He leaned backward as the ax came swinging toward his neck and felt the displaced air blow across his face. He jabbed a fist into his attacker’s ribs, then another. Something crunched. He stepped behind the groaning man, swung an arm around his throat-it was Popov, the shift manager, who had never even raised his voice the whole time that Maxim had worked there-and began to choke him.
Popov dropped to the ground like a sack of beetroot.
Maxim grabbed the ax from the dead man’s hand and immediately buried it in the face of Stanislav, who already had the hack he was holding halfway through an arc toward Maxim’s chest. Maxim tried to duck out of its path, but the hack still connected and gouged a large chunk out of his side.
Stanislav toppled backward and fell to the ground, the ax embedded in his face.
Maxim dropped to his knees, then keeled over, grabbing his torn flesh with both hands, trying to push the two sides of the wound back together.
He lay there, writhing on the ground, pain shooting through him, his hands bathed in his own blood, and glanced down the mineshaft. He could barely make out the dimly lit silhouettes of other mudaks up and down the tunnels, hacking away at one another furiously.
He looked down to the wound in his side. His blood was rippling through his fingers and cascading onto the thick grime of the mine floor. He kept staring at it as the death cries echoed around him and the minutes slipped by, his mind numb, his thoughts adrift in a maelstrom of confusion-then a powerful explosion ripped through the air behind him.
The walls shook, and dust and rock shards rained down on him.
Three other explosions followed, knocking the lanterns off their mounts and plunging the already-dark tunnels of the mine into total darkness.
Everything went deathly silent for a brief moment-then came a cool breeze and an urgent, rushing sound.
A rush that turned into a roar.
Maxim stared into the darkness. He never saw the solid wall of water that plowed into him with the force of an anvil and whisked him away. But in those seconds of consciousness, in those last moments before the water overpowered his lungs and the force of the torrent slammed him against the tunnel wall, Maxim Nikolaev’s final thoughts were of his boyhood and of how peaceful it would be to return to the river of his youth.
STANDING BY THE DETONATOR at the mouth of the tunnel, the man of science listened until all silence returned to the mountain. He was shaking visibly, though not from the cold. His companion, on the other hand, was unnaturally calm and serene. Which made the scientist shake even more.
They had made the long journey together, from the distant isolation of the Siberian monastery to this equally forsaken place. A journey that had started many years ago with the promise of great things, but that had since veered into savage, criminal territory. The man of science couldn’t quite put his finger on how they’d reached this point of no return, how it had all degenerated into mass murder. And as he stared at his companion, he feared there would be more to come.
“What have we done?” he muttered, fearful even as the words snuck past his lips.
His companion turned to face him. For a man of such power and influence, a man who had become an intimate friend and confidant of the tsar and tsarina, he was unusually dressed. An old, greasy jacket, tattered around the cuffs. Baggy trousers that hung low at the back, like the serouals worn by the Turks. A farmer’s oiled boots. Then there was the wild, tangled beard, and the greasy hair, parted down the middle like that of a tavern waiter. The scientist knew it was all artifice, of course, all part of a calculated look. A craftily honed image for a grand master plan, one in which the man of science had become an enabler and an accomplice. A costume designed to convey the humbleness and humility of a true man of God. An outfit so basic it also couldn’t possibly detract from its wearer’s hypnotic, gray-blue gaze.
The gaze of a demon.
“What have we done?” his companion replied in his odd, simple, almost primordial manner of speech. “I’ll tell you what we’ve done, my friend. You and me… we’ve just ensured the salvation of our people.”
As always happened in the other’s company, the man of science felt a numbing weakness overcome him. All he could do was stand there and nod. But as he began to digest what they had just done, a stifling darkness descended upon him and he wondered about what horrors lay ahead, horrors he would have never imagined possible back in that secluded monastery, where he’d first met the mysterious peasant. Where the man had brought him back from the edge, shown him the wonder of his gift, and talked to him about his wanderings among the hidden cloisters deep in the forests and the beliefs he had learned there. Where the mystic with the piercing eyes had first told him about the advent of “true tsar,” a fair ruler, a redeemer of the people born of the common folk. A savior of Holy Rus.
For the briefest moment, the man of science wondered if he’d ever be able to extricate himself from his mentor’s hold and avoid the madness that surely lay ahead. But as quickly as the thought had surfaced, it was gone, snuffed out before it could even begin to take shape.
He’d never seen anyone refuse anything of Grigory Efimovich Rasputin.
And he knew, with crippling certainty, that his will was far from strong enough for him to be the first.
1
Queens, New York City
Present Day
The vodka didn’t taste like much, not anymore, and that last swig had scorched his throat like acid, but that didn’t stop him from wanting more.
This was a bad day for Leo Sokolov.
A bad day coming close on the heels of many bad days.
He tore his eyes off the wall-mounted TV screen and gestured to the barman for a top-up, then returned his gaze to the live feed coming back from Moscow. Bitterness roiled inside him as the camera zoomed in on the coffin being lowered into the ground.
The last of us, he lamented in angry silence. The last… and the best.
The last of the family I wiped out.
The screen split to show another feed, this one coming from the city’s Manezh Square, where thousands of protesters were angrily demonstrating under the walls and spires of the Kremlin. Under the very noses of those who had murdered that brave, noble-that magnificent man.
You can scream and shout all you like, he fumed inwardly. What do they care? What they did to him they’ll do again, and they’ll keep doing it every time someone dares to speak out against them. They don’t care how many they kill. To them, we’re all just… He remembered the man’s rousing words.
We’re all just cattle.
A profound sadness seeped through him as the screen shifted to a close-up of the grieving widow, all in black, doing her best to appear dignified and defiant despite knowing, Sokolov was sure, that any lingering aspirations of protest would be relentlessly snuffed out of her.
Sokolov’s fingers tightened against the glass.
Unlike other opposition leaders, the man they were burying hadn’t been an egomaniac lusting for power, or a bored oligarch looking to add another trophy to his gilded life. Ilya Shislenko hadn’t been a wistful Communist, a messianic environmentalist, or a raving leftist radical. He was just a concerned, ordinary citizen, a lawyer who was determined to try to make things right. If not right, then at least better. Driven to fight those in power, the ones he’d publicly branded as the party of liars and thieves-a label that was now firmly embedded in the psyches of those campaigning against the government. Committed to fight the rampant corruption and embezzlement, to get rid of those who’d stolen the country from the ones who’d enslaved it for decades, those who now ruled it with a gold-plated blade instead of an iron fist, those who’d pillaged its formidable wealth and stashed their billions in London and Zurich. Putting his life on the line to give his fellow countrymen some of the dignity and the freedom that many of their neighbors in Europe and elsewhere around the world enjoyed.