Wade and the Scorpion's Claw by Tony Abbott
“What other information?” said Becca. “We didn’t give him—”
“No, stop, no!” Lily cried, staring at her phone. “Look! Look!”
As we watched, every photo Lily had taken at the museum—of the spice box, the poem inside its lid, and everything else—evaporated from the screen, and her phone died.
“Start it again,” Dad said.
She pressed the On button over and over. Nothing. No image appeared, no icons, no home screen. The phone was wiped clean.
“The servers!” I said. “Wolff said the Teutonic Order had incredible computing power. They probably have spyware, satellites, all kinds of tech stuff trained on us and our cell phones. He knew we called the cab. He knew where we stopped for food. Now he has all of our clues. He knows everything we know!”
Dad growled under his breath. “Give me your phones,” he said agitatedly. “We can always buy more if we need them. We know where we have to go, who we have to see tonight. Our flight to New York is at ten tomorrow morning. We know that, and we don’t need phones anymore.”
“What about the investigator?” Darrell said, handing him his phone.
Dad jammed his eyes shut, then opened them. “Right. I’ll keep mine. I’ll just take out the battery until later. Lily, please.”
“But Uncle Roald, how will we . . . ,” she started, but she trailed off, giving her brand-new phone to him. “Okay. I get it.”
Dad removed the batteries from both phones, then dumped them into a trash bin. “We’re going off the grid. We’re just ourselves now, together every second from here on. Understood? No separating.”
“But what are we going to do?” said Becca. Her voice was hoarse as she looked across the water at the end of the bridge. “Feng Yi and Markus Wolff know about the houseboat. They know what we know.”
“Not both of them, not everything,” Dad said. His forehead creased like it does when he works out a math problem. “They only have everything if they’re working together, but they’re obviously not.”
“That’s right,” I said. “We showed Feng Yi the symbol. He might guess where Papa Dean’s houseboat is, but Lily erased the image of the symbol before Wolff could steal it from her phone.”
“And Wolff has Mr. Chen’s hand, but Feng Yi doesn’t,” said Becca. “Wolff said it was the last piece of the puzzle. Guys, we’re still in the game.”
The lights were going out around us. Fisherman’s Wharf was thinning out. It was near midnight now, and cold wind was blowing off the water.
“Here’s another thing,” my dad said. “I don’t know much about prosthetic limbs, but even in the little glimpse I had, I’m pretty certain the synthetic material covering the machinery of Mr. Chen’s hand included fingerprints—”
“Ooh, I know why!” said Lily. “To unlock a room or a safe, like Tricia Powell did at the museum! That’s what Leathercoat meant when he said the hand was for the last part of the relic hunt.”
“Exactly right,” my dad said. “We still don’t know where the relic is, but I don’t think they do, either. Let’s get over to Papa Dean’s place as soon as we can.”
“We can still take a cab to Sausalito, right?” said Becca, shivering in the wind. “If we use cash, no one can track us.”
“Absolutely,” said Dad, heading quickly for the street. “Let’s go.”
So it was settled.
We were off the grid and on the move.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Because the Wharf was shutting down and cabs were scarce, Lily came up with the idea of going to a nearby hotel to grab a cab from there.
“Where to?” the driver said as we climbed in.
“Sausalito,” said Becca.
“And where in Sausalito?” he asked.
“Do you have a map?” Darrell asked. “We’ll show you.”
“Yeah . . . somewhere . . .” The driver rummaged around under his seat and then passed a wad of crinkled paper over to us.
Darrell studied the map under the seat light. “Here. Liberty Dock.”
The driver flipped on his meter. “Now you’re talking.”
The cab whizzed up to the bridge, crossed it, and wound down through the streets on the far side. A few minutes later, it slowed and pulled into a mostly empty parking lot. “This is as close as I can get. You’ll have to walk the rest of the way.”
The cab left us there. It was quiet down by the water. The air was so cold my lungs hurt. The sky beyond the bridge was dead black, and the stars seemed on fire.
Where mathematics and magic become one.
Becca shivered again, and I wanted to huddle with her to get warm, but we had no time for anything like that. We saw the sign for Liberty Dock, a long pier that ran straight out from the parking lot. We hurried to it.
“My tracing will tell us which houseboat,” said Darrell. “Wade, your notebook, please.”
Following his artwork, we trotted down the stairs and slipped through an arch to a floating boardwalk that ran the length of the docks.
“I just thought of something,” said Lily. “If Papa Dean has no power in his house, the electronic fingerprints of Mr. Chen’s hand don’t work on anything there. So whatever it opens has to be somewhere else.”
“Good point,” Dad said. “If we’re right, Papa Dean knows where.” He checked his watch. “It’s nearly twelve thirty already. I hope he’s awake. . . .”
I think we all hoped he was awake. And alive.
If, as Markus Wolff told us, Feng Yi had survived his fall from the pagoda, and if he’d figured out that the symbol was actually a map, he could already have found Papa Dean and be long gone. Or he could still be there. “Dad, Feng Yi could . . .”
“I know. Be on your guard,” he said. “Everyone.”
We made our way quietly down to the end, where the dock made the right angle of the upside-down L. The dot on Darrell’s tracing showed the inside corner, but there were two houseboats there. One was marked 47; the other one had no number visible.
“It’s the red one on the left,” said Becca, studying the tracing.
Darrell squinted. “You know that because I’m such a good artist?”
“I know it because the other house has a light on, but the red one is dark. No electricity. Off the grid.”
The plank was short. We stepped down it as quietly as we could. We listened for a minute. Two minutes. No sound from inside. I knocked once on the solid wooden door. The pressure of the knock sent the door swinging open into darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Mr. Dean?” Dad whispered. “Papa Dean?”
No answer. It was cold inside the floating house. Dad didn’t want to use the flashlight app on his phone, so the room was pitch-black.
“Hold on,” Darrell whispered. He crossed the room with short, careful steps until he came to a wall. He felt around with his hands and found a table. “I thought so. A candle.” He moved his hands over on the tabletop. A second later there was a scratch, and a flame lit in his fingers. He lighted two candles.
The orange glow pushed into the room, which was messy, as if there’d been a struggle. Papers were scattered all over the place.
“Uh-oh,” said Lily. “This is not a good sign.”
“Mr. Dean?” I said. Again, no answer. The front room was small. Taking one of the candles, Becca moved into the small kitchen, then to the bedroom. She let out a soft scream. “Omigod! Get in here!”
We rushed into the bedroom. I nearly threw up.
Papa Dean lay sprawled on the wooden floor, his face twisted in pain, his cheeks and forehead bruised. He was pressing both hands hard on his stomach. Blood pooled under his fingers and on the floorboards beneath him.
Dad was immediately next to him. “Darrell, find someone to call 911.”
Darrell ran out onto the dock. I heard him banging on the door of another houseboat.
“Hold on; help will be here soon,” my dad said softly.
The grizzled man lifted one of his hands a
“Did Feng Yi do this to you?” I asked.
“Of course he did. You sent him here.”
“Sent him? No,” my dad said, pressing the wound with towels that Lily brought from the kitchen. “What do you mean?”
“Feng Yi played you so well,” the man breathed out. “He threw his stars around and you coughed up your secrets to him. The moment he came here demanding the relic, I knew he had fooled you. It was all a decoy: his Star Warriors, his faked death, his oily words, all that was so you’d show him the map to my house. Thanks for nothing.”
Darrell was back. “They called for an ambulance.”
“You could have helped us at the airport,” said Lily.
“I didn’t know you,” he said. “And I don’t like you. I’ve been fighting the Order for thirty-five years. Then you come in? Don’t expect Guardians to like you or help you. This relic cost me everything.”
“We’re sorry,” my dad said. “We got involved because—”
“You don’t know enough to be sorry,” the man snapped. “You’re just a dumb family. This is war.”
Which every single person along the way had insisted on telling us. Maybe that was nothing to argue about. We are a family, just a family, but I couldn’t stop myself.
“You know what, fine. You’re right,” I said, my chest heaving. “Maybe we shouldn’t be Guardians. But we lost someone, too. We lost our mom, and now finding the relics and finding her are the same thing for us.”
Ignoring me, Papa Dean grabbed my father by the collar. “He doesn’t have the hand, does he? Tell me Feng doesn’t have it.”
“Markus Wolff has it,” my dad said.
We heard sirens. “Then get out,” he said. “There’s only one chance now. You don’t want to be here. Take the . . . take the . . .” He stretched out a bloody hand to a bookcase by the bed. He tugged a slender paperback from it. Its pages tore as his fingers smeared and fumbled them. He finally seemed to lose all his strength and simply whispered, “Page seven. Get out . . .”
Sirens overlapped other sirens now. They were getting closer. They were almost on top of us now.
“The EMTs will help you,” my dad said, taking the bloody book. “I’m sorry for everything. Kids, we have to go!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Lights were coming on in the neighboring houseboats as the sirens wailed to a stop in the parking lot and unloaded their personnel.
My stomach twisted in knots. My throat was thick. I felt like puking from fear. So much blood. So many lies. We had sent Feng Yi here. We were in the middle of something violent and real and unlike anything we’d ever thought possible. But we had to keep going, didn’t we? We had to, to find Sara. We were in too deep to stop.
“The other way,” Becca said. “Down the other arm of the dock. We can’t let the police find us!”
She was right. The number of times we’d been near a tragedy, an attack, a dead or dying person was far beyond normal. As frightening as it all was, we had to run, even from the good guys.
We got ourselves off the dock into the parking lot away from the ambulances and police cars. We hurried up through the streets winding along the coast. Up toward the vast orange bridge.
If the others were like me, they were beating themselves up. We’d sent Feng Yi right to the houseboat. We’d given Markus Wolff the hand of Mr. Chen. Now both of them were further along than we were.
And closer to the relic.
It also shocked me how much this Guardian hated us. Just a dumb family. I tried to work out in my head the connection from Copernicus to the trader Pires to the Chinese court, and on to the theft thirty years ago and where the relics went after that. There were pieces of the puzzle we didn’t have, and maybe never would have, but I kept coming back to the way he’d treated us. “Dad,” I whispered. “What he said to us. I mean—”
“Not now, Wade. We can’t be distracted by that. We still have a job to do.” He slowed as we approached the sidewalk, then stopped. “Wait . . .” He choked a little, then just dragged us close to him, all of us, in a bear hug. “Look,” he said while we were all pressed against him, “I am either the worst father in the world or a lunatic, bringing you into this, and keeping us doing this . . .”
“Neither,” said Darrell, wiping his cheeks. “Mom’s the reason. She would want us to do this. To keep going. To keep the Order from getting another relic. She’s the reason, Dad. Mom is.”
My dad was going to say something, but I wouldn’t let him. “Darrell’s right,” I said. “We all know that having a relic will give us more power in this . . . war, if that’s what it is. For Sara. But there’s the legacy, too. Keeping Copernicus’s time machine away from Galina and her murderers is something we have to do.”
Lily piped up. “Especially now, right? Both Mr. Chen and Papa Dean have been taken out, and the relic is going to fall into her hands one way or the other. There’s nobody left but us. Nobody in this whole city right now. It’s only us. Bec?”
Becca’s eyes were welling up with tears. She nodded.
I knew Dad was swallowing back tears, too. He loosened his hug.
“You’re the best kids ever,” he said. “I’m sorry. The clues. We need to read the book. Find whatever is there.”
He pulled the bloodied paperback out of his jacket, and we started walking to the bridge again. The cold wind off the water was sweeping up the coast and fluttering the book’s cover open.
Becca took it from him and turned the pages. “It’s a collection of poems by Papa Dean,” she said. “I think it’s called beat poetry. The one on page seven is short.”
We paused under the streetlamp, listening as she read.
Prime Time for D
D is for daybreak and ding-dong.
D is for double and deadline.
D is for duomo, dagoba, and dewal.
D is for doomsday.
D is for digits.
D is for D, as in MDXIV.
She read it again, and a third time as we started up and across the bridge’s pedestrian path. She said, “Anyone want to take a stab at it?”
Darrell grumbled. “Don’t look at me. My brain doesn’t work that way. It goes in flashes. I can’t put things together. I jump at stuff.”
“Sometimes a flash is what we need, bro,” I said.
“Well, ‘double’ means Andreas, right?” said Lily. “Hans Novak wrote in the diary that Andreas looked so much like Nicolaus that he could be his double.”
“And digits are fingers,” said Dad. “For Mr. Chen’s hand, maybe. And MDXIV are Roman numerals for . . .” He worked it out in his head. “The year 1514, when Andreas joined Nicolaus. The poem seems to be about the legacy, without actually naming it.”
“Deadline could mean that there’s a deadline to this whole thing,” I said. “The Frombork Protocol, maybe. Or the change of days Ptolemy talked about.”
“What about the churches?” Darrell said.
We stopped. “What churches?” Lily asked.
“Well, maybe not church churches, but duomo and dagoba and dewal are different kinds of places of worship in other countries. My mom worked on a manuscript about world religions.”
“Brilliant, Darrell,” said Lily.
My father suddenly seemed to get something. “Becca, may I?” She gave him the book, and he stood under one of the bridge lights and studied the poem. “Places of worship . . . churches . . . ‘D is for ding-dong and daybreak.’ Churches and church bells? Maybe we’re supposed to be looking for a church. A church with a safe, perhaps?”
“The diary! Hans mentions church bells twice.” Becca pulled her notebook out of her bag and flipped it open to the new translations she had done in the museum. She read out two passages.
. . . the night as black as the pit wherein we discovered Ptolemy’s device. In Frombork at this moment, so you will understand the hour, we would hear the vesper bells ring from the cathedr
“In my mind, Hans,” says Nicolaus, “the cathedral bells toll with every splash of the oar that takes my poor brother from me.”
In a few more hours the sky over San Francisco would be starting to brighten, but right now the night over the Pacific was as black as when Andreas rowed away from his brother. Despite all the evidence telling me it wasn’t five hundred years ago, every time we put our heads together we were re-creating scenes from the life of Copernicus.
“Vespers are the bells they ring at night?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Becca. “In English novels there are always bells at different times of the day.”
“The poem mentions daybreak,” I said. “What are those called?”
Lily grumbled. “If I still had a phone, I could look it all up.”
“Dad, the phone,” said Darrell. “We can call the investigator, too.”
Dad looked to the sky above the bridge like he expected someone up there to tell him what to do. “Okay. A few minutes, that’s all.” He removed his phone from his pocket and inserted the battery. Seconds later, it lit up. “All right, Lily. Church hours.”
“Church hours,” she repeated as she called up the browser and keyed in the question, while Darrell paced back and forth, staring at the phone. Lily’s search didn’t take long. “They’re called canonical hours, and there are eight of them: matins, lauds, prime, terce—”
“That’s it!” I said. “When is prime? What hour?”
“—sext, none, vespers, and compline,” Lily finished. “Prime is at six a.m. Thank you.” She passed the phone back to my father.
“Dad, call her,” said Darrell. “Call the investigator. Please.”
“I am,” he said, tapping in the number. “Got her voice mail. It’s not quite morning there. Phone tag. Hello. This is Roald Kaplan. My phone is on again. Please call back.”