The Serpent's Curse (38 page)

“Did you say ‘splash-splash'?”

“Just. Do. It.”

Wade lifted his right index finger, held it steady with his left hand, and keyed in the final number.

Zero.

7, 1, 9, 3, 2, 4, 0. For
NC
. Nicolaus Copernicus.

Nothing happened for a full five seconds. Then there came a soft click. It was followed by a slow sequence of sliding bolts and levers behind the door, ending in a dull thud. Wade stared at Lily. She stared at him.

Breathing deeply, they pushed on the door together. It opened soundlessly. And side by side, they slipped into the tomb of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Greywolf

W
olves howled and guns blasted as Darrell and Becca pushed from hall to room to passage to the center of the fortress. It stank of animals.

“Becca, trade you, the jewels for the pipe. I'll break them.”

“Not likely, but yeah.” She inserted the relic into the inner pocket of her parka, where Darrell knew she kept the diary. Both relic and diary, he suddenly realized, had belonged to Copernicus.

The man who'd started this quest.

The man who, in a roundabout way, had led them here to Darrell's mother.

“Darrell!” Becca cried. He turned to hear the frantic scampering of paws. Three wolves broke into the room. They were emaciated and gray. They slid across the floorboards, momentarily startled to see the kids. Their growling was like the grinding of gears.

“The door at the top of the stairs,” Darrell whispered. “Go!” The wolves leaped up after them, but Roald and Marceline were suddenly there, startling the wolves with gunfire. Two of the creatures bared their fangs and growled, but ran out of the room. The third stood its ground for a second, arched up its hind legs, then ran out, too.

“Go with the children,” Marceline said to Roald. “I'll stay here. Go on!”

“Hurry!” Roald snagged their sleeves as he rushed up with them. “She's got ammo, and she's a great shot.”

From the top of the stairs, they turned to a mirrored hallway. Darrell ran down the hall and found a final set of stairs. Now that they had the Serpens head, it was all about finding his mother. They climbed to the landing. Roald shot at the locked door, a double-wide set of doors, and pushed into a large circular room. It was the inside room of the tower.

“Sara!” Roald cried out.

Darrell nearly vomited.

His mother hung, limp and drugged, inside a cage of metal bands at the center of a horrifying engine of gears and wheels and pistons. A haggard young man jerked out from behind the machine. He had an enormous handgun trained on them.

“You were never supposed to make it this far,” the man said. “You were supposed to die at the hands of the Red Brotherhood. Or at least the wolves!”

“What have you done to her?” Darrell screamed. “Get my mother out of that thing!”

The man barely registered the words, but shot wildly. The bullet ricocheted powerfully off the wall behind them. “Stop or die. I must finish Kronos. I must . . .” His eyes widened, then narrowed, as if his brain was completely fried. Keeping his pistol leveled at the three of them, the man moved his free hand. It scrambled with lightning speed over a keyboard attached by a cable to the machine. The machine resembled a kind of gun, its barrel hinged inward at his mother.

“We're taking her out of there,” Roald said, moving toward the machine. The man raised his gun and shot him.

In the forearm. Becca screamed. Roald reeled back, dropping his pistol, but stayed on his feet. It was a graze, not serious. “I'm fine,” he said.

Darrell pulled out the Taser. “We're going to get her—”

“Please stop, or I will kill you all!” the man screamed, firing his pistol at the floor in front of Darrell, exploding the flagstones at his feet. “Twelve minutes! Twelve min— No! Eleven! Look! See!” He pointed the gun barrel at a clock mechanism mounted next to Sara. “If you move, I will kill her. And then I will kill you. I must do this.”

Darrell heard footsteps coming toward them in the hallway. Marceline? The shooting had stopped. Had she neutralized the wolves?

Marceline Dufort leaped up the stairs and burst into the laboratory, her machine gun raised. The man at the device was startled to see her, and her gun. He thrust his pistol at Sara's head. “Drop your gun. Kick it here. Or she dies right now.” Marceline placed her gun on the floor and followed his order.

“You see I
must
do this,” the man said, his pistol still trained on Darrell's mother. He moved his free hand back to the keyboard and tapped three times in rapid succession.

The machine made an urgent sound.

One very large wheel began to turn.

Moscow

L
ily quickly pulled the tomb's utility door closed behind them and held her breath. No alarm. The
NC
code had worked. With, naturally, her own brilliant correction.

She and Wade wound through a sequence of basement hallways until they found a cement staircase with a door at the top. They climbed up. The door was locked, but there was another keypad. Assured by Aleksandr that the Guardian code could override any other, they used it again, and the door lock clicked. They opened it and entered the mausoleum.

“Oh, man,” Wade breathed.

She totally agreed.

The inside of the tomb resembled a modern hotel lobby more than a crypt, except, of course, for the giant coffin.

There were lights embedded in the ceiling, bare stone walls, marble floors. It wasn't as frigid as outside by any means, but it wasn't room temp, either.
Tomb temp,
Lily thought, then dismissed it. This was a place of reverence, whatever you thought of the man lying there.

Wade was dumbstruck, barely moving. “Where would you hide a relic here?”

“The shorter list is where
couldn't
you hide one,” she said. “Serpens could be anywhere.” Though not, she hoped, inside the coffin.

Or
sarcophagus
, as the websites had called it. It stood on a raised platform in the center of the large square room. The base was framed in marble. Above it was a bronze sculpture of cloth spilling tastefully out from the open casket. Several feet above the casket itself stood a construction of four tiers of marble and wood. In between were walls of thick glass, angled slightly outward from the base to the larger top. Inside the glass, lying in the casket as still as stone, was the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin.

She swallowed hard and took a step toward it.

The dead leader's head and shoulders were—nice touch—tilted upward on a dark ruby pillow. To make for better viewing by the daily crowds, she guessed. Lenin's eyes were closed, but the embalming was so good that they looked as if they had just recently shut themselves. His hands were poised individually, not crossing each other at the waist, but separated. They had, if Lily could bring her mind to say it, a kind of personality. The right hand was folded on itself as if holding something. She really hoped it wasn't a diamond serpent. The left hand rested lightly on the upper left thigh.

“Okay, let's get to work,” Wade said.

She shook her head to focus her thoughts. “Take two walls. Go over every inch of them. But remember that people are here all the time to pay their respects. So maybe the best hiding place will be a place where people don't go very much.”

“Good point,” Wade said softly. “I guess we have to be as clever as the Guardian who hid the relic. We have no real information on who he was, but we know the
NC
trick with the keypad. Maybe there's something like that going on inside, too.”

“I just hope it's as far away as possible from
him
,” she said. “You know, the third person in the room.” She thought she heard Wade chuckling.

She hoped it was Wade chuckling.

For his part, Wade wanted to think logically about their search, but Guardian code makers were among the most sophisticated in the world, so it could be devilishly clever. Or devilishly simple. Or intuitive. Or impossible.

The four walls were clean, just flat or stepped marble blocks up to the ceiling, with minimal ornaments and light fixtures, none of which looked like it held a relic, and all of which was far too public anyway. So they moved toward the center of the tomb, or rather Lily did, because Wade found he had stopped moving.

“What's the matter? Outside the obvious one of breaking into a tomb?”

“I don't know.” Wade slipped the strip of paper that Alek had given them from his pocket and stared at the simple cleverness of the solution to the entry code. Then he scanned the four corners of the room and the public entrance on the front wall, an entrance that jutted out into Red Square. That entrance was just like the zero on a keypad. He looked down at the floor, then up at the ceiling.

“What are you thinking?” she asked. “Because I hope you're thinking.”

“I think I am thinking,” he said. “And I'm thinking that the
NC
thing
could
be more than just the entry code. I mean, it's what Aleksandr told us. No matter how many times codes are changed, this will still work. Well, maybe that's the beauty of it. The simplicity. Because look at the layout of the floor. It juts forward, like the zero on the keypad. What if we trace the same two letters in the room, as if they form the same shape as the letters?”

Lily visually took in the four corners, the middle of the back wall, the right wall (from Lenin's perspective), and the entrance. “I don't know what we'll see that way that we didn't see before.”

“Maybe it isn't what we see,” he said. “Or what
we
see.”

“Fine, be cryptical. I don't have a better idea.”

Together, they stood under the ceiling light in the lower left corner. It suddenly flickered out. They walked slowly to the upper left corner, making the first “stroke” of the
N
. There was another ceiling light there. It too went out when they stood under it. They made their way around the sarcophagus to the lower right, then finally to the upper right, completing the
N
. There were ceiling lights in both corners, and both went out.

“That was the
N
. Now the
C
,” he said. Starting at the middle of the back wall, where there was also a ceiling light, they went to the middle of the side wall, then down to the entrance—the long journey to the end of the
C
—where there was a final ceiling light. Those three blinked and died, too.

“The lights are sensors!” she said.

All seven lights came on again, and from the center of the room came the sound of something sliding. To Wade, it seemed more mechanical than electronic. The sound continued for another few seconds, then stopped with a click.

“The sarcophagus,” he whispered. His arms and legs tingled as he walked slowly to the large glass coffin, but Lily focused on the source of the noise first. She scurried over to the foot of the coffin. The marble molding around the base was unbroken except in one spot, where a short length of black marble was protruding two or three inches. As the ceiling light haloed her face and hair, she knelt and pried at the close-fitting molding.