CHAPTER SIX

Gran Sasso, Italy

June 15

Midnight

Paul Ferrere climbed crabwise among the rocks, trying once more to discover a way into the nuclear facility buried below. The picturesque crags hid an overwhelming force of Teutonic knights, Italian police investigators, and well-armed nuclear inspectors, all in one another’s pockets, working cozily together under the ruse of a nuclear accident.

It was no accident.

Galina Krause had kidnapped Roald Kaplan, Terence Ackroyd, and a dozen other nuclear physicists and engineers, and very likely forced them to accomplish a task he couldn’t begin to wrap his head around: rebuilding a five-hundred-year-old time machine that he’d seen trucks deliver to the mountain’s entrance days ago.

“No,” he mused. “Leave astrophysics to the experts. I need to get inside this hill—”

A figure darted among the rocks below, and he crouched instinctively to his knees. It wasn’t a guard, but someone moving as he himself moved, snakelike, solo. He kept low for a minute or so, then shifted, when a barrel of cold steel touched the back of his neck.

“Turn around slowly.”

A woman’s voice.

He turned. She was tall, in her thirties, muscular, dressed in a dark leather jumpsuit. Her hair, what he could see of it, was wrapped in a black scarf.

He tried to smile. “You are . . .”

She did not smile. “My name is Mistral.”

The name. He’d heard it. “The thief from Monte Carlo? The one after the da Vinci spectacles? Sara Kaplan told me about you. You’re here because of Ugo Drangheta, the billionaire.”

She lowered her pistol. “He is inside this mountain.”

“So are friends of mine,” Paul said.

She looked down at the twinkling lights surrounding the entrance to the facility, barely visible below. “Ugo and I were following the time machine to this place when he was taken.”

“Galina Krause has kidnapped a dozen or more nuclear scientists. I believe they’re trying to reassemble the machine. She ordered their capture.”

“If she has killed Ugo, I will avenge his murder. As soon as I locate a way in.”

Paul Ferrere had always been wary of allies. They have a habit of turning on you when you least expect it. But he’d been at this for days, and doing it by himself wasn’t working. “Then we two are on the same side.” He put out his hand. “For the duration?”

She nodded once, took his hand, and shook it. “For the duration.”

He pointed toward a ridge some yards away. “I saw mist rising before. There could be a vent.”

“Let’s have a look.”

Paul watched his new partner, the vengeful thief Mistral, slither away like a serpent among the high grass. He followed close behind.

In the CERN laboratory a mile beneath the mountain, Roald Kaplan stared at the device rising in front of him. Emerging from a mess of bars and struts and pipes and beams was a spherical creation of unutterable beauty and obvious power.

The Eternity Machine of Nicolaus Copernicus.

It was an ancient astrolabe able to voyage the length and breadth of time itself. Twelve unique niches were spaced evenly around the large wheel that gave it its shape. In each niche would stand a strange device—a relic—vital to the machine’s power and maneuverability.

Just yesterday—or was it the day before?—he had discovered that one of the slots was deeper than the others and more central to the pilot’s chair. Could the relic belonging to that slot be the main one, he wondered, somehow binding the others to it?

“These relics, Roald. I wonder if we shall ever see one.”

Roald turned. A bushy-haired scientist from Cambridge named Graham Knox stood behind him. Bespectacled and athletic, Knox bit his lip as his eyes ranged along the great wheel. “They are the navigational devices. At least I suppose they are.”

“Possibly,” said Roald warily.

After many days of imprisonment under the mountain, Roald had begun to suspect that some of his “colleagues” had surrendered to Galina by informing on the others. He’d heard notions that in another part of the lab, some physicists, using their discoveries about the Copernicus device, were working on improving Kronos III, the Order’s most advanced time machine. Roald had learned to be cautious, saying only what he was sure Galina already knew. Knox alternately shook his head and nodded.

A few moments later they were joined by five or six others.

“My husband and children will be frantic and come for me,” said Jesminda Singh from the Strasbourg Institute. “I know they will.”

Some days before, Jesminda had showed Roald a small ringlike seal among the astrolabe parts. It was intended to be positioned near the slot for the central relic, she had said, but out of all the parts, it alone appeared to have no actual function. The ring was impressed with the tiny figure of Apollo, the Greek god, strumming a lyre. The icon, Roald knew from his reading, was the personal seal of Nicolaus Copernicus.

But what did it mean, that an object with no purpose was part of the astrolabe?

Finally, it was knowing that Jesminda hadn’t shared her discovery with anyone else that cemented his trust in her. So the two of them had agreed to work like Penelope, the heroine of the Odyssey. One helped to build the astrolabe, while the other unbuilt it wherever possible. In that way, they hoped to keep from finishing the machine before the conditions for their escape seemed right.

“They will all come. Our families, the authorities. NATO.” This was Hiro Shimugachi from Tokyo. “They must be planning to extract us. They simply must be. I know it.” His eyes were ringed with sleeplessness and fatigue.

Knox snorted under his breath. “You’ve seen the hazmat teams. This Galina Krause is using the director Petrescu to tell the world there is a spill of some kind. ‘Keep away! We will take care of it!’ Nonsense. Even if there is a spill, no one’s coming for us. The world is biting its nails, perhaps, but not coming any closer.”

“My sons will come,” said an engineer from China. “They’ll do anything to find me.”

Knox looked around and walked away. “Either way, he’ll be here soon. That gray-faced zombie, the colonel. Better get back to work.”

The colonel.

Roald’s chest burned with anger at the mention of him. The colonel was Radip Surawaluk, Darrell’s biological father. In some insane way—Roald had no conceivable clue how—the colonel had joined up with Galina. He’d become one of her pawns, but a pawn with power. He led an army of several thousand paramilitary assassins.

Most of the scientists got back to the business of fitting the final parts together, but Jesminda Singh stayed. “Roald,” she whispered. “I heard something. Project Aurora. Does this mean anything to you?”

“Project Aurora?” He rolled the words over in his mind. “I wonder . . .”

During their imprisonment and forced rebuilding of the machine, Roald had studied it closely. The mystery of the hole in the sky had always troubled him, but when he examined the positioning of the relics in the machine’s frame, he could see that the energy produced by the relics might very well be what made the timehole possible.

Why Galina had a deadline for her launching of it was unclear, however.

And why she had assembled a dozen powerful nuclear devices in a sunken tanker off the coast of Cyprus was still a dark mystery, though a mystery he had to solve soon.

Her deadline was coming fast.

“The devil enters,” Jesminda whispered.

The ghostly figure of Galina appeared, surrounded by several security guards. Like every other time he’d seen her, she wore black from neck to boots. Not quite twenty years old, with long raven hair and skin as pale as ivory, she strode to the astrolabe. Everyone stood back like serfs in the presence of their empress while she examined the machine. Then Roald saw in her hands what he had never expected to see.

Crux. The amber cross Becca and the others had discovered in London. So! The Order had invaded the vaults of the British Museum. Seeing it here meant Galina had three relics so far.

“Kaplan, keeping working!”

The gruff voice of the colonel.

How this man, whom Roald had met but once after he and Sara were married, had become barely human in the last five years, and a stone-faced, emotionless thing, was beyond him. Another dark riddle of the Copernicus mystery.

Roald bowed slightly. With trembling fingers he inserted a bolt through a beam and hand tightened the nut on the other side. He nodded to Jesminda, who dutifully used a sixteenth-century wrench to secure the connection.

One more section of the astrolabe was complete.

How long before it would be ready to fly into time?

Out of the corner of his eye, he now saw the wily assassin, Markus Wolff, stroll casually over to Galina. He lifted his hand out of a leather satchel over his shoulder, and Roald was stunned a second time.

Wolff held a piece of paper ripped along one side as if torn from a book. Roald recognized the size and color of the paper. It was from Copernicus’s secret diary!

“I was able to retrieve only one of the pages,” Wolff said.

Sara! Kids! What happened? Are you all right?

Galina took the page and pressed it to her chest.

Roald felt a sharp strike on his arm. The colonel’s eyes burned him. “Keep working!”

Leaving the floor of the lab, Galina climbed the stairs to the gallery office once occupied by the facility’s director. Her arms and legs seemed made of heavy metal, as heavy as the ancient gold of the astrolabe itself. She felt on fire. She froze.

She tapped a button on a console, and a wall of bulletproof blinds sealed her away from the floor below. The diary page felt cold in her fingers. Its ink was flecked with silver and gold and was deeply figured and devilishly encoded.

For the next hour she pored over the letters and numbers, finally urging them to give up a riddle.

The talons are tamed by the daughter of Rome

“The talons are tamed by the daughter of Rome,” she said aloud. “Daughter of Rome? In the sixteenth century, Rome was ruled by . . . the pope.” She smiled to herself. “And what pope of Copernicus’s time had a daughter? Alexander VI. The pope from the infamous Borgia family.”

Remembering the name of the pope’s daughter, Galina tapped out a secure message to the archivists at the Copernicus Room in Madrid.

Everything on Lucrezia Borgia. Immediately.

She closed her eyes, and once again, the images came.

Bronze-faced men with harps. A writhing serpent. Tangled blossoms. A blue griffin.

“I need Ebner now,” she said to herself. “He must be released.” Opening her eyes, Galina searched her phone for a long-unused number on her contact list.

Nineteen hundred kilometers north-northwest of Gran Sasso, in Room 411 of Ward 4F—the Adult Critical Care Unit (“Two-only visitors allowed at a patient’s bedside at any one time”)—of the Royal London Hospital, lay a man mummified in bandages.

A Medusa’s head of wires and tubes tied him to an array of blinking, buzzing, beeping machines. As he breathed in, out, in, out, his vitals monitor pulsed a slow rhythm. He was the once-dead but surprisingly revived working-class assassin known as Archie Doyle.

In Archie’s small flower-decorated room stood not a phalanx of armed knights of the Teutonic Order, but a plump woman in a floral housecoat and a small child—the “two-only visitors” specified.

They were Sheila Doyle and her four-year-old son, Paulie.

Sheila looked on the sad, bandaged figure of her husband, daubing her nose with a tissue she took from the sleeve of her housecoat. It had been months since Archie was shot by that brute Felix Ross. Months since Archie’s “death” on the street outside the church of Saint Andrew Undershaft was reported in the newspapers. Weeks since his revival by a couple of semi-medical blokes assigned to Group 6 of the East London section of the Teutonic Order.

“Mum?” said Paulie, tugging the hem of her dress.

She patted the boy on his head. “Yes, dear?”

“Is Daddy a vegetable?”

“No more than he was before, dear,” she replied.

Paulie was quiet awhile, then he tugged her hem again. “Mum?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Will he wake up?”

“When that phone rings, I expect he will,” she said.

Paulie stared at the lifeless phone on the stand next to Archie’s bed. “Ring, please. It’s me dad in there.”

Forty seconds later, the phone rang.