The Serpent’s Curse. Tony Abbott

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ room the way he had come.

       Good. The fewer minutes this “Bartolo Cassa” is around, the better. Something about him is simply not quite right. Not … normal. And those sunglasses? Is he blind?

      Galina gazed across the sea of workers. Her voice was low. “Despite all this data gathering, Ebner, there are holes in the Magister’s biography. We require someone on the ground.”

      “On the ground? But where?” he asked, gesturing to the tiny lights glowing on one of two giant wall maps. “From Tokyo to Helsinki, to London, Cape Town, Vancouver, and everywhere in between, our agents span the entire globe—”

      “Not here. Not now,” Galina said. “Then. There. We need someone in Copernicus’s time to follow him. One hundred databases, and yet there are far too many gaps in our knowledge of the Magister. We must send someone back.”

      “Back?” Ebner felt his spine shudder. “You do not mean another experiment?”

      “One that will succeed,” she said, her eyes piercing his.

      “With a human subject?” he said. “A subject who can report to us? From the sixteenth century?” Ebner found himself shaking his head, then stopped. It was unwise to deny one so powerful. “Kronos Three is by far the most successful temporal device we have constructed, yet you see the untidy result at Somosierra. Two souls were left behind in 1808! These experiments are far too risky for a person. The possibility of simply losing a traveler is too great. You must realize, Galina, that only the”—he barely whispered the next words—“only Copernicus’s original Eternity Machine has been proved to navigate time and place accurately. The Kronos experiments are far from foolproof—”

      A desk chair squeaked, and Helmut Bern hustled over, breathing oddly. “Miss Krause!”

       Helmut Bern! Always Johnny-on-the-spot, lobbying for Galina’s blessing.

      “What is it?” Ebner snapped.

      “Two things. Forgive me, I heard you discussing the Kronos program. I believe I have just pinpointed the central error of the devices. A rather long and twisted string of programming. A difficult fix, but I can manage it. Three days, perhaps four.”

      “And the second thing?” Galina asked.

      “A bit we’ve just picked up,” Bern said, grinning like an idiot. “Copernicus sent a letter from Cádiz in May of 1517. It mentions a journey by sea. Much of it is coded, but we have begun to decrypt it.”

      “Cádiz,” Galina said, studying the other large map in the room, one illustrating the sixteenth-century world of the astronomer. “Fascinating. The Magister sails the Mediterranean. Good work, Bern. Continue with all due haste.”

      “Yes, Miss Krause!” Bern returned gleefully to his terminal.

      “There. You see, Galina,” Ebner said. “There is no need for another Kronos experiment. This information will help us track—”

      “Send her.”

      His eyes widened. “Send …”

      “You told me our recent experiments were too risky,” Galina responded. “A trial, then. A minor experiment. With someone expendable. Send Sara Kaplan.”

      “No experiment in the physics of time is minor!” he blurted, then caught himself. “Forgive me, Galina, but that woman was to have been our insurance that the Kaplans would give us the relics.”

      “All the family needs to know is that we have her,” she said. “Fear will do the rest. What actually happens to the woman is of little consequence.”

      “But, but …” Ebner was sputtering now. “Galina, even assuming we manage to get the woman to report to us, how would she do it? By what mechanism? To say nothing of the havoc she might create five centuries ago. Any tiny misstep of hers could shudder down through the years to the present. Her mere presence could cause a greater rupture—”

      “Ready Kronos Three for her journey. In the meantime, I go to Prague to persuade this courier to reveal his Italian contact. A message was delivered. I want to know to whom.” Galina turned her face away. It was a face, Ebner knew, from which all expression had just died. She was done listening. She had issued her command.

      So.

      Sara Kaplan would go on a journey.

      A journey likely to result in her death.

      Or worse.

      

      New York

      “That didn’t just happen,” Becca heard someone saying.

      She turned. It was Darrell.

      “Oh, it happened,” someone else said. That was Wade, who was looking at her when he said it. There was a hand on her arm, urging her gently out of the town car and onto the street. Even at night, New York City was noisy. And cold, bitter cold for the middle of March. But she hardly registered those things. Her head buzzed. Her eyes could barely focus enough to keep her from smashing into stuff.

      She had just attacked a man.

      Stabbed a man.

      No matter that he was a thickheaded creepy goon, or that he had mauled poor Lily and threatened to toss her off a bridge, or that three days ago his boss, Galina, had shot Becca herself with a gas-powered crossbow, giving her a wound that still hadn’t healed. Forget all that. Becca was a girl who read books, a girl with a loving family, a girl who was just a girl. The Hummer goon was maybe a goon, but he was also a human being, and she had stabbed him. With a dagger.

      She glanced at her hands. One was shaking like a leaf in a storm, but at least there was no blood on it. She would have freaked if there’d been blood on it. The other hand? Lily was holding it. Tightly. Comfortingly.

      “It’s okay, Bec,” Lily said, pulling her along the sidewalk by her unhurt arm. “You saved my life. You were awesome. Really. Thank you doesn’t begin to cover it. I was so scared and … well … I guess you knew that and that’s why you …”

      Becca’s cell phone vibrated suddenly, and she didn’t hear the rest. She pulled it out and glanced at the screen. She saw who was calling her. She let it vibrate.

      Before they had departed the San Francisco airport that morning, Uncle Roald had picked up new phones for each of them. Despite the danger of their phones being tracked, he said it was unrealistic to think that the five of them would always be in the same place at the same time. They needed to be able to communicate with one another at a moment’s notice. Though Lily had immediately cross-programmed the phones with all their numbers as well as family numbers, they all kept their batteries out most of the time. The first thing Becca herself had done was to call her mother to say she was safe. Her mother hadn’t answered. No one had answered. So she’d left a voice mail. She realized now that she must have forgotten to remove the battery, because СКАЧАТЬ