As his eyes adapted to the darkness, Monk could make out ahead of him the dim shape of the stairs to the upper floor. To his left was the vaulted arch leading to the four halls of the ground floor. From inside he heard a slight bump, as of someone nudging one of the showcases.
Taking a deep breath, Monk threw himself through the arch in a parachute roll, continuing to turn over and over in the darkness until he came up against a wall. As he came through the doorway he half-glimpsed the blue-white flash of muzzle flame and was covered in fragments of glass as a case above his head took the bullet.
The hall was long and narrow, though he could not see it, with long glass cases along both sides and a single display area, also enclosed in glass, in the center. Inside these, waiting again for the bright electric lights and the gawking tourists, were the priceless coronation robes, Russian, Turkish, and Persian, of all the Rurik and Romanov czars. A few square inches of any of them, and the jewels stitched to them, would keep a working man for years.
As the last shard of glass tinkled down, Monk strained his ears and heard at length a gasp as of someone trying not to pant letting out his breath. Taking a triangle of broken plate glass, he lobbed it through the blackness toward the sound.
Glass landed on glass case, there was another wild shot, and the sound of running feet between the echoes of the detonation. Monk rose to a crouch and ran forward, sheltering behind the center display until he realized Grishin had retreated into the next hall and was waiting for him.
Monk advanced to the communicating arch, a second slice of glass in his hand. When he was ready he tossed it far down the hall, then stepped through the arch and immediately sideways behi
nd a cabinet. This time there was no bullet.
With his night vision returned he realized he was in a smaller hall containing jewel- and ivory-studded thrones. Though he did not know it, the coronation throne of Ivan the Terrible was a few feet to his left and that of Boris Godunov just beyond it.
The man ahead of him had clearly been running, for while Monk’s breathing after his rest in the trees was measured and even, he could hear somewhere up ahead of him the rasp of the air entering Grishin’s lungs.
Reaching up, he tapped the barrel of his automatic high on the glass above him, then pulled his hand down. He saw the flash of a gun muzzle in the darkness and fired quickly back. Above his head more glass broke and Grishin’s bullet clipped a shower of brilliants off the diamond throne of Czar Alexei.
Monk’s bullet must have been close, for Grishin turned and ran into the next hall which, though Monk did not know it and Grishin must have forgotten, was the last: a cul-de-sac, the hall of the antique carriages.
Hearing the scuttle of feet ahead of him, Monk followed fast, before Grishin could find a new sniping position. He reached the last hall and ducked behind an ornate seventeenth-century four-wheeled carriage embossed with golden fruit. At least the carriages gave shelter, but they also hid Grishin. Each carriage was on a raised dais, cordoned from the public not by glass cases but ropes on vertical stanchions.
He peered out from behind the state coach presented in 1600 by Elizabeth the First of England to Boris Godunov and tried to spot his enemy, but the blackness of the hall was complete and the coaches were only discernible as vague shapes.
As he watched, the clouds outside the tall narrow windows parted, and a single moonbeam filtered through. The windows were burglarproof and double-glazed; it was very dim light.
Yet something gleamed. A tiny point in all that darkness somewhere behind the ornate gilded wheel of the coach of Czaritsa Elizabeta.
Monk tried to remember the teaching of Mr. Sims at Castle Forbes. Two-handed, laddie, and hold it steady. Forget the O.K. Corral—that’s fiction.
Monk raised his Sig Sauer two-handed and drew a bead on a spot four inches above the point of light. A slow breath, hold steady, fire.
The bullet went through the spokes of the wheel and hit something behind it. As the echoes drifted away and his ears ceased to ring, he heard the sliding thump of a heavy object hitting the floor.
It could be a ruse. He waited five minutes, then saw that the dim outline on the floor beside the carriage did not move. Slipping from cover to cover behind the antique wooden-framed vehicles, he moved closer until he could see a torso and a head, facedown to the floor. Only then did he approach, gun at the ready, and turn the body over.
Colonel Anatoli Grishin had taken the single bullet just above the left eye. As Mr. Sims would have said, it slows them up a bit. Jason Monk looked down at the man he hated and felt nothing. It was done because it had to be done.
Pocketing his gun, he stooped, took the dead man’s left hand, and pulled something from it.
The small object lay in his palm in the gloom, the raw American silver that had glittered in the moonlight, the luminous turquoise hacked from the hills by a Ute or Navajo. A ring brought from the high country of his own land, given on a park bench to a brave man at Yalta, and torn from the finger of a corpse in a courtyard at Lefortovo Jail.
He pocketed the ring, turned, and walked back to his car. The Battle of Moscow was over.
Epilogue
ON THE MORNING OF JANUARY 1 MOSCOW AND ALL Russia awoke to the grim knowledge of what had happened in their capital city. Television cameras carried the images to every corner of the sprawling land. The nation was subdued by what it saw.
Inside the Kremlin walls there was a scene of devastation. The facades of the cathedrals of the Assumption, the Annunciation, and the Archangel were pitted and scarred by bullets. Broken glass glittered against the snow and ice.
Black smears from burning vehicles defaced the exteriors of the Terem and Facets Palaces and those of the Senate and the Great Kremlin Palace were torn by machine-gun fire.
Two huddled bodies lay beneath the Czar’s Cannon, and the removal teams carried others out from the arsenal and the Palace of Congresses where they had taken refuge in the last minutes of life.
Elsewhere the armored personnel carriers and trucks of the Black Guard smoldered and fumed in the morning light. The flames had melted tracts of tarmac, which had then re-formed in the cold like waves of the sea.
The acting president, Ivan Markov, flew back at once from his vacation home, arriving shortly after midday. In the late afternoon he received the Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias in private audience.