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The Forbidden Stone
Tony Abbott
RICK RIORDAN meets DAN BROWN in this epic historical adventure series packed full of puzzles, clues and edge-of-your-seat excitement!Legend has it that Copernicus found twelve powerful relics that could harness the cosmos and transport people through time when assembled in the shape of an astrolabe. Recognising the astrolabe’s terrible power, Copernicus hid the relics in far-flung corners of the globe and assigned loyal Guardians to pass down the duty of protecting the relics across the ages.In the wrong hands, the astrolabe could control the world. That’s exactly what Galina Krauss and her powerful Teutonic Order plan to do once she collects all the pieces and reassembles them. She’s already infiltrated the Guardians and broken down their defences. Humankind won’t know what’s happened until it’s too late.What Galina doesn’t know is that a letter, the Guardians’ last cry for help, has fallen into the hands of four young friends – Wade, Lily, Darrel and Becca. Four young friends who are about to find themselves caught up in a centuries-old battle to save fate itself…
Praise for THE COPERNICUS LEGACY: The Forbidden Stone (#ulink_2a606f0a-3ede-5f15-91f1-6b496f78cc73)
“The Copernicus Legacy takes you on a fantastical journey that is as eye-opening as it is page-turning. With mysteries hiding behind secrets coded in riddle, this book is like a Dan Brown thriller for young readers. The further you get, the more you must read!”
—Angie Sage, New York Times bestselling author of the Septimus Heap series
“Full of mystery and intrigue, this book had me completely transfixed.”
—Ridley Pearson, New York Times bestselling author of the Kingdom Keepers series.
To my family, adventurers all
Table of Contents
Cover (#u2482614e-f0b1-59d4-a548-d0e4b7c952e5)
Title Page (#u511157ea-2363-5cba-878a-807841356f26)
Praise (#ubca0c9a7-4a59-529a-8584-1c4470c714d7)
Dedication (#uc3158c75-aef4-5468-903e-eecdead4571d)
Chapter One (#u195a4d54-8370-59e2-9919-794b51888f51)
Chapter Two (#u329f3587-f84a-5f17-8d73-d10a6dbfda32)
Chapter Three (#u8a323fbe-b16c-5e46-a9b6-849d227048e2)
Chapter Four (#uff9c91b7-ddb0-5e1a-9816-e007dfb37143)
Chapter Five (#uceb5209d-3b19-526d-88b2-fddd4626b1b7)
Chapter Six (#ua1b6abb6-4148-585a-b141-1387c51024ae)
Chapter Seven (#uae2ab029-337f-5e4a-94f5-2d2f5da3de18)
Chapter Eight (#u7830dddb-b590-5208-a675-8bee2f706435)
Chapter Nine (#u87104dc2-40b2-5661-93cf-1ca29313de5f)
Chapter Ten (#u7d69c193-8188-5a21-a844-14ce83227a26)
Chapter Eleven (#u7a9c9a70-349b-5d03-a2cf-d11d52a35bef)
Chapter Twelve (#u75c3751f-b9d6-570c-9620-a80e60b3124a)
Chapter Thirteen (#uea75d151-97f1-54e1-995c-e6cf43a422ea)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
(#ulink_ea57ccd8-c075-5934-aece-c36e5696a2c3)
Austin, Texas
March 8th
11:47 p.m.
How and why—and precisely when—Wade Kaplan dreamed that his priceless star chart had burst into flame he didn’t know, but the instant its swirls of silver ink and richly painted constellations caught fire, he bolted awake.
“No!”
The room was pitch-black. There was no fire.
Knowing the door between his room and his stepbrother Darrell’s was open, he tilted his head toward it. Slow, rhythmic breathing. Okay, good. Their first official day of school vacation had hardly been restful, rushing around doing last-minute chores before his stepmom, Sara, flew off on a business trip to South America. Her flight would leave early in the morning, and despite the hectic day, he and Darrell had promised to be up at the crack of dawn to see her off.
And yet …
Wade pushed the sheets aside, walked to the window, and quietly raised the shade.
It was a nearly moonless night, and stars were sprinkled thickly across the velvety black. His house in the hills some miles from the Austin city lights usually meant a vivid night sky, and tonight was no exception.
Turning to his desk, he opened the top drawer and drew out a leather satchel the size of a large paperback. Not only had it not burned, but it was cool to the touch, and he realized it had been weeks since he’d last handled it. He undid its straps and removed a thick sheet of folded parchment. His skin tingled when he opened it. The map was a gift for his seventh birthday from a dear friend of his father’s, a man he’d come to know as Uncle Henry. Engraved and hand-painted in the early sixteenth century, the map was a work of science, art, and history combined, and he cherished it.
Why, then, had he just dreamed of its destruction?
Wade turned the star map around until it matched the arrangement of constellations outside his window. Then, as if it had waited for him simply to look up, a meteor slid slowly across the dark, sparking as it passed. “Darrell, look!” he said instinctively, waiting for a second streak of light, knowing that one never comes when you expect it. A slow minute went by. No. That was all. He traced his finger across the map. “Right through Draco and Cygnus.”
“The bad kids from Harry Potter?”
Wade spun around. “Darrell! Did you see it?”
His stepbrother staggered over, rubbing his eyes. “The sky? Yeah. I saw it yesterday too. What time is it? Is the world ending? Answer the second question first.”
Wade laughed. “About midnight. I just saw a meteor. They’re actually much more common than people think.”
“And yet here we stand, staring out your window. Mom’s trip comes in, like, an hour, doesn’t it?”
“I know. Sorry.”
Wade had known since he was a toddler that stars were energy-producing balls of fiery gas burning at incredible heat hundreds of millions of miles away. Since his very first years in school, science had been his thing, his strength. But spread out over the Texas skies—or anywhere, really—stars were also something else. Not merely randomly positioned specks blinking in the darkness.
“Darrell, look,” Wade said, pointing to the chart then the sky. “That’s Cepheus. See, it’s a kind of box with a pointed hat on top. And there’s one of Pegasus’s legs. Stars are like, I don’t know, messages from way out there to us down here. If only we could read the code, you know?”
Darrell squinted. “I don’t really see them, but I believe you, which is part of the stepbrother code. I also believe I need to sleep or I’ll die.” He started back to his room.
“Uncle Henry wrote me once, �The sky is where mathematics and magic become one.’ Isn’t that so cool?”
“I’m becoming one with my bed.”
“Tomorrow we’ll go to the campus observatory,” Wade said. “You have to see it.”
“It’s already tomorrow, and I’m already asleep!” Darrell said. Then he turned from the doorway. “But seriously, bro. Very cool. I get it.” In three strides he was on his bed, where he snorted exaggeratedly, went quiet, and was, amazingly, asleep.
Wade watched a minute longer, then drew the shade down. He folded the celestial chart and carefully returned it to his desk drawer. Where math and magic become one. Wade felt that too. He felt it like he felt his own heartbeat. Since the beginning of time, people had read whole stories in the sky, finding the past, present, and future in the seeming arrangement of star to star to star. When he thought of the kind old man who’d given him the priceless chart six years before, he smiled. “Thanks again, Uncle Henry.”
Crawling back into bed, Wade felt strangely calm.
He had no idea that in the coming days he, and Darrell too, would measure their lives as happening before or after that starry night.
(#ulink_ed3c8c4c-d5ad-5a02-8174-8b1c280c66c6)
Frombork, Poland
March 8th
Eight hours earlier
The night was bitterly cold for March, and even more so near the frigid waters of the Baltic Sea.
A young woman, not twenty years old, pulled her fur coat tightly around herself. Her long dark hair waved in the constant wind off the water. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she gazed up at the square brick tower standing tall and empty against the sky. That vague W-shaped cluster of stars flickering behind the tower was Cassiopeia, she thought. The throne of the queen.
Queen. The title meant something to her. Or might someday.
She knew she wouldn’t be able to linger long. A limousine idled thirty feet away at the edge of the road near the pine trees. Four men sat quietly inside the car. A phone call was expected. The call that she had been waiting such a long time for—years, in fact. And after the call? There would be miles to travel tonight. She knew that, too.
And yet she could not move.
The longer she stared at the tower—her sharp eyes scanning the broad granite lintel over the oak door, the narrow catwalks and stairs draping the outside wall from the ground to the high peaked summit standing starkly against the sky—the more the old scene overwhelmed her.
And just like that, it was five hundred years ago, a night she had heard about so often, it seemed as real as if she had been there. Snow swirled against the walls and up to the doorstep. Normally white and clean, the drifts burned red from the flames boiling up the sides of the tower.
“Fire! Magister, awake!” A boy, sixteen years old, ran helter-skelter down the tower steps, racing to the inlet with empty buckets flying in his hands.
The legend has given us the boy’s name: Hans Novak.
Then came the thundering of hooves, and the young woman saw horsemen, fierce-faced and monstrous under plates of angled armor. Their blades were thick with blood, their eyes wolfish with rage. The village beyond was an inferno of flame. Now they’d come in for the kill.
And there he was. The scholar. The mathematician. Magister. The man she felt she had always known. He leaped down the tower steps from its summit, his leather cloak flying behind him.
“Fiends!” he cried at the horsemen. “I know why you have come! I will not obey!” From the folds of his cloak he drew a sword—Himmelklinge, he called it: “Sky Blade.” He jumped to the ground and planted his boots in the snow while the horsemen circled around, outnumbering him eight to one.
The clash of sword against sword echoed under the sparkling sky. More than a scholar, the Magister was also a swordsman, trained in the ancient arts. She smiled at that. Swordsman. He fought off one knight, then a second and third, tumbling them from their saddles. Not only Sky Blade whisked in the air, but so did his dueling dagger, its wavy blade piercing the chinks in their armor. The Magister was swift and efficient, tutored by the best swordsman in Bologna. But his ferocity couldn’t last. Two horsemen roped the boy, wrestling him to the ground, his now-laden buckets spilling, cracking.
The scholar’s dagger ceased flashing. Sky Blade fell silent.
“Stop!” he said, hanging his head. “Release the boy. Release him, and I will do as the Grand Master says …”
The sound of the car horn broke the night air and brought the young woman back to the present. She turned, drawing a stray strand of hair behind her ear. If the men in the car had looked closely they might have seen a three-inch vertical scar on her neck below her ear. She didn’t conceal it. In more ways than one, the scar was a sign of her survival.
But the men in the car dared not look. Instead, a pale runtish specimen, large-headed and bent, shivering in his thin coat, stumbled out of the backseat and scurried over.
“They have found him,” the man said eagerly, drying with a finger the drool that had leaked from the edge of his mouth. “They have found the head of the five. They have found him—”
“Where?” she asked.
“Berlin! Just as you suspected!”
Her eyes lingered on the tower a moment longer.
Her eyes. One blue, one silver-gray. A condition called heterochromia iridis. A chance mutation, both a blessing and a curse. Was this what made her so mesmerizing?
Brushing a wave of hair back over her collar, she strode to the limousine, slid into the backseat, and caught a glimpse of the nameless driver in the rearview.
“Airport,” she said. “We five fly to Berlin tonight.”
“Yes, Miss Krause,” said the driver, who had a name, though she never used it. “Right away, Miss Krause.”
“Galina. My dear,” said the pale man as he slipped into the seat next to her, “when we arrive in Berlin—”
“Silence,” she said, and the pale man caught his breath and lowered his gaze to the ruby necklace that shone below the collar of her coat. The red stone was in the shape of a sea creature.
A kraken.
As the car roared away, Galina Krause glanced once more at the tower, standing black against the starry firmament.
In her mind, the flames—as they always did when she imagined that night so long ago—coiled higher.
“And so,” she whispered to herself, “it begins.”
Just before two in the morning, in the sector of the city once called East Berlin, on a street named Unter den Linden, a long black car crawled to a stop with the quiet ease of a panther.
The engine went silent.
For decades Unter den Linden—“under the linden trees”—had been cut in two by the infamous Berlin Wall. Now that the Cold War was over and the wall was down, the avenue was whole again and teeming with life. Three floors above, a dim light shone in the window of a small apartment. The haggard face of an old man blinked out over the passing cars, the raucous music clubs, the bustle of pedestrians crowding the avenue. Their night was in full swing.
All seemed normal, all seemed well.
All was not well.
Heinrich Vogel, retired professor of astronomy at Humboldt University, hobbled from the window into his study, deeply troubled.
Was the great secret unraveling at last?
And what of the future? Of humanity? Of the world itself?
He stoked the small flame in the fireplace. It blossomed. Sliding into a chair, he typed furiously on his computer keyboard, then paused. Among the seven newspapers on his desk sat the Paris daily Le Monde. Two hours had gone by since his dear friend, Bernard Dufort, was to have called him. He always called the instant the coded crossword appeared online. He had done so the second Monday of every month for the last seventeen years. “RIP.” A morbid joke, perhaps, but one easily missed unless you knew to look for the letters near the intersection of 48 Across and Down.
Tonight, there was no call. The encoded crossword did not appear.
Vogel could only assume that the delicately constructed system of communication had been compromised. The inner circle had been breached.
As he hit Send on his computer, he wondered whether his colleague at Le Monde had fled his post. Or worse. That he had not fled his post but had perished in defense of their secret.
“In either case, I must leave Berlin,” he said to himself, standing and scanning the room. “Flee now and hope my American friend will understand my message … and remember the old days.”
He checked his watch. Two a.m., give or take. It was six hours earlier in Texas, after office hours. His friend would see the email in the morning. The clues were there. If only Roald would connect and follow them.
“I have kept you out of it until the last. Now, I have no choice. And young Wade. I dread this even more for him. The terrible responsibility …”
He lifted the phone from its cradle and pressed a number into it, waited for the connection, and spoke four words.
“Carlo, expect a visit.”
He set down the receiver, knowing that the number dialed and each word spoken were twisted and garbled in a way that could be unscrambled only at the receiving end. Technology had its uses, after all.
Checking his vest pocket for the fifth time in as many minutes, he fingered the train ticket. Then he placed his computer on the floor and stomped on it until its shell cracked. He removed the hard drive, bent it nearly in half, and threw it into the fire.
“What else?” He spied the starfish paperweight on his desk. It was no more than a cheap beachside souvenir. A sea star—Asterias, its Latin term—molded in glass.
Asterias. The name he’d called his hand-picked group of students so long ago. All that was over now. He gave the paperweight a pat, then took up a framed photograph. It was of himself two decades before, with three young men and two women standing under the blue glow of a café’s sign. They were all smiling. Professor and students. Asterias.
“My friend,” Vogel whispered to one of the faces. “It is all in your hands now. If only you will take the challenge—”
Something snapped sharply on the street below the apartment. Vogel’s heart thumped with dread. A door creaked and footsteps thudded up the stairs. “No, no. It is too soon—”
He threw the photograph in the fire and the door burst open. Three thick men in dark suits pushed their way in. They were followed by a shrunken man with wire glasses and flat hair and a woman young enough to be a student herself.
“Who are you?” Vogel cried, dragging the glass paperweight off the desk and clutching it tightly. He knew too well who they were. The enemies of man.
The first thug knocked him down. Vogel stumbled hard to his knees, then to the floor. “Murderers! Thieves!” he screamed, while the other two men fanned out into the small apartment, turning over everything in sight. The woman stood by the door as calm and silent as a coiled snake. What was wrong with her expression? She was beautiful. Like an angel, even.
And yet … those eyes.
Was she the one?
The men tore the books from the shelves. Tables crashed to the floor. Upholstered chairs, his bed, his pillows, all sliced open. His priceless collection of musical instruments tossed aside as if they were worthless toys.
“Brutes!” the old man cried out. “There is nothing here!”
The bent man with pasty skin and spectacles perched on his nose like a second set of eyes leaned over him.
“Your associate in Paris gave you up,” he snarled at Vogel. “You have the key to the relics. Give it to us.”
Adrenaline spiking his old veins, Vogel gripped the starfish paperweight and slammed it hard against the temple of the pale man. “There is the key. There, on your head!”
The pale man pawed his bleeding temple. “What have you done to my face, you fool?”
“Improved it!” Vogel snapped.
One of the thick men knelt and wrapped his massive hand around the old man’s neck. He grinned as he brought his fingers together.
“Breathe your last, old fool!” shrieked the pale man.
Vogel burst out with a cold laugh. “No. Not last …”
The woman glared at Vogel, then at the hearth. “He has told someone! There is something in the fire—get it!”
Without thinking, the pale man thrust his hand into the flames, screaming as he dragged the smoldering hard drive onto the floor. The photograph was already ash.
“Discover who he has told,” the woman said coldly. “I should have known. The key was never here. Finish him. Drop his body in the streets. Leave no clues—”
Choking, Vogel flailed frantically. He knocked over a music stand, hoping to grip its shaft. Instead, all that came to his hand was a battered silver pitch pipe.
As life ebbed swiftly from the old man, Galina Krause stared at him from two different-hued eyes. One blue. One silvery gray.
“Go ahead, Vogel. Play for us. Play your swan song …”
(#ulink_51f59862-b63e-554e-a405-f05662fa5f0f)
Austin, Texas
March 9th
8:03 a.m.
Wade and Darrell took turns yanking on the door of the observatory at the University of Texas.
It wouldn’t budge.
“And that’s why Dad gave you the key,” Wade said.
“Which I gave to you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I’m pretty sure I did,” said Darrell.
“When?”
“Before.”
“Before when?”
“Before you lost it.”
Wade grumbled. “I didn’t lose the key. I couldn’t lose the key. I couldn’t lose it because I saw Dad give it to you. In his office. When he dropped us off to run Sara to the airport.”
“Sara. You mean the lady I call Mom?”
“Sara lets me call her Sara,” Wade said. “Which is beside the point. The key? Remember, Dad took it from his desk drawer? He handed it to you? Do any of these images ring a bell?”
Darrell patted his pockets. “No bells are currently ringing, and I still don’t have the key.”
“You must have left it on his desk.” Wade shoved Darrell aside and retraced his steps down the narrow iron staircase to a small office on the third floor of Painter Hall.
Wade’s father—Darrell’s stepfather—was Dr. Roald Kaplan, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Texas in Austin, and Painter Hall was the home of an eighty-year-old observatory housing one of the largest telescopes that still operated by an intricate system of cranks and pulleys.
Wade sighed. “Darrell, you have to see this telescope. I can’t believe that after what, three years, we haven’t brought you in here. It’s total steampunk, all winches and gears and levers and weights.”
A flicker of interest flashed across Darrell’s face. In typical fashion, he responded off center. “I do enjoy the punk which is called steamy.”
It being spring break, both boys were looking ahead to a long week of no school. Which to Wade meant nine days of reading astronomy textbooks and nine nights of studying stars from the university’s observatory. He was pretty sure that to Darrell vacation meant some strange combination of hibernating and nonstop eating.
Or thrashing his Stratocaster at maximum volume.
Darrell had been trying to form a band for months with no luck. Wade felt there were two reasons for that. First, Darrell wanted to call his band the Simpletones, which was supposed to be ironic but maybe wasn’t. And second, he only wanted to play surf-punk, which Wade was pretty sure was not a thing.
They pulled up to their father’s office. Wade grabbed the knob, tried to turn it. That door was locked, too.
“Are you kidding me?” he said. “Dad won’t be back from the airport for another half hour. I have to show you this scope. I wonder where Campus Security’s office is. They’ll let us in—”
“Don’t move. I think I grabbed a campus map,” said Darrell, shoving his hands into his jeans pockets. “If Security is even up yet. It’s only … eight-ish. Which for some reason reminds me I’m hungry.”
“You ate a muffin an hour ago.”
“Exactly. One whole hour. You think Dad will let us go for an early lunch? How long do you think all this will … oh.”
“�Oh,’ what?”
Darrell slid a dull brass key out of his pocket. “Is this what we’re looking for?”
“I knew it,” Wade growled. “Come on.”
“Fine, but are we still talking about nothing to eat?”
Wade laughed. “Sorry, bro.”
Darrell mumbled something, then hummed a raucous guitar solo as they made their way back up to the dome. Good, thought Wade. This is what Darrell did when he was more or less happy. Obsess about food and hum riffs.
Five minutes later, the boys pushed through the door of the old observatory, and the atmosphere of the large room washed over them like a wave of the past.
Darrell whistled. “You weren’t kidding, steampunk!”
Centered directly below a huge copper dome stood the famous Painter Hall telescope. A twelve-foot-long iron tube built in 1933, it was poised on a brick platform and was meticulously balanced by a giant weight, making it easily maneuverable into any position. Wade explained that the scope’s lens measured a mere nine inches across—compared to, say, the McDonald Observatory’s scope, whose mirror was thirty-six feet across. But this was a historical instrument, and Wade loved that. He loved the places where science and history crisscrossed. There was something exciting about lenses and gears and mechanisms that made exploration that much more, what was the word, human.
Wade had long had a thing for the old Painter Hall telescope, ever since his father first brought him into that round room. It was there he learned to locate the planets and constellations. It was in that observatory that he’d read the myths that lay behind their exotic names. It was there where he’d come to appreciate his own tiny place in the vast cosmos of space.
Where math and magic become one.
“Not bad, huh?”
“Not bad at all.” Darrell jumped up to the platform. “Cables, cranks. Levers. A clock drive! Mechanical future stuff. I love it! What awesome stuff can it do?”
“Not much in the daytime, but we’ll come back tonight for some real stargazing. Don’t mess with anything until I find the operating instructions. You’ll love the way it swings around with just a touch.” Wade plopped down at a small desk near the door. His father was writing a history of the telescope and had set up a research station there. “Just wait. Mars will be as close as a dinner plate.”
“I wish I were close to a dinner plate,” said Darrell. “Do you still have nothing to eat?”
“Since the last time you asked? No. But why don’t you check those pockets you never check?”
“Because I obviously don’t carry food with me … oh.” Darrell pulled a slender packet from his other pocket. “Gum is food, right?”
“It is if you swallow it,” said Wade.
“I always do.”
Before he’d met Darrell and his new stepmom, Sara, three years ago, Wade had hoped for the longest time that his real mother and father would get back together. He was crushed to realize they weren’t going to, and he was still having trouble accepting that the past was really the past. But he saw his real mom often (she lived in California now) and was coming to understand that you move on and learn to live with lots of stuff. He also had to admit that the new families were working out really well.
“Can you believe Mom’s going to be lost in the jungles of South America for a week?” Darrell asked from the platform. “Well, not lost, but hunting down some crazy writer?”
“I know, a week with no phones, no electricity, nothing.”
“Except bugs,” said Darrell. “Lots of bugs. Then she flies to New York. Then London. My jet-setting mom.”
“Sara’s supercool,” Wade said.
“Yes. Mymother is.”
Any way you looked at it, the best part of the deal was Darrell himself. From the instant the two boys were introduced, he’d become the brother Wade had always wanted. They complemented each other in just about every way, but at the same time, Wade and Darrell couldn’t be more different.
Darrell had short dark hair, olive skin, and deep brown eyes that he got from his Thai father. Wade was fair-skinned, sandy-haired, and lanky. Darrell was five feet four and a guitarist of strange loud stuff that might be really excellent or might just be loud. Wade was three inches taller and owned an iPod full of Bach, because Bach was not loud, was the most mathematical of composers, and was someone his mother had taught him to love. Darrell was a junior tennis pro. Wade wore sneakers like a junior tennis pro. Darrell was comfortable with just about everyone. Wade felt more comfortable with Darrell than he did with himself. Finally, Darrell was usually smiling, even when he was sleeping, while Wade had invented neurotic worrying.
And he felt a sudden jolt of worry at exactly that moment.
While searching for the telescope’s operating manual on the desk, he’d accidentally moved the mouse on his father’s computer. The screen saver flickered away and an email message popped up. Without wanting to, Wade noticed the sender’s name.
Heinrich Vogel.
“No kidding?” Wade whispered. “Uncle Henry?”
“No. The name is Darrell,” said Darrell from the platform. “I thought being my stepbrother for three years you would know that.”
“No. Dad got an email from Uncle Henry. We were just talking about him. You know he’s not really my uncle, right? He was Dad’s college teacher in Germany. I haven’t seen him since I was seven.”
Darrell hopped down the stairs and peered over Wade’s shoulder. “Emails are private. Don’t read it. What does it say?”
Wade tried not to read it, but his eyes strayed.
Lca guygas eamizub zb.
Bluysna luynaedab odxx sio wands.
Juilatl lca Hyndblaub xanytq.
Rdse lca loaxma uaxdtb.
Qiz yua lca xybl.
Darrell frowned. “Does Dad read German? Or is that Russian?”
“Neither. It’s got to be some kind of code.”
“Code. Wait, is our dad a spy? He’s a spy, isn’t he? Of course he’s a spy, he never told me he was, which is exactly what a spy would do. I knew it. It’s that beard. No one really knows what he looks like under there.”
“Darrell, no.”
“He’s probably a double agent. That’s the best kind. No one’s a single agent anymore. Or, no, a triple agent. That’s even better. Wait, what is a triple agent—”
The door squeaked open. “So there you are!”
Wade shot up from the desk the moment his father entered the observatory. “Nothing!” he said.
Roald Kaplan had run track in high school, had been a champion long-distance runner in college, and still ran the occasional marathon. He was trim and tall and handsome behind sunglasses and a dark, close-cut beard. “Sara’s safely off on her flight to Bolivia. Thanks for hanging out here, while we did our last-minute zipping around. What are you guys up to?”
“Well,” Darrell piped in, “I found gum.”
“And I …,” Wade said, “… didn’t?”
Darrell cleared his throat. “Wade’s odd behavior means he’s worried. Which, I know, is not breaking news, but he found something bizarro on your computer …”
Wade pointed at the computer screen. “Dad, I’m sorry, but it was an accident that I saw the screen at all. I know I shouldn’t have read the email, but I saw it, and … what’s going on? It’s from Uncle Henry, but it looks like code.”
Dr. Kaplan paused for a long moment. His smile faded away. He leaned over Wade and tapped the keyboard. The email printed out on a nearby printer. Then he deleted the message and shut the computer off.
“Not here. Not now.”
(#ulink_ec3a697b-3ffd-5ef6-a8b3-f298ecf98f23)
“Can you at least tell us why Uncle Henry’s writing to you in code?” Wade asked when they got into the car. “Is he in trouble? Or in danger? Dad, are we in danger?”
“You worry too much,” said Dr. Kaplan, unconvincingly.
“Is Uncle Henry a spy?” asked Darrell. “Because if he’s a spy, that’s huge. A spy in the family would actually be terrific and awesomely cool. As you probably already know, I would make a perfect spy—”
“Boys, please,” Dr. Kaplan said, weaving through campus traffic and onto the streets. “I’m sure Uncle Henry is just fine, and I’m almost positive it’s some kind of joke message. In any case, it won’t make sense to you—or even to me—until we get home. There are a couple pieces of the puzzle I need to figure it out. Until then …”
Puzzle? Wade didn’t know what to say. He sat quietly looking out the window for the next twenty minutes as they drove from campus into the hills west of Austin.
Darrell did not sit quietly. “I think I have it. Uncle Henry is a professor in Germany, but he’s secretly doing spy stuff. He’s a master cryptographer, and he’s trying to recruit you to be a spy too. Dad, if you can’t do it, I’ll do it. Sure. I know professors make a good cover. They pretend to sit in their offices all sleepy over their books and stuff while secretly they’re running all kinds of spy missions. But middle school kids are even better. No one would ever suspect us. Wade, you could be a spy, too. Of course, you’d do the desk stuff while I go around the world with my band as a cover. Not that the Simpletones would be a cover band. We’d play all original stuff. They call that being in the field. I’d be a field agent. Agent being the technical term for �spy’ …”
Darrell hadn’t stopped talking, but as he was often forced to do when his stepbrother thrashed on guitar, Wade had to tune him out to be able to think.
Ever since Uncle Henry had given him the antique celestial map on his seventh birthday, Wade had been a fanatic about star maps and charts and the courses and routes of celestial bodies. He’d stayed up every night for weeks studying the map by moonlight and flashlight. Of course, he learned most things from his father, a brilliant astronomer, but it was probably Uncle Henry’s star map that stole his deeper imagination. The chart was old and strange and mysterious, and in his mind Wade associated all those qualities with the stars themselves. Between his father and Uncle Henry, Wade learned to love the night sky more than anything.
When they finally turned into the driveway of a sprawling home overlooking a shallow valley, Darrell practically exploded in the backseat. “Uncle Henry is a spy! Someone’s casing our house!”
As Dr. Kaplan slowed the car, a shape darted along the side garden and disappeared under the roof that hung over the front door.
Wade stiffened. “Dad, tear out of here—”
“Yoo-hoo!”
A girl in shorts and a stylishly slashed T-shirt strolled out from under the overhang to the car, wheeling an orange suitcase behind her.
It was Lily Kaplan, Wade’s first cousin, his father’s niece. “Surprise, people!”
“Lily? This is a surprise,” said Dr. Kaplan, rolling down the window.
“Like, what are you even doing here?” Darrell asked.
“Like, nice to even see you, too,” Lily said, snapping a picture of Darrell on her cell phone. “Oh, I’m posting that face.” Her thumbs flew over the phone while she talked.
“I’m supposed to be on vacation with my parents in Paris right now,” she said. “That’s in France. One of my school friends was even coming with me. We were going to shop. Well, I was going to shop. Big-time. But then Mom got the flu. Also big-time. Then Dad had to fly to Seattle for work. So good-bye France, and that’s why he called you, Uncle Roald, and … wait. You did talk to my dad? He said he was going to call you.”
Dr. Kaplan frowned. “I …” He fished out his cell phone and tapped it several times. “It must have run out of battery. I’m so sorry I didn’t get his message.”
Lily clucked her tongue. “No one should ever let his battery run down. I never let my battery run down. Your phone is like your brain. More important, even. Anyway, my dad dropped us here for the week and—ta-da!—here we are.”
Something sparked in Wade’s head. “Us? We? Here we are?”
Lily turned and made a little wave toward the house. “Becca came with me. Wade, you remember Becca, right?”
Of course he did.
Becca Moore.
The instant Becca walked out of the shade of the overhang, Wade stood up like a soldier at attention. He couldn’t stop himself. It was instinctive and weird. He knew it was. But more than being weird, it hurt, because Wade was still in the car. You don’t stand up in cars. Even convertibles, which his dad’s car was not. As Wade jammed his head into the ceiling, he knew it must look epically dumb.
Guys didn’t stand up for just anyone.
But then, Becca Moore was not just anyone. She was … interesting. His brain wouldn’t let him go any further than that.
Interesting.
Becca was born in Massachusetts and had moved to Austin when she was eight. She was tall and fair and had long brown, almost black hair tied in a loose ponytail. Wade was a little afraid of her because she was so smart, but she didn’t broadcast it and was almost as quiet as he was, which was another cool thing about her. As she walked over to the car, she was wearing a faded red 2012 Austin Teen Book Festival T-shirt, slim blue jean leggings, and mouse-gray ballet flats so soft they made no more sound than if she were barefoot.
Interesting.
Dr. Kaplan got out of the car and hugged both girls. “Well, we’re glad to have you visit. Come on in!”
Darrell couldn’t stop laughing as Wade unfolded himself from the car and limped to the front door.
No sooner had they all piled inside than Lily spun around. “Pose!” She snapped another picture with her phone. “So awesome. Wade with his eyes closed. Darrell looking like … Darrell.” Then she found a seat in the living room, tugged a sleek tablet computer from her bag, and instantly began to type on its touch-screen keyboard. She looked up. “I’m writing a travel blog. But you knew that, right?”
No one knew that. If Wade had realized he would end up on the internet, he might have combed his hair that morning. Or washed it.
Lily grinned as she typed. “Vacation Day One. The Big Disappointment. A week with my cousins Wade and Darrell. I can barely bring my fingers to type these words …”
Darrell frowned. “Ha. And also, ha.”
Tearing his eyes away from Becca, who sat quietly on the couch next to Lily, Wade watched his father move distractedly around the living room. The coded email from Uncle Henry was obviously on his mind. Of course it was. Code? What did code even mean, except keeping a secret from someone? Who would Uncle Henry and his dad need to keep secrets from?
When the snappy conversation between Lily and Darrell finally paused, he spoke up. “Dad, the email?”
“I need your celestial map,” his father said, as if he’d been waiting for a lull, too. “The star chart Uncle Henry gave you when you were seven.”
Wade blinked. “Really? Why?”
“You’ll see,” his father said.
(#ulink_11cfc76b-dc1e-59e0-bbba-05d2ad83c5d5)
In the quiet of his room, Wade slid open the top drawer of his desk. He removed the leather folder as he had the night before. The map, so precious and so rare, would now, suddenly, be the center of everyone’s attention. But why did Dad want the chart? Puzzling over this, he brought it into the dining room, where he found them all sitting around the table.
His father pulled out a chair for him. “Wade, open the map, please …”
He unzipped the folder and opened it flat, revealing the thick sheet of parchment creased over itself twice. He saw, as he hadn’t in the darkness of his room the night before, faint, penciled letters on the backside, reading, Happy Birth-day, Wade. Carefully, he unfolded the parchment on the table and spread it out faceup.
Becca leaned over it, her eyes glowing. “Wade, this is so gorgeous. Wow …”
“Thanks,” he said quietly.
Spread out, the map was about the size of a small poster. It had been engraved in 1515 and was exquisitely hand painted. The heavens were colored deep blue, and the original forty-eight constellations described by the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy were drawn and starred in silver inks. Crater, Lyra, Orion, Cassiopeia, all the others. Evenly spaced around the map’s edge was a sequence of letters in gold forming an incomplete alphabet, which had always puzzled Wade and about which his father had offered no real explanation.
“Okay, so,” Dr. Kaplan said, taking a deep breath. “First we have the email.” He produced the printed email from his blazer pocket, then carefully traced his fingers over the letters bordering Wade’s star map. “Uncle Henry gave you this chart for your birthday, knowing you would like it.”
“I love it,” Wade said almost reverently. “It’s what really got me super-interested in the stars.”
“I know,” his father said. “Maybe you don’t remember me telling you, but it wasn’t the first time I had seen this map. Heinrich showed it to me while I was still a student, quite a few years before you were born. He had a little apartment then; he still does.”
“Have you seen him since then?” Becca asked.
“Once, then letters, email once in a while,” he said. “Heinrich had always been a collector of antiques. One night twenty or so years ago, in front of me and some other students, he unfolded five identical printings, all hand-colored, of the same map from the sixteenth century. This map. As we all watched, he took out a pen, dipped it in gold ink, and without a word, inked an alphabet around the edge of each one.”
“But the alphabet is messed up,” Lily said. “It’s only got … seventeen letters.” On her tablet she typed in the gold-inked letters framing the star map, while Darrell did the same on a yellow pad.
C D F G H I J K M O P Q V W X Y Z
“Of course.” Dr. Kaplan slipped on a pair of reading glasses. “We noticed the same thing. Heinrich told us our alphabets were one part of a cipher—a code—of his own invention. He said we might have to use it someday. Before we ever needed it, he said, he would see that we each received one copy of the map. Then he put them away before we could really do any figuring. And that was that. I never thought much about the maps again until your seventh birthday, Wade, when he gave you this one. He brushed off any mention of the code then. I assumed it didn’t matter anymore.”
Darrell shook his head slowly. “But it does matter. And it proves I was right. He was a spy. He was pretending to be a professor, but he was a secret agent.”
Dr. Kaplan cracked a smile. “I really don’t think so. He’s retired now, but he was one of the foremost physicists of his day. When he first showed us the maps, he swore us to secrecy. He called our little group of five students Asterias. That’s the Latin name for the sea star. We were, Heinrich said, like the five arms of the starfish, and he was the head. It seemed a little silly at the time. A professor’s whimsy. But we were graduating and going our separate ways, so we all agreed. In the last few years I lost communication with most of them, and he’s never asked me to use the code. Until today.”
Wade breathed in to try to calm himself. It didn’t work. A hundred questions collided in his brain. “Are you saying that the cipher on the map will decode the email?”
“But not all the letters are there,” said Becca. “If it’s a standard substitution code, it needs all twenty-six letters.”
Everyone looked at her.
“Substitution code?” said Darrell. “Uh-huh. Putting aside for a moment what substitution codes even are, how do you know about them?”
Becca blushed a little. “I read. A lot. Last summer I read all the Sherlock Holmes stories. You know what I mean, right, Dr. Kaplan?”
He smiled. “I do. Sherlock Holmes solves substitution codes in several of the stories. When we asked Heinrich about the missing letters, he just winked and slyly tapped the side of his nose. We pressed him about what he meant, and he said, �when things are missing, you look for them!’ You’re all pretty brainy, so the first step for us is, what letters are missing?”
Lily had apparently already figured it out and told them with a grin. “A, B, E, L, N, R, S, T, and U!”
“Good,” Dr. Kaplan said. He wrote them on Darrell’s pad.
A B E L N R S T U
“Nine letters. The cipher begins as a fairly simple Caesar code, a substitution code originated a couple of thousand years ago by Julius Caesar for his private letters. Heinrich was a student of ciphers, and he modified this in his own way.
“So, the letters not on the map form a secret word or phrase. You unscramble the missing letters to find the words, then put them at the beginning of the alphabet to make the full twenty-six letters again.”
“Nine letters could spell a lot of words,” said Darrell.
Dr. Kaplan nodded. “But they should somehow be familiar to the person for whom the code is intended …” He paused, stroking his chin. “My diary. I kept a journal then, a student notebook, where I wrote down lecture notes and random things. It’s in my office. Hold on.” He left the room at a trot.
“We can start,” said Becca. “A, B, E, L, N, R, S, T, and U. Let’s think.”
The dining room went quiet, except for Darrell’s pencil scratching and occasional humming and Lily’s fingers tapping on the tablet’s screen. Becca frowned and looked off across the room.
Wade tried to think, but the image of Uncle Henry inking the maps in gold was mesmerizing. Was it by candlelight, their student faces glowing? Was his apartment as hushed as their dining room was right now? Why did he do it in the first place?
His father returned, leafing through a small black notebook. “Maybe the answer is somewhere in here …”
“I get the words rest, nut, and eat,” Darrell said finally.
“Of course you do,” said Lily. “I see ears.”
“I get lean burst,” said Becca with a smile. “Do I get a prize for using all the letters?”
Wade resisted jumping up and shouting, “Yes, you do!”
But the more he studied the letters, the more they began to shift places like the panels in one of those number slide puzzles. This was how his mind often solved math problems. His father said he was a natural at numbers. And now, apparently, at letters, too.
Common combinations … S … T … slid forward and back … vowels moved and moved again. Fixing his eyes on the letters, Wade went through them again, again, then click. Solved. Or sort of solved. He cleared his throat. “Well …”
Four faces looked at him.
“One thing the letters spell is blue star with an extra n,” he said. “I don’t know what the n stands for, but a blue star is a real thing. If a star appears blue, it means it’s approaching Earth.”
Dr. Kaplan stared at the letters on the pad, nodding. Then he turned to the last page in his notebook and smiled. “Oh, boy. Close. Very close. But look.”
As they watched him, he slowly rewrote blue star n as blau stern.
“Blau stern?” said Becca. “That’s blue star in German.”
“Exactly,” Dr. Kaplan said, showing them the words in his notebook. “Blau Stern was the name of the café in Berlin where we met after classes—”
“I knew it!” said Darrell. “Your spy hangout!”
(#ulink_1f23d573-6965-5b34-9c89-4673989ba57b)
Roald blew out a fast breath. “Hardly, Darrell. But we’ve done it. Good work. What we do now is take the secret phrase and add it to the beginning of the incomplete alphabet to make a full twenty-six letters.”
They rewrote the alphabet.
B L A U S T E R N C D F G H I J K M O P Q V W X Y Z
“Now we arrange the normal ABC alphabet under it?” asked Lily.
“Not quite,” Dr. Kaplan said. “Instead of a second alphabet, Heinrich added an extra step. We need a number key. We have to know how many letters we count from the coded letter to find the proper letter for the substitution.”
“Is there a number on the map?” asked Lily. “Maybe we already have the number key, but it’s hidden on Wade’s chart.”
“Smart, Lil.” Becca squinted over the map. Wade noticed a little thing she did when she was concentrating. A squiggle of her lips.
Dr. Kaplan stood. “Smart, yes, but there are hundreds of numbers on the map. Coordinates, degrees. I can’t help but feel that Uncle Henry would point to the number directly, with a specific clue—”
“Maybe he did, with this,” said Darrell. He flipped the corner of the map over. In faint script it read Happy Birth-day, Wade. “Mom told me that pencil marks are great on manuscripts. They last for years but they can be erased. Anyway, a birthday is a number.”
“Holy cow,” said Lily. “Wade, what’s your birthday?”
“October sixth.”
“Ten and six,” said Becca. “Sixteen. So the substitution for each letter is sixteen letters away? Let’s start.”
They counted sixteen letters from each letter of the first two words of the coded message.
Lca guygas …
became
Mzo apiaoq …
Darrell tried to pronounce it. “May-zo app-i-ay-ock?”
Lily turned to Roald. “This isn’t a language, is it?”
“No,” he said. “We must have gotten the substitution wrong.”
“Wait,” said Becca, tapping the map. “If your uncle likes codes and puzzles, maybe he meant everything about the message to be a clue, right? So what about the minus sign in �birth-day’?”
Wade leaned over the faint pencil marks. “Maybe that’s just the European way of writing it. Is it, Dad?”
His father raised an eyebrow. “Or maybe Heinrich is asking us to subtract the day from your birthday. In other words, October sixth isn’t ten plus six, it’s ten minus six. Let’s try four.”
They did.
Lca …
became
The …
“I know that word!” Lily screamed. “That’s it!”
Dr. Kaplan laughed. “So the number is four. We count off four letters from the letter in the code to give us the correct letter, like this.”
He scribbled on Darrell’s pad for the next few minutes, then showed them.
B = S
L = T
A = E
U = R
S = N
T = C
E = D
R = F
N = G
C = H
D = I
F = J
G = K
H = M
I = O
J = P
K = Q
M = V
O = W
P = X
Q = Y
V = Z
W = B
X = L
Y = A
Z = U
“If we’re right about this decryption code, where the email message uses the letter B, it really represents S, and so forth down the line. So when the whole message is translated …” Dr. Kaplan scratched away on the pad for several minutes. He breathed in and out more excitedly until he dropped his pencil and spoke.
“The kraken devours us.
Strange tragedies will now begin.
Protect the Magisters Legacy.
Find the twelve relics.
You are the last.”
Wade felt a twinge in the center of his chest. You are the last. That was never a good message, especially when it was in code. But the other words? Tragedies? Legacy? Relics?
“Magister,” said Darrell. “Is that like a magician?”
Dr. Kaplan shook his head. “More like a master. A title of respect. Like professor.”
“Okay, but we’re not calling you Magister, Dad.”
“And kraken?” said Lily. “What’s kraken?”
“Sort of a giant squid,” Becca said. “A sea monster. It’s in legends and stories and things.”
Wade blinked. Where does she get this stuff? Substitution codes and krakens? Is it really all that time she spends poring over books or is she an actual genius? Either way, she’s kind of amazing.
“How did your uncle know yesterday about the tragedies they’re talking about this morning?” asked Lily.
“What tragedies?” Darrell asked.
“The things going on all over. It’s been on the net all morning. Look.” Lily linked to a news page on her tablet and scrolled down. Below the political news was a photo report of a building collapse in the center of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. Below that were several pieces about an oil tanker sinking in the Mediterranean. “It’s pretty weird, isn’t it, that they both happened at kind of the same time as his message? They’re tragedies, right?” Lily looked from one to the other of them. “I think they are.”
“They are, of course,” Dr. Kaplan said over the tablet. “But I don’t know …”
“Call him,” said Wade. “Call Uncle Henry now and find out what he means.”
“You absolutely have to, Uncle Roald,” Lily added.
Dr. Kaplan glanced at his watch. “It’s six hours later there. Afternoon. He should be home. All right.” He found the number in his notebook. Sliding his cell phone from his jacket pocket, he realized once again that it was dead and plugged it into its charger. Then he went into the living room and keyed the number into the home phone. He put it on speaker, and set it on the coffee table.
It rang five times before a woman answered, “Ja?”
“Hello,” said Dr. Kaplan. “I would like to speak to Herr Heinrich Vogel, please. It’s urgent.”
There was a pause. “Nein. No. No Herr Vogel. I em Frau Munch. Howze kipper.” The woman had a thick accent. It took a moment for Wade to understand her.
“Housekeeper,” he whispered.
“Can you please give Dr. Vogel a message?”
“No mess edge.”
“It’s short. Please tell him to call me. My name is—”
“Herr Vogel no call. Herr Vogel iz ded!”
(#ulink_aa98e9a7-c118-5aae-ac77-12ef4bdf29a2)
Wade turned to his father. “Dad?”
Dr. Kaplan appeared to freeze for a moment. Then he slipped off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, the phone crackling on the table. “Excuse me, I don’t think we heard you. Are you saying … Heinrich …”
“Ded. Ja. Ja.” The voice rasped from the other end. “Ze fun … fun …”
Becca silently mouthed the word, “Fun.”
“Fun … fun … eral. Tomorrow mornink. Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof. Here. Berlin. Elfen glock.”
“Eleven o’clock?” said Lily.
“Ja, ja.”
“Wait. This can’t be right,” said Wade. His chest was burning. “I mean how? How did he die? When?”
The voice on the other end went in and out.
“Frau Munch,” his father said, leaning over the phone. “Frau—”
“Hurry. You vill mizz ze boorial!”
The line clicked. She had hung up.
The children stared at one another, listening to the dial tone until the phone blinked and the connection was severed. Lily set it back in its cradle.
Wade felt suddenly dizzy, as if freezing water streamed down his back, while the inside of his chest was on fire. “Dad?” He lowered himself onto the sofa and felt Becca’s hand touch his shoulder.
Uncle Henry … dead?
Dr. Kaplan slumped down next to him, nearly buried by the cushions. “Wade, I’m so sorry. This is … unbelievable. How could Heinrich be dead?” He looked at the wall clock. “I can’t go … not with you here and Sara flying off to South America.” He seemed as deflated as the pillows around him.
Darrell picked up the translated email and read over its few words. “I mean, I didn’t know Uncle Henry, but something about this isn’t right. He sends you a strange email, a coded message, and now he’s dead? This is way too suspicious.”
Wade stood up from the sofa. Becca’s hand slipped away. “Dad, what do you think we should do?”
His father pressed his fingers to his temples and rubbed them in slow circles. “Kids, I don’t know yet. It’s too sudden. But I’m fairly sure there’s no time to do anything. Certainly not while your mom’s away.” He took in a deep breath. His face was drawn and gray.
“At least call her,” said Darrell. “She needs to know.”
Roald glanced again at his watch as if trying to find more information there than it could deliver. “She’ll be in the air now, but I’ll leave a message. Lily, could you look up the flight to La Paz, Bolivia, and see when her first layover is?”
“Sure thing.” She tapped and swiped her screen.
Roald dried his eyes and dialed Sara’s number. “Sara, hi. I know you’re in the air now, but call me when you get to your first stop—”
“Atlanta in two hours,” Lily reported. “But there’s a storm.”
He nodded. “Everybody’s fine, but a dear old professor of mine has … passed away. Heinrich Vogel. You’ve heard me talk about him. His funeral is tomorrow. In Germany. Of course, I’m not going to leave the kids for a second. Lily and her friend Becca are here, too. I feel I should go but, well, call me from Atlanta when you land, and we’ll sort this out.” He hung up.
“Does anybody seriously think his death has anything to do with the email and the code?” Becca asked. “It’s kind of too James Bond to be real.”
“Bond is real,” Darrell whispered.
“I wish his housekeeper had told us more,” said Wade. “Why didn’t she tell us?”
“And these things in the news?” Lily said. “They can’t really be connected to Uncle Henry.”
“I can’t imagine how they could be,” Roald said. “They sound like accidents, tragic, but unrelated.” He flipped page after page of his notebook. “The Magister’s Legacy. Magister. That sounds slightly familiar.” He started pacing as he read. “Heinrich, what are you trying to tell us …?”
Wade knew his father always paced when he was thinking through math problems. This was something else entirely.
“Bring us with you,” Becca said suddenly.
Roald turned. “What?”
Lily jumped up. “Yes! Six of us were going to fly to France, but we got airline credit instead. I bet that’s more than enough for a bunch of tickets to Germany. We have our passports already. We should go, Uncle Roald!”
Dr. Kaplan laughed nervously. “No, no, no.”
The boys looked at each other. “Dad, we all got passports for Mexico last year,” said Darrell. “And you could use some backup. Europe is all about spies, isn’t it?”
“Maybe not so much anymore,” said Becca.
“No, there are tons of movies,” Darrell said. “They call it the—”
“The Cold War,” Becca said. “That’s over now.”
“Or maybe that’s what they want you to believe—”
“Kids, really? Spies? Backup? Heinrich was an old man. It might just have been his time to go. What do you think this is all about?”
Wade didn’t know what it was all about.
He didn’t know anything except that Uncle Henry died right after they got a coded message, and his father wanted to go to Berlin for the funeral of his old friend. Of their old friend. Uncle Henry was connected from the beginning with his own deep love of astronomy.
“Maybe we can fly there, Dad,” he said quietly. “After Atlanta, Sara’s going to be unreachable for a week anyway. Uncle Henry told us to find some relics. Well, Europe has tons of relics. Dad, really. I think we should go.”
“Wade …” His father trailed off, his eyes turning from his notebook to the email message on the table and the coded star chart spread out next to it. “Maybe I can ask my assistant, Joan, to stay for a couple of days to watch over you. You remember her. She’s young and fun. Well, youngish. And she has a poodle now—”
Darrell snorted. “Dad, remember last vacation? She ran screaming out of here after only two hours with Wade and me. I think we’d better go with you.”
“No one’s going to Europe!” Dr. Kaplan said, wiping his eyes again. “We can’t.”
Lily sidled over and patted his arm with her tablet. “But we could, Uncle Roald. He was your teacher, your friend, and Wade’s uncle. We can so do it. According to the airline website the next flight is completely doable. We can totally make it. I’ve got the credit codes for tickets right here. I just checked, my dad is fine with it. I think we should all pack our chargers and go.”
“You already checked with your dad?” Roald said.
Seeing his father’s expression beginning to soften, Wade wanted to hug Lily. If Becca had said what Lily just had, he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself.
His father stood in the center of the room, his eyes shut, his head tilted up.
Wade knew the look. His father needed quiet while he worked out the last few elements of a problem. He was brilliant that way. On the other hand, if his father thought like that for too long, he might anticipate the hundreds of reasons not to fly to Berlin with a bunch of kids and remember someone to stay with them while he went alone.
“Dad, I want to go,” Wade said.
“Me, too,” said Darrell. “I think we should. All of us. As a family.”
“Boys …” Roald started, then wrapped his arms around them. “All right. Yes. Yes.”
“I’ll book the flights now and call a cab,” said Lily. “Better pack. Only a little over two hours to takeoff!”
(#ulink_ec27d228-20ce-59ea-b671-023940e99395)
Nowotna, Poland
March 9th
10:23 p.m.
Frost was forming over the rutted fields of northern Poland.
Three giant klieg lights cast a brilliant glow on a stone-faced man in a long leather overcoat, making his trim white hair look like the peak of a snow-capped mountain. He stared down at the dirt being excavated shovelful by shovelful from a pit.
“Fifteen days and nothing,” said a voice over his shoulder. “The men are exhausted. We should try another location.”
The white-haired man half turned, keeping his eyes riveted on the work below. “She told Dr. von Braun the exact spot. She knows these things. Would you like to tell her that we gave up?”
The second man shrank back. “No. No. I’m simply saying that perhaps the coordinates are wrong and there’s been a mistake.”
“Fraulein Krause makes no mistakes.”
“And yet fifteen days and still no—”
Clink.
The white-haired man felt his heart stop. The shovelers froze in their places, turning their eyes up to him. He clambered down into the pit, the workers helping him from ledge to ledge. He reached the bottom and shooed them away. Holding a flashlight in one hand, he took a soft brush from the pocket of his coat and cleared away centuries of dirt from the object lodged in the ground. First he revealed a corner. The object was rectangular. This quickened his heart. She had told him: a bronze casket the size of a Gucci shoebox. As a man of fine taste, he knew exactly the dimensions she meant. More brushing, more clawing gently at the centuries of caked dirt, and a bronze box revealed itself.
Carefully, he extracted it from the ground.
“Light! More light!”
Two work lights were refocused on the box. With the handle of the brush he cleared the dirt from the rim of the chest’s lid. Setting it on level ground, he undid the clasp that held the lid to the body of the chest. He drew in a long breath to calm his thudding heart and lifted the lid for the first time in five centuries.
Inside, amid the tattered remains of its velvet lining, was a leather strap, a sort of belt, half-rotted away as if it were the skin of a corpse. On it, however, and catching the spotlights’ beams as exquisitely as it would have on the day it was last seen, sat a large ruby in the shape of a sea creature with a dozen coiling arms.
A kraken.
The white-haired man turned. “You were saying?”
At the same moment a thousand miles south, the same starry sky looked down over the streets of an Italian city packing up for the night. Bologna on a warm March evening was heaven, mused a middle-aged woman at a café table. The street was deserted, save for the shopkeepers and café owners sweeping, turning their chairs over, and lowering their louvered security gates in preparation for tomorrow morning’s rush. She sat on a wicker chair, sipped the last drop of espresso from her cup, then set it down in its saucer and picked up her cell phone.
“Answer this time,” she said aloud. She pressed the name for the fourth time in the last ten minutes. Holding the phone to her ear, she heard the same message, brief and clipped. After the tone she said, “Call me, Henry. Please. It’s about Silvio. I have discovered something about his accident last year. Something he intended me to find after all this time. I need to speak with you as soon as you get this.” She ended the call.
Across the piazza, chimes sounded. She glanced up at the six-hundred-year-old tower, then at her phone. The clock, a nineteenth-century addition, wasn’t more than a minute off.
Cars were fewer now. She had to get going to her office, a short stroll from the café. Her lecture on Michelangelo’s poems was early the next morning, and there were final notes to assemble. Her husband, Silvio, a longtime reader of the artist’s poetry, would have loved to be there to listen. Now, she realized, there was only one reason he wouldn’t be.
As she reached into her bag for several coins, a black car rumbled up the cobbled street toward the cafГ©. It drove across the open square and shrieked to a halt, skidding on the stones. The rear door flew open, and a man wearing an oily black suit leaped out.
Instinctively, the woman screamed. “Aiuto! Help!”
From inside the café came the sound of a broom dropping, the quick scrape of chairs. “Que? Signora Mercanti?”
The oily man outside wrapped one arm around the woman’s face, the other around her waist. She kicked furiously with her heels, knocking over the small table. The man dragged her into the backseat. The car roared away.
When the cafГ© owner rushed out three seconds later, all he saw was an overturned table and a small saucer spinning on the pavement.
(#ulink_b5745c47-79b4-503c-bb01-0d7775b7c43e)
Becca Moore nearly screamed, “I’m going to Europe!” when she caught herself and slapped her hands over her mouth. “I’m so sorry!”
“For what?” asked Wade, looking up from his backpack.
The house was in a minor uproar as Wade, Darrell, and Dr. Kaplan rushed from room to room, grabbing clothes, stuffing duffel bags.
“I almost said something dumb,” she said. “Go pack.”
Becca knew her face was red. She always blushed when she made social mistakes. And even when she didn’t. Never mind that she had wanted to go to Europe since forever. Or that before they came to this country her grandparents were their own melting pot of French, German, Scottish, and Spanish. Or that Europe was home to all the cultures she adored. Or that it was the place they actually kept Paris and Rome and Madrid, not to mention Berlin.
She had never really believed that she would get to Europe with Lily, and when the trip was canceled she knew she had jinxed it by not believing it would happen in the first place.
Lily! She sat on the couch next to her, sorting through her own luggage. What a kind of angel to invite me in the first place.Me! The total opposite of her cool, together, plugged-in self!
Yet now, mere hours after that disappointment, here they were, going again! Having met Roald Kaplan through Lily’s dad, her parents were fine with the change in plans. There was nothing stopping her.
But how thoughtless she nearly was!
A man had died. Dr. Kaplan’s old teacher. Wade’s sort-of uncle.
“It’s okay,” said Wade, pausing in his packing to reach his hand toward her arm—which Lily glared at—but not quite making contact. Becca had noticed that about him. He was … reachy. But from a distance. She smiled at him, but he’d already looked away.
I have a goofy smile anyway. Which is why I don’t use it a lot.
“He’s mostly okay,” Lily whispered when Wade left the room. “But, you know, he’s all mathy and stuff like his dad.” She wiggled her fingers in the air over her head then leaned closer. “Darrell, kind of a mystery, no? Bottom line, you and me will have to stick together to stay sane.”
Becca laughed. “Deal.”
Dr. Kaplan came in to retrieve his notebook. When he saw the girls, he breathed out a kind of sad laugh. “Sorry, not the best reason to go to Europe. You should stuff what you need into a carry-on. We need to travel light. Two days max, and we’re home.”
“Already done, Uncle Roald,” Lily said with a smile.
For Becca it was easy. Three tops, extra jeans, sweater, assorted junk, comb, small bag, book. While everyone ran around gathering last-minute things and setting timers and locking and relocking doors, she watched Wade carefully pack the decoded email and the star chart in the leather folder and slip it into his backpack as calmly as if he were a kind of planet and they were all moons orbiting him.
Beep!
Lily gasped. “Taxi! Here we go!”
The first flight they’d been able to book from Austin-Bergstrom International was United Airways Flight 766, leaving at 12:15 p.m. After a layover in Washington, D.C., to change planes, they were due to arrive in Berlin just before eleven o’clock the next morning, meaning they’d have to rush to be at the Alter St.-Matthäus cemetery on time.
The airport was a madhouse. Becca knew it would be and steeled herself against the noise as best she could. Anywhere crowded made her feel a little crazy and a little edgy. So many people, so many eyes. From the moment they entered the terminal, she didn’t think, she didn’t listen, she just followed Lily through ticketing and security.
“I’ve done this a few times,” Lily whispered to her as they hustled along. “You see all kinds of people in airports. The best advice I can give? Don’t make eye contact.”
“I normally don’t,” Becca said. “Anywhere.”
Lily laughed. “I noticed. It’s fine. I’ll tell you when it’s okay to look up. We’ll be at the gate soon. You can relax. Gawk at Wade or something.”
“Gawk?”
“Kidding!” Lily laughed halfway down the next hallway.
Wade? Was it obvious? NO EYE CONTACT!
(#ulink_b2fc4864-bf32-5ca7-afd4-afdca0bf1b36)
Minutes later they arrived at the gate. Keeping her head low, Becca sat next to Lily, immediately opened her backpack, and slipped out her book. It was a big one, guaranteed to take days. Reading, if it was possible at all, was the best for turning off the noise.
She opened to page 190. Chapter XXXII.
Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities.
Odd line to be reading just now, she thought.
“A little light reading?” said Darrell, from the seat next to her in the waiting area. “Is that a history of the universe or something?”
“No …”
Wade tilted his head to read the title. “Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville. That’s a guy’s quest to find a giant whale, isn’t it? But then he finds the whale, the ship sinks, and everybody dies?”
“Not everybody,” said Becca. “This is my second time through.”
“Actually,” said Darrell, “my mom once worked with a manuscript by Herman Melville. Dickens too. Well, everybody. After Bolivia, she’s flying to New York to talk to Terence Somebody about donating his stuff to the university library. She’s the chief archivist in the rare books department.”
Becca flicked a glance up at him and smiled. “I know. Your mom is so cool.”
Darrell beamed. “I made her my mom, you know. She was just a regular person before I came along.”
Wade squinted at him. “You have such a weird take on stuff.”
The first boarding call was announced and Dr. Kaplan sat up. “I’m calling Sara again, just to touch base and tell her what we’re up to.”
It was clear that Wade’s father was worried about doing such a huge thing without his wife’s input. That was kind of nice. They seemed really close, and Becca figured they must talk about everything. But not this time. The call went to voice mail again. He talked for a bit, asked her at least to text, and closed the phone.
“Mrs. Kaplan will get the message before we get to Washington,” she said, “and you can talk to her during the layover.”
“Oh, go ahead and call her Sara,” Darrell said. “Everybody but me does.”
“Thanks,” Dr. Kaplan said, smiling just like a dad, she thought. “Do call her Sara. And me Uncle Roald, or just plain Roald. I’ll tell you, I will feel better when she knows exactly what we’re doing.”
Which is … going to Europe! she screamed inside.
“Passengers for Flight Seven Sixty-Six to Washington, D.C., and those continuing on to Berlin, we are now boarding group three.”
Twenty minutes later, as the plane was taxiing into position for takeoff, Wade and Darrell leaned all over each other—and Lily—to get the best view of the city while they took off. It was the last thing Becca wanted to look at. She didn’t mind riding in cars. She kind of liked buses. Trains she really loved. Giant birds made of heavy steel that somehow defied gravity? Not so much.
The engines whined impossibly loudly, and the jet started rolling fast. She gripped the seat handles.
“That’s my arm, you know,” said Lily.
“Sorry—”
“You get used to it. Settle in. Next stop, Washington!”
Her stomach was feeling somewhere between weightless and sinking as the jet rose. After a few minutes she realized that the noise was there to stay, making talking uncomfortable for anybody but Darrell, who seemed to be keeping Wade from paying attention to anyone else. Fine. Even Lily, who loved to chat, finally gave up and just typed her blog post.
The engines droned for the longest two hours in history before she managed to doze off.
“Finally!” Dr. Kaplan said when the jet touched down at Washington’s Reagan airport, where they had to switch planes. As soon as he turned on his phone it buzzed with a missed call. He listened for a minute, pressed a button, spoke several words, then ended the call.
“Because of storms in Atlanta, Sara nearly missed her connection to Bolivia and had to run,” he said. “She’s already in the air again and will probably be off the grid until the end of the week at the earliest. So it’s just us. Let’s use the restrooms, eat, then get some newspapers for the flight. See if we discover any more disasters. Maybe find a link.”
Their layover was shortened when the Atlanta storm system threatened D.C. They hurried back to the gate from the food court, stopping quickly at a news kiosk on the way.
Because her grandparents lived in Austin and babysat often over the years, Becca had learned several foreign languages early. Her French wasn’t great—her German and Spanish were better—but she could read it more or less without a dictionary, so when she saw a copy of Le Monde, she bought it. Not that she knew exactly—or even vaguely—what they were looking for. Tragedies? The whole world was tragic some days. And here she was going digging for more.
“Final boarding call for Flight Three-Fifty-Four to Berlin.”
“We’re off!” Dr. Kaplan ushered them into the Jetway. The cabin door closed soon after they took their seats, and the jet taxied out on the slick runway.
“You can hold my arm if you want to,” Lily whispered to her.
She laughed. “It’s okay. I’m a pro now.”
Hardly. Her lungs felt squashed during the long climb to cruising altitude, and her brain pounded like hammers on an anvil.
“Breathe,” Lily said. “You’ll stay alive better.”
“Thanks.” They finally leveled out. “Maybe I’m not such a pro.”
“Guys, listen to this,” Darrell said, a London paper in his lap. “The oil tanker in the Mediterranean near Turkey that we heard about? They know now that it had seventeen people on board. That’s pretty tragic.”
Then Wade folded his newspaper over and showed it to them. “Is this anything? There was an accident between a truck and a stretch limo outside of Miami. So, the truck driver disappears from the scene but they find him wandering a hundred miles away at almost exactly the same time as the accident.”
“It probably wasn’t even him driving the truck,” said Lily.
Wade shook his head. “There were witnesses at the accident who identified him. Plus, he had the truck keys with him.”
“Okay, that’s a little freaky,” said Lily.
Dr. Kaplan took Wade’s newspaper and read the article. “Heinrich was a dear friend, but he retired some years ago. He kept to himself. I hate to say it, but maybe his email might just have been him getting old. You know, it happens. And he passed away, and there’s no link between these things at all.”
Becca found herself stuck on the words “passed away.” They sounded so peaceful and so unlike the coded message. Devours. Tragedies. Protect. Find. Besides that, they didn’t really know how he died, did they? His housekeeper hadn’t said a word about that.
She was about to close Le Monde when a short news item caught her eye. “It’s not huge, but there was a death at the newspaper’s office in Paris. A person from the night staff accidentally fell down an open elevator shaft. He was killed.”
“Wade, remember this,” said Darrell. “I do not want to go like that. No way.”
“I’ll try to make sure you don’t,” Wade said.
Roald turned. “One of the five in our little group from twenty years ago works at Le Monde. I wonder if he knew the man who died. I haven’t talked to him in ages. His name was Bernard Something—”
“Bernard Dufort?” Becca asked.
“Yes! We called him Bernie. Is he quoted—”
Her blood went cold. “Bernard Dufort was the man who fell down the elevator shaft. Police are calling it an accident, but the investigation is continuing.”
Something happened to Dr. Kaplan then, Becca thought, and it was different from the other weird news about truck accidents and building collapses. His face grew instantly dark and he seemed to fall inside himself. Was it because the bad news was starting to connect? Strangely connect? The email. The death of Heinrich Vogel. The newspaper stories. And now Bernard Dufort.
Darrell leaned to him. “Was Bernie a good friend of yours?”
Roald closed his eyes for a second. “Not really. I mean, a bit. He was just one of us in Heinrich’s little Asterias group, you know?”
“Do you think that’s what he was talking about?” Wade asked. “�The kraken devours us. You are the last.’ Maybe this is what he meant. The last of Asterias. Are you in danger?”
“No, Wade, no,” his father said firmly. “Of course not.”
“But do you keep up with the other people in the group?” asked Darrell. “How do we find out—”
Roald raised a finger, and they all went quiet.
“These newspaper things, I can’t really say. Uncle Henry and Bernard, that’s a different story. Once we’re on the ground there, we’ll probably learn what really happened. In the meantime, we’ll be fine if we stay together.”
“We won’t be any trouble, honest,” Lily said, glancing at the rest of them with a quick nod of her head.
“Heinrich was a good man,” Roald said firmly. “A good human being. Let’s pay our respects. And then we’ll see what we see. You’re right about not being any trouble, Lily. You four are not leaving my sight. Not for a second.”
He breathed calmly, smiled at each of them, then slid his student journal from his jacket pocket, pulled his glasses up, and started reading.
The food carts began rattling down the aisle, and Becca leaned back to read Moby-Dick. She stopped pages later when the ship’s crew neared the environs of the great white whale.
With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.
Monster. Moby Dick was a giant whale, a sea monster. As she read the words over, she wondered once again what Uncle Henry meant in his message when he said kraken.
(#ulink_5cf1ba22-15dd-54af-aa36-2688c4ada10f)
For as long as he could stand it, Ebner von Braun was immersing the thin burned fingers of his left hand in a bowl of ice water that he carried with him.
Ceramic. Venetian. Thirteenth century.
Four very odd years with Galina Krause had taught him something of the arts of ages past. “Use this,” she had said, a baffling act of compassion, he’d thought, until she added, “and stop whining about your disgusting fingers.”
The elevator stopped. Subbasement Three.
The door slid aside and, as usual, the dull white ceiling lights of the laboratory made him oddly nauseated. The lab smelled of temperature control, clean-room disinfectant, and fear.
Not to mention the infernal buzzing, a white noise that Ebner wasn’t certain came from the lab or from him. His ears had begun to ring nearly four years earlier, after one of the Order’s experiments. It was now like a continuous waterfall of ball bearings from a great height into the center of his head. The sound was always there. An evil companion. A familiar spirit, as the old stories of Doctor Faustus termed it.
Like seven similar installations across the globe, this control room was large and white and completely devoid of personality. Unless you counted the artfully unshaven young scientist sitting at a long bank of computers.
Ebner had chosen Helmut Bern from the most brilliant of recent graduates, but while he was certain of Bern’s uncommon talent for digital surveillance and electronic decryption, Ebner was still unsure about the darkness of the young man’s soul. He watched the slender hands move over the keyboard. Swift, yes. Accurate, undoubtedly. But how dedicated?
“Sir?” Helmut said, twisting his chair around.
“Is the computer ready?”
“It is, sir.” The young scientist tapped a slim silver briefcase on the counter next to him. “It contains everything you requested. Battery life is essentially infinite. No blind spots anywhere across the globe. I’m curious, why did you have me construct such a thing at this particular time?”
Ebner glared. “You’re curious? I’m curious. Have you reconstructed Vogel’s hard drive?”
Seeming disappointed, the scientist glanced at the ceramic bowl Ebner cradled in the crook of his arm. “Very soon. Sir.”
On the neighboring monitor was a live-camera feed of the former Edificio Petrobras in Rio de Janeiro. Construction crews and crime scene investigators swarmed the crumbled gray stone and glass in what Ebner knew would be a futile effort to find the cause of the collapse.
“Vogel’s final email?”
“Coded.”
“Crack the code.”
“By morning.”
“Morning?”
“At the latest.”
While Ebner might have adored the speed of this conversation in a film, spare questions and clipped commands were his thing.
Young Helmut Bern, no matter how brilliant he may have been in his own unshaven way, had no business mimicking his style. It stunk of irony. Only those in command were allowed the privilege of irony. Workers, no matter how little or how much they were paid, were still workers, unwashed masses of common folk, and their duty was to obey him with smarmy respect. Even sniveling was preferable to snarkiness.
Smiling to himself, Ebner drew his hand from the ice bowl, shook his fingers, and set the bowl on the young scientist’s desk. Slowly, he took out from his breast pocket a blue leather-bound notebook, turned to the first blank page, and wrote the name “Helmut Bern.” Next to it he set down the words “Iceland. Station Four.” He added a question mark for good measure and closed the notebook.
“The tanker off the coast of Cypress?”
“Good news,” Bern said, clacking his keyboard. The image dissolved into text, and he read from it. “Our divers have already made contact with the hull, and undersea building has begun. Habitation can occur as early as next week. Would you care to examine our current experiment?”
So many experiments. So many missions around the world undertaken on Galina Krause’s specific orders. His ears shrieked.
“The Australian Transit? Yes.” Ebner stepped toward the inner laboratory. It was walled in tinted glass to shield the radioactivity of the light beams.
“Excuse me, Doctor …?”
Ebner paused, half turned his head. “Yes?”
“The twelve items. I mean, why now? After all this time.”
Ebner wondered if he should say anything. Would it be unguarded to speak? Silence was a kind of power, after all. Miss Krause had taught him that.
But bringing someone into your confidence, that was power, too. He decided, for the moment, to be distant. “Miss Krause recognizes an urgency. There is a singular alignment of causes.”
Helmut Bern stroked his unshaven chin. “Do you mean to say there is a timetable?”
I say what I mean to say!
Ebner brushed it off. “Life is a timetable. You should concern yourself with your own.” He liked the way that sounded, even if he was unsure exactly what it meant. It had its desired effect nevertheless. Helmut Bern bit his tongue, turned to the screen, and said no more.
Ebner walked through the open door of the inner lab.
The gun—if he could call it that, a ten-foot spoked wheel of platinum alloy in whose center stood a long, narrow cylinder of steel, coiled with a helix of ultrathin glass fiber—occupied one half of the room. In the other sat a cage of white mice, the most intelligent of their experimental patients. Ebner laughed to himself. Little good will intelligence do them where they’re going.
The elevator door slid aside in the first room. The nameless driver leaned in, spotted Ebner. “Time,” he said.
Ebner withdrew from the inner laboratory.
Time. It’s always time.
He passed Helmut Bern’s desk, dipped his hand into the bowl of lukewarm water, removed it, and shook the drops from his fingers. “I must return this priceless bowl to Miss Krause now,” he said, staring down at Bern. “It must be empty.”
“Sir?”
“Remove the water,” Ebner said as softly as he could.
Bern pushed back his chair. “Sir?”
“Here. Now.”
The young unshaven scientist, glancing from the nameless driver at the door to Ebner, lifted the bowl. He brought it to his lips and drank down the water.
“You’re welcome,” said Ebner.
“Uh …” Bern murmured. “Thank you, Dr. von Braun.”
Ebner could not help his own lips. They curved into a thin smile. He now wondered whether Iceland was in fact the proper place for Helmut Bern.
Taking the empty bowl and the silver-cased computer, he joined the driver in the elevator, pressed Up, and left.
(#ulink_d2bd9f6d-0273-5c4a-ac9e-99fe4cb547bc)
Berlin was gray. It was cold. It was raining.
When the kids pushed out of the enormous arrival terminal the next morning in search of a taxi, the air hit them heavily with diesel exhaust and cigarette smoke and the odor of strong coffee.
Becca took a shallow breath. “I read that Europe smells like this.”
Roald nodded. “It takes me back. I wish we weren’t here for this reason.”
“One cab left,” Wade called out, hurrying with Darrell to a small car with a short man standing next to it.
No one spoke as the taxi zigzagged out of the airport complex and raced onto the highway toward the city. They passed several clusters of identical high rises surrounded by small parks of bare trees.
“Not too attractive,” Lily said.
Roald explained that much of Berlin had been rebuilt after the Second World War with a sense of function rather than style. The sober buildings made Berlin seem that much more cold and sad.
The cab exited the highway and entered rain-slicked streets by the railroad and after that a series of cobblestone roads in what Becca guessed was an older part of the city.
Pulling to an abrupt stop before a tall set of iron gates, they arrived at the cemetery just before eleven thirty. They got out, hoisting their carry-on bags over their shoulders.
Inside the grounds stood a soot-stained church-like building that looked as if it had been there for centuries but which Lily’s tablet said was a “mere hundred and fifty years old.”
Beyond the chapel, the graves and markers stretched away into several heavily wooded acres.
Wade pointed across the park. “People are gathering over there.” His words were strangely muffled in the cold air. “There’s a path.”
Many of the gravestones were placed in orderly rows stretching away from the path. Others with faded words and numbers seemed to have grown right out of the ground. Some stones had rain-soaked stuffed animals placed among the wreaths.
Children’s graves.
One well-worn trail slithered between the trees like a snake, ending at four tall unadorned stone blocks, two of which were inscribed with names Becca knew well: Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, the brothers who had collected folk tales in the middle of the nineteenth century. Lily snapped a picture before hurrying on.
As they crossed the grass and threaded through a stand of tall trees, Becca breathed in a scent of pine needles and tried to steady herself. She felt almost light-headed.
What was it about graveyards?
What was it? She knew exactly what it was.
When her younger sister, Maggie, had fallen ill two years ago, Becca had been terrified of losing her. She cried herself to sleep more nights than she could remember and had begun to dream of places like this—avenues of stone, the murmuring of small voices—and didn’t stop dreaming about them until her sister was fully recovered and out of danger. Some of her fear she hid from her parents, who were struggling in their own way with a possible unbearable loss. Maggie was fine now, and yet …
Lily touched her on the arm. “There they are.”
A small group of mourners clustered under the boughs of several towering beech trees. Nearby stood a sad old mausoleum overgrown with vines. The name carved into the stone over its doors was all but unreadable. A crumbling sundial stood at an angle in front of it. Time. Death. Tombs. Loss.
Melville’s words came back to her. Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost …
Something moved. Beyond the old tomb a handful of men in overalls stood among the trees, groundskeepers, probably waiting for the service to be over. Maggie’s face hovered in her mind, but Becca whooshed it away with a rapid shake of her head. No. She’s fine. This funeral is not for her. This is for Heinrich Vogel. An old man. Wade’s uncle.
“I don’t recognize anyone here,” Dr. Kaplan whispered. “I guess all of his old professor friends are gone now, but I expected …” He removed his glasses, wiped his cheeks. “I expected to see another student or two.”
Becca patted his arm, remembering the email. You are the last.
Roald and the boys advanced. Lily hung back. “I know this isn’t right,” she whispered, sliding her bag off her shoulder and pulling her phone out. “I mean, I know it’s a funeral, but I want to get this.”
“Lily, I don’t know …”
But she took a slow video of the mourners as the priest began.
“Guten Morgen, liebe Freunde …”
Becca’s grandmother Heidi had taught her a good bit of German, though making out conversations was always tougher than reading. People spoke so quickly and always talked on and on, moving forward, never going back, like you could do if you were reading a book.
We are something, something here … friend … scientist … teacher … his life of “Gelehrsamkeit” … scholarship …
Becca’s mind drifted. Ever since her sister’s recovery, she had been drawn to cemeteries, even though they frightened her. Maybe it was a kind of gratitude that she hadn’t had to visit her sister in one. But an actual service was sad and she didn’t need to be more sad. She rubbed her eyes, realized once more that she hadn’t slept for many hours and wondered when they would have a chance to rest.
… final rest … soul’s long journey …
No, no. Please don’t go there. Blinking her eyelashes apart she gazed beyond the tilted sundial to a tomb with a broken column sticking up from it. Next to that leaned a stone with a weeping angel sitting on top. Loss and grief no matter where she looked …
A man appeared at the edge of the wooded path to their left. He walked slowly toward the mourners, then stopped midway, his eyes moving over her and the Kaplans.
Becca turned to see Lily still filming. “That guy over there stopped coming when he saw your camera.”
Darrell stepped back to them. “You saw that, too? Here come his friends.”
Two other men joined the first. One was a heavyset man with a chiseled face, wearing a slick black suit. The other was pale, smaller, and hunched over like a bent wire. The pale man spoke to the other two, who both stepped behind a tomb at the same time, as if they were connected.
Becca watched the pale man pick his way carefully over the wet grass to the gravesite and stand close-by. His hands were folded, his head down. During a pause in the priest’s words, the man raised his eyes to Becca, then to Roald and Wade, then lowered his face. She felt a weird tingle crawl up her back, as if in that instant he had looked directly through her. His glasses were thick and his posture twisted, although he was not an old man. His left temple bore a nasty V-shaped bruise, stippled with dots. It looked recent.
“Amen …”
The priest dribbled holy water on the casket from a small silver vessel, murmured a final blessing, and it was over. The sky seemed to darken at the same moment. The chill rain came down harder.
The crowd dispersed quickly, some to cars, others on foot on the paths and sidewalks toward the exits. Several people hailed taxis on the street. Soon the cemetery was empty except for them, the workers, and the three men by the weeping angel, still eyeing them.
She stepped toward Wade and his father. “Uncle Roald, those guys are watching us.” By the time Roald lifted his head, slid his glasses back on, and turned to look, the men had gone.
(#ulink_96da9b69-a677-5c8e-98da-ec6bdd5a5788)
To get out of the rain, Darrell squirrelled himself under the broad lintel of a haunted mausoleum next to the others who, he guessed, were silent because they were wondering what to do next. He was pretty sure what they should do next.
“Ever since we had that bizarro conversation with Uncle Henry’s housekeeper on the phone, I keep thinking she’s got to know something.”
“We’ll go to the apartment,” Dr. Kaplan said. “But we’re checking into a hotel first. We rushed to get here on time, but we can slow down now. We’ll clean up, then head over to his place.”
“Which brings me to my next point. There’s got to be a restaurant in this city, right?” Darrell added. “Germans make good food. Maybe they don’t. It doesn’t matter. I’ll eat whatever. Did anyone like the food on the airplane? Let me rephrase that. Did anyone eat the food on the airplane—”
“Darrell, you’re doing it again,” said Lily.
He stopped talking, but his brain kept going. I ate it, but it wasn’t good and it wasn’t enough. No one else is hungry? I’m hungry …
“Why wasn’t Frau Munch here, Dad?” Wade asked. “It’s strange, isn’t it? She answered his phone. Maybe she even lives there, or at least in his building.”
“Everything’s strange,” Darrell said. “It’s Europe.”
Roald turned to face the exit, looking as if he were holding his breath to keep himself together. “I’m sure she’ll tell us something that will just put an end to the mystery. First, a hotel. Let’s go.”
Darrell partly agreed with his stepfather—she’ll tell us something—but he wasn’t sure that the mystery would end soon. It probably wouldn’t. A coded email from a friend who was suddenly dead had to mean something in the spy capital of the world. Of course it did.
Thanks to Lily’s online searching, they found an inexpensive hotel and checked into two rooms, one for Lily and Becca, one for the boys and their father. Darrell wanted to drop his junk off and get right back out on the street—Strasse, Becca told him—but sitting on the bed was a mistake. He could almost hear it screaming at him to lie down on it. He sank into the soft mattress, hoping it was as bug-free as it appeared. By the time his eyes opened, it was already midafternoon and everyone else was waking up too.
Lunch in the hotel dining room was something drowned in heavy sauce, but there was a lot of it, so that was good. When they stepped onto the busy Strasse, it was nearing dinnertime, the restaurants were lighting up, and he was feeling hungry again, though apparently no one else was.
They found a cab to Uncle Henry’s, and at twenty minutes to five they pulled to a stop in front of squat, faceless building on a broad, divided avenue called Unter den Linden.
Roald glanced into his student notebook, checked the building number, and closed the book. “This is it.” He paid the driver and they climbed out. A string of sirens two or three blocks away went eee-ooo-eee-ooo, like in the movies. Police? Fire trucks? Spies?
No, spies don’t use sirens.
A woman bundled against the cold murmured something as she stole quickly around them and up the street. Was she a spy? Or just cold. He could see his breath and started stamping his feet.
“Heinrich lived on the third floor,” Roald said, stepping up to a wide door set between a pair of waist-high planters with evergreen bushes in them. He pressed the bell. It rang faintly inside. No answer. He rang again. Again, no answer.
“Now what?” asked Lily. “Should we wait for someone to go in and tag along?”
“Or force our way in,” Darrell added. “Wade, you and me—”
“You and me what?”
“Hold your horses,” Roald said. He knelt down and reached behind the planter to the left of the door, slid his fingers up the side, and stopped halfway. When he drew back, he was holding a key ring with two keys.
“Cool!” said Wade. “Hidden in plain sight. How did you know?”
“Heinrich always left extra keys for late-arriving students.”
“Like you?” asked Becca.
“Oh yes. We used to talk long into the night. All of us.”
Using one key for the outside door, they entered a deserted lobby barely illuminated by a small ceiling fixture.
“European electricity,” Darrell breathed. “From the Dark Ages.”
Lily chuckled. “As long as it charges our phones.”
They climbed two flights of narrow stairs. The steps creaked, and it was nearly as cold in the stairwell as it was outside, but the building was otherwise quiet. They stopped at apartment 32. Roald raised his hand to knock on the door, then murmured that the apartment was empty. He unlocked it instead, and they entered.
“Hello?” Wade said quietly. “Anyone?”
No sound. The rooms were dark and without heat. Lily found the nearest light switch, and a table lamp came on. The living room looked neat and orderly, as if it had just been cleaned, except for one extremely dusty table by the street window. Becca picked up a silver pitch pipe from it. “Was Heinrich Vogel in a barbershop quartet?”
“No. A modern music group,” Dr. Kaplan said. “But then, maybe I didn’t know him all that well—”
Clack. Thump. Clack. Thump.
Darrell’s heart flew into his throat. “Someone’s coming up the stairs!”
Before they could move, the door swung open, and an elderly woman with thin gray hair leaned into the room. She scanned the space from wall to wall as if she didn’t see any of them.
“Wer ist da?”
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