by Magnus Flyte
In her room now, she drew back the curtains. How nice. The hotel had champagne ready. Prague Castle was framed almost perfectly in her window, the spires of St. Vitus Cathedral etched blackly into the night sky. So pretty. There had always been a certain magic in Prague. Her private line phone beeped. A message from Tad in their special code.
They were evacuating the palace. A bomb squad had been called. Tad had tracked the Weston girl’s GPS on her phone. She was in St. Vitus.
No. No. No.
Charlotte was furious. But Charlotte Yates was a doer. She would finish this thing herself.
She began texting instructions.
SIXTY-TWO
“These are the Crown Jewels of Bohemia,” said Sarah, peering at an orb that glittered in the pale light from her dying phone. “So that means . . .”
“We’re in St. Vitus Cathedral,” Max groaned. “Sarah. We’re trapped in the Crown Chamber, the most heavily fortified spot in the whole nation.” Sarah looked at the bag in his hands. The bomb inside would blow any second.
Sarah began quickly searching the room for something to use as a tool to get them out of there. She picked up and then tossed aside a golden apple. A jeweled scepter. A magnificent furred cloak. All priceless, all useless.
At least they were deep underground and the walls were thick. All the people down here were already dead. At least when they died they wouldn’t take anyone else with them.
They scrambled among the massive tombs in the cold and dark, hoping to find another way out. Blind, Sarah slammed into a sarcophagus. As she hit it, she was wrenched backward and a tiny wrought-iron gargoyle’s hand caught the chain that held the gold key Nico had given her. For a moment, she was strangled by the chain, then it snapped and the key clattered across the marble floor.
Max dropped down beside her. “Sarah,” he said as she gasped for breath, feeling her throat. “Sarah, I—” He stopped suddenly.
What do you say when you have moments to live? “Max.” But he wasn’t looking at h
er. He was staring at the floor.
The key was moving.
It was sliding across the stone floor as if pulled by some invisible thread.
It was more than a key.
It was a magnet.
Wordlessly, spellbound, Sarah and Max followed the snaking line of the key, which came to rest on top of a small triangle-shaped piece of marble, the corner of a larger rectangular pattern on the floor.
The triangle. Tycho Brahe’s favorite symbol.
Prague is a threshold. Fire.
Dark matter and energy make up ninety-six percent of the universe.
“What are you doing?” Max yelled.
“I think there’s a hell portal here,” said Sarah.
Her fingers dug frantically around the edges of the mosaic piece but found nothing. No break in the stone. No way to pull it up or push it down. Max leaned over her and wrapped his hand around the key, wrenching it up.
And the piece of marble came with it, seemingly pulled by the key’s magnetic force. Max stumbled backward, staggering under the heavy weight. Sarah leaned forward. In the shallow hollow left by the stone she could make out the edges of a keyhole.
“The key!” she screamed at Max. “Give me the key!”
SIXTY-THREE
Getting out of the hotel would have been a pleasant refresher course in old skills of deception, if it weren’t for the urgency of the matter at hand. Charlotte had told her agents she was going to bed with a headache, hidden herself in the room service cart, and, once in the bowels of the hotel, stolen a maid’s uniform. Too easy, really. The only imperfect moment had been outside the hotel, when an old woman seemed to recognize her. She limped toward Charlotte, arm upraised, and Charlotte immersed herself in a group of tourists.
Tad was waiting for her near the south doorway of St. Vitus. Charlotte glanced behind her to make sure the old woman was no longer on her tail. Despite her age the woman had managed to hobble along behind Charlotte for blocks. It was like the old days, when every babushka was an informer.
“I have the marchesa,” Tad said cal
mly, “but she got a little feisty, so I had to be persuasive.”
He had, in fact, used the bottom portion of the marchesa’s own evening gown to tie her to a pew in the nave. It actually looked like Elisa was deep in prayer, which surely was a first. Tad had also stuffed a fragment of the dress in the marchesa’s mouth.
“You can untie her,” Charlotte said to Tad. She pulled the gag free.
“What is happening?” Elisa hissed. “You betray me? You put a bomb in my palace?”
“Shhhh.” Charlotte held a finger to her lips and then pointed to a small doorway in the corner of the Chapel of St. Wenceslas. She grabbed Elisa’s arm and pulled her along. Tad followed closely.
“This is what is happening,” Charlotte said in a friendly way to the marchesa. “I didn’t plant a bomb anywhere. But you did. And then you came and shot your fiancé, and the girl your fiancé was fucking. And then you shot yourself. Tad?”
Tad handed her his service weapon with the silencer tightly screwed on and Senator Charlotte Yates shot Marchesa Elisa Lobkowicz DeBenedetti in the head. “Shoot open the locks,” she said, pointing to the door to the Crown Chamber.
As Tad centered his pistol to blow apart the seventh lock, Charlotte centered her pistol on Tad. Her bullet went right through the back of his skull and pierced the lock. He dropped to the floor and the door swung silently open.
How economical, she thought. No sense wasting taxpayers’ money on an extra bullet.
SIXTY-FOUR
Max pried the key away from the marble piece, and once it was free it flew in the air toward the opening in the floor. Sarah snatched it, guiding it into the lock, her hands burning from the now blazingly hot metal. As she turned the key the ground beneath her hands and knees began vibrating, almost undulating. Sarah fought for purchase on the cold marble. Max grabbed hold of her legs, hauling Sarah backward as the larger rectangle set in the floor flew upward, like some kind of Satanic jack-in-the-box. A jet of brilliant red-gold light shot out of the hole, seemed to hover in the air above their heads for a moment, and then rushed back down into the portal. The chamber was flooded with a powerful scent of amber. The stone rectangle hit the floor with a tremendous thud that jolted Sarah’s spine and brought tears to her eyes. She heard Max shouting her name.
“Throw it in!” she screamed. “Max! Throw it in!”
And Sarah saw the white paper Lobkowicz Palace Museum goodie bag sail over her head and disappear into the portal.
For a moment there was total silence and then Sarah heard a small pop. She turned to look at Max and saw his head jerk up. His eyes went wide, and a spot of red appeared on his pristine white flat-pleated tuxedo shirt just below his collarbone. He looked terribly surprised. Sarah had a microsecond of confusion—The hell portal shot Max?—then threw herself at him as she heard the second pop.
They tumbled behind a tomb and the bullet ricocheted off the marble.
Someone was here. Someone was shooting at them.
Max was underneath her, wounded, but still breathing. He motioned with his right arm and then stifled a scream. Sarah pressed her hand against the blood pooling on his shoulder.
Think, she told herself. Think fast.
Max had brought a pistol. Where did he leave the pistol?
Cautiously, Sarah inched her body over Max’s to the side of the tomb. If she could just see . . . With a ping another bullet ricocheted off the floor, inches from her head.
The pistol was where Max had set it down when they came in. On the other side of the hell portal.
They were trapped. Sitting ducks.
Still trying to stanch Max’s wound, Sarah scrabbled around for something—anything—she could use as a weapon and felt Max pressing something hard and round into her hand. He pulled her close and whispered, “Atalanta.”
She looked down at the object he had given her.
And then Sarah took a deep breath and burst into action. She launched herself from behind the tomb, took a running leap up onto the sarcophagus, crossed it in two steps, and vaulted across the room toward the tomb where the pistol lay. As she jumped headfirst, she twisted midflight and threw the object in her hand as hard as she could in the direction of the gunman, willing her body to replicate the move she and her father had watched countless outfielders for the Red Sox make.
Good arm, her dad always said. And he would circle her skinny bicep in his large hand and shake it while she giggled. That’s a good arm.
The gun went pop again.
As her body continued to fly through the air, she suddenly felt the grip of the portal below her, pulling her into its force. Time seemed to stop. She could see galaxies, universes, cosmos. Voices and music and sound. Time and space and history and life over aeons compressed into one small doorway. Everything, she thought.
Then smash, she hit the stone floor and was scrambling for cover, her ears ringing from the ricochet of the bullet. And through that she heard the clink clink of something rolling back toward her along the floor. The missile she had thrown. Her knee stung with a fiery pain.
Sarah reached up, felt along the top of the sarcophagus. Her fingers closed over the pistol.
There was silence in the room, then footsteps and a low chuckle.
“Nice move,” said a woman’s voice.
Sarah glanced down at the ancient gun between her knees, not certain exactly how to operate it. You cocked a pistol, didn’t you? She pulled a lever and something made a quiet click. Just point, she told herself. Point and shoot.
The footsteps came closer, then stopped again. Another chuckle.
“So that’s what you threw at me. A golden apple. The golden apple. You know, I always wanted it.”
Sarah peeked over the top of the sarcophagus, trying to get the woman in the sights of the tiny weapon. In the glow from the portal, she saw her. The woman wore a maid’s uniform under a trench coat. But even if she hadn’t known her from her voice, the face was unmistakable. It was Charlotte Yates.
The senator stopped a few feet from the portal. “A furnace,” she said. “What a convenient way of getting rid of dead bodies. I love a crypt with a built-in crematorium.”
The apple hovered on the edge of the portal, still spinning slightly.
Sarah steadied her breath. She remembered Suzi telling her once that you were supposed to fire a gun in between heartbeats. That was when your hand was stillest.
Eyes glittering, Charlotte leaned over and picked up the apple. “Exquisite,” she said, holding it up and admiring it. A single drop of blood sat on her cheek like a ruby.
Sarah realized she would have to step out from behind the sarcophagus to fire. She would have one chance. The light from the portal bounced off the gems and lit up Charlotte’s face in shades of emerald and sapphire.
Sarah waited for the space between heartbeats, stood up, stepped out, and pulled the trigger. Ffffft. It sounded exactly like when her dad would set off firecrackers on the beach. Some of them were always duds. This was a dud.
Charlotte looked at Sarah and began to laugh. Sarah stood there, knowing it was over. With the apple still in her hand, Charlotte raised her gun and pointed it at Sarah.
So this was her end.
And at the end it was Pols’s voice she heard: You have to pray for help. But Sarah, don’t ask until you’re sincere.
Sarah closed her eyes. “Help me,” she said.
Whoosh.
All at once Sarah heard running footsteps and the sound of bodies colliding and a scream.
She opened her eyes to see the apple flying through the air
.
And Charlotte Yates going headfirst into the hell portal.
The massive marble lid to the portal slid across the floor and slammed into place with a resounding crash.
Sarah looked at the person now standing where Charlotte had been. She was also wearing a maid’s uniform. The woman staggered a little.
“Stefania?” said Sarah.
“I do not care if they throw me in jail,” said Stefania, straightening her shoulders with the ghost of her former ballerina’s grace. “She steal my life. Now I take hers.”
Sarah turned to see Max pulling himself up from behind the tomb. She tried to run to him, but her knees buckled under her.
“Sarah,” called Max. “Sarah, are you all right?”
“He is losing blood,” said Stefania, looking at Max. “And so are you.”
Sarah looked down at her bare feet, one of which was now covered in blood.
“You saved our lives,” said Max to Stefania. “Now I want you to go upstairs and find Nicolas Pertusato. Tell him where we are. An ambulance. Nicolas Pertusato . . .”
“The little man,” Stefania said. “Yes. I . . . I will. Prince Lobkowicz.” She tucked one foot behind another and bent slowly to the ground in a curtsy.
“Really, I’m just Max Anderson,” said Max.
SIXTY-FIVE
The Secret Service did not like admitting that they had lost the senator, but when they went in to wake Boss Lady at five a.m., she was not in the hotel room.
“Well, where the hell is she?” demanded the head of the CIA, awakened from sleep back in Virginia by a panicked agent using the red phone.
“We think she snuck out,” said the head of her detail. “Do you want us to notify the president she’s AWOL?”
“No!” he snapped. “I’ll alert our people. The last thing we need out there is the news that the most powerful United States senator is loose in the world, unprotected. You better hope she went for a fucking jog.”
Except the head of the CIA was pretty sure she hadn’t gone for a fucking jog, because while he was talking to the idiot Secret Service agent, he was getting a text message that one of his own agents in Prague had found a briefcase sitting on his doorstep that morning, right on top of the Financial Times and the Prague Post. A briefcase full of documents linking Charlotte Yates—Charlotte Yates!—to the KGB. Had no one kept their nose clean during the cold war? The briefcase had belonged to John Paisley, the former head of the CIA who had been linked to both the Kennedy assassination and Watergate, and who’d been found dead in 1978, having committed suicide by jumping off his sailboat. Except that when most people commit suicide, they don’t tie their bodies down with diving weights after shooting themselves in the head. And their briefcases don’t mysteriously disappear. The Agency had always suspected that the KGB had offed Paisley, but frankly, with his disgusting swinging seventies lifestyle and his Russian connections, he had become an embarrassment to the Agency anyway. No one cared who had done the deed.
Now, more than thirty years later, the briefcase had resurfaced on the same night Charlotte Yates had disappeared. There was going to be major damage control to do. No way in hell did anyone want the news to come out that the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had been—wait for it—a KGB agent. The list of people who would be embarrassed by that would be pretty much the entire Washington phone book. And where the hell was the bitch? Probably sitting on a cruise ship along the Volga, drinking vodka and eating caviar, thought the head of the CIA bitterly. The Russians knew how to take care of their people. As he popped a Bromo-Seltzer and tied his tie, his phone beeped again with the news that a Secret Service agent had been found dead in St. Vitus Cathedral, just down the pew from a dead Italian socialite.
It’s enough to make you vote Democratic, thought the head of the CIA, texting the agent to get a cleanup going.
• • •
Sarah and Max, lying in bed at Nela under the supervision of Nico’s wife, Oksana, who had had them admitted to Na Františku Hospital and then released without any record of their having been there at all, much less treated for gunshot wounds, were amazed to hear the news blazing from every TV, news website, and newspaper that Charlotte Yates had had a massive heart attack on an Air Force Gulfstream V C-37A wh
ile returning from her trip to Europe. A defibrillator and a doctor were onboard, but nothing could be done. It was hotly debated on every channel that despite heart disease being the number one killer of women, women’s cardiac health never got enough attention or research dollars. In the days after the quietly elegant funeral, insurance companies felt pressured to pay for mandatory echocardiograms for women over fifty.
“It was all for nothing,” Max sighed.
“What?” Sarah turned to him and gently straightened the collar of his pajamas. “Don’t say that.”
“Miles told me everything he knew about the letters between Charlotte Yates and Yuri Bespalov. I e-mailed it all to some reporter friends. But without the actual letters . . . it’s like Reagan. Now that she’s dead, people only want to hear nice things about her.”
“I’m glad Miles came clean,” Sarah said. “It wasn’t for nothing. We know the truth.” There were a lot of victims whose deaths had been avenged that night in the cathedral.
Sarah did wish Nico had copied the contents of the Paisley briefcase. He claimed there hadn’t been time. Moy strahovoy polic, Yuri Bespalov had called the briefcase when Sarah had encountered him in the library. Sarah had looked the phrase up. My insurance policy. Although it hadn’t been Àfor Yuri, in the end.
At least the items Nico had stored at Faust House were safely back in the palace, stored in a secret workroom. Max planned to go over them personally when he was back on his feet. He hoped to find some clue there about the Fleece.
