The Serpent's Curse

  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.

  “Good,” said Lily.

  “I just think you should know this stuff,” she added.

  “We should,” said Wade, leaning over her and her notebook.

  The snow had let up a bit, and traffic was faster now. She spied the dim lights from skyscrapers in northern Moscow in the distance. Somehow that comforted her.

  “So . . . since the backward shape of Italy was on the left, or first, if we’re reading left to right, the code actually starts at the end of the message. This means that o-r-a-f-o-l-a-t-i-v-a-i-m-a-l-l-u-s is backward. Turned around it becomes s-u-l-l-a-m-i-a-v-i-t-a-l-o-f-a-r-o.”

  She wrote that down as neatly as she could, bouncing along in a wrecked car at eighty miles an hour. She saw a word there, too. “Now, because the passage starts with the end of the message, I’m going to guess that the lengths of the coded words—O-u-r-n a-o f-r-o-a l-f-a a-t-s-i-u—correspond to the length of the words of the final words of the message, starting from the end. In other words, four letters, then two letters, four, three, five, and so on.”

  Becca doubted whether they could follow this, but she felt she needed to explain it as thoroughly as possible, praying it actually did what she hoped it would.

  “So, assuming it means something real, we break up s-u-l-l-a-m-i-a-v-i-t-a-l-o-f-a-r-o into words, starting from the end, of four letters, two, four, three, five, et cetera. The letters form the words like this . . .”

  sulla mia vita lo faro

  Becca had to pause. She read the separated words over and over, stunned to realize that her method actually had worked. She had deciphered the code.

  “What is it? What does it mean?” asked Lily, still holding the light over the notebook. “Anything?”

  Becca could barely bring herself to speak it. “It’s the last line of the passage. It means, ‘Upon my life I will.’”

  “Astounding,” Roald said from the front.

  “Oh, man.” Darrell breathed out a cloud of cold air. “You did it. You totally cracked the cipher.”

  After that, it was short but brain-heated work to translate the first half of the diary passage, though a bit tougher to discover exactly where the forward and backward messages met. She tugged her woolen hat down low and finally finished. Shivering between Lily and Wade, she read the deciphered passage aloud, even as the Aleko slowed in the approach to Moscow’s center.

  xiii February 1517.

  One hour ago on the frozen road to Muscovy, Maxim Grek and I were ambushed by the knights of East Prussia.

  The battle was brief but fierce. Sword in hand, I flew and struck like a Persian dervish. Thirty men came at us. Many will not return to their homes this night, but two escaped with a treasure beyond belief.

  “Half of Serpens is in their hands,” I tell Maxim. “I need a strong man to guard its other half, to keep it hidden from men’s eyes. From Albrecht’s, from Vasily’s as well.”

  “Friend, why me?” he asks.

  “Sir,” I say, “I have sailed with ancient Caesar. This cut above my brow was gained when I fought side by side with the great Alexander. These bruises on my hands? From crawling through a trench battling iron monsters!”

  “Holy cow,” Wade interrupted. “Dad? It sounds like World War One.”

  “What do you speak of?” he asks me.

  “The past, the future, all times between. Maxim, three years ago I discovered a device that, used by the wrong men, can be a terrible weapon. This is why I have disassembled it. This is why, my friend, I am asking you to hide a piece of it.”

  He bows his head. “Tell me, Nicolaus, what would you have me do?”

  I loosen the straps of the bag. The relic falls into my palm. Maxim’s eyes widen. “It glitters like Vasily’s jewels!”

  “All told,” I say, “this relic is a construct of nine diamonds, one for each star in the Serpens constellation, set in a hinged device of silver. The artifact, when whole, breathes like a living thing. It now lies lifeless in my hand because its head, three diamonds circling twin eyes of such blue splendor, was stolen this night by Albrecht’s men. It is the head that makes the body move. It is the head that gives it life. Many have died because of it.”

  “Boris’s story about Albrecht and the crying baby was on February eighteenth, five days later than this,” said Lily. “Sorry. Go on.”

  “Serpens, indeed, sounds cursed,” Maxim says.

  “Pain. Loss. Greed,” I say. “These are the serpent’s curse. I am asking you to take it with you wherever you go. Where would you like to be?”

  Maxim smiles. “Italy, without a doubt. My days with you and your brother, Andreas, in Padua were the happiest of my life. I dream of Italy.”

  “Then bring Serpens with you. And devise a code to speak with future friends. You will need it.”

  He nods slowly. “I think backward to what I have said to you, and there is my code.”

  “Good,” I say. “Now, Maxim of Athos, will you guard the relic, keep it safe from Albrecht and the eyes of sinful men?”

  He blesses me and whispers the words that the first Guardian himself spoke.

  “Upon my life I will.”

  Uncle Roald made a sound through his lips. “This is one of the first times Copernicus has talked about his journeys. He met Caesar? And Alexander the Great? Excellent work, Becca. It’s extraordinary.” He was forced to slow the car several streets away from the rental agency.

  “Does the same decryption key work for the scroll, too?” asked Lily. “We need to hear from Maxim.”

  Becca studied the first words of the scroll that appeared under the date. Laonmd brrea sdmeo lrliar moonro . . . . “I think so. Give me a few minutes.”

  The traffic eased a bit, and Roald pulled the damaged car into the rental center garage to the astonished stares of the desk agents. While he endured the agents’ screaming and arguing, and a mountain of paperwork, Becca kept going. Wade held the diary and Darrell her notebook as she used the same system—two sets of words folded into each other back to front—to translate the scroll Maxim hid in the Onion Tower.

  xvii January
1556

  Andreas died one brief year after I took the Serpens body from Nicolaus.

  Nicolaus himself has been gone more than a decade.

  I never saw Italy again. Saint Sergius has become my tomb. I prepare for death. Then, one day, I have a visitor.

  “I am Rheticus,” he says. “I was the Magister’s friend. Trust me with Serpens now.”

  I can tell from his eyes that Rheticus is a good man, but the serpent has cursed me. I do not want to give it up. To save my soul, I hand the relic to this good man. “Take it.”

  To find the body of the serpent now, follow the man named Rheticus.

  I have done my duty to Nicolaus.

  The shadow of death comes soon.

  Uncle Roald led them from the rental car center into the bitter Moscow night, listening while Becca read over the coded scroll. “I remember Rheticus,” he said.

  “You took good notes at Uncle Henry’s lectures,” Wade said. “It’s all in the notebook. Rheticus came to Copernicus at the end of his life and convinced him to publish his proof that the earth revolves around the sun.”

  “So we have to follow him now?” asked Darrell. “Does this mean the quest will take us somewhere else?”

  Becca frowned. “It might, if all this is just another layer of the onion.”

  “Possibly,” Roald said. “Rheticus was the one who really made the world aware of Copernicus’s brilliance. Interestingly, he came into Nicolaus’s life at least twenty years after the relics were hidden. I guess what Maxim is saying is that Rheticus knew about the time machine, the relics, everything. We can talk this over in the safe house.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Terence Ackroyd had booked the Kaplan family into a tiny flat of three rooms. It was located on the fourth floor of a building operated as part student hostel, part long-term hotel, run by an expatriate Austrian couple in their sixties. Just two streets off the broad-laned Teatral’ny Proyezd, the flat was not too far from Red Square and the Kremlin, the centuries-old seat of the Russian government. Wade tried to imagine a warm room, food, and rest, but he couldn’t.

  In the center is a relic, he thought as he marched through the stinging, almost horizontal snow. Copernicus to Maxim to Rheticus to who? One clue to another and another, but how far away from the center are we? It seemed to Wade that the layers of the onion were all they’d seen so far. What he was certain of, as they stomped block after frozen block toward their rooms, was that another day was gone, Sara was still missing, and they had a clue or two, but no relic.

  “A few more intersections,” his father called over his shoulder. “Stay together.”

  The flat was still a half-dozen snowbound blocks away when, as they tried to turn onto Teatral’ny, they found several police vans parked end to end across the avenue. A brigade of policemen with automatic rifles was busy cordoning off the street at the corner.

  Becca dug into her bag for her phrase book. She sidled up to a group of spectators. “What’s going on?” she whispered in halting Russian. The man she’d asked said nothing or something unintelligible, then snapped his fingers at a uniformed policeman, who trotted over.

  Wade’s first thought: What if the police are looking for us?

  But the officer took only a brief glance at them and jetted off some harsh-sounding words, one of which Wade recognized: Lubyanka. The Soviet prison Boris said he had spent time in. It was just up the hill from them right now.

  “Lubyanka Square is the scene of some kind of protest against the government,” Becca told them. They now heard yelling and raucous singing from up the street. “He said it’s none of our concern, and we should go away.”

  “But our flat,” Lily said. “And I’m frozen, and my poor feet. The ground is cold—”

  “Nyet! No go here!” The policeman scowled, making a show of regripping his rifle for effect. “All you, go away!”

  Roald pulled them back, smiling to the officer as he did. “If we can’t get there this way, we can’t,” he said under his breath. “We don’t want to get tangled up with the authorities. All they have to do is check with passport control, and who knows what the flak is from our performance at the monastery? Let’s backtrack until we find an open street. I’m sure they’re not just closing off a big part of the city where people live. I have a street map. Let’s try another way.”

  They slid back among the streams of people moving down Teatral’ny Proyezd from Lubyanka Square. Wade’s father studied the map to find a side street that might swing them back around to their flat. The sidewalks were iced over, narrowed by mounds of shoveled snow. When they reached the end of the street, police vans were parked end to end one way across that road, too, while on the far side of the street another crowd was assembling.

  “Is this the same demonstration or another one?” Lily asked. “What now?”

  Someone barked out loudly on a bullhorn. A banner unfurling awkwardly among the protestors seemed to galvanize the growing crowd into movement. The thump of footsteps, a roar at first, quickly became a kind of rhythmic thunder. A flag appeared suddenly.

  “What is this, Les Miz?” said Becca. “We shouldn’t be here, Uncle Roald.”

  “Let’s make our way around the crowd to the far end of the block,” he said firmly. “Don’t get separated. Always have one another in eyeshot. Yell out if something happens. Look for signs for Teatral’ny Proyezd. That’s the street our flat is off of. Teatral’ny. Ask if you need help. Use your phones if we get separated, but don’t get separated, but here’s cash and change in case,” he said, dividing up the currency he had in his pockets. “The demonstration can’t last all night. Stay close. Come on.”

  Wade’s father began weaving along the sidewalk, his hand up for them to focus on. But the crowd was large, spilling beyond its original shape and rolling like a wave now.

  Darrell nudged Wade’s arm. “Look.” A group of men in black parkas and wool caps emerged from the crowd. They were moving slowly toward them. “I don’t like this.”

  Following Wade’s father, the kids pushed through the stragglers on the fringes, when the police abruptly moved into position behind the vans, like soldiers defending a wall.

  Wade expected to hear the crack of gunfire any second. “Dad, maybe we should—”

  The men in parkas weren’t visible now. Wade’s attention was taken by a tall flat-faced man in a long overcoat who snapped orders to the officers crouched behind the cars. He was bald and had a bushy black mustache. The police shifted not only behind their cars but on both sides of the avenue. A second bullhorn squealed angrily. The front of the crowd stopped, but the back kept pushing forward. The shouting was punctuated by screaming now.

  “Wade, get over here!” his father yelled, and Wade saw the mustached policeman spin around on his heels as if he’d heard Wade’s name—seemingly impossible in all the noise. The man stared in their direction until he fixed on Wade. The men in parkas were there again, too, striding toward Wade. Oh, no. No.

  Lily threaded her way through the crowd. Wade saw Becca’s ponytail swinging. They were together, at least. Where was Darrell? The protestors were moving again in waves. He swam against the tide of bodies, trying to reach the girls, while Darrell was suddenly deep in the crowd, abreast of their father. The demonstration was all around him now and frightening. Strange faces yelled angrily. He felt a punch in his side. Spittle sprayed his cheek. He looked up. The men in parkas were closer. But his father wasn’t where he’d last seen him.

  Jumping to see over the crowd, he yelled, “Dad!” then heard a sudden loud pop. Becca whirled around toward him, cringing, while Lily slid past a cluster of protesters to Darrell. There was his father again, reaching backward for them but being dragged farther away. Wade muscled through the crowd and snagged Becca’s sleeve. “Bec, let’s get out of this. There’s a subway over there somewhere.”

  “You want to eat? Now?”

  “No, a metro!” Wade said. “We can ride it back to the flat—”


  They broke free of the jostling bodies and ducked between close-set stone buildings, hurrying to where the subway arrows pointed. He searched the crowd. His father, Darrell, and Lily were already across the street, looking back to find him and Becca. Wade waved his arms, but they didn’t see him. There was another pop, then a shout. He couldn’t see the men in parkas. Groups of demonstrators were spilling around quickly as if they would start running. Then Wade spied the stairs. Together he and Becca entered the heated subway. He held her by the hand, afraid without his father and the others, but responsible for himself and Becca. When they reached the bottom of the stairs, heat washed over them, and being underground had never felt so good.

  “This is like Boston a little,” Becca said nervously. “They call their subway the T.”

  “Good. Then you lead.”

  She cracked a smile. “I think we follow the noise down the stairs.”

  After paying for tickets with pocket change, and snatching a color-coded map of the subway system, they jumped down the nearest steps to the platform. They huddled behind a vending machine for minutes before boarding the first train that came screeching to a stop. It was immaculate and filled with passengers.

  “If this station is called Okhotny Ryad, we’d better get off at the next station, wherever that is,” said Becca, reading the map on the subway wall. “It’s pretty far anyway. We’ll either walk back or take a cab to the flat. Maybe the demonstration will have moved on by then.”

  “That was crazy, huh?” Wade said. “Those guys were chasing us, weren’t they?”

  “I didn’t see them, but Darrell seemed to. There were so many people.”

  They were crammed together face-to-face in the standing-room-only car. It was a sea of thick coats, knit caps, shopping bags, and teetering bodies as the train lurched forward. Wade wasn’t sure exactly why, but he suddenly wanted to say something comforting to Becca. All he came up with was “How’s your arm?”