The Golden Vendetta (5 page)

L
ily slid all the books and papers from the bed into Becca's new super-tough go-bag, then snatched up her own while Becca flew into the other room to wake her sister.

“Mags, we're moving again.”

Maggie slid out of bed half-asleep and pulled on the clothes that Becca had gathered for her. “Has Galina Sauerkraut come back?”

“We don't know,” Becca said. “We just have to go.”

It was frightening to move in the middle of the night, and although Lily and Becca had signed on for it, the others hadn't. Lily switched off the nightstand light and peeked out the shades. A large black Escalade was
parked sideways in the hotel lot.
Terence?
She waited by the hall door for the signal. A minute went by, another half minute . . . Then it came, a persistent tapping on the door.

Five knocks, two knocks, four knocks. A pause. Then again.

The sequence—five, two, four—meant the fifth month, twenty-fourth day: May 24, the day Copernicus died. Becca had wanted to add the year—one, five, four, three, for 1543—but Lily had argued that by the time someone got all those knocks out, the bad guys would be all over them. So they'd settled for five, two, four. Lily answered with five slow taps, one for each of the occupants in the suite.

“Mr. and Mrs. Benson,” she hissed, “time to move again—”

“Please let Terence in,” Becca's mother answered.

Lily pulled open the hall door. A familiar middle-aged man stood there, rumpled but alert and friendly. Terence Ackroyd had dark hair that was graying at the temples and a pair of bright green eyes blinking behind glasses.

“You've been tracked down,” he said softly. “And there's something else.”

Becca came out of Maggie's room, slinging her sister's
extra bag over her shoulder.

“We'll be okay,” Lily said to Maggie. “We're pros at this, and I am seriously ready to move on. The AC here is not what
I
call AC.”

“Terence?” said Mrs. Moore, carrying a large satchel. “Is it—”

“Serious? Yes,” he said, lending a hand with the bags. “I've just received a message from Roald. The Kaplans, excuse me, the Parkers, are on the move to France. Down the stairs quickly.”

“Are they all right?” asked Becca.

“Tell us they're all right,” Lily added.

“They will be,” Terence said under his breath to the two of them, “once you two get there.”

Just the way those words sounded made Lily want to burst into a shout, or a scream, or a sob, or
something
to show how eager she was to get away from her own life, no matter how serious or dangerous it might be.

Terence trotted down the outside stairs two at a time, tucking his shirt in as he went. The night was warm and breezy, and the air sweeping in reminded Lily of Uncle Roald's house in Austin. It was where Wade and Darrell and she and Becca had put together the first clues about the Copernicus Legacy.

Crouching low between the cars, they ran across the
parking lot to the Escalade. An armed man popped out of the front and opened the doors and closed them as soon as the family was inside.

They were soon passing through streets of houses that reminded Lily of her old neighborhood, where she and Becca lived before the Teutonic Order started harassing them. Lily tried not to look, but she caught sight of a house that looked like hers. She cringed to see it. It was dark and appeared empty, like hers was now. Was that because of the Order? Sure. But it would have been empty anyway.

Twenty minutes later, Becca watched the van pull into the parking lot of the John F. Germany Public Library. The dark bulk of the building, lifeless in the middle of the night, would have been intimidating, frightening, even, but in the few weeks the “Bensons” had been in Tampa, Becca had come to know nearly every room in the library, from the book repair on the bottom floor to the most isolated study carrel on the top. She had already spent many hours in it and had come to love it as her second home, like her favorite, the Faulk Central Library in Austin.

There was a faint glimmer of light coming from one of the windows on the ground floor.

“What's going on?” Becca's father asked. “Terence, we have a right to know.”

Terence turned off the engine of the Cadillac. “You do. I wish I could tell you. But I don't know much myself. It looks like Galina is on the move again.” He motioned to the light coming from a ground-floor window of the library. “A woman, a very old woman, has crossed half the world to get to you.”

“To us?” said Becca's mother.

Terence shook his head. “To the girls.”

“Who is she?” asked Lily. “What does she want?”

“I don't know, and she wouldn't say or can't say. Not to me, anyway. As near as I can determine, she made her way here without any sort of legal identification. How she did that, I can't tell you. How she knew you were here, I can't tell you either. She was ambushed in Tampa by agents of the Order. My men intervened and brought her here on the way to a hospital. We think she might be a Guardian, but there's no proof. All she said was ‘Becca. Lily. Becca. Lily.' So I fetched you. I pray she's still alive.”

They piled out of the SUV, and Terence sent a text from his phone. A few seconds later, the rear library doors buzzed and clicked. He pulled them open, and everyone entered a yellow-lit hallway.

In the repair room at the end of the hall, a woman
dressed in a swirl of black robes, the lower half of which were wrinkled and smeared with blood, lay supine on a worktable. A hood obscured most of her face, but Becca could see that the woman was pale, thin-lipped, and very old, more than eighty, possibly more than ninety. She had a bandage taped hastily across one side of her face. Her hands and skin were as white as snow, except for a lot of blood smeared on her fingers. Blood, and what looked like silver paint . . . or ink.

Attending her was a young man in scrubs. Terence introduced him as a friend whose name they didn't need to know. He wore a stethoscope around his neck. He looked at them all, then shook his head. “Not much I can do here but keep her stable. She needs to get to the hospital, stat.”

“Five minutes,” said Terence. “Girls.”

They moved to the table and bent down to the woman.

“Hello?” said Lily. “We're here. Lily and Becca. It's us.”

The old woman opened her wrinkled eyelids. Her lips trembled. She mumbled something softly. Both girls bent down closer. “Carlo told me . . . you are here.”

“Carlo?” said Lily. “You know Carlo Nuovenuto?”

It was Carlo who had given the Copernicus diary to
the children. He was one of the very first Guardians they had ever met, though his whereabouts right now were a mystery.

“I . . . Guardian,” she said. “Mother . . .”

“Mother?” said Becca. “Are you Carlo's mother?”

“No! Mother!” the woman croaked. “We stay, we always stay!” It didn't make sense, but Becca vowed to remember every word, every syllable. The woman shook, then held the girls by their wrists, lifted her head up, and through her convulsive coughing shouted as loudly as she could:

“La harrrr! Ghh . . . harr!”

As soon as the sounds left her lips, she fell limp to the table, and her hands loosened their grip. Her eyes lost their fire and flickered closed. The doctor leaned over, pressed his stethoscope to the woman's sunken breast, and pulled out his phone. “We need to go. Now.”

Terence nodded to the armed man who'd ridden with them. “Please help her into the doctor's car.”

Becca let out a long breath, felt her chest heave. Maggie was whimpering in the corner, cowering with her parents.

“What did she mean?” Lily asked softly. “She's a mother and ‘la har'?”

Becca had learned—from Copernicus himself in
London—that the hiding of the relics for hundreds of years had depended on a complex, and sometimes seemingly random, collection of codes and riddles and hints. Most Guardians had to be kept in the dark, for the greater security of the Legacy.

“That's a mystery for later,” Terence said. “Look, the Teutonic Order is closing in. I have a plan to throw them off, but it requires that you split up—”

“No!” said Maggie, lunging at Becca, wrapping her arms around her. “No.”

“Maggie, I'm sorry,” Terence said. “The girls are suddenly needed, and our escape will work only if we send you off in different directions. Not for long—”

“No, not again,” said Becca's mother. “We won't allow it.”

Becca wanted to feel the same way, but she honestly felt she couldn't afford to. As much as she loved her family, if Copernicus had taught her anything in London, it was that nothing was more important than finding the relics of his Eternity Machine. If only to keep them from Galina Krause.

“Lily and I are getting these clues for a reason,” Becca said to her parents.

“I know, dear,” said her father, “but you're not leaving us again. You can't. It's too dangerous.”

“It's very dangerous, I agree,” said Terence. “And I know it's difficult to hear, but I'm afraid we don't have a choice.” He gave the girls a grim glance. “An hour ago, Paul Ferrere called me. Apparently, the theft of an old Polish manuscript two months ago may be directly related to a fatal plane crash in Poland at the same time, both of which are connected to the search for the relics. The Order is hatching something very big. The Copernicus diary is vital to stopping them, and Becca and Lily are vital, too. I will personally accompany them both to Paris. You'll all meet up in a matter of days, I assure you. Becca and Lily are necessary to the success of this project. They are, in a word,
needed.”

Becca was so thrilled, she nearly screamed.
We're needed! Yes, we are!

As Terence handed the Moores a travel waiver, giving him permission to take both Becca and Lily—because they were acting as Lily's temporary guardians—out of the country, the door opened. Terence's son, Julian, entered the repair room. He hugged the girls. “We need to move. The Order's slumber is over. They're after us. All of us. Mr. and Mrs. Moore, Maggie, I'm Julian, by the way. You'll need to come with me.”

“Lily, do you want me to call your parents?” Terence asked.

“They don't care.”

Becca's mother practically launched herself at Lily. “They
do
care, dear; they do!” She pulled her into a tight embrace. “It's very difficult for them right now. You know they love you. You've always known.”

Lily hugged Mrs. Moore as tightly, then wiped her cheeks. “I know. But it's better for them if I'm out of the picture for a while. Besides, the Legacy.”

There was the sound of more than one car approaching the library.

“Maggie, I'm sorry,” said Becca.

“It's okay,” Maggie said, trying impossibly to dry her face. “You'll have more stories to tell me. You better keep safe.”

Becca wrapped her arms around Maggie. “I will. I will.”

“Come along now, please.” Terence slid his hand into his jacket and tugged out airline boarding passes to Paris made in the girls' aliases.

There came a shout from outside the building. It was followed by the racing of an engine and more squealing tires . . . and Maggie's stifled scream.

“Out, everyone, out!” Terence said as he and Julian spirited the girls and Becca's family off in different directions.

Côte d'Azur, France

June 4

7:27 a.m.

“I
t's finally coming together.”

“Not me and sleep. They're not coming together. Not while you're awake.”

The clacking of iron wheels on the rails beneath his compartment on the train had kept Darrell awake for the last two hours, and it seemed that Wade should be awake, too. Why? Because it was finally coming together.

“So you're
not
sleeping.”

“Yes, Dana. I'm not.”

“Don't call me Dana.”

“I wouldn't have to if I were asleep. Dana.”

Lily and Becca had arrived in Paris the afternoon before. That night, they and Terence had met up inside one of the less chaotic corners of the vast Gare de Lyon train terminal in south Paris. There was two months' worth of reunion in three minutes—all awkward hugs and looks and sweaty palms.

Then, at precisely 10:14 p.m., Oskar Gerrenhausen, suspected of stealing a Polish document for Galina, appeared at the station. He presented his ticket for the Paris-Rome sleeper train and boarded. They did the same.

Now, the morning after, the girls were still asleep in the compartment they shared with Darrell's mother, while Roald was in the dining car assembling breakfast to bring back to them. The thief was in the compartment next door to the boys. Darrell, Wade, and his stepfather had listened in stages all night, but Gerrenhausen hadn't emerged from his cabin since the train had left Paris.

Darrell stood and stretched, though there was hardly room for either. As soon as the girls had arrived the day before, Becca had told them about the old woman at midnight and her incomprehensible words, “Har-har,”
or something like that, before she fell unconscious, which was strange enough. But then Becca related how, after reading and rereading the diary pages on the plane halfway across the Atlantic, she and Lily had found something else, and it was big.

“Look,” Becca had said, and she'd read out a bit about Copernicus meeting an old man in his workshop. “Together Lily and I found another passage about that meeting. There Copernicus says, ‘A good man lost something saving Hans once, but you, my Mechanicysta Mediolanu, have restored it to him again.'”

“Of course, I instantly found out that ‘Mechanicysta Mediolanu' means ‘the Mechanist of Milan,'” Lily had added. “Which refers to a particular person, who I will now show you . . .” She'd flipped open her tablet to a picture and grinned.

Wade had frowned. “That's Leonardo da Vinci. You aren't saying—”

“We are!” Becca jumped. “Leonardo da Vinci! Can you believe it? Leonardo da Vinci and Nicolaus met, and he actually
made
something for Copernicus!”

Wade had nearly turned himself inside out. “Da Vinci is the greatest genius of all time! He invented the helicopter; he painted the
Mona Lisa
and the
Last Supper;
he made all kinds of weapons. He invented everything!”

“Except whispering,” Paul Ferrere had said. “There. Look.”

And that was when they'd seen the little bookseller head toward the train.

Now Darrell raised the window shade. Leonardo and Nicolaus. Everyone was still stunned by that. Or not
everyone.
After the excitement of last night in Paris, Lily seemed to have crashed. Her parents' divorce was draining her: of her perkiness, her usual sparkle, her bounce, if that was a thing.

Darrell had been through a divorce. If only he weren't so tongue-tied, he might have come up with something helpful to her. He joked around, as usual, thinking a dose of Darrell was good for anything, but the spell wasn't working. He'd try harder.

A sign flashed by: Nice 32km. The train was now on what he'd read was the Côte d'Azur—the blue coast—France's southern shore that bordered the Mediterranean Sea. Dawn came on strong, with bold rays of sunlight glimmering over the fields and little towns visible from that side of the train. He was thinking how beautiful and peaceful it all was, when something crashed against the wall to his left.

Wade sprang up. “What was—”

“Shh!” whispered Darrell.

A muffled voice shouted from the far side. It was garbled. Then came a second, high-pitched shout, which was cut short. This was followed by a deep, dull thump, then silence.

Darrell's mouth dropped open. “Dude, that was a gunshot!”