The Golden Vendetta (28 page)

Tours, France

June 8

Late afternoon

B
ecca was the first to spot Julian outside the Val de Loire airport in Tours, waving to them from the driver's seat of a rental car.

In Budapest, they had decided that Sara would go to Turkey with Lily and Darrell, and that Becca and Wade would meet Julian in France as soon as they were able to get there—which was Sunday afternoon. They would have with them the
ocularia,
the first key, and the diary safely in Becca's indestructible go-bag. As usual, Julian would provide a new set of secure phones for them.

Sara had also called Silva, asking him to please meet them in Turkey, if he was able to. She told Silva that since Galina possessed not only the second key but also the powerful resources of the Copernicus Room to assemble the tiniest fragments of data, it was practically ensured that the Order would be waiting for them. Silva told them he would meet them as soon as he could.

There was no reunion chatter when Becca and Wade got in the car and Julian started it up. “Still no word from my dad,” he said. “Paul Ferrere's on-site now but so far as he can tell Roald and my dad are already inside, and Paul can't get near the facility. One more day, we're going to the police.”

Wade nodded, then shared a look with Becca.

She knew what he was thinking. Sara was great, supersmart and careful, but with his father unreachable, at best a critical member of the team was out of action. At worst, his father was in grave danger.

Julian drove speedily onto the highway and headed southwest toward Château d'Amboise, on the grounds of which stood Leonardo's smaller house. “It could simply be that the mountain lab is out of range of phones, for security reasons. Paul doesn't think so, but I'm hoping that's all it is.”

“Us, too,” Becca said. “Your father and Roald are
smart. They can deal.”

“They can. And my dad can make a deadly weapon out of a toothpick, so there's no reason to panic. Still . . .” He didn't finish, just let it end there, and concentrated on the driving.

After one quiet roundabout hour they drove through the gates and up a winding road to the main château.

From where they parked outside a sprawling complex of ornate stone mansions, it was a brisk seven-minute walk to the much smaller Château de Cloux, now known as Château du Clos Lucé.

“I'd always thought that Clos Lucé could mean something like the ‘castle' or ‘keep' of ‘light,'” he said. “It was really no stretch at all to think of the château where da Vinci died as a lantern.”

“A big lantern,” Wade murmured when they finally saw it.

True enough, Becca thought. The house was small only when compared to the city-size immensity of the nearby Château d'Amboise. Da Vinci's mansion was three stories of red bricks, white limestone, and tile set in a sweep of rolling lawns. Leonardo died when he was sixty-seven on May 2, 1519, a little over a month after he returned from . . . wherever it was that he and the others hid Triangulum.

“I love these quiet places,” Becca said. “Like Bletchley Park in England. Quiet places where we learn incredible things.”

“Maybe not so quiet,” Wade whispered, pausing on the path toward the house. “Julian, I maybe see an agent. Bearded, tall. On the left. His hand is buried in his jacket pocket.”

“He could be château security,” said Becca. “Or not. I see his short friend.”

Julian pulled out his phone and brought it to his ear as if receiving a call. “Pretend you don't see them. We'll have a tiny advantage.”

“We could take them,” Becca whispered, only half joking.

“Oh, I know,” Julian said. “We totally could. But we don't want to scare the museum guides, do we?” He turned away as if to speak on his phone. “You go on the tour. I'll try to lead our friends on a little chase. Remember to find the key.”

“That's the idea,” said Becca.

Julian slipped away, still pretending to be on a phone call, and in a matter of seconds had gone around the side of the house. The taller of the sketchy men pursued him, followed a few moments later by his shorter colleague.

“Julian's good,” said Becca. “Professional.”

“Yeah. Easy to forget he's only seventeen. Come on.”

As soon as they identified themselves inside the house as Americans, a perky young woman trotted over to them, a student intern from Massachusetts named Lucy. Which seemed appropriate to Becca, because, after all, the intern's name meant “light,” too.

After giving them a solid overview of Leonardo's last years in France, she swished them through several rooms and finally into the master's final workshop. Because the tour was near the end of the day, Lucy's presentation to them and the three other visitors became more relaxed and informal, and more informative.

“We're interested in Leonardo's work while he was here,” Wade said, during a gap in the discussion.

“Especially his work with silver,” Becca added. “And especially from 1517 to the end. Kind of specific, I know, but . . .”

“Well, he was a renowned silversmith,” the guide said. “And in the last years, he was deeply into the study of mirrors. Mirrors use silver, of course, for the reflection; they always have. But Leonardo worked on, or wrote about, what he called a three-sided mirror, or
lo specchio con tre lati.”
Her accent was good.

The two shared a look. They knew exactly what that looked like.

“Interesting,” said Becca.

Lucy smiled. “You probably know that Leonardo was a hopeless experimenter. He sketched out thousands of proposed plans and never went through with them. I think he simply
had
to understand how something worked, but then became bored when he figured it out. Who knows how the mind of a genius works?”

“They called him the spy of nature, didn't they?” said Wade.

“Exactly!” Lucy said. “Well, feel free to look around, but obviously don't touch anything. Wouldn't want to break an original da Vinci!”

As the intern wandered off, Wade and Becca scoured the workshop for anything that might be a clue to the location of the last key. While no one was looking, Becca took the
ocularia
from her bag and slipped them on, hiding them under a pair of dark glasses.

As he usually did, Wade seemed to need to talk out everything they knew so far. “Leonardo and Copernicus met here in 1517—that much we know,” he whispered. “Copernicus asked him to be a Guardian, but Leonardo was too old. So Nicolaus looked around, saw all the
silver, all the mirrors, maybe he saw designs for armor; whatever it was, something clicked in his memory. He remembered his old pirate friend, the man who had lost his forearm saving Hans Novak. It all came together for him. He asked Leonardo, ‘Make a silver arm for my friend, the pirate Baba Aruj, called Barbarossa.'”

Becca liked the way it all sounded, laid out like that. It struck all the right notes. “Leonardo used his knowledge of silver and mirrors, and he made a new arm, a silver arm, with Triangulum inside to power the fingers like a motor. It was the first mechanical prosthetic arm.”

Wade looked at her. Becca liked that he was smiling. The two of them together had pressed at the problem until it gave up an answer.

Part of an answer.

“But there's still a question,” said Wade, looking out to the garden from a window made of wavy glass. “If Leonardo said that the fourth key doesn't exist, why would he tell Guardians to come here to his lantern? What did he mean?”

Becca imagined the scene in the stony place where the silver arm rested. Leonardo was there. Copernicus. Barbarossa Two. She suddenly felt a wave of awe fall over her. “These men, three famous people in the same place, talking as friends, trying to save the world,
protecting something of great power from falling into the wrong hands . . . oh . . . oh!”

He smiled at her. “What is it?”

Her eyes were wide, staring at him through the shaded
ocularia.
“Wade!”

“What?”

Without taking the glasses off, she started scanning the room. “It's not just that the fourth key doesn't
exist.
Wade, what if . . . what if . . . Leonardo
never made
the fourth key? That could be why no one would ever find it. That's what his riddle is. Three keys lock the relic away, but you need four keys to unlock it. So why didn't he make the fourth key? Because he didn't need to. Only the Guardian who collected the relic would need to. That's us! We need to make the fourth key! It's totally the best kind of security!”

Wade looked at her through the glasses. Her eyes must have seemed all broken up into fragments. “Okay, Becca. That's actually kind of brilliant. But how does it help us find it?”

“Because the fourth key
is
here!” she said. “It's like Lucy said. He designed it, he drew it, but he never made it. We need to find his design. And then we need to find someone to make the key for us. That's what any Guardian would have had to do!”

He looked straight through the silver lenses into her eyes.

“You're pretty amazing,” he said. “You know that, right?”

S
earching frantically in every room in the château that was open to the public, Becca felt her heart ready to explode.

“Even assuming we're right,” she whispered to Wade as she peered through the
ocularia
hidden under her dark glasses, “and the fourth and final key has to be made from scratch before we can unlock Triangulum, how are we actually going to make it? Could Julian help us?”

Wade looked out the nearest window to the garden, then turned to her. “I hope so. Should I call him? Maybe he's in trouble.”

“Let's find the design or whatever it is first,” she said.
That's when she realized something she hadn't before. “Galina's not as light on her feet as we are.”

“What do you mean?”

“That we're a team,” she said. “We can spread ourselves across countries and work independently and at the same time. While Lily and Sara and Darrell are off in Turkey finding the third key, we're finding the fourth.”

“Galina has the Copernicus servers,” he said. “And Ebner and Wolff.”

“But she doesn't trust anyone, not really. You see that, right? And she's not well. That's easy to see, too. Galina has a serious weakness. She's alone.”

Wade nodded. “You're right. Being alone isn't the way to find the relics. You need a team. We have a team. You, me, Lily, Darrell, Sara, my dad . . . when he gets back . . .” He trailed off, then added,
“And
Julian and Terence, Silva, Karim and Abul-Qasim, Carlo, and Bingo and Pinky and Alula. That's how we find the relics. That's the way we'll win.”

An image of Lily's face flashed into Becca's mind. Her best friend was hurt. She should be there with her. “Let's find this thing.”

Wade headed back into the workshop. “Except that I don't know what we're actually looking for. Even if
Leonardo was making a pun on
lantern,
maybe he really means
lantern.
But I don't see any. At least not one that could be from the early sixteenth century.”

“Keep at it.” Becca entered the bedroom where Leonardo died. She hoped to find a crusty old lantern overlooked in a niche in the wall. Maybe it no longer held a candle, but in its secret compartment were the designs for the final key.

No such luck.

Becca felt her excitement slipping away, like the sun was doing right now in the late afternoon. The sky was clouding up. The museum would close in less than half an hour, and they had nothing. Julian was still out there running interference—she hoped he was, and hadn't fallen into the clutches of the Order.

“Let's . . . let's look at the drawings and paintings. Maybe there's something there,” she said. “A lantern in one of his paintings. It could be a code. Maybe?”

The museum shop had a good selection of art books covering the full range of Leonardo's drawings and sketches. They each took a massive collection and scanned it for work done after 1517. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Then, something.

Wade leaned over a page in a catalog of late drawings.
“Bec . . . look at this. It's from one of his famous notebooks of sketches and writings called
Codex Atlanticus.
A drawing from 1515 or later.”

It was a lantern, but not the usual type of lantern. The caption noted that it was a kind of primitive slide projector called a camera obscura or a magic lantern.

“I don't get that it's a design for a key, though,” he said.

She lifted the
ocularia
and sunglasses off and replaced them with her reading glasses. She studied the drawing. “Leonardo said, ‘not
without
the lantern.' Like Lily said, ‘not without' could mean ‘within.' The lines inside the lantern aren't very clear. They might be different when you look through the
ocularia.
I'm going to use the combination five-five-five. It's Leonardo's number, after all.”

“Go for it.”

Making sure no one saw, Becca adjusted the lenses as she had before—five-five-five on one side, five-five-five on the other. Taking a breath, she slipped them on.

Under the lenses, the crosshatched lines inside the lantern reformed themselves and took on the look of a schematic. It was the design for the fourth key. She took off the glasses, held her new phone behind the lenses, and snapped a photo. Then another. Six photos in all.

What she saw in the decoded lines was a clear image of a key.

A key. Similar to but more intricate than the others. It bore the same telltale ornamentation on its shell, but it also had gears and struts and linkages and silver wires extending from it. It almost looked like a weapon or an engine, and reminded her that Leonardo had designed many military machines in his career.

“The fourth key,” she whispered. “We found it!”

But Wade was fixed on another page in the book of drawings. He turned the book around to her, to one of several sketches depicting a cataclysm of water.

“Becca, the flood. There's a whole series of these drawings under the same title:
Deluge.
The flood my dad told us about . . .”

“What's the date of the drawings?”

He read the caption. “Between 1515 and 1519.”

She shivered in the sunlit room. These drawings from five centuries ago seemed as fresh and terrifying as if they had rendered something that had just happened today. Or would happen tomorrow.

Or . . . at whatever deadline they knew Galina was obsessed with.

“What if Leonardo drew these because Copernicus told him about the horrors of time travel?” she asked. “The ones he told me about in London? Wade, maybe Copernicus saw a flood and told Leonardo. But it hasn't come yet. It's coming now. Your father knows about it, and it has to do with Galina.”

Wade pulled out the phone Julian had given him. “I'm calling Sara—”

Julian raced in, followed by the intern, who was angry. “There's no running allowed in Leonardo's house!” she said.

“Sorry!” said Julian. “If I break something, I'll buy it.” He drew Wade and Becca quickly from the room. “I threw off our friends—finally—but a couple of black cars just pulled into the lot. You know what that means. I hope you found what you were looking for.”

“We have the design for the fourth key,” Becca said, pocketing her phone.

“And that's not all,” said Wade. “But first, we need the best jeweler you know!”