Red Templar

by Paul Christopher

  On the trip to Moscow there had been only one scary moment. A roadblock guard outside of Perm had insisted on opening Eddie’s coffin, a flimsy fiberboard creation with a fake satin lining and bronze-colored plastic handles. Lying in the coffin beside him, Holliday could only hold his breath and listen.

  Dimitri had pried open the upper half of Eddie’s coffin. The stink of the half dozen feet in the open baggie between Eddie’s legs and the whispered word “holera” from Dimitri had been enough to send the guard away as fast as his legs could carry him. The rest of the trip, while disgusting, was uneventful.

  And now here they were at the red beating heart of Ronald Reagan’s Axis of Evil. Holliday had never seen the Russians in quite that light, but for an American boy brought up in the fifties and sixties they were certainly the main enemy, with an occasional serving of Chinese as a side dish.

  When Holliday was growing up, everything Russian had necessarily been dark, brooding and corrupt, where everyone was named Boris or Igor or Natasha, and the men never shaved. Khrushchev pounded his shoe in the U.N. The Russkies never could have come up with the H-bomb on their own, and Sputnik was the greatest blow to the American ego since the British burned down the White House in 1814.

  Time, events and a whole lot of reading of history had altered his perspective somewhat, but, as a soldier and sometime intelligence officer, his adult life had always centered on the Soviet Union as the bull’s-eye on the target. By the same token, the same time and events had altered America as well, and these days Holliday could almost sympathize with Putin’s feeling that the great motherland’s grandeur had been tarnished.

  Afghanistan had been a travesty; everyone drank far too much vodka, and the entire Russian Federation appeared to be a fiefdom of organized crime. The United States had gone through its own transformation, from the avenging angel that had won World War II and saved the world to the quagmires of Vietnam, reality television, childhood obesity and Wall Street recklessness. Meanwhile, both nations suffered the cultural degradation of McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC and IKEA.

  As they passed under the high curved arch of the Spassky Tower, it occurred to Holliday that maybe the Internet crazies weren’t so far off the mark with their global conspiracies; he found himself thinking of Rex Deus and Kate Sinclair and her sinister forces, of the priest Brennan and the Vatican Secret Service, and of this new group mentioned by the Bulgarian monk-the Order of the Phoenix.

  Between them and the other half dozen or so shadowy alphabet organizations he knew about, maybe the world really was controlled by forces beyond the control of the ordinary person. He laughed aloud, his voice echoing from the ancient stone of the tunnel-like entrance to the Kremlin.

  “What is so funny?” Eddie asked.

  “I was just thinking of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin fighting back-to-back, beating off the Communist hordes for truth, justice and the American way.”

  The Cuban snorted. “They should have come to Habana and stood with me for ten hours in the hot sun listening to El Comandante speaking in the Plaza de la Revolucion; they would have died of boredom.”

  “You actually did that?” Holliday asked, surprised. Eddie had never struck him as a dedicated comunista.

  “Naturalmente.” Eddie grinned. “In the old days they gave you lunch in a box and beer to make crowds for the cameras. In later times the police rounded you up and took you there in buses-if you did not go, you didn’t work for a week. ?VivaFidel!”

  The two men came out from under the arch. On their left were the gardens in front of the two so-called Nameless Towers of the Kremlin Wall, and on their right was the neoclassical yellow-and-white Presidential Administration Building. For a crisp fall day there were a surprising number of tourists wandering around, some unsupervised, but most in regimented tours led by guides speaking English, Mandarin, Japanese and German. The Cuban approached one of the big-hatted, ornately uniformed guards posing for pictures in front of the main entrance.

  “Kak my mozhem poluchit’ v Oruzhyei’noi’ palate?” Eddie asked. The guard stared at the Cuban, his jaw dropping like an old-fashioned steam shovel in a cartoon. He gave Eddie a stuttering reply, then watched, still openmouthed, as the tall black man rejoined Holliday. “We go past the big cannon and keep to the right until we come to the Armoury. It is a palace with a green roof,” Eddie reported.

  The czar’s cannon turned out to be a gigantic thirty-four-ton bombard with a bronze barrel and one-ton cannonballs from the sixteenth century. It had never been fired. Right beside it was the Czar Bell, two hundred tons of bronze that broke in the casting pit, and was never hung or rung. It seemed a little odd to Holliday that the Russians, not to mention the old-guard Communists of the Soviet Union, would be so proud of such useless white elephants that had no purpose except to express some sort of weird cultural impotence. Who knew? Maybe it was the reason Russians drank so much vodka.

  They followed the guard’s directions and eventually found the Armoury, which really did have a green roof.

  “A question, if you do not mind, compadre,” asked Eddie as they stared up at the rococo-style building.

  “What is it?”

  “What are we doing in this place?”

  “We’re casing the joint.” Holliday smiled.

  “?Que?” Eddie asked.

  “Forget it,” answered Holliday. “Let’s go see this egg everyone’s been talking about.”

  “Tell me, where we are on this Black Tusk thing?” J. Hunter Kokum, the assistant deputy national security adviser, asked. The pale, white-haired man in his two-thousand-dollar funereal Brioni suit leaned back in his antique button leather office chair and stared across Charles Dickens’s darkly varnished, honey-topped mahogany writing desk, an object that had cost him almost a million dollars at a Christie’s auction and almost caused an international incident. Seated across from him, Whit Havers cleared his throat nervously.

  “After completing the Amsterdam assignment, Bone met with our contact there and then went to Yekaterinburg to wait for the targets.”

  “What happened?”

  “According to Bone, they never went near the church at the Ipatiev location. They did meet with a man named Anton Zukov, the curator of the Ipatiev House museum, which is contained in the basement of the church they built to memorialize the Romanovs.”

  “This is starting to sound like Dr. Zhivago.” Kokum grunted.

  “Who?” Havers asked.

  “Forget it.” Kokum sighed. “Before your time.” He glanced at a black-tabbed file on his desk. Black tabs were like black American Express cards-not many people had access to them. Whit Havers certainly didn’t. He wondered whether it had anything to do with Black Tusk. Kokum looked up from the file as though suddenly remembering that Whit was still in the room. “What happened when they talked to Zukov?”

  “Zukov told them that Genrikhovich was a pathological liar, that the Kremlin Egg had never even been in the Hermitage, let alone evacuated from it. Apparently the egg has always been in the Kremlin, except when it was sent out for cleaning and repair. It is there to this day.”

  “How does Bone know they spoke to Zukov?”

  “He followed them, sir.”

  “And how does he know what was said? Did he bug the place or something?”

  “No, sir. Bone questioned Zukov about the matter after Holliday and the other man had left.”

  “Questioned him?”

  Havers cleared his throat uncomfortably. “‘Interrogated’ might be a better word, sir.”

  “Ah,” murmured Kokum. “And if this Zukov fellow decides to talk about his interrogation by Mr. Bone, what is he likely to say?”

  “Very little,” answered Havers. “In fact, it is highly unlikely that he will say anything at all.”

  “And why is that, Mr. Havers?”

  “Because Mr. Zukov now resides in a swamp in the Koptyaki forest about thirty kilometers outside Yekaterinburg, sir.”

  “Ah,” said Kokum, tenting h
is fingers together. “Your idea?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Havers.

  “You’re better at this than I thought, young man.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t screw it up.” The narrow, cold face of the silver-haired man spoke volumes: Fuck up and it will be your head on the block, sonny boy; that’s what you’ve been right from the start: a sacrificial lamb.

  “No, sir.” Havers felt a faint shiver, and the Harvard-educated, once-upon-a-time Jamaican unaccountably found himself wondering which half of his DNA he’d picked up from his real father, the inimitable Nedrick Samuels. He prayed it wasn’t the strand controlling flight under pressure.

  The treasures of the Kremlin Armoury are contained in nine chambers on two floors of the mid-nineteenth-century building. The ten Faberge eggs are located in the second large room on the second floor of the building. Once again Holliday was struck by the almost masochistic fascination of the old Soviet regime in keeping the ancient, beautiful and incredibly valuable regalia of their oppressors on display, including Ivan the Terrible’s throne.

  The ten eggs in the Kremlin Armoury collection were all held in a single large display case, arranged on dull brown, felt-covered tiers shaped roughly like an ancient Mayan stepped pyramid. The Kremlin Egg, also known as the Uspenski Cathedral Egg, occupied the highest level-the place where the bloody human sacrifices were usually made-not a far-fetched metaphor when dealing with relics from the last of the czars and the beginnings of the Russian Revolution.

  Although the eggs were housed in a two-hundred-year-old building, the lighting within the Armoury was definitely state-of-the-art. Holliday had no doubt that the display case with the egg collection was made of bulletproof glass, and a careful look at the base of the display revealed the wires and leads going to motion detectors or pressure alarms or both. With several thousand well-armed presidential guards and forty-foot-thick walls it would take more than George Clooney and his franchised entourage of crooks to spirit away the Kremlin Egg from this place.

  “I have the same question, compadre: what are we doing in this place?” Eddie whispered.

  Holliday purposefully walked away from the brightly lit egg display and wandered casually into the next room. Neither the guards nor the sprinkling of visitors were paying any attention to them. “Genrikhovich said the Cathedral Egg we just saw on display is a fake.”

  “And we know Genrikhovich is a liar.” Eddie shrugged.

  “I don’t think he was lying about that,” said Holliday.

  “Why not?”

  “Because he had no reason to. People usually lie for a reason.”

  “Not if they are demente, crazy,” answered the Cuban.

  “Just for a minute, make the assumption that this time he was telling the truth. The Cathedral Egg is a fake. Why would anyone do such a thing? It makes no sense.”

  “In the history books it says that companero Stalin sold many things to get foreign currency; why not this huevo grande, then? It would have been worth a great deal even then. Perhaps he replaced it with this copy so no one would know.”

  “I don’t think Stalin was that subtle. To him selling off czarist treasures would be a patriotic act. Besides, he didn’t come to real power until 1922. I don’t think he was worrying about Romanov eggs back then.” Holliday shook his head. “It’s the only question that counts-why switch out the eggs?”

  “The eggs of Faberge, they all had surprises inside-yes?” Eddie asked.

  “That’s right.” Holliday nodded. “The Trans-Siberian Egg had its own little solid gold train; the Rosebud Egg had a tiny diamond crown and a sapphire pendant; the Imperial Yacht Egg had a tiny platinum replica of the yacht Standart inside. What’s your point?”

  “Perhaps the egg of the Cathedral had a secret within it that someone wanted to keep secret.”

  “A nice theory, but who do we ask about it?”

  “If one thing Genrikhovich said was true, maybe something else was true as well,” said Eddie.

  “Such as?”

  “The man gospodin Zukov said was one of Genrikhovich’s fantasies. The bastardo son of this KGB defector.”

  “Anatoliy Golitsyn’s love child. Anatoliy Ivanov.”

  28

  There were eleven A. Ivanov in the Moscow phone book, but only one of them lived on Sivtsev Vrazhek Lane. Number thirty-six was a two-story nineteenth-century granite block of flats with a leaded mansard roof, built to look like the old aristocratic mansions that had once been common on the street.

  The building stood on the corner of Sivtsev Vrazhek and Plotnikov Street, a block from the kilometer-long pedestrian-only section of bustling Arbat Street. In the old days the Arbat had been home to top-ranking government apparatchiks, and in the “new” old days, when the Mafiya and the gangs ruled in the old historic neighborhoods close to the Garden Ring, the Arbat was a place of purchased sex, expensive vodka and lines of black Escalades lining the streets like a Muscovite’s dream of Fifth Avenue in New York.

  At the turn of the nineteenth century it was home to writers, artists and young revolutionaries; at the turn of the twentieth century, gentrification had turned like a grinding wheel, and it was turning into Greenwich Village all over again.

  Eddie peered anxiously around at the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings that ran up and down the narrow street. It was dusk now, and the Cuban looked apprehensive. Dealing with a few thugs in a St. Petersburg square was one thing in broad daylight, but something else in the dark of a Moscow night.

  White racism was alive and well in Russia, and Moscow was its capital. Groups like the banned Slavic Union, Young Russia and Young Moscow were becoming more powerful each day, and Eddie knew that the longer he stayed in Russia the more dangerous it became, no matter how fluent he was in the language. The groups had become so bold they were even posting their immigrant “kills” on YouTube.

  “What apartment is he in, again?” Holliday asked.

  Eddie glanced at the scrap of paper from the phone book. “Numero tres. Three,” he said. They stepped up to the main door and pulled it open. In the old days a housekeeper would pop out of her single room at the first creaking of the door, but today there was nothing but a corridor stretching the length of the building.

  Number three was on the right. Holliday could hear music playing softly. It sounded like Rimsky-Korsakov, the man who wrote “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Holliday could also hear low voices, the tone urgent. He knocked. The voices stopped abruptly, but the music played on for a few seconds longer. Then it too fell silent. Holliday knocked again. He heard another sound; slippers swishing on wood floors.

  “Kto eto?”

  Holliday gave Eddie the nod. “Druz’ya Viktora Ostrovskogo,” answered the Cuban. There was a long pause and then the sound of chains being drawn and latches turned. Holliday touched the side pocket of his jacket. The flat Serdyukov pistol he’d taken from the woman on the Trans-Siberian was still there. He kept his hand in his pocket and popped off the trigger safety. Unless Anatoliy Ivanov wore something better than a grade-three Kevlar vest to answer the door, they were covered.

  The door opened. Holliday found himself staring at a man in his late forties or early fifties with salt-and-pepper hair and a long graying beard. He was dressed in a plain black suit with a large silver three-banded pectoral cross around his neck, identifying him as a Russian Orthodox priest. The walls behind the man were covered in icons of every size and type. There was a second man sitting on a worn, faded green corduroy couch, eating something that looked suspiciously like a Big Mac. He looked up, his mouth full of food, and adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles with one hand, the half-eaten burger in the other.

  “So, we are friends again, are we?”

  It was Victor Genrikhovich.

  Although there were certainly doubtful aspects to Anton Pesek’s character, morals, personality and perhaps even his sanity, there was no doubt that he was extremely good at his job. Within five minutes of
the appearance of Holliday and his black companion at the mausoleum-like exit to the Teatralnaya metro station just off Red Square, he had taken up a loose surveillance, following them at a distance across the cobbled plaza and through the Spassky Gate into the Kremlin.

  Pesek, who hated the cold, was dressed in a gray, down-filled nylon ski jacket, an old-fashioned Russian fur hat, jeans and work boots. In a small backpack slung over his shoulder he carried several pieces of potentially useful equipment that had come in handy on other assignments. He looked like everyone else, and he looked like no one in particular, which is the best way to look when you’re following someone.

  The Czech assassin followed Holliday and his friend as they meandered through the Kremlin, looking at the sights, but he stopped when they entered the Armoury Museum. Father Brennan had briefed him on the egg and its importance, but there was no way Holliday was going to try to steal it from behind the prisonlike walls of the Kremlin. Instead he stepped inside the small gold-domed St. Lazar Church across from the Armoury’s main entrance and waited. He picked up a pamphlet beside a donation box and began to read, one eye on the Armoury entrance.

  According to the pamphlet, the Kremlin had originally been called Mastera Gornogo, or Wizard’s Mountain-a burial place for wizards, witches and magicians whose spirits were restless. A priest had once cursed the place and, according to legend, was martyred on the spot. Pesek smiled. According to the stories Pesek’s father had told him, Comrade Stalin had martyred more than priests in this place.

  Reading on, Pesek discovered that in 1750 Elizabeth, empress of Russia, had ordered St. Lazar’s Church to be built for the indigents and beggars of the city. Twice each year all the dead beggars who had been kept in a giant icehouse to keep them from decomposing were brought to the church and buried in a single grave. There were so many beggars in Moscow, however, that the ritual was ended after only a dozen years for lack of space, but the church still stood, the cemetery paved over hundreds of years ago, its nameless occupants forgotten.