Blood Royal

by Jonathan Green

  ULYSSES KICKED OPEN the door to the roof and dashed through, letting it bang shut behind him.

  The reality of the situation he now found himself in hit him like a punch to the gut and he tensed as the cyber-organic assassin turned like a cornered tiger and flexed its blades.

  Recognition seemed to flash in its eyes as it faced its pursuer. It hissed, lips pulling back from pearly white teeth, the grimace lending its acid-etched features an even more grotesquely-demonic aspect.

  “No, no, no, little red bag. Not this time, not this time,” it gibbered.

  Seeing it waver, Ulysses felt a sudden rush of rage as the desire for revenge boiled within him; the image of the Firebird’s savaged corpse fresh in his mind. He raised his gun. Surely a shot between the eyes would end this monster’s reign of terror.

  Slowly he pulled back the trigger. But then the rational part of his psyche and his deep-seated need for answers overrode his anger and his finger froze.

  “Why?” he demanded. “Why did you do it? Why kill her? Who sent you?”

  “No, no, no, mustn’t say,” the Ripper gabbled. “Cannot say. No, no, no, will not say.”

  Ulysses took a step forwards. The automaton assassin backed away from him.

  “Who sent you?”

  The cyborg’s steel toes tapped and scraped on the stony surface of the theatre roof.

  “WHO SENT YOU!” Ulysses screamed.

  Hearing the door to the roof crash open again, Ulysses ducked and spun, his pistol whipping round to meet the black-clothed figures pouring through it. Ulysses recognised special forces police when they were pointing their guns at him.

  Hearing a frantic scrabbling behind him, Ulysses turned and was just in time to see the killer scramble head-first over the edge of the roof and down the front of the theatre.

  “Put the gun down!”

  He turned back to see a striking blond-haired woman step from between the gunmen, wearing knee-length black boots and a black trench coat. Her blonde hair was whipping about her face in the wind. She was stunningly attractive, with high sculptural cheekbones and a delicate mouth, her skin like translucent porcelain, her lips full and red.

  “So, Mr Quicksilver, we meet again,” she said, a smile playing about her lips.

  “We do?”

  “Well we will, Ulysses, and as a result, I would advise that you trust me and do exactly as I say.”

  “Trust you?”

  He began to lower his gun and then stopped himself, blinking.

  Ulysses scanned the rooftop, looking for any possible way off it without having to resort to surrendering to the blonde-haired agent and her gun-toting henchmen, or having to go through them.

  There was always the option of following the Ripper off the roof and, at that moment, Ulysses didn’t see that he had any other choice.

  He cautiously backed towards the edge with slow, shuffling steps, keeping one wary eye on the guns being pointed at him.

  “Stop, Ulysses!” the woman called.

  And then he heard a shout from below and glanced down. There, on the steps of the Bolshoi Theatre beneath him, was Nimrod. In his hands he held the trailing edge of one of the banners that were currently adorning the facade of the building, promoting the production of Swan Lake. As he backed away, pulling the banner from the front of the building, a vertiginous slide formed, the fabric rippling as it was caught by the breeze. That night’s audience watched with confused and disapproving glances, but none of them moved to stop him.

  There was no time to think, only to act.

  Visions of a death-defying fall through a blizzard above the snow-clad peaks of Mount Manaslu replaying through his mind, Ulysses stepped off the edge.

  There was a stomach-lurching moment of freefall and then the fabric of the banner went taut around him, slowing his descent, but only a little. And then he was skidding at speed.

  He flew off the end of the improvised slide and into the arms of his manservant, knocking Nimrod to the ground.

  “Sorry about that, old boy,” he apologised, his face mere inches from the older man’s.

  “Don’t mention it, sir,” Nimrod replied, his cheeks reddening uncharacteristically.

  As the two men disentangled themselves, Ulysses caught sight of a line of irritated and disbelieving faces peering over the lip of the theatre roof, the blonde-haired woman among them.

  “This way, sir,” Nimrod called breathlessly.

  “How did you know?” Ulysses asked. “How did you know I was up there?”

  “Let’s just say, we heard a commotion and put two and two together.”

  “Are Miss Wishart and Miranda with you?”

  “They’re waiting in the car.”

  “The car? What car?”

  It was then that Ulysses saw the Zil limousine pulled up beside the kerb, the faces of the woman and the child peering out anxiously through the glass of the rear passenger window.

  “That car, sir.”

  “Where did you get the wheels, Nimrod?” Ulysses asked as he climbed into the passenger seat.

  “I think it’s best if I don’t say, sir,” his manservant replied as he took his place behind the wheel.

  “How come?”

  “Culpable deniability, sir. Now buckle up because this is going to be tight.”

  Its engine growling like a great Russian bear, the car screeched away from the kerb and sped off into the traffic, hurtling away along the Teatralnaya Ploshchad.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Tomb Raiders

  WHILE NIMROD DROVE through the night, Miranda and her governess slept. They hadn’t dared return to their hotel. With his contact dead and the Russians on their tail, it would have been the first place anybody coming after them would have looked. And as long as the child and Miss Wishart were with him, he could keep a close eye on them.

  During the journey Ulysses only dozed. On the rare occasions when he did drop off for more than a few head-jerking moments, his dreams were full of knife-fingered killers and a hundred dead Firebirds.

  It was in this manner that they came at dawn the next day to Tsarskoye Selo.

  The Tsar’s Village, as was the name of the place when translated into English, lay sixteen miles south of the St Petersburg, and was one of the official royal residences of the Russian royal family; although the current ruler – Tsarina Anastasia III – made little use of either the baroque Catherine Palace or the neoclassical Alexander Palace, preferring to base herself at the Peterhof, also known as the Russian Versailles.

  But Natasha Eltsina’s dying words hadn’t sent them racing across the oblast, in an attempt to evade the authorities in Moscow, on a site-seeing tour of the royal palaces. They had come here for the famed royal cemetery, in search of the final resting place of the most infamous individual in recent Russian history.

  “Go to Tsarskoye Selo,” the Firebird had told Ulysses with her dying breath. “Take what lies in the devil’s tomb... In Rasputin’s tomb.”

  Nimrod brought the purloined limousine to a halt beside the cemetery wall, looking no worse for wear in spite of having driven all night.

  “This is the place, sir.”

  “Indeed,” Ulysses said, peering out of his window through the April morning mist at the cemetery wall and the roofs of the tombs beyond.

  “Best you two stay here,” he said to Miranda and her governess. “Nimrod will leave you the keys just in case, but should anyone turn up sound the horn immediately. Meanwhile, Nimrod and I will take a look around. Shouldn’t be too long.”

  Miranda smiled at him. The governess, looking both bleary-eyed and anxious, merely nodded.

  “Righty-ho then,” Ulysses said, turning back to his butler sat behind the wheel of the Zil. “Let’s go.”

  DESPITE THE FACT that it was April, it was cold in the graveyard. The two men strode slowly yet purposefully between the marble tombs and white headstones, attempting to decipher the Cyrillic script of the epitaphs and find what they were looking for. />
  “I don’t mean to be impolite, sir,” Nimrod said, “but do you know which is Rasputin’s tomb?”

  “Course I do, old boy,” the dandy blustered. He stopped and smiled weakly at his manservant. “I had hoped it would stand out rather, being referred to as the tomb of a devil and all that.”

  “I see,” Nimrod said.

  “I mean, wasn’t he involved with some cult or other?”

  “You mean, the khlysty, sir?”

  “That’s the one. Don’t they have some sort of cult symbol or other?”

  “You mean like that one, sir?” Nimrod asked, pointing at the facia of a near-black tomb behind Ulysses.

  Ulysses turned, and looked up at the symbol inscribed there. Beneath it, amongst all the Cyrillic script was a date: 16.12.1916.

  Over eighty years before, Rasputin – the mad monk –had been murdered by a group of conspirators concerned that he had gained undue influence over the Russian royal family.

  At the time it had looked like the outrage might lead to full scale revolution, until Queen Victoria – or at least the nation of Magna Britannia – had stepped in to quell the rising rebellion.

  The Tsarevna Anastasia had survived and gone on to rule a Russia that was now, in reality, no more than a princeling state of Magna Britannia.

  The rebel leaders made one last defiant stand in the middle of Moscow and were gunned down by landsknecht war machines, bathing the stones of the plaza in the blood of Lenin, Trotsky, Dybenko and Kerensky. The place had been known as Red Square ever since in fearful memory of how close Russia had come to falling to communism.

  But the Marxist philosophy had not gone away and had found a home in the burgeoning United States of America, a nation kept in check by British foreign policy and unable to feed its own populace. The propaganda and ideals of the Russian Bolsheviks found favour there, and the concept of the American Dream was born. The last president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, had been assassinated by a communist sympathiser in 1920 and the United States had been re-invented as the United Soviet States of America, or USSA.

  “I told you it would be around here somewhere,” Ulysses said.

  Approaching the impregnable-looking stone door he tested it with a push of his hand. It didn’t even give.

  Nimrod joined him. “Would you like a hand, sir?”

  “A hand would be... very handy,” Ulysses said, and the two men now both put their shoulders to the door and pushed.

  Still nothing.

  “I believe the door may be locked, sir,” Nimrod said.

  “And we don’t have a key.”

  “Just give me a minute, sir.” Nimrod crouched down, a bundle of lock picks suddenly in his hand. Only a few seconds later there was a distinctive click and, at a push, the door ground open.

  The grating of stone on stone was loud in the silent vault, the sound echoing away from them into the distant darkness of the crypt.

  Ulysses rummaged in a jacket pocket for a moment – finding an old train ticket to Yorkshire, a comb and the tooth of a cave bear – before his fingers settled on the solid cylindrical shape of the flashlight. Flicking the switch, Ulysses aimed the torch-beam into the darkness beyond that had not been disturbed for God knew how many decades.

  “After you, old boy,” Ulysses offered generously.

  “WILL YOU LOOK at that?” Ulysses said, drawing his manservant’s attention to the curious markings on the wall above them, partially obscured by thick cobwebs and shadows. “What do you make of them? Some sort of cult signs or symbols? Possibly slightly out of the ordinary for a tomb, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I would, sir. And isn’t it also more usually the case to find a body inside a tomb?”

  “Indeed.” The slab standing in the middle of the dank chamber was empty.

  Ulysses played his torch over the stone, picking out the edges of the plinth, looking for any signs of where a body might once have lain, or any joins that might suggest that what they were looking at was a sarcophagus.

  Ulysses and Nimrod crouched down, trying to find some way to move the slab on top of the plinth

  Doubts started to worry at Ulysses’ mind then. Perhaps this wasn’t Rasputin’s tomb. He had heard legends of what had been done to the miracle-worker’s body after his death, but most accounts claimed that his body had ultimately been returned to this very vault, and the devil sealed inside for all eternity.

  “Come on, Nimrod, this is no good,” Ulysses puffed. “If this is a sarcophagus then I’m Tsarina Anastasia.”

  He took a step back and surveyed the slab once more. In the darkness, his foot brushed against something. Crouching, he sought it by torchlight. And then there it was, at the foot of the slab, amidst the bones of rats and putrid black fungal blooms.

  It was a book, about the size of a notebook or journal.

  Training his torch on it, Ulysses opened the covers.

  There, on the page before him, was what at first appeared to be nothing but gobbledygook, but it was not unfamiliar gobbledygook, for it was written in the tight, tidy hand of the late Dr Victor Gallowglass.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Enemy of My Enemy

  OUTSIDE THE TOMB, the sun was struggling to penetrate the stubborn ground mist that shrouded the burial plots and wound between the stones with something like animal intelligence.

  Ulysses took another look at Gallowglass’s notebook now that they were out in the daylight. As he flicked through the well-thumbed journal thoughts poured through his mind. How had the haematologist’s precious notebook ended up not only in Russia, but inside the empty tomb of Rasputin? And how had Natasha Eltsina known it was there?

  “So, is this the Russian connection you were looking for?” Nimrod asked, nodding at the battered notebook.

  “I suppose, actually, it is. Although I didn’t realise this was what we should be looking for when we came to this country.”

  “But someone did.”

  “Yes,” Ulysses mused.

  Ulysses stopped abruptly in his tracks, putting a hand to Nimrod to stop him too, whilst slipping Gallowglass’s notebook into an inside jacket pocket and swapping it for his pistol.

  Six familiar black-clad figures stepped out from between the crowding tombs, guns trained on the two gentlemen.

  Last to emerge was the blonde-haired woman, only now she was wearing a pair of dark glasses and much of her face was swathed by a black scarf.

  “Mr Quicksilver,” the woman said in accented, yet faultless, English, “or can I call you Ulysses? Please, put the gun down.”

  “Who are you and how do you know who I am?” Ulysses challenged.

  “But of course, you won’t remember yet. Let us just say that it is my business to know when an agent of the British throne is visiting my country,” she said. “As to who I am, my designation is Agent Katarina Kharkova, or simply Agent K, if you prefer. Although you can call me Katarina.”

  “Agent K, eh? And who do you work for?”

  “I am an agent of the throne of Imperial Russia. Whichever way you look at it, we’re on the same side.”

  Ulysses regarded the six gunmen. “And which side would that be?”

  “Now, now, Ulysses, you really are hard work, aren’t you? Do you really want to talk politics or shall we – how do you say? – cut to the chase?”

  “I would love do,” Ulysses replied, “but before we do, if I am to co-operate with you, then you need to co-operate with me.”

  “I am sorry? In what way?”

  “We pool our knowledge. Quid pro quo.”

  “But I am the one holding all the cards.”

  “Was the Firebird on your side too?”

  Agent K said nothing, a smile barely hiding her growing irritation.

  “Very good. Have it your way. And now I have a question for you.”

  “Go on.”

  “Natasha Eltsina sent you here, didn’t she?”

  Ulysses opened his mouth to speak, but then thought better
of it and said nothing.

  “What was it she sent you to find?”

  “Isn’t it possible that we are here simply to take a look around one of Russia’s greatest Imperial monuments?”

  “Not when it’s eight a.m. on a misty April morning, no. Ulysses, I hate to do this to you,” the woman said, “but perhaps now would be an appropriate time to tell you that I have an agent watching your car.”

  Ulysses frowned. There had been no warning hoot from Miss Wishart.

  “Are you threatening me, Agent K?”

  Agent K removed her glasses, wincing in the morning sunlight.

  “I could have you arrested and the cemetery searched, along with you and your manservant. You could save yourself the trouble if you were to simply give me what we both know you have.”

  Ulysses said nothing.

  “You do not need to be fighting me, Ulysses.”

  Ulysses relaxed, feeling the tension and stress of the moment easing. She was right, of course. There were six gunmen trained on the two of them and, for all he knew, she really was on his side.

  Slowly, resigned to the fact that he was about to be relieved of his secret burden, Ulysses put a hand in his jacket pocket.

  It was then that he heard the scritch-scratch of steel-claws on stone.

  Following Ulysses’ gaze, Agent K shot a glance behind her, even as the spider-legged automaton appeared over the top of a tomb.

  “Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock,” it gibbered to itself.

  Before any of them really knew what was going on, the cyber-organic killer had pounced from its perch and cut down one of the gunmen.

  “Run!” Ulysses hissed at Nimrod.

  They didn’t look back, not once, not even when the screaming started and the ring of slicing blades quickly silenced the thunderous roar of heavy arms-fire.

  “What in hell’s name is going on, sir?” Nimrod puffed as the two of them sprinted away, heading for the entrance.