The Romanov Cross: A Novel

by Robert Masello

  The Romanov Cross is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Robert Masello

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Masello, Robert.

  The Romanov cross : a novel / Robert Masello.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53359-3

  1. Antiquities—Collection and preservation—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.A81925R66 2013

  813′.6—dc23

  2012015943

  www.bantamdell.com

  Cover design : Eileen Carey

  Jacket images : © John Burcham /Gettyimages (cross);

  © David Clapp/Oxford Scientific/Gettyimages (background)

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Two

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Part Three

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Part Four

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Afterword

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Prologue

  THE BERING STRAIT, 1918

  “Sergei, do not die,” the girl said, turning around in the open boat. “I forbid you to die.” She had hoped, in vain, that her voice would not falter.

  When she tried to reach out to him, he pulled away, still holding on to the tiller with dead-white fingers.

  “No, no,” he said, drawing back in horror. “Don’t touch me.” His eyes were wild, the stubble on his pale young cheeks flecked with blood and foam. “You have to sail there,” he said, as he pointed with one trembling finger over the prow of the boat. “There!” he said, demanding that Ana—a willful teenager, who had never been responsible for anything more than picking a frock—turn, and do what he, a farm boy no more than a few years her senior, was ordering.

  Reluctantly she looked back, the ragged sail crackling above her head, and saw in the distance, beyond a cloud of fog, the indistinct outline of an island, dark and forbidding, rising from the sea. From the boat, it looked like a clenched fist, encircled by a misty-gray bracelet. Ana had never seen a more unwelcoming sight.

  “Look for the fires,” he croaked. “They will light fires.”

  “But I can’t sail the boat alone. You have to do it.”

  Sergei shook his head and coughed so hard the blood ran between his fingers. He glanced down at his soiled hand, his eyes glazed, and whispered, “May God protect you, malenkaya.” And then, as calmly as if he were turning in bed, he rolled over the side of the boat and into the icy waters of the strait.

  “Sergei!” she screamed, plunging toward the stern so abruptly she threatened to capsize the boat.

  But he was already gone, floating off with his sealskin coat billowing out around him like the spread wings of a bat. For a few more seconds, he bobbed on the surface, riding the waves until the weight of his body and his boots and his clothes dragged him down. All that remained was a single wilted and frozen blue cornflower floating on the water.

  The sight of it made her want to weep.

  She was alone in the boat—alone in the world—and the tiller was already lurching wildly from one side to the other, screeching louder than the gulls swooping in and out of the fog. The hollow place in her heart, the place where she had already stored so many deaths, would now have to find room for Sergei’s, too.

  How many more could she possibly be expected to hold there?

  Clambering over the icy thwart, her fur coat as wet and heavy as armor, she perched on the little wooden seat in the stern. Even with her hood pulled low, the wind blew sleet and spray into her face. But at least the gusts were driving her toward the island. Her gloves were as stiff as icicles, and it was a struggle to loop the rope to the sail around one wrist, as she had seen Sergei do, and grasp the tiller with the other. The open boat cut through the waves, rising and falling, rising and falling. The fog surrounded her like a shroud, and she was so exhausted, so cold and so hungry, that she fell into a kind of stupor.

  Her thoughts wandered to her garden in Tsarskoe Selo, the private enclave outside St. Petersburg, where she had grown her own roses, and to the fifteenth birthday party her parents had thrown for her there. It was only two years ago, a time before her life had gone from a dream to a nightmare. Now it seemed like something she must have imagined out of whole cloth. She thought of her sister, giving her a book of poems by her favorite writer—Pushkin—and her little brother sitting on his pony, as Nagorny, the rough sailor who had become his constant attendant, held the reins.

  Her father, in his military uniform, had been standing stiffly on the verandah, holding her mother’s hand.

  A wave dashed her full in the face, the frigid water running down her neck and under the collar of her coat. She shivered as the tiller threatened to slip out of her hand, and the rope attached to the sail cut into her wrist like a tourniquet. Her boots were slick with ice, and her bad foot had no feeling left in it at all.

  But she also remembered, towering right behind her mother, the monk with the black eyes and the long, tangled beard. The bejeweled cross that he wore on his cassock, she was wearing now, under her corsets and coat; it had protected her from much, just as the monk had promised, but she doubted that even the cross would be enough to save her now.

  As the boat came closer to the shore, it bucked like a horse trying to throw its rider, and she had to brace herself firmly against the s
tern. The slush in the hull was several inches deep and washed back and forth over whatever was left of her frozen provisions.

  If she did not reach land tonight, she would surely follow poor Sergei into the freezing sea. Gulls and ospreys circled in the pewter sky, taunting her with their cries.

  She pulled in on the sail, and the boat keeled, slicing through the waters. She was close enough now that she could see a jumble of boulders littering the beach and a dense wall of snow-covered forest just beyond them. But where were the fires that Sergei had promised? With the back of her sleeve, she wiped the seawater from her eyes—she had always been nearsighted but too vain to wear glasses. Dr. Botkin had once offered her a pair, at the house with the whitewashed windows, the house where …

  No, she could not think about that. She had to keep her thoughts from straying there … especially now, when her life once again hung in the balance.

  An osprey shot across the bow of the boat, then doubled back past the creaking mast, and as her eyes followed it, she saw a flickering glow—a torch as tall as a tree—burning on the cliffs ahead.

  And then, squinting hard, she saw another.

  Her heart rose in her chest.

  There was a scraping sound as the surf dragged the bottom of the boat across a bed of sharp rocks and shells. She loosened her grip on the rope, and the sail swung wide, snapping as loud as a gunshot. She clung to the tiller with her frozen hands as the boat bumped and spun onto the wet sand and gravel, lodging there as the tide surged back out again.

  She could barely move, but she knew that if she hesitated, the next wave could come in and pull her back out to sea again. Now, before her last ounce of strength abandoned her, she had to force herself to clamber to the front of the boat and step onto the island.

  She got up unsteadily—her left foot as numb as a post—and struggled over the thwarts, the boat pitching and groaning beneath her. She thought she heard a bell clanging, a deep booming sound that reverberated off the rocks and trees. Touching the place on her breast where the cross rested, she murmured a prayer of thanks to St. Peter for delivering her from evil.

  And then, nearly toppling over, she stepped into the water—which quickly rose above the tops of her boots—and staggered onto the beach. Her feet slipped and stumbled on the wet stones, but she crawled a few yards up the sand before allowing herself to fall to her knees. Her head was bowed, as if awaiting the blow of an axe, and her breath came only in ragged gasps. All she could hear was the ice crackling in her hair. But she was alive, and that was what mattered. She had survived the trek over the frozen tundra, the journey across the open sea … and the horrors of the house with the whitewashed windows. She had made it to a new continent, and as she peered down the beach, she could see dark shapes in the twilight, running toward her.

  Yes, they were coming, to rescue her. Sergei had spoken the truth.

  If she’d had the strength, she’d have called out to them, or waved an arm.

  But her limbs had no feeling left in them, and her teeth were chattering in her skull.

  The figures were coming so fast, and running so low, she could hardly believe her eyes.

  And then she felt an even greater chill clutch at her heart, as she realized what the running shapes really were.

  She whipped around toward the boat again, but it had already been dislodged and was disappearing into the fog.

  Had she come so far … for this?

  But she was too exhausted, too paralyzed with cold and despair, even to try to save herself.

  She stared in terror down the beach as, shoulders heaving and eyes blazing orange in the dusk, the pack of ravening black wolves galloped toward her across the rocks and sand.

  Chapter 1

  KHAN NESHIN

  Helmand Province, Afghanistan, July 10, 2011

  “You okay, Major?”

  Slater knew what he looked like, and he knew why Sergeant Groves was asking. He had taken a fistful of pills that morning, but the fever was back. He put out a hand to steady himself, then yanked it back off the hood of the jeep. The metal was as hot as a stove.

  “I’ll survive,” he said, rubbing the tips of his fingers against his camo pants. That morning, he had visited the Marine barracks and watched as two more men had been airlifted out, both of them at death’s door; he wasn’t sure they’d make it. Despite all the normal precautions, the malaria, which he’d contracted himself a year before on a mission to Darfur, had decimated this camp. As a U.S. Army doctor and field epidemiologist, Major Frank Slater had been dispatched to figure out what else could be done—and fast.

  The rice paddies he was looking at now were a prime breeding ground for the deadly mosquitoes, and the base had been built not only too close by, but directly downwind. At night, when they liked to feed, swarms of insects lifted off the paddies and descended en masse on the barracks and the canteen and the guard towers. Once, in the Euphrates Valley, Slater had seen a cloud of bugs rising so thick and high in the sky that he’d mistaken it for an oncoming storm.

  “So, which way do you want to go with this?” Sergeant Groves asked. An African-American as tough and uncompromising as the Cleveland streets that he hailed from—“by the time I left, all we were making there was icicles,” he’d once told Slater—he always spoke with purpose and brevity. “Spray the swamp or move the base?”

  Slater was debating that very thing when he was distracted by a pair of travelers—a young girl, maybe nine or ten, and her father—slogging through the paddy with an overburdened mule. Nearly everyone in Afghanistan had been exposed to malaria—it was as common as the flu in the rest of the world—and over the generations they had either died or developed a rudimentary immunity. They often got sick, but they had learned to live with it.

  The young Americans, on the other hand, fresh from farms in Wisconsin and mountain towns in Colorado, didn’t fare as well.

  The girl was leading the mule, while her father steadied the huge baskets of grain thrown across its scrawny back.

  “I’m on it,” Private Diaz said, stepping out from the driver’s seat of the jeep. His M4 was already cradled in his hands. One thing the soldiers learned fast in the Middle East was that even the most innocuous sight could be their last. Baskets could carry explosives. Mules could be time bombs. Even kids could be used as decoys, or sacrificed altogether by the jihadis. On a previous mission, Slater had had to sort through the rubble of a girls’ school in Kandahar province after a Taliban, working undercover as a school custodian, had driven a motorcycle festooned with explosives straight into the classroom.

  “Allahu Akbar!” the janitor had shouted with jubilation, “God is great!” just before blowing them all to kingdom come.

  For the past ten years, Slater had seen death, in one form or another, nearly every day, but he still wasn’t sure which was worse—the fact that it could still shock him or the fact that on most days it didn’t. Just how hard, he often wondered, could a man let his heart become? How hard did it need to be?

  The girl was looking back at him now with big dark eyes under her headscarf as she led the mule out of the paddy and up onto the embankment. The father switched at its rump with a hollow reed. The private, his rifle slung forward, ordered them to stop where they were. His Arabic was pretty basic, but the hand gesture and the loaded gun were universally understood.

  Slater and Groves—his right-hand man on every mission he had undertaken from Iraq to Somalia—watched as Private Diaz approached them.

  “Open the baskets,” he said, making a motion with one hand to indicate what he wanted. The father issued an order to his daughter, who flipped the lid off one basket, then waited as the soldier peered inside.

  “The other one, too,” Diaz said, stepping around the mule’s lowered head.

  The girl did as he ordered, standing beside the basket as Diaz poked the muzzle of his gun into the grain.

  And just as Slater was about to order him to let them move along—was this any way to win hearts a
nd minds?—a bright ribbon of iridescent green shot up out of the basket, fast as a lightning bolt, and struck the girl on the face. She went down as if hit by a mallet, writhing on the ground, and the private jumped back in surprise.

  “Jesus,” he was saying over and over as he pointed the rifle futilely at the thrashing body of the girl. “It’s a viper!”

  But Slater already knew that, and even as her father was wailing in terror, he was racing to her side. The snake still had its fangs buried in her cheek, secreting its venom, its tail shaking ferociously. Slater pulled his field knife from its scabbard—a knife he normally used to cut tissue samples from diseased cadavers—and with the other hand grabbed for the viper’s tail. Twice he felt its rough mottled surface, strong as a steel pipe, slip through his fingers, but on the third try he held it taut and was able to slice through the vertebrae. Half of the snake came away with a spill of blood, but the head was still fixed in its mortal bite.

  The girl’s eyes were shut and her limbs were flailing, and it was only after Groves used his own broad hands to hold her down that Slater was able to pinch the back of the dying viper’s head and pull the fangs loose. The snake’s tongue flicked like a whip, but the light in its yellow eyes was fading. Slater pinched harder until the tongue slowed and the eyes lost their luster altogether. He tossed the carcass down the embankment, and Diaz, for good measure, unleashed a burst of shots from his rifle that rolled the coils down into the murky water.