The Romanov Cross

Chapter 12

“We’ll be coming up on St. Peter’s Island in about ten minutes,” the pilot said, his voice crackling over Slater’s headphones; even with the phones on, the rattling of the propellers and the thrumming of the twin engines on the Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane made it hard to hear. “I just wanted to make sure you guys got a good look at the place before the light goes.” On the horizon, the sun was a copper dollar sinking below the hazy outline of eastern Siberia. “We don’t get much daylight at this time of year.”

“In Irkutsk, I had sunlamps,” Professor Kozak said into his own microphone. “Three,” he said, holding up three gloved fingers for Slater to see. “One in every room.”

Slater nodded amicably, balancing a sealed envelope on his lap. The two men were packed in shoulder to shoulder behind the pilot and copilot, and flying over the icy, teal-blue waters of the Bering Strait; below them, the Pacific and Arctic Oceans converged, and the International Date Line cut an invisible line between Little Diomede Island, which belonged to the United States, and Big Diomede, which was Russian territory. While Sergeant Groves was back in Nome, organizing the rest of the cargo and waiting to shepherd Dr. Eva Lantos on the last leg of her journey from Boston, Slater had decided to go on ahead in the first chopper, along with his borrowed Russian geologist. There was no time to lose, and he wanted them both to get a good look at the lay of the land on St. Peter’s. Many decisions, he knew, had to be made, and they had to be made fast.

It had been an arduous and complicated trip already. Slater had flown from D.C. to L.A. to Seattle before catching a flight to Anchorage, and from there hopping on a supply plane to Nome, where the two helicopters were being loaded with the mountain of equipment and provisions the expedition would require. When the first one’s cargo bay had been filled, with everything from inflatable labs to hard rubber ground mats, then securely locked down, Slater and the burly professor, who hadn’t seen each other since picking their way across a minefield in Croatia, climbed aboard.

Unlike most helicopters, the Sikorsky was designed chiefly for the transportation of heavy cargo loads — up to twenty thousand pounds — and as a result it looked a lot like a gigantic praying mantis, with a bulbous cabin dangling up front for the pilots and passengers (no more than five people at a time) and a long, slim cargo bay with an extendable crane for lowering, or lifting, supplies from great heights. Two rotors — one with six long blades mounted above the chassis, and the other propping up the tail — kept it airborne. To Slater, it felt a lot like traveling in a construction vehicle.

For many miles, they had traveled along the rugged coastline of Alaska and over vast stretches of overgrown taiga, where aspens and grasses and dense brush thrived, and barren tundra where the soil was more unforgiving. Now and then he could make out polar bears lumbering across the ice floes, or caribou herds pawing for lichen buried beneath the frost. As they passed over a swath of land extending out into the sea, Slater tapped the copilot on the shoulder and pointed down at the gabled rooflines and crooked fences of a small town.

“Cape Prince of Wales,” the copilot said. “Founded in 1778.”

“By Captain Cook,” Professor Kozak said, proud to pitch in.

There wasn’t much to see, and at the rate they were going — roughly 120 miles per hour — the tiny town, cradled by a rocky ridge, was already disappearing from view. But Slater knew its sad history well. It wasn’t so different from that of its neighbor, Port Orlov.

Called Kingigin, or “high bluff” by its native inhabitants, it had once been a thriving Eskimo village and a lively trading post for deerskins, ivory, jade, flint, beads, and baleen. On the westernmost point of the North American continent, lying just south of the polar circle and with nothing but a dogsled trail leading to it from the mainland, the town should have been as safe from the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 as any place on earth. There wasn’t even a telegraph connection. But through a series of calamitous events, Wales, like a handful of other Alaskan hamlets, wound up suffering the highest mortality rates in America.

In October of that year, the steamship Victoria sailed into Nome, and the city’s doctor, aware of the danger, met the ship at the dock, where he insisted on examining the passengers and crew; he even went so far as to quarantine several dozen at Holy Cross Hospital. But when only one of them got sick after five days there (and even that illness was chalked up to tonsillitis), the doctor permitted the patients to be released. A hospital worker died of the flu four days later, and within forty-eight hours the whole city of Nome was placed under quarantine.

But by then the damage had been done. Mail had been unloaded from the ship, and even though every shred of it had been fumigated, the sailors who handed the bags to the local mail carriers had been unwitting bearers of the virus. Now, the mailmen, too, riding their dogsleds to every far-flung outpost in the territory, acted as the plague’s deadly agents. Wherever they went, they brought with them the contagion, and by the time rescuers reached the village of Wales, three weeks after the mail had been delivered, they found scenes of utter devastation — decaying corpses piled in snowdrifts, packs of wild dogs tearing at the remains. In one hut, a man was found with his arms wrapped around his stove, frozen solid, and he had had to be buried, still kneeling, in a square box. The survivors were found starving, drinking nothing but reindeer broth, in the one-room schoolhouse.

“Look at that!” the professor exclaimed, pointing to Cape Mountain now passing below them. “That, my friend, is the end of the Continental Divide.” His breath reeked of spearmint gum, which he was chewing assiduously to keep his ears from getting plugged.

A jagged brown peak, slick with snow and ice, Cape Mountain sat atop a gigantic slab of granite, shaped like an axe. The natives liked to say that the slab was the spot where Paul Bunyan had put his hatchet down, after he’d chopped down every tree in the Arctic. Slater could see how the legend got started.

“When we get to St. Peter’s,” the pilot said, “I’ll come in from the east, do a complete three-sixty, then we can hover wherever you want.” He consulted the fuel gauges, then added, “But not for long.”

At the thought of finally seeing the island, Slater felt his heart race, and he straightened up in his seat, which wasn’t easy given the bulk of the parka he was wearing and the over-the-shoulder restraints. The professor didn’t leave him much room, either, but he was enthusiastic company, and for that reason alone, Slater knew he’d picked the right man for what could prove to be the very bleak job ahead.

As the chopper approached, Slater could see — straight ahead and framed between the pilots’ shoulders — a gnarled hunk of black stone, surrounded by jutting rocks that broke the surface of the roiling waters. Its foundation was largely obscured by ice and mist. Slater could see snatches of beach, though they looked too steep and small for a helicopter, much less this one, to land on. Chiseled into the stone cliff, there appeared to be a winding set of steps.

“That whole island, it is from a volcano,” the professor observed over the headphones, admiringly. “Basaltic lava, two million years old.” He took off his spectacles, blew some dust from the lenses — filling the cabin with the scent of spearmint again — then hastily put them back on.

The chopper banked to the right, and now Slater got a better view out his own side window. Steep cliffs, dotted with nesting terns, rose to an uneven plateau, raggedly forested with deep green spruce and alders.

“Can you get closer?” Slater asked.

“Will do,” the pilot replied, “but the winds get tricky around the cliffs.”

The chopper descended and made a closer pass. But that was when Slater suddenly saw something, camouflaged by the patchy forest, which made him grab Kozak’s sleeve and point down.

An onion-shaped dome, made of rough timber and pocked with holes, poked its head up through the trees.

“The Russian colony,” the pilot said, circling.

Although the helicopter was buffeted by nasty crosswinds, the pilot was able to hold it steady enough that Slater could get the lay of the land. The old church was surrounded by several other ramshackle structures — old cabins teetering on their raised foundations, empty livestock pens, a well with a rusted bucket. A stockade wall, partly dismantled, enclosed what was left of the village.

But where was the cemetery?

The same thing must have occurred to the professor, who plucked at Slater’s sleeve and pointed off toward a trail leading away from what was once the main gate. It disappeared into a dense grove of evergreens.

“Could you move west?” Slater requested, and the pilot said, “Roger. But we’ve only got a few more minutes before we have to head into Port Orlov for refueling.”

The Sikorsky turned, its propellers churning even more loudly in hover mode than they did when flying, and followed the trail over the tops of the trees, until a rocky promontory appeared below. It jutted out from the plateau like an ironing board, its windswept ground dotted with old wooden crosses, toppling over, and gray-stone slabs.

It made sense, Slater thought. The graveyard had been sited as far from the colony as possible.

And in the gathering gloom, he saw a ragged spot at the very end of the promontory, where the earth and stone hung precariously above the cliffs, as if a limb had been ripped away from the body of the island … and now he knew precisely where the coffin found floating at sea had originated.

“Lights out,” the pilot said, and the last rays of the sun vanished as abruptly as a candle’s flame being snuffed. Darkness descended over the island, and the helicopter swiftly banked away from the steep, unforgiving cliffs.

But one question remained in Slater’s head. This had been possibly the most isolated colony on the planet, surrounded by ice floes and rocky coastlines, with no mail, and no intercourse with the locals. It should have been the safest place on earth during the 1918 pandemic. But even here, the Spanish flu had managed to insinuate its deadly tentacles, and he wondered if he would ever find out how. Not for the first time, he felt a flicker of grudging admiration for his terrible foe. Damn, it was wily.

“Those are crabbing boats below,” the pilot observed, as Slater looked down to see their running lights bucking in the choppy seas. “Worst job in the whole world.”

Funny, Slater thought. He had often heard his own job described that way.

Chapter 13

The Winter Palace was never more beautiful than when it was done up for the Christmas Ball. Anastasia looked forward to it every year — particularly in a year as tragic and bloody as this one had been. Although millions of ill-equipped Russian soldiers were still desperately fighting the Germans along the far-flung borders of the empire, here, tonight, you would never know it. As she gazed down at the vast, snowy forecourt, hundreds of sleek carriages and gleaming motorcars, jingling sleighs and bright red troikas, drew to a halt in front of the massive entry hall of the palace, and the Tsar and Tsaritsa’s guests, decked out in all their finery, disembarked, laughing and chattering among themselves. Even from the window seat in her room, the young grand duchess could catch some of their exchanges — most of them spoken in French as it was so much more fashionable than Russian — and spot some of the more familiar faces; just then, in fact, stepping out of one of the most ornately gilded carriages, drawn by four splendid white horses with golden tassels in their manes and tails, she saw the young Grand Duke Dmitri, her father’s cousin, and his fast friend, Prince Felix Yussoupov, scion of the richest family in Russia.

Rumor had it that the Yussoupovs were even richer than the imperial family, something that Anastasia found impossible to believe. Who could possibly have more than the Tsar? The very thought struck her as rude, even if Felix himself was among the most charming and sought-after young men in all of St. Petersburg.

For well over an hour, the guests assembled in the grand ballroom until, at eight thirty sharp, the Master of Ceremonies banged an ebony staff three times on the marble floor and announced the presence of their imperial majesties. The mahogany doors, trimmed in gold, were thrown open, and Anastasia and her three sisters followed their father and mother into the immense ballroom, lighted by crystal chandeliers. All around them, men in medal-bedecked uniforms and black tailcoats bowed, while the women in billowing silk gowns curtsied with a fluttering sound that reminded Anastasia of flocks of geese taking flight above a field. Gems of every color and size sparkled at the ladies’ necks and ears and adorned their wrists and fingers. A prima ballerina from the St. Petersburg Ballet wore white shoes with heels and buckles made of pavé diamonds.

The orchestra broke into a polonaise, and while her parents went about greeting the guests — her mother wearing that telltale air of distraction that fell over her whenever her son Alexei was suffering from one of his agonizing bouts — Anastasia blushed fiercely and simply did her best not to trip over the hem of her long white dress. Because of the deformity to her left foot, her shoes were specially made for her by the court cobbler in Moscow, but the polished parquet floor was extremely difficult to navigate, and she dreaded taking a spill with every aristocrat in the land on hand to watch. The Grand Marshal of the Court, Count Paul Benckendorff, took her by the arm and proffered a glass of champagne.

Anastasia quickly looked around and said, “What if Mama were to see?”

“What if she does?” the count said with a laugh. The ends of his gray moustache stuck out from his face as straight as a pencil. “It’s New Year’s Eve, and you’re fifteen!”

When she still hesitated, he said, “Drink up!” and, laughing along with him now, she did. (In all honesty, she had sipped champagne several times before, but she knew that her mother still did not approve.) “And reserve the chaconne for me,” he added with a wink before moving off to welcome a party from the British Embassy.

While her older sisters danced, Anastasia looked on, making mental notes of everything she saw, the better to tell her brother Alexei the next morning. The Heir Apparent was sequestered in the royal family’s private apartments, recovering from a nosebleed that had begun with nothing more than a sneeze the day before. But because of his disease, the bleeding would not stop, and Dr. Botkin, in consultation with the best surgeons in St. Petersburg, was still debating whether or not to risk cauterizing the burst blood vessel that had caused it. Every doctor, Anastasia knew well, dreaded being the one who might do the Tsarevitch greater, or grave, harm. As a result, they generally chose to do nothing but wait and watch and pray that each crisis would pass.

Rasputin had, of course, been summoned — indeed, he was due at the ball — but, as often occurred, no one had been able to find him yet. Famous as he was, he also led a secretive private life. Anastasia had heard tales about that, too — some of them quite scandalous — but her mother adamantly insisted that the stories were all a pack of lies, made up by political and personal enemies of the man she called, with reverence and affection, Father Grigori.

By now, there must have been close to a thousand people in the ballroom, and scores of servants were circulating on the perimeter of the dance floor with silver trays of caviar and sliced sturgeon, flutes of champagne and glasses of claret. Massive buffet tables, laden with everything from lobster salad to whipped cream and pastry tarts, were set up in the adjoining chambers. But Anastasia was so enraptured by the beauty of the ball that she longed to sweep around the room to the strains of the mazurka or the waltz. She only trusted herself, however, in the arms of a few, among them the count. When he returned for the chaconne, and wrapped a strong arm around her waist, she knew that he would support her and guide her steps; as they danced she was able to tilt her head back and feel herself briefly transported. The champagne, she thought, was a great help; she should drink it more often. She saw her sisters — Olga and Tatiana and Marie — moving around her, and to her they looked as graceful as swans. Was she forever to feel like the ugly duckling, she wondered — which made it all the more surprising when she saw a hand in a white-leather glove descend upon the count’s shoulder and heard a voice say, “May I intrude?”

The count put his head back, and said, “But I was just hitting my stride, Prince!”

Yussoupov smiled and as the count relinquished his hold, boldly stepped in. Anastasia could hardly believe what was happening. Prince Felix Yussoupov could dance with anyone he liked, anytime he liked. He had dark, wavy hair, and a long, almost feminine face, with dark, soulful eyes. His lashes were longer than any of her own sisters’, and as she looked at them now, closer than she had ever seen them before, she could swear that they had been tinted and curled, and she remembered the gossip she had overheard — that the young prince liked to be seen around town masquerading as a woman, in furs and jewels and silken gowns. She had never known what to make of such tales, especially as he had recently married a celebrated beauty named Irina — who was nowhere in sight at the ball.

As if intuiting her thought, he said, “The Princess Irina’s in the Crimea, at Kokoz.”

No matter how splendid the Yussoupovs’ palace there was — and the accounts of its magnificence were many — Anastasia could not imagine missing the Tsar’s Christmas Ball.

“But I see another guest is missing, too,” he said, as she sailed in his arms across the dance floor. The prince was an even more adept dancer than the count.

“Alexei is asleep,” she said. “He was out hunting all day.” Like the others in the royal family, she had been tutored to conceal the gravity of her brother’s condition.

The prince nodded and smiled, but she understood now that it wasn’t her brother he had been referring to.

“Oh, do you mean Father Grigori?” she said.

For some reason, Yussoupov seemed to find that funny, and laughed. Even his teeth were perfect — small and even and brilliantly white.

“Yes, of course, Father Grigori,” he said, and now she knew he was making fun of her for calling him that. “Our friend Rasputin must be on quite a bender if he’s late to the Winter Palace ball.”

Anastasia was perplexed.

“He’s coming tonight, isn’t he?”

“I should think so,” she replied. But did he think that she oversaw the guest list?

“I ask because you two seem to have a special rapport, n’est-ce pas? Whenever we go out drinking together, the good Father Grigori speaks of your family often — but he talks about you more often than all the others combined.”

That he spoke of them at all was shocking to Anastasia, but she couldn’t help but wonder what it was he said about her. She was secretly flattered. Without her having to ask, Yussoupov obliged.

“He seems to think that you carry what he calls a ‘spark of holy fire.’ And if anyone should know about such stuff as that, it’s Rasputin.”

Anastasia was growing dizzy, though she couldn’t tell if it was from the twirling of the dance, the champagne, or the confusion she felt at the strange turns of the conversation. What did Felix Yussoupov want from her?

“Does he ever speak of me?” he asked.

“Not that I can think of. Why would he?”

“We are the best of friends,” he said, with feigned indignation, “that’s why. But he can have a wicked tongue on him, and I’ve just been curious to know if my name ever came up behind the closed doors of the imperial apartments.” His eyes, deep and dark and penetrating, were staring into hers, and she felt as if a wolf were sizing her up for dinner.

“I think I need to sit down,” she said, suddenly feeling unsteady on her feet.

The prince, without missing a beat, swept her from the floor and onto a gilded divan framed between a pair of floor-length mirrors. Two other ladies quickly moved to make room for their royal addition.

“Forgive me,” the prince said, bowing at the waist with one hand folded behind his back. “I fear my conversation has proved tiresome to Your Royal Highness.” Anastasia still had the sense that he was somehow mocking her. Mocking a grand duchess! “I’m sure our mutual friend will turn up any minute. Wherever the champagne is flowing, Father Grigori cannot be far behind.”

As he retired, the other ladies fluttered their eyes and tried to catch his attention, but to no avail. He was already hailing Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and gesturing toward one of the buffet chambers. And so the ladies set their sights on Anastasia, instead.

“You look very lovely tonight, Your Highness,” one of them gushed, and the other said, “But where has your mother gone to? Her dress was quite beautiful and I was eager to study it more closely.” She leaned closer with a smile and said, “That way I can get a better copy made when I leave for Paris.”

Flattery was something Anastasia, like any member of the royal family, was inured to. Her mother and father had brought her up, as best they could, to ignore it. For an honest opinion, there were family members one could turn to, and certain confidantes and retainers, such as Dr. Botkin, the French tutor Pierre Gilliard, or Anna Demidova, her mother’s maid who had served the Tsaritsa forever and whose loyalty and love were undoubted. And even though Jemmy was just a cocker spaniel, Anastasia knew that the little dog would love her just the same whether she was a grand duchess or a peasant girl. She wished that people could be more like dogs.

A servant offered her another glass of champagne, and with her mother nowhere in sight, she saw no reason not to take it. She was done dancing for the night — her left foot already ached a bit — and she chatted amiably with the two ladies, both of whom turned out to be the wives of ministers of something or other (ministers came and went so routinely that Anastasia never bothered to get their names straight) and began to wonder at her mother’s absence. The Tsar himself was holding court at one end of the ballroom, but it was beginning to dawn on Anastasia that if her mother had already disappeared — and Father Grigori had not shown up at all — there could only be one reason.

Alexei must have taken a turn for the worse.

Excusing herself, she skirted the dance floor, waved good night to Count Benckendorff, and lifting her long skirt a few inches, scurried down one of the vast galleries lined with towering columns of jasper, marble, and malachite. Some late-arriving guests swiftly stopped to bow and curtsy as she passed, then she was hurrying up the main staircase and down several more corridors, decorated with rich tapestries and gloomy oil portraits, until she reached the family’s private quarters in the East Wing. Comprised of only twenty or thirty rooms, most of them overlooking an enclosed park, this was the Romanovs’ sanctuary, the place where they could live a relatively normal, uninhibited, and unobserved life. The Ethiopian guards silently opened the doors as she approached, and just as silently closed them behind her a moment later.

She was running toward her brother’s rooms when she happened to notice that the door to her mother’s private chapel was ajar. Candlelight flickered from within, and when she peered around the open door, she saw Rasputin standing before the altar, surrounded by votive candles and dozens of holy icons — portraits of the Virgin Mary, or various saints, daubed in gold and silver, on resin wood or bronze. He did not hear her as she entered, so absorbed was he in his prayers, and though she did not wish to startle him, she needed to know if her brother was in danger.

“Father Grigori,” she murmured, and as if he had known she was there all along, he said, without turning, “I have comforted the Tsarevitch, and he will live.”

She waited, relieved — what kind of Christmas would this have been if he had not? — and wondering if she should leave the starets to his prayers.

“But my own time is fast approaching,” he said, the candlelight glinting off the pectoral cross.

He turned his head without turning his body, and despite her reverence for the holy man, Anastasia was reminded of a snake sinuously twisting its neck around. His eyes were smoldering in their sockets.

“I shall not live to see the New Year,” he said. “I have written it all down in a letter I have given to Simanovich.”

Simanovich, Anastasia knew, was his personal secretary, a slovenly man who reeked of tobacco juice and sweat.

“But it is for your father to read one day. If I am killed by common assassins, by my brothers the peasants, then you and your family have nothing to fear; the Romanovs shall rule for hundreds of years.” Then he raised a finger in warning, his beard bristling as if with electricity. “But if I am murdered by the boyars — if it is the nobles who take my life — then their hands will be soiled with my blood for twenty-five years. Brothers will kill brothers. If any relation to your family brings about my death, then woe to the dynasty. The Russian people will rise against you with murder in their hearts.”

The blood froze in Anastasia’s veins. She had never heard him speak in such apocalyptic tones, and for the first time she drew back from him in fear.

“That is why you must take this,” he said, grasping the emerald cross on its chain. “You must wear it always.”

He lifted the cross over his head, then draped it over hers, turning it so she could see the back. Their heads were so close she could smell the liquor on his breath and see the dead-white skin beneath the zigzag part in his long black hair. “It was to be my Christmas present to you. Look, my child, look.”

There was an inscription now, but in the flickering light of the votive candles, it was too hard to read.

“See? See what it says?” he implored. “ ‘To my little one.’ ” Malenkaya. “ ‘No one can break the chains of love that bind us.’ ”

It was signed, she could see now, “Your loving father, Grigori.”

“It is time you knew,” he said. “Although I will not be here in body, I shall always be watching over you in spirit. This cross shall be your shield.”

“But why me?” Anastasia said, her voice quavering to her own surprise, “and not the others?” She wished that her mother — or anyone, for that matter — would intrude on the private chapel and break this awful spell she felt being cast. “Why not my sisters? They’re older and”—she hesitated, ashamed, then blurted out what she was thinking—“more beautiful than I’ll ever be.”

Rasputin scoffed and reared back. “You are the one most beautiful in the sight of God,” he said, raising his own gaze toward the stained-glass ceiling.

“But what about Alexei? He’s the one who will rule Russia one day.”

“Hear me,” Rasputin said, before lowering his own voice and eyes. “The blood of your family is poisoned; the Tsarevitch is poisoned. It was matushka who carried the taint.”

He often called the Tsar and Tsaritsa by the traditional endearments matushka and batushka, terms that suggested they were the loving mother and father of their people. And though Anastasia had indeed learned about the curse of hemophilia being hereditary — she had heard her own mother one night wailing in her boudoir that it was she who had brought this suffering upon her son — she had never heard the monk utter anything so blunt and damning.

“This curse you carry in your veins will be your own salvation one day. A plague shall overwhelm the world, but you shall be proof against it.”

Anastasia thought he was babbling now, caught in the throes of some holy trance, and all she wanted was to break away. She deeply regretted ever leaving the ballroom.

“Thank you, Father, for the gift,” she mumbled, touching the cross — it was heavier than she might ever have imagined, and beautiful as it was, she wished that she did not have it. “I should go and look in on my brother now.” She drew back slowly, like a rabbit keeping a stoat in its view.

Rasputin’s gaze did not waver, nor did he move, as she edged toward the door. In his black cassock, framed by the dull glint of the holy icons in the candlelight, he looked like a pillar of smoke.

Not knowing what to say, she murmured, “The blessings of Christmas upon you, Father.”

“Pray for me,” he said.

And then, just as she put her good foot out behind her and stepped from the confines of the chapel, she heard him mutter, “For I am no longer among the living.”

Chapter 14

Perched atop the hard seat of the Zamboni, Nika Tincook wrestled with the sticky gears. The machine was probably thirty years old by now, so a little trouble was only to be expected. Besides, the city budget of Port Orlov did not allow for any new expenditures. No one knew that better than she did.

Wrapped in the beaver-skin coat her grandmother had made for her, topped off with a Seattle Seahawks stocking cap, Nika shoved the gearshift again, and this time it caught. Under the lights of the hockey rink, she steered the old Zamboni in wide, slow sweeps, cleaning and resurfacing the ice. She always found the job relaxing, almost like skating with her hands folded behind her back. No one else was out there — everybody was home making dinner — and she could be completely alone with her thoughts.

Which was all the more reason why she was annoyed at the increasing noise she began to hear. At first, she thought something had gone wrong with the Zamboni again, and she actually bent forward in her seat to hear the motor better, but then she realized the commotion was coming from somewhere farther off. And it was coming fast.

Looking up at the sky, she saw lights approaching — red and white ones — but not spread apart the way they would be on a bush plane. They were concentrated, and two bright beams were searching the ground as the craft got closer. It was a chopper — a long and weirdly articulated one — and as it clattered into view above the town’s community center, she realized with horror that the beams were now moving in her direction and fixing on the rink. She was bathed in a blinding white glow, and a bullhorn started issuing orders from on high.

“Please move the Zamboni off the ice,” the voice announced.

“What the—” But she was already turning the wheel and gunning the engine up to its full ten miles per hour. The racket from the chopper was deafening, and bits of snow and ice skittered every which way across the rink.

As soon as she’d driven down the ramp and into the municipal garage, where the city kept everything from its snowplows to its ambulance, she switched off the engine and raced back outside.

The helicopter, its wheels extended like an insect’s legs, was lowering itself onto the ice that she had just finished polishing. What could this possibly be about? Please God, not another news crew dispatched to recap the Neptune disaster and interview the sole survivor, Harley Vane. Like a lot of people, she didn’t even believe Harley’s account, but the truth, unfortunately, lay somewhere at the bottom of the Bering Sea.

The rotors were turned off, and as they wheezed into silence, the hatchway opened, and a burly man with glasses stepped out. He slipped on the ice and landed with a smack on his rump. Laughing, he was helped up by another man, lean and tall, who guided him toward the steel bleachers. Nika crunched across the hard-packed snow and hollered, “Who are you?”

The two men noticed her for the first time. The tall one had dark eyes, dark hair, and reminded her of long-distance runners she had known — and dated — in college. He moved across the slippery ice with a becoming assurance and agility, but he didn’t reply.

“And who told you,” she went on, “that you could land on our hockey rink?”

Pulling off a glove, he extended his hand. “Frank Slater,” he said, “and sorry about the rink. But we were low on fuel when we saw your lights.”

“Lucky there wasn’t a game on.”

“And I am Vassily Kozak,” the professor said, bowing his head, “of the Trofimuk United Institute of Geology, Geophysics and Mineralogy. It is a part of the Russian Academy of Sciences.”

Now Nika was more puzzled than ever.

“We’re here on some important business,” Slater said, and though she ought to be used to it by now, her back went up at the slight hint of condescension in his voice. Because she was a woman, and young, and, to be fair, had been caught driving the Zamboni, he was just assuming she was some underling.

“I need to talk to the mayor of Port Orlov,” he said, showing her a bulky sealed envelope addressed to the city hall. “Could you show me where to find him?”

“Is the mayor expecting you?” she said, as sweetly as she could muster.

“I’m afraid not.”

“You came all this way, in the biggest chopper I’ve ever seen, without making an appointment?”

“There wasn’t time.”

“Right,” she said, skeptically. “Email is so slow these days.”

The professor was looking around with interest, and he said to them both, “Would you forgive me if I went for a short walk? I would like to stretch my legs.”

“No problem,” Nika said. “It’s hard to get lost in Port Orlov. The street’s that way,” she said, pointing off to one side of the big clumsy buildings, raised on cinder blocks, that comprised the community center. To Slater, she said, “You can follow me.”

They picked their way across the hard, uneven ground and entered the center. Geordie, her nephew, was sitting at a computer console, plowing his way through a bag of potato chips.

“Why don’t you bring us some coffee?” she said. “And knock off the chips.”

She led Slater down the hall, past the community bulletin board covered with ads for craft workshops and used ski gear, and into an office with battered metal furniture and a ceiling made of white acoustical tiles, several of which were sagging.

“Have a seat, Mr. Slater,” she said, shrugging off her coat and hat.

“Actually, it’s Dr. Slater,” he said, in an offhand tone that carried a welcome touch of humility. “I’m here from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, in Washington.”

If she hadn’t guessed already, now she knew that this was a serious matter.

Geordie waddled in with the cups of coffee and a couple of nondairy creamers.

“You can just leave those there,” she said, clearing a space on the desk by shoving stacks of papers around. Slater took off his own coat and put the envelope down on a free corner.

“I should warn you,” he said, “another chopper will be arriving tomorrow morning, so if there’s anyplace in particular you’d like it to land, just let me know.”

At least he was being accommodating, she thought, despite all the mystery. But two helicopters?

“So what’s all this about?” she said.

“It’s best, I think, if any information was disseminated from your own mayor’s office.”

“In that case,” she said, picking up the envelope, and using a whalebone letter opener, “let’s see what we’ve got.”

He started to protest, even raising one hand to take the envelope back, but the smile on her lips must have given her away.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “You’re N. J. Tincook — the mayor?”

She pulled out the folder inside. “Nikaluk Jane Tincook, but most folks just call me Nika. Nice to meet you,” she said, though her eyes were fixed on the official warnings, and top secret clearance stamps, on the cover of the report. The title alone was enough to knock her out of her chair. “AFIP Project Plan, St. Peter’s Island, Alaska (17th District): Geological Survey, Exhumation, Core Sampling, and Viral Analysis Procedures.” And the report attached, she saw from a quick riffle through the pages, must have been sixty or seventy pages long, all of it in dense, single-spaced prose, with elaborate footnotes, indices, charts, and diagrams. The last time she’d had to wade through something like this was in grad school at Berkeley. “You expect me to read this now?” she said. “And make sense of it?”

“No, I don’t,” he said.

“Then why didn’t you send it on in advance?”

“Because, as you’ve seen from the cover clearances, we’re trying to stay under the radar as much as possible.”

“Why?” She was starting to feel exasperated again, and it looked like Dr. Slater could see it. He sipped his coffee, and then, in a very calm and deliberate tone, said, “Let me explain.” She had the sense that he had done this kind of thing many times before, that he was used to talking to people who had been, for reasons he was not at liberty to explain, kept in the dark.

As he laid out the case before her, her suspicions were confirmed. The stuff about the coffin lid and Harley Vane she already knew, just as she knew most of what he told her about the old Russian colony. She had grown up in Port Orlov; everyone there knew that a sect of crazy Russians had once inhabited the island and that they’d been wiped out in 1918 by the Spanish flu. She even knew that the sect had been followers of the mad monk Rasputin, who was said to have bewitched the royal family of Russia, the Romanovs, in the years before the Revolution. But out of politeness, and curiosity about where all this was going, she let him run on. As the grandma who raised her had always said, God gave us only one mouth, but two ears. So listen.

Truth be told, she also liked the sound of his voice, now that he was talking to her like an equal.

“Rasputin’s patron saint was St. Peter,” Slater explained.

And see, she thought, that was something she hadn’t known.

“The coffin lid bore an impression of the saint, holding the keys to Heaven and Hell. That’s one way we knew where it came from.”

“But apart from Harley Vane’s washing up there, nobody’s set foot on that island for years. It’s got a very bad reputation among the locals. How do you know for sure?”

“We did a flyover an hour ago. We could see where the graveyard had given way. The permafrost has thawed, and the cliff is eroding.”

Nika’s phone rang, and she hollered, “Pick it up, Geordie! No calls.”

“That’s why we have to set up an inspection site there, exhume the bodies, take samples, and make sure that there is no viable virus present.”

And it suddenly dawned on her, with full clarity, why this had all been kept so secret. My God, they were talking about doing something that was, first of all, a serious desecration of old graves — the sort of thing her own Inuit people would take a very dim view of — but even worse, they were talking about the potential release of a plague that had wiped out untold millions. That was one lesson that no native Alaskan escaped.

“But why here? Those bodies have been buried for almost a hundred years. Why would you think that they would contain a live virus when there are graveyards all over the globe filled with people who died from the flu?”

“But the bodies there weren’t flash frozen and kept in that state ever since.”

In her mind’s eye, she pictured the woolly-mammoth carcass that had been unearthed, nearly perfectly preserved, when they built the oil and gas refinery just outside town. She was just six years old then, but she remembered staring at it, feeling so sad, and wondering if it had been killed by a dinosaur.

“What about the risk to this town? If there’s a threat a few miles offshore, that’s a lot too close for comfort in my book. Are we going to have to evacuate? And if so, for how long? Who’s going to pay for that, and where are we supposed to go?”

She had a dozen other questions, too, but he held up his hand and said, “Hold on, hold on. It’s all in that report.”

“Thanks very much,” she said, acidly, “but as we’ve already discussed, it’ll take me all night to read that thing.”

“The risk,” Dr. Slater said, “has been calculated to be well within reasonable limits, and just to be on the safe side, we will be proceeding under Biohazard 3 conditions at all times. Any specimens will be taken on and off the island by Coast Guard helicopter. They won’t even pass through Port Orlov. We will only need this town as a temporary staging area. We’ll have assembled, and be gone, by the day after tomorrow. Nobody needs to go anywhere.”

For the moment, she was pacified, but she still wasn’t happy. She had come back to this town in the middle of nowhere because she felt a responsibility to it, and to her native people. She knew the history of their suffering, and she knew the toll those terrible misdeeds continued to take, down to the present day. There wasn’t an Inuit family that didn’t still feel the pain from the loss of their way of life, not a family that wasn’t fractured by depression or alcoholism or drugs. She had made it out, with a scholarship first to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and then the graduate program in anthropology at Berkeley. But she had come back, to be their voice and their defender. Only right now, she wasn’t sure how best to go about it.

The phone rang again, cut short by Geordie picking up down the hall.

“I know I’ve given you a lot to digest,” Slater said, but before she could answer, Geordie hollered, “When you said no calls, did you mean the sanitation plant, too?”

“Yes!” she called back, exasperated.

“But I’d be happy to answer any other questions you have. I know you’ll have plenty more.”

A gust of cold air blew down the corridor, followed by the sound of stamping feet. Professor Kozak leaned in the doorway, his glasses fogged and his face ruddy. “Is anyone hungry? I am hungry enough to eat the bear!”

It was just the note of comic relief that Nika needed. She smiled, and Dr. Slater smiled, too. His face took on a wry, but appealing, expression. She found herself wondering where else he had been before winding up in this remote corner of Alaska. From the weariness that she also saw in his face, she guessed it had been a lot of the world’s hot spots. “I’m not sure they’re serving bear,” she said, slipping the report into her desk drawer, then locking it, “but I know a place that does the best mooseburger north of Nome.”

Chapter 15

Charlie had been in the middle of a webcast, sending out the word from the Vane’s Holy Writ headquarters — and of course soliciting funds so that the church could continue its “community outreach programs in the most removed and spiritually deprived regions of America’s great northwest”—when his whole damn house started to shake.

His wife Rebekah had come running into the room with her hands over her head and her half-wit sister Bathsheba right behind her shouting, “It’s the Rapture! Prepare yourself for the Lord!”

Charlie almost might have believed it himself, except that the sound from on high reminded him so much of a helicopter. Out the window, he could see spotlights whisking back and forth across the backyard and the garage, where he kept his specially equipped and modified minivan.

Whipping around from the Skype camera on his computer, he’d wheeled his chair out of the meeting room and onto the back deck, just in time to see this huge friggin’ chopper moving like a giant dragonfly over his land. It was no more than fifty feet off the ground and looked to him like it was on some kind of close-surveillance mission. For a moment, he wondered if the federal government was sending a black-ops team to take him out; he’d certainly been known to say some inflammatory things about those bastards in Washington. The lighted cross on top of his roof, it suddenly occurred to him, might as well have been a bull’s-eye.

But the chopper moved on, skimming the treetops, then disappearing over the ridge and heading in the general direction of the community center. He listened as its roar gradually decreased, then grabbed his cell phone out of the pocket of his cardigan and called Harley. First he got the automated message, but he called back immediately, and this time Harley, sounding groggy, picked up.

“How the hell did you sleep through that?” Charlie demanded.

“Sleep through what?”

“That helicopter that just about knocked my chimney off.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the military chopper that’s scoping out the town. I bet it’s got something to do with you and that coffin.”

“Charlie, next time you decide to flip out, call somebody else.”

“Don’t you dare hang up,” he warned. “Now get up and get your ass down to the Yardarm and find out what’s going on.” The Yardarm Bar and Grill was the local equivalent of a switchboard.

“Why don’t you go?”

“ ’Cause I’m in the middle of my broadcast.”

Harley laughed. “To who? You really think anybody’s listening out there?”

Charlie did sometimes wonder how many there were, but envelopes containing small checks and five-dollar bills did occasionally show up in his mailbox, so there had to be some. Not to mention the fact that he had two women in his house who had found him over the Web.

“I’m not gonna argue about this,” Charlie said, with the authority that always carried the day. “Get going.”

When he hung up and turned around on the cold deck, Rebekah was standing in the doorway with her hands in the pockets of one of her long dresses. Bathsheba was lurking right behind her, apparently persuaded that the Rapture had been postponed. Their white faces and beaked noses put him in mind of seagulls.

“We lost the connection online,” Rebekah said. “I told you we don’t have enough bandwidth.”

Harley dropped the phone on the mattress and lay there for a while. Why did Charlie always get to call the shots? It couldn’t be because he was in a wheelchair; it had been like this his whole life. Angie had told Harley he should just leave Port Orlov and start over someplace where his brother couldn’t boss him around. And he was starting to think that, dumb as she was, she was right about that much. If this graveyard gig worked out, and the coffins did contain valuable stuff, then that just might be his ticket to the good life in the Lower 48.

He wouldn’t even give his brother his phone number.

Getting up, he stumbled around the trailer, looking for some clean clothes — or clothes that would pass for clean — and ran his fingers through his hair in lieu of a proper brush. The floor was ankle deep in detritus — beer cans, cereal boxes, martial-arts magazines — and all of it was bathed in a faint violet glow from the snake cage on the counter next to the microwave. Glancing in, he saw Fergie curled on the rock, and he said, “You hungry?” He couldn’t remember when he had last fed her, so he opened the freezer and took out a frozen mouse — it was curled up like a question mark in a plastic baggie — and nuked it for about a minute. Once he had left one in too long and the stench had made the trailer unlivable for a week. He’d had to move back home with Charlie and the witches, and that was so creepy he couldn’t wait to get out of there. Bathsheba, in particular, kept turning up outside his door on one dumb pretext or another.

The trailer was parked about a hundred yards off Front Street, between the lumberyard and a place called the Arctic Circle Gun Shoppe. Harley had never asked anybody if he could park it there, and nobody had ever told him he couldn’t. That was one thing that you could say for Alaska — the place was still wide open.

But freezing. Even though the Yardarm was only a few minutes’ walk away, by the time he got there his ears were burning from the cold, and he had to stand in the doorway soaking up the heat. The usual crowd was around, Angie was carrying out a tray of burgers and fries, but some things were different: there were two guys at the bar he had never seen before — real straight-arrow types, still in their Coast Guard uniforms — and over in the far corner, Nika Tincook was at a table with two other men he’d never laid eyes on. Four strangers in one night, in a bar in Port Orlov — that was positively breaking news.

On her way back to the kitchen, Harley snagged Angie by the arm and said, “What’s up?”

“Harley, don’t do that here — the boss is watching.”

But he couldn’t fail to notice that her eyes had flitted in the direction of the two Coast Guard dudes, one of whom had glanced back.

“Who are they?”

“Pilots.”

“I can see that.”

“Were you just handling those dead mice again?” she said, wrinkling her nose. She brushed at the place on her arm where he’d been holding her.

“What are they doing here?”

“You got me. Why don’t you ask them?”

She pulled away and went back through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

Harley, hoping nobody had noticed how she shrugged him off all of a sudden, sauntered over toward the bar and eased himself onto a stool near the Coast Guardsmen. Engrossed in their own conversation, they didn’t acknowledge him in any way.

He ordered a beer and then, leaning toward them, said, “Never seen you guys around town.”

“Just passing through,” the one with the blond crew cut said, but without turning around.

“On that chopper that flew in?”

The red-haired one — who’d been checking out Angie — nodded warily.

“Oh yeah? If you don’t mind my asking, what’s the job?”

“Routine,” the redhead said, and when Harley looked over at the crew-cut guy, he, too, just stared down into his nearly empty mug and said, “Training mission.”

Then they kind of closed up like a clamshell, talking to each other in low tones, and Harley felt like a horse’s ass sitting there on the stool next to them. But he wasn’t about to get up and leave right away because that would make it look even worse. Instead, he sat there and finished his beer, trying to draw the bartender into conversation about the latest Seahawks game. But even Al was too busy to talk.

There was a boisterous laugh from the rear, back near the pool tables, and Harley saw it was from the husky guy in glasses, the one sitting between the tall, thin guy and Port Orlov’s illustrious mayor, Nika. Harley had never had a thing for native chicks — he liked leggy blondes, even if they were fake blondes like Angie — but for Nika, he had often told his pals Eddie and Russell, he would make an exception. She couldn’t have been more than five-three, five-four, with big, dark eyes and hair as black as a seal. But he loved the way she was built — trim and hard, and when the weather was good and she went around town in just a fleece jacket, with her long hair loose and whipping in the wind, he had to admit she got him going.

After putting away one more beer and hanging out by the jukebox like he cared what played next, he meandered back toward the pool tables. Selecting a cue from the rack, he pretended to be checking its tip and its straightness, and then, as if offhandedly, noticed Nika sitting a few feet away. “Hey, Your Honor,” he said, facetiously.

“Harley.”

“Want to run a few balls with me?”

“Another time.”

He was debating what his next move should be when the tall guy, with the remains of a burger and fries on the plate in front of him, saved him the trouble. “Is that Harley as in Vane?” he asked.

“The one and only. Accept no substitutes.”

“Frank Slater,” he said, rising enough to extend a hand. “I’m pleased to meet you. I heard about your ordeal.”

“Yeah, that’s what it was, all right.”

“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” he said, pushing out an extra chair. “I’m a doctor — it’s in our nature.” This was too good to be true, Harley thought, even if Nika did look like she was going to shit a brick. Harley turned the chair around so that he could lean his arms on the back as he sat down.

“This is Professor Kozak,” Slater said.

“Prof.” When they shook, the guy’s grip was like a vise — not like any professor’s that Harley’d ever heard of. Had to be a Russkie.

“I’m glad to see you look completely recovered,” the doctor observed. “No residual effects then?”

“Nah, I’m okay,” Harley said, though if the guy had asked about any mental effects, he could have told him a different story. Every time he closed his eyes, he had a nightmare about being chased by a pack of black wolves, only they all had human faces.

“You know, there’s something called PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder — and it can hit you days, weeks, or even months, after something like what happened to you.”

Harley had seen enough TV shows to know all about it. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard.”

“I just wanted you to keep it in mind,” he said, “and let you know that you should see someone if you start having some problems dealing with the fallout. It would be completely normal if you did.”

Harley snickered. “Yeah, okay. If I start freaking out, I’ll just go and see one of the shrinks we don’t have, at the hospital that doesn’t exist.”

The doc nodded, like he knew he’d just made an ass of himself, but at the same time Harley felt this weird urge to take him up on the offer and get some of this crap off his chest — to tell him about the dreams of the wolves and the sight of somebody with a yellow lantern. It wasn’t like he could confess any of it to Russell or Eddie — they’d just tell him to have another beer — and even Angie would think he was acting like a pussy.

“You mind if I ask you a question now?” Harley said.

“Shoot.”

“What are you doing out here in the armpit of Alaska?” Glancing at Nika, he added, “No offense, Your Honor.”

“None taken. And you can knock off the ‘Your Honor’ stuff.”

He liked that it had gotten to her.

Slater bobbed his head, wiped up some ketchup with the last of his fries, and said, “Just some preparedness drills with the Coast Guard. Better safe than sorry.”

But his eyes didn’t meet Harley’s, and now Harley knew that something pretty big must be up, after all. Charlie’s suspicions were right; he might be an asshole, but he was smart. Harley would give him that.

“By the way,” Slater said, “what ever happened to that coffin lid that you rode to shore like a surfboard? I saw a photo of it in the paper.”

“Why?”

“Just curious.”

“As a doctor?”

Slater’s expression gave away nothing — and everything.

“I was thinking about putting it up on eBay,” Harley taunted. “But if you want to make me a cash offer …”

“Actually,” Slater said, “I was thinking along rather different lines. I was thinking that it doesn’t belong to you, and it ought to go back where it came from.”

“Oh yeah? Where’s that?”

“To the graveyard, on St. Peter’s Island.”

Then Slater looked straight at Harley, no bullshit anymore, and Harley could see he was dealing with more than some doc on a training run. So it was high time that the doc knew who he was dealing with, too.

“Law of the sea,” Harley said. “I found it, it’s salvage, and it’s mine. And no one better fuck with me.” He stood up, pushing off from the chair. “See you around,” he said, before glancing at Nika and adding, “Your Honor.”

“I do not think I would trust that man,” Kozak said, as Harley stalked off. Finishing off his mug of beer, he plunked the glass down on the table and burped softly.

“I think you would be right not to,” Nika said. “Harley and his brother Charlie are both bad news.”

Kozak excused himself to head for the men’s room, and Slater asked her for the full rundown.

“We’d be here all night,” Nika said, “just going through the police blotter.” But she gave him the capsule description of the Vane family and its long history in the town of Port Orlov. He seemed particularly intrigued when she mentioned that Charlie ran an evangelical mission over the Web.

“So that explains the lighted cross above that house in the woods,” he said. “I couldn’t help but notice it from the chopper.”

“X marks the spot.”

“And you think he’s for real?”

That was a tough one, and even Nika was of two minds. “I think he thinks so. But can a leopard really change its spots? Underneath, I’ve got to believe that Charlie Vane is still the same petty crook he’s always been. You can judge for yourself tomorrow.”

“How come?”

“He’s sure to be at the funeral service for the crew of the Neptune II. The whole town will turn out.”

“I’m not sure the professor and I should attend.”

Nika laughed. “You might as well. I mean, if you think your being here is some kind of secret, you’ve never been to a town like Port Orlov. Harley’s probably bragging already about how he told you to stuff it. If he’s lucky, it’ll be a good enough story to get Angie Dobbs back into bed with him.”

“Who’s Angie Dobbs?”

“The town’s most eligible bachelorette,” Nika replied. “The blond waitress over by the jukebox.”

Indeed, Harley was loudly regaling her, and a couple of others, with some tale or other. Slater wryly shook his head.

“It sounds like you’ve got your hands full running this town.”

Nika shrugged; she didn’t want him to think she felt that way. But it was the truth, nevertheless. Port Orlov, like so many Inuit villages in Alaska, was a wreck. With far too few social services and way too many problems, there were times when she felt marooned in the wilderness. Even if the town could just manage to get a decent, full-time medical clinic, it would be a huge step forward, but try finding the money for it, much less a doctor to staff it. For all of her noble intentions, Nika only had two hands and there were only so many hours in the day.

“We make do with what we’ve got,” she finally said.

“Sometimes,” he sympathized, “the satisfaction has to come from knowing you’ve done all that you can. No matter what the odds.”

She had the feeling that he was talking about his own work, too, and she wondered what terrible scenarios he might be revisiting in his mind. He had the look of a man who’d seen things no one should see, done things no one should ever have to have done. And despite their differences — not to mention that fact that they’d gotten off to a bumpy start at the hockey rink — she was starting to feel as if Slater might prove to be a kindred spirit.

In a backwater like this, they weren’t easy to come by.

Chapter 16

“Who do you trust?” Charlie asked, staring into the Skype lens attached to his computer.

“You mean which doctor?” the woman asked, confused. “I don’t know, they’re all so confusing, talking about carcinomas and—”

“Who do you trust?” Charlie broke in, his powerful hands gripping the wheels of his chair.

The woman on the screen visibly drew into herself, shoulders hunched, head down. Her straggly hair looked plastered to her skull.

“Who gives it to you straight?”

“You do?” she ventured, like a student hoping she’d found the right answer.

“Wrong!” he exploded.

She shrank further.

“I’m just the vessel, I’m just the messenger. Jesus gives it to you straight. ‘Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’ Jesus is saying, put your faith in me — all your faith, not just a little bit, not just whatever you think you can spare — but the whole enchilada.”

“I do,” she pleaded, “I do believe in the whole thing, in God, but—”

“No ‘buts’ allowed! God says give it all, and I will return it all, one hundred fold. What’s holding you back?”

She paused. Children’s voices could be heard from another room. “I’m afraid,” she said in a furtive voice. “I’m so afraid.”

Charlie realized he was losing her; he was coming on too strong. This woman was still in the grip of worldly concerns, she was afraid of dying, and she was putting her faith in all the wrong places. He deliberately lowered his voice and adopted a more consoling tone. “I was once like you,” he said, “before God took away the use of my legs. I lived in fear, every day, fear of losing whatever I had — my health, my family, the love of my friends.” Even Charlie had to admit that the love of his friends was a bit of a stretch, but he was on a roll and could be forgiven. “And then, God gave me a good hard slap, he wrapped my canoe around a rock in the Heron River Gorge and stuck me in this wheelchair like he was planting a turnip in the ground.” In the time before the Forestry Service had gotten there to rescue him, Charlie had seen Jesus, as plain as he saw this woman on his computer screen now. He was wearing a long white robe, just like in the pictures, only his hair was long and black and the crown of thorns sparkled, kind of like it was made of tinsel. “And I have been growing ever since. My body has shriveled, but my spirit is as tall as a sequoia.” He had never seen Jesus again, but he knew that that day would come — either in this world, or the next.

Just out of range of the lens, and in a low voice not meant to be picked up by the computer, Rebekah said, “We’re going to be late.” She was standing in the doorway to the meeting room, her coat and gloves already on.

He waved one hand behind him, again too low to be seen, to signal that he had heard her. The woman on the screen was crying.

“I’m not as strong as you,” she murmured. “Between the biopsies and the scans and all the tests, I’m just … exhausted.”

“I hear you, Sister.” He called all of his online parishioners either Sister or Brother. “But God never gives us more than He thinks we can handle.”

“Bathsheba’s waiting in the car,” Rebekah hissed.

“I have to go now. There’s a prayer service in town; they’re waiting for me.” Although he might have given her the impression that he was presiding at the prayer service, which wasn’t exactly true, he hadn’t lied, either. There was a service — the memorial for the crewmen who had drowned on the Neptune II—but the only reason they’d be waiting for him was because he was planning to pick up his brother, Harley, who was supposed to offer some remarks. Charlie had already written them out for him.

“God be with you, Sister,” he concluded. “If you don’t abandon Him, He won’t abandon you. Never forget that.”

“I try not to.”

“PayPal,” Rebekah urged in a low voice from the doorway.

“Right,” Charlie said, so wrapped up in his divine mission that he had almost forgotten the Lord’s instructions to find the means to spread the word. “And don’t forget to send in your tithe via PayPal.”

The woman nodded, blowing her nose into a wadded-up ball of Kleenex.

“Bless you, Sister.”

“Bless you,” she said, before signing off.

Rebekah, sighing in exasperation—“You must think this place runs on prayers instead of money!”—wheeled him down the ramp to the garage, then helped as he hoisted himself into the driver’s seat of the blue minivan. His upper-body strength was still good. While Rebekah stowed the chair in the back, Bathsheba huddled over a book. If Charlie asked her what she was reading, she would claim it was Scripture, but more than once, it had turned out to be one of those Twilight books about vampires and such. Charlie had had to chastise her severely.

The service was scheduled for noon, and Charlie knew that Harley would barely be up in time. He backed the car out of the garage, using the array of rotary cable hand controls that allowed him to drive without having to use his feet on the gas or brake pedals; it was all done by twisting the specially installed shift on the steering wheel. The driveway was long and bumpy, and the main road wasn’t much better.

“I don’t like you talking to that woman so much,” Rebekah said.

It took a second for Charlie even to figure out who she was talking about.

“She’s just calling for sympathy,” Rebekah went on.

“She’s dying, for Christ’s sake.”

“That’s no excuse. We all die.”

“She’s part of my flock.”

“Then shear her and be done with it.”

Bathsheba tittered in the backseat, and Charlie glanced in the rearview mirror.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.”

After they’d moved in with him, it had taken Charlie a few days before he realized that Bathsheba wasn’t just shy — she was actually a bit slow. Her older sister looked after her.

Still, he needed help around the house, and even more help running the Vane’s Holy Writ website and church. Rebekah had a lot of business sense, and Bathsheba could be entrusted with the simple housekeeping chores and such. Beyond that, however, she could be a problem. “We’re not going to have any trouble today, are we?” he asked over his shoulder.

Bathsheba pretended not to know what he was referring to.

“No fits? No antics?” The last time they’d set foot in the Lutheran Church, which served as the all-purpose house of worship for Port Orlov, Bathsheba had claimed to be assailed by devils. Raised in a tiny fundamentalist, Northeastern sect that had splintered off the mainstream a hundred years ago, the two women had arrived in Port Orlov with some pretty well-established, if unorthodox, ideas. But Charlie chalked up incidents like that last one to those damn books Bathsheba read. Thank God the town library, housed in the community center, consisted of about three shelves of tattered Reader’s Digest books.

“Don’t you worry about my sister,” Rebekah said sharply. “You take care of that brother of yours.” Indeed, he was planning to do just that; he had a very full agenda for both Harley and those two screw-loose friends of his, Eddie and Russell.

They drove in silence until they reached the outskirts of the town, then turned onto Front Street, pulling in between the lumberyard and the gun shop. The trailer still rested on the rusty steel hitch, a foot off the ground.

“Go get him,” Charlie said to Rebekah, and she said, “It’s cold out. Just honk the horn.”

Obedience, Charlie thought, would be the theme for his next video sermon.

He honked, and watched as the window blind was raised. He could see the outline of Harley’s head, framed by the pale violet glow of the snake tank. Charlie had never actually been inside the trailer, but Rebekah had been, and she’d filled him in on the gory details.

The door opened and Harley stumbled down the steps, still zipping his coat. His hair looked wet from the shower. He climbed into the backseat next to Bathsheba, who stashed her book out of sight. Charlie looked back and said, “Show me the speech you’re going to make.”

“What speech? I’m just gonna say a couple of things and sit down as fast as I can.”

“I thought you’d say that.” Charlie fished some typewritten notes out of his coat pocket. “Read these over on the way. It’s what you’re going to say.”

Harley grudgingly took the paper and studied it as Charlie drove. Charlie rather fancied his own way with words — over the years he had been able to talk his way out of more than one rap, including armed burglary and assault — and even if he couldn’t be the one declaiming them, it would be his words spoken from the pulpit of the town church.

With his handicapped sticker, Charlie was able to park the van right beside the front stairs. Rebekah pushed his chair up the ramp. Just inside, not far from the plaque that listed all the fishermen who had been lost at sea in the past hundred years, there were bulletin boards covered with the names and photos of the newly dead. Lucas Muller. Freddie Farrell. Jonah Tasi, the Samoan. Buddy Kubelik. Old Man Richter. It said here that the old man’s first name was Aloysius. No wonder he never used it. The photos showed the men holding up fish they’d caught, or crouching over dead elk, or hoisting beer mugs at the Yardarm. Some people had tacked on little notes and cards saying good-bye.

As Charlie’s wheelchair was maneuvered down the aisle, the other people seemed to take quick notice of him, then turn away. Charlie knew that his entourage made something of a spectacle, and he liked that. This town had always been too small for him and his ambitions, but it wasn’t until the accident — and his being saved — that he’d found the message, and the means, to make himself heard around the world. Vane’s Holy Writ wasn’t a powerful force yet, but he had every confidence that one day it would be. In His own good time, the Lord would show him how.

Rebekah stopped the chair beside the very front pew, and Charlie was pleased to see that the mayor and a couple of men beside her — one of whom looked like a Russkie — had to scoot down to make room for them. These must be the guys from the chopper, and Charlie was happy to catch a glimpse of them. Know your enemy, that’s what he’d always said. And the Lord, he felt sure, would have no quarrel with common sense. That was where a lot of people went wrong, in his view; they thought the Lord wanted you to act like some Simple Simon, to go around expecting the best of everybody and trusting them like some dumb dog. What a load. The Lord wanted you to use your God-given wits to aid Him in His cause — and Charlie had never come up short in that department.

But speaking of which … the Right Reverend Wallach, a worthless milquetoast who couldn’t stir a bowl of Cheerios much less a congregation, ascended to the pulpit with a Bible in one hand and in the other a white life preserver from the Neptune II, which he hung from a hook attached to the lectern. It was not the first time the hook had been used for that purpose, nor would it be the last. The Bering Sea wasn’t getting any kinder.

“We are gathered here today,” the reverend said, “in remembrance of the good men who lost their lives doing what they did so well, and with such joy.”

Ten seconds in, and Charlie had already nearly guffawed. Anybody who thought crabbers did it for the fun of it was out of his mind. It was just about the worst work in the world. He’d done it for years, before the first Neptune went down, and hadn’t missed it for a single minute since. Extending his ministry was what he lived for now, and to that end he would do whatever he had to. Or, more to the point, whatever Harley, and his pals Eddie and Russell, had to do. Before the service, he’d spotted those other two losers smoking a joint outside.

Harley had already broached the subject of the job to them, so Charlie wasn’t going to have to waste a lot of time on persuasion. Getting onto St. Peter’s Island, and digging up graves that might still be sealed in the permafrost, was going to require a lot of hard work. What bothered Charlie was that he’d let this potential gold mine sit there, right under his nose, his whole life. Was it Providence that had finally opened his eyes? If there was more treasure where that emerald-embossed cross had come from, he was finally going to have the resources to do whatever he wanted. He’d be able to flood the whole planet with the holy word. Jesus might have put the stash in his way for that very reason.

And who knew how much of it there might be?

Ever since he’d found the cross in Harley’s anorak, he’d been digging through Internet sites, ordering books and downloading monographs, even posing as a professor at the University of Alaska in order to call up a couple of experts on Russian history and grill them. And everything he’d learned — like the fact that the colony was founded by a batch of fanatical Siberians who had settled on the island between 1910 and 1918—only whetted his appetite more.

“We are going to hear today from members of the lost men’s families,” the reverend was droning on. “And also from the captain of the unfortunate vessel capsized on that fateful night, for he alone lived to tell the tale.”

And a tale it would be, Charlie thought.

“Let us begin,” the reverend said, “with Mr. Muller, the father of the youngest crewman, Lucas.”

As Muller, who ran a hardware supply store, stepped solemnly to the pulpit, Charlie tapped his fingers impatiently on his knees. He was still pondering his latest findings. Turns out, these Siberians had been followers of the mad monk, Rasputin, the one who had bewitched the last Tsar and Tsaritsa of Russia. The Romanovs. Some of this stuff had come back to him from school — you couldn’t grow up in Alaska and know nothing about the Russians who lived right across the strait — but what he hadn’t known about was the Romanov jewels. He hadn’t known that the Tsar and his family had owned one of the most astonishing collections of jewelry the world had ever seen.

And that a lot of it was still missing to this day.

“My boy never failed at anything he put his mind to,” Mr. Muller was saying. “He was smart as a whip and worked as hard as any man I ever knew.”

Charlie knew that the blame for the shipwreck had been attributed to Lucas’s piloting of the boat, and he guessed that this was the father’s way of redeeming his son’s reputation. He hoped that Harley wouldn’t decide to ad-lib and rub any salt in that wound.

As Muller yielded the pulpit to the Samoan sailor’s mother, Charlie went over the list in his mind again — the endless array of tiaras and necklaces, earrings and bracelets, gilded crosses and enameled eggs — eggs, made by some jeweler named Fabergé—that had comprised the royal collection. The Tsaritsa, infatuated with her holy man from the steppes, had given him lavish presents, and there were even rumors that she had become his mistress. But who would ever know, or give a damn, about that now? All that mattered to Charlie was the obvious value of the cross — and the fact that it had been found on the island. If the cross was there, the rest of the missing Romanov jewels might be there, too.

The Samoan’s mother had given way to Farrell’s sister, and then to an engineering buddy of Old Man Richter, and it was finally time for Harley, who slouched to the pulpit like a man about to be hanged. Charlie wanted to holler at him to straighten up, but he was relieved to see him take out the comments Charlie had written for him and start reading.

Rebekah nodded approvingly, and glanced over at Charlie with her beady, hard eyes. Bathsheba had put down whatever trashy book she’d brought and was actually paying some attention.

“Mankind is forever caught in the crosshairs of God’s grace,” Harley was saying — a line Charlie was particularly fond of. “Belief is the path that we all must take. That path will lead us through the trials and tribulations of life, and protect us from the many evils and the countless plagues that assail us. Even as I clung to the lid of that coffin, I trusted in God to deliver me to shore.”

Charlie knew that God was probably the last thing on Harley’s mind that night, but it sure sounded good. Harley then read Charlie’s account of all the other deeply religious revelations he’d had as he fought his way through the freezing sea — full of doubts and fears — before landing on the shore, where his faith had finally deposited him.

“I only wish that I had been able to save my fellow crew members who had shared in that awful voyage with me,” he concluded. “But I do know now that they are all resting, safe and dry, in God’s loving hands.”

When he wrapped up, Charlie wanted to applaud, or maybe even proclaim in some way that those were his words, but he just didn’t see how to do it gracefully. The mayor got up next — big surprise — and made some remarks that she probably thought would help get her elected again (as if anybody in his right mind would want the job, anyway) before the Reverend Wallach recited the Lord’s Prayer, and announced that hot drinks and refreshments were now being served in the annex.

“I do okay?” Harley shuffled over to ask his brother. He stuffed the paper into the back pocket of his jeans.

“You mumbled some of the lines, but yeah, it was fine.”

“You’re supposed to make eye contact,” Rebekah put in.

“I didn’t ask you.”

“Well, if you’d been smart, you would have.”

There was no love lost, Charlie knew, between his brother and Rebekah. Until the sisters had shown up, Harley had lived in the old family homestead, too, but once the women had taken over, Harley, and his pet snake, had been none too subtly eased out the door.

“I thought you did good,” Bathsheba said shyly.

“Where are the idiots?” Charlie asked, and Harley, knowing exactly who he was referring to, looked around the emptying church. “Over in the annex, I guess.”

“Get them and meet me out at the van.”

Rebekah wheeled him back outside, then went to join her sister at the refreshment tables. Charlie knew the two sisters would be about as welcome there as ants at a picnic.

A few minutes later, Harley showed up with Eddie and Russell. Their hands were so filled with donuts and bagels and cardboard cups of coffee they didn’t know how to get the van’s doors opened. Finally, Harley put his own cup on the hood of the car and slid open the side door. Charlie wondered to himself how these three would ever be able to accomplish anything more complicated.

But it was his job to make sure they did.

“What’s the word?” he asked as they settled into the backseats. “Have you got a boat?”

The three of them exchanged baffled looks before Eddie volunteered that he could probably make off with his uncle’s boat for a few days. “But I might have to throw him a few bucks if he finds out.”

“Throw him a six-pack and he’ll never find out anything,” Russell said.

“You boys have got to get onto that island by tomorrow,” Charlie said.

“And do what?” Russell asked, crumbs spilling from his mouth. He had the look, Charlie thought, of a cow chewing its cud.

“Get the jewels before these government guys get there.”

“Who says they’re even going there?” Eddie asked.

Charlie took a second to calm himself, then said, “They don’t do surveillance runs over places they don’t plan to go. And they don’t give my brother, Harley, here grief about that coffin lid if they’re not planning to look for the rest of it themselves.”

“But they’re gonna have all this equipment and shit,” Eddie said.

“That’s why you’re going to get there first, and land on the leeward side of the island,” Charlie explained. “As far from the beach as you can get.”

“There’s nowhere else to put in,” Eddie replied.

“A big boat, no, but your uncle’s trawler draws under six feet. You can get it into a cove. And of course you’ll have to wait until dark.” These days, darkness was falling sooner and sooner in the afternoon. “You can’t light any fires, either. When the feds do come, you don’t want them smelling your smoke or spotting the campsite. A cave would be good. Find a cave.”

“For how long?” Eddie whined.

“As long as it takes,” Charlie replied. “And bring some guns.”

“Guns?” Russell said, finding his voice again. “I’m not shooting it out with a bunch of Coast Guardsmen. Two years at Spring Creek was plenty for me.”

“Wolves,” Charlie said. “The island’s got wolves, in case you haven’t heard.”

“Oh.”

Some of the townspeople were filtering out of the annex now, pulling on hats and gloves. Geordie Ayakuk, eating a hot dog, had on neither. These natives had natural blubber, Charlie thought — another sign of God’s mysterious handiwork.

The two sisters appeared in the throng, coming toward the van, and it was as if Harley and his cronies had seen a ghost.

“Okay then,” Eddie said, hastily unlatching the side door and sliding it open. “I better get going.”

“Me, too,” Russell said, spilling out after him.

Harley remained in the front passenger seat. With a dubious expression, he said, “How long do you really think this is going to take?”

“It all depends.”

“On what?”

“On how fast you can dig.”

Rebekah was now standing by the car door, plainly waiting for Harley to give up the front seat to her.

“I’ll drop you off at your trailer,” Charlie said, “and you can get started on the packing.”

But Harley took one look at Bathsheba — eager to share a ride in the backseat with him — and said, “Forget it — I’ll walk.”

Chapter 17

As the van pulled away, Harley put up the collar on his parka and trudged down Front Street in a biting wind. It was only midday, but the clouds were thick and the light was already fading from the sky. Everything around him — the smattering of storefronts, the crooked totem pole, the rusted-out trucks with the monster tires — was bathed in a dull pewter-colored glow, like it was all contained under some overturned bowl. What would it be like, he wondered, to see hot sunlight on palm trees and walk around in nothing but a T-shirt and shorts?

And what would Angie Dobbs look like with a real tan, not that lobstery color she sometimes got when she’d been to the tanning parlor in Nome?

Both the Arctic Circle Gun Shoppe and the lumberyard were closed because of the funeral service, and apart from the violet glow from the snake tank filtering through the slats of his blind, his trailer, too, lay dark and silent at the end of the alleyway between them. The Rottweiler in the gun shop barked ferociously as he passed by, and threw itself against the chicken-wire screen in the window.

“Shut the fuck up,” Harley said, as he went to the storage shed behind the lumberyard. There was a padlock on the door, but Harley knew that the owner had lost the keys so many times he didn’t bother to lock the damn thing anymore. Besides, what was there to steal, apart from the few shovels and picks that were precisely what Harley was after? They probably wouldn’t even be missed before he was back from the island with what he hoped would be the jewels in hand.

The jewels that would buy him his first-class ticket to Miami Beach.

Cracking the metal doors open just enough to slink inside, Harley groped for the string attached to the lightbulb in the ceiling. The whole fixture swayed, throwing shadows over the already gloomy interior. There were piles of rotting boards, a couple of broken-down lathes, sagging sawhorses littered with tools. Toward the back, leaning up against the wall like a bunch of drunks, he saw the shovels and spades and iron pickaxes that they’d need to dig up the graves and crack open the coffins. Just looking at them made his arms ache, and he reminded himself to make sure that Eddie and Russell did most of the hard labor. He was the foreman on this job, and the foreman’s job was to oversee things. He could already anticipate the shit he was going to get from the other two.

Skirting a wheelbarrow with a missing wheel, he started to rummage around among the shovels, looking for the ones best suited to the job. He’d need at least one with a broad flat blade in case the snow came down hard, and a couple more with sharper, firmer ends for penetrating the soil. Chisels would be good, too; they could be driven into the ground like stakes and, if placed well enough, Eddie and Russell might be able to remove whole slabs of earth, virtually intact, all at once.

The wind was blowing so hard at the metal doors that one of them banged shut again, and Harley jumped at the sound. The hanging light fixture swung from the ceiling like a pendulum, and Harley wished the damn thing had a higher-wattage bulb in it. Everything in the room cast a weird shadow around the corrugated metal walls, and for one split second Harley thought he caught a glimpse of something moving behind him, as if it had just entered the shed.

Could the damn dog have been let loose? He stood stock-still, waiting, but he didn’t see anything skulking along the ground, among the planks and chain saws. And if he listened carefully, as he was doing now, over the sound of the wind he could hear the Rottweiler howling in the gun shop next door, right where she belonged.

But howling like she was freaking out over something.

Harley didn’t understand the point of dogs. As far as he was concerned, they were just failed wolves — and you could shoot the whole lot of them, for all he cared.

He went back to picking his tools — he didn’t want to spend all day in here, since what he was doing might, technically, be called stealing if the owner caught him at it — but stopped when he thought he heard something moving again, on just the other side of a tall stack of boards.

“Hey,” he said. “Somebody in here?”

But there was no reply.

“McDaniel?” he said, thinking it might be the owner of the lumberyard trying to catch him red-handed. “That you? It’s Harley.”

Still no answer, but definitely the sound of a footfall.

“I just needed to borrow a shovel to clear the ice off my trailer hitch. Hope that’s okay.” But knowing the reputation the Vane boys had around town, he added, “I was gonna put it right back as soon as I was done.” And for once, Christ, it was almost the truth.

With a spade still in his hands, he crept gingerly to the end of the pile, expecting maybe to see McDaniel, or even that Inuit kid who worked as his assistant, but what he saw instead, going in and out of the light, was more like some scrawny scarecrow. At first he even thought it might be a mannequin.

But then it blinked.

“Who the fuck are you?” he said, but even as he asked, he recognized him.

The wet brown hair, hanging down onto the gray tunic with the banded collar. The long black sealskin coat. The big dark eyes, the petrified skin, the yellow teeth protruding from the drawn lips.

It was the body from the coffin he’d found in the nets.

And as he looked on in horror, the creature extended his hand, as if expecting to be given something.

“What do you want?” Harley said, backing up but clutching the spade for dear life. “Get the fuck out of here!”

The young man opened his mouth — and Harley could swear that, even from ten feet away, he got a gust of the foulest air he had ever smelled — and said something in what sounded like Russian. But Russian spoken as if by someone still in the act of drowning, the words gurgling and slurred.

Harley lifted the spade and cocked it back over one shoulder, like a baseball bat.

“Don’t come any closer!”

He could hear the Rottweiler next door going crazier than ever, and for once he did wish the damn dog had gotten loose.

The man repeated whatever he’d said, and even lifted a hand — the fingers were nothing but stark white bones, with long, curling nails — and touched an area of his chest.

Right about where the emerald cross had hung.

Jesus Christ. If Harley had had it on him, he’d have thrown the damn thing right back at him.

“I don’t have it!” he shouted. And then, as if it would make any sense, “Charlie’s got it!”

But the man didn’t look like he understood a word of English, and when he took a step forward, Harley found himself backed up against the rear wall of the shed. He brandished the spade, but the man took no apparent notice. He came closer and Harley swung the spade at him, catching him on the shoulder and flinging him like a bundle of sticks and rags into a pile of loose timbers and shavings.

Screaming, Harley leapt over the spot where he had been standing, and with the spade still clutched in his hand, ran toward the door, knocking the wheelbarrow over on its side, then out into the alleyway. The Rottweiler was going crazy, barking in a frenzy and foaming at the window. Looking over his shoulder, Harley suddenly collided with something, or someone, and went sprawling on the ground.

Standing above him, looking pissed and confused, was McDaniel.

“What the hell are you up to, Harley?” His eyes flicked to the spade. “You planning to shovel my driveway?”

“I just needed to borrow this,” Harley said, still trying to catch his breath and keeping an eye on the open doors to the shed. Was the damn thing going to come out after him?

“Borrow it?” McDaniel said. “Yeah, right.”

He stomped into the shed before Harley could stop him, and after a minute or so, Harley saw the light go out and McDaniel came out again, none the worse for wear.

“You need to borrow some tools,” he said, “all you have to do is ask.”

“Got it,” Harley said, standing on his own two feet now. But what had happened to that corpse in the sealskin coat? Had McDaniel missed it somehow? Or was it just … gone?

“That was a pretty good speech you made in the church.”

Was it ever there in the first place? Harley wondered if he was losing it.

“Now don’t go fucking things up by stealing stuff again.”

Harley nodded, and shuffled off toward his trailer, leaving the spade propped by the steps. His hands were so cold and unsteady he had trouble getting the key in the lock. And when he did finally turn to close the door behind him, he saw McDaniel still watching him and shaking his head.

Chapter 18

Tonight, Prince Felix Yussoupov thought, I am going to change everything. Not only the way the world regards me, but history itself.

Oh, he was well aware of the figure he cut in cosmopolitan society. For years, he had deliberately gone about shocking everyone he knew — showing up in the finest women’s fashions and draped in his mother’s jewels, at cafés and restaurants and parties. He had hosted wild parties — orgies, to be frank — at one or another of his family’s many palaces in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or the countryside. He had enjoyed the favors of girls and boys alike, actresses and opera singers and dashing young sailors. And to cap it all off, he had married one of the Tsar’s own nieces, the Princess Irina, celebrated for her unparalleled beauty. In truth, he thought he was just as good-looking as she was, but she was a very sought-after match, and together he had to admit that they made a perfect pair.

Tonight, however, the princess was safely ensconced hundreds of miles from St. Petersburg, in the grand Yussoupov hunting lodge in the Crimea. He wanted her nowhere near the Moika Palace tonight, on this fateful New Year’s Eve. It was enough that she had served as bait for the trap.

Yussoupov had promised Rasputin that if he came to the palace at midnight, there would be a private party at which the monk would be introduced, at long last, to this famous beauty. “The princess has heard so much about you,” Yussoupov told him, “she insisted that I arrange for her to meet you in person.” The man’s rapacity was exceeded only by his vanity. “I have promised her you would be there.”

The prince had sent his own motorcar — the black Bentley with the family crest on the doors — to pick up Rasputin and bring him to the palace. Checking his gold pocket watch, he saw that the car should be arriving any minute. From the upper floor, he could hear the gramophone playing “Yankee Doodle Dandy”—a very popular tune among Russian society these days — and the sound of his coconspirators’ voices, simulating the merriment of a party in full swing.

Snow was falling on the flagstones of the court outside and sticking to the thin sheet of ice that covered the canal beyond the gates. Downstairs, in the vaulted chambers where the deed was to be done, all was in readiness. The dainty cakes, laced with cyanide, were arrayed on silver salvers. The Madeira, also poisoned, was decanted and waiting only to be drunk. And when Yussoupov saw Dr. Lazovert, disguised as a chauffeur, pilot the car through the iron gates, he stepped outside to greet his guest.

“Welcome!” he shouted, throwing open his arms, as Rasputin disembarked.

“Felix!” Rasputin replied, grasping him in a bear hug.

For the mad monk, he was positively presentable tonight. Yussoupov could tell the man had bathed — the scent of cheap soap clung to his skin — and he was wearing an intricately embroidered silk blouse and black-velvet trousers. Even his leather boots were shined and clean.

But the pectoral cross that usually dangled around his throat, its emeralds reputedly imbued with some mystical powers of enchantment — for how else could a brute like this have risen to such eminence and power? — was nowhere visible. Yussoupov took it as a stroke of luck, like entering the lists against an opponent with a broken lance.

Cocking his head at the noise from the upper windows, Rasputin said, “You’ve started the merriment without me!”

But the prince was already guiding him into the vestibule and away from the main staircase. Rasputin resisted, and Yussoupov had to whisper, “The princess will join us downstairs, for our own party, later.”

“What’s wrong with that one?” Rasputin said, with a glint of indignation in his eye.

“It’s a rather stuffy affair,” Yussoupov said, urging him again toward the stairs to the cellar. “Several of those troublemakers from the Duma are there.”

“I’m not afraid of them!” Rasputin said. “They can rail about me all they want! I eat politicians for breakfast.”

“But we have something far better waiting for you.”

Reluctantly, Rasputin allowed himself to be led down the winding stairs to the vaulted rooms below. A roaring fire had been set in the hearth, and the air had been perfumed with incense. Grand Duke Dmitri, standing nervously by the bar, held up a glass of champagne and echoed the welcome from their host.

Rasputin looked mollified by his presence. He was an interesting mix, this so-called holy man — one moment a man of the people, speaking for the peasants, and the next a craven adventurer, eager to find favor with the nobles whom he pretended to despise. One thing Yussoupov did know was that Rasputin had become a liability to the aristocracy; with the Tsaritsa completely in his thrall, he was able to make or break the fortunes of anyone at court. And he had begun to use that influence, more and more, to meddle in affairs of state — and even to influence the course of the war. With Rasputin trying to second-guess everything from the military’s strategy to the Tsar’s choice of ministers, it was plain to patriots like Prince Felix and the Grand Duke Dmitri that something had to be done.

And tonight, they would do it. When the news got out, the prince was certain that he would be miraculously transformed in the public mind from notorious, rich wastrel to the Savior of Mother Russia.

“We’ve made your favorites,” Dmitri said, proffering the platter of cakes that Rasputin normally adored, but to his and Felix’s consternation, the starets declined them. He wandered around the room, passing under the stone arches and admiring the objets d’art that filled the glass vitrines. The granite floors were covered with thick Persian carpets and a white bearskin rug, the bear’s head still attached and fangs bared.

“Music!” Yussoupov said, clapping his hands, and Dmitri picked up a balalaika and began to strum. Rasputin began to wave his hand in time to the music, then slumped onto a carved divan. On the table beside him, the cakes beckoned, and as Yussoupov pretended not to notice, Rasputin idly picked one up and gobbled it down.

Dr. Lazovert, who had personally ground up the potassium cyanide and sprinkled it into each pastry, had sworn that death would be nearly instantaneous.

Even Dmitri slowed his strumming to watch.

But Rasputin simply grinned, and said, “Again! And play something more cheerful this time!”

The prince looked on in wonder as the monk picked a crumb from his bushy beard and ate it.

Along with a second cake.

Dmitri’s fingers fumbled at the strings of the instrument. Yussoupov waited with bated breath. Rasputin appeared unaffected.

“Perhaps our guest would enjoy some wine,” Dmitri said, a telltale quaver in his voice, and Yussoupov, as if waking from a bad dream, quickly went to fetch the decanter. Filling a crystal goblet with Madeira, he held it out to the reclining monk.

“You want me to drink alone?” Rasputin said, taking the glass, and the prince, feigning amusement, returned to the bar and poured himself a generous snifter of brandy, instead.

“To the New Year!” he said, raising his glass.

“To the beautiful Princess Irina!” Rasputin bellowed, as the clock in the corner struck the hour. “Is she ever planning to join us down here?” He downed the glass of Madeira, wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, then held out his glass for more. The prince nearly staggered as he fetched the bottle and refilled the glass.

Was it possible, he began to wonder? Could this creature — this filthy monk from the wastelands of Siberia — truly be some sort of prophet? Even without the pectoral cross, was he invulnerable, watched over by some divine Providence, as he had so often and grandly proclaimed?

The Grand Duke Dmitri, pleading a sudden headache, dropped the balalaika on an ottoman and fled up the winding stairs in terror. Rasputin stirred himself on the couch, then abruptly stood. Thank God, Yussoupov thought, the man was at least weaving on his feet. He ambled like a bear toward one of the vitrines, the one that held a rock-crystal crucifix fashioned in sixteenth-century Italy, and studied it through the glass.

Yussoupov was at his wit’s end. As a last resort, he had hidden a Browning revolver in an ebony box behind the bar, and with shaking hands he retrieved it now, and stepped behind the monk.

“Feel free to take the crucifix out of the case,” he said, but Rasputin seemed content to leave it where it was. Instead, his hands went to his gut and began to massage his belly.

“You might be wise to hold it,” the prince said, his tone more determined than before, “and say a prayer.” Yussoupov could see Rasputin’s face reflected in the glass, just as the monk could see his own.

Rasputin suddenly gagged, and putting out a hand toward the cabinet, said, “You have poisoned me.”

Yussoupov did not reply. Instead, he raised the gun, his hand trembling, aimed it squarely at Rasputin’s back, and fired once.

For several seconds, Rasputin did not move or even flinch. The prince tried to fire again, but his finger was so slick with sweat it slid off the trigger. Slowly, the monk turned around, his blue eyes now blazing with rage, before he toppled over, falling flat on the bearskin rug.

Yussoupov heard footsteps on the stairs, and when he turned he saw Grand Duke Dmitri, Dr. Lazovert, and another conspirator, Purishkevich, all staring at the gun hanging from his hand, and then at the body lying prostrate on the floor. The monk lay still, his eyes closed, but there was no sign of any blood. Dr. Lazovert cautiously approached, took Rasputin’s pulse, and declared him dead.

“Good, then let’s wrap him up in something and get him out of here,” Purishkevich, the oldest and most levelheaded among them, said, looking all around the vaulted cellars.

How had they not thought through this part of the plan, Yussoupov berated himself.

“Upstairs,” Purishkevich declared. “We’ll use the blue curtains from the drawing room.”

As the others all too eagerly raced back up the stairs, Yussoupov was left alone again with the corpse. He slumped into an armchair, dropping the revolver on the carpet. He had expected to be overcome with emotion, to be brimming with a sense of triumph. But there was none of that. His hands were still shaking, and his ears were ringing from the clamor of the shot.

A spark flew from the hearth, landing only inches from the monk’s outstretched boot.

Which twitched.

The prince’s breath stopped in his throat, and as he studied the monk’s face, he saw first one eye open, then the other. And before he could even jump up from his chair, Rasputin was back on his feet, spittle flying from his snarling lips, his hands tearing at Yussoupov’s clothing.

“You murderer!” the monk said, as his fingers clenched around the prince’s neck. They were both being dragged to the floor, but the prince was able to break free and run for the stairs, screaming for help.

“Murderer!”

Rasputin was close behind him, scrambling up the winding steps like an animal on all fours. Yussoupov could hear him panting and felt his hands grasping at the hem of his trousers.

“He’s alive! He’s alive!” he shouted running into the drawing room and slamming the doors closed behind him. Purishkevich and the others, gathering up the torn curtains, looked slack-jawed with disbelief. “He’s still alive!” Yussoupov repeated, barring the doors with his back.

“It can’t be,” Dr. Lazovert said. “He had no pulse.”

“You shot him,” Dmitri said. “You shot him in the back.”

“He’s been poisoned ten times over,” Lazovert added.

“But he’s escaping!” the prince screamed. “Even now!”

“This is impossible,” Purishkevich said, dismissively, but at the same time drawing a pistol from beneath his waistcoat. “Get out of the way.”

Pushing the prince aside, he strode out into the hallway with the gun drawn. A trail of blood led toward the marble vestibule, and a cold wind was blowing into the palace through the open doors. Yussoupov, cowering behind him, pointed outside and said, “You see? You see?”

Slipping and sliding in the falling snow, the monk was making his way inexorably across the courtyard and toward the main gates, which fronted onto the canal.

“Murderers!” Rasputin was shouting. “The Tsaritsa shall hear of this! You are murderers!”

“Kill him!” Yussoupov was screaming. “Before he gets away!”

But even as Purishkevich stepped forward and fired, Yussoupov jostled his arm and the bullet clanged off the iron gates.

“Shoot him!” Yussoupov cried, and Purishkevich, pushing him away, took aim again.

The shot went wide, as did the next. Rasputin was fiddling with the lock on the gates. To concentrate, Purishkevich bit his own left hand, then fired again, and this time the bullet hit Rasputin in the shoulder. He slumped to one side, and the next shot struck the back of his head.

By the time the conspirators huddled around the fallen body, his blood was seeping out onto the snow, but his eyes were still staring up at the sky and he was grinding his teeth in pain and fury. Was there no killing this man, Yussoupov thought in horror? Would it never end?

Purishkevich, too, swore under his breath, then kicked the monk in the temple, hard. Yussoupov, for want of a better weapon, removed his heavy, hand-tooled leather belt with the silver buckle and lashed at the body until, at last, there was no further sign of life. Dr. Lazovert raised a hand to stop them. “Enough,” he said, “it’s done.”

The Grand Duke Dmitri emerged from the house, dragging the blue curtains, but before they could roll the body up in them, Yussoupov said, “Stop,” and kneeling down, he tore open Rasputin’s bloody shirt and searched his neck and chest for any sign of the cross.

“What are you doing?” Dmitri asked.

“The emerald cross — I’m looking for it!”

“Good Christ, Felix, aren’t you rich enough already?” Dmitri said, shoving him aside. “Have you lost your mind?”

A fair question, Yussoupov thought, as he sat back in the snow, watching as the others finished wrapping the corpse and tying a rope around the whole bundle. It was late on a cold and snowy night, so to Yussoupov’s relief, they saw no one, and no one saw them, as they carried the body down an alleyway, under a bridge, and out onto the frozen Neva River; there, they shoved it through a hole in the ice. In the moonlight, it appeared as nothing more than a dark shadow under the water, drifting slowly, silently, downstream. With it went Yussoupov’s dreams of glory. Suddenly it had dawned on him — and how could he have been so blind? — that far from being hailed as a savior, he might just as easily be labeled an assassin. It was hard work killing a man — he’d never done it before — and though the Tsar might secretly rejoice at being rid of the madman, the Tsaritsa would be enraged. Why hadn’t he thought these things through more clearly?

All he wanted now, with every freezing fiber of his being, was for the body to remain undiscovered beneath the ice until spring … or, better yet, doomsday.

Chapter 19

During the funeral service, Slater had received a running commentary, under her breath, from Nika. As one mourner after another took the podium, she told him who it was, how he or she was connected to the Neptune tragedy, how long the family had been working in these Alaskan waters. They were a hardy lot, and Slater felt the anguish of their loss. In a place like this, there wasn’t much to hold on to, and they had all just suffered a devastating blow.

But of all the people present, he had to admit that the most riveting bunch were the Vanes — Charlie wheeling in like a dignitary waiting for his ovation, attended to by the two whey-faced women in the long dresses. Harley scuffling along behind, like a kid about to perform at a recital for which he hadn’t practiced. Even seated in the pews, they seemed to create an air of turbulence around them, and he noticed that after Harley had made his remarks, and the service had concluded, none of the other congregants seemed all that anxious to hang out with them.

“Not the most popular kids at school, are they?” Slater said, as he and Nika made their way next door to the rec center and the refreshments. There was a wide, empty circle around the two women. Slater had never seen a pair of sisters who gave off a more witchy vibe.

“Most folks in Port Orlov know enough not to get mixed up with them.”

Already loaded down with donuts and coffee, Eddie and Russell made their way back outside again.

“With some exceptions,” she added.

Slater himself was an object of some interest, he could tell. Everyone in town had seen the Sikorsky by now, and although the mayor herself had backed up his story—“it’s a routine training mission for the Coast Guard,” he had heard her tell three people already — he was sure that there were other rumors circulating, too. It wouldn’t be a small town if there weren’t.

But as long as the rumors didn’t involve the Spanish flu, he was okay with it.

On the way out, he saw a blue van with what looked like a confab going on inside, among the Vane boys and Eddie and Russell. He wondered if he should post a sentry on the chopper that night or risk having its hubcaps stolen. He’d already been stuck in Port Orlov longer than he’d intended, but bad weather in the Midwest had grounded Eva Lantos’s plane, and military red tape had tied up some of the equipment scheduled for arrival on the second chopper. Murphy’s Law in action. Slater knew that every mission encountered problems like these — especially one like this, organized virtually on the fly — but it didn’t make it any easier to take. Patience had never been among his virtues.

When he got back to the community center, where he’d been bunking with Professor Kozak and the two Coast Guard pilots, he went straight to Nika’s office, where he’d set up his own little command post on a corner of her desk and the top of her file cabinet. It was the most secure office on the premises, and she’d been very accommodating, but he still felt a bit guilty about usurping so much of her space. She’d even given him the spare key.

“Don’t lose it,” she said. “The town locksmith is drunk most of the time, and it’s not easy to get another one made.”

With Nika off making official condolence calls, and Kozak exploring the local terrain, he sat down in Nika’s chair — instead of the stool he’d brought in for himself — and got to work, checking logistics, firing off email queries, figuring out how this assignment could be completed in the shortest amount of time and with the minimum amount of public scrutiny. The weather reports weren’t good — a storm was brewing — and he wanted to beat it to St. Peter’s Island, at least in time to get a few of the necessary structures set up. He didn’t much relish the idea of erecting lighting poles in the teeth of gale-force winds.

For a couple of hours, he managed to lose himself in his work, even phoning Sergeant Groves — and plainly waking him up — to go over the latest alterations to the plan.

“So what’s your ETA now?” he asked, and Groves, audibly yawning, said, “We should be able to load everything onto the second Sikorsky — including the good Dr. Lantos — by Thursday morning.”

It was only Tuesday night now, and Slater had to bite his lip in frustration.

“What time do you want to rendezvous on the island?” Groves asked.

“We’re not going to,” Slater said, having given it much thought since his aerial reconnaissance. “The colony’s on top of the plateau, but it’s hemmed in by trees and the remaining wooden structures. The graveyard is in an even trickier spot. There’s no room for two helicopters to off-load at the same time.”

“How’s the beach? We could use that, right?”

Again, Slater had to nix the idea. “The beach can handle no more than a Zodiac. It’s too narrow and sloped, and the only way up to the plateau, a considerable distance, is a staircase cut into the stone. I wouldn’t try to carry a kitten up those steps, much less a centrifuge.”

“So you’ll go first?”

“Yes, and you can follow. We’ll leave a two-hour window for the initial cargo deployment, and start at eleven A.M. on Thursday. It won’t be light enough earlier.”

They were discussing a myriad of other details — the order in which the hazard tents would be erected, the grid of the ground ramps and location of the generator shacks — when Slater picked up the aroma of stew and heard a furtive knock on the door.

“Come in,” he said, holding the phone to his shoulder, and looked up to see Nika holding a Crock-Pot between two pot holders.

“The Yardarm is doing their version of chicken Kiev tonight,” she said. “Trust me, you’re better off with my home cooking.”

Slater was embarrassed to be caught so much in possession of her office and started to rise from her chair.

“Finish your call,” she said, “and meet me in the gym.”

“Sounds like you’ve made a friend,” Sergeant Groves said with a laugh before they hung up. “Now don’t blow it.”

Slater straightened up his papers and tried to leave her desk the way he’d found it, then went down the hall to the community center’s gymnasium, where Nika had set up a card table underneath the scoreboard with a bottle of wine, the pot of stew, and a couple of place settings. It was about the least picturesque spot Slater could ever have imagined, which was why he found it puzzling that it felt so cozy and romantic. He instinctively tucked his shirt into his pants to straighten it out and ran a hand over his hair. Maybe he did need to get out more, as Sergeant Groves had often kidded him. “You’re divorced,” Groves had told him the last time they’d had a drink in a D.C. bar. “You’re not dead.”

“You really didn’t have to do this,” Slater said, taking a seat on the folding chair across from Nika.

“Inuit hospitality,” she said, dishing out the stew. “We’d be disgraced if we didn’t do something for a guest who had come so far.”

Slater opened the wine bottle and filled their glasses. He raised his glass in a toast to his host, then found himself tongue-tied. “To … a successful mission,” he said, and Nika smiled. Clinking her glass against his, she said, “To a successful mission.”

“And a terrific meal,” Slater said, trying to recover. “Smells great.” He draped his napkin in his lap. “Thanks so much.”

The conversation went in stops and starts. Slater, who could talk about disease vectors until the cows came home, had never been good at this small talk; his wife Martha had always been the one to carry the day. Between bites of the reindeer stew, he asked Nika about her life and her background, and she was happy to oblige. It even turned out that they had some friends in common on the faculty of Berkeley, where she’d received her master’s in anthropology before coming back to serve the people of Port Orlov.

“I wanted to preserve and record a way of life — the native traditions and customs,” she said, “before they disappeared altogether.”

“It can’t be easy to keep them going in the age of the Internet and the cell phone and the video game.”

“No, it’s not,” she conceded. “But there’s a lot to be said for that ancient culture. It sustained my people through centuries in the harshest climate on earth.”

As they talked, Slater discovered that she had an extensive knowledge of, and even deeper reverence for, the spiritual beliefs and legends of the native Alaskans. It was like receiving a free and fascinating tutorial … and from a teacher, he had to admit, who was a lot better-looking than anyone he remembered from his own school days. She was dressed in just a pair of jeans and a white cable-knit sweater, with her long black hair swept back on both sides of her head and held by an amber barrette, but she might as well have been dressed to the nines. If it weren’t for the scoreboard above the table, which revealed that Port Orlov had lost its last basketball game to a Visiting Team by twelve points, he could have sworn they were in some intimate little bistro in the Lower 48.

He wasn’t even aware of when, or how, she had deftly turned the conversation back to him, but he found himself explaining how he’d been drawn into epidemiology, then about what had happened in Afghanistan to derail his Army career.

“And yet they’ve entrusted you with this very sensitive assignment,” she said, refilling his glass. “They must still have a very high opinion of you.”

“I work cheap,” he said, to deflect the compliment.

But Nika, in her own subtle way, wouldn’t let it go, asking question after question about how the mission was going to proceed, in what steps and over what period of time. Normally, Slater would have been much more circumspect about sharing any of this information, but after she had been so open with him, and considering the fact that she had been so cooperative so far, in everything from sharing her office to letting the chopper remain parked in the middle of the town’s hockey rink, he would have felt churlish for holding back. It was only when she asked what time they would be leaving for the island that he heard a distant alarm bell. What did she mean by “they”?

“The team,” he said, “will be lifting off late Thursday morning.”

“Do I need to bring anything in particular along?” she asked innocently, as she produced two cherry tarts from a hamper beneath the table. “Sorry, I should have brought ice cream to top them off.”

“No, the team has everything it needs,” he emphasized.

“Okay, no problem,” she said, sticking an upright spoon into his tart for him. “I’ve got the best sleeping bag in the world and I’m used to bunking down anywhere.”

“Where are you talking about?” Slater said, ignoring the spoon and tart.

“On St. Peter’s Island,” she replied. “You didn’t think I was going to let you go without me, did you?”

“Actually,” he said, starting to feel played, “I did. This is a highly classified and possibly dangerous mission, and only authorized personnel — all of whom I have carefully handpicked — are going over there.”

Nika dabbed at her lips with her napkin, and said, “I had the tarts in a bun warmer. You should eat yours before it gets cold.”

“I’m afraid there can be no exceptions.”

“I agree,” she said. “Authorized personnel only. And as the mayor of Port Orlov, in addition to its duly appointed tribal elder, I have to point out to you that the island is encompassed by the Northwest Territories Native Americans Act of 1986, and as such it is within our rights and prerogatives to decide who and when and how any incursions are made there.”

Slater sat so far back in his chair it almost toppled over onto the gym floor.

“Now I’m not saying that official permission has been denied,” she said, taking another spoonful of her tart, “but I’m not saying it’s been granted yet, either.”

She looked up at Slater, her black eyes shining, an inquisitive smile on her lips. “If I do say so myself, this is one hell of a tart.”

And Slater, who had been up against some pretty formidable adversaries in his day, could only marvel at her aplomb. He’d never been snookered so smoothly, or so deliciously, in his life. Her veiled threat to delay the mission could be easily overruled by Dr. Levinson at the AFIP, but the paperwork and bureaucracy involved would tie him up on the ground for several days at least.

“Yep,” she said, nodding over her dessert, “a little vanilla ice cream and this would have been perfect.”

He had just acquired, like it or not, his own Sacajawea.

Chapter 20

“Goddammit,” Harley muttered, “watch where you’re throwing that rope.”

“I didn’t see you there,” Russell said.

“And keep your voice down!”

“You keep yours down!” Russell shot back.

This expedition, Harley thought, was not getting off to the best start. First, they’d had to jimmy the fuel pump at the dock in order to gas up the boat.

And then, of course, there’d been that little “incident” in McDaniel’s storage shed. When Harley had dared to poke his head back inside the next day, all he’d found by the wall was a pile of old rags and some wooden planks. He’d put the whole thing down to a hallucination, brought on by the stress from making that speech in the church, but he still hadn’t managed to completely persuade himself. For now, he just put it out of his mind and resolved to say nothing about it to Eddie or Russell. They’d simply chalk it up to his being stoned on something … and want their share of whatever he’d been stoned on.

“What are you two making all this racket about?” Eddie said, coming up from the hold. “I thought we were supposed to keep quiet.”

It was a freezing night on the docks of Port Orlov, and the chance of anyone else’s being out, much less dumb enough to be setting sail, was pretty slight, but Harley had made it clear from the start that they should go about their business in the utmost secrecy. He hadn’t even breathed a word of it to Angie, though that might have had more to do with the way she’d exchanged looks with that Coast Guardsman at the Yardarm than it did with his discretion. He was still ticked off and jealous.

“Let’s shove off already,” Harley said, “before the weather gets here.” The next few days — if days were what you could call the murky gray episodes that separated the long stretches of darkness — were supposed to be stormy. But if you waited around for good weather in Alaska, as any local could tell you, you’d be waiting around forever.

The boat, called the Kodiak, belonged to Eddie’s uncle, who was usually too lazy to take it out. It was nearly thirty years old and it wasn’t much to look at, but since it had originally been built as a Navy launch, it had a very stiff hull, and a heavy steel rudder shoe that could withstand any kinds of trouble — rocks, logs, grounding — that the Bering Strait could throw at it. As on most Alaskan fishing ships, the cabin windows were Lexan and mounted to the outside, so that even the worst waves couldn’t blow them out. In his cups one night, Eddie’s uncle had bragged that it could withstand a complete swamping for twelve hours without sinking. How he would know such a thing had puzzled Harley — had they swamped it to find out? — but he didn’t ask then, and he didn’t care to find out now.

In the cabin, he let Eddie hang on to the wheel — after all, it was his uncle’s boat — while Russell slouched in the corner with a beer.

“Keep it at half throttle till we’re well away,” Harley said, “then head northwest.”

“I know where St. Pete’s is,” Eddie sneered.

“And you,” Harley said to Russell, “get your ass out on deck and look for bergs.”

“Why don’t you get out there and freeze your own ass off?”

Harley could have removed the gun that was strapped under his anorak and made his point that way, but he didn’t want to make things any worse than they were, and he didn’t want to resort to any extreme measures until he had to. Russell defiantly took another long slug from the beer can, and it occurred to Harley that having him out on deck as lookout was a bad idea, anyway. He’d probably fall off the boat.

“Fuck it,” he said, “I’ll do it myself.” Addressing Eddie, he said, “Take us around the west cliffs, then to the leeward side for a berth.”

“Aye, aye, Captain Bligh.”

Harley slipped a pair of binoculars around his neck, put up the hood on his coat, and tightened the Velcro clasps at the sleeves, then stepped out on the slippery, ice-rimed deck. He hadn’t been out at sea since the wreck of the Neptune, and he found there was a new sense of anxiety in him. It shouldn’t have come as a shock. But now, when he looked around him at the rolling black waters, all he could think of was the night he’d been sure he would be swallowed up in them and lost forever. He thought about how close he’d come to winding up as just another one of those names inscribed on the plaque in the Lutheran church. His hands clenched the railings now, the same way they had clenched the top of that coffin. At first, he had kept the lid propped up in his trailer, next to the snake tank, like a trophy. But then it had spooked him, and he had stashed it under the bed.

Which only made things worse.

Finally, in desperation, he’d stuck it in the crawl space under the trailer where there was a bunch of other old timbers. He’d have just heaved the damn thing back into the sea if it weren’t for the fact that he was convinced it would be worth something, to someone, someday. When that Dr. Slater had told him he should return it to the island, he’d actually given it some serious thought; the main reason he couldn’t do it now was because it might give that asshole some satisfaction if he did.

The moon was out, which was a lucky thing, since the strait was choppy that night and huge chunks of ice were grinding and rolling through the channel. Off in the distance, the two black slabs of Big and Little Diomede lay like watchdogs at the gateway to Siberia. There wasn’t another boat in sight, but the sky was speckled with stars as sharp and bright as needles. Looking up, Harley’s eyes filled with tears, not because he was overwhelmed with emotion but because the wind was so cold and so relentless. He wiped them away with the back of one glove, but they sprang right back. He made his way to the bow and took hold of the search lamp there. The boat rose and fell on the swells, spray flying up and freezing on his lips and cheeks. He spread his legs on the deck to keep his balance and peered into the blackness, following the beam of the light.

Were there other coffins out there, carrying their awful cargo up and down the waves, bumping up against the ice floes? If there were, he prayed he wouldn’t see them. He’d had enough trouble since finding the first one.

“Coming up on the starboard side,” Eddie announced over the bullhorn, as if he was some tour guide. “Welcome to St. Peter’s Island.”

Shit. Harley wanted to brain him for making so much noise. The whole idea had been to stay under the radar. What if the Coast Guard was already lying low in some cove?

He waved up at the wheelhouse, gesturing for Eddie to keep it down, and after a quick scan of the waters ahead, turned off the bow light. They were just beyond the breakers, and if Eddie didn’t do something stupid — which was always a possibility — they’d be okay.

The Kodiak plowed ahead, while Harley removed the lens cap from the binoculars, and swept them over the island. The beach, as usual, was shrouded in spray and mist, but in the moonlight, he could just make out a ladder of steps, carved into the side of the rugged cliffs and leading all the way up to a jagged promontory. He’d sailed past this island many times in the Neptune I and the Neptune II, always giving it a wide berth, but tonight their course was taking them closer to the shore than ever before. As the Kodiak rounded the island, with no sign of the Coast Guard, the Navy, or one of those damn choppers anywhere in sight, Harley put the bow light on again and caught the great glistening back of a killer whale, just rising from the waves, its blowhole spouting like a geyser. It took several seconds before the whale submerged again — time enough for Harley to reflect on the guts those old Inuit hunters must have had to take on a creature of that size and power in nothing but flimsy kayaks, with a handful of harpoons. He’d have been afraid to take it on with an Uzi. It was hard to believe that the natives he knew now — those guys like fat Geordie Ayakuk who hugged a desk in the community center, or the old rummies that hung around the Yardarm cadging drinks — could possibly be their descendants. Man, what the fuck had happened to them?

A cloud passed before the moon, a sign of the storms that were undoubtedly on their way, and Harley turned the searchlight toward the island, looking for some safe — and secluded — harbor. But even on this side, rocks jutted up from the sea, and white water foamed over the hidden reefs. People who didn’t know anything about sailing always thought that the closer you were to shore, the safer you were. But Harley knew that they were dead wrong. The open sea gave you room to maneuver, time to think, and if you’d read your charts right, the chances that there was something deadly lurking right under your hull were pretty slim.

No, the worst disasters happened as you approached the shore, especially if that shore was as dangerous a destination as St. Peter’s Island. In addition to the boat Harley had already lost to these waters, he knew of at least a dozen others that had been driven too close to this coastline by snowstorms and rogue waves and overpowering winds; he had seen sudden riptides grip a boat and completely take control of it, dragging it helplessly in whatever direction it wished, before dashing it against a picket of jagged rocks. You could run the engine all you wanted, you could put on every sail you had, but if the Bering Sea wanted a piece of your ass, it was going to get it.

Up in the wheelhouse, he could see Eddie and Russell hunched over the wheel. Each of them was holding a beer can now and laughing uproariously at something. Christ, if only he had anybody he could actually rely on. He’d needed some help on this gig, and in some ways these two were the obvious candidates. Since getting out of the Spring Creek penitentiary, Russell had been working part-time for the refinery — and was always short of beer money — and Eddie lived off the dough every resident got each year from the Permanent Fund, courtesy of the big oil companies that operated in Alaska. When needed, he supplemented his income with plumbing or selling pot.

More to the point, neither of them would be missed for a few days.

But the Kodiak was getting perilously close to shore now, and Harley figured he could no longer leave Eddie at the wheel — not if he wanted to keep the boat in one piece.

Sweeping the searchlight back and forth across the cliffs, he saw flocks of kittiwakes startled into flight, and steep, impregnable walls slick with ice. A ripple of white foam indicated an underwater reef off the port side. The boat was halfway around the island from the Russian colony, and there was no sign of another beach. An inlet or cove was the best he could hope for; they’d have to drop anchor and use the Kodiak’s skiff to go ashore.

Fixing the searchlight in place, he went back up to the bridge, and the minute he came through the door, the wind howling at his back, Eddie and Russell, looking vaguely guilty, stopped laughing.

“What was so funny?”

“Nothing,” Eddie said.

Harley figured that the joke had been at his expense. Eddie stifled another laugh, and now Harley knew for sure — and he saw red.

“Lighten up,” Russell said, a bit blearily. “Have a beer.” He held out a can and Harley smacked it out of his hand so hard that the can hit the binnacle and cracked the anemometer screen.

“Fuck,” Eddie shouted. “My uncle’s going to see that!”

Russell’s shoulders hunched, and his fists clenched. Eddie saw it, too, and leapt between them, his arms outstretched.

“Hey, guys, chill out. Come on now, come on. We’re all friends here.”

“Are we?” Harley said, glaring first at one, then the other. “Because if we’re such good friends, we’re gonna have to get something straight. This is my gig, and I don’t want a couple of drunken stoners fucking it up.”

The beer can was rolling around the floor of the wheelhouse, spraying foam through a dent. The wheel, unattended, was turning slowly.

“Who said I’m drunk?” Russell challenged him, weaving on his feet.

Harley smiled, acting like it was all okay now, then spun around, throwing out one leg in a classic martial-arts move that caught Russell behind his knees and dumped his ass on the floor. He landed with a thump that jolted the whole cabin, then he lay there, propped up against the chart table, stunned.

“What the fuck?” Eddie said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“And you,” Harley said, “get out on deck and keep watch.” Harley moved to take control of the wheel, but Eddie grabbed it again, refusing to budge.

“It’s my uncle’s boat.”

Harley shoved him, and Eddie stumbled into Russell, who was just getting to his feet. They both went down, and Harley whipped around, the gun out of his belt now. Eddie put out both of his hands, and said, “Whoa there, pardner! Put that away before somebody gets hurt.”

Harley waited a few seconds, just to make sure Russell wasn’t planning on anything further.

Russell opened his own hands, as if to show he had no weapon and no bad intentions. “Jesus, Harley. Get a grip.”

Harley was just putting the gun back in his belt when the boat lurched, and they heard a grinding noise like a tin can scraping on cement. Harley turned and saw that the loose wheel had spun again, and through the window of the bridge he saw that the bow was pointing straight toward the cliffs, no more than forty yards away. But the boat wasn’t moving, and unless he was sorely mistaken, they had just run aground on one of the many reefs he might have seen coming if he hadn’t been so distracted.

“Goddamn!” Eddie shouted, leaping to his feet and going for the throttle. Before Harley could stop him, he had thrown the boat into reverse, and the grinding had come again, even louder this time … but the Kodiak still didn’t move.

“Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn!” Eddie hollered, stamping his feet as he went in circles around the cramped space in the bridge. The boat was jammed on a reef, teetering this way and that like a car perched atop a snowbank. “You are bad luck!” he shouted, pointing a finger at Harley. “You are such bad luck, man!”

Even Harley was temporarily at a loss. Was he bad luck?

Eddie was just about to try the throttle again when Harley stopped him. “You’ll rip its guts out,” he said.

“What else can we do?”

“We can wait,” Harley said. “Maybe the tide will give us a boost. Russell, go below and see if we’re taking on water.”

For once, Russell took an order and stumbled down to the hold.

Eddie, fuming, glared at Harley, who turned around and stared at the small portion of the island illuminated by the bow light. At water level, he saw a bunch of tide pools, frothing white, then disappearing, and above them a jumble of rocks, piled halfway up the side of the cliff. That much was a lucky break. The rocks looked climbable, and the remaining slope was pockmarked with caves and crevices and ledges.

“They told me not to do this,” Eddie muttered, shaking his head. “They told me not to go to sea with a Vane.”

“Who told you what? You were supposed to keep your mouth shut about this. Who did you tell?”

“Nobody,” Eddie said, retreating. “I didn’t tell anybody. It’s just something everybody says, down at the docks.”

Harley couldn’t be too surprised. His family had lost two boats already, Charlie was in a wheelchair, and for all he knew they’d just beached a third.

Russell, panting, appeared in the hatchway. “It’s not too bad. The hull’s holding.”

“For how long?” Eddie said in a panic.

“Your uncle always said she could be swamped for twelve hours without sinking,” Harley said.

“Swamped? Didn’t you hear what Russell just said? She’s holding. Man, don’t put your family curse on it. Let’s just get out of here.”

“That’s exactly what we’re not going to do,” Harley said. “We’re going to drop anchor, with enough slack to let the boat drift off the rocks with the next tide.”

“And do what until then?” Eddie shot back. “Sit here and wait?”

“No. We’re going onto the island, and get started. How else are you gonna buy your uncle a new anemometer?” Zipping up his coat, Harley said, “Get your gear together, both of you. I’ll get the skiff ready.”

Out on deck, he walked the length of the ship but didn’t see much damage except to the paint. Provided she didn’t spring a leak, she would stay where she was until the currents, and some clever engine maneuvers, freed her again. He dropped anchor and watched as the chain played out for no more than a few seconds. Stepping to the bow, he maneuvered the light around, picking out the best route through the rocks and tide pools. It wasn’t going to be easy to get the skiff through unscathed, but he could do it, even with the deadweight of Russell and Eddie on board. It was only as he flicked off the searchlight, in order to see the wet walls of the cliff without the reflection glaring off them, that he glimpsed on the ridgeline what looked like a yellow light, gently swinging. He blinked, thinking it was just an aftereffect of the bright bow light going off, like a strobe, but when he looked again, the yellow glow, more like a lantern suspended in midair, was still there.

Chapter 21

On the morning that Rasputin’s body was to be buried, Anastasia and the other members of the royal family bundled into two long black touring cars and drove from St. Petersburg to the imperial park at Tsarskoe Selo. There, a grave had been dug near the site where a church was later to be erected in his honor.

Anastasia had never seen her mother so bereaved. At the news of Father Grigori’s murder, she had utterly broken down, fearing that her son Alexei had lost his most potent protector. And when she learned that the deed had been done by Prince Yussoupov and, worse yet, Grand Duke Dmitri, a Romanov relation, she had almost lost her wits altogether. Anastasia and her three older sisters had taken turns watching over their mother.

Looking out the window now, Ana saw endless, snow-covered fields, lined by white birches and punctuated, like print on a white page, by scribbles of crows. It was a beautiful morning, with a sun so bright and a sky so blue Fabergé himself might have enameled the scene. Icicles hanging from the eaves of the occasional farmhouse glistened like diamonds. Under her own blouse, Ana wore the emerald cross the monk had given her at the Christmas ball. That was the last time she had seen him alive, and she had not taken off the cross ever since.

The body itself had not remained hidden for long. In their haste, the conspirators had left one of Rasputin’s boots lying out on the ice of the frozen Neva. The corpse had floated not far off, and when another hole was cut through the ice to retrieve it, the starets was found to have been alive even after being submerged in the river. One of his arms had wriggled free of the ropes and was frozen stiff as if raised in a benediction, and his lungs were filled with water. For all the poison in his bloodstream, the bullets in his body, and the bruises from the beating, the monk had died in the end by drowning.

Once the cars had entered the park, and the Cossack guards had closed the gates and resumed their endless patrols again, Anastasia saw that wooden walkways had been built across a frozen field. The cars stopped, and Tsar Nicholas himself stepped out of the first one, his wife leaning heavily on the arm of her close friend, Madame Vyrubova. The Tsaritsa Alexandra was dressed entirely in black, as were they all, but carried in her arms a bouquet of white roses plucked that morning from the greenhouse at the Winter Palace.

In the distance, a motor van was parked by an open grave, its engine still running, a plume of gray smoke rising from its exhaust. As Anastasia drew closer, picking her way carefully over the freshly placed boards, she saw the foot of a coffin — a simple one, made of white oak — resting in the back of the van. Her mother went straight to it and asked one of the attendants to open it.

Looking uncertain, the attendant glanced at the Tsar, who nodded.

The lid was lifted, and though Ana was standing far back with her sisters, she caught a glimpse of the holy man’s black beard, stiffly brushed … and a ragged hole in his head, above his left eye, as if someone had drilled his skull with an augur. His broad hands, once so full of power and expression, were folded meekly against the shoulders of his black cassock.

All in all, it was the most shocking sight Ana had ever seen … but she did not quail, even as her sister Tatiana let out a whimper and Olga consoled her. In Ana’s head, all she could hear were the words Rasputin had spoken to her in the chapel.

“If any relation to your family takes my life, then woe to the dynasty. The Russian people will rise against you with murder in their hearts.”

And not only had Grand Duke Dmitri participated in the murder, he had bragged about it the next day.

“The blood of your family is poisoned,” the monk had said. “But this curse you carry in your veins will be your own salvation one day. A plague shall overwhelm the world, but you shall be proof against it.”

Ana still had no idea what these last words betokened. But she wore the emerald cross he had given her, with its secret inscription on the back, nonetheless.

Her mother handed the white roses to her friend and placed two objects on Rasputin’s breast. One was an icon that everyone in the imperial family had inscribed, and the other was a letter that she had dictated to Anastasia because her own hand was too unsteady. “My dear martyr,” it had read, “give me thy blessing that it may follow me always on the sad and dreary path I have yet to follow here below. And remember us from on high in your holy prayers.” Ana had held the letter for her mother to sign. Lifting herself from the divan, where the pain from her sciatica had once again relegated her, her mother had written “Alexandra” with her usual flourish, before pressing the page first to her heart, then to her lips.

Now, the letter, too, was lying on Father Grigori’s breast. The attendants closed and sealed the coffin, and it was lowered into the grave. A chaplain read the funeral service, but Ana was listening only to the sound of the winter wind as it rustled through the creaky scaffolding of the church being built close by. She looked at her family, standing silent and still in their black coats and boots and hats, all in a row, and it was as if she were looking at a photograph. A grim photograph that made her think of the monk’s dire prophecy again.

“Here,” Madame Vyrubova said, softly, “take this.” She handed Ana some of the white roses. And then, after her mother and father and sisters had cast their own into the open grave, Ana dropped hers, too, watching the petals flutter like snowflakes onto the lid of the coffin.

“I am no longer among the living,” Rasputin had said on that Christmas night.

But even now, even here, some part of Anastasia did not believe it.

Chapter 22

Lying in his sleeping bag on the floor of the cave, Harley checked the time on his cell phone. The phone reception was for shit — what would you expect from a cave on an island in the middle of nowhere? — but the clock told him it was 8 A.M.

And that meant it was high time to get this damn show on the road.

After they’d run the Kodiak aground the night before, Harley and his two next-to-useless assistants had off-loaded their supplies onto the skiff and laboriously toted them up the side of the sloping cliff and into the first cave that looked relatively safe and dry. They had left an LED light burning atop a crate all night, and looking around now, Harley saw the ration boxes and knapsacks stacked against the craggy stone walls, along with the shovels, spades, and, leave it to Russell, three cases of beer. Judging from the sound of his snoring, Russell was still sleeping off the cold ones he’d already drunk. Harley crawled out of his sleeping bag, kicked Eddie to wake him up, then, bending to keep from banging his head on the low ceiling, went to the mouth of the cave; they’d stretched a tarp between two crates to keep out the wind. Batting the tarp aside, he looked out on the cold, dark morning and the seawater frothing in the tide pools at the foot of the cliff. The boat was still marooned on the rocks, advertising their presence on the island, but at least it was stranded as far from the old Russian colony as it could get. Harley would have liked to find a hideout farther from the boat, just in case the Coast Guard ever came along and spotted it, but he knew that if he’d asked Eddie and Russell to hump the supplies any deeper into the woods, he’d have had a mutiny on his hands.

“What the hell time is it?” Eddie said, burrowing deeper into his bag to escape the cold blast from the entrance.

“Time to get up and get going.”

“Take Russell.”

But Harley had already decided to let Russell sleep it off. After the brawl that had erupted on the boat, he was wary of having the two of them along — especially on this first reconnaissance mission. He didn’t know exactly what was out there, and a loose cannon like Russell could wind up proving a liability. Plus, he wanted to cover some serious ground.

After they’d both eaten some canned Army surplus meals that Harley had picked up at the Arctic Circle Gun Shoppe, they stepped out onto the rocky ledge. Harley had strapped a twelve-gauge shotgun on his back and wedged a can of bear mace — made from concentrated red chili peppers — in his pocket. Over one shoulder he carried a spade; Eddie had a pickaxe. As they marched off, he had an unfortunate image of the seven dwarfs heading off into the woods.

Fifty feet in, and it started to feel even more like that damn fairy tale. The island itself was small, but forbidding. Densely forested with spruce and hemlock and alder, the ground was rocky and uneven and lightly dusted with snow, with a lot more to come if the weather reports were true. The prickly spines of devil’s club bushes snatched at their sleeves, and one of them even pulled Eddie’s stocking cap off his head. He had to stop and snatch it back, then, out of sheer annoyance, he broke the twig off and stomped on it.

“You sure it’s dead?” Harley said.

“Fuck you,” Eddie replied. “You have any idea where you’re going, by the way, or are we just out for a hike?”

It wasn’t a bad question. Harley had only the vaguest sense of where the colony lay ahead, and he figured the graveyard had to be part of it. “If we keep to a fairly straight course, we’re bound to hit it,” Harley said, turning around and cutting through some brush. He purposely made plenty of noise as he went since bears were partial to thickets like these, and a startled grizzly was a pissed grizzly. At this time of year, it was unlikely he’d stumble across any of them foraging for food — normally they’d be hibernating in their dens, or, if they were really lucky, the hollow core of a big old cottonwood tree — but it was better to be noisy than sorry, he figured.

Wolves, however, were another matter. Wolves were always on the move, year-round, scavenging dead carcasses, and hunting fresh prey — young caribou or unwary moose. Only on rare occasions had they been known to hunt man, and the one thing Harley had been taught was that you never ran from them. If confronted, you stood your ground, shouted, threw rocks, anything. Running was an invitation to be chased by the whole pack, though who knew how the black ones that inhabited this island — known to be a peculiar lot — would behave. There were all kinds of tales about them. Sailors told stories about seeing them lined up on the cliffs at night, looking across the strait toward Siberia, their muzzles raised, howling in unison. And a couple of hunters from Saskatchewan who had set out to bag a few never showed up again. Their kayak washed up a few weeks later, holding a bloodstained pair of gloves and a wooden paddle that looked like it had been nearly gnawed in half.

At the time, even though the two hunters were presumed dead, there had been some talk of mounting a rescue mission. But nobody had wanted to volunteer, and Nika, the newly elected mayor, had seemed perfectly okay to let things stand. It was almost like she was on the side of the damn wolves.

For another hour or so, they plowed through the forest, the evergreens towering high overhead, and just as Harley was beginning to fear he’d gone off course, he spied a clearing through the trees — and just beyond it, the timbered wall of a stockade. A wall that had fallen into considerable disrepair, its logs listing to one side or the other like misaligned teeth. To Harley’s relief, there was even a ragged gap large enough to offer easy entry to the colony grounds.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Eddie said, coming as close to a compliment as Harley was ever likely to get.

And given the ghoulish nature of the work they were planning, Harley wondered for a moment if it wasn’t true.

“Is that their church?” Eddie said, and Harley, too, lifted his eyes to the crumbling onion dome that rose on the other side of the wall.

“Guess so,” he said. “And just as long as they’re not holding any services, it’s fine with me.”

The truth was — and despite the jokes — the whole place was still giving Harley a very uneasy feeling, not that he would ever confess anything like that to Eddie. For years, he had heard stories about the old Russian colony, and that was all before he’d been washed up on the beach that night and nearly lost his left foot to that leaping wolf … or glimpsed a flash of that yellow lantern sailors used to talk about spotting. But he had never imagined himself standing in the dark, frigid morning air, with a spade in his hand, about to enter the abandoned colony itself.

“Come on, man,” Eddie said, shouldering past him with his pickaxe cradled like a musket against his shoulder. “Let’s get this over with.”

Harley let Eddie slither through the opening in the wall first, then followed. They were at the back of the church, its wooden walls stripped bare of almost all their white paint by the years of wind and rain and snow. Angling around one side, he came across a window with only a splinter or two of glass jutting up from its frame; a lone shutter banged back and forth. As the church was raised on rotted pilings, and tilting a bit at that, Harley had to stand on his tiptoes to peer inside. Taking out the flashlight, he played its beam around the front of the nave and saw a faded mural painted on the opposite wall. From what he could see in the gloom, it had once been a picture of the Virgin Mary with a halo over her head. But what thrilled him was the touch or two of gold paint that was still left on the picture; those old Russkies loved their gold almost as much as they loved their Madonna. He hoped they’d buried some of that, too.

“What do you see?” Eddie said. “Let’s go inside and check it out.”

But Harley didn’t want to get sidetracked, especially as all he could make out besides the painted icon was a great big pile of junk — old milking pails, blacksmith tools, broken furniture — piled up against a carved screen. It looked like the place had been pretty thoroughly scavenged, and trashed, by somebody in the past hundred years.

“On the way back,” he said, just to shut him up. “Let’s find the cemetery first.”

As they passed the front steps of the church, with one door sagging and ajar, Eddie cast a longing look back but followed Harley past an old well and into the open area of the colony. They were surrounded on all sides by crumbling old cabins and open stalls. In one of them, Harley saw a rusted anvil, in another a pair of iron-hooped kegs. Plainly, it had once been a working village, with maybe forty or fifty people living in it. But all that concerned Harley was where these people went when they died. There was no sign of a graveyard anywhere, not even on the other side of the church. Weren’t folks supposed to be buried in the churchyard in the old days?

At the far end of the stockade he saw what had to have been the main gate to the colony — some weathered beams, off-balance like the totem pole in town, still framed the entrance — and after switching the shovel to his other shoulder, Harley set off for it. Outside, a path led away from the colony, across some cleared land, and straight into a dense grove of trees.

“Not another fucking forest,” Eddie complained.

“This one’s got a trail,” Harley said, striding ahead, and it did. Although it was narrow and winding, the path seemed to be leading him back toward the rim of the island. Gradually, it descended, and to Harley’s relief yet again, he saw a gateway ahead, like the colony gates only much smaller. And the posts, he noted as he got closer, were elaborately carved with something in Russian. It looked like the same word or two, chiseled into the wood over and over and over again. Even Eddie paused to study the writing. “You think it says, ‘Welcome to the buried treasure’?” he said.

And Harley could only wonder. Just beyond the posts lay the colony graveyard, no more than an acre, but littered with stone markers and wooden crosses tilting this way and that in the frozen ground. It was starting to get lighter out, the sun fighting its way through a scrim of hazy clouds, and in the faint daylight Harley could also see that many of the headstones had their own curious inscription down toward their base. It looked like a little crescent, but he was damned if he knew what that meant either. Did headstone makers sign their work? Shit, he thought, dropping the end of his spade between his feet, where was he supposed to start?

Eddie was wandering around among the graves, taking an occasional swipe at one of the wooden crosses with the end of his pickaxe, and Harley — who was by no means a religious man — still thought it was wrong and shouted, “Stop it, you dumb fuck.”

The gravity of what they were about to do struck him now like never before, and he cursed his brother Charlie, and he cursed himself for always playing the fool. How the hell did he get here?

Eddie stopped to take a piss, the urine splashing on the unyielding ground, and when he finished up and turned around, he said, “So, where do you want to start? I’m freezing my ass off already.”

And all Harley could think of was starting where it had all begun. With mechanical footsteps, he walked toward the rim of the graveyard, a precipice overlooking the Bering Strait. A coffin had fallen into the sea, and in only a minute or two he had found the spot from which it must have fallen.

At the very edge of the cliff, a hunk of dirt and rock had eroded away, leaving a scar in the earth. Harley took care not to step too close.

“That where you think it came from?” Eddie said, with a snort.

And Harley said, “Yes.” He stared at the jagged earth, and it was as if he was looking at a vanished grave … and worse. He could picture the gaunt man in the sealskin coat as he lay in the coffin aboard the Neptune II. Or as he appeared in the storage shed behind the gun shop.

Looking for his emerald cross.

“I say we pick the one with the biggest headstone,” Eddie said, surveying the graveyard. “The richer the dead guy was, the better the chances he got buried with some good stuff on him.”

With no better plan in mind, Harley had to concede it wasn’t the worst logic.

Eddie walked off a few yards, stopping beside a truncated stone angel, and said, “This one’s good as any.” And then, slipping the backpack off and tossing it to one side, he lifted the pickaxe and swung it over his head.

The iron barely grazed the soil before rebounding hard, and Eddie dropped the shaft and danced backward, swearing and shaking his hands.

Harley laughed, and Eddie said, “You try it then.”

“Let’s do this right,” Harley said, taking off his own pack, loaded with the steel climbing spikes and chisel. “If we loosen the soil first, we may get something done before dark.”

For the next hour or two, they bent their heads over the grave, alternately driving spikes into the ground, chopping at the surrounding dirt, scraping it away with the end of the spade. It was slow and backbreaking work, and Harley felt the futility of it with every breath. They should have brought dynamite and simply blown the place to pieces before that Slater guy showed up. His only hope lay in the fact that the Russian gravediggers must have had the same problems he was having; the graves they dug must have been as shallow as they could make them.

After taking a break to open some more tins of food — Eddie got Spam, and he made Harley trade it to him for his own can of corned beef hash — they got back to work. Eddie took a turn chopping and mincing at the dirt with the end of the spade, and when he caught what looked like the dull patina of buried wood, he got down on his knees and brushed the soil away with the ends of his sweaty gloves.

“That’s a coffin,” he exulted. “We did it, man!”

Harley told him to step back, then, lifting the pickaxe, he brought it down with a crash. There was the sharp crack of the blade cutting into wood.

Eddie was pumping his arms in anticipation of the treasure chest he thought they were about to uncover.

Harley wanted to tell him to cool it, but his own blood was up, too. If something did turn up in the casket, he’d have something to throw in Charlie’s face. Who’s the fuckup now?

He raised the pickaxe again, its dull iron blade framed against a sky of the same color, and even as he ripped it down into the coffin, something on the far horizon caught his eye.

The pick, as a result, missed its mark, and landed with a bone-aching thud in the frozen soil to one side.

“Watch what you’re doing,” Eddie said. “You gotta hit the spot that’s clear already.”

But Harley was watching that speck on the horizon again. It was just a black dot, but it was coming in their direction.

Eddie was using the spade to make a greater target on the top of the coffin. And when Harley didn’t lift the pick for the next blow, he said, “You want me to do it?” He reached for the pick. “Give it to me, ya pussy.”

Harley let him, not taking his eyes off the approaching speck. Which was now distinctly coming into view — it was a helicopter, undoubtedly the one from the hockey rink in Port Orlov — and it was coming right at them.

“Duck!” Harley said, and Eddie looked at him in confusion.

“From what?”

“From that!” he said, pointing at the oncoming chopper.

Now they could hear the racket of its engines and its rotating blades on the ocean wind.

Harley flattened himself against a wooden cross and Eddie huddled at the foot of the broken angel, his arms folded over his head. Unless the chopper stopped to hover above the cemetery, it would pass over them so fast they wouldn’t be seen … though their spade and pickaxe lay in plain sight on the snow. Damn. Harley reached out one arm and grabbed the spade and dragged it under him.

There was a rush of wind and noise as the chopper swooped low overhead, zooming straight over the graveyard and the trees and aiming for the colony grounds. Once it was safely past, Harley leapt to his feet and watched as it did indeed slow down and make a circular pass over the spot where the stockade walls enclosed the old settlement. Red and white running lights adorned its fuselage, blinking on and off, as the chopper, built like some huge green praying mantis, seemed to suspend itself in midair, before descending below the tree line, and out of Harley’s view.

“Fuck me, man,” Eddie said. “They’re here already?”

He was right about that, Harley thought. They were well and truly fucked if these guys were here for anything more than a quick stopover, or, as those douche-bag pilots had claimed, a “routine training mission.”

His eyes went back to the splintered coffin in the partially exposed grave. And so did Eddie’s.

“No way I’m letting those assholes get what we dug up,” Eddie said, rising from the foot of the tombstone.

And neither was Harley, though he knew there wasn’t much time. Brushing the dirt and ice from his gloves, he raised the pick and taking a deep breath first, swung it high above his head, then brought it down one more time with a satisfying thwack.

Chapter 23

Dr. Slater, ever the hospitable team leader, had offered the virologist, Dr. Lantos, who had arrived in Port Orlov just a few hours earlier, a window seat on the Sikorsky Skycrane, but she had demurred.

“I’m not a fan of flying,” she said, “and looking out the window of a helicopter is about the last thing I want to do.”

Even now, as the chopper flew toward the forbidding cliffs of St. Peter’s Island, she was sitting very still in the seat facing him, her eyes closed behind her thick glasses and her hands clutched tightly in her lap. Professor Kozak, whose ample bulk was strapped into the seat at Slater’s side, was craning his neck for a better view out of his own window.

“We’re coming up on the cemetery,” he said over the headphones, and as they whooshed over it, he pressed his forehead against the Plexiglas for a better view.

Slater took a look, too, but they were over it so fast it was all he could do to catch a glimpse of the spot where the cliff had given way.

“You see that?” Kozak said, and Slater asked him what.

“Something moved.”

“What do you mean?”

“Might have been a wolf down in the graveyard.”

“There are wolves?” Dr. Lantos, said, her eyes still closed.

“A few,” Slater replied. “But Nika tells me that if we leave them alone, they’ll leave us alone.” He had assigned Nika to the second chopper, which would follow in a couple of hours, so she could help guide Sergeant Groves and his crew. She’d looked at him a little suspiciously, afraid that this might be some ruse to keep her off the island and out of harm’s way, after all, but he had laughed and said, “You know, you should really work in Washington.”

“Why?”

“You’ve got all the natural instincts.”

Frowning, she said, “I’ll take that as a compliment, for now.”

The helicopter started to slow down, banking to one side, and Slater saw Dr. Lantos swallow hard. For all her fearsome reputation in the lab and in academic circles, where her work was always ahead of the curve and so meticulous as to be indisputable, she was plainly as unhappy in the air as she had claimed. He wondered how she’d made it on the five separate flights that had been necessary just to get her all this way from M.I.T.

“We’re over the landing zone,” the pilot’s voice crackled on the headphones. And then, as a gag, he added, “Please make sure your tray tables are completely secured, and your seats are in the upright position.” As if these hard seats could be made to budge an inch.

Wobbling back and forth, the Sikorsky slowly settled itself on the ground, its tires giving the craft a jounce as they made contact with the ground. Dr. Lantos let out a long breath, and for the first time since boarding, unclasped her hands and let her shoulders fall.

When she opened her eyes, Dr. Slater said, sympathetically, “Maybe we can get the Coast Guard to ferry you back when we’re done here.”

“I get seasick, too.”

As the rotors wound down with a sigh, Professor Kozak unlatched the cabin door, threw it open, and clambered down. Lantos followed him, a trifle unsteadily, and Slater brought up the rear.

One of the pilots was already on the ground, heading for the cargo hold. And though Slater was eager to oversee the unloading of the lab gear — with the rest of the heavy equipment coming on the second chopper — he had to stop and simply look around. He had not actually set foot on the island, much less inside the colony, until this second, and whenever he arrived at the site of any epidemiological expedition, he immediately needed to get the lay of the land. From the first flyover three days before, he knew the general layout of the settlement, but it was only when he walked away from the helicopter now and did a 360 that he had a true sense of it.

And it felt like he’d stepped inside a ghostly fort.

Despite all the gaps in the timbers, the stockade wall was still formidable, and the abandoned buildings — with their empty windows and gaping doors — seemed eerily tenanted, anyway. He knew there was no one inside the structures, but that didn’t stop him from feeling as if he was being observed. A bucket swung from a rusty chain above an old well, and he marveled that the chain was still intact at all. At the other end of the compound, and tilted slightly on its raised pilings, stood a wooden church with its distinctively orthodox onion dome. He could imagine the hard and uncompromising lives of the Russians who had carved this place out of such an unwelcoming wilderness, making a home for themselves in this most inhospitable and inaccessible spot. A place where they considered themselves impregnable and unreachable … until the Spanish flu had found them.

Again, Slater wondered how. What sly mechanism had the virus used to journey across the frozen waters of the Bering Sea, up onto this isolated rock, and in through the wooden gates that stood behind him?

“The ramp’s down,” the pilot said. “Should we start unloading?”

Slater said yes, and turned back to supervise it. Kozak was smoking a cigar, the pungent aroma wafting in the wind, and Dr. Lantos was bundled up in her coat, the hood raised over her nimbus of frizzy salt-and-pepper hair, stamping her feet on the frozen ground to keep the circulation going. Glancing up at the murky gray sky, Slater reminded himself that he had a window of only a few hours in which to get some tents and other protective structures set up. The alternative — bunking down in the rotted cabins or the leaning church — would not, he suspected, go over very well.

By the time the second Sikorsky flew to the island with Nika and Sergeant Groves aboard, piles of equipment had been off-loaded into the central area of the compound, and temporary landing lights had been arranged in a wide circle. The lights were more than a precaution; although it was only midafternoon, the dark was falling fast.

The sergeant and his crew had arrived that morning, and Nika had been able to bring Groves up to speed. He was a powerful figure, with a thick neck and an intense expression, but she immediately took to his no-nonsense attitude and the quickness with which he grasped everything she had to say, from the topography of the island to the sensitivity of the local Inuit population about what was going to go on there, on ground still considered theirs. She also had the feeling that he would do anything for Dr. Slater; apparently, they’d been through some very tight spots together, and the bond between them was strong.

The moment their chopper landed on the spot now vacated by the first one, Sergeant Groves leapt from the cabin and began directing the crew members on the unloading and disposition of the remaining materiel. He and Slater exchanged a look or two, a few words, and the rest of their communications seemed to be done telepathically, working together seamlessly to get the first things done first, and as rapidly as possible. A generator shed was erected, and thick coils of wire were run across the ground along grid lines that they must have worked out beforehand. A mess tent was set up, and Dr. Lantos was quick to go inside and open her laptop computer on top of a rations crate. In just an hour or two, electric lights were up and running, a lavatory was discreetly but conveniently placed in the shelter of a stockade wall, and flags had been stuck in the ground where the prefab labs and residential tents would be constructed the next day. Nika, impressed by the military precision and speed, did her best just to stay out of the way.

Not that she didn’t feel she had her own duties to perform. Dr. Slater might have thought that she had been using her status as the tribal elder simply to secure herself a berth on the island, but he was wrong. She took her duties seriously. She was an anthropologist by training — a scientist — but she was also imbued with a powerful spiritual urge, one that connected her not only to the Inuit people but to the worldview that they maintained. She was not someone to discount the legends and practices of her people, or to deny the possibility of things simply because our ordinary senses could not see or hear or smell them. So long as 90 percent of the universe was composed of something routinely called “dark matter,” who was she to set any limits on what might, or might not, be true?

The night had truly fallen now, and while the others gathered in the mess tent — its green walls glowing like a firefly in summer — Nika pulled her collar up around her face and walked into the blackness of the compound. She listened to the wind, hoping to hear the voices of the souls who had once lived — and died — here. She peered into the cabins and open stalls, trying to imagine the settlers’ faces peering out. And all the while, she was trying, in her own way, to communicate with them. To reassure them that she, and the others with her, had come not to pillage or intrude, but to accomplish something of great magnitude … something that might help keep others from succumbing to the same terrible fate that they had.

Despite whatever benign intentions she was trying to telegraph, however, she was getting no such messages in return. Just a howling, empty void.

Stopping in front of the church, which sloped ever so gently to one side, she felt that she had come, not surprisingly, to the fulcrum of the colony. The one place where the power — and the essence — of the sect had been most concentrated. And even as she heard Sergeant Groves bellowing out into the darkness that it was dinnertime—“and we close the kitchen at eight!”—she dropped her backpack and sleeping bag on the church steps. Precisely because it gave her the willies, and because it had been the one place she could be assured that all the souls here had regularly gathered, she knew that this was where she would need to bunk down later that night.

Chapter 24

Rasputin had been right.

But Anastasia had to struggle to remember his very words.

He had predicted that if a member of the aristocracy, or more specifically her family, were responsible for his murder, it would signal the end of the Romanov dynasty. Pamphlets secretly published by his irate followers proclaimed that the streets would run with blood, brother would turn against brother, and no one in her family would be safe.

And lo and behold, so far it was all coming to pass.

This day — August 13, 1917—was to be the last one the Romanovs spent at their beloved Tsarskoe Selo. The country had been torn apart by war, then by revolution in the streets. Ana could hardly keep straight all the different factions fighting for power — Reds, Whites, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, the supporters of President Kerensky and his provisional government. All she knew was that her father had been forced to abdicate the throne, and that ever since then, she and her family had become virtual prisoners, kept under close supervision and constant guard.

And not by the Cossacks who had been their loyal defenders, or the four proud Ethiopians who had stood sentry at their doors.

No, now they were guarded by insolent soldiers and common workers, wearing red armbands and surly expressions. Men who had refused even to carry their trunks and suitcases to the train station, from which they were to depart that evening. Count Benckendorff had had to give them each three rubles to do it.

The night before, Ana had been awakened from her sleep by the sound of gunfire, but when she ran out onto the balcony in her nightgown, the soldiers had looked up and hooted, and an officer had lifted the head of one of the tame deer that they had been rounding up and shooting for sport. Her spaniel, Jemmy, barked furiously through the balustrade, and that only made the soldiers, if you could even dignify them with the term, laugh harder.

Now, that same officer was milling about the grand entry hall, poking his nose into their suitcases. Even the count could do nothing to stop him. Her mother and father were reduced to standing meekly to one side as the contingent in charge debated how and when to move their prisoners to the train station. Apparently, there was some question about their safety once outside the gates of the imperial park. It was hard for Ana to believe it was any worse out there than it had been in here.

“Just do as they say,” her father had told her, and it made her both angry and sad to see him — once the Tsar of All the Russias — so diminished. “Kerensky himself has guaranteed that he will find a way to get us out of the country.”

How could he do that, she wondered, if he could not figure out a way to get them from the palace to the train depot?

It was nearly dawn when the orders were finally given to convey the exhausted royal family, and a handful of their faithful retainers, to the station. A troop of cavalry accompanied them. The train, disguised with a sign and flags proclaiming it to be on a Red Cross mission, was stuck on a siding where there was no platform. With as little courtesy as possible, the soldiers hoisted the Tsaritsa and the other women up into the cars. Ana hated having their hands on her, and brushed her skirts madly as soon as she was out of sight inside the cabin.

And so began their long journey eastward, into the wide and empty spaces of Siberia. The train itself was comfortable and well provisioned, and enough of the family’s household members were accompanying them — such as her father’s valet, her mother’s maid Anna Demidova, the French tutor Pierre Gilliard, and best of all the cook — that the trip occasionally took on the aspect of an outing to the royal estates in the Crimea, or some other country retreat. Every evening at six o’clock, the train stopped so that Jemmy and her father’s dog, too, could be walked. Ana couldn’t wait for these little breaks, to feel the solid soil under her feet instead of the constant rumble of the train tracks. And she found a beauty in the green marsh grasses and endless vistas of the steppes. If a grove of white birch trees happened to present itself, she and her sisters sometimes played hide-and-seek, a child’s game that took them back to happier days. Her mother, laid up by her sciatica, would watch them from the train window, and Alexei, if he was feeling well enough, would stroll along the side of the tracks with his father.

Once, when Ana had strayed too far from the train while picking cornflowers, a young soldier, thin as a rail and with a struggling brown moustache, had warned her back. Anastasia, gesturing out at the vast wilderness, said, “You think I would make a run for it? Where do you think I would go?”

The soldier, who seemed flustered to be speaking to a grand duchess at all — even a deposed one — said, “I don’t know. But please don’t try.” His tone was less admonitory than it was pleading. He was doing his duty, that she could see, but he wasn’t entirely at ease with it. She smiled at him — he couldn’t be more than a year or two older than she was, nineteen or twenty at the most — and he held his rifle as if it were a hoe, something she suspected he was much more familiar with.

“Sergei!” another of the soldiers hollered from atop a nearby hill. “Get that limping bitch back here!”

Sergei blushed deeply; some of the soldiers enjoyed delivering insults to their royal prisoners. Ana, who had grown accustomed if not inured to it, glanced at the bouquet of bright blue cornflowers in her hand and said, “I have enough.”

When she dropped one on her return to the waiting train, Sergei picked it up and, bobbing his head as if in a furtive bow, tried to give it back to her.

“You keep it,” she said, and if she thought he had blushed before, it was nothing compared to the crimson flush that filled his young face now. He looked so much like a tomato she laughed and said, “Don’t let the others see that you have it, Sergei. They’ll call it imperial property and take it away.”

He stuck it into the pocket of his frayed military tunic as if it were made of gold.

After that, Ana got used to Sergei’s guarding her. Whenever she stepped off the train with her spaniel, Jemmy, she expected to see him trailing her at a distance, and the other soldiers, too, seemed to regard her as his charge. Her sisters kidded her that she had found a suitor. Usually, the train would not stop anywhere near a station or a town; Ana didn’t know if it was because the Red Guards thought the local people would attack the imperial family, or try to liberate them. On one day, a village was in sight — a prosperous-looking one, judging from the flower-filled window boxes, the green fields, and busy barnyards — but it was safely removed on the other side of the river. Ana noticed that Sergei was gazing at it longingly, his rifle drooping even lower than usual.

“What’s the name of that village?” she asked, and at first he was so lost in thought he didn’t answer.

When she repeated the question, he said, “That is my home.” And then he turned toward her and said, “It’s called Pokrovskoe.”

Now Anastasia looked at it, too, with special attention. Pokrovskoe. She had heard Rasputin speak of it often. It was his own hometown. And he had predicted that the Romanovs would see it one day.

Could he have imagined it would be under circumstances like these?

She did not need to ask the next question before Sergei said, “Father Grigori lived in the house you see with two stories.”

It was unmistakable, looming over all the other cottages in the town the way Rasputin himself had always dominated whatever company he was in. Anastasia wondered who lived in it now — she had heard rumors of a wife and young son. But then there had been so many rumors, most of them scurrilous, that neither she, nor the Tsaritsa, to whom they were often whispered, knew what to believe. She was eager to alert her mother, who was still on the train resting her bad back, where they were; she would want to know.

Coming closer than he ever had before, but keeping an eye out lest the other guards grow suspicious, Sergei said, “There are those who still communicate with the starets.”

“What do you mean, communicate with him? Father Grigori is dead. He is buried in the imperial park.”

Sergei’s eyes earnestly bore into hers.

“I put a white rose on his coffin myself,” Ana said. Her fingers, without meaning to, went to her chest and touched the cross beneath her blouse.

“There are those who keep the fire alight,” Sergei said, just before the whistle on the locomotive screeched. Jemmy barked back at it.

“All aboard,” an officer hollered from on top of the royal train car, “and now!” The whistle went off again, and there was an impatient chuffing sound from the engine.

Sergei ostentatiously lifted his rifle barrel and nudged his prisoner in the direction of the train. Anastasia walked back toward the tracks, Jemmy trotting at her heels. Her sisters were already mounting the stairs, followed by her father in his customary khaki tunic and forage cap. He was holding Alexei, identically dressed, by the hand. The engineer was waving a flag.

Anastasia turned around to say something to Sergei, but he was sauntering back to the troop car with a pair of the other guards and pretended not to notice.

Moments later, the train resumed its journey, and as Ana watched from the window, the flowers and fields and whitewashed barns of Pokrovskoe slid from view. She had forgotten to ask which house had been Sergei’s, and deeply regretted that now.

Chapter 25

“Kushtaka,” Nika said, and Slater had to ask her to repeat it, partly to catch this new word again, and partly because he simply liked to hear her say it.

The lights in the mess tent were wavering, as the wind, only partially blocked by the old stockade, battered the triple-reinforced nylon walls with a dull roar. The temporary electrical grid Sergeant Groves had slapped together was still holding, but the lamps, strung up on wires, were swaying above their makeshift dinner table. Tomorrow, Slater thought, they’d have to get the backup generator online, too — just in case.

“Kushtaka,” Nika said. “The otter-men. If you were an unhappy soul, still nursing some grievance on earth, you were condemned to linger here, unable to ascend the staircase of the aurora borealis into heaven. Or maybe you just drowned, and your body could not be recovered and properly disposed of — either way, your spirit could become a changeling, half-human and half-otter.”

“Why otter?” Dr. Eva Lantos asked, as she dunked her herbal tea bag one more time.

“Because the otter lived between the sea and the land, and now your spirit lived between life and death.”

“We have many such legends in Russia, too,” Professor Kozak said, mopping up the last remnants of his stew with a crust of bread. “I grew up with such stories.”

“Most cultures do have something similar,” Nika agreed. “The kushtaka, for instance, were sometimes said to take on the form of a beautiful woman, or someone you loved, in order to lure you into deep water or the depths of a forest. If you got lost, you could wind up becoming a changeling yourself.”

“So if I see Angelina Jolie in the woods,” Kozak said, “and she is calling to me, ‘Vassily! Vassily! I must have you!’ I should not go to her.”

“You might at least want to think it over,” Nika said with a smile.

Kozak shrugged. “Still, I would go.”

Slater leaned back against a crate and surveyed his team like a proud father observing his brood. In only a matter of hours on the island, they had begun to come together nicely as a team. Professor Kozak was an industrious bear, quickly unpacking his ground-penetrating radar equipment and itching to get started the next day. Dr. Lantos had checked all the crates of lab equipment and supplies, and advised Slater on where they should set up the autopsy tent. Sergeant Groves was off on rounds right now, securing the premises (from force of habit, since the island held no hostiles) and getting to know the Coast Guardsmen who had been left to complete the construction of the prefabs, lighting poles, and ramps the next day.

If the weather allowed, that was. A storm was heading their way, and already its winds were scouring the colony like a steel brush. Slater prayed they wouldn’t get a heavy snowfall, which would mean just that much more digging to get to the graves.

And then there was Nika, whose presence here he had so opposed at first, and who was rather like a spirit herself — a friendly, woodland sprite, filled with native tales and history and lore. Slater found himself immersed not only in her words, but in the light that seemed to be captured in her jet-black hair and eyes. Her tawny skin had taken on a positively golden cast in the glow of the lamps, and he noticed that she frequently touched a little ivory figurine, no bigger than a jump drive, hanging outside her blue-and-gold Berkeley sweatshirt. He was grateful when the professor, perhaps noting it too, asked, “Is that a figure of a little kushtaka around your neck?”

“No,” Nika said, holding it out on its thin chain so that they all could see it better. “That would be bad luck. This is a good-luck charm. We call them bilikins.”

Slater leaned closer, his coffee mug still in his hand. Now he could see that it was an owl, expertly carved with its wings furled and its eyes wide open.

“The owl represents the perfect guide because he can see even in the dark of night. The leader of the hunt traditionally wore it.”

“Walrus tusk?” Kozak said, turning it over in his stubby fingers.

“Maybe,” Nika said. “But my grandmother gave it to me, and her grandmother gave it to her, and if the story is true, it’s made from the tusk of a woolly mammoth. They’re frozen in the soil all around here, and every once in a while one turns up.”

What else, Slater couldn’t help but think, was he going to find in the frozen soil of St. Peter’s Island? A perfectly preserved specimen, its viral load stored within the flesh like a ticking bomb, or a decaying corpse, whose deadly contaminant had been leeched away by decades of slow exposure and erosion?

“Yes,” Kozak said, “the topography and geology of Alaska is like Siberia, and is well suited to this sort of preservation.” Now that he knew its provenance, he looked even more impressed by the humble bilikin.

An especially strong gust of wind battered the tent, and the lights flickered again. Slater reached into his shirt pocket and removed several plastic packets, each one containing a dozen blue capsules and a dozen white.

“I think brandy is more usual after dinner, yes?” Kozak said, examining his packet.

“I’m afraid it wouldn’t mix well with these,” Slater said.

Dr. Lantos had opened her packet, and said, “Prophylactic measures?”

“Yes. The blue one’s a standard anti-influenza drug; you’ll need to take it every day for the next six days, whether we’re still working here or not. The white one is a neuraminidase inhibitor that’s shown both preventative and therapeutic results in trials done at the AFIP.”

“I never heard of these trials,” Lantos said, examining the white capsule skeptically.

“The results haven’t been made public yet. And tomorrow,” he said, with a grin, “may be the best field test we’ve ever run.”

“So we are the guinea pigs?” Kozak said.

Slater nodded and washed one of each of the pills down with the last of his coffee. Kozak and Lantos did the same, but Nika sat silently, waiting.

“Where’s mine?”

Swallowing, Slater said, “You won’t need them.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not coming into contact with any of the bodies.”

“Who said so?”

“The exhumations are a very dangerous and very grim spectacle. There’s no need to subject yourself to any of that.”

But Nika dug in her heels. “Do we really need to go through this again? As the tribal rep, and a trained anthropologist, I insist on being there.” She held out her palm, flat.

Slater glanced at Lantos and the professor, and they both looked at him as if to say, “Not my call.”

Slater dug into his shirt pocket, removed the packet he was planning to give Groves when he got back from his rounds, and plopped it in Nika’s hand, instead; he’d make up another one later for the sergeant. She smiled in victory and held the little plastic baggie up like a trophy, and the others laughed. Slater had to smile, too; no wonder she’d become mayor.

“Now they might make you drowsy,” he advised, “so take them just before you go to bed.”

“And where would that be?” Dr. Lantos said, glancing around the mess tent, one of the few structures erected that day.

“I’m afraid this will have to double as the barracks for tonight.”

“Then I’ve got dibs on this juicy spot under the table,” she said, tapping her foot on the insulated rubber flooring.

“And I will put my sleeping bag on top of that fat pile of cushions,” Kozak said, gesturing at the stack of mats that would be laid down to make a path to the graveyard the next day.

“Nika,” Slater said, “I was thinking that you could—”

“I already know where I’m sleeping tonight,” she said.

“You do?”

“I do.”

As they trudged across the colony grounds, covered with crates and bundles of supplies unloaded from the Sikorskys, Slater continued to argue with her, but Nika would have none of it. She felt it was her duty to make this gesture of atonement to the spirits who had once inhabited this place. There was no explaining such a “metaphysical” view, however, to a man as empirically oriented as Frank Slater. She recognized that it was his job as an epidemiologist to look at things as squarely and objectively as possible, and to keep all other considerations out of the equation.

It was her job, as she saw it, to remain open and attuned to it all — the seen and the unseen, the facts and the faith. She had grown up among the legends and the folklore of her people. Her first memories were of fantastic natural phenomena — the swirling lights of the aurora borealis, the barking of a chorus of seals draped like mermaids on the ice floes, the sun that set for months at a time. You could not grow up on the coast of Alaska, one shallow breath below the Arctic Circle, and not feel both your remoteness from the rest of the world and your oneness with the vast and timeless elements — the impenetrable mountain ranges, the impassable seas — that surrounded you. Instilled within her was a sense of wonder — wonder at humanity’s place in the great scheme of things — and an innate respect for any people’s attempt to create a belief system able to encompass it all.

When they arrived at the church steps, she expected Slater to stop, like a boy dropping off his date at her home, but he started up the stairs instead.

“Wait,” she said, and he turned to look down at her. One of the two doors had fallen off its hinges and left a narrow opening.

“Don’t go in,” she said.

“Why not? The whole place is tilting already — let’s see if it’s safe.”

“I’ll be careful,” she said. What she didn’t say was that she didn’t want his presence to disturb the vibe inside, whatever it might be — and she knew that if she so much as hinted at that, he’d think she’d completely lost her mind. She was surprised herself at how much she already valued his good opinion of her; it wasn’t something she’d experienced in a long time. The dating pool in Port Orlov was meager, to put it kindly.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, grabbing up her bedroll and backpack and sidling past him.

He looked unpersuaded.

“Here,” she said, taking the bilikin from around her neck and dropping it down over his head. “Now you can keep an eye on things even in the dark of night.”

“You’re going to need it more than I do,” he said, glancing toward the church doors.

“It’s the leader of the hunt who’s supposed to wear it.”

For that split second it took her to put the necklace on him, their faces had been very close, and she had felt his warm breath on her cheek. She had seen the stubble on his chin, and a faint scar along his jawline. Where, she wondered, had he come by that? And why did she have such an urge to run her finger gently along its length?

“See you in the morning,” she said, to break the mood. “Put me down for French toast.”

But he still appeared dubious as she slipped between the doors, then flattened herself for a moment against the back of one, with her eyes closed. It was only when she heard his footsteps descend the stairs outside that she opened them again, to a scene of such desolation that she was sorely temped to change her plans.

Chapter 26

By the time Harley and Eddie had found their way back to the cave again, stumbling through the forest with their flashlights and their tools, night had fallen, and the wind had been blowing in their faces the whole time. Even with the black wool balaclava pulled all the way down over his head, Harley’s face stung like it been slapped a thousand times.

Eddie, similarly attired, had done nothing but bitch all the way back.

Especially because their haul had been so disappointing.

The moment they staggered into the cave — about the tenth one they’d tried — Russell had been up on his feet and shouting, “What the fuck? You left me here?”

Harley, trying to get the tarp back in place, had told him to shut up, but Russell was just getting going.

“Where the fuck have you been? I wake up, and I’m ready to go, and you two assholes are nowhere around! Where did you go? Why didn’t you wake me?”

“Because you got so damn drunk last night,” Harley said, gesturing at a few of the beer cans glittering in the glow of the Coleman lamp, “we didn’t have time for you to sober up.”

“You didn’t have time, or you didn’t want to share whatever you got? You went digging, right?” His eyes went to the shovel and pickaxe they had dropped by the mouth of the cave. “What’d you find? You holding out on me already?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, slumping in a weary heap against the wall. “We’re holding out on you.”

Harley tossed his backpack down, reached inside it and threw a string of crystal rosary beads on the ground. “That’s what we found.”

Russell picked it up, looked at the beads — apparently even he could tell they were pretty worthless — and tossed them away. “What else?”

“What else what?” Eddie said. “It took us hours just to dig up that piece of shit.”

“I don’t believe you,” Russell said, grabbing Harley’s backpack and shaking it out. A cascade of PowerBars, Tic Tacs, Chapstick, Trojans, and the like spilled out.

Harley felt his temper start to rise — this day had been bad enough already — and he was about to demand that Russell put it all back in the bag when he stopped himself. He could tell that Russell was on the verge of losing it altogether, and maybe a little drunk even now. He also knew what was really wigging him out — and it wasn’t the idea that he’d been cheated. It was having to spend the day alone, cooped up in this cave, wondering what was going on and whether or not he and Eddie were even planning to come back at all. Russell would never admit it — Harley knew that damn well — but he was having a panic attack.

After two years at Spring Creek — and several stays in solitary confinement there — Russell had lost his talent for solitude, or confinement.

“So what’s the plan then?” Russell said, looming over him but still having to stoop beneath the low roof of the cave. “Do we leave?”

“On what?” Eddie said. “Last I checked, the Kodiak’s on the rocks.”

“The skiff then.”

“In these seas?” Eddie sneered.

“Well what then? Are we gonna dig again tomorrow?”

That was the million-dollar question that Harley had been puzzling over all the way back. As he and Eddie had skirted the colony on their return, he had seen the propeller blades of the Sikorsky rising behind the stockade wall, and he had glimpsed the stark white light of electric bulbs. That guy Slater and his Coast Guard crew were settling in … but for what? If they moved into the graveyard, all he’d be able to do was wait them out.

Or, and this had occurred to him halfway back, he could wait to see if they unearthed anything of value, then steal it from them once they had. It wasn’t as if the Coast Guard thought there was anyone else on the island. Maybe, as a result, they wouldn’t take the normal security precautions. You never could tell.

“What are we eating?” Eddie said, rummaging around in the supplies. “Let’s make something good and hot.”

“Sure,” Harley said, “and while we’re at it, why don’t we hang out a sign that says we’re here? Why don’t we make a big fire, and some smoke, and maybe even attract some animals to the smell?”

Eddie, stymied, rubbed his mittened hands together and waited.

Harley crawled over to the box of canned rations, and tossed them each a couple. The ones he grabbed for himself said BEEF STROGANOFF.

Grumbling, the other two settled into their corners and dug in.

Harley was hungry, too, and after everything he’d been through, even the shit in the can tasted great. That must be how the Army got away with it. Drop a guy into some desert foxhole, and he’ll eat anything, and be grateful for it.

The rosary was lying over by the wall, and Harley couldn’t help but relive the disappointment he’d felt when they’d finally busted into the coffin. Eddie had been afraid to reach in, so it had fallen to Harley again to take the damn thing out. He’d tried not to look at the face of the corpse this time; the last thing he needed was to be haunted by yet another figment of his imagination, like that guy in the sealskin coat. He’d felt around on the upper body and the face and the neck, checking the fingers too for rings, but this was the only thing he could locate or pry loose. Even the string of beads hadn’t come easy; it was as if the corpse was fighting to hang on to it.

When they were done, Harley had shoved the shards of the coffin back into the grave, then covered up the hole with dirt and snow again. He hoped it would snow some more during the night to further conceal his tracks.

Russell belched and popped the top on another beer. Harley was starting to think that the three cases might not last long enough, after all.

Of course it was an open question how long Russell himself would last. The guy was like a ticking bomb ever since he’d come back from the penitentiary, and Harley just wanted to make sure that he was well out of range of the explosion when it happened.

Chapter 27

Standing with her back to the door, Nika fished out her flashlight and played the beam around the interior of the abandoned church. The place was so dark that the light could only penetrate a few small feet of the space at a time. Making things worse, everything was at a slight angle, so that she felt as if she were on a boat listing to one side at sea.

Testing the floor carefully, she advanced a few feet toward some wooden pews. Between them, there was a narrow stretch where the boards weren’t too badly warped and the pews might afford some protection from drafts. For a second, she reconsidered going back to the mess tent, but the thought of giving up on her mission, not to mention listening to Kozak snore all night (and there was no way he wasn’t a snorer) stiffened her resolve. She took off her boots and wrapped her fur coat around them to make a pillow, then unrolled her sleeping bag and slithered down into it.

Even for someone long accustomed to acting as the mayor, tribal elder, Zamboni driver, and general factotum for a whole town, it had been a particularly hard day, and although she couldn’t have predicted that she’d be sleeping in the ruins of an old Orthodox church that night, it wasn’t the first time she’d wound up bunking down under strange conditions. As an anthropologist specializing in the native peoples of the Arctic climes, she had slept in igloos she’d carved herself, in shelters made from walrus gut and caribou hides, in long-abandoned iron mines that had once been blasted from the frozen soil. This was hardly the worst spot she’d ever been in.

But it might have been the eeriest. In fact, she still had that uneasy sensation she’d had ever since setting foot on the island. At first, she’d attributed it to the awkwardness of the situation between Dr. Slater and herself; he’d resisted her coming along, but now that she was there, he seemed to feel that he had some special duty to watch over her. The last thing she’d wanted was to add to his burden — the expedition alone was plenty of responsibility for one man — but she also had to admit that a part of her rather liked it. She was so used to taking care of things herself, whether it was a fishing dispute down at the dock or a municipal shortfall, that she’d forgotten what it was like to have someone else looking out for her. She’d been a lone wolf so long, it was nice to come across another of the breed.

No, her discomfort was from something else, something that clung to the island itself, like kelp to a rock. Nika had always been attuned to such things — her grandmother, who had raised her, had said she’d make a good shaman. Supposedly, her father had had such talents, but Nika hardly knew him, as he had gone missing when she was an infant, and her mother, working the late shift at the oil refinery, had been run off the road by a drunk driver and killed on the spot. For this part of Alaska, the story was not that unusual, and Nika had been determined to change her part in it before it was too late.

Instead of sticking around town and getting pregnant at seventeen by some fisherman, she’d hit the books, hard, and won a scholarship to the University of Alaska at Fairbanks; after that, she’d entered the doctoral program at Berkeley. Her old boyfriend Ben had been planning for the two of them to move to Florida, where he’d just received a job offer — tenure track yet — at the University of Miami. She’d even flown there with him for a week to look around at the campus and check out some apartments, but every palm tree was like a needle in her heart. And for someone who’d seen seals skinned and elk field-dressed, it was alarming how grossed out she’d been by the sight of palmetto bugs scurrying across a kitchen counter.

To Ben’s surprise, if not her own, Nika had returned to the place she’d been determined to escape. Now that she’d made her point and earned her degrees, she decided to come back to Port Orlov, where she could do more for her people than write ethnographic monographs published in scholarly journals that no one would ever read. She could so something concrete. Maybe it was what priests meant when they talked about their calling.

Down toward the nave of the church, she heard a faint rustling sound, and she held her breath. Rats. That would be all she needed. Her hand slipped out of her sleeping bag and made sure her flashlight was within easy reach.

Slater, she thought, showed that same missionary zeal. Although she’d never have admitted it, she’d done a thorough Internet search on him and what she’d read had been very impressive — impeccable academic credentials, an illustrious Army career in the Medical Corps, a number of published papers on epidemiological issues, all of them based on firsthand reports from war zones and trouble spots. But this man who had once been an Army major was now a civilian again, and reading between the lines on the Web, where she could almost see the fingertips of government censors, it looked to her like something had abruptly gone awry. Had he been drummed out of the service? What could he have possibly done? In her estimation, Slater seemed like efficiency incarnate, a model of rectitude, the oldest Boy Scout she’d ever known … but with a world-weary edge to him. And something else, too — a pallor to his skin, a glassy sheen in his eye now and then. It occurred to her that he might have been sick lately. Maybe he still was. But with what?

The sound came again, but this time it was more like little feet pattering across the wood, then something being shifted. Dragged. She wanted to reach down and unzip her bag, but she was afraid the noise would give her away. Damn, why hadn’t she inspected the place more thoroughly before bedding down? Or better yet, just slept in the mess tent?

She started to work her way out of the bag without unzipping it. She had just cleared her shoulders when the dragging sound came again — closer, louder. And this time she could tell there was a live creature of some kind, warm and breathing softly, inching nearer. She didn’t know whether to lie as still and silent as possible, or struggle to free herself from the bag. She craned her head backwards, so she could see into the aisle, and as she did, something slid into view. It was on the ground and only a foot or two from her face. In the moonlight, she could just make out that it was a head, turned toward her. The eyes were wide open, and so was the mouth.

She screamed and turned on the flashlight.

The old man — in an orange life jacket — was staring at her … but just beyond him a pair of fierce yellow eyes glittered like coals in the dark.

The wolf, dragging the corpse by its ravaged arm, stood its ground, not budging an inch.

Nika shrieked at it and waved the flashlight wildly.

The wolf lowered its head, growling. No wolf worth its salt ever released a hunk of meat without a greater threat than this.

She swatted at it with the flashlight, and the wolf ducked, still clenching its prize.

She shrieked again, and a few seconds later there was a clamor at the doors, the sound of running boots and men shouting.

The wolf jerked its head, ripping a hunk of frozen flesh from the old man’s arm, then lunged back into the darkest recesses of the church.

“Nika! Where are you?”

It was Slater.

Flashlight beams were crisscrossing the air above her.

“Here,” she managed to cry out, kicking her legs free of the sleeping bag.

“Where?”

The boots came closer as she scrambled out from between the pews.

“Watch out — there’s a wolf in here!”

“Where?” This was the sergeant’s voice now.

“It just ran into the back!”

Slater threw a protective arm, tight as a hoop of steel, around her shoulders, then he said, “Jesus Christ,” as he took in the corpse on the floor.

“Get out!” Sergeant Groves was shouting. “Get out now! I’ll take care of the wolf.”

But Slater wasn’t going anywhere. He pointed his own flashlight toward the far end of the church. There was a wooden screen, a few feet high and still adorned with scraps of paint, standing behind a jumble of broken boards and furniture.

Among the debris, a black shadow stirred.

“I see it!” Groves said, and she heard his pistol cock.

“Don’t shoot it!” Nika shouted.

But the sergeant snorted in derision, and the gun went off with a deafening blast. A corner of an old chair flew apart in a spray of splinters, and the shadow leapt behind a pew.

“Let it go!” Nika said. “If we leave, it will go on its own!” She pulled on the sleeve of Slater’s shirt.

Just then, there was a blur of motion as the creature vaulted out of its cover and, to their astonishment, came racing straight toward them.

Groves fired again, the bullet hitting an andiron with a clang, and before he could get off another shot, the wolf, like a gust of wind, went hurtling right past them all, head down, eyes fixed on the open doors. Nika felt its fur bristle against her leg as it charged down the aisle.

The sergeant whirled around, but Slater warned him not to shoot.

And then it was gone, into the night.

“Was there just one?” Groves asked her urgently.

“Yes,” she said, “that’s all I saw.”

The sergeant’s eyes now fell on the corpse, and after taking a deep breath, he looked more puzzled than appalled. “Who the hell is this?”

“One of the lost crewmen,” Slater said, kneeling down, and examining the life jacket in the flashlight beam. In white letters, it read NEPTUNE II.

“Wait — I recognize him now,” Nika said. “It’s Richter. Down at the docks, where he worked, they always called him Old Man Richter.” She became aware that there were several other members of the expedition now, clustered on the steps of the church and peering in through the open doors.

“I guess Harley Vane wasn’t the only survivor of the shipwreck, after all,” Slater said.

“But how the hell did this old guy get up here to the colony?” Groves, holstering his gun, wondered aloud.

“When they have no choice,” Nika said, solemnly, “people can do extraordinary things.” And St. Peter’s Island was plainly the place to do them. No wonder she’d had the heebie-jeebies since getting there. The island had a bad rep, and it was living up to it in spades.

Chapter 28

Slater awoke in the dark, with no idea of the time. He glanced at the fluorescent numerals on his watch, and saw that it was not even 6 A.M. yet. The sun wouldn’t rise, if that’s what you could call it, for hours yet.

All around him he was aware of the others, still asleep — Dr. Lantos on the insulated rubber flooring under the table, Kozak snoring on a pile of the ground mats, and Nika — safely removed from the old church — curled like a cat into her sleeping bag between some unpacked crates. The thought of what might have happened to her earlier that night, alone with the wolf and its frozen carrion, made him shudder. He had never lost a man — or woman — on a mission before, and he was not about to start now.

Especially with someone like Nika.

Rising quietly, he went to the flap of the tent and poked his head outside. The air was so cold that just drawing a breath felt as if he’d swallowed a bucket of ice, and the colony grounds were dusted with a fresh coat of snow — not as deep as he’d dreaded but enough to prove a nuisance with their dig. The Sikorsky was parked a hundred meters away, with Sergeant Groves and his Coast Guard crew bunked down inside. Like the Greeks hidden away in the Trojan horse, Slater thought.

As he watched, the hatchway slid open, and Groves, his parka flapping open and his boots unlaced, stepped out onto the snow with his flashlight on. Slater raised a hand, but Groves didn’t see him as he made his way to the latrines. There was an immense amount of work to do that day, but Slater knew that if anybody could get it all organized and done, it would be the sergeant.

When he ducked his head back inside, he saw that Dr. Lantos was stirring. “Who let the draft in?” she said, fumbling for her glasses, and even the professor had quit snoring and was stretching his burly arms. All he could see of Nika was the top of her head, burrowing deeper into her bag for a few extra minutes of slumber.

The day was officially under way.

Over the next few hours, Groves and his crew got a hot breakfast going in the mess tent and unloaded the remainder of the supplies in the chopper, while Dr. Lantos and the professor checked over their equipment inventories and made sure everything was accounted for and in order. As soon as the sky showed a glimmer of light, and Slater could see that the crewmen, under the guidance of the pilot, Rudy, were erecting the other prefab structures according to the plans he had drawn up, he left them to it and rounded up his own team for the trip to the cemetery. Dr. Lantos wanted to stay behind for now and personally oversee the construction and placement of the autopsy tent, but the others were raring to go. Kozak, both gloves fastened on the handlebars of his ground-penetrating radar unit, looked like he was about to mow a lawn.

“You sure you don’t want to wait until we’ve seen what kind of access we have to the cemetery?” Slater asked, but Kozak patted the bright red handles of the GPR like it was a trusted dog and said, “It has gone everywhere. And until we do the ground study, what else can you do, anyway?”

Slater had to agree. Digging up graves under any circumstances was a harrowing business, rife with potential problems. But digging up graves containing the hundred-year-old remains of victims of the Spanish flu — remains that might have deteriorated, in coffins that might have disintegrated, in graves that might even have shifted their location underground due to geothermal changes — was a task requiring the utmost care and professional expertise.

Not to mention sensitivity. It was no surprise to Slater that he saw Nika lacing up her boots and slipping on her glove liners.

“I don’t suppose I could persuade you to stay out of harm’s way today?” Slater said.

“Thanks, but after last night,” she said, “I think I’ve already had my baptism by fire.”

Sergeant Groves, with a bundle of wire flags under his arm, smiled and shook his head at his boss, as if to say, You were dreaming if you thought she wasn’t coming. And though Slater knew he was right, he had had to give it a try. In addition to all the other considerations, exhumations were often dangerous affairs, and the first thing any team leader tried to do was limit the personnel present.

The second thing was to avoid wasting time on battles with headstrong opponents who were bound and determined to pursue their own agenda no matter what.

The sky was a sullen gray when the team finally passed under the main gates of the colony and started down the cleared slope that led to the grove of trees. Slater spotted a narrow break in the woods that suggested a trail had once begun here, and without a word Sergeant Groves wired a red flag to the nearest bough. As they forced their way through the thick trees and dense underbrush, brambles pulling at the sleeves of their coats and low-hanging branches dropping their load of fresh snow on top of their hoods and hats, Groves continued to place an occasional marker along the way.

“We’ll need all of this cut away on both sides,” Slater said, over his shoulder, and Groves replied, “I can get a team with power saws down here later this afternoon. You want ramping, too?”

“Yes, wherever the ground is particularly uneven.”

“Yes, please, I will need that,” the professor said, as he struggled with Nika’s help to steer the wheels of his GPR around an especially gnarly root formation.

Slater, seeing the difficulty he was having, resisted saying I told you so. He understood the professor’s impatience to get started; it was a failing, or virtue, in his own nature, too. But years of running epidemiological missions had taught him to rein in his impulses by making a careful plan and following it to the letter.

“What do you want to do about lighting?” Groves asked.

“A halogen stanchion every twenty feet or so, maybe three hundred watts each.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

Slater knew that it would mean running a lot of cables and power from the generators in the colony all the way through the forest, but they were going to have to do that, anyway, to power up the dressing and decontamination chamber.

When they did emerge from the trees again, Slater stopped at a pair of weathered gateposts, with something — some word or two — whittled into the wood.

Nika immediately removed a glove and reverently ran one finger over the faint writing. “It’s Russian.”

And when Kozak stepped forward and leaned close enough to see, he said, “It’s the same thing, over and over again.”

“What?” Groves asked.

“It says, ‘Forgive me, forgive me.’ ”

“I wonder why,” Nika said, softly.

But Slater, surveying the graveyard that extended all the way to the cliffside, wondered who had scrawled it there. Had it been the founder of the sect, who had brought his flock to ruin in such a bleak and unforgiving spot? Had it been the last surviving member of the colony?

Or could it have been the carrier himself, aware of the calamity he had brought upon his fellows?

The chances of their ever finding out were slim, nor could he allow himself to become distracted by such questions. Right now, looking out across the desolate cemetery, with its tilting crosses and broken tombstones, he was assessing the lay of the land. Glancing to his left, he saw a cleared spot covered only by a soft white duvet of snow.

“We’ll build the biohazard prefab there,” he told Groves, who was already sticking more of his wire flags into the ground to demarcate its boundaries. He’d erected such structures before and knew that he needed a space about eight feet square. These chambers were always a tight squeeze, but the bigger they got, the more chances there were for a sprung seam or a loose flap compromising the whole thing.

Kozak was already trundling his GPR, on its four hard rubber wheels, between the gateposts and onto the grounds of the graveyard. Parking it beside a rotted tree stump, he pounded his boots on the soil, almost as if he were starting some dance, then knelt, pulling off his gloves, and rubbed the snow and frost away from a patch of earth. He sifted a few grains between his thick fingers, then pressed his cheek against the ground as if he were listening for a heartbeat. Slater and Nika exchanged an amused look, but Slater knew that there had to be a good reason for everything he was doing. Kozak was the best at what he did and he could read the earth like nobody else. Slapping the ground several times, then brushing the dirt from his palms and pants, he declared, “The first foot or two is permafrost, but we can cut through. Three or four feet down, there is bedrock.”

For Slater, that was good news. The graves would have had to be shallow ones.

“But I will need to do a thorough GPR survey of the whole area.”

“There won’t be time,” Slater said, thinking of his timetable, and of the winter storms bearing down from Siberia any day now. “Start over by the precipice, where the erosion’s already started. I need to know that the ground we’ll be working on tomorrow is stable.”

At the edge of the graveyard, there was a gouge in the earth, where the overhanging rock and soil had dropped off into the Bering Sea like a broken diving board. As Slater approached the spot, he felt Kozak grab his sleeve and say, “Wait.”

Pushing the GPR like a stroller, Kozak moved slowly past him, all the while intently studying the computer monitor that was mounted between the two red handles. Nika, at his elbow, looked entranced by the shadowy black-and-white imagery appearing on the screen, and Kozak was only too happy to explain what the images, and the accompanying numbers scrolling down both sides of the monitor, conveyed.

“The transducer,” he said, pointing to one of the twin black antennae mounted on the lower part of the carriage, “is sending pulses of energy into the ground. These pulses, they penetrate materials with different electrical conduction properties and make a kind of reflection, here,” he said, tapping the interface screen. “It is something called dielectric permittivity. And the data, it is all stored in the computer.”

“What’s the data telling you right now?” Slater asked as they approached the graves closest to the edge of the precipice.

Kozak paused before answering. “I will need to analyze it later. But there is something strange. Either the monitor is malfunctioning, or the ground has fracture lines that are not geological in origin.”

“Oh, you mean from when the graves were dug?” the sergeant surmised.

“Something more than that,” Kozak said, still looking a bit puzzled. He pushed the GPR carriage over the plot closest to the area were the cliff had given way, then moved it back and forth slowly, from the top of the grave to its foot. Slater craned his neck to look at the monitor himself, and it vaguely reminded him of looking at a sonogram. What he saw there was a fuzzy image of a long rectangle, with something sharper and harder depicted in the middle of the space. But when Kozak rolled the GPR back again one more time, Slater could see that the edges of the image grew wider and more irregular. Blurred. He could guess what that meant, but he waited for Kozak to say it.

“Frost heaval.”

“The coffins have been shifting in the ground?”

Kozak nodded. “The closer to the cliff they are, the more movement there has been.”

Movement meant damage, and damage meant any number of things might have transpired in the Alaskan soil, from leakage to contamination to — and this he could only hope for — disintegration and harmless dissipation.

“What are the ground temps?” Slater asked, and Kozak punched a few buttons on the computer, bringing up a separate graph on the screen. “At a depth of one meter or so, where most of the coffins are, it’s between minus four and minus ten degrees Celsius.”

“Is that good or bad?” Nika asked.

“At the AFIP,” Slater replied, “we keep our specimens, for safety’s sake, at minus seventy Celsius.”

But this then would have to be the grave with which their project began. It was closest to ground zero, as it were, and as a result the condition of the cadaver in the casket lost at sea would be most closely replicated in this one. In any epidemiological mission, it was critical to work from the most hazardous location first, then proceed outward from there to see where, and how far, some contagion or contaminant might have spread. Slater motioned to Groves and told him the excavation work should begin right here, and Groves twisted a wire pennant around the top of the cross at the top of the grave, then stuck another into the snow at the foot of the grave.

“And make sure you keep the soil as intact as possible, so that we can lay it back neatly over the grave when we’re done.”

Groves made a note of it, as Nika nodded approvingly.

“We want to leave no sign of any desecration behind us when we’re done.”

“And the sooner you all go,” Kozak piped up, waving his hands, “the easier it will be for me to finish my own work here. So, scat — I must make my grid now, and you are all in the way.”

Slater knew what it was like to have a bunch of onlookers hanging around when you wanted to concentrate on a serious task at hand, so he ushered Nika and the sergeant back toward the gateposts as Kozak focused on his GPR. If this first exhumation was going to go off without a hitch tomorrow, there were things he needed to do back at the colony today. Kozak was barely aware of their leaving. And though he jiggled the monitor to see if he could remove the squiggly lines that were spoiling the topographic map, they kept coming right back, as did the occasional impression of a hard, probably metallic, object as he rolled the GPR chassis over each individual gravesite. A strong blast of cold wind swept in from the sea, bending the boughs of the dark trees that bordered the barren graveyard, and he pressed the earflaps of his hat closer against his head. It was the same kind of hat he’d worn as a boy, growing up in the Soviet Union. And now, on this strange island, he was revisited by that same crushing sadness that he remembered enveloping him even back then.

That was one reason he had just shooed them all away. When this depression fell, he needed to be alone with it … and it fell upon him often in climes like these. He was carried back in time, to a throng of mourners, gathered at an impressive state funeral in Moscow, when he was just a boy. Wrapped in their heavy black coats and fur hats, they had stood impassively as the wind had battered their faces and brought tears to their eyes. Of course, given the reputation for steely rectitude of the dignitary whose funeral it was — a man whom everyone feared and no one much liked — a sharp wind was the only way any of them would have been inclined to shed a tear.

As young Vassily had looked on, the Russian Orthodox priest, in his long black cassock and purple chimney-pot hat — the kamilavka—had overseen the perebor, or tolling of the bells. First, a small bell had been struck once, and then, in succession, slightly larger bells were rung, each one symbolizing the progress of the soul from cradle to grave — or so his mother had leaned down to whisper in his ear. At the end, all the bells were struck together, signifying the end of earthly existence. The coffin, sealed with four nails in memory of the four nails that had crucified Christ, was lowered into the grave, with the head facing east to await the Resurrection. The priest poured the ashes from a censer into the open pit, and after each of the stony-faced mourners had tossed in a shovelful of dirt and drifted off down the snowy pathways of the cemetery, Vassily had found himself alone there, with only his widowed mother. He had leaned back against her and she had folded her arms over him as they watched the gravediggers, impatient to finish the job, emerge from the cover of the trees to fill up the rest of his father’s grave.

Chapter 29

“So, where did you say you got this?” Voynovich asked, while leaning back on his stool. He’d gotten even fatter, if that was possible, since Charlie Vane had last come into the Gold Mine to fence some other items.

“I already told you,” Charlie said. “It was a gift from God.”

“Yeah, right. I’ve heard your show. You and God are good buds now.”

Charlie knew that nobody believed that his conversion to Christ was the real thing, but so what? There would always be unbelievers and naysayers. Jesus himself had to deal with Doubting Thomas. But he’d driven here, all the way to Nome, because Voynovich was the only person he could think of who could give him a decent appraisal of the emerald cross — and tell him what the damn writing said on the other side.

Voynovich studied the cross under his loupe one more time. “I can’t be completely sure until I take them out,” he said, “but these stones could just be glass.”

“They’re emeralds,” Charlie said, “so don’t give me any of your bullshit.” Just because he was a man of God now, it didn’t mean he’d become a sucker. “And the cross is silver.”

“Yeah, I’ll give you that much.”

It was only four in the afternoon, but it was dark out, and in deference to the delicacy of their negotiations, Voynovich had lowered the front blinds of the pawnshop and flipped the sign to CLOSED. The place hadn’t changed much over the years — the same old moose head hung on the wall, the dusty cabinets displayed a seemingly unchanged array of Inuit scrimshaw, old mining tools, and “rare” coins in sealed plastic sleeves. The fluorescent lights still sputtered and fizzed.

“It’s definitely an old piece,” Voynovich conceded.

“How old?”

“Best guess? Judging from the condition, at least a hundred years. Of course, if I knew more about how and where you found it — it’s why I asked — I’d probably be able to tell you a whole lot more.” He shrugged his shoulders under his baggy corduroy shirt and shook a fresh cigarette out of the packet lying on the counter.

“How about the writing on the back?” Charlie asked, shifting in his wheelchair. He was still sore from his long drive from Port Orlov. “What’s it say?”

Voynovich turned it over and tried peering at it through the bottom of his gold bifocals, then gave up. “Gotta get the magnifying glass out of the back,” he said, sliding off the stool, and heading for the rear of the shop. A trail of smoke wafted into the air behind him.

The trouble with dealing with crooks, Charlie reflected, was that they never stopped being crooks. Not emeralds? What a load. Voynovich was probably hoping to buy the thing outright from him for a couple of hundred bucks, act like he was doing Charlie a favor the whole time, then turn around and sell it for thousands through his own guys down in Tacoma. Well, Charlie hadn’t come all this way for a couple hundred bucks, and he sure didn’t want to have to tell Rebekah that that was all he got. While she was supposed to be the subservient wife — that’s what the Bible decreed — she had a tongue on her that could cut like a knife.

Right now, she was out shopping with her sister. The town of Nome was small — only around ten thousand people lived in the area — but compared to Port Orlov, it was the big city. The streets were lined with bars and bingo parlors and tourist traps selling native handicrafts and souvenirs. Most of the buildings were two stories high, made of weathered wood and brick, and clung close to the wet streets, lending the place the feel of an Old West mining camp.

Voynovich lumbered back to his stool, parked his cigarette on the foil ashtray, and held the magnifying glass over the back of the cross. “My Russian’s not what it used to be,” he said, “and some of this is pretty far gone. From all the dents and scorch marks, it looks like some moron used the thing for target practice.”

“Just tell me what the hell it says.”

The pawnbroker leaned over to inspect it more closely. “It looks like it says, ‘To my … little one. No one can break the chains of holy love that bind us. Your loving father, Grigori.’ ”

Voynovich studied it for another few seconds, then sat back.

“That’s it?” Charlie asked.

“That’s it.”

Charlie didn’t know what exactly he’d been expecting, but this wasn’t it. A gift from a doting dad? Nothing there sounded like a clue to some vast buried treasure trove.

“If you want me to hang on to it and see what else I can find out, no problem,” Voynovich said, a little too readily for Charlie’s comfort. “I’ve got a big data base for Russian stuff and a few people I could talk to.”

“No.”

“Fine,” Voynovich said. “Then if you just want to sell it, we can go ahead and do that, instead. It’s probably worth more in one piece, but we can see what they think down in Tacoma. Maybe breaking it up is the way to go … especially if those are emeralds.” He started to pick the cross up off the counter, but Charlie reached up and grabbed his wrist — he hated how the damn wheelchair kept him lower than most people — and stopped him.

“I’m hanging on to it,” he said, and Voynovich looked confused.

“I thought you wanted to make some money.”

“And I will.” He wrapped the cross back up in the soft old rag he’d brought it in, then stuffed it into the inside pocket of his coat.

“If you want some kind of an advance,” the pawnbroker said, his eyes avidly following the cross into Charlie’s pocket, “I could do that. What do you say to two hundred bucks now and—”

But Charlie was already pushing his wheelchair away from the counter.

“Okay, five hundred up front, against whatever we get, plus the usual split.”

Charlie was at the door, but to his humiliation, it was the kind you had to pull inwards, and he had to wait there for Voynovich to come over and hold it open while he maneuvered his chair over the threshold.

“Make it a grand,” Charlie heard over his shoulder as he wheeled away. “An even grand.” But now, with the bid rising so fast, he knew that the thing must really be worth something, after all. Quite a bit, in fact, unless he missed his guess.

The sidewalk, like every concrete surface in Alaska, was pitted and uneven, and it was murder getting the chair down the street. But Charlie knew where he’d find Bathsheba. The Book Nook sold used paperbacks, and she’d be in there stocking up on romance novels.

Somebody leaving the store held the door open for him, and a little bell tinkled overhead. Bathsheba, no surprise, had her nose buried in some piece of trash that she hastily tried to hide when he wheeled up beside her.

“Where’s your sister?”

“Just up the street, buying yarn.”

“We’re going.”

“You’re done already? Rebekah said we could eat someplace in town.”

“Rebekah said wrong.”

“But there’s that place, the Nugget—”

“I said, we’re going.”

He whirled the chair around, and Bathsheba put the book back on the shelf and leapt to get the door open for him. Once Rebekah had been retrieved from the yarn shop, the sisters helped Charlie up into the driver’s seat of the van, and he pulled out onto the slushy street using the hand controls.

“Look,” Rebekah said, as Charlie drove by without even slowing down, “that’s the burled arch.” She was hoping to distract her disappointed sister.

“The what?” Bathsheba said, taking the bait and turning in the backseat to glance at the split spruce log raised atop two columns.

“That’s the place where the Iditarod race ends every year.”

“What’s that?”

“Remember, I told you about it last time.”

“Tell me again.”

How in God’s name did Rebekah put up with it, Charlie wondered? Always having to explain everything to her sister, even when she’d already explained it a dozen times before? They’d come to him as a package deal — wife and sister, indivisible — and since he’d needed a lot of help around the house, he thought why not. Still, there were times, like right now, when he wondered if he hadn’t acted rashly.

Then he chastised himself for the uncharitable thought. Man, staying right with Jesus was a full-time job.

“It’s in honor of something that happened many years ago,” Rebekah said, with the patience she showed to no one but her sister. “There was an epidemic of a disease, typhoid I think—”

“Diphtheria,” Charlie corrected her.

“Okay. Diphtheria. And the children of Nome — the native children — had no immunity to it.”

“It was in 1925,” Charlie said, unable to restrain himself. “And it used to be called ‘The Great Race of Mercy.’ ”

Rebekah waited a second, scowling, then went on. “The only medicine for it—”

“The serum.”

“Was in Anchorage.” She lay in wait for another correction, and when it didn’t come, she continued. “So teams of dogsleds had to be organized in relays, and the serum was carried hundreds and hundreds of miles, through terrible storms and ice and snow, to get to the children of Nome before the disease did.”

“And did it?”

“It did — in only five or six days. And there was a famous dog who was the first one to run right up this street, pulling the sled across the finish line.”

“Balto,” Charlie said, “his name was Balto. But the real hero was a different dog, one named Togo. Togo and his musher were the ones who took the serum through the hardest and the longest part of the route.” There wasn’t a kid in Alaska who didn’t know the story behind the present-day Iditarod, named after the trail so much of it took place on. But it had always bugged Charlie that the credit didn’t go where it really belonged. Once, many years ago, before the Merchant Marine had drummed him out, he’d had a shore leave in New York City and seen a statue there, in Central Park, of Balto. He’d wanted to scrawl Togo on it instead.

“Can we watch the race sometime?” Bathsheba asked.

Rebekah looked over at Charlie. “When is it, anyway?”

“March,” he said. “I’ll be sure to get us front-row seats.” He wondered why it still bothered him, about Togo. Maybe, he thought, it was because he hated stories where the ones who should be recognized for their greatness were somehow overlooked, and somebody else was able to swoop in at the end and get all the glory.

At the corner of Main Street, they passed the famous signpost with a dozen different placards showing the distances from there to everywhere else. Los Angeles was 2,871 miles away, the Arctic Circle a mere 141 miles. A couple of tourists were posing for pictures underneath it. Bathsheba craned her neck to get a better look.

“Get me Harley on the horn,” he said, as the van pulled out of the town proper. The lights of Nome hadn’t been much, but the night enveloped them the moment they left. Rebekah called up his brother on the car’s speakerphone, and Charlie heard the ring tone just before he got a burst of static, followed by dead air. Same as he’d been getting for the past couple of days.

“Goddammit!” he said, slapping his palm against the steering wheel.

“It’s an island in the middle of nowhere,” Rebekah said, hanging up. “I don’t know why you ever expected to get any reception.”

“I’m hungry,” Bathsheba said from the backseat.

“We should have eaten in town,” Rebekah said to Charlie. “Now you’ll have to pull over at that roadhouse we passed on the Sound.”

Charlie was about to protest, but he realized that he was hungry, too — it was just in his nature to be contrary — and it was going to be a long drive back. The road between Nome and Port Orlov, if that’s what you could call it, ranged from asphalt to gravel to hardpan — a compacted layer of dirt just beneath the topsoil — and most of it could be bumpy and rutted and washed out even in summer.

And this was sure as hell not summer.

In the snowy wastes around them, it was hard to see much, but mired in the moonlit fields there were old, abandoned gold dredges squatting like mastodons. Occasionally, you could come across one of these that was still in operation — growling like thunder as it devoured rocks and brush and muck in a never-ending quest for the gold that might be mixed up in it. Even more eerily, railroad engines were stranded in the frozen tundra — left to rust on sunken tracks that had lost their purpose the moment the gold ran out. Their smokestacks, red with age, were the tallest things in the treeless fields.

“There it is,” Rebekah said, pointing to the parking-lot lights of the roadhouse — a prefab structure on pylons — perched beside the Nome seawall. The granite wall, erected in the early fifties by the Army Corps of Engineers, was over three thousand feet long and sixty-five feet wide at the base, and it stood above what had once been known as Gold Beach, a place where the prospectors and miners of 1899 had discovered an almost miraculous supply of gold literally lying on the sands, just waiting to be collected.

“You coming in?” Rebekah asked, but they both knew Charlie wouldn’t want to have to climb in and out of the van again. Pulling up onto the gravel, he parked and said, “Bring me a sandwich and get the thermos filled with tea. Peppermint if they’ve got it. And don’t take forever.”

The sisters got out of the car, buried under their long coats, and scurried up the ramp. Since he’d had no luck reaching Harley’s cell phone, he tried calling Eddie’s number, then Russell’s, but they weren’t working, either. What was happening on St. Peter’s Island? Had they found a safe harbor for the Kodiak, and a secluded cave to hide out in? More important, had they started digging and found anything yet? Charlie had high hopes, but not a lot of confidence; he hadn’t exactly dispatched the A-Team and he knew it.

Waves were crashing on the breakwater out beyond the roadhouse. After the gold had been discovered on the beach — in such quantities that 2 million dollars’ worth was gathered in the summer of 1899 alone — steamships from San Francisco and Seattle had carried so many eager prospectors to Nome that a tent city had soon stretched thirty miles along the shore, all the way to Cape Rodney. Charlie had seen pictures of it hanging on the walls of the Nugget Inn in town. Mile after mile of canvas and stretched hides, shacks and lean-tos, all packed with desperate men and women struggling to make their fortunes. He felt the weight of the cross in his pocket and wondered how much had really changed since then? Alaska was still the Wild West in many ways — probably the last of it that was left — where loners and free spirits, people down on their luck or looking to find it in the first place, could come and make a fresh start.

While he waited in the warm car, he kneaded the tops of his dead legs. He couldn’t feel anything below the groin, but he knew that it was a good idea to keep the circulation going and the muscles from atrophying. Everything happened for a reason, that’s what he’d had to keep telling himself every day since the accident, and if this was God’s way of bringing him back into the fold, then so be it.

The sisters, coming out of the roadhouse, with their white faces and wisps of black hair blowing free from the buns at the back of their heads, reminded him of a couple of strutting crows. Bathsheba was carrying the thermos and Rebekah had the sandwich in a paper bag. Salmon salad on whole wheat toast, as it turned out. At least she got that sort of thing right. He ate it while playing a CD of a biblical sermon — sometimes he got ideas for his own broadcasts this way — and then backed the car out of the lot.

They could have spent the night in Nome, but Charlie hated to waste money, and besides, he liked to be back in his own place, with the ramps and everything else he needed to be comfortable. Not to mention the fact that the chances of hearing any news out of nearby St. Pete’s were going to be better there than in distant Nome. This first part of the road was blissfully asphalt, with a white line down the center and shoulders on either side, but he knew the rest of the way back wasn’t going to be that smooth. At least the van was equipped for it, with two spare cans of gas (a necessity when traveling in the wilderness regions of Alaska), plastic headlight covers to ward off the flying gravel, and, in case he collided with anything big, a wire mesh screen in front to protect the radiator and the paint job. If you hit a moose head-on, it could be curtains for more than the moose.

He hadn’t gone twenty miles before he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that Bathsheba had slumped over in the backseat, fast asleep. Rebekah noticed it, too, and in a low voice, said, “So, how much did you get from Voynovich?”

“Nothing.”

“What are you talking about?” She glanced into the backseat again to make sure her sister was out. Some things they kept from her, for fear she could blurt out a piece of news she wasn’t supposed to know.

“I hung on to it,” he said, patting his breast pocket.

Rebekah folded her arms across her breast and, barely containing herself, said, “You want to tell me why?”

“Because he offered me a grand up front.”

Now she really looked puzzled.

“And if it was worth that much to him just to keep me from walking out of the store with it, it must be worth a helluva lot more. If Harley and his idiot friends manage to find any more stuff like it on the island, I’m going to go on down to Tacoma and fence it all myself.”

In a mollified tone, she asked, “Did he at least tell you what it said on the back?”

“Yeah, but it’s just an endearment. Nothing that says Romanov about it.” Or at least so far as he knew. When he got home, and wasn’t online ministering to Vane’s Holy Writ flock, he planned to be doing whatever research he could. Dollars to donuts, Voynovich was already doing exactly the same thing.

He drove on into the night, sipping the tea, and watching as, first, the center white line disappeared, then as the breakdown lane evaporated; the road became a narrow, serpentine trail, wending its way through snowy hills and along frozen streambeds. There were old wooden bridges, reinforced and supported on cement blocks, stretching across frozen gullies, and highway signs warning of wildlife crossings. Moose, bear, elk, caribou, fox, Dall sheep. At the right times of year, if you had a mind to, you could survive off the roadkill alone in these parts.

Rebekah, too, soon fell asleep, her head leaning against her doorjamb, and Charlie tried to stay awake by paying attention to the biblical sermon on the CD. The preacher was an old man called the Right Reverend Abercrombie, and he spoke in a lulling, monotonous tone.

“And when we read, in Exodus 7–12, about the ten plagues that descended upon the Egyptians, what are we to make of them?” the reverend said. “What was God’s purpose?”

To kick Egyptian ass, Charlie thought, and to kick it hard.

“The purpose of the Lord was twofold,” the reverend continued. “Of course he wanted to persuade the Pharaoh to free the Israelites. But he also had a second reason — and that was to show just how strong the God of Israel was in comparison to the gods of Egypt. It was a point he wanted to make not only to the Egyptians, but to the Israelites themselves.”

While the Reverend Abercrombie went through his analysis of the ten plagues, one by one, and expounded on what each of them meant, Charlie kept his eyes peeled for trouble up ahead, looking out for the little red flags that were commonly posted along the roadside wherever there were loose gravel breaks, or where the pavement had cracked from frost heaval.

“ ‘If you do not let my people go,’ ” Abercrombie recited from the Old Testament, “ ‘I will send swarms of flies on you and your officials, on your people and into your houses.’ ”

What had always troubled Charlie about the ten plagues was that Yahweh seemed so willing to go another round all the time, whether it was with flies, or gnats, or frogs, or pestilence. For the Lord God Almighty, He didn’t know how to lower the boom, once and for all. No wonder Pharaoh kept agreeing to set the Israelites free before going back on his word every time.

An oil tanker, horn blaring as it came round a bend, barreled past him in the opposite direction, the wind from its passage buffeting the van.

But both of the sisters slept on.

“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand toward the sky so that darkness will spread over Egypt — darkness that can be felt,’ ” the reverend quoted.

Darkness that can be felt. The first time Charlie had read that, he remembered thinking that it was as if the book were describing Alaska. The darkness in the woods at night, or on a lonely road, when a storm was concealing the moon and stars, could be as thick and palpable as a beaver pelt. He had known men to die, frozen to death, on their own land, unable to see or find their way to their houses. And soon, as winter continued to descend, the night would fasten its grip even more tightly, extinguishing the sun altogether.

In his headlights, the only signs of human activity he could see, for mile after mile after mile, were the junk heaps abandoned on the sides of the road. Broken-down old trucks half-buried in the snow, motorcycle frames riddled with bullet holes, a decrepit Winnebago resting on its axles. In Alaska, it was easy to abandon things, but nothing went unscavenged. All of these wrecks had been carefully stripped of any useful parts, like an animal stripped of its fur, its meat, its antlers.

As he approached the wide turn that he knew led to the Heron River Bridge, the road began to washboard, huge ripples in the asphalt making the van buck and swerve. Miraculously, Rebekah only moved her head away from the door and let her chin slump in the other direction, while Bathsheba slept on in the backseat. Behind her, in the rear of the van, he could hear the gas sloshing in the cans.

The ground gradually rose through snow-covered hills, with battered and dented signs along the road warning of oncoming traffic, avalanche dangers, animal crossings, possible strong wind conditions, icy road hazards, you name it. Using the hand levers, Charlie slowed down. Fortunately, he had no one behind him, and nothing, so far, approaching from the other direction. The bridge — a two-lane, steel span — was one of the biggest in the region, even though the Heron River itself didn’t amount to much. It lay far below, at the bottom of a granite canyon, and half the time it was frozen solid. At other times, however, when the snowpack melted in the spring, or the rains came, it could become a raging torrent overnight.

Charlie shifted in his seat, and as he switched gears, the silver cross nudged him again in the ribs. It was kind of uncomfortable keeping it there. With Bathsheba asleep anyway, he saw no harm in taking it out and laying it flat, still concealed in the rag, on the console beside the thermos. The road had turned to compacted gravel here to offer better traction, and as he steered past a pair of icy boulders, each one slick with ice and the size of a house, he slowed down again.

“And when the tenth and final plague came, the Lord said, ‘About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill …’ ”

There was the sound of something stirring in the back of the van, and then he heard the leather of the backseat creaking. Damn, why couldn’t Bathsheba have stayed asleep for just another couple of hours? He did not need to deal with her blather.

“ ‘… and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt — worse than ever has been or ever will be again.’ ”

Rebekah was still snoring, but her sister must be awake.

“Exodus, 11, 4–6.”

As the tires rumbled onto the corrugated lanes of the steel bridge, Charlie caught, out of the corner of one eye, a hand reaching over and into the front seat. At first, he figured she was reaching for the thermos, but then he thought, Bathsheba hates peppermint tea.

“Even so, the Lord had provided for his chosen people,” Abercrombie commented, “instructing them to mark their doorposts with the blood of the lamb.”

Maybe she thought it was root beer, her favorite.

“It’s peppermint tea,” he said. “You won’t like it.”

Taking his eye off the slippery road for an instant, he saw that her wrist was surprisingly bony and white, even for Bathsheba, and something wet and stringy touched his cheek. Christ, why hadn’t she dried her hair before she got back in the car?

And then she really pissed him off. She went right past the thermos and reached for the rag holding the cross.

“Leave that alone,” he barked, reluctant to take a hand off the wheel on the icy bridge.

But she went ahead anyway and picked it up.

Shit. He took one hand off the wheel and grabbed her wrist — it was cold and slick as an icicle — but when he glanced up at the rearview mirror, he saw not Bathsheba’s sullen features, but two hollow eye sockets, sunken in the long face of a dead man in a black sealskin coat.

When he turned his head, a thatch of matted dark hair, knotted and rank as seaweed, swept his face. He’d have screamed, but he was struck dumb. The car swerved, scraping the guardrail so hard a shower of blue sparks erupted.

“What?” Rebekah said, startled awake. “What’s happening?”

Charlie dropped hold of the bony wrist and wrestled with the wheel. The tires skidded on a thin coat of ice.

Bathsheba was sitting bolt upright, muttering “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want …”

The car banged the rails again, the hatchback springing open and the alarm bell dinging.

An oncoming truck pumped its horn, switching its headlight beams to bright and sweeping the interior of the van.

“What’s going on?” Bathsheba said. Icy cold air was flooding the car from the open hatch.

“And the Lord said to the Israelites, ‘I will not suffer the destroyer to come into your houses …’ ”

“Watch it!” Rebekah shouted, as he barely managed to get control before they veered into the other lane.

In the rearview mirror, the dead man was gone, as if extinguished by the gush of light and air. All Charlie saw was Bathsheba, and through the gaping hatch the empty roadway disappearing behind him.

The truck rattled by, its driver thrusting his middle finger out the window at Charlie.

“Did you fall asleep?” Rebekah accused him. The cross, free of its rag, was lying on the floor of the van.

“Ew,” Bathsheba said, squirming in her seat.

“And the angel of death spared them, as the Lord had promised.”

“Double ew,” Bathsheba said again. “It stinks back here.”

“What are you talking about?” Rebekah snapped, turning around. “And close that hatch before we lose half the gear!”

The van eased off the other end of the Heron River Bridge, and Charlie, steering it onto the shoulder, took his first full breath in what felt like forever. His hands were shaking, and he was still too scared even to turn in his seat.

“And it’s all wet back here,” Bathsheba complained, settling back into her own seat after securing the hatch.

Rebekah took a look around the rear, and said, “You should have stomped the snow off your boots before you got back in the van.”

“I did,” Bathsheba insisted.

“Then what did you step in?” she said, rolling down her window. “It does smell like something died back there.”

“Forget about the smell,” Charlie muttered to Rebekah. Gesturing at the cross on the floor, he said, “Pick that up.”

She did, wrapping it back in the rag.

“Put it in the glove compartment.”

She stuck it in the compartment and slammed the little door shut. “And you,” she said, glaring at him, “watch your damn driving from now on.”

“ ‘And it came to pass that the Lord did bring the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt …’ ”

Charlie flicked off the CD and punched the radio dial to a country-western station.

“I was listening to that,” Rebekah complained.

“You were sleeping,” he said, as Garth Brooks came on, mournfully wailing about lightning strikes and rolling thunder. “Listen to this instead.”

With his eyes fastened on the road, his hands clenching the wheel, and his heartbeat gradually returning to normal, he steered the van out into the darkness of the surrounding land—darkness that could be felt—and pondered the cross they had looted from a Russian grave.

Was the apparition he had just seen in the backseat its rightful owner?

A wolf — a big dark one — was momentarily caught in the headlights, loping along the side of the road, as if keeping pace with the van. But then, with a turn of its head and a silver flash of its eyes, it vanished into the night.

Chapter 30

By the time Slater had reached the bottom of the stone steps leading to the beach, he could hardly believe it.

It had been hard enough coming down them, in the light of day, but to think that Old Man Richter had managed to climb up them after being shipwrecked was almost beyond comprehension.

“That guy we found in the church must have been one tough old bird,” Rudy, the Coast Guard ensign, said.

“The toughest there ever was.”

In some places, the steps were no more than a few inches wide, and they zigged and zagged down the cliff face from the colony grounds high above them. Up top, Slater could hear the sounds of Sergeant Groves’s work crew preparing for the exhumations — buzz saws cutting a clear path to the cemetery, jackhammers loosening soil, hammers clanging on metal stanchions as the lighting poles and lab tents were erected. Even now, at high noon, the sun was struggling to make itself felt through the low-hanging clouds, and a hundred yards offshore the bracelet of mist that clung to St. Peter’s Island obscured the Bering Strait beyond.

“Just in case,” Rudy was saying as he walked a few yards down the rocky beach, “this RHI is going to be left right here.”

A bright yellow boat — called a Rigid Hull Inflatable — was sitting just above the high-tide line, tied to a boulder and raised on makeshift davits fashioned from driftwood. A black, waterproof tarp was stretched tight over its interior.

“Chances are,” Rudy said, “it will never be needed, but if air transport is unavailable or for some reason temporarily impractical, this will provide a means to get off the island and back to Port Orlov.”

“I take it you’ll be here to do the navigating,” Slater said.

“Yes, I’m staying when the Sikorsky goes, but the boat pretty much sails itself. Port Orlov’s just about three miles due east.”

The chopper was leaving that night, in less than two hours, carrying the rest of the Coast Guard personnel — along with a body bag containing the remains of Richter. Nika had contacted Geordie to take custody of the corpse and keep it under wraps in the community center’s garage until she could get back and arrange for a proper burial.

Slater looked forward to limiting the complement on the island. When dealing with an epidemiological event like this, the fewer people present, the smaller the risk of anything from misinformation to contagion escaping into the greater pool. As it was, there were far too many questions from the Coast Guardsmen, and even though they had been warned that anything they had seen or done on the island was considered highly classified, Slater knew from experience that no secret shared by more than three people ever stayed secret for long. He slapped a hand on the side of the boat, like patting a trusty steed, all the while hoping he would never need to take it out on the open sea. If everything went as planned, the exhumation and autopsy work would be done in roughly seventy-two hours, and the chopper would be back to retrieve Slater’s team and their core samples before the weather turned any worse than it already was.

Even for Alaska, there was a bone-chilling snap in the air, courtesy of a Siberian low that had been moving slowly, but inexorably, in the direction of St. Peter’s Island. Snowfall so far had been slight, just a couple of inches, but even that much precipitation meant time and effort would be expended to clear it away. The most important thing for Slater right now was to get into that cemetery and start the dig. He had spent several hours going over all the topographical data with Professor Kozak, and he had chosen the grave closest to the edge of the cliff to begin his work. Not only was it the one most in danger of falling victim to the same erosion that had released the first coffin, it was also the one that might have been exposed to the greatest variations in soil and air temperature, and from the frost heaval that they could cause.

As soon as he returned to the colony grounds, Slater made the equivalent of hospital rounds, inspecting the various labs and facilities, which had been erected in record time. Green neoprene tents, connected by hard rubber matting that provided pathways among them, glowed from within like lightbulbs. Ropes had been strung up alongside all the paths so that, in the event of a sudden whiteout, anyone caught outside could still hang on and grope his or her way to safety. In addition to the mess tent, there were several bivouacs now — one reserved for Dr. Lantos and Nika, who had definitely renounced her notion of sleeping in the old church — and over by the main gates a combination laboratory and autopsy tent. A metal ramp with rails on both sides had been erected to its entrance, where a big orange triangle announced that it was a Biohazard Level-3 Facility, open to authorized personnel only. The tent was shrouded in heavy-duty, double-plastic sheaths, stuck together with Velcro-type adhesive strips; in this climate, zippers tended to freeze and get stuck.

Parting the curtains, Slater stepped inside the laboratory area of the tent. Dr. Lantos was under a table, straightening out a tangle of cords that looked like a pile of snakes. For a second, Slater was taken back to the rice paddy in Afghanistan … and the viper lashing out at the little girl. Warm air was blowing in through the vents, but the ambient temperature was still no better than fifty-seven or fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.

Crawling back out, feetfirst, Dr. Lantos looked up and saw him. Pushing her glasses back onto the bridge of her nose and glancing at her wristwatch, she said, “Don’t tell me you’re ready to go.”

“Not until you say the lab is done.”

Sitting back on her heels, she said, “It may not look like much, but I do think it’s fully operational. Want the thirty-second tour?”

“Absolutely.”

The truth was, the relatively warm air was feeling really good, and he didn’t mind lingering a bit. The new antiviral regimen was playing havoc with his usual malarial meds, and more than once that morning he’d felt a sudden shiver descend his spine. If anyone else under his command had reported similar problems, Slater would have promptly removed that person from active duty and ordered rest and maybe even a medical evaluation. But if he took himself out of the picture, if he admitted what was going on to anyone else on the team, the whole mission would grind to an immediate halt. Even more to the point, if, God forbid, word of the delay got back to Dr. Levinson at the AFIP, he’d instantly be replaced, recalled … and relegated to a desk job in D.C. forever after.

And that was not a risk he was prepared to take.

“This is our living room,” Dr. Lantos joked, waving her arm around the long, narrow space, illuminated by a row of light fixtures attached to a single aluminum beam that ran the length of the room. Counters had been set up on either side, topped with electron microscopes, racks of test tubes, vials, flasks, beakers, rubber gloves, and antiseptic dispensers. Underneath them there were cabinets and bins with neatly labeled and color-coded drawers.

“You have all the power you need?” Slater asked, and Lantos nodded vigorously, which only served to call his attention to the pencil, and the pen, she had stuck in the frizzy mop of her gray hair. He had the fleeting impression that if he looked hard enough in there, he could find anything from grocery lists to ticket stubs. It was one of the things that had always endeared her to him.

At the rear of the tent, a second chamber — a chamber within a chamber, as it were — had been erected behind its own clear plastic curtains; parting them, he was met by a blast of much colder air. A freezer, about half the size of a normal refrigerator, squatted on the triple-insulated rubber mat that comprised the floor. Standing in the center of the space was a long, stainless-steel autopsy table, and beside it a wheeled cart that held an array of vessels and receptacles for the organs and tissue samples they would be removing from the corpses they exhumed. Slater expected to take samples from no less than three or four, drawn from all quarters of the cemetery, before he was done. After inspecting the air vents, which were serviced by a separate filtration unit outside, Slater was satisfied that the place was indeed ready to go.

“Grab your hat,” he said. “It’s showtime.”

With Dr. Lantos in tow, Slater rounded up Professor Kozak, who was buried in his geological studies, and told them to wait for him by the main gates. Then, with some reluctance, he went to fetch Nika. He wished it could be avoided, he did not want her anywhere near the site and exposed to any of the myriad dangers it might present, but he also knew she’d be livid if he tried to leave her out.

Not to mention the fact that as the duly appointed tribal representative and mayor of the closest town, she could shut him down if she really wanted to.

Poking his head into the flap of her tent, he found her typing furiously on her laptop. She was compiling field notes, he knew, for an anthropological report she hoped to write, and Slater had not yet found the heart to tell her that none of what was happening on St. Peter’s Island was likely to see the light of day, much less in some academic journal. The only official report that would ever be written would be his own, and if experience was any indication, it would be restricted to a very small cadre of AFIP scientists and directors to review.

“The digging is done?” she said expectantly.

“It should be by the time we get there and suit up.”

Twirling around on her camp stool, she grabbed a worn and faded leather jerkin that was lying on her cot and slipped it over her head. It had a long fringe that hung below her waist, and red and black stitches depicting bears and eagles and otters all over it.

“When I said suit up, I meant a hazmat suit.”

“That’s fine,” she said, winding her long black hair into a glossy ponytail and flipping it over the collar of the jerkin. “But as the tribal rep, I’ve got to wear the sacred garment.” Pulling on a parka over everything else, she added, “And I’ll need a minute to say some words over any grave you open.”

“But they’ll be Russian graves, not Inuit,” Slater said, and Nika just shrugged as she slipped past him and onto the rubber-matted pathway outside. Her boots squelched in the icy slush.

“It’s our land, our rules,” she said with a smile. “The home-field advantage.” Slater wasn’t sure what advantage it might confer, but he did know that from here on in the rules would be his own. At the colony gates, he and Nika hooked up with Lantos and the professor, and the four of them, bundled up in coats and hats and gloves against the chill ocean wind, trooped down the pathway toward the trees. Sergeant Groves and his crew had cleared a trail through the woods, but the brush had already begun to impinge again; snow-laden branches drooped down overhead and sharp twigs plucked at the puffy sleeves of his down-filled parka. It was a far cry from his usual postings, where the worst impediments were sunstroke and scorpion bites.

Even though it was technically early afternoon, the sun was so dim that the light stanchions, positioned every few yards along the pathway, were all switched on, providing an eerie glow. As Slater approached the cemetery gateposts, scrawled with their anonymous plea to “Forgive me,” he glanced over toward the promontory where he could see Groves and a Coast Guardsman, cloaked in their own hazmat suits, repositioning a jackhammer to loosen whatever frozen soil still remained at the parameters previously demarcated by Kozak. The strips of wet sod that had already been removed had been laid, according to Slater’s instructions, neatly to one side on top of a canvas ground cover. When the exhumation was finished, the grave was to be returned to a state as close to its previous condition as possible — and the canvas cover incinerated.

Meanwhile, the dressing tent had been set up just to the left of the entrance, and as Groves let loose with one more loud volley from the jackhammer, Slater guided his team into the chamber. The aluminum floor rumbled from the weight of their boots. A rack had been set up, and an assortment of white Tyvek hazmat coveralls and thermal jumpsuits were hanging from the hooks, with visored helmets on a shelf just above them and a row of white boot covers lined up below.

Although he knew that Lantos and Kozak would be familiar with the routine, he advised everyone to doff their overcoats, put on a jumpsuit over the rest, then zip themselves into one of the white coveralls.

As he expected, Kozak was already huffing and puffing to get himself into everything, and Lantos was helping Nika to get properly attired; the leather jerkin wasn’t making it any easier, especially as Slater pointed out that it had to go inside, rather than outside, the hazmat gear.

“Otherwise, it’ll have to be disposed of afterward,” he said.

“No way,” Nika said, struggling to get the zipper all the way up and over it. “This has been in my tribe for at least two hundred years.”

Once she was in, Lantos pulled on her own outfit, and Slater, similarly encased in his jumpsuit, made sure that the elastic bands at Nika’s wrist and ankles were tightly drawn. Then he helped her on with her white booties. Plucking at her sleeve, Nika said, “I think I prefer natural fabrics. What’s this made of, anyway?”

“High-density polyethylene,” Slater replied, “and it’s virtually indestructible. But it’ll protect you from any bloodborne pathogens, or dry particles as small as half a micron.”

“But aren’t we going to cook inside them?”

“Not as much as you would think,” Lantos interjected. “Even though they keep out water and other liquid molecules, they’ll still allow heat and sweat vapors to escape. Which isn’t to say,” she added, passing her the headgear that Nika studied skeptically, “you’re going to be comfortable out there.”

“Okay, helmets, too, now,” Slater said, and they all took one last breath of unimpeded air before putting on the visored hoods, the bottoms of which hung down onto their shoulders. With all four of them in the tent at once, and bundled up like sausages, it was getting hard to budge without bumping into each other. Lantos tucked a surgical kit under her arm, and with Slater holding the tent flaps, they exited with a certain amount of nervous laughter, looking like a bunch of beekeepers heading out to work in the apiary.

But the mood changed the moment they got outside and the first blast of wind rippled the jumpsuits. As they trudged through the cemetery in single file, with Kozak carefully leading the way along the path he had already marked with little flags and Slater bringing up the rear, the full import of what they were about to do was brought home. Sergeant Groves and the Coast Guardsman were waiting by the gravesite, standing next to a high-intensity lamp they had set up. Slater relieved them of their duty now that the exhumation work was about to begin. They’d been working for hours and deserved a break. Groves saluted by touching two fingers to the little plastic visor of his helmet, and, toting his jackhammer, headed back to the dressing shed.

The tombstone, adorned with two doors carved into its upper corners, had been laid to one side, incongruously enough next to a stretcher. And even though the name on the marker had long since been worn away, Slater could see that at its very bottom, where the frozen earth had afforded it some protection from the elements, something like a crescent had been carved.

“What’s that mean?” he said, pointing it out to the professor. “I’ve seen it on the posts to the cemetery and on some of the other headstones.”

“Some people say it is the symbol of Islam, and it is always at the bottom to show the victory of Christ over the unbelievers.”

“It sounds like you don’t agree with them.”

“I don’t. I believe it is meant to be an anchor. In the Russian faith, that is the symbol of the hope for salvation. The hope that the church provides.” He scratched at the side of his helmet, as if it were his head. “The two doors, though, those are unusual.”

While salvation, Slater thought, might be uncertain, in this particular case, resurrection — at least in the corporeal sense — was painfully imminent. Looking into the open grave, he could see, beneath the thin scrim of dirt and gravel, the pale gleam of wood bleached white by its decades in the soil. He could even detect a couple of deep cracks in the lid of the coffin.

“Just as I predicted,” Kozak put in, “the frost heaval has done some damage to the casket.”

Lantos and Nika were standing on the other side of the grave, Lantos surveying the site with a professional eye, and Nika, her head tilted down, apparently reciting some native prayer or blessing. Although Slater wondered what she made of the grim spectacle on display, in deference to her work he nudged Kozak and they both kept silent for the next minute or two. All he could hear from under her helmet was a murmured chant, but he detected a slight rocking on her heels, as if she were moving to some ancient rhythm only she could discern. He became conscious of the bilikin that he was wearing under his shirt, and for some reason he wished that she knew he had it on.

When she had finished, Slater glanced over at Lantos, got a nod in return, then, like a diver going over the side, he slipped down into the grave itself. It would not have been easy under any circumstances, but the bulky clothing made him uncharacteristically clumsy. With an arm that wasn’t as steady as he would have liked—damn those drugs—he balanced himself on the rectangular coffin, then crouched to peek through the largest crack. His visor, though it was clean as a whistle, presented yet one more obstacle.

“Vassily,” he said, “could you move the lamp to the left? My own shadow’s getting in the way.”

Kozak repositioned the light, and said, in a voice muffled by his hood, “Better?”

“We’ll see,” Slater replied, before bending down to peer through the crack again.

He was greeted by the sight of someone staring back at him.

A blue eye, like a clouded marble, gazed upward from under a film of ice, and he reared back in surprise.

“What is it?” Nika said with concern.

“Yes,” Kozak said, “what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Slater said. “I was just startled. I thought I was at the foot of the coffin.”

“You’re not?” Kozak said.

“No. The head’s at this end.”

“So it’s facing west?”

“Yes. What’s the difference?”

“That would mean he had been a deacon, or maybe a priest.”

“I don’t follow,” Nika said.

“Unlike his parishioners,” Kozak explained, “a church leader is buried facing his congregation.”

“Whichever way he’s facing,” Dr. Lantos said, handing Slater a hammer with a clawed end, “you’re going to need this. Try not to leave splinters.”

Slater didn’t look back through the crack but applied himself to removing the rusty nails from the four corners of the box. They crumbled at the first touch of the hammer. Leaning to one side in the narrow grave, he pried up the lid, which rose halfway before splitting down the middle.

“So much for splinters,” Lantos said, as Slater passed up one half of the lid to her, and Kozak reached down to collect the other.

With the lid cleared away, the corpse was on full display, and Slater had nowhere to stand but a very narrow trough along one side. Kozak’s surmise, however, was right — the man was dressed in a long black cassock that glistened like ebony beneath a sheen of ice; the sleeves were rolled back to reveal a hint of scarlet lining. His hands were clenched tight, and in one he held a tightly rolled piece of paper. In the other, he clutched a copper icon, the size and shape of an index card, with its picture side down. Slater glanced up at the professor for any further elaboration.

“The paper is the prayer of absolution,” Kozak volunteered. “Traditionally, it was placed in the corpse’s hand after it had been read aloud by a priest. As for the icon, that must be what showed up on the GPR. I kept getting hits of metal or hard mineral deposits.”

Slater looked back at the body, whose face was as arresting in death as it must have been in life. He had hypnotic blue-gray eyes, even now, and blond hair — nearly white — that must have once hung down to his shoulders. His face was clean-shaven, and his mouth had fallen open, as if he were just about to speak; his lips were flecked with dark splotches of blood. His expression was one of surprise.

“I would say, from his youth and the fact that he has no beard,” Kozak said, “he was a deacon.”

“Deacon or priest or whatever,” Lantos said, “I think if you can cut away some of that fabric before taking the samples, we’d be better off. The drill could get snagged.”

Slater knew she was right, but it was as if her voice were coming from a mile away. It was more than the muffling of the helmets. He was struggling to maintain his composure and presence of mind, a problem that someone in his line of work should long ago have conquered. He put it down to the effect of all the antiviral drugs he’d been taking, but whatever the cause, he knew that now was no time to lose control.

“You’re right,” he said. “Give me the surgical scissors.”

Anticipating him perfectly, she had them ready. But to put them to use, he would first have to get into the correct position, and there was only one way to do that. Straddling the corpse, he slowly sat down on it, like a rider in a saddle. He could hear the crackling of the ice that coated the body, and it reminded him of the sound of stepping out on a frozen pond. The corpse itself was as stiff and hard as an iron anvil. With the butt end of the scissors, he chipped at the ice on the deacon’s chest until a spot a few inches around had been cleared. Shards of ice had flown up into the corpse’s face, and he brushed them away with his gloved fingertips.

“I don’t think he’ll mind,” Lantos said.

Turning the scissors, he carefully nudged the tip beneath the black cloth, just enough to separate it from the frozen flesh, then snipped until he could pull a piece of the fabric free. He handed it up to Lantos for safekeeping, then, on the opposite side of the breastbone, he did the same. The exposed skin was the color of old ivory, but with a fine sheen, as if Vaseline had been spread on it.

“The cadaver mat,” Lantos said, before he could ask for it.

She handed him a green-rubber sheath the size of a bath towel, which had short vertical and horizontal incisions in it. He draped it across the upper torso, then poked a finger through one hole to loosen it up. In autopsy work like this, the cadaver mat was used not only as a sign of respect but to keep airborne particles to a minimum.

“Okay,” he said, “I can start taking the samples now.”

Lantos, like a nurse in an ER, slapped into his hand a small, low-speed aerosol drill the size of a screwdriver. After making sure that he had located the spot directly above the left lung, he braced himself with one hand, while with the other he pressed the tip of the drill through the hole. With a soft whirring sound, the blade bored into the corpse, then suctioned up a minuscule sliver of lung tissue, which Lantos immediately placed in a vial already marked for that purpose.

Slater was vaguely aware of a commotion up above. “What is it?” he said, trying to maintain his focus.

“It’s nothing,” Lantos said. “Keep going.”

“It’s Nika,” Kozak said. “She’s not feeling very well.”

Slater looked up but saw no sign of her.

Kozak simply said, “Go on,” and weakly waved one hand.

Slater nodded — this was grisly work, he recognized that, and nothing could really prepare you for it — but the sooner he collected the in situ specimens, the sooner they could all leave the graveyard … and that meant the deacon, too. Once these utterly uncompromised specimens had been taken, the whole body would be hoisted out of the shattered coffin and taken back to the autopsy chamber in the colony, there to be thawed out and more thoroughly dissected. He was counting on Kozak to carry the other end of the stretcher.

“Heart next,” Lantos asked, “or brain?”

Somewhere in the woods a wolf howled.

“Trachea,” Slater said, and the next time he handed the specimen up to Dr. Lantos, he noticed that Kozak, too, was missing from the lip of the grave. He didn’t have to say a word before Lantos chuckled and said, “Yep, one more down. Looks like it’s just us chickens from now on.”

Chapter 31

Apart from a sliver of one small pane, all the windows in the big, brick house had been whitewashed. That way, none of the Romanov prisoners could see outside or be seen in turn by anyone passing by.

Not that the peasants or shopkeepers in the tiny, Siberian backwater of Ekaterinburg would even have dared to look toward the house. Any suspicion that you were a Tsarist sympathizer, and your life wasn’t worth a ruble.

The Bolsheviks had evicted the rightful owner — a merchant named Ipatiev — and installed Anastasia and her family, along with a few of their remaining servants and friends, in five rooms on the upper story. The ground floor was reserved for the commissars, most of whom had been angry, disgruntled workers at the local Zlokazovsky and Syseretsky factories before the revolution. A five-foot-tall fence had been built around the perimeter of the house and its interior courtyard, and it was constantly patrolled.

But Anastasia knew when it was time for Sergei to make his rounds, and she always stationed herself at that small slice of window — left clear so that the Romanovs could consult a thermometer attached to the wall outside — when he was due. Even then, she was afraid to wave, and he was afraid to do anything more than cast a furtive glance in her direction. If they were caught, the rest of the window would be promptly whitewashed, and Sergei would be shot as a possible accomplice to the imperial family.

“So, is he there?” her sister Tatiana whispered as she bent her head over her sewing. She was opening a hem in a dress and secreting there a handful of the diamonds the Romanovs had so far successfully smuggled on their long odyssey. They were sewn into every garment, under every button, into the brim of every cap and the stays of every corset.

“Not yet,” Anastasia said, “but sometimes he is delayed if the other guard wants to stop and have a smoke with him.”

Smiling ruefully, Tatiana shook her head and said, “You know, don’t you, that you were supposed to marry a German prince and cement the alliance? Not fall for some revolutionary guard.”

“And so were you,” Anastasia replied.

“No, I was destined for the Bulgarian.”

“I thought Maria was to marry the Bulgarian.”

“Maria was going to marry an Austrian duke. I forget which one.”

How far they had come from all that, Anastasia thought. Royal weddings, international alliances, princes and palaces and languorous vacations at Livadia, their seaside retreat in the Crimea. Now, here they were, the whole family, confined to a few hot and stuffy rooms, with no locks on the doors and guards who enjoyed nothing more than barging in at any moment to catch them unawares. As a precaution, Olga was keeping watch in the next room; at least the soldiers’ boots made a lot of noise as they came tromping down the wooden hallway.

“There he is,” Anastasia murmured, as the gangly Sergei sauntered into view outside. He was holding his rifle over his shoulder, as a sentry was supposed to do, but he looked no more comfortable with it than before. In stolen moments together, Anastasia had learned that he had been the youngest son of a farmer, whose wheat fields adjoined those of Rasputin’s family; they had all lived in the village of Pokrovskoe from time immemorial, and though Sergei had been conscripted into the Red Guard, his sympathies lay still with the holy man whose healing powers had once saved him from a deathly illness.

And if Father Grigori was a true and loyal friend to the Romanovs, then so, too, would Sergei be. He did not trust, or even much like, his comrades in arms; Ana had seen that right off. But it had taken some time before she put her faith in him — and even then it was only over the warnings of her family. Ever since, however, he had proved to be a reliable confidant, and a necessary conduit of news from the outside.

He stopped now, knowing he was in plain view of the unpainted window, and without looking up at all held his cigarette between two fingers upraised in a V.

“He has a message for us!” Anastasia said, seeing the signal.

“Are you sure?” Tatiana said, stopping her stitching so abruptly a loose diamond rolled off her lap.

“Yes, yes!”

For weeks now, there had been rumors of a rescue plan — three hundred officers, loyal to the monarchy, were to ride into the town and liberate the Tsar and his family. From what little the Romanovs knew, civil war had broken out all across Mother Russia, and on many of the long Siberian nights, when the dusk lingered until almost midnight, they could hear the distant rumble of artillery and were left to wonder whose guns they were. Could they be the White army advancing on the Red Guard strongholds, determined to overturn the Revolution and save the captives in the Ipatiev house? Last night the cannons had sounded closer than ever before, and as Anastasia had tossed and turned in her metal cot, she had barely been able to constrain her hopes.

And now Sergei had another message from the outside world, which — if their luck held — he would smuggle in with their daily provisions.

Olga coughed violently in the next room, patting her chest operatically, and Anastasia flew away from the window and Tatiana buried her needlework under her wide skirt, then snatched up the volume of Pushkin by her side.

The new commandant, Yakov Yurovsky, a sinister creature with a thick mane of black hair, a black goatee, and a gratingly insincere manner about him, burst in, apologizing for the intrusion at the same time that his cold gray eyes scanned the room for contraband or mischief of any kind. “I expect you heard the barrage last night.”

“We did,” the Tsar — now simply referred to as Nicholas — said, as he entered from the adjoining study. He was wearing his customary military tunic — with its epaulettes ripped off by the Red Guards — and a pair of threadbare jodhpurs.

“I trust it did not interfere with your sleep.”

Anastasia knew, as did everyone, that his concern was a joke, but it was a joke that they all had to play along with. She could see a faint fire blaze up in her father’s eyes, but as usual he suppressed it and simply assured the commandant that they had all slept soundly.

“Further precautions may have to be taken to ensure your safety,” Yurovsky said, and seeing the Tsaritsa — called merely Alexandra now — inching into the room with one hand pressed to the small of her aching back, added, “A hot compress, with powdered sage, will do much to alleviate the pain of sciatica.” He said it with the same bland authority he always assumed. Anastasia had the impression that he wished to be taken for a physician, though Dr. Botkin had assured her privately that the man was a complete fraud.

“Thank you,” Alexandra replied, in the same even tone her husband adopted. “If you would be so kind as to provide some sage, I will try it.”

Anastasia knew Yurovsky would never send the sage, and even if he did, her mother would never use it. It was all a grand pantomime in which her whole family, and their ruthless captors, continued to engage. The Bolsheviks pretended to be protecting the imperial family from harm, the Romanovs pretended to believe it, and everyone walked on pins and needles, afraid of provoking the situation into an explosion of some kind.

“How is the boy?” Yurovsky asked. “Walking yet?”

Alexei, bored out of his wits at the confinement, had played a stupid trick, riding his sled down some stairs, and the injuries ever since had laid him up. Dr. Botkin, with limited means at his disposal, did everything he could, but the pain was excruciating, and the former heir to the Russian throne was stuck in his bed, his legs raised, and much of the time delirious from fever.

“No, not yet,” Nicholas said. “If he could once again receive the electrical stimulation treatments provided by the doctor in town, it might help.”

Yurovsky nodded thoughtfully, and said, “I shall look into that.”

Ana knew what that meant. Nothing.

“Will we be receiving some rations today?” Alexandra asked, and to this Yurovsky said, “As soon as the soldiers and my staff are taken care of, I’ll see what’s left.”

Oh, how he must have relished the opportunity to put the Tsaritsa in her place like that. Ana thought she even saw her father’s right hand clench into a fist for a second, before he slipped it behind his back. She wished that just once her father would let fly, hang the consequences.

After Yurovsky had completed a brief inspection of the premises — lifting Alexei’s blanket to be sure his leg still looked purple and swollen, studying her mother’s many icons just so he could sully them with his touch, licentiously fingering her sister’s nightgowns neatly folded at the foot of their cots — he strolled out, and everyone at last breathed a temporary sigh of relief.

It was then that Ana shared the news that Sergei had another message for them. Several times over the past few weeks, he had brought messages from an anonymous White officer who was planning a daring rescue mission, and perhaps this would be the one announcing that the attempt was imminent.

An hour or two later, when she heard the cook, Kharitonov, outside in the courtyard, she was able to peer through the window and see that Sergei was indeed carrying brown eggs and black bread, curd tarts and a bottle of fresh milk, in a wicker basket. The food was provided by the sisters in the nearby monastery of Novo-Tikhvin, and without it Ana wondered how her family would have survived at all. Yurovsky let the baskets pass because he first helped himself liberally to every one of them that arrived. (The tarts seldom made it past him.)

With her family’s silent encouragement, Ana scurried downstairs to the kitchen, with her dog, Jemmy, panting close behind. How she wished she could move as gracefully as her sisters, or that she wasn’t quite so chubby. (Her mother always insisted that she was just short-waisted.) But Sergei didn’t seem to mind, and even though Ana knew as well as everyone else that this was just a silly fancy, there was so little happiness in her family’s life right now — and so little help available to them from any quarter — that no one saw any reason to interfere. Fate, the Romanovs had learned, could be as bitter as it was unpredictable. Be grateful, her father told her one day when they saw a blue jay preening on a tree branch, for every beautiful thing, no matter how small, that the Lord provided.

When she came in, the cook was exclaiming over the provisions he was laying out on the kitchen table. “Look!” he said to Ana. “Flour! White flour. And raisins.” She could see he was already debating how best to use them; Kharitonov was a master at making something from nothing.

But Sergei sidled closer to Anastasia, and in a voice that even she could barely hear, he said, “Be ready.”

“For what?” she whispered. The cook was showing off his bounty to her mother’s maid, Anna Demidova, who had come in to see what all the commotion was about. Anastasia saw her surreptitiously pop a raisin into her mouth as Jemmy scoured the floor for anything that might have fallen.

“I don’t know, but telegrams have been coming and going from Yurovsky’s office all morning.”

“Are we going to be rescued?”

“And a truck has been hired in the village.”

Ana had no idea what to make of that, but she prayed it would have something to do with their liberation. Perhaps the commandant was planning to steal whatever he could from the Ipatiev house — there were still some nice sticks of furniture downstairs — and clear out before the Tsar’s loyal troops arrived.

“Thank you,” Ana said, “for being our friend,” and as she spoke she let the sleeve of her blouse brush up against his arm. Just as she expected, he blushed furiously, and she took a delight in that. She, and her sisters, had all led such a sheltered and protected life in many ways. Oh, at the beginning of this war, and before the Revolution of course, they had been allowed to assist wounded soldiers in the Army hospitals — indeed, their mother had made their duties there compulsory — but of romance Ana had known almost nothing. She had briefly nursed crushes on their music teacher or French tutor or riding instructor, but then, for want of any alternatives, so had her three sisters. Sergei, though just a common boy, was at least all her own.

“It is my honor,” he said, “to serve you,” but his voice was full of greater meaning than the words alone conveyed.

Before she could answer, another guard, a burly fellow with broken teeth, staggered in, and the maid Demidova made a quick exit. Taking one look at the food, he ripped the loaf of black bread in two and stuffed half of it into his mouth, almost all at once. When the crumbs fell and Jemmy went for them, he kicked the dog to one side with the toe of his muddy boot.

“How dare you!” Ana said, snatching up her dog.

“I’d do the same to you,” he said, bits of bread flying from his lips. Glancing at Sergei, he said, “Shouldn’t you be out on patrol, comrade?”

Sergei wavered, just as she had seen her father do with the commandant, before deciding that discretion was the better part of valor. Turning on his heel, he picked up the empty basket and went out the kitchen door to the courtyard.

Anastasia glared at the filthy guard, who chewed the bread with his mouth open, but when the cook Kharitonov threw her a warning look, she snuggled Jemmy closer in her arms and went back to the stairs.

“We should have a dance sometime,” the guard said, no doubt mocking her gait as she climbed the wooden steps.

Chapter 32

“Just shut up,” Harley said, as he crouched in the shadow of the crooked church, “and let me think.”

For once, Eddie and Russell did as they were told, but he knew it wouldn’t last long.

Looking out over the colony grounds, Harley was amazed at how the place had been transformed in the space of a couple of days. There were half a dozen green tents, some in the traditional peaked style, others more like Quonset huts, but all of them solidly built and interconnected by pathways laid down with rubber matting and lamp poles and guide ropes. Even over the sound of the rising wind, he could hear the hum of generators from an aluminum shed, erected near a lavatory platform raised above a pair of portable holding tanks.

But what he didn’t see was any people; in fact, right now, the place looked as abandoned as it had the first time he’d been here. The Coast Guard guys were gone, and so was their chopper. When he’d heard it lift off hours ago, he’d hoped that its departure signaled the end of the expedition to the island; at last, he thought, it would be safe to get back to grave-robbing.

But he’d sure as hell been wrong on that score. Somebody was here, and it looked like they were planning to stay a while. Damn, damn, damn.

“I’m freezing my ass off,” Russell muttered. “What’s the plan?”

Harley was having to recalibrate, and quickly. They were carrying their shovels and pickaxe, along with some steel pitons he hoped to use to loosen up sections of soil this time around. He saw no one patrolling the grounds, but he knew it would be far too dangerous to try to make their way across the open colony. If somebody unexpectedly came out of one of those tents, there’d be nowhere to hide.

Crawling backward, he said, “Let’s go straight to the graveyard.” There was only another hour or two of weak sunlight left in the day, and he couldn’t afford to waste any of it.

Skirting the colony by sticking to the other side of the wooden stockade, he led them through the thickets of spruce and alder and hemlock, batting a course through the snow-laden branches, until to his own surprise he saw that a parallel trail had been neatly cut and laid all the way down from the colony gates to the wooden posts of the cemetery. Lights, too, had been strung up the whole way, and they were switched on even now. Although he couldn’t figure out how the government had heard about the emerald cross he’d found, he thought it was pretty clear, from all of this construction, that they had heard about it somehow. His brother Charlie wasn’t stupid; it was unlikely he’d spilled the beans to anyone, but Harley had a lot less faith in that greedy bitch his brother had married, or her idiot sister. Bathsheba would tell anyone anything.

And now look what he had to contend with as a result.

“Check this out,” Eddie said, holding open the flap to a dressing shed built to the left of the gates. Harley glanced inside and saw a rack of white coveralls and booties and visored headgear, all neatly arranged. Before he could stop him, Russell had slunk inside and put on one of the helmets.

“Take me to your leader,” he said, with his arms outstretched, and Harley had to snatch the helmet off him and slap it back on the shelf.

“Get out of here,” he ordered, “before I kick your ass all the way back to Port Orlov.”

“Yeah,” Russell sneered, “you and what army?”

The graveyard, luckily, was as deserted as the colony, and the fresh snow had nicely covered their tracks from the previous grave they’d opened. But now there were tight nylon lines stretched all over the place, with little pennants stuck into the ground here and there, marking the whole graveyard off in some kind of grid. And off at the far end, where the cliff gave way, whole strips of sod had been laid, crisscross, on top of a tarp, along with a fallen marker. As Harley got closer, he could see an open grave yawning.

“Looks like they got the job done better than we did,” Eddie said. “Shit, I wonder what they used.”

Harley was less interested in how they’d done it, then why. They hadn’t just dug up the grave and searched for treasures; they’d taken the whole damn body. As he stood beside the empty plot, he wondered what they wanted with a corpse. Did they think there was something inside it, something they could only extract elsewhere? Maybe after thawing the thing out? All that was left here were the remnants of the wooden coffin, a lot of it cracked and splintered.

“Hey, check it out,” said Russell, craning his head over the edge of the cliff and pointing down at the beach below. “It’s a boat.”

Harley gingerly approached the cliff and saw what he was pointing at — an RHI up on davits. This was the first piece of good news he’d had in days; the Kodiak was still stuck on the rocks and taking on water, and he had not known how to break it to his crew that the thing would probably never make it back to shore. Now he had an alternative, courtesy of the United States Coast Guard.

The only problem was, he’d be returning virtually empty-handed if he left now. Those rosary beads couldn’t be worth much.

“So,” Eddie said, scanning the desolate cemetery, “where do we start?”

Harley wished he knew. He’d picked wrong the last time, guessing that the most impressive headstone would be sitting atop the greatest booty. It was like that stupid game show, Deal or No Deal. Who knew where the serious loot was hidden?

“Russell, I’m going to need you to keep watch,” he said. “Go down that trail about twenty yards, lie low, and wait there. If you see or hear anyone coming, get back here and warn us.”

“Wait a second,” Eddie complained. “I did the digging last time. Why don’t I get to be the watchman?”

“Just do what I say,” Harley said, “both of you.”

Russell plainly didn’t need to hear another word; the idea of not working was sweet, and he tossed his spade to Eddie and meandered back toward the lighted trailhead. Eddie picked up the spade in the hand that wasn’t holding the pick and looked at Harley with a sour expression that said, You’d better get it right this time.

Chapter 33

Russell couldn’t believe his luck. All the way to the graveyard, he’d been thinking how bad it would suck to have to try to dig up a frozen grave. Just chipping the ice away from some of the intake valves on his oil-company job was a bitch and a half. Waiting until he was safely through the cemetery gates and out of Harley’s sight, he reached into the pocket of his parka and pulled out one of the beers he’d been carrying. One thing you could say about Alaska — the whole damn state was a cooler.

He went down the trail, looking for a comfortable perch — which wasn’t going to be easy. Everything was covered in snow and ice, and the ground was as solid as a rock. He wished Harley and Eddie a lot of luck, especially after their last dig had turned up nothing but a bunch of crystal beads on a string. As far as he was concerned, this whole trip was going to be a bust, and he’d be lucky to get back to the Yardarm with ten bucks in his pocket.

If he wanted to score Angie Dobbs, he’d need more than that as bait. Christ, it was hilarious that Harley thought it was such a big deal he’d fucked her. Who hadn’t?

In the harsh glow of the next light pole, he spotted a glistening stump just off to one side of the trail. It was an old tree trunk, covered in moss and lichen, and though it wasn’t exactly a Barcalounger, it was the best prospect he was likely to uncover. Brushing the snow away from the matt of rotting leaves around its base, he picked up a bunch of them in his arms and made as much of a cushion as he could. Then he plopped down on top of the pile before the rising wind could blow them away, pulled the string on his hood to cinch it closer to his face, and waited.

Everybody was always talking about the pure and unstained beauty of Alaska — Russell had seen all the brochures and ads and commercials the state tourist bureau put out — but as far as he could see, it was a load of crap. The place was cold and wet and dark and the rotting leaves he was sitting on stank. He took another slug of the beer. Without alcohol, and pussy, there’d be no reason to go on living.

And pot. He shouldn’t forget the value of grade-A weed, which was never more plentiful than when he was behind bars at Spring Creek.

He hadn’t been sitting on the stump for very long — the can of beer still had a few drops left in it — when he thought he heard something.

Quickly, he swiped the hood back off his head, and listened hard.

Was that a voice, or just the wind sighing in the boughs?

He stood up, gulped the last of the beer, and tossed the can into the bushes.

Yes, it was. It was a voice, talking in some weird accent. Russian. For a second he thought, It’s the ghost of one of those dead settlers. The legends about the island are all true! Then he got hold of himself, and before he knew it, his feet were carrying him back onto the trail, and through the woods, past the lighting poles, between the carved gateposts of the graveyard. Harley and Eddie were wandering around like they still hadn’t picked a target yet, but he knew he couldn’t shout at them. Instead, he ran among the graves, waving his arms like a lunatic, until they saw him and grabbed up their gear and took off in all directions. Russell tripped over a hole in the ground — shit, was this the grave they’d already opened? — and by the time he got up again they were gone.

He could hear another voice, too, now, carried on the wind and coming up the trail, and he ran helter-skelter out of the graveyard and into the surrounding woods. The branches tore at his sleeves and the thicket was almost impenetrable but he just kept running. The breath was hot in his throat, and he realized, not for the first time, just how out of shape he was. Two years in the penitentiary can do that to you. So it was a miracle when he stumbled into a tiny glade where an ancient hut still stood. All that was left of the place was a few boards holding the walls in place and a door made out of wooden staves, but right now it looked better than the Yardarm to him.

He banged through the brittle door, closed what was left of it behind him, then bent over double, gasping for breath. The beer came up in a rush of hot vomit, splashing onto his boots. The wind rattled the sticks of the door. He saw a table, and an old, empty dynamite crate drawn up to it like a stool. He leaned one hand on the side of the table. An old leather book was on it, with the frozen nub of a candle in a pewter dish. His head was pounding so hard he thought he was going to stroke out on the spot. Get a grip, he told himself. You haven’t even done anything wrong yet. It was Harley who broke open the grave. I’m just along for the ride.

He sat down with a thump on the dynamite box, which groaned but remained intact.

All he’d done, he reminded himself, was trespass — and maybe on government property. What could the penalty be for that, anyway? It couldn’t be that bad, and if it weren’t for the fact that he was still on parole, it wouldn’t have even been worth worrying about. But he was on parole, and if he ever had to go back into that cramped cell in Spring Creek — where the walls had pressed in tighter every day — he’d kill himself.

First, however, he’d kill Harley Vane for getting him into this mess.

Chapter 34

“What’s that mean again?” Dr. Lantos asked, as she extended the masking tape.

Slater finished writing on the cardboard—“Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae”—before slapping the sign on the outside of the thick plastic walls separating the autopsy chamber from the rest of the lab tent. “It means, ‘This is the place where death rejoices to help the living.’ At the AFIP, we always kept the sign up to remind us why we were there. To help the living.”

“I hope the deacon feels the same way.”

“He was a man of God, wasn’t he?”

Lantos snorted. “You must have a higher regard for organized religion than I do.”

Slater had been brought up without any religion at all. And though he sometimes envied those who were able to find solace in their faith — his ex had still attended church on a regular basis — he was convinced that if the seed of belief weren’t planted early, it could never really thrive.

Both he and Dr. Lantos were already garbed from head to toe in hazmat suits, and now that they were ready to enter the autopsy chamber, they put on their face masks with plastic goggles. They took a few extra seconds to adjust them and make sure they felt secure, since once they were inside it couldn’t be done again without running the risk of breaking the seal. Satisfied, Slater held open the heavy-duty plastic flaps of the chamber, and in a muffled voice, said, “After you.”

Lantos, whose hood was raised an inch or two by the frizz of her hair, ducked inside, and Slater followed, turning to seal the long Velcro strips that held the flaps closed. In here, even the rubber floor had a heavy plastic sheath beneath it; that way, when the work on St. Peter’s Island was done, the entire autopsy compartment could be rolled up like an enormous sheet of cellophane and incinerated. To Slater, it felt as if he’d stepped inside a jellyfish, with shimmering translucent walls all around, above, and below him.

The body of the deacon, still in his long black cassock with the red lining, lay on the autopsy table staring at the ceiling.

Lantos, poking at the corpse with one gloved finger, said, “They always take longer to thaw than you expect.” It was as if she were talking about a Thanksgiving turkey, and though an ordinary person might have been put off by her tone, Slater recognized it for what it was. This was how medical professionals — epidemiologists included — often spoke to each other. The casual banter was meant to dispel the doubts and fears and just plain moral confusion that confronted anyone about to desecrate and dismember human flesh. Otherwise, it was all too easy to see yourself instead lying on that table, a hunk of mortal ruins swiftly on its way to decay.

“Do you want to wait a while,” Lantos asked, “or start removing the clothes?”

Slater squeezed the deacon’s shoulder, pressed the abdomen, flexed a booted foot, and said, “We can go ahead. The clothing may be stiffer than the skin.”

“Then pail and scalpels it is.”

Everything they would need for the autopsy was already in the room, from surgical instruments to disposal bins, and in the small freezer in the corner they had already stored the in situ specimens from the graveyard; these would remain the cleanest and purest samples of all, transported back to the AFIP untouched.

“You’ll have to be careful with that paper,” Lantos said, touching the prayer of absolution that the corpse still held in one hand. “It could disintegrate.”

Slater knew she was right, and when he separated the scroll from the dead flesh that held it, he gently laid it aside on one of the metal trays arrayed on the counter behind him. As if it were a living creature, hiding from a predator, the paper curled even more tightly in on itself.

Lantos went about removing the icon clutched in the deacon’s other hand, but even that was dicey. “He doesn’t seem to want to let go,” she said, giving it another tug and finally freeing it. Glancing at it through her goggles, she said, “And now I can see why.”

She turned it over for Slater to see. It was a picture of the Virgin and Child, preserved enough to show a faint red in her veil and pale blue in the gown she wore. It was Byzantine in appearance, the two figures lacking all perspective, but on the forehead and shoulders of the Virgin there were three diamonds sparkling in the light of the overhead lamp. “We’re rich,” Lantos joked as Slater admired the brilliance of the stones.

“Wait’ll Kozak sees this,” he remarked, placing it beside the paper. “I’m sure he’ll be able to tell us all about it.”

But Lantos, like a busy tailor, was already snipping away at the black cassock, cutting long strips down the length of the body, then peeling them off like Band-Aids. As each strip was removed, she used the foot pedal to open the refuse bin and drop it in. When the fabric was all gone, she and Slater together pulled the boots off the deacon’s feet and dropped them in the bin, too. They landed with a clunk.

The body, completely naked now, lay on the table, its arms still stiffly in place, crossed just below the chest. There were puncture wounds where the aerosol drill had suctioned up the initial specimens, and Slater could not but be reminded of the wounds on the body of Christ, especially as the young deacon was otherwise almost beatific. His long blond locks had thawed sufficiently to brush his shoulders again, and his skin, nearly hairless, was a marmoreal white, like the Pietà. His blue eyes were wide open.

Taking the digital camera from the counter behind him, Slater took several shots of the body, first, full-figure, then close-ups of the face and other areas where the first incisions had been made. Next, he checked the weight as it registered on the table scale, and noted it down by speaking aloud: a voice-activated recorder was running in the room. When he was done, Lantos held up the body block, a wedge of firm foam rubber, and said, “Okay, how about you do the heavy lifting, and I’ll put it under?”

As Slater raised the upper half of the body from the table, the deacon’s eyes seemed to bore into his own, questioning these terrible liberties being taken with him. Lantos jammed the block under the small of the cadaver’s back. When Slater eased the body down again, its head and arms now fell backwards, while its chest was stretched and lifted up for easier dissection. Lantos brushed her hands together, as if to say that’s that.

“What’s your choice?” she said to Slater. “Y or T or straight down the middle?”

There were several standard methods of opening a corpse, but for Slater’s purposes in this instance, he had already decided that the first choice was the best. “We’ll do a Y,” he said, “so we can get the maximum exposure of the neck and respiratory tract.”

Lantos nodded, her mop of frizzy hair looking positively electrified under the high-intensity lamp. Handing Slater the shears, she waited patiently while he made two large and deep incisions starting at the top of each of the deacon’s shoulders and running down the front of the chest, all the way to the sternum where they met. Once there, he continued cutting straight down the rest of the body, deviating just enough to the left to pass around the navel, and stopping only when he bumped up to the pubic bone. Because the body had not completely thawed, the skin crackled as the blades did their work.

Slater wished he had remembered to put on some music. It helped with focus.

“Very neatly done,” Lantos said, her voice muffled by her face mask.

And it was. Even Slater would concede as much; the firmness of the flesh made the cutting more precise. And though autopsies always involved less blood than might be expected — with no cardiac activity, it was only gravity that affected the pressure and flow — he was still surprised at just how little fluid was present. The blood remaining must have crystallized, he thought, or maybe evaporated … but that was before he put the shears away and, with Lantos pulling from the other side, split open the torso like cracking a pumpkin. Then he could see why.

It looked like a blowtorch had been applied to the deacon’s entrails. Beneath the rib cage, everything appeared blackened and engorged. It reminded Slater of a fire victim he had autopsied years ago, during a stint in Sierra Leone.

“This was not an easy death,” Lantos said, in a more somber tone. “This poor guy died in agony.”

Slater had no doubt about that, either. Taking the bone saw, he cut through the ribs on both sides of the chest, then, with Lantos helping, lifted the sternum and the ribs, still attached, free of the cavity, and placed the whole section in a shallow silver tray.

For the benefit of the audio record, he announced what he had just done.

Then he turned around to survey the unobstructed viscera of the young deacon.

It was as if the man had swallowed a ball of hot tar. The protective cells and cilia lining the bronchial tubes had been razed as if by a prairie fire, and the lungs looked like eggplants, bruised a deep and livid purple. The pericardial sac enclosing the heart resembled a sheet of torn, black crepe paper, and the heart itself, visible through the holes, was as gnarled and dark as a hand grenade.

“Major necrotic damage apparent to nearly all major organ systems. Evidence of both viral and bacteriological pathogenesis.”

“It looks like a bomb went off inside him,” Lantos observed, readying a syringe to draw one of many blood samples to come.

“Not a bomb,” Slater said, “but a storm. A cytokine storm.” The Spanish flu was a diabolical machine, one that hijacked the victim’s own immunological response and turned it against him. Under normal circumstances, the cytokines — soluble, hormonelike proteins — acted as messengers among the cells of the immune system, helping to target microbial infections like viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi, and directing the antibodies and killer cells to attack them. But with the Spanish flu, the whole system went into overdrive, the cytokines targeting everything in sight, the antibodies sticking like glue to anything they came into contact with, the killer cells blasting everything in range. It was like a wild shoot ’em up, devastating every cell in the body, compromising every defense mechanism, until the victim ultimately drowned in an overwhelming tide of his own mucus and virus-choked blood.

“And such a young man,” Lantos said, slicing through the heart sac with the tip of her scalpel. Speaking up for the recorder, she added, “Drawing blood samples from the pulmonary veins and inferior vena cava, although what’s left is barely liquid. Thawing is incomplete. Also checking the pulmonary artery, where,” she said, leaning close for a better look, “there appears to have been no clotting.”

Youth, Slater reflected, had been a detriment when it came to the Spanish flu; for that matter, so was a healthy constitution. The stronger the subject, the more powerful his or her immunological response would have been to the disease — and the more powerful the response, the more lethal it was, in turn, when the disease sent the protective mechanisms spinning out of control. As a result, the Spanish flu was most devastating to the young, able-bodied soldiers shipping off to France in 1918, then to the young doctors and nurses who came to their aid. The first responders, as it were. Infants and the elderly, the already infirm, were, ironically, less likely to die from the disease than those in the vigorous prime of life.

Slater was inevitably reminded, as he went about his grisly work, of his night in the medical archives, when he had first studied the slides of the Spanish flu taken from the young doughboy. The soldier’s body had been ravaged just as this one had been, his agonizing death had been the same as the Russian deacon’s. The flu had made no distinctions as it cut its swath through the peoples of the globe.

Gradually, the vials and test tubes and specimen jars began to fill with the samples taken from the lungs and heart, the trachea and spleen, the liver and pancreas and stomach. And when that was done, Lantos reached under the corpse and pulled out the foam block. The body settled back, with an audible expulsion of air, as if relieved.

But only for a minute or two.

As Slater lifted the head, the long blond hair hanging in tendrils over his glove, Lantos put the block under the back of the neck. With his bloody scalpel, Slater made an incision behind one ear, and traced a path over the crown of the head, ending at a point just behind the other ear. Using the hair as a handle, he pulled the scalp away from the skull in two nearly equal flaps, one draping itself over the front of the face, the other hanging down in back. The sound reminded him of the Velcro being ripped apart in the tent flaps.

“You getting tired?” Lantos asked. “We could take a break.”

But Slater wanted to press on. His stamina was not what it was, and he feared that he could have a malarial chill at any moment; better to keep at it while his hand was reasonably steady and take a break only if he had to. “I’ll take the Stryker saw,” he said, and Lantos handed it to him. The air behind his face mask was warm and uncomfortably moist.

As she made sure that the skin and stray hairs stayed clear of the blade, Slater methodically sawed a circular cap, the size of a beret, from the very top of the skull. Once the cut was complete, he put the saw down and jiggled the section he had cut. In a couple of spots, it still held firm to the rest of the head, and he had to go back with his scalpel and pry the connective tissue or bone loose. If he were back in med school, he’d have just earned a C.

Then, as Lantos held a clean basin under the back of the head, he lifted the cap free and she put it out of the way.

The brain was now completely exposed; the dura mater, normally white, was the color of strong tea. Slater picked up a pair of forceps, his wet fingers almost letting them slip, as Eva took the lid off a container of formalin — a 15-percent solution of formaldehyde gas in buffered water that would be used to preserve the brain samples long enough to get them back to the labs in Washington — and held it out.

Suddenly, the overhead light waned, then brightened, then waned again.

Slater’s gaze met Lantos’s.

The light flickered.

It was the generator, he thought. It couldn’t be anything else.

The light went out, then on, then out again.

The backup generator was kicking in, sensing a break in the current, and coming online. His eyes flew to the freezer vault on the floor of the chamber — the one containing the first specimens taken in the open grave. But then he noticed Lantos looking through the plastic barriers of the chamber and out at the tent walls, which appeared to be undulating in the wind … but undulating in color.

What the hell?

The flaps of the main lab area flew open, and through the distortion of the plastic sheathing, Slater could make out a figure — moving small and fast — toward the autopsy chamber. Nika.

“It’s okay!” she hollered, even as Slater shouted, “Don’t come in here!” The biohazard warning insignia — an orange triangle — should have been enough, but Nika was the kind of woman who might race right through it.

“What’s going on?” Slater said.

“It’s the northern lights!”

“I mean what’s happening to the power!”

“The northern lights!” she repeated, impatiently waiting just outside the chamber. “The aurora borealis! It screws up the electrical fields every time.”

The walls of the tent were glowing a faint gold.

“You go,” Lantos said, “I’ll finish up in here.”

“Absolutely not,” Slater replied, but Lantos held firm.

“We’ve done all we can do in one session, anyway,” she said.

“We’ve got the brainpan to excavate.”

“It can wait,” she replied. “To be honest, Frank, your hand isn’t as steady as it needs to be. I was wondering when to tell you. You need to take a rest.”

Slater was surprised that she would say so, but he was willing to concede that she might be right. He’d been pushing it, and any minute he might have made a terrible mistake. He’d made the right choice in recruiting her for this mission.

“Thanks,” he said. “Point taken.”

After warning Nika to wait for him outside the tent, he stripped off the hazmat suit and protective gear, depositing them all in the safety bin. Then, after a quick scrubdown in the lab, he grabbed his coat off the hook by the entrance and joined her in the fresh air.

The sky was still swarming with strange shapes and colors. Taking his hand like an enthusiastic kid at the zoo, Nika tried to drag him down toward the colony gates, but first Slater had to make a detour to the generator shed, the snow and ice crunching under his boots, to make sure the machinery was still functioning. Rudy the Coast Guardsman was already inside, keeping a close watch on the twin turbines and their myriad gauges.

“Has the current been uninterrupted?” Slater asked urgently.

“Except for a couple of hiccups, and for no more than a second or two each time,” Rudy replied, “it’s been okay.”

Slater breathed a sigh of relief even as the cell phone in his pants pocket suddenly rang, buzzed, and by the time he took it out, went dead.

“The aurora gives off a really strong electromagnetic charge,” Nika said sympathetically. “You probably just lost your address book and emails.”

“Let me know if either one of the generators goes down for more than a minute,” Slater said, and Rudy, not taking his eyes off the machinery, signaled that he would.

Stepping out of the shed again, Slater let himself be led down to the cliffs, where Sergeant Groves and Kozak were already occupying ringside seats, gazing out over the black expanse of the Bering Strait. A curtain of shimmering lights — green and yellow, purple and pink — were swirling and curlicuing in the air, hovering maybe sixty or seventy miles above the water and extending high into the sky.

“The solar flares are putting on quite a show for us tonight,” Kozak said, acknowledging Slater and Nika by cocking his pipe in their direction. The cherry tobacco perfumed the air.

“Solar?” Groves said. “We haven’t seen the sun for more than three hours all week.”

“The solar wind takes two days to reach us, and when the flood of electrons and protons hits the upper atmosphere, they collide with the atoms there, and go boom!” He took another puff on his pipe. “This collision gives off radiation in the form of light. Different atoms give off different colors. In Mongolia, I once saw them turn to a scarlet red. But that is very rare.”

“Yeah, well, these will do just fine,” Groves said, staring up at the pulsating veil of green and yellow bands performing elaborate arabesques in the sky. “You don’t catch anything like this in Afghanistan.”

Slater, too, was impressed — he’d never seen the aurora borealis — but the sparkling green lights bathing the horizon made him think, oddly enough, of that hellish sight on CNN, on the night the United States had initiated its much-vaunted “shock and awe” attack on Baghdad. He’d known that much of America was sitting in front of its TV sets, filled with that strange, guilty exultation that comes with war and displays of military might; when he was young and unthinking, he’d felt that way himself. But his own heart had sickened at the thought of what he knew was happening there on the ground. He had been dispatched to far too many such places in the aftermath of war, places where nothing remained standing and everything from cholera to typhus ran riot. He was aware of the human toll that was being taken before his very eyes.

“For the Native Americans,” Nika said, “the northern lights were considered a ladder to heaven.”

“I can see why,” Groves readily assented.

“Whenever they saw the lights, they thought they were looking at the spirits of their ancestors dancing and playing games as they ascended to the next world.”

“Maybe they had it right,” Groves said.

“It certainly beats the funerals in Russia,” Kozak said, solemnly. He tamped at his pipe and appeared lost in thought.

While they had all bundled up against the freezing wind, Slater noticed that Nika’s coat was loosely drawn around her, and her own long hair was streaming out like a mane. As she stood there beside him on the cliff, looking out toward the dwindling lights above the sea — the bands were swirling together now into a glowing lime-green corona — she looked so much like a natural part of this spectacle that it was no surprise to him she had returned from San Francisco to Alaska, or that she had been made a tribal elder of the Inuit people. He could see her ancestors in her.

He must have been staring because she suddenly turned to look him full in the face, her head cocked to one side. “Your first time?”

“The aurora?” he replied. “Yes.”

“I’m glad it was with me,” she said, with a wry smile.

And right then, as if the streaming display had been suddenly sucked into a black hole, the lights went out, leaving only the pinpoint pricks of the stars and the cold sea wind snapping at their clothes.

“What just happened?”

“They do that,” she said.

Still, Frank and Nika remained where they were, as did Kozak and Groves, all looking out at the ice-choked ocean like concertgoers hoping for an encore. But there was none.

And then, from far off in the woods somewhere, Slater heard a howl.

“Sounds like everyone is disappointed,” Groves joked, as the howl of the wolf became a chorus.

Nika shivered, and suddenly drew her coat tighter around her as the mournful choir, lost in the woods surrounding the colony, bayed for the lost lights of Heaven.

Chapter 35

Russell had sat in the hut for hours, nursing the last beer he’d carried in his pocket, and waiting for Harley and Eddie to come and get him. Did they really expect him to find his way back through the woods — much less locate that shitty little cave they’d been hiding out in — all by himself?

He had exhausted the entertainment possibilities of the hut in the first half hour. There were old animal skins — otter, beaver, bear — covering some unfinished headstones, and an assortment of rusty old shovels and axes leaning up against the walls. The leather-bound book on the table was written in Russian, but Russell could tell, from the way that the names and dates seemed to be lined up on most of the pages, that it must have been the sexton’s ledger. A record of who was getting buried where, and when. For a while, he tore out one page at a time and tried to keep a fire going with his Bic lighter, but each page simply vanished in a puff of smoke without generating more than a second of heat. He stuck the remainder in his pocket, just in case it might prove to be worth something to some nutcase at one of those antique shops in Nome.

It was only after the last daylight had gone, and the northern lights suddenly appeared in the sky, that he realized he was on his own, that nobody was coming to get him or offer a lick of help. He could slowly freeze to death in this hut, or he could try to make his own way back to the cave. The wind whistled through the spaces between the timbers and rattled the staves of the door so hard they sounded like castanets.

Cursing Harley, cursing Eddie, and cursing his luck, Russell stood up and instantly regretted it. He’d twisted his ankle in that pothole in the graveyard, and although he’d thought the pain would pass, the ankle had continued to swell. Rolling his sock down, he could see that the skin was a deep shade of purple already. The throbbing, too, was getting worse all the time. Slowly, carefully, he hobbled to the door, where he ripped one of the staves loose to make a crutch he could lean on.

He hated to think how much it was going to hurt when he really tried to walk with such a bad sprain.

Outside, the sky was still alight with the shimmering glow of the aurora borealis. He’d seen it a million times in his life, so the effect had definitely worn off, but he hoped that the light at least would stick around. He had a flashlight in his free hand — Harley had made sure they carried the essentials — but even among this dense brush and overhanging trees, the aurora lent enough illumination to help him pick his way through the woods. The snowy branches were tinged with the alternating colors in the sky — green and yellow and a pale dusky rose — that made the whole forest look fake and strange, like a scene from some movie. A movie Russell did not want to be in.

A strong wind was blowing, too, with flakes of snow and ice spinning through the air. He had only the most general sense of where he was. He knew the colony was off toward the sea, and the cave was somewhere to the west, but when he had heard the voices approaching and run wildly into the forest, he had lost all sense of direction.

The beers probably hadn’t helped on that score, either.

As he hobbled along, the flashlight beam trained at his feet to keep from tripping over any uneven ground, he told himself that if the Kodiak hadn’t been refloated on the tide by now, he was going to call the mainland, admit that they were stranded on St. Peter’s, and somehow get the hell back to Port Orlov. Even if there were jewels inside those coffins, this guy Slater, and the Coast Guard, had gotten there first by now, so what was the point of sticking around?

When the northern lights were suddenly extinguished — it always reminded Russell of the way his grandfather would pinch a candle flame between his thumb and forefinger — the forest went almost black all around him. Only the moon and stars offered a little help to navigate by.

Trying to ignore the pain in his ankle, Russell focused on what he’d do once he got back home — he imagined himself hoisting a brew in the Yardarm and maybe shooting some pool — when he heard a bustling in an alder thicket. He stopped, expecting a covey of quail to fly out, or maybe a squirrel to scamper underfoot, but nothing did. He waited silently — if it was a bear, it would want to avoid him as much as he wanted to avoid it — and then he said, with as much bravado as he could muster, “Hey, asshole, I’m coming through.” It was always best to give a bear fair warning.

But there was no more noise, and no sign or smell of anything lingering in the brush, so he forged on. Not that he didn’t wish he could trade his flashlight for a can of that mace Harley carried. He knew there were wolves on the island, but wolves never attacked humans. They looked for herds of elk, and cut the young, or the feeble, ones from the pack. He kept going, leaning on the stave with one hand and using the other one, clutching the flashlight, to bat low-hanging branches out of his way. He never thought he’d miss driving the propane truck, but right now even that was looking good. He just hoped his boss would let him slide for missing a few days of work; he’d told him he had to visit a sick relative, but if the truth got back to him, or even worse if it got back to Russell’s parole officer, it’d mean big trouble.

The rustling came again, and this time out of the corner of his eye he saw a flash of movement behind a moss-covered tree trunk. He rubbed the back of his glove across his eyes to clear his vision — the snow was starting to come down faster now — and swept the flashlight beam across the brush. But everything was suddenly still.

Too still … as if the usual woodland creatures had fled, or were lying low.

He felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. His feet weren’t moving, but he knew it was no time to stand still. Should he retreat to the hut, he wondered, where he could grab one of those old rusty spades and at least have some kind of weapon if he needed it? The stave he was holding wasn’t going to be much help.

But when he turned around, he realized that he had no more idea how to get back to the hut than he did to find the cave. The trees were so tightly spaced, the ground so covered with moss and leaves and damp muddy snow, he’d have to be one of the native Inuit to thread his way back. And the prospect of getting marooned in that freezing, spooky shack overnight was way too scary to think about.

He turned back in the direction he’d been going and, as stealthily as possible, hobbled on. Even if he could just keep to a straight line, he figured, he’d eventually hit the cliffs on the other side — the whole friggin’ island wasn’t that big — and from there he could just hug the cliffs until he spotted the boat down in the cove. It couldn’t be that hard, or take that long. He told himself that all he had to do was keep his wits about him, ignore the pain in his ankle, and keep making progress.

And then something skittered across the path ahead of him.

Jesus Christ. He stopped dead, wondering what it had been. It had moved like a shadow, black and fast. He’d heard all the native legends about the otter-men, but who ever believed in shit like that? That old totem pole in town, the one that had fallen halfway over, supposedly told the story. His third-grade teacher had tried to tell the class about it one day, but Russell hadn’t paid any attention.

Now, he sort of wished he had.

He debated about whether it was better to keep quiet and get the hell out of there, or make some noise and try to bluster his way through. But that would all depend on what he was up against, and so far he hadn’t actually seen anything well enough to know.

A twig snapped behind him, on the other side, and he whipped around. A gust of wind blew the snow off a bough and into his face, but even as he blinked to clear his vision he saw a pair of eyes — yellow and intent — peering out from the brush.

Instinctively, he jabbed the stave at the bushes, but hit nothing. The eyes were gone as suddenly as they had appeared.

But Russell wasn’t about to wait around. Clawing his way through the woods as fast as he could, the anguish in his ankle overwhelmed by the adrenaline surging through his veins, he plowed ahead, knocking branches out of his way, clambering over the trunks of dead trees, slipping on wet moss, and once, on a brackish coil of goose droppings. His boots were slick with the shit when his toe caught on something hard, jutting up from the ground, and he was thrown flat, his head colliding with a rotten log. The flashlight went flying from his hand.

He lay there, stunned for an instant, but he could sense that he was still being tracked, that something was still watching him, waiting him out. First, he heard a sound on his right — snow crunching under a foot or paw — then he heard a sound on his left, like panting. There was more than one of them. He felt like he was being studied, like his infirmity had been noted, and now the stalkers were just awaiting the right opportunity to bring him down … like a wounded animal separated from the herd.

The way that wolves would do it.

He took a hurried breath and struggled to his feet again, leaning on the stave. The more he gave the impression of weakness and fear, the more he would embolden the attackers. If a bear threatened you, it was best to stand your ground, pump yourself up to look as big as you could manage, and make a lot of racket. But if it was wolves, that was something else. They never tired of the game … and to them it was a game. They would shift responsibilities, one running the animal down, then resting, while another picked up the chase. They would harry and harass their prey, nipping at its heels, barking in its face, racing in circles so that the creature got dizzy just trying to keep the many wolves in its sights. Russell had once gone hunting with his uncle and watched as a pack of them surrounded a starving coyote that had had the nerve to scavenge one of their kills. They had neatly spaced themselves out to cover any possible escape route, then crept closer, until the coyote, suddenly looking up from its feast, found itself with nowhere to run.

And then the wolves had descended all at once, in a bristling fury of fangs and claws.

Russell was so disoriented — and panicked now — that he hardly knew which way to turn. But he did know that the cave was still far off, while the old Russian colony was close. He could give himself up to the Coast Guard, claim he was just some stupid kayaker that the storm had washed up on the shore. Maybe that guy Dr. Slater could even take a look at his ankle, and better yet, give him something for the pain.

The colony, as best he could make out, was off to his left, in the direction of the strait. Keeping a close eye on the brush, and moving as quickly, but as cautiously, as he could, he cut a trail through the trees. The snow was swirling more thickly than ever. Remembering something his uncle had once told him, he thought of breaking the end of a branch here and there as a way of marking his progress, but he knew it was too dark for him ever to find the broken bits again. It would only be possible the next day … and he was beginning to doubt he would live that long.

Something leapt over a fallen trunk on his right, and he caught a glimpse of sleek black fur.

And then, from his other side, he heard a yip.

A short one, a signal to its mate.

Which was responded to with the same sound.

He picked up his pace, his heart pounding in his chest. He clenched the end of the stave, his only weapon. His eyes strained to see ahead, to catch sight of the colony. His breath was coming in bursts, and he told himself to breathe more evenly, more deeply. The essential thing was to keep moving. They would only move in for the kill if they thought he was helpless and had given up … or if they had already acquired a taste for human flesh.

Focus, he told himself, forging ahead. Focus. And through the trees, down a slope, he saw a spot of something bright green. And glowing.

A tent! One of those colony tents!

It was behind what was left of the stockade wall. Christ, it felt like a hundred years ago that he had first seen this damn place. He swung the stave through the brush, clumsily trudging down the hillside, and then exulting as he shimmied through a gap in the timbers.

He was behind that old church, but when he turned, he saw that the wolves — and there were four of them, not two, all black, and their yellow eyes gleaming — were slinking between the logs, too. Their heads were lowered, their hackles raised, and they showed no signs of quitting their hunt.

He swung the stave in a wide arc, but only one of them backed off. The others stood their ground, snarling now, saliva dripping from their jaws.

“Help!” he shouted, but the wind was roaring in his ears. “Somebody help me!”

He could feel the wolves spreading out around him, cutting off any retreat. He swung the stave again, and this time the alpha wolf, in front of the pack and with a blaze of white on its muzzle, snapped at the end of the stick, nearly managing to yank it from his hands. He could feel the heat of its body; he could smell its rank breath.

Whirling around, he saw a hole in the foundation of the church, not much bigger than a manhole cover, but big enough. He backed up toward it, poking the stave at whichever wolf got closest. When the alpha lunged at it again — and gripped the stick between its teeth — he suddenly let go, turned around, and scrambled into the hole. The wood was jagged, and splinters cut through his gloves, but he was pulling himself in with all his might, wriggling his body in after. He was jackknifed into the gloomy interior when something snagged the bottom of his boot. He pulled the leg harder, praying he had caught his shoe on a shard of wood, but the foot was only jerked back even harder.

And now he could feel the bite, the fangs sinking right through his boot and heavy woolen sock … and into his skin.

He pulled again, but to his amazement he felt himself being hauled backwards. His hands scrabbled at the thick wood of the wall, trying to find any purchase, but all he got was a handful of splinters and sawdust. He shook his leg, and kicked his foot out. He heard his pants ripping, and felt his own hot blood soaking through his sock.

He screamed again, his cry echoing in the empty church.

And then there was another set of fangs, fastened like a vise on his other foot.

Like a snake being yanked out of its den, he slithered backward, out of the hole, and flopped onto the ground. Turning over to punch at their snouts, he saw above him a frenzy of yellow eyes, black fur, and open, dripping jaws. He tried to lift his hands to fight back, but the alpha had already nuzzled its head under his chin, seeking, and swiftly finding, his jugular. Its teeth felt as long and fine as knitting needles as they sank into his neck.

Chapter 36

The electric chandelier was ablaze with light, and Jemmy, who usually slept soundly on her feet, was stirring. Anastasia rubbed her eyes and said, “What’s going on?”

Her father was standing in the doorway in his nightshirt. “The commandant has asked us to dress and go down to one of the lower rooms.”

“Why?” Olga asked from her cot.

“He says that there is some unrest in the town, and it will be safer for us if we are not on the upper story.”

All four of the girls hastily exchanged looks, wondering what this really might portend, but Anastasia prayed that it was the first news of their deliverance. Sergei had said telegrams had been flying back and forth from Moscow and that something was afoot. Maybe the White Army was indeed within reach. Even now, the night wind carried the faint rumble of distant guns.

The girls sprang out of bed and had no sooner started dressing than their mother appeared and reminded them to put on their special corsets — the ones with the royal jewels so laboriously sewn into all of the linings.

“We have to be ready for anything,” Alexandra said. But there was a note of hope in her voice, too, a note that Ana had not heard for so many months of their captivity. “We might not be coming back to these rooms.”

Even though they had spent countless hours working on the corsets, the girls had never actually worn them yet, and Ana found that hers weighed much more than she might ever have imagined. It was hard to get on, and with the emerald cross from Father Grigori hanging around her neck, too, she felt like a walking jewelry box.

Like her sisters, she put on a long dark skirt and a white blouse, and by the time they were out in the hall the family’s companions in exile had also assembled there — Dr. Botkin, polishing his gold-rimmed glasses; her father’s valet, Trupp; her mother’s personal maid, Demidova; Kharitonov the cook. Tatiana asked what time it was, and Dr. Botkin consulted his pocket watch.

“Nearly one o’clock.”

Her mother came out next, clutching one of the pillows that also contained a cache of jewels inside it (Demidova had the other), then her father emerged, carrying a sleepy Alexei in his arms. Her father was not a tall man, but he had a broad chest and strong arms, and somehow he always managed to carry his son as effortlessly as if the boy were made of feathers. Ana carried Jemmy, who was strangely, but blissfully, silent for a change.

With Nicholas leading the way, the family trooped down the creaking stairway to the foyer. Yurovsky was waiting at the bottom, stroking his black goatee and wearing a long overcoat far too warm for the July night.

“This way,” he said, guiding them out into the courtyard — Ana was so glad of the chance to see the stars and breathe the fresh air, perfumed with lilac and honeysuckle, that she almost cried aloud for joy — then back down a set of stairs that led to the cellar. “You will please wait in here,” he said. “It won’t be long.”

The room was not much bigger than the girls’ bedroom upstairs, and the walls were covered with peeling wallpaper in a pattern of yellow stripes. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture in the room — Ana wondered if Yurovsky hadn’t already started his looting of the place — and a single electric bulb, with no shade, hung from a string, casting a harsh white light around the barren space. Just before the commandant closed the double doors behind him, Alexandra said, “May we not have some chairs?”

Ana knew that her mother’s back was very bad, but she also knew that it was Alexei she was most concerned about.

“Of course,” Yurovsky said, and closed the doors. Ana assumed that they would never see the chairs, any more than they saw the powdered sage or anything else that the commandant promised, but to her surprise, he kicked the doors open a minute later and dragged in two wooden chairs.

Alexandra sat down on one of them, casually placing the pillow behind the small of her back as if for comfort, while Nicholas sat down on the other with Alexei cradled in his lap.

“The capitalist newspapers have been circulating stories,” Yurovsky said. “They claim that you have escaped, or that you are not being kept safe. We need to take a photograph to put an end to these rumors once and for all. You will please arrange yourselves so that you may all be seen.”

Having had their portrait taken a thousand times, the royal family obligingly fell into their customary spots, with the parents and Alexei in the middle and the girls spread out on either side.

“Yes, yes,” Yurovsky said, directing Dr. Botkin and the others into a single file against the wall behind them. “Exactly. Everyone stay right where you are.”

Then, he popped back out the door again. There was nothing to look at and nothing to do. Ana fidgeted in her corset, stifling not only from the weight but the heat of it. Who knew that diamonds and rubies could be so heavy? Olga put a hand on her mother’s shoulder, and Alexandra kissed and squeezed it hopefully.

Ana wondered where Sergei was, and if he knew what was going on. There was only one window, crossed with iron bars, opening onto ground level, but it was placed high in the wall and she couldn’t see anything outside. How many officers, she wondered, were riding to their rescue even now?

Time seemed to stand still in the airless cellar as they held their positions and waited for the photographer to come in with his tripod and his camera and his black cloth. Jemmy squirmed in her arms, but she didn’t want to put him down for fear he’d get into some trouble. The commandant had made plain, on previous occasions, that he had no use for dogs.

When the doors did open again, Yurovsky came in, with his long coat unbuttoned and nearly a dozen guards jostling to join him inside. Reading aloud from a sheet of paper he held high in his hand, Yurovsky announced that “in view of the fact that your relatives and supporters have continued their attacks on Soviet Russia, the Executive Committee of the Urals has decided to execute you.”

Ana thought she could not have heard him correctly, and her father, after looking quickly at his family assembled around him, turned back to Yurovsky in disbelief and said, “What? What?”

The commandant quickly repeated the sentence, word for word, then drew from his belt a revolver and shot the former Tsar directly through the forehead. Ana saw her father pitch backwards in the chair, dropping Alexei to the floor. She saw her mother fling up a hand to cross herself, and her sisters shrink back against the wall. She heard Demidova cry out and Botkin protest, then everything became an awful blur.

The Red Guards pulled out their own guns and all Ana remembered was a deafening roar as the shots rang out and the room filled with choking smoke and screams for mercy and the hot splash of blood, blood flying everywhere. Jemmy turned into a limp soaking rag in her arms, and as the bullets clanged and ricocheted off the gems in her corset, Ana toppled over and fell beneath the crush of dead and dying bodies … and still the firing continued. The lightbulb in the ceiling exploded, and the last thing she saw, as she clutched at the emerald cross beneath her blouse, was the looming phantom of Rasputin himself rising before her, as if his black beard and cassock were fashioned from the swirling smoke and gunpowder. In her ear, she heard the deep rumble of his voice whispering, as he once had done at the Christmas ball, “I shall always be watching over you, little one.” Malenkaya.