The Golden Vendetta (29 page)

Alanya, Turkey

June 8

Evening

B
ecause of all the near-death experiences they'd racked up so far, the uneventful flight to Antalya airport was just long and boring and foodless, but Darrell couldn't care about any of that after he deplaned and got Wade's call.

“I have good news and bad news,” Wade had told him.

And as good as the good news was—“Becca and I found the design for the fourth key”—the bad news was crazy bad: “We also found a bunch of flood drawings.”

Darrell told Lily first, hoping she would actually talk with him. She was quiet to begin with. “Hmm,” she said. Then she got quieter.

His mother was quiet, too, but for a different reason. “I keep thinking about your stepfather's secret meeting,” she said softly. She was going to say more, he was sure of it, but she swallowed the rest. “But first, we get the third key.”

“You bet we do,” he said. He glanced over at Lily, who just nodded, which was better than nothing.

Of course, it made sense to Darrell to connect the Copernicus horrors—
we should have a better term for that
—with the flood that his stepfather had told them about. But it was a kind of grim, end-of-the-world sense. The bad news was drowning the good news.

His mother had sat next to him all through the flight, trying, hopelessly, to unlock the secret of the puzzle box of the tower, to find the exact location of the third key, but she was getting nowhere.

When he'd tried to be polite—“Don't drive yourself crazy with it” and “Do you want me to try?”—she shook her head. “I just want to try one more thing.” So he'd turned to Lily, but every time he looked at her, he'd found himself tongue-tied.

His mom and dad had broken up, so he
kind of
knew
what she was feeling, but he'd been a lot younger when his father had drifted out of their lives, and Darrell and his mother had always been together, so yeah, he didn't
really
know what she was feeling at all.

Maybe I can just tell her that. Maybe someone can let me do something!

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot announced, “we have begun our descent into Antalya airport and will arrive in approximately twenty minutes. Flight crew, please begin your cross-check and prepare the cabin for landing.”

He glanced at Lily.
Say something neutral,
he thought. “I hope Silva is there,” he said. “Or a hundred of his friends. I think we'll need protection.”

“Well, you will,” she said.

Ah! Good old Lily!
He decided not to wreck it with a quip. He just laughed.

Turning to the window, he saw how the ultramarine blue of the sea contrasted with the brown earth and beaches of the coast that spread out beneath them.

“It looks like a vacation place,” his mother said, still fiddling with the puzzle.

“That's what makes it so dangerous,” he said.

“Meaning what?” asked Lily.

“I'm not sure.” But he made a mental note to use it on Wade.

The airport was large, but not jammed at that time of day. Because Becca and Wade had the first Barbarossa key, Darrell, Lily, and Sara didn't need to hide anything in a locker, but he came up with the bright idea to rent one anyway, just to have a decoy locker key.

“Uh-oh,” Lily whispered. “Some guys just walked into the terminal. Not the good kind of guys.”

Darrell saw them. A trio of plainclothes Europeans, beefy, hands in pockets, on phones, obviously packing sidearms, heads swiveling around the room. He didn't want to be seen watching, but he couldn't wrench his eyes away. Big mistake. His stare connected with one of them. There was a flash of recognition.

His mother saw. “Get out of here!” She rushed them both back through the crowded concourse, searching for the nearest exit. Darrell “accidentally” dropped the locker key, and Lily “accidentally” kicked it across the floor, sending one of the agents skittering after it.

“Good fake,” she said. “Now run!”

They were out on the sidewalk before the men, and bolted into the car at the head of the taxi line. Darrell said, “Driver, please get us out of here. We're being followed!” But the driver apparently wasn't familiar
with spy movies, because he just turned in his seat and shrugged, until Darrell's mother held out a huge wad of euros. The man grabbed the bills, punched the gas, and the cab screeched away from the curb. Two of the three agents stumbled out of the terminal, shouting. The third was probably checking the lockers, Darrell thought. So there!

When Sara told the driver their destination, his foot lifted off the gas pedal.

“Kizil Kule? Is over hour away.” The man sighed, as if he'd heard the request a billion times before, but Darrell's mother folded over another few euro notes, and he was all smiles. “Yes, yes.” He pressed his foot on the gas again and got on the highway.

It
was
over an hour away. Not less. Close to two hours after the airport-key incident, the driver dropped them at the water, stuffing the remainder of the fare into his pocket and shaking his head as he left.

Kizil Kule was a squat polygon, and the model in his mother's hands right now was indeed accurate. Darrell thought its many sides must have helped deflect direct artillery strikes, like the angles on a stealth fighter deflects radar. It was, even after seven or eight centuries, fresh and stout, and a perfect place for Copernicus
and Heyreddin to have secreted the third key to Triangulum.

In fact, because of Heyreddin's high esteem and position in the Ottoman capital, it probably meant that the hiding place was especially clever.

Great,
Darrell thought.
Another challenge.
His mother had relinquished the puzzle to him, and he realized why she hadn't been able to solve it. It was a heavy block of wood with a taunting little rattly thing inside. No matter how you rotated its moving sections, the only thing that happened was that the rattle kept rattling, and the puzzle kept its secret.

“Better go in,” his mother said. “Maybe inside the tower there's a clue to the puzzle that will give us a clue to where the key is inside the tower. In other words, a clue to the puzzle, so the puzzle can give us a clue.”

“A Darrellism,” said Lily. “I fear for you, Sara Kaplan.”

Lily found a few Turkish words on her phone and, after guessing how to pronounce them, told Sara, who bought three tickets into the tower museum. Ten minutes later they entered the cool air of its lowest level, the bottom of a labyrinth of stairways and ramps and levels and shadows. Plenty of shadows.

After escaping from Clos Lucé, Julian, Becca, and Wade jetted to Rome, where, hours later, they found themselves hurrying down a warren of narrow passages off the Via Borghese.

Julian had earlier linked to his father's computers in Nice and dug up the name of a black-market jeweler his father had interviewed for one of his novels,
The Vatican Directive,
a book Julian thought deserved a far more exciting title.

“Her name is . . . ,” Becca said.

“Adriana Nissi,” said Julian, searching the street. “Via della Torretta. Number sixty-nine.”

“Does ‘black market' mean she's really good, or really bad?” Becca asked.

“A little of both, I think,” said Julian. “We'll find out soon.”

Entering the ground floor of number 69, they found the jeweler listed as residing on the top floor.

They rang for her. No answer.

“We can't wait.” Julian bounded up the staircase from the street.

The door to the flat was open. The interior was illuminated by a bank of open windows along the rear of the building. A warm breeze blew out to the landing.

Julian knocked.
“Ciao? C'è qualcuno?”
he asked.

“Sì. È aperto,”
came the muffled reply. “Come in, door is open.”

They pushed in and found a tattooed middle-aged woman wearing goggles, a halter top, low-slung work pants, and no shoes, leaning over a high bench. Her tattoos, Julian noted silently, seemed to wander from her neck to her toes, and might have been everywhere in between. A long blue snake coiled down the outside of her bare left arm, its bloody fangs inked out over her two middle fingers. She held a miniature blowtorch in one hand and was alternately dipping it at and removing it from a length of gold pipe. An electronic cigarette hung from her lips, and she wore a jeweled nose ring and earlobe studs. Looking over her shoulder at them, she extinguished the blowtorch. The snake rippled when she moved. She removed her goggles, then blinked. “You are Julian!”

“Yes!” he said. “Thank you for seeing us.”

“But of course. I know your mother from pictures.”

This surprised Julian, and for a moment he brought up his mother's face. “Did you really?”

“
Sì, sì.
You look so like her. I am sorry you lost her very young. Come for kiss.” He didn't have to because she lunged across the floor to him and kissed both his cheeks. He turned red instantly.

Shaking the kids' hands, she added, “So,
amici miei,
what can I do for you?”

Her eyes lit up like a child's when Wade said the name Leonardo, and she gasped repeatedly when Becca showed her the photos of the key she'd taken through the
ocularia
.

“
O, dio mio!”
she said under her breath. Pressing her temples, she walked over to her workbench and studied the phone under a jeweler's loupe as if she were holding a priceless artifact and not a digital copy of one. She sent the best image to a computer across the room, and printed an enlarged photo of the design. She taped it in place on the workbench.

“I suspect you need this key
pronto?
”

“Sì,”
said Wade. “If you can.”

Adriana Nissi smiled. “I can. You wait.”

She quickly assembled tools and materials from all over her workshop, bringing them to the bench. When she finally dropped her goggles back over her eyes, and the blowtorch flashed, her toned arms flexed and her biceps bulged.

Julian swore he saw that blue tattoo snake slither slowly down her arm as the sparks flew like stars to the studio floor.

Central Italy

June 8

Evening

U
go Drangheta powered his SUV swiftly down the Vocabolo Angelica, just north of the well-known hairpin between Papigno and Marmore, where the road sank in a sharp V, changed its name to Vocabolo Rancio, and drove sharply north. His rage had boiled for so long, it was now seething in his blood.

Galina Krause would die, and he would have her empire.

“How far behind are we?” he asked his passenger. He was on the trail of a convoy of five black vehicles,
including one large transport, that his brother-in-law had spotted leaving Salzburg, Austria.

Mistral glanced ahead, then checked the message on her phone. “Less than an hour. Are you certain we are following the astrolabe?”

“We will find out. In less than an hour.”

He was downshifting in anticipation of the famous hairpin when he caught sight of a large truck with German license plates parked in the otherwise deserted lot of Ristorante il Focolare, a boarded-up pizza restaurant situated at the very apex of the hairpin.

“Ugo? No, no. It cannot be.”

He braked to a crawl, snarling the traffic behind him. His suspicion kicking in, he drove slowly past the lot, saw that the truck's cabin was empty, and continued up the road. A half mile or so later, he pulled over, let the traffic by, and reversed. He carefully returned to the restaurant and pulled into the lot. Mistral removed two pistols from the glove box in front of her. They were for her. Ugo had his own brace of handguns and pulled them out from under his seat.

“Wait here.”

“No, Ugo, I am with you in everything.”

He looked at her, kissed her, and exited the car. She went out her side. They rounded the large truck. It
was indeed empty, though the rear compartment was locked.

“Shh, listen,” Mistral whispered.

He froze. Someone, a man, laughed inside the abandoned restaurant. Another two or three men answered with more laughter.

“They're taking a rest,” he said, his heart pounding. If he could stop this, if only he could . . . Ugo didn't know what. His plans had not yet had a chance to form themselves, except to insist that any disruption of Galina's plans was good.

He raised both guns—she did, too—and he nodded to her to go around the patio to the right of the parking lot. “On my signal,” he whispered.

There was more laughter and the sound of glasses clinking as she scurried past the boarded windows around the corner, then peered back around—her beautiful face—giving him a nod.

He drew a breath, waited three seconds, and returned the nod. Both firing, they blasted open the doors and burst into the restaurant, to be confronted with what could only be described as a firing squad of two dozen men. The barrage was horrendous: Ugo fell to the ground outside, struck in the face, the torso, his already wounded arm. In desperation, he fired back
into the restaurant doorway.

He watched Mistral fire over and over, then disappear back out the side door onto the patio and into the valley below, pursued by ten, twelve gunmen.

“Mistral . . .” His voice was a whisper. He heard the woods erupt with a chaos of bullets, hundreds, thousands, then stop abruptly.
My Mistral. She must be dead.

Ugo crawled back to the SUV, dragged himself to its footrest, to the door handle, to the seat. He slid painfully behind the wheel, bleeding from his head, his stomach, his arm. He saw—or thought he saw—a khaki-wearing Asian man with a black pistol standing in the doorway of the restaurant, his face a thing of stone.

Ugo pressed the ignition, blood streaming down his hand; then a resounding blast came from the doorway, and the windshield exploded into his eyes.

After trudging up the endless stairs to the open roof of Kizil Kule in Alanya, Turkey, Ebner von Braun, trailed by Oskar Gerrenhausen and the skinnier of the two unspeakable agents from Tunis, felt his stomach tumble. He had tinnitus, a constant ringing deep in his ears like a horde of cicadas living inside his head. Here, with the ocean grinding below and the wind screaming across the bricks at such a pitch, he felt nauseous.

“Some view,” said Emil, who had scrounged up a replacement needle to pick his teeth with. He waved the encrusted thing around like a pointer.

Ebner wheeled away from him, shuddering. “Oh, for the love of Albrecht!”

“Take these,” said the bookseller, opening to him a tin of small white pills. “For seasickness. I, too, suffer.”

Remembering Galina in the ruins of Carthage, Ebner drew out several of the pills, popped two, and saved the rest for later. “It is all this running around, you see.”

“I do,” Gerrenhausen said to him. “It was I who identified this tower to Miss Krause as the location of the third Triangulum key.”

“Care to narrow that location down a little?” Ebner replied. “It's rather a big place. We are but several feet away from discovering the key, but several feet in which direction, my little friend?”

“Alas, the key was not that specific.”

“You two talk like a book,” said Emil, who broke wind loudly and walked away.

It was absurd to Ebner, their need to rely on the blasted Kaplan family for clues. All this skulking around, waiting for “breaks.” Galina's two-month absence had created a situation that was cosmically unnatural. Back in March, the order had been simple: Kill the Kaplans.
Then the mess in London, Crux, the old church, evidence of time travel, the death of Archie Doyle, all led to the command being rescinded. The waffling bred its own kind of seasickness. And yet . . .

The family's record of success was dismally clear. After locating two relics already, they were well on their way to finding a third. Was it partly because of the poor quality of the Order's far-flung agents? Of the sort exemplified by the fat man and this
thing? My Lord,
he thought.
Give me Helmut Bern or even the late, lamented Archie Doyle over these creatures.

Gerrenhausen held out the key. “Perhaps a new set of eyes will find a clue?”

Ebner was reaching for it when someone screamed from below. Moments later a young French boy, perhaps five years old, rushed up the stairs to the roof, crying, “A giant fat man is chasing people with a gun!”

So. The Kaplans had been found.

Eight minutes before the screaming boy, Darrell's head split in half because he wasn't Wade. Wade would have worked on the puzzle until—
voilà!
—he found an elegant and stunning way to open the priceless puzzle box and reveal the actual location of the third Barbarossa key. But, no, Wade was in France, which left Darrell to
make do with twisting and turning and shaking and rolling the stupid thing in every conceivable way, while it just looked back at him smugly and said, “Ha!” So while his mother was on a lower level, and Lily on the level above, Darrell gripped the puzzle and smacked it lightly against the nearest wall. Nothing happened. He hit it again, a little harder.

Twice. Nothing. Nothing.

Finally, his anger took over, and he slammed it at the wall hard. It split.

“Uh-oh.”

He'd just destroyed a work of sixteenth-century Ottoman craftsmanship. That was probably a sin, at least a crime, at best unforgivable, but . . . the bead, a small wooden ball painted silver, of course, rolled across the floor and bounced away down the stairs. And there in the broken fragments of the puzzle were tiny silver paint marks that the rattling bead had made.

Darrell knew where the third key was hidden.

He breathed out. “Okay, then. Okay—” He listened. Footsteps were coming up the stairs from below. Footsteps he knew. Not his mother's. She was down on another level somewhere and, he hoped, safe. No, these were the light, dancing footsteps of a very heavy man.

“Lily, get down here!” he cried overloudly. “The key's
in a chamber on the lowest level of the tower!”

Lily rushed down the stairs to him. “Really, you solved the puzzle?”

“Sort of—”

She spied the splintered wood. “Darrell!”

That's when some French kid started screaming. He tumbled up the stairs inches from Bigboy, who pranced nimbly up after him, waving his pistol around. Darrell jumped away from the stair opening as the gun went off. The centuries-old brick exploded behind his head. Darrell pushed Lily back toward the upward steps. Another shot exploded on the wall next to his face. He was terrified, moving without reason, just moving.

Lily scrabbled around on the steps and suddenly hurled a five-inch square of broken brick right past Darrell's head. It struck Bigboy in the face, tearing open his wide pink cheek. The guy squealed, slapping his bloody face with one hand as he tumbled to the stone floor, falling forward like a whale. The gun went off beneath him, and he let out a horrible groan.

Lily went white in the face, faltered as she tried to get up. “What did I do—”

“Lily, come on.” Darrell jumped two steps up the staircase.

“But you said it was downstairs!” Lily said.

“I lied. I guessed someone was listening. It's near the top of the tower—”

Lily leaped past him up the steps, then without warning pushed him backward into a deep cutout in the side of the wall and slapped her hand over his mouth. It was close in there. She was very close to him. He felt her breathing as if it were his own lungs doing it, but when he tried to shift away, she pressed against him harder, pinning them deeper in the shadows, until he saw why.

Fish leaped down the stairs right past them.

Ebner trailed him down the staircase, pushing screaming tourists out of the way with the barrel of his gun. He was on the phone, muttering and spitting in German. The bookseller skipped down after Ebner.

Darrell and Lily waited in the scanty shadows, pressed against each other until the three men had disappeared onto the level below.

“Uh . . . ,” Darrell said.

“Just come on,” she said as she jumped up the stairs. “And don't say it.”

“Say what?”

“Anything.” She shook herself as if shaking off bugs. “Now go!”

Darrell took the lead, bounding up to the second-highest level. Holding the important piece of the
shattered model, he veered left at the top of the steps and pushed through to one of the outer chambers. There was a cutout in the brick with a view of the sea. He lined it up with the model. He ran his finger down the wall from the sill until he saw a tiny silver mark on the corner of one of the bricks.

“Whoa, Darrell . . . ,” Lily whispered.

He smiled. “Come on. Help me.”

Together, they pried the brick out.

The third key was lodged securely behind the brick. As with the one they'd discovered in Tunisia, the dense design work identified the key unmistakably as the work of Leonardo da Vinci.

“There's a big
M,
and writing on the shaft,” Lily whispered. She traced her fingers over the inscribed letters. They were crudely written, identifiable barely as letters at all, and were strange: partly Latinate, partly something else. The accents were ones that neither of them had ever seen before.

As usual with Darrell, he had to speak them aloud—
try
to speak them aloud—the way a child might try to sound out unfamiliar words.

“Lahar garrr gahhh rrrr,” he said. “El ahar gargar? What kind of language is—”

Lily started shaking. “Darrell . . .” She closed her hands over her face, then dropped them. “Darrell, this is what the old woman said to me and Becca in Austin. The Mother. She said, ‘Lahar gaharr.' We thought she was just trying to breathe, but she was saying words. My translator. I need my translator!”

“My phone?” he said. “Or yours?”

“Mine. My apps. But my fingers are shaking—”

He took her phone. “What's your pass code?”