The Serpent's Curse (30 page)

“Whoa.” Becca's eyes widened. “Someone sent a coded message to Boris that said ‘Vorkuta'?”

“But Aleksandr is dead,” said Wade. “I have proof right here in my pocket. So who would send the message, and what would it mean to Boris?”

“Those are the questions,” Roald said. “After the witnesses, the dental records, all of Boris's research, he would never have believed Alek was sending him a message. He knew Alek was dead. But maybe Alek hid something in Vorkuta, and a Guardian found it and sent a message to Boris. The Guardian used the old code, knowing that Boris would have to come. He just never got the message.”

The nose of the jet dropped suddenly. Water bottles, mugs, whatever was loose flew off the tables. Becca nearly dropped the diary. Overhead lights flickered.

“Whoa!” Darrell said. “What's going on—”

The jet dipped again, this time at a steeper angle, and the engines shrieked in protest.

“The storm,” said Wade. “Maybe the wings are icing over—”

“Stay put!” Roald staggered to the cockpit, throwing the door open. “What's the trouble?”

“Wind shear!” Terence said, working hard to lift the jet back up and keep control. “Unfortunately, we have to head right back into the track of the storm.”

“We're close to Greywolf, are we not?” Marceline asked as she studied the chart.

“Very close, I think,” Terence said.

“Can you keep going?” Darrell asked, clutching the door frame next to his father. Wade was out of his seat now too, and staggering down the aisle to the front.

“The wings have iced up and are starting to drag us down,” Terence murmured. “I don't know how long I can—”

The words were lost under the sound of the crying engines. Lily stared at Becca. They were both clutching their seat handles so tightly neither could move. “Becca, we better not be going to cra—”

“Don't say it! Don't you dare!”

One of the engines began to whine strangely. The jet tilted suddenly. Wade spun down the aisle and landed on the floor in front of Becca. She screamed.

“I have to land!” Terence said. “Brace yourselves; it's going to be rough!”

The next thing Lily knew, everything was bouncing around the cabin. Roald and Darrell slid back into the aisle sideways, then pitched forward again. Paul crawled over to help them. There was a deep groan of metal. The landing gear dropped. The underside of the jet beneath their feet was battered from below. The jet was slicing into the trees.

“I see a clearing—hold tight!”

“We're going down!” Lily yelled.

Branches slapped the wings; then there was a thunderous squeal of metal as the landing gear and the hull of the jet went skidding along the frozen ground. As hard as Lily tried, she couldn't keep herself together. She started screaming.

Greywolf

I
n the large, lead-lined tower of Greywolf, Ebner von Braun observed the miserable form of Sara Kaplan, folded inside the cage at the center of Kronos, shivering like a waif in a storm. It crossed his mind that even if she did not know precisely what awaited her, she must have had an inkling, a premonition, and it was taking its toll on her health.
Expendable
. That was the word Galina had used.

Helmut Bern clacked furiously on his computer, attempting to finish the patch of programming necessary to resuscitate the crude prototype.

Screening out for a moment the machine's pathetic inmate, Ebner gazed over his own workmanship. If Kronos I was crude, he had to admit that it was also very beautiful. It had survived the terrible fire and suffered four years of disuse, but Helmut, good soldier that he was, had burnished the machine to a brilliant sheen and restored its moving parts to pristine running order.

In a rage since her empty-handed return from Venice, Galina scowled suddenly. “We should send her now! Send her!”

Bern nearly turned himself inside out with shock. “What? No! Please not yet! She'll be destroyed in transit.” Then, his breath blooming icily in front of him, he whined, “Miss Krause . . . I beg you . . .”

Galina sneered and looked away. A reprieve for poor Helmut.

“You are an obedient servant, Helmut Bern,” Ebner said with, he hoped, a hint of irony.

Kronos was mostly Ebner's own handiwork—based on Galina's fevered vision—and he loved it like a first, awkward child. He was elated to see it humming once more, and horrified to realize that every experiment involving it had claimed at least one life.

The door to the laboratory resounded with a knock. Galina turned. “Enter.”

It was Bartolo Cassa, the sunglasses-wearing muscleman who managed to be everywhere at the same time, like a tabloid celebrity. “Miss Krause,” he said, “the injured guard has died of his wounds. Since then, the escaped prisoner must have made contact with the Kaplans. The family has left Saint Petersburg, heading east by jet. They have also had high-level assistance from a Guardian in the FSB.”

“Alert the Brotherhood to increase security over every acre of the property,” Ebner said. “The family will enter a trap. Is there anything else?”

Cassa nodded. “A report from the Copernicus Room. The messenger Miss Krause eliminated in Venice . . .”

“Yes?” she said.

“The clock she possessed was owned by the courier you neutralized in Prague. The message it likely contained originated elsewhere. It has been traced backward to its source.”

Galina merely tilted her head. It was the signal for Cassa to speak.

He did.

One word.

“Vorkuta.”

Vorkuta?
It was as if Ebner were being punished for thinking he was as cold as he could be. The godforsaken Siberian city of Vorkuta was an iceberg in a land of ice.

“Bring the transport around,” she said frostily to Cassa. “We go to the airfield immediately.” She turned away from him as if he were no longer there, and in a moment he was not. “Helmut Bern, you will be successful.”

The programmer's stubbled head turned to her, his features dappled with sweat, his hands trembling with fear. “Miss Krause, I am working as quickly—”

A frown. “Did I ask you?”

Bern shot a glance at Ebner but must have realized he was floating alone on a frozen sea. “Yes. Of course, Miss Krause,” he managed. “That is to say, no, you did not ask, and yes . . . we are on schedule. We will be successful.”

Galina smiled icily. “Ebner, we own the best people.”

He attempted to match her smile. “We
are
the Teutonic Order.”

Galina whipped around and exited the chamber with him, bolting and locking the laboratory from the outside. On the landing, she said, “Greywolf will live up to its name, Ebner. Let the wolves loose in the castle. If the Brotherhood should fail on the grounds, the wolves will protect Kronos until our return.”

When they were out the front door, Ebner told the stony-faced local leader of the Red Brotherhood to empty the building except for Bern and the woman and to release the wolves into the fortress. For dramatic effect, he added, “Release the kraken!”

When the guard tilted his head in puzzlement, Ebner pointed wearily to the stables. “Release the wolves into the house!”

“Sir,” the guard said, his expression stony once more.

The military transport started up, with the ever-present Bartolo Cassa at its wheel.

“We will be in Vorkuta in three hours, Ebner,” Galina said.

Vorkuta
, he mused.
Where “warm” is twenty degrees below zero.

T
he last thing Wade remembered before he didn't remember anything else was Becca's face, staring into his and screaming. He was on the floor under her seat, and she was screaming at him. Then nothing for a while; then he woke, still under Becca's seat, but she wasn't in it. Pain shot up his legs and into his sides when he tried to stand.

“So . . . we made it . . . ,” he said.

“No. We didn't,” Darrell grunted from somewhere. “We all died.”

Terence Ackroyd had piloted the jet like a bird among the trees, so incredibly precisely that everyone was only banged up, which was still like having been tumbled in a dryer for thirty minutes, but was better than being dead, which he was pretty sure he wasn't, despite Darrell's claim.

But that could change,
he told himself.

Marceline Dufort jerked open the cabin door, and the snowstorm flew inside. Bracing themselves, they climbed out into the blinding snow and found themselves in a narrow clearing about fifty feet from a mainly straight road that might have made a better landing strip but had been hidden from above by the trees. Wade and Darrell staggered to their father and the others.

“I'm going to get the radio going,” Terence was saying. “I think I can fly us out of here, but NetJet will send a rescue chopper anyway—after the storm passes.”

“Wait, no,” said Marceline, consulting the aerial photograph. “Look here.” The top of the image showed the vague shape of the structure that was Greywolf, but the detective drew her finger to a road winding through the woods at the very lowest edge of the image. “I think this is where we are.”

Wade's father stretched, his face grimacing with pain, as he scanned the trees around them. “How far do you think we are from the castle?”

“At the edge of the property, but not too far,” Marceline said. “Perhaps ten kilometers. And see here. Only one kilometer from Greywolf's landing strip.”

“I agree,” said her partner, checking a compass and then pointing up into the deeper woods. “The land rises steeply from here on, the forest is thick, and there are ledges and chasms all over the property, many of them man-made to deter intruders.”

“What are you saying?” asked Wade.

Paul grunted. “That it will be a hard climb, but I agree that we not wait for a chopper. We lost nearly an hour because of the storm. It is already almost three in the afternoon. If we climb to Greywolf steadily, we can make it by nightfall, with time to spare before the deadline.
If
we don't run into the Brotherhood, a big
if
.”

“Are kilometers more or less than miles?” Lily asked.

“Shorter,” said Becca.

“Doesn't matter,” said Darrell. “We're going on.”

“All right then,” said Terence. He pulled a handgun from inside the plane and shoved it into his coat pocket.

Wade's father nodded. “Get your gear, everyone. We have a deadline. But first, listen.” He brushed snow from his hair and pulled up his hood. “Darrell, you and the investigators know this, but the others don't. During World War Two, Stalin visited Greywolf many times. All the roads on the property were monitored then. Sometime in the sixties electronic surveillance was installed and probably updated a few times since then. We're entering the enemy camp here. We've never done anything like this before.”

“Let's hope we're far enough away that our landing didn't alert the Order,” said Terence. “But I guess we have to assume our jet won't be a secret too long.”

“Indeed,” Marceline added, checking her automatic. “For now we have the element of surprise, as long as we stay smart and keep off the roads. We don't want a firefight, but we must be ready for one.”

Darrell swiped on his cell. “Less than nine hours to midnight.”

And that was it. They began marching upward in single file, Roald and the children in a group, Terence and the investigators in the lead, armed and fanning out to cover more territory.

Darrell kept his head low. The wind and the blinding snow and ice that had forced the jet down were mercifully less on the ground. The heavy snow seemed to collect in the dense branches above them more than fall on them, but the upward trek was slow and tiring. A half hour—that seemed twice that, Darrell thought—passed without any sense of progress.

Other than the rough track weaving through the trees, the first sign of Greywolf being a “property” and not just wilderness was a head-high stone wall that snaked through a portion of the forest. It looked old. Maybe sixteenth century. Terence and the two detectives studied both directions.