Spartan Gold (30 page)

“Better still: Has he followed in Abdank’s footsteps and put them to use?”

Sam checked his watch. “Well, we’ll know shortly.”

They had a contact to meet.

As it turned out, Selma’s research into Khotyn became something of a one-stop shopping trip, giving them not only a hint about how they might sneak into Khotyn, but also, hopefully, a road map of exactly how to go about it.

The archive curator at Taras Shevchenko University, a man named Petro Bohuslav, hated his work with a passion and he desperately wanted to move to Trieste, Italy, and open a bookstore. After some parrying, he’d made his pitch to Selma: For the right price he was willing to share a set of rare, as yet unarchived blueprints of Khotyn, as well as his personal knowledge of the grounds.

They found him in a mom-and-pop restaurant overlooking the Balaclava marina, a few miles down the coast. Night had fully fallen by the time they arrived and the interior of the café was dimly lit by hurricane lamps on each table. Soft kobza folk music played over loudspeakers hidden by hanging ferns. The air smelled of sausage and onions.

As they entered, a man in a corner booth lifted his head and studied them for five long seconds, then put his face back into his menu. A hostess in a bright red shirt and white blouse approached them. Sam smiled and nodded at the man and they made their way through the tables to the booth.

“Mr. Bohuslav?” Remi asked in English.

The man looked up. He had receding white hair and a bulbous drinker’s nose. He nodded. “I am Bohuslav. You are Mr. and Mrs. Jones?”

“That’s right.”

“Sit, please.” They did. “Something to eat? Drink?”

“No, thank you,” Remi said.

“You want into Khotyn, yes?”

“We didn’t say that,” Sam replied. “We’re writers doing a book on the Crimean War.”

“Yes, your assistant told me. Tough woman, that one.”

Remi smiled. “She is that.”

“So, this book you are writing—it is about the Siege of Sevastopol or the war?”

“Both.”

“You need special details. You are willing to pay?”

“Depends on the details,” Sam replied. “And how special they are.”

“First, tell me: You know who lives there now?”

Remi shrugged. “No, why?”

“A bad man bought Khotyn in the nineties. A criminal. His name is Bondaruk. He lives there now. Many guards.”

“Thanks for the information, but we’re not planning an invasion,” Sam lied. “Tell us about you. How do you know so much about the place? Not just from the blueprints, I hope.”

Bohuslav grinned, displaying a trio of silver front teeth. “No. More than that. You see, after the war, after we drove the Germans out, I was stationed there. I was a cook for the general. After that, in 1953, I moved to Kiev and worked at the university. Started as a janitor, then became research assistant in the history department. In 1969 the government decided to make Khotyn a museum, and they asked the university to head the project. I went with others from the department to do a survey. Spent a month there, mapping, taking photographs, exploring. . . . I have all my original notes and sketches and photos, you see.”

“Along with the blueprints?”

“Those, too.”

“The problem is,” Remi said, “that was forty years ago. A lot could have changed in that time. Who knows what the new owner has done since you were there.”

Bohuslav held up a finger in triumph. “Hah. You are wrong. This man, Bondaruk, last year he hired me to come to Khotyn and consult on restoration. He wanted help making it look more like Zaporozhian Cossack period. I spent two weeks there. Except for decoration, nothing has changed. I went almost anywhere I wanted, mostly without escort.”

Sam and Remi exchanged oblique glances. Upon hearing about Bohuslav’s offer from Selma, their first concern was that Bondaruk was setting a trap for them, but upon further contemplation they’d decided this was unlikely, primarily because of Sam’s Inverse Law of Power and Assumption of Invulnerability, but also because of a suspicion that had been nagging at them since their journey had begun: Was Bondaruk, having had little luck unraveling the riddle on his own, letting them run free in hopes that they would lead him to what they’d dubbed Napoleon’s Gold? It was possible, but still it didn’t change their options: Keep going, or quit.

But, however unlikely the trap scenario, they were still curious about Bohuslav’s motivation. The amount he was asking for—fifty thousand Ukrainian hryvnias, or ten thousand U.S. dollars—seemed a paltry amount given what Bondaruk would do to him should his betrayal be discovered. Sam and Remi suspected desperation, but about what?

“Why are you doing this?” Sam asked.

“For the money. I want to go to Trieste—”

“We heard. But why cross Bondaruk? If he’s as bad as you say he is—”

“He is.”

“Then why risk it?”

Bohuslav hesitated, his mouth twisting into a frown. He sighed. “You know about Pripyat, yes?”

“The town near Chernobyl,” Remi replied.

“Yes. My wife, Olena, was there when she was younger, when the nuclear plant exploded. Her family was one of the last to get out. Now she has cancer—of the ovaries.”

“We’re sorry to hear that,” Sam said.

Bohuslav gave a fatalist shrug. “She has always wanted to see Italy, to live there, and I promised her we would someday. Before she dies I’d like to keep my promise. I’m more afraid of breaking my promise to Olena than of Bondaruk.”

“What’s to keep you from simply turning around and selling us out to Bondaruk for a higher price?”

“Nothing. Except that I am not a stupid man. What would I do, go to him and say, ‘I was going to betray you, but for more money I will not’? Bondaruk does not bargain. The last man who tried that—a greedy policeman—disappeared, along with his family. No, friend, I would rather deal with you. Less money, but at least I will be alive to enjoy it.”

Sam and Remi looked at one another, then back to Bohuslav.

“I’m telling you the truth,” he said. “You give me money, and I promise: You will know more about Khotyn than Bondaruk does.”

L
eaning over the chart table under the dim red glow of the lamp above it, Remi used the compass and dividers to plot their current position. She used the pencil clamped between her teeth to jot a few calculations along the chart’s margin, then circled a spot on the course line and whispered. “We’re there.”

In response, Sam, standing at the helm, throttled down the engines and turned off the ignition. The fishing trawler coasted through the fog, the water hissing along her sides until she slowed to a stop. Sam ducked out the pilothouse door, dropped the anchor overboard, then came back inside.

“It should be off our port bow,” Remi said, joining him at the window. He lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes and scanned the darkness off the bow, at first seeing only fog and then, faintly in the distance, a slowly pulsing white light.

“Nicely done,” Sam said.

This point three miles off the lighthouse had been the critical waypoint for tonight’s journey, and as their rented boat had not come equipped with a GPS navigation system, they’d had to rely on dead reckoning, using their course, speed, and the occasional recognizable landmark picked out by the short-range radar to guide their way.

“If only that were the hard part,” Remi replied.

“Come on, let’s get suited up.”

The night before, after agreeing to Bohuslav’s price and calling Selma to approve the money transfer to his account, they’d followed the Ukrainian to the Balaclava train station and waited in the car while he retrieved a leather satchel from one of the rental lockers. A quick scan of the satchel’s contents seemed to confirm Bohuslav was on the level—either the sketches, notes, photos, and blueprints inside were genuine or they were dealing with a professional forger.

Back at their hotel in Yevpatoria, fifty miles up the coast from Sevastopol, they laid the contents of the satchel out on the bed and went to work, with Selma watching on via webcam. After an hour of cross-checking what they already knew about Bondaruk’s estate, they were sure Bohuslav’s material was the real deal. Every entrance, every stairwell, and every room in the mansion was accounted for, but more importantly so, too, were the rumors about Bogdan Abdank’s smuggling tunnels. Khotyn was riddled with miles of them, starting in the cliff face below the mansion, where cargo was unloaded, and branching into myriad storage chambers and exits, some of which emerged from the earth almost a mile beyond the estate’s grounds.

More surprising was the discovery that the Zaporozhian Cossack had not been the only one to take advantage of the tunnels. Every subsequent occupant, from the Crimean War’s Admiral Nakhimov to the Nazis to the Soviet Red Army, had used them for a variety of purposes: ammunition depots, fallout shelters, private brothels, and in some cases as vaults for their own spoils of war.

However, the one piece of information they most needed was missing from Bohuslav’s information—where precisely Bondaruk might be keeping his bottle from Napoleon’s Lost Cellar.

“Of course, there’s another possibility,” Remi said. “Perhaps he’s got it locked away somewhere else.”

“I doubt it,” Sam replied. “Everything about Bondaruk’s personality suggests he’s a control freak. He didn’t get to where he is by leaving the important stuff to chance. Something he’s this obsessed about he’d want to have close at hand.”

“Good point.”

“Assuming that’s right,” Selma said over the webcam, “there might be some clues in the blueprints. If he’s a serious collector—and we know he is—then he’s going to keep his most prized pieces in an environmentally controlled area—that means separate air-conditioning units, humidity-control systems, backup power generators, fire suppression. . . . And he’ll probably have it separated from the rest of the mansion. Check Bohuslav’s notes for any mention of those things.”

It took an hour of work, picking their way through Bohuslav’s chicken-scratched notes, which were written in both English and Russian, but finally Remi found a room in the mansion’s western wing that was labeled SECURE UTILITY ROOM.

“The location fits,” Selma said.

“Here’s something else,” Sam said, reading from another note: “ ‘Denied access western side.’ Add that to the secure utility room and we may have found our
X
.”

Ironically, the mansion itself was laid out in the shape of a peace symbol, with the main portion of the house in the center, two wings radiating out to the southeast and to the northeast, and a third wing to the west, and all encircled by the low stone wall.

“The problem is,” Remi said, “the plans show the smuggler’s tunnels merge with the mansion in two places—at the stables a couple hundred yards north of the house and in the southeast wing.”

Sam replied, “So we either have to hoof it—no pun intended—across the open ground to the west wing and hope we find a way in, or come up on the southeast wing and pick our way through the house and pray we’re able to dodge the guards.”