The Forbidden Stone

“No …”

Wade tilted his head to read the title. “Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville. That’s a guy’s quest to find a giant whale, isn’t it? But then he finds the whale, the ship sinks, and everybody dies?”

“Not everybody,” said Becca. “This is my second time through.”

“Actually,” said Darrell, “my mom once worked with a manuscript by Herman Melville. Dickens too. Well, everybody. After Bolivia, she’s flying to New York to talk to Terence Somebody about donating his stuff to the university library. She’s the chief archivist in the rare books department.”

Becca flicked a glance up at him and smiled. “I know. Your mom is so cool.”

Darrell beamed. “I made her my mom, you know. She was just a regular person before I came along.”

Wade squinted at him. “You have such a weird take on stuff.”

The first boarding call was announced and Dr. Kaplan sat up. “I’m calling Sara again, just to touch base and tell her what we’re up to.”

It was clear that Wade’s father was worried about doing such a huge thing without his wife’s input. That was kind of nice. They seemed really close, and Becca figured they must talk about everything. But not this time. The call went to voice mail again. He talked for a bit, asked her at least to text, and closed the phone.

“Mrs. Kaplan will get the message before we get to Washington,” she said, “and you can talk to her during the layover.”

“Oh, go ahead and call her Sara,” Darrell said. “Everybody but me does.”

“Thanks,” Dr. Kaplan said, smiling just like a dad, she thought. “Do call her Sara. And me Uncle Roald, or just plain Roald. I’ll tell you, I will feel better when she knows exactly what we’re doing.”

Which is … going to Europe! she screamed inside.

“Passengers for Flight Seven Sixty-Six to Washington, D.C., and those continuing on to Berlin, we are now boarding group three.”

Twenty minutes later, as the plane was taxiing into position for takeoff, Wade and Darrell leaned all over each other—and Lily—to get the best view of the city while they took off. It was the last thing Becca wanted to look at. She didn’t mind riding in cars. She kind of liked buses. Trains she really loved. Giant birds made of heavy steel that somehow defied gravity? Not so much.

The engines whined impossibly loudly, and the jet started rolling fast. She gripped the seat handles.

“That’s my arm, you know,” said Lily.

“Sorry—”

“You get used to it. Settle in. Next stop, Washington!”

Her stomach was feeling somewhere between weightless and sinking as the jet rose. After a few minutes she realized that the noise was there to stay, making talking uncomfortable for anybody but Darrell, who seemed to be keeping Wade from paying attention to anyone else. Fine. Even Lily, who loved to chat, finally gave up and just typed her blog post.

The engines droned for the longest two hours in history before she managed to doze off.

“Finally!” Dr. Kaplan said when the jet touched down at Washington’s Reagan airport, where they had to switch planes. As soon as he turned on his phone it buzzed with a missed call. He listened for a minute, pressed a button, spoke several words, then ended the call.

“Because of storms in Atlanta, Sara nearly missed her connection to Bolivia and had to run,” he said. “She’s already in the air again and will probably be off the grid until the end of the week at the earliest. So it’s just us. Let’s use the restrooms, eat, then get some newspapers for the flight. See if we discover any more disasters. Maybe find a link.”

Their layover was shortened when the Atlanta storm system threatened D.C. They hurried back to the gate from the food court, stopping quickly at a news kiosk on the way.

Because her grandparents lived in Austin and babysat often over the years, Becca had learned several foreign languages early. Her French wasn’t great—her German and Spanish were better—but she could read it more or less without a dictionary, so when she saw a copy of Le Monde, she bought it. Not that she knew exactly—or even vaguely—what they were looking for. Tragedies? The whole world was tragic some days. And here she was going digging for more.

“Final boarding call for Flight Three-Fifty-Four to Berlin.”

“We’re off!” Dr. Kaplan ushered them into the Jetway. The cabin door closed soon after they took their seats, and the jet taxied out on the slick runway.

“You can hold my arm if you want to,” Lily whispered to her.

She laughed. “It’s okay. I’m a pro now.”

Hardly. Her lungs felt squashed during the long climb to cruising altitude, and her brain pounded like hammers on an anvil.

“Breathe,” Lily said. “You’ll stay alive better.”

“Thanks.” They finally leveled out. “Maybe I’m not such a pro.”

“Guys, listen to this,” Darrell said, a London paper in his lap. “The oil tanker in the Mediterranean near Turkey that we heard about? They know now that it had seventeen people on board. That’s pretty tragic.”

Then Wade folded his newspaper over and showed it to them. “Is this anything? There was an accident between a truck and a stretch limo outside of Miami. So, the truck driver disappears from the scene but they find him wandering a hundred miles away at almost exactly the same time as the accident.”

“It probably wasn’t even him driving the truck,” said Lily.

Wade shook his head. “There were witnesses at the accident who identified him. Plus, he had the truck keys with him.”

“Okay, that’s a little freaky,” said Lily.

Dr. Kaplan took Wade’s newspaper and read the article. “Heinrich was a dear friend, but he retired some years ago. He kept to himself. I hate to say it, but maybe his email might just have been him getting old. You know, it happens. And he passed away, and there’s no link between these things at all.”

Becca found herself stuck on the words “passed away.” They sounded so peaceful and so unlike the coded message. Devours. Tragedies. Protect. Find. Besides that, they didn’t really know how he died, did they? His housekeeper hadn’t said a word about that.

She was about to close Le Monde when a short news item caught her eye. “It’s not huge, but there was a death at the newspaper’s office in Paris. A person from the night staff accidentally fell down an open elevator shaft. He was killed.”

“Wade, remember this,” said Darrell. “I do not want to go like that. No way.”

“I’ll try to make sure you don’t,” Wade said.

Roald turned. “One of the five in our little group from twenty years ago works at Le Monde. I wonder if he knew the man who died. I haven’t talked to him in ages. His name was Bernard Something—”

“Bernard Dufort?” Becca asked.

“Yes! We called him Bernie. Is he quoted—”

Her blood went cold. “Bernard Dufort was the man who fell down the elevator shaft. Police are calling it an accident, but the investigation is continuing.”

Something happened to Dr. Kaplan then, Becca thought, and it was different from the other weird news about truck accidents and building collapses. His face grew instantly dark and he seemed to fall inside himself. Was it because the bad news was starting to connect? Strangely connect? The email. The death of Heinrich Vogel. The newspaper stories. And now Bernard Dufort.

Darrell leaned to him. “Was Bernie a good friend of yours?”

Roald closed his eyes for a second. “Not really. I mean, a bit. He was just one of us in Heinrich’s little Asterias group, you know?”

“Do you think that’s what he was talking about?” Wade asked. “‘The kraken devours us. You are the last.’ Maybe this is what he meant. The last of Asterias. Are you in danger?”

“No, Wade, no,” his father said firmly. “Of course not.”

“But do you keep up with the other people in the group?” asked Darrell. “How do we find out—”

Roald raised a finger, and they all went quiet.

“These newspaper things, I can’t really say. Uncle Henry and Bernard, that’s a different story. Once we’re on the ground there, we’ll probably learn what really happened. In the meantime, we’ll be fine if we stay together.”

“We won’t be any trouble, honest,” Lily said, glancing at the rest of them with a quick nod of her head.

“Heinrich was a good man,” Roald said firmly. “A good human being. Let’s pay our respects. And then we’ll see what we see. You’re right about not being any trouble, Lily. You four are not leaving my sight. Not for a second.”

He breathed calmly, smiled at each of them, then slid his student journal from his jacket pocket, pulled his glasses up, and started reading.

The food carts began rattling down the aisle, and Becca leaned back to read Moby-Dick. She stopped pages later when the ship’s crew neared the environs of the great white whale.

With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.

Monster. Moby Dick was a giant whale, a sea monster. As she read the words over, she wondered once again what Uncle Henry meant in his message when he said kraken.

For as long as he could stand it, Ebner von Braun was immersing the thin burned fingers of his left hand in a bowl of ice water that he carried with him.

Ceramic. Venetian. Thirteenth century.

Four very odd years with Galina Krause had taught him something of the arts of ages past. “Use this,” she had said, a baffling act of compassion, he’d thought, until she added, “and stop whining about your disgusting fingers.”

The elevator stopped. Subbasement Three.

The door slid aside and, as usual, the dull white ceiling lights of the laboratory made him oddly nauseated. The lab smelled of temperature control, clean-room disinfectant, and fear.

Not to mention the infernal buzzing, a white noise that Ebner wasn’t certain came from the lab or from him. His ears had begun to ring nearly four years earlier, after one of the Order’s experiments. It was now like a continuous waterfall of ball bearings from a great height into the center of his head. The sound was always there. An evil companion. A familiar spirit, as the old stories of Doctor Faustus termed it.

Like seven similar installations across the globe, this control room was large and white and completely devoid of personality. Unless you counted the artfully unshaven young scientist sitting at a long bank of computers.

Ebner had chosen Helmut Bern from the most brilliant of recent graduates, but while he was certain of Bern’s uncommon talent for digital surveillance and electronic decryption, Ebner was still unsure about the darkness of the young man’s soul. He watched the slender hands move over the keyboard. Swift, yes. Accurate, undoubtedly. But how dedicated?

“Sir?” Helmut said, twisting his chair around.

“Is the computer ready?”

“It is, sir.” The young scientist tapped a slim silver briefcase on the counter next to him. “It contains everything you requested. Battery life is essentially infinite. No blind spots anywhere across the globe. I’m curious, why did you have me construct such a thing at this particular time?”

Ebner glared. “You’re curious? I’m curious. Have you reconstructed Vogel’s hard drive?”

Seeming disappointed, the scientist glanced at the ceramic bowl Ebner cradled in the crook of his arm. “Very soon. Sir.”

On the neighboring monitor was a live-camera feed of the former Edificio Petrobras in Rio de Janeiro. Construction crews and crime scene investigators swarmed the crumbled gray stone and glass in what Ebner knew would be a futile effort to find the cause of the collapse.

“Vogel’s final email?”

“Coded.”

“Crack the code.”

“By morning.”

“Morning?”

“At the latest.”

While Ebner might have adored the speed of this conversation in a film, spare questions and clipped commands were his thing.

Young Helmut Bern, no matter how brilliant he may have been in his own unshaven way, had no business mimicking his style. It stunk of irony. Only those in command were allowed the privilege of irony. Workers, no matter how little or how much they were paid, were still workers, unwashed masses of common folk, and their duty was to obey him with smarmy respect. Even sniveling was preferable to snarkiness.

Smiling to himself, Ebner drew his hand from the ice bowl, shook his fingers, and set the bowl on the young scientist’s desk. Slowly, he took out from his breast pocket a blue leather-bound notebook, turned to the first blank page, and wrote the name “Helmut Bern.” Next to it he set down the words “Iceland. Station Four.” He added a question mark for good measure and closed the notebook.

“The tanker off the coast of Cypress?”

“Good news,” Bern said, clacking his keyboard. The image dissolved into text, and he read from it. “Our divers have already made contact with the hull, and undersea building has begun. Habitation can occur as early as next week. Would you care to examine our current experiment?”

So many experiments. So many missions around the world undertaken on Galina Krause’s specific orders. His ears shrieked.

“The Australian Transit? Yes.” Ebner stepped toward the inner laboratory. It was walled in tinted glass to shield the radioactivity of the light beams.

“Excuse me, Doctor …?”

Ebner paused, half turned his head. “Yes?”

“The twelve items. I mean, why now? After all this time.”

Ebner wondered if he should say anything. Would it be unguarded to speak? Silence was a kind of power, after all. Miss Krause had taught him that.

But bringing someone into your confidence, that was power, too. He decided, for the moment, to be distant. “Miss Krause recognizes an urgency. There is a singular alignment of causes.”

Helmut Bern stroked his unshaven chin. “Do you mean to say there is a timetable?”

I say what I mean to say!

Ebner brushed it off. “Life is a timetable. You should concern yourself with your own.” He liked the way that sounded, even if he was unsure exactly what it meant. It had its desired effect nevertheless. Helmut Bern bit his tongue, turned to the screen, and said no more.

Ebner walked through the open door of the inner lab.

The gun—if he could call it that, a ten-foot spoked wheel of platinum alloy in whose center stood a long, narrow cylinder of steel, coiled with a helix of ultrathin glass fiber—occupied one half of the room. In the other sat a cage of white mice, the most intelligent of their experimental patients. Ebner laughed to himself. Little good will intelligence do them where they’re going.

The elevator door slid aside in the first room. The nameless driver leaned in, spotted Ebner. “Time,” he said.

Ebner withdrew from the inner laboratory.

Time. It’s always time.

He passed Helmut Bern’s desk, dipped his hand into the bowl of lukewarm water, removed it, and shook the drops from his fingers. “I must return this priceless bowl to Miss Krause now,” he said, staring down at Bern. “It must be empty.”

“Sir?”

“Remove the water,” Ebner said as softly as he could.

Bern pushed back his chair. “Sir?”

“Here. Now.”

The young unshaven scientist, glancing from the nameless driver at the door to Ebner, lifted the bowl. He brought it to his lips and drank down the water.

“You’re welcome,” said Ebner.

“Uh …” Bern murmured. “Thank you, Dr. von Braun.”

Ebner could not help his own lips. They curved into a thin smile. He now wondered whether Iceland was in fact the proper place for Helmut Bern.

Taking the empty bowl and the silver-cased computer, he joined the driver in the elevator, pressed Up, and left.

Berlin was gray. It was cold. It was raining.

When the kids pushed out of the enormous arrival terminal the next morning in search of a taxi, the air hit them heavily with diesel exhaust and cigarette smoke and the odor of strong coffee.

Becca took a shallow breath. “I read that Europe smells like this.”

Roald nodded. “It takes me back. I wish we weren’t here for this reason.”

“One cab left,” Wade called out, hurrying with Darrell to a small car with a short man standing next to it.

No one spoke as the taxi zigzagged out of the airport complex and raced onto the highway toward the city. They passed several clusters of identical high rises surrounded by small parks of bare trees.

“Not too attractive,” Lily said.

Roald explained that much of Berlin had been rebuilt after the Second World War with a sense of function rather than style. The sober buildings made Berlin seem that much more cold and sad.

The cab exited the highway and entered rain-slicked streets by the railroad and after that a series of cobblestone roads in what Becca guessed was an older part of the city.

Pulling to an abrupt stop before a tall set of iron gates, they arrived at the cemetery just before eleven thirty. They got out, hoisting their carry-on bags over their shoulders.

Inside the grounds stood a soot-stained church-like building that looked as if it had been there for centuries but which Lily’s tablet said was a “mere hundred and fifty years old.”

Beyond the chapel, the graves and markers stretched away into several heavily wooded acres.

Wade pointed across the park. “People are gathering over there.” His words were strangely muffled in the cold air. “There’s a path.”

Many of the gravestones were placed in orderly rows stretching away from the path. Others with faded words and numbers seemed to have grown right out of the ground. Some stones had rain-soaked stuffed animals placed among the wreaths.

Children’s graves.

One well-worn trail slithered between the trees like a snake, ending at four tall unadorned stone blocks, two of which were inscribed with names Becca knew well: Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, the brothers who had collected folk tales in the middle of the nineteenth century. Lily snapped a picture before hurrying on.

As they crossed the grass and threaded through a stand of tall trees, Becca breathed in a scent of pine needles and tried to steady herself. She felt almost light-headed.

What was it about graveyards?

What was it? She knew exactly what it was.

When her younger sister, Maggie, had fallen ill two years ago, Becca had been terrified of losing her. She cried herself to sleep more nights than she could remember and had begun to dream of places like this—avenues of stone, the murmuring of small voices—and didn’t stop dreaming about them until her sister was fully recovered and out of danger. Some of her fear she hid from her parents, who were struggling in their own way with a possible unbearable loss. Maggie was fine now, and yet …

Lily touched her on the arm. “There they are.”

A small group of mourners clustered under the boughs of several towering beech trees. Nearby stood a sad old mausoleum overgrown with vines. The name carved into the stone over its doors was all but unreadable. A crumbling sundial stood at an angle in front of it. Time. Death. Tombs. Loss.

Melville’s words came back to her. Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost …

Something moved. Beyond the old tomb a handful of men in overalls stood among the trees, groundskeepers, probably waiting for the service to be over. Maggie’s face hovered in her mind, but Becca whooshed it away with a rapid shake of her head. No. She’s fine. This funeral is not for her. This is for Heinrich Vogel. An old man. Wade’s uncle.

“I don’t recognize anyone here,” Dr. Kaplan whispered. “I guess all of his old professor friends are gone now, but I expected …” He removed his glasses, wiped his cheeks. “I expected to see another student or two.”

Becca patted his arm, remembering the email. You are the last.

Roald and the boys advanced. Lily hung back. “I know this isn’t right,” she whispered, sliding her bag off her shoulder and pulling her phone out. “I mean, I know it’s a funeral, but I want to get this.”

“Lily, I don’t know …”

But she took a slow video of the mourners as the priest began.

“Guten Morgen, liebe Freunde …”

Becca’s grandmother Heidi had taught her a good bit of German, though making out conversations was always tougher than reading. People spoke so quickly and always talked on and on, moving forward, never going back, like you could do if you were reading a book.

We are something, something here … friend … scientist … teacher … his life of “Gelehrsamkeit” … scholarship …

Becca’s mind drifted. Ever since her sister’s recovery, she had been drawn to cemeteries, even though they frightened her. Maybe it was a kind of gratitude that she hadn’t had to visit her sister in one. But an actual service was sad and she didn’t need to be more sad. She rubbed her eyes, realized once more that she hadn’t slept for many hours and wondered when they would have a chance to rest.

… final rest … soul’s long journey …

No, no. Please don’t go there. Blinking her eyelashes apart she gazed beyond the tilted sundial to a tomb with a broken column sticking up from it. Next to that leaned a stone with a weeping angel sitting on top. Loss and grief no matter where she looked …

A man appeared at the edge of the wooded path to their left. He walked slowly toward the mourners, then stopped midway, his eyes moving over her and the Kaplans.

Becca turned to see Lily still filming. “That guy over there stopped coming when he saw your camera.”

Darrell stepped back to them. “You saw that, too? Here come his friends.”

Two other men joined the first. One was a heavyset man with a chiseled face, wearing a slick black suit. The other was pale, smaller, and hunched over like a bent wire. The pale man spoke to the other two, who both stepped behind a tomb at the same time, as if they were connected.

Becca watched the pale man pick his way carefully over the wet grass to the gravesite and stand close-by. His hands were folded, his head down. During a pause in the priest’s words, the man raised his eyes to Becca, then to Roald and Wade, then lowered his face. She felt a weird tingle crawl up her back, as if in that instant he had looked directly through her. His glasses were thick and his posture twisted, although he was not an old man. His left temple bore a nasty V-shaped bruise, stippled with dots. It looked recent.

“Amen …”

The priest dribbled holy water on the casket from a small silver vessel, murmured a final blessing, and it was over. The sky seemed to darken at the same moment. The chill rain came down harder.

The crowd dispersed quickly, some to cars, others on foot on the paths and sidewalks toward the exits. Several people hailed taxis on the street. Soon the cemetery was empty except for them, the workers, and the three men by the weeping angel, still eyeing them.

She stepped toward Wade and his father. “Uncle Roald, those guys are watching us.” By the time Roald lifted his head, slid his glasses back on, and turned to look, the men had gone.

To get out of the rain, Darrell squirrelled himself under the broad lintel of a haunted mausoleum next to the others who, he guessed, were silent because they were wondering what to do next. He was pretty sure what they should do next.