Chapter 1

1

May 10, 1:03 P . M . MSK

Moscow, Russian Federation

The silence of a tomb hung over the subterranean vault, but it was not sarcophagi that lined its floor. Instead, a dozen steel-strapped chests were arrayed in a semicircle under an arched brick roof. The only noise was the echoing drip of water from the labyrinth of tunnels that the group had traversed to reach this site.

Monsignor Alex Borrelli entered the space with a shiver that was part delight and part trepidation. His heart pounded in his chest. He felt like a trespasser, maybe a grave robber.

"Porazitel'nyy!" Vadim blurted out with youthful enthusiasm. "Just as I described, da? "

"It is indeed astounding," Alex confirmed.

Vadim was a student from Moscow State University. A week ago, he and a motley group of fellow subterranean adventurers had stumbled upon this locked vault far below the streets of Moscow. Luckily, the young man had recognized the importance of his discovery and alerted the city's archaeological museum.

At the time, Alex had taken the discovery to be a sign of heavenly providence, especially as he was already here in Moscow. As a member of the Vatican's Pontifical Commission of Sacred Archaeology, Alex worked closely with the Apostolic Archive back in Rome. Alex's professional interest was in the history of the holy library, on establishing the provenance of its collection. Over the decades, he had uncovered many astounding and sometimes sordid tales behind various volumes.

In fact, this was why Alex had come to Moscow, to meet with his counterpart at the Russian Orthodox Church. For the past several years, the patriarchate's Holy Synod had been demanding the return of hundreds of tomes held in the Vatican library, which truthfully had been stolen from the country during the era of the tsars. The pope had personally sent Alex to oversee these discussions. The task would take some judicious diplomacy to discern who had rightful claim to the books in question. Some were of extreme historical value, and most were priceless.

Then a few days ago, word had leaked to Alex of the discovery deep beneath Moscow, of a cache of ancient books sealed up in a vault. His counterpart within the Russian Orthodox Church—Bishop Nikil Yelagin—had invited him to accompany the archaeological team, to help ascertain if the books were of any import. There were only a handful of others who had the knowledge and expertise to judge the significance of what might lay below.

Still, Alex knew this invitation was as much a part of diplomatic wrangling as it was a matter of his personal expertise. His inclusion served as a demonstration of cooperation by the orthodox church.

"How should we proceed?" Igor Koskov asked, joining him in the doorway.

"With care."

Alex turned to Igor. The lanky, dark-haired Russian was an archivist from Moscow's Museum of Archaeology. The young man was barely out of his twenties, four decades younger than Alex's seventy-two years.

"We should photograph everything before any books are moved," Alex warned. "Then go about meticulously cataloging each volume."

Igor nodded, letting Alex take the lead. "I'll spread the word to the others."

Igor crossed to his colleagues, a group of archaeologists, five men and a woman. No one was older than forty. After much gesticulating and some stern looks Alex's way, the team set off into the chamber, hauling in their gear. Like Alex, the team was dressed in dark blue coveralls and wore safety helmets topped by battery-powered lamps. The group started setting up tripods, measuring the room, and taking photographs, not only of the chests, but also the vault's walls and doors.

Alex respected their thoroughness.

Another did not. Clearly impatient with such meticulous work, Vadim waved to Alex. The student waited beside a trunk, one that had been left open by his friends. It stood to the left of the door, out of the way of the bustle.

"Come see," Vadim urged him.

"Don't touch anything," Alex warned. "The books will be very fragile."

Vadim scowled, but in a good-natured way, as if the young man was tolerating a scolding grandfather. "Не пережив й. I would not let anyone touch anything. We only peek in trunks, da ? No more."

"Very good."

Alex crossed to the open chest, trailed by Igor, whose eyes glinted with curiosity.

Inside the trunk, rows of leather spines were cradled within oak racks. It appeared more trays lay below the topmost one, stacked one atop the other.

Alex waved the beam of his helmet's lamp over the upper collection. He read a few of the titles. "Plato's Timaeus and Critias... Aristotle's De Partibus Animalium... Ptolemy's Almagest." He leaned closer. "That looks like a Byzantine copy of Corpus Hippocraticum ."

The books were centuries, if not millennia, old. And all well preserved.

Alex rubbed an ache in his chest as his breathing tightened with excitement.

" Neveroyatnyy... " Igor mumbled with awe, plainly equally amazed.

The archivist reached and hovered a finger over the leather-bound volume of Corpus Hippocraticum . The book was a collection of sixty ancient Greek medicinal works, attributed to the physician Hippocrates. But it was not the subject matter that most interested the man.

Igor turned to Alex. "A Byzantine copy, you said."

" Maybe Byzantine," he cautioned, knowing what the archivist hoped this meant.

"If so, it could be evidence that these trunks, these books, came from the Golden Library."

Alex glanced over to the archaeologists as they labored across the room, whispering in Russian to one another. He knew the hope that they all held.

For centuries, hundreds of men and women—historians, explorers, adventurers, thieves—had been searching for the Golden Library, a treasure trove of volumes hidden away by Ivan the Terrible and lost after his death. But it wasn't even Ivan's collection. It was his grandfather—Ivan the Great—who had gathered together that vast library during the fifteenth century. A majority of it came as a dowry when the emperor married his second wife, Sophia Palaiologina, a Byzantine princess, who carried the collection with her after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. It was said to hold the most treasured volumes of the Library of Constantinople, including manuscripts from the ancient Library of Alexandria.

Alex looked enviously across the arc of chests. According to records, the Golden Library contained documents written in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Egyptian, even Chinese texts from the second century.

"If we could ever find it," Igor extolled, "just think what we might uncover? I read how a nineteenth-century historian—Christopher von Dabelov—claimed to have seen a list of the library's titles. That list included all hundred-and-forty-two books of Titus Livius's History of Rome . Only thirty-five of those volumes still exist today. Dabelov also noted an unknown poem written by Virgil. And a full version of Cicero's De Republica . Can you just imagine what such a discovery would mean?"

Alex tried to temper Igor's enthusiasm. "I know of Dabelov's account. It's highly suspect, likely a fraud. In fact, the Golden Library may no longer exist. It could've been burned or destroyed long ago."

Igor shook his head, refusing to accept this. "Ivan the Terrible valued that collection, hiring hordes of Russian translators to work through the library. It is well documented that he purposefully hid the collection somewhere underground—either in Moscow or elsewhere. There are stories that he discovered mystical texts that would grant Russia great power. So firm was this belief that many of the scholars working on the translations quit and fled, fearing Ivan would use black magic found in those books to wreak great harm."

Alex cast him a skeptical gaze.

Igor shrugged. "No matter the truth of such legends, it is well known that Ivan believed the future of Russia was tied to that library. If he truly put such stock in its collection, he would have hidden it well and not let it be destroyed."

Vadim interrupted their discussion, likely indifferent to the esoterica of lost libraries. He pointed into the trunk. "Look. Something shine in there. Down deeper."

Alex leaned closer, following his finger. "What do you mean?"

"Under the top books." Vadim stepped in front of them. "I show you."

The student reached to the handles of the oak rack, preparing to lift it off and expose what he had spotted.

"Don't!" Alex called out.

" Ne! " Igor reinforced.

Vadim ignored them and lifted the top tray of books out of the trunk.

With the damage done, Alex waved the young man off. "Be careful. Carry the rack off to the side and gently place it down. Somewhere dry. We'll want photos of that tray and books."

Vadim sighed heavily and lumbered off with his burden.

Alex shook his head and watched after him.

"He was right," Igor said, drawing back Alex's attention.

Alex stepped closer and shone his light into the trunk's depths. The next layer held similar books, but the middle row was taken up by a nine-volume set of tomes. Alex noted the titles on their spines.

"My God, it's a complete series of Histories by Herodotus." Alex gaped at the Greek books from the fifth century B . C . E . "No intact collection has ever been found. I wager this set is older than the Codex A at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence. That copy has served as the model for most modern translations."

"But why is that fourth book in the series the only one covered in gold leaf?"

Alex frowned. It was puzzling. All nine volumes were leatherbound, but the fourth in the series was adorned with gold. Its reflective shine must have caught Vadim's attention.

Unable to stop himself, Alex reached a finger and carefully slipped the book free. Equally curious, Igor stepped closer, raising no objection. As Alex pulled the volume out, something snapped inside the trunk, loud enough to make the men jolt back.

A breath later, a thunderous boom shook the space.

Alex lost his footing. "What's happenin—"

Igor grabbed him around the waist and shouldered him out the vault door, all but carrying him. Once across the threshold, Igor leaped headlong with Alex as the entire room collapsed behind them.

Behind Igor's shoulder, Alex caught a glimpse of Vadim, half-turned in their direction. Then he and the others were gone, crushed under a thunderous rockfall of bricks and stone.

Outside, a wall of dust swept the two sprawled men, blinding and choking them.

Alex gasped, struggling to understand.

Igor explained, waving away the dust and helping Alex up. "The chamber... it must've been booby-trapped."

"But why?" Alex moaned.

The two staggered closer to the ruins of the doorway. For several minutes, they called and shouted, but Alex knew it was futile. Even hope could not withstand the weight of that collapse. It was plain that there could be no survivors under the tonnage of rock.

More rumblings—likely aftershocks—continued, threatening further rockfalls.

Igor pulled Alex away and pointed up. "We can't stay here."

2:07 P . M .

Fleeing the death behind him, Alex clambered up the stone steps carved out of the city's bedrock. He clutched what he could save to his chest. His heart pounded against the flaking gold-leaf cover of the book that he had rescued, the fourth volume of Herodotus's Histories .

He had dropped the Greek text after being thrown free of the collapse, but he had recovered it from the floor. He had briefly inspected it, shaking dust from its pages, wiping silt from its gilded cover. It was only then that he had spotted something that he still struggled to understand.

Despite that, one thing was certain.

"I can't let this be lost..." he gasped out to the darkness, casting the beam of his helmet's lamp up the spiraling staircase.

"Let me carry the book for you, Monsignor," Igor offered, raising an arm. "We still have a long way to climb."

Alex glanced back at the archivist. Igor's eyes squinted with the pain of their loss. Terror and grief had drained his features to a deathly pallor.

Alex pulled the ancient text harder to his chest. "This is my burden to carry. It was my foolishness that killed them all."

Igor lowered his arm.

With a heavy heart, Alex continued his climb. His cardiologist back in Rome had warned him against this journey, but it was not his recent angioplasty that made each breath an agony. Guilt tightened his chest. Each thud of his heart felt like a hammer blow against his ribs.

"I shouldn't have rushed matters," Alex said.

"No one objected to your timetable," Igor argued. "We couldn't risk word spreading. We had to secure it before anyone else ransacked the site."

Alex swallowed hard. He had used that same reasoning yesterday, urging the group to proceed quickly. But that wasn't his only motivation. With his failing health, he couldn't let this chance pass him by. At his age, he had come to learn a hard truth.

Patience was a luxury of the young.

Guilt-ridden and heart-sore, he rounded another turn in the stairs. He swiped sweat from his brow with his free hand. The air was stiflingly humid; the walls were slick and damp. As his lips moved in a silent prayer for the dead, his heel slipped on a patch of black mold. With a cry, his arms windmilling, he crashed to his knees. He felt the impact all the way up into his molars. The precious text flew from his hand, struck the wall, and bounced down the steps.

Alex winced, less from the pain than from the harm he might have wrought. Down on one hand, he craned back. "Is the book damaged?"

Igor hurried over, recovered the volume, then climbed back up to him. Alex tried to stand, but Igor waved him down.

"We should rest a moment. Are you injured?"

Alex settled to a seat with a sigh. "Just my pride."

The young man dropped to the stair next to him and handed him the book. "Looks only scuffed. Its binding, while old, has proven stubborn."

Relieved, Alex rested the ancient text on his lap. He pictured all that had been lost under the tons of rock. Any recovery, if even possible, would take weeks. Beyond the loss of lives, he remembered the books he had briefly spotted, a treasure trove of Greek and Roman texts.

Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Hippocrates...

Alex sat straighter, startled by a sudden realization, a recognition of a theme to this hidden collection—or at least what had been stored in the open trunk.

"The books," he mumbled. "They were all scientific treatises."

Igor glanced over to him. "Monsignor?"

"They all pertained to Greek and Roman efforts to understand the natural world." Alex rested a palm on the book in his lap. "Even Herodotus's Histories is less a historical text than it is an analytical travelogue. It deals more with geography and the peoples of various lands. The massive work is said to be based on Herodotus's travels across the known world of his time."

Igor frowned. "If you're right, why would such books be locked away? To what end?" He searched down the dark stairs. "And why booby trap the collection? What were they trying to hide?"

Alex shook his head. "I think it was more about protection . To keep a secret."

"What secret?"

"The location of the Golden Library."

Igor gasped next to him—half shocked, half scoffing.

Alex ignored him and stared down at the bright leaf that adorned the leather cover. He knew it was that sheen that had made him pull the volume from the others. But it was not a lust for gold that had drawn his hand.

It was a longing for lost knowledge.

"If we could find it..." Alex started, but he left the rest unspoken.

Maybe such a discovery would help atone for the deaths below .

Igor's shoulders slumped. "If it truly exists, maybe the library is cursed, as many have claimed over the centuries."

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 a church. 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."

3:33 P . 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 is why she 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?"

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 the cathedral. 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 of the 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.

The group parted, and another figure pushed forward, clearly their leader.

The figure marched up to him, drawing nose to nose with him. "Where is the library?"

Alex quailed back—not from the threat, but from the raw venom in that voice. He stared at the ice blue eyes above the drape of cloth. He was shocked to realize his interrogator was a woman.

He pushed down his shock and stammered, "I don't know what—"

The woman silenced him with a flick of her wrist. A steel blade appeared in her fingertips as if out of thin air. "I've been paid well to find the truth."

The point of her dagger lifted his chin and freed his tongue.

"We... we found a chamber," he admitted, aghast at how quickly word must have spread about Vadim's discovery. "A vault. With trunks of books. But it was booby trapped. The whole place collapsed. We barely got out alive."

Her gaze shifted to what he clutched to his chest. "But not empty-handed, it seems."

He pulled the book tighter. He couldn't help from doing so, though it likely hinted at its value. "It's an old Greek text. All I could grab. But it's only of academic value."

She reached and ripped the book from his hands. "We shall see about that."

He tried to snatch it back, but it was to no avail. It only made her eyes narrow suspiciously.

She pressed him, "And there was no evidence the collection below was connected to the Golden Library."

"None at all," he lied.

She huffed heavily and swung away. Her arm waved back as if dismissing him—but a sharp line of fire ignited across his throat. "Then you're of no use to me."

A hot dampness poured down his chest. It was only then that he realized her dagger had sliced deep under his chin. Shocked, he coughed more blood. As he was released, he fell to his hands and knees. His heart pounded hard. Agony flared in his chest. Pain narrowed his sight.

"No..." he choked out.

His captors ignored him, stepping past him.

He reached into his pocket, clawed out his phone, and cradled his body low over it. He tried to hide his efforts as he tapped and swiped rapidly. Blood pooled on the red bricks under him.

Before darkness could overwhelm him, he struck the last button, an address. He heard the whoosh of the text as it sent off a cache of photos. They were pictures he had taken on the stairs with Igor's help.

Alex's efforts were finally noted—whether from the noise or the shine of the screen.

The woman lunged back toward him, knocked him over, and grabbed the phone. She cursed thickly in Russian. The vehemence made her underlings lurch back.

Alex let his head fall to the cold bricks. His gaze drifted to the shining golden cupola of the Ivan the Great Bell Tower, which still glowed brightly against the purple sky. The tower was a monument to Ivan III, whose grandson—Ivan the Terrible—hid the treasure that led to so many deaths this day.

The library must be indeed cursed...

Darkness finally snuffed out the golden torch, taking the world with it. Still, Alex took solace in his final act. The new prefect of the Vatican Archives had given him an address to text in case of emergency. It came with no name, not even a number, just a symbol.

A single Greek letter, which Alex took to be providential.

He pictured it as he took his last breath, praying it was significant.

∑