The Boy from Reactor 4

CHAPTER 27

NADIA LOOKED AROUND for someone who could guide her toward the proper entrance. She’d studied the Pecherska Lavra, the Caves Monastery, as a student in Ukrainian School growing up. It was a mythical place, one she read about but wasn’t sure really existed. Now, as she stood beneath the peach-and-ivory Lavra Belltower, despite the urgency of the moment, excerpts from lectures came flooding back to mind.

In 1051, St. Anthony Pechersk left Mount Athos in Greece to live in a man-made cave in Kyiv. As his disciples followed him, he expanded his home into an underground city of tunnels, rooms, and chapels. Monks spent lifetimes praying, meditating, and writing in what became known as the Pecherska Lavra. Memoirs suggest the underground network may have once stretched for hundreds of kilometers, from Kyiv to Moscow. By the twentieth century, more than 120 saints were buried in the Caves Monastery.

In 1959, Nikita Khrushchev began a fresh campaign to destroy all remaining traces of Christianity in the Soviet Union. He confiscated religious icons, burned churches, and either executed priests or tortured them into recanting their religious convictions. He also ordered the removal of the bodies of the saints as a prelude to the destruction of the Pecherska Lavra.

No one is certain exactly what happened next, but the accepted story is something like this: A platoon of soldiers arrived in a truck to remove the bodies. They loaded them onto their vehicle, but when they tried to leave, the engine wouldn’t start. Mechanics were summoned to examine the truck. They found nothing wrong. Still, it wouldn’t start.

A priest told the soldiers that it was impossible for the bodies of the saints to be removed from the caves. At his suggestion, the soldiers unloaded the bodies from the truck. The engine started. When they put the bodies back on the truck, it wouldn’t start. After lying outside for three weeks while Soviet officials debated what to do, the bodies were returned to the caves, and Khrushchev gave strict orders: nothing belowground was to be touched again.

Later, Soviet scientists conducted tests to understand why the bodies remained preserved despite no embalming. They determined that lack of moisture prevented decay. An experiment with wheat plants proved that the bodies also emitted an organic matter that influenced the nuclear content of living matter and may have helped preserve the monks’ remains.

Nadia got directions to the lower entry to the Far Caves from a tour guide with a badge hanging around her neck. As Nadia hurried down a sidewalk, a flock of monks swooped by her, their long black cloaks billowing in their wake. They appeared to float slightly aboveground like spirits who alternated living among the earthly and the celestial. Nadia followed them down the steep drop along the fifteen-foot-high fortification wall toward the southeast corner of the Lavra, in her black weather-resistant jacket and leggings.

The exit from the Far Caves was in the Church of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin. Its towering gold dome was the landmark for the entrance on the near side of the street in the unassuming and tiny Annozachatiyevskaya Church. Nadia spotted the green-roof walkway Clementine had mentioned on the phone.

The monks disappeared inside the entrance. Nadia stopped beside the wooden door to the church and checked her watch.

It was 1:13. She was thirteen minutes late. She’d underestimated the Lavra’s sprawl. The street along the edge of the Lavra teemed with tourists, visitors, and vendors selling food and souvenirs.

At 1:26, three boys ran up to her. They barely came up to her waist, with gaunt, dirt-smeared cheeks and tousled hair. Their eyes were lively, appraising her and her purse.

Homeless children. Nadia had read about them. Abandoned or orphaned, with nowhere to go, no socialist state to take care of them. The shortest of the three stepped forward. “Are you Nadia Tesla?”

“Yes.”

He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “A lady told us to give this to you.”

“She did?” Nadia looked around. “Where? What lady?”

The boy’s tongue flicked out of the corner of his lips, as though he were contemplating mischief. “She told us you’d give us ten hryvnia.”

Ten hryvnia was a little more than a dollar. Nadia twisted her body away from them, cracked her purse open, and pulled out two hundred hryvnia. The boy’s eyes lit up as though he’d found the biggest sucker in Kyiv. He extended the paper with his left hand and reached out for the money with his right. Nadia did the opposite. Each of them held on to both for two beats and stared at each other. The boy snatched the money and released the paper. He took off with his friends toward the river beyond the lavra.

Nadia unfolded the paper. An unsteady hand had scribbled a note:

Nadia considered the implications of Clementine’s instructions. Perhaps her uncle had buried the money in the tomb of a saint that bore his name, and Clementine was empowered to show her the exact location. Maybe hiding the money in plain sight was the best solution, especially for a man who was surrounded by scavengers and thieves. The tombs were there for any tourist to see, but they would never be moved, not after Khrushchev’s experience. How hard was it to hide $10 million in a tomb? Not too hard if the money was in bearer bonds.

Nadia started toward the entrance to the Far Caves.

“Wait,” a rawboned babushka said, beside her souvenir stand. “Don’t go in there.” She patted her head, which was wrapped in a floral scarf. “Women must cover themselves before going in the caves.”

A tour group of thirty to forty people was making its way down the fortification wall toward the same entrance. All the women wore shawls on their heads.

Nadia bought a scarf with a bright floral pattern on one side and a plain black one on the other. The babushka said the dark side would come in handy in the unfortunate event of a funeral. She wrapped it around Nadia’s head with the floral side on the exterior so that other people could see her better. Nadia also bought a cheap lighter at the babushka’s suggestion, to use with the beeswax candle she bought as a donation to the monastery. She stored both in her purse and went into the church.

The plunge down the initial stairway to the caves reminded Nadia of an entry to a medieval wine cellar. Light from the doorway faded as she descended narrow steps. Her shoulders brushed the whitewashed walls on either side.

The staircase turned right at the bottom and deposited her into a twisting, equally narrow tunnel. Candles illuminated the path from bronze sconces along the white walls. The stone tiles beneath her feet pitched downward. Looking forward, she could see that the concave ceiling resembled the top of a keyhole. It created the illusion that she had entered a portal that was leading her to the center of the earth.

Muffled voices echoed around her. The street curved into an elongated S. The voices ahead grew louder until they were audible whispers. A sharp turn, and the street came to a fork. Nadia glanced at her crude black-and-white map. She veered left toward the voices, sniffing incense in the air. An opening in the wall revealed itself on the left.

Nadia looked in. An Asian couple stood with candles beside the body of a saint named Joseph. A maroon shroud covered his remains in an old wooden coffin. The man leaned forward and kissed the shroud atop the body.

Nadia moved on past three more cells containing bodies of the saints and found the Church of the Annunciation. Shimmering gold icons of Saint Mary and Saint Joseph hung against a turquoise wall painted with a gold cross. An African family of three admired an altar covered in green velvet, the little girl clinging to her mother’s knees.

As Nadia continued past the church, she idly scratched an itch on her brow. Her fingers left a wet spot on her forehead.

The monastery’s floor fell to a depth of 775 feet. That was one-sixth of a mile. The floor seemed to pitch downward forever. Nadia cursed herself for thinking in terms of miles while underground. It was not conducive to sanity. Another interminable S-shaped hike revealed the Church of the Nativity. More gilded iconostasis. The church was empty. Nadia checked her diagram. Another city block and she would be there.

As she marched onward, the air thinned out. Her lungs stretched for oxygen. Sconces and candles grew scarce. Light faded.

Nadia stopped, removed the beeswax candle from her purse, and lit it. Continued forward. Heard whispers up ahead.

There. A coffin.

Nadia raised her candle to the placard on the wall.

A bare skull greeted her with gleaming ivory teeth.

Nadia jumped back. Someone had placed it in a recessed opening in the wall. She took a deep breath and shone her light again to read the name on the wall.

Saint Sisoi.

She checked her diagram. Prince Feodor was the next saint listed. Only prominent saints were listed. Clementine said Saint Damian was after Sisoi and before Prince Feodor.

He was next.

The street became a straightaway. The whispers grew louder. They came from a hole in the wall up ahead. Was that Saint Damian’s crypt? Had Clementine brought her uncle with her? Was it she who was whispering to him?

Nadia heard loud, muffled voices behind her. A commotion of some kind.

She crept forward. The hole in the wall was a room. She slid to the edge of the room and peered around the corner inside.

Six figures in black cloaks stood chanting quietly in a refectory, a small room with beds carved in the walls. They were the monks she’d followed down the fortification wall to the monastery.

Nadia forged ahead. A candlestick shone in the distance. She took a deep breath and marched toward it.

A tall, angular figure bent over a coffin in the wall. He straightened and turned to Nadia.

The light of their candles became one. Nadia gazed at the person.

He was an old man with a gigantic crooked nose, dressed in green overalls. An ID hung around his neck. He held a clipboard in his hands. The word Official was emblazoned above Pecherska Lavra on the ID. He was a curator of some sort.

Nadia looked at the coffin. “Is this Saint Damian?” she whispered.

The man frowned. “Saint Damian?” He nodded at the sign on the wall. “This is the body of Prince Feodor.”

Nadia read the sign. “Where is the body of Saint Damian? Is it up ahead?”

The man’s frown deepened. “There is no Saint Damian.”

Nadia lost her breath. “There is no Saint Damian?”

“No, there isn’t. And there is no ‘up ahead.’”

The curator picked up the candle and extended his arm beyond the coffin. The tunnel ended. There was a wall dead ahead.

“Some of the caves collapsed through the years,” he said. “This is the farthest point west. This… is the end.”

Light flashed behind Nadia. Human voices. Women chattering, thinking they were whispering when everyone could hear them.

The curator sighed. “Tour group.”

Nadia remembered the group of thirty to forty people.

“We’re totally screwed,” he said. “We’re behind them now. There’s no way for anyone to pass. They have to stop and turn in line. It’s going to take hours for us to get out of here.”

By the glow of lantern flashlights, Nadia saw people round the corner.

Clementine Seelick was not waiting for her. Instead, she’d sent Nadia to the bowels of Kyiv. Now she was eight hundred feet beneath the face of the earth, trapped behind a tour group—being led by Misha Markov and Brad Specter.