The Romanov Legacy

by Jenni Wiltz

  He left the lights off and made his way down the long private hallway to his office. The message light on his office phone was blinking but he ignored it. He didn’t trust any of the building’s phone lines, nor did he trust any of the computer VoIP accounts.

  Vadim turned the phone over on his desk and removed the back panel, inspecting it for listening devices. When he found none, he replaced the panel and switched on his computer. Anyone monitoring office activity would now be able to see he was on the network, but it couldn’t be helped.

  He accessed the bureau’s database of dossiers and pulled up everything coded with the threat level white—world bankers, businessmen, and prominent individuals who posed no direct threat to Russian security but who warranted monitoring simply because of the wealth or resources at their disposal. The system asked for a username and password before displaying the contents of the files.

  Liliya had written him a program he usually only used when working from home—a software map that scrambled keystrokes, creating unique associations for each login attempt. Anyone monitoring his keystrokes would be able to tell which keys he pressed, but they wouldn’t match up with his actual password and it would appear as if he entered a different login and password with each access attempt. He activated the program from a flash drive.

  A mock keyboard appeared on screen with random letter placement. Before he typed anything, he activated a second program of Liliya’s. This one scanned the machine and his network connection for cloaked users, alerting him if anyone was using a remote function to view his screen. The keyboard-scrambler program was only effective as long as no one saw the mock keyboard’s letter distribution. When the scan came up clean, he proceeded.

  The system pulled up a list of all the requested files, with a search box above the pages of results. He typed “Bank of England.” Immediately, the database brought up a list of dossiers on the governor, executive directors, and monetary policy committee members. He clicked on the governor’s name and scanned the contact information.

  His computer’s clock read 8:15 a.m. and London was three hours behind that. Vadim grimaced and dialed anyway.

  The phone rang four times before a man’s deep, scratchy voice answered. “What the devil do you want at this hour, Berkeley?”

  “Mr. Perry, I apologize for the ill-timed nature of this call. My name is Vadim Primakov and I am the Director of the Bureau of Classified Intelligence of the Russian Federation. I need to speak with you about a very urgent matter regarding the account of Tsar Nicholas II.”

  The Englishman did not respond. The line crackled with awkward, frozen silence.

  Vadim took a deep breath. “Sir, I beg you, don’t hang up. This is not a training exercise. You may be contacted shortly by Prime Minister Maxim Starinov. I wish to explain what is happening here, and how it affects your bank.”

  The man still didn’t reply, but Vadim could hear the rustling of bedclothes, as if Perry were now sitting up and paying attention. He decided to continue, relaying what Constantine had told him in the car. “We have recently come into possession of information written by the Tsar’s daughters—Olga and Maria, to be exact. The daughters each wrote down your bank as the source of the Tsar’s funds. These letters also include the name on the account and the password,” he lied. “We will need to access this account very soon.”

  “I’m terribly sorry, sir, but I don’t know anything about—”

  “Yes, you do,” Vadim interrupted, pulling the Rumkowski file up on his screen. “We are well aware of the defensive maneuvers your bank has used over the years to deflect scrutiny from this account. Bark and Peacock hid it well, but the money does not belong to you. It belongs to the Russian government, according to Soviet decree. In the interests of European solidarity, I advise you to forgo any further defensive action.”

  “Sir, I will need proof of your allegations. I will need proof of your identity. And our Prime Minister will need to be notified, as will the bank’s executive directors.”

  “I will get you anything you need as long as the necessary people are informed and in place for the account’s opening later today.”

  Perry sputtered, as if he’d choked on his morning tea. “But that’s impossible!”

  Vadim grit his teeth. “People are going to die unless this can be solved.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t even know where the paperwork for such an account would be, if it exists at all.”

  “Find it.” Then he switched tactics, deciding to up the ante. “I don’t think Prime Minister Starinov wants to be kept waiting.”

  “He’s coming?”

  “He is in the air as we speak,” Vadim lied. “Bringing the Grand Duchess’s letters straight to you.”

  “But…but we might have to get clearance from Buckingham.”

  “I suggest you do so now. You will be contacted again shortly.” Vadim replaced the phone in its cradle and put his head in his hands. He could hardly concentrate on the task at hand; his mind tormented him with images of Marya, bound and gagged, tossed into the back of a van. He pictured tears running down her face, soaking the gag. He pictured her choking on her own sobs, gasping for air and believing everyone had abandoned her. Vadim smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand to force the images away.

  How could Starinov do it? he wondered. How could a little girl’s life, or any life, be worth a few bundles of tsarist rubbish? Who, other than God, claims the power to decide such things?

  Jarred loose by his panicked smack, a memory began to surface deep in the recesses of his brain: a day at Sokolniky’s School Number One when he’d been paired with Maxim for a geography drill. The two of them, no older than six or seven, had been given a map of the Soviet Union and told to label as many cities, rivers, and mountains as possible in two minutes. The entire class had been paired up to compete, with the winner to be awarded a pair of gold-trimmed fountain pens. He remembered Starinov’s eyes, cold and ruthless as they watched the pens, held up for display in the teacher’s hands.

  “I want that pen,” Starinov had said to him. “We have to win.”

  Vadim turned up his nose. “It’s ugly. What do you want it for, anyway?”

  “I don’t, but look at all that gold. I can sell it to someone and get what I really want. Hurry.” The boys had set to scribbling, their pencils flying over the map: the Urals, Sverdlovsk, Lake Baikal, Irkutsk, Kamchatka, Arkangelsk. In the end, they had won. The teacher beamed proudly when Maxim clasped the pen to his chest and sighed contentedly, a perfect facsimile of a proud winner. Anyone would have believed he had wanted the pen all along.

  Is that what’s happening here? Vadim wondered. Is there more than the tsar’s account at stake?

  He looked back to his computer screen, still filled with the contents of the Rumkowski file. There were at least two levels of clearance he did not have, each of which presumably contained more information about the tsar’s account. There was only one person who could get that information for him. Unfortunately, she had locked him out of the house and was no longer speaking to him. Still, he had to try. He reached for the phone and dialed his own home.

  “Liliya, please,” he said. “It’s for Marya.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  July 2012

  Moscow, Russia

  When the plane’s hatch opened, Viktor ordered Ivan and Yakov off first. “Take the cargo. I’ll follow with this one,” he said, squeezing Natalie’s arm like a blood pressure cuff.

  Natalie watched the Vympel men hurry to obey, studiously avoiding Sergei’s body. She heard a squeak as the cargo hold opened, followed by a dull scrape—the sound of a body being dragged against the floor. A car’s engine started, doors slammed, and the car sped away. Beth didn’t make a sound.

  Viktor pushed her into the back seat of a black sedan with tinted windows. The car pulled onto a crowded highway, two lanes in each direction separated by a thin metal guardrail. Soft green embankments rounded away from the highway on either
side. The driver sped around solitary cars that chugged along, belching exhaust. Even the cars looked strange to her: metal squares in bright colors, animal cracker boxes on wheels. Suddenly she realized how far from her own home she was and how unprepared to pull off any sort of rescue.

  She glared at Viktor, perched happily in the seat next to her. This is all your fault, she thought. She imagined a child, a boy, who idolized a traitor—someone who became famous for how well he lied. “Why do you do it?” she asked.

  Viktor turned to her and raised an eyebrow. “Do what?”

  “Philby. The British shit. Why can’t you just be yourself?”

  “Darling, I’m a spook. There’s no such thing as being oneself.”

  “That’s not true. What the hell are you running from?”

  “The law, the truth, a particularly unsatisfying childhood…take your pick, love.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve bullshitted shrinks my whole life. I know the difference between the truth, a lie, and what they want to hear. You lie, Viktor, all the time. Why?”

  Belial snickered and shuffled his feet. Rolling waves of pain rippled over the surface of her brain. I’d think you know all about that, little one. Except you learned how to tell the truth instead of how to lie. Or have you already forgotten how it happened?

  No, she thought. I haven’t forgotten. She remembered the day her parents told her they were taking her out of public school, in fourth grade. They told her the principal didn’t want her around other students until the cause of her “episodes” could be determined and addressed with medication. But later that week, she heard Beth telling their mother that Natalie’s teachers wondered what had happened to her, that homework was piling up. The school knew nothing about her absence.

  Up to that point, she’d done her best to hide the fact that Belial was with her all the time, but it hadn’t been enough. Her own parents were afraid and embarrassed by her. There had been no point in fighting it after that. I still hate them for it, she thought.

  And suddenly it all made sense to her.

  “That’s it,” she said. “They didn’t believe you. That’s how it started, isn’t it?”

  “What the bloody hell are you talking about?”

  “That’s why you lie. Your parents, family, friends…someone accused you of lying, or of doing something you didn’t do. No matter what you said, you couldn’t make them believe you.”

  “You’re insane,” he spat. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “It easy to become what people already believe you to be. No one’s disappointed that way.”

  “Shut your goddamned mouth or I’ll do it for you!”

  “Did it work?” she asked. “Did it make them proud of you?”

  Without warning, he raised his arms and slapped her across the cheek, black brows drawn together. “Say one more word and I’ll lock you in the trunk.”

  Natalie absorbed the sting of his palm and compared it to others she’d felt. Anger hurt less than fear, she realized. Viktor was angry, but her mother had been afraid.

  *

  They drove for another twenty minutes before the driver turned off the Leninsky Prospect and veered east. Natalie saw a vast green park on her right, followed by spaced-out office buildings. Except for the Cyrillic signs, it looked to her like pictures of the South or the East Coast: trees and green grass everywhere. The driver turned right again and the office buildings grew taller. They sped down an access road toward a tall building shaped like a capital “I.” The sedan continued around the back of the building where a driveway sloped down into an underground parking lot.

  A guard station and gate protected the lot. The sedan pulled up slowly and the driver rolled down his window, flashing a badge. The guards inspected it and nodded, opening the single-armed gate. The driver sped through and stopped beneath the center of the building, next to an elevator bay.

  “Let’s go,” Viktor said, grasping her arm and pulling her from the car. She stumbled behind him into the elevator. He pressed “12” and waited for the doors to close. When the elevator docked, he marched her into a mahogany-paneled office and closed the door behind them. Natalie scanned the conference table, leather settee, and assortment of salon chairs but no one else was inside. “Where’s Beth? Where did they take her?”

  “Not here, obviously.” Viktor waved a hand to indicate the office’s green marble fireplace. “Are you cold?” He flipped another switch and the gas logs inside ignited with a comforting orange flame. “This place belongs to Starinov. Well, actually it belongs to the Ussov family, but they belong to Starinov.”

  “Did you hear me, asshole? I want my sister and I want her now.”

  “All in good time.” Viktor stepped closer to her and touched the neckline of her dress, spattered with drops of Sergei’s blood. “You need to clean up a little, pet.” He pointed to a set of double doors on the far side of the room. “Through them and to the right,” he said, giving her a push. “But don’t take too long. If you’re not back in ten minutes, I’ll tell Ivan to slice off one of your sister’s fingers.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  July 2012

  London, England

  Algernon Perry, governor of the Bank of England, hung up the phone and sighed heavily. He was sick and tired of the way Russian oligarchs behaved as though London were merely a satellite of Moscow. “Buying up our property, jetting around as if they own the place,” he grumbled. “Barbarians, the lot of them.” Still, he couldn’t deny that they were good for business, depositing tens of millions of pounds and rarely requiring anything more than a quarterly interest statement.

  In bed beside him, his wife lay silent as a stone. She’d never had trouble sleeping; even the phone failed to wake her. It allowed him to conduct business at odd hours. She snored like a jackhammer as he sorted out the bank’s Asian affairs with the Hong Kong office. If anyone inquired about the noise, he told them he was on a turbo prop plane, scheduled shortly for landing.

  “Just one more call, sweetheart,” he said, reaching for the piece of paper tucked beside the phone. He dialed the number he’d been given, still half asleep and unsure why he was complying with the head barbarian’s request.

  “Da?”

  “It happened just as you said it would, Your Excellency.”

  “I appreciate the prompt update, Mr. Perry. Can you tell me what was said?”

  “A man claiming to be Vadim Primakov called and requested access to the tsarist account. He said you were already on your way. I told him what we’d agreed upon, that access was simply not possible in so short a time.”

  The Russian prime minister sounded pleased. “Exactly right. As I told you earlier, this man is a dangerous fanatic who must be stopped. It’s quite unfortunate—his granddaughter has been kidnapped by one of our most prominent crime syndicates. I’m afraid he has become mad with grief, and will do anything they tell him.”

  “Dreadful,” Perry said dryly. As far as he was concerned, all Russians were gangsters. Things like this were bound to happen sooner or later when one handed policing tasks over to men who were criminals themselves.

  “I will make sure the man doesn’t cross your borders, Mr. Perry. He won’t trouble you again. In the meantime, there is one more thing you can help us with.”

  “Delighted,” Perry said, stifling a yawn.

  “Since the machinery has already been set in motion, I would like to access the account.”

  “Have you the password, Your Excellency? I believe you had not yet located it the last time we spoke.”

  “The password is no longer a problem, but based on the number of interested parties, we cannot take any chances. I wish to restrict the account’s access to myself and myself only. No generals, no ministers, no ambassadors.”

  Perry shivered. The room was cold and he longed to slip back beneath the duvet. “I must warn you, Your Excellency. There is one provision that has never been made public.”

  “What
is that?”

  Algernon Perry told the Russian Prime Minister about the only stipulation on the account, enshrined shortly after the bank’s officers learned of the tsar’s murder. “It’s highly unusual,” he finished. “But it was authorized by Sir Peter Bark, with the full knowledge and approval of His Majesty George V.”

  Perry heard nothing but long-distance crackles on the other end of the line.

  “Your Excellency?” Perry said. “Are you still there?”

  He heard a torrent of Russian swear words, followed by the sound of the phone being tossed at the wall.

  Bloody barbarian, he thought.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  July 2012

  Moscow, Russia

  Cold water removed the last trace of Sergei’s blood from her skin but did nothing to erase the stains on her dress. The red circles faded and spread, looking like impressionist cherry blossoms against the pale purple fabric. She stared at them in the mirror, transfixed.

  Belial had told her once that blood held no secrets from those who could read it. Why do you think we have no books in heaven? he said. We read your blood instead. It tells us everything about you. Sometimes we can’t wait to read the next chapter, so we open you up.

  Sergei had no more story to tell. Neither did Yuri. What about you? she wondered, staring at the pale, half-dead thing in the mirror. With her smeared eye makeup, she looked like a creature from a black and white movie, the bride of Frankenstein. All the better, she thought, for fighting the devil and his emissaries.

  She returned to the office the way she had come. Sunlight streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, burnishing the mahogany executive desk until it was the color of blood. The gas logs in the fireplace burned brightly, emitting light if not warmth.

  Viktor clapped his hands. “Much better, my dear. Now come here and sit down. I’m making you a drink.”

  Natalie obeyed, perching on a leather settee beside the desk. He handed her a cut-crystal glass filled with vodka and pulled a matching footstool out from beside the settee. Gently, he put his hand beneath her ankles and lifted them onto the stool.