The Golden Vendetta (8 page)

Nice, France

June 4

Morning

M
oments after the Kaplans left the rail terminal and entered the city streets of Nice, Wade heard his father's phone ring. He hoped it was Terence. He didn't want to spend any more time not knowing where he was going.

It was Terence.

“Dad, put it on speaker,” he said.

“Hello, all,” said Terence. “I heard about the fancy footwork at the station. Good job. Go directly to number five Rue de la Préfecture. It overlooks the Place du
Palais. I have two floors there; you'll be on the top one. The bookseller's been charged on suspicion of murder, which may eventually be reduced to manslaughter or self-defense. He's been taken to the Palais de Justice, the police headquarters in Nice's old quarter, which is conveniently across the square from the apartment. I like it because I frequently need to talk with the police for my novels. Your cover stands right now, although, as always, that will change.”

Wade's father gave them each a look. “We'll be careful.”

“It's in our blood,” Darrell added as they crossed a busy avenue and into a shady street that wandered south to the water.

“What about the document the bookseller stole in Paris?” Becca asked.

“Confiscated, most likely,” Terence replied. “Paul Ferrere found out it's called the Voytsdorf Ledger. Why Galina wants it, we don't know yet. My man inside the police will look into it. Listen, I'll arrive later. I'm following up with Paul, but you need to know that he and his investigators are hearing about several accidents that took place around the same time as the plane crash in Poland. Galina's up to something.”

“Besides the relics?” asked Roald.

“It seems so. I'll be there tomorrow afternoon to give you a full briefing. Julian is coming in from the States. Don't know his flight time. Until then.” He signed off.

“I knew it,” said Darrell as they wove toward the Place du Palais. “Galina is planning a massive operation. We're here just in time. In time for what, we don't have a clue, but we will. This won't end until it ends, and even then it won't end because there will be the next time and the—”

“Darrell, shh,” said Lily. “My ears are tired. The rest of me is tired, too. There, Rue de la Préfecture, not a minute too soon. I need to decompress.”

“Just don't decompose,” Darrell said.

She looked at him. “What?”

“Nothing.”

Terence's housekeeper, a severe woman in her sixties named Madame Cousteau, met them outside the apartment. Wade glanced at his watch. It had been, all told, a thirty-minute evasive walk from the station. Good to know. Using gestures and a few English words, supplemented by a conversation with Becca, the woman showed them into an open elevator with a wrought-iron gate across the front.

“Elegant,” said Sara.

“Old,” said the housekeeper.

Wade still wanted to grab Becca's bag from her and swing it up over his shoulder. He would never forget the horrifying moment Becca was wounded by Galina in the cave where they found their first relic. He couldn't see the scar, but Becca kept her bag tight against her side and wouldn't let it go.

“So the arm's getting better?” he asked.

“I've been on antibiotics off and on since they discovered toxin in the wound. I took my last dose in Paris last night.” She shook the orange bottle soundlessly.

It seemed to Wade a really personal detail, though he wasn't sure why.

The Ackroyd safe flat in Nice was indeed large.

Besides taking up most of the top floor of the building, which gave it window views on three sides, it had a narrow balcony overlooking the bustling square. The
place
below was a short walk to the seaside promenade and a major boulevard, but far enough from both to be out of the crush of tourist throngs.

Madame Cousteau told them that the
quartier
also boasted restaurants and cafés on nearly every corner.

“I can't wait to try them,” said Sara.

“But for you, only one.”

“One?” said Roald. “But the food in Nice—”

The housekeeper shook her head. “Ground floor. Secure. No exceptions.”

Wade shared a look with the others. “Well, food is food, right?”

“Not really,” said Becca.

“I found my room,” Lily said. She had walked into a small windowless room that resembled a well-stocked computer store. It was obviously Terence's office when he was there. There were lots of computers of all different sizes networked to a black box that could have been a steel-plated safe designed to withstand a direct bomb blast. It was a server.

“We can bring in a bed for you,” Sara said with a laugh.

“You got that right,” she said.

“No bed,” said Madame Cousteau, wagging her finger at them. “Is Mr. Terence's office.”

Knowing that the bookseller had been arrested and was in jail nearby, and after their jet lag and the impossible-to-sleep-in sleeper compartments on the train, not to mention a huge lunch prepared by Madame Cousteau, everyone eventually sank into their beds to take naps. Wade's turned into a deep, overnight sleep.

It was the next afternoon when he and everyone else finally felt alert enough to get to work.

While his father and stepmother were busy on several phones with Terence and Paul Ferrere, Wade spent two hours spread out at the dining room table with Becca, scouring the Leonardo parts of the diary.

Together, they found something new.

Facing the first “silver” page was one that appeared black, but seemed to have marks on the other side of it that were different from any writing on the previous page. “Becca,” he said, “could this be another one of those double pages, like the cipher we discovered in San Francisco? A hidden page folds out and . . .”

Becca slid her fingernail in the gutter of the book as before, and an unseen page became visible. Drawn on it was a triangular grid of symbols. “Whoa!”

“Those aren't letters,” said Wade. “At least not all of them are.”

It reminded him a little of the Holbein puzzle they'd discovered in London. That code had been made of symbols describing alchemical processes.

“The column running down the left side looks kind of like letters,” Becca said. “Under the sun there's a G, then a
U
with two dots—an umlaut—over it. The other characters could be some language I don't know.”

“Let's take out the letters we can recognize,” said Wade. Following the letters down the left-hand column, he wrote them down in his notebook.

Becca frowned. “The umlauts could mean it's German, but the accent on the
S
isn't. Either way, I don't know what it means.”

“Lily?” said Wade, looking around. But she was still in her room. “We could use a translator. Maybe Terence's office.”

They found a laptop and started it up. After finding a translator site, Becca entered the letters. “Huh. The Detect Language button on the program says it's Turkish.”

Darrell walked in, biting the end off a croissant.
“Turkish? From Turkey? Did Copernicus know Turkish?” He stuffed the rest of the croissant in his mouth.

“In Turkish it's two words,” Wade said. “
GÜMÜŞ
and
KOL
. And
gümüş kol
means ‘silver arm.'” He stared at Becca.

“‘Silver arm'?” she whispered. “Is that what Leonardo made for Nicolaus in his workshop? The old woman in Tampa had silvery fingers. Everything's silver!”

“But does ‘silver arm'
mean
anything?” said Darrell, leaning over the computer. “I mean, besides that I really want one?”

Wade keyed the words into the laptop's search engine. A few seconds later, the reference came back. He scanned it, felt his heart quicken.

“Okay. We have something here. There was a
pirate
nicknamed Silver Arm. A Barbary pirate from North Africa. He had a silver arm because he lost his real one in a battle. His name was Baba Aruj, and he was one of two pirate brothers called Barbarossa, because they had . . . Becca, they had red beards! Red beards!”

Becca screamed as she flipped back several pages in the diary. “The first passage that Lily and I read! So this pirate Barbarossa friend of Nicolaus's had a silver arm . . .”

“I don't want one if I have to lose my real one,” said Darrell.

Wade stood up from the desk. “So Copernicus asks Leonardo da Vinci to be a Guardian. Leo says, ‘No, I'm too old.' But he agrees to make a thing to hide the relic in. What he makes is an arm—out of silver—for a pirate who saved Hans's life during a battle. And this is where Copernicus puts the relic, whatever it actually is. The relic is inside the arm.”

He turned to Becca and Darrell. “Is this right?”

Becca began to nod slowly. “I think so. But you know what else? I'm thinking that because this story appears in the diary right after the Serpens story, whatever relic is in the silver arm is the one that Serpens points to.”

Wade sat down in front of the laptop again. “Yes. Which could mean that Galina has a head start on it. But she doesn't have the diary to tell her some important details, so we could be even with her.”

Darrell loved it, the way that things connected one to another and another. Even if they didn't know yet what the relic actually was, they were assembling the mystery. He had to tell Lily. Her room door was closed, but he went over to it and was ready to knock when he heard her voice through the door.

She was on the phone, talking quietly. To her parents? He voice was very soft. And . . . choked. Was she
crying? Lily never cried. He pulled away and went back to the dining room, where Wade and Becca were still at it, sewing up their discovery into a package that worked. They were good at that. He wasn't so much. Was Lily actually crying? He paced the dining room, then found himself walking all over the apartment, peeking in all the rooms, his brain methodically determining escape routes and memorizing the position of all the doors and windows. When he finally came back to the dining room, Lily was there. Her eyes were normal, not red. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he didn't know anything.

“Guess what,” he said, glancing at her, but not too long. “There's another elevator, a private one, in the back of the apartment. I think it takes you all the way down to the street and lets you out on the back side of the building—”

“You not take it,” said the housekeeper, suddenly appearing from nowhere.

“I didn't!” Darrell said. “I won't. You can just tell from the buttons where it goes.” Afraid of the woman's dark stare, he escaped out onto the balcony.

The sky was a giant royal-blue dome, marbled here and there with a light scrim of clouds. The quaint orange- and red-tiled rooftops spread out around the square in varying heights on all sides. Beyond them was
the great inviting expanse of the sea.

“So . . .” It was Lily, stepping out next to him but looking away, out over the water. He couldn't see her eyes.

“Everything okay?” he asked, being sensitive.

“Sure. What are we looking at out here?”

“France,” he said. “Strange you don't know that.”

“Ha. Ha. Did you hear what Wade and Becca found? It's big.” She brushed her cheeks.

“I know,” he said. “You're sure you're okay?”

“I'm good,” she said in a way that ended that line of conversation. “So, this is France, huh?”

“The French Mediterranean,” said Becca, coming out onto the terrace with Wade behind her. Both of them were glowing about the discovery of Copernicus and Leonardo and the silver-armed pirate.

“All the way to the right is the rest of the French Riviera, then Spain,” Becca went on. “On the left is more France, then Italy. Straight ahead on the other side of the water is, if you can believe it, Africa.
Africa!
Where the Barbarossa brothers lived their pirate life.”