“You are at the monastery of Novo-Tikhvin. A soldier, Sergei, brought you here.”

“When?” Her voice came out as a croak.

“Three days ago.”

Three days ago … and then it all came back in a flood, the late-night awakening, the innocent march to the cellar, lining up for the photograph to be taken … and the guards bursting into the room instead. The reading of the death sentence. Her mind could go no further before she broke down, racked with uncontrollable sobs. The nun, her face framed by the squarish black hat and the black veils that hung down on either side of her cheeks, consoled her as best she could, all the while counseling her to remain quiet.

“My family …” Ana finally murmured, “my family?”

But the nun did not reply. She didn’t have to. Ana knew. Just as she knew who this nun was now — her name, she recalled, was Leonida. Sister Leonida. It was she who had sometimes brought the fresh provisions to the Ipatiev house.

“The Bolsheviks are looking for you. They know that you escaped. So we have hidden you here, above the bakery.”

The monastery was almost as famous for its bread and baked goods as it was for its many good works. In addition to the six churches it housed within its grounds, the monastery was also home to a diocesan school and library, a hospital, an orphanage, and workshops where the sisters — nearly a thousand of them — painted icons and embroidered ecclesiastical garments with silken threads of gold and silver. Their work had long been considered the finest in the Russian Empire.

Sister Leonida said, “You must eat something,” and gathering up her skirts, carefully descended the ladder. She left the lantern beside the straw-filled mattress, and by its light Ana removed her blanket and inspected herself. She was dressed in a long white cassock — a rason—that the nuns and priests customarily wore under their outer robes; it went all the way to her feet and the sleeves were long and tapered to the wrist. The clothes she had worn that terrible night were gone — what could have been left of them after that fusillade? — but her corset, lined with the royal jewels, was draped across a chair. She wondered if the nuns had discovered its secret cache … the cache that only now, she realized, must have saved her life by deflecting the hail of bullets. Her ribs and abdomen were as sore as if she had been pummeled by a hundred fists, and there were fresh bandages on her shoulders and legs. Plucking the rason away from her breast, she glimpsed the emerald cross still resting against her bosom. Coarse woolen socks had been pulled on over her feet; she was reminded of Jemmy, her little spaniel, who used to sleep atop her feet at night, and another round of hot tears coursed down her cheeks.

When Sister Leonida returned, she brought a hunk of fresh brown bread and a bowl of hot lamb stew. Ana didn’t want it — her throat was so constricted with grief that she could not imagine swallowing — but Leonida urged her to eat. “You owe this to yourself, to your family … and to God. He has spared you for a reason.”

Had He? Yes, she had been spared, but to what did she truly owe that strange fate? She could recall the prophetic words of the holy man Rasputin … and though she wished she could forget it, she saw in her mind’s eye his ghostly image arising from the smoke in the cellar that night.

Once she had eaten enough of the stew to satisfy the nun—“I’ll leave the bowl here,” Leonida said, “and you can finish the rest when I bring you some of the honey cake that’s in the oven right now”—Ana asked after Sergei. “Do the Bolsheviks know he was the one who rescued me?”

The sister nodded. “He is in hiding, too. But I will get word to him that you are awake and recovering well.”

“Can he come to me here?” Ana wasn’t sure if she was asking for some unthinkable favor, or even possibly putting Sergei into some greater danger than he was already in. But she longed to see him.

“Eat,” the sister said, “and rest.”

Ana did not know how to interpret that reply but was afraid to push any harder. And truth be told, she was already fading back into a lethargy, retreating from everything she had already learned, needing to forget again … and to lose herself once more in the soothing abyss of sleep.

Chapter 47

It was with dread in his heart that Slater rushed to Nika’s tent. He couldn’t very well knock on the flaps, but he shouted above the wind that he was going to come in and that she should don her mask and gear.

What he saw beneath her goggles was a pair of frightened eyes. The bare lightbulb rigged overhead bobbed on its cord in the billowing tent.

“Let me see your hand,” he said, and like a dog with a wounded paw she held out her palm. With his own gloves he inspected the spot where the needle had punctured the skin. The mark was still evident, but so far it wasn’t inflamed or suspect in any way. A small relief, but not much more than that. The etiology and incubation period of this flu was uncertain, to say the least. “How are you feeling?”

“Scared,” she admitted. Her long black hair was tied in two glistening braids that hung down over her shoulders.

“We all are,” he said. “But it’s going to be okay, trust me.”

“How is Eva doing?”

“I’ve done as much as I can for her here.” Indeed, he had just changed her dressings, replaced several broken sutures, and administered stronger sedation. “But she’s going to be evacuated by chopper very soon. You’re going, too.”

“But I’m all right. If you need the space on the helicopter for—”

“I need you to help me track down Harley Vane and Eddie.”

“What are you talking about?”

As quickly as he could, he explained what he had learned, including the fact that Russell’s frozen corpse had been unearthed outside the church. Nika appeared incredulous.

“He was attacked by the wolves?” she said.

“No room for doubt on that score,” Slater said, before going on to explain what he thought the others had been up to on the island.

“Then there’s no way of knowing what they might have been exposed to?”

“No,” Slater said, “there isn’t. And they don’t know either.”

Nika, fully grasping the gravity of the situation, said, “But can they possibly have made it to shore in that boat? In these seas?”

“For argument’s sake, we have to assume that they did.”

“I should call the sheriff in town,” she said, starting for the SAT phone, but Slater put up a hand to stop her.

“He’s already been notified, and he’s been told what precautions to take for himself and his men.” Slater had also notified the Coast Guard, the National Guard, and the civilian authorities in the state capital of Juneau. What he needed was a tight ring to be formed around the town of Port Orlov, and a wider ring with a ten-mile perimeter to be formed around even that. Northwest Alaska, fortunately, was sparsely populated, and it wasn’t exactly crisscrossed with roads and highways; most of the travel was done by boat and air, and Slater had already arranged for the harbor to be blockaded and the commercial aircraft to be grounded. When he’d encountered any resistance, he’d referred the calls to AFIP headquarters in Washington. By now, he figured, Dr. Levinson was probably planning to put him in front of a firing squad when and if he ever got back.

“Frank,” Nika said, “what’s going to happen to the people in Port Orlov?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “We’re going to stop this thing in its tracks.”

“I just couldn’t bear it,” she said, still sounding fearful, “if what happened in 1918 happened again … and on my watch. I’m the mayor, I’m the tribal elder, I’m the one they trusted. I remember the stories of my people dying in their huts, the dogs feeding on their bodies for weeks.”

“That won’t happen,” he said, holding her hands in his gloves and wishing that he could just strip off all the protective gear — his and hers — and touch her for real.