The Serpent's Curse (20 page)

“What's simple?” asked Wade.

Darrell flipped the map around. “Look at this right here. Two towers away. This one on the corner is called the Good Friday Tower, right? The next one is called the Onion Tower. Right here on the south wall of the monastery. In the painting, Dominic is holding an onion and pointing to a tower. He's saying Onion Tower. The relic is in the Onion Tower—”

There came the sudden sound of footsteps from the bottom of the stairway outside.

“Dr. Kaplan! Children!” someone called. “We know you are up there!” The voice was unfamiliar.

Roald peeked out of the cell, then quickly jerked back in. “The government man from before. He must be with the Brotherhood. He's not alone.”

The stairway groaned with several sets of feet. “Dr. Kaplan, come out this instant,” another voice shouted. “You are all in violation of the laws of Holy Trinity—Saint Sergius Lavra and the Russian Federation!”

B
ecca held her breath as at least two, maybe three or even four people stomped up the stairs and into the passage outside Maxim's cell, only to find the gate at the far end of the passage padlocked. The urgency of the raised voices and the rattling of the gate told her they didn't have the key with them.

There was a good deal more yelling before the men hurried back down the steps. One of them yelled over and over,
“Poluchit' klyuchi!”
The final word sounded enough like
key
in both French and Italian for Becca to know that the men would soon be back.

“I hope Brother Semyon is okay,” said Lily.

“We'll have to hope he can take care of himself.” Roald peeked out again. The hall was empty. “Darrell, how do we get to the Onion Tower?”

“Without going back down the stairs? Only one way. Over the roof on the outside wall. But I don't see how to get up there.”

“There's scaffolding along parts of the outside wall,” said Wade.

Roald shook his head. “Let's see what's at the other end of the passage.”

They scurried out of the cell and down the narrow hallway to where it ended in a brief L, a dead end that led nowhere except for a small window set high in the wall. Becca suspected it might offer the only way to go, besides back down the stairs and into the hands of men who were most certainly from the Red Brotherhood.

“The window is our only way out,” she said softly.

“Like you know,” said Darrell.

“Do you have a better idea, smarty?” asked Lily. “As the intelligence officer around here, I'm siding with Becca. Which is like her getting an A and you getting . . .”

“Yes?”

“Not an A,” she said. “But can we even get it open?”

Roald reached to the sill and pulled himself up high enough to see out. “There's scaffolding right outside. I guess we'll have to go this way.”

More shouting from the hall, then the clank of chains hitting the floor. There was only the bolt now that kept the men from getting to them. Together, Wade and his father pushed out on the window. It groaned. “Careful, Dad. You're pushing too hard—”

More groaning; then the window fell away. Snowflakes flew in on them. Becca expected to hear the glass shatter down the side of the wall to the courtyard below, but it clanked to a stop just under the window.

“Let me test the scaffold,” Roald said.

“It's probably slippery. Be careful,” said Lily.

Roald clambered up to the sill, reached his arms through, and pulled himself outside. “It's slippery as anything, but strong enough to hold us. Come on, who's next?”

Wade and Darrell both boosted Becca up; she took Roald's hand and slid forward through the window, scraping her wounded arm, though she tried to ignore the sudden pain. When she was out, she found herself standing on a slightly slanted scaffold running along the inside walls, with cold snowflakes whirling in her face.

An iron framework supported the narrow planks all the way to the corner. Lily crawled out next. Wade went after her, then Darrell, who immediately pointed to a green-topped tower midway between the nearest corner and the one next to it. “That's Maxim's Onion Tower.”

A rough voice yelled out suddenly from the courtyard below. “Do not go any farther. You have nowhere to run!” It was the rumpled-suited man from before. He was with three other men wearing lousy suits. One of the men held two phones and yelled into both. The men were soon joined by a half-dozen others, who started up the scaffold from the ground. Brother Semyon stood by helplessly.

“Never mind them,” Darrell snapped. “To the corner.” They made their way quickly along the planks as far as they could. Another stretch of boards ran along the outside walls from the corner to the Onion Tower.

“Dad, we can make it over the roof to the other scaffold,” Wade said. He didn't wait for a response from his father, just crawled over the roof. Minutes later, they were all standing on the boards running along the outside walls.

Becca pointed to the parking lot. “Look. Our car. Uncle Roald, what if you got the car and drove it down the outside wall under the tower? We can get to the tower, find the relic, and get down from there. We won't have to run into the guys climbing up.”

Roald looked both ways, down the scaffolding to the ground and back at the men slowly climbing up. He wagged his head. “All right. Five minutes. I'll try to draw the men away. You be down there right below the Onion Tower. I'll meet you. Go!”

As Roald carefully worked his way to the ground outside the monastery, Wade led the others to where the scaffolding intersected with the Onion Tower's top floor, just below a set of high-arched windows. “I'm going to slide down to the gutter to get a foothold and open a window. Break it, if I have to.”

Once down there, he found one of the three windows unlocked. He pushed it in easily. Darrell was right behind him. They dropped down onto a wide-planked wooden floor. Lily and Becca slid in next.

They were in the Onion Tower.

It was empty; the walls were simple and bare. It had a wooden floor that looked, at most, a hundred years old—a bad sign, if Maxim hid something in 1556. Walls of plain gray stone led up to a wooden ceiling that was nothing more than the inside of the cupola.

“Not a lot of hiding places,” said Darrell.

Wade quietly lowered two planks that barred the doors. They were sealed in. “So now what?” he asked.

“Back to the picture,” Lily said, bringing it up on her tablet. “Maxim is pointing—I mean, Saint Dominic is—to the base of the middle window.”

“Do you think he was being that exact?” asked Darrell.

Becca looked around the small space. “Each side of the tower has three windows, but he's standing on the ground in front of it, which eliminates the sides where the walls meet the tower. So there are only two walls where it could be—”

“Actually, one,” Lily said. “Dominic is obviously standing inside the monastery, because he was a prisoner like Maxim was. So it's got to be on the inside wall.”

“It,” said Darrell. “I sure hope we're talking about the relic. Either way, Maxim can't have known how long his secret would need to be hidden, so he probably hid it in something made of stone.”

Wade peeked out the window. “Dad's in the car. There's a van in the parking lot now. Hurry this up.”

As quickly as they could, they went over the entire inside wall, and especially the window area, but saw nothing, until Becca, brushing away stone dust accumulated over the years, ran her fingers over the shelf at the bottom of the middle north window.

At the base of the mullion, the pillar between the windows, two small figures were scratched into the surface of the stone, deeply enough to have endured for a long time.

“Boots?” said Darrell. “A pretty gnarly pair of boots, if you ask me.”

“Or the gnarly outline of Italy,” said Becca. “Which makes perfect sense. Dominic was Italian. Maxim and Copernicus were in Italy at the same time.”

“But why
two
Italys, and why is one of them backward?” Darrell asked. “Italy against Italy?”

“Or . . .” Becca dug Copernicus's diary from her bag and quickly leafed to the final pages—the Guardian Files—she had isolated. “Or . . . Italian against Italian?”

“Meaning what?” asked Wade.

“The coded passage,” she said. “Maybe it's coded in the same language, only one of them is used backward.”

“I am so not understanding you,” said Wade. “Plus we need to hurry.”

Snow flew in the open window behind Becca. The storm was getting worse. She had to block it out. “What I mean is that two Italys, one facing the other, might mean that there aren't two code languages, only one, and part of the message is backward.”

“Up there!” said Lily, searching the wall above the Italy drawing. “The boots are pointing to something. I'm not . . . tall enough to see what it is.”

Wade almost smiled. “The oldest cryptogram in the book. You point to the answer.” He reached up and slipped his fingers into a small gap between two stones. He carefully drew out a rolled-up strip of parchment. It was nearly black with dense writing. There was a date—xvii January 1556—followed by a brief passage in a language that seemed like gibberish. “Becca, can you read—”

Footsteps scraped the floor heavily in the passage outside the tower. Something slammed roughly against the door. A similar sound fell against the opposite door.

“They're breaking in,” Darrell whispered. He moved to the far window. “We need to get down the scaffold to the car.”

More footsteps stomped down the halls outside the tower. The doors thundered. A hinge tore off one door frame and clanked to the floor.

“Out the window!” Lily said. “Now!”

W
ade crawled first out the window and onto the ledge along the wall. At that point, the scaffold was a single slippery board. He hated this, hated heights, and the snow didn't make any of what they were doing smart or easy.

“Where's Dad?” Darrell asked, sliding out next to him.

Lily was next. “They got him,” she said. “They got him, and they arrested him, and now they're coming for us—”

Then there he was, his tiny car sliding around the corner too quickly for the snow, nearly crashing into the trees that edged the wall, but he managed to right it and skidded to a stop beneath the tower. They climbed down the scaffolding as quickly as they could, jumping the last five feet, where there were no more boards. Then the van appeared, roaring from the parking lot onto the snowy ground, until its driver realized it was too large to fit between the trees and the outer wall. The van slid to a stop. The doors opened, and several men bolted out.

“The Brotherhood!” Roald said from the open window of the car. “Get in!”

As soon as they were safely inside, Roald gunned the engine. The Aleko spun down the narrow strip of ground and around the walls, losing their pursuers as they slid and careened over the property. They finally thudded onto an actual road and bounded up the entrance ramp of the highway. Roald swerved abruptly into traffic and crossed like a crazy man to the fast lane, gaining as much speed as the rattletrap could handle. It was approaching seven o'clock, the traffic was still heavy, but they were on their way back to Moscow.