“And did she succeed?” Vera asked.
Valko said quietly, “My daughter was pregnant when she was killed. During the autopsy it was discovered that an egg had formed in Angela’s womb. The child was a boy. I saw his corpse. His skin was golden and he had the white wings of an archangel. Angela’s second child would have been a warrior. He would have brought peace and tranquility to our world. But this savior child died with her.”
“What became of the angel?” Vera asked.
“After Angela’s death, I knew that I needed to find Lucien,” Valko said. “And after searching for many months, I found him imprisoned in Siberia.”
“They must have taken him to the panopticon,” Vera said. Rumors about the existence of a great Siberian prison were forever circulating among Russian angelologists. It was just the kind of detention center to be found in the wilderness—old-fashioned, aesthetically complex, flawlessly designed, and impenetrable. But no one had ever verified if the panopticon actually existed.
“The very one,” Valko said. “The same day Angela was murdered, Lucien was taken into captivity by the Russian hunters and transported by train to Siberia.”
“They wanted to study him?” Vera asked.
“Clearly,” Valko said. “With such a magnificent creature there would be much to examine and explore. The biological breakdown of an archangel’s son could occupy researchers for years.”
“But the society was founded to fight the Nephilim,” Sveti said. “How could someone get away with the imprisonment of a creature proven to derive from an altogether different, truly divine angelic form?”
“I’m not sure the guards would have known the difference,” Valko said. “And besides, that prison conducts its business outside of the confines of our conventions.”
As if by a sudden impulse, Valko gestured for them to follow him back outside into the garden, where a table had been set with a breakfast of Valko’s antediluvian fruit—orange strawberries and blue apples and green oranges. Vera shivered, feeling the crisp mountain air on her arms as she made her way to the table.
“Sit a moment,” Valko said, pulling a chair out for Vera. “We’ll have something to eat while we finish our conversation.”
Vera sat alongside the others, watching as they chose fruit from a platter. Vera took a strawberry, picked up her knife and fork, and cut it in half. A thick orange juice seeped from the center. Valko opened a thermos and poured coffee into their mugs.
Valko continued where he had left off. “The panopticon prison is funded beyond anything you and I could dream of. As a result, it is extremely well equipped and secure. The scientists there are using captive angelic creatures as experimental subjects. They are taking blood and DNA samples; they are taking biopsies, bone samples, MRI scans; they are even operating on the creatures. They are very powerful and, as they say about absolute power, well . . .” Valko paused to cut a fruit that seemed a cross between a kiwi and a pear, “the aphorism is a perfect expression of the chief technician there—a British scientist named Merlin Godwin.”
Vera nearly choked on her coffee. Hearing the name Merlin Godwin now, uttered in this Edenic garden, was so jarring that she could hardly swallow. She glanced at her watch. Almost twenty-four hours had passed since she had seen Angela’s interrogation projected on a cellar wall of the Winter Palace. Finally, she found her voice. “Merlin Godwin is a traitor.”
“Godwin has been in the Grigoris’ pocket since the beginning,” Valko conceded.
“Why has he been permitted to continue his work, then?” Azov asked. “Sveti and I are struggling to keep our projects going, and this criminal is set up with unlimited funding and equipment.”
“The academy believes that the work he’s doing is of benefit to them,” Valko said. “Keeping him in Siberia is a form of containment: He is a permanent resident of the panopticon. He has absolutely no contact with the world outside.”
“He’s a prisoner himself,” Vera said.
“As director and chief scientist of the facility, I would hardly call him that,” Valko said. “He has ultimate control of the facility. But his power lies only within the walls of the prison. His work with the Grigoris is something he has managed to maintain, apparently, although I have no idea how.”
“Or why,” Sveti added. “How could they allow him to continue his work? I can’t imagine the Grigoris using their own kind as experimental subjects.”
“I have my own theories about that,” Valko said, winking at Vera. “I suspect that they are attempting to develop a new genetic pool as a way to renew themselves. What they may not realize is that their efforts are hopeless without a creature who can give them the biological blueprint they need.”
“Hence Lucien,” Azov added.
“I took care of Lucien,” Valko said, and Vera could hear the pride of a man who had spent a lifetime outsmarting the creatures. “I got him out of Siberia before they did any real harm to him.”
“He’s here?” Vera asked.
“All in due time, my dear,” Valko said. “You came to me for answers and I will try to provide some.” Valko leaned back in his chair, his coffee steaming in his hand. “As you know, the field of angelic genetics was founded by my daughter. What you may not know is that her work was closely monitored by her enemies. They hoped to use genetic engineering to create angels.”
“But I thought you said Angela didn’t believe cloning could work?” Azov said.
“She didn’t think it would be viable,” Valko said. “And her reasoning came from the most basic aspects of genetic inheritance—the nature of mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA.”
“Ah, the pillars of ancestry societies everywhere,” Azov said. “We’ve had a number of religious scholars at St. Ivan asking to exhume the remains of John the Baptist, hoping to run such DNA testing.”
“And of course you tell them why that would not be prudent,” Valko said.
“I tell them that it’s the mitochondrial DNA of the female members of a family that acts as a time capsule: A girl’s mitochondrial DNA is a replica of her mother’s, grandmother’s, great-grandmother’s, and so on. So John the Baptist, being a man—a man who may have descended from the Archangel Gabriel, I would now add—wouldn’t deliver the goods.”
“Angela discovered that the same is true for female Nephilim,” Valko said. “There is an exact replica of the maternal line in every female born, creating an enormous possibility to examine ancient DNA structures of female creatures.”
“But the Nephilim are descended from angels and women,” Vera said. “The mitochondrial DNA would, thus, lead back to humanity, not to angels.”
“Correct,” Valko said. “That was why Godwin ultimately found Lucien unusable. He was descended from an angel, sure enough, and was very, very pure. But with an angelic father and a very pure Nephilistic mother, Lucien’s genes were impossible for Godwin to sequence with the technology available in the 1980s. His mitochondrial DNA was a direct match to Alexandra Romanov’s. His nuclear DNA was a hodgepodge of his parents’ combined genes—human, Nephil, and an unidentifiable strain that Godwin couldn’t pinpoint and therefore deemed worthless to him and his project.”
“And Lucien?” Vera asked again. She couldn’t help but think of how alluring it would be to be able to see the creature, to touch it, to feel the heat of its skin.
“When I finally found Lucien in 1986, Godwin had him in their prison in Siberia. The terrible conditions didn’t seem to affect him—he is a transcendental being, quite literally, and the realities of the material world cannot touch him. Even so, I knew that I needed to get him out of there, and so I convinced Godwin that I had the one thing on earth more precious than Lucien—an ingredient in the elusive medicine of Noah.”
“Silphium,” Azov said.
“There were two seeds in the cache you gave me in 1985,” Valko said. “I gave one of them to Godwin in exchange for Lucien.”
“But why?” Azov said, his voice rising. “How could you d
o something so irresponsible?”
“First of all, if Lucien had remained in Siberia, he would have eventually been used by Godwin—and by extension the Grigoris—in some fashion or another. This is most certain. Second, and more important, I knew that they didn’t have a clue about the formula. It was recorded in one place and one place only.”
“Rasputin’s Book of Flowers,” Vera said. “Buried in an old lady’s antique shop, right under the Grigoris’ noses.”
“Until now, evidently,” Valko replied, glancing at Vera’s satchel, as if verifying that she was bringing it along. “But really, even if Godwin were lucky enough to get the silphium seed to grow, he couldn’t use it.”
“And so you took Lucien from Russia,” Azov said.
“I came here, to these mountains, with Lucien. I hoped to study him, to listen to him, to understand his nature. It is no small thing, having a seraph’s descendant at one’s disposal—our discipline is the classification of angelic systems. Lucien is derived from the highest order.”
“Is he here, in these mountains?” Vera asked, fixing Valko in her gaze, noting the determination with which he spoke about Lucien, the ambition that burned in his eyes. It had been only days since she had revisited the photographs Seraphina Valko had taken of the Watcher. That she might actually see such a creature in the flesh, might touch it and speak to it, was hard to believe.
Valko nodded, an air of pride in his manner. “I gave him a room here, in my cabin, but he was never able to stay there. He would leave to wander through the Rhodopes, spending days and then weeks in the canyons. I would find him at the summit of a mountain, luminescent as a ray of sunshine, singing praises to the heavens, and then I would find him in the caves, in a trance of introspection. And so I took him down into the Devil’s Throat, where he has stayed for many years. Perhaps it is the proximity of his fellow angels, but he finds comfort there, close to the Watchers. There is something in his soul that finds peace in this circle of hell.”
The Seventh Circle
VIOLENCE
Smolyan, Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria
Valko stepped into his hiking boots, bent over, and tied the laces. Spring in the mountains was cold, and they would need heavy jackets and gloves to keep warm. He went into the greenhouse and found a number of Gore-Tex parkas. He went to a metal cabinet, unlocked the doors, and began pulling out tiny lacquered boxes, spoons fashioned of different metals, a mortar and pestle, and a number of glass jars and put them carefully in his backpack. He wrapped a portable gas burner in a cloth and added it to his supplies. Everything necessary had to be brought into the cavern.
As he zipped his jacket, he turned to the others, sizing them up. He distributed the parkas, and gave everyone a cap and a pair of gloves. Both Sveti and Vera were potentially worrisome. Although trim and tanned from her work on the Black Sea, Sveti was a linguist, whose greatest physical exertion was the moving of books from one shelf to another, and—if he was a good judge of character—Vera wasn’t much different. Neither of them had the training or the strength for a real expedition.
He tried to remember that he’d been a novice himself once too, and that he needed to be patient with his younger colleagues. His first expeditions were in the Pyrenees Mountains, where he and his first wife, Seraphina, had fallen in love. They continued to find remains of the Nephilim in mountain sites in the years following their marriage. Her work in the Rhodopes had changed everything for them both. The discovery of Valkine, contact with the Watchers, the series of photographs Seraphina had taken of a dead angel, and—their greatest achievement—the recovery of the lyre: Such advances had never been made before, and although nearly seventy years had passed, he’d never reached such heights again. He had remarried twice, but he’d never forgotten his brilliant Seraphina. Maybe it was nostalgia for their time together, but he felt closer to her in the mountains than anywhere else.
They set off toward the peaks above Smolyan, walking within the thick forest. They would avoid the village roads near Trigrad and descend to the Devil’s Throat from behind. He’d done it many times over the past years, filling his backpack with a video camera so that he could record his observations about the site. Only now he didn’t pack his notebooks or his camera. He knew that this was his last trip into the cave.
The snow had melted in March, and they climbed over a bed of pine needles and rock, safe under the cover of enormous evergreens. A patch of sunlight appeared overhead, sliding between the barren branches of a linden tree and casting a golden gleam over the forest floor. He glanced over his shoulder as they ascended, noting the smoke rising from the chimney of his stone house—the smoke grew fainter and fainter, until it dissolved away completely.
The sun had climbed into the sky by the time they reached the Devil’s Throat. The rocky surface of the mountain seemed silver in the brightness. Valko led the way up the steep rise of the mountain and through a dense patch of forest. Beyond the overgrown bramble stood the large, dark cave. Once, many years before, this had been a much revered entrance to the Devil’s Throat. Thracians had created shrines here; myths and legends grew around the site. The local people believed that Orpheus descended to the underworld from the cave and that devils lived in the labryinthian structures deep below it. Anyone who entered would be cursed, lost to life aboveground, forever mired in darkness.
Approaching the entrance, Valko remembered the first time he had seen it. It had seemed to him to be just a hole gaping in the side of the mountain like so many other caves he’d seen in his travels, but of course it had been so much more. He would never forget the smile of triumph on Seraphina’s face when she returned to Paris after the Second Angelic Expedition. She had found the opening to the underworld, and she had brought back its most precious treasure. Of course, everything had changed since her death. He’d stayed in Paris, remarried, raised a daughter, divorced, buried a daughter. Only then, after Angela’s death, when the last of his connections to Paris was gone, had he made the trek to the Devil’s Throat Cavern himself. For twenty-five years Valko had climbed the sheer rock face, the sound of the waterfall crashing in his ears, and spied on the Watchers, waiting for the day when he would return. For years his life had been in that secluded valley. He’d disguised himself so well that nobody knew who he was or what he was doing. He’d married a Bulgarian woman, spoke Bulgarian like a native, mixed with local men in the village bars, and done everything he could to fit in. If the Nephilim had discovered his identity, he would be dead. But they hadn’t.
Leaning against the entrance of the cavern, he looked past his young comrades and through the tangle of birch trees beyond, letting his mind drift to the hours ahead. He threw a rope ladder over the ledge. Vera stepped to it, grabbed the first rung, and lowered herself down. The descent would be painstaking and dangerous. The familiar sound of water bounced through the gorge, echoing, filling the space with a deafening noise, and he wondered why Vera and Azov hadn’t asked for more specific information about the layout of the Devil’s Throat, why they had trusted him about Lucien, why they didn’t verify his story. It used to be that agents trusted no one.
Valko knew the mythology behind the cavern, but he also knew the cave as a geological formation. He knew the depth and the general perimeters as precisely as the contour lines on a topographical map; he recognized the sound of water that came from the river and the water that came from the waterfall. Quickly he went, letting gravity take him downward. He counted each step, positioning his feet carefully, delicately on the ladder rungs, adding them up. He looked over his shoulder, straining to see in the swirling, infinite darkness. He knew that the noise would grow louder and louder as he descended. As the shaft deepened, the darkness would become thick. He could see no farther than the whites of his knuckles wrapped upon the ladder’s rungs, and yet he knew that soon he would reach the bottom.
The Devil’s Throat Cavern, Smolyan, Bulgaria
As Vera followed Valko through the darkness, she saw a skeletal figure stret
ched out on the rock, its pale arms crossed upon its chest. Seraphina Valko’s photographs of the dead Watcher had taken Vera’s breath away when she’d first seen them a year earlier in Paris, and now here was the actual angel, in the flesh, its skin giving the illusion of life, its golden hair curling in tendrils to its shoulders. As they stood over its body, taking in its unearthly beauty, Vera felt a sense that she was following a path created long before her birth.
“It looks alive,” Vera said, lifting the white metallic gown and rubbing the fabric between her fingers.
“I wouldn’t touch it,” Valko said. “The bodies of angels weren’t meant to be touched. The level of radioactivity may still be very high.”
Azov bent over the body. “But I thought that they couldn’t die.”
“Immortality is a gift that can be taken as easily as it is bequeathed,” Valko said. “Clematis believed that the Lord struck the angel down as vengeance. It may be that angels live the way humans do—in the shadow of their Creator, wholly dependent upon the whims of divinity.”
Valko, who had clearly seen the dead Watcher many times before, headed off into the cavern. Vera followed the trembling glow of his flashlight into the cold, wet space. He stopped before a declivity in the wall that, upon closer inspection, was a chiseled corridor that opened into a large room. In the depths of the space, removed from the roar of water, there was light and movement, the soft scraping of a pen on paper. A figure stood and walked toward them, his thin body barely discernible.
“Lucien?” Valko said, in little more than a whisper.
“What is it?” a soft voice said.
“Lucien, there are some people I’d like you to meet,” Valko said. “Do you mind if we come in?”
The angel hesitated, and then, as if realizing that he couldn’t refuse, stepped aside and let them pass into his chamber.