The Shroud

by Harold Robbins

  I took the money away from him and put everything back in the envelope and out of his reach.

  Even while I was still resisting the idea, if there was a chance I was going to Dubai, I had to think about the logistics—which amounted to making sure Morty was cared for. I’d have to pay someone to take care of him while I was gone.

  I had the perfect person—an older neighbor upstairs. The man lived by himself and mentioned a couple of times he would be happy to watch Morty if I ever had to go away for a few days. I never took him up on it because I was too broke to travel. Besides, I worried that with Morty’s bad temper, I’d come home to find the man had cooked him in a microwave.

  I stared at the ticket again. First-class. Limo service.

  I had all the fee up-front, most of my expenses already paid for in the form of transportation and lodging.

  What I didn’t have was much time to think about it—or more accurately, to agonize over it.

  Exactly what Lipton had in mind.

  6

  Dubai

  Bloody Nazi. That was how Sir Henri Lipton thought of his client even though the man was neither German nor a Nazi. Giving it a second thought, he decided that since the man was Russian, perhaps thinking of him as Ivan the Terrible, the insanely murderous, fanatical czar of Russia, would have been more fitting.

  No … in this case, bloody Nazi was more accurate.

  Lipton left his limo when it pulled up just short of the shaded front of the Burj al-Arab Hotel. A long line of Rolls-Royce limos were disgorging passengers ahead, forcing him into a bad temper as he had to walk a hundred feet under the burning Arabian sun.

  Born and bred in cool, damp England, the brief exposure to the dry, hot desert air made Lipton grimace and cringe. The parched air dried his skin the first day he arrived. After three days, burnt breezes made his skin crawl and gave him a sinus headache even though he spent most of his time in refrigerated air-conditioned rooms and didn’t get into a limo until the temperature was arctic.

  The country needed swamp coolers, he thought. The old-fashioned evaporative room coolers added moisture to the air because they drew air strained through a water-soaked membrane.

  He told just about everyone who would listen that water coolers would serve the hot, dry climate better than the refrigerated air units that turned the environment cold but still lacking moisture.

  He had pointed out to the management at his hotel the advantages of evaporative air-conditioning and had gotten blank stares in return. Probably something to do with the fact that refrigerated air could be made from electricity generated from oil, which the tiny kingdom swam in, while a swamp cooler required water that had to be processed from the Gulf’s salt water at great expense.

  Lipton was convinced that the dry, refrigerated air inside was working with the hot, dry air outside to turn his skin into leather. He only tolerated air-conditioning because the other choice was to shrivel up like a dried prune.

  He wondered if his strong reaction to the dry heat was because he had barely escaped a burning inferno after his London art gallery was savagely attacked and torched when a very big art deal went very wrong. And very violent.

  He shuddered, remembering the scorching his skin took as the flames licked at him.

  A far better image from his past was a cool, wet, salty breeze coming off the English Channel and through the balcony windows of his West Dorset country home on cliffs near the coastal town of Lyme Regis. Out for a walk with his lover Albert, wearing his favorite hat and warm, oil-rubbed sailor’s sweater, a gun loaded with bird shot resting on his left arm, his gun dog, Marlowe, prancing out in front …

  Of course, all of that was before his exile.

  That was how he thought of his separation from his home country; he wasn’t a fugitive who had fled to avoid arrest for high crimes and misdemeanors, but a martyr suffering an unjust punishment, as if it were a forced separation from his homeland due to political or social ostracism.

  In his own estimation, the fact that he was just a bloody crook—a very successful bloody crook—didn’t enter into the equation.

  Lipton had landed in Dubai because it was a soaring new metropolis, a new world unencumbered by the prejudices of the old. And he had bribed the right person to make sure he stayed welcome.

  He hadn’t exactly fallen in love with the city on a desert peninsula that extended out into the Persian Gulf. The dry air that made him shrivel up and itch was enough to make him hate the place, but that was just the beginning. The city’s atomic mushroom-cloud building standards—what appeared to be machines spitting out an endless supply of steel beams and concrete mud—offended his idea that art and architecture required great craftsmanship.

  Buildings appeared to pop up overnight, suddenly exploding upward during the hours of darkness, erupting from the desert sand and ready for occupancy in the morning sun.

  An exaggeration on his part, but that was to be expected from a man who made—and lost—a fortune using hyperbole.

  He knew the Persian Gulf city was being called a new wonder of the world because it was a place with skyscrapers like the superluxurious, thousand-foot-tall Burj al-Arab Hotel, which was seated on its own private island … an island that had to be built before the hotel was constructed.

  He felt comfortable with antiquities and antiques and loved Britain with its stately old buildings, cathedrals, cobblestone paths, and farmhouses that had been occupied since the Dark Ages.

  Dubai was bright and new and shined like chrome.

  A connoisseur of the gracefully aged and ancient, Lipton thought of the city as a platinum Disneyland for rich grown-ups.

  A very strange country … if you could call it that, he thought.

  Technically, Dubai was just one of seven separate little postage-stamp entities bound together in a loose federation; old-fashioned “sheikdoms” that managed to survive into the modern world because they had a bellyful of black gold—petroleum.

  Once called the Trucial Sheikdoms, the name was changed to the United Arab Emirates even though the seven rulers each kept the title “sheik” rather than “emir,” which loosely translated as “prince.”

  What he did like about Dubai was the smell of money. A man in exile needed money, especially a man like him, who was both on the run and had expensive tastes. The scent of money was especially sweet in Dubai, where East met West in a burst of rabid materialism. Money flocked to Dubai as it once did to Hong Kong and Singapore.

  He was on his way to meet someone who also had the smell of money, enough of it to buy the most precious things on earth. Like Henri, the man was a visitor from the north, but much farther north than London.

  Boris Alexandrovich Nevsky had flown in from Moscow.

  Nevsky was staying in the royal suite on the twenty-fifth floor of the hotel that claimed to be the only seven-star accommodation in the world. Naturally, the royal suite had a private elevator. And in this case, the elevator also came with an “attendant” who spoke only Russian and had a gun bulge on the left breast of his suit jacket.

  Out of curiosity, Lipton had made a quick Internet check of the suite before he left his own hotel for the meeting. The royal suite had more than eight thousand square feet of living space spread over two stories—about four or five times the size of an average American or European home. It came with twenty-four-hour butler service, a chauffer-driven Rolls-Royce, private elevator, and private movie theater.

  One didn’t have to be a king to stay there, but it helped—the tariff was thirty thousand dollars a day, plus extras …

  Lipton had had significant personal wealth and had mingled with the very rich and famous on every continent for decades, but he could not even imagine what a respectable gratuity was to the hotel service staff when one left a suite that ran thirty thousand a day plus …

  Stepping out of the elevator, he was met by another man with a breast bulge … only this one also had a metal detector wand that he used to frisk Lipton.

&
nbsp; The man Lipton was meeting wasn’t a king, but in a way he was a head of state … a state within one of the most powerful nations on the globe. And a pope to boot.

  Boris Alexandrovich Nevsky was the patriarch of the Third Rome Church. Headquartered in Moscow, the religious organization was a splinter group of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its message wasn’t only a spiritual one but nationalistic and militaristic: Nevsky preached that the Russian people could return to their days of greatness when they were not only a world power, but held sway over a vast empire.

  Naturally, the return to empire could only be done as it had been in the past—by force.

  The threat of an armed insurrection by religious fanatics did not endear the patriarch to the Russian government.

  One reason for Lipton’s success as a salesman and a scoundrel was knowing everything about the marks he ripped off. He had studied Nevsky and knew that the use of “Third Rome” in the name of Nevsky’s church hinted at its goals.

  The “First Rome” was the city in Italy that initially held sway over the vast Roman Empire.

  The “Second Rome” arose when Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire, moved the capital from Rome to Constantinople, the city that is now named Istanbul, and called it the Second Rome.

  The adherence to Christianity was proclaimed at Constantinople, but the religion ultimately split into two great branches, Roman Catholicism headed by the pope in Rome, and Eastern Orthodoxy, headed by the patriarch in Constantinople.

  After the fall of Constantinople to the Muslims during the Renaissance, a Russian king crowned himself “czar” (for Caesar) and proclaimed Moscow to be the heir to the Eastern Roman Empire, making it the “Third Rome,” with the patriarch of Moscow being the Russian equivalent of the pope in Rome.

  The “Third Rome” crown was lost after the reigning Russian czar and his family were murdered during the revolution in 1917 and the communists rose to run the country. When the “state religion” of communism evaporated in the 1990s, leaving Russians spiritually empty, tens of millions of Russians poured back into churches to find their savior.

  During the Soviet era, Nevsky had been a simple Orthodox priest—and had been rumored to have been a KGB agent, not a striking paradox considering that the communist bureaucracy attempted to infiltrate and control every aspect of life, from birth to death.

  In the wild days of the 1990s when the “old commie czars” like Gorbachev were falling from power, new Russian political leaders rose and former KGB thugs turned into mafiya enforcers. During that turbulent time, Nevsky took a small group of zealous religious practitioners and opened his own church, one based upon both faith in God and a fanatical belief in the greatness of the Russian fatherland—and its destiny to dominate the world.

  Fifteen years later, Moscow’s Third Church of Rome had four million members and a political agenda that agitated for a return to the days when Russia was an imperial empire and its patriarch presided over hundreds of millions of Orthodox Christians.

  The door to Nevsky’s suite opened and two women came out. Both were Nordic types, the pale blondes Middle Eastern men referred to as ice-cream cones. Opposites attract, he thought. He had a dark-haired friend who studied in Finland and found himself highly desirable by light-haired women he met in bars.

  Lipton considered himself a worldly man, well traveled, and despite the fact he was gay, understood immediately that the women coming out of the suite possessed that subtle edge of hardness that comes from being paid for sex. In his mind, there were just so many times a woman got paid to kneel down and suck before she got jaded about life, love, and the pursuit of happiness, and it showed on their faces and in their attitudes.

  It didn’t surprise him that two women from the “other side of the street” came out of Nevsky’s suite—the religious leader’s sexual appetite was as notorious as his zeal. And was much admired by his fanatical followers, who vicariously reveled in his excesses.

  A sexual scandal that would bring down an ordinary politician or church primate just increased Nevsky’s popularity with his flock.

  Led into the suite by the butler, Lipton waited in the reception area until Nevsky’s daughter appeared. Unlike their counterparts in Rome, some Orthodox priests were permitted to marry.

  Karina was a striking woman—tall, with dark hair and light olive skin. Like her father, her gray eyes conveyed a burning intensity.

  Because her father had the light hair and complexion of a northern Slav, Lipton assumed Karina’s dark hair and skin tone came from her Chechen mother. He had heard that the mother, who passed away during Karina’s childhood, had a complexion that was slightly darker than most Chechens, people from a region in the Caucasus Mountains.

  Unlike most Europeans in the Russian sphere, Chechens had an Islamic heritage. Lipton knew that Karina’s mother had brought Nevsky two assets when he was a young, poor priest—credit for her conversion from Islam and a substantial amount of money in the form of an old-fashioned dowry.

  Most men would no doubt find Karina an attractive woman. Lipton didn’t have any sexual interest in her, but having a dirty mind, he found it secretly amusing that her lipstick was slightly smudged. His gutter mentality immediately concocted a scene with Karina and the two ice-cream cones that had just left, with her father no doubt thrown somewhere in between.

  “The patriarch is concerned about you bringing this woman from New York into our business.”

  Lipton had never heard her use the word “father” when she referred to Nevsky.

  “I’ve explained to him that the woman is necessary. She knows the antiquity field better than anyone else. And she’s smart and honest and we can rely upon her.”

  “You better hope so. You know how serious the patriarch is about this quest. He doesn’t tolerate mistakes.”

  Lipton locked eyes with her. He needed the Russians, but he also knew better than to show any weakness when dealing with a predator.

  “Neither do I.”

  Karina nodded gravely. “The patriarch will see you in a moment. I have an errand to run, but the butler will take care of your needs while you wait.”

  Lipton uttered a sigh. It was his kind of life. He just couldn’t afford it at the moment.

  But he had plans to put himself back on top.

  With enough money to live like a king in a cool, damp climate.

  7

  Karina left the hotel in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce and had the car drop her off at Dubai Mall. Newly opened in part, when completed it would be the world’s biggest shopping center. To the people of Dubai, one of the smallest countries on the planet in terms of people and area, having the “world’s biggest and best” had become part of the culture. Everything the little city-state did was bigger and better than anywhere else in the world.

  Carrying an already full shopping bag, she meandered around before going into a clothing store changing room. She came out of the room wearing the abaya, a black cloak, and shayla, a black veil. Her Western-style clothes were in the shopping bag she carried.

  The clothing change was an extremely effective disguise because it hid her features and drew no attention—the mall hosted women dressed in the latest Western fashions and others dressed in traditional Islamic covering, with nothing showing but their eyes. Because most Arabic women in Dubai had brown eyes, Karina had put on contact lenses to hide her gray eyes.

  Karina’s purpose was simply to disguise herself in case she was being followed. And she expected to be followed. Her father had many enemies, with the government of Russia topping the list. And she knew that surveillance of her might come from closer to home: her father didn’t completely trust anyone, including her.

  She knew her father’s instincts were basically good … even when it came to his own daughter.

  Raised to be a Christian by a father who was fanatical in his beliefs, she had earlier rebelled against his strict commandments. In college, she took as her lover a young professor
from Chechnya who was a Sunni Muslim like most of the people of her mother’s land. He, too, was a fanatic, but perhaps because his zeal was bitterly and violently opposed to her father’s brand of religion, she was drawn to him.

  When the Soviet Union collapsed and many of the subnations of which it was composed became independent, the new government of Russia blocked Chechnya from separating—and decades of bloody war resulted, with atrocities on both sides as patriotic Chechen groups reverted to terrorist attacks when outright war and guerilla warfare failed to achieve their political aims.

  As with so many modern independence movements, the chosen path to resistance was through acts of terrorism against the Russians. In turn, Russia sent troops into Chechnya that crippled the country and killed so many people that a cry of genocide was raised.

  Karina gave her all to the Chechen movement. She had participated in the planning but not the execution of one of the most tragic hostage crises in Russian history—the 2004 Beslan school siege in which a group of Chechen terrorists took more than a thousand children and adults hostage. More than three hundred died during the siege, including nearly two hundred children.

  Typical of other Russian hostage crises, Russian police and troops were blamed for killing more hostages than the terrorists. The stark brutality and unrestrained violence of Russian police units against people in Chechnya—unprovoked arrests, rapes, and torture—had become a matter of shame and fear to the Russians themselves.

  The violence and counterviolence between the Russian forces and the Chechen separatists had become epidemic.

  Karina accepted the philosophy of her comrades: War with innocent casualties was not so much necessary as simply inevitable in the struggle to free Chechnya. Bombs exploding in crowded cafés, on buses, airplanes, and subway stations, didn’t discriminate between those who opposed the movement and those who actually sympathized with it.

  As usual in the struggle between violent antagonists, no one asked the victims what they thought.