and I’m damn well ready to do it. It is the only way for me to survive this, I promise you. Even the most cynical Russian would never believe a man capable of doing such a thing to himself!” He laughed at his own notion and filled his glass to the brim.
“You’ll have to explain giving up the code, general,” Hawke said.
“A moment of weakness? A butcher has a meat cleaver poised above your left hand, and he asks you for a number. Few among us could resist the temptation to give it to him, wouldn’t you agree?”
Hawke and Dr. Halter rose from the table and brought him the items he’d requested. Hawke couldn’t resist running his index finger along the edge of the heavy cleaver’s blade. Sharp as a razor, it instantly produced a thin line of bright red blood on the pad of his fingertip.
“Please leave me alone until it’s over and done,” Kuragin said. “When you return, you can bind me to this table in a convincing fashion. There is a length of heavy rope beneath my chair. Then call the emergency medical ambulance. And then you must leave at once. Understood? And never tell a living soul what has happened here. Never.”
“Yes,” Hawke said, holding the swinging kitchen door open for Dr. Halter. “We understand perfectly.”
The two men walked out into the adjacent living room and sat in the two wooden chairs facing the fire. Neither spoke for a few long minutes.
“He’s finishing the vodka,” Hawke finally said, gazing into the flames, “then he’ll do it.”
“Do it? You don’t actually think he’ll go through with this insanity, do you?” Halter said, an incredulous look in his eyes. “No one has that kind of courage. No one.”
“We shall soon see, won’t we?”
A moment later, a horrendous
Kuragin had done it.
Bright red blood spattered the white stucco wall beside the kitchen table. The bloody left hand, still twitching, was completely severed from the forearm by the blade of the meat cleaver, now buried at least an inch deep into the wooden table. The general had pitched forward in his chair when he passed out, his forehead resting on the table. He wasn’t making a sound. Shock had already set in, and the man was clearly unconscious, blood spurting wildly from the grievous wound at the end of his arm.
Hawke quickly wrapped the man’s bloody stump in a tightly wound towel and plunged it into the bowl of ice, while Halter collected the blood-spattered Beta detonator that had fallen to the floor. That done, Halter picked up the kitchen phone and rang for an ambulance, giving the address of the farmhouse, saying only that a man had been found grievously injured and was losing a lot of blood. A doctor should come as quickly as humanly possible. He hung up without giving his name.
“WHAT TIME IS the Tsar accepting his award tonight?” Hawke asked, as they carefully lifted the general’s body and placed him faceup on the table. Hawke used the heavy hemp rope the general had placed beneath his chair to bind the man in a position required for an amputation. It looked real enough, he decided, stepping back to inspect his efforts. As if a man had been bound and relieved of his hand with a meat cleaver. It might work.
“The banquet is at seven, I believe,” Halter said. “Why?”
“I plan to be there,” Hawke said. “I want to make sure his Imperial Majesty, the new Tsar of all Russia, gets the rousing welcome he so richly deserves.”
“Alex, there’s something you should know right now. Korsakov is threatening to destroy an unspecified Western city with a population of one million if the NATO troops just deployed in Eastern Europe are not pulled back from the borders. He phoned the White House and gave President McAtee twenty-four hours to demonstrate his willingness to back off whilst he regained his lost territories.”
“When was this?”
“Sixteen hours ago.”
“So, we’ve got to move very quickly.”
“I’d say that’s an understatement of a huge order of magnitude.”
“Get into the bloody car, then, man! You’ve got the code? The matchbook?”
“Yes. In my waistcoat pocket.”
“A bunch of random numbers, from the look of it. Mean anything to you, professor?” Hawke turned the key, praying the damn car would turn over. Now that the sun had dropped behind the forest, the temperature had plummeted. The highway back to Stockholm would be treacherous.
“One-seven-ought-seven-one-nine-one-eight. Seventeen July, nineteen hundred and eighteen. The exact date of the night Commandant Yurokovsky and his Chekists herded the Romanovs down into the cellar of the house in Ekaterinberg and murdered Tsar Nicholas II, the Empress Katherine, the heir, their four daughters, and the servants.”
“Why would Korsakov choose that date, do you suppose?” Hawke asked. The motor caught on the second try, and he grabbed first gear, racing out of the farmhouse yard, the old Saab whining in its traces.
“It was the last night of the Tsars, Alex. Perhaps he fancies himself as the dawn of a new era, wouldn’t you suppose?”
“Yeah, I suppose he does,” Hawke said, accelerating up the snowy lane, careening once more off the snowbanks lining the road. He drove with ferocity. But in his mind was a perfectly composed picture of his beautiful Anastasia when last he’d seen her. They’d not spoken in days. Tonight, she would be with her father in Stockholm as he accepted his Nobel Prize from the king of Sweden. Somehow, he’d find her. She’d invited him, after all.
Sooner or, he hoped, later, the Tsar would learn that the second detonator had been forcibly taken from Kuragin and fallen into enemy hands. When he did, Hawke knew Korsakov would instantly trigger the thing and detonate it, not caring which enemy had it or where they were.
Which made the timing of everything to come a bit more interesting. He and his new friend Dr. Halter were literally babysitting a live bomb.
Someone would be first to push the button. And someone else would be first to die.
Hawke, his mind racing, knew he’d have to find some way to take the Tsar out when he was alone, or at least get him out in the open. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, accept any collateral damage. He could not conscience the death of innocents.
Such as the woman he loved.
Or, and here his heart paused a beat, their unborn child.
65
The Nobel Prize banquet ceremony is held each year at the Stadshuset in Stockholm. Even a monarch’s coronation cannot rival the Nobel celebration in terms of pure grandeur and epic scale. The massive Stadshuset complex, with its three-hundred-fifty-foot tower at one corner, is built in the Swedish Romantic style. It stands on the banks of the Riddarfjarden, a freshwater lake in the heart of Stockholm. Tonight, Sweden’s beautiful State House was ablaze with light.
Alex Hawke, shivering as he climbed out of the Saab’s passenger seat, thought it looked like a great medieval fortress, but Professor Halter had informed him that it was built in 1923.
“Are you sure you’re not going to freeze to death out here?” he asked the professor. Halter would remain in the car while Hawke went inside. Halter was dressed for Russian winter, wearing an
“I’ll be fine. But try to hurry this up, will you?” he said. “It is frightfully cold, and we’re rapidly running out of time. He intends to destroy the first city on his agenda in a little less than two hours.”
“I’ll be twenty minutes,” Hawke said, glancing at his watch. “Thirty max. Keep your eye on that entry door, and
