The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone by Tony Abbott Page A

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.

Chapter Twelve
    B erlin 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