The Crown of Fire

by Tony Abbott

  “Silvio was active in Asterias since our college days in Berlin with Uncle Henry,” Roald said. “I feel so strange that I—we—got involved only six months ago.”

  “Heinrich wanted to keep you out of it,” Isabella said, “because of the children.”

  “I’m so sorry, Isabella,” Sara said. “If only Silvio were still here with us today.”

  Isabella nodded. “If only. But he would be honored and grateful for all that you have done for the Magister.”

  Photos, some grainy, some crystal clear, showed Galina in Paris, in Istanbul, in Budapest, in Tunis, Geneva, London, and dozens of other cities they had battled her in. Several close-ups showed the scar on her neck at various stages. Thinking of wounds, Lily thought of Becca again and wanted to be with her or her with them, well again. She closed her eyes and pushed back the tears. Lily knew that if Silvio Mercanti were alive, a more recent shot would show how Galina’s scar had become inflamed.

  Isabella, murmuring in Italian as she slowly walked toward a smaller back room, suddenly froze when she came to the doorway. “Oh, dear. This is it.”

  The room, when they all entered it, was indeed it.

  In large letters across the rear wall were the words Il dodicesimo reliquia.

  “The twelfth relic,” she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Darrell was struck by the sheer number of objects in the inner room. There was a long bookshelf, crowded with volumes on many subjects, from cryptography to art history, from ancient astronomy to nuclear physics. Above it stood a giant hand-drawn rendering of The Last Judgment. It was crude, sketched in bold marker, but it was clearly an attempt to imitate the fresco’s composition.

  In the center, instead of Christ in the halo of light was Copernicus, standing with arms spread wide in front of the sun. All around the saved and the damned were engravings of the original Guardians and a legion of knights dressed in the armor of the Teutonic Order.

  They were all there, not only the more recent protectors—Boris and Aleksandr Rubashov, Janet Thompson, Shoichi Yokoi, and others—but inside of them was a circle of the faces of the original Guardians: Magellan, the trader Tomé Pires, the family of Sir Thomas More, including his daughter Margaret, Hans Holbein and Joan Aleyn, then Lucrezia Borgia, the pirate Barbarossa, Ponce de León, Maxim Grek, Eleanor of Austria. . . .

  “This is what Silvio was working on when he was murdered,” Isabella whispered.

  “Eleven,” Darrell said, counting the original faces. “There are eleven original Guardians here. Twelve relics. Eleven Guardians. Isabella, can I read the poem again?”

  She gave him her translation. He read out the second stanza of the poem once more.

  “You say the art of numbers hides a fact:

  That one binds others to its power alone.

  And so the Master must as master act,

  And over all the others bear the crown.”

  Darrell chewed his lip. “‘And over all the others bear the crown.’ Okay, I’m no English professor, but notice he doesn’t say ‘wear the crown.’ He says ‘bear the crown.’ Which means, like, carry it, right? And he says the Magister—Master in the poem—has to take control of something. So if the twelfth relic is Corona, the crown, this could be saying that Copernicus took it. Or am I nuts? Anyone?”

  “You are, often,” Lily said, “but, this time . . . I don’t know.”

  Wade nodded slowly. “So you’re thinking Copernicus hid Corona Borealis himself?”

  Isabella breathed out slowly. “Sì . . . sì . . . if Silvio found only eleven Guardians.”

  Darrell’s mother looked around the walls. “But did Silvio discover where Corona might be and not get a chance to tell anyone? I’m sorry, Isabella, but can you remind us of the circumstances of his death? If it’s not too painful.”

  She shook her head. “Painful, yes. But there is rage. Much more rage . . . at her.” She motioned back to the Galina Room. “Silvio was skiing. There was an avalanche.”

  “Where was that exactly?” Roald asked, looking at a map of Europe.

  “The north face of Mont Blanc in France,” she said. “He was killed instantly. They called it a regrettable accident. It was not. The avalanche was set. Man-made. I believe it was Markus Wolff who was the one.”

  Darrell scanned a large map of the world tacked up on a wall of the inner room. It must have measured ten feet wide. “Chalk up another murder to Markus Wolff,” he said.

  “Because Silvio was a Guardian, and a member of Heinrich Vogel’s Asterias group, he was always a target. Roald, you were kept safe from it, until you were not. But I believe the real reason for Silvio’s murder began earlier. When he started taking his skiing trips, he said I should not come with him. Too dangerous. I never knew where he went. But if Nicolaus did hide the twelfth relic himself, he must have left clues for the Guardians. The Protocol could not be enacted if Corona was never found.”

  “True,” Roald said. “So let’s assume the secret got passed down to today.”

  “There are so many places to hide a relic,” said Lily. “And why did Copernicus hide one relic and not all of them? I mean, why did he think he especially had to hide one of the twelve?”

  “Because it was the most powerful relic?” said Wade. “Dad, you thought that, right? It was different from the others, bigger?”

  “It seemed to be,” said Roald. “It took up a larger space on the big wheel. And it was the one that went in front, as if it was more important than the rest, or controlled them.”

  “But still,” Lily said, “Nicolaus had lots of friends. Dozens. He could easily find someone else to hide Corona. So if we’re right and over all the others he bore the crown, why just this one?”

  As she said that, Lily looked straight at Darrell.

  After all they’d been through, just the two of them, hadn’t something allowed their brains to work in sync like a couple of computers hooked up, hardwired together to boost their power? Darrell was brilliant enough in his way—or just plain brilliant—as she was in her own way. Together, couldn’t they simply . . .

  And just looking at him, it seemed to fall into place for both of them.

  “Is it because,” Darrell said, staring into her eyes, “Copernicus could take a relic somewhere none of his friends could?”

  Lily’s heart skipped a beat. “Yes. And where’s the one place Nicolaus could travel to that no one else ever could?”

  Darrell didn’t look away. He stared right back, and he said it.

  “Time. Nicolaus could travel in time. Holy cow, Lily—”

  Darrell jumped over to her and picked her up off her feet. “Lily, you did it! You got it! Copernicus hid the twelfth relic in the future!”

  The revelation stunned them. Lily herself felt light-headed. But the moment Darrell set her down, she also crashed.

  “But when? And where?” she said. “And how can we find it, if it’s in the future?”

  “Maybe because we’re supposed to?” said Sara. “Or you’re supposed to.” She touched the wall where a ratty old parchment was scrawled with a word in Russian characters.

  “Novizhny?” Wade said. “Silvio knew about us even before we did?”

  “Not only Silvio,” Roald said, standing next to Sara. “The parchment is dated twenty-sixth April, seventeen ninety-four. The day of Floréal Muguet. They knew about you back then.”

  “But what exactly does it mean that we’re here now,” said Wade, “and the final relic isn’t, that it’s in the future . . . ?” He froze. “Wait. Maybe we’re the Novizhny and we’re here now because now is when the twelfth relic is.”

  Darrell gave him a look. “You’re going to have to give me more than that.”

  “Ditto,” said Lily.

  Sara and Isabella nodded at him, too.

  But Roald narrowed his eyes at his son. “No, no. You have something there, Wade. If Nicolaus did hide the relic, and he hid it in the future, only he would know both when the relic was hidden and wh
en you kids came along, right? And only he would know that the twelfth relic and the ones who find it have to be around at the same time.”

  “You mean now?” said Darrell.

  “Yes, now!” Wade said. “By the deadline! Corona Borealis has to be found now, and it is found because we’re here to find it!”

  Roald’s cell phone rang. “It’s Terence.” He listened for only a few moments before the call ended. “He just heard from Paul Ferrere and Mistral. Galina’s yacht was spotted off the coast of Crete this morning. She knows the launch site.”

  The inner room went quiet for a few moments.

  “Look,” said Sara. “If Corona is necessary to complete the Protocol, we need to find it fast. But if it’s only findable now, the question becomes . . . where? Where in all the world?”

  “Start with Silvio’s death,” Isabella said. “He was killed for devoting his life to discovering the twelfth relic. Look on the map. These are his four skiing trips.”

  At four places on the map were outlines of heads with question marks inside. Next to each was a postcard addressed to Silvio, each one containing a message in a different language.

  “These postcards,” she said, “the last from Mont Blanc, could be . . . part of a single clue, no? They were all so similar. Listen.”

  She slipped her reading glasses down from her forehead. “The first card is from a man named Brinko Håper at North Cape in Norway. It is dated February nineteenth four years ago, when Silvio took his first trip. The message reads, ‘Silvio, ski here!’ And the note from Silvio says, ‘Brinko Håper did not show up.’”

  “And the second card?” said Wade. “Same day the following year. It shows a ski lift.”

  She read out that one, too. “From Swedish Lappland, the Kiruna Mountains. Same message as the first, this time from Franc Hoppas. Silvio reports, ‘Hoppas not here.’”

  Lily found a third postcard near the floor of the middle wall. “The Harz Mountains a year later. They’re in Germany, aren’t they?”

  Isabella nodded. “Herr Hoffnung. Also a no-show.”

  “Were these men Guardians?” asked Sara. “If they were, why would they lure Silvio somewhere and not meet him? If they were from Galina or Markus Wolff, why didn’t they try to kill him at any of these other places?”

  “And the fourth one?” said Roald. “From Mont Blanc?”

  Isabella took in a long breath as she read that one. “From a certain Jean-Luc Espoir. Also, Monsieur Espoir does not appear. This is where Silvio is murdered. I don’t understand what this means.”

  Wade studied the map, conflicting thoughts grinding in his mind. “Sorry, Isabella. What were the exact names of the places besides Mont Blanc?”

  “Harz Mountains in Germany,” Isabella said. “Kiruna in Sweden. North Cape in Norway.”

  It took Wade a few seconds to locate the places. “Well, here’s something,” he said. “When you arrange them in order by date, they point south in a straight line. . . .”

  “They’re pointing where?” said Lily. “To wherever Corona is hidden?”

  “Maybe,” said Wade. He traced his finger through the bulge of Africa’s northwest coast, through the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the South Pole. “But there could be a hundred places, a thousand, along this line. Or am I reading this wrong?”

  “I don’t think so,” his father said. “But you’re right. There are far too many places to consider. It needs to be narrowed down.”

  “If only Becca were here,” Darrell said. “She could help us make the connection. Her dreams or visions or whatever they are.”

  Wade remembered what Nicolaus had told Becca. “Hope . . .”

  “Hope,” said Isabella. “This is what the name Hoffnung means. The German contact. ‘Hope.’”

  Wade felt a chill. “Wait a second.” He read one postcard after another. “The names of the men who invited Silvio to each place. Three names begin with H except for Jean-Luc Espoir. Do you know French?”

  “Espoir also means ‘hope,’” Sara said excitedly. “Of these four, I only know French.”

  “Language dictionaries,” his father said. They searched through the volumes on the bookshelves and found several.

  “Yes! Håper from Norway and Hoppas from Sweden—both names translate to ‘hope,’” Sara said. “All four names mean ‘hope.’ Let’s find another ‘hope’ reference that the line points to.”

  Lily found a yardstick, and Wade drew a line to the bottom of the map and read out the names of every point that lay along it. Using the dictionaries, Darrell and Sara translated each name for its relation to the word hope. There were no connections. None of the cities on the direct path of the line had anything to do with the idea of hope.

  Until the line ended.

  At the very tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, between something called the Drake Passage and the Weddell Sea, was a research station belonging to Argentina.

  It was a base called Esperanza.

  Hope.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Wade couldn’t wait for another day to pass; he had to tell Becca.

  At the Thomas Cook office nearest the station, his father and stepmother arranged travel to Antarctica while Wade used the agency’s encrypted phone to call Silva. Lily was smushed in the small communications room with him. It took an agonizing series of minutes to be connected, first to an aide, then to Silva, who was patrolling the corridor outside her room, then after several minutes to Dr. Cranach, who was at her bedside.

  “Security,” Lily whispered nervously to him. “It has to be that way. It’ll be okay.”

  His heart surged into his throat when the doctor said, “I will hold the phone for her. Just a moment.”

  The “moment” became nearly a minute as the line went silent. Wade was about to say something when he heard Becca breathing into the phone. It was a dry, gasping sound, a million miles away.

  “Hello . . . ?” she said.

  “Becca?” he said softly. “I . . . it’s Wade. Lily is here, too.”

  “Hi, Bec. We love you!”

  No words, only labored breathing. Lily buried her face in her hands.

  “It’s okay,” Wade said, “you don’t have to say anything. We . . . we love you, Becca. I know it’s hard.” He so wanted her to speak and nearly lost his breath waiting for her to say something, but it was obvious she couldn’t. He tried not to choke on the dryness in his own throat and kept going, as much for Lily as for himself.

  “Just listen, Bec. So, we found out so much in the last few days. First of all, Michelangelo’s poem turns out to be about meeting Helmut Bern at Egmond Abbey. You sent Bern there, and Michelangelo met him there. You made it happen. We went to the Vatican and met the pope, and the last clue is about you; the rowboat and everything is all about you.”

  He knew what he was saying was all crammed together and didn’t make sense the way he was talking, but he kept on.

  “The final relic is Corona Borealis. The crown. We learned that it’s at the South Pole. Can you imagine that? It’s winter down there. We’re going soon. And the launch site is the island of Crete, in the Mediterranean. It’s all mountains and palace ruins. We’ll go there, too, Becca. We’re finally getting to the big stuff. All because of you, of what you did in London. That was the key. You had to go back in time for all this to happen: Bern, Michelangelo, all of it.”

  Wade paused, waiting for a word or a sound from her; and he waited and waited, but there was only breathing. Lily had her ear to the phone, but she was shaking too much to say anything.

  “Okay,” he said. “Then we discovered that Nicolaus himself hid the twelfth relic. He was the one who hid Corona at the South Pole. . . .” He realized he’d just told her that, and he stopped. “Becca, you have to pull through! You have to! Becca, please!”

  The phone clicked and scraped as if it were passing hands.

  “Becca!” Lily said. “Don’t go!”

  Then her voice. “Wa . . .” A bare whisper. Wade pushed th
e phone against his ear to hear what she was saying.

  “Wade . . . you . . . you can do it. . . .”

  There was more scuffling on the line.

  “Becca?” Lily said. “You’ll do it with us. You’ll help us stop Galina. It’s everything we’ve hoped for, and it’s so close now—”

  The low voice of Dr. Cranach came on the line; there were footsteps in the background and the sound of several monitors beeping. “I’m terribly sorry. Your friend cannot speak with you any longer. Just now. We must hang up. Please, you understand. Thank you.”

  The line was open for a few more seconds, full of the sound of voices talking over one another, then it cut off abruptly and the connection died.

  The call was over.

  Wade collapsed to his knees on the floor, and Lily with him.

  “Wade!” Darrell ran in from the next office. “Lily? What? What’s going on!”

  Per volare in aria. Per volare via da qui.

  To fly in the air. To fly away from here.

  You’ll fly now to the frozen Pole and to the sea-bound ruins of ancient Crete, its sea-warmed breezes, the blue blue rolling sea, the wine-dark sea, the deep deep deep of the sea.

  Il mare. The sea.

  Keep going, Wade and Lily. Keep going, Darrell. My lovely Maggie, keep going. Keep going to the end. Andare avanti fino alla fine. I’ll see you flying past. Passato. Past. Passing me as I fly. Passaggio. To pass you by. Passare da voi. To pass. Passare.

  Away from here.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Esperanza Base, Antarctica

  September 13

  Morning

  After all the crying and after Wade’s father and stepmother had gotten off the phone with Simon Tingle and learned that Galina’s key agents across Europe were massing in the Mediterranean, it had been decided that Sara would join Terence, Julian, Paul Ferrere, Marceline, and Mistral on the island of Crete. The equinox would arrive soon, and they needed eyes on Galina and her work at the ruins of Minos’s palace.