Obviously, he’d been right. And now that the initial attack had failed… something—maybe Baptiste—was telling him that eliminating this intense, blond man who preferred steak to chicken might not actually be the right thing, and he always paid attention to his instincts. He would be with his companions again shortly, and he would discuss what they had seen.
For no reason whatsoever, a chill ran along his spine. Gooseflesh erupted. In Moussa’s mind, Baptiste opened one eye. When Moussa was a boy, his grandfather, dark eyes both twinkling and serious, had told him that whenever he got goosebumps, it meant someone was walking on his grave.
“Somebody’s walking on somebody’s grave,” Moussa murmured, and instantly went on high alert.
***
Lin had spent some time in solitary for her participation in the attack on Lynch, but the guards told her they were releasing her for an hour, under observation, in the common room, if she continued to behave herself.
“My ribbons,” she had said forlornly. “May I dance with my ribbons still?”
The Abstergo Foundation, she and the others had learned early on, was big on “constructive activities” and “artistic expression.” That meant when Lin had displayed a fondness for dancing with ribbons, they had been inclined to permit her to continue. Just as they encouraged Emir to tend his garden.
Yes, she was told, she was free to dance with her ribbons, and Lin smiled, and looked content and vacuous.
She was the first they had released, though Emir and Moussa soon joined her. They did not ask about Nathan; Duncan Walpole’s descendant had come close to killing Lynch. Common room time would of course be withheld.
But they had a plan for that.
Shao Jun was always just a whisper away in Lin’s mind, but Lin always felt the strongest connection to her ancestor when she danced. Dr. Rikkin had told her that unfortunately she had to insert the agonizing epidural so that the arm could move her to match her ancestor’s movement.
“It’s called neuro-muscular facilitation—muscle memory,” she had explained to Lin. And Lin had found it to be a useful thing.
Shao Jun had been born into slavery, and was raised to become a concubine of the Zhengde Emperor. She had become his favorite when she was in her early teens, but only for her dancing, her acrobatics… and her ability to spy on his enemies. Upon the emperor’s death, Shao Jun’s spying talents enabled her to discover the existence of the Assassins… and the Templar leadership in China, a group of ambitious eunuchs called the Eight Tigers.
Now Lin’s fingers grasped the thick red ribbons she had been forced to fasten to cardboard paper towel tubes; they were the only objects deemed “safe.” It didn’t matter. She had no jian, and no means to recreate Jun’s unique weapon, the hidden footblade. And of course, after the earlier incident, they would not permit her to access anything that could be crafted into throwing darts.
But she had her body. And that would be enough.
She walked out to an open area in the common room, and began to dance. Strong, fit, and lithe to begin with, she had learned the movements of the Ribbon Dance, birthed in the Tang dynasty, from Jun, who was a master at it.
As she posed and swirled, bending and kicking, the red ribbons flowing like animated streams of blood in breathtaking circles and undulations about her frame, Lin was accomplishing two things. One: connecting with her ancestor. And two… providing a distraction.
Unlike Baptiste and Walpole, Jun had no stain upon her name. She had lived a long, full life, achieving the role of Mentor among the Assassins. She had never turned to the Templars, for money, or greed, or fear.
Jun—and Lin—hated Templars. But all was well.
Soon, the Assassins would go tiger hunting.
***
“What’s happening?” Sofia demanded. She couldn’t take her eyes from Cal. A parade of horrible scenarios was crowding into her imagination, and she forced them away. Fear wouldn’t serve her. Facts would.
“He’s gone dark.” Samia’s voice was higher than normal. She, too, was struggling against unhelpful fear.
“Why have we lost him?” She paused, then asked, “Is Aguilar dead?”
The Animus had shown her the famous Assassin Leap of Faith before. Their genetics were extraordinary, and Sofia knew that. But she also knew that the bridge off which Aguilar had leaped was taller by about fifty feet than San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. And Aguilar had been so badly injured, for so long….
What would being in Aguilar’s memories at the time of his death have done to Cal? Had they come all this way for nothing? Had Aguilar, in the end, failed?
Had she, Sofia, failed—both the Templar Order and Callum Lynch?
She could not decide which fate would be worse.
“No,” Alex said after checking Cal’s brain wave pattern. “He’s alive. Synchronization resuming.”
Sofia had not taken her eyes off Cal, who was still kneeling on the floor, and at the news she felt both relieved and confused. This shouldn’t be happening.
Her father’s voice floated down from his office, saying the words that couldn’t be true… but were.
“He’s controlling it.”
Sofia’s eyes widened. This wasn’t possible. No one had ever been able to wrest control of a simulation from her. But now, at last, Cal moved, slowly lifting his head to stare directly ahead.
And Sofia knew her father was right.
“Status?” she inquired, keeping her voice calm and steady.
“Back in,” Alex assured her, pleased and relieved. Cal rose and stood in a relaxed but ready posture. The simulation began to take shape around him; she could now make out the silhouettes of ships and sails.
“Where are we?”
“It looks like a military port,” Alex answered. Ghost vessels took shape around Cal’s unnaturally rigid, still body; visible, but translucent and only faintly colored. “The architecture’s Andalusian.”
A suspicion began to form in Sofia’s mind; taking shape, imperfectly and unclearly, like the port city the Animus was constructing around them. She tamped it down. She was a scientist, and she would wait for more facts. But the theory hovered, tantalizing… perfect.
“Elevation?” Sofia asked, her eyes flickering from the phantom vessels to Cal.
“Eleven meters,” Alex answered. “Gulf of Cádiz. Palos de la Frontera.” Her suspicion deepened. “The boats?”
“They don’t look like warships,” Alex mused. He scanned the holograms and added, “They’re seventy feet by twenty. Lateen sails… ah, they’re caravels. Used for exploration.”
Cal was no longer present. He was seeing through Aguilar’s eyes, looking up, and Sofia caught the spectral image of a holographic bird soaring overhead.
CHAPTER 22
Aguilar sat in the hold of the ship, gazing up through a slatted wooden frame at the eagle overhead, and envied it fiercely.
He was exhausted, filthy, and wounded in body and spirit. He had been traveling for five days, fighting off infection, taking odd routes, walking and stealing horses to throw any Templars off the scent. But he was alive, for the moment at least, and he was here.
Food had been spread out before him, but he touched nothing, and when the captain of the ship entered, Aguilar did not rise.
“Assassins died for this,” he said bluntly. The captain did not move, simply stood quietly at the end of the table, as if Aguilar were the master of the vessel, not he. “Protect it with your life.”
“I am a friend of the Creed,” the bearded, slender captain assured him.
***
Sofia’s eyes narrowed. She had grown up all over Europe, and she knew her own accent reflected her upbringing. Able to speak three languages fluently, she had an ear for accents, and she knew at once that this unknown captain was not a native Spanish-speaker.
***
Slowly, Aguilar extended his hand. In it, he bore the Apple of Eden. The captain reached to accept it from him, but before he could do so,
Aguilar added, “Take it to your grave.”
The captain paled beneath his tan, but met the Assassin’s eyes.
“I swear,” he said. His fingers curled around it securely.
“Following the light of the sun, I shall leave this old world behind.”
***
Sofia stood, rooted to the spot, as Alex provided the translation. “‘I shall leave this old world behind,’” she repeated. The words confirmed what she had almost dared not believe.
“It’s Christopher Columbus,” she breathed, and then Aguilar’s words to the captain took on a sudden, powerful new meaning. “Where is he buried?”
Alex understood the import of her question. He was the most unruffled person she had ever known, seemingly born with the quintessential British stiff upper lip. But she noticed sweat gathering on his hairline as he quickly searched the Animus database.
“His remains were returned to Spain,” Alex said. “His tomb is in Seville Cathedral.”
Sofia stared at the images on the screen.
“We found it,” she breathed.
***
It was time.
Moussa absently bounced the orange ball on the floor, then made a perfect shot. Scooping up the basketball, he bounced it a few more times, then rolled it from one hand to the other and behind his back as he assessed the situation.
Over in the greenhouse area, Emir was busy repotting rosemary, and gave Moussa a casual glance over his shoulder. Rosemary; that’s for remembrance. Some snatch of a poem or something, long gone, but it made Moussa smile.
Several others were sitting at the tables, eating placidly. Behind Moussa, Lin was doing Jun’s ribbon dance. Since the confrontation, there were more guards on the floor than usual. The dance was beautiful, and provided an excellent distraction.
While two guards watched Lin, Moussa called out cheerfully to two others.
“Hey! All-stars! Care for a little two on one?”
In days past, before the arrival of the Pioneer, the guards had been more complacent. One or two of them had usually obliged him. But today, Moussa could smell the tension on the air. He could feel it, singing along his veins. Something very big was going down. So today, the guards simply stared at him. One of them narrowed his eyes in suspicion.
Moussa had mastered sleight of hand long ago. Or had that been Baptiste? He had forgotten, and in the end, it didn’t matter. Certainly not now.
He tossed the ball down behind him and his hands came up, fists clenched but palms down.
“Pick one,” Moussa invited. The guards were used to his games, but this time, they didn’t play. “Any one,” he encouraged.
When they did not, Moussa shrugged, lifted his hands, and hurled the pair of smoke bombs he had stolen from Sofia Rikkin’s office to the floor. Their exquisitely wrought filigree glass exteriors shattered, and a wall of smoke surged upward.
Lin instantly executed a graceful, flying leap into the churning gray cloud. Her foot connected with a guard’s abdomen and he doubled over, vomiting. Moussa snatched the baton that fell from the guard’s fingers and cracked him over the head with it. As the guard fell to the floor, Moussa whirled, taking out the second guard the same way.
***
It was Emir’s turn, now. His plants abandoned, he had positioned himself by the main entrance into the common room.
Alarms blared stridently, and ugly red flashes disrupted the cool blue of the lighting and the soft dove-gray of Moussa’s smoke bombs.
The door burst open. Four more guards, batons at the ready, raced in to assist their fellows in quelling this latest uprising. Emir waited until the last possible second, then darted forward, seized the last guard by the back of his neck as if he were nothing more than an errant puppy, and slammed him face-first into the wall. The guard slid down to the floor, leaving a trail of red smeared on the concrete.
His escape unnoticed thanks to the concealing, eye-stinging billow of smoke, Emir turned to the corridor toward the surveillance room, breaking into a run.
Unlike Moussa and Nathan, Emir’s Assassin ancestor had been someone he had been proud to be descended from. Far from being a traitor to the Brotherhood, Yusuf Tazim, born in 1467, had been a friend to one of the greatest Assassins of all time—Ezio Auditore da Firenze, even giving that famous man one of his trademark weapons—an exceedingly useful device called a hookblade.
Emir had grown up without family around him. His earliest memories were of foster homes, shunted from one to the other while uncaring so-called parents pocketed money intended for his upkeep. Yusuf, too, had grown up without knowing his father and had a similar unsavory early life. But at seventeen, he had attracted the attention of Ishak Pasha, the leader of the Ottoman Brotherhood of Assassins.
It was a family. And as Yusuf grew, he became almost a parent to the younger members he taught. Warm, with an excellent sense of humor, Yusuf was everything Emir wanted to have in his life; wanted to do with his life. The Templars had put him in the Animus for their own ends, but Emir wondered if they understood that, strangely, they had also given him a gift by introducing him to this noble man.
Yusuf had died at the then-respectable age of forty-five, exactly as he would have wished: defending an innocent against the hated Templars.
Emir was only in his mid-thirties. He had no idea if he would live to be a hundred, or if he would die sometime within the next few minutes. He did know that that if, as he now suspected, this Pioneer was the one they had been waiting for, should he die defending Cal Lynch, Emir would deem that death as satisfying as the one Yusuf had been granted.
As they had anticipated, Moussa and Lin’s distraction had worked. The surveillance room’s door was unlocked. Most of the guards had been dispatched, and only three remained in the surveillance room. McGowen was nowhere to be seen, which was an unlooked-for gift. That one would have been a challenge to take down.
Fools, Emir thought.
The three guards who were left behind were all focused on their monitors watching the common room, the Animus Room, and the corridors down which their fellows were racing. They did not even notice Emir walking right in.
One of them finally spotted him and charged, lifting her baton. Emir seized her arm and twisted, hard. He felt something snap. She grunted and paled, but her other hand rose and came close to colliding with his jaw before he knocked it out of the way and punched her instead. Her nose crunched beneath his fist, and a stiff-handed blow to the throat removed her as a threat. She collapsed to the floor.
The second came at him. Emir sent him reeling back with a powerful kick to his chest, snatching up his baton and using it to first knock its owner out and then to crush the trachea of the final remaining guard.
It had taken him less than thirty seconds to incapacitate the guards and gain control of the heart of security at the Abstergo Foundation.
Emir shook his head in contempt and set to his task. The ones who had claimed Yusuf’s life had at least been competent.
He bent over one of the screens, tapping it to get a map of the compound, clicked on the common room, and then began opening the cell doors one by one.
Starting with Nathan’s.
***
Moussa and Lin were holding their own, even though at least a dozen, perhaps two dozen—it was a bit hard to tell with the smoke, Moussa mused—armed guards had charged in once the smoke bombs had done their job.
Lin in particular fought the hated Templars like a caged tiger set loose. She leaped, spun, and kicked like the entire thing was a choreographed dance performance; a ballet of blood. Her small frame made the bulkier, armed guards underestimate her, which she used to her advantage.
Moussa, meanwhile, snatched up weapons that the unconscious or dead guards no longer needed, and shared the crossbows and batons. He kept one eye on the main door, and when he saw it start to descend he shouted out to his companions. They immediately turned and raced through it as it lowered.
Moussa waited till the last minut
e, to make sure as many as possible had gone first, and then he dove for the narrowing space between the floor and the bottom of the heavy metal door, sliding under it just in time.
Lin helped him to his feet, both of them relishing the sound of the trapped guards futilely pounding on the wrong side of the door.
“Looks like the inmates are running the asylum,” he said, and grinned.
CHAPTER 23
Sofia was vaguely aware that something was going on outside the confines of the Animus Room. Perhaps a second attack from the patients; she’d been told that there had been an earlier attempt on Cal today. It had been readily handled. If this was another one, it was none of her concern; she would leave that to McGowen.
Her focus, her attention, her entire being, right at this moment, was focused on Callum Lynch.
The previous scene had dissolved, the holographic images of ships and sails and Christopher Columbus simply fading into nothingness. That much was normal. But Cal stood, still synchronized in the Animus itself although the maneuvering arm was disabled, the insectoid epidural unit still jammed into his brain stem.
And he was not alone.
Aguilar de Nerha stood with him, beside him and slightly in front of him. They stared into one another’s eyes, and Sofia realized that they were actually seeing each other.
How is this possible?
Slowly, Aguilar nodded and stepped back. Cal looked around the room. Companions, Assassins all, were taking shape.
One was a soldier in a U.S. uniform, circa 1943. Another wore the olive uniform of a WWI doughboy, although a hood covered his head, not the distinctive round helmet. A third was clad in the navy coat of a Union officer.
Back they went, spanning first decades, then centuries. A French revolutionist, then one from America’s revolution. Sofia’s stunned eyes took in clothing from the English Civil War, everything from formal Elizabethan ruffs and the sweep of a Cavalier cape to peasant’s tunics and roughly made leather armor.
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