“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.”