The Serpent's Curse (2 page)

“I
s everyone . . . ,” somebody was saying when Wade lifted his throbbing head. The Hummer had spun around fifty yards up the bridge, pulled into the outside lane, and was now aimed at the damaged limo, revving its engine.

Wade yanked up on the door handle. “Get out of the car!” The door wouldn't open. He kicked it. Pain spiked his leg. “Darrell—”

A thin stream of blood trickling down his cheek, Darrell kicked too. The door squealed open a crack. Lily and Becca threw themselves at it. The hinges groaned and the door fell to the roadway. The sudden loss of weight in the back sent the limo teetering forward. There was a moan from behind the wheel.

“The driver!” Wade's father said. He shattered the divider to the front compartment, then grabbed the man's shoulder and squirmed carefully over the seat to him. First puncturing the air bag, he jerked open the passenger door to his right and dragged the driver through it onto the pavement, just as the Hummer pulled up. Four black doors flew open and four oak-sized men emerged.

One of the men walked out into the road and gestured for the oncoming cars to go past. Was he smiling?

Yes, he was.

Wade's frantic thoughts drew to a point: stay close, physically close, to Darrell and the girls. He huddled them together, himself in front. His father staggered over with the driver leaning on his shoulder.

One thick-necked thug, somewhere between seven and ten feet tall, glared down at them with eyes the color of iron. His face was dented and garbage-can ugly.

“Make no movements,” he said in a voice like a truck shifting gears. Then he must have thought better of his words, because he added, “One movement. Give us relic and daggers.”

Seriously?
Wade thought.
He's clarifying his threat? Who does that?

But there was nothing funny in the guy's features. There were lumps all over his face as if
he'd
been the one in the accident, but they were neither recent nor red. He'd grown up a monstrosity, Wade guessed, so what choice did he have but to become a thug?

No, that wasn't right. Everyone had a choice.

“Now,” the man grunted, drawing an automatic weapon from inside his tight-fitting jacket. He stood with his big boots planted flat on the pavement like one of the bridge girders.

Sirens sounded from the streets they had just come from.

“Or we could wait for the cops,” Wade said, stepping forward as if his new toughness meant being aggressive and blurting stuff at bad guys. His father, still holding up the driver, yanked him back.

In a move Wade didn't quite understand, one of the thugs splayed his thick fingers and grabbed Lily by the arm. Then he lifted her off the ground like a rag doll—probably because she was the smallest—and strode with her to the railing. “She goes over.”

Before Wade could react, before he could
think
of moving, his father slid the driver onto him and jumped at the thug, wrenching his arm to let Lily go, which the man didn't—until there was a sudden flash of silver, and the goon screamed.

Shouting incomprehensibly, Becca had thrust Magellan's priceless dagger into the man's arm. Its ivory hilt cracked off in her hand, while the blade stayed in him. She pulled Lily from him and staggered back, stunned at what she had done.

Wade whipped out his own dagger, ready to fight, when a sleek white town car raced up the bridge from the Manhattan side, a blue light flashing from its dashboard.

The other goons dragged their wounded comrade into the Hummer, Becca's hiltless blade still in his arm.

“Ve get you all, dead and dead—” one goon was muttering idiotically.

Not this time,
Wade thought, staring at Becca.
Because of you . . .

The town car shrieked to a stop, and the passenger door flew open. “I'm Terence Ackroyd,” the driver said. “Everybody in!” Then he helped Wade's father slide the limo driver inside. As the Hummer tore back to Brooklyn, the others piled into the town car, and they roared away, shaken but alive and mostly unhurt.

Wade couldn't breathe, couldn't speak.
Becca was amazing,
he thought.
She saved us. She . . .
He quaked like an old man, his hands trembling uncontrollably as they sped across the bridge into the winding streets of lower Manhattan.

Madrid, Spain

March 18

2:06 a.m.

T
hin, pale, and slightly bent, the brilliant physicist Ebner von Braun stepped wearily inside a non-descript building buried in a warren of backstreets off the Plaza Conde de Barajas in old Madrid.

Madrid may well be one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Ebner thought, but that entry hall was disgusting. It was dismal and dark, its floor was uneven, and its grotesquely peeling walls were sodden with the odor of rancid olive oil, scorched garlic, and, surprisingly, turpentine.

Breathing through a handkerchief, he pressed a button on the wall. The elevator doors jerked noisily aside. He stepped in, and the racket of the ancient cables began. A long minute and several subbasements later, he found himself strolling the length of a bank of large, high-definition computer monitors.

Here, the smell was of nothing at all, the pristine, climate-controlled cleanliness of modern science. Ebner gazed over the backs of three hundred men and women, their fingers clacking endlessly on multiple keyboards, text scrolling up and down, screen images shifting and alive with video, and he smiled.

Such busy little bees they are!

Except they are not little bees, are they?
he thought.
They are devils. Demons—Orcs!—all recruited, mostly by me, for the vast army of Galina Krause and the Knights of the Teutonic Order.

The round chamber, one hundred forty feet side to side, with multiple tiers of bookcases rising to a star-painted ceiling, reminded him of the main reading room in the British Museum.

Except ours is better.

In addition to the NSA-level computing resources collected here, the bookshelves and glass-fronted cases alone were laden with over seven million reference books in every conceivable language, hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, many more thousands of early printed works, geographical and topographical maps, marine charts, celestial diagrams, paintings, drawings, engravings, ledgers, letters, tracts, notebooks, and assorted rare or secret documents, all collected from the last five and a half centuries of human history for one purpose: to document every single event in the life of Nicolaus Copernicus.

Behold, the Copernicus Room.

After four years, the massive servers had at last come online, and this army of frowning scientists, burrowing historians, scurrying archivists, and bleary-eyed programmers was now assembled to collect, collate, and cross-reference every conceivable atom of available knowledge to track Copernicus's slightest movement from the day of his birth, on 19 February 1473, to his fateful journey from Frombork, Poland, in 1514, with his assistant, Hans Novak, to his discovery of the time-traveling, relic-bejeweled astrolabe in a location still unknown, and every moment else, all the way to his death in Frombork Castle, on 24 May 1543.

All to determine the identity of the twelve first Guardians.

Now that the modern-day Guardians had invoked the infamous Frombork Protocol, which decreed that the relics be gathered from their hiding places around the world to be destroyed, Ebner found himself wondering for the millionth time: Who were these original protectors, the good men and women whom Copernicus asked to guard his precious relics? One was Magellan, yes. They knew how his relic was secreted in a cave on the island of Guam. Another was the Portuguese trader Tomé Pires, who brought the poisonous Scorpio relic to China, a relic nearly recovered in San Francisco two days ago. But who were the other ten? And what of the mysterious twelfth relic?

If it was possible to know, the Copernicus Room would tell them.

And yet,
Ebner mused as he strolled among the Orcs,
at such a cost.

The rush of the Order's recent renaissance, their rebirth at light speed over the last four years under Galina's leadership, had not been without blunders. The unprecedented and impatient Kronos program, the Order's secret mission to create its own time machine, had resulted in catastrophically botched incidents:

The ridiculous Florida experiment, an ultimately insignificant test that was still trailing its rags publicly. The spontaneous crumbling of a building in the bustling heart of Rio de Janeiro. And, perhaps worst of all, the strange, half-promising, half-calamitous episode at the Somosierra Tunnel, a mere hour's drive from where he stood right now.

Somosierra was particularly troublesome.

Ebner drew the newspaper clipping from his jacket.

The incident remains under investigation by local and federal crime units.

Of course it does! A school bus vanishes in a tunnel and reappears days later, bearing evidence of an attack by Napoleonic soldiers from 1808? To say nothing of the disappearance of two of its passengers or the subsequent deadly illness of the survivors?

To Ebner, these mistakes meant one thing: only Copernicus's original device—his Eternity Machine, as a recently discovered document referred to it—could ever travel through time successfully.

Every effort otherwise seemed doomed to failure. That was why he had issued a moratorium. No more experiments until further data was amassed and analyzed.

Meanwhile, the workers worked, the researchers researched, and the Copernicus Room, Ebner's beloved brainchild, hummed on.

For example . . . him . . . there . . . Helmut Bern.

The young Swiss hipster sat hunched over his station as if over a platter of hot cheese and sausages. With an improbably constant three days' stubble, an artfully shaved head, and a gold ear stud, Bern had just been relocated from Berlin. The man was now dedicated to uncovering the errors in the Kronos program, and especially Kronos III, the time gun used in the Somosierra mess.

Ebner was strolling over to question him on his progress when the thousands of fingers stopped clacking at once. There was a sudden hush in the room, and Ebner swung around, his heart thudding wildly.

It was she, entering.

Galina Krause—the not-yet-twenty-year-old Grand Mistress of the Knights of the Teutonic Order—slid liquidly between the elevator doors and strode into the Copernicus Room.

As always, she was dressed in black as severe as raven feathers. A silver-studded belt was nearly the only color. But then, who needed color when the different hues of her irises—one silver, one diamond blue, a phenomenon known as heterochromia iridis—took all one's breath away, made her so forbidding, so strangely and mysteriously hypnotic? The very definition, Ebner mused, of dangerous beauty.
Femme fatale.

Draped around her neck was a half-dollar-sized ruby carved into the shape of a kraken, a jewel once owned by the sixteenth-century Grand Master Albrecht von Hohenzollern. Galina's personal archaeologist, Markus Wolff, had found that particular item, though he, Ebner, had been the one to present it to her last week.

Ebner bowed instinctively. Anyone standing did the same.

Observing the attention, Galina waved it off with her hand. “Vela will inform the Kaplans where the next relic is,” she said, her voice slithering toward him as she approached. “If they are intelligent enough to decipher its message. Where are they at this moment?”

“Newly arrived in New York City,” Ebner said. “Alas, after Markus Wolff left them in California, they are once again safe and sound. Our New York agents got nothing from them but the blade of Magellan's dagger. We have dispatched a more seasoned squad from Marseille.”

“The Kaplan brood is learning to defend itself,” Galina said. “Continue to have them watched closely and every movement entered into these databases. Assign one unit specifically to monitor them, but do not stall them. We may need their lead, if all of this”—she flicked her fingers almost dismissively around the vast chamber—“does not offer up the names of the original Guardians.”

“It shall,” Ebner said proudly. “No expense has been spared. One hundred interconnected databases are now online.”

“Alert our agents in Texas to watch their families, too, and ensure that they know they are being watched.”

“Ah, an added element of fear, good,” said Ebner. “On another matter, we have traced a courier working with the present-day Guardians.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Prague. He recently returned there from somewhere in Italy. We do not have his Italian contact yet, but the courier's identity is known to us.”

“Curious,” she said softly. “I have business in Prague. I will . . .” Galina suddenly looked past Ebner at a tall, broad-shouldered man with a deep tan stepping off the elevator. He wore wraparound dark glasses.

Who the devil is this,
thought Ebner,
a film star?