The Serpent's Curse

  The troll practically turned inside out, he looked so stunned. “Galina! I have it!” He thrust his hand at the relic, when Becca threw it as hard as she could out the door and down the stairs. “Fool!” he screamed, limping after it with his wounded foot. He was nearly out of the room when Marceline thrust her foot straight out. Ebner tripped out the door and back down the stairs. Everyone else ran toward the machine.

  Darrell elbowed the programmer aside. He threw aside the chain, wrenched open the cage. “Mom!” he screamed. “Mom!” But the creep was all bone now, clawing at the controls. Just as Roald reached him, grabbing his fingers, Helmut Bern drove his hand at a blue lever on the console.

  “Galina, I did it!” he shrieked. “Kronos is perfect!” Becca pounded his face and hands, then heard a final tick of the clock like a thunderous explosion, and Darrell screamed—“Mom—Mom—Mom—Mom!”—and Roald threw his hands toward Sara just as a blinding light flashed across Becca’s eyes like a white razor, and then there was nothing.

  Nothing but darkness and silence and nothing.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  Bosporus Strait, Turkey

  March 24

  11:57 a.m.

  The old steam-powered ferry rocked gently on the waves.

  Galina Krause leaned on the starboard railing and watched in silence as ancient Istanbul shimmered before her eyes. A city of white and glistening gold, beckoning her to pause at the crossroads of Europe and Asia Minor before passing through the strait into the broad Sea of Marmara and beyond, to the Mediterranean.

  “Miss Krause.”

  The voice was deep, icy. She turned. “Markus Wolff.”

  “You asked me to investigate the Somosierra incident.”

  “What have you discovered about the driver, Diego Vargas? The young student?”

  “You will recall the theory that a time event establishes a hole in the past,” Wolff said. “A hole that might linger some amount of time after the event before collapsing.”

  She trembled. “And?”

  Wolff handed her a black-and-white photograph. “This image was taken by the war photographer Robert Capa in Somosierra. It dates from early September 1936. From the same sequence as Capa’s famous portrait of the dying soldier.”

  This print showed a young boy, his jacket in tatters, his face worn by war—or something worse—staring, hollow-eyed, at the camera.

  “The Copernicus Room’s facial-recognition software has confirmed that this face is that of Fernando Salta, aged eleven years, four months, thirteen days,” said Wolff.

  “Fernando Salta?”

  “The student stranded at Somosierra in 1808,” said Wolff. “This photograph is proof that our student has traveled forward from 1808 to 1936. Fernando Salta is making his way back to the present.”

  Galina stared at the photograph. The boy’s dark eyes burned with something. Desire to return? Certainly. But what else? Anger? Revenge? What manner of creature was eleven-year-old Fernando Salta becoming, during his passage through time? And where and when would he turn up next?

  “What do you wish me to do now?” Wolff asked.

  Galina removed the miniature Holbein portrait from her jacket pocket. She uttered a simple instruction. “London. Discover what can be discovered.” Wolff pocketed the portrait and drifted away among the other passengers.

  Galina turned to the sparkling cityscape, but her view of the many-towered mosques of the ancient metropolis blurred. Her fingers slipped into the same zipped pocket and removed Serpens’s two sections. She connected them with an easy twist at the inner hinges.

  The relic, complete for the first time in five centuries, lay in her palm for a moment, then twitched.

  Tick . . . tick . . . tick . . .

  The very breath was sucked out of her lungs. She felt dizzy, intoxicated by the hypnotic movement of the serpent sliding across her skin. Suddenly, as if it had stung her—cursed her—she unhooked the thing. Her thoughts flashed to Copernicus, disassembling his Legacy, distributing its relics.

  Perhaps he’d known the horror of such power after all.

  Ebner limped up behind her, a bruised fighter. She knew he was smiling despite his various wounds. “A momentous juncture,” he said, leaning heavily on his cane. “On the one hand, the first relic, Vela, will soon be ours. A new effort is being mounted by the gentlemen from Marseille to retrieve it from the Morgan’s vault in New York City. And with Serpens in our possession, we will soon locate the third Copernicus artifact. It is only a matter of time before the astrolabe is rebuilt, my dear.”

  “We are out front once more, Ebner, and sailing into the warm south.”

  He grinned. “I should tell you that the particle injection Kronos delivered to its passenger is working splendidly. Already our traveler has been located. Alas, not at the precise time and place we hoped—a thousand miles and six months off—but bizarrely close enough.”

  Galina felt her body flood with a strange glee. “Ebner, I want the Kaplans dead.” She turned her eyes to him. “Kill them. All but the one, do you understand?”

  Ebner laughed a subtle laugh. He tapped a few buttons on his cell phone. “I am sending an alert to our man on the scene.”

  Galina knew that at that instant a message was delivered not only in Berlin, but also to a computer screen in a flat on faraway Foulden Road in London.

  ☑Terminate immediately

  “You have made Mr. Doyle very happy,” he said.

  “Collect my bags, Ebner; we are entering port.”

  As her doting physicist receded, scuffling across the deck on his cane, Galina leaned against the railing. She drew in lungful after lungful of sea air and lightly touched the scar on her neck. It was warm.

  Once again, she had nearly died in Russia. She would never set foot there again, if she could help it, and thanks to the children, she would likely not have to. Not in this lifetime, at least.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  London

  March 27

  9:27 a.m.

  Wade Kaplan stared up at the exquisite vaulted ceilings of Westminster Abbey, but he wasn’t seeing them. The thousands of footsteps that padded and clicked and scampered and slid over the marble floors of the enormous nave were no more than a blur of echoes, a soft whoosh of noise behind his twisting thoughts.

  What happened?

  How did it all happen?

  Could we have done anything differently?

  What do we do now?

  Someone touched his shoulder. He looked to see Lily’s slender fingers. He didn’t want her to remove them. He needed something real to prove to him that they were actually there and that it had happened the way it did.

  “You were good back there,” she said. “In Russia. You were good. Me, too, of course, but you, too.”

  “We did what we could, right? There wasn’t anything else we could have done, was there?”

  “No . . . ,” she said, as if maybe there was doubt. Then, more firmly, “No.”

  As tough as he thought they had become in New York at the beginning of the hunt for Serpens, they were tougher now. Tougher, harder, more steeled for the road ahead. It had been a horrifying week and a half of extremes—of bitter arctic cold, of danger and countless brushes with death—pushing each of them to the brink. It had exhausted every ounce of everything they’d had, but they’d come through it.

  Mostly.

  Lily and Darrell stood next to him, all three staring quietly into the shadows beneath the gallery of the north transept, where Wade’s father leaned over the side of a wheelchair and hugged Sara as if he could lose her again at any minute, as if he were hugging her for the first time ever.

  Sara Kaplan was alive and safe and with them again.

  Wade recalled the frantic moment when they’d all met in the early morning at the airport in Moscow.

  How Sara had wrapped her weak arms around Lily and Wade together and brought Darrell and everyone into it, crying their names over and over, not singling out h
er real son over anyone else, how soon they were all crying.

  Then, on the flight to London, while the kids took turns filling her in about the search for Vela and Serpens, Sara was stunned and silent, until she threw herself on all the children, Darrell last and most, then completely lost it, shaking uncontrollably in his father’s arms the rest of the long flight. She slept in the London hospital for a day and a half, where she was monitored and nourished. For three days they were in a kind of limbo, waiting on pins and needles until yesterday morning, when she woke up and it was suddenly over. “I want to see London,” she said, and that was that.

  Of course Sara was weak and she would, her doctors insisted, become exhausted despite herself. They urged Roald to make sure she used a wheelchair for another few days, but they were pleased to say that she would make a complete recovery. Sara’s ordeal, everyone was happy to realize, was over.

  Wade looked around himself like a panorama camera. “So where’s Bec—”

  Then there she was, still wrapped in her fur-lined parka, standing quietly to the side of them as if she’d been there the whole time. She wore a puzzled frown on her face, and her eyes were downcast nearly to her feet, while she rocked on the marble tiles as if to keep her balance.

  At least since the Moscow airport, Becca had been so quiet—so quiet—and had barely spoken a word. He stepped over to her. “Hey. We lost you for a second.”

  “Lost?”

  “I mean, how are you feeling? The headaches. Your fever? Were you crying?”

  “What?” she said. “No. Why?” She lifted her hand, apparently surprised to find her cheeks wet and salty. Her puzzled look returned. “Oh. Maybe. It’s . . . it’s good to have Sara back.”

  He nodded over and over again, aware he was grinning like a fool but unable to stop. “Oh, yeah, it’s good. I feel like crying, too.”

  Lost . . .

  Becca had stood there immobile for many minutes, her eyes throbbing, even in the abbey’s diffused light. Her head felt as if it were being bisected by a battle-ax separating the hemispheres in a way that had, three times so far, preceded something like a blackout. The crossbow wound on her arm hurt like never before, too. It might have stung from the hospital antiseptic she’d received here in London, but it felt like it wasn’t healing so much as deepening, getting worse.

  Around Becca in every direction, the noise of the great stone room crashed into her ears like waves battering a deck in a storm. It brought back to mind scenes from Moby-Dick, which she had been reading just last week.

  When she stepped after Wade to join his parents, who clung to each other like the lost loves reunited that they actually were, Becca was not aware of the words of her friends or the echo of their feet on the stones so much as the sudden terrible creaking of wood, and an odd forlorn voice in her ears crying, I am lost . . . lost! Bring me home!

  Lily sidled up to Becca, joining arms with her. “You guys, we are never, ever splitting up again. I never want to make big decisions. Ever. Not without all of you there to back me up when I decide something brilliant.” Lily held back her tears as well as she could, but she finally had to turn away and rub her cheeks dry. “I know I’ve said it a billion times since Russia, but I still sort of can’t believe we had Serpens and lost it.”

  “It was worth it,” Darrell said softly. “But yeah. We had it, and we gave it away.”

  The loss of both halves of Serpens was a gnawing ache to them all.

  In the coming days, Lily knew, the weirdness of Kronos and Galina and the loss of Serpens and all of it would probably become less a kind of grief and more an alarm, goading them to keep up the hunt. It would force them into their next mission. They were Guardians of the Astrolabe of Copernicus. They were the Novizhny. If there had been the slightest doubt about that when they entered Russia, if they’d thought they were really only there to find Sara, there was no doubt now. After what had happened at Greywolf and Vorkuta and Red Square, there could never be any doubt.

  Becca stayed mostly quiet about it, but Darrell had given them a stunning second-by-second account of the last moments before the device’s clock struck midnight.

  “After Ebner bolted for the jewels,” Darrell had said, “Helmut Bern tried to keep us from getting Mom out of Kronos. But Becca punched—I’m telling you punched—the guy with, like, a movie punch. Bern looked like he’d just been insulted or something; then he fell back at the last second before midnight. Dad and I yanked Mom out of Kronos, the machine went all ka-boom on us, the lights and everything went out, and Dad dragged us all out of there, even Marceline, without looking back.”

  Lily couldn’t get enough of the story, partly because she and Wade had had no idea what had happened before they got to the airport, nor that they had both recovered—then given up—their halves of Serpens. Neither Terence nor Inspector Yazinsky had had any news from Greywolf, either about Roald and Sara or about Darrell and Becca. Everyone had kept checking phones, but there had been no word.

  Bright morning light streamed in the stained-glass windows of the nave, crisscrossing the floor in shapes of shadow and color. Darrell felt peaceful for the first time since his mother had been kidnapped.

  “I keep thinking we should be holding Serpens right now,” he said, gazing up at the brilliant gold altarpiece, then back at them. “We should have the relic right here in our hands. Cursed or not, I think we’d be able to deal with it. It’s supposed to be ours. I mean . . . well . . . we should have it, end of story.”

  There wasn’t much else to say. They all felt the same.

  “I keep wondering if the umbrella man is out there somewhere,” Wade said, scanning the vast nave of the abbey. “Not that we’d know it if he’s in disguise.”

  “No problem,” said Darrell. “Lily can spot a wig fifty feet away, right, Lil?”

  She laughed. “Just one of my talents.” Then she sighed. “I guess we go back to Texas now? Just like that?”

  Wade grumbled. “No one wants to, but we don’t know where to start searching for the next relic, do we? Only Galina does.”

  In a day or two, their London rest would be over. Lily’s and Becca’s parents were due to arrive to take them home. There would be all sorts of craziness trying to justify all they’d done, but Darrell knew that when the girls’ parents saw his mother safe and heard how she wouldn’t be there if not for the two girls’ help, they’d realize that there had been no choice. They would all have to work out their individual returns to Austin, however, and even how safe that might be, given how the Order forced them from their homes. That was as big a question as anything else.

  But then, only one thing wasn’t a question.

  They’d made a solemn oath, the four of them, that they were “totally and completely and absolutely” committed to the relic quest. And Darrell’s mother and stepfather were just as committed. They had no real idea where to start looking for the third relic—a giant obstacle, but they’d overcome obstacles before.

  Lots of them.

  Wade was the first to see a familiar-looking boy trot across the marble stones to them.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” Julian Ackroyd said. “All safe and sound?”

  “Neither,” Darrell said, “but good enough. How’s your dad?”

  “Fine. He’s tied up with the London foundation until tonight, but I’ve just gotten off the phone with him,” Julian said. “Paul and Marceline are back in Paris and doing all right, but both will be out of action for a while. They reported that there’s not a stitch of information on Galina Krause right now. When she disappeared from Red Square in the chopper, she might just as well have been swallowed up by the storm. Dad’s people are searching, but you know . . .” He trailed off.

  “She’ll discover where the next relic is,” Becca said, as if it pained her to talk. Her brow was furrowed again. “She’ll do what she can to rebuild the Eternity Machine. She’ll destroy the world.”

  “We might be able to help with that,” Julian said. “Honestly
, I’ve never seen Dad so into anything. Me, either, actually. He’s dedicating a whole division of our foundation to stopping Galina Krause. We’re not letting this go.”

  “Thanks for that,” said Wade, watching Becca’s expression darken as Roald wheeled Sara out of Poets’ Corner and across the floor toward them.

  “Which brings me to the real reason I wanted to meet you here in London,” Julian said. He swiped his phone. “In addition to helping with the London activities of the Ackroyd Foundation, I’ve been doing some work. I believe you know this man?”

  They leaned over the picture to see a tall, white-haired man in a long black leather coat standing by a river. He had close-cropped white hair and a stony expression.

  “OMG, that’s Markus Wolff!” Lily said. “He killed us in San Francisco! Well, almost!”

  “He said he would finish the job if he ever saw us again,” said Darrell.

  “Markus Wolff,” Julian said, “works exclusively for Galina Krause as a sort of personal archaeologist.”

  “And personal assassin,” Lily added.

  “There are boats behind him,” Becca said. “Where was this picture taken, and when?”

  “This morning on the Thames, not two and a half miles from here,” Julian said, closing his phone. “During the current renovations of the historic area, the remains of a trading barge from the early fifteen hundreds have been discovered. The question is, what’s so interesting to Galina Krause about an old boat?”

  “A boat . . . ,” Becca murmured.

  Wade stepped next to her. “A clue to another relic. A definite clue.”

  “You must be Julian!” Sara said softly, raising her hand to him as Wade’s father wheeled her to a stop.

  “I am!” Julian took her hand with a broad smile. “I’m happy to meet you, Sara Kaplan, and so happy to see you up and around.”

  “No way can you keep my mom down,” Darrell said.

  “And you won’t,” Sara said, her voice coming back to her. “Does anyone know where Galina’s gone to? I have a score to settle with that . . . young woman.”