The Serpent's Curse

by Tony Abbott

  “Basically,” Terence said, “it’s best for none of you to return to Austin until we’re sure of what we are dealing with. The Order could simply be flexing its muscles. I have no doubt that whatever they are doing comes from Galina herself, but my feeling is that she won’t want to spread herself too thin with actions as intimidating as doing anything to the girls’ families. Her empire is huge. She will need to focus it.”

  Wade shared a look with Darrell, who muttered something about Galina that Wade knew he probably shouldn’t repeat. That was when his father produced a narrow silver tube from his pocket. It was the size of a fat ballpoint.

  “It’s a stun gun,” he said. “A miniature Taser. Totally legal. The investigators gave one to me.”

  “Do we each get one?” asked Darrell.

  “Absolutely not. And it’s for defense only.”

  “A little something,” said Terence. “It can be handy in tight quarters, without being a dangerous weapon.”

  Minutes later, Lily returned, wiping her cheeks. “They’re all right. Way upset, with, like, a million questions, but they don’t think I should be there right now.” She started crying again behind her hands. “I’m sorry.” Darrell put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him.

  Becca came back to the table looking like a zombie, blinking tears away from her eyes, unable to sit down. “Maggie’s okay, worried like crazy. My parents, too, but they said I should stay with you. I never even thought of going home, and now I really want to, but I guess I should stay. I don’t know.”

  Lily pulled away from Darrell and put her hand on Becca’s wrist, and Becca sat. It was like that for a long while, everyone quiet, eyes down, not knowing what to say.

  Wade once more remembered his dream of the cave: Becca lying lifeless on the floor. Then the way Markus Wolff had stared at her in San Francisco. He suddenly feared that Becca might be in some particular kind of danger, but he still didn’t know how to express it. He just gazed at her, then at Lily, then at Becca again.

  Finally, dishes were removed and dessert came, and that seemed to reset things.

  “Is Boris Volkov a friend of yours?” Roald asked over a final coffee.

  “No, not a friend,” Terence said, waving a waiter over and asking for the check. “But he’s useful. Listen to what he has to say. He knows many people in Russia who may be able to help you. However, I wouldn’t entirely trust him. Boris doesn’t do anything for nothing.”

  Wade felt uneasy to hear those words. But he hoped that the mysterious Russian would shed light on the relic’s whereabouts. At the very least, the family was, as his father had hoped, moving forward.

  To Russia. To the second relic . . . and Sara.

  “In the meantime,” Julian said, “Dad and I will focus on finding out what we can from our side. The instant we discover anything, we’ll call you.”

  “Night or day,” Roald said, looking around at the children.

  With a final firm pledge of assistance, Terence made a call. Seven minutes later, Dennis pulled up outside the Water Club in yet another limo. Their luggage packed and safely in the trunk, the kids and Roald began their roundabout journey to JFK, to await their evening flight to London.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Madrid; London

  March 19

  Ebner von Braun woke to the tinny ascending scale of a digital marimba that suddenly sounded like a skeleton drumming a piano with its own bones. It was a ringtone he was determined to change at his first opportunity.

  He blinked his eyes onto a black room.

  Where am I?

  More marimba.

  Right.

  Madrid.

  He slid open the phone. “¿Hola?”

  It was an Orc from the Copernicus Room. He listened. “¿Londres?” he said. “¿Cuándo?” The voice replied. Ebner pulled the phone away from his face. “¿Quién es el jefe del Grupo de los Seis?”

  “Señor Doyle.”

  “Then send Señor Doyle.”

  Click.

  The aroma of grilled tomatoes greeted Archie Doyle when he woke up. He gazed through sleepy eyes at the bedroom of his three-room flat at 36B Foulden Road in the Borough of Hackney in London. He yawned.

  It was 5:51 a.m., and his wife, Sheila, and his son, Paulie, were already awake.

  Ah, family.

  He flapped his lips and blew out the stale breath of sleep. “Bbbbbbbbbb!” This habit, and other exercises of the face and vocal cords, were ones he had learned in his unsuccessful years as an actor, which, alas, were all of them. As an actor, a mimic, a stand-up comedian, and the sad clown Tristophanes, in whose guise he appeared at birthday parties and bar mitzvahs, Archie Doyle had struggled.

  He was far better at his other calling.

  He liked to kill people.

  And he’d be getting to do more of it soon. A recent and bizarre auto accident involving no less than three operatives had left Archie next in line to head Group 6 of the East London section of the Teutonic Order, a post he held while Berlin made up its corporate mind about more permanent arrangements.

  Archie was determined to make a good impression.

  “The rrrrrain in Spppppain stays mmmmmainly on the ppppplain!”

  “That you, dear?” came the call from the kitchen. “Breakfast in five minutes.”

  “Coming, luv,” Archie responded happily. Sitting up, he slid his laptop from the end table onto the bed and opened it. He then typed in seven distinct passwords, and the screen he wanted came up. On it was a photograph of five rather downcast people, a man and four young teenagers, at a departure gate in what his trained eye told him was JFK airport in New York. Did they know they were being tracked? Their expressions suggested they might. It was next to impossible to avoid detection in such places when the Order was after you. On the other hand, a father and four children? Where was Mum?

  Mine not to reason why.

  Beneath the photograph were the names of the five persons, and these words:

  Guardian alert: 19 March. NY flight Virgin Atlantic 004. Arrival 7:25 a.m. Heathrow Terminal 3.

  “Oh, brilliant!” he whispered with a smile. There was a standing order to terminate all Guardians when identified as such. Five kills in one day. This would be a rather lovely way to convince his superiors that Archie was the man for the top job.

  When he scrolled down a little farther, however, his smile crinkled to disappointment. Beneath the names and destination of the people in the photograph was a series of items with little boxes to be checkmarked as to Archie’s course of action.

  ☐Terminate immediately

  ☐Terminate off site

  ☐Kidnap and report

  ☑Follow only and report

  “Blast it all!” he breathed softly. “I am a termination machine!”

  Still, a job was a job, and pleasing the Order was far preferable to displeasing them. And by them he meant her, and by her he meant Galina Krause. He’d seen her angry once. He hoped never to see it again.

  Pulling up the train schedule, Archie calculated that the journey from his local railway station of Rectory Road to Heathrow would take a total of ninety-four minutes. Just before 6:30, he would snag a seat on the excruciatingly slow one-hour service west to central London, disembark at Paddington Station, dash over to Platform 6 for the 7:30 Heathrow Express to Terminal 3, and arrive twenty minutes later. Given another twenty or so minutes spent deplaning, collecting bags, if any, passport control, bathroom time, etc., the gloomy family couldn’t be expected to be out of the arrivals hall until eight a.m. at the earliest, anyway. He checked the time again. Six o’clock.

  I do have to get a move on.

  Archie Doyle was of normal height and build with features that were, in the best tradition of foreign agents, nondescript. He leaped from bed, cleaned himself up, dressed in a smart wool suit of dark blue and a white shirt with muted tie, and topped it all off with a crisp bowler hat. He then slipped his briefcase onto his dresser and flipped up t
he lid.

  Inside were the tools of his trade: several thicknesses and shades of adhesive mustaches and matching eyebrows, a range of eyeglasses, a tube of rub-on tanner, two false noses, three slender vials of poison, a small pistol and silencer, a stiletto, and assorted untraceable cell phones. It amazed him how many of these items he also used for his party activities. He placed his computer inside and clamped the briefcase shut. Then he slid his brolly—umbrella—from the closet, opened and closed it once, then tapped one of two small buttons inside its handle. With barely a breath, a hollow two-inch needle emerged from the umbrella’s tip. Such a weapon could inflict a range of wounds, from a simple annoying scratch to a deadly puncture, if the needle was infused with poison. That was what the second button was for.

  Archie wondered for an instant: Who were the Kaplans, anyway? Why “follow only and report”? Why not terminate? With no answers coming, he carefully retracted the umbrella’s needle, gave his bowler a slap, and was in the kitchen—all in less than ten minutes from the time he woke.

  His lovely wife, Sheila, turned to him, her smile like sunshine on the lawn of Hyde Park. In the tiny room with her, and taking up much of the floor space, was a portable crib. Fingers in mouth, sippy cup wedged between his plump legs, sat Paulie Doyle, fourteen months of pudge and drool and grins.

  “I’m nearly plating the tomatoes, dear,” Sheila said. “Kippers this morning?”

  Archie Doyle sighed. “Sorry, dear. Must leap to the office immediately. I’ll grab an egg and bacon on the way to the train. Save the tomatoes, though. Should be home for lunch.”

  “All right, dear,” she said. “You have a wunnyful day.”

  “Thanks, luv,” Archie said, kissing her ample cheek. “And bye-bye, Little Prince Paulie.” He ruffled the wispy hair on the head of his son on his way to the door.

  Archie was out, down the stairs, and on the sidewalk in a flash. Brisk day. Gray but pleasant. A perfect day for a termination—or five—he thought, but good enough to follow only and report.

  “We shall see,” he murmured, fingering the second button on his umbrella, “what we shall see.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  London

  Knowing there was little escape from airport cameras, Becca emerged head down from the Jetway in the arrivals terminal at London’s Heathrow Airport. She trailed Lily, who as usual was acting as a sort of guide through the crowded world of crowds. It was the morning after the flight, and early, only a few minutes after eight a.m. But already the gates and concourses were busy, and Becca couldn’t look up without feeling nauseous.

  A really annoying personality trait.

  It was like shouting, Hey, everybody, look at me! I’m not looking at you!

  “You’ll have to learn to do this one day, you know,” Lily said over her shoulder.

  “Not if you’re always here.”

  “I just might be!”

  Before the flight had left New York the previous evening, both girls had received a second and third round of phone calls from their parents, and Becca had had a very long talk with Maggie, which had managed to settle them both so that by the end they’d been laughing through their tears and whispering promises to each other to be good and safe. Becca felt that for her and Lily, hearing from their families was like Roald, Darrell, and Wade hearing from the investigators: all of them were now more or less assured that things were as okay as they could be for the moment and moving in the right direction. Without that, Becca didn’t know how they could possibly focus on the relic and Russia and whatever else was to come. But here they were, on their first leg of the Serpens quest, and they were doing it.

  “Oh, brother, now it begins,” Lily grumbled as an airport official waved them and a hundred thousand other international passengers into the same skinny line.

  There was no hiding here, Becca thought. No possibility of evasive action. Everyone had to go through passport control. And they were undoubtedly being filmed. In San Francisco they’d learned about the Order’s awesome “Copernicus servers,” with a computer power most first-world countries would envy. The family had probably been spotted at Kennedy airport, back in New York, so the Order had to know they were already in London. Eyes were on them. Of course they were.

  Nearly an hour of blurring movement and bouncing from one line into another and opening bags and zipping them up and showing documents and squeezing into another line finally ended, and they were out of the terminal, and it was great, but not that great.

  London might have been the home of Oliver Twist and Sherlock Holmes, but Becca’s first experience outside the terminal was a stabbing downpour of cold, heavy, exhaust-filled, vertical rain.

  “Absolutely fabulous, it’s not,” Lily grumbled. “Who knew it rained in England?”

  “Uck, okay. Stay together,” Roald urged, and they did, sticking close as he moved them quickly across the lanes of bus and shuttle traffic to the taxi stand, where they piled into a bulbous black cab that looked very much like the old one they’d seen in San Francisco last week. The sight of it started a superfast stream of memories in Becca’s mind, culminating with a gun at her head at Mission Dolores, which, thankfully, hadn’t gone off. Best not to live those days again. These days were bound to be scary enough.

  “We’ll be stopping at various places,” Roald told the driver from the backseat. “First destination, Covent Garden.”

  “Certainly.”

  The taxi, piloted by a very quiet driver who wore a Sikh turban, was soon grinding its way from the airport and up onto a broad highway known as the M4. One of the things both Terence Ackroyd and the investigator had advised, to confuse would-be followers, was to take a roundabout route wherever they went. Terence Ackroyd’s private apartment—or “safe flat,” as he called it—was near the British Museum, but it would likely be a couple of hours before they actually reached it.

  “Evasive maneuvers,” Roald called them.

  In the same spirit, Darrell and Wade had worked out a set of secret finger gestures on the plane. “To use if something bad is happening but you can’t tell anyone,” Darrell had said.

  Lily gave them a blank look. “Um . . . what?”

  “The complete range of bad things can be said with only five fingers,” Wade insisted. “You raise them to your face in a casual way, and the rest of us know what to do.”

  “What?” she said again.

  They explained it this way:

  One finger: The Order is near—run.

  Two fingers: Meet me at (location to be determined).

  Three fingers: Create a diversion.

  Four fingers: Help.

  Five fingers: Just get away from me.

  The last one was added by Darrell specifically, he said, for use between the brothers. Becca and Lily spent a long time rolling their eyes, then shrugged and practiced the gestures. Roald woke from a brief nap as the plane was descending and learned them as well, but he thought he might be able to come up with a better set of commands.

  “I dare you, Dad,” Darrell quipped.

  Becca watched out the cab window as they motored swiftly past brick and brownstone neighborhoods with names that exuded Englishness: Cranford and Osterley, Brentford and Shepherd’s Bush. She could practically see the sheep grazing in pastures, though that was a scene from old novels and, by now, there weren’t many pastures that hadn’t been developed and built on.

  Still, the slower the taxi went, the more clogged the streets were, and the more Becca began to feel the aura of “London, England” breathing from the sights around her. It came powerfully. All those English novels by English writers! They were written here, about here, and they were everywhere, as if those books had spilled their pages out into the living city. Even the presence of the Sikh driver spoke of the once-great colonial empire that was Great Britain, and how London gathered in its vast geography everyone from everywhere it had ever ruled.

  “My first time to London in ten years,” said Roald, his neck craning aroun
d here and there to catch every moment, just as she was doing. “There was a conference at the University of London. I presented a paper on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. It was my first international paper.”

  “So cool,” Becca breathed, aware that there was little volume in what she said.

  “Only if you don’t read the paper,” he said with a laugh. “Pretty dull stuff.”

  “Still,” she said. “London.”

  Trying not to annoy or alarm the driver, Roald gave him several addresses to drive to—as if they were sightseeing—before the final one. After Covent Garden, a bustling market in the heart of the city, they drove through the madly snarled traffic of Piccadilly Circus, around to Selfridges department store, across a bridge to Southwark, and back over another bridge to Saint Paul’s Cathedral. When, finally, they motored toward their final stop, Darrell suggested they call the telephone number Terence had given them, “to get things started.” Roald tapped a number on the cell phone installed with Julian’s homemade alert software.

  “Galina probably knows we’re in London,” Wade whispered; then he frowned. “There’s no probably about it. She knows. We have to be supersmart.”

  Becca shared a grim look with the others. Despite their hopped-up phones, if for some reason Galina Krause didn’t already know their exact location, she would soon.

  “I’ve never been not smart,” said Lily. “An intelligence officer can’t afford to be. That witch is out there. Her and her thugs. I’m sure of it.”

  The Sikh driver half turned. “Thugs, miss. This is a word coming from the Hindi term thuggees, the name given to some fanatic followers of Kali. The goddess of destruction.”

  “Thank you,” Lily said, her eyes widening. “How weirdly . . . accurate. . . .”

  Becca’s blood tingled in her veins. The quest was on, and she believed, as they all did, that if Maxim was the Guardian, and Serpens was the second relic, then Russia was the place, and she hoped Boris Volkov would help confirm it.

  “Hallo? Who is?” The voice crackled loudly from Roald’s phone.