The Boy from Reactor 4

The bartender delivered tea and beer. Two sips later, Misha’s cell phone rang.

“We have to go,” he said to Kirilo after hanging up. “It’s the Tesla woman. She lost my men on purpose, as though she’s about to meet someone.”

“Where did they last see her?”

“On the funicular headed to Podil. But that was misdirection. She just arrived at the Caves Monastery.”

CHAPTER 27

NADIA LOOKED AROUND for someone who could guide her toward the proper entrance. She’d studied the Pecherska Lavra, the Caves Monastery, as a student in Ukrainian School growing up. It was a mythical place, one she read about but wasn’t sure really existed. Now, as she stood beneath the peach-and-ivory Lavra Belltower, despite the urgency of the moment, excerpts from lectures came flooding back to mind.

In 1051, St. Anthony Pechersk left Mount Athos in Greece to live in a man-made cave in Kyiv. As his disciples followed him, he expanded his home into an underground city of tunnels, rooms, and chapels. Monks spent lifetimes praying, meditating, and writing in what became known as the Pecherska Lavra. Memoirs suggest the underground network may have once stretched for hundreds of kilometers, from Kyiv to Moscow. By the twentieth century, more than 120 saints were buried in the Caves Monastery.

In 1959, Nikita Khrushchev began a fresh campaign to destroy all remaining traces of Christianity in the Soviet Union. He confiscated religious icons, burned churches, and either executed priests or tortured them into recanting their religious convictions. He also ordered the removal of the bodies of the saints as a prelude to the destruction of the Pecherska Lavra.

No one is certain exactly what happened next, but the accepted story is something like this: A platoon of soldiers arrived in a truck to remove the bodies. They loaded them onto their vehicle, but when they tried to leave, the engine wouldn’t start. Mechanics were summoned to examine the truck. They found nothing wrong. Still, it wouldn’t start.

A priest told the soldiers that it was impossible for the bodies of the saints to be removed from the caves. At his suggestion, the soldiers unloaded the bodies from the truck. The engine started. When they put the bodies back on the truck, it wouldn’t start. After lying outside for three weeks while Soviet officials debated what to do, the bodies were returned to the caves, and Khrushchev gave strict orders: nothing belowground was to be touched again.

Later, Soviet scientists conducted tests to understand why the bodies remained preserved despite no embalming. They determined that lack of moisture prevented decay. An experiment with wheat plants proved that the bodies also emitted an organic matter that influenced the nuclear content of living matter and may have helped preserve the monks’ remains.

Nadia got directions to the lower entry to the Far Caves from a tour guide with a badge hanging around her neck. As Nadia hurried down a sidewalk, a flock of monks swooped by her, their long black cloaks billowing in their wake. They appeared to float slightly aboveground like spirits who alternated living among the earthly and the celestial. Nadia followed them down the steep drop along the fifteen-foot-high fortification wall toward the southeast corner of the Lavra, in her black weather-resistant jacket and leggings.

The exit from the Far Caves was in the Church of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin. Its towering gold dome was the landmark for the entrance on the near side of the street in the unassuming and tiny Annozachatiyevskaya Church. Nadia spotted the green-roof walkway Clementine had mentioned on the phone.

The monks disappeared inside the entrance. Nadia stopped beside the wooden door to the church and checked her watch.

It was 1:13. She was thirteen minutes late. She’d underestimated the Lavra’s sprawl. The street along the edge of the Lavra teemed with tourists, visitors, and vendors selling food and souvenirs.

At 1:26, three boys ran up to her. They barely came up to her waist, with gaunt, dirt-smeared cheeks and tousled hair. Their eyes were lively, appraising her and her purse.

Homeless children. Nadia had read about them. Abandoned or orphaned, with nowhere to go, no socialist state to take care of them. The shortest of the three stepped forward. “Are you Nadia Tesla?”

“Yes.”

He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “A lady told us to give this to you.”

“She did?” Nadia looked around. “Where? What lady?”

The boy’s tongue flicked out of the corner of his lips, as though he were contemplating mischief. “She told us you’d give us ten hryvnia.”