Tony Abbott - The Forbidden Stone

Roald dried his eyes and dialed Sara’s number. “Sara, hi. I know you’re in the air now, but call me when you get to your first stop—”

“Atlanta in two hours,” Lily reported. “But there’s a storm.”

He nodded. “Everybody’s fine, but a dear old professor of mine has … passed away. Heinrich Vogel. You’ve heard me talk about him. His funeral is tomorrow. In Germany. Of course, I’m not going to leave the kids for a second. Lily and her friend Becca are here, too. I feel I should go but, well, call me from Atlanta when you land, and we’ll sort this out.” He hung up.

“Does anybody seriously think his death has anything to do with the email and the code?” Becca asked. “It’s kind of too James Bond to be real.”

“Bond is real,” Darrell whispered.

“I wish his housekeeper had told us more,” said Wade. “Why didn’t she tell us?”

“And these things in the news?” Lily said. “They can’t really be connected to Uncle Henry.”

“I can’t imagine how they could be,” Roald said. “They sound like accidents, tragic, but unrelated.” He flipped page after page of his notebook. “The Magister’s Legacy. Magister. That sounds slightly familiar.” He started pacing as he read. “Heinrich, what are you trying to tell us …?”

Wade knew his father always paced when he was thinking through math problems. This was something else entirely.

“Bring us with you,” Becca said suddenly.

Roald turned. “What?”

Lily jumped up. “Yes! Six of us were going to fly to France, but we got airline credit instead. I bet that’s more than enough for a bunch of tickets to Germany. We have our passports already. We should go, Uncle Roald!”

Dr. Kaplan laughed nervously. “No, no, no.”

The boys looked at each other. “Dad, we all got passports for Mexico last year,” said Darrell. “And you could use some backup. Europe is all about spies, isn’t it?”

“Maybe not so much anymore,” said Becca.

“No, there are tons of movies,” Darrell said. “They call it the—”

“The Cold War,” Becca said. “That’s over now.”

“Or maybe that’s what they want you to believe—”

“Kids, really? Spies? Backup? Heinrich was an old man. It might just have been his time to go. What do you think this is all about?”

Wade didn’t know what it was all about.

He didn’t know anything except that Uncle Henry died right after they got a coded message, and his father wanted to go to Berlin for the funeral of his old friend. Of their old friend. Uncle Henry was connected from the beginning with his own deep love of astronomy.

“Maybe we can fly there, Dad,” he said quietly. “After Atlanta, Sara’s going to be unreachable for a week anyway. Uncle Henry told us to find some relics. Well, Europe has tons of relics. Dad, really. I think we should go.”

“Wade …” His father trailed off, his eyes turning from his notebook to the email message on the table and the coded star chart spread out next to it. “Maybe I can ask my assistant, Joan, to stay for a couple of days to watch over you. You remember her. She’s young and fun. Well, youngish. And she has a poodle now—”

Darrell snorted. “Dad, remember last vacation? She ran screaming out of here after only two hours with Wade and me. I think we’d better go with you.”

“No one’s going to Europe!” Dr. Kaplan said, wiping his eyes again. “We can’t.”

Lily sidled over and patted his arm with her tablet. “But we could, Uncle Roald. He was your teacher, your friend, and Wade’s uncle. We can so do it. According to the airline website the next flight is completely doable. We can totally make it. I’ve got the credit codes for tickets right here. I just checked, my dad is fine with it. I think we should all pack our chargers and go.”

“You already checked with your dad?” Roald said.

Seeing his father’s expression beginning to soften, Wade wanted to hug Lily. If Becca had said what Lily just had, he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself.

His father stood in the center of the room, his eyes shut, his head tilted up.

Wade knew the look. His father needed quiet while he worked out the last few elements of a problem. He was brilliant that way. On the other hand, if his father thought like that for too long, he might anticipate the hundreds of reasons not to fly to Berlin with a bunch of kids and remember someone to stay with them while he went alone.

“Dad, I want to go,” Wade said.

“Me, too,” said Darrell. “I think we should. All of us. As a family.”

“Boys …” Roald started, then wrapped his arms around them. “All right. Yes. Yes.”

“I’ll book the flights now and call a cab,” said Lily. “Better pack. Only a little over two hours to takeoff!”

Nowotna, Poland

March 9th

10:23 p.m.

Frost was forming over the rutted fields of northern Poland.

Three giant klieg lights cast a brilliant glow on a stone-faced man in a long leather overcoat, making his trim white hair look like the peak of a snow-capped mountain. He stared down at the dirt being excavated shovelful by shovelful from a pit.

“Fifteen days and nothing,” said a voice over his shoulder. “The men are exhausted. We should try another location.”

The white-haired man half turned, keeping his eyes riveted on the work below. “She told Dr. von Braun the exact spot. She knows these things. Would you like to tell her that we gave up?”

The second man shrank back. “No. No. I’m simply saying that perhaps the coordinates are wrong and there’s been a mistake.”

“Fraulein Krause makes no mistakes.”

“And yet fifteen days and still no—”

Clink.

The white-haired man felt his heart stop. The shovelers froze in their places, turning their eyes up to him. He clambered down into the pit, the workers helping him from ledge to ledge. He reached the bottom and shooed them away. Holding a flashlight in one hand, he took a soft brush from the pocket of his coat and cleared away centuries of dirt from the object lodged in the ground. First he revealed a corner. The object was rectangular. This quickened his heart. She had told him: a bronze casket the size of a Gucci shoebox . As a man of fine taste, he knew exactly the dimensions she meant. More brushing, more clawing gently at the centuries of caked dirt, and a bronze box revealed itself.

Carefully, he extracted it from the ground.

“Light! More light!”

Two work lights were refocused on the box. With the handle of the brush he cleared the dirt from the rim of the chest’s lid. Setting it on level ground, he undid the clasp that held the lid to the body of the chest. He drew in a long breath to calm his thudding heart and lifted the lid for the first time in five centuries.

Inside, amid the tattered remains of its velvet lining, was a leather strap, a sort of belt, half-rotted away as if it were the skin of a corpse. On it, however, and catching the spotlights’ beams as exquisitely as it would have on the day it was last seen, sat a large ruby in the shape of a sea creature with a dozen coiling arms.

A kraken.

The white-haired man turned. “You were saying?”

At the same moment a thousand miles south, the same starry sky looked down over the streets of an Italian city packing up for the night. Bologna on a warm March evening was heaven, mused a middle-aged woman at a café table. The street was deserted, save for the shopkeepers and café owners sweeping, turning their chairs over, and lowering their louvered security gates in preparation for tomorrow morning’s rush. She sat on a wicker chair, sipped the last drop of espresso from her cup, then set it down in its saucer and picked up her cell phone.