In the dark Marten had no idea where he was, or how long he had been there. Two days, three, four. A week. Maybe even more. The ride in the truck, bound and rolled up in the carpet, had seemed interminable but in reality had probably been no more than five or six hours. Afterward, he’d been taken out blindfolded. As in Rotterdam there had been stairs, four flights this time, and as in Rotterdam he’d been put alone into a small, windowless room. The only difference was that here he had a small water closet with a toilet and washbasin and a cot with a pillow and blankets. What had happened to the family who had saved him, he couldn’t begin to imagine.
Over that same period his captors had bound his wrists and taken him blindfolded from the room at least a dozen times, walking him down a flight of stairs to a room where the man with the throaty voice and strong tobacco breath and thick accent waited to ask the same questions as before. Each time he gave the same answers. And when he did the questions began all over again.
“You work for the CIA. How did you penetrate the Russian inner circle?”
“My name is Nicholas Marten. I am a student—”
“You work for the CIA. Who is your handler? Where is your base?”
“My name is—”
“Who is Rebecca? Where is she now?”
“My name is—”
By now it had become a game of wills. Even though, as an LAPD homicide detective, Marten had been well schooled in the art of interrogation, he had not been taught what it was like to be on the other end of the stick, being interrogated instead of doing the interrogating, and certainly he had no defense lawyer to intervene on his behalf. He felt like a captured soldier giving name, rank, and serial number. And like a captured soldier, he knew that his first duty was to escape. But that had been impossible. He was under their control twenty-four hours a day, either alone, locked inside the room in the dark with balaclava-hooded guards outside his door, or—the door suddenly opening, the balaclavas storming in to bind his wrists and take him blindfolded down the stairs for more interrogation.
He had been given food and water and the means to keep himself more or less physically clean. Curiously, aside from the constant darkness—or blindfolds, which amounted to the same thing—and the interrogations that brought with them the odd shove or slap, he had not been harmed or physically mistreated. Yet, the endless passage of time aside, the worst thing was not knowing. For all his guessing, he had no idea who his captors were or what they were doing or plotting, or what they really expected to gain by keeping him imprisoned. Nor had he any idea how long it would go on—or if, at some point, they would tire of the interrogations and simply kill him.
Though he did his best not to show it, it was wearing him down. With no idea if it was day or night, with no sense of the passage of time, he was beginning to lose touch with reality. Worse, his nerves seemed filled with electricity and he knew he was edging into paranoia. The dark was bad enough, but increasingly he found himself listening for the slightest sound outside his door that would tell him they were coming again. Coming to take him and blindfold and bind him and take him down for more questioning. Sometimes he heard different sounds, or he thought he did. The worst were sharp and scratching. Always they began as one or two and then quickly became five, ten, fifty, a hundred until he was certain there were thousands of tiny scurrying feet outside his door, an army of rats scratching away at the woodwork trying to get in. How many times had he jumped from his cot and rushed to the door in the dark, yelling and banging on it to drive them away, only to stop a heartbeat later when he knew he had heard nothing at all?
Every so often, once a day, he believed, the door would open and the balaclavas would come in. There were always two of them, and they would leave food and then go back out without a word. Sometimes nothing else happened for days on end. Those were the times he actually wanted to be taken down and questioned. It was a human interaction, even though it was always accusatory and always the same.
By now the interrogator’s voice had nearly become his own, with its familiar cadence and the accent he still could not place. The once nauseating smell of his tobacco breath had become almost welcome. A narcotic of some kind. To keep his sanity and survive, he knew, he had to wholly change his mind-set and focus not on his captors or the darkness but on something else entirely.
And he had.
It was Rebecca. How she had looked and been when he had last seen her at the villa in Davos. The adoring bride-to-be, the next Tsarina of Russia. He thought of her emotional condition then and what it would be now. If she thought he was dead, and how she would react to his death. And if she was still being innocently swept along in the wake of Cabrera’s covert and bloody seizure of the Russian throne.
Swept along.
Because she loved him.
And knew he loved her.
And had no idea who he was.
Or what he had done.
“Who is Rebecca?”
“A girlfriend.”
“You work for the CIA.”
“No.”
“How did you penetrate the Russian inner circle?”
“I am a student.”
“Where is Rebecca now?”
“I don’t know.”
“You work for the CIA. Who is your handler? Where is your base?”
“No!” Marten said out loud. The interrogator’s voice was inside his head battling him as if they were in the interrogation room. He was doing it to himself, as he knew they wanted, but it was a game he refused to play. Abruptly he pushed himself up from the cot where he sat in the dark and found his way to the tiny water closet. There he flushed the toilet and waited, listening to the water run down and the toilet basin refill. There was only one reason he’d done it. To keep the voice away. He flushed again, and then once more. Finally he went back and found the cot and lay down to stare into the darkness.
He knew his captors were using the dark and staggering the time between interrogations to deliberately disorient him, increasing his anxiety and making him fear their return all that much more. Their purpose was clear, to let him drive himself to the point where he would crumble and admit almost anything they demanded, which would allow them to use him as a huge playing card, especially if he confessed to being a CIA operative. And they wanted to make a political example of him. So crumbling was something he had to deny them. To do it he had to retain his sanity. The best way to do that, he realized, was to deliberately shift his thoughts from the present and focus on the past, replaying memories. And he had.
Mostly they were from long ago, of Rebecca growing up, of himself and Dan Ford as boys, riding bikes and teasing girls, and then he remembered what he had thought of after he had seen Dan’s body in the Citroen as it was pulled from the Seine—the homemade rocket-launcher explosion that, at age ten, caused Dan to lose his right eye. And he wondered again whether, if Dan had had his full sight, he might have seen Raymond sooner, and in doing so would have had a chance to save himself. Tragically it was a question that would never be answered and only added to Marten’s terrible and immense guilt.
With it came another thought, one he had continually tried to push away but that kept coming back. What if, in the auto body garage, with the squad watching, he had simply done what Valparaiso had urged and put his own Double Eagle Colt to Raymond’s head and pulled the trigger? If he had done that, none of the rest would ever have happened.
15
The rest.
“The pieces.”
“The pieces that will ensure the future.”
Marten could still see Raymond on the Metrolink train in L.A. Hear his words as clearly as if he were saying them this moment.
“What pieces?” Marten had demanded.
He could still see Raymond’s slow, calculated, arrogant smile as he answered. “That, you will have to find out for yourself.”
Well, he had. He knew what the “pieces” were. The vintage Spanish Navaja switchblade and the 8 mm film. Film, he was certain, that had bee
n taken of Raymond/Alexander killing his half brother in Paris twenty years earlier.
He knew what “ensure the future” meant, too. It was Alexander’s future, because having the “pieces,” the knife and the condemning film, meant he was no longer under threat from exposure to, or prosecution from, that murder.
Earlier, in surmising what might have happened in the park, he suggested to Kovalenko that perhaps someone had been taking home movies of the birthday party and had inadvertently filmed the murder. Now he wondered if that someone had been Alfred Neuss. If so, had he somehow come to take possession of the murder weapon afterward? And then, knowing full well who the killer had been—and as one of Peter Kitner’s oldest friends—had said nothing to the police and given that friend both the knife and the film, which Kitner then asked him to be caretaker of?
And had Neuss, knowing who Kitner really was, quietly and clandestinely, and with Kitner’s permission, divulged that information to the four handpicked Romanov family members living in the Americas and far from the tragedy in Paris? Swearing them to secrecy, had he asked them to be keepers of the safe deposit keys at the request of the true head of the imperial family? That possibility, and the way the victims had been tortured before they had been killed, made Marten think Neuss had not given a specific reason for his request or explained the why of the keys themselves, or told the location of the box they would open. Perhaps the people had not even known about the keys at all. Maybe each had simply been given a sealed package or envelope with the instructions that if anything were to happen to Kitner the envelopes or packages were to be sent immediately to a third party—the French police maybe, or perhaps to Neuss’s or Kitner’s legal representatives. Or maybe to some combination of all three?
Elaborate? Perhaps.
Unnecessary? Maybe.
But considering the cunning and reach of the Baroness, it might well have been a kind of fail-safe tactic to provide another level of protection against someone trying to retrieve the “pieces.”
If Marten continued that line of reasoning and it had indeed been Neuss who had shot the film, it was clear he would have also been an eyewitness to the murder and therefore a very necessary subject for elimination. Why Alexander and the Baroness had waited for so many years to act, to retrieve the “pieces” and take care of Neuss was a mystery, unless—as Marten had suggested to Kovalenko before—the Baroness had used those years to carefully watch the course of history and, after the fall of the Soviet Union and sensing what was to come, had begun forcefully and deliberately courting the major power brokers inside Russia. Not just those in business and politics as he had thought earlier but also, as he had seen firsthand at the villa in Davos, those at the highest levels of the Orthodox Church and the Russian military.
With her influence in place, and knowing full well who Kitner really was, the Baroness would have bided her time until she was certain the social and economic conditions were primed for a return of the monarchy. When that time came, she made her move, quietly divulging to the proper persons Kitner’s true identity and thus setting in motion the legal and technical apparatus to confirm beyond doubt who he was.
Once that was done, and perhaps even at the Baroness’s further urging, Kitner was invited to meet with the Russian president and/or other top representatives of the Russian government, presented with the findings, and asked to head a new constitutional monarchy. When he had agreed and the plans and dates were firmly set—first, for his presentation to the Romanov family the day after he was knighted in London, and second, for the public announcement to be made several weeks later in Moscow—the Baroness and Alexander put their precisely timed, surgical plan into action. It would be done so swiftly that Kitner could suspect nothing until it was too late, because by then the Romanovs would already know who he was and that the Russian government had formally, if secretly, acknowledged him as the new monarch.
It was a move made, Marten saw, as a carefully calculated measure that not only announced the restoration of the monarchy with Kitner recognized as the rightful heir to the throne, but opened the door wide for his abdication to his eldest son. Even with all that had happened, Marten had to marvel at the Baroness’s guile. By the very presence of the president of Russia, the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, the mayor of Moscow, and the Russian Federation minister of defense at the villa in Davos, there was little doubt she had paved the way for Alexander as well, perhaps by convincing them that Alexander had the one thing Kitner did not, youth—and the huge public romance that went with it, especially when he was about to take as his bride a young, royally titled, educated, sophisticated beauty like Rebecca.
And each—president, patriarch, mayor, minister of defense—for his own reasons, and in one way or another, would have agreed, or he would not have come in the first place. How or when the Baroness had accomplished that, or the way in which she had presented Alexander to them, was impossible to know. The fact was she had. And Kitner, it seemed, was to have been the last to know of his own abdication. It was a fait accompli, done even before he signed it.
Judging from the Baroness’s consummate planning and Raymond’s lethal ability, it was a plot that should have gone off without a hitch—retrieve the safe deposit keys, eliminate the four Romanovs who possessed them, then kill Neuss and recover the condemning “pieces.” Then, the day after Kitner was presented to the Romanov family in London, have the FSO colonel Murzin bring him to the house on Uxbridge Street, make it known they were in possession of the “pieces,” and demand that he abdicate. And Kitner, terrified Alexander would kill him or one of his family, as he had so boldly proven he could do and would do and had done, even as a child, would comply—to protect his life and those of his wife and other children.
Neuss had been last on the list to be killed—when, as an eyewitness to Raymond/Alexander’s murder of Paul, it would have seemed logical to eliminate him first. That might have been because they were afraid Neuss himself was part of the fail-safe plan and killing him could trigger a major alarm, causing the Romanovs to instantly send the safe deposit keys wherever they had been instructed to. So instead they had resolved those problems first, retrieving the keys and killing the Romanovs who had them. The killing of Neuss would then be the exclamation point to this part of their game, designed as much to terrify Kitner as to eliminate the jeweler. Of course, there was always the possibility that if Kitner learned about the killings of the Romanovs and Neuss and about the missing keys he would panic and stop the entire process—which, in retrospect, and with Neuss’s arrival in London, was exactly what he had done—but, with Murzin and the FSO poised to take control the moment he was presented to the family and counting on Kitner’s own eagerness to gain the throne, it was a chance they obviously had been willing to take.
Yet as much as Marten’s analysis seemed reasonable, he knew there was no way to be certain he was right. There might have been other things at play entirely.
But the order of things aside, it was a plan that should have worked. Except that it didn’t because fate had suddenly intervened and two wholly unforeseen things, one after the other, ran all of it straight into the ground. First, they failed to realize the keepers of the keys had no idea where the box was that the keys would open; second, the ice storm had put Alexander, as Raymond Thorne, on the same train as Frank Donlan.
Angry that it had taken him so long to understand what had been going on, and angry at his continued and forced confinement here, Marten again got up from the cot, this time not to go to the toilet but to pace the room in the dark. It was five strides from one wall to the other before he had to turn around and go back. He crossed it once and then again. As he crossed the third time his thoughts went to the knife Alexander had used to try to kill him on the mountain trail. Almost certainly it was the Spanish switchblade retrieved from Fabien Curtay’s safe in Monaco and most probably the same knife used to kill Kitner’s son twenty years earlier in Paris. And in all likelihood was the same razor-sharp weapon used to
kill Halliday and Dan Ford and the printer’s rep Jean-Luc Vabres and the Zurich printer Hans Lossberg. Kovalenko had said that at one time he thought what he was looking at was ritual killing, and maybe that was how it had begun—Alexander killing the younger Paul to throw fear and terror into Kitner’s soul and at the same time removing his next eldest son, who might have become a rival to Alexander for the throne.
But then, as an adult, he had become a coldly dispassionate soldier, using a gun to commit the murders in the Americas and to kill Neuss and Curtay in Europe. With the “pieces” in his possession, that impersonal gun had suddenly been replaced by the very personal knife he had used to begin his journey. Why? Was it now, after everything, when he saw the throne nearly within his grasp, that there had come an almost primal need to prove to himself and to the Baroness, even to the world, that he was at the top of his game and worthy of being called Tsar of all Russia? With the abrupt casting aside of the gun for the very singular ritual of the knife he now had back in his possession, with the blood and the vicious slaughter of his victims, was he, consciously or subconsciously, demonstrating that he was indeed capable of presiding over Russia with an iron hand?
Kovalenko had thought that he might be looking at ritual murder, and Marten, at the same time, had suggested, based on the use of the knife and the manner of the slayings, that the killer seemed to be losing control. Now, seeing Alexander as some kind of warrior-king nearing the end of a murderous, exhausting, almost lifelong campaign (with his prize, the throne of Russia, finally in view), suddenly reunited with his symbolic knife and using it so savagely and emotionally to eradicate the last impediments to his goal—it appeared both of them had been right.
Yet for all that, there was something else. In remembering the way Alexander had looked at Rebecca that night at the villa in Davos with unconditional love in his eyes, Marten wondered if he wasn’t being torn in another way as well. Perhaps too much ambition, too much battle, too much blood and violence were being intensely countered by his total love for Rebecca and the sea of calm that came with it. And that part of him wanted nothing at all to do with the sadistic whirlwind of murder and bloodshed that came with the quest for the throne or even the throne itself. If true, it would mean there was a monstrous psychotic conflict going on inside him that would rage all the more feverishly as the days wore on and his coronation drew ever nearer.