The Copernicus Archives #2

by Tony Abbott

  “Government, maybe,” Julian said. “Or royal family, checking out the barge.”

  Wolff turned his gaze from the barge to the hatted man and watched his movements down to the sand as steadily as I followed Wolff’s. The work stopped, while the man in the hat spoke to a couple of archaeologists, one of whom was nodding, the other of whom seemed to be almost angry. The man raised his hand, turned away, and answered his phone. He spoke a few words into it. I looked back at Wolff. He was on the phone, too.

  “They’re talking to each other,” I said. “That man down there is working for the Order.”

  “We’ll call him Hatman,” Lily said.

  Wade ran his hand through his wet hair again. “If he is with the Order, he’s high up in the government, right? Someone who doesn’t need license plates.”

  While Wolff kept speaking on his phone, Hatman scanned the crowd, moving his gaze nearer and nearer to us.

  “Get back—he’s looking for us,” said Roald, tugging us into the ranks of the spectators so we couldn’t be seen. At the same time, two hefty-size gargoyles emerged from the black BMW. They were dressed in black jeans and jackets. They’d seen us. They entered the crowd and moved toward us.

  Sara stood from her wheelchair. “Julian, I think we need our car now. Let’s get away from here.”

  “I’m calling for it,” said Julian. “I don’t know who those men are.”

  Several policemen barked at the spectators to move back from the BMW. It reversed slowly, leaving the two gargoyles behind. My head thundered. What was happening? I could faint at any second. My nostril was damp. I sniffed it in.

  “We need to vanish.” Roald urged us through the fringes of the crowd and away from the embankment. Sara was back in the chair. Darrell pushed as quickly as he could—“Excuse, please!”—and helped make a path for us.

  Julian swiped off his phone. “Our driver can’t make it around the crowds. He’ll meet us on Upper Thames Street, straight ahead—”

  Everything ached, as if I’d fallen down a long flight of stairs, but I pushed ahead with the others; then I looked up, and saw the street sign.

  Allhallows Lane. The path taken by Bern and Copernicus.

  I shivered all over, but my face and neck burned. “Uh . . .”

  “Come on, Bec,” Lily said, pulling my arm. “Julian knows the best way.”

  I stopped. If the twisting old streets were still there, we could avoid the mysterious car with no license plates, maybe put the two thugs off the scent.

  “This way,” I said. It was how the girl, Meg, had said it. “This way.”

  “Becca, no,” said Wade. “Where do you think you’re—”

  I pulled away from the others, trotted down some stairs, and turned left off Allhallows, through a tunnel marked with blue lights on the pavement. Parked motorcycles lined the tunnel. Then right, up the hill away from the river. Yes. This was the way.

  “Becca, wait,” Roald said from the back. “The wheelchair.”

  Sara, too. “Becca, we can’t—”

  But Julian said, “No. Let me help you down the stairs. Becca’s right. This is better. I’ll phone my driver. Everyone follow her.”

  Soot-black walls rose up narrowly on either side of me. The street ahead was lined with trucks, blocking other vehicles from entering. It was the same path, the same corner. So I hadn’t dreamed it. It had been real, my climb from the river through the streets after Helmut Bern. After Copernicus.

  Suddenly Wade was running with me, past a couple of old cannons—of Cannon Street? Lily was there, too. There might have been a more direct way, but when I saw the old, narrow path of College Street, I entered it. Just like I had five hundred years ago.

  Darrell pushed his mother as quickly as he could. The streets were bumpy, barely paved over centuries of cobblestones. “Hold up,” he called.

  “No! Follow me!” I passed a church on the right, then rounded another corner up and away from the river. “Just follow me.”

  “The men,” Roald said from the back. “The men from the black car . . .”

  We forged up College Hill, then down and left onto Walbrook and up into Bucklersbury Passage, where the Old Barge had stood ages ago. The BMW was suddenly roaring up the nearest passable street and skidded across one end of the passage. A motorcycle stopped at the other end. In its saddle was one of the goons in black jeans. Where had he picked up a bike? In the tunnel with blue lights?

  “We need to move faster,” said Darrell. “Mom?”

  She got out of the chair with Roald’s help. “I’m good. Really. Let’s go.”

  A second motorcycle joined the first, idling with it. Both engines cut out at the same time. The riders dismounted together.

  My legs felt like collapsing. I stumbled. Lily kept up with me. “Becca, really, what’s going on with you? You have to tell me. You’ve never been here before.”

  “Not now,” I said. “I just know the way. That’s all.”

  “Sure. Okay.”

  I knew it was wrong to keep this to myself. The loneliness of it would break me. Nicolaus knew it. That was the real horror. To be left alone in a cold place without my friends. Only myself. No others. Suddenly I froze. There was a fence surrounding a construction site. A sign pinned up on it read Temple of Mithras.

  “The temple!” I said. “He told me about it.”

  “The temple?” Julian shot a look at me, then behind us. The two motorcycle men had joined two or three others on foot now. I saw Hatman’s hand pointing out the car window.

  “Through the fence to the next block,” Julian said. “Becca’s right. Go!”

  Wade and Darrell pushed at a hinged door in the fence and urged Lily and me through it, then Roald and Sara. Julian ran in last, still on the phone to his driver, who must be trying desperately to find us.

  We wove through cranes and tractors, piles of girders, and shouting construction workers—“Hey, it’s not open yet!” “Get out of here!” “Bloody tourists!”—and finally past the red and white foundation stones of an ancient temple nestled serenely among the noise and fenced off within the fenced-off site. We crashed out to the street a block away from the men at the exact moment that Julian’s limo raced up the street toward us.

  Wade faltered. “Becca, what the—how in the world did you know—”

  “I’ll tell you!” I said. “I’ll tell you everything! Just get in!”

  Breathless, we dived into the car, Julian pulling the doors closed behind us. The limo screeched away from the curb, and the moment it did, I did tell them.

  Almost everything.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The car raced north through the streets as I blabbed. My nose may have bled again, another drop, but I wiped it away before anyone saw. I told them about the blackouts, the barge, Helmut Bern, Thomas and Nicolaus, the code he wrote in the diary, Meg’s codes, the horror, and whatever else I could remember.

  They sat there stunned until I finished. Then they just sat there.

  “I’m sorry I kept it a secret,” I said. “I didn’t want to, except I wasn’t sure it was anything real. But I knew the way up the streets, and he told me ‘the Temple of Mithras,’ which I had never heard of, and our car was exactly there. He knew it would be, don’t ask me how, but he knew!”

  Roald frowned deeply and seemed on the verge of speaking, while Sara studied my face and held my hand calmly. In the end, it was Wade who spoke.

  “Are you saying . . . you actually saw him? You talked to him? To Copernicus? The real guy? And he knew you?” He stared into my eyes as deeply as he ever had. “I can’t believe you really talked to him—”

  “Seriously, Wade?” Lily snapped. “Becca flies away to the sixteenth century and might never come back, and that’s what you can’t believe? Not that oh, poor Becca might be going nuts? Not that you’re going nuts,” she said to me. “I’m just saying.”

  “Yeah, but Copernicus!” said Wade, shaking his head. “Him himself! It’s just . . . hard to bel
ieve.”

  “She knew the way,” said Darrell. “I believe her.”

  We motored past a giant domed church. I remembered from our first time in London that it was the famous Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

  “It is hard to believe,” I said. “I just hope I’m really not going nuts.”

  Sara stroked my hand. “You’re not. When Kronos exploded, that did this to you. The machine and her, Galina.” Her eyes narrowed in disgust. “But I’m sure it won’t last. It’s like post-traumatic stress. It’ll fade.”

  I felt like collapsing in her arms. I thought of my mother, father, and Maggie, and how I wanted this to be over by the time they all got here. But the blackouts, or whatever they were, seemed to be getting longer and deeper for me.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I think I’m okay now. It’s just . . . very . . . weird.”

  “At least you didn’t disappear,” Darrell said. “It’s all in your head.”

  “It is not, Darrell!” said Lily, my guard dog again. “It’s real!”

  “What I mean is,” he said patiently, “you were still here when your brain threw you back in time. It would be so much worse if you left for real.”

  I gave him a look. “Is that a compliment?”

  Darrell seemed to think about that. “Probably. I am known to give them. Plus, no time passes while you’re back there, spying on dead people. You just sort of zonk out, and then—bingo—you’re all Becca again.”

  Wade listened to the whole thing and nodded. Just once. Slightly.

  If it weren’t so scary, it would be slightly ridiculous. I sat up in my seat, tried to smile. “Yeah, I’m a spy, all right. A spy in the house of the dead.”

  “Well, I’m calling your parents,” Roald insisted, tugging out his cell phone.

  I put my hand up. “Please don’t. If they manage to get on tonight’s flight from Austin, they’ll be here tomorrow morning anyway. Maybe we should just follow what I see.”

  Roald continued to frown at me, but Darrell nodded. “You know, we probably should,” he said. “Galina has Serpens, which means she’ll steal this amber relic before we get near it.”

  “Actually, that’s not right,” I said as the driver continued to our safe flat on Chenies Mews in the Bloomsbury neighborhood. “Nicolaus told me that Serpens doesn’t lead to this relic. It kills me that I was so close to this thing when we need it so bad. But I guess it had to be given to its first Guardian first. Still, we might have enough to follow the relic through history. Nicolaus gave me some clues. Maybe that’s all we need. I mean, these visions should be good for something.”

  Wade was staring at me. It was an odd look. Then he said, “Your . . . nose.”

  I pushed my finger against my right nostril. “Sorry.” It was only another drop. But it scared me. “All the excitement. I think I can remember the codes. Really.”

  They nodded quietly. As usual, you can’t keep Lily quiet very long.

  “Okay, but no splitting up,” she said. “Not for a second. You start to get sucked back into five hundred years ago, you beep that alarm, baby—”

  “I will.” I tried to smile. “I really should write down everything I remember before I don’t remember it anymore.”

  “I’ll remind you to remember not to forget to remember,” said Darrell, being silly. The tension in the car was thick, and he’s always good for breaking it up.

  “Remember what?” I said. They laughed, all except Sara and Roald.

  As we drove from street to street, I wrote furiously in my notebook. At the same time, Lily was busy on her tablet, trying to identify the house I saw, while Roald and Sara batted historical names back and forth.

  “I just texted my dad,” said Julian. “He doesn’t know offhand what officials drive cars without plates, but we’ll find out. Dad has friends in important places. In the meantime, we should keep off the main avenues.”

  The driver gave a nod, slowed, and wove through a series of narrow streets.

  After a while Roald said, “Sara and I are pretty much agreed that according to what you told us, Becca, the Guardian you saw is Saint Thomas More. He was a politician and writer in the sixteenth century. Only we think he lived in Chelsea on the other side of London, and not near where you saw him.”

  I stopped writing.

  Lily raised her hand. She had a page up on her tablet. “He did live in Chelsea, but that was later. In 1517, he lived in Bucklersbury Passage. And he had a daughter named Meg who was about twelve then. And Meg had a younger sister named Elizabeth. Thomas also supported the Charterhouse hospital and took in orphans, like the girl Joan who couldn’t talk. He sounds like a pretty decent guy.”

  “And the book he had just written?” I said. “The one with codes? I’m trying to remember the code Nicolaus wrote for Meg before I look in the diary. I don’t want to get confused. There’s so much he told me.”

  “I don’t know about the codes,” Sara said, “but he may have been talking about Thomas’s book called Utopia. It’s his most well-known work.”

  “It came out in 1516,” said Lily, reading her tablet. “You said it was recent.”

  “More was powerful during the reign of Henry the Eighth,” Roald said.

  “Henry had six wives,” said Lily. “Not at the same time, of course.”

  Roald nodded. “Henry sentenced Thomas More to death.”

  “Not his head,” said Darrell. “It was his head, right? Henry chopped it off.”

  “Not him personally,” said Wade. “Kings have special guys for that.”

  “That’s some kind of job, isn’t it?” said Darrell. “How do you practice? With watermelons?”

  Lily cupped her hand over her mouth. “Gross, you guys.”

  “Boys, not funny,” said Sara. “Death is death.”

  “So, we’re right,” I said. “It sounds like it was Thomas More. Copernicus knew what would happen, but he couldn’t tell Thomas. People who traveled in time, he said, were like blind men with torches.”

  When I looked up from my notebook, Wade was staring at me again. It wasn’t at my nose this time, but he looked as if he had something to say.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” I asked him.

  He blinked, then shook his head. “I just think we need to get back to the safe flat. Becca, you’re kind of pale. Like falling-down-unconscious pale.”

  Lily gasped. “Excuse me, Wade? You never tell someone, and by someone I mean us”—she pointed to herself and me—“that we don’t look good. It’s rude.”

  Wade frowned. “Well, I didn’t mean it that way—”

  “Oh, so you think Becca looks good?” asked Darrell.

  “That’s not what I meant!”

  “So you think she’s ugly?” said Lily.

  “Guys, give it a break,” Sara said. “We could all use a rest—”

  “And food!” said Darrell. “I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say we need food. And if I don’t speak for everyone, it’s because you’re wrong. To put it another way—food now. Food now!”

  Julian laughed. “I know just the place.”

  “But before food, I need that book,” I said. “Unless I’m a total lunatic, and I may be, Copernicus gave me major clues about where to find the relic. I need to get a copy of Utopia. If what I remember translates to real words, maybe that will prove it once and for all.” I looked right at Wade. “To everybody.”

  “Hey, I didn’t say I didn’t—”

  “Book now!” said Darrell. “Then food now!”

  “The closest bookshop is twelve minutes away,” said Lily, looking up from her tablet. She showed Julian what she’d found.

  “I know it,” he said. “Driver, please take us to Lamb’s Conduit.”

  Darrell made a face. “I really hope that’s a street and not a body part.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Halfway up Lamb’s Conduit, a cool street with parquet-style paving bricks, was Pucker’s Books, a teeny shop shoehorned between a sparkling new Pret A
Manger restaurant and a bustling bicycle repair.

  The limo eased down the block and around a corner to the nearest parking spot. We got out and studied the street. No black cars. No motorcycles. No Hatman.

  Julian said, “You know what—you go in. We stumbled upon Markus Wolff and the black car, but I want to make sure we’re not being tracked. I’m going to upgrade the software on your phones remotely from the servers at the Ackroyd Foundation in Fleet Street. I’ll snag a cab. The limo will stay. I’ll be right back.”

  “Sounds good,” said Roald. “We’ll eat at Pret A Manger when we’re done.”

  Julian gave us a nod, looked both ways, and jogged away.

  The moment I pushed open the front door of Pucker’s and a bell chimed, the aroma of dry paper overpowered me—tens of thousands of freshly printed and antique books were crammed onto wooden shelves, in teetering stacks on the floor, in skyscraper piles on old oak tables. They were jammed into the window seats, across the aisles, on the stairs leading up, on the stairs leading down, and on every available inch of the cashier’s counter.

  No wonder the little old guy behind the register was busy coughing his head off. “Wel”—gasp—“come,” he said, raising his reading glasses to reveal the largest eyes I’d ever seen. “How can I—kakk—help you?”

  Roald kept his arms firmly around Sara’s shoulders until he settled her on a small bench made of encyclopedias. “We’re interested in Thomas More.”

  “Ah, the More the—ggg—merrier!” The proprietor gagged, waiting for our reaction. I smiled. Apparently, not enough for him.

  “So,” he said sharply, “which do you want? The saint—kkk—the scholar, the martyr, or the—ggg—writer? We have the complete works, quite a steal at—gkk-kk—four hundred pounds.”

  “We’d like something light enough to carry around,” said Lily with a smile.

  The man narrowed his large eyes at her. “American humor. Well, then his selected works—ggg-kkkk!—are available. In p-p-paperback. Would you like new or used?”