The Hunters (34 page)

‘Tell her to focus!’ Papineau yelled at Garcia, who relayed the message. As Jasmine gained control over her emotions, Garcia’s program finally had a chance to make its comparisons. Papineau watched his screen as thin, red outlines began to encircle various objects. When a possible match was found, the system briefly flashed an image of the artifact before adding it to a list of results. Like a massive, multi-player online game, the program kept a running tally of the discoveries.

Papineau watched with fascination as the program continued to outline, display, and compile with increasing speed, until his screen looked like an explosion of digital fireworks.

* * *

Borovsky smiled at the sight of Jasmine and the others combing through the artifacts. It was the fact that she seemed genuinely interested in the historical value of the pieces, rather than the price they would fetch, that pleased him the most. He hoped the others understood the heritage of these items, and the lengths to which he would go to protect them.

He was beginning to like these newcomers.

He sincerely hoped that he wouldn’t have to shoot them.

‘Before the prince fled,’ Borovsky explained, ‘decisions were made as to which pieces were to accompany him. Time was not on his side, and he left the treasure nearly exactly as you see it today. With no way to accurately determine which pieces are related, those sworn to protect it simply left it as the prince had left it.’

‘This is amazing,’ Jasmine blurted.

Again Borovsky smiled. ‘It makes me happy to hear you say that. There are six more cars, all similar in content and disarray. But the eighth car is
different
… Come, there is something you must see.’

After helping everyone from the first car, Borovsky silently led them to the rear of the train. The suspense was working its own particular brand of magic on each of them. Jasmine couldn’t wait to inventory the historical artifacts of the other six cars. Now that they had found it, Sarah and McNutt were wondering if they had to
deliver
the train before Papineau would hand them their money. Anna wondered how long her superior had been guarding his secret.

Meanwhile, two questions burdened Cobb: what treasure among treasures was in the eighth car, and what price would they have to pay for seeing it?

Cobb cautiously entered the eighth car and started to examine the last compartment. The front half was filled with crates, paintings, sculptures, and files - nothing noteworthy as far as he was concerned. Then Borovsky pointed toward the far corner. When he saw it, Cobb felt a rolling chill as a wave of goose pimples covered his arms.

It was a coffin.

As Cobb approached it, he studied the exterior of the box. Made of thick, heavy wood, it was spiked down in sixteen places along its edge. Strangely, it was also latched on either side with heavy iron locks that required a large key to open.

They all followed Cobb toward the coffin. Everyone except for Jasmine, who literally froze for a moment in the doorway as if she’d gazed at the face of the Gorgon.

‘Someone didn’t want us to get into that box,’ McNutt said.

‘Garcia? You got anything?’ Cobb quietly asked.

‘Searching, boss, but I’m not optimistic,’ he said.

It didn’t matter. Borovsky was about to show them what was inside.

Borovsky removed a chain from around his neck and used the attached key to unlock the ancient locks. Picking up a small pry bar from a nearby crate, he thrust the sharpened end under the lid. Struggling to simply remove one of the sixteen nails, he motioned for Cobb to pick up the second pry bar and start on the opposite side. Working together, it still took them nearly five minutes to move their way around the coffin. As Borovsky pried loose the final anchor, Cobb and McNutt gently pulled back the wooden curtain while bracing themselves for the expected and inevitable stench of death.

There was none. Much to everyone’s surprise, there were also no spiders, cockroaches, ants, maggots, flies, mice, or rats. There was only a slight aroma.

‘What is that smell?’ McNutt said. ‘It’s like … fruit.’

‘Shellac,’ Jasmine said, transfixed by the object within. ‘Used as a preservative - made from lac, a deposit found on trees across this continent.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I thought it might be prune.’

McNutt was only partly kidding because the object inside the coffin looked like a human-sized, human-shaped prune.

Time seemed to have sealed its limbs against, and slightly into, its desiccated yet lumpy body, which consisted of what seemed to be eroding clothing combined with mummified flesh.

Whatever hair was left on its wrinkle-skinned skull now looked like stringy mold. There were only vague suggestions of ears, eyes, nose, or mouth. Over the years, its shape had shifted severely. Now it looked like a Halloween mask.

The only thing seemingly untouched by time was a ring that clung to what used to be its finger. The wide, gold band of the ring was encrusted with sparkling diamonds. The girdle held a magnificent, blood-red ruby. The face of the ring was oblong, with bands of onyx standing out against the polished jewel.

The emblem was clear.

It was the three-barred cross of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The ring was sanctimonious, yet righteous; decadent, yet humble. It somehow reflected lust and virtue at the same time. As if the designer recognized the sin of creating such a lavish bauble before asking for God’s forgiveness by adorning the piece with the holy sign of his faith.

‘We’ve found the ultimate treasure,’ Jasmine said.

‘We have?’ Cobb asked. ‘I mean - is this what I think it is?’

She looked back at the others with a palpable sense of dread.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s Rasputin.’

The reactions to the announcement were muted. The shock of the find was tempered by Borovsky’s explanation that this body was what had drawn the attention of the Black Robes and why they were so fanatically determined to remain.

Cobb was not startled or unnerved by Rasputin’s corpse. It was just one more dead body on a day full of them. Instead, he focused on the rest of the train car, searching for more surprises.

Sarah walked over casually to the coffin. She froze when she saw the ring on his finger.

‘Get me a good image,’ Garcia said.

McNutt brought the flashlight closer.

‘How do you know it’s him?’ McNutt asked Jasmine.

Jasmine pointed to the ring. ‘That’s a gift from the tsarina.’

‘Couldn’t it have been looted from one of the palaces and left here with the rest of the treasure?’ he asked.

‘Hidden on a dead body?’ Sarah said.

‘In a coffin,’ McNutt replied. ‘Who’d look there with all the rest of this lying around?’

‘Me,’ Sarah said, looking over the perimeter of the pine box. ‘The way that thing was sealed tight, they might as well have built a neon sign that said “Important!”’

Jasmine corrected her. ‘Actually, the spikes and padlock weren’t to keep people out.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Sarah asked.

Jasmine didn’t answer. It took a moment for her meaning to penetrate.

‘Oh,’ McNutt gasped. ‘It was to keep Dracula in.’

‘It’s Rasputin all right,’ Garcia said. ‘Facial recognition is a match. So much for the rumor that his body was immolated.’

There was no response.

For a moment, the train car was, fittingly, as quiet as a tomb.

McNutt broke the silence. He pointed at the ring and glanced at Sarah. ‘Gonna go for that?’

Sarah looked down at the jewelry. The corpse still had a disquieting power about it. ‘Too tough to fence.’ She cocked her head slightly to one side, then knelt on one knee beside the coffin to get a better look at the infamous mystic.

‘Praying to your master?’ McNutt asked.

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Please tell me you aren’t a Black Robe. I’d hate to shoot you before I get to bang you.’

Cobb glanced at Sarah and quickly studied her face. McNutt’s idea wasn’t likely, but it wasn’t impossible. Papineau had strong-armed Garcia into spying for him; maybe he’d hired a second mole. Or maybe the Black Robes had bribed her. He took a second - literally, no more - to study her posture, her eyes, her hands. Her head was tilted to one side, not bowed. Her eyes were moving; they were not down, not shut. Her fingers were relaxed and nowhere near a weapon. She did not have what the guys at Guantanamo Bay called ‘snapback’ - the look of a captive, or infiltrator, or sleeper, who was shedding a guise and reverting to their true self.

‘Sarah,’ Cobb said, ‘you with us?’

‘Yeah,’ she assured him. ‘Just looking.’

Cobb nodded. ‘All right then. Let’s go.’

No one asked where. The others in the group were still in the thrall of a man who had been dead nearly a century - a man whose mesmeric powers, at least, transcended death.

Cobb led his team members back toward the entrance of the cave when the hair on his arms began to prickle. The others would soon feel the same sensation, but Cobb’s sharply-honed senses alerted him first. He froze, his head slowly panning from side to side.

‘I feel it, too,’ McNutt agreed.

‘Feel what?’ Sarah asked.

‘The air’s moving in here,’ McNutt explained.

‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Jasmine argued. ‘That would mean—’

‘There’s a second opening somewhere,’ Sarah said. ‘He’s right.’

They looked back toward the front of the train. No one could honestly say that they knew that’s where the cave opened, but it was the logical choice.

Sarah grinned and looked meaningfully at Cobb.

‘You up for it?’ he asked her.

‘It’s what I do, Jack.’

‘Go to it then,’ he ordered.

‘I don’t get it!’ Garcia cried. ‘What’s going on now?’

‘Garcia, I’m with you,’ McNutt said. ‘Except I’m here, and I’m lost.’

But Sarah was already sneaking past the front of the first car, going deeper into the cave. Cobb turned in the other direction and headed back toward Decebal, with a distracted McNutt and a confused Jasmine close behind.

‘Did you know about this too, Papi?’ Cobb asked as they walked.

‘I’m not even sure what you’re talking about,’ the Frenchman said in his ear.

He sounded genuinely puzzled.

‘Jack,’ Jasmine said, frustration in her voice, ‘what are we doing?’

‘You saw the track we were on earlier, outside,’ Cobb explained. ‘It ended. Decisively. No hidden rails that would’ve let us push farther. Isn’t that right, Garcia?’

‘There was no iron anywhere up ahead,’ he agreed.

‘But this train got in here,’ Sarah stressed in their ears, ‘so there had to be more track at some point.’

‘And after they drove this train inside, that track was pulled up and removed, probably melted,’ Cobb said. ‘Getting the treasure out again would take a small, properly equipped army to replace a missing kilometer of rail - all the while being picked off by the members of the honor guard.’

‘Wait,’ Jasmine said. ‘Are you saying there’s another way out? That the Romanovs never had any intention of going back, but they gave themselves the option of going forward?’

‘I’ll let you know soon enough,’ Sarah offered.

Cobb checked his watch. ‘Garcia, is that Papi-cam dried out yet?’

A moment later Garcia replied. ‘Nope. Still not online.’

Cobb heard a snort from Papineau. Cobb felt a pinch of anger - not at the Frenchman’s reaction but about his secrecy. If he had told Cobb that there was a camera in the command centre, Cobb wouldn’t have short-circuited it and they could be getting valuable intelligence on the Black Robes right now. That was Papineau’s error, not his.

Cobb motioned for Jasmine to follow as he went to confer with Borovsky.

* * *

Grigori Sidorov, the leader of the Black Robes, was not happy.

‘I told you not to shoot at them!’ he shouted, banging the flat of his hand on the table in the command center of the train.

Vladimir Losovich held the Heckler & Koch 91 sniper rifle he had taken from the freight car. He cradled it as if it were his child. ‘We weren’t shooting at them,’ he grunted. ‘We were shooting at the horsemen.’

The Black Robes were crawling all over the train, looking for whatever they could use, examine, or loot. After they had piled up their dead and removed the net to make sure it wouldn’t get underfoot, a group of six went into the woods and tried to follow the trail. There was distant gunfire in the woods, but no indication of whose it was or what the result might have been. The majority of the Black Robes went back to the train.

Sidorov twisted his head toward the big, metal bracket holding the array of computer screens, where three Black Robes toiled. ‘Any progress breaking their security?’

The one on the right, watching the actions of the one hunched in the middle as if he were playing a video game, shrugged noncommittally.

Sidorov sat down heavily where Papineau and Cobb once sat. He dismissed Losovich with a wave of a hand. He let the hackers continue to click away as he surveyed the situation.

They were close. The body he had sought all his life was out there, just beyond his reach. But not for long. The biggest danger, if not the biggest impediment, was his own desperation.

He finally admitted it to himself. He wanted it so badly that he had been reckless in his attack. Over-eager. Part of that, too, was that he felt alone. He drew strength from the knowledge that Rasputin must have felt the same way.
But I am just an aspirant, a pilgrim, a
strannik.

Sidorov missed Kazan: not just the city but the people. He missed his palace. He had been feeling the withdrawal from sin more and more, the same way an addict felt the absence of drugs. He needed a fix soon, and the shooting of a few villagers and horses had not sufficed.

A slaughter
, he thought distractedly.
That would do. Finding these horsemen, their women, their children. Where were the six men he had sent out? Why had they not called, or sent a messenger, or returned? Could this golden opportunity be slipping away
?

Sidorov pulled his phone from his coat pocket and pressed the button that immediately linked him with his offices. ‘Where are my reinforcements?’