Eddie turned the switch on the little ventilator fan and lit one of the cigars he’d purchased in the lobby of the infamous Ukraine Hotel. “Tell me, Doc, why are we doing these things? I like excitement, yes, but I think this is getting a little crazy.” The Cuban shrugged. “You have told me the story of this monk, Helder Rodrigues, and the promise you made him when he was dying, but even promises come to their end, companero; am I right?”
“Well, in the first place our snoring, farting friend in the top bunk is right-we’ve gone too far to back out now. It’s simply a matter of survival, of getting out of this whole thing alive. We’ve got the FSB after us and God only knows who else.”
“That is not what I meant, companero, and you know it.” The Cuban shrugged his powerful shoulders. “This thing, whatever it is, has a. . sujecion, a grip on you.” Eddie smiled broadly in the darkness. “You are my friend and I go where you go, do what you do, but I would like to understand better the reason for all of this. I am old-fashioned, Doc; if I die I would like it either to be as a very old man with a pretty girl in the bed with me or for some great cause.”
Holliday stared out the window, the darkness broken every few minutes by the distant, dim light from farmhouses-lives lived that he would never know, dramas unfolding that he would never witness, nothing more than a passing wraith in the night. Finally he turned back to Eddie.
“At first, when I discovered the sword in my uncle Henry’s house I thought I was part of something important, something ancient and good. Uncle Henry was the only real family I ever had, and I thought there couldn’t be anything better than following in his footsteps. That’s why I got my degree and my doctorate in history, to be like him. After getting out of the army I taught at West Point, a teacher like my uncle Henry. He was magic to me. He showed me that history was everywhere, from the blood-rich soil of Antietam to the seventeenth-century graffiti on the walls of the palace at Versailles. He showed me that there was sometimes more history in the writings of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain than there was in a hundred history textbooks.
“When I learned of his connection to the Templar tradition and eventually of his role in protecting that great treasure in the caves of the Corvo volcano in the Azores, I loved him even more. He was truly a knight in shining armor to me.”
“You are sounding like he is no longer the shining knight for you,” said Eddie.
“I learned that he was only a man. A spy for his country and a man who killed more than once to get what he wanted. A man who crossed boundaries that perhaps should have been left uncrossed. And that was only my uncle. The more I investigated his fellow ‘knights,’ these new Templars, these holy men and their holy cause, the more I saw them for what they truly were-some of them, anyway-what they had always been: avaricious, greedy men piling up wealth and power for their own sake. It’s one secret society at war with another. This Order of the Phoenix, or whatever Putin and his oligarchs call it, and whoever or whatever the Templars are now-it is enormous power versus enormous power, and there can be only one left in the end. That’s what this fifth sword is all about. North, south, east and west, with the fifth sword in the middle, the Rose Sword and whatever secret it holds. The Rose Sword, the last sword, is everything to them.”
“And the secret of this sword’s location is somehow in the egg of the Faberge given by the czar?” Eddie asked.
“That would seem to be the accepted idea. Find out the secret of the Kremlin Egg and you find the sword. Find the sword and you find the real secret the Templars have been hiding from the world for the last seven hundred years.”
The two friends sat in the dark together talking, sharing their pasts, their glories and their tragedies. Eddie spoke of being black in Cuba, and even after Castro’s revolution how white and separate the country remained, without one black minister in the government or black general in the military.
He joked about his early days as a criminal, stealing mangoes off the trees that lined the main boulevard of Miramar, the police hot on his trail, of being beaten and bullied for his strange name in his early school days, and fabricating makeshift weights from cans full of cement and iron bars. On the other hand he spoke well of his education-a university engineering degree-and of his early military career, learning to fly anything from little single-prop Zlin Z 26 trainers to massive MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter jets.
Finally he spoke of his days in Africa, his final disillusionment with a revolution that supported other, poorer countries with multimillion-dollar aircraft and pilots while simultaneously being so corrupt at home that the government was unable to feed its people a daily meal of beans and rice, and where nurses and secretaries and even doctors became prostitutes in the evening to make ends meet. A country where everything was blamed on the “embargo” and where tomatoes rotted in the fields for want of the machinery to pick them, while in Havana the black market thrived and people with the right connections watched Miami satellite TV on wide plasma screens.
For his part Holliday spoke of growing up poor, of his early escape into books given to him by Uncle Henry and of his drunk and often abusive father. He spoke about the army as another kind of an escape, the training making a man out of a boy and how the wars he’d fought had seemed to steal small parts of his soul. He spoke about his love for his wife, Fay, and her sudden passing, and of his love for teaching history. He talked about his niece, Peggy, and Rafi Wanounou, the good man she’d married, an Israeli archaeologist. He talked about his regret at not having had children, and together the two men talked of their mutual love of baseball.
Both men fell asleep around one thirty in the morning just after leaving Vladimir, Eddie’s namesake and the first station stop and locomotive change for the Trans-Siberian. The rocking motion put an already tired Holliday into a deep and dreamless sleep that was suddenly and forcefully interrupted by Eddie seemingly only a few seconds later. Holliday craned his neck and saw a weak line of light coming through the break between the curtains covering the window. He remembered Eddie pulling them closed just before oblivion reached up and grabbed him. He looked at the glowing dial of his old Hamilton wristwatch. Five o’clock in the morning Moscow time, dawn wherever they were right now.
Eddie was shaking him by the shoulder. “Wake up, mi coronel; we have a problem.”
“What problem?”
“It is Genrikhovich, the Russian.”
“What about him?”
“He is gone.”
22
“What do you mean, gone?”
“I woke up to use the excusado. . the toilet. When I came back I heard no snoring from above me, so I looked and he was not there. I thought perhaps he’d needed the toilet himself and went to the one in the next car along, but he was not there either.”
“What about the provodnitsa, or whatever the hell they call her?”
“Asleep, presumably. She was not at her post by the samovar at the end of the car.”
“It’s a train, for God’s sake. He’s got to be somewhere.”
“I have looked from one end of the train to the other, mi companero. He is vanished. Desaparecido.”
“Where the hell are we?” Holliday asked, sitting up groggily.
“Somewhere between Nizhniy Novgorod and Yoshkar-Ola.”
“Where the hell is that?”
“Nowhere,” said Eddie.
“Have there been any stops since we went to bed?”
“Nizhniy Novgorod.”
“Could he have gotten off the train there?”
“It is very doubtful, mi coronel. He would almost surely have awakened me.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. When I got up for the toilet he was snoring. When I returned he was not. I was gone perhaps three minutes at the most.”