somewhere else; somebody may have heard the shot and called the police. We should be on our way out of here pretty soon; there’s blood all over the place and a body in the refrigerator.”
“Nobody actually
“Keep it short anyway,” said Holliday.
Ivanov nodded, casting a wary glance at the mess on the floor and walls. “Father Stelletskii went to the Kiev Seminary. He was a brilliant scholar, especially in the subjects of history and scriptural archaeology. In 1906, less than a year after he graduated, he was teaching history and geography at the Russian-Arab Seminary in Nazareth. While he was there he became convinced from his studies that Christ himself had written his own gospel and that it had been secretly taken from Judea by Joseph of Arimathea.”
“The Grail myths,” said Holliday.
“Yes,” said Ivanov, enthusiasm creeping into his tone despite the gore all around him. “Father Stelletskii could never understand why any great significance should be attached to a cup Jesus drank from at the Last Supper. Why not a plate, a bowl, a jug or some other vessel? In Aramaic, the language both spoken and written during the time of Christ, the masculine word for ‘cup’ is
“I think we must hurry,
“What is it?” Holliday asked.
“There is nothing. That is what is making me nervous. I do not like it.”
“Hurry it up,” said Holliday to the priest.
“When Ivan built the Kremlin he made a special place for the books and treasures from Constantinople. As time went on, more and more rooms and passages were built beneath the Kremlin. The Kremlin itself changed from wood to brick and stone. The great library was lost. It has been lost for more than five hundred years, and everyone has looked for it.”
“Including your Father Stelletskii,” said Holliday.
“In 1912 Father Stelletskii organized the Commission for the Study of Underground Antiquities, which was built to study the underground tunnels of Moscow. He asked for permission to dig beneath the Kremlin, but he was not permitted to. In 1914 he discovered Dabelov’s catalog of the library of Ivan the Terrible, but further work was cut short by World War One and then the Russian Revolution. Father Stelletskii returned to the Ukraine and to Kiev. He continually petitioned the government to dig beneath the Kremlin, and finally in 1929 Stalin gave his permission- the thought of the richness of the hoard spurring his interest. The first dig began in 1933 but nothing was found. The Second World War stopped any further digs at the Kremlin, and Father Stelletskii fell ill. He died shortly after the war, but Stalin had the Moscow Archaeological Institute continue searching up until his death. Khrushchev continued the search, as did Yeltsin, Gorbachev and now Putin.”
“And found nothing,” said Holliday.
“And found nothing.” Ivanov nodded.
“Maybe because there was nothing to find,” Holliday said.
“Or maybe because they did not have Father Stelletskii’s maps to guide them,” said Genrikhovich.
“You have the maps?” Holliday said.
“They were hidden at the seminary in Kiev. I discovered them hidden there when I was a student. I took up the good father’s work.”
“Where are the maps?”
“Not here.” Genrikhovich smiled.
“Show me,” said Holliday.
He could hear, muffled by the distance, the strange warbling of approaching sirens. Ivanov went back into the kitchen and filled a knapsack with bottled water and cans of food, then led them out of the apartment and down a long corridor leading to a rear exit. The exit opened onto Kaloshin Alley, the narrow side street running at right angles to Sivtsev Vrazhek Lane. Ivanov’s car, an old Lada, was parked in a small vacant lot behind his building. A few moments later, with the sirens coming closer, they were moving south through the crowded streets of nighttime Moscow, headed toward the Kremlin.
Brinsley Whitman Havers III, deputy assistant to the deputy national security adviser, deplaned at Moscow’s Domodedovo International Airport on the afternoon United Airlines flight from Washington Dulles with only his briefcase and an overnight bag. He had spent the entire flight in his first-class seat touching his suit jacket, feeling the weight of his newly minted diplomatic passport in his inside pocket, his brain buzzing with the mental shock and awe of suddenly being thrust into the world of international intrigue, and trying to look cool and detached about his adventure at the same time, and failing miserably.
An embassy marine met him at customs, took him to a waiting Escalade and whisked him off to the walled blockhouse-style embassy in the Presnensky district in the city center. Thirty-five minutes after arriving in Moscow, Whit Havers, seated behind tinted bulletproof glass, was whisked through the gates of Bolshoy Deviatinsky Pereulok No. 8.
A check of his “mailbox” on the National Security Agency’s internal computer Web site showed that his contact had requested a face-to-face at some place called Coffee Mania in the Neglinnaya Plaza on Trubnaya Square at nine o’clock that evening. Whit, whose foreign travel outside of Jamaica and the D.C. area consisted of a two-day trip to Toronto for a G8 summit, was beside himself with excitement, but he managed to give the countersignal agreeing to the contact. Whit Havers was going to have a meeting with an “asset” that he was “running.” He called the transport pool, arranged for a driver and an unmarked car for later in the evening, and found his way to the embassy cafeteria for a celebratory banana muffin and a nonfat latte.
At seven forty-five the unmarked, a last year’s tan-colored Dodge Caravan that stood out like Donald Trump in a Yugo, took Whit across town to Trubnaya Square. Neglinnaya Plaza turned out to be that uniquely European invention, the vertical mall. A perfectly good eighteenth- or nineteenth-century building was demolished and something that was generally an architect’s version of a rocket ship or a seven-story twenty-fifth-century blender was raised into the cavity like a glittering tooth, generally created with a lot of brushed steel and glittering glass. Thirty or forty high-end, brand-name boutiques were crammed into the building, and the place began to print money. The real value of the property, of course, was the four levels of underground parking, which the plaza charged an arm and a leg for, parking in Moscow having a street value roughly on a par with high-grade cocaine.
Coffee Mania was half Starbucks, half tapas restaurant, with as many food choices as there were sizes of various coffees. There were at least thirty different sandwiches and twenty-odd desserts listed on the chalkboard menu hanging over the long zinc-and-black marble bar. The clientele were young, rich and dressed like they’d stepped out of an L.A. television show. The music droning through the speakers was some kind of Euro-trance that Whit didn’t recognize.
Even though Whit arrived at exactly eight, Bone was there before him, standing out for his drabness of dress as much as his age. He was wearing a gray wool overcoat, corduroy pants that would have looked better on someone weeding his garden and a pair of old brown shoes. There was a black sports bag at his feet. Whit, as usual, was head-to-toe Armani. Except for the dusky color of his skin he fit right into the Coffee Mania crowd. He sat down opposite Bone in the tiny booth at the back of the cafe.
“Black Tusk,” said Whit, giving the recognition code and feeling a little foolish.
“You’re the one running me?” Bone said, looking surprised. “A bit young, aren’t you, lad?”
