the Romanov Prophecy (2004) (25 page)

“It’s heavy,” she said.

He knelt down and tried the weight. She was right. He shook it back and forth. Something with mass slid inside. He laid the box back on the ground and grabbed the shovel.

“Stand back.”

He pounded the point of the blade into the lock. It took three jabs to crack the hasp free. He was about to reach down and open the lid when a swirl of light streaked across the tree line. His head whirled around and he saw four dots in the distance—the headlights of two cars approaching fast down the lane where they’d parked. The car lights extinguished at about the point where they’d parked.

“Kill the light,” he said. “And come on.”

He left the shovels and grabbed the box. Akilina cradled the rifle.

He plunged into the trees and maneuvered through the underbrush to a point beyond the open grave, but far enough into the woods for cover. His clothes quickly dampened from wet foliage, and he was careful not to jostle the box, not sure of how fragile the contents might be. He slowly moved in the direction of their car, weaving a path around the cemetery back to where they’d parked. The wind freshened, now beating a loud rhythm with the branches.

Two flashlights clicked on in the distance.

Crouching down, he moved toward the burial clearing, stopping short, still in the trees. Four dark forms emerged from the end of the trail and entered the cemetery. Three stood tall and strode firm. One was hunched forward and moved slower. In the beams of one of the flashlights he spotted the face of Droopy. The other beam revealed the pudgy features of Inspector Felix Orleg. As they came closer he could tell from the silhouette that the other man was Cro-Magnon, and the final form was Vassily Maks.

“Mr. Lord,” Orleg called out in Russian. “We know you are here. Make this easy, would you please?”

“Who is he?” Akilina whispered in his ear.

“A problem,” he mouthed.

“That man with the light was on the train,” she whispered.

“Both of them were.” He looked back at the rifle she held. “At least we’re armed.”

He watched through the undergrowth, around the dark streaks of trees, as the four forms moved toward the open grave, two flashlight beams leading the way.

“This where your father is buried?” he heard Orleg ask.

Vassily Maks moved toward the stone marker revealed by one of the lights. The wind momentarily masked the voices and he could not hear if the old man said anything. But he did hear when Orleg yelled in Russian, “Lord, either come out or I’ll kill this old man. Your choice.”

He wanted to reach back, take the rifle from Akilina, and rush forward, but all three of the other men were surely armed and certainly knew how to handle themselves. He, on the other hand, was scared to death and was betting his life on the prophecy of a charlatan murdered a hundred years ago. But before he could make any decision, Vassily Maks made it for him.

“Do not worry about me, Raven. I am prepared.”

Maks started to run from his father’s grave, back toward the cars. The other three forms stood still, but Lord could see Droopy’s arm raise, the outline of a gun in his hand.

“If you can hear, Raven,” Maks screamed. “Russian Hill.”

One shot cracked in the night and the old man dropped to the ground.

The breath left Lord and he felt Akilina stiffen. They watched while Cro-Magnon calmly walked over and dragged the body back toward the grave, tossing it into the hole.

“We have to go,” he whispered to her.

She didn’t argue.

They crept from tree to tree, made their way through the woods back toward the car, and stepped to where the three vehicles were parked.

Running footsteps were approaching from the direction of the cemetery.

Only one set.

He and Akilina crouched low in the foliage just beyond the muddy roadbed.

Droopy appeared with a flashlight in hand. Keys jingled in the dark, and the trunk to one of the two cars opened. Lord rushed from the woods. Droopy seemed to hear the steps and rose up from the trunk. Lord crashed the metal box onto the man’s skull.

Droopy collapsed to the ground.

Lord looked down, satisfied that the man was out, then glanced into the trunk. A tiny light illuminated a dead stare from Iosif Maks.

What had Rasputin said?
Twelve must die before the resurrection can be complete.
Mother of God. Two more just had.

Akilina rushed forward and saw the body.

“Oh no,” she muttered. “Both of them?”

“We don’t have time for this. Get in our car.” He gave her the keys. “But be quiet with the door. Don’t crank the engine until I tell you.” He handed her the box and took the rifle.

The cemetery was a good fifty yards up the road, the route soft and muddy. Not the easiest terrain to negotiate, especially in the dark. Cro-Magnon and Orleg were probably searching the woods, Droopy sent back to retrieve the other body, an open grave the perfect place to dump it. Lord had even left two shovels for them. It wouldn’t be long, though, before they began to miss their associate.

He chambered a round, aimed at the right rear tire of one of the cars, and fired. He quickly chambered another and blew out the front tire of the other car. He then raced to his car and leaped in.

“Go. Now.”

Akilina turned the key and slammed the gear into first. Tires spun as she maneuvered the front end left and straightened back out on the narrow road.

She floored the accelerator and they shot off into the dark.

They found the main highway and drove south. An hour passed with both of them quiet, the excitement of the moment ebbing with the realization that two men had just died.

It started to rain. Even the sky seemed to share their sorrow.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Lord said, more to himself than to Akilina.

“What Professor Pashenko said must be true.”

Not what he wanted to hear. “Pull over. Up there.”

There was nothing around but dark fields and dense woods. He hadn’t seen a house for miles. No cars had appeared behind them, and they’d passed only three going the opposite direction.

Akilina whipped the wheel left. “What are we doing?”

He reached for the metal box lying in the backseat. “Finding out if this was worth it.”

He cradled the muddy box in his lap. The lock had shattered from the shovel blows and the bottom was dented from the blow to Droopy. He wrenched the hasp free, slowly opened the lid, and shone the flashlight inside.

The first thing he saw was the shimmer of gold.

He lifted out the ingot, about the size of a Hershey’s chocolate bar. Thirty years underground had not diminished its glimmer. Stamped into the top was a number and the letters
NR
, a double-headed eagle between them. The mark of Nicholas II. He’d seen photographs of the symbol many times. The ingot was heavy, perhaps five pounds. Worth right now about thirty thousand dollars, if he correctly recalled the current price of an ounce of gold.

“It’s from the royal treasury,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

A small cloth bag that had deteriorated lay beneath. He fingered the outside and determined that it had once been velvet. In the weak beam of the flashlight it appeared a dark blue or maybe purple. He pressed down on the exterior. There was something hard inside, and something smaller. He handed the flashlight to Akilina and used both hands to peel back the rotting cloth.

A gold sheet covered in etched words appeared, as did a brass key. On the key was inscribed
C.M.B. 716.
The words on the sheet were written in Cyrillic. He read the inscription out loud:

“But we don’t know where the next portal is,” Akilina said.

“Maybe we do.”

She stared at him.

He could still hear the words Vassily Maks had screamed before dying.

Russian Hill.

His mind quickly reviewed what he’d read through the years. During the Russian civil war that raged from 1918 to 1920, White Army forces were heavily financed by American, British, and Japanese interests. The Red Bolsheviks were deemed a great danger, so gold, munitions, and other supplies were funneled to the Russian mainland through the frontier town of Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. Maks had told them earlier that the two Romanov children were herded east, away from the Red Army. The easternmost point was Vladivostok. Thousands of Russian refuges had taken the same route, some fleeing the Soviets, some seeking a fresh start, others just on the run. The American West Coast became a magnet not only for refugees, but also for the funding of the beleaguered White Army, which eventually was defeated by Lenin and the Reds.

He heard Vassily Maks scream once more.

North Beach lay to the east, Nob Hill to the south. Beautiful old houses, cafés, and offbeat retail stores dotted the summit and slope. It was a trendy part of a trendy city. But in the early 1800s it was where a group of Russian fur traders had been buried. Then, the rocky shore and steep terrain were populated only by Miwok and Ohlone tribes. It would be decades before white men dominated. The legend of the graves gave the spot its name.

Russian Hill.

San Francisco, California.

America.

That was where the two Romanovs had been taken.

He told Akilina what he thought. “It makes perfect sense. The United States is a big place. Easy to lose two teenagers there, and no one would have any idea who they were. Americans knew little about the Russian imperial family. Nobody really gave a damn. If Yussoupov is as smart as he’s beginning to appear, that would be the percentage play.” He held up the key and stared at the initials etched into it.
C.M.B. 716.
“My guess? This is the key to a safe deposit box in a San Francisco bank. We’ll just have to find out which one when we get there, and hope it still exists.”

“Could it?”

Lord shrugged. “San Francisco has an old financial district. There’s a good chance. Even if the bank’s gone, the boxes may have been left with a successor institution. It’s a common practice.” He paused. “Vassily told us that he had one other piece of information to give us after we got back from the cemetery. I’m betting that San Francisco was the next leg of the journey.”

“He said he didn’t know where the children were taken.”

“We can’t assume that was the truth. Just more deception until we retrieved the box. Our job now is to find Hell’s Bell, whatever that is.” He lifted the gold ingot. “Unfortunately, this is useless. We’d never get it out through customs. Not too many people nowadays would have imperial gold in their possession. I think you’re right, Akilina. What Professor Pashenko said must be true. No Russian peasant would keep something like this and not melt it down a long time ago, unless it was more precious to him in its original form. Kolya Maks apparently took this seriously. As did Vassily and Iosif. They both died for it.”

He stared out the darkened windshield. A wave of resolution shot through him. “You know where we are?”

She nodded. “Near the Ukraine border, almost out of Russia. This highway goes to Kiev.”

“How far?”

“Four hundred kilometers. Maybe less.”

He recalled reading State Department briefings before leaving for Moscow that noted the lack of border checks between Russia and Ukraine. It had proven simply too expensive to staff all the checkpoints, and with so many Russians living in Ukraine it was deemed an unnecessary bother.

He glanced through the rear windshield. An hour behind were Droopy, Cro-Magnon, and Felix Orleg. Ahead was open.

“Let’s go. We can catch a plane out of Kiev.”

THIRTY

MOSCOW
MONDAY, OCTOBER 18
2:00 AM

Hayes studied the five faces gathered in the paneled room. It was the same room they’d used for the past seven weeks. Stalin, Lenin, Brezhnev, and Khrushchev were there, along with the priest whom Patriarch Adrian had assigned as his personal envoy. He was a short man with a frizzled beard the texture of steel wool and rheumy green eyes. The envoy had exercised enough foresight to dress in a simple suit and tie, showing no outward signs of association with the church. The man had been unceremoniously dubbed by the others Rasputin, a name the priest did not like.

All of the men had been summoned from a sound sleep and told to be present within the hour. Too much was at stake to wait until morning. Hayes was glad food and drink had been prepared. There were platters of sliced fish and salami, globs of red and black caviar heaped onto boiled eggs, cognac, vodka, and coffee.

He’d taken the past few minutes to explain what had happened the day before in Starodug. Two dead Makses, but no information. Both had stubbornly refused to say anything. Iosif Maks had merely pointed the way to Vassily, the old man leading them to the grave. Yet he’d said nothing, save for a shout to the raven.

“The grave was Kolya Maks’. Vassily Maks was his son,” Stalin said. “Kolya was a member of the palace guard in Nicholas’ time. He traded sides at the revolution and was in Yekaterinburg at the time of the imperial executions. He is not listed as having been on the death squad, but that means nothing, considering the accuracy of that era’s record keeping. No statement was ever taken from him. He was buried in some sort of uniform that was not Soviet. I assume it was imperial.”

Brezhnev shifted in the chair and turned to Hayes. “Your Mr. Lord obviously needed something from that grave. Something he now has.”

Hayes and Stalin had personally gone to the grave late last night, after the men had returned with news of what happened. There was nothing to find, and the two Makses were left with their ancestor.

“Vassily Maks took us there so he could get that message to Lord,” Hayes said. “It is the only reason he agreed to go.”

“Why do you say that?” Lenin asked.

“He is a man who apparently took his duty to heart. He would not have revealed the grave’s location, save for the fact he needed Lord to know something. He knew he was going to die. He just needed to complete his duty before that happened.” His patience with his Russian associates was running thin. “Could you please tell me what this is all about? You have me parading across this country killing people, yet I have no idea why. What are Lord and the woman after? Are there Romanovs who survived Yekaterinburg?”

“I agree,” Rasputin said. “I want to know what is happening. I was told the situation with succession was under control. There were no problems. Yet there is this sense of urgency.”

Brezhnev banged his vodka glass onto a small table beside him. “For decades there have been rumors that some of the imperial family were not murdered. Grand duchesses and tsarevichs have appeared all over the world. After our civil war ended in 1920, Lenin became convinced that a Romanov survivor existed. He learned that Felix Yussoupov had perhaps spirited away at least one Romanov. But he could never verify the fact, and his health failed before he could determine more.”

Hayes was still skeptical. “Yussoupov murdered Rasputin. Nicholas and Alexandra hated him for that. Why in the world would he be involved with the imperial family?”

Khrushchev answered him. “Yussoupov was a unique individual. He suffered from the malady of sudden ideas. He murdered the
starets
on an impulse, thinking he was freeing the imperial family from a devil’s grasp. Interestingly, his punishment was merely banishment to one of his estates in central Russia. That move saved his life, since he was not around when the February and October Revolutions occurred. A lot of Romanovs and nobles died then.”

Hayes was something of a student of Russian history, the fate of the imperial family having served as fascinating reading on a long plane ride. He recalled that Grand Duke Michael, Nicholas’s younger brother, was shot six days
before
Yekaterinburg. Alexandra’s sister, Nicholas’s cousin Serge, and four other grand dukes were all murdered the day
after,
thrown down a mine shaft in the Urals. More grand dukes and duchesses died in the months that followed. By 1919 the Romanov family was devastated. Only a precious few escaped to the West.

Khrushchev said, “Rasputin predicted that if he was murdered by boyars, their hands would remain soiled by blood. He also said that if an imperial relative carried out his murder none of the family would live more than two years, and they would be killed by the Russian people. Rasputin was murdered in December 1916 by the husband of a royal niece. The imperial family was wiped from the face of the Earth by August 1918.”

Hayes was not impressed. “We have no proof that this prediction actually occurred.”

Brezhnev leveled a tight gaze at him. “We do now. The writing your Mr. Lord found, in Alexandra’s own hand, confirms that Rasputin told the tsarina his prediction in October 1916, two months before he died. This country’s great founder”—Brezhnev’s sarcasm was clear—“our beloved Lenin, evidently thought the matter quite serious. And Stalin was petrified enough to seal everything and kill anyone with knowledge.”

Hayes had not realized the significance of what Lord had found until this moment.

Lenin said, “The provisional government offered Yussoupov the throne in March 1917, after both Nicholas and his brother, Michael, abdicated. The Romanov family was finished. So the government thought the Yussoupov family could take over. Felix was widely respected for killing Rasputin. The people thought him a savior. But he refused the offer. After the Soviets took full control, Yussoupov finally fled the nation.”

“If Yussoupov was anything, he was a patriot,” Khrushchev said. “Hitler offered him the governorship of Russia, once Germany had conquered, and he absolutely refused. The communists offered him a job as curator of several museums, and he said no. He loved Mother Russia and apparently never realized, until it was far too late, that murdering Rasputin was a mistake. He could never have intended for the imperial family to be killed. He apparently harbored enormous guilt over the tsar’s death. So he formulated a plan.”

“How do you know this?” Hayes asked.

Stalin smiled. “The archives have yielded their secrets since the communist fall. It’s like a
matryoshky
doll—each layer peeled away to reveal the next. No one wanted this to happen, but we all believed now would be the time of revelation.”

“You suspected all along a Romanov survived?”

“We suspected nothing,” Brezhnev said. “We simply feared that whatever was put into place decades ago might come to fruition with the reemergence of imperial rule. It seems we were right. The involvement of your Mr. Lord was not expected, but perhaps it is fortunate the situation has developed as it has.”

Stalin said, “Our state archives are full of reports from people who participated in the executions at Yekaterinburg. But Yussoupov was clever. He involved the fewest individuals possible with his plan. Lenin and Stalin’s secret police learned only minor details. Nothing was ever confirmed.”

Hayes sipped his coffee, then asked, “From what I recall, Yussoupov lived a modest life after fleeing Russia.”

“He followed the tsar’s lead and repatriated most of his foreign investments when World War I broke out,” Brezhnev said. “Which meant his cash and stocks were here. The Bolsheviks seized all his Russian property, which included the art and jewels the Yussoupov family had amassed. But Felix was smarter than he appeared. He’d invested in Europe, especially Switzerland and France. He projected a modest lifestyle, but he always had money. Documents indicate that he traded in American railway stock in the nineteen twenties and converted his investment into gold before your Depression. The Soviets searched for the vault where that gold was deposited, but found nothing.”

Lenin shifted in his chair. “He may also have managed tsarist investments that escaped Bolshevik reach. Many believed Nicholas II secreted millions of rubles away in foreign banks, and Yussoupov made many trips to the United States until his death in the late nineteen sixties.”

Hayes was tired, but there was adrenaline flowing through his veins. “So what do we do now?”

“We must find Miles Lord and the woman,” Khrushchev said. “I passed an alert to all border stations, but I am afraid it is too late. We don’t maintain checks at the Ukrainian border any longer, and that was the nearest exit point. Mr. Hayes, you have the capacity to travel wherever and whenever it is necessary. We need you to be ready. Lord will most likely make contact. There is no reason for him to mistrust you. When he does, act quickly. I think you now understand the gravity of the situation.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I see the picture real clear.”

THIRTY-ONE

ATLANTA, GEORGIA
7:15 AM

Akilina watched as Lord slid the key into the lock and opened the door to his apartment. She followed him inside.

They’d slept in the Kiev airport Saturday night, catching an Aeroflot shuttle Sunday morning to Frankfurt, Germany. All of the afternoon and early-evening flights were booked, so they’d waited in the terminal for a late-night Delta nonstop to Atlanta, two seats available in coach, which Lord bought with half the money Semyon Pashenko had provided.

They’d stashed the gold bar in an airport locker in Kiev, worried the whole time how secure it would be, but Akilina agreed with Lord’s conclusion—there was no way to bring the ingot out with them.

They’d both slept on the plane, but the time difference was taking its toll and they weren’t through chasing the sun. In the Atlanta terminal Lord booked two seats on a flight to San Francisco, leaving at noon. They needed a shower and a change of clothes, so a twenty-minute taxi ride brought them to where Lord lived.

She was impressed with the apartment, which was far better than what Semyon Pashenko possessed, but probably common for an American, she concluded. The carpets were soft and clean, the furniture, to her way of thinking, elegant and expensive. It was a little chilly inside until Lord adjusted a wall thermostat and central heat warmed the rooms. A far cry from the radiators in her Moscow apartment, which tended to run either wide open or not at all. She noticed the overall neatness and decided that wasn’t surprising. Miles Lord had appeared from the start as a person in control of himself.

“There are towels in the hall bathroom. Help yourself,” he told her in Russian. “You can use that bedroom there to clean up.”

Her English was okay, but limited. She’d had trouble understanding conversations at the airport, particularly what the customs officer had asked. Luckily, her performer’s visa provided access into the country, no questions asked.

“I have a bath in my bedroom. I’ll see you in a bit.”

Lord left her to a shower and she took her time, letting the warm water caress her tired muscles. It was still the middle of the night to her body. In the bedroom she found a terry-cloth robe waiting on the bed and wrapped it around herself. Lord explained that they had an hour until they needed to head back to the airport for the flight west. She toweled her hair dry and let the tangled curls fall loose to her shoulders. Water running from the back bedroom confirmed that Lord was still in the shower.

She strolled into the den and took a moment to admire photographs framed on the wall and angled on two wood tables. Miles Lord had obviously come from a large family. There were several shots of him with an assortment of younger men and women at various stages in life. He was apparently the oldest, one picture of the entire family showed him in his late teens, four brothers and sisters not far behind.

A couple of shots revealed him in athletic gear, his face obstructed by a helmet and face guard, his shoulders padded beneath a numbered jersey. There was one image of his father, framed solo, standing off to the side. It showed a man of about forty with earnest, deep brown eyes and hair a close-cropped black that matched his skin. His brow glistened from sweat, and he stood before a pulpit, mouth open, ivory teeth glittering, right index finger pointed skyward. He wore a suit that seemed to fit well, and she noticed a glint of gold from cufflinks exposed on his outstretched arm. In the bottom right corner was some writing in black marker. She lifted the frame and tried to read the words, but her ability with Western alphabet was strained.

“It says, ‘Son, come join me,’ ” Lord said in Russian.

She turned.

Lord stood in the open doorway, a maroon robe encasing his dark frame, bare feet protruding from the bottom. In the V formed by the collar she noticed a muscular chest dusted with a light brush of curly gray-brown hair.

“He gave me that picture trying to get me to become a part of his ministry.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He stepped close, smelling of soap and shampoo. She noticed he’d shaved, a two-day stubble on his neck and jaw gone, his cocoa complexion unmarred by the ridges of time and tragedy all so common in her homeland.

“My father cheated on my mother and left us penniless. I had no desire to follow in those footsteps.”

She recalled his bitterness from Friday night in Semyon Pashenko’s apartment. “And your mother?”

“She loved him. Still does. Never will she hear a foul word about him. His followers were the same. Grover Lord was a saint to all of them.”

“No one knew?”

“No one would believe. He would have simply screamed discrimination and roared from the pulpit how hard it was for a successful black man to survive.”

“We were taught in school about prejudice in this country. How blacks have no chance in a white society. Is that true?”

“It was, and some say it still is. But I don’t think so. I’m not saying this country is perfect; it’s far from that. But it is a land of opportunity, if you take advantage of the chances.”

“Did you, Miles Lord?”