by Jenni Wiltz
“Jesus Christ, I hate Americans.”
“The letter writer says he’ll contact me again within 24 hours. If he doesn’t like my answer, he’ll offer the password to the Chechens and then the Georgians.”
“He’s bluffing. He’d never give it up.”
“Can we be sure of that? If he gets enough money from the fanatics in Grozny, he might be better off letting the rest of us fight over the tsar’s inheritance while he retires on a beach in the South Pacific.” Kadyrov breathed out a deep, troubled sigh. “Vadim, I know this is a bad situation. We don’t know what’s in the account or if it even exists. But Rumkowski believed it. My father did, too.”
“And you?” Vadim asked. “What do you believe?”
“My father wouldn’t have wasted his life looking for something that doesn’t exist.”
Vadim tried to remember the last time he’d read Rumkowski’s file. The damn thing had six levels of classification on it and he’d only ever reached the fourth. What was in the other two levels? Could there be definitive proof that the tsar’s secret account actually existed? It wasn’t the kind of thing he could simply ask about. People associated with that file had a strange habit of disappearing. “This ends here, Mikhail. Tell your lunatic he will have to deal with us in person.”
“You’re going to negotiate with him?”
“I can’t let him wave those letters at the Chechens or the Georgians. Saakashvili would snatch them in an instant if he thought it would bring the Kremlin crawling back to him. If Starinov found out, we wouldn’t live long enough to take a piss. When your lunatic contacts you, arrange a meeting at his home. No public places, under any circumstances. I’ll send one of my men to handle it.”
“Handle it?” the ambassador repeated. “I don’t want any trouble, Vadim Petrovich.”
“Russia does not negotiate with terrorists, separatists, mobsters, pirates, or American lunatics who think they know this county’s history better than their own.”
“And Professor Brandon? Even if you kill this man, she still knows everything.”
“The Public Security Intelligence Bureau will handle this. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir. Shall I call Valery back?”
“No. I’ll handle it. Speak of this to no one. The matter is closed, Mikhail Vasilievich.”
Vadim hung up the phone. He missed the small click on the line that indicated he was not the only one to hear the ambassador’s story.
Chapter Six
July 2012
Cusco, Peru
The alpaca fur lay soft as clouds beneath his palm. Constantine Dashkov tousled the thick white strands and turned the blanket over to inspect the construction. The vendor asked 300 nuevo soles and he would have paid twice that, but haggling was the custom and he would only insult the shopkeeper by handing over the money. “Doscientos,” he said.
The man shook his head. “Trescientos, por favor.”
Constantine fingered the mottled leather on the blanket’s underside, pretending to find flaws in the tanning. “She usually prefers vicuña,” he lied.
“You will find no vicuña for this price.”
“I did at Señor Fernandez’s shop.” He didn’t tell the man that Señor Fernandez also offered coca leaves at an exorbitant price and threw in a vicuña coat or blanket as a complimentary gift with purchase.
“Fernandez is a fool,” the vendor said, curling his lip to reveal squat teeth the color of bean curd. “He dyes goat hair and tells tourists it is vicuña.”
“Is that so?” Constantine rocked back on his heels and tried to look thoughtful. Behind the shopkeeper’s hut, the Andes rose like sleeping giants, waiting to be woken. “Doscientos cincuenta y no mas.”
“Bueno.” The shopkeeper snatched the blanket from him and scuttled behind his workbench to wrap it, leather side out, in thinly woven burlap.
“Gracias.” Constantine stepped out of the shop and took a deep breath that did not fill his lungs. The filament-thin air stretched over the jagged peaks like a piece of plastic wrap forced to cover an entire banquet table. Russian air was the opposite: thick, solid, with weight that could fill you or crush you, depending on the season. I am done with this place, he thought. No more flat tires, no more insects the size of small children. I am going home.
The vibration of his cell phone interrupted him. He pulled it from his pocket, glancing at the number. “Vadim,” he said. “What is it?”
“Greetings, my boy,” the bureau chief said, his tired baritone crackling over the air. “How is Peru?”
“Suffocating,” he answered. Behind him, the shopkeeper tied up his purchase with long strands of twine. “But I’m on my way home now.”
“About that…there has been a change of plan.”
He clenched his fingers around the narrow phone. “Don’t do this to me, Vadim.”
“There is no choice, I’m afraid. Let me explain.” Constantine’s gut churned as he listened to the ludicrous story spill out of Vadim’s mouth: the blackmailer in San Francisco, his professor accomplice, and the favor Vadim could do nothing but repay. “I wouldn’t ask this of you unless it were for him,” the older man finished weakly.
“Goddamn it, Vadim.” Constantine suppressed the urge to hit something. He imagined slamming his fist into another man’s face just to feel the satisfying crunch of cartilage. This was the fifth time he’d been promised leave, and the fifth time it had been revoked. He hadn’t seen his family in one year, ten months and thirteen days. Hurry, his father’s email had said. We’re losing her. “Get someone else,” he said. “I can’t do it.”
“This is not a request, my boy. It must be handled quickly and quietly, before it comes to the Prime Minister’s attention.”
“Not this time, Vadim. She’s waiting for me.”
“I’m very sorry, my boy, but you leave in an hour. The file is on the plane.”
He opened his mouth to protest but the line was already dead. Behind him, the shopkeeper held out the wrapped package. Constantine shook his head. “Lo siento, senor. I’m not going home after all.”
*
The Global Express XRS sat fueled and ready when he arrived at Velazco Astete. The bureau fielded a fleet of private jets, keeping its agents out of public terminals and off traceable passenger manifests. Each jet had radar scramblers, missile defense, a private stateroom, and a freezer full of Russian Standard. The flight crews consisted solely of retired Soviet Air Defense Force pilots. Sometimes they would open the door to the flight deck and tell their passengers stories about shooting down Korean planes by accident.
Constantine saluted his pilot and co-pilot as he stepped into the cabin and grabbed a bottle from the freezer. He’d emailed his father from the cab, informing him of the delay. Tell Lana to hang on, he wrote. One more stop and I’ll be home.
His eyes drifted down to the file on the seat next to him. It bore the bureau’s seal—a double eagle clutching a scroll in one talon and a saber in the other. He slit the sealing tape and sifted through the contents: a summary of the Romanov murder, snippets of an old case file with a Soviet locator number, and dossiers on two people, Professor Elizabeth Brandon and the letter writer, Yuri Voloshin.
The information on Voloshin came from the Russian consul in San Francisco, a man named Kadyrov. Voloshin had apparently contacted the consul that morning; on Vadim’s instructions, the consul set up a meeting for tomorrow. Yuri Voloshin’s background check read like a petty crime novel. His father died when he was eight, after which he lived with his immigrant grandfather. Since the age of 19, he’d been in and out of prison for theft and drug charges, with no steady jobs, education, wife, or kids. Aside from his minor connections within the vory zakone, there was nothing to mark his presence on earth.
Professor Elizabeth Brandon proved slightly more compelling as a subject. A tenured professor at a liberal arts university, she had an impressive public record—six books, two Pulitzer nominations and occasional editorials in The New York
Times. She was divorced with one child, and the legal guardian of a younger sister who was a hair’s breadth away from being institutionalized. He grunted, feeling an unwilling kinship with his victim. Svetlana’s doctors had done nothing but shake their heads and give her more pills. All he realized was that they didn’t understand a goddamn thing about what was going on in Lana’s mind. How could anything like that be fixed by a pill?
He flipped to the summary of the Romanov murder. All seven members of the deposed imperial family were imprisoned in Ekaterinburg from April to July of 1918: Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, his son Alexei and four daughters named Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia. As the politicians in Moscow tried to decide what to do with the inconvenient family, a counter-revolutionary force—the White Army—advanced on Ekaterinburg.
The Ural Soviet decided it couldn’t risk the former Tsar falling into enemy hands. They telegraphed Moscow, informing Lenin of their decision to kill the captives; no response came back. The men of the Ural Soviet interpreted silence as acquiescence and killed the entire family, with their servants, on the night of July 16/17. They dismembered, disfigured, burned, and buried the corpses in the Koptyaki Forest.
For months after the murder, Lenin’s government fed conflicting stories to the press, some stating the whole family had been killed, some that only Nicholas and Alexei had been killed. Lenin used the dead family’s survival as a bargaining chip to keep channels of communication open with other interested parties, namely Germany and England. Because no one found the bodies until decades later, Lenin’s ruse worked. Escape rumors abounded and for the first year or two after the murder, very few people had any idea what really happened.
Constantine saved the most interesting part of the dossier for last—the old Soviet file, begun in 1931 by an agent named Rumkowski. Stalin had tasked Rumkowski with finding Tsarist funds in foreign banks and securing them for Soviet coffers. When Rumkowski asked how Stalin knew the money was there to be found, the dictator answered, “Lenin.” He never revealed to Rumkowski how Lenin knew the money existed.
Rumkowski’s preliminary inquiries to major banks—Barclays, Crédit Lyonnais, Mendelsohn’s—all came back negative, so he decided to play dirty. He sent agents into Europe posed as bankers, notaries, and even a Polish nobleman to get close to various relatives of the Tsar and the pretender Anna Anderson. What they reported confirmed the suspicion that the money was out there, most likely in an open and unclaimed account in the Bank of England.
Later, Rumkowski hit on the idea of questioning the men who had guarded and murdered the Tsar, hoping one of them might have heard something in the family’s last days. But by the time he got around to it, just before World War II, many of the men were dead and buried themselves.
However, one guard named Ivan Skorokhodov left a granddaughter who confessed to a local priest that her grandfather had been in love with Marie Romanov. The pair planned to escape together, she said, and claim the Tsar’s fortune, which was held in the Bank of England. Her grandfather, who died in 1921 of influenza, said Marie spoke of a password. Anyone with the password could access the Tsar’s money. Marie had promised to relay the password to him in writing, so that if anything happened to her during her escape attempt, at least her beloved could live a financially secure life. That password never came, and eventually the guard learned that Marie and her family had been murdered.
The guard told his daughter this story while he lay dying, and that daughter told her daughter, who later confessed the sin of greed to her priest. The priest published his memoirs in the late 1940s, including this story. Only fifty volumes were printed, and the file noted that 34 of them had been destroyed by the KGB to keep the story from spreading.
For whatever reason, Rumkowski believed this tale to be true. He searched the Ipatiev house timber by timber, looking for the password Marie might have left for Skorokhodov. He found nothing. In the early 1970s, when he was ready to retire, he passed his information on to Boris Yeltsin, who managed to get the necessary permits to raze the Ipatiev House in 1977. Still, no password was found.
Over the years, other sources pointed to England as a potential source of hidden Tsarist money, from pretenders such as Anna Anderson to former servants and companions like the Tsarina’s friend Lili Dehn. The Bank of England issued countless statements denying the existence of a secret account. Rumkowski believed they were all lying, under a blanket order originating with King George V. He believed they had hopes of confiscating the money themselves.
Over time, Rumkowski’s leads thinned out as people who remembered the Tsar died or succumbed to dementia. No one ever confirmed Ivan Skorokhodov’s story, and the file remained open but dormant, a nuisance that nagged at Soviet premiers desperate for money to fund the space race, Olympic athletic programs, and the war in Afghanistan.
Constantine set the file down. Somewhere deep behind his eyes, a headache was forming. The rhythmic throb reminded him of a derrick, pulling black gold out of the Baku oil fields. This assignment was ridiculous. If Stalin himself couldn’t find the Tsar’s money, how was anyone else supposed to?
The intercom buzzed to life. “Excuse the interruption, Mr. Dashkov. We have reached our cruising altitude of 43,000 feet. Our expected landing time in San Francisco is 9:30 p.m. local time. The flight should be smooth, if you want to get some sleep.”
Constantine waved acceptance; the cabin camera displayed in the cockpit would let the pilot know he understood. He opened the small bottle of vodka and drank all of it, settling down into a restless sleep.
Chapter Seven
July 1918
Ekaterinburg, Russia
Olga sat alone in the upstairs drawing room, pretending to read her Bible. It lay open on her lap but she hadn’t turned a page in more than an hour. The words of Jesus failed to comfort her because she could only think of the horrible end that awaited him. No matter how kind he was, the people he sought to help always betrayed him. How had it felt, she wondered, at the moment of death? Was it a relief to put down the burden of suffering? Was it a struggle not to curse the soldier who had thrown the spear? What did it all matter, since two thousand years later, the same terrible crimes were still being perpetrated?
Her eyes drifted to the empty basket on the side table. Any moment now, the delivery boy would come to fetch it and bring it back to the nunnery. The guard who had struck her, bribed with one of Marie’s bracelets, would escort the boy upstairs while Marie kept the rest of the family away.
Olga moved her jaw from side to side, still feeling soreness throb in her gums. It wasn’t the first time she’d been hit—it happened to all the girls at one time or another in the past few months. Only Alexei and the Tsarina escaped, Alexei because of his hemophilia and the Tsarina because, truthfully, the men were all afraid of her. Her mother’s posture and bearing were still that of an empress, even if her beauty had long faded.
Olga knew she would not be able to see the boy approach because the soldiers had painted all the windows over. Instead, she closed her eyes and listened until she heard the sound of the outer gate and a guard’s voice giving the go-ahead. Raucous laughter followed the poor boy as he trudged up the steps and knocked on the front door. The downstairs guard opened it and Olga held her breath until she heard a single pair of footsteps trudge up the stairs.
The boy emerged from the stairwell and looked at the floor instead of at her. “Dobryi dyehn,” he said softly.
“Dobryi dyehn,” Olga replied, smiling in spite of herself. On this hot July day, the boy wore a scarf wound twice around his neck. “You are dressed for snow, Filipp Feodorovich.”
His eyes remained on the floor. “Y-yes, your—”
“Olga,” she interrupted. People who referred to them by their titles usually earned a beating from the guards. She glanced toward the far end of the drawing room where Anastasia and Marie sat on the floor, playing a card game. Marie looked up when she felt her gaze and nodded.
“Here is the basket, Filipp
,” Olga said, putting her Bible down. “Please thank the nuns for their kindness. Their love reminds us that hope is not lost, as does your kindness in bringing us their gifts.”
“T-thank you,” Filipp mumbled. He reached out to grab the handle, and when his hand brushed Olga’s, she gasped.
“Filipp! You’re freezing!”
“Y-yes, your—I mean, yes. I do not feel well. Yesterday I was sweating all day, and today I shiver no matter what I put on.”
A knife twisted in her heart as she realized this boy’s illness was heaven-sent. “Filipp,” she said softly, coming closer to him. “I need your help. Are you able to do something for me?”
“Of course, your—”
“Good.” Olga smiled, brushing the boy’s floppy hair from his eyes. “My sister and I trust in you, Filipp. You mustn’t let the soldiers search the basket today. If they try and take it from you, you must cough or sneeze and tell them you visited someone in the influenza ward of the nunnery.”
“Yes, miss.”
“Tell them the person died, and that you are ill, now, too.”
The boy wiped his nose with his hand, and nodded.
“I have to tell you a secret, Filipp.” She leaned in next to him, breathing in the smell of straw and horse that twined itself in his hair. “Hidden in this basket are two letters from my sister and I to our friends outside. We’ve told them a secret in these letters, but we’ve left out one important part. I need you to write that part down before you send these letters.”
Filipp’s dark eyes shone with excitement and fever. “Of course, miss. What should I write on them?”
Olga whispered in his ear the words that the Tsar, her father, had made them all swear never to reveal. They meant nothing to Filipp. His eyes looked back at her, unaware and unblinking. “Is that all, miss?” he said.
“No, my dear, that is not all. Once you have done this for us, you must forget what I have told you, every word of it.” She bit her lip; it was very likely the fever would do this for him. If he spoke a word of this, his ravings could be blamed on his illness.
