Empire (A Jack Sigler Thriller Book 8)

by Jeremy Robinson

  His finger moved to depress the button that would end the call, but before he could touch it, there was click and a familiar voice spoke. “Da?”

  Vladimir’s tone was hesitant, the lone syllable full of apprehension. Peter did not allow himself to read too much into it. “Tell me what happened, tovarich.”

  Tovarich. Comrade.

  The word had once held great significance for all Russians during the Soviet era, not only as a term of endearment but also as a subtle reminder of the duty owed by each citizen to the greater good. Peter had chosen it deliberately.

  “You are safe?” Vladimir sounded relieved, but Peter knew better than to accept anything the man said at face value. Whether friend or foe, Vladimir could not have survived in the spy game as long as he had without being a consummate actor.

  “You know that I am. Now, tell me what happened, and make me believe it.” He glanced at his wristwatch, noting the time that had already elapsed since initiating the call. If Vladimir was working with the FSB to capture him, the response was already underway.

  “You did not tell me about your traveling companions.”

  Was he stalling? “That is not an answer.”

  “It is the only answer,” Vladimir said. “They were looking for your son. It was a trap to catch him.”

  “My son?” The question was out before he could stop himself. Vladimir had deftly turned the conversation away from the matter of his own trustworthiness and placed the blame on Peter. The damage was done, so he pushed ahead. “What does Jack have to do with any of this?”

  “You tell me, tovarich,” Vladimir retorted, throwing the word back at him. “They knew he was coming. There is a leak somewhere. A highly placed source. When I learned of it, I tried to call and warn you, but there was no answer.”

  If Vladimir had tried to make contact when they were already inside the Lubyanka on their way to the basement archives, the call would not have gone through. But that assumed Vladimir was being truthful, and that was something of which Peter was not yet convinced.

  He wanted to believe this man who had safeguarded him for so long, and protected him and his family at great risk. If Vladimir had wanted to betray them, he could have done so at any time. If everything that had led up to this moment was part of a grand scheme to win the trust of Peter and Lynn—and that was a possibility Peter could not dismiss—then why had Vladimir chosen this moment to reveal his true nature, when there was nothing to gain?

  Unless there was something to gain. Something that Peter couldn’t see.

  “I am so sorry, my friend, but they have your wife and son.”

  Peter felt his blood go cold. “No. You’re—”

  Lying!

  “—mistaken.”

  Vladimir went on as if Peter had not spoken. “They have been taken to Volosgrad, a secret facility north of Yekaterinburg. There is still time to rescue them, but you must hurry. I will…” He hesitated, as if contemplating something truly terrible. “I will meet you there, old friend. In Yekaterinburg. We will do this together.”

  Peter was speechless for a long time. Too long, he realized, checking his watch. If Vladimir was the architect of the earlier betrayal, then the noose would close around Peter’s neck.

  But if he was telling the truth?

  Yekaterinburg.

  Jack and Asya were to rendezvous with their team there. Surely, that could not be a coincidence. Peter had never heard of Volosgrad before, but in all likelihood, it was the very place the Chess Team had been sent to investigate. Asya was already en route, and if Vladimir was wrong or lying about Jack and Lynn being captured, they too would be headed there.

  All roads, it seemed, led to Yekaterinburg. “How will I find you?”

  “Go to Church on the Blood. I will find you.”

  Peter’s instincts told him a blind date like that was a very bad idea. He knew a few ways of mitigating the risk, but ultimately it all came down to the question of whether or not to trust Vladimir. “Why? Why have you always looked out for us?”

  “There can only be one answer, my friend. I am a patriot. Everything I have done, everything I do, is for Mother Russia.”

  It was not an answer Peter would ever have expected. “How does protecting us benefit Russia?”

  “Everything is connected, old friend. Even what happened to your daughter. I will explain when I see you.”

  “My daughter? Julie? Is she alive? Is Julie still alive?”

  There was a long pause. “I will take you to her.”

  27

  He grips the base of his seat tightly as the F-14 rolls over and stays that way, belly-up like a dead fish in the sky. The plane continues rocketing forward, the G-forces plastering him into the acceleration chair. Below him, separated by the canopy and twenty-thousand feet of air, the ocean is an endless blue-green eternity, with no hint of the storm to come.

  Then it is all gone as the plane begins corkscrewing through the sky, shades of blue shuffling like cards in the hands of a street magician… Light blue sky, dark blue ocean… Sky… Ocean… Light… Dark…

  “You better not throw up, god damn it!” Julie shouts, and he doesn’t think she’s joking. “I mean it, King. Breathe through it.”

  “Then…stop…”

  The spiral ends and he feels acceleration again, but this does little to quell the nausea twisting his guts, or the inexplicable pain stabbing through his lower back. It’s as if someone has driven a hook through his hip and left him hanging by it.

  Suddenly, the plane heels over, and he can see both sky and ocean now. A dive. He tries to shout, but no sound comes out. He tries to pound on the back of the pilot’s seat, but his arms won’t move. It’s as if they are being held in place by some unseen force.

  “Pull up! Please, Julie. You’re going to kill us!”

  The endless sparkling blue resolves into cresting waves, rising and falling. Close. So close.

  A loud hiss fills the cockpit. Alarms sound, warning of imminent impact. He tries to reach out for the ejection handle but his arms still won’t work. All around him the sounds grow louder, deafeningly loud, as the blue ocean reaches up. Then she turns to look at him, her neck craning around at an impossible angle in the close confines of the cockpit, her raven black hair falling loose around her face. Smiling as she opens her mouth to speak.

  “Don’t you know? We can’t die.”

  King jolted back to consciousness, though for a moment, he wondered if it was a false awakening. Had The Dream merely shifted, as dreams sometimes do, fooling him with the semblance of a return to normalcy? Part of him still felt trapped in it. The strange pain auguring into his hip was still there—a throbbing persistent ache, like a railroad spike driven through his abdomen.

  Julie’s face was still there, too, hovering just above him, no longer smiling. “Good. You are awake.”

  “Awake?”

  He tried to rise up, but his body was still immobilized, not by a five-point harness or the G-forces, but rather by leather restraints cinched around his waist and extremities. He winced as the attempt sent a fresh wave of pain through his body. “What happened?”

  “Alexei needed a sample of your bone marrow.”

  Alexei.

  The name severed whatever connection remained, bringing him fully awake. The woman was not Julie, but Catherine Alexander. He was in some secret Russian base. A madman in a lab coat had just strapped him down and stabbed a gigantic hollow needle into his hip bone.

  “He should have anesthetized you first,” Catherine went on. “That’s the procedure. But Alexei is…” She trailed off as if unable to find an appropriately benign euphemism for bat-shit crazy.

  “Thanks for trying so hard to stop him,” King said. Because he was clenching his teeth to endure the constant agony radiating through his lower body, his retort lost some the intended sarcasm, but Catherine picked up on it nonetheless.

  “I don’t give Alexei orders,” she snapped.

  “Really? My mistake.
I got the impression you were like Darth Vader around here.”

  Her face registered mild confusion, as if the reference had sailed past her, then she shook her head. “Alexei is very special to the President. He tolerates the boy’s eccentricities.”

  “Eccentricities.” King laughed and then winced. “Is that what you’re going to call that? Where’s my mother?”

  Catherine’s eyes narrowed, as if she was trying to decide whether to accommodate her prisoner’s request or assert her authority over him. He expected the latter, but she surprised him. “I moved her elsewhere. No mother should have to watch something like that.”

  “Thank you.” He paused a beat, then decided to see how far her goodwill would extend. “What’s ‘Firebird’? And why does that lunatic need my bone marrow for it?”

  She stared at him for a moment, then turned her head and addressed someone else in the room. “Wait outside.”

  He craned his head around just in time to see two soldiers, their AK-104 carbines hanging from slings over their shoulders, exiting the room. Catherine turned back to King and folded her arms across her chest. He tried to remember if that had been one of Julie’s mannerisms. “You are special, King. Not like Alexei. In fact, you are everything that Alexei is not.”

  “Well that explains it, then.”

  “You are part of an experiment that has been going on right here in Volosgrad for more than fifty years.”

  “Volosgrad?”

  She frowned as if disappointed that this was the question he had chosen to ask. “You must have wondered why your parents were brought together.”

  “Nope. Call me old fashioned, but I figured it was true love.”

  Catherine either did not hear him or chose to ignore the comment. “In 1892, a young Siberian man suffering from what he thought was a seizure disorder, left his family and journeyed to the Nikolay Monastery in Verkhoture. He had hoped that the monks would heal him, but instead of finding a cure, he learned the truth about his condition. A hermit named Makary revealed to him that he was part of an ancient bloodline. He was descended from a race of giants that once lived in the Ural Mountains, long before the rise of mankind. This place, Volosgrad, was named for the ancient giant city that Makary discovered.

  “What the young man mistook for seizures were in fact the awakening of latent abilities inherited from his giant ancestors. Under Makary’s direction, he learned to control those abilities. He was able to influence the minds of other people, and even induce a sort of psychosomatic healing state with just a touch. He saw visions of a terrible darkness that would engulf all of Russia. For many years after, he wandered the country as a strannik, a religious mystic, sharing both his wisdom and his healing gift, until he came to the attention of Tsar Nicholas.”

  King suddenly forgot all about the pain. “You’re talking about Rasputin.”

  “A great man, unjustly reviled by history,” Catherine said. “More than a man, actually. The blood of old gods flowed through his veins.” She flashed an indulgent smile. “Not actual gods of course, but that is how they are remembered. During his years of wandering, Rasputin sired many children—”

  “Is that what you meant by ‘sharing his wisdom’?” King laughed to hide his growing dismay at the strange turn the conversation had taken.

  “In fact, it is. His blood was the only defense against the darkness he foresaw. His descendants—his children and grandchildren—would be the protectors of the Russian empire and the Romanov dynasty. The light to guide Russia out of the darkness.”

  “The darkness being the Soviet Union,” King surmised. “Well, mission accomplished, I guess.”

  “The Communists were only a symptom of a greater malaise.”

  “Uh-huh. So let’s skip to the part where you tell me that mom and dad are both descended from Rasputin, which makes me practically a pureblood.” He said it with an indifferent air to hide how stunned he was by the revelation—not because it sounded so implausible but because it actually made a lot of sense. “That’s the big experiment, right?”

  It did not require a great leap of faith to believe that Grigori Rasputin, the so-called ‘mad monk’ and close confidant to the ill-fated Romanov family, was a descendant of Alexander Diotrephes—or that King’s own ancestry might trace through him. Nor was it hard to accept that his parents had both been recruited into the Soviet spy agency at a young age because of their unknown heritage. King could believe that they had been brought together in what amounted to an arranged marriage and sent to a foreign assignment as a way to both rarefy the bloodline and protect it from the enemy controlling Russia.

  “In a word,” Catherine said, “yes. Your parents are the descendants of Rasputin, Children of Adoon. You are. And so was your sister.”

  Coming on the heels of everything else, the familiar name for the Diotrephes bloodline did not even faze him, but what she said next did.

  “I think I might be her. I think I’m Julie.”

  28

  King’s screams echoed after Lynn as she was taken from the examination room, dragged down a flight of stairs and locked in a small chain-link enclosure. The space resembled nothing less than a dog kennel, replete with a strong animal odor and clumps of dark fur on the concrete floor. The cage was one in a long row lined up against the wall. There was another row just like it across a narrow aisle. From her limited vantage, she could not tell how many cages there were, or if any of them were occupied. The soldiers pushed her in and closed the gate, securing it with a padlock. Afterward, they switched off the overhead lights, leaving her in the dark, alone and helpless, weeping for her son.

  Lynn Machtchenko however was anything but helpless.

  She remained still for a full minute, then another, listening for any sounds in the darkness that might indicate that she was being watched.

  Nothing.

  When she was sure that she was alone, she contorted her body until she was able to reach her right foot and take the set of miniature lock-picking tools from a hidden compartment in the heel of her shoe. She used one of the picks to shim the pawl in the handcuffs, allowing them to swing open. Then she began groping along the chain-link wall until she found the gate and the heavy-duty padlock that held it shut. She probed the lock for a few seconds with her fingertips. Then, working by touch alone, she got it unlocked in less than thirty seconds. She returned the picks to their place and then drew a thin carbon-fiber dagger from a sheath concealed in the sole of the other shoe.

  Peter had always told her that she was the better spy, but her superiority owed more to the fact that most people—most enemies—fatally underestimated her skills, both physical and mental. The agents who had arrested them in Moscow had performed only a cursory pat down. After that, they had mostly ignored her, not even bothering to replace the sack hood over her head before dragging her down into this dungeon. It was a mistake that at least some of them wouldn’t live to regret.

  She eased the gate open a few inches but stopped when one of the old hinges let out a rusty squeal. After another minute of waiting—listening but hearing nothing—she slipped through the gap and crept out into the darkness beyond. With one hand stretched out, fingertips lightly touching the chain-link cage, she started in the direction of the stairs.

  “Who are you?”

  The whisper froze Lynn in her tracks. It was a man’s voice, and right next to her.

  In a cage, she realized. Another prisoner.

  The question had been asked in Russian, but there was something odd about the man’s speech pattern. He sounded fatigued, as if the mere act of uttering the question had left him completely exhausted.

  “Lynn,” she said, giving nothing more than her name.

  “Why are you here?”

  She turned, facing the cage, even though she could see nothing. A faint smell of sickness joined the unpleasant mélange of odors that permeated the room. It was almost certainly emanating from the other captive. “I could ask you the same thing.”

 
; “Are you with them? Is this supposed to get me to talk?” He was not whispering anymore, and now the weariness in his voice was even more pronounced. Lynn was also beginning to suspect that, in addition to whatever else was ailing him, he was not a native Russian.

  His paranoia was understandable. One of the first things a captive lost was the ability to trust. It occurred to Lynn that the source of the disembodied voice might in fact be the very thing he was accusing her of being, but she discounted the idea immediately. No one had asked her anything so far, and she doubted anyone cared enough to create such an elaborate ruse to trick her. No, the man was a prisoner, like her. That made him either a potential ally or a liability.

  “Doesn’t matter,” the man continued, mumbling now. “Those beasts. Did they get you, too?”

  “Beasts?” The odd phrase used to describe their captors caught her by surprise. It confirmed her suspicion that the man wasn’t as familiar with the language as he believed. “Are you American?” she asked in English.

  There was a strange shuffling sound in the darkness. “How…” The word, also in English, came out in a stifled gasp. He drew a sharp breath, then in a more subdued tone said, “Yes.”

  “Then we are on the same side,” she told him. “Are you here with anyone else?”

  “Not anymore.”

  No wonder he sounds so beaten down, she thought. “Well, I’m here with someone. My son.” And my daughter, she thought but didn’t say. “We’re getting out of here. All of us. Including you.” She slipped her shoe off and retrieved the picks, then began groping for the gate to the man’s cage.

  “What’s the use? We can’t get past those beasts.”

  “Why do you keep calling them that?”

  “What else should I call them? Monsters? Ape-men?”

  Lynn realized he wasn’t talking about their Russian captors but something else entirely, but judging by how agitated the man was becoming, she decided not to press the issue.