Copyright

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2014

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers

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Text copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014 Illustrations copyright © Bill Perkins 2014

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014, Jacket art © 2014 by Bill Perkins, Logo art © 2014 by Jason Cook/Début Art, Front cover design by Tom Forget

Tony Abbott asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007581931

Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007581948

Version: 2014-09-03

TONY ABBOTT is the author of nearly a hundred books. He has worked in libraries, in bookshops and at a publishing company, and currently teaches college English. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, two daughters and two dogs.

Praise for THE COPERNICUS LEGACY SERIES

“I had to keep reminding myself The Copernicus Legacy was intended for a young audience. Full of mystery and intrigue, this book had me completely transfixed.”

Ridley Pearson, New York Times bestselling author of the Kingdom Keepers series

“The Copernicus Legacy takes you on a fantastical journey that is as eye-opening as it is page-turning. With mysteries hiding behind secrets coded in riddle, this book is like a Dan Brown thriller for young readers. The further you get, the more you must read!”

Angie Sage, New York Times bestselling author of the Septimus Heap series

“The Copernicus Legacy has it all: A secret code, priceless relics, murderous knights, a five-hundred-year-old mystery, and a story full of friendship, family, humor, and intelligence.”

Wendy Mass, New York Times bestselling author of The Candymakers and Every Soul a Star

“With engaging characters, a globe-trotting plot, and dangerous villains, it is hard to find something not to like. Equal parts edge-of-your-seat suspense and heartfelt coming-of-age.”

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Fast-paced and clever, the novel reads like a mash-up of the National Treasure films and The Da Vinci Code.”

Publishers Weekly

To Guardians everywhere

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Also by Tony Abbott

About the Publisher

New York City

March 17

8:56 p.m.

Twelve hidden relics.

One ancient time machine.

A mother, lost.

Seven minutes before the nasty, pumped-up SUV appeared, Wade Kaplan slumped against his seat in the limousine and scowled silently.

None of his weary co-passengers had spoken a word since the airport. They needed to. They needed to talk, and then they needed to act, together, all of them—his father, astrophysicist Dr. Roald Kaplan; his whip-sharp cousin Lily; her seriously awesome friend Becca Moore; and his stepbrother—no, his brother—Darrell.

“Ten minutes, we’ll be in Manhattan,” the driver said, his eyes constantly scanning the road, the mirrors, the side windows. “There are sandwiches in the side compartments. You must be hungry, no?”

Wade felt someone should respond to the older gentleman who’d met them at the airport, but no one did. They looked at the floor, at their hands, at their reflections in the windows, anywhere but eye to eye. After what seemed like an eternity, when even Wade couldn’t make himself answer, the question faded in the air and died.

For the last three days, he and his family had come to grips with a terrifying truth. His stepmother, Sara, had been kidnapped by the vicious agents of the Teutonic Order of Ancient Prussia.

“You can see the skyline coming up,” the driver said, as if it were perfectly all right that no one was speaking.

Ever since Wade’s uncle Henry had sent a coded message to his father and was then found murdered, Wade and the others had been swept into a hunt for twelve priceless artifacts hidden around the world by the friends of the sixteenth-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus—the Guardians.

The relics were originally part of a machina tempore—an ancient time machine that Copernicus had discovered, rebuilt, journeyed in, and then disassembled when he realized the evil Teutonic Order was after it.

What did an old time machine have to do with Sara Kaplan?

The mysterious young leader of the present-day Teutonic Knights, Galina Krause, burned to possess the twelve Copernicus relics and rebuild his machine. No sooner had the children outwitted the Order and discovered Vela—the blue stone now safely tucked into the breast pocket of Wade’s father’s tweed jacket—than the news came to them.

Sara had vanished.

Galina’s cryptic words in Guam suddenly made sense. Because the Copernicus legend hinted that Vela would lead to the next relic, Sara would be brought to wherever the second relic was likely to be—to serve as the ultimate ransom.

Wade glanced at the dark buildings flashing past. Their windows stared back like sinister eyes. The hope that had sustained his family on their recent layover in San Francisco—that Sara would soon be freed—had proved utterly false.

They were crushed.

Yet if they were crushed, they were also learning that what didn’t kill them might make them stronger—and smarter. Since their quest began, Wade had grown certain that nothing in the world was coincidental. Events and people were connected across time and place in a way he’d never understood before. He also knew that Galina’s minions were everywhere. Right now, sitting in that car, he and his family were more determined than ever to discover the next relic, overcome the ruthless Order, and bring Sara home safe.

But they couldn’t sulk anymore, they couldn’t brood; they had to talk.

Anxious to break the silence, Wade cleared his throat.

Then Lily spoke. “Someone’s following us. It looks like a tank.”

His father, suddenly alert, twisted in his seat. “A Hummer. Dark gray.”

“I see it,” the driver said, instantly speeding up. “I’m calling Mr. Ackroyd.”

The oversize armored box thundering behind them did indeed look like a military vehicle, weaving swiftly between the cars and gaining ground.

“The stinking Order,” Lily said, more than a flutter of fear in her voice.

“Galina knew our plans from San Francisco,” Wade said. “She knows every single thing about us.”

“Not how much we hate her,” said Darrell, his first words in two hours.

That was the other thing. If their global search for the Copernicus relics—Texas to Berlin to Italy to Guam to San Francisco—had made them stronger, it had made them darker, too. For one thing, they were armed. Two dueling daggers, one owned by Copernicus, the other by the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, had come into their hands. Wade was pretty sure they’d never actually use them, but having weapons and being a little more ruthless might be the only way to get Sara back.

“Galina Krause will kill to get Vela,” Becca said, gripping Lily’s hand as the limo bounced faster up the street. “She doesn’t care about hurting people. She wants Vela and the next relic, and the next, until she has them all.”

“That’s precisely what I’m here to avoid,” the driver said, tearing past signs for the Midtown Tunnel. He appeared to accelerate straight for the tunnel, but veered abruptly off the exit. “Sorry about that. We’re in escape mode.”

Roald sat forward. “But the tunnel’s the fastest way, isn’t it?”

“No options in tunnels,” the driver said. “Can’t turn or pass. Never enter a dark room if there’s another way.”

He powered to the end of the exit ramp, then took a sharp left under the expressway and accelerated onto Van Dam Street. The back tires let loose for a second, and they drifted through the turn, which, luckily, wasn’t crowded. Less than a minute later, they were racing down Greenpoint Boulevard, took a sharp left onto Henry, a zig onto Norman, a zag onto Monitor, then shot past a park onto a street called Driggs.

Why Wade even noticed the street names in the middle of a chase, he didn’t know, but observing details had also become a habit over the last days. Clues, he realized, were everywhere, not merely to what was going on now, but to the past and the future as well.

Becca searched out the tinted back window. “Did we lose them?”

“Three cars behind,” the driver said. “Hold tight. This will be a little tricky—”

Wade’s father braced himself in front of the two girls. Dad! Wade wanted to say, but the driver wrenched the wheel sharply to the right, the girls lurched forward, and he himself slid off his seat. The driver might have been hoping that last little maneuver would lose the Hummer. It didn’t. The driver sped through the intersection on Union Avenue and swerved left at the final second, sending two slow-moving cars nearly into each other. That also didn’t work. The Hummer was on their tail like a stock car slipstreaming the tail of the one before it.

Lily went white with fear. “Why don’t they just—”

“Williamsburg Bridge,” the driver announced into a receiver that buzzed on the dashboard, as if he were driving a taxi. “Gray Hummer, obscured license. Will try to lose it in lower Manhat—”

They were on the bridge before he finished his sentence. So was the Hummer, closing in fast. Then it flicked out its lights.

Becca cried, “Get down!”

There were two flashes from its front passenger window and two simultaneous explosions, one on either side of the car. The limo’s rear tires blew out. The driver punched the brakes, but the car slid sideways across two lanes at high speed, struck the barrier on the water side, and threw the kids hard against one another. Shots thudded into the side panels.

“Omigod!” Lily shrieked. “They’re murdering us—”

As the limo careened toward the inner lane, the Hummer roared past and clipped the limo hard, ramming it into the inside wall. The limo spun back across the road, then flew up the concrete road partition. Its undercarriage shrieked as it slid onto the railing and then stopped sharply, pivoting across the barrier and the outside railing like a seesaw.

The driver slammed forward into the exploding air bag. Lily, Becca, Wade, and Roald were thrown to the floor. Darrell bounced to the ceiling and was back down on the seat, clutching his head with both hands.

Then there was silence. A different kind of silence from before. The quiet you hear before the world goes dark.

Looking out the front, Wade saw a field of black water and glittering lights beyond.

The limo was dangling on the bridge railing, inches from plunging into the East River.

“Is everyone …,” somebody was saying when Wade lifted his throbbing head. The Hummer had spun around fifty yards up the bridge, pulled into the outside lane, and was now aimed at the damaged limo, revving its engine.

Wade yanked up on the door handle. “Get out of the car!” The door wouldn’t open. He kicked it. Pain spiked his leg. “Darrell—”

A thin stream of blood trickling down his cheek, Darrell kicked too. The door squealed open a crack. Lily and Becca threw themselves at it. The hinges groaned and the door fell to the roadway. The sudden loss of weight in the back sent the limo teetering forward. There was a moan from behind the wheel.

“The driver!” Wade’s father said. He shattered the divider to the front compartment, then grabbed the man’s shoulder and squirmed carefully over the seat to him. First puncturing the air bag, he jerked open the passenger door to his right and dragged the driver through it onto the pavement, just as the Hummer pulled up. Four black doors flew open and four oak-sized men emerged.

One of the men walked out into the road and gestured for the oncoming cars to go past. Was he smiling?

Yes, he was.

Wade’s frantic thoughts drew to a point: stay close, physically close, to Darrell and the girls. He huddled them together, himself in front. His father staggered over with the driver leaning on his shoulder.

One thick-necked thug, somewhere between seven and ten feet tall, glared down at them with eyes the color of iron. His face was dented and garbage-can ugly.

“Make no movements,” he said in a voice like a truck shifting gears. Then he must have thought better of his words, because he added, “One movement. Give us relic and daggers.”

Seriously? Wade thought. He’s clarifying his threat? Who does that?

But there was nothing funny in the guy’s features. There were lumps all over his face as if he’d been the one in the accident, but they were neither recent nor red. He’d grown up a monstrosity, Wade guessed, so what choice did he have but to become a thug?

No, that wasn’t right. Everyone had a choice.

“Now,” the man grunted, drawing an automatic weapon from inside his tight-fitting jacket. He stood with his big boots planted flat on the pavement like one of the bridge girders.

Sirens sounded from the streets they had just come from.

“Or we could wait for the cops,” Wade said, stepping forward as if his new toughness meant being aggressive and blurting stuff at bad guys. His father, still holding up the driver, yanked him back.

In a move Wade didn’t quite understand, one of the thugs splayed his thick fingers and grabbed Lily by the arm. Then he lifted her off the ground like a rag doll—probably because she was the smallest—and strode with her to the railing. “She goes over.”

Before Wade could react, before he could think of moving, his father slid the driver onto him and jumped at the thug, wrenching his arm to let Lily go, which the man didn’t—until there was a sudden flash of silver, and the goon screamed.

Shouting incomprehensibly, Becca had thrust Magellan’s priceless dagger into the man’s arm. Its ivory hilt cracked off in her hand, while the blade stayed in him. She pulled Lily from him and staggered back, stunned at what she had done.

Wade whipped out his own dagger, ready to fight, when a sleek white town car raced up the bridge from the Manhattan side, a blue light flashing from its dashboard.

The other goons dragged their wounded comrade into the Hummer, Becca’s hiltless blade still in his arm.

“Ve get you all, dead and dead—” one goon was muttering idiotically.

Not this time, Wade thought, staring at Becca. Because of you …

The town car shrieked to a stop, and the passenger door flew open. “I’m Terence Ackroyd,” the driver said. “Everybody in!” Then he helped Wade’s father slide the limo driver inside. As the Hummer tore back to Brooklyn, the others piled into the town car, and they roared away, shaken but alive and mostly unhurt.

Wade couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. Becca was amazing, he thought. She saved us. She … He quaked like an old man, his hands trembling uncontrollably as they sped across the bridge into the winding streets of lower Manhattan.

Madrid, Spain

March 18

2:06 a.m.

Thin, pale, and slightly bent, the brilliant physicist Ebner von Braun stepped wearily inside a nondescript building buried in a warren of backstreets off the Plaza Conde de Barajas in old Madrid.

Madrid may well be one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Ebner thought, but that entry hall was disgusting. It was dismal and dark, its floor was uneven, and its grotesquely peeling walls were sodden with the odor of rancid olive oil, scorched garlic, and, surprisingly, turpentine.

Breathing through a handkerchief, he pressed a button on the wall. The elevator doors jerked noisily aside. He stepped in, and the racket of the ancient cables began. A long minute and several subbasements later, he found himself strolling the length of a bank of large, high-definition computer monitors.

Here, the smell was of nothing at all, the pristine, climate-controlled cleanliness of modern science. Ebner gazed over the backs of three hundred men and women, their fingers clacking endlessly on multiple keyboards, text scrolling up and down, screen images shifting and alive with video, and he smiled.

Such busy little bees they are!

Except they are not little bees, are they? he thought. They are devils. Demons—Orcs!—all recruited, mostly by me, for the vast army of Galina Krause and the Knights of the Teutonic Order.

The round chamber, one hundred forty feet side to side, with multiple tiers of bookcases rising to a star-painted ceiling, reminded him of the main reading room in the British Museum.

Except ours is better.

In addition to the NSA-level computing resources collected here, the bookshelves and glass-fronted cases alone were laden with over seven million reference books in every conceivable language, hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, many more thousands of early printed works, geographical and topographical maps, marine charts, celestial diagrams, paintings, drawings, engravings, ledgers, letters, tracts, notebooks, and assorted rare or secret documents, all collected from the last five and a half centuries of human history for one purpose: to document every single event in the life of Nicolaus Copernicus.

Behold, the Copernicus Room.

After four years, the massive servers had at last come online, and this army of frowning scientists, burrowing historians, scurrying archivists, and bleary-eyed programmers was now assembled to collect, collate, and cross-reference every conceivable atom of available knowledge to track Copernicus’s slightest movement from the day of his birth, on 19 February 1473, to his fateful journey from Frombork, Poland, in 1514, with his assistant, Hans Novak, to his discovery of the time-traveling, relic-bejeweled astrolabe in a location still unknown, and every moment else, all the way to his death in Frombork Castle, on 24 May 1543.

All to determine the identity of the twelve first Guardians.

Now that the modern-day Guardians had invoked the infamous Frombork Protocol, which decreed that the relics be gathered from their hiding places around the world to be destroyed, Ebner found himself wondering for the millionth time: Who were these original protectors, the good men and women whom Copernicus asked to guard his precious relics? One was Magellan, yes. They knew how his relic was secreted in a cave on the island of Guam. Another was the Portuguese trader Tomé Pires, who brought the poisonous Scorpio relic to China, a relic nearly recovered in San Francisco two days ago. But who were the other ten? And what of the mysterious twelfth relic?

If it was possible to know, the Copernicus Room would tell them.

And yet, Ebner mused as he strolled among the Orcs, at such a cost.

The rush of the Order’s recent renaissance, their rebirth at light speed over the last four years under Galina’s leadership, had not been without blunders. The unprecedented and impatient Kronos program, the Order’s secret mission to create its own time machine, had resulted in catastrophically botched incidents:

The ridiculous Florida experiment, an ultimately insignificant test that was still trailing its rags publicly. The spontaneous crumbling of a building in the bustling heart of Rio de Janeiro. And, perhaps worst of all, the strange, half-promising, half-calamitous episode at the Somosierra Tunnel, a mere hour’s drive from where he stood right now.

Somosierra was particularly troublesome.

Ebner drew the newspaper clipping from his jacket.

The incident remains under investigation by local and federal crime units.

Of course it does! A school bus vanishes in a tunnel and reappears days later, bearing evidence of an attack by Napoleonic soldiers from 1808? To say nothing of the disappearance of two of its passengers or the subsequent deadly illness of the survivors?

To Ebner, these mistakes meant one thing: only Copernicus’s original device—his Eternity Machine, as a recently discovered document referred to it—could ever travel through time successfully.

Every effort otherwise seemed doomed to failure. That was why he had issued a moratorium. No more experiments until further data was amassed and analyzed.

Meanwhile, the workers worked, the researchers researched, and the Copernicus Room, Ebner’s beloved brainchild, hummed on.

For example … him … there … Helmut Bern.

The young Swiss hipster sat hunched over his station as if over a platter of hot cheese and sausages. With an improbably constant three days’ stubble, an artfully shaved head, and a gold ear stud, Bern had just been relocated from Berlin. The man was now dedicated to uncovering the errors in the Kronos program, and especially Kronos III, the time gun used in the Somosierra mess.

Ebner was strolling over to question him on his progress when the thousands of fingers stopped clacking at once. There was a sudden hush in the room, and Ebner swung around, his heart thudding wildly.

It was she, entering.

Galina Krause—the not-yet-twenty-year-old Grand Mistress of the Knights of the Teutonic Order—slid liquidly between the elevator doors and strode into the Copernicus Room.

As always, she was dressed in black as severe as raven feathers. A silver-studded belt was nearly the only color. But then, who needed color when the different hues of her irises—one silver, one diamond blue, a phenomenon known as heterochromia iridis—took all one’s breath away, made her so forbidding, so strangely and mysteriously hypnotic? The very definition, Ebner mused, of dangerous beauty. Femme fatale.

Draped around her neck was a half-dollar-sized ruby carved into the shape of a kraken, a jewel once owned by the sixteenth-century Grand Master Albrecht von Hohenzollern. Galina’s personal archaeologist, Markus Wolff, had found that particular item, though he, Ebner, had been the one to present it to her last week.

Ebner bowed instinctively. Anyone standing did the same.

Observing the attention, Galina waved it off with her hand. “Vela will inform the Kaplans where the next relic is,” she said, her voice slithering toward him as she approached. “If they are intelligent enough to decipher its message. Where are they at this moment?”

“Newly arrived in New York City,” Ebner said. “Alas, after Markus Wolff left them in California, they are once again safe and sound. Our New York agents got nothing from them but the blade of Magellan’s dagger. We have dispatched a more seasoned squad from Marseille.”

“The Kaplan brood is learning to defend itself,” Galina said. “Continue to have them watched closely and every movement entered into these databases. Assign one unit specifically to monitor them, but do not stall them. We may need their lead, if all of this”—she flicked her fingers almost dismissively around the vast chamber—“does not offer up the names of the original Guardians.”

“It shall,” Ebner said proudly. “No expense has been spared. One hundred interconnected databases are now online.”

“Alert our agents in Texas to watch their families, too, and ensure that they know they are being watched.”

“Ah, an added element of fear, good,” said Ebner. “On another matter, we have traced a courier working with the present-day Guardians.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Prague. He recently returned there from somewhere in Italy. We do not have his Italian contact yet, but the courier’s identity is known to us.”

“Curious,” she said softly. “I have business in Prague. I will …” Galina suddenly looked past Ebner at a tall, broad-shouldered man with a deep tan stepping off the elevator. He wore wraparound dark glasses.

Who the devil is this, thought Ebner, a film star?

The man approached. Ebner raised his hand. “You are?”

“Bartolo Cassa,” he said. “Miss Krause, the cargo from Rio is now on Spanish soil.”

Galina studied him. “The cargo from South America. Yes. Sara Kaplan. Have it transferred to my hangar at the airport.”

“Yes, Miss Krause.” He bowed, turned, and left the room the way he had come.

Good. The fewer minutes this “Bartolo Cassa” is around, the better. Something about him is simply not quite right. Not … normal. And those sunglasses? Is he blind?

Galina gazed across the sea of workers. Her voice was low. “Despite all this data gathering, Ebner, there are holes in the Magister’s biography. We require someone on the ground.”

“On the ground? But where?” he asked, gesturing to the tiny lights glowing on one of two giant wall maps. “From Tokyo to Helsinki, to London, Cape Town, Vancouver, and everywhere in between, our agents span the entire globe—”

“Not here. Not now,” Galina said. “Then. There. We need someone in Copernicus’s time to follow him. One hundred databases, and yet there are far too many gaps in our knowledge of the Magister. We must send someone back.”

“Back?” Ebner felt his spine shudder. “You do not mean another experiment?”

“One that will succeed,” she said, her eyes piercing his.

“With a human subject?” he said. “A subject who can report to us? From the sixteenth century?” Ebner found himself shaking his head, then stopped. It was unwise to deny one so powerful. “Kronos Three is by far the most successful temporal device we have constructed, yet you see the untidy result at Somosierra. Two souls were left behind in 1808! These experiments are far too risky for a person. The possibility of simply losing a traveler is too great. You must realize, Galina, that only the”—he barely whispered the next words—“only Copernicus’s original Eternity Machine has been proved to navigate time and place accurately. The Kronos experiments are far from foolproof—”

A desk chair squeaked, and Helmut Bern hustled over, breathing oddly. “Miss Krause!”

Helmut Bern! Always Johnny-on-the-spot, lobbying for Galina’s blessing.

“What is it?” Ebner snapped.

“Two things. Forgive me, I heard you discussing the Kronos program. I believe I have just pinpointed the central error of the devices. A rather long and twisted string of programming. A difficult fix, but I can manage it. Three days, perhaps four.”

“And the second thing?” Galina asked.

“A bit we’ve just picked up,” Bern said, grinning like an idiot. “Copernicus sent a letter from Cádiz in May of 1517. It mentions a journey by sea. Much of it is coded, but we have begun to decrypt it.”

“Cádiz,” Galina said, studying the other large map in the room, one illustrating the sixteenth-century world of the astronomer. “Fascinating. The Magister sails the Mediterranean. Good work, Bern. Continue with all due haste.”

“Yes, Miss Krause!” Bern returned gleefully to his terminal.

“There. You see, Galina,” Ebner said. “There is no need for another Kronos experiment. This information will help us track—”

“Send her.”

His eyes widened. “Send …”

“You told me our recent experiments were too risky,” Galina responded. “A trial, then. A minor experiment. With someone expendable. Send Sara Kaplan.”

“No experiment in the physics of time is minor!” he blurted, then caught himself. “Forgive me, Galina, but that woman was to have been our insurance that the Kaplans would give us the relics.”

“All the family needs to know is that we have her,” she said. “Fear will do the rest. What actually happens to the woman is of little consequence.”

“But, but …” Ebner was sputtering now. “Galina, even assuming we manage to get the woman to report to us, how would she do it? By what mechanism? To say nothing of the havoc she might create five centuries ago. Any tiny misstep of hers could shudder down through the years to the present. Her mere presence could cause a greater rupture—”

“Ready Kronos Three for her journey. In the meantime, I go to Prague to persuade this courier to reveal his Italian contact. A message was delivered. I want to know to whom.” Galina turned her face away. It was a face, Ebner knew, from which all expression had just died. She was done listening. She had issued her command.

So.

Sara Kaplan would go on a journey.

A journey likely to result in her death.

Or worse.

New York

“That didn’t just happen,” Becca heard someone saying.

She turned. It was Darrell.

“Oh, it happened,” someone else said. That was Wade, who was looking at her when he said it. There was a hand on her arm, urging her gently out of the town car and onto the street. Even at night, New York City was noisy. And cold, bitter cold for the middle of March. But she hardly registered those things. Her head buzzed. Her eyes could barely focus enough to keep her from smashing into stuff.

She had just attacked a man.

Stabbed a man.

No matter that he was a thickheaded creepy goon, or that he had mauled poor Lily and threatened to toss her off a bridge, or that three days ago his boss, Galina, had shot Becca herself with a gas-powered crossbow, giving her a wound that still hadn’t healed. Forget all that. Becca was a girl who read books, a girl with a loving family, a girl who was just a girl. The Hummer goon was maybe a goon, but he was also a human being, and she had stabbed him. With a dagger.

She glanced at her hands. One was shaking like a leaf in a storm, but at least there was no blood on it. She would have freaked if there’d been blood on it. The other hand? Lily was holding it. Tightly. Comfortingly.

“It’s okay, Bec,” Lily said, pulling her along the sidewalk by her unhurt arm. “You saved my life. You were awesome. Really. Thank you doesn’t begin to cover it. I was so scared and … well … I guess you knew that and that’s why you …”

Becca’s cell phone vibrated suddenly, and she didn’t hear the rest. She pulled it out and glanced at the screen. She saw who was calling her. She let it vibrate.

Before they had departed the San Francisco airport that morning, Uncle Roald had picked up new phones for each of them. Despite the danger of their phones being tracked, he said it was unrealistic to think that the five of them would always be in the same place at the same time. They needed to be able to communicate with one another at a moment’s notice. Though Lily had immediately cross-programmed the phones with all their numbers as well as family numbers, they all kept their batteries out most of the time. The first thing Becca herself had done was to call her mother to say she was safe. Her mother hadn’t answered. No one had answered. So she’d left a voice mail. She realized now that she must have forgotten to remove the battery, because someone was calling back.

The dark screen was lit with four large white letters.

Home.

But how could she answer it? She had just … she had just …

The phone stopped vibrating, and Becca watched the number 1 appear next to the voice mail icon. She slipped it back into her pocket. Lily was still talking.

“… are definitely my hero, and I so owe you one, or probably way more than one, but we’ll round it off to one big one …”

“Uh-huh,” Becca said. “Uh-huh.”

What would Maggie say if she knew what I just did? Becca’s younger sister was the reason for so many things in her life. After nearly dying two years ago, Maggie was always on her mind, and when that creep grabbed Lily on the bridge, Becca saw Maggie in the thug’s powerful grip. How could she not jump at him? And if her hand went to Magellan’s dagger first, well, she couldn’t stop herself. But no way could she talk to anyone at home. Not yet.

The doors of the Gramercy Park Hotel whisked open, and warm air engulfed them. After raising his hand to the man and woman behind the check-in desk, who smiled warmly, Terence Ackroyd led the Kaplans into the elevator, pressing the button for the seventh floor.

It was Mr. Ackroyd who’d originally told them that Sara had disappeared. Sara was supposed to fly from Bolivia to New York to meet him, but her luggage arrived without her. His rescuing them in the car, not an instant too soon, was their first actual meeting with the famous writer, though Becca had started reading one of his books, The Prometheus Riddle. The spy thriller she’d picked up in Honolulu was like their lives now. Full of death and near death. She wondered where the novelist got his ideas. He didn’t look like a spy as much as a rich man. He was tall, casually dressed, with longish dark hair, graying at the temples. He moved easily among all the glitter and obvious wealth in the lobby, as if he owned the place.

Maybe he did.

She was coming back to herself now. Observing things. Beginning to remember stuff and hear things in real time. Happily, their limo driver was all right, just shaken up, and had already retired to his own room on a lower floor. Darrell’s forehead was gashed slightly from the limo’s ceiling light and had been bandaged using the first aid kit in Mr. Ackroyd’s car. There was talk about getting a doctor to look at her arrow wound, which she hardly felt at the moment.

They entered the elevator. It was warm. Her breathing was slowing down, her breaths becoming deeper. She took her place between Lily and Wade at the back of the glass-and-wood-paneled car and clamped her elbow tightly on her shoulder bag. The bag held not only the cracked hilt of the Magellan dagger, but something even more priceless. The secret diary of Nicolaus Copernicus.

Written by the astronomer and his young assistant, Hans Novak, from 1514 to about a decade later, the diary was the main source of what they knew about the time-traveling astrolabe. The book was composed in several languages and was heavily coded. Thanks to her maternal grandparents, Becca had a gift for foreign languages, and with the help of Wade’s science and math smarts she had already translated pretty good-size chunks of the diary into her red notebook. In fact, it was on the jet here from San Francisco that they’d discovered what Copernicus had come to call his time-traveling device.

Die Ewigkeitsmaschine.

The Eternity Machine.

It seemed the perfect name for something so mysterious, and so deadly.

“Here we are,” Terence Ackroyd said as the elevator opened directly into his suite.

Whoa. The suite was huge, a multiroom apartment with broad windows looking out over lower Manhattan. It was furnished like a billionaire’s home, with a combination of antique chairs painted gold and white and modern leather sofas, two of which shared a lacquered Japanese coffee table that Mr. Ackroyd went straight to. He motioned for them to sit. “Please, rest, while we brew some fresh tea.”

We?

“I have it, Dad.”

A boy entered the room, carrying a tray with a steaming teapot and several cups on it. He seemed a couple of years older than the kids, and had long, sandy-colored hair and very blue eyes. He set the tray on the table between the couches.

“I’m Julian,” he said.

Terence smiled. “My son. Excuse me for a moment.” Then he slipped off into a room with double doors, leaving them open. It was a study, from which a keyboard suite by Handel was playing softly from hidden speakers.

Is that where he writes his thrillers?

“I have to apologize for your welcome to New York,” Julian said with as pleasant a smile as his father’s, which he kept while they introduced themselves. “The Knights of the Teutonic Order have been violent since their first appearance in Jerusalem in 1198. Lawless in Poland and other northern European cities after the Crusades. Copernicus himself fought them several times. They were finally abolished by Napoleon in 1809, but a sect related to Albrecht von Hohenzollern has continued underground since then, hanging on through bloodlines, mostly, and has grown suddenly very wealthy.”

His way of speaking was a bit PBS, Becca thought, but he went straight to business, which was what they needed right now.

“But Mr. Kaplan, I’m sorry,” he said, suddenly bouncing to his feet. “Of course you want to know about Mrs. Kaplan. Let me bring her luggage.”

“Thank you. And call me Roald, please.”

Julian trotted down a hall as his father returned from his workroom. “Becca, the hotel doctor is on his way up to take a look at your arm,” Terence said. “In the meantime, Dennis, our driver, sends his heartfelt regards.” He breathed out. “Now … you’ve been through—are going through—a terrible shock, and I’m very sorry.”

“We appreciate anything you can tell us about Sara,” Wade said, with a look at Darrell. “About Mom.”

Terence nodded and sat among them. “First, let me say this. I have sources on the ground all over the world. For my writing, you understand. This apartment is one of a few research stations I have that’s fully equipped: a workroom, communications study, and so on. I’m trying to say that my research team and I are fully at your disposal.”

“And why are you helping us exactly?” Darrell broke in. “I mean, sorry, but you don’t really know us, and we’ve learned we can’t trust new people.”

“Whoa, Darrell,” Lily said. “That’s rude.”

“No, no. Fair question,” Terence said. “It’s simple. The moment I received Sara’s things, I knew something was off, you see. Something was dreadfully wrong. Since I’m a mystery writer, my antennae shot up. More than that, I’ve just started, well, a foundation for causes that are actively fighting injustice here and around the globe. The Teutonic Order is far more powerful than you. More powerful, actually, than any international organization I’ve come across. And they’ve become that mainly in the last four years. I’ve asked myself, what exactly is going on here?”

“War,” said Darrell gloomily. “That’s what’s going on. Galina Krause and the Teutonic Order have declared war on us.”

“I completely agree,” Terence said. “And on the world, too, which is why my foundation and I want to help you however we can … but there will be time later for that. Here’s Sara’s suitcase.”

The moment Julian entered the room with Sara’s main bag and set it down on the coffee table, Becca watched Uncle Roald and Darrell. Roald practically leaped on the suitcase. But his fingers shook, and she saw the blood drain visibly from his cheeks. Darrell hovered over the suitcase next to his stepfather, his fingers poised but apparently unable to touch anything. Becca wanted to help, but stupidly couldn’t think of how. It took Roald a full minute to open the clasp and unzip the case, and by the time he lifted the top, he had to wipe away tears.

Sara’s clothes, toiletries, books, shoes—everything was stowed neatly in its place, just as Sara must have packed it for the return flight from South America, the flight she never made. A lump forced its way into Becca’s throat, and she teared up, too. On the table in front of them was the clearest evidence so far that Sara was lost, and that no one knew where.

Darrell put both hands over his eyes. “Oh, Mom … Mom …”

Becca looked at the floor. Her heart thundered as loudly as it had when she’d thought of Lily and Maggie on the bridge.

“I hasten to say that I have every reason to believe that right now your mother is safe,” Terence said earnestly to Darrell. “Step by step, here’s what we think …”

The voice blurred in Darrell’s ears, then faded away.

Something had cracked inside him when his mother’s suitcase was opened, and it was still cracking. Seeing her clothes like that was like looking at stuff belonging to somebody who was dead. His throat tightened. He threw himself back on the sofa to be able to breathe, but just as quickly bent over the suitcase again. His ears were hot, like something was screaming into them. His stepfather was on his feet now, looking away.

When Lily patted him awkwardly on the arm, Darrell realized that the room was quiet and everyone was waiting for him. To do what? He glanced up to see them all staring at him; then he brushed his hand over his face. Oh, right. To stop crying. He wiped his cheeks. “Sorry. Go on, Mr. Ackroyd.”

“No need to be sorry,” the man said, glancing searchingly at Julian.

Uh-huh, and what was that look?

“To continue, when I realized that Sara’s luggage had arrived here without her, I immediately examined it, without actually moving too much. All of her belongings, including her phone and wallet, everything seemed to be here and intact.”

“As my dad told you on the phone in Guam, we didn’t contact the police because of what else we found,” Julian said. He was now sitting in a chair across the room, alternately looking down from behind the curtain, as if he was surveilling the street, and tapping the keys on a laptop.

“Exactly,” said Terence. “We’ve discovered two things. The first is what I take to be a warning, hidden cleverly in the inner lining.” Terence carefully peeled back a portion of the patterned lining. It had been pried open and reclosed with a safety pin. Tucked into the space behind the lining was a charm bracelet.

Roald lifted it out. “I know this bracelet. Sara’s had it for a long time, but …”

One of its charms was wrapped inside a self-adhesive Forever postage stamp depicting the American flag.

“May I?” Carefully unpeeling the stamp, Terence revealed the charm inside. It was a silver skull.

“I don’t like the way this looks,” Darrell said. “Dad, a skull? Mom’s not a skull kind of person. And I don’t remember this charm. When did she get it?”

Terence was about to speak when Roald said, “I think she got it last year at a conference in Mexico. It’s a standard icon there. ‘Day of the Dead’ and all that.”

“But wrapped inside a picture of the American flag,” said Lily. “Is that like something against our country?”

“No, no.” Terence shook his head vigorously. “Not at all. I attended that same conference. It was, in fact, where I met Sara for the first time and decided to donate my manuscripts to her archive in Austin. I believe this part of the clue was actually meant for me. It is a direct reference to a silly thing I wrote about in my first novel—”

“The Zanzibar Cryptex,” Julian said from across the room. “Not one of your best, Dad. The ending on the ocean liner?”

Terence smirked. “Everyone’s a critic. But seriously, in that book there was a similar clue, an item wrapped in a stamp. And it meant something very specific, which Sara well knew. You see, the skull represents, well, death, or at the very least danger. The flag quite simply means the authorities. The message in the novel—and here—is plain: contacting the authorities will put Sara in more danger. At least she thought so. She must have been threatened or somehow understood that bringing the police in—”

“Or the CIA or FBI,” Julian added.

“—would not help,” Terence said. “For the moment, then, finding her should remain a private matter. But not without resources.”

“Sara’s in danger but she’s sending us codes and clues?” Lily said. “What a mom.”

“You better believe it,” Wade whispered.

The elevator chime rang behind them, and Terence hopped up. “Ah, Becca. Your doctor.” A middle-aged woman entered, smiling, and Becca went with her to the dining-room table, where they chatted softly, so Becca could also listen.

Roald stood anxiously. “All right, so Sara is telling us to be cautious. Terence, you said you found two things.”

“That’s my cue,” Julian said, leaving his chair by the window after one last look at the street and setting his laptop on the coffee table. “Three hours ago we received a heavily encrypted video from our investigators in Brazil. I’ve just been decoding it and cleaning up some of the images.” He adjusted the screen, and hit the Play button.

A fuzzy nighttime video image appeared, showing an old station wagon creeping slowly along what appeared to be a utility road behind a large building. There were words on the side of the building: Reparação Hangar 4.

“Hmm. An airline-repair hangar,” Terence whispered, shooting a glance at his son. “In Rio de Janeiro.”

In the video the car stopped abruptly. Behind it, a set of double doors slid aside on the hangar, and two shapes emerged from it. The driver and a passenger climbed from the car, opened the back of the station wagon, and began to tug something out, while the two men from the hangar assisted. It was a coffin. The four men carried it like pallbearers into the hangar. A few minutes later, the two from the station wagon reappeared, closed the rear door, and drove off. The video ended.

Darrell stared at his stepfather, not wanting to believe what he saw, but his lips formed the words. “Mom is dead?”

“No, no,” said Terence, rising and putting his hand on Darrell’s shoulder. “What we have just witnessed means precisely the opposite. The shipment of coffins is a well-known but poorly policed method of moving people from country to country without documents. The time stamp tells us that this occurred at two twenty-seven a.m. last night, Rio time. Precisely thirty-six minutes later, two small private jets took off, both heading east on different routes, possibly to Europe or Africa. By tomorrow, we will know where each landed. If your mother is indeed in that coffin, it means that the Order is flying her somewhere, smuggling her to another country. Excuse me for being blunt, but if Sara were … dead, the Order would not go to such lengths. This video not only means that she is alive, but that precautions are being taken to ensure her safety.”

It didn’t sound right to Darrell, but Terence’s face—and Julian’s—betrayed no sense of hiding the truth. “She’s alive? You’re sure?”

“I quite believe so,” Terence said, nodding heartily. “It is a matter now of tracking down both jets to see where they may be moving her.”

“We had heard something about Madrid,” said Becca from the dining room. “In San Francisco, we discovered that the Order has some servers, big computers, there, and Galina might have been there, too.”

“Good. I’ll alert my people. This may be a solid lead.”

“We’ve been tricked before,” said Lily.

“I understand your disappointment in San Francisco,” Terence said. “But my network is largest in Europe. I’ve taken the liberty of arranging a meeting between Dr. Kaplan and myself and Paul Ferrere, the head of my Paris bureau, tomorrow morning, here in the city. Ferrere is ex–Foreign Legion and has a team of detectives spread across the length and breadth of Europe. We have hopes of finding Sara Kaplan before very long.”

“Hopes?” Darrell grunted.

Roald patted him on the arm. “Not false hopes. Never again. But we can inch ahead. Keep moving forward.”

Darrell wanted to believe him. “Okay …”

His stepfather took one more look at the paused video on Julian’s laptop and began to pace the living room. “Here’s the way I see it. Galina Krause may be waiting for us to lead her somewhere, and we’ll be in danger the moment we make a move. I get that, but while we’re waiting for a solid lead about Sara, we have to continue our search for the second relic, the one Vela is supposed to lead us to. Wade, you have my notebook; Becca, you have the diary. Lily, you’re the electronic brains. Darrell, you cracked some riddles in San Francisco that baffled the rest of us. Together, we will find the second relic, and we will find Sara.”

Darrell got it. He understood. It made sense, and having Terence and his detectives on the case gave them a way forward. His lungs were gasping for a deep breath, and his heart pounded like pistons in his chest, but being scattered or afraid wouldn’t help them or his mother. He wiped his cheeks. “Okay. Good.”

The doctor left, with a silent smile and thumbs-up to the family, and Becca rejoined them, a clean bandage on her arm.

“All set,” she said. “It feels great. Thank you, Mr. Ackroyd … Terence.”

“Not at all,” he said.

“And now … Vela,” said Roald.

Still worrying about his mother, Darrell watched his stepfather move his hand inside the breast pocket of his jacket. When he drew it out, he was holding the brilliant blue stone.

“I’m Sara Kaplan,” she told herself for the thousandth time. “I’m an American. I’ve been kidnapped. I don’t know by whom, and I don’t know why. I had no time—almost no time—to alert anyone. It happened too fast.”

She had rehearsed these words over and over so she could tell the first person she saw in as short a time as possible. But she hadn’t seen anyone at all since … since when? Since the hotel on the morning of her flight from La Paz, Bolivia, to meet Terence Ackroyd in New York City. She’d rehearsed that scene over and over, too.

A bright tap on the hotel room door.

“Just a minute!” she’d said.

Thinking it a hotel employee come for her luggage, she opened the door.

The man—broad shouldered, mean faced, in sunglasses—was on her in a flash. Hand over mouth, pushing her back into the room, kicking the door shut behind him. “Resist and your family will be killed. If they notify the authorities, you will be killed. Silence. Silence—”

She twisted away from him, threw herself at the bathroom door, and locked herself in. “Do not panic!” she’d told herself. Look around, look around. Her suitcase was in there. She’d been packing to return home. Her phone, her pocketbook, everything was there. No time to make a call. Futile to scrawl a message on the mirror—he would smear any message to illegibility.

Then, inspiration. The silliest thing in the world, but it made sense. Her charm bracelet. She slid it off, wrapped the skull in a stamp. It seemed idiotic, but Terence would recognize it. From his novel. The Madagascar Codex. No, The Zambian Crypt? The Zimbabwe—

The door split open on its hinges as she stuffed the bracelet into the lining of her suitcase and pinned it closed. The face above her was flat and brutal. The eyes … the eyes were invisible behind those black-lensed sunglasses. She was screaming now at the top of her lungs, and couldn’t imagine how she could not be rescued, when there came another thought: she was not screaming at all, but falling silently to the floor of the bathroom. There was a stabbing pain in her neck, and her cries, if they ever came out at all, were choked to silence. She stared up at the ceiling as she slipped to the floor, wondering if she would crack her head on the tiles.

Seconds passed. Minutes? Then there was the sound of a zipper coming from somewhere at her feet, and then flaps of black plastic were being folded over her face, and all the light was gone.

Darrell’s face came to her then, in a swift sequence of his ages from birth up to when she saw him that last morning in Austin. And Wade. And Roald. What would they … what would …

Then all her thoughts faded, and she fell away to a place of no dreams.

Nothing for hours and days until today. She was unable to move. There was a freshness to the air in the … what was she in, anyway? A bag? A box? There were tubes in her arm. She couldn’t raise herself or move her hands to find out. I’m in restraints. But there was air in there, so he wanted her alive, whoever he was. The man in the sunglasses … Zanzibar! That was it!

The Zanzibar Cryptex.

She wanted to scream that she was alive and being taken somewhere, but … The waves that had been falling over her became more rhythmic, and sleep took her, or what she thought might be sleep, but she wasn’t very sure of that.

New York

Even under the Ackroyd living room’s subtle lamplight, Vela shone as if it were its own star. Like a heavenly body not of this earth. Which it might actually be, thought Lily. What did any of them really know about the shadowy origins of the relics? Copernicus had supposedly found an old astrolabe built by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy. But that was all pretty hazy.

“Let’s bring it into the study,” said Julian.

Julian seemed to be really bright. His father was kind of brilliant, too. How many books had he written? Ten? A hundred? She and the others were surrounded by smart people, so you had to think they really would get Sara back and find the relics.

The study off the living room was large and lined with thousands of books—not all of them written by Terence Ackroyd, thank goodness. It was traditional in a way, sleepy almost, but also equipped with a really high level of computer gear.

There was a long worktable with a wide-lens magnifying device perched on it. Several shelves of cameras, printers, and scanners were next to the worktable along with stacks of servers. On the wall behind them was a range of twenty-four clocks showing the current time in each of the world’s major time zones. Except for a gnarly old typewriter on a stand by itself like a museum piece from another century, the room was like she imagined a secret CIA lair would be.

The only other thing I’d need would be … nothing.

“First things first,” Julian said, opening a small tablet computer that lay on the worktable next to five sparkling new cell phones. “These are for you. We’ve loaded this tablet with tons of texts and image databases that can help with the relic hunt.”

“Wow, thanks,” Lily said, practically snatching it from his hands. “I’m kind of the digital person here.”

Julian laughed. “Ooh, the tech master of the group. The intelligence officer. Very cool. I’ve modified each phone’s GPS function with a software app I invented. The tablet likewise. Except to one another, and mine and Dad’s, these units will emit random location coordinates, making them essentially blind to most conventional GPS locators.” He passed a phone to each of them, and turned to Roald. “Now … the relic …”

Roald set Vela gently on the worktable. When he did, Lily realized they’d been so completely focused on hiding and protecting Vela over the last few days that this was only the second time since Wade and Becca discovered it that they’d been able to bring it safely out into the open.

Wade and Becca, she thought.

Wade had been giving Becca goo-goo eyes ever since Mission Dolores in San Francisco, where they’d discovered that the Scorpio relic was a fake. Maybe it was because of the stare the Order’s assassin, Markus Wolff, had given Becca in the Mission. Or maybe Wade realized something about the twelfth relic that Wolff had been all cryptic about. Either way, something was up, those weird looks meant something, and Lily would find out. She could read Darrell. He was hot or cold. Not so much in between. And by hot or cold she meant either hilarious or ready to explode. Wade was a different story. Becca, too, for that matter, and … Wait, where was I? Oh. Right. Vela.

Triangular in shape, about four inches from base to upper point, with one short side and two of roughly equal length, Vela was something Roald called “technically an isosceles triangle.” Except that one of its long sides curved in slightly toward the center like a sail in the wind. Which made sense, since Vela was supposed to represent the sail in the constellation Argo Navis. It also had a slew of curved lines etched into it.

When they examined the stone closely they saw that even though it was about the same thickness from the front side to the back—about a quarter of an inch—Vela was undoubtedly heavier in the middle than in any of the corners, a fact that she was the first to voice. “Look.” She placed it flat across her finger and it balanced. “Something’s in there.”

“Maybe an inner mechanism,” Roald said. “Something hidden inside its heart.”

“Yes, yes,” Terence said, taking it now from Lily. “I can see the faint design on both sides of the stone and a series of very tiny, even infinitesimal, separations that could mean that the stone somehow opens up. It is far too heavy to be a normal stone.”

Passing it around, they gently tried to coax the stone to reveal its secret, but short of prying it open and maybe busting it, they couldn’t find a way. Vela told them nothing.

“Have you considered that it’s fairly dangerous to be lugging this around with you?” Julian said. “There are vaults in the city that are pretty near uncrackable, even by the Order.”

Roald nodded. “A good idea, I agree. But the legend says ‘the first will circle to the last,’ meaning that something about Vela is a clue to the next relic or maybe its Guardian. We need to discover something soon or we won’t know where to look.”

“There’s also this.” Becca slid her hand into her shoulder bag and tugged out the cracked hilt of the Magellan dagger. “The handle cracked when I … you know. I’m sorry …”

“I’m so glad you did,” Lily said, shuddering to see the hilt again. “It was, well …” She was going to say that what Becca had done—stabbing the goon on the bridge and saving her life—was something so beyond amazing, but she felt suddenly on the verge of tears, which she never was, so instead she just closed her mouth, which was also pretty rare, and smiled like a dope at whoever, which turned out to be Wade, who, as usual, was staring at Becca with his googly eyes.

“That’s quite something,” Julian said, drawing in a quiet breath when Becca set the hilt on the table. “Italian, by any chance?”

“Bolognese,” said Wade, finally tearing his eyes from Becca.

“Yes, yes.” Julian picked it up gently, but it suddenly separated into two pieces of carved ivory and fell back on the table. “Ack! I’m sorry!”

“Hold on …” Lily used her slender fingers to tug something out from inside the hilt. It was a long, narrow ribbon. “What is this?”

Terence stood. “Oh, ho!” He pinched one end of the ribbon and held it up. It dangled about three feet.

“Microscope!” said Julian. He snatched the ribbon from his father, then jerked away from the table to the far end of the room, where he sat at a small table. Not ten seconds later, he said, “Dad, we’ve seen this kind of thing before.”

They all rushed over to Julian in a flash, but Lily pushed her way through the crowd to be the first one leaning over the lens. “Letters,” she said. “I see letters. They’re pretty faded, but they’re there, written one under the other the whole length of the ribbon.”

Darrell moved in next. “T-O-E-G-S-K, and a bunch more. We’ve done word scrambles and substitution codes. Is this one of those? They look random.”

Terence took his own look and smiled. “Not random at all, actually. These letters are one half of a cipher called a scytale.” He pronounced the word as if it rhymed with Italy.

“Invented by the ancient Spartans, the cipher consists of two parts: a ribbon made of cloth or leather with letters on it, and a wooden staff,” he continued. “The staff has a number of flat sides on it, rather like a pencil. You wrap the ribbon around the staff like a candy cane stripe, and if the staff is the right size, the letters line up in words.”

Julian grinned. “The trick is that you always have to keep the ribbon separate from the staff until it’s time to decode the message.” He paused and looked at his father. “Dad, are you thinking what I’m thinking? Two birds?”

“Two birds?” said Wade. “Is that code for something?”

Julian laughed. “It’s a saying. Kill two birds with one stone. The Morgan Library up the street has an awesome vault for Vela. It also happens to have probably the best—and least known—collection of scytale staffs on the East Coast. I’ll bet we can find one that works with this ribbon.”

“I suggest we hit the Morgan Library at eight tomorrow morning,” Terence said.

“Don’t museums usually open later than that?” said Becca.

“Yes, but for Dad and me, the Morgan is never closed,” said Julian with a smile that seemed to Lily like the sun breaking out after a long darkness.

Prague, Czech Republic

March 18

9:13 a.m.

Galina Krause kept her hand inside her coat, where a compact Beretta Storm lay holstered against her ribs. Its barrel, specially filed to obscure its ballistics, was still warm. She would be gone long before the police discovered the body of the Guardian’s courier, Jaroslav Hájek, or the single untraceable bullet in his head.

She disliked killing old men, but the courier had refused to reveal his Italian contact, although his flat did contain a collection of antique hand clocks, which was likely a clue to how the message had been transferred. In any case, a dead courier working with the Guardians was never a bad thing, and one obstacle less in her overall journey.

As Galina walked the winding, snow-dusted streets of Prague’s Old Town, she passed through deserted alleys and passages barely wider than a sidewalk. Finally, she entered into the somber “antiquarian district.” This section of Prague deserved its designation. A neighborhood forlorn, yet rich in history and the smell of a past carelessly abandoned by modernity. For that reason alone, she adored it.

She halted three doors down from a tiny low-awninged shopfront on Bĕlehradská Street. Antikvariát Gerrenhausen appeared as it must have generations ago: crumbling, forever in shadow, hauntingly like those sad, cluttered storefronts in old photographs of a forgotten, bygone era.

A man entered the street from the far end. He was tall. His close-cropped white hair cut a severe contrast with the stark black of his knee-length leather coat.

Markus Wolff had recently returned from the United States.

She moved toward him, though their eyes would not meet until the standard subterfuge was completed. Wolff approached her, passed by, and then, after scanning the street and its neighboring windows for prying eyes, doubled back to her.

“Miss Krause.” He greeted her in a deep baritone, a voice that was, if possible, icier than her own. He unslung a black leather satchel from his shoulder and set it on the sidewalk at her feet. “The remains of the shattered jade scorpion from Mission Dolores. The Madrid servers can perhaps make sense of them.”

“Excellent,” she replied. “Do you have the video I asked you to take in San Francisco?”

“I do.” He pressed the screen of his phone.

A moment later, a file appeared on hers. She opened it. A boy, seven and three-quarters years of age, ran awkwardly across a field of green grass, kicking a soccer ball. The camera zoomed in on his face. The tender smile, the pink cheeks, the lazy blond curls flying in the wind. She paused it. The boy was oblivious to his own mortality.

“Splendid,” she said sullenly. “Wolff, take note of this street. This shop.”

“I have.”

“You may be asked to return here in the weeks to come,” she said. “For now, I want you to look into the Somosierra incident. Ease my mind.”

“The stranded bus driver and student,” he said. “I will search for physical evidence.”

She felt suddenly nauseated and wanted the conversation to end. “In six days’ time I will be in Istanbul. We will meet there.”

Markus Wolff nodded once and left.

Man of few words, Galina thought. How refreshing. Shouldering the leather satchel and drawing a cold breath, she entered the shop. A cadaverous gentleman, the seventh generation of Gerrenhausens, stood hunched and motionless behind a counter cluttered with books and rolled maps, yellowed file folders, and an assortment of wooden boxes. He listened as a gramophone on the shelf behind him emitted a scratchy yet plaintive string quartet movement. She recognized it as Haydn. The D-minor andante.

“You have the item I requested?” she asked. The sound of her voice was nearly swallowed by the yearning violins and the thick, paper-muffled air in the old shop.

The slender hands of the emaciated proprietor twitched, while his lips formed a smile as thin as a razor blade. “It has just arrived, miss.” He reached under the counter and withdrew a small oak box, burnished nearly black with age. He opened the lid.

Nestled deeply in maroon velvet was a delicate miniature portrait of a kind common in the sixteenth century.

The framed circular painting, two inches in diameter, was a product of Hans Holbein the Younger. “Incorrectly dated 1541, it was created actually between 1533 and 1535, during the painter’s years in England at the court of King Henry the Eighth, as you know,” the proprietor said.

The portrait featured the face and shoulders of its sitter, a brilliant bloom of flesh in a setting of velvety black and midnight blue. It was a three-quarter view, in which the sitter, aged somewhere between seventeen and nineteen, gazed off, a sorrowful expression on the face, eyes dark, lips pursed, almost trembling. It was not a peaceful portrait, and Galina found herself shuddering at the sight of it. She closed the box.

“The fee is one hundred seventy-five thousand euros,” the proprietor said softly, as if only slightly embarrassed by the number. “Its former home, a boutique museum in Edinburgh, will not soon realize it is displaying a forgery. Such workmanship is costly.”

To Galina the miniature was worth ten times as much, a hundred times. It was not the money that mattered in this instance. She had become aware over the last years that she required the strictest loyalty and silence from an antiquarian such as Herr Gerrenhausen and knew how pitifully easy it was to gain such loyalty and silence when a loved one was threatened. Smiling at the old proprietor, she swiped her phone open to the frozen video. “Do you recognize this young boy?”

The man squinted at the phone and beamed. “Why, yes! That is my grandson, Adrian. He lives with my youngest daughter and her husband in California. But why … how … why do you have a video of Adrian …?” He trailed off. His face turned the color of white wax.

Galina slid a list of several items across the counter to him. “This is what I need. You will acquire the items for me. There will be no end to our relationship until I say there is. Currently the boy is safe. But he is within our grasp at any moment. You do understand me.”

Rapid nodding preceded a long string of garbled words, which the man punctuated finally with “I understand.”

She felt her expression ease. “I am wiring the purchase fee for the miniature to your Munich account. The first item on the list is to be auctioned at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes in June. You will acquire it anonymously.”

“Of course! I will. Yes, everything.”

The Haydn andante ended morosely behind him.

Galina swiped the image of the boy from her phone, then inserted the blackened oak box into her leather satchel and left the shop, short of breath and shivering, but not from the cold.

New York

The morning after the discovery of the ribbon in the dagger’s hilt, Darrell woke early from somber dreams about his mother to hear his stepfather and Terence Ackroyd working out an elaborate plan for that morning, a ruse intended to throw off any agents of the Teutonic Order who might be watching the hotel.

“The first of many new plans,” Roald had told him.

“I hope they work,” Darrell grumbled to himself.

The plan involved three cars, the family of the Gramercy Park Hotel’s assistant manager, two retired New York City policemen, a traffic officer, and a crew of window cleaners—all creating multiple distractions while the kids zigzagged uptown with Julian, and Roald and Terence headed on foot to the West Side to meet the detective Paul Ferrere.

A half hour later, Darrell and the others were streaming up Madison Avenue, shielded by crowds of commuters and early shoppers. Since he had no sense whatsoever of anyone watching them, Darrell accepted that their plan had actually succeeded.

Despite the latest storm having dumped nine heavy inches of snow that was now aging into black and crusty walls, narrowing the streets and the sidewalks to half their width, their walk uptown was brisk but still not fast enough for him.

As soon as Darrell pictured his mother tied to a chair or pounding on a door or lying bound up in a locked closet, his mind went red, and blood rushed like waves inside his head until he couldn’t see straight.

But he had to hope, right? He had to put his mother’s situation in a pocket and get on with what he knew he had to get on with. We’re doing everything possible. We have detectives. We have Terence’s assistance. Sooner or later, Mom will be where the next relic is, because that’s where Galina will take her.

So fine. Get your head in the game.

He managed to refocus himself in time to hear Julian saying to Wade, who was five steps behind him, “I was born in Mandalay, actually. Myanmar. What they used to call Burma. It’s where my mom died. I was four. I never had much time with her.”

So. That was why Terence had given his son that look last night. Julian had lost his mother, too. How do you even deal with not growing up with your mom, having so little time to be with her? And Myanmar? Myanmar was right next to Thailand, where Darrell’s father had grown up.

They came to the southwest corner of the intersection of Madison Avenue and Thirty-Sixth Street and waited for the light. Lily nudged him and nodded at two low-roofed Renaissance-style mansions—one of brown stone blocks, the other white—with a modern glass-and-steel atrium joining them.

“We are going to get so much help here,” she said. “I have a feeling.”

Becca nodded. “Like Wade said in San Francisco, the more relics we find, the more leverage we have.”

“I know,” Darrel said, mustering up a smile. “I get it.”

The truth was that he wanted to go after the next relic. Not as much as he needed to find his mother, of course, but a real close second. This was important. The Copernicus Legacy was life-alteringly amazing. It was cosmic. Time travel blew his mind, and if Galina wanted to reassemble the astrolabe, that was enough to make him vow she never would. He needed to be a part of what they were doing, no matter how dangerous or scary.

We have to stop Galina. At all costs.

Lily was very impressed. And, seriously, not a lot of stuff impressed her. But exactly as Julian had promised the night before, even though the Morgan Library and Museum was still closed to the public, its doors whisked open for them and sealed solidly after they entered.

Wow.

“You’ll be rather astounded at their collection,” Julian told them when they filed into the tall, glass-walled atrium. “And their security.” He nodded at a pair of hefty guards by the doors who looked more than a match for the oak-headed thugs from last night.

“I should also tell you that your new tablet contains a slew of one-of-a-kind documents from the Morgan’s private holdings,” he added. “Sixteenth-century biographies. Maps. Astronomical treatises. Code books. It’ll take you months to go through it all.”

“I could do it in a few days,” Lily said, shrugging.

“I’m sure you could,” he said with a smile.

Lily had felt special last night when the Ackroyds, both father and son, had recognized that she was, in Julian’s words, “the tech master of the group. The intelligence officer.”

I so like that! Intelligence officer. That’s exactly what I am.

“Good morning.” A slender man in a dark blue suit with soft-heeled shoes, who Julian whispered was one of the two chief curators, met them in the atrium. The kids took turns explaining why they were there.

“Scytales and the vault,” the curator said, tapping his fingers on his chin. “Got it. Vault first. Please follow me.” He spun around and led them through several still-darkened galleries to a bank of elevators. They took one down into the library’s underground level. “Perhaps Julian has told you, but the lowest level runs beneath the entire length of both the library and Pierpont Morgan’s original residence.”

“This is where my dad is suggesting you keep … the object,” Julian said. “For the time being at least. We have extensive vault privileges here.”

After leading them through several passages, the curator paused at a large steel door. “When Mr. Morgan had the house built, he constantly rotated his collection between what he displayed upstairs and what was stored in the vault. In the century since then, security has been updated countless times. The vault is now virtually invulnerable. Even in the case of nuclear attack, which, surprisingly, is a factor … no matter how slight.”

For instance, what if the Order … never mind.

He opened the door with a pass code and a fingerprint scan. Inside stood a narrow entry hall leading to a second door. “Built into the side walls is a kind of electronic gauntlet,” the curator said. “You have to pass through it to reach the vault.”

“You’ll like this,” Julian said to them as they entered. “Gates trip and floor tiles sink if you take the wrong route to the inner chamber. Any intruder would be trapped between the walls long before any theft or damage could occur.”

The curator nodded. “For example, several infrared sensors are scanning us as we’re passing through right now—”

Beeep!

The curator turned to Wade. “Er … you appear to have something on you …”

Even in its unique protective holster, one that had fooled various airport security scanners, Wade’s antique dagger now set off the Morgan’s sensors. “It’s the first time that’s happened,” he said. “You have the best security I’ve seen.”

“About the dagger,” Julian said. “Your dad wanted it in the vault, too, didn’t he?”

Wade nodded reluctantly. “He told me this morning. He’s right, I guess.” He slipped off the holster with Copernicus’s dagger housed invisibly inside and handed it to the curator.

Lily hated weapons of any kind, but Wade giving up the dagger? Wouldn’t they need it? He’d carried it since Berlin last week, and the Magellan dagger had saved her life just yesterday. They were, after all, at war with the Teutonic Knights. On the other hand, Copernicus’s own private weapon was far too precious—and, she supposed, too dangerous—to carry around. So, yeah. Good idea.

The large steel door opened on a staggeringly wide, deep, and high-ceilinged room.

Becca started to wheeze.

“Indeed,” said the curator, grinning for the first time since they’d met him.

One side of the room was lined with numerous three-tiered display compartments and multishelf bookcases. On the far end was a honeycomb of hundreds of narrow slots built up to the ceiling. Paintings were shelved upright in these spaces. Classical sculptures of people and animals—some realistic, some fantastical—were clustered here and there the entire length of the vault.

The curator set the dagger and its holster reverently on a worktable, then stepped over to a portion of the wall containing built-in safe-deposit-type boxes.

“What is your birth date, Wade?” he asked.

“Me?”

Lily remembered how the deciphering of Uncle Henry’s original coded message had involved a reference to Wade’s birthday. That was what had started their quest.

“October sixth.”

“So…” The curator selected and removed one of the boxes, which he said was “made of a titanium alloy,” and brought it to the table. He placed the holster and dagger inside the box, sealed it, tapped in a key-code combination, and returned the box to its slot in the wall. He then withdrew the box directly below it. “The, ah, object you wish to store here?”

Darrell drew Vela from an inside pocket.

Raising his eyebrows very high, the curator took the heavy blue stone—the relic with something buried in its interior—and swaddled it carefully in new velvet.

“It’s priceless,” Lily said.

“I believe it,” the curator responded. He set the velvet-wrapped stone in a wooden box. Then he placed that box inside a second titanium container, which he inserted below the one with the dagger inside. When he pushed it all the way in, there was a low whump followed by the clicking and rolling of tumblers that stopped with a hush.

“Now you’ll want to see our head of antiquities,” the curator said, leading them all briskly out of the vault and security corridor. “I’ll ask her to meet you upstairs in the atrium. If anyone can help you decode your message, she’s the one.”

Taking one last look at the sealed vault door, Lily breathed easily. Vela, the first of the Copernicus relics, was now hidden safely underneath New York City.

The curator led them back up to the atrium.

As Wade watched the man disappear, Darrell’s hip pocket began to ring. “It’s Dad,” he said, and stepped away, listening, Lily along with him. Becca turned to follow them when Wade stopped her.

“How’s your arm?” he asked.

She smiled. “Okay. Better all the time.”

“Good.” He was still deciding if he should tell Becca about the dream. The one he’d had leaving Guam in which Becca had seemed to be, well, dead. He’d so far been unable to say it out loud. It was too upsetting, even for him. Naturally, he worried that his dream had something to do with Markus Wolff’s intense look at her in the Mission in San Francisco, although that was clearly impossible, since his dream had been earlier.

“What about the Mission?” Becca asked.

“What?”

“You said Mission, just now.”

His face went hot. “I did? Well … it’s just … I wonder what Markus Wolff meant about the twelfth relic. That we should ask ourselves what it was.”

“Me, too. Strange, huh?”

“Yeah.”

That went nowhere.

Darrell was off the phone now. “Good news. Investigators are spreading across Europe.”

“He said we have to be prepared that they won’t find your mom today or probably tomorrow,” Lily added. “That it’ll take some time, but everybody feels good about it.”

“Excellent,” said Julian. “It may not be long now before we know what the ribbon says and where it points.”

“Find the relic, find Sara,” Becca said.

“That’s the idea,” said Wade.

There was a slow click of heels on tile, and a tiny, very old woman hobbled into the open atrium as if wandering in from the long past. She wore a dark beige pantsuit with a bright pink scarf flowing up out of her vest like a fountain. Her eyes flickered like a pair of tiny flashlights low on battery, and she bleated, “I’m … ancient …”

Wade glanced at the others, then back to the woman. “Oh, not so much—”

“… curator here at the … Morgan,” she said, scowling at him. She huffed several more breaths as if each could be her last. “Dr. Rosemary Billing …”

“Pleased to meet you, Dr. Billing,” Becca said.

“Ham,” the woman said.

“Excuse me?” said Lily.

“Ham,” the woman repeated. “Billingham. My name is Bill … ingham. Why won’t you let me …” Three, four breaths. “… finish? Now … who are … you all … and how … may I help you?”

One by one they told her their names. She frowned severely at each one until Julian’s. “Julian?” she gasped, adjusting her glasses. “There you are! Well, if you’re … here then it’s quite all right. Fol … low me.”

Stopping and starting several times, like a car backing up in a tight space, Dr. Billingham turned around and toddled down the hallway she had just come from, wheezing the whole time. What seemed a day and a half later, they arrived at a small, windowless room. Rosemary flicked on the lights and, after much finger motion, unlocked a glass-topped display case.

“Despite these … scytale staffs being, in many cases, also used as … weapons, they’re old, and … we must consider them extremely fragile. Rather … like me …”

Wade didn’t know whether to laugh or not, but he knew to wait.

Five breaths later, she added, “… dieval manuscripts.”

Then Rosemary waved her hand over the contents of the case like a game-show hostess. She was right to do so. As Julian had promised, the library’s collection of scytale staffs was special. They were obviously ancient, and all were roughly between five and ten inches long. Two were carved in thick ebony, one appeared to be cast in bronze, and the others were shaped of ivory or wood. Each was nestled in its own formfitting compartment and labeled by date. The earliest was from the sixth century BCE—“Before the Common … Era,” Rosemary explained—the most recent from Germany in the eleventh century. The smallest staff was little bigger around than a pencil, while the largest bore a circumference similar to the handle on a tennis racket.

“Now show me your rib …,” Rosemary asked Becca alarmingly, then finished with “… bon.”

Becca removed the ribbon carefully from her pocket, unrolled it, and laid it flat on the table.

The curator frowned through her spectacles as she examined the ribbon. “About a … hundred letters?”

“Ninety,” Becca said, glancing at Julian, who nodded.

“Ah, just … like … me …”

Wade waited six, seven breaths, but that turned out to be the end of her sentence.

Rosemary tugged either end of the ribbon lightly. “The fabric is silk. Without … running tests, I would guess it was woven sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century.”

“That fits our date,” Darrell said.

The curator raised a finger as if to shush him. “Also, it doesn’t … stretch very much. This is good. It means we’ll have better luck finding an exact fit. Let’s start small … and go up from there.” Then, chuckling to herself, she added, “The narrower the staff, the larger the mess …”

Two breaths.

“… age.”

Rosemary took up the narrowest of the staffs, more of a dowel than anything else, with five equal sides. Pinching the top end of the ribbon against one of the sides, she gently spiraled it around the dowel like the stripe of a candy cane, making sure that the letters sat next to one another. The first line of the message read:

TGOSNOTSTPHID

Which, because of the peculiar wiring of his brain, Darrell said aloud before anyone could stop him. “‘To go snot stupid.’ No, wait. ‘Togo’s not stupid.’ Is that the dog from The Wizard of Oz? Who’s Togo?”

“You are,” said Wade, glaring at his stepbrother. “And we’re not sure what language it’s in, remember that. Copernicus knew several. Either way, that’s obviously not the right staff. Can we try a bigger one, to spread out the letters—”

“Keep your pant … s on, young man,” Rosemary growled at Wade, who she suddenly seemed to like less than she liked Darrell. “I shall choo … se what we do next. And I choose … a bigger one, to spread out the letters more.” She returned the first dowel to the case, then selected a thicker one and carefully wrapped the ribbon around it. It produced the following sequence of letters:

TOSMNHTTHLDE

“That’s not a word,” said Lily. “Another one?”

The curator’s wobbly cheeks turned red, and Wade wondered if she would explode and what that might look like. He stepped back. Rose … mary waved a hand in front of her face as if to cool off, then pulled out a staff with ten sides and a diameter of about one and a half inches. Wrapping the ribbon around it produced the following first three lines in English:

TOTHELAND

OFENDLESS

SNOWTOBEG

“To the land of endless snow …” Becca gasped. “That’s it! Yay, we found it!”

Rosemary’s face was purple when she whirled it around to Becca’s. “Who found it, dear? Did we … find it? Because I rather th … ink I found it.”

“You did, Rosemary,” said Julian. “As usual, you are being tremendously awesome. My friends here, as grateful as they are, are simply super anxious to know what the rest of the message says. Forgive them, please.”

“Dear … boy!” Rosemary said, pausing to pinch Julian’s cheeks a few times. “Here then … is the whole th … ing.”

TOTHELAND

OFENDLESS

SNOWTOBEG

THEATHOSG

REEKCONCE

ALTHEUNBO

UNDDOUBLE

EYEDBEAST

FROMDEMON

MASTERAVH

Wade drew out the notebook containing the major clues they’d discovered so far and, after much scribbling, broke down the text into individual words.

TO THE LAND OF ENDLESS SNOW TO BEG THE ATHOS GREEK CONCEAL THE UNBOUND DOUBLE EYED BEAST FROM DEMON MASTER AVH

And there it was, a riddle to the location of the second Guardian and the second relic.

“We’re all thinking it, right?” said Becca. “‘Demon Master AVH’?”

“Albrecht von Hohenzollern, Grand Master of the Teutonic Order in the fifteen hundreds,” said Darrell. “I like that Copernicus finally called him what he was.”

Wade set his father’s college notebook on the table, closed his eyes, and tried to think. Land of endless snow, Athos Greek, conceal the unbound … double-eyed beast … double-eyed …

“If I close my eyes … for that long … people think I’m dead!” Rosemary cackled.

“No, no,” Wade said, opening his eyes. “It’s just that … double-eyed beast describes the object we’re looking for, and it’s based on a constellation.” From his backpack, he took out and unfolded the celestial map his uncle Henry had given him.

“Oh, there are several star charts in our collection,” Rosemary said, “but that’s a very nice one.”

“Thanks.” Carefully running his fingers over the constellations, Wade searched the chart’s colorful illustrations, hoping something would pop out at him. His mind flashed with the idea of the twelfth relic, but he waved it away. Right now there were at least a dozen candidates for double-eyed beast—constellations named for dogs, wolves, dragons, monsters—but not one of them suggested that it and it alone was the one Copernicus referred to on the ribbon. “If I study this long enough, I bet I can figure it out.”

“Then my work here is done,” Dr. Billingham said. She slid the ribbon from the staff, pressed it into Becca’s palm, replaced the staff in the display case, snapped the case shut, and locked it away. “For the further meaning of your message, I suggest you all trot off to Hell …”

“… Enistic archives,” Rosemary finished. “The phrase the Athos Greek undoubtedly points to Hellenistic culture. You should start with section five in the reading room. Good-bye.”

The curator brusquely shooed them from the room by flicking her fingers toward the door, and they headed back to the atrium.

“That took a week,” Lily said, blinking her eyes as if coming out of a cave.

“But we have the message,” said Becca. “Now we just need to know what it means.” The truth was, the instant Becca had heard the words reading room, her pulse had sped up. As always, she had the Copernicus diary in her bag and knew it was as precious as just about any rare book anywhere. But the Morgan’s collection was world famous for a reason. Gutenberg Bibles, Dickens manuscripts, diaries, biographies, histories, artwork, political documents. The Morgan had them all.

“The Athos Greek,” she said. “Land of endless snow. Those are awesomely definite clues to who the Guardian might be. Greece is in the south of Europe, but endless snow sounds like the north. I’m sure the diary will tell us even more.”

“And I can’t stop thinking about the double-eyed beast,” Wade added, looking back at her as he had so many times since San Francisco. What that was all about, Becca didn’t know. “If I keep studying the star map, I might be able to narrow it down.” Then he started chewing his lip, that little thing he did when he was thinking.

Before entering the Morgan’s upstairs reading room, they were asked to stow their belongings—except for notebooks and computers—in special lockers outside the room and, interestingly, to wash their hands.

“Because of the oils,” Darrell said, wiggling his fingers. “The oils in our skin can damage original materials. Mom knows stuff like that.”

“And now so do you,” said Lily.

After they explained the basic reason for their visit—“Greek monasteries and monks of the early sixteenth century”—the young man who’d let them in gave them a brief tour of the holdings, and they each decided to take on a different aspect of the research. Wade unfolded his celestial map and sat his notebook by its side. Julian pulled down from the shelves a large photographic book on Mediterranean monasteries as well as several maps of the world and Greece for the exact location of Athos. Lily gave herself the task of scanning the five Copernicus biographies loaded on the new tablet, while Darrell hunted down a handful of books on sixteenth-century Greek history.

As they got to work, Becca stood staring at the filled bookshelves and glass bookcases, at the dozens of reference stacks, and at the lone, lucky, lucky librarian behind the counter, and she wondered how in the world she could ever get his job.

Imagine being the master of this room! I would totally live here.

“Becca, are you with us?” asked Lily. “Or lost in your own head?”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “I mean, no. I’m fine.”

She set down on the table in front of her a book disguised in a wrinkled copy of the London Times, knowing that the librarian would envy her if he only knew that, ten feet away, was the five-hundred-year-old diary of Copernicus.

Before running for their lives in San Francisco, Becca had discovered in the diary’s final pages a sequence of heavily coded passages along with a tabula recta, a square block of letters. When she’d discovered the right key word, the square had allowed her to decode a particularly difficult passage. That passage, among other things, had confirmed that the original Guardian of the Scorpio relic was a Portuguese trader named Tomé Pires. The clue had eventually led to them locating not the original relic, but a centuries-old decoy.

Then, just this morning, when the pain in her arm had woken her, she’d distracted herself by studying the other coded pages. As in San Francisco, where she’d come across a tiny sketch of a scorpion in the margin of a page, Becca had discovered a date written in tiny letters—xiii February 1517—and another drawing. It was so faint as to be nearly invisible.

At first, she’d thought the image—almost certainly sketched by Copernicus himself—was meant to be two diamonds touching end to end. But now the “double-eyed beast” of the scytale message suggested that the drawing was really of two eyes, and that the passage next to the drawing might tell the story of the Guardian whose name they were searching for. Either way, the first line of the double-eyed passage was impenetrable.

Ourn ao froa lfa atsiu vlali am sa tlrlau dsa …

Without the right key word, it might prove fruitless to try to decode it, but maybe she had to try anyway. Still, where to start? Ourn ao froa …?

“Becca, can you read Greek?” asked Darrell, holding an old volume bound in red leather. “This one’s about the lives of monks in the time period we want.”

“Sorry,” she grumbled. “I feel like I’m doing it now.”

“I can help,” the librarian whispered at the counter. He then showed Darrell to a scanner whose output was linked to a translation program. “I suggest you scan the book’s table of contents first, find the pages you think you want, then scan them. The translation will appear on this computer.”

“Perfect,” said Darrell.

After some minutes of quiet work, in which they all searched for anything that might connect to the scytale message, Julian sat back from the table. “First of all, there are over twenty monasteries in Athos. Some are like fortresses built on cliffs over the ocean. You have to climb these endless narrow stairs cut into the rocks. But it makes me wonder if Copernicus ever visited Greece. I mean, how did he meet the Athos Greek?”

Lily did quick word searches through the several biographies on the tablet. “Copernicus traveled, but it doesn’t look like he ever visited Greece. At least I can’t find any journey recorded in these books. So we’re back to square zero.”

“I think you mean square one,” said Wade. “But they’re pretty close together.”

“Um, yeah, until me,” said Darrell inexplicably. “It scrambles my brain, but I think I found something. It’s from a Greek book called something like Holy Monks of Athos. The translation is rough, but listen to this.”

He cleared his throat and read the words on the computer. “‘One big monks Athos be Maximus, living 1475 until 1556 when he became no longer.”

Wade stared at him. “Which I think means … the same time as Copernicus.”

“I think so, too,” Darrell said. “Now … ‘unlike monk brothers of his, Maximus studied far Italy, Padua, when 1502 came round.’” He grinned. “Nice style, huh?”

“Padua,” said Becca. “We know Copernicus was in Bologna … Lily?”

Lily scanned the indexes again. “Yep. He was a student at the University of Padua from 1501 to 1502.”

Becca looked up from the diary and grinned. “Darrell, it proves what you said.”

“Probably. What are we talking about?”

“That everybody knew everybody back then. The world had lots fewer people, and they all gathered in the same places.”

Darrell nodded. “I did say that. So, yes, I am right. Plus, Italy, right? Everybody went there because of the weather.”

“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it?” said Julian. “The land of snow and endless night doesn’t sound like either Italy or Greece. Something more northern, maybe …”

Darrell squinted at the screen. “‘Maximus can be known as Greek Maxim or Maxim Grek or Maximus Grekus or Grekus Maximus.’”

“Huh,” said Lily. “Greek Maxim. I get it.”

“You do?” asked Wade.

“Sure, I mean, I ask myself why they would call him Greek Maxim, right?” They shook their heads. “Well, think about it. Would you call a Greek a Greek when he’s in Greece? No, you wouldn’t, because they’re all Greek in Greece. So … anyone—”

“Ooh!” Becca said. “They called him ‘the Greek’ when he lived in another country!”

“A country with snow?” asked Julian. “Darrell, what does the book say?”

Darrell squinted at the screen. “Um, yeah. Lots of snow. The endless kind …”

“Norway!” said Wade. “No! Iceland!”

“Russia, my friends,” Darrell said, pleased with himself. “At least I think that’s what this says. Listen. ‘Come later Maxim was by Russia Duke Vasily the Three invited Moscow to. There he Russian make of Greek into Russian word pages.’”

“That makes sense,” said Becca. “They wanted Maxim to translate Greek stuff into Russian because the Greeks probably had all kinds of books they didn’t have in Russia.”

Darrell grumbled. “Which is exactly what I said.”

“When did Maxim go to Russia?” asked Wade.

“If you’ll let me continue—”

“It’s hard to listen to,” said Wade.

“So are you.” Darrell cleared his throat and started up. “It says … 1515. Exactly when we need him to be in the land of endless snow. I totally bet Maxim Grek is the second Guardian.”

Becca stood. “Darrell, this is huge. I think maybe you did it—”

“Russia is huge, too.” Lily pushed a map to the middle of the table. “Look at it. Where do we even begin?”

“Wait. There’s more.” Darrell scanned another page of the book. “‘His life problems came big in Russia. Duke Vasily make him prison for Maxim when Maxim say Duke no marry.’ Which means that after going to Russia things turned pretty rough for Maxim. Vasily threw him in jail because Maxim didn’t like him marrying some lady.”

“As opposed to who?” asked Becca.

Darrell scanned the text. “His wife.”

“Oh.”

Julian stood and paced the length of the table. “Did Maxim die in Russia? If he did, the relic may still be there. Besides that, sometimes people do important things on their deathbeds. Like the Frombork Protocol, right? Maybe before he died, Maxim left a clue about where he hid the relic.”

Darrell stood away from the computer. “I anymore read cannot. Eyes of me blur big. Anyone …?”

“I’ll do it,” said Lily. She slid over to the computer and read the screen for a few seconds. “Oh, and double oh. It says … ‘Duke Vasily many had of alliances. One of with’ … ack! Guess who?”

“The pope,” said Darrell. “Napoleon. Dracula! Final answer!”

She shook her head. “The Demon Master, AVH himself!”

“Seriously?” said Wade. “Duke Vasily’s ally was Albrecht von Hohenzollern?”

“‘Albrecht of Hohenzollern Prussia,’” Lily read. “The one and only Grand Master of the creepy Knights of the Teutonic Order, and the creepy nemesis of Copernicus!”

The reading room went quiet.

Becca closed the diary, unable to read anymore. “So … Copernicus meets Maxim Grek in Padua when they’re students. Later, when he has to hide the relics, he remembers his college friend, who is now in Russia, where Maxim quickly becomes the enemy of Vasily and Albrecht at the same time. Maxim Grek is very possibly our Guardian!”

Lily smiled. “And because the first will circle to the last, Copernicus leaves the clue in Magellan’s dagger, which we only found when Becca cracked it—saving my life. In other words, you’re welcome.”

Darrell eased back to the computer. “It goes on … ‘War plenty. Maxim prison was after and after for his life. Last years in Saint Sergius monastery inside out of Muscovy. Only after Maxim die is he buried. This can be 1556!’” Darrell blinked. “To translate the translation, Maxim was jailed in one monastery after another and finally spent his last years in a place called Saint Sergius, a monastery ‘inside out of Muscovy.’ He never made it back to Greece. They buried him in the monastery after he died.”

“Here’s Saint Sergius.” Julian turned a large photographic book around. Spread across two pages was a picture of the massive Saint Sergius monastery. It was an enormous and opulent fortress. Towering over its high white stone walls were dozens of plump domes painted brilliant gold or deep blue and flecked all over with silver stars.

“Can you imagine how many places you could hide a relic there?” asked Lily. “Seriously, it makes sense to start at the end of his life and work backward. It’s how we zeroed in on Magellan.”

Which Becca realized for the first time was true, as it had been for Uncle Henry, too. It was at the end of his life that he had passed the secret on to them.

“Man, I wish I was going with you,” said Julian.

“Going with us?” Wade asked. “To Russia? Are we seriously thinking the relic is in Russia?”

“Go to where he died. That’s where I would begin,” Darrell said. “Russia. The monastery at Saint Sergius. For which, by the way, you’re welcome.”

“All right, then,” said Wade. “It would be totally amazing if we think we’ve already figured out who the Guardian might be. But I’m getting nowhere on what the double-eyed relic is—”

Julian’s cell phone buzzed. He swiped it on and answered it. He nodded once, ended the call, and stood up. “We have to go right now.”

“Did the Order find us?” said Darrell. “Are they here? Why do we have to leave?”

“For brunch,” Julian said. “Our dads are meeting us in half an hour!”

As a precaution, Lily, Julian, and a guard left the Morgan from the old entrance on Thirty-Sixth Street, while Wade, Becca, Darrell, and another guard exited the brownstone through a pair of glass doors at 24 East Thirty-Seventh Street. They met one another a block east of the museum, on Park Avenue, where a brown four-door Honda sedan was idling at the curb. Dennis, the Ackroyds’ driver, sat behind the wheel. He smiled and unlocked the doors, the kids climbed in, and the two guards trotted back to the museum.

“Dennis, how are you feeling this morning?” Julian asked.

“Fine today,” he said. “Where to?”

“The Water Club.”

“I hope they have food, too,” said Darrell.

Wade laughed. Darrell was feeling good. They all were. In a couple of short hours, they had gained a solid idea of who the second Guardian was. That was real progress.

Ten minutes later, after zigzagging from block to block across streets and down avenues, they arrived at a broad, low restaurant overlooking the river. Julian thanked Dennis, who drove off to park nearby.

“Your father will arrive in … seventeen minutes,” said a man at the desk, checking his watch. “Your table is ready for you now.”

The dining room smelled deliciously of hot coffee, fried eggs, bacon, and pastries, and Wade’s stomach wanted all of them. They crossed the floor to a large round table by a wide bank of windows. Snowflakes, heavier now, were falling gently and dissolving into the river outside.

Becca took a seat next to him. “What’s this river?”

“The East River,” said Julian. “You can just make out the Williamsburg Bridge.”

“Oh.” She shivered. “Better to look at it than be on it.”

As soon as they were all seated, Wade drew the star chart from his backpack and unfolded it. “The constellation is here, somewhere,” he murmured. “The double-eyed beast has got to be one of Ptolemy’s original forty-eight constellations. But which one?”

“There are a dozen or so ‘beasts,’” Lily said, making air quotes around the last word. “And I’m including dogs, birds, Hydras, dragons, and bears.”

Wade nodded. “But some are profiles. Not all of them have both eyes visible.” As he looked at his antique sky map, Wade imagined Uncle Henry’s kind, old face, and he felt something shut off in his brain. The table, the windows, the snow vanishing into the river, even Becca and the others around him, seemed to fade into the background. His talent for blocking out noises and distractions—so tested lately—came forward.

He mentally ticked off the constellations that couldn’t for an instant be considered “double-eyed.” That still left a number of water creatures, centaurs, a lion, bears, a dragon, a horse, and more. Studying the golden and silver constellations, he remembered what his father had taught him about stars, and a small thought entered his mind.

Could double-eyed refer to the astronomical phenomenon known as a double star? “Huh …”

“Huh, what?” asked Lily.

“Well, maybe Copernicus meant that there’s a double star in the constellation’s head.”

“What’s a double star?” Darrell asked. “And don’t say two stars.”

Wade laughed. “Well, they kind of are two stars—”

“I asked you not to—”

“Which is why I did. A double star is really where two stars are so close together that they sometimes appear like one really bright star. It’s only when you observe them for a long time that you discover that there are two of them. Lily, can you cross-check double stars against Ptolemy’s forty-eight constellations?”

“Smart,” she said, her fingers already moving over the tablet’s screen, “for a non–intelligence officer, that is. I’m searching, searching, and … oh.”

“You found something already?” asked Julian.

“Actually, no. There are a ton of double stars in the constellations and a bunch where the eyes could be.”

Darrell leaned over Wade’s notebook. “Well, then, what about this ‘unbound’ beast? What does that even mean? A wild beast? A beast out of control?”

“Right,” said Julian. “Or maybe it’s loose somehow? Not together—”

“You mean like Wade?” said Darrell.

“Good one,” said Julian. “I mean like in a bunch of different parts? Is there a constellation, one constellation, in more than one part? That also has a double star in its head?”

Wade studied the star chart carefully before ruling out one constellation after another. Then he stopped, shaking his head. He ran through the constellations a second time. He felt a smile coming on that he couldn’t hide. “You got it, Julian. There is one constellation that has two stars in its head, and it is in two separate parts,” he said. “Just one …”

They waited.

“Wade. Seriously,” said Becca.

“And they call the name of that constellation …”

Lily narrowed her eyes at him. “Tell. Us.”

“Serpens,” he said, tapping the chart directly on the constellation appearing in the northern sky. “Serpens. Which stands for—”

“The Serpent, yeah,” Darrell said. “We figured it out. Let’s go find it.”

“Except … look at it,” said Wade. “The Serpens constellation really is in two parts. In the west is the serpent head and in the east is the body. In between is the figure of the guy who’s wrestling it—Ophiuchus—and he’s got his own other constellation. Serpens is actually divided into two parts. It’s odd that way.”

“You’re odd that way,” Darrell said, squinting over the chart.

“I get it from you,” Wade said. “I’m just hoping the relic isn’t in two pieces, each one hidden in a different place.”

“We’ll still find it,” Darrell said. “Both of it.”

Wade was wondering what it might really mean if the relic was split and hidden in two places when his father and Terence Ackroyd entered the restaurant. They both wore cautious smiles.

“Paul Ferrere is already on his way back to Paris, certain that Sara is in Europe, probably southern Europe,” said Terence. “All other destinations for the two jets have been ruled out, and the detectives are paying particular attention to Madrid’s several municipal and private airfields.”

“Which is very good,” Wade’s father added. “Their extensive team of investigators is fanning out across the continent.”

“Really good!” said Darrell. “This is soooo good!”

“From this moment on, I will be the go-between for the detectives and you,” Terence said. “Now, what did you learn at the Morgan?”

“Maxim Grek.”

“Serpens.”

“Russia.”

That’s what Wade and the others told his father and Terence. Both men countered their arguments here and there, and the kids countered back. This went on during their three-course brunch, until both men agreed that, given the evidence, they were very likely on the right track.

“Russia,” Roald said finally. “As soon as Galina finds out, and she will find out, she’ll bring Sara to Russia, too. If we have no other leads, then Russia is a start. Don’t travel visas take several days to get?”

Julian glanced at his father. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Comrade Boris?”

Terence seemed strangely reluctant, then nodded. “I think so, yes. There is a man. A Russian fellow. His name is Boris Volkov. He’s lived in London for the past few years. I think you should fly there first and see him. He can likely be of help to you.”

“Likely?” said Becca.

“Volkov is a scholar of languages and a historian of Russia’s medieval period,” Terence said. “I met him when I was writing a book about the treasure the Crusaders brought back from the Middle East. He knows a lot about the Order, perhaps the Guardians, too. Whether he is an agent of one or the other, I can’t say. He’s quite cagey about what he reveals. But he may be able to help you get into Russia quickly and aid you while you’re there. Boris Volkov seems to have … connections.”

“Well, we can’t afford—” Wade’s father began.

Terence waved his hand to stop him. “Think no more about that. I told you, my resources are yours. Since you don’t have the authorities on your side, the Ackroyd Foundation will bankroll your continued travels. I’ll do everything in my power to help you get Sara back safely and find the relic.”

“Awesome,” said Lily, smiling at both Ackroyds. “Thank you, again.”

Wade’s father took a breath, then raised his eyes to the two girls. “There’s … something else,” he said. “Becca, I called your mother this morning, and Lily, your dad, about you going home or going on. You both need to call your parents, not at home, but on their cell phones.”

Becca’s face fell. “What is it? Oh, I should have answered when I got the call last night. I didn’t want to. What’s happening—”

Roald held up his hands. “Everyone is fine, they’re fine, and in fact Paul Ferrere has already alerted his people in Austin. But there was an incident at Maggie’s school the other day, and Lily, your father was followed home from work. Nothing happened, nothing at all, but as of this morning, both of your families have been relocated temporarily.”

Lily held one hand over her mouth as she dug furiously for her phone.

Becca did the same. “Maggie, Maggie, I should have answered!”

For the next few minutes, both girls were sitting at different tables, glued to their cell phones, deep in conversation with their parents, while Terence filled in the details.

“The stinking Order,” Darrell grumbled.

“Dad—” Wade started.

“I already talked to your mother,” his father said, assuring him. “She’s fine and traveling in Mexico. She doesn’t appear to be on their radar at all.”

A weight had been lifted, but Wade realized it had been days since he had spoken with her. “I’ll call her right after this.”

“Basically,” Terence said, “it’s best for none of you to return to Austin until we’re sure of what we are dealing with. The Order could simply be flexing its muscles. I have no doubt that whatever they are doing comes from Galina herself, but my feeling is that she won’t want to spread herself too thin with actions as intimidating as doing anything to the girls’ families. Her empire is huge. She will need to focus it.”

Wade shared a look with Darrell, who muttered something about Galina that Wade knew he probably shouldn’t repeat. That was when his father produced a narrow silver tube from his pocket. It was the size of a fat ballpoint.

“It’s a stun gun,” he said. “A miniature Taser. Totally legal. The investigators gave one to me.”

“Do we each get one?” asked Darrell.

“Absolutely not. And it’s for defense only.”

“A little something,” said Terence. “It can be handy in tight quarters, without being a dangerous weapon.”

Minutes later, Lily returned, wiping her cheeks. “They’re all right. Way upset, with, like, a million questions, but they don’t think I should be there right now.” She started crying again behind her hands. “I’m sorry.” Darrell put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him.

Becca came back to the table looking like a zombie, blinking tears away from her eyes, unable to sit down. “Maggie’s okay, worried like crazy. My parents, too, but they said I should stay with you. I never even thought of going home, and now I really want to, but I guess I should stay. I don’t know.”

Lily pulled away from Darrell and put her hand on Becca’s wrist, and Becca sat. It was like that for a long while, everyone quiet, eyes down, not knowing what to say.

Wade once more remembered his dream of the cave: Becca lying lifeless on the floor. Then the way Markus Wolff had stared at her in San Francisco. He suddenly feared that Becca might be in some particular kind of danger, but he still didn’t know how to express it. He just gazed at her, then at Lily, then at Becca again.

Finally, dishes were removed and dessert came, and that seemed to reset things.

“Is Boris Volkov a friend of yours?” Roald asked over a final coffee.

“No, not a friend,” Terence said, waving a waiter over and asking for the check. “But he’s useful. Listen to what he has to say. He knows many people in Russia who may be able to help you. However, I wouldn’t entirely trust him. Boris doesn’t do anything for nothing.”

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

Ebner 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?”

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

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