The Copernicus Archives #2

by Tony Abbott

  And all too momentary.

  The two equal arms of the cross begged to be attached.

  “I think you should . . . ,” said Wade, half reaching to pull wet hair from my cheeks, then letting his hand fall without doing it. It was such a different look from the one he gave me this morning. “You deserve to. You found it.”

  Lily and Darrell both nodded. I lifted out the two pieces. There was a notch in the center of each. I brought them together there. The arms sank into place with a click. The amber cross quivered in my hands for a moment, I let go, and rods suddenly jutted out of the arms, like multiple blades. Crux began to revolve in the air in front of us, like some kind of medieval helicopter. The two arms spun in opposite directions, making a strange, keening wail that grew louder and louder until Crux became its own winged machine. The cross of Copernicus, the prisoner’s cross of Thomas More, the cross encrypted into the Holbein portrait, beamed out like a floodlight and lifted up to the ceiling of the chamber.

  “Take it apart!” Lily said. “Take it apart! Guys—”

  Both boys thrust their hands at the cross and carefully detached one wing from the other. The moment they set them back into the algorism box and closed it tight, the light vanished, and the muffled noise of life rushed back.

  Wade’s expression was of awe. We all must have looked the same.

  “We have the relic,” he said.

  We did have the relic. Our second relic. We were in the lead once more.

  Then we heard glass crashing on the floor above us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I spun around toward the door at the top of the crypt stairs. “What was—”

  Something shattered in the nave. Chairs, tables scraped across the floor. Then two pops of gunfire, and someone shouted, “Take him down! Everyone now!” A stampede of feet thundered across the church floor.

  “Should we stay here?” Lily whispered. “I’m staying here. Sir Felix and his agents will protect us.”

  A flurry of more shots was followed by a pair of running feet toward the door from the nave into the tower. The door slammed aside while Darrell shut the door to the crypt and bolted it as Markus Wolff had done that afternoon.

  We turned off our phone lights. Holbein’s box was already in my bag. We held our breath. Someone stepped through the debris outside our door. We leaned and ducked away from any line of fire. There was a knock instead.

  “Hello, are you in there? This is Felix Ross. Your parents are safe, but Wolff is here, and that other man, Doyle. MI5 are cornering them, but you’d better slip out now, just in case.”

  We looked at one another in the dark. Wade whispered, “I guess it’s all right.”

  Darrell climbed the stairs and unbolted the door; we opened it. Sir Felix was there, his friendly face half smiling. “Good show. Now, quietly. Very.” He pressed a finger to his lips, turned, and started back. We followed him out one by one.

  Only we didn’t get far. Three steps outside of the crypt door, I felt cold metal pressing the back of my neck. “Don’t move, you little thief!”

  Everyone turned to see who was behind me. But I knew.

  “Doyle!” I said.

  “At your service. Your funeral service, that is. Now hand it over!” He kept the barrel pressed against my neck. I saw Sir Felix sizing up Doyle, as if he was thinking of a plan to help us, but without a gun, what could he do?

  “I think we’d better do as he requests,” he whispered. “Doyle, you are rather surrounded by British intelligence, poor chap. Nowhere to run, you see.”

  The killer snorted. “I do see. Once Wolff gets here, we’ll all see. He picks off British intelligence for breakfast. Now give me the relic!”

  Sir Felix urged the others away from Doyle and me, but as he did, someone pounded on the door to the nave—which Doyle must have locked—and the gunman turned his head. That’s when Wade jumped forward and dragged the bag off my shoulder. He spun around, and instead of unlocking the door, he scrabbled across the rubble and hooked his arm around a broken beam slanting overhead. He pulled himself up to the third step of the tower and from there to the fourth.

  “Why, I oughta—” Doyle shouted. He plowed through us, knocking Sir Felix to the stones, wriggling away from Darrell. He jumped up after Wade.

  “It’ll collapse!” I said. “Wade, stop!”

  But he wouldn’t. He was on what remained of the first landing and starting up on stairs even more rotten. Doyle was only a few steps behind him. I lost them both in the dark, then saw them in the lights from the upper windows. The wood must have sliced Wade’s fingers. He slipped back. I screamed.

  I couldn’t watch and do nothing. I pushed away from the others and hoisted myself up to the third step. My wounded arm burned, but I managed to clutch the next stair. I saw Wade kicking at Doyle, when Doyle’s gun went off.

  Plaster exploded off the ceiling, and white dust rained down on them. Doyle lowered his head. I slipped down, but caught myself. The whole staircase was sagging away from the wall now. I felt like throwing up, but I kept climbing.

  Downstairs, the church was chaotic: people were pounding on the nave door but not getting it open. What had Doyle done to it?

  Then, I don’t know how, I was up there, too, battering Doyle’s legs, then his back, then his head. He crumpled forward into Wade, pushing him against a window. I heard glass crack, then shatter in the street below. Wade’s alarm, still on his belt loop, went off as he hit the window. Shouts came from the street.

  I clasped both hands together and brought them down on Doyle’s head. He fell forward. Wade threw his arms out, then twisted aside, his tinny alarm still beeping. Doyle went headfirst into the remaining glass, shrieked, and fell.

  Out of the tower.

  I screamed something I don’t remember. Wade spun to the window. I climbed the last step and looked out next to him. Archie Doyle’s body was twisted, facedown on the ground, surrounded by intelligence agents. I grabbed Wade to steady me.

  “One dead,” he said, his voice barely audible.

  “No! What are you doing? No!” Lily yelled from below.

  “I beg your pardon, I have to . . .” Strangely, Sir Felix was grappling for the stairs now. He was stronger than he looked and was already on the third step.

  “We’ll come down,” I said, shaking, not knowing how I could make my feet move. But Sir Felix kept climbing up. The framework of the stairs shuddered. The weight was too much after all. The planks creaked beneath our feet.

  “Yes, you’ll come down,” Sir Felix said. “Just like Archie did.”

  “Becca—” Wade said.

  I watched the man’s hand dip into his jacket. He withdrew something black.

  “He’s got a gun!” Darrell shouted, battering the locked door with a brick.

  There was nothing to do, nowhere to go. Sir Felix was up there in no time.

  “Archie Doyle was a bit of a fool, but a necessary one,” he said, holding his gun on us, pushing us away from the window. We practically stepped on each other’s toes. He peered out the window. “Simon Tingle, too. I naturally heard everything you asked him about. Both men, alas, won’t see tomorrow.”

  “My dad says Simon will live,” said Wade. “You won’t get him.”

  “Won’t I? A knight of the British Empire and of the Teutonic Order can do a great many things. The relic, please. Now there’s a good fellow—”

  Suddenly, the door broke open below us, and Roald and Terence, along with several agents, poured into the tower, shining powerful lights up at us.

  “Sir Felix, you won’t escape,” one of the agents yelled. “Sir—”

  The window behind Sir Felix exploded. Glass splashed inside the tower like water. Felix didn’t have a chance to look around before a second blast blew him off the platform and out the window he’d just looked out of. Blew him out. As if he were a puppet.

  I screamed and screamed.

  “Omigod!” Lily cried out from below. “Who’s shooting?”r />
  Wade tried to hold me back, but I stepped to the edge of the sagging floor and looked out the glassless window frame. “Becca, get out of the way—”

  On the scaffolding of the building across the street, I glimpsed a shape in a long leather coat. There was the brief glint of a gun barrel, a flash of white hair, then nothing. “It’s over,” I said. I knew the shooting was over. Two were dead. There wouldn’t be any more tonight. Copernicus had told me what to expect.

  “Wolff’s appointment. He was after Sir Felix.”

  Leadenhall was a carnival of flashing lights and men with automatic weapons. Two crumpled bodies lay on the street not far from each other. Medical personnel crowded around them, but they were clearly dead.

  Two dead in the shadow of the tower.

  Even without seeing him, I knew that a man who didn’t belong in that sudden crowd was down there. Someone from another time.

  Nicolaus Copernicus.

  Had he seen all this before, or was he seeing it now? If he was seeing it now, was he still on his unexplained third journey? Or was this his fourth, or eighth, or tenth? No answers came. Time was shot through with holes.

  One thing I knew: history was already changing. Because I had saved Joan Aleyn? Or because I didn’t break Markus Wolff’s phone when I had the chance?

  Holodomor. Yellow Turban.

  The names of those tragedies swam in my head. How could one person do so much horror? What horrors were beginning right here and now?

  Someone was pulling me. Wade. Wade was pulling me back down the stairs. “I was scared,” he said. “That we’d lose you.”

  I gripped his hand as hard as I could. “Me, too.”

  My heart was stuffed in my throat. Barely able to breathe, I wanted to bury myself in him and the others and not let go and not have to say anything. I knew that eventually I would have to talk about it. But not right now. I didn’t know the right words. Only the wrong ones.

  Uskok . . . Smyrna . . .

  So that’s pretty much the unfunny story I promised you.

  Ha. Ha. Ha.

  Except it’s not the whole story.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Friday, March 28

  9:28 a.m.

  Last night, after everything we had done, my sleep was black, deep, and dreamless.

  Nearly dreamless.

  Sometime during the long night, I caught a glimpse of Joan, stumbling away on the dark sand to find Hans Holbein, the father of her child. The weight of early death had been lifted from her. I also saw Helmut Bern sailing to a monastery, heading for Kronos. I prayed he’d find it before the microhole closed.

  I had no idea what horrors would happen because of what I had done, but neither of those two things seemed bad. It was only later, at Heathrow this morning, that the final puzzle piece clicked into place.

  At the Pret A Manger in Terminal 3.

  My parents had texted last night to say that they’d found seats on an evening flight out from Austin. As we waited now for the plane that would bring Lily’s father and my parents and Maggie to us, we quietly worked out yesterday’s events. The passage of Crux from Nicolaus to Thomas and then on the day of Thomas’s death to Meg and Joan, and later to Joan’s daughter, Rebecca. How Sir Felix had appeared as Hatman at the embankment yesterday morning, how he had planted the bug on my bag in his office, how he had worked with Doyle, how Wolff had finally taken him out, and how the Teutonic Order was cruel to its own.

  My nose hadn’t bled for hours, but unprepared as I always am, when I talked about Joan at the river, I had to use a table napkin to dry what I hoped would be my last round of tears. Or I would have dried them, if I hadn’t stopped dead.

  When I brought the Pret A Manger napkin to my face, I finally noticed the funny little recycling comment printed on it.

  If Pret staff . . . hand you huge bunches of napkins (which you don’t need or want) please give them the evil eye. Waste not want not.

  I grew cold all over and realized what had really happened.

  . . . the evil . . .

  Because of the strange coilings of time, I had left something behind at the river nearly five hundred years ago. Joan Aleyn had kept the napkin I’d used to stop her bleeding forehead and put it in the locket that contained her husband’s portrait of her. I couldn’t tell you why Markus Wolff had the locket, but secreted inside it was the napkin that had mingled Joan’s and my blood together. The napkin that Nicolaus somehow must have known about. The napkin that memorialized why Joan had named her daughter after me.

  Copernicus had said it was good that she lived.

  Yes, it was.

  But then, what did the evil mean? Had a horrible thing already happened sometime in the past? Was it evil that Helmut Bern found his way back to Kronos? Would it have been better if Joan had died that night?

  I knew I wouldn’t have done anything different.

  And why was Galina so obsessed with this mute girl in the first place? So much so that she sent her best agent to find out about her? What did Joan Aleyn really mean to Galina Krause? Were she and Galina related, as Wolff had suggested? Was that what this was all about? Blood?

  Or more accurately . . . bloodline?

  Only then did I understand that we—all of us—are as deeply woven into the protection of the Legacy as Copernicus himself was. We are part of his Legacy, tangled up and bound to it like he himself was—and is.

  We make the horror happen. We make the good.

  Copernicus swore a deadly oath to protect the world from a horror without end, and we are bound to swear that oath, too. Have I caused tragedies? Maybe. But aren’t we causing tragedies every moment of our lives? Aren’t we all blind men, setting fire to everything we touch? Have I gone into the past? Or has the past come forward for me? Is there any difference between the past and the present? And what about the future? Where—and when—is the future, exactly?

  I daubed my eyes, then crunched the napkin and threw it away.

  As the plane from Austin landed and we crowded together to see my parents and Maggie, I knew one thing at least. In my bag, nestled close to Copernicus’s diary, was Holbein’s wooden box. And inside the box lay the prisoner’s cross.

  We had Crux.

  We were winning.

  Two to one.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Gratitude goes to many people who helped in the writing of this book, from the technical to the inspirational. In the first category is the National Trust Photo Library in England, whose splendid staff I contacted regarding Rowland Lockey’s 1592 portrait of Thomas More’s family, an image after a lost Holbein original. Readers can study this image for the hidden cross referred to in the story.

  A hearty thank-you goes to the staff at HarperCollins UK, with whom I enjoyed a fine lunch in Hammersmith by the ever-present Thames, and especially to Ruth Alltimes and Sarah Radford; also to Tania Fitzgerald at Historic Royal Palaces for even entertaining a request to visit the Bell Tower—on Good Friday, of all days. I promise proper notice next time.

  To Tony, the real buildings manager at Saint Andrew Undershaft, and John Ewington, OBE, at Saint Katharine Cree, thank you both for letting me poke around your churches, though certainly not to the extent described in this book.

  Visitors to Bletchley Park will already know the magic of the place. Since the beginning of this series I’ve wanted to set part of the Copernicus story there, and I’m happy to have had the opportunity. The men and women who worked there in the period between 1939 and 1945 are, as we now know, very real heroes. To say that I want to live and work at Bletchley during those years would remain no more than an idle dream—except for the possibilities suggested by this book. I’ll keep hoping. During my visit, in addition to benefiting from the docent’s fine description of the Enigma machine, I was honored to meet one of the original Wrens, the sparkly Joan Martin—“Lewis, when I was here.” If I have given my Bletchley character the name Mavis, I have also given her Mrs. Martin’s resonant words to me:
“I worked on the Bombe, you know. The Turing Bombe.”

  Within the terms of this very short novel, I’ve tried to stick with as many facts as I could. Thomas More’s life and death, his letters, his family, and his love for Meg are well known. Nicolaus Kratzer, Hans Holbein, and Joan Aleyn are real. Some facts—the shadiness of Kratzer, for example, or the dates of Holbein’s actual residency in England—have been adjusted for this story. My playfulness with minor points of recorded history do not, of course, reflect on any of my outstanding sources. Of those many I want to single out The Life of Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd, Wolf Hall, the novel by Hilary Mantel, The Secret Lives of Codebreakers by Sinclair McKay, Hans Holbein: Revised and Expanded Second Edition by Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Grenier, and Saint Thomas More: Selected Writings edited by John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne, with a preface by Joseph W. Koterski. The latter two volumes are quoted here, the first in reference to the likely location of Holbein’s tomb, the second in the excerpts from More’s last letter.

  Gratitude, as always, to my wife, Dolores, for her close readings and suggestions; to my dear editor, Claudia Gabel; and to Katherine Tegen, Melissa, Alana, Ro, Lauren, my splendid copy editor Karen, and everyone else at KT Books and HarperCollins who make these stories live. Thank you, all.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo by Thomas Sayers Ellis

  TONY ABBOTT is the author of over a hundred books for young readers, including the bestselling series The Secrets of Droon. He has two daughters and lives in Connecticut with his wife and two dogs. You can visit him online at www.tonyabbottbooks.com.

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  CREDITS

  Cover art © 2015 by Bill Perkins

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