Wade and the Scorpion's Claw (17 page)

“You will not escape alive, I promise you that,” Feng Yi threatened.

“We don't have the key,” Dad said. “Wolff has it.”

Feng Yi shrugged. “Then it will arrive soon. And we shall see if the fourth jade scorpion holds the true Copernicus relic.”

“It's killed so many people,” I said. “Andreas Copernicus died because of it. If the legends are true, what makes you think it won't kill you, too?”

Feng Yi waved his gun hand as if swatting a fly. “It is one of the twelve relics of the astrolabe. Its value is beyond your imagining. You should be grateful I am taking it away from you.”

“You murdered Mr. Chen and stole his hand,” said Lily bitterly. “You tried to kill Papa Dean. You tricked us the whole time. You and your dumb henchmen. You're not superheroes. Just creeps.”

Mr. Feng's face stretched slightly into a thin smile. “Vaults can conceal, museums can collect, time can hide, but people? People are the weakest link in any secret. You should have bowed out before coming this far. You are trying to play our deadly game, but you are, alas, merely a father and his little family—”

“Stop saying that!” I shouted. “We got this far, didn't we?”

Feng Yi's smile faded. “You did. So let us go the rest of the way and await Herr Wolff in the treasury behind the altar, where Mr. Chen's hand will be of use.”

Why he didn't just do away with us then and there, I didn't know. Did he need us for something?

He gestured behind us with his pistol, and while his warriors remained in the nave, we preceded Feng to a small door directly behind the altarpiece. With a dull thwack, he blew off the handle and pushed the door open. The church's treasury was narrow. Each wall held a number of vault doors, some with electronic lockers, others with combinations.

“This is where the church stores its precious objects,” Feng Yi said. “I wonder if they know what exactly they might have here. The hand's ‘fingerprints' will show us. . . .” He smiled at one vault. “There.”

Mounted on one plain gray metal door, almost at floor level, was a mechanism with five pads in the position of a left hand.

Someone yelled from the church nave. There were several sets of feet running down the aisle and among the pews, followed by the
whump-whump
of shots being fired. Then came a quick string of Chinese words in a voice I knew too well. The words ended with “Galina Krause.”

A flurry of movement followed. Then silence.

Feng Yi's eyes widened when Markus Wolff stepped into the vault, the black satchel over his shoulder, his gun pointed at us.

I smelled the stinging odor of gunpowder wafting in with him.

“Markus!” Feng Yi said, throwing on a fake smile and pointing exaggeratedly to the vault. “I have found it for us. You see? The vault that holds the Scorpio relic!”

Leathercoat didn't fall for it.

“I see many things, Feng,” Wolff said calmly. “Your betrayal, for example. You should know that Galina has only contempt for traitors. Your Star Warriors seem to comprehend this. Only two of your holy dozen remain. I suggested they stand by to remove your body.”

Wolff raised his pistol; Feng Yi sneered and grabbed Becca roughly. “I will kill her! Kill her, do you understand! Open the vault. Hurry!” When he pushed his pistol barrel into Becca's neck, she winced, and I wondered if he had forced us into the treasury as some kind of leverage. Dad felt me move and held me back, held us all back.

In the quiet moments that followed, Wolff let out a sound between his teeth. His body tensed. For the first time since I'd seen his dead eyes in Honolulu, they seemed to flash with anger. He stared at Becca so intensely as if he intended to bore directly through her. Finally, he unshouldered the black satchel and removed the prosthetic hand. He carefully placed its fingers one by one on the five pads of the safe door, pressing his own on top of them to ensure the connection. We waited while an old clock on the wall of the treasury ticked toward the hour. Time seemed to slow to nothing.

Nothing moved. Nothing sounded. Nothing.

Then the mission bells struck the hour of prime.

One, two, three . . .

The first peals rang through the room, shuddering the walls and floor. Then came a subtle trembling behind the vault door.

Four, five . . .

“Like clockwork,” Feng Yi said, his face gleeful, crazy, half in candlelight, half in shadow, and his pistol firmly at Becca's throat.

We couldn't move.

Six . . .

The door of the safe clicked and swung open.

Glimmering inside, in the faint glow of the treasury candles, was the pale figure of a jade scorpion.

T
he scorpion figurine was intricate and exquisite, what I could only imagine was a priceless example of Ming craftsmanship. The scorpion had eight legs, a short, curved tail and stinger, and a pair of razor-like claws.

Though I couldn't touch it, couldn't even get near it, I felt in my fingers and hands the weight that it possessed. The air in the room trembled around us, as it does when exposed to the beauty and mystery of a true relic. The scorpion sat poised on the floor of the safe like a living thing ready to jump.

“Is it the true relic?” Dad asked. “Or a decoy?”

“After five centuries, no clues remain to determine this,” Markus Wolff said, admiring the figurine with wide eyes that now had a little life in them. “The piece must be tested in a laboratory, shielded against radium poisoning, and the shell removed. Even if it does not contain the true relic, its markings may lead us to where the relic hides.”

While some of us were feeling the magic of the figurine, I could see the anger building up in Darrell. In the way he stood. In his fiery eyes. His inability to keep still. “So,” he growled, “after all the stupid searching. The people hurt and killed. It could still be . . .
nothing
?”

“Or it could be the one!” Feng Yi murmured as he removed the scorpion from the vault. He held it to the candle, but the flame flickered and dimmed mysteriously. Even from a few feet away, I saw the jade appear to be on fire from inside, dulling all light in the room, as if it were its own miniature sun. My knees felt weak. Could the real relic be right here with us? Was this the Scorpio relic of Copernicus?

“I have laboratories in China,” Feng Yi said, his eyes flashing. “If this figurine holds the true relic, I will begin my own search—”

The bullet from Wolff's pistol whizzed past Becca's face and into Feng's shoulder. The impact whipped him around. Becca screamed, and I leaped to her despite myself and pulled her to us. Her bandage was bloodstained, her arm weak.

Wounded, Feng Yi waved his gun wildly. We all ducked, and he lunged past us into the church, still clutching the scorpion. Wolff turned. There came a second shot, and a third.

We rushed out into the nave.

Feng Yi was writhing on the floor, the bloody scorpion a few feet away, just out of his reach. Wolff trained his pistol on the two Star Warriors now. Then he removed a lead box from his satchel. Slipping on a single, left-handed protective glove, he started toward the scorpion.

I didn't have time to think. I didn't try. I was running on instinct. “Galina Krause is not getting it!” I yelled. “Never! Not after what she's done to Sara. Or to Becca!” I bolted past Wolff.

“Wade!” my dad shouted. “No!”

I snatched the scorpion from the floor, Wolff's gun on me.

“You cannot!” Feng Yi cried. “The poison! The markings—”

Wolff aimed at my chest. “Give it—”

I threw the figurine down.

As in the cave where Vela was found, all the air in the room was sucked away. Even when the scorpion shattered on the sacristy's stone floor, I heard no sound. Even when it was clear there was no iron scorpion inside the figurine, I heard nothing. Staring at the fragments of jade on the floor, I nearly collapsed. There was no relic. It was the fourth decoy.

For a long moment, Wolff stared me down with his dead eyes. Then he turned to Feng's men. “There is nothing here for you now,” he said calmly. “Your leader has fallen. Take him away, or die here.”

The two men fixed each other with a look. The game had changed, and they'd understood. Without a word, they hoisted Feng Yi limply between them and carried him from the church.

Dad, Becca, Darrell, and Lily stared at me as Wolff slowly collected the remains of the scorpion in the box. He placed the box into the satchel and slung the satchel over his shoulder. Slipping his gun into the side pocket of his long coat, he turned away.

My father cleared his throat. “What about us?”

Wolff turned, his attention riveted on me. “Wade Kaplan, you may have known the scorpion was a decoy or may simply have been lucky. The Order will reassemble it for its clue. Until then, I have other business.”

Becca gripped her bloodstained bandage. She was practically sobbing. “You're letting . . . you're letting us go? Why?”

Wolff gazed at her stonily. “Why? The French call it
carte blanche
.” His eyes flickered toward my face. “In war, one uses what one can to win, a lesson you are learning for yourselves.”

He paused to breathe in the scent of the candle wax and gunpowder, then concluded ominously, “If I need you again, I will find you.”

“What about my mom?” Darrell demanded. “Sara Kaplan. Where is she?”

“Of her I know little,” Wolff said, “save that she is no longer in South America as you, and your investigator, seem to believe. I'm afraid that's a trail that will remain cold. Until Galina gets what she wants.”

“It's not true, you creep!” Darrell shouted. “The detectives are going to find her—”

I stopped Darrell by rushing up to Wolff myself, staring in his face, and whispering to him, “You opened the vault when Feng threatened Becca. Why? What is it about her? I know you don't lie. Tell me!”

Wolff gazed at me, his eyes again as dead as before. Then he took three steps toward the mission door and paused. “These are tiny questions. Ask yourselves but this: Where is the twelfth relic?”

“The twelfth relic!” I said, flashing suddenly on what Galina had said in my dream. “What does that mean?”

“What, indeed,” Wolff said. “The answer to that is the answer to everything. Vela, the others, all will come into our possession eventually.” He put his hand on the door and pulled it open. It was raining heavily outside. Smiling, he added, “And now you know far too much to live very long.”

He walked out of the church as he had walked into it, silently.

For a moment, we were all too stunned to speak.

Then Lily turned to me. “That was . . . Wade, tell me you knew that wasn't the true relic. Tell me! You could have made us radioactive!”

My knees felt like Jell-O. I sat down in a pew. “It had to be a decoy. It didn't match what Hans wrote in the diary. That the scorpion relic had a long tail, not a short one. Only we have the diary, so only we knew that.”

“So where's the real Scorpio?” she asked.

Before anyone could say anything, Dad gasped and tugged his phone quickly from his pocket, putting it on speaker. “Yes? Hello?”

“Hello, Dr. Kaplan.” The investigator's voice sounded hoarse and tired. “I am sorry not to respond before now. My detectives and I located the house outside Rio, and we have just finished searching it top to bottom. I am sorry, very sorry, to report that we found no trace of Sara Kaplan. . . .”

And my heart crashed through the floor. Darrell began shouting, and the rest was the mumble of words Markus Wolff had predicted.

“. . . so promising . . . arrived too late . . . wife must have been moved . . . other location . . . dead end . . . sorry . . . very sorry . . .”

The dark thing we had all kept at bay in the back of our minds had rushed forward and smacked us down.

After all the hope, Sara was more gone than before.

The call ended, and my dad fell in on himself. His face went dark with sadness; he jammed his eyes closed, squeezing tears down his cheeks. Darrell tore away from Becca and Lily, who had tried to put their arms around his shoulders, and lunged at Dad, pounding him on the back until he wrapped his arms around him. It was like my dream in the cave: everyone confused, grieving, weeping.

How long we stayed that way, I can't even tell you.

Five minutes. A half hour. Time stopped while we died inside.

Finally, Dad pulled us all together, his face stone, his eyes wet, his lips quivering. “We'll figure this out; we have to,” he said. “Sara is out there, waiting for us to find her. We need to get to the airport. Retrieve Vela and the daggers. Get on our flight. Go to New York. Keep searching. Our flight leaves in three hours. Come on.”

That was all anyone could say. We hurried out of the quiet mission, with Lily and me on either side of Becca, supporting her, Darrell stomping behind us, cursing to himself. The rain was harder but strangely warmer now.

The weather in San Francisco changed in the blink of an eye. I got that. But then, everything that had happened so far was all about
change
.

A wreck of old metal had become a time-conquering machine.

A happy little family had been struck by tragedy and was becoming a band of fighters.

Relic hunters.

Guardians.

We were shouldering more pain than we thought we could. We were growing closer to one another as we pushed forward into a dark and dangerous future. We were getting tougher, faster, harder, stronger.

Whether we were better people now than we had been when we'd touched down in San Francisco, I can't say.
Better
is a tough thing to claim. But one thing was certain. As we hurried past Feng Yi's bloody footprints, washing away in the rain, as we pushed on, haunted by the mystery of the Copernicus Legacy and fearing Sara's fate more than ever, we didn't stop running.