The Golden Vendetta (34 page)

“I'm Roald Kaplan. Who are you? Why are we here?”

“So. Roald Kaplan. We meet at last. My name is Ugo
Drangheta. Why are we here? Me, to be killed. You for some other reason.”

“You're not a scientist?”

“No. I was following you. I believed you to be the one who could help me. Then we were attacked.”

“We?” Roald looked around the room.

“My lovely Mistral may have been killed by the colonel. I don't know.”

The steel doors whooshed open. Galina Krause entered, followed by Dr. Petrescu, who looked haggard and shrunken. They were accompanied by a dozen armed men, who were wheeling in a large platform. The assembled scientists were pushed to the perimeter of the lab, away from the man cuffed to the chair.

“What is all this? What is that junk?” one of Roald's colleagues whispered. “Roald, tell me.”

He couldn't speak.

The platform contained a great pile of girders, plates, rods, arc-shaped struts, stacks of levers, loose hinges and joints, gears and pipes, all gleaming with the color of a dark sun. Each item was wrought of the reddest gold he had ever seen.

Roald recognized the fragments from the diary's sketches.

This was the broken skeleton of Copernicus's original
astrolabe. The bits and pieces found at Olsztyn and Kraków and Prague and elsewhere over the last two months.

Galina Krause walked slowly up to it. Her face was drawn, her cheekbones prominent and razor sharp. Her two differently hued eyes burned like torches in the darkness around them. The doors sealed behind her.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “You will use your expertise to assist me in reassembling this device. If you do not . . .”

She produced a handgun, aimed it point-blank at the man called Ugo Drangheta, and pulled the trigger. The scientists screamed. Two fainted dead away. Roald nearly fell, his head pounding with the blast of the gun in that room. He was horrified to see a man become a corpse with less than a second ticking off the clock.

Sliding her pistol inside the flap of her leather jacket, she said, “You see I am serious. Oskar?”

Roald was shocked to see the little bookseller emerge from behind the troops. “People,” he began, “you will have access to the Voytsdorf Ledger. This document will be used to aid your assembly of this centuries-old astrolabe.”

“And soon,” Galina continued, “thanks to the generosity of Dr. Kaplan here, you will be able to consult the private diary of Nicolaus Copernicus himself. As we
speak, it is being obtained.”

“What?” said Roald. “No. No!”

Galina stepped toward him, smiling coldly. “Oh, yes, Dr. Kaplan. The diary will be here this afternoon. Colonel?”

Choking back anger and confusion, Roald watched a man in a military uniform emerge from behind the ranks of the troops guarding them. As he drew near, Roald felt his stomach convulse. He had seen the man once before, five years ago. He knew the face, although it had changed since then. Turned to stone.

Colonel,
she called him?

He hadn't been called
Colonel
five years ago.

Five years ago, his name was Radip Surawaluk.

He was Darrell's father.

At the Nice airport, eight men in black fatigues waited in parking area six. Twelve miles away, another six agents dressed in flowery sport shirts strode across the Place du Palais de Justice toward the Rue de la Préfecture. One of them carried a heavy green duffel bag.

At that moment in London, Ebner von Braun secured the last straps of his bulletproof vest. It pinched. “On my signal,” he whispered.

He stared as icily as he could at the twenty-four armed operatives crowding in an abandoned Underground tunnel under Bloomsbury. Ahead of them stood a hatchway leading into a series of passages beneath the British Museum, where the relic named Crux was secured.

His phone buzzed. He opened it. A man in a navy-blue suit had sent him a text. His man inside. At the same moment, several locks on the far side of the hatch clicked in sequence.

Taking a deep breath, his heart palpitating, Ebner whispered, “Now.”

The hatchway swung back on its hinges, and the Order poured through.

Back in Nice, Darrell waited on the balcony of the Ackroyd apartment for Becca, Wade, Julian, and Sara to return from the airport with his stepfather and Terence. Lily stood next to him, looking out over the square, her arms folded across her chest. The sun was rising in the sky. It was quiet up there, just the two of them, although Madame Cousteau was still on guard inside.

Darrell decided to say aloud what he'd been thinking for a while.

“Lily, we've escaped death way too often.” It was
a dumb way to begin a conversation, but he went on. “Are we blessed? Or just lucky?”

She nodded slowly, didn't answer.

“I mean, I was born blessed,” he said comically. “The rest of you guys, I'm not sure of. I'm just saying Galina could have killed us a million times over.”

She turned to him. Her eyes were as blue as the Mediterranean. Her hair was going gold in the sunlight. She opened her lips to speak, then didn't.

“But that's not what she's after now,” he said. “You see that, right? The Teutonic Order will follow us to the ends of the earth, but not to kill us. That's not the problem. That's not what we have to be afraid of.”

She didn't offer anything, but he was on a roll, so he kept going. “We don't have to be afraid of dying, at least not by her hand. It's . . .” He didn't want to say it, but did anyway. “It's everyone else. My mom, my stepdad, Terence, Julian. Even Paul Ferrere and Silva and Carlo. All those people. They're expendable. But we're not, the four of us. Don't ask me why, but Galina needs us. She proved that by not killing us, by letting us keep searching for the relics. We're part of her plan, Lily.”

He stopped there, then threw on the last little bit that seemed needing to be said. “Maybe one day she'll realize that maybe she doesn't need us. But right now
she does. The question is
for what
? And the answer is what really scares me, you know?”

He didn't know the answer, so he backtracked. “Galina will keep us around until the end. It's what she'll do to everyone and everything we love. That's the problem—”

“Darrell, stop.” Lily searched his face with her blue eyes, and it seemed like she would say something or cry or laugh, but he didn't know which. “No more.”

“No more,” he repeated, then turned from her and watched the people crisscrossing the square below. His tongue felt thick. “Look, I know you don't think I'm the sharpest at some stuff, but I know you're not happy about your parents. You're broken up about it, and—”

“Darrell,” she said, stopping him again. “I'm not sure I can keep doing this.” She touched his arm. “You know, no. That's not right. I
am
sure. I have to go home. My parents want me to come back. Need me to come home. To be part of a . . . it sounds so stupid . . . a new beginning with them.” She blubbered that out, crying through the words. “I hate it, but it's probably right. They're right. No more relics. No more of this stuff. No more Galina.”

“Are you kidding me? Lily, no.”

“I thought I could ignore it, just be with you.”

“Me?”

“You guys, all of you. But this will end anyway. The relic hunt will. Maybe if I go back now, my family won't. Won't end, I mean. Maybe we
can
stay together.”

“But what are you going to do in Austin without all this?” he asked her.

“Not Austin. Seattle. My parents and I are moving.”

“Seattle? There are no relics in Seattle!”

“You're not listening to me,” she said. “Look, I've thought about it a lot over the last week. A lot. And I can't do this stuff anymore. At least for now. I just have to say good-bye to it. I have to be with my mom and dad. I owe them to try. That's all. That's all.”

Darrell felt his insides turn to water and his head go empty.

“Lily, you can't. In the tower . . .” He stopped there. Why did he go there? Nothing
happened
in the tower. They were squished together, and it was nothing. Yeah, it was nothing, but he shouted a curse inside his head and blurted it out. “In the tower, it was—I mean, I really like you.”

“Darrell, please—”

His phone buzzed. He ignored it. It buzzed again. He looked into her eyes, then at the screen. It was a text. Not from his mother. It was from Paul Ferrere.

“Wait, what?”

There was a sudden dull snapping sound—once, twice. Darrell's neck froze. A door slammed in the apartment behind him. Bolts slid closed.

“No, no . . .”

“What is it?”

He spun around. The housekeeper stumbled in awkwardly from another room, clutching her hand to her side. There was blood soaking down her blouse.

“Prenez votre relique!”
she gasped.
“Partez maintenant!”
She thrust a small box at Darrell, then fell to the floor.
“Allez!
Go. Elevator. Go, now!”

More gunshots. Silva shouted from the stairs. A stampede of boots pounded outside the door. The door frame shook; the knob flew across the room and clattered against the wall.

Lily took Darrell by the hand. “Run!”

TO BE CONTINUED in
The Copernicus Legacy: Crown of Fire.

F
rom the beginning of this Copernican journey, it's been great fun to mix fact with fiction in a particular way. Of the historical characters in this book, probably the most famous other than Copernicus himself is Leonardo da Vinci. While Copernicus is considered the originator (discounting Greek and Arab star watchers) of the heliocentric theory of our planetary system, published in book form in 1543, students of what are known as da Vinci's “notebooks” have often remarked on the Italian artist's much earlier statement, “The sun does not move.” I have explained the anachronism of this remark in two ways: first by imagining a conversation between the two men, and then by adding
a simple question mark to the end of Leonardo's statement. You're welcome. It's still Copernicus.

Literature about da Vinci fills many libraries besides my own, but I want to single out a couple of wonderful volumes:
Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind
by Charles Nicholl and
Leonardo: The Artist and the Man
by Serge Bramly. About the Barbarossa brothers I found no full-length books, though entries in BrillOnline's
Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition
, as well as portions of
Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World
by Roger Crowley, were extremely helpful.
An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943
by Rick Atkinson and the novels
The English Patient
by Michael Ondaatje and
The Sheltering Sky
by Paul Bowles, as well as the latter's
Points in Time: Tales from Morocco,
aided my North Africa research.

F
irst and foremost, I want to thank Jane Abbott, my elder daughter, for her magnificent rendering of one of da Vinci's Deluge drawings. It appears in chapter 53 of this book. Jane may have a career as a forger ahead of her, which, as her father, I will naturally support. I also wish to thank my younger daughter, Lucy, whose fellowship as an English guide at the Château de Chantilly some years ago inspired her namesake at Clos Lucé in this book.

I've been privileged to communicate with a host of Islamic scholars during the writing of the story. I am grateful first of all to Professor Martin Nguyen in the Department of Religious Studies at Fairfield University
for his more-than-kind assistance with the niceties of mosque behavior and Arabic language, translation, and spelling. He gave unstintingly of his time, at a time when I most needed it. I am also indebted to J. L. Berggren, professor emeritus in the Department of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University, for directing me to the
Encyclopaedia of Islam
and for his on-point research suggestions regarding the Tunisian portion of the book. Finally, Nidhal Guessoum, Mohammad Odeh of the International Astronomical Center in Abu Dhabi, Nabil Ben Nessib at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, and his gracious brother, Riadh Ben Nessib at the Cité des Sciences à Tunis, were instrumental with regard to features of al-Zaytuna mosque in Tunis.

Travel to all the settings in which an international thriller unfolds is daunting and, given one's writing schedule, often quite impossible. So I want to thank Christopher Socci for his colorful personal evocations of Morocco; they allowed me to conjure with more confidence a faraway place in word and mood. Naturally, all the errors and stylistic gaffes here are completely my own.

I want to acknowledge my longtime agent, George Nicholson, who passed away during the final stages of revising this book. For over two decades George was
my supporter, my reader, a thinker of great wit and compassion, an elegant gentleman, and a friend who I regret not being able to talk to anymore.

To my wife, Dolores, always my first and closest reader, thank you for putting up with me and with this, my longest book to date. I feel as if we've been around the world, too. To all the hard-working people at Katherine Tegen Books—to Katherine, to my editors Claudia Gabel and Melissa Miller, to Alana Whitman, Lauren Flower, Ro Romanello, and Karen Sherman, thank you for flying with me—to the sun and back—on this Copernican sojourn.