The Golden Vendetta

by Tony Abbott

  They were stiffened to silence. The lady barely kept herself from exploding all over her little room.

  Her words and her tone reminded Wade of the poet known as Papa Dean, the Guardian of the Scorpio relic in San Francisco, or rather, the decoy of Scorpio. To put it mildly, Papa Dean didn’t think much of the Kaplans, either. He hated them.

  “Maybe we’re not the greatest Guardians who ever lived,” said Lily, who seemed to be fired up for the first time in hours. “But Carlo trusted us, and we’re doing what we need to, to protect the Legacy. Plus we’re in a hurry, because Galina just found the second key. If she somehow finds the third one, she’ll know where the relic is. So you don’t have to be so mad at us. If you have a clue that we can—”

  “Silence!” the old woman shouted. “I am angry because you are so late. You must fly like the wind to ever hope to catch up to the demon woman. Guardians are few and we are dying. Since Galina Krause killed Heinrich Vogel, more than fifty of us have perished around the globe to protect the Legacy. You could easily add yourselves to that number if you are careless!”

  Fifty? Wade thought. That many? The number was horrendous.

  “I believed that there would be others, stronger than we are, to take our places. But . . . children?”

  “And my mom!” said Darrell. “And my stepdad, who’s finding out about Galina right now. Her weird plans. Plus, what about Hans Novak? He was a boy. He helped Copernicus more than you ever did.”

  “Darrell,” Sara said, her hand on his forearm.

  The woman’s sunken cheeks reddened, and her eyes welled up. She stared at them for a long time, saying nothing.

  “We’re called the Noviszhny in Russia,” Becca added, softly.

  Finally, the old woman turned to the bookcase and removed a large antique book and set it on the table in front of them. Opening it, they saw that it was a fake, and that a section of its pages had been cut out. In the cutout was an octagonal object about five inches long and three inches from side to side. It was constructed of multiple pieces of burnished wood that were inlaid with semiprecious stones and designs made out of the thinnest impressed wire.

  The woman removed it from its hiding place. “This is the clue you are seeking.” She handed it to Sara. “Sometimes there is a second clue, because of the fear that one clue will be lost. This is your second clue. There will not be a third.”

  “It’s heavy,” said Sara, turning it slowly in her hands.

  Becca removed the ocularia from their case and slid them on. “There are marks in silver here and there on its surface. Numbers. They could be the lens combination to the next part of the story.”

  “Are the wooden pieces movable?” asked Wade, taking the object from his stepmother. Something rattled when he moved it from side to side. “There’s something inside. It’s a puzzle of some kind. A puzzle box. Is that right?”

  The woman toddled over to the window and looked out. “It is a clue to the next key. Other than that, I know nothing. If Galina Krause has the second key as you and tonight’s tomb watcher reported, then you each have a message telling you where the next key is. Go. You are out of time. Morning will arrive all too quickly.”

  “What about you?” asked Becca. “What will you do now?”

  “Remain at my post. The Protocol demands that I stay. And that you go. Now!” She rushed for the door, threw them out, and slammed and bolted it behind them before anyone could say a word.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Darrell shivered. It was in the small hours of Sunday morning, and Nagymező Street was silent, still, completely deserted.

  Not a soul moved on either side of the block. A flag hanging from a window opposite rippled lightly in the breeze. Traffic moved sparsely on the far cross street, but no one entered Nagymező. Nothing moved there.

  Darrell tapped Wade’s arm. “What do you think? Can you solve it?”

  Wade shook his head as he held the heavy cylinder of red wood. It was divided into three sections, each one exactly a third of the cylinder’s length. There must have been something like an axle running through the center of the pieces because Darrell watched him turn the sections back and forth like the faces of a Rubik’s Cube.

  “I don’t know . . . yet. I really need time.”

  One end of the puzzle was flat. The other had little cutouts along the rim—he counted over twenty—like the crenellations at the top of a tower.

  “Is it a model of an actual tower somewhere?” said Lily. “And once you solve the puzzle does the thing rattling inside show you where in the tower the key is?”

  “That’s clever enough for Copernicus,” Sara said. “And Ottoman puzzle makers.”

  They were moving slowly along the dark street, Wade turning the octagon, when Becca stopped him. “Wait. I see a triangle. I think that’s a triangle.” She took a quick picture of it with Sara’s phone and enlarged it. “Yes. It’s marked with the numbers four, one, four. I think I can read the next silver page.”

  Darrell watched her adjust the ocularia’s lenses to the new combination. She closed her eyes, breathed in. She slipped on the ocularia, and he saw her face tighten from the instant pain of looking through them. Ignoring it, she read the next passage of the hidden story, and translated it in her head as she went along. “It’s from Leonardo, again.” But it wasn’t what she or anyone else had hoped for. After writing it in her notebook, she read it to them.

  We insert our keys, first the astronomer, then the pirate, then myself. The stones revolve and lock into one another. The silver arm of Barbarossa is hidden.

  After it is done, we each withdraw our key. “The three keys of Barbarossa.”

  But Nicolo is the first to see my little secret. “Locking the stones has revealed a fourth keyhole. Leonardo? Three keys to lock it, four keys to unlock it?”

  “An extra precaution against thieves,” I say. “The room will be destroyed if the lock’s steel cables are broken. The floor will sink. The walls around you now will compress. None can retrieve the relic without the four keys.”

  Heyreddin Barbarossa gives me a stare. “And where is the fourth key?”

  I smile. “The fourth key does not exist.”

  “Leonardo?” Nicolo says.

  “It will never be found. Not without the lantern that lights my final days.”

  “No more riddles!” they chime. “Tell us!”

  I do not. Instead I lock my lips with my fingers, signaling I am done.

  Darrell groaned. “Seriously, there’s a fourth key that doesn’t even exist? A fourth key? That doesn’t exist?”

  “It has to be a riddle,” said Sara.

  “It better be,” Darrell said. He wanted to scream or hit something, but then, they probably all did. He turned to Wade. “Well?”

  Wade pulled at the object’s various surfaces and turned each of the three parts clockwise and counterclockwise at different increments, gently, near his ear, trying to hear or feel an inner movement that would release the puzzle.

  “Just keep moving,” Darrell said. “Wade can’t do anything if we look at him.”

  “Good,” his mother said. “Good idea. Let’s walk to the river.”

  Lily said nothing, just pushed ahead of everyone else.

  We’re really fraying, Darrell thought. Everybody’s pressed to the limit. Can the relic hunt keep on like this? Will we survive the quest all the way to the end?

  While they walked from street to street toward the Danube, Becca and his mother fell to whispering about what their next move should be. He saw his mother pause once to check her phone, but there had been no message.

  “Dad’s with Terence,” Darrell said. “Between them, they’ll know what to do.”

  He didn’t want to let his mind go where it had gone when they couldn’t reach his mother for days, only to discover that she’d been kidnapped.

  Even though they knew the phones were compromised, Becca put in a call to Julian, who hadn’t heard from Roald or Terence, either, bu
t would arrange to come to them “once you know where the next key is hidden.”

  Darrell nudged Wade. “More pressure for you, bro,” he said. “But, you know, no pressure or anything.” Wade gave him a look and edged away.

  We’re all at our limits.

  Then Becca stopped short. Lily did, too. They stared down the street.

  Silhouetted against the streetlamp was a figure that might have been a woman or a man wearing a long robe.

  “Lily,” Becca whispered. “It’s like the old woman in Austin.”

  But no. When the figure came slowly toward them, limping stiffly with every other step, it moved like a man. A smaller figure appeared by his side, helping.

  “Holy cow!” said Darrell. “Is that . . . it’s Abul-Qasim and Karim!”

  They rushed to them, but when they came under a streetlight, they could see that Abul-Qasim’s cheeks and eyes were scraped and bruised, there was a bandage on his forehead, and he grimaced with each step toward them. Sara urged them to sit on a nearby bench.

  “It was Fatboy, wasn’t it?” Lily said angrily.

  “Bigboy,” said Becca.

  “Not anymore.”

  “Yes, the two men,” said Karim. “They found me hiding, took your phone, Wade, then made us tell them what we knew.”

  “As soon as the men left, we determined to study the information you had uncovered,” said Abul-Qasim.

  Karim nodded. “I have a good memory. I remembered the numbers on the face of the key, and suspected Istanbul. But Granddad wondered if our qibla was part of it. He was right. Putting it together, we made the same leap that you must have made. The Ottomans were here, so we said, ‘Budapest!’ We flew here as soon as we could.”

  “How did you know we were right here?” asked Darrell.

  Abul-Qasim smiled. “Knowing the ruthlessness of the Order, we checked the hospitals and found a young man who had been shot. I persuaded the police I was his spiritual adviser. The man understood at once that we knew you.”

  Karim let out a quiet breath. “He told us where he had sent you. So we’ve come to help.”

  “Help?” said Sara. “But you’re in more danger now than you were before.”

  “Helping is what Guardians do,” said Abul-Qasim.

  “I knew it,” said Becca. “You’re Guardians.”

  “Only if you allow us to be,” the man said. “After those two agents left us, we spoke, Karim and myself, for a long time. We don’t know the whole story, but we feel we know you, and would like to join you on your mission. Between Karim and myself, we know something about history, astronomy, geography. Let us help you.”

  Lily turned to the end of the street. “Let’s go somewhere. I still feel the creepy Order creeping around.”

  A few minutes’ walk brought them to an all-night kávéház—coffeehouse—not far from the river, where they huddled together at a worn table.

  “Galina found the Budapest key,” said Darrell. “We think she’s already gone to the next location. But there’s this. Wade?”

  He showed them the wooden puzzle. “We don’t know what it is. I mean, we know it’s a puzzle, but we don’t know what the shape of it means.”

  “We think it could be a building of some kind,” said Sara. “But we have no idea.” She shot a glance at Lily. “It’s hard to search the internet for something when you don’t know what it is.”

  Abul-Qasim took the puzzle in his hands and turned it from side to side. The object hidden in the middle of it clicked with each movement. “This is very much like some old Arabic puzzle boxes I have seen, except that it’s not Arabic. It is Ottoman. Karim?”

  The boy took the puzzle and held it to the light. “Yes, the markings. Turkish?”

  Between the two of them, they began to assemble a handful of clues. Finally, Abul-Qasim sat the puzzle upright on the table. It stood like a squat tower. He closed his eyes for several seconds, then blinked them open.

  “Someone please look up Kizil Kule.”

  Lily didn’t. She couldn’t bring herself to search and link, search and link. She let Sara do it. For the last ten minutes, after seeing what their two friends from Tunisia had gone through to get to them, Lily had felt the brutality of the relic hunt steal something from her. She watched them all going at it, trading clues, making fresh connections. Was she already out of the hunt? Maybe, she thought. She’d answer her parents soon. She felt it coming, was almost ready to hear the “good news.”

  But one thing bothered her.

  She borrowed Becca’s notebook and turned to the passage Becca had read them. Something unsettled her about the passage, and she’d been around Becca enough to know that what bothered you just might be what gave you the answer.

  It was da Vinci’s snarky response to the question of where the fourth key was.

  It will never be found. Not without the lantern that lights my final days.

  That was the riddle. Fourteen words. But she wasn’t bothered by the first five. It was the last nine: Not without the lantern that lights my final days. And of those, she felt there were two parts.

  Not without the lantern.

  And that lights my final days.

  While the others puzzled over the puzzle box, she started on the first four words. Not without the lantern could simply mean “you need the light of the lantern.” But maybe without meant “outside.” You’ll never find it outside the lantern. You’ll find it inside the lantern. Okay. But it didn’t seem to mean any actual lantern he might have had at the moment, because Nicolaus and Heyreddin would have searched it and found the key right there. No, he meant another lantern. Plus he also said the key didn’t even exist.

  That’s where the last five words came in, and of those, the last three were the riddle. My final days. They already knew that Leonardo died in France. Sara had said that his last house was the Château du Clos Lucé in central France.

  Something about the château’s name bothered her now.

  She asked Becca for her phone and went to a trusty translation site. Clos meant “closed.” “Walled in.” A close, or a walled-in place. Lucé. Nothing from the translator, but those letters. Lucé, as in translucent? Something to do with light?

  Closed light?

  Lantern.

  She felt a tingle in her neck. “Um, I think I have something.”

  They turned to her. Wade nodded. “Go.”

  “I don’t know about the fourth key not existing, but if it does exist, I think I know where it is. His home in France. Clos Lucé. It kind of means ‘lantern.’ I think we should check it out.”

  “But Kizil Kule,” said Darrell. “We have to go there, too. Look.”

  Sara turned the tablet around for her. “Kizil Kule means ‘red tower,’” she said. “It’s on the coast of Turkey in a city called Alanya. It’s a hundred feet tall and was built in the thirteenth century to defend the Ottomans from invaders. The picture of the tower exactly matches the puzzle.”

  “I’m willing to bet that the third key is in the red tower,” Wade said. “And that the bean rattling inside tells which room the key is hidden in.”

  “We all think so,” said Becca.

  “Fine,” said Lily. “But we’ll still be missing the fourth key, and it may be the most important of all. Listen to this.”

  She went through the riddle step by step with them.

  After she was done, Abul-Qasim nodded slowly. “I think Lily may be right. In saying, ‘The lantern that lights my final days,’ Leonardo appears to be pointing you to his home at Clos Lucé. Leonardo was practically on his deathbed when he hid the relic with Copernicus and Heyreddin. Clos Lucé could very well be the lantern he speaks of, and some of you may have to go there.”

  Darrell stood from the table, a grin spreading on his face. “This is so good. I like this. Guardians at work. We can totally do this.”

  “We can,” said Sara. “Thanks to you, Abul-Qasim, and to you, Karim. Now both of you have to get yourselves back to the hospital to vis
it the young man who was shot. You’ve done enough Guardian work for one day. Two days.”

  Karim smiled. “Remember, you have friends in Tunis, if you ever need them.”

  “Not just friends,” said Becca. “Guardians.”

  Abul-Qasim rose to his feet, steadier than before. “Good luck. Ma’a salama. Allah yusallmak.”

  “In other words,” said Karim, “Good-bye, and may Allah go with you.”

  Becca used the words Alula had told them. “Shukran jazeelan.”

  Abul-Qasim and Karim bowed to them. A few minutes later they were on the street, in a taxicab, and gone.

  “We have to go, too,” said Sara, removing her phone from her bag and turning it on. “I’m calling Julian to ask him to meet some of you at Clos Lucé. The others will come with me to Turkey. Who wants to go where?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  “Idiot!”

  As the nameless driver screeched into the Order’s hangar at the Budapest airport, the short, rumpled man in the corner watched her storm out of the car, leaving the door swinging. She was angry. He hoped only at the driver, not at him.

  “Gerrenhausen!” she screamed.

  She wants me. Oskar emerged from the shadows of the hangar, wrapped his open trench coat around himself, and trotted over, hoping his face showed less fear and more an eagerness to please.

  “Yes, Miss Krause? How may I be of—”

  “This key was crafted by Leonardo.” She handed it to him. “But the engraving is so much cruder, it must be the work of Copernicus or Heyreddin Barbarossa. What does the design mean? Is the double K the Russian letter zhe?”

  Gerrenhausen took the heavy object into his hands. “Yes, yes, Leonardo. The letter, perhaps Russian, perhaps not. And silver marks here, likely readable only with the stolen ocularia”—he did not look at her as he said that word, knowing it was partially his fault the children had it—“but we can determine one or two things. . . .”

  He trembled to imagine her anger if he should come up with something wrong or, worse, nothing at all. He thought of stepping out of reach, when his senses tingled excitedly. Recognition did not surface, but something else did.