The Golden Vendetta (3 page)

Paris, France

April 4

10:33 p.m.

H
e was known as “the bookseller.” Of compact stature, Oskar Gerrenhausen was a gray-whiskered cat of a man, somewhere between sixty and seventy-five, who had been forced by threats to do an evil young woman's unscrupulous acquisition work.

Forced?
Yes,
he mused. But his long history in antiquities, as well as a stint in the anticommunist Czech underground in the eighties, had given him a deep love of pursuing the forbidden, uncovering the unknown,
possessing, even for a short time, objects of inestimable value.

Having left the busier boulevards of the Left Bank to the evening tourist crush, Gerrenhausen wove from awning to awning along Rue Jacob. He cowered, shoulders bowed against the warm rain, stepping lightly along the sidewalk until he arrived at Rue Bonaparte. There he turned right, toward the river.

He walked fifteen paces, and stopped.

Librairie Fortier. Gold lettering on its windows read:
Spécialiste des documents, lettres, gravures, et livres de voyages anciens du 15ème et du 16ème siècle.

Specialist indeed. Henri Fortier had, unknowingly, just taken possession of the so-called Voytsdorf Ledger, a rather boring document about sheep, cattle, acreage, and currency reform penned by Nicolaus Copernicus in 1519. Boring, that is, if you didn't know that the ledger contained a hidden list of the components of a machine that obsessed Galina Krause. His next acquisition was to take place at a private auction in two months' time. June 5.

Gerrenhausen stepped beneath the awning and gently tried the shop door—it was locked. He slid a small bag of tools from the leather messenger bag he wore under his coat, selected one, pried the door lock, and
slipped inside the store. No alarm. Was someone still here? He spied a thin stream of light from the back room of the store.

So. Instead of a simple theft, there could be a murder, too. He gripped the gun in the pocket of his coat, slid back the safety. He tiptoed toward the light, peeked in through the door's slender crack, and saw Henri Fortier bowed over a bundle of old papers. Oskar's senses tingled.

But wait. Fortier did not raise his head, and his slow, rhythmic movement suggested he was sleeping. Gerrenhausen smiled.
And under the cover of dreams, what mischief may happen!
He relaxed his grip on his gun and approached the desk nimbly. Reaching in front of Fortier, his fingers and movements as sensitive as delicate seismic instruments, Oskar slid the document out from under the sleeping man's magnifying glass. The top page had a silvery sheen to it; Fortier had apparently become mesmerized by its strange glow. So the auction in June was more important than ever.

Oskar Gerrenhausen rolled the ledger into a tubular container, which he then placed in his messenger bag. He silently left the back room and exited the shop. He relocked the front door, reset the safety on his handgun, repocketed it, and gave it a pat. “Not tonight, my
friend. Soon, perhaps, but not tonight.”

Smiling to himself, the bookseller disappeared down the sidewalk, huddled against the rain, and made deliberately toward the river.

Motel Nowhere, Marble Falls, Texas

June 2

6:48 p.m.

D
arrell sat back in the only chair in room 113, looked longingly at his old passport, and sighed. “There should be a death date on these things. I've been dead exactly two months today.”

Wade looked up from the bed where he was reading. “You know you're supposed to keep that old passport hidden. Put it away before Dad catches you.”

“My old
real
passport, you mean. You realize that, right? Two months have passed since we boarded that jet in London, and I died.”

“I do know how to read a calendar. Two months is right. But the ‘died' part isn't so much.”

Darrell stood. Sunlight bounced up from the cars through the louvered window of their junky motel outside Austin. He had had this same conversation with his stepbrother almost every day for the last eight weeks. Only the dates changed. Yesterday it had been “tomorrow will be exactly two months.”

“You didn't die,” he said to Wade. “But I did. Two months ago. The same day the relic hunt ended. Just ended. Like it . . .
ended.”

“You kinda like her, don't you?”

Darrell shot a look at Wade, who was grinning. “Who? Lily?”

“No, lover boy. Galina Krause. You can't wait to see her again.”

“Galina?” Darrell growled. “I can't wait to
not
see
you
again.”

“Too late. I'm right here.”

After London, the whole bunch of them had gone into Terence Ackroyd's private witness-protection thing. Because Lily's parents' divorce had become so angry and messy, Lily had asked to stay with Becca and
her
parents “somewhere” (Terence wouldn't tell them for security reasons—“radio silence,” he called it). Darrell,
his mother, his stepfather, and Wade were currently residing at Motel Nowhere, the brothers being tutored by grad students from the university, while their parents settled their business there before taking a dual leave of absence. Terence had cleverly arranged for false identification documents, licenses, and passports.

Ever since landing in the States, the Kaplans were the Parker family: Sara was Cynthia; Roald was Gary; Wade was Michael. And Darrell?

Darrell was Dana.

It was Dana who had killed him. Exactly two months ago.

Dana was a girl's name. With Becca and Lily and now Dana, people looking at their names would think there were three girls in the group. His real passport, with a real picture of his real self, only made the whole thing intolerable.

Still, the Galina Krause situation was probably worse. She had simply disappeared. Vanished. Evaporated.

If Darrell had returned from London alive to every possibility of where the hunt might take them next, what he
hadn't
expected was for the hunt to take them nowhere at all.

According to the investigator Paul Ferrere in France, Chief Inspector Simon Yazinsky in Russia, Isabella
Mercanti in Italy, and Terence's friends in the British intelligence services, Galina had dropped off the face of the earth.

Her absence was totally bewildering.

More than bewildering, it was worrying. If no one had heard a word about her for two whole months, she must be planning something amazingly huge.

Something unutterably evil.

But day after day there was no word. Nothing.

It
could
have been a welcome break for them. After all, the Order's lousy agents didn't seem to know where the “Parkers” were. But Darrell couldn't relax. He was a person who did things, a person who moved, a person who couldn't sit still. He was, as his real passport so completely spelled out, Darrell Surawaluk Evans Kaplan!

His first last name came from his father, who was Thai. When his parents had divorced, he'd taken back his mother's name. When his mom had married Wade's father, he'd added Kaplan to the bunch. It was a mouthful. But it was kind of cool. It made him seem international, which, of course, he was. A good background for a relic Guardian, which, of course, he also was. But Dana Parker?

No.

As he zipped his passport back into the hidden pocket
in his jeans—his mother had sewn such secret pockets in all of their clothes—his stepfather came into the bedroom from the shared bathroom, wiggling a toothbrush in his mouth.

“I'm going to campus in about five minutes. Your mother's just finishing up there. We'll come back here together. Terence says he has a new place for us to go, a hotel not so—”

“Nowhere-y?” said Darrell.

Brrng. Brrng.

The room phone that never rang—rang. Wade tossed down his book. “No one knows we're here. Only Terence and Julian. And they'd use our cells.”

Brrng. Brrng.

“It wouldn't be Sara,” Roald said.

Brrng. Brrng.

“It could be Lily. I'm answering it.” Darrell snatched the phone from its cradle. “Hello—”

“Is fazzer?”

“Lily? Wait, who is this?”

“I speak wiz fazzer. Hurry!”

Darrell gave the phone to his stepfather, who put it on speaker.

“Hello, can I help you?”

“I call from Petrescu,” the voice said.

“Petrescu?” said Roald. “Where is that? Who is this, please?”

There was a pause, then the voice continued as if it were reading. “Seven, eight . . . ten, three . . .”

“Wade!” Darrell whispered. “Get this down!”

Wade grabbed his notebook from the nightstand, flipping past the pages covered with the clues, riddles, and number codes they'd solved in the past.

“. . . eleven, two . . . thirteen, eight . . . sixteen, one . . .”

“Excuse me,” Roald started.

“B-T-Z!”
said the voice. “English edition. Issue fifteen thousand nine hundred forty-seven. Not online. Real paper.”

The line went dead. Roald replaced the phone in its cradle.

Darrell leaned over Wade's notebook. “It's a code. We have a new code. Look, the first number in each pair is higher than the first number in the pair before it. Did I solve it?”

“Oh my gosh, Darrell!” Wade said, with a grin. “No, you didn't. Dad, what do you think
BTZ
means?”

“They're letters,” said Darrell, giving him his own grin back.

“
BTZ
could be a newspaper,” his stepfather said. “A foreign one, if we're supposed to read the English edition. ‘Petrescu' sounds Romanian. A city, maybe.”

“Either way, we're doing it,” said Darrell, slinging his jacket on. “Mom's still on campus. She can scour the newspapers at the library while we head over there.” He peeked outside the door and looked both ways. “Clear. Let's go.”

Because his father was driving and Darrell was bouncing too much at the thought of a new code, Wade made the call to his stepmother, only to find that Sara was already on her way back to the motel but would call a library colleague to know to expect them. Then she called back a few minutes later.

“You were right,” she said.
“B-T-Z
is indeed a newspaper, a German daily named
Berliner Tageszeitung.
Be careful. See you back at Motel One Chair.”

The Perry-Castañeda Library, or PCL, at the University of Texas maintained paper holdings of international newspapers for several months before digitizing them. Wade hoped that this issue of the
BTZ
hadn't already been scanned. They were in luck. When they arrived, the on-duty librarian walked them directly to the
hard-copy stacks of the
Tageszeitung.
The papers were in good shape and clearly labeled. It took Wade less than ten minutes to locate a copy of issue number 15,947.

When he pulled it from the shelf, his heart thumped.

“Dad, look. It's from March eleventh, two days after Uncle Henry died.”

“A sign that maybe it
is
a Guardian message,” his father said.

“Oh, it is. I've already decided,” said Darrell.

Uncle Henry was not Wade's actual uncle, but Dr. Heinrich Vogel, his father's college teacher and a longtime friend of the family. When Wade was seven, Uncle Henry had given him a sixteenth-century star chart. It was that chart that had helped them solve the first clue relating to the Copernicus Legacy.

Find the twelve relics.

That clue had led them to Berlin, where Uncle Henry had been murdered by agents of the Teutonic Order under the command of Galina Krause. After the old man's violent death, they'd taken up his cause to locate and protect the twelve relics.

“You start on this,” his father said, laying out the newspaper on a broad study table. “I'll see if I can find out what Petrescu is. I'll be over there.” He pointed to a nearby bank of computers. “Yell if you find anything.”

Darrell nodded. “Except it's a library, so we'll whisper.”

The two boys searched the issue page by page, through articles on politics, economics, concerts, books. Wade tested the number sequence against page numbers, then column numbers, and finally against any numbers—even sports scores, stock market and weather reports, and picture captions.

“Nothing is obvious,” he said. “Maybe we need a third clue to figure it out.”

Then Darrell turned to the obituaries on page 31.

It contained the following notice.

“We were at those memorial services,” Darrell said.

Wade breathed heavily through his nose. “It's where we first saw the Teutonic Order and realized we were being followed.”

“And the hunt began,” said Darrell. “What's CERN?”

“The international research lab for nuclear stuff. They have the Large Hadron Collider. It's famous. All the best nuclear scientists work there. I told you about it like a thousand times. You don't listen.”

“Wait. What? Sorry, I wasn't listening. Who are you? And why do you have that look on your face?”

“You don't think . . .”

“Yes I do. What?”

“That the numbers the man said on the phone go with the obituary?” said Wade. “I mean, it would be the way a Guardian contacts us. Becca told us about a number code that works with books.”

“I remember. The book code,” said Darrell. “It gives you three numbers and tells pages and lines and words. Well, the numbers are in pairs here, so maybe we're supposed to assume that it's Uncle Henry's obituary and use just the line and the word. Try it.”

Wade took out his notebook and turned to the page with the numbers the phone caller told them. “The first pair is seven, eight. So the seventh line, eighth word.” He counted down. “Hmm. The word is
of.”

“To throw you off,” Darrell said, pushing his way in. “You have to try it without the title. The seventh line, eighth word is . . . Ha, told you. It's
eight.
The message begins with the word
eight.
I
did
solve it!”

“The next pair of numbers is ten and three,” said Wade, “which means tenth line, third word.
Days.
Darrell,
I
solved it. The message starts
eight days
!”

Eleven and two was
CERN.

Thirteen and eight was
secret.

Sixteen and one was
meeting.

The entire message read:

           
Eight days CERN secret meeting

“We got it!” Darrell said, not whispering.

His stepfather trotted back from the computer with a notecard in his hand.

“Dad,” said Wade, “we figured it out—”

“Mostly I did.”

“The message is ‘eight days CERN secret meeting.' There's going to be an important meeting at CERN in Switzerland in eight days.”

“We got the clue today,” said Darrell, “so we're talking eight days from today, which is Tuesday, June tenth. Whoever sent the message probably wants you—and definitely us—to be there.”

His father studied the obituary and the code side by side. “This explains Petrescu.”