The Serpent's Curse (10 page)

Wade felt uneasy to hear those words. But he hoped that the mysterious Russian would shed light on the relic's whereabouts. At the very least, the family was, as his father had hoped, moving forward.

To Russia. To the second relic . . . and Sara.

“In the meantime,” Julian said, “Dad and I will focus on finding out what we can from our side. The instant we discover anything, we'll call you.”

“Night or day,” Roald said, looking around at the children.

With a final firm pledge of assistance, Terence made a call. Seven minutes later, Dennis pulled up outside the Water Club in yet another limo. Their luggage packed and safely in the trunk, the kids and Roald began their roundabout journey to JFK, to await their evening flight to London.

Madrid; London

March 19

E
bner von Braun woke to the tinny ascending scale of a digital marimba that suddenly sounded like a skeleton drumming a piano with its own bones. It was a ringtone he was determined to change at his first opportunity.

He blinked his eyes onto a black room.

Where am I?

More marimba.

Right.

Madrid.

He slid open the phone.
“¿Hola?”

It was an Orc from the Copernicus Room. He listened.
“¿Londres?”
he said.
“¿Cuándo?”
The voice replied. Ebner pulled the phone away from his face.
“¿Quién es el jefe del Grupo de los Seis?”

“Señor Doyle.”

“Then send Señor Doyle.”

Click.

The aroma of grilled tomatoes greeted Archie Doyle when he woke up. He gazed through sleepy eyes at the bedroom of his three-room flat at 36B Foulden Road in the Borough of Hackney in London. He yawned.

It was 5:51 a.m., and his wife, Sheila, and his son, Paulie, were already awake.

Ah, family.

He flapped his lips and blew out the stale breath of sleep. “Bbbbbbbbbb!” This habit, and other exercises of the face and vocal cords, were ones he had learned in his unsuccessful years as an actor, which, alas, were all of them. As an actor, a mimic, a stand-up comedian, and the sad clown Tristophanes, in whose guise he appeared at birthday parties and bar mitzvahs, Archie Doyle had struggled.

He was far better at his other calling.

He liked to kill people.

And he'd be getting to do more of it soon. A recent and bizarre auto accident involving no less than three operatives had left Archie next in line to head Group 6 of the East London section of the Teutonic Order, a post he held while Berlin made up its corporate mind about more permanent arrangements.

Archie was determined to make a good impression.

“The rrrrrain in Spppppain stays mmmmmainly on the ppppplain!”

“That you, dear?” came the call from the kitchen. “Breakfast in five minutes.”

“Coming, luv,” Archie responded happily. Sitting up, he slid his laptop from the end table onto the bed and opened it. He then typed in seven distinct passwords, and the screen he wanted came up. On it was a photograph of five rather downcast people, a man and four young teenagers, at a departure gate in what his trained eye told him was JFK airport in New York. Did they know they were being tracked? Their expressions suggested they might. It was next to impossible to avoid detection in such places when the Order was after you. On the other hand, a father and four children? Where was Mum?

Mine not to reason why.

Beneath the photograph were the names of the five persons, and these words:

Guardian alert: 19 March. NY flight Virgin Atlantic 004. Arrival 7:25 a.m. Heathrow Terminal 3.

“Oh, brilliant!” he whispered with a smile. There was a standing order to terminate all Guardians when identified as such. Five kills in one day. This would be a rather lovely way to convince his superiors that Archie was the man for the top job.

When he scrolled down a little farther, however, his smile crinkled to disappointment. Beneath the names and destination of the people in the photograph was a series of items with little boxes to be checkmarked as to Archie's course of action.

           
☐
 
Terminate immediately

           
☐
 
Terminate off site

           
☐
 
Kidnap and report

           
☑
 
Follow only and report

“Blast it all!” he breathed softly. “I am a termination machine!”

Still, a job was a job, and pleasing the Order was far preferable to displeasing them. And by
them
he meant
her
, and by
her
he meant Galina Krause. He'd seen her angry once. He hoped never to see it again.

Pulling up the train schedule, Archie calculated that the journey from his local railway station of Rectory Road to Heathrow would take a total of ninety-four minutes. Just before 6:30, he would snag a seat on the excruciatingly slow one-hour service west to central London, disembark at Paddington Station, dash over to Platform 6 for the 7:30 Heathrow Express to Terminal 3, and arrive twenty minutes later. Given another twenty or so minutes spent deplaning, collecting bags, if any, passport control, bathroom time, etc., the gloomy family couldn't be expected to be out of the arrivals hall until eight a.m. at the earliest, anyway. He checked the time again. Six o'clock.

I do have to get a move on.

Archie Doyle was of normal height and build with features that were, in the best tradition of foreign agents, nondescript. He leaped from bed, cleaned himself up, dressed in a smart wool suit of dark blue and a white shirt with muted tie, and topped it all off with a crisp bowler hat. He then slipped his briefcase onto his dresser and flipped up the lid.

Inside were the tools of his trade: several thicknesses and shades of adhesive mustaches and matching eyebrows, a range of eyeglasses, a tube of rub-on tanner, two false noses, three slender vials of poison, a small pistol and silencer, a stiletto, and assorted untraceable cell phones. It amazed him how many of these items he also used for his party activities. He placed his computer inside and clamped the briefcase shut. Then he slid his brolly—umbrella—from the closet, opened and closed it once, then tapped one of two small buttons inside its handle. With barely a breath, a hollow two-inch needle emerged from the umbrella's tip. Such a weapon could inflict a range of wounds, from a simple annoying scratch to a deadly puncture, if the needle was infused with poison. That was what the second button was for.

Archie wondered for an instant: Who
were
the Kaplans, anyway? Why “follow only and report”? Why not terminate? With no answers coming, he carefully retracted the umbrella's needle, gave his bowler a slap, and was in the kitchen—all in less than ten minutes from the time he woke.

His lovely wife, Sheila, turned to him, her smile like sunshine on the lawn of Hyde Park. In the tiny room with her, and taking up much of the floor space, was a portable crib. Fingers in mouth, sippy cup wedged between his plump legs, sat Paulie Doyle, fourteen months of pudge and drool and grins.

“I'm nearly plating the tomatoes, dear,” Sheila said. “Kippers this morning?”

Archie Doyle sighed. “Sorry, dear. Must leap to the office immediately. I'll grab an egg and bacon on the way to the train. Save the tomatoes, though. Should be home for lunch.”

“All right, dear,” she said. “You have a wunnyful day.”

“Thanks, luv,” Archie said, kissing her ample cheek. “And bye-bye, Little Prince Paulie.” He ruffled the wispy hair on the head of his son on his way to the door.

Archie was out, down the stairs, and on the sidewalk in a flash. Brisk day. Gray but pleasant. A perfect day for a termination—or five—he thought, but good enough to follow only and report.

“We shall see,” he murmured, fingering the second button on his umbrella, “what we shall see.”

London

K
nowing there was little escape from airport cameras, Becca emerged head down from the Jetway in the arrivals terminal at London's Heathrow Airport. She trailed Lily, who as usual was acting as a sort of guide through the crowded world of crowds. It was the morning after the flight, and early, only a few minutes after eight a.m. But already the gates and concourses were busy, and Becca couldn't look up without feeling nauseous.

A really annoying personality trait.

It was like shouting,
Hey, everybody, look at me! I'm not looking at you!

“You'll have to learn to do this one day, you know,” Lily said over her shoulder.

“Not if you're always here.”

“I just might be!”

Before the flight had left New York the previous evening, both girls had received a second and third round of phone calls from their parents, and Becca had had a very long talk with Maggie, which had managed to settle them both so that by the end they'd been laughing through their tears and whispering promises to each other to be good and safe. Becca felt that for her and Lily, hearing from their families was like Roald, Darrell, and Wade hearing from the investigators: all of them were now more or less assured that things were as okay as they could be for the moment and moving in the right direction. Without that, Becca didn't know how they could possibly focus on the relic and Russia and whatever else was to come. But here they were, on their first leg of the Serpens quest, and they were doing it.

“Oh, brother, now it begins,” Lily grumbled as an airport official waved them and a hundred thousand other international passengers into the same skinny line.

There was no hiding here, Becca thought. No possibility of evasive action. Everyone had to go through passport control. And they were undoubtedly being filmed. In San Francisco they'd learned about the Order's awesome “Copernicus servers,” with a computer power most first-world countries would envy. The family had probably been spotted at Kennedy airport, back in New York, so the Order
had
to know they were already in London. Eyes were on them. Of course they were.

Nearly an hour of blurring movement and bouncing from one line into another and opening bags and zipping them up and showing documents and squeezing into another line finally ended, and they were out of the terminal, and it was great, but not that great.

London might have been the home of Oliver Twist and Sherlock Holmes, but Becca's first experience outside the terminal was a stabbing downpour of cold, heavy, exhaust-filled, vertical rain.

“Absolutely fabulous, it's not,” Lily grumbled. “Who knew it rained in England?”

“Uck, okay. Stay together,” Roald urged, and they did, sticking close as he moved them quickly across the lanes of bus and shuttle traffic to the taxi stand, where they piled into a bulbous black cab that looked very much like the old one they'd seen in San Francisco last week. The sight of it started a superfast stream of memories in Becca's mind, culminating with a gun at her head at Mission Dolores, which, thankfully, hadn't gone off. Best not to live those days again. These days were bound to be scary enough.

“We'll be stopping at various places,” Roald told the driver from the backseat. “First destination, Covent Garden.”

“Certainly.”

The taxi, piloted by a very quiet driver who wore a Sikh turban, was soon grinding its way from the airport and up onto a broad highway known as the M4. One of the things both Terence Ackroyd and the investigator had advised, to confuse would-be followers, was to take a roundabout route wherever they went. Terence Ackroyd's private apartment—or “safe flat,” as he called it—was near the British Museum, but it would likely be a couple of hours before they actually reached it.

“Evasive maneuvers,” Roald called them.

In the same spirit, Darrell and Wade had worked out a set of secret finger gestures on the plane. “To use if something bad is happening but you can't tell anyone,” Darrell had said.