The Forbidden Stone

Wade turned to his father. “Dad?”

Dr. Kaplan appeared to freeze for a moment. Then he slipped off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, the phone crackling on the table. “Excuse me, I don’t think we heard you. Are you saying … Heinrich …”

“Ded. Ja. Ja.” The voice rasped from the other end. “Ze fun … fun …”

Becca silently mouthed the word, “Fun.”

“Fun … fun … eral. Tomorrow mornink. Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof. Here. Berlin. Elfen glock.”

“Eleven o’clock?” said Lily.

“Ja, ja.”

“Wait. This can’t be right,” said Wade. His chest was burning. “I mean how? How did he die? When?”

The voice on the other end went in and out.

“Frau Munch,” his father said, leaning over the phone. “Frau—”

“Hurry. You vill mizz ze boorial!”

The line clicked. She had hung up.

The children stared at one another, listening to the dial tone until the phone blinked and the connection was severed. Lily set it back in its cradle.

Wade felt suddenly dizzy, as if freezing water streamed down his back, while the inside of his chest was on fire. “Dad?” He lowered himself onto the sofa and felt Becca’s hand touch his shoulder.

Uncle Henry … dead?

Dr. Kaplan slumped down next to him, nearly buried by the cushions. “Wade, I’m so sorry. This is … unbelievable. How could Heinrich be dead?” He looked at the wall clock. “I can’t go … not with you here and Sara flying off to South America.” He seemed as deflated as the pillows around him.

Darrell picked up the translated email and read over its few words. “I mean, I didn’t know Uncle Henry, but something about this isn’t right. He sends you a strange email, a coded message, and now he’s dead? This is way too suspicious.”

Wade stood up from the sofa. Becca’s hand slipped away. “Dad, what do you think we should do?”

His father pressed his fingers to his temples and rubbed them in slow circles. “Kids, I don’t know yet. It’s too sudden. But I’m fairly sure there’s no time to do anything. Certainly not while your mom’s away.” He took in a deep breath. His face was drawn and gray.

“At least call her,” said Darrell. “She needs to know.”

Roald glanced again at his watch as if trying to find more information there than it could deliver. “She’ll be in the air now, but I’ll leave a message. Lily, could you look up the flight to La Paz, Bolivia, and see when her first layover is?”

“Sure thing.” She tapped and swiped her screen.

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.

“Answer this time,” she said aloud. She pressed the name for the fourth time in the last ten minutes. Holding the phone to her ear, she heard the same message, brief and clipped. After the tone she said, “Call me, Henry. Please. It’s about Silvio. I have discovered something about his accident last year. Something he intended me to find after all this time. I need to speak with you as soon as you get this.” She ended the call.

Across the piazza, chimes sounded. She glanced up at the six-hundred-year-old tower, then at her phone. The clock, a nineteenth-century addition, wasn’t more than a minute off.

Cars were fewer now. She had to get going to her office, a short stroll from the café. Her lecture on Michelangelo’s poems was early the next morning, and there were final notes to assemble. Her husband, Silvio, a longtime reader of the artist’s poetry, would have loved to be there to listen. Now, she realized, there was only one reason he wouldn’t be.

As she reached into her bag for several coins, a black car rumbled up the cobbled street toward the café. It drove across the open square and shrieked to a halt, skidding on the stones. The rear door flew open, and a man wearing an oily black suit leaped out.

Instinctively, the woman screamed. “Aiuto! Help!”

From inside the café came the sound of a broom dropping, the quick scrape of chairs. “Que? Signora Mercanti?”

The oily man outside wrapped one arm around the woman’s face, the other around her waist. She kicked furiously with her heels, knocking over the small table. The man dragged her into the backseat. The car roared away.

When the café owner rushed out three seconds later, all he saw was an overturned table and a small saucer spinning on the pavement.

Becca Moore nearly screamed, “I’m going to Europe!” when she caught herself and slapped her hands over her mouth. “I’m so sorry!”

“For what?” asked Wade, looking up from his backpack.

The house was in a minor uproar as Wade, Darrell, and Dr. Kaplan rushed from room to room, grabbing clothes, stuffing duffel bags.

“I almost said something dumb,” she said. “Go pack.”

Becca knew her face was red. She always blushed when she made social mistakes. And even when she didn’t. Never mind that she had wanted to go to Europe since forever. Or that before they came to this country her grandparents were their own melting pot of French, German, Scottish, and Spanish. Or that Europe was home to all the cultures she adored. Or that it was the place they actually kept Paris and Rome and Madrid, not to mention Berlin.

She had never really believed that she would get to Europe with Lily, and when the trip was canceled she knew she had jinxed it by not believing it would happen in the first place.

Lily! She sat on the couch next to her, sorting through her own luggage. What a kind of angel to invite me in the first place. Me! The total opposite of her cool, together, plugged-in self!

Yet now, mere hours after that disappointment, here they were, going again! Having met Roald Kaplan through Lily’s dad, her parents were fine with the change in plans. There was nothing stopping her.

But how thoughtless she nearly was!

A man had died. Dr. Kaplan’s old teacher. Wade’s sort-of uncle.

“It’s okay,” said Wade, pausing in his packing to reach his hand toward her arm—which Lily glared at—but not quite making contact. Becca had noticed that about him. He was … reachy. But from a distance. She smiled at him, but he’d already looked away.

I have a goofy smile anyway. Which is why I don’t use it a lot.

“He’s mostly okay,” Lily whispered when Wade left the room. “But, you know, he’s all mathy and stuff like his dad.” She wiggled her fingers in the air over her head then leaned closer. “Darrell, kind of a mystery, no? Bottom line, you and me will have to stick together to stay sane.”

Becca laughed. “Deal.”

Dr. Kaplan came in to retrieve his notebook. When he saw the girls, he breathed out a kind of sad laugh. “Sorry, not the best reason to go to Europe. You should stuff what you need into a carry-on. We need to travel light. Two days max, and we’re home.”

“Already done, Uncle Roald,” Lily said with a smile.

For Becca it was easy. Three tops, extra jeans, sweater, assorted junk, comb, small bag, book. While everyone ran around gathering last-minute things and setting timers and locking and relocking doors, she watched Wade carefully pack the decoded email and the star chart in the leather folder and slip it into his backpack as calmly as if he were a kind of planet and they were all moons orbiting him.

Beep!

Lily gasped. “Taxi! Here we go!”

The first flight they’d been able to book from Austin-Bergstrom International was United Airways Flight 766, leaving at 12:15 p.m. After a layover in Washington, D.C., to change planes, they were due to arrive in Berlin just before eleven o’clock the next morning, meaning they’d have to rush to be at the Alter St.-Matthäus cemetery on time.

The airport was a madhouse. Becca knew it would be and steeled herself against the noise as best she could. Anywhere crowded made her feel a little crazy and a little edgy. So many people, so many eyes. From the moment they entered the terminal, she didn’t think, she didn’t listen, she just followed Lily through ticketing and security.

“I’ve done this a few times,” Lily whispered to her as they hustled along. “You see all kinds of people in airports. The best advice I can give? Don’t make eye contact.”

“I normally don’t,” Becca said. “Anywhere.”

Lily laughed. “I noticed. It’s fine. I’ll tell you when it’s okay to look up. We’ll be at the gate soon. You can relax. Gawk at Wade or something.”

“Gawk?”

“Kidding!” Lily laughed halfway down the next hallway.

Wade? Was it obvious? NO EYE CONTACT!

Minutes later they arrived at the gate. Keeping her head low, Becca sat next to Lily, immediately opened her backpack, and slipped out her book. It was a big one, guaranteed to take days. Reading, if it was possible at all, was the best for turning off the noise.

She opened to page 190. Chapter XXXII.

Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities.

Odd line to be reading just now, she thought.

“A little light reading?” said Darrell, from the seat next to her in the waiting area. “Is that a history of the universe or something?”