The Golden Vendetta (27 page)

Karim smiled. “Remember, you have friends in Tunis, if you ever need them.”

“Not just friends,” said Becca. “Guardians.”

Abul-Qasim rose to his feet, steadier than before. “Good luck.
Ma'a salama. Allah yusallmak.”

“In other words,” said Karim, “Good-bye, and may Allah go with you.”

Becca used the words Alula had told them.
“Shukran jazeelan.”

Abul-Qasim and Karim bowed to them. A few minutes later they were on the street, in a taxicab, and gone.

“We have to go, too,” said Sara, removing her phone from her bag and turning it on. “I'm calling Julian to ask him to meet some of you at Clos Lucé. The others will come with me to Turkey. Who wants to go where?”

“I
diot!”

As the nameless driver screeched into the Order's hangar at the Budapest airport, the short, rumpled man in the corner watched her storm out of the car, leaving the door swinging. She was angry. He hoped only at the driver, not at him.

“Gerrenhausen!” she screamed.

She wants me.
Oskar emerged from the shadows of the hangar, wrapped his open trench coat around himself, and trotted over, hoping his face showed less fear and more an eagerness to please.

“Yes, Miss Krause? How may I be of—”

“This key was crafted by Leonardo.” She handed it
to him. “But the engraving is so much cruder, it must be the work of Copernicus or Heyreddin Barbarossa. What does the design mean? Is the double
K
the Russian letter
zhe?”

Gerrenhausen took the heavy object into his hands. “Yes, yes, Leonardo. The letter, perhaps Russian, perhaps not. And silver marks here, likely readable only with the stolen
ocularia”
—he did not look at her as he said that word, knowing it was partially his fault the children had it—“but we can determine one or two things. . . .”

He trembled to imagine her anger if he should come up with something wrong or, worse, nothing at all. He thought of stepping out of reach, when his senses tingled excitedly. Recognition did not surface, but something else did.

“Look here. There is the barest tab, a lever of sorts, on the edge of the back side. My fingers, you see, are so very sensitive.”

He pressed the lever gently. It pushed in, then fell out onto his palm. The lever was actually a tube, hollow and no wider than a needle. And it contained something. He held it up to his lips and blew hard. A tiny fragment of paper fell out into his palm. He unrolled it. It was a quarter-of-an-inch square. One side was blank. The other contained a very small colored image.

“A compass rose,” Galina said. “But no map to identify its origin.”

“No,” Gerrenhausen murmured as he closed his eyes and moved the tiny paper gently between his thumb and forefinger, “no map . . . but the cartographic paper it is painted on—that, perhaps, is the clue. My fingers know it. The paper is not European, Miss Krause. Not Western European, at least.”

“From Budapest?”

He brought the fragment up to his nose and sniffed it several times. “No. Beyond. It is Greek, perhaps. Or Egyptian. No . . . Turkish.”

“Ottoman!” she said. “Yes. And what else?”

He nodded, a smile teasing at his lips. He was on home ground now, she in thrall to his peculiar mastery of the history of paper. “It is a compass rose from a Turkish map produced in the first part of the sixteenth century. . . .” He handed the paper to her, then withdrew a narrow notebook from the breast pocket of his coat. He consulted page after page and then stopped. Holding it up, he took the cartographic fragment back from Galina and held it next to the notebook page. “Ah, yes. Piri Reis. A cartographer for Suleiman the Great of Istanbul. This is a fragment of a printing of maps he made of the coast of Alanya, a port city in the Antalya Province of Turkey.”

Galina breathed. “Excellent. Anything else?”

“With that as a clue,” the little man went on, “I can now offer a guess as to the image on the front of the key. The back-to-back double
K
emblem is not the Russian letter, but identifies the octagonal building as the tower of Kizil Kule, a formidable structure that guarded that same portion of the Turkish coast for over eight centuries. That, my dear Miss Krause, is where another Barbarossa key is located!”

She turned immediately from him. She seemed happy with his work. Perhaps now she would reconsider
her threat to his grandson.

“Gerrenhausen, come. You are needed.”

The words were music to him. He followed Galina across the hangar to her jet and watched her press an icon on her phone. Ebner von Braun's face came up, the blue of ocean water behind and below him. He was on the deck of a ship. The tumblers in Gerrenhausen's brain turned.
He is on her yacht near Turkey.
Ebner was very near the next key.

“Ebner, the third key is hidden in the tower of Kizil Kule in Alanya,” she said. “Notify our newly arrived agents in Istanbul to meet you there. Direct others to the nearest airport. I am sending Gerrenhausen with the second key.”

This was unexpected. “Me?” he said.

“The relic may be close by. We must be ready with the key. Ebner, the Kaplans could have beaten us there. Descend on the tower now!”

“Of course,” Ebner said. “And will you join us, Galina?”

“Once my other business is done,” she said. “Do not fail me!”

Hong Kong, People's Republic of China

June 8

7:28 p.m.

I
n the Marco Polo suite at the Peninsula hotel, Markus Wolff looked up from the desk and out across Victoria Harbor at Hong Kong Island.

Twilight was coming. The mix of yachts, tall-masted sailing craft, traditional junks, and assorted barges and dinghies streamed in and out of the wharves even at this late hour. It was a scene he had viewed nightly for the last two days, and now it was time. He glanced at his phone: 7:28 p.m.

At seven forty-five, with dusk finally settling over
the harbor, he would board the Star Ferry for the island. From the dock he would then walk to his appointment on Wing Lok Street. Strange, he thought, having an appointment with a man who expected someone else. Feng Yi was a traitor to the Order, a clever man so obsessed with the authentic Scorpio relic that he had finally located it, after killing nine people who stood in his way. He was now arranging to smuggle the relic into North Africa. To a buyer who had expressed sudden and lucrative interest. A man by the name of Ugo Drangheta.

The alarm on Wolff's phone rang. It was seven thirty.

Time to go.

Wolff closed his edition of the late poems of Emily Dickinson and rose from the desk. He arranged the items on it as they had been before he took the room. He slipped on a pair of tight gloves, entered the bathroom, and returned with a damp hand towel, which he used to wipe down the surfaces he had touched. As the hotel's recycling notice suggested, he tossed the towel on the bathroom floor.

After picking his satchel up off the bed, he smoothed the bedspread with the flat of his gloved hand. One more look around. He left the room. In the lobby, he nodded once at the concierge, who returned the nod
and said, “Good day, Mr. Ambler.”
Ambler
was an identity Wolff used often in the Far East.

On the street, he took his bearings, walked to the ferry docks, boarded the seven forty-five, and was on the island by eight. A ten-minute stroll brought him to the corner of Wing Lok and Man Wa Lane, where he waited under an awning behind an illegally parked van.

Last night, he had sent Feng Yi a text from a burner phone:

Feng Yi had responded.
Prove you represent who you say.

Wolff had then transferred a photograph from his phone, as if it were a picture of his own wrist, an image courtesy of Oskar Gerrenhausen.

He had repeated the message.
Come alone.
This received no response. So now, under that awning, Wolff waited to see if his trick had worked.

At 8:28 p.m. a taxi rolled quietly to a stop at the far end of the street. A man struggled out of the backseat. He held a small brushed-aluminum briefcase. He said something to the driver, closed the door behind him, and began to limp toward number 71. The man had long black hair, much as he had in San Francisco, where Wolff had shot him for trying to steal the Scorpio relic. But like all failed seekers of that poisoned device, Yi had succumbed to a death lust. He had become ill from the radiation, and still he couldn't drag himself along the sidewalk for a minute without rechecking the radioactive contents of the suitcase.

When the moment came, Wolff could say something clever to him, but with the end so near, the words one said had to bear so much more weight than mere cleverness. A soul would die soon, leave the world, his journey done.

He thought again of the words he had been reading in the hotel.

Wolff wondered which of the two of them the poem might refer to.

But there was no sense in waiting. The street was quiet. He wouldn't break the air with the concussion of an unsilenced gunshot. He drew the noise suppresser from inside his leather coat, screwed it onto the barrel of his Walther, took seven steps, and raised it at the limping man.

“Mr. Yi.”

Feng Yi raised his face. “You? But no—”

The report from the Walther was quick, dense, dull. Feng Yi fell to the street with a groan, his expression puzzled, his face a question, a worry, as if he didn't quite understand his own ambush and was unable to comprehend what had just been done to him. The second shot removed the worry, removed everything.

At the far end of the street, the taxi backed up, drove away. Wolff stood over the body, watched its stillness for a few seconds. Dusk fell into night.

He removed the silencer, pocketed both it and the gun, then opened the suitcase for a fraction of a second. The jade scorpion lay fitted tightly inside.

“And that is done.”

He snapped the case shut. “Dear Galina, the scales are even once more.”

Some nine thousand kilometers to the northwest, an armored convoy approached the route to the central
Apennine range called the Monti della Laga, the mountains of the lakes.

Marius Linzmaier glanced out of the corner of his eye. The colonel sitting next to him had worn the same somber face the entire trip.

“Pull over,” the colonel said, his first words since before the Austrian border crossing. Linzmaier slowed and parked on the shoulder, and the following vehicles did the same. They idled there while the colonel removed his phone from his jacket pocket and placed a call.

“We are one and one-half hours from arrival,” he said into the phone. There came a few words of response the driver couldn't hear. The colonel nodded and hung up.

“We wait here.”

Linzmaier turned off the engine. “May I ask for what?”

“Our people at Nowa Huta report seeing a man and a woman surveilling the steelworks.”

“Did our people intervene?”

“No. That will be our job. We wait here.”

Confused as he was, but knowing that the conversation with the colonel was unlikely to continue, Linzmaier left the cabin, went around to the rear
compartment, and unlocked the doors. One by one a troop of armed guards left the compartment and stood by the side of the road, stretching, smoking. The driver studied what he had been transporting: a monster of unconnected fragments, a skeleton of girders, rods and struts coiled into the shape of claws, levers and pistons and pipes and gears in frightening disarray—a thing unbuilt, unformed, unborn. It terrified him. The looks on the guards' faces told him they felt the same. They were gray and grim and, in a word, horrified to have been locked up with that mess for so long.

The one thing that joined the pieces in some kind of symmetry was that down to the very last bolt and gear, they all seemed to be crafted of a single substance.

Gold.