Red Templar

“You’re better at this than I thought, young man.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t screw it up.” The narrow, cold face of the silver-haired man spoke volumes: Fuck up and it will be your head on the block, sonny boy; that’s what you’ve been right from the start: a sacrificial lamb.

“No, sir.” Havers felt a faint shiver, and the Harvard-educated, once-upon-a-time Jamaican unaccountably found himself wondering which half of his DNA he’d picked up from his real father, the inimitable Nedrick Samuels. He prayed it wasn’t the strand controlling flight under pressure.

The treasures of the Kremlin Armoury are contained in nine chambers on two floors of the mid-nineteenth- century building. The ten Faberge eggs are located in the second large room on the second floor of the building. Once again Holliday was struck by the almost masochistic fascination of the old Soviet regime in keeping the ancient, beautiful and incredibly valuable regalia of their oppressors on display, including Ivan the Terrible’s throne.

The ten eggs in the Kremlin Armoury collection were all held in a single large display case, arranged on dull brown, felt-covered tiers shaped roughly like an ancient Mayan stepped pyramid. The Kremlin Egg, also known as the Uspenski Cathedral Egg, occupied the highest level-the place where the bloody human sacrifices were usually made-not a far-fetched metaphor when dealing with relics from the last of the czars and the beginnings of the Russian Revolution.

Although the eggs were housed in a two-hundred-year-old building, the lighting within the Armoury was definitely state-of-the-art. Holliday had no doubt that the display case with the egg collection was made of bulletproof glass, and a careful look at the base of the display revealed the wires and leads going to motion detectors or pressure alarms or both. With several thousand well-armed presidential guards and forty-foot-thick walls it would take more than George Clooney and his franchised entourage of crooks to spirit away the Kremlin Egg from this place.

“I have the same question, compadre: what are we doing in this place?” Eddie whispered.

Holliday purposefully walked away from the brightly lit egg display and wandered casually into the next room. Neither the guards nor the sprinkling of visitors were paying any attention to them. “Genrikhovich said the Cathedral Egg we just saw on display is a fake.”

“And we know Genrikhovich is a liar.” Eddie shrugged.

“I don’t think he was lying about that,” said Holliday.

“Why not?”

“Because he had no reason to. People usually lie for a reason.”

“Not if they are demente, crazy,” answered the Cuban.

“Just for a minute, make the assumption that this time he was telling the truth. The Cathedral Egg is a fake. Why would anyone do such a thing? It makes no sense.”

“In the history books it says that companero Stalin sold many things to get foreign currency; why not this huevo grande, then? It would have been worth a great deal even then. Perhaps he replaced it with this copy so no one would know.”

“I don’t think Stalin was that subtle. To him selling off czarist treasures would be a patriotic act. Besides, he didn’t come to real power until 1922. I don’t think he was worrying about Romanov eggs back then.” Holliday shook his head. “It’s the only question that counts-why switch out the eggs?”

“The eggs of Faberge, they all had surprises inside-yes?” Eddie asked.

“That’s right.” Holliday nodded. “The Trans-Siberian Egg had its own little solid gold train; the Rosebud Egg had a tiny diamond crown and a sapphire pendant; the Imperial Yacht Egg had a tiny platinum replica of the yacht Standart inside. What’s your point?”

“Perhaps the egg of the Cathedral had a secret within it that someone wanted to keep secret.”

“A nice theory, but who do we ask about it?”

“If one thing Genrikhovich said was true, maybe something else was true as well,” said Eddie.

“Such as?”

“The man gospodin Zukov said was one of Genrikhovich’s fantasies. The bastardo son of this KGB defector.”

“Anatoliy Golitsyn’s love child. Anatoliy Ivanov.”

28

There were eleven A. Ivanov in the Moscow phone book, but only one of them lived on Sivtsev Vrazhek Lane. Number thirty-six was a two-story nineteenth-century granite block of flats with a leaded mansard roof, built to look like the old aristocratic mansions that had once been common on the street.

The building stood on the corner of Sivtsev Vrazhek and Plotnikov Street, a block from the kilometer-long pedestrian-only section of bustling Arbat Street. In the old days the Arbat had been home to top-ranking government apparatchiks, and in the “new” old days, when the Mafiya and the gangs ruled in the old historic neighborhoods close to the Garden Ring, the Arbat was a place of purchased sex, expensive vodka and lines of black Escalades lining the streets like a Muscovite’s dream of Fifth Avenue in New York.

At the turn of the nineteenth century it was home to writers, artists and young revolutionaries; at the turn of the twentieth century, gentrification had turned like a grinding wheel, and it was turning into Greenwich Village all over again.

Eddie peered anxiously around at the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings that ran up and down the narrow street. It was dusk now, and the Cuban looked apprehensive. Dealing with a few thugs in a St. Petersburg square was one thing in broad daylight, but something else in the dark of a Moscow night.

White racism was alive and well in Russia, and Moscow was its capital. Groups like the banned Slavic Union, Young Russia and Young Moscow were becoming more powerful each day, and Eddie knew that the longer he stayed in Russia the more dangerous it became, no matter how fluent he was in the language. The groups had become so bold they were even posting their immigrant “kills” on YouTube.

“What apartment is he in, again?” Holliday asked.

Eddie glanced at the scrap of paper from the phone book. “Numero tres. Three,” he said. They stepped up to the main door and pulled it open. In the old days a housekeeper would pop out of her single room at the first creaking of the door, but today there was nothing but a corridor stretching the length of the building.

Number three was on the right. Holliday could hear music playing softly. It sounded like Rimsky-Korsakov, the man who wrote “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Holliday could also hear low voices, the tone urgent. He knocked. The voices stopped abruptly, but the music played on for a few seconds longer. Then it too fell silent. Holliday knocked again. He heard another sound; slippers swishing on wood floors.

“Kto eto?”

Holliday gave Eddie the nod. “Druz’ya Viktora Ostrovskogo,” answered the Cuban. There was a long pause and then the sound of chains being drawn and latches turned. Holliday touched the side pocket of his jacket. The flat Serdyukov pistol he’d taken from the woman on the Trans-Siberian was still there. He kept his hand in his pocket and popped off the trigger safety. Unless Anatoliy Ivanov wore something better than a grade-three Kevlar vest to answer the door, they were covered.

The door opened. Holliday found himself staring at a man in his late forties or early fifties with salt-and- pepper hair and a long graying beard. He was dressed in a plain black suit with a large silver three-banded pectoral cross around his neck, identifying him as a Russian Orthodox priest. The walls behind the man were covered in icons of every size and type. There was a second man sitting on a worn, faded green corduroy couch, eating something that looked suspiciously like a Big Mac. He looked up, his mouth full of food, and adjusted his wire- rimmed spectacles with one hand, the half-eaten burger in the other.

“So, we are friends again, are we?”

It was Victor Genrikhovich.