“Give me that gun with the plugs,” Nick said. When Kate handed it to him, Nick told her to close the door to the compartment, to lock it tight, and to shoot anything bigger than a Coke machine if the door was pulled open. “Use real bullets this time,” Nick said. “Keep shooting until the gun goes click.”
As the door closed, Nick turned just in time to see big Franz entering the gap between the two cars. Jake dropped down from his vantage point, driving his elbow onto the big man’s skull. Franz didn’t flinch.
Jake took the stun gun, stuck it against Franz’s neck, and hit the button. There was a loud crackle of electricity. Franz looked down at Jake like a man vaguely annoyed by a buzzing mosquito.
Franz picked Jake up by the neck with one hand and carried Jake toward the edge of the gap. The ground was rushing below Jake’s feet.
Nick opened the door and fired with the gun, hitting Franz with every plug in the cartridge. Abdomen, chest, neck, forehead. Each blow was enough to put a normal man on the floor for a very long time. As Franz let go, Jake was barely able to grab on to the ladder that ran up the side of the car. The wind rushed past him at 150 miles per hour, trying to blow him off the train.
Inside, Nick was backing away from the door as Franz tore it open and stepped inside the car. “Let’s talk about this,” Nick said. “Sprechen Sie Englisch? Français? Italiano?”
Franz took three more steps forward. The compartment door opened and Quentin’s foot came out to trip him. Franz landed so hard, it was a wonder the train didn’t derail. As he was shaking his head clear and starting to push himself back up, Kate came out and wrapped her father’s thin metal cable around the man’s ankles, tying it into a quick knot.
“Hey, didn’t I shoot you in London?” she asked.
Franz looked up at her like, Do you really expect this to do anything other than slow me down for maybe three seconds?
Kate showed him the grappling hook on the other end of the cable.
Franz’s eyes grew wide. He scrambled to untie the cable, but Kate had already led it through the door and into the gap between the cars. Jake was just managing to climb back off the side ladder.
“You might want to step aside, Dad,” Kate said.
As soon as Jake was behind her, Kate spun the grappling hook three times and out through the gap.
They happened to be going over a bridge, spanning high above a river. The hook hit one of the bridge’s tension wires and caught immediately. One half second later, Franz was pulled through the door to slam violently against the other car, and .000001 seconds after that he was yanked by his feet through the gap.
Jake and Kate both heard the sound of a great weight hitting a hard metal beam at very high speed. As they poked their heads through the gap, they saw Franz’s body dangling from the cable over the river. Franz’s ankles finally worked free of the cable and he fell at least two hundred feet to the rocky riverbed below.
When they went back to the compartment, Nick, Quentin, and Professor Lewis were catching their breath. Especially the professor. “This is not what I signed up for, guys,” Lewis said. “I’ve never had a gun pointed at me before.”
“You did great,” Nick said. “Everybody did.”
“No, I really think it might be time for me to go home,” Lewis said.
Everyone else looked at each other.
“It might not be that easy,” Nick finally said. “They found us at your house, remember? They know you’re with us.”
The professor thought about that one, closed his eyes, and nodded. “Looks like my unplanned vacation is going to last a while longer.”
“Which brings up an even more important question,” Nick said. “How did they know we’d be on this train? We didn’t even know we’d be on it ourselves until we decided this morning.”
“They can’t be tracking us anymore,” Kate said. “I dumped my phone in England.”
“My phone’s always clean,” Nick said.
“And mine,” Quentin said.
“Same here,” Jake said.
A moment passed, and then everyone turned to Professor Lewis. Another moment passed as he noticed everyone staring at him. “What?”
“Professor Lewis,” Quentin said, measuring each word. “Do you still have your own personal cell phone in your possession?”
He took out his phone from his tweed jacket. “This one?”
Jake, Nick, and Kate all let out breaths, rolling their eyes. Quentin stayed focused on Lewis. “You brought that with you from England.”
“Yes. Is that a problem?”
“Not for long,” Jake said, grabbing the phone from Lewis’s hand.
“Wait,” Nick said. “Don’t just throw it out the window. We can use it to our advantage.”
“A false flag?”
“Exactly,” Nick said. “When this train arrives in Salzburg, the phone will still be on board, but we won’t be.”
“The next stop is Rosenheim,” Kate said. “We get off there, but then what?”
“Then we go to Vienna,” Lewis said.
Everyone looked at him again.
“When that gun was pointed at me, I think I had an inspiration and figured it out. Dem Erzherzog von Österreich und dem Heiligen Römischen Kaiser. The Archduke of Austria and the Holy Roman Emperor. For a short period of time that was one and the same person, beginning with Francis the First. When Francis was crowned as both, he lived at the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna.”
“So we go to the palace and we look for what?” Kate asked.
“Der Eisbär,” Lewis said. “The literal translation is ‘ice bear,’ but what that really means is ‘polar bear.’ ”
“So another crazy king,” Kate said. “Or archduke or emperor or whatever. And another animal clue for us to find. Is that what you’re telling us?”
The professor winced. “Not exactly. This time, it’s a different kind of animal clue.”
“What do you mean?” Kate asked.
“The Tiergarten Schönbrunn,” Lewis said. “It’s part of the palace, and it happens to be the oldest zoo in the world. The polar bear exhibit, in fact, is quite famous.”
“Wait a minute,” Kate said. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“Yes,” Lewis said. “The next link is guarded by real-life polar bears.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was another beautiful day in another beautiful European city. Kate sat on the balcony outside her hotel room, looking out over the baroque architecture of Vienna. Her father came out, stood at the rail, and looked down at the same view. “How you doing, kid?”
“I just talked to Jessup,” she said, holding up a burner phone. “He’s been working on the Interpol leak.”
“Getting anywhere?”
“Not yet,” Kate said. “As long as Interpol is compromised, it’s going to keep feeling like the whole world is trying to stop us, even the guys with badges.”
They both looked out at the city for a while.
“You really think we’re going to find it?” Kate finally asked.