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Authors: Tony Abbott

The Golden Vendetta (23 page)

BOOK: The Golden Vendetta
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C
HAPTER
F
ORTY
-T
HREE

N
ight had fallen heavy, fast, and hard.

Lily powered down the street ahead of Sara and Becca, with Darrell and Wade right behind. She hated being breathless, shaken, afraid because of Galina and her assassins. The crazy woman would find them wherever they went. As soon as Lily and the others woke up in the morning, Galina's knife was already at their throats.

Sara waved down a taxi, and they threw themselves in. “Airport! Please. Fast!”

“Oui, oui!”
the driver said, jamming the engine into gear and flying off into the traffic of a wide boulevard.

“Those creeps are minutes behind us. We need a
map of the Mediterranean,” Becca said, almost choking on her breath. “Double-check if we're really going to Istanbul.”

“And I know the phones are compromised, but I need one for a second,” Wade grumbled. “I have to determine an azimuth. Once I find north, or zero degrees, we'll know where the angle of seventy-nine degrees actually points to.”

Lily brought up a map on her tablet, but Sara shook her head. “No. A map of the Ottoman Empire is what we need. The world in 1543, the year of Nicolaus and Heyreddin's journey to hide the keys.”

Lily shook off a shiver and tapped her fingers ferociously on the tablet's screen. “The closest I can do is 1580. Wade, here.”

“Thanks,” he said.

On the screen was the familiar Mediterranean region, outlining the usual countries, but highlighting the extent of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe at the height of the empire's dominance.

Using the compass direction in the map's legend, and from a starting point of Tunis, Wade traced the azimuth of seventy-nine degrees from true north. “It could be in Greece,” he said, “but the city it points to directly
is what Karim said: Istanbul, Turkey.”

“They were hiding the keys in Ottoman locations,” said Becca.

“And right where I pointed Bigboy and Fish,” he groaned. “Because of the stupid, stupid, stupid photo I took and practically
gave to them,
they'll discover the location of the second key and tell Galina, and they'll all get there before us, and snatch it up, and we'll be left with nothing!”

Darrell held the key tightly in his hands, trying to close his ears against the rush of noise and danger and open them to what Wade was saying, but something else was going on. The key was going on. It was going on his fingers.

“My fingers are turning silver. What is this stuff? Paint? Ink? Whatever it is, it's coming off on my hands. There's a triangle on the back of this key. Becca—”

“Becca, the glasses, hurry,” whispered Sara, with an eye on the driver to make sure he wasn't looking. “Maybe there's something to read.”

“Before Darrell smudges it to oblivion,” said Lily, taking a picture of the back of the key and enlarging it. The numbers inside the triangle were three, six, and four.

Becca adjusted the
ocularia
and, holding her head
down, slipped them on. She blew the crumbs of silver ink away.

“More Arabic. How are we . . .” She quickly traced the characters as accurately as she could in her notebook and leaned over the backseat to the driver. “Excuse me, sir? Can you read this?” She held the notebook out to him.

The driver slowed the cab, glanced at it. “Is two words,” he said. “It says ‘from qibla.' You know what is qibla?”

“We do!” said Sara. “Kids, do you know what this means?”

“Not exactly,” said Becca.

“That it's not seventy-nine degrees from true north,” she said. “It's seventy-nine degrees
from
a hundred and twelve degrees. It's not Istanbul at all. Wade—”

“That's . . . thirty-three degrees from north,” he said. Using the phone's compass again to estimate the direction on the map on Lily's tablet, he traced his finger along a much narrower angle, northeast from Tunis, across the Mediterranean.

“It's not Italy,” said Becca. “The Ottoman Empire didn't extend to Italy.”

A line drawn at exactly thirty-three degrees clockwise from north of al-Zaytuna mosque in Tunis pointed
directly to one great European city.

“Budapest?” said Lily. “The Ottomans really went all the way up to Hungary? Is there anything left there from the Ottoman days?”

“Hey,” said Darrell. “Instead of Turkey, it's Hungary? Am I the only one thinking of food right now?”

“Voici l'aéroport!”
barked the driver, pulling up to the departure terminal.

After paying and dragging everyone out, Sara took over the tablet from Wade and scoured the internet even as the rest of them cased the outside of the terminal, then they quickly entered the building.

“Some things are still around from the sixteenth century,” she said, one eye on the crush of people inside. “And that's where we'll have to start looking. Becca, can you read the next silver passage in the diary? You have the numbers.”

“As soon as my head stops spinning,” Becca said. “But Wade, you know, it turned out all right anyway. You only took a picture of the front of the key. Bigboy and Fish—and Galina—will think the second key is in Istanbul. We're pulling away. We'll find the relic!”

Wade grumbled under his breath as they headed to the ticket counter. “Thanks, but it was still a dumb move. And Galina's smart. She'll figure it out. She
always does. She's only a half step behind us.”

The next available flight to Budapest was on Air France the following morning. So they stayed under false names at one of the airport hotels. After a two-hour stopover in Paris, their jet would arrive at Budapest Ferenc Liszt International Airport by late afternoon of the next day, Saturday, June seventh.

Budapest.

Where they hoped to find the second Barbarossa key.

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY
-F
OUR

E
bner found Galina standing alone, head bowed, under a partially crumbled archway on the fringes of ancient Carthage. Harsh spotlights on the ruins of the old Punic, Roman, Vandal, and Arabic city put her in shadow. So ghostly. So thin.

“Galina? Miss Krause?”

Five minutes before, she had ordered the driver to stop the car on the way to the airport and had frantically bolted out. Now he understood why. As he drew nearer, he smelled the odor of sickness. She lifted her head slowly, cupped a hand to her mouth, then threw her head back. And that was a motion he knew all too well. Pills. Medication. No, her last treatment had been
far from successful. His mind wandered briefly to Olsztyn, when she had fainted into his arms.

“Speak,” she said softly.

“Alas, we believe the Kaplans have already left Tunis by air. Our people are scouring the airline ticket databases as we speak and will soon know where they are flying to. In the meantime, our agents have arrived.” He glanced back. The insanely odd pair was waiting by their car. “They have something for you.”

She turned, steadied herself on her feet, and looked out on the night, the pale spotlights, the dead culture. She held up her hand.

“Ebner, it took me far too long to understand what the serpent was trying to tell me.” She pulled strands of her long dark hair one by one from her face. “Serpens was not pointing me toward the relic. The
relic
is not in several different places. The
clues
to the relic are. I predict we shall travel three or four times before we find the relic's true location.”

“Precisely,” he said. “This is why our agents are anxious to see you.”

Ebner turned his face and prepared himself to view once more the overweight baby of a man who was on their payroll and who slid uncannily over the ancient stones like a dancer. Following the baby was a man of
two dimensions, next to whom Ebner felt overweight.

The fat one—
yes, let us say it outright
—slid his massive paw into a pocket of his grimy suit coat and withdrew a battered cell phone.

“It belongs to one of the Kepelen boys, Wade,” he said, then added with a smirk, “We wrestled it from Ali Baba's grandson.”

Galina swung around and slapped him across the face. “You're a racist and a fool, you fat man! You should have followed the Kaplan family.”

“It has a photo of a key!” said the other man, Emil.

Galina snatched the phone from the fat agent and studied the image. “A key? A key. So.
This
is what the Kaplans have been searching for. Ebner, you remember the places Serpens took us toward? Eastern Europe. Syria. Perhaps a second key and a third key await us there.”

“I know a word or two of the local gargle,” Emil said, mouthing what appeared to be a needle between his lips. “That word on the key is ‘azimuth.' It's an angle or something—”

“Galina Krause knows what an azimuth is!” Ebner said, leaning over her to examine the image on the phone. “Ah. Definitely of Leonardo's making, but the clues are by Copernicus and the pirate on their later
journey. So, seventy-nine degrees. From Tunis that would be . . .” He opened his own phone and tapped the number into an app. A moment later, he turned his phone to her. “Istanbul?”

Galina frowned. “Perhaps. Perhaps there exists another clue to tell us exactly where. Fat man, get out of my sight. Go to Istanbul with your shadow and wait for instructions.”

As the two mismatched men left together, the fish-faced Emil tossed his needle onto the ancient stones. Ebner cringed. It was soiled with bits of food and blood.

“Ebner,” she said softly, “this phone is not as protected as their usual phones are. Establish a connection between it and the Copernicus Room. Have them trace all the Kaplan numbers. If even one of them can be cracked, our servers will triangulate their location.”

For seven minutes, neither of them spoke. Galina moved among the fallen stones. Slowly. Unsteadily. Ebner wondered how ill she was. Had her latest doctor given her an all-too-hopeless report? Was that why she'd killed him?

Ebner received a text from the Copernicus Room. “They have purchased tickets connecting to Budapest.”

She nodded. “So, there was an another clue relating to the key's numbers. Let the agents proceed to Turkey.
We may need them there.”

“As you say,” said Ebner, “but the servers also report that Dr. Roald Kaplan is not in Geneva. The family plays this game well. He is heading here.”

He showed her his phone.

           
42.454°N

           
13.576°E

           
Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso

           
L'Aquila, Abruzzo, Italy

Galina glared at the screen. “Petrescu moved the meeting from Geneva. Even better. Alert the colonel. Tell him to deliver Aurora
there
as quickly as possible, and alert us when he is within fifty kilometers of the laboratory. In the meantime, we fly to Budapest.”

Just before dawn the next morning some two thousand kilometers northeast of Tunis, Ugo Drangheta and his partner, Mistral, both wounded in Galina's bitter attack on his compound, slowly approached the walls of Olsztyn Castle, where his sister had perished.

Mistral nursed a broken hand and a deep gash across her forehead. He had a bullet wound in his shoulder, a fractured shinbone, a battered kneecap. Ignoring their
pain and the drenching downpour, they made their way across the lawns to the cordoned-off construction area beneath the castle's northeast wall.

Ugo stared at the hole in the ground and began to weep. “Uliana . . .”

Mistral put her arms around him. “Yes, Uliana, always Uliana, but why this interest in Roald Kaplan?”

He took in a long breath. “At first, I wanted only to kill Galina Krause. But you yourself introduced the notion of the astrolabe. The time-travel machine. The Kaplan father is an astrophysicist. He knows what the woman is doing and if the machine is real. We will join him, aid him. I will be his ally.”

She removed her arms. “What if all he sees in you is another enemy?”

Ugo stood at the edge of the pit, staring into the darkness. “I will make him believe. For Uliana's sake.”

There was the sound of footsteps in the soggy grass.

“Her husband has come,” she whispered, as a man of about thirty years old approached out of the rain. She slid a knife from her belt.

Ugo raised his hand. “Not yet.”

The man stopped. He had obviously shed tears recently; his face was hard, angry, resolute. “I am Vilmos Biszku,”
he said, his voice steady. “Uliana was my wife for two years. I cannot live without her. You are Ugo Drangheta?”

Ugo nodded. “If you loved my sister, tell me what you know about the Teutonic Order and Galina Krause.”

The man quivered, shook it off. “Just before Uliana died, she told me that Galina Krause was searching for pieces of some old machine. Uliana didn't know where the pieces were supposed to be, but she heard places named. Kraków. Prague. Salzburg. I loved Uliana more than the world. Tell me what you want of me. I cannot rest until Galina Krause is dead.”

Ugo breathed slowly to calm his heartbeat. “Mistral, the knife.”

With it, Ugo cut a mark into the young man's forearm.

Wincing, shivering, the young man said, “Command me, Sir Ugo.”

In his mind, Ugo grew to massive size. “First report to my office in Warsaw. They will equip you. Then go to Prague. Discover what you can about the machine. Report all to me.”

Vilmos Biszku turned and walked away, blood from his arm staining the rain-drenched lawns.

“And for us?” Mistral asked.

“Kraków.”

BOOK: The Golden Vendetta
6.22Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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