the Romanov Prophecy (2004) (13 page)

He spotted a grocery a few yards down the sidewalk and ducked inside. The man tending the shelves was thin and old. “You have a telephone I might use?” he asked in Russian.

The man tossed him a grave look and did not reply. Lord reached into his pocket and brought out ten rubles. The man accepted the money and pointed to the counter. He stepped over, dialed the Volkhov, and told the hotel operator to connect him with Taylor Hayes’s room. The phone rang a dozen times. When the hotel operator came back on, he told her to try the restaurant. Two minutes later Hayes was on the line.

“Miles, where the hell are you?”

“Taylor, we have a big problem.”

He told Hayes what had happened. A few times he let his gaze drift to the man tending his shelves, wondering if he could understand English, but the traffic noise spilling in from outside helped mask the conversation.

“They’re after
me,
Taylor. Not Bely or anybody else. Me.”

“All right. Calm down.”

“Calm down? That bodyguard you gave me is in with them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he joined up with the other two looking for me.”

“I understand—”

“No, you don’t, Taylor. Until you’ve been chased by Russian mobsters, you can’t understand.”

“Miles, listen to me. Panic is not going to get you out of this. Go to the nearest police.”

“Shit, no. I don’t trust anybody in this rat hole. The whole goddamn country is on the take. You got to help me, Taylor. You’re the only one I trust.”

“What did you go to St. Petersburg for? I told you to stay low.”

He explained about Semyon Pashenko and what the older man had told him. “And he was right, Taylor. There was stuff there.”

“Does it affect Baklanov’s claim to throne?”

“It might.”

“You’re telling me Lenin thought some of the tsar’s family survived the massacre at Yekaterinburg?”

“He was sure interested in the subject. There are enough written references to make you wonder.”

“Jesus. Just what we need.”

“Look, it’s probably nothing at all. Come on, it’s been almost a hundred years since Nicholas II was murdered. Surely somebody would have surfaced by now.” At the mention of the tsar’s name, the store clerk perked up. He lowered his voice. “But that’s not my real worry at the moment. Getting out of here alive is.”

“Where are the papers?”

“On me.”

“Okay. Find the subway and take a train to Red Square. Lenin’s tomb—”

“Why not the hotel?”

“Could be watched. Let’s stay public. The tomb will be opening shortly. There are army guards all over the place. You’ll be safe there. They can’t all be on the take.”

Paranoia was taking over. But Hayes was right. Listen to him.

“Wait outside the tomb. I’ll be there with the cavalry shortly. Understand?”

“Just hurry.”

SIXTEEN

8:30 AM

Lord’s entrance to the Metro was a station in the northern part of town. The subway train was packed in a suffocating closeness with stinking commuters. He clung to a steel pole and felt the clatter of wheels to rail. At least no one seemed threatening. All of them appeared wary. Like himself.

He left the Metro at the Historical Museum and crossed a busy street, passing through Resurrection Gate. Red Square opened beyond. He marveled at the recently rebuilt gate, the original seventeenth-century white towers and redbrick archways having fallen victim to Stalin.

The compactness of Red Square had always struck him as odd. Communist television spectaculars had made the cobbled space look endless. In reality, it was only a third longer than a football field and less than half as wide. The imposing redbrick walls of the Kremlin stood to the southwest side. On the northeast rose the GUM department store, the massive baroque building resembling more a nineteenth-century train station than a bastion of capitalism. The north end was dominated by the Historical Museum and its white-tiled roof. A double-headed Romanov eagle now decorated the top of the building, the Red Star gone the way of the communists. At the south end stood St. Basil’s Cathedral, an explosion of pinnacles, onion domes, and spade-shaped gables. Its collage of colors, flooded in arc light and splashed onto the blackness of a Moscow night, was the city’s most recognizable symbol.

Steel barricades at either end prevented pedestrians from entering the square. Lord knew the area remained cordoned off every day until one
PM,
when Lenin’s tomb closed.

And he saw that Hayes was right.

There were at least two dozen uniformed
militsya
in and around the boxlike tomb. A small queue of visitors had already formed in front of the granite mausoleum. The building sat on the highest point of the square, nestled close to the Kremlin wall, a row of towering silver firs standing guard on either side, flanking the walls beyond.

He rounded the barricade and followed a tour group toward the tomb. He buttoned his jacket against the chill and wished he’d brought his wool coat, but it was back in the compartment of the Red Arrow he and Ilya Zenov had briefly shared. Bells chimed in the clock tower above the walls. Tourists wearing oversized down jackets and cameras milled about. Garish colors clearly tagged them. Most Russians seemed to favor black, gray, brown, and navy blue. Gloves were a giveaway, too. True Russians shunned them, even in the dead of winter.

He followed the tour group to the front of the mausoleum. One of the
militsya
ambled toward him, a young, pale-faced man dressed in an olive-green greatcoat and blue fur
shlapa.
He noticed the lack of a weapon, the guard’s function purely ceremonial. Too bad.

“Are you here to tour the shrine?” the guard asked in Russian.

Though he understood him perfectly, he decided to feign ignorance. He shook his head. “No Russian. English?”

The guard’s face stayed frozen. “Passport,” the man said in English.

The last thing Lord wanted was to attract attention. He quickly glanced around, searching for Taylor Hayes or anybody coming his way.

“Passport,” the guard said again.

Another guard moved in his direction.

He reached into his back pocket and found his passport. The blue cover would immediately identify him as American. He handed it to the guard, but nerves caused his grip to slip and the booklet dropped to the cobbles. He bent down to retrieve it and felt a
swoosh
as something whipped past his right ear and sank into the guard’s chest. He looked up to see a ribbon of red pouring from a hole in the man’s green coat. The guard gasped for breath, his eyes rolled skyward, then his body folded to the pavement.

Lord spun around and spied a gunman a hundred yards away atop the GUM department store.

The gunman leveled his rifle and re-aimed.

Pocketing the passport, Lord rushed past the crowd and leapt up the granite steps, shoving people to the ground and screaming in English and Russian, “Gunman. Run.”

Tourists scattered.

He dived forward just as another bullet ricocheted off the glazed stone beside him. He landed hard on the black labradorite of the tomb’s foyer and rolled inside just as another bullet obliterated more red granite at the doorway.

Two more guards rushed up from inside the tomb.

“There’s a gunman outside,” he screamed in Russian. “On top of GUM.”

Neither guard was armed, but one darted into a small cubicle and dialed a phone. Lord inched toward the doorway. People were racing in every direction. But none was in danger. He was the target. The gunman was still on the roof, wedged between a row of arc lights. Suddenly a dark Volvo station wagon zoomed out of a side street south of GUM, directly in front of St. Basil’s. The car screeched to a stop and two doors popped open.

Droopy and Cro-Magnon stepped out, then sprinted toward the tomb.

He had only one way to go, so he bolted down the staircase into the bowels of the mausoleum. People were crowded at the base of the stairs, fear in their eyes. He shouldered past them, turned twice, and entered the main vault. He raced around the walkway that encircled Lenin’s glass coffin, giving the waxy corpse only a momentary glance. Two more guards were on the other side. Neither voiced a word. He bounded up a slick marble staircase and popped out a side exit. Instead of turning right, back toward Red Square, he darted left.

A quick glance confirmed that the rifleman had spotted him. But the angle wasn’t right. The shooter needed to move, and Lord saw the man do just that.

He was now in the green space behind the mausoleum’s receding tiers. A stairway, chained shut, rose to his left. He knew it led up to the rooftop reviewing platform. No point going there. He needed to stay low.

He ran forward toward the Kremlin wall. When he glanced back he saw the gunman take up a new position toward the end of the arc lights. Lord was now in the area behind the tomb. Stone busts commemorated the graves of such men as Sverdlov, Brezhnev, Kalinin, and Stalin.

Two shots rang out.

He dived to the concrete path, using the trunk of one of the silver firs for cover. A bullet raked the tree’s boughs, careering off the Kremlin wall behind him, while another ricocheted off one of the stone monuments. He couldn’t go right, toward the Historical Museum. Too open. Left allowed the mausoleum to work as a shield. But then the gunman wasn’t as immediate a problem as the men he’d seen climb out of the Volvo.

He turned left and ran straight ahead, down a narrow path among the graves of party leaders. He stayed in a crouch and moved as fast as he could, using the tree trunks for protection.

Emerging on the other side of the tomb, shots started again from the GUM roof. Bullets chipped away at the Kremlin wall. The gunman couldn’t be that bad a shot, so Lord reasoned that he was being herded in a predetermined direction, one where Droopy and Cro-Magnon would surely be waiting.

He glanced left beyond the granite reviewing stands toward Red Square. Droopy and Cro-Magnon spotted him and raced his way.

Three police cars roared into the square from the south, their lights flashing, sirens blaring. Their appearance halted Droopy and Cro-Magnon’s rapid approach. He stopped, too, huddling close to a stone monolith for protection.

Droopy and Cro-Magnon looked back toward GUM’s roof. The gunman high above signaled, then disappeared. They apparently took his cue and beat a retreat to the Volvo.

Police cars roared into the square, one obliterating a freestanding barricade. Uniformed
militsya
poured out, weapons in hand. Lord looked left, back from where he had come. More
militsya
were running toward him down the narrow path parallel to the wall, their greatcoats unbuttoned, breath condensing in the cool, dry air.

And they were armed.

There was nowhere for him to go.

He raised his hands above his head and stood.

The first policeman to approach slammed him to the ground and burrowed the barrel of a gun into the nape of his neck.

SEVENTEEN

11:00 AM

Lord was handcuffed and transported from Red Square in a police cruiser. The
militsya
were anything but courteous, and he reminded himself that he wasn’t in the United States. So he kept silent and spoke English when acknowledging his name and American citizenship. There was no sign of Taylor Hayes anywhere.

From the little bit of conversation he overheard, the guard had been shot dead. Two other guards were wounded, one seriously. The gunman had fled the rooftop. No trace of him had been found. Apparently, none of the guards or
militsya
noticed the dark Volvo station wagon and its two occupants. He decided to offer nothing until he was able to talk face-to-face with Hayes. There seemed little doubt now that the phones at the Volkhov were being monitored. How else would anyone have known where he was? That would imply, perhaps, some faction of the government was involved with whatever was occurring.

Yet Droopy and Cro-Magnon had fled at the approach of the police.

He needed to get to Hayes. His employer would know what to do. Perhaps some element of the police could help? But he doubted it. He had little trust left for any Russian.

He was whisked through the streets in a wailing squad car directly to central headquarters. The modern, multistory building faced the Moskva River, the former Russian White House on the opposite bank. He was taken to the third floor and led down a dismal corridor lined with rows of empty chairs to an office where Inspector Feliks Orleg greeted him. The pudgy Russian was dressed in the same dark suit from three days before, when they had first met on Nikolskaya Prospekt before the bleeding body of Artemy Bely.

“Mr. Lord. Come in. Sit,” Orleg said in English.

The office was a claustrophobic cubicle with grimy plaster walls. There was a black metal desk, file cabinet, and two chairs. The floor was a gritty tile, the ceiling nicotine-stained, and Lord could see why—Orleg puffed hard on a black Turkish cigarette. The blue fog was intense, but at least it tempered the body odor blossoming from the inspector.

Orleg ordered the handcuffs removed. The door was closed and they were left alone.

“No need for restraints. Correct, Mr. Lord?”

“Why am I being treated like a criminal?”

Orleg sat behind the desk in a rickety oak chair that squealed. The inspector’s tie hung loose, a yellowed collar unbuttoned. “Twice you were where somebody died. This time, policeman.”

“I didn’t shoot anyone.”

“But violence follows you. Why?”

He liked the obstinate inspector less today than at their first meeting. The Russian had liquid eyes that screwed up when he spoke. Disdain filled his face, and Lord wondered what was actually moving through the bastard’s mind while the face maintained an icy facade. He didn’t like the odd flutter in his chest. Was that fear? Or apprehension?

“I want to make a phone call,” he said.

Orleg puffed on his cigarette. “To?”

“That’s not your concern.”

A thin smile accompanied a vacuous stare. “We are not America, Mr. Lord. No rights for people in custody.”