The Romanov Cross: A Novel (8 page)

So she had heard; in her honor, her father had freed some youthful political prisoners on the day of her birth.

But as for what chains she herself would ever break, the monk had never said, and she had never had the courage to ask.

Her mother was drawing the
starets
toward the bed, and Dr. Botkin diplomatically stepped away. Ana knew that there was no love lost between the doctor and Rasputin, but she also knew that her mother had placed her ultimate faith in the holy man and not the physician. Everyone else knew it, too.

Most of all, Rasputin.

The monk stood at the foot of the bed, towering over the ailing Tsarevitch, and with his eyes raised to heaven, began to murmur a prayer. In one hand, he clutched a heavy pectoral cross—emerald-encrusted and hanging from his neck on a silver chain. Ana had once seen it in the cabinets of her mother’s mauve boudoir, along with the rest of the renowned Romanov jewels.

His beard jutted out like a stiff black beehive, and his words rumbled like the echo of a distant train. Low, and constant, and though Ana could barely make out what he was saying, the sound alone was strangely comforting. She could see her brother’s tortured eyes turning toward Rasputin, and after a minute or two, his moaning ceased, and his breathing appeared to become more regular. It was a transformation she had seen before though neither she, nor anyone else, seemed to know what caused it. Her mother ascribed it to the power of God—“the Lord speaks through Father Grigori”—but the court physicians remained baffled.

Rasputin came around to the side of the bed and clasped the boy’s hands between his own rough paws. “The bleeding will stop,” he said, “the pain will go away.” He stroked the Tsarevitch’s hands, as the Tsaritsa
looked on through a flood of her own tears. He repeated these words, again and again, before saying, “You will rest, Alexei. You will rest. And when you wake, you will be better. Your leg will not be so swollen, you will not feel the pain.” He leaned forward, his beard covering the boy’s face and the emerald cross dangling into the bedclothes, to kiss him lightly on his forehead. “And you will sing out for your oatmeal with honey and jam.” He smiled, a smile as crooked as the part that ran down the center of his matted hair, and uttered another prayer under his breath. As he stepped back from the bed, his muddy boots left a puddle on the carpet.

But Alexei wasn’t writhing in pain. He was, miraculously, asleep, and with a silent wave of his arms, Rasputin—as if he were the Tsar himself—ushered them all into the next room.

“You, too, little Ana,” he whispered, draping a hand on the shoulder of her blue silk robe, before closing the doors to the bedchamber behind him. The emerald cross, swinging against his cassock, winked in the glow from the hearth, and on a sudden impulse, she kissed it.

Rasputin said, “Ah, Christ speaks to you, doesn’t he, little one?”

Ana did not know the answer to that, any more than she knew why she had just done what she just did.

But Father Grigori smiled through his broken teeth as if he knew full well.

Although Dr. Levinson had spoken with a touch of hyperbole, Slater soon discovered that she’d meant what she said. He was instructed to draw up a game plan and risk assessment, a preliminary budget (though Dr. Levinson had made it clear on his way out that cost was to be no object), put together a team of whatever specialists he would require, and have it all on her desk in seventy-two hours. Normally, it was the kind of thing that would have taken weeks, if not months—not only to be put together but to be vetted by everyone else in the chain of command. But again, Dr. Levinson had made it plain that this project would have the highest-priority clearance not only from AFIP, but from the Army, the Air Force, and the Coast Guard, all of which would have to be involved at one stage or another. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had also offered their full cooperation and support. “But I don’t want them meddling,” Levinson had said. “They take a month to make a cup of coffee.”

Dr. Slater had returned to his offices, rolled up his sleeves, and started making out the ideal roster to assist him. He would need a team of people who were as dedicated as they were skilled, and as competent as they were fearless. They would be performing some of the most sensitive and dangerous work imaginable, and under what
were sure to be very tricky and adverse conditions. It was one thing to do an autopsy in a state-of-the-art lab; it was altogether another to take organ core samples in an open graveyard, on a freezing island, where the ground beneath your feet could give way at any time. He would have to choose his people very carefully.

First of all, the logistics would be crucial. There would be tons of gear—quite literally—that would have to be brought to the island site. Everything from decontamination tents to jackhammers, generators to refrigerators (even in Alaska). For a job this big and complicated, there was only one man he trusted—Sergeant Jerome Groves, who was due to be redeployed to some hot zone in the Middle East at the end of the week. All things considered, he might be glad to get the call.

Slater put his name at the top of the list.

The next thing he’d need would be that geologist he’d been thinking about earlier. Before Slater and his team put even one shovel into the earth, they would need to use ground-penetrating radar to assess what lay beneath the soil, and to make sure—before doing irreversible damage—that the coffins, and the bodies inside, had not shifted or become separated from each other over the past century. During a typhoid outbreak in Croatia, he had once worked with a Russian who had read the underground water tables as easily as if he were reading a menu in a restaurant. He was attached at the time to the Trofimuk United Institute of Geology, Geophysics and Mineralogy, the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but Slater had no idea what he was doing now. Still, Professor Vassily Kozak was the man he wanted, and he added his name to the list.

As for the virology and autopsy work, Slater could take care of most of that himself. But he would still need another pair of hands, and another set of eyes, to assist him in the cemetery, and to help him run the lab. It took him only a few seconds to come up with Dr. Eva Lantos, a virologist with a Ph.D. from M.I.T. and a mind like a steel trap. The last time he’d heard from her, she’d been living in Boston with her latest girlfriend, and working on the mole-rat genome, but if anybody was up for an adventure, it would be Eva.

Slater made a few calls, left a few messages that were, because of the top secret nature of the mission, a lot more cryptic than he’d have liked, and started burrowing through the accompanying paperwork the AFIP had gathered for him. By the time he had written a preliminary request list and sent the memo back to Dr. Levinson’s office, he glanced out the window and saw that it was already dark out; he’d forgotten to have lunch and had somehow powered himself through the day with nothing but black coffee and a packet of trail mix he’d found in his desk. As a doctor—particularly one who suffered from recurring bouts of malaria—he knew perfectly well that he needed to keep to a healthy and well-regulated diet, and do whatever he could to lower his stress levels. But that was a laugh, of course. He had no sooner escaped spending five years in the brig than he’d been posted to an Arctic island on a Level-3 mission. Fishing his pill case out of his pocket, he swallowed a couple of Chloriquine tablets, flicked off the desk lamp, and went down to get something to eat.

Because of the erratic schedules of scientists and researchers, the cafeteria was kept open around the clock, so he grabbed a quick sandwich and a Snapple. A couple of people said hi, and “Weren’t you overseas somewhere?” and he realized, with relief, that the news of his assault on a commanding officer and his subsequent court-martial hadn’t received much play here. The civilians on staff had no idea of its gravity—all they knew about military discipline was what they’d seen on episodes of
JAG
—and the army personnel were so involved in their own projects and plans, they weren’t concerned with anyone else’s.

He ate alone, and after tossing the sandwich wrapper and the empty bottle into the trash, he considered heading home, but then he thought, to what? An empty apartment? He could always go to the gym and work out, but there was something so forlorn about the gym at night. The fluorescent lights, the acrid odor of sweat that had been building up all day, the weary attendant mopping the locker-room floor. Not to mention all the other guys who, like him, had nowhere better to go.

And even if his body was flagging, his mind was still percolating
just fine right now. That was both his blessing and his curse. It always had been. If his brain were equipped with an on/off switch, he had yet to find it. Nights were the worst. His thoughts could take him anywhere and everywhere; it was like a wild ride at an amusement park that never stopped. And right now the roller-coaster car was hurtling him along toward one destination in particular—the AFIP Tissue Repository, housed next door in the archives of the old Army Medical Museum. It had been founded, with his typical foresight and wisdom, by Abraham Lincoln himself—and it hadn’t changed all that much ever since.

The most comprehensive collection of tissue samples in the world, the Repository contained over 3 million specimens—among them pieces of lung tissue from a private at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, the first American soldier who had succumbed to the 1918 flu. Before setting out for the wilds of Alaska, Dr. Slater wanted to see the slides himself and get a look at this ancient enemy he was about to confront.

But when he tried his security card on the main concourse leading to the museum, he found there was a glitch in his clearance—no doubt another problem arising from his military discharge. And though he knew he could get it fixed the next day, that didn’t help him now. He passed the laminated card, which he wore on a chain around his neck, under the scanner one more time, just for luck, and watched as the lights stayed red. A third try he suspected would set off an internal alarm. He waited around in the corridor for a minute or two, hoping to piggyback on someone else going his way, but at this time of night the offices were largely deserted and no one else was around, much less heading over to the gloomy confines of the old museum.

Still, there was another route, and though it was a lot more circuitous, it would allow him to circumvent the particular security system obstructing him now. Going back toward his office, he took a sharp right through the environmental and toxicology wing, descended the fire stairs to the garage level, then walked briskly across the unheated, and nearly empty, garage. Not briskly enough, he thought, as he felt a sudden chill. He picked up the pace, scurrying down a flight of crumbling stairs that opened into a subbasement corridor, originally designed
for the discreet unloading of cadavers by horse-drawn carriages in the years following the Civil War.

The hallways here were made of red brick, faded with age, and the lights in the ceiling, each one in a little wire nest, were incandescent bulbs, and low-wattage at that. The doors he passed bore frosted-glass panes, with gold hand lettering and labels that read
HISTOLOGY, WAR WOUND RECORDS
, or
DEPARTMENT OF PALEOPATHOLOGY
. It was hard to believe that this warren was still occupied, but Slater knew that the whole Walter Reed complex had long since outgrown its campus, and no nook or cranny was allowed to lie fallow for long.

As he turned the corner toward the Tissue Repository, he came upon the old display cases that had once been part of the public exhibitions. Although they were no longer part of any organized tours, the cabinets exhibited, on dusty shelves behind thick glass, a collection of formaldehyde-filled jars. Some of them dated back to the midnineteenth century, and held specimens of gross physical anomalies—twins conjoined at the torso, or fetuses born with the fused legs and feet of
sirenomella
victims. Because of their fishlike tails and amphibious eyes, they were named after the mythical sirens, or mermaids, and had seldom survived their birth by more than a day. Now, many decades later, they still floated, silently, intact, and unchanged, in the limbo of their murky jars.

Just inside the doors to the Repository, a night clerk in a crisply pressed tan uniform, his head down and earbuds in place, was typing away on his computer keyboard. He looked up in surprise when Slater entered, quickly yanked the buds, straightened in his chair, and slid a clipboard across the desk for Slater to sign in.

“I’ll need your ID, too,” he said. Slater held out his security card, while the clerk jotted down the number, then checked it online against the name on the register. Slater prayed that a problem wouldn’t crop up, but the clerk nodded, and said, “What can I do for you, sir?”

Slater explained what he was after, but as the clerk started to get up from his chair, he said, “You can stay put. I know my way around in here, and I can get it myself.”

“You sure?” the clerk said, sounding like he’d love to get back to
what he’d been doing. Slater caught a glimpse on the computer of some video war game.

“Yes. It won’t take me long.”

And then, inexplicably, the clerk pulled some Kleenex from a box and handed a wad to Slater.

“What’s this for?”

“Pardon my saying so, sir, but you’re sweating.” He gestured at his forehead, and when Slater dabbed at his skin, the tissues did indeed come away damp.

“Thanks,” Slater said, “I guess I was in too big a hurry to get here.”

The clerk shrugged and, surveying the spooky vault, said, “That’ll be a first, sir.”

The Repository was huge, with several chambers interconnecting under brick archways, all of them retrofitted with rows of bright track lights mounted above microscope-equipped workstations. Long aisles were lined with endless rows of metal cabinets, each of them divided into drawers, no deeper than a deck of cards, containing the tissue and bone samples. Organized first by the pathology, then by the organic or anatomical origin, and then again by era, the samples had been gathered and sent to the archives from barracks and battlefields all over the world, and unless size was an issue, the oldest ones in any category were usually deposited in the bottom drawers of each section. It took Slater, who hadn’t been down in these archives for several years, a half hour just to find his way into the right corner of the right room. It was the last chamber in the chain, and like all the others he had passed through, no one else was in it.