The Romanov Cross: A Novel (47 page)

Nika, swearing, pumped the brakes again, but the driveway was icy and the vehicle fishtailed. There was an alarming thump, and Bathsheba was sent flying into a snowdrift.

“Oh, no!” Nika said, pounding the wheel in frustration and finally bringing the ambulance to a complete halt.

Frank had unbuckled his belt and was reaching for the door handle when Rebekah came flying down the front steps, screaming like a banshee at the sight of her sister in the snowbank. To Slater’s shock, she lifted the shotgun and without hesitation fired a round straight at the vehicle.

As the right headlight exploded in a shower of white sparks and shattered glass, Slater reached across the seat and dragged Nika down under him.

The second shot crashed through the windshield and dented the roof above their heads. A hole the size of a fist had been punched through the glass, but the rest of the windshield, crazed with a thousand fissures, held together.

Slater heard the chambering of two new rounds, but he wasn’t about to wait for Rebekah to improve her aim. Throwing open the side door, he rolled out onto the snow. A tuft of dirt and ice exploded behind him as he dodged behind a tree. He heard the crunching of the snow under Rebekah’s feet as she ran after him, and when he glanced around the trunk, another shotgun blast tore a big chunk of bark loose, throwing chips and splinters into his face.

But that meant both barrels were empty again, and he had a few seconds at most before she could reload.

Wiping his eyes clean, he bolted out from behind the tree. She had just slapped in a fresh round when he leapt for her. But his booties slipped, and all he could do was bat the barrel away in time for the shot to rip through the treetops and send a flock of birds screeching into the night.

She grunted in anger, and he groped for the gun. She tried to swing it away, but he held on, and with a violent wrench managed to yank it out of her hands. With her fingers extended like claws, she let out a bloodcurdling scream and sprang at his face, and he had no choice but to jerk the stock of the rifle up under her chin. Her jaws smacked shut like a bear trap, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she was out cold by the time she hit the ground.

When the din of the rifle blast had at last stopped echoing in his head, Slater heard Nika over by the snowbank, crying for help.

The lights flickered and dimmed as an Arctic blast pummeled the walls of the mess tent, and for a few seconds Professor Kozak thought his computer was about to crash. But the generators kept humming and, despite the muffled roar of the wind, the structure held firm. He poured himself another shot of vodka.

It was only a few hours since the helicopter had left with Slater and Nika aboard, but already the colony felt increasingly forlorn and abandoned. Dr. Lantos was gone, and though he hoped for a miracle, he did not think that one would be forthcoming. He didn’t see how she could have possibly survived her injuries, or the protracted evacuation to Juneau. Besides himself, only Sergeant Groves and Rudy remained, and they were out on patrol, making sure the island had no other intruders, and that nothing further occurred to disturb the eviscerated corpse of the deacon. Presumably, the poor man was still lying on the slab in the autopsy chamber.

The professor did not envy Frank Slater. This was not a mission report he would ever want to write. Whatever
could
go wrong,
had
gone wrong … and badly. He could only assume that it spelled the end of Slater’s career as a field epidemiologist.

He returned his gaze to the images on his computer, pictures of
what the Russian Orthodox church called the Theotokos. All were representations of the Virgin Mary and Child, but in four traditional poses. The Hodigitria, in which the Virgin pointed to the child as a guide to salvation. The Eleusa, in which the child touches his face to his mother’s, symbolizing the bond between God and mankind. The Agiosortissa, or Intercessor, in which Mary holds out her hands in supplication to a separate image of Christ. And, finally, the Panakranta, depicting Mary on a royal throne, with the Christ child in her lap; according to the Fourth Ecumenical Council, it was in this configuration that the two were represented as presiding over the destiny of the world.

Although Frank had given him only the roughest description of the icon they had freed from the deacon’s frozen hand—and which had now been stolen by some unknown hand—Kozak was confident that this last design, more regal than the others, was the right one. The red veil over her head was a symbol of her suffering, the blue dress a mark of her bond with humanity. The three diamonds that Slater had mentioned—on the Virgin’s forehead and shoulders—were meant to suggest the Holy Trinity.

From the communications desk in the corner, there was a burst of static, and then a ghostly voice from the Coast Guard station in Point Barrow, warning of another storm front swooping down on the Bering Strait. How, and why, Kozak wondered, had these settlers decided to plant their colony in this most unforgiving of places? The wind howled around the tent, and he was reminded of the terrors he had felt as a boy, reading late in his tiny room at the top of the stairs of the summer dacha. Every June his family had left their palatial flat in Moscow—high on Kutuzovsky Prospect—and gone to this wretched house in the middle of nowhere for “the fresh air.” As far as Vassily was concerned, the air was plenty fresh in the city libraries. The house had no electricity, and he had had to read his books by the light of a kerosene lantern. He could smell its smudgy odor even now and envision the rough log walls. Every time a branch had brushed against the eaves, or a window frame had whined, he had imagined that a
rusalka
was beckoning to him from the riverbank. Pale maidens, garlanded
with flowers, they were said to lure the unsuspecting to their watery lairs and drown them there; the gardener told him that he had once chased a
rusalka
off the end of the dock with his pitchfork. “So don’t you worry, young Vassily,” he’d said. “They won’t be coming around here anymore.”

But young Vassily had worried, all the same.

There was a question from the Coast Guard operator in Point Barrow—“Do you read me, St. Peter’s Island? Do you read me?”—and Kozak had finally gotten up from his chair and replied.

“Yes, we read you, loud and clear. This is Professor Vassily Kozak, of the Trofimuk United Institute of Geology, Geophysics, and Mineralogy.”

There was the crackle of static, then an uncertain, “The what institute? Are you also with the AFIP mission? Under Dr. Frank Slater? Over.”

Apparently, word had not yet traveled everywhere that Frank had been officially relieved of his duties.

“I am.”

“Okay then. Well, we’re clocking winds speed of over one hundred miles per hour and barometric pressure that’s dropping like a stone—ninety-eight millibars at last reading. You might want to batten down the hatches real tight, for at least the next twenty-four hours.”

“Thank you for that warning,” Kozak said, stifling a belch. “I will batten down all hatches. Over.”

Then he had shuffled back to his seat, poured another stiff shot of vodka, and riffled through the tattered pages of the book found in that dead boy’s pocket. Nika had said his name was Russell.

The book, as Kozak had surmised at first glance, was the sexton’s register, a record of the burials in the colony’s graveyard. Where Russell had come by it, no one knew, but Kozak had a pretty good idea. Somewhere in the woods, not far from the cemetery, there was probably an old hovel, tumbled down and overgrown by now, where the sexton had kept his tools, his ledgers, and the headstones. Once the storm had passed, he would have to recruit Sergeant Groves and go looking for it.

The bottle of vodka was running low. Fortunately, he had packed several others.

The pages that had been left in the book showed a surprising scrum of entries all dating from the autumn of 1918, along with some notes on the dynamite the colonists had used to blow open graves to a sufficient depth. Eight-inch sticks, made in Delaware by DuPont. Manufactured to kill the Germans on the battlefields of the First World War, the dynamite had instead been used to help bury Russian pacifists thousands of miles from any front. Kozak was pleased to find this proof of his theory. No wonder this cliffside was crumbling faster than even global warming could have predicted.

But it was when he turned to the last few pages of the ledger, written in a more feminine hand, that he put his glass down and sat up straighter in his chair. The ink was considerably faded, and the pages still damp around the edges, but it was clear that the sexton was no longer their author. Had he died? Was this new writer his replacement? Where the book had been a cursory list of names and dates, there were suddenly plaintive appeals, mixed in among the last death entries, and all written in a more formal Russian.

“Forgive me,”
one anguished note read.
“I have become the curse of all who know me, both at home and here in this awful place.”

Below it, she had dutifully entered another burial entry, this one for a man named Stefan Novyk,
“Deacon of our holy congregation.”
So that was his name—it had been obliterated from the headstone, but now the strange motif chiseled into the stone made perfect sense. The two doors in the upper corners had symbolized the deacon’s doors … leading through the iconostasis to the altar behind. The place where the true treasures of the church were, traditionally, kept secret and protected.
“It was he who saved me from the wolves, and he who gave me shelter. And this is how I have rewarded him.”

The next few lines had become blurred and illegible, but below them, scrawled in what looked like a trembling hand, one last burial was recorded.

“Tonight, the Lord saw fit to return to me the mortal remains of Sergei Ilyinsky, my own poor, sweet, loyal, and much beloved Sergei. His body was
washed up on the shore of this accursed island, and I have buried it myself in the last grave. I can dig no more. Around his neck, I have placed the emerald cross once given to me by the holy man in St. Petersburg. May it guard Sergei on his journey now … and may its chains no longer bind me to this earth. I long to be released, but I fear that its blessing has now become my curse.”

Kozak sat back in his chair, deeply moved by the anguish and loneliness of this anonymous woman. The rest of the page was empty, and Kozak turned it eagerly to see if there was anything more.

In the center of this last page were the words, “My soul endures here … 
forever
. Mother of God, deliver me.” Just below, there was a signature that made his heart stop. He quickly tossed down a generous shot of vodka. The lights in the tent dimmed and flickered, and he wondered if it might be the aurora borealis, disturbing the magnetic and electrical fields again. But he was in no mood to go outside and see. Not now.

When the lights burned bright again, he read it once more.

But it was still the same.

He drained the rest of the vodka, and as he plopped the empty bottle on the table, the lights again did go out, plunging him into darkness. Alone with his thoughts, and the ancient ledger, he felt the same eerie chill he had felt as a boy when it was the
rusalka
he had imagined coming back from the dead.

Slater stood up again and surveyed his work. He wasn’t proud of what had happened, but he had dealt with its repercussions as best he could.

With Nika’s help, he had pried Bathsheba out of the snowbank, and after a quick examination, determined that apart from a few bruises, the worst damage she’d suffered might be a fractured tibia. She could walk, but not well, and she had had to be suspended between Slater’s and Nika’s shoulders to make it back up into the house. Even then, she seemed to be more worried about Harley than she was about herself.

“It’s all Charlie’s fault,” she said, wincing with the pain. “Charlie gets him into trouble all the time. All Harley needs is somebody to take care of him, somebody that understands him.”

Slater and Nika exchanged a look; it sounded like she was describing one of the bad-boy characters from some romance novel. Using the supplies from the ambulance, Slater set her leg, made her comfortable on the sofa, then, because he could not have her warning the brothers that he was in pursuit—or worse yet, wandering off into town—he gave her a healthy shot of a painkiller before she even knew what he was up to. Enough not only to lessen the discomfort, but to leave her in a happy twilight state for several hours.

Rebekah had presented a bigger problem. He had regretted having to hit her so hard with the butt of the rifle, but when someone was trying to kill you, you didn’t have much choice. She was still unconscious, which was a good thing in that it allowed him to check her out without having to fend off another attack. Her lip was split, she had cracked a tooth in front, but her airways were clear and her heartbeat was regular. When she woke up, she’d be in a lot of pain—he left a bottle of Vicodin in plain sight, though he had no idea if her religious convictions allowed her to take it—and then, to be on the safe side, he used the rope her sister had brought to tie her to a folding chair.

“Take the cell phones, too,” Slater said, and Nika snatched them off the desk. The guns he took himself. “Okay then,” he concluded, “we’ve done what we can here. Let’s hit the road.”

Outside, the snow was falling so thickly he had to haul the shovel out of the back of the ambulance and do a little digging to provide some traction for the back tires. Nika confessed to feeling a bit unsteady—not surprising after all that had just happened—and Slater took the wheel. Even with only one headlight working, he could see tire tracks leading out of the Vane driveway and off in the only other direction available … toward Nome. Under his shirt, he could feel the ivory owl Nika had given him, and if ever he needed its help seeing in the dark, now was that time.

High overhead, but concealed by the storm, he could hear the roar of another helicopter racing toward Port Orlov. Whichever branch of the military or civilian authority had dispatched it, the overall emergency response, he knew, would be growing by the minute. The town of Port Orlov would be under a complete and rigorously enforced quarantine until further notice, and he was lucky to have gotten out when he did. Only he knew the full extent of the deadly cargo Harley and Charlie might be carrying in their pockets—or in their veins—and he was determined to avert any further catastrophe from occurring. As the head of the mission, he was responsible for allowing it to start, and now he was equally determined to be the one to quell it.