Red Templar

27

John Holliday strolled across the interlocking paving stones of Red Square and tried not to think of the decided queasiness in the pit of his stomach. The reaction didn’t come from the faint odor of rotting human feet that he was sure clung to his skin even after three showers. He knew that instead it came from sitting in on too many intelligence briefings, squinting at grainy photographs and trying to identify the types of missiles mounted on carriers paraded through the square on May Day each year, or identifying which bigwigs had appeared on the podium and which ones had been discreetly airbrushed out.

The tall, thick walls of the Kremlin, the stone mass of the government-only GUM store, and the goose-stepping guards in their silly peaked caps marching back and forth like toy soldiers in front of Lenin’s tomb were as familiar to him as a recurring nightmare, even though he’d never been here before. It was like a monstrous case of vertigo that was way out of his control.

The Chaplitzky brothers had taken Holliday and Eddie to the rural dacha village of Peredelkino, about twenty kilometers from Moscow. According to the Chaplitskys, the dacha, an outsize log cabin, had once belonged to an obscure Russian writer in the 1970s, but now it looked more like a warehouse, most of the rooms stacked with boxes of iPads, laptops, GPS units, BlackBerrys and other electronic devices.

On the trip to Moscow there had been only one scary moment. A roadblock guard outside of Perm had insisted on opening Eddie’s coffin, a flimsy fiberboard creation with a fake satin lining and bronze-colored plastic handles. Lying in the coffin beside him, Holliday could only hold his breath and listen.

Dimitri had pried open the upper half of Eddie’s coffin. The stink of the half dozen feet in the open baggie between Eddie’s legs and the whispered word “holera” from Dimitri had been enough to send the guard away as fast as his legs could carry him. The rest of the trip, while disgusting, was uneventful.

And now here they were at the red beating heart of Ronald Reagan’s Axis of Evil. Holliday had never seen the Russians in quite that light, but for an American boy brought up in the fifties and sixties they were certainly the main enemy, with an occasional serving of Chinese as a side dish.

When Holliday was growing up, everything Russian had necessarily been dark, brooding and corrupt, where everyone was named Boris or Igor or Natasha, and the men never shaved. Khrushchev pounded his shoe in the U.N. The Russkies never could have come up with the H-bomb on their own, and Sputnik was the greatest blow to the American ego since the British burned down the White House in 1814.

Time, events and a whole lot of reading of history had altered his perspective somewhat, but, as a soldier and sometime intelligence officer, his adult life had always centered on the Soviet Union as the bull’s-eye on the target. By the same token, the same time and events had altered America as well, and these days Holliday could almost sympathize with Putin’s feeling that the great motherland’s grandeur had been tarnished.

Afghanistan had been a travesty; everyone drank far too much vodka, and the entire Russian Federation appeared to be a fiefdom of organized crime. The United States had gone through its own transformation, from the avenging angel that had won World War II and saved the world to the quagmires of Vietnam, reality television, childhood obesity and Wall Street recklessness. Meanwhile, both nations suffered the cultural degradation of McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC and IKEA.

As they passed under the high curved arch of the Spassky Tower, it occurred to Holliday that maybe the Internet crazies weren’t so far off the mark with their global conspiracies; he found himself thinking of Rex Deus and Kate Sinclair and her sinister forces, of the priest Brennan and the Vatican Secret Service, and of this new group mentioned by the Bulgarian monk-the Order of the Phoenix.

Between them and the other half dozen or so shadowy alphabet organizations he knew about, maybe the world really was controlled by forces beyond the control of the ordinary person. He laughed aloud, his voice echoing from the ancient stone of the tunnel-like entrance to the Kremlin.

“What is so funny?” Eddie asked.

“I was just thinking of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin fighting back-to-back, beating off the Communist hordes for truth, justice and the American way.”

The Cuban snorted. “They should have come to Habana and stood with me for ten hours in the hot sun listening to El Comandante speaking in the Plaza de la Revolucion; they would have died of boredom.”

“You actually did that?” Holliday asked, surprised. Eddie had never struck him as a dedicated comunista.

“Naturalmente.” Eddie grinned. “In the old days they gave you lunch in a box and beer to make crowds for the cameras. In later times the police rounded you up and took you there in buses-if you did not go, you didn’t work for a week. ?VivaFidel!”

The two men came out from under the arch. On their left were the gardens in front of the two so-called Nameless Towers of the Kremlin Wall, and on their right was the neoclassical yellow-and-white Presidential Administration Building. For a crisp fall day there were a surprising number of tourists wandering around, some unsupervised, but most in regimented tours led by guides speaking English, Mandarin, Japanese and German. The Cuban approached one of the big-hatted, ornately uniformed guards posing for pictures in front of the main entrance.

“Kak my mozhem poluchit’ v Oruzhyei’noi’ palate?” Eddie asked. The guard stared at the Cuban, his jaw dropping like an old-fashioned steam shovel in a cartoon. He gave Eddie a stuttering reply, then watched, still openmouthed, as the tall black man rejoined Holliday. “We go past the big cannon and keep to the right until we come to the Armoury. It is a palace with a green roof,” Eddie reported.

The czar’s cannon turned out to be a gigantic thirty-four-ton bombard with a bronze barrel and one-ton cannonballs from the sixteenth century. It had never been fired. Right beside it was the Czar Bell, two hundred tons of bronze that broke in the casting pit, and was never hung or rung. It seemed a little odd to Holliday that the Russians, not to mention the old-guard Communists of the Soviet Union, would be so proud of such useless white elephants that had no purpose except to express some sort of weird cultural impotence. Who knew? Maybe it was the reason Russians drank so much vodka.

They followed the guard’s directions and eventually found the Armoury, which really did have a green roof.

“A question, if you do not mind, compadre,” asked Eddie as they stared up at the rococo-style building.

“What is it?”

“What are we doing in this place?”

“We’re casing the joint.” Holliday smiled.

“?Que?” Eddie asked.

“Forget it,” answered Holliday. “Let’s go see this egg everyone’s been talking about.”

“Tell me, where we are on this Black Tusk thing?” J. Hunter Kokum, the assistant deputy national security adviser, asked. The pale, white-haired man in his two-thousand-dollar funereal Brioni suit leaned back in his antique button leather office chair and stared across Charles Dickens’s darkly varnished, honey-topped mahogany writing desk, an object that had cost him almost a million dollars at a Christie’s auction and almost caused an international incident. Seated across from him, Whit Havers cleared his throat nervously.

“After completing the Amsterdam assignment, Bone met with our contact there and then went to Yekaterinburg to wait for the targets.”

“What happened?”

“According to Bone, they never went near the church at the Ipatiev location. They did meet with a man named Anton Zukov, the curator of the Ipatiev House museum, which is contained in the basement of the church they built to memorialize the Romanovs.”

“This is starting to sound like Dr. Zhivago.” Kokum grunted.

“Who?” Havers asked.

“Forget it.” Kokum sighed. “Before your time.” He glanced at a black-tabbed file on his desk. Black tabs were like black American Express cards-not many people had access to them. Whit Havers certainly didn’t. He wondered whether it had anything to do with Black Tusk. Kokum looked up from the file as though suddenly remembering that Whit was still in the room. “What happened when they talked to Zukov?”

“Zukov told them that Genrikhovich was a pathological liar, that the Kremlin Egg had never even been in the Hermitage, let alone evacuated from it. Apparently the egg has always been in the Kremlin, except when it was sent out for cleaning and repair. It is there to this day.”

“How does Bone know they spoke to Zukov?”

“He followed them, sir.”

“And how does he know what was said? Did he bug the place or something?”

“No, sir. Bone questioned Zukov about the matter after Holliday and the other man had left.”

“Questioned him?”

Havers cleared his throat uncomfortably. “‘Interrogated’ might be a better word, sir.”

“Ah,” murmured Kokum. “And if this Zukov fellow decides to talk about his interrogation by Mr. Bone, what is he likely to say?”

“Very little,” answered Havers. “In fact, it is highly unlikely that he will say anything at all.”

“And why is that, Mr. Havers?”

“Because Mr. Zukov now resides in a swamp in the Koptyaki forest about thirty kilometers outside Yekaterinburg, sir.”

“Ah,” said Kokum, tenting his fingers together. “Your idea?”

“Yes, sir,” said Havers.

“You’re better at this than I thought, young man.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t screw it up.” The narrow, cold face of the silver-haired man spoke volumes: Fuck up and it will be your head on the block, sonny boy; that’s what you’ve been right from the start: a sacrificial lamb.

“No, sir.” Havers felt a faint shiver, and the Harvard-educated, once-upon-a-time Jamaican unaccountably found himself wondering which half of his DNA he’d picked up from his real father, the inimitable Nedrick Samuels. He prayed it wasn’t the strand controlling flight under pressure.

The treasures of the Kremlin Armoury are contained in nine chambers on two floors of the mid-nineteenth-century building. The ten Faberge eggs are located in the second large room on the second floor of the building. Once again Holliday was struck by the almost masochistic fascination of the old Soviet regime in keeping the ancient, beautiful and incredibly valuable regalia of their oppressors on display, including Ivan the Terrible’s throne.

The ten eggs in the Kremlin Armoury collection were all held in a single large display case, arranged on dull brown, felt-covered tiers shaped roughly like an ancient Mayan stepped pyramid. The Kremlin Egg, also known as the Uspenski Cathedral Egg, occupied the highest level-the place where the bloody human sacrifices were usually made-not a far-fetched metaphor when dealing with relics from the last of the czars and the beginnings of the Russian Revolution.

Although the eggs were housed in a two-hundred-year-old building, the lighting within the Armoury was definitely state-of-the-art. Holliday had no doubt that the display case with the egg collection was made of bulletproof glass, and a careful look at the base of the display revealed the wires and leads going to motion detectors or pressure alarms or both. With several thousand well-armed presidential guards and forty-foot-thick walls it would take more than George Clooney and his franchised entourage of crooks to spirit away the Kremlin Egg from this place.

“I have the same question, compadre: what are we doing in this place?” Eddie whispered.

Holliday purposefully walked away from the brightly lit egg display and wandered casually into the next room. Neither the guards nor the sprinkling of visitors were paying any attention to them. “Genrikhovich said the Cathedral Egg we just saw on display is a fake.”

“And we know Genrikhovich is a liar.” Eddie shrugged.

“I don’t think he was lying about that,” said Holliday.

“Why not?”

“Because he had no reason to. People usually lie for a reason.”

“Not if they are demente, crazy,” answered the Cuban.

“Just for a minute, make the assumption that this time he was telling the truth. The Cathedral Egg is a fake. Why would anyone do such a thing? It makes no sense.”

“In the history books it says that companero Stalin sold many things to get foreign currency; why not this huevo grande, then? It would have been worth a great deal even then. Perhaps he replaced it with this copy so no one would know.”

“I don’t think Stalin was that subtle. To him selling off czarist treasures would be a patriotic act. Besides, he didn’t come to real power until 1922. I don’t think he was worrying about Romanov eggs back then.” Holliday shook his head. “It’s the only question that counts-why switch out the eggs?”

“The eggs of Faberge, they all had surprises inside-yes?” Eddie asked.

“That’s right.” Holliday nodded. “The Trans-Siberian Egg had its own little solid gold train; the Rosebud Egg had a tiny diamond crown and a sapphire pendant; the Imperial Yacht Egg had a tiny platinum replica of the yacht Standart inside. What’s your point?”

“Perhaps the egg of the Cathedral had a secret within it that someone wanted to keep secret.”

“A nice theory, but who do we ask about it?”

“If one thing Genrikhovich said was true, maybe something else was true as well,” said Eddie.

“Such as?”

“The man gospodin Zukov said was one of Genrikhovich’s fantasies. The bastardo son of this KGB defector.”

“Anatoliy Golitsyn’s love child. Anatoliy Ivanov.”