“I will tell the world! I will shout it from the rooftops, and I will see those murderers hang!”
Sergei was hushing her when he heard what sounded like a broomstick banging on the bottom of the trapdoor. Sister Leonida must have been keeping guard in the kitchen down below.
“Someday,” he said, trying to calm her, “you will do that, and I will help you. But that day is still far off. You have enemies, and you have already seen what they can do. Now is not the time for that, Ana.”
Breathing hard, she subsided. “What is it the time for then? Hiding in this attic like a little mouse?”
“No, not that, either.” This was as good an opportunity as he was likely to get to broach the subject he had been meaning to introduce. “Now is the time to leave, with me, for the place Father Grigori himself prepared as a refuge. It was part of the vision he had before his death.”
Ana remembered well many of Rasputin’s predictions … all of which had so far come true — even, to her sorrow, the most dire.
“It is a colony on an island, and many of the faithful are already there. I remember the day they left Pokrovskoe, led by the Deacon Stefan. You won’t be safe until you are out of the country and hidden in a place where no one can find you.”
She did not appear persuaded, but she was still listening. “Where is this secret place?”
“A long way east of here, across the steppes.”
“And how do you propose we get there?”
Sergei had spent many hours mapping it out in his head, figuring out where they could board, under assumed names, the recently completed Trans-Siberian Railway, and how far they could take it eastward. When it detoured to the south, they would have to disembark and find a way to continue northward. At some point, they would have to find a pilot, with a plane, willing to take them across the Bering Strait. The right price, he had learned, made anything possible, and payment was the one thing he knew would not be an obstacle. Even as he had carried Ana’s limp body through the woods, he had glimpsed the cache of precious jewels sewn into her corset. A bauble or two from that tattered lining and he was confident that he could secure whatever transportation they might need. But instead of outlining the plan in any detail for her now — there would be many weeks to do that — he simply gestured at the emerald cross around her neck and said, “I have read the inscription on the back.”
Anastasia blushed, as if he’d caught her stepping out of the bath.
“His blessing has protected you so far,” Sergei said. “Why would it end now?”
Chapter 49
The police siren was coming closer, and Charlie just had time to close the doors to his meeting room — where Harley was laid out cold on the couch — before a pair of headlights swept his front windows and he heard tires crunching on the ice and gravel.
Rebekah, still mad as a hen about Harley’s throwing up on the rug, stormed toward the door, but Charlie wheeled into the foyer, cutting her off and ordering her back into the kitchen. “And tell your sister to stay there, too!”
Rebekah said, “What? I can’t answer my own door now?”
“No, and it’s not your damn door anyway. It’s mine.”
There was the sound of boots stamping off snow on the porch.
“Now scat,” he whispered, “and not a word to anyone about Harley.”
The knocking came a second later — loud and hard — and Charlie heard the sheriff’s voice saying, “Open up, Charlie! It’s Ray Blaine.”
Charlie took his time about undoing the locks, making sure Rebekah was out of sight, before opening the door. The police cruiser was parked in the drive, the crossbar on its roof flashing blue, but more surprising than that was the gauze face mask covering the sheriff’s mouth and nose, the rubber gloves on his hands, and the fact that he stepped back a few feet.
“Hey, Ray,” Charlie said. “What brings you out on a night like this?”
“You seen Harley?”
“No. Why? Please don’t tell me he’s gotten into some trouble again,” Charlie said, shaking his head like a parent whose child was forever caught pulling pranks.
“How about Eddie Pavlik?”
“Nope, him neither. Say, what’s with the mask? You sick, or is it Halloween already?”
“Don’t you be lying to me, Charlie,” Ray said, craning his neck to get a look inside. “If you see either one of them, you call me, you got that? And if I were you, I wouldn’t let ’em get too close.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Charlie said, just as the walkie-talkie went off on the sheriff’s belt.
Ray answered the call and, turning a few feet down the porch, said, “Yes, sir, I’m there now.” He listened, then said, “We’re setting up the roadblocks just as fast as we can.”
Roadblocks?
The sheriff shut it off, brushed the snow from his shoulders, and said, “Don’t plan on going anywhere tonight.”
“Are you telling me I’m under arrest?” Charlie said, feigning more indignation than he felt. “What for?”
“I’m telling you the roads are closed.”
And that was all Charlie needed to hear. As soon as the sheriff had climbed back into his patrol car, Charlie did a wheelie and shouted to Rebekah to pack some food and coffee. “And none of that decaf chicory shit! Make it the real stuff we serve on meeting nights.”
Then he threw open the pocket doors and hollered at Harley to wake up. “We’re leaving!”
Harley mumbled something but didn’t move until Charlie poked his arm and repeated himself.
“Man, I was so fast asleep,” Harley said. “Why’re we leaving?”
“Maybe that’s something that you can tell me, while we drive.”
Although Charlie might now be a man of God, he’d been a man of the world for a whole lot longer than that, and at times like this he reverted to form. He knew that if the law came calling, and they were setting up roadblocks and looking high and low for Harley, it must be serious. Even if it was just about those damned jewels — the emerald cross and that icon with the diamonds in it — it was better to get to Voynovich’s place on the double, fence them for whatever he could get, then hole up in the ice-fishing cabin for a while … or at least until he could figure out just what kind of shit was going down.
Harley was pulling on his wet boots and complaining about some pain in his leg, but Charlie didn’t want to hear it.
“Go get in the van,” he said, as he stuck the cross and icon in his pockets. In the kitchen, he grabbed the provisions that Rebekah had stuffed in a plastic sack, then wheeled out the back door and onto the ramp to the garage.
Bathsheba, lingering in the doorway, timidly asked if Harley was okay. “He’s not in trouble, is he?”
Charlie had to laugh. “When isn’t he?” he said, without even looking back.
As he climbed into the driver’s seat and adjusted the hand controls, he got a strong whiff of his brother and wished to hell he’d made him shower first. He looked as bad as he smelled — his eyes with a mad gleam, his skin kind of sweaty. Scratching his thigh. What the hell did someone even as dumb as Bathsheba see in him?
Charlie backed the van down the sloping, icy drive, all the while plotting his route. He’d have to avoid the one and only main road that connected Port Orlov to civilization — if you could call Nome civilization — since the sheriff would be patrolling the local stretch, and Charlie didn’t know exactly where this checkpoint would be set up. He’d have to get around it, but once he’d managed that, he’d probably have clear sailing the rest of the way.
At the first turn, he steered the old Ford van across a field, through a couple of rusty barbed-wire fences, and onto an old logging road. The van bounced up and down on the rutted track and Harley said, “Why’d you do that? You’re gonna break an axle.”