Eternal Empire

Eternal Empire

“In
Eternal Empire
, lost worlds and mysterious legends collide with modern-day resonance. Alec Nevala-Lee dishes up another sparkling and complex kaleidoscope of Russian lore, from Scythians and saints to serpents and spies, as two resourceful heroines race to decipher the buried secret.”

—Katherine Neville,
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Eight
and
The Fire

City of Exiles

“Alec Nevala-Lee creates a dazzlingly detailed and authentic world of intrigue, weaving a harrowing tale that will enthrall readers with an undercurrent of political ambiguity that evokes le Carré and an intricate, continent-crossing plot reminiscent of
The Day of the Jackal
. Delivering a complex mix of espionage, European politics, Old Testament riddles, and Cold War mysteries, Nevala-Lee is clearly emerging as one of the most elegant new voices in suspense literature.”

—David Heinzmann, author of
Throwaway Girl

“Stylish. . . . Introduces Mormon FBI agent Rachel Wolfe, who's come to London to work with the British police . . . à la Clarice Starling.”

—
Publishers Weekly

The Icon Thief

“Alec Nevala-Lee is no debut author; he must have been a thriller writer in some past life. This one has everything: great writing, great characters, great story, great bad guy, and a religious conspiracy to boot.
The Icon Thief
is smart, sophisticated, and has enough fast-paced action to keep anyone up past midnight. I'm jealous.”

—
New York Times
bestselling author Paul Christopher

“Twists and turns aplenty lift this thriller above the rest. From the brutal thugs of the Russian mafia to the affected inhabitants of the American art world, this book introduces a cast of believable and intriguing characters. Add a story line where almost nothing is as it first appears, and where the plot turns around on itself to reveal startling contradictions, and the result is a book that grips and holds the reader like a vise. I devoured it in a single sitting.”

—national bestselling author James Becker

“Alec Nevala-Lee comes roaring out of the gate with a novel that's as thrilling as it is thought-provoking, as unexpected as it is erudite.
The Icon Thief
is a wild ride through a fascinating and morally complex world, a puzzle Duchamp himself would have applauded. Bravo.”

—
national bestselling author Jesse Kellerman

“Nevala-Lee's cerebral, exciting debut proves there's plenty of life left in the
Da Vinci Code–
style thriller as long as fresh venues and original characters enhance the familiar plot elements and genre tropes.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

The Icon Thief

City of Exiles

ALEC NEVALA-LEE

A SIGNET SELECT BOOK

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA), 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

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First published by Signet Select, an imprint of New American Library,

a division of Penguin Group (USA)

Copyright © Alec Nevala-Lee, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

SIGNET SELECT and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA).

ISBN 978-1-101-62770-9

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

     The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

If the polar sea ice does retreat, the colossal untapped stores of oil, gas and minerals below present the prospect of riches unimaginable for the Kremlin. There were incidental rumours about a more cryptic geopolitics floating among journalists at Moscow dinner parties, claiming that President Putin had asked to have a piece of the polar seabed brought back for him, as one of the entrances to the underground kingdom of Shambhala in the hollow earth is believed to lie beneath the Pole.

—Rachel Polonsky,
Molotov's Magic Lantern

 

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

—Winston Churchill, September 6, 1943

I vag
uely reflected that a pistol shot can be heard at a considerable distance.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

A
rkady arrived at the museum at ten. When a guard in white gloves asked him to open his bag, he unslung it from his shoulder and raised the front flap. The guard ran a penlight across the main compartment and thanked him absently. Arkady nodded and took the bag back again, careful to keep it upright. Then he continued into the entrance hall, past the masonry piers and urns of flowers, and headed with the other visitors into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

On this weekday morning, half an hour after opening, the museum was not especially crowded. Looking around the bright domed space, Arkady took in the flocks of tourists and children, the retirees and art students, and, above all, the guards in their white shirts and black ties. He had known that the search of his bag would be perfunctory, but he was more concerned by another detail. The guards at the doors only rarely carried guns, but today one was wearing a sidearm.

A few minutes later, he was climbing the grand staircase, a visitor's pin secured to his bag. Instead of passing under the arch into the main line of galleries, he turned and went down the hallway of drawings to his left. Later accounts would emphasize his dark complexion and Uzbek features, but in reality, he was simply a slender, rather handsome young man of medium height, with something of the bearing of a former soldier, which was precisely what he was.

He continued into the next wing, a gallery lined with statues by Rodin and Barye, the famous sculptor of hunting scenes. Most of the visitors were filing toward the far end of the hall, where a special exhibition was taking place, but Arkady headed for a door to one side. Security footage would later reveal that he hesitated only briefly before crossing the threshold.

Inside, the gallery was quiet, with a single pair of visitors in sight. It was a large red space with a parquet floor and a bench set beneath the skylight in the ceiling. As Arkady went in, he noticed a guard in a blue polyester suit standing in the doorway of the next room, her back turned.

He had visited this gallery twice before. Without looking, he knew that the walls were covered in canvases by Ingres and Géricault, with one particularly notable portrait, of an elongated nude glancing back over one shoulder, hanging directly across from him. To his left was the work he was here to see, but he did not look at it yet. Instead, he pretended to study the canvas beside it, a painting of a woman being abducted by two men on horses, as he waited for his moment to come.

At last, the other visitors drifted out of the room. Aside from the guard in the doorway, he had the gallery to himself. Keeping her uniform in his peripheral vision, Arkady turned away from the picture before him, his heart quickening, and approached his true object of desire.

It was not a work likely to catch the eye of a casual viewer, a small oil painting, thirteen by twenty inches, depicting a landscape of low mountains. In the distance lay a body of water, perhaps an inland sea. A few groups of herdsmen in pastoral clothes were scattered across the composition. At the center, a woman, naked from the waist up, was milking a mare with a white stripe down its nose.

But the most striking figure was a man lying before a crude hut, clearly out of place among the rest. He was leaning on one elbow against the sloping ground, his body draped in a loose robe, and his head was bowed, as if he was brooding over the remembered geography of some faraway land.

It is not impossible that Arkady Kagan, as he stood before the painting, felt some kinship with this model of exile, so far from home, cut off from those he knew and loved. A second later, however, the feeling passed, and he noticed that the guard in the doorway was gone.

Arkady looked around the gallery. He was alone. It was sooner than he had expected, but he had no choice but to move now.

Opening the side pocket of his shoulder bag, he removed and undid a folded magazine, which was held shut by a pair of rubber bands. Inside was a flat glass bottle the size of a pint flask. Arkady unscrewed the top, allowing a puff of white vapor to escape, and turned back to the picture. He gave it one last look, staring into the face of the exiled poet, and before he could lose his courage, he took a step back and flung the contents of the flask at the painting.

It would later be determined, from the pattern of splashes, that he had swung the bottle three times. The restoration report would note in passing that if the picture had been doused with water at once, it might have been saved, but the guards had been understandably reluctant to act without further instruction. By the time the conservators arrived, the acid had eaten through to the underlying wood, carbonizing the oils and leaving three irreparable holes.

But all that lay in the future. As soon as Arkady had emptied the bottle, he let it fall to his feet. From his jacket pocket, which had not been searched, he drew a hunting knife. Unsheathing it, he went up to the picture and lunged forward, plunging the knife into the top of the painting, above the central mountain. Then he pulled it down, using both hands, in a long vertical slash, slicing through the image of the distant sea and gouging the wood beneath.

He took a step back, breathing hard. His plan, at this point, had been to drop the knife and go to the bench at the center of the room to calmly await arrest. Indeed, he might well have remembered to do this, altering everything that followed, had he not heard a startled gasp from behind him.

Arkady turned. Standing in the doorway was the guard from before. For the first time, he saw that she was surprisingly young, with a sheaf of brown curls pulled back from her forehead. He saw her eyes flick toward the painting, taking in the damage, and then dart back to meet his own.

If the guard had shouted for him to stay where he was, he would have done so gladly. Instead, as she looked at him in silence, he was suddenly overwhelmed by shame. Before she could say anything, he turned and walked away, the knife still clutched in one hand. Behind him, the stream of melting paint was flowing down the wall, pooling in a black puddle on the parquet floor.

Leaving the room, Arkady found himself back in the main gallery, but he did not return the way he had come. Instead, he headed to the right, ignoring the elevators, and passed into a pair of galleries devoted to Cypriot art. Beyond this was a staircase, which he took, his pulse thudding somewhere up around his ears. As he rounded the landing and continued down the next flight of stairs, a cooler part of his brain reminded him that the alarm would have gone out by now to the museum's communication center, which had a direct hotline to the police.

He descended to ground level and entered the splendidly renovated galleries of Greek and Roman antiquities, his footfalls echoing on the marble. Around him, visitors were staring, but he ignored their looks and pressed on past the headless statues. Only a hundred yards lay between him and the outside world.

Up ahead, where the galleries gave way to the entrance hall, a guard was speaking into a handheld transceiver. When he saw Arkady, his eyes widened, and he lowered his radio with a shout:
“Hey, you—”

Arkady went past him without pausing. Part of him knew he should halt, but instead, he pushed his way through a knot of startled visitors at the ticket desk. The only way out was through the main doors.

Passing the coat check to his right, he heard more shouts, but he kept going. The exit was forty steps away. Beyond the row of stanchions, he could make out the light of the summer day outside.

He was nearly there when he heard another shout, the meaning of which became clear only later, and felt a pair of blows strike his chest.

Arkady became aware of two things at once. The first was that he was still holding the knife, which he had intended to leave in the gallery. The second was that he had been shot.

Looking up, he saw a guard standing before him, his face pale and disbelieving, his sidearm drawn. For a second, the two men stood eye to eye. Then Arkady glanced down at his chest. With his free hand, he touched the patch of warmth that was already spreading across his shirt, and then he fell to the floor.

Arkady rolled onto his back, the knife falling from his fingers at last. In the ceiling far above, he saw one of three circular skylights, which reminded him, curiously, of the three holes the acid had left. Feeling nothing but a strange satisfaction, he closed his eyes to that perfectly white sky, the blood pooling across the floor beneath him, and breathed out for the last time.

In the aftermath of his death, there would be rumors of a racial component in the decision to open fire, leading to a number of protests. Ultimately, however, an investigative commission would determine that the guard in question, a museum veteran of ten years, had mistaken the knife in the other man's hand for a gun. Since the situation had given him ample reason to regard Arkady as dangerous, it was concluded that the shooting had simply been a regrettable accident.

Afterward, the press would compare the incident to other famous cases of art vandalism, including one notorious episode three years before in Philadelphia. And while some wondered why the dead man had ignored the more celebrated portrait by Ingres in the same gallery, surprisingly few ventured to guess why he had chosen to attack that particular work, a painting by Eugène Delacroix:
Ovid chez les Scythes
, or
Ovid Among the Scythians
.