Library of Gold

by Alex Archer

  History has a way of hiding its secrets…

  He was one of Russia’s most infamous rulers, and he alone held the key to a legendary Byzantine collection of books, given to him in the dowry of Princess Sophia of Constantinople. Ivan Vasilyevich—otherwise known as Ivan the Terrible—owned a library filled with rare and priceless tomes that men would kill for. Would die for. But the czar carried the knowledge of its whereabouts to his grave. And it falls to archaeologist Annja Creed, almost five hundred years later, to discover the secrets of the Library of Gold.

  When the opportunity to unravel the mystery of this so-called eighth wonder of the world lands in Annja’s lap, she can’t resist. Armed with a diary of cryptic clues, she embarks on a journey to Russia, where she must somehow find her way into the very heart of the country, beneath the Kremlin.

  But Annja soon discovers she’s racing a ruthless KGB agent driven by sinister motives. She finds herself deep beneath the Russian soil in a dangerous game of cat and mouse... Will she be the next to mysteriously disappear from history?

  “Colonel! You should take a look at this.”

  The guard led them outside St. Basil’s Cathedral and over to one of the trash cans in Red Square. He pointed inside the mouth of the barrel.

  Sitting on some discarded trash was a woman’s hand.

  Goshenko reached in and pulled it out, which caused the captain of the guard to recoil. But the hand wasn’t flesh and blood. It was stone. The stone hand of the Virgin Mother.

  The colonel looked at it for a moment and then held it up so Danislov could see its hollow center. “I want to know what was hidden inside here, Sergeant. I don’t care what you have to do, just get me whatever it was.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “The American, Annja Creed, and her companion are staying over at the Marriott on Tverskaya Street.” Colonel Goshenko nodded, satisfied. “I suggest you start there.”

  Titles in this series:

  Destiny

  Solomon’s Jar

  The Spider Stone

  The Chosen

  Forbidden City

  The Lost Scrolls

  God of Thunder

  Secret of the Slaves

  Warrior Spirit

  Serpent’s Kiss

  Provenance

  The Soul Stealer

  Gabriel’s Horn

  The Golden Elephant

  Swordsman’s Legacy

  Polar Quest

  Eternal Journey

  Sacrifice

  Seeker’s Curse

  Footprints

  Paradox

  The Spirit Banner

  Sacred Ground

  The Bone Conjurer

  Tribal Ways

  The Dragon’s Mark

  Phantom Prospect

  Restless Soul

  False Horizon

  The Other Crowd

  Tear of the Gods

  The Oracle’s Message

  Cradle of Solitude

  Labyrinth

  Fury’s Goddess

  Magic Lantern

  Library of Gold

  ™

  Library of Gold

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to Joe Nassise for his contribution to this work.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 1

  Footsteps in the dark.

  That’s all Ridolfo di Fioravanti heard at first, the tramp of booted feet somewhere in the distance, but it was enough. Though he couldn’t see them yet, he knew who was marching down the long, dark tunnels toward him and the rest of the men working on the project. He knew that when they were at last revealed in the light of the oil lamps there would be no doubt of their intentions.

  He had begun to suspect what was being prepared for them when the guards changed. For weeks the work crews had been accompanied by a squad of soldiers, there, he suspected, to prevent the workers from making off with the tools more than anything else. But within the past week the soldiers had been replaced by men wearing the black uniform and dog’s head insignia of the Oprichniki, the czar’s secret police. This was not a good sign. The Oprichniki were nothing more than sadistic thugs in uniform, brought into being to help the czar quell internal resistance and turned loose to terrorize and torture anyone he saw as a threat.

  Ridolfo should have seen it coming. When Czar Ivan had first summoned him to his palace and told him what he wanted to do, Ridolfo had been too caught up in the technicalities of the project to see the danger. He’d let his excitement overcome his good sense and now it seemed he was going to pay for that oversight.

  But not before he saw to his family’s welfare.

  He crossed the room to where his nephew, Giuseppe, was helping some of the other workers pile debris from an earlier excavation into a cart. Grabbing the boy by the arm, Ridolfo led him off to one side.

  “I need you to take a message to your father for me,” he told the boy.

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  “But I’ll miss the end of the shift!”

  The conditions they were working in were arduous, at best, and for a moment Ridolfo didn’t understand why the boy would want to be slaving down here when he could be out in the sunlight above. But then the meaning of the boy’s statement filtered past Ridolfo’s fear enough to make sense. The workers were paid at the end of each work period. If Giuseppe left now, he’d forfeit the effort he’d put in up to this point.

  If he doesn’t leave now, he’ll be dead.

  “I will collect your wages myself,” Ridolfo told him with a smile on his face. “Have no fear.”

  Ridolfo was the chief foreman and designer of the project, which made the lie seem convincing. Thankfully the boy took it at face value.

  Ridolfo reached inside his shirt and removed the slim leather journal he kept secreted there. He passed it to Giuseppe.

  “Take this to your father and tell him the crows are flying. Understand? The crows are flying.”

  Giuseppe frowned but nodded, anyway. “The crows are flying. Yes, sir.”

  “Good boy!” Ridolfo kept the smile on his face, but inside he wanted to scream. The sound of booted feet was much closer now and they were all but out of time. If the czar had sent his uniformed lapdogs down the emergency exit, they were already too late.

  Only one way to find out…

  “Come,” he said with fake cheer, pulling his nephew into the rear section of the vault to where the narrow mouth of the emergency exit was half-hidden in the shadows. He stuck his head inside the tunnel and listened for as long as he dared, but didn’t hear anything. Perhaps the way was still open.

  He
picked up the emergency lantern that always stood inside the entrance of the tunnel and lit it, illuminating the passageway before him. “This will take you directly to the surface,” he said to the boy. “Better yet, by going this way you won’t have to deal with the guards at the main entrance.”

  That last brought a smile to Giuseppe’s face; he hated the dimwitted brutes that passed as guards around here. He took the lantern Ridolfo passed to him and, without a backward glance, scampered up the tunnel with the journal clutched in his other hand.

  Ridolfo watched until the lantern’s light disappeared around a bend and then he quickly moved away from the opening, not wanting to give those who were coming any indication that the passageway was in use. He’d worked out the plan with his brother several days ago when he’d first begun to suspect the end that Czar Ivan had in mind for those working on the project. The message was innocuous enough that it wouldn’t raise concerns if the boy was caught and forced to disclose it, but Ridolfo’s brother would understand what it meant. As any peasant knew, the only time the crows gathered was when they had something to feast upon.

  Ridolfo stepped back into the main vault at the same time a squad of Oprichniki soldiers marched into the room, their weapons in hand, pointed toward the workers. The sight infuriated Ridolfo—how dare they threaten his men? But the angry shout that rose in his throat was instantly stifled when the tall, dark form of Ivan Vasilyevich IV, Grand Prince of Moscow and Czar of the Russian Empire, also known as Ivan the Terrible, stepped from behind the squad.

  Ridolfo sank to one knee and his men followed suit, none of them daring to look in the czar’s direction. Ivan had been known to fly into a rage at even an unintended slight.

  Today, however, he seemed to be in a jovial mood.

  “Get up!” came his deep, booming voice. “Get up! The floor is no place for my chief architect.”

  Ridolfo did as he was told, still mindful that the Oprichniki had not relaxed their watchfulness.

  Ivan was tall, with wide shoulders and a broad chest, made all the more intimidating by his seeming boundless energy. He would never be called handsome, for his small eyes and hooked nose gave him a sinister expression even when he was smiling, as he was now.

  “The work goes well, no?” he asked, his voice made louder by the way it echoed off the close stone walls.

  Ridolfo nodded. “It does, indeed, Your Highness,” he replied, surprised at his steadiness. He knew what was coming, could see it in the gleam in the czar’s eyes, but he’d be damned if he let his fear overwhelm him. He would play his part to the very end. Every second he kept the czar occupied here was another that his family could use to make their escape. “A few more days and we should be complete.”

  The czar’s joviality, of course, was a front. Upon hearing the answer to his question, it quickly vanished, to be replaced by a deep frown. “Days?” The czar glanced with a heavy scowl at Nikolaevich, one of the men in the work crew, who swiftly turned his face away.

  You bastard! Ridolfo thought at the revelation of the traitor, but he was careful to keep his expression neutral. He’d known the czar had spies in his work crew, but he’d never even suspected the big Muscovite.

  Nothing to be done about it now.

  “It is nothing vital,” he said easily, trying to keep Ivan’s legendary temper from erupting upon them all. “Cosmetic issues only.”

  The minute he said it, Ridolfo realized it was the wrong statement to make. The vault had not been designed for the public, but to protect Ivan’s most precious treasure. A few rough spots here and there were nothing compared to keeping the secret of the vault’s existence.

  The self-satisfied smirk that flashed across the czar’s face, there and gone again so quickly Ridolfo might have missed it if he wasn’t looking intently, told the architect it was too late to try to fix the mistake.

  He’d just killed his only opportunity to delay the inevitable. Ridolfo would not be leaving this chamber alive.

  That realization brought with it a strange sense of relief. There was no longer any need to worry about what was to happen; it was too late for that. With his death only moments away, he felt a surge of defiance, the likes of which he’d never felt before. As the other men in the work crew watched in surprise, Ridolfo slowly climbed to his feet, staring at the czar, letting the contempt he felt show plainly on his face.

  Unfortunately, that contempt, righteous or not, was wasted on a murderous thug like Ivan the Terrible. The czar stepped back behind the circle of soldiers he’d brought with him and said clearly enough for everyone to hear, “Get rid of them, Captain. Every last one of them.”

  Ridolfo and his men were horribly outnumbered, but that didn’t stop him and several of the other more perceptive workers from snatching up shovels and pickaxes and charging the hated Oprichniki with murder in their hearts.

  The end result was all but preordained. Ridolfo managed to deliver a couple of blows with the pickax before the soldier in front of him parried a strike and thrust a thick-bladed cavalry sabre through Ridolfo’s chest.

  As the Italian architect lay bleeding to death on the cold stone tile his men had laid only days before, his last thought was of his brother’s son and the clues buried in the pages of the journal the boy carried to the sunlight high above.

  Chapter 2

  “You sounded a little tired in that one, Annja. Let’s redo it, all right?”

  Annja Creed stared out through the glass of the sound booth at the smiling face of her producer, Doug Morrell, and had to resist the urge to run him through with her sword. She sounded tired because she was tired; they’d been at this for more than nine hours already! If he wanted her to sound fresh and energetic, they were going to have to call it quits soon or she wouldn’t have a voice left for tomorrow’s session.

  Annja worked as one of the hosts of Chasing History’s Monsters, a cable television show that featured a combination of history crossed with the weird and unexplained. It was her job to act as the show’s resident skeptic, using reason and history to explain some of the more fantastical ideas that were raised during each episode. It was a position she was well suited for. Her background as an archaeologist gave her the skills to examine disparate pieces of information and pull them together into logical theories, while her ability to speak multiple languages, specifically French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Latin, allowed her to be comfortable in the foreign locations where the show often sent her.

  Of course, her travel had a tendency to bring her face-to-face with all kinds of other trouble, as well. It was almost as if the sword were orchestrating her movements, causing her to be in the right place at the right time to defend the innocent and right wrongs. She’d faced off against enemies of all kinds since taking up the sword, from Thuggee death cults to the angry spirit of an ancient Inuit god. She never knew what she would be facing next.

  The ancient Chinese used to curse people with the expression “May you live in interesting times.” Since the sword came into her life, Annja understood the power in that curse.

  Her life had certainly become interesting.

  She’d arrived at the show’s Manhattan studio early to get a jump on the voice-over work she was scheduled to do for the next three days. The powers-that-be had decided a Chasing History’s Monsters boxed set was just the thing to help kick DVD sales up the charts. They wanted Annja to provide additional detail on the things she’d seen and heard while filming each episode. A kind of director’s cut track, if you will, but from the host’s perspective. The past week had been spent reviewing the episodes, making notes and then turning those notes into coherent remarks to be recorded during the voice-over sessions. Trying to reconstruct thought processes and research of the past several seasons’ worth of programs hadn’t been easy.

  It had also stirred up plenty of other memories, as well. Her first encounter with Roux, meeting Garin Braden, the mystical reforging of the sword once carried by Joan of Arc, the new role she’d adopted as p
rotector of the innocent and defender of the good. Her life had been put in danger more times than she could count. And yet she wouldn’t trade it for the world. Somewhere, deep inside, she knew she’d been born to wield that sword. And she had every intention of doing so well into the foreseeable future. Even if she didn’t understand the hows and whys behind it.

  “Earth to Annja? Hellooo? Anybody home?”

  Doug’s voice over her headphones startled her from her reminiscing.

  “I’m here, Doug. Just rehearsing the lines in my head. One more time and then I’m done for the night.”

  Doug’s boyish grin flashed from the other side of the glass. “Sure, Annja, one more time and that’s it.”

  It took them two more takes, actually, but when they were finished everyone involved applauded. It had been a long day, but they might be able to cut it down to two days if they kept this pace up.

  Afterward Doug dragged Annja to his office to deliver his suggestions for what she should say during tomorrow’s commentary.

  As usual, he was way over the top.

  “Not a chance, Doug,” she found herself saying not five minutes after entering the room. “No way.”

  “But it will drive ratings through the roof, Annja!”

  “I don’t care if it blows them into outer space. I’m not going to say I witnessed a chupacabra attack outside Mexico City.”

  “Okay, forget the attack. How about just claiming you saw one? That should achieve the same effect.”

  “Yeah, of making me look like the world’s biggest idiot. No, Doug, no chupacabra. Period.”

  “Now you’re just being difficult.”

  “No, I’m being honest.”

  “Honest? Since when is that—?”

  Thankfully Doug was interrupted by a knock at the door. A young brunette stuck her head inside the room.

  “Mr. Morrell?”

  Doug held up a finger to Annja as if to say, Hold that thought and then turned to face their visitor.

  “Yes, Jessica?”

  “This was just delivered for Annja,” she said, handing him a fancy envelope tied with a red ribbon.

  Annja couldn’t miss the flirtatious smile Jessica sent Doug, especially since the show’s newest intern didn’t even bother to glance in her direction. The look of irritation that crossed the girl’s face when Doug distractedly took the envelope didn’t go unnoticed, either. Neither did the way she shut the door too hard in her wake.