CHAPTER TWELVE

Havana, Cuba

July 12

4:17 a.m.

The Red Brotherhood will follow you, then kill you.

Darrell crouched at the front of the motorboat, remembering Papa Dean’s parting words. The orange haze over Havana’s harbor had been visible for two hours already, and they were finally close enough to distinguish individual lights. He scanned the shore west of the city. Altogether, it had been some six hours since they’d rowed the small boat away from Key West and got out far enough to start up the motor.

Follow, then kill.

Papa Dean hadn’t bothered to wave good-bye. That would have blown his cover as the grumpiest Guardian still alive.

Now Darrell felt the same. Grumpy, angry with himself, sullen. The silence between him and Lily was eating him alive, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. She had risked their lives. But they all had, at one time or another. He wanted to say, “Lily, okay, we’re fine,” but something stopped him. Maybe it was because the two of them were alone, not knowing if Wade and Becca were safe, to say nothing of his mother and stepfather, and he felt he and Lily had to be tougher than tough, had to step up, had to be Novizhny, and they couldn’t make mistakes anymore.

Finally, though, over everything else, she was Lily, and they were alone together, and they were all they had.

For the hundredth time, he opened his mouth to say something when suddenly, she did.

“I’m so sorry, Darrell. It was dumb. I knew it. Darrell?”

He forced himself to speak. “We have to find Cat Cove that Papa Dean showed us on his chart.”

“Dog Cove. Listen, Darrell . . .”

“There can’t be much fuel left,” he said. “It’ll have to be soon. Over there somewhere.”

“Darrell—”

“Lily!” He turned to her, reaching out and wanting to shake her but not doing it. “My gosh, Lily, we’re good. We’re okay. I probably would have done the same thing and called my mom.” Then the floodgates opened. “I have done the same thing. Wade did it, too, in Africa, remember? Or Budapest. Or London. Or somewhere. I don’t know. Anyway, the point is, we love our people. We love our people, and we need to talk to them. So, yeah, I get it. You saw a phone, and you called your people. I get it. We’re good.”

She jammed her eyes shut, and she was shaking.

“No, really, we’re good,” he repeated. “We really are. Lily . . .” He breathed out, feeling so much relief after being so quiet for days. “And . . . we’re here. Look. The cove. It looks way more like a dog than a cat. . . .”

Lily nodded quickly, ran the back of her hand across her wet eyes, then cut the engine. It sputtered for a few moments, then died in a cloud of burned oil.

They drifted for a while in the quiet and let the tide pull them in. Dawn would be on them in less than an hour. The warm sea lapped at the hull. Finally, Darrell felt the lump in his throat break up. They were talking again. Good. He swallowed.

“We need to get ashore now,” he said.

“How do we skittle it?” Lily asked.

He laughed. “Scuttle it. Maybe just by tipping it over? But it can’t be in shallow water, which is another reason to do it here and swim in. Daylight will come soon.”

The sky was already blueing in the east, and the contrast of the orange city lights of Havana to the darkness of the sky was fading. He could make out clusters of buildings and individual streetlights now. There were no real skyscrapers, but the shoreline was jammed with small structures, and palm trees, and areas of thick greenery. A bank of dark clouds lay hovering in the west.

Lily hitched her thick, waterproof backpack over her shoulders and slipped into the water. So did he. They floated next to each other and tried to tip water inside the boat, but the vessel proved too buoyant, and it was next to impossible. Darrell finally climbed back in and poked the not-paddle end of an oar into the bottom. It was surprisingly loud, but after a few tries, he broke through the hull. Water spouted up, and the boat filled quickly.

Darrell sank with it and pushed off as the boat slid under the waves. It vanished with a few sad bubbles.

Lily paddled with her arms and legs to keep afloat. “Good-bye, escape route.”

“One thing at a time. First we find Señora Vélaz. Then we find Corvus.”

“All while staying alive.”

“That’s the plan.”

The cove was protected against the westerly morning breezes, the narrow beach deserted, and the water deep and blue and calm. Swimming with a buoyant backpack turned out to be easier than Darrell expected, though he guessed it might be the last thing that was. Lily was naturally faster than he was and hit the sand first. Once out of the water, they changed into the clothes kept dry in their packs. They checked their new false passports and the Cuban pesos Dean had grudgingly given Lily. Between them both, they’d memorized the address of the hundred-year-old Guardian and the route of streets to get there. Stashing their wet things under some rocks, they hid among the crags of the cove until evening, eating sandwiches they had packed. It had rained off and on all day. When it was dark, they threaded their way up from the water to the road.

Darrell would have preferred commando outfits for them, combat boots and all. But they were dressed in shorts and T-shirts like tourists in midsummer.

“In case we’re stopped,” Lily said, “we’re a couple of cool middle-schoolers on an American tour of the island.”

“No, Canadian. And we’re hurrying to catch up with our teacher,” he added.

“Our Canadian teacher. Who’s out shopping.”

“For souvenirs.”

She grinned. “Perfect.”

It was good to be friends again, Darrell thought. Novizhny, with a job to do, yes, but mostly friends.

After a slow hour of cautious zigzagging, during which they saw many cars cruising the streets, including old American models from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as modern black cars and military transports, with no one stopping them or asking them anything, they approached a neighborhood of marine warehouses and garages that reminded Lily a little of Nice’s waterfront but that were far less rich. It was Havana’s old harbor.

“Clouds are coming in,” she said. “It looks like more rain on the way.”

“There’s also that bad news,” said Darrell. “Papa Dean was right. The Brotherhood’s here.”

Sharp white spotlights glinted off the gray and white hulls of a fleet of Russian tankers and military vessels in the harbor. Two large cruise ships and a freighter were docked, as well. All had Russian names.

Принимая Крым

Наша Украина

Король Владимир Второй

“Becca could tell us what those names mean,” Lily said. “Probably nothing good. Man, I wish we were all here.”

“Yeah. Me, too. But . . . come on.”

Their memorized directions took them into a series of narrow backstreets and alleyways of flat-fronted stucco buildings punctuated every now and then by an elaborate church or an open plaza. They finally entered a passage wide enough for only a single person, traveled to the end, and came out into a small piazza. It was the address of Señora Vélaz, the hundred-year-old Guardian. But it was neither a Ponce de León museum nor a house.

It was a movie theater, a shabby building with a tilted marquee held up by crisscrossed planks. Most of the bulbs on the sign were out, but the front doors were open.

“I guess we go in?” Lily said.

Darrell scanned the piazza around them as the first hot raindrops fell into the street. There might have been a car hovering in the shadows. He tried to peer into the dark, but the rain was already coming steadily, and if there was a car, it seemed to be gone now.

“I guess we do,” he said.

They went inside.

Other than the sullen counter attendant, who mostly just pointed to the price card and tapped the counter, the lobby was empty.

The film being shown was naturally in Spanish and blared with yelling and explosions. Lily couldn’t see the screen from the lobby, so she didn’t pay attention. She knew she wouldn’t understand what the characters were saying anyway, despite how many Spanish words she’d learned from Becca in Tampa. When Becca’s face appeared in her mind, she felt empty and suddenly sad, but that wasn’t helping.

Just be here now, she thought. Focus on the task. So many people have died for the relics. We’re the Novizhny. We owe it to them to find the relics.

“Excuse me,” Lily said. “Señora Vélaz esta . . . here?”

The attendant raised her head. “Señorita Vélaz? Sí. Arriba, en la sala.”

Darrell said, “Upstairs?” pointing to the ceiling.

“Sí. La cabina de proyección,” the girl said, which likely meant “projection room.”

“Gracias,” Lily said.

“Muchas,” Darrell added.

The staircase creaked under their footsteps. The landing at the top opened into a hallway as dark and narrow as the stairs. They had to walk in single file. Lily took the lead. There were muffled gasps, shouts, laughter coming from the crammed mezzanine behind the wall on their left. She still didn’t care about the film.

The door to the booth was open a crack. A young woman, a little older than they were, sat bent over a desk, reading a book under a low lamp as an antique film projector churned noisily on a nearby table.

Darrell stepped into the small room “Uh, excusez-moi. We’re looking for Señora Vélaz—”

The girl flicked a gun up at them from behind her book.

“Hands high or you die like dogs,” she said, in nearly perfect movie English.

Her eyes were pools of black water, her face a creamy brown marked with a thin white scar that ran down her right cheek from the outside edge of her eye to her chin. To Darrell, it seemed to divide her features like a face in a modern painting. The pistol, an old one, was steady. She held it low and pointed it directly at his forehead.

“Please,” he said. “Don’t. We’ve come a long way.”

“To kill me?” she asked. “Who are you?”

Lily edged out from behind him. “We were told to find Señora Vélaz.” Her words were clear and firm.

The girl glared back and forth from Lily to him, the pistol still aimed at his head.

“Why?”

Lily took another half step. “Have you ever heard the word Novizhny?”

At that, the girl’s large black eyes narrowed suddenly, then grew. She lowered the gun, then burst up from the desk. “Novizhny! Yes! Yes! You have come to save the world!”