The Romanov Cross: A Novel (30 page)

“And when the tenth and final plague came, the Lord said, ‘About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill …’ ”

There was the sound of something stirring in the back of the van, and then he heard the leather of the backseat creaking. Damn, why couldn’t Bathsheba have stayed asleep for just another couple of hours? He did not need to deal with her blather.

“ ‘… and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt—worse than ever has been or ever will be again.’ ”

Rebekah was still snoring, but her sister must be awake.

“Exodus, 11, 4–6.”

As the tires rumbled onto the corrugated lanes of the steel bridge, Charlie caught, out of the corner of one eye, a hand reaching over and into the front seat. At first, he figured she was reaching for the thermos, but then he thought, Bathsheba hates peppermint tea.

“Even so, the Lord had provided for his chosen people,” Abercrombie commented, “instructing them to mark their doorposts with the blood of the lamb.”

Maybe she thought it was root beer, her favorite.

“It’s peppermint tea,” he said. “You won’t like it.”

Taking his eye off the slippery road for an instant, he saw that her wrist was surprisingly bony and white, even for Bathsheba, and something wet and stringy touched his cheek. Christ, why hadn’t she dried her hair before she got back in the car?

And then she really pissed him off. She went right past the thermos and reached for the rag holding the cross.

“Leave that alone,” he barked, reluctant to take a hand off the wheel on the icy bridge.

But she went ahead anyway and picked it up.

Shit
. He took one hand off the wheel and grabbed her wrist—it was cold and slick as an icicle—but when he glanced up at the rearview mirror, he saw not Bathsheba’s sullen features, but two hollow eye sockets, sunken in the long face of a dead man in a black sealskin coat.

When he turned his head, a thatch of matted dark hair, knotted and rank as seaweed, swept his face. He’d have screamed, but he was struck dumb. The car swerved, scraping the guardrail so hard a shower of blue sparks erupted.

“What?” Rebekah said, startled awake. “What’s happening?”

Charlie dropped hold of the bony wrist and wrestled with the wheel. The tires skidded on a thin coat of ice.

Bathsheba was sitting bolt upright, muttering “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want …”

The car banged the rails again, the hatchback springing open and the alarm bell dinging.

An oncoming truck pumped its horn, switching its headlight beams to bright and sweeping the interior of the van.

“What’s going on?” Bathsheba said. Icy cold air was flooding the car from the open hatch.

“And the Lord said to the Israelites, ‘I will not suffer the destroyer to come into your houses …’ ”

“Watch it!” Rebekah shouted, as he barely managed to get control before they veered into the other lane.

In the rearview mirror, the dead man was gone, as if extinguished
by the gush of light and air. All Charlie saw was Bathsheba, and through the gaping hatch the empty roadway disappearing behind him.

The truck rattled by, its driver thrusting his middle finger out the window at Charlie.

“Did you fall asleep?” Rebekah accused him. The cross, free of its rag, was lying on the floor of the van.

“Ew,” Bathsheba said, squirming in her seat.

“And the angel of death spared them, as the Lord had promised.”

“Double ew,” Bathsheba said again. “It stinks back here.”

“What are you talking about?” Rebekah snapped, turning around. “And close that hatch before we lose half the gear!”

The van eased off the other end of the Heron River Bridge, and Charlie, steering it onto the shoulder, took his first full breath in what felt like forever. His hands were shaking, and he was still too scared even to turn in his seat.

“And it’s all wet back here,” Bathsheba complained, settling back into her own seat after securing the hatch.

Rebekah took a look around the rear, and said, “You should have stomped the snow off your boots before you got back in the van.”

“I did,” Bathsheba insisted.

“Then what did you step in?” she said, rolling down her window. “It does smell like something died back there.”

“Forget about the smell,” Charlie muttered to Rebekah. Gesturing at the cross on the floor, he said, “Pick that up.”

She did, wrapping it back in the rag.

“Put it in the glove compartment.”

She stuck it in the compartment and slammed the little door shut. “And you,” she said, glaring at him, “watch your damn driving from now on.”

“ ‘And it came to pass that the Lord did bring the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt …’ ”

Charlie flicked off the CD and punched the radio dial to a country-western station.

“I was listening to that,” Rebekah complained.

“You were sleeping,” he said, as Garth Brooks came on, mournfully wailing about lightning strikes and rolling thunder. “Listen to this instead.”

With his eyes fastened on the road, his hands clenching the wheel, and his heartbeat gradually returning to normal, he steered the van out into the darkness of the surrounding land—
darkness that could be felt
—and pondered the cross they had looted from a Russian grave.

Was the apparition he had just seen in the backseat its rightful owner?

A wolf—a big dark one—was momentarily caught in the headlights, loping along the side of the road, as if keeping pace with the van. But then, with a turn of its head and a silver flash of its eyes, it vanished into the night.

By the time Slater had reached the bottom of the stone steps leading to the beach, he could hardly believe it.

It had been hard enough coming down them, in the light of day, but to think that Old Man Richter had managed to climb
up
them after being shipwrecked was almost beyond comprehension.

“That guy we found in the church must have been one tough old bird,” Rudy, the Coast Guard ensign, said.

“The toughest there ever was.”

In some places, the steps were no more than a few inches wide, and they zigged and zagged down the cliff face from the colony grounds high above them. Up top, Slater could hear the sounds of Sergeant Groves’s work crew preparing for the exhumations—buzz saws cutting a clear path to the cemetery, jackhammers loosening soil, hammers clanging on metal stanchions as the lighting poles and lab tents were erected. Even now, at high noon, the sun was struggling to make itself felt through the low-hanging clouds, and a hundred yards offshore the bracelet of mist that clung to St. Peter’s Island obscured the Bering Strait beyond.

“Just in case,” Rudy was saying as he walked a few yards down the rocky beach, “this RHI is going to be left right here.”

A bright yellow boat—called a Rigid Hull Inflatable—was sitting just above the high-tide line, tied to a boulder and raised on makeshift davits fashioned from driftwood. A black, waterproof tarp was stretched tight over its interior.

“Chances are,” Rudy said, “it will never be needed, but if air transport is unavailable or for some reason temporarily impractical, this will provide a means to get off the island and back to Port Orlov.”

“I take it you’ll be here to do the navigating,” Slater said.

“Yes, I’m staying when the Sikorsky goes, but the boat pretty much sails itself. Port Orlov’s just about three miles due east.”

The chopper was leaving that night, in less than two hours, carrying the rest of the Coast Guard personnel—along with a body bag containing the remains of Richter. Nika had contacted Geordie to take custody of the corpse and keep it under wraps in the community center’s garage until she could get back and arrange for a proper burial.

Slater looked forward to limiting the complement on the island. When dealing with an epidemiological event like this, the fewer people present, the smaller the risk of anything from misinformation to contagion escaping into the greater pool. As it was, there were far too many questions from the Coast Guardsmen, and even though they had been warned that anything they had seen or done on the island was considered highly classified, Slater knew from experience that no secret shared by more than three people ever stayed secret for long. He slapped a hand on the side of the boat, like patting a trusty steed, all the while hoping he would never need to take it out on the open sea. If everything went as planned, the exhumation and autopsy work would be done in roughly seventy-two hours, and the chopper would be back to retrieve Slater’s team and their core samples before the weather turned any worse than it already was.

Even for Alaska, there was a bone-chilling snap in the air, courtesy of a Siberian low that had been moving slowly, but inexorably, in the direction of St. Peter’s Island. Snowfall so far had been slight, just a couple of inches, but even that much precipitation meant time and effort would be expended to clear it away. The most important thing
for Slater right now was to get into that cemetery and start the dig. He had spent several hours going over all the topographical data with Professor Kozak, and he had chosen the grave closest to the edge of the cliff to begin his work. Not only was it the one most in danger of falling victim to the same erosion that had released the first coffin, it was also the one that might have been exposed to the greatest variations in soil and air temperature, and from the frost heaval that they could cause.

As soon as he returned to the colony grounds, Slater made the equivalent of hospital rounds, inspecting the various labs and facilities, which had been erected in record time. Green neoprene tents, connected by hard rubber matting that provided pathways among them, glowed from within like lightbulbs. Ropes had been strung up alongside all the paths so that, in the event of a sudden whiteout, anyone caught outside could still hang on and grope his or her way to safety. In addition to the mess tent, there were several bivouacs now—one reserved for Dr. Lantos and Nika, who had definitely renounced her notion of sleeping in the old church—and over by the main gates a combination laboratory and autopsy tent. A metal ramp with rails on both sides had been erected to its entrance, where a big orange triangle announced that it was a Biohazard Level-3 Facility, open to authorized personnel only. The tent was shrouded in heavy-duty, double-plastic sheaths, stuck together with Velcro-type adhesive strips; in this climate, zippers tended to freeze and get stuck.

Parting the curtains, Slater stepped inside the laboratory area of the tent. Dr. Lantos was under a table, straightening out a tangle of cords that looked like a pile of snakes. For a second, Slater was taken back to the rice paddy in Afghanistan … and the viper lashing out at the little girl. Warm air was blowing in through the vents, but the ambient temperature was still no better than fifty-seven or fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.

Crawling back out, feetfirst, Dr. Lantos looked up and saw him. Pushing her glasses back onto the bridge of her nose and glancing at her wristwatch, she said, “Don’t tell me you’re ready to go.”

“Not until you say the lab is done.”

Sitting back on her heels, she said, “It may not look like much, but I do think it’s fully operational. Want the thirty-second tour?”

“Absolutely.”

The truth was, the relatively warm air was feeling really good, and he didn’t mind lingering a bit. The new antiviral regimen was playing havoc with his usual malarial meds, and more than once that morning he’d felt a sudden shiver descend his spine. If anyone else under his command had reported similar problems, Slater would have promptly removed that person from active duty and ordered rest and maybe even a medical evaluation. But if he took himself out of the picture, if he admitted what was going on to anyone else on the team, the whole mission would grind to an immediate halt. Even more to the point, if, God forbid, word of the delay got back to Dr. Levinson at the AFIP, he’d instantly be replaced, recalled … and relegated to a desk job in D.C. forever after.

And that was not a risk he was prepared to take.

“This is our living room,” Dr. Lantos joked, waving her arm around the long, narrow space, illuminated by a row of light fixtures attached to a single aluminum beam that ran the length of the room. Counters had been set up on either side, topped with electron microscopes, racks of test tubes, vials, flasks, beakers, rubber gloves, and antiseptic dispensers. Underneath them there were cabinets and bins with neatly labeled and color-coded drawers.

“You have all the power you need?” Slater asked, and Lantos nodded vigorously, which only served to call his attention to the pencil, and the pen, she had stuck in the frizzy mop of her gray hair. He had the fleeting impression that if he looked hard enough in there, he could find anything from grocery lists to ticket stubs. It was one of the things that had always endeared her to him.

At the rear of the tent, a second chamber—a chamber within a chamber, as it were—had been erected behind its own clear plastic curtains; parting them, he was met by a blast of much colder air. A freezer, about half the size of a normal refrigerator, squatted on the triple-insulated rubber mat that comprised the floor. Standing in the center of the space was a long, stainless-steel autopsy table, and beside
it a wheeled cart that held an array of vessels and receptacles for the organs and tissue samples they would be removing from the corpses they exhumed. Slater expected to take samples from no less than three or four, drawn from all quarters of the cemetery, before he was done. After inspecting the air vents, which were serviced by a separate filtration unit outside, Slater was satisfied that the place was indeed ready to go.

“Grab your hat,” he said. “It’s showtime.”

With Dr. Lantos in tow, Slater rounded up Professor Kozak, who was buried in his geological studies, and told them to wait for him by the main gates. Then, with some reluctance, he went to fetch Nika. He wished it could be avoided, he did not want her anywhere near the site and exposed to any of the myriad dangers it might present, but he also knew she’d be livid if he tried to leave her out.