The Boy from Reactor 4

She checked her diagram. Prince Feodor was the next saint listed. Only prominent saints were listed. Clementine said Saint Damian was after Sisoi and before Prince Feodor.

He was next.

The street became a straightaway. The whispers grew louder. They came from a hole in the wall up ahead. Was that Saint Damian’s crypt? Had Clementine brought her uncle with her? Was it she who was whispering to him?

Nadia heard loud, muffled voices behind her. A commotion of some kind.

She crept forward. The hole in the wall was a room. She slid to the edge of the room and peered around the corner inside.

Six figures in black cloaks stood chanting quietly in a refectory, a small room with beds carved in the walls. They were the monks she’d followed down the fortification wall to the monastery.

Nadia forged ahead. A candlestick shone in the distance. She took a deep breath and marched toward it.

A tall, angular figure bent over a coffin in the wall. He straightened and turned to Nadia.

The light of their candles became one. Nadia gazed at the person.

He was an old man with a gigantic crooked nose, dressed in green overalls. An ID hung around his neck. He held a clipboard in his hands. The word Official was emblazoned above Pecherska Lavra on the ID. He was a curator of some sort.

Nadia looked at the coffin. “Is this Saint Damian?” she whispered.

The man frowned. “Saint Damian?” He nodded at the sign on the wall. “This is the body of Prince Feodor.”

Nadia read the sign. “Where is the body of Saint Damian? Is it up ahead?”

The man’s frown deepened. “There is no Saint Damian.”

Nadia lost her breath. “There is no Saint Damian?”

“No, there isn’t. And there is no ‘up ahead.’”

The curator picked up the candle and extended his arm beyond the coffin. The tunnel ended. There was a wall dead ahead.

“Some of the caves collapsed through the years,” he said. “This is the farthest point west. This…is the end.”

Light flashed behind Nadia. Human voices. Women chattering, thinking they were whispering when everyone could hear them.

The curator sighed. “Tour group.”

Nadia remembered the group of thirty to forty people.

“We’re totally screwed,” he said. “We’re behind them now. There’s no way for anyone to pass. They have to stop and turn in line. It’s going to take hours for us to get out of here.”

By the glow of lantern flashlights, Nadia saw people round the corner.

Clementine Seelick was not waiting for her. Instead, she’d sent Nadia to the bowels of Kyiv. Now she was eight hundred feet beneath the face of the earth, trapped behind a tour group—being led by Misha Markov and Brad Specter.

CHAPTER 28

KIRILO STOOPED AND squinted over Misha’s shoulder as they squeezed through the tunnel. This was ridiculous. All three of them would be hunchbacks by the time they got out.

He had known it would be like this when he insisted on going along with the two Americans, but what choice did he have? The other American, Specter, had done his college dissertation on the caves and said he knew them well. The Upper Lavra connected with the Lower Lavra. A knowledgeable man knew half a dozen exits. Hell, some thought the tunnels went all the way to Moscow.

He’d be damned if the moscal and his man were going to get away with the clue to the money or whatever it was they were certain was so valuable before he got paid.

They approached a doorway. Misha raised his fist in the air for Kirilo and Specter to slow down. The tour group they’d passed at the Church of Nativity dawdled behind them. Kirilo could smell the perfume of the woman who’d screamed when he’d shoved her aside so they could get past her, some sort of rose-infused rat piss.

“You’re sure she’s here,” Kirilo whispered to Specter.

“I’m sure,” Specter said. “She lost two of my people and thinks she’s alone. Whoever she was trying to meet at Yaroslaviv Val used kids to deliver a note. That person must be here.”

“He’s the one we want,” Misha said.

“What will you do with the Tesla woman?” Kirilo said.

“The Varangian Caves,” Specter said. “In the eastern end of the Lower Lavra. Where the Vikings used to bury their loot in the tenth century. There are no bodies there. No one will ever find her.”

Specter turned the corner and burst through the doorway. Misha and Kirilo followed him inside the small room.

Seven monks in black cloaks stood chanting with their heads bowed. They didn’t look up, as though used to idiot tourists interrupting them. Specter shined the light around the room. Nothing. He looked at Misha, who nodded toward the door.

Kirilo backpedaled, and the other two men came out with them. This was not good. Ukrainians knew better than to mess around with the bodies of the saints or the monks who protected them. They were asking for trouble. He began to wonder if the money was worth tempting God himself.