Wade and the Scorpion's Claw (16 page)

We got ourselves off the dock into the parking lot away from the ambulances and police cars. We hurried up through the streets winding along the coast. Up toward the vast orange bridge.

If the others were like me, they were beating themselves up. We'd sent Feng Yi right to the houseboat. We'd given Markus Wolff the hand of Mr. Chen. Now both of them were further along than we were.

And closer to the relic.

It also shocked me how much this Guardian hated us.
Just a dumb family.
I tried to work out in my head the connection from Copernicus to the trader Pires to the Chinese court, and on to the theft thirty years ago and where the relics went after that. There were pieces of the puzzle we didn't have, and maybe never would have, but I kept coming back to the way he'd treated us. “Dad,” I whispered. “What he said to us. I mean—”

“Not now, Wade. We can't be distracted by that. We still have a job to do.” He slowed as we approached the sidewalk, then stopped. “Wait . . .” He choked a little, then just dragged us close to him, all of us, in a bear hug. “Look,” he said while we were all pressed against him, “I am either the worst father in the world or a lunatic, bringing you into this, and
keeping
us doing this . . .”

“Neither,” said Darrell, wiping his cheeks. “Mom's the reason. She would want us to do this. To keep going. To keep the Order from getting another relic. She's the reason, Dad. Mom is.”

My dad was going to say something, but I wouldn't let him. “Darrell's right,” I said. “We all know that having a relic will give us more power in this . . . war, if that's what it is. For Sara. But there's the legacy, too. Keeping Copernicus's time machine away from Galina and her murderers is something we have to do.”

Lily piped up. “Especially now, right? Both Mr. Chen and Papa Dean have been taken out, and the relic is going to fall into her hands one way or the other. There's nobody left but us. Nobody in this whole city right now. It's only us. Bec?”

Becca's eyes were welling up with tears. She nodded.

I knew Dad was swallowing back tears, too. He loosened his hug.

“You're the best kids ever,” he said. “I'm sorry. The clues. We need to read the book. Find whatever is there.”

He pulled the bloodied paperback out of his jacket, and we started walking to the bridge again. The cold wind off the water was sweeping up the coast and fluttering the book's cover open.

Becca took it from him and turned the pages. “It's a collection of poems by Papa Dean,” she said. “I think it's called beat poetry. The one on page seven is short.”

We paused under the streetlamp, listening as she read.

She read it again, and a third time as we started up and across the bridge's pedestrian path. She said, “Anyone want to take a stab at it?”

Darrell grumbled. “Don't look at me. My brain doesn't work that way. It goes in flashes. I can't put things together. I jump at stuff.”

“Sometimes a flash is what we need, bro,” I said.

“Well, ‘double' means Andreas, right?” said Lily. “Hans Novak wrote in the diary that Andreas looked so much like Nicolaus that he could be his double.”

“And digits are fingers,” said Dad. “For Mr. Chen's hand, maybe. And MDXIV are Roman numerals for . . .” He worked it out in his head. “The year 1514, when Andreas joined Nicolaus. The poem seems to be about the legacy, without actually naming it.”

“Deadline could mean that there's a deadline to this whole thing,” I said. “The Frombork Protocol, maybe. Or the change of days Ptolemy talked about.”

“What about the churches?” Darrell said.

We stopped. “What churches?” Lily asked.

“Well, maybe not
church
churches, but duomo and dagoba and dewal are different kinds of places of worship in other countries. My mom worked on a manuscript about world religions.”

“Brilliant, Darrell,” said Lily.

My father suddenly seemed to get something. “Becca, may I?” She gave him the book, and he stood under one of the bridge lights and studied the poem. “Places of worship . . . churches . . . ‘D is for ding-dong and daybreak.' Churches and church bells? Maybe we're supposed to be looking for a church. A church with a safe, perhaps?”

“The diary! Hans mentions church bells twice.” Becca pulled her notebook out of her bag and flipped it open to the new translations she had done in the museum. She read out two passages.

In a few more hours the sky over San Francisco would be starting to brighten, but right now the night over the Pacific was as black as when Andreas rowed away from his brother. Despite all the evidence telling me it wasn't five hundred years ago, every time we put our heads together we were re-creating scenes from the life of Copernicus.

“Vespers are the bells they ring at night?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Becca. “In English novels there are always bells at different times of the day.”

“The poem mentions daybreak,” I said. “What are those called?”

Lily grumbled. “If I still had a phone, I could look it all up.”

“Dad, the phone,” said Darrell. “We can call the investigator, too.”

Dad looked to the sky above the bridge like he expected someone up there to tell him what to do. “Okay. A few minutes, that's all.” He removed his phone from his pocket and inserted the battery. Seconds later, it lit up. “All right, Lily. Church hours.”

“Church hours,” she repeated as she called up the browser and keyed in the question, while Darrell paced back and forth, staring at the phone. Lily's search didn't take long. “They're called canonical hours, and there are eight of them: matins, lauds, prime, terce—”

“That's it!” I said. “When is prime? What hour?”

“—sext, none, vespers, and compline,” Lily finished. “Prime is at six a.m. Thank you.” She passed the phone back to my father.

“Dad, call her,” said Darrell. “Call the investigator. Please.”

“I am,” he said, tapping in the number. “Got her voice mail. It's not quite morning there. Phone tag. Hello. This is Roald Kaplan. My phone is on again. Please call back.”

Relieved that Dad had made the call, Darrell started rocking on his feet under the streetlight. “Okay, okay, ‘Prime Time for D.' Six in the morning. But there's something else. I can't put my finger on it. . . .” He stopped. “Becca, the brochure. The museum brochure. You still have it?”

“Of course.” She fished in her bag and pulled it out. “But why?”

“Wade, your notebook,” he said. I grabbed it from my bag and gave it to him.

We watched as Darrell turned the brochure to the page with the picture of Alan Hughes and his wife. He flashed it in front of us. “Alan Hughes died in 1988 after donating the spice box to the museum. That's like three years after the jade scorpions were stolen from the Forbidden City. Who has a pen?”

“Darrell, what are you thinking?” said Dad, slipping a ballpoint from his jacket pocket and clicking it.

Darrell took the pen and started scratching on the brochure.

“What are you doing? I collect those!” Becca yelped.

“Don't you scribble up my notebook!” I said.

Darrell flipped the brochure around. “Look at this picture of Alan Hughes. Who does he suddenly look like?”

Alan Hughes had a big Santa beard scrawled on his face.

“The Wolverine,” said Lily.

“The Wolver—” Darrell practically jumped at her. “How do you know about the Wolverine?”

“Dude, I go to the movies,” she said calmly. “And you draw him really badly.”

“Come on, Darrell,” Dad said. “What are you getting at?”

“It's Papa Dean!” he screamed. “Papa Dean is Alan Hughes thirty years later! Sorry about the brochure, Bec, but look at him!”

It was true. He'd nailed it. The face was the same. The features, the eyes. Alan Hughes, the man who donated the scorpion's spice box to the museum as a clue for Guardians, was himself Scorpio's Guardian.

“But what does that mean now?” asked Lily. “Even if they are the same person, they're both out of the picture.”

“Why do you want my notebook?” I asked, snatching his pen away.

He turned the pages carefully under the bridge light. “Alan Hughes was survived by his wife,” he said, tapping the page in my notebook where I'd copied down the museum's label for the spice box. “Dolly.”

“Dolly . . . ,” Dad repeated. “Short for . . .” He suddenly flicked his eyes up at the sky; then he closed them and started rocking slightly on his feet as Darrell had just done. Becca started to say something, but I quickly raised my finger, and she stopped.

Dad needed the gears to slip into place.

And they did.

“Dolly is short for Dolores,” he said softly, turning toward the city, then checking his watch. “Everyone who's familiar with San Francisco knows that the oldest building in San Francisco is a place of worship, a church, and that that church is called Mission Dolores. ‘Prime Time for D' is six a.m. at Mission Dolores. We have four hours to get there.”

That was it. We'd figured it out. We started walking.

M
isión San Francisco de Asís, better known as Mission Dolores, stands at the corner of Sixteenth and Dolores Streets.

We arrived there at 5:46 a.m.

We had walked the whole way, across the great bridge, down the deserted streets. It was miles and miles. We were dead on our feet and empty of everything. But even being empty, we needed to be together, not in a cab or anything, just us, walking together. Most of the time we didn't talk, but when we did, we went over what we knew about the relic.

We were way beyond exhausted before we got there.

But we got there.

It was nearing dawn, though the sky had hardly begun to brighten. Just about the time we reached the mission, it had started to sprinkle, and that sprinkle had now become a steady rain. Not to mention that the already-cold air had quickly turned colder. Changeable weather, changing again.

The narrow, squat building Papa Dean's clues had indicated as a resting place for Scorpio was built of white stone. Four chunky columns flanked a pair of studded wooden doors. A gallery ran over the doorway and just under a peaked roof of Spanish tiles that gleamed now in the morning rain. A simple cross stood fixed at the peak.

On a sunny day, the mission might have looked peaceful, even pleasant. In the rain, knowing what we knew, it looked more like a decorated coffin.

We cased out the mission for a few minutes. No one entered while we hid next to a fence across Dolores Street, at least no one we saw.

“We shouldn't have a problem getting inside,” Dad told us. “Many churches are open day and night for people who need a quiet place to pray.”

That sounded like what we needed just then. I kept realizing that the investigator hadn't called back yet, and a voice in the back of my head told me that might not be a good thing.

“Let's go,” Darrell said, his voice nearly gone.

We crossed the street and the grassy median in between the lanes and walked up the red stone steps leading into the church.

Dad was right. The doors were open.

The long, narrow room inside had rows of wooden benches, a peaked ceiling, and a tall, richly decorated altar at the far end. The space smelled of candle wax, damp stone, and scented smoke, even this early in the morning. The smell might also have simply been the odor of the past. The feeling in there—the walls so old, the dimly colored early light, the almost overpowering hush of the room—made me think of the cave in Guam again. We were near a relic now, just as we had been then. And just like the cave had seemed a couple of days ago, we were now in a holy place. I thought of Sara, mostly Sara, but also about Becca and her arm.

It was silent for minute after minute; then there was a noise, and the hairs on my neck bristled.

His chiseled cheekbones and long black hair caught the candlelight. Of course I knew by now that Feng Yi had never died in his fall from the pagoda. That had been part of his big scam to get us to give him time to find the Guardian. But it was still a shock to see him.

“It took me quite a while, putting the clues together,” he said softly, raising a pistol into view. “First realizing who Papa Dean was, then having my agents in Shanghai scour their databases for information, all to give me the simple fact of his wife's name. Dolores. The rest was a leap of intellect, which I have become quite good at. You have brought the key? I hope you have brought the key. You, Wade, managed to snag it from me, during my . . . escape.”

“No,” I said.

“No,” Darrell repeated, shifting back and forth on his feet. “No way.”

“Alas,” Mr. Feng said quietly. “Then you will perish.”

“There are five of us,” said Dad.

“Five mortals,” Feng Yi said, sneering. “A poor showing against my legendary Star Warriors.” He hissed, and a dark shape rose soundlessly from the pews to our left. Then another on the right, and another behind us. Twelve in all, the shrouded fighters under Feng's command, each of whom held an array of sparkling stars.