Rasputin's Shadow (34 page)

I
t
was a really, really weird feeling.

Huddled there behind the Dumpster, looking down the alley toward the warehouse. Keeping a nervous eye on the SWAT agents who were scattered in various positions all around me. Not knowing if something was going to zap us and turn us all into trigger-happy, bloodthirsty zombies.

Waiting there and wondering if my mind was going to be taken over was truly disconcerting. It didn’t help that I had all the time in the world to brood on it. My mind was having a field day imagining how it would play out. I wanted to believe I would be above it, that somehow I possessed such strength of character that I would be able to resist it and valiantly rise out of my foxhole and put a bullet right between Koschey’s shocked eyes. I found it really hard to accept the idea that, in truth, I would succumb to it as quickly as the next guy, and the notion that something could take hold of me and make me do stuff over which I had zero control was more than unnerving. It was actually terrifying. I knew, there and then, that getting Koschey and making sure no one ever got to use Sokolov’s invention again was the most important thing I was ever going to do in this life.

Even worse, another disturbing thought weaseled its way into the quagmire my mind was caught up in. I found myself thinking about Alex, and about how I desperately didn’t want him to grow up without a dad. He’d lost his mom already. I had to make sure I was there for him. I’d lost my own dad, in circumstances that weren’t any less traumatic than what Alex went through when Michelle died. I was only ten when it happened. I came home from school and walked into my dad’s study to find him at his desk, sprawled back in his big chair, and lifeless. Not from some heart attack. He’d stuffed his Smith & Wesson .38 in his mouth and pulled the trigger. In my shocked state, I hadn’t turned away. I’d walked up to him in a curious, numbed daze. I’d seen the back of his head missing, the wall behind him splattered with gore, images that would haunt me forever. Alex already had his share of those. I wanted him to have as normal and, well, happy a life from here on as I could possibly provide for him. And part of that included keeping myself in the picture.

I kept Alex’s face in mind as time slowed to a crawl and I sat there and waited, wondering if Koschey was going to show up or if I would even be aware of what could be my last moments of life.

***

K
OSCHEY’S FINGER CARESSED THE
Command key on the open laptop.

Time was running out. He needed to make a decision.

They were there, in his grasp. At his mercy.

One tap.

He hesitated—then, quietly seething with anger, he decided against it.

He wasn’t even sure Sokolov was still there. That was the clincher. And even if he were, Koschey couldn’t be sure that the SWAT-team members’ protective gear—their helmets and their earpieces—wouldn’t dampen the device’s effect enough to pose him a threat. If they did, then he’d be putting himself in danger.

He couldn’t risk it. He had bigger fish to fry.

Koschey drum-tapped the body of the laptop and settled on his decision. It was a major setback, no doubt, but their having Sokolov wouldn’t affect his immediate plans. Nothing Sokolov could tell them would matter. They wouldn’t be able to stop him this time. He certainly didn’t like the idea of the Americans having Sokolov. They’d know the technology’s secrets and its weaknesses. They could get Sokolov to build them a device. But that would take time.

Then he saw something that confirmed he’d made the right call. One of the vans and the unmarked sedan drove off, in tandem. They turned out of the estate down the road from him and set off toward the city.

Sokolov could be riding in one of the vehicles. Well protected. On his way to a serious debrief.

Koschey considered driving after them. Maybe using the device to attack them at a traffic light. Again, he decided against it. Too many unknowns. Too risky.

Getting Sokolov back—or killing him—would have to wait.

Bigger fish to fry, he reminded himself. Time to move on.

With rage pulsating silently through him, he put his car into gear and drove away.

***

H
ALF AN HOUR OR
so later, two more SWAT vans arrived. I think I must have dropped a couple of pounds in sweat by then.

They’d brought extra earpieces and helmets with them. And while they deployed and set up a containment perimeter around the warehouse, I left Infantino in charge and got one of the agents to drive me back to Federal Plaza.

I was disappointed that Koschey hadn’t shown up, but glad to get the hell out of there. And right then, I was really hoping Sokolov would be able to tell us something useful. And hoping I wouldn’t experience those sweats again.

Within twenty minutes, I was in an interview room at Federal Plaza with Aparo, Larisa, and Sokolov.

“No luck with Koschey’s SUV,” Aparo told me as I sat down, then motioned at Sokolov. “He says he had its plates covered the whole time they were working on it.”

I asked, “Why would Koschey do that?”

Larisa said, “Plan for the unexpected, especially when it’s that easy to do.”

Clearly, the instructors at the SVR knew their stuff.

I shared Aparo’s frustration. It was too vague to put out an APB on it, though it was still worth relaying to the SWAT team at the warehouse.

I called Infantino. Then we got down to Sokolov’s past and to what “it” was.

***

“I
T ALL STARTED WITH
my grandfather’s memoirs,” Sokolov told us.

He talked about his youth, about finding the old journals in the cellar of the cottage he’d grown up in. He was an efficient storyteller and hadn’t dwelled too long on detail, which was good. I could feel a ticking clock bearing down on us all, given that Koschey was still out there, with the device. Sokolov then hit some visible reticence and went silent. We offered him food and drink, which he declined. Then after an uncomfortable moment, he seemed to reach some kind of internal resignation, and he told us what was in the diaries.

Mish
a’s Journal

Karovo, Kaluga Province

December 1926

I
t was a night that would long be remembered. The night that would change everything.

Not just for me, but for everyone in the empire.

And to the end of my days, given everything that followed, I shall wonder whether or not I should have stopped it from happening.

That winter ten years ago, back in 1916, was bleak and harsh. The war against the Germans was raging on, and eleven million of Mother Russia’s faithful sons had already been sucked into its bloody embrace. Horrific losses increased by the day, and the Army’s supply of weapons was virtually depleted. Across the land, there was great hardship and suffering. With food and manpower diverted to the front, there was widespread starvation. The people were angry. Trouble was brewing.

In Petrograd, we were all living on a knife’s edge. Rasputin was, as always, oblivious to the danger bubbling around us. His mind was elsewhere, strategizing for our grand intervention at the front. I was playing along while desperately searching for a way out of my quandary.

My old master was, by then, in continual fear for his life, and with good reason. He was loathed by all of Petrograd’s society, if not by everyone in the empire. The nobility and the bourgeoisie were outraged at how this sinful peasant had brought shame to the court and how he seemed to control the royal couple as if they were his marionettes. They blamed his meddling for the disastrous mismanagement of the war—it was at his behest that the tsar had relieved Grand Duke Nikolai of his command and taken over the war campaign himself. It was leading to an inevitable revolution that would cause them to lose everything.

It was in that turbulent environment that on a fateful day that December, Rasputin received an unexpected invitation. Prince Felix Yusupov, the young heir to Russia’s biggest fortune, wanted Rasputin to join him and some friends at his palace. The Yusupovs were descendants of the Tatar ruler Khan Yusuf and, it was believed, of the Prophet Mohamed himself. The prince’s ancestors had ruled over Damascus, Antioch, and Egypt before ending up in Russia at the time of Ivan the Terrible and converting to Christianity a century later. Their palace fronting the Moika Canal, one of many they owned across the empire, was a sprawling edifice that rivaled the Alexander Palace in its grandeur. It had ballrooms, bathing pools, and a private theater where Liszt and Chopin had performed concerts. Much later, I would hear that long after the revolution had wrecked the empire and the Yusupovs had fled Russia on board a British warship, the remains of a corpse were discovered in one of the palace’s many hidden rooms. The bones turned out to be those of Felix’s great-grandmother’s lover. This was a family whose history mirrored that of Russia. On this occasion, it was fated to influence it one final time.

Felix and Rasputin had become more than acquaintances over the last year, but Rasputin had never been to the Moika Palace, nor had he met the prince’s wife, Irina, who was the niece of the tsar and was, according to Felix, feeling unwell.

He asked Rasputin if he wouldn’t mind treating her while he was there, and offered to send his driver to pick him up.

Irina was young and attractive. I couldn’t help but think of the poor woman as yet another lamb being led to the slaughter. But perhaps something else was afoot.

Rasputin knew that Yusupov, as Russia’s richest heir and a key member of the nobility, harbored the same hostility toward him as the rest of his enemies. He suspected Yusupov and his friends had other intentions regarding him. Malevolent ones. It was already insulting that the prince couldn’t be seen to receive him during the day and had asked that he visit them in the middle of the night.

Still, he decided he would go to the meeting. He wanted to know what they were up to.

“We’ll use the device,” he told me. “You will set it up outside the Moika Palace before I go in. And once they’re under its effect, I will know what they really have planned for me.”

I harbored the same suspicions, but I had a different plan in mind. I decided I would find out on my own, before he went there.

Not knowing anything about the layout of the palace was going to be a problem. I didn’t know where to set up my device, and I didn’t want to risk riding out there on the cart with the larger machine, the one we’d used at the mines. The only alternative was to use a coat with the conductors sewn into its sleeves, the one Rasputin had used the first time he treated the tsarevich. It would be more powerful than that earlier version, of course. Many years had passed, and my work had greatly evolved. Still, it was a risk, but one I felt compelled to take.

If nothing else, Rasputin had definitely turned me into an adventurer.

I showed up at the Moika Palace the next day and, reining in my nervousness, I presented myself as the personal envoy of Rasputin and asked to see the prince. Felix, curious as to my presence, agreed to receive me. The liveried Ethiopian manservant led me past rooms of astounding opulence, past a library lined with shelves that held what must have been every book ever written, and down a steep staircase to a charming basement room. It had a vaulted ceiling and was divided into two parts. One was a cozy dining room that had a roaring fireplace. There was a magnificent inlaid ebony cabinet beside it that seemed like it was made up of thousands of tiny mirrors, with a splendid rock-crystal crucifix sitting on it. The other part was a sitting room that had a settee facing a large polar-bear skin. The only windows were small and set high in the wall on one side, just under the ceiling.

Before long, the prince joined me there. He was slim and unprepossessing, his features thinly drawn. He reeked of elegance and of breeding, but I found his manner phlegmatic and rather effeminate. As a youth and during his years at Oxford, he was known to enjoy dressing up in women’s clothing and going to nightclubs disguised as such, and I could easily picture him in that attire. Rumors abounded about his liaisons with Grand Duke Dimitry Pavlovich, the tsar’s tall, ruggedly handsome young cousin who lived nearby.

Once we were alone, I switched on the device and waited until I felt the prince was under its influence. Then I began by asking him how he felt about Rasputin.

“That scoundrel is the root of all evil and the cause of all our problems,” he hissed, his eyes bulging angrily. “He is single-handedly responsible for all the misfortunes that have blighted Russia. If he isn’t stopped, he’s going to bring down the monarchy and bring us down with it. Do you know what he did last month?”

I probably did, but I replied, “No.”

“He offered to get me a senior posting in the government,” Felix scoffed. “Me, Prince Felix Yusupov. This illiterate peasant from the armpit of Siberia was offering me a job. In my uncle-in-law’s government.”

“What did you reply?” I asked.

“I took on a humbled air and told him I felt I was too young and inexperienced to serve at such a high level, but that I was immeasurably flattered and gratified by the thought that someone as discerning as he had such a lofty opinion of me.” He looked at me in disbelief, then he burst out laughing.

I waited for him to settle down, then I asked him, “So what is to be done?”

He fixed me with a surprisingly chilling glare and took in a deep breath, then, almost under his breath, he said, “Only the complete destruction of Rasputin will save Mother Russia. It is the only way to release the tsar from his vile spell and allow him to lead us to a decisive victory against the Germans.”

He then told me what they had planned for Rasputin.

They had chosen the date, December 16, because of something I had forgotten. “It is,” he said coldly, “the fifth anniversary of that failed attempt on the depraved scoundrel’s life. You remember it, yes? The day that prostitute with no nose stabbed him in Tobolsk.”

I remembered it well. It had been the catalyst to darker times, although I suspect they would have happened with or without the syphilitic whore and her dagger.

I made sure the setting was strong enough so that Felix wouldn’t remember our chat, and left him.

I didn’t tell Rasputin any of it.

***

T
HAT NIGHT,
I
HUDDLED
in the shadows outside the Moika Palace, as Rasputin had asked, awaiting his arrival. But I had no plans to use the machine. I didn’t even bring it with me.

It was a mildly cold evening, a few degrees above freezing, and a light, wet snow was falling. At around half past midnight, the canvas-topped motorcar I’d seen earlier returned and pulled into the yard outside the palace. The driver, whom I knew to be Lazovert, the military doctor who was acting as the prince’s chauffeur, came out first, dressed in a long coat and an Astrakhan cap with ear flaps on it. He opened the rear door. Prince Felix stepped out first. Then I saw Rasputin emerge, looking regal in his fur coat and his beaver hat.

Rasputin stepped up to the house as if it were his own. What a journey, I thought. What a long way we’ve come since our days in the austere cells of the monastery at Verkhoturye.

They disappeared into a doorway. I kept watch.

For about an hour, nothing visible happened, not from my vantage point from behind a large hedge. But in my mind’s eye, I tried to picture what was happening in that basement. The prince had described their plans to me in great detail. Years later, it would be hard to glean what exactly did take place. Several of the participants have described the event in their published memoirs, but they were all contradictory and, knowing Rasputin as I did, seemed rather fanciful.

What I did know was that Felix would be entertaining Rasputin in the basement dining room. The servants had been told they wouldn’t be needed for the night. The other plotters would be waiting upstairs in the prince’s study: his friend and lover Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich, who had been raised in the tsar’s household and loathed Rasputin for all the calamities that had befallen his family; Vladimir Purishkevich, a monarchist member of the Duma who had repeatedly denounced Rasputin; Lieutenant Sukhotin, a soldier who had been wounded in the war and believed Rasputin to be a German spy; Dr. Lazavert, a friend of Purishkevich; and two women: Vera Karalli, a ballerina who was also a lover of the grand duke; and Marianna Pistolkors, Dimitry’s stepsister. Felix had not wanted his wife to be there.

I pictured Felix and Rasputin sitting around the table or on the settee, by the bear skin, a log fire crackling in the hearth. Rasputin would have on one of his prized silk shirts, the ones embroidered by the tsarina. It would only inflame the young prince even more. I imagined Felix offering Rasputin the pastries that they had laced with chippings of potassium cyanide, and offering him a glass of wine that they had spiked with a vial of the same poison. They had opted to use poison to avoid the noise from gunshots. A police station stood directly opposite the palace, across the Moika Canal, not fifty meters away. Gunshots in the dead of the night, even inside the palace, would be heard.

I knew Rasputin wouldn’t eat the pastries. He still didn’t eat sweets. The wine, though, he would happily drink.

And drink he did. But nothing happened. They had prepared four glasses, two of which were laced with the poison. Rasputin downed them, and kept on talking, unaffected. He downed the third glass. Then he smiled at the young prince before his brow darkened around his ice-blue eyes and his face took on a look of terrifying hatred.

“You see,” Rasputin told Felix. “Whatever you have planned for me, it won’t work. You can’t hurt me, no matter how hard you try. Now pour me another cup, I’m thirsty. And come sit close to me. We have a lot to discuss.”

Felix was perturbed. Rasputin had drunk all the poison and although he seemed a bit drowsy, he was still as fit as he was when he came in. His fellow plotters upstairs were also getting impatient and rowdy. Rasputin heard the noise and remembered he was also there to treat Irina.

“What’s all that noise?” he asked.

“It’s Irina and her guests. They’re probably leaving. I’ll go take a look.”

Felix left Rasputin and hurried up the stairs to his study. He told the others what had happened.

“What should we do?” he asked in a panic, but before anyone could answer, he saw Dimitry’s Browning lying on the table and grabbed it.

He went back down to the basement, where he found Rasputin standing by the fireplace and studying the richly inlaid cabinet next to it.

“I like this cabinet,” Rasputin told him.

“I think you’d do better to study the crucifix and pray to it,” the prince told him. Then he raised his gun.

***

A
T ABOUT HALF PAST
two, still standing outside, feeling heavy-headed and shivering from the cold, I heard a single gunshot. The detonation roused me like a slap to the face, and I felt my pulse quicken.

Was he dead? Could that possibly be the end of Rasputin? It seemed such an unfitting finish for him. I never imagined he would leave this world in such a prosaic way.

True to form, he wasn’t going to disappoint me.