The Serpent's Curse (37 page)

Satisfied that the Brotherhood had not followed them, Wade pulled out the paper Aleksandr had given them, huddled against the wind, and tried to study the drawing. But all he saw in his mind were Sara and Darrell and Becca and his father, and he could only imagine the terror of what was happening at Greywolf. “I hope they're okay. The others, I mean—”

“I know who you mean,” Lily said, crouching up against him in the doorway. “I'm thinking about them, too. But we have work here. Come on.”

He tried to reset his thoughts and focus on the paper again. “Okay, if you're right, the first clue is Red Square, but what do we do when we get there?”

“Hey, I deciphered the first clue,” she said. “Now it's your turn.”

“Thanks so much.”

“While you think, let's keep moving,” she said. “And I mean it. You think.”

They marched out of the doorway into the wind, crossed two streets, doubled back, and moved forward until the tunneled arches of the famed Resurrection Gate loomed ahead of them. They waited where they had agreed to meet Terence, but he didn't come and didn't come.

Lily shook her head. “We need to go on. Terence may be hours. We don't have hours. The journey to the end of the sea is long, and we're nearly there. What does the triangle inside the square mean?”

Wade had asked himself the same question. “It's technically an upside down
V
; the bottom isn't closed, as in a triangle.”

Lily gave him a face. “Helpful, Einstein. Alek said his Guardian friend was an Egyptologist. They're all about pharaohs and pyramids and deserts and mummies—” She stopped, whipped out her tablet, and powered it on. “I'm searching ‘Red Square' and ‘Egypt' to see if there's any kind of clue here. What about the numbers? Come on. Figure out the numbers while we walk.”

They crept through under the gate's deep archway and came out alongside the bulky, ornate, redbrick State Historical Museum. Its gold awnings were heavy with new snow. They paused at the corner and looked south across the vast, deserted square. It was already covered by a thickening blanket of white; snow was blowing around in more twisters.

“The numbers, I don't get,” he said, slowing under the first streetlight. “Forgetting for a second the upside-down
V
, I've been trying to find a pattern in the numbers, but I don't see one. Seven, one, nine, three, blank, blank, blank. If there was a pattern, I might be able to figure out the last three. They might be a combination or an entry code. But I can't find the sequence. Maybe I can use the calculator on the tablet—”

“Oh.”

“What?”

She pointed across the square through the squalling snow. Against the high red wall of the Kremlin fortress stood a stumpy pyramid of red and black stone. “There.”

“What about it?” he asked.

“Well, (
a
) it's a pyramid. And (
b
) it's the Lenin mausoleum. Not John Lennon, but Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution. And (
c
) maybe your eyes aren't as good as mine because of all the reading you do, but if you look at the lettering on the front of the tomb, the red lettering against the black, you'll see what I see. It says
Lenin
. Of course, it's in Russian, so the
L
in
Lenin
is not a regular
L
, as in Lily, but an upside-down
V
. Look at it.”

He did. Through the whirling flakes he read the letters.

∧ Е Н И Н

He made a sound. “Whoa . . . is that it?”

“I don't know,” she said, tugging Alek's scroll from him, “but if the outside box
does
mean Red Square, then the upside-down
V
could mean a building
in
Red Square. That would make me think that maybe the numbers tell us something
about
the upside-down-
V
building. Maybe that's the way the clue goes. From outside to inside.”

From outside to inside?
Lily was being pretty brilliant.

Wade studied the tomb. It sat snugly against the Kremlin wall, a squat, five-level pyramid of granite and marble, forty feet tall. It vaguely reminded him of a stepped Aztec temple. In one way it was small, like the foundation of a much taller structure that was never built. In another way, the building was grimly impressive, its multiple levels catching the light of the square in odd and ominous ways.

Because it was the resting place of a maybe-controversial Russian leader, it was heavily guarded. From that distance, it appeared to have eight, maybe ten fully armed soldiers stationed around it.

“Okay, but why there?” he asked.

“Because Lenin is
embalmed
,” she said, wagging her tablet. “It says here that every year and a half they redo the embalming to keep him looking fresh and natural. I'm guessing that Alek's Guardian friend was an Egyptologist who knew about embalming, and that he worked on Lenin and hid Serpens in there while he was doing embalming stuff.”

“Your face turns green whenever you say
embalming
, you know,” Wade said.

“I feel it doing that.”

On either side of the tomb and following the Kremlin wall was a loose row of blue spruce trees. They were impeccably trimmed, of nearly identical size, and now ornamented and sagging with heavy late-season snow.

“So . . . the Copernicus relic is in Lenin's tomb?” Wade said.

“One plus one equals Lenin's tomb,” she said.

“Speaking of numbers, what
about
the numbers?” he asked.

“That's so your department, math head,” she said. “Come on.”

They paused close to the facade of the Historical Museum, then darted over the cobblestones to where the Kremlin wall jutted out. They peeked around the abutment to scout out the mausoleum guards.

“Two guards on this side of the tomb and six spread across the front,” Lily said. “I don't see any at all covering the back. There are probably two or more on the far side. You know, maybe the numbers are a Russian phone number.”

He gave her a look. “I think modern Russian phone numbers have more than seven digits.”

“Digits, huh?” She counted the guards again. “Maybe it's an old number.”

“Right. Maybe it's Lenin's home phone number from 1924, but nobody knows the last three digits because how do you phone a dead guy?”

She looked at him. “You could try a little harder, you know. We're out of time. We need to do this. Then we need to get out of Russia forever.”

At the word
Russia
, Wade's brain twitched. In their time there, he'd never come to terms with the country. His “map” of Russia was false, based on the insane things they'd done over the last few days, the danger they'd been in, the number of times they'd nearly died, the terror about Sara's fate. The dread of what was happening at Greywolf weighed on him like lead. He'd seen Lubyanka and Vorkuta, but he'd never really gotten to know
Russia
. Now, like Lily, all he wanted to do was leave it.

“Our best bet is to make our way behind the trees,” Lily said. She slid past him, weaving through a stretch of temporary fencing. They flattened together against the Kremlin wall. Wade figured they were a couple hundred yards from the tomb. His chest ached. This was ridiculous. A movie. What if they were actually spotted? Caught? Fired on?

And yet, the moment the tomb guards looked off toward the cathedral, he trotted down the narrow space between the trees and the Kremlin wall, toward the back corner of the tomb, with Lily right after him. Ridiculous or not, they were doing it and getting closer to the center of the onion.

Then Lily went to stone. “Look.”

There was a narrow set of steps at the back of the structure, leading down several feet from ground level to a steel door at the bottom of the steps.

“A basement.”

“Do tombs have basements?” he whispered.

“Maybe. This is Russia. What do we know?” She leaned out as far as she could and stared at the tomb. “Besides, there's something on the wall next to the door. I think it's a keypad. There are your
digits
for you, math boy.”

The soldiers shifted slightly, then froze like columns, unmoving, except for their eyes, which were staring forward. The kids waited for some kind of noise distraction, and after a few breathless minutes, it came. A siren blared several blocks away from the square. An ambulance or fire engine, wheeling through the streets, honking and wailing. Then a second one, following the first. Wade and Lily left the cover of the trees and darted the twenty feet to the back corner of the mausoleum and down the narrow steps before the sirens died. The keypad was set at eye level next to the door frame.

“This is where you shine, number boy,” she said. “Or get us killed. Your choice.”

His chest tightened. His heart didn't stop booming. Keypads. Lily was right. A single wrong entry and they were done for. A squad of Russian soldiers were only yards away, and they probably had orders to shoot to kill, no questions asked.

“Have you figured out the pattern yet?” she asked.

He shook his head. “There are a thousand combinations. Just let me think.” And he tried to. He nearly did. But the thought of all the possible combinations froze him.
Key in the wrong numbers and we're dead.
With one unknown number, he might have had a chance to determine the pattern, but
three
unknowns? He stared blankly at the keypad as if it would somehow tell him the answer. It didn't. He looked at the strip of paper for the numbers. He didn't have to. He had memorized the sequence.

7, 1, 9, 3, ? ? ?

He tugged off his glove, then ran his shaking index finger over the keypad, not touching it, but tracing out the first four numbers. Seven. One. Nine. Three. He did it again. A third time. A fourth. Something unfroze in his brain. Something thawed and shifted.

“Your fingers aren't touching the pad, you know,” Lily said.

“I know,” he said. “But look at this.” He repeated the sequence twice for her. “See?”

“Your finger not touching the pad? I do see that.”

“No, look again. There's a shape. What shape does it make when you key in seven, one, nine, and three?” He moved his index finger once again over the keys.

“Um . . .
N
,” she said. “So seven, one, nine, three is
N
, as in . . . Wait, you're not saying
N
for
Nicolaus
? Are you saying the next three numbers form a
C
for
Copernicus
?”

He found himself grinning at her. “Why not? It's what Brother Semyon did at the monastery, moving the stones in the shape of an
M
, for
Maxim
. It's an old trick, a simple one, but unless you know where and when to do it, you wouldn't guess it. If this
is
it, making the shape of a letter with numbers, the three numbers for
C
would be two, four, and eight. The whole sequence, for
N
and
C
is seven, one, nine, three, two, four, eight. I'm going to do it.” He glared at her. “Unless you stop me.”

She crossed her arms.

“Okay, then.” He raised his trembling finger and tapped in the numbers.

Seven
. . .

One . . .

Nine . . .

Three . . .

Two . . .

Four . . .

“Wait!” Lily whispered, clutching his hand suddenly. “It's not eight. It's zero. The last three numbers aren't two, four, eight; they're two, four, zero.”

“What? Why?”

“Because of the other clue. The Copernicus quote, remember? ‘The journey to the end of the sea is long'? Everybody's been telling us this line, but what if sometimes it isn't
sea
—as in splash-splash—but
C
as in
Copernicus
? The journey to the end of the
C
is long. And the Egyptologist meant it that way, as a trick or a pun. Guardians have to be tricky. So the leg of the
C
doesn't end at eight. It goes as long as it can. All the way down to zero. Do it, do zero now!”