The Golden Vendetta (18 page)

A
s the sun bore down over the narrow alleys, Becca pressed herself into the lessening shadows with lessening success. While she might have been able to proceed in London or even Rome, this was a completely different culture. She was so obviously a pale American teenager, lost in the strange marketplace of Casablanca, which she both couldn't and didn't want to get out of.

My friends are here. They're looking for me. I know they are.

Unless they weren't. Maybe she was the only one who was still free. Maybe the others, the people she loved most in the world . . . That was a dark thought
she'd better push off to the side.

Breathe, Becca, breathe.

Long. Calm. Breaths.

She did. It helped. She remembered Galina breathing her pain away. But that was a thought for later. She looked around. The smells, the sounds, the heat, the aridity of the air drying up her nose, sent a sharp pain into her forehead.

She reached up and tested her nose for blood. No. Not that. Not like London.

She took a breath, ready to start off again, when a strange grinding sound came from the interior of her bag. Like metal on metal. And clicking, as if something were striking the teeth of a moving gear.

What in the world?

She slipped behind a row of already-crowded market stalls and found herself in a small shaded alley. She opened her bag and looked inside.

As Becca watched, she felt her breath leave her body. A spark, a speck of silvery light, flew from the diary to the box with the
ocularia
inside, where it sizzled and was returned. Back and forth, forth and back, a miniature bridge of sparkling light formed between the two objects in her bag. It wasn't magic. No. It was electrical. A charge existed between the
two objects. Between the silver of one and the silver ink of the other.

“They're connected. They
are,”
she whispered. And there, in the quiet of a narrow alley in Morocco, she discovered what she had been hoping to find.

A way to read the diary's silver pages.

Her fingers trembled as she removed the glasses from the box, unfolded them, and gently slipped them on her face. She hooked the curved arms over the tops of her ears one at a time so as not to put strain on them. The last thing she wanted to do was bend the framework of the old device.

I must look silly. Like a character in a comic book.

Blinking through the three-sided, mirror lenses, she discovered that by shifting one or another of them by almost infinitesimal degrees with a dial on each side, you could obtain any number of different combinations. Wade could have told her how many exactly, but with six actual lenses it must be quite a lot.

She turned the diary pages until she found the silvery ones. Even with the glasses, they were illegible.

You have to set the lenses to the right combination to read the silver ink.

She took off the glasses and studied the gears on each side of the frames. They were numbered, so you needed
to know the numbers to set them at—three number settings from one to ten on each side. But how did you know how to set them?

The only three-number sequence she had found so far was the five-five-five of the tiny triangle on the Leonardo page. Would it work?

The dials were so small, like watch winders, and so difficult to read that she was forced to do what Lily laughed at, put on two pairs of reading glasses. Squinting through the double glasses, she turned the tiny dials with her fingertips. Five, five, five on one side, five, five, five on the other.

She put the
ocularia
back on and looked at the first silvery page.

Her blood pumped in her ears as letters seemed to float out, finally visible against the tangled mesh of crisscrossing lines. It was handwriting, but the handwriting was not Copernicus's, nor Hans Novak's, both of whose styles she knew. The letters were inked back to front, and they were in Italian.

Everyone knows Leonardo wrote backward! He must have written in Copernicus's diary!

Translating the words as she went along, Becca read the first passage.

Her breath caught in her throat. “Oh . . . Lily! The woman in Florida! ‘Generation after generation'? She was one of those Mothers! Five hundred years later, they're still around?”

That was all that Leonardo had written on the silver page that used the five-five-five combination of lenses. In Nicolaus's hand, however, were three minute scratches:

These numbers were different. They were the shaking writing of a very old man. “He wrote these later. Much later,” she said to herself. “When exactly?”

She then wondered if the numbers were not only the next combination of the
ocularia,
but also a date.

“One, forty-three. January 1543? He died in May of that year. Could this be when he and Heyreddin hid the keys? He was practically on his deathbed!”

She quickly reset the lenses to the new combination
and put the glasses back on. The frames bit into her face, burned her cheekbones like hot wire. But there it was. A second level of the code suddenly became visible.

Only this time it wasn't writing. It was a drawing.

Before she removed the
ocularia
and put them back into their box, she copied the drawing into her notebook as closely as she could. Her heart was fluttering so quickly, she thought she might faint.

Copernicus, da Vinci, and Barbarossa together did this amazing thing. And she was practically there with them, reading their words, their images, their codes. If
what had happened in London had changed her in any way, it was this: to know that the past is right here with us, inside us, all around us, everything we are.

Practically laughing, she spoke aloud to the empty street.

“I found the first part of the story. We have the directions to the first key. We're on our way!”

Setting the diary and the glasses back into her bag, she looked both ways and tried to take stock of where she was. Casablanca and the noise of a hot morning. Okay, then—
soon
they would be on their way. For now, she was still very much alone.

Sara Kaplan had no idea where in the medina she was, but she'd never been so terrified in her life. Not even in the coffin. Of course she was scared, and the reason was easy to see. She wasn't an operative, a secret agent, a soldier, or a spy. She'd just been trying to act like one. Yet somehow she'd become the head of a spy unit . . . of children. She was a mother, a stepmother, an archivist, and a wife. But did those things keep her from losing her children?

No.

She ran from street to street, using all the French she knew, but no one confessed to seeing any Western
children wandering or running. She hoped Becca was still free, still in possession of the priceless diary—and the stolen
ocularia
—and that Silva was keeping her safe. The others, the others had been swallowed up by a black car. She knew she had to keep herself from being snatched or there would be no hope at all, so when there'd been a chance, she'd slid away. Now it seemed like the stupidest and most careless thing to have done. Not being with her family, even if they were in danger, drove her crazy.

Like a mother should always be, when thinking about her children.

And then, among all the faces in a sea of faces, she spied one she knew. Silva. Alone. Limping, cradling his arm, coming for her, and calling out, “I know where they are!”

The city was coming more and more alive around Becca. The tinkle of tiny bells and a fragrant aroma of cooking floated down from the open windows she passed. There was the odor of exhaust, too, but that was as beautiful in its way as the sunlight and the music weaving through the air.

It was serene, almost peaceful. She moved along the streets, carefully tracing and retracing the same ways,
hoping to find her friends. She had discovered a huge clue to the location of the relic. The
ocularia
and the diary
did
work together. It was monumental! It took her breath so suddenly that she had to pause. She leaned against a wall on the shaded side of the alley, and felt the blocks cool her burning shoulder blades.

“Une matinée chaude, non?”

Becca looked up. A girl, maybe fourteen, peered down at her from an upper window, a lazy smile on her face. As differently as she was dressed and as strange as their seeing each other was, they both smiled at the same time.

A hot morning? “Oui, très chaude,”
Becca replied.
“Bonjour.”

“Vous êtes perdues?”

Am I lost?
Becca wondered. “Yes.
Oui. Un peu. Pourriez-vous me dire comment se rendre à l'Hôpital d'Enfants?
”

The girl's face turned serious.
“Vous n'êtes pas blessées, êtes-vous?

Am I hurt? “Non, non. Mes amis sont là.” My friends are there. I hope.

She smiled from the balcony.
“Ah, oui. Je peux vous amener. Il n'est pas loin. Avez-vous faim? J'apporterai quelque chose.”

“Hungry? Yes.
Oui, oui, merci!
”

The girl vanished inside the room and was out the door on the street in minutes with a small glass of tea and a hot roll wrapped in a cloth napkin, which she gave to Becca.
“Je m'appelle Reyah.”
She turned toward the end of the alley.
“Par ici. Allons-y!”