Vadim shook his head. “I know the truth. She is
alive.”
He felt a cold lump of fear puddle in the bottom of his
stomach. “I told you not to believe anything they said.”
“She isn’t dead,” Vadim muttered. “I can get her
back. They just want you, my boy. You understand, don’t you?”
“Marya’s gone, Vadim. Starinov’s men killed her and
then lied to you. Jesus, you know I would never have left her
behind! Why did you believe them?”
“Just get on the plane, my boy,” Vadim said, pointing the
gun at him with teary eyes and shaking hands. “Please, get on the plane
and they’ll bring her back to me.”
Beth pointed at Viktor. “You were there! Tell
him what happened!”
Viktor ignored her. He executed a mock bow towards
Vadim. “Your cooperation will be rewarded, sir,” he said as he shoved
Natalie behind him. He motioned for Beth to follow and, with a bent head,
she obeyed. Constantine knew he could kick the gun out of Vadim’s hand
and overpower the older man. But if he did, Viktor might close the hatch
and leave him behind.
He met Vadim’s pain-sore eyes. “I tried to save
her. And I would never have left her behind. When you come to your
senses, you’ll see that.” Then he tossed the rifle onto the tarmac at
Vadim’s feet and walked up onto the plane.
July 2012
Moscow, Russia
Natalie heard the plane’s hatch click shut behind
them. Viktor marched her straight to the back, where a blue-eyed man with
sharp features sat with a drink in his hand. The top of his head
reflected light, and the remaining hair on the sides was cut so short as to be
almost invisible. He looked too young to be bald; his red lips were thin
and well-defined, and his pale skin remained smooth. “Welcome,” he said,
baring short, narrow teeth that looked like those of a child.
Belial twitched.
Beware, little one. I have
met this one before.
Viktor pushed her into a seat across from the red-lipped man
and threw Beth down next to her. In the front of the plane, two armed
soldiers tossed Constantine into a seat and pointed their guns at him.
“I am Maxim Apraximovich Starinov,” the man said. “And
I believe you know why you are here. Believe me, I find it truly amusing
that two Americans will be the ones to help me unlock our tsar’s last secret.”
“Why is that?” she asked.
“Because after supposedly winning the last cold war, you are
going to give me what I need to defeat your country in the next one.”
“Those of us who went to college call that ‘ironic,’ not
amusing,” Beth said.
Natalie watched his eyes but they registered no humor, no
anger, not a single flicker of human emotion.
He’ll kill us all and
feel nothing
, she realized. Belial seconded her opinion.
Do
not let him see your fear, little one. He feeds on it.
“Please,” Starinov said. “Relax. We will not
arrive in London for several hours. Let us get to know each other.”
“We know you already,” Beth said. “We don’t like you.”
Starinov grimaced. “I fail to understand why the
world’s worst citizens are still considered its moral police. Your Uncle
Sam is a bad parent who gives you vodka before school, ice cream before bed,
and a whore for your fourteenth birthday. He steals the wallet from your
pocket and when you ask him for money, he offers what he has already taken from
you. Still the world idolizes him and turns its back on its true savior.”
“Let me guess,” Beth said. “That’s you?”
“When children cry, whom do they ask for? Not an
uncle, surely. They want their mother.”
“You don’t strike me as the nurturing type.”
Natalie thought about the ancient nicknames for the
country’s tsar and tsarina—“little father” and “little mother.” The
parent/child relationship was sown deeply into the soil of Russian
culture. “Mother Russia,” she said. “He’s talking about Mother
Russia.”
“Very good,” Starinov said. “What could be more
natural than a mother taking care of her children? Who better to decide
which children should be punished and which should be rewarded?”
“Mothers don’t punish their children by killing them,” she
said.
“Perhaps that is why there are so many bad children in the
world.”
“That’s what Hitler said.”
“Americans always invoke Hitler when a strong ruler does
something of which they disapprove.”
“How long did it take you to realize Chechnya wasn’t
Poland?”
“As long as it took your country to realize Iraq wasn’t
France.”
“Just because Vichy and al-Maliki rhyme doesn’t mean they’re
the same thing.”
“Excuse me,” Beth said, “but what the hell does any of this
have to do with the Romanovs?”
“It doesn’t,” Natalie answered. “It’s just
foreplay.”
“Call it what you will,” the prime minister said, taking a
sip of vodka from a cut-crystal glass. “But the world has never seen a
man as wealthy as the tsar. You cannot tell me you’ve never imagined
being that rich or powerful.”
“Never,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Angels don’t take bribes.”
Viktor leaned over Natalie’s shoulder. “Don’t let her
go on with this angel rubbish,” he said. “It’s a voice in her head and
she does whatever it tells her to. It told her to stab Yakov in the neck
with a brooch.”
“I had a good reason,” she snapped, glaring up at
Viktor. “You know I did.”
“Oh?” Starinov asked. “What was that?”
He won’t like this part
, Belial said.
She smiled and leaned forward, looking Starinov in the
eye. “Have you ever felt your heart stop in your chest and quiver, just
long enough to miss a beat? Afterward, once you’ve caught your breath,
your heart pumps a little faster to catch up. Does that sound familiar?”
He nodded and she continued. “That’s an angel. They read our blood
like it’s a book. Sometimes when they’re reading you they want the pages
to turn a little faster.”
Starinov blinked twice. “You’ve quite the imagination,
don’t you?”
“You can call it that if it makes you feel safer.”
Viktor snorted. “You see what I’ve been up against?”
“I do,” Starinov said. He had the same dismissive look
her shrinks had, a false smile that barely kept the disdain veiled behind a
polite public façade. He pointed at her hair clip and then at the brooch
she’d reattached to her shoulder. “Where did you get those?”
“A man gave them to me.”
“And where did he get them?”
“The Ipatiev house.”
“All property of the former tsar belongs to me now.”
“It belongs to the people of Russia and the Russian state.”
“I am the Russian state!”
“Your legislative branch would disagree.”
“Enough,” he said, slamming his empty glass on the
table. “Bring us the letters!”
Viktor walked up the plane’s center aisle to where two more
Vympel men held Constantine and put out his hand. Natalie turned in her
seat but she couldn’t see Constantine—he was situated lower than the head
cushions. She heard the rustle of fabric and paper, then a muffled
groan. Over the seat backs, she saw Viktor’s face go pale.
“What is it?” she asked, afraid for Constantine.
What
if he’s unconscious? What if they’ve killed him?
Viktor turned and held the letters up. They were
soaked through with blood. “Ivan,” Natalie said, remembering the slash
he’d given Constantine. “Viktor, can’t you do something for him?
He’ll bleed to death!”
“Like what, love? Call an ambulance?” He carried
the sodden letters to Starinov, who wrinkled his nose and pointed at
Natalie. “All yours,” Viktor said, dropping them onto the table in front
of her.
At her side, Beth gasped. “That’s Marie’s writing,
isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Natalie said. “I’ve read that one, but I
haven’t seen Olga’s.”
She separated the top letter from the bottom letter but the
blood had already thoroughly dissolved the ink. It had left nothing but
charcoal-like smudges across the page, illegible beneath the stain. At
the top of the page, the date remained untouched.
July 12, 1918.
She couldn’t even make out a signature at the bottom.
It was gone, all of it, along with any chance of finding the
password.
July 2012
Moscow, Russia
Vadim heard the Challenger take off from the private runway,
a breathless god’s exhale of heat and air. He leaned his head against the
window, incapable of rising from his chair. He reached into his jacket
pocket and pulled out a small gold picture frame.
She wore her favorite purple dress and a purple ribbon in
her hair. In her arms she clutched an irate cat that belonged to their
neighbors. She’d tied a matching ribbon around the cat’s neck. The
animal hung stiffly from her grasp, as if willing the girl to put it
down. No matter how many times Marya teased and tormented the cat, it
tolerated her caresses with remarkable good grace for a full five
minutes. Marya loved it as if it were her own, smuggling smoked salmon in
her pockets in case she saw it on the way to school.
He stroked the glass over her cheek, unable to believe he
would never touch her or hold her again. Constantine had been right all
along. Starinov lied to him and he’d swallowed it up.
But who
could blame me?
he thought.
Who would believe someone could murder
this tiny person, a girl who’d barely begun to live?
His lips quivered and a pile of ash fell from his cigarette
to the floor. Now he faced the prospect of telling Liliya. He knew
his daughter’s temperament. She would want to hate him, but because of
what he and Valery had done for her, she would feel unable to express that
anger. The resentment would build inside her every day until it grew and
spread, killing her like a cancer.
For himself, he knew he was finished. He’d heard
stories of snipers with hundreds of kills whose steady hands never faltered
until a single shot went astray and killed the wrong person. Then the
sniper lost his confidence and his abilities, thanks to shaking hands or cloudy
eyes. Despite hundreds of repetitions and the body’s own muscle memory,
the mind lost what had made it special in the first place—control. He’d
believed he was being so careful to reward loyalty and honesty in his agents,
but he’d obviously failed. How long had Viktor been working for
Maxim? How long had he been feeding the FSB information from the bureau’s
private databases?
He could never trust his own judgment again.
Maxim had done more than kill Marya. He’d destroyed
Vadim and Liliya, too. Maybe that’s what he wanted all along. Had
Constantine’s rusalka been right?
At least my soul is spoken for,
she’d
said.
Yours is still available to the highest bidder.
But he hadn’t sold his soul. He simply hadn’t used it.
You must leave Liliya with more than this
, he
thought.
You must make her believe you tried to set it right.
He ground out his cigarette on the floor and texted his
driver. There was still one person who might be able to help.
July 2012
En route to London, England
Natalie glanced out the window as the Mercedes S-class flew
down the M3 from Farnborough to London. It was late afternoon and most of
the cars she saw were moving in the opposite direction, away from the
city. The Mercedes, closely followed by a second identical sedan, had
little difficulty weaving past colicky Peugeots and sputtering Vauxhalls.
Separated from Constantine and her sister, Natalie rode in
the lead car with Starinov, Viktor, and a bodyguard. At first, she noted
landmarks as they passed: the ring road, a reservoir, a big stadium, and
two separate river crossings. But the Romanov letters, clutched in her
hand, thrummed with a life and energy of their own and drew her attention back
to them. Part of her held out hope that if she stared at them hard
enough, the dissolved letters would reform.
Belial, I need a miracle
,
she begged.
I’m sorry, little one,
he answered.
You know
it doesn’t work like that.
He tapped his fingers against her brain
and she gasped with the impact of lightning-bright pain.
You know that
if you want me to get you out of this, all you have to do is ask.
No
, she commanded.
You’ll take over and
you’ll fight and you won’t care who gets hurt.
Belial shrugged his shoulders in defeat. Every wingtip
brushed her brain case, delivering the sting of a needle piercing flesh.
She closed her eyes before Starinov or Viktor could see her cry.
From the safety of the darkness behind her eyelids, she
tried to piece together what she remembered from Marie’s letter.
Somewhere there had to be an unusual word or phrase, a bit of diction that
seemed wrong. If she could just find one loose thread and pull it until
it unraveled, maybe she could guess the password.
Suddenly, it occurred to her that she was looking for help
in the wrong place. What could Belial possibly know? If the
Romanovs had selected the password, they were the ones she needed to ask.
She tried to clear her mind and let the ghosts of the Romanov children float
over her, the way she’d seen them in hundreds of photographs and film
reels. She saw Tatiana standing in the snow, Anastasia with her skirt
bunched around her ankles in the waters of Livadia, Olga turning her head
sideways from a book to bare the beginnings of a smile, Alexei holding a ball
above his dog’s head. They were one of the richest families in the
history of the world, yet one of the most tragic. What could it all mean
in the end? How would they have chosen a single word to encapsulate their
lives? “Help me,” she whispered. “Help me understand.”