That truly was impossible.
Carlo slipped out of his sandals, bowed to Ganesha, then moved silently into a coolness that seemed quite impossible so near the sweltering bazaar. He descended exactly one hundred stone steps into a warren of high-ceilinged corridors running in all directions beneath the streets. The site had gone derelict since the Delhi Guardians were killed several weeks before.
The children, he thought. Wade, Becca, Lily, Darrell. Had he been right to bring them into this in the first place? But then, there really was no first place. So what choice did I have? And, besides, they’d really been in it from the start.
From before the start, if I might say such a thing.
He thought of Heinrich Vogel, Wade’s uncle Henry, how his proud but sad death at the hands of Galina and the Order, and the beginning of the Kaplans’ hunt for the relics, now seemed completely inseparable from five centuries before, when the Magister had first flown his remarkable astrolabe.
What is time anyway but a small word for a vast and inexplicable phenomenon? What are past, present, and future but vague points on an endlessly coiling thread?
Carlo paused. The battering of his heart tolled the imminence of battle, the battle that would lead to . . . to the one event that had haunted him for so long.
Taking one corridor to its end, he tapped a sequence of letters into a keypad. A steel door slid aside, and he entered a long chilled room whose walls were lined with antique weaponry.
There were sharp-edged cudgels made from the jawbones of oxen, triple-bladed swords cast of iron and bronze, mechanical spring-loaded attack knives, and many-pronged spear-like shafts of different lengths. There was even, he was pleased to see, a near-perfect specimen of the pugnale Bolognese, the wavy-bladed dagger that had brought the children to Bologna and to his fencing school those long months ago.
He removed a large canvas satchel from a hook on the wall by the door and proceeded into the next room and the next, where the weapons grew more sophisticated and modern until he paused in front of a row of the latest ultralight multishot underbarrel launchers. He removed four of these and slid them into the bag. On his way back, he also selected a dozen or more of the older killing machines and packed them into a second duffel.
“And now, I’m ready.”
Leaving the temple the way he’d come, Carlo continued down the main street of the teeming bazaar, where he met Tacia, the fifteen-year-old leader of his fencing students. She had newly arrived from Bologna that morning.
“So,” Carlo said.
“So,” Tacia said. She bowed, then swung her waterfall of hair over her shoulder. “Seven of Galina’s agents were still in Delhi as of this morning. They are no more.”
“May God have mercy on their souls,” Carlo said. “What else?”
“The Kaplans are in Paris, waiting for you. But perhaps there is a more immediate need. The mountain in Italy, where the Kaplan father is being held with other scientists to rebuild the astrolabe.”
“We have hidden ourselves too long,” Carlo said. “To Italy first.”
On Tacia’s signal, students appeared one by one from this street, that alley, that shop, until nearly two dozen stood by her side.
Carlo nodded. Swinging his duffel bags over his shoulders, he led them out of the bazaar, his troop of young Guardians.
Sometime later, they arrived in a neighborhood of lawns and small white and gold palaces, where four paneled vans were waiting to bring them to the airport.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Paris, France
August 2
8:27 p.m.
Wade felt the jolt when the frozen-fish delivery truck stopped. He was huddled in the back with the others. He looked at Darrell. “We’re here.”
“Not a moment too soon,” he said. “I smell like a fish now.”
“You always did,” said Wade, trying to keep things as light as possible.
A small panel opened between the cabin and the rear of the truck. Marceline Dufort smiled grimly. “We are near the northeast corner of the Place des Vosges. I will park the truck and be in the square in minutes. Three colleagues are already stationed at various points inside. You are clear to exit.”
“Thank you, Marceline,” Sara said. She opened the rear doors of the truck and got out. Becca and Lily followed, then Darrell, then Wade.
Pulling their various caps and scarves and hoods low, they hurried to the corner, then across the street to the Café Hugo, where they took two adjacent tables on the sidewalk. They had a clear view down the colonnade to number 6 Place des Vosges, the Maison de Victor Hugo.
Wade stared at the five-franc note on the tabletop in front of Becca.
The bill’s clue about the Panthéon was now obvious. The code @
[email protected]@5 meant simply the twenty-fourth of July, and that the clock hiding Lyra had to be set to the hour of five to release the relic. Here, at the Place des Vosges, the sequence @
[email protected]@
[email protected] likely indicated the second of August at either nine or six o’clock. Having found out, however, that the Victor Hugo house was located at number 6, they guessed that whatever was going to happen would relate to nine, and since they didn’t know if the warning meant nine in the morning or at night, they’d had to come at both times of day. In fact, they’d visited the Place every day since finding Lyra, but they’d noticed nothing that would suggest the Hugo house had anything to do with the relic hunt.
“We have half an hour,” Lily said. “Darrell, should we go over the Lyra tune again? Maybe this time . . .”
“Maybe this time,” he grumbled, tugging a sheet of music paper from his pocket. “So, as I said before, Lyra’s melody uses all five strings to play a total of twelve notes before it begins to repeat the same sequence.”
“I’m writing this down,” Wade said, taking out his notebook and opening it flat on the table.
“Good idea,” said Darrell. “So, the strings are tuned A, B, C, E, and G. I know this because of my perfect pitch. No brag. Just fact. So the melody goes like this: A-CCC-GGG-BB-EE-A.” He whistled it, and the waiter came over.
When Sara said, “No, thank you, sorry,” the guy scowled and walked back inside.
“What I mean is,” Darrell said, “the first A is like a whole note. This is followed by three plucks on the C string real fast. Then three on the G string, also real fast. Then B twice and E twice, then a final A. After that fades, it goes quiet, then starts the whole sequence again.” He hummed it quietly this time.
“It doesn’t sound like much,” Lily said.
“Notes are letters,” Becca said. “Except it doesn’t spell anything real.”
Darrell shrugged. “Just Ack-ge-bea. Otherwise, not much.”
“The Baroque composer J. S. Bach encrypted his last name into his music,” Wade said. “He used the regular notes B-flat, A, and C of his name, and for the H, he used a B-natural. There was a standard German way of encrypting words in music. We kind of need to search for this.”
Lily turned to Sara. “Can I? I’ll be quick.”
Marceline, who was visible now, walking through the park, her eyes focused on them, had given Sara several burner phones, insisting that they be used only in emergencies and only once each. They weren’t top-of-the-line, but they did have limited data service.
“For one minute only,” Sara said.
“I won’t need all that time,” Lily said with a smile.
Wade watched as her thumbs tapped the tiny keyboard like a pair of woodpecker beaks. Naturally she found what she was looking for in a matter of seconds.
“There are two major ways of encrypting letters in musical scores,” she said. “There’s the German way, which is frankly a bit clunky. But a French way is better. The composer Hélène-Louise Demars invented a system for her composition called L’oroscope in seventeen forty-eight. Perfect timing for the Lyra clue, I’d say. She figured out a simple way to encode the whole alphabet. She devised a chart.” Lily showed them the phone’s screen.
“Wade, copy it into your notebook f
or me, then kill the phone,” Darrell said.
“Knowing Darrell, he actually does mean ‘kill,’” Lily added.
Wade quickly reproduced the chart. Watching Lily quietly snap the phone in half, he gave his notebook to Darrell. “You get it?”
Darrell studied it for a few moments. “I think so. The idea is that one A note—bing—actually equals A, and B equals B, and so on. But if you need, say, an H, you hit two A notes quickly—bing-bing. If you want an O, you hit three notes quickly—bing-bing-bing—and so on.”
“Does it work with Lyra’s notes?” asked Becca. “What do we get?”
They looked at the list of the twelve notes again and translated them.
A-CCC-GGG-BB-EE-A
became . . .
A-Q-U-I-L-A
“Ooh! Ooh! I know this!” Lily said. “Aquila is Latin for ‘eagle.’ It’s one of Ptolemy’s constellations. It’s the eagle that flies around with Zeus’s thunderbolts. Or lightning bolts. Some kind of bolts. Lyra is pointing to Aquila—”
She was cut off by a loud shout from down the arcade, followed by the unmistakable sound of masonry absorbing the sudden hit of bullets.
Becca shot to her feet. “It’s nine o’clock! This is it!”
Bolting from the café, they tore down the colonnade toward the Hugo house when three muffled pops erupted midway to the opposite corner. Marceline and two investigators took off toward them.
The lights were dim under there, but Wade saw a man crumple to the ground and roll forward into the street. Two men stumbled away from him. One was thin and bent over.
“It’s Ebner!” Wade shouted. “And another guy in bandages. They shot someone.”
Amid scattered gunfire and screaming, Marceline and her agents chased Ebner and the bandaged figure across the park. Wade and Darrell hurried to the man who lay motionless on the pavement. His clothes were ragged and old. Blood was pooling underneath him.
He was dead.
“No! No!” Darrell cried. “No more killing!”
Seconds later, there came another volley of gunshots from the sidewalk outside the doors of the Hugo house. The kids doubled back and found the limp form of another man. He had been hit more than once. His shirt, a brown rag beneath a sumptuous cloak, was soaked from his chest to his stomach.
Sara knelt to him. “Someone call emergency!”
Becca gasped when she saw him. “But . . . but . . . oh my gosh, it’s Helmut Bern!”
Becca’s brain stuttered, trying to understand how it was possible. “Helmut . . .”
“Becca Moore,” he said. “We meet again, thanks to you.”
“But . . . Helmut, you must have found Kronos! And if you’re here . . . here and now . . . you must have sent me the message!”
Crowds of bystanders grew quickly under the arcade, some plainly in shock, some on their phones. One clambered across the grass, holding his phone camera high to capture the scene as a getaway car sped out of the Place and away into traffic.
“Ebner and Doyle have shot Fernando,” Helmut groaned. “Help my poor friend. . . .”
“He’s . . . ,” Darrell said. “He’s dead. Ebner and another guy killed him.”
Helmut closed his eyes. “He is—was—Fernando Salta. You know the name.”
They looked at one another when all at once Wade gasped. “Oh my gosh, yes. Fernando Salta. The incident of the school bus in March. Spain, right? There was a boy. I remember the newspapers. We knew it was Galina’s time travel experiment.”
As the onlookers crushed in and multiple sirens wailed in the distance, Becca remembered every moment of her conversation with Bern in London. She recalled her momentary kindness to her enemy, telling him where the time machine Kronos I was located. If she hadn’t, he would not be here now.
“Help is coming,” she said.
Gasping, Bern raised his eyes to her. “No, no. I . . . will die here. My wounds are mortal. But that is fine. You will need this. . . .”
He pawed at the inside lining of his cloak, clumsily, with a three-fingered hand. “I kept it from her assassins. For you. Inside. Go ahead.”
Becca flipped over the cloak to a patch stitched into the lining. She searched for an opening. There was none. She ripped the lining. A scarf fell out. It was folded several times over something heavy. She opened it.
It was a long arrow-shaped object made of gray metal. Lead, Becca guessed.
“What is it?” Darrell asked. The sirens were nearing.
Taking the shaft in her hand, she felt the arrow throb. Its tip spun like the blades of a fan, and the metal “feathers” at the opposite end extended, sliding out several inches from the shaft. There were marks of charring along the shaft as if it had been in a fire.
“Ohhh,” Lily gasped over her shoulder. “An arrow. Is it . . . ?”
“Yes, Sagitta,” Bern whispered. “One of the twelve. Later you will know how I came to have it. It is but a loan for now. I expect it back when the time comes.”
Bern looked as if he had more to say, but couldn’t manage it. Two sirens stopped wailing on the far side of the square. The jammed streets prevented the police vehicles from coming closer. Car doors opened, shut. Running, shouting.
“Là-bas! Là-bas!” “Down there!”
“They’ll question us, arrest us,” said Darrell.
Becca glimpsed figures moving just out of the light. Shadows in the deeper shadows. She felt a sudden hand on her shoulder. Lily’s.
“They could be with the Order,” she said.
“I will deal with the police,” Marceline said. “Go. The fish truck is three blocks south of here. Keys inside. Go.”
Sara stood, taking Lily and Darrell by the arms and tugging them through a portico toward the streets outside the square. Wade edged away with them.
Becca didn’t move. “I’m sorry, Helmut. I have to go. We have to go—”
As the others slipped away, pushing through the crowd and down the colonnade, Bern jerked out a hand and tried to hold her there. His grip was featherlight. He had no strength in his hand, his fingers. He stared at her with near-lifeless eyes. He mouthed another word, maybe more than one, a strange slithering sound.
“Cass . . . iop . . . ie . . . a . . . Zar . . . zuela . . .”
Then he twitched his fingers. Three fingers. He did it twice.
“Becca Moore,” he gasped. “You helped me home. I will come back . . . for you . . . . the rowboat, remember. . . .” He smiled. “I will come for you . . . kkkk . . . kkkk. . . .”
His last breaths were rank. “Helmut?” she said, then his head slid to the side.
Shouts up and down the colonnade clashed with the words in her head. Rowboat. Cassiopiea Zarzuela. And Sagitta was a loan? He expected it back? She bent to hear if he had anything else. No. Helmut Bern was dead. He was gone.
A hand took her arm gently.
Wade helped her to her feet—“Come on, Bec. Come on”—and he moved with her into the shadows of the colonnade. They joined the others, running quickly south from the square as police pushed away the crowds gathering around the two dead men.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
That night, they huddled in a new set of dingy rooms on the Left Bank, too shocked to speak. Wade stared out the window, feeling empty, hollowed out.
The view was not of charming Parisian streetlights or blossoming chestnut trees, but of an interior courtyard filled with trash bins, abandoned wicker chairs, piles of used lumber, and a stack of what might have been parts from a dozen bicycles or—Wade thought—a small airplane. No one said much of anything. They were all twisted up inside. Their joy at decoding the mystery of Lyra and the gift of Sagitta was canceled out by the double murder at the Place des Vosges.
“Bern is dead. That Spanish boy—old man—is dead,” he murmured. “We have Sagitta and a clue to Aquila, but they cost another two deaths, two more kills for the Order.”
No one responded to what he said. Everybody knew it. It was plain enough.
Th
en the room phone rang.
“Who knows we’re here, outside of Marceline?” Darrell said.
Lily sat up on the bed. “The last time the phone just rang it was Markus Wolff.”
Sara stood over the phone. It rang a second time. “Nobody answer it.”
“The Order wants us dead,” said Wade. “They’re not going to warn us.” He reached around his stepmother and picked up the receiver.
“Hello?” he said.
He felt his knees collapse suddenly under him, and he fell onto the bed. “Omigod, Dad? It’s Dad!” He dropped the phone, but scooped it up and managed to hit the speaker button.
“Roald?” Sara screamed. “Is it you?”
The voice, hoarse, gravelly, and with barely any strength to it, said, “Yes, Sara, Wade, everyone, we’re out of the mountain. We’re all right. Terence, too, and Jesminda—sorry, Dr. Singh from Strasbourg; she was wounded, but she’ll be okay. Oh, my God, to hear your voices!” He choked up, wept into the phone. They were all crying.
“We made it out yesterday and have been in hiding,” Wade’s father continued. “Paul Ferrere and a woman named Mistral burrowed in for us. And Carlo. My gosh, after all this time, he came for us with a small army of fencing students. We’re all right. . . .”
Overcome, Sara shook and bowed her head and cried into her hands.
“It worked!” said Lily. “Our message to Carlo. Darrell, it worked!”
“Yay, Dad!” Darrell yelled as he hopped up and down on the floor. “You made it!”
Terence took over the call. “We’re in a transport now, heading over the mountains to the airport. For real, this time. I’ve talked to Julian. He’ll meet you soon.”
“Dad, it’s so incredible to hear your voice,” Wade said. “We have so much to tell you. We have four more relics you don’t know about—”
“When will we . . . see you?” Sara asked.
“First we have to follow the astrolabe,” Wade’s father said softly. “I’m sorry. Galina removed the machine from Gran Sasso, and we’re on the hunt for it. I have a seal, a kind of ring. It isn’t structural, but I know it belonged to Nicolaus. It’s his personal seal. It has the figure of Apollo on it. I think it’s a clue to something, but I don’t know what.”