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Wade and the Scorpion’s Claw
Tony Abbott
The quest for the relics continues, picking up right where The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone left off. Now Wade, the curious, analytical yet starry-eyed member of the group, leads the chase for another relic through the busy streets of San Francisco while on the run from a treacherous henchman.Wade and the Scorpion's Claw picks up right where The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone left off, with the Kaplan family seeking the next Copernicus relic. Now Wade, the curious, analytical, yet starry-eyed member of the group, leads the chase for another relic through the busy streets of San Francisco while on the run from one of Galina Krause's most treacherous henchmen.
Copyright (#ulink_2550b5c9-5fda-595d-91be-6330af02a74b)
First published in paperback in the USA
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2014
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Text copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Illustrations copyright © Bill Perkins 2014
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014, Jacket art © 2014 by Bill Perkins, Logo art © 2014 by Jason Cook/Début Art, Front cover design by Tom Forget
Tony Abbott asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007581870
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007581887
Version: 2014-08-05
Table of Contents
Cover (#ua216035f-00ec-594d-a476-730f38bebcdd)
Title Page (#ub2d8dcca-e54f-5d57-a3b8-90b827b1fd29)
Copyright (#ueeb10e37-4703-58ed-8afc-a3dfa026ec77)
Chapter One (#u618edd95-a0c2-5e33-ab8d-2a95e7500394)
Chapter Two (#u2d53a689-e6dc-5b11-a812-0361d378fae0)
Chapter Three (#udecb4c43-46b1-5172-96d4-dc38d02e7b8f)
Chapter Four (#u852e6cf4-4c00-585b-9bbf-b75a0c5c2d96)
Chapter Five (#u7fdd5b69-ed0b-5041-8187-e6632f937c21)
Chapter Six (#uf6767596-72ce-524f-a62e-d9a745b2e8ac)
Chapter Seven (#ue53cfd5d-78e4-561b-9a65-5f304e44bf3e)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
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)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
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Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean
Sunday, March 16
3:51 a.m.
It was only a dream—a dumb, exhaustion-fueled dream.
But knowing me, the way I hold on to stuff forever, I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. I’ll probably always remember it as thedream.
To begin with, my name is Wade Kaplan. I’m thirteen years old and kind of a math geek. I live in Austin, Texas, though I haven’t been there for a very long week. At the exact moment I was having the dream, my family and I were squished on the first of three endless flights from the tiny island of Guam in the South Pacific to New York City.
We were on our way to meet someone who could help us understand what had happened yesterday—the day my stepmom, Sara Kaplan, was kidnapped.
More on that later.
To go back a bit, Sara married my astrophysicist dad, Roald Kaplan, three years ago, and her son, Darrell, became my new stepbrother and absolute best friend. While I was in the middle of the dream, Darrell was crammed into the row right next to me. Dad sat three seats beyond him, across the aisle. Sandwiched between were Lily Kaplan, my cousin on my dad’s side, and Becca Moore, her best friend.
They were the last people I saw before I closed my eyes somewhere between Guam and Hawaii and my dumb dreaming brain took over.
I was in a cave. No, scratch that. I was in the cave—the cave where we had found the first of the twelve relics of the Copernicus Legacy.
Yep, that’s what I said: the Copernicus Legacy.
You see, five hundred years ago, in the early sixteenth century, the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus went on a secret journey and uncovered the remains of a large astronomical instrument.
This ancient device, a kind of oversize astrolabe—with seats in it—contained twelve amazing objects that gave the machine its unbelievable power.
Power to travel.
In time.
That’s right. The past, the future, the whole spectrum of time from the beginning to, well, I guess, the end of it.
Anyway, Copernicus’s mortal enemy, a guy named Albrecht von Hohenzollern, learned about the astrolabe. Albrecht was the Grand Master of the superpowerful, incredibly secret, and seriously evil Knights of the Teutonic Order of Ancient Prussia.
Copernicus knew that if Albrecht and his Order got hold of the time machine, they’d use it to rip the fabric of our universe to shreds.
So Copernicus did the only thing he could do.
He took the astrolabe apart and asked twelve friends around the world to hide and protect its twelve powerful relics. These men and women were called Guardians.
Okay, back to the dream.
Every detail of the cave’s stony walls had been downloaded onto my brain’s hard drive—the rough limestone, streaked with yellow and red, the constellations painted on every surface all the way up the tapering walls to the opening at the top, the blue handprint that pointed the way to the first relic, and, above all, the incredible silence of the stone. The cave seemed nothing less than a kind of temple from another world.
So I was standing in the center of the cave, when—whoosh—there he was, with a cape and a velvet hat, and a sword longer than your arm.
Nicolaus Copernicus, the revolutionary astronomer who proved that the earth revolved around the sun, and not the other way around. He was standing not ten feet away from me next to his awesome machine—a large sphere of iron and brass and bronze, in the center of which sat a pair of tufted seats.
To be honest, the dream Copernicus looked a lot like my dad, with a beard and glasses. That was weird enough. But everyone else was in the cave, too, and they were all sad, like someone had just died.
Lily was sobbing like a baby. “Oh, Wade,” she said. “Oh, Wade!”
Like Lily, Darrell was crying but also shaking his head and stomping around like an angry bull. (That’s actually kind of what he’s been doing ever since he heard about his mother, and I don’t really blame him.) Finally I saw Becca, lying on the floor of the cave, not moving, her arms over her chest. I probably dreamed that because Becca was wounded in the cave in real life. But here she looked, you know, the opposite of alive.
“Becca?” No answer. “What’s going on? Somebody tell me!”
Nobody told me anything. Then Copernicus-Dad came over to me.
“Vela,” he said, his face dark under his hat. “I need it now.”
Just so you know: Vela is the relic of the astrolabe that we found in the cave.
For the last five centuries, followers of the original Guardians have kept the relics safe, using codes, clues, riddles, and mysteries that would twist your brain into a pretzel.
Until last week.
Galina Krause, the Teutonic Order’s freaky-beautiful new leader, ordered the murder of the communications chief of the modern Guardians, an old man named Heinrich Vogel.
To me, he was Uncle Henry, my father’s college teacher and friend.
Don’t ask me how we did it, but following a number of clues Uncle Henry had left for us, we found the first relic before Galina did—a small blue stone called Vela—in that cave in Guam.
At that moment, we became Guardians of the Copernicus Legacy. I guess one part of that means having crazy dreams like this one. Another part is that members of your family get taken away from you.
“Wade, please …”
I handed Vela to Copernicus-Dad. He attached the triangular blue stone to the time machine.
“You see,” he said. “All things are possible …”
I knew it was my own mind saying that. I mean, it was my dream, right? But it felt like Copernicus-Dad was telling me, too. “Cool,” I said.
Suddenly, the big wheels of the time machine began to turn, and the cave became hazy around me.
“All things are possible, Wade,” he said. “Except one …”
“Wait. What?” I said.
Then she was there—Galina Krause with her nasty crossbow, the one she used to wound Becca. “Where is the twelfth relic?” she demanded.
I looked around frantically, but now I was alone. Darrell, Lily, Becca, even Copernicus-Dad had vanished. Galina closed in, her crossbow aimed dead at me. I tried to yell, but the oxygen in the cave was sucked away. I couldn’t breathe. The cave went pitch-black and as silent as a tomb, until Galina spoke.
“Die, Wade Kaplan, die!”
I heard the click of the trigger as the arrow left the bow.
I heard the whoosh in the air ГўВЂВ¦
… and felt the arrow’s razor tip enter my chest …
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“Ahhhh!”
I jumped like a jack-in-the-box. About an inch off my seat. My seat belt was fastened tight and dragged me down hard.
“Ahh … mmmph!”
Darrell had his hand clamped over my mouth. “Dude, really? Screaming in a jet? The pilot’s gonna ask you to step outside.”
I pushed his hand away. I was soaked with sweat, my head was throbbing, my heart was thundering, and everyone was staring. I’d just had … the dream.
“Sorry. Nightmare.” I coughed.
Darrell grunted. “Join the club. Except it’s no dream. We left Guam on Sunday, right? But guess what? It’s Saturday again. We just crossed something called the international date line, which turns today into the day before today. So instead of yesterday, Mom was kidnapped two days ago.”
He slammed his fist on the poor armrest. “Great, huh? We’re going backward.”
“Darrell …” I wanted to tell him that the international date line didn’t actually mean what he said, but what really struck me was that I’d dreamed about a time machine at the exact moment we—sort of—went back in time. Before my dream, it was Sunday. Now it was Saturday. A coincidence?
Except I don’t believe in coincidence anymore.
The plane descended into Honolulu, and it was good to feel the jolt of the wheels touching the ground. Before anyone else could, I grabbed Becca’s bag for her. After Galina had grazed her with the arrow in the cave, we helped Becca in little ways. Her wound was a day old—or two, if you were Darrell—and wasn’t close to healing. I shivered, remembering her lying on the cave floor in my dream. At the very least, Becca needed to see a doctor so we’d know she was really okay.
There was a rush of movement and new air and crammed bodies as we stumbled through the Jetway and entered the terminal, but the moment I set foot in the arrival gate area, I tensed up.
“Do you guys feel that?” I whispered. “Somebody’s eyes are on us.”
Becca glanced around. “I do. I’m pretty sure no one followed us from Guam, but someone’s watching us now.”
“They’re probably hiding inside recycling bins,” Lily muttered. “Or disguised as young moms with strollers. The Order is too smart to be seen, and they have to be, because otherwise everybody would know about them, but no one knows about them except us, of course, which goes without saying, but there you go, I said it anyway.”
That was a perfect Lily kind of sentence. I was getting to like how she got so much in before she ran out of breath and had to stop.
“Kids, look,” Dad said, slowing and facing us. “You’re right to be cautious, but sometimes people are just people, you know? It doesn’t help to see trouble where it isn’t. We have enough to think about without imagining enemies.”
Dad might have been right—he usually is—and by “enough to think about” he probably meant Sara. But ever since we attended Uncle Henry’s funeral in Berlin, we’d been squarely on the Order’s radar. Later, after we’d overheard Galina Krause say, “Bring her to me. Only she can help us now,” we knew that her ugly goons had kidnapped Sara.
What that meant was simple.
Finding the relics and rescuing Sara had become the same quest.
Looking as exhausted as I’ve ever seen him, Dad said, “We have a good bit of time in Honolulu before our flight to San Francisco. I know we’re all hungry, but I want to find a walk-in clinic where someone can take a look at Becca’s arm. Then we’ll get a bite to eat.”
“A clinic would be great,” she said, smiling. “Thanks.”
It was a quick hike past restaurants, souvenir shops, and newsstands to a little clinic, where an intern cleaned and changed Becca’s bandage. After he was done, and Becca gave us the thumbs-up, we headed slowly in the direction of our next departure gate, taking a roundabout route. I mean, we knew the Order would know where we were sooner or later, but we wanted to make it as difficult as possible for them. We started in the opposite direction, doubled back, entered shops and left at different times from different exits. It was probably overkill, but all part of our new way of doing things.
Luckily, there was no rush. Our flight to San Francisco was still several hours away.
I should mention that we’ve learned to travel light. Pretty much all I keep in my backpack are a change of jeans, two shirts, underwear and socks, an extra pair of sneakers, and a baseball cap. In a leather envelope, I carry the celestial map that Uncle Henry gave me on my seventh birthday. It was a major clue in starting us on the search for the relics.
Oh, and I also have two sixteenth-century dueling daggers.
Not your normal luggage, I know. One of the daggers belonged to Copernicus, the other to the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who turned out to be Vela’s first Guardian. I sort of argued with my dad that because he had Vela hidden in his bag, it was smart for someone else to hide the daggers. Besides, the security-evading holster the Guardian Carlo Nuovenuto had given me in Italy was so techie, I’d successfully brought both blades through several security checkpoints. Dad agreed.
Security had become a major priority, for obvious reasons.
Carlo had also given us a new cell phone, but we were pretty sure it had been hacked in Guam, so Dad stopped at a kiosk and bought us three new ones, another part of his plan to throw off the Order. He gave a bottom-of-the-line one to Darrell, kept one for himself, and gave a high-end smartphone to Lily.
“I feel like a spy,” she said, admiring its features. “I guess we make only essential calls and searches?”
“Exactly,” my dad said. “No way are these a gift. We need to take our situation seriously. We’ll keep only each other’s numbers, and every few days, we’ll get new phones. It’ll be expensive, but safer. It’s just one way to stay ahead of the Order.”
Near our gate I saw a place called the Diamond Head Pineapple Snack Hut, and my stomach grumbled. Because of the time difference between Guam and Honolulu, not to mention the date line, it was by now late afternoon local time, but our internal clocks were so messed up that we pretty much ate whatever we wanted whenever we could. Pancakes and pizza, grilled cheese and fried eggs, sodas and hot chocolate.
While Darrell and Dad went to order, the rest of us sank into our chairs and spread our junk on the table. Since I’d been writing down clues and riddles in my dad’s college notebook, it had sort of become mine, and it was becoming as valuable as anything we had.
After I scanned the tables around us—everyone sitting at them seemed like passengers as tired and grumpy as we were—I leafed through my latest notes while Lily searched for an outlet. She is an awesome online searcher, which is why she got the best phone. She can take a blobby mess—sometimes all we can come up with—and create a search term that will—boom—get the exact answer we need.
Looking both ways, Becca dropped her hand into her bag. “Guys,” she whispered like a conspirator, “I want to show you what I found in the diary.”
A ripple of excitement shot through me with the speed of Galina’s arrow. As good as my notebook is, and as awesome a searcher as Lily is, there is nothing like the book Becca slid onto the table and quickly covered with her arm.
The secret diary of Nicolaus Copernicus.
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The Copernicus diary’s actual title is The Day Book of Nicolaus Copernicus: His Secret Voyages in Earth and Heaven.
The old book was started in 1514 by the astronomer’s assistant, a thirteen-year-old boy named Hans Novak. It ended about ten years later, penned by Copernicus himself.
Because Becca is a total language expert, having learned Spanish, Italian, German, and bits and pieces of other languages from her parents and grandparents, she’s been translating the entries into a red Moleskine notebook.
“On our flight here, I found eleven passages at the end of the diary,” she told Lily and me. “All of them are coded. We tracked Vela a different way because it was the first relic, but I think each of these eleven passages might be about one of the other original Guardians and his or her relic, but I need a key to decode them. Actually, I need eleven different keys, because they all seem to be coded differently.”
“Do you think the key words are somewhere in the diary?” I asked.
Becca shook her head. “Not the key words, but there’s this.”
She gently slid her finger down a single page at the end of the diary. Unlike most other pages, its outside edge wasn’t ragged, but straight.
“That looks different,” said Lily. “Was it cut or something to make the edge straight?”
“I thought so, too,” Becca said. “But no.” She ran her finger between that page and the facing page, deep into the gutter of the book. There, with a slender fingernail, she peeled the page back, revealing that the straight edge was in fact a fold. The page’s flap was inscribed with a large square of letters.
“It’s a cipher, but I don’t know how it works yet,” Becca said.
“I’ll tell you!” Lily bounced up, tugged her phone from the charger, and immediately started tapping on its screen.
“How do you even know what to search for?” I asked.
Lily snorted. “Because while your brain is going â€�huh?’ mine is going â€�aha!’”
I glanced over my shoulder. Darrell and Dad were loading up their trays.
“It’s called a tabula recta,” said Lily. “It’s a â€�letter square,’ created by a cryptological guy named Trithemius in the sixteenth century.” She flipped her phone around and widened an image with a swipe of her fingers. It was almost identical to the hand-inked square Becca had found in the diary.
“You did it again, Lily,” I said.
She gave a little bow. “Trithemius’s square includes twenty-four cipher alphabets, so each time you code a letter—say L, for Lily—you give it a different letter. It’s nearly impossible to figure out without the key word. Trithemius was all about improving codes.”
Dad and Darrell wove through the food court with two trays full of food. I trotted over to help and noticed that Darrell’s eyes were red. I knew right away that he and my dad had had a time-out.
“Until we get to New York, we’re not going to make much headway,” Dad was saying.
“I get it,” said Darrell. “I just wish it were all happening faster. I keep thinking of Mom in some dark place with no food—”
“You can’t go there, Darrell,” Dad said. “You’ll only twist yourself up in knots, and we don’t know anything real yet. Look, let’s eat; then we’ll call Terence Ackroyd, all of us. Get the latest. Okay?”
“Good. Yeah. Let’s do that.” Darrell settled his tray in the middle of our table. While he stuffed a pineapple spear into his mouth, Becca showed him and Dad the letter square and one of the passages.
Darrell snorted. “Beefy kahillik buffwuzz ifgabood?”
“I think you added some letters there, but either way, without the key word, it means nothing,” Becca said.
“Unless you’re an ifgabood,” he said.
Aside from the funny nonwords, Darrell wasn’t into it. He calls ciphers “word math,” which is actually a clever way of describing them. Darrell doesn’t plod through stuff. He’s an improviser. Tennis. Guitar solos. He has to jump from one thing to another, one thought to another, one move to another, just to compete. All that moving sometimes makes him hard to follow and jumpy.
Sometimes it makes him plain brilliant.
Dad perused the diary. “Eleven passages. One for each of the other relics …”
“I think so,” Becca said, twisting her lips as she often did when she was deep into translating. “We have to find the key words, but I don’t think they’ll come from the diary. I think they’re out there. In the world. We just have to be smart enough to find them.”
“Good thing we’ve got such a smarty-pants like you in our gang,” said Lily, winking at her.
Becca smiled. “Thanks, but you better save the compliments, at least for now. Breaking the code is going to be super challenging.”
The rest of our brunch-lunch-dinner passed pretty much in silence. I could tell from Darrell’s dark looks that he was going where my dad had told him not to go. Thinking about his mother trapped in a cold dark place with no light, no heat, no food … now I was doing it.
Finally, Dad keyed in Terence Ackroyd’s number, and we all went quiet. He was about to put it on speaker when it apparently went to voice mail. He hung up without leaving a message and looked at his watch. “It’s nighttime there. Maybe he’s out. He’ll call back.” He stood abruptly. He scanned the concourse in both directions, looking for what, I wasn’t sure. Teutonic Knights? I glanced around, too. No one seemed overly suspicious. Which, of course, made me more suspicious.
“Okay, team, good lunch,” he said, trying to smile but not quite making it. “We need to keep moving.”
I got what he was doing. Dad had done this my entire life—taking all the danger and scary stuff into himself so that no one else would worry or feel bad or be afraid.
If only it were that easy.
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After we spent almost three more tiring hours zig-zagging among the airport’s hundreds of shops, being tricky but not really seeing anyone we could identify as being from the Order, we headed to the gate to rest and wait. The Honolulu-to–San Francisco flight was still a little over an hour and a half away, but I was surprised to find that the gate had already begun to fill with passengers from Hong Kong, whose earlier flight was joining ours. We found five seats together and settled in, then I went to look out the window.
It was evening now and the sky had darkened enough for the first stars to be visible, even over the brightly lit airstrips.
“Where math and magic join up, right?” whispered Darrell, sidling up to me. “What Uncle Henry said about the sky?”
I turned to him. “You do listen when I tell you stuff.”
“Sure,” he said. “Just not all the time.”
Where mathematics and magic become one was the way Uncle Henry had once described the sky to me. It was a magical place of stars and constellations and planets, always in motion, an area where science and mysticism wove into each other. Except now the sky had become something even more. It had become our way of life.
“You should try to sleep,” I told him as we headed back to the others. “We all should. We have another hour at least before we can even board.”
“I can’t sleep,” Darrell said, slumping into a seat next to Becca, stretching out, then hunching over, ready to bolt up. “Sleep is for other people. I hate waiting here. It’s dead time.”
“Have you tried humming a lullaby inside your head?” Lily asked, probably hoping a joke might distract him from his mother’s disappearance.
He groaned. He wasn’t taking the bait.
Sara is Darrell’s actual mom, so of course he was in worse shape than the rest of us, probably even Dad. Not knowing the fate of someone you love is crushing. I love Sara, too. We all do. But for Darrell it’s definitely the hardest. She’s his mother, the one who fed him and read to him and nagged him and held his hand when he had nightmares. It was kind of amazing he wasn’t even more of a wreck than he was.
“If I fall asleep,” Darrell said, staring at his hands as if wondering what they were for, “will it mean I’m not thinking about Mom?”
“That’s so not possible,” I said, and then added, “but I get it. No one’s going to be right until Sara’s back.”
Becca grabbed my sleeve. “Him. On our left.”
I think I actually shuddered when she said him and was instantly on edge. I turned my head slowly and saw a tall man in a long black leather coat striding into our gate. He carried no luggage, and his hands were driven deep into his coat pockets. He paused, pulled one hand out to glance at his phone, and then pocketed it.
“He’s German,” Lily whispered. “You can tell by his shoes.”
I believed her. Lily knew fashion backward and forward and usually got it right about stuff like that.
The man couldn’t have been more than ten years older than my dad, but his hair was as white as snow and cropped very short. I could see his face was weathered, as if he’d spent a lot of time outside.
“Plus, he’s totally overdressed for Hawaii,” Lily added. “Which makes him too suspicious not to be evil.”
“Lily,” said Dad softly, eyeing the tall man. “Don’t go overboard.”
She frowned. “Okay, but just in case, my code name for him is Leathercoat.”
“He’s with the Order,” Darrell said, raising his eyes to the man.
Becca shivered and twisted away in her seat. “At least he can’t do anything to us out here in the open …”
“I agree with Darrell,” I said. “Everyone’s with the Order—”
A baby laughed suddenly.
“The baby, too?” Lily asked with a smirk.
“Probably in training,” I said.
The baby’s laugh was full-throated, and so was his mother’s. The reason was a middle-aged man, one of the passengers joining us from the Hong Kong flight. He knelt in front of the stroller, making faces, then tipped over and balanced on one hand, his long black hair dangling to the floor. The baby practically exploded in laughter. Finally, the man jumped to his feet and took a low bow.
Several people clapped, including Lily. “I used to be able to do stuff like that,” she said. “Not since sixth grade, though. I’m rusty.”
“I never knew you were in the circus,” Darrell teased her despite himself. Joking around was his way of covering up his feelings.
“I was,” she said flatly. “It’s where I first saw your clown act.”
He grumbled a laugh, which was as good as he could do. I looked around. Leathercoat had wandered away, probably for a pineapple sandwich. Maybe Dad was right. He was just a guy.
“Kids, come over here.” Dad waved us toward him. “Terence Ackroyd just texted me the number of an investigator in Bolivia. I called and it’s ringing.”
Terence Ackroyd was the mystery writer who Sara had been due to meet in New York. After her luggage, cell phone, and passport all arrived from Bolivia without her, he was the one who’d told us Sara was missing.
Remembering what Galina Krause had said in Guam, we then put two and two together and realized that the Order had kidnapped Sara.
“One of Mr. Ackroyd’s mystery novels is set in Bolivia, and he knows a first-rate private detective there,” Dad said to us. “So he asked her to look into Sara’s disappearance. He just sent me the number and told me to call her anytime—” He held up his hand. “Hello? Yes, this is Roald Kaplan,” he said as softly as he could. “Terence Ackroyd gave me this number. Regarding … my wife. I was calling to see if you’d heard anything …” His voice trailed off. I could tell he was listening intently. Then he put the phone on speaker, and we crowded around.
There was a woman’s accented voice on the other end.
“Dr. Kaplan,” she said huskily, “our team of nine investigators believes that Sara Kaplan was taken from Bolivia to Brazil. We are tracking her location now.” Then her voice changed. “Mr. Ackroyd has insisted we do not contact official authorities. He has told you?”
“He has,” my dad said, with a glance up at Darrell, who hung on every word. “He said there was a message in her luggage?”
“He can tell you more about that when you arrive in New York,” the woman said. “In the meantime, we are on the brink of information that you will find helpful. I don’t want to go too far, but it could be very good news. I will call you within the next several hours.”
The expression on Dad’s face was suddenly a mixture of tears and smiles. “That’s really promising. I can’t thank you enough for everything you’re doing. Call this phone anytime. Please.”
“Of course. Keep it close.” She hung up.
Dad pressed the End Call button on his phone and put his arm around Darrell. He didn’t say anything. Neither of them did. But for the first time since we’d learned about Sara’s disappearance, Dad looked like he might really smile.
So did Darrell. “This is awesome! This is soooo good.”
It was definitely not news to go all crazy happy about, not yet, but it felt good that real detectives were looking for Sara. “Our team of nine investigators,” the woman had said. So far our little group had turned out to be pretty good at solving puzzles. But figuring out codes and riddles from the past was nothing like searching for a living person.
So, yeah, we felt lighter. I glanced around at the other passengers, wondering if they’d suddenly look less suspicious. They actually did.
Good. Now we could begin to relax a little.
The gate was cramming up even more now. There were so few empty seats that I didn’t think anything when a man in a dark suit sat down in the row directly across from us. He was thin, and he wore thick black glasses and carried a green shoulder bag. His hands were stuck deep in his side pockets. I heard my dad’s voice in my head—Not everyone’s planning something—so I looked away.
Darrell was feeling better, which usually meant he was hungry. “I need a Snickers,” he said. “Let’s all go to the newsstand, me for food and you to search the world papers for tragedies. Okay, Dad?”
“Ten minutes,” he said after checking his watch. “Stay close.”
In one of his last messages to us, Uncle Henry had predicted we’d hear about disasters happening around the world, and that they were connected to the Teutonic Order’s hunt for the relics. Sure enough, we soon read reports of a building collapse in South America, a ship sinking in the Mediterranean, and the disappearance of a school bus that later reappeared, shot up by musket bullets from the nineteenth century.
Yeah. Try to figure that one out.
In the airport bookstore, we searched the papers as we always did, but my attention was instantly snagged by the shelf of Terence Ackroyd thrillers. Last week, I would’ve barely noticed them. The store had quite a few of them—The Umbrian Vespers, The Berlin Manifesto, and his latest hardcover novel, The Mozart Inferno, which was currently at the top of the bestseller list.
“He’s an actual person,” said Becca. “I almost doubted it until now. I should read one. We’re going to see him in New York, after all.” She decided on The Prometheus Riddle, a spy thriller set in Greece.
“A nuclear submarine sank off India’s coast,” Lily said, holding up that morning’s London Times. “Ten crew members are missing. I bet the Order is behind it. They probably love to sink ships.”
Darrell poked my arm. “If I move a fraction of an inch—”
“Your head will fall off?” I said.
“And … I can see the German dude, hovering outside my field of vision.”
“Leathercoat,” whispered Lily. “Call him Leathercoat.”
Glancing over an issue of Science magazine, I saw the guy standing like a statue, holding a copy of El Mundo but not reading it.
I felt the same strange sensation I’d been experiencing for the last week: my skin tingled and a strange pain pierced my chest. It’s the jab of adrenaline you feel when you’re afraid. I’d felt that in my dream, too.
“I … have to use the bathroom,” I said.
“Because you’re scared,” Darrell told me. “It’s a well-known fact that panic makes you have to go—”
Lily put her hands over her ears. “Darrell, please stop talking!”
I headed to the men’s room. “See you back at the gate.”
“Nuh-uh. Buddy system,” Becca said. “Darrell’ll go with you.”
“What are you, my kindergarten teacher?” Darrell said. “Last time I took a buddy to the bathroom, I was five years old. And while we’re at it, why are we even calling it a bathroom? It doesn’t have a bathtub in it. That would be weird.”
“You’re weird,” said Lily.
“Or a restroom,” he went on, “because you don’t go in there to rest.”
“Darrell, please just go!” said Lily.
“That’s it!” he said. “We should call it a go room! I love it.”
She shoved him hard. “If you love it so much, then go to the go room already! Becca and I have our own mission.” She held up her London Times and five dollars. “We’re going to give the diary an old-fashioned makeover, a newspaper book cover!”
We split up, and Darrell tagged along with me. At least until his stomach remembered the Snickers he didn’t get. “My taste buds are requesting multiple Snickers bars for the road. Or the air. Or whatever. Wait for me here.”
“Easy for you to say,” I grumbled.
It was good to see him lightening up a bit. The phone call with the Bolivian detective had done it. We knew nothing about the investigation, but it occurred to me that if a team of detectives found Sara and got her on a plane, she might actually get to New York at the same time we did.
Meanwhile, I waited and waited until I couldn’t wait anymore. I waved at Darrell at the candy counter; then I sprinted off down a long hall to the men’s room. It smelled like disinfectant and hand soap once I got in there. I stood still for a few seconds, listening to gate announcements, until I was sure I was alone. I did what I needed to do, washed up, and was out again when a shape darkened the end of the corridor. “Darrell? It’s about time—”
Not Darrell.
Leathercoat.
He stepped purposely down the narrow hall toward the restroom. I tried to move aside to give him room, but he blocked me.
“I’m sorry—” I started, but he raised his hand, then fixed a pair of lifeless eyes on mine.
(#ulink_901497a5-749a-58e3-91d7-f6cd526a28b1)
Leathercoat stood unmoving, staring right at me.
I could feel my scalp prickling. My forehead throbbed. My good feeling vanished completely. The man’s irises were so dark, they seemed almost black. There was nothing in them but a kind of intense stillness.
“Wade Kaplan,” he said softly, though his words managed to echo in the corridor, “you know whom I work for. You have met her. She injured your friend.”
My hands instinctively balled into fists at the mention of Becca’s wound and the thought of how much it was still hurting her. I remembered her from my dream, motionless on the floor of the cave.
“We knew you were with the Order,” I said. “It was so obvious.”
How many Snickers bars is Darrell buying? Where is everyone?
“Then you know who Galina Krause has taken from you,” Leathercoat said. “Kindly remember this fact the next time we meet, when I ask you for something.”
His words were delivered slowly and with precision. He had just a trace of an accent, and his voice was deep and crisp, like an actor’s.
“Because you have nothing better to do than follow us,” I said.
“Allow me to pick your brain for a moment,” he said. “Who do you imagine has the highest level of computing technology in the world?”
“What is this, a quiz?”
“Pretend it is.”
I eyed the end of the corridor. I couldn’t get to it. “NASA?” I answered.
He smiled thinly. “An appropriate response from an astronomer’s son. NASA is to the Teutonic Order’s Copernicus servers as a doghouse is to … Windsor Castle. Keep this in mind when you think to elude me and other agents of Galina Krause.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say besides “Whatever that means.”
“You see, you and your family have no idea of the cosmic scope of what you have gotten yourselves involved in.”
I stepped backward, bumping against the wall behind me. “You either,” I said, meaninglessly.
“The great machine’s relics? What has a simple family like yours to do with such treasures? Still, your cooperation may serve me well.”
“Yeah, like we’d help you.”
Darrell, come on and get in here! Really, in the whole airport, no one has to go to the go room?
“I could yell for help,” I said.
“Sounding an alarm will do neither of us any good.”
My fingers twitched. I wanted to hurt him somehow, to make him feel the terror that the Order made us feel. My hand dived into my backpack. Because it was shaking so much, it took me a second, but I finally whipped out one of the daggers. It felt wrong to be holding a deadly weapon, but I jabbed its short, wavy blade in the air anyway. It looked silly in my little hand. “Tell Galina to let Sara go.”
He flicked his dead eyes at the dagger, then back to my face. “Perhaps you do not know French, but allow me to enlighten you,” he said. “Galina Krause has given me carte blanche. This means â€�blank check.’ In other words, I may do as I wish. Wielding a dagger in this manner is impolite. Furthermore, it means nothing. You will not use it. You will never use it, Wade Kaplan.”
“Stop saying my name!” I gripped the handle so tightly my knuckles turned white. But he was right. I couldn’t imagine using the dagger. How could I hurt a person? Even a bad one. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.
“We will want both daggers also,” he said. “But keep them for now, if it gives you comfort. We will meet again soon … Wade Kaplan.”
All at once, the entrance to the corridor filled with shapes, and two young boys and their father trotted in, chattering and laughing. Before they saw me, the German strolled out past them, whistling a melody that sounded like a wolf howling.
I staggered out into the concourse. Fear rolled over me like the sweat dripping down my arms, my face. Darrell sauntered over from the snack stand, munching one Snickers bar while tearing open the wrapper of another. “I got one for you, but I had to eat it … Dude, what’s with you? Did the sink explode? You’re dripping wet.”
Barely able to stand on my own feet, I glared at him. “Thanks to you, I’m never using a bathroom again.”
When we got back to the gate, Dad was flipping mad. “You never do things alone! I told you. Darrell—you messed up!”
“Dad, I’m sorry,” he said. “The phone call was so good …”
And more of the same, while I felt the blood drain from my face, neck, and head. I said, “I’m sorry, Dad. We’re sorry. It was … I didn’t expect he really was a Teutonic Knight. Dad, I’m scared …”
He settled me quickly into his seat. “All right,” he said more calmly, though his face was dark and anxious. “All right.” He scanned the crowd, but of course Leathercoat was nowhere in sight. “Please tell me again exactly what he said. Word for word.”
When I repeated Leathercoat’s actual words, most of it sounded weirdly polite, almost friendly. I realized the menace was in what he didn’t say. Allow me to pick your brain … kindly remember this fact … allow me to enlighten you … if it gives you comfort.
Dad listened intently, completely silent himself, as if, once more, he was trying to draw the whole incident into himself. Finally, he brushed my wet hair from my forehead. “Okay. Okay. You handled yourself very well.”
“Should we tell security?” asked Becca. “Wade is scared, and so am I, Uncle Roald. Leathercoat says he wants us to cooperate? He’s saying we can’t tell anyone. Are we just going to do what he says?”
“No. No. I don’t know.” Dad looked around the busy gate and breathed sharply. “First, we’d have to prove something against him. Threatening is hard to prove, but it would certainly mean we wouldn’t get to New York for another few days. Look, I get it. Not contacting the police helps the Order as much as it might help us, but that’s a risk we have to take, at least for now.”
“Like Terence told us, and the investigator from Bolivia,” said Lily.
“Exactly,” he said. I saw his face grow more determined. He set his jaw and narrowed his eyes. “So, no police for now. But one way to look at this is that Leathercoat just blew his cover. He knows about us? Well, we know about him now, too.”
I hoped that would help. Leathercoat had said we were in way over our heads. He was so right about that. I tried to swallow, tried to slow my pulse. I failed at both. Finally, with my hands quaking like leaves in the wind, I scribbled in my notebook. I wrote down everything I remembered of what Leathercoat said. Then I wrote down the sad dream. It was all pretty frightening stuff.
After what seemed like a century, the welcome announcement came.
“Now boarding Flight Five-Thirty-One to San Francisco and New York.”
Good, I thought. Get me out of this place. I stuffed the notebook in my backpack and headed quickly into line.
(#ulink_9a21d714-6f3e-5c3a-b368-34d0d8c3a499)
The jet was packed. The attendant at the desk told my dad that the flight had been overbooked and that one of our five seats wasn’t with the others. The loner was three rows back, which I said I would take, but Dad wanted us all together.
The man with the green shoulder bag was in the window seat across from our other seats. He already had a blanket draped over him and sat leaning against the window.
When another passenger—the long-haired acrobat guy who’d stood on his hand for the baby—came in, heading for the open aisle seat, Dad asked if he’d mind switching with me.
“Or are you two together?” Dad asked him.
“No, no.” The acrobat glanced at the man by the window, then at me, and smiled. “Not at all. Please, son, sit here.”
So after we were settled, Darrell and I were split by the aisle. He only took his seat—he was the last one to sit before the cabin door closed—after making sure Leathercoat wasn’t on our flight. “I didn’t see him. But if he works for Galina, he’s too good to be seen.” Which didn’t make any real sense, and didn’t slow my pounding heart, either.
As the jet taxied from the gate to the runway, the man with the green bag turned to me. “I am Dominic Chen,” he said, extending his right hand.
His fingers were ice-cold. “Wade Kaplan,” I said.
“I like to sleep on overnight flights,” he said with a slender smile, “but the protocol with fellow passengers is to chat, so we can, if you like.”
Protocol.
A week ago, protocol was just a school vocabulary word. But since Uncle Henry’s death had set off the secret Frombork Protocol—a set of instructions for the Guardians to gather the relics and destroy them—the word had taken on a whole new meaning. Maybe Mr. Chen’s use of protocol was just a coincidence.
Coincidence. Another word that sounded an alarm.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I like to rest, too.”
He nodded. “When we awake, it will be Sunday morning, the first day of a brand-new week. Enjoy your sleep.”
There was something soothing about Mr. Chen’s voice. Within minutes of hearing it, and the droning engines, I began to feel drowsy. I glanced at Darrell, the girls, and my dad. Their eyes were closed. We’d all gone a long time without any kind of rest, so that was good.
I closed my eyes, too. I wanted to go back to the dream of the cave, if only to get a better ending to it, but returning to a dream is nearly impossible when you try to force it. It didn’t work. Soon enough I stopped hearing noises and fell sound asleep.
I dreamed of nothing this time. Black space. No sound.
A few hours later, I woke up to bad news.
“… affects passengers with destinations in New York,” the pilot was saying. “A real kahuna of a snowstorm is flying up the East Coast and has shut down all three New York airports.”
Lots of passengers groaned, so we weren’t alone.
“Are you kidding me?” Darrell’s hair was going in every direction. He was obviously still groggy, but he had the ability to be groggy and jumpy at the same time. “We’re finally on our way, then everything stops? I can’t take this!” He slammed both fists onto his thighs.
“Don’t self-punch,” I said.
“But come on—”
“I get it,” I said. “Two steps forward, one step back.” I glanced at Dad, who leaned over and said something quietly. Darrell wiped his eyes and mumbled a couple of words, but shook his head sharply.
Soon there was a flurry of additional announcements.
“We’ll arrive a half hour ahead of schedule … it’s raining in San Francisco … airport hotel for stranded passengers …”
Blah blah blah. Landing early was normally good, except this time it meant that we’d spend an extra half hour in rainy San Francisco before we could get to New York and start our real search for Sara.
My ears popped as the jet descended. Mr. Chen was still wrapped up in his blanket, eyes closed, face turned to the window. Even with the clouds, the shade next to him was brightening with daylight. I wanted to raise it to see the city as we landed, like we were getting somewhere, but I didn’t want to bother him.
The landing gear rumbled welcomingly beneath the floor. As we drew closer to the airport, the pilot said his final words to the flight crew to prepare for landing. I tapped Mr. Chen’s shoulder lightly.
“Excuse me, Mr. Chen, we’re landing. If you’re going to New York, there’s a snowstorm.” I waited for him to rustle his blanket, blink, turn to face me sleepily. But he didn’t move.
We were asked to shift our seat backs upright. Because Mr. Chen remained sleeping, a passing flight attendant pressed the button on the arm of his seat to push his seat back gently forward. As she moved down the aisle, the blanket over his shoulders rolled down a few inches, and my blood turned to ice.
In the folds of Mr. Chen’s neck were several dark bruises.
“Mr. Chen?” I whispered. “Mr. Chen?” My throat seized. I could barely make a sound. I leaned across the aisle. “Dad,” I croaked. “Dad!” I glanced back to make sure I had seen what I thought I had.
There was no doubt. The angle of his neck and the purple marks on his skin meant only one thing.
I was sitting next to a dead man.
(#ulink_fa4cbb99-b13b-51f4-a481-381677ea02b4)
Dominic Chen was dead.
What I mean is, he was dead now, but he wasn’t before. He’d been very much alive when I’d gone to sleep a few hours earlier.
I had never been so close to death before. He was so still. His eyes, his lips—his whole body was sunken heavily into his seat as if he were made of stone. The dream image of Becca on the floor of the cave flashed in my mind, then vanished.
My dad couldn’t leave his seat while the jet taxied to the gate, and it took its time getting there. “Wade,” he whispered across Darrell. “Keep still. Don’t freak out. I’ll be there as soon as …”
I wanted to tell him easy for you to say, but my mouth wasn’t working. It was the longest eight minutes of my life. Becca, Lily, and Darrell shot me astonished looks, as if they understood only too well that my seatmate was dead. Had we changed this much already? That we expected somebody to die so close to us? I didn’t want to believe it.
I tried my hardest not to throw up. I wanted to run screaming down the aisle, but I was cemented where I sat.
Finally, the seat belt sign binged off. Becca bolted up in her seat, one hand over her open mouth, while Lily held her other one. Dad carefully but quickly eased his way between the passengers already crowding the aisle and helped me out of my belt.
I could barely stand up, but we managed to exchange seats. Dad bent over Mr. Chen in a position that blocked most passengers’ view. I heard him whisper a few words and nod as if he’d gotten a response. Totally crazy, I thought, but I knew I wasn’t exactly thinking straight. He was being careful. He didn’t want people to panic. Or us to panic. When Dad turned his face up, his eyes were filled with fear, but his lips wore a thin smile meant to keep anyone else from suspecting that Mr. Chen was dead. Why?
No police. No authorities. Not even now.
Becca’s eyes were welling up. “Is he …”
“Don’t say the word, please,” Dad said, tucking the blanket gently behind Mr. Chen’s shoulders, as if he were simply asleep.
“He said protocol,” I whispered to no one in particular. “Nobody uses that word. Not to a kid. But he said it.” I must have had a sick look on my face, because in the middle of everyone moving, opening the overhead bins, talking, Becca put her good arm around me.
Lily poked Darrell. “You told us Leathercoat wasn’t here.”
Darrell looked as terrified as I felt, jerking his head in every direction. “I didn’t see him. I checked and rechecked.”
We were being careful, not raising our voices, not leaving our seats. My heart was thundering; my ears rang. Passengers streamed down the aisles. I guess we appeared as though we were waiting for them to leave. When most of them had, we gathered our stuff and looked one last time at Mr. Chen, and my dad steered us off the plane into the Jetway.
“We have to tell someone,” Becca said softly, wiping her cheeks. “Maybe airport security?” I was carrying her bag again, and I touched her hand for a second as we came out into the gate.
“In a minute.” Dad scanned the passengers as they made their way down the concourse. “Telling the authorities might be uncomfortable for the Order, if the police even believe they did this—”
“They did!” said Lily.
“—but we were sitting next to him,” he continued. “And the investigation will keep us here. I know it sounds callous—cruel, even—but we can’t get drawn into this any more than we have to be. We didn’t actually know Mr. Chen. It could be unrelated.”
“Dad, no,” I said, as calmly as I could. “First there’s Leathercoat; then Mr. Chen said protocol. Maybe he wanted to see if I would do or say anything. But I didn’t. Maybe I should’ve … I don’t know …”
“Everyone, just stop. For a second,” Dad said. “I’m sorry; I mean … we’re obviously not playing around here. You know that.”
I thought we knew it, but I guess there was more to learn. Dad had never wanted us to get mixed up in whatever this was becoming. From the murder of Uncle Henry to Sara’s kidnapping, it was way more dangerous than anything we’d thought possible. Now here we were, at an airport in a strange city, and a man sitting next to us had been murdered.
The chubby, laughing baby’s parents settled him into his stroller, as he bubbled with giggles. The last few passengers exited the Jetway, some on their phones, others chatting with one another.
“They’re all too busy to notice Mr. Chen,” Darrell said. “They don’t care about him just sitting there being all—”
“Don’t say it.” I could hardly suck in enough air to breathe, and my head was light.
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