by K. T. Tomb
At the station, Thyri upgraded her ticket to a first class cabin and left them to find their seats in standard class. Travis stepped into the bookstore at the terminal and bought the latest Dan Brown novel that he had been meaning to read. He deliberately took his time browsing the store so that by the time he boarded the others were already seated. He nonchalantly walked down the aisle past where they were sitting and took a window seat at the back. He was in a sour mood. Over the past couple of days he had gotten to know Thyri and had come to like her and appreciate her principles and values. It had pained him to watch her explode in the taxi and finally put her foot down. It reminded him of his years with Adam at Yale. Not being as privileged as his fellow students, it had been hard for them to make genuine friends. Wealthy people moved in different circles of society and were governed by a different set of values; he had found that they were usually lesser values. He just wanted to get to Baikal and do what they had to do. The expedition was not living up to Travis’ expectations by a long shot. However, he still yearned for adventure, and the possibility of discovery was too exciting for him to ignore.
***
“Now just a moment, Travis,” said the reporter, as she scrambled to review her notes. “If it didn’t make complete sense based on the facts we do know, I wouldn’t believe a single word.”
I really didn’t care if she believed me or not. I had spent the last three months contemplating telling my story and this was my big chance to finally unburden myself. When I returned from Russia, I was completely worn out. For weeks I sequestered myself in the house, not even leaving to go grocery shopping. I became a voluntary hermit; cutting off as much contact with other people as I could. I became a time bomb, it seemed that time was running out for me. The only thing that had kept me tied to the real world had been Thyri’s voice messages. She had been a good friend, calling daily and leaving any kind of message she wanted to on his answering machine; news headlines about their discovery on Lake Baikal, quotes from the books she was reading, even descriptions of the shoes or clothes she had bought on a shopping trip. It was a long recovery but considering all we went through, I was just happy to eventually make it back into society.
“Anyway,” the reporter continued with her interview, “how long were you in Calais?”
“Really, it was about 10 minutes. The pilot was waiting for us on the tarmac at Calais-Dunkerque airport,” Travis snickered at that.
“What’s so funny, Mr. Monnahan?” she asked, curious.
“I called it an airport,” he said, still laughing.“Have you ever seen Calais-Dunkerque airport?”
She shook her head.
“Never mind then,” he replied. “We boarded the jet and took off almost immediately for Helsinki. It was important to make sure we moved so fast that we were undetectable. Mickey Large was known to track people down using information from their Underground card and the city’s closed circuit TV system. We wanted to ensure that if he followed us to Calais, our trail would be ice cold by the time he got there. In about two and a half hours, we landed in Helsinki.
“To ensure that our identities and arrival remained as anonymous as possible, a private hangar had been arranged and customs and immigrations agents came to meet us there. An armored, mirror tinted SUV was also waiting to take us to our hotel. As it turned out, Thyri received a phone call while we were on the way to the hotel. She had changed the location of our accommodations and the confirmation had just come through so she told the driver the address and he made the necessary adjustments to his route. We spent the next two days in one of the Ragnarsson family chalets nestled among the thousands of inlets near Kotka.”
The reporter paused for a moment and that made me slightly uncomfortable.
“So at that point it seemed you had everything under control,” she eventually said.
“It was. It was just a matter of biding our time until we could cross the gulf and get to St. Petersburg.”
“If that was the case,” she started, “how did you get Mark Gunnar to go to Russia with you? You didn’t need his help with visas anymore.”
It was getting quite clear to me that if I wanted the essence of our story to come through in this woman’s article, I was going to have to take over the direction of the interview; her questions were shallow and inconsequential, there was no way it would turn out the way I wanted it to.I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out the black credit card that Thyri had given me. I paused for a minute, then I placed it in front of me on the desk. and tapped it. “Is it still activated?” she asked.
I could hear her breath catch as she said it. Then I looked into her eyes and there it was; that twinkle, ‘The look of greed’ as I had so painfully come to know it. I’d seen it in Mickey’s eyes, and Mikhail’s...now here it was again, reminding me that my instinct had been right the whole time, reminding me that I should never doubt its existence; to do so again may just prove fatal.
“Oh, no,” I laughed. “I just keep it with me as a reminder. It ended up costing us more than just money to leave Finland for Russia but it also resulted in a lifelong friendship for me, so once again, no regrets. Mark was a very cool guy, but he was no push over, he knew that what he had was worth the price to us.”
“Ah, so it was Thyri who got you out again,” She retorted, and started to take more notes down in her tiny, black reporter’s notebook.
“Actually no, it wasn’t,” I said, visibly annoyed now. “And I advise that you don’t write down any answers in that notebook before I give them to you. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Mr. Monnahan,” she said apprehensively. “I apologize, I just assumed that was the obvious answer.”
“Don’t assume. Ask questions and write down my answers. Make notes of anything else I choose to add.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
Good, I thought, maybe now she’ll start to take this thing more seriously. “It was Fiona who made all the arrangements to get us to St. Petersburg. In a way, that was how she got herself back into our good graces. I didn’t mean to paint a bad picture of her earlier, she did the best she could. It’s just that, for some reason, during the first part of that expedition she had a hard time getting onboard. You see that a lot with recovering addicts; the minute things start to go right, they get scared and revert to their old ways. Fiona had been going through a very rough patch. The opportunities that the expedition was presenting for her werejust overwhelming, I think.
“Anyway, she got Mark onboard and when he heard why we were going to Baikal, he wanted in on the adventure. I couldn’t blame him. He was too young to be stuck in the white collar rut he so clearly was in. Instead of the initial five grand apiece for the Finnish passports and diplomatic visas he was offering, all he wanted was inclusion on the trip, a piece of the action and some of the acclaim afterwards. Thyri approved, so at that point, we became six.
“The passports were completely legitimate, they weren’t forgeries; no one would hassle us and better yet, no group that consisted of a Norwegian, some Americans and a Brit boarded the Helsinki ferry that day. Even if Mickey managed to track us to Finland, he wouldn’t have a clue where we went next, it was perfect.”
“How did you feel finally arriving in St. Petersburg, and how did you begin your search for Kitezh there?” she asked me.
“It was amazing, the quintessential European city. The inner city at least, has a very old world, artistic feel to it. But as you drive towards the suburbs, you see more and more of those grey high-rises they like to show on the news. The remnants of the soviet era which many Russians still see as a nostalgic time in history; kind of like how Americans feel about the ‘50s.
“Good, good,” she continued and wrote more notes. “So, I guess the next thing I want to know about is Xenia and her connection to all this. I’m starting to wonder why all of you would go off on an adventure like this, other than being stark raving mad; which a lot of media coverage has painted you to be.”
She was ri
ght. What had we been thinking? We hadn’t been, was the simple answer to that question. When Xenia had first approached Adam online and told him about the Kitezh phenomenon, he hadn’t been sure that she was altogether sane either; but the more we researched it, the more intrigued we were. Then she started sending us articles she had translated about the recent sightings that had been reported and we were hooked. All we needed was a financial backer and a few more experts to augment the team.
It hadn’t been hard to find fellow adventurers at the convention; they had come flocking to our booth to apply.
***
Fiona put her bags in her room, stepped out of her grimy travel clothes and luxuriated in the hot shower for thirty minutes. She had thought seriously during the trip about everything Thyri had said in the taxi as they were leaving London. Of course, she was seething all the way to Calais but as the silent treatment prevailed on the jet, she had more than enough time to think about what she had done.
In her estimation, she had been wreckless and for a set of people whose lives she had repeatedly put in danger over the last two days, they were actually taking it in good stride. They weren’t speaking to her at all, even Savannah was giving her the cold shoulder, but if the shoe was on the other foot, she would have kicked them out of the cab. With that thought in mind she ate her humble pie gladly.
She dressed and went to find Thyri’s room. She assumed the heiress would have occupied the Master bedroom but curiously, it was unoccupied; there were no bags in there. She continued down the hall until she heard her unmistakable Norwegian accent coming from behind a closed door. Fiona knocked and waited.
“Come in,” she heard, “it’s open.”
Fiona stepped into the bedroom and took a quick look around. It was very cozy and well decorated. Thyri was seated in front of the dressing table brushing her extraordinary hair. She spoke to her in the mirror.
“How can I help you, Fiona,” Thyri asked.
“I wanted to run something by you before I went ahead and did anything.”
“That’s the best idea you’ve had since we met.”
The ice was evident in Thyri’s reply. Fiona flinched but continued. She deserved that response.
“From here we can simply hop the ferry day after tomorrow without any problem but I wondered if it wouldn’t be better if we had different passports for the Russian leg of the trip.”
Thyri was genuinely intrigued and she turned around to face her.
“Go on.”
“My friend Mark can get us all Finnish passports, real ones, with diplomatic visas as well; which I think might smooth the way for us over there.”
“I think you have something there, Fiona. It would also throw Mickey off if he manages to follow us this far. He’ll be asking about a group of foreigners going to St. Petersburg; not a group of Finns.”
“Exactly!”
***
Fiona and the Finnish man greeted each other with the European “cheek kissing” salutation that annoyed Travis and Adam to no end. As Americans, it never made sense to them, it was something they saw only pretentious people and celebrities do.
The Finnish man, or Mark as Fiona had introduced him, was far younger than Travis had envisioned. He was clearly just about Fiona’s age which meant he was in his mid twenties. The two conversed deeply in Finnish, laughing and smiling at each other. The others stepped out of their way as Fiona lead him inside the house.
Seated in the living room, Thyri told Mark their story. They all watched as his eyes grew bigger and bigger the more they told him. He was particularly excited at the mention of Kitezh.
“I’ve heard that story since I was a child,” he confessed. “I think every Russian and Scandinavian child has heard the tales of the Mongol invasions and of all the heroes who rebelled against their evil campaigns. Kitezh is a particularly popular children’s fairytale; grandmothers often use it to encourage them to say their prayers.”
“It’s true,” Thyri confirmed, smiling broadly at the memory.
Suddenly, Mark turned to Thyri and said, “I want to come.”
They were all shocked.
“What do you mean, Mr. Gunnar?”
“I’d like to join you and go to Baikal to see if Kitezh is really there,” he said. “I can have the passports ready to go by tomorrow and I won’t charge you a thing; all I want is to join you and if we find anything, to be a part of the publicity.”
“Mark Gunnar,” Thyri said, standing to indicate that his time with them had expired, “you have proven yourself to be a little too good to be true. We will have to discuss it. Fiona will give you a call before dinner time.”
Travis appreciated that she hadn’t vetoed their opinions about taking on Mark Gunnar. He felt it was important to have everyone’s input as well. Not that it mattered much; they both knew that none of the others would object.
***
The ferry from Helsinki was just as uneventful as the flight to Finland and it was surprising how easily they crossed into Russia. It seemed strange that while all hell was breaking loose on the Crimean peninsula, they walked into Russia’s second largest city as if they were walking across the Florida-Georgia line. The ferry stopped right before docking and immigration agents came around checking the passengers’ papers. It was eerily silent for a minute as they each handed their brand new passports over for inspection, but none of the agents said a word to any of the people they inspected. It was almost as if these agents were barely present and merely looked and stamped each document absentmindedly.
Within minutes, they’d disembarked the ferry and were on the way to their hotel. They had arrived in St. Petersburg earlier than their originally scheduled flight so Xenia was still in Moscow. She wouldn’t be arriving until later that evening. They decided to have their English-speaking taxi driver take them around the city so they could enjoy seeing a little of the wonderful city. They were very happy to find that almost everything was written in English as well as Cyrillic. Travis couldn’t stand the backwards R’s, he found it disconcerting.
The city center impressed Travis, he expected it to look like something out of a bleak 1980s cold war movie. Instead, he found culture and music everywhere, and a bustling metropolis that could rank in comparison with many cities in the United States.
“St. Petersburg is the biggest city located above the Arctic Circle, and as such, the sun does not set in the summer,” their cab driver narrated to them. “The city becomes a party town at that time of year.”
Travis knew that just about twenty years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to find a McDonalds, or any fast food restaurant so not only was he surprised at the fast food places he saw everywhere, but also, according to their driver, beer was available at every single one. He decided that he liked Russia already.
Xenia had certainly chosen very fabulous accommodations for them. The Grand European Hotel was a huge hotel that dated back to pre-soviet times. It had been known as the “Hotel Evropeiskaya” during that time, and was one of the first luxury hotels built in the city. To Travis, it seemed the entire city was built on a foundation of luxury and questionable money. The entire street was filled with fast cars and motorbikes, some even raced each other down a densely populated street and the drivers stopped for no one.
They all retired to their rooms to rest for a while, it had been an early start for them that morning. Mark had advised them that bad weather had been forecasted for the Gulf and they had all agreed it was smarter to get across earlier than not at all.
***
“What do you mean you lost them?” Mickey asked calmly.
He never looked up from the cards in his hand except to scan the chips that lay in the center of the table.
“When we got to the hotel they were gone, Boss,” John said, terrified.
They had searched the entire area looking for Fiona and her friends but they hadn’t been able to find a trace of them.
“Well did you call Barry?”
“I
didn’t think of that Boss, I wanted to let you know what happened first.”
“Where’s your phone, Johnny?” Mickey asked.
“I’ve got it right here.”
“Oh, I see. You didn’t think you coulda called to tell me that?”
John turned red and couldn’t form the words to answer him.
“You’re just lucky I’m in the middle of this game or I’d shoot you right now. Fold!”
Mickey threw the cards down and turned to the petrified man.
“If you make me have to get up from this table and find them myself, I’m going to kill you. So I’d suggest that you get on that phone of yours, call Barry and make him check the CCTV in the area and when you get the information, find them and bring them to me. Don’t set foot back inside this building without that blond bimbo and all of her friends. Do you understand me, you dummy?”
“Yes, Boss.”
“Good.”
Chapter Four
“Tell me Mr. Monnahan,” the reporter started, “what happened when you finally got to Lake Baikal?”
“Well, no one told us that it was a twelve hour flight,’ he paused and sighed deeply. “If only that had been the biggest of my worries then Kitezh would have been a cake walk.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever heard the story of the invisible city?”
“Actually,not until the story originally broke three months ago.”
“You should have done some research before you came looking for an exclusive,” Travis said harshly. “Do you mind if we take a break, I’m exhausted and starving.”