“Town,” she finally blurted out. “They went to town.”

“That’s a lie,” Nika said. “We’d have passed them on our way here.”

Bathsheba bustled back into the room, trailing a length of rope on the carpet behind her.

“Although they don’t know it,” Slater said, “Harley and your husband are in great danger.”

“No more than you are,” she said, twitching the gun. “And what’s with those masks and rubber gloves? You look like a pair of burglars to me. That’s what I’ll say when they ask me why I had to shoot you.”

“They have to be heading toward Nome,” Nika said to Slater, as if they were alone.

“Then that’s where we’ll be going,” Slater said, ignoring Bathsheba, who stood by, fiddling with the rope, and Rebekah, still clenching the shotgun but plainly wondering what to do next. “Come on.”

He calmly, but with cool deliberation, tipped the rifle barrel to one side as Nika scurried out of the room, and then, holding his breath, he followed her out to the ambulance. They both jumped in, and as Nika threw the vehicle into reverse to back down the driveway, she said appreciatively, “Next time somebody needs a hostage negotiator, I’ll know who to call.”

“Just drive.”

But they were no more than halfway down the hill when Bathsheba, waving the rope like a cowboy, ran behind them, pressing her hands to the back bumper.

“Leave Harley alone!” she was shouting. “He didn’t do anything!”

Nika hit the brakes, but the ambulance kept skidding down the slope, pushing Bathsheba behind it.

“Leave him alone!”

Nika, swearing, pumped the brakes again, but the driveway was icy and the vehicle fishtailed. There was an alarming thump, and Bathsheba was sent flying into a snowdrift.

“Oh, no!” Nika said, pounding the wheel in frustration and finally bringing the ambulance to a complete halt.

Frank had unbuckled his belt and was reaching for the door handle when Rebekah came flying down the front steps, screaming like a banshee at the sight of her sister in the snowbank. To Slater’s shock, she lifted the shotgun and without hesitation fired a round straight at the vehicle.

As the right headlight exploded in a shower of white sparks and shattered glass, Slater reached across the seat and dragged Nika down under him.

The second shot crashed through the windshield and dented the roof above their heads. A hole the size of a fist had been punched through the glass, but the rest of the windshield, crazed with a thousand fissures, held together.

Slater heard the chambering of two new rounds, but he wasn’t about to wait for Rebekah to improve her aim. Throwing open the side door, he rolled out onto the snow. A tuft of dirt and ice exploded behind him as he dodged behind a tree. He heard the crunching of the snow under Rebekah’s feet as she ran after him, and when he glanced around the trunk, another shotgun blast tore a big chunk of bark loose, throwing chips and splinters into his face.

But that meant both barrels were empty again, and he had a few seconds at most before she could reload.

Wiping his eyes clean, he bolted out from behind the tree. She had just slapped in a fresh round when he leapt for her. But his booties slipped, and all he could do was bat the barrel away in time for the shot to rip through the treetops and send a flock of birds screeching into the night.

She grunted in anger, and he groped for the gun. She tried to swing it away, but he held on, and with a violent wrench managed to yank it out of her hands. With her fingers extended like claws, she let out a bloodcurdling scream and sprang at his face, and he had no choice but to jerk the stock of the rifle up under her chin. Her jaws smacked shut like a bear trap, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she was out cold by the time she hit the ground.

When the din of the rifle blast had at last stopped echoing in his head, Slater heard Nika over by the snowbank, crying for help.

Chapter 51

The lights flickered and dimmed as an Arctic blast pummeled the walls of the mess tent, and for a few seconds Professor Kozak thought his computer was about to crash. But the generators kept humming and, despite the muffled roar of the wind, the structure held firm. He poured himself another shot of vodka.

It was only a few hours since the helicopter had left with Slater and Nika aboard, but already the colony felt increasingly forlorn and abandoned. Dr. Lantos was gone, and though he hoped for a miracle, he did not think that one would be forthcoming. He didn’t see how she could have possibly survived her injuries, or the protracted evacuation to Juneau. Besides himself, only Sergeant Groves and Rudy remained, and they were out on patrol, making sure the island had no other intruders, and that nothing further occurred to disturb the eviscerated corpse of the deacon. Presumably, the poor man was still lying on the slab in the autopsy chamber.

The professor did not envy Frank Slater. This was not a mission report he would ever want to write. Whatever could go wrong, had gone wrong … and badly. He could only assume that it spelled the end of Slater’s career as a field epidemiologist.

He returned his gaze to the images on his computer, pictures of what the Russian Orthodox church called the Theotokos. All were representations of the Virgin Mary and Child, but in four traditional poses. The Hodigitria, in which the Virgin pointed to the child as a guide to salvation. The Eleusa, in which the child touches his face to his mother’s, symbolizing the bond between God and mankind. The Agiosortissa, or Intercessor, in which Mary holds out her hands in supplication to a separate image of Christ. And, finally, the Panakranta, depicting Mary on a royal throne, with the Christ child in her lap; according to the Fourth Ecumenical Council, it was in this configuration that the two were represented as presiding over the destiny of the world.

Although Frank had given him only the roughest description of the icon they had freed from the deacon’s frozen hand — and which had now been stolen by some unknown hand — Kozak was confident that this last design, more regal than the others, was the right one. The red veil over her head was a symbol of her suffering, the blue dress a mark of her bond with humanity. The three diamonds that Slater had mentioned — on the Virgin’s forehead and shoulders — were meant to suggest the Holy Trinity.

From the communications desk in the corner, there was a burst of static, and then a ghostly voice from the Coast Guard station in Point Barrow, warning of another storm front swooping down on the Bering Strait. How, and why, Kozak wondered, had these settlers decided to plant their colony in this most unforgiving of places? The wind howled around the tent, and he was reminded of the terrors he had felt as a boy, reading late in his tiny room at the top of the stairs of the summer dacha. Every June his family had left their palatial flat in Moscow — high on Kutuzovsky Prospect — and gone to this wretched house in the middle of nowhere for “the fresh air.” As far as Vassily was concerned, the air was plenty fresh in the city libraries. The house had no electricity, and he had had to read his books by the light of a kerosene lantern. He could smell its smudgy odor even now and envision the rough log walls. Every time a branch had brushed against the eaves, or a window frame had whined, he had imagined that a rusalka was beckoning to him from the riverbank. Pale maidens, garlanded with flowers, they were said to lure the unsuspecting to their watery lairs and drown them there; the gardener told him that he had once chased a rusalka off the end of the dock with his pitchfork. “So don’t you worry, young Vassily,” he’d said. “They won’t be coming around here anymore.”

But young Vassily had worried, all the same.