The Serpent's Curse (21 page)

“Good work, Dad,” said Darrell. “You were awesome.”

Roald grumbled under his breath. “I feel like a teenager,” he said. “And not in a good way. What did you discover in the tower? Not Serpens?”

“No. A small document,” said Becca. “And a decryption key. I think it's a decryption key, maybe to the passage in the diary. I hope it is . . .”

“It's a start, anyway,” his father said.

Which only reminded Wade of that line Boris had told them twice.
The journey to the end of the sea is long.
Well, their long day was ending, they had all risked their lives, and they had no relic, only a tiny scroll of paper that they
hoped
would be a part of the puzzle, but they weren't even sure of that. Sara was still lost, somewhere in Russia. But Russia was enormous. Maxim Grek was looking like just the beginning of a very long journey. But they wouldn't know for certain until they deciphered the scroll. Even if they did find something, it might be just one clue leading to another and another . . .

Is hidden, and is hidden, and is hidden like layers of onion.

Roald switched lanes suddenly, then switched again, just as abruptly.

“Dad?” Darrell said. “What is it?”

“They found us. The van parked outside the monastery. Hold on—”

He swerved boldly across the highway and took the nearest exit ramp onto a side road. They bounced onto the street at the bottom of the ramp and headed for the highway underpass, where Roald spun the car around. He switched off the headlights.

The large gray van screeched down the exit ramp after them, then paused when it spotted them hiding under the highway. It motored slowly toward them. A moment later, a black car appeared. They could see the man in the rumpled suit from the monastery behind the wheel.

“This is not good,” said Lily. “Should we get out and take cover?”

“We can take the little guy,” said Darrell.

“No way,” said his father, staring in each direction as if memorizing what he saw.

Suddenly the driver of the black car jumped out and approached them, his gun drawn. Wade's father glared at him intently. “Wade, get in the driver's seat, foot on the brake, put it in gear, and don't take your eyes off me.”

“Dad, I can't drive!”

“You might have to. The rest of you stay put.” His father jumped out of the car, leaving the engine running, and started talking, babbling really, as Wade warily shifted behind the wheel.

“I have what you're looking for!” his father yelled. “We found it at the monastery. The monk tried to stop us, but we found it. You can take it. We don't even know what it is, but you can take it. Just leave us alone. Let us leave in peace, and that's it. We'll go home.”

Wade knew his father was bluffing, but what else he was planning he had no idea, until he saw his father reach into his hip pocket and palm the little silver device the detectives had given him in New York. The stun gun.

“You are being smart,” said the man in a thick voice. He waved his gun casually, not at anyone.

Keeping the thick-voiced man between himself and the van, Wade's father marched right up to him, still jabbering like a lunatic, waving his arms. All at once, he crouched and jerked the Taser into the guy's chest. The man went spasmodic. He cried out and arched backward, dropping his gun. He fell in a quivering heap onto the snowy pavement. The goons from the van bolted over on foot.

“Wade! Now!”

He couldn't believe his father actually wanted him to drive the car, but his father was obviously trapped. The only way he could escape was if Wade jammed his foot on the accelerator and plowed the car between the charging men and his father.

“Omigod, Wade!” Becca cried. “Do it!”

“I—ahhh!”

The squeal of tires and the groaning of the engine weren't the worst things. Becca and Darrell both shrieked when he nearly ran his father down. At the last second, Wade stomped his foot on the brake. The car skidded ten feet toward the goons. They scattered. Lily reached over the seat and swung the front passenger door open. Wade's father dived into the car.

“Heads down! Gas!” his father yelled. Wade pressed the pedal to the floor.

His father grabbed the wheel, and together they swerved at the men again. The air exploded with shots. The car skidded between the van and the black car, then back up the wrong way onto the exit ramp. Bullets thudded into the side panels and blew out the rear window. With a crazy turn of the wheel, they spun into traffic and righted seconds before they would have smashed into a tractor trailer.

“Good . . . good . . . ,” his father said, finally lifting himself over Wade and switching places with him. Under cover of quickly thickening snowfall, they tore back down the highway to Moscow.

Greywolf

S
ara Kaplan woke up to ticking.

It sounded like the teeth of one gear joining with another's. Or the rhythmical oscillations of a giant clockwork. Either way, it wasn't normal.

“Where am I?” she mumbled through gagged lips. No answer. Blindfolded, she listened with every atom she could muster. No sound but the strange, loud ticking behind her head. The man who always seemed to be humming wasn't nearby. She was alone, still caged in that horrifying machine.

It had been hours since the troll and the supermodel had had her removed from the coffin. While her brain was still oozing forward like sludge, making only the most obvious connections, Sara deduced that the coffin had been used to keep prying eyes away as they smuggled her from place to place. She also reasoned that she had taken a series of airplane flights since she was first drugged in La Paz and could be just about anywhere now.

It was cold here. What did that crazy witch call it? Greywolf? What in the world were the Copernicus relics, and what did her family have to do with them? And of all things, a coffin! What sort of people . . .

But Sara guessed what sort of people they were. Not what they were all about, of course, but the kinds of things they did. Evil things. Very expensive evil things.

This wasn't your ordinary kidnapping for ransom.

At the thought of ransom and the image of her family around the living-room table waiting for a call, her eyes welled up. Then her brain sparked again. No. Not the living-room table. Roald had taken the children to Europe. Berlin. She'd received that message on her phone before she landed in Bolivia. A series of messages, even a couple from Darrell a few days later, put them somewhere—Italy?—with Roald's niece and her friend. Seriously? What was going on? What in the world was her family doing, traveling across the globe while she was transferred from a coffin to a horrible ticking engine? At least there didn't seem to be any more flights for her. She was where her kidnappers wanted her.

Greywolf.

Wherever that was . . .

Footsteps approached.

“Please tell me where I am,” she gasped, scarcely more clearly. The footsteps came closer. She took in a breath and tried again. “Where—”

“Hush, my dear. Quiet!” A woman's voice, her breath hot and stale.

“Who's there?” All at once, Sara's blindfold was lifted and her gag removed. She blinked in the light, and the face before her clarified. The woman was her age, maybe a few years older. Her dark hair was limp, dangling over her face, her clothes filthy, stained. In one hand she held . . . a kitchen knife? Was there blood on it?

“Don't hurt me, please,” Sara said. “I've been kidnapped.”

“What? No,” said the woman. She placed the knife carefully on the floor at her feet, then set about struggling with the chains that bound Sara into the machine, but her weak, bruised fingers could do nothing. “I must get you out of here,” she said. An accent. Italian?

“Who are you?” Sara asked the woman.

“You have . . . I heard them saying . . . two days only.”

“Two days? Before what? Who are you?”

The woman seemed half delirious, her thin fingers shaking, her eyes darting back and forth over the clockwork mechanism whose ticking had woken Sara. “Two days before the machine does what it does! The clockwork. Look. It counts down!”

“Who are you?” Sara repeated. “And these people? Where is Greywolf? Please, you have to get a message to my husband. His name is Roald Kaplan. His cell number is—”

The woman's fingers froze. She stared at Sara. “Roald Kaplan . . . you said Roald Kaplan? You are Sara Kaplan! They took you, too! Because of the relics!”

“Wait, how do you know Roald—”

“I will try to find him. I have a friend at Moscow State University.”

“Moscow? We're in Russia?”

Something clanked from outside the room. The door to the upper gallery swung open, and the humming man in the lab coat entered in a rush, holding a tray and focused on keeping whatever was on it from spilling. The woman quickly replaced Sara's gag and the blindfold. Sara heard her pick up the knife and duck around behind the machine.
Who are you?
she wanted to scream, but she let her head drop to her chest as if she were still drugged. She'd read enough Terence Ackroyd stories to know to do that. When she heard the man in the lab coat humming as he trotted down the stairs to her, and smelled the hot coffee, she realized he hadn't seen the woman. She had escaped.

Whoever she is, she knows Roald! She'll find him. She'll tell him where I am. He'll come for me. Darrell and Wade, too. Soon they'll come for me!

Moscow

S
trangely, to herself at least, Becca didn't freak out after the insanity of the car chase. Even racing to Moscow in a smoking, sputtering, nearly windowless rental car with a bullet-riddled engine didn't faze her. And while everyone else was either breathless (Lily) or crazy anxious (Wade) or jabbering his head off (Darrell) or staring zombielike down the road ahead (Uncle Roald), Becca was calm.

More than calm, she was serene.

Something had clicked, and her mind was blocking everything out and holding a single image. The mirrored outlines of Italy.

She was certain they were the key to decrypting the Maxim passage in Copernicus's diary, the one marked with the date “xiii February 1517.”

If they were
also
the key to the tiny scroll from the Onion Tower, she would translate both texts here and now. She would do it in that freezing, smoking, cramped Aleko, and she would conjure the astronomer's words and Maxim's five-hundred-year-old message.

Badgering Wade and Darrell to shield the diary from the wind, Lily focused the tablet in flashlight mode overhead so Becca could work out the double-eyed code.

Like a television chef preparing a delicious dish, she ran her finger along the diary page and narrated everything.

“First, we have the coded passage. Here is the beginning line.”

Ourn ao froa lfa atsiu vlali am sa tlrlau dsa . . .

“If I'm right about the two facing Italys, the double-eyed passage is created by sort of
braiding
the words from the beginning
and
the end. To decode it, we have to separate every other letter into the two halves of the message. So the first, third, fifth, and so on give us
this
line.” She wrote the letters carefully in her notebook, hoping she could hold on to the slender thread of how she thought the code worked.

o r a f o l a t i v a i m a l l u s

“And the second, fourth, sixth, and so on, give us
this
line.”

u n o r a f a s u l l a s t r a d a

She wrote those letters down beneath the first. She recognized a word in that line—
strada
, for “street”—but it could be meaningless if the backward half of the code didn't work too.

“Will there be a quiz on this?” asked Darrell. “Or do you want us to know this because you are planning to leave us?”

“Neither,” she said.