Movement near the back of the hall drew his eye and his sword.
A woman appeared from the shadows of a lower stair. She stumbled forward, weaving two steps into view, unsteady, dazed. Dressed all in white, she bore a crown of laurel branches.
He knew who stood before him.
The Oracle of Delphi.
The centurion fought back a tremble of fear. Like many of the legion, he still secretly practiced the old ways. Even slaughtered bulls to Mithra and bathed in their blood.
Still, a new sun was on the rise.
There was no stopping it.
Who dares violate Apollo's temple? she called out to them.
With the stony weight of his men's eyes upon him, the centurion marched to face the woman. Bring forth the girl! he demanded.
She is gone. Beyond even your reach.
The centurion knew that was impossible. The temple was surrounded.
Still, worry pushed him forward.
The Oracle stepped to block him from the stairs. She held a palm against his breastplate. The adytum below is forbidden to all men.
But not to the emperor. And I am under his edict.
She refused to move. You will not pass.
The centurion had his orders under the seal of Emperor Theodosius, handed to him personally by the emperor's son Arcadius. The old gods were to be silenced, their old temples torn down. All across the empire, including Delphi. The centurion had been given one additional command.
He would obey.
He thrust his sword deep into the Oracle's belly and drove it full to the hilt.
A gasp escaped her. She fell against his shoulder, as in a lover's embrace. He shouldered her away from him roughly.
Blood splashed across his armor, across the floor.
The Oracle slumped to the marble, then to her side. A trembling arm reached to the pool of her own blood. Her palm settled into it. A new spring , she whispered, as if it were a promise.
Then her body went slack with death.
The centurion stepped over her form and let his sword lead him down the stairs to a small blind cave. An old woman's corpse, arrow-bit, lay in a black pool of blood. A three-legged chair lay toppled beside a riven crack in the floor. He searched the rest of the room and turned a full circle.
Impossible.
The chamber was empty.
March 1959
Carpathian Mountains Romania
Major Yuri Raev climbed out of the Russian ZiS-151 truck and dropped to the rutted dirt road. His legs trembled under him. To steady himself, he leaned a hand on the green steel door of the battered vehicle, both cursing it and thanking it. The rattle of the week-long trek up into the mountains still made his spine ache. Even his molars seemed loose in his skull. Still, it took such a rugged vehicle to climb the stony switchbacks and river-flooded roads to reach this isolated winter camp.
He glanced over his shoulder as the rear door to the truck's bed crashed down.
Soldiers in black-and-white uniforms hopped out. Their winter garb blended with the snow and granite of the densely wooded highlands. Morning fog still hung in hollows like sullen ghosts.
The men swore and stamped their boots. Small flickers of fire sparked as cigarettes were dropped or ground out. With a clatter, the soldiers readied their Kalashnikov assault rifles. But they were only the rear guard, meant to keep all away.
Yuri faced forward as the second in command of this mission, Lieutenant
Dobritsky, marched over. He was a blocky Ukrainian with a pocked face and broken nose, outfitted in winter camouflage. Red rings from his snow goggles still circled his eyes.
Major, sir, the camp is secure.
Is it them? Who we seek?
Dobritsky shrugged, leaving it for Yuri to decide. They'd already had one false alarm, raiding a winter camp of half-starved peasants, who'd been eking out a living by quarrying stone.
Yuri scowled. These mountains were from another era, Stone-Aged, backward, rife with superstition and poverty. Yet the craggy, forested highlands were also a perfect refuge for those who wished to remain hidden.
Yuri stepped to the side and studied the curve of the rutted track that served as a road. Mud and snow had been churned up by the lead vehicles. Through the trees, Yuri spotted a score of IMZ-Ural motorcycles, each bearing an armed soldier in a sidecar. The heavy bikes had swept up in advance and secured the site, cutting off all means of escape.
Rumor and tortured testimony had led to this remote place. And still it had required scouring the highlands and burning a few homesteads to warm the occasional frozen tongues. Few were willing to speak of the Carpathian Romani.
Especially with the stories spoken about this isolated clan in particular, whispers of strigoi and moroi. Evil spirits and witches.
But had he found them at long last?
Lieutenant Dobritsky shifted his boots. What now, Major?
Yuri noted the sour turn to the Ukrainian's lips. Though Yuri was a major in the
Soviet army, he was no soldier. He stood a head shorter than Dobritsky, with a slight paunch to his belly and a doughy face. Recruited from Leningrad State
University, he had risen to his position through the ranks of the military's scientific branches. At the age of twenty-eight, he was already chief of the biophysics laboratory at the State Control Institute of Medical and Biological
Research.
Where is Captain Martov? Yuri asked. The representative of Soviet Military
Intelligence seldom left Dobritsky's side and kept an officious eye on all matters.
Waiting for us at the camp's entrance.
Dobritsky slogged a straight path up the road's center. Yuri sidestepped to the edge, where the ground was still frozen and the walking easier. Reaching the last switchback, the lieutenant pointed toward a camp sheltered in a cover of steep crags and surrounded by black woods.
Gypsies, Dobritsky grunted. As you ordered, da?
But is this the right Romani clan?
Ahead, the Gypsy wagons were painted in faded hues of green and black, with wheels as tall as Yuri. Some paint had peeled and flaked to reveal bolder colors hidden beneath, peeks at happier times. The tall wooden wagons were piled with snow and fringed by icicles along the sides. Windows were etched with frost.
Blackened pits marked old bonfires. Two fires were still lit deeper in the winter camp, casting flames as high as the tallest wagon. Another wagon stood shattered and burned to a husk.
To one side, a few swaybacked draft horses hung their heads dully from beneath a lean-to of salvaged wood planks and piled stones. Goats and a few sheep ambled through the camp.
The soldiers had the site surrounded. A few dead bodies in ragged clothes and furred jackets lay sprawled here and there. The living looked little better. The camp's residents had been hauled from their wagons and heavy tents.
Shouts rose from deeper in the camp as the last of the Gypsies were rounded up.
A spatter of automatic gunfire sounded. Kalashnikovs. Yuri observed the grim-eyed crowd. Some of the women were on their knees, sobbing. The dark men were steely in their black regard of the intruders. Most were bloody, wounded, broken-limbed.
Where are all the children? Yuri asked.
The answer came from his other side, bright and brittle as the ice frosting these highlands. Barricaded in the church.
Yuri turned to face the speaker, Captain Savina Martov, the mission's intelligence officer. She was buried in a black overcoat with a fur-lined hood.
Her black hair was a match to the hood's fringe of Russian wolf.
She lifted a slender arm toward a steeple rising beyond the wagons and tents. It appeared to be the only permanent structure here. Built all of local stone, the church blended into the surrounding crags.
The children were already assembled in the structure before our forces arrived, Savina recounted.
Dobritsky nodded. Must have heard the motorcycles' engines.
Savina met Yuri's eyes. Morning light danced in her green eyes. The intelligence officer had her own thoughts. It had been Savina who had delivered a cache of research papers to Yuri's institute, notebooks and reams of data from
Auschwitz-Birkenau, specifically the work of Dr. Josef Mengele, the concentration camp's Angel of Death.
Yuri had many sweat-soaked nightmares after reading through the material. It was well known that Dr. Mengele had performed all manner of horrible experiments on the prisoners, but the monster bore a special fascination for Gypsies, especially their children. He would ply them with treats and chocolates. They came to call him Uncle Pepe. This was all done just to get the children to better cooperate. Eventually he had them all slaughtered but not before he discovered an especially unique pair of Gypsy twins.
Two identical girls. Sasha and Meena.
Yuri had read those notes with a mixture of fascination and horror.
Mengele had kept meticulous notes on the remarkable twins: age, family history, lineage. He tortured the twins' family and relatives to uncover more details, verified by testing with the girls. Mengele accelerated his experiments. But as the war drew to a close, he was forced to prematurely terminate his tests. He killed the twins with injections of phenol into their hearts.
Mengele had scrawled his frustration near the end.
Wenn ich nur mehr Zeit gehabt hStte
If only I'd had more time
Are you ready? Savina asked Yuri.
He nodded.
Accompanied by Dobritsky and another soldier, the pair headed into the camp. He stepped around a corpse sprawled facedown in a pool of frozen blood.
The church appeared ahead. It was all stacked stones, no windows. A single door stood closed, constructed of hewn beams of stout wood, banded and studded in copper. The building looked more like a fortress than a church.
Two soldiers flanked the doors with a steel battering ram.
Dobritsky glanced to Yuri.
He nodded.
Break it down! the lieutenant ordered sharply.
The men swung the ram and smashed the door. Wood splintered. It held for two more swings. Finally the door burst open with a crack of thunder.
Yuri shadowed Savina and stepped forward.
Small oil lamps lit the dark interior. Rows of pews lined either side, leading to a raised altar. Children of all ages cowered among the benches, strangely silent.
As Yuri continued toward the altar, he studied the children. Many bore disturbing deformities: pinheaded microcephaly, cleft lips, dwarfism. One child had no arms at all, only a torso. Inbreeding. Yuri's skin pebbled with unease.
No wonder the rural folk around here feared this Romani clan, told tales of spirits and monsters.
How will you know if these are the right children? Savina asked with clear disgust in her voice.
Yuri quoted from one of the tortured interviews recorded by Mengele. The lair of the chovihanis. The place was where the twins had been born, a secret kept by the Gypsies going back to the founding of the clans.
Are these the ones? Savina pressed.
Yuri shook his head. I don't know.
He continued toward a girl seated before the altar. She clutched a rag doll to her chest, though her own garb was little better than her doll's. As Yuri neared, he noted the child seemed perfect, spared of any of the deformities. In the dim light, the pure crystal blue of her eyes shone brightly.
So rare among the Romani.
Like the twins, Sasha and Meena.
Yuri knelt in front of her. She seemed not to notice him. Her gaze passed straight through him. He sensed there was something wrong with this child, possibly worse than any of the other deformities.
Though her eyes never seemed to focus any sharper, she lifted a hand toward him.
Unchi Pepe, she lisped in a thin Romani voice.
A wash of fear swept through Yuri. Uncle Pepe. The pet name for Josef Mengele.
It had been used by all the Gypsy children. But these children were too young to have ever seen the insides of a concentration camp.
Yuri stared into those vacant eyes. Did the child know what Yuri and his research team intended? How could she? Mengele's words haunted him:
If only I'd had more time
That would not be Yuri's problem. His team would be granted all the time it needed. The facility was already under construction. Far from prying eyes.
Savina stepped closer. She needed an answer.
Yuri knew the truth; he'd known it the moment he stared into this girl's face.
Still he hesitated.
Savina placed a hand on his elbow. Major?
There could be no turning back, so Yuri nodded, acknowledging the horror to come. Da. These are the chovihanis.
Are you certain?
Yuri nodded again, but he kept his gaze fixed on the child's blue eyes. He barely heard Savina order Dobritsky: Collect all the children into the trucks.
Eliminate everyone else.
Yuri did not countermand those orders. He knew why they were here.
The child still held out her hand. Unchi Pepe, she repeated.
He took the tiny fingers into his own. There was no denying it, no turning back.
Yes, I am.
FIRST