The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone

by Tony Abbott

  “Spotted?” said Lily.

  “Do as I say!” Roald snapped. “Sorry. Wait five minutes, then go to the platform and wait for me there. Take these things.” He slid the dagger and his student notebook directly into Wade’s backpack.

  Wade pocketed the euros. “Dad, are you sure?”

  His father studied the big room. His face was drawn and tense. “Just until we’re safe on the train. If anything happens, we trust no one until we find Isabella Mercanti. After this, we do not separate, you hear me?”

  “We hear you, Dad,” Darrell said. “Hurry up, though, okay?”

  He was already gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  His father was too fast.

  Roald Kaplan had disappeared into the throng in seconds. Wade sensed that his father was trying hard to keep his emotions under control, trying to be the same old dad for him and Darrell and the girls, but he’d never seen his father so anxious and abrupt.

  We trust no one.

  Was there something about Uncle Henry’s message that Dad wasn’t telling them? What had Asterias really been about? If Uncle Henry was dead, if Bernard Dufort and Silvio Mercanti were both dead, his dad must be in danger, too. Maybe they were all in danger because they were here together?

  He didn’t know.

  What he did know, or was beginning to know, was one thing: that if his father was pressing ahead despite the danger, he himself needed to step up. Sons did that, and he needed to be at the top of his game.

  The clock on the wall said 14:24. European time for 2:24 p.m. The train would leave in just over fifteen minutes. Becca, Lily, and Darrell were huddled together, facing one another and invisible from most of the people running around. That’s smart. Darrell’s right to think about spies. Maybe that’s who these bad guys really are.

  He glanced into his backpack at the map, and now the notebook and the dagger. He patted the money in his pocket.

  “Five minutes are over,” he said, his throat tightening. “Let’s find our train. And be cool about it. The goons could be here already.”

  Darrell made a face. “Not to mention the lady with the silver gun.”

  “Not to mention that you always mention the lady with the silver gun,” Lily snapped.

  Platform 19 was as crowded as everywhere else. They immediately took up position behind a fat column when the platform thrummed and a giant red train rolled down the tracks into the station. As soon as it stopped, the platform became a sea of passengers descending from its doors—businessmen swinging briefcases, families dragging suitcases, carrying bundles, and pushing strollers through the crowds waiting to get on. The train idled while crews of sanitation workers poured onto it and jumped from car to car with plastic trash bags.

  “I wouldn’t want that job,” said Darrell.

  Wade watched the clock. 14:28. 14:31.

  Where are you, Dad?

  “Has anyone ever been on a sleeper car?” Becca asked. “I haven’t.”

  “Once,” Wade said. “I took the Texas Eagle from Austin to Los Angeles to visit my mom. If German trains are the same, there should be a corridor inside the car. The cabins are marked.”

  “We’re in cabin seven,” Lily said, trying to see inside the car, but the windows were too high. “How do you sleep?”

  “Sleeping is crummy,” he said. “There are benches and upper beds that fold out into a kind of bunk bed thing.”

  “I’m on top!” said Darrell. “The cabin is probably tiny, right?”

  “But it’s ours,” Wade said. “There won’t be strangers in there.”

  “Uh, yeah, there won’t be,” said Lily.

  14:33.

  His chest went icy. A thousand things could be happening while they waited like idiots there. Dad, come on!

  At a sign from a uniformed conductor, passengers began mounting the steps on either end of their car, showing their tickets to the conductors positioned near the train. The crowding on the platform eased.

  Dad . . .

  “Should we wait until he gets here? Or get on now?” said Darrell, pacing the length of the train car.

  “Of course we’ll wait,” said Lily. “We have our own cabin. The seats are ours, so no one else can take them. We’re fine—”

  “Uh . . . no.” Becca nodded toward an escalator across the concourse. Going up to the next level of the station, their heads swiveling like owls, were four thick men dressed in black. “Are they from the cemetery?”

  Wade couldn’t believe how fast things were happening. “They traced the credit card when Dad bought our tickets. He was right.”

  “They must have a computer surveillance system,” said Darrell.

  “And troops everywhere,” said Lily.

  “Please don’t call them troops,” Becca said, hiding behind the column, then peering out. “I don’t see the woman. But I saw one of those guys at the funeral.”

  The men fanned out on the level above them and scanned the platforms below. “They know we’re in the station, but not which train we’re taking,” Wade said, turning his face away. “So they don’t know where we’re going. Not yet, anyway. Which means if it was Dad’s credit card, it was just the amount, not the destination. That’s good.”

  “Not seeing them at all would be so much better,” said Darrell. “I knew this would happen. In spy movies, it always happens this way. Everywhere you look, there they are. They know things they couldn’t possibly know but they still know them and that’s how they know.”

  Wade wanted Darrell to put a sock in it, but he was right. No sooner had the first four men taken positions overhead than a second group of similar goons appeared at the end of their own platform.

  Becca lowered her face. “Why is your dad taking so long?”

  The large round clock on the platform column read 14:35. Less than five minutes to departure. Dad, please! Had something happened? Or was he just picking up snacks for the long train ride?

  Lily’s phone rang suddenly. “Hello?” Her eyes grew wide, and she thrust the phone at Wade.

  “Hello?” he said, taking it. “Hello? Dad! What? Where are you?” Wade swung around. His father was walking quickly across the concourse toward their platform. “Dad says everybody on the train. Now!”

  The kids flashed their tickets and jumped onto the train car. An announcement in German boomed over the station address system. Wade leaned out over the stairs and saw his father sprinting full speed toward Platform 25. No, Dad. It’s this one!

  Behind his father were three men from the cemetery, walking quickly but not running. Someone in the crowd shouted. Then a shrill whistle blasted. At the same instant, his father leaned forward and twisted his feet oddly. What? Why? Roald stumbled right in front of the men. He crashed to the floor, taking two goons down with him. Someone shouted again. Another whistle. The train squealed. The car jerked once on the track.

  “Dad!” Wade yelled from the open doorway. “Da—”

  Becca put her hand over his mouth. “Shh!”

  A crowd of passengers jammed up against the huddle of men, apparently unsure of what it was all about. They tried to help Dr. Kaplan to his feet. A uniformed policeman appeared, his hand on a holster at his waist, but he was blocked by the crowd around his father and the fallen men. A second policeman was joined now by several other men in suits, all hovering around his father. The train squealed again, and it started to move.

  Darrell banged his fist on the door. “Dad! Dad!”

  The train gasped once more and pulled away from the platform. The short policeman from the cemetery appeared now, gesticulating frantically to his men, one of whom shouted into a cell phone. Others butted their way through the crowd toward the end of their platform, but the head car was already out of the station. The train was gaining speed.

  “Oh my gosh,” said Lily, staring out the window as the station receded. “What . . . what . . . what are we going to do?”

  “The police have Dad!” Darrell shrieked, grabbing Wade by
the shoulders and shaking him. “He saved us from being caught!”

  Wade couldn’t breathe. “The last thing he said on the phone was about Isabella Mercanti. The lady in Bologna. He wants us to find her. He said we should try to not to get caught. And she’d help us.”

  “Don’t get caught?” Lily frowned. “Ohhhh, man . . .”

  “I have to call Mom right now,” said Darrell. “I don’t care where she is!”

  Wade handed him Lily’s phone. He tapped in Sara’s cell number, as the train sped through the train yard. Everyone watched his face. “Mom!” he said, then paused and breathed out. “Voice mail. Of course. She’s in Bolivia already. Mom? Hey, it’s me. Look, we’re on a train in Berlin and Dad just got—”

  “Wait!” Wade put his hand over the phone. “They already broke into our house. They don’t need to know about Sara. Plus she’s off the grid. Which is what we should be. Close it.”

  “But I have to tell her!”

  “She can’t come here!” Wade insisted. “These guys may know we’re going to Verona, but maybe not to Bologna. Don’t give it away. End the call.”

  Darrell gave him a dark look, pulled away, and said, “Call you later,” and hung up. “What a fail,” he groaned.

  “You did the right thing,” said Lily.

  “Nobody calls anywhere,” Wade said, trying to sound calm, although he really felt like screaming and punching something over and over. Then he felt a touch on his arm. It was Becca.

  “Look, your dad is . . . going to be okay. There were hundreds of witnesses back there. And we have passports and tickets,” she said. “Plus a little bit of cash. The best thing to do is get off at the next stop, wherever that is. Go to the American embassy, or call it first, or whatever, and do our best to explain what’s been happening. We can try to get in touch with Isabella Mercanti from there. If she’s your father’s friend, she’ll help us.”

  Wade looked at her. Suddenly, he could breathe again. “Yeah, you’re right. That’s amazing that you could figure all that out. Under pressure and everything.”

  Becca sighed. “I have some practice, but never mind that. Are we all agreed?”

  Everyone nodded. They found cabin seven, a small room with two facing bench seats with a narrow bed folded up overhead above each one. They sat down, trying to catch their breath as the train picked up more speed. Outside the windows the downtown was diminishing rapidly into suburbs and wooded areas broken by highways. It was a gray day like the day before. Germany was a gray place.

  Lily pulled her tablet from her bag and swiped at the screen.

  “The next town with an American embassy is a place called Magdeburg. It’s a pretty big city—”

  The compartment door jostled suddenly and squeaked open.

  “Sorry, zis cabin-zee is taken-zee,” said Darrell.

  The door swung wide to reveal two men with flat expressionless faces blocking the way like a pair of oak trees.

  “Whoa, what the—” Wade stood.

  A third man with a plump red face and badly dyed black hair squeezed between the man-trees. He had a cell phone at his ear.

  “Ya,” he said into it. Then he lowered it. “You, show me ticket, now!”

  Without thinking, Wade showed him his ticket.

  The man barked into the phone. “Bologna.”

  At the sound of the word, Wade’s stomach twisted. Why had he simply obeyed the man?

  Redface turned the phone around and snapped a picture of them. Bwip! A moment later, he said, “Ya!” into the phone again and hung up.

  In an accent as thick as peanut butter, the red-faced man with the black helmet hair said, “If you vant to zee your vater Dr. Keplen alife again . . . you vill come viss us. Now.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Darrell had expected this from the beginning.

  Ugly guys with ugly guns and thick accents. “Come viss us.” It was playing out like the bad screenplay of a cheesy foreign spy movie. He knew it would be this way. He was only surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. This was Germany, after all. The capital of spies and murder and death and foreign movies and spies.

  The tree-size men pushed them into an empty corridor. Naturally, it was empty; all the other passengers had already found their cabins and were making themselves comfortable eating warm snacks. If people had been moving in the corridor, the kids could have made a scene and the bad guys might have been arrested. Or, wait. Not arrested. The bad guys were working with the police. Or fake police. Whatever. They were all spies, and spies with accents were always bad news.

  “Zis vay,” the red-faced spy said. His hair shone like a jet-black bowling ball. It was probably crusty and sticky.

  Never mind his hair, plan our escape!

  The men marched the kids roughly down the narrow corridor, through the heavy connecting door and onto the platform between the cars. The wind was strong and nearly blew them off the train.

  No escape plans came to him there.

  The city had long disappeared behind them, and they were speeding through the last stretch of suburbs dotted with trees and houses, until finally there were no houses and just forest.

  A good place to dump our bodies.

  “Into ze next car!”

  Darrell wished he had the sort of brain that would look at their situation and come up with an instant foolproof plan for escape. A movie once showed into the mind of the hero, and it buzzed like a computer, an electronic head. That would be so cool right now.

  “Hurry alonk,” Redface said. “Ze next car.”

  The train began to slow. The next station appeared in the distance. Two black SUVs were idling on the street outside the station. Not good. Sliding their guns into their pockets, the two giants nudged the children toward the end of the next car to the stairs that lowered to the platform, while their boss got on his phone again.

  Checking with Mommy?

  Then he had a thought. It was a small thought, but he’d seen enough movies about trains to know what happens when a train pulls into a station. He poked his fingers into Lily’s and Wade’s backs and whispered, “Get ready to run.”

  “They have guns!” Lily whispered.

  “Silence!” Redface spat. “Keep movink to ze door.”

  Darrell took a chance, and purposely stumbled to the floor.

  “Get up—”

  It was a short delay, but what he expected to happen, happened. Even before the train stopped, several compartment doors swung wide and passengers plowed into the corridor.

  “Run!” said Darrell. He lurched to his feet and pushed his friends forward into a tangle of passengers.

  “Hey!” “Ach du lieber!” the passengers yelled, but the kids rammed their way through them, past the connecting door and into the next car, bounding down that corridor to the end. The train jerked once. Becca stopped short and pointed out the window. “Look!”

  Two more extra-large men in suits quickly climbed aboard.

  “Now there are five of them!” Lily said.

  “Keep moving!” said Wade, pushing them farther away from the men. Darrell realized soon enough that they were going to run out of train, and they did. The door to the final car was locked.

  “It’s the baggage car,” said Becca.

  Lily pounded on the door with her fists. “Let us in!”

  “Eine minute!” shouted a voice behind the door. Two bolts were shoved back. The door opened a crack. “Was ist das?”

  As the train picked up speed, Darrell heard the thugs crashing into the car toward them. “We need to—”

  Becca rattled off a couple of sentences that sounded like she was coughing. But apparently that’s what German sounded like, because the mustached man behind the door let them into the baggage car, then bolted the door behind them.

  “I told him I needed medication from my suitcase—”

  The door shook. “Lassen Sie Uns rein!” grunted a voice. “Die Kinder sind Ausreisser! Runavays!”

  The security guar
d growled. “Vhat now?”

  “They’re lying!” said Lily.

  They jumped over bags and suitcases to the door at the far end of the car. Pushing it open, they found themselves staring at the receding tracks. The train was racing quickly over the miles now, approaching top speed.

  Unlocking the far door, the baggage guard reluctantly let the four thick men and Redface into the car. They pushed him aside, but he snagged one of the goons and started arguing his head off. Redface and his thugs simply pushed through to the rear and trapped the kids on the outside platform.

  “No more runnink!” Redface grunted. “Giff us ze key.”

  The wind tore icily around them. The guard inside was ranting in a high-pitched voice now.

  Darrell’s brain scanned their options when he suddenly came up with a second amazing idea. He dug into his backpack, pulled out the pitch pipe, and held it out over the tracks. “You want the key? Here’s the key. It belonged to Vogel. One more inch, I toss it overboard.”

  The men froze. “No, do not,” said one of them.

  “Zey know nussing!” said Redface.

  “Oh yeah?” Darrell snarled. “Well, this is what was in the safe at the tomb. The secret you’ve all been looking for. That pretty lady told you to get it, didn’t she?” Nice detail, he thought, and it seemed to work. The men mumbled at one another. As quickly as the train had gained speed, it slowed again. They were approaching a bridge. The lead car clattered onto it, slower still.

  “Zey know nussing!” Redface repeated, his face getting redder and puffier. “Get it before ze next station!” The thugs lunged forward like the front line of the Texas Longhorns, pinning all of them to the back rail.

  The space was too cramped to hold them. Lily kicked out, while Wade squirmed in front of Becca. Darrell managed to wrestle his arm free and fling the pitch pipe. One of the men shouted as it sailed through the air, and clattered onto the tracks. Redface responded by shoving the shouter right off the platform. “Find it! Get it!”

  That left Redface and three goons. His thoughts popping one after another, Darrell pushed forward, and Redface fell back through the door into the baggage car, where the guard was yelling on the phone.