The body should not have been left on display like that. Even for someone of a purely secular temperament like Slater, it was blatantly disrespectful, and from a medical standpoint it was dangerous. Despite the hurry he was in, he took a minute to part the drapes and go inside.
The chamber was in utter disarray, just as he had left it, but something struck him as odd: the organs that had been removed were untouched in their bowls, and the body itself bore no signs of animal savagery. He knew that many carnivores, no matter how opportunistic or hungry, could sense or smell disease in carrion prey, and he wondered if that was what had happened here. Had the wolf detected something sufficiently awry to put it off its feed?
The corpse had been so compromised that no further research work could be done on it anyway, so he picked up the tarp that had been used to transport it from the cemetery and drew it over the body like a sheet. Before covering up the head, though, he noticed that the eyes, to his surprise, had shifted their direction. He remembered them as staring straight ahead, blue-gray marbles fixed in place beneath pale blond brows. But now they were looking to the left, the lashes still damp from thawing.
An effect of the decomposition, no doubt, but unnerving, all the same.
He followed their gaze … to the freezer unit in the corner.
Which stood open. And empty.
Slater instantly hunched down, not believing his own eyes, and even ran a hand around the barren shelves where he had deposited the specimens taken in situ, in addition to some of the later specimens he and Dr. Lantos had taken during the autopsy.
All he found was a couple of crushed vials, as if someone had been in such a hurry that he had dropped them before absconding with the rest. But who? Russell? What on earth could he have wanted with them?
None of it made the slightest sense.
And then he remembered that Eva — in her shock at the entry of the wolf — had thrown the paper prayer and the diamond-studded icon in the freezer, too. And they were missing, as well.
That much, finally, did make sense.
And when Rudy burst in to say that the RHI was gone, Slater exploded. “What do you mean it’s gone? Why wasn’t it secured properly?”
“It was,” Rudy shot back. “Somebody untied the ropes, and there’s footprints in the snow!” Suddenly, everything was coming together like a terrifying thunderclap. Russell wasn’t alone — his cronies Harley and Eddie must have been on the island, too.
And even now they were sailing back to Port Orlov … with the virus in their pockets.
Chapter 46
Anastasia awoke to the sound of screaming … her own.
Everything around her was black and silent and still, as if she’d been muffled in a cloak of the heaviest black mink.
Or buried in a coffin.
She screamed again, every inch of her body aching and sore, but when she threw out her arms, thankfully they did not collide with the boards of a casket and when she sat up nothing obstructed her head.
But where was she?
She heard hurried, furtive footsteps and then the sound of a door opening … but from the floor. Light spilled into the room from a kerosene lamp, raised through a trapdoor, and a woman’s voice urged her not to scream again.
“You are safe, my child. You are safe.”
A woman in a black nun’s habit clambered up the last rungs of the ladder and knelt beside the pallet she was lying on. “I’m sorry,” she said, “the lamp must have run out of oil.” Her face seemed vaguely familiar.
And now Ana could see a rickety table, with an extinguished lantern on it, and a ceramic bowl and pitcher. The ceiling was sharply slanted, and cobwebs hung from the rafters. She was in an attic … an attic that smelled of warm bread and yeast and honey.
“You are at the monastery of Novo-Tikhvin. A soldier, Sergei, brought you here.”
“When?” Her voice came out as a croak.
“Three days ago.”
Three days ago … and then it all came back in a flood, the late-night awakening, the innocent march to the cellar, lining up for the photograph to be taken … and the guards bursting into the room instead. The reading of the death sentence. Her mind could go no further before she broke down, racked with uncontrollable sobs. The nun, her face framed by the squarish black hat and the black veils that hung down on either side of her cheeks, consoled her as best she could, all the while counseling her to remain quiet.
“My family …” Ana finally murmured, “my family?”
But the nun did not reply. She didn’t have to. Ana knew. Just as she knew who this nun was now — her name, she recalled, was Leonida. Sister Leonida. It was she who had sometimes brought the fresh provisions to the Ipatiev house.
“The Bolsheviks are looking for you. They know that you escaped. So we have hidden you here, above the bakery.”
The monastery was almost as famous for its bread and baked goods as it was for its many good works. In addition to the six churches it housed within its grounds, the monastery was also home to a diocesan school and library, a hospital, an orphanage, and workshops where the sisters — nearly a thousand of them — painted icons and embroidered ecclesiastical garments with silken threads of gold and silver. Their work had long been considered the finest in the Russian Empire.
Sister Leonida said, “You must eat something,” and gathering up her skirts, carefully descended the ladder. She left the lantern beside the straw-filled mattress, and by its light Ana removed her blanket and inspected herself. She was dressed in a long white cassock — a rason—that the nuns and priests customarily wore under their outer robes; it went all the way to her feet and the sleeves were long and tapered to the wrist. The clothes she had worn that terrible night were gone — what could have been left of them after that fusillade? — but her corset, lined with the royal jewels, was draped across a chair. She wondered if the nuns had discovered its secret cache … the cache that only now, she realized, must have saved her life by deflecting the hail of bullets. Her ribs and abdomen were as sore as if she had been pummeled by a hundred fists, and there were fresh bandages on her shoulders and legs. Plucking the rason away from her breast, she glimpsed the emerald cross still resting against her bosom. Coarse woolen socks had been pulled on over her feet; she was reminded of Jemmy, her little spaniel, who used to sleep atop her feet at night, and another round of hot tears coursed down her cheeks.
When Sister Leonida returned, she brought a hunk of fresh brown bread and a bowl of hot lamb stew. Ana didn’t want it — her throat was so constricted with grief that she could not imagine swallowing — but Leonida urged her to eat. “You owe this to yourself, to your family … and to God. He has spared you for a reason.”
Had He? Yes, she had been spared, but to what did she truly owe that strange fate? She could recall the prophetic words of the holy man Rasputin … and though she wished she could forget it, she saw in her mind’s eye his ghostly image arising from the smoke in the cellar that night.
Once she had eaten enough of the stew to satisfy the nun—“I’ll leave the bowl here,” Leonida said, “and you can finish the rest when I bring you some of the honey cake that’s in the oven right now”—Ana asked after Sergei. “Do the Bolsheviks know he was the one who rescued me?”
The sister nodded. “He is in hiding, too. But I will get word to him that you are awake and recovering well.”
“Can he come to me here?” Ana wasn’t sure if she was asking for some unthinkable favor, or even possibly putting Sergei into some greater danger than he was already in. But she longed to see him.