“A letter that never arrived. Nat, they’re all
lying. Why can’t you see that?”
“It exists! It’s still out there, in someone’s attic
or sewn into the lining of a coat that’s hanging in the Moscow Goodwill.
Russians are superstitious…they don’t swear to a priest unless they’re telling
the truth.”
“How many people swore Anna Anderson was Anastasia?”
Beth got up and circled the room, a black-clad vulture in Blahniks. “I
humored you the first time you brought this up and I bit my tongue the
second. But I have to tell you, Nat, you’re going
Rain Man
on me
with this one. There is no missing money. The guard’s granddaughter
lied and you fell for it. Just accept it, all right?”
She’s wrong
, Belial said.
Why can’t you make
her see?
I’m trying
, Natalie thought. Tears stung her
eyes and she fought the urge to crawl under Beth’s desk. “The Bank of
England said—”
“Fuck the Bank of England!” Beth looked up at the
clock and swore. “I have a make-or-break press conference in an hour,
Nat! I have a kid to raise, an ex draining me for alimony, a chancellor
breathing down my neck, and I just went on a date with someone who thinks the
Weimar Republic is part of the Hoth System. I don’t have the luxury of
living in an alternate universe right now! If you’re going to help me,
fine. If not, go find someone else to listen to your nutball conspiracy
theories.”
“Oh, I helped you,” Natalie said, glancing at the pile of
cards on the desk. “I was going to ease you into it before you decided to
be a bitch about it.”
Beth turned the color of calamine lotion. “Nat, you
didn’t! Tell me you didn’t!” She snatched up the cards, shuffling
through them.
“You’ll have everyone’s attention around the two minute
mark. Be ready.” She grabbed her flask and stumbled out of the room
before her sister could see her cry.
July 2012
San Francisco, California
Ambassador Mikhail Kadyrov sat down at his desk and reached
for the steaming cup of coffee sitting on the blotter. He pinched off the
lid and inhaled. Coffee was one thing this country got right. He
had never liked the tar-black sludge his mother served at home in the
Caucasus. “Olenka, you’re an angel,” he called to his assistant.
Thin as a rail and hopelessly addicted to more than one
Columbian export, Olenka knew every coffee counter in the city. “It’s
shade-grown, the old-fashioned way,” she answered. “Not these bullshit
hybrid plants with overgrown leaves.”
He sniffed the coffee suspiciously and picked up the
envelope sitting on his desk—an 11”x13” manila with no return address. A
single sheet of paper slipped out, typed with block capital letters. He
read it quickly. When he reached the bottom of the page, all thought of
coffee had vanished.
“Olenka,” he said, snatching the envelope and marching it
out to her. “When did this arrive?”
“I don’t know. What is it?”
“It was on my desk, next to the coffee. You must have
put it there.”
“I didn’t, I swear.”
“Tell me the truth, Olenka.” He looked into her eyes,
small and wide-set, layered with multiple hues of shiny gray powder.
“This is important.”
“I put your coffee on your desk and came right back out
here.”
“Was the envelope already there?”
She shrugged. “I think so.”
“I need you to be sure.”
“Jesus, I don’t know! I didn’t know there’d be a
quiz!”
“Have any delivery men come into the office?”
“It’s too early for that. What’s going on? Am I
in trouble?”
Kadyrov felt the contents of his stomach churn. It had
to be a joke. It was simply not possible that someone in San Francisco
had managed to locate what the Soviets had been unable to find since
1918. Every Cheka agent since the era of Dzerzhinsky, including his
father, had been told about it—all with no luck. Most of them believed it
didn’t exist.
But it did exist. His father had believed it.
And now someone else did, too.
Beads of sweat pearled on his forehead. Who could he
tell? What if this was a joke, a former KGB agent having a laugh at his
expense? He’d lose his cushy California posting and be sent to a
third-world hellhole.
He had to choose his confidante wisely. Men had been
buried for less.
“Don’t let anyone in,” he ordered, stumbling into his office
and closing the door.
The envelope was covered with his prints, but surely Valery
could do what they did on American TV shows: find trace elements of a rare
mineral that pinpointed the author’s location or build a profile based on word
choice and handwriting analysis. Whoever this person was, he or she had
breached embassy security and must be prosecuted. At least the
closed-circuit security cameras would have an image, something for Valery to go
on.
He looked again at the letter. The author claimed to
have an accomplice, an American professor prominent within her field whose
reputation for scholarly accuracy was impeccable. It was meant to be a
threat, Mikhail knew. A veiled warning that killing the author of the
note wouldn’t solve anything—there was someone else who had the information,
someone whose disappearance wouldn’t go unnoticed.
They both had to be silenced. If what the author
claimed was true, a single person stood to become one of the richest, most
powerful people on the face of the earth: a new Tsar. It could
never be allowed.
He reached for the phone.
July 2012
Moscow, Russia
The phone rang with a shrill double beep, its red light
blinking furiously. Vadim Primakov covered it with an open file folder
and kept working.
I don’t have time for this
, he thought.
The Kremlin wanted to cut his agency’s funding by another ten percent, putting
them back at a level he hadn’t seen since 1994.
That bastard Starinov
is reducing us to a footnote in history.
Founded by Yeltsin to circumvent FSK infighting, the Public
Security Intelligence Bureau was meant to be an independent intelligence
service staffed with people Yeltsin could trust—people who had never worked for
the KGB, NKVD, or FSK. Their mandate ran from counter-terrorism to
surveillance and action services. But when Yeltsin handed the reins of
power to Vladimir Putin, a former FSB director, the bureau became an unwanted
stepchild. Putin reduced the bureau’s agents to fact-checkers for FSB
journalists and escorts for foreign dignitaries. Now, Prime Minister
Maxim Starinov was determined to finish what Putin began—he’d already begun
dismantling any bureaucratic entity not staffed with his own minions.
The only way to save his funding was to attack someone
else’s, but wading through his stolen copy of the FSB budget would take
hours. Nikulin had dropped it off at 6:00 p.m. and it had to be returned
by morning. The paper was spectrally controlled, making it impossible to
photocopy or scan. Eighty pages of densely populated spreadsheets
remained and it was already past 9:30 p.m.
But the damn phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Vadim
counted eight rings, then ten, then twelve. He lifted the file folder to
check the LCD readout. The caller’s ID and number were blocked, but the
bureau’s decryption software displayed the digits as it identified them.
When he saw the country code for the United States pop up, he swore.
Problems in America never simply went away.
He picked up the handset. “Go away. I’m busy.”
“
Dobryi vyecher
, Vadim Petrovich. I am Mikhail
Vasilievich Kadyrov, Consul General in San Francisco.”
“What the hell do you want?”
“I need your help.”
“Call your Ministry. I don’t work for them.”
“Valery said you were the one I should call.”
Vadim swore. The powerful Chairman of the
Investigative Committee had erased an embezzlement charge against his daughter,
making it possible for her to find work and take care of his granddaughter
again. It was a small favor compared to what many others asked for;
still, he should have known Valery would keep score. “What does he want?”
“I received an anonymous letter here in San Francisco,”
Mikhail began. “From someone who claimed he has access to the lost
tsarist funds in the Bank of England.”
Vadim cut him short. “I’m not interested in ancient
history. Tell Valery I have better things to do.”
“Are you familiar with the Rumkowski file?”
Vadim shivered. No one had mentioned that file aloud
in years, not since Yeltsin. He reached to the back of his desk phone and
toggled off the automatic recording switch. “What about it?”
“Do you remember what it said?”
“Of course.”
“Whoever wrote this letter claims to have the password.”
Vadim frowned. “But no civilian knows there
is
a password. The contents of that file were never declassified. The
only people who saw it are in the Kremlin or in the ground. As a matter
of fact, Mikhail Vasilievich, how do
you
know about it?”
“My father was one of the men Rumkowski used to infiltrate
the bank.”
“Jesus Christ.” Vadim scribbled a note to have
Kadyrov’s file brought up from the archives. “What else does it
say?”
“The writer claims two of the four Grand Duchesses wrote
letters to people on the outside during their captivity, each with the password
inside. Just before the family was murdered in 1918, those letters were
smuggled out of the Ipatiev House—by this person’s great-grandfather.”
“Rumkowski didn’t say anything about the password leaving
that house.”
“No,” the ambassador said pointedly. “He didn’t.”
Alarm bells began ringing in Vadim’s head. Something
Yeltsin had said to him once, when he asked why Yeltsin chose to raze the
mansion in which the Romanovs were massacred. “For all we knew,” Yeltsin
said, “the password was still in there. We had to take it apart piece by
piece. It was the only way to know for sure.” That had been in
1977, when Yeltsin was first secretary of the Sverdlovsk District Central
Committee and Vadim a junior secretary in the Moscow City Party
Committee. No one had ever said anything about looking for the password
outside
the Ipatiev house—until now.
Still, this lunatic letter writer was probably a fortune
hunter, someone who read too many thrillers. “What does he want?”
“Asylum, citizenship, and immunity.”
Vadim snorted. “Is that all?”
“He also says that if we don’t give him what he wants, he’ll
sell the password to the highest bidder.”
“Does he really think someone will pay more than the tsar
left behind?”
“Think about it, Vadim. Maybe there’s more than money
in the account. If he knows about the password, what else might he
know?”
It was a possibility Vadim hadn’t even considered.
“Why does this fool believe we’ll do as he asks?”
“Because he’s already shared his information with someone
else, a professor named Elizabeth Brandon. I had to look her up, but it
seems she’s quite well known in university circles. Her new book is about
Tsar Nicholas II. It’s a revisionist history, of all things.”
“Jesus Christ, I hate Americans.”
“The letter writer says he’ll contact me again within 24
hours. If he doesn’t like my answer, he’ll offer the password to the
Chechens and then the Georgians.”
“He’s bluffing. He’d never give it up.”
“Can we be sure of that? If he gets enough money from
the fanatics in Grozny, he might be better off letting the rest of us fight
over the tsar’s inheritance while he retires on a beach in the South
Pacific.” Kadyrov breathed out a deep, troubled sigh. “Vadim, I
know this is a bad situation. We don’t know what’s in the account or if
it even exists. But Rumkowski believed it. My father did, too.”
“And you?” Vadim asked. “What do you believe?”
“My father wouldn’t have wasted his life looking for
something that doesn’t exist.”
Vadim tried to remember the last time he’d read Rumkowski’s
file. The damn thing had six levels of classification on it and he’d only
ever reached the fourth. What was in the other two levels? Could
there be definitive proof that the tsar’s secret account actually
existed? It wasn’t the kind of thing he could simply ask about.
People associated with that file had a strange habit of disappearing. “This
ends here, Mikhail. Tell your lunatic he will have to deal with us in
person.”
“You’re going to negotiate with him?”
“I can’t let him wave those letters at the Chechens or the
Georgians. Saakashvili would snatch them in an instant if he thought it
would bring the Kremlin crawling back to him. If Starinov found out, we
wouldn’t live long enough to take a piss. When your lunatic contacts you,
arrange a meeting at his home. No public places, under any
circumstances. I’ll send one of my men to handle it.”
“Handle it?” the ambassador repeated. “I don’t want
any trouble, Vadim Petrovich.”
“Russia does not negotiate with terrorists, separatists,
mobsters, pirates, or American lunatics who think they know this county’s
history better than their own.”
“And Professor Brandon? Even if you kill this man, she
still knows everything.”
“The Public Security Intelligence Bureau will handle
this. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir. Shall I call Valery back?”
“No. I’ll handle it. Speak of this to no
one. The matter is closed, Mikhail Vasilievich.”
Vadim hung up the phone. He missed the small click on
the line that indicated he was not the only one to hear the ambassador’s story.