The Romanov Stone

by Robert C. Yeager

  Molina’s nose told him this lock had recently been lubricated—a plus because the oil would serve the dual purpose of quieting the pins and making them more slippery.

  He inserted the tiny wrench in the keyway, gently turning the cylinder clockwise until it jammed in the surrounding housing. This meant some of the pins had already cleared the cylinder, but others, still protruding into the keyway, were binding.

  Molina inserted the pick all the way into the keyway. Long ago he’d learned to tune his ears and fingers to the slightest changes in sound and touch as the pick passed over the pins. He projected his mind into the lock, reconstructing an image of how it responded to his manipulations.

  Varying the tension on the wrench, he pulled the pick out quickly so that it bounced the remaining protruding pins up and above the cylinder—blocking them out of the cylinder’s path as it turned.

  The door opened soundlessly. Molina knelt to place his tools on the floor, lightly holding one end of the silk cord.

  In a single movement, he slipped inside.

  The man who’d smoked on the sidewalk now slumped in a chair to the door’s right, head lolled, eyes glazed in near-sleep. Behind a half-opened door, Imre Novyck snored in the room just beyond. The entry to the remaining bedroom was closed.

  Molina pirouetted as he moved to face the sleeping driver. His hands flew up, and the cord looped gracefully in the air, like a cowboy’s lariat. By the time the Russian’s eyes fully opened, his carotid artery had been sealed for nearly ten seconds. His mouth emitted a silent rush of air. His saliva rustled softly, like a dry summer wind. His chin touched his chest. He had not made a sound.

  Molina stepped in long strides toward the closed door.

  The woman, gagged and bound by plastic ties to her bed, lifted her head. Molina put a finger to her lips.

  Don’t speak or make a sound, he mouthed.

  Bound and gagged, she lay on top of the bedclothes. A small nightstand lamp revealed that she still wore the same black body suit in which he’d seen her captured.

  Against the room’s dingy green wallpaper, Kate’s albescent skin looked like fallen fruit. A crimson bruise blotched her right cheek. Blood crawled from a slash on her forehead. A purple scab clotted her lower lip. Her fall, Molina wondered, or a subsequent beating by Novyck’s thugs?

  Her eyes moved frantically in their sockets, from his face to the door and back again. Molina read their jittered calculus. Was he an ally? A police detective perhaps? Did his wordless warning mean he was someone who might help her?

  But Molina didn’t try to loosen her bindings. He dropped to his knees and looked under the bed. He crossed the room and opened a tiny closet. He went to a chest and pulled out each of its drawers. He recrossed the room and opened the nightstand.

  Molina met her eyes again, and saw her dawning realization. He wasn’t there to rescue her—he was looking for the stone.

  Molina backed out of the room, closing the door behind him.

  As he passed, he glanced into Novyck’s room. Next to his bed was a matched set of leather luggage. The set’s smallest case lay on the covers, inches from its possessor’s hand. Molina now knew the gem’s location.

  For a moment, he paused, bringing his hands together in a steeple in front of his nose. For his task in the next few seconds, he must summon everything he’d learned and been trained for.

  In quick, catlike steps, he entered Novyck’s room, soundlessly moving to the side of the bed.

  Novyck lay on his side, one arm draped over the leather briefcase that Molina was certain contained the alexandrite. The other circled a young woman, her voluptuous form outlined under the sheets.

  Then Molina saw the blue-steel link between the briefcase and its possessor’s wrist.

  There’d be no taking the gem now. A bedmate and handcuffs were too big a risk, even for El Mimico.

  Outside the room, Molina grabbed his belongings. At the stairwell, he slipped back into his clothes.

  Back on the sidewalk, he flipped open his mobile.

  “The stone and egg are in the hotel, in Novyck’s possession,” Molina told the Slav. “The woman is alive.”

  “What about Blake?”

  “Forget Blake. Meet me here, at the Ratchka Hotel.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Their luggage is packed. They’re leaving, and we must follow. Whatever else they are after has to be where they are going. Come now.”

  Chapter 54

  Unable to sleep, Simon Blake sat at the Imperial bar, nursing his second scotch. He’d brought the frog pendant with him after having it repaired by a jeweler in the hotel. Now he hung the necklace from his fingers, watching the glittering amphibian twist above his drink.

  His other hand tightened on the glass, and his lips firmed into a thin line. Kate, he vowed to himself, would again wear this piece. In the meantime, however, there was still the significant matter of her whereabouts. Blake knew she was Imre Novyck’s prisoner, but where was she being held?

  Then it hit him: What if they’d taken Kate back to the Kruschev Arms, the cheap hotel where she’d dropped the ledger book? It was obvious Novyck had corrupted someone at the establishment, a night clerk or perhaps the owner. Could Novyck be keeping her there before heading to London? They had to leave soon. The Bank of England deadline was just three days away. Blake had nothing to lose: The hotel was in Old Arbat, only a brief walk from the Imperial.

  Slipping the necklace into a zippered pocket, Blake headed out the door. The first rays of sun splintered between buildings as, in ones and twos, the city’s earliest risers trickled across the streets. As Blake knew from previous visits, Moscow slowed perceptibly in August. Some businesses closed down or followed reduced schedules. Wealthy residents departed for their country dachas.

  Blake was waiting to cross Nikitskiy Bulvar—one of the southern links in the Boulevard Ring—when he saw the big man, or rather saw his reflection. The image bounced back at Blake from the side of a yellow-and-white Moscow “A” tram. In the shiny, wavy metal, the figure moved like a rubber toy. The man tried to conceal his ripply form behind a street vendor. When the sidewalk seller moved his cart, he stood exposed. But Blake had already recognized him—it was the man who’d jumped them in Massachusetts. Blake judged him to be about twenty feet away.

  About a hundred steps into Nikitskiy Bulvar’s park-like central mall, Blake stopped at a bench. The Slav was still behind him, but he too had halted, and was talking into his mobile. Then he wheeled away from Blake and, cell still clamped to his ear, headed in the opposite direction—back toward the Imperial Hotel.

  Reversing roles, Blake now stalked the bigger man. His prey put a lot of weight and hurry on the hoof. The Slav hurled himself forward, extending his stride, his feet hitting the sidewalk on the backs of their heels. While one hand held the cell phone to his ear, his free arm flung forward in loose, akimbo arcs. To Blake, the man’s hurried movements, his full-stride conversations with whomever was on the other end of the mobile, and his obliviousness to the fact that he was now the one being followed, evidenced urgency.

  Was the Slav working for Novyck? Blake had no idea. Perhaps he’d concluded that Kate had the original alexandrite, or correctly deduced that she’d come to Russia in search of it. In either case, he’d followed Blake in hopes of being led to Kate. So there could have been only one reason he’d abruptly changed direction: The cell phone call must have told him where she was.

  His heart beating faster, Blake walked back through the trees on Nikitskiy Bulvar. Krasky moved ahead, limbs still pumping, laddering in and out of view behind large shrubs. Remnants of Moscow’s “summer snows”—the feathery fluff that fell from the city’s 350,000 poplars in June and July, still swirled in street gutters, and collected against the windward side of hedges and curbs.

  Blake made his way along Gazetny Street, now trailin
g Krasky by about half a block. The big Slav dodged and weaved through a short line—short only because of the early hour—outside the door at McDonald’s. The giant American chain had proven the truth of the Russian saying, “eating increases the appetite.” More than five thousand Moscovites, working at some fifty-odd locations throughout the city, now flipped the firm’s patties.

  They passed the turnoff for the Imperial. Where the hell was the big man headed?

  Blake looked right, past the foreboding walls of the Kremlin. Like bright, upended turnips, St. Basil Cathedral’s blue, red and gold spheres poked their striped tips into the morning sky.

  Its scattered onion domes kept Moscow from looking like a dozen other megalopolises. Without them, the city’s glass-and-steel office buildings, and its traffic-jammed streets, differed little from similar structures and surroundings in London, Paris or New York. “Moscow,” a concierge had told Blake on his first visit, “is not Russia.” Indeed, take away its Eastern Orthodoxy and its Mongol heritage, and Moscow could be Any City, Anywhere.

  Krasky passed the Moldavian Embassy. He turned left, his steps slowing as the elevation rose. Behind him, Blake saw the Cathedral of Nativity of our Lady, built as a novitiate in the fourteenth century but home for a commune of squatters by the twentieth. He followed Krasky as he doubled-back over Boulevard Ring.

  Crossing Trubnaya Street, the Ukrainian walked about a block and a half and then stopped. On the opposite side of the street stood the Hotel Rachka, whose facade was dominated by a single row of square, one-story colonnades and a modestly appointed lobby with large plate-glass windows. Blake sidled off to a side street, eyeing the hotel from around the corner.

  They were less than three blocks from Imre Novyck’s mansion.

  Blake’s pulse quickened. Kate had to be inside that hotel.

  Another man, dark, much smaller, joined the big Slav on the sidewalk. The two came together, chatting animatedly, but in low voices. Then the smaller man walked away, turning a corner out of view.

  Blake backtracked to a phone booth, grateful that a half dozen plastic kopeks clacked in his pocket. He slipped a token into the slot and a moment later was talking to Lt. Boris Mozhaev on the latter’s mobile.

  “Look, Mr. Blake,” the detective said through a sleep-thickened accent, “purely on circumstantial evidence you suspect Miss Gavrill may be in the hotel. But I’ve already sent my men on one wild birdy chase. And some of us were up very late last night. What do you expect us to do when we get there?”

  “Enter the hotel and rescue her, of course.” Blake was surprised. Earlier, the officer had seemed so concerned with his department’s public image. Now he seemed more interested in getting his beauty sleep, and more than a little irritated by a straightforward request for help.

  “Quite impossible,” came the officer’s abrupt reply. “And as an American, Mr. Blake, you of all people should appreciate why. We can’t simply enter private hotels, barge into their rooms and remove guests. Perhaps under Kruschev, but no more.”

  “You could at least go in and question the clerk.” Had Mozhaev been visited by the mafiya?

  “And what would that accomplish? If you are wrong, Miss Gavrill is not there and we have wasted our time. If you are correct, Novyck has either bribed the clerk or he owns the hotel and we have wasted our time. Moscow’s crime problems, Mr. Blake, are far too serious for us to waste our time.”

  “But can’t you see—”

  “No, Mr. Blake, I can’t see. Goodbye.”

  The chief detective clicked off his cell, detonating an explosion of anger in Blake. He didn’t know which made him more furious: Mozhaev’s apparent change in attitude or his own sense of powerlessness.

  While hot rage pounded in his temples, cold fear clutched his gut. What about Kate? They had to keep her alive—at least until they’d drawn the Romanov funds out of the Bank of England—but what ordeals might she be enduring in the meantime? Were they turning Kate into a drug-addicted zombie? Were Novyck’s thugs abusing her in other ways, perhaps for their own sadistic or sexual pleasure?

  Worst of all, time was running out. In three days, barring an act of Parliament, the deadline for claiming dormant accounts would expire. The Bank of England funds that Nicholas had established for Lydia—now rightfully Kate’s—would be lost forever. At that point, assuming he was correct that Novyck possessed the real stone and egg, her life would be of little value to them.

  He had to get into that hotel.

  He stuck his head around the corner. Vulcan Krasky had disappeared.

  Blake darted across the street, his fear-tautened muscles welcoming the release.

  The clerk was a well-shaped brunette in her late forties with tightly bound hair and lips that flattened against her teeth in a thin line. Her manner was perfunctory and unhelpful. Her heavily accented English, Blake thought, could serve as a perfect cover for deliberate misinterpretation. She wore round glasses whose lenses reflected the lobby’s fluorescent ceiling lights.

  “No sir, no one matching that description has left the hotel.”

  A 1950’s cartoonist could have drawn her mouth; her straight lips moved, but the rest of her face remained immobile.

  “No, no. I asked whether anyone like that is staying at the hotel.”

  “I really wouldn’t know sir. I only just came on duty.”

  “You don’t get many guests from the U.S. here,” he asserted, leaning toward her on the counter. Perhaps minor flirtation would help. The woman stepped back and stared blankly at him.

  The Rachka, Blake was certain, had never seen the inside of a Western travel guide. Its clientele had to be limited to nationals and Eastern Europeans.

  “How many rooms are in this hotel?” he asked rhetorically. “Twenty-five? Thirty? Wouldn’t the clerk you relieved have noticed that an American woman arrived in the company of several Russian men? Wouldn’t they have mentioned it to you?” He was getting nowhere; Blake realized he’d asked almost the same questions in the hotel where he’d looked for Kate earlier.

  “Sir,” she replied stiffly, as if reciting from memory, “no one told me about an American woman. Or Russian men.” She patted her hair, lifting her bust. “And my hours are quite full enough, thank you, without time to study each and every guest who signs our registry. Now”—her lips curled firmly against her teeth—“would you like to leave a number where you can be reached should your friends arrive?”

  Blake shook his head. The clerk’s performance had done its work. His emotional energy vanished like a volatile gas, leaving in its place a heavy cloud of depression. He turned away, and walked back outside.

  Unknown to Blake, his movements were again being tracked by Vulcan Krasky. On the rooftop of a small apartment building across the street, the big Ukrainian watched him through a pair of high-powered binoculars. He saw Blake walk out of the Rachka’s lobby, step into a narrow walkway between two buildings, then turn back to face the hotel.

  They’d switched roles for a second time, but now stalker and prey shared the same fate. They could only watch and wait.

  Chapter 55

  The full-throated rumble of a race-tuned, four-hundred-horsepower Italian V-8 opened Simon Blake’s eyes. He’d concealed himself by leaning against an alley wall alongside a trio of dumpsters across from the Rachka. In the shadows, drowsiness settled over him like a hood. Now, he felt a rush of adrenaline as the sleek Maserati pulled in front of the hotel. He wondered again why Novyck, a furtive denizen of the nether world, would choose such a singularly distinctive car.

  Then he saw the answer.

  A woman, more buxom than Kate but about the same height and with an identical crop of short dark hair—almost certainly, he guessed, the unhelpful desk clerk in a wig—came down the stairs, accompanied by a man of about the same build as Novyck and wearing the latter’s trademark Armani suit. The couple got into the car, w
hich drove slowly away.

  About half a block down, the big Maser passed the first cross street. A taxi pulled out and followed. Two men sat as passengers in the cab and, an instant before it drove out of view, Blake recognized the large Slav sitting on the right.

  There could be little doubt: Clearly, the big man—and perhaps the smaller companion Blake had seen him with earlier—planned to trail Kate to London as well. So now, besides himself, there were at least three underworld competitors pursuing the alexandrite and egg.

  A battered, Soviet-era Lada sedan drew up in front of the hotel.

  Moments later, Kate, supported on either side by Novyck’s men, haltingly descended the Rachka’s front steps. Dressed in a Navy pinstripe suit as if she were a businesswoman on a trip, Kate looked groggy. Her leg gave way when she reached the sidewalk, and only the arms gripping her elbows saved her from a fall. Even from Blake’s distant vantage point, it seemed obvious she’d been drugged.

  Novyck walked behind them, carrying a small case. A subordinate reached out to take it, but Novyck brushed him aside and entered the car, taking a seat beside Kate. His two henchmen sat together in the front seat.

  They sped away.

  Blake urgently needed his own chastniki, and—especially at this hour—it wouldn’t be easy. Airport-bound drivers who hadn’t paid the mafia for protection risked violent consequences; many now routinely refused fares to that destination. Blake reached inside his jacket for the zippered pocket that contained his wallet. He’d need bribe money, both for the cab and for a plane ticket. Undiscounted, a coach flight to London could cost $1,500. He’d probably need $500 more to “tip” the ticket agent.

  Counting more than twenty-two $100 bills and three $500 travelers’ checks, Blake sighed with relief.

  He stepped out into Trubnaya Street and began waving his arms.

  Chapter 56

  Kate’s body seemed separated from her consciousness, as if transformed into something other than flesh and bone. Her spine furrowed like a stiff pole into the soft leather of the First Class Aeroflot seat. Her eyes felt sticky in their sockets, shifting almost as slowly as her thoughts.