“Freeing the animals,” she replied. “He doesn’t want his horses under the peasant asses of Bolshevik butchers. His words.”
They both laughed. And Romanovsky’s eyes filled as they gazed at his wife. In her wealth of midnight hair, which she wore loose and well past her shoulders, restrained from clouding her face by a barrette over each temple. In her steady black eyes. In her features, large but perfectly chiseled. And above all in her complexion, which was as utterly white as her hair was utterly black. She made him think of a madonna.
“What is it, my darling?”
“Nothing. Where is little Sophia?”
“In the nursery. She is being readied.”
“Go fetch her. We must leave at once.”
She was two steps above him on the wide stairwell, when gunfire erupted in the front courtyard. Screams of dying men reached their ears, and suddenly the massive doors were flung wide.
Fifteen-year-old Sergei Romanovsky was flung to the floor where he rolled toward them. He was followed by three Russian soldiers. The one with the sergeant’s stripes approached them.
“Prince Romanovsky?”
“Yes.”
“Your family?” The man gestured to the boy and the woman.
“Yes. My wife, Sophia. My son, Sergei.”
“And these three?” the sergeant said, nodding toward the dumbstruck women.
“Servants,” Romanovsky replied.
“And who else is here?”
Romanovsky hesitated only a second. “Only the male servants... outside.”
“They are all dead,” Boris Glaskov said. He turned and shot the three servant women.
Princess Sophia was too shocked to scream. She gasped in terror and clutched her husband’s arm. Young Sergei reacted in the same manner, staring in quiet, stunned disbelief.
“Butchers!” Romanovsky hissed.
“That is so you know I will do everything I say I will do,” the sergeant stated flatly. “In there, all of you.”
Glaskov prodded them into a small study, and turned to his men. “Tell the others to stand guard outside. You two, search the house.”
Glaskov closed and locked the paneled door behind the men. Using drapery cord, he tied the man and boy to chairs. He bound Princess Sophia spread-eagled across a chaise.
When he was finished, he stood before them. “Boy, where are the jewels?” He jabbed his rifle in Sergei’s chest.
“He knows nothing,” Prince Romanovsky said.
Glaskov turned to the older man. “And you?”
Romanovsky stared at him, his eyes glittering. “What would a peasant like yourself do with jewels?”
Glaskov slapped him three times. “I have very little time, and even less patience. Where are they hidden?”
Romanovsky spat in Glaskov’s face. The sergeant turned to Sophia. He wrapped his right hand in the bodice of her dress and ripped it from her body. Within seconds he had stripped her nude.
Romanovsky cried out in rage. Glaskov slapped him again. “Where are they, all of them! And tell me the truth, old man, because I have an itemized list.”
“Valentin,” Sophia hissed, “tell this pig nothing!”
Glaskov raised his tunic and unbuttoned the front of his trousers. “Where?”
Sweat poured from the prince’s face. “What are you going to do?”
“I am going to rape your wife. Where!”
Romanovsky took a deep breath. “In the chapel. There is a false back on the rear of the altar.”
Glaskov fell forward between Sophia’s legs. She cursed him in screams as he entered her.
Two
The present time
The electric train from Salzburg droned through the storm and sent the snowflakes spinning crazily in its wake, but nothing could prevent their piling on top of the already deep snow. So far, the train had made good time in spite of the whiteness in the high mountain passes. Fortunately, there was still no wind to create the impassable drifts so common to the Tyrol. The air was unbelievably dry, and the snow was light and fluffy. It was as though the great cloud bank, drifting slowly into western Austria, had stopped, hemmed in by the Alps, and now was trying to shake off its tons of snow in order to raise itself high above the peaks that held it captive and drift on again into the heart of Europe and beyond.
Nick Carter gave up staring out the window, and glanced at his watch. The train would arrive in Kitzbühel in another twenty minutes, a full two hours late because of the storm.
No matter.
The message hadn’t specified a time, only a date. It had come through the usual contact in Paris, and, as usual, was cryptic: Very important I see you in person. Evening of the tenth, my chalet, Kitzbühel. Lorena.
Lorena was Madame Lorena Zornova. Carter had met her ten years earlier, in Vienna, through an equally cryptic message:
My name is Lorena Zornova. I am a refugee from Budapest, a defector, if you wish to call it that. I wish, in the future, to pass information on to you, only you.
“Why me?” Carter had asked, when they had finally met.
“Because my contact in the East knows of you and thinks you can be trusted.” To his surprise, she popped off several operations he had undertaken in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
“All right,” Carter said, and nodded, “your information is good. What do you want in return?”
“A modest fee, enough to live here in the West.”
“That’s reasonable. I think it would be no problem.”
A contact and drop was set up through Paris. And the information she provided was good, pure gold. When it was something really big, Carter would go to her in person. Some of those meetings had taken place in tropical, exotic locales.
Lorena Zornova was not a young woman but she was all woman, and exceedingly beautiful. It was only natural that she and Carter would eventually share more than information.
But even in bed he had never learned a shred of knowledge about her past. That was a closed book, with only a hint of anything to come.
“One day I will ask you a very big favor. By then you will owe me several big favors. When that day comes, perhaps then you will know the real Lorena.”
Carter had never complained. Neither had David Hawk nor AXE. One intelligence coup followed another through the years as a result of her information.
It had been three years since Carter had last seen her in person.
Carrying just a small overnight bag, the Killmaster stepped from the train into blinding snow. He turned left out of the station and into the back streets of the village. The snow seemed to get heavier with each step from a motionless gray sky.
He stopped for a minute and stood at the corner of a narrow street and listened. There was no traffic of any kind, and the absolute quiet was unnerving. The snowflakes gathered on his bare head and coated his eyebrows. He tried to peer through the snowflakes and penetrate the wall of gloom around him, but he couldn’t see more than a radius of twenty feet.
He kept walking until he heard music, and then followed the sound until he saw the window with a lighted stein.
Inside, it was warm and practically empty. The bartender was a giant of a man in height, with a girth to match.
“Schnapps,” Carter said, and waited until it was poured. “I just got off the train. I need a taxi.”
“Hotel, right across the street.”
“No, I need to go a way outside the village.”
“Ach, on a night like this?” He shook his head, seemed to think on it for a moment, and leaned forward. “You’ll pay?”
“I’ll pay.”
Two minutes later, Carter was back on the street heading four houses down for “old Kirchner’s.” It seemed that Herr Kirchner ran a car-for-hire, and that he was the only one greedy enough to go out on a night like this.