Free The Golden Vendetta by Tony Abbott

and KOL . And gümüş kol means ‘silver arm.’” He stared at Becca.
    â€œâ€˜Silver arm’?” she whispered. “Is that what Leonardo made for Nicolaus in his workshop? The old woman in Tampa had silvery fingers. Everything’s silver!”
    â€œBut does ‘silver arm’ mean anything?” said Darrell, leaning over the computer. “I mean, besides that I really want one?”
    Wade keyed the words into the laptop’s search engine. A few seconds later, the reference came back. He scanned it, felt his heart quicken.
    â€œOkay. We have something here. There was a pirate nicknamed Silver Arm. A Barbary pirate from North Africa. He had a silver arm because he lost his real one in a battle. His name was Baba Aruj, and he was one of two pirate brothers called Barbarossa, because they had . . . Becca, they had red beards! Red beards!”
    Becca screamed as she flipped back several pages in the diary. “The first passage that Lily and I read! So this pirate Barbarossa friend of Nicolaus’s had a silver arm . . .”
    â€œI don’t want one if I have to lose my real one,” said Darrell.
    Wade stood up from the desk. “So Copernicus asks Leonardo da Vinci to be a Guardian. Leo says, ‘No, I’m too old.’ But he agrees to make a thing to hide the relic in. What he makes is an arm—out of silver—for a pirate who saved Hans’s life during a battle. And this is where Copernicus puts the relic, whatever it actually is. The relic is inside the arm.”
    He turned to Becca and Darrell. “Is this right?”
    Becca began to nod slowly. “I think so. But you know what else? I’m thinking that because this story appears in the diary right after the Serpens story, whatever relic is in the silver arm is the one that Serpens points to.”
    Wade sat down in front of the laptop again. “Yes. Which could mean that Galina has a head start on it. But she doesn’t have the diary to tell her some important details, so we could be even with her.”
    Darrell loved it, the way that things connected one to another and another. Even if they didn’t know yet what the relic actually was, they were assembling the mystery. He had to tell Lily. Her room door was closed, but he went over to it and was ready to knock when he heard her voice through the door.
    She was on the phone, talking quietly. To her parents? He voice was very soft. And . . . choked. Was shecrying? Lily never cried. He pulled away and went back to the dining room, where Wade and Becca were still at it, sewing up their discovery into a package that worked. They were good at that. He wasn’t so much. Was Lily actually crying? He paced the dining room, then found himself walking all over the apartment, peeking in all the rooms, his brain methodically determining escape routes and memorizing the position of all the doors and windows. When he finally came back to the dining room, Lily was there. Her eyes were normal, not red. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he didn’t know anything.
    â€œGuess what,” he said, glancing at her, but not too long. “There’s another elevator, a private one, in the back of the apartment. I think it takes you all the way down to the street and lets you out on the back side of the building—”
    â€œYou not take it,” said the housekeeper, suddenly appearing from nowhere.
    â€œI didn’t!” Darrell said. “I won’t. You can just tell from the buttons where it goes.” Afraid of the woman’s dark stare, he escaped out onto the balcony.
    The sky was a giant royal-blue dome, marbled here and there with a light scrim of clouds. The quaint orange- and red-tiled rooftops spread out around the square in varying heights on all sides. Beyond them wasthe great inviting expanse of the sea.
    â€œSo . . .” It was Lily, stepping out next to him but looking away, out over the water. He