The Copernicus Archives #2

by Tony Abbott

  Holodomor. Smyrna. Uskok. Yellow Turban. What did they mean?

  Pressing a second napkin to my nose, I did what Lily would do and went straight to the internet, keying in the words Nicolaus had told me. Do that yourself, and you’ll know what the words mean, too. They were all tragic, terrible events. Horrifying episodes in history with tens of thousands of deaths, millions in the case of Holodomor. Untold suffering. How could Nicolaus have caused them? They were from different times, spanning nearly two thousand years.

  I caused them, or I may as well have. A time traveler is like a blind man with a torch, setting fire to everything he stumbles into.

  And the other thing. You must speak of these horrors, or the Order will win.

  My stomach convulsed. I rushed to the bathroom and knelt on the tiles in front of the toilet. I waited. Nothing. I washed my face. I couldn’t process it—the blind man with a torch. Did he mean that I was blind like that? That I would be?

  I splashed cold water on my face again, toweled off, then closed the curtains, darkening the room from the afternoon sun and muffling the sounds of the city even more. I needed to calm myself. To understand.

  I opened the book of Thomas’s writings and turned instinctively to his letters. I wanted to hear his voice again, quiet, intelligent.

  His short last letter, written to Meg, was unbearably sad. Tears came to my eyes with every gentle word, as I imagined tears had come to him when he wrote them. It made me miss my own family, and I longed to see them as soon as possible. Certainly, I didn’t know all about Thomas More, but he loved Meg, loved the mute girl Joan Aleyn who still lived with him, he had a son, who he loved, his old father, his whole big family.

  As I read the letter, I heard him giving Meg his last instructions.

  . . . to my good daughter Cecily . . . I send her my blessing and to all her children and pray her to pray for me. I send her a handkerchief . . .

  . . . to my good daughter Joan Aleyn to give her I pray you some kind answer . . .

  . . . I send now unto my good daughter Clement her algorism stone . . .

  . . . I pray you . . . recommend me to my good son John More. . . .

  But it was his last words to Meg that finally broke my heart.

  Fare well my dear child and pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends that we may merrily meet in heaven. . . .

  Tears ran down my cheeks. In my mind I saw Thomas as clearly as I just had. It was later that same morning, and I saw Thomas take final leave of his cell. I watched him drag himself through the passages, out the Tower gate, then up the long, slow hill to the scaffold. I climbed the steps with him. I stood next to him. Together we searched the astonished and silent crowd for his beloved Meg—

  I sat up and opened my eyes. “What’s an algorism stone?”

  I went back to the letter. I send now unto my good daughter Clement her algorism stone. Clement. I knew it was the last name of one of his wards, all of whom he called his daughters. Searching the footnotes at the bottom of the page, I discovered that an algorism stone was “a slate for calculations or, in this case, for jotting down thoughts best kept from prying eyes.”

  It wasn’t enough.

  I found two sites that dealt with Thomas More. One said that algorism stones, or slates, were often kept in boxes that also held charcoal pencils, paper, and sometimes the rods and beads of an abacus, which you could use to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. The “stone” referred to the slate, yes, but what if More meant “algorism stone” as a kind of code to mean the box the slate was in.

  Then it hit me.

  “The box that Holbein built for him! Nicolaus told Thomas to have him make a box. This is the box! It’s where he hid the amber cross!” I jumped from bed. “Thomas had Crux with him in the Tower. With his last letter he was passing it on to his family. And the strange Holbein puzzle will tell us where it is!”

  I was about to tear the door open and shout what I’d discovered when a sudden movement between the curtains caught my eye. I pulled one gently aside and saw a car enter the mews with the slow, slinky motion of a jungle animal prowling in the shadows. It was a black car.

  “Lily! Everyone!” I pressed my thumb on the keychain alarm. It was loud.

  “What’s going on up there?” Lily called. “Is your nose bleeding again?”

  The car nosed halfway around the corner. It had no plates. Through the open window I heard a quiet click, and its engine cut out. No . . . no . . .

  “The black car!” I shouted. “Everybody! The black car!”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Someone—Wade or Darrell, I couldn’t tell whose voice it was—called sharply from the living room. I heard the slap of bare feet on the hardwood. Sara was suddenly in my room, tugging me from the window. “Don’t let them see you.”

  “How do they know?” I said. “Our phones are good; Julian said they were.”

  “I don’t know.” Her hand was insistent. “Just move from the window.”

  I couldn’t. Both rear doors of the car opened at the same time, spreading like raven wings. I expected the men we’d seen earlier. Instead three men in black jumpsuits and body armor climbed out. One reached back into the rear seat and pulled out something. An automatic rifle. He handed it to the other man and took one for himself; then both pulled ski masks over their faces.

  Roald was running down the hall, his hand clasped around his phone, the screen bright. “Time to use the rear exit. Bring only what you need. Out. Now!”

  I grabbed my bag, and we hurried down the back stairs into the walled courtyard behind the building. Sara moved slowly, coughing into her hand, stifling the noise as much as she could. From the street in front came a sharp crack. The front-door alarm rang for a few seconds, then stopped.

  “They’ve broken in!” Lily whispered.

  I clamped my bag tight under my arm. Nicolaus’s diary was more important than ever. It was his way of communicating directly to us. Directly to me.

  “We need to get out of London,” Roald said, punching the screen of his phone as he hurried through the alley, holding it to his ear. “I’m trying Terence—”

  “Come on, Bec.” Wade ran with me. I felt like a shadow, half there, half with Thomas More and Copernicus, with Holbein . . .

  Sun broke through and shone down the passage behind Gower Street. It was a little after two now, and warming up, but I shivered. My armpits were grossly wet. My vision narrowed, squeezing everything into a tunnel. I couldn’t breathe.

  “Sir Felix wasn’t able to do anything,” Darrell grumbled. “Some help he is—”

  “Darrell, he’s only one man,” his mother said, leaning on him.

  We squirreled through the passage. Darrell helped his mother, but the moment he took his hand from her, she stumbled. Lily caught her. I wondered how long it would take the men to realize we’d gone out the back. Sara was on the move again, holding herself together, steadier now. Roald, Lily, and Wade were first to reach the end of the passage. Wade squirmed ahead like the leader. He put his hand up for us to shush, peeked out, looked back at us, didn’t move.

  “Is someone out there?” Lily whispered.

  Wade shook his head. “Becca, are you all right? Have you been crying?”

  I was leaning against the wall, the last of us, even behind Sara. My face must have been deathly. “I went back again. This time, Nicolaus showed me a puzzle. Holbein made it, he said. It had German characters and symbols.” My head pounded. I checked my nose. Dry for now. “Let’s just get out of here!”

  Still on the phone, Roald slipped by Wade and looked out. A window broke behind us, a harsh sound in the quiet of the alley. “Someone call Julian.”

  “I will. I’ll tell him about the Holbein puzzle, too.” Wade pushed his hand into his pocket, tugged out his phone, and hit the screen with his thumb. As he did, I hurriedly explained my theory about the algorism stone.

  “I think it could be a code for the relic box,” I said. “Thomas had it
with him in the Tower of London, then gave it to his family—”

  Another crash of glass behind us, then clipped shouting.

  “Now.” Roald slid out onto Gower Street. We followed one by one, me last.

  Darrell scanned the traffic. “We can’t use main streets—”

  Julian’s calm voice crackled through the speaker on Wade’s phone. “I’m working on the car, but no luck yet. I just rechecked; your phones are good. Where are you now?”

  “Top of Gower Street,” Darrell said, still looking out between the buildings. “It’s busy. I don’t see anyone on this side of the flat, though. Not yet.”

  “Becca saw a puzzle,” Wade said into his phone. “By Hans Holbein—”

  “My dad needs to know that,” Julian said.

  Suddenly Terence was on Roald’s phone, also on speaker. “Your Umbrella Man—Archie Doyle—is one slippery agent. He’s already killed eight people for the Order, including your friend Boris. He’s lurking around, so be careful. In the meantime, run across the street and back to the university. There’s no car access on that part of campus. Then go north—”

  “North?” said Lily. “We’re from Texas. Everything’s north!”

  “From Chenies Mews to Gower is east,” Julian added from Wade’s phone. It was a weird multiway conversation. “Go north to Euston Station. Listen, Dad, they found a German puzzle.” We heard a door slam in the background.

  “German puzzle, let me work on that,” said Terence. “But look, you people want Euston train station, not the Underground. I suggest splitting up, at least for now. Sara, go to the third cashier and ask for ‘five tickets for the next train to Bishops Stortford via the London Midland line.’ Say it exactly that way. Roald, meet me at Autonoleggio Nazionale in forty minutes. Just you alone. I have information. Too much for the phone. Roald, forty minutes. Hurry!”

  “I should know about the black car soon,” said Julian. “Talk to you later.”

  They both signed off, and Roald’s phone went silent.

  “What Terence said sounded like Italian,” said Darrell. “Is there a new code?”

  “He’s trying it out in his new novel,” Roald said. “Different languages mean different things. Italian means cut any numbers in half. He’ll meet me in twenty minutes. Also, Bishops Stortford is where his mother was born. The third cashier will give you the proper destination.”

  “Autonoleggio nazionale means something like ‘national rental car,’” I said.

  After a few seconds on her tablet, Lily said, “There’s National Car Hire on Pentonville Road. A twenty-minute walk. You’ll just have time.” She showed him the screen.

  “Got it. Kids, Sara,” said Roald, gathering us to him, “I’ll draw them away. You help one another to the station. I’ll join you after I meet with Terence.”

  “Wait!” Sara said fiercely, grasping his sleeve. “They’re killers working with Markus Wolff. You don’t know what they’ll do. I mean, you do know what they’ll do. I don’t want to split up. We shouldn’t—”

  Roald nodded, holding her to him. “Doyle I don’t know about, but Wolff seems like the senior man here. He’ll wait until he gets a clear run at us—”

  “All the more reason to stay with us, Uncle Roald,” Lily said.

  “All the more reason to throw them off,” Roald said. “Look, I know what I’m doing. Julian and Terence will run interference. You have a lead. Follow it.” Roald kissed Sara quickly, then pushed for the last time through the narrow cut-through and was out on Gower Street, running south, which Lily said was exactly the wrong direction from Pentonville Road. I couldn’t tell whether the BMW was in the crush of traffic, but if it was, it must have seen him. He zigzagged along the sidewalk, waving his arms, stopping, stepping out into the road, stepping back. It was quite a show. Sara groaned under her breath.

  “All right,” said Wade, taking the lead again. “We can do this.”

  We waited for a lull in the traffic, checked and rechecked both ways before crossing, then sprinted across Gower and into the busy university.

  Students rushed across the lawns to get to classes; groups of faculty chatted, smoked. Mothers with strollers, joggers, young people tossing Frisbees, everyone going on with their normal lives.

  We hurried diagonally across the yards, keeping ourselves as inconspicuous as possible. I kept my eyes open for Archie Doyle, but my mind was swimming with Thomas More’s algorism stone and Copernicus’s strange warning.

  I’d have to tell everyone that, too. And soon.

  Finally, we came out to the broad, frantic Euston Road. The pedestrian path across it to the train station was a zigzag over one lane, a median, and another lane. The instant the lights turned in our favor, we moved through the mass of bodies pouring out of the terminal and entered the station at last.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Like all the train stations we’d been in since the relic hunt started, Euston Station boomed with people and announcements and a million sights and smells and other distractions. On top of that, every face looked sinister.

  “Mom, remember,” Darrell said. “You ask the third cashier for ‘five tickets for the next train to Bishops Stortford via the London Midland line.’”

  “I remember, thanks. Go to that newsstand, all of you”—Sara pointed like Roald would do—“pick up a tourist guidebook, and stay put. Do. Not. Move. I’ll be right back.” She gave us a stern look, then headed off to the ticket line. She seemed small and frail in the crowd, but she moved quickly across the floor.

  My head was spinning. I had to get the puzzle on paper before I forgot it. The room was so loud that I couldn’t concentrate. Maybe I’d already forgotten it, the strange lines and symbols. Then, on the way to the newsstand, I froze.

  Lily tugged at my bad arm. I winced, but I wouldn’t budge.

  “Wait,” she said. “Are you seeing Henry the Eighth in your mind? Is he as fat as they say?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, he might be; that’s not it. Someone’s here in the station.”

  “Wolff?” said Darrell, scanning the huge room. “Or Archie Doyle?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I sensed a presence. “If we’re not being tracked electronically, then we’re being followed on foot.”

  “Which makes it even creepier,” said Lily. “Can you narrow it down?”

  I could. My neck tingled when I saw a man near a coffee kiosk, stirring a paper cup over and over. People rushed past him, but he seemed planted. I realized that from where he stood, he could see the whole big room. He wore a rumpled green jacket, baggy jeans, sneakers. The outfit was so normal, it seemed a kind of camouflage. But it was his doughy, dull face that gave him away. You don’t nearly get killed by someone and not carry his face with you forever.

  “It’s Doyle.”

  Lily followed my gaze and shuddered. “Oh, my gosh. It’s him! Darrell, Wade, don’t look now, but look over there, but don’t make it seem like you’re looking over there, so don’t actually look, but look who it is.”

  Wade stepped forward and picked up a thick guidebook from the nearest rack. He pretended to read it but glanced over and groaned. “He looks so . . . regular.”

  Every few seconds Doyle would stop stirring his drink to check his watch.

  “Julian said our phones are good,” said Lily. “If he’s right, and he usually is, how does Doyle know we’re here?”

  “Does it matter right now?” Wade said. “He knows.”

  “Should we run?” said Darrell. “Or attack him? Or call the police? Or just attack him? I kind of vote to attack him.”

  “Which goes against absolutely everything Roald and Sara told us,” said Lily. “Still . . .”

  “We have to throw him off somehow,” I said. “We may have lost the black-car goons, but this creep is slippery, like Terence said. He pops up like a gopher.”

  “That’s why they hired him.” Darrell glanced at the ticket line. “Mom’s next at booth three. We’ll find out soon where we’
re going.”

  Wade paid for the guidebook. “Uh-oh, he’s coming this way.”

  “I have a plan,” said Lily. “Well, I think I have a plan.” She looked around and settled on a handful of teenagers on the other side of the newsstand. Then she plucked two London souvenir caps from a nearby rack and turned to the clerk. “These two, please.” She paid for them, then slapped one on my head and the other on Wade’s. She laughed like a crazy girl as she switched the caps back and forth. “Good, he sees us.”

  “Yeah, real good, Lily,” said Darrell. “Now we have to attack him—”

  “Keep those caps on and come with me.” She pushed us all over to a group of boys and girls at the back of the newsstand, just out of Doyle’s line of sight. She said something to them. They nodded with a laugh. Then she slid our hats off our heads and sat them on one of the boys and a girl with a ponytail. Clever. They didn’t look like us, but were about the same height. The kids turned and walked away, switching caps, then switching them back, laughing loudly.

  “What is all this—” Darrell started.

  “Shh.” Lily kept us behind the newsstand, then peeked out. “It worked. I told them to laugh to attract attention. It worked. Look!”

  You could almost see Doyle jump with joy when he spotted our decoys pass under an arch and enter the platform area. Looking both ways, he dumped his coffee cup in a receptacle and skulked quickly after the kids. When they entered an open train car, he paused a few seconds, bowed his head, then did the same.

  “Yes!” I said. “Lily, you are awesome!”

  “Simple, but effective,” she said. We moved up outside the platform arch. “I hope Doyle doesn’t mess with those nice kids. Maybe they could take him.”

  The doors whisked closed on the train. Then, just as it began its roll out of the station, the girl with the decoy cap turned in her seat. I watched Doyle. He saw her and spun around in a rage, and started moving back through the carriage.

  “He knows and he’s mad!” I said. The train soon picked up speed and was out of the station, too far for me to see any more.