The Serpent's Curse (26 page)

Because of Isabella's condition, it was several hours before she felt well enough to fly. Once she gave the go-ahead, Lily booked them all—the inspector, Isabella, Becca, Wade, and herself—on the earliest nonstop to Venice. It would leave at two p.m. Given the time difference, Venice being three hours earlier than Moscow, the three-and-a-half-hour flight was scheduled to arrive midafternoon. That would leave them five solid hours before the opera performance on Saturday evening.

“Venice is quite different from Rome or Bologna,” Isabella said as they took their seats on the flight. “But I have always loved it there. So will you.”

Lily felt they could trust Isabella. One of the marks of Guardians seemed to be that they didn't press, they didn't force, they didn't make you feel as if you had to
do
or
feel
or
tell them
something. That was plain in Copernicus's conversation with Maxim. He asked; he didn't force. Maxim agreed anyway.

Upon my life I will.

“The relic we're searching for in Russia is called Serpens,” she told Isabella. Remembering that Isabella's husband, Silvio, was a friend of Uncle Roald's, she added, “I'm so sorry your husband passed away.”

Isabella shook her head. “Silvio's murder was disguised as a skiing mishap. He was murdered by an agent named Markus Wolff. I know you know him. It was Silvio's obsession with what he called ‘number twelve' that got him killed. There is a mystery about the twelfth—the final—relic. It is somehow odd and unlike the others.”

“Wolff hinted at the same thing in San Francisco,” Lily said. “He said that what the twelfth relic is, is the answer to everything. What did Mr. Mercanti find out?”

Isabella frowned. “I know little, but he was close to discovering something. The Order thinks I know what it is. The answer lies hidden in our apartment in Bologna. I will find it. For Silvio, I will find it.”

“We know how terrible the Order is,” said Wade. “The death of my uncle Henry—Heinrich Vogel—pulled us into the relic hunt in the first place.”

“Heinrich was a good man,” she said. “I was calling him when I was kidnapped.”

“Thanks to him, we have one relic so far,” said Becca. “But Serpens is in two parts, and we have neither, which isn't good.”

“But neither does Galina, yes?” said the inspector.

“Right,” said Lily. “And that
is
good. Really good.”

“Maybe having lots of layers to the onion are all right, after all,” Becca said.

It was warm and sunny when they arrived at Marco Polo Airport, a small and clean affair built out over the water six and a half miles north of the city. Lily shed her coat at the earliest opportunity. Though brisk in late March, Italy was already showing signs of spring, and after so much cold Lily began to feel, as they all did, thawed out, rejuvenated, alive. “No more hunching against the cold,” she said. “I can stand straight up for the first time in days. No more windburn, either. Or frozen fingers.”

Maybe best of all, they weren't being followed yet. Galina might already be there, but likely didn't know that they were.

Becca seemed to be beaming. The attention to her wound by an intern at the railway clinic where they first saw Isabella, and a set of fresh bandages, had obviously made her feel better. And hopeful. They all felt that, too.

“The south,” Becca said. “The sun feels so amazing.”

Isabella was feeling better, too. She had eaten two large meals since they'd found her in the clinic, had called her friends in Bologna, had slept like a stone, and was anxious to return home as soon as possible. Chief Inspector Yazinsky tried to persuade her to take a police escort back to Bologna, but two friends from her university met her at the airport. After a long round of good-byes and tears and hugs, Wade said, “Thank you for everything you are doing. You are the most amazing person. . . .”

“So are you,” Isabella said. “So are you all. I will call your father, Wade, when I reach Bologna. You will all see me again.”

They left Isabella with her friends to await a connecting flight.

Then, at a little after three o'clock, after using Terence's Ackroyd's credit card to withdraw euros from an airport ATM, the kids and Inspector Yazinsky climbed aboard a launch called a vaporetto for the hour-long water ride into Venice. They settled into seats by the windows facing east and were soon motoring past long strips of land that Lily's maps told them surrounded and formed the giant Venice lagoon.

“This is great,” Becca said. “We can almost pretend we're tourists.”

“Almost,” said Wade. “We should blend in, but be alert to everything.”

Lily knew this was true. They were seriously the furthest thing from being tourists. None of what they saw, heard, or thought about was what a tourist saw or heard or thought about. Everything meant something on their quest for the relic. After all, would this strange place, so far from everything they were learning in Russia, give them the vital information they sought?

She hoped so.

The vaporetto slowed and sidled into the dock. They emerged by a series of walkways and ramps into the Piazza San Marco—Saint Mark's Square.

Now that it was midafternoon on a warm day, the area was thronged with tourists. It was almost too much for Lily not to run over and talk to fellow Americans, but it was out of the question, as the inspector kept telling them.

“We are undercover,” he said, “as much as a Russian inspector and three American teenagers can be undercover.”

The immense domed Basilica di San Marco loomed over the square on one end. Adjacent to it was the Doge's Palace, a colonnaded structure with rose-shaped cutouts and a long gallery of pointed arches. Everywhere else were outdoor cafés and stalls selling postcards and scarves and every kind of souvenir. Pigeons constantly fluttered up and settled here and there across the stones. And then there were the canals: wide avenues of water between blocks of buildings, and narrower inlets down the side streets, alleys, and passages.

“So beautiful and warm,” said Wade, making notes about the sites in his notebook. “Strange sensation. My fingers don't actually ache.”

“Going back will be hard,” said Lily. “Mostly on my toes.”

When they entered the plaza between the twin pillars of San Marco and San Teodoro, Becca stopped dead. Against one side of the piazza stood a tower whose main feature was a giant twenty-four-hour astronomical clock. The face of the clock was brilliant blue, the numbers around its face—Roman numerals, of course—were gold, and at the center stood an unmoving, dull-colored globe representing the earth.

“It is pre-Copernican, is it not?” asked the inspector.

“It is,” said Becca. “The earth is in the center of the clock, as if the sun were revolving around it.”

“Kind of my line,” said Wade, nudging her. “But exactly right.”

“The tower is called the Torre dell'Orologio. Saint Mark's Clock Tower,” Lily said. “Built in 1497.”

The fiery, smiling face of the sun was mounted on the hour hand. The face was divided into several concentric discs, which, they guessed, turned at different speeds to reflect the movement of the sun and the moon around the earth. The moon was an orb sunk halfway into its circling disc, and turned on its own axis. Half the orb was blue, the other half gold, and when it revolved, the golden half illustrated the phases, from new moon to full and back again.

“It's so beautiful,” Becca said. “It makes you think that astronomy—and Copernicus—are everywhere.”

“They are everywhere,” the inspector whispered as he scanned the piazza. “But Galina is here as well. Let us lay low until the opera.”

That brought Lily and the rest of them back to reality. They weren't tourists. They had never been tourists.

After finding reasonably priced clothing shops, where they bought a few scarves and a necktie each for Wade and Inspector Yazinsky, they hid out the rest of the day.

At twenty minutes before nine, under stars glittering like jewels against the blue Venetian sky, they arrived at the old opera house, hoping to peel away yet another layer of the onion.

Saint Petersburg

N
ear the intersection of Rimskogo-Korsakova and Sadovaya Streets stood Saint Petersburg's Central Railway Museum.

To Darrell it was a world of dust. A bright young man who looked like he did everything from cataloging ancient maps to mopping the floors ushered them into a large, frigid room known as the Cherepanov Archives. The collection included virtually untouched and unexamined historical and topographical maps from the last one hundred sixty years of railway exploration.

Narrowing their search was Isabella Mercanti's vague but vital clue—“Greywolf”—along with a surprise lead the detective Paul Ferrere had brought from Paris: an unidentified private jet had been tracked into the wastelands north and east of the city.

One hour earlier, Paul had met them at the train station and introduced his colleague. “My right-hand operative, Marceline Dufort,” he said.

“Dufort?” said Roald as they headed for a taxicab. “Are you related at all to—”

“I am Bernard's sister,” she said.

Like Isabella's husband, Bernard Dufort was another original member of Asterias, and a Guardian. His murder in Paris had led directly to the death of Heinrich Vogel—Uncle Henry—which had then led the Kaplans to become involved in the relic hunt.

“Wow, we're pleased to have you with us,” said Darrell. “Thanks for helping.”

At the museum, Marceline located a large map from 1852 and spread it out on one of the many worktables in the main map room. “Let us begin with this.”

Paul traced his finger across it, north from Madrid. “The jet that Galina Krause flies is a Mystère-Falcon,” he said. “On a full tank, the Falcon has a flying range of two thousand kilometers. If she flew from Madrid to here, she would have to refuel, most likely in Berlin, where we know she has a private airstrip. Assuming that she did not refuel again, a straight flight from Berlin to the Saint Petersburg area would have landed her no farther than this area.”

He circled a two-hundred-mile region of forests and hills to the northeast of the city. “Because we believe the fortress was a former headquarters of the KGB, and thus within heavily monitored airspace, no present-day satellite map we could find shows its exact location. That is why our search of old maps may provide our only real evidence of Greywolf's existence.”

Darrell felt upbeat for the first time in days. “We're getting closer, Dad.”

“I think so, too.”

They each took a different group of maps and scoured the region, with, at first, little luck. Then Darrell found something. He
thought
he found something. While searching a crusty French map from 1848 of the forests of the Republic of Karelia—in the center of Galina's flight zone—Darrell found himself squinting at the tiniest inked writing he had ever seen. Inside a series of concentric circles meant to designate a hill were six almost invisible letters.

Chât
.
L.G.

“What does
chat
mean in French?” he asked.

Marceline smiled. “It means ‘cat.' Where do you see this?”

He pressed his finger on the map. Marceline saw what he was pointing at, and her smile dropped. “No, no.
Chat
means ‘cat,' but
chât
with a period and an accent like this means it is an abbreviation. It could mean
château
.
‘
Castle.'”

Roald was by his side now, bending over the map. “What could the initials
LG
mean?”

“Ah!” said Paul, sharing a look with his colleague. “Your son has found something.
LG
are not the initials for a person.
LG
very probably means
loup gris
.”

“Dad?” said Darrell.

Roald instantly put his arms around him. “
Loup gris
is ‘grey wolf.' You found your mother, Darrell. You found her!”