“Why are you doing this?” Sam asked.
“For the money. I want to go to Trieste—”
“We heard. But why cross Bondaruk? If he’s as bad as you say he is—”
“He is.”
“Then why risk it?”
Bohuslav hesitated, his mouth twisting into a frown. He sighed. “You know about Pripyat, yes?”
“The town near Chernobyl,” Remi replied.
“Yes. My wife, Olena, was there when she was younger, when the nuclear plant exploded. Her family was one of the last to get out. Now she has cancer—of the ovaries.”
“We’re sorry to hear that,” Sam said.
Bohuslav gave a fatalist shrug. “She has always wanted to see Italy, to live there, and I promised her we would someday. Before she dies I’d like to keep my promise. I’m more afraid of breaking my promise to Olena than of Bondaruk.”
“What’s to keep you from simply turning around and selling us out to Bondaruk for a higher price?”
“Nothing. Except that I am not a stupid man. What would I do, go to him and say, ‘I was going to betray you, but for more money I will not’? Bondaruk does not bargain. The last man who tried that—a greedy policeman—disappeared, along with his family. No, friend, I would rather deal with you. Less money, but at least I will be alive to enjoy it.”
Sam and Remi looked at one another, then back to Bohuslav.
“I’m telling you the truth,” he said. “You give me money, and I promise: You will know more about Khotyn than Bondaruk does.”
CHAPTER 35
Leaning over the chart table under the dim red glow of the lamp above it, Remi used the compass and dividers to plot their current position. She used the pencil clamped between her teeth to jot a few calculations along the chart’s margin, then circled a spot on the course line and whispered. “We’re there.”
In response, Sam, standing at the helm, throttled down the engines and turned off the ignition. The fishing trawler coasted through the fog, the water hissing along her sides until she slowed to a stop. Sam ducked out the pilothouse door, dropped the anchor overboard, then came back inside.
“It should be off our port bow,” Remi said, joining him at the window. He lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes and scanned the darkness off the bow, at first seeing only fog and then, faintly in the distance, a slowly pulsing white light.
“Nicely done,” Sam said.
This point three miles off the lighthouse had been the critical waypoint for tonight’s journey, and as their rented boat had not come equipped with a GPS navigation system, they’d had to rely on dead reckoning, using their course, speed, and the occasional recognizable landmark picked out by the short-range radar to guide their way.
“If only that were the hard part,” Remi replied.
“Come on, let’s get suited up.”
The night before, after agreeing to Bohuslav’s price and calling Selma to approve the money transfer to his account, they’d followed the Ukrainian to the Balaclava train station and waited in the car while he retrieved a leather satchel from one of the rental lockers. A quick scan of the satchel’s contents seemed to confirm Bohuslav was on the level—either the sketches, notes, photos, and blueprints inside were genuine or they were dealing with a professional forger.
Back at their hotel in Yevpatoria, fifty miles up the coast from Sevastopol, they laid the contents of the satchel out on the bed and went to work, with Selma watching on via webcam. After an hour of cross-checking what they already knew about Bondaruk’s estate, they were sure Bohuslav’s material was the real deal. Every entrance, every stairwell, and every room in the mansion was accounted for, but more importantly so, too, were the rumors about Bogdan Abdank’s smuggling tunnels. Khotyn was riddled with miles of them, starting in the cliff face below the mansion, where cargo was unloaded, and branching into myriad storage chambers and exits, some of which emerged from the earth almost a mile beyond the estate’s grounds.
More surprising was the discovery that the Zaporozhian Cossack had not been the only one to take advantage of the tunnels. Every subsequent occupant, from the Crimean War’s Admiral Nakhimov to the Nazis to the Soviet Red Army, had used them for a variety of purposes: ammunition depots, fallout shelters, private brothels, and in some cases as vaults for their own spoils of war.
However, the one piece of information they most needed was missing from Bohuslav’s information—where precisely Bondaruk might be keeping his bottle from Napoleon’s Lost Cellar.
“Of course, there’s another possibility,” Remi said. “Perhaps he’s got it locked away somewhere else.”
“I doubt it,” Sam replied. “Everything about Bondaruk’s personality suggests he’s a control freak. He didn’t get to where he is by leaving the important stuff to chance. Something he’s this obsessed about he’d want to have close at hand.”
“Good point.”
“Assuming that’s right,” Selma said over the webcam, “there might be some clues in the blueprints. If he’s a serious collector—and we know he is—then he’s going to keep his most prized pieces in an environmentally controlled area—that means separate air-conditioning units, humidity-control systems, backup power generators, fire suppression. . . . And he’ll probably have it separated from the rest of the mansion. Check Bohuslav’s notes for any mention of those things.”
It took an hour of work, picking their way through Bohuslav’s chicken-scratched notes, which were written in both English and Russian, but finally Remi found a room in the mansion’s western wing that was labeled SECURE UTILITY ROOM.
“The location fits,” Selma said.
“Here’s something else,” Sam said, reading from another note: “ ‘Denied access western side.’ Add that to the secure utility room and we may have found our X.”
Ironically, the mansion itself was laid out in the shape of a peace symbol, with the main portion of the house in the center, two wings radiating out to the southeast and to the northeast, and a third wing to the west, and all encircled by the low stone wall.
“The problem is,” Remi said, “the plans show the smuggler’s tunnels merge with the mansion in two places—at the stables a couple hundred yards north of the house and in the southeast wing.”
Sam replied, “So we either have to hoof it—no pun intended—across the open ground to the west wing and hope we find a way in, or come up on the southeast wing and pick our way through the house and pray we’re able to dodge the guards.”
Surprising neither of them, Selma had found them a reliable equipment source in Yevpatoria, an old Soviet Red Army surplus store run by a former soldier turned body-shop mechanic. Their outfits for the evening were a pair of Cold War-era naval commando camouflage coveralls; their transport a five-foot rubber dinghy complete with a battery-powered electric trolling motor.
Suited up, their faces streaked with black face paint, they inflated the raft, affixed the motor to the transom, then lowered the raft over the side of the fishing boat, donned their backpacks, and climbed in. Remi pushed the trawler’s gunwale and within seconds it disappeared in the fog. Sam turned the motor’s ignition and it hummed to life. Sitting on the bow, Remi aimed her compass at the lighthouse, then lifted her hand and pointed into the fog.
“Damn the torpedoes,” Sam said, and throttled up.
The trolling motor was quiet, but slow, pushing them along at three knots, barely a walking pace, so it was an hour before Remi, who had kept a steady fix on the lighthouse’s pulsing beacon, raised her hand, calling a halt. Sam throttled down.