Текст книги "The Romanov Cross"
Автор книги: Robert Masello
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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 35 страниц)
Chapter 43
It was the hardest call Slater had ever had to make, but with lives hanging in the balance – Eva’s for sure, and possibly Nika’s, too – he called Dr. Levinson in D.C. Apparently, he had caught her at a dinner party, and until she had moved into a private study, he could hear the sounds of clinking glasses and cutlery in the background.
As succinctly as he could, he told her what was happening on the island, and with every word he uttered he could imagine the expression of mounting disbelief, and anger, on her face. She had gone to bat for him at the court-martial, she had given him this golden opportunity to redeem himself, and he had blown it sky-high. When she finally spoke, he could hear the steel in her voice.
“So you have not one, but two, compromised team members?” she said. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that he might make a third.
“Yes. And I will need them to be evacuated immediately to a mainland hospital, where a strict quarantine can be established.”
“Why didn’t you call for it already?”
“I did, but we’re having a priorities problem. It looks like the Coast Guard may need a kick in the pants from AFIP headquarters, or an assist from the Air National Guard.”
“Consider it done.”
He thanked her.
“Don’t thank me, Frank. You know what this means, don’t you?”
He could guess, but she told him, anyway.
“Once we get this straightened out, I’ll want you back in Washington for a full debriefing. When we’re finished with that, your civilian status with the AFIP will be considered terminated.”
The same as his military status had already been withdrawn.
“I understand.”
“Do you?” It was the first time real emotion cut through the icy reserve she had maintained so far. “You’re the best we had, Frank, and I went out on a limb for you. And now you’ve cut off the damn limb, too.”
When she hung up, he stood there in the communications tent for a few seconds, gathering his thoughts, watching as his entire career went up in smoke, until Sergeant Groves, covered with snow, came through the flaps. Slater quickly slipped his face mask back on, and held up a hand to keep Groves at a distance.
“The lab tent’s clear?” Slater said. “No sign of the wolf?”
“Long gone,” Groves replied, fitting his own mask back over his mouth and nose. “I left Rudy on watch. But there is something you’ve got to see.”
“Is it about Eva? Is she okay?”
“No change, as far as I know.”
“Nika?” He had confined her to her tent until further notice.
“No, it’s none of that,” Groves said. He beckoned Slater to follow him out of the tent.
Slater, who’d had no more than a couple of hours’ sleep, pulled his coat and gloves on over his fresh hazmat suit and followed Groves out into the storm. There was only a feeble light in the sky, and to keep the wind from blowing him off his feet he had to cling to the ropes lining the pathway. Groves plodded across the colony grounds to the church, but detoured at the front steps to go around the side. There, he stopped beside a patch where the snow, much disturbed, had a raspberry tinge. It didn’t take long for Slater to make out the mangled remains of a body and the shreds of a blue work uniform … or to recognize them as belonging to that guy named Russell, whom he’d first seen at the bar, then at the memorial service at the Lutheran church. He was part of Harley Vane’s pack.
“How long do you think he’s been here?”
Groves shrugged. “Can’t be that long. We’d have seen it on the regular patrols.”
Slater wondered if he’d been alone on the island, or if he’d brought Harley. Or the third musketeer, the one named Eddie something. Were the others, in fact, possibly still around?
And if they were, what were they doing here? Had they been responsible for that hole in the cemetery? Why on earth would they have been trying to dig up graves, much less now, with his own contingent there?
“Looks like the wolves got him,” Groves said.
“Among other things,” Slater replied, solemnly. He wasn’t sure what these guys were capable of, but Nika would have a much better idea. For now, it was just another wild card to add to the rapidly accumulating stack. In the snow, he saw a soggy old book, with a torn binding, and picked it up. It looked like a ledger, in Russian.
“Dry this out, then let Kozak take a crack at it.”
“Will do. And the body?”
“Bag it, under hazard wraps, and we’ll send it back to Port Orlov when the chopper gets here.”
“When’s that?”
Slater wished he knew. Looking at the sky, he saw nothing but roiling gray clouds, giving way to banks of blacker thunderheads moving in across the strait. Whenever the helicopter arrived, it would be a bad time.
“And don’t mention it to anyone else yet,” Slater said. Groves nodded. On missions like these, they both knew, information was given out only on a need-to-know basis.
Going into the church, he was surprised not to see Kozak sitting on the stool outside the quarantine tent that had been set up around Lantos; he’d been assigned to guard the premises and listen for any sign that Lantos had become conscious again. The Demerol drip should have kept her quiet and sedated, but you never knew. Slater looked toward the far end of the church, where he could see a flashlight beam moving back and forth across the great heap of broken pews and tangled ironwork.
“You’ve abandoned your post,” he said, as he approached the professor. “In wartime, you could be shot for that.”
Kozak was supposed to be wearing a gauze face mask, too, part of the costume Slater required for quarantine duty, but he’d let his dangle down around his neck. Slater gestured for him to raise it again, but before he did, Kozak declared, “Do you know what this is?”
“Looks like a pile of junk to me.”
“Look behind the junk,” Kozak said, finally lifting the mask back into place over his neatly trimmed silver beard. “The junk has been put here to hide the screen that shielded the altar.”
“There’s an altar back there?”
“Yes, there has to be, and the screen is called the iconostasis. You will find it in all the Russian Orthodox churches. It protects the holy of holies, the sanctuary. In a big church, like the one I went to in Moscow when I was a boy, there were several doors through the iconostasis. Only certain monks or priests could use each one. There were many rules. But in a smaller church, one like this, there was sometimes just a single door – the door of Saint Stephen, the Protomartyr.”
“The what?” Slater had never been one for religion. In his experience, it was just another reason for people to kill each other with conviction and impunity.
“Saint Stephen, the first martyr of the Christian church,” Kozak said, with a touch of exasperation. “Have you never sung the song about good king Wencelas, on the feast of Stephen?” Kozak started humming the tune, but Slater was already nodding in recognition and he stopped. “Saint Stephen was put on trial by the Sanhedrin,” Kozak said, resuming his explanation, “and then he was stoned to death.”
“For what?”
“Preaching that Christ was divine.”
There you go again, Slater thought. One more entry for his inventory of religious slaughter.
Lifting his digital camera to take a picture of the jumble, Kozak said, “I am going to write a paper about this church, I think.”
“Not while you’re supposed to be on duty watching Eva.”
“She has been sleeping. I have listened to the monitor,” Kozak assured him, before adding gravely, “but she should be in a hospital by now, yes?”
“Yes, and she will be soon. A chopper’s on the way.”
“Ah, so you got through to someone, after all.”
“I had to call the head of the AFIP, in D.C. If she can’t get them to jump, no one can.”
Kozak slipped the camera back into his pocket. “I suspect she was not happy to hear this news,” Kozak sympathized.
“No, she wasn’t.” Now that Slater was aware of it, he could see that there was indeed some sort of screen erected behind all the camouflage. He could even detect the glint of gold paint on a faded mural.
Kozak nodded, looking down. “The bureaucrats, they never understand. The situation on the ground is never the same as the situation in their plans. They think it should always be easy, the way it looks on paper.”
You can say that again, Slater thought. He was trying not to dwell on the fallout from his conversation with Dr. Levinson. The rest of his life loomed before him like a great empty plain, and it was almost a relief when his thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a low, but anguished, murmuring from the quarantine tent.
“Eva’s awake again,” he said, as her voice crackled over the audio monitor.
“But she sounds like she is in pain.”
He could increase the drip, even give her an injection, but there was only so much he could do under these conditions. And as he hurried back to help her, he heard an even worse sound.
A spasm of coughing. Harsh and wet. And flulike.
Chapter 44
The breaker of chains.
When Charlie Vane read those four words on the computer screen, he felt as if he had just broken into the vault at Fort Knox.
The silver cross was sitting on a yellow legal pad, its emeralds glinting in the buttery glow of the banker’s lamp. Like a lottery winner who needed to study his lucky ticket one more time, Charlie picked it up and turned it over. The inscription was in Russian, but he had written the translation Voynovich had given him on the pad.
“To my little one. No one can break the chains of divine love that bind us. Your loving father, Grigori.”
He had been reading it all wrong. Misinterpreting what it said.
But now he knew better. It was as if, with that one simple phrase, he’d just been given the key to a secret code. Now he knew the story. All his Internet research had finally paid off.
By the year 1901, Nicholas II, the reigning Romanov Tsar, had long been praying for a son. He and his wife, Alexandra, had had three daughters already, and to ensure the survival of his dynasty, Nicholas needed a male heir to be born. But on the night of June 18, the Tsaritsa gave birth to a fourth daughter, and to keep his wife from seeing his disappointment, Nicholas took a long walk to compose himself before going into the royal chamber. On that walk, he must have given himself a stern talking-to, because he resolved to make the best of it and honor the birth of this new daughter by freeing several students who had been imprisoned for rioting in Moscow and St. Petersburg the previous winter.
The name he chose for her was Anastasia, which meant the breaker of chains.
As Charlie studied the cross again, he saw how everything now fell right into place.
“The little one”– malenkaya—to whom it was addressed was a commonly used nickname for the mischievous young grand duchess, Anastasia. And the “loving father” was not her dad, but a priest. A father named Grigori.
As in Grigori Rasputin, the self-proclaimed holy man revered by the Romanovs and reviled by the nation.
What Charlie was holding was not only a piece of history, but an object of absolutely unimaginable value. The days of soliciting measly contributions to Vane’s Holy Writ website were over forever! He could bring his message – personal liberation through total subjugation, in all things, to the holy will! – to millions of people at once. Not incidentally, he could become even richer and more famous in the process, though that, too, was no doubt part of the heavenly plan for him.
He had barely had time to savor his triumph, and imagine the bidding war that would ensue among the world’s wealthiest collectors and museums, when the motion-detector lights went on outside the house, bathing the driveway in their cold white glare. Pushing his wheelchair back on the piled-up rugs, he glanced outside, and while he expected to see a moose ambling by, or maybe a couple of foxes scampering across the snow, he saw his brother Harley, looking like he was on his last legs, staggering toward the front steps.
“Rebekah!” he shouted. “Go open the front door!”
“Why?” she called back from the kitchen. “I’m baking.” The smell of charred, sourdough bread had filled the house for hours.
There was a hammering on the front door, and Harley was crying, “Open up! For Christ’s sake, open up!”
Charlie was maneuvering his chair toward the front hall when he heard Bathsheba skip down the stairs and eagerly say, “I’ll get it! It’s Harley.” She had a thing for his younger brother; she’d once said that he looked like he could be one of those young vampires in her books.
But when she opened the door, Harley virtually slumped inside, slammed the door closed behind him, and threw the bolt. He leaned back against it, his eyes wild, his brown hair sticking out in icy spikes. His boots were dripping onto the carpets that covered the old, uneven floorboards, and his skin was even whiter than Bathsheba’s, which was saying something.
“They won’t stop!” he cried. “They won’t stop!”
“Who won’t stop?” Charlie said, the wheel of his chair snagging on the edge of a rug.
“Eddie and Russell!”
“What are you talking about? Are they here, too?”
“No, man – they’re gone!”
Gone?Whatever he really meant by that, Charlie knew that he had some very serious trouble on his hands. Bathsheba shrank back toward the staircase. “Okay, Harley, why don’t you just calm down? Come on inside and tell me what’s going on. Bathsheba, go and tell your sister to bring us some of her hot tea and that bread she’s been burning all afternoon.”
It took Harley several seconds to pry himself away from the door, and as Charlie led him back into the meeting room where he worked, he heard the clink of what sounded like glass and metal from the backpack slung over Harley’s shoulder. Was that a good sign, he wondered? It had been days since he’d heard any news from St. Peter’s Island, and while he was relieved to see that Harley was alive, it was plain as could be that he was off his rocker.
“You’re okay now,” Charlie said. “You can just sit down and relax.”
Harley went to the window first and stayed there, staring outside until the motion detectors finally turned off and the driveway went black. He yanked the curtains closed and whirled around in a panic as Rebekah came in carrying the tea and toast. Bathsheba peered in, half-concealed, from the doorway.
“Just put the tray down,” Charlie said, “and leave us alone.”
Rebekah did as she was told, but let it bang on the desktop and the tea slosh over the rims of the mugs in protest at such brusque treatment.
“That bread’s not from any store,” she said, as if someone had suggested otherwise, then slammed the pocket doors together behind her as she left.
“Drink this,” Charlie said, handing his brother a mug. “Tastes like shit, but it’s good for you.”
Harley took it, his hands shaking, and slurped some of it down. He let the backpack slip onto the floor, between his feet. Then he wolfed a couple of slabs of the toast down, too, without even bothering to slather on any of the homemade jam. Charlie studied him as if he were one of the crazy people who occasionally showed up – online or in person – at his ministry. They usually claimed that there were voices in their heads, or that they were being followed. One of the local Inuit had shown up, screaming that he was being tracked, and it turned out that he was right – he had escaped from a mental ward all the way over in Dillingham and the social workers were hot on his trail.
Harley looked just as bad, but Charlie just let him sit and sip the home-brewed tea – no complaints out of him this time – until he seemed to calm down. Just what had happened on that island? And what did he mean when he said that Eddie and Russell weregone?
“You know, you can take off your coat and stay awhile,” Charlie said.
But Harley looked like he was still too cold to take it off, and Charlie knew enough not to rush him. And it was the backpack, anyway – not the coat – that he was dying to get into.
“While you were gone, I took a little trip myself,” Charlie said by way of distraction. “To Nome.”
Apart from nervously rubbing his thigh, Harley didn’t react in any way.
“I went to see that thief Voynovich.”
Harley’s eyes flicked up from the rim of the mug.
“He told me a few things about the cross. And I’ve done some digging on my own.”
Harley was starting to focus again.
“Seems like it might be worth a helluva lot more than we thought.”
Harley snorted, like none of this mattered much anymore, and Charlie took offense.
“In case you care,” Charlie said, “it belonged to Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Tsar. And it was a gift to her from a guy named Rasputin. I figured all of that out by myself, sitting in this very room.” He waited for the news to sink in. “How about that?”
“If you ask me, you should throw the fucking thing in the ocean.”
That was not exactly the reaction that Charlie was expecting. A puddle was forming on the rug around his brother’s boots, soaking the bottom of the backpack.
“You know what?” he said. “I don’t know what you’re on, or what the hell happened to you, but I’m already sick of this routine. Are you gonna tell me what’s going on? Where are Eddie and Russell?”
Harley, finally, cracked a smile, but it wasn’t the kind of smile that would gladden any heart. To Charlie, it made him look as demented as that guy from Dillingham.
“Eddie and Russell are dead.”
“Dead?” Holy Hell, what sort of trouble had these cretins gotten themselves into?
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean, sort of?”
“Eddie fell off a cliff, and Russell got eaten by wolves.”
Charlie blew out a breath, then said, “That sounds plenty dead to me.”
Harley actually chuckled. “Yeah, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”
Charlie, not overly endowed with patience to begin with, was now fresh out. For all he knew, Eddie and Russell were down at the Yardarm right now, just as stoned and out of it as his brother was. Who knew what they were ingesting? Eddie’s mom was known for cooking up some pretty wicked shit. “Pick up that damn backpack,” he said, “and give it to me.”
Harley tossed the damp backpack onto Charlie’s lap.
As Charlie started to root around inside, Harley said, “I’d be careful if I were you,” but it was already too late. Charlie had pierced a finger, and pulling it out, stuck it in his mouth to stanch the bleeding.
“What have you got in here?” Charlie said, turning the satchel over and shaking it out on the rug. A hail of broken tubes and stoppers fell out, some of them bloody or smeared with melting flesh. Charlie recoiled at the mess. “Are you nuts?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Where’d you get all this crap?”
“The colony.”
“What for?”
“Just keep shaking.”
Charlie shook it again, and this time the icon fell right into his lap. The Virgin Mary, the infant Jesus … adorned with three sparkling diamonds. Charlie’s mood changed in an instant. “Holy Mother of God.”
“Damn straight.”
Charlie angled his chair to catch the light from the desk lamp better, and to see the diamonds shine.
“This is from one of the graves?”
Harley nodded.
“And there’s more where this came from?”
“I suppose so.”
What kind of answer was that? Charlie was caught between exultation and frustration. Between the emerald cross and this icon, they had struck the mother lode, but how much more had his idiot brother left in the ground? “Then we’ll have to go back.”
“Not me.”
God, give me strength, Charlie thought. If it weren’t for this wheelchair … He was searching for the right tack and trying to keep his temper, when Harley bent over double, calmly vomiting the tea and toast onto the carpets.
Oh, Christ, Rebekah was going to have a fit.
But Harley smiled dreamily, unaffected, before toppling out of the chair, unconscious, and into the pool of puke and broken vials.
Chapter 45
The second Slater entered the quarantine tent, he could see that Lantos had gone from stable to critical. Her brow was bathed in sweat, her normally frizzy hair was limp and sticking to her scalp in clumps, her lips were a pale blue. Delirious, she was thrashing around in the improvised restraints that they had finally had time to fashion for her, and muttering about wolves and blood and mice.
“Eva, stop struggling,” he said, trying to pin her arms more firmly to the cot. “I want to give you something for the pain.”
“Hospital,” she said, barely focusing on him. “I need … to be … hospital.”
“I know, and you will be,” he said. “We’ll have you off the island very soon. I promise.” But was it a promise he could keep?
Fumbling though the minimal supplies in the tent, he searched for a fresh syringe and an ampoule of morphine. In battle zones, the medics carried morphine sticks, like corncob holders, that could be jammed right into the skin, and he’d have given anything for one of them right now. But this mission hadn’t been designed for that. He wasn’t equipped with a field bag. For that matter, he couldn’t even find an unused syringe; what he had was still down in the lab tent and autopsy chamber.
He plugged what was left of the Demerol into one of her IV drips, along with the antibiotics that were being introduced through the other, and said, “I’ll be right back. You’re going to make it. You’re going to be fine.”
Then, warning Kozak to keep watch but stay clear, he hurried out into the storm. In the wind and blowing snow, the other tents appeared as no more than green blurs, and he feared that the chopper would never even attempt a landing under such conditions. Clutching the guide ropes, he pulled himself across the colony grounds and down toward the main gates, where the lab tent stood. When he got there, he found Rudy, in his protective gear, huddled just inside the flaps, batting himself with his arms to keep warm.
“Gonna be tough on that pilot,” Rudy said, indicating the storm. “I don’t know how he’s gonna be able to make a landing in this.”
But Slater had already been considering the only alternative. “I want you to go down to the beach and get the RHI ready. We may have to launch it.”
“In this?”
“Just do it.”
Then he went into the lab, past the glass tanks teeming with white mice, and straight to the supply cabinet, which, despite the mayhem from the wolf attack, was still sealed and intact. Opening it, he took out several packets and pouches of the retroviral medications and antibiotics, stuffing them in the voluminous pockets of his coat and, when those were full, the hazmat suit he was wearing over it. He also grabbed some swabs, sterile bandages, and clean syringes.
What else? He was trying to think of everything, but his mind kept fleeing back to Nika. If Lantos was reeling from the effects of her physical injuries, then that was one thing. But if she was indeed sick with the flu, it was possible that Nika, too, had been infected by the puncture wound from the needle. With flu, much less a variant strain that had been frozen for over a hundred years, there was no telling how, or to whom, it would be communicable, and under what circumstances. One thing he did know was that Nika had to get off the island as soon as possible. He rued the day he had allowed her to come along on the mission. She had become far too precious to him, and that was a position no epidemiologist should ever find himself in.
The blood-streaked plastic panels of the autopsy chamber dangled like red ribbons at the other end of the lab; the sign declaring that this was the place where the dead rejoiced to help the living lay on the floor, with a bloody paw print on it. Slater could just make out the crimson outlines of the deacon’s body on the table inside … which reminded him of something Kozak had told him. The deacon’s door in the iconostasis was the one that led to the sanctuary, where whatever was most holy was kept. So this man, this desecrated corpse, had been the keeper of the colony’s greatest treasures and deepest secrets.
The body should not have been left on display like that. Even for someone of a purely secular temperament like Slater, it was blatantly disrespectful, and from a medical standpoint it was dangerous. Despite the hurry he was in, he took a minute to part the drapes and go inside.
The chamber was in utter disarray, just as he had left it, but something struck him as odd: the organs that had been removed were untouched in their bowls, and the body itself bore no signs of animal savagery. He knew that many carnivores, no matter how opportunistic or hungry, could sense or smell disease in carrion prey, and he wondered if that was what had happened here. Had the wolf detected something sufficiently awry to put it off its feed?
The corpse had been so compromised that no further research work could be done on it anyway, so he picked up the tarp that had been used to transport it from the cemetery and drew it over the body like a sheet. Before covering up the head, though, he noticed that the eyes, to his surprise, had shifted their direction. He remembered them as staring straight ahead, blue-gray marbles fixed in place beneath pale blond brows. But now they were looking to the left, the lashes still damp from thawing.
An effect of the decomposition, no doubt, but unnerving, all the same.
He followed their gaze … to the freezer unit in the corner.
Which stood open. And empty.
Slater instantly hunched down, not believing his own eyes, and even ran a hand around the barren shelves where he had deposited the specimens taken in situ, in addition to some of the later specimens he and Dr. Lantos had taken during the autopsy.
All he found was a couple of crushed vials, as if someone had been in such a hurry that he had dropped them before absconding with the rest. But who? Russell? What on earth could he have wanted with them?
None of it made the slightest sense.
And then he remembered that Eva – in her shock at the entry of the wolf – had thrown the paper prayer and the diamond-studded icon in the freezer, too. And they were missing, as well.
That much, finally, did make sense.
And when Rudy burst in to say that the RHI was gone, Slater exploded. “What do you mean it’s gone? Why wasn’t it secured properly?”
“It was,” Rudy shot back. “Somebody untied the ropes, and there’s footprints in the snow!” Suddenly, everything was coming together like a terrifying thunderclap. Russell wasn’t alone – his cronies Harley and Eddie must have been on the island, too.
And even now they were sailing back to Port Orlov … with the virus in their pockets.
