The Golden Vendetta (31 page)

Through his mother's camera, they watched one crate after another move into the tanker's cargo bay. But that wasn't all. Some crates had been unpacked, and there were what appeared to be missiles or rockets on platforms, a rigging of thick cords connecting them, a wall of computer screens, and several giant concrete canisters lined up in tandem. The onetime wrecked tanker was now an extraordinary high-tech laboratory—or war room. It seemed impossible, but there it was.

Silva came into view on the screen and gave the thumbs-up.

“They're returning,” Darrell said. “Good. Get my mom out of there. We've seen enough.”

They had all seen enough to make their blood run cold.

“T
he tanker is filled with an array of nuclear devices,” Silva said as he climbed over the side of the motorboat and helped Sara in after him. “Some I've seen before, others not. A few of them are not the most modern. If I'm correct, K-twenty-seven is a Soviet submarine that sank in the nineteen eighties. But no matter how old they are, those guys are hooking them up in sequence. There are also eight, maybe ten large concrete-encased miniature nuclear reactors. Bottom line,” he said, “the Teutonic Order appears to be building its own nuclear warehouse.”

Lily watched the blood drain from Silva's face, as if he had just realized the implications of what he'd just
seen. For a soldier of his war experience, it was frightening.

“But what for?” Darrell asked. “Why are they stockpiling nuclear bombs?”

“No, they're not all necessarily bombs,” Silva said. “I can't tell you if she's building a giant warhead or something else.”

“Something else . . . like what?” asked Sara.

He shrugged. “A large reactor? Maybe it's both that
and
a weapon. All I know is that she's got a lot of firepower down there for something, and it's not good.”

Lily shivered. “Copernicus told Becca in London that something like a nuclear event happened when his astrolabe traveled in time. The hole in the sky. Maybe this is all for that? And whatever Galina's doing under the water is part of the same thing? I don't know. What else could it be?”

“The deluge,” said Sara. “Lily, it's what the Mother warned you about in Tampa. It's what Becca and Wade discovered in France. Maybe it happens in the future. We don't know. But one thing is sure: Galina has far more power than we dreamed, which makes it essential she doesn't get any more relics. None!”

“Then no more talk,” said Silva. “We need to extract those keys.”

No one spoke while the crewmen exchanged their tanks for fresh ones. They rechecked their weapons. Then it was time. They entered the water, Sara and Silva first. This time all the men went, leaving Lily and Darrel alone on the boat with strict orders to stay low and stay put.

A short quarter hour later, using the riflescope, Lily spotted them bobbing up outside the hull. They were near the front of the yacht. Silva removed his face mask, slipped his hand inside his armored vest, and pulled out a black object the size and shape of a squashed baseball.

Darrell's phone crackled. “Yes?”

“Is there anyone on the front deck?” Sara asked.

Darrell sighted the deck through the riflescope. “One, two guys. They're moving back toward the main cabin now. No. No one's up front. Why—”

Before Darrell could finish, Silva heaved the black object up over the side of the yacht. It smacked down on the deck and exploded in smoke and shrapnel. The windows of the front cabin crackled and shattered.

“Whoa!” said Lily. The crew of the yacht reacted instantly, shouting, calling for men from below. An alarm began to howl. A dozen or so armed agents raced to the blast site; some ran for fire extinguishers; others scanned over the side.

By that time, however, Sara, Silva, and his men were
gone from the surface, reappearing a few seconds later below the rear of the yacht. A grappling hook shot up the side, hooked on the back railing, and a rope ladder fluttered down the side of the hull.

The team climbed up in a flash. The grenade must have been partly a smoke bomb, because thick gray clouds had billowed up from the impact and now shielded Sara and the others.

“They're on board,” said Lily. “I can't believe this. Your crazy mother. Imagine if your dad saw this.”

“Both would freak,” he said. “My real dad
and
Roald.”

They soon lost sight of the extraction team on the deck.

The image on Darrell's phone, already hazy from the smoke, flickered, was grainy, shaky, but as soon as Sara and the others pushed their way down the stairs to the aft cabin, there was the sound of gunfire.

“They've been spotted,” Lily said.

“Silva's good. I have to think he'll protect her. But if she gets hurt . . .”

The video blacked out, returned briefly, then died altogether. No audio. Silence from the phone. Gunshots continued below deck. Smoke blew everywhere.

“I knew it!” he snapped. “Lily, I'm not just going to—”

“No kidding! It's your mom!” She studied the dashboard. “How do you . . .” Then she saw a red button and pressed it. The engine roared to life. “Ha!”

Taking the wheel, she pulled the throttle back, and the boat shot off toward the yacht. This was something she'd never done before. It seemed easy enough. You hit the gas, point the boat, and it goes there.

“Cut it back a bit to keep the noise down,” Darrell said, his eyes on the yacht.

The smoke from the bomb wafted across the water, stinging their eyes, but it covered their advance. Soon, they were under the rope ladder. Lily cut the engine like she'd seen the captain do. Darrell tied the boat's rope to the ladder and grasped the third rung, caught a foot on the bottom, and pulled himself up. She climbed up after.

Gunfire crackled in the air around them, but when they reached the deck, they realized it was all coming from below. The deck was far larger when you were on it than it seemed through the scope. Darrell looked both ways, then ran toward the stairway into the lower cabins.

“Not that way,” she said. “To the front and through the blasted windows. They're all tangled up down those stairs. We should go in the front. Keys first.”

“Yeah, but . . . no, you're right. They're the soldiers. We're the key getters.”

They crept along the railing around the side of the main cabin. Not only were the windows smashed, but one of the steel doors lay partially twisted on its hinges. There was no one in the front room, so no one heard Darrell kicking the door over and over until there was room to crawl through. Lily was happy she'd guessed right. The fighting really was in the rear of the yacht.

Maybe remembering Casablanca and the episode of the zip cuffs, Darrell hung back to let her take the lead. She pressed ahead as if she knew where to go. The cabins they passed were empty. She kept moving forward, then down to another deck. The rooms were smaller there. Then a sound. Intermittent beeping.

“The communications room?” she whispered.

“Maybe. It's not where the keys would be. Keep going.” Darrell trotted down the hallway to the next door, a hatch-like bulkhead with a cross-shaped handle.

Lily glanced in the room.

Banks of computer terminals lined two of the walls. She recognized one of them as a radar station. The green concentric circles, the digital hand sweeping around like a fast clock hand.
They're tracking something,
she thought. But watching the blip for a few seconds,
she saw it didn't move. The thing was stationary. She made a mental note of the blip's coordinates.

“You're wasting time!” Darrell hissed, reaching for her hand but ending up not taking it. “Look, the shooting's slowed down. Maybe there's a standoff. Now's our chance.” He nodded toward the bulkhead. After he turned the handle, they moved silently through the hatch, then down a set of stairs two at a time.

Suddenly, there was Silva, his finger pressed to his lips. Darrell mouthed,
My mom.
Silva tilted his head behind him, and there was Sara, gripping a pistol—so un-mother-like, so cool. Darrell only half resisted the urge to hug her, which was touching, but the gun battle fired up again behind them. Silva's men were taking on the Order a corridor away.

Silva nodded, and Sara eased past Darrell, then Lily, pressing their shoulders down as she passed them, until they were crouched on the floor. She and Silva were inches from the next bulkhead.

Lily didn't see what the signal was, but Silva spun the handle and kicked the hatch wide. There was a
sudden face, the barrel of an automatic, but Silva was on him, thrusting his sharply angled elbow up into the guard's chin, sending the guy to the floor. Sara kicked the automatic away, snatched it up, and slung it over her shoulder. So cool again.

“Is this it?” Silva asked, pointing to a small but apparently heavy wooden box sitting on a shelf in the cargo hold.

Lily and Darrell were on it in a flash. They popped the box open, unwrapped a thick velvet covering, and saw the two keys. Without a word, Lily collected them, gave one to Darrell, and took the other for her bag.

“Security,” she said.

“Security,” he agreed.

“And we're out,” said Silva. “Up the stairs.”

They tore up the stairs, Sara behind them. There followed a series of shots from the rear of the yacht. They halted. Ebner von Braun stood quivering next to one of Silva's beefy commandos, who had a gun pressed to Ebner's head. His face was pasty white, his jaw trembling. The yacht's crew surrounded them all, but it was clear they wouldn't risk a move with Ebner in custody. The bookseller stood beside him, his hands up, shaking like a trapped mouse.

“Back,” said Silva, pressing his handgun into Ebner's
chest. “Back to the ladder. Something tells me you'd be a pretty good prisoner, but first, von Braun, you're letting us go.”

“I hope you have a good imagination,” Darrell said breathlessly. “You'll need it when Galina asks why you let us slip through your creepy fingers.”

Lily was impressed for the second time in one day.

Ebner looked as if he would explode in rage. Sara reached the ladder and held it. Darrell climbed down, then Lily, then the commandos, and finally Silva with Ebner. Lily hadn't expected that twist, but it was necessary, or the yacht crew would open fire before they could escape.

Poor thin, pale Ebner struggled with every rung of the wobbly ladder.

When they were safe on the motorboat and out of range of the yacht, Ebner turned his beady eyes to Sara. “What are your plans with me?”

“I should take you prisoner,” she said, “like you and Galina took me. But we need to move quickly.”

“Where to, might I ask?” Ebner said.

“That's it.” Silva pulled him to his feet. “Any last words?”

“I have one,” said Darrell. He stared Ebner in the face. “You—” he said, and used a word Lily couldn't believe
he even knew. His mother gasped, but Darrell had nailed it. Ebner didn't smirk or laugh as he had so often before. He simply gulped in a breath as Silva pushed him off the boat into the water. He flailed around, but Lily guessed that he'd survive. No, they weren't killers. Not like he was.

As soon as their motorboat eased up to the dock, Lily checked her phone. Three voice mails. She entered into her GPS app the coordinates she'd read off the yacht's radar screen.

“Italy. There's a radar blip in central Italy. Sara, I think it's at Gran Sasso. Galina knows where Roald is.”

Sara's face was brittle, as if it would collapse in tears if only she let it. “Not knowing about him is . . .” She didn't finish. “Malta. We need to get to Malta.”

Rome, Italy

June 9

I
t was just after one a.m. when Wade—crammed with Becca and Julian in a taxi speeding to Rome's airport and ready to fly off to Turkey to meet the others—received Darrell's terse message.

“Malta?” he asked. “The island?”

Julian's phone was already out. “A short hop by helicopter. Dad may have a fit, but I'm chartering a chopper for us and a jet for the others.”

It seemed barely minutes later that they were buckled into a Eurocopter AS355 twin-turbine helicopter, soaring due south across the Mediterranean, the newly forged key still warm in Becca's go-bag. The confirmation came soon from Sara that their jet from Turkey would arrive in Malta within an hour of the slower helicopter.

Roughly one and a half hours later, the helicopter began to descend, and Wade caught sight of the island of Malta, a dark shape in the darkness of the sea, but sprinkled from end to end with tiny flickering lights.

“It looks pretty peaceful,” said Lily.

“Now it does,” said Julian. “Pilot, please land just south of Rabat, away from the center of the city. There's open space there.”

“I suspect to do so finely,” the pilot replied, in a reasonable attempt at English, then followed it up with “yet.” He swooped the chopper over the eastern side of the island. “I respect the nightlies, fellows,” he said, “but I not can land without personal lightings, not this blackness of. If you have enemies, they will spit us.”

“Spot us,” said Julian. “And that's fine. Nothing to do about that.”

“Okay, everything, nope.”

Wade nodded. “We'll get to Rabat and wait for the
others. They should be here in”—he checked the phone Julian had given him in France—“about an hour. Until then, we lay low.”

The pilot finally chose a dark and more or less flat area called Ghar Burk, a collection of farmers' fields a little south of the city.

Once on the ground, they hurried into Rabat from the west and quickly established a beachhead in an all-hours music club.

Because Becca had the
ocularia,
but Lily and Darrell had the second and third keys, she had to wait to decipher the next part of the diary until she had the second key in front of her and could examine it for the lens combination.

Waiting was hard.

The lights in the club were low, and Wade felt exhausted. Candle flames moving slowly inside hurricane glasses on the tabletops didn't help, either. Faces wavered in and out of the light, faces in half shadow, ghostly faces, though none of them, Wade suspected, would ever imagine what might be coming. He couldn't keep his thoughts from straying to the final flood. The deluge. It was too frightening to think about, but he couldn't think of anything else. They were all tired. The trip from Budapest to Clos Lucé to Rome to Malta
had worn them out. No matter how great Sara was, or Julian, not having his father with them made everything worse.

But the big work, the real work, was yet to come.

If he could, he'd go out there, find the relic, and get off the island. The darkness unnerved him, like a storm was rolling slowly toward them, but they had to stay to meet it. Besides, as Silva had said, a battle waged too soon was a battle lost. So they waited, as the music—coming softly out of speakers on a small bare stage—flowed among the tables and into the black night and Becca tried out one combination after another of the silver lenses, hoping to hit on one to read the silver page's final clues, but not finding it.

“I hate not knowing,” she said, blinking six eyes at him through the lenses' latest configuration. “I might just stumble on it. If I keep at it. But I have to keep at it.”

If I keep at it.

Maybe it was the darkness, the candles, the odd quiet, the danger, the flood, but Wade's heart tingled then, as if dozens of tiny bells were strung along each of his ribs and Becca had run her fingertip lightly across them, setting them swinging. He felt dizzyingly lightweight, maybe from the helicopter's quick descent, maybe from the exhaustion, maybe from neither of those things.

Darrell would punch his arm playfully if he knew any of that, but let him punch. Becca rubbed her temples and rolled up her sleeves in the heat. He glimpsed the scar from the arrow wound Galina had given her in Guam. He remembered her telling him that she'd taken her last antibiotic in Paris. Even in the dim light he could see the wound was still pink.

If I keep at it.

He now remembered waiting in the desert under Bingo's plane, and that moment when they'd found Vela together in the cave on Guam, and that earlier night on their first quest, when they'd all slept under the stars in Rome.

If I keep at it.

After everything that Becca had been through, the poisoned wound, its scar on her arm, her enduring the blast by Kronos, her blackouts in London, the frightening chase in Casablanca, the shootouts in Monte Carlo and Budapest, to still
keep at it
was beyond cool.

It was heroic. It was strong. It touched him.

And that word
touched,
as it formed in his mind, set the bells chiming again and his chest ringing.

“Answer it.”

Wade focused his eyes. Becca was looking at him. “Sorry, what?”

“Someone's texting you.”

He blinked, swiped open his phone, read the brief message. “Darrell, Lily, and Sara will be here in ten minutes.”

It was the slowest ten minutes of Becca's life. But they allowed her to imagine once more the incredible meeting of three minds. Barbarossa, Nicolaus Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci. And she and the others were following
—had
followed, for the last week—their footsteps across Europe and Africa all the way to the tiny island of Malta. Being away from her family was tough, often, but this? Despite all her self-doubts and worries and awkwardness, this was what she was about. This was her.

When the crew from Kizil Kule finally entered the club, hurrying through the dark room to their table, there were only a couple of hugs and welcomes before they got to business. No fuss. They were Guardians.

Given what they were facing, it struck Becca that their greetings might just as well be the good-byes of people going into battle. Both Lily and Sara seemed closer to the edge since Budapest.
I'll step up, then. As much as I can.

“Here.” Wade set the newly forged fourth key on the table.

Sara shook herself out of her thoughts. “It's just like them,” she said quietly. “Wow. It could have been made by Leonardo himself. The gears and the wires. It looks motorized. It's beautiful.”

“Adriana's really good,” said Julian. “And fast.”

“What about the third key?” said Becca.

As Darrell placed the Budapest key on the table, Lily set down the one from the Kizil Kule tower in Turkey. Becca moved it behind two candles on the table in front of her and slid the mirror glasses on. “Someone scraped this.”

“I had to,” said Darrell. “In case Ebner and his goons found it. What I scraped off were a couple of Maltese words—”

“Becca, they were ‘lahar gar-gar'!” said Lily. “And they mean ‘the final flood'! Can you believe it?”

It shook her. “The final flood,” Becca repeated. “Holy cow, it all connects. All the way back to the library in Tampa. The quest for Triangulum started there.”

“And we hope it ends here,” said Sara. “Becca, can you read the code on the key?”

Becca set the
ocularia
back to their previous setting and studied the key. There were tiny numbers on it, this time on the rim of the bow. “Got it. Three-six-five.” She clicked the lenses into the proper combination. Tilting
the diary into the light, and with the
ocularia
focused directly on the page, she read the last clue. As before, it was an infuriating word riddle, but this time it was written in English.

She read it out.

“It's not Nicolaus's handwriting,” Becca said. “This is from Leonardo.”

“I didn't know he knew English,” said Sara.

“Maybe he didn't,” said Darrell, pushing his chair back from the table. “It doesn't make much sense. This leaves me out.”

“Okay,” said Becca, “but Leonardo knew about Malta from the beginning, and this is based on his being here. Even if he didn't know where Copernicus and Heyredden later hid the keys, he knew where the silver arm was buried.”

Wade moved close over Becca's notebook and stared at the words. “At least the riddle is short. I mean, it's clever, but maybe not insoluble. It doesn't rely on strange wording so much. It's perfectly understandable from that standpoint.”

“You're not,” said Darrell.

“And it's creepy,” Lily said softly.

“It might help to say it in different words,” Sara said. “No rats will see the star eating the bones. Anything?”

“Still creepy,” said Lily.

“Granted,” said Sara. “But
rats
and
star
have the same letters. They're mirror versions of each other. Leonardo was all about mirrors and riddles and backward writing, so what if we reverse those two words. Does it read any differently?” Her phone rang, and she stood to answer it. “Hello?” Listening, she walked away.

“Mom's right,” said Darrell. “What if it's actually, ‘No star will see the rats feast on bones'?”

“Slightly less creepy,” said Lily, “and maybe this is the real riddle. It's like, where do rats feast on bones? Well, a cemetery, right? So we could be looking for a cemetery.”

“But if no star will see them do that . . . ,” said Wade, trying to be involved, but distracted by Sara's call.
Could it be Dad? Or Paul Ferrere? Sara is listening, not speaking.
“Then maybe it's . . . sorry. I lost my thought.”

“Inside a church maybe,” said Julian. “Tombs in a church.”

“They don't normally have rats inside churches,” said Darrell. “Crypts, like in London?”

“Or catacombs?” said Becca.

“Catacombs. I like it,” said Wade. His stepmother was looking at her phone now, enlarging an image, maybe. He wanted to go over, but didn't. He felt himself letting the others figure this out.
Is it about Dad?

“I'm looking up catacombs,” said Lily, firing up her tablet for the first time in quite a while. It didn't take her long to find references to a famous series of burial tunnels on Malta called Saint Paul's Catacombs. “Here's a map of the graveyard tunnels.”

“It's kind of a maze,” Darrell groaned over Lily's shoulder. “And it could go for miles. How are we going to find a tiny relic in all that?”

Becca shot a look at Lily. “Are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

Lily narrowed her eyes. “I'm not thinking anything, so no.”

“The grid,” said Becca. “The grid we found
all the way back in Nice. Remember?” She turned the pages gently until she located the original clue they'd found all those days ago.