The Thieves of Faith

by Richard Doetsch

  But her joy turned to shock and fear as she looked into his eyes and saw something there that she had not seen before. There was a detachment. It was like looking into the eyes of a stranger, a shark, someone without a soul. And her fears were confirmed as she felt the blade slide into her stomach, searing pain radiating outward from her core. Through it all, Julian held her eye, silently watching, hoping to see the moment when her soul left her body.

  Yves stood there in shock as Julian laid the body of his daughter on the deck. He was paralyzed with fear as Julian walked straight up to him, never raising a hand in defense as the blade slipped between his ribs and he heard Julian murmur, “Tell God I said hello.”

  At the age of twenty-six, Julian Zivera became the sole head of God’s Truth, a religion, a business, a concept where he was paid over one billion tax-free dollars annually to expound on God, on science, on life. He inherited everything, the grounds, the castle monastery, the parishioners, the medical labs, even the yacht, God’s Truth.

  Julian had arrived in Corsica with a handful of degrees, a photographic memory, and a ten-year plan to take over Trepaunt’s religion. Julian always exceeded expectation; he did it in five.

  Chapter 28

  Michael stared at the rounded back end of a laser sensor protruding from a metal duct. The small hum of a motor echoed from within; he knew he had found the right location. The Covini laser sensor was the latest model, made by a firm out of Delaware. The Russians had spared no expense in protecting their most recently built facility. The earth and stone room they stood in was no more than six feet high, the unused area of what had been excavated for the structure in front of them. The air-conditioning duct was anchored into the rock face below and in back leaving two sides exposed, every seam double soldered, its thick metal construction coated in triple-density polymer resin to keep out moisture. It fed into a concrete bunker that disappeared into the rock where it had been poured.

  Michael had led the way through a series of tunnels, doubling back more than twenty times until he was able to follow his compass to the exact declination he had marked on his map. They had to crawl the last hundred feet on their hands and knees through a cramped earthen overhang and punch their way through an earthen barrier. They were ten stories below the Arsenal; as the crow flies they were no more than a half mile from the raging pool of water that Michael thought led to the Liberia, though it felt as if they had walked clear to St. Petersburg.

  Michael walked around the ductwork, studying it, examining each seam as if it told a story.

  “So much for getting in this way,” Fetisov said.

  “Air ducts are usually riveted, but that’s when you’re working with tin. These seams are welded.” Michael indicated the lumpy erratic lines that joined the heavy metal sheets together. “And they were all done from the outside.” Michael continued walking along the perimeter of the duct before it vanished into the concrete slab. He turned and walked back. “Every one except this one.” And he stopped, crouching down to a joint that was clearly smooth.

  Busch and Fetisov looked at Michael, confusion on both of their faces.

  Michael stood. “Whoever built this duct did it from out here.” He pointed at the small bits of welding debris and scorch marks that littered the rocky ground beneath their feet. “But he had to get back inside. So he left one opening until last.” Michael again crouched down and ran his finger along the smooth seam. “The last seam of the last day of his job, done from inside the tight confines of a thirty-by-thirty-inch shaftway.” Michael looked at his watch: it was six-thirty in the morning. He pulled out a small oxyacetylene torch that Fetisov had secured from Busch’s knapsack, fired it up, and ran it back and forth along the upper seam. The torch hissed and popped as it made quick work of the joint, heating it to a malleability his tools could manipulate. Michael flipped off the torch and, with his knife, popped out the small panel of the duct. Using the heavy blade, he gently bent it upward, avoiding touching the red-hot metal with his hands. And as the metal tunnel was peeled open like a tin can, red pin-lights burst out from the inside, painting the small confines in which the three men stood neon-red as the laser lights bounced around. Both Busch and Fetisov dropped to the ground as if they were under fire.

  Michael burst out in a huge grin at the two men who became suddenly sheepish. He walked back to the sensor that stuck out of the ductwork and examined the device as the red light continued to dance within the duct, occasionally spilling out into the open area. The hum of the motor was more pronounced now that the shaft had been compromised. Michael used his knife and popped off the top of the laser, exposing a series of wires. He leaned in, examining the device that had been built in his homeland. It somehow offered him a bit of comfort seeing this U.S. technology but he knew that comfort would vanish if he was not careful in the next fifteen seconds. Michael separated four of the wires, pulling them up and away from the mechanism. He looked at Busch and Fetisov and then cut the white wire. The hum ceased and the red laser shining out of the duct froze along the wall. Michael touched the two ends of the wire together and the motor briefly hummed as the red light fell back into the duct and ceased to be seen. He disconnected the wire again and moved back to the open end: he peered into the duct and without saying a word, climbed in.

  Michael crawled through the metal tube and, within ten feet, came to a metal grate, casting jail-bar-like shadows against the duct’s interior. Michael shimmied forward and peered through the slats. The room before him was new and pure white, everything from the walls to the carpeting to the furniture. It was a vestibule without windows that possessed two doors: a wide double door on swing hinges and a freight-sized elevator door. There was a single chair and a desk with nothing but a telephone on the smooth white surface. The high hat lights were dimmed for the night, softening the room’s antiseptic appearance.

  They were ten stories beneath the Kremlin in a world carved from the strata. There appeared to be no one about at this hour, but Michael struggled to remain quiet nonetheless as he carefully removed the screws that held the air grille in place. He popped out the grille and passed it back to Busch.

  “Security alarms?” Busch asked from outside the duct.

  “Ten stories down. A phalanx of guards around the top side entrance.” Michael looked back at Fetisov. “You said this place was refurbished in less than six months?”

  “Yeah, about that.”

  “And what was it before?”

  “These labs were dead storage for over ten years.”

  Michael turned back to Busch. “I think we just beat the security down here. Governments on budgets don’t waste money on security for dead storage.” Michael stuck his left leg into the room, ready to enter. “But we’ll find out for sure in a moment.”

  Michael lowered himself into the room. It was a five-foot drop to the floor; he landed on the balls of his feet in a crouch and crept toward the far door. He opened it to find a long corridor bordered by six doors. Michael listened and after a moment walked into the hallway.

  Arriving at the first door, he stared at the plaque, not comprehending the Russian Cyrillic letters.

  “Dr. Skovokov.”

  Michael turned to see Nikolai behind him looking over his shoulder.

  “That’s his office.”

  Michael nodded and continued down the hall.

  “Conference room and a lab,” Nikolai said as he pointed at two more doors. He stopped at the second-to-last door. “Operating theater.”

  Michael grabbed the handle and slowly opened the door. He was met by a large open operating room, a lone procedure table in the middle, adjustable overhead lights and microphones hanging from the ceiling. Along the back walls were various computer monitors, trays filled with scalpels, bone saws, and rib clamps, and three video cameras. A table covered with microscopes, bio-analyzers, and high-definition scanners sat off to one side. On the far wall was a thirty-foot-wide window, behind which sat forty chairs arranged cinema style.

>   “Looks like they sell tickets,” Busch said as he pointed at the rows of chairs behind the glass.

  “They have a surgical demonstration scheduled for eleven a.m.?” Michael asked.

  “They’ll seat everybody at ten forty-five,” Fetisov said. “I’ve heard they’ll have as many as twenty watching him demonstrate some new procedure on a cadaver.”

  “They’ve got to be kidding,” Busch said, disgust in his voice. “You’d think they were dissecting an alien or something. This is just wrong. Fucking Russians.”

  Fetisov glared at Busch.

  “I mean—not you,” Busch said apologetically.

  Fetisov tried to ignore Busch. “They should be rolling the body in at ten-fifty. Skovokov will give a brief speech and get to work at eleven.”

  “You’re sure Genevieve is on sublevel nine?” Busch asked.

  “Right above us,” Fetisov said as he pointed up.

  “Alive?”

  “Yes, but under sedation.”

  “Then this all depends on timing,” Michael said as he examined the room. “Once they are all in place, we have to remove all communications and disable the elevator.”

  Michael walked out of the operating room and into the theater. He looked at the observation window, in the corners, behind the fake plants. He checked the steel door, opening and closing it several times, testing it.

  “What if we remove some of the phones now?” Busch asked.

  “They’ll know and then cancel the whole thing,” Michael said. “We can’t let there be any suspicion as to what is about to happen.”

  “I’m going to check out the elevator,” Busch said as he headed out of the room.

  “Are you and your friend going to be able to handle all of this?” Nikolai asked as he walked into the theater.

  “Are you sure she is above us?”

  “On the life of my wife…and my mistress,” Fetisov said with a smile.

  “It’s a grab-and-go.”

  “That’s not what I asked. We’re talking about stealing a box—which you haven’t found yet, I might add—and getting a sedated woman out of here.”

  “I’m well aware of what we are doing,” Michael said, growing annoyed with Fetisov. “How much is Zivera paying you?”

  “Let’s just say more than you could imagine.”

  “My father dies if we fail,” Michael said, trying to make a point. “What happens to you if we fail?”

  Nikolai stared at Michael, an anger boiled up inside him. Red blotches dotted his neck, slowly moving upward. With a lightning-fast arm, he struck out, grabbing Michael by the throat with an iron grip. “We can’t fail.”

  Michael didn’t react, he could see the rage in the man’s face, his dead eye hauntingly dancing about. Nikolai might have been working for Zivera but Michael realized it probably wasn’t by choice. It was Zivera’s way to conjure the most unique motivation and make failure a fatal act. He didn’t lure Nikolai by appealing to his greed, he bent him to his will by grabbing him by the heart.

  “We have a problem here?” Busch asked as he poked his head in the room.

  Nikolai released Michael from his grip. Neither broke eye contact for several seconds.

  “No,” Michael said as Nikolai silently walked past Busch and out of the theater. Michael looked at him a little differently. Nikolai was still deadly but his commitment to carrying through this job was unquestionable.

  Michael followed Busch to the open half-sized doorway of the elevator shaft, ducked his head, and jumped in the pit.

  They both looked up the long dark shaft and saw it crisscrossed with lasers, hundreds of needle-like beams fragmenting the shaftway, their dancing red fingers so numerous they appeared an opaque barrier. “That’s what I thought. There’s your security,” Michael said. “No one comes in or out unless it’s on the elevator. I imagine the beams’ override switch is linked to the cab. They only shut off as the cab ascends or descends.”

  Michael leaned his head back, pulled his flashlight, and shined it up at the elevator door to sublevel nine. It was standard in design, easily opened from within the shaftway. It would be a simple thing to do but for the red laser security barrier around, above, and below it. Genevieve was behind that door; she was so close, yet Michael didn’t dare reach out for her. He hoped she was all right. Michael finally turned to the electrical panel mounted on the side wall of the elevator pit and opened it up.

  “Isn’t there a way we could just grab her now?” Busch asked.

  “I wish,” Michael said as he looked up once more at the red glow above before he turned back to examine the inner workings of the control panel. “We need the cab to be moving so these laser alarms are disabled. And even if we were able to grab her now, they would know how we came in and would ratchet up security all around the Kremlin and Moscow to the point that we would never have a chance of getting back in for the box, let alone getting out of the country.”

  “You really think we can do this?”

  “You and I?”

  “Yeah, you and I.”

  Michael took a deep breath. “As crazy as it sounds, yes, I do. Don’t take it the wrong way but we make a pretty good team. Cops and robbers.”

  “I always was partial to cowboys and Indians. What’s with you and Captain Red?” Busch asked as he leaned over Michael’s shoulder looking at the control panel.

  “We’re working for and being asked to trust a guy we don’t even know,” Michael said as he looked at the elevator control panel’s schematic. He thanked God for his understanding of these universally used diagrams; the Cyrillic labels were all Greek to him.

  “He seems all right to me for a Russkie, except I don’t like the way he had his hand around your throat.”

  “I didn’t like that much, either,” Michael said as he rubbed his neck. He shut the elevator panel, looked about the tight confines of the room, and took one last look at the shaft above him, at the elevator door that stood between him and Genevieve. The door that was obstructed by the deep red security barrier.

  “I get the impression that Zivera has him over a barrel the same way he has you.”

  “Yeah, I was thinking the same but…something tells me he wouldn’t hesitate a minute to take us both out once we get what we came for.”

  “Then we don’t let him get near what we came for,” Busch said as he smiled at Michael.

  The three men crawled up the shaft tunnel that ran beyond the subterranean medical facility, their crash-helmet lights leading the way. Busch had secured the grille in place with a single screw and bent the metal ductwork back in place. They followed the orange paint trail that Michael had sprayed. What took them an hour on the way in was only ten minutes on the way back out. Michael left several cans of gray spray paint at their respective operation points to be used during their final departure to cover their tracks, to erase their trail.

  “All right,” Michael said, looking around the grotto at the small meandering rivers, at the dark tunnels where the waterway exited. “We have to be back here by five a.m.”

  “Which tunnel are we going out?”

  Michael turned and pointed at the third from the left. He pulled three masks and three pony bottles from his bag and passed one of each to Nikolai and Busch. Without a word each put on a mask and held tight to the small regulator on an air bottle. Michael sealed up his bag, took one last look around the cavern, and jumped in the water.

  He swam the twenty yards across the moat and entered the third tunnel to the left. The light from Michael’s helmet lit up the water tunnel for twenty yards before it veered off to the left. Michael was amazed that something built hundreds of years earlier was able to stand the test of time when things back home didn’t last more than twenty years. He looked ahead and saw nothing but the heads of two rats as they swam to get out of his light. Five yards back Busch and Nikolai brought up the rear. Michael began to feel the tug of a current; it was minimal but it pulled him along just the same. As he rounded the corner, he
saw that the tunnel ran another twenty yards before the ceiling began to angle down until it finally merged with the water. And the current was stronger here. Michael kicked against it, trying to gauge its strength, but his actions did nothing. He just kept floating closer and closer to where the water and the ceiling met. Behind him, Busch and Nikolai rode side by side. Michael wasn’t sure if they were beginning to bond or if Busch was just being his overprotective self, not letting Nikolai out of his sight.

  And when Michael turned back he saw the ceiling, seeming to fall upon him as it angled downward. Michael waited until the last minute, shoved the pony bottle in his mouth, and went under. The helmet upon his head remained snug as its light cast silt-filled rays down the stream. There was no letting up now. The current continued to grow and Michael noted the tunnel falling off into an angle just sharp enough to hold off anyone trying to climb up from the bottom. As Michael bounced off the pipe’s walls, he felt the sliminess and realized there was no grip if he wanted to delay his departure from this forgotten mystery. He rode the current, speeding along, doing everything in his power not to crash into the wall. He used his feet to guide him and push off any impending corner. Finally, he tumbled and squirted out into an open pool, but he didn’t linger as he felt himself suddenly sucked under again, this time into a dark tunnel that spat him out into the predawn waters of the Moskva River.

  Michael looked back to see the Kremlin sitting high on the hill, the Great Kremlin Palace peering over the sixty-foot walls. The outer world was just beginning to wake, cars driving by the citadel, unaware of the world that was hidden beneath their great architectural heritage.

  Suddenly, Busch and Fetisov bobbed to the surface beside him.

  Fetisov was shaken up, coughing, gasping for air. “Are you out of your American mind?”