The Romanov Cross

Chapter 37

Lantos, accustomed to working under optimal conditions at M.I.T., was having to make some adjustments. She wasn’t used to her feet sticking to damp rubber mats on the floor, for instance, or to Arctic blasts battering the walls of her lab. Nor was she accustomed to the constant roar of the wind, like a ceaseless pounding surf, or the lamps swaying overhead.

The Tyvek suit and rubber apron she was wearing weren’t exactly comfortable, either. With her fingers encased in latex, her mouth and nose covered by a face mask, and her eyes protected by oversized goggles designed to accommodate her glasses, she had to move more slowly, and with greater deliberation, than her nature dictated. But she knew that this mission had to yield some answers, and quickly. What were they dealing with — the dead remnants of an extinct plague, or the dormant, but still viable, vestiges of the greatest killer the world had ever known?

For hours she had done nothing but study the specimens taken from the various organ sites of the young deacon, whose body still lay, like a disassembled engine, in the autopsy chamber at the rear of the lab tent. She didn’t like leaving it like that, not only because it presented a hazard but because she always tried to be respectful in her work. As soon as Slater got back from the graveyard, where he and Kozak had gone to figure out which grave to open next, she would enlist his help in putting the body back together.

In order to feel confident in their results, she and Slater had decided that they would need to exhume no less than three more corpses, all from separate and distinct spots in the cemetery. To avoid any risk of cross-contamination or confusion among the specimens taken, they had also determined to work on only one cadaver at a time, reap the harvest they required, then put the dissected remains back in their frozen grave. The simplest lab protocols were always the safest and most elegant, Lantos believed, especially when dealing with what were called “select agents”—the most notorious pathogens like ricin, anthrax, and ebola — and under such tricky conditions as these.

After stretching her muscles and pressing her hands to the small of her back, she debated going over to the mess tent for a quick pick-me-up — some hot oatmeal and a mug of coffee — or to get just one more test under way. The idea of a break was very tempting, but it was such a hassle to suit up, then undress again, that she decided to go forward with just one more bit of business first.

The animal trial.

Lantos had a soft spot for the mice she routinely subjected to these tests. They were far more intelligent and even cunning creatures than they were given credit for. But countless millions of them had been bred and used and destroyed by now for the purposes of medical research and scientific gain; it was their misfortune that they reproduced rapidly and had genetic counterparts, some nearly identical, to 99 percent of human genes. She wished there was some other and better way to glean the information the scientists needed … but so far no one had come up with one.

Right now she had three glass containers, each containing six white mice, all ranged on a counter. One tank was the control group — who would remain untouched in any way — another was the tank whose inhabitants would be injected with a common flu virus, and a third was reserved for the mice who would be exposed to the viral strains or material that had been extracted and isolated from the body of the deacon.

Nestled in a corner of the lab tent, an open crate of additional live mice was housed for subsequent tests. She had checked their food and water supplies that morning.

One by one, Lantos reached into the second tank, and with a packet of syringes she found it devilishly hard to manipulate through the gloves, injected each with a dose of the strain most prevalent in the human population at the time she had departed for the island. Lots of people, all over the globe, were going to be sick with it that winter, but no one whose health wasn’t otherwise compromised would die from it. The mice scrambled around, trying to avoid her grasp, but lay docile in her hand as she made the injections, marked their backs with a dab of blue ink, and put them back among their comrades.

It was with the third tank that she had to be extraordinarily alert and careful. She had made a serum from the blood drawn from the deacon’s frozen veins, spun and purified it, and dubbed it SPI — for St. Peter’s Island—#1. There would be several others in the days to come. The serum was contained in an innocuous brown vial with a little orange label, and as she filled a fresh syringe with the concoction, then administered a drop or two to each of the six mice in the third tank, she wondered if she was looking at a harmless soup, or Armageddon in a bottle. Each SPI #1 mouse was marked with a daub of orange stain on its back and tail.

The mysteries of flu were legion. The Spanish flu had been an airborne illness, dispelled and disseminated in the coughs and sneezes of its victims; all of their bodily fluids and secretions, from mucus to saliva, tears to feces to blood, were saturated with the virus, and the next victim had only to breathe in a poisoned vapor, or unwittingly touch a tainted surface before then touching that same hand to his mouth or nose or eyes, for the transmission to be made. The flu was onto another host.

And mutating all the while. Just as Lantos felt a certain sympathy for the mice, she also harbored a grudging, if horrified, admiration for the flu. Almost all researchers eventually did. The virus was a veritable Houdini, armed with a thousand tricks and stunts and contortions that would allow it to move through as large a host population as possible, with the greatest possible ease and speed, and keeping one step ahead of its victims’ ability to create antibodies or defense mechanisms to defeat it. Even armed with the latest technology and decades of previous research results, the scientific community — Lantos included — was often astonished at the infinitesimally small changes that could transform a flu from a mild annoyance to a lethal disease of epic proportions. In reconstructions of the 1918 flu, research scientists had concluded that it was the polymerase genes and the HA and NA genes in particular that had made it so virulent. But the sequences of those polymerase proteins were not only present in subsequent human strains, but differed by a mere ten amino acids from some of the most dangerous avian influenza viruses seen in the past few years. The flu could morph, Lantos knew, almost before your eyes, changing its genetic structure to blend in with any crowd, like an immigrant putting on a new suit of clothes to walk the streets unnoticed.

And, to make matters worse, it had learned over the centuries to jump species, too, as fluidly as a trapeze artist. No one knew whether the next pandemic was brewing in a pigpen in Bolivia, or on a poultry farm in Macau.

Once all the mice were treated and marked — their tanks separately ventilated, and placed several feet apart — Lantos stoppered the vial of SPI #1 and took it back, for safekeeping, to the freezer in the autopsy chamber. There, she placed it beside the range of samples taken from the deacon’s cadaver, along with the diamond-studded icon and the paper prayer he had held in his rigid hands. Slater had promised Kozak that if the initial lab results on the blood and tissue came back clear, he would allow him to thaw out the paper, unscroll it, and read whatever it said. The professor had looked like a kid who’d been promised a trip to Disneyland.

We are all such strange creatures, Lantos thought, closing the freezer. We have our individual passions and interests, most of them formed in some way in our childhoods, then those same interests become translated in our later lives into careers. Kozak had probably collected rocks and geodes, and wound up a geologist, while she had always been fascinated by the natural world and the myriad forms that life could take. Summers had been spent on the Massachusetts coastline, studying the busy life in the tide pools and clamming with her dad. Where did all this activity come from? How did it all survive? She could see how everything was connected, but what then was her place in it (apart from enjoying, guiltily, the clam chowder)? If there was a natural order — or disorder — who or what was responsible for that? Big questions. She had loved to turn them over and over in her mind, and now, by concentrating on one of the tiniest and yet most indefatigable life-forms on the planet, she got to dedicate her life to the big stuff, after all. If you could figure out the flu, it was like turning the key on a box filled with mysteries.

But a Pandora’s box, if you weren’t careful.

She closed the freezer, and as she turned to leave the autopsy chamber, she thought she saw a yellow glow, like a lanternlight, hovering near the main entry to the lab tent. And maybe someone’s silhouette, too — someone on the short side. But she was peering through several layers of thick plastic sheathing, and it was like looking at something at the bottom of a murky pond. She was reminded of the crabs that would scuttle for cover when she fished her hand into the tide pool.

She parted the curtains of the autopsy chamber and stepped out, face mask and goggles still in place, expecting to see Slater, or maybe even the professor, entering the tent. After so many hours of work, she would be glad of the company.

But she was wrong.

More wrong than she had ever been in her life.

She stopped where she was and stood stock-still, but it wasn’t as if she could become invisible. The human silhouette was gone, the tent flaps were open, and a black wolf, with a white blaze on its muzzle, planted its paws on the rubber matting, its back bristling from the wind, its eyes glaring with a strangely human intensity.

Chapter 38

“The lines are still on the screen!” Kozak shouted to Slater from across the graveyard. He was pushing his GPR back and forth like a vacuum cleaner on the snowy ground.

“So it’s not a computer malfunction?”

Kozak shook his head, his head down and earmuffs flapping, as he studied the digital monitor mounted between the handlebars. The professor had been puzzled by the fissile lines that kept showing up on the geothermal ground charts and had insisted on coming back out again to see if they would reappear.

And they had.

Now, Slater wondered, would he have an explanation? Looking out across the windswept cemetery, Slater could barely imagine how, or why, anyone would have willingly chosen to settle in such a bleak and inaccessible spot as St. Peter’s Island, a place where even the simple act of burial would have required a Herculean effort.

“Of course!” Kozak said to himself, loudly enough that Slater could still hear it across the rows of old graves, while smacking his palm against his forehead.

“Of course what?” Slater said, stepping between the stones and markers.

“These are the kinds of lines and deformations you usually see only in minefields.”

“There were no mines here,” Slater said, coming to his side.

“But there were explosions,” Kozak said, pointing at the crazed web of lines that radiated across his computer grid. “You see where they are?”

“It looks like they’re everywhere.”

“Everywhere in the graveyard,” Kozak said, “but not as you come to the end of the rows. Not as you start to enter the woods.”

“Okay,” Slater conceded, “I’ll buy that.”

“The colonists were setting off explosions in the cemetery. They were using dynamite, probably, to break up the tundra and permafrost.”

Of course, Slater thought, echoing Kozak. It made perfect sense. Global warming might have loosened the hold of the soil, but it was the bedrock beneath that had been fractured already. No wonder that coffin had fallen into the sea.

But what would it mean in the epidemiological sense? What would it mean for the cadavers of flu victims? Would it have created an aerated or unstable ground environment, and if so, would that have contributed to the decay of the bodies and the dissipation of any viral threat? The state of the deacon’s body argued otherwise — he was frozen as solid as an ice cube when he’d been dug up — but he could prove to be an anomaly. The only way to know for sure was to exhume at least two or three more.

And to do it before this storm that was blowing in got any worse.

Slater had pretty much decided on which grave to excavate next. It was a dozen yards or so closer in from the cliffs, and if he followed that one up with the plot at the northwesternmost corner of the lot, he’d have a rough triangle that he could then work either in, or out, from, depending on the results he and Lantos were getting in the lab. By now, he figured, she had created a purified blood sample from the deacon, and might even have begun the live-animal trials. He was eager to find out how she was coming along.

“What do you say we pack it in then?” Slater asked.

But Kozak, rapt in the numbers that were scrolling down one side of his computer screen, simply grunted.

“Vassily?”

“You go; I want to study this more,” the professor said. “I will see you in camp.”

Slater knew enough not to disturb a fellow scientist when he was absorbed in his work — he himself had been known to fall asleep at his desk after ten or twelve straight hours of crunching data — so he clapped him on the padded shoulder of his parka and picked his way back through the graves. But he must have taken a slightly different route because suddenly his foot plunged through the snow and into a hole in the ground. The sole of his boot thumped on top of a creaking coffin.

How could he — and Kozak — have missed this on their general survey of the graveyard days ago?

Pulling his boot out, he got down on his knees and brushed the snow cover away. About two feet down, he saw a casket lid splintered as if it had been hit by an axe. Through a gaping hole in the wood, he saw the dark shadows of a corpse.

Jesus Christ. When had this happened? In the pale and failing light of the day, he couldn’t tell if the damage had been done recently, or if this was just an age-old accident that had been overlooked thus far.

Either way, it had to be contained, and immediately.

“What are you doing?” Kozak called out.

“There’s a hole in the ground here,” Slater hollered, “and a compromised burial plot.”

“That’s not possible,” the professor said, indignantly, heading in his direction. “I covered all the ground, and if there had been a hole of any kind—”

“It’s here,” Slater interrupted, “and don’t come any closer. We’ll have to seal this up right away.” He was already reformulating his exhumation schedule; this grave, and its dimly glimpsed occupant, would have to be the next one investigated. Grabbing up several of the pennant flags that marked the grid, he stuck them as firmly as he could in the snowy earth all around the perimeter of the grave. “Don’t come any closer than you already have,” he warned Kozak again, “and don’t let Rudy or Groves get any closer than this, either.”

He stood up, and looked all around for any sign of intrusion, but the fresh snow had covered any tracks that might have been there. None of this made any sense. If the hole had been made recently, who could have done it? Why would they have done it?

And could they possibly still be on the island somewhere?

“Keep an eye out,” he said ominously to the professor. “We might not be alone here.”

Even as the professor looked at him slack-jawed, Slater took off for the colony. He needed to put the word out that the cemetery was now completely off-limits to everyone — though it was Nika he had foremost in his mind. He could not risk her coming out here to perform some native ritual so long as an open grave posed any possible danger.

The matted pathway was slippery with snow and ice, and as he hurried down it he had to regain his balance once or twice by grabbing a light pole and holding on. The daylight was going fast. Running through the gates he heard a scream — unmistakably from Lantos in the lab.

What now?

Barreling up the ramp and into the tent, throwing all caution — and safety protocols — to the wind, he saw a black wolf leaping up at the plastic sheathing of the autopsy chamber. Lantos was inside, brandishing the Stryker saw and screaming for help. The plastic was already shredded in strips, but the wolf had not yet been able to claw its way through.

Slater’s eyes searched the lab for any kind of weapon, but all he saw were microscopes and vials and glass tanks of agitated white mice.

The wolf swiped at the plastic again, ripping another strip loose, then yanking at it with its jaws.

“Hey!” Slater shouted, just to grab its attention. “Over here!”

The wolf whipped its head around. There was a bolt of white on its muzzle and plastic hanging from its teeth.

He snatched a specimen scale off the counter and hurled it, missing the target but distracting the beast for a second.

“Come on!” he shouted, treading backwards toward the exit. “Follow me, you bastard!” He grabbed a clipboard and threw that, too, the pages fluttering loose as it flew. “Follow me!”

But the wolf refused to take the bait. Now it seemed to know that he was harmless, and with renewed vigor it turned its head sideways, gathered a hunk of the heavy-duty sheathing in its mouth, and began tearing it away again.

Lantos screamed as a great swath of the shredded curtain fell apart, enough for the wolf to squirm its way into the autopsy chamber.

Lantos swung the saw, but the wolf leapt on her, fangs flashing and claws out, and as Slater ran through the lab he saw her fall under its weight.

He tore through the same opening as the wolf, snatched the biggest scalpel on the instrument tray and slashed at the raised hackles on the animal’s back. The first cut was ignored, and so was the second, but on the third the wolf howled, and twisted around in rage.

Slater stepped back, the bloody scalpel slick in his hand, bracing himself against the freezer for the attack. To his astonishment the wolf snarled, but instead of charging at him, it turned away and leapt onto the autopsy table, squarely setting its paws on either side of the deacon’s corpse, like a predator defending its kill.

“Run!” Slater said to Lantos, who was lying on the floor in her lab suit and rubber apron. “Can you run?”

Lantos scrambled out of the chamber, her hands cradling her abdomen, while Slater, the breath raw in his throat, covered her retreat.

The wolf bent its head to the ravaged remains on the table and sniffed at them. Its own blood matted its thick black fur, lending it an oily sheen.

Slater inched his way backwards, watching the wolf while clutching the scalpel.

But the creature stood its ground atop the table, not even bothering to look at him as he parted the torn curtains and stepped into the lab proper. Still looking over his shoulder, Slater hurried toward the open flaps that were slapping in the wind. Just before he passed through them, he took one last look at the wolf through the hanging shreds of the autopsy chamber. Lifting its powerful head toward the sky, it howled with a sound as forlorn and grief-stricken as any mourner at a funeral.

He staggered through the tent flaps; they were smeared with blood, as was the railing of the ramp. In the last of the daylight, he could see a trail of crimson spots on the white snow, leading off into the colony grounds. All around the stockade, he could hear the baying of wolves, answering the call.

But he could not see Lantos.

The trail of blood and footprints seemed to go first in one direction, and then in another, as if she were staggering blindly, simply trying to put distance between herself and the lab tent.

“Eva!” he called out, and the only reply he heard was from the wolves. “Eva!”

The tents were glowing green all around him, but the blood led him up toward the old well, where he found a deeper and wetter pool. “Eva!”

She was crumpled in a heap, her arms cradling her stomach, against the stone wall of the well. When he turned her over, he could see that the blood was oozing through a gash in her rubber apron. Her face mask was askew, and as he bent over her, he said, “Can you hear me?”

There was no answer, but he felt for a pulse in her neck and found it. “Just hang in there,” he said, “you’re going to be all right. I promise you.” It was a promise he wasn’t at all sure he could keep.

Snow had started to fall in earnest, and it was dark. If he was going to save her life, he would have to perform emergency surgery on her and close that wound, but the lab was now off-limits, as were all the other colony tents. Lantos might have been contaminated, and he needed to keep her in quarantine from now on.

The cockeyed church, with its onion dome, rose before him, and picking her up in his arms, he mounted the old wooden steps, kicked the doors open with one foot, then laid her as gently as he could atop one of the pews.

When she groaned, he was relieved to hear it. “Eva, I’ll be right back.” He placed her hands, still in their sticky gloves, on her own abdomen. “Keep pressing down. You hear me? Keep it compacted.”

She grunted softly, and Slater charged out again. The wolves were howling in the woods — had they picked up the scent of all the blood? — as he yanked the doors firmly closed behind him. The green tents, only fifty yards off, looked a mile away. But he barely stopped to catch his breath before he vaulted down the steps on his way to fetch his surgical supplies.

The mission had just gone completely off the rails, but if he didn’t keep his head, it could lead to a disaster of epic proportions.

Chapter 39

“But what about Russell?” Eddie complained. “We gotta keep looking for Russell!”

As far as Harley was concerned, they had looked for Russell long enough. They’d gone all the way back to the graveyard, where they’d hidden behind some trees long enough to see some stocky guy with a little silver beard pushing what looked like a lawn mower around on the snow, then they’d tried to follow their drunken buddy’s trail through the woods. The only clue they picked up was his flashlight, still shining under a bunch of bushes. But it didn’t look good — why would Russell, dumb as he was, have thrown his flashlight away?

“We can’t leave a man behind!” Eddie said, his eyes gleaming in the dusk, and at that Harley had nearly puked. We can’t leave a man behind? What did Eddie think they were — Marines?

“Forget it,” Harley said. “He’s either frozen stiff somewhere, or he’s holed up in the colony right now, warm as toast and telling some bullshit story about how he got lost kayaking.”

And the colony was where Harley was heading. He’d had enough of the graveyard, and more than enough of the fucking woods. If the Coast Guard guys had dug up something special, he’d find it in the colony by now.

It hadn’t been hard to slip through the gap in the stockade wall, and just before the daylight completely vanished, he led Eddie to a secluded spot behind the generator shed. Digging into his backpack, he pulled out a pair of night-vision binoculars and looped the cord around his neck.

“Hey, where’d you get those?” Eddie said enviously as Harley adjusted the scopes.

“Arctic Circle Gun Shoppe.”

“What’d they cost?”

“How the hell should I know?” It wasn’t as if he’d paid for them. He’d swiped them along with the MREs.

The tents were glowing green, but the ground between them was dark, and it was there that the infrared-sensitive lenses came in handy. Harley could sweep the grounds, and if anybody was moving on the pathways, he’d see the blurry outline of their bodies. The only drawback was the slight high-pitched whine that the binoculars gave off, like a mosquito incessantly buzzing around your ears.

Kind of like Eddie.

“I want to see!” Eddie said, groping for the binoculars. “Let me take a look.”

Harley had to swat his hands away, and he could see now that Eddie was flying high. Somewhere along the trail, he must have ingested some uppers. And that was all that Harley needed now — a speed freak as an accomplice.

As he watched, he saw some activity up by the church — that Slater guy was running around in one of those lab suits — and he was bringing up Nika Tincook, the mayor, their arms filled with what looked like sheets and blankets and medical instrument bags. What the fuck was going on? Even over the rising wind, he could hear their voices — they sounded alarmed — but what he didn’t hear, or see, was any activity down in that big old tent by the main gates … where the flaps were waving wildly and the lights were all on inside.

“Come on,” he said to Eddie, “but keep low and keep your mouth shut.”

“What are we doing? Are we rescuing Russell?”

Harley didn’t bother to reply. Crouching low, he set off across the colony grounds, leaping over the PVC pipes and electrical cables that stretched across the snow and under the braided ropes that marked the paths. At the ramp, he slowed down for a second — was that blood on the railing? — but he couldn’t very well stay outside either. He ducked under the flaps and waited for Eddie to follow him in.

“Hey, man, did you see the blood on—”

“Shut up,” Harley said, looking around but seeing no one. There were counters on both sides, covered with beakers and vials and microscopes; it reminded him of the chemistry class he’d failed. On a computer screen, he saw what looked like a molecule — or was it an atom? — turning slowly on its axis.

“Check it out,” Eddie said, gesturing at three tanks of white mice. “Wouldn’t your snake like a taste of these little babies?”

Before Harley could stop him, the idiot had reached inside a container and lifted one out by its tail. Its back was stained with orange ink and it dangled frantically in the air.

“Drop the goddamned mouse,” Harley said.

Grinning, Eddie lifted it over his open mouth like he was about to swallow it, and Harley shoved him, hard enough that the mouse slipped free and ran squeaking for cover.

“I am going to kick your ass if you do one more stupid thing,” Harley said.

“Big man,” Eddie said, but he lowered his eyes and didn’t issue any further challenge.

Harley turned back to the room; the only thing worth stealing in here might be the laptops, or maybe the microscopes, and they’d be a bitch to carry back. At the far end of the tent, there were ripped plastic curtains that extended from the floor to the ceiling. It looked like some kind of inner sanctum, but one that had been busted into. That alone was good enough for Harley.

He walked down the center of the room, noting that there was blood here, too, and even more on the strips of plastic. Even Eddie was hanging back.

Harley poked his head into what was left of this chamber, and nearly threw up on the spot.

A dismembered corpse was lying on a stainless-steel table, and there were bowls and basins of blood and organs on surgical carts and counters.

“Jesus Christ Almighty,” Eddie said, though he was so revved up he walked in mesmerized. Standing over the body and flipping back the flap of scalp concealing its face, he said, “I wonder who he was.”

One of the old Russians, Harley thought, though why they’d do something like this to him now …

“Looks like a wolf got at him, too.”

“What are you talking about?” Harley said, afraid to look too closely. How was Eddie managing it?

“Paw prints,” Eddie said, and now Harley glanced over long enough to see that Eddie was actually right about something. There were bloody paw prints — and pretty fresh-looking ones at that — on the tabletop.

Harley spun his gaze around the tiny chamber, as if a wolf might still be lurking somewhere, but all that caught his attention this time was a fridge with a wheel on it like you’d see on a bank vault.

But given everything else in the room, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to open it.

“What’s in there?” Eddie said excitedly.

Harley had come this far; there was no point in stopping now. He turned the wheel, there was a hissing sound as the seal was broken, and a bright white light came on inside.

Again, there was an array of flasks and vials, many of them marked with stickers and labels, but there was also the unmistakable sparkle of white diamonds — three of them, embedded in an old brass icon of the Virgin Mary. Eddie saw it, too, and made a grab for it, knocking over half of the bottles and tubes in the fridge, but Harley wedged it into his own breast pocket and said, “We’ll fence it in Nome.”

“Damn straight we will,” Eddie said, “and this, too.”

It was an old scrap of paper, rolled up like a scroll, and Eddie snatched it off the shelf and scrabbled it open, the page crackling and breaking in several spots.

It was a few lines long, black ink that had faded to gray, and written in Russian.

“What’d you think it was going to be?” Harley sneered. “A treasure map?”

“Maybe it is, for all you know,” Eddie said, stuffing it into the pocket of his parka. Then, to Harley’s dismay, he grabbed some of the test tubes and vials and stashed those in his pocket, too.

“That stuff’s not worth shit,” Harley said. “What are you doing?”

“It might be worth something to somebody,” he replied, “and they can pay me to get it back.” When he realized his own pocket was full, he crammed a couple more into Harley’s pockets, too. “And they can pay you, too!” Harley batted him away again — more and more, he wished he’d checked everyone’s backpacks for drugs and booze before they’d left Port Orlov — and closed the freezer door. For good measure, he gave the wheel a spin.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Harley said, and after Eddie had cast one more look at the mutilated corpse — what was he thinking of stealing now, Harley thought, a kidney? — they stepped out into the lab.

“The laptops?” Eddie said, but Harley shook his head. They were government-issue, and probably traceable; besides, he just wanted to get the hell out of this damn slaughterhouse. They had slunk no more than ten or twenty yards away when he saw a burly black guy, in an Army coat, running toward the lab tent with one of the Coast Guardsmen right behind him. They were carrying rifles and they were loaded for bear … or wolf.

Ducking behind the generator shed, Harley threaded his way back through the stockade wall. But even with the aid of the night-vision binoculars, it would be nearly impossible to find his way through the woods at night; the surest route would be to stick to the ridgeline and simply follow it around until he returned to the cove where, if he was lucky, the Kodiak might by some miracle be afloat.

The problem was, his pal Eddie was still so stoned he could waltz off the cliff, or wander off into the woods, and for the time being at least, Harley needed him alive; the Kodiak needed a deckhand. Taking a nylon cord out of his backpack, he tied a tight loop around Eddie’s waist — Eddie laughed and tried to twirl as it was done — and then knotted the other end around the tool belt he was wearing to hold his knife and bear mace. He’d left no more than ten or fifteen feet of rope between them.

With the edge of the forest on one side and the ocean on the other, Harley set off along the cliffs, picking his way over the rocks and brambles with his flashlight beam and occasionally feeling the drag of Eddie as he slowed down or missed a step. It would have been an arduous task on a summer day, but in the dark, with an Arctic wind slicing across the Bering Sea, it was nearly impossible. Once he was well away from the colony, he breathed a little easier and let his flashlight pan out over a wider stretch of ground. The snow was crusting, and his boots crunched with every step he took. But one false move, he knew, and they could both go tumbling off the ridgeline.

With no landmarks to go by, it was impossible to calculate the distance they’d traveled. All he could do was plow ahead and count on spotting the cove where the Kodiak was anchored; from there, he could easily find his way back into the cave. But if he missed it, or overshot the mark, both he and Eddie could wind up either lost in the storm, or worse. Already, his feet and hands were starting to lose some sensation from the unrelenting cold. As soon as they got back to the cave, he would light the camp stove and make some hot soup or stew. Nobody was going to be out doing reconnaissance on a night like this.

Several times, Eddie stumbled, and Harley had to stop to let him get back on his feet. The farther they went, the more he thought he was carrying Eddie rather than leading him.

“Wake up!” Harley finally shouted at him. “I’m not gonna keep hauling your ass for you!”

“Fuck you!” Eddie shouted back. “I’m freezing back here.”

“Yeah, right,” Harley said, “like it’s warmer in front.”

Harley kept plodding forward, glancing at the ground, then off at the turbulent black sea crashing below. It was only when he thought he caught a glimpse of the boat that he deliberately stopped to clear his vision and make sure. He turned the flashlight in its direction, but the beam couldn’t penetrate that far. Taking out the night-vision binoculars, he tried to draw a bead on it, but there was so much snow flying in the air now, and so little light, that it was useless.

Still, he thought he could hear the groaning of its hull over the roar of the surf.

“Almost there,” he said to Eddie, whose presence he could sense right behind him. He left the binoculars looped around his neck.

But Eddie didn’t say anything.

“Maybe we’ll even find Russell there.”

Again, there was no reply, which was odd for such a motormouth as Eddie.

Turning around, Harley raised the flashlight and saw someone — but definitely not Eddie — standing right behind him.

It was an old woman, in a long skirt and a kerchief tied around her head. He lifted the beam to her face and saw two blue eyes, hard as a husky’s, sunken into a leathery face, lined and creased as an antique map. She was staring, but not at his face; her eyes were trained on the breast pocket of his coat, where the icon was stashed.

She didn’t have to say a word; he knew what she wanted.

And he swung at her with the flashlight.

But somehow missed.

He was grabbing for his knife when Eddie stumbled up, and said, “Holy Christ.”

Harley was weirdly relieved that Eddie could see her, too, but when he wheeled around, holding the knife out and searching for the old woman in the snow, he got so tangled up in the rope that it was Eddie he nearly stabbed.

“Watch the fucking knife!” Eddie shouted, as he backpedaled as fast as he could go.

Too fast, as it happened.

Harley suddenly felt the rope jerk tight on his tool belt, and a second later, he was staggering toward the cliff. Eddie was screaming, already sliding backwards down the icy slope. Harley flailed around, trying to grab hold of anything in reach.

“Help me!” Eddie shouted, and Harley managed to snag a low-lying branch heavy with snow. The knife dropped to the ground.

But even as he hung on with one hand, his gloves stripping the snow and then the needles right off of it, the branch slid free, and he crashed to his knees. He heard the crunch of test tubes breaking in his pockets, and a moment later the sharp pain of broken glass cutting into his thigh. He was being dragged off the edge of the cliff, too, by the weight of Eddie on the rope.

“Christ Almighty!” Eddie hollered in terror, his boots scraping the rock for any kind of ledge or crevice.

Harley dug his fingers into the snow and ice, and found a ridge in the earth, a solid bit of frozen tundra, maybe three or four inches deep, and hung on for dear life, but the nylon cord was pulling him down, twisting the belt around his waist like a tourniquet. His underarms were burning from the drag on the sleeves of his coat.

He reached for the buckle on his belt, but it was pulled so tight he couldn’t loosen it.

“Pull me up, Vane! Pull me up!”

But he didn’t have that kind of purchase, and he knew his own strength was going to give out fast. His collar was choking him, the binoculars were digging into his chest. Clinging to the soil with one hand, he used the other to grope for the knife, lying only inches away, and then wedged its blade under the straining cord.

“I can’t hang on here!” Eddie grunted. “The rope’s killing me!”

With fumbling fingers, Harley sawed at the cord. It was taut as a piano wire, but he felt a thread start to frazzle. He sawed again, harder.

“Pull!” Eddie huffed, sounding as if the very air was being squeezed from his lungs.

Harley’s parka was wrapping itself around him like a python, and in a few seconds he wouldn’t even be able to move at all. Awkwardly, he worked the blade back and forth, back and forth.

“Pull!”

And then, just as he thought he would pass out, he heard a sharp twang, like a banjo string breaking, and all the pressure, all the weight on him, instantly stopped. The cord whizzed across the snow, while his fingers still held tight to the ground. And then he heard Eddie’s terrified cry, fast diminishing and swallowed in the wind. If there was a splash, it was lost in the storm.

Putting his face down, he felt the cold snow bathing his hot skin, and he simply lay there, breathing slowly, in and out, telling himself, over and over again, that he was still alive, he was still alive.

It was a long while before he had the courage, or the strength, to raise his head, look around, and see that the old woman was gone, too. He was all alone in the dark.

Chapter 40

Improvisation was the name of the game. Any epidemiologist worth his salt knew that you had to be able to turn on a dime when circumstances changed — and in the field, circumstances always did.

In a matter of less than an hour, Slater had managed to get a temporary quarantine tent rigged up inside the nave of the church, with everything from an overhead lamp to a powerful space heater, and he had put the wounded and half-delirious Lantos on a pair of IV drips; one contained a broad spectrum antibiotic to guard against the sepsis that was sure to follow from the slash of the wolf’s claw, and the other a concentrated solution of Demerol that had kept her sedated enough to allow him to do what he had to do. What he really needed was an anesthetist, but when he came to the island, he hadn’t planned to perform surgery on anyone still alive.

Groves and Rudy had been deployed to seal up the windows of the church to guard against any drafts or exposure, and Nika had been enlisted as head nurse. After her reaction to the work he’d had to do in the graveyard — drilling specimens from the deacon’s corpse — he wasn’t sure she’d be able to handle it, but to her credit, she hadn’t even balked at his request. In fact, she’d looked happy for the chance to redeem herself.

“Just tell me what to do,” she said, “and I’ll do it.”

And so she had. He’d had her suit up in everything from gloves to goggles, and now she was standing on the opposite side of the gurney, behaving as if she’d been in operating rooms all her life. When he’d needed her help to set up the IV lines, she took his instructions perfectly, and her nimble fingers did the job without hesitation. When he asked for an instrument, she instinctively seemed to know which one he meant, and when he needed her to hold a sponge, or even put her finger on a suture while he pulled the thread through the wounded flesh, she didn’t blanch — or if she did, he couldn’t see it behind her protective gear.

“You’re doing a great job,” he said, his voice muffled by his own face mask.

“Then why am I sweating so much?”

“We all do. It’s why we burn these damn suits afterward.” It occurred to him that she’d have made a fine country doctor — and from what he’d gathered in town, Port Orlov needed one.

His fears for Lantos, however, were rapidly mounting. She had been slipping in and out of consciousness, and though he’d tried to knock her out enough to perform the necessary surgery without causing her unbearable pain, it was a fine balance he was trying to achieve. He had to keep her unconscious and immobilized, but without depressing her respiratory function any further than necessary.

The work was more extensive than he had anticipated; the wolf, an expert at gutting its prey with a single swipe of its claws, had wreaked havoc in her abdominal cavity, and in addition to that there was the ever-present, and far worse, threat of a viral component having come into play. The autopsy chamber had been filled with bowls of blood and organs, and Lantos had sustained a large and open wound. The Spanish flu was an airborne disease when transmitted by its living hosts, but it flourished in the blood and bodily fluids of its victims. If any of the samples they had taken were viable, then Lantos could have become directly infected, and even now, as she lay on the table breathing feebly through her own face mask, she could be functioning as a veritable flu factory.

Plainly, the entire situation was becoming untenable. Lantos was going to need to be evacuated to a proper hospital, and soon — and the biological materials left exposed in the lab tent were going to have to be gathered up, with the utmost care, and safely destroyed. In their frozen state, the specimens taken in situ from the grave itself had been dangerous enough. But once the body had been thawed for the autopsy and the harvesting of additional tissue, there was no telling what had happened to any virus that might still have been preserved in the flesh and viscera. Most probably, it had been inert, or rendered that way by the thermal change.

But there was always the chance that, for even a short window of time, it had been alive … and communicable.

Lantos stirred on the table, and her hands twitched. Slater had been in such a hurry to attend to her injuries that he hadn’t had time to arrange for any of the usual restraints. He nodded at Nika, and told her how to increase the Demerol drip. Their work was not yet done … even if he was only running on fumes and adrenaline at this point.

In fact, he wasn’t sure how much longer he could maintain the intense focus he needed, or keep his hands steady enough to do the delicate repairs Lantos required. As it was, he knew that he was just doing stopgap work — enough to stop the hemorrhaging and hold things in place — until a more skilled surgeon, in a fully equipped operating room, could do it right.

But how long would that be?

He heard the doors of the church creaking open again, then Sergeant Groves’s voice just outside the sealed flaps of the tent.

“Sorry to report this,” Groves said, “but no luck with the Coast Guard. One chopper’s grounded for repair, and the other’s already on a rescue mission off Little Diomede.”

“So what about sending a boat?” Slater said, his eyes still focused on his patient.

“They say the sea’s so rough, they doubt they can get in close enough right now. They’ve got to wait the storm out.”

“Which means how long?” he asked impatiently, pulling another suture through.

Lantos moaned, her head twisting on the table.

After a pause, Groves admitted, “No telling. But Rudy said the forecast’s not good.”

Even in the tent, Slater could hear the howling of the wind, tearing at the old timbers of the church, and he could only imagine the pounding of the sea on the rocks and shoals surrounding St. Peter’s Island. Small wonder the strange Russian sect had chosen to take refuge here; it was one of the most impregnable and unapproachable spots in the world. Of all the hellholes Slater had been to — and he’d been to plenty — this one felt cursed even to him.

“Get back on the radio,” he snapped, more irritated and distracted than was wise, “and tell them this can’t wait. It’s a life-or-death emergency.”

“Frank,” Nika said.

“Find out who’s in charge — go as high up the chain as you can—”

“Frank, the bleeding just got worse—”

“And tell them to call Dr. Levinson at the AFIP if they need to get a top security clearance. I guarantee—”

“Frank!” Nika insisted.

And when he looked at Nika, and saw what she was bowing her head at, he could see that there was an upwelling of blood, as if from a layer of the dermis that had been insufficiently closed, seeping between the sutures. Lantos groaned, and though she should have been rendered unconscious by the drip, her hands swung loose, perhaps in involuntary contractions. Nika grabbed at one of them, and missed, and Slater said, “Let me do it — just stand back.”

But Nika fumbled across the table in an attempt to snag the other hand — a breach of protocol that a trained nurse would have known not to do — and before either one of them knew how it had happened, Nika flinched and said, “Ouch,” as the tip of the suturing needle pierced the palm of her glove. For a split second that seemed like an eternity, the needle stayed there, before Slater yanked it out, and looked through his visor at Nika. She was studying the tiny puncture in her glove, from which a dot of her own blood was now oozing, and then she looked up at him, her dark eyes full of disbelief … and questions.

Exactly as he feared were his own.

Chapter 41

Sergei was pushing a wheelbarrow back toward the Ipatiev house when he heard the sound of gunshots. For days, there had been the rumble of distant artillery, but this was small-arms fire, and much closer to home.

It sounded like a string of firecrackers.

The wheelbarrow was filled with several gas cans. Commandant Yurovsky had sent him into town with orders to siphon the fuel out of every vehicle he could find, and if anybody asked any questions, to refer them to the Kremlin. This was not the sort of duty the Bolsheviks had promised him when they came to his village and dragooned him the previous spring.

The shots were coming one at a time now, and Sergei stopped in the middle of the dark road, fear gripping at his heart. Who was doing all this shooting, in the dead of night, and why?

Pushing the wheelbarrow as fast as he could over the bumps and ruts in the dirt road, he arrived at the sharp-staked palisade surrounding the house, and when the sentry called out who was there, he said, “It’s Comrade Sergei Ilyinsky. With the gasoline.”

“Bring it around back.”

In the courtyard, Sergei found a truck waiting, and the stench of gunpowder in the air … and blood. His eyes shot to the iron grille covering the basement window, but it was dark inside and he couldn’t see a thing.

Yurovsky, stepping out of the house, saw the gas canisters and said, “That’s all?”

“There aren’t many tractors in Ekaterinburg,” Sergei said, careful to keep any emotion out of his voice.

“Go upstairs and get the sheets and blankets.”

Sergei mounted the back steps and found the house in commotion. Other guards were trooping up and down the stairs, their arms filled with linens, their mouths crammed with food, a couple swigging vodka from a jug. By the time he got to the room Anastasia shared with her sisters, the four cots had already been stripped bare. Books and diaries, combs and shoes, were scattered around the floor. Arkady, one of the Latvian guards who had recently been brought to the house, was stripping some curtains from the whitewashed windows.

“What’s going on?” Sergei said. “Where are they?”

Arkady looked at him quizzically, and said, “In Hell, if you ask me.” Then, tossing the curtains to Sergei, he said, “Take these to the basement.”

His arms clutching the curtains, Sergei stumbled down the stairs, his mind refusing to accept the awful reality of what must have just happened, then across the courtyard and down to the cellar. The acrid smell of smoke and death grew stronger with every step he took, and Sergei’s heart grew as heavy as a stone. At the bottom, Yurovsky, in his long coat, was holding a lantern and directing the operation.

The floor was so awash in blood that the soldiers trying to roll the bodies up in the sheets and drapery kept slipping and sliding.

“Just get them out of here!” Yurovsky was barking. “The truck’s right outside.”

Sergei scanned the carnage; he saw Dr. Botkin’s gold eyeglasses gleaming on his bloody face, he saw Demidova with a bayonet still stuck in her chest. He saw the Tsar’s worn old boots sticking out of a sheet, and his young son Alexei — one side of his face obliterated by a close gunshot to the ear — being wrapped in a tablecloth, like a shroud.

But where was Anastasia?

“Don’t just stand there!” Yurovsky said, smacking him on the shoulder. “Get to work.”

Sergei stepped into the morass, searching for Ana, and found her beneath the corpse of her sister Tatiana, soaked in blood, her little dog crushed beneath her. Her hair was caked with blood, her clothes were ripped to shreds, her hands were clutching something under her bodice.

Sergei felt the anger and the bile rise in his throat, and if he could have done it, he’d have killed Yurovsky and every other guard in the house on the spot. The House of Special Purpose — that’s what the Ipatiev mansion had been officially called, and Sergei had always taken it to mean imprisonment.

Now he knew that it meant murder.

He laid the curtains on the floor — they were the color of cream, and imprinted with little blue seahorses — and gently rolled Ana’s body onto them. He looked at her face, smeared with blood and ash and tears, then closed the ends of the curtains over her as if he were wrapping a precious gift.

“Move along,” Yurovsky shouted, “all of you!”

Sergei could hear the truck engine idling in the courtyard. The Latvians were throwing the remaining bodies over their shoulders like carpets, and carting them out. Sergei picked up Anastasia in his arms, as if carrying a child to bed, and leaving the cellar he heard Yurovsky joke, “Careful not to wake her.”

Sergei was numb with shock and grief, and when the guards told him to toss the body into the back of the truck with all the rest, Sergei simply climbed inside instead, and slumped against the side wall with the body between his knees.

“You always were sweet on that one,” a guard cracked. “That’s why the commandant sent you into town tonight.” He slammed the half panel at the back of the vehicle shut. “Now you can help bury her.”

He banged on the side of the truck, and the engine was put into gear. With a jolt, the truck lumbered across the courtyard, out through the palisade, and onto the Koptyaki road. The pile of corpses — Sergei counted ten others in all — gently swayed and rocked, as if it were all a single creature, at every bump and pothole in the road. The Tsar and his valet, the Tsaritsa and her maid, their daughters, the heir to the throne, the cook, the doctor … all tangled together in an indiscriminate mound of blood-soaked linens.

Sergei wondered where the truck was headed … and what he would do when he got there.

An old car, crammed with shovels, gasoline, and Latvians was jouncing along behind them.

For at least an hour, they forged through the forest on old rutted mining roads. Sergei could hear tree branches on either side scratching at the sides of the truck and the tires squelching in the mud.

And then — unless his mind was playing tricks on him — he heard something else, too.

He bent his head.

It came again.

A moan.

He pulled the cream-colored curtain away.

“Ana,” he whispered, “are you alive?”

Her eyes were closed, and her face twitched like someone still caught in a nightmare.

“Ana, be still!”

Her face was wrenched in agony, her lips parted, and she started to cry out.

Sergei pressed his palm to her mouth, and said, “Ana, don’t make a sound. Do you hear me? It’s Sergei. Don’t move.”

She tried to scream again, and again he flattened his hand on her lips.

“If they know you’re alive, they’ll kill us both.”

Her eyes opened, filled with panic, and he leaned even closer so that she could see him better. Despite all that had passed between them, in looks and words and flowers, the bounds of propriety had never been crossed. Until this night, Sergei would no sooner have dreamed of holding a grand duchess of Russia than he would have imagined himself becoming the Tsar.

Even as his heart soared — the love of his life was cradled in his arms! — Sergei’s mind raced. How had she survived the slaughter? Was the blood covering her body her own — or her sister’s?

And how could he ever spirit her away from this caravan of death?

The truck was going up a hill, the gears grinding, when he heard the thundering of hoofbeats and wild shouts coming through the forest. The brakes squealed, and even as the truck stopped, Yurovsky was leaping like a demon from the car behind, cursing and brandishing a long-muzzled Mauser.

Was Anastasia going to be rescued after all? Were these the White cavalry officers, loyal to the Tsar, that Ana and her family had long prayed for? Or could they be renegade Czech soldiers who abhorred the revolutionaries? Sergei didn’t care, just so long as there were enough of them to overpower the Red Guards. He’d take his own chances.

“Keep still,” he said to Anastasia, smoothing her befouled hair with his hand.

He could hear horses snorting, and the creak of wagon wheels.

“We were promised we’d get them!” someone was shouting. “All of them — alive!”

“Well, you’re too late for that now,” Yurovsky replied. “But this truck can’t make it any farther. We’ll need those carts to get the bodies to the Four Brothers.”

Sergei knew that the four brothers referred to the stumps of four towering pine trees that had once stood where nothing but coal pits and peat bogs now lay. Was this how Yurovsky had planned to dispose of the bodies? By throwing them down the abandoned coal shafts?

“I promised my men that they’d have some fun with the duchesses,” the man complained. “And I planned to have the Tsaritsa myself.”

“Shut your trap, Ermakov, and do what I tell you.” Yurovsky was struggling to remain in command of the rowdy horsemen; that much Sergei could tell from the strained pitch of his voice. “Unload the bodies, and the first man I see stealing anything, I’ll shoot.”

What would they steal, Sergei thought? The rings on their fingers? But even as he heard a few of the men dismounting, and the Latvians clambering out of the car, he knew that this might be his only opportunity to save Ana. As soon as the back panel was dropped flat again, and he saw the faces of the peasants leering in at the bloody cargo, he stood up, teetering a little as if he were drunk, and said, “Take them away, comrades.”

A few dirty hands reached in, grabbed the dangling arms and legs of the dead and dragged them out of the truck. Sheets were pulled aside, and one man called out, “I’ve got a duchess, but I’m damned if I know which one.”

There was laughter, topped only when another man shouted, “And I’ve got the queen bitch herself!”

Picking up the body of Anastasia, and handling it with deliberate carelessness, Sergei stepped over the corpses of the maid and the cook and hopped down onto the ground. The road was illuminated by the headlights of the car, but the forest was thick on both sides, and as the hay carts were brought around back, Sergei carried his bundle past one wagon, and then another, and when a cry went up at the discovery of the Tsar—“Who wants to spit in the face of Nikolashka himself!” Ermakov exulted — Sergei pretended to drunkenly stumble off the rutted path and into a pile of brambles.

But no one called out after him, and no one noticed. Everyone was so intent on defiling the corpse of the Tsar that they didn’t see him disappear, and hoisting the girl over his shoulder like a sack of grain — and how many times had he done that very thing in the fields of Pokrovskoe? — he trotted into the dense and pitch-black woods. Ana groaned, and all he could say was, “Hush, Ana, hush.” She was heavier than he thought she would be, and her body was harder and stiffer, but in all the hubbub and confusion, the Reds might not even notice that one of the duchesses was missing until they assembled all the bodies at the Four Brothers. By then Sergei planned to be miles away, hidden in the one place he knew would provide a safe refuge for the lone survivor of the imperial family.

Chapter 42

Harley had just spent the worst night of his entire life, and he was not about to go through another one like it. He’d broken into Russell’s remaining stores of beer and drifted off into sleep for half an hour here and there, but every time he did, he’d awakened again with a start, expecting to see that old lady from the cliffs, or Eddie, bruised and bloodied, cursing him out for cutting the rope.

Or that mangled guy on the autopsy table in the tent.

As far as he was concerned, St. Peter’s Island was even worse than all the stories and legends he’d ever heard about it. It was one big haunted house, fit for nothing but the dead and anyone else who felt ready to join them. He needed to get off of it while there was still time.

If there was still time.

As soon as the storm abated enough to let a little daylight shine, he’d ventured out of the cave to see if the trawler Kodiak had been freed by the surging tides.

Freed wasn’t the word. Scuttled was more like it. The boat had settled deeper into the cove, and he could see pieces of it drifting away on each icy wave. The groaning he had heard the night before was its hull being scraped on the rocks, its cabin flooding, its masts and doors and gangways being rent by the pounding surf.

As for the skiff — not that he could ever have made it back to Port Orlov in that flimsy thing, anyway — it had been dragged down by the tide and reduced to a pile of splinters and sawdust.

There was really only one option left to him — the RHI that he’d spotted down on the beach below the cemetery, where the Coast Guard must have left it for an emergency evacuation.

Well, if this wasn’t an emergency, then what the hell was?

Trekking over that way again was about the last thing in the world he wanted to do — that black dude with the rifle was never far from his thoughts — but he just didn’t see any way around it. He also knew that if he debated it much longer, he’d lose the few hours of daylight he had left. Earlier, he had emptied his coat pockets — vials, icon, and all — willy-nilly into his backpack, and now he threw in some Power-Bars, a bottled water, and the handgun Russell had been kind enough to leave behind. He’d have liked to take more, but he wanted to be sure he was traveling light. He wasn’t feeling up to par and wouldn’t have been surprised if he was running a bit of a fever. By the time he got back to his trailer, he’d probably be sporting a full-blown cold.

Walking back toward the beach and the stone steps leading down to the inflatable boat, he saw that his tracks from the day before had already been obliterated. Alaska had a way of doing that. Every sign of human life was soon wiped away by nature, and the stuff that lasted at all — like the colony — just wound up being a reminder of how empty, short, and hollow life really was. Sometimes, like right now, Harley thought it might have been a good idea to go and live someplace else, after all. He should have done it the day Charlie had moved his two crazy women into the old house.

As he approached the rear of the stockade, Harley could hear the cawing of crows and noticed that a pair of red hawks were circling lazily in the sky. If he could have avoided cutting through the colony again, he would have, but the wind on the cliffs was so strong — and his memories of the specter he’d seen there so fresh — he felt the risks were better just scuttling across the campground and out through the main gates. Despite the bitter cold, he was sweating inside his parka.

There were even more birds circling in the sky above the side of the old church, and a whole flock of them on the ground strutting and pecking around a spot close to a jagged hole in the foundation. A snowdrift had been blown up against one wall, but just as Harley crept past, the birds reluctantly took flight, and he could see that there was something lying there, mostly hidden under the crust of snow. It appeared that other animals had been burrowing into the drift, too, and he could see that the snow had a faintly pinkish cast … and that what he’d thought was a twig sticking up was actually the toe of a boot. He moved a little closer, and with the tips of his glove brushed some snow away. He didn’t need to see anything more than the torn shreds of a propane company work shirt to know that these were the remains of Russell, and that the local critters had been heartily chowing down.

Just as the crabs had probably made the most of Eddie by now.

It wasn’t that he was completely heartless — after all, he’d known these guys a long time — but it couldn’t help but occur to him that whatever the diamonds in the icon were worth (and it had to be plenty), he’d now be splitting the money only two ways, instead of four. Charlie would probably claim it was all the hand of God at work.

Staying low to the ground, he hurried past the colony tents, through the main gates, and over to the side of the cliff. The mist that clung to St. Peter’s Island was lying a hundred yards offshore, but on the beach below he could still see the yellow RHI, firmly tied and clamped between makeshift davits made out of driftwood logs. It was just about the first piece of luck he’d had since this whole damn nightmare had begun, he thought.

The steps that some crazy Russian must have carved into the cliff a hundred years ago were only a few inches wide at most, and zigged and zagged their way down to the waterline. Even if he hadn’t been feeling peaked, the descent would have been a bitch. The wind, skirling off the Bering Strait, forced him to flatten himself against the rock and shimmy his way down, putting out one foot at a time and nudging it around until he had cleared the snow and scree — and sometimes the birds — from the lower perch, then gingerly placing his weight there. More than once, the birds came back, flitting around his head, defending their turf, but he didn’t even bother to bat them away. He needed both hands to cling to the slippery rock.

The backpack, even with its contents stripped down, was more of a burden than he expected, and the weight of it kept threatening to throw him off-balance. He tried to control his breathing and not to look down any more than he had to; if he panicked, he was a goner. His arms ached from embracing the rocky walls and his knees started to quiver from the strain, but eventually he could hear the waves sloshing on the sand and pebbles, and he could feel the ocean spray blowing onto his face. When the stone steps gave out, and he felt his boots crunching on the hardscrabble beach, he collapsed in a heap, his head down, his hands splayed on either side.

Never again, he told himself, never again was he going to get involved in something this stupid.

Still conserving what little strength was left in his legs, he crawled, breathing heavily, across the gravel and sand. The fog had drifted in, which was going to make it that much harder to steer a course through the rocks and shoals that rimmed the shoreline. But then that figured — this island had been bad luck from start to finish, and he couldn’t wait to get off it.

Slapping a hand on the firmly inflated side of the RHI, he hoisted himself up onto his knees, enough to groggily assess the craft. A waterproof and heavy-duty black tarp had been tightly sealed across the interior, but as he fumbled at the snaps and knots that kept it in place, he had the discomfiting feeling that there was something under it. Once or twice, under the rumble of the crashing waves, he thought he heard a furtive noise, the sound of something scuttling for cover. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts, and focused on loosening the rest of the stays. Once, he even thought he heard the crunch of a boot on the sand behind him, and whirled around groping for his gun, but all he saw was a rolling column of fog … and no one in it.

Eddie was gone, he reminded himself. Splattered on the rocks on the other side of the damn island.

And Russell … well, Russell was just that lump under the snowdrift.

He untied the last of the straps holding the tarp down, and yanked it back.

Two startled eyes were staring back at him, and before he could even register his shock, the creature flew past him, a blaze of wet brown fur and black claws.

Harley stumbled backwards, as the otter scampered up the beach, its tail swishing, before abruptly changing course, turning toward the water again and slipping silently into the icy wash.

It was all over in a matter of seconds, but it took Harley a minute or two to calm down again and get back to work.

Damn otter. He vaguely recalled some legend about otters, some native bullshit, but since they were probably bad luck — like everything else out here — he didn’t try too hard to remember it. On the Vane’s Holy Writ broadcasts, Charlie was always trying to prove how the Inuit stories had something to do with Jesus, but Harley didn’t buy it. He thought his brother was just trying to con a few more bucks out of the locals.

With frozen fingers, he freed the clamps holding the boat to the davits, then, tugging the braided rope, dragged it down to the water.

The bright yellow boat bobbed on the surf like a rubber ducky, and it took him three tries before he could hoist himself, boots and pants dripping wet, onto its fixed seat in back, and get the motor running.

Turning the boat parallel to the shore, he took it away from some jagged rocks, and slowly out to sea. He knew that no one in his right mind would be trying this, which was precisely why he’d probably get away with it. The fog was so thick it was like churning through clam chowder, but it would dissipate once he got a little farther from the island. His plan was to run parallel to the cliffs, then due southwest to Port Orlov. But he wasn’t so dumb that he’d sail it right into the harbor; no, he was going to put in at the old family wharf a few miles away, then, when everything had blown over, maybe he could strip the boat and sell it for parts.

The spray was blowing into his face and even when he wiped it away with his sleeve, he couldn’t see much better — his coat, too, was sopping. And he was starting to feel truly shitty. He coughed, and he didn’t like the sound of it. What he needed was a good hot meal at the Yardarm, and Angie Dobbs back in his bed. Yes, a little Angie in the night would cure whatever ailed him.

His progress was slower than he thought it should be, and he gunned the engine higher.

Although the boat was carrying so little weight that it should have been skimming along, the current was either stronger than he estimated, or the prow was weighted down somehow. The wind was howling so loudly in his ears that it seemed like he could hear voices; it would have been okay if it had been Angie telling him how good he was in bed, or Charlie — the old Charlie — telling him how to pull off an easy con.

But it wasn’t, and they weren’t.

It sounded more like Eddie, asking him why he’d cut the goddamned rope … or Russell, screaming as the wild animals had taken him apart.

Fuck Eddie. Fuck Russell. They’d taken their chances. Harley wasn’t their keeper.

The boat bucked a wave, and Harley clutched the throttle tight.

Christ Almighty he was cold. He pulled the loose tarp all the way up to his waist.

And in the billowing fog that engulfed the boat, he could swear that for just one instant, he saw them both — his two accomplices — sitting toward the bow, waiting for him to ferry them back home. Deadweight, he thought, as always.

When he blinked, they were gone — Harley knew an hallucination when he was having one, and this damn island seemed to specialize in them.

But when he blinked again — oh, sweet Jesus — there they were again, looking at him like it was all his fault somehow.

Chapter 43

It was the hardest call Slater had ever had to make, but with lives hanging in the balance — Eva’s for sure, and possibly Nika’s, too — he called Dr. Levinson in D.C. Apparently, he had caught her at a dinner party, and until she had moved into a private study, he could hear the sounds of clinking glasses and cutlery in the background.

As succinctly as he could, he told her what was happening on the island, and with every word he uttered he could imagine the expression of mounting disbelief, and anger, on her face. She had gone to bat for him at the court-martial, she had given him this golden opportunity to redeem himself, and he had blown it sky-high. When she finally spoke, he could hear the steel in her voice.

“So you have not one, but two, compromised team members?” she said. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that he might make a third.

“Yes. And I will need them to be evacuated immediately to a mainland hospital, where a strict quarantine can be established.”

“Why didn’t you call for it already?”

“I did, but we’re having a priorities problem. It looks like the Coast Guard may need a kick in the pants from AFIP headquarters, or an assist from the Air National Guard.”

“Consider it done.”

He thanked her.

“Don’t thank me, Frank. You know what this means, don’t you?”

He could guess, but she told him, anyway.

“Once we get this straightened out, I’ll want you back in Washington for a full debriefing. When we’re finished with that, your civilian status with the AFIP will be considered terminated.”

The same as his military status had already been withdrawn.

“I understand.”

“Do you?” It was the first time real emotion cut through the icy reserve she had maintained so far. “You’re the best we had, Frank, and I went out on a limb for you. And now you’ve cut off the damn limb, too.”

When she hung up, he stood there in the communications tent for a few seconds, gathering his thoughts, watching as his entire career went up in smoke, until Sergeant Groves, covered with snow, came through the flaps. Slater quickly slipped his face mask back on, and held up a hand to keep Groves at a distance.

“The lab tent’s clear?” Slater said. “No sign of the wolf?”

“Long gone,” Groves replied, fitting his own mask back over his mouth and nose. “I left Rudy on watch. But there is something you’ve got to see.”

“Is it about Eva? Is she okay?”

“No change, as far as I know.”

“Nika?” He had confined her to her tent until further notice.

“No, it’s none of that,” Groves said. He beckoned Slater to follow him out of the tent.

Slater, who’d had no more than a couple of hours’ sleep, pulled his coat and gloves on over his fresh hazmat suit and followed Groves out into the storm. There was only a feeble light in the sky, and to keep the wind from blowing him off his feet he had to cling to the ropes lining the pathway. Groves plodded across the colony grounds to the church, but detoured at the front steps to go around the side. There, he stopped beside a patch where the snow, much disturbed, had a raspberry tinge. It didn’t take long for Slater to make out the mangled remains of a body and the shreds of a blue work uniform … or to recognize them as belonging to that guy named Russell, whom he’d first seen at the bar, then at the memorial service at the Lutheran church. He was part of Harley Vane’s pack.

“How long do you think he’s been here?”

Groves shrugged. “Can’t be that long. We’d have seen it on the regular patrols.”

Slater wondered if he’d been alone on the island, or if he’d brought Harley. Or the third musketeer, the one named Eddie something. Were the others, in fact, possibly still around?

And if they were, what were they doing here? Had they been responsible for that hole in the cemetery? Why on earth would they have been trying to dig up graves, much less now, with his own contingent there?

“Looks like the wolves got him,” Groves said.

“Among other things,” Slater replied, solemnly. He wasn’t sure what these guys were capable of, but Nika would have a much better idea. For now, it was just another wild card to add to the rapidly accumulating stack. In the snow, he saw a soggy old book, with a torn binding, and picked it up. It looked like a ledger, in Russian.

“Dry this out, then let Kozak take a crack at it.”

“Will do. And the body?”

“Bag it, under hazard wraps, and we’ll send it back to Port Orlov when the chopper gets here.”

“When’s that?”

Slater wished he knew. Looking at the sky, he saw nothing but roiling gray clouds, giving way to banks of blacker thunderheads moving in across the strait. Whenever the helicopter arrived, it would be a bad time.

“And don’t mention it to anyone else yet,” Slater said. Groves nodded. On missions like these, they both knew, information was given out only on a need-to-know basis.

Going into the church, he was surprised not to see Kozak sitting on the stool outside the quarantine tent that had been set up around Lantos; he’d been assigned to guard the premises and listen for any sign that Lantos had become conscious again. The Demerol drip should have kept her quiet and sedated, but you never knew. Slater looked toward the far end of the church, where he could see a flashlight beam moving back and forth across the great heap of broken pews and tangled ironwork.

“You’ve abandoned your post,” he said, as he approached the professor. “In wartime, you could be shot for that.”

Kozak was supposed to be wearing a gauze face mask, too, part of the costume Slater required for quarantine duty, but he’d let his dangle down around his neck. Slater gestured for him to raise it again, but before he did, Kozak declared, “Do you know what this is?”

“Looks like a pile of junk to me.”

“Look behind the junk,” Kozak said, finally lifting the mask back into place over his neatly trimmed silver beard. “The junk has been put here to hide the screen that shielded the altar.”

“There’s an altar back there?”

“Yes, there has to be, and the screen is called the iconostasis. You will find it in all the Russian Orthodox churches. It protects the holy of holies, the sanctuary. In a big church, like the one I went to in Moscow when I was a boy, there were several doors through the iconostasis. Only certain monks or priests could use each one. There were many rules. But in a smaller church, one like this, there was sometimes just a single door — the door of Saint Stephen, the Protomartyr.”

“The what?” Slater had never been one for religion. In his experience, it was just another reason for people to kill each other with conviction and impunity.

“Saint Stephen, the first martyr of the Christian church,” Kozak said, with a touch of exasperation. “Have you never sung the song about good king Wencelas, on the feast of Stephen?” Kozak started humming the tune, but Slater was already nodding in recognition and he stopped. “Saint Stephen was put on trial by the Sanhedrin,” Kozak said, resuming his explanation, “and then he was stoned to death.”

“For what?”

“Preaching that Christ was divine.”

There you go again, Slater thought. One more entry for his inventory of religious slaughter.

Lifting his digital camera to take a picture of the jumble, Kozak said, “I am going to write a paper about this church, I think.”

“Not while you’re supposed to be on duty watching Eva.”

“She has been sleeping. I have listened to the monitor,” Kozak assured him, before adding gravely, “but she should be in a hospital by now, yes?”

“Yes, and she will be soon. A chopper’s on the way.”

“Ah, so you got through to someone, after all.”

“I had to call the head of the AFIP, in D.C. If she can’t get them to jump, no one can.”

Kozak slipped the camera back into his pocket. “I suspect she was not happy to hear this news,” Kozak sympathized.

“No, she wasn’t.” Now that Slater was aware of it, he could see that there was indeed some sort of screen erected behind all the camouflage. He could even detect the glint of gold paint on a faded mural.

Kozak nodded, looking down. “The bureaucrats, they never understand. The situation on the ground is never the same as the situation in their plans. They think it should always be easy, the way it looks on paper.”

You can say that again, Slater thought. He was trying not to dwell on the fallout from his conversation with Dr. Levinson. The rest of his life loomed before him like a great empty plain, and it was almost a relief when his thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a low, but anguished, murmuring from the quarantine tent.

“Eva’s awake again,” he said, as her voice crackled over the audio monitor.

“But she sounds like she is in pain.”

He could increase the drip, even give her an injection, but there was only so much he could do under these conditions. And as he hurried back to help her, he heard an even worse sound.

A spasm of coughing. Harsh and wet. And flulike.

Chapter 44

The breaker of chains.

When Charlie Vane read those four words on the computer screen, he felt as if he had just broken into the vault at Fort Knox.

The silver cross was sitting on a yellow legal pad, its emeralds glinting in the buttery glow of the banker’s lamp. Like a lottery winner who needed to study his lucky ticket one more time, Charlie picked it up and turned it over. The inscription was in Russian, but he had written the translation Voynovich had given him on the pad.

“To my little one. No one can break the chains of divine love that bind us. Your loving father, Grigori.”

He had been reading it all wrong. Misinterpreting what it said.

But now he knew better. It was as if, with that one simple phrase, he’d just been given the key to a secret code. Now he knew the story. All his Internet research had finally paid off.

By the year 1901, Nicholas II, the reigning Romanov Tsar, had long been praying for a son. He and his wife, Alexandra, had had three daughters already, and to ensure the survival of his dynasty, Nicholas needed a male heir to be born. But on the night of June 18, the Tsaritsa gave birth to a fourth daughter, and to keep his wife from seeing his disappointment, Nicholas took a long walk to compose himself before going into the royal chamber. On that walk, he must have given himself a stern talking-to, because he resolved to make the best of it and honor the birth of this new daughter by freeing several students who had been imprisoned for rioting in Moscow and St. Petersburg the previous winter.

The name he chose for her was Anastasia, which meant the breaker of chains.

As Charlie studied the cross again, he saw how everything now fell right into place.

“The little one”—malenkaya—to whom it was addressed was a commonly used nickname for the mischievous young grand duchess, Anastasia. And the “loving father” was not her dad, but a priest. A father named Grigori.

As in Grigori Rasputin, the self-proclaimed holy man revered by the Romanovs and reviled by the nation.

What Charlie was holding was not only a piece of history, but an object of absolutely unimaginable value. The days of soliciting measly contributions to Vane’s Holy Writ website were over forever! He could bring his message — personal liberation through total subjugation, in all things, to the holy will! — to millions of people at once. Not incidentally, he could become even richer and more famous in the process, though that, too, was no doubt part of the heavenly plan for him.

He had barely had time to savor his triumph, and imagine the bidding war that would ensue among the world’s wealthiest collectors and museums, when the motion-detector lights went on outside the house, bathing the driveway in their cold white glare. Pushing his wheelchair back on the piled-up rugs, he glanced outside, and while he expected to see a moose ambling by, or maybe a couple of foxes scampering across the snow, he saw his brother Harley, looking like he was on his last legs, staggering toward the front steps.

“Rebekah!” he shouted. “Go open the front door!”

“Why?” she called back from the kitchen. “I’m baking.” The smell of charred, sourdough bread had filled the house for hours.

There was a hammering on the front door, and Harley was crying, “Open up! For Christ’s sake, open up!”

Charlie was maneuvering his chair toward the front hall when he heard Bathsheba skip down the stairs and eagerly say, “I’ll get it! It’s Harley.” She had a thing for his younger brother; she’d once said that he looked like he could be one of those young vampires in her books.

But when she opened the door, Harley virtually slumped inside, slammed the door closed behind him, and threw the bolt. He leaned back against it, his eyes wild, his brown hair sticking out in icy spikes. His boots were dripping onto the carpets that covered the old, uneven floorboards, and his skin was even whiter than Bathsheba’s, which was saying something.

“They won’t stop!” he cried. “They won’t stop!”

“Who won’t stop?” Charlie said, the wheel of his chair snagging on the edge of a rug.

“Eddie and Russell!”

“What are you talking about? Are they here, too?”

“No, man — they’re gone!”

Gone? Whatever he really meant by that, Charlie knew that he had some very serious trouble on his hands. Bathsheba shrank back toward the staircase. “Okay, Harley, why don’t you just calm down? Come on inside and tell me what’s going on. Bathsheba, go and tell your sister to bring us some of her hot tea and that bread she’s been burning all afternoon.”

It took Harley several seconds to pry himself away from the door, and as Charlie led him back into the meeting room where he worked, he heard the clink of what sounded like glass and metal from the backpack slung over Harley’s shoulder. Was that a good sign, he wondered? It had been days since he’d heard any news from St. Peter’s Island, and while he was relieved to see that Harley was alive, it was plain as could be that he was off his rocker.

“You’re okay now,” Charlie said. “You can just sit down and relax.”

Harley went to the window first and stayed there, staring outside until the motion detectors finally turned off and the driveway went black. He yanked the curtains closed and whirled around in a panic as Rebekah came in carrying the tea and toast. Bathsheba peered in, half-concealed, from the doorway.

“Just put the tray down,” Charlie said, “and leave us alone.”

Rebekah did as she was told, but let it bang on the desktop and the tea slosh over the rims of the mugs in protest at such brusque treatment.

“That bread’s not from any store,” she said, as if someone had suggested otherwise, then slammed the pocket doors together behind her as she left.

“Drink this,” Charlie said, handing his brother a mug. “Tastes like shit, but it’s good for you.”

Harley took it, his hands shaking, and slurped some of it down. He let the backpack slip onto the floor, between his feet. Then he wolfed a couple of slabs of the toast down, too, without even bothering to slather on any of the homemade jam. Charlie studied him as if he were one of the crazy people who occasionally showed up — online or in person — at his ministry. They usually claimed that there were voices in their heads, or that they were being followed. One of the local Inuit had shown up, screaming that he was being tracked, and it turned out that he was right — he had escaped from a mental ward all the way over in Dillingham and the social workers were hot on his trail.

Harley looked just as bad, but Charlie just let him sit and sip the home-brewed tea — no complaints out of him this time — until he seemed to calm down. Just what had happened on that island? And what did he mean when he said that Eddie and Russell were gone?

“You know, you can take off your coat and stay awhile,” Charlie said.

But Harley looked like he was still too cold to take it off, and Charlie knew enough not to rush him. And it was the backpack, anyway — not the coat — that he was dying to get into.

“While you were gone, I took a little trip myself,” Charlie said by way of distraction. “To Nome.”

Apart from nervously rubbing his thigh, Harley didn’t react in any way.

“I went to see that thief Voynovich.”

Harley’s eyes flicked up from the rim of the mug.

“He told me a few things about the cross. And I’ve done some digging on my own.”

Harley was starting to focus again.

“Seems like it might be worth a helluva lot more than we thought.”

Harley snorted, like none of this mattered much anymore, and Charlie took offense.

“In case you care,” Charlie said, “it belonged to Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Tsar. And it was a gift to her from a guy named Rasputin. I figured all of that out by myself, sitting in this very room.” He waited for the news to sink in. “How about that?”

“If you ask me, you should throw the fucking thing in the ocean.”

That was not exactly the reaction that Charlie was expecting. A puddle was forming on the rug around his brother’s boots, soaking the bottom of the backpack.

“You know what?” he said. “I don’t know what you’re on, or what the hell happened to you, but I’m already sick of this routine. Are you gonna tell me what’s going on? Where are Eddie and Russell?”

Harley, finally, cracked a smile, but it wasn’t the kind of smile that would gladden any heart. To Charlie, it made him look as demented as that guy from Dillingham.

“Eddie and Russell are dead.”

“Dead?” Holy Hell, what sort of trouble had these cretins gotten themselves into?

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean, sort of?”

“Eddie fell off a cliff, and Russell got eaten by wolves.”

Charlie blew out a breath, then said, “That sounds plenty dead to me.”

Harley actually chuckled. “Yeah, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Charlie, not overly endowed with patience to begin with, was now fresh out. For all he knew, Eddie and Russell were down at the Yardarm right now, just as stoned and out of it as his brother was. Who knew what they were ingesting? Eddie’s mom was known for cooking up some pretty wicked shit. “Pick up that damn backpack,” he said, “and give it to me.”

Harley tossed the damp backpack onto Charlie’s lap.

As Charlie started to root around inside, Harley said, “I’d be careful if I were you,” but it was already too late. Charlie had pierced a finger, and pulling it out, stuck it in his mouth to stanch the bleeding.

“What have you got in here?” Charlie said, turning the satchel over and shaking it out on the rug. A hail of broken tubes and stoppers fell out, some of them bloody or smeared with melting flesh. Charlie recoiled at the mess. “Are you nuts?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Where’d you get all this crap?”

“The colony.”

“What for?”

“Just keep shaking.”

Charlie shook it again, and this time the icon fell right into his lap. The Virgin Mary, the infant Jesus … adorned with three sparkling diamonds. Charlie’s mood changed in an instant. “Holy Mother of God.”

“Damn straight.”

Charlie angled his chair to catch the light from the desk lamp better, and to see the diamonds shine.

“This is from one of the graves?”

Harley nodded.

“And there’s more where this came from?”

“I suppose so.”

What kind of answer was that? Charlie was caught between exultation and frustration. Between the emerald cross and this icon, they had struck the mother lode, but how much more had his idiot brother left in the ground? “Then we’ll have to go back.”

“Not me.”

God, give me strength, Charlie thought. If it weren’t for this wheelchair … He was searching for the right tack and trying to keep his temper, when Harley bent over double, calmly vomiting the tea and toast onto the carpets.

Oh, Christ, Rebekah was going to have a fit.

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

Chapter 45

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.

Chapter 46

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.

Chapter 47

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?”

“For argument’s sake, we have to assume that they did.”

“I should call the sheriff in town,” she said, starting for the SAT phone, but Slater put up a hand to stop her.

“He’s already been notified, and he’s been told what precautions to take for himself and his men.” Slater had also notified the Coast Guard, the National Guard, and the civilian authorities in the state capital of Juneau. What he needed was a tight ring to be formed around the town of Port Orlov, and a wider ring with a ten-mile perimeter to be formed around even that. Northwest Alaska, fortunately, was sparsely populated, and it wasn’t exactly crisscrossed with roads and highways; most of the travel was done by boat and air, and Slater had already arranged for the harbor to be blockaded and the commercial aircraft to be grounded. When he’d encountered any resistance, he’d referred the calls to AFIP headquarters in Washington. By now, he figured, Dr. Levinson was probably planning to put him in front of a firing squad when and if he ever got back.

“Frank,” Nika said, “what’s going to happen to the people in Port Orlov?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “We’re going to stop this thing in its tracks.”

“I just couldn’t bear it,” she said, still sounding fearful, “if what happened in 1918 happened again … and on my watch. I’m the mayor, I’m the tribal elder, I’m the one they trusted. I remember the stories of my people dying in their huts, the dogs feeding on their bodies for weeks.”

“That won’t happen,” he said, holding her hands in his gloves and wishing that he could just strip off all the protective gear — his and hers — and touch her for real.

“My great-grandparents passed down the stories. They were among the few survivors.”

“And God bless your ancestors, because that immunity might have been passed down to you, and others. We’re going to take every precaution,” he said, “just as we have to do, but we will contain the threat.”

Unable to kiss her, or even touch the skin of her naked hand with his own, he bent his forehead to hers and rested it there. And though he was aware of how odd and even comical this scene would appear to any outside observer — a couple in hazmat suits, communing in a rickety, windblown tent — it was also the most intimate moment he had experienced in years. He closed his eyes — it felt like the first time he’d shut them in ages — and if it were not for the distant clatter of propeller blades, he might have stayed that way forever.

“Frank, do you hear that?”

He did. “Get your things together and be ready to go in five minutes!”

Outside, and wiping away the snow that stuck to his goggles, he looked up to see the blinking red lights of the Coast Guard helicopter as it skimmed over the treetops, then circled the colony grounds. Sergeant Groves lighted a ring of flares to mark the spot, and the chopper slowly descended, wobbling wildly and whipping the snow into a white froth. Slater didn’t even wait for its wheels to settle before charging up to the cabin door as it slid open.

“Follow me!” he ordered, and two medics, already swaddled in blue hazmat suits, leapt out into the storm carrying a metal-reinforced stretcher. At the church, Slater kicked the crooked doors ajar and barged inside, the wind blowing a gust of snow like a little tornado all the way down the nave toward the iconostasis.

“In here,” Slater said, stopping to rip open the makeshift quarantine tent.

Eva was barely conscious as he removed the IV lines, gave the medics the latest stats on her condition, and helped slide her onto the stretcher.

“Frank,” she mumbled, “I’m sorry …”

But the rest of her words were lost beneath her mask and in the commotion of her removal.

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” he said, laying a hand on her frail shoulder.

The medics carried her carefully down the slanting steps and across the colony grounds to the landing pad. Slater saw Sergeant Groves and Rudy hauling the body bag with Russell inside it toward the cargo hatch, and as Groves undid the latches, the pilot jumped out of the cockpit to object to this unexpected and additional cargo.

Even over the howling wind, Slater could hear him shouting, “What the hell are you doing? I have no authorization for that!”

And for Slater it was suddenly as if he were back in Afghanistan, with a little girl dying from a viper bite. “I’m authorizing it,” he declared, and as the medics clambered aboard with Lantos, Nika appeared, ducking into the cabin like a shot. The pilot, even under his own gauze mask, looked confused about what to do about all this, but Slater set him straight. “And now we need to take off!” At such times, it was hard to remember that he wasn’t a major anymore, only a civilian epidemiologist, but he had learned that if he behaved like one, few people were prepared to question his commands. He climbed into the chopper to close any debate.

Seconds later, the props whirring, the helicopter rose into the air, buffeted this way and that as if a giant paw were batting it around; out the Plexiglas window, Slater could see Groves and Rudy, hands raised in farewell, and as he adjusted his shoulder restraints so that they weren’t squashing the little ivory bilikin into his chest — so where was the luck the damn thing was supposed to bring? — he spotted Kozak skidding into view, with the earmuffs of his fur hat blowing straight out like wings on either side of his head, and holding his thumbs up in encouragement. It was a good team, that much he had done right. Lantos groaned as the chopper dipped, then plowed forward, its nose down, soaring just above the timbers of the stockade and the onion dome of the crooked church.

Chapter 48

Sergei had never had any trouble going to ground. You could not grow up on the steppes of Siberia and not know how to live off the land and stay out of sight; it was bred into the bones of anyone whose ancestors had ever had to flee a Mongol horde, or hide from a rampaging pack of Cossacks.

But these days it was especially tricky. After he had safely delivered Anastasia into the hands of Sister Leonida, he had hovered around the town of Ekaterinburg, where great changes were under way — particularly at the House of Special Purpose. He had watched from the shadows as all signs and vestiges of the royal family were removed and burned in a bonfire in the courtyard. He could see the Red Guards overseeing local workers as they scraped the whitewash from the windows, scrubbed the obscene graffiti from the outhouse, brought in mops and brooms and buckets to clean out the charnel house in the cellar. And he had managed to forage through the trash in town and find a soiled copy of a local broadsheet, the text of which had no doubt been approved, if not written, by Lenin himself. The headline read, DECISION OF THE PRESIDIUM OF THE DIVISIONAL COUNCIL OF DEPUTIES OF WORKMEN, PEASANTS, AND RED GUARDS OF THE URALS, and the article contained the official party declaration: “In view of the fact that Czechoslovak bands are threatening the Red capital of the Urals, Ekaterinburg; that the crowned executioner may escape from the tribunal of the people (a White Guard plot to carry off the whole imperial family has just been discovered), the Presidium of the Divisional Committee in pursuance of the will of the people has decided that the ex-Tsar Nicholas Romanov, guilty before the people of innumerable bloody crimes, shall be shot.

“The decision was carried into execution on the night of July 16–17. Romanov’s family has been transferred from Ekaterinburg to a place of greater safety.”

A place of greater safety, he scoffed, crumpling the sheet in his hands. The bottom of a coal pit at a desolate spot called the Four Brothers.

But the paper was right about one thing — the Czechs and White Guards were indeed infiltrating, and overrunning, the area. Eight days after the massacre, Yurovsky and his Latvian comrades had had to make a run for it, and now that most of them were gone, Sergei had risked returning to Novo-Tikhvin late that same night.

“She is much better,” Sister Leonida said, ushering him through a back gate, “though, as you would expect, she is sorely troubled.”

“Can she be moved?”

“Why move her? She is safe here, lost among the many sisters.”

But Sergei knew better than that; he knew that the tides were always turning in war and that Ekaterinburg was destined to fall back into Red hands eventually. When it did, the monastery itself would probably be destroyed; Lenin had no love for religion.

Furthermore, for all he knew, Commandant Yurovsky — no fool — had figured out that he’d been cheated, that the youngest duchess might still be alive somewhere. No, there was only one place on earth where she would be truly secure, and Sergei was determined to take her there.

The nun led him into the bakery, unoccupied now but still warm and aromatic from the day’s baking, and silently pointed to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Then she discreetly left him to his own devices. Stepping atop a barrel of flour, he pulled the door down cautiously, unfolded its steps, and after climbing to the top saw Anastasia sitting at a small table in the corner of the attic, writing in a journal by the light of a kerosene lamp. Dressed in a black cassock with elaborate silver embroidery, and humming some melancholy tune under her breath, she didn’t hear him, but continued to scrawl across the pages of the notebook, her head down, her light brown curls grazing her shoulders. Despite everything that they had been through together, he was still shy — a rural farm boy, who felt himself nothing but elbows and knees and cowlicks when he was in her company.

But if it ever came to it, he would risk his life again to save her.

“Ana,” he said, and her head came up slightly, as if she had heard a ghost in the rafters. “Ana.”

And then she turned from the table, her gray eyes, once so filled with mischief and joy, now brimming with an ineffable sadness. She was not yet eighteen, but her expression betrayed the grief and fear of someone who had seen horrors no one should see and lived through nightmares no one should ever have had to endure. Her cheeks, once plump and rosy, were drawn and hollow, and her lips were thin and downcast.

“I prayed you would come back.” Even her voice was subdued, burdened.

Sergei closed the trapdoor behind him and went to kneel beside her at the table. She stroked his head as if she were the older woman — and here he was, twenty, just last month — but when he looked up at her, he could see how pleased she was to see him. “I was so afraid I would never be able to thank you.”

The back of her hand brushed the side of his face, and his skin tingled at her touch.

“Sister Leonida tells me you are recovering well.”

“They have been very good to me here.”

On the table he saw that there was a bud vase with several blue cornflowers in it, and he smiled. “Remember the day you gave me one of those?” He did not tell her that he had it still.

Ana smiled, too, and for several minutes they reminisced about only insignificant things — the flowers in the summer fields as the train had made its way into Siberia, the way Jemmy had loved to jump off the caboose and run in circles whenever they had stopped for coal, Dr. Botkin’s passion for chess (and how frustrated he was whenever young Alexei had brought him to a draw). Like so many of the Russian peasants, Sergei had been filled with a native reverence for the Tsar and his family — a reverence that the Reds had worked tirelessly to undermine and destroy. The bloody toll of the war had sealed the Bolsheviks’ argument.

But once Sergei had been exposed to the family itself, once he had seen the heir to the throne writhing in pain from a minor injury, or the Tsaritsa ceaselessly fretting over him, once he had heard the laughter of the four grand duchesses and watched the melancholy Tsar pace the length of the palisade at the Ipatiev house, he had changed his mind again. Now they were not just iconic figures to him, the bloody puppets that Lenin had made them out to be, but real people … people that the starets of his village, at one time the most famous man in all of Russia, had befriended.

Was Sergei going to listen to a prophet from his own town — a man of God, touched with holy fire — or Lenin, an exiled politician that the Germans had smuggled back into the country in a secret train, purely to foment rebellion?

“How have you stayed safe?” Anastasia asked, and Sergei told her how and where he had been hiding out in the surrounding countryside. In July, it could be done; later in the year, it would not have been so easy.

“And does the world know …” she said, faltering, “about what happened to my family?”

He told her what he’d read in the broadsheet, including its bold lie about the safety of the family, and a flush of fury rose in her cheeks.

“Murderers!” she exclaimed. “And cowards, too — afraid to admit to their crimes!”

Sergei wondered if that was what she had been writing about in her journal.

“I will tell the world! I will shout it from the rooftops, and I will see those murderers hang!”

Sergei was hushing her when he heard what sounded like a broomstick banging on the bottom of the trapdoor. Sister Leonida must have been keeping guard in the kitchen down below.

“Someday,” he said, trying to calm her, “you will do that, and I will help you. But that day is still far off. You have enemies, and you have already seen what they can do. Now is not the time for that, Ana.”

Breathing hard, she subsided. “What is it the time for then? Hiding in this attic like a little mouse?”

“No, not that, either.” This was as good an opportunity as he was likely to get to broach the subject he had been meaning to introduce. “Now is the time to leave, with me, for the place Father Grigori himself prepared as a refuge. It was part of the vision he had before his death.”

Ana remembered well many of Rasputin’s predictions … all of which had so far come true — even, to her sorrow, the most dire.

“It is a colony on an island, and many of the faithful are already there. I remember the day they left Pokrovskoe, led by the Deacon Stefan. You won’t be safe until you are out of the country and hidden in a place where no one can find you.”

She did not appear persuaded, but she was still listening. “Where is this secret place?”

“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?”

Chapter 49

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.

Chapter 50

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?”

Standing on the ice with legs spread wide apart to keep his balance, he called back, “Not yet.” As instructed, he was wearing his own mask and gloves, too. “I went out to the Vane house, but Charlie said they weren’t there.”

“We both know that Charlie Vane couldn’t tell the truth if he tried.”

“I hear ya, Mayor. But I haven’t got a warrant to search the place, and nobody’s seen Harley, or Eddie for that matter, for the past few days.” Gesturing at the oil truck deployed from the company that employed Russell, he said, “And Russell hasn’t shown up for his job, either.”

“He won’t be,” Nika said, soberly. “He’s dead.”

“What did you say?”

She pointed to the cargo bay, where two Coast Guardsmen, also suited up, were removing the body bag.

“He was found on the island. The wolves got him.”

The sheriff, even from half a dozen yards away, was plainly pole-axed.

“Keep him on ice, and keep the bag sealed,” Slater interjected, before turning back to Nika and saying, in a low voice, “Maybe we should take that drive now.”

“Sure,” she said, knowing full well what he meant. Taking care not to slip on the ice, and under the puzzled eye of the sheriff and his deputy, Nika led Slater over to the municipal garage at one end of the rink; the last time she’d been in here she’d been parking the Zamboni. Now she went right past it, along with the snowplows and the garbage truck, and stopped beside Port Orlov’s one and only all-terrain ambulance.

“Get in,” she said, sliding into the driver’s seat, as he raced around to the passenger side. “Where to first?”

“Harley’s place.”

“Buckle up,” she replied, rolling down her window and putting the car into gear.

As she pulled out of the garage, the sheriff scooted in front of the headlights, holding up his hands. “Hey, hang on, where you going with that?” he shouted, holding the mask away from his mouth. “Nobody’s supposed to be going anywhere tonight — those are orders.”

“The mayor is exempt,” Nika called out, swerving around him and heading past the corner of the community center. For a second, the deputy held up his shotgun, as if waiting for instructions to shoot, but the sheriff just stood there, hands on his ample hips, unsure whose authority won out in a situation like this.

Front Street was deserted, the few fishing-gear shops and the grocery closed up tight. Even the Yardarm was dark. The old totem pole, teetering to one side, loomed ahead. Slater looked at its grinning otters and snarling wolves with a new understanding. There was nothing like a trip to St. Peter’s Island to broaden your horizons.

With a deafening roar, the chopper, fully fueled again, soared over their heads, red lights blinking, as it headed east … carrying its precious, and endangered, cargo.

“Will she make it?” Nika asked.

And this time Slater didn’t know how to reply; he had thoroughly briefed the chief medical officer on board, and Dr. Levinson had prepared the team in Juneau. But there was no knowing. “I hope so,” he finally said.

In the meantime, all he could do was keep a close watch on Nika.

Turning the ambulance into the driveway between a gun shop and a lumberyard, she said, “Harley lives in that trailer out back.” A violet glow could be seen between the tangled slats of the window blind. “He’s probably feeding his snake.”

Climbing out of the ambulance, she bounded up the steps to the door, banged loudly with the flat of her hand, then leaned over toward the window and peered inside. Slater, standing with one foot in the car and the other out, pulled the mask away from his mouth and took this chance to gulp the fresh night air. The thermals and hazmat suit he was wearing were plenty warm for the car — too warm, in fact — but even after a minute or two outside, the Alaskan cold could start to penetrate them. When Nika turned around, she was shaking her head.

“Eddie’s place next?” he asked.

“Eddie’s mom’s a meth head. Nobody hangs out there, not even Eddie.”

“And you say that this Charlie Vane is a liar.”

“True enough,” she said, getting back behind the wheel, “but I never said he was a good one.”

Backing up onto the empty street, she took a right at the edge of the lumberyard and headed down a dark, bumpy track no longer lined with any stores or commercial establishments. This one was just a back road dotted with an occasional shack, slapped together out of weathered planks and tar paper, or a mobile home parked up the hillside. Old wooden meat racks leaned between dilapidated sheds and piles of firewood. On the way, Nika elaborated on Charlie and his church of the Holy Writ.

“And you say he’s actually got followers?”

Nika shrugged. “Online, I guess you can find all types. Charlie did even better, though. He managed to convince those two women you saw at the memorial service — Rebekah and Bathsheba — to come and run his household for him.”

She tapped the brakes as a large, black object lumbered across the road. As the moose languidly turned its head, the headlights made its antlers and eyes shine. For a creature of such size, the legs looked too spindly and the knobby knees downright fragile.

“He needed them,” Nika said, picking up speed again once the moose had moseyed down an embankment, “since his accident.”

“What exactly happened?”

Nika reiterated enough of the family history — sunken crab boats, a hundred petty-theft charges, the tragic but harebrained attempt to run the rapids at Heron River — to give him a renewed sense of who he might be dealing with. “But he still gets around pretty well — he’s got his wheelchair, and a four-wheel-drive van that’s been totally retrofitted with hand controls and an eight-cylinder engine. The only thing that surprises me is that he hasn’t cracked it up yet.”

The ambulance bucked as it hit a series of potholes, and she gripped the wheel with her latex gloves more tightly. “The Vane family,” she summed up, “has an uncanny talent for destruction.”

Slater, staring off into the inky blackness, wondered just how deep that talent ran. Even if he found Harley, would he be able to reason with him? If he still had the vials from the freezer in the lab, not to mention the scroll and the icon, would Slater be able to explain to him the mortal danger in which he had placed himself as a result? Would he be able to convince him that no further charges would be leveled against him — that his very identity would be concealed — if he would just relinquish this lethal booty? Slater was well aware of the catastrophe this entire mission had become, but if he could simply contain the danger before it went any farther, it might provide a decent grace note to end his public career on. He could still hear his ex-wife’s voice in his head, all those times she had tried to talk him into a nice, quiet, suburban practice, treating allergies and scraped knees, but the idea was still anathema. He wanted his work to matter in the world, to feel that he was doing something valuable and needed and worthwhile.

For a long stretch now, there had been no signs of habitation at all, just a lonely road that had gradually wound its way back down toward the jagged coastline. Snow and sleet, blown all the way from Siberia and across the Bering Sea, slashed against the windows. It was hard to imagine the zeal that must have driven that tiny Russian sect, over a hundred years before, to make that same journey across this icy strait and settle on a forbidding bit of foreign land, a place they dared to rename after their patron saint, St. Peter.

Even more astonishing was the fact that their long-forgotten journey, which had ended in their own annihilation, should now pose such a threat to the world beyond this wilderness.

“It’s just around the next bend,” Nika said, slowing the ambulance. “You can’t miss the lighted cross that Charlie stuck up on his roof.”

Slater recalled seeing the cross when he had first flown over the town. But as the headlights swept the sparse brush along the oceanfront, his eyes were riveted on a ramshackle wharf, instead. Lashed to a concrete piling, a small vessel bobbed in the icy water.

It was the RHI.

“Harley’s here,” he declared. “That’s the boat from the island!”

Nika nodded and turned the ambulance up a narrow drive with snowdrifts piled high on either side, stopping beside a flight of sagging stairs. The illuminated cross beamed beside the chimney stack. There were lights on in the house, and a detached garage that looked old enough to have been originally built as a stable.

“Let me do the talking,” Nika said. “They may be crazy, but I know how to handle them.”

While Nika went up the stairs, Slater took a flashlight from the glove compartment and sidled around to the garage. As he dragged a rotting log over toward a window mounted high on the wall, he heard Nika pounding on the front door of the house. The booties of his hazmat suit were wet, and he had to work hard to maintain his balance while pointing the flashlight beam through the grimy, spider-webbed glass. Inside, he could make out a stack of used tires, a pyramid of rusty paint cans, and a snowmobile.

But there was no sign of a van, retrofitted or otherwise.

“Step on down,” he heard from a few feet behind him, “or else,” and when he turned his head, he saw Rebekah, in a long, ratty fur coat, aiming a shotgun at him. Judging from the look on her scrawny face, it was not an idle threat.

He stepped off the log, holding his palms out to show he meant no harm.

“We’re looking for Harley Vane,” he said, his voice muffled by his mask, “that’s all.”

“I could shoot you dead,” she said, “right on this spot, and I’d be within my rights.”

“We just need to talk to him,” he said, in as reasonable a tone as he could muster.

“Get going,” she said, indicating with the end of the gun that he should walk around to the front steps and go on up them. He could feel the rifle trained on him the whole way. In the entry hall, he found Nika with her own hands in the air, and Bathsheba shakily aiming a pistol in her general direction.

“I thought you said they’d listen to you,” Slater said, and Nika shrugged.

“They tell me Harley’s not here,” she said.

“Go on into the meeting room,” Rebekah ordered, and then Bathsheba stood to one side. Beyond her, Slater saw a big room with rugs all over the floor and some folding chairs stacked beside a gun cabinet, which was standing wide open.

Once Slater and Nika had complied, the two sisters seemed at a loss as to what to do next. Bathsheba had forgotten even to keep her pistol raised, and Rebekah kept moving the muzzle of her own doublebarreled shotgun from one to the other.

“Charlie’s not home, either?” Nika asked.

“Go get some rope,” Rebekah said to her sister.

“How much?”

“As much as you can find!”

Slater was quickly assessing this place they called the meeting room; to him, it appeared to serve as more of an office. There was a massive old slab of a desk, with papers and printouts spilling out of wire bins, and two, big-screen computer monitors. One was showing the screen saver — a towering cross, with a white wolf at its base, and the title Vane’s Holy Writ. But the images on the other one were a lot more intriguing.

When Bathsheba left to get the rope, Slater inched closer and saw an array of Russian icons, most of them featuring the Virgin Mary in a red veil, holding the Christ child in her lap. The headline read: FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE HERMITAGE MUSEUM, ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA. One of them was the spitting image of the icon they’d found in the deacon’s grave.

If he’d had a shred of doubt about Harley’s complicity in the missing icon — or where he had just been — it was gone now.

As was any doubt about the sisters’ plans; they were going to hold him hostage there, along with Nika, as long as it took for the Vane boys to complete their getaway in the missing van.

“Where did they go?” he asked, noting, for the first time, a wet spot on the rug and the faint smell of vomit.

Rebekah’s grip on the shotgun tightened.

“You need to know some things,” he said, sternly. “My name is Dr. Frank Slater, and I am asking you, as a representative of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, in Washington, D.C., to put the gun down and answer my questions.”

Rebekah was listening, but the gun didn’t budge.

“If you don’t cooperate — if you don’t tell me, right now, where Harley and his brother have gone — you will face local, state, and federal charges. You will be brought to trial, I can guarantee you that, and you, and your sister, will both be sentenced to serious prison time.” He stared straight back into her pallid face. “This is your last chance to cooperate.”

“Town,” she finally blurted out. “They went to town.”

“That’s a lie,” Nika said. “We’d have passed them on our way here.”

Bathsheba bustled back into the room, trailing a length of rope on the carpet behind her.

“Although they don’t know it,” Slater said, “Harley and your husband are in great danger.”

“No more than you are,” she said, twitching the gun. “And what’s with those masks and rubber gloves? You look like a pair of burglars to me. That’s what I’ll say when they ask me why I had to shoot you.”

“They have to be heading toward Nome,” Nika said to Slater, as if they were alone.

“Then that’s where we’ll be going,” Slater said, ignoring Bathsheba, who stood by, fiddling with the rope, and Rebekah, still clenching the shotgun but plainly wondering what to do next. “Come on.”

He calmly, but with cool deliberation, tipped the rifle barrel to one side as Nika scurried out of the room, and then, holding his breath, he followed her out to the ambulance. They both jumped in, and as Nika threw the vehicle into reverse to back down the driveway, she said appreciatively, “Next time somebody needs a hostage negotiator, I’ll know who to call.”

“Just drive.”

But they were no more than halfway down the hill when Bathsheba, waving the rope like a cowboy, ran behind them, pressing her hands to the back bumper.

“Leave Harley alone!” she was shouting. “He didn’t do anything!”

Nika hit the brakes, but the ambulance kept skidding down the slope, pushing Bathsheba behind it.

“Leave him alone!”

Nika, swearing, pumped the brakes again, but the driveway was icy and the vehicle fishtailed. There was an alarming thump, and Bathsheba was sent flying into a snowdrift.

“Oh, no!” Nika said, pounding the wheel in frustration and finally bringing the ambulance to a complete halt.

Frank had unbuckled his belt and was reaching for the door handle when Rebekah came flying down the front steps, screaming like a banshee at the sight of her sister in the snowbank. To Slater’s shock, she lifted the shotgun and without hesitation fired a round straight at the vehicle.

As the right headlight exploded in a shower of white sparks and shattered glass, Slater reached across the seat and dragged Nika down under him.

The second shot crashed through the windshield and dented the roof above their heads. A hole the size of a fist had been punched through the glass, but the rest of the windshield, crazed with a thousand fissures, held together.

Slater heard the chambering of two new rounds, but he wasn’t about to wait for Rebekah to improve her aim. Throwing open the side door, he rolled out onto the snow. A tuft of dirt and ice exploded behind him as he dodged behind a tree. He heard the crunching of the snow under Rebekah’s feet as she ran after him, and when he glanced around the trunk, another shotgun blast tore a big chunk of bark loose, throwing chips and splinters into his face.

But that meant both barrels were empty again, and he had a few seconds at most before she could reload.

Wiping his eyes clean, he bolted out from behind the tree. She had just slapped in a fresh round when he leapt for her. But his booties slipped, and all he could do was bat the barrel away in time for the shot to rip through the treetops and send a flock of birds screeching into the night.

She grunted in anger, and he groped for the gun. She tried to swing it away, but he held on, and with a violent wrench managed to yank it out of her hands. With her fingers extended like claws, she let out a bloodcurdling scream and sprang at his face, and he had no choice but to jerk the stock of the rifle up under her chin. Her jaws smacked shut like a bear trap, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she was out cold by the time she hit the ground.

When the din of the rifle blast had at last stopped echoing in his head, Slater heard Nika over by the snowbank, crying for help.

Chapter 51

The lights flickered and dimmed as an Arctic blast pummeled the walls of the mess tent, and for a few seconds Professor Kozak thought his computer was about to crash. But the generators kept humming and, despite the muffled roar of the wind, the structure held firm. He poured himself another shot of vodka.

It was only a few hours since the helicopter had left with Slater and Nika aboard, but already the colony felt increasingly forlorn and abandoned. Dr. Lantos was gone, and though he hoped for a miracle, he did not think that one would be forthcoming. He didn’t see how she could have possibly survived her injuries, or the protracted evacuation to Juneau. Besides himself, only Sergeant Groves and Rudy remained, and they were out on patrol, making sure the island had no other intruders, and that nothing further occurred to disturb the eviscerated corpse of the deacon. Presumably, the poor man was still lying on the slab in the autopsy chamber.

The professor did not envy Frank Slater. This was not a mission report he would ever want to write. Whatever could go wrong, had gone wrong … and badly. He could only assume that it spelled the end of Slater’s career as a field epidemiologist.

He returned his gaze to the images on his computer, pictures of what the Russian Orthodox church called the Theotokos. All were representations of the Virgin Mary and Child, but in four traditional poses. The Hodigitria, in which the Virgin pointed to the child as a guide to salvation. The Eleusa, in which the child touches his face to his mother’s, symbolizing the bond between God and mankind. The Agiosortissa, or Intercessor, in which Mary holds out her hands in supplication to a separate image of Christ. And, finally, the Panakranta, depicting Mary on a royal throne, with the Christ child in her lap; according to the Fourth Ecumenical Council, it was in this configuration that the two were represented as presiding over the destiny of the world.

Although Frank had given him only the roughest description of the icon they had freed from the deacon’s frozen hand — and which had now been stolen by some unknown hand — Kozak was confident that this last design, more regal than the others, was the right one. The red veil over her head was a symbol of her suffering, the blue dress a mark of her bond with humanity. The three diamonds that Slater had mentioned — on the Virgin’s forehead and shoulders — were meant to suggest the Holy Trinity.

From the communications desk in the corner, there was a burst of static, and then a ghostly voice from the Coast Guard station in Point Barrow, warning of another storm front swooping down on the Bering Strait. How, and why, Kozak wondered, had these settlers decided to plant their colony in this most unforgiving of places? The wind howled around the tent, and he was reminded of the terrors he had felt as a boy, reading late in his tiny room at the top of the stairs of the summer dacha. Every June his family had left their palatial flat in Moscow — high on Kutuzovsky Prospect — and gone to this wretched house in the middle of nowhere for “the fresh air.” As far as Vassily was concerned, the air was plenty fresh in the city libraries. The house had no electricity, and he had had to read his books by the light of a kerosene lantern. He could smell its smudgy odor even now and envision the rough log walls. Every time a branch had brushed against the eaves, or a window frame had whined, he had imagined that a rusalka was beckoning to him from the riverbank. Pale maidens, garlanded with flowers, they were said to lure the unsuspecting to their watery lairs and drown them there; the gardener told him that he had once chased a rusalka off the end of the dock with his pitchfork. “So don’t you worry, young Vassily,” he’d said. “They won’t be coming around here anymore.”

But young Vassily had worried, all the same.

There was a question from the Coast Guard operator in Point Barrow—“Do you read me, St. Peter’s Island? Do you read me?”—and Kozak had finally gotten up from his chair and replied.

“Yes, we read you, loud and clear. This is Professor Vassily Kozak, of the Trofimuk United Institute of Geology, Geophysics, and Mineralogy.”

There was the crackle of static, then an uncertain, “The what institute? Are you also with the AFIP mission? Under Dr. Frank Slater? Over.”

Apparently, word had not yet traveled everywhere that Frank had been officially relieved of his duties.

“I am.”

“Okay then. Well, we’re clocking winds speed of over one hundred miles per hour and barometric pressure that’s dropping like a stone — ninety-eight millibars at last reading. You might want to batten down the hatches real tight, for at least the next twenty-four hours.”

“Thank you for that warning,” Kozak said, stifling a belch. “I will batten down all hatches. Over.”

Then he had shuffled back to his seat, poured another stiff shot of vodka, and riffled through the tattered pages of the book found in that dead boy’s pocket. Nika had said his name was Russell.

The book, as Kozak had surmised at first glance, was the sexton’s register, a record of the burials in the colony’s graveyard. Where Russell had come by it, no one knew, but Kozak had a pretty good idea. Somewhere in the woods, not far from the cemetery, there was probably an old hovel, tumbled down and overgrown by now, where the sexton had kept his tools, his ledgers, and the headstones. Once the storm had passed, he would have to recruit Sergeant Groves and go looking for it.

The bottle of vodka was running low. Fortunately, he had packed several others.

The pages that had been left in the book showed a surprising scrum of entries all dating from the autumn of 1918, along with some notes on the dynamite the colonists had used to blow open graves to a sufficient depth. Eight-inch sticks, made in Delaware by DuPont. Manufactured to kill the Germans on the battlefields of the First World War, the dynamite had instead been used to help bury Russian pacifists thousands of miles from any front. Kozak was pleased to find this proof of his theory. No wonder this cliffside was crumbling faster than even global warming could have predicted.

But it was when he turned to the last few pages of the ledger, written in a more feminine hand, that he put his glass down and sat up straighter in his chair. The ink was considerably faded, and the pages still damp around the edges, but it was clear that the sexton was no longer their author. Had he died? Was this new writer his replacement? Where the book had been a cursory list of names and dates, there were suddenly plaintive appeals, mixed in among the last death entries, and all written in a more formal Russian.

“Forgive me,” one anguished note read. “I have become the curse of all who know me, both at home and here in this awful place.”

Below it, she had dutifully entered another burial entry, this one for a man named Stefan Novyk, “Deacon of our holy congregation.” So that was his name — it had been obliterated from the headstone, but now the strange motif chiseled into the stone made perfect sense. The two doors in the upper corners had symbolized the deacon’s doors … leading through the iconostasis to the altar behind. The place where the true treasures of the church were, traditionally, kept secret and protected. “It was he who saved me from the wolves, and he who gave me shelter. And this is how I have rewarded him.”

The next few lines had become blurred and illegible, but below them, scrawled in what looked like a trembling hand, one last burial was recorded.

“Tonight, the Lord saw fit to return to me the mortal remains of Sergei Ilyinsky, my own poor, sweet, loyal, and much beloved Sergei. His body was washed up on the shore of this accursed island, and I have buried it myself in the last grave. I can dig no more. Around his neck, I have placed the emerald cross once given to me by the holy man in St. Petersburg. May it guard Sergei on his journey now … and may its chains no longer bind me to this earth. I long to be released, but I fear that its blessing has now become my curse.”

Kozak sat back in his chair, deeply moved by the anguish and loneliness of this anonymous woman. The rest of the page was empty, and Kozak turned it eagerly to see if there was anything more.

In the center of this last page were the words, “My soul endures here … forever. Mother of God, deliver me.” Just below, there was a signature that made his heart stop. He quickly tossed down a generous shot of vodka. The lights in the tent dimmed and flickered, and he wondered if it might be the aurora borealis, disturbing the magnetic and electrical fields again. But he was in no mood to go outside and see. Not now.

When the lights burned bright again, he read it once more.

But it was still the same.

He drained the rest of the vodka, and as he plopped the empty bottle on the table, the lights again did go out, plunging him into darkness. Alone with his thoughts, and the ancient ledger, he felt the same eerie chill he had felt as a boy when it was the rusalka he had imagined coming back from the dead.

Chapter 52

Slater stood up again and surveyed his work. He wasn’t proud of what had happened, but he had dealt with its repercussions as best he could.

With Nika’s help, he had pried Bathsheba out of the snowbank, and after a quick examination, determined that apart from a few bruises, the worst damage she’d suffered might be a fractured tibia. She could walk, but not well, and she had had to be suspended between Slater’s and Nika’s shoulders to make it back up into the house. Even then, she seemed to be more worried about Harley than she was about herself.

“It’s all Charlie’s fault,” she said, wincing with the pain. “Charlie gets him into trouble all the time. All Harley needs is somebody to take care of him, somebody that understands him.”

Slater and Nika exchanged a look; it sounded like she was describing one of the bad-boy characters from some romance novel. Using the supplies from the ambulance, Slater set her leg, made her comfortable on the sofa, then, because he could not have her warning the brothers that he was in pursuit — or worse yet, wandering off into town — he gave her a healthy shot of a painkiller before she even knew what he was up to. Enough not only to lessen the discomfort, but to leave her in a happy twilight state for several hours.

Rebekah had presented a bigger problem. He had regretted having to hit her so hard with the butt of the rifle, but when someone was trying to kill you, you didn’t have much choice. She was still unconscious, which was a good thing in that it allowed him to check her out without having to fend off another attack. Her lip was split, she had cracked a tooth in front, but her airways were clear and her heartbeat was regular. When she woke up, she’d be in a lot of pain — he left a bottle of Vicodin in plain sight, though he had no idea if her religious convictions allowed her to take it — and then, to be on the safe side, he used the rope her sister had brought to tie her to a folding chair.

“Take the cell phones, too,” Slater said, and Nika snatched them off the desk. The guns he took himself. “Okay then,” he concluded, “we’ve done what we can here. Let’s hit the road.”

Outside, the snow was falling so thickly he had to haul the shovel out of the back of the ambulance and do a little digging to provide some traction for the back tires. Nika confessed to feeling a bit unsteady — not surprising after all that had just happened — and Slater took the wheel. Even with only one headlight working, he could see tire tracks leading out of the Vane driveway and off in the only other direction available … toward Nome. Under his shirt, he could feel the ivory owl Nika had given him, and if ever he needed its help seeing in the dark, now was that time.

High overhead, but concealed by the storm, he could hear the roar of another helicopter racing toward Port Orlov. Whichever branch of the military or civilian authority had dispatched it, the overall emergency response, he knew, would be growing by the minute. The town of Port Orlov would be under a complete and rigorously enforced quarantine until further notice, and he was lucky to have gotten out when he did. Only he knew the full extent of the deadly cargo Harley and Charlie might be carrying in their pockets — or in their veins — and he was determined to avert any further catastrophe from occurring. As the head of the mission, he was responsible for allowing it to start, and now he was equally determined to be the one to quell it.

For a second, he wondered who would be assigned to replace him. Whoever it was had undoubtedly already been chosen. There was no time to waste.

“Call the sheriff,” he said to Nika as he gripped the wheel with one hand and rummaged around in the console between the two front seats. “Tell him about the women, and tell him not to let anybody in or out of the Vanes’ house until a hazmat team gets there. Full precautions have to be taken.” Although they had both been as careful as they could be — indeed, he could feel a pool of sweat cooling inside the thermals he wore under the damp hazmat suit — viruses were among the sneakiest things on earth. And this one, though its primary mode of transmission was airborne, thrived in the blood and flesh and bodily fluids of its carriers.

While Nika made the call — and he could tell she was getting static from Sheriff Ray — he found in the console a pair of woolly mittens, assorted loose meds, and a petrified Almond Joy bar. When she got off, she said, “I think we’re both going to be under arrest before this is all over.”

“Been there, done that,” he said, with a half smile. “Here, have some dinner,” he said, offering her the candy bar. “You’re looking peaked.”

“Not hungry.”

“Eat it, anyway. You need to keep up your strength.” She was slouched low in her seat though maybe it was just to avoid the stiff breeze blowing through the hole that the shotgun shell had left in the windshield.

With the gloves on, she had to fumble at the wrapper, and as she did so, Slater leaned forward in the driver’s seat and stuffed a mitten into the hole. He was afraid that if he pushed too hard, the rest of the window, crazed with a thousand fissures, would give way, but for the moment it appeared to be holding.

“How can you see around that?” Nika asked.

“Who said I could?”

So far, he hadn’t passed any other cars or trucks, which meant that the roadblock was probably already in place somewhere up ahead. But he feared that if the Vane brothers hadn’t been stopped by now, they might have found a way to slip through the net. And the unfolding of that scenario was too dreadful even to contemplate. How wide would the dragnet eventually have to be? And what kind of panic might ensue if they tried to enforce it on a much more extensive scale?

He rubbed the side of one eye, where a splinter from the tree had hit him, and turned up the heat in the ambulance. From the way Nika was hunching her small shoulders, he guessed she was still chilled.

“You should take off your boots,” he advised her, “and put your feet on the heat vent. You need to warm up.”

Removing her footgear, she propped her stockinged feet up on the dashboard, wiggling her toes. “Frank,” she said, somberly, “what happens if we do catch up to them?”

“I reason with them.”

“That’s it? That’s your plan?” She turned her head to stare out the side window. “These are not the kind of guys who listen to reason.”

Slater was aware of that, too.

“I hope you have a Plan B,” she said.

“I did take the guns from their house.”

She didn’t seem overly impressed with that plan, either, but Slater hoped it would never come to that. The roadblock was still somewhere up ahead, and he prayed that when he got there he’d see Charlie’s van pulled over on the shoulder and the Vane brothers under arrest.

He drove on, the road winding now through rougher terrain. He wondered if Eva Lantos had arrived at the containment unit in Juneau yet … and if she was still fighting for her life. It was a miracle that she had survived at all. The wolf attack could easily have killed her, and so could the viral exposure in the demolished lab, but it was a testimony to her stubborn spirit that she had not succumbed to either one. It was her hardheadedness that had convinced him to enlist her for this mission in the first place.

As he came around a bend, he saw the neighboring hills flickering in the rosy glow of highway beacons that had been set up along the road. Bobbing his head to see around the mitten in the windshield and past the network of cracks in the glass, he still caught no glimpse of a van. He had switched his one headlight to bright, and he slowed the ambulance as he saw an Army officer in a combat helmet stepping out of an armored vehicle parked in the center of the pavement. The officer had lifted both of his hands to indicate that they should stop, and if that wasn’t clear enough, two National Guardsmen were kneeling on the asphalt, with their rifles pointed at the grille of his car.

“Looks like they mean business,” Nika said.

“They should.”

Slater stopped the car and waited until the officer approached. A soldier walked to the other side, his rifle slung over one shoulder but a finger on the trigger. Both of them, he was pleased to see, were wearing gauze face masks over their mouths, latex gloves on their hands, and keeping to a safe distance. Though they had probably never imagined that they’d have to observe these protocols, at least they’d been properly trained in them.

“Okay,” the officer said, “let’s start with who you are.” He had lieutenant’s bars on his helmet, and the mask billowed out with each word. “ID, please.”

Nika passed her driver’s license over, and added, “I’m the mayor of Port Orlov.”

Reaching out his arm at full length to take and inspect the license, he said, approvingly, “You don’t look like any mayor I’ve ever seen.” Wet snow was starting to settle on his helmet.

“Yeah, thanks,” she said, with the weary tone of someone who had heard that line one too many times. She took the license back.

The back doors of the ambulance were thrown open, and the soldier nosed around with the muzzle of his rifle.

Slater proffered his laminated, AFIP badge, and when the lieutenant saw the name and picture on it, he did a double take. “You’re Dr. Slater? The one running the mission?”

“Yes.” For once, inefficiency was his friend; he was still nominally in charge, it appeared.

“Then what the hell are you doing out here, and driving this piece of junk?” He surveyed the broken headlight and windshield. “You hit a moose?”

“No, but we ran into some other trouble.” He was not about to elaborate. The back doors were slammed shut again.

“What have you heard about the Vane boys?” Slater asked, taking back his ID. “Has anyone spotted them?”

“Not yet.”

“Keep an eye out for a blue Ford van. We have reason to believe they’re out in it.”

“Nothing like that’s come through here. We’ve stopped one logging truck and one old lady driving a pickup.”

“Are you sure that’s all?” Nika said, leaning toward the officer. “They must have hit this roadblock by now.”

“No, ma’am, they didn’t. We’ve been up and running since 1800 hours.”

“Then they must have gotten around it,” she muttered to Slater. “Maybe on one of the old logging trails.”

Slater didn’t doubt her.

“But even if they got around this, they can’t get around the Heron River Gorge,” she added. “It’s long and it’s wide, and there’s only one bridge across it.”

“How far ahead?” he asked her.

“Forty miles, maybe fifty.”

“Listen carefully, Lieutenant,” Slater said. Between the helmet and the face mask, all he could really see of the young man’s face was a pair of bright brown eyes. “I need you to call whoever’s in charge, and tell them to set up another roadblock at the Heron River Bridge. Tell them to do it right away, and to keep an eye out for that van.”

He put the ambulance into gear, and the lieutenant said, “Hey, wait — where do you think you’re going?”

“The bridge. Now clear the road.”

The lieutenant looked torn. “My orders are still in effect, and I’m supposed to stop all traffic in both directions.”

“And you’re doing a fine job,” Slater said. “But I’m the one in charge of this operation — you said it yourself — and I’m telling you to move your vehicle.”

Just to shut off any further debate, Slater rolled up his window and flicked the switch that activated the siren and flash bar atop the ambulance. The lieutenant hesitated, but when Slater glared at him and pointed his finger at the truck, he waved to his soldiers to move the vehicle out of the way. A couple of others peeled up a spike strip that Slater only now saw had been placed in the roadway just beyond. He was glad that he hadn’t run out of patience and simply decided to barrel through the barricade.

The moment the path was clear, he steered the ambulance through the opening and pulled the mitten out of the hole. He needed the windshield wipers more than he needed the windbreak. And once the roadblock was no longer visible even in his rearview mirror, he killed the siren and flashing lights.

“I don’t want to give the Vanes any more warning than I have to,” he said, speeding up as much as the slippery pavement and damaged car would allow.

“By now, I’m sure they’ve figured a few things out,” Nika said. “They know that somebody must be coming after them, or they wouldn’t be off-roading.”

True enough, he thought, flexing his fingers on the steering wheel and plowing on through the rising snowstorm. But did they know that the gravest danger of all was riding right along with them in their van?

Chapter 53

Charlie’s mind was churning. He hadn’t seen a single other vehicle moving on the highway in either direction, but on a night like this, who in his right mind would be out? Only long-haul truckers would brave it, and that was only because they had to. The snow was coming down so fast, the windshield wipers were having trouble handling it, even at their top speed.

Glancing into the rearview mirror, he saw Harley huddled in the backseat, and if he thought he looked sickly before, it was worse now. His forehead was beaded with sweat, his eyes had a weird glaze, and his fingers kept picking at that damn wound on his leg; all Charlie knew was that he must have gotten into some mean shit on that island. Mean shit, which was probably infecting the whole car by now. He’d have to tell Rebekah and Bathsheba to scrub down and sanitize the whole van once he got back to Port Orlov.

With the back of his hand, Charlie checked his own forehead, and he was as cool as a cucumber. Didn’t have a cough or anything else, either. At least not so far. But if Harley did have something contagious, and he gave it to Charlie, there was going to be hell to pay.

A sign flashed by in the darkness, saying NEXT FOOD AND FUEL—50 MILES, and Charlie glanced at the gas gauge; he had about half a tank left, but with the extra canisters in the back he could easily make it to Nome without stopping. He didn’t want to risk using his credit card at a service station, or showing his face at a diner. One thing he’d learned was, people remembered the guy in the wheelchair, and just in case anyone came along trying to follow his trail, he didn’t want to leave any more clues than he had to. Let ’em guess what the Vane boys were up to.

In a weird way, he found it exhilarating to be out on the road like this. It reminded him of his former life, before he’d given himself over to the Lord. When they weren’t out crabbing, he and Harley had always been off running some scam, or hijacking somebody’s boat, or burglarizing some rich bastard’s vacation home. He knew now that what he’d been doing was wrong, that he was breaking the third, or was it the fourth, commandment, the one about not stealing, but he also knew that he’d felt a rush nothing else could come close to. These days, when he was preaching and really getting into it, really feeling the Presence of the Lord, it was sort of like that.

But if he was completely honest with himself, it still wasn’t as good as cracking open somebody’s wall safe and finding a stack of hundreds inside. Why was that? It was something he would have to take up with Jesus during his next heart-to-heart.

Fumbling inside his coat, he pulled a cigarette and a Bic lighter out of his shirt pocket. With the women gone, he could sneak in a smoke. He inhaled deeply, and dropped the lighter on the passenger seat. Funny, how a cigarette could make your lungs feel bigger even as, in actual fact, it shrunk ’em up.

A gust of wind slapped the side of the van so hard it roused Harley from his stupor. “The icon,” he said, in a worried voice, “what did you do with it?”

“It’s right here in the glove compartment. Same as the cross.”

“I need it.”

“What for?” Charlie couldn’t tell if his brother was in his right mind or not.

“To save me.”

Now he knew. “How’s it gonna save you, Harley?”

“It’s got the baby Jesus on it. Jesus saved you, right?”

“Yes, He did. But you don’t need an old icon for that.”

“I do,” Harley croaked. “I need something ’cuz I’m gonna die tonight.”

Charlie had never heard his brother say anything like that, not ever, and when he looked in the rearview mirror again, he saw that Harley’s eyes were burning like black coals and his whole head was shaking.

“Nobody’s dying tonight,” Charlie said. His mind went back to the night he’d seen — imagined — the hollow-eyed man in the long coat, reaching for the cross from the backseat. He didn’t care how much this Russian stuff was worth anymore — he was starting to wish he’d never laid eyes on any of it. “As soon as we get to Nome, we’ll take you to a doctor. Get you fixed right up.”

The road was veering now, as it began to track along the rim of the Heron River Gorge. Normally, that alone — the site of the accident that had left Charlie a paraplegic for life — was enough to rattle him, even if all this other crap hadn’t been going on.

But it was going on, which made his apprehension just that much worse.

A sign said the bridge was coming up ahead. Huge, snow-covered hunks of granite, left by ancient glaciers, lined the shoulders like train cars waiting to be hitched.

“There’s not enough time,” Harley said. “Give me the icon now.”

“I can’t reach over that far. I’ll get it for you once we cross the bridge.”

“Too late,” Harley said, with chilling certainty. “That’ll be too late.”

The van rocked and swayed as it hit a stretch of asphalt buckled from frost heave. Every year, the highway department had to come out in the spring and repair the damage done in the winter. Once in their youth, Charlie and Harley had tried to make off with one of their road graders, before realizing that its top speed was about ten miles per hour.

The gorge cut a deep swath through the land for nearly nine miles, and the bridge over it had been built at the narrowest spot available, between two rocky bluffs. He kept a close eye on the road, which was rapidly disappearing under a shifting scrim of snow and ice. Even with four-wheel drive and chains on his tires, he was losing traction now and then. His brother moaned, and when he glanced in the rearview mirror to check on him, what he noticed instead was a tiny pinprick of light, way down the road behind them.

A tiny pinprick that was moving.

“Harley, quit your moaning and turn around!”

“Why?”

“Just tell me what you see down the road!”

The blanket still wrapped around his shoulders, Harley turned and looked.

“Looks like a headlight. Maybe just a motorcycle.”

Charlie studied the tiny light, and damn if it didn’t look like it was a single headlamp after all. But who’d be trying to navigate these dangerous roads, in the middle of a blizzard, on a motorcycle? That’d be crazy. Cops would be using a heavy-duty cruiser, the National Guard guys would be in a jeep. The only thing he could tell for sure was that it was moving along at a good clip.

“Keep an eye on it,” Charlie said, turning off the cruise control and pushing the accelerator lever.

“Shit. What if it’s Eddie on a snowmobile?”

He heard the click of a safety being taken off a gun. A Glock 19, from the sound of it. Oh, Christ, Harley was not only nuts … but armed?

“Where’d you get that?” Charlie demanded, though it had undoubtedly come from his own gun cabinet. “Put it away. Now.”

But Harley was off in his own delusion again. “Fuckin’ Eddie,” he muttered, staring out the back of the van.

“Eddie’s dead. You told me so yourself.”

Harley, still staring, clucked his tongue and said, “Eddie never did know when to call it quits. I never should have let him come back with me.”

Come back? Charlie thought Eddie had fallen off a cliff on the island.

“Well, this time I’m going to cap his ass for good.”

Charlie stopped trying to make sense of Harley’s ravings. All he could do was drive … and pray he got to Nome before Harley went off in his van like a bomb.

Chapter 54

Stepping into the tavern, Ana was careful to remain behind Sergei. Dressed in rough old clothes, her hair chopped short, and her eyes downcast, she appeared to be the perfect peasant wife, beaten into subservience and silence. After so many weeks on the run, it was an act she was finally growing used to.

Sergei, in a brown-wool tunic buttoned all the way up the side of his neck, and a black sealskin coat, furtively scanned the tavern and its occupants. A couple of dozen men in leather jackets were playing cards and dominoes and swigging from bottles of beer and vodka. A fire was crackling in the immense hearth, and gas lamps burned along the walls. A phonograph on the bar played a scratchy version of the country’s newly inaugurated anthem, the Internationale; every note of it made Ana want to smash the record.

Sitting alone at a table in the corner, a bald man in a pilot’s uniform raised his chin in acknowledgment. Sergei and Ana threaded their way through the cluttered room, drawing a few glances and a couple of coarse remarks about the rubes, before drawing up chairs at the table.

“You are Nevsky?” Sergei asked in a low voice.

The bald man didn’t answer but motioned to the innkeeper to bring two more glasses. Above the bar, a placard promoting the Imperial Russian Air Force had been defaced, and written in red paint on the wall beside it was the new name for the Soviet air force — the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Air Fleet. The bald man had several bright medals and ribbons pinned to his shirt.

The innkeeper plunked the glasses down on the table, filled them from a brandy decanter, and said, “Your bill is overdue, Nevsky.”

“I’ll pay it after you’ve shot down your first enemy fighter,” Nevsky said in a hoarse grumble.

The innkeeper grunted in disgust, and went back to the bar.

“And who is this?” Nevsky said, gesturing to Ana.

“My wife.”

“I wasn’t told there would be two of you,” he said, trying to stifle a cough.

“What difference does it make? The airplane can carry one more passenger, can’t it?”

Nevsky threw down a shot of the brandy. “Not for the same price it can’t.”

Ana wasn’t surprised. Although she kept her composure and said nothing, this was the same story they had encountered throughout their journey from the monastery at Novo-Tikhvin. They had been forced to bribe everyone, from wagon drivers to lorry loaders to ticket agents on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Everyone in Russia had his hand out, and nothing could be done or had without some special compensation being offered. The entire nation was starved and desperate and teeming with violence, and much as she tried to find some sympathy in her heart for these people — the people her own father and mother, despite what was said about them, had held so dear — she could not. In every soldier and peasant she encountered, she saw nothing but another murderer.

“What is the price then?” Sergei asked.

“Double. What else would it be?” He refilled his glass. “Do you take me for a thief?”

Sergei didn’t even have to look at Ana for approval; funds were the one thing they had. “We’ll pay it, but only after you take us to the island.”

“And only after you show me that you actually have it,” Nevsky said, pointedly looking Sergei up and down. The sealskin coat was weathered, his tunic was soiled, his boots were worn. Nevsky appeared dubious.

Sergei turned slightly toward Ana, and she pulled from under her full skirts a drawstring pouch. Sergei took it into his own lap, and with his hands concealed beneath the scarred tabletop removed two white diamonds the size of teardrops. He held them in his palm as Nevsky craned his neck to look under the table and see.

“One of them now,” Nevsky said, “as the down payment.”

Sergei gave it to him, and after looking around the room to see that no one was watching, Nevsky took a good long look at it and rolled it between his fingers. Satisfied, he wrapped it in his red handkerchief and stuck it in the pocket of his shirt. Then, leaning back in his chair with a skeptical expression, he said, “But where would someone like you have come by something like this?”

It was a question Sergei and Ana had been asked before.

“The Winter Palace,” Sergei confided, as if ashamed of his own actions.

“The Tsar’s treasures belonged to the people,” Nevsky said, feigning indignation and coughing into the back of his hand. “When the Winter Palace was stormed, that loot belonged to the proletariat.”

“I am part of the proletariat,” Sergei replied, and at this Nevsky laughed.

“An enterprising one, I’ll say that for you.” Then, leaning close, he explained that Sergei and Ana were to meet him at the airfield as soon as it was light out. “Keep behind the hangars, and for God’s sake, don’t call any attention to yourselves. Don’t bring anything heavier than a handful of straw. The plane won’t carry any more weight.”

That night, in return for an exorbitant charge to the innkeeper, Sergei and Ana bedded down between the beer barrels in the cellar of the tavern and waited anxiously for the dawn. Ana had never been in an airplane before, and she was quite sure Sergei had never been, either. She didn’t ask him because she knew he liked to pretend to be more worldly and experienced than he was, although, in her eyes, he was just a boy — a gangly creature with loose limbs and a cowlick and a long face that reminded her of her favorite pony. And she loved him.

Not only because he had saved her life — though wouldn’t that have been enough? — but because his heart had remained pure and righteous. She loved him for his innocence, for his devotion … and because he loved her in turn. Ana had lived a life of extravagant luxury and immense privilege, but she had also been cloistered and cosseted and confined, and it was only in the past year, when all of that had been stripped away, that she felt she had learned so much of what life was really like. Father Grigori had always told her she had a special destiny — the emerald cross beneath her blouse attested to the unbreakable bond between them — but only now did she feel she might be moving toward such a thing, whatever it might turn out to be. And without Sergei, she would never have escaped the makeshift graveyard at the Four Brothers, where everyone else in her family lay.

It sickened her that the official Soviet press still claimed that only her father had been shot and the rest of the family was safely sequestered somewhere. Once she made it to freedom, even if that freedom was only an island in the middle of the Bering Sea, she would find a way to expose these butchers for what they were.

It wasn’t yet dawn when Sergei nudged her. She doubted that he had been able to sleep any more than she had. They gathered their few things together in a bundle and crept up the stairs from the cellar. The innkeeper in a nightshirt was lighting a fire in the grate and pretended not to see them. Outside, the air was frigid, but the sky was lightening enough that she could see there wasn’t even a wisp of a cloud in any direction. Surely this would be good weather for the flight to St. Peter’s Island. The thought of being in a place, no matter how barren and remote, where she could openly be herself, where she did not have to fear every encounter and dodge every stranger, where she would be embraced by friends and followers of Father Grigori, promised such relief that it eradicated any fear she might have had of boarding the plane.

By the time they got to the hangars, the plane, with a red star freshly painted on its nose, was already on the runway. Nevsky, a leather cap clinging to his bald head and tinted goggles hanging down around his neck, was circling it, checking the tires and the struts and the wings. There were two wings, a wider one above the tiny cabin and a shorter one below, connected by a latticework of wires, and a long tail that reminded her of a dragonfly. It looked to her almost as flimsy as a dragonfly, too, and she could hardly imagine it carrying them for miles over an icy sea. Sergei had stopped where he stood, and was staring at it with slack-jawed wonder and evident dread, when Nevsky noticed them and, taking a quick look around the empty field, waved them over.

“Come on,” Ana said, taking Sergei by the arm and drawing him out of the shadows of the hangar. “We have to hurry.”

Nevsky was holding open the small door to the cabin, and he frowned when he saw their bundle. “What did I tell you about the weight?” he said, taking the bundle in hand, gauging it, then grudgingly tossing it onto the cabin floor. “Get in!” he ordered, coughing, then spitting a wad of phlegm onto the tarmac.

Bending double, Ana crawled through the dented metal door and sat bolt upright on a padded plank with the bag wedged under her feet; she could barely move since, in order to keep the bundle light, she had worn the corset freighted with jewels under her coat. Sergei, his eyes wide as saucers, got in and sat on a plank opposite. The space was so small, and his legs were so long, their knees touched. Ana gave him an encouraging smile, but he looked like a lamb being led to the slaughter.

Grunting, Nevsky crawled into the cabin, latched the door behind him, and squirmed into a seat at the front of the plane; it was shaped like a bucket and cushioned by a Persian rug folded double. With thick but nimble fingers, he began turning dials and flicking switches and doing all manner of things that Ana could not fathom. What she did understand was the machine gun firmly mounted at his elbow, and aimed through an aperture in the windscreen. The sight of its black barrel and deadly snout reminded her that this plane had been designed for aerial combat, not for ferrying refugees. It was built to dispense death, not life … like everything the Bolsheviks put their hand to.

“There are straps,” Nevsky said, over his shoulder. “Fasten them under your arms and around your waists.”

Ana found the straps hanging like reins in a stable from the sides of the cabin, and did as she was told; the clasp, she could not help but notice, was embossed with a double eagle, the old insignia of the Russian Air Force. Sergei’s fingers moved mechanically as he strapped himself in; his eyes were riveted on the floor, which appeared to have been cobbled together with sheets of steel, then sealed with a coat of tar. The whole compartment felt too insubstantial to withstand the rigors of a rough road, much less flight.

But the propellers, a pair on each side, suddenly engaged, and as the sun came fully into the Siberian sky, Nevsky piloted the plane onto the runway, shouting back to them, “Hold on!” But to what, Ana wondered? There was a roar from the engines, and a rumbling from the tires as they bounced across the ground. Sergei’s eyes were closed, and he was as rigid as a stick, his head back against the wall of the fuselage. His lips were moving in what was no doubt a prayer. The roar grew louder all the time, and the cabin rocked and creaked and swayed, and at any moment Ana would not have been surprised to see the whole contraption explode. Looking over Nevsky’s broad shoulders, she saw the tundra hurtling past, so fast it was only a brownish blur now — how could anything move at such a speed? she thought — and Nevsky pulling back on an oak-handled throttle that reminded her of one of Count Benckendorff’s canes. The speed increased, the roar of the motors became deafening, and just when she thought the shuddering plane was sure to fall apart, the nose tilted up ever so slightly, the jouncing abruptly stopped, and to her amazement she saw the ground falling away. The windscreen blazed with shards of orange light, and she wished that she, too, had a pair of the tinted goggles Nevsky was wearing. There was the strangest sensation in her stomach, as if it had just dropped into her shoes, but it wasn’t unpleasant; it was like the times Nagorny, Alexei’s guardian, had swung her so high on the garden swing that she had stopped at the top, afraid she was about to spill over the bar, before swooping back down instead. In her head, she could hear Alexei begging to be swung that high, too, and his delighted screams when Nagorny complied.

The grief overwhelmed her again, as it often did, like a crashing wave.

But Sergei’s eyes were open now. He refused to look out through the window, but gave Anastasia a wan smile. She reached across and squeezed his hand.

“We will be flying northeast,” Nevsky shouted, his words carried back to them on a cold draft. “This damn sun will be in our eyes the whole way.”

Ana liked it — she liked the hot bright yellow light, she liked the sky around it, a cerulean blue unmarred by a single wisp of cloud, and she liked it when the dark, snow-patched ground dropped away altogether, replaced by the cobalt blue of the Bering Sea. Glaciers sat serenely in the choppy waters, a pod of breaching whales gamboled among the chunks of floating ice. The horizon was a gleaming orange line, pulled tight as a stitch, and somewhere ahead there lay an island that was no longer a part of Russia at all, an island that housed a small colony of believers. A small colony of friends.

She would have liked to talk to Sergei, if only to distract him, but the howling of the wind and the din of the propellers was too great. Instead, she made do with holding his hand and gazing out at the unimaginable spectacle through the cockpit window. What a pity it was tainted by the machine gun, black, gleaming with oil, and brooding like a vulture.

When the plane banked, she was pressed back against the wall — it felt like lying on a slab of ice — and this time the sensation in her stomach was not so easily dismissed. The plane was losing altitude, she could feel it, and for a second she worried that they were going to crash, after all. Glancing out the window, she saw that the world had tilted to an odd angle, and in the distance, she could see two islands, not one, both of them flat and gray and barely rising above the sea. One was much bigger than the other, and she wondered which of them was St. Peter’s. Neither looked especially welcoming.

The angle grew even more extreme, and the engines made a louder, grinding sound, as the plane descended even more, soaring across the channel that narrowly separated the islands, and the windscreen filled with the image of the bigger of the two. Gradually, the plane leveled off, and the coastline appeared. Rugged, barren, choked with coveys of squalling birds. Anastasia caught a glimpse of a collection of huts, clustered on the cliffs above an inlet, as the plane dropped onto a cleared field, its tires bouncing up again as they touched the ground. The propellers whirred down, and Nevsky clutched the throttle with both hands, pulling back on it as if he were subduing a stallion. The cabin rattled, the tires squealed, and only the machine gun remained motionless. For several hundred yards, the plane rumbled and rolled along the tundra, before the engines stopped growling and the propellers stopped spinning and everything came to a halt.

Nevsky, pushing the goggles onto the top of his head, turned in his seat and said, “You can unfasten those straps now.” Then he coughed into his handkerchief.

Ana and Sergei undid their straps, and with trembling fingers Sergei unlatched the little door. He clambered out onto the ground, then held out a hand to help Ana. When she bent over, the corset nipped at her ribs, and her feet felt so unsteady she nearly toppled over. Sergei propped her up as Nevsky disembarked. Without a word, he went to a tiny, falling-down shed, and came out lugging two gas cans, one in each hand.

Ana, bewildered, looked all around, but apart from the shed, there was no sign of any habitation nearby, or any people. Were those huts the entire colony? Her heart began to sink. And why was there no one there to welcome them?

Nevsky seemed to be studiously avoiding them, and when Sergei ventured a question, he brushed him off and said, “Let me finish with this first,” as he poured the second can of gas down the funnel he had inserted in the tank at the rear of the plane. When that was done, he returned to the shed, came out with two more, and poured them in, too. A brisk wind was cutting across the open field, and Ana huddled in the shelter of the fuselage.

Tossing the empty cans to one side and removing the funnel, Nevsky finally turned to them and said, “I’ll have that second diamond now.”

“Where is everyone?” Sergei said.

“They’ll be here. Now, where is it?”

Sergei looked uncertain, but when Ana nodded, he gave it to him. Nevsky tucked it into his pocket, and threw open the little door to the plane. Then he jumped in, threw the latches, and only appeared again through the window of the cockpit. Sliding the window panel open, he spoke across the top of the machine gun as Ana and Sergei gathered below.

“Right now you’re on what the Eskimos call Nunarbuk.”

“You mean that’s their name for St. Peter’s Island?” Sergei said.

“St. Peter’s Island,” Nevsky said, fitting his goggles back into place, and pointing due east, “is over there.”

“That’s where we paid you to take us!” Ana cried, but Nevsky just shrugged.

“They have no landing strip,” he said.

“Then you have to take us back with you!” Sergei demanded, hammering at the side of the plane.

“Watch out,” Nevsky said, as he started to close the window. “The propellers can cut you in half like a loaf of bread.”

A moment later, Ana heard the engines revving up. The propellers clicked and twitched, then began to turn, and Sergei had to duck back away from the plane. It bumped along the ground in a wide circle, protected by its four whirling blades, before quickly gathering speed and then, as they watched in shock, altitude, too. It was only as it rose high into the sky, shining in the sun and banking slowly toward Siberia, that Ana realized they had even forgotten to retrieve their bundle from under the seat.

Chapter 55

“Is that it?” Slater asked. “Is that the van?”

Nika craned forward in the passenger seat. “I can’t tell,” she said, peering through the fractured windshield. “The snow’s too thick.”

On the right side of the road, a yellow sign said, “HERON RIVER BRIDGE AHEAD. PROCEED WITH CAUTION. REDUCE SPEED.” It was pocked with bullet holes, and Slater wondered if there was a single sign or mailbox in Alaska that hadn’t been used for target practice.

He stepped on the gas, but he felt the tires starting to lose traction on the icy surface and he had to ease off again.

The road was winding its way through a rubble-strewn landscape of stunted trees and immense boulders. Sometimes, the vehicle in front of him would disappear behind the rocks, or be engulfed in a whirling cloud of snow, but each time he caught a glimpse of it, he was able to pick out another detail or two. First, he could see the boxy silhouette of a van. And then he could tell it was some dark color, blue or black.

It had to be Charlie Vane’s car.

He knew that he was driving the ambulance far too fast for the road and weather conditions, but he still wasn’t closing the distance. Vane had to be doing at least sixty-five or seventy miles per hour. At any moment, he expected to see the van go spinning off the road or crashing into the rocks.

“Do you think they’ve spotted us?” Nika asked.

“Absolutely.” But what would they be able to see? “Should I put on the siren and lights? Maybe convince them it’s the police on their tail?”

“They’d only drive faster.”

Which was pretty much what Slater had thought, too.

“There’s one more bend in the road,” Nika advised him, “but it’s a wide one, and it runs behind those hills. When you come out on the other side, you’ll see the gorge, and the bridge, off in the distance but straight ahead.”

What Slater hoped to see was a National Guard barricade, with spotlights and trucks and armed soldiers, but he was afraid it was too much to expect. There probably hadn’t been time to set up something so elaborate, and now he was wondering just how far he would have to keep trailing the Vanes. All the way to Nome? He glanced at his dashboard and saw that the gas tank was already three-quarters empty. But it was critical that he stop them before they reached any population center.

The question remained — how?

Snowy hills rose up on all sides, funneling the wind and snow into a dense fog that almost entirely obscured the road. Steel poles, only four or five feet high, with red reflectors on top, were the only way to stay on course, and rusty signs warned of curves, oncoming traffic, animal crossings, avalanches, hazardous ice. The ambulance clung to the road, the windshield wipers beating furiously, the lone headlight shining on the blur of falling snow. A steady stream of freezing air blew into the car through the hole in the windshield, and Slater prayed that the wipers wouldn’t catch on one of the cracks and cause the whole window to implode in their faces.

And just when he thought the hills would never come to an end, he emerged onto a broad icy plateau. Even the van must have had to slow down, as the distance between them now was no more than the equivalent of a few city blocks.

Better yet, Slater could see the steel span of the Heron River Bridge, rising into the darkness … with an Alaska Highway Patrol car parked laterally in front of it, its headlights shining and blue roof bar flashing.

It wasn’t a whole platoon from the National Guard, but it would do.

Or so he thought.

He watched the van begin to slow down, as if Charlie was debating what to do, and Slater used that chance to close some more of the gap.

“Okay, now let’s turn on the lights and siren!” Slater said, clutching the wheel with both hands as he suddenly felt the ambulance sliding on a patch of black ice. “Time to let him know he’s surrounded.”

But just as Nika got everything blaring, and Slater saw the patrolman stepping out of the car, the van shot forward, its back wheels hurling up a shower of snow and sleet as it rocketed toward the bridge.

“What’s he doing?” Nika shouted.

But it was clear seconds later, as the van accelerated to top speed and hit the front end of the patrol car, sending it spinning out of the way like a top, sparks flying and metal screeching. The cop jumped out of its path in the nick of time.

Slater, trying to keep control of his own car, tapped his foot on the brakes and steered into the direction of the skid. But the ambulance had gathered its own momentum now.

Up ahead, the van bounded up the corrugated ramp and onto the bridge, bucking like a bronco trying to throw its rider.

In the ambulance, Slater clung to the steering wheel and Nika braced herself against the dashboard as the vehicle did a full, unimpeded circle before finally coming to a stop, its front fender thumping into a mound of snow.

After the initial jolt, Slater looked out his side window again, just in time to see the patrolman kneeling, one arm bracing the other, and firing several rounds at the back of the fleeing vehicle.

At first, the shots appeared to have no effect, but then, after the last one, Slater saw the van suddenly zig and zag on the bridge, cutting from one lane to the other, before banging into a guardrail so hard that two wheels left the pavement, then all four. As it flipped over, tires smoking and glass spraying, it spun, like an upside-down plate, halfway down the deserted bridge.

“You okay?” Slater said to Nika.

“Yep,” she said, in a shaky voice, “but I’m not so sure about the ambulance, or the Vanes.” She, too, was looking off at the wreckage on the bridge.

He told her to use the radio to call for medical backup. “And stay on the radio until they get here. Keep away from the accident scene.”

Then he leapt out of the ambulance, and raced toward the bridge.

“Who are you?” the patrolman hollered, still holding the gun. Slater was relieved to see that the patrolman, too, had a face mask — the word had gone out — but it was dangling down around his neck.

“Stay clear!” Slater shouted, running past the damaged patrol car. “And put your mask on until I tell you otherwise!”

“On whose authority?”

“Mine!” Slater declared. “And that’s an order!”

Before the cop could issue another challenge, Slater ran right past him, his eyes fixed on the van … and praying that this was as far as both of the Vanes, and the virus, had traveled.

Chapter 56

It was the chimes Charlie noticed first.

He was upside down in the van, his head up against the broken roof light.

The chimes, the ones that went off whenever you hadn’t fastened a seat belt, or closed your door properly, were dinging sweetly.

It took him a few seconds to orient himself.

He remembered slowing down for the roadblock, and he also remembered thinking, What was the point of trying to get past it? They’d have a chopper tracking him down next. And then, before he knew what was happening, Harley had flipped out in the backseat and started screaming, “Go through it! Go through it!”

But Charlie wasn’t going to be that stupid anymore; he’d seen enough trouble in his life, and he was a reformed man now, anyway. He was trying to reason with Harley when his brother, with the blanket still wrapped around his shoulders, lunged over the back of the seat and punched the accelerator lever.

“Go through!”

The van blasted off and Charlie, knocked back as if he were an astronaut, groped in vain for the hand brake as they smashed into the front of the police car, then, instantly picking up speed again, hurtled past.

His fingers were just able to graze the wheel as the van lurched onto the bridge, but Harley was hanging over him, trying to steer. He thought he’d heard a shot — or was it a tire exploding? — and then they were crashing into a metal guardrail, the windows shattering all around. Gas canisters and gear from the back of the van flew in every direction as the wheels hit an ice slick, and the whole car flipped in the air like a pancake on the griddle.

And now all he could hear were the chimes. The inside of the van smelled like gasoline, tinged with the astringent smell of blood. His neck and shoulders aching, he glanced at the front of his coat, where a wet, dark stain was slowly spreading. The punctured airbag was hanging down like an empty saddlebag, and the glove compartment gaped open. Its contents, including the cross and icon, were scattered somewhere in the jumble of pulverized glass and twisted metal.

“Shit.”

He heard that. It was Harley’s voice. He was alive — but where?

Gradually, other sounds came to him, too. The dripping of gasoline, the creak of mangled steel, the tinkle of falling glass. The world was returning … and with it, agonizing pain.

Charlie tried to turn, but the seat belt was coiled like a snake around his waist, and his legs of course were as useless as ever. He tried moving, but only one arm came up from the wreckage. He tried to reach for the buckle on the seat belt, but the bulk of his coat was bunched up and in the way.

“Where are you?” he asked through gritted teeth.

He heard a moan, and something twitched behind his head. He had the impression it was a foot. “Try not to move,” he said, mindful of his own paralysis. “They’ll get a medic out here.” But how long would that take? They were in the middle of nowhere, in a snowstorm.

“I told you,” Harley groaned. “I told you I was gonna die tonight.”

Charlie had to admit he hadn’t been far off. But the good Lord still seemed to have some other plan in mind for them.

And then, under the howling of the wind, there was the sound of running feet. And a guy in some kind of white lab suit was crouching down beside the wreck. He had a gauze mask on, and rubber gloves. How could medics have gotten there this fast, he wondered?

Peering in at Charlie, he quickly assessed the situation, and said, “Can you breathe?”

“Barely,” Charlie replied. “The seat belt.”

And then the guy’s hands were working the buckle, prying it loose. When it popped open, Charlie’s belly fell and he felt a rush of cold air entering his lungs. Then his coat was being opened, and the medic took a long look without saying anything. Two of the spokes from the gearshift were sticking out of him like bent twigs.

“Hang in there,” he said evenly, “you’re gonna be okay.”

Christ, that’s exactly what they’d said to him after he’d hit those rocks running the Heron River Gorge.

Then he closed the coat again, and moved beyond Charlie’s narrow field of vision, to tend to Harley in back.

“Can you move your head and neck?”

Harley groaned again and swore, but the medic was slowly extricating him from the wreckage. “Don’t move anything you don’t have to,” the medic said. “Just let me do it.”

Through the empty space where his window had been, Charlie could see his brother’s mangled body being pulled from the van and onto the asphalt. Heavy snow was falling, mixing with a widening pool of something wet and viscous. For a second, Charlie thought, Could that be blood? But then he realized it wasn’t. It was gas.

Harley’s groaning was becoming more of a scream. And he was shouting something about Eddie again. “Goddamn it, Eddie, it wasn’t my fault!”

And he was struggling with the medic. It seemed like he thought the guy was Eddie.

“Calm down,” Charlie mumbled to his brother. Funny how his guts were growing colder by the second. “He’s not Eddie.”

“Fuck you,” Harley spat at the medic, his arms flailing under the blanket drenched in blood. And then, in a flash, one of his hands broke free, and it was holding the goddamned Glock semiautomatic.

“I told you to quit it!” Harley shouted. “I told you!”

The medic grabbed for his wrist, but not before a sudden spray of shots went wild into the snowy night sky.

The medic twisted the wrist, banging it on the road and trying to free the gun, but Harley managed to pull the trigger one more time. Charlie saw a blazing arc of light, a bright and beautiful orange parabola that nearly blinded him, as the bullets ripped into the overturned van and punched holes in the gas cans. That was when the whole world lifted off, painlessly and effortlessly, with an all-enveloping whomp, and Charlie was carried up into the air, as if by the Rapture itself … up out of the wreckage, out of his own maimed body, and into a darkness so deep, so dense, and so comforting that he could actually feel it …

Chapter 57

Nika froze, the radio handset dropping into her lap, as she watched the fireball unfurl and the ruined van shoot up into the air. A moment later, the impact of the blast reached the ambulance, shattering the splintered windshield and raining glass down onto the dashboard.

The boom sounded like a distant thunderclap, and the chassis of the ambulance shimmied.

“What was that?” a static-y voice asked over the radio. “Are you still there?”

Pieces of the van started crashing down on the asphalt, while others flew in flames over the side of the bridge.

“Please reply,” the operator insisted. “Are you okay?”

Nika was lifting the mike when something slammed down on the hood of the ambulance, then ricocheted through the gaping hole and onto the seat beside her. She looked down at it — half a leg, in blue jeans, soaked in blood, the foot still attached. And then, in shock, she bolted out of the car.

She was running for the bridge, right past the patrolman who was standing outside his damaged car, mike in hand and the cord stretched to its limit. She heard him saying, “Emergency! Now!” She just kept telling herself, Frank wasn’t wearing blue jeans. He was wearing the white lab suit. He could still be all right.

When she got to the ramp of the bridge, she could see bits of burning wreckage still wafting to the bottom of the gorge. The wind reeked of gasoline and carnage. She ran on, toward the cloud of black smoke and destruction, but as she got closer she had to slow down and pick her way, while squinting her eyes against the acrid fumes, through the smoldering debris.

“Frank? Can you hear me? Frank?”

The storm was whipping the smoke and ashes into an evil, dusky brew. As she stopped for a second to clear the tears from her eyes, the cop ran past her, sweeping his flashlight back and forth. Its bright beam picked out hunks of torn metal and wood and fabric … and chunks of scorched body parts.

Please, God, she thought. Please, God, let me find him.

“Frank!” she called again, the dirty air searing her lungs as she plowed ahead. She remembered the face mask hanging around her neck, and quickly fixed it over her mouth and nose. She was never so glad to have it.

An axle of the van, with two wheels still connected, lay like a barbell in the middle of the roadway.

The side of her foot bumped against something that rolled, like a black bowling ball, down the white line of the bridge. It was only as it rotated that she saw it was a perfectly smooth, perfectly burned, perfectly unrecognizable head.

She stopped in her tracks, afraid to move another step or see another horror. Gusts of wind kept picking over things that had fallen back to earth, blowing them around as if for further inspection, but Nika couldn’t bear to look. She lowered her eyes, breathing hard, and saw something shining in the glow of a burning seat cushion. It was a cross, made of silver. With emeralds that sparkled in the light of the fires crackling all around them. What on earth would that be doing here?

“Over here!” the patrolman cried, holding the mask away from his lips.

He was crouched by the railing.

“Over here!”

Nika jumped over a twisted muffler pipe and went to the railing.

A body, nearly ripped in half, was lying with a shredded blanket wrapped around it. Already she could tell it was missing a couple of limbs.

Her heart plummeted like a rock, but then the patrolman, pointing his flashlight, said, “Underneath! Look underneath!”

She brushed the cinders out of her eyes.

And then she saw that someone else lay there, too, shielded by the mangled corpse.

“Help me,” the cop said, snapping his mask back into place and starting to disentangle the two.

They allowed what was left of the body on top to slither to one side. Enough of it remained, even now, that she could recognize Harley Vane.

And beneath him lay Frank, his lab suit soiled with blood and ash, the ivory owl on its leather string draped over one shoulder. When she said his name, she saw his eyelids flutter. His mask was gone, and his face was seared and bleeding. But she saw his lips move.

“Lie still,” she said, tenderly brushing soot from his cheek. “Don’t try to talk.”

But he tried to, anyway … and she could swear he said “Nika.”

Turning to the cop, she said, “Call for a medical evacuation. We need a helicopter as fast as they can get here!”

But he was shaking his head. “I radioed already, and every chopper is on duty enforcing the quarantine. It’ll be hours before any help gets here.”

Hours was not something Nika had to spare.

“Then I’ll need to take your patrol car.”

“Have you seen what’s left of it? You’ll be driving with no hood.”

Her brain was racing. Her only option was the ambulance with the missing windshield, the lone headlight, and not enough gas. “Can you drain your gas tank into the ambulance for me?”

“That I can do,” he said, plainly relieved that he could finally offer some sort of help, and headed back across the smoldering minefield.

Nika bent low over Frank, trying to assess his injuries, but he was so saturated in blood it was hard to tell. His face was covered with cuts and abrasions, and she carefully raked her fingers through his hair, stiff and matted, in search of any gash or obvious wound. To her relief, she found none. Loosening his hazard suit and trying to peer inside, she could see no open wounds or protruding bones, but internal injuries, even she knew, could be a lot less apparent and much more deadly.

When the patrolman returned with the gurney, they lifted Frank onto it, wheeled him to the back of the ambulance. On the way, Nika’s eye was caught again by the silver cross, glinting among the broken glass and metal, so she stuck it in her pocket. She assumed it was a family heirloom that Vane’s wife would want back, and it might make a small peace offering after all that had happened. Way too small … but still, something.

After they had secured the gurney, the patrolman said, “I still don’t know how you’re gonna make it, in this weather and this vehicle.”

But Nika was already hauling out the medics’ gear stashed in back. She slung on a huge red anorak, with white crosses on its sleeves and a voluminous hood. Her face was barely visible under the dirty mask, and even the remainder she covered with a pair of protective snow goggles. Her hands, still in the latex gloves, went into thermally insulated gloves. When she was done, the cop said, “You still in there, Doc?”

Somewhere along the way, maybe because of the white suit and ambulance, he had assumed she was a doctor — and she had been savvy enough not to correct him. She nodded in answer to his question, but even that movement might have been lost in the folds of the hood.

“I’ll radio ahead and let ’em know you’re coming.”

Then she brushed the broken glass away from the driver’s seat, removed the severed leg and deposited it on the roadway, and fastened her seat belt. The patrolman, using his flashlight like an airport worker directing a jet onto the right runway, helped guide the ambulance through the carnage and debris on the bridge — little piles were still burning like signal fires — and then waved her on her way. She lifted a hand in salute, and glancing in the rearview mirror, watched as he was swallowed up in the maelstrom of the storm.

Chapter 58

Once the plane was completely out of sight, even the sound of its motor lost in the rustling of the wind along the abandoned airstrip, Anastasia said, “There was a village, on the cliffs. I saw it before we landed.”

But Sergei stood where he was, his black sealskin coat billowing out around him, his eyes still fixed on the blue but empty sky.

“Sergei, he’s gone. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

He was still clutching a stone — he had thrown several in impotent fury at the plane — and looked reluctant to give it up.

Ana, deciding to give him time, went to the shed and looked inside. Plainly, it was a depot for the planes, with gas cans and tools and various pieces of machinery lying around, but nothing she could see that would be of any use to them.

“I’m sorry,” she heard over her shoulder. “I was a fool.”

“We both were,” she said, remembering that it was she who had encouraged him to hand over the second diamond. “Anyone who trusts another Russian,” she added bitterly, “is a fool.”

Taking his hand, she led him across the field, favoring her bad foot, which had accumulated many blisters on their journey, and back toward the cliffs where she had seen the dismal huts. Halfway there, she saw several figures approaching — three men, squat and broad, swathed in fur coats, with their hoods thrown back and something odd about their faces. It was only as they came closer that she saw the men had ivory disks, the size of coins, implanted in their jutting, lower lips. She knew that these must be the Eskimos; with their wide, weather-beaten features, high cheekbones and black eyes, they reminded her of the Mongolian trick riders who had once performed at Tsarskoe Selo for her parents’ anniversary.

Ana and Sergei stopped and let the men close the remaining distance. The two younger ones stood back, while the third, with woolly gray eyebrows and leaning on a staff, raised a bare hand and said, “Da?” Yes.

Ana did not know what to reply. The man was looking around, as if he, too, was puzzled at the lack of a plane, a pilot, or any explanation for their being there.

“Da?” he repeated, and she wasn’t sure he understood what he was saying himself.

“My name is Ana,” she said, “and this is Sergei.”

The old man nodded.

How, she wondered, should she continue? “I’m afraid that we may need your help.” Did he understand any other words of Russian?

“We want to go to St. Peter’s Island,” Sergei spoke up, pointing off to the east. “Saint. Peter’s. Island.”

“Kanut,” he said, lightly touching his fingers to the front of his coat.

Ana, smiling tightly, repeated their own names, and the old man nodded in agreement again. “Do you speak Russian?” she asked.

“Da.” Then added, “Some words.”

Thank God, she thought. It might be possible to make themselves understood, after all, but before she could begin, he had turned around and was heading back toward the cliffs. She could only assume that they were meant to follow, especially as his two henchmen waited for them to go on before bringing up the rear. Bewildered as she was, she did not feel threatened, as she would have with her own countrymen.

The village, if you could call it that, was not far off. She could hear huskies barking and smell smoke before she saw the huts again; there were no more than ten or fifteen of them, and they were the crudest structures she had ever seen, low piles of stone with skins stretched across the tops to make a roof. Steep trails led down the cliff to a sliver of rocky beach where canoes and kayaks were laid upside down across racks made of whalebone. Raised on its own poles was a wooden lifeboat with the name Carpathia, in Russian, still faintly legible on its side. Sergei squeezed her hand and with the other pointed off across the Bering Strait. In the distance, like a black fist rising from the sea, she could just make out a tiny island, oddly surrounded, even on a clear day like this, with a belt of fog.

The old man bent low and lifting a sealskin flap ducked into one of the hovels. Within, Ana was surprised to find the room so warm and spacious. The hard ground was covered with many layers of pelts and furs, haphazardly overlapping each other, and two women, as short and broad as the men, were tending to a primitive hearth with a tin chimney spout in the corner. Ana heard the bubbling of a samovar and smelled the surprising aroma of Indian tea. When one of the women, smiling with worn-down yellowed teeth, brought them the tea, it was in chipped china cups with gold rims and Carpathia written on them again. Ana had the strong sense that these things had all been salvaged from a wreck of the same name.

But it was clear to her that Kanut was doing his best to show them the royal treatment. And though no sugar or lemon or milk was on offer, not to mention the traditional tea cakes, beautifully decorated and arrayed, that she had once been so accustomed to, it was the most welcoming and delicious cup of tea she had ever been served. Much as her heart had hardened since Ekaterinburg, she was equally touched by any small display of human kindness.

“How did you learn to speak Russian?” she asked, carefully enunciating each word. Shrugging off his coat, the old man revealed an embroidered, deerskin vest fastened with whalebone buttons, and a little carved figure of a bear hanging down around his neck. She wondered if it was a bear that also adorned the plate in his lip.

“Traders,” he said. “I work on ships.” He held up an arm, hand clenched as if to hurl a harpoon. “Ten year.”

At her side, Sergei radiated impatience, and she put a calming hand on his arm. “Drink the tea,” she said gently, “it will refresh you,” before thanking their host directly. Despite the strange surroundings, she felt as if she were back in one of the imperial palaces, welcoming a delegation from one of the far-flung outposts of the empire. Her family had once ruled nearly a sixth of the globe, and now she was reduced to the clothes on her back and the treasures in her corset. How thankful she was, yet again, that she had had the foresight to wear it, rather than stuffing it in their stolen bundle.

For several minutes, they haltingly talked about his adventures at sea — he had apparently traveled through most of the Arctic regions, hunting beavers, walruses, seals, whales — but Ana could sense the pressure building in Sergei. He kept crossing and recrossing his legs, clearing his throat, even coughing. Finally, when he could stand it no more, he broke in to say, “Can we hire you, or some of your men, to take us across to the island? We will gladly pay you whatever you want.”

Although the old man smiled politely, Ana could tell he was offended at having his colloquy interrupted. He seldom had a new listener, she imagined. But when he shook his head, it was with more than petty annoyance.

“No. Not there,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Bad luck,” he said, his fingers unconsciously grazing the ivory bear around his neck.

Was it his good-luck charm, Ana wondered? His equivalent of the emerald cross beneath her blouse?

“Is it because the Russian settlers are there?” Sergei pressed on. “I can promise you, they will do you no harm. They are followers of a great man, a holy man, known as Father Grigori.”

But the old man was as stolid and impassive as a boulder.

“He was also called Rasputin,” Sergei said. “Surely you have heard of him by that name.”

“Place for spirits,” he said, of the island. “I tell them, do not go there. Place for the dead. Do not go.”

Ana had the impression that he was saying it was a holy place for the Eskimos, sacred ground that the colonists had defiled by their very presence. Even that one glimpse of it that she had had confirmed her suspicions. It was a forbidding spot.

But Sergei was not to be dissuaded. For that matter, neither was she. They could hardly return to Russia now, and they had come all this way to find a safe harbor, if only for a year or two, until the world had come to its senses and the Reds had been turned out of power as ruthlessly as they had taken it. No, she was as determined as Sergei to reach their destination, especially now that it was within sight.

“Well, then, if you don’t want to go,” Sergei said, “what about selling us one of those boats down on the beach? The one from the Carpathia?” He held up his cup and pointed at the word on his teacup.

Kanut frowned.

“How much do you want for it?” Sergei went on, glancing at Anastasia. Reaching inside her coat, she drew out the drawstring bag in which they kept their ready bribes, and Sergei opened it, rummaged around inside, and took out a sparkling yellow diamond. He held it out toward the old man. “It’s worth a thousand rubles. And what’s that wooden boat worth?”

When the old man showed no interest, Sergei took out a sapphire so big and so blue it looked like a blueberry. “Both of them, you can have them both.”

But Kanut still didn’t budge. Ana didn’t know if this was some bargaining tactic, or if he was sincerely uninterested.

Sergei’s frustration was growing, but then he seemed to have hit on something. He dug deeper into the pouch and came out with three gold rings that had once belonged to Ana’s sisters. Her heart ached at seeing them. But Sergei was right — the moment the gold appeared, Kanut paid attention. He didn’t care about gems, but gold was the currency of the world, particularly in these regions where so much of it was mined.

“The rings — pure gold — you can have all three.”

Kanut held out his palm, and when Sergei had dropped the rings onto it, he left it there … waiting for the diamond and the sapphire to join them. So, Ana thought, he wasn’t so impervious to their beauty, and their value, after all. Sergei reluctantly handed over the jewels, too. They had just bought a sailboat for the price of the imperial yacht Standart.

The old man pocketed the booty in his vest, and perhaps afraid that these two fools might regret the deal, stood up and said, “You must go soon. The tides.” He shouted some instructions to the women, one of whom was just about to serve them some hunks of cured blubber, and motioned for Ana and Sergei to follow him.

Outside, the two men who had been accompanying Kanut were crouching on the tundra, tossing fishtails to the dogs, who were straining at their chains. The old man issued some order in their native tongue, and the men looked puzzled. The old man said something more, and Ana saw one of them, with a gold tooth in the front of his mouth, look at her and laugh. She did not need a translator to grasp the gist of what had been said.

The trail down to the beach was steep, and with her bad foot, it was difficult to maintain her balance. Sergei put an arm around her waist and virtually carried her much of the way. At the bottom, he was winded, and bending over double, dissolved in a fit of coughs.

Under Kanut’s close eye, the two men unlashed the sailboat from the whalebone posts, flipped it right-side-up, and slipped its bow into the frigid, slushy water. One of them stepped between the thwarts, and pulling on a coiled rope, raised a limp canvas sail. The other produced a dented canteen — he shook it so that they could hear it was filled — along with a knotted handful of jerky strips and some cured blubber, then tossed them all into the stern of the boat. Enough provisions, Ana surmised, for them to make it to the neighboring island … or die lost at sea.

Sergei, looking alarmingly winded and pale, put out a hand and helped Anastasia into the boat, and once she was settled, he took a seat at the stern, taking the tiller in one hand and the rope connected to the sail in the other. Nodding at the two Eskimos, like a hunter telling the beaters to release the hounds, he wound the rope around his wrist as the natives put their shoulders down and pushed the boat away from shore. It bobbed in place at first, before Sergei pulled the sail higher and the wind suddenly caught it and snapped it tight. The boat veered away from the rocky beach, the cold waves lapping hungrily at its sides as Ana clutched an oarlock. Nunarbuk receded quickly, its squat stone huts lost in the gray cliffside, while St. Peter’s Island remained a black knob in the midst of the choppy sea. A flock of birds — all dusky hued and crying discordantly — flew around and around their feeble mast, as if issuing a warning of their own.

But Anastasia merely whispered a prayer under her breath and touched her hand to the place on her breast where the emerald cross hung. In what else could she put her faith?

Chapter 59

Alone on the open road, with Frank strapped to the gurney in the ambulance bay behind her, Nika drove on toward Nome, snow blowing straight into the car through the missing windshield. At times it was flying so thick and fast that it totally obscured the lanes, and Nika had to stop the car altogether and wait for things to clear before she could even tell which way the road was going. The highway reflectors winked red when caught in the headlight, but that was about the only help she got.

She knew there wasn’t much in the way of human habitation out here, and what there was would be invisible behind the swirling snow. She coughed behind her mask — at least it kept the snow out of her mouth — but she worried that she was starting to feel light-headed. The candy bar she’d eaten earlier might not be enough to sustain her, though the very thought of food made her nauseous, not hungry. She simply had to keep control of her nerves and stay focused, for another few hours. Frank’s life depended upon it.

Glancing in back, she saw that he was lying motionless under several blankets and a thermal cover, a stocking cap pulled low over his brow, all the while drifting in and out of consciousness. She was worried about a concussion, or worse, but what did she know? Despite what the patrolman might believe, she was no doctor.

If only Frank were fully conscious and aware, he could have assessed his condition himself.

She turned on the heater, full blast, but with the window gone, most of the hot air dissipated almost immediately; the rest simply melted the snow and ice piling up in the front of the ambulance until she found frigid water sloshing around among the foot pedals. Still, without the heat on, she felt that her hands, even in the gloves, might freeze.

Once the highway turned inland, the evergreens grew thicker, rising on both sides of the highway and affording some modicum of protection from the wind. They also helped her to see where the road was going, and she was able to pick up speed. She was even able to spot the occasional road sign — usually warning of some treacherous stretch ahead — but sometimes telling her how much farther it was to Nome. She’d have enough gas, she could see that, but keeping the ambulance from skidding off into a snowdrift, or colliding with some nocturnal creature out foraging, could prove deadly. She personally knew of three people in Port Orlov who had died from exposure, and one of them was an Inuit — Geordie’s great uncle — and he had lived there his entire life. His hungry malamute had wandered into the Yardarm, alone, four days later.

As she huddled over the wheel, pressing on toward Nome on her own desperate mission, she was reminded of the other malamute, the famous Balto, who had carried the lifesaving serum there almost a hundred years before. She thought of the terrible hardships those dogs and mushers had endured, and even as she suffered a bout of coughing herself, she tried to bolster her spirit with their own bravery and commitment. If they could do it on open sleds, across impossible terrain, why should she be questioning her chances? She had a car, albeit a lousy one. She had a heater — even if it was turning everything to porridge — and she had a doctor on board, despite the fact that he was injured and mostly unconscious. She should have had it made.

The pep rally didn’t help as much as she hoped it would.

She turned on the radio, and a country-western station kicked in, despite the storm. She didn’t really follow that kind of music, so the singer, crooning about a girl who got away, wasn’t familiar to her. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was the connection to civilization, the voice from the void, the company it provided, as she drove on through the darkness and the freezing cold. It was a mental lifeline, and one she clung to … especially as she felt her own energy slipping.

How much time passed by like that, she didn’t know. She was so concentrated on following the road, keeping track of those elusive reflectors posted along the sides, that she was becoming snow-blind. And more than once, without knowing it, she must have closed her eyes for a few seconds, because when she looked up again something in her field of vision had changed — a sign was already rushing past her, or the road had started to bend through a grove of trees. She’d hastily wipe the snow from her goggles, pound her arms to get the blood flowing, and tell herself in a loud voice, “Wake up, Nika — wake up!”

The ambulance was so old it had no GPS, and even the odometer was stuck, so it was hard to keep track of how much farther she had to go. She had to rely upon the infrequent signage. But there was no point in worrying about it, she thought, and less point in turning back. “You’ll get there when you get there,” her grandmother used to say. Back then, she’d thought it was pretty dumb. Right now, it seemed like the height of wisdom.

Taylor Swift — now there was someone she did recognize — came on, singing an old hit she’d written about some guy who’d treated her badly (who was it, Nika tried to recall, the tabloids said there were so many) when she was surprised by a voice from the ambulance bay saying, “Enough … enough.”

She quickly turned her head to see Frank stirring on the gurney. The covers were still tucked around him, the stocking hat dusted with snow.

“No more … country music.”

His voice came out like a frog, croaking, but it was music to her ears. He angled his head so that their eyes could meet — deep bruises were already forming all around his sockets, making it look like he’d just been punched — and she fumbled to turn off the radio.

“Are you okay?” she asked, alternating between looking at Frank and watching the road.

“Where are we?”

“On the way to the hospital, in Nome.”

He closed his eyes, as if mulling it over.

“Should I pull over? Do you need my help?”

Opening them again, he said, “What happened, at the bridge?”

Unsure where to begin, she started to describe the patrol car’s blocking the entrance, but he shook his head slightly and said, “That much I remember. I meant the Vanes.”

She swallowed, and said, “The van blew up. It must have been loaded with lots of extra gas. You were thrown clear.”

His gaze traveled around the ambulance, snow drifting around the interior like the white flakes in a snow globe. Plainly, he had noted no other passengers, and Nika didn’t think she needed to say anything more. He put his head back down, staring at the roof of the cabin, and she studied the road again. In a good sign, the surface seemed smoother and more recently plowed, which meant she was getting closer to the city.

Even with the heat on high, she was shivering in her coat, and had to bend forward over the wheel when another bout of coughing hit her.

“How long has that been going on?” Slater asked, as if suddenly on alert again.

Nika waved it off, loosening her face mask to catch some fresh air; fear was making her hyperventilate. Despite the whirling snow and ice, she could see lights up ahead. Not many, but enough. With both gloves, she gripped the wheel like a captain determined to go down with the ship and steered for the lights.

A roadhouse was dimly discernible on her left, and the sign above the seawall on Gold Beach. She was driving along the Norton Sound, the wind thumping at the sides of the ambulance like paddles. The new hospital wasn’t too far off. On a clear night, she might have been able to see it by now; only four stories high, it was nonetheless the tallest structure in town. The mariners, who had once used the church steeples as their beacons, now looked for the lighted antennae atop the hospital.

When she finally entered the concentrated network of streets that comprised downtown Nome, she felt like a marathoner running on shaky legs toward the finish line. As if to bring the point home, she saw off to her left the wooden archway that marked the end of the Iditarod race … and then the wooden sign festooned with placards showing the distance to places like Miami and Rio. The streetlamps swayed and bobbed, casting a wild yellow glow on the bingo parlors and bars, but not a soul was out on the windy, snow-choked streets.

At the corner of West Fifth Avenue, she turned too sharply, and the ambulance nearly slid into a hydrant before she could straighten it out again.

Take it easy, she told herself, you’re almost there.

Just ahead she could see the lighted sign that read NORTON SOUND REGIONAL HEALTHCARE: EMERGENCY ENTRANCE, and blowing the horn the whole way, she piloted the car down the ramp, under the covered portico, and into the heated garage.

Several members of the hospital staff came charging out through the sliding glass doors — all duly warned, and garbed in hazmat suits — and while two of them jumped into the back of the old ambulance and started trundling Frank, still on the gurney, into the receiving area, a third yanked open the driver’s side door. Melted snow and slush slopped out, and Nika felt as if she was about to slide out onto the floor, too. A burly male nurse grabbed her, and escorted her inside, a strong arm wrapped around her waist.

“Quarantine,” she said, through her mask. “He needs to be quarantined.”

“They know,” he said, through a plastic face mask of his own. “The Alaska Highway Patrol called ahead.”

She was guided onto the nearest chair, but when she glanced down at her mask, she could see that there was a pink stain on the gauze. “Me, too,” she said, in a muffled voice.

But she wasn’t sure he’d heard her.

When her gloves were taken off to check for frostbite, she saw in the center of her palm, where the needle had pricked her on St. Peter’s island, a cluster of tiny red lines, radiating outwards like the rays of the sun in a child’s drawing.

“Me, too,” she repeated, drawing away from him and doubling over as a fit of coughing overwhelmed her. “Quarantine.”

The nurse instinctively jumped back, and when Nika’s breath finally returned, she gasped, “Stay away,” before sliding down out of the chair, limp as a rag doll, and onto the gleaming linoleum floor.

Chapter 60

“Let me at least take the tiller!” Anastasia had begged Sergei, more than once, but he had refused every time. His teeth were clenched in determination, his eyes were fixed on the distant prospect of St. Peter’s Island, but Ana feared for his life. He had guarded her, cared for her, loved her, for thousands of miles, and now, just as they were within sight of their destination, his skin was turning blue, and his cough had become rough and constant and alarming.

It had also become familiar.

Anastasia and her sister Tatiana had come down with the flu themselves the winter before, but bad as it had been, they had weathered it. Thousands of others, she knew, did not. In the military hospitals, where the imperial daughters helped to tend to the soldiers wounded in battle with the Germans, Ana often passed by the influenza wards, where she could hear the retching and hacking, the agonized cries and the deathly gurgles of its victims as they drowned in a tide of their own blood and mucus. Once gone, their bodies were hastily wrapped in their own sheets, and rather than being taken through the hospital corridors again, and risking a further spread of the contagion, they were slipped out a window, down a wooden chute requisitioned from a grain silo, and straight onto the back of a waiting wagon. Huge pits, swimming in quicklime, had been dug on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, and the dead were deposited there with no observance or ceremony of any kind. Who would have lingered in such a place to do so?

She should have known when she first heard the pilot Nevsky coughing at the inn. All the way across the continent, she and Sergei had skirted every danger, from random thieves to Bolshevik soldiers, corrupt officials to marauding Cossacks, but this was the one threat that could not be seen coming. And even if they had, what else could they do? There was no other means of getting as far as they had than to bribe a pilot. She wished an ill fate on Nevsky.

“Sergei,” she warned, in the tone of a grand duchess who would brook no dissent, “I cannot sail this boat alone. For my sake, if not your own, you must rest, just for a bit.”

But he had acted as if he hadn’t even heard her; it was possible he had not. It looked as if the teeth were rattling in his skull, and he had collapsed in another paroxysm of coughing. It had all come on so fast she could hardly believe it … though she had seen such a phenomenon before. Even in the military wards, it had often been the hardiest and most energetic young men who had fallen the fastest. It was one of the great mysteries of the disease. Dr. Botkin, who had cared for Ana and her sister, had suggested it was this very constitution that contributed to the victims’ demise. “Their own strength is their undoing,” he had said, shaking his head as he read their thermometers and ordered more cold compresses to bring down their fevers. “Be glad that you are frail and pampered princesses,” he’d said, and Tatiana had thrown a pillow at him.

Was that truly what had saved them? Or was it, as Rasputin had darkly ordained, that she carried in her blood a proof against the plague, that the deadly blood disease inherited from her mother, and passed on only to the male offspring, offered some immunity from the worst ravages of the Spanish flu? How strange, that her compromised nature might have been her greatest guardian.

She could serve as the messenger of doom, it seemed, but not one of its victims.

A block of ice bumped up against the boat, and a wave of icy blue water crested the starboard side and sloshed into the bottom, washing up and over her boots. She tried to lift her feet above the water, but she could not maintain her balance on the narrow thwart for very long. Both her feet were nearly frozen, but the left one in particular, wearing the boot specially designed to accommodate its deformity, had no feeling left in it at all. She longed to remove the boot and rub the life back into it, ideally before a roaring fire … but St. Peter’s Island was still far off.

And the closer they got, the less welcoming it appeared.

A gnarled black rock, swathed in mist and surrounded by jagged rocks sticking up out of the water like spikes, it was the least likely place on earth to have earned the name of sanctuary. But that, she knew, was precisely why it had been chosen. The followers of Father Grigori, who believed, as she did, that he was a prophet, had traveled all the way from Pokrovskoe to take refuge here, to build their church and to await the return of their starets. For Ana, his bodily return seemed unlikely — she knew all too well the ravages that had been inflicted upon him before his drowning in the Neva River — but she did not doubt the strength of his spirit. She did not doubt the image she had seen, swirling up out of the gun smoke in that cellar in Ekaterinburg, any more than she doubted the emerald cross, imbued with his powers, that she still wore under her coat and corset.

Sergei had taken his hand from the tiller and was pointing, with one shaking finger, ahead at the island. When she reached out and stroked the side of his face, he drew back in horror, afraid of infecting her, and insisted that she look for the fires. “They will light fires.”

And then, racked with a cough that drenched his own hand in blood, he had let go of the sail and let go of life. Blessing her, he had rolled over the side of the boat, and into the churning waters of the strait.

The last thing she had seen of him, as she lunged to the stern and his body was engulfed by the waves, was a frozen blue cornflower bobbing between the shards of ice. It was, undoubtedly, the one she had first given him by the train tracks in Siberia.

She’d have given every gem in her corset to reclaim it.

And then she had turned to the task of steering the boat through the blinding fog and the heaving waves, steadfastly looking for the fires that Sergei said they lighted on the cliffs every night. “They are the beacons to guide their prophet, lost and wandering in the dark, to their new home,” he had told her. And when she saw them burning like tiny candles at the end of a long and gloomy hallway, her heart had risen in her chest. The boat, as if guided by some miraculous hand, had passed through the rocks and reefs and tide pools, and ground to a halt on a narrow strip of pebbles and sand. When she had sunk to her knees on the beach, soaked to the skin and gasping for breath, she had thanked God for her deliverance. Over the crashing of the surf, she thought she heard the tolling of a church bell.

And in the last light of day — a day that was shorter in this northern part of the world than anywhere else — she had looked up to see her rescuers running down the beach toward her. But the prayer of thanks turned to ashes in her mouth as they closed the distance.

Far from coming to her rescue, these were a pack of black wolves, their eyes shining orange and their white fangs bared. The boat was gone, drifting back out to sea, and even if she had wanted to try to outrun them, there was nowhere to go. Pulling the cross from beneath her clothes, she clutched it tightly, lowered her head in prayer, and prepared to join her massacred family in Heaven. The wolves came on, and at any moment she expected to hear their bloodthirsty panting and feel their sharp teeth at her throat. But just as she braced herself for the attack, she heard a sharp, piercing whistle from the cliffs above, and when she lifted her eyes long enough to look through the veil of her own ice-rimed hair, she saw the wolves drawing up short, nervously pawing the sand, moving in circles around her, whining and barking like dogs at the kitchen door.

What had happened?

The lead wolf, with a white blaze on its muzzle, stepped closer — she could smell his rank breath — and stared at her hands, clutching the emerald cross, with an almost human curiosity.

The whistle came again, and all the wolves turned to look at the cliffside, where a man in a long black cassock was slowly descending an almost invisible flight of stairs. For a second, Anastasia thought, “My God, it is Rasputin!” But as he marched across the frozen beach, she saw that it was someone else — tall as Rasputin and as broad in the shoulder, but with a face that was more benign, less worldly, and unshrouded by a tangled black beard. There was an undeniable ferocity in Father Grigori’s features, but none in this priest’s. He waved one arm, and the wolves, except for their leader, were swept back like dust before a broom.

“Anastasia,” he said, dropping to his knees beside her, “I am Deacon Stefan.”

It was the man Sergei had told her about, the man who had led the pilgrims from his village.

Taking her into his embrace, he said, “We have been waiting a long time for you.”

The hot tears suddenly springing from her eyes warmed her face, and when the wolf with the white nose stepped forward to lick them, the deacon did not intervene.