Eternal Empire (17 page)

I
lya arrived at Brasov at shortly before noon the following day. Leaving the gray railway terminal with a flock of arrivals from Bucharest, he and Bogdan headed for the parking lot, where they came to a halt before a green Vauxhall Corsa. Bogdan gestured toward the vehicle. “Get in.”

Remembering the keys that he had been given with the rest of his papers, Ilya unlocked the car. He tossed his bag on the backseat and slid behind the wheel. “Where are we going?”

Bogdan put away his own bag and climbed in on the passenger's side. “Sinaia. Fifty kilometers south. You know it?”

Ilya adjusted his mirrors and glanced at the glove compartment. “See if you can find a map.”

Bogdan opened the glove box, rifled through its contents, and emerged with a road atlas, which Ilya accepted. He knew how to get from here to Sinaia, but he had wanted to see whether the glove compartment contained anything else.

They drove without speaking through Brasov, a chilly, spare alpine city lined with apartment blocks from the time of Ceausescu. As they continued south, the traffic grew light and the sides of the highway became thickly forested, the blue peaks of the Carpathians standing like ghosts in the distance. Looking out at the mountains, Ilya felt as if he were passing out of the world in which he had spent the last ten years of his life, drawing ever closer to his past.

In time, they neared Sinaia, a resort town east of the Bucegi mountain range. Leaving the highway, they turned north, the road narrowing as it wound up through the forest. As they approached a gravel parking area at the shoulder, Bogdan spoke up. “Stop here. We walk the rest of the way.”

Ilya turned into the lot, in which a handful of other cars were visible, and shut off the engine. Bogdan told him to leave his bag behind. As Ilya emerged from the car into the cool mountain air, he found that he knew exactly where they were going, but he still wasn't sure why.

The two of them headed on foot up a road paved with cobblestones. Aside from a few hikers in the distance, they were alone in the forest, the slender gray trunks of firs marching up and down the mountain.

They continued in silence for ten minutes. After they had walked half a mile, Bogdan paused, checking to make sure that no one else was in sight, and left the main road, moving deeper into the trees, where an almost invisible footpath led up the wooded hillside.

Behind him, Ilya paused. Bogdan motioned impatiently. “Come on. Not far to go.”

After a beat, Ilya followed. As they passed out of sight of the main path, the ground grew steeper. He kept several steps behind Bogdan. It seemed doubtful that they would have brought him this far only to kill him now, but he was well aware that bad things could happen in woods like this.

Finally, through the firs, he caught a glimpse of a building near the crest of the hill. Drawing closer, he found that it was a cottage, two stories high, with flecks of brown paint on its weathered boards. There were no vehicles in sight. A stone wall ran along one side of the house, which seemed to fade into the woods. In the rear yard stood a pile of gravel as white as bone.

Bogdan went up to the cottage and knocked twice. A second later, the door was opened by a man whom Ilya had last seen at the house in Hackney Wick. A shotgun was slung over his shoulder.

Inside, the house was only sparsely furnished. A worn rug lay on the floor, the boards creaking audibly at every step. Looking into the next room, Ilya saw a kitchen table and chairs with the remains of a recent meal.

As Bogdan kicked off his shoes and headed without a word for the couch, the guard closed the front door and began to climb the stairs to the upper story, gesturing for Ilya to come as well. Ilya let him get most of the way up before following, one ear tuned to the floorboards behind him.

On the second floor, which was equally bare, Ilya heard voices coming from a room at the end of the hall. One of them he recognized at once. Following the guard toward the door, he found himself standing at the threshold of a small bedroom facing the clearing below.

The first thing he saw was Vasylenko. The old man was seated at the edge of the bed, in new clothes, with a fresh haircut and shave. He was talking quietly to another member of the team from Hackney, breaking off as the two others came in. The guard from downstairs said nothing, but went at once to the window, the lower sash of which had been raised.

Before the window, a tripod had been set. And on the tripod was a sniper's rifle.

Ilya took in the rifle, then looked around at the others. “Has the time come already?”

Vasylenko smiled. “Not exactly. If it were that easy, we never would have brought you this far.” He nodded at the window. “Please, take a look. I'm sure you'll find it interesting.”

Ilya went to the windowsill. Looking past the rifle, he saw that the cottage had a fine view of a broad sloped clearing below. Past a field dotted with haystacks, there stood a striking building, a palace with slim spires and towers in the style of a timbered chalet. “Peles Castle.”

Vasylenko said nothing. Ilya kept his eye on the window, wondering why they were here. It was a former royal hunting preserve and summer retreat, now a museum, a frequent destination for tourists in this part of the country, a number of whom he could see wandering in the terraced gardens surrounding the palace. He turned away from the view. “So?”

In response, Vasylenko signaled at the guard standing next to the tripod. Bending down, the guard looked through the rifle's telescopic sight, checking the view through the scope, then nodded. As the guard withdrew again, Vasylenko turned his eyes back to Ilya. “See for yourself.”

Ilya bent over the scope. He found that its crosshairs were trained on a woman seated on a stone bench in one of the gardens, some five hundred yards away. She was by herself, talking on a cell phone, and although her face was visible only in profile, Ilya recognized her. It was Maddy Blume.

At once, he understood. Ilya turned back to Vasylenko, who was smiling. “Why?”

“Consider it a precaution,” Vasylenko said softly. “I have no doubt that you will do exactly what you have promised. But I also know how I would be tempted to act in such a situation. I would play along while I could, waiting for the right moment to take my revenge. This is a safeguard. If you flee, or do anything else to upset the plan, we can kill the girl at any time.”

Ilya kept his face still. “What makes you think this girl means anything to me?”

“Only a hunch,” Vasylenko replied. “I suspect that you have one weakness. You still think of yourself as a righteous man. And you would not allow this woman, whose life you have already complicated, to die through no fault of her own.” The old man paused. “In any case, there's one sure way to find out.”

At these words, the guard at the windowsill bent down again over the rifle, his eye at the scope. He adjusted his aim slightly, then waited in silence, his finger resting lightly on the trigger. Through the window, Ilya could just make out the figure of Maddy in the garden below. She had a guidebook in her hands.

Vasylenko looked back at Ilya, his eyes full of dark humor. “The choice is yours. Life or death. Which shall it be?”

M
addy had bought the guidebook at the airport that morning, and as she opened it now, she noticed for the first time that its cover bore a picture of the palace in whose garden she was seated. Glancing over her shoulder, she turned to the inside cover, on which she had been secretly taking notes. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” Powell said over the cell phone. “Tell me who you've seen so far.”

Maddy shifted the phone to her other hand. She was sitting on a stone bench on one of the terraces, alongside a fountain decked with reclining nudes. Upon their arrival at the palace, she had declined to join the others on the tour. They had been gone for some time, led no doubt by Tarkovsky himself, who took a great deal of interest in the history of this part of Transylvania.

She looked over her notes. “There are something like thirty guests scheduled to travel on the yacht, with roughly the same number of crew. I've seen about half of them. The rest will meet us at Constanta tomorrow. I have a list of names if you want it. Are you ready?”

The voice of Adam Hill came over the line. “I'm ready whenever you are.”

Maddy quickly ran down the list. “Tarkovsky and his wife, of course. They're separated, but she's here for the sake of appearances. His daughter, Nina, and her tutor. Elena Usova, Orlov, and the security team.”

“Got it,” Adam said. She could hear the sound of typing in the background. “Go on.”

“There are several board members from Tarkovsky's foundation. Lord Norwood, the former foreign secretary, is supposed to join us in Constanta. I've also seen Sir George Holder, the banker, and Paul Douglas, the former ambassador to Russia, along with their wives. There are at least three executives from Argo and two founding members of Polyneft with their spouses or girlfriends.”

Powell came back on the line again. “Good work. But you need to be discreet. You're giving us useful information, but it won't be worth it if Tarkovsky finds out what you're doing.”

“I know,” Maddy said, reflecting that Powell had no idea what she was doing here at all. “Anyway, I'm not sure how close I can get. I expect that people like me will be kept away from the others.”

This statement was addressed to Powell, but it was also intended for someone else. The cell phone she was using was the one she had been given by her abductors, and although she had heard nothing from them since her departure, she suspected that every word she spoke was likely to be overheard.

She had waited until she was at the airport to tell Powell where she was going. Powell had been surprised, but he had also recognized that it represented a rare opportunity. He had cautioned her to remain in the background but to learn whatever she could about the guests, in hopes that it would reveal something about Tarkovsky's intentions in the Black Sea.

Maddy remembered that he had also promised to do something else. “Have you had a chance to look into what I asked about?”

Adam spoke up. “I have. We've been checking out the name Tarkovsky mentioned. I don't know if you've looked at Gleb Boky yet—”

Maddy glanced back at the palace. “Only what I was able to find before I left. He was an officer of the secret police, right?”

“Among other things,” Adam said. “Boky was a Ukrainian revolutionary who became a leading organizer for the Bolsheviks. Later, he helped orchestrate the Red Terror, and he was one of the major architects of the gulag system.”

Powell spoke up. “My father kept a file on Boky, who went on to run the secret police in Turkestan. The locals were terrified of him, saying that he ate dog's meat and drank human blood, but he was also a gifted cryptographer who developed ciphers for the revolutionists. After the civil war, he became the chief code breaker of the security services, as the head of what was called the Special Section, which focused on cryptography, surveillance, and running the concentration camps.”

“I know,” Maddy said. “I saw most of this online. But why would Tarkovsky care?”

“Because Boky was obsessed with Shambhala,” Adam said. “Along with its other activities, the Special Section was dedicated to investigating the occult. It was located in a secret building, apart from the Lubyanka, and looked at ways of influencing society on a large scale, through the camps, obviously, but also on a psychological level. Among other things, it researched truth serum, hypnosis, and what we'd consider occult techniques, like mind control.”

In Adam's voice, Maddy heard a trace of enthusiasm of a kind that she had last heard many years ago, in the voice of a young man who was now dead. “But why would they waste time on this?”

“From their point of view, it wasn't a waste of time at all,” Powell said. “Nearly every intelligence agency has looked into such phenomena. It's a question of competitive advantage.”

“And this is where Shambhala comes in,” Adam continued. “Boky's lead investigator was a man named Alexander Barchenko, a writer and occultist who was convinced that Shambhala was a real place somewhere in Central Asia. According to him, it was a hidden scientific community of immense power, founded on a mathematically precise system of occult knowledge that could control minds, read thoughts, and predict the future. And he managed to convince both Boky and Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka, to sponsor his research.”

Powell broke in. “These were not what you'd call fanciful or sentimental men. I doubt that either believed in Shambhala itself. But they might have thought it worthwhile to investigate traditional forms of mind control, which Barchenko claimed could be found in the East.”

“And he did his best to prove it,” Adam said. “At first, he tried to organize an expedition to find Shambhala itself, but it was canceled at the last minute. Instead, he and Boky began to look into occult groups closer to home. It's unclear what the results were, but if you look at the history of Russian intelligence, you find references to experiments in mass hypnosis and the use of Tibetan potions to extract confessions. And in the end, their work was transferred to the Institute of Experimental Medicine, the same laboratory that investigated truth drugs and poisons.”

Maddy, who had been taking notes on the back page of her guidebook, felt the tips of her fingers grow cold. “What kind of poisons?”

The men on the other end fell silent. “Poisons like the kind we've both seen before,” Powell said at last. “These impulses all arise from the same source. There's always been an affinity in Russia between poison and black magic. It doesn't surprise me to see it again here. The real question is why Tarkovsky has taken an interest in this, and why he would mention it to you—”

As Powell spoke, Maddy heard a familiar voice, carried over a distance in the mountain air. Turning, she saw Tarkovsky emerging from the palace, his wife and daughter to either side. Tarkovsky's wife, Ludmilla, whom she had met only briefly, was tall, beautiful, and severe, confirming her suspicion that the oligarch had a definite type with which he liked to surround himself.

She continued to watch Tarkovsky, who was followed shortly thereafter by Elena and the members of his security team. “I can think of one reason. Shambhala is a symbol of social change, or spiritual transformation, which Boky was trying to turn into a science. Tarkovsky is interested in the same thing. As he sees it, the world is about to enter a new era, and he wants to play a role in whatever is coming. It makes sense that he'd be interested in the history of social control in Russia. But I still don't know what he intends to do with it.”

Even as she said this, Maddy saw that the oligarch's assistant was waving at her, motioning for her to join the rest of the group. Maddy spoke quietly into her phone. “Listen, I need to go.”

“All right,” Powell said. “We'll keep working here. Call us again when you can.”

“I will.” Maddy hung up. Rising from the bench, she wondered what her eavesdroppers had made of this conversation, in which she had left her true thoughts unspoken. Tarkovsky's interest in these matters was only part of a larger picture, one that she had gradually begun to trace, on her own, through the files and records in which it could dimly be glimpsed. It was a story that went back decades, but it gained direction and purpose in the last three years. And if Tarkovsky had found himself drawn to such forces, it came as no surprise that they had also been drawn to him.

Maddy began to head toward the others. As she did, her eye was momentarily caught by a cottage on the hill above the clearing, about five hundred yards away. Then she went to join the rest of the group.

Back in the house in the trees, standing before the window on the second floor, Ilya watched Maddy leave.

At his side, the man at the tripod drew back from the rifle. Vasylenko, who had been observing them in silence for the past minute, spoke at last. “Have you made your decision, Ilyuha?”

Ilya did not turn away from the window. “And what happens when this is over?”

“I let her go,” Vasylenko said. “I have nothing to gain from her death, once our work is complete. And I have no fear that she'll talk.”

Looking away from the view, Ilya turned to Vasylenko. “How can you be sure?”

Vasylenko only rose from the edge of the bed. “That isn't your concern. You'll find out soon enough.”