The Golden Vendetta (24 page)

Budapest, Hungary

June 7

6:17 p.m.

A
fter a delay on the tarmac in Paris it was early in the evening of a foggy day when they finally reached Budapest, a city divided by the wandering Danube River. Wade knew there were songs about the Danube but couldn't remember any of them.

He had done something monumentally dumb in losing his phone. It didn't matter that the loss might actually have thrown off Galina and her goons. It was amateur. He tried to make up for it by suggesting they put the key in an airport locker to keep it secure while
they searched for the next one.

“We'll be back at the airport anyway to search for the third key,” he reasoned.

“I agree,” said Lily surprisingly. “I feel someone's watching us. He—and I'm assuming it's a man, because they're the ones who make a mess of everything in the world—saw us get off the plane, exit the arrival gate, and go through passport control. I felt his beady little eyes on us every moment. But of course each time I looked around, all I saw were passengers, regular people, no obvious Teutonic agents, so he must be there.”

“Hard not to agree with that,” said Darrell.

Of course it wasn't, thought Wade. What she'd said was pure Darrell. “I agree, too,” he added, “but I don't know about the ‘man' idea. There's Galina.”

“And she's not a man,” Darrell actually said aloud.

Lily flashed him a look. “Maybe. But she's a totally different story.”

“Oh, yeah, she is,” Darrell said, digging himself in deeper, although Lily didn't take the bait.

The air outside the airport was unseasonably cool, the sky was heavily overcast, and it felt like rain was on the way.

“We have to assume that they'll find us,” said Sara as they entered a taxi. “So it is a good idea that we're
keeping the key locked up. Becca, have you found anything?”

On the flight, Becca had been careful not to let anyone see her using the strange-looking
ocularia.
The new silver number code they'd found on the back of the key proved to be the same one that unlocked the next portion of the diary. This was not a passage of the 1519 story, but a series of shaky lines written alternatively by the two very old men, Copernicus first. She read from the translation she had written in her notebook.

Darrell frowned. “Is this a turban joke? Because if we're doing Ottoman turban jokes now, I think we're pretty sunk.”

“There's nothing else?” asked Lily.

“No,” Becca told them. “I can't read the next passage. It must rely on another combination of lenses. There's nothing now but these six lines.”

Sara shook her head. “Turbans and tombs. There's a lot to work with. Maybe too much. But let's get started.”

Lily gazed out the cab window. She had slept, but not well. All night she'd twisted in her cheap airport hotel bed, dreaming of arguing with her parents, who were sometimes walking toward her as she argued, sometimes away. Maybe that was because she'd disabled incoming calls and hadn't heard a word since Tunis's “good news.” Now she was in a cab. Another cab. It was early evening; everything was gray: the cars, the buildings, the people, the sky. It always seemed to be nearing the end of the day that, even so, would go on for another few hours. Lily felt she hardly knew
where
or
when
she was anymore. She guessed the fraying of her home life—
fraying? It's exploding
—was hitting her hard, making her mad at everyone. She glanced at her black phone screen. Would hearing the news help or hurt?

She thought of the hot desert winds, the rising and falling dunes. In gray Budapest, the desert seemed no more than a dream.

She wanted . . . what did she want?

She wanted to be alone. To think her own thoughts by herself.

Looking out at the streets the cab was whizzing by, she wondered what it would be like to walk down one of them by herself. To hear nothing but the clicking of her heels on the sidewalk, not all the noise. Hadn't both Wade and Sara used her tablet at critical moments and found the clues they were looking for? She was totally replaceable. Lily searched her heart for a magnet that might keep her on course and didn't find one. She'd miss them, if she wasn't here, of course. Becca the most. Darrell, too. Wade, too.

She'd miss them, being alone, away from the noise.

Lily is brooding more and more,
thought Darrell.

I know why, of course. But she always pops out of it. She's Lily. So she will, this time, too. She's just too perky not to.

He knew
perky
was a dumb word, and he quickly brushed it from his mind and looked out the window. The gray streets were darkening, night rolling in; the city was now starting to sparkle with lights. It was hard for him to imagine this obviously European capital of churches and bridges and castles and little old peaked houses being ruled by a Turkish emperor.

It didn't fit in the neat little box of what he knew of world history. Turkey was in the Middle East. Hungary was deep in Europe. And yet Ottomans had lived in
Hungary. Had they worn their robes and scarves when they were here? Or was that a stereotype, taken from bad Hollywood movies? Maybe.

Of course it was true, as Becca had told them, that the Romans founded everything, not just Nice, and Romans wore togas, but maybe not in the colder parts of Europe? He was going way beyond his comfort zone in thinking of all this. One thing he did know: the Romans had founded just about every city east of New York.

Wade was mumbling something.

“We have to look at the riddle,” he said, “both from now
and
from five hundred years ago. The first key tells us that Copernicus and Barb Two hid the second key here. That was 1543. If the place they hid it
doesn't
exist anymore, then we're back at square zero, as Lily says. But if it
does
exist, then what?”

“Then there's a place four hundred and sixty years old that is still around,” said Sara.

“Exactly,” said Wade. “And if you're the Guardian of that key, you make sure that it's protected there. That's Guardian 101. Now, because of Barb Two,
and
to honor Barb One, let's assume it's some special Ottoman site. So, one thing is, how many Ottoman places are still around in Budapest? That's one thing to find out.
But there's something else. It's sort of logical and sort of not.”

“Like you sometimes,” said Becca.

He grinned. “True. But I can't work it all out by myself.”

“Keep going,” Sara said.

“Okay. When the riddle says, ‘Baba is dead. And Baba is dead now, too,' it sounds like they're talking about two different people, both named Baba. And while one Baba sleeps in a tomb, the other sleeps in a turban.”

“Where's the logical part?” asked Darrell.

“The logical part is this,” Wade said, taking a breath.
“Both
Babas are dead, so they're
both
in tombs, but one of the tombs is, I don't know, a turban, or
like
a turban. You know, maybe it has a domelike shape.”

It wasn't all that much, but it might be enough for Lily, if they could drag her out of the hole she was falling in. “Lil,” Darrell said. “Lily?”

She turned to him, her forehead creased, her eyes moving across his face.

“I know. Me. I'll look it up.” She swiped her tablet on.

The cabdriver drove slowly into the heart of the city, around and around the old streets, because they had told him to keep doing it until they knew where to stop.
The cabbie told them in French—he didn't know English or German—that he didn't care as long as they paid.

“Nous allons vous payer,”
Becca said, and that settled it.

Darrell saw towering spires everywhere and old stone churches and ancient neighborhoods and so many stone bridges as the cab drove from street to street that the general feel of Budapest for him was of a dark old medieval city, like something out of a fairy tale.

Lily looked up from her screen. “I searched on Baba and Budapest and found a guy named Baba who wasn't Baba Aruj. He was named Gül Baba. He was an Ottoman from Turkey, but he's buried on a hill here. By the way, apparently
türbe
in Turkish means ‘tomb' . . .”

“Then that's it. Holy cow, Lily,” said Darrell. “Good work.”

“Sara, could you take over again?” Lily said, turning to the window.

“Sure.” Sara gently slipped the tablet away from Lily and read from it.

“Gül Baba was a Turkish poet,” she read.

“Black fingers,” said Wade. “From all that ink he used for writing.”

“He died here in 1541, during the Ottoman reign,” she continued, “and his tomb was built two years later in 1543—the year of Copernicus and Heyreddin's
journey, the year Nicolaus died. Actually, the tomb still belongs to Turkey. It's on a hill overlooking the river, called Rose Hill.”

“Good work, Lily. You found him,” Darrell said again. He smiled, but she sat expressionless, looking out the cab window. Was she crying again?

“Pourriez-vous nous emmener à Rose Hill, s'il vous plaît?”
Sara asked the driver, speaking French, which Darrell remembered his mother knew pretty well.
“Le tombeau de Gül Baba?”

“Non,”
he said.
“Non!”

“Excuse me, why not?” Sara asked.

When Darrell saw the driver's face in the rearview, the man's eyes were riveted on the traffic behind them. He swung around. “Someone's following us,” Darrell said, spotting two blue cars, one close, one farther back.

“Oui,
following!” the driver said.

“Essayez de les perdre, s'il vous plaît,”
said Becca.
“Et rapidement!
”

“Ah, certainement!”
The driver punched his foot on the accelerator, and Darrell watched the two blue cars speed up, too.

G
alina Krause's private jet touched down minutes after the Kaplans arrived in Budapest. Her agents on the scene were instructed to follow, but not to intervene, not yet.

“They are in Buda, near the river,” said an agent named Istvan who met her at the airport. “We can be there in ten minutes. Operatives are already on the scene.”

“Make it five minutes, and tell the others to wait for me.”

“Yes, Miss Krause.”

Her phone rang. It was Ebner. “Yes?”

“There is something new,” Ebner said. “Ugo
Drangheta and Mistral the thief were sighted driving south across Poland. They were at Olsztyn Castle. Galina, he learned something there.”

Galina closed her eyes. “Alert the colonel. Have him intercept the couple.”

Four hundred kilometers north of the Hungarian capital, Marius Linzmaier downshifted the armored transport disguised as a delivery truck. They approached Nowa Huta, the easternmost suburb of Kraków, Poland. He was to make another pickup. Pickup? Yes, but of what, exactly? He had never actually seen his cargo, but it was heavy, he knew that. Their driving progress was being monitored; he knew that, too. His front-seat companion certainly didn't tell him any more.

The grim-faced military man hadn't actually said anything at all for the last nine hours, and the cabin seemed to be getting smaller by the minute. The fifteen paramilitary agents of the Teutonic Order stuffed in the truck's rear compartment guarding whatever it was didn't know how well they had it.

“Colonel,” said Marius, “we will arrive at the Lenin Steelworks in eighteen minutes.” He knew it hadn't been called the V. I. Lenin Steelworks since the fall of Communism, but perhaps to get a reaction from the
stone sitting next to him?

No such luck. Nothing.

“Then shall I notify our men in Building Forty-Three?”

Without changing his expression, the colonel nodded once.

And that was the whole of it. The man simply never spoke. Not so much as a word issued from his lips, as though his breath were too valuable to share with a commoner. Marius had to admit that there was something regal about how the fellow sat for hours without moving. As regal and uncommunicative as a statue of a German prince. The Teutonic Order, thought Marius, had been born in Germany, had faltered in Germany, had nearly disappeared in Germany, and since Galina Krause, had been reborn in Germany.

The colonel was not German.

That, if nothing else about the silent man, was plain to see.