The man in the mirrored sunglasses was Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, later to become the KGB; the young girl was Svetlana Stalin, Joseph Stalin’s only legitimate child; the secretary with the headphones was Otto Kuusinen, Stalin’s private secretary and one of the very few people to survive the vast Stalinist purges; and the man in the uniform smoking the pipe-the same tooth-scarred pipe sitting in the rack in front of him-was Joseph Stalin himself.
Holliday breathed deeply. This was Stalin’s study in the “nearer dacha” at Kuntsevo, about thirty miles outside Moscow. Stalin had spent his last years here, and he had died here.
Holliday dropped the machine gun and the knapsack on the desk. He pulled out the big leather chair and dropped down into it, giving in to his fatigue for a few precious seconds.
He realized just how desperately tired he was, not only physically but mentally. The last years had taken their toll. Once upon a time he’d been a historian and a teacher, both roles that suited him well. Sometimes he yearned for the fresh faces of his kids at West Point, but he could see no way back along that path now. Ever since making his promise to the dying monk Rodrigues on that tiny volcanic island in the Azores, he’d gone down a rabbit hole of intrigue and conspiracy and into a dark world he’d never even suspected existed.
He opened the bloodstained knapsack and took out the manuscript that Genrikhovich had removed from the ornate Ark of the Covenant in the treasure chamber. It was bound in some dark animal skin, probably goat, the cover stiff with age. He opened it. The first page had a single line of script in ancient Aramaic, the language most likely to have been spoken by Christ.
Did it say what the Russian had read out so triumphantly-the Gospel of Yeshua ben Yusef, Jesus, son of Joseph? Holliday flipped through the long pages of small, neat script, the ink faded to a pale sepia. The upper and lower edges of the pages were roughly cut, which made sense if you assumed that such a document had originally been written on scrolls, then cut into pages sometime in the future.
Were they really the words of Christ, perhaps written in his own hand? Unlikely. Holliday had never heard a discussion of the topic, but Jesus was almost certainly functionally illiterate-he most probably could neither read nor write; such a level of education wouldn’t have been available to the son of a carpenter, and there was no documentation in any of the other gospels about Christ attending any kind of school. The gospel could have been physically written by one or more of his disciples, several of whom were known to be quite well educated.
Genuine, a fake, a fairy tale? And did it matter? One way or the other it was a time bomb and a document of immense power. Holliday traced a line of script with his finger. Was he touching the word of God?
It was the same with all religions: Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius, the Dalai Lama, the gods of popularity cults, like Mao, Che, even Eddie’s aging Fidel-before they were revered they were men, and one way or the other, over time the ideas of these men were taken, misused, abused and eternally reinterpreted for reasons of power and personal gain. The Gospel of Yeshua ben Yusef would be no different; it would be used for other people’s ends and to satisfy other people’s needs.
Once more Holliday heard the dying words of Helder Rodrigues: Too many secrets, too many secrets. In that moment, with that memory clear and present in his mind, Holliday came to his decision, a decision that went against all the tenets of truth he’d ever been taught. A secret revealed was a secret that could never be made secret again, and some secrets were better left alone.
He flipped the manuscript over and tented it on the desk. He pulled open all the drawers on both pedestals of the desk and pulled out reams of old paper, brittle and yellow and tinder dry. The irony of what he was about to do and where did not escape him. He was keeping the bright secret of a holy man by destroying it in a place once occupied by one of the most unholy men ever to have walked the earth.
He reached out, took one of the wax-preserved phosphorous matches out of its holder and dragged it down the sandpaper strip. It sputtered for only a second, but then it burst into flame. Holliday gently touched the match to the brittle pages of the manuscript, watching them ignite, and in turn light the pile of papers he’d built up around it.
He picked up the machine gun and stood up, stepping back. Soon the entire top of the desk was alight, pages and sheets of paper carried up into the roof beams on the hot air currents, more pages whirling and twisting over to the curtains. Within less than a minute the entire room was ablaze.
Holliday went back to the hallway. He roused Eddie, stood him up, then managed to get one of the overcoats on the pegs onto him-a gray double-breasted thing with brass buttons and a fur collar. He chose another coat for himself, shrugged into it and guided Eddie toward the front door.
“Something is burning, I think,” said Eddie blearily.
“It sure is.” Holliday smiled. Holding Eddie under the arms, he managed to open the front door, where they were met by a blast of cold air. It was snowing again. “Let’s go find a ride, amigo.”
40
Unfortunately for Felix Fyodor Fosdikov, the sandwich he had eaten combined with the vodka and the overheated cabin of his big power grader had conspired to put him into a troubled sleep, his head tucked down to his belly, his snores rumbling like cannon fire. Had he stayed awake he would have seen the snow reach the ten-centimeter tape on the blade of his plow and would have gone off on his route. As it was he slept through the ten-centimeter mark, the twenty and the thirty before he woke up.
At first he thought his heartburn dream had become some kind of hideous nightmare in which Stalin had come back to life as a black man and was sitting beside him in the cab. Beyond the black Stalin was another man with a patch over one eye like a pirate and a very nasty-looking machine pistol.
The man with the patch over his eye said something unintelligible to the black Stalin, who appeared to be very sick and perspiring. Felix Fyodor Fosdikov was perspiring, too, and the heartburn was spreading everywhere now, turning his throat into molten lava. He fought to hold back the vomit while simultaneously clamping down on his bowels. This was no dream. The black Stalin turned to him and spoke.
“Vy znaete sposob amerikanskogo poso’stva?”
“Konechno.” Felix Fyodor nodded. Under the circumstances, telling the truth seemed like the best option. Out of the corner of his eye he could see a fiery glow somewhere behind the high fence that surrounded the dacha. Bad things were happening tonight. His heartburn cranked up another notch.
“He knows,” said Eddie, turning to Holliday, crammed in beside him in the small, overheated cab.
“Then tell him to go there now,” Holliday said, gesturing with his weapon.
“Tuda, v nastoyashchyee vremya,” translated Eddie.
Felix Fyodor didn’t need to be told twice.
“Da,” he said, and threw the big power grader into one of its many forward gears. The tall, insectlike machine lurched forward into the snowy night. Behind it, in the birch woods beyond the fence, the dacha burned and the first sirens could be heard.