The Romanov Cross

Chapter 61

It was a strange situation. That much, Dr. Frank Slater would have been the first to admit.

On the one hand, he was a patient at the Nome Regional Health Center, most of his time spent lying in the cranked-up hospital bed and under observation by closed-circuit camera and through the glass panels of the ICU doors, and on the other hand he was in charge.

The explosion on the bridge had left him with a concussion, two fractured ribs that made him wince with every deep breath he took, and more cuts and bruises than he could count. His malarial meds had had to be airlifted in — normally, there wasn’t much call for them in Alaska — but if anything, it was his chronic disease that had helped to save his life. Because of his already compromised immunological response, and the ingestion of his retroviral drugs, any exposure he had undergone to the Spanish flu had been mitigated. His system was already too weakened to mount the kind of stiff resistance that engendered the fatal cytokine storms that had killed so many millions.

It was the first time he’d ever been grateful for that damn mosquito bite.

But even as he was being nursed back to health, he knew that he bore the responsibility for running this quarantine unit. He had improvised it himself — first by commandeering the ICU, then by putting the staff through intensive, on-the-spot training. They were a lot more accustomed to routine problems like heart attacks and hunting accidents, but even as they were wheeling him in on the gurney, he had begun to issue instructions on how to deal with a virus as potentially deadly as this one. He had strictly cordoned off this area of the hospital’s top floor, nearly all communication was done through the intercom system, and only a limited number of personnel, always outfitted in full hazmat gear, were ever allowed in or out. Right now, the unit had just one other patient — Nikaluk Tincook.

And she had not fared as well as he had. Like Dr. Lantos, she had been brought in suffering not only from the flu, but from septicemia, a flood tide of bacteria clogging her bloodstream. The minute Slater had been told about the red lines on her palm, he had personally drained and sterilized the wound site, but it was too little, too late. The flu and the sepsis were like old pals, reunited now and working in deadly concert, and if he didn’t calibrate his responses perfectly, he could lose her to either one. The fear gnawed at him like a rat.

Dr. Jonah Knudsen, the crusty old coot who normally ran the hospital, had advised that she be sent on to the state-of-the-art facility in Juneau, where Dr. Lantos was being treated. Standing outside the door and speaking through the intercom, he had told Slater that Rebekah Vane and her sister Bathsheba had also been sent there.

“Have they presented symptoms of the flu?”

“Rebekah has,” he said, “but then she apparently had greater physical contact with Harley Vane and his bodily fluids.”

“His bodily fluids?”

“She served him tea and toast, and later, after he’d vomited, she cleaned up the mess.”

Then it made some sense.

“Although her condition is otherwise stable, she does have a fractured jaw and other minor injuries, and just so you know, she has named you, in addition to the federal government, in a lawsuit for a host of damages. First and foremost, of course, is the loss of her husband.”

Of course, Slater thought. Even as they were fighting to save her life, from an incident that would never have occurred if her family had not gone on an illegal treasure hunt in the first place, she was lying in her bed concocting lawsuits. It was the new American pastime, and it made him, more than ever, want to find a way to get away from everything that it suggested and implied. He simply wanted to practice medicine again, in a place where his talents and his work would be valued and the bureaucracy extended no further than the usual burden of insurance forms. His days as a globe-trotting epidemiologist might be over — Dr. Levinson had made that perfectly clear — but his efforts to save Lantos, and now Nika, had reminded him of the satisfaction to be had from healing just one person. What was that old Hebrew proverb he’d once heard Dr. Levinson herself say—“If you save one life, it’s the same as saving the whole world.”

Right now the only life he wanted to save, even more than his own, was Nika’s.

All day long, her small compact body, sweating through one hospital gown after another, had been racked with coughing fits and spasms. Her long black hair, tied into a tight braid, had lashed the pillows like a whip. Her platelet count plummeted, her blood gases revealed she had entered into metabolic acidosis, her breathing became so faint that a mechanical ventilator had to be wheeled in; her major organs began to shut down like dominoes falling in a row. Lungs, liver, central nervous system; when her kidneys failed, Slater had had to immediately put her on dialysis.

She’d been young and healthy and athletic, and now it was the very strength of her immune system that was threatening to kill her. It was kicking into overdrive … and throwing her whole body into shock. Many patients, he knew, never came back from it.

The hospital staff, panicking, looked to him for guidance, and he ordered up a fresh barrage of IV antibiotics — cindamycin and flucytosine this time — along with vasopressors to constrict her blood vessels and treat her hypotension, insulin to stabilize her blood-sugar levels, corticosteroids to counteract the inflammation. The diseases were burning through her like a forest fire, consuming her just as her Inuit ancestors had once been consumed, and he had to find a way to sustain her long enough to let the contagion burn itself out.

“Dr. Slater,” one of the nurses said after he had maintained his vigil for hours on end, “why don’t you go back to your own room and take a break? We’ll alert you if anything changes.”

“I’ll stay,” he said, perched in a fresh lime-green hazard suit on the plastic chair in the corner. Every few hours, the chair, like everything else in this section of the old ICU, was sprayed from top to bottom with a powerful disinfectant.

Surrounded by the machines and screens, tubes and wires and IV trolleys, Nika could barely be seen. But every fluctuation in her respiration or temperature, cardiac rate or cerebral activity, was being tracked and monitored by the array of instruments that had been brought into the room. Slater, exhausted, slumped backward in the chair, and felt the ivory bilikin on its leather string swing against his damp skin.

The little owl, with its furled wings. On the island, Professor Kozak had asked about it, and Nika had said it was purportedly from a woolly mammoth.

Impressed, Slater had looked at it even more closely.

“That would make it, perhaps, eleven thousand years old,” Kozak had later informed him.

Slater wondered if it had gained some extra charge, some supernatural potency, over all those centuries it had endured. Although he wasn’t a believer in such things — how could he be? — right now he was ready to accept any help he could get.

Dr. Knudsen appeared, hovering in a white lab coat, through the glass panel in the door.

That was not the help he had hoped for.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Knudsen said, sounding not sorry at all as he bent toward the intercom box, “but I thought you should know.”

“Know what?” Slater said, already dreading the reply.

“It’s about Dr. Eva Lantos. She died one hour ago.”

It was like a hammer blow to his already bruised chest.

“For purposes of public safety,” Knudsen continued, “the official death certificate entered in Juneau is recording it as simply a lethal bacterial infection. But her body was immediately removed to the AFIP labs in D.C. by Army air transport.”

Slater could see that the doctor was holding a clipboard against his chest, and rocking on his heels.

“I’m very sorry,” he said.

But Slater didn’t think he looked any more regretful than he sounded; he looked like a man who didn’t mind telling his privileged guest, the one who had taken over his own ICU, that he wasn’t such a hotshot, after all.

It was the first time Slater had lost a colleague on one of his missions; you could not be a field epidemiologist, in the world’s most deadly and undeveloped regions, and not be aware of the risks you were taking. It was something that lurked in the back of your mind the whole time.

But Eva Lantos? She’d been holed up in her M.I.T. lab, safe and sound, and he had lured her out. While nothing that happened on the island could have logically been foreseen — it was a place where logic seemed to hold no sway — he blamed himself, all the same. It was a simple, straight line he could draw — if he had not phoned her that afternoon from his office at the institute, she’d be happily teasing out the rat genome in Boston today. Instead, she was dead in an isolation tank at AFIP.

Slater closed his eyes and wished that Knudsen, this angel of death, would leave him be. When he looked again, Knudsen was gone. Thank God for small favors. And then he realized that, through the fabric of his suit, his fingers were clutching the ivory owl.

The monitors kept up a steady beeping, the ventilator whooshed, the machines hummed, and Nika — silent, still, her eyes shut — fought on. He remembered the first time they’d met, when the helicopter had chased the Zamboni she was driving right off the ice rink. They’d gotten off on the wrong foot, especially when he was so slow to realize that she was the mayor of the town—and the tribal elder, to boot. He’d had a lot of catching up to do.

But he had quickly come to recognize her virtues, her skills … and her beauty. That last item he had tried to overlook — he knew he had serious work to do, and it was no time to become distracted. Slater had always maintained a strictly professional demeanor in the field, and on an expedition of this importance, it was especially critical. He had never intended to feel the way he did now, he had never seen it coming. Like that fantastic display of the aurora borealis they had watched together one night, it had taken him utterly by surprise.

And now … what did he do with these feelings? He had never told her how he felt. He had never told her that he had fallen in love with her. But if she died tonight, in this terrible place, away from her home and the people she loved, he did not know how he would bear it.

He had lost all track of time. There was a clock on the wall, but he had no idea if it was 10 A.M. or 10 P.M. There was only one window, down at the end of the hall, and even that one was tinted and permasealed. Meanwhile, the Alaskan daylight was coming later, and growing shorter, all the time. How the Inuit had survived in this intemperate world astonished him still, but they were a hardy lot … and that, in the end, was what he was counting on. Nika’s ancestors had been among the sturdy few to survive the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, and perhaps that acquired immunity had been passed down to the young woman fighting for her life now.

He unzipped his suit enough to pull the ivory owl through, and then he snapped the cord. He smoothed a spot on her blanket and laid the bilikin down on top of it. He knew that she was in a very dark place, and if the owl could truly prove to be a guide, then now was the time.

Chapter 62

The deacon, not surprisingly, was the first to succumb.

It was he who had first embraced Anastasia on the beach, he who had held her hands — the very hands that had caressed the cheek of the dying Sergei — as he escorted her up the steps chiseled into the cliffs and through the main gates of the colony. The others, maybe three or four dozen in all, were beside themselves with joy when she arrived. She was brought into the church, where a supper had been hastily laid on a table in the nave, and the bell in the church dome was rung over and over. Her safe arrival was considered a harbinger of a bigger, and even better, thing to come. She was the long-anticipated psychopomp, the bird who heralded the return of Rasputin himself.

Anastasia was seated at the head of a long and narrow refectory table, and to her embarrassment an old peasant woman summarily removed the sopping boots from her feet, and soaked her aching, frozen toes in a bucket of warm, salted water. The embarrassment immediately gave way, however, to a tingling sensation, and a not-altogether-pleasant throbbing as the blood once again began to circulate in her feet and ankles. Deacon Stefan offered her a glass of something she imagined to be grog — Nagorny the sailor had described such stuff — as bracing as it was vile. Other women were still bringing hot bread and pots of stew to the table, and Anastasia, though so grief-stricken at the loss of Sergei that she could barely eat, took what she could, and thanked them profusely. All of them — men, women, and a handful of children — stared at her unabashedly, and she could not help but notice how often their eyes went to the emerald cross. Several times she saw the older colonists cross themselves while gazing upon it. They listened, enraptured, as she recounted the journey that she, and the missing Sergei, had undertaken. It was rare enough, Ana surmised, that they saw anyone new here, and rarer still when that newcomer was one of the grand duchesses of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty.

Here, if nowhere in Russia anymore, that title commanded respect, even reverence.

A cabin was set aside for Ana, but when she saw that it was filled with someone else’s personal belongings — a hand-stitched quilt, an icon of St. Peter, pans and kettles on hooks above a potbellied stove, a dress in the armoire — she tried to decline. “I don’t want to put anyone out of her home,” she said. “I can sleep anywhere — the church would be fine.”

But Deacon Stefan had insisted. “The people vied for the opportunity,” he said. “Vera would be mortified if you didn’t accept her hospitality. She is honored.”

And so she had accepted. She did not even remember saying goodnight to the deacon. The second she had sat down on the straw-filled mattress, she had been overwhelmed by fatigue and fallen into not so much a sleep as a stupor. She had a vague recollection of the old woman who had bathed her feet coming into the room and removing her other damp clothes. The quilt was thrown over her, tucked tight to her chin, and a bearskin was thrown over that. Ana did not move a muscle; she felt she couldn’t even if she tried. For many hours — she never knew exactly — she lay there, half-asleep and half-aware of everything and everyone. Her mind traveled back over the endless journey that had brought her to the island at last, combing over every detail, revisiting every scene, from the attic room at Novo-Tikhvin to the cramped compartment on the Trans-Siberian Railway (where a conductor had become so inordinately curious about Ana that Sergei had made them disembark in the dead of night at the next fueling station).

Sergei. One more name to add to the list of the dead and beloved in her life. The list was already so long, and she was barely eighteen. How long would it become? Forgive me, she prayed. Forgive me for the suffering my family and I have brought upon so many. She felt herself both blessed — she alone had survived the slaughter in the house with the whitewashed windows — and at the same time accursed. No one else would have to live on, knowing exactly what had happened there, reliving it in dreams … and nightmares.

Late the next day, when she arose, the few hours of sunlight had nearly passed. She ventured out of the tiny cabin and into a frostbitten twilight. All around her rose a stockade wall, and within it a small but tidy colony had been erected. Apart from the church, which stood at one end and appeared to serve also as a meeting house and dining hall, there were cabins and livestock pens, vegetable gardens, a blacksmith shop and apothecary, even a common outhouse, with separate doors for men and women. However bleak the surroundings, it was a world unto itself.

A man splitting logs looked up from his chores and touched the brim of his fur cap. Then he returned to his work. A woman in a long peasant skirt, with a woolen shawl drawn over her head and around her shoulders, carried a bushel basket of roots and mushrooms into one of the cabins; a pale and dismal light crept across the threshold before the door was closed again with a creak and a thump. A cold wind whistled between the timbers of the stockade, and Ana was inevitably reminded of the palisade that had been built around the Ipatiev house. Yurovsky had said it was for the protection of the imperial family as they took the air, but no one had been fooled by that. It might just as well have been iron bars.

“So you’re awake?” she heard, as Deacon Stefan strode through the main gates; he was carrying a fishing pole over one shoulder and a couple of halibut on a line. “I looked in on you earlier. You were sleeping like a log.”

He wasn’t wearing his cassock anymore but a thick fur coat that fell to his ankles. Long strands of his hair, so blond as to be almost white, spilled from under his Cossack-style hat. “Are you feeling well?”

“Yes,” she said, “I think so.” She hadn’t even considered the question, there was so much else to absorb and take in.

“The man you mentioned at dinner — Sergei,” he said, his blue eyes cast downward, “there has been no sign of him. I have searched the shoreline.”

Anastasia nodded.

“But the sea often yields in the end,” he said. “We will keep looking.”

Ana thanked him, but he brushed it aside.

“We will say a mass for him every day until he has been returned to us.”

And then he coughed, just once, into the back of his clenched hand, and Ana felt her spine stiffen.

“You’ve been out fishing in this cold?” she said. “I hope you haven’t caught a chill.” She had not mentioned Sergei’s illness. She had only said he was thrown from the boat during the crossing.

“It’s nothing,” he said, but coughing again. “No one ever recommended this place for its weather.”

“No, I don’t imagine that they do.”

“Let me get these fish into a frying pan,” he said. “We all eat together in the church, as soon as it is dark.”

“What can I do to help?” Anastasia said. Although a grand duchess by birth, she had been brought up to treat the common people with respect and to share their burdens when possible. It was why their father had made them sleep for years in ordinary cots in plainly decorated bedrooms, and their mother had ferried them to the Army hospitals to tend to the wounded. It was a puzzle Anastasia would never solve, how the peasants and workmen and soldiers of Russia had been convinced by a heartless revolutionary named Lenin that her family had not cared for and loved — yes, “loved” was not too strong a word for it — all of them.

Needless to say, she no longer felt that way at all, and she wondered what Father Grigori would say if she were able to tell him so.

“Never fear,” the deacon said in answer to her last question. “There’s no shortage of things that need to be done in the colony. You’ll fit right in, Your Highness.”

He threw her a half smile over his shoulder as he marched on with the fish swinging on the line over his shoulder. She tried to return the smile, but her face smarted, and she wasn’t sure if it was due to the cutting wind or the fact that she was so unaccustomed to the expression.

Chapter 63

Nika was running, running so hard the blood beat in her ears and muffled all other sounds. Running so hard the breath was raw in her throat and her lungs ached. Running so hard that her legs were starting to wobble and her shoulders to sag.

But she had to keep going, across the frozen hills, through the brush and barren trees, on and on … toward a low rise overlooking a tiny village huddled on the shoreline. There, she stopped, doubling over with her hands on her knees to catch her breath.

It was late autumn, and while some of the natives had already erected their igloos, with domed roofs and walls of packed snow, others were still making do with the tents made of caribou skins, stitched together with long ropes of sinew and anchored with bones. She waited, watching, but even from the ceremonial hall — the qarqui—at the far end of the village, there was no sign of any human activity. There were no fishermen hauling their kayaks onto the rocky beach, no children playing, no women tending to the huskies. (And where were the dogs?) It was an eerie sight, the lonely village, lying under a fresh blanket of snow, with a dense, dark cloud bank advancing across the Bering Sea and swallowing the last pale rays of the sun as it came. The only sounds were the wind whipping the waves onto the rocks, and the cries of cormorants circling overhead.

How odd, she thought, to hear cormorants. They had gone extinct years ago.

But then, this was years ago. Even now, Nika was aware that what she was experiencing was real, but unreal … that she was only a dreamer, inhabiting a dream, in which she nevertheless had a crucial role to play. She adjusted the straps of the knapsack digging into her shoulders, careful not to damage the precious ampoules that she knew — simply knew — were nestled inside.

She felt as if she had been traveling for days without stopping, all the while burning with fever, or racked with chills. She felt racked and depleted, and her mouth was filled with the acrid taste of her own blood. Her mukluks were slick with ice, her sealskin coat damp with her own perspiration. But she knew that she had to go down into the village. It was there her work had to be done.

Her boots skidding in the snow, she slid down the hill and approached the outermost of the igloos. The entryway was dug several feet down into the earth, and driftwood had been used to make a crude door. But when she tried to push it open, it stuck. Crouching down, she pushed harder, and something that was leaning against the other side gradually fell to one side, and she was able to peer into the gloom.

The kudluk, the lantern that was normally burning bright with seal oil, was extinguished, but the skylight let in enough illumination for her to make out several people scattered around the floor in contorted postures. Their faces were frozen in rictus, and their eyes stared blankly. Splashes of blood spotted the hides and straw that had been laid down on the hard sod. The body that had been slumped behind the door was a young man still in his rawhide coat, the hood raised, his hands clenched around a hunting knife buried to the hilt in his own gut. It appeared that he had chosen to take his own life rather than endure what the others had suffered.

Nika backed out, pulling the door closed behind her. Horrifying as the sight had been, she was not surprised by it; it was as if she had known what to expect behind that door, as if she had remembered it from some deep well of the collective unconscious. And as she stepped away, she felt her foot catch on something under the snow — a chain. She jerked it up, and found it was attached to a stake embedded in the permafrost … to which a husky had been tethered. She brushed some of the snow away, and found the dog, dead of exposure, or starvation. It lay there now like a concrete statue, its tongue, lolling from its mouth, as blue as the ice in a crevasse.

Looking around at the neighboring huts and igloos, she saw similar mounds, where other dogs presumably now lay dead and frozen solid.

As she moved among the dwellings, poking her head in one, then another, she saw similar grisly scenes, native people lying dead on blood-soaked sod and animal hides. As she came to the last one before the qarqui, she heard sounds from inside, and thought she might at last find some survivors. Throwing back the antelope skins that covered the doorway, she stepped inside and stopped dead as the startled dogs, their jaws and fur matted with blood, looked up from their feast. A couple of them still trailed the leashes and stakes that they had managed to rip from the ground. Mingled among their paws were the ravaged remains of the corpses they had been tearing apart.

A big white dog, its snout dyed pink by now, growled menacingly, warning her away from the banquet.

Slowly, she stepped back and let the antelope skins conceal her from view.

The clouds had filled the sky now, and the last of the daylight disappeared as she hurried to seek refuge in the ceremonial house, the town hall, as it were, of the Inuit people, where the villagers would traditionally come to sing and dance and perform their sacred rituals during the long, dark Arctic winters. It was a big, oval-shaped building, made from chunks of tundra and slabs of driftwood, knitted together with all sorts of skins and pelts, and the moment she ducked her head to enter the passageway that led to the narrow door — fashioned from what had once been the bottom of a kayak — she again heard noises. But not the sound of scavenging dogs this time. When she stood still, she heard a woman’s voice — faint and elderly — speaking in her native tongue.

She opened the door, which swung on a hinge made of caribou gut, and saw the old Inuit woman, short and squat, stirring a pot with a long ivory spoon. In the yellow glow of the fire, several children — their black eyes filled with grief — gathered around the old woman like bear cubs keeping close to their mother.

When Nika said, “Thank God some of you are still alive,” they all turned and stared at her as if she were a messenger from a foreign planet. Stone benches lined the walls, and the ceiling was hung with antlers and ornamental figures carved from whale baleen and walrus tusks. A totem pole, identical to the one in the center of Port Orlov, stood proud and tall as a mast at the far end of the lodge. Looking at its vivid colors and erect carriage, Nika was reminded of all that it represented, and felt a wave of shame. If she were given the chance, she resolved to do what she should have done long before.

“Nikaluk,” the old woman said in a weak but tender voice, “I knew you would come.” She had high, Asiatic cheekbones and her few remaining teeth were worn down to yellow nubs. “I knew it.”

If only Nika herself had been so sure. The flu had burned through her as it had burned through nearly everyone else, but somehow, she — like the children and the old people, whose frail bodies could not mount such an overwhelming, and self-destructive, resistance — had lived through it. Her chest, which had once felt like it was filled with smoldering coals, was cooler now. Her throat was no longer choked with a rising tide of her own blood. Her eyes, which had burned like shining pebbles on the beach, felt as if they had been bathed in a stream.

The old woman came toward her, the children clinging to her ragged skirts, and said, “You will save us.”

“Yes, yes,” Nika said, remembering her mission and slinging the knapsack off her shoulders. Quickly kneeling to undo the straps, she dug inside for the ampoules of serum … but to her horror they weren’t there. She dug deeper, but all she found inside was icicles, clattering like glass. How could she have been so deceived?

She had failed. At this, the most critical time, she had failed her people, and the shame, even greater now than it had been when she first saw the totem pole as it should have been, made her almost unable to look up into the old woman’s eyes.

But then she felt a hand on her head, like a benediction, and when she did look up, the old woman said, “You will save us,” and pressed something into Nika’s palm.

It was small and smooth, a piece of ivory, simply carved. In the flickering firelight, Nika saw that it was an owl, a guardian spirit of the Inuit people. Nika wasn’t sure if she should accept it — perhaps it was the only thing of value the old woman possessed — but she knew it would give offense if she tried to refuse it.

The old woman stroked Nika’s hair and smiled. A smile that reminded her of her own grandmother. Or, could it be … her own great-grandmother?

In that instant, Nika suddenly understood that she had not come to this place to give at all. She had come there to receive.

Bowing her head, she said, “I will try … I will try.”

But then, as if from the end of a long tunnel, she heard her name.

“Nika?”

This was not the old woman’s voice anymore, nor did she feel her hand on her hair. A white light suffused the room, a light too bright for her eyes, and a different hand — in a cool glove — was smoothing her brow.

“I will try,” she said one last time, before the old woman faded away, along with the children, the campfire, and the ancestral carvings hanging from the beams of the qarqui. The last thing to disappear was the grinning otter on the totem pole.

“Nika,” she heard again, and cracked her eyes open enough to see Frank, perched beside her bedside, surrounded by blinking screens and softly beeping monitors. “Nika,” he said, pulling off his visor and tossing it aside.

His cheeks, she could see, were wet with tears.

“You’re all right now,” he said, though somehow she knew that already. “You’re going to be all right.”

He lifted her hand off the blanket and pressed his lips against it, and she could tell that she was holding something tight. When she opened her palm, she saw the ivory bilikin that she had once given him. It seemed like ages ago.

But the little owl had done its job, she thought … guiding her through the darkness, through the other world that she had just left, and back into the land of the living. She would never forget its help, nor the sacred trust she now knew that it signified.

“I was so afraid,” Frank said. “I thought I might have missed my chance.”

“Your chance?” Nika said, her throat as dry as parchment. Frank looked haggard and drawn, and it was plain that he hadn’t shaved in days.

“To tell you that I love you.”

If Nika had not already been lying down, and drained of all energy, she knew she would have reacted quite differently. All she could do now was squeeze his hand with what strength she had, and say, “That’s a relief.”

Frank, taken aback, straightened up in his chair and laughed. “A relief?”

“I didn’t want to be in this thing alone,” she said.

Chapter 64

The next morning, the deacon was not awake to ring the church bell. At dinner, he hadn’t had much of an appetite for the fish he’d caught, and he’d complained of a headache and chills. When Anastasia was shown to his cabin, she warned the others not to enter and went in by herself.

Although it was well past breakfast time, the sun had not yet risen. By the light of the oil lamp flickering beside his bed, Ana could see that the deacon had contracted the flu. His white-blond hair was damp and stringy, spread across his pillow, and his brow was beaded with sweat. His pale eyes were wandering distractedly around the room, and there were gobbets of dried blood on his blanket. She had seen soldiers like this in the hospital wards … and she had heard their bodies, shrouded in sheets, trundling down the grain chute and into the waiting wagons.

Stepping outside, where several of the colonists were waiting apprehensively for word, she called for hot water and broth, extra blankets, firewood, and brandy if they had it. She tried to remember what Dr. Botkin had prescribed and guess what he would have done, but in her heart she knew that it was all in God’s hands already. The Spanish flu took whomever it wanted — the strongest, first — and most of the time it took them fast.

For the rest of the day, Anastasia stayed by the deacon’s side, administering to him, trying in vain to get him to take some sustenance, mopping his brow and wiping the flecks of blood from his lips after he had been racked by a coughing fit. Occasionally, he muttered the name Father Grigori, and it was clear to Anastasia that he was speaking to him as if he were there. Several times, the conversation seemed so real that Ana turned in her chair, or went to the door and peeked outside, but each time all she saw gathered in the gloom were a handful of colonists, tolling their beads, clutching and kissing holy icons, and murmuring prayers for the deacon’s recovery. So many of them focused on the emerald cross she wore around her neck that she eventually grew self-conscious about it, and tucked it away. Whatever powers they thought it possessed were proving useless against the onslaught of the flu.

Once or twice, she heard muffled coughing among them, which only exacerbated the dread in her heart.

By the following dawn, the deacon was dead.

Anastasia cleaned him as best she could, then took his black cassock, with the sleeves lined in scarlet silk, and put it on him. She crossed his hands across his chest, then sat down at the wooden table that served as his desk. On it, there were writing materials, loose pages from his sermons, and an icon of the Virgin Mary, adorned with three white diamonds. Something so valuable could only have come from the hand of Rasputin himself. Using a scrap of paper from one of his sermons, she wrote a prayer for the soul of Deacon Stefan, curled it up, and slipped it into one of his lifeless hands, then, in the other, she placed the icon. He was as ready to meet his Maker as anyone would ever be.

Not for the first time she longed to make that final journey herself … to see Sergei, her family, her friends, kindly Dr. Botkin, Nagorny, the maid Demidova. Despite what the Russian Orthodox Church might believe, Anastasia was sure that her dog Jemmy would be waiting for her there, too. In a world so awash in hate, why should love — of any kind — not find a safe haven in the next?

Weary, and famished herself, she blew out the oil lamp, closed the door, and went to the church, in search of company and a communal meal. But unlike before, when dozens of people had drawn up chairs and pews to the sides of the long refectory tables, there were only ten or twelve souls present, and even they shied away when she came through the double doors. Vera fell to her knees in front of the iconostasis screen, crossing herself three times. The man who had been chopping wood bent his head over his soup bowl and barely dared to look up.

A woman laying pewter plates on the table asked, “How is the deacon?”

“The deacon has passed away,” Ana replied, and she saw the woman cast a quick look around the room, as if to confirm that everyone had heard. Several people cried out, an old man hurled his pipe at the floor, and there was a general exodus from the church. Some of them nodded solemnly in Ana’s direction as they left, their haggard faces filled with fear and incomprehension … but all of them, without exception, gave her a wide berth.

Standing alone in the nave, she realized that she had not only come to the ends of the earth, but to the end of everything this life had to offer. Already, she had gone from the herald of the prophet Father Grigori, celebrated and welcomed, to the harbinger of doom. And though she still carried the aura and the emblem of Rasputin himself, she had sown confusion in his flock. They no longer knew what to make of her, or how to interpret the trouble she had brought upon their heads. Had they committed some error, they no doubt wondered, in their way of life? Had they failed in their devotion? And was Anastasia an instrument of divine retribution?

Even if they had summoned the courage to ask, these were questions she could never have answered herself.

What followed over the coming days was as inevitable as it was tragic. One by one, the colonists came down with the flu, and one by one the survivors used dynamite and pickaxes to open shallow graves in the ground and give the dead some semblance of a Christian burial. Ana attended the interments — indeed, the colonists would not have proceeded without her silent presence, such was her prestige as a princess and Rasputin’s chosen one — but after a while it became nearly impossible for her to bear. The graveyard was poised on the cliffs above the Bering Sea, and Ana had to fight an overwhelming impulse to hurl herself off the precipice and into the waiting sea below. All that kept her from doing so was an even greater fear — a fear that the power of the emerald cross was so great she might find herself alive even then, tossing and turning beneath the icy waves for eternity.

Among the last to die was the sexton, and Ana took over his job, dutifully recording the names of the deceased and the dates on which they died. Some of them, in their delirium, had wandered off into the woods, never to be seen again, while others perished on the rocks below the colony, their bodies lying crumpled and still until the tide took them out to sea. For the rest, Ana scrounged among the half-completed headstones and coffin lids that the sexton had left, and provided each of them with as much of a proper burial as could still be managed. The sexton — plainly as industrious as he was fatalistic — had also had the foresight to leave a number of empty graves … more than enough, as it turned out, to accommodate his fellow colonists.

And then, one day, there was no one left to bury, no one left to mourn. There was no one else at all. She had walked to the edge of the cemetery, clutching the emerald cross when she saw a dark figure lying on the beach below, the tails of a sealskin coat spread like a bat’s wings across the pebbles and sand.

She stopped dead, her toes already extending over the precipice, and stared down at it. Could it be? After all this time?

Making her way down to the beach, she approached the body as if it were a trap waiting to spring. She did not believe her own eyes. But as she came closer, she saw that even now, a brown cowlick, frozen stiff, was standing up at the back of his head. She knelt, the freezing sand crackling under her boots, and gently turned the body onto its back. Coated in ice, Sergei looked as if he were made of glass.

“The sea often yields in the end,” the deacon had said. And so it had.

In the cemetery, an empty grave remained; it was the one closest to the cliffs, and Anastasia had wondered if anyone would be left to put her in it one day. Now she could use it to embrace the body of her beloved protector, Sergei, instead — which was precisely what she did.

As he lay there now in his open casket, she reached in under her coat. Lifting out the emerald cross, she read one last time the blessing Rasputin had engraved on its silver frame: “No one can break the chains of love that bind us.” A play on her name, as the breaker of chains. But she wanted the chains broken now. She wanted whatever force it was that tethered her to this earth to be sundered forever.

She raised Sergei’s head and draped the chain around it, the emerald cross resting on his chest. Then she lifted the lid of the coffin — an elaborately carved piece with an image of St. Peter himself on it — and fitted it into place. Something, she thought, had told her to preserve this coffin until now. Then, driving home the traditional four nails, she shoveled as much dirt and snow as she could loosen into the grave. One of the black wolves that haunted the island appeared at the gates to the cemetery, the gates where she had obsessively whittled her pleas for forgiveness, and raising its head, let out a mournful howl. But Ana wasn’t afraid. These creatures, she knew, were only souls as lost and bereft as she was … sentenced to the same kind of purgatory. They, too, were trapped in a world not of their own making, as unable to transcend it as they were to find peace. From the moment the black wolf had licked the tears from her face on the beach, she had recognized that their fate and hers were conjoined — weren’t they all Rasputin’s faithful children? — and she had known that they would only end their unhappy journey when hers, too, had come to an end.

Chapter 65

As soon as Slater saw Nika wheeled to the ambulance, protesting all the way—“I can walk, you know! I don’t need a wheelchair!”—he was sure she was back to being herself. Hospital protocols, however, dictated that she leave the Nome Regional Health Center in a chair, and prudence dictated that an ambulance convey her all the way back to her home in Port Orlov.

“I’ll see you there in no time,” Slater said, leaning down for one last kiss, as the orderly pushing the chair politely looked away.

“The work on the totem pole should be done by now,” she said.

Indeed, it was almost the first order she had given once the fever had broken and she had become fully conscious again. Although he had never asked, Slater knew that something had happened to her while she hovered in that land between life and death, something that compelled her to restore the totem pole in Port Orlov to its former glory and prominence.

“The unveiling is going to be a pretty big celebration for a town like ours.”

“Sounds like a party I can’t miss.”

“Then don’t.”

She was allowed to sit up front with the ambulance driver, and once they had pulled away, Slater crossed the snowy parking lot to the waiting Coast Guard helicopter. This time, he was alone in the passenger compartment, and the pilot, starting the engine, ordered him to buckle in immediately. “We’re on a very tight schedule,” he said, showing him none of the respect that had been shown back in the day when he was Major Frank Slater, or even the Dr. Slater in charge of the St. Peter’s Island operation. Now he was just some civilian taking up government resources.

But far from being irritated, Slater felt like a weight had been taken off his shoulders. His life was his own now — and he had made some definite plans for it.

The chopper headed straight for the sea and followed the coastline north. Slater leaned his head back and stared out the window. He was still weak from the ordeal and needed to put on a few more pounds, but he’d come to grips with what had happened and made a kind of peace with himself. Maybe he couldn’t save the world anymore; maybe it was better just to save a little piece of it. He couldn’t wait for the right time to tell Nika.

In the weak afternoon light, he could see on the horizon the familiar plateaus of Big and Little Diomede, and the icy blue channel between them that marked the meeting point of the United States and Russia. The sky was clear — a pale gray the color of a pigeon’s wing — but as they neared the island, he could see that the wind, the never-ending wind, was busy as usual, stirring the fog around its rocky shores.

Hard to believe that such a short time had passed since he had first made this approach. It felt like ages.

As the helicopter came closer, he noted that there were two or three Coast Guard vessels lying offshore, and that the colony itself was far more extensively lighted, fenced, and occupied than when he had left it. To accommodate the chopper, there was even a circular helipad, marked with reflectors, slapped down between the old well in front of the church and the green tents that Slater’s own crew had erected.

“Hang on,” the pilot announced over the headphones, as the chopper, slowing down to make its landing, was buffeted by the gusts off the Bering Strait and the whole aircraft wobbled. Slater held on to the straps, and no sooner had the wheels touched down and the engines been cut, the rotors spinning to a stop, than he saw Professor Kozak and Sergeant Groves running to open the hatchway door.

“It is so good to see you,” Kozak said, slapping him on the back, as Groves clasped his hand in a firm grip.

“A lot’s changed around here,” Groves added, shepherding them all out from under the chopper’s blades.

“I could see that from the air,” Slater replied. Indeed, as he looked around now, he could see that several walkways had been laid down, running between extra tents and aluminum Quonset huts. Aerials were poking up everywhere, and an additional battery of generators was humming away under a covered port. Several Coast Guardsmen were scurrying among the various structures.

“How’re you feeling?” Groves asked, but before he could even answer, Kozak interjected, “You are well, yes? You must be, or they would not have let you go.” The professor looked him up and down, and regardless of what he might have been thinking, said, “Yes, you appear very well.”

Slater smiled; Kozak was such a bad liar. He knew that he still looked like he’d just been in a bar brawl. The bruises on his face had faded to a faint blue, but many of the cuts and abrasions had yet to heal completely, and unless he walked carefully, his fractured ribs gave him a jolt.

“And Nika?” Kozak asked. “How is she?”

“On her way back to Port Orlov,” Slater replied.

“They are lucky that she is their mayor,” Kozak said.

“You can say that again,” Groves said, chuckling. “But she’ll be governor before you know it. There’s no stopping that one.”

And then, as if all of their thoughts had pivoted in the same direction like a covey of birds, there was a moment of deep silence.

“Dr. Lantos was a very brave woman,” the sergeant finally said, and Kozak, solemnly crossing himself, added, “And a very good scientist.”

“None better,” Slater agreed. Whatever else had been lifted from his shoulders, the death of Eva Lantos had not; it would always weigh heavy on his conscience.

Off in the direction of the cemetery, there was the rumble of heavy machinery — to Slater it sounded suspiciously like a cement mixer — but before he could ask about it, Rudy, the fresh-faced young ensign, hurried toward them.

“Welcome back, Dr. Slater,” he said, saluting quite unnecessarily. “Colonel Waggoner, the acting commander, has ordered that you report to HQ immediately upon arrival.”

Ordered. It was funny how little import the word carried for Slater now.

“Better make sure you straighten your tie and shine your shoes,” Groves said dryly.

Slater knew that there was no love lost between what was left of his own team and the new regime.

“It’s this way,” Rudy said, starting in the direction of the largest Quonset hut, where the lab tent — altogether gone now — had once stood. How, Slater wondered, had they disposed of the deacon’s remains? To do so safely, a host of critical precautions had to have been taken. But were they?

“Frank,” Kozak said, snagging his sleeve, “we must talk. As soon as you have time.”

Rudy stopped and called out, “Dr. Slater? I’m afraid it’ll be my ass in a sling.”

“It’s very important,” Kozak added, in a low but urgent tone.

Slater figured it probably had something to do with the geological studies he’d been completing, but what could be that pressing? The graveyard, he had been advised, had been cordoned off — for good this time — and the whole island made a secured site. But scientists, he also knew from experience, always assumed their own work to be critical. “First thing,” he assured him, before turning to follow his impatient escort.

The headquarters was bustling with activity, and the far end was reserved for Colonel Waggoner’s office. He had the square jaw, the square shoulders, and the square head that Slater had encountered all too often in his military career. He was standing up and on the SAT phone when Slater was shown in, and he motioned brusquely at a chair positioned across from his desk.

Shades of being sent to the principal’s office, Slater mused.

When Slater had been made to sit there long enough for the point to have been made, Waggoner ended his call and said, in an admonitory tone, “Guess you’ve noticed that we made a few changes. We run this operation pretty differently now.”

“You should have waited,” Slater said. “There are safety protocols that need to be observed.”

The colonel looked taken aback. “We have an AFIP officer on-site, handpicked by Dr. Levinson in Washington.”

“Who?”

“Captain Stanley Jenkins, M.D.”

“He’s a good choice,” Slater said, relieved. He’d never worked with him personally, but he’d read the man’s reports from the field and knew he was an up-and-comer. “Do whatever Captain Jenkins tells you to do and you won’t go wrong.”

Waggoner looked even more put off. “Dr. Jenkins is here in an advisory capacity only, and he takes his orders from me. Maybe you’ve forgotten how the military branches of our government work since your court-martial, Dr. Slater.”

It was a cheap shot, but Slater let it pass.

“As for your associates, Professor Kozak and Sergeant Groves, I have asked them to restrict their movements to the base. Kozak’s been completing some ground studies inside the colony walls. I can’t say what the hell they’ll be good for, but they keep him away from the cemetery and out of my way. As for you, the debriefing will take place at 0900 hours tomorrow morning, so collect any notes or data you might have left lying around here and bring them. Also, make sure you gather up your remaining gear because as soon as we’re done, you and your pals will be flown off the island. There will be no further access.”

After ordering Slater, in addition, to restrict himself to the common areas within the perimeter of the stockade, he dismissed him with a flick of his wrist. Slater had the impression that the colonel had waited his whole life to sink his teeth into an operation of this importance — though how long the Coast Guard would maintain its sole jurisdiction here was an open question — and he could tell he would brook no interference.

Once outside, Slater blew out a deep breath and rubbed his aching ribs. The seat harness on the chopper had given them a workout. Looking around, he noticed that high-power spotlights had been mounted atop the stockade walls, and given that the sunlight was already fading, they had been switched on. The grounds were bathed in a harsh white light that threw stark shadows in every direction and lent the colony, with its old log cabins and storehouses, an oddly artificial appearance. The crooked church, with its decrepit onion dome, looked like the haunted house from an amusement park. Yellow tape had been stretched across its doors in a big X, along with loops of heavy chain.

But no one, he also noted, was watching him. Ensign Rudy was nowhere to be seen, and a couple of other Coast Guardsmen were busy wheeling a cart of cables from one tent to another. If he was going to make a run at the one place he was most eager to see — the old graveyard — he wasn’t likely to get a better shot than this.

With the colonel’s order not to leave the colony grounds still ringing in his ears, Slater sauntered toward the main gate, jauntily saluting the Coast Guardsman stationed there, before heading down the ramp that led to the cemetery. He didn’t dare look back, but he had no sooner approached the woods than he saw that a wide swath of the trees had been felled and the ramp had been replaced by a gravel driveway fifteen feet wide. He could see the muddy tire treads, and the rumble of machinery got louder all the time.

By the time he got to the spot where the old gateposts had once stood — they, too, were gone — he had noticed the unmistakable smells of powerful disinfectant chemicals and hot tar. Hanging back, he saw the funnel of a cement truck pouring a thick, even coat of concrete over the remaining ground. All the tombstones and crosses had been removed, and half a dozen workers in full hazmat suits, hard hats, and hip waders — a novel combination — were smoothing the surface as it was laid down. The decontamination shack had been left standing, but huge, empty cylinders of malathion, an organophosphate widely used in places like Central America where DDT had lost its sting, were strewn around outside it. Slater didn’t have to ask. Rather than running the risk of exposing any more of the bodies, the AFIP must have decided simply to poison the ground, to saturate it with concentrated, industrial-strength chemicals, then seal the graveyard for good measure under a foot of fresh concrete.

It wouldn’t last, he thought. The warming climate would eventually shift the earth again, and crack the cement. But that was government for you. Do the temporary fix for now, then form some committees to debate the problem for several years to come.

A curious worker spotted him, and instead of ducking out of sight, Slater waved and shouted, “Good job! Keep it up!” The worker returned to spreading the concrete.

Then Slater turned around and followed the well-lighted drive back to the colony gates. Behind him he felt like an old and terrible giant had been put to bed beneath a new blanket. He prayed it would sleep there soundly forever.

Inside his tent, he found that his cot and personal effects had been left untouched. A vial of his Chloriquine pills was lying beside an empty coffee cup and a report he’d been annotating. Professor Kozak popped in, and perching awkwardly on a campstool, said, “You saw the cemetery?”

Slater nodded while stacking some loose papers. “Did they disinter any of the other bodies first?”

Kozak shook his head. “They took one look and sent in the bulldozers to level the place.”

Slater nodded and started gathering up his notebooks.

“How did it go with Waggoner?” Kozak asked.

“Pretty much as expected,” Slater replied, stuffing the notebooks into a backpack. “We’ve got till maybe noon tomorrow before we’re exiled for good.”

Kozak stroked his short silver beard thoughtfully. “Then there is no choice. It will have to be tonight. At midnight.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ve got to get back in the church.”

“Why go back?” Slater asked, mystified. “There’s nothing inside the place but old broken pews and tables. What’s the point?”

Kozak took his iPhone out of his pocket, swiped his finger across it a couple of times, then held it out. Slater saw a photo of an old headstone, with what looked like a pair of doors etched on either side of a Russian name.

“Okay,” Slater said. “Nice carving. But what about it?”

“That is the tombstone of the man we dug up,” Kozak said. “Stefan Novyk. The deacon.”

Slater still didn’t understand.

“The two doors are called the deacon’s doors. They are the way through the iconostasis.”

“You mean that wooden screen, right, the one with all the junk thrown together in front of it?”

“Yes. The altar is behind it.”

“I’ll take your word for it. But even if you think there’s actually something of value back there, do I have to remind you that we’re not the raiders of the lost ark?”

“No, we are not,” Kozak agreed. “But we are scientists, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And historians?”

That one was questionable, but Slater nodded in agreement anyway, just to get him to finish.

“For instance, wouldn’t you like to know how the flu got to this place in the middle of nowhere?”

It was a question that had indeed puzzled Slater, but the Spanish flu had been ingenious that way. All it might have taken was a single lost kayaker from the mainland.

Kozak put the phone down, dug deep into the other pocket of his coat, and produced the sexton’s ledger. He must have been keeping it under wraps, Slater thought, or the colonel would surely have confiscated it by now. Turning to the last pages, and with his stubby finger underscoring a final section, written in a florid, feminine hand, Kozak translated the words.

“Here it reads, ‘Forgive me. I have become the curse of all who know me.’ ” Kozak looked up. “Do you remember the words carved into the gates of the graveyard, over and over?”

“They said, ‘Forgive me,’ ” Slater replied, and the professor nodded with satisfaction before returning to the book.

“There is also a burial entry. For the deacon. The writer says that he saved her from the wolves and gave her shelter on the island, and this is how she has rewarded him.”

“With what? The flu?”

Kozak simply went on. “This last burial entry was for someone named Sergei. He must have been lost at sea, but his body washed up onshore. She writes that she had to bury him herself, with a cross around his neck, because no one else was left to do it.”

Slater was moved by this anonymous woman’s terrible ordeal, but before Kozak could go on, he said, “This cross — does she say anything more about it?”

The professor scanned the faded ink again and said, “Yes, since you ask — she calls it the emerald cross.”

Nika, Slater recalled, had retrieved just such a cross from the wreckage on the bridge. It was found in her pockets when she passed out at the hospital in Nome, and for all he knew, it had been hermetically sealed and sent to the AFIP labs by now along with every other single thing they had been carrying. The widow Vane would no doubt bring suit to get it back.

“By the time she’s done with the journal,” Kozak continued, “the writer is claiming that her soul is doomed to live on in this awful place forever.”

“Who could blame her?” Slater said. “She must have been raving mad by then.”

“Exactly,” the professor replied, “No one could blame her, especially considering what else she had already endured. This was a girl — a young woman — who had seen Hell itself.”

“You know who it is?” Slater said. “She’s signed it?”

Kozak, nervously clearing his throat, turned to the last page. “Here, she is begging Heaven to release her from her earthly bonds. And then, below that, she wrote her name.” He underlined the signature with his finger again.

Slater waited. “Well?”

“It reads,” Kozak, said, stroking his silver beard and holding Slater’s gaze, “ ‘Anastasia, Grand Duchess of All the Russias.’ ”

Chapter 66

Sitting with Kozak and Groves in the mess tent that night, Slater felt like a mutineer. All around them, the Coast Guardsmen and techies who had been brought in to deal with the cleanup of the colony were chowing down, boisterously trading jokes and telling stories, piling their plates high and unwinding from another trying day, while Slater and his own team were huddled over an aluminum table in the corner, partly concealed by stacked crates, and speaking in low tones about things no one would ever believe.

“But I thought all those stories about Anastasia were bull,” Groves said, mopping up the sloppy joe gravy with a crust of bread. “She died along with everybody else in her family.”

“Not necessarily,” Kozak replied. “There were always rumors that one of the sisters had survived.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But what about DNA analysis?” Slater asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“What am I looking at?” Groves asked.

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

“A crawl space?” Slater said.

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

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

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

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

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

“This is Captain Jenkins,” Kozak said.

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

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

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

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

“What about leeching?” Slater asked.

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

“It’s going to crack.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 67

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only death could come to her as a surprise now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 68

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is! It is!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was in the nave, a few yards in front of the iconostasis.

Ducking again, he squeezed his field pack through the hole and hacked at the neighboring plank until he was able to loosen it enough to push it aside. With considerable effort, he was able to haul himself up into the church, but only barely. Kozak would need more room, and so, before he signaled him to follow, he chopped at a third board until the hole was as wide as a manhole cover. Then, he sat back and took a deep breath, rubbing his rib cage.

From below, he heard Kozak’s voice echoing along the tunnel. “Is it clear? Are you in?”

Slater bent to the hole and whistled through the sawdust on his lips. He could hear a muffled huffing and puffing as Kozak, big but strong, hauled himself along the frozen ground. He imagined this must be what a bear sounded like as it prepared its den for a winter’s hibernation. When he saw his flashlight beam growing bright, Slater slipped his head down into the hole and saw Kozak’s eyeglasses glinting in the darkness. Slater put his hand down, and Kozak grabbed it with his leather glove. Slater pulled, his ribs giving him a jolt, and the professor eventually emerged from the tunnel, scraped, sputtering, and covered with dirt and ice and bits of wood.

“Next time,” he said, “a bigger hole, please.”

Slater smiled.

But as Kozak, his legs still dangling underground, gazed around the church, illuminated only by the feeble glow of the flashlights and the moonlight filtering in through the cracks in the roof beams and the holes in the dome, he looked like a kid at a carnival. “It’s all ours!” he whispered.

“Not for long,” Slater replied. “Let’s go find that sacristy.”

Kozak got to his feet and lumbered across the sloping floor toward the jumble of wreckage concealing the iconostasis screen. “You look at that end, and I’ll look at this,” Kozak said, stepping close to the pile of broken furniture and twisted andirons.

“And what exactly am I looking for?”

“You are at the south end, so you will be looking for the entrance — a door with a picture of St. Michael, the Defender of the Faith.”

“How will I know it’s him?”

“He’ll probably be carrying a sword. I’ll be looking for the exit door, which should show the Archangel Gabriel, the Messenger of God.”

“Which one do we want?”

“Whichever one happens to be open.”

Slater pressed his face toward the screen, trying to peer through the debris. His flashlight picked up flecks of paint — in red and gold and blue — on old whitewashed boards. Here and there, he could even see the outlines of angels and saints and, in one place, what looked like it might have been a painting of Noah’s Ark.

“In grand cathedrals,” Kozak said, while inspecting his own end, “these screens were ornately decorated and went all the way to the ceiling.”

This one went nearly that high, and in its own day Slater imagined that it, too, had been beautiful in its own simple fashion.

“I have found Gabriel,” Kozak exulted, “and he is blowing his horn.”

“To welcome us in?”

“No, the door is nailed shut and boarded over. Very unusual.”

Kozak came down toward Slater’s end. “Maybe we will have better luck with St. Michael.”

Pulling aside the broken refectory tables and cracked barrels, they scoured the wall with their flashlight beams until Slater could dimly make out the frame of a doorway — narrow and arched at the top, with the barest outline remaining of a golden-haired saint wielding a silver sword. On this door, there was a rusted chain, hanging loose, and no boards secured across it.

No words needed to be exchanged. With each of them taking hold of one end of an upended pew, they inched it away from the iconostasis. Then, Slater cleared away some other debris, like cutting tumbleweed away from a fence, until he could get to the door itself. If there had ever been a handle, it had long since fallen off and was probably rolling around in the darkness beneath their feet.

“Let me,” Kozak said, elbowing past him and putting his shoulder against the wood. “If there’s a curse, it should fall on me.”

He pressed his burly shoulder against the door and Slater heard its antique hinges squeak, but hold.

“Russians do good work,” Kozak muttered, putting his head down and pressing harder. After a few seconds, there was a popping sound, as first one hinge, then the other, gave way. The door, its bottom scraping the floor, creaked open.

Kozak stood to one side, and with a sweep of his arm gestured for Slater to enter first. “I do not care what they say in Washington,” he declared. “You are still the head of this mission.”

Slater appreciated the vote of confidence and slid through the open space, pushing the door wider as he went. Cobwebs clung to his head, and the air inside was as cold and still and stifling as a meat locker. He had the uneasy sense of intruding upon something sacred and long inviolate. He swept his flashlight beam around the room, but the rays seemed to be swallowed up by the inky blackness. Here, there were no holes in the roof or cracks in the timbered walls to let in the moonlight, and even the floor, when he turned the light on it, gave off the dull gleam of tar. This sacristy had been sealed like a tomb.

“I would give a great deal for a lamp right now,” Kozak said.

So would Slater. The flashlight only gave him glimpses of what lay all around him — a wooden altar, covered with one red cloth and one white. A few ecclesiastical vessels — chalices and bowls and salvers. Everything thick with dust.

But a candelabra, too — with the nubs of candles still in it.

“Have you got some matches on you?” Slater asked, and Kozak, patting his pipe pocket, said, “Always.”

Slater left his flashlight beam trained on the candelabra, and the professor struck one match after another, trying to find and light the wicks. Eventually, out of six or seven candles, he got four of them lighted, providing a flickering but more diffused light to penetrate the room.

The first thing he noticed was a door, no more than four feet tall, cut flush with the logs in the wall and secured by a crossbar. When he pointed it out to Kozak, he said, jokingly, “I wish we’d known about that in advance.”

“Huh,” Kozak said, running his fingers over his beard. “A bishop’s door. You find such a thing in the great churches of places like Moscow — places where a bishop might actually wish to make a miraculous appearance. But I would never have expected to find one here.” He rattled the crossbar in its grooves and it moved easily. “And they could hardly have expected a bishop to come to this church.”

“What about a grand duchess?” Slater was beginning to believe what Kozak had translated from the sexton’s ledger.

But Kozak shook his head. “I don’t think even she knew she would end her days here.”

“Who was it built for then?”

“If I had to make a guess,” the professor said, “I would say it was her protector and confessor. The man these settlers came here to venerate. Rasputin.”

Slater glanced again at the rough-hewn door, fitted so skillfully into the wall that it would hardly be noticed if it were not for the bar. They had missed its existence entirely from the outside.

Against the opposite wall, a mirrored cabinet stood open, with two cassocks hanging from its hooks. Kozak reverently stroked the sleeve of the white cassock, saying, “This one was used only for Pascha. Easter.” The other was black, with a scarlet lining, and when he brushed it to one side, he reached into the back of the cabinet, felt the rim of a basin — no doubt the sacrarium used to wash the holy linens after a service — and started to lift it out. There was the sound of pebbles sloshing around in a bowl.

“Frank.” Kozak’s voice was filled with awe. “Frank.”

The professor moved to the altar, holding the bowl in front of him as carefully as if it were the host itself. When he put it down, Slater trained his own beam on it, and it was like he was looking at a kaleidoscope.

The basin itself was made of white porcelain, with a gold rim, but inside it, as if they were a heap of marbles, lay a dazzling mound of gems — bright white diamonds, fiery rubies, sapphires as blue as the crevices in a glacier, emeralds as green as a cat’s eyes. There were rings, too — of gold and silver — and bracelets and broaches — ivory and onyx — and ropes of pearls, coiled and tangled, that had faded to a pale yellow. Kozak dipped his hands in, as if he were tossing a salad, and let the jewels sift back into the bowl between his fingers. They clinked and clattered as they fell, the sound echoing around the sacristy.

“Talk about a king’s ransom,” Slater said.

“No,” Kozak said. “A Tsar’s ransom.”

It was more than Slater had ever imagined finding. He had gone along with the professor’s scheme more out of curiosity than conviction — not to mention the pleasure of defying Colonel Waggoner’s orders — and now they had stumbled upon a long-lost and legendary treasure. They had found what remained of the Romanov jewels.

The candles guttered on the altar, and one threw a spark that drifted, glowing, toward the back of the room. Slater followed it first with his eyes, and then, as he thought he discerned something in the shadows, with the beam of his flashlight.

Kozak was still absorbed in the gems, but Slater took a step or two toward the rear of the chamber.

A chair — no, it was more like a throne — had been placed in the darkest recess, atop a sort of dais. It had huge, clawed feet that protruded from under a long, gossamer-thin canopy draped from the roof. It was so grand that it made its own small enclosure. Had this, too, been designed in anticipation of Rasputin’s arrival?

It was only as he got closer that he thought he saw the tip of a small boot poking out from under the cloth. It couldn’t be. He took hold of the canopy and lifted it a few inches — enough to see that the boot was heavy and black, laced high and built with a thick heel, as if it had been molded to a deformed foot. Lifting the faded cloth higher, he saw the ragged hem of a long skirt — dark blue wool, homespun.

“Vassily,” he said, “come here.”

“Can’t you see I am busy?” Kozak joked.

“I mean it.”

Kozak ambled over, his broad back temporarily obscuring the candlelight, and upon seeing the canopied chair, said, “And that is called a Bishop’s Throne. They must have been expecting Rasputin, after all.”

Slater directed his gaze to the boot and skirt, and the professor immediately grew still. “My God,” he breathed.

Slater drew the canopy to one side, gently, but even so it began to shred and tumble from its hooks, releasing a cloud of dust that made them both turn away, coughing and closing their eyes. When the dust had settled and Slater turned back again, what he saw stunned him. His first thought was of the mummies found in the high Andes.

The old woman in the chair was sitting as erect as a queen, her eyes closed, her long gray hair knotted into a single long plait that hung over one shoulder of her cloak. Under it, she was wearing several layers of clothing — he saw the collar of a worn blouse, a jacket made of some hide, even the bottom of a richly embroidered corset.

But it was her skin that was the most entrancing. Her face looked like an old, withered apple, lined with a thousand creases, and her hands, which lay on the armrests of the chair, were brown with age; her fingers looked as brittle as twigs. One hand cradled the base of an old-fashioned kerosene lantern.

“Do you think …” Slater said, but before he could finish, Kozak had said, “Yes. Even the boot confirms it. Anastasia’s left foot was malformed.”

For at least a minute, they both stood in respectful silence, wrapped in their own thoughts. Slater was already wondering how he would broach these discoveries to the colonel, who had strictly confined him to quarters. Waggoner could rant all he wanted, but confronted with the proof itself — a bowl full of gems and a frozen corpse — he would have no choice but to alert the higher authorities in the Coast Guard, the AFIP, and Lord knows how many other agencies.

“What do we do now?” the professor finally said, and Slater switched himself back into the scientific mode. If it weren’t for the astounding, even unbelievable, nature of what they had just discovered, he asked himself, what would he have normally done? Under more logical circumstances, what would the next order of business be?

Evidence, and the systematic gathering of it. On any epidemiological mission, the first objective was to collect all the available data and evidence at the site, and that’s what he needed to do here and now — even before notifying the colonel. Once Waggoner was apprised of the situation, Slater was not at all confident that he would be given any further access. In all likelihood, he would be put under guard and whisked off the island as fast as the first chopper could take him — and in handcuffs, if the colonel had his way. No, this, he recognized, might well be his only chance to do any science at all.

Slater took off his field kit and opened it, planning out the task ahead. Unlike all the others on the island, Anastasia plainly had not died of the flu — she was immune, as was he, after weathering the storm at the hospital in Nome. But he did not forget that it was she who had carried it here, nearly a century ago. As a result, it was critical that he still observe the necessary and standard precautions — especially in regard to the bystander Kozak.

Digging out a gauze face mask, he told the professor to put it on and to stand back by the altar.

“Why?” Kozak said. “What are you planning to do?”

Donning another mask himself, Slater said, “Provide your friends at the Trofimuk Institute with a little DNA evidence, if all goes well.”

“Yes, thank you,” Kozak said, slipping the elastic bands behind his ears. “I think they would rather have that than the royal jewels.”

Slater lifted the lantern off the arm of the chair and placed it on the dais beside her boot. Puzzlingly, there was moisture there, and even the hem of her long skirt looked damp; he assumed he must have been dripping melted snow from his coat.

Then he surveyed the corpse, deciding on the best area from which to draw the sample. The hair could provide some DNA, especially if he made sure to capture the follicle, too — the shaft would provide only mitochondrial evidence — but it was terribly degraded and might not do the job. Her bony wrist, on the other hand, lay perfectly exposed, and if he could suction up some petrified skin and blood cells from a vein, he would get the richest and most viable sample possible.

Laying his own flashlight on the opposite arm of the chair, he reminded Kozak to remain at a distance, “But try holding up the candelabra. I need all the light I can get.”

Kozak raised the candles, and in their flickering glow, Slater located the vein — a barely perceptible blue line under the mottled brown skin — and took an empty syringe out of his kit. To get a better angle, he turned the hand slightly — it moved more easily than he expected — drew back the plunger, and touched its tip to the skin.

Then he depressed the plunger.

And the hand flinched.

Slater recoiled, leaving the syringe stuck.

Even Kozak must have seen what had just happened. “Mother of God,” he intoned.

Slater stepped back, first in astonishment, and then in horror.

The woman’s eyes opened — they were a pale gray — and she looked at him as if she were still asleep — asleep and unwilling to wake up. She stirred in the chair, like a dreamer merely turning in bed, and her boot inched the lantern off the dais, where it shattered on the floor. Rivulets of kerosene ran in all directions, soaking the fallen canopy.

“Mother of God,” Kozak said again, stumbling backwards, the candelabra shaking in his hand. A lighted candle, toppling from its perch, dropped to the floor.

There was a crackling sound, as the flame caught the kerosene and raced across the floor of the sacristy.

Slater could not believe his own eyes.

The old woman herself looked bewildered, but oddly unafraid. Nor did she move to avoid the erupting flame.

“We have to get out!” Kozak shouted, and Slater could hear him fumbling with the crossbar that secured the bishop’s door.

The fire grazed the edge of the canopy, and the dry old fabric went up like a torch. The licking flames snagged the hem of the altar cloths and they, too, ignited, engulfing the sacrarium like a ring of sacred fire. The rubies glowed like coals, the diamonds blazed, the bowl itself blackened and cracked, spilling the gems all over the altar.

“Come on!” Kozak shouted, as Slater heard the crossbar thump onto the floor. The tar was heating up, melting.

But he couldn’t leave the old woman — whoever she was — to die here.

“Now!” the professor shouted, throwing open the bishop’s door. A gust of icy wind roared into the room, as if it had been eagerly awaiting its chance, and before Slater could make a move, the whole sacristy was suddenly aswirl with fire and ash, smoke and snow. The old woman never budged from the dais, and Slater could swear that she even opened her arms to the maelstrom, as if she were welcoming a long-lost lover. He even thought that he heard her calling out a name—“Sergei!”—again and again.

The kerosene around her feet sent tendrils of flame shooting up her body. As her hair exploded in a crackling corona of fire, Slater felt Kozak’s heavy hand on his collar, dragging him out of the church.

Outside, Kozak rolled him onto the ground; he hadn’t even noticed that his pants were smoldering and his boots were sticky with hot tar. Groves appeared and patted him down with handfuls of snow, all the while pushing and pulling them both away from the mounting inferno.

“What’s going on?” a guard shouted, running toward the billowing smoke. It was Rudy, with a rifle that he quickly turned away when he saw who it was. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Rudy looked into the sacristy, just as Slater did, but it was like looking into the belly of a blast furnace. The flames were white-hot now, hissing and spitting, and they had soared up into the onion dome, its holes and cracks making it glow like the candle flame it was meant to represent. The whole church began to collapse in on itself with a thunderous clatter and crash, throwing sparks and streamers of fire into the night. Carried on the wind, they landed on the wooden cover of the old well, the roof beams of the neighboring cabins, the old blacksmith stall.

Coast Guardsmen and men from the work crews were tumbling out of their Quonset huts, pulling on parkas and boots and gloves, shouting and running helter-skelter across the grounds of the colony.

First one structure caught fire, then another, until it was as if the whole stockade was forming a ring of orange flame. Slater and Kozak and Groves scrambled down the hill toward the main gates, colliding with Colonel Waggoner, his coat open, his boots unclasped, his hair wild. He took them all in for a second, but it was enough for Slater to know that he’d figured out who was responsible. Slater’s pants were scorched black and flapping around his legs.

“We’ve got a hose going, Colonel!” a Coast Guardsman hollered to him, but Waggoner looked around at the looming wall of flame and waved the man toward the gates.

“Just get out! Get out now!” He stumbled up the hill a few yards, but the smoke was getting thicker by the minute. “Evacuate!” he shouted to anyone who could still hear him. “Evacuate the colony!”

With the sergeant plowing a path for them, Slater and Kozak joined the others jostling toward the main gates, and by the time they reached the safety of the cliffs and turned around, breathless, to see, the colony was nothing but an immense bonfire, teased by the treacherous winds off the Bering Sea and filling the sky with a cloud of smoke and cinders. Slater could feel the ash settling on his bare head and shoulders.

The church had long since fallen off its foundation, and there was nothing left of it to be seen. Somewhere under the towering pile of burning debris lay the Romanov jewels — and their last rightful owner … the Grand Duchess Anastasia. Of that, Slater was now sure, though no one else but Professor Kozak would ever know, or ever believe, it.

Nor would he ever tell anyone — not even Nika. It was better if the ground was considered barren and sere, better if the last of the Romanovs was allowed to rest in peace, free from ghouls and treasure-hunters like Harley and Charlie Vane. She had waited a very long time for this, and whatever spell had kept her here on this lonely island, long beyond any ordinary human span, Slater hoped that it, too, had been extinguished at last.

Let the bulldozers and the organophosphates, the concrete and the impermeable seal, come, and let the colony be buried forever. Let Anastasia’s grave remain unmarked, undisturbed, unknown.

But not unmourned. From all over the island, the wind carried the baleful howl of the black wolves … a keening that lasted all through the night.

The fire burned until the next morning, and it was only then — though it was still dark out — that the colonel pulled together an exploratory crew to venture back into the smoky grounds and assess the situation.

When Slater volunteered to lead the team, Waggoner glared at him, and spitting his words out like bullets, said, “I should never have let you back on the island.”

And for once, Slater thought he had a point.

Chapter 69

The helicopter didn’t even cut its engines. It simply touched its runners to the ice of the hockey rink, and as soon as the hatch was opened, Slater, Kozak, and Sergeant Groves were virtually ejected from the cabin, along with their backpacks and gear. The professor’s GPR was rolled out of the cargo bay, and a moment later, the propellers, which had never stopped turning, lifted the craft back into the night sky. Slater watched as it headed back toward the devastation on St. Peter’s Island, his heart filled with a sense of deep regret — nothing in his life had ever gone so terribly wrong — mingled with an undeniable relief.

It wasn’t his problem anymore.

The debriefing he had been scheduled to undergo that morning had been canceled due to the conflagration, and Colonel Waggoner had asked him only one question.

“Was the fire deliberate, or accidental, Dr. Slater?”

“Accidental,” Slater replied. What use was there in denying it?

The colonel, whose hands were full as it was, told him he could keep his notes and records, and file a full report from Port Orlov, “or anywhere else you go. Personally, I don’t ever want to lay eyes on you again, and trust me on this, they feel the same way at the AFIP offices in Washington.”

Indeed, he’d been right about that. Frank had made one last call to Dr. Levinson, who’d listened coldly as he gave her an edited account of what had happened at the site — omitting any mention of the gems or, God forbid, their owner — and when he’d stopped to take a breath, she had informed him that Rebekah Vane had also succumbed to the Spanish flu, while being treated at the biohazard facility in Juneau.

“I thought she had been stabilized,” he mumbled.

“So did I,” Dr. Levinson said. “We were both wrong.”

He could hear the disappointment, and even dismissal, in her voice.

“Have there been any other breaches,” he asked, dreading the answer, “or casualties?”

“Not so far. We think we got there in time and established a suitable quarantine zone.” There was a pause on the line. “Needless to say, your report will be classified top secret. You, and the remaining members of your team, are under a strict information embargo.”

“Understood.”

“Is it, Dr. Slater? Because nothing else on this mission seems to have been.”

He took the shot. He deserved it.

“I’ll look for your report in one week. And oh,” she said, icily, before abruptly hanging up, “don’t expect any references.”

If it hadn’t been so painful, he might have laughed. But given what his plans were now, he doubted that he would need any.

“So what do you say?” Groves asked him. “Should we drop off our stuff at the community center and head into town for some grub?”

Slater nodded and the three of them trooped wearily off the ice.

Inside the center, they found Geordie holding down the fort all by himself.

“Yeah, I figured that chopper might be bringing you guys back,” he said. “But if you’re looking for the mayor, she’s already at the celebration.”

“What celebration?” Kozak asked.

Even Slater had forgotten that it was scheduled for tonight.

“The rededication of the totem pole,” Geordie said, as if it were world news. “You remember how it was crooked? Some people in town, and some of the stores, have gotten together to have it fixed up again.”

“How come you’re not there then?” Groves asked, and Geordie glanced at the clock on the wall. “City hall officially remains open until six P.M. I’ve got almost a half hour to go.”

The men shared a chuckle, and Slater said, “I admire your work ethic, but if everybody’s at the party, who’s gonna call?”

Geordie mulled it over for a second or two, then grabbing his coat from a chair, said, “Come on — you don’t want to miss this!”

On the way, they passed the Arctic Circle Gun Shoppe, and stopping for a moment to look down the alley, Slater could see Harley Vane’s old trailer. No lavender light was shining through the blinds anymore, and a FOR RENT sign was hanging forlornly from the door handle. What a lot of trouble had come up in his nets that night, Slater thought, and what a lot of lives, including Harley’s own, had been lost as a result.

Front Street was lighted up from stem to stern, and the Yardarm was doing a land-office business. Although the totem pole itself was shrouded in a canvas sail prior to its unveiling, it did appear to be standing erect.

“I wish they had let me do a ground study first,” Kozak muttered, as Groves peeled off toward the busy bar. “If it is not done properly, it will tilt again.”

A flatbed truck was parked between the pole and the harbor docks, and two huge speakers in its bed were blaring the Black-Eyed Peas. Maybe a hundred people were milling around, rubbing their hands together over blazing trash cans, guzzling beer from ice-cold cans or hot cider from steaming mugs, laughing and shouting at each other over the music. A few were dancing to try to keep warm.

Lifting the earmuff on one side of Geordie’s hat, Slater leaned close and said, “Where’s Nika?” and Geordie turned around, pointing at the harbormaster’s shack.

Behind one of its lighted windows, he could see her now, head down, reading something. He approached the shack and stopped just outside. The walls were plastered with charts and flyers, fishing nets and rods hung from the rafters.

Nika was jotting down notes in the margin of a wrinkled sheet of paper and did not see him at the window. For a moment, he simply savored the chance to observe her unnoticed. The last time he had seen her she was being wheeled out to the ambulance for the ride back to Port Orlov, and though she was not as wan as she had been, she still appeared paler than usual. Her black hair had been plaited into two pigtails, and perhaps in honor of the occasion, she had adorned them with tightly tied ribbons and colorful beads. She looked, he thought, as natural, and as naturally beautiful, as one of her ancestors.

And then she looked up, as if sensing he was there. Squinting into the darkness, she raised a hand, and Slater went around to the door.

By the time he got it open, she was already in his arms. He kicked it closed, and they simply stood there, cradling each other in their arms, wordlessly. And if Slater had still had any doubts at all, if he had any lingering reservations about the decision he had already made but not yet shared, they melted away in the heat of their embrace.

Before he could find the right words, Nika, with her face still pressed against his chest, said, “I was working on what to say.”

“About the totem pole?”

“I can’t forget to mention any of the donors who helped to raise the money or do the work.”

It was as if their hearts were so full of more important things, they could only address a more immediate and inconsequential topic.

“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” he said.

“Public speaking is not my favorite activity.”

“You’ll be a smash.”

He hugged her more tightly in encouragement, then they separated enough that he could look down into the dark pools of her eyes. It was a sight he knew he would never tire of.

“I’ve been doing some thinking,” he said, his voice faltering; already, he regretted that he hadn’t come up with some better opening.

“About?”

“About what I’m going to do now that I’m no longer working for the AFIP. I was thinking that—”

There was a banging on the door and a snowball hit the window as a bunch of teenage boys, horsing around outside, hollered, “Get a room, Mayor!” and “So when do we get to see the totem pole?”

Nika, laughing in embarrassment, pulled away. Glancing at her watch, she shouted, “It’s not time yet. It’s officially scheduled for six P.M.”

“Looked like it was the right time to me!” one of them hooted outside the window, as the others, dispersing into the night, guffawed.

Slater tried to regroup, but Nika had returned to the table where she had left her speech and was looking it over one last time. Making one final addition — Growdon’s Lumberyard and Mill — she folded the paper into the pocket of her coat. “Oh, I almost forgot I had this on me,” she said, pulling out an opaque plastic baggie labeled Nome Regional Health Center. “The orderly gave it to me on the way out.”

Slater took the bag and unzipped it.

“I found it on the bridge, and they gave it back to me along with my other personal belongings.”

Slater could hardly believe what he was seeing. A Russian Orthodox cross, made of silver, and studded with emeralds.

“It must have been Charlie’s, or maybe it belonged to his wife.”

Slater knew better.

“But now Charlie’s dead,” Nika said. “And Harley, too.”

Slater knew that a memorial service for the Vane boys was scheduled for the following Sunday, but he wondered just how many mourners would turn up.

“I guess we should just give it to his wife,” she concluded.

“Rebekah didn’t make it, either,” Slater said. “She died from the flu, at the treatment center in Juneau.”

Nika hadn’t known that, and the news rocked her for a moment. “What’s to become of Bathsheba?”

“Last I heard, she was heading back to the cult in New England. Apparently, the lost lamb is still prized there.”

Nika nodded, looking relieved. But then, studying the cross again, she said, “So what do we do with this then? It looks awfully valuable.”

It was a terrible breach of medical protocols, Slater thought, for the cross to have been returned at all — under normal circumstances, he would have raised hell over it — but in this one instance, it was a godsend. The worst mistake he could make at this point would be to make its existence known, or to release it to anyone else, ever again. Turning it over, he saw that there was an inscription on the back, in Russian of course, and even as he wondered what it said, he slipped the cross into the pocket of his own parka and said, “I’ll take care of it.”

“Come on, Mayor — we’re freezing our asses off out here!” one of the teenagers shouted from the pier.

Nika said, “Maybe we should get this over with.”

Slater opened the door, and they walked toward the commotion around the totem pole, which was still veiled in its tattered sail.

Calling out to a couple of the partiers, she asked them to swing their trucks and cars around, and aim their headlights at the pole. Then she climbed up into the back of the flatbed, disconnected the speakers from the long, trailing power cords, and plugged in a microphone instead. The music abruptly stopped, and the crowd grew quiet as the vehicles pointed their lights at the pole. The only sounds were the crackling of the fires in the trash cans and the rustle of the wind, the never-ending wind, blowing off the sea. The night was clear.

Standing in the bed of the truck, mike in hand, Nika welcomed them all, first in English, then in the Inuit’s native tongue. There was a lot of happy nodding in the crowd, especially among the older people, at the sound of their own, almost forgotten language being spoken. It wasn’t hard for Slater to see how this vibrant young woman could also have become their tribal elder.

“Before I get to the reason we’re all here tonight, I want to take this opportunity to answer a few of the important questions that have been coming into the community center all day,” she said.

“Yeah, what burned last night?” a kid in a down parka called out. “I heard it was St. Peter’s? I can still smell the smoke.”

“Yes, there was a fire in the old colony. But I have been informed,” she said, nodding toward Slater, who was standing close to the truck, “that it has been entirely contained, and the Coast Guard will be overseeing the island from now on.”

“That’s still our land,” an older Inuit man complained. “It’s ours, by treaty.”

“They can have it,” another one answered him. “The damn place has been cursed for a hundred years.”

Nika held up a hand, and said, “It’s still ours. But for the time being, it’s off-limits.”

Slater knew that it would stay that way — strictly off-limits — forever.

“And what was the deal with that quarantine?” a white guy in a Green Bay Packers hat asked. “That’s bullshit, the government telling me where I can, and can’t, go. I couldn’t get to my ice-fishing shack.”

There was a lot of muttering and nodding heads, and Slater heard two or three people saying something about conspiracies.

“That was an emergency measure,” she said, and here she spoke carefully, following the script that she and Slater had rehearsed in Nome. “I can tell you now that there was the remote chance of a communicable disease reaching Port Orlov, and to be on the safe side we had to cordon off the immediate area. There is no threat now, however. None whatsoever.”

“And what really happened to the Vanes?” the Packers fan asked. “Charlie Vane still owes me a hundred bucks for a snowblower.”

“As I reported in the community newsletter,” Nika patiently explained, “Charlie and Harley Vane died in a car crash on the Heron River Bridge. We’re planning to hold a memorial service next Sunday.”

“That won’t get me my hundred bucks back.”

Nika, wisely, let that one pass, and just when Slater thought the whole event was going to devolve into a Tea Party rally, she asked everyone to gather around the foot of the totem pole for the unveiling.

“For too long now,” she said, “we have all been living with a disgrace in the center of our town. And as your mayor, I take a lot of the blame for that. This totem pole was built, by some of our Native American ancestors, two hundred years ago, and it was bequeathed to their descendants. It’s more than just some stately souvenir. It represents the Inuit people — their history, their legends, their spirits. It was meant to remind us of our heritage, and at the same time to watch over us in the present day.”

She allowed her words to sink in before continuing.

“But we have not watched over it. We’ve allowed the paint to fade. We’ve let the wood crack. We’ve let it almost fall over.”

The Inuit in the throng looked distinctly uncomfortable at this reminder of their own neglect, and even the nonnatives looked vaguely embarrassed, too.

“It’s the symbol of Alaska, and as such it should always stand tall. The way that all Alaskans, whatever their background, and wherever they came from, do.”

This was one sentiment that could be counted on to meet with general approval, which it did.

“And that’s why we have come together tonight, all the people of Port Orlov, to set things straight — in every way.” Referring to the paper in her hand, she read off the list of donors and citizens and businesses that had contributed money, time, and labor to fixing the totem pole. The hardware store had contributed the paint and cement, the Growdon Lumberyard had worked to restore the wood, a local contractor had supervised the construction of the new base. Many others had chipped in five or ten dollars to the cost. And the Yardarm had provided free drinks for the celebration. “But only one beer per customer,” Nika warned everyone, with a smile.

There was a smattering of applause when she was done with the list, and as Nika nodded at her nephew Geordie, he stepped forward and took hold of the rope that held the covering in place.

“And so, with no further ado and before we all freeze to death, let’s take a look at what we can do when we all pull together. Geordie, let ’er rip.”

Geordie gave a sharp tug on the rope, but, anticlimactically, there seemed to be a snag. Changing position and wrapping the rope around his wrist, he tugged again, and this time the old sail neatly unfurled from the top of the pole, rustling and pooling around the base. The freshly painted faces of the otters and bears, foxes and wolves, gleamed in the light of the arc lamps; their teeth were now white and shining, their fur a rich brown or inky black, their eyes a deep, metallic blue.

At first there was an appreciative silence from the crowd, then the Packers fan tossed his hat in the air, and hollered out the state motto, “North to the Future!” Everyone laughed and started to applaud, and even Slater felt himself caught up in the general exultation.

Kozak sidled up to him, his free beer in hand, and said, “I will still do a ground study before I leave. No charge.”

Slater nodded in thanks.

“But it is quite beautiful now,” the professor acknowledged.

Sergeant Groves, standing a few yards off, gave it two thumbs-up.

Nika put the mike away, ducked down behind the speakers, and plugged in the CD player.

But it wasn’t the Black-Eyed Peas she was playing anymore.

Now it was a native song, a rhythmic chant, accompanied by a low, steady drumbeat. A respectful silence fell over the town square, and some of the older Inuit people instinctively lowered their heads. With eyes closed and arms held akimbo, they began to gently sway and stomp their boots in the snow. The area around the base of the totem pole cleared away, as the elders, and a few of the younger Native Americans, too, started to dance in a slow circle around it. The old women moved like hawks soaring on the wind, arms spread wide, while the men lumbered like bears on the ice. Everyone else made way, watching this ancient ritual unfold in the shadow of the pole, feeling the power, the majesty, and the unspoken sadness, of the dance. It was a nearly forgotten vestige of a world long gone, a world that had started to slip away on the very day the first Russian explorers sailed into these waters in the eighteenth century.

Nika, too, was absorbed in the music and the dance, her shoulders undulating as she stood between the speakers, her eyes closed in mystic communion. It was this ineffable connection that had brought her back to Port Orlov, and it was this same connection that would make it impossible for her to leave. She had come back to rescue her people, to save their culture from extinction, and Frank, watching her now, knew that she would never give that up … even for him.

Just as he knew it would be wrong of him ever to ask it.

The spell cast by the music was interrupted by a crackling burst of static, and the lights in the storefronts suddenly dimmed, then shut down altogether. The speakers on the flatbed sputtered and fizzled, and the streetlamps along Front Street blinked out one by one.

Slater could guess what was happening.

The dancers, like everyone else, stopped and looked up at the omen revealing itself in the sky. The tribal elders hummed and chanted in place, their upturned faces growing wet with tears.

A gigantic ribbon of green light, smooth and shiny as satin, was slowly unspooling … then rippling wider, like a curtain spreading itself open across a blackened stage. It was only the second time Slater had seen the aurora borealis, but he could not have conceived of a more portentous time for it.

Nika, looking delighted, jumped down from the bed of the truck and grabbed his hand.

“Don’t tell me you planned this,” he said, and she laughed.

“I wish I could take credit,” she replied, “but I’m only the mayor, not God.”

Most of the crowd stayed right where they were, but some drifted off toward the shoreline to watch the lights over the water.

Nika, like a kid at a carnival, dragged Frank toward the harbormaster’s shack, then out onto the pier. At the very end, they stood alone with the sky shimmering above them. Slater wrapped his arms around her, and she leaned back into his embrace. Together, they gazed up at the spectacle unfolding in the night, the green now joined by a flickering orange flame that spiraled like a staircase up into the heavens. Even the air seemed to crackle with the electrical energy.

“The spirits are rising,” Nika said, her dark eyes shining in the orange glow.

Across the black waters, Slater could swear that he heard the wolves on St. Peter’s Island baying at the sky.

“They’re going home.”

And he believed it. The lights were like a celestial staircase, and he could envision the old woman — Anastasia, Grand Duchess of All the Russias — climbing the steps at long last.

He could see other things, too. He could see himself remaining in this place, with Nika forever at his side, and running the medical clinic that the town so desperately needed. For too long, he had tried to save the world. Now he would concentrate on saving just this tiny, much-overlooked part of it.

When the lights went out, snuffed like a candle, and Nika turned her head in the darkness, he bent down and kissed her. All the words he’d meant to say evaporated, all his questions were answered. There was no need to speak at all.

And even the wolves, he noted, had gone silent. Apart from the cry of a hawk, soaring overhead but impossible to discern in the night sky, there was nothing but the empty and incessant howling of the wind.

Still holding his hand, Nika started back down the pier, but Slater stopped a few seconds later and said, “I just have one thing to do.”

Nika, though curious, stayed where she was as he reached into his pocket for the emerald cross and returned to the end of the dock.

The hawk, still crying, swooped past the dock, some wriggling prey clutched in its talons.

Nika saw him raise his arm, and heard a distant splash, and when he came back to her, she didn’t ask him what he’d done. She didn’t have to.

The lights in town flickered back on, and arm in arm, they walked toward home together … as the hawk settled into its perch atop the Yardarm. There, it went about devouring its hard-won meal — a tiny white mouse, with an orange stain on its back and tail.