Alex shook his head, refusing to give in to defeat. “Even the trap... someone set it centuries ago. It suggests that the collection of scientific texts was left purposefully. Maybe it was meant to be a test, a breadcrumb left behind that would lead to the greater collection. That is, if someone was wise enough to understand its clues and not be killed.”
“But how can we be sure?” Igor pushed to his feet, clearly ready and anxious to continue climbing out of the maze.
Alex took hold of his wrist and drew him back down. “I must show you something. It’s important.”
Until now, he had not shared what he had truly discovered below. There had been no time. He had barely caught a glimpse of it while dust filled the air.
“What is it?” Igor asked.
Alex carefully opened the flaking leather cover of Herodotus’s text. On the inside, someone had inscribed an intricate design. The most prominent being the drawing of an open book, one gilded in gold like the outside cover. It was clearly a more recent adornment—as in two or three centuries ago versus the age of the Greek text itself.
Igor stiffened as Alex focused his lamp’s beam on the gilded drawing of a book.
The gold reflected the light, making the image of the sketched tome shine all the brighter. It was a single volume, splayed open in the middle. It glowed above a detailed drawing of a building, likely achurch. The rest of the page was marked up, but most of it had faded into obscurity, though some faint writing was still discernible.
Igor squinted at the page. “Are those Norse runes off to the side?”
“I believe so. Also some Greek writing. And maybe scientific notations.”
“But what are we looking at? What’s being depicted here?”
“I believe it’s a map. One encrypted in pictures, letters, and numbers.” Alex hovered a fingertip over the top of the gilded book. “A map to the Golden Library.”
Igor’s eyes grew huge.
“Whoever drew this—or commissioned it,” Alex continued, “they likely set that trap tied to this book.”
Igor nodded. “She must have found the library and wanted to protect her secret from anyone unworthy of its discovery.”
Alex tore his gaze from the book. “She?”
Igor pointed to a line of Cyrillic at the bottom, plainly meant to be a signature. He read it aloud. “Yekaterina Velikaya.”
Alex frowned, struggling to understand.
Igor clarified. “Or as she was better known... Catherine the Great.”
3:33P.M.
After taking a few precautions to help preserve their discovery, Alex set off with Igor. They climbed for another hour before reaching the top of the stairs. Yet, they were still deep in the maze, a long way from sunlight and open air. They would’ve gotten lost, except Vadim had left chalk marks along their path. Igor followed those guideposts across a warren of passages, crawlways, and shattered breaks in old walls.
Alex touched each scrawl in silent thanks to the intrepid young man.
Before setting off here, Alex had read up on this subterranean world. It stretched for hundreds of square miles, even burrowing beneath the Kremlin, though access to those regions had been sealed off long ago. The first tunnels had been excavated in the fourteenth century by Prince Dmitry Donskoy, as a secret exit from the Kremlin. Later, the patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church had also dug passageways beneath their cathedrals and basilicas, connecting them to Donskoy’s tunnels, so the clergy could flee to the Kremlin in times of distress.
Over the passing centuries, the warren slowly spread wider and deeper. It was used by spies, by assassins, by illicit lovers. Bodies were dumped down here. During the sixteenth century, Ivan the Terrible had used the maze to hide a cache of weapons, guns that were discovered in 1978 by Soviet workers who were expanding the city’s subway.
But that’s not all that Ivan had hid underground.
Alex firmed his grip on the ancient Greek text.
Igor noted this. “Do you truly believe Catherine the Great discovered the Golden Library?”
“I don’t know, but if she did, the larger question iswhyshe kept it secret. Such an astounding discovery—a library to rival the greatest in the world—would’ve brought great fame to the Russian empire and her rule.”
Igor bobbed his head in agreement. “Catherine was dedicated to her adopted country. She was well-read, interested in literature, philosophy, and science. Her greatest desire was for Russia to rise in prominence and notoriety, to become an empire to rival any European country.”
“If so, then why keep the discovery of the Golden Library secret?”
