The Romanov Conspiracy (27 page)

“What do you know about Sorg personally?”

“Very little, except he must have had his nerves surgically removed to do what he’s doing.”

Mack looked out at London’s rooftops. “I met him once when I worked in Washington. He’s a strange character. Thrives on danger. I heard whispers that he spied for us in Russia in 1913, when we were following the rise of the socialist groups, and that he was picked up by the Ochrana and tortured. He had a very rough time of it by all accounts, before he escaped and managed to flee the country.”

“And they sent him back in? Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“He volunteered, sir. But here’s the thing—his nerves are shot to pieces. The only way he can cope is by using laudanum, apparently.”

Boyle looked askew. “You’re not serious. Can we rely on this fellow?”

“State says we can. But it brings me to our problem.” Mack unfolded a typed page. “This came over the secure telegraph, sir. I’ve decoded the original.”

Page put down his empty glass and took the typed sheet.

Mack added, “In Dimitri’s last report he suspected that he was being hunted by the secret police. It seems he may have run out of luck.”

Page looked worried as he finished reading the paper. “You’re sure of this?”

“I’m afraid our man in Ekaterinburg may be finished before we even start.”

PART THREE

32

EKATERINBURG

Everything was going fine until Sorg had to stab the woman to death.

That morning he dragged a wooden handcart behind him, its wheels bouncing over the cobbled backstreets. He was dressed in a worker’s cotton smock, a worn cap, coarse woolen trousers, and scuffed high boots. With his bushy beard and greasy hair he looked every inch a Russian peasant.

The handcart he found in a secondhand huckster shop in the markets. A wheel was damaged and one of the handles loose, but for eight rubles the man in the shop had thrown in a hammer and nails to cement the deal.

Sorg fixed up the cart and piled in some scraps of wood and a few red bricks, his frayed black overcoat draped over the handles. A man with a handcart was a man with a purpose, the kind of busy worker who thronged Ekaterinburg’s streets. Under the pile of scrap Sorg had hidden the revolver he’d taken from the landlord, Ravich.

In the space of a year, Ekaterinburg had been occupied by the Whites, then overrun by the Reds, then seized by the Whites again, and now retaken by the Reds in fierce and bloody battles. The bustling Siberian city at the crossroads with Asia was in turmoil, the streets teeming with refugees, poor and wealthy alike, desperate to flee Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Everyone looked wretched. Electric streetcars were crowded, the backstreets narrow and noisy, and the gutters choked with filth and stinking to heaven. The population of over a hundred thousand was swelled by almost half that again, and an air of panic saturated the city.

The industrial heartland of Siberia, with the richest mines of platinum, gold, and valuable metals, was under constant siege. Each evening at eight the sirens signaled the commencement of curfew, which lasted until 5 a.m.

Sorg dragged his cart past the log houses of the working class and came to a warren of backstreets teeming with workers’ tenements, where the stench of uncollected garbage hit his nostrils. Here and there along the city’s three-mile-long Voznesensky Prospect, lined with linden trees, the stucco fronts of mansions, businesses, and churches were blistered by gunfire.

It was now illegal to sell maps in Russia—the Reds feared they could be of use to enemy spies. Simple possession was punishable by execution, so Sorg took mental note of streets, alleyways, and bridges.

He paid special attention to the hotels, lodging houses, and barracks that garrisoned restless gangs of Red Guard units. The idiots made it easy for him: everywhere they stayed, they hung fluttering red flags. After a couple of weeks, Sorg was familiar with every back alley.

In one side street he came across a grotesque sight: five bodies slumped against the wall of a merchant’s grain store. What looked like an entire family, father, mother, and their three juvenile children, had been executed, their corpses riddled with bullets and left to rot. A message daubed in white paint on the grain store wall said, “These traitors tried to starve the revolution! All traitors will be executed!”

Nobody was safe from the Reds’ paranoia and carnage. And yet despite it, every hotel and lodging house in Ekaterinburg was filled to bursting.

Arriving in late May, Sorg found a ruin of a lodging house on the edge of the markets area, laundry hanging from its upstairs balconies. But it had a huge rear garden that backed into thick woods, perfect if Sorg needed to escape in a hurry. He bought a sturdy lock and chain and fastened his handcart to a backyard drainpipe each night.

He shared a squalid room with three other men, a wooden bunk each and a filthy toilet and washroom down the hall with a chipped enamel bath and a cold water tap that didn’t always work.

Two of the men were railway workers; the third was a twitchy
young man with a wispy beard, whom he sometimes played cards with to pass the time. Sorg suspected that he was a White deserter.

What cash Sorg had left, he stashed in his boots and buried in an oilskin bag in the woods behind the lodging house. He kept his steel pen handy at all times.

That morning, as he dragged his cart toward the snaking Iset River and its broad lake, Sorg heard a church bell tower chime 10 a.m.

He hurried his pace.

With luck, today I’m going to contact Anastasia
.

Sorg turned up a hill into a cobbled alleyway of dilapidated old warehouses, most of them boarded up. He halted outside one of the buildings, checked that the alleyway was empty, then lifted the latch on a pair of double doors and dragged the cart in after him.

The warehouse he entered was covered in rotted hay that smelled of excrement, the lime-washed walls daubed with revolutionary slogans: “Down with the rich.” “Kill the bourgeoisie who bleed us.”

Sorg lowered the door latch again and wedged a wooden plank lengthways against the door to prevent anyone from entering. The cart would act as an obstacle in case he needed to flee out the rear. From under the scrap wood he took the revolver and stuffed it in his pocket.

He climbed creaking wooden stairs to a huge loft, stacked with piles of old birch logs. Four glass panes sprayed frosty light into the room. The window looked down toward the Iset River. He had discovered the loft two weeks ago when scouring the city for an observation position.

Sorg crossed to a woodpile in a corner and removed some logs. Underneath was hidden the brass spyglass. He took it over to the window, wiped condensation from a fogged window pane with his sleeve, and saw in the distance the southern side of the Ipatiev House and its gardens.

Ekaterinburg’s streets babbled with Chinese whispers. Within a day of arriving he heard about the “House of Special Purpose” near Voznesensky Prospect. The house once belonged to a wealthy local business before it was seized by the Reds to house the Romanovs.

He settled himself down on the grimy floor and peered through the
spyglass. The two-story Ipatiev compound was guarded by a double wooden fence, parts of it over three meters high. Sorg spotted three bored-looking guards armed with rifles wandering the grounds. The view was so restricted by the high fence, he could only make out the heads or torsos of anyone strolling in the garden.

More guards patrolled a wide street outside. And in the soaring bell tower of nearby Voznesensky Cathedral was a Red Army machine-gun nest, the weapon trained on the Ipatiev House.

Sorg had no fear of the machine-gunner—every time he trained his spyglass on the tower, the gunner was either asleep or scratching himself.

Sorg checked his pocket watch: 10:20 a.m.

Anastasia and her family usually took their daily exercise twice in the gardens: at 11:30 a.m., and again about 3:30 p.m., on each occasion for half an hour. Sometimes it lasted longer, depending on the whim of the guards. It was over a year since he last communicated with her. It seemed an eternity. But today he hoped to change that and his heart soared with anticipation.

He settled down to wait, his nerves on edge.

In his pockets were stuffed a bottle of beer, a block of hard cheese wrapped in greaseproof paper, and the laudanum tincture. He removed the bottle, shook it, and twisted open the dropper cap.

He made his meager supply last by watering it down with vodka, until it became a weak, watery brown mixture. On occasions when his supply ran out, he chain-smoked cigarettes and drank vast amounts of tea and coffee.

But even coffee and cigarettes were getting scarce with rationing. He squeezed a few drops into his lower gums, screwed back on the stopper, and ran a forefinger around the inside of his mouth, vigorously rubbing the laudanum into his gums.

Within minutes he began to relax.

An image floated in front of him—Anastasia’s face—and his mind drifted back to their last meeting.

33

Sorg could never forget that final day. It was seared into his mind like an open wound.