Her staunch refusal to accept the fact of her brother’s death in the car immediately after the service struck the chord in him once again. And later, when she insisted on continuing to make the monthly rent payments on his Manchester flat. And her continuing defiance now, weeks later, and so publicly among the staff, with the guest list. And then again here, when he’d admonished her and she’d simply dismissed the guest list, emphasizing instead her enduring belief that Nicholas was alive.
Her belief troubled him as never before, gnawing and twisting inside him. He could see it like a dark spot on an X-ray, its tiny fibrous root starting to take hold in his organs, a disease beginning to spread. With it came a single word.
Fear.
Fear that Rebecca was right and that Marten was alive, and somewhere turning his eyes toward Moscow. Maybe not taking action yet, but soon, when his body was healed from the knife wounds and whatever beating he had taken in the river. What would happen if Marten came and laid bare who he really was and who he thought and could prove Alexander was? What if, as a result, Alexander were suddenly whisked from public view? The official account would be that he had suddenly taken ill and could no longer reign. And what if, afterward, they asked his father to retract his abdication and made him Tsarevich after all? And what if, because of it, Rebecca refused to marry him?
In the pit of his stomach a pulsating rhythm began. It was distant, even faint, but there nonetheless, like a metronome mimicking the beat of his heart.
Boom, boom, it went.
Boom, boom.
Boom, boom.
Boom, boom.
20
MONDAY, MARCH 31.
The glow of the television in the dark. Again. The Three Stooges, Gilligan’s Island, Miami Vice, The Ed Sullivan Show.
Again.
The Three Stooges, Gilligan’s Island, Miami Vice, The Ed Sullivan Show.
Again.
The Three Stooges, Gilligan’s Island, Miami Vice, The Ed Sullivan Show.
Nicholas Marten dozed and woke and dozed. And then he got up and did the best he could trying to regain his physical strength and, afterward, keep it. An hour, two hours, three, every day. Sit-ups, push-ups, trunk twists, leg-lifts, single-leg balances, stretching, running in place. His broken ribs and bruises from the river were now all but healed. The same was true of his knife wounds.
How long he had been there he didn’t know, but it felt as if it had been forever. It seemed like weeks since he’d last been interrogated. The intensity that had been there in the beginning had slowly subsided. It made him wonder what had happened. Maybe his raspy-voiced interrogator had gone to do other things, leaving a skeleton crew behind to keep watch on him. Or perhaps he’d been caught and arrested. Or perhaps he had gone to another part of the world to tell them about the American he had as a prisoner and to try and make a deal for him. Even if he wasn’t CIA, they could still kill him and leave his body somewhere and claim he was, for whatever advantage it might give them.
Every day when they came with food, he pressed them, asking them why? Why were they keeping him? What did they plan to do with him? Every day he got the same answer. “Be quiet. Be quiet.” Then they left his food and walked out. After that came the dreaded sound of the door as it was locked.
Again.
The Three Stooges, Gilligan’s Island, Miami Vice, The Ed Sullivan Show. This time with Rin Tin Tin thrown in.
He was beginning to think maybe the shows weren’t on at all. Maybe the screen was blank and the reruns were simply in his mind. Maybe he had switched the lone broadcast channel to a band with nothing on it just to keep the TV on for its light. He didn’t know, didn’t remember. Everything hung on the evening news, but it was increasingly difficult to get a sense of what time of day or night it was on or what the date was, because they had begun broadcasting the news the same as they did the series, over and over, the same thing as many as eight times a day. Moreover, the last story he’d seen about Alexander and Rebecca had been days earlier. Curiously, it had been funny and had made him laugh out loud—the first laughter he could remember in months.
The media, on a tear to learn about Rebecca, had shown her in the garden of a formal home in Denmark with two well-dressed, middle-aged, smiling people, Prince Jean Félix Christian and his wife Marie Gabrielle, who were her birth parents (or so he had been able to piece together as little by little he began to understand rudimentary German). They told the story of who she was, explaining she had been kidnapped as a child and that a ransom had been demanded. Afterward they’d waited in vain for further word while the police agencies searched, but nothing had ever happened. That was until now.
Then the tape had cut to the place she had spent her early years—Coles Corner, Vermont. Alexander well knew she had grown up in L.A. as Rebecca Barron, but wisely he let the story of her childhood in Vermont play as the truth, and it worked. At least a half-dozen townspeople had been interviewed and to a person they told of remembering Rebecca and her brother, Nicholas, as children. It was incredible, as if everyone there had some driving need to be part of this gigantic myth, and so they made up all kinds of personal anecdotes about the little township girl who was soon to become the darling Tsarina of Russia. School dances, Fourth of July parades, boyfriends and girlfriends, a third-grade teacher who helped her with her terribly flawed penmanship. “Oh, she was awful.”
There was even a scene taped in the tiny family graveyard on the old Marten homestead; the television reporter stood directly over the unmarked spot where Hiram Ott had buried the real Nicholas Marten. Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t have done it better, even to the final stroke of perfection: A reporter questioning a Coles Corner alderman about Rebecca’s educational records was told that several years earlier the town’s administrative hall that shared space with the fire department had burned to the ground and all of the township’s records, including those of the school department, had gone up in flames.
At that Nicholas Marten, the new Nicholas Marten, the one in captivity, had burst out laughing, and afterward laughed and laughed until he cried and his belly hurt.
But all that had been days before, and since then he had seen nothing of them. Even the news seemed uneventful and blended in with the reruns. He was going crazy and he knew it.
Then, for the two millionth time, he heard the theme song from Gilligan’s Island and suddenly he’d had enough. Anything was better than the television. At least in the dark he could listen to the city outside. Sirens. Traffic. Children playing. Trash being collected. Once in a while, shouts of anger in German.
Abruptly he went toward the glow, his hand reaching passionately for the television’s off switch, and then the station cut away from Gilligan’s Island to a German-speaking news anchor. Marten heard the name Sir Peter Kitner and then the camera cut from the studio to a country roadside in England. “Henley-on-Thames,” an identifying caption read. He saw police and rescue workers and the terrible wreckage of an exploded Rolls-Royce. There was no need for a translator. He understood the German newscaster completely: The car had been blown up and five people were dead—Sir Peter Kitner, media mogul, former Tsarevich of Russia, grandson of murdered Tsar Nicholas, son of the escaped Alexei; Kitner’s wife, Luisa, cousin of King Juan Carlos of Spain; their son Michael, heir-designate to Kitner’s media empire; and Kitner’s driver, his bodyguard, a Dr. Geoffrey Higgs.
“My God, he killed them, too,” Marten breathed in horror.
Suddenly the horror turned to rage. “Raymond!” he blurted. Abruptly he turned from the screen. Never mind that he had killed Red, or Josef Speer, or Alfred Neuss, or Halliday or Dan Ford, or Jean-Luc Vabres or the Zurich printer, Hans Lossberg. Alexander /Raymond had turned against his own family once again, this time murdering his father, as he had murdered his half brother before. What would happen when he snapped and unleashed his terror on Rebecca?
He couldn’t let himself think about it. But he knew he had to do something, and he had to do it quickly.
&
nbsp; 21
Once more Marten paced the room. This time his thoughts were on his captors. Who they were, who they might be, what was driving them. He was looking for a weak spot, something he had missed, something he hadn’t picked up on before, anyplace where they might be vulnerable. Thinking back, he examined their behavior from the moment they had taken control of him in Rotterdam through the days and weeks until now. What stood out most clearly was what he had thought of before, that no matter how intense the interrogations or isolated his captivity, aside from a minor shove or slap, they had never resorted to physical punishment. Their practice had been simply to interrogate him and then isolate him in darkness and let his own mind do their work for them. Why they had given him the television he didn’t know. Perhaps they were just being humane. Or maybe it was for some other reason he had no idea of. But the fact was he had not been physically abused and he had been fed and provided a toilet and washbasin that enabled him to keep himself clean. Looking at it that way made him begin to think that maybe they weren’t terrorists or drug smugglers at all but instead were people like the “hauler” who trafficked in human beings, and who, by this stage, had determined he was not the big fish they thought he was and were wondering what to do with him.
Were they dangerous? Of course. They were engaged in the very risky and highly illegal business of transporting undocumented persons between countries on full terrorist alert, and doing it at a time when international police agencies were cooperating at a level never before seen. To do what they were doing, they would not be operating without strong connections to organized crime. So, not only would they be afraid of being caught, they would also be afraid of the gangsters they were paying to protect them.
He was certain they had done what they had with him because they thought they had a catch they could capitalize on, building both power and prestige. At the same time, he had little doubt that if they were pressed and thought the police were closing in, they would simply take him off and kill him and dump his body in the closest gutter or vacant lot they could find.
That aside, the thing was, if they were traffickers in human beings, they would be doing it for the money alone and not have the steely fanaticism of terrorists or the deadly mind-set of the killers who ran the drug trade.
Following that line of thinking, he had to assume their greatest fear, aside from running afoul of the gangsters they would be in bed with, was that they would be caught. Perhaps the thing to do would be to reveal what he had been so protective of before—tell them who Rebecca really was and ask them what they thought might happen if they were found to be holding the brother-in-law of the next Tsar of Russia captive. Ask them what might be the result if they were turned over to the Tsar’s personal security force, the FSO, perhaps even naming Colonel Murzin in particular as evidence that he was telling the truth, then making the threat more fearsome by suggesting that Murzin in turn might hand them over to the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB. In that situation there would be no question at all of the outcome. They would be treated with extreme severity if not finality.
Taking that approach with them was a long shot at best because, other than the names he could drop and the fact that they knew he had been at the Tsarevich’s dinner, he had absolutely nothing to back up his threat. It would be a bluff of the highest order, and if he was wrong and they were terrorists or drug traffickers after all, once he had told them who Rebecca was, and because of it who he was, he would simply be confirming what they had thought all along, that he was a major catch, and in a heartbeat he would find himself in far worse trouble than he would ever want to imagine.
On the other hand, if he was right and they were nothing more than smugglers of human cargo they might be frightened enough to simply let him go, if for no other reason than to get themselves out of a potentially disastrous if not deadly situation.
It wasn’t much, but it was all he had. In the end it boiled down to two simple questions. Was he willing to bet his life and Rebecca’s on his judgment of who these people were? And if he was, was he a good enough actor to pull it off?
The answer to both was the same.
He had no choice.
22
“I want to talk.” Marten banged and pounded on the door, yelling through it. “I want to talk! I want to confess!”
Forty-five minutes later he sat bound and blindfolded in the interrogation room.
“What do you want to say?” his throaty-voiced interrogator asked, tobacco, as always, heavy on his breath. “What do you want to confess?”
“You wanted to know why I was at the dinner in Davos. You asked who Rebecca was. I lied about both because I was trying to protect her. The photograph in my wallet does not show her as she looks now. The reason I was in Davos was because I had been invited by the Tsarevich himself. Rebecca is not my girlfriend, she is my sister. She is formally known as Alexandra Elisabeth Gabrielle Christian, and she is to be married to the Tsarevich immediately after his coronation.”
“If this is true, why did you not confess it before?” The interrogator’s reply was calm, even detached. It was impossible for Marten to tell how he had reacted or what he was thinking. All he could do was continue with what he had begun.
“I was afraid you would realize that as a member of the Tsar’s family I would be of political use. That you would find a way to exploit who I am. Even kill me if that would help your cause.”
“We can do with you as we wish, the same as before.” The interrogator’s voice remained even and emotionless. “What did you hope to gain from telling us now?”
It was a question Marten had anticipated. This was where he had to carefully turn things so that the pressure was taken from him and put on the interrogator.
“What I hope to gain is not only for my benefit but yours.”
“Mine?” The interrogator punched out an angry laugh. “You are the one bound and blindfolded. It is your life in question, not ours.”
Marten smiled inwardly. His man was not only annoyed but affronted. That was good because it put him on the defensive. Exactly what Marten wanted.
“I have been here a long time. Too long.”
“Come to the point!” his interrogator snapped. Now he was becoming irritated. Better yet.
“The calendar is moving quickly toward the day Alexander Romanov is to be crowned Tsar. His future brother-in-law is missing and has been for too long. It is a situation that is healthy neither for his married life nor his position as monarch, and he will have become angry and impatient.”
This was a point where Marten was afraid his interrogator would ask why there had been no media coverage of his disappearance, but he didn’t. Still, it was something he had wondered about himself. He finally assumed Alexander had ordered it kept quiet, and as far as he could tell it had been.
“Since there has been no word of me and since they will have found no body, and because of the great unrest in the world, he and his people will assume I have been kidnapped and believe whoever has done it is waiting for the coronation to take some kind of terrorist-theater action that involves me. It is something they cannot allow to happen.
“You may know the Tsarevich has a personal guard called the Federalnaya Slujba Ohrani, the FSO. They are former Spetsnaz commandos led by a very capable man named Colonel Murzin. There is no doubt they will have been looking for me. And by now you can be certain other highly select and persuasive Russian security forces will have joined them.
“It won’t be long before they find your door, and when they come through it they won’t be smiling.” Marten paused to give his interrogator a moment to think, but not too much of a moment.
“The clock is ticking, and the circle around you is tightening. If I were you I would take my men and get as far away from me and from this place as quickly as I possibly could.”
For a long moment there was silence. Then Marten heard a distinct snap of fingers, and without a word he was taken back u
p the stairs to his room. His blindfold removed, he sat there in the dark with no idea what to expect. An hour passed and then another, and he began to wonder if he had been wrong in his judgment and even now they were making a deal for him and soon he would be on his way to some terrorist hideout where he would be dealt with in ways he didn’t want to think about.
Another hour passed. Then he heard them coming up the stairs. Four, by the count. Seconds later the door burst open and they blindfolded him and bound his hands behind him. Then they were out the door and going down the stairs. One flight, then another, and then two more. He heard a door bang open, and he was taken out into cold air.
Shoved forward, he heard someone grunt, and then he was being lifted up and wrestled into what seemed like the back of a truck, the same way he had been brought there. He held his breath, waiting for them to push him to the floor and roll him into a carpet as they had before. Instead he heard the raspy voice of his interrogator.
“May God be kind to you,” he said. Then he heard them leave. The doors were slammed shut and the slip-lock bolted from the outside. Next he heard the motor start. A second later there was the jamming of gears and the truck lurched forward.
23
Marten braced himself as the truck accelerated. Twenty seconds later it slowed and he had to brace himself again as the driver took a sharp turn, then once more. Where he had been or where they were taking him now, he had no idea, but it didn’t matter. The cold, chilling words of his interrogator had been enough.
“May God be kind to you.” It was a death sentence. He had wholly misjudged who they were. By trying to outsmart them he had outsmarted himself and given them a grand prize, more than they ever could have expected. Because of it he was on his way to Hell. These were brutal times, and he was all too aware of what had happened to others who were trophies of one kind or another. He was certain that within hours he would be handed over to some unknown group. He would be questioned and then tortured until he made whatever kind of political statement they demanded. Finally, he would be killed. All of it would most likely be done before a video camera, with a copy of the tape sent to any number of global news organizations to show what terrible and ruthless power the world had still to fear.