The Crown of Fire

by Tony Abbott

  DEDICATION

  To readers in every corner of the world

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Praise

  Books by Tony Abbott

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER ONE

  Nice, France

  June 10

  10:48 a.m.

  Gunshots exploded in the Ackroyd apartment, tearing ragged holes in the walls, the furniture, the paintings. The agents of the Teutonic Order had attacked suddenly and swiftly.

  “Run!” Lily shouted. “Run!”

  Darrell tore through the rooms to the apartment’s private elevator and pulled open the narrow door. “Get in!”

  Lily flew past him and crouched to the left of the door, pounding the Down button. She clutched her traveling bag under one arm. Under the other was a small aluminum box, inside of which was the razor-edged silver device known as Triangulum. The fifth of the twelve relics of the Copernicus Legacy.

  The agents of the Order wanted it.

  The door frame of the elevator shattered under a spray of bullets. Darrell brushed splinters from his face as the door closed, his heart thundering like a flat-out Maserati. As they descended four floors toward street level, his mind flew over the last weird minutes.

  Smack in the middle of a heart-wrenching conversation with Lily—“I have to go home,” she’d insisted. “No more relics. No more of this stuff”—the shooting began. The housekeeper, Madame Cousteau—what was she, sixty? eighty?—came stumbling across the floor, her dress bloody, her face ghost-white. With her last ounce of strength, she’d thrust the relic box into their hands and urged them to flee.

  Silva, their single-name, black ops–trained bodyguard, raced into the room as they’d left it, trading shots in several directions at once before he was struck in the shoulder, the arm, the side. He collapsed to the floor. It was horrible to see their longtime friend writhing in pain. Both Silva and Madame Cousteau had sacrificed themselves to protect the relic that Lily was clutching to her chest. Darrell hated when people did that—threw themselves in the line of fire, selflessly giving the kids time to escape.

  “The police have to come.” Lily stamped on the elevator floor to make it descend faster. “Not that that means anything, either. The police work for her.”

  Her.

  Galina Krause, the young leader of the Teutonic Order and the one person in the world who wanted the twelve relics as much as they did. Those relics, when assembled, would power a time machine built by the famous astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.

  Despite everything the kids had discovered about Galina over the months since the relic hunt began, they didn’t know why she wanted to travel in time. Darrell wondered if, after everything else, that question might be the crowning mystery atop a gigantic mountain of mysteries.

  The elevator jerked abruptly to a stop. The doors didn’t open.

  “We’re between floors,” Lily whispered. “Darrell, they stopped it!”

  “They found the emergency shutoff. They’re trapping us inside.”

  “Not me. I’m not staying here—”

  “Well, I’m not, either!”

  Digging his fingers between the doors did nothing but break his nails. He frantically whipped off his belt and wedged the buckle between the doors, jamming it in with the palm of his hand. This gave him room enough to force his fingers into the crack.

  Once Lily helped, they were able to pry the doors open a few inches, then a foot, then wide enough to slip through. The elevator was halfway between the second and third floors. They dragged open the outer doors. Jumping up, Lily poked her head out.

  “No one. Yet.”

  She slid out easily—she’d been a gymnast since elementary school—then helped Darrell up into the hallway. The corridor ran outside someone else’s apartment. Darrell saw a window at the end and a wooden stand big enough only for the vase of flowers sitting on it. Roses. Or some other flower. Darrell didn’t know flowers.

  A scattering of gunfire sounded from the upper floor. Was Silva still battling the attackers? Was he even alive? Death in the summer on the French Riviera. People died in beautiful places all the time.

  “Out the window?” Lily whispered. She moved past him to the end of the hall, unlocked the sash, slipped it up. “Can you do that?”

  He joined her and looked out. The drop from the window to the ground wasn’t short. He shook his head. “We’ll break our legs.”

  “You maybe,” she said with a smirk. “But what does it matter? We’ll die if we stay.”

  “Wasn’t it you who said run? Hard to run with broken legs.”

  “Fine,” she growled, then pointed to a railed gallery on a house opposite that was slightly closer. “Can you jump that far?”

  There was a splash of gunfire behind them. A door was kicked open. Stomping feet.

  “I can fall that far.”

  “That’s all I ask.”

  Lily tried to hold the aluminum box under her arm, but he took it from her. He wedged it into his waistband. Without his belt on it actually helped keep his pants up. She climbed into the window’s wide frame and gripped the sides. When she leaned back and her arms tensed, he noticed how muscular she was. Months of battling the Teutonic Order had made her into a soldier. She launched herself from the window. He almost couldn’t look, but there she was on the far terrace, crouching on her feet. She’d done it.

  Darrell hesitated like the next guy to parachute out a plane, then heard a series of close shots, and leaped from the window. Lily half caught him so he didn’t crack his head. His heart was hammering wildly as they rushed off the terrace and into the room.

  It was empty.

  So was the corridor outside the room. It was heavily shaded despite the sunny morning—he was trying hard to notice things to get his brain b
ack. There was a windowless metal door at the far end of the hall. There was no other way to go.

  “Come on, then,” Lily said. “You still have Triangulum?”

  “Of course I do. It’s actually keeping—”

  “Well, it better,” she said.

  Lily’s devastating good-bye—that she was leaving their hunt for the relics, leaving Europe, leaving them, and leaving him—came just as he’d finally gotten the courage to say he liked her. The instant he was pouring out his heart, she dumped that pile of bricks on him. “I’m leaving. Bye.”

  He’d had mere seconds to get nauseous before the shooting started, and it was all “Run! Run! Run!”

  The door at the end of the hall opened into a stairway. It led down to a backstreet behind the Place de Palais du Justice, the Palais being Nice’s main police station. The sun was blazing when they staggered into the street.

  Whistles shrieked. Darrell spotted a slew of gendarmes, police officers, racing out of the Palais. It only meant that he and Lily needed to get out of there fast.

  They trotted quickly to the next corner, then down the street to the next and the next.

  “They were hit,” Lily said suddenly. “They were both hit. Back there.” She wasn’t looking at him when she said this. He guessed she couldn’t erase the frightening images, the wounding and possible murder of Silva and the housekeeper, the blood, the terror in their eyes.

  “We can’t focus on them right now,” Darrell said. “We have to—”

  “There. Bikes,” Lily said. She rushed to a pair of girls’ bicycles with baskets and ribbons tied on them.

  Not exactly his choice, but there weren’t any Aston Martin DB5s in sight. Luckily, neither bike was locked—people trusted people. Wasn’t that a nice idea? Looking around and seeing no one near, they mounted the bikes and pedaled cautiously away from the curb into the lush morning streets.

  Not knowing where he was going, but following Lily, who seemed to, Darrell was finally able to give a thought—a terrified thought—to the others: his mother, Sara; his stepbrother, Wade; their friend Becca; and Julian, the son of their benefactor and friend, Terence Ackroyd. Darrell wondered if their detective friend, Paul Ferrere, had warned them in time. Either way, it was likely that they’d been lured into an ambush at the Nice airport and that it had probably happened at exactly the same moment the apartment was attacked, so neither could warn the other.

  Then there was Darrell’s stepfather, Roald Kaplan. According to a text Darrell had just received from Paul, Roald and Terence Ackroyd weren’t guests at Gran Sasso, an underground nuclear laboratory in Italy, after all. They were being held against their will, and the facility was under lockdown. The two men—and a bunch of other scientists—had plainly been kidnapped by Galina and her agents and had been prisoners for days.

  “Lily, hold up. Where exactly are we going?”

  “How should I know?” She steered her bike to the sidewalk and parked under a tree. She dismounted, looking ready to cry. “We have to think. I can’t think, but I think we have to.”

  “I agree,” he said. “But maybe not here.”

  Any movement—cars, pedestrians, other bicyclists, motorbikers—seemed suspicious. Figures crisscrossed every street, plaza, and alleyway around them. Darrell had to assume that the Order was everywhere by now, willing to kill to bring Triangulum to Galina.

  “Let’s ditch the bikes and make ourselves invisible,” he said. “We have to be able to react quickly—”

  “Darrell, I’m afraid.”

  “Hey. Me, too. A ton. Let’s get the relic somewhere at least a little safe”—he tapped the aluminum box at his waist—“then try to contact my mom and Wade and Becca.”

  “My parents will search for me, you know,” she said. “They’ll find us and help us.”

  Darrell pushed his fingers back through his short hair. His head was wet from perspiration. “You know what, I hope not. If they find us, it’ll mean the Order can find us, which they’ll certainly do before your parents, so that when your parents find us, we won’t even be there.”

  Lily groaned from Darrell’s latest Darrellism, but he had touched a nerve.

  If she did leave the quest as she said she was going to, would she maybe, just maybe, miss his semi-idiotic remarks? Except that right now what he’d said didn’t seem so idiotic, semi or otherwise.

  She scanned both ends of the street and took a long slow breath. “This way.” Then, walking under a palm tree, or some other kind of ferny tree, she felt herself stiffen.

  “What?” he said.

  She slid her hand into her shorts pocket and pulled out her phone. “A call.”

  “Don’t answer it.”

  She read the name. “It’s Becca! For half a second, that’s all!”

  “Lily, wait—”

  “Becca, hello? Are you all right?”

  A long pause. “Alas, your friend Rebecca cannot come to the phone. You would do well to turn over the relic to our men if you want to see her alive.”

  “It’s Markus Wolff!” she gasped.

  Markus Wolff was Galina Krause’s most ruthless assassin and one of the scariest men alive—if you could call a robotic killer alive.

  Darrell jerked the phone roughly from her fingers. “No electronics!” He threw it on the sidewalk and ground it to pieces under his heel.

  “Darrell!”

  “Lily, no,” he said. “We know my mom and the others are in trouble. They know we’re in trouble. It’s how we live. We don’t need tracking devices on us!”

  Then he pulled out his phone and did the same, crushing it underfoot.

  Surprising herself, she didn’t scream. The Order’s thugs—warriors and killers, really—were doubtless tracing cell phone signals even then. Any car could suddenly slow and a gun barrel peek out. She and Darrell had one of the priceless relics, after all.

  “You know what, you’re right.”

  “I am so— Wait. Say that again?”

  “You’re right. We can’t trust our stuff. Isn’t it a thing that hackers can crack a phone, no matter how encrypted, in, like, an hour?”

  “I think I heard that.”

  “Well then, yeah.” She slid her minitablet from the small bag hanging on her shoulder and gave it to him. “Do it.”

  Turning her face, she heard Darrell snap the tablet in half then scoop up the remains of all three devices and toss them into the nearest trash receptacle.

  “No grid, Lily. We run, we eat, we sleep. We’re just us, starting now.”

  She sighed. “I hope that’ll be enough. Anyway, I was nearly out of battery. You know what we seriously need?”

  “Motorcycles? A helicopter?”

  “A friend with connections to smuggle us out of Nice,” she said. “And I’m suddenly thinking of that man who helped us in Monte Carlo last week. Maurice Maurice.”

  “Maurice Maurice?” Darrell blinked. “The gangster?”

  “The entrepreneur, yes,” she said.

  Maurice Maurice was an underworld friend of Terence Ackroyd, who had recently provided the Kaplans with a camera to secretly monitor an auction where a pair of sixteenth-century mirrored spectacles crafted by Leonardo da Vinci were being sold. Those glasses had ultimately led them to the location of the Triangulum relic.

  “Fine,” Darrell said. “But where do we find Maurice?”

  “Well, what’s the most criminal part of the coast of France?”

  “The shops?”

  “The docks,” she said. “That’s where all the smuggling happens. Someone down there has to know him.”

  It wasn’t much, Darrell thought, but it was a direction. Lily’s brain was, all things considered, cooler than his own, except, of course, when it wasn’t. Still, now they had a plan. Something to do before they were found, tortured, and killed. He resecured the box snugly in his waistband and followed Lily down to the water.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Côte d’Azur International Airport

  Ten
kilometers away

  Eleven minutes earlier

  Becca Moore disliked airports.

  A lot.

  The Nice airport was all right, she guessed. Efficient and clean and bright and all that. But the noise—the roar—of competing sounds was like a thousand needles piercing her head. Her pulse was through the roof. She felt heavy. She was afraid, trembling, shivering, hot and cold all at once. Something was running through her, a strange, dull kind of electricity.

  It wasn’t normal.

  Not to mention that when you’re expecting a flight, the sheer act of waiting drives you nuts.

  At 10:55, Roald Kaplan and Terence Ackroyd were due to arrive from Rome after almost a week spent at Gran Sasso, the underground laboratory of CERN, the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Organization for Nuclear Research. Wade had received a text that morning from his father giving the details of his and Terence’s arrival, but little else.

  Terence’s son, Julian, was now pacing the baggage claim. Wade and his stepmother, Sara, stood at the escalator, anxiously awaiting the rush of passengers. Becca herself was utterly exhausted from their recent frantic search for Triangulum. Their nonstop quest—from France to Morocco to Tunisia to Hungary, then back to France, then Turkey, then Malta—had pretty much drained the life out of her. Now she was fighting chills as she tried her best not to collapse from the roar and the needles in her brain. Finally an announcement came over the address system stating that Dr. Kaplan’s flight had just landed and its luggage would “apparaîtra prochainement sur le tapis roulant numéro huit.”

  Taking a deep breath, Becca dragged herself over to carousel 8.

  Wade followed his stepmother and joined Becca and Julian at the carousel. “It won’t be long now,” he said. “I can’t wait to hear their story. Working inside an underground nuclear lab has got to be so strange and cool.”

  “Our story’s probably better,” Julian said with a nervous laugh.

  Right.

  While Wade’s father and Terence were guests of the laboratory’s director, Marin Petrescu, to discuss illegal nuclear activity that pointed directly to Galina Krause and the Teutonic Order, Wade, Becca, Lily, and Darrell had discovered Triangulum. It had been hidden on the tiny island of Malta in the early-sixteenth century by the famous pirate Barbarossa and the even-more-famous artist Leonardo da Vinci.