The Serpent's Curse

  She cradled an area between the elbow and shoulder of her left arm. “It itches, so that’s a good sign, right? Like it’s beginning to heal?”

  “Good,” he said, trying to smile. The truth was that her bandages, when he’d glimpsed them under her coat, were dark, as if she had bled some. “We need to find another clinic to have it looked at. The Austrian couple who run the hostel will know where to go.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to slow us down—”

  “Becca. You won’t. We need to protect you.” Was that comforting? He didn’t know. He tried to follow up with something more promising than what he was thinking when the tunnel outside the windows brightened, and the train began to slow.

  “We’d better get off,” she said, rummaging through her bag. “The next stop is way beyond Red Square, and too far to walk back. And I actually don’t think we can hail a cab. I must have lost my phrase book in the crowd, and I didn’t get to the taxicab page. We don’t want to end up even farther away.”

  Wade snorted a laugh. “Agreed.”

  He eased through the passengers to be ready to jump off when the train stopped. Before it did, the door from the next compartment opened with a breath of air, and Wade’s heart thumped. The tall policeman with the bushy mustache pushed in. His gray overcoat flapped open to reveal a thick leather strap across his chest. He gripped something like a phone in his hand, reading it and then staring into the crowd.

  “Becca . . .”

  “I see him. Did he follow us down here? He’s either with the police . . . or he’s part of the Red Brotherhood.”

  “Or both. Watch out for guys in black parkas.”

  The train screeched to a stop. The doors groaned aside. Wade instinctively took her arm, but it was the wrong one. She winced, and he let go. He jumped onto the platform and turned for her, but a block of people pushed past him into the car, and Becca was forced away from the doors.

  “Becca—” He tried to push his way back onto the car, but she was crowded even farther from the doors. He couldn’t get on. She couldn’t get off. The whistle sounded. The doors began to close. “Becca!” Then the mustached man jumped from the rear door of the car onto the platform. With a single look at Becca, Wade charged away into a warren of tunnels as the subway roared off into the dark.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Snow was falling heavily when Wade stumbled up the metro stairs to the street. The flakes were large and wet and flying in his face and down his neck. He pulled his woolen cap low and ran up the sidewalk to the nearest corner. His shirt was soaked through. Everything was soaked, though his chest was a block of ice. He looked back. No one else came out of the subway. He searched the intersection.

  “Wait!” someone yelled in English. Or was it “Wade”? He didn’t look back. Panicking, he hurried down the sidewalk, slipping, nearly falling. He reached the next intersection. Footsteps thudded behind him. Several sets. Running this time.

  At the first break in traffic, he tore across the wide avenue to a park on the other side. He ducked behind a shuttered kiosk. The mustached man paced the far corner, his overcoat flapping and flapping, scanning the intersection. Was he the one who had called to him? Why would anyone “wait” for someone pursuing him?

  Trying to keep the kiosk directly between him and the tall man, he made himself small and ran as quietly as he could in the opposite direction. He soon found himself in a maze of grim gray buildings that resembled a movie set for the apocalypse.

  He ducked into the first side alley he saw. Narrow, barren. Cold.

  He’d lost his breath and couldn’t get it back. Not from running so much, but deep inside. As if his lungs were failing him.

  “Wait!” the voice called.

  He stormed deeper into a cement quadrangle and glanced back, and something told him to turn at the first corner. He slipped on the ice, smashing his knee on the pavement. The pain speared up his side. On his feet again, turn, and down the passage, then turn again. His legs were lead. The snow was heavier, wetter. He started to remember the warmth of Rome, that night outside the Museo Copernicano, when they’d slept under the stars. Of being together with Darrell and Becca and Lily. But there wasn’t enough of his brain to do anything but run.

  He was running on bone. He stumbled to the end of the alley, hoping for an outlet. There was none. It ended in gray stone, a coffin of concrete. Heavy footsteps crashed behind him. Many more than before. Twenty paces behind him. Ten. Five. Three.

  Wade rested his head on the cold cement wall, then spun around with a cry—“Help me!”—as a group of men in hooded coats closed over him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Becca raced through the slushy streets. The demonstration had broken up as quickly as it had formed. She found the safe house, but Wade hadn’t returned.

  Roald was on the phone to the police, getting nowhere.

  “They have him,” she gasped. “The police or the FSB or the Brotherhood. They took him!” She told them everything, and Darrell started doing his caged-animal thing. He eyed the tiny window of their room as if he was going to jump out of it. Then he shot her a look as if it was somehow her fault that Wade wasn’t there. As if she should be lost, instead.

  She understood. Brothers. She was nearly as close to Lily as she was to her own sister, Maggie. If anything happened to her . . .

  “I couldn’t get off the train,” she said. “The crowd was pushy, and I—”

  “We know, Bec,” Lily said, patting her hand. “It’s not that—”

  “Of course it’s not that!” Darrell practically shouted, then breathed out sharply. “It’s this dumb freezing place. Wade could be anywhere—”

  The door swung in. Becca jumped for it, but it was a man in a parka and black combat fatigues and boots. Behind him were several other men dressed the same. “Put down the phone,” the first one said to Roald. “Gather things. Come with us. No time.”

  “But—” Roald began, the phone halfway to its cradle.

  Darrell shook his head crazily. “No! I’m not leaving! I’m not going anywhere without Wade!”

  The lead man pulled his pistol out of its holster. “No words. Put down phone. Chief Inspector Yazinsky has ordered us to bring you to station.” Becca then watched as the man did an odd thing. He put a finger to his lips, and whispered, “Red Brotherhood are entering lobby downstairs. They are coming. We do not want firefight in building. Please. Hurry.”

  And that was it. She went electric and so did everyone else. They threw their things together. The men—were they even real police?—shut off all the lights but one and hovered at the windows and doors, guns drawn.

  The man made a hissing noise. There was a shout from outside their room. The men at the door crouched. A shot exploded through the door frame and crashed back out the window. The men at the door returned fire.

  “Stair escape through bathroom,” the lead man said. He pushed them efficiently through the room and into the bathroom, where he slammed the bottom sash up as far as it would go. Eight inches. Not enough. He raised a jackboot and kicked it out entirely. Glass splattered onto an iron landing. “Mister first,” he said, “then others.”

  Roald slipped through the opening into the whirling snow and waited on the landing for Becca and Lily. They took the iron steps down to the next landing and the next, while Darrell followed with the officer. An unmarked car was waiting at the bottom. The gunfight above had stopped and been replaced with yelling and the sound of multiple sirens approaching through the snowy streets.

  “Who are you?” Roald said as they were hustled into the back of the cruiser. There was no answer. The driver started up, the electronic door locks engaged, and the car slid away, leaving the officer who had helped them on the street, trotting into the hotel, his weapon raised. The cruiser was nearly around the corner when Becca felt the air shudder. Glass and wood and fire blew like a rocket’s ignition out of their room, showering the street with flaming debris.

  Darrell scr
eamed, “They bombed our room! Those freaks bombed our room!”

  A second blast blew fire out everywhere. The cruiser picked up speed and they were on another street and another. More sirens. The driver tore through several blocks north from the safe house, down the hill from Lubyanka Square, whizzing past the ragged remains of the demonstration, slowing only as they entered a wide plaza. In the center of the plaza was a big box of a building. There was a range of brightly lit double-arched windows across the front and a heavy square tower sprouting from the roof. The area in front of it was filled with taxicabs.

  “This is . . . I thought we were going to the police station,” Roald said.

  Becca read the sign: ЛЕНИНГРАДСКИЙ ВОКЗАЛ. “What is this place?”

  “Leningradskiy train station,” the man said in English. “You leave on next train.”

  “Dad, what is this?” Darrell cried.

  “No talking now,” the officer said. He pulled the cruiser to the front of the building and, without looking at them, electronically unlocked the doors. “Inside. Officer will find you. Go. Now!”

  They stumbled out into a tumult of circling cars and still heavier snow.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The bag over his head had been the worst. Wade could barely stomach the smell of someone else’s face and hair and breath so close to his own.

  Even now he spat out a greasy thread. “Gross . . .”

  The room was tiny, a small box, four feet by nine feet—he’d paced it out—with only a padded bench in it. It was a cell smaller than Maxim’s. They’d thrust him inside and slammed the door behind him. He’d torn off the bag immediately and thrown it on the floor. That was—what—two hours ago? Longer? Was it the middle of the night?

  The stained bag sat on the floorboards, a lump of gray canvas. Floorboards. Not a concrete floor. In the dim light of the hanging bulb he studied the narrow oak boards set in an angled pattern, one next to another, like the weave of a fancy overcoat.

  His breath left him.

  Parquet.

  “I’m in Lubyanka prison.”

  His heart sank, then squeezed tight, and something wrenched up his throat. He wanted to cry. He pounded on the door with his fists. “Let me out. I’m an American! You hear me? You can’t do this! I’m an American citizen!”

  No answer. But the mustached man knew who Wade was anyway. Of course he did. He and a handful of large, hard men had cornered him, bagged him, and pulled him into a car. Boris’s words came back to him. Car take you to Lubyanka.

  He remembered Lily telling them how Saint Dominic was the patron saint of those who were falsely accused. Like Sara? Yes, like Sara. Thinking that actually gave him hope. He was locked up, but alive. And Sara was, too. She had to be.

  Wiping his face, Wade paced the cell front to back, door to bench, three and a half steps, turn, then three and a half steps back. He tried to find a place of calm inside him. If there was silence, if he was alone, he could make use of it.

  So far, they had nothing. They didn’t have a relic yet. They had nothing but words. But it wasn’t just a mess of unrelated words. It wasn’t random. It was a kind of history, where things from here and there were connected and made a picture.

  It was like . . . what?

  A constellation, his astronomical brain told him.

  Isolate the things I see. Put them in order. Make the connections. Bring all the stories down to points of light.

  He stooped to the floor and ran his fingers along the floorboards where they met the wall, looking for a nail or something sharp. Nothing. Then he remembered. The tooth. He slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled it out. Black, chipped, dead. The tooth of a martyred Guardian, perhaps. A victim of Galina Krause. It was the perfect thing to use against her.

  With the tooth pinched between his fingers, Wade scratched a letter into the wall.

  C

  That was for Copernicus. In 1517 he gave the body of Serpens to Maxim—M—who at his death, in 1556, gave it to Rheticus—R—who died in 1574. But the other thing that happened in 1517 was that the nephews of Albrecht—A—stole the head of Serpens. Albrecht himself died in 1568, a generation after Copernicus’s own death in 1543.

  So what did that look like? It looked like this:

  Strangely, reducing the confusion of his thoughts to a clear drawing calmed him. It really did look like a constellation, the shorthand for a long story. A story reduced to glowing points of light, which then became the story again.

  His breath slowed. His panic ebbed. Moving from there to there to there was progress. It gave him a direction.

  “So now we have two questions,” Wade said to himself, pocketing the tooth. “Where did the head go after Albrecht, and where did the body go after Rheticus?”

  Keys jangled outside the door. It burst wide, nearly smacking him in the face. Before he could see anyone, he was spun around and his wrists were shackled behind his back. The canvas bag, wet now and smelling of mice, was dropped over his head again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Darrell was stone. He refused to move or set foot in the Leningradskiy train station. “We’re not leaving without Wade. First Mom, now Wade? We’re not leaving.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” his stepfather said. “I’m calling the embassy right now. I don’t know who Chief Inspector Yazinsky is, but authorities or no, we need help here.”

  Before Roald could locate the number, a short older man in a gray overcoat hanging loose over a suit and tie—obviously a policeman or secret service officer—pushed out the station doors into the parking lot. “Please close the phone, sir. The inspector wishes no calls. Not from your phone. We cannot take chances. Please . . .” Roald looked shocked but didn’t resist. The man pulled the cell from his hand, swiped it off, removed its battery, and pocketed it. “Follow me, please.” His grip on Roald’s arm was apparently strong, as he tugged him forcefully to the door.

  “Uncle Roald—” Lily started.

  “Do as he says.”

  Cursing to himself, Darrell reluctantly followed him into the station.

  It was an enormous open room with a lighted arcade running down each of the long sides. Hundreds of people wove across the floor from end to end, even at that time of night. The air was filled with the din of voices and footsteps, the rumbling of wheeled suitcases, and overlapping announcements in Russian, English, and French. The incessant clink and clatter from late-night restaurants and snack bars added its own kind of roar in his ears. Beneath it all rolled the thunder of the rails running from the station out into the countryside beyond Moscow.

  “Wait here one minute,” the officer commanded, and strode several feet away.

  Becca huddled together with Lily and Darrell. All of them were mumbling, afraid, trying to be logical, but everything they said came down to some crazy version of “What in the world is going on?”

  Then Lily’s cell phone rang. “Who’s calling me?” she answered. “May I help you?”

  The voice on the other end was slow and faraway. “I’m calling from the morgue.”

  “Ahhhh!” Lily screamed, and dropped the phone.

  “What!” Becca cried.

  “It’s the morgue! Someone’s dead!” Lily scrambled for the cell phone, but Darrell tore it from her fingers and punched the speaker button.

  “Hello? Hello? Are you there? Is it Wade? Is it my brother? Is he . . . dead?”

  “Dea . . . I . . . not . . .” The voice was faint, crackly.

  “Can you please speak up,” Roald said into the phone. “Is this the morgue? Are you calling from the morgue?”

  “. . . an Library,” said the suddenly familiar voice. “The Morg . . . an Library. In New York City. Is this the Kaplan family?”

  Darrell buried his head in his hands, practically sobbing. “Good God.”

  Roald said, “Hello, you are Dr. Billingham, I presume? This is Roald Kaplan. We’re just . . . never mind. Do you have some news for us?”

/>   “I am a mess . . . ,” Rosemary said, “ . . . enger for Julian Ackroyd. He says his fa . . . ther has business in London, but will arrive in Mos . . . cow on Sun . . . day morning. There is news, he says. Are you under . . . standing me?”

  “Thank you,” said Roald. “Thank you so much!”

  “That’s not . . . all,” Rosemary said. “Last night there was a robbery . . .”

  “Oh, my gosh, Vela!” Lily said.

  “. . . attempt at the library. Of course, nothing was taken. The police are hunting for a Germ . . .” There was a long few seconds before “. . . an man and three French ass . . . ociates. That’s . . . all. Good day.”

  The short officer returned and drew them swiftly down the perimeter of the room toward the far inside corner. He scanned the crowd like a hawk, but gave no answer to Darrell’s—or anyone else’s—urgent questions.

  At the same time an unmarked automobile motored swiftly from one snowbound street to the next. The car made constant turns, approaching a yellow-towered public building three times before turning away to begin another series of zigzags and cutbacks.

  Chief Inspector Simon Yazinsky sat in the rear seat. He tugged one end of his bushy mustache and turned to the passenger sitting next to him.

  “Truly, Wade,” he said in lightly accented English, “my sincerest apologies for the filthy bag. A bit dramatic, I know. Lubyanka, as well. All of it. It was for your own safety that you remained anonymous. You see, in Russia the Teutonic Order and its allies here, the Red Brotherhood, are everywhere and powerful. Your visit to Saint Sergius alerted the Brotherhood. They planned to use the demonstration as a cover to kidnap you. I had to intervene. For your own safety, you must leave the city.”

  Wade nodded slowly, desperately trying to take it all in with the fraction of a brain he had left. “So you arrested me because the Brotherhood was after us? The men in black parkas at the demonstration?”

  He nodded. “Although I have a distinguished rank in the FSB, even after I scooped you up, I wanted no one to see you. I can trust my friend here behind the wheel, but few others on my staff. I must also inform you that there has just been an attempt on the safety of your family. An attack and explosion in your rooms.”