The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone (9 page)

Chapter Nineteen

N
estled in the plush backseat of her powerful silver SUV, Galina Krause fixed her eyes on the computer image of a man in a canoe on a river in the jungles of Brazil.

The canoe was in one piece. The man was not.

“Fool!” The driver with no name screamed to the taxicab he had just forced off the street. “Idiot—”

“Silence,” she said. “Continue to Unter den Linden.”

Ebner von Braun glanced at Galina as she studied the computer screen with her gray and blue eyes. He wondered what his illustrious grand-uncle would have thought about him. A theoretical physicist of such brilliance having gone over to—what did they call it?—the dark side?

He probably would have scolded me
, Ebner thought,
and rapped his gold-tipped baton across my knuckles. At which point, I imagine, his eyes would have twinkled as he offered me a glass of cognac.

“To power!” he would have toasted.

Perhaps, someday, we shall toast together . . .

Pushing back the dark hair from her cheek, Galina cooed into her cell phone. “You have been careless, Mr. Cassa. I will give you twelve hours to settle your affairs in Rio and bid farewell to your family. By”—she paused to check the computer time—“six a.m. your time you will be dead.” She ended the call smoothly, turned to Ebner, and said, “Make it so.”

He bowed his head, and his words—“Of course, Miss Krause”—sent a wave of nausea into his throat. Ebner had something to tell her that she would not enjoy hearing. It wasn’t good news, and he was hesitant even to bring it up. Yet when she found out later on her own—and she always found out—he would be in more than one piece himself. He was suddenly aware that her eyes were no longer on the computer screen. They were on him.

“Well,” she said, “spit it out.”

Ebner cleared his throat. “The elevator incident in Paris was a necessity, I’m afraid. The victim, a minor sort of man, was not merely a writer at the newspaper, but an inseparable part of the secret organization Vogel had built.
Le Monde
had hired the man seventeen years ago. His name was Bernard—”

“Spare me his name,” Galina snapped. “How did their system work? Was there a failsafe? A backup?”

Ebner went on. “We believe that the simplicity of their method was responsible for its success. There was a system of rotating keepers of the secret. One led to another and another and another and finally to the Frenchman. A brief message was sent from Vogel on the evening of the second Monday of every month. Ber . . . this man in Paris published each coded message in print and online in
Le Monde
editions throughout the world. This was how the various members of the organization were notified.”

“The message?” she asked.

“Simple. The letters RIP. In English, Rest in Peace,” Ebner said. “The letters would be positioned in the puzzle according to a series of ever-changing number tricks based on the number twelve.”

She breathed in sharply. “Twelve. Of course. Vogel was informing the others that the legacy
rests in piece
. Because we must assume that his death launched the Protocol, this is now no longer true.”

Ebner shuddered slightly. The word
Protocol
was a terrifying piece of terminology. As he understood it, it meant that the twelve relics, no matter where they were across the globe, were destined for their final, irreversible journey.

“No other communication seems to have been made among the participants. To increase security, most members are unaware of one another. Only Vogel, as their communications chief, knew all of the . . . the Guardians.”

“The Guardians,” Galina repeated softly. “And the man in Paris gave resistance?”

“Naturally, at first,” said Ebner. “We had to convince him to speak. He told us about Vogel not on the threat of his own death, but on that of his family. He said it was a miracle we found him. It was. But miracles end like everything else. He told us what we needed to know. Then he died. Tragically.”

“And the Paris police? The newspaper?”

This was it. The big messy problem. Two of their agents in Paris had been slipshod. Because it was a death of a journalist, one of Dufort’s colleagues was now burrowing deep into the tragedy. So far, he had discovered only a small fragment of evidence, but it was enough. “A cover-up will be possible, of course, but it will cost money,” he said. “I have wired the Banque Nationale—”

Galina moved her head slightly. Her eyes bore into him. “I will go to the top, the director-general of the
sûreté
. In the meantime, discipline the Paris agents. Permanently.”

“As you wish, Miss Krause.”

“You hesitate?”

Ebner sucked in a cold breath. “It is only that too many bodies are not invisible. Neither are collapsed buildings or sinking ships.”

“Time is against us.”

“Which is why we are working already on several fronts to achieve the Order’s ultimate goal. The experiments, the laboratories, as well as this search for the twelve—”

“You are not saying the challenge is too great for you, Ebner von Braun?”

“Galina, please. Not at all. Only that we are doing everything we can while maintaining secrecy. We must remain an Order of ghosts, after all.” He was suddenly aware that his choice of words could have unfortunate connotations. “An invisible presence, I mean.”

She lowered her magnificent eyes to his chest. “Discretion, then,” she said. Then she turned her face to the window. The rain had changed over to thick wet snow somewhere on their drive. “This family who visited the tomb? Who are they? What do they know? Could Vogel have shared the secret with them?”

“A man and his brood of children? I doubt it,” Ebner said. “But we are running their identities through our databases even now.” Ebner flexed his bandaged fingers. “If anything turns up on Vogel’s hard drive, we shall know by morning.”

“By . . .
morning
?”

“Before morning,” Ebner said. “Much sooner than morning.”
Note,
he thought,
Helmut Bern at Station Two must quicken his reconstruction of the hard drive.

“And the old man’s apartment was cleared of evidence?”

“Every stitch,” said Ebner. “We left it exactly as his housekeeper normally does.”
Or had they?
He had not been there to supervise the work personally, always a risk. That was ever the problem faced by a global organization with—what had he called it?—a singular alignment of causes.

Galina narrowed her gaze at Ebner. He glanced away, couldn’t look directly into those eyes. They were stronger than a death ray. And he should know about death rays. Those experiments had been completed at Station Three in Mumbai just last month.

“And if you are wrong . . .” she started.

“I know,” said Ebner, swallowing hard. “My own elevator accident.”

Chapter Twenty

A
s Wade stepped to the cemetery gates a hand touched his arm.

“Wait here,” his father whispered. “I’ll find a way inside.”

Yeah, inside the park of death!

He watched his father trot down the sidewalk. He knew his dad had run track in college, and he admired all the trophies in his study at home, but now he wished the man weren’t so quick. In seconds he was around the corner and gone, and Wade felt strangely abandoned. It being the dark of night, frigid, and now snowing didn’t help either.

It also occurred to him that his father, being an adult, was taking a far bigger risk than he and Darrell and the others. Running from men in cars, rushing through foreign streets, fleeing in underground passages! The kids might be thought of as just fooling around, being carefree tourists. But not his dad. What did it mean that he was doing this?

That this is life-and-death stuff
.

The gates appeared so much taller at night than they had that morning. And the gnarly spikes at the top seemed left over from a medieval weapon factory.

Maybe because they were far from home, it was night, the snow was wet, or the lights from passing cars floated like ghosts through the trees, but the dark graveyard seemed suddenly haunted.

“Someone’s probably following us right now.”

“Darrell, come on,” Wade said.

“I can feel it,” he said, twitching as he looked in every direction. “I’ve always been able to feel those things. I’m sensitive to changes in the air or something. I was that way even when I was small. Things like movement in the dark. Footsteps. Whispers. Eyes staring at you from behind stuff. It all goes in my brain and creates a total sense of doom. It’s happening right now. And it’s getting worse.”

“
You’re
getting worse,” said Wade. “And I mean that in the politest way possible. You’re freaking everyone out.”

“It’s not
me
freaking everyone out,” Darrell said, shifting from foot to foot like a tennis player waiting for a serve. “It’s that we’re breaking into a cemetery at night. A
cemetery
. At
night
!”

“Okay, already!” said Lily. “Becca’s scared enough.”

“We’re
all
scared enough.” Becca shivered as she huddled under the arch. “Plus this suddenly seems extra insane, to be out here like this. I feel sick to my stomach. Not to mention exhausted. Maybe we should just go back home. All the way home. To Texas.”

Wade wondered if he agreed with that, when his father appeared at the same corner he had vanished around, waving them over.

“It’s basically like Fort Knox here,” he said, “but I found an opening in a hedge along the side wall. There’s a gate, but it’s only a little over waist high. We can climb over it.”

Ten minutes later, after a lot of back-and-forth checking from Darrell and waiting until there were no passing cars, they had vaulted over the low gate onto a pathway.
In
the park of death
.

“Keep close to the wall,” said Darrell, crouching like a secret agent on a mission. “And whisper.”

They crept along the inside of the wall until Lily, enlarging a map of the cemetery on her tablet, located the path they had taken earlier in the day, and they hurried through the trees to it. The snow had turned back to rain by the time they arrived at the Kupfermann tomb.

At night the tomb looked even sadder than it had that morning. A small peaked house of black stone, it was crowded over by vines, its door columns were cracked, and its walls were hairy with moss.

Rain pooled on the dimpled, weathered face of the sundial and the angled blade bisecting it.

“‘Follow the gnomon, follow the blade,’” Darrell said. “It looks like the blade of the sundial is pointing right
inside
the tomb.”

Lily took a step back. “I just thought of something. If this is Uncle Henry’s wife’s tomb, then is he . . . in there now?”

Roald turned away for a moment, then back. “I guess he is. They must have laid him to rest inside after everyone left the service.”

“Then we really shouldn’t do this, should we?” she asked.

Dr. Kaplan ran his fingers through his hair, plainly not liking the idea. He cleared his throat. “No, we shouldn’t, and wouldn’t. Except that Heinrich was telling us to. I have to think that his wish is more important than respecting the sanctity of a tomb.”

“Maybe it
is
respecting him,” Becca said quietly. “He kind of led us here, all the way from Texas.”

Wade looked up to see her blushing.

“Okay, then,” Lily said. “Following the clue is like his final wish.”

Wade choked up a little, crouched, and stared both ways along the angle of the gnomon like a gunsight. “Looking up, there’s nothing but sky. But if you stretch a line down from the high point of the blade, it looks like it would hit the ground somewhere on the back right side of the tomb floor.”

“Boys,” Roald said. They stepped up to the threshold.

The wide door was made of mottled bronze. It was as heavy as a vault door and large, but it must have been hinged with great care and oiled regularly, because when the three of them tugged on the handle, the door opened silently and with ease.

The inside of the tomb was a black room.

Lily tapped the flashlight app on her phone, and the room lit up with frail gray light. In the center were two raised stone coffins, one older than the other, both recently cleaned. On the top of each lay the carved effigy of a figure in a shroud.

“Uncle Henry and his wife are together now,” Becca whispered. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Kaplan and Wade.”

“Thank you,” they said together.

Darrell squinted into the dark. “The gnomon points to the rear corner. Lily . . .” The phone light washed over dull slabs of concrete fitted into one another. There was nothing particular in the back corner of the room.

“Shine it there,” said Dr. Kaplan, and Lily trained the light over the rear wall. “Keep going . . . stop.”

Roughly in the center of the wall was an old-style representation of the solar system, carved in deep relief. Seven perfectly round rings surrounded the sun, the inner six of which had a small raised half sphere on them.

“The Copernican solar system of six planets and the sphere of the fixed stars,” Dr. Kaplan said, counting from the sun outward. “Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Only with the telescope would they discover Neptune and Uranus.”

“The message said the Earth moves,” said Becca. “Maybe it does. Lil, could I see the light?” She took the phone and moved up to the rear wall. The planets were half spheres of varying sizes protruding from the surface of the wall. “Earth is the third planet?”

“Third rock from the sun,” Darrell said.

Becca reached up and touched it. Nothing happened. She pressed it in. Nothing. She grabbed it tightly under her palm and turned. The brief sound of grinding stone came from the rear corner of the tomb. Shining the light there, they saw one stone slab tilted ever so slightly up from the floor as if it were hinged.

“Holy cow!” Wade knelt to it. On the edge of the thick slab was an indentation, inside of which sat a rusty iron ring about the size of a bracelet. “Darrell, help me—”

Together the two boys took hold of the ring and pulled up with all their strength. The stone slab lifted away from the floor.