paramilitary group.

  He said nothing as the truck gained speed.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  By the time Wade and the others met up with Sara and Becca, then ran together back to the apartment on the Place du Palais, his father was deep in the middle of a private conversation on the phone—Wade didn’t know who with. However, Terence had finally arrived and was firing up the computers in his study. After hearing about the photos and the recording, he took Becca’s phone and attached a USB cord to it.

  “Bad news, I’m afraid,” he said. “The results of our investigation into Olsztyn Castle reveal that the plane crash there was one of at least seven similar accidents through Poland, Germany, and Slovenia at the beginning of April. All the sites are associated with Copernicus’s life in one way or another.”

  Sara frowned. “Not relics? Galina hasn’t found more relics?”

  He shook his head. “We don’t believe so. But here’s the thing that’s worrying. Excavation equipment was present at all seven sites.”

  “Galina is digging for something,” said Becca.

  Sara nodded, keeping an eye on Wade’s father in the other room. “She’s started on some big operation. We’ll need to find out what it is.”

  Wade loved that his stepmother was so completely into the hunt for the relics. He shared a look with Darrell and found the same sense of awe on his face.

  “Oh, man,” Lily murmured when Becca’s photos of the sleek silver Mercedes flashed on Terence’s monitor. “Evil guys get the best cars.”

  Terence tapped the mouse and an array of audio controls appeared.

  “Do you think you can get anything from Becca’s recording?” Darrell asked.

  “I’m certainly going to try,” he said, donning a pair of headphones. “Applying a series of filters should isolate ambient sounds, leaving only voices. Julian built this software. He’ll be here later today, by the way, with a report about your folks, Becca. And yours, Lily.”

  “Really?” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Julian will be great, and we can use the help,” said Wade, peeking in the other room, where his father was listening intently to someone on the other end of the phone.

  “All right,” said Terence, “tell me if this makes any sense to you.” He unplugged the headphones and turned up the speakers.

  Becca’s recording was a babel of odd noises, clunks, traffic, and garbled voices. They heard the whoosh and pop of wind, what could have been seagulls, the roar of buses. After several final adjustments, Terence canceled most of the conflicting sounds. “If this actually works, it’s going into my next novel.”

  There it was at last—a dull rumble of background noise, then four words—three from Gerrenhausen, one from Sunglasses.

  “Brille . . . Silber tinte . . .”

  “Carlo . . .”

  “Gerrenhausen is speaking in German,” said Becca. “Can we play it again?”

  They played the recording several times, just to be sure they had heard everything. They had. No other intelligible words came from the recording.

  “Spectacles, silver ink, and Carlo,” said Becca.

  “They can’t be talking about the ink used in the diary,” said Sara, “because they don’t have the diary. So there must be silver ink somewhere else.”

  “On the ledger that Gerrenhausen stole, maybe?” said Wade.

  “Or the silver arm?” said Lily. “No, you don’t read arms.”

  “Unless they’re tattooed,” said Darrell.

  “Helpful. Really.”

  “Well, what about Carlo?” Darrell said. “Do we think it’s our Carlo? You said the old woman in Tampa said his name, too.”

  “And she had silver ink on her fingers,” said Becc
a. “We know that Carlo and the diary are connected, but ‘spectacles’? We can’t read the silver pages. Maybe there are special glasses to read them . . . I don’t know. Lily?”

  “Yeah, X-ray glasses,” she said. “They’d be good.”

  Terence stood from the computer. “Allow me to suggest a simpler explanation for ‘Carlo.’ In this part of the world, it may simply mean Monte Carlo, a city twenty kilometers east of us.”

  “Right. The playground of the super wealthy,” said Sara. “I’ve heard stories.” She turned to Darrell. “It’s a bit of a spy capital, too.”

  He grinned. “I’m ready.”

  “So . . .” Wade stood now. His father was still on the phone in the other room. What is it about? He’ll tell us. “So . . . Oskar Gerrenhausen steals something called the Voytsdorf Ledger from a dealer in Paris. A guy on the train tries to steal it from him, but Gerrenhausen kills him. Now we hear that there might be—might be—glasses that help with the ledger. And the bookseller and Sunglasses are going to Monte Carlo for them. Is that right?”

  Sara listened. Pressing her lips together, she nodded. “We may as well make the leap. Let’s assume that the silver ink the bookseller is talking about is the same silver ink used in the diary. And both of them have to do with the old woman’s silver fingers, the pirate’s silver arm, and the relic we think is inside it.”

  “Then we should go to Monte Carlo to see what we find,” Wade said, looking at the others, then at his father, still on the phone. “Does everybody think so? It’s not like we have a lot of other leads.”

  He heard the click of the phone. When his father entered the computer room, his face was grim.

  “Who were you talking to?” Sara asked.

  “Partly talking, mostly listening to a message over and over, a very puzzling and encrypted message,” he said, rattling a paper. “I finally worked it out.”

  “From who?” Darrell asked.

  “Dr. Petrescu. He’s changing everything about the secret meeting. It’s not going to be in five days. Instead, he wants me and several other physicists to come immediately. But not to CERN headquarters in Geneva. He’s asked me go to Gran Sasso, their partner laboratory in Italy. Petrescu is afraid, and he knows something about what we’ve been up to. He’s taking all kinds of precautions.”