“Dry this out, then let Kozak take a crack at it.”

“Will do. And the body?”

“Bag it, under hazard wraps, and we’ll send it back to Port Orlov when the chopper gets here.”

“When’s that?”

Slater wished he knew. Looking at the sky, he saw nothing but roiling gray clouds, giving way to banks of blacker thunderheads moving in across the strait. Whenever the helicopter arrived, it would be a bad time.

“And don’t mention it to anyone else yet,” Slater said. Groves nodded. On missions like these, they both knew, information was given out only on a need-to-know basis.

Going into the church, he was surprised not to see Kozak sitting on the stool outside the quarantine tent that had been set up around Lantos; he’d been assigned to guard the premises and listen for any sign that Lantos had become conscious again. The Demerol drip should have kept her quiet and sedated, but you never knew. Slater looked toward the far end of the church, where he could see a flashlight beam moving back and forth across the great heap of broken pews and tangled ironwork.

“You’ve abandoned your post,” he said, as he approached the professor. “In wartime, you could be shot for that.”

Kozak was supposed to be wearing a gauze face mask, too, part of the costume Slater required for quarantine duty, but he’d let his dangle down around his neck. Slater gestured for him to raise it again, but before he did, Kozak declared, “Do you know what this is?”

“Looks like a pile of junk to me.”

“Look behind the junk,” Kozak said, finally lifting the mask back into place over his neatly trimmed silver beard. “The junk has been put here to hide the screen that shielded the altar.”

“There’s an altar back there?”

“Yes, there has to be, and the screen is called the iconostasis. You will find it in all the Russian Orthodox churches. It protects the holy of holies, the sanctuary. In a big church, like the one I went to in Moscow when I was a boy, there were several doors through the iconostasis. Only certain monks or priests could use each one. There were many rules. But in a smaller church, one like this, there was sometimes just a single door — the door of Saint Stephen, the Protomartyr.”

“The what?” Slater had never been one for religion. In his experience, it was just another reason for people to kill each other with conviction and impunity.

“Saint Stephen, the first martyr of the Christian church,” Kozak said, with a touch of exasperation. “Have you never sung the song about good king Wencelas, on the feast of Stephen?” Kozak started humming the tune, but Slater was already nodding in recognition and he stopped. “Saint Stephen was put on trial by the Sanhedrin,” Kozak said, resuming his explanation, “and then he was stoned to death.”

“For what?”

“Preaching that Christ was divine.”

There you go again, Slater thought. One more entry for his inventory of religious slaughter.

Lifting his digital camera to take a picture of the jumble, Kozak said, “I am going to write a paper about this church, I think.”

“Not while you’re supposed to be on duty watching Eva.”

“She has been sleeping. I have listened to the monitor,” Kozak assured him, before adding gravely, “but she should be in a hospital by now, yes?”

“Yes, and she will be soon. A chopper’s on the way.”

“Ah, so you got through to someone, after all.”

“I had to call the head of the AFIP, in D.C. If she can’t get them to jump, no one can.”

Kozak slipped the camera back into his pocket. “I suspect she was not happy to hear this news,” Kozak sympathized.

“No, she wasn’t.” Now that Slater was aware of it, he could see that there was indeed some sort of screen erected behind all the camouflage. He could even detect the glint of gold paint on a faded mural.

Kozak nodded, looking down. “The bureaucrats, they never understand. The situation on the ground is never the same as the situation in their plans. They think it should always be easy, the way it looks on paper.”

You can say that again, Slater thought. He was trying not to dwell on the fallout from his conversation with Dr. Levinson. The rest of his life loomed before him like a great empty plain, and it was almost a relief when his thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a low, but anguished, murmuring from the quarantine tent.

“Eva’s awake again,” he said, as her voice crackled over the audio monitor.

“But she sounds like she is in pain.”

He could increase the drip, even give her an injection, but there was only so much he could do under these conditions. And as he hurried back to help her, he heard an even worse sound.

A spasm of coughing. Harsh and wet. And flulike.

Chapter 44

The breaker of chains.

When Charlie Vane read those four words on the computer screen, he felt as if he had just broken into the vault at Fort Knox.

The silver cross was sitting on a yellow legal pad, its emeralds glinting in the buttery glow of the banker’s lamp. Like a lottery winner who needed to study his lucky ticket one more time, Charlie picked it up and turned it over. The inscription was in Russian, but he had written the translation Voynovich had given him on the pad.

“To my little one. No one can break the chains of divine love that bind us. Your loving father, Grigori.”

He had been reading it all wrong. Misinterpreting what it said.

But now he knew better. It was as if, with that one simple phrase, he’d just been given the key to a secret code. Now he knew the story. All his Internet research had finally paid off.

By the year 1901, Nicholas II, the reigning Romanov Tsar, had long been praying for a son. He and his wife, Alexandra, had had three daughters already, and to ensure the survival of his dynasty, Nicholas needed a male heir to be born. But on the night of June 18, the Tsaritsa gave birth to a fourth daughter, and to keep his wife from seeing his disappointment, Nicholas took a long walk to compose himself before going into the royal chamber. On that walk, he must have given himself a stern talking-to, because he resolved to make the best of it and honor the birth of this new daughter by freeing several students who had been imprisoned for rioting in Moscow and St. Petersburg the previous winter.

The name he chose for her was Anastasia, which meant the breaker of chains.

As Charlie studied the cross again, he saw how everything now fell right into place.

“The little one”—malenkaya—to whom it was addressed was a commonly used nickname for the mischievous young grand duchess, Anastasia. And the “loving father” was not her dad, but a priest. A father named Grigori.

As in Grigori Rasputin, the self-proclaimed holy man revered by the Romanovs and reviled by the nation.

What Charlie was holding was not only a piece of history, but an object of absolutely unimaginable value. The days of soliciting measly contributions to Vane’s Holy Writ website were over forever! He could bring his message — personal liberation through total subjugation, in all things, to the holy will! — to millions of people at once. Not incidentally, he could become even richer and more famous in the process, though that, too, was no doubt part of the heavenly plan for him.

He had barely had time to savor his triumph, and imagine the bidding war that would ensue among the world’s wealthiest collectors and museums, when the motion-detector lights went on outside the house, bathing the driveway in their cold white glare. Pushing his wheelchair back on the piled-up rugs, he glanced outside, and while he expected to see a moose ambling by, or maybe a couple of foxes scampering across the snow, he saw his brother Harley, looking like he was on his last legs, staggering toward the front steps.

“Rebekah!” he shouted. “Go open the front door!”