by Alex Archer
According to Chernov, he and his men had followed Creed and her companions deeper into the tunnels, going down several levels until they reached an older section of the underground. Worried that his squad might be stranded in unfamiliar territory in darkness, he’d ordered his men to move in closer so they didn’t risk losing their quarry.
Somehow, the woman had become aware of their presence and laid an ambush for their point man.
“An unarmed woman ambushed a fully armed FSS officer?” Goshenko asked, his voice dripping with disbelief.
“Yes, sir. She wasn’t unarmed, though, sir.”
Finally, a new piece of information, Goshenko thought. “So she fired on your man?”
Chernov winced. “No, sir. Not exactly.”
“What, exactly, happened, then, if she didn’t fire upon him?”
“She attacked him with a sword, sir.”
Goshenko stared at him.
“A sword?”
“Yes, sir. She must have surprised him in the darkness and used the sword to take him captive. He was scouting ahead and when I caught up with him, the woman was standing with her weapon to his throat. From my position I could hear her asking him questions.”
“I…see. A sword. Really.”
Goshenko shot a look over at Danislov, but the other man remained quiet. Turning back to Chernov, the colonel said, “Go on.”
“She took his weapon from him and then used that to hold him captive.”
“What happened to the sword?”
“It, uh, vanished, sir.”
“Vanished?”
Realizing how that sounded, Chernov tried to temper his statement. “She must have put it down once she had the gun, sir. I didn’t see it anymore, at least.”
“Uh-huh. Go on.”
To keep his subordinate from talking to their target, Chernov had been forced to terminate the other man. The target had begun firing back down the tunnel in their direction as a result, causing the other men in the unit to respond in kind. All that gunfire caused the already-unstable tunnel to collapse, burying the target and her companions beneath the deluge.
“We barely escaped with our lives,” Chernov concluded.
Goshenko didn’t care how close they’d come to dying. That was what he paid them for—to take risks. What he cared about was Annja Creed.
“Where is the body?” he asked, looking around the room for it, determined to find something worth salvaging. Maybe she’d written her thoughts down in a notebook or on a scrap of paper… .
“Body, sir?”
“Yes, the body. Creed’s body. Where did you put it?”
“Uh, we didn’t recover the body, sir.”
Goshenko rounded on the other man. “What?”
“We didn’t recover the body, sir.”
“You left Annja Creed’s body in the tunnels?” the FSB colonel asked in an icily calm voice, pinning the man in place with his stare like a bug on a specimen board.
Several feet away, Danislov stood, watching, silent. A drop of sweat slipped down the side of Chernov’s face.
“It was buried under an avalanche. What were we supposed to do, sir?”
Goshenko had to give him credit, this Chernov had done a decent job of relaying only the facts in the face of his own obvious animosity and might have managed to get out of there with more than his rank intact if he’d stuck to doing so. But responding with a question of his own, even a rhetorical one, had pushed a dangerous man’s button.
Goshenko didn’t leave any time for the question to settle. It was still there, floating in the air before them, when the colonel said quietly, “Sergeant.”
Danislov stepped forward and snapped to attention beside Goshenko.
“Sir.”
The colonel ignored the salute, snatching the pistol from Danislov’s belt. He pointed the gun at Chernov’s face and pulled the trigger.
A bullet hole appeared in the middle of the team leader’s forehead. Blood, bone and brain matter splashed on the wall behind him as the bullet exited the back of Chernov’s skull. He hit the ground like a two-hundred-pound bag of wet sand.
The gunshot echoed in the abandoned warehouse for a moment and then faded away. Into the silence that followed, Goshenko said to Danislov, “I want that body found and brought back to the surface. I don’t care if you have to excavate half of Moscow to do it.”
“Understood.”
Without another word, he turned and strode out of the warehouse.
Chapter 22
The next morning the three of them sat around Vlad’s tiny apartment in uncomfortable silence. No one wanted to be the first to suggest that their expedition was over, but it was certainly looking that way. The cave-in had been bad and they were lucky to have escaped unscathed. Annja had a newfound appreciation for Vlad’s ability to navigate underground. Without him they would probably still be wandering those endless tunnels, lost in the dark.
Her thoughts turned to their assailants from the night before. Had they really been FSS agents? If so, what had they wanted?
From Annja’s perspective, there seemed little chance the armed men had stumbled on her and her companions by accident. She had seen a spark of recognition in the first man’s eyes when she’d confronted him. He’d clearly known who she was and had been about to say something directly to her when he’d been gunned down in cold blood. She was regretting not having had the chance to search him for anything that might have helped her ascertain that he was who his ID said he was.
Someone who was a little bit paranoid might think that the men they’d encountered in the tunnels were after the same thing they were—the library. Or, at the very least, what Annja and her team knew about the library’s whereabouts. Someone who was very paranoid might even come to the conclusion they’d been there to capture or kill one of them. Annja was convinced it was all of the above.
She glanced over at Gianni but couldn’t quite see him as a target of a Russian hit squad. The same went for Vlad; he might be loud about certain issues, but she couldn’t imagine any of his rhetoric bringing down the wrath of the FSS.
Which left only Annja.
She’d been racking up quite an impressive list of enemies, as her quest had put her in the crosshairs of several criminals, from petty thieves to international terrorists. Just about all of them—the ones who were still alive—had reason to want her dead, and what better place to arrange for her to have an “accident” but deep beneath a city far from home?
It wasn’t a comforting thought.
Then again, if she wanted comfort, she would have stayed at home.
Tired of the silence, Annja asked, “Well, now what?”
That got Gianni’s attention, at least.
“Now what?” he repeated, incredulous. “Now we’re done. Or did you happen to miss the four tons of rock that just cut off the only route we have?”
Annja cut him some slack and bit back the retort that sprung to mind. He was upset; they all were. But she wasn’t the type to give up after a single try and there was no way she was going to throw up her hands and call it quits that easily.
As she opened her mouth to say so, Vladimir spoke up from the other side of the room. “Nyet,” he said in that deep rumbling voice of his. “We are not done. There is more than one way to, how you say, make cat skinless?”
“To skin a cat,” Annja corrected automatically. “You know another route, don’t you?”
He shrugged. “Is possible. Not sure yet. Let me see map.”
Annja glanced over at Gianni, who thought it over for a moment and then handed over the map they’d found hidden in the Virgin’s hand.
Vladimir unfolded it and laid it out on the kitchen table. He studied it for a long moment, grunted to himself and then disappeared into a back room. He returned a moment later with an old-fashioned ledger book, which he put on the table next to the map.
As he flipped through the ledger, Annja could see that the pages, like the walls in the front room, were
covered with inked drawings of subterranean tunnels. Each drawing had been annotated by hand in fine Cyrillic script. It hit her then that what Vladimir had here was a treasure in and of itself, a constantly updated catalog of all he had seen and done in the caverns and tunnels beneath the city.
Annja’s hopes rose. Without the maps the task had seemed hopeless. It would have taken them years to figure out a way around the collapsed tunnel and to get them back on track. But now, with the information Vlad had so carefully collected over the years, it might actually be possible… .
Their host spent several minutes comparing the images on various pages of his ledger to the map on the table in front of him. At last, he sat back with a satisfied expression.
“Yes. It is possible. Very difficult, but possible.”
Annja liked the “possible” part. “Talk to me, Vlad.”
“We will have to go much deeper—six, maybe seven levels down. We intersect original tunnel here,” he said, pointing to a spot on the map on the other side of the cave-in.
Gianni joined them at the table. “If we’ve still got a chance at going after the library, what are we doing sitting around here, then?”
“Not so easy,” Vlad replied, shaking his head. “This route much more dangerous.”
“How so?” Annja asked. They’d already survived a tunnel collapse and an attack by what she suspected was a Russian hit squad. She didn’t see how it could get much more dangerous.
Vladimir pulled two folded sheets of paper out of the back of his ledger. When he opened the first, the others could see that it was a modern map of the Moscow subway system. He pointed to an area marked as the Ramenskoye District, about fifty kilometers from the city center.
“Just after World War II, Stalin built underground city here in Ramenskoye.”
“An underground city?” Gianni echoed.
“Da, city. Built to hold up to 15,000 people.” Vlad drew a finger across the map to show where it stretched. “From here…to here. To protect senior staff and their families in case of war with the West.”
“What happened to it?” Annja asked, even though she suspected she already knew.
Vladimir shrugged, then confirmed her suspicions. “Nothing. The bunker is still there.”
Gianni looked confused. “Can someone tell me why we’re talking about a bunker complex? The library is somewhere beneath the Kremlin, not halfway across Russia in some underground fallout shelter, for heaven’s sake.”
The big Russian turned to answer, but Annja beat him to it.
“Metro-2,” she said in a voice filled with disbelief.
She’d certainly heard of it; given Chasing History’s Monsters’ penchant for urban legends, how could she not? But she’d always assumed that this was really nothing more than fanciful rumor.
That rumor claimed that there was a second, secret subway system that paralleled the public metro system, designed and built by the government for use in the event of an emergency. The KGB was supposed to have built the first line on Stalin’s behalf, running directly from the Kremlin to the Soviet leader’s private dacha. Several other lines were rumored to run between various ministry buildings and bunkers like the one beneath Ramenskoye.
Of course, that’s all they were, rumors, right?
“Da,” Vlad said, dispelling that notion like a will-o’-the-wisp, “Metro-2.” He unfolded the second piece of paper. This was a map, as well, but unlike the first it had been hand-drawn on very thin paper. A moment later she understood when Vlad laid it over the subway map, allowing the first map to show through the second and revealing how the Metro-2 tunnels crisscrossed those of the more modern Moscow metro.
“We enter through Ramenskoye bunker, here,” Vlad said, pointing to a shaded area on the hand-drawn overlay. He then traced a blue line that ran across the city to another shaded area. “Take this tunnel here until we reach Academy of Oceanology warehouse. Use Kremlin tunnel system from there to reach vault.”
Annja studied the map, trying to get a sense of the plan’s viability. It was difficult, given the vague details and the fact that she didn’t understand the language well enough to make heads or tails of the annotations.
“Have you taken this route before?” she asked.
Vlad hesitated. “No,” he said. “Map comes from a trustworthy source, but is not mine. Am confident I get you in and out without difficulty.”
It wasn’t the answer she was hoping to hear, but it would have to do. After all, what choice did they have? Give up the hunt? Not a chance, not after what they’d been through already. She was just going to have to trust him. He’d gotten them out of one scrape already.
“All right,” she said, looking up at them. “Let’s do this.”
* * *
THE CALL CAME IN AROUND ten o’clock that morning. Goshenko was in the office and happened to pick up the phone himself, rather than waiting for his secretary to get it.
“Good morning, Colonel.”
It was a man’s voice, though not one he recognized. Which was unusual, as there weren’t many people outside the FSS who had this number. The caller spoke in Russian, but Goshenko thought he could detect a slight accent behind the words, marking whoever it was as a nonnative.
“Who is this?”
“That’s not important. What is important is that we are both searching for the library.”
Goshenko didn’t see any advantage to playing coy, given that the caller had reached him on a private line.
“Go on,” he said.
“I’d like to propose a partnership. I’ll provide you with the information I have, including where and when that annoying television host is going to make another attempt to locate the library. And in exchange I receive a share of the treasure when the library is located.”
“There won’t be another attempt,” Goshenko replied, his interest in the conversation rapidly dwindling. “Annja Creed is dead.”
The momentary silence on the other end of the line was quickly replaced with laughter.
“I assure you, Miss Creed is quite well, despite the attempt your agents made to bury her alive.”
Goshenko’s attention was now fully on the caller. Only a handful of people knew he was interested in the library, and even fewer still were aware that he had men hunting for Annja Creed because of the map he suspected she had. Aside from Danislov, the only other men in on what had happened down there in the tunnels were even now boarding a plane to take them to their new tour of duty just north of the Arctic Circle. He’d signed the transfer paperwork immediately upon returning to his office. That left only two ways the caller could have come by his information. Either he had a mole very deep in Goshenko’s organization or…
…he was working with Creed directly.
Colonel Goshenko suddenly had a very good idea just who his caller might be.
“When is this attempt supposed to take place?”
“Do we have a deal?”
“Yes. Provided your information checks out.”
There was a moment of silence as his caller decided what Goshenko’s word was worth. “Creed and her group will try again in a few hours. The starting point will be the bunker complex in Ramenskoye.”
Ramenskoye?
“You can’t be serious.”
The caller ignored the comment. “They have a map, directing them to Fioravanti’s vault. If we can get our hands on that, we won’t need the Creed woman any longer.”
Chapter 23
As they piled into the van for the third time in less than seventy-two hours, Annja felt a decided sense of déjà vu. It seemed it was her destiny to drive around Moscow in a van that smelled like sewage, hunting for a library most of the world had forgotten existed.
You’ve come a long way, baby. She had to quash a sudden case of the giggles.
Thanks to heavy traffic, it took them just over an hour to get out of the city and then another forty-five minutes to reach Ramenskoye.
Annja felt pretty good. She’d
expected to be exhausted after being buried alive the night before, but she’d awoken refreshed, although sore. It was something she’d noticed before because of the sword. Her body seemed to heal faster than normal. Her dexterity and reaction time were getting better, as well.
Gianni, on the other hand, wasn’t doing so great. He was irritable, snapping at even the slightest of comments—a result, no doubt, of the pain he was feeling from the gash in the side of his head. Annja had cleaned the wound as best she could and wrapped it in gauze covered with a topical anesthetic, but that had probably worn off several hours ago.
Of the three of them, Vlad was the only one who had escaped without injury. His years of being in the underground had prepared him for the unexpected. Annja now understood why Sir Charles valued him so highly; Vlad was a good man to have around in a crisis.
While the big Russian drove, Gianni used the satellite phone to place a call to Charles Davies. It was just before dawn in Connecticut, but given that they were headed underground again and would be out of touch for some time after that, it was important to bring their benefactor up to speed on everything that had happened to date.
Or, rather, most of what had happened, she thought with a twinge of guilt.
She and Gianni had agreed between them that they would leave out any mention of the FSS hit squad, if, indeed, that had been what it was, and of Annja’s own close call in the cave-in. Charles couldn’t do anything about either event, and besides, they’d survived them, hadn’t they?
Instead, they told him that the tunnel conditions had made it impossible to reach the vault from the direction they had originally planned on taking, so they were going to try an alternate route. He asked if they needed more equipment or more time to study the situation to be certain that the option they were choosing was the best one available, but they declined. They strongly suspected they weren’t the only ones going after the library, and if they spent too much time thinking rather than doing, they might miss their chance entirely.
