The Serpent's Curse

  Becca pushed down the steps in front of him. “Un motoscafo! Presto!”

  One started up his motor and whirred quietly toward the landing. “Sì? Per dove?”

  Becca pointed down the canal. “Seguire quella barca!”

  The pilot wagged his head from side to side when the inspector drew out his badge. Then Lily waved a ten-euro note at him. “Sì! Sì!” he said. They jumped in. He threw the boat into gear.

  What Wade hoped would be a high-speed chase was anything but. The canal outside the theater, Rio delle Veste, was narrow and clogged with scores of black gondolas moored along the sides. Slicing past them, Galina’s boat nearly tore one of them in half.

  “Faster!” said Wade.

  “Is electric motor,” the pilot said. “For eco, yes?”

  “That woman stole something from us!” Becca snapped. “Chase her!”

  “Sì, but, la polizia,” said the pilot.

  “I am the polizia!” boomed the inspector, slapping his badge again.

  “Not here you not,” the driver said.

  Lily pushed two more bills into his hand. “Go!”

  The pilot shrugged and hit the accelerator. They made up some of the distance, but Galina’s gas-powered boat was pulling away. Then, seconds before it vanished around the corner, she turned back, her hair flying around her face. There was a silent flash of light from the vicinity of her hip, a splash, and the sound of a thud striking their motorboat below the waterline.

  The inspector tugged out a small pistol. “Keep your heads down!”

  “Che cosa?” the driver cried out. “No, no—”

  When Galina’s own driver realized she was firing a gun, he cut the engine and began shouting at her. So, he wasn’t one of her agents. She whipped her gun at him, and he splashed noisily into the canal. She took the wheel herself.

  “Please!” Becca urged. “It’s life and death!”

  “Death of motor license!” the pilot said, even as he jammed down the accelerator.

  They trailed Galina left onto the curving Rio dei Barcaroli. Pedestrians on the bridges overhead shouted in punctuated phrases—curses, Wade was certain—but their boat sped underneath, barely squeezing past gondolas that looked suddenly like bobbing coffins. Galina yelled out something in Italian, and dark figures swarmed out of the shadows on the sides of the canal and darted across the bridges, taking aim with pistols.

  Shots slapped dully into the water in front of their boat. The pilot swerved once, twice, eluding them, and made it past the bridge. Galina’s boat thundered north onto the Rio di San Luca. Wade saw an approaching marker leaning over the canal like a dented street sign. Rio Fuseri. “She’s heading for the Grand Canal. We can cut her off if we go right.”

  “Please,” the driver said. “Too much traffic. Too much police launches. Is forbidden.”

  “I’ll deal with them,” said Yazinsky. “Do as Wade says!”

  Another ten euros from Lily and the driver roared into the Rio Fuseri, picking up speed as they lost sight of her.

  “This better be the right move,” Lily growled. “We could lose her altogether.”

  “We won’t,” Wade said, hoping he was right. Galina had stolen what they needed desperately—without leverage, his stepmother was in more danger. He wasn’t going to leave Venice without it. The canal was blocked at the next intersection with a mangle of gondolas. The driver sped right, then turned left behind the great piazza. They could see the domes of the basilica lit up like giant festive balloons.

  They zigzagged right, then left and left again, away from the piazza, and burst suddenly out onto the Grand Canal in a wide sweep of spray. The famous Rialto Bridge arched over the water straight ahead. And there was Galina, headlights glaring, speeding toward them from the opposite direction. Her face was pale, angry, startled.

  She cut her engine suddenly. Wade studied her face, her strange, hypnotic eyes glinting in the canal lights, the hanging lamps, the lacquered hulls of the gondolas, the lights from the houses looming over the water. Time seemed to pause for a second. He saw in her eyes that she would do anything to avoid being caught.

  Shoot them all dead, if she had to.

  Then it was over. She gunned the engine and aimed toward them.

  Inspector Yazinsky aimed his pistol. “Full speed ahead!”

  “Sul serio?” their driver spat. He matched Galina’s speed, his motor whirring like a top, then tried to steer away when he realized she wasn’t going to stop. Too late. The boats scraped each other horribly, and Wade found himself a bare two feet away from Galina. His legs took over, and he leaped from their boat right onto the deck of hers.

  An instantaneously stupid move. He crashed to his knees, then staggered to his feet, pain knifing up his legs. Galina whipped him across the face with the side of her hand. Her hand!

  It was ice-cold and strong as steel. It flattened him. He tried to climb to his feet, but she had the engine at full throttle. He thudded awkwardly onto the deck, half on and half off the boat, water spitting into his face. He arched up again. “You! Always you!” she cried, kicking his legs out from under him.

  He slammed back to the deck but managed to swing his arm around, clamping onto her leg. He pulled with all his strength. She fell to the planks. The engine idled while the wheel was locked in an ever-widening turn.

  “Wade!” Becca yelled from somewhere. “You—”

  “Stop at once!” the inspector bellowed at Galina.

  Wade couldn’t hear the rest. He grasped at Galina’s hand, trying to force the gun away from her, when he saw a shiny disc on the deck. The clock! She had dropped it! Releasing Galina, risking that she would turn the gun back on him, he dived for the clock with both hands, when she swung her gun at his head. It was like being struck by a baseball bat. He was up and over the side, half falling, half jumping, and fell headfirst into the canal.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  “Wade! Omigod, Wade!”

  Becca was half out of their boat as it drew alongside, grasping at the water with the inspector. Wade flailed and splashed like a drowning man. Together they lifted him out.

  “I have it,” he gasped, spitting out a mouthful of canal water. “I . . .”

  “Here come the police launches,” said Yazinsky.

  “Galina took off,” Lily added. “She’s gone. We can’t get stuck here. Come on.”

  Becca draped her jacket over Wade’s shivering shoulders, and she and Lily squashed him between them. Their awesome driver, to whom Lily gave another twenty euros, motored them quickly to the nearest landing. Hurried away by the inspector, the kids disappeared into the crowded streets just as the Venice traffic police arrived with sirens blaring.

  At the first corner, Wade stopped hobbling along. “Wait,” he said. “Look.”

  When he showed them what he had stolen from Galina, Becca recognized it instantly. “That’s a souvenir of the Saint Mark’s clock. The astronomical clock in Piazza San Marco. The messenger said it was a clue for Boris that only he would understand.”

  “She also said ‘midnight,’” Lily added.

  “It’s nearly midnight now,” Yazinsky said. “Do you think that Boris was to go to the clock in the piazza?”

  Wade shivered in Becca’s jacket. “I don’t know. But there’s probably something with the clock that we need to see. There are bells, right? Chimes? Maybe something will happen when they ring at midnight, something that Boris was supposed to see.”

  “Quickly, then,” the inspector urged.

  They zigzagged through the streets, the inspector leading them along the fringes of any piazzas they had to cross, joining bunches of tourists as a shield. They saw neither Galina nor any agents she might have in Venice. Four minutes before midnight, they emerged from the Salita San Moise, through the colonnade, and into Piazza San Marco. Even at that late hour, the crowds were heavy and noisy. Soon the bell atop the tower began to chime, struck by two monumental bronze figures with hammers. Twenty-four slow, momentous p
eals that seemed to roll beneath the stones under their feet and out into the lagoon.

  At the fading of the last of the echoes, everyone resumed their strolling and talking. Becca, Wade, Lily, and Inspector Yazinsky just stared at the clock. A minute passed, another minute, five minutes.

  “Nothing’s happening,” said Lily. “What did the messenger mean? ‘Midnight’? Are we supposed to go up there and find something behind the clock or in the mechanism or something? What’s the message? Don’t tell me we have to climb up there. . . .”

  “I can get us in, if it comes to that,” Yazinsky said.

  On a whim, Becca hurried over to a vendor’s stall just closing up. She quickly found souvenir clocks similar to the one meant for Boris. But they were not identical. She called them over. “These souvenirs are trinkets, not nearly as detailed as ours is. Ours is metal, not plastic, with movable faces and all. It’s much more like the real one.”

  Wade took Boris’s clock from her. Even before being aware of it, his fingers started working the miniature like a Rubik’s Cube, twisting and turning its various faces and dials, trying to match its faces to the one on the tower, setting the time to midnight.

  A shrill whistle sounded from the motor launch landing along the water’s edge. It would soon make its final run to the airport.

  “We should go,” said Lily.

  “Hold on,” he said, still working the miniature clock, shifting its movable parts to show the exact moment of midnight. Nothing happened. It was a dead metal toy in his hands, until he twisted the tiny moon’s face a fraction backward, so less gold peered out of its face. Then—click—the back of the clock sprang open in his palm.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Under the warm blue-black sky, her heart thumping at this new discovery, Becca studied the device in Wade’s palm. Inside its open cover were four unusual characters—not inscribed, but scratched, roughly, as if in haste.

  “They are not Cyrillic,” Yazinsky said. “I have never seen such marks.”

  Wade moved the clock closer to the nearest lamplight and turned to Becca.

  “Don’t ask me,” she said. “I was going to ask if they’re math symbols or something from physics maybe.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know all the symbols in trigonometry—my dad does—but these aren’t any astronomical or mathematical symbols I’ve ever seen. Hieroglyphics, maybe?”

  Becca didn’t think so.

  “If Darrell were here,” Lily said, “he’d go, ‘Aaatheee.’ Because if you squint, the letters almost look like they could be A-T-H-E—”

  Becca breathed in sharply. “Boris was a scholar of dead languages. This message was meant for him. A dead language from some old civilization. Oh, what did Boris say at the restaurant about it . . . ? Wade, your notebook.”

  His cell phone buzzed. “Here.” He gave her the notebook. “It’s Darrell. It’s three in the morning there!” He switched the phone on speaker. “Darrell, what’s going on—”

  “Greywolf is a creepy old castle,” Darrell interrupted, his voice hoarse, faraway, gloomy. “We checked it a dozen different ways on lots of crumbly old maps, and we’re sure. It’s two hundred miles from anywhere. Plus it’s, well, never mind. You have to meet us in Saint Petersburg. Pulkovo Airport it’s called. We’ll fly from here. What’s happening down there?”

  “We got a little wet,” Becca said. “Mostly Wade. Galina stole the message meant for Boris, but Wade fought her and stole it back. We don’t know what it says yet.”

  “Don’t tell Dad about me fighting her,” Wade said. He took a breath. “Boris’s contact in Venice was attacked by Galina. We had to leave her. I don’t know . . .”

  “The Order is taking out the Guardians, one by one,” the inspector said, leaning in to the phone.

  “Is there any word about Mom?” asked Wade.

  “Just get here as soon as you can, that’s all.”

  The call ended with that grim statement. The launch blasted its horn once more for passengers.

  “Come, come,” Yazinsky said. “There’s no reason anymore to remain in Venice. We must return to Russia.”

  An hour later, the four of them were in their seats on a small jet ascending from the Marco Polo Airport. After a brief layover in Moscow, they would arrive in Saint Petersburg at dawn on Sunday. The day of the midnight deadline.

  At which time a weird machine would do something horrible to Sara.

  “Listen to this,” Becca said, studying Wade’s notebook. “Boris said that a world-famous code was solved when he and his brother were young and living in Siberia. That must have been in the 1950s. He said that A and B was a kind of joke to them. And they sent coded messages ‘even when we grow up.’ What do you think that means? That A and B was a joke?”

  Lily nodded. “I’m typing it all in—Boris, Aleksandr, A, B, dead languages, Siberia, the whole business.”

  Wade stared out the window down at the receding lights of Venice. Only from up there could he truly see the serpentine shape of the Grand Canal that he had fallen into, winding away through the narrow streets of the city. “Aleksandr is dead, so someone else sent Boris this message in their old code.”

  Lily let out a long slow breath, her fingers poised over the tablet’s screen. “Well . . . there was something called Linear A and Linear B, ancient languages discovered in the early twentieth century. No one has cracked A, but Linear B was decrypted in the 1950s.”

  “When Boris and Aleksandr were boys,” said Becca.

  “It is a wonder to watch you work,” the inspector said. “You are rather amazing.”

  “Thanks,” said Lily. “We’re learning.” She hit another link, then another, started scrolling and scrolling, then stopped. “Yes, oh, yes! This is it. The message inside the clock is written in Linear B. Look.”

  She flipped the tablet around for everyone to see.

  “The note for Boris uses the symbols of Linear B,” she said. “Each symbol translates to the sound shown underneath each character.”

  The four characters of the message . . . translated to . . . wo ro ku ta.

  “What’s worokuta?” Becca asked. “Lil, again, please?”

  She typed that in. “There’s ‘Wirikuta.’ It’s a site sacred to the Wixárika Nation, Indians in Mexico. It’s supposed to be the place the world was created—”

  “No,” Becca said.

  “It’s not where the world was created?” asked Wade.

  “No, worokuta is not Wirikuta,” she said, “because there are actual Linear B symbols for ‘wi’ and ‘ri,’ but the message uses the ones for ‘wo’ and ‘ro,’ which means that whoever sent it was saying something else to Boris.”

  They looked to the inspector. “I am sorry. I wish I could tell you what worokuta means, but I studied criminal justice, not dead languages. It means nothing to me.”

  They all went quiet. Their most recent rest had been on the flight to Venice, many long hours before. Since then, the attack on the Guardian messenger at the opera, the canal chase, the enigma of the clock’s strange code, and Darrell’s gloomy message had left them drained and exhausted.

  They really needed to rest.

  But Wade knew they never would.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Saint Petersburg

  March 24

  Darrell stared from the windows of the arrivals hall at Saint Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport as he had without pause for nearly three hours, hoping every incoming flight would be his brother’s jet from Venice by way of Moscow.

  His stepfather was pacing as usual, but Darrell found himself frozen to the spot, unable to do anything but scan the sky for incoming aircraft. He feared that the moment he left his post, or moved a single atom of air, the last three hours of fruitless waiting would reset and begin again.

  Greywolf was a centuries-old fortress buried in evergreen forests and rocky terrain more than two hundred miles from where he was standing. His mother was a prisoner there, trapped inside a device th
at was ticking down to midnight that night, a mere fifteen hours away.

  But if Galina Krause had kidnapped his mother as ransom to force them to give her Vela—and Serpens, if they had it—why, Darrell asked himself, why was his mother in a machine ticking down to something horrible?

  Why kill my mother?

  What does the machine do?

  A flurry of people broke into the baggage area. Looking exhausted, dragging luggage, they swarmed across the floor. Then he saw three people weaving through the crowd, running when they could, followed by a tall mustached man. There was Lily’s worried face. Then Wade’s. Finally Becca’s. There was no reunion, no time for one.

  “Terence will be here soon,” Darrell said, hurrying to meet them. “Flying one of those NetJet thingies, a private plane from London. He’s a pilot. A good one, they say. Anyway, Greywolf is an old castle, two hundred miles outside the city. An hour’s flight. Once we get started.”

  “Darrell found the fortress,” Roald told them. “We confirmed and double confirmed it, but he found it first.”

  “It’s that brain.” Wade gave Darrell a soft punch in the arm. “Every once in a while, he blows out the cobwebs, and it works. It even surprises him. Not us, though.”

  Darrell wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t make himself. All he saw was his mother’s face and it—a giant clockwork machine . . . gears and wheels . . . “Greywolf is a horrible place. But we have help.” He nodded toward the two investigators, who were busily checking their computers. “They’re coming with us.”

  Terence landed at noon, two hours later than expected. He’d had to switch jets at the last moment, for one with a greater flight range.

  “So sorry,” he said. “But the delay gave me time to consult with the archivist at the Ministry of Defence in London. She discovered a rare aerial snapshot of the area taken in 1941. It’s apparently the last clear photo of the place before the Soviets completed camouflaging the grounds. The image indicates a private landing strip on the Greywolf property.” He enlarged it on his phone. “Pray that the strip is still functional.”