The Serpent's Curse (16 page)

He batted them away one by one. “I also play cricket!”

Wade's cell phone began to ring. He couldn't answer it, but he managed to pull it out and throw it to Lily, as Becca and now Darrell both heaved things at the man. Wade sliced down and brought the umbrella close enough to grab the shaft of it. Dropping the lamp, he yanked the umbrella hard to get it away from the man, who growled and held on with both hands, pumping it at Wade.

“Your dad is on the phone, screaming to know where we are!” Lily said.

“Tell—him—the—morgue!” the man said, his face a gnarled grimace, until Becca heaved the videotape player, trailing cords and all, at his head. He groaned once and fell backward. The umbrella dropped to the floor, and Wade kicked it off the landing. It clattered between the stairs for five floors before crashing to the lobby below.

“We shall meet again!” the man coughed at them. “Oh, yes, we shall!”

“Can it!” Darrell snapped. He had Wade by the forearm and dragged him from the landing and down the stairs behind Lily and Becca. They all hurried down two flights when Darrell stopped suddenly and spun on his heels. “You know what? Tell Galina,” he yelled, his chest heaving, “tell Galina that we're coming for my mother. And then we're coming for her!”

Out on the street, the rain had begun again.

Lily paused for a second. “Wade, your dad wants us at Victoria Station right now. He's already got our stuff from the safe house. We're flying to Moscow on the next flight.” She handed him the phone. “Everybody, Boris is . . . Boris died.”

Northern Europe

G
alina Krause's jet droned low over the Baltic Sea, skirting the northern shores of Poland. In her mind, she conjured the burning tower in Frombork. How Nicolaus Copernicus, sword in hand, had rushed down the stairs outside the tower to save Hans Novak from Albrecht's knights. The flames, the snow, the furious attack on the tower were sights and sounds she imagined often.

And now, if she turned just so in her seat, she could see that other momentous location, the spot where Albrecht's castle at Königsberg had stood so long ago.

These two places—the Magister's tower and Albrecht's castle, barely one hundred fifty kilometers from each other—were deeply and inextricably linked.

And the words came back to her.

Eine Legende besagt . . .

One legend says . . .

Four years ago, Galina first entered the ruins of Schloss Königsberg. She was barely sixteen years old and as near death as a human can be and still breathe, yet even then her mind was filled with tales of that burning Frombork tower.

Buried under the monstrous Cold War architecture known as the House of Soviets in the renamed city of Kaliningrad, the ruined foundations of Albrecht's castle concealed a history as grand as it was bleak. Among the fallen stones and crumbled walls she squirmed her way, snakelike, to the undercrypt. There she had located the legendary Serpens relic she had heard stories about, but which only she had known was there.

“Why did Albrecht not hide
both
parts of the relic in the same place?”

Ebner von Braun, sitting against the windows on the opposite side of the jet, raised his head from a pristine second edition of
Faust
, part one, from 1828. “Excuse me? I didn't catch that.”

“The legend,” Galina said. “If it was true, as one legend says, that Albrecht had
both
parts of Serpens, why were they not both at Schloss Königsberg?”

Ebner gazed at the sea below, a finger marking his place in the book. “The legend. Yes. Perhaps it is false. Perhaps Albrecht did hide both parts there. After all these centuries, we do not know. If he did, possibly the other part was stolen before you got there. We know only that you discovered the head before it was lost again.”

Galina knew it was still a puzzle to Ebner—and to the entire ruling circle of Teutonic Knights—how a young dying girl could possibly have known what the great Albrecht von Hohenzollern had possessed five centuries before, let alone where to find it so long after the Grand Master's death. The answer was trivially simple, but letting the puzzle fester kept them convinced of her brilliance.

“It must have been the war,” she mused. “When the Soviets invaded East Prussia in April 1945, they sought to retrieve Russian treasures looted by the Nazis. One nameless soldier likely discovered the body of Serpens. Bedazzled by it, he took it home with him in his rucksack. He kept it for years on the shelf between his bottle of vodka and his jar of borscht. There is only the legend, Ebner, but I believe both body and head of Serpens remain in Russia to this day. In fact, I am certain of it. As I am certain that we shall find them both.”

Ebner returned to his reading, silently turning a page as the jet droned.

She watched the slender wrist of the Baltic Sea widen into the Gulf of Finland. In the farther distance, she could just make out that glittering and audacious jewel dredged from an abysmal swamp, the czarist refuge of incomparable wealth and the source of so much beauty and pain: Saint Petersburg.

Take me to the clinic,
she had told Ebner at Schloss Königsberg that stormy night four years ago, nearer death than when she had entered the ruins, but with the head of Serpens clutched in her shivering hands.
Take me now.

More than three hundred kilometers east of Saint Petersburg lay the dark den of Greywolf. As horrifying as crawling through the ruins of Königsberg had been, as near a nightmare as one could possibly conceive, she would soon be in a worse place.

All because both parts of Serpens might still be on Russian soil, as one legend said.

Eine Legende besagt . . .

Moscow

March 21

“C
ome sroo. Sroo!”

In a species of English, a stout middle-aged woman in a vaguely official outfit shooed Wade and the others through passport control at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport.

“Thank you,” he said, not really knowing why. She didn't acknowledge him anyway.

The cramped, airless arrivals hall smelled of too many people jammed into too small a space, but to Wade it was a kind of progress. They had not, as it turned out, been able to take the next flight to Moscow. They'd been on their way to Victoria Station for the train to Heathrow when the police had stopped them. Their renewed investigation of the sudden collapse and death of Boris Volkov—officially revealed as Boris Rubashov—had taken nearly the full day. After spending the evening at their safe flat in Chenies Mews, the children had finally been interviewed by the police the following morning. They'd replied to questions they had no answers to, then languished back at the flat for several more hours, until the ruling came down—false, they knew—that, awaiting toxicology results, there were no immediate signs of foul play.

While the medical examiners waited for the findings, the authorities had no reason to hold the Kaplans, so Roald had booked seats on the earliest possible flight to Moscow. They were finally off the ground by the very late evening of the day of the interview, but not before Wade's father had blown up—several times—about actually fighting with an agent of the Order, as they'd done at Boris's flat.

“An assassin!” his father called the umbrella man. “You totally went off script! I clearly raised five fingers!”

“Which means get away from me,” said Darrell.

“No, it means meet me at the safe house.”

“No, meet at the safe house is two fingers,” said Becca.

“No, two fingers is wait for me!” Roald said.

“Dad, wait for me is not any of the fingers,” said Wade, flipping open the notebook. “See?” His father grabbed the notebook, read the finger gestures of the family code, and grunted. “Oh.”

“Dad, maybe it looks like we were careless—” Darrell started.

“You
were
careless!”

“Excuse me, Uncle Roald, but not really so much,” Lily added boldly, but also sweetly. “I mean, it might seem like we got away with something, but we thought you gave us a message, and we used our instincts. Plus we were smart, never splitting up from one another, and the thing we got away with was . . . a clue. A pretty big clue.”

Wade's father stared at them for a full two minutes; then, just as it appeared as if he was going to go on another tirade, he got a call from Paris. “Paul Ferrere, the investigator.” Listening for a few moments, his father nodded, then said,
“Merci.”
He pushed End Call. “Sara left Madrid, flying northeast. To Russia.”

“That settles it,” said Darrell, jumping up. “We're going to Russia.”

And now they were. Slowly. Even after catching the plane, a four-hour time difference, plus a Siberian snow front that delayed by nearly three hours a normally four-hour flight, it was now three days since they'd left New York City. But they were on Russian soil at last and were ready to move forward once more.

“Hurry sroo!” the official repeated, waving the line ahead.

Darrell piled into Wade. “Even the lady with the bun thinks this is going way too slow.”

“Poor Boris,” Lily whispered, zipping and unzipping her bag nervously. “He should be coming sroo with us.”

“Wade,” said Becca, “I hope you wrote down what he said at the restaurant.”

“The key words.”

“Well, I made a video of the videotape at his flat, which may be against copyright, but I don't think so,” Lily said as Roald ushered them gently along the line, then positioned himself at the head to speak with the passport-control officials.

“Whatever you do, bro, don't look guilty.” Darrell nodded toward the officers.

“Of what? I haven't done anything.”

“Doesn't matter. Did you know that when your adrenaline spikes, you suddenly need the bathroom?”

“Eww, Darrell, gross!” said Lily. “Get away from me.”

“You have to do five fingers if you're going to say that,” said Darrell. “But most of all, bro, don't sweat. Fear is all about stuff coming out of your body. They'll know you're lying if you sweat, plus you'll need the bathroom, but you won't get to go because they'll send you straight to Sumeria without a key.”

“Siberia,” said Becca.

Darrell smirked. “Sure, if you're lucky.”

“Bags be open. Computers be in themselves bins. Passports and visas be out.”

Wade pushed his stuffed backpack between Becca's and Lily's bags on the conveyor and suddenly wanted to thank Boris for everything he'd given them. The visas were one thing, but there was also the tooth. Why Wade hadn't gotten rid of it, he wasn't sure, except that it was like a voice urging him on to do whatever he had to do. His father had said they should keep it in case it turned out to be another clue, so he'd stowed it in his backpack among his socks.

Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, since Boris had made a point of his possible “side trip,” they'd also found a ticket to a theater performance among the documents.