The Copernicus Archives #2 (13 page)

Her face was ashy gray under the moonlight—except where her forehead and temples were slashed and bleeding, blossoming red. I pinched her nostrils closed. I'd never done this before, just seen an online video.

Holding her nose shut, I pressed my lips to hers and breathed in as hard as I could. Remembering how you alternate—pump the chest, breathe into the mouth, chest, mouth—I breathed in, then thumped my hands on her chest. Again. Again.

She jerked under me, convulsed. Water oozed from her lips, fountained out, mixing with her blood. I tipped her head to the side. Kept pumping. Then she coughed and spat river water onto the sand. She looked up at me, her face icy pale, her lips blue. I wanted to say something, but had no idea what. She groaned softly and tried to sit up.

“No, no,” I said. “On your side.” She spat out more water, coughing, gagging.

I cast around for something to stop the flow of blood into her eyes. My hands dug into my soaking pockets, finding nothing but the last of the wadded-up napkins I'd taken at the sandwich shop. She flinched under my touch. I can't tell you what that felt like—like touching air that touched me back. I watched, astounded, as the napkin, wet as it was, became soaked in her blood, and I felt my fingers grow moist when her blood seeped through the paper, soaking into the drops—now brown—of my blood. The ground shifted and gave under me. I swooned but held to her tightly.

“Keep this on your forehead,” I said. “Press hard.”

She did, her eyes now staring fully at me. In gratitude? In awe? Who even
was
I, coming to her from the future? A stray beam of moonlight flashed into my eyes. I heard the sudden roar of traffic on Lower Thames Street. Joan faded in and out. My vision, whatever it actually was, was pulling away from me. I fought it.

“Go, Joan!” I said to her, not knowing if she heard me. “Go to Holbein. He'll take care of you. Take the relic. I can't take it. Tell him to hide it in his crypt.”

She was nearly invisible now. I heard Wade and Lily murmuring nearby, the echo of voices surrounded by stone. For an instant, I was overwhelmed by the smell
of the damp cell I had left to follow Bern.

Then Joan clutched my wrist with her free hand, wrenching me back to her. Still holding the bloody napkin on her face, she set my hand gently on the bump at her waist. She pointed to herself and growled a word.

That growl was her name. “Joan.” Then she pointed at me, her eyes wide.

“I'm Becca,” I said. “Rebecca.”

She nodded and touched my hand to her waist again, and it was as if someone had drowned me with icy water. It had been staring at me the whole time.

R A H

“I . . . I . . .” The sand and the river faded away. I was solidly back in Thomas More's cell in the Bell Tower. Someone was shaking me by the shoulders. I gasped and gagged. Wade slapped his palm on my back. I came to.

“Becca!” he said. “Becca, where are you?”

“What? I—”

“Terence and Julian have spotted Archie Doyle,” said Sara. “He followed us to the Tower. Markus Wolff slipped away. We're supposed to wait here—”

“Sir Felix is bringing his spies to help us,” said Darrell. “Two people will die here tonight. Bec, you're wet—”

“It's not here. It's not this tower! Tell him to meet us at Saint Andrew!” I said, my clothes soaked, my head splitting in two. “The Holbein puzzle leads back there. Crux is in Holbein's crypt! It's there!”

I
told them all what I'd seen and done, while Roald and Sara urged us quickly away from the Tower and Archie Doyle, and into the winding streets back to Saint Andrew.

“Becca,” Wade said, hustling next to me, “this is just—”

“Not now! I don't need to hear it's impossible. I know it's impossible. But if it didn't happen, if I didn't save her,
RAH
means nothing, and we have no relic.”

I pushed ahead of Wade, ahead of everyone but Roald and Sara, up Tower Hill, that sad last climb of Thomas More, saying out loud what I should have realized ages ago. “Copernicus wasn't talking about the Tower of
London. He was talking about Saint Andrew's tower. That's where two dead will die.”

“Which means Copernicus is in London right now,” said Lily. “He's here.”

I realized that, too.

We were breathless and frantic by the time we reached the church. A dozen armed men swarmed toward us instantly when a voice came out of the shadows.

“It's all right, officers. They're with me.”

Sir Felix hustled over. The men backed off.

In a low voice, he said, “The government has set up a ring of security around the church. It's been cleared of people. My intelligence mates identified the car as belonging to a German national who consults with the government. Except on this occasion. He's after something, and thinks you have it. He somehow tracked me, of all people, and may have followed me here. But I dare say he's after you.”

He checked his watch, scanned the street, then checked it again. Why that seemed sinister, I can't tell you. Maybe it was because I remember Simon Tingle doing the same thing before he was shot. I cast a quick look around for a car with no license plates. It wasn't there. Not yet.

Roald said, “This will sound odd, Sir Felix, but we have information that there will be an attempt on someone's life, possibly right here.”

“Two attempts,” Wade added. “Tonight.”

Sir Felix blinked as if we were lunatics. Then he slid into gear. “I suggest some of you go inside and find whatever this man wants. Roald, Sara, you come with me and talk to my man in charge. Give him a description of your pursuers.”

The church was open, dimly lit when we entered.

“Becca, are you sure about this?” asked Darrell as we crossed the nave.

I tried to reconnect the last few dots that had brought us there, but they wouldn't come together. “I don't know. I hope so, but I don't know.” I shivered, my clothes still wet. My pulse pounded in my wrists, my neck, my temples. My forehead burned. I hoped something was down there we'd all missed the first time. If it wasn't, we had nothing.

We entered through the door at the base of the tower, picked through the rubble to the second door, and climbed the steps down into the crypt. Lily shed her tablet's full light ahead through the dust on Holbein's stone and the recently pried-out mortar around it.

“Lily, shine the light lower,” I said, and read the writing on Joan Aleyn's partially pried-out stone.

JOAN ALEYN HOLBEIN

ORPHAN, FOUNDLING, WIFE

BORN 21 DECEMBER 1515

I felt myself sharpen, all my senses come into play. Maybe that's what saving a life does to you, puts you into focus.
If
I really did save Joan's life.

I reached out and placed my fingers on the stone. It was cold, damp. My fingertips searched for the words and numbers I had seen only an hour before.

DROWNED 6 JULY 1535

But they weren't there now, no matter what Markus Wolff and I had seen earlier. They weren't there. I stared at the stone. “She didn't . . . she didn't . . .”

“Becca?” Wade said. “What does it mean? No death date? But we saw it.”

“It can't mean she's still . . .” Darrell didn't finish.

My heart shuddered inside my chest. All I could think was that I actually
had
tampered with history, that Joan Aleyn didn't die that day.

“She lives,” I said. “Copernicus said, ‘She lives.' He meant that Joan survived that night.”

“It's not possible,” Lily whispered. “It's not. But . . .”

I was already searching for another stone, the one I
now
believed would be there. It was. Below Joan's vault was a third stone. It read:

REBECCA ALEYN HOLBEIN

DAUGHTER OF HANS AND JOAN HOLBEIN

BORN 7 SEPTEMBER 1535

DIED 19 MARCH 1604

“Rebecca Aleyn Holbein,” Darrell whispered. “
R-A-H.
We didn't see that before.”

“Because it wasn't there before,” I said, shaking, terrified, and humbled that Joan had named her daughter after me. “The relic is behind Rebecca's stone. We have to open it. I don't want to, but we have to. Joan would want us to.”

Together Wade and Darrell used the same tool Wolff had used earlier. They chipped away the mortar and carefully pried back the stone. A flat wooden box lay just inside, next to a tight wrapping of cloths and dust that might have been Rebecca's remains. My hands shook; my throat tightened. “Oh . . .”

Wade touched my arm. “Becca . . .”

I took control of myself and placed my hands on the box. It was made of wood and slate and clamped with brass corners. I brought it out into Lily's light. Lifting
the latch, we opened the box. Our faces were bathed in a fierce amber glow like Thomas More's had been five hundred years ago. I felt the same sort of quiet falling over us as in the cave on Guam when Wade and I found our first relic. The silence in the crypt just then was heavy, deep, almost holy.

And all too momentary.

The two equal arms of the cross begged to be attached.

“I think you should . . . ,” said Wade, half reaching to pull wet hair from my cheeks, then letting his hand fall without doing it. It was such a different look from the one he gave me this morning. “You deserve to. You found it.”

Lily and Darrell both nodded. I lifted out the two pieces. There was a notch in the center of each. I brought them together there. The arms sank into place with a click. The amber cross quivered in my hands for a moment, I let go, and rods suddenly jutted out of the arms, like multiple blades. Crux began to revolve in the air in front of us, like some kind of medieval helicopter. The two arms spun in opposite directions, making a strange, keening wail that grew louder and louder until Crux became its own winged machine. The cross of Copernicus, the prisoner's cross of Thomas More,
the cross encrypted into the Holbein portrait, beamed out like a floodlight and lifted up to the ceiling of the chamber.

“Take it apart!” Lily said. “Take it apart! Guys—”

Both boys thrust their hands at the cross and carefully detached one wing from the other. The moment they set them back into the algorism box and closed it tight, the light vanished, and the muffled noise of life rushed back.

Wade's expression was of awe. We all must have looked the same.

“We have the relic,” he said.

We did have the relic. Our second relic. We were in the lead once more.

Then we heard glass crashing on the floor above us.

I
spun around toward the door at the top of the crypt stairs. “What was—”

Something shattered in the nave. Chairs, tables scraped across the floor. Then two pops of gunfire, and someone shouted, “Take him down! Everyone now!” A stampede of feet thundered across the church floor.

“Should we stay here?” Lily whispered. “I'm staying here. Sir Felix and his agents will protect us.”

A flurry of more shots was followed by a pair of running feet toward the door from the nave into the tower. The door slammed aside while Darrell shut the door to the crypt and bolted it as Markus Wolff had done that afternoon.

We turned off our phone lights. Holbein's box was
already in my bag. We held our breath. Someone stepped through the debris outside our door. We leaned and ducked away from any line of fire. There was a knock instead.

“Hello, are you in there? This is Felix Ross. Your parents are safe, but Wolff is here, and that other man, Doyle. MI5 are cornering them, but you'd better slip out now, just in case.”

We looked at one another in the dark. Wade whispered, “I guess it's all right.”

Darrell climbed the stairs and unbolted the door; we opened it. Sir Felix was there, his friendly face half smiling. “Good show. Now, quietly. Very.” He pressed a finger to his lips, turned, and started back. We followed him out one by one.

Only we didn't get far. Three steps outside of the crypt door, I felt cold metal pressing the back of my neck. “Don't move, you little thief!”

Everyone turned to see who was behind me. But I knew.

“Doyle!” I said.

“At your service. Your
funeral
service, that is. Now hand it over!” He kept the barrel pressed against my neck. I saw Sir Felix sizing up Doyle, as if he was thinking of a plan to help us, but without a gun, what could he do?

“I think we'd better do as he requests,” he whispered. “Doyle, you
are
rather surrounded by British intelligence, poor chap. Nowhere to run, you see.”

The killer snorted. “I
do
see. Once Wolff gets here, we'll
all
see. He picks off British intelligence for breakfast. Now give me the relic!”

Sir Felix urged the others away from Doyle and me, but as he did, someone pounded on the door to the nave—which Doyle must have locked—and the gunman turned his head. That's when Wade jumped forward and dragged the bag off my shoulder. He spun around, and instead of unlocking the door, he scrabbled across the rubble and hooked his arm around a broken beam slanting overhead. He pulled himself up to the third step of the tower and from there to the fourth.

“Why, I oughta—” Doyle shouted. He plowed through us, knocking Sir Felix to the stones, wriggling away from Darrell. He jumped up after Wade.

“It'll collapse!” I said. “Wade, stop!”

But he wouldn't. He was on what remained of the first landing and starting up on stairs even more rotten. Doyle was only a few steps behind him. I lost them both in the dark, then saw them in the lights from the upper windows. The wood must have sliced Wade's fingers. He slipped back. I screamed.

I couldn't watch and do nothing. I pushed away from
the others and hoisted myself up to the third step. My wounded arm burned, but I managed to clutch the next stair. I saw Wade kicking at Doyle, when Doyle's gun went off.

Plaster exploded off the ceiling, and white dust rained down on them. Doyle lowered his head. I slipped down, but caught myself. The whole staircase was sagging away from the wall now. I felt like throwing up, but I kept climbing.

Downstairs, the church was chaotic: people were pounding on the nave door but not getting it open. What had Doyle done to it?

Then, I don't know how, I was up there, too, battering Doyle's legs, then his back, then his head. He crumpled forward into Wade, pushing him against a window. I heard glass crack, then shatter in the street below. Wade's alarm, still on his belt loop, went off as he hit the window. Shouts came from the street.

I clasped both hands together and brought them down on Doyle's head. He fell forward. Wade threw his arms out, then twisted aside, his tinny alarm still beeping. Doyle went headfirst into the remaining glass, shrieked, and fell.

Out of the tower.

I screamed something I don't remember. Wade spun to the window. I climbed the last step and looked out
next to him. Archie Doyle's body was twisted, facedown on the ground, surrounded by intelligence agents. I grabbed Wade to steady me.

“One dead,” he said, his voice barely audible.

“No! What are you doing? No!” Lily yelled from below.

“I beg your pardon, I have to . . .” Strangely, Sir Felix was grappling for the stairs now. He was stronger than he looked and was already on the third step.

“We'll come down,” I said, shaking, not knowing how I could make my feet move. But Sir Felix kept climbing up. The framework of the stairs shuddered. The weight was too much after all. The planks creaked beneath our feet.

“Yes, you'll come down,” Sir Felix said. “Just like Archie did.”

“Becca—” Wade said.

I watched the man's hand dip into his jacket. He withdrew something black.

“He's got a gun!” Darrell shouted, battering the locked door with a brick.

There was nothing to do, nowhere to go. Sir Felix was up there in no time.

“Archie Doyle was a bit of a fool, but a necessary one,” he said, holding his gun on us, pushing us away from the window. We practically stepped on each other's
toes. He peered out the window. “Simon Tingle, too. I naturally heard everything you asked him about. Both men, alas, won't see tomorrow.”

“My dad says Simon will live,” said Wade. “You won't get him.”

“Won't I? A knight of the British Empire
and
of the Teutonic Order can do a great many things. The relic, please. Now there's a good fellow—”

Suddenly, the door broke open below us, and Roald and Terence, along with several agents, poured into the tower, shining powerful lights up at us.

“Sir Felix, you won't escape,” one of the agents yelled. “Sir—”

The window behind Sir Felix exploded. Glass splashed inside the tower like water. Felix didn't have a chance to look around before a second blast blew him off the platform and out the window he'd just looked out of. Blew him out. As if he were a puppet.

I screamed and screamed.

“Omigod!” Lily cried out from below. “Who's shooting?”

Wade tried to hold me back, but I stepped to the edge of the sagging floor and looked out the glassless window frame. “Becca, get out of the way—”

On the scaffolding of the building across the street, I glimpsed a shape in a long leather coat. There was the
brief glint of a gun barrel, a flash of white hair, then nothing. “It's over,” I said. I knew the shooting was over. Two were dead. There wouldn't be any more tonight. Copernicus had told me what to expect.

“Wolff's appointment. He was after Sir Felix.”

Leadenhall was a carnival of flashing lights and men with automatic weapons. Two crumpled bodies lay on the street not far from each other. Medical personnel crowded around them, but they were clearly dead.

Two dead in the shadow of the tower.

Even without seeing him, I knew that a man who didn't belong in that sudden crowd was down there. Someone from another time.

Nicolaus Copernicus.

Had he seen all this before, or was he seeing it now? If he
was
seeing it now, was he still on his unexplained third journey? Or was this his fourth, or eighth, or tenth? No answers came. Time was shot through with holes.

One thing I knew: history was already changing. Because I had saved Joan Aleyn? Or because I didn't break Markus Wolff's phone when I had the chance?

Holodomor. Yellow Turban.

The names of those tragedies swam in my head. How could one person do so much horror? What horrors were beginning right here and now?

Someone was pulling me. Wade. Wade was pulling me back down the stairs. “I was scared,” he said. “That we'd lose you.”

I gripped his hand as hard as I could. “Me, too.”

My heart was stuffed in my throat. Barely able to breathe, I wanted to bury myself in him and the others and not let go and not have to say anything. I knew that eventually I would have to talk about it. But not right now. I didn't know the right words. Only the wrong ones.

Uskok . . . Smyrna . . .

So that's pretty much the unfunny story I promised you.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Except it's not the
whole
story.