The Romanov Cross: A Novel (43 page)

But Harley smiled dreamily, unaffected, before toppling out of the chair, unconscious, and into the pool of puke and broken vials.

The second Slater entered the quarantine tent, he could see that Lantos had gone from stable to critical. Her brow was bathed in sweat, her normally frizzy hair was limp and sticking to her scalp in clumps, her lips were a pale blue. Delirious, she was thrashing around in the improvised restraints that they had finally had time to fashion for her, and muttering about wolves and blood and mice.

“Eva, stop struggling,” he said, trying to pin her arms more firmly to the cot. “I want to give you something for the pain.”

“Hospital,” she said, barely focusing on him. “I need … to be … hospital.”

“I know, and you will be,” he said. “We’ll have you off the island very soon. I promise.” But was it a promise he could keep?

Fumbling though the minimal supplies in the tent, he searched for a fresh syringe and an ampoule of morphine. In battle zones, the medics carried morphine sticks, like corncob holders, that could be jammed right into the skin, and he’d have given anything for one of them right now. But this mission hadn’t been designed for that. He wasn’t equipped with a field bag. For that matter, he couldn’t even find an unused syringe; what he had was still down in the lab tent and autopsy chamber.

He plugged what was left of the Demerol into one of her IV drips, along with the antibiotics that were being introduced through the other, and said, “I’ll be right back. You’re going to make it. You’re going to be fine.”

Then, warning Kozak to keep watch but stay clear, he hurried out into the storm. In the wind and blowing snow, the other tents appeared as no more than green blurs, and he feared that the chopper would never even attempt a landing under such conditions. Clutching the guide ropes, he pulled himself across the colony grounds and down toward the main gates, where the lab tent stood. When he got there, he found Rudy, in his protective gear, huddled just inside the flaps, batting himself with his arms to keep warm.

“Gonna be tough on that pilot,” Rudy said, indicating the storm. “I don’t know how he’s gonna be able to make a landing in this.”

But Slater had already been considering the only alternative. “I want you to go down to the beach and get the RHI ready. We may have to launch it.”

“In this?”

“Just do it.”

Then he went into the lab, past the glass tanks teeming with white mice, and straight to the supply cabinet, which, despite the mayhem from the wolf attack, was still sealed and intact. Opening it, he took out several packets and pouches of the retroviral medications and antibiotics, stuffing them in the voluminous pockets of his coat and, when those were full, the hazmat suit he was wearing over it. He also grabbed some swabs, sterile bandages, and clean syringes.

What else? He was trying to think of everything, but his mind kept fleeing back to Nika. If Lantos was reeling from the effects of her physical injuries, then that was one thing. But if she was indeed sick with the flu, it was possible that Nika, too, had been infected by the puncture wound from the needle. With flu, much less a variant strain that had been frozen for over a hundred years, there was no telling how, or to whom, it would be communicable, and under what circumstances. One thing he did know was that Nika had to get off the island as soon as possible. He rued the day he had allowed her to come
along on the mission. She had become far too precious to him, and that was a position no epidemiologist should ever find himself in.

The blood-streaked plastic panels of the autopsy chamber dangled like red ribbons at the other end of the lab; the sign declaring that this was the place where the dead rejoiced to help the living lay on the floor, with a bloody paw print on it. Slater could just make out the crimson outlines of the deacon’s body on the table inside … which reminded him of something Kozak had told him. The deacon’s door in the iconostasis was the one that led to the sanctuary, where whatever was most holy was kept. So this man, this desecrated corpse, had been the keeper of the colony’s greatest treasures and deepest secrets.

The body should not have been left on display like that. Even for someone of a purely secular temperament like Slater, it was blatantly disrespectful, and from a medical standpoint it was dangerous. Despite the hurry he was in, he took a minute to part the drapes and go inside.

The chamber was in utter disarray, just as he had left it, but something struck him as odd: the organs that had been removed were untouched in their bowls, and the body itself bore no signs of animal savagery. He knew that many carnivores, no matter how opportunistic or hungry, could sense or smell disease in carrion prey, and he wondered if that was what had happened here. Had the wolf detected something sufficiently awry to put it off its feed?

The corpse had been so compromised that no further research work could be done on it anyway, so he picked up the tarp that had been used to transport it from the cemetery and drew it over the body like a sheet. Before covering up the head, though, he noticed that the eyes, to his surprise, had shifted their direction. He remembered them as staring straight ahead, blue-gray marbles fixed in place beneath pale blond brows. But now they were looking to the left, the lashes still damp from thawing.

An effect of the decomposition, no doubt, but unnerving, all the same.

He followed their gaze … to the freezer unit in the corner.

Which stood open. And empty.

Slater instantly hunched down, not believing his own eyes, and even ran a hand around the barren shelves where he had deposited the specimens taken
in situ
, in addition to some of the later specimens he and Dr. Lantos had taken during the autopsy.

All he found was a couple of crushed vials, as if someone had been in such a hurry that he had dropped them before absconding with the rest. But who? Russell? What on earth could he have wanted with them?

None of it made the slightest sense.

And then he remembered that Eva—in her shock at the entry of the wolf—had thrown the paper prayer and the diamond-studded icon in the freezer, too. And they were missing, as well.

That much, finally, did make sense.

And when Rudy burst in to say that the RHI was gone, Slater exploded. “What do you mean it’s gone? Why wasn’t it secured properly?”

“It was,” Rudy shot back. “Somebody untied the ropes, and there’s footprints in the snow!” Suddenly, everything was coming together like a terrifying thunderclap. Russell wasn’t alone—his cronies Harley and Eddie must have been on the island, too.

And even now they were sailing back to Port Orlov … with the virus in their pockets.

Anastasia awoke to the sound of screaming … her own.

Everything around her was black and silent and still, as if she’d been muffled in a cloak of the heaviest black mink.

Or buried in a coffin.

She screamed again, every inch of her body aching and sore, but when she threw out her arms, thankfully they did not collide with the boards of a casket and when she sat up nothing obstructed her head.

But where was she?

She heard hurried, furtive footsteps and then the sound of a door opening … but from the floor. Light spilled into the room from a kerosene lamp, raised through a trapdoor, and a woman’s voice urged her not to scream again.

“You are safe, my child. You are safe.”

A woman in a black nun’s habit clambered up the last rungs of the ladder and knelt beside the pallet she was lying on. “I’m sorry,” she said, “the lamp must have run out of oil.” Her face seemed vaguely familiar.

And now Ana could see a rickety table, with an extinguished lantern on it, and a ceramic bowl and pitcher. The ceiling was sharply
slanted, and cobwebs hung from the rafters. She was in an attic … an attic that smelled of warm bread and yeast and honey.

“You are at the monastery of Novo-Tikhvin. A soldier, Sergei, brought you here.”

“When?” Her voice came out as a croak.

“Three days ago.”

Three days ago … and then it all came back in a flood, the late-night awakening, the innocent march to the cellar, lining up for the photograph to be taken … and the guards bursting into the room instead. The reading of the death sentence. Her mind could go no further before she broke down, racked with uncontrollable sobs. The nun, her face framed by the squarish black hat and the black veils that hung down on either side of her cheeks, consoled her as best she could, all the while counseling her to remain quiet.

“My family …” Ana finally murmured, “my family?”

But the nun did not reply. She didn’t have to. Ana knew. Just as she knew who this nun was now—her name, she recalled, was Leonida. Sister Leonida. It was she who had sometimes brought the fresh provisions to the Ipatiev house.

“The Bolsheviks are looking for you. They know that you escaped. So we have hidden you here, above the bakery.”

The monastery was almost as famous for its bread and baked goods as it was for its many good works. In addition to the six churches it housed within its grounds, the monastery was also home to a diocesan school and library, a hospital, an orphanage, and workshops where the sisters—nearly a thousand of them—painted icons and embroidered ecclesiastical garments with silken threads of gold and silver. Their work had long been considered the finest in the Russian Empire.

Sister Leonida said, “You must eat something,” and gathering up her skirts, carefully descended the ladder. She left the lantern beside the straw-filled mattress, and by its light Ana removed her blanket and inspected herself. She was dressed in a long white cassock—a
rason—
that the nuns and priests customarily wore under their outer robes; it
went all the way to her feet and the sleeves were long and tapered to the wrist. The clothes she had worn that terrible night were gone—what could have been left of them after that fusillade?—but her corset, lined with the royal jewels, was draped across a chair. She wondered if the nuns had discovered its secret cache … the cache that only now, she realized, must have saved her life by deflecting the hail of bullets. Her ribs and abdomen were as sore as if she had been pummeled by a hundred fists, and there were fresh bandages on her shoulders and legs. Plucking the
rason
away from her breast, she glimpsed the emerald cross still resting against her bosom. Coarse woolen socks had been pulled on over her feet; she was reminded of Jemmy, her little spaniel, who used to sleep atop her feet at night, and another round of hot tears coursed down her cheeks.

When Sister Leonida returned, she brought a hunk of fresh brown bread and a bowl of hot lamb stew. Ana didn’t want it—her throat was so constricted with grief that she could not imagine swallowing—but Leonida urged her to eat. “You owe this to yourself, to your family … and to God. He has spared you for a reason.”

Had He? Yes, she had been spared, but to what did she truly owe that strange fate? She could recall the prophetic words of the holy man Rasputin … and though she wished she could forget it, she saw in her mind’s eye his ghostly image arising from the smoke in the cellar that night.

Once she had eaten enough of the stew to satisfy the nun—“I’ll leave the bowl here,” Leonida said, “and you can finish the rest when I bring you some of the honey cake that’s in the oven right now”—Ana asked after Sergei. “Do the Bolsheviks know he was the one who rescued me?”

The sister nodded. “He is in hiding, too. But I will get word to him that you are awake and recovering well.”

“Can he come to me here?” Ana wasn’t sure if she was asking for some unthinkable favor, or even possibly putting Sergei into some greater danger than he was already in. But she longed to see him.

“Eat,” the sister said, “and rest.”

Ana did not know how to interpret that reply but was afraid to push any harder. And truth be told, she was already fading back into a lethargy, retreating from everything she had already learned, needing to forget again … and to lose herself once more in the soothing abyss of sleep.

It was with dread in his heart that Slater rushed to Nika’s tent. He couldn’t very well knock on the flaps, but he shouted above the wind that he was going to come in and that she should don her mask and gear.

What he saw beneath her goggles was a pair of frightened eyes. The bare lightbulb rigged overhead bobbed on its cord in the billowing tent.

“Let me see your hand,” he said, and like a dog with a wounded paw she held out her palm. With his own gloves he inspected the spot where the needle had punctured the skin. The mark was still evident, but so far it wasn’t inflamed or suspect in any way. A small relief, but not much more than that. The etiology and incubation period of this flu was uncertain, to say the least. “How are you feeling?”

“Scared,” she admitted. Her long black hair was tied in two glistening braids that hung down over her shoulders.

“We all are,” he said. “But it’s going to be okay, trust me.”

“How is Eva doing?”

“I’ve done as much as I can for her here.” Indeed, he had just changed her dressings, replaced several broken sutures, and administered
stronger sedation. “But she’s going to be evacuated by chopper very soon. You’re going, too.”

“But I’m all right. If you need the space on the helicopter for—”

“I need you to help me track down Harley Vane and Eddie.”

“What are you talking about?”

As quickly as he could, he explained what he had learned, including the fact that Russell’s frozen corpse had been unearthed outside the church. Nika appeared incredulous.

“He was attacked by the wolves?” she said.

“No room for doubt on that score,” Slater said, before going on to explain what he thought the others had been up to on the island.

“Then there’s no way of knowing what they might have been exposed to?”

“No,” Slater said, “there isn’t. And they don’t know either.”

Nika, fully grasping the gravity of the situation, said, “But can they possibly have made it to shore in that boat? In these seas?”