The Golden Vendetta

by Tony Abbott

  Budapest.

  Where they hoped to find the second Barbarossa key.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Ebner found Galina standing alone, head bowed, under a partially crumbled archway on the fringes of ancient Carthage. Harsh spotlights on the ruins of the old Punic, Roman, Vandal, and Arabic city put her in shadow. So ghostly. So thin.

  “Galina? Miss Krause?”

  Five minutes before, she had ordered the driver to stop the car on the way to the airport and had frantically bolted out. Now he understood why. As he drew nearer, he smelled the odor of sickness. She lifted her head slowly, cupped a hand to her mouth, then threw her head back. And that was a motion he knew all too well. Pills. Medication. No, her last treatment had been far from successful. His mind wandered briefly to Olsztyn, when she had fainted into his arms.

  “Speak,” she said softly.

  “Alas, we believe the Kaplans have already left Tunis by air. Our people are scouring the airline ticket databases as we speak and will soon know where they are flying to. In the meantime, our agents have arrived.” He glanced back. The insanely odd pair was waiting by their car. “They have something for you.”

  She turned, steadied herself on her feet, and looked out on the night, the pale spotlights, the dead culture. She held up her hand.

  “Ebner, it took me far too long to understand what the serpent was trying to tell me.” She pulled strands of her long dark hair one by one from her face. “Serpens was not pointing me toward the relic. The relic is not in several different places. The clues to the relic are. I predict we shall travel three or four times before we find the relic’s true location.”

  “Precisely,” he said. “This is why our agents are anxious to see you.”

  Ebner turned his face and prepared himself to view once more the overweight baby of a man who was on their payroll and who slid uncannily over the ancient stones like a dancer. Following the baby was a man of two dimensions, next to whom Ebner felt overweight.

  The fat one—yes, let us say it outright—slid his massive paw into a pocket of his grimy suit coat and withdrew a battered cell phone.

  “It belongs to one of the Kepelen boys, Wade,” he said, then added with a smirk, “We wrestled it from Ali Baba’s grandson.”

  Galina swung around and slapped him across the face. “You’re a racist and a fool, you fat man! You should have followed the Kaplan family.”

  “It has a photo of a key!” said the other man, Emil.

  Galina snatched the phone from the fat agent and studied the image. “A key? A key. So. This is what the Kaplans have been searching for. Ebner, you remember the places Serpens took us toward? Eastern Europe. Syria. Perhaps a second key and a third key await us there.”

  “I know a word or two of the local gargle,” Emil said, mouthing what appeared to be a needle between his lips. “That word on the key is ‘azimuth.’ It’s an angle or something—”

  “Galina Krause knows what an azimuth is!” Ebner said, leaning over her to examine the image on the phone. “Ah. Definitely of Leonardo’s making, but the clues are by Copernicus and the pirate on their later journey. So, seventy-nine degrees. From Tunis that would be . . .” He opened his own phone and tapped the number into an app. A moment later, he turned his phone to her. “Istanbul?”

  Galina frowned. “Perhaps. Perhaps there exists another clue to tell us exactly where. Fat man, get out of my sight. Go to Istanbul with your shadow and wait for instructions.”

  As the two mismatched men left together, the fish-faced Emil tossed his needle onto the ancient stones. Ebner cringed. It was soiled with bits of food and blood.

  “Ebner,” she said softly, “this phone is not as protected as their usual phones are. Establish a connection between it and the Copernicus Room. Have them trace all the Kaplan numbers. If even one of them can be cracked, our servers will triangulate their location.”

  For seven minutes, neither of them spoke. Galina moved among the fallen stones. Slowly. Unsteadily. Ebner wondered how ill she was. Had her latest doctor given her an all-too-hopeless report? Was that why she’d killed him?

  Ebner received a text from the Copernicus Room. “They have purchased tickets connecting to Budapest.”

  She nodded. “So, there was an another clue relating to the key’s numbers. Let the agents proceed to Turkey. We may need them there.”

  “As you say,” said Ebner, “but the servers also report that Dr. Roald Kaplan is not in Geneva. The family plays this game well. He is heading here.”

  He showed her his phone.

  42.454°N

  13.576°E

  Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso

  L’Aquila, Abruzzo, Italy

  Galina glared at the screen. “Petrescu moved the meeting from Geneva. Even better. Alert the colonel. Tell him to deliver Aurora there as quickly as possible, and alert us when he is within fifty kilometers of the laboratory. In the meantime, we fly to Budapest.”

  Just before dawn the next morning some two thousand kilometers northeast of Tunis, Ugo Drangheta and his partner, Mistral, both wounded in Galina’s bitter attack on his compound, slowly approached the walls of Olsztyn Castle, where his sister had perished.

  Mistral nursed a broken hand and a deep gash across her forehead. He had a bullet wound in his shoulder, a fractured shinbone, a battered kneecap. Ignoring their pain and the drenching downpour, they made their way across the lawns to the cordoned-off construction area beneath the castle’s northeast wall.

  Ugo stared at the hole in the ground and began to weep. “Uliana . . .”

  Mistral put her arms around him. “Yes, Uliana, always Uliana, but why this interest in Roald Kaplan?”

  He took in a long breath. “At first, I wanted only to kill Galina Krause. But you yourself introduced the notion of the astrolabe. The time-travel machine. The Kaplan father is an astrophysicist. He knows what the woman is doing and if the machine is real. We will join him, aid him. I will be his ally.”

  She removed her arms. “What if all he sees in you is another enemy?”

  Ugo stood at the edge of the pit, staring into the darkness. “I will make him believe. For Uliana’s sake.”

  There was the sound of footsteps in the soggy grass.

  “Her husband has come,” she whispered, as a man of about thirty years old approached out of the rain. She slid a knife from her belt.

  Ugo raised his hand. “Not yet.”

  The man stopped. He had obviously shed tears recently; his face was hard, angry, resolute. “I am Vilmos Biszku,” he said, his voice steady. “Uliana was my wife for two years. I cannot live without her. You are Ugo Drangheta?”

  Ugo nodded. “If you loved my sister, tell me what you know about the Teutonic Order and Galina Krause.”

  The man quivered, shook it off. “Just before Uliana died, she told me that Galina Krause was searching for pieces of some old machine. Uliana didn’t know where the pieces were supposed to be, but she heard places named. Kraków. Prague. Salzburg. I loved Uliana more than the world. Tell me what you want of me. I cannot rest until Galina Krause is dead.”

  Ugo breathed slowly to calm his heartbeat. “Mistral, the knife.”

  With it, Ugo cut a mark into the young man’s forearm.

  Wincing, shivering, the young man said, “Command me, Sir Ugo.”

  In his mind, Ugo grew to massive size. “First report to my office in Warsaw. They will equip you. Then go to Prague. Discover what you can about the machine. Report all to me.”

  Vilmos Biszku turned and walked away, blood from his arm staining the rain-drenched lawns.

  “And for us?” Mistral asked.

  “Kraków.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Budapest, Hungary

  June 7

  6:17 p.m.

  After a delay on the tarmac in Paris it was early in the evening of a foggy day when they finally reached Budapest, a city divided by the wandering Danube River. Wade knew there were songs about the Danube
but couldn’t remember any of them.

  He had done something monumentally dumb in losing his phone. It didn’t matter that the loss might actually have thrown off Galina and her goons. It was amateur. He tried to make up for it by suggesting they put the key in an airport locker to keep it secure while they searched for the next one.

  “We’ll be back at the airport anyway to search for the third key,” he reasoned.

  “I agree,” said Lily surprisingly. “I feel someone’s watching us. He—and I’m assuming it’s a man, because they’re the ones who make a mess of everything in the world—saw us get off the plane, exit the arrival gate, and go through passport control. I felt his beady little eyes on us every moment. But of course each time I looked around, all I saw were passengers, regular people, no obvious Teutonic agents, so he must be there.”

  “Hard not to agree with that,” said Darrell.

  Of course it wasn’t, thought Wade. What she’d said was pure Darrell. “I agree, too,” he added, “but I don’t know about the ‘man’ idea. There’s Galina.”

  “And she’s not a man,” Darrell actually said aloud.

  Lily flashed him a look. “Maybe. But she’s a totally different story.”

  “Oh, yeah, she is,” Darrell said, digging himself in deeper, although Lily didn’t take the bait.

  The air outside the airport was unseasonably cool, the sky was heavily overcast, and it felt like rain was on the way.

  “We have to assume that they’ll find us,” said Sara as they entered a taxi. “So it is a good idea that we’re keeping the key locked up. Becca, have you found anything?”

  On the flight, Becca had been careful not to let anyone see her using the strange-looking ocularia. The new silver number code they’d found on the back of the key proved to be the same one that unlocked the next portion of the diary. This was not a passage of the 1519 story, but a series of shaky lines written alternatively by the two very old men, Copernicus first. She read from the translation she had written in her notebook.

  Baba’s hand is silver; his beard is red.

  Baba’s fingers are black; his head is bald.

  Baba sleeps in a tomb.

  Baba sleeps in a turban.

  Baba is dead.

  And Baba is dead now, too.

  Darrell frowned. “Is this a turban joke? Because if we’re doing Ottoman turban jokes now, I think we’re pretty sunk.”

  “There’s nothing else?” asked Lily.

  “No,” Becca told them. “I can’t read the next passage. It must rely on another combination of lenses. There’s nothing now but these six lines.”

  Sara shook her head. “Turbans and tombs. There’s a lot to work with. Maybe too much. But let’s get started.”

  Lily gazed out the cab window. She had slept, but not well. All night she’d twisted in her cheap airport hotel bed, dreaming of arguing with her parents, who were sometimes walking toward her as she argued, sometimes away. Maybe that was because she’d disabled incoming calls and hadn’t heard a word since Tunis’s “good news.” Now she was in a cab. Another cab. It was early evening; everything was gray: the cars, the buildings, the people, the sky. It always seemed to be nearing the end of the day that, even so, would go on for another few hours. Lily felt she hardly knew where or when she was anymore. She guessed the fraying of her home life—fraying? It’s exploding—was hitting her hard, making her mad at everyone. She glanced at her black phone screen. Would hearing the news help or hurt?

  She thought of the hot desert winds, the rising and falling dunes. In gray Budapest, the desert seemed no more than a dream.

  She wanted . . . what did she want?

  She wanted to be alone. To think her own thoughts by herself.

  Looking out at the streets the cab was whizzing by, she wondered what it would be like to walk down one of them by herself. To hear nothing but the clicking of her heels on the sidewalk, not all the noise. Hadn’t both Wade and Sara used her tablet at critical moments and found the clues they were looking for? She was totally replaceable. Lily searched her heart for a magnet that might keep her on course and didn’t find one. She’d miss them, if she wasn’t here, of course. Becca the most. Darrell, too. Wade, too.

  She’d miss them, being alone, away from the noise.

  Lily is brooding more and more, thought Darrell.

  I know why, of course. But she always pops out of it. She’s Lily. So she will, this time, too. She’s just too perky not to.

  He knew perky was a dumb word, and he quickly brushed it from his mind and looked out the window. The gray streets were darkening, night rolling in; the city was now starting to sparkle with lights. It was hard for him to imagine this obviously European capital of churches and bridges and castles and little old peaked houses being ruled by a Turkish emperor.

  It didn’t fit in the neat little box of what he knew of world history. Turkey was in the Middle East. Hungary was deep in Europe. And yet Ottomans had lived in Hungary. Had they worn their robes and scarves when they were here? Or was that a stereotype, taken from bad Hollywood movies? Maybe.

  Of course it was true, as Becca had told them, that the Romans founded everything, not just Nice, and Romans wore togas, but maybe not in the colder parts of Europe? He was going way beyond his comfort zone in thinking of all this. One thing he did know: the Romans had founded just about every city east of New York.

  Wade was mumbling something.

  “We have to look at the riddle,” he said, “both from now and from five hundred years ago. The first key tells us that Copernicus and Barb Two hid the second key here. That was 1543. If the place they hid it doesn’t exist anymore, then we’re back at square zero, as Lily says. But if it does exist, then what?”

  “Then there’s a place four hundred and sixty years old that is still around,” said Sara.

  “Exactly,” said Wade. “And if you’re the Guardian of that key, you make sure that it’s protected there. That’s Guardian 101. Now, because of Barb Two, and to honor Barb One, let’s assume it’s some special Ottoman site. So, one thing is, how many Ottoman places are still around in Budapest? That’s one thing to find out. But there’s something else. It’s sort of logical and sort of not.”

  “Like you sometimes,” said Becca.

  He grinned. “True. But I can’t work it all out by myself.”

  “Keep going,” Sara said.

  “Okay. When the riddle says, ‘Baba is dead. And Baba is dead now, too,’ it sounds like they’re talking about two different people, both named Baba. And while one Baba sleeps in a tomb, the other sleeps in a turban.”

  “Where’s the logical part?” asked Darrell.

  “The logical part is this,” Wade said, taking a breath. “Both Babas are dead, so they’re both in tombs, but one of the tombs is, I don’t know, a turban, or like a turban. You know, maybe it has a domelike shape.”

  It wasn’t all that much, but it might be enough for Lily, if they could drag her out of the hole she was falling in. “Lil,” Darrell said. “Lily?”

  She turned to him, her forehead creased, her eyes moving across his face.

  “I know. Me. I’ll look it up.” She swiped her tablet on.

  The cabdriver drove slowly into the heart of the city, around and around the old streets, because they had told him to keep doing it until they knew where to stop. The cabbie told them in French—he didn’t know English or German—that he didn’t care as long as they paid.

  “Nous allons vous payer,” Becca said, and that settled it.

  Darrell saw towering spires everywhere and old stone churches and ancient neighborhoods and so many stone bridges as the cab drove from street to street that the general feel of Budapest for him was of a dark old medieval city, like something out of a fairy tale.

  Lily looked up from her screen. “I searched on Baba and Budapest and found a guy named Baba who wasn’t Baba Aruj. He was named Gül Baba. He was an Ottoman from Turkey, but he’s buried on a hill here. By the way, apparen
tly türbe in Turkish means ‘tomb’ . . .”

  “Then that’s it. Holy cow, Lily,” said Darrell. “Good work.”

  “Sara, could you take over again?” Lily said, turning to the window.

  “Sure.” Sara gently slipped the tablet away from Lily and read from it.

  “Gül Baba was a Turkish poet,” she read.

  “Black fingers,” said Wade. “From all that ink he used for writing.”

  “He died here in 1541, during the Ottoman reign,” she continued, “and his tomb was built two years later in 1543—the year of Copernicus and Heyreddin’s journey, the year Nicolaus died. Actually, the tomb still belongs to Turkey. It’s on a hill overlooking the river, called Rose Hill.”

  “Good work, Lily. You found him,” Darrell said again. He smiled, but she sat expressionless, looking out the cab window. Was she crying again?

  “Pourriez-vous nous emmener à Rose Hill, s’il vous plaît?” Sara asked the driver, speaking French, which Darrell remembered his mother knew pretty well. “Le tombeau de Gül Baba?”

  “Non,” he said. “Non!”

  “Excuse me, why not?” Sara asked.

  When Darrell saw the driver’s face in the rearview, the man’s eyes were riveted on the traffic behind them. He swung around. “Someone’s following us,” Darrell said, spotting two blue cars, one close, one farther back.

  “Oui, following!” the driver said.

  “Essayez de les perdre, s’il vous plaît,” said Becca. “Et rapidement!”

  “Ah, certainement!” The driver punched his foot on the accelerator, and Darrell watched the two blue cars speed up, too.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Galina Krause’s private jet touched down minutes after the Kaplans arrived in Budapest. Her agents on the scene were instructed to follow, but not to intervene, not yet.

  “They are in Buda, near the river,” said an agent named Istvan who met her at the airport. “We can be there in ten minutes. Operatives are already on the scene.”

  “Make it five minutes, and tell the others to wait for me.”