Igor shrugged his thin shoulders. “She must’ve had her reasons. Maybe if we can decrypt her code, we could solve that mystery, too.”
“But first, we have to escape this confounding maze.”
By now, stabbing pains shot through Alex’s chest. Three months ago, he had four stents placed in various cardiac vessels. He swore he could feel each one as his heart pounded heavily, both from the exertion and from the weight of the responsibility he carried.
Seven souls died for this...
He refused to let their sacrifice be for nothing.
“There!” Igor pointed ahead. “I recognize those stairs. They should lead to the door out of here.”
“Thank the Lord,” Alex muttered with relief.
They hurried together toward the steps. Igor led the way up, which ended at a rusted metal door. He shoved the heavy gate open. Bright sunlight filled the passageway, blinding them both. The two men shielded their eyes against the glare and pushed into the open air.
They exited into a basement level of a building under construction. Scaffolding and ladders climbed all around them, along with piles of bricks.
Steps away, the shining edifice of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior loomed high, topped by its gold cupolas. Stalin blew up the original cathedral in 1931 in his war against religion. He eventually built a public pool in its place. But after the fall of the Soviet Union and a resurgence of religious belief, the Russian Orthodox Church had been funded to restore the cathedral.
The construction site here was destined to be a future domicile for the cathedral’s clergy and church officials. It was being built on the site of the old Soviet-era pool, marking it as a visible example of the expanding role of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Last week, Vadim and his band of urban explorers had cleared a pile of rubble on one side of the old pool and exposed the door. But the unearthing of it hadn’t been pure chance. The young student had studied an account by a laborer—Apollos Ivanov—who described his own discovery of the door back in 1933, after Stalin’s bombing of thecathedral. Ivanov ended up exploring these same tunnels, stumbling upon skeletons and the sealed passageways beneath the Kremlin. Vadim had used this old account to estimate where the old entrance might be and spent weeks doggedly searching for it—until he found it.
Only to be killed for his ingenuity.
Alex squinted against the glare of the low sun.
“We must alert Bishop Yelagin about the tragedy below,” Igor said. “Get the authorities to start a recovery effort.”
Alex fumbled his cell phone free of his pocket. “I can try to reach him. If I can get a signal.”
He lifted the device to his face, and the screen bloomed to life. He swung the cell through the air, testing for a connection. In the process, he almost dropped the book.
“The call can wait another moment,” Igor said. “We’re only a few blocks from my museum. We can alert the bishop from there. I can also get my colleagues to secure the book and to start the restoration process. If there’s any hope of deciphering that illuminated drawing, we must make it more legible.”
Alex agreed. “At the Vatican Archives, I used UV fluorescent imaging to bring out the faded writing in a thousand-year-old Archimedes Palimpsest. With care, we should be able to do the same with this text.”
“Da.There are other methods I’d love to try, too. I read about Dutch scientists at Leiden University who employed x-ray spectrometry to reveal hidden pages in the bindings of old medieval texts. Who knows what other clues Catherine the Great built into this tome? You already noted the handwritten annotations in the margins of several pages within the book itself, along with other drawings and underlined passages.”
“We don’t know if any of those were done by Catherine or by prior scholars who had been studying the text.”
“Still, we must pick this book apart if we hope to discover the location of the Golden Library.”
“Assuming it’s not a wild goose chase.”
Determined to find out, Igor and Alex worked free of the construction site and reached the open street. In the distance, over the top ofthe neighboring buildings, the towers of the Kremlin glowed in the last rays of the evening sun, setting the domes and spires on fire. The Moscow Archaeological Museum lay within a stone’s throw of Red Square.
The pair set off down the street, which was lined by the detritus and refuse of last night’s Victory Day celebration, a raucous party and military parade that commemorated the Soviet defeat of the Nazis in 1945. Being the day after, the street was mostly deserted as people slept off the drunken revelry.
Alex gingerly picked his way across a debris field of vodka bottles, beer cans, and crumpled fast food bags. He could only imagine the sight of them hiking through the streets in caked coveralls and caving helmets.
As they reached the end of the street, the full breadth of Red Square opened up. On the far side rose the walled fortress of the Kremlin. At one corner, a star shone brightly atop a hulking brick clock tower, glowing like a small sun in the twilit gloaming. Elsewhere, a dense cluster of domed cathedrals framed the darkening sky. The most prominent of all was the gilded cupola of the Ivan the Great Bell Tower, which glowed like a golden torch.
Igor drew his gaze away and pointed in the opposite direction. “We should get to the museum.”
As Alex turned, a sharp crack made him jump. Igor looked at him with a confused expression. The young man sank to his knees. A dark bloom spread across the chest of his blue coveralls. Igor opened his mouth as if to voice a question, but blood flowed over his lips. He toppled to his side.
Alex backed away—into the grip of men in dark clothes. He lost his footing, but he was held up by iron fingers. More figures closed in out of the shadows, all masked by swaths of cloths over their faces.
