The Serpent's Curse

  “Or KGB agents,” Darrell said. He glanced quickly around them. “They’re in disguise, of course. Much better than Lily’s umbrella killer. You never see them until they pounce on you; then it’s too late. James Bond could tell you.”

  “The KGB is called the FSB now,” Becca said, “and anyway, we should totally expect it. Duke Vasily was a friend of Albrecht’s, remember. Maybe they’re still working together. The Order and the FSB. As scary as Berlin was, or London, this is worse. So much worse.”

  It was a lot of words for Becca, she knew that. But she felt she had to get it out there.

  Because when you think about it . . . what just happened with Wade almost certainly means that the Order knows exactly where we are and what we’re doing. The Russian safe house, she thought. How will we get there without the Order’s agents tracking us? Even with Julian’s untraceable phones, going to an airport tells everyone where you are.

  They walked unhindered through the terminal and outside into the icy, smoke-thick, and diesel-clogged air. It was frigid, a new kind of iron cold that froze your bones.

  “Even though we pretty much know that Umbrella Man killed Boris,” Lily said as Roald led them to the platform for the shuttle that was supposed to take them to the rental car center, “does it mean we automatically believe everything Boris told us? He did hide his real name from us. Could our trip to Russia be a setup?”

  Darrell stomped his feet to keep warm. “Yeah, we have to think of that. Even though his visas got us in here safely. All except Wade, I mean. He’s on borrowed time. Lubyanky, here you come.”

  “Funny,” said Wade, splaying five fingers in Darrell’s face.

  “Calm down, everyone,” Roald said. “We’ll talk when we get into our car.” He waved down the rental car shuttle bus like a soccer dad on the sidelines. The driver seemed to make the stop grudgingly, as if picking up passengers were voluntary. Scowling, he whisked the door open but didn’t leave his seat or help them stow their bags.

  “Let’s keep focused,” Roald whispered as they mounted the steps to their seats. “The car ride to Saint Sergius will take us a couple of hours. But we have to remember, it’s a holy place and a shrine, where Maxim and thousands of monks lived, all the way up to now. We are polite, we’re tourists, we’re Texans, but we watch our backs, stay together, and if we find ourselves against a wall, we don’t fight anyone.” His voice grew louder with the last three words, but he lowered it again. “There’s always another way to solve things. After Saint Sergius, we’ll drive back to Moscow. We’ll be here again before it gets dark.”

  “If you ask me, it’s already dark,” Darrell grumbled. “Let’s go already.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  It was just after two o’clock in the afternoon when Lily and the others emerged from the rental car center under a grim sky swirling with gray clouds. Uncle Roald squeezed behind the wheel of a boxy blue Aleko sedan like a giant on a tricycle. The rest of them squished in wherever they could. The car stank of diesel fuel inside and out, but it drove perkily enough to push Lily back in her seat when Roald hit the accelerator.

  “Finally, we’re moving,” Darrell said with a sigh.

  “Agreed,” said Wade. “Thank you, Boris.”

  “And Terence Ackroyd,” Roald reminded them. “This car will free up our movements. Public transportation here is too public. There are CCTV cameras everywhere. After the monastery, we’ll hole up in the Moscow safe house, but until then we have no footprint. We spend as little money as we can. We slip in and out of wherever we are like ghosts.”

  Lily wasn’t sure he expected or wanted a response from anyone, but she gave one anyway. “I’m totally into that.” She liked their new secrecy and felt safer because of the precautions, even the troublesome finger gestures. But ghosts? I really like that.

  The roads out of the airport were surprisingly simple. But the weather was turning grayer by the minute, more bitterly cold, and the clouds announced that serious snow was on its way. The Aleko’s heating system was loud and ineffective.

  “If, as we all pretty much hope, Maxim Grek does prove to be the second Guardian,” Becca said, turning to the double-eyed figure sketched in the diary’s margin, “the monastery where he lived his last years might actually give me something to decode these pages, which I am now calling ‘the Guardian Files.’”

  Darrell nodded, smiling. “Nice. I think we should name everything. It makes it seem more important that way.”

  Wade turned. “I name you . . . Darrell.”

  Darrell grinned. “I already feel important.”

  For the next hour, Lily searched online encyclopedia entries about Saint Sergius on the tablet, covering as much history as she could. “Sergiev Posad,” she told them, “is the first stop on the western side of what is called ‘the Golden Ring,’ a four-hundred-mile drive through a bunch of ancient monastic towns stretching northeast of Moscow. The monastery of Saint Sergius was founded in 1345 and is still the most important monastery in the country. It’s also the center of the Russian Orthodox Church. It’s called a lavra, which is a monastery including a bunch of cells for hermits. There are over three hundred monks there now.”

  “An army, if they’re all working for the Order,” Darrell said.

  “Darrell, they’re not,” his stepfather said.

  There was little information about Maxim’s stay there, except to say that cells from around the time of his death might still exist. “Which is good,” she said. “But the monastery’s also under renovation, which could be a problem. The original cells were built inside the walls. We should start there and see where it takes us.”

  After a good stretch of highway driving, Wade arched up in his seat. “I think I see it. The monastery.”

  They were still miles from the city proper, but a cluster of towers rose over the landscape like beacons. The monastery seemed enormous, perched on a hill and surrounded by tall, powerful, whitewashed stone walls set at irregular angles. Some portions of the walls were fitted with scaffolding, while dozens of domed towers loomed over the walls, some dazzlingly blue and spangled with stars like the night sky, others brilliant gold, and every one of them dusted with a ring of fresh snow.

  All told, the drive to Sergiev Posad had taken a little over two hours, putting them there at roughly half past four. The large parking area had only a few cars in it, a smattering of work trucks, and one police vehicle, idling at an angle to the front gate. Roald parked at the far end of the lot, and they got out. They walked quietly through the mounting wind toward the entrance gate in the shadow of the walls.

  Then Roald paused and checked his watch. “Kids . . .” His voice was low, almost hoarse from not speaking. “This is a different land, one with centuries of history that Western visitors might not understand. Be on your guard, all of you. And I’ll say it again. Absolutely do not confront anyone. This is serious. More serious than serious.”

  As if the few birds and the roaring of traffic and even the movement of the air understood his words, the instant they passed through the massive monastery gate, quiet fell over them like a low, gray, heavy, ominous shadow.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Greywolf, Republic of Karelia, Northwest Russia

  When her silver Range Rover stopped three hundred kilometers northeast of Saint Petersburg, Galina Krause’s stomach twisted like a cloth being wrung out.

  In one sense, Greywolf, the secret sixteenth-century fortress of Duke Vasily III, seemed like any private lair built outside any city the size of Saint Petersburg: a summertime resort used by those in favor with the current political regime.

  Except that in 1515, there was no Saint Petersburg, and Greywolf was hundreds of miles from any shadow of civilized life. It was constructed in a time of blood law, betrayal, and murder, the menacing fortress of a powerful and quite paranoid ruler.

  Vasily III had built the blocklike main structure using an army of slave labor—who he’d then had slain because they knew far too muc
h. Greywolf—or Seriyvolk—was, in fact, where Vasily and Albrecht had cemented their mysterious and violent alliance. The building was born, existed, and aged nearly two centuries before Saint Petersburg existed. By that time, Greywolf was already buried deep in the wolf-ridden wastelands, far from the prying eyes of any human being, let alone an intrigue-besotted royal court.

  To Galina Krause, Greywolf represented the deepest circle of torment she had ever endured in her young life.

  “Open the doors,” she said.

  Ebner tore himself from his heated seat in the Range Rover, slogged past the burned-out husk of the east wing, whose beams had been blackened four years earlier by a violent inferno, and trod up the wide stairs to unlock and unbolt the heavy front doors.

  Glancing up at the fortified tower that protruded from the castle’s heart like the hilt of a dagger, Galina ascended the steps behind him. He shifted aside. She entered, intent on ignoring the shadow passing over her, although—inauspiciously—the Madrid coffin followed her in.

  Two faceless men from the Red Brotherhood rolled the box through room after spacious room and into a windowless chamber in the center of the ground floor. From there they moved into an elevator installed in Stalin’s time. A half minute later, they reached the summit of the tower, and the box was wheeled out. The room was a broad, circular, and high-ceilinged laboratory with a gallery running around the upper level. Save for a very large object in wraps, the room was bare.

  “Galina,” Ebner began, “there is still time to rethink—”

  “We have different concepts of time, Ebner. Remove the cover.”

  He sighed and walked to the center of the room. He tugged at the heavy black cloth. It fell away from a construction of gears and rods and barrels that vaguely resembled an alien weapon.

  Kronos I.

  Despite the airy promises of the Copernicus Room, or the chance of overtaking the Kaplans in their freakishly successful run for the relics, to Galina it was Kronos I that held out the most hope.

  “Miss Krause . . .” Ebner cleared his throat. “This prototype was a failure. Built before I could conduct the necessary and exhaustive tests. Built, Galina, you must recall, in the horrifying days of your recovery four years ago. The poor creatures we sent God-knows-where never had a chance of survival. Kronos One was born of impatience, constructed years before I could assemble the data needed to—”

  “You built it.”

  He paused. “I did. I did build it. I built Kronos to your specifications. And the concept was brilliant. To mimic the Copernicus astrolabe in such a manner, with such inconceivable detail, was a lofty goal. But after four years of improvements, even Kronos Three, our most effective model, is fatally flawed. Our goal of a faultless time journey has proved unattainable. Heaven knows how you ever conceived of something so devilishly . . . magnificent, particularly in your weakened state. But your—our—ideas were frighteningly incomplete.”

  “Helmut Bern will complete them.”

  “Galina, please—”

  She raised her hand with such suddenness it must have taken his breath away. He coughed and stifled himself.

  She approached the ten-foot spoked wheel of platinum. The barrel protruding from its center was winged with a series of angled flanges, large at the body of the gun and narrowing to a point at the tip. There was no helical coil of superconducting fiber, which they had implemented on later models, and little finesse to the targeting mechanism.

  On the other hand, no machine, not even Kronos III, had ever attempted to send a living thing back half a millennium. Their only real success, the botched Somosierra test, had been a mere two hundred years. Kronos I, unlike any subsequent version of the machine, contained a seat of sorts, a kind of cage, which held the passenger, though the controls were set wisely out of reach.

  “Kronos One was both crude and audacious,” Galina said softly, running her fingers along the machine’s razor-sharp angles. “And therein lies its beauty, Ebner. Open the coffin.”

  With an even sadder breath, Ebner undid the four latches around the perimeter of the death box. His face grimacing like a weightlifter’s, he lifted the upper half of the lid to reveal the blindfolded, unmoving body of Sara Kaplan.

  Her unkempt brown hair had twisted across her face during the flight from Madrid. Her clothes, a summer-weight linen camping suit, were wrinkled, stained, sunken. Her face was pale white but bore a surprising rosy tinge in its cheeks.

  Galina turned to the two silent men. “Move her into the cage.”

  The two men undid the restraints and removed Sara from the coffin. They carried her dead weight to Kronos I and inserted her in the cage’s reclining seat. They closed the cage door and chained and bolted it shut.

  “Leave us,” Galina said to the men. They bowed wordlessly and left.

  She untied the woman’s blindfold, then removed a small black case from her belt. From it she withdrew a syringe and a bottle of clear liquid. She tapped the syringe’s glass barrel. Pressing her thumb on the plunger, she watched the needle release a tiny bubble of air, then a narrow fountain of the liquid.

  How often Galina had seen the same thing done by doctors over the last four years. First here in Greywolf, then in Argentina, then in Sydney, Oslo, Myanmar, and most recently Budapest. A seemingly endless series of injections, endured for but one end.

  She sank the needle into the woman’s arm.

  I know exactly how this feels, my dear. The cold pinch. The pressure on the skin. The heat in your arm as the chemical swims into your bloodstream.

  The body in the cage jerked violently, ripping its worn camping suit. Her legs stiffened against the iron bars, her head convulsed, the jaws ground each other, her eyes shuddered open, and she screamed, her first words for days.

  “You insane crazy freak—”

  Sara Kaplan screamed and screamed, then coughed and gagged until her lungs gave out and her head fell back.

  “Perhaps I am such a thing,” Galina said, stroking the scar on her neck. “On the other hand, you are, thus far, unhurt. You will remain alive as long as you help us locate some stolen property.”

  “In your dreams, witch—”

  “You will help us,” Galina repeated in a dry, unemotional tone. “Or not only you, but Roald Kaplan and your two sons will die. Then we shall simply close this house and walk away. No one will think to look for you here. No one comes to Greywolf.”

  “Except maniacs like you,” Sara gasped, looking around at the cage and the machine. “Did you invent this nightmare? Is this, like, the inside of your sick head?”

  “You, my dear, are ransom,” Galina said, suddenly smiling. “And your future is controlled by this nightmare. Think of Darrell and of Wade. Think of your husband. Soon, your family will discover that you can be saved in only one way. By giving me the Copernicus relics.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “If they do not give them to me, well . . .”

  Sara started yelling at the top of her lungs.

  “Shall I?” Ebner asked.

  With a nod from her, Ebner roughly gagged Sara with a cloth soaked with sedatives. He strapped the gag to her face with a band stretching around her head and retied her blindfold. He retested the cage’s locks and bolts and stepped away.

  Helmut Bern entered the chamber, dusting snow from the shoulders of his Prada overcoat and gawking like an idiot. “What is this place? It looks like the set of a Frankenstein movie. . . .” He trailed off when he saw the machine. Puzzled, he looked to Ebner, then to Galina, then back at the machine. “There’s a woman in that thing.”

  “Which is no concern of yours,” Galina said impassively. “Bern, I want you to reprogram Kronos with what you discovered in Madrid. You will also incorporate at the moment of transport a particle injection into its passenger.”

  “A particle injection?” Bern said. “What sort of particle?”

  “A radioisotope,” she said. “For tracking purposes.”

/>   “But that will poison the passen . . . her. It will poison her.”

  “Once more, this does not concern you. Finally, I wish you to decrypt the Magister’s Cádiz code and enter its coordinates into the computer. You have until”—she glanced at her phone—“the end of the day on Sunday. Let us say midnight.”

  “Midnight on Sunday?” Bern said. “That’s barely two days!”

  Galina leaned over to a clockwork mechanism that was mounted outside the cage near the spoked wheel. She touched a number of minute levers sequentially, and the sound of clicking began. “The timer is set at fifty-six hours, eleven minutes, twenty-two seconds . . . twenty-one . . . twenty. . . . No delay, Bern.”

  “But, how can I work with such a deadline?” he said, his voice gaining pitch with each word. “Miss Krause, please. I will certainly labor as hard as I can, but by midnight Sunday? What the devil will happen then?”

  “Kronos will do what it was meant to do.”

  “With unfinished programming?” Bern’s voice was at toddler pitch now. “What if I need ten minutes more? Three seconds more?”

  “I have an appointment in Istanbul Monday morning that cannot be missed. No delay, Bern. Please do not make me say this a third time.” Galina turned away from the incredulous expression on his face, her lips warming into a smile as Bartolo Cassa entered the chamber, pushing in a second coffin.

  “Ah, the Italian shipment,” she said.

  “Leave it against the wall,” Ebner said sharply. “Is there anything else?”

  “A message from the Copernicus Room,” Cassa said. “They have just traced the Prague courier’s contact in Italy, the agent who was to pass a message to Boris Rubashov tomorrow night, and where.” He handed Galina his phone.

  On it was a single image.

  She felt a shiver run up her spine to the base of her skull. “Is this all? No other word?”