The Golden Vendetta

by Tony Abbott

  “Okay, Lily,” said Sara. “Look, I’ll call the university in Austin and talk to my director. I’m sure I can get into the auction because of my archive work.”

  “Smart, Mom,” said Darrell. “Using your connections. We need to know what Gerrenhausen is after.”

  “Which is what Galina’s after,” said Lily. “Which is what we want.”

  Becca grinned at her. “You sound like Darrell now.”

  “It’s idol worship,” Darrell said. “I get that. Wade does it, too. . . .”

  Wade stopped listening. A broad-chested man in a jet-black suit swept in from the street, speaking over his shoulder in a language Wade had never heard before. Behind him floated a slender but sturdy woman in a flowing black dress with a black headscarf fastened under her chin and framing her face. Not stopping at the desk, they went directly to an open elevator, and the doors closed behind them.

  Becca admired the way Sara’s position as archivist at the University of Texas gave her quick last-minute entry to the auction. Her director even agreed to give her authorization under her latest fake name: Dr. Theresa McKay.

  But there were two minor hitches. They needed a certified check—a problem Julian easily solved even at night because of his father’s extensive bank contacts—and only two people per party were allowed into the salon. Obviously, Sara had to be one of them.

  “I think Becca should be the other one,” Wade said, and Becca wondered how that would go over. “It makes the most sense,” he went on. “Becca’s the translator. She knows the most about Copernicus, really. They’re practically personal friends. Becca is my choice.”

  Which was way too odd to respond to, but she didn’t have to, because Julian said, “Even in a blond wig?”

  “A blond wig? Who said anything about a wig?” said Becca.

  “With bangs,” said Lily. “And glasses. You, too, Sara.”

  “And shades,” added Darrell. “Not like you-know-who, but nice ones. Stylish. But not too stylish, or you’ll attract attention. And a hat so low you have to peek under it to see anything, but no one will see you. It’s either that or body armor.”

  It was settled. Sara and Becca would go undercover while the others stayed outside. Not so secretly, Becca was overjoyed. She was the right choice. But there was also the danger of being discovered no matter how blond-wigged she was.

  One of the Ackroyds’ “acquaintances” in the Nice underworld, a gentleman known as Maurice Maurice, was able on short notice to provide a wire—both audio and visual—for one of the chosen people to wear, so that the others could see and hear what happened at the auction. Maurice Maurice claimed it was waterproof, too.

  “In case you must go swimming,” he said. “Or are thrown into a fountain!”

  It was decided that Becca would wear Mr. Maurice’s wire. The others would watch the auction on Lily’s tablet from the restaurant located just off the lobby.

  Evening fell over the sparkling city, and Julian, Wade, Darrell, and Lily set up shop in the restaurant. Lily’s tablet was hooked up to Becca’s camera, her earpiece, and her microphone.

  After they made sure the connection worked, Becca and Sara entered the gilded salon.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Zis way, pliss,” said the pert young woman sitting at a table inside the doors. Her jet-black hair was cut in a sharp angle across her forehead, and she drew the papers from Sara with the barest tips of her fingers, as if the papers were covered with slime.

  She then nodded toward a stack of green cardboard paddles. “For you, Dr. Mack-eye from Owstin, Taxeze.” The top paddle was marked 23 in large white numerals on both sides of the card. “Ze catalog,” she gargled, and pointed at a stack of them. She finally directed them, without even making eye contact, to a line of people waiting to examine the items. “Next in line, pliss?”

  “Never mind the brat,” Darrell said in Becca’s ear. “Show us stuff.”

  Becca did a casual turn around the room, knowing that the camera lens attached to her collar would catch most of the action. The auction hall was neither jammed nor empty, but the excitement in the room bristled.

  “See the security guys?” she whispered into her microphone. At least a dozen beefy men with no obvious interest in the sixteenth century lined the walls. Four of them were speaking softly into walkie-talkies.

  “Becca, look here.” Sara stood at a long bank of display cases.

  Most of them had old books and maps, but in one of them, labeled Lot 14, was an old—and very odd—pair of handcrafted silver spectacles.

  A label read:

  Ocularia arcanum. Purpose unknown. 16th-century French (?)

  “Oh,” Becca breathed.

  The glasses were completely silver, from their rims to the tips of the arms curling gently to fit behind the ears. The lenses were mirrored, triangular, and prismatic, and each one contained three surfaces, at slightly different angles on slightly different planes, that were geared to be movable.

  A series of tiny numbered dials on the outer sides seemed to be the mechanism for adjusting the three lenses into a particular combination.

  Extending out from the sides of the lenses to hold the glasses to the face were a pair of delicate, looping rods.

  A curved nose brace, cushioned with velvet, sat between the lenses.

  All in all, the glasses appeared like something from a science-fiction movie or—as Darrell whispered in her ear when he saw the picture through the camera—“total sci-fi futuristically backward steampunk!”

  “This is it. Wade, everyone, do you see this? These glasses are why the bookseller is here,” Becca whispered. “The cryptologic lenses that Leonardo made for Copernicus. It’s how Nicolaus wrote the silver pages in the diary, and how Guardians can read them. We can’t let Galina get hold of them.”

  Becca wanted to break open the display case and run off with the glasses.

  “Do not touch!” said the young woman with the angled hair, who had been eyeing her. Becca pulled away, lowered her hat over her face, and drifted to the back of the room.

  “If Triangulum is the next relic,” Wade said into her earpiece, “and Galina needs these glasses to discover it, it means that Serpens isn’t telling her where the next relic is. She needs the glasses to read the map. We’re not behind. We’re neck and neck.”

  Becca felt her heart skip a beat or two. “This is big.”

  Sara whispered into Becca’s collar to the others. “I need everyone to start thinking of a way to get these things without getting killed.”

  “Who else is in the room?” Julian asked Becca through her earpiece. “Cassa?”

  Becca turned slowly. “Not yet—”

  “Stop moving,” said Wade. “That guy in the dark suit. The fireplug guy at the back of the room. I saw him in the lobby before. He looks like trouble.”

  Becca kept the camera on him. The man in the suit stood like a powerful black stone planted between the two visible exits.

  “Until we know his name,” said Lily, “we’ll call him Darksuit. And maybe even after that. He looks suspicious enough to be involved in this.”

  “But why does Galina need two bidders?” asked Darrell. “Wouldn’t just one be more efficient? And cheaper? Because don’t two bidders work against each other to raise the price? Or maybe I don’t understand auctions.”

  “I think you’re right,” said Becca. “We’ll keep an eye on him.”

  “Is the woman there?” asked Wade. “A woman in a headscarf was with him.”

  Becca scanned the room. A woman all in black from her hood to her shoes came in and stood next to Darksuit, who was now on the phone.

  “She’s here, too. They’re all here.”

  “She looks like a gymnast,” said Lily.

  “Why do you think that?” asked Darrell.

  “Because I used to be one. I know the muscles you need, and she has them.”

  Becca felt her brain speeding up, her thoughts flying. What if I can actually read the
silver pages in the diary with these weird glasses? We would zoom ahead of Galina, find the next relic, leave her in the dust. How can we get them?

  “Attention, please,” said an older woman at the podium at the front of the room. “We will begin the auction in three minutes. Please take your seats.”

  She gave a nod to the security guards. “Gentlemen, secure the doors.”

  The inspection period had formally ended, and the doors closed quietly.

  The auction had begun.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Not ten minutes from the Hôtel de Paris, Galina Krause’s yacht was motoring toward Monte Carlo’s harbor. Soon the city would be in sight.

  She didn’t care right now. She stared instead at the radar monitor in the communications room, studying the slow progress of the green blip on the screen. The caravan from Berlin was now leaving Prague. Another portion of the astrolabe’s fragments had been collected.

  “Keep me informed of any deviation from the plan,” she said to the operator.

  “Of course, Miss Krause.”

  She took the stairs up one level and entered her private room, where she stood alone for a minute, two minutes, and felt the floor sway. Would she be sick again?

  No—she suppressed the urge. The harbor was visible now, glistening through the portholes. It would not be long. On a table in the center of the room sat the Voytsdorf Ledger, whose secret text was readable only by the ocularia arcanum that Oskar Gerrenhausen would soon bring her.

  Using the strange spectacles crafted by da Vinci, she would finally understand the clever construction of the astrolabe’s pieces, the devilishly precise method that Copernicus had revealed to his assistant Rheticus on his deathbed.

  Her golden vendetta would begin its unstoppable progress.

  And yet the location of the next relic stymied her.

  The latest report from the Order’s computer servers in Madrid was baffling.

  By connecting infinitesimally small shreds of data, the Copernicus Room’s analysts had ferreted out a mysterious series of events:

  1.In April 1519 Copernicus embarks on a secret journey.

  2.In April 1519 Leonardo da Vinci embarks on a secret journey.

  3.In April 1519 Heyreddin Barbarossa embarks on a secret journey.

  4.In May 1519 Leonardo da Vinci dies at Clos Lucé in France.

  5.In April 1543 Heyreddin and Copernicus, both nearing their deaths, embark on a second journey together.

  Were the first three the same journey? To date, all of the relics were given to Guardians in a single year, 1517. What occurred two years later to require the three men to undertake secret journeys? Her mind rolled the information over and over and over. And why had Copernicus dragged himself from his deathbed to make a second journey with the younger Barbarossa?

  What had Markus Wolff said? The past is a curious creature. It was indeed.

  Suddenly, Ebner von Braun stormed into the cabin, perspiring like a wrestler. “Drangheta!” he gasped. “Ugo Drangheta has appeared at the auction! The man is surely out of his mind!”

  Her heart stopped. She felt the blood draining from her head. She clutched the table. “Drangheta seeks the Leonardo glasses. Send for the Crows. Have them meet us at the hotel. Ten men. More. Arm yourself, Ebner. There will be gunfire tonight.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Darrell grumbled under his breath. As much as he wanted to see and hear everything going on inside the auction salon, he hated staring at a screen. Listening through earphones. Eavesdropping, lurking, following.

  Operatives didn’t follow. Guardians certainly didn’t. They moved. They acted. They operated. They led. And yet, so far, following was all they’d been doing. It was wrong. He was Darrell Surawaluk Evans Kaplan, after all!

  “Calm down, Robin.”

  Darrell flashed Wade a look. “Have your fun. You’re still not Batman.”

  All the spy books he’d ever read always talked about leaving your emotions out of it. You needed to be calm to be smart, a hard thing for him to do. The calm part. He’d been wired from birth, a jittery kid, usually on edge, and since Greywolf and his mother’s captivity, Darrell’s edge was closer. Right now he felt close to falling right off.

  “Seriously, Darrell,” Wade said. “Our mom is on it. We’re good.”

  “Except we’re not good,” said Darrell. “I want to case the room for myself. See where the exits are, who’s packing a gun. I want to control Becca like a character in a video game. Move left. Back up. Move right. Zoom in on that guy. Spin around.”

  “She would so not go for that,” said Lily.

  “No, I would not,” Becca said through her microphone.

  Darrell grumbled again.

  In the salon, Becca eyed the bookseller like a hawk. Behind her blond bangs she studied his moves, his little twitches, the way he lifted his eyeglasses and rested them on his forehead, the way he tapped texts into his phone, with his nose practically on the screen. Bad eyesight, probably, from all the reading a bookseller has to do. Still, the small man managed to be both a thief and a killer.

  “Are you guys getting all this?” she asked quietly.

  “We are,” said Lily. “You’re a good cinematographer.”

  A rapid tap from the podium signaled that the auction had begun.

  Becca tensed up. The first items were paintings and drawings. Some were by names she knew, others not. Neither Gerrenhausen nor Darksuit bid for them.

  Soon enough the glasses came up.

  “Lot fourteen,” the auctioneer said, “is a one-of-a-kind pair of mirror-lensed glasses, dubbed ocularia arcanum, dating from the early sixteenth century. They are crafted of silver, of silver thread of very high quality, and of mirrored glass. Although undocumented, they are believed to have originated at a French workshop.”

  Becca’s heart beat double time. “They’re documented in one place,” she whispered. “I wonder if anyone besides us—and Gerrenhausen and Galina—knows that da Vinci made them for Copernicus.”

  “To hide Triangulum,” Sara added.

  “Bidding will open at three hundred thousand euros, and rise by increments of one hundred thousand thereafter. This is a one-of-a-kind example of very fine craftsmanship from a European workshop.”

  There was momentary silence in the hall. Becca kept her eyes and camera trained on the bookseller in the second row. He seemed to draw in a breath, and he started to raise his bidding paddle, when the auctioneer made an announcement.

  “Three hundred thousand is the opening bid from the gentleman in the back.”

  Gerrenhausen practically exploded in his seat. He swung around, his forehead wet with perspiration. His placard went up, and his phone appeared in his hand.

  “Darksuit was the first bid,” Becca whispered. “You were right, Wade. He wants it.”

  “Four hundred, thank you. Do I hear five hundred? Yes, five hundred thousand euros bid from the gentleman in the last row. Six hundred?”

  Gerrenhausen raised his paddle, then Darksuit. It was a quick round of up-bidding from the two men. Becca was amazed at how swiftly the price rose.

  Every once in a while, someone else would enter a bid, but would be quickly overtaken by the two men at opposite ends of the salon. The bidding held at seven million euros for a very long minute.

  Finally, Darksuit threw his placard on his seat and spat out words in a language Becca didn’t know. He stormed from the salon before the bidding for the next lot began. Gerrenhausen had won the item.

  The woman in the headscarf lingered in her seat until the little bookseller entered a private room for the financial transaction; then she slipped out, too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Becca and Sara left the salon and met the others in the lobby restaurant.

  “Look who’s back,” said Darrell, nodding with his chin. No sooner had Gerrenhausen left the auction hall than Sunglasses appeared with the agent they’d first seen dressed as a railroad porter. They took the elevator toget
her and were gone.

  Darrell tapped Wade’s shoulder. “We should go up the stairs. Follow them—”

  “Hold on.” Sara snagged the boys before they went anywhere. Three armed guards pushed a rolling cart across the lobby and into the elevator. The doors closed behind them, and it went up.

  Becca grumbled. “This is happening too fast. They’re taking the glasses to Gerrenhausen’s room. Galina will get them. We can’t just let her do that.”

  “Mom, I know it’s dangerous, but we have to be up there,” said Darrell.

  It had long ago been decided that if they ever had to split up, one of the two parents would always be present, unless it was completely impossible. With Roald in Italy, Julian was the most likely replacement.

  “Look, I’ll totally go up there,” Julian said. “Alone or with a team.”

  Sara nodded. “A team. Lily, Darrell, you stay here with me. We need to have eyes in both places. Becca, please keep your wire on.”

  “Will do.”

  Julian led the way up the staircase, Becca and Wade following quickly behind, while Sara, Lily, and Darrell staked out a dim corner just off the main lobby. It had a full view of the front and one of the side exits.

  Darrell paced between the tables, keeping one eye on the lobby.

  “Something’s going to happen,” Lily whispered. “I feel it in my bones.”

  “Me, too,” said Sara. “Darksuit was very angry. He wants those glasses—who knows why—and he’s not just going to let them go. He’ll try something.”

  Darrell was more impressed with his mother’s recovery every day. Kidnapped, then strapped into a deadly device. He wouldn’t have been able to deal with it so well. She was good.

  Suddenly, the elevator doors flashed open, and Darksuit emerged, his face a somber mask. A hotel porter followed him, pushing a dolly filled with luggage.

  “Your car has just pulled up, Mr. Drangheta,” the desk attendant said.

  “Drangheta!” Lily whispered. “It was his guy who Gerrenhausen killed on the train. He really wants those glasses!”