The Serpent's Curse (35 page)

Aleksandr coughed for a full half minute. “Simply that Copernicus himself tried to destroy them but could not.”

“Then where is Serpens now?” he asked for the third time.

“Have I told you that there is a morgue at Greywolf?”

“Yes, Alek, you did,” said Wade. Was the man losing his mind? Losing his blood
and
his mind? Then it struck him with the power of Galina's punch. “Are you saying you
hid
the Serpens head in the morgue at Greywolf? That it never left?”

Aleksandr gasped. “I did! It never left! It lies bathed in the blood of the dead. The body, however . . .” With difficulty, he lifted up his right pant leg. The leg itself was burned and scarred as badly as his face and neck, but there was something else, too. A section of several square inches of scarred skin covered his calf. It was sewn on one side with haphazard stiches like those on the Frankenstein monster.

“It looks as if you operated on your—” Lily started.

Aleksandr nodded once. “There was no place closer to me than myself.”

Using a shard of glass, Aleksandr laboriously slashed away at the stitched skin. It bled little because of the thick scarring. Slowly he pried the wound open. From it, he withdrew a small white capsule, two or so inches long. He wiped it clean and pulled it apart, then tilted the open capsule into his palm.

“Knowing I could no longer protect the relic my father found in the ruins of Königsberg, I sent it to a friend of mine. An Egyptologist in Moscow. He perished last year. Even so, Serpens remains safe. Once, I dared to ask where he hid it. He did not respond until on his deathbed. Then he sent me this. Along with the Magister's own words. You will be happy to hear that the twisted path of the Serpens body ends with this clue. Now I give it to you.” He pulled a rolled strip of paper from the capsule and passed it to Wade, breathing out a long, ragged breath.

On the paper was a square box drawn in ink as red as blood. Filling the inside of the box was a large upside-down
V
with a sequence of numbers running up the left side to the top and three question marks running down the right side.

“What does it mean?” Wade asked. “You said he was your friend in Moscow?”

“I never knew the significance. My friend told me just this: no matter how many codes are devised, this will override them all. What that means, I do not know. But if you wish to locate the body of Serpens, this is nearly all the help I can give.”

“What were Copernicus's words that your friend told you?” Lily asked.

“‘Puteshestvye do kontsa morya dlinoy,'”
he whispered. “Which means ‘the journey to the end of the sea is long.'”

“Boris told us that!” said Lily. “What does it mean?”

Aleksandr seemed relieved, as if released of a great burden. “It is a quotation we Guardians have always known. As Nicolaus's journey was long in the hiding of the relics, the Guardians' journey is just as long. You will find Serpens soon, but your journey will continue!” Then he began coughing, and his breathing grew rapid, shallow, and labored.

Wade hacked once more at the lock. It broke off. He whipped the door open to find a clear passage, but opening the door sucked the fire into the room.

“Up! Out!” Aleksandr choked. “You cannot die like this!” When he lifted himself up from the floor, he bled freely. Yet he managed to push Wade and Lily ahead of him through the door, into room after room, then hung between them, huffing, “This way . . . no, there! That tunnel! Up. Up! You
must
find the relic before Galina. You must!”

Wade's legs felt like lead. The fire burst into the passages behind them faster than they could run. Aleksandr grew suddenly heavy. Was he dead? “Lily . . .”

Tears cut through the grime on her cheeks. “I feel cold air. That way. That way!”

Together, they pulled Alek up a narrow side passage. There
was
cold air, streaming in on them. A ceiling beam crashed down across the passage. Then two more. They were trapped. A voice shouted from the other side of the fallen beams. No, it was the roar of the fire. No, a voice. A call from so far away that Wade wasn't sure he even heard it. Lily's fingers tightened on his wrist. She stopped her breath to listen.

There was a crash, and the voice yelled, “Stand away. Get back!”

Lily pulled Wade flat with Aleksandr behind the fallen beams as the wall burst in at them. Voices came clearer now, even above the screams of the fire. Terence stumbled in with a stream of Russian police behind him. Wade could tell from their uniforms and the expression on Terence's face that they were real police, not Brotherhood. They threw fire cloaks on the children and Aleksandr.

“Out of here!” Terence cried. “Hurry up!”

And they were running, Terence and the police carrying the limp form of Aleksandr from the burning mine. They tore up a last set of broken metal steps and fell onto the frozen ground as the mine threw up a howling gust of flame.

The entrance collapsed; the rumbling and thundering was now underground. They were out of the mine. Bitter cold rushed over them. They laid the burned man on the ground. He was limp, completely still. His mouth gaped. His eyes stared upward. Terence and two policemen worked over him. Sirens wailed in the distance, coming closer. Ambulances, fire engines. Wade turned to see a plume of black smoke pouring out from the mine in three columns. “Lily, Terence, we have to—”

“Maybe they'll come in time to save him,” she said.

“Sure,” he said.

The quest for Serpens. We're closer than ever to the center, but we're not done.

Terence helped Lily and Wade to their feet. They left Aleksandr Rubashov on the icy ground surrounded by policemen and medical technicians rushing from their trucks, and ran back across the tundra toward the paved strip.

“To the airport,” said Terence. “We'll find a plane. We can be at Greywolf in under three hours.”

“No,” said Lily. “Alek gave us one last clue. We have to go to Moscow!”

On the airstrip, an old woman with a mop of white hair bent under the nose of Terence's jet. She supervised a mechanic changing the last of the three blown tires.

“What's going on?” Lily asked. “Who's that?”

“I think she believes she's the new owner of our jet,” Terence said, trotting quickly over the tarmac. “While I was with the police, she commandeered it.”

The woman was dressed in what looked like ten layers of clothing, and she had a rifle over her shoulder. At the sound of their footsteps, she pulled a hidden revolver from inside her coat.
“Stoy!”
she snarled, a word that obviously meant “Stop!”

“Let me handle this,” Terence whispered. “Hello—this—is—our—jet!”

The woman narrowed her eyes at both of them but did not lower the pistol. She shook her head and said a long string of Russian, ending in, “
Nyet.
Is my zhet.” Then, without taking her tiny eyes off them, she tapped the gun barrel on the fuselage. The door of the plane squeaked open from the inside, and a young woman poked her head out. “I am Ekaterina,” she said. “I speak English.”

“This is really our jet, and we need to fly to Moscow right now,” Wade said.

The younger woman shook her head. “It
was
your jet. We are taking it.”

“I have an idea,” whispered Terence. He offered the Ogienko family, as they called themselves, ten thousand rubles to fly them to Moscow in the jet. They hesitated. When Lily searched the net and discovered that ten thousand rubles was about three hundred dollars, Terence quintupled it, which made the old woman and her family ecstatic.

“But I fly zhet,” the old woman insisted. “Is my zhet.”

“Fine,” said Terence. “Just let's go!”

As soon as they muscled their way into the tiny cockpit, the pilot gunned the engines. A little girl, the English-speaking woman's daughter and the pilot's granddaughter, immediately began to kick Wade in the shins, then laugh as if it were the funniest thing in Russia. Maybe it was.

“We have to tell your dad about the morgue,” said Lily.

Wade pulled out his phone. “No service. Excuse me, do you have a radio on board?”

“Yes,” said the pilot's daughter. “But you cannot call a cell phone.”

“How about FSB headquarters in Moscow?” asked Lily.

The woman's eyes widened. “Do not turn us in.”

Terence assured them they would not, and Wade radioed Inspector Yazinsky. He was rerouted and put on hold several times before finally reaching the inspector's answering machine. “This is Wade. Tell my father that the head of Serpens is in the morgue at Greywolf. Aleksandr said it's in the east wing of the fortress. Serpens is ‘bathed in the blood of the dead.' Sara is trapped in a time machine. We'll go to the airport with Terence when it's all over, but right now we're flying to Moscow—”

The connection crackled and died.

“The relic is in Red Square,” Lily said. “We're going to Red Square.”

“What?” said Wade.

“Red Square?” said Terence.

“Pfft!” muttered the old woman.

“Look at it,” Lily said, holding up the sketch Alek had given them. “It's a red box. A red square. The body of Serpens is hidden in Red Square!”

“Seat belts. We fly now,” said Ekaterina.

Terence offered to copilot the jet, but the old woman refused his help. Without much experience at the controls, the pilot moved the wheel first too much, then too little. The plane lifted, then sank toward the blank gray face of a giant high-rise. She tugged the wheel back again, and they rose but barely gained altitude.

The tires bounced across the icy roof of a second building; the jet dropped off the far side, nearly crashing into a third building until the pilot veered left and the nose lifted at the last second. They cleared the next roof and the next.

At last, the city below them, an unruly mass of streetlights and lighted buildings, surrounded by the vast darkness of the Siberian landscape, began to shrink and fade away.

They were airborne.

A
s her Mystère-Falcon shot over the tundra back to Greywolf, Galina studied the satellite image she'd just received on her cell phone. Three figures were running away from the burning Vorkuta mine toward a jet standing on the airfield. There was a force of police and a man lying in the snow. Emergency vehicles surrounded the mine.

“They are charmed, these children,” she said softly.

“Rather than charred,” Ebner offered.

Bartolo Cassa sat stonily in the pilot's seat. “They would never have escaped without help,” he said quietly. “The flamethrower was sabotaged.”

“I should have shot them myself,” Galina said.

Then why didn't I?
Seeing them there, children only a few years younger than herself, she'd found herself unable to take the shot. Did she
want
the children alive? Why would that be? They had followed her, sometimes even led her, to something that was so deeply a part of herself. How could she tolerate such an intrusion?

Was it that . . . one of the children
might
turn out to be . . . the one who . . .

She could not think it.

Calmly, she tapped in a text and waited as the jet climbed.
Triangulate their course.
The cockpit was silent for two minutes until her cell lit up with a single word.

“Moscow,” she read. “They are en route to Moscow.”

“Shall I change course?” Cassa asked her.

“No. Ebner will return to Greywolf. You will pilot me to Moscow. Ebner, have a troop of the Crows meet me at Sheremetyevo in Moscow, with a transport. The Russian surgeon has obviously given the children a clue. I will follow them. Midnight comes soon. You shall oversee the completion of Bern's programming and the successful transportation of Sara Kaplan to Cádiz in 1517. Complete this mission. We need a body there . . . and then.”