Prologue

Moscow

May, 1952

The room was rather plain and unimpressive when its initial construction was completed. A simple concrete rectangle, it was rather large, though, about the size of a basketball court. However, this room was carved out of small mountain of solid granite that lay quite out of place in a much larger bed of clay. It was 250 feet underground, and would eventually house the most valuable collection of its kind in the world.

Chapter One

Last Summer

The Gothic shadow of the five hundred year-old cathedral stabbed across the Grote Markt, its spire penetrating the window of the Cafe den Engel where Tyler Oakland sat. It was only his second day in Antwerp, but as he sat there sipping a draught bolleke, he felt like a true local having his daily glass.

Lost in the moment, he watched as dozens of flags rippled from the windows of the Renaissance-era City Hall. They folded back on themselves and snapped sharply in the warm gusts that rushed across the facades of the stepped-gable guild houses lining the market square. 

In the center, a bronze Silvius Brabo was taking a running start to hurl the hand of a foe into the Scheldt River, four blocks to the west.  

Legend had it that a giant named Druon Antigoon would demand a toll from those who wanted to pass through Antwerp on the river. If anyone refused payment, Druon the Giant would cut off the poor soul’s hand and throw it into the river. Some say that the city’s name came from the Dutch hand werpen, meaning roughly ‘to shed, or throw, a hand.’

Brabo, a Roman soldier, gave the giant a taste of his own medicine. For  his efforts in ending the giant’s reign of terror, he was now immortalized by the statue in the market square. 

Tyler smirked to himself as he thought of the myth, which he’d read on a Wikipedia site on the flight from London, the third and final leg of his long trip from Tucson. 

By way of Dulles. 

Virginia. 

There was nothing cathartic in releasing the dark irony that washed over him. His own father, a giant in Tyler’s youthful eyes, ruled the waters of the far-away Rappahannock from his piece-of-shit fiberglass Sabre Runabout Classic. Funny, though, Tyler could only remember one time when he saw his father actually in the dark-olive water of the Virginia river. He had figuratively and physically tried to lend his son a hand, but he, too, suffered a legend-ending fate as the result.  

That one time.

Chapter Two

Four Months Ago

Moscow is the largest metropolitan area in Europe, has a population of over seventeen million, consistently ranks as one of the most expensive cities in the world in which to live, and, in spite of recent efforts that have reduced its numbers, still has one of the largest concentrations of billionaires in the world.

Former capital at one time of both the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, and the home of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - brutal autocracies all - the “City by the Moskva River,” is over eight hundred and fifty years old. Like any concentration of mankind that has survived almost a millennium, its history has not been without its turbulent times. In fact, the name “Moscow” is believed to have been derived from an ancient Baltic-Finnic language, in which it means “dark” and “turbid.” Mysterious. Hidden. Tumultuous.

Two hundred and fifty feet below the Armory building in the Kremlin, three men sat around a long table in the middle of a sixty-by-twenty-foot room. A massive, circular, ultra-modern, cobalt steel vault door dominated one end of the room. At the other was a small break room and bathroom. Five identical walk-in safes lined each wall on either side of the table. One safe door was open. 

A fourth man, middle-aged like the others, stepped out of the open safe and picked up a long, narrow, metal drawer from the table. The drawer was filled with two dozen small thick plastic bags. A note card was attached to each. Faded hand-written notations identified the weight, color, and clarity of the single rough diamond inside. 

Yevgeny Andreyivich Dubrinin was fifty-two, plump, and had a fashion sense that was mired in Soviet-era sartorial splendor. The thick-rib corduroy pants he favored were either brown or navy-blue, an easy match for a not-so-finely-woven, less-than-white (because-bleach-was-a-luxury-in-Soviet-times) button-down cotton shirt. Over that he wore a pullover sweater, usually red, that looked like it was knitted by a blind grandmother, but was, in fact, a gift from his wife. Topping it all off was a horribly obvious comb over.

    In spite of his rather drab appearance and a job that rarely released him to the light of day, Yevgeny Dubrinin was perpetually cheerful. Seldom did he let a working day pass without relating a joke or humorous anecdote to his colleagues.

The three men that worked with Yevgeny were about as nondescript as he was.  Innokentiy and Vladimir were in their late forties, with Alexei the youngest at forty-three. All were of average physical appearance. If passed on Red Square the only thing anyone would be likely to notice - besides, respectively, the comb over, a bald head, a pockmarked face, and a bushy black mustache and eyebrows - was that they had just walked out of the Kremlin.

Yevgeny picked up the drawer and carried it to the nearest safe. Its Diebold Craine door was over sixty years old, and the space inside was roughly six feet deep, seven feet high, and four feet wide. 

The back and left walls were concrete, but the right wall wasn’t really a wall at all, but floor-to-ceiling rows of metal drawers, like safety deposit boxes. Twelve rows of twelve, with one empty slot. 

Yevgeny slid the drawer in.