The Serpent's Curse (11 page)

Lily gave them a blank look. “Um . . . what?”

“The complete range of bad things can be said with only five fingers,” Wade insisted. “You raise them to your face in a casual way, and the rest of us know what to do.”

“What?” she said again.

They explained it this way:

One finger: The Order is near—run.

Two fingers: Meet me at (location to be determined).

Three fingers: Create a diversion.

Four fingers: Help.

Five fingers: Just get away from me.

The last one was added by Darrell specifically, he said, for use between the brothers. Becca and Lily spent a long time rolling their eyes, then shrugged and practiced the gestures. Roald woke from a brief nap as the plane was descending and learned them as well, but he thought he might be able to come up with a better set of commands.

“I dare you, Dad,” Darrell quipped.

Becca watched out the cab window as they motored swiftly past brick and brownstone neighborhoods with names that exuded Englishness: Cranford and Osterley, Brentford and Shepherd's Bush. She could practically see the sheep grazing in pastures, though that was a scene from old novels and, by now, there weren't many pastures that hadn't been developed and built on.

Still, the slower the taxi went, the more clogged the streets were, and the more Becca began to feel the aura of “London, England” breathing from the sights around her. It came powerfully. All those English novels by English writers! They were written here, about here, and they were everywhere, as if those books had spilled their pages out into the living city. Even the presence of the Sikh driver spoke of the once-great colonial empire that was Great Britain, and how London gathered in its vast geography everyone from everywhere it had ever ruled.

“My first time to London in ten years,” said Roald, his neck craning around here and there to catch every moment, just as she was doing. “There was a conference at the University of London. I presented a paper on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. It was my first international paper.”

“So cool,” Becca breathed, aware that there was little volume in what she said.

“Only if you don't read the paper,” he said with a laugh. “Pretty dull stuff.”

“Still,” she said. “London.”

Trying not to annoy or alarm the driver, Roald gave him several addresses to drive to—as if they were sightseeing—before the final one. After Covent Garden, a bustling market in the heart of the city, they drove through the madly snarled traffic of Piccadilly Circus, around to Selfridges department store, across a bridge to Southwark, and back over another bridge to Saint Paul's Cathedral. When, finally, they motored toward their final stop, Darrell suggested they call the telephone number Terence had given them, “to get things started.” Roald tapped a number on the cell phone installed with Julian's homemade alert software.

“Galina probably knows we're in London,” Wade whispered; then he frowned. “There's no probably about it. She knows. We have to be supersmart.”

Becca shared a grim look with the others. Despite their hopped-up phones, if for some reason Galina Krause
didn't
already know their exact location, she would soon.

“I've never been not smart,” said Lily. “An intelligence officer can't afford to be. That witch is out there. Her and her thugs. I'm sure of it.”

The Sikh driver half turned. “
Thugs
, miss. This is a word coming from the Hindi term
thuggees
, the name given to some fanatic followers of Kali. The goddess of destruction.”

“Thank you,” Lily said, her eyes widening. “How weirdly . . . accurate. . . .”

Becca's blood tingled in her veins. The quest was on, and she believed, as they all did, that if Maxim
was
the Guardian, and Serpens
was
the second relic, then Russia was the place, and she hoped Boris Volkov would help confirm it.

“Hallo? Who is?” The voice crackled loudly from Roald's phone.

“Hello. Is this Boris Volkov?”

“Ya. Hallo. Who is?”

“Excuse me,” Roald said as they eased deeper into the streets. “This is a friend of Terence Ackroyd's. He told us—”

“Ah, yes, Terry! Dear friend, Terry. Yes, yes. Family Keplen. Come see me. Is Boris. Boris Volkov.” There was the sound of ice clinking into a glass on the other end. “You come Promenade. Ten thirty this morning. Dorchester Hotel.”

“Uh . . . we would prefer somewhere more private,” Roald said.

“No. Public is safe. Witnesses be there. Public only. Bring item with you, yes?”

“Item?” said Roald. “I'm not sure I know exactly—”

“Park Lane. You find? Yes? Good. You come.”

Click.

“Dad, what does he want?” Wade asked. “We don't have any
item
for him.”

Roald tapped the phone and returned it to his jacket pocket. “I think we'll find out soon enough. Hotel Cavendish, Gower Street,” he told the driver.

“Certainly.”

T
he Hotel Cavendish was a small boutique hotel near the corner of Gower Street and Torrington Place in the neighborhood surrounding the British Museum. Wade wondered what their rooms were like. He would continue to wonder. When their taxi wove through a series of narrow streets and passages and finally stopped outside, his father paid their driver handsomely. They entered the hotel, where they booked two rooms, made sure the taxi was gone, then turned and walked right back outside, to the bewilderment of the desk clerk, who was dangling two sets of room keys for no one.

“That looked kind of comfy,” said Lily. “And expensive.”

“Paul Ferrere always books a room he never stays in,” Wade's father said. “This is the kind of life we're living right now. Our flat is a few short blocks away.”

He then led the kids up Gower Street, took a left onto Torrington Place, and hung a right into the narrow Chenies Mews, an L-shaped passage whose long side ran parallel to Gower. They walked along the Mews to the corner of the L, where Roald paused in front of a nondescript and, Wade thought, seedy-looking brick building. But the narrow street was quiet and the building more warehouse-like than domestic, both precautions Wade appreciated as Terence's way of keeping them under the radar.

“Just for a day or two,” said Roald. “And just so we're all clear: this is our ‘location to be determined.' Memorize where we are in relation to the neighborhood.”

“Got it,” said Becca.

Wade and Darrell quickly left their bags in their ample rooms inside. It was 10:03 a.m. On their return to the Hotel Cavendish by a different route, Wade kept scanning the neighborhood. He noticed no slowing cars or anyone loitering suspiciously. He saw only a young couple in running gear heading to breakfast and a businessman in a blue suit and bowler hat, shaking out his umbrella under a bus stop shelter. But then, according to Darrell, he wouldn't see an agent of the Order until it was too late.

They assembled on the sidewalk in front of the Cavendish while the desk clerk gawked from the lobby. Roald hailed a black cab. The roundabout twenty-minute drive took them past the massive and imposing British Museum, which drew an extended gasp from Becca.

“Next time,” she said. “Next time, all the sights.”

“Maybe the Ackroyds have special privileges there, too,” said Darrell.

Becca's jaw dropped playfully. “Don't kid me.”

The cold rain continued to fall on the street, on the cars, on the gray buildings. Wade thought it made the city look sadder than it probably was, but they likely wouldn't get to see much of London anyway. Not if Boris Volkov told them what Wade hoped he would. By this afternoon, they'd be flying to Russia, to find both the relic and Sara.

“We should buy winter coats in London before we leave,” Lily said out of nowhere. “
If
we leave. For Russia, I mean. We should go back to Selfridges. For parkas and scarves and gloves. And Uggs.”

For what seemed like a day and a half, they drove past the famous and huge expanse of lawn known as Hyde Park before coiling into an area congested by expensive cars, where the cab left them off. A five-minute evasive walk brought them finally to the graceful Dorchester Hotel. Under its broad awning a top-hatted doorman directed them through the revolving doors into the marble lobby. With a quick look around them, they wove their way into the bustling Promenade room.

A
tuxedoed man stood behind a tall desk at the entrance to the restaurant.

He nodded politely when they told him who they were there to meet. “Yes, yes. Mr. Volkov has been waiting. One moment.” He stepped out and cast a glance over the restaurant.

The Promenade was a deep, busy room lined with elegant tables and chairs on either side, with a central bank of velvet-cushioned sofas. Short potted palm trees were placed every few feet, and gold-topped columns rose to a tiered ceiling. There was also a lot of gold in the other fixtures and hangings, and a jungle of enormous flower arrangements on tables.

The place boomed with the sound of clinking cutlery and tinkling glass and the bubbling murmurs of dozens of breakfast conversations. It was also filled with the smell of toast and coffee, which was fine, but Wade wondered if they'd ever heard of the basic bacon, egg, and cheese on a hard roll.

The maître d' adjusted his glasses and pointed. “Mr. Volkov is right over . . .”

He didn't have to go on. A very big man wearing a very big suit waved both arms from the end of the room as if he were trying to stop traffic.

“You must be Keplens!” he bellowed.

“Great,” Darrell whispered. “Three seconds in a public place and already we've been outed.”

By a really enormous guy.

Wade's antennae went up instantly. “Dad, I don't get it. Why did he want to meet here?” he whispered. “The whole world sees us.”

“Unless it's a trap,” Darrell said.

“Maybe,” Wade's father said. “He
is
right that being in public might protect us from outright attack. Remember, the Order doesn't want to get caught, either. Maybe he knows something about being careful that we don't.”

Boris Volkov was completely huge, and seemed to grow more huge the closer they came. He appeared to Wade every bit as cagey and suspicious as Terence Ackroyd had suggested. Weaving around the tables toward him, Wade kept a lookout for anyone paying special attention to them, but after turning to see who the “Keplens!” were, the other patrons seemed to have gone back to their private conversations.
Good,
he thought.
I'd rather eat than run.

The large Russian bounced up awkwardly when they came over, nearly taking the tablecloth with him, and wrapped his arms around them in a weird group hug.

Wade wanted to trust him, but he didn't care for the heavy, fumy smell that blossomed from him. Alcohol in the morning? What sort of person had Terence hooked them up with? Everyone, he told himself, every single person was under suspicion until proved otherwise. That was a lesson they'd learned in San Francisco, with the killer Feng Yi, who had betrayed the kids
and
the Teutonic Order.

His father introduced them all, and Volkov forced them into a very precise arrangement at the table. He asked Becca and Lily, who he called by each other's name—
Lee-lee
and
Bake-ahh
—to squeeze in alongside him, while he gestured Wade, his father, and Darrell to take seats on the other side. Settling in, Wade tugged out his notebook and turned to the first clean page, ready for whatever the strange man told them.

In the few moments that followed, during which they ordered, Wade eyed Boris Volkov as best he could without staring. First off, everything on the guy was sweating. His jowly cheeks, his forehead, the ridge above his chin, his levels of neck. The front of his shirt was soaked through. There was a drop of sweat dangling from the tip of his nose, which he didn't wipe away, but which never appeared to fall, either.