The Book of Spies

by Gayle Lynds

  They were silent.

  At last Tucker said, “Judd, there’s work for you with me whenever you want. I know you’re reluctant now, but remember, I can use you. Ivan the Terrible was onto something when he commissioned The Book of Spies. Spies have a long if checkered past, and we’re still badly needed.”

  Judd shook his head. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  Eva cleared her throat. “What about me?”

  The men stared at her.

  “What do you mean?” Judd asked sharply.

  “Both of you seemed to think I did a good job,” she said calmly. “I want to go through the CIA training program. If I get weeded out, so be it.”

  “But you loved your work as a curator,” Judd objected.

  “Yes, but I never felt the same commitment, the same sense of doing something that could make a difference. You must’ve sensed I was heading in this direction, Judd. Otherwise you wouldn’t have bothered to teach me so much.”

  Tucker chuckled. “You’re right, Eva. You’ve got the talent and the brains. I’ll make some calls tomorrow.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll be leaving you here. I’m going to meet my wife at the Kennedy for opera. Her idea. I hate opera, but right now she gets whatever she wants.” He pounded Judd on the back and kissed Eva on the cheek. “I know I can trust both of you never to say a word about the operation.” He turned and left.

  “Is he in charge of Catapult now?” Eva asked as she looked back over her shoulder, watching his energetic gait.

  “Hell, no.” Judd’s gray eyes danced. “My bet is he’ll never take the job. Gloria’s irritated, but she’s living with it.” Then he said solemnly, “I warned you not to like the work too much.”

  She smiled. “Are you going to hold it against me?”

  “No. You’ll be a damn good addition to Langley.”

  He reached into his pocket and held out his hand. As he uncurled his fingers, she saw her wedding ring and the necklace Charles had given her.

  “You kept them?” She felt a strange emotion.

  “Now that life is settling down a bit, I thought you might know more what you wanted to do with them. They’re yours, after all.”

  “The pendant is a Roman coin. The goddess Diana. It was Charles’s first gift to me.”

  “She’s the huntress,” he remembered.

  “Yes, somehow I reminded Charles of her.”

  “He wasn’t wrong about that.”

  She took the jewelry and the responsibility. “I’ll donate them.” She slid them into her pocket.

  They walked on silently. She was mulling what Tucker had said about illusions.

  “Strange how neither of us saw the truth about your father and Charles,” she said at last. “Instead what we saw was love. Ut ameris, amabilis esto. That’s from Ovid and it means that if you want to be loved, be lovable. In their own ways they were lovable. We can’t ever forget what they did—but it’d be healthy for us to work on forgiving them.”

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  “Yes, we’ll talk more.”

  She smiled at him, and he smiled back, gazing deep into her eyes. A warm intimacy passed between them.

  “I’m glad to have met you, Eva Blake.” He took her hand. His grip was firm.

  She held up their hands and gazed at his. His hand no longer looked to her like the hand of a killer. But then, Michelangelo had been working in marble, and this was the warm flesh of a man. A very good man.

  Rome, Italy

  THE MONTH of July was the height of Estate Romana, the Rome summer festival. A six-week auditory and visual feast, the festival was a flood of mostly outdoor shows, many set in grassy parks and amid ruins to take advantage of the splendor of ancient Rome. The Carnivore always tried to be in the city for at least a few days to enjoy as much as he could. Tonight was a good night for it, warm but not hot, the stars shining brightly.

  Passing the tumbled walls and columns of the Temple of Claudius on his right, he climbed the steep paving stones of Via Claudia and breathed deeply, filling his lungs and expelling air in mighty bursts, savoring his returned vigor, his good health. Escaping from the Isle of Pericles had taken every ounce of strength he’d had. The medic’s painkillers had helped, and of course he had long practiced the rule of the cat—never show you’re injured, vulnerable.

  Jack O’Keefe, Doug Kennedy, and George Russell had been waiting in a high-powered speedboat at the specified location, and within hours they were at the airport on Mykonos and on their way home. The bullet that got him had ripped through large muscles and nicked a rib, so he had taken time to convalesce, then resumed his regime of cardio and weights.

  At the wrought-iron gate he bought a ticket and walked onto the grounds of the magnificent Villa Celimontana. The park spread across Celio Hill, one of the city’s seven storied hills, south of the Coliseum. Little known, it was an oasis of peace and greenery in chaotic Rome. Across the drive, “Jazz” was projected in colorful letters. The Carnivore strode through the lights, taking in the tall cypresses and centuries-old oaks and pines. The winding pathways were littered with pieces of carved marble and broken classical statues. In five minutes he was at the sixteenth-century villa, a tall two stories and pink in the night’s lights.

  Turning a corner, he passed an outdoor jazz poster gallery, sculptures, artistic installations, and finally a fountain heralding the venue’s entrance. He listened to the jazz sounds of Charles Lloyd’s sweet tenor sax.

  As the rich music filled the night air, he climbed the wood terraces built for the summer season. Rows of tables decorated with little red lanterns filled the top three levels of the semicircular amphitheater, while concert seating was on the patio below, the chairs facing the stage, where Lloyd was soloing in front of a small jazz band.

  He found his table, sat, and reached for the beer that was awaiting him—a chilled blond beer from Birra Menabrea, perfect for the warm night.

  “Good to see you, Uncle Hal.” Bash Badawi was out of his usual shorts and T-shirt, dressed for the occasion in worn jeans and an open-necked purple shirt rolled up at the sleeves. Both were cellophane tight against his muscular body. Despite the late hour, wraparound sunglasses sat on his straight jet-black hair, and his dark eyes were smiling in his golden face. He looked completely modern Roman.

  “How’s your mother?” The Carnivore drank. Bash was not really his nephew, but his first cousin once removed—his mother’s sister’s grandchild. It was complicated, but then they came from a large Italian family.

  “Mom’s good. Making pasta as if we were all still living at home. I told her she should start selling online, but she got all bent out of shape. The pasta wouldn’t be fresh—but I was for suggesting it. That woman can still swing a killer wood spoon. You know what I mean, with the long handle and the hot spaghetti sauce dripping from the bowl. Painful.” Grinning, Bash assessed him. “You look pretty good for a guy who had his entrails toyed with.”

  “Just muscle.” The Carnivore drank again, enjoying the young man who reminded him of who he might have been. Then he asked the question that had drawn him here: “Anyone looking for me?”

  “Just the usual rogues, wannabes, and historians. Seriously, I think you’re safe. I can’t give you the details about how I know—national security and all that—but the fellow you met on the island, Tucker Andersen, has called off the hunt.”

  The Carnivore only nodded, but he was relieved. He had liked Andersen and Blake, and now he owed Judd Ryder.

  “You going to be in trouble over this?” he asked.

  “Hey, no prob. You did us a favor, and I’m keeping my mouth shut. Secrecy’s what they trained me for.” Bash raised a muscular hand, two fingers displayed, signaling for more beers. “So are you on downtime now? Got any exciting jobs?” he asked casually.

  The Carnivore gazed over the parapet at the vistas of Rome. The city’s lights sparkled around the massive ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. Today it was a shell of bricks, but at one time it had
sprawled across twenty-seven acres and accommodated sixteen hundred bathers at a time. He remembered that Emperor Caracalla, who had built the baths in the third century A.D., had been a cruel, ruthless ruler. Traveling from Edessa to begin a war with Parthia, he had stopped to urinate on the roadside and was assassinated by one of his own—a frustrated and ambitious officer in the Imperial Guard.

  The Carnivore chuckled. “Drink up, boy. The night is young, and for the moment I’ll pretend I am as well. As for my plans, secrecy’s what I was trained for, too.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  THE MYSTERIOUS HISTORY OF THE LIBRARY OF GOLD

  THE SEARCH for Ivan the Terrible’s lost library—occasionally called the Byzantine Libreria—in the labyrinthine tunnels under Moscow has continued for some five centuries, capturing the imaginations of emperors, potentates, and the Vatican. Joseph Stalin stopped the hunt in the 1930s because he feared that searching the tunnels would leave him vulnerable to attack from beneath, while Vladimir Putin, in a gesture signifying Russia’s new openness, allowed the quest to resume in the 1990s.

  Today a host of scholars, scientists, historians, and amateurs pore over old, incomplete maps and request official permission to investigate. Joining the pursuit are vine walkers who claim to use bioenergetic powers to locate metal; psychics who act as security against “dark forces” that might be guarding the hidden tomes since past searchers have been prone to accidents, disease, blindness, or death; and the Diggers of the Underground Planet, a group of urban spelunkers with a cult following, who drop through manholes and pry open forgotten iron doors to reach the unexplored passages.

  My interest in the library dates back more than twenty years. On June 28, 1989, I was reading the Los Angeles Times when “Kremlin Tunnels: The Secret of Moscow’s Underworld,” by Masha Hamilton, caught my attention.

  It was a summer evening in 1933 when the two young men found what they were searching for: the entrance to a centuries-old underground tunnel within sight of the red Kremlin walls. As they crept underground toward Moscow’s seat of power, lighting their way with a lantern, the men believed they might find Ivan the Terrible’s legendary library of gold-covered books. Instead they found five skeletons, a passageway sometimes so narrow that they had to file through singly and, within a few hundred yards of the Kremlin, a rusted steel door they could not open.

  I was enthralled by this “library of gold-covered books,” which immediately became in my mind the Library of Gold. Kremlin officials stopped the young pair’s exploration and swore them to secrecy with the implied threat of death, then Stalin ordered a swimming pool built over the area, putting a conclusive end to anyone’s quest.

  The story of the fabled library is one of geopolitics, an arranged marriage, madness, and the enduring love of books. And it begins more than two thousand years ago in the Greco-Roman world of emperors, scholars, warriors, and the wealthy.

  An intentionally chilling ancient Roman tombstone has this inscription: Sum quod eris, fui quod sis—“I am what you will be; I was what you are.” Public and private libraries were assembled by the ancients to enjoy, to educate, and to display affluence and privilege. But in the largest sense they were created to preserve knowledge. Remarkable international library centers in Alexandria, Pergamum, Antioch, Rome, and Athens thrived for centuries. Tragically all were obliterated, sometimes in war, sometimes with avarice, sometimes purposefully to destroy history and culture.

  The last great repository in that long-ago Western world was the royal library in Constantinople. Founded in about 330 A.D. by Constantine the Great, the city grew up on the site of a Greek town called Byzantium. At the time, it was known as the Roman Empire, though today it is referred to as the Byzantine Empire. By 475, the royal library had 120,000 volumes, probably making it the largest in that era. Over the following centuries the library was burned several times, vaporizing multitudes of priceless works, including, some claimed, a piece by Homer lettered in gold on a twelve-foot-long snakeskin.

  Still the imperial collection constantly rose from the literary ashes. In the 1400s the Spanish traveler Pero Tafur described it thus: “. . . a marble gallery opening on arcades with tiled marble benches all around and with similarly crafted tables placed end to end upon low columns; there are many books there, ancient texts and histories.”

  The final blow came on May 29, 1453, when Mehmed the Conqueror and his Ottoman Turks brutally seized Constantinople. The English historian Edward Gibbon wrote, “One hundred twenty thousand manuscripts are said to have disappeared.”

  Six years later the survivors of the Byzantine royal family escaped as the Ottoman Turks invaded Morea, the rich Greek Peloponnese peninsula ruled by the emperor’s heir and nephew, Thomas Paleologus. Accompanying Thomas on the small Venetian galley were his wife and children—two young sons and a daughter, Zoë, about twelve years old. She would play a critical role in the Library of Gold.

  They made their way to Italy, where Pius II took them under the papal wing, and the Vatican provided a palace and stipend. The pope had a vital political and religious goal—to enthrone Thomas at a recaptured Constantinople. Thomas and his family were Greek Orthodox, but they had promptly converted to Roman Catholic once they reached Italy. If the pope succeeded, Thomas would rule over a Christian New Byzantium, Western in outlook, uniting Catholic and Orthodox—and under the religious control of Rome.

  The Venetians, who were making fortunes in trade with the Ottoman Turks, were less than happy about it. When Pius tried twice to mount a Fifth Crusade, this time against Constantinople, the Venetians dithered. Finally they delayed their fleet so long that the last attempted attack fell apart, and the pope died.

  The next pope, Paul II, feinted. He looked east again, but this time his target was the widowed Ivan III, the Grand Prince of Moscow, soon to be called Ivan the Great. The Russian Orthodox Church had long flourished in Moscow. Hoping to acquire Ivan as a military ally against the Turks, as well as his consent for the Union of Churches, the pope offered Zoë’s hand in marriage in 1472. She was now about twenty years old.

  Moscow was the strongest of the Russian states and the fastest growing power of the times, although it was still under the Muslim yoke. Ivan accepted the proposal, and the royal pair married in Moscow before the year was out. Zoë took the name Sophia.

  We know Sophia traveled with a large retinue by land and sea to Moscow. Her arrival was accompanied by Italians and Greeks, who settled there, too, and became influential, even rebuilding the Kremlin in a Russian-Italianate style. This is the point where the legend begins.

  According to several commentators, Sophia brought with her to Moscow priceless illuminated manuscripts from the Byzantine imperial collection. “The chronicles mention 100 carts loaded with 300 boxes with rare books arriving in Moscow,” according to Alexandra Vinogradskaya, writing in The Russian Culture Navigator. Another version is this: “The princess arrived in Moscow with a dowry of 70 carts, carrying hundreds of trunks, which contained the heritage of early cultures—the library collected by the Byzantine emperors,” explains Nikolay Khinsky on WhereRussia.com, the Russian National Tourist site for International Travelers.

  What is undisputed is that Sophia did bring the Ivory Throne of the Byzantine emperors on which Russian monarchs were crowned ever after, as well as the double-headed eagle, the imperial symbol of the Byzantine Empire for a thousand years, which became the Kremlin’s for nearly another five hundred years. She introduced the grand court traditions of Byzantium, too, including ceremonial etiquette and costume. Even before the wedding, Ivan had assumed the title of czar—Caesar—and then added grozny, “formidable,” a reverential adjective common in Byzantine autocracy, since the sovereign was considered the earthly image of God and empowered with all His sacred and judicial powers.

  Since Sophia carried so much of Byzantium with her, it is very possible illuminated manuscripts were among her gifts. As Deb Brown, bibliographer and research services librarian for Byzantine studies
at Dumbarton Oaks, wrote me: “There seems to be nothing in the (published) contemporary sources that testifies to books in Zoë/Sophia’s possession, but I’m not convinced that she did not carry books with her. The silence of sources has to be weighed against the nature of the sources, which are few and concerned with matters of state and monies, not much else. There are plenty of indications that she was literate and well-educated.”

  Ultimately the Vatican’s geopolitical gamesmanship partially succeeded. Sophia was the one who persuaded Ivan III in 1478 to challenge the Golden Horde. “When the customary messengers came from the Tatar Khan demanding the usual tribute, Ivan threw the edict on the ground, stamped and spat on it, and killed all the ambassadors save one, whom he sent back to his master,” according to Gilbert Grosvenor in National Geographic magazine. Over time his armies beat back Khan Ahmed’s soldiers, and Moscow was never seriously threatened by them again. One of the longest-reigning Russian rulers, Ivan tripled his territory and laid the foundations of state, based largely on the autocratic rule of Byzantium.

  Where the Vatican failed was that the Chair of Peter was not unified with the throne of Constantine—upon her arrival in Moscow, Sophia had promptly endorsed Orthodoxy again.

  The Library of Gold would have passed from Sophia and Ivan to their son Vasily III, and from him to his son Ivan IV. In 1547 at the young age of seventeen, Ivan IV outwitted Kremlin plots and crowned himself “Czar of All Russia.” Eventually he, too, became known as Grozny—Ivan the Terrible—infamous ever since for his cruelty, slaughters of entire cities, and pleasure in torture. At the same time, a hundred years before Peter the Great was credited with doing so, Ivan opened Russia to the West. He frequently corresponded with European monarchs, including Elizabeth I of England, exchanged diplomats, and nurtured international trade. He not only extended Russia to the Pacific Ocean, but he also introduced the printing press to Russia.