The Romanov Cross: A Novel

by Robert Masello

  “Is all that for us?” Harley asked, with a hint of pride.

  Charlie angled the van down the other side of the hill and bumped along until he was sure he was well past the roadblock. He’d have continued on through the trees and brush, but he knew there was a series of ravines and gullies coming up, and not even a Humvee could have made it much farther. Besides, while he was heading due southeast, the authorities would still be looking for him northwest of his true location.

  With both hands furiously working the gears and gas and brake levers, he maneuvered the van down a long, slick gradient, once or twice nearly losing control.

  “You want me to drive?” Harley asked.

  “Like you’d know how.”

  “I know how. Who drove you back from Dillingham the time you got so shit-faced you couldn’t stand up?”

  “In case you forgot, I can’t ever stand up.”

  “Well, if you could have.”

  Charlie guided the car along a long drainage ditch, then up an embankment and onto the asphalt. For the first time in over an hour, all the tires were on the same level. But considering the fact that an allpoints bulletin was out for Harley, maybe it would be best, he thought, if his brother was just a little less visible to some good citizen with a CB radio.

  “Get in the back,” he said, “and use the blanket to cover yourself up.”

  “Nobody’s gonna be out in this shit,” Harley complained. “I can just duck down if I have to.”

  “Are you gonna argue every single thing with me?”

  Grumbling, Harley crawled over the front seat, his muddy boots kicking Charlie’s Bible CDs all over the floor. Rummaging around among the emergency supplies that every driver in Alaska knew to carry—extra gas cans, flares, flashlights, batteries, a spare tire, lug wrench, some beef jerky, bottled water, mosquito repellent, sleeping bag—Harley pulled out a ratty blanket and drew it around his shoulders.

  Charlie checked him out in the rearview mirror, huddled behind the driver’s seat, and didn’t like what he saw. Was he shivering?

  “Now lie down and try to get some sleep,” he said.

  For once, Harley did as he was told.

  Driving on into the night, Charlie turned the radio to the local weather station and heard that the storm was only going to get worse. Welcome to Alaska. He pushed the accelerator lever forward, locking in the cruise control at a steady forty-five—any faster than that and he’d spin out for sure—and focused on the road. His headlights illuminated only a narrow slice right down the middle, but he could sense, all around him, the low frozen hills pressing in on him—lonely and empty and dark. A darkness, as Exodus and the Reverend Abercrombie had so aptly put it, that could be felt.

  Chapter 50

  As the helicopter swept in over the harbor of Port Orlov, Slater could see the Coast Guard vessels bobbing offshore, their spotlights sweeping back and forth across the docks, making sure that nothing came in or went out. Not that it was likely on a night like this. The town itself was largely dark, the snowy streets scoured by the punishing wind.

  Dr. Lantos was barely clinging to life, her face beneath the oxygen mask a deep purple, and in Slater’s mind there could no longer be any question about what was wrong. She had a hacking cough, mounting pulmonary problems, and a high fever.

  She had come down with the flu.

  Which meant it was possible that Nika, pierced by the needle, might have become infected, too. But it wasn’t certain, there were still too many questions. Was it transmissible that way? Had the needle been infected, and more to the point, had it been infected before the puncture wound occurred? Slater clung to the possibility that it had not, even as he tended to Lantos. The last time he had found himself in a position like this, administering to an endangered patient in the bay of a helicopter, the outcome had been bad indeed, but right now, he had to put those fears, and those terrible memories from Afghanistan, aside. This time, he lectured himself, the patient would survive; this time she would get the care she needed before it was too late; this time he would get full cooperation instead of delays and impediments.

  As the chopper descended, it skimmed the tops of the evergreen trees, and made for the bright white lights of the hockey rink. It had no sooner settled on the center of the ice, its rotors still winding to a halt, than a refueling truck rumbled toward it. The nearest biohazard-containment facility was hundreds of miles away in the state capital. “Eva,” Slater said, laying a hand on her shoulder, “I’ll see you in Juneau.”

  But she did not reply, or show any sign of even having heard him.

  The bay doors were thrown open by a medical officer in full hazmat ensemble, and Slater leapt out. He held up a hand to help Nika to disembark but she was already jumping out on her own.

  She called out “Ray!” to a man wearing a police parka and a sheriff’s badge a few yards away, but her face mask made it impossible to be heard. Pulling it away for a second, she called out again, “Ray! Did you find them?”

  Standing on the ice with legs spread wide apart to keep his balance, he called back, “Not yet.” As instructed, he was wearing his own mask and gloves, too. “I went out to the Vane house, but Charlie said they weren’t there.”

  “We both know that Charlie Vane couldn’t tell the truth if he tried.”

  “I hear ya, Mayor. But I haven’t got a warrant to search the place, and nobody’s seen Harley, or Eddie for that matter, for the past few days.” Gesturing at the oil truck deployed from the company that employed Russell, he said, “And Russell hasn’t shown up for his job, either.”

  “He won’t be,” Nika said, soberly. “He’s dead.”

  “What did you say?”

  She pointed to the cargo bay, where two Coast Guardsmen, also suited up, were removing the body bag.

  “He was found on the island. The wolves got him.”

  The sheriff, even from half a dozen yards away, was plainly pole-axed.

  “Keep him on ice, and keep the bag sealed,” Slater interjected, before turning back to Nika and saying, in a low voice, “Maybe we should take that drive now.”

  “Sure,” she said, knowing full well what he meant. Taking care not to slip on the ice, and under the puzzled eye of the sheriff and his deputy, Nika led Slater over to the municipal garage at one end of the rink; the last time she’d been in here she’d been parking the Zamboni. Now she went right past it, along with the snowplows and the garbage truck, and stopped beside Port Orlov’s one and only all-terrain ambulance.

  “Get in,” she said, sliding into the driver’s seat, as he raced around to the passenger side. “Where to first?”

  “Harley’s place.”

  “Buckle up,” she replied, rolling down her window and putting the car into gear.

  As she pulled out of the garage, the sheriff scooted in front of the headlights, holding up his hands. “Hey, hang on, where you going with that?” he shouted, holding the mask away from his mouth. “Nobody’s supposed to be going anywhere tonight—those are orders.”

  “The mayor is exempt,” Nika called out, swerving around him and heading past the corner of the community center. For a second, the deputy held up his shotgun, as if waiting for instructions to shoot, but the sheriff just stood there, hands on his ample hips, unsure whose authority won out in a situation like this.

  Front Street was deserted, the few fishing-gear shops and the grocery closed up tight. Even the Yardarm was dark. The old totem pole, teetering to one side, loomed ahead. Slater looked at its grinning otters and snarling wolves with a new understanding. There was nothing like a trip to St. Peter’s Island to broaden your horizons.

  With a deafening roar, the chopper, fully fueled again, soared over their heads, red lights blinking, as it headed east … carrying its precious, and endangered, cargo.

  “Will she make it?” Nika asked.

  And this time Slater didn’t know how to reply; he had thoroughly briefed the chief medical officer on board, and Dr. Levinson had prepared t
he team in Juneau. But there was no knowing. “I hope so,” he finally said.

  In the meantime, all he could do was keep a close watch on Nika.

  Turning the ambulance into the driveway between a gun shop and a lumberyard, she said, “Harley lives in that trailer out back.” A violet glow could be seen between the tangled slats of the window blind. “He’s probably feeding his snake.”

  Climbing out of the ambulance, she bounded up the steps to the door, banged loudly with the flat of her hand, then leaned over toward the window and peered inside. Slater, standing with one foot in the car and the other out, pulled the mask away from his mouth and took this chance to gulp the fresh night air. The thermals and hazmat suit he was wearing were plenty warm for the car—too warm, in fact—but even after a minute or two outside, the Alaskan cold could start to penetrate them. When Nika turned around, she was shaking her head.

  “Eddie’s place next?” he asked.

  “Eddie’s mom’s a meth head. Nobody hangs out there, not even Eddie.”

  “And you say that this Charlie Vane is a liar.”

  “True enough,” she said, getting back behind the wheel, “but I never said he was a good one.”

  Backing up onto the empty street, she took a right at the edge of the lumberyard and headed down a dark, bumpy track no longer lined with any stores or commercial establishments. This one was just a back road dotted with an occasional shack, slapped together out of weathered planks and tar paper, or a mobile home parked up the hillside. Old wooden meat racks leaned between dilapidated sheds and piles of firewood. On the way, Nika elaborated on Charlie and his church of the Holy Writ.

  “And you say he’s actually got followers?”

  Nika shrugged. “Online, I guess you can find all types. Charlie did even better, though. He managed to convince those two women you saw at the memorial service—Rebekah and Bathsheba—to come and run his household for him.”

  She tapped the brakes as a large, black object lumbered across the road. As the moose languidly turned its head, the headlights made its antlers and eyes shine. For a creature of such size, the legs looked too spindly and the knobby knees downright fragile.

  “He needed them,” Nika said, picking up speed again once the moose had moseyed down an embankment, “since his accident.”

  “What exactly happened?”

  Nika reiterated enough of the family history—sunken crab boats, a hundred petty-theft charges, the tragic but harebrained attempt to run the rapids at Heron River—to give him a renewed sense of who he might be dealing with. “But he still gets around pretty well—he’s got his wheelchair, and a four-wheel-drive van that’s been totally retrofitted with hand controls and an eight-cylinder engine. The only thing that surprises me is that he hasn’t cracked it up yet.”

  The ambulance bucked as it hit a series of potholes, and she gripped the wheel with her latex gloves more tightly. “The Vane family,” she summed up, “has an uncanny talent for destruction.”

  Slater, staring off into the inky blackness, wondered just how deep that talent ran. Even if he found Harley, would he be able to reason with him? If he still had the vials from the freezer in the lab, not to mention the scroll and the icon, would Slater be able to explain to him the mortal danger in which he had placed himself as a result? Would he be able to convince him that no further charges would be leveled against him—that his very identity would be concealed—if he would just relinquish this lethal booty? Slater was well aware of the catastrophe this entire mission had become, but if he could simply contain the danger before it went any farther, it might provide a decent grace note to end his public career on. He could still hear his ex-wife’s voice in his head, all those times she had tried to talk him into a nice, quiet, suburban practice, treating allergies and scraped knees, but the idea was still anathema. He wanted his work to matter in the world, to feel that he was doing something valuable and needed and worthwhile.

  For a long stretch now, there had been no signs of habitation at all, just a lonely road that had gradually wound its way back down toward the jagged coastline. Snow and sleet, blown all the way from Siberia and across the Bering Sea, slashed against the windows. It was hard to imagine the zeal that must have driven that tiny Russian sect, over a hundred years before, to make that same journey across this icy strait and settle on a forbidding bit of foreign land, a place they dared to rename after their patron saint, St. Peter.

  Even more astonishing was the fact that their long-forgotten journey, which had ended in their own annihilation, should now pose such a threat to the world beyond this wilderness.

  “It’s just around the next bend,” Nika said, slowing the ambulance. “You can’t miss the lighted cross that Charlie stuck up on his roof.”

  Slater recalled seeing the cross when he had first flown over the town. But as the headlights swept the sparse brush along the oceanfront, his eyes were riveted on a ramshackle wharf, instead. Lashed to a concrete piling, a small vessel bobbed in the icy water.

  It was the RHI.

  “Harley’s here,” he declared. “That’s the boat from the island!”

  Nika nodded and turned the ambulance up a narrow drive with snowdrifts piled high on either side, stopping beside a flight of sagging stairs. The illuminated cross beamed beside the chimney stack. There were lights on in the house, and a detached garage that looked old enough to have been originally built as a stable.

  “Let me do the talking,” Nika said. “They may be crazy, but I know how to handle them.”

  While Nika went up the stairs, Slater took a flashlight from the glove compartment and sidled around to the garage. As he dragged a rotting log over toward a window mounted high on the wall, he heard Nika pounding on the front door of the house. The booties of his hazmat suit were wet, and he had to work hard to maintain his balance while pointing the flashlight beam through the grimy, spider-webbed glass. Inside, he could make out a stack of used tires, a pyramid of rusty paint cans, and a snowmobile.

  But there was no sign of a van, retrofitted or otherwise.

  “Step on down,” he heard from a few feet behind him, “or else,” and when he turned his head, he saw Rebekah, in a long, ratty fur coat, aiming a shotgun at him. Judging from the look on her scrawny face, it was not an idle threat.

  He stepped off the log, holding his palms out to show he meant no harm.

  “We’re looking for Harley Vane,” he said, his voice muffled by his mask, “that’s all.”

  “I could shoot you dead,” she said, “right on this spot, and I’d be within my rights.”

  “We just need to talk to him,” he said, in as reasonable a tone as he could muster.

  “Get going,” she said, indicating with the end of the gun that he should walk around to the front steps and go on up them. He could feel the rifle trained on him the whole way. In the entry hall, he found Nika with her own hands in the air, and Bathsheba shakily aiming a pistol in her general direction.

  “I thought you said they’d listen to you,” Slater said, and Nika shrugged.

  “They tell me Harley’s not here,” she said.

  “Go on into the meeting room,” Rebekah ordered, and then Bathsheba stood to one side. Beyond her, Slater saw a big room with rugs all over the floor and some folding chairs stacked beside a gun cabinet, which was standing wide open.

  Once Slater and Nika had complied, the two sisters seemed at a loss as to what to do next. Bathsheba had forgotten even to keep her pistol raised, and Rebekah kept moving the muzzle of her own doublebarreled shotgun from one to the other.

  “Charlie’s not home, either?” Nika asked.

  “Go get some rope,” Rebekah said to her sister.

  “How much?”

  “As much as you can find!”

  Slater was quickly assessing this place they called the meeting room; to him, it appeared to serve as more of an office. There was a massive old slab of a desk, with papers and printouts spilling out of wire bins, and two, big-screen compu
ter monitors. One was showing the screen saver—a towering cross, with a white wolf at its base, and the title Vane’s Holy Writ. But the images on the other one were a lot more intriguing.

  When Bathsheba left to get the rope, Slater inched closer and saw an array of Russian icons, most of them featuring the Virgin Mary in a red veil, holding the Christ child in her lap. The headline read: FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE HERMITAGE MUSEUM, ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA. One of them was the spitting image of the icon they’d found in the deacon’s grave.

  If he’d had a shred of doubt about Harley’s complicity in the missing icon—or where he had just been—it was gone now.

  As was any doubt about the sisters’ plans; they were going to hold him hostage there, along with Nika, as long as it took for the Vane boys to complete their getaway in the missing van.

  “Where did they go?” he asked, noting, for the first time, a wet spot on the rug and the faint smell of vomit.

  Rebekah’s grip on the shotgun tightened.

  “You need to know some things,” he said, sternly. “My name is Dr. Frank Slater, and I am asking you, as a representative of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, in Washington, D.C., to put the gun down and answer my questions.”

  Rebekah was listening, but the gun didn’t budge.

  “If you don’t cooperate—if you don’t tell me, right now, where Harley and his brother have gone—you will face local, state, and federal charges. You will be brought to trial, I can guarantee you that, and you, and your sister, will both be sentenced to serious prison time.” He stared straight back into her pallid face. “This is your last chance to cooperate.”

  “Town,” she finally blurted out. “They went to town.”

  “That’s a lie,” Nika said. “We’d have passed them on our way here.”

  Bathsheba bustled back into the room, trailing a length of rope on the carpet behind her.

  “Although they don’t know it,” Slater said, “Harley and your husband are in great danger.”