“I was in Czechoslovakia when Chernobyl happened years ago,” said O’Rourke. “Were there jokes here about that?”
Lucian shrugged. “Sure. We joke about everything that scares the shit out of us or makes us want to cry. Don’t you?”
Kate nodded. “Like the definition of NASA after the Challenger disaster in that same year of ’86,” she said. “Oops…Need Another Seven Astronauts.”
No one laughed. They were not talking to amuse one another.
“In Czechoslovakia,” said O’Rourke, “the gag was that the new national anthem for the U.S.S.R. after Chernobyl was Pec nám spadla, pec nám spadla…‘Our oven has collapsed, our oven has collapsed.’” After a moment of silence, the priest said, “It’s a folk song.”
“Here, after Chernobyl,” said Lucian, “we asked each other what the three shortest things in the world were.”
“What were they?” said Kate, finishing the last of her tea.
“The Romanian constitution, the menu in a Polish restaurant, and the lifespan of a Chernobyl fireman.”
They sat in the darkness without speaking for several minutes. Rain beat a tattoo on the roof.
“What do you think will happen to Gorbachev and the U.S.S.R.?” O’Rourke asked Lucian.
The medical student chuckled softly. “They are both extinct, but neither knows it yet. When Gorbachev came back from the attempted coup in August and announced that he still had faith in the Marxist system, he was announcing his own obsolescence.”
“And the nation?” said Kate.
Lucian shook his head. “There is no nation there, only an empire that can no longer cow its subjugated parts into submission. The Soviet Union is already on the scrap heap of history, just as socialist Romania is. Neither organism has had the decency to realize that it is dead…a nosferatu.” He tapped fingers on the plastic steering wheel. “But Russia has Yeltsin and he is an ambitious man…a very ambitious man. I see a glint in his eye that reminds me of our former leader here. Yeltsin will use Russian sovereignty to break up the U.S.S.R. by next spring.”
“So soon?” said Kate.
“Sooner perhaps. I would not be surprised if the C.C.C.P. is officially buried by the new year.”
“But what if Gorbachev—” began O’Rourke.
Lucian held his hand up for silence, then leaned forward and cleaned the windshield of condensation.
The electric gates of Radu Fortuna’s compound were opening. Kate sunk lower in her seat, knowing as she did so that it was silly to try to hide.
A black Mercedes slipped through the gates, turned left onto the street, and accelerated away. The headlights had passed over their Dacia without pausing.
“Is that him?” whispered Kate.
Lucian shrugged, started the Dacia after three grinding attempts, and pulled out just as the Mercedes turned out of sight. The Dacia rattled and squeaked as Lucian accelerated down the street at forty or fifty miles per hour, his headlights still off. They slid onto Strada Galati and saw the taillights of the Mercedes three blocks ahead. Lucian hunched over the wheel and floored the accelerator. The Dacia complained more loudly but roared and rattled down the empty street.
“Follow that car,” whispered Kate.
They kept the Mercedes in sight while driving north on Strada Galati, found a bit of midnight traffic—mostly trucks—to blend with going west on Bulevardul Ilie Pintilie, but almost lost the Mercedes when it disappeared around the traffic circle at Piaţa Victoriei. Lucian guessed correctly that the sedan had turned north onto Şoseaua Kiseleff, and after a moment of sickening tension the Mercedes was visible again splashing through an intersection two blocks ahead. Lucian whipped the Dacia up to almost ninety kph until the Mercedes was less than a block ahead, then he slowed to keep pace. It helped that the few other cars and trucks on the main boulevard were also ignoring all posted speed limits.
They stayed right again onto the Bucharest-Ploieşti Road and passed out of the tree-lined sections of the city, past huge buildings and monuments dark and silent in the night, then they were in the countryside, with fields falling away on either side. The Mercedes passed the turnoff to Otopeni Airport without slowing, but Lucian brought the Dacia down to sixty kilometers per hour as they all caught sight of the usual military and police vehicles along the road to the international airport. Beyond Otopeni, he accelerated again, keeping only one truck between the Mercedes and Dacia.
“We don’t even know if this is Radu Fortuna,” said O’Rourke from the backseat.
“Why did you know his name?” asked Kate. “Why did you laugh?”
The priest explained about his first trip to Romania two years earlier with the billionaire Vernor Deacon Trent’s “assessment team.”
Lucian almost drove off the road. “Vernor Deacon Trent was here?” His voice was shaky.
“He may still be here,” said O’Rourke. “His foundation and corporation announced his illness weeks after the rest of us returned. To this day, no one knows where he is or in what condition. He’s sort of the Howard Hughes of the nineties.”
Lucian shook his head. The single windshield wiper whipped back and forth in front of him. “Vernor Deacon Trent is no Howard Hughes,” he said tightly. “And how does Comrade Radu Fortuna figure in with Mr. Trent?”
O’Rourke explained about the opinionated ONT guide during that bizarre tour.
Lucian smiled with humor. “I suspect that Trent and Fortuna were having some fun with you.”
Kate looked away from the rainswept windshield and dark fields. “You’re saying that Vernor Deacon Trent may be strigoi?”
Lucian was silent for a long interval. “The Order has believed that Trent may have been one of the original Family members,” he said finally. “Perhaps the legendary Father.”
“Father?” said Kate, but at that moment the Mercedes ahead of them turned off the highway onto a secondary road.
“Shit,” said Lucian. He had followed the truck past the road and now he had to slow, find a place wide enough to turn around, and make a U-turn. The Mercedes was the dimmest of taillight glows by the time the Dacia was bouncing down the narrow, potholed lane after it. They passed village homes and low, “systematized” apartments on their left, all dark.
Kate glanced at the odometer again. They had come about thirty-five kilometers from Bucharest.
“I think I know where they’re going,” said Lucian.
Kate saw the sign as they entered the second small village: Şnagov.
“I’ve read about this place,” she said.
The Mercedes turned right at a fork in the road in the center of the village and sped up again. Lucian doused the headlights and followed as best he could. The bumpy road was almost invisible in the dark and rain.
“We’ll lose them,” said O’Rourke as the taillights disappeared around a bend.
Lucian shook his head. A mile or so farther on and they could see the Mercedes’ brakelights flare and then the headlights became visible to their left as the black sedan turned down an even narrower lane. Lucian let the Dacia slowly approach the turnoff.
“Hurry!” said Kate as the Mercedes dwindled down the long lane.
“Can’t,” said Lucian. “It’s a private road. See the checkpoint?”
Kate saw it then as the Mercedes stopped—a gate with several vehicles parked near it. Flashlights flared briefly as someone checked the identities of the Mercedes driver and occupants. Kate could make out the lights of a huge home a quarter of a mile or so beyond the checkpoint.
“Goddamn it,” breathed Kate. “Is there another way to that house?”
Lucian drummed his fingers on the wheel. “I don’t think the house is the destination,” he said as if musing to himself. Headlights suddenly became visible far behind them. “Damn. Hang on.” With the headlights still off, he flogged the Dacia down the highway, squealing around turns and bouncing over sudden dips. The last lights fell away behind them and a forest closed in on either side.
“I want to go back,”
said Kate, her heart pounding with frustration and anger. “If there’s a chance that Joshua is at that house, I want to go back even if I have to cross the fields on foot.”
Lucian did not slow. “That compound was on the lake,” he said. “I know another way.”
There was no other traffic as they drove another mile or two alongside a railroad track, the road deteriorating the farther they got from the village, until finally, just as the lane crossed the tracks, Lucian turned left onto an even narrower road. Gravel and puddles made noise beneath the wheels. He turned on the parking lights as the Dacia crept forward under a dripping arch of bare branches.
“Sort of a national forest area,” he said, frowning as he concentrated on missing potholes the size of small lakes. Finally he cursed and turned on the headlights.
They passed under a sagging wooden arch with faded letters, and the lane dwindled to little more than a wide path through the thick forest. Just as Kate was ready to ask if Lucian knew where he was, the lane opened up onto an asphalt surface again and they drove past a dark and silent stucco building on their left.
“Restaurant and guesthouse,” said Lucian, not even glancing toward it. “It’s been shut since Ceauşescu died.” Several smaller lanes led to their right and left, but Lucian kept the Dacia on the widest of them. Kate could see overturned picnic tables and weed-cluttered grassy areas now. The area looked like an American state park that had been abandoned for decades.
Suddenly Lucian slowed, stopped, backed the Dacia, and turned left down an asphalt lane no wider than a footpath. The lane ended a hundred yards downhill, and gravel hissed under the wheels. Kate could see a faint gleam of water between the trees ahead.
Lucian parked the car. “We need to hurry.” He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a flashlight and something heavier. Kate blinked when she realized that the second object was a pistol of some sort—a semiautomatic from the shape of it. Lucian tucked the pistol away in his jacket and tried the flashlight. The beam was strong. “Let’s go,” he said.
They went another hundred feet downhill through wet grass and suddenly there was a low wire fence in front of them. There was a gate to their left, but it was locked. Lucian clambered over the gate and Kate followed. O’Rourke’s artificial leg obviously gave him some problem, but he made no noise as he used his upper-body strength to pull himself up and over. The three crouched on what appeared to be a small, grassy peninsula with a dock, a shack, and heaps of what Kate realized were rowboats stacked upside down. The rain had stopped but the forest dripped behind them. Cuckoos and bullfrogs were making noise from the swampy inlet to their left.
Lucian leaned close to whisper. “I don’t think they still keep a guard in the shack, but let’s be as quiet as we can.” He motioned to O’Rourke and the two men lifted the top rowboat, righted it, and carried it to the gravel loading area near the dock. Lucian gestured for silence again and disappeared in the shadows near the shack, returning with two heavy oars.
Kate clambered aboard first and settled into the bow while Lucian locked the oars in and O’Rourke pushed them off and lifted himself into the stern. They floated past the dock and Lucian rowed almost silently until they were far out past the dock and the darkened shack.
Kate’s eyes had adjusted to the dark now and she realized that they were in a wide lagoon. A large, dark building—obviously the restaurant/ guesthouse they had driven by—terminated one end of the lagoon a few hundred yards to their left, and Kate could see weed-littered steps coming down to the water there. Ahead of them, a dark line of trees was the source of more swamp sounds. Kate realized how loud the cacophony was now, and Lucian’s stronger strokes with the oars were muted by the bullfrog and cuckoo noises from three sides.
Lucian aimed the rowboat between two tree-lined points, out into what Kate realized was the actual lake. It seemed very wide in the darkness, the opposite shore—if it was the opposite shore—the smallest of treelines across the horizon.
They had passed out of the entrance to the lagoon—only a hundred and fifty feet or so across there—and into the choppy waves, strong currents, and cold winds of the main lake when Kate looked down, lifted wet feet, and said, “We’re shipping water.”
“La naiba!” said Lucian. “Sorry. Can you two bail?”
“With what?” said O’Rourke. “All we have is our hands.” The priest leaned over the side a minute. “It doesn’t look too deep here. I think I see weeds or something in the water.”
Kate heard Lucian chuckle. “The lagoon was a few meters deep,” he said. “Out here it’s a bit deeper. Lake Şnagov is said to be the deepest lake in all of Europe. As far as I know, they’ve never plumbed its depths.”
There was silence for a minute except for frog and cuckoo sounds. O’Rourke said, “Shall we make for the shore?”
“No,” said Kate. “We’ll bail with our hands if we have to.”
Lucian rowed. The lagoon entrance receded and then was lost to sight as they pulled to their left, deeper into the dark expanse of lake. Kate could see the bright lights of a large building a mile or two across the water. “Is that the place where Radu Fortuna’s Mercedes was headed?” she whispered to Lucian.
The young man grunted. “We’re not headed there, though,” he whispered. “We’re going to the island.” He nodded toward a dark hump which Kate only now realized was not part of the north shore. It was still half a mile or more away.
“But if Fortuna is at the house on shore—” she began, then stopped as sounds of a large boat’s engine coughing to life crossed the water to them. She turned around and watched from the bow as a ship’s running lights came on below the brightly lit estate. Suddenly there were more lights and three small speedboats roared away from the distant dock and pounded out into the lake.
“Shit,” whispered Lucian and shipped his oars. The three of them crouched expectantly and watched as the speedboats growled their way toward them. Searchlights stabbed out and across the water.
“Down!” whispered Lucian, and they all crouched in three inches of water, only the tops of their heads above the gunwales.
The speedboats crossed and crisscrossed the half mile of water between the estate and the opposite side of the island, then swept around to the other side, their searchlights probing both the shore and the expanse of lake beyond. One of the boats roared out toward the lagoon they had just rowed from, its searchlight on and the smacking of its hull sharp and clear across the dark water. The boat swerved and seemed headed straight toward them.
Kate crouched and found that she was whispering to herself, citing a litany to the darkness, the clouds above, and the low profile of their rowboat. The speedboat roared closer.
“If they shoot, go into the water,” whispered Lucian. He racked the slide on the automatic pistol.
Kate wondered if O’Rourke could swim well with his artificial leg. Well, she was a good swimmer—three times a week she swam laps at the Boulder Rec Center—and if need be, she’d drag both men back to shore. Joshua, she thought, adding his name to her whispered litany.
The speedboat arced to its right and passed them sixty yards to their left. The waves were higher now as a wind came up, and their little rowboat could not have been more than the briefest of silhouettes against an equally dark shoreline. Kate, O’Rourke, and Lucian crouched in the lapping water as the speedboat roared into the lagoon, stabbed searchlights along the shore there—visible as a glow through autumn-bare trees—and then pounded its way back out and around the perimeter of the lake, occasionally checking out something along the shore with its light. Once there was the rattle of small-arms fire, sharp and metallic and clear across the water, and then the boat completed its circuit and roared back toward the island.
The large boat—some sort of cruiser forty or fifty feet long by the looks of it—was chugging its way toward the island now, all three speedboats as escort. Kate moved back to the bow of the rowboat, feeling the water lapping above her ankles. She was soake
d and cold. Above them, the clouds made gaps through which she could see the stars. A cold wind blew at them from the north.
Lucian began rowing again. When he paused to gasp for breath, O’Rourke said, “Let me take a turn,” and moved to the center seat. Kate was shivering now, wishing that she had volunteered first, but she wanted to stay in the bow and watch the island.
The large boat had tied up at a dock on the left point of the island while two of the speedboats also put in. The third one continued to orbit. Kate heard shouts and then saw flashlights gleam on the dock. They were doused and suddenly torches flared to life. Dark figures beneath the line of torches were clearly visible as they filed from the dock up under the trees onto the island proper.
“We need to time this right,” said Lucian, stopping O’Rourke’s rowing and pointing to a place several hundred meters east of the dock. “We can put in there, but we have to make a dash for it when the patrol boat is on the far side of the island.” He removed his watch and stared at the radium dial as the boat continued its counterclockwise patrol.
“Three minutes ten seconds,” said Lucian as the speedboat growled its way around the southwest point again. “Are you fresh enough to row that fast?” he asked O’Rourke.
The priest nodded. When the speedboat disappeared around the east point again, he put his back into it. The rowboat’s progress seemed slow, the current pushing them west stronger than ever. Kate could hear O’Rourke’s grunts and wheezing breath.
“Two minutes,” whispered Lucian, studying his watch.
Kate could just hear the speedboat’s engine on the other side of the small island, could see dark shapes on the dock. What if they see us? What if the boat speeds up? O’Rourke rowed steadily, the clumsy oars biting deep. The island seemed no closer than it had before.
“One minute,” whispered Lucian.
Kate could hear the speedboat now, purring its way around the northwest corner of the island. They were closer—the island seemed taller, the dark trees distinct, but O’Rourke seemed to be putting most of his energy into not letting the current sweep them west into the dock. The oars sounded very loud as they bit at the water. If the patrol boat came around now, they would be directly in its path.