“Yes, there has to be, and the screen is called the iconostasis. You will find it in all the Russian Orthodox churches. It protects the holy of holies, the sanctuary. In a big church, like the one I went to in Moscow when I was a boy, there were several doors through the iconostasis. Only certain monks or priests could use each one. There were many rules. But in a smaller church, one like this, there was sometimes just a single door—the door of Saint Stephen, the Protomartyr.”
“The what?” Slater had never been one for religion. In his experience, it was just another reason for people to kill each other with conviction and impunity.
“Saint Stephen, the first martyr of the Christian church,” Kozak said, with a touch of exasperation. “Have you never sung the song about good king Wencelas, on the feast of Stephen?” Kozak started humming the tune, but Slater was already nodding in recognition and he stopped. “Saint Stephen was put on trial by the Sanhedrin,” Kozak said, resuming his explanation, “and then he was stoned to death.”
“For what?”
“Preaching that Christ was divine.”
There you go again, Slater thought. One more entry for his inventory of religious slaughter.
Lifting his digital camera to take a picture of the jumble, Kozak said, “I am going to write a paper about this church, I think.”
“Not while you’re supposed to be on duty watching Eva.”
“She has been sleeping. I have listened to the monitor,” Kozak assured him, before adding gravely, “but she should be in a hospital by now, yes?”
“Yes, and she will be soon. A chopper’s on the way.”
“Ah, so you got through to someone, after all.”
“I had to call the head of the AFIP, in D.C. If she can’t get them to jump, no one can.”
Kozak slipped the camera back into his pocket. “I suspect she was not happy to hear this news,” Kozak sympathized.
“No, she wasn’t.” Now that Slater was aware of it, he could see that there was indeed some sort of screen erected behind all the camouflage. He could even detect the glint of gold paint on a faded mural.
Kozak nodded, looking down. “The bureaucrats, they never understand. The situation on the ground is never the same as the situation in their plans. They think it should always be easy, the way it looks on paper.”
You can say that again, Slater thought. He was trying not to dwell on the fallout from his conversation with Dr. Levinson. The rest of his life loomed before him like a great empty plain, and it was almost a relief when his thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a low, but anguished, murmuring from the quarantine tent.
“Eva’s awake again,” he said, as her voice crackled over the audio monitor.
“But she sounds like she is in pain.”
He could increase the drip, even give her an injection, but there was only so much he could do under these conditions. And as he hurried back to help her, he heard an even worse sound.
A spasm of coughing. Harsh and wet. And flulike.
Chapter 44
The breaker of chains.
When Charlie Vane read those four words on the computer screen, he felt as if he had just broken into the vault at Fort Knox.
The silver cross was sitting on a yellow legal pad, its emeralds glinting in the buttery glow of the banker’s lamp. Like a lottery winner who needed to study his lucky ticket one more time, Charlie picked it up and turned it over. The inscription was in Russian, but he had written the translation Voynovich had given him on the pad.
“To my little one. No one can break the chains of divine love that bind us. Your loving father, Grigori.”
He had been reading it all wrong. Misinterpreting what it said.
But now he knew better. It was as if, with that one simple phrase, he’d just been given the key to a secret code. Now he knew the story. All his Internet research had finally paid off.
By the year 1901, Nicholas II, the reigning Romanov Tsar, had long been praying for a son. He and his wife, Alexandra, had had three daughters already, and to ensure the survival of his dynasty, Nicholas needed a male heir to be born. But on the night of June 18, the Tsaritsa gave birth to a fourth daughter, and to keep his wife from seeing his disappointment, Nicholas took a long walk to compose himself before going into the royal chamber. On that walk, he must have given himself a stern talking-to, because he resolved to make the best of it and honor the birth of this new daughter by freeing several students who had been imprisoned for rioting in Moscow and St. Petersburg the previous winter.
The name he chose for her was Anastasia, which meant the breaker of chains.
As Charlie studied the cross again, he saw how everything now fell right into place.
“The little one”—malenkaya—to whom it was addressed was a commonly used nickname for the mischievous young grand duchess, Anastasia. And the “loving father” was not her dad, but a priest. A father named Grigori.