Rebecca sat up straight and her eyes flashed defiance. “The truth is, Nicholas is not dead. And no matter what either of you does or says, I will not change my mind. One day, a door will open and there he’ll be. You will see, all of you.”
7
The Baroness watched Rebecca, sitting across the cabin from her quietly reading, and then looked to Alexander, standing in the aisle farther down, chatting with Colonel Murzin. Finally she turned to look out the window as the chartered Tupolev jetliner broke through the clouds. Moments later they cleared the weather front and she could see the English coastline as they moved out over the North Sea heading east toward Moscow.
Rebecca had said little since her adamant defense of her brother’s survival in the car, and Alexander had wisely decided to leave her alone. Her recovery from months of psychotherapy had left her not only healthy but strong-willed and exceedingly independent. The sense of it brought the Baroness back to a moment earlier when they had dropped Lady Clementine at her university office on their way to the airport and Rebecca had gotten out of the car in the rain to earnestly hug her good-bye. Witnessing it she felt a sudden pang of concern, even portent, that their relationship was too close and that at some future point it might cause trouble for her or Alexander. But it was a notion she shook off as groundless and only anxiety provoking, and she refused to think more about it.
Below she could see the roll of whitecaps on the gray sea and in the distance the coast of Denmark. Soon they would be across it and approaching the southern tip of Sweden. The thought of the land where she had grown up triggered memories, and she drifted back to the long journey she had begun at nineteen when her mother died and she left Stockholm for Paris to study at the Sorbonne. It was there she met Peter Kitner, and they instantly fell madly and passionately in love. It was a relationship so natural and so emotionally and physically charged that even the smallest part of an hour spent apart was agonizing. Theirs was a love like no other. They were certain it had been predestined and would last for all eternity. Because of it they told each other things that were deep and guarded and very personal. She told him about her father and their flight from Russia and his death in the gulag. Later she told him what had happened in Naples when she was fifteen, although she carefully couched it by saying the young woman who had been abducted and then raped and who had then killed and mutilated the man who had done it had been not she but a “close friend” and that the friend had never been caught.
And even though she’d told the truth without revealing herself, it was still the closest she’d ever come to sharing her murderous secret with anyone. Not long afterward Kitner shared his own secret with her, telling her who his father was and who his family had been and swearing her forever to silence because they were afraid of Communist reprisals and he had been strictly forbidden by his parents to ever speak of it.
It was an unveiling that shocked her to the core and literally took her breath away. If there had been any question at all before, there no longer was. Their coming together was indeed God’s doing and their true destiny. She was born of Russian aristocracy and he was heir to the Russian throne. The sacred soul of the Motherland, the grave mantle of his ancestors and the thing her father had died for, lived in them both and was theirs to preserve. She believed it and he believed it. Very soon afterward she became pregnant with Alexander and, overjoyed, Kitner married her. After Kitner’s father and himself, their child would be the legitimate heir to the crown of Russia. In what seemed a blink, their future and what they truly believed was Russia’s, had been sealed. One day in their lifetime the Communist system would crumble, and finally and rightfully the monarchy would be restored, and they would sit at its head. Her husband and herself and their child.
And then, and as swiftly, it all came apart.
Told of their marriage and her pregnancy, Kitner’s parents erupted in anger and outrage. His mother called her a whore and a user and, born of Russian aristocracy or not, hardly of the ancestry to be mother of a direct heir to the throne. Kitner was summarily ordered from their apartment and forbidden ever to see her again. The following day their marriage was annulled, and a lawyer representing the family presented her with a substantial check and directed her never to try to contact the family, use their name, or divulge who they were. Still they weren’t through. Their final demand was cruelest of all—that she abort the child inside her.
Wildly, adamantly, vociferously, she refused. One day passed, and then two, and nothing happened. But on the third a steely, dark-eyed man came to the door. He told her an abortion had been arranged and that she was to come with him right then. Again she vehemently refused and tried to slam the door in his face. Instead she was slapped hard across the face and told to get her things. Minutes later they drove away in his car. To her it was Naples all over again. Rape, abortion against her will, the violation was the same. Her abductor’s greatest mistake had been in letting her get her things. In her purse was the knife she had used in Naples and kept for just such a moment. A few moments later they stopped for a traffic light. The man grinned thinly and told her that where they were going was in the next block and that it would soon be over.
For him it was. Before the light could change, she slid the knife from her purse and in a single motion pulled it straight across his throat. A millisecond later she threw open the car door and ran, certain she would be caught any moment and sent to prison for the rest of her life. Collecting her things, she fled from Paris that same day, taking the train to Nice in the South of France. There she rented a nondescript apartment and lived on the money provided by Kitner’s family. Six months later she gave birth to Alexander. All the while, she was waiting for the police who never came. Looking back, all she could think was that there had been no witnesses to her crime and that Kitner’s family, fearing exposure, never notified the authorities of her, or their, connection to the murdered man. Still she had lived all those months on edge, working consciously to control her fear of the police and to calm the fury about what had been done to her. Then, with a healthy infant Alexander in her arms, she carefully turned her thoughts to what she would do next.
The deliberate and hateful actions of Peter Kitner’s family had been one thing. In a way she could understand and even accept them as the same kind of perverse, cruel, and arrogant human behavior that had sent her father to the gulag and thrust the brutal rapist on her in Naples.
What she could not understand, nor would she ever accept, had been the conduct of Peter Kitner himself. The man who had sworn he loved her beyond life itself, who had fathered her child and married her, who shared the same dream for Russia as she—when ordered from her life by his mother and father, he had done just that, removed himself from her life.
Never once had he stood up and declared his love for her. Never once had he defended her or their relationship. Never once had he committed any action whatsoever on her behalf or on behalf of their unborn child. Never once had he said a word of kindness or comfort to her. What he had done instead was to simply cross the room and walk out, never once so much as looking at her. Her father, on the other hand, had looked back and smiled and blown her a kiss as he was being led to the train that would take him to the gulag.
Her father was proud and loving and defiant. To her he was the soul of Russia. Peter Kitner was direct heir to the Russian throne, yet he had simply done as he had been told to protect the imperial lineage, and later done it again by marrying into the royal family of Spain and raising a family of suitable imperial order.
That was a part of it she might have been willing to understand, but that he had walked out without ever so much as looking at her, without ever giving her even that much, was something she would never forgive him for and for which she had sworn he would one day pay dearly.
And he had. With the life of his son. With the crown of Russia. And he would continue to pay.
With what was still to come.
8
ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29. 1
2:15 P.M.
The motorcade was a block long. Horns blared. Sirens shrieked. Tons of tiny pieces of colored paper rained down from apartment and office buildings, where, despite the bitter cold, hundreds of people cheered from wide-open windows, while thousands more lined the streets below them.
The focus of their attention was the figures standing in the large wide-open sunroof of a black Mercedes limousine surrounded by eight black Volgas.
Alexander, in a tailored gray business suit, smiled exuberantly, waving to the wildly appreciative crowd as they passed. Beside him stood Rebecca, in a full-length designer mink coat and mink pillbox hat. She was smiling, beautiful, and glamorous. To the middle-aged and elderly they looked like a young Jack and Jackie Kennedy. To the young, like rock stars.
And that was the whole idea.
Less than forty-eight hours earlier Alexander Cabrera Nikolaevich Romanov had been officially named Tsarevich by President Gitinov in a very public introduction of him to both houses of parliament in Moscow. The response by members of the Duma, the lower house, and the Federal Council, the upper, was immediate—a thunderous standing ovation by everyone there, save fifty or so hard-line Communists who had shown their clear disapproval by simply walking out.
Alexander’s acceptance speech had been no less rousing and emotional than the applause as he paid careful homage to his grandfather Alexei Romanov, son of Tsar Nicholas, and his father, Tsarevich Petr Mikhail Romanov Kitner, who had carefully protected the story of Alexei’s escape from the Ipatiev-house massacre and therefore preserved the true line of succession until the time was right for the return of the monarchy. He then thanked President Gitinov and the members of parliament, Nikolai Nemov, the mayor of Moscow, Marshal Golovkin, Russian Federation minister of defense, and most profoundly Gregor II, the Most Holy Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church—all of whom were present—for having the grace and wisdom to return the heart and soul of Russian history to her people. He ended by speaking of his father one more time, praising him for seeing Russia not as a weakened country, old, corrupt, and decaying, but as a young and vibrant nation; troubled, yes, but free from the horrors of Stalin, Communism, and the cold war and fully ready to blossom from their ashes. It was the youth of Russia that would lead the way, he said, and that was why his father so unselfishly had stepped aside in favor of a Romanov more their own age who would stand at their forefront. Together they would lead Russia into a prosperous, healthy, and noble tomorrow.
His speech, televised live across the country’s eleven time zones and by Russian-language stations around the world, lasted only thirty-two minutes and ended with a second thunderous standing ovation that continued for fifteen minutes more. When it was over Alexander Cabrera Nikolaevich Romanov had become not just Tsarevich of Russia but a national hero.
Twenty-four hours later, with cameras from nearly every news organization in existence jamming the Kremlin’s gilded hall that was once the throne room of the Tsars, he introduced the beautiful Alexandra Elisabeth Gabrielle Christian as his bride-to-be and the woman who, upon his coronation, would become Tsarina of Russia. “I would have called her Alexandra, but she prefers her given name, Rebecca,” he joked warmly as he put his arm around her. “I think so as not to confuse me.”
It brought down the house. Overnight, and as if from nowhere, a Russian Camelot was born and the nation and the world went crazy.
“Wave, my darling!” Alexander shouted above the crowd, throwing off the blizzard of confetti that fell around them.
“It is alright?” Rebecca replied in Russian.
“Alright? They want you to, my darling.” He looked at her, his eyes filled with love, his smile larger than ever. “They want you to. Wave, wave! They wait for neither our marriage nor my coronation. To them you are already their Tsarina!”
9
Images came and went.
Some were starkly clear, as if they were occurring in present time. Others were vague, as in a dream. Others still had all the dread and horror of nightmares.
Clearest of all was coming back from the edge of death when he saw himself on the floor-bed they had made for him in the tiny cabin. His eyes closed, his complexion ghostly white, his body covered with a tattered blanket, he lay perfectly still with no sign of life at all. Then, so effortlessly that it might have been an effect in a movie, he began to drift upward and away from himself. Higher he went, as if the room had no ceiling, the building no roof, and then he saw the door open and the young mother come in. She carried a hot drink in a tin cup, and she knelt down beside him and lifted his head, then opened his lips and forced the liquid inside. Warmth such as he’d never experienced surged through him, and suddenly he was no longer drifting away but looking into her gentle eyes.
“More,” she said, or something like it, because she spoke a language he didn’t understand. But whatever she had said didn’t matter because she pressed the tin cup to his lips again and this time made him drink on his own. And he did. The taste was bitter but good and he drank it all. Then he relaxed and put his head back down, and he saw her pull the blanket up around him and smile kindly as he fell asleep.
In his sleep he remembered.
Swirling black water racing him downstream in the darkness, hurtling him viciously against ice and rocks and debris, and all the while trying to grab at sticks, logs, stones, anything at hand to stop himself as he flew past in a ride that seemed never to end.
And then suddenly feeling everything stop and finding himself in a still eddy away from the rush and roar of water. It was overgrown with winter-naked brush and fallen trees. He grasped one, a birch, he thought, and pulled himself up and into the snow. It was there he realized the storm had caught up. The wind screamed and snow blew almost horizontally. But in moments in between, because the storm had not gathered full course, the wind stopped and the full moon shone. It was there, soaking wet and in the freezing cold, he saw the patch of red in the snow beneath where he lay. And he remembered the flash of the knife and the deep cut Raymond had made in his side, above his waist, just beneath his ribs.
Oh, yes, it had been Raymond. In the fight on the footbridge Marten had torn open Cabrera’s shirt, ripping it to the navel. For an instant he had seen the scar at his throat where John Barron’s bullet had grazed Raymond in the exchange of gunfire during his bloody escape from the Criminal Courts Building in Los Angeles.
He might call himself Alexander Cabrera, or even Romanov, or Tsarevich, but whatever he called himself, there was no doubt whatsoever that he was Raymond.
The cabin where he was was little more than a shack some three miles downstream from the pathway bridge above Villa Enkratzer. The seven- or eight-year-old girl who, gathering firewood with her father, had found him in blinding snow at dawn, huddled in the protection of a great fallen fir, was one of four who had helped him. The others were her father, her mother, and her younger brother, who was five, maybe, or six. They spoke very little English, a half-dozen words at best, and he had no understanding of their language at all.
From what he could piece together—as he went from waking to dreams to hallucinations and back to waking in a fever caused by an infection developed from the knife wounds—they were a family of refugees, possibly from Albania. They were very poor and were waiting in the cabin for what the father called “a hauler” to come. They had tea and herbs and very little food, but what they had they crushed in the tin cup and added boiling water and shared with him.
At some point there had been a loud argument between husband and wife when he was overcome with shivering and the wife was demanding the husband forget their own situation and go for a doctor. The husband had refused, huddling his children in his arms as if to say one man was not worth losing everything else for.
Later had come a sharp knock on the cabin door, but he had heard it from a distance as the family—fires put out, all traces of their presence expertly wiped away, as had been their everyday practice—hid away in the woods with Marten, while Swiss
army commandos searched the cabin and left.
Much later, maybe days after the first, there was another sharp knock on the door, but this time it was heard from inside and came in the middle of the night. And he remembered the father so cautiously opening the door to find their “hauler” was finally there.
He remembered clearly the father trying to get his family out of there to go with the “hauler” and the wife and children refusing to leave without Marten. And the father finally relenting. And Marten, half walking, half stumbling, moving with the family a mile or more through the snow and darkness. And there, on the edge of an icy country road, being loaded, with the twenty others already there, into the back of a waiting truck.
After that had come the rattle and bounce of the truck over rough roads. He remembered the numbing pain of his wounds, from the knife cut in his side and the lesser one on his arm, and those that came as the result of the brutal ride down the river. Two broken ribs, maybe more, and a severely bruised shoulder.
He remembered sleeping and waking and seeing drained and gaunt faces staring at him. And then sleeping again, and waking, for what seemed like days. Once in a while the truck would stop in woods or fields hidden by trees. The father would help him out with the others and Marten would urinate or defecate or do nothing at all. Like the rest of them. Later the daughter or mother or son would give him something to drink and eat, and he would fall back asleep. How he managed to get through it, or in reality, how any of them did—he didn’t know.
Finally there was no more movement and someone helped him out of the truck and up a long and narrow flight of stairs. He remembered a bed, and crawling into the indescribable luxury of it.
Much later he woke to sunshine in a large and entirely unfamiliar apartment. The boy and girl helped him up to a window to look out on a brilliantly clear late winter day. Outside he saw a large shipping canal with seagoing boats and people and traffic on the streets alongside it.