The Emperor's Revenge (The Oregon Files)

by Clive Cussler

  “Did the archbishop have any objections?” Golov asked.

  Kulpa shook his head. “Once I explained the danger of a possible explosion, he seemed happy to have us come for the inspection, even if it takes a few days.”

  The cathedral had been rebuilt several times over the centuries due to wars and fires. It had been turned into a warehouse by the Soviets after World War II and returned to its role as a fully functional cathedral only in 1989. It was understandable that the archbishop should not want to see it destroyed yet again.

  They unloaded the van, each carrying a bag of equipment. O’Connor stacked several boxes onto a handcart and they all headed to the main door. There they met the policeman in charge of the evacuation as he escorted a couple out through the main entrance.

  “Is the building clear?” Kulpa asked in Russian. Although Lithuanian was the official language, most residents were also fluent in their neighboring country’s tongue.

  The uniformed officer nodded. “We have made a thorough sweep of the building. No one else is left inside. The archbishop has confirmed it and returned home. Two officers will remain outside to ensure that no one else goes in. All of the other doors have been locked.”

  “Good. Make sure your men stay out here as well. I don’t want them causing an explosion by striking a careless spark. Absolutely no smoking.”

  “I’ll inform the men.”

  Kulpa turned to Golov. “Masks on from here.”

  They all donned gas masks purely for show. When they were kitted up, they entered the church.

  The central nave was lined with square pillars and painted a pristine white. Elaborate designs adorned the arched ceiling. Large oil paintings were the only other decorations. Row upon row of wooden pews stretched to the altar at the far end, which was buttressed by green marble columns.

  “This way,” Golov said, who was more familiar with the cathedral’s interior than Kulpa was thanks to the tour the previous day.

  They made their way to the far end of the room and went through a door that led to a set of descending stairs.

  Golov nodded, and they all removed their masks.

  He pointed at Kulpa. “You wait here. Make sure we are left alone. I’ll station a man up here with you to keep you company.”

  Kulpa’s eyes wandered to the staircase. Golov could tell that the utility foreman desperately wanted to know what they were up to, but he was either smart enough or scared enough not to ask.

  “Of course,” Kulpa said. He looked around and, seeing no chairs, plopped down on the floor.

  “Stay with him,” Golov said to Monroe, who nodded and took up a post standing next to the door.

  The rest of them went down the stairs, carrying the boxes that had been on the handcart. As they entered the lower part of the church, the walls changed to exposed brick held in place by crude mortar. A musty smell pervaded the air.

  They were in the cathedral’s age-old catacombs. For the benefit of tourists, the ancient floor had been covered over by modern material, and soft lights at the base of the vaulted walls cast a moody glow. Although there was a maze of passages, clues Napoleon left in the diary pages would allow them to narrow down the search area considerably.

  “Where do we start?” O’Connor asked as he set his box down.

  Golov oriented himself so that he was facing north. “The pages from Napoleon’s Diary indicated the treasure would be somewhere in that direction.”

  Finding valuables hidden away inside the cathedral wouldn’t be unprecedented. Twenty years ago in the same cathedral, workers installing electrical cables discovered a cache of pre–World War II antiques secreted behind a wall. They had been sealed up as the Nazi invasion began, and then remained there after those who’d hidden the treasure were killed in the war, taking the knowledge of the secret stash with them.

  Golov was certain Napoleon’s men had similarly hid the treasure from Moscow. They had stowed it in a large chamber and then sealed it up so that the barrier looked like any of the other walls in the catacombs. After the men who did the work succumbed to the bitter cold during the remainder of the retreat, the emperor was left as the sole remaining person who knew exactly where the treasure was hidden. That information had died with him. Given the thickness of the walls, attempting to penetrate them with any type of sensing device would be useless. Brute force was the only way the riches would be unearthed.

  Golov nodded to Sirkal, who unzipped his bag. He took out a handheld electric demolition hammer and a loop of heavy-duty extension cord.

  “Find somewhere to plug that in,” Golov said. “Let’s start digging.”

  FORTY-NINE

  Rain had been pelting the river for an hour and it didn’t show any signs of letting up. The fabric cover kept Juan dry as he piloted the Sea Ray during the monotonous search pattern up and down the river, three hundred yards in one direction and three hundred yards in the other, until they’d exhausted a grid and moved on to the next section. They’d been able to rig up covers for the metal detecting equipment, but Linda and Gretchen had to monitor the displays with only their rain jackets to shield them from the weather. Trono and MacD kept out of the way inside the cabin, playing cards.

  The tedious operation had been going on for six hours now without a peep from the sensors. They ate sandwiches as they worked, and the boat had a small head, so there was no need to stop until they ran out of fuel. Their supply would last them until it was dark, at their current slow trolling speed.

  The routine left Juan a lot of time alone with his thoughts. Gretchen had said little to him when they’d all met for breakfast to finalize their plans. His bed was empty when his alarm went off that morning.

  Juan had set a rule for himself that he’d never get involved with a member of his crew, but Gretchen wasn’t part of the crew. At least, not yet. His comments about her joining the Oregon were serious, but now he wasn’t sure that was a good idea. The spark between them had always been there. It’s just that they’d never acted on it while they were both married.

  “Chairman,” Trono called from inside the cabin, “I’ve got Eric on the line. Says it’s urgent.”

  “All right,” Juan said. “Take the wheel for me.”

  “I thought you’d never ask. It’s been a while since I’ve been powerboat racing.”

  “Restrain yourself. Three knots is all we need.”

  They switched places. Juan took the mobile phone from him and ducked into the cabin. Raindrops hammered against the roof so loudly that Juan put his finger in his free ear.

  “What have you got for me, Stoney?”

  “Chairman, Murph and I have made some discoveries you need to know about.”

  “On the diary code or the words that Marie Marceau told us?”

  “Both. We don’t think Marceau said zings, like you thought. It’s more likely that she said Zingst, which is a town along the Baltic coast—Zingst, Germany.”

  That certainly made more sense than anything else Juan had come up with. “What’s the significance?”

  “There’s a huge transformer station there. One that feeds all of the power from the largest offshore wind farm in the world to the European electrical grid.”

  “That fits with our intel that ShadowFoe was looking into the power system. Do you think they’re targeting that station like the one they did in Frankfurt?”

  “It’s possible, especially since we’ve deciphered what Marceau meant by lightning grid.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense,” Juan said.

  “When I was doing my Internet search, the Dutch translation of lightning grid popped up. It’s bliksem raster. The reason it came up is that Bliksem Raster is also the name of one of the largest suppliers of industrial-grade electrical equipment to the European Union.”

  “Any connection to Antonovich?”

  “Just that he owns ha
lf of it as part of a joint venture.”

  Juan shook his head in amazement.

  “It gets better,” Eric continued. “The other half of Bliksem Raster was owned by Lars and Oskar Dijkstra.”

  “Why is that important?”

  “Because Lars and Oskar are currently dead. Their private jet went down in Gibraltar last week on their way to the auction in Malta. Authorities still have no theory why the plane crashed, but one witness said the wing was glowing red before it caught fire.”

  “Sounds like the work of a high-powered laser.”

  “That’s what we thought.”

  “Wait a minute. I know the Dijkstra name. They own a shipping line, don’t they?”

  “You stole my thunder. Guess what shipping line owned the Narwhal.”

  Now it was all coming into focus. The Dijkstras must have gone into business with Antonovich and then something went wrong. Perhaps they had learned about the treasure and planned to acquire the Jaffa Column and Napoleon’s Diary out from under him to find it themselves, but Antonovich killed them before they had the chance.

  “What’s the connection between Bliksem Raster and the transformer station in Zingst?” Juan asked. “Why would Marceau think those two pieces of information were important enough to tell us while she was dying?”

  “We’re still working on that one. Now Murph wants to talk to you.”

  Juan heard the phone shuffling and then Murph spoke.

  “Chairman, I just got done with my analysis of the column. I wanted to make sure I had it right before I sent you on a wild-goose chase.”

  Juan frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I was able to reconstruct the etchings on the part of the Jaffa Column that was damaged and compare it to the notes in the diary. It took a bit of massaging, but I think I teased out the location of the treasure.”

  “You’ve got an exact spot on the river where we should look?”

  “Not exactly. I don’t think it’s in the river at all.”

  “What are you talking about? The diary pages were clear.”

  “I think they were forged. Impressive job, if you ask me,” Murph said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because of what I found in the part of the diary we have. See, ShadowFoe must have known we’d be able to narrow down the location of the treasure to Vilnius, so they couldn’t just direct us to somewhere in, I don’t know, Belarus. They had to make the location of the treasure believable but not where it really is. So they came up with this alternative.”

  “Then where is the treasure?”

  “The code in the diary comes down to a fairly simple cipher that refers to specific letters in the diary itself. Then we transferred those letters to Greek inscriptions on the column, which referred to corresponding Latin characters underneath them. The damage obliterated some of the markings, but the ones that remained helped me partially spell out a particular location.”

  “Which is?” Juan asked impatiently.

  “I’m texting it to you now.”

  Moments later, the phone dinged with the message.

  Cata_om__s Cath__r_l_ Vi__ius.

  “It’s the best I could do. I think it’s supposed to spell out ‘Catacombes Cathédrale Vilnius.’ The Vilnius Cathedral is in the center of the city, practically right next to the Neris River, and there’s extensive catacombs underneath it.”

  Juan grimaced at being deceived. Marceau was just a pawn. She was killed simply as a diversion, to make him believe the information that had been planted on her phone. And he had been manipulated into wasting his time looking in the wrong place.

  “We’re on our way there,” Juan said, then yelled up to Trono, “Mike! You’re going to test your power racing skills after all.”

  “Really?” Trono called back with glee.

  “I want to be in Vilnius as soon as you can get us there. Gun it.”

  FIFTY

  Piles of bricks littered the floor in three different locations where Golov and his men had removed them to reveal nothing more than the stone that formed the bedrock beneath the cathedral. But in the fourth spot he had chosen the demolition hammer punched through three layers of brick and mortar into a hollow space behind the wall. It had taken them another hour to pull enough bricks down to open a hole large enough for them to walk through and now Golov took the first step inside.

  His flashlight illuminated a vault at least sixty feet long and forty feet wide. It was stacked six feet high with objects. Only a central aisle the width of a car remained accessible.

  O’Connor passed him two high-powered work lights mounted on stands and Golov placed them so that they flanked either side of the aisle. When he turned them on, he gasped at the magnificent treasure that lay before him.

  The entire wealth of nineteenth-century Moscow that hadn’t been taken or burned by the Russians in their frantic retreat before Napoleon’s army was crammed into this one room. The first item Golov noticed near the entrance was the gilded cross from the Ivan the Great Bell Tower, the tallest building in the Kremlin. It was the most famous item thought to be part of the treasure hoard and yet it lay on its side as if it were tossed there in haste. The gold leaf was just as bright as it had been over two hundred years ago when it was sealed in its hiding place.

  The heaviest objects lay closest to the front, including at least a dozen ancient cannons, crates brimming with tarnished silver housewares, and iron boxes. He used a crowbar to open one and found it full of antique weapons dating back to the Gothic period. The next box he opened was only half full, but that’s because it was filled with gold jewelry that outweighed the steel weapons.

  Golov imagined the soldiers hiding this hoard, exhausted from their retreat through the frigid Russian winter, many having survived on nothing more than moldy bread and horsemeat they could scavenge from fallen animals. They would have carried the heaviest items only as far as they needed to, putting the lighter objects to the rear, before completing the arduous task of bricking up the entrance so that it would be virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the catacombs.

  Now Golov had his chance to make sure that none of Alexei Polichev’s formulas had survived and fallen into Napoleon’s hands. If they were still here, he had to either retrieve them or destroy them.

  Sirkal was the next into the room and surveyed the cache stoically. He walked with a measured pace behind Golov. He understood that the treasure in this chamber was nothing more than a stepping-stone to their true objective.

  O’Connor and Jablonski, however, whooped it up as they came through and saw the riches before them. O’Connor scooped up a handful of gold jewelry to stuff in his pocket when Golov barked, “Put that back.”

  “Nobody’s going to miss it,” O’Connor protested.

  “You can buy all the gold you want when we’re done with Dynamo. I don’t want this to turn into a scavenging free-for-all. We’re here for a purpose.”

  “Fine,” O’Connor grumbled. He tossed the jewelry back in the box.

  Golov walked to the end of the aisle, scanning the crates and boxes for any sign of something from Moscow State University. He got to the dim end of the chamber without seeing anything that stood out. Relieved, he turned on his heel and walked past Sirkal, who had paused three-quarters of the way in.

  Golov stopped next to him. “What is it?”

  Sirkal pointed at something near the wall. “There’s an illustration that looks like the one Ivana showed us. It seems to be a seal or a logo.”

  Golov never would have seen what the taller Indian had spotted. He climbed onto a crate and shined his flashlight in the direction Sirkal was pointing.

  There it was. The old seal of Moscow State University. It was blackened at the edges but readable. The seal was affixed to the side of a leather trunk, which was also charred but intact.

  “Bring
it out here,” Golov instructed. Sirkal and O’Connor hauled the trunk back to the aisle, where they set it down in front of Golov. The trunk was latched but unlocked.

  Golov knelt and worked to unclasp the latches. The brass fittings had corroded shut over the centuries, so it took several strikes of his hammer to free them.

  He raised the lid. There, in perfect condition, was a trove of papers dating from the time of Napoleon. His researchers at the Academy of Sciences had specifically requested that he bring back any noteworthy papers recovered during the invasion. He had done the same when he had conquered Egypt, bringing back discoveries identified there by his science adviser, Joseph Fourier, whose advanced differential equations are still taught to physics students.

  Golov riffled through the papers until he saw a familiar name. He lifted a file out. The title was laden with mathematical jargon about encryption and codes that Golov didn’t understand, but he definitely recognized the author’s name: Alexei Polichev. He looked at several more papers by Polichev and they all seemed to be related to cryptography and the unique formulas that had formed the basis for Ivana’s virus programs.

  Now he had a decision to make. Should he take the trunk with him or destroy it with the rest of the treasure? The plan had been to destroy everything and let the recovery team take weeks to sort it all out. The files would be forever lost.

  But he also wondered if there might be further use for Polichev’s work. If Ivana could make sense of these papers, perhaps there was more they could accomplish in the future using his theories.

  In the end, it was his curiosity that won out. He wanted to know what was in these documents.

  Golov slammed the lid shut and closed the latches.

  “We’re bringing the trunk with us,” he said to Sirkal and O’Connor. “Let’s move it to the van. Carrying this out will look suspicious, so we’ll have to take care of the police.”