The Romanov Cross: A Novel (45 page)

“A long way east of here, across the steppes.”

“And how do you propose we get there?”

Sergei had spent many hours mapping it out in his head, figuring out where they could board, under assumed names, the recently completed Trans-Siberian Railway, and how far they could take it eastward. When it detoured to the south, they would have to disembark and find a way to continue northward. At some point, they would have to find a pilot, with a plane, willing to take them across the Bering Strait. The right price, he had learned, made anything possible, and payment was the one thing he knew would not be an obstacle. Even as he had carried Ana’s limp body through the woods, he had glimpsed the cache of precious jewels sewn into her corset. A bauble or two from that tattered lining and he was confident that he could secure whatever transportation they might need. But instead of outlining
the plan in any detail for her now—there would be many weeks to do that—he simply gestured at the emerald cross around her neck and said, “I have read the inscription on the back.”

Anastasia blushed, as if he’d caught her stepping out of the bath.

“His blessing has protected you so far,” Sergei said. “Why would it end now?”

The police siren was coming closer, and Charlie just had time to close the doors to his meeting room—where Harley was laid out cold on the couch—before a pair of headlights swept his front windows and he heard tires crunching on the ice and gravel.

Rebekah, still mad as a hen about Harley’s throwing up on the rug, stormed toward the door, but Charlie wheeled into the foyer, cutting her off and ordering her back into the kitchen. “And tell your sister to stay there, too!”

Rebekah said, “What? I can’t answer my own door now?”

“No, and it’s not your damn door anyway. It’s mine.”

There was the sound of boots stamping off snow on the porch.

“Now scat,” he whispered, “and not a word to anyone about Harley.”

The knocking came a second later—loud and hard—and Charlie heard the sheriff’s voice saying, “Open up, Charlie! It’s Ray Blaine.”

Charlie took his time about undoing the locks, making sure Rebekah was out of sight, before opening the door. The police cruiser was parked in the drive, the crossbar on its roof flashing blue, but more surprising than that was the gauze face mask covering the sheriff’s
mouth and nose, the rubber gloves on his hands, and the fact that he stepped back a few feet.

“Hey, Ray,” Charlie said. “What brings you out on a night like this?”

“You seen Harley?”

“No. Why? Please don’t tell me he’s gotten into some trouble again,” Charlie said, shaking his head like a parent whose child was forever caught pulling pranks.

“How about Eddie Pavlik?”

“Nope, him neither. Say, what’s with the mask? You sick, or is it Halloween already?”

“Don’t you be lying to me, Charlie,” Ray said, craning his neck to get a look inside. “If you see either one of them, you call me, you got that? And if I were you, I wouldn’t let ’em get too close.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Charlie said, just as the walkie-talkie went off on the sheriff’s belt.

Ray answered the call and, turning a few feet down the porch, said, “Yes, sir, I’m there now.” He listened, then said, “We’re setting up the roadblocks just as fast as we can.”

Roadblocks?

The sheriff shut it off, brushed the snow from his shoulders, and said, “Don’t plan on going anywhere tonight.”

“Are you telling me I’m under arrest?” Charlie said, feigning more indignation than he felt. “What for?”

“I’m telling you the roads are closed.”

And that was all Charlie needed to hear. As soon as the sheriff had climbed back into his patrol car, Charlie did a wheelie and shouted to Rebekah to pack some food and coffee. “And none of that decaf chicory shit! Make it the real stuff we serve on meeting nights.”

Then he threw open the pocket doors and hollered at Harley to wake up. “We’re leaving!”

Harley mumbled something but didn’t move until Charlie poked his arm and repeated himself.

“Man, I was so fast asleep,” Harley said. “Why’re we leaving?”

“Maybe that’s something that
you
can tell
me
, while we drive.”

Although Charlie might now be a man of God, he’d been a man of the world for a whole lot longer than that, and at times like this he reverted to form. He knew that if the law came calling, and they were setting up roadblocks and looking high and low for Harley, it must be serious. Even if it was just about those damned jewels—the emerald cross and that icon with the diamonds in it—it was better to get to Voynovich’s place on the double, fence them for whatever he could get, then hole up in the ice-fishing cabin for a while … or at least until he could figure out just what kind of shit was going down.

Harley was pulling on his wet boots and complaining about some pain in his leg, but Charlie didn’t want to hear it.

“Go get in the van,” he said, as he stuck the cross and icon in his pockets. In the kitchen, he grabbed the provisions that Rebekah had stuffed in a plastic sack, then wheeled out the back door and onto the ramp to the garage.

Bathsheba, lingering in the doorway, timidly asked if Harley was okay. “He’s not in trouble, is he?”

Charlie had to laugh. “When isn’t he?” he said, without even looking back.

As he climbed into the driver’s seat and adjusted the hand controls, he got a strong whiff of his brother and wished to hell he’d made him shower first. He looked as bad as he smelled—his eyes with a mad gleam, his skin kind of sweaty. Scratching his thigh. What the hell did someone even as dumb as Bathsheba see in him?

Charlie backed the van down the sloping, icy drive, all the while plotting his route. He’d have to avoid the one and only main road that connected Port Orlov to civilization—if you could call Nome civilization—since the sheriff would be patrolling the local stretch, and Charlie didn’t know exactly where this checkpoint would be set up. He’d have to get around it, but once he’d managed that, he’d probably have clear sailing the rest of the way.

At the first turn, he steered the old Ford van across a field, through a couple of rusty barbed-wire fences, and onto an old logging road.
The van bounced up and down on the rutted track and Harley said, “Why’d you do that? You’re gonna break an axle.”

“I’ll break it over your head if you don’t tell me why you’ve got every cop in Alaska out looking for you.”

“They are?”

“Don’t bullshit me, Harley—did you kill Eddie? Or Russell?”

“Of course not, I told you, Eddie fell off a cliff, and Russell—”

“—got eaten by wolves. Yeah, yeah. I know what you told me, but I also know nobody ever went to this much trouble just to catch a thief.” Glancing away from the narrow dirt track for a second, he took in Harley’s disheveled appearance and said, “What’s wrong with you, anyway? Why’s the sheriff wearing a mask?”

“What mask?” Harley said, scratching at his thigh again.

“And what the fuck is wrong with your leg?”

“I got cut, on all that crap Eddie stuck in my pocket. A lot of it broke.”

Charlie’d been cut, too, when he’d poked around in Harley’s backpack. “Show me your leg.”

“What?” Harley protested. “I’m not gonna drop my pants for you.”

Charlie stuck out one hand and grabbed his brother by the throat. “Show … me … your … leg.” Ever since the accident, Charlie’s arms had only gotten that much stronger, but he still needed both hands to steer the van and manipulate the levers. He had to let go, as Harley unbuckled the seat belt and worked his jeans down to his knees. Charlie stopped the van, flicked on the cabin light, and saw a small cut, maybe an inch or two long, on Harley’s pale skin. It wasn’t much in itself, but radiating from the wound were raised, ropy lines, like red licorice strips.

He remembered the sheriff warning him not to let his brother get too close. “How long have those lines been there?”

“I don’t know,” Harley said, as if they really weren’t his problem. “They look longer now.” Suddenly doubling over, Harley coughed and a droplet of blood splatted on the dashboard. “Sorry about that,” he mumbled, wiping it off with the sleeve of his coat. “I know how you are about this car.”

“How long has
that
been happening?”

“Maybe a few hours. I think I got sick sailing that damn boat over here.” He pulled his pants back up and buckled the belt. “I oughta get a medal just for being able to do it.”

Something was going on here—something bad—but Charlie didn’t know what. And sitting in the woods wasn’t going to get him anywhere. Harley needed a doctor, and if anybody would know of a doctor who could keep his mouth shut—for the right price—it was Voynovich. Charlie put the van into gear, and jounced along the logging trail, the wind battering the chassis and snow piling up on the windshield, until he reached the top of a barren crest, where he doused his lights and stopped. Down below on the road, he could see a half dozen guys in National Guard fatigues, setting up highway flares and laying a spike strip across the two lanes.

“Is all that for us?” Harley asked, with a hint of pride.

Charlie angled the van down the other side of the hill and bumped along until he was sure he was well past the roadblock. He’d have continued on through the trees and brush, but he knew there was a series of ravines and gullies coming up, and not even a Humvee could have made it much farther. Besides, while he was heading due southeast, the authorities would still be looking for him northwest of his true location.

With both hands furiously working the gears and gas and brake levers, he maneuvered the van down a long, slick gradient, once or twice nearly losing control.

“You want me to drive?” Harley asked.

“Like you’d know how.”

“I know how. Who drove you back from Dillingham the time you got so shit-faced you couldn’t stand up?”

“In case you forgot, I can’t ever stand up.”

“Well, if you could have.”

Charlie guided the car along a long drainage ditch, then up an embankment and onto the asphalt. For the first time in over an hour, all the tires were on the same level. But considering the fact that an allpoints bulletin was out for Harley, maybe it would be best, he thought,
if his brother was just a little less visible to some good citizen with a CB radio.

“Get in the back,” he said, “and use the blanket to cover yourself up.”

“Nobody’s gonna be out in this shit,” Harley complained. “I can just duck down if I have to.”

“Are you gonna argue every single thing with me?”

Grumbling, Harley crawled over the front seat, his muddy boots kicking Charlie’s Bible CDs all over the floor. Rummaging around among the emergency supplies that every driver in Alaska knew to carry—extra gas cans, flares, flashlights, batteries, a spare tire, lug wrench, some beef jerky, bottled water, mosquito repellent, sleeping bag—Harley pulled out a ratty blanket and drew it around his shoulders.

Charlie checked him out in the rearview mirror, huddled behind the driver’s seat, and didn’t like what he saw.
Was he shivering?

“Now lie down and try to get some sleep,” he said.

For once, Harley did as he was told.

Driving on into the night, Charlie turned the radio to the local weather station and heard that the storm was only going to get worse. Welcome to Alaska. He pushed the accelerator lever forward, locking in the cruise control at a steady forty-five—any faster than that and he’d spin out for sure—and focused on the road. His headlights illuminated only a narrow slice right down the middle, but he could sense, all around him, the low frozen hills pressing in on him—lonely and empty and dark. A darkness, as Exodus and the Reverend Abercrombie had so aptly put it, that could be felt.

As the helicopter swept in over the harbor of Port Orlov, Slater could see the Coast Guard vessels bobbing offshore, their spotlights sweeping back and forth across the docks, making sure that nothing came in or went out. Not that it was likely on a night like this. The town itself was largely dark, the snowy streets scoured by the punishing wind.

Dr. Lantos was barely clinging to life, her face beneath the oxygen mask a deep purple, and in Slater’s mind there could no longer be any question about what was wrong. She had a hacking cough, mounting pulmonary problems, and a high fever.

She had come down with the flu.

Which meant it was possible that Nika, pierced by the needle, might have become infected, too. But it wasn’t certain, there were still too many questions. Was it transmissible that way? Had the needle been infected, and more to the point, had it been infected before the puncture wound occurred? Slater clung to the possibility that it had not, even as he tended to Lantos. The last time he had found himself in a position like this, administering to an endangered patient in the bay of a helicopter, the outcome had been bad indeed, but right now, he had to put those fears, and those terrible memories from Afghanistan,
aside. This time, he lectured himself, the patient
would
survive; this time she would get the care she needed before it was too late; this time he would get full cooperation instead of delays and impediments.

As the chopper descended, it skimmed the tops of the evergreen trees, and made for the bright white lights of the hockey rink. It had no sooner settled on the center of the ice, its rotors still winding to a halt, than a refueling truck rumbled toward it. The nearest biohazard-containment facility was hundreds of miles away in the state capital. “Eva,” Slater said, laying a hand on her shoulder, “I’ll see you in Juneau.”

But she did not reply, or show any sign of even having heard him.

The bay doors were thrown open by a medical officer in full hazmat ensemble, and Slater leapt out. He held up a hand to help Nika to disembark but she was already jumping out on her own.

She called out “Ray!” to a man wearing a police parka and a sheriff’s badge a few yards away, but her face mask made it impossible to be heard. Pulling it away for a second, she called out again, “Ray! Did you find them?”