The Golden Vendetta (4 page)

“What does it mean?” Wade asked.

“Dr. Marin Petrescu is the new director of CERN. He worked for years at the IAEA. He may have known Uncle Henry from there.”

“Maybe he's a Guardian, too,” Darrell whispered. “Even if he isn't, this is about the Legacy. I knew it had to be. Why else would he send a message using Uncle Henry's obituary?”

“Dad, if the director of the world's most famous nuclear research laboratory wants to see you, something big is going on. How can Darrell and I and you, of course, not go?”

“I'm not sure a message sent to me means that we all have to go,” Wade's father said with a small smile. “But come on. We need to talk. Let's get home.”

“Motel Nowhere is not home,” said Darrell. “I'm just saying.”

When they arrived back at the motel, Sara was on the secure computer, speaking with Paul Ferrere, the French private detective who had helped rescue her in Russia.

“Paul,” Sara said, “will you please repeat what you just told me?”

“Certainly,” he said, as the others gathered around the screen. “One of our agents snapped a photograph of Ebner von Braun speaking with a man outside the Paris Opera two months ago. It was the day
after
the fatal plane crash in Olsztyn, Poland, and hours before a well-respected book dealer on the Left Bank here was robbed of a sixteenth-century document of Polish origin.”

“Aha!” said Darrell. “Go on.”

“We have formally identified the other man as Oskar
Gerrenhausen, a reputed antiquarian bookseller whom we now suspect to be the thief. Like Ebner and Galina, he has not been seen since. Until now. Tonight he purchased a ticket for tomorrow evening's Paris-to-Rome train, leaving from the Gare de Lyon. I advise you to be here as soon as you can, or the man may slip through our fingers.”

Roald took a breath. “Paul, are you saying the Order is active again, after two months of virtually no activity?”

“It most certainly is.”

Wade felt his blood shoot through his veins like electricity through a wire.

“We need to tell the girls,” he said. “Mom, Dad, where do you think they are?”

“Doesn't matter,” said Darrell, leaping to the dresser with his open backpack. “Just get them. Get them and tell them the relic hunt is back on!”

Tampa, Florida

June 2

11:24 p.m.

B
ecca thought “radio silence” was a miserable idea. Safe and secure, maybe. Smart, definitely. But miserable all the same.

Two months without a single word about Galina's whereabouts or the Order's nasty business had been torture. For all Becca knew, the relic hunt was completely dead. Or the boys were doing it without them.

“Are you going to want to read the diary again?” Lily asked.

Becca shook her head. “It's so late. My eyes are tired.”

“All of me is tired, but what else is there to do?”

The two friends were sitting cross-legged on Becca's bed in the bedroom they shared in their two conjoined “suites” in a so-so motel on the outskirts of Tampa. The Copernicus diary, Becca's red notebook, and Lily's secure tablet were spread out between them. Becca's parents were sleeping in one of the second suite's two bedrooms, her sister Maggie in the other.

This was the latest hiding place Terence Ackroyd had moved them into because of the Order's threats against their families. The truth was, however, that there hadn't been a direct threat against the Benson family (which was who they were now). His witness-protection program was working well. Maybe too well.

Terence called it Code Red whenever they had to pack up and move. Each time they did, Becca hoped it would be because the relic hunt had started again. Each time, she was disappointed. She'd waited for something to tell them that Galina Krause was blazing across the world searching for the next relic. But the creepily young and kind-of-beautiful murderer had simply vanished.

There'd been no Code Red in the weeks since they'd
come to Tampa. Becca felt she was hanging in midair, waiting for something. What she'd learned in London from Copernicus himself—that time travel caused unimaginably horrible events to happen—seemed more and more like an old memory.

Still, the worst part of the last two months was the Lily situation.

Her parents had totally broken apart, and her family was angry and silent and in shreds. It tore Becca's heart to see her friend so hurt. Lily was damaged much more, of course, but she wouldn't show it. Lily was Lily, bright and perfect, and that's all she wanted people to see. Becca would have been crying all the time.

You'd actually never have expected them to be able to stand each other. They were as different as lobster and peanut butter. Becca was overly booky; Lily was way too electronically connected. Becca was moody and quiet; Lily was totally out there and quick and talky and funny. At least before her parents started throwing things.

The breakup of Lily's parents—after fifteen years—was inconceivable to everybody. Becca didn't know what to say or do for her friend except to be with her as much as she could. And that was the best part of the Lily situation.

To keep both their minds off the breakup and the slump in the hunt for the relics, Becca had delved deeper and harder into Copernicus's secret diary, trying to decipher several coded passages dated directly after Nicolaus left Serpens with Maxim Grek in Russia.

Lily, meanwhile, had created a database of all the tragedies that had happened around the world since the beginning of March, when the relic hunt began.

Because she and the others frequently had to discard their phones, they'd all begun storing critical data remotely on one of the secure Ackroyd computers in New York. This newest database contained data on several strange incidents of suspected time travel in Florida and Spain, the destruction of an office building in Rio, the murder of a Swedish diplomat, the sinking of a tanker in the eastern Mediterranean, and no fewer than three midnight thefts from famous art museums in Europe and Asia.

“All right,” Becca whispered. “Eyes refreshed. Let's get back to it. Maybe this time, we'll discover something real.”

Grateful for any distraction from the divorce, Lily dragged her tablet over, swiped it on, and wiggled her fingers, ready to enter search terms. If she didn't have
what it took to keep her family together, at least she was good at this.

Trying to sound as eager as possible, she said, “Go.”

“Okay, so. Remember I said that the diary pages right after the last Serpens entry were written in English? Well, I passed over it before because it's way too odd if you read it straight, but now I think there's a code here. Just listen.”

“It goes on for another page like that,” Becca said.

For a secret diary, it wasn't what Lily expected to hear. “It's so not relicky.”

“Is that a word?”

“I'm a groundbreaker. What's that mark?” Lily
pointed to a tiny blot of ink positioned under the last word of the last line of the passage.

Becca reached for a second pair of reading glasses—the girl had, like, a dozen of them, all bought since she experienced those weird blackouts in London—and slid them on over the first pair.

“Not a look, by the way,” said Lily.

“Thanks for the warning. I don't know what this thing is, but I'm thinking it's just an ink blot or defect on the page.”

“It could be more,” said Lily. “We live in Code World, after all.”

“I'd need a magnifying glass to make sure.”

“Really?” said Lily. “Or you could just snap a picture of it on your phone and enlarge it.”

“Oh, right.”

“Gosh, you people need me!” Lily took a photo and enlarged it. The “ink blot” turned out to be nothing of the sort. It was a triangle, with numbers inside it.

“Five-five-five,” said Becca. “Better than six-six-six, the devil's number.”

“Is it the cipher?” asked Lily. “If I'm using the word right.”

“You are. What do you mean?”

“Well, maybe the number's a key to the passage above it. Maybe Nicolaus isn't writing about packing junk for a trip at all.”

“How is it a key?”

Lily sighed. “I don't know! What are five and five and five? Fifteen. So maybe the fifteenth word means something. I'll do it.” She scanned the passage. “The fifteenth word is
I
. I did it!”

“Girls!” Mrs. Moore hissed through the open door from the other suite. “It's midnight. Go to sleep!”

“Sorry, Mrs. Benson,” Lily said, then whispered, “I did solve it, didn't I?”

“You didn't,” whispered Becca. “But maybe you have something. Maybe it's not every fifteenth word, but it could be the fifth, then the tenth, and then the fifteenth, like that. Or maybe every fifth word, just repeating five, five, five all the way.”

“If that turns out to be right, I still solved it,” said Lily.

Becca underlined every fifth word in the passage as written in her notebook.

Every fifth word yielded something quite different than a story of books and bowls and maps. The text appeared to break into two distinct sentences.

“Whoa!” Lily said. “Bec, this could break the hunt wide open.”

On the surface, the next passage appeared to be about a set of horseshoes for Hans Novak's new horse.
Put together, the underlined fifth words told a very different story.

“Becca, we are getting so close!” Lily whispered. “Who's this old workshop guy? Hurry up, decode the next passage!”

“That's just it,” Becca said. “The next several pages are scribbled over with some kind of silver stuff—ink or paint or something. There are no words at all, just lines going in every direction. Except that the pages are worn and smudged, as if someone read them over and over, but you can't see any words.”

Lily leaned over the diary. The page shimmered under the nightstand lamp. “Whoa. I feel a little dizzy just looking at it.”

“I know. Me too.”

“So maybe there are words written in invisible ink—”

There was a sudden screeching of tires in the parking lot below.

Then the sound of several doors squealing open at the same time and the thump of quick footsteps across the lot.

“Lily!” Becca whispered. “It's Code Red! I can't believe it—it's Code Red!”