The Golden Vendetta (6 page)

S
till staring at Darrell, Wade jumped to his feet, suddenly wide awake. His veins turned to ice.
Gunshot. Murder. The Teutonic Order. Galina's active again.

There was a sudden, heart-wrenching groan from the compartment.

“I'm texting Dad,” he whispered, switching his phone on and tapping in a text. As they went out into the hall, he saw his father running down the corridor to them. Darrell nodded toward the bookseller's door and made the universal hand signal for shooting a gun.

Urging the boys aside, Wade's father tapped the door. “Hello? Is everything all right in there?”

A small voice said, “Yes, yes. Come in.”

Sharing a quick look with them, Wade's father entered the compartment first, while they stood half in, half out. On the floor, amid a scattering of clothes and papers spilling out of a small roller suitcase, was the body of a large man. His arms were splayed across the space between the bunks, his suit was twisted around him, and his white shirt was stained with a growing island of deep red.

Wade cupped his hand over his mouth.

“No, no,” said the small voice. “It's quite all right. He's dead.”

That much was obvious, and it didn't help.

The bookseller, quite a bit older and smaller than the man on the floor, was huddled in the corner, quivering like a leaf in a storm. He had wispy white hair and thick spectacles, and in one hand he held an automatic weapon, its barrel lengthened by a three-inch noise suppressor. In the other he had a cell phone, which he slid into a pocket the moment the boys and their father entered.

The sharp smell of gunpowder hovered in the air. The scene inside the cabin was in complete contrast to the sunny day dawning outside the window.

“I shot him,” the little man said, in a squeaky voice tinged with an Eastern European accent. “And he died.
Just like that.” The little man's shirttails were untucked. He wore only one slipper; the other foot was bare. It appeared that he'd been sleeping when the man entered his cabin.

“We'll call the conductor,” Wade's father said.

Wade found a small red button near the door. He picked out a word or two of French and guessed that pressing the button would contact the nearest conductor.

Darrell stood quietly. “In the meantime, why don't you put the gun down?”

“Of course. Of course.” The little man stared at the gun in his hand but made no effort to put it down. “He tried to rob me. I had no choice but to kill him.”

To kill him.

Wade's father removed a handkerchief from his jacket and used it to slip the gun carefully out of the man's hand.

“I am a bookseller,” the man said. Wade knew he was. Would he say he worked for Galina Krause? “Mostly a bookseller, that is. I locate other things upon occasion. He would have killed me, you see. I had no choice in the matter. He came at me. It is warm in here. But perhaps it is only me. . . .”

He's in shock,
Wade thought.
Trauma does that to you.
The bookseller had just killed a man, the man on the floor covered with blood.

Wade stifled a second impulse to be sick.

“Boys,” said his father, “why not go and find the conductor?”

“Okay.” Wade didn't move.

Even in the circumstances—a dead man, a gun, a crime—there was something Wade couldn't put his finger on, and he didn't want to leave before it came to him. The relic hunt had made him like that. An observer. But what bothered him?

The compartment was as small as theirs, and beyond the single piece of upset luggage, there were only the five of them in there—the dead giant, Darrell, himself, his father, and the old man. Somewhere in the compartment might be the Polish document he had stolen in Paris. But where? There was a leather messenger bag hanging in the closet. Then it came to him.

What was bothering him was the gun.

“Did you use this other man's gun?” he asked.

Gerrenhausen studied the pistol lying on the bunk next to Wade's father. “The Beretta? No. This is mine. Often I travel with valuable items, so . . .”

“So you had a silencer?” Darrell asked.

And that was it. Darrell had asked the question.
You
only have a silencer if you're a killer. Maybe this man really is a bookseller, but he's also an agent of the Order.
Wade liked that he—and Darrell—had noticed the details.

“The conductor's taking his time,” Darrell whispered. “The button's not working. I'll get him.” He slipped past Wade and his father into the corridor.

Because the man on the floor was clearly dead, Wade didn't want to look at him, but he noticed something anyway. A small tattoo on the upper side of the man's left wrist. It was nearly obscured by the cuff of his shirt. It resembled a circle with four small bars crossing into it, but not meeting in the center.

Odd for such a big man to have such a small tattoo,
he thought.

Darrell arrived a few minutes later with the conductor and two railroad security officials, who questioned them. Some minutes after that, Sara came down the corridor and took them aside.

“We need to stick close to this man,” she whispered. “We all remember what Becca learned in London. The horror that Copernicus saw, the horror of letting Galina do what she wants. We have to follow this bookseller.”

Wade's father nodded slowly. “They'll take him off the train at Nice. Terence has a flat there where we can stay. It's simple enough to fly from Nice to my meeting in Switzerland. Agreed?”

Agreed.

Oskar Gerrenhausen was handcuffed in nylon zip cuffs by one of the security officers and taken into custody. His cabin, now a crime scene, was sealed and guarded, and the train rolled on under the rising sun toward the city of Nice.

Katha, Upper Myanmar

June 4

Afternoon

A
hole in the sky.

A hole in her life.

After becoming aware of when and where she was, Galina realized that her collapse and eight weeks in a coma had put her maddeningly and agonizingly far behind schedule. Yet her two months of oblivion were not without one victory. Her mind had continued to work, to dream, to create. Her coma had in fact left her mind free to wander. And wander it had. A long-buried memory had surfaced with a scorching vengeance.
And her plan had birthed itself, fully formed, like Venus emerging from the sea's foam.

With only one hundred and eleven days left, the looming deadline rose like a great black poisonous cloud that enveloped everything in its path. She couldn't risk losing any more time. She would move with terrifying speed, a scythe, hewing every obstacle, leaving nothing in her path.

She would pursue a vendetta against the world.

A golden one.

Everything would come together in a single global operation.

She spoke its name in her mind.
Aurora.

Aurora. Its first two letters the symbol for gold. Light. Dawn. The golden sun.

She opened her eyes to see her slender-fingered, tawny-skinned doctor leaning back from the gurney she lay on. He smiled a lifeless smile. “Fully awake, then, are you? I must say, when your man Ebner brought you here in April, I had little hope.”

“Did you?” she said, sitting up. “And now?”

His hazel eyes scanned her face with no more emotion than if he were reading an EKG. “Miss Krause, the tissues at the site of your surgery are deeply inflamed. You have been on a regimen of Carbora thirty-one,
high doses, but you are now beyond Carbora's help altogether. The body can only endure so much abuse, and you have treated yours poorly. I cannot help you. In fact, I dare say your cancer has developed beyond
anyone's
skill or capacity to—”

“Wrong answer.” Galina slid the tubes off herself and took up her phone from the bedside table. She tapped out a message and sent it. An instant later there was a quiet
bing
from outside the door. The doctor swung on his heels and stared at the door as pair of jumpsuited militiamen pushed through it into the hospital room.

“What is the meaning—” the doctor said.

The men took hold of the doctor and pinned him roughly against the nearest wall. A third man, dressed in high-level military trappings, entered. He was short, powerful, a brick of a man in a uniform. He bowed slightly to Galina.

“Colonel, meet the doctor,” Galina said. “Doctor, meet the colonel.”

“What?” The doctor was wild-eyed. “Colonel? Help me!”

The colonel's face was cold. It bore the emotion of a corpse. He drew a small object from a pouch at his belt. It was a syringe. He raised it, pressed its plunger.

Galina shook her head. “Wait a moment.”

“You wish to spare him?” the colonel asked, glancing from the doctor to the needle in his hand. He tapped it again; a spout of clear liquid shot into the air.

Galina walked up to the doctor, looked into his eyes. Such fear there. “No. Merely to do it myself. After two months in a coma, I am out of practice.”

The doctor shuddered, screaming, “No!”

Galina slid the syringe from the colonel's hand and injected the doctor's arm. He struggled for a few moments, then slumped to the floor. She heard the rain start up again, a light pattering.

The two militiamen removed the body as efficiently as movers hauling a refrigerator. Operatives of Galina's Burmese militia, a crack mercenary unit numbering six thousand, were headquartered delightfully nearby.

“Colonel, shut down the lab, then go to Station Two in Berlin. A package is awaiting transport. I will notify you soon of its destination.”

The man bowed silently. Galina donned a blue robe hanging on a rack by the door, swept a gold scarf around her face, and left the clinic. Outside, the world swept around her in a noisy mess. The air was a heavy fog dragging itself painfully up from the earth.
Breathing was like chewing wads of cotton soaked in hot water.

Katha was not large, a city bordered by the Irrawaddy River and haunted by the foothills that ranged across the country to the north. She made her way to the river, alley by alley, through narrow streets of tumbledown shacks and shops and houses where stray dogs scrounged for food.

She was a stray, too, wasn't she?

Strays always found a way to live.

Reaching the river, she turned north, when the insistent chiming of her cell phone tore her from her thoughts. She swiped away the lock screen.

A message from Ebner, forwarding a text from Oskar Gerrenhausen.

Killed man to protect ledger. I will be arrested in Nice. Auction tomorrow. Thief's wrist wore this mark. Please advise.

Galina's pulse sped up at the sign. Who was this? Another player in the relic hunt? She did not know the symbol. She replied to the bookseller's message.

Our man in Nice will arrange your release. Proceed to Monte Carlo. Do not fail to acquire the item.

She sent another text to Ebner—
What is this symbol?—
then studied the tattoo for a moment. It was the calling card, no doubt, of a new entrant in the relic hunt.

“So the Kaplans are not the only ones interested in the relics? Fine. Let us play this game to the end.”

She slid a hand beneath her flowing robe, reached for her Beretta Storm, patted it twice, and kept her palm on its grip as she pushed through the winding alleys along the Irrawaddy River and the rain-soaked bazaar.

A dozen or so minutes northeast of Galina's position, under the awning of a shop selling tin objects for home and office, the sunken-chested nuclear physicist Ebner von Braun studied a transaction between an old woman and a goat.

He was trying to predict which of them would win the contest, when his phone buzzed. It was the Copernicus Room in Madrid, responding to the text he'd sent after receiving Galina's.

Company logo of Ugo Drangheta, industrialist. Known to require his inner circle to wear this tattoo. Amassed his fortune in real estate, airlines, steel factories, shipping after breakup of Yugoslavia. Chief residences include Helsinki, Shanghai, Hanoi, Moscow, Casablanca. Born Sarajevo October 1974, unmarried, parents deceased, one sibling—Uliana Biszku, pilot, joined Order 2013—deceased.

Ebner shuddered as he read those last words. He knew the name Uliana Biszku, though he knew for certain Galina did not. How could this have happened? The pilot had volunteered for the assignment. Had
anyone
known she had a brother?
How will I tell Galina?

Just then, proving her uncanny ability to be everywhere at once, Galina approached him, a dervish of robes and scarves, hovering above the rubbish of the street. His heart pounded like the quick rapping of a lover on a door.

And then, as she removed a scarf, a shock. Galina's face. Her face was the color of ash; her eyes were hollow; she was but a ghost of herself. So the treatment had not worked after all. Did the girl know how she looked? He was aghast, dizzy, his heart fluttering, but he would say nothing.

“The doctor talked,” she said softly.

“As in he talked
too much?”

“Not anymore.”

Ebner was well aware of Galina's habit of cleaning up the space around her. “You'll run out of them one day, you know. Doctors.”

She shot him a look. “Not if you keep finding them for me.”

“Of course, Galina. It is what I do.”

“Walk with me, Ebner. And tell me, what news?”

He swallowed slowly. “The would-be assassin on the train was an employee of Ugo Drangheta. Drangheta is . . . the brother of a woman named Uliana Biszku.”

“Who is . . . ?”

“Who
was
the pilot of the plane that crashed into Olsztyn Castle in April,” he said. “A mistake was made in our lower ranks, although I must say that the pilot volunteered for the assignment.”

“Not for her death,” said Galina, who displayed less emotion than he had anticipated.

“No,” said Ebner. “But this sudden appearance of a hitman on the train suggests that our pilot's bereaved brother seeks retribution.”

“By attacking Gerrenhausen and inserting himself into the hunt for the relics?”

“Rather, I think, to force a confrontation with you,” he said.

After several interminable minutes in which the crush of individuals streaming through the streets threatened to overwhelm them, Galina said, “The search for the astrolabe fragments.”

He blew out a breath. Good, another topic. “We have not been idle. Over two hundred pieces of the astrolabe's main framing mechanism, both large and small, have been excavated. The majority of them are gathered at Station Two in Berlin. Others in Kraków, Prague, Salzburg, elsewhere. Together they make, naturally, no more than a pile of bones, if I may say so. An unassembled skeleton lacking sinews, flesh, organs, blood. We have gained
some
knowledge of the remaining relics. One, for example, appears to be forged of ancient iron and bears the shape of a wolf. Our investigation is ongoing.”

“I had a vision in my long sleep, Ebner,” she said. “Operation Aurora.”

“Aurora. What is it?”

“It will proceed at full throttle simultaneous to the hunting down of the relics. I'm texting you a location. Arrange with the colonel to retrieve all the fragments
and deliver them there at one p.m. Central European Time on Tuesday, the tenth, six days from today.”

Ebner checked his phone uneasily. Appearing on the screen were the coordinates 42°27′14.4″N, 13°34′33.6″E. He copied them into his GPS app and watched as it pinpointed the location on a map. His uneasiness deepened.

“My dear Galina, I know this location. Of course I do. But is this wise—”

“The world is against me, my health demands quick action . . . And so, a vendetta against them all.”

“Vendetta? Galina, perhaps you are not ready to reveal the full scope of Operation Aurora to me—that is fine—but would a more careful consideration—”

“There is no time.” She shot him another text. “Make these things happen on the same timetable. Aurora rises in the next six days. See that you rise with it.”

She looked not at him but through him, beyond an open temple door to the darkness within. “What of the Kaplans?”

He swallowed, glancing at the new text. “Information has surfaced that they are on the Continent, posing as a family called the Parkers. We are zeroing in on them as we speak. The family enjoys the help of a wealthy man of considerable resources and contacts
worldwide. Beyond this, the Kaplans have grown very smart very quickly. Apparently, one cannot pursue, kidnap, torture, or harass them without their rising to the occasion.”

She refocused. “Good. Until we know which ones are expendable, we need them all. I will deal with them. You have your orders.”