The Golden Vendetta

by Tony Abbott

  They did need to drink as much as they could, and Alula had stocked plenty of water bottles for them. When a hot wind blew at them out of the northwest, she began to tell them about desert winds. Lily loved their romantic names.

  “Simoom is one,” Alula said musically. “There is also the harmattan, and the dry ghibli, and the sweet and salty imbat that comes mostly from the water. There is the solano, too . . .”

  The first hour came and went. They were quiet, exhausted. Lily ached all over. The attack at the villa, their chase through the medina, the terror at the desert café—they were wearing her down. But more than everything else was the persistent worry about the phone call she’d have to make but couldn’t bring herself to face.

  Whatever her parents said would change everything.

  To Becca, the terrain in Tunisia was so different from the dune-filled deserts in Algeria. Here there were waist-high grasses and weeds, wind-tossed flowers, and the remains of what looked like stalks of wheat. The landscape greened up the farther east and north they drove, reminding her of the olive tree in the drawing.

  She slid on the ocularia and tried to read more words on the silver page, but no matter how she arranged the lenses, the rest of the story was locked away.

  “These glasses are like a key, too,” she said. “Or many keys. There are so many combinations of the lenses, but only one that will unlock the next passage. Something in Tunis may tell us. I hope.”

  “Not long to Tunis,” said Alula. “One hour. No less.”

  Soon the land began to slope down to the sea, the day faded, the white sky turned blue and purple in the east, and the kids finally spotted the outskirts of the sprawling metropolis of Tunis. The giant Mediterranean beyond lay out to the horizon like a great flat darkness.

  They stopped to get gas, which Sara paid for. While they were waiting, Becca had one more idea and drew the diary from her bag.

  “Alula, excuse me, but would you have any idea what this means?” She opened to the page with the drawing of Carthage. “We know it says ‘Carthage,’ and that it’s probably about when the city was destroyed. But the olive tree? And the sun? Do you have any idea what it means?”

  The woman leaned her head over the picture. “Well, it is an olive tree. It’s growing out of a column. They say that all the marble from Carthage was used to build new things.”

  “I knew it!” said Wade. “That was my idea. But what did they build?”

  Alula shrugged. “Old things in Tunis. I don’t know. But look. I show you the word of column. Here.” She wrote it down in Becca’s notebook. “The word for sun is this. And olive is this.”

  Becca studied Alula’s fluid finger motions as she wrote the words in her notebook, although she realized that “wrote” was hardly the correct word for what she had done on the page. It was painting. “That’s beautiful. Thank you.”

  “I hope it helps,” the woman said.

  “It all helps,” said Sara. “Very much. If you can, would you please drop us off at the American embassy? I’ll call my husband from there, and we can use their services to narrow our search even more.”

  Alula smiled. “It is but minutes away. No less.” Ten minutes later, she left them outside a gray building complex in a large fenced-off area.

  “Here. American embassy. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  “Thank you, so much,” Sara replied.

  “That is shukran jazeelan, in Arabic,” Alula said. “Thank you for an adventure!”

  Once they were inside the embassy—using their real passports for the first time in days—Sara placed a call to Roald while Becca and the others searched out the tiny library. Since the outline of the allegorical drawing led them to think that what they were looking for might be an old mosque, Becca asked the young man behind the counter for information.

  “As you can guess, we have several very old ones,” he said, setting them up at a computer. He unfolded a map of the city. It was printed in both English and Arabic. He circled the many mosques. Lily slid into the seat in front of the computer, Becca spread out the diary and her notebook, and Wade brought out his own notebook, with Darrell leaning over his shoulder.

  They began to work.

  “Out of the seventeen mosques,” Becca said, “two are modern, and eight others were built later than the fifteen hundreds. That leaves seven.”

  Seven mosques.

  Between yawns, Lily dug at the internet, following one link, finding nothing, backtracking, then moving forward again. She followed olive and olive tree, then allegorical drawings, which only made her crazy. From there, she jogged back and forth between Carthage and marble, until she found actual internet confirmation of what they had guessed.

  “A lot of building material from Carthage was brought to Tunis,” she said. “They built some of the oldest buildings built. Some of them are still standing.”

  “What about buildings from Hijri 84?” asked Darrell.

  “That’s a little harder to find,” she said. “It’s not like they have a list of the year a building was born. Built. Whatever. I’m so tired.”

  “I can take over, Lil, if you want,” Wade said.

  “Please,” she said. “I’d better call home.”

  She turned her phone on for the first time since Casablanca, wondering if it would ring the moment it powered up. It didn’t. But there were three text messages waiting for her. They were group texts, sent from two phones to all three of them.

  The first, from her mother, said, Please call, dear. Then her father texted, Good news. Finally, her mother added, We think it’s good news.

  She nearly dropped the phone, her hand was trembling so violently. The roller coaster of it made her want to scream. She drew a long slow breath and started to tap in her mother’s phone number. There was every reason to call home now—right now—and only one reason not to. She was afraid of what “good news” could possibly mean, and who it was good for. She glanced over at the others. They were all bent over books and maps, absorbed in deciphering the drawing. Darrell flicked his eyes over at her, then buried his head again. She drew another breath and blinked her eyes dry. She disabled her phone from accepting incoming calls—an easy hack, after all. She powered off the phone and went back to the others.

  “So, what did you find out?”

  Darrell grumbled. “Not much. If we’re right that the drawing refers to a mosque near Carthage, we still don’t know what the olive tree and the sun are supposed to mean.”

  “We’re going around and around, hoping to get closer, but not hitting on the critical clue,” Becca said, rubbing her eyes. “We need help. Human help.”

  “I have an idea,” Lily said. She slid Becca’s notebook off the table and marched over to the clerk’s desk. “Excuse me, we have this picture that we’re trying to figure out. . . .”

  He brightened as he looked at Becca’s rendition of the drawing. “Mostly I research passports and things. I rather like this.” He glanced at the drawing and spoke the same words Alula had, as he looked at the picture. Column and sun, and then he came to the olive tree.

  “The Arabic for olive,” he said, “is pronounced ‘zy-toon.’”

  Lily nodded. “Okay . . .”

  “‘Zy-toon,’” he repeated, coming out from behind his desk. “Didn’t you see? The mosques I circled for you on the English map.” He led her back to their table, scanned the map, then tapped his finger on one of the circles he had drawn. “Al-Zaytuna Mosque,” he said. “The mosque of the olive tree. It is one of the oldest in Tunis. And yes, it was built with marble from Carthage. The guides always tell you so!”

  Becca jumped up from the table. “Thank you! Thank you!”

  Lily took a breath. She had to keep going to keep her mind off . . . the other thing. “Intelligence officer coming through,” she said, nudging Wade from the computer. Her fingers blurred over the keyboard; then she punched the Enter key.

  “Okay. Al-Zaytuna. Something, something . . . The ma
rble of the columns and the arches and the main courtyard, as well as—ha!—a famous sundial, were built with marble from the ruins of Carthage.” She spun around in her chair and faced them, beaming a big smile. “The first Barbarossa key, the first key to Triangulum, is in this mosque. Copernicus and Barb Two hid it there. And that’s where we’re going right now!”

  “Yes! Good work, people!” Darrell hurried into the office to tell his mother. Lily and the others followed and found Sara sitting in the desk chair by the phone, staring at it. Her face was tense and tight. Her eyes were red.

  “Mom, what is it?” Darrell asked.

  Sara looked up at them. “It’s Roald. I couldn’t reach him for the longest time and kept trying. When I finally got him, he was breathless, as if he’d been running, or was running while I was talking to him. There were echoes. He was inside. In the underground lab, I guess. I asked him what was going on, what about the meeting, but he said the strangest thing. He said, ‘A flood. There’s going to be a flood.’ When I pressed him for more, the line went dead. I couldn’t reconnect. He was gone.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The relief Wade had felt at finding a real clue to where the first of the keys was—they’d had little but guesses so far—crashed and burned after Sara’s weird phone call with his father.

  His father. Running. His father, afraid. There’s going to be a flood.

  Wade felt he could easily spiral into some pretty dark thoughts.

  “Kids, we don’t know . . . ,” Sara began, then stopped.

  So she felt it too. This might be as bad as they imagined. A flood.

  Wade took a moment. He pressed himself to look at the call logically, not emotionally. Emotionally, he wanted to scream and hit something and get to Gran Sasso as soon as he could. Logically? Logically, there was next to nothing to go on. There’s going to be a flood.

  “What kind of flood?” he asked, a shiver running up his neck. “Where? How? You can’t predict floods, can you? Not like that. Is he talking about a flood there in Italy? The weather’s good there. And there are lakes near him, not oceans. Lakes don’t flood, not in good weather. So what, then? Galina can’t make a flood happen, can she? Seriously? How do you do that—”

  “Wade,” Sara said. “We don’t know.”

  “Uncle Roald’s great at codes,” said Becca. “Maybe it’s a code, a message.”

  “But he never talks to us in code. Not like that.” Wade was getting hot all over. He went back to the table, but the map no longer interested him. He always trusted his father to be careful, but if Galina was doing something . . . A flood?

  “It could be Drangheta,” Darrell said. “He was after Dad, too. Drangheta owns ships, remember. Ships, water, floods.”

  “Darrell,” said Lily.

  “Kids.” Sara held up her hands and stood up, and they went quiet. After almost a solid minute of watching her face, Wade saw her pull it together like she usually did, doing the parent thing, keeping her suspicions in check. “Let’s put our brains to it,” she said, not looking at anyone specific. “And be smart. Keep our worries on the side. A flood. So, okay. Something bad. We’re always ready to fit that into what’s going on. But we don’t know anything real yet. Just add this clue to the others and keep moving.”

  Then, still looking as if she could crumble if she let herself, she simply didn’t. She drew in a long breath and coolly arranged for a taxicab to drive them to the mosque.

  So. Okay. Keep our worries on the side.

  A somber ride later, through the slow, thick evening traffic, the harsh blaring of horns, and the over-revving of motors, they stood at the end of Rue Jamaa Ez Zitouna, looking up at the main entrance to the Zaytuna Mosque.

  It was a vast walled structure—“Over an acre,” Lily told them—surmounted by a tall, square minaret with a crescent at the top. Floodlights lit up the sides of the tower. The mosque bordered on Tunis’s medina, the now-familiar narrow-streeted old section of the city.

  “We want the courtyard inside,” said Darrell. “It’s called the sahn. That’s where the sundial is. We’ll have to search every inch of it for the key.”

  “If the mosque is still open,” said Becca. “Evening prayers are over now.”

  Wade liked that she knew stuff like that, but barely found any space in his own head to think of anything besides his father.

  They ascended the stone steps. Inside a tall arch, whose frame was very like the outline in the diary’s allegorical drawing, was an only slightly smaller pair of wooden doors. Sara tried one. The doors were unlocked. Together, the five of them entered under the main ornamental archway. The instant they set foot inside the walls and the doors slowly closed behind them, quiet descended over them like a heavy shawl. But it wasn’t a tense quiet.

  It was peaceful, and time slowed in that way it does when the noise of the world is shut away. Their own breathing and the sound of their footsteps were hushed in the dense darkness and the quiet of the stones.

  Of course, Wade thought. When you’re worried or afraid, you find a quiet place and pray. Protect my dad. Protect Terence, too.

  The vast open courtyard lay ahead, but no one entered it.

  “Now what?” whispered Darrell.

  Only a few seconds passed before a slender older man moved toward them out of the shadows to the left. He wore layered robes of different colors and a short, tight-fitting hat, and as he approached, the fabric of his garments floated around him.

  “My name is Abul-Qasim,” he said.

  His words, spoken deeply in perfect English, also seemed to float.

  “I’m one of the caretakers of the mosque. It’s late for visitors. Still, how can I help you?”

  Wade noticed what he took to be expensive jeweled stitching on the collar of the man’s robe, while his hat was old and frayed. His gray hair was short beneath its worn velvet seam. His beard was stubbly, also gray.

  The fabric shoes he wore—which Wade later learned were called babouches—were little more than rags with leather soles stitched to them.

  A boy trotted out of the shadows and stood by him. “My grandson, Karim.”

  Karim was around eleven or twelve years old, and his dress was a smaller version of his grandfather’s. He smiled at them. “Hi. You’re Americans?”

  Sara smiled back. “Yes. Please forgive us, but we’re looking for something. We believe it could be in your mosque. It would have been hidden here a very long time ago. In the sixteenth century.”

  The man raised his eyebrows. “In the sixteenth century we were here for hundreds of years already.” He smiled. “Tell me, and I’ll try to help.”

  Something about the man reminded Wade of Brother Semyon at the monastery of Saint Sergius in Russia, although the two men couldn’t have been more different. Semyon was young and tall; Abul-Qasim was older, grayer, shorter. But they both exuded, if that was the right word, the same aura of good feeling, of kindness, of trust. It was a feeling Wade sensed from their faces, the way they looked at him and the others, and from something about their eyes. The words holy men seemed a perfect way to describe both of them.

  Abul-Qasim was plainly someone you didn’t keep secrets from, and the others must have felt the same, because they told this man as much as they dared in as brief a way as they could.

  As he listened, he startled them by knowing some of the story.

  “The elder Barbarossa’s name was Baba Aruj. Yes, he was a buccaneer, but also a people’s hero in North Africa. As for finding an object secreted here, well, as you see our mosque is very large. Even if you go back five centuries, there are still a thousand places your object might have been hidden.”

  He stopped at the entrance to the giant prayer hall, a tall room of chandeliers and dozens of thick columns arranged in bays. On either side of the entrance to the room were empty racks. For shoes, Wade thought. He wondered whether they were supposed to remove their shoes now.

  “Can you show us what you have?” asked Karim.

>   Becca slid Copernicus’s diary and her notebook from her bag. “There’s a passage in this diary that says that Nicolaus, and Baba Aruj’s younger brother, Heyreddin, hid three keys to something very precious. The first key is hidden in a place described by this drawing in my notebook. It’s an allegory.”

  Abul-Qasim studied the drawing, listening as Sara and the children told him how they came to believe the key was in the mosque, ending with the notion that the key was hidden in a sundial.

  “You’ve been clever,” he said. “I find allegorical art difficult, but I believe I’d have come to the same conclusion as you. The face of the sun in the olive tree would seem to indicate that our sundial is what you’re looking for.”

  But Abul-Qasim didn’t move from his position in the hallway, either to the prayer hall or the courtyard, and it was soon clear that while he was sympathetic, he couldn’t allow the tampering with and removal of any object from one of Islam’s holy places.

  Even when Sara explained the mission of the Guardians, their mission—“it’s vital that we find the object, and many lives could be at stake”—he shook his head.

  “I sympathize, of course. But I’m afraid it’s not possible.”

  “What if we can prove that the key actually belonged to Copernicus?” asked Wade. “I know some astronomy, and believe us when we say that what Copernicus was hiding with this key is really important. It was made for him and the Guardians, not really for Barbarossa or the Ottomans. And it was meant to be found . . . by us.”

  Abul-Qasim tilted his head from one side to the other, his smile neither increasing nor fading. “The astronomer is certainly a hero to all people of science, no matter where they live. Even supposing you can show me—if you can prove to me—that Nicolaus Copernicus entered these walls, and that he hid something here to be found by the keepers of his memory, I would not be able to convince my fellow stewards of the mosque to allow you to leave with it. Certainly not in any reasonable time.”