The Golden Vendetta (22 page)

“Yes! Good work, people!” Darrell hurried into the office to tell his mother. Lily and the others followed and found Sara sitting in the desk chair by the phone, staring at it. Her face was tense and tight. Her eyes were red.

“Mom, what is it?” Darrell asked.

Sara looked up at them. “It's Roald. I couldn't reach him for the longest time and kept trying. When I finally got him, he was breathless, as if he'd been running, or was running while I was talking to him. There were echoes. He was inside. In the underground lab, I guess. I asked him what was going on, what about the meeting, but he said the strangest thing. He said, ‘A flood. There's going to be a flood.' When I pressed him for more, the line went dead. I couldn't reconnect. He was gone.”

T
he relief Wade had felt at finding a real clue to where the first of the keys was—they'd had little but guesses so far—crashed and burned after Sara's weird phone call with his father.

His father. Running. His father, afraid.
There's going to be a flood.

Wade felt he could easily spiral into some pretty dark thoughts.

“Kids, we don't know . . . ,” Sara began, then stopped.

So she felt it too. This might be as bad as they imagined.
A flood.

Wade took a moment. He pressed himself to look at the call logically, not emotionally. Emotionally, he
wanted to scream and hit something and get to Gran Sasso as soon as he could. Logically? Logically, there was next to nothing to go on.
There's going to be a flood.

“What kind of flood?” he asked, a shiver running up his neck. “Where? How? You can't
predict
floods, can you? Not like that. Is he talking about a flood there in Italy? The weather's good there. And there are lakes near him, not oceans. Lakes don't flood, not in good weather. So what, then? Galina can't make a flood happen, can she? Seriously? How do you do that—”

“Wade,” Sara said. “We don't know.”

“Uncle Roald's great at codes,” said Becca. “Maybe it's a code, a message.”

“But he never talks to
us
in code. Not like that.” Wade was getting hot all over. He went back to the table, but the map no longer interested him. He always trusted his father to be careful, but if Galina was doing something . . .
A flood?

“It could be Drangheta,” Darrell said. “He was after Dad, too. Drangheta owns ships, remember. Ships, water, floods.”

“Darrell,” said Lily.

“Kids.” Sara held up her hands and stood up, and they went quiet. After almost a solid minute of watching her face, Wade saw her pull it together like she
usually did, doing the parent thing, keeping her suspicions in check. “Let's put our brains to it,” she said, not looking at anyone specific. “And be smart. Keep our worries on the side. A flood. So, okay. Something bad. We're always ready to fit that into what's going on. But we don't know anything real yet. Just add this clue to the others and keep moving.”

Then, still looking as if she could crumble if she let herself, she simply didn't. She drew in a long breath and coolly arranged for a taxicab to drive them to the mosque.

So. Okay. Keep our worries on the side.

A somber ride later, through the slow, thick evening traffic, the harsh blaring of horns, and the over-revving of motors, they stood at the end of Rue Jamaa Ez Zitouna, looking up at the main entrance to the Zaytuna Mosque.

It was a vast walled structure—“Over an acre,” Lily told them—surmounted by a tall, square minaret with a crescent at the top. Floodlights lit up the sides of the tower. The mosque bordered on Tunis's medina, the now-familiar narrow-streeted old section of the city.

“We want the courtyard inside,” said Darrell. “It's called the
sahn.
That's where the sundial is. We'll have to search every inch of it for the key.”

“If the mosque is still open,” said Becca. “Evening prayers are over now.”

Wade liked that she knew stuff like that, but barely found any space in his own head to think of anything besides his father.

They ascended the stone steps. Inside a tall arch, whose frame was very like the outline in the diary's allegorical drawing, was an only slightly smaller pair of wooden doors. Sara tried one. The doors were unlocked. Together, the five of them entered under the main ornamental archway. The instant they set foot inside the walls and the doors slowly closed behind them, quiet descended over them like a heavy shawl. But it wasn't a tense quiet.

It was peaceful, and time slowed in that way it does when the noise of the world is shut away. Their own breathing and the sound of their footsteps were hushed in the dense darkness and the quiet of the stones.

Of course,
Wade thought.
When you're worried or afraid, you find a quiet place and pray. Protect my dad. Protect Terence, too.

The vast open courtyard lay ahead, but no one entered it.

“Now what?” whispered Darrell.

Only a few seconds passed before a slender older
man moved toward them out of the shadows to the left. He wore layered robes of different colors and a short, tight-fitting hat, and as he approached, the fabric of his garments floated around him.

“My name is Abul-Qasim,” he said.

His words, spoken deeply in perfect English, also seemed to float.

“I'm one of the caretakers of the mosque. It's late for visitors. Still, how can I help you?”

Wade noticed what he took to be expensive jeweled stitching on the collar of the man's robe, while his hat was old and frayed. His gray hair was short beneath its worn velvet seam. His beard was stubbly, also gray.

The fabric shoes he wore—which Wade later learned were called
babouches
—were little more than rags with leather soles stitched to them.

A boy trotted out of the shadows and stood by him. “My grandson, Karim.”

Karim was around eleven or twelve years old, and his dress was a smaller version of his grandfather's. He smiled at them. “Hi. You're Americans?”

Sara smiled back. “Yes. Please forgive us, but we're looking for something. We believe it could be in your mosque. It would have been hidden here a very long time ago. In the sixteenth century.”

The man raised his eyebrows. “In the sixteenth century we were here for hundreds of years already.” He smiled. “Tell me, and I'll try to help.”

Something about the man reminded Wade of Brother Semyon at the monastery of Saint Sergius in Russia, although the two men couldn't have been more different. Semyon was young and tall; Abul-Qasim was older, grayer, shorter. But they both exuded, if that was the right word, the same aura of good feeling, of kindness, of trust. It was a feeling Wade sensed from their faces, the way they looked at him and the others, and from something about their eyes. The words
holy men
seemed a perfect way to describe both of them.

Abul-Qasim was plainly someone you didn't keep secrets from, and the others must have felt the same, because they told this man as much as they dared in as brief a way as they could.

As he listened, he startled them by knowing some of the story.

“The elder Barbarossa's name was Baba Aruj. Yes, he was a buccaneer, but also a people's hero in North Africa. As for finding an object secreted here, well, as you see our mosque is very large. Even if you go back five centuries, there are still a thousand places your object might have been hidden.”

He stopped at the entrance to the giant prayer hall, a tall room of chandeliers and dozens of thick columns arranged in bays. On either side of the entrance to the room were empty racks.
For shoes,
Wade thought. He wondered whether they were supposed to remove their shoes now.

“Can you show us what you have?” asked Karim.

Becca slid Copernicus's diary and her notebook from her bag. “There's a passage in this diary that says that Nicolaus, and Baba Aruj's younger brother, Heyreddin, hid three keys to something very precious. The first key is hidden in a place described by this drawing in my notebook. It's an allegory.”

Abul-Qasim studied the drawing, listening as Sara and the children told him how they came to believe the key was in the mosque, ending with the notion that the key was hidden in a sundial.

“You've been clever,” he said. “I find allegorical art difficult, but I believe I'd have come to the same conclusion as you. The face of the sun in the olive tree would seem to indicate that our sundial is what you're looking for.”

But Abul-Qasim didn't move from his position in the hallway, either to the prayer hall or the courtyard, and it was soon clear that while he was sympathetic, he
couldn't allow the tampering with and removal of any object from one of Islam's holy places.

Even when Sara explained the mission of the Guardians,
their
mission—“it's vital that we find the object, and many lives could be at stake”—he shook his head.

“I sympathize, of course. But I'm afraid it's not possible.”

“What if we can prove that the key actually belonged to Copernicus?” asked Wade. “I know some astronomy, and believe us when we say that what Copernicus was hiding with this key is really important. It was made for him and the Guardians, not really for Barbarossa or the Ottomans. And it was meant to be found . . . by us.”

Abul-Qasim tilted his head from one side to the other, his smile neither increasing nor fading. “The astronomer is certainly a hero to all people of science, no matter where they live. Even supposing you can show me—if you can
prove
to me—that Nicolaus Copernicus entered these walls,
and
that he hid something here to be found by the keepers of his memory, I would not be able to convince my fellow stewards of the mosque to allow you to leave with it. Certainly not in any reasonable time.”

To Wade, Becca looked as if she were going to blow to pieces, and Sara didn't look much different, but she
put her hand on Becca's arm, smiled grimly, and said, “We understand, of course, sir, and we thank you for listening to us.”

“But, Sara, please . . . ,” Wade started, then paused. They had no right to mess around here.

Even if Galina ripped the place to shreds looking for it, they themselves would not. The mosque was holy. A shrine and a place of worship. He'd felt it the minute they entered. Since he and his family weren't Muslim, they had little right to be there at all. Wade felt Abul-Qasim would kindly shoo them out, case closed.

Instead the man held up his hand as if he knew what Wade was thinking, and right then another, different tone entered the conversation.

“I understand your desires,” he said. “And how strong, and perhaps, good, they may be. But you must realize that I have a very important . . . phone call.”

Abul-Qasim then fixed his eyes on his grandson. He put his hands on the boy's shoulders. “Karim, if you would be so kind as to show our visitors the way? I may be gone some minutes. On my important phone call. Ten minutes.”

Then Abul-Qasim looked at Wade, his mother, and the others. “Perhaps even longer. It may be a long call. Now, please forgive my rudeness as I take my leave of
you. Karim will show you the way. . . .”

He slipped off his shoes, turned, and strode off quickly across the matted floor of the prayer hall. The room was dusky with candlelight. He was gone.

“What just happened?” Darrell whispered.

“You mentioned his name,” said Karim, smiling.

“Barbarossa?” said Lily.

Karim shook his head. “Copernicus. My grandfather is, or was, a scientist. He knows all about time and space and physics. He taught cosmology. Besides, you heard him. He asked me to ‘show you the way.' Not the way
out
. Just ‘the way.' We live in different cultures, but I'm pretty sure that means the same to both of us. Wink, wink. So. Let me show you the way . . . to the sundial!”

“You are awesome!” said Wade.

“Everything around here is. Come on.”

W
ade and the others followed Karim, backtracking along the gallery to the main entrance. They passed through a pair of wooden doors set into a low wall and entered a large open courtyard—the
sahn.

The instant they did, a great flock of pigeons swept up from the stones and circled the floodlit minaret.

“Like Saint Mark's Square in Venice,” said Lily.

“Yes!” said Karim. “Well, I've seen some movies of it.”

The sun had dipped below the horizon, and the sky overhead was dark, a deep purple splashed with flickering stars, but waves of heat still rose up from the tiles as if the entire space were underwater. Some of the
pigeons settled back on the stones.

In the center of the yard three stone discs were set on low pediments some ten to twelve feet apart. A higher, rectangular column of stone on which four iron gnomons jutted up like blades stood in more or less equal distance from the discs.

“Are there three sundials?” Lily asked.

“No, no,” said Karim. “The three pediments are openings to wells. During prayer times, when the courtyard is full of people in the middle of the day, it gets very hot. So, there is water. This sundial, however, is far older. My grandfather knows his astronomy. He taught me a lot. Show me what you have.”

Becca took the mirrored spectacles out of their case, adjusted them, and read the passage in the diary, translating it to him.

Karim frowned. “So, you're really looking for a number. The letters you read at the end.
LdV?
I wonder if this is a clue also.”

“It stands for Leonardo da Vinci,” Darrell said.

“But could
LDV
also be a Roman numeral?” asked Becca.

Karim shook his head. “The letters, yes, but not in that order. The proper way to say it is
DLV,
which equals five hundred fifty-five. A number that does not occur
on any of these sundials.”

“Five hundred fifty-five.” Lily looked directly at Becca. “Five-five-five.”

“It could be right,” said Becca.

They checked the number five on the sundial, but there was nothing to make it seem as if something was hidden there.

“Maybe he means to add them?” asked Lily. “Fifteen?”

“Possibly.” Karim asked to see the drawing again. He pointed to the word
Sol
beneath the face on the olive tree. “Did Copernicus write this word?”

“It's not his handwriting,” said Becca. “I'm guessing that since most of the words are Arabic, they were written by the younger Barbarossa brother, Heyreddin. We call him Barb Two. They were both very old at the time, and Copernicus was ill. He died just weeks later.”

Karim smiled. “That's it, then.
Sol
is the answer.”

“Sol
is Latin for ‘sun,'” said Sara.

“Of course it is,” the boy said. “But if this is Heyreddin's handwriting, the clue is not in Latin, although the letters are. He was an Ottoman and a Turk. It is Turkish.
Sol
means something quite different in Turkish, the language that Barb Two knew best.”

He folded his arms across his chest and kept smiling.

“Uh . . . Karim?” said Darrell. “Are you going to tell us?”

“Sol
means ‘left'!” he said. “Your clue means to search the left of the sundial!”

They stood in front of the sundial and went over every inch of the left side, particularly the leftmost of the four gnomons, but they could find nothing there.

“What did we get wrong?” said Wade.

“What if . . . ,” Lily began, “what if the five-five-five has to do with the time of day? Five o'clock, ten o'clock, and maybe fifteen hundred hours, three o'clock in the afternoon. I don't know . . .”

Karim smiled. “Yes, yes! Where would the left gnomon point at those times of day? Let's try.” He ran his fingers along the outer edge of the sundial and suddenly stopped at the tile marking the five o'clock position. It sank below the surface of the sundial. “Oh, yes!” The same thing happened at the ten o'clock position, and again at three.

The moment the last tile sank, they heard the sound of stone sliding against stone on the left side of the sundial near the base. A portion of the column had slid outward.

Darrell laughed. “You found it!”

“See what it is!” said Karim. “Miss Sara, please.”

Sara knelt and drew out the stone. Behind it lay a slim box of marble approximately two inches wide and six inches long. It had two small openings, one at either end, which appeared to be finger holes, allowing the marble piece to be lifted out.

Wade's heart was thumping. “The first key is in there.”

“We hope,” said Becca.

“Karim?” said Sara. “I think it's most proper for you to do this.”

He beamed at them. “Thank you for the honor.” He inserted his small fingers into the holes and pulled up on the lid.

Inside, fixed tightly within the walls of a shallow indentation, was a large key, nearly six inches long and made of rough, thickly cast iron.

The entire surface of the key was engraved with interlocking loops and delicate swirls of ornamentation. They were the marks of a key made by da Vinci.

The shaft was more or less plain, even rugged, and the bit—the part that fit into the lock—was thickly made, with a complex arrangement of angled parts. But it was the bow of the key, the part you gripped when you turned it, that was the most amazing and intricate. Wade took a photograph and enlarged it on his phone.

The face of the bow was wide, perhaps two inches across and a quarter-inch thick, and it was incised with numbers all around the perimeter, in the manner of a clock. There was an Arabic word scratched into the center. The back of the bow was coated in silver.

“The numbers around the edge are wrong,” said Darrell. “There are two twelves.”

“Karim, what does the word on the key mean?” Sara asked.

He studied it, pronounced it silently with his lips, then asked for something to trace it on. Wade gave him his notebook. Finally, Karim said it aloud. It sounded like “ascent.”

“I would translate it as ‘azimuth,'” Karim said. “It's the direction between one point and another. Wade, you know astronomy, so you know azimuth, yes?”

He nodded. “Not well. I have to refresh my memory, but I think it's the degree of an angle from a vertical line, isn't it? The way to measure the position of stars?”

“Yes, but it's also used in navigation. Seafarers used azimuths to keep on course. There are three hundred sixty degrees in a circle, with zero and one hundred eighty as the north and south poles. The numbers on this key would seem to give you a direction. Not a distance, but a direction.”

“So the total of all the numbers should give us the degree, right?” asked Darrell.

“Already got it,” said Lily. “The numbers from one to ten, with two twelves and no eleven, equal seventy-nine. So what is seventy-nine degrees from here?”

“I have to find true north first,” said Wade.

“What's this line?” asked Becca, pointing to a straight line of stones that ran from one side of the courtyard to the other. “Is it north?”

Karim shook his head. “No, no. That is our
qibla.
You see the cupola in that wall? That is the entrance to the prayer hall. Against the back of that is our qibla wall. It is the direction to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. We pray facing Mecca. It is one hundred twelve degrees from true north.”

“Which is that way,” said Wade, lining up his phone's compass. “Seventy-nine degrees would point somewhere east-northeast of here.”

“You'll need a map and a calculator,” Karim said, “but it could be somewhere like Istanbul. On the other side of the Mediterranean. In Turkey.”

“Which makes sense,” said Becca. “Heyreddin lived there later in life, and he probably started from there when he took the journey with Copernicus. Sara?”

Sara drew a long breath. It was plain to Wade that she was worried about the next leg of the journey without his father. “Istanbul . . .”

Abul-Qasim raced into the courtyard, his robes flying. The pigeons fluttered off again. “You must leave! They have found you. Don't ask me how. There is an exit to the streets in the medina.”

“Who is it?” said Sara, as they rushed across the courtyard to the far side.

“A large man, and his slender companion who looks like a—”

“Fish!” said Becca. “It's Bigboy and Fish!”

“Are you serious?” said Lily. “They must have tracked our new phones. They flew their plane after us. It's the only way they could have found us so soon! Hide the key!”

Darrell pushed it deep in his pocket and ran for the exit.

A shot boomed across the courtyard, and the pigeons
swept up again, a wall of wings and feathers. The fat man from the desert rushed under the qibla colonnade toward them, waving his pistol like a madman. “Shtop right there!” Fish was racing around the other side. He had a long dagger gripped in his hand and held it out straight like a sword. Abul-Qasim swept his arms around Karim and pulled him back behind him.

Bigboy's next shot struck the stones near Wade. He jumped out of the way, lost his balance. When he fell, his phone crashed out of his hand to the ground and clattered across the stones out of reach. Darrell was suddenly there, pulling him away before he could crawl for it.

“The photo! The photo of the key is on there—”

“Doesn't matter,” said Darrell, as bullets crackled over his head. “You do.”

Karim tore out of his grandfather's grasp and sprinted across the courtyard. He scooped up the phone, ran between the columns toward the prayer hall, but Fish bolted after him like a rocket and wrenched the phone from him. Abul-Qasim leaped across the stones toward his grandson, but Bigboy twirled around and grabbed him with one hand and pressed his gun into his ribs. Abul-Qasim yelled over his shoulder, “Go! Go!”

Wade wanted to rush to their aid, but Darrell
wouldn't let him into the line of fire. He yanked Wade's arm until it felt as if it were going to fall off, and they were out, racing under the colonnade and down the steps into the bustling street.