The Romanov Cross: A Novel (58 page)

“How?” Groves asked. “Unless I’ve got my history wrong, they were executed at close range.”

“According to some accounts—and these were given by the assassins themselves—the bullets bounced off the girls’ bodies. The killers became frightened, thinking that the young duchesses might be divine, after all. It was only later, when the bodies were stripped at the
coal mines and the corsets were taken off them, that the jewels were found in the lining.”

“So it was like they had body armor on,” Groves said, a little less skeptically now.

“Yes. And there is also a story of a sympathetic guard who helped to smuggle Anastasia to safety.”

“That’s a lot of speculative leaps you just made,” Slater said. Despite what had been written in the sexton’s journal, he could not accept it all as readily as Kozak had. Maybe Kozak had misinterpreted something; maybe it was a hoax—or the entry of a woman who had gone justifiably mad. “For one thing, haven’t all the bodies been recovered?”

“Not necessarily,” the professor declared. “There are still questions. Eleven people were shot in that cellar, but the physical remains of only nine, maybe ten, were ever identified with some degree of certainty. Remember, the bodies had been mutilated, dismembered, burned, and saturated with acid; they had also been moved from one place to another to avoid detection. It was all a great jumble of broken bones and rotting teeth, scattered in several places.”

“But what about DNA analysis?” Slater asked.

“By the time the burial sites were revisited in 2008, the decay had been substantial. Also, please remember that six women were killed there, and four of them were sisters, close in age. Even if a bone could be identified as that of a young woman, it was difficult to know whose it was. Was it Anastasia, or simply a piece of Maria or Olga or Tatiana?” Kozak leaned back in his chair, dabbing a napkin at his beard. “No, my friends, it has never been a settled question. It never will be,” he said, “unless we settle it.”

“And how is breaking into the church tonight going to help settle it?” Groves asked.

“Everything precious that the colony contained would have been kept in its sacristy, the altar room behind the iconostasis. There should be two doors that lead through it, one at either end. The deacon’s own records are undoubtedly inside, listing all the members of his congregation.
Is there some evidence of Anastasia there? Who knows what we might find?”

“But that’s if we could get in,” Groves said. “Have you noticed that they’ve roped the place off, padlocked the doors, and plugged the hole in the side wall? The colonel’s even got a sentry doing laps around the place.”

Kozak smiled and unfolded a topographical map between their plates. “The beauties of GPR,” he said, pointing to a dip in two of the lines.

“What am I looking at?” Groves asked.

“To prepare a foundation for the church and to level the ground, the settlers set off dynamite. The same way they prepared the graveyard. Then they sank the corner supports, and built the church with a small gap underneath it.”

“A crawl space?” Slater said.

“Yes, and the tilting of the church has left it wider right here, under the northern side. It is probably big enough for us to get through. Then we pry a hole up through the floorboards; most of them are rotting, anyway.”

“Is that a treasure map you’ve got there?” Slater heard a derisive voice booming from the entryway. Looking up, he saw Colonel Waggoner and his retinue stomping the snow off their boots and unzipping their parkas. Slater’s first impulse was to conceal the chart, but that would only call more attention to it. “Better use it fast,” Waggoner said. “Your flight leaves tomorrow, gentlemen, at noon sharp.”

One of his lieutenants said something Slater couldn’t make out, and Waggoner, laughing, replied, “What more harm could they do?”

Then he marched on toward the table reserved for the commander, with all but one of the others in tow. Slater didn’t recognize him, but he wore a captain’s uniform under his coat and, after nodding hello to Kozak and Groves, extended his hand.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Dr. Slater.”

“This is Captain Jenkins,” Kozak said.

“AFIP,” Jenkins added. “First thing I had to do on this job was read
through all your files in D.C. If you don’t mind my saying so, you’ve done some spectacular work.”

“Tell that to your boss,” Groves said, lifting his chin toward Waggoner’s table.

“Jenkins!” the colonel hollered. “No consorting with the enemy!” He laughed, as if it were a joke, but no one was fooled.

“He makes a lot of noise, but don’t worry,” Jenkins confided. “So far, he’s let me run my own show. We used the professor’s ground-fracture maps to pump undiluted organophosphates to a depth of two meters.”

“What about leeching?” Slater asked.

“Should be minimal, and we’re laying concrete on top in the meantime.”

“It’s going to crack.”

“You know that, and I know that, but the oversight committee in Washington wanted concrete, so I’m giving it to them.”

Already, Slater could see that Captain Jenkins was better at the politics than he had ever been.

“In January, once the new budget is done,” Jenkins continued, “I’ll build in the cost of an impermeable seal. We’ll lay it down in the spring.”

Slater nodded in approval, relieved to see that the job was in such capable hands. What he’d heard about the captain was true.

Once Jenkins had gone to take his seat at the colonel’s table, Kozak said, “At least they used my radar maps for something.” Then, leaning forward, he said, “So? You heard the colonel. If we do not do it tonight, we will not have another chance.”

Groves looked at Slater, appraisingly, while Kozak drummed his fingers on the map.

Colonel Waggoner laughed loudly at something, banging his fist on the table so hard that plates jumped.

“What can they do?” Slater said, pushing his chair back and glancing at his watch. “Court-martial me?”

The colony was so bright, Anastasia could barely stand it. Even now, long after dark, long after all the day’s activity had ceased, the intruders left their lights on—huge glaring lamps brighter than a thousand crystal chandeliers. What were they afraid of? What did they hope to see? Their green tents glowed from within, their engines hummed all night and day, and their airplanes—strangely shaped machines, equipped with propellers spinning on top like pinwheels—came and went, disgorging yet other machines, trucks and tractors, all of them designed, it seemed, to wreak havoc and destruction.

Already, the cemetery was gone. The posts, into which she had carved her plea for forgiveness so many years ago, had been pulled down. The tombstones had been wantonly swept away, the graves themselves paved over, but she knew, as she crossed the smooth hard surface, exactly whose souls lay beneath her boots at each step. Arkady, the blacksmith, was buried here. Ilya, the woodman, was buried there; his wife rested beside him. When she approached the cliffs, she knew that the remains of the Deacon Stefan had lain below. And just beyond it, at the outermost point, the grave of Sergei had once been located.

Now, the spot was just a jagged scar in the earth.

She stood there, looking out to sea, as she had done for time immemorial, wondering if she would ever be able to join the sleeping souls that she had once known. She had buried the emerald cross with her one true love, but its power over her had persisted. The chains that bound her to the earth still held tight, long beyond any mortal span. Although Rasputin had prophesied just such a curse upon her family if they should be responsible for his death, she alone had lived to endure it. Why oh why had the
starets
not foreseen that?

Or had he? That was what she pondered in her darkest moments of all.

There were boats out tonight, bobbing in the Bering Sea. Even they had their lights on, regularly sweeping their beams across the rocky cliffs and shoreline. The feeble glow from her lantern was swallowed in their occasional flood of light. At first, she had thought all these intrusions on the island might signal some end to her eternal purgatory there, but now she was no longer so hopeful. She did not know what, if anything, these events might portend. Perhaps they would prove just a passing phase, a random incursion into her solitude, ending again in her abandonment. It would not be a surprise to her.

Only death could come to her as a surprise now.

As she turned back toward her sanctuary, she could hear the soft footfall of the wolves who were her only companions. As the settlers had died, the wolves had proliferated—one, it appeared, for each dead soul. And over the many decades, their number, she had not failed to notice, had neither increased nor decreased. They could not speak, but in their eyes she could see a preternatural intelligence, a yearning to reach across the silent divide between humans and animals. She knew that they, too, were held captive here, isolated as she was, caught in the same spell. Their allegiance to the fallen
starets
was as unshakeable as their predatory instinct, and the prophet’s power, like Circe’s over her swine, lingered well beyond his own watery grave.

The leader of the pack, with a white blaze on his muzzle, trotted ahead, as if to assure her safe passage. It was a journey they had made thousands of times before.

Even the church, normally dark, was bathed, like everything else, in the glow of the colony lamps; its ancient and damaged cupola shone like a beacon as she approached. People in the old country had often joked that the tops of Russian Orthodox churches looked like onions, but Father Grigori had explained to her when she was a girl that it was meant to represent something holy.

“The dome is shaped like a candle flame,” he had told her, pointing to the top of the imperial chapel at Tsarkoe Selo. “It is meant to light our way to Heaven.”

If only she could believe that. If only, Anastasia thought, she could find such a pathway. Oh, how fast she would climb it, bad foot or no.

But as God had not seen fit to show her the way, and eternal damnation awaited those who attempted to thwart His will by their own hand, all she could do was submit herself and pray for deliverance.

For now, she took leave of the wolves and passed through the secret door that led to her private chamber. Bolting the passageway behind her, she settled her aching bones into this last tiny refuge. Resting the lantern beside her hand, she closed her eyes and willed herself back to other times and other places. Sometimes it was the royal retreat in the Crimea, sometimes it was the garden of the Alexander Palace. Always it was with her family. Like a woodland creature hibernating for the winter, she would enter into a suspended state, a dreamlike trance from which she hoped never to awaken.

And yet, fight it as hard as she might, she always did. The next night, or maybe the one after that, she always found herself awake again, walking the cliffs, lantern in hand and heart as heavy as a millstone.

Poking his head out of his tent, Slater knew there was simply no way to cross the grounds to the church without being spotted. The colonel plainly believed in lots of lights, all the time.

Slipping his field pack onto his back—one thing he’d learned was to keep his basic supplies, from first-aid kit to syringes on him at all times—he checked his watch. It was just before midnight, and after waiting as a lone sentry stomped across the grounds and off toward the main gate, he sauntered out of the tent, walking briskly between the tents and bivouacs and around the old well. It was a clear night, but frigidly cold—when wasn’t it?—and made worse by a biting wind. Even beneath all his thermal gear, he had to fight back a shiver.

He gave the church a wide berth, swinging wide and keeping to what cover he could, before doubling back to the northern wall. So far, there was no further sign of the night patrol.

Nor was there any sign of Sergeant Groves or Kozak, either … until he heard a low whistle and turned to see them both huddled in the breach of the stockade wall. The professor carried a shovel and Groves had liberated a pickaxe. Waving them over, Slater grabbed the professor by the shoulder and said, “So where’s this crawl space?”

Kozak, moving faster than a man of his girth usually moved, scuttled
to a spot a few yards away, got down on his knees, peered at the base of the church, pawed at the snowy ground, and whispered, “Under here—it should be right under here.”

“It should be, or it is?” Slater said.

“It is! It is!”

Groves didn’t need any more instruction than that. He muscled them both aside, and swung the pickaxe at the ground. Fortunately, the dull clang of the blade on the hard ground was muffled by the gusting wind. After several strokes, he paused to let Kozak shovel the loose soil and snow away.

“Yes, yes, it’s here!” Kozak said. “A few more strikes!”

Groves wielded the pickaxe while Slater, crouching, kept watch. When he was done, Kozak quickly brushed the debris aside—slivers of timber and sawdust were mixed with the snow and ice—and ran his flashlight beam back and forth. “Frank!” he urged. “Come!”

Slater reached into his field pack and withdrew the scabbard that housed a nine-inch surgical knife; it wasn’t often that he had had to use the knife, but once or twice emergency amputations had had to be performed. If its broad blade could saw through bone, he assumed it would do perfectly well with wood.

“Look!” Kozak said, and peering into the hole, Slater could see that the GPR had been right. A veritable tunnel had been dynamited through the earth and it lay there now like an open streambed. The church teetered over it precariously. Still, if the building had managed to remain standing for the past century, what were the chances it would choose tonight to collapse?

Clutching the scabbard between his teeth, Slater shimmied into the hole, flashlight in hand. The passage was wider than he might have expected—good news for Kozak, who was going to have to follow him—but the floor of the church was grazing his head the whole way. The ground was as hard as rock, and his ribs hurt like hell every time he had to pull himself a few feet forward. The air, what there was of it, smelled like the deepest, dankest cellar, and after going only ten or fifteen feet, the tilt of the church made any further progress impossible. Squirming onto his back and aiming the flashlight at the floorboards
above his head, Slater found a gap between two of the planks and, removing the knife from its scabbard, wedged the blade into it. As he worked it back and forth, shavings trickled down onto his face, and he had to blow them away. Eventually, a hole opened—a hole big enough for him to put his fingers through. He pulled down, and after several tugs, the wood cracked. He was reminded of the splintering of the coffin lid in the graveyard. He pulled again, but it was hard to get the proper leverage. Taking a breath and turning his face sideways to protect his eyes, he let go of the flashlight and used both hands to pry the board loose. This time it came away, leaving a gap big enough for him to lift his head through like a periscope.