The Crown of Fire

  Struggling, I pull her to the bank and breathe into her, and she lives to name her child after me.

  There is a rowboat just beyond us, and arms reaching down to drag a drowning man aboard, and so two souls are saved tonight.

  That man is Helmut Bern. “Rowboat!” he whispers. “Cassiopiea Zarzuela!”

  Then he catches my eye and flicks his fingers twice. Three. Three.

  Three.

  Three.

  Thirty-three!

  The rowboat drifts away, the water breaks over my head. I splash to the surface. I scream.

  “Thirty-three!”

  “Becca?”

  A face was leaning over my bed. I looked up.

  “Becca? It’s me. Silva. Are you awake? Can you hear me?”

  “Silva, listen!” I said. “The twelfth relic! What Helmut Bern told me, was trying to tell me. Rowboat and what sounded like Cassiopiea Zarzuela. And then he flicked three fingers at me, twice. Silva, the last part of the clue is thirty-three. Tell them! Tell them thirty-three!”

  “Becca—”

  But I sink down again. The man’s face is lost above the surface. I fall away again, below the rolling tide of the green beast.

  Three.

  Three.

  Thirty-three.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  En route to Olsztyn, Poland

  August 22

  Late night

  After Sara disabled the GPS in Carlo’s van and Wade’s father took the wheel, relying on Polish road maps they’d found in the glove compartment, Wade tried to comprehend Becca’s most recent translations from Nicolaus’s diary.

  “Some passages are just masses of numbers and letters and symbols,” he said. “I doubt Becca even understood what she was translating. I sure don’t. Dad, you might. They’re the most advanced equations and postulates of astrophysics I’ve ever seen. The letter O and the number twelve come up a lot.”

  Darrell frowned over his shoulder. “Maybe a code that relates to the twelfth relic? And Olsztyn? They could be connected. There are so many questions.”

  “Yeah, and no computer to answer them with,” Lily said.

  “Dad, didn’t you tell us once that when Copernicus lived in Olsztyn, he sketched the night sky on the walls of his rooms there?” asked Wade.

  “Yes, in fifteen sixteen or so, I think.”

  “Perfect timing,” said Darrell. “So we find the constellation Cepheus on the wall and kneel there and we’ll find the Protocol. Somehow. That’s what the code is telling us, isn’t it? I mean, the key word is Protocol, so it makes sense.”

  “We need a break like that,” said Lily. “Now that Galina has six relics, she may decide she doesn’t need to stick to the deadline.”

  “I think she does,” Wade’s father said, tugging a blanket over Sara, who was sleeping in the seat next to him. “Her deadline is astronomical, which is both good and bad for us. It gives us, what, four weeks to find the final pieces to the puzzle, the Protocol, the twelfth relic, the location of the launch site.”

  “That’s a lot of stuff,” Darrell said.

  “It is,” Sara added. “We also have to realize that the astronomical deadline will come, no matter what.”

  “We should probably ditch the van before long,” Wade said. “You never know.”

  “There’s public transportation, and Olsztyn is about an hour away,” his father said. “Even without giving out signals, the van could simply be spotted.”

  They decided to park on a quiet side street in the town of Dobre Miasto. Sara reprogrammed the GPS for a route to Sarajevo. They waited for a while to see if any obvious agents of the Order showed themselves. They didn’t, so they boarded a bus to the first city with a train station. It took them hours out of their way and a sequence of trains, but they arrived the following morning in the city of Olsztyn.

  To Wade, they’d made some progress, but they’d hit another stumbling block. The castle had been shut down indefinitely, and was fenced off and surrounded by construction vehicles.

  “The castle’s been closed for repairs for weeks,” Sara translated from a sign posted on the construction fence. “This is German, not my best language, but it’s probably because Galina and Ebner crashed a plane into it some months ago.”

  “And where they found pieces of the astrolabe,” Wade’s father added.

  “Well, we’re certainly not waiting for them to open the doors again,” Lily said.

  “No. The confusion of construction may be just the distraction we need,” Sara said. “The work is on the castle wall and foundation, but the upper rooms look undamaged.”

  Wade scanned the streets nearby. There were shops, a bakery, what appeared to be a travel agent, and several small tourist hotels.

  “What do you think about getting a room overlooking the castle?” he said. “We can scope out the workers and make a plan for getting inside. Just for a few hours or a day.”

  His parents glanced at each other. “Good idea,” Sara said. “Brilliant, in fact.”

  “It’s called establishing a base of operations,” Darrell said. “I’m sure Wade learned it from me, but, you know, that’s fine. I’m a giver.”

  “You’re always giving me a headache,” Lily said. “But you know, that’s fine.”

  For the next day and a half they took turns monitoring every significant movement of trucks and work crews from the windows of their hotel rooms across from the castle. The crews worked two shifts, from seven a.m. to six p.m. and from six p.m. to five a.m. The two hours between the end of the second shift and the beginning of the next day’s first shift were idle, while a small handful of security guards patrolled the large site.

  “Tomorrow morning after five,” Wade’s father said, “we go in.”

  It rained through the night, harder toward morning. When Darrell saw the second shift cut off, shutting down their machines, scurrying for cars, he knew they would move soon.

  “Everybody ready?” he asked.

  “The diary, the notebooks, and your pistol, Roald, stay here with me,” his mother said. “I’ll be a lookout from up here. At the first sign of anything fishy, I’ll run down to the street, find an open car, and honk its horn. You’d better get going.”

  His mother was a great commander, Darrell thought. Sharp, brief, to the point. He liked that. She gave them all a nod, and they left the room like soldiers on a mission.

  The rain was punishing, hard, and, for that time of year, strangely cold.

  They had noticed over the last two days that the security guards bolted the construction fence from the inside when the last workers left. The backhoe driver always parked nearby, and the plan was that they’d scale the fence, climb onto the roof of the backhoe and down to the ground. From there it was only some ten feet to the nearest pile of building stones. And from there a few feet more to the unfinished wall.

  It turned out to work like a charm.

  After they had scaled the fence and were all inside and huddling behind the backhoe, Roald scanned the open space, gave them a look, and darted across the puddly ground. They followed singly. A few more feet and they were at the base of the half-finished outer wall. Roald boosted them up one after another, then climbed over himself. Inside, however, stood a second wall, of crisscrossing bricks, sealing them off from the inside rooms of the castle.

  “Surprise,” Wade said. “Just what we don’t need.”

  “This wall is new,” said Lily, running her hands along the surface. “Maybe we can, you know, take it a little apart?”

  Roald gave her a look. “A little.” Finding a rubber-tipped hammer in a stack of tools, he tapped gently at the bricks. The mortar loosened, and he pried out one brick after another, passing them all behind to Darrell, who passed them to Wade, who stacked them quietly on the ground. Soon, the gap was wide enough for them to slip through.

  Roald went while Darrell held the light for him. Then he took the light from Darrell and shone it around a room. It was clean, sparsel
y furnished, and dry.

  “Stairs, there,” Lily said, pointing to a narrow set of stone steps.

  They went up and up in the dark until they arrived at the astronomer’s famous top-floor study. It had been preserved in a style common to the early-sixteenth century and was furnished with desks and chairs and cabinets to show how Nicolaus might have lived and worked there. He had indeed drawn giant circles and lines and numbers and starlike bursts on the walls, though many of his marks had faded over the centuries.

  “Hans must have been here, too,” Darrell said. “He had to be, right? To know that the Protocol was hidden here?” His words echoed in the room. “I mean, can you imagine the two of them here, talking, eating, working, writing? This is like sacred ground. We know more about both of them than anyone. It’s fairly incredible.”

  “It is,” his stepfather said. “Wade, remind us what Cepheus looks like.”

  Wade took his star chart from his pack and carefully unfolded it. “Cepheus the king is sitting on his throne and is a sort of tilted box with a point. Its stars are his crown and knees and arms.”

  Roald shone his light on the walls and ceiling. “I don’t see it. Maybe it’s one of the ones that have faded over the last five hundred years. Hans probably wouldn’t know that when he wrote the clue, though.”

  “Right,” said Darrell. “But . . . Wade, can I?” He took the celestial map and tried to match it to the positions of the constellations still partly visible on the walls.

  “Huh?” he said. “Cepheus could be sitting . . . somewhere behind that chest.”

  A tall upright wooden chest stood against the wall. It was nearly six feet high and four feet wide, made of oak. It looked like it weighed a ton.

  “No wonder no one ever moved it out of the way,” Lily said. “Everybody, take a corner.”

  The chest was as heavy as a tree, and every muscle in Darrell’s back seized up when they shifted it out. Lily slid behind the chest and shone her light on the wall.

  “Darrell, you were right,” she said. “Cepheus is here. And bonus, he’s not nearly as faded as the rest of the drawings because he was protected from the light.”

  “So now what?” asked Darrell.

  “Well, now I . . . Oh.”

  “Oh, what?” said Roald. “What do you see?”

  “The floor, look.” Lily cast her light on the floor beneath where she knelt.

  On one—and only one—of the floor stones hidden by the wooden chest there was a tiny mark. It was a standing figure, a cape draped over his shoulder, playing what appeared to be a harp or a lyre.

  “Oh my gosh,” Roald said, “that’s Apollo, the same image as on Nicolaus’s personal seal. Boys, let’s pull the chest out another foot. We need to get under that stone.”

  Five minutes of soft grunting later, the chest was three feet from the wall, and Lily moved her fingers around the edge of the stone. “I need a knife or something.”

  Darrell scoured the room and found a short sharp-edged ruler. Lily dug its blade in deep under the edge of the stone. She levered it up. Set into the flooring beneath the stone was a narrow wooden box about ten inches long and two inches wide, almost like a small toolbox. She slipped it out and gave it to Roald. He set the box on Nicolaus’s desk and unclasped the simple lock.

  A single folded sheet of paper was the only thing inside.

  “Oh, man,” Wade breathed. “Is this really it? The Frombork Protocol?”

  The paper was folded over several times and sealed with wax. The seal was also in the shape of Apollo playing a harp. It was unbroken.

  “Lily, your fingers are the smallest,” Darrell said. “Can you open it? We don’t want to tear it.”

  Lily carefully peeled the wax seal off the paper, separated one side of the sheet from the other, and unfolded the paper. It was so brittle and dry, it looked as if it would just crumble in her fingers. The handwritten text was dated 1543, the year of the astronomer’s death, and his signature was at the bottom. It was frail but clear, and it was in English.

  Darrell couldn’t help but see and feel the final hours before Nicolaus breathed his last.

  “Bring it into the light of the window,” Roald said softly.

  Darrell read it aloud while Wade recorded it on the last page of Becca’s notebook.

  Frombork, Poland

  24 May 1543

  In my tears, I decree this.

  If ever the Demon Master attempts to rebuild the machine, you are to recover its twelve relics, return to the occasion of its first launch, and destroy the machine before.

  I hereby seal this document with the sign of Apollo as given me by my beloved brother.

  After I lost Andreas, I gave his seal of Dionysus to Hans Novak.

  After I lost Hans, that ring was lost, too.

  Now I am lost. I am alone. I am ill. My soul will soon fly among the stars.

  —Nicolaus Copernicus

  At the very bottom of the paper was a long string of marks of a kind they had never seen before. It was a code, they guessed, but one that seemed to defy any logic.

  “Hans Novak died,” said Lily. “Nicolaus was alone at the end. This is so sad.”

  Darrell felt the same. It was sad. It was Nicolaus’s good-bye to the world. But what he had long expected to find in the famous Protocol wasn’t there.

  “Sorry, but what is Nicolaus saying we have to do? Destroy the machine before? Before what? And he wants us to go to where the machine was first launched, but he doesn’t tell us where that was. And if the relics are indestructible, how can we destroy them? I thought . . . I thought this would have all the answers. It has none of the answers. We don’t even know how Carlo got Hans Novak’s note about where to find this—”

  A car horn sounded from outside.

  Lily ran to the window. “We’d better leave all this for later,” she said. “That’s Sara’s signal. Something’s going on out there. We need to get out.”

  “Pack up,” said Roald. “Hurry.”

  Darrell restored the fragile Protocol to its box, slid it inside his jacket, and they rushed two steps at a time down the stairs after his stepfather. They heard the scratching of keys in locks as they jumped down into the cellar and through the opening in the brick wall. There was no time to rebuild the wall. They just abandoned everything and left.

  Spotlights flared on around the castle, and the guards seemed to have doubled in number. Roald pushed Lily and Darrell out toward the backhoe. Seconds later he and Wade followed. They waited until no one was looking and climbed up the backhoe and over the fence.

  Sara met them outside the hotel in a large blue sedan idling at the curb.

  “I thought we might need to get out quickly. Everything’s in the car. Let’s drive.”

  They had gone no more than five blocks when Lily screamed in Darrell’s ear.

  “Stop!”

  “What the— I’m deaf now!”

  “Stop,” she said. “Neckermann. The Thomas Cook affiliate. There, on the corner. I can use Simon Tingle’s card!”

  They pulled up in front of the small travel agency, its windows plastered with travel deals, euro prices slashed and reslashed. It was locked, but Lily, Darrell, and Wade knocked on the door until a young woman came, then rushed inside with Roald, while Sara idled the car.

  The moment they presented Simon’s card, the young woman said, “We have a message for you.” She brought them immediately to a basement office equipped like a small command center.

  “From Simon?” asked Lily.

  “No,” the woman said, reading from the screen. “From a man named . . . Silva. It came through Julian Ackroyd, then to Simon. It is several days old. Here is the recording.” She tapped a key on the computer’s keyboard.

  The recording crackled. “I hope this reaches you in time.” Silva’s voice, low, almost whispering. “I don’t know when you’ll get this, but Becca came to, for a few seconds last night. Sorry, the twenty-second. She told me to tell you this. In Paris just
before he died, Helmut Bern told her, ‘Cassiopiea Zarzuela. Thirty-three.’ It all goes together. ‘Cassiopiea. Zarzuela. Thirty-three.’ Sorry, it’s not much. After telling me this, she went under again. No change. Be careful. Out.”

  The recording hissed with static for a few seconds, then nothing. That was all.

  She went under again.

  Wade felt himself being hollowed out bit by bit, and yet he was full enough to want to stop everything and just cry. She could be dying. She is dying. His father put his arm around Wade’s shoulders.

  “We can’t despair,” he said. “Becca has the best care imaginable. She’s protected by Silva and his men. We have to keep going. We have to hope that it’ll turn out all right. We can’t do anything else.”

  Wade nodded, as if in reflex. Hope. Okay. It’s something. He turned to Lily, who was drying her eyes. He hugged her, then Darrell, too.

  “It seems like not so much,” Lily said. “Except of course it’s not, coming from Becca. ‘Cassiopiea Zarzuela Thirty-three.’ An address maybe? A person. Or not a person, like Floréal Muguet?”

  “Cassiopiea’s another constellation,” Roald said. “The rest . . .”

  “Let me enter the terms in our database,” the young woman said. “But in the meantime, may I suggest you call Simon Tingle in London? He could very well find the answers you need more quickly.”

  “Yes, please,” said Darrell. “He’s terrific.”

  Four and a half minutes later, they were videoing with Simon Tingle on a secure British intelligence computer. He sat in his office at University College London, the same office where they’d met him in London when searching for Crux.

  “No time for pleasantries, people. Feed me mysteries! My little gray cells await the stimulation.”

  He listened with his eyes closed as they told him what Becca had told Silva, and he leaned back in his chair nearly to the point of falling over. He did this for a minute or two before he leaped suddenly from the chair and disappeared from the screen. Moments later he was back.

  “Quite a challenge, but here it is. Cassiopiea can, of course, be many things—mythological story, constellation, so forth—but its meaning narrows considerably when you combine it with the second word. Zarzuela is a particular kind of Spanish opera from the early-eighteenth century. One of its chief composers was a chap named Antoni Literes Carrió, who in July seventeen forty-seven wrote a zarzuela entitled—ta-da!—Cassiopiea. Now, Carrió had his studio off the Plaza Conde de Barajas in Madrid. All this may seem scattered, except for the final bit—the number thirty-three.