by Jenni Wiltz
The doctors couldn’t explain it. They told her parents that her heart rate had fallen to 29 beats per minute, resulting in a coma. They didn’t say anything about Belial. True to his word, the angel had taken up residence in her head. He perched in the space between her brain tissue and her skull. It hurt when he moved and every time he shifted his wings, the tips of his feathers pricked her brain like needles. When she tried to explain this to the doctor, he shook his head and said it was impossible. She told him to look for Belial on an X-ray, but he found the wrong thing—all he wanted to talk about was something called the limbic system.
Her parents shuffled her between psychiatrists, psychologists, and neurologists but none of them could find Belial either, so she gave up and stopped talking altogether. She simply sat, uncommunicative, until they let her go. Some diagnosed her as autistic; others said she was an early-onset paranoid delusional schizophrenic. They pumped her full of olanzapine and sent her home, leaving her embarrassed parents full of apologies for their daughter’s refusal to “get well.”
When she was fourteen, her parents died in a car accident. Natalie missed the funeral because she set the alarm clock for p.m. instead of a.m. Black-clad Beth barged in afterward and demanded that Natalie recite the list of Plantagenet kings in sequential order. When Natalie mixed up Henry III and Edward III, Beth flushed every pill in the house and moved back home.
The three of them—she, Beth and Belial—eventually developed a comfortable working relationship. Belial dispensed angelic wisdom and acute physical pain in equal measure. Beth dosed her with cognitive therapy, and she herself had learned that alcohol was by far the most effective means of making it all just go away. There had been several occasions when alcohol failed her, but only one that had convinced Beth to take out a life insurance policy for each of them. The puffy white lines on her forearm still itched sometimes, as if the skin beneath them fit too tightly.
Natalie looked at the clock again. It was after two, which meant Beth’s lunch date had gone well. She refilled the pencil cup and sipped as slowly as she could until the familiar clomp of Beth’s shoes echoed in the hallway.
Tall, thin, and blonde, Beth Brandon swept into the room on a breeze of Dolce & Gabbana perfume. “That’s it,” she said, tossing her tote bag into a chair. “No more blind dates with guys in the computer science department.”
“What happened?”
“He ate sushi with his hands.” She stopped, staring at the Yale, Class of ‘95 mug in Natalie’s hands. “Nat, what are you doing?”
“Drinking whiskey.”
“Out of my pencil cup? That’s disgusting. Why didn’t you drink it from the flask?”
“Whiskey needs to breathe, Beth.”
“So does your liver.”
Natalie shrugged. “Sometimes I eat sushi with my hands.”
“You’re different.”
She’d heard those words all her life, even from Beth, who should have had the guts to tell her to just use the goddamn chopsticks. She raised the cup and drained it in a single gulp.
Beth sighed. “I’m sorry, babe, I didn’t mean it. Just put down the booze. How are my talking points coming?”
Natalie tapped the bundle of index cards on the desk. As Beth’s research assistant, it was her job to track down the information Beth needed for her books, speeches, and lecture notes. Rosemont University paid her just enough to stay afloat, and having Beth as a boss kept her from having to explain Belial to a real employer. “You’re covered,” Natalie said. “You’re boring, but you’re covered.”
“Boring will pay for Seth’s next year of school. The chancellor said he’d put me on the top pay grade if this book performs.”
“The chancellor’s an asshole. He’s going to pass you up for department chair.”
Beth shrugged. “He thinks I’m too young.”
“Change his mind.”
“Nat, please. This is my career. Let me handle it my own way.”
“Your way sucks,” Natalie said, slamming the cup onto Beth’s desk. “If you want the chancellor’s attention, you know how to get it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“Come on, Nat, we talked about this before I wrote the book. It’s not the right time. Not this book. Not now.”
“I told you it exists. Why won’t you believe me?”
Beth blinked twice. “I do believe you.”
“You only blink when you’re bullshitting people.”
“Jesus, Nat, are we back to this again? No one has ever found any evidence that there’s money out there with the tsar’s name on it. If there were, someone would have talked by now. We would have found a paper trail. Entire books have been written about this.”
“Book,” Natalie corrected. “And he followed the wrong trail.”
“I’m a not a treasure hunter. This book is about Nicholas II, not his money.”
“But Clarke, Lovell, Fallows, Holtzmann…they were all looking for an account with the tsar’s name on it, something with deposits made before the abdication. Belial said that’s not how it happened.”
“How did it happen, then? Did he tell you that?”
“No,” Natalie grumbled, looking down at her untied shoes. “I don’t think he knows.”
Don’t I? Belial snickered. He flicked his wings and the movement sent bolts of lightning shooting through her skull. She sucked in her breath and gritted her teeth.
“Listen, kiddo,” Beth said, “I’d love for you to be right, but I can’t risk my reputation on something you don’t know. The book is written…this is the press conference announcing its release, for God’s sake!” Beth sank into a folding chair next to the desk and Natalie stared at her until she relented. “Don’t look at me like that. You know as well as I do that Stalin tore that country apart looking for extra money. If there were any tsarist accounts left, he would have found them.”
“Are you saying Stalin is smarter than we are?”
“I’m saying you need to get a grip and admit how improbable it is.”
Natalie held out her wrists. “As improbable as this?”
Beth shivered. “There’s only so much I can take on faith, Nat.”
“Belial said there’s a password. Do you remember that confession I found? The one that said Marie planned to give the password away to the guard she’d fallen in love with?”
Beth slipped off her jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. “I thought we went over this. There isn’t one shred of evidence to prove Marie went through with it. It’s not mentioned in any of the Romanov diaries, in statements from the guards, or the Sokolov report.”
“That guard might not have talked, but his granddaughter did. On her deathbed, she swore to a priest that Grand Duchess Marie told her grandfather how to retrieve Nicholas’s money. There was a password, she said, that Marie had sent him in a letter.”
“A letter that never arrived. Nat, they’re all lying. Why can’t you see that?”
“It exists! It’s still out there, in someone’s attic or sewn into the lining of a coat that’s hanging in the Moscow Goodwill. Russians are superstitious…they don’t swear to a priest unless they’re telling the truth.”
“How many people swore Anna Anderson was Anastasia?” Beth got up and circled the room, a black-clad vulture in Blahniks. “I humored you the first time you brought this up and I bit my tongue the second. But I have to tell you, Nat, you’re going Rain Man on me with this one. There is no missing money. The guard’s granddaughter lied and you fell for it. Just accept it, all right?”
She’s wrong, Belial said. Why can’t you make her see?
I’m trying, Natalie thought. Tears stung her eyes and she fought the urge to crawl under Beth’s desk. “The Bank of England said—”
“Fuck the Bank of England!” Beth looked up at the clock and swore. “I have a make-or-break press conference in an hour, Nat! I have a kid to raise, an ex drainin
g me for alimony, a chancellor breathing down my neck, and I just went on a date with someone who thinks the Weimar Republic is part of the Hoth System. I don’t have the luxury of living in an alternate universe right now! If you’re going to help me, fine. If not, go find someone else to listen to your nutball conspiracy theories.”
“Oh, I helped you,” Natalie said, glancing at the pile of cards on the desk. “I was going to ease you into it before you decided to be a bitch about it.”
Beth turned the color of calamine lotion. “Nat, you didn’t! Tell me you didn’t!” She snatched up the cards, shuffling through them.
“You’ll have everyone’s attention around the two minute mark. Be ready.” She grabbed her flask and stumbled out of the room before her sister could see her cry.
Chapter Four
July 2012
San Francisco, California
Ambassador Mikhail Kadyrov sat down at his desk and reached for the steaming cup of coffee sitting on the blotter. He pinched off the lid and inhaled. Coffee was one thing this country got right. He had never liked the tar-black sludge his mother served at home in the Caucasus. “Olenka, you’re an angel,” he called to his assistant.
Thin as a rail and hopelessly addicted to more than one Columbian export, Olenka knew every coffee counter in the city. “It’s shade-grown, the old-fashioned way,” she answered. “Not these bullshit hybrid plants with overgrown leaves.”
He sniffed the coffee suspiciously and picked up the envelope sitting on his desk—an 11”x13” manila with no return address. A single sheet of paper slipped out, typed with block capital letters. He read it quickly. When he reached the bottom of the page, all thought of coffee had vanished.
“Olenka,” he said, snatching the envelope and marching it out to her. “When did this arrive?”
“I don’t know. What is it?”
“It was on my desk, next to the coffee. You must have put it there.”
“I didn’t, I swear.”
“Tell me the truth, Olenka.” He looked into her eyes, small and wide-set, layered with multiple hues of shiny gray powder. “This is important.”
“I put your coffee on your desk and came right back out here.”
“Was the envelope already there?”
She shrugged. “I think so.”
“I need you to be sure.”
“Jesus, I don’t know! I didn’t know there’d be a quiz!”
“Have any delivery men come into the office?”
“It’s too early for that. What’s going on? Am I in trouble?”
Kadyrov felt the contents of his stomach churn. It had to be a joke. It was simply not possible that someone in San Francisco had managed to locate what the Soviets had been unable to find since 1918. Every Cheka agent since the era of Dzerzhinsky, including his father, had been told about it—all with no luck. Most of them believed it didn’t exist.
But it did exist. His father had believed it. And now someone else did, too.
Beads of sweat pearled on his forehead. Who could he tell? What if this was a joke, a former KGB agent having a laugh at his expense? He’d lose his cushy California posting and be sent to a third-world hellhole.
He had to choose his confidante wisely. Men had been buried for less.
“Don’t let anyone in,” he ordered, stumbling into his office and closing the door.
The envelope was covered with his prints, but surely Valery could do what they did on American TV shows: find trace elements of a rare mineral that pinpointed the author’s location or build a profile based on word choice and handwriting analysis. Whoever this person was, he or she had breached embassy security and must be prosecuted. At least the closed-circuit security cameras would have an image, something for Valery to go on.
He looked again at the letter. The author claimed to have an accomplice, an American professor prominent within her field whose reputation for scholarly accuracy was impeccable. It was meant to be a threat, Mikhail knew. A veiled warning that killing the author of the note wouldn’t solve anything—there was someone else who had the information, someone whose disappearance wouldn’t go unnoticed.
They both had to be silenced. If what the author claimed was true, a single person stood to become one of the richest, most powerful people on the face of the earth: a new Tsar. It could never be allowed.
He reached for the phone.
Chapter Five
July 2012
Moscow, Russia
The phone rang with a shrill double beep, its red light blinking furiously. Vadim Primakov covered it with an open file folder and kept working. I don’t have time for this, he thought. The Kremlin wanted to cut his agency’s funding by another ten percent, putting them back at a level he hadn’t seen since 1994. That bastard Starinov is reducing us to a footnote in history.
Founded by Yeltsin to circumvent FSK infighting, the Public Security Intelligence Bureau was meant to be an independent intelligence service staffed with people Yeltsin could trust—people who had never worked for the KGB, NKVD, or FSK. Their mandate ran from counter-terrorism to surveillance and action services. But when Yeltsin handed the reins of power to Vladimir Putin, a former FSB director, the bureau became an unwanted stepchild. Putin reduced the bureau’s agents to fact-checkers for FSB journalists and escorts for foreign dignitaries. Now, Prime Minister Maxim Starinov was determined to finish what Putin began—he’d already begun dismantling any bureaucratic entity not staffed with his own minions.
The only way to save his funding was to attack someone else’s, but wading through his stolen copy of the FSB budget would take hours. Nikulin had dropped it off at 6:00 p.m. and it had to be returned by morning. The paper was spectrally controlled, making it impossible to photocopy or scan. Eighty pages of densely populated spreadsheets remained and it was already past 9:30 p.m.
But the damn phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Vadim counted eight rings, then ten, then twelve. He lifted the file folder to check the LCD readout. The caller’s ID and number were blocked, but the bureau’s decryption software displayed the digits as it identified them. When he saw the country code for the United States pop up, he swore.
Problems in America never simply went away.
He picked up the handset. “Go away. I’m busy.”
“Dobryi vyecher, Vadim Petrovich. I am Mikhail Vasilievich Kadyrov, Consul General in San Francisco.”
“What the hell do you want?”
“I need your help.”
“Call your Ministry. I don’t work for them.”
“Valery said you were the one I should call.”
Vadim swore. The powerful Chairman of the Investigative Committee had erased an embezzlement charge against his daughter, making it possible for her to find work and take care of his granddaughter again. It was a small favor compared to what many others asked for; still, he should have known Valery would keep score. “What does he want?”
“I received an anonymous letter here in San Francisco,” Mikhail began. “From someone who claimed he has access to the lost tsarist funds in the Bank of England.”
Vadim cut him short. “I’m not interested in ancient history. Tell Valery I have better things to do.”
“Are you familiar with the Rumkowski file?”
Vadim shivered. No one had mentioned that file aloud in years, not since Yeltsin. He reached to the back of his desk phone and toggled off the automatic recording switch. “What about it?”
“Do you remember what it said?”
“Of course.”
“Whoever wrote this letter claims to have the password.”
Vadim frowned. “But no civilian knows there is a password. The contents of that file were never declassified. The only people who saw it are in the Kremlin or in the ground. As a matter of fact, Mikhail Vasilievich, how do you know about it?”
“My father was one of the men Rumkowski used to infiltrate the bank.”
“Jesus Christ.” Vadim scribbled a note to have Kadyrov’s file brought u
p from the archives. “What else does it say?”
“The writer claims two of the four Grand Duchesses wrote letters to people on the outside during their captivity, each with the password inside. Just before the family was murdered in 1918, those letters were smuggled out of the Ipatiev House—by this person’s great-grandfather.”
“Rumkowski didn’t say anything about the password leaving that house.”
“No,” the ambassador said pointedly. “He didn’t.”
Alarm bells began ringing in Vadim’s head. Something Yeltsin had said to him once, when he asked why Yeltsin chose to raze the mansion in which the Romanovs were massacred. “For all we knew,” Yeltsin said, “the password was still in there. We had to take it apart piece by piece. It was the only way to know for sure.” That had been in 1977, when Yeltsin was first secretary of the Sverdlovsk District Central Committee and Vadim a junior secretary in the Moscow City Party Committee. No one had ever said anything about looking for the password outside the Ipatiev house—until now.
Still, this lunatic letter writer was probably a fortune hunter, someone who read too many thrillers. “What does he want?”
“Asylum, citizenship, and immunity.”
Vadim snorted. “Is that all?”
“He also says that if we don’t give him what he wants, he’ll sell the password to the highest bidder.”
“Does he really think someone will pay more than the tsar left behind?”
“Think about it, Vadim. Maybe there’s more than money in the account. If he knows about the password, what else might he know?”
It was a possibility Vadim hadn’t even considered. “Why does this fool believe we’ll do as he asks?”
“Because he’s already shared his information with someone else, a professor named Elizabeth Brandon. I had to look her up, but it seems she’s quite well known in university circles. Her new book is about Tsar Nicholas II. It’s a revisionist history, of all things.”