Century #4: Dragon of Seas (27 page)

“Six thousand years ago, the North Star didn’t point north,” Sheng says. “Six thousand years ago, north was marked by a star in the constellation Draco.…”

“To find the North Star, you need to triple the short side of the Dipper … in this direction. One … two …” Harvey begins to take long strides over the rocks.

When he sees them walking away, Heremit Devil turns and motions to Nik Knife.

“Eleven … and twelve!” Harvey exclaims, stopping between the island’s slick black stones.

“See anything?”

The boy looks around. Rocks, rocks, rocks. And a pool of brackish water. He sinks his hands into the icy water and finds that the stone below has a different texture.

“Come help me!” he shouts to the others.

Nik Knife starts running.

The four kids kneel down and scoop out the water with their hands as fast as they can, revealing a stone circle that looks like the base of a statue. It’s a meter in diameter and thirty centimeters tall. The outer circumference of the base is protected by a copper ring. Harvey digs his foot into the rock and pries it up. Below it, carved all around the base are seven round holes.

“It looks like a submarine hatch,” Elettra murmurs.

“A door?” Harvey wonders.

Sheng sits down on the wet rock. “Okay, but how do we open it?” He points at the seven holes around it. He smiles faintly, turns to Nik Knife, who’s a few paces away from them, and waves him over.

“What do you want from him?” Elettra whispers.

“I need the tops,” Sheng replies.

Heremit Devil joins them, too, and Nik Knife shows him the strange round base. When the man nods, the knife thrower takes the tops out of the backpack one by one. When the tops are inserted into the round holes, they slide into place and their metal tips interlock with an ancient mechanism. Heremit personally inserts his own top, the one with the skull on it.

Then Harvey tries pushing on the base, but nothing happens. He asks for help from the others. Even from Nik Knife.

“C’mon!”

“It’s moving!”

With a groan, the stone base slides aside, revealing a complex notched mechanism that kept it clasped to the surrounding rock with an airtight seal.

It really is a rudimentary hatch.

And now there’s a stairway leading down into the darkness.

The knife thrower looks at his watch and then at the helicopter, which is little more than a speck on the horizon. “Ten minutes!” he exclaims, worried.

“C
ECILE
?” F
ERNANDO
M
ELODIA ASKS FALTERINGLY INTO THE GOLD
phone at the Grand Hyatt.

“Fernando?” Mistral’s mother asks, surprised.

She spent a sleepless night hoping to hear from her daughter. She was expecting something more reassuring than the simple text she received after their escape from the hotel.

Meanwhile, Cecile followed the instructions from the man with the baseball cap, that Jacob Mahler she first met in Paris. She couldn’t sleep, aware that what was going on was no longer a simple treasure hunt.

Someone was sitting in the hotel lobby, spying on her.

“You need to go down to the lobby,” Jacob Mahler ordered her. “Make sure you’re dressed up and that people notice you, but don’t look at anybody. Order room service. For three people. Raise your voice so others can hear you. Speak in French.”

Cecile had to convince the man keeping tabs on her that she intended to spend the whole night in the room. Then she switched on the television in Elettra’s room, turning up the volume so it could be heard from the hallway.

Cecile waited a whole night without sleeping. She kept up the ruse the next day: breakfast for three from room service. Lunch. She went down to the reception desk to order it, and when she was heading back upstairs, she tried to peek through the elevator doors to observe the other guests sitting in the lobby, reading the paper. She hoped to discover which of them might be the mysterious spy they had to avoid.

These are the thoughts whirling through Cecile’s mind the moment she recognizes Fernando’s voice.

“Are you all right, Cecile?” Elettra’s father asks her.

“Yes, of course. Where are you?”

“Below you.”

A wave of relief sweeps over the young perfume designer’s face.

“I’m in the lobby,” the man specifies.

Fernando is there, in Shanghai, just a few floors away. “What are you doing in the lobby?”

“I came to help you. How are things going? The kids?”

“Come upstairs. Room four-oh-five.”

Minutes later, to their own surprise, Cecile Blanchard and Fernando Melodia are in each other’s arms. Fernando tells her he made the mistake of taking the world’s fastest train, spending almost two hours to reach the Grand Hyatt. He hasn’t made a reservation and there aren’t any rooms available. But he’s planning on sleeping in Elettra’s room next door.

“We’ve had problems,” Cecile finally says. She tells him about the man called Jacob Mahler and his escape with the girls.

“A guy about this tall … with gray hair?” Fernando asks, still holding Cecile in his arms, with less and less embarrassment.

“You know him?”

“I fought him,” he replies with understandable exaggeration.

His words have an instant effect: Cecile feels she has a real man beside her and buries her face even deeper into Fernando’s sweater.

“I haven’t held anyone like this,” he suddenly says, “since Elettra’s mother passed away.”

These words also have an instant effect: Cecile pulls away from him and comes up with a series of nonexistent problems and unnecessary justifications. “Oh, Fernando, I’m sorry, it’s just that I—I didn’t mean to, but—but I don’t really know what—”

Then she opens her eyes wide, surprised.

Fernando Melodia is kissing her.

Then they tell each other everything they have to tell, from the discovery of the golden patterns in the Veil of Isis to Aunt Irene’s role in the whole situation. Behind the river, the sun sets, if it ever came out, and the rain dies down.

The two parents check their cell phones. No calls. No messages.

“Maybe we should go out,” Fernando suggests.

She’s at a loss. “What if the kids call?”

“Then they call. They’re called mobile phones because they’re mobile.”

“Mahler said we were being watched, and that we might be followed.”

Fernando takes Cecile’s hands in his own and squeezes them gently. “Let’s let them follow us, then.”

* * *

After changing their minds a hundred times, Fernando and Cecile decide to leave on foot.

They step out onto the damp sidewalk the moment the streetlights and signs begin to light up. They walk along the river and past shops, turn down a side street and walk back up the blocks among the skyscrapers, their necks craned skyward. They watch as helicopters scan the streets with their big, white searchlights. They see police cars pass by, lights flashing and sirens blaring. Their hearts in their mouths and knots in their stomachs, they follow them.

They enter Century Park at seven forty-five, a quarter of an hour before the gates will be closed for the night.

On the other end of the park, helicopters are circling around a black glass and steel skyscraper and another nearby building, whose top floor is engulfed in smoke.

“A fire. Or a gas leak,” Fernando guesses. He doesn’t realize it, but he’s staring at Jacob Mahler’s former home.

He has no way of knowing that someone from Heremit Devil’s security team opened a door that was better left shut.

The two stand there for a long time, staring at the lights and listening to the helicopters.

“What did you say?” Cecile asks him.

“I didn’t say anything.”

She looks around and asks, “Down where?”

“Down where what?”

“Didn’t you say ‘Down here’?”

“No, I didn’t say anything.…”

Then Fernando also hears someone shouting. It’s a distant
voice, but it sounds so close. And it’s asking for help. In Italian, of all things.

“Help! Can anybody hear me? Help! I’m down here! Down here!” the stranger shouts with a desperate tone.

Following the faint voice, Fernando and Cecile walk over to a playground bordered by a ring of manholes. The voice is coming from below them.

Fernando kneels down and presses his face up against the metal grate, but he can’t see anything.

Then the voice from below the manhole shouts, “Fernando!”

“Ermete?” Elettra’s father asks, stunned. “Is that you?”

“Come down here! We’re about to drown!” shouts the engineer.

Mademoiselle Cybel has managed to remove the gag from his mouth.

T
HE FIRST ONE TO GO DOWN THE STAIRS IS
H
ARVEY
. T
HERE ARE
only twelve steps, which lead into a large, sloping, low-ceilinged chamber carved into the rock.

“It’s dry,” he says.

“What do you see?”

The only source of light is the narrow opening he just came down through.

“Nothing,” he replies.

“Move,” Heremit Devil says from behind them. He goes down the stairs and stands beside Harvey. He switches on a flashlight and shines it around. Sheng, Mistral and Elettra follow him, escorted by Nik Knife.

“So this is it?” the man mutters. “This is the secret?”

The dim light illuminates walls covered with writings, carved stone panels, a metal tripod that looks like a torch holder and other stone slabs lying on the ground.

“Who knows what this room is for?”

Nik Knife checks his watch. Nine minutes until the helicopter returns.

Elettra feels her fingers sizzling with energy, despite the insulating outfit she’s still wearing. She spreads open her hands. “Light,” she says.

And twelve metal torches are instantly ablaze.

When the room lights up, Heremit Devil staggers, frightened.

“How did you do that?” he shrieks.

Then he looks around, astonished. The chamber now looks much larger than it seemed. It’s almost three meters high and the sloping floor leads into a long, spiral passageway that winds down into the rock. On the walls are torches and large vases with stylized trees painted on them. Inside the vases are handfuls of seeds that look just like the ones they found in the underground realms of New York. Slabs of carved stone are on the ground, leaned up against the bare walls. But farther down the passageway, the walls are covered with inscriptions and engravings. Plaques in different materials covered with writings, the most recent ones in Western characters and in a totally unexpected language.

“Spanish?” Heremit Devil asks aloud, walking over to the most recent panel to read it.

JUAN CABOTO, PER ENCÀRREC DE LA CORONA ANGLESA, DESEMBARCA A TERRANOVA (1499)

The panel beside it is in Chinese. On it is the account of Zheng He’s fleet leaving the ports of China to explore the world many years before Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America.

Peering around and glancing at the writings, the little group makes its way down the spiral passage, Heremit Devil at a restrained pace, the kids almost running. The farther down they go, the more ancient the plaques are. And the languages keep
changing, moving from Chinese to Arabic, from Hebrew to Russian.

Farther down.

Latin. Greek.

Even farther down.

Hieroglyphs. Cuneiform alphabet.

It’s like going back in time through the history of the world’s languages. Heremit Devil looks around, astonished.

At the umpteenth turn, the passageway comes to an end at a wall covered with an intricate mosaic. In the center of the mosaic is the sun. And the eleven rings around it are the uniform orbits of the planets in the solar system. A twelfth planet’s ring is completely out of phase compared to the others: a long ellipsis tapered on its far ends.

Resting on a small altar on the floor in front of the wall is a crudely carved stone.

While the others are looking around, trying to make sense of their surroundings, Sheng is looking around as if the chamber was filled with people. And for him, it really is: standing before the stone slabs are people of all different nationalities and from all different eras. Navigators, mandarins, knights, court officials, priests, legionaries, scribes, desert nomads, tribal shamans. Passing before his golden eyes are guns, lances, chariots, coats of arms, warhorses. Passing by are ideas and dreams from different times and different countries, which have remained there, filling the chamber with images for those who are able to see them.