The Serpent’s Curse

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.”