The Golden Vendetta (30 page)

“Zero nine two three.”

He started to tap it in. “Wait. September twenty-third? That's my birthday—”

“So?”

“And you disabled your phone and messaging?”

“Just do it!”

He did, finally hitting the translator app on her home screen. There were noises on the level below. “This is dumb,” he said. “We need to get out of here.”

“If we lose the key, at least we'll have one clue. Hurry up!”

“Got it. But how do I do this. I can't key in those accents.”

Growling, Lily took the phone from him. “If we're lucky, it'll still translate it.”

Selecting the button that read
detect language,
Lily typed in the letters in English—
L-ahhar gharghar.
A few moments passed before anything happened; then two words popped up.

“Maltese!” Lily said. “Darrell, the old woman was from Malta. The women Leonardo talks about. The one who came to us. The Mothers who protect the relic. That's what the
M
on the key means. The Mothers are in Malta! Guarding Triangulum!”

“Lily, look at what the words actually mean,” Darrell said.
“L-aħħar għargħar
means ‘the final flood.'”

She was staring at the screen, her mouth open, when his mother suddenly appeared. “I managed to slip past them, but there are more now. At least ten of them entered the tower, and they're clearing it, floor by floor. We need to go up.”

“Is there a helicopter up there?”

“No, but there's no going down,” she said. “You found it?”

“Here.” Darrell gave her the key. “Come on.”

Lily outpaced them both, rushing up the steps two at a time.

It was hot on the roof of the tower, but there was a haze darkening the sea.

“Now what?” Lily said.

All Darrell could think of was the flood. The deluge. The Mothers of Malta. “The key tells too much. The words. If Galina finds out . . . Mom, the key.”

Before she could actually release it, he snatched it away, went to the parapet, and scraped the shaft across its sharp stones, wearing down the words.

“That's an original da Vinci you're defacing!” said Sara.

“And it breaks my heart.”

Ebner von Braun flew up the last stairs and was on the roof of the tower with them. He wasn't alone. Ten, maybe twelve others, as well as the two thugs from Africa and the little antiquarian bookseller, surrounded them.

“You will give me the key,” Ebner said, waving his pistol to shoo the children to the edge of the roof.
Meanwhile, Bigboy, breathless and sweating, with a large bloody stain on his vast shirt, dragged Sara roughly from them. Fish raised a surprisingly wide butcher's knife to Sara's neck.

“You see? No choice.” Ebner approached. “Galina wants what she wants.”

“He is correct,” the bookseller said. “She always gets it, too.”

Ebner set the end of his pistol barrel against the center of Darrell's forehead and slid the key from his hand. He glanced at it and handed it to Gerrenhausen.

The bookseller studied it, then smiled. “Yes, identical craftsmanship. It is of a kind with the Budapest key. We now have two of the three.”

Of the four,
thought Darrell.

Ebner took it back and slipped it into the pocket of his coat. “Hendriks, Emil, detain them.”

“Kill them?” said Bigboy.

“Alas, not yet. Detain them only.”

Ebner and the bookseller stormed out of the tower into a waiting car. It took them to the dock, where they boarded a motorboat that took them in an hour and a half the fifty nautical miles south to the yacht of Galina Krause.

Galina,
he thought.
Galina, we are nearly there.
He was about to place a call to her when his fingers felt the shaft of the key in his pocket. Yanking it into the daylight, he spied the horrifying defacement.

“What the devil! They know where the relic is!”

“The boy mangled a genuine Leonardo!” Gerrenhausen cried, pounding his fists on his thighs. “I should have shot him on the train when I had the chance!”

All at once, Ebner's phone tinkled with a harp arpeggio.
Galina!
He could decline the call. No, he could never. Dreading the coming conversation, he swiped the screen to answer and howled silently to himself.

No, no, no!

T
rembling from fear and exhaustion, Lily realized that staying alive was sometimes just a matter of timing. In this case, perfect timing.

As soon as Bigboy and Fish pushed her, Sara, and Darrell at gunpoint out of the tower toward a battered black car, Silva appeared out of the dusk. The grizzled, thick-armed, beret-wearing man in combat fatigues wormed his way through the crowd leaving the tower, with several large friends in tow.

“We are agents of the Teutonic Order,” Bigboy said right away. “Perhaps you do not realize who you are dealing with—”

“In fact, I do,” said Silva. “Two men who might be
dead in”—he checked his watch—“twelve seconds, if I don't tell my friends here not to kill you. And right now, I'm forgetting what language they speak.”

“Eh?” said Fish. “All I got from that is twelve seconds.”

To make it clearer, Silva's friends surrounded the two agents, who released their captives. Silva peeled the gun out of Bigboy's fat fingers. He took Fish's carving knife, too. Then he hurled them off the side of the nearest wharf into the water.

“Oops,” Silva said. “Littering. My bad. Go get those, will you?”

“Eh?” said Fish. “In the water?”

“That's right.”

“Galina Krause will not appreciate your treatment of official agents of the Teutonic Order of Ancient Prussia,” Bigboy said.

“Would she appreciate digging them up out of the ground?” Silva said.

“She'll come for you,” said Fish, and he waved his arm out to sea. “She's got herself a small army of less than fifty—”

“Hush, Emil!” Bigboy snarled. “They will find out soon enough.”

Silva looked south across the water. “Thanks for the
tip. Now pinch your noses and dive!”

Lily watched Bigboy and Fish slide off the side of the wharf into the water. “Thank you for the show, Mr. Silva,” she said.

“It's just Silva,” he said.

Ten minutes later, they were sitting around a crowded table in a market café.

“Silva, you saved our lives, again,” Sara said, pressing her hand over his. “You have a pretty perfect sense of timing.”

Lily could see a pinprick of blood on Sara's neck where Fish had stuck her.

“My job,” he said. “And my pleasure. Seriously, you're so much more polite than my usual bosses.” The grazed forearm he had suffered in Casablanca didn't seem to bother him in the slightest. “By the way, that fish-faced goon back there did us a service. My men spotted a mega-yacht about fifty nautical miles off the coast. Now we know it belongs to Galina.”

“Her agents stole the Kizil Kule key,” said Sara. “They now have two, and maybe both are on that yacht. We assume that Galina doesn't know yet where Triangulum is, or she'd be off to Malta.” She whispered the last word.

“I bet she's not even on the yacht,” said Darrell. “She
wouldn't have left a key to Ebner or those two jerks from the desert if she had been. She's somewhere else.”

“Now that those goons are out of the way, it's only Ebner and the bookseller,” Lily added.

“Only Ebner, the bookseller, and the forty others who crew a yacht that size,” Silva said.

“She doesn't know about the fourth key, either,” said Darrell, “so we have the advantage, which may not be too much of one, but she can't actually get to the relic without us, but on the other hand, if we steal the keys back, we can find the relic without her.”

Silva seemed a little annoyed by the time Darrell finished his long sentence, so he just laid his thoughts out in his simple paramilitary way: “We'll launch an assault on the yacht at twenty-three hundred hours.”

Which Darrell translated as, “Eleven tonight. Two plus hours from now.”

Since the events at Kizil Kule, Lily had pretty much decided to see it to the end. She knew there was nothing else to do, because there was far too much at stake now. They'd go after the keys, steal them, and escape to Malta before the Order knew what hit them. After that? Well, she'd think about that later.

Silva made a few calls, then told them that his associates would meet them at the docks within the hour.
“They'll have your scuba gear with them.”

“Wait,
our
scuba gear?” said Sara.

Silva brought out a nautical chart and, moving his coffee mug aside, spread it out on the table. He narrowed his eyes and traced his finger from approximately where they were on the shore to the position of the yacht his men had spotted. “My friends are chartering the fastest motorboat they can lay their hands on, and it'll be a surprise attack, but someone will have to identify the package—the
keys.
My men and I can't do that. We need your eyes on-site.”

“Well, I've never scubaed in my life,” said Lily.

Silva took a breath. “You're a diver, aren't you?” he asked Darrell.

“Darrell?” Lily couldn't stifle a laugh. “No, he's not.”

“As a matter of fact, I am,” he said. “My father taught me when I was young. Mom dives, too.”

“Whoa. Glub-glub,” Lily murmured. “A scuba family. I'm impressed.”

“Darrell's not going in the water,” Sara said, taking out her phone. “I'll be our eyes on-site. I'm texting the others through Terence's server to meet us in Malta.” She paused. It was at the point, Lily thought, that she would have said something about Uncle Roald. She went on. “One way or another, Malta is where all this ends.”

“Any word from Terence?” Darrell asked.

Silva shook his head. “Terence and Roald are MIA in Italy somewhere. Paul Ferrere and his team are still on the hunt for them.”

MIA. Missing in action.
Lily wanted to read any sign of hope in Silva's tone or expression, but the soldier gave up nothing. Sara simply nodded. It was almost too much to watch her go coolly about the task of being a Guardian and a mother while hurting so much inside. Lily knew what that hurt felt like, and though Sara was strong she couldn't shed the hollow stare of separation. Lily knew all about that, too. She'd seen it in the mirror every day since London.

“Two hours, seven minutes,” Silva said, ordering a cup of strong coffee. “Until then, we plan.”

Two hours and seven minutes,
Lily thought.
It's time.
She excused herself and went to find the restroom, if there was one. On the way she turned on her phone.

T
wo hours later the dark Alanya docks were sleeping. Fishing boats, tourist cruise vessels, coast guard patrols, charter boats, and every other kind of vessel were tied up at the pier for the day.

The air was warm, but Darrell was freezing, shaking at the thought of what the next hour would bring.

An attack. Armed men against other armed men. His mother in the middle. Why he hadn't felt the same in Casablanca at Drangheta's villa, he didn't know. Maybe because he hadn't known about the flood then. Now something dark was moving toward them, like a huge wall of water, and it just plain scared him.

He tried to think of an excuse for his mother not to
go with Silva, but the guy was right. They needed one of them to identify the keys for sure. There was only going to be a single shot at this.

Darrell walked up and down the wharf. Other than Silva and the sketchy man at the harbormaster's hut he spoke to, no one said a word. He paced. They all paced. They watched and waited it out. At seven minutes past eleven, a motorboat putted noisily over to them. It was decked out as a fishing boat, with thick nets draped over it. Darrell remembered Bingo's plane and guessed the nets might be a kind of camouflage. Silva caught a rope tossed to him, pulled the boat, and tied it up to the dock. One of the men jumped up on the boardwalk and handed Silva a cell phone.

Silva studied the screen silently, then turned to them. “Take a look. The first shot is Galina's yacht yesterday morning. The second is now. Notice anything?”

Darrell studied the two photos of the yacht. They were taken at different times of day, so it didn't strike him at first what Silva was hinting at.

When Lily took the phone and swiped back and forth between the two images several times, she saw it.

“The waterline?” she said. “The waterline changed from yesterday to today. The yacht was deeper in the water yesterday, by several feet, but now it's not. So it
was heavier when it arrived? It unloaded something?”

Sara turned to Silva. “What do you think it means?”

“I think it means we now have two missions,” he said. “Extract the keys, and find out what the Order is unloading in the water between here and Cyprus. Let's move.”

Mist rolled over the dark water.

Lily's heart ached as they motored into the eerie blackness. She knew she'd been falling deeper into herself from the moment she and Darrell were crammed into that niche at Kizil Kule. Why? Being smashed up against him didn't mean anything, did it? No, of course not. Then why was she so . . . so . . .
not here?

Because of “the news” from home.

Two hours ago she'd enabled her phone, tapped in her mother's number—it was early afternoon in Austin—and the wail that greeted her and the torrent of tears and her mother's shaky and near-inaudible whisper crushed her. Then the news.

“Honey, Lily, we decided to try to make this work. Your father and I—put it on speaker, would you?”

Lily heard the phone toggle. “Dad?”

“I'm here, honey,” said her father, drawing in a sharp breath. “Okay, so, we decided that the only way to do
this, to be a family again, is to start new. Fresh. Completely. With you. The three of us. The way it was at the beginning.”

“And it has to be away from here,” her mother continued. “From Austin. There are shadows here, but there are better places. And you have to be with us, Lily, honey. That's the way it will work. Will you come home, honey? Now? We want you home—”

“We need you home, honeybunch,” said her father.

She'd had no chance to say anything so far, and now didn't know what to say. “Away from Austin? What do you mean?”

“Should I tell her?” her mother said. “I will,” her father said. “In Seattle, honey. We found a house.”

“You can't go around the world like this,” her mother said. “It's crazy and dangerous, and we need you here—”

“No,” Lily said.

“—and seriously, Lil, it's the only way this is going to work. You know, we could come to you, pick you up—”

“No,” she said. “Didn't you hear me? I can't just up and leave.”

“Lily, this is serious,” her father said. “Whatever you're doing there is just wrong, some kind of dangerous fantasy. The Moores are crazy worried about Becca,
and we are about you. We're coming to get you. Just tell us where you are, and we'll—”

She hung up.

She was going to say that she would call them back, but she hung up. She powered off her phone and stuffed it away.

A family. Fresh start. Seattle. Just wrong.

Now, hours later, she was still dumbstruck. She clasped the boat's side railing with both hands, afraid that if she didn't steady herself, she'd throw up or be sucked into the water or both.
Just be here now,
she thought.
Be here.

When the boat was within a half mile of the yacht, Silva said, “Good,” and the captain cut the engine. They were in position, bobbing on the waves. Her throat tightened. She felt dizzy.

Sara placed her hand on Lily's arm. “Are you all right, honey?”

“Fine,” she said. “Let's get those keys.”

As they drifted in the darkness, the stone-faced crewmen—silent so far, though most of them didn't speak English anyway—dressed themselves in scuba gear and checked their handguns, which they then wrapped in plastic sheaths. Silva pulled out his infrared riflescope and trained it on the yacht in the misty distance.

“They're still unloading,” he whispered. “Look now.”

Sara used the scope, then passed it to Darrell, who gave it to Lily. She saw a large crate lowered from the deck, down the side, and into the water. Four scuba-wearing divers took hold of the chains supporting it and descended with it.

“What could it be?” Lily asked. “Are they dumping something?”

“The divers have single tanks,” Silva said. “They'll have to surface soon.”

“In less than an hour,” said Sara. “At the longest.”

It wasn't long at all. Not even twenty minutes elapsed before the chains came up dangling and empty. The divers were not there.

“Where did they go?” Darrell asked. “What's down there?”

“Wait, where exactly are we?” Lily asked. Silva told her: halfway between Turkey and Cyprus. She sucked in a sudden breath. “Oh my gosh. The chart. I need to see the chart.” Silva gave it to her. She called up the remote server where she stored her data, found what she was looking for, and studied the chart side by side with her phone. Her heart skipped a beat. “Oh man.”

“What is it?” asked Sara.

“At the beginning of March we got that coded
message from Uncle Henry.”

“It's what started all of this,” Darrell said. “What about it?”

“Uncle Henry said ‘tragedies' would begin all over the world, remember? Well, one of the very first ones we found—I think it was me who found it—was an oil tanker sinking in the Mediterranean. Off the coast of Cyprus. At the time, it was just one of the weird things going on, but last week, when Becca and I were being bored in Florida, I looked up all the tragedies again and marked the coordinates here. I didn't remember it until now, but look.”

Silva located their boat's coordinates on his phone. “That's here,” he said. “The tanker sank right here.”

“The wreck of the tanker,” said Sara, “the wreck
three months ago,
is part of Galina's plan? What on earth is she doing down there?”

Darrell looked from Lily to his mother, at her face, into her eyes. What he read there shook him. Dr. Sara Kaplan, senior archivist at the Harry Ransom Center
at the University of Texas, Austin, had been changing right in front of them. He'd noticed some of what was going on—her leadership, of course—but not all of it. The researcher, teacher, administrator, and mother he loved had—while still being all of those—become a person of action.

A Guardian, sure, but also an operative and a soldier.

Her bronze forearms had muscled over the last months since her abduction to Russia. Her face had taken on a kind of strength since London that he hadn't seen before. And now, she was forcing the mystery of where his stepfather was to take a backseat to stopping Galina and protecting the Legacy.

Then, when Silva offered her a pair of oxygen tanks, saying, “We need to see what's down there before we go for the keys, and we need you with us,” his mother slipped on the harness like a pro.

“Ooh, Sara, take the wire,” said Lily, tugging the camera and audio contraption out of her bag. “I threw it in here after Monte Carlo. Remember, that nice man Maurice Maurice told us it's waterproof. We'll sync it to watch on Darrell's phone and see what you see. I'd use my phone, but it's nearly out of power.”

“Great idea,” Darrell said. “We need to keep tabs on you, Mom.”

She gave him a flat smile, then hooked it on and tested the connection to their phones. “Keep the boat behind the fog bank,” she said to the one man who would remain with them. “We'll be back as soon as we see what's down there.”

Darrell tried to give his mother a reassuring smile, but the muscles of his face wouldn't cooperate. As she hugged him he blurted, “Don't die.”

“Keep your bubble stream out of sight,” Lily said. Sara hugged her, too.

Darrell watched three crewmen slip over the side, then his mother, and finally Silva. They let their belt weights pull them down below the surface. Soon the bubbles cleared enough for Darrell to see on his phone what his mother was seeing. She mingled with the divers, and they were on their way down and toward the yacht.

Lily murmured something so low it might have been praying. Darrell found himself doing the same. The image on his phone was tiny to begin with, but as his mother sank from the surface, the water became murkier, until it was almost black.

“Lily,” said Darrell, “what did I do? Sending my mom down in the water like that. Am I crazy? My mom!”

“Darrell, she can do it. She's not as fragile as you
or me, or any of us. She's the one person holding us together here.”

Which was both good to know and not so good. He was supposed to step up, wasn't he? Ever since his real father had vacated the scene, it had been Darrell and his mother, and he felt responsible for her. Be the man of the house. Her being close meant that he could be a goofball sometimes, but not when she was risking her life. “Lily, I—”

“Shh. Look.”

A sudden stream of white shot through the thick darkness on the screen. His mother's camera jiggled, then steadied and moved in. There it was, tilted under a rocky shelf two hundred feet under the surface. The wreck of a giant oil tanker that had capsized and sunk three months before.

Only it wasn't a wreck anymore.

It was no longer on its side, and it had been shifted under a great rock shelf, hidden from the surface and probably from any kind of satellite surveillance. It was enormous in length and breadth, and it was lit up like a huge underwater factory.

A gigantic secret base.

“So for the last three months,” he whispered, though he didn't have to, “ever since the tanker sank, the Order
has been building . . . this? What in the world for? Lily, it's enormous. How could the world not know about this?”

She stared at the screen of her phone. “The Order sent in a salvage crew, maybe, or hijacked a real salvage crew and pretended to cut the tanker up, but they built a base instead. Darrell, it's kind of James Bondy.”

“Yeah, but we're looking right at it! How could they do this?”

“Because the Order has people everywhere,” she said. “Because a whole bunch of corrupt people and agencies were involved. They must have been bribed or somehow forced to cooperate. Galina knows how to force people, that's for sure.”

“But why?” he whispered. “What is it for?”

Outside the tanker, and going in and out of a series of loading platforms, were what appeared to be dozens of divers. His mother saw—and so could they—that the upper decks inside the ship were intact, and that there was oxygen, since the personnel visible through portholes did not wear oxygen tanks.

“Sara, if you can hear me,” Lily said. “That crate we saw being lowered from the yacht. Can you see it now and find out what it might be?”

Sara must have heard, because she swam lower and
aimed her camera through the porthole at one of the holds that was sealed and had oxygen. The image came back: a crate marked with several characters. Lily took a stab. “Korean? We'll take a screenshot and check it later.”

“And there's something Russian,” Darrell said, pointing to his screen. “There's a red star and it says K-twenty-seven. We'll look it up to see what that means.”