3
The “act,” as Lady Clem called it, was one Alexander Cabrera had set up with meticulous care and forethought. Although the battle with Marten had been far more difficult than he had anticipated, overall, it had worked, and worked well.
The idea of utilizing the demonstrators was something conceived much earlier as a relatively simple and inexpensive insurance policy to cover Marten’s death. A telephone call to a European radical antiglobalization activist collective had put the plan in motion. Identifying himself as a member of a well-known group called the Radical Activist Network of Trainers, he told the collective of the high-level gathering of politicians and businessmen to be held at Villa Enkratzer. Describing the building and telling them where it was located, he detailed who would be there, how the villa could be reached from a little-known mountain fire road, and where, in the forests above it, it would be easy to set up a camp from which activists could make a surprise demonstration from the mountainside, joining a protest that would be trying to reach the villa from the main road on the morning of Saturday the eighteenth—the day after his nighttime rendezvous with Marten on the villa trail. In other words, the demonstrators would be camped and on-scene, but would not have expected to come down to the villa until the following day.
Authorities had planned for thirty thousand protesters trying to get into Davos, so he had little or no doubt that at least a handful of the most dedicated would take his bait. And he had been right. A follow-up call a week later saying he had heard about the protest and wanted to join those packing in had confirmed it. A small group was already going in, he was told. They needed no one else.
He’d made certain they were there himself when he, Rebecca, the Baroness, and the Rothfels had come in by helicopter from Neuchâtel earlier in the day and he’d had the pilot approach the villa’s helipad from over the mountains instead of Davos Valley as was usually done. He counted five mountain tents, hidden among the trees, when they passed over. A glimpse was all he’d had, but it was all he needed to know his ruse had worked and his scapegoats were in place.
He’d made the tracks in the snow leading up toward their encampment himself, in the freezing but exhilarating moments after Marten had gone over the side and he’d recovered the knife. He’d turned back only when the storm became so intense he knew the falling snow would cover the tracks anyway. Then, with his blood pumping and unmindful of the cold, he’d rushed for the villa to sound the alarm.
His bravura all-night performance leading the search party immediately afterward had been done primarily to showcase his heroics as a people’s Tsarevich but also to demonstrate his horror and dismay at what happened and to show his deep caring for Nicholas Marten. His only fear, of course, was that Marten might be found alive, but he knew the chances of that were next to none. He’d cut him badly, and the furious course of icy water over miles of rock and steep waterfalls combined with the storm and subfreezing conditions made survival an impossibility.
What he’d done last, in daylight and in the warmth of the villa, still dressed in his boots and a parka over his tattered tuxedo, was consult with the four most important men in his life, men who, with numerous others, had remained at the villa and kept vigil throughout the night—President Gitinov, His Holiness Gregor II, Mayor Nemov, and Marshal Golovkin. “Because of what has happened,” he told them, “and because Nicholas Marten was the brother of the woman who is to become the next Tsarina of Russia, I ask that we postpone announcing the return of the monarchy until a more appropriate time and in a more appropriate place.”
There was no question at all that it was the right and proper thing to do, and to a man they agreed. It was a moment underscored when the fifty-two-year-old President Gitinov had surprisingly taken him aside to personally extend his sympathy and to tell him he fully understood.
“It is best for you and it is best for Russia,” Gitinov had said genuinely and with sympathy.
Alexander knew it was a gesture that was not easy for a man who had approved the return of the monarchy chiefly because of the combined political strength of the others there with them—the Most Holy Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, the mayor of Moscow, and the Russian Federation minister of defense. Although each was hugely authoritative in his own right, when it came to national politics they thought and acted as one, and when they chose to raise or become involved with a state issue, their influence on the members of both houses of the Russian parliament was enormous.
The idea of a return of the monarchy had churned dinner-table arguments across Russia almost from the day Alexander’s great-grandfather, Tsar Nicholas, had been murdered. But it had never been more than that until the triumvirate, through their own individual and collective experiences, had realized that Russia, reestablished as a state since the collapse of the Soviet Union, was still deeply troubled. Governed by a bloated bureaucracy, the young democracy was weighed down by an economy that, despite shedding much debt and showing solid gains in its oil and grain industries, was generally weak and unreliable. Further, it was protected by a vastly underpaid, rusting, and disheartened military and, as significantly, was, in virtually every corner of the country, rife with poverty, violence, and corruption. These were huge, complex problems they didn’t believe the current government was successfully addressing with concrete plans. In examining the situation further, the triumvirate concluded that if Russia was to be a truly strong, economically progressive, and influential country it needed a very public and emotionally stabilizing force that would give the people an immediate and powerful sense of unity, pride, and self. They saw the answer in the reinstatement of the imperial family to the Russian throne in the form of a constitutional monarchy—a figurehead government that, like that in England, was essentially powerless to rule but, like England’s, one that would be filled with pomp, circumstance, ceremony, and goodwill that could quickly and emotionally excite the public, and around which they could rally a new and enduring national spirit. Once their arguments for such a return had been organized and formally presented to parliament, they had fiercely pressed its members to see the measure through to passage.
For Gitinov the idea was impossible. He saw the triumvirate as hostile to his administration, and their influence as a dark and ever-hovering threat to his own power base. So to him, the idea of a return of the monarchy was little more than a political maneuver to further their own ends. Moreover, it was dangerous, because he knew that their backing a royal head of state, figurehead or not, could, at some point, begin to undermine his own authority—even theirs if the monarch became too influential. It was an issue made all the more worrisome when he learned Kitner was to abdicate in favor of his eldest son, because it meant that he would be competing for the public mind not only with a crowned head but with one who was young, handsome, and exceedingly charismatic, and who had an extraordinarily beautiful bride-to-be marching beside him. They looked like movie stars and would be perched on a pedestal by the world media for years as Russia’s Kennedyesque super-couple. Worse yet, Alexander was true royalty, a direct descendant of the three-hundred-year Romanov dynasty, whom even the oldest of the old and poorest of the poor would revere as the beating heart of the Russian soul.
Gitinov knew he could have used his own considerable power and influence to turn the vote against the triumvirate and in the end most likely would have prevailed. By then, though, the idea that the parliament was considering returning the imperial family to the throne had become public knowledge and had received a groundswell of approval. To turn the vote against it would take enormous effort and would make it seem that he was afraid a return of the monarchy would weaken his power, and that was something he couldn’t afford to have happen. So instead of fighting it he had acquiesced, even meeting with the triumvirate at His Holiness Patriarch Gregor II’s residence at Peredelkino near Moscow to openly and enthusiastically champion the idea.
It was all politics; why he had consented, and why he had come to Davos, and why, too, he
had gone out of his way to personally offer Alexander his sympathy for what had happened on the mountain. Alexander knew it but he had shown nothing, responding only with a respectful, heartfelt thank-you and a grateful handshake.
Then, his duties over, Alexander Nikolaevich Romanov, Tsarevich of Russia, had simply left and gone to bed. Wholly exhausted and utterly victorious.
4
MOSCOW. SUNDAY, JANUARY 19. 7:05 A.M.
The sound of the telephone woke Kovalenko from a restless sleep. Immediately he picked it up from the bedside table and hunched over it, trying not to wake his wife.
“Da,” he said.
“It is Philippe Lenard, Inspector. Sorry to wake you so early on Sunday,” the Parisian policeman said. “I understand you have been taken off the case.”
“Yes. Your car is being returned to you by the FSO.”
“I know, thank you.”
Kovalenko cocked his head. Lenard’s speech was flat, his words just lying there. Something was wrong.
“You were traveling most of yesterday, is that right?”
“Yes. Zurich to Paris to Moscow. I should have called you during my layover in Paris. Sorry. What is it? Why are you calling me?”
“From the sound of your voice I have to assume you haven’t heard.”
“Heard what?”
“About Nicholas Marten.”
“What about him?”
“He’s dead.”
“What?”
“He was attacked by a band of radical protesters in Davos on Friday night.”
“Jesus God.” Kovalenko ran a hand through his hair and got out of bed.
“What is it?” His wife rolled over, peering at him from her pillow.
“Nothing, Tatyana, go back to sleep.” He turned back to the phone. “Let me call you in thirty minutes, Philippe … . Your cell phone, yes.” Kovalenko hung up and stared off.
“What is it?” Tatyana asked again.
“A man I know, an American, was killed late Friday in Switzerland. I’m not quite sure what to do about it.”
“He was a friend?”
“Yes, he was a friend.”
“I’m sorry. But if he’s dead, what can you do about it?”
Kovalenko looked off. Outside he could hear a truck pass, its driver shifting gears awkwardly.
Abruptly he looked back to Tatyana. “I had an envelope mailed to you from Zurich on”—Kovalenko had to stop and think, the days all ran together—“Friday. It hasn’t arrived.”
“That was the day before yesterday, so no, of course not. Why?”
“Nothing, it’s not important.” Kovalenko tugged at an ear and crossed the room, then turned back. “Tatyana, I realize I’ve just come home, but I must go to the ministry.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“What about the kids? They haven’t seen you in—”
“Tatyana—right now.”
5
RUSSIAN MINISTRY OF JUSTICE. 7:55 A.M.
Kovalenko had not called Lenard back in the thirty minutes he’d promised. The only call he’d made was to his immediate superior, fifty-two-year-old Irina Malikova, mother of five and the Ministry of Justice chief investigator. He needed to talk to her, and in the security of her ministry office, as soon as possible.
What he would tell her was the thing that he had been reluctant to present to anyone because of its sheer volatility and his lack of absolute proof. Now he felt he had no choice but to reveal it because it was critical to national security. What he would tell her was that Alexander Cabrera, next in the line of succession for the imperial throne, was, in all probability, the madman Raymond Oliver Thorne, the man responsible for the murders of the Romanovs in the Americas the year before, for the murder of Fabien Curtay in Monaco, and for the murders of Alfred Neuss, James Halliday, a former LAPD homicide detective, Los Angeles Times Paris correspondent Dan Ford, and two others, one outside Paris and one in Zurich—and, he was certain, for the death of Nicholas Marten at Villa Enkratzer in Davos.
What the gray-haired, blue-eyed Irina Malikova would tell him, in her third-floor, interior, windowless office in the faceless, utilitarian building at number 4a Ulitsa Vorontzovo Pole was, to the outside world, highly classified, but something those at Villa Enkratzer already knew.
“Señor Cabrera is not the next in line to become Tsar,” Irina Malikova said. “He already is Tsarevich. Sir Peter Kitner Mikhail Romanov formally abdicated in favor of his son yesterday.”
“What?”
“Yes.”
Kovalenko was astounded. Nearly everything Marten had surmised had come true.
“So, Inspector, it should be more than apparent that the first Tsarevich of All Russia since the revolution cannot also be a common criminal. A mass murderer.”
“The problem, Madame Chief Inspector, is that I am all but certain he is. And with his fingerprints, I can remove any doubt whatsoever.”
“How?”
“I have a computer disk. It belonged to the former Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective murdered in Paris. It contains the original LAPD booking sheet on Raymond Thorne—it has his photograph and fingerprints. We need only Cabrera’s fingerprints to know conclusively.”
“Thorne is dead.” Irina Malikova said with finality.
“No,” Kovalenko pushed back, “I have every reason to believe he is Cabrera. His appearance has been changed by cosmetic surgery, but not his fingerprints.”
Malikova hesitated, studying him. “Who else knows about the disk?” she asked finally.
“Marten and I were the only ones.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes.”
“There are no copies.”
“None that I know of.”
“Where is this disk now?”
“In the mail to me, sent from Zurich last Friday.”
“When you get it, bring it to me right away. Day or night. I don’t care. And—this is most important—you are to tell no one about it. No one.”
Irina Malikova fixed Kovalenko with a stare, as if to underscore the extreme weight of her order; then her manner softened and she smiled. “Now, go home and be with your family. You have been too long away from them.”
That was the end of it, and Malikova turned away to bring up a file on the computer screen on her desk. Kovalenko wasn’t quite finished.
“If I may ask you, Madame Chief Inspector,” he said quietly, “why was I removed from the investigation?”
Irina Malikova hesitated, and then she turned back. “It came from above.”
“From whom?”
“The participation of Ministry of Justice personnel in cases outside of the country is to cease immediately. That was the wording, Inspector. There was no explanation.”
Kovalenko smiled faintly. “There never is.” Abruptly he stood. “I’m looking forward to time with my wife and children. When I have the disk I will notify you.”
With that, Kovalenko left her office and walked down the long corridor past the cubicle-like rooms populated here and there with the few investigators working the Sunday shift. Afterward he took the elevator to the ground floor and flashed his identity card at a face behind a glass partition. A buzzer sounded and the door in front of him opened. A moment later he stepped out into a gray Moscow day. It was cold and spitting snow, the way it had been when two of Murzin’s men had driven him from Villa Enkratzer and put him on the train to Zurich, leaving Marten alone to deal with Alexander Cabrera.
It wasn’t until now, leaving the ministry and walking along the dull, overcast, wintry Moscow streets, that he realized how hard the news had hit him. Nicholas Marten was dead. It didn’t seem possible, but it was. “Was he a friend?” Tatyana had asked, and without thinking, he’d said yes. And it was true. He’d hardly known him, but for some reason he felt closer to Marten than to people he’d known for years. Suddenly he felt a lump rise up in his throat. “And then that’s it,” he said bitterly and out loud. “And then
that’s it.”
Everything that had been a man’s life. Gone with his final breath. Just like that.
6
THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22. 10:15 A.M.
Against Rebecca’s wishes, a private memorial service was held for her brother at St. Peter’s House in the university precinct on Oxford Road.
Under a ceiling of umbrellas held against a cold rain by Colonel Murzin’s FSO detail, Alexander led Rebecca, the Baroness, and Lady Clementine from a dark gray Rolls-Royce and up a flight of steps and into the building.
Lord Prestbury, the chancellor and vice-chancellor of the university, several of Nicholas’s professors, and a handful of his friends were all who attended. The service lasted little more than twenty minutes and then it was over. People stood, solemnly paid Rebecca their deepest respects and condolences, and left.
“I really wish you hadn’t done it,” Rebecca said on the way back to the airport.
Alexander took her hand and looked at her gently and lovingly. “My darling, I know how difficult it is for you, but it’s best to have closure on these horrible things as quickly as possible. Otherwise they will continue to eat at your heart and only beget greater sadness.”
“My brother is not dead.” Rebecca’s eyes went to Lady Clem and then to the Baroness. “You don’t believe he is either, do you?”
“I know how you feel in your heart.” No matter the grief and pain and loss Lady Clem felt inwardly, outside she remained composed and dignified and at the same time respectful of her close friend. “I wish we could all wake from the same nightmare and find it isn’t true, that none of it happened. But I’m afraid we shan’t.” Lady Clem smiled gently.
“Reality is not the same as what we might wish,” the Baroness said in the same quiet tone. “I’m afraid we have no choice but to accept the truth.”
Nicholas Marten 01 - The Exile Page 59