LITMIR.BIZ

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“All right, so Sara is telling us to be cautious. Terence, you said you found two things.”

      “That’s my cue,” Julian said, leaving his chair by the window after one last look at the street and setting his laptop on the coffee table. “Three hours ago we received a heavily encrypted video from our investigators in Brazil. I’ve just been decoding it and cleaning up some of the images.” He adjusted the screen, and hit the Play button.

      A fuzzy nighttime video image appeared, showing an old station wagon creeping slowly along what appeared to be a utility road behind a large building. There were words on the side of the building: Reparação Hangar 4.

      “Hmm. An airline-repair hangar,” Terence whispered, shooting a glance at his son. “In Rio de Janeiro.”

      In the video the car stopped abruptly. Behind it, a set of double doors slid aside on the hangar, and two shapes emerged from it. The driver and a passenger climbed from the car, opened the back of the station wagon, and began to tug something out, while the two men from the hangar assisted. It was a coffin. The four men carried it like pallbearers into the hangar. A few minutes later, the two from the station wagon reappeared, closed the rear door, and drove off. The video ended.

      Darrell stared at his stepfather, not wanting to believe what he saw, but his lips formed the words. “Mom is dead?”

      “No, no,” said Terence, rising and putting his hand on Darrell’s shoulder. “What we have just witnessed means precisely the opposite. The shipment of coffins is a well-known but poorly policed method of moving people from country to country without documents. The time stamp tells us that this occurred at two twenty-seven a.m. last night, Rio time. Precisely thirty-six minutes later, two small private jets took off, both heading east on different routes, possibly to Europe or Africa. By tomorrow, we will know where each landed. If your mother is indeed in that coffin, it means that the Order is flying her somewhere, smuggling her to another country. Excuse me for being blunt, but if Sara were … dead, the Order would not go to such lengths. This video not only means that she is alive, but that precautions are being taken to ensure her safety.”

      It didn’t sound right to Darrell, but Terence’s face—and Julian’s—betrayed no sense of hiding the truth. “She’s alive? You’re sure?”

      “I quite believe so,” Terence said, nodding heartily. “It is a matter now of tracking down both jets to see where they may be moving her.”

      “We had heard something about Madrid,” said Becca from the dining room. “In San Francisco, we discovered that the Order has some servers, big computers, there, and Galina might have been there, too.”

      “Good. I’ll alert my people. This may be a solid lead.”

      “We’ve been tricked before,” said Lily.

      “I understand your disappointment in San Francisco,” Terence said. “But my network is largest in Europe. I’ve taken the liberty of arranging a meeting between Dr. Kaplan and myself and Paul Ferrere, the head of my Paris bureau, tomorrow morning, here in the city. Ferrere is ex–Foreign Legion and has a team of detectives spread across the length and breadth of Europe. We have hopes of finding Sara Kaplan before very long.”

      “Hopes?” Darrell grunted.

      Roald patted him on the arm. “Not false hopes. Never again. But we can inch ahead. Keep moving forward.”

      Darrell wanted to believe him. “Okay …”

      His stepfather took one more look at the paused video on Julian’s laptop and began to pace the living room. “Here’s the way I see it. Galina Krause may be waiting for us to lead her somewhere, and we’ll be in danger the moment we make a move. I get that, but while we’re waiting for a solid lead about Sara, we have to continue our search for the second relic, the one Vela is supposed to lead us to. Wade, you have my notebook; Becca, you have the diary. Lily, you’re the electronic brains. Darrell, you cracked some riddles in San Francisco that baffled the rest of us. Together, we will find the second relic, and we will find Sara.”

      Darrell got it. He understood. It made sense, and having Terence and his detectives on the case gave them a way forward. His lungs were gasping for a deep breath, and his heart pounded like pistons in his chest, but being scattered or afraid wouldn’t help them or his mother. He wiped his cheeks. “Okay. Good.”

      The doctor left, with a silent smile and thumbs-up to the family, and Becca rejoined them, a clean bandage on her arm.

      “All set,” she said. “It feels great. Thank you, Mr. Ackroyd … Terence.”

      “Not at all,” he said.

      “And now … Vela,” said Roald.

      Still worrying about his mother, Darrell watched his stepfather move his hand inside the breast pocket of his jacket. When he drew it out, he was holding the brilliant blue stone.

      

      “I’m Sara Kaplan,” she told herself for the thousandth time. “I’m an American. I’ve been kidnapped. I don’t know by whom, and I don’t know why. I had no time—almost no time—to alert anyone. It happened too fast.”

      She had rehearsed these words over and over so she could tell the first person she saw in as short a time as possible. But she hadn’t seen anyone at all since … since when? Since the hotel on the morning of her flight from La Paz, Bolivia, to meet Terence Ackroyd in New York City. She’d rehearsed that scene over and over, too.

       A bright tap on the hotel room door.

       “Just a minute!” she’d said.

       Thinking it a hotel employee come for her luggage, she opened the door.

       The man—broad shouldered, mean faced, in sunglasses—was on her in a flash. Hand over mouth, pushing her back into the room, kicking the door shut behind him. “Resist and your family will be killed. If they notify the authorities, you will be killed. Silence. Silence—”

      She twisted away from him, threw herself at the bathroom door, and locked herself in. “Do not panic!” she’d told herself. Look around, look around. Her suitcase was in there. She’d been packing to return home. Her phone, her pocketbook, everything was there. No time to make a call. Futile to scrawl a message on the mirror—he would smear any message to illegibility.

      Then, inspiration. The silliest thing in the world, but it made sense. Her charm bracelet. She slid it off, wrapped the skull in a stamp. It seemed idiotic, but Terence would recognize it. From his novel. The Madagascar Codex. No, The Zambian Crypt? The Zimbabwe—

       The door split open on its hinges as she stuffed the bracelet into the lining of her suitcase and pinned it closed. The face above her was flat and brutal. The eyes … the eyes were invisible behind those black-lensed sunglasses. She was screaming now at the top of her lungs, and couldn’t imagine how she could not be rescued, when there came another thought: she was not screaming at all, but falling silently to the floor of the bathroom. There was a stabbing pain in her neck, and her cries, if they ever came out at all, were choked to silence. She stared up at the ceiling as she slipped to the floor, wondering if she would crack her head on the tiles.

       Seconds passed. Minutes? Then there was the sound of a zipper coming from somewhere at her feet, and then flaps of black plastic were being folded over her face, and all the light was gone.

       Darrell’s face came to her then, in a swift sequence of his ages from birth up to when she saw him that last morning in Austin. And Wade. And Roald. What would they … what would …

      

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