PROLOGUE

St. Petersburg, Russia, Tuesday, March 1, 1881, midafternoon

Viktor shivered in the afternoon sunlight both from the cold and his mounting excitement. Although the sky was cloudless so close to the Arctic Circle the steady north wind prevented the sun’s feeble rays from having much effect. The snow was nearly a meter high along the sides of the road as he and Sofia walked up and down the sidewalk beside the Catherine Canal, stomping their feet and huddling deep within their thick woolen coats, as they waited for their chance to change the world.

The three bomb throwers were a hundred meters down the road, doing their best to look purposeful. Sofia had berated one for washing his salami and bread down with wine that morning. He’d shrugged and said if this were his final meal, she should be content he was drinking wine and not vodka.

Suddenly the royal carriage and Cossack bodyguards came rushing toward them, barely giving Sofia enough time to signal the bombers with her raised handkerchief.

The first assassin misjudged the speed of the carriage, and his nitroglycerin bomb fell among the following Cossacks, exploding with a flash which was accompanied by the screams of the wounded horses and men.

Viktor cursed and feared the tsar would escape. The Narodnaya Volya, or “People’s Will,” had tried twice before and it appeared their “propaganda by deed” would fail again.

But at a barked order from inside, the bulletproof carriage slid to a halt. Alexander stepped out wrapped in a thick fur coat. He approached the wounded men to console them while looking about for his attackers. The police chief of St. Petersburg in the following sleigh cried out, “Thank God!” when he saw his monarch emerge unharmed.

Viktor gritted his teeth as their target stood out in the open, unscathed. As he and Sofia drew nearer however, he saw a young boy writhing beside the road, blood staining the front of his clothes, and suddenly Viktor wanted to vomit.

The second assassin raised his hand from within the gathering crowd and cried out, “It is too early to thank God!” and dashed his bomb onto the ground at the tsar’s feet. The second explosion knocked Viktor down from forty feet away, and when he rose, he saw the Russian monarch lying upon the packed snow, his entrails splayed between his legs. Viktor’s nausea finally overcame him and he knelt retching into a ditch while the guards lifted the shattered man onto a sleigh and sped to the palace. In vain.

Within the hour, Alexander II was dead. Alexander III quickly set about to find his father’s killers and crush their organization forever.

In the general confusion, Sofia and Viktor slipped away to her apartment and prepared for the aftermath. “Pack your bag, Viktor, our time is short,” Sofia said. “The Okhrana will be unleashed like hunting dogs and sent everywhere to find us. Your age will be no defense, so I’m sending you where they cannot find you. We leave in five minutes.”

Five minutes was ample time. A simple cloth sack with his spare shirt, pants, a pocketknife, two flannel foot wraps, and his father’s pocket watch, and he was done. The watch had been given to his brother Andrei as the oldest son when their father died, but Andrei had given it to Viktor “for safekeeping” when they arrived in St. Petersburg. Now it was his, safe or not.

At the train station, Sofia pressed a thick wad of rubles and a false passport into his hand. Then hugging him fiercely, she gave him a note. “Memorize this name and address, then destroy it and come up with a new name for yourself. If I get captured, I don’t want to know it. I have too much to forget already. Now go!”

Sofia disappeared within the crowd, and Viktor looked down at the creased paper and passport in his hand. The passport identified him as Vanna Petkovic and the paper read:

HERR THOMAS VOGEL,471 INVALIDENSTRASSE, BERLIN. PASSWORD: PARIS

Viktor spoke no German, some English, and a little French, so the name and address were difficult to remember and impossible to pronounce. Time enough for that later, he thought.

The pale boy with the quiet gray eyes knew the shortest route to Berlin was through Poland. He also knew this would be common knowledge to the Okhrana, should Sofia break, so he bought a train ticket to nearby Helsinki. From there he could book passage on a ferry to Kiel on the north German coast, then a train south to Berlin. He was grateful for his brother’s insistence that he learn geography.

Viktor worried about his brother, Andrei, a prisoner of the Okhrana for the past week. The fact that the assassins hadn’t been arrested before today proved Andrei hadn’t broken under interrogation, but now with the tsar dead he would be shown no restraint. Viktor shivered at what this meant, but there was nothing he could do. As much as he loved his brother, he knew the only way he would ever see him again would be if he joined him, first in prison, then on the gallows.

Alone on the train, Viktor looked again at the scrap of paper with the address in Berlin and wondered who or what awaited him there. He watched as his motherland, the Rodina, passed by his window while the train bore on for Finland. The next day he would take a boat to Germany and an uncertain future.

Two days later, a thin, exhausted young man approached the address on Invaliden Strasse and the gun shop of Herr Thomas Vogel. When he entered, a young girl with long blonde hair, slightly older than Viktor, was oiling a fowling piece with a rich mahogany stock and Damascus steel barrels. When she asked if she could help him, he could only say her father’s name, and “bitte.” Puzzled, she motioned for him to wait. When she brought her father out from his lathe in the back room, he asked “Ja? Was darf es sein?” Viktor had no idea what he was being asked, but looked down at his feet and mumbled, “Paris.”

Herr Vogel pursed his lips for a moment. “Astrid, make him a bed in the loft over the workshop. He will be my new apprentice.”

Astrid threw back her hair and gave the young man another look. Thin, almost to the point of starvation, he had nevertheless been growing briskly the past year given the wrists and ankles protruding from his clothes. His hands were not rough. A student. Or he had been.

She was about to turn and lead him to the loft when his eyes rose, and the cool grayness of them caused her heart to pause. She imagined the color of the winter sky just before the snow fell, yet his gaze warmed her in ways she had never felt before. His eyelashes were a thick brown, the contrast making his eyes glimmer deep underneath. Astrid led him to his new home and found it difficult to sleep that night, imagining those eyes shining by candlelight in the workshop next door.

Herr Vogel took no notice of this. He could calculate the trajectory of a bullet at two hundred meters; the arc of Cupid’s arrow was invisible to him.

That night, Viktor tried to warm himself beneath the thin quilt Frau Hilda Vogel had grudgingly given him. He thought of the goldenhaired young woman who had led him upstairs. “I must learn German quickly,” he vowed, “if I am to talk to her.”

By the time he awoke the next morning, Sofia and Andrei were reunited in prison. Viktor’s name was mentioned briefly in their rough interrogation, but in the rush to placate an impatient new tsar with their execution, it was soon forgotten. Sofia was the first woman hanged in Russia in living memory.

From that morning forward, young Viktor Zhelyabov was also no more. He’d written down the name of the captain of the ferry to Kiel and so became Herman Ott. At least he could pronounce it.