The Golden Vendetta

by Tony Abbott

  Wade’s father gave them each a look. “We’ll be careful.”

  “It’s in our blood,” Darrell added as they crossed a busy avenue and into a shady street that wandered south to the water.

  “What about the document the bookseller stole in Paris?” Becca asked.

  “Confiscated, most likely,” Terence replied. “Paul Ferrere found out it’s called the Voytsdorf Ledger. Why Galina wants it, we don’t know yet. My man inside the police will look into it. Listen, I’ll arrive later. I’m following up with Paul, but you need to know that he and his investigators are hearing about several accidents that took place around the same time as the plane crash in Poland. Galina’s up to something.”

  “Besides the relics?” asked Roald.

  “It seems so. I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon to give you a full briefing. Julian is coming in from the States. Don’t know his flight time. Until then.” He signed off.

  “I knew it,” said Darrell as they wove toward the Place du Palais. “Galina is planning a massive operation. We’re here just in time. In time for what, we don’t have a clue, but we will. This won’t end until it ends, and even then it won’t end because there will be the next time and the—”

  “Darrell, shh,” said Lily. “My ears are tired. The rest of me is tired, too. There, Rue de la Préfecture, not a minute too soon. I need to decompress.”

  “Just don’t decompose,” Darrell said.

  She looked at him. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Terence’s housekeeper, a severe woman in her sixties named Madame Cousteau, met them outside the apartment. Wade glanced at his watch. It had been, all told, a thirty-minute evasive walk from the station. Good to know. Using gestures and a few English words, supplemented by a conversation with Becca, the woman showed them into an open elevator with a wrought-iron gate across the front.

  “Elegant,” said Sara.

  “Old,” said the housekeeper.

  Wade still wanted to grab Becca’s bag from her and swing it up over his shoulder. He would never forget the horrifying moment Becca was wounded by Galina in the cave where they found their first relic. He couldn’t see the scar, but Becca kept her bag tight against her side and wouldn’t let it go.

  “So the arm’s getting better?” he asked.

  “I’ve been on antibiotics off and on since they discovered toxin in the wound. I took my last dose in Paris last night.” She shook the orange bottle soundlessly.

  It seemed to Wade a really personal detail, though he wasn’t sure why.

  The Ackroyd safe flat in Nice was indeed large.

  Besides taking up most of the top floor of the building, which gave it window views on three sides, it had a narrow balcony overlooking the bustling square. The place below was a short walk to the seaside promenade and a major boulevard, but far enough from both to be out of the crush of tourist throngs.

  Madame Cousteau told them that the quartier also boasted restaurants and cafés on nearly every corner.

  “I can’t wait to try them,” said Sara.

  “But for you, only one.”

  “One?” said Roald. “But the food in Nice—”

  The housekeeper shook her head. “Ground floor. Secure. No exceptions.”

  Wade shared a look with the others. “Well, food is food, right?”

  “Not really,” said Becca.

  “I found my room,” Lily said. She had walked into a small windowless room that resembled a well-stocked computer store. It was obviously Terence’s office when he was there. There were lots of computers of all different sizes networked to a black box that could have been a steel-plated safe designed to withstand a direct bomb blast. It was a server.

  “We can bring in a bed for you,” Sara said with a laugh.

  “You got that right,” she said.

  “No bed,” said Madame Cousteau, wagging her finger at them. “Is Mr. Terence’s office.”

  Knowing that the bookseller had been arrested and was in jail nearby, and after their jet lag and the impossible-to-sleep-in sleeper compartments on the train, not to mention a huge lunch prepared by Madame Cousteau, everyone eventually sank into their beds to take naps. Wade’s turned into a deep, overnight sleep.

  It was the next afternoon when he and everyone else finally felt alert enough to get to work.

  While his father and stepmother were busy on several phones with Terence and Paul Ferrere, Wade spent two hours spread out at the dining room table with Becca, scouring the Leonardo parts of the diary.

  Together, they found something new.

  Facing the first “silver” page was one that appeared black, but seemed to have marks on the other side of it that were different from any writing on the previous page. “Becca,” he said, “could this be another one of those double pages, like the cipher we discovered in San Francisco? A hidden page folds out and . . .”

  Becca slid her fingernail in the gutter of the book as before, and an unseen page became visible. Drawn on it was a triangular grid of symbols. “Whoa!”

  “Those aren’t letters,” said Wade. “At least not all of them are.”

  It reminded him a little of the Holbein puzzle they’d discovered in London. That code had been made of symbols describing alchemical processes.

  “The column running down the left side looks kind of like letters,” Becca said. “Under the sun there’s a G, then a U with two dots—an umlaut—over it. The other characters could be some language I don’t know.”

  “Let’s take out the letters we can recognize,” said Wade. Following the letters down the left-hand column, he wrote them down in his notebook.

  G Ü M Ü Ş K O L

  Becca frowned. “The umlauts could mean it’s German, but the accent on the S isn’t. Either way, I don’t know what it means.”

  “Lily?” said Wade, looking around. But she was still in her room. “We could use a translator. Maybe Terence’s office.”

  They found a laptop and started it up. After finding a translator site, Becca entered the letters. “Huh. The Detect Language button on the program says it’s Turkish.”

  Darrell walked in, biting the end off a croissant. “Turkish? From Turkey? Did Copernicus know Turkish?” He stuffed the rest of the croissant in his mouth.

  “In Turkish it’s two words,” Wade said. “GÜMÜŞ and KOL. And gümüş kol means ‘silver arm.’” He stared at Becca.

  “‘Silver arm’?” she whispered. “Is that what Leonardo made for Nicolaus in his workshop? The old woman in Tampa had silvery fingers. Everything’s silver!”

  “But does ‘silver arm’ mean anything?” said Darrell, leaning over the computer. “I mean, besides that I really want one?”

  Wade keyed the words into the laptop’s search engine. A few seconds later, the reference came back. He scanned it, felt his heart quicken.

  “Okay. We have something here. There was a pirate nicknamed Silver Arm. A Barbary pirate from North Africa. He had a silver arm because he lost his real one in a battle. His name was Baba Aruj, and he was one of two pirate brothers called Barbarossa, because they had . . . Becca, they had red beards! Red beards!”

  Becca screamed as she flipped back several pages in the diary. “The first passage that Lily and I read! So this pirate Barbarossa friend of Nicolaus’s had a silver arm . . .”

  “I don’t want one if I have to lose my real one,” said Darrell.

  Wade stood up from the desk. “So Copernicus asks Leonardo da Vinci to be a Guardian. Leo says, ‘No, I’m too old.’ But he agrees to make a thing to hide the relic in. What he makes is an arm—out of silver—for a pirate who saved Hans’s life during a battle. And this is where Copernicus puts the relic, whatever it actually is. The relic is inside the arm.”

  He turned to Becca and Darrell. “Is this right?”

  Becca began to nod slowly. “I think so. But you know what else? I’m thinking that because this story appears in the diary right after the Serpens story, whatever relic is in the
silver arm is the one that Serpens points to.”

  Wade sat down in front of the laptop again. “Yes. Which could mean that Galina has a head start on it. But she doesn’t have the diary to tell her some important details, so we could be even with her.”

  Darrell loved it, the way that things connected one to another and another. Even if they didn’t know yet what the relic actually was, they were assembling the mystery. He had to tell Lily. Her room door was closed, but he went over to it and was ready to knock when he heard her voice through the door.

  She was on the phone, talking quietly. To her parents? He voice was very soft. And . . . choked. Was she crying? Lily never cried. He pulled away and went back to the dining room, where Wade and Becca were still at it, sewing up their discovery into a package that worked. They were good at that. He wasn’t so much. Was Lily actually crying? He paced the dining room, then found himself walking all over the apartment, peeking in all the rooms, his brain methodically determining escape routes and memorizing the position of all the doors and windows. When he finally came back to the dining room, Lily was there. Her eyes were normal, not red. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he didn’t know anything.

  “Guess what,” he said, glancing at her, but not too long. “There’s another elevator, a private one, in the back of the apartment. I think it takes you all the way down to the street and lets you out on the back side of the building—”

  “You not take it,” said the housekeeper, suddenly appearing from nowhere.

  “I didn’t!” Darrell said. “I won’t. You can just tell from the buttons where it goes.” Afraid of the woman’s dark stare, he escaped out onto the balcony.

  The sky was a giant royal-blue dome, marbled here and there with a light scrim of clouds. The quaint orange- and red-tiled rooftops spread out around the square in varying heights on all sides. Beyond them was the great inviting expanse of the sea.

  “So . . .” It was Lily, stepping out next to him but looking away, out over the water. He couldn’t see her eyes.

  “Everything okay?” he asked, being sensitive.

  “Sure. What are we looking at out here?”

  “France,” he said. “Strange you don’t know that.”

  “Ha. Ha. Did you hear what Wade and Becca found? It’s big.” She brushed her cheeks.

  “I know,” he said. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m good,” she said in a way that ended that line of conversation. “So, this is France, huh?”

  “The French Mediterranean,” said Becca, coming out onto the terrace with Wade behind her. Both of them were glowing about the discovery of Copernicus and Leonardo and the silver-armed pirate.

  “All the way to the right is the rest of the French Riviera, then Spain,” Becca went on. “On the left is more France, then Italy. Straight ahead on the other side of the water is, if you can believe it, Africa. Africa! Where the Barbarossa brothers lived their pirate life.”

  “Barb One and Barb Two,” said Lily.

  “Exactly,” Becca said. “Of course, every bit of this was Roman Empire at one time. There are Roman ruins and a famous amphitheater not far from here—”

  “Bringggg!” said Lily. “History class is over. I actually like what Darrell said better. This is France. And you know what? We should eat French food at a French restaurant. It’s practically dinnertime. Somebody ate the absolute last croissant, there’s nothing left in the fridge except cheese, and I’m hungry for more than cheese. I’ve never been so hungry. Madame Cousteau didn’t shop today, and all I can think of is the food they give you on the train, which is not actually food but a kind of recycled wood chips with gravy, and of course you eat it because you don’t want to starve to death in your compartment, but then later—like exactly later enough to be the farthest away from any kind of bathroom—you realize that wasn’t food, but it’s already way too late. Right, Bec? I mean, I’m right, right? You didn’t like your wood chips, either, right?”

  Becca stared at her. “I did not.”

  Maybe the phone call was all right after all, thought Darrell. Lily’s up, happy, maybe a little over the top, but that’s so much better than not having her here at all. Holy cow, what would that be like?

  Sara insisted that they go to the downstairs restaurant and bring the charming housekeeper with them. “We’ll be down a little later, as soon as Roald finishes this last phone call. The café is open in front,” she said, “so you can see the square, but it has a back room where you can eat privately.”

  “As long as they have French food,” said Lily.

  “They do,” said Roald, cupping his hand over his phone. “Look, the Teutonic Order will know by now that we didn’t continue to Rome. You know what to do.”

  They did. It was a way of life now. The kids took the public elevator with the housekeeper, who seemed to be liking them less with each passing hour.

  The Place du Palais de Justice, which the apartment overlooked, was a public square free of cars. On three sides were restaurants, on the fourth an imposing classical building that could have been anything from a library to a bank but turned out to be the Palais de Justice.

  The café in the building was exactly as Sara had described it. The back room was secure, but it had a full view of the square outside through a wall of mirrored glass. Madame Cousteau stood guard at the doorway like a statue.

  “This is the life,” Becca said, relaxing into a chair next to the two-way mirror. “I can’t believe we’re actually here. Two days ago, Lily and I were in a motel in Florida. Look at us now, about to order French food in France.”

  A waiter in a long white apron slid between the tables to them. “Oui, messieurs, mademoiselles. Que voudriez-vous commander aujourd’hui?”

  They ordered two grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches of the kind called croque-monsieur, two authentic salades niçoises, and four Orangina soft drinks. The cold drinks arrived first, the food after ten or so minutes. Lily proclaimed that food had never tasted so good, “or so real!”

  While they ate, the sun slowly lowered in the sky, and a cooler breeze swept across the square and into the café. Here and there lights came on, windows twinkled, and soon the open part of the café was blue with late-afternoon shadow. The waiters began to light candles on the tables. Wade realized that his father and stepmother hadn’t joined them. He got out his phone.

  “Don’t spoil it,” said Becca. He didn’t make the call.

  “Excusez-moi,” said Lily, and she went off down a corridor to find the restrooms. Becca went, too. Madame Cousteau followed them.

  “She’s like a ghost, that lady, shadowing us everywhere,” said Wade. “I kind of like it. I wouldn’t like to be the bad guy that meets her.”

  “However, as usual, grown-ups don’t like us much.”

  Wade nodded. “Well, you.”

  Darrell scanned the menu again. “I completely admit that. My question now is, what’s a profiterole? Second question: Should I be getting one? It sounds French and gooey. Is it? Well, it’s probably French. But is it gooey? I feel like something gooey.”

  “You look like something goo—” Wade’s phone buzzed. He swiped it on. “It’s from Dad.” On the screen was a series of numbers. “Coordinates. Why doesn’t he just tell me?” He plugged the numbers into his GPS app.

  The screen showed a map. He zeroed in on it. It was an image of that very square, the plaza outside their café. The coordinates identified a table under an umbrella at a bistro on the far side of the square.

  “What is it . . . ?”

  “That’s what I’m asking,” said Darrell. “Is a profiterole a kind of roll?”

  Wade stood up from the table and stared through the mirrored window across the square to the exact spot the coordinates pointed to. Suddenly, the skin on the back of his neck began to prickle. His blood pounded in his ears.

  “No . . . no . . . no . . .”

  “No, what?” said Darrell. “It’s not how you pronounce it?”

  “N
o . . .” was all that Wade could manage to say.

  “Yeah, you see, that kind of answer doesn’t help—”

  “Robin, stand up and look!”

  Staring straight across the Place du Palais, Wade had spotted a face he’d hoped he would never see again.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Darrell grumbled. Wade was doing it again: not saying the thing, but just pointing his face at it. Still, in the interest of stepbrotherhood he paused on his quest for dessert and followed Wade’s weird stare across the Place du Palais.

  Fifteen or twenty small round tables were scattered under a café awning. Looking beyond them, he spied the table Wade’s eyes were fixed on. Two men sat at it. One had his head down, reading the menu like Darrell had wanted to do.

  The other . . . the other wore wraparound sunglasses. “I can’t believe it!”

  “No kidding.”

  The man in sunglasses—this particular man in sunglasses, code-named Sunglasses—had tried to kill them about a hundred times. Worse, he had nearly incinerated Lily and Wade. Worse than worse, he had kidnapped Darrell’s mother in Bolivia, then flown her to Europe and finally to Russia.

  In a coffin.

  After Markus Wolff, Sunglasses was the scariest person they’d ever met. And the person Darrell most wanted to . . . to . . . never mind. But it was grim.

  “Mom must be freaking out,” he whispered.

  “Is he here because of us?” said Wade. “Does he know we followed the bookseller? He’s good, but we’ve been so careful.”

  When Lily and Becca returned with the frowning housekeeper, Darrell told them. “Look over there, but don’t look like you’re looking.”